The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science is based on occult science, as we have often emphasised, which brings us knowledge of the forces underlying the various epochs, and also enables us to understand what is at work in the cultural periods of our own epoch. So we must speak of these inner forces of our own time, whenever and wherever we meet, in order to understand the tasks of Spiritual Science in relation to what is at work beneath the surface of life, and so that occult research can help us direct our lives in harmony with the great goals of mankind.

In order to speak about contemporary occult trends it would be a good thing to start from the point where deep, occult research can lead us to what is also taking place in the super-sensible world in our time. By way of introduction we must also take into account what we have right in front of us at present, though we can only give a general sketch of it and not go into any details. Many things can only be spoken of without embarrassment in Anthroposophical gatherings, for ours is a time of dogmatism and abstraction. The strange thing is that this basic characteristic is not recognised in exoteric life, and people believe generally that their thoughts and actions are free from dogma, when in fact they are extremely dogmatic. They think they are basing themselves on reality, although they are really lost in the wildest abstractions. Therefore it is worthwhile bringing Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science, with its realities, to the attention of wider circles, to open up the possibility for an understanding of our epoch, though it will probably be a long time before the outside world wants to develop a deeper understanding for these things. We do not see how tied up in dogmas and abstractions our civilisation is, until we stop looking at it from the abstract point of view and begin seeing it in a really living way. One then finds a trend of thought whose chief characteristic consists in the laying down of ready-made dogmas that enlightened people are required to accept, whilst imagining they are being genuinely discriminating. Something of the sort is evident in the so-called monistic movement, though it is not justified in calling itself monistic. It gets its chief dogmas from modern natural science, in fact that particular branch of it which, strictly speaking, likes drawing its knowledge by means of purely external methods. If this natural science were to keep to its own field of activity, it could do important work; instead of this it leads to the formation of a new religion. Men take the facts of materialistic natural science and turn them into abstract dogmas. And anyone who is of the opinion that he is right because he is convinced of these dogmas himself, believes that the others have lagged a long way behind. They completely ignore the whole life of human individuality, and strive only to cram their heads with what the external world outlook considers as dogmas, and to regard the conclusions drawn from abstractions as the most important thing. This leads to the formation of sects whose adherents cling to expert opinions, principles and dogmas which they then advocate as the thing.

All that comprises the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement represents the opposite of this. This movement does not set out to follow a number of doctrines but to place the worth of the human individuality in the foreground.

Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science leads to the kind of social life that is based on a mutual interchange founded on the sort of confidence that each personality has in the other. Human beings should and will come together who have trust in one another. And in joint tasks one ought to say: You are the right person, not because you adhere to this or the other principle, but because you can achieve this or that and do not disturb the other people in the course of your work. Nothing could be worse than this, that the bad modern habit of forming sects should take hold of Anthroposophical life. It is not only when you are in full agreement with your neighbour that you should listen to him, but, if you are not, you should still reserve freedom and mobility for yourself and for him, and, with this recognition of individualities, work educationally in the Anthroposophical movement. Our time has very little understanding for this sort of thing. It aims at generalities. What is right for one can make the other man appear a fool. In the Anthroposophical movement we must make a clean sweep of that. If this attitude were not prevalent in the outside world of materialism, men would hasten of their own accord to understand human individualities in our own way, and then a scientific spirituality would soon appear that would be bound to lead to a world conception of a spiritual kind. But men are rigid with dogmas and therefore cannot reach it.

If you look into the principles that are upheld in monistic gatherings, you would soon see that none of these principles and dogmas are based on the outlook and results of present day science but on those of fifteen to twenty years ago. Thus, for instance, a personality distinguished in modern scientific circles said at a recent scientific meeting in Koenigsberg: ‘Facts of physics are all tending in a certain direction. People always used to speak of the ether as being in matter and outside, and it was taken for granted without taking the other known material sciences into account. But, after all, this has gradually met with justified doubt, and therefore we must now ask what the physicists should assume to be there in place of the ether.’ The answer was: Purely mathematical constructions, Hertz' and Maxwell' equations, conceptual formulae. According to these, light does not spread through space by means of ether vibrations, but, assuming them not to be there, it overcomes the non-material space as a vacuum in the sense of the equations referred to, so that according to this the transmission of light appears to be bound to concepts and ideas. It could quite easily happen that anyone who pointed to such hypotheses of the most up-to-date science in a monistic meeting could be mistaken for a mad theosophist, making the absurd proposition that thoughts are the bearers of light. Yet Max Planck³⁷ of Berlin, a respected authority on natural science, declared this to be his scientific opinion. If, therefore the monists wanted to make progress in science, they would also have to accept this opinion of the experts. As this is not the case, a monistic religion will only be possible if its supporters believe they have a scientific basis, but do not know that their assumptions have long been superseded. People who think in a monistic way are only held together by the results of so-called intellectual research and its world conception, or the biased dogmas arising out of this. Whereas the Anthroposophically orientated theosophist complies with facts that cannot deprive anyone of his freedom or lead to the formation of sects, and each individuality can remain free.

An important aspect of the Anthroposophically orientated spiritual movement is that it gives an impulse for self-education in a way that hardly has its equal at the present time. We must understand what we ourselves are as a movement, and realise that this movement is based on foundations that can only be found within this movement and nowhere outside.

Facts of real life can show us this. There are many people who think we ought to take what Anthroposophically orientated Spiritual Science has to offer and give it out in philosophical terms, in the style of official science, to make Spiritual Science more acceptable to the representatives and followers of officialdom. But that cannot be done, because it is impossible to make compromises between the occult stream of Spiritual Science and any other movement that arises out of the characteristic outlook of our times, like the monistic one, for instance—that is, one that has a completely different basis. To bring about compromises between the two, even if only in form, is impossible. It is much more a matter of aiming at bringing a new impulse into the culture of the times. The others cannot even understand or explain their own basic facts, nor judge them one single step ahead, because they lack the courage to draw the conclusions arising from these facts. On closer examination we find incomplete thought processes in every sect, including scientific circles, and Spiritual Science must see these for what they are, for we know that a half truth or a quarter truth is worse than a total fallacy because it deceives the outside world which is not competent to judge. The Anthroposophist must enter the very nerve of the spiritual movement in order to understand the materialistic movement that sets the pace in the outside world, because it sometimes works with facts that are tending in the direction of spiritual truth, but are not fully developed.

If the medical branch of natural science means to go seriously into bodily research, it cannot ignore the sphere, the concepts and the results of occult investigation. The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud³⁸ in Vienna, which enjoys a large and still growing circulation, gives us an instructive example of the difficulties arising in this sphere. It began by investigating the life of the soul in both the physically and the mentally ill, in an attempt to discover certain psychic causes there, in the long-forgotten early years, for example, because there was a definite feeling that what is still there in the unconscious has its lasting effect on later life too. An ingenious doctor of this school, Dr. Breuer,³⁹ tried to put the patients into a condition of hypnosis, and then let them make a kind of confession, so that he could probe into the depths of their souls. You all know that it is a great relief to talk about what is oppressing you. People were often cured by these hypnotic confessions, or they were well on the way to it. Even without hypnosis Freud often achieved the same results by means of well chosen questions. Apart from this he discovered that happenings of a largely unconscious kind are revealed in dream life, and out of this a kind of dream interpretation arose in the school of psychoanalysis. If someone were now to say that here is a good opportunity to strike a compromise between Spiritual Science and the results of these efforts, such an opinion can only be called a fallacy, because despite the quarter truth contained in it he would soon become aware that the direction in question leads to the wildest errors and that it would be preferable to keep to purely materialistic interpretations. Spiritual Science, when properly understood, has to reject such things. The point is that the ideas about the soul's dream life and the resulting theory are steeped in coarse, sense-bound thinking, and it is therefore not possible on this basis to turn it into a spiritual truth. For in order to do that one needs the spiritual foundations that Spiritual Science has to offer, otherwise one gropes around in obscure hypotheses and theories and explains them in a materialistic way. And that is the way things have turned out in the Freudian school. They certainly got as far as the symbolism of dreams, but wove into them the thoughts of the materialistic age, whilst Schubert's⁴⁰ and Volkelt's⁴¹ correct conception could be started on in Leipzig but not developed. They thought of the dream as a symbol of sexual life, because our time is incapable of realising that this area is the lowest revelation of innumerable worlds that rise far above our world in spiritual significance. By so doing they are turning it into something that gives an irresponsible flavour to a whole field of investigation, and, in consequence, brings about the most serious errors. Therefore the only thing that Spiritual Science can say about the Freudian school is that it has to reject its research on the grounds that it is dilettante. If it would first of all make itself thoroughly acquainted with spiritual investigation, these truths would produce quite different results. People would then begin to see that our age is an intellectual age, an age of dogma, that drives people into a wild chaos of instincts and passions and is satisfied with what is merely intellectual and abstract.

In the example of the Freudian school therefore, we see an area of soul life being shown in a wrong light and dragged down by the worst kind of materialism by trying to relate all the phenomena to sex, a procedure of which one could say that it arose out of the personal inclination of the scientists themselves, only they are not conscious of it, and it is dilettante into the bargain.

We must feel how necessary it is that spiritual investigation rejects half and quarter truths and only adopts those it can defend with its own principles, for we realise that Spiritual Science can work out of its own strength. It is important to stress that my first books did not grow out of theosophy, yet people outside find it strange that I nevertheless became a theosophist later on. That is a short-sighted, narrow-minded view, however. The books have this about them that despite their strictly scientific attitude they do not have dealings with what is regarded as official science, or assume the style that believes itself capable of making general definitions.

