The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When speaking about the spiritual worlds as we are doing in these lectures, we should keep the following well in mind: the clairvoyant consciousness which the human soul can develop in itself will change nothing in the nature and individuality of a person, for everything entering that consciousness was already long present in man's nature. Knowing a thing is not the same as creating it; a person learns only to perceive what is already there as a fact. Obvious as this is, it has to be said, for we must lead our thoughts to realize that the nature of the human being is hidden in the very depths of his existence; it can be brought up out of those depths only through clairvoyant cognition. It follows from this that the true, inmost nature of man's being cannot be brought to light in any other way than through occult knowledge. We can learn what a human being actually is not through any kind of philosophy but only through the kind of knowledge based on clairvoyant consciousness. To the observation we use in the sense world and to the understanding limited to the sense world, the being of man, the true, inmost nature of man, lies in hidden worlds. Clairvoyant consciousness provides the point of view from which the worlds beyond the so-called threshold have to be observed; in order to perceive and learn, quite different demands are made on it from those in the sense world.

This is the most important thing: that the human soul should become more or less accustomed to the fact that the way of looking at and recognizing things that for the sense world is the correct and healthy one is not the only way.

Here I shall give the name elemental world to the first world that the soul of a human being enters on becoming clairvoyant and crossing the threshold. Only a person who wants to carry the habits of the sense world into the higher super-sensible worlds can demand a uniform choice of names for all the points of view the higher worlds can offer. (At the close of this course of lectures and also in my small book coming out in a day or two, The Threshold of the Spiritual World, I shall point out the connection between the terms chosen here—for example, elemental world and those in my books Theosophy and Occult Science, soul world, spirit world, and so on—in order that people do not look for contradictions in a superficial way where they do not exist.)

Fully new demands meet the life of soul when it steps over the threshold into the elemental world. If the human soul insisted on entering this world with the habits of the sense world, two things might happen: cloudiness or complete darkness would spread over the horizon of the consciousness, over the field of vision, or else—if the soul wanted to enter the elemental world without preparing itself for the peculiarities and requirements there—it would be thrown back again into the sense world. The elemental world is absolutely different from the sense world. In this world of ours when you move from one living being to another, from one happening to the next, you have these beings and events before you and can observe them; while confronting and observing them, you keep your own distinct existence, your own separate personality. You know all the time that in the presence of another person or happening you are the same person that you were before and that you will be the same when you confront a new situation; you can never lose yourself in another being or happening. You confront them, you stand outside them and you know you will always be the same in the sense world wherever you go.

This changes as soon as a person enters the elemental world. There it is necessary to adapt one's whole inner life of soul to a being or event so completely that one transforms one's own inner soul life into this other being, into this other event. We can learn nothing at all in the elemental world unless we become a different person within every other being, indeed unless we become similar to a high degree to the other beings and events.

We have to have, then, one peculiarity of soul for the elemental world: the capacity for transforming our own being into other beings outside ourselves. We must have the faculty of metamorphosis. We must be able to immerse ourselves in and become the other being. We must be able to lose the consciousness which always—in order to remain emotionally healthy—we have to have in the sense world, the consciousness of “I am myself.” In the elemental world we get to know another being only when in a way we inwardly have “become” the other. When we have crossed the threshold, we have to move through the elemental world in such a way that with every step we transform ourselves into every single happening, creep into every single being. It belongs to the health of a person's soul that in passing through the sense world, he should hold his own and assert his individual character, but this is altogether impossible in the elemental world, where it would lead either to the darkening of his field of vision or to his being thrown back into the sense world.

You will easily understand that in order to exercise the faculty of transformation, the soul needs something more than it already possesses here in our world. The human soul is too weak to be able to change itself continuously and adapt itself to every sort of being if it enters the elemental world in its ordinary state. Therefore the forces of the human soul must be strengthened and heightened through the preparations described in my books, Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds from these the life of soul will become stronger and more forceful. It can then immerse itself in other entities without losing itself in the process. This being said, you will understand at once the importance of noting what is called the threshold between the sense world and the super-sensible world. We have already said that the clairvoyant consciousness of a human being on earth must go back and forth continually, that it must observe the spiritual world beyond the threshold while it is outside the physical body and must then return into the physical body, exercising in a healthy way the faculties which lead it to the right observation of the physical sense world.

Let us suppose that a person's clairvoyant consciousness, when returning over the threshold, were to take back into the sense world the faculty of transformation it has to have in order to be at all aware of the spiritual world. The faculty of transformation I've been speaking about is a peculiarity of the human etheric body, which lives by preference in the elemental world. Now suppose that a person were to go back into the physical world keeping his etheric body as capable of transformation as it has to be in the elemental world. What would happen? Each of the worlds has it's own special laws.

The sense world is the world of self-contained forms, for here the Spirits of Form rule. The elemental world is the world of mobility, of metamorphosis, of transformation; just as we continually have to change in order to feel at home in that world, all the beings there are continually changing themselves. There is no enclosed, circumscribed form: all is in continual metamorphosis. A soul has to take part in this ever-changing existence outside the physical body if it wants to unfold itself there. Then in the physical sense world we must allow our etheric body, as an entity of the elemental world capable of metamorphosis, to sink down into the physical body. Through this physical body I am a definite personality in the physical sense world; I am this or that distinct person. My physical body stamps my personality upon me; the physical body and the conditions of the physical world in which I find myself make me a personality. In the elemental world one is not a personality, for this would require an enclosed form. Here, however, we must note that what the clairvoyant consciousness recognizes in the human soul is, and always has been, present within it. Through the forces of the physical body, the mobility of the etheric body is restrained only for the time being. As soon as the etheric body sinks back into the physical encasement, its powers of movement are held together and adapted to the form. If the etheric body were not tucked into the physical body as if into a tote bag, it would always be impelled to continuous transformation.

Now let us suppose that a soul, becoming clairvoyant, were to carry over into the physical world this desire of its etheric body for transformation. Then with its tendency towards movement, it will fit rather loosely into the physical body, and thus the soul can come into contradiction with the physical world that wants to shape it into a definite personality. The etheric body, which always wants to move freely, can come back over the threshold in the wrong way, every moment wishing to be something or someone else, someone that may be quite the opposite of the firmly imprinted form of the physical body. To put it even more concretely: a person could be, say, a Scandinavian bank executive, thanks to his physical body, but because his etheric brings over into the physical world the impulse to free itself from physical constraints, he may imagine himself to be the emperor of China. (Or, to use another example, a person may be—let us say—the president of the Theosophical Society, and if her etheric body has been loosened, she may imagine that she has been in the presence of the Director of the Universe.)⁹

We see that the threshold that sharply divides the sense world from the super-sensible world must be respected absolutely; the soul must observe the requirements of each of the two worlds, adapting and conducting itself differently on this side and that. We have emphasized repeatedly that the peculiarities of the super-sensible world must not unlawfully be carried over when one comes back into the sense world. If I may put it more plainly, one has to understand how to conduct oneself in both worlds; one may not carry over into one world the method of observation that is right for the other.

First of all then, we have to take note that the essential faculty for finding and feeling oneself in the elemental world is the faculty of transformation. But the human soul could never live permanently in this mobile element. The etheric body could as little remain permanently in a state of being able to transform itself, as a human being in the physical world could remain continually awake. Only when we are awake can we observe the physical world; asleep, we do not perceive it. Nevertheless we have to allow the waking condition to alternate with the sleeping one. Something comparable to this is necessary in the elemental world. Just as little as it is right in the physical world to be continually awake, for life here must swing like a pendulum between waking and sleeping, so something similar is necessary for the life of the etheric body in the elemental world. There must be an opposite pole, as it were, something that works in the opposite direction to the faculty of transformation leading to perception in the spiritual world. What is it that makes the human being capable of transformation? It is his living in imagination, in mental images, the ability to make his ideas and thoughts so mobile that through his lively, flexible thinking he can dip down into other beings and happenings. For the opposite condition, comparable to sleep in the sense world, it is the will of the human being that must be developed and strengthened. For the faculty of transformation: thinking or imagination; for the opposite condition: the will.

To understand this, we should consider that in the physical sense world the human being is a self, an ego, an “I.” It is the physical body, as long as it is awake, that contributes what is necessary for this feeling of self. The forces of the physical body, when the human being sinks down into it, supply him with the power to feel himself an ego, an I. It is different in the elemental world. There the human being himself must achieve to some degree what the physical body achieves in the physical world. He can develop no feeling of self in the elemental world if he does not exert his will, if he himself does not do the “willing.” This, however, calls for overcoming something that is deeply rooted in us: our love of comfort and convenience. For the elemental world this self-willing is necessary; like the alternation of sleeping and waking in the physical world, the condition of “transforming oneself into other beings” must give way to the feeling of self-strengthened volition. Just as we have become tired in the physical world and close our eyes, overcome by sleep, the moment comes in the elemental world when the etheric body feels, “I cannot go on continually changing; now I must shut out all the beings and happenings around me. I will have to thrust it all out of my field of vision and look away from it. I now must will myself and live absolutely and entirely within myself, ignoring the other beings and occurrences.” This willing of self, excluding everything else, corresponds to sleep in the physical world.

We would be mistaken if we imagined that the alternation of transformation with strengthened ego feeling were regulated in the elemental world just as naturally as waking and sleeping are in the physical world. According to clairvoyant consciousness—and to this alone it is perceptible—it takes place at will, not passing so easily as waking here passes into sleep. After one has lived for a time in the element of metamorphosis, one feels the need within oneself to engage and use the other swing of the pendulum of elemental life. In a much more arbitrary way than with our waking and sleeping, the element of transforming oneself alternates with living within with its heightened feeling of self. Yes, our consciousness can even bring it about through its elasticity that in certain circumstances both conditions can be present at the same time: on the one hand, one transforms oneself to some degree and yet can hold together certain parts of the soul and rest within oneself. In the elemental world we can wake and sleep at the same time, something we should not try to do in the physical world if we have any concern for our soul life.

We must further consider that when thinking develops into the faculty of transformation and begins to be at home in the elemental world, it cannot be used in that world in the way that is right and healthy for the physical world. What is thinking like in our ordinary world? Observe it as you follow its movement. A person is aware of thoughts in his soul; he knows that he is grasping, spinning out, connecting and separating these thoughts. Inwardly he feels himself to be the master of his thoughts, which seem rather passive; they allow themselves to be connected and separated, to be formed and then dismissed. This life of thought must develop in the elemental world a step further. There a person is not in a position to deal with thoughts that are passive. If someone really succeeds in entering that world with his clairvoyant soul, it seems as though his thoughts were not things over which he has any command: they are living beings. Only imagine how it is when you cannot form and connect and separate your thoughts but, instead, each one of them in your consciousness begins to have a life of its own, a life as an entity in itself. You thrust your consciousness into a place, it seems, where you don't find thoughts that are like those in the physical world but where they are living beings. I can only use a grotesque picture which will help us somehow to realize how different our thinking must become from what it is here. Imagine sticking your head into an anthill, while your thinking comes to a stop—you would have ants in your head instead of thoughts! It is just like that, when your soul dips down into the elemental world; your thoughts become so alive that they themselves join each other, separate from each other and lead a life of their own. We truly need a stronger power of soul to confront these living thought-beings with our consciousness than we do with the passive thoughts of the physical world, which allow themselves to be formed at will, to be connected and separated not only sensibly but often even quite foolishly. They are patient things, these thoughts of our ordinary world; they let the human soul do anything it likes with them. But it is quite different when we thrust our soul into the elemental world, where our thoughts will lead an independent life. A human being must hold his own with his soul life and assert his will in confronting these active, lively, no longer passive thoughts. In the physical world our thinking can be completely stupid and this does not harm us at all. But if we do foolish things with our thinking in the elemental world, it may well happen that our stupid thoughts, creeping around there as independent beings, can hurt us, can even cause real pain.

Thus we see that the habits of our soul life must change when we cross the threshold from the physical into the super-sensible world. If we were then to return to the physical world with the activity we have to bring to bear on the living thought entities of the elemental world and failed to develop in ourselves sound thinking with these passive thoughts, wishing rather to hold fast to the conditions of the other world, our thoughts would continually run away from us; then hurrying after them, we would become a slave to our thoughts.

When a person enters the elemental world with clairvoyant soul and develops his faculty of metamorphosis, he delves into it with his inner life, transforming himself according to the kind of entity he is confronting. What is his experience when he does this? It is something we can call sympathy and antipathy. Out of soul depths these experiences seem to well up, presenting themselves to the soul that has become clairvoyant. Quite definite kinds of sympathy and antipathy appear as it transforms itself into this or that other being. When the person proceeds from one transformation to the next, he is continually aware of different sympathies or antipathies. Just as in the physical world we recognize, characterize, describe the objects and living beings, in short, perceive them when the eye sees their color or the ear hears their tones so correspondingly in the spiritual world we would describe its beings in terms of particular sympathies and antipathies. Two things, however, should be noted. One is that in our usual way of speaking in the physical world, we generally differentiate only between stronger and weaker degrees of sympathy and antipathy; in the elemental world the sympathies and antipathies differ from one another not only in degree but also in quality. There they vary, just as yellow here is quite different from red. As our colors are qualitatively different, so are the many varieties of sympathy and antipathy that we meet in the elemental world. In order therefore to describe this correctly, one may not merely say—as one would do in the physical world—that in diving down and entering this particular entity one feels greater sympathy, while in immersing oneself in another entity one feels less sympathy. No! Sympathies of all sorts and kinds can be found there!

The other point to note is this: Our usual natural attitude to sympathy and antipathy cannot be carried over into the elemental world. Here in this world we feel drawn to some people, repelled by others; we associate by choice with those who are sympathetic and wish to stay near them; we turn away from the things and people who are abhorrent and refuse to have anything to do with them. This cannot be the case in the elemental world, for there—if I may express it rather oddly—we will not find the sympathies sympathetic nor the antipathies antipathetic. This would resemble someone in the physical world saying, “I can stand only the blues and greens, not the red or yellow colors. I simply have to run away from red and yellow!” If a being of the elemental world is antipathetic, it means that it has a distinct characteristic of that world, which must be described as antipathetic, and we have to deal with it just as we deal in the sense world with the colors blue and red, not permitting one to be more sympathetic to us than the other. Here we meet all the colors with a certain calmness because they convey what the things are; only when a person is a bit neurotic does he run away from certain colors, or when he is a bull and cannot bear the sight of red. Most of us accept all the colors with equanimity and in the same way we should be able to observe with the utmost calmness the qualities of sympathy and antipathy that belong to the elemental world. For this we must necessarily change the attitude of soul usual in the physical world, where it is attracted by sympathy and repelled by antipathy; it must become completely changed. There the inner mood or disposition corresponding to the feelings of sympathy and antipathy must be replaced with what we can call soul-quiet, spirit-peacefulness.¹⁰ With an inwardly resolute soul life filled with spirit calm, we must immerse ourselves in the entities and transform ourselves into them; then we will feel the qualities of these beings rising within our soul depths as sympathies and antipathies. Only when we can do this, with such an attitude toward sympathy and antipathy, will the soul, in its experiences, be capable of letting the sympathetic and antipathetic perception appear before it as images that are right and true. That is, only then are we capable not merely of feeling what the perception of sympathies and antipathies is but of really experiencing our own particular self, transformed into another being, suddenly rising up as one or another color-picture or as one or another tone-picture of the elemental world.

You can also learn how sympathies and antipathies play a part in regard to the experience of the soul in the spiritual world if you will look with a certain amount of inner understanding at the chapter of my book Theosophy that describes the soul world. You will see there that the soul world is actually constructed of sympathies and antipathies. From my description you will have been able to learn that what we know as thinking in the physical sense world is really only the external shadowy imprint, called up by the physical body, of the thinking that, lying in occult depths, can be called a true living force. As soon as we enter the elemental world and move with our etheric body, thoughts become—one can say—denser, more alive, more independent, more true to their own nature. What we experience as thought in the physical body relates to this truer element of thinking as a shadow on the wall relates to the objects casting it. As a matter of fact, it is the shadow of the elemental thought-life thrown into the physical sense world through the instrumentality of the physical body. When we think, our thinking lies more or less in the shadow of thought beings. Here clairvoyant spiritual knowledge throws new light on the true nature of thinking. No philosophy, no external science, however ingenious, can determine anything of the real nature of thinking; only a knowledge based on clairvoyant consciousness can recognize what it is.

The same thing holds good with the nature of our willing. The will must grow stronger, for in the elemental world things are not so obliging that the ego feeling is provided for us as it is through the forces of the physical body. There we ourselves have to will the feeling of ego; we have to find out what it means for our soul to be entirely filled with the consciousness, “I will myself”; we have to experience something of the greatest significance: that when we are not strong enough to bring forth the real act of will, “I will myself,” and not just the thought of it, at that moment we will feel ourselves falling unconscious as though in a faint. If we do not hold ourselves together in the elemental world, we will fall into a kind of faint. There we look into the true nature of the will, again something that cannot be discovered by external science or philosophy but only by the clairvoyant consciousness. What we call the will in the physical world is a shadowy image of the strong, living will of the elemental world, which grows and develops so that it can maintain the self out of its own volition without the support of external forces. We can say that everything in that world, when we grow accustomed to it, becomes self-willed.

Above all, when we have left the physical body and our etheric body has the elemental world as its environment, it is through the innate character of the etheric body that the drive to transform ourselves awakens. We wish to immerse ourselves in the other beings. However, just as in our waking state by day the need for sleep arises, so in the elemental world there arises in turn the need to be alone, to shut out everything into which we could transform ourselves. Then again, when we have felt alone for a while and developed the strong feeling of will, “I will myself,” there comes what may be called a terrible feeling of isolation, of being forsaken, which evokes the longing to awaken out of this state, of only willing oneself, to the faculty of transformation again. While we rest in physical sleep, other forces take care that we wake up; we don't have to attend to it ourselves. In the elemental world when we are in the sleeping condition of only willing ourselves, it is through the demand of feeling forsaken that we are impelled to put ourselves into the state of transformation, that is, of wanting to awaken.

From all this, you see how different are the conditions of experiencing oneself in the elemental world, of perceiving oneself there, from those of the physical world. You can judge therefore how necessary it is, again and again, to take care that the clairvoyant consciousness, passing back and forth from one world to the other, adapts itself correctly to the requirements of each world and does not carry over, on crossing the threshold, the usages of one into the other. The strengthening and invigorating of the life of soul consequently belongs to the preparation we have often described as necessary for the experience of super-sensible worlds.

What must above all become strong and forceful are the soul experiences we can call the eminently moral ones. These imprint themselves as soul dispositions in firmness of character and inner resolute calm. Inner courage and firmness of character must most especially be developed, for through weakness of character we cripple the whole life of soul, which would then come powerless into the elemental world; this we must avoid if we hope to have a true and correct experience there. No one who is really earnest about gaining knowledge in the higher worlds will therefore fail to give weight to the strengthening of the moral forces among all the other forces that help the soul enter those worlds. One of the most shameful errors is foisted on humanity when someone takes it on himself to say that clairvoyance should be acquired without paying attention to strengthening the moral life. It must be stressed once and for all that what I described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds as the development of the lotus flowers that crystallize in the spirit body of a student-clairvoyant may indeed take place without attention to supportive moral strength but certainly ought not to do so.

The lotus flowers must be there if a person wants to have the faculty of transformation. That faculty comes into existence when the flowers unfold their petals in a motion away from the human being, in order to grasp the spiritual world and adhere to it. Whatever a person develops as the ability to transform himself is expressed for the clairvoyant vision in the unfolding of the lotus flowers. Whatever he can acquire of a strengthened ego-feeling becomes inner firmness; we can call it an elementary backbone. Both of these must be correspondingly developed, the lotus flowers so that one can transform oneself, and an elementary backbone so that one can unfold a strengthened ego in the elemental world.

As mentioned in the lecture yesterday, what develops in a spiritual way can lead to a high order of virtues in the spiritual world, but if this is allowed to stream down into the sense world, it can bring about the most terrible vices. It is the same with the lotus flowers and elemental backbone. By practicing certain methods it is also possible to awaken the lotus flowers and backbone without aiming for moral firmness—but this no conscientious clairvoyant would recommend. It is not merely a question of attaining something or other in the higher worlds, but of knowing what is involved. At the moment we pass over the threshold into the spiritual world, we approach the luciferic and ahrimanic beings, of whom we have already spoken; here we meet them in quite a different way from any confrontation we might have in the physical world. We will have the remarkable experience that as soon as we cross the threshold, that is, as soon as we have developed the lotus flowers and a backbone, we will see the luciferic powers coming towards us with the intention of seizing the lotus flowers. They stretch their tentacles out towards our lotus flowers; we must have developed in the right way so that we use the lotus flowers to grasp and understand the spiritual events and so that they are not themselves grasped by the luciferic powers. It is possible to prevent their being seized by these powers only by ascending into the spiritual world with firmly established moral forces.

I have already mentioned that in the physical sense world the ahrimanic forces approach us more from outside, the luciferic more from within the soul. In the spiritual world it is just the opposite: the luciferic beings come from outside and try to lay hold of the lotus flowers, whereas the ahrimanic beings come from within and settle themselves tenaciously within the elementary backbone. If we have risen into the spiritual world without the support of morality, the ahrimanic and luciferic powers form an extraordinary alliance with each other. If we have come into the higher worlds filled with ambition, vanity, pride or with the desire for power, Ahriman and Lucifer will succeed in forming a partnership with each other. I will use a picture for what they do, but this picture corresponds to the actual situation and you will understand that what I am indicating really takes place: Ahriman and Lucifer form an alliance; together they bind the petals of the lotus flowers to the elementary backbone. When all the petals are fastened to the backbone, the human being is tied up in himself, fettered within himself through his strongly developed lotus flowers and backbone. The results of this will be the onset of egoism and love of deception to an extent that would be impossible were he to remain normally in the physical world. Thus we see what can happen if clairvoyant consciousness is not developed in the right way: the alliance of Ahriman and Lucifer whereby the petals of the lotus flowers are fastened onto the elementary backbone, fettering a person within himself by means of his own elemental or etheric capacities. These are the things we must know if we wish to penetrate with open eyes and with understanding into the actual spiritual world.

• 9. Leadbeater wrote that he had “stood with Mrs. Besant in the presence of the Director of the Universe.” Mrs. Besant was at that time the President of the Theosophical Society.
• 10. See The Souls' Awakening, Scene 4. The Guardian of the Threshold says:
  You see myself, too in delusion's form
  while vain desires are joined to inner sight
  and spirit peacefulness as sheath of soul
  has not yet taken hold of your whole being.

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:

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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.

The purpose of these lectures is to bring still loftier concepts to those more advanced students of theosophy who have been familiar for some time with its world-conception and—which is much more important—have become at home in its way of thinking and feeling. This will make it more difficult for the later-comers to follow; perhaps they are well able to follow with their understanding, but it will become increasingly difficult for them to regard as sound and reasonable what is brought forward from the higher sections of theosophy. Much goodwill, therefore, will be required of new-comers to follow these group-lectures with the understanding of feeling and perception. Yet we should make no progress if we had no opportunity of throwing light upon the higher realms of spiritual existence as well. That then is the purpose of these lectures.

Now in the last lecture I gave you a picture of the evolution of our whole planetary system. Before that we had considered the planetary system itself in so far as the various planets are peopled by beings who have an influence on our human body. What is to be brought forward today will link on to these two previous studies. We will extend still further our picture of the planetary system and learn some of the mysteries of our cosmic existence from a spiritual aspect.

In the numerous popular accounts of the origin of our planetary system one is first led back to a kind of original mist, to a vast fog-like structure, a nebula, out of which our sun and its planets have somehow agglomerated, although for the driving force in this process only physical forces, as a rule, are taken into account. This is called the “Kant-Laplace theory,” though it is somewhat modified today, and those who have arrived at an intellectual grasp of the gradual agglomeration of the different planets out of the original nebula up to the condition in which they and our earth now exist, are very proud of their intelligence. They continually emphasize that it is but little in keeping with the present important advance in science to speak of spiritual forces and spiritual beings in this separation of the heavenly bodies out of the nebula. Various popular books, too, describe such statements as completely backward and superstitious.

Now the intelligence of a student of theosophy would suffice for an understanding of what is brought forward in this way. But he goes somewhat further. It is clear to him that the physical forces of attraction and repulsion were not enough. It is clear that all sorts of other things played a part. Theosophy has still to put up with being proclaimed thoroughly dense and stupid and a dreadful superstition by popular official science—which one could perhaps call “antisophy.” But we are living in an age which in a remarkable way is full of hope for the theosophist. It could he said that the theories, opinions and knowledge that modern popular science forms from its own facts look like tiny, gasping, dwarf-like creatures which run puffing and blowing at a considerable distance behind the facts. The facts of modern science are actually far, far ahead of the “belief” of modern science—only that is not recognized. I should only like to remind you of how we have often spoken here of the activity of the astral body during the night, of how the astral body at night works at upbuilding the physical and etheric bodies and ridding them of the fatigue substances they have acquired during the day. To express the sentence in this form would simply strike modern science as something not fit for polite society. But facts speak a plain language. When, for example, we can read in an American paper today that a researcher has established the theory that the sleep activity in man is an involving, constructive one, whereas on the other hand the waking activity is a destructive one, you have again a proof of how modern science runs after the facts like little dwarfs who cannot keep up. In the world-conception of theosophy you have the great illuminating views that are drawn out of a spiritual conception of the world.

When we consider the origin of our present solar system theosophically we need in no wise—nor in other fields—directly contradict what is put forward by physical science. For theosophy has no objections to make in respect of what physical science strives to know—that is, what eyes could have seen in the successive phases of evolution. If at the time of the original nebula someone had placed a chair out in universal space, had sat on it for a sufficiently long life-time and had watched how the different globes had gathered themselves into balls and separated off, with physical eyes he would have seen nothing but what physical science has affirmed. But that would be just the same as if two observers reported that a man gave another a box on the ear and one of them should say: The man was furiously angry with the other and that made him shoot out his hand and give the other a box on the ear. The second observer might say: I saw nothing of anger or passion, I only saw the hand move and inflict the blow.—That is the external, materialistic description, the method employed by modern science; it does not contradict the spiritual examination of the facts. However, the man who believes that this materialistic description is the only one naturally feels that his scientific eminence is vastly superior to everything put forward by spiritual research. The modified Kant-Laplace theory may definitely hold good as an external event, but within the whole forming of globes, within this whole crystallizing of the separate cosmic globes, spiritual forces and spiritual beings were at work.