Spiritual Science should draw abundant life from the foundations of occultism, make no compromises and show a courage that is lacking in the domains outside. Whoever refuses to make any compromises of this kind, acquires a reputation of being inadequate in the eyes of those people who always want one to give way, but do not do so themselves. As opposed to this, Spiritual Science stands in the world as a spiritual movement firmly established on its own basis, and its members must always be conscious of this fact, and see it to be a vital element of this spiritual movement. It sometimes happens that people with special interests come into Spiritual Science, but where Spiritual Science and spiritual investigations are concerned it is not a case of special interests. Each individual can follow these up for himself, and he should not expect Spiritual Science to follow after him. Spiritual Science must penetrate into our whole cultural situation and have the courage to carry out its task in life with consistency in an age that is justifiably called intellectual.

But do not let us imagine that this intellectuality ought to merge, as such, with spiritual life, for we have to take our start from facts that are reached by clairvoyant means. We find, then, that the life of the soul has three basic elements. There is, firstly, the life of concepts, intellectuality, which to begin with only comes to expression in perception. When we consider intellectuality by itself, we notice that it is bound in the widest sense to the material world from which man draws his mental images. These images themselves, of course, are super-sensible. From the very connection between the life of mental imagery and the life of perception we see that the former is connected with the physical plane. If we involve ourselves in difficult thoughts and think to such an extent that we get tired, then we sleep well, provided that only the life of thought and not the life of feeling was engaged in the activity. Therefore we can grasp the statement that the life of thought is a super-sensible process, and is connected with the next element, the astral world. It is from the astral plane that those forces come that awaken and maintain the life of thought in the human soul.

The second element consists of the waves of feeling that pass through our soul, such as pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sorrow, love, dislike, and so on. The flow of thought and feeling is intimately connected with our ego, and these rob us of our sleep because their emotional unrest prevents us entering the astral plane. We can understand therefore that this brings us into connection with lower Devachan, which does not accept our emotions if they are impure but rejects them from that part of the astral world that is lower Devachan.

Morality and will impulses are the third element. The man who can look back on good deeds in his day's review can experience a moment of bliss before falling asleep. He is in the pleasant situation in which he can say: If only it were possible to prolong it, to enjoy the enlivening power of it, and that it could take hold of our whole soul life as a fructifying force! This enables us to understand what occult investigation tell us: That will impulses refer us to higher Devachan, where they are accepted only if they issue from a pure will and are suitable for this spiritual world. Thus our life of mental images and concepts, our intellectuality, is closely connected with the astral world, our life of feeling with lower Devachan and our life of will with higher Devachan.

In addition to these we have our life of sense perception on the physical plane. These four elements develop at a different rate in human incarnations during the various cultural epochs.

When we consider the occult background, we see how the life of perception comes to the fore in the Greco-Roman era, how the Greek and the Roman was completely attuned to the physical world that he esteemed so highly. Our time, the fifth cultural epoch, is that of thinking, of intellectuality. This is why the abstract sciences are flourishing. The coming sixth age will retain intellectual life, in the same way as we in the fifth have retained the life of perception, and will in addition express itself in the feeling life of the soul. The environment will affect people so that it causes them pleasure and displeasure, joy and pain, sympathy and antipathy, to a degree that as yet can only be felt by the occultist who is capable of overcoming mere intellect, and understanding certain connections of life with real feeling, without lengthy logical reasoning. The occultist feels displeasure over illogical things, joy and peace of soul over logical things. If he defends something that he immediately sees to be right, he has to prove it nowadays with a lengthy argument, in order to be understood. The occultist feels pain especially vividly when he reads the newspaper, because it is just in the daily papers that one frequently finds illogicality incarnate. You have to read them, nevertheless—choosing as carefully as you can—in order to keep in touch with the outside world. You should not choose in the way the professor of the Chinese language did, who told his colleague one day, in a great state of agitation: I have just this moment discovered—it was the year 1870–71—that Germany has been at war with France for half a year, because I only read the Chinese newspapers.

In the last post-Atlantean epoch, the seventh era, the sense for morality will develop, that is, the sense for the will impulses. Remarkable progress will come about through this. Occult investigations, even those of the present-day, show us that someone can be very clever and intellectual without being moral. Nowadays intellectuality and morality exist alongside each other. Little by little, however, the curious fact will emerge that a person's cleverness will be killed off by his immorality, so that in the far future an immoral person will actually be stupid or will have to become so. A moral era is coming in which the morality of our whole soul life and the intellectuality of those later times will become one.

Although man has within his soul all the four elements mentioned, sense perception predominated over all others in the Greco-Roman era, and intellectuality is added to this to a greater degree in the present; in the one before the last, the sixth period, emotion will predominate, and in the seventh, the last cultural epoch, it will be morality, and in a way we can only dream of today. We cannot even imagine what it will be like as Socrates could, who considered that virtue could be both taught and learnt. All this, however, will become reality by the seventh epoch, for the tendencies that are already clearly perceptible in occultism foretell this.

Intellectuality, then, is the chief spiritual characteristic of our age, but there is a difference between the way it comes to expression in the materialistic thinking of the world and in Spiritual Science. Man is connected through his intellect with the astral plane, but he will only be conscious of this—and he will only make the right use of it—when he has developed clairvoyance. This will begin in an ever-increasing number of human beings in the course of the twentieth century. Progress will only be made in this direction when men not only develop a heightened intellect for themselves but also lift it up into the astral world. The human being who has advanced to intellectual clairvoyance in this way can and will approach the etherically visible Christ more and more clearly in the course of the next three thousand years. In bygone times, however, when man was mainly connected with the physical plane, Christ could only appear in physical incarnation. In the present age of the intellect He can appear only in etheric form. Spiritual Science wishes to prepare mankind for this in such a way that it acquires a proper understanding and makes proper use of the clairvoyant faculties that are slowly appearing and will be used for vision later on, in the course of natural development. And this will ensure that in the second half of our intellectual age the Christ will be seen clairvoyantly in His etheric form.

The age of feeling will develop the soul further in a different respect, enabling it to enter the lower Devachanic world in a conscious way. Christ will appear as a form of light to a number of human beings in the lower Devachanic world, revealing Himself through sound, and from His astral body of light He will fill their receptive souls with the Word that was active in astral form in the beginning, as is expressed by John in the opening words of his Gospel.

In the age of morality a number of human beings will perceive the Christ revealing Himself from higher Devachan in His true Ego that surpasses all human egos in inconceivable greatness, and with such splendour that It can bestow on man the highest possible moral impulses. Such is the connection between the impulses of the different cultural epochs and the soul of man. From higher and ever higher worlds will come the forces that flow into man and become active within him.

Perception in the physical world is wonderful indeed; even more wonderful is the intellect when it attains predominance and forms a connection with the astral world, and even greater still are the feelings and morality that are connected with the Devachanic world.

Thinking this through logically you will realise the logic in this course of development, because life confirms it on all sides. The Anthroposophist faces these stages of development consciously, not only in broad sweeps and universal truths but also in the individual details of human development. In the abuses of the outer world the striving towards dogma of the intellectual element is very prominent, but in spiritual knowledge the intellect has to become spiritualised so that it can understand the more advanced results of occult investigation. This is more clearly illuminated in the fact that in the Greco-Roman era, through the Mystery of Golgotha, we are presented in physical form with that which then developed further so that with its impact on the human soul it could lead humanity upwards. It is necessary above all that man learns to understand what this Christ Impulse signifies for our world. It has to be stressed that this Christ Impulse is a living reality that is streaming into mankind, and that Christ did not give the world a doctrine or a theory but the impulse for new life. Let us take a serious look at this.

Since the Saturn stage, throughout the Sun and Moon stage, man has developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies. The ego could only appear on earth in a body that was sufficiently prepared for it and then develop further under the nurturing influence of the Christ Impulse because Christ is macrocosmically what our ego is to us microcosmically. The four principles of the macrocosm are connected in manifold ways with our four lower principles including the most important of these, the ego. In our present cultural period the higher human principles can already be glimpsed in our development. Life-spirit, spirit-self and spirit-man will be developed in us out of the higher spirit worlds through the macrocosmic principles. Not through the fourth macrocosmic principle, however, but through the help of beings that have no macrocosmic significance of their own but only microcosmic significance, really working as teachers among mankind, as they have themselves advanced by one or more principles beyond man himself. On the other hand Christ is a macrocosmic being at the fourth stage of His macrocosmic development, as man is microcosmically at the fourth stage.

So you should keep macrocosmic and microcosmic principles apart, but be clear about the fact that the four first macrocosmic principles include of course all the higher microcosmic principles. Thus the microcosmic beings work as teachers and seek to carry mankind forward through their teaching, whereas Christ, working as a macrocosmic reality, is not a teacher like the other teachers of humanity, for He united Himself with the earth as a reality, as power, as very life.

The loftiest teachers of the successive epochs are the so-called Bodhisattvas who already in the pre-Christian era pointed to Christ in His full reality of being; again in the Christian era they point to Him as a power Who is now united with the earth. Thus the Bodhisattvas work both before and after Christ's physical life on earth. He, who was born as the son of a king in India 550 years before Christ, lived and taught for twenty-nine years as a Bodhisattva, and then ascended to the rank of Buddha; thereafter he was never again to appear on the earth in a body of flesh, but from then onwards he worked from the spiritual world. When this Bodhisattva became Buddha he was succeeded in that very moment by the new Bodhisattva whose mission it is to lead mankind to an understanding of the Christ Impulse. All these things had come to pass before the appearance of Christ on the earth, for about the year 105 BC. there was living in Palestine a man still to this day defamed in rabbinical literature, Jeshu ben Pandira, and he was an incarnation of this new Bodhisattva. Jesus of Nazareth is an essentially different Being, in that when He reached the age of thirty He became the bearer of Christ at the baptism by John in the Jordan.

It was Jeshu ben Pandira from whom the Essene⁴² teachings were mainly derived. One of his pupils bore the name of Matthew, and he too pointed to the Mystery of Golgotha. Jeshu ben Pandira was stoned by his enemies and his corpse was hung on a cross as a further mark of contempt. His existence can be established without the help of occult research for plenty is said about him in rabbinical literature, although the information is either misleading or deliberately falsified. He bore within him the individuality of the new Bodhisattva and was the successor of Gautama Buddha. The name of his pupil Matthew passed over to later pupils, and the content of the Gospel known by that name had already been in existence since the time of the first Matthew, in the form of a description of the rituals contained in the ancient mystery-scripts. In the life of Christ Jesus the essential content of these mysteries became reality on the physical plane. What were previously only pictures from the mysteries, seeds as it were of subsequent happenings, now became reality. Thus the Christ Mystery had already been known prophetically, had indeed been enacted in the ceremonies of the ancient mysteries, before it became, once and once only, an actual event on the physical plane.

The Bodhisattva who once lived as Jeshu ben Pandira comes down to the earth again and again in a human body and will continue to do so in order to fulfil the rest of his task and particular mission which cannot as yet be completed. Although its consummation can already be foreseen by clairvoyance, no larynx exists that is capable of producing the sounds of the speech that will be uttered when this Bodhisattva rises to the rank of Buddha. In agreement with oriental occultism, therefore, it can be said: Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha, that is to say, towards the end of the next three thousand years, the Bodhisattva who is his successor will become Buddha. But as it is his mission to prepare human beings for the epoch connected paramountly with the development of true morality, when, in the future, he becomes Buddha, his spoken words will contain the magic power of goodness. For thousands of years, therefore, oriental tradition has predicted: Maitreya Buddha, the Buddha who is to come, will be a bringer of goodness by way of the word. He will then be able to teach men the real nature of the Christ Impulse, and in this age the Buddha stream and the Christ stream will flow into one. Only so can the Christ Mystery be truly understood.

• 37. Max Planck: 1858 – 1947, founder of the quantum theory. ‘Die Stellung der neureren Physik zur mechanischen Naturanschaung’ (The Position of Modern Physics with respect to the Mechanical World outlook), lecture held on 23.9.1910 at the 82nd session of German natural scientists and doctors in Konigsberg; Leipzig, 1910.
• 38. Sigmund Freud: 1856 – 1939, founder of psychoanalysis.
• 39. Dr. Breuer: Joseph Breuer, Viennese surgeon. See Rudolf Steiner ‘An Autobiography’, Steinerbooks, New York, 1977, and also lecture of 10th November 1917 in ‘Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy’, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1946.
• 40. Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert: 1780 – 1860, natural philosopher. ‘Die Geschichte der Seele’ (History of the Soul) Stuttgart. 1839.
• 41. Johann Volkelt: 1848 – 1930: ‘Die Traum-Phantasie’ (Dream Pictures) Stuttgart 1875. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘Riddles of Philosophy’, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1973.
• 42. Essene teachings: Essenes, Jewish secret Order, about 150 BC. to 70 AD. See also Rudolf Steiner ‘The Fifth Gospel’; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1968.

Let us continue with our studies which are to bring us closer and closer to a deeper understanding of man's being and task in the world. You will remember that in one of the group lectures held here this winter (10th November) we spoke about the four different ways in which it is possible for the human being to be ill, and we indicated that illnesses arising as the actual result of karma would not be discussed until later. Today we want to talk about at least a certain part of this karmic cause of illness.

We explained before that the division of man's being into four members, the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, enables us to have a kind of survey of the phenomena of illness in so far as each of these members comes to expression in certain organs and organ complexes of the physical body itself. That is, the ego has its chief physical equivalent in the blood, the astral body in the nervous system, the etheric body in all that comes under the heading of the glandular system, and the physical body represents itself. Then we presented the illnesses arising out of the ego as such, and which therefore have their physical manifestation in irregularities in the functioning of the blood. We indicated that what originates in irregularities in the astral body manifests in irregularities in the nervous system, and what originates in the etheric body manifests in the glandular system, and that it is in the physical body that we have to look for those illnesses that primarily have external causes. All this, however, only points to that aspect of illness that is connected with the span of one human lifetime. Now anyone who is able to look at world existence in a spiritual scientific way has an inkling that illness must also depend to some extent on a person's karma, on that great law of causes which show the spiritual connections between man's various incarnations. But the ways of karma are very intricate and manifold, and we must study the more detailed composition of karmic connections before we can understand anything about them. Let us talk today about a few aspects of something that is very interesting for people to know, namely, how illnesses are connected with causes made by man himself in earlier lives. In order to do this we must say a few introductory words on the subject of how the law of karma works in human life. We shall be referring to some things most of you know from other lectures, but it is essential to have an exact picture of how the karmic causes of one life become the effects in the next. Therefore we shall have to say a few words about what actually happens to man spiritually in the period after death.

We know that on passing through the portal of death man first of all has the kind of experiences that come about because he is now in an entirely different situation from anything met with in life. His ego and astral body are connected with the etheric body, but without the physical body being there. He has, as it were, laid that aside. This only happens in exceptional circumstances in life, as we have often mentioned. During life, when man is asleep, he lays his etheric body aside as well as his physical body, hence this combination of ego, astral body and etheric body exists only after death, and then for a short while only, just a matter of days. The experiences that follow immediately after death have also been mentioned; man's feeling of growing larger and larger beyond the space he previously occupied, until he encompasses all things. We have mentioned the picture of his past life standing before him as a great tableau. Then, after a number of days that varies individually, the second corpse, the etheric body, is laid aside and absorbed by the general world ether, except in those cases we mentioned whilst discussing intimate questions of reincarnation, when the etheric body is preserved in a certain way for use in the future. Nevertheless an extract of the etheric body is kept, being the fruit of life experience. Then follows the life that is determined by the combination of ego and astral body without man being bound to a physical body. This is the period we call Kamaloca in anthroposophical literature, and often describe it, too, as the period of learning to do without the physical body and physical existence altogether.

We know that when man has just passed through the portal of death he still has all those forces in his astral body which were there at the moment of death. For he has laid aside only the physical body, the instrument of enjoyment and action. This he has no longer, but the astral body he still has. He still has the bearer of passions, instincts and desires. He still hankers for the same things—out of habit you might say—that he hankered for in life. Now whilst he was alive it was through the instrument of the physical body that man satisfied his desires. After death he no longer has this instrument, thus he is deprived of the possibility of satisfaction. This is felt as a kind of thirst for physical life until man has grown accustomed to live solely in the world of the spirit and to have solely what can be acquired out of the spirit. Until man has learnt to do this, he continues living in what we call the period of breaking himself of his habits, or Kamaloca.

We have already described the remarkable way in which this period of life runs its course, and we know that at this stage of his existence man's life flows backwards. This is something that is difficult for newcomers to anthroposophy to understand at first. Man passes through the Kamaloca period which lasts roughly a third of the length of his earthly life—in reverse sequence. Assuming that a man dies in his fortieth year, he will pass through all the experiences he has gone through in life in the reverse order, beginning with his thirty-ninth year, then the thirty-eighth, the thirty-seventh, the thirty-sixth, and so on. He really does go through his whole life backwards, right to the moment of birth. This is what is behind the beautiful words of Christ, when He was speaking of man's entry into the spiritual world or the kingdom of Heaven: ‘Except ye ... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ In other words, man lives backwards as far as his first moments and being absolved of everything, he can then enter Devachan or the kingdom of Heaven, and be in the spiritual world from then onwards. This is difficult to imagine, as we are so very accustomed to time being absolute, like it is on the physical plane. It requires considerable effort to get used to this, but it will come.

Now we must picture to ourselves what man actually does in Kamaloca. We could say a great deal about it, of course. Today, however, we shall concentrate solely on what concerns the question of the karmic cause of illnesses. So what I am about to say must not be taken as the only kind of experience in Kamaloca, but as one among many.

We can visualise first of all what use man makes of this time in Kamaloca for his future by imagining that the man who died at forty had done something in his twentieth year that hurt someone else. When somebody has done something like this that hurt another person, it has a certain effect on his whole life. Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means for me, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. And this development progresses in such a fashion that man as it were is always putting obstacles in his own path. If this primary force were the only thing that were active—it is this very force that is to bring the soul back to the spiritual—man would need only a very short time on earth. But in that case the whole of earth evolution would have taken an entirely different course; it would also have failed to achieve its purpose. You must not think that man would be better off if he put no obstacles in his own way. It is only by setting himself these handicaps that he grows strong and acquires experience, for it is the very eradicating and overcoming of these hindrances that will make him the strong being he must become by the end of earth evolution. It is thoroughly in keeping with earth evolution that he puts stones in his own path. If he did not have to muster the strength to remove these obstacles he would not acquire this strength at all. Then the world would be the poorer. We must altogether disregard the good and evil connected with these hindrances and look solely at the wisdom of the world that intended, right from the beginning, that man should have the possibility of setting himself hindrances in earthly evolution so that in removing them he could acquire strength for later. We could even say that the wise guidance of the world allowed man to become evil and gave him the possibility of doing harm, so that in repairing the harm and overcoming the evil he can become stronger in the course of karmic development than he would have become had he reached his goal without effort. This is how we should understand the significance and justification of obstacles and hindrances.

When, therefore, whilst living his life backwards in Kamaloca after death, a man encounters some harm he did to a fellow man in his twentieth year, he experiences this harm just as much as the joy and good he brought to others. Only now it is in his own astral body that he experiences the harm he did to someone else. Supposing he hit someone when he was twenty, so that it really hurt. In his reverse journey through life he feels it in his own astral body in exactly the same way the other person did when it happened. You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations. Your own astral body tells you what it felt like, and you realise you have laid an obstacle in the way of your further development. This has to be cleared away, otherwise you cannot get beyond it. This is the moment you form the intention of getting rid of the obstacle. So when you have lived through the Kamaloca period, you arrive back in your childhood filled with the intention of getting rid of all the hindrances you created in life. You are full of intentions, and it is the force of these intentions that brings about the special character of your future lives on earth.