The experimenter shows us today in a beautiful way how this Kant-Laplace theory can proceed. One need only take a fairly small ball of oil that swims in water. Then one can very easily put a little cardboard disk in the plane of the equator through this ball and put a needle through the centre. Now one rotates the needle very rapidly, little oil-balls split off, and it is easy to picture a cosmic system in miniature and to show how a cosmic system has separated itself off into globes in space. The experimenter has only forgotten one thing. He forgets that he himself was there, that he made the necessary preparation, that he then rotated the needle and that what cannot go of itself on a miniature scale cannot go of itself in the universe. Out there it is supposed to go of itself. Things are not in the least so very difficult to comprehend, but the right physical principles are so worn out that those who do not want to see them really need not see them. So, spiritual forces and spiritual beings were active in this whole process of planet formation and we will now learn something about it.

I must remind you of the often-repeated fact that before our Earth became “Earth” it had gone through earlier embodiments, other planetary conditions—the Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, and only then advanced to its present Earth condition. Now picture vividly ancient Saturn, floating in space in the far-distant past, the first embodiment of our Earth. Within the whole being of Saturn there was as yet nothing at all of what we see round us today as our plants, minerals, animals. Saturn consisted in the beginning of nothing but the very first rudiments of humanity. We speak of ancient Saturn as of nothing but a sort of conglomeration of human beings. Man existed at that time only in the first rudiments of his physical body. Ancient Saturn was simply composed of individual physical human bodies—somewhat as a mulberry or blackberry is composed of nothing but single tiny berries. It was surrounded by an atmosphere, as today our Earth is surrounded by air, but in relation to what we know as atmosphere today it was spiritual. It was entirely of a spiritual nature and within the Saturn evolution man began his first development. Then came a time when Saturn went through a state similar to man's condition between death and rebirth in Devachan. One calls this state of a cosmic body, Pralaya. Thus Saturn went through a sort of devachanic state and when it entered again upon a kind of externally perceptible existence, it emerged as our Earth's second planetary stage, as Sun. This Sun-condition brought the human being again further. Certain beings which had remained behind now emerged at the side of the human kingdom, so that there were then two kingdoms on the Sun. Then came a Pralaya, a devachanic condition, after which the whole planet was transformed into the Moon-condition; and so it continued, again a Pralaya, until the Moon passed over into our Earth.

When our Earth came forth from the purely spiritual devachanic state and received for the first time a kind of externally perceptible existence, it was not like it is today. In fact, seen externally, it could really be pictured as a kind of great primordial nebula, as our physical science describes. Only we must think of this primordial mist as immense, far greater than the present earth, extending far beyond the outermost planets now belonging to our solar system—far beyond Uranus. To spiritual science what is seen coming forth from a spiritual condition is not merely a kind of physical mist. To describe it as a kind of mist and nothing more is about as sensible as if a man who has seen another should reply to a question as to what he saw: I saw muscles which are attached to bones and blood—simply describing the physical aspect. For in the primordial mist there were a multitude of spiritual forces and spiritual beings. They belonged to it, and what happened in this primordial mist was a consequence of the deeds of spiritual beings. All that the physicist sees when he sets out a chair in cosmic space and watches the proceedings, he describes just as the observer who denied the passion and anger and described only the moving hand. In reality, what took place there—the separating off of cosmic bodies and globes—was the act of spiritual beings; in the primordial mist, therefore, we must see the garment, the outer manifestation, of a multitude of spiritual beings.

They are spiritual beings at very varied stages of evolution. They do not arise out of a nothingness, they have a past behind them. They have the Saturn, Sun, Moon-past behind them. They have gone through all this and now they stand before the task of turning into deeds all that they have gone through. They have to “do” what they have learnt on Saturn, Sun, Moon, and they stand at most diverse heights of development. Among them are beings who were as advanced on ancient Saturn as man is on Earth today. These have already passed through their human stage on Saturn and thus stand far above man at the outset of the Earth's evolution. Other beings are there who went through their human stage on the Sun, others who did so on the Moon. The human being waited to go through his human stage on the Earth. Even if we consider only this fourfold hierarchy we have a series of different beings at different stages of evolution.

We call the beings who went through their human stage on the Sun, the “Fire-Spirits,” but you must not imagine that they were externally like the men of today. They went through their human stage in a different external form. The ancient Sun planet had an extraordinarily fine light substance, far lighter than our present substance. At that time there was no kind of solid or fluid, nothing but the gaseous element existed, and the bodies of the Fire-Spirits in spite of their being of human rank were gaseous bodies. One can go through the human stage in cosmic evolution in the most varied forms. Only the Earth-man goes through it in the flesh on Earth. The beings who had human rank on the Moon and who were already at a higher stage than man went through it in a kind of watery condition.

Thus these spirits and a whole host of others were united with the primordial mist that lay at the starting-point of our Solar system. Thus, for instance, you can readily understand that what began for man upon Saturn began in some way for other beings upon the Sun. As on Saturn the first rudiments of the physical body began, so on the Sun other beings followed, just as in schools different primary pupils are always following on. These beings have only advanced to the point of being physically incorporated in our contemporary animals. On the Moon followed beings who are present in our contemporary plants, and our present minerals have only been added on the Earth. These are our youngest companions in evolution whose pains and joys I described to you in a previous lecture. Thus in the original mist there were not only advanced beings but those too who had not yet reached the human stage.

We must now add to those which I have enumerated, beings I have spoken of as lagging behind at certain stages of cosmic evolution. Let us take the Fire-Spirits. They had already attained their human stage on the Sun, and now, on the Earth, they are highly exalted beings, two stages above man. They are so advanced that not until man has ascended through the Jupiter and Venus existence to the Vulcan existence will he be mature for such an existence as that of the lofty Sun-Spirits at the beginning of the Earth's development. But now there were beings who had remained behind, who should have progressed on the Sun as far as the Fire-Spirits, but who for certain reasons stayed behind. They could not develop to the full height which the Fire-Spirits had reached when the Earth stood at the outset of its evolution.

You will all remember that at the very beginning of its evolution the Earth was still one body with sun and moon—and this you can easily combine with the theory of the original mist or nebula. If you were, therefore, to stir together the three heavenly bodies, earth, sun, moon, in a gigantic cosmic cauldron you would get a body which at one time existed. Then came the time when the sun drew out and left earth and moon, to be followed by a time when the moon too drew out and left our earth as it is today with the sun on one side and the moon on the other. We now ask our-selves how it came about that three bodies arose out of the one. You will easily see why that happened when you re-member that highly-evolved beings, standing two stages above man, were present in the primordial mist—unified with its external existence. They would have had nothing directly to do on such a cosmic body as our present day earth, they needed a dwelling place with quite different characteristics. On the other hand the human being would have been consumed in an existence united with the sun. He needed a weakened, milder existence. It was essential then that through the action of the Fire-Spirits the sun should be withdrawn from the earth and made into their scene of action. It was not a merely physical event: we must under-stand it as the deed of the Fire-Spirits themselves. They drew out their dwelling place and all they needed as sub-stances from the earth and made their theatre the sun. By virtue of their nature they can endure that immense velocity of development. If the human being were exposed to such a velocity, then scarcely were he young when he would at once become old. All evolution went on at a furious tempo. Only such beings as stood two stages higher than man could bear the sun-existence. They drew away together with the sun and left behind the earth with the moon.

Now we can answer the question too why the moon had to separate from the earth. If the moon had remained united with the earth then man could again not have sustained his existence. The moon had to be thrust out, for it would have mummified man's whole development. Men would not have undergone such a rapid development as they would had the sun remained, but they would have been carbonized, dried to mummies; their evolution would have been such a slow one that they would have become mummified. In order to produce just the degree of development useful to man, the moon with its forces and its subordinate beings had to be thrust out. And so likewise united with the moon are those beings which I have described as remaining at a time of life comparable to that reached today on earth by a seven-year-old child. As they only go through an existence such as a human existence up to the age of seven, when only the physical body is developed, they need a dwelling-place such as the moon. When you add the fact that not only these various beings were united with the original nebula, but a whole series more, standing at very varied stages of evolution, then you will understand that not only these cosmic bodies, earth, sun, moon, separated from the nebula, but other cosmic bodies too. Indeed they all agglomerated as separate globes because scenes of action had to be found for the varying stages of evolution of the different beings.

Thus there were beings at the very beginning of our Earth who were scarcely fitted to take part in further development, who were still so young in their whole evolution that any further step would have destroyed them. They had to receive a sphere of action, so to speak, on which they could preserve their complete youthfulness. All other fields of action existed to give dwelling-places to those who were al-ready more advanced. For the beings who arose last of all during the Moon existence, and who therefore had stayed behind at a very early evolutionary stage, a field of action had to be separated out. This scene of action was the cosmic body which we call “Uranus,” and which therefore has but slight connection with our earthly existence. Uranus has become the theatre for beings which had to remain at a very backward stage.

Then evolution proceeded. Apart from Uranus, all that forms our universe was contained in an original pap-like mass. Greek mythology calls this condition “Chaos.” Then Uranus separated out, the rest remaining still in the Chaos. Within it were beings who in their development stood precisely at the stage at which we human beings stood when our Earth passed through the Saturn condition. And for these beings a special theatre, “Saturn,” was created, since standing at that stage, only just beginning their existence, they could not share in all that came later. Thus a second cosmic body split off, Saturn, which you still see in the heavens today. It arose through the fact that there were beings who stood at the same stage as man at the Saturn-time of the Earth. Whereas Saturn arose as a separate cosmic body, everything else that belongs to our present planetary system, the earth with all its beings, was still in this original pap-like mass. Only Uranus and Saturn were outside.

The next thing that took place was the separating of another planet which had to become the scene for a certain stage of development. That was the planet Jupiter, the third to split off from the misty mass which for us is actually the earth. At the time of Jupiter's separation, sun, moon, as well as all the other planets of our system, were still united with the earth. When Jupiter had split off there gradually arose the forerunners of contemporary humanity. That is to say, our present human beings emerged again just as a new plant comes out of the seed. The human seeds had gradually formed during the conditions of ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon, and now while the sun was still linked with the earth these human seeds came out again.

But now the human beings would not have been able to evolve further, they could not support the tempo as long as the sun remained with the earth. Then something came about which we can well understand when we are clear that the beings we have called the Fire-Spirits took their scene of action away from the earth. The sun pressed out and we have now sun, with earth and moon together. During this time Mars—in a way which would take too much time to relate now in detail—had again formed a theatre for particular beings, and in its further advance Mars actually passed through the earth and moon and left behind what to-day we know as iron. Hence Mars was the cause of the iron particles deposited in living beings, that is, in the blood. Now someone could say: That is not so very remarkable, iron is everywhere. For just as other bodies were in the primordial mist, so too was Mars with the iron which it left behind. Iron is in all the other planets as well!—Science today, however, wonderfully confirms what is given here from the teaching of spiritual science. You will remember that I once showed you how one passes symbolically from the green sap of the plant, chlorophyll, to the blood of man. Plants arose at the period before this passage of Mars had taken place and have preserved their characteristic. Then the iron was deposited in the beings more highly organized than the plants, permeating the red blood. Thus what has recently been found in a Zurich laboratory is in complete accordance with these spiritual-scientific facts, namely, that blood can-not be compared with chlorophyll, simply because it was deposited later. We must not imagine that blood depends in any way on the substantiality of the chemical element “iron.” I say that especially, because someone might say that one can speak of no connection at all of chlorophyll with the blood. Today science makes the discovery that the blood is to be traced back to the element “iron”—whereas chlorophyll contains no iron. It is nevertheless in the fullest harmony with what Spiritual Science has to say, it is only a matter of looking at things in the right light.

Then for reasons which we have already stated, the moon separated and we have the earth by itself and the present moon as its satellite. To the sun withdrew all the beings of an essentially higher order than man, whom we have called the Fire-Spirits. But there were certain beings which had not ascended high enough to be able really to endure the sun existence. You must be clear that they were beings exalted far above man, but still not so far advanced as to be able, like the Fire-Spirits, to live on the sun. Dwelling-places had to be created for them. None of the other theatres could have served them, for those were for beings of another nature, who had by no means attained the great age of the beings who, though belonging to the Fire-Spirits, had not quite kept up with them in cosmic evolution. In the main there were two species of beings who had remained behind, and two special arenas were therefore formed for them through the severing of Mercury and Venus from the sun. Mercury and Venus are two planets which have split off as the centres for those Fire-Spirits who are exalted far above human existence, yet who could not have supported the sun-existence. So you have Mercury in the neighbourhood of the sun as arena for those beings who had not been able to live with the Fire-Spirits on the sun, and Venus as arena for beings who in a certain respect had remained behind the Mercury beings but who yet stood far above man.

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Thus you have seen these various cosmic bodies originate out of the primoridal mist from inner causes, from spiritually-inspired activities. If one keeps to the physical alone, matters take their course in the way depicted by modern science, but the point is to learn to know the spiritual causes by which things have become what they are. Inside the primordial mist, the beings have themselves created the dwelling-places in which they could live. Now these various beings who were, so to say, harmoniously side by side before they had separated, did not remain without connection. On the contrary, they work through one another throughout. The influence of the Mercury and Venus beings on the earth is of a quite special interest. Put yourselves back into the time when the sun and then the moon released itself from the earth and man began his existence in his present form. He has acquired this existence in the present form through the fact that one of the Sun-Spirits forbore—if I may so express it—from continuing his existence on the sun, but united himself with the moon. In this way a lofty regent of the moon arose. Beings of a lower order existed on the moon, but one of the Sun-Spirits united himself with the moon-existence. This Sun-Spirit who is therefore really a displaced Sun-Spirit in the universe is, as divine, spiritual being, Yahve, Jehovah, the regent of the moon. We shall see why that came about if we consider the following.

We have seen that if the sun had remained united to the earth man would have been consumed by the swift course of development, and if the moon and its forces alone had worked upon man he would have been mummified. Precisely through the harmony of sun and moon forces arose the equilibrium that keeps man in the present tempo of evolution. When the Earth had come over from the old Moon, man had his physical body from Saturn, his etheric body from the Sun and his astral body from the Moon. But be-cause he had the three bodies and the seed with the three bodies now began to develop, he had a very different form. You would open your eyes in amazement if I should de-scribe it to you, for the present human form has arisen quite slowly and gradually from the time of the moon-separation. But the base, inferior moon-forces could not have given man his present form. They could certainly have given him a form, but an inferior one. If the moon-forces had remained with the earth they would have held him fast in one form. Forces that give the form must proceed from the moon, while forces that continually alter the form proceed from the sun. But in order that the present human form should arise, a molder, a modeler of form, must work from the moon; it was not possible otherwise. At that time therefore began the development of the ego-man. The fourth member of the human entity arose and Yahve gave the human being the nucleus to a form which would enable him to become an ego-bearer.

Now man was not yet capable of carrying out the work of which I have told you. I have explained that man's ego works upon his astral, etheric, and physical bodies. But he can only begin this work gradually. As a child needs teachers, so when man was already prepared to become an ego-bearer, he needed a stimulus on earth to enable him to advance, and there were two “stimulators.” You can think whence, from the whole cosmic evolution, they came.

The beings who stood nearest to man were the Venus and Mercury beings. Until, at the end of the Atlantean Age, man could make the first feeble efforts to work independently with his ego upon the three bodies—for that was just possible at the end of the Atlantean Age—he had to have teachers. These teachers were beings of Venus and Mercury, and they went on working far beyond the Age of Atlantis. But they are not to be looked on as we look on our present teachers; the Venus beings must rather be thought of as those who endowed man with his intellectuality. Men knew nothing at all of this; just as the different human fluids work upon man, so did the forces of these beings influence him until he could work upon his bodies independently. What we find in man today as intelligence was mediated to him through the spirits who remained behind on Venus as Fire-Spirits of a lesser order. In addition to these were other teachers and they were in fact perceived consciously as teachers by men who attained clairvoyance—the teachers of the great Mysteries of ancient times. In the far past there was not only that all-embracing influence of the Venus-Spirits who worked more or less on mankind as a whole, there were also Mystery centres where the most advanced human beings received instruction spiritually from the Fire-Spirits. The exalted Fire-Spirits of Mercury instructed in the Mysteries; there they appeared—if we may say so—in a spiritual embodiment and were the teachers of the first initiates. Just as the first initiates became the teachers of the great masses of mankind, so did the beings of Mercury work as the teachers of the first initiates. From this you may realize that the beings of other stars have an influence upon man, but the very complicated nature of this influence can be seen from the following.

You remember that in my Theosophy¹ we roughly divide the human being by saying that he consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, spirit-self, life-spirit, spirit-man. The more correct division, as you know, is physical, etheric, astral bodies, then the three soul-forces in which the ego emerges—sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, consciousness soul—and that only then we have spirit-self or Manas, life-spirit or Budhi, spirit-man or Atma. Thus the soul-element is inserted as sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul. If we follow man's evolution on the Earth we can say that to the three constituents brought over from the Moon, the first development to be added was the sentient soul, then arose the intellectual soul, and not till towards the end of Atlantean times, when man learnt for the first time to say “I” to himself, did the consciousness-soul arise. Since then man can begin to work consciously from within upon the members of his being. If we divide man thus into body, soul, spirit, then we have to divide the soul again into sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul. These evolved gradually, and the consciousness soul could as yet have no influence, for it arose only as the last. These members had therefore to be kindled from without, and beings from outside were active. Mars in fact worked on the sentient soul, the already-separated Mercury with its beings worked on the origin of the intellectual soul, and Jupiter, which had been in existence the longest, worked on the origin of the consciousness soul.

Thus in the soul-nature of man we have the working of the three cosmic bodies, of Mars in the sentient soul, Mercury in the intellectual soul, Jupiter in the consciousness soul, and inasmuch as spirit-self presses into the consciousness soul, Venus with its beings is active. Mercury was also active with regard to the first initiates, so that the Mercury beings exercised a twofold activity, the one quite unconscious to man inasmuch as they developed his intellectual soul, and then as well they were the first teachers of the initiates when they worked in a fully-conscious way. The Mercury beings had thus a continuous double activity, rather as many country schoolmasters instruct the children and cultivate the land allotted to them. The Mercury beings had to develop the intellectual soul and besides that had to be the great schoolmasters of the great initiates. All these things can also be grasped by pure logic.

Now you can perhaps ask why should just Jupiter work on the consciousness soul, since it is such a distant planet. But these things are not investigated on logical grounds, but by investigating the facts of the spiritual worlds. There you would perceive it as a fact that the consciousness soul is kindled by Jupiter beings, to whose help come, on the other hand, laggard Venus beings. Things cannot be fitted into an external scheme in the activity of the cosmos; one must realize that when a planet has already fulfilled a task, its beings can later fulfill another task as well. In the course of the second race of humanity Jupiter beings co-operated on the perfecting of the etheric body; then they themselves advanced a stage, and when the human being was far enough on for his consciousness soul to develop, they had to intervene again and help in its development. What is working in space enters into joint activity in most varied ways; one cannot pass from one activity to another in any sort of schematic way.

So you see how the physicist when he looks out into the universe sees only the external bodies of spiritual organisms, and how spiritual science leads us to the spiritual foundations which bring about what the physicist sees. We have not been giving ourselves up to the illusion of the man who takes the little ball of oil and forgets that he himself turns it. We have sought for the beings who themselves drew out the globes of the planets which we perceive. We have not fallen into the illusion of thinking that if we are not there, the whole thing does not go on revolving. We have sought the “revolver,” the one who stands behind as the actual spiritually active being—so that one can always find full accord between what is said by Spiritual Science and discovered by official science. Only you can never derive what Spiritual Science says from the facts of science. You would then at most come to an analogy. If on the other hand the spiritual facts have been found by occult means, then, if you disregard what official science has yet to find, they will every time be in accord with what the physicist too has to say. So the theosophist can support the physicist. He knows very well that an occurrence in the physical realm may be just what the physicist describes, but in addition there is always the spiritual process. This does not prevent many scientists from feeling very superior and considering the theosophist a poor simpleton, or something worse. But the theosophist can look on quite calmly. It will be quite different in fifty years' time, for the continuation of merely materialistic science would do great harm to the health and well-being of man-kind if things were to remain as they are today, and if spiritual science were not to combat them.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, Theosophy Anthroposophic Press, Inc., New York.

(From an incomplete transcript)

When we contemplate the world around us we find as our environment on Earth the beings of the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms, and whatever belongs to and is produced from these kingdoms—mountains, rivers, clouds and so forth. We look up to the heavens and as we contemplate the stars and the planets we shall realise as the result of anthroposophical study that, like the Earth, these different celestial bodies have their inhabitants. But as man turns his gaze to his earthly environment and also to the heavens, he finds in this spatial environment Beings who are connected with one part only of himself. We know from Anthroposophy that man is a fourfold being, composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, and that in sleep the Ego and astral body separate from the physical and etheric bodies. But the Universe we perceive through our senses is related to our physical body only, not to our astral body or Ego. The only exceptions are two celestial bodies: the Sun and the Moon. The Sun and the Moon are the abodes of spiritual Beings just as the Earth is the abode of man. The other celestial bodies are also peopled by spiritual Beings but during his life between birth and death man is related to them in an indirect way only. In this respect the Sun and Moon are exceptions. They are the two gates or portals through which, in physical life on Earth too, men are linked with the spiritual world. The Sun is connected with our Ego, the Moon with our astral body.

We shall begin to understand this if we turn to what has been said in the different books and lecture-courses.

You know that the Moon, now moving independently through cosmic space, was once united with the Earth; at a certain point of time it liberated itself and went out into the Universe where it now forms a kind of colony of the Earth. This applies not only to the physical Moon but also to the Beings who inhabit it. You know too that the Earth was once inhabited both by men and by certain higher Beings who were the first great Teachers of humanity. They were not incarnated in physical bodies as men are to-day but only in etheric bodies. Nevertheless intercourse between men and these Beings continued until the Atlantean epoch. In those primeval ages on Earth men were exhorted at certain times to maintain complete stillness and calm in their souls, to be oblivious of their physical environment. And then, in those primeval men—we ourselves, in fact, for we were all on Earth in previous lives—it was as if the Great Teachers spoke from within them and they felt this as Inspiration. These Beings did not communicate their messages and teachings to men as we communicate with one another to-day, but in the way I have indicated. Works giving expression to a wonderful, primordial wisdom were the fruits of this intercourse. Modern man is fundamentally arrogant, priding himself on being infinitely clever. And so indeed he is, in comparison with the men of those remote ages. But cleverness by itself leads neither to wisdom nor to real knowledge. Cleverness is due to the intellect and intellect is not the only instrument for acquiring knowledge. It was by deeper forces of the soul that men in primeval times were led to the knowledge which they did not express in intellectual phraseology or in terms of our pedantic grammar—for all grammar is pedantic—but in language that was half poetry. Beings at an advanced stage of evolution, the primeval sages who taught men through Inspiration, were the originators of works of supreme beauty, fragments of which have been preserved to this day. Only the dull-witted could fail to wonder at the Vedic literature, the Yoga and Vedanta philosophy of India, the lore of ancient Persia and Egypt. The more thoroughly we steep ourselves in these records, the more obvious it is that although we of the modern age are far cleverer than those ancient men, the knowledge they presented in a most beautiful, poetic form leads very deeply into world-mysteries. The scripts which fill us with such admiration and astonishment if our hearts are rightly attuned are only the last vestiges of the wonderful, primordial wisdom that once existed in humanity as oral tradition and that Spiritual Science alone is able to investigate. But men have outgrown this wisdom in its primal form. They would not have reached maturity nor achieved freedom in knowledge through their own efforts had they continued at the stage of that ancient wisdom.

The great Teachers, having fulfilled their task, left the Earth together with the Moon which as a physical planet had gone out into the Universe. Today the great Teachers form a kind of spiritual colony on the Moon and a seer who investigates the Moon with the help of Initiation-Science finds it peopled by those wise Beings who were once the companions of men. The wisdom of these Beings can even now be investigated through a higher development of the faculties described in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These Beings have an important task to perform for humanity—a task which it is difficult to describe in earthly words.

The Moon Beings keep the “books,” the records, of the whole past of humanity and of every individual man. These books are not, of course, anything in the least like the volumes in our libraries but this designation is nevertheless justifiable. The “books” contain records of what every individual human being has experienced in his successive earthly lives. When we are descending from the Cosmos to the Earth from the existence stretching between death and a new birth, we come into inner contact with the records of our past in these great “books” kept by the Moon sages. Before we arrive on the Earth, this past is imprinted in the astral body we bring with us into earthly existence and in that astral body are the “entries” made by the Moon Beings.

In ordinary circumstances these entries do not reach the head. During earthly life the head is by no means an organ of outstanding importance, although it is, of course, essential for the concepts and ideas relating to outer, material existence. What is inscribed into man during the final stage of his descent from the Cosmos to the Earth is inscribed—believe it or not as you will—into the part of him we call the spiritual side of the metabolic-limb system. The inscriptions therefore lie deep down in the unconscious, but they are actually there and they pass over into the process of growth, into the health and above all they determine what I will call the “curability” (Heilbarkeit) of a human being when he is ill on Earth. It is obviously important to understand the nature of illness but even more important to understand how to heal. Supersensible knowledge itself is an essential help, for this reveals what has been inscribed from the Akasha Chronicle by the Moon Beings into the forces of the process of growth, into the forces of nourishment, into the forces of breathing, and so on. It is these inscriptions that determine whether a man puts up strong or only slight resistance to the healing of an illness. One individual will be easily healed, another only with difficulty. This is entirely dependent upon how the karma from previous earthly lives makes it possible for the inscriptions to take effect.

When we think about what the Moon, together with the Beings who inhabit it spiritually, means for us on the Earth, we are finally led to say that the Moon is intimately connected with our past, with our previous earthly lives. To understand what the Moon existence out yonder in cosmic space means on Earth is to have intuitive perception of man's past. Destiny is formed out of what we bring over from our previous earthly life, that is to say, from our past, and what we experience during the present life. And out of what can be experienced in the present life, together with our past, our future destiny takes shape.