Let us suppose that in his twentieth year B hurt A. He now has to feel the pain himself, and resolves to recompense A in a future life, that is, in the physical world, where the injury was done. The force of this good resolution forms a bond of attraction between B and A and brings them together in the next life. That mysterious force of attraction that brings people together in life springs from what they have acquired in Kamaloca. Our experiences there lead us to those people in life whom we have to recompense or with whom we have any kind of connection. Now you will realise that the Kamaloca forces we have taken into ourselves for the righting of wrongs in life can by no means always be worked out in a single life. It can then happen that we form connections with a great number of people in one life, and that next time we are in Kamaloca we have the possibility of meeting them again. Now this depends, too, on the other people, whether we meet them again in the following life. That spreads itself over many lives. In one life we correct this, in another life that, and so on. You must certainly not imagine that we can immediately put everything right in one life. It depends entirely on whether the other person also develops in his soul the corresponding bond of attraction.

Now let us take a closer look at the working of karma, by examining a particular example. In Kamaloca we form the intention of carrying out a certain thing in the next or one of our future lives. This force planted in our soul remains in it and does not leave it. We are born again with all the forces we have mustered. This is inevitable. Now life consists not only of those things we have to put right in our karmic connections although what we are about to say can also be related to that. We may have put hindrances in our path, lived in a one-sided way, not made proper use of our life, living only for particular pleasures and tasks and allowing other possibilities that life offered us to pass us by, so that other faculties have remained dormant. This also calls forth karmic causes in Kamaloca, and we bring this with us into life. Then we are born again as babies. Suppose we live to be ten or twenty. Our souls contain all the forces we have mustered, and when they have become mature they make their appearance. During a certain period of our lives an inner necessity will doubtless arise urging us to carry them out. So let us suppose that in our twentieth year we feel an inner urge to carry out a particular deed, because we made the resolution in Kamaloca. For the sake of simplicity, let us keep to the example of feeling the urge to recompense someone. The bond of attraction has brought us together, and there he is. As far as the external situation goes, we can quite well do the deed. Yet there can still be an obstacle. The compensating deed could be one to which our own organism is not equal. Our organism is also dependent on the forces of heredity. This makes for disharmony in any life. Man is born on the one side into these forces of heredity. His physical and etheric body inherit the qualities that can be passed down through the generations. This hereditary stream is, of course, bound to have some measure of external connection with the karma our soul has set itself. For as it comes down from the spiritual world our soul is attracted to the kind of parents through whom it can inherit those qualities that come closest to our requirements. They never, however, entirely correspond, for in the body this cannot be so. There is always a certain discrepancy between the forces of heredity and what the soul brings with it from the past. Now it all depends on whether the soul is strong enough to overcome all the obstacles in the line of heredity, and is capable of re-forming the organism during the course of a lifetime, so that it overcomes what does not suit it. People vary a great deal in this respect. Some souls have acquired great strength in the course of previous incarnations. A soul of this nature has to incarnate in the most suitable body possible, though it will not be absolutely suitable. Yet this soul might be strong enough more or less to overcome everything not suited to it, though this is not necessarily always the case. Let us follow this up in detail by looking at the brain.

This instrument of our life of concepts and ideas is inherited externally through our line of heredity. Its delicate convolutions are formed in one way or another according to this line of heredity. The soul will always to some extent have the inner strength to overcome what does not suit it and bring its instrument into harmony with its own forces, but only to a certain extent. The stronger the soul is the better it can do this. And if circumstances are such that it becomes impossible for the soul forces to overcome the resistance in the composition of the brain, the brain cannot be used properly. And then there occurs what we call mental defectiveness, mental illness. A melancholic temperament arises too, because the soul forces are not strong enough to overcome certain things in the organism. In the middle of life—it is different at the beginning and at the end—the forces of our soul always encounter a certain unsuitability in their instrument. This is the secret that always lies hidden behind the inner conflict and disharmony in human nature. What men often imagine to be the reason for their discontent is usually just a mask. In reality the reasons for it are as we have described. Thus we see the relationship between what the soul takes with it from incarnation to incarnation and what it receives from the line of heredity.

Now let us suppose we are reborn, and when we are twenty our soul feels the urge to compensate for a particular deed. We have also encountered the person concerned, yet our soul is not capable of overcoming the inner resistance necessary for doing the deed. We always have to set our forces in motion when we have a deed to do. A person does not usually notice anything happening within him, and, to begin with, he does not need to notice. The following might easily happen: There is a person who, at the age of twenty, feels the urge in his soul to compensate for something. External circumstances are favourable, but his inner strength cannot take hold of his organs and carry out what he should do.

A person does not need to know about all this, yet he will be aware of its effect. This effect appears in the form of some illness, and here lies the karmic connection between what happened in a previous life and the illness. The spiritual cause of the illness will guide the whole process in such a way that the person thereby becomes capable of carrying out the deed of compensation the next time he has the opportunity. To put it another way, in our twentieth year we are not capable of doing a particular deed. The urge is there, nevertheless, and the soul wants to do it. What does the soul do instead? It struggles, as it were, with its unusable organ, attacks it and destroys it. When the organ that should have been instrumental in carrying out the deed externally has been destroyed by these soul forces, then comes the inevitable reaction, which we call the process of healing, and the forces of the organism have to be called up to restore the organ. This organ, which was destroyed because it was unfit to perform the task, is rebuilt through the illness so as to be capable of performing it, although by the time the illness is over it might well be too late. But then the soul has now gained the strength to mould the growth and development of this organ in the course of life in such a way that in the next incarnation the deed can be carried out. Thus illness can be the very thing that makes us fit to carry out our karmic obligations in another life.

Here we have a secret karmic connection between illness and further development, for in reality illness is a process of further development. In order that the soul develops the power to form an organ in the way it needs, the unsuitable organ has to be destroyed and rebuilt again by the soul forces. Here we come upon a law in human life that has to be described somewhat as follows: Man has to acquire his strength by overcoming obstacles in the world, one after another. Strictly speaking all our strength was acquired by the overcoming of obstacles in previous incarnations. Our present capacities are the result of our illnesses in earlier lives.

To make this especially clear, let us imagine that a soul is not yet capable of making use of the mid-brain. How can it acquire the capacity to use it properly? It can only do this by becoming conscious of the incapacity, destroying the mid-brain and rebuilding it, and in this process of rebuilding it the capacity is acquired. We become capable of everything that we ourselves have taken through the process of destroying and rebuilding. This has been felt to be true by all those people who, in the various religions, have connected a very exalted being with this process of destroying and rebuilding. In the religious beliefs of the Indians ‘Shiva’ represents the ruling powers that destroy and then restore things to life again.

That is one of the ways in which karma instigates a process of illness. In the case of illnesses that concern mankind in general rather than man as an individual, we find something else that gives them a more general character. For instance we see typical cases of children's diseases appearing at certain times. These show nothing else than that the child is learning inner control of a certain part of his organism, after which he can then be in control of it in all his future incarnations. We should regard illness as a process that makes a person capable. We shall then come to think of illness in quite a different way. We must not, of course, conclude from this that if someone is knocked down by a train it should be explained in the same way. That sort of thing does not come under the same heading as illness nor what we have just been discussing. But there is another kind of karmic cause of illness which is just as interesting, and which we shall only understand if we look at it in greater detail.

Suppose you learn one or another thing, the sort of thing you learn in life. First of all you have to learn it, for the most important accomplishments in life have first to be learnt. The process of learning is absolutely necessary. But that is not the end of it, for learning is only the most external part. The learning of a thing is still a long way short of all that we shall experience through it. We are born into life with definite capacities acquired partly through heredity and partly through our earlier incarnations. The range of our capacities is after all limited. In the course of each incarnation we increase our store of experience. This acquired knowledge is not so closely connected with us as the temperament and disposition and so on that we have brought with us into life. What we learn in life to begin with in the way of memory and habit is less closely connected with us, and therefore it also makes its appearance in life in a more fragmentary manner. Not until after death does it appear in the etheric body in the great memory tableau. Then we have to incorporate this into us and make it part of ourselves.

Let us assume then that we have learnt something in life and are then born again. In our new life it can well be that because of hereditary or other conditions, or perhaps because our learning has not been harmonious, and although we have learnt something, it was not sufficient to have the whole thing at our finger tips, then on reincarnating, we develop what we have learnt in one direction but not in another. Let us assume we learnt something in life that necessitates having a certain part of our brain organised in a particular way or having a certain characteristic in the blood circulation in a succeeding life, and then let us assume that we had failed to learn the other things that are a necessary part of this. This, however, is not necessarily an immediate drawback. Man has to take forward leaps in life, and he has to learn from experience that he has done something in a one-sided way. Now he is born again with the fruits of what he has learnt, but he lacks the possibility of developing himself in such a way that everything can come to expression, and what he has learnt from life can really be carried into effect. A man might for instance have received a certain degree of initiation into the great mysteries of existence in one of his incarnations, and when he is born again these forces that were planted in him want to come to expression. But let us assume it has been impossible for him to develop certain forces which could produce the necessary harmony in the organism. At a certain point in his life it will inevitably happen that what he previously learnt wants to come to expression. But an essential organ is missing. So what happens? An illness has to occur that could have a very, very deep-seated karmic cause. And again part of the organism has to be destroyed and rebuilt afresh. And by means of this rebuilding of the organ the soul senses which are the right forces in the other direction, and it takes this feeling along with it. When this is acquired this way, or even through initiation, it usually happens that the fruits show themselves in that same incarnation. That is, an illness occurs in the course of which the soul experiences what it lacks. And then, for instance, something can take place immediately after the illness that otherwise would not have been achieved. It could be that a person would have been able to reach a certain stage of enlightenment in his previous life, but he could not get through to part of his brain, and he did not develop the strength to break through the resistance. Then this offending organ must inevitably be destroyed, and a severe illness can result. Then comes the rebuilding, whereby the soul becomes aware of the forces necessary to overcome the blockage, and the awaited enlightenment ensues. The process of suffering an illness can definitely be regarded as a sign that something important is to follow.

Now we are touching on matters that our profane world would certainly sneer at. Yet many a person will have noticed a kind of perpetual discontent, as though part of the soul could not come to expression and life becomes impossible. A severe illness breaks out, and the overcoming of this illness brings an entirely new impulse, like a feeling of release that the blockage has really gone and the organ can be used. This was all due to the organ being unusable. In the life cycles of the present, people still have a lot of these blockages, of course, and they cannot all be overcome at once. We must not necessarily think of spiritual enlightenment every time; this kind of thing also happens in connection with many less significant life processes.

Thus we see that on the one hand we are faced with the necessity of developing some particular quality, and on the other hand the course of karma triggers off illness. Therefore we should never really be satisfied with remarking in a trivial sense: ‘If I get ill I have brought it upon myself through my karma.’ For we should not only think of karma in the past and of illness as being the settlement, but we should actually think of illness as just the second stage, which arises in order to produce creative strength and ability in the future. We thoroughly misunderstand illness and karma if we only look at the past; this turns karma into a merely accidental law of fate. But when we can look through present karma into the future, then karma becomes a law of action and of fruitfulness in life.

All this points to a significant law governing human existence. And in order to get at least some idea of it today—we shall return to it in greater detail later—let us look back into that ancient time in which man came into being in his present form, the Lemurian epoch. Man gradually descended from divine-spiritual existence into today's external existence, cladding himself first of all in his sheaths, and set out along the path of incarnations in the outer world, moving forward from incarnation to incarnation until the present time. Before man began to incarnate, the possibility was not there for him to engender illness within himself in the way he can today. Not until man had acquired the ability to control his relationship with the outside world was he capable of doing wrong and therefore also capable of producing wrong formations of his organs and of engendering the possibility of illness. It was impossible before that for man to give rise to the process of illness in himself. Whilst divine influence was still supreme, and it was not yet in man's own hands to conduct his own life, there was no possibility of illness. Then this possibility of illness arose. If this is how it was, where can we best learn the way to heal? The best way of doing this is to look back into those times when divine-spiritual powers sent their influence into man and endowed him with perfect health, with no possibility of illness, that is, before his first incarnation. People who have had any knowledge of this have always felt this way. Bearing this in mind, I would now like you to try and look beneath the surface at the kind of thing expressed in mythologies. I will not actually draw your attention to the source of medical science proper in the Egyptian Hermes cult, but only to the Greek and Roman cult of Aesculapius.

Aesculapius, the son of Apollo, is so to speak the father of Greek physicians. And what does Greek mythology tell us about him? While still a boy his father takes him to the mountains where he can become the pupil of the centaur Chiron. It is Chiron the centaur who teaches Aesculapius, the father of pharmacy about the healing forces in the plants and elsewhere on the earth. What kind of being is Chiron the centaur? He is a being of the kind that existed before man descended in Lemurian times: a being half man and half animal. This myth tells us that Aesculapius is taken to the particular Mystery where he is shown those forces of health which were the source of man's health before man came down into his first incarnation.

Thus we find this important law expressed in a Greek myth, too; this great spiritual fact, that must be of particular interest to us, coming as it does at the start of man's earthly pilgrimage. The myths, in particular, will only be recognised as pictures of the deepest happenings of life when human beings get beyond the ABC of spiritual science. Myths, especially, are pictures of the deepest secrets of human existence.

When the whole of life is looked at in this way, it will be judged accordingly, and—this must be stressed more and more—spiritual science will grow into something that will become part of everyday life. Men will live spiritual science, and not until that time comes will the original intention of spiritual science come to realisation. Spiritual science will become the great impulse for the ascent of mankind, for mankind's real welfare and real progress.

The lecture yesterday covered the steps up to the Lemurian epoch in the evolution of our earth. During that epoch a great cosmic event took place, namely, the exit of the moon from the substance of the earth. The direct result of this was that the right tempo was introduced into the evolution possible for man. In respect of form and temperature the earth at that time was essentially different from what it is today; its temperature was so much higher that contemporary man could not have lived upon it. Gradually the earth densified and solid substances were formed. When in the lecture yesterday it was said that bodies “hardened,” this is not to be understood in the physical sense but as meaning in respect of strength and quality. Certain substances dissolved. The whole earth was in a seething-fluidic state and it solidified only be degrees. But it must not be thought that this means hard and dense in the modern physical sense; it relates only to strength and quality. These forces would have mummified human beings. Out of the seething-fluidic state of the earth, formations resembling islands emerged and the beings living on them were slightly similar to our present animals and plants. During the first half of the Lemurian epoch, man himself did not live actually on the earth but in the sphere above the earth, in a fine, rarefied corporeality; his constitution was much more spiritual. At the beginning of the Lemurian epoch man had not, as yet, his later bodily nature, nor did he take the more solid kind of nourishment. Indeed, even at the end of the Lemurian epoch you would not have found even the densest forms of man's body equipped with bones such as exist today. The substance of man's physical body at that time was still flexible, gelatinous, hardly distinguishable outwardly from the surrounding sub-stance. The souls who had descended to the earth too soon drew this kind of densest substance into their bodies, with the result that then there were living on the earth men whose constitutions were least spiritual, while the others were still living above the earth.

It was only now, during the Lemurian epoch, through the ejection of fine ashes and fiery-fluidic metallic masses, that the first foundation of the mineral kingdom was laid. These masses formed the beginning, as it were, of islands. This is a more pictorial way of expressing it but that is how the process of gradual densification presents itself to clairvoyant sight. Out of these masses there emerged what we may call a plant kingdom and only later on the animal kingdom. It would lead too far if I were to attempt to tell you in detail how the physical world densified. Everything really descended out of higher spheres, including the continents as they densified. But the being who is man today still tarried, as it were, in a sphere above the earth. Men lived within this more ethereal sphere and there developed their finer bodies. The human etheric and astral bodies there were not yet connected strongly with the physical body but were freer from it. With the solidification of the physical body, which now became progressively denser, however, the connection with the etheric and astral bodies became closer. Instead of hovering and floating above the earth, man became a being who now trod the earth itself.

At this time an important influence asserted itself upon man. If there had been no such influence, what would have happened to him? For long, long ages he would have remained a being without initiative, without inner independence, an automaton, propelled by the forces of higher spiritual beings. Forces from the spiritual beings streamed perpetually into his physical, etheric and astral bodies. Among these beings there were some who worked chiefly upon his astral body and had themselves remained backward in their own evolution; these were the luciferic beings. They drew man down to the physical plane more quickly than the good, normally evolved spiritual beings had done.

The luciferic beings were spirits who ought in reality to have completed their task on Old Moon. Had they asserted their influence upon men then, they would have been able to work only upon the astral body for that was the highest member of man's constitution on Old Moon. They were, however, incapable of this because they were retarded beings. Nor could they affect the ego, because on Old Moon they had not known of its existence. The luciferic beings had eventually evolved to the stage of being able to work upon man's astral body, but man himself had meantime progressed and the ego had been membered into him. The luciferic beings could not yet have worked upon the ego; higher beings were doing so, and also upon the astral body, but only through and by way of the ego. These higher beings would not have allowed themselves to work directly upon the astral body, for that was a task they had already accomplished during the Old Moon period. If the luciferic beings had failed to have any influence upon man, the higher beings alone would have worked upon his astral body by way of the ego and so have purified the astral body. Instead of this, however, during the Lemurian epoch the luciferic beings worked directly upon man's astral body from every side and consequently the astral body was exposed to all the influences that should have been worked out on Old Moon. As a result there were implanted into man urges, desires and passions that would not have been his lot if the higher beings alone had worked upon him. The gods would not have allowed these influences to have access to him. The luciferic influence had a twofold effect upon man. Firstly, a certain enthusiasm, a certain zeal could be kindled in him to do one thing or another; but this zeal was not guided by his ego, not influenced by the higher beings working in him. Secondly, it was made possible for him to secede from the higher beings, to do evil, but also to have freedom. Thus, initiative, enthusiasm and freedom for man were due to the luciferic beings but the possibility of doing evil also existed. The luciferic beings insinuated themselves into man's astral body. Fundamentally speaking, this is still the case today; it is they who on the one side make man free and on the other entice him to evil.

Owing to the fact that man's astral body was permeated by the luciferic beings, he was led prematurely down to the earth from the atmosphere above it. For this the luciferic beings are essentially to blame. They were the cause of the deterioration and premature densification of man's astral body; otherwise, he would still have remained for a long time in the atmosphere. This, in the Bible, is called Paradise.

Thus, the expulsion from Paradise was due to the influence of the gods. You should therefore picture the earth in its seething fluid condition and man being led by the luciferic beings too soon down to the earth on which continents were forming. At that time man's astral body still had a far greater influence upon his environment, greater magical powers than were his later on; there was as yet no such drastic separation between the laws of nature and the will of man. In this connection an evil man today would be unable to cause any special damage to nature. He would be incapable of this. In that early period it was different. Evil lusts in the soul of man had a visible, magical effect in nature; they attracted the forces of fire above and on the earth. Through his evil lusts and magic will, man set the forces of nature ablaze. Today this is no longer possible, but at that time fire flashed through the air when men were evil.