In its cosmic aspect, therefore, the Moon with its Beings is revealed as the power which carves the pattern of our past in our destiny. You will realise from this how little is known to-day about the true functions of the celestial bodies. Information about the Moon such as we are accustomed to hear from the physical sciences to-day is not knowledge in the true sense. A modern physicist who purports to describe the Moon assumes that the mountain ranges depicted on lunar maps were always there. This is a very naive belief. The Moon Beings themselves were always there, the soul-and-spirit belonging to the Moon was always there, but not the physical substance. You will be able to understand this by thinking of man himself. In the course of a man's earthly life the physical substances in his body are perpetually changing. After a period of seven to eight years, all the substances originally within us have been replaced. What has remained is the soul-and-spirit, and the same applies to the heavenly bodies. The substance of the Moon, although of longer duration than the substance of the human body, has all changed in the course of the ages; spirit-and-soul alone has remained. With these things in mind, our view of the Universe is altogether different from that presented by the material knowledge of to-day. This knowledge is extremely astute, highly intellectual; above all it can calculate with deadly accuracy. The calculations are accurate—but they are not true. Suppose someone makes calculations about the structure of the heart. He scrutinises it to-day and again in a month's time. It has changed, very slightly. After another month the change is again slight, and then he works out to what extent the heart changes in a year. He need only multiply and he has the figure for ten years. He can calculate what the measurements of the heart were three hundred years ago, and what they will be three hundred years from now. The calculations will certainly be correct. Only—the heart did not exist three hundred years ago, nor will it exist three hundred years hence! The same procedure is adopted in other cases. The calculations are invariably correct but they do not tally with the reality! The same applies to the outer substantiality of the heavenly bodies. Their substance changes but the element of soul-and-spirit remains. And in the case of the Moon it is this element of soul-and-spirit that is woven into our destiny by the great Recorders of our past life and therefore constitutes part of the web of our destiny.

So the Moon is in truth one of the portals showing man the way into the spiritual world—the world out of which his destiny is woven by Beings who were once his wise companions of the Earth in times when men themselves wove their destiny instinctively. The weaving of destiny now takes place entirely in the subconscious.

Still another portal leads into the spiritual world: it is the portal of the Sun. When through Initiation-science we acquire knowledge of the Sun, the Beings we encounter are not connected with the Earth in the same way as the Moon Beings; in the Sun sphere we do not encounter Beings who once had their abode on the Earth. The Beings we encounter in the Sun are referred to in the book Occult Science as the Angeloi and the higher Beings of the Hierarchies. When I say “in the Sun,” you must of course picture such Beings in the whole Sun sphere, in the flood of light radiating from the Sun.

The Sun is the abode of the Angeloi, one of whom is always connected with an individual human being. We ourselves, in respect of our Ego are connected with these higher Beings through our Sun existence. The Angeloi are in a certain sense the cosmic prototypes of men, for in future times man will attain their rank. These Beings, with whose nature we ourselves have a certain relationship, have their abode in the Sun sphere. From this you will realise that just as our past is connected with the Moon existence, so is our future connected with the Sun existence. Moon and Sun represent our past and our future. When we know on the one side that the Moon Beings are the “bookkeepers,” the “recorders” of our past, that records of our past earthly lives are inscribed, as it were, on the leaves of their books, Initiation-Science makes it clear that we must turn to the Angeloi when we give any thought to our future. Just as what we have done in the past works on into our present life, the things we do in the present must work on into the future. But this is possible only through the Angeloi who direct their gaze to a man's present deeds and bring them to effect in the future.

It is good and right to take account of this function of the Angeloi. We do many things that ought to bear fruit in the future. Humanity of the present age has become sadly thoughtless about such matters. When a man has performed some deed he should think of his Angelos, saying inwardly: “May my Guardian Spirit receive this my deed as a root and from it bring forth fruit.” The more definite and vivid the imagery used when a man addresses his Angelos in connection with deeds which should subsequently bear fruit, the more abundant this fruit can be in the future.

And so the Moon Beings preserve our past destiny and the Sun Beings weave new destiny for the future. It is not outer, physical light alone that the Sun and Moon send down to the Earth. Being connected as it is with our astral body, the Moon provides the initial impulse whereby everything from our past is woven into our destiny. The Sun is connected with our Ego and through the Beings who are a prototype of our future cosmic existence, has to do with our future destiny. And so the heavenly mirror-pictures of our destiny are images of the relationship between Sun and Moon.

Initiation-Science explains and confirms these facts. When a man has achieved the necessary degree of development as I have described it in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he then sees, when he contemplates the Full Moon, not only what normal consciousness sees. In the light of the Full Moon he perceives his past destiny, the content of his previous earthly life. And when with enhanced spiritual vision he focuses his gaze upon the place occupied by the dark, physically invisible New Moon, its dark shadow becomes for him the great Admonisher formed by his destiny, proclaiming to him what his attitude must be to actions in his previous earthly life in order that he may make compensation for them in the further course of his karma.

It is possible for a man to establish a similar relationship with the Sun. This enables him to have an inkling of future destinies—a general glimpse, at least, without specific details.

If we now turn from the cosmic aspect to man himself, we find that human destiny is woven in a wonderful way out of two kinds of circumstances. When two individuals meet each other, one of them, let us say, in his twenty-fifth year, the other in his thirtieth, it may be the case—not, of course, always—that when the one or the other looks back over his life up to this point he realises with absolute certainty that each of them has pursued his path of life as though they were deliberately seeking for one another. To ignore such things simply denotes lack of thought. The child had already set out upon the path that led inevitably to the other human being and the latter's path too led to the common meeting-point. All this took place in the subconscious realm—but what has been at work there? Think of the one individual as A and the other as B. Before entering into earthly life, A descended through the Moon sphere. The Moon Beings had inscribed in their records and also into his astral body, what he had experienced in common with B in the past earthly life, and these entries made by the Moon Beings in the Akasha Chronicle influenced the paths taken by both A and B. From the moment they meet, the subconscious is no longer all-important, for the two now come face to face and make a certain impression on one another. This is not a case of conservation of the past; it is the present that is now at work. The Angeloi intervene and lead the individuals concerned to further stages. The forces of Sun existence are now operating, so that within a man's inmost being, Sun and Moon together weave his destiny. This can be clearly visualised by thoughtful perception of the course of human life.

When two individuals meet, the impression they make upon each other may be intrinsically different. There are cases where one of the two takes the other right into the sphere of his will, of his feelings. The outer, personal impression has had little influence here. Intellectualists have no understanding of what is going on inwardly in such cases, for one of the most wonderful experiences imaginable is to see what kind of relationship is formed when two human beings come across each other for the first time. It may happen that A takes B into the sphere of his will by saying to himself: What B does I want to do myself; what pleases him, also pleases me.—Now B may be unsightly and unattractive and nobody can conceive that he could possibly be pleasing to A.—You see, the attraction in this case is not caused by the reasoning mind or by the sense-impressions, but by the deeper forces of the soul—by the will and what goes from the will into the heart. However unsightly the other may be, he has become so only in the present earthly life. The origin of the bond between the two lies in the experiences they shared in the previous life. Seen from outside it seems that the two cannot possibly live in harmony, but the fact is that what is present subconsciously in each of them leads their wills together. Even in childhood this often becomes evident. A child tries so hard to be like “him,” to have the same wishes as “he” has, to feel as “he” feels. A karmic connection is certainly present in such circumstances.

That is one kind of meeting between individuals and if they were alive to such happenings—as will inevitably be the case in a by no means distant future, when more attention will be paid to man's inner nature—the working of the will would indicate that past earthly lives have already been spent in company with such individuals; moreover subconscious soul-forces give hints of experiences shared with others in the past incarnation.

The other kind of meeting is this.—One individual comes across another but no relationship whatever is established between their wills; the aesthetic or mental impression is predominant. How often it happens that a man A makes the acquaintance of man B, but does not afterwards refer to him with the warmth or abhorrence with which he speaks of someone with whom he has a karmic connection from earlier times. One may praise an individual with whom there is no karmic tie, one may appreciate him, consider him a splendid fellow, but he makes no effect upon the will—he makes an effect only upon the mind, upon the aesthetic sense.

That is the second kind of meeting between individuals. If the effect made by the two upon each other reaches into the will, into the heart, into the inmost nature, then a karmic connection exists; the two individuals have been led to each other as the result of common experiences in the past earthly life. If an effect made by another person reaches only into the intellect, into the aesthetic sense, this is not an outcome of the Moon's activity, but a situation brought about by the Sun and one that will have its sequel only in the future. And so through a thoughtful, observant study of human life we can learn to perceive the signs of karmic connections.

What I have now told you is a fruit of knowledge attainable through Anthroposophy, and just as nobody need himself be an artist to see beauty in a picture, as little need a man himself be an Initiate to understand these things. They can be understood because the ideas harmonise. There are people who say: The spiritual world is no concern of ours; we shall understand it only when we are actually in it.—They say this because they are accustomed nowadays to accept as proof only what can be confirmed in a material, physical way. Such people are like dunderheads who say: Everything in the wide world must be supported—otherwise it falls down; the Earth, the Moon, the Sun—all have their places in cosmic space but they must have supports to prevent them from falling! Such people do not know that the cosmic bodies mutually support each other. Anthroposophy calls for this kind of understanding. Its ideas cannot be supported by external, physical proofs, but for all that they mutually support each other. When you read an anthroposophical book for the first time, you may lay it aside because you are accustomed to find everything proved up to the hilt and in this book there are no such proofs. But if you read on you will find that like the cosmic bodies the ideas support and sustain each other.

The teachings can be understood even when one is not an Initiate, but through Initiation-Science they become much more concretely real and are experienced differently. Therefore someone who is sufficiently advanced is able to speak in a different way about the web of human destiny that is woven out of the past, the present and the future. The experiences of a person who has reached a certain stage of Initiation become much more concrete.—Suppose that somebody is standing in front of you; he tells you something and you hear it clearly. An Initiate can hear the inner voice as well as the outer; he can hear the spiritual speech which is no less clear than ordinary human speech. A person with whom an Initiate was karmically connected in the past and whom he meets in the present life, speaks to him as clearly and unambiguously as people speak in the ordinary way. The Initiate hears an inner speech. You will say: then an Initiate must have around him a whole collection of people who speak to him with varying degrees of clarity. And that is actually the case. At the same time it is concrete proof of the way in which the previous earthly life has been spent. I have said that the Moon Beings, the great Recorders, register destiny; but immediately an Initiate encounters someone with whom he was karmically connected in the previous earthly life, the light of the Full Moon radiates to him the recorded ‘entries’ of the other individual.

What we think and do in the immediate present does not at once speak to us, but after a certain time, by no means very long, our deeds that have been registered by the Moon Beings become living and, in a sense, articulate. The Akashic pictures are living pictures; if you discover the content of a past earthly life you learn to know both yourself and the other human being concerned. Common experiences of the past incarnation rise up into consciousness; no wonder that we hear them speak both from within ourselves and from within the other individual. We are united inwardly with those with whom we were associated in the previous earthly life.

In the future men must develop a delicate feeling for the stirrings of the will when meeting another person. In about seven to nine thousand years all human beings on the Earth will be able to hear those with whom they are karmically connected, speaking from within.

Now if, after Initiation has been attained, a meeting takes place with someone with whom there is no karmic bond, who is encountered for the first time, again the experience is different. Naturally, an Initiate may also come across individuals with whom he is not karmically connected. In any case his experience will differ from that of others. He has a fine and delicate feeling for new facts revealed by the individual confronting him, in this case, as a cosmic being.

An individual encountered for the first time enables us to see more deeply into the Cosmos. It is a piece of good fortune to meet such a person and recognition that this meeting enlarges our knowledge of the world must develop into fine sensitivity. An Initiate has a certain obligation in connection with every individual with whom he has no karmic connection from the past, whom he encounters for the first time in the Cosmos (the spiritual world). He must link himself with the spiritual Being belonging to the realm of the Angeloi who is the Guardian Spirit of this individual. He must become acquainted not only with the individual himself but with his Guardian Angel as well. The Guardian Angel of this individual speaks unambiguously from within him. Hence when an Initiate encounters different human beings with whom he has no karmic bond, he hears a clear and definite speech. He hears what the Angeloi of these individuals are saying.

This gives a certain character to the intercourse between an Initiate and ordinary men. He takes into himself what the Angelos wishes to say to the person who has come into his ken; he transforms himself as it were into the Angelos of this person and what he can say to the latter is therefore more intimate than it is for ordinary consciousness. The Initiate is actually a different being in all his contacts with individuals whose first meeting with him is in the Cosmos, because he has identified himself with the Angelos of each individual concerned. This is the secret of the faculty of self-transformation possessed by those who with the power bestowed by Initiation come face to face with other men. People to-day have very little feeling for such things compared with the faculty of perception they possessed in centuries by no means very long ago. It might have happened then that a sage, confronting twenty other persons, would have been described quite differently by each of them. The commonplace verdict in such circumstances would be that as each of the twenty descriptions given was quite different from all the rest, none of the twenty writers actually saw the individual in question. But perhaps they all did! He changed in every case by establishing a link with the Angelos of each person concerned.

In this connection a veritable abyss lies between what is accepted usage today and what was taken for granted not so very long ago. A great deal of learning is available in our time but it is communicated in an entirely different way. In the higher training given in an epoch not far behind us, those who were called upon to be leaders of the people as priests or teachers were taught to develop the capacity to unite themselves with the Angelos of a human being. But even remembrance of this has vanished. Knowledge of the Angeloi was indispensable for those who aspired to be leaders of mankind, in order to develop the power of self-transformation.

And now something else.—It will strike you as extraordinary—I have spoken of it in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact—that there are great similarities in biographies of ancient Initiates. Study these biographies and you will find that very many features are alike, for the great Initiates underwent similar experiences in their souls. Biographies of ordinary human beings would never be alike. If those who encountered Zarathustra had all written about him, every characterisation would have been different, because Zarathustra changed every time an individual came before him. What the world was meant to know about the great Initiates was biography inspired by higher Spirits.

When the meeting between an Initiate and some individual takes place for the first time in the Cosmos, the Initiate has to establish contact with the Angelos of that individual. In doing so he acquires a great deal of knowledge about the outer spiritual world. In point of fact one cannot acquire deeper knowledge of other human beings through spiritual faculties without learning to know a host of Angeloi. A true knowledge of man is impossible without knowledge of the Angeloi. Just as human beings not karmically connected with each other acquire knowledge of the surrounding world through ordinary perception, the Initiate gains knowledge of the world of the Angeloi—which is then the bridge between himself and the higher Hierarchies.

There are also other indications of the existence of a karmic connection. We may meet an individual and then have a great deal to do with him, work with him and so on, but we never dream about him. The reason is that the karmic connection is not with our astral body, but only with our Ego.

We may come across someone of whom we have only a fleeting glance and yet he follows us into our very dreams—into our waking dreams too. Our picture of him is quite unconnected with his outward appearance and has arisen entirely in the inner life, because we have a karmic tie with him. Again we may meet someone with whom we are karmically connected and feel impelled to paint him. An artist may paint a portrait in which an uncultured person sees no likeness whatever, whereas an Initiate may recognise a previous incarnation of the individual whose portrait has been painted. We get to know someone with whom we have a karmic connection in the depths of his being although the knowledge may remain subconscious. Through individuals with whom we have had no previous karmic connection, whom we meet for the first time, we enlarge our knowledge of humanity in general.

When you go to a tea-party or some such function, just keep your ears open and listen to the conversation.—If someone has met another individual with whom he is karmically connected, he will say little about the others present, but about this particular individual he will say something of real significance, especially if he is unaware of what is behind it all. At the same kind of tea-party you may get into conversation with someone with whom you have no karmic connection at all. Your interest in him is very superficial and he seems to you to be typical of all the other guests. Such a gathering is very brief as a rule, and a great deal of talk goes on about world affairs, about noted politicians and the like. After listening to these few people we may judge the whole of society by this criterion. The judgement may be erroneous but nevertheless it is through individuals with whom we have no karmic connection that another aspect of the world is presented to us. There was once a traveller who happened to reach Konigsberg Station at midnight. He asked for a cup of coffee and was addressed in very coarse language by the red-headed waiter who had been dozing. The traveller wrote in his diary: “The people of Konigsberg have red hair, are sleepy and coarse.” He was judging all the people of Konigsberg by this night-waiter—someone with whom he had no karmic connection!

Through studies of this kind we learn not only how to assess life and its values, but we get nearer to other human beings and are connected with them in a different way. We learn not only to understand human life—which is the essential task of Anthroposophy—we also learn to know cosmic life. Sun and Moon cease to be the subject of abstract theories and become living realities in the Cosmos—the great counterparts in the Universe of the microcosmic destiny of men on the Earth.

Sun-activity combines with Moon-activity in our life. The light radiating to us from the Moon is connected with our cosmic past and the light of the Sun is connected with our cosmic future.

It was the aim of the Christmas Meeting, when the Anthroposophical Society was given a new foundation, to stress the importance of Anthroposophy for life itself. It was said that esotericism in the true sense of the word must be a living power among us. The Christmas Meeting was not intended merely to be a festive gathering of a number of Anthroposophists, but its efficacy and its impulses were meant to endure. One new plan is to issue a News Sheet—as a matter of fact the first three numbers have already appeared—containing reports of what is going on in the Anthroposophical Society. The Society must become a kind of living, spiritual organism. On my journeys I have constantly found Members in The Hague, for example, saying: “We have no idea what the Members in Vienna are doing, and yet we belong to an Anthroposophical Society!”—I wonder how many here in Zurich could tell me what is going on in the Groups of the Society in Leipzig or Hamburg? But this is what must be possible in future. Members of the New Zealand Group should have a real picture of what is going on in Vienna, and so on. It will be helpful if the Members will send to the editorial office of the News Sheet accounts of their experiences both in the Society and outside it. This material will then be edited, and Members will be able to read about whatever is going on in the Society. I propose in future to include in the News Sheet short, concentrated aphorisms for use in the Group Meetings or on other occasions.

All these measures should instil real life, pulsating life, into the Anthroposophical Society, and every Member should realise that this was the aim of the Christmas Meeting. Moreover it is only because this is how things ought to be, and indeed must be, if Anthroposophy itself is to do justice to its past and future, that I have undertaken the Presidency, associated with an Executive which I know will work fruitfully from the centre at the Goetheanum. I had for many years kept apart from all administrative matters, and had it not been an absolute necessity I should not have thought of starting anew and repeating in old age what one did as a young man. I want to appeal to every Member of the Anthroposophical Society to help in ensuring that through the Christmas Meeting the foundation stone of anthroposophical life shall be laid in the hearts of our Members and that it shall develop as a living seed, so that active life may constantly increase in the Society. If that happens, the Society will also be able to send its impulse out into the world.

A great deal of course could still be added to all that I have touched upon in these lectures, but we shall endeavour today to conclude them with a summary of the whole subject.

The approach we have taken throughout these lectures raises an important issue: What is the attitude to Anthroposophy, to spiritual investigation as presented by Anthroposophy? What is the position in regard to the understanding of anthroposophical teachings seeing that few today can have immediate access to spiritual exercises and practices which enable them to perceive and test thoroughly for themselves the anthroposophical descriptions of other worlds? This is a question that lies close to the hearts of those who feel an urge and even a longing to take up Anthroposophy. But this question is always seen in a false light, and is the more likely to be misinterpreted precisely because they are unable to grasp the right procedures such as I have advocated in these lectures.

People may ask: what is the use of all these descriptions of the spiritual world if I cannot look into that world myself? I should like, therefore, to touch upon this question in my cursory analysis today.

It is not true to say that one cannot acquire an insight into anthroposophical teachings and an understanding of them unless one can investigate the spiritual world oneself. I t is essential to distinguish, especially at the present time, between the actual discovery of facts relating to the different worlds and the comprehension of those facts. This distinction will be clear to you when you recall that man, as we know him today, belongs in fact to different worlds and that his experiences are derived from different worlds. Man as he is constituted today acquires his stock of knowledge and his consciousness of everyday existence in the course of his day to day experiences. During his waking life this consciousness which was the starting-point of our enquiry gives him a certain perspective over a limited field, over that aspect of the world that is accessible to sense-observation, and which can be grasped and interpreted by means of the intellect which he has developed in the course of evolution.

With his understanding man penetrates in his dreams into this world concealed behind the phenomenal world, in a vague, indefinite way as I have already pointed out. In his psychic life man contacts the world through which he passes between death and rebirth only in dreamless sleep, where he is surrounded by spiritual darkness and where he lives out a life which normally he cannot recall.

Man knows three states of consciousness—waking, dreaming and deep sleep. But he does not live only in the worlds to which this threefold consciousness gives access, for he is a being whose kingdom has many mansions. His physical body lives in a different world from his etheric body, his etheric body again in a different world from his astral body and both live in different worlds from the Ego.

And this threefold consciousness—clear waking consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness (one would like to say absence of consciousness but one can only describe it as diminished consciousness)—belong to the Ego as it is today. And this Ego when it looks inwards has also three states of consciousness. When it looks outwards, it knows waking (day) consciousness, dream consciousness and sleep consciousness. When it looks inwards, it knows clear intellectual consciousness; a sentient consciousness, a sentient life, though this is far more opaque and dreamlike than one usually imagines; it knows als1˃ a sentient life and finally the dim, twilight will-consciousness that resembles the state of deep sleep. Normal consciousness can no more explain the origin of willing than it can explain the origin of sleep. When a man performs an act of will it is accompanied by a thought which is clear and lucid. He then shrouds this thought in feeling which is more indefinite. The thought that is imbued with feeling passes down into the limbs; the process cannot be experienced by normal consciousness. To the kind of investigation of which I spoke yesterday and the day before, willing presents the following picture: whilst a thought wills something in the head and is then transmitted to the whole body through feeling, so that a man wills in the whole of his body, something akin to a delicate, subtle and intimate process of combustion sets in meanwhile.

When man develops Initiate-consciousness he is able to experience this life of will which is subject to the influence of warmth, but it remains wholly subliminal to ordinary consciousness. This is merely one instance which shows how what lies in the subliminal consciousness can be raised to the level of Initiate-consciousness.

When the information in the book I mentioned yesterday is made progressively more accessible to the public, people will realize that when we contemplate with Initiate-consciousness an act of will performed by man, we have the impression that we are watching the lighting of a candle or even the kindling of a warmth-giving light. Just as we have in this instance a clear picture of the external phenomenon, so we shall be able to see the thought as it is precipitated into the will. We then say: the thought develops feeling and from feeling—it follows a downward direction in man—proceeds a sensation of warmth, a flame in man. And this flame wills; it is kindled by degrees. We can represent schematical1y this normal consciousness in the following way:

Now although, in order to investigate the spiritual world, we must of necessity direct our consciousness to that world which we seek to apprehend cognitively, none the less, if the fruits of our investigations are to be communicated honestly, the ideas communicated verbally must be expressed in the language of other forms of consciousness.

You can now understand, perhaps, that this is a twofold process. In the first place, for example, we investigate the world of the human organs as I explained yesterday. We investigate the phenomena in question by utilizing the emergent forces in man as he draws near to the spiritual world during the course of his life. We then discover the relevant facts as they are revealed to the understanding. And there are men in the world who are aware of these facts and who communicate them to the world. When they are imparted to the world by such men they can be comprehended by normal consciousness if we look at them with the necessary objectivity. In the course of human evolution there has always been a minority who devoted themselves to investigation of the facts relating to the spiritual world and who then communicated to others the fruits of their investigations.

Now one factor today militates against the acceptance of such knowledge, namely, that as a rule people grow up in a social environment and under an educational system that conditions their habitual responses to such an extent that they can believe only in the world of fact, in the sensory world, and the rational information derived from the world of the senses. This habit is so strongly ingrained that people are inclined to say: At the university there are graduate members of the teaching faculty who, in addition to teaching, investigate certain factual aspects of the phenomenal world or confirm the findings of other research workers in this field. Everyone accepts their findings. Even though one does not investigate the facts oneself, one still believes in them. This boundless credulity is reserved especially for modern science. People believe things which, to those who have insight, are not only problematical, but definitely untrue. This situation stems from centuries of education. I would like to point out that this form of education was unknown to men of earlier centuries. They were far more inclined to believe those who made researches into spiritual facts since they still preserved something of the old insight into, and participation in the spiritual world that was consistent with their will and feeling. Today people are strangers to such knowledge. They are accustomed to an outlook which on the Continent is more theoretical and in England and America more practical, and which has now become firmly established.

On the Continent there exist detailed theories about these matters whilst in England and America there is an instinctive feeling for them which is by no means easy to overcome. During the course of centuries mankind has become inured to a scientific outlook that is related to the phenomenal world and has come to accept the findings of astronomy, botany, zoology and medicine, for example, in the form in which they are presented in recognized schools or centres of learning. A chemist, for example, undertakes a piece of research in his laboratory. People have not the slightest understanding of the technique involved. The work is acclaimed and they unhesitatingly declare: “Here is truth, here is knowledge that makes no appeal to faith.” But what they call knowledge is, in effect, an act of faith.

And amongst the methods adopted for investigating the phenomenal world, for ascertaining the laws of the phenomenal world through the instrument of reason, not a single one gives the slightest information about the spiritual world. But there are few who can afford to dispense wholly with the spiritual world. Those who do so, are not honest with themselves, they persuade themselves into it. Mankind feels an imperious need to know something about the spiritual world. As yet men ignore those who can tell them something about the spiritual world as it is known today, but they are prepared to listen to historical traditions, to the teachings of the Bible and sacred scriptures of the East. They are interested in these traditional writings, because otherwise they cannot satisfy their need for some sort of relationship to a spiritual world. And in spite of the fact that both the Bible and the Eastern scriptures have been investigated only by individual Initiates, people claim that they reflect a different kind of outlook, which bears no relationship to the knowledge of the phenomenal world, scientific knowledge, and depends upon faith and appeals to faith. And so a rigid line of demarcation is set up between science and belief. Men refer science to the phenomenal world and belief to the spiritual world.

Amongst the theologians of the Evangelical Church on the Continent—not amongst the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church who have retained the old traditions, and who do not accept the dichotomy of the Evangelicals or the natural scientists—there exist innumerable theories showing that there are definite boundaries to knowledge and thereafter faith steps in. They are convinced there can be no other possibility.

England is less hag-ridden because theorizing is unpopular. Here the traditional attitude is, on the one hand, to listen to what science has to say, and, on the other hand, to live reverently—I will not go so far as to say sanctimoniously—in faith and to keep the two spheres rigidly apart.

For some time past, laymen and scholars have adopted this point of view. Newton laid the foundations of a theory of gravitation, i.e. of a conception of space which, by its very nature, excludes any possibility of a spiritual outlook. If the world were as Newton depicted it, it would be devoid of spirit. But no-one has the courage to admit it. One cannot imagine a divine-spiritual Presence that lives and moves and has its being in the Newtonian world.

But not only the devotees of these ideas ultimately accept a conception of space and time that excludes the spiritual, but also those who undertake independent research work. Newton offers an excellent example of the latter, for he not only laid the foundation of a world-outlook which excluded the spiritual, but at the same time in his interpretation of the Apocalypse he fully accepted the spiritual.

The links between knowledge of the phenomenal world and knowledge of the spiritual world have been severed. Today the theorists set out to give solid proof of this dichotomy and every effort is made to inoculate the thoughts and feelings of those who distrust theory with this idea, so that ultimately they become conditioned.

On the other hand, man's intelligence, power of comprehension and ideation, his capacity for ideas, have today reached a point where, if he keeps them under conscious control, he can grasp by reason, though he cannot investigate by reason, the teachings of Initiation Science.

It is essential that the following point of view should find wider acceptance: that investigations into the spiritual world must be undertaken by those who, in their present life on Earth are able to call upon forces from earlier incarnations, for it is these forces which release the necessary powers for spiritual investigation; and further, that the results of these investigations shall be accepted by increasing numbers of men and incorporated into ideas which are comprehensible; and that, when the results of spiritual research are accepted by healthy understanding, a way is prepared for these other men, by virtue of this understanding, to have real experience of the spiritual world. For I have often said that the healthiest way to enter the spiritual world is first of all to read about it or to assimilate what we are told about it.

If we accept these ideas, they become inwardly quickened and we attain not only to understanding, but also to clairvoyant vision in accordance with our karmic development. In this respect we must give serious thought to the idea of karma. Today man is not concerned with karma; he believes that just as we analyse sulphur in the laboratory, so we can analyse by laboratory techniques the origin of so-called trans-normal phenomena; and that, as with sulphur, we must subject the individual who manifests abnormal forms of knowledge to experimental tests.

But mineral sulphur has no karma. Only the sulphur associated with the human body has karma, for only human beings are subject to karma. We cannot assume that it is part of man's karma to be experimented upon in a laboratory which would be a necessary prerequisite if the investigations were to have any value.

For this reason we have need of Spiritual Science. It would first of all be necessary to enquire into the karmic conditions which enable us to gain knowledge of the spiritual world through the agency of another. I have explained this clearly at the end of the later editions of my book Theosophy. But mankind today is not yet ready to accept this idea, not from incapacity, but from conservatism; but it is of immense significance.

It is essential to realize that we must not immediately undertake investigations into the spiritual world; but on the other hand if we do not adopt undesirable practices, such as experimenting with karma when there is no karmic necessity, or with mediums whose procedure we do not understand; and if we rely upon the everyday consciousness, which is the right condition of consciousness for this world, then we will attain to a perfect understanding of the communications of Initiation Science. We are greatly mistaken if we imagine that we cannot have such an understanding without first being able to experience the spiritual world for ourselves. To say, “what avails the spiritual world, if I cannot experience it for myself?” is to encourage yet another of the errors commonly committed today. This is to commit one of the greatest, most dangerous and most obvious of errors and must be clearly recognized by those who are associated with a Movement such as the Anthroposophical Society.

Man's existence here on the physical plane is bound up with existence in other worlds. To the unprejudiced mind this can be explained by the fact that man's experiences, as seen in the light of total human experience, are such that, in relation to the most vital questions in life they meet with incomprehension on the part of the ordinary daily consciousness because they appear unrelated, whereas in certain instances they are in effect closely associated.

In this brief account, therefore, I should like first to speak of man's entrance into the physical world and his exit, of birth and death.

Birth and death, the two most momentous events of our life on Earth, appear to ordinary consciousness to be isolated phenomena. We associate all that precedes birth, all that is related to human incarnation, with the beginning of our life on Earth, and death with its end. They appear to be dissociated. But the spiritual investigator sees them drawing ever more closely together. For if we take the path leading to the Moon mysteries and woo the night into the day in the manner described yesterday, then we perceive how, during the processes of birth, the physical body and etheric body progressively grow and flourish: how they develop out of the germ, gradually assume human form, and how during earthly life their vitality progressively increases up to the age of thirty-five, when it gradually decreases and a decline sets in. This process, of course, can be observed externally. But he who follows the lunar path, which I described yesterday, perceives that whilst the cellular life of the physical and etheric bodies grows, develops and assumes embryonic form, another form of life, which in Anthroposophy we call the astral body and Ego, is subject to the forces of decay and death.

When we uncover the hidden recesses of life—I gave a concrete description of this yesterday—we become aware of the birth of the physical and etheric and the death of the astral and Ego. We perceive death interwoven with life, the winter of life allied to its springtime.

And again, when we observe man with Initiate-consciousness, we are aware that, as his body declines, there is a burgeoning of the Ego and the astral from the thirty-fifth year onwards. This burgeoning life is retarded by the presence of dying forces in the physical and etheric being. Nevertheless a definite renewal does take place. And so by means of spiritual investigation we come to recognize the presence of death in life and life in death. Thus we prepare ourselves to trace back that which is seen to be dying at the time of birth to its pre-earthly life where it is revealed in its full significance and greatness.

And because we perceive the gradual burgeoning of the astral and Ego within the declining etheric and physical (for they are imprisoned within the etheric and physical), we prepare ourselves to follow them into the spiritual world after their release from the physical and etheric bodies at the moment of death. Thus we see that birth and death are interrelated, whilst to ordinary consciousness they appear to be isolated events.

All this information which is revealed by spiritual investigation can be grasped by ordinary consciousness as I indicated in the first part of today's lecture. At the same time one must be prepared to abandon the demands of ordinary consciousness for factual or scientific proof.

I once knew a man who maintained that, just as a stone falls to the ground, so if I pick up a chair and let go, it also falls to the ground since everything is subject to gravitation. Wherefore if the Earth is not supported, as it is claimed, it must of necessity fall. But he failed to realize that objects must fall to the ground because they are subject to the gravitational pull of the Earth, that the Earth itself however moves freely in space like the stars which mutually support and attract one another.

Those who, like the modern scientist, demand that proof must be supported by the evidence of the senses resemble this man who believed that the Earth must fall unless it is firmly underpinned. Anthroposophical truths are like the stars which mutually support each other. People must be prepared to see the whole picture. And if they can do this by means of their normal understanding they will begin really to grasp anthroposophical ideas such as the interrelationship of birth and death.

Let us go a little further and take the case of the man who is well grounded in the principles of modern science, but whilst alert and receptive to anthroposophical ideas has not yet learned to take the whole man into consideration, but only the separate organs in the manner described yesterday.

Through this knowledge of the organs acquired in the course of Initiation we are not only aware of birth and death, but of something quite different. In the light of this knowledge of the organs, birth and death have lost their usual significance, for it is only the whole human being who dies, not his separate organs. The lungs, for example, cannot die. Science today dimly realizes that when the whole human being has died, his single organs can be animated to a certain extent. Irrespective of whether a man is buried or cremated, his separate organs do not die. The individual organs take their path into that sphere of the Cosmos to which each is related. Even if man is buried beneath the earth, every organ finds its way into the Cosmos through water, air or warmth, as the case may be. In reality they are dissolved, but they do not perish; only the whole human being perishes.

Death, then, can only have meaning in relation to the whole human being. In the animal the organs die, whereas in man they are dissolved into the Cosmos. They dissolve rapidly. Burial is the slower process, cremation the faster. We can follow the individual organs as they take their path towards the infinite, each towards its own sphere. They are not lost in infinity, but return in the form of the mighty cosmic being whom I described to you yesterday. Thus, as we observe the organs with Initiate-consciousness, we see what really befalls the organs at death, namely, this streaming out of the organs into those regions of the Cosmos to which they are severally related. The heart takes a different path from the lungs; the liver from lungs and heart. They are dispersed throughout the Cosmos. Then the Cosmic Man appears; we see him as he really is, integrated in the Cosmos. And in the vision of this Cosmic Man we become aware of what is the source of successive incarnations, for example. We need this vision which has its origin, not in the whole man, but in the perception of the several organs, in order to be able to recognize once more, clearly and distinctly, the karmic return of former Earth lives in the present life.

It is for this reason that those who approached the spiritual world through the Moon path, mystics, theosophists, and so on, perceived the strangest phenomena—human souls as they had lived on Earth, gods and spirits—but could neither recognize nor decide what they were, nor give any definite assurance whether they were in the presence of Alanus ab Insulis, Dante or Brunetto Latini. Sometimes the entities were given the most grotesque appellations. And they were unable to determine whether the incarnations they contacted were their own or other people's, or what they were.

Thus the spiritual world is associated with the realm of Moon consciousness that has been wooed into the day; then, under the influx of the Venus impulses, this vision is lost and we now behold the spiritual world in its totality, but without that clear definition which it should possess. It is in this realm that we first begin to realize man's situation in the world as a whole and his position as a cosmic being.

In this connection, however, we cannot escape a tragic realization. For if man were simply the complete physical man he appears to be here on Earth, what a virtuous, docile and noble being he would be! Just as little as we can investigate death with normal consciousness—we can always understand death in the sense already suggested—just as little can we discover by means of the ordinary consciousness why human beings, with their candid faces—and there is no denying they have candid faces—have a capacity for evil. It is not the whole man who can become evil. His outer tegument, the skin, as such is noble and good; but man becomes evil through his individual organs; in his organs lies the potentiality for evil.

And thus we come to recognize the relationship of the organs to their respective cosmic spheres and also from what spheres obsession with evil originates; for fundamentally, obsession is inherent in the slightest manifestation of evil.

Thus our knowledge of the total man reveals first, birth and death; secondly, a knowledge of his organization reveals his relationship to the Cosmos in health and disease, namely, evil.

And so we can only perceive spiritually that Figure who experienced the Mystery of Golgotha when we are able to behold Cosmic Man through human organology. For it was as Cosmic Man that Christ came from the Sun. Until that moment He was not earthly man. He approached the Earth in cosmic form. How can we expect to recognize Cosmic Man if we have not first prepared ourselves to understand Cosmic Man as he really is! It is precisely out of this understanding of the Cosmic Man that Christology can grow.

Thus you see how true paths lead into the spiritual world, to a knowledge of birth and death and of the relationship of the human organism to the Cosmos, to the recognition of evil and to knowledge of Christ, the Cosmic Man. All this can be understood, when it is presented in such a way that the various aspects are shown to support each other. And the best means of finding one's own way into the spiritual world is through understanding and by meditating upon what is understood. Other rules for meditation then serve as additional supports. This is the right path into the spiritual worlds for human beings today. On the other hand, all experimenting with other paths which fail to use and maintain the normal channels of consciousness, all experimenting with trance conditions such as mediumism, somnambulism, hypnotism and so on, all investigation into world-events that cannot be apprehended by a consciousness that is a travesty of modern natural science—all these are false paths, for they do not lead into the true spiritual world.

When man is sensitively aware of the findings of spiritual investigation, namely, that through knowledge of the organs the Cosmic Man returns, that this “return” can to some extent lead to an understanding of Christ when all that is disclosed to occult investigation and insight is admitted into the Initiate-consciousness and becomes an integral part of his sentient life, then, through feeling, the Divine manifests in the terrestrial. And this is the province of art.

Through feeling, art embodies half consciously that which man receives from the spiritual world along those paths of return of which I have spoken. In all ages, therefore, it was those who were predestined to do so by their karma, who clothed the spiritual in material form.

Our naturalistic art has abandoned the spiritual approach. Every high point in the history of art depicts the spiritual in sensuous form, or rather raises the material into the realm of the spiritual. Raphael is valued so highly because, to a greater degree than any other painter, he was able to clothe the spiritual in sensuous representation.

Now in the course of the history of art there existed a general movement which tended more to the plastic or graphic arts. Today we must once again inject new life into the plastic arts, for the immediacy of the original impulse was lost years ago.

For centuries the impulse towards music has been growing and expanding. Therefore the plastic arts have assumed a musical character to a greater or lesser extent. Music, which includes also the musical element in the arts of speech, is destined to be the art of the future.

The first Goetheanum at Dornach was conceived musically and for this reason its architecture, sculpture and painting met with so little understanding. And for the same reason, the second Goetheanum will also meet with little understanding because the element of music must be introduced into painting, sculpture and architecture, in accordance with man's future evolution.

The coming of the figure of Christ, the spiritually-living figure, which I referred to as the culminating point in human evolution, has been magnificently portrayed in Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting, but in future will have to be expressed through music.

The urge to give a musical expression of the Christ Impulse already existed. It was anticipated in Richard Wagner and was ultimately responsible for the creation of Parsifal. But in Parsifal the introduction of the Christ Impulse into the phenomenal world where it seeks to give expression to the purest Christian spirit, has been given a mere symbolic indication, such as the appearance of the Dove and so on. The Communion has also been portrayed symbolically. The music of Parsifal fails to portray the real significance of the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth.

Music is able to portray this Christ Impulse musically, in tones that are inwardly permeated with spirit. If music allows itself to be inspired by Spiritual Science, it will find ways of expressing the Christ Impulse, for it will reveal purely artistically and intuitively how the Christ Impulse in the Cosmos and the Earth can be awakened symphonically in tones.

To this end we only need to be able to deepen our experience of the sphere of the major third by an inner enrichment of musical experience that penetrates into the hidden depths of feeling. If we experience the sphere of the major third as something wholly enclosed within the inner being of man and if we then feel the sphere of the major fifth to have the characteristic of “enveloping,” so that, as we grow into the configuration of the fifth, we reach the boundary of the human and the cosmic, where the cosmic resounds into the sphere of the human and the human, consumed with longing, yearns to rush forth into the Cosmos, then, in the mystery enacted between the spheres of the major third and major fifth, we can experience musically something of the inner being of man that reaches out into the Cosmos.

And if we then succeed in setting free the dissonances of the seventh to echo cosmic life, where the dissonances express man's sentient experiences in the Cosmos as he journeys towards the various spiritual realms; and if we succeed in allowing the dissonances of the seventh to die away, so that through their dying fall they acquire a certain definition, then in their dying strains they are ultimately resolved in something which, to the musical ear, resembles a musical firmament.

If, then, having already given a subtle indication of the experience of the ‘minor’ with the ‘major,’ if, in the dying strains of the dissonances of the seventh, in this spontaneous re-creation of the dissonances into a totality, we find here a means of passing in an intensely minor mood from the dissonances of the seventh, from the near consonance of these diminishing dissonances to the sphere of the fifth in a minor mood, and from that point blend the sphere of the fifth with that of the minor third, then we shall have evoked in this way the musical experience of the Incarnation, and what is more, of the Incarnation of the Christ.

In feeling our way outwards into the sphere of the seventh, which to cosmic feeling is only apparently dissonant and that we fashion into a ‘firmament,’ in that it is seemingly supported by the octave, if we have grasped this with our feelings and retrace our steps in the manner already indicated and find how, in the embryonic form of the consonances of the minor third, there is a possibility of giving a musical representation of the Incarnation, then, when we retrace our steps to the major third in this sphere, the “Hallelujah” of the Christ can ring out from this musical configuration as pure music.

Then, within the configuration of the tones man will be able to conjure forth an immediate realization of the super-sensible and express it musically.

The Christ Impulse can be found in music. And the dissolution of the symphonic into near dissonance, as in Beethoven, can be redeemed by a return to the dominion of the cosmic in music. Bruckner attempted this within the narrow limits of a traditional framework. But his posthumous Symphony shows that he could not escape these limitations. On one hand we admire its greatness, but on the other hand we find a hesitant approach to the true elements of music, and a failure to achieve a full realization of these elements which can only be experienced in the way I have described, i.e. when we have made strides in the realm of pure music and discover therein the essence, the fundamental spirit which can conjure forth a world through tones.

Without doubt the musical development I have described will one day be achieved through anthroposophical inspiration if mankind does not sink into decadence; and ultimately—and this will depend entirely upon mankind—the true nature of the Christ Impulse will be revealed externally.

I wish to draw your attention to this because you will then realize that Anthroposophy seeks to permeate all aspects of life. This can be accomplished if man, for his part, finds the true path to anthroposophical experience and investigation. It will even come to ~ass that one day the realm of music shall echo the teachings of Anthroposophy and the Christian enigma shall be solved through music.

With these words I hope to have concluded what I could only indicate in these lectures, to indicate the purposes I had in view.

I should like to add, however, that I hope to have succeeded in awakening in your souls some recognition of anthroposophical truths; and that these truths will grow and multiply and fertilize ever wider fields of human life.

May this cycle of lectures be a small contribution to the far-reaching aim which Anthroposophy sets out to achieve.

To study the matter further we must refer to what has already been brought forward.

When the subject under discussion is the relation of souls in human bodies to discarnate souls between death and rebirth, the chief thing is to direct the spiritual vision to the ‘psychic atmosphere’ in which they must meet in order to establish a relationship between them. We found that there must be a certain disposition of soul on the part of the living which, as it were, forms a bridge to the knowledge of the so-called dead. This disposition of soul always betokens the existence of a certain psychic element, and it may be said that when this element exists, when its presence shows the suitable feeling of the living, it is possible for these relations thus to come to pass.

We had to show that this possibility of a blending in the psychic atmosphere is created by the living through two directions of feeling; the first of which may be called the feeling of universal gratitude to all life's experiences. The general relationship of the human soul to its environment falls into an unconscious part and a conscious part. Everyone knows the conscious part; it consists in man's following what meets him in life with sympathy and antipathy and with his general perception. The subconscious part consists in developing, below the threshold of consciousness, a better and more sublime feeling than any we can develop in ordinary consciousness. This feeling can only be described as the knowledge always in the hidden subconscious part of the soul that we must be thankful for every experience of life, even the smallest. Our difficult experiences may for the moment cause us pain, but to a wider view of existence, even painful experiences so present themselves that, not in the surface regions but in the subconscious soul, man can be thankful for them, thankful that life is unceasingly supplied with gifts from the universe. This exists as a real subconscious feeling in the soul. The other direction of feeling is that we must unite our own ego with every being with whom we have anything to do in life. Our actions extend to other beings, some, it may be, even inanimate; but wherever we have done anything, wherever our being has been united with another in action, something remains; and this remainder establishes a permanent relationship between our being and everything with which we have ever been connected. This feeling of kinship is the foundation for a deeper one, a feeling generally unrecognised by the higher soul; a feeling of oneness with the surrounding world.

Those feelings—of gratitude and of union with the environment with which one is karmically united—can come to more and more conscious fruition. To a certain extent a man can awaken in his soul what lives in these feelings and perceptions; and to the degree in which this is done, he qualifies himself to build a bridge to souls living between death and rebirth. Their thoughts can only find the way to us when they are able to penetrate through the realm of the feeling of gratitude which we develop; and we can only find the way to them by fostering in our souls, at least to some extent, a feeling of communion. The fact that we are able to feel gratitude towards the universe enables such a mood to enter our souls. When we wish to enter into relation with the dead in any way, then because we have cultivated this disposition, because we are able to feel it, the way for the dead to reach us is opened; and because we can feel that our being lives in an organic community of which it forms a part, as our finger forms a part of our body, we become ripe to feel the same gratitude to the dead when they are no longer present in the physical body, so that by this means we can reach them with our thoughts. Only when we have acquired something of a disposition of gratitude, a feeling of communion, can we apply them in given cases.

These experiences are not the only ones; subconscious perceptions and moods are of many kinds. All that we develop in the soul opens out the path to the world in which dwell the dead between death and rebirth. Thus there is a very definite feeling existing subconsciously, but which can be gradually brought into the consciousness, a feeling which we may put alongside of the feeling of gratitude; it becomes lost to man in proportion as he degenerates into materialism, although to a certain degree it always exists in the subconsciousness and is never rooted out, even by the strongest materialism. Enrichment, enhancement and an ennobling of life, however, depend on man's raising such things from his subconsciousness to his consciousness. The feeling here referred to can be called universal confidence in the life which flows through and past us;—confidence in life! In a materialistic view of life, this disposition to confidence in life is very difficult to find. It resembles gratitude to life, but is quite another feeling alongside of it; for confidence in life consists in a steadfast disposition of soul, so that life, however it may approach us, has under all circumstances something to give us, so that we can never degenerate to the thought that life could have nothing more to give us. True, we pass through difficult and sorrowful experiences, but in the greater life relations these present themselves as something that most enriches and strengthens us for life. The chief thing is that this enduring disposition existing in the lower soul should be raised to the higher—the feeling: ‘O Life! Thou raisest me and bearest me, thou providest for my progress.’

If such a disposition were fostered in educational systems a tremendous amount would be gained. It is even good to plan our teaching and education so as to show, by individual examples, that life deserves our confidence—just because it is often so hard to understand. When a man considers life from such a standpoint, asking: ‘Art thou worthy of confidence, O Life?’ he finds much that otherwise he would not find in life. Such a mood should not be considered superficially; it should not lead to finding everything in life brilliant and good. On the contrary, in particular cases this very ‘confidence’ in life may lead to a sharp criticism of evil and foolish things. When a man has not confidence in life, this often leads to his avoiding the exercise of criticism towards what is bad and foolish, because he wishes to pass by the things wherein he has no confidence. It is not a matter of having confidence in particular things; that belongs to another sphere. Man has confidence in one thing and not in another, according as the things and beings present themselves; but the point is for him to have confidence in the general life, as a whole, in the common relationships of life, for if he can draw up any of the confidence always present in the subconsciousness, a way is opened for the real observation of the spiritual guidance and wise disposition of life. Anyone who is observant, not in theory but with feeling, says again and again: ‘As the occurrences of life follow one another, they mean something to me when they take me into themselves, they have something to do with me in which I can have confidence.’ This prepares him for the real gradual perception of what spiritually lives and weaves in these things. Anyone who has not this confidence closes himself to this.

Now to apply this to the relations between the living and the dead. When we develop this disposition of confidence, we make it possible for the dead to find his way to us with his thoughts; for thoughts can, as it were, sail on this mood of confidence from him to us. When we have confidence in life, faith in it, we are able to bring the soul into a condition in which the inspirations, which are thoughts sent to us by the dead, can appear;—gratitude towards life, confidence in life as described, belong in a sense together. If we have not this universal confidence in life as a whole, we cannot acquire sufficient confidence in anyone to extend beyond death; it is then simply a ‘memory’ of our confidence. We must realise that if this feeling is to meet with the discarnate dead, no longer incorporated in a physical body, it must be modified, and different from the perceptions and feelings which are extended to friends in the physical body. True, we have confidence in a man in the physical body and this will be useful for the conditions after death; but it is necessary that this confidence should be augmented by the universal, common confidence in life, for the relations of life after death are different. It is not only necessary to ‘remember’ the confidence we had in him in life, but we need to call forth freshly animated confidence in a being who can no longer waken confidence by his physical presence. For this it is necessary that we should ray something into the world, as it were, which has nothing to do with physical things; for the above-described universal confidence in life has nothing to do with physical things.

Just as this confidence places itself side by side with the feeling of gratitude, so something else places itself beside the feeling of oneness which is ever present in the lower soul and can be raised to the higher. That again is something which should receive more consideration than it does. This can be done when the element of which I am about to speak is given consideration in the educational systems of our materialistic age. A great deal depends upon this. If man is to take his right place in the world in the present cycle of time, it is necessary for him to develop a faculty which must be cultivated from knowledge of the spiritual world, not from an undefined instinct;—we might even say he must draw up something from the lower soul which came of itself in earner times of atavistic clairvoyance without any need of cultivation and which, though a few scattered remains still exist, is now gradually disappearing, as is all else derived from olden times. What a man needs in this respect is the possibility through life itself to rejuvenate and refresh again and again his feelings towards what must be encountered in life. We can so squander life that after a certain age we begin to feel more or less ‘tired,’ because we have lost the living share in life and are not able to bring sufficient zest to it for its phenomena to give us joy. Just compare the two extremes: the grasp and acceptance of experience in early youth—and the weary acceptance of life's phenomena in later age. Just consider how many disappointments are connected with this. There is a difference in whether a man is able to make his soul forces take part in a continual resurrection so that each morning is new to his psychic experience, or whether, as it were, the course of his life has wearied him for the appreciation of its phenomena.