Through the wickedness of masses of human beings and the fact that man succumbed too completely to the influence of the luciferic beings and lent himself to evil, the forces of fire in Lemuria were kindled. Thus, Lemuria perished as the result of the raging fires and the wickedness of a large section of its population. The human beings who were saved went to the West, to a continent lying between the present Africa, Europe and America, namely, Atlantis. There the evolution of humanity continued for long, long ages. The number of human beings gradually increased and the souls who had gone to Jupiter, Mars, and so on, during the period of desolation, came down to this continent. The process lasted for a long time. It was thus that the concept of race developed in ancient Atlantis. In occultism it is said that there were human beings in Atlantis whose bodies were inhabited by souls who had previously been on Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and so on. They were called Mars men, Jupiter men, for example. The external forms of the bodies differed for this reason. During the whole first half of Atlantis the texture of the human body was much softer, much more flexible, and yielded to the forces of the soul. These soul forces were essentially more powerful than they are today, and they both shaped and overpowered the physical body. A man of ancient Atlantis would have been able to break a railroad track, let us say, with ease, not because his physical forces were strong, for his bony system had still not developed, but through his magical, psychic forces. A cannon ball, for example, could have been repulsed by this psychic force. The density of flesh developed only later. A similar phenomenon is still to be found today in certain lunatics who on account of the liberation of strong psychic forces—in that condition the physical body is not properly connected with the higher bodies—can lift and throw heavy objects.

Because in Atlantis man's physical body was still pliable, he could more easily adjust himself to processes in the life of soul; the physical stature could be made to decrease or increase in size. If, for example, a man in Atlantis was, let: us say, stupid or sensual, he fell into matter, as it were, and became a giant in stature. The more intelligent human beings developed a delicate constitution and were smaller in stature; those who were dull-witted were giants. Man's external form was far, far more strongly influenced by the forces of soul than is the case today when substance has become rigid. The bodies of men developed in accordance with the qualities of soul, and this accounted for the great differences in the races.

When myths and legends have described the dwarfs as being clever and the giants as dull-witted, we recognize once again the reflection of a profound, occult trend. When a soul came down again to the earth from Mars, the qualities with which it had been connected there continued for a long time to influence it and the body it inhabited. This fact explains the differences in races and racial characteristics.

If the evolution of humanity until the middle of the Atlantean epoch had proceeded without the influence of Lucifer, man would by then have developed a picture consciousness imbued with a high degree of clairvoyance. There would have been in his soul something that through its power would have revealed the external world to him in inner pictures; he would not have perceived objects outside through his eyes. As a result of the luciferic influence man had perceived the physical world at an early stage, but not rightly. He saw the external world through a veil, as it were. Evolution as provided for him by the divine-spiritual beings was that in place of the dull, clairvoyant consciousness with which his inner world was perceived in pictures, he would have seen the external world but in such a way that behind everything material, spirit would have been present. He would have seen the spirit behind the physical world. All of a sudden—but please do not take that literally, for the process was obviously lengthy—the external world would have appeared to man at a certain time; he would have awakened. The inner world would have suddenly vanished but the consciousness of the spirit whence that world originated would have remained. Man would have seen not only the plants, animals and so forth but simultaneously the spirit whence they had come forth. Because the luciferic beings drew man down to the earth too soon, the external world had the effect of hiding the world of spirit from him; physical matter became opaque for him. Otherwise, he would have seen through it to the primordial spiritual ground of the world. Because man had come down too soon into matter, it proved to be too dense for him and he could not penetrate it. But from the middle of the Atlantean epoch onward, other retarded spiritual beings were able to impregnate this matter, in consequence of which it was as if clouded, made turbid, and man was again no longer able to behold the spiritual. These were the ahrimanic or Mephistophelian beings. Mephistopheles—Ahriman is not the same being as Lucifer. Through untruth Zarathustra calls Ahriman the liar. He beclouds the purity of the spirit of man, conceals the spiritual from him. Ahriman comes after Lucifer and instils into man the illusion that matter is a reality in itself. So in his progress, during which the divine-spiritual beings wanted their influence to work upon him, man allowed himself to be subject to two other influences: those of Lucifer who assails man in his inner nature, in the astral body, endeavoring to confuse and mislead him, and Ahriman, who, working from outside, deludes man to a certain extent, causing the external world to appear to him as maya, as matter, We must speak of Lucifer as the spirit who is active within man. Ahriman, on the contrary, is the spirit who spreads matter like a veil over the spiritual and makes recognition of the spiritual world impossible. These two spirits hold man back in his development to spirituality. It was especially the ahrimanic influence that asserted itself in man and caused the Atlantean part of the earth to perish.

In Lemuria, with their magical forces, men had a strong effect upon nature. They could, for example, control fire. The Atlanteans were no longer capable of this. But with their will they could control the germinal forces in which deep secrets lie hidden—the forces of air and water. Fire was beyond their control. Let us be clear that when we look at a locomotive today, constructed by and controlled by man, this is something quite different. Today man understands how to make the forces contained in coal serve his purposes, to turn them into a propelling power. This process means that he controls the lifeless, mineral force in the coal. The Atlantean, however, controlled the actual life force contained in seeds. Think of the life force that causes the blades of grass to sprout from the earth. This life force was extracted from the seed by the Atlanteans and put to use. In their sheds where the Atlanteans kept their “air ships” they laid up enormous stocks of seeds, just as we today store coal. With the force accumulated from the seeds they propelled their vehicles. When the clairvoyant looks back to that epoch, he sees these vehicles near the earth in the air that was still dense to a certain extent; equipped with a kind of steerage apparatus, they rose up and moved. The Atlanteans controlled these forces. Now it is unthinkable to imagine that the forces of plants—soul forces, that is to say—can be applied by magical means without at the same time influencing the forces of air and water. When the will of the Atlantean turned to evil and used these forces for egotistic purposes, he simultaneously evoked the forces of water and of air, released them, and ancient Atlantis perished as the result. The continents came into existence through the cooperation of the elements and man. But now the ahrimanic influence was gradually able to become so strong that man could no longer see the spiritual. Behind physical matter he could see nothing except the mineral element, the inorganic, and therewith the magical powers vanished ever more completely from him.

In the Atlantean epoch man was able to control and master the life force in the plant kingdom. In the Lemurian epoch it lay within his power to control the seminal forces of animals, and indeed it actually came to the point of Lemurian man applying these seminal forces of animals to transform animal forms into human forms. Every such magical action performed by man with the seminal forces, causes a release of the forces of fire. When such will becomes evil, the worst forces of black magic are generated and evoked. Today the most evil forces on the earth are still released when black magicians mishandle forces that are, generally speaking, withheld from mankind. These forces are powerful and at the same time holy. They are forces that, in the wise hands of worthy guides, can be applied in the highest and purest service of humanity.

Man now gradually became incapable of moulding his body. Cartilage and bones, the hard constituents, were integrated into it and man's resemblance to his present stature constantly increased. It was in the Atlantean epoch that what has been described first took place and it is therefore comprehensible that ancient Atlantis cannot be found by modern researchers. Hopes cherished by learned men of still being able to find traces of human evolution in those olden times, will never be fulfilled, because man was then a being whose limbs still consisted of soft, flabby substance. Such a body cannot be preserved, just as after a hundred years no remnants of the soft-bodied mollusks are to he found. Remnants of animals from ancient periods can still be found because the animals had already hardened while man's constitution was still soft and pliable. The animals came down into matter too soon; they were not able to wait. Out of the earliest human figures who had become physical too soon the most stunted human figures have come into existence. The noblest human figures stayed above the earth the longest, and remained soft and pliable. They waited until they were able to avoid an epoch during which they would have been obliged to remain stationary at a certain stage of hardening, as in the case of the animals. Because they were not able to wait, the animals have remained at a stage of rigidity and hardening.

The evolution of the earth has now been described up to the time when the forces of water were unleashed and ancient Atlantis perished. The human beings who were saved from Atlantis made their way on the one side toward America, on the other, to the Europe, Asia and Africa of today. These great migrations continued for long ages.

We will now think once more of ancient Atlantean culture. In the earliest period man possessed strong magical powers. With these powers he controlled the seed forces, mastered the forces of nature and in a certain way was still able to see into the spiritual world. Clairvoyance then gradually faded. Men were destined to found the culture belonging to the earth; they were to descend to the earth in the real sense. Thus, at the end of Atlantis there were two kinds of human beings within the peoples and races. Firstly, at the height of Atlantean culture there were seers, clairvoyants and powerful magicians who worked by means of magical forces and were able to see into the spiritual world. Beside them were people who were preparing to be the founders of present humanity. They already had within them the rudiments of the faculties possessed by men today. They could emphatically no longer equal the achievements of the old Atlanteans but they were able to make preparation for intelligence, for the power of judgment. They possessed the elementary faculties of calculation, computation, analysis and so forth. They were the people who developed the rudiments of the intelligence of today and no longer made use of the magical forces applied. by the Atlantean magicians at the time when their application was already fraught with danger on account of the powerful ahrimanic influence. They were those “others,” the despised people, rather like the anthroposophists today who meet together in small groups, or like the first Christians in ancient Rome who gathered together in the catacombs.

Now in Atlantis there were also centers of culture and ritual—we will call them the Atlantean Oracles—where what is called the Atlantean wisdom was harbored and practiced. In accordance with the differences in human souls due to their having come down to the earth from different planets, there were necessarily different Oracles for men of different constitutions. There was a Mars Oracle, a Jupiter Oracle, a Venus Oracle, and so on. These Oracles were sanctuaries where the initiates, who were sages of a certain degree, guided and led the Mars race, the Jupiter race, and so on. All these Oracles, however, were in turn led by the still more powerful Sun Oracle. This was the leading center of the Mysteries whence the cultural instructions for the other Oracles proceeded. As well as this highest leadership, all Mars men were under that of the center where the initiate of the Mars Oracle resided, together with his pupils; all Mercury souls were led from the Mercury Oracle, all Jupiter souls from the Jupiter Oracle, and so on. All these Oracle centers, however, were subject to the authority of the great initiate of the Sun Oracle.