It is specially important to consider this in our time, so that it should gain an influence in the systems of education. With respect to such things, we face a significant turning-point in human evolution. Our judgment of earlier epochs is framed under the influence of the modern science of ‘History,’ which is fiction of a strangely distorted kind. It is not even known how it has come about that training and education have been so directed that in later life man does not retain what he should. Under the influence of the present method the most that we produce in later years of life from the faculties exercised during our youthful education is a mere memory. We remember what we learnt, what was said to us, and as a rule we are contented if we do but remember. We do not, however, notice that many mysteries underlie human life, and in this connection one significant mystery. Reference has already been made to it in former lectures from another point of view. Man is a manifold being. We will first observe him as a twofold being. This twofold nature is expressed even in his outer bodily form, which shows us man as a head, and as the remaining part. Let us first divide man in this way. Were we to keep this difference in structure well in mind, we should be able to make very significant discoveries in natural science. If we observe the structure of the head purely physiologically, anatomically, it presents itself as that to which the more material history of evolution, known as the Darwinian theory, may be applied. In respect of his head, man is placed, as it were, in the stream of evolution; but only in respect of his head, not as regards the rest of his organism. In order to understand the descent of man, we must think of the head alone, disregarding the proportion in size, and consider all attached to it. Suppose evolution took such a course that in time to come man developed certain additional organs of still greater significance; this development, this metamorphosis, might go even further. This was actually the case in the past: man was, long ago, actually a head-being only, developing little by little and becoming what he is to-day. What is attached to the head, although physically larger, only grew there later. It is a younger structure. As regards his head, man is descended from the oldest organism, all the rest grew later. The reason why the head is so important to the present man is because it remembers former incarnations. The rest of his organisation is, on the other hand, a preliminary condition for later incarnations. In this respect man is a twofold being. The head is organised quite differently from the rest of the organism. The head is an ossified organ. The fact is that if man had not the rest of his organism, he would certainly be very spiritualised,—but a ‘spiritualised animal’ only. Unless the head were inspired thereto, it would never feel itself as ‘man.’ It points back to the old epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon, the rest of the organism only to that of the Moon, and indeed to the later part of that period; it only grew on to the head-part and is really in this respect something like a parasite. We may well think of it in this way: the head was once the whole man; below, it had outlets and openings by which it fed. It was a very peculiar being. As it developed, the lower orifices closed to the environment, and therefore were no longer able either to serve for nourishment or to bring the head into connection with the influences streaming in from the environment; and because the head also ossified above, the remaining part of the body then became necessary. This part of the physical organism only came into being at a time when it was no longer possible for the rest of the animal creation to take form. It may be said that this is difficult to imagine. The only reply is that man must take the trouble to realise that the world is not so simple as some would like to believe, some who prefer not to think much in order to understand it. In this respect men experience a number of ideas by which they claim that the world is easy to understand, and they have very remarkable views. There is an abundance of literature by those who hold Kant as a great philosopher. That is due to the fact that they understand no other philosophers, and have to exercise much thought-force to understand Kant. As he was to them the greatest philosopher (in their own opinion men often consider themselves to be the greatest geniuses!) they can understand none of the others. It is only because Kant is so difficult to understand that he is regarded by them as a great philosopher. With this is connected the fact that man is afraid to regard the world as complicated, as requiring the power of thought for its comprehension. These things have been described from various points of view, and when some day my lectures on ‘Occult Physiology’ are published, men will be able to read how it can be proved by embryology, that it is foolish to say that the brain has developed from the spinal cord. The opposite is the case; the brain is a transformed spinal cord of former times, and the present spinal cord is only added to the brain as an appendage. We must learn to understand that what seems the simplest part of man has come into being later than what seems the more complicated; what is more primitive and at a more subordinate stage, has come into being later.

This reference to the twofold nature of man is made here in order to explain the rest, which is the outcome of this duality. The consequence is, that as regards our soul life, which develops under the restrictions of the bodily nature, we ourselves are included in this duality. We have not only the organic development of the head and that of the rest of the organism, but also two different rates, two different velocities in the development of the soul. The development of the head is comparatively rapid, and that of the rest of the organism—we will call it the development of the heart—is about three or four times slower. The condition for the head is that as a rule it closes its development about the 20th year; as regards the head we are old at 20, it is only because we obtain refreshment from the rest of the organism, which develops three or four times as slowly, that we continue our life agreeably. The development of our head is quick, that of the heart, of the rest of the organism, three or four times slower; and in this duality we live our earthly life. In childhood and youth our headorganism can absorb a great deal, therefore we study during that time; but what we then received must be continually renewed and refreshed, must be constantly encompassed by the slower evolutionary progress of the rest of the organs, the progress of the heart.

Now let us reflect that if education, as in our age, only takes into consideration the development of the head, it is because in training and education we only allow any rights to the head, the consequence is that the head is only articulated as a dead organism into the slower progress of the evolution of the rest; it holds this back. The phenomenon that at the present time man grows old early in his soul and inner nature, is chiefly due to the system of training and education. Of course we must not suppose that at the present time we can put the question: How shall we arrange education, so that this shall not happen? This is a very important matter which cannot be answered in a few words, for education would have to be altered in almost every respect, for it would not be a question of memory only, but of something with which man could refresh and revive himself. Let us ask ourselves how many to-day, when they look back to an achievement in childhood, upon all they experienced then, upon what their teachers and relations said, are able to remember more than: ‘You must do this,’ are able to plunge again into what was experienced in youth, looking lovingly back to the hand-clasp, to every single remark, to the sound of the voice, to the permeation with feeling of what was offered them in childhood, experiencing it as a continual fount of rejuvenation? It is connected with the rates of development we experience within us, that man must follow the quicker development of his head, which closes about the 20th year, and that the slower progress of the heart, the evolution of the rest of him, has to be nourished throughout his life. We must not only give the head what is prescribed for it, but also that from which the rest of the organism can again and again draw forth restorative force for the whole of our lives. For this it is necessary that every branch of education should be permeated by a certain artistic element. To-day, when people avoid the artistic element, thinking that to foster the life of fancy—and fancy carries man beyond mere everyday reality—might bring fantasy into education, there is no inclination whatever to pay attention to such mysteries of life. We need only look to certain spheres to see what is here meant—for it does, of course, still exist here and there—and we shall see that something can be realised in this way; but it must be realised by man's again becoming ‘man.’ This is necessary for many reasons; we shall draw attention to one of them.

Those who wish to become teachers to-day are examined as to what they know, but what does this prove? As a rule only that the candidate has for the time of the examination, hammered into his head something which—if he is at all suited for that particular subject—he has been able to gather from many books, day after day acquiring what it is not in the least necessary to acquire in that way. What should be required above all in such examinations is to ascertain whether the candidate has the heart, mind and temperament for gradually establishing a relationship between himself and the children. Examination should not test the candidate's knowledge, but ascertain his power, and whether he is sufficiently a ‘man.’ To make such demands to-day would, I know, simply mean for the present time one of two things. Either it would be said that anyone who demands such tests is quite crazy, such a man does not live in the world of reality; or if reluctant to give such an answer, they would say: ‘Something of the kind does take place, we all want that.’ People suppose that results come about from this training, because they only understand the subject in so far as they bring their consideration to bear upon it.

The foregoing is intended to throw light from a certain side upon something which the lower soul always feels, and which is so difficult to bring up into the higher soul at the present time; something which is desired by the human soul and will be desired more and more as the time goes on;—so that we may see in the right light the fact that the soul needs something wherewith continually to renew the power of its forces, so that we may not grow weary with our progressing life, but are always able to say, full of hope: ‘Each new day will be to us like the first one we consciously experienced.’ For this however we must, in a sense, not need to ‘grow old;’ it is urgently necessary that there should be no occasion to grow old in soul. When we observe how many comparatively young people there are who are dreadfully old and how few regard each day as a new experience given them, as to a lively child, we know what must be achieved and given by a spiritual culture in this domain. Ultimately the feeling here meant is the feeling which acquires the perennial hopefulness of life and enables us to experience the right relation between the living and the so-called dead. Otherwise the facts which should establish our relationship to one of the dead remain too strongly in the memory. A man can remember what he experienced with his dead during life. If, however, when the dead is physically absent we cannot have the feeling that we can always revivify what we experienced with him during life, our feeling and perception are not strong enough to experience this new relationship that the dead is still present as a spiritual being and can work as a spirit. If a man has grown so deadened that he can no longer revive anything of the hopefulness of life, he can no longer feel that a complete transformation has taken place. Formerly he could help himself by meeting his friend in life; now the spirit alone can come to his help. He can meet him, however, if he evolves this feeling of the ever-enduring stimulation of the life-forces, in order to keep the hopefulness of life fresh.

It may seem strange to say so, but a healthy life, especially healthy in the directions which a man might develop here (unless he be in a clouded state of consciousness), never leads to the consideration of life as anything of which he can be tired; for even when he has grown old, a thoroughly sound life leads him to wish to accept each day as something new and fresh. Sound health does not lead a man to say when old: ‘Thank God my life is behind me;’ rather does he say to himself: ‘I should like to go back forty or fifty years and pass through the same circumstances again!’—This is the man who has learnt through wisdom to cheer himself with the thought that what he cannot carry through in this life, he will do more correctly in another. The sound man does not regret anything he has experienced, and if wisdom is needed for this, he does not long to have it in this life, but is able to wait for another. The right confidence in life is built on vigorously maintained life-hopes.

These then, are the feelings which rightly inspire life and at the same time create the bridge between the living here and the dead yonder:—gratitude towards the life which greets us here; confidence in its experiences; an intimate feeling-in-common; the faculty of making hope active in life through ever fresh springing life-forces; these are the inner ethical impulses which, felt in the right way, can supply the highest external social ethics; for ethics, like history, can only be understood in the subconscious realm.

Another question in regard to the relationship of the living to the dead frequently arises: What is the real difference in a relationship between man and man when incarnated in physical bodies, and between them when one is in a physical body and the other not, or when neither is in a physical body? In respect to one point of view I should here like to mention something of importance.

When we observe the ego and actual soul life—also called the astral body—by means of spiritual science (the ego, as we have often heard, is the youngest, the baby among the principles of man's organisation, whereas the astral body is somewhat older, though only dating from the Moon evolution) we must say of these two highest principles that they are not as yet so far advanced for man to rely on them alone for power to maintain himself independently of other men. If we were here with one another—each only as ego and astral body—we should be together as though in a sort of primordial jelly. Our entities would merge into each other, we should not be separate and would not know how to distinguish ourselves one from the other. There could be no possibility of knowing whether a hand or leg were one's own or another's (the whole matter would then of course be quite different, we cannot really thus compare the circumstances). We could not even properly recognise our feelings as our own. To perceive ourselves as separated men depends on each one having been drawn out of the general fluid—as we must picture a very early period—like a drop; and in such a way that the individual souls did not flow together again, but each soul-drop was held together as though in a sponge. Something like that really occurred. Only because we as human beings are in etheric and physical bodies are we separated from one another, really separate. In sleep we are only separated by a strong longing for our physical body. This longing which draws us ardently to the physical body, divides us in sleep; otherwise we should drift through one another all night long. It would probably be much against the grain of sentimental minds if they knew how strongly they come into connection with other beings in their neighbourhood. This, however, is not so very bad in comparison with what might be if this ardent longing for the physical body did not exist as long as man is physically incorporated.

We might now ask: What divides our souls from others in the time between death and rebirth? Well: as with our ego and astral body between birth and death we belong to a physical and etheric body, so after death, until rebirth, we are part of quite definite starry structures, in no way the same; each one of us belongs to quite a distinct structure. From out [of] this instinct we speak of ‘man's star.’ This starry structure, taking its physical projection first, is periphically globular, but we can divide it in many ways. The regions overlap each other, but each belongs to another. Expressed spiritually, we might say that each belongs to a different rank of Archangels and Angels. Just as people here are drawn together through their souls, so between death and rebirth, each belongs to a particular starry structure, to a particular rank of Angels and Archangels; their souls all meet together there. The reason this is so, but only apparently (for we must not now go further into the mystery) is because on earth each one has his own physical body. I say ‘apparently’ and you will wonder; but it is surprising when investigated how each has his own starry structure and how these overlap. Let us think of a particular group of Angels and Archangels. In the life between death and rebirth, thousands of Angels and Archangels belong to one soul; imagine only one of all these thousands, taken away and replaced by another, and we have the region of the next soul.

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In this diagram two souls have, with one exception, which they have from another realm, the same stars; but no two souls have absolutely similar starry structures. Thus men are individualised between death and rebirth, by having each his special starry structure. From this we see upon what the separation of souls between death and rebirth is based. In the physical world, as we know, this division is effected by the physical body. Man has his physical body as a shell as it were; he observes the world from it, and everything must come to the physical body. All that comes into the soul of man between death and rebirth stands, as regards the relation between his astral body and ego, in a similar way in regard to a starry structure, as here the soul and the ego stand with regard to the physical body. Thus the question as to how this severance comes about is also answered as above.

From these considerations we have seen to-day how we can work upon our souls in forming certain feelings and perceptions, so that the bridge of communication may be formed between the so-called dead and the living. What has just been said can also attract thoughts, perceptive thoughts and thoughtful perceptions, which can in their turn have a share in the creation of this bridge. This takes place by our seeking more and more to form a kind of perception with regard to some particular dead friend which when we have experienced something in the soul, can bring up the impulse to ask ourselves: How would the dead experience what I experience at this moment? By creating the imagination that the dead experienced the event side by side with us and making this really a living feeling, man gauges in a certain respect, either how the dead has intercourse with the living, or the dead with the dead, when we consider the various starry realms given, in relation to our own souls or to each other. We can here surmise what interplays between soul and soul through their assignment to the starry realm. If we concentrate through the presence of the dead upon a directly present interest, if in this way we feel the dead living immediately beside us, then from such things as are discussed to-day we become more and more conscious that the dead really do approach us. The soul will develop a consciousness of this. In this connection we must have confidence in life that these things are so; for if we do not have confidence but are impatient with life, the other truth obtains. What confidence brings is drawn away by impatience; what man might learn through confidence, is made dark by impatience. Nothing is worse, than if by our impatience we conjure up a mist before the soul.

In the lecture on the Kalevala, (14th November, 1914), I made a statement which you will probably not have found easy to understand. You will remember, I spoke of a “being” that stretches across Europe from west to east; and I spoke of it as having three limbs that reach out in an easterly direction. I said that for the ancient Finnish folk these three limbs were known as Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkainen, and that they were what we today, in our more materialistic language, call the gulfs of Riga, Finland and Bothnia. You will probably have wondered how I could say that these gulfs had anything to do with a being, when they are obviously nothing else than extensions of the surface of the sea. There is no body; how then can it be possible to speak of a being?

I can well imagine that this difficulty might arise in your minds, and it is typical. For again and again you will find that truths which come from the spiritual world lay themselves open to the charge of being contradictory. The very fact that they do so is significant and is quite as it should be; and the only way to arrive at a satisfactory solution of the contradiction is in every case to make a still deeper study of the matter in question. And this I want to do today in respect of certain problems in spiritual knowledge. But first let me preface what I have to say with a few introductory words.

We will glance, to begin with, at some of the prejudices concerning the nature of man that are prevalent in the materialistic thought of our time. Let us take one example. Various physical processes are to be found in man, among others processes of the brain and nervous system; and it is common knowledge that when these processes take place, processes take place also in the soul. The conclusion is drawn that the processes in the soul are no more than the expression of the physical processes. The materialist studies what goes on in the body of the human being, finds there—or rather pre-supposes hypothetically—delicate nerve-processes, and says: The thinking, feeling and willing processes are in reality only accompanying phenomena of what is going on all the time as physical processes. This view is quite commonly held today and it will undoubtedly strike deeper and deeper root into the materialistic thinking of the near future. From the point of view of logic it is about as clever as the following would be.—Suppose someone walking along a road discovers tracks on it—here, parallel ruts, and here again, marks like the soles of human feet. He thinks this over and says to himself: “The material of which the road is made has undergone certain changes and influences, with the result that it has in some places become packed together so as to form ruts, whilst at other places it has been sucked downwards and we see on the surface what looks like the impress of a human foot.”

Such a conclusion is of course a crudely mistaken one, the truth being that a wagon has passed and made the two ruts with the wheels, and a man has also been walking on the road and made the other impressions with his feet. Not the nature of the soil, but the man and the wagon are responsible for the tracks.

The case is no different with the processes that go on in our nervous system! Whenever we think or feel or will, we are setting up processes that are of the nature of soul-and-spirit. And so long as we live in the physical world, these processes are united with the physical body, they leave their tracks in it—just as the wagon and the man leave their tracks behind in the road. But these tracks in the body have no more to do with the material of which the body is made than have the tracks in the road to do with the materials of which the road is constructed. In reality, the processes that take place in the matter of the brain and in the matter of the nerves have nothing whatever to do with the actual thought-processes. The relation between them is no nearer than the relation between what the man and the wagon are doing and what is going on in the surface of the earth over which they are moving. It is really quite important to take a little trouble to consider the matter in this light. For it reveals to one that the anatomist or physiologist who investigates merely the physical processes in the organism is like a spirit-being who moves about under the earth without ever coming up to the surface, and who has never even seen men or wagons. All he can do is to observe from below that unevennesses occur in the surface of the earth; he never comes close up to them, and he sees them always from the other side. Investigating them in this limited way, he imagines the earth itself has given rise to them by its own activity. The moment such a spirit were to come out on to the surface, he would become acquainted with the true state of affairs. This is exactly how it is with the anatomist and physiologist who work from the materialistic point of view. They are always under the earth—for to know nothing of Spiritual Science is to be “under the earth!” What they investigate is the material processes, and these have nothing to do with what is happening above in the realm of soul-and-spirit. It will be man's task in the near future to free himself from this anatomical and physiological thinking and work through to a spiritual-scientific thinking. Then he will feel as an underground imp might feel who was suddenly lifted up above the earth and saw for the first time how the tracks he had observed from below had really come about. Imps burrowing under the earth—that is what the scientists are, who take account only of the spiritual that is under the earth—for even the material is spiritual! And mankind will have to experience the great shock that must inevitably come when these underground imps come out into the open—into the realm, that is, of the soul-and-spirit.

These introductory words were necessary in order to prepare you for the subject of today's lecture, which I think you will find helps to solve the contradiction of which we were speaking—that the gulfs of Bothnia, Finland and Riga are obviously mere surfaces, and yet I spoke as though they were a being, or rather limbs of a mighty being stretching from west to east.

We are accustomed to speak of ourselves as beings of space, and we are right; as human beings we are spatial beings. When, however, we come to consider what we are in reality, that is quite another matter. The fact is, man is in reality something altogether different from what we imagine him to be when we look at him only in the outer Maya, in the phantasmagoria of external appearance. There he appears of course as a being of space, spatially enclosed within his skin. But directly we try to carry our thought a little deeper, we are confronted with three great problems or riddles in respect of the human form.

The first of these riddles conceals itself under all manner of puzzling and mystifying illusions. For the external Maya of appearance deceives us again and again in regard to our own existence; and you can find traces of this deception in the science of the present day, particularly at certain points where science is quite at a loss and has been forced to construct all manner of hypotheses. Hypotheses have for example been constantly brought forward to account for the fact that man has two eyes and two ears and yet does not see or hear double. How is it that these organs are symmetrically disposed? How is it that they are present not singly but in pairs? This simple fact offers science a hard nut to crack, and you have only to glance through the literature on the subject to find what a very great deal has been written on this question of why we see with two eyes and hear with two ears.

Man is really coarsely organized; we can sometimes find evidence of this in the very way we speak. For in reality we have also two noses! Only they have grown together and are not so obvious as the two eyes and two ears. Hence we do not speak of two noses, but of one nose; crudely organized as we are, we never discover that we have two! It is nevertheless the case that in all human perception a symmetry comes to expression, a right-and-left symmetry. Had he not two ears, two eyes, and two noses, man would not attain to the perception of his own I or Ego.

Correspondingly, man needs also for the Ego experience two hands. When we clasp the hands together and feel the one with the other, we immediately get something of an Ego experience. And it is really a similar process, when we unite into one whole the perceptions of two eyes or two ears. Every time we make a sense perception, we perceive the world from two sides, from left and from right. And to the fact that we have these two directions of perception left and right, and bring them together—to this fact we owe our Ego-nature as human beings. Otherwise we would not be I- or Ego-men at all. If, for example, our eyes were situated near our ears and we had no possibility of combining the lines of vision, we would always remain beings who are involved in a Group Soul. To be an Ego-being we must make the right and the left meet. Throughout the whole realm of human perception there is always this crossing of right and left in the middle. Look at this vertical line on the blackboard. Imagine that a plane projects out here from the blackboard along this line. Everything comes, from left and right, up to this line of incision. We, my dear friends, are ourselves actually in this plane. We are not in space, we are only in this surface, this plane. We are not beings extended in space, we are surface beings, that come about through the crossing of the impulse from the left with the impulse from the right. And if to the question: Where are you? you want to find an answer, not in accordance with Maya, but in accordance with reality, then you must not point to the space where your body is standing and say: “I am here,” but you will have to say: “I am in the place where my left man and my right man meet.” In reality you are there, and only there. Just as we had surfaces in the case of the being of whom I spoke before, surfaces where air and water meet, so in man we have the left half and the right half. In that being the two halves were different, in man they are alike; but man is also a surface being, man is a plane. It is Maya that we see him as having form and figure.

Whence then has man this form and figure? He has it because he stands in the midst of a battle. A being from the left is fighting in man with a being from the right. If we were able to be entirely within our left half we would have a powerful perception of the one being, and if we were in our right half we would have a correspondingly powerful perception of the other being. Our existence as a double being arises from the fact that the Luciferic being is fighting in us from the left and the Ahrimanic being from the right.

Let us try to make a picture of it in our minds. From the left the Luciferic being fights his way through and throws up, as it were, his fortifications, and from the right Ahriman fights his way through and throws up his fortifications. And all that you can do is to stand in the middle between the two. The left part of you—your left man, as it were—is the fortification set up by Lucifer, and your right man is the fortification set up by Ahriman. And the whole art of life consists in finding the true balance between them. We do it unconsciously whenever we perceive with the senses. When we hear with the left ear and with the right ear, and then unite into a single perception the impulses that reach us in this way, or when we feel with the left hand and with the right hand and unite the two perceptions, we are placing ourselves into the surface that lies on the boundary of the conflict between Lucifer and Ahriman. As narrow as—no, narrower than—the blade of a knife is the space that is left to us in the middle, where we have to play our part. Our organism does not really belong to us; we are a battlefield for the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers—and for other powers too, of like nature with them, but into that subject we cannot enter now.

We men are thus in reality surface beings wedged between two entities that are no concern of ours! Our left man does not concern us, neither does our right man: what concerns us is the process that goes on between the two.

And now we can develop a little further the comparison I made use of before. For, as we all recognize, there are processes perpetually going on under the earth; but it is not these that make the tracks in the road. Similarly, what happens in you in the right and left half of your organism, all the processes that take place between Lucifer and Ahriman, have nothing whatever to do with the experience you have in your soul. What goes on down below the surface of the earth—the worms creeping about, the changes in temperature in accordance with the seasons of the year, and so forth—all this has no connection with the tracks that have come in the road, and it is these tracks that are comparable with what takes place in the organism of man. Our researches in physiology and anatomy reveal to us the fight that is being waged within us between Lucifer and Ahriman, but they do not compel us to give ourselves up to the superstition that the life of the soul owes its origin to these processes going on between Lucifer and Ahriman. That is a complete mistake; the life of the soul takes its course within the soul itself—that is to say, in the surface, in the plane, not in the spatial organism at all.

Now the working of Lucifer and Ahriman is not the same in all parts of the human organism, and it is interesting to observe its gradation. Beginning from the head, we find that there Lucifer and Ahriman have thrown up fairly equal fortifications; the left and right halves of the head are very similar. This means that the forces of left and right have in the head not much possibility of interplay and the surface between them is left comparatively undisturbed. There in the middle is the surface, with Lucifer on the left and Ahriman on the right; and because the left and right halves of the head are so similar in form, Lucifer and Ahriman spring back from one another, and in between them man is able to develop a quiet surface activity. Thinking, pure thought as such, is very little disturbed by Lucifer and Ahriman; because in the head they recoil from one another.

When, however, we follow the form of man further down, we find a change. On one side Lucifer works powerfully and builds up the stomach, on the other side Ahriman does the same and builds up the liver. The stomach is the means with which Lucifer fights from left to right; and no true understanding can come about of the relation between stomach and liver, until we see how Lucifer has built up the stomach as a kind of weapon of defence, and Ahriman the liver. These two—stomach and liver—are perpetually waging war one against the other, and physiology would do well to study the conflict. And if the heart of man tends to lean a little over towards the left, then that is an expression of the fact that Lucifer from one side and Ahriman from the other are trying each to grasp something for himself, The whole left and right relationship is an expression of the fight that is being waged in man between Lucifer and Ahriman. We said that in the case of man, what lies on either side of the middle surface is, generally speaking, alike. We have, however, already seen that this is true only for the upper part of man; as we follow the form of man downwards, the similarity gradually disappears. In the case of the being of whom I spoke before, with the three outstretched limbs—Lemminkäinen, Ilmarinen and Wainämöinen—the one half is air and the other water; the two halves are totally different in kind. And even in man, when we attain to clairvoyant knowledge it becomes clear to us that there are two distinct halves. For no sooner have we suggested away the physical body and turned our attention to the etheric body, than we find that the left half grows brighter and clearer than the right half. The left half is all shining and gleaming with radiant light, and the right half is wrapped in darkness and gloom. Yes, that is actually how it is with the left-right human being.

There are, however, other directions in accordance with which man takes up his position in the world of space. Expressed in the language of occultism, this means nothing else than that he is placed in still other ways into the midst of the fight between Lucifer and Ahriman. Let us go on, then, to consider how man stands in space with a forward and backward orientation, looking before and behind. Instead of observing him as a being of left and right, we will now direct our thoughts to the front and back of the human form. From this aspect also we find that man is not the being of space he appears to be. For as from left and from right Lucifer and Ahriman do battle with one another across man, and what shows in space is really only the barricades they put up one against the other, so also from behind Ahriman is fighting and from in front Lucifer. From behind Ahriman thrusts forward his activity, and from in front Lucifer thrusts forward his activity in opposition. Man stands in the middle between them. In connection, however, with the forward and backward direction in man we discover that Lucifer and Ahriman do not succeed in coming so close to one another as to leave nothing but a surface between them. We find here a somewhat different state of affairs. Ahriman comes only as far as the plane which can be drawn through the spinal column, and Lucifer as far as the plane which can be drawn through the breast bone, where the ribs end and meet. In between these two planes lies a space which separates Lucifer and Ahriman one from the other, where the effects of their working are thrown together in confusion. There they stand and fight—not at close quarters, but as though shooting at one another across the intervening space. And there stand we in the midst of the fight. Thus, in respect of the direction before and behind, man is a being that has space.

In the left-right direction the fight between Lucifer and Ahriman is waged principally in the sphere of thought. Thoughts are whirled across from left and from right and meet in the surface in the middle. Cosmic thoughts and cosmic forms of thought impinge upon one another here on the human surface in the middle. In the direction before and behind, Lucifer and Ahriman do battle more in the realm of feeling. And since here the opposing forces do not approach one another so nearly, in the space that is left between them we ourselves have room to be together with our own feelings. When we have thoughts that offer opposition to one another from left and from right, then we have the feeling that these thoughts belong to the world. With our thoughts we think the objects that are in the world outside. When we make our own thoughts, then these thoughts are a mere phantasmagoria; they do not any longer belong to the world. In our feelings, on the other hand, we belong to ourselves; for there Lucifer and Ahriman do not quite meet, there we have room to be active in between them. This is the reason why in our feelings we are so essentially within ourselves.