This great leader of the Sun Oracle, the greatest initiate of Atlantis, directed his attention above all to that section of human beings who differed from the ordinary population in ancient Atlantis. They were simple people who were looked down upon and who no longer possessed magical powers. But it was they who were gathered together by the great initiate because they had developed the new faculties, even if only in a primitive form. It was from them that understanding of the new age was to be expected. The great initiate gathered together this useful material for the future, and also those old initiates or magicians who had not persisted in clinging egotistically to the former practices. Our present age presents a similar picture and can be compared with the conditions prevailing in Atlantis at that time. Today, too, there are on the one side the influential figures in the prevailing forms of culture, people who in their own way are magicians, working only with what is inorganic; on the other side, there are the despised people who still today want to work for the future. At that time, in Atlantis, the representatives of culture, the old magicians, also looked down with disparagement upon the small number of those who had developed the new faculty, which was useless in ancient Atlantis. The great initiate of the Sun Oracle did not, however, despise these people; today, too, the proud bearers of our culture look down upon a small number of human beings, upon the anthroposophists who gather in small, insignificant meeting places and are said to engage in all kinds of foolish activities. Generally speaking, they are unprofessional laymen who claim to be inaugurating the future. These are the people who are developing and preparing in themselves a faculty that to the others seems useless, but because it has a foreboding of the future is able to create a connection again with the spiritual world. In Atlantis long ago it was a matter of finding the connection with the physical, material world; the task today is to discover the spiritual again. Just as at that time the old initiate gathered his host together locally, directing his call to the simple, despised people, so today again, under different—not local—conditions, a call goes forth from the great Masters of Wisdom who are allowing certain spiritual treasures of wisdom to flow into humanity. Those possessed of certain qualities respond to this call as did certain human beings long ages ago; they were individuals who had within them primitive talents for calculation, computation and so forth.

This wisdom is not imparted in order that theosophical dogmas shall be grasped by the intellect but that they shall be understood by the heart. A man is then strong enough to know why theosophy is there today. It is there to meet a great challenge of evolution, and he who knows this also finds the strength to conquer all obstacles, come what may. He proceeds along his path because he knows that what is intended to come to pass through theosophy must come to pass for the further progress of humanity on the path to the spirit.

The great initiate of the Sun Oracle led the small group of human beings and founded a kind of cultural center in Asia. He drew these individuals to him in order to make them capable of founding post-Atlantean culture. During the great migration, everything that had come into existence in Atlantis had been mingled, jumbled together. It follows that in the post-Atlantean epoch one should no longer speak of races but of civilizations, cultures.

We will now turn to consider the consecutive civilizations in the post-Atlantean epoch, the first of which is the ancient Indian. A remarkable mixture of peoples had been saved after the Atlantean catastrophe and had congregated in primeval India. The human beings who lived there still had the deepest, overwhelming yearning for the spiritual world, knowing that from it they had been born and that now they had lost it. Thither the great initiate of the Sun Oracle sent the seven Holy Rishis. With longing fraught with pain, the man of ancient India maintained that the world of the senses is untrue and that the spiritual world from which he has descended is the only true world. It was, therefore, easy for the Holy Rishis to teach what they had to say about the primeval wisdom, about the Mysteries, to those who still harbored a longing for the spiritual world. To the ancient Indians the material world was maya, the great illusion.

Already a different attitude of soul prevailed in the second post-Atlantean epoch of culture, the ancient Persian epoch. Western thinking and research in the physical world realize that this wonderful world, constructed as it is according to laws of perfect harmony is worthy to be penetrated by the spirit. The people of Zarathustra had a boding realization of this. Those who have knowledge of the people of ancient Persia will be able to distinguish clearly between them and the people of India. To the latter, everything around them was maya, illusion; the spiritual world alone was real and a worthy goal of aspiration; that world alone was permeated by the highest self. Such an attitude of soul could not master the physical world. This became possible for the first time with the culture inaugurated by Zarathustra, the great pupil of the mighty initiate of the Sun Oracle. He knew and taught that the world outside is not maya but the expression of divine-spiritual reality, that behind it lies what Ahriman had hidden from man. What thus lies behind the world of sense must be disclosed and Zarathustra's aim was to find the spirit in the material world. That was his mission. In Ormuzd and Ahriman light and darkness are pitted against each other.

In the third epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldean-Assyrian-Babylonian, man had already formed a close link with the physical world. Lifting his eyes to the stellar script in the heavens, the deeds and the wisdom of the gods were revealed to him and he tried to understand and fathom them. The wonderful stellar wisdom of the Chaldean priesthood is a memorial of these strivings.

The fourth culture, that of Greece and Rome, leads man right down to the physical plane. He has now come to love it so dearly that he has quite forgotten his origin. He no longer understands the spiritual world. This is clearly indicated in the saying of the Greek hero, Achilles: “Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the realm of the Shades.” The wonderful sculpture of Greece and the citizenship of Rome are the hallmarks of this fourth epoch of culture. The fifth cultural epoch is our own. Materialism and the department store give it a certain characteristic stamp.

The purpose of all these cultures is, after all, that the physical plane shall be gradually mastered by man. Two fundamental streams come to expression in the cultures that have existed until today. The views and trends of feeling of the Eastern and Western worlds confront each other at the present time. The Eastern world calls the physical plane maya or illusion and does not want to be entangled with it either in thoughts, acts or feelings. The basic aim of the Western conception of the world, however, is to penetrate into this material world, come to grips with it. Outwardly, therefore, things may come to a confrontation but each world has its own complete justification. Let the Western world concern itself with external culture and by this means develop the forces of the soul, and let the Eastern take its path. At the summit they come together.

Thus we think of the Indian who leads an inner, spiritual life, withdrawn from the outer, material world, and the Persian who still sees something inimical in matter but nevertheless infuses spirit into it. The Egyptian contemplates the spirit and its laws; the Chaldean sees in the movements of the stars the script of the gods in space and reveres the stellar wisdom as the expression. of divine-spiritual beings. We see the Greek who knew how to imprint in matter itself the ideal of beauty and perfection of what nature has created; the Greek personifies the epoch when we can marvel at the marriage between spirit and matter in the physical masterpieces of art. Reference must be made here to a deep, occult background. Think of the Greek temple in its majestic purity and beauty; it is the actual dwelling place of the god. The essential difference between these works of architecture and sculpture and those of other cultural epochs is that the Greek temple in its pure form is so supreme in the perfection of its lines, even from the architectonic, artistic standpoint, that nothing can equal it. if the soul steeps itself in these lines—in the ruins of the temple at this is still to be seen—if it contemplates a Doric or an Ionian temple and has something of what is called space consciousness, it perceives how these lines are actually integrated in space. You yourselves are aware that certain currents, certain streams, are present in space. The Greek temple follows the inevitable courses of these streams and presents them in physical reality. The Greek creates in space what he has actually found there. The essential secret of the Greek temple is the presence within it of the god himself. Whereas the congregation of the faithful is an integral part of the Gothic cathedral, the Greek temple is a whole in itself. The Gothic cathedral, with its pointed arches and windows, is only conceivable together with its congregation, whose hands, folded in devotion, mirror its forms and together with it constitute a whole. Spirituality was actually present in the Greek temple; it afforded the spiritual being an opportunity to descend and find a dwelling place.

But during this epoch, which has so well understood how to adorn the earth with masterpieces of art, men increasingly lost connection with the spiritual world. The physical world was full of brightness and light for a man but when he passed through death during the epoch of Greco-Latin culture, the spiritual world was barren, cold and dark for him. During the post-Atlantean era, man had conquered the physical world but in the spiritual world sadness and gloom were his lot. Even the initiates, who both here and in yonder world are the teachers of mankind, could bring no consolation. When they told those who were living between death and a new birth about happenings in the physical world, those human souls became even more sorrowful; with every fiber of their beings they clung to the material world that was now taken from them. Here, too, a change took place through the event of Golgotha and the appearance of Christ Jesus on the earth. After His death on the Cross He descended into the Underworld—this is called the journey to Hell—and to those who were no longer living in a physical body He proclaimed that in very truth life had been victorious over death. It was thereby again made possible for souls to rise into the spiritual world.

As we approach the processes in the astral body and in the Self of man as experienced in occult development, it becomes more and more difficult to describe them. For the experience in these parts of human nature is far removed from the experience of everyday life. In the ordinary life of the soul we usually experience life in the astral body as the flowing and ebbing of desires, emotions, impulses, passions, etc.; and we also feel as our inward life that which is expressed collectively in the ego. But what is thus experienced is really nothing but the reflection, the mirroring of the self and the astral body in the etheric body and the physical body; it is no conscious experience of the astral body and the self. We cannot through what we experience in the ordinary life of the soul obtain a true idea of the actual experience in the higher worlds in our astral body and self; therefore, when we describe these things, we must have recourse to a kind of representation suited to these higher worlds, we must have recourse to imaginations: and these imaginations are really actually experienced. But one must not imagine that the beholding of the clairvoyant imaginations is the only thing that we experience; in a sense it is not even the principal thing; the principal thing is what we then experience inwardly through it; the processes and inward tests which the soul goes through when it confronts these imaginations.