We human beings are creatures of the beings of the higher hierarchies, and they have created us in accordance with the manner of their working. We are beings of surface between left and right because the higher beings have made us so and placed us so into space. It is they, the Gods, who do not suffer Lucifer and Ahriman to come together in man. We are in this sense creatures of the good Gods. The good Gods, working out of their creative thoughts and purposes, took as it were this resolve. “A conflict is going on,” they said, “between Ahriman and Lucifer. We must set up a wall and enclose a region which they will not be able to enter, where they will not be able to carry on their strife at close quarters.” We human beings have thus been placed into the struggle between Lucifer and Ahriman as creatures of the good Gods; and the better we stand our ground in the struggle, the more truly are we creatures of the good Gods.

In respect of the before and behind, there the good Gods do not allow Lucifer to enter right into us; they created a barricade in the place where the ribs meet in the breast bone. And the wonderfully constructed tower that encloses the spine and the brain is a fortification the good Gods have erected against Ahriman. Ahriman cannot pass this line; all he can do is to send his arrows of feeling across to Lucifer. There in the space between stand we ourselves, separating the two from each other.

There is still a third direction in man, the direction from above downwards. Here again we have to make the discovery that the true state of affairs is not as it seems in external appearance. For from below upwards works Ahriman, and from above downwards Lucifer. Again we find that the good Gods have thrown up a barrier against Lucifer; at a certain plane in man his influence is held in check. You will find the plane by taking the skeleton and removing from it the skull. There where the skull rested on the cervical vertebrae, imagine a horizontal surface. This invisible horizontal surface is the barrier, where man can take his stand and hold up the Luciferic influence that comes from above. Lucifer can come no further, he can only shoot his arrows thence down into man. And his arrows are now arrows of will. From left to right fly arrows of thought, from front to back arrows of feeling and from above downwards as well as from below upwards, arrows of will.

Here, too, we have left to us an intermediate field of action. For about in a line with the diaphragm, you have the surface that acts as a barricade against the upward pressure of Ahriman. Ahriman can reach only as far as the diaphragm with his missiles of will, he can come no further with his will, with his essential being; and in between the two planes lies our own field of action.

You see how complicated the human being is! Take any one portion of the human figure—for example, the left side of the face. As a being of thought, Lucifer can fill entirely this left side of the human countenance; as a being of feeling he can also penetrate it up to a point; and as a being of will he can enter right into and through it from above. And you can go on to discover for every part of the body how Lucifer and Ahriman work in the human being of space by means of cosmic impulses of thought and feeling and will, remembering always that as beings of thought we are actually only surface beings, whilst as men of feeling we have a space between the before and the behind where we can unfold an activity of our own, and again as men of will we have a field of activity between the above and the below, between the surface we imagined drawn through the top of the cervical vertebrae and the surface of the diaphragm. You see, you have first to abstract all those parts that do not belong to man at all, before you can build up a true idea of the human form. Then, and only then, are you in a position to do this.

The truth is, the whole form of man has been put together by forces working from without. It receives its distinctive character from outside itself, and we do not understand the form of man so long as we consider it merely as it appears at first sight; we only understand it when we know how it is connected with the whole cosmos of space, when we are able to see how from right and left, from above and below, from before and behind, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces are bearing in upon man, and giving him the character of a being of space.

And now, my dear friends, this is also the way in which you must approach something else that has been shaped and formed in accordance with the true cosmic working in the world. I mean our building here in Dornach. If you look at the Goetheanum [ The first building, destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve, 1922/23. ] merely in its outward appearance, you might be disposed to think that the actual building itself, the space occupied by the wood, was the most important part. That is, however, by no means the case. The most important part is what, judging by appearances, does not exist! Take any one of the forms; the essential part of that form is not the shaped and sculptured wood, but is where there is nothing—where the air bounds the wood. The way to obtain the true and real Goetheanum would be to take an immense mound of wax and make a model of the inside of the building, and then study this model or impression. What you go into when you enter the building, what you stand within and cannot see but can only feel—that is the thing that matters. I said once on a former occasion that our building is built on the principle of a “Gugelhopf” [ A shaped cake made in Vienna. Note by Translator. ] cake mould. Imagine you have a tin mould and you bake your cake in it. Which is the more important—the mould or the cake? Obviously the cake. What matters is that the cake should receive the proper “Gugelhopf” shape. As far as the mould is concerned, all that matters is that the mixture, when it is poured into the mould and baked, should turn into a cake of the desired form.

Similarly, in our building it is not the surrounding walls that are of importance, it is what is enclosed within the surrounding walls. And within the walls will be the feelings and thoughts of the people who are in the building. These will develop aright if those who are in the building turn their eyes to its boundary, feel the forms and then fill these forms with forms of thought. What is inside the building will be like the cake, and what we build is the mould that holds and shapes the cake. And the mould has to be of such a kind that it leads to the development of right thoughts and right feelings. This is the principle underlying the new art in contradistinction to the art of olden times. In the art of olden times the essential thing was what is outside in space; but in the new art something else is of account. What is outside is no more than the mould, and the essential thing cannot really be created by the artist at all, it is what is within.

Nor is this true only of plastic forms. It is equally true of painting. The important thing is, not what is painted, but the experience in feeling to which the painting gives rise. Painting too is no more than a cake mould!

The truth is, my dear friends, we have here touched the very heart and core of the moment in evolution in which we stand. This is the step in evolution that has now to be taken, the step forgive the trivial comparison—from the cake mould to the cake. The cake is in this case the Spiritual; to enter into the world of the Spirit—that is the direction in which all our endeavor must now be set. If we fail to recognize this fact, we shall never be able to appraise correctly what we are trying to do here in art. For if we look at this art from the standpoint of the old, we can very easily exclaim: “But I see nothing beautiful in it!” We mean, I see no beautiful cake mould—never suspecting that the mould is not what matters at all, but the cake that is to be inside it. When we once understand this principle in art, my dear friends, we shall be very near understanding the whole meaning and significance of the step forward in spiritual evolution which is to be made through Spiritual Science. Through Spiritual Science man must learn to work his way out of the “Gugelhopf” mould into the “Gugelhopf” itself. He must, for example, get free of the superstition that the origin of thought lies in the brain processes, when as a matter of fact in the processes that go on in the brain cosmic processes are at work and conflicts are being waged between Lucifer and Ahriman. Man must learn to see that the thoughts and feelings of the human soul are tracks graven into the twistings and turnings of these conflicts and have nothing to do with the material processes—in other words, with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic processes.

Let me draw another comparison. Suppose we were to go into a beautiful garden—beautiful particularly in the whole arrangement and lay-out of the flower beds—and we wanted to pronounce an opinion on this beautiful garden. And suppose we were able to look down a hole in the earth and spied there a little underground imp who said to us: “I will tell you how it is that here are roses and over there are violets, and why you find a bush in one place and flowers in another. For I creep about all the time under the surface, and I can see the earth and the soil which has caused all these flowers—violets, roses and the rest—to spring up.” We could answer: “Yes, you describe these processes very nicely; all that you tell me is quite true and must necessarily happen. But for the garden to come into existence as I see it, something else is required—gardeners must have been at work there. They work, however, in a region which you have never seen and about which you have never troubled your head at all.”

In like manner, we must learn to say to the anatomist and physiologist: “I find your activity when I look down through a hole in the earth. Down there you are creeping about and discovering processes which certainly have to take place, but which have nothing at all to do with what takes place in the soul and spirit above ground. And you will only be able to interpret correctly what takes place down below, when you study the relationships that hold sway between the Luciferic and Ahrimanic worlds and those other hierarchies who bring Lucifer and Ahriman into balance.”

Here we must refer to another fact in human evolution, that has hitherto only had influence in man's conception of the Ego, but that we shall learn to know in a much fuller and wider way through Spiritual Science. A time will come in the future when men will say: “We are told in the Bible of the breath of Jehovah which was breathed into man. But into what part of man was the breath breathed?”

If you recall all that I have said in this lecture, you will be able to see that the region into which the breath was breathed is the intervening region that is in between the onsets from before and behind and from above and below—there, in the middle, where Jehovah created man, as it were in the form of a cube. There it was that he so filled man with His own being, with His own magic breath, that the influence of this magic breath was able to extend into the regions in the rest of man that belong to Lucifer and Ahriman. Here in the midst, bounded above and below and before and behind, is an intervening space where the breath of Jehovah enters directly into the spatial human being.

What I have been giving you in this lecture is spoken in respect of the human being of physical space. As you see, even here we can widen our outlook and learn to behold man as he stands within the cosmos. But there are also moral and spiritual aspects of what is apparently external and spatial. And in these aspects too, where the workings of the human soul are concerned—if not in so striking a way as in the case of spatial man, yet here too, what meets us at first is found to be no reality, but only a phantasmagoria. In morality, in logic and in all the activity of the soul, Lucifer and Ahriman are working one upon the other, and man stands at the boundary between them. Of this most important and significant chapter in the understanding of the human being we will speak tomorrow.

Through all that we have recently been discussing here there runs a basic theme. This basic theme is an expression of how at the present time, within the whole cultural development of mankind, the necessity may be seen for a new impulse—that is, a spiritual impulse, an impulse towards spiritual knowledge.

In these recent lectures it was intended to show from the most varied points of view that we have been passing through an age with a quite distinct character and that now a new age must begin. The age that has been running its course is the time when thinking and perceiving have reached their most pronounced form of materialism, the time when throughout the centuries materialistic thinking and perceiving have increasingly taken hold of the inner life of the human soul. But just as a pendulum that has swung to one side has then to swing in the opposite direction, we are now faced by an age when the human soul must once more come to the perception that in everything having to do with the senses, in everything material, spiritual impulses, spiritual forces, are experience of the spiritual forces behind material sense phenomena—spiritual forces to which for centuries mankind has been able to give but little attention and but little interest.

Now we all know how in our day the assertion that it is possible for the human soul to enter spiritual worlds is decried and considered heretical. We know how a multiplicity of factors in life—either conscious or unconscious—are directed against the coming of such a stream in world-conception as that of spiritual science. It is easy to see how at the present time what spiritual science must offer, for the ordering of life and the facts of life, would appear absolutely absurd, foolish, and fantastic. When, however, we enter into what is maintained even now by men of insight, out of a deeper impulse in life, all that has just been described: takes on a different aspect.

I should like first to point out to you that among men of deeper insight today there does not always exist antagonism against what spiritual science maintains—antagonism to spiritual science itself  is certainly there but not so much against what it stands for. Many, very many, examples of this might be quoted; today I will give you a characteristic one connected with a recent philosopher of repute—Otto Liebmann, who died a short while ago.

Most of you will not even know his name; that will not matter. But I should like to say that Otto Liebmann was one of the most clear-sighted of those who have recently analysed. Man’s life of thought—that he thoroughly ploughed the ground of epistemology, always putting the question: How much reality is human thought capable of grasping?

I should like to read you a short passage from Otto Liebmann’s philosophical writings because it is characteristic of a man who throughout his life made great efforts to fathom the nature of human thought and what at the present time can be said about it in the light of the results of modern science. This is what Otto Liebmann said: “Someone might hit on the idea that there is not just albumen and yolk in a hen’s egg, but besides these something of a ghostly nature - an invisible spirit. This spirit materializes itself and when it has completed this materialisation it bursts open the egg-shell with the sharp beak, darts upon the grain and pecks it up.”

It might occur to one, he says, that a spirit was in the egg and that when the egg-shell was broken this spirit came out and pecked up the grain. .. What will those people say who are building up a world-conception founded on present-day science? They will tell you:  If anyone says that a spirit is working in a hen's egg, he is a fool.—That is how the clever people of today will speak and their remark will apply to those who call themselves theosophists or anthroposophists. But what says the philosopher who has been at such infinite pains to analyse man’s present thinking? He says: The only thing to be said against this assertion is that the preposition "in" is nonsense when used in a physical sense, but in a metaphysical is quite right. It is true that we get nowhere by conceiving the spirit to be within the egg spatially; when, however, this is taken metaphysically no objection can be made; it is only that the preposition cannot be used in its ordinary sense.

We are therefore faced with the fact that a philosopher who has written an intelligent book, "The Analysis of Reality", and another on "Thoughts and Facts” (what is said about the "invisible spirit" comes in the second part of the 1899 "Naturerkenntnis")—that this philosopher owns that, in reality, it is possible to stand at the pinnacle of modern philosophy and yet be unable to do other than admit that an invisible spirit lies hidden in the egg of a hen.

It goes without saying that Otto Liebmann would have scorned to recognise the reasonable nature of spiritual science. We might ask why this is. Why would he—or anyone who thinks in the way he does—not pursue the matter further and perceive in spiritual science what would make him say: Strictly speaking, this spiritual science is merely wanting to confirm that in the hen’s egg there is actually an invisible spirit!—The name is not of importance; with us it would be called the etheric body, which for its part is permeated by the astral body. The spiritual scientist indeed says what it is that is hidden within as invisible spirit; thus spiritual scientist says nothing but what others are saying—yet there is this difficulty in turning to spiritual science. It is said to be foolish and fantastic in spite of being urgently needed for the science and the thinking of the day.

Now how far is it from the assertion that an invisible spirit is concealed in the hen’s egg to the other statement that in the human physical body too—anatomy and physiology examine only the physical—something invisible is hidden? If we could clear up the difficulty about the use of the preposition "in” (dwelt upon by the philosopher); we should come to the point of indicating what spiritual science says, namely, that what is "within" consists of etheric body, astral body and ego. Thus, spiritual science does nothing for which there is no ample proof that it is really demanded by all that has to do with present-day though and culture. Spiritual Science however, obviously has to go farther, for it cannot stop short at the vague idea that an invisible spirit is concealed in a hen's egg—especially when this same idea is applied to man. There we have to be clear that what is thus hidden in man is possessed of certain qualities, certain inner factors of reality. Whereas in the case of the hen's egg our conception can be what we might almost call of a ghostly nature—"an unknown spirit is concealed there"—if we go on to man we have to recognise that, when living in the physical body, he develops consciousness and does so for the very reason that the physical body is such a complicated apparatus. Thereby we sense that what has here been called invisible spirit must be recognised as underlying the visible. Now, if what is external has consciousness we have to take for granted that there is consciousness also in what is within, and that what is within cannot be deemed unconscious.

Science will lead to the perception of something like what spiritual science assumes, namely, that in the physical body there lives a spiritual man.  It is the nature of this spiritual man’s consciousness to which our attention is directed by spiritual science.

Today we know—have known for some -time how to give an answer about the precise qualities of the invisible spirit underlying man. If we take, to begin with, what today is offered us by philosophy, we shall admit that at the basis of man, too, there lies an invisible spirit. We now ask: Is it possible to know anything about this spirit? Most certainly it is. Just as man can acquire knowledge about the world outside through sense perception and the thoughts connected with the brain, this knowledge can go further; for in the spirit there lives Imagination—what has been described as Imaginative knowledge. We should then be able to see that it is not only in the hen’s egg that there lies an invisible spirit, but that in man is hidden an etheric body which, given the possibility (this is also mentioned in our writings), frees itself from the physical body and develops Imaginative knowledge—knowledge that works, in the world in Imaginations, standing before the soul in fluctuating Imaginations.

We must here ask: What is the reason for spiritual science meeting with so much opposition today, the fact that people who do not understand it arrived at, and give indications of, what is said by spiritual science?

My dear friends, here something must be said that it is dangerous to put into words—or in any case not without danger. Why would Otto Liebmann, had he picked up a book on spiritual science, have certainly said: I find this really foolish, ridiculous—while standing himself at the very gates of the spiritual world? Why was he living in such strange self-deception—standing before the gates but, the door being opened to him, saying: No, I am not entering—why? It is certainly not very reasonable!

Sometimes comparisons throw light, therefore it is with a comparison that I should like to answer the question: Why among the finest men today are there those who shy away from spiritual science?

I should like at the same time to draw your attention to something of which we have already spoken, namely, what I said about sleep and fatigue. There is much talk today about the reason for people having to sleep and it is said to because they are tired—so that tiredness is considered the essential cause of sleep. This is what is said today. Now from the most ordinary experience in life everyone knows that any leisured person who comes to a lecture, out of politeness shall we say, will often fall asleep when the lecture has hardly begun even if he isn’t tired—so that we may all come to the conclusion that fatigue is not entirely the cause of sleep. On the contrary, we should be nearer the truth in saying, not that we go to sleep because we are tired, but that we feel tired because we want to sleep. This would be more correct.

The essential nature of sleep consists in a man going with his ego and his astral body out of the physical and etheric bodies, thus feeding upon his physical body and etheric body from outside—we might even say feeding upon and digesting them; whereas when he is within his physical and etheric bodies he lives with his consciousness in the external world. Note well what is actually said here. If with ego and astral body we are outside our physical and etheric bodies, we apply all our will, all our desires, to these physical and etheric bodies; we feed on and digest physical body and etheric body from outside; whereas when we are within these bodes the outside world makes its impressions upon us.

Now everything in the world depends like the pendulum upon periodicity. When the pendulum has swung up to a certain point it descends again and then rises up to the same height on the opposite side through the force it acquires in its descent. In the same way that the pendulum can go not only up to here but has to return to the level it reached before it descended are  sleeping and waking opposed to one another. Roughly it may be expressed thus.

Let us suppose that from waking to falling asleep we have been interested in the outside world and what has passed there. This absorbing of the outside world can be likened to the swing of the pendulum in one direction. When we have sufficiently absorbed the world outside then by reason of the satiety this causes there develops the satisfaction formerly provided by the outside world—and we go to sleep. When we have exhausted this enjoyment of ourselves we are able to wake up again.  It is a swinging to and fro, a periodicity, which takes its regular course in the same way as in ordinary mechanics. Lucifer and Ahriman can, however, lift a man out of the whole course of nature. Thus the man who goes to a lecture or concert from sheer courtesy and not because he wants to listen, can be lifted out of himself so that he loses all interest. He withdraws from himself, feeds on himself, finding this more interesting than what is going on around him.  

Thus we can see that whoever falls asleep in an abnormal way simply has no interest in his environment and what is going on there. We find exactly the same thing among those, of whom I have spoken, who have had their attention turned to what spiritual science offers. In the sphere of spiritual science Otto Liebmann is just like a man who goes out of courtesy to a concert or lecture and at once falls asleep. He goes, yet is not actually willing to take in what he is offered there.

On a higher level we can say the same of men who are like Otto Liebmann. They come to philosophy, to the land of the spirit through conditions holding good in our world. Someone writes a thesis, a book, is then sent as teacher to a grammar school and, when proving himself to be a thinker, he is sent on to a university. Philosophising is world-courtesy, just world-courtesy—and there is no need for any call to the land of the spirit. One goes to the door, even goes inside, and then falls asleep; not immediately like the satiated concert-goer, who sleeps without even being tired, through lack of interested consciousness in the subject—but the philosopher cannot wake up to Imaginative consciousness. If it is impossible for people to awake to Imaginative consciousness then the moment anything is said about the spiritual world they fall asleep. In other words, it is too difficult for them to take in anything about spiritual science. It is therefore not without danger to make this assertion, for people will say: So you are the people who are making a study of what to other men, to men of consequence, is so difficult!—Since we are conscious of the difficulty, however, we shall not be too arrogant. For we shall know that the very points about which we ought to agree will be attacked by the world because people refuse to embark upon so difficult an affair—for the very reason that they find it too difficult.

Now let us examine these difficulties rather more closely. We will point the way by asking: What does ordinary human thinking consist in from the time of waking to that of failing asleep? In what does it consist? How whoever thinks in a grossly materialistic way holds the following opinion—that men have a brain that is of extraordinarily delicate construction, that in this brain processes go on and because they do so thinking arises. Thinking is a consequence of this brain-process; so he says.

I have already pointed out that this is just as if someone were to say: I go along a street where there are footprints and the tracks of wheels. Whence come these—tracks? It is the earth beneath which must have made them; the earth itself has made the traces of feet and wheels appear. Logically this is on a par with thinking that it is the brain that makes these impressions. When someone goes out, sees all kinds of tracks along the street and says: Aha—then it is the earth that is inwardly permeated by a variety of forces which make these tracks—the same as when the physiologist, examining the human brain, and substantiating the fact that all manner of processes are going on there, says: It is the brain that is doing all this. There is just as little reason for saying that it is the earth itself that makes the tracks which are really made by the men and vehicles moving around upon it as there is for saying that what the anatomists and physiologists discover is by the brain, when it is far rather the work of forces in movement in the etheric body.

By this you will be able to see in what the deceptive nature of materialist consists.  There is nothing in everyday life that does not make an impression on the brain. Just as every step makes an impression on the earth, and you can prove that each of your steps has made its impression, you can also prove that all that is willed and thought makes its impression, has its influence, on the brain. But that is only the trace, it is only what is left behind of the thinking. Thinking takes place indeed in the etheric body; in reality everything you perceive as thinking is nothing but the etheric body's inner activity. So long as we remain in the physical body we need this physical body for thinking. It is very easy to see why the materialist does not arrive at the true. The materialist says: For heaven sake, can’t you see that you must have a brain if you are to think?  And if you see this, you can also see that it is your brain which actually does the thinking.  And if you see this, you can also see that it is your brain which actually does the thinking.  This conclusion is about as clever as to say: I can prove that this track on the road has been made by the ground itself.  I shall remove part of the ground and you will see that without it you are unable to walk. The ground is indeed a necessity—it is also necessary to have a brain to be able, when in the physical body, to think.

It is necessary for us to be clear about these things for it is only then that that we learn under what illusion present day thinking labours, with what a host of illusions this thinking fools itself, and how the only cure for this must be effected through that knowledge so difficult to acquire which, we trust, does not fail to take the physical body into consideration. For when going about in the physical body we must have solid earth beneath our feet: When thinking in the physical world we must have support for our thinking; we must have a nervous system. When, however, we change the place of our thinking activity to our astral body, the etheric body will become for us what the physical body is when we think with the etheric body.

If we progress to Imaginative thinking we then think in the astral and the etheric body retains the traces as formerly, when thinking took place in the etheric body, the traces were retained by the physical body. When after death we are outside the physical body and have also laid aside the etheric body—in the way often described—then our support is the outer life—ether and what is developed by the astral body and later by the ego we write into the whole cosmic ether.

This, therefore, is the process we go through during what is called the first stage of initiation.  The process consists in our removing our thinking (it is no longer thinking, only the activity of thinking) from the etheric body to the astral body, getting over to the more volatile etheric body the retention of the traces which formerly the physical body held.  This is the essential feature of the first stage in initiation.  It is essential that the activity formerly carried on by the etheric body should be handed over to the astral body.

Thus we see that while living in Imaginative knowledge we, as it were, withdraw from the physical body to the etheric body, imprinting no further traces into the physical body. Through this it comes about that, for anyone who makes this first step in initiation, the physical body from which he withdraws becomes objective and is then outside his astral body and ego. Formerly it was within, now it is outside. He thinks, feels and wills in the astral body. He has an influence on the etheric body, leaves traces in it, but he no longer influences the physical body and looks upon it as something external.

This is approximately the normal course when it is a question of the first step in initiation—the normal course. It finds expression in a quite definite way in subjective experience.

By means of a diagram I will now make clear in what this first stage of initiation consists. Let us assume that this is the human physical head—and all around the human physical head we have the etheric body. When a man begins to develop what I have been speaking about, when he begins to develop Imaginative knowledge, then the etheric body grows in this way larger, and what is characteristic of this is that parallel with it goes on naturally what has been described as the cultivation of the lotus flowers. The man grows etherically out of himself and the strange thing is that, while he is doing so, something develops out of his body which I would call a kind of etheric heart.

As [a] physical human being we have our physical heart, and we all know how to appreciate the difference between a dry, abstract man who develops his thoughts in a machine-like way and a man who goes with his heart into everything that he experiences—with his physical heart, that is; we can all appreciate this distinction. From the man who slouches around without any interest in life and whose heart plays no part in the experiences of his soul, we do not expect much on the physical plane in the way of real cosmic knowledge.  A kind of spiritual heart develops outside our physical body, parallel to the phenomena I have described in “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”, just as the blood-system develops and has its center in the heart. The blood-system goes outside the body and outside the body we feel ourselves in our heart bound up with what we know in the way of spiritual science. Only we must not look to enter into the knowledge of spiritual science with the heart that is in our body but with the heart outside it, for it is with this heart that we enter into what we know of spiritual science.

On reading what is written in the sphere of spiritual science it is possible to say: But this too is scientifically dry—this is science—here we have to go back to school again! We must in any case do enough learning in life, and now we are supposed to learn what spiritual science has to say. There is no heart in that.—One will discover the heart in it when going into things deeply enough.

It is true that many people say:  Theosophy must consist above all in a man in his ego becoming one with the whole world.—This “becoming one", this “development in man of the divine man", this "discovery of the divine ego”, and so on—these are the pet phrases of those who want to be theosophists without having any knowledge of theosophy.  This all springs from lack of desire to develop warmth of heart even when no longer sustained by the living warmth of the physical heart.  Just as Lichtenberg said: “When a head and a book collide and there is a hollow sound, the book is not to be blamed”, we might say: If a man comes up against spiritual science and finds no warmth of heart in it, it is not spiritual science that is to blame. All that I have just been describing as the normal path to clairvoyance consists in man lifting out from his physical body, his etheric body and also the higher members of his organization, and providing himself with a heart outside the limits of his physical body.

What then do ordinary thoughts rest upon? A thought of this kind is actually only developed in the etheric body; it then comes up against the physical body and there makes impressions all over the brain. If we call up before our souls the essential feature of everyday thinking we can say: It rests on our thinking in the etheric body, and on what is thus thought sinking into the nervous system of the brain; there it makes impressions which do not, however, go very deep but rebound. In this way the thinking is reflected and thus enters our consciousness. A thought therefore consists above all in our having it in our soul as far as the etheric body; it then makes an impression on the physical brain, but cannot enter it and has to rebound. These reflected thoughts we perceive.  Then physiology comes along and points to the traces which have appeared in the physical brain.

Now how would it be were the thought not reflected back, were it to enter the brain and there merely to cause processes? Were the thought not reflected back we should not be able to perceive it; then it would go into the brain and be the cause simply of processes. It would be conceivable that the thought, instead of being thrown back, might enter the brain; then we should not be conscious of it, for it is only by the thought being reflected that consciousness arises.

There is, however, an activity of the soul which does enter the body and that is the will. Willing differs from thinking because thinking is thrown back from the bodily organization and perceived as a mirrored image—whereas willing is not. The willing enters into the bodily organization; thereby a physical bodily process is called into being. This brings it about that we walk, move our hands, and so on. Actual willing arises in quite a different way from thinking: which does so by being thrown back. But willing enters into the bodily organization, is not thrown back, but within the bodily organization brings about definite processes. Nevertheless in one part of our bodily organization there is the possibility for what thus sinks down being thrown back.

Follow carefully what I am about to say. The procedure in brain-thinking is this—thought-activity develops in the etheric brain, rebounds against the physical nervous system, thus bringing our thoughts into consciousness.  In the case of clairvoyance we, as it were, thrust the brain back; we think with the astral body and the thinking is thrown back to us by the etheric body.

Here (1 in diagram) is the outer world, here the physical body (when brain thinking is in question). Here (2 in diagram) for clairvoyance, is the outer world, what we work upon with our astral body; we let the etheric body throw this back and we altogether exclude the physical body.

Here (I), however, when we will, the activity of the soul goes down into the physical body. Hence when we walk, when we move our hand, this is done by the soul; but the activity of the soul has to bring about inner organic, material processes, upon which the activity of the soul expends itself. It might be put thus—that the will consists in the activity of the soul being exhausted by its material work in the body.

Let us now ask in what way we actually live when living in our thinking. My answer would be that in our thinking we are living close to the boundary of eternity. The moment we exclude the physical body and let our thoughts be rayed back from the etheric body we live in what we carry through the gate of death. As long as we let the physical body ray back the thoughts, we are living in all that is between birth and death; when we will, our will belongs entirely to our physical body. Our physical body is there to promote activity.  Whereas our thinking stands at the very gate of eternity, our willing is organized for the physical body.

Remember how I said in one of the lectures that our willing is the baby and when it is older it will become thinking. This is absolutely in accordance with what from another point of view we can develop today. Willing is under the ban of the temporal, and only because a man develops, becomes wiser and wiser and permeates his willing by thought, does he raise what is inherent in willing out of time into the sphere of eternity, and free his willing from his body.

But in a certain part of our body there is something inserted, namely, the secondary nervous system, the glandular system, the nervous system of the abdomen—part of which is often called the solar plexus. As developed in a man at present this nervous system is an unfinished organ; it exists only in an embryonic state. It will develop itself later. But just as of a child we know that he has qualities which can still go on developing as he grows up, we can know that this nervous system, today in the service of organic activity, will also develop further. This nervous system which works side-by-side with the systems of brain and spine and with the nerves that branch-out into the limbs, this abdominal nervous system is not so far developed today that it would be able to do what it will do when man has once reached Jupiter. By that time brain and spine will have lost ground and the abdominal nervous system will have progressed to something quite different from what it is today. It will then be placed on the surface of a man; for all that to begin with was within a man will later have its place on his surface.

For this reason for ordinary life between birth and death we make no direct use of this nervous system, letting it remain in the subconscious. Through abnormal conditions, however, it may happen that what a man has in his will and his capacity for desire enters his organism, and through these abnormal conditions—about which we shall speak presently—is thrown back by the abdominal nervous system in the same way as the thought is thrown back by the brain. The will goes into the glandular system but instead of becoming active it is thrown back by the glandular system and something arises in man that usually takes place in his brain—a process which may be characterized as follows.

When we bear in mind the transition from the ordinary waking state to clairvoyance, you can see how within us thinking, feeling and willing reflect themselves in the ordinary nervous system—feeling and willing, that is, to the extent that they are thoughts—and we let what is our willing sink down into our organization. In clairvoyance we form by these means—outside the space occupied by the body—a higher organ over against the brain. As the ordinary brain is connected with our physical heart, what develops as thought outside (in the astral body) is connected with the etheric heart. This is the higher clairvoyance—clairvoyance of the head.

A man can, however, take the reverse path. He can go into the organization with the baby-willing in such a way that willing becomes thinking, whereas otherwise he made thinking into will. This is the deeper distinction between what a little time ago I described here as head-clairvoyance and abdominal clairvoyance {See lecture 1}. In the case of head-clairvoyance we form a new etheric organ in which we are independent of the bodily organization we have in ordinary life. Where abdominal clairvoyance is concerned appeal is made to the glandular system, to what otherwise remains unnoticed. Hence the results of abdominal clairvoyance are more fleeting than ordinary waking experience; they have no significance for the soul when passing through the gate of death; whereas even for those souls who have gone through the gate of death, everything gained by head-clairvoyance has spiritual, lasting significance—greater significance than waking day-experience. What is acquired through abdominal clairvoyance has even less significance for life after death than ordinary waking day-knowledge.  All somnambulistic clairvoyance is below waking day-consciousness—not above.

This is certainly not to say that all manner of positional and other qualities cannot be developed through abdominal clairvoyance; because the moment abdominal clairvoyance arises it is really the glands which always send the willing particularly, there arises one of the main forces of opposition against spiritual science which strives in all directions after clearness.

Spiritual science must everywhere have real sympathy and love for consistent, complete thoughts, not for those that are incomplete. It must not be content with the vague and obscure, but on all sides press on towards what does not narrowly shed the mere semblance of light but spreads true light throughout the wide spaces of the world. In this connection, we still have much, very much, to overcome.

These are the things I wanted to make objects of our study, in order to show how through Ahriman, in the course of the centuries, thoughts have given rise to the denial of the spiritual world, but how the spiritual world itself has worked in the thoughts of those who deny it because—the time has come.

“The time has come.”  Appropriate here are these words from Goethe’s “Fairy Tale”.

This must very soon receive confirmation.

A participant asks about the significance of milkweed and dandelion juices as a remedy for leukemia. This remedy presented itself to him during a meditation.

Of course, it is important to take into account the accompanying symptoms, because leukemia can have a wide variety of causes. If it is the case that there can be a clear awareness that one is dealing with a disturbance in the rhythmic human being, then you will be right; then you will come to results. The thing is this: Wherever products are used that come from the plant kingdom and still have the remnants of the etheric body in them – and that is the case with resinous and milky juices, both in dandelion and in spurge; it is also the case with wax, for example in vegetable wax – all these substances have a strong effect on the human rhythmic system. But if we are dealing with something that has its primary cause not in the human being's rhythmic system but in the metabolism – these things merge into one another, but in principle they must be distinguished – then you will hardly succeed. Everything that still contains the etheric body within it has a very strong effect on the internal mobility of the astral body, and thus stimulates the entire activity of the organism from the astral body. And in this way one can achieve success. This is based on the fact that the astral body is strongly influenced by these substances and that, because it acts on the etheric body, it then also causes a balance in the etheric body.

What are the conditions for a smallpox epidemic to occur? It seems that this disease has lost its malignant character. I have observed such cases.

What does spiritual science have to say about vaccination?

In this matter, as with smallpox, we are dealing with a strong regression of the ego organization of all three other human bodies, both the physical and the etheric and astral bodies, in the individual. This strong regression, this weakening of the ego organization, can be due to the fact that the person, with their present ego, slips into the egos of past lives; and as a result, there is a strong affinity between the ego organization and the spiritual world. And what is remarkable about smallpox is that there is a certain similarity with what a person goes through when they undergo certain types of initiation. However strange it may seem, this is the case.

When a person, for example, really gets to know the effect of the zodiacal figures on people, such states of knowledge are associated with strong inner shocks. At least a person can undergo this by controlling it more, by working more on the soul, what is present in the case of smallpox, because it is a matter of the person living very strongly in the spiritual during the smallpox illness, albeit in a different way.

It can be said that the risk of infection is extremely high when suffering from smallpox. However, one should not be so careless as to always think of physical mediation in the transmission, but rather that the psychological predispositions are particularly strong in the case of smallpox. Proof of this could be that one can protect oneself very well if one is able to shut oneself away in the right way. I am able to speak about this because once, as a twenty-two-year-old person — I need not mention the circumstances — I taught a pupil whose mother was lying with black smallpox right next to it, separated only by a screen from the room in which I was giving my lessons. I did nothing about it, continued the lessons the whole time until the mother recovered. But I did it quite willingly, especially to see how one can protect oneself when one absolutely takes the smallpox patient, including those suffering from black smallpox, quite objectively like another object, like a stone or a bush, towards which one has no further feelings of fear or any other psychological stirrings, but takes it as an objective fact. In this case, the danger of infection must indeed be highly counteracted. Therefore, after all, the psychic factor can also play a strong role in the infection.

I have never been afraid of exposing myself to the possibility of infection, and in fact I have never been infected and have never suffered from an infectious disease. I was therefore able to determine that simply the consciousness, the strong consciousness of the existence of an illness can be the cause of illness from the astral body. The strong consciousness of an illness can be the cause of illness from the astral body.

And the smallpox vaccination? That is a peculiar case. You see, if you vaccinate someone and you educate them as an anthroposophist, it does no harm. It only harms those who grow up with predominantly materialistic thoughts. In such cases, vaccination becomes a kind of Ahrimanic force; the person can no longer rise above a certain materialistic feeling. And that is actually the most worrying thing about the smallpox vaccination, that people are virtually clothed with a phantom. The human being has a phantom that prevents him from getting rid of the soul entities as far from the physical organism as in normal consciousness. He becomes constitutionally materialistic, he can no longer rise to the spiritual. That is the worrying thing about vaccination. Of course, the statistics are always brought into play. The question is whether so much value has to be placed on statistics in these matters. With the smallpox vaccination, it is very much a psychological issue. It cannot be ruled out that the belief that the vaccination helps plays an incalculably large role. If this belief were replaced by something else, if people were educated in a way that would make them impressionable by something other than vaccination, for example, by bringing them closer to the spirit, it would be quite possible that, against the unconscious intrusion: here is a smallpox epidemic! - by complete consciousness of it: here is something spiritual, even if it is an unauthorized spiritual, against which I must protect myself! would work just as well as one would have to strengthen people against such influences.

If the circumstances are as they are, for example in our area, where the influence through education and so on is very difficult, how should one behave there?

You just have to vaccinate. There is no other way. Because fanatical opposition to these things is what I, not for medical reasons, but for general anthroposophical reasons, would not recommend at all. Fanatical opposition to these things is not what we are aiming for. Instead, we want to use insight to change things on a large scale. I have always regarded this, when I was friends with doctors, as something to be combated, for example with Dr. Asch, who absolutely did not vaccinate. I have always fought against that. Because if he does not vaccinate, someone else will. It is a complete nonsense to be so fanatical in the details.

Dr. Kolisko: As a school doctor, I observed that children who start school show a tremendous inner restlessness, which manifests itself particularly during sleep, so that the parents of children aged 6 or 7 complain that the children are plagued by nightmares, by motor restlessness, and that they have difficulty falling asleep. What are the circumstances that lead to this?

The conditions that children show when they start school, that is, in Germany, stem from the fact that, due to the nutritional conditions that have prevailed for years, rather than the general conditions, the inner ability to digest food - not the process that takes place in the stomach, but the inner ability, where it is important to drive the food pulp out of the intestines - is highly disturbed. It is the case that these children actually become incapable of properly interacting with their astral body in the etheric body. As a result, these children are usually unable to really transfer what they take in as food, even if they take it in through charity, into the organism. Every food has its own inherent laws; it must pass through a certain stage of digestion, every food must pass into the inorganic state. This is something that is not known in external science, that, for example, the protein we consume as vegetable or animal protein must be thoroughly disorganized, converted into the mineral state and then reconverted into human protein. The whole process takes place in the state nascendi, but it does take place. This transmutation must take place, otherwise the process does not take place as a human process, but as a foreign one. So we can say that within the human skin, roughly speaking, apart from the presence of direct salts, there must be nothing that occurs outside the human organism. There is nothing within the human skin that is outside except salt. Everything else is transmuted. Now, just when their etheric body is becoming free – it becomes free when they enter primary school age – these children lose the ability to organize this freed etheric body in the right way, starting from the astral body. This is what causes this digestive disorder. They have extra-human processes in them; and such things must be combated quite rationally physically. We have this remedy, which we prepared when we had some particularly bad examples of such children. I believe you will always have excellent success in this direction. Dr., do you remember the pale little boy in the second class? What about him?

He is much better.

He is now quite decent, relatively.

We have also used it on many other children.

That was the next occasion: there was a pale boy whom the doctors had already given up on; he was supposed to die in the near future. We used this remedy on him: calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate. It turned out that this remedy was very effective in promoting digestion; then the internal conditions improved. It is always the case that shortness of breath and breathing difficulties occur when the astral body cannot work properly. If it is held back, shortness of breath occurs, which can also be the cause of hidden anxiety. All this can be improved with this remedy. This remedy is of the

manner that one can say that if a person is no longer able to benefit from what he eats, despite eating, then this remedy is an extraordinarily good one.

What do you do for spinal paralysis?

What are the symptoms?

Just tenderness over the affected vertebra. The x-ray shows that the affected vertebra may have melted together a little on one side, that the vertebra has now taken on this (shown or drawn) shape instead of its normal shape.

It is natural that in such things, where there are such localized conditions, it is very difficult to approach the matter if one does not go back to the primary cause. Which vertebra is it?

The sixth thoracic vertebra.

Is there any kind of external mechanical insult that can be proven?

No, but the finding is that it is derived from pulmonary tuberculosis.

But there are changes in the hilar glands.

It is the case that in the x-ray image, larger shadows are found at this point, which enter the lung tissue in a scattered manner.

How old is the patient?

Thirty-five years.

Has he had this problem for long? Has it been noticed for long?

About three months. I have four such patients, all of them women. Two of them have a trauma on their back from falling down the stairs. In the other two, the x-ray image is such that one could conclude that the problem originates in the lungs.

Can't you prove that the neighboring vertebra is also affected?

Not a single one. In one case it is the tenth, in other cases the sixth. These are adults, about 36 to 39 years old. In one child the case is traumatic, in a twenty-year-old girl it is also traumatic.

In such a case, one would have to try to examine whether the lungs – the matter does not of course have its cause there – have insufficient space at some point, perhaps because they have been expanded. And in this case, one will find something in the area where the lungs unfold towards the front. And there it will be a matter of finding further dilations in some area of the lungs, expansions, for this shrinking - it is a shrinking process. Perhaps it is not in the lung area; it could even be in the bone of one of the ribs. That would have to be looked for. Then it would be a matter of using something that is suitable for balancing the formation of the human body. Now we have a substance that is excellently suited for balancing traumas. That is tobacco. Injected in dilution, it proves to be what balances deformities. If the aim is to bring the remedy to work freely in the organism, phosphorus must be used. Then it will certainly be possible to achieve healing processes in this way. It can definitely be said that healing processes will be achieved if the person concerned is under twenty-eight years of age. But it is not impossible, especially in women, to achieve healing processes even at a later age. And when you have very stubborn natures that are very reluctant, you would have to get them to be cheered up artificially, to cheer up their growth forces, their vital forces a little, and in this way promote the effect. That is what I mean, that in such a case you could do that.

In connection with what has been said about syphilis, I would like to ask how a patient who has received mercury and salvarsan can be freed from the damage caused by the medicine.

The following can be done to alleviate damage caused by mercury: give the patient a very hot bath every day or every other day and let the patient sweat profusely. This alone will greatly stimulate the body to defend itself against the mercury. It is necessary to defend oneself against the mercury to the very depths of one's bones when one has been treated with it. For you have perhaps all heard that after mercury cures, small droplets of mercury can be detected in the bones when an autopsy is performed. When the organism is strengthened by the hot baths, it is already a strong helper to the organism. That it helps sufficiently can be seen from the fact that the bathwater turns black from the returning mercury. Did you not notice that? You have to notice it! Because you don't understand why the bathwater is so dark. If that does not happen, then an arsenic bath should be taken, with about 5% of an arsenical water added to the bath; again, the patient should take a warm bath and, in particular, it should be ensured that the peculiar smell of ink that arises is actually smelled by the patient, so that he has a sensory impression of it. (Gap in the text.)

In such a case, a follow-up cure is needed. The mercury may have been almost completely removed, but the destructive tendency introduced by the mercury remains in the organism. We must bear in mind that mercury has an extraordinarily strong effect on the human organism. One must consider: what is mercury for the human organism? If you follow the embryonic development, you have an ascending embryonic development, that is, from the germ rising to what becomes a human being, and you have a descending development, something that falls away, that is gradually destroyed. The regulator of this destruction is that which, in the human being, is the inner mercurial nature. And if it should turn out that there are too many vital forces, then you could check it by means of mercury, which works constitutionally towards the destruction of the human being. This destructive tendency of mercury must be combated psychically. If you can induce a person to pursue a completely abstract science quite regularly, geometry, for example, dutifully for half an hour every day, then that is the follow-up cure. Sharp, logically connecting and separating thoughts that engage the mind and help to develop inner activity, not passive surrender to the world, but this inner activity, is what must actually be applied for a very long time. Then you will be able to heal someone of the forces of Mercury.

Sometimes women develop nodular hardenings in the mammary gland. Is it safe to use Viscum prophylactically, even if the diagnosis of carcinoma is questionable?

Have you found that prophylaxis in this case causes any damage?

You once said that with this remedy, which is being considered for a disease, there is also a risk of causing something in the wrong case.

We use the viscuminjection in a very specific way. Let us assume the case of an error in the diagnosis. That can be the case. Of course, one would not proceed prophylactically because one has diagnosed that carcinoma is in its early stages. As soon as the tendency is there, prophylaxis can no longer do any harm. But let us assume that an error has occurred. Now we inject seven times in a row; then we take a break. If there really had been an error, we would see it immediately, because a kind of carcinomatous tendency would have arisen that would immediately disappear when we did the second seven injections. We would not go any further. What would be created would be transformed again by a similar process. If one is careful, it is quite impossible to do any harm with Viscum treatment.

Dr. Köller: I had a conversation with a lay doctor about carcinoma treatment. I told him that I believe Viscum is a cure for this. He replied that this would be the case, but that one would have to take something else, namely Quendel; otherwise one would not have the possibility to get to the disease with Viscum. Quendel is what provides the possibility.

Did the man know this on his own initiative?

Dr. Köller: I got to know him because he had performed a remarkable healing. A girl who was almost blind came to see him. He is an eye diagnostician. It is not clear how he does it. He has 750 kinds of tea. It is so difficult to have a conversation with these people. They are all very optimistic. He said that everything can be cured, even cancer. He didn't ask how we do it, he just said it was through mistletoe. He told me that he and a few friends had once been walking through a landscape and had come across a cherry tree with mistletoe on it; the tree was stunted and had cancer. The man said to himself that there was a great healing power in mistletoe.

Viscum is the specific for carcinoma. There is nothing to be done about it. Of course, because basically every disease is treated differently, since every organism is in a certain condition, the remedies are sometimes supported by the addition of something else. It is possible that he has cured with mistletoe. He does not use it as an injection. In that case, it is possible that something else would be needed as an addition. But when Viscum is used as an injection, it is the specific remedy. You just have to pay attention to the differences in the individual case, whether you have the mistletoe from an oak tree, a cherry tree or another tree, such as an apple tree. The essential thing is that the use of mistletoe juice really depends on the fact that we actually have to enhance its effect. I don't know if you have seen that we are not seeking to use Viscum in such a simple way, but that we need an apparatus to do so. First we bring the mistletoe juices into a vertical movement, and then we let a horizontally rotating movement penetrate them. The aim is to make the mistletoe juice drip and to circulate it in drops, combining it again with mistletoe juice in horizontal circles, so that a special structure is created right down to the smallest circles. This is actually only the healing effect of the viscum, which arises. Of course, it is an effective remedy in itself; but the absolutely specific remedy only arises in this complicated way. The only thing that can be said is that when the disease occurs in a complicated way, quendel is used. Because the pure carcinoma, which is a self-contained disease, is not like influenza or flu, for example, where all sorts of things can be added. It is a self-contained disease that is treated with a self-contained remedy.

It is interesting that a person comes up with something like this just because of what he has told you and what you have said, but it is only a mask, not a mask known to him; because the knowledge can only come to such a person in his sleep. The Lord gives to his own in his sleep, truly. There is a prophetic foresight in his sleep that he is looking for mistletoe. Then he remembers this unconscious prophetic experience just as he comes to the mistletoe. A conversation takes place that is quite insignificant for the matter itself. It must be clear that a certain foreknowledge is possible, especially in cases of illness. You can rely on that. I remind you of the case of Schleichs: the person concerned knew that he would die the next night.

Dr. Köller: Basically, it turned out that he also cures in other ways. He said that he had not been at rest; he did not believe that I would get anywhere.

He does not inject. If you give the remedy mistletoe as an internal medicine, you cannot hit the cancer. You hit more of his soul. But you are hitting a malformation in the etheric body, which expresses itself through an impairment of the sensory. You cannot heal internally with mistletoe, only through injection. I understand what he is saying to you; he doesn't dare to approach the matter.

Is the cause of cancer the same in women and men? Is the cause different in the upper and lower human being? I believe I have noticed that the remedy satisfied in the case of stomach cancer but did not satisfy in the case of uterine cancer. Success was clear in the case of stomach cancer in men. In contrast, the matter drags on in the case of uterine cancer. In some cases we cannot get at it; we always injected into the periphery, even in the case of uterine cancer.

It is of course the case that you have to decide whether to inject further away from the site of the cancer or to get very close. If you can get very close to the site, you will achieve results more quickly than if the cancer is in a place where you cannot get close.

With the uterus, you can get close all around, while with stomach cancer you are much further away.

That is quite right. But on the other hand, there is much more communication between the surface and the stomach than between the surface and the uterus. The uterus is a more internal organ. However, the different success is not justified by the fact that there is a difference between men and women. There must be other conditions. All sources of error must be excluded. It is definitely the case that some of our remedies have gained a reputation for being less effective because the remedies in the way they used to be prepared were not as stable. Now, I believe, this no longer occurs in the same way; when they have aged, they will no longer work less well.

For some of the remedies, we are still in the experimental stage.

It has become much more apparent to me that the carcinoma remedy, as it has been manufactured so far, loses a great deal when it is one year old, while it is absolutely effective when it is not particularly old. So this matter would also have to be excluded, excluded as a source of error, and included. Possibly a considerably larger dose would also have to be used for uterine cancer.

A participant would like to ask about a girl who is now 29 years old and who went insane between the ages of 18 and 19. As a child, she was always unruly and naughty; now she has become completely dull. Especially during her period, she became wild. During the time when she became more and more dull, she also became increasingly fat; she now weighs 97 kilograms. So before she was what you might call a naughty girl; then between the ages of 18 and 19, a great increase in this naughtiness, dullness, stupidity, non-reaction, raging during the period, so that the straitjacket had to be applied; then she became more and more dull, less and less responsive, fatter and fatter, with regular periods. She was treated with thyroid extract with the result that the dullness and fattening subsided.

These symptoms all indicate that she had a very weak ego organization. And it is very likely that in such a case, a strengthening of the ego organization can be achieved by a silica cure, a silicon cure, whereby one would have to advise taking the cure twice, i.e. taking silica and taking silica baths. Also Equisetum, that is a good thing. It is likely that one can achieve something for her in this way.

She received silicic acid for a while, but not baths, two years ago; but everything has remained the same.

I would emphasize the effect of silicic acid through baths, especially because this, if it were to be effective, would already have a specific effect. The peculiar rhythmic states that occur through silicic acid would hold back this fat formation, would also combat dullness, and would make her more sociable. It could also be that she is in a state where she does not absorb silicic acid. In this case, an experiment should be made with a very highly potentized phosphoric acid salt, with phosphoric acid potassium. One would have to bring the matter to effectiveness again.

On further question:

The silicic acid to about the sixth decimal place. But really use quartz for internal administration, and equisetum for baths.

Question about a neurasthenic patient. The matter responded very well to formic acid injections, but came back this year and did not go away despite formic acid injections. Eventually, I went down the wrong track by taking out an ingrown toenail, after which the matter got even worse. I tried formic acid again, reinforced with silicon; but I couldn't get through. The pain became unbearable, radiating from the foot to the calf. It was a variety of pains, sometimes rhythmic. I had to give him morphine injections, which I had to increase a lot; I barely touched him to keep the pain within tolerable levels. He couldn't sleep anymore. He would sit holding his foot, complaining of terrible pain; I tried alternating foot baths. The foot had to be amputated halfway up the calf. I ask because unfortunately the process also wants to appear on the other leg. What can be done?

In such a case, it is important to determine what the primary cause is.

He traces it back to his time in the military, when he usually didn't have very good shoes. He is 47 years old and often had to lie in the wet.

But could the pain have occurred first not in the leg but perhaps in the abdomen? It is quite possible that the whole case originates from a deformation at some point in the intestine, that he received a splinter, fell off the horse, pushed himself up, and that this caused an intestinal deformation. This intestinal deformation has the peculiarity of migrating downward and causing such conditions as you have described in the legs, first in one, but then jumping over to the other. Usually this ends in bone tuberculosis. But if the case is as likely as it is, you can achieve something with the remedy that works against the deformation: tobacco. In such a case with tobacco enemas (see note 5. 326).

He smokes quite a lot.

That has nothing to do with it. Tobacco smoke does not affect the organism in the same way as when you use tobacco by injection or as enemas. You only need very diluted enemas if you use them. It has a completely different effect on the organism. When smoking, the tobacco does not have time to exert its re-deforming effect.

A boy who is now eleven years old learned to walk when he was one, and could also speak a little. When he was two years old, he was standing a little too close during a shooting exercise with cannons. It is said that he has been deaf and dumb ever since. His speech is an incomprehensible babble, and he hears absolutely nothing. Is there anything that can be done? He can walk; he even looks very intelligent.

Otherwise, there are no disorders except for not hearing and speaking? What happens if you somehow make an impression on the eye?

Then he reacts just like a normal person; only in the ear and in speaking is there a change.

How was the second teething?

Quite normal at seven and a half.

One would have to assume that in some way the vitality of the auditory nerve has been broken. Now, after all, we have had quite considerable success with edelweiss, especially in the 10th decimal; or first in the 6th, then in the 10th, to revive the auditory nerve. There have been failures, but basically these have been observed in fairly old people; not really in younger people. I do think you can try this. It is indeed extremely difficult to treat these devitalized nerves; but one can certainly be successful with edelweiss under certain circumstances.

During the war, a female patient had suffered some kind of shock. She believed that her fiancé was dead. She was alone at home and had no one to talk to about it. Since then, she has become epileptic. The attacks always occur before her period. The attacks occur with tongue biting and so on, very typical. As soon as the period begins, it is over. She is in an institution for epileptics, even though the seizures only occur before her period.

How is she treated?

(Answer missing)

In such a case, you start with belladonna. If that doesn't help, you move on to reindeer moss in 6 decimal, and finally you administer fly agaric. It is very difficult to say anything specific in this case without seeing the patient. There could be any number of underlying causes.

A fifty-year-old man had a very hard time in his earlier years. For eleven years he had rheumatoid arthritis, which killed a brother of his. Now there is still a change in the left knee. Until two years ago, he had episodes of blood rushing to his head. Two years ago, a clear change occurred. He gained weight, and the rush of blood to the head disappeared. But what occurred was what he briefly describes as asthma. He has breathing difficulties, he has to gasp for breath when he talks. I have the impression that the problem is now in the bronchial tubes.

At 48 years old. Just as the rush used to be to the head, now it's to the chest. Now it happens that the man sometimes turns a little blue; it just needs to be quiet for him to turn a little blue.

It's possible.

It is very likely that this man is able to convert too much of the oxygen he has taken in into carbonic acid, so that he always has too much carbonic acid in his blood. You can test whether the man does not feel relieved when given air with more oxygen. If that is the case, then it is quite clear. Then the man produces too much carbonic acid, and it is necessary to give this man - what is he? —

- engineer —

to add silicon in the first decimal place, i.e. five percent, and he should be encouraged to do so, if he has taken it, for about half an hour after taking the silicon, to make some kind of mental effort. Then he can get better. He then manages to reduce the excessive carbonic acid production capacity.

We must now conclude, and continue tomorrow in the same vein.

I don't find these types of questions fruitful. The individual gets a lot out of them, but the others don't get much out of them. One should ask more general questions, something more interesting. Tomorrow it should be done a little differently. Don't you agree, Doctor?

I am prepared to answer anything that is asked. You can give a whole lecture on each question. I could have talked about the subject until now, when the first one asked; but then only one person would have had their turn. I think it was quite good to hear something varied. It's not important that we are satisfied, but that the audience is.

I think that something is being done here, as in the way clinics are held at the university, because the way of asking the question does not allow for the other question of how one can develop understanding within oneself.

That would come immediately if a question were asked about it. So tomorrow, ask a question about it, then it can come about. I don't think it's completely useless to go into this question. But other answers come up. We just evaluate them in such a way that the audience can be satisfied.

What about deepening the diagnosis? We can think about a patient in many ways. A lot of questions arise, and one often faces the difficulty of deciding what to do. Intellectually you cannot; you have to make a volitional decision. I would like to ask: Is it not possible to push back this intellectual volitional impulse at that moment, so that what you have to do comes to you? Perhaps you could say something about that?

You mean how one can make the diagnosis more transparent?

In treatment, you are faced with various possibilities. You can't decide whether to use herbal or mineral remedies; you have to decide on something. You should be able to approach the patient from deeper grounds and to merge all these ideas together so that you arrive at knowing that this is the right thing to do.

We will make something up tomorrow and then develop an idealized diagnosis.

What I said yesterday about the path of the human intellect toward the future, rests upon definite facts that can be brought to light through spiritual-scientific knowledge. Today we shall deal with some of these facts. You must be conscious in a practical way, I might say, of the following.

When a man confronts you, he is that being we speak about in spiritual science. That is to say, above everything we must always be aware that he is a four-membered being, as you know from my book Theosophy. We have before us the ego, the astral body, ether body, and physical body. The fact that every time a person stands before us we are confronted by these four members of the human entity, brings it about that ordinary human perception does not know what it faces in man. Ordinarily one thinks: “What I see before me, filling space, is the physical body.” But what is physical in it we would not see as we usually see it if it were to confront us merely as physical body. We see it as it usually is today only because it is permeated by the ether body, the astral body, and ego. Strange as it may sound, that which is the physical body proper is a corpse, even during our lifetime. When we are confronted by a human corpse we are actually confronted by the physical body. In the corpse we have physical man not permeated by ether and astral body and ego. It is forsaken by them and shows its true nature. You do not visualize yourself properly if you believe you carry what you consider to be the physical body of man with you through space. A more correct view would be if you thought of yourself as a corpse with your ego, astral and etheric bodies carrying this corpse through space.

A consciousness of the true nature of man's being becomes more and more important for our age. For the conditions existing in the present cycle of mankind's evolution were not the same in earlier periods. What I am now relating cannot be ascertained by outer physical science, but spiritual-scientific cognition does observe these facts. As you know, the fourth post Atlantean age begins in the eighth century B.C.; further back we come to the Egypto-Chaldean period. At that time human bodies had a constitution different from that of today. Those you find now in the museum as mummies had a much more delicate constitution than present-day human bodies. They were much more permeated by the plant element; they were not so completely corpse as is the modern human body. As physical bodies they were akin to plant nature, whereas the present-day physical body, since the Greco-Latin age, is akin to the mineral world. If through some cosmic miracle the bodies of that ancient population were to be bestowed upon us, we would all be ill. We would carry proliferating growths in our body. Many a disease consists in the fact that the human body atavistically returns to conditions that were the normal ones in the Egypto-Chaldean age. Today we find tumorous formations in the body which are caused by the fact that a part of this or that person's body develops the tendency to become what the whole body was for the ancient Egypto-Chaldean population.

This is closely connected with human evolution. We as modern men carry a corpse in our body. The ancient Egyptian carried as his body something of a plant-like nature. The result was that his knowledge was different from ours, his intelligence acted differently. What do we know through our science that we are so proud of? Only that which is dead. Science shows that life cannot be grasped with ordinary intelligence. To be sure, certain research scientists believe that if they continue with their chemical experiments the moment will come when they will be able, through complicated combinations of atoms, molecules, and their interactions, to know the processes of life. This moment will never come. On the chemico-physical path one will only be able to grasp the minerally dead; that is to say, one will only grasp that aspect of the living which is a corpse.

Yet, what in man is intelligent and gains knowledge is nevertheless this physical body, this corpse. What then does this corpse do as we carry it about? It achieves most in a knowledge of mathematics and geometry. Everything is transparent there. The further we move from the mathematical-geometrical the more un-transparent do matters become. The reason for this is that the human corpse is the real knower today; the dead can only recognize the dead. Today what the ether body is, the astral body, the ego, does not think in man; it remains in obscurity. If the ether body would be able to know in the same way that the physical body knows the dead, it would know the life of the plant world. This was the peculiar thing with the Egyptian, that with his plant-like, living body he had knowledge of the plant world in a way quite different from ours. Much instinctive knowledge of the plant world can be traced back to what was embodied in Egyptian culture through their instinctively knowing consciousness. Even what is known today in botany about substances for medicinal use comes often from traditions originating in ancient Egyptian wisdom. You know how a number of so-called lodges, not founded on genuine fundamentals, call themselves Egyptian lodges. That is because they refer back to Egypt if they want to impart certain knowledge—which, however, is no longer very valuable. In these circles there still live certain traditions stemming from the wisdom which could be had through the Egyptian body. One can say, as humanity gradually progresses into the Greco-Latin period the living, human plant-body gradually died out. We carry an extremely dead body in us; especially is this true for the head. The science of the initiates perceives the human head as a corpse, as something continually dying. More and more will humanity become conscious of the fact that its vehicle for knowledge is a corpse; that it therefore knows only what is dead.

For this reason, the further we go into the future the more intensively will we feel a longing to know what is living. But the living will not be known through ordinary intelligence bound to the corpse. Much will be needed to make it possible for man again to penetrate the world in a living way. We must know today what it is that man has lost. When he passed over from the Atlantean to the post Atlantean age there was much he could not do that he can do today. Since a certain time in your childhood you are able to say “I” in referring to yourself. You may say it without any great respect. But in former ages of mankind's evolution this “I” was not referred to with so little respect. There were times, prior to the Egyptian age, when a name for “I” was used which, when pronounced, stupefied a person. Pronouncing it, therefore, was avoided. If people right after the Atlantean epoch had experienced the pronouncing of the name for “I”—at that time it was only known to the initiates—the whole congregation would have fainted, so powerful was the effect of uttering this name for “I.” An echo of this fact lingered with the ancient Hebrews who spoke of the unutterable name of the Deity in the soul; a word which only the initiates were permitted to speak, or that was expressed before the congregation in a kind of eurythmy.

The ineffable name of God had its origin in what I have just told you. Gradually this fact was lost, and the deep effect of such practices diminished. In the first post-Atlantean epoch a deep effect in the ego; in the second epoch a deep effect in the astral body; in the third epoch a deep effect in the ether body, but the effect was bearable—an effect which, as I stated yesterday, brought men into connection with the cosmos. Today we can say “I”—we can say anything—without its having a deep effect upon us, because we grasp the world with our corpse. That is to say, we grasp what is dead, what is mineral in the world. But we must arouse ourselves to rise again to those regions in which we can take hold of the living. Whereas the Greco-Latin period created more and more dead knowledge for the corpse, in our time intelligence follows the path I mentioned yesterday. We must, therefore, resist mere intelligence; we must add something to it. It is in the nature of our time that we have to retrace the path of development, so that in the fifth post-Atlantean period we learn to know the plant, in the sixth period the animal, and in the seventh the truly human. Thus, it will be our present task to pass beyond a knowledge of the mineral and learn to know the plant element.

Now after realizing this, ask yourself who is the person who exemplifies this search for plant knowledge. It is Goethe. Contrary to the preoccupation of all outer science with what is dead, he occupied himself with the life, the growth, the metamorphosis of plants. Thus, he was the man of the fifth post-Atlantean period in its elementary beginnings. In his small treatise of the year 1790, An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, you will see how Goethe tries to comprehend the plant from leaf to leaf as something developing, unfolding, not as something completed, dead. That is the beginning of the knowledge that should be sought in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In Goetheanism we have the keynote for this. Science will have to wake up in the Goethean sense, will have to pass from the dead to the living. This is what is meant when I say again and again that we must acquire the ability to leave behind the dead, abstract concepts and arrive at those that are living and concrete. What I said two days ago and yesterday is basically the way to these living, concrete concepts.

It will not be possible to enter into these concepts and ideas if we are not ready to develop our general world view and concept of life as a unity. Through the special con-figuration of our culture we are forced to let the various currents of our world view run side by side in a disorganized fashion. Just think how man's religious view of the world and his scientific view often run parallel, completely disconnected. He builds no bridge between the two; in-deed, he is afraid of doing so. We must make it clear that this state of affairs cannot continue.

I have drawn your attention to the egotistical way man forms his world view at the present time. I have described how men today are chiefly interested in the life of the soul after death. This interest springs from pure egotism. I have said we must pass on to interest in the life of the soul from birth onward, seeing it as a continuation of the life prior to birth. If we were to observe the child's growth into the world as a continuation of his pre-natal existence, with the same concern we feel for his soul after death, our thinking about the world would be much less egotistical than it is today. But this egotism in our world view is connected with many other things.

Here I come to a point where men today must become ever more clear about underlying facts. In the period of time culminating in our age the egotistic element was chiefly developed. The ego has permeated man's viewing of the world; it has also permeated his will. We must not deceive ourselves about that. The religious denominations in particular have become egotistical. This you can see even in externalities. Just consider how modern preachers have to reckon with people's egotism. The more they make promises concerning the life of the soul after death the more they reach their goal. People today have little interest in other spiritual questions; in, for instance, that creative flow of life which shows itself so wonderfully after birth in the soul that previously was in the spiritual world.

A result of this lack of interest is the way man thinks about the Divine in the various religious denominations. The fact that we visualize a God as The Highest has no special meaning. Here it is essential that we free ourselves from deception. What do most people mean today if they say “God?“ What kind of being do people refer to when they speak of God? It is an Angel; nothing else but their own Angel whom they call God. People have just a bare intimation that a protective spirit guides their life; they look up to him and call him their God. This is the egotism of the churches, that they do not pass beyond the Angel with their concept of God. A narrowing of interests is caused by egotism; and this narrowing of interests is to be clearly seen in public life.

Do people today ask about the general destiny of man-kind? Oh! it is often very sad if one wants to speak to people about human destiny. No one has any idea of the degree of change that has taken place in this respect in a comparatively short time. Today we may say to people: The military conflict that has spread over the earth during the last four or five years will be followed by the mightiest spiritual battle, which will cover the earth in a form never experienced before. Its origin lies in the fact of the Occident naming as illusion or ideology what the Orient calls reality, and the Orient feeling as reality what the Occident calls ideology. We may draw people's attention to this weighty matter and it does not even dawn on them that if something similar had been said only a hundred years ago it would have so taken hold of people's souls that they would never have gotten over it.

This change in humanity, this growing indifference to the great questions of destiny, is the most striking phenomenon. Everything bounces off mankind, so to say. The most comprehensive, incisive facts are accepted like a sensation. People are not deeply shaken by them. The reason for this is the clever, ever increasing egotism that constricts men's interests. We may have whatever fine democracies where men meet in parliaments, but concern for the fate of man-kind does not permeate them, because the people who are elected to these parliaments do not feel the urgency to know mankind's destiny. Egotistical interests hold sway. Every-one has his own egotistical interest. Similarities in outer interests such as often arise from one's profession, lead people to form groups. When the groups are large enough, majorities arise. In this way a concern not for human destinies but only for egotism, multiplied by the number of persons involved, becomes active in parliaments and men's proposals.

Because of the way egotism lives in people now, even their religious professions are under its influence. They will have their necessary renewal if people's interests broaden; that is, if men will again look beyond their personal destiny to the destiny of mankind; if they will be deeply moved when one tells them that in the West a culture develops that is different from that of the East, and that the culture of the Middle is again different from that of both East and West. Or if one tells them that in the West the great goals of mankind are sought, when they are sought, through the use of mediums who are put into a trance and are thereby consciously brought into a sub-earthly relationship to the spiritual worlds, out of which they speak of great historical aims. We could tell this repeatedly to Europeans, yet they will not believe that in English-American countries there really exist societies in which the attempt is made to find out through questions cleverly put to mediums what the great goals of mankind are. People likewise do not believe that the Oriental obtains knowledge about the destiny of mankind not through mediums but on the mystical path. In the beautiful speeches of Rabindranath Tagore, easily available today, you can read what the Oriental thinks on a grand scale about the goals of mankind. These speeches are read as one reads the feature articles of any hack journalist; because today people distinguish little between a journalistic hack and persons of great spirituality like Rabindranath Tagore. They are not aware, I might say, that different racial substances can live side by side. What is valid for Middle Europe I have put forward in public lectures for many years. It was not received as it should have been.

With this I only wish to point out that one may become aware of something that reaches beyond the egotistical fate of a man and is connected with the destiny of groups of men, so that we can make specific differentiations across the face of the earth. If one lifts his view toward comprehending human destiny in mankind as a whole, if one concerns himself intensely with what thus passes beyond personal destiny, then one tunes his soul to comprehending a higher reality than the Angel; actually, that of the Archangel. Thoughts concerning the significance of an Archangel do not arise in one's soul if one remains in the regions concerned with egotistical man. Preachers may talk ever so much about the Divine; if they only preach within the confines of egotistical man they speak merely of the Angel. Calling it by a different name is just an untruth; it does not put the matter straight. Only if one begins to be interested in man's destiny as a unity over the whole earth does his soul begin to elevate itself to the Archangel.

Now let us pass on to something else. Let us feel what I have indicated in these lectures about the successive impulses of mankind's evolution. You will find that most of our leading citizens were educated in the classical schools—Gymnasium—during the years when the soul is pliable and flexible. These classical schools were not born out of the culture of our age but of the Greco-Latin age. If those Greeks and Romans had done what we did, they would have established Egypto-Chaldean classical schools. They didn't do that; they took the subjects for their teaching from immediate life. We take them from the previous period and educate people accordingly. This is very significant, but we haven't recognized it. Had we done so a note would have sounded within the feminist movement that did not resound, and that is: Men, if their intelligence is to be specially trained, are sent into antiquated schools. There their brains become hardened. Women have the good fortune of not being admitted into the classical schools. We want to develop our intelligence in an original way; we want to show what can be developed in the present age if we are not made dull in our youth by Greco-Latin classical education.

These words did not resound, but in their place: Men have crept into and hidden under the Greco-Latin classical education, let us women do the same. Let us also become students of the classical schools.

So little has understanding spread for what is necessary! We must realize that in our present time we are not educated for our age but for the Greco-Latin culture. This is inserted into our lives. We must sense it. We must sense what, as Greco-Latin culture, acts in the leading people of today, in the so-called intellectuals. This is one aspect of what we carry within us in our spiritual education. We read no newspaper that does not contain Greco-Latin education; because, although writing in our national idiom, we actually write in the Greco-Latin form.

And in regard to our concept of rights we live in Romanism, again something antiquated. To be sure, the old national rights battle at times against Roman law, but they do not prevail. We must feel how a time that has passed lives in what man calls right and wrong in public life.

Only in economic life do we live in the present. This is a significant statement. Perhaps I may say in passing that many women use the concepts of the present in their cooking, in managing their households. In doing so they actually are the people of the present age; everything else that is carried into the present is antiquated. I do not present this matter of their cooking as something particularly desirable, but the other aspect is much less desirable, namely, that the souls of women also want to go back from the present to antiquated cultures. In looking upon our cultural surroundings we have not only what acts in space but also the effects of bygone eras. If we acquire a feeling for this, not only the past affects us but the future as well. It is our task to let the future work into us. Because, if there did not live in every person, however slightly aware of it, a kind of rebellion against the Hellenism of education and the Romanism of rights, if the future were not to ray in upon us, we would be pathetic creatures, really very pathetic creatures.

Besides space we must also consider time in our culture; that is to say, what as history reaches over into our present from the past and from the future. We, as people of the present, must realize that past and future play into our souls. Just as America, England, Asia, China, India—the East and the West as two opposites—have their effect upon us as Europeans, so do we carry Greece, Rome, and the future in us. If we are willing to focus our attention on the future by becoming aware of how what is past and what is coming into being live in our souls, then another attitude arises in us concerning human destiny, an attitude that transcends egotism and is different from what is aroused by a merely spatial consideration. Only if we develop this soul attitude is it possible for us to form concepts about the sphere of the Time Spirits, the Archai. That is to say, we come to the third rank of divine beings in the order of the Hierarchies.

It is good if man by such means places before himself these three Hierarchies in concepts and ideas, because the Spirits of Form who come next are much harder to comprehend. But it suffices for modern man if he attempts to penetrate beyond egotism into the sphere of the unegotistic, doing this repeatedly, and occupying himself with what I have just explained. I must emphasize again, that especially the training of teachers should make use of these facts. A teacher should not be permitted to instruct and educate without having acquired an idea of the egotism that strives toward the closest God, the Angel; without also having acquired a concept of the unegotistic, destiny-determining powers who are side by side in space above the earth, the Archangel beings; and without having acquired a concept of how past and future reach over into our culture, the Roman life of rights, the Greek spiritual substance, and the undefined rebel of the future, which saves us.

Mankind at present has little inclination to enter into these matters. Some time ago I repeatedly emphasized that it is one of our social tasks to derive from the present our educational subjects to be used during the time spent today in classical schools. To do as the Greeks themselves did, namely, take the subjects for education from present-day life.

Shortly after the time, and in the same place where I had spoken about the social importance of this problem (I do not wish to imply a causal connection, but the matter has symptomatic meaning) there appeared in all the news-papers in that place a number of advertisements propagandizing the modern classical schools. I had delivered lectures characterizing classical education in the way I have done here. The advertisements declared what the German nation owes to the classical education of its youth, for “strengthening the national consciousness,” “the national power,” and so on. This was a few weeks before the Treaty of Versailles. These advertisements were signed by a variety of local figures from the schools and the department of education. What has to be brought out today as to the factual basis of mankind's evolution, is rejected. People let it bounce off; it does not touch the depths of the soul. For this reason, it is so difficult to be active in the social sphere. One will never be able to take hold of the social question with the superficialities employed today. It is a deeply significant question that cannot be grasped if one will not look deeply into the nature of man and the world. Because this is so it should be evident how important are certain proposals offered by the threefold social order.

We must acquire an organ for what is necessary for our age, and it is difficult to acquire this organ in the spiritual sphere. For an education that has gradually been taken over by the State has deprived man of active striving; it has made him into a devoted member of the State structure. How do the majority of people live? Up to the sixth year of age man may live unhindered because the State does not yet consider him sanitary enough. The State would not like to devote itself to the tasks that have to be carried out in the first childhood years. Man is still left to the powers outside the State. But then it lays claim to him and he is trained to fit the pattern of the State; he ceases to be a person and bears the stamp of the State. He strives to fit this pattern because it is instilled in him. He not only gets his keep from the State while he works but beyond the working age up to his death, in the form of a pension. It is the ideal of many people today to have a position that entitles them to a pension. The soul too becomes entitled to a pension, even beyond death, without any effort on its part, because it receives eternal bliss through the activity of the church. The church sees to that. Now it is very uncomfortable to hear that salvation lies in free spiritual striving which must be independent of the State. The State must only serve civil rights, where there will be no claim to a pension. This is reason enough for many to reject it, as we have occasion to notice again and again.

Concerning the most intimate spiritual life, the religious life, the world of the future will demand of man that he work for his immortality; that he let his soul be active so that it may receive into itself, through activity, the Divine, the Christ-impulse.

In the course of my life I have received many letters from church people who state that anthroposophy is fundamentally a fine thing, but it contradicts the simple Christian faith; that Christ has redeemed the soul, that one can attain salvation in Christ without any effort on one's part. People cannot let go of the “simple belief in the attainment of salvation through Christ.” They believe themselves to be especially pious if they say or write something like that. But they are egotistical, extremely egotistical. They want to be passive in their souls and let it be the concern of the Divine to transport the soul, nicely pensioned, through the portal of death.

Matters are not so easy in that world conception in which, in future, the religious element must be created. Here one must understand that the presence of the Divine in the soul must be worked for. One will no longer be able just to surrender passively to the churches, which promise to carry the souls into the beyond. (The involvement of money for such service, a scandal in the past, has now fallen into disuse, but secretly it still plays a role in this process, also in obtaining special blessings.) But the transition to inner activity is what is needed for mankind, something it doesn't yet cherish very much.

In order to gain a feeling for what is necessary in this regard we must keep in mind, first, the metamorphosis of humanity since the time of ancient Egypt when the body was more of a plant-like nature. Should there be a relapse into that state in the present age, man would become sick and develop tumors and such things. Secondly, the fact that we carry our body as a corpse which can think, can under-stand. In this way we gain a feeling for what mankind needs, which is, to advance in the solving of social problems in the way this has to be done in the present time. We must no longer allow ourselves to consider such a matter as the social question as being utterly simple.

You see, this is what is so difficult at present: That people would like to be enlightened on the most important aspects of life by a few abstract statements. If a book like The Threefold Social Order contains more than a few abstract statements, if it contains the results of an observation of life, then people say they do not understand it. They consider it confusing. But this is the misfortune at present, that people do not wish to enter into what precisely they ought to enter into. For abstract sentences, completely lucid, refer to what is dead; the social element, however, ought to be alive. Here we must employ flexible ideas, flexible sentences, flexible forms. Therefore, it is necessary that we not only reflect upon the transformation of single institutions, but that we really adjust ourselves to a genuine transformation in our thinking and learning, down to their innermost structure.

This is what I would like to leave with you today when I have to leave again for a few weeks. We must feel ourselves influenced by the working together of our anthroposophical and our social movement. I should like you to comprehend more and more why it is that the anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit must flow into the souls of men if anything is to be achieved in the social field. And I would bring close to your hearts what I have said repeatedly in various ways: It is of utmost importance to acknowledge that what we can acquire of anthroposophical knowledge is the true guide-line now for all action and striving; that we must have the courage to will to prevail with anthroposophy. The worst thing is that people in these days have so little courage for willing to prevail with what is needed. They permit their best will-forces to break down; though it is so necessary they do not will to carry through.

Learn to represent anthroposophy with courage. Receive graciously the people who show an interest in looking at this building which represents our spiritual striving. Rejoice in every single individual who shows even a little understanding. Meet with him. But do not take it to heart if your efforts are fruitless, and people meet our activities with evil intention, or, what is more frequent, with lack of understanding. Just resist it suitably. It is courage that is needed to bring our efforts through to good results. Let us think of ourselves as the handful of people whose destiny it is to know and to communicate to the world what it so sorely needs today. Let the people ridicule us and say that it is presumption to believe all this. It is true nevertheless. Saying to oneself, “It is true nevertheless,”—saying it so earnestly that it fills one's whole soul, this needs the inner courage we must have. May it permeate us as anthroposophical substance. Then we shall do what we have to do, everyone at the place where he is. This I wanted to say to you today.

We are longing for the day when our activity through this building brings us closer to the outside world; our activity which in any case is very difficult. This building is the only one that takes into account the great destinies of mankind even in its forms, and it is very gratifying to see that attention is being paid to it. Something else, however, is necessary for favorable progress in social problems, and that is, that this building through its very forms, which are stronger than other modern architectural forms, should aid in the strengthening of humanity's spiritual powers; making men more amenable to what one wishes them to know, so that they may rise not only to the nature of the Angel, but to the Archangel, and to the Spirit of the Time.

With these words I take leave of you for a few weeks. I hope to be able then to continue these considerations, and that during this time we shall come into an intensive activity for our building itself. Because, my dear friends, we are justified in emphasizing on every hand that readiness for work, that joy in work is needed for all men. This will not come if people are not moved by great purposes. I believe that if people can be convinced that through the three-folding of the social organism they can attain an existence worthy of man, they will begin to work again. Otherwise they will continue to strike. For in the field of physical labor people need an impulse that takes hold of them in their inmost souls.

But we must show that our work has been fruitful in attaining at least one objective, and this radiates into the world. Only then can we give the impulse to mankind to overcome spiritually what is dead in our time. Let us think this over, my dear friends, until the time when we are together again and can speak further about these questions.