And this is particularly the case with such an important and powerful imagination as that which has been described as the Paradise-Imagination. One who really experiences this Paradise-Imagination, who can have it before him as a conquest in higher experience, feels himself standing in the middle of an inner surging of the soul, he feels himself laid hold of by an inner soul-wave, and he feels that he himself might err in the two different directions described in the last lecture; he feels himself attracted, vividly attracted by all the passions and emotions which continue to work from the personal life he had previously led on the physical plane; for the personal interests which we have gradually acquired on the physical plane work with ever-increasing strength as numberless magnetic forces of attraction. But, on the other hand, he feels something else. The nearer he comes, the more clearly he sees this Paradise-Imagination, the more power have these forces which draw him down to personal interests. What they bring about in him is that they blot out the Paradise-Imagination more and more, or perhaps it would be better to say that they prevent it from appearing properly; he is as though benumbed: the personal interests, emotions, feelings, sensations, etc., which we drag about with us, are so many hundreds and hundreds of magnetic forces which are so many causes of stupefaction. When the student tries to progress so far in his self-training that he observes his astral body more and more truthfully (for the Paradise-Imagination is experienced outside the physical body and etheric body, that is, in the astral body and Ego), when he has grasped the true nature and character of the astral body, he knows that it is the Egotist. And he alone is in the right position at this point, which he has reached through self-training, if he does not allow his egotistical interests to become personal to his nature and to draw him with numberless forces, but can make the interests of the whole of humanity and the world more and more his own. At this stage of occult development a counter-balance against the egotism of the astral body is felt, something which is the more evident, the more the egotistic forces bestir themselves in the now liberated astral body. There is an ever-increasing feeling of solitude, icy solitude. This icy solitude is also part of what is experienced in the inward surging of the soul. It is this icy solitude which cures one of allowing egotism to have the upper hand, and the student has trained himself correctly if at this point in his occult development he can feel the impulse to be everything through himself and for himself, and can at the same time also feel the frosty solitude approaching him.

It is just as important to have this feeling as to approach gradually to the Paradise-Imagination. And when these two forces, that of the egotism which expands to world-interests and the frosty solitude, work together, the student then draws nearer and nearer to the Paradise-Imagination. And when this latter appears in all its vividness, when it is actually there, the time has also arrived for experiencing the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold in the entirely right way. It is difficult to give a single description of the Guardian of the Threshold—I have done so on different occasions in our theosophical considerations. It is not so much our task to-day to describe the Guardian of the Threshold as to describe the inward experiences in the sheaths of man and in the human self. If the student draws closer to the Paradise-Imagination; that is to say, if it becomes more and more vivid, and he meets the Guardian of the Threshold, he then feels the full force of the magnetic forces just described, and as he confronts the Guardian of the Threshold he feels—and this is a dreadful sensation—he feels as though chained or rooted to the spot. For all the magnetic forces which draw him down to what is personal now exercise their strongest influence; and only if he progressed to the point at which the frosty solitude has become so instructive that he is really able to make the world's interests his own, does he pass the Guardian of the Threshold; and then only does he feel himself united with the Paradise-Imagination, and become one with it. He then feels himself within it. The experience is like a coming into a right relationship with the world-interests, so that he can confess: ‘Now only may I allow my own interests to assert themselves, for they have become the interests of the world.’

But if he does not pass, if he has not yet acquired sufficient universal interests, his personal interests then draw him back and there comes about what in Occultism is described as: not passing the Guardian of the Threshold. These personal interests obscure the Paradise-Imagination; he may obtain separate parts of it, as it were, indistinct impressions, but not perfect ones, and one is dragged back, as it were, into the personal life. It may then happen that he has thereby received the power to have a certain degree of clairvoyant experience; but these are then really maya-experiences; they may be quite misleading, for they are entirely permeated and clouded by personal interests.

Only through such an experience is the student able fully to comprehend—for it now becomes a serious matter to him, as it were—that personal interests must pass into world-interests if he really wishes to see accurately in the Spiritual world. It is actually the case that before attaining this stage he cannot thoroughly believe this, for the personal interests are against it; but now having reached this point he sees it.

We have now reached a very hazardous place in the description of occult conditions; yet the endeavour shall be made to describe the next steps also, as they appear from the experience of occultists, and in the way in which they must be given, reckoning with the fact that our hearers are trying, in a sense, to make these things a possession of their own souls, and to work upon them further; for things such as these cannot be expressed in dry abstract ideas; we must try to portray what appears to clairvoyant vision. Now, this clairvoyant vision should by no means be understood as something that can be rigidly and diagrammatically depicted; but what I shall describe is again a typical experience, like that of the Paradise-experience, and we must really have this experience in order to recognise afterwards what knowledge and occult vision really are. Until this experience comes we can have no real idea, I mean no experienced idea, of occult vision; but still, when such a thing is described, we can understand it, if we bring sound human understanding to bear upon it. It must now be described, as far as is possible, from vision itself.

I will suppose that the student has passed the Guardian of the Threshold and the union with the Paradise-Imagination is accomplished; that he feels within it, as if this Paradise-Imagination had now become his own greater astral sheath. He still distinctly feels his own astral body about him, and knows that it is connected with his Self, but at the same time he knows that this astral body extends its interests to all that concerns the objects and beings of the Paradise-Imagination. When the student knows his union with the Paradise-Imagination is accomplished, he may then have somewhat the following impression: he will perceive his own astral body as belonging to him, and when he has felt sufficiently what has just been described as icy solitude, this feeling becomes a power within him, and it will preserve him from gazing at nothing but himself after his accomplishment of his union with the Paradise-Imagination. He will thereby create for himself, as it were, the organ by which he may behold other beings. His occult vision will first fall on another being, a being who will make a special impression upon him, because it will appear just like himself. He himself feels that he is in his Self and astral body; the other being also at first appears to him with a Self and an astral body. This is because the qualities and powers which the pupil brings with him to such a moment enables him to see just such a being, which presents itself as if in a self and an astral body. The student will now have the following experience—produced by the frosty solitude which he has learned to bear.

The forces of his astral body will be seen endeavouring to flow outwards. If I were to represent this in diagram, I should have to draw it in this manner; but, as I have said, it is only very diagrammatically expressed. I draw the Self something like the nucleus of a comet, and the astral body like the comet's tail spreading out above.

But that is only a diagram; for the student really sees a being, he sees himself as a being, and this vision is much more complex than the vision of one's own being as physical man. He also sees within his own self the other being to which he looks across. As already said, this is a typical experience. His vision simply falls upon such a being, but he feels that this being is not in such a sphere of frosty solitude as he is himself, and therefore its astral body is seen as though directed downwards. It is extremely important to experience this, to feel oneself as if in an astral body which opens upwards, develops its rays of force upwards, wishes to stream upwards, and yet to see the other being as a Self whose astral body develops its forces downwards.

With this typical experience there now comes into the self-consciousness something like the following: ‘I am of lower degree, of less value than this other being. What is valuable in the other being is that it can open its astral body downwards, it can, as it were, pour its forces downwards.’ And the student's impression is that of having left the physical world. The forces which proceed downwards from the astral body of the other go to the physical world, and work there as forces of blessing; in short, he has the impression that he is confronting a being that may send down to the earth, as a Spiritual rain of blessing, that which it has acquired in the Spiritual world; whereas he himself cannot direct his astral body downwards, it insists on going upwards. He has a feeling that he is of less value, because he cannot direct his astral body downwards. Further, he has a feeling that this consciousness arising thus within him must lead to a Spiritual act. A Spiritual decision matures. This Spiritual decision is to take his loneliness to this second being and warm his coldness with his warmth; he unites himself with this other being. Now, for a moment he has the impression that his own consciousness is being blotted out, as though he had brought about a sort of killing of his own being, a sort of consuming of his own being as though by fire. Then flashes into the self-consciousness, which had previously felt itself blotted out, something which he now first learns to know: Inspiration. He feels himself inspired. It is like a conversation, a typical conversation, now held with a being whom he has only learned to know because it allows him to share in its inspiration. If a student is really capable of understanding what this being sends in as his inspiring voice, he might translate what it says in somewhat the following words: ‘Because thou hast found the way to the other and hast united thyself with his beneficial rain of sacrifice, thou may'st return to the earth with him, within him, and I will make thee his guardian on the earth.’ And the student has the feeling that something of infinite importance has been taken into his soul through being able to hear these words of inspiration. In the Spiritual there is a being that is more precious than oneself, and that is .allowed to pour its astral being downwards in blessing. Through the impression of being able to unite with this being, and being its guardian when he descends, the student first learns to understand how, as physical human beings who tread the earth, we are really related through our physical and etheric coverings to that which is impregnated as higher powers in the Self and the astral body. In our physical and etheric coverings we are guardians of that which is to develop further and further to higher spheres. Only in this inner experience, when he feels his external being as the guardian of the inner being, does a man really have a true understanding of the relation of the external being to the inner being of man.

Now, when the student has passed the Guardian of the Threshold, the experience which I have just described does not stand alone, but is followed by another. I have described the purely clairvoyant and inspired experience the student may have when, outside the physical body and etheric body, he arrives at union with the Paradise-Imagination, and then obtains the inspiration which first gives an idea of the inter-relationship between the sheaths. But when he has passed the Guardian of the Threshold a second impression is added to the first one; the vision opens past the Guardian of the Threshold down into the physical world. I draw a line to represent the boundary between the higher Spiritual worlds and the physical world; above it is the realm of the Spiritual worlds and below that of the physical.

He now sees down into the physical world, as it were, and there appears another picture, a picture of himself standing below as man. The student observes his own astral body; but this astral body which now appears as a reflection is directed downwards, it does not try to develop the force to stream towards the Spiritual world; it clings closely, as it were, to the physical plane, it does not raise itself to the heights. He also sees the reflection of the other being, whose astral body streams upwards. He has the feeling that this astral body is streaming into the Spiritual world. He sees himself and he sees the other, and he has the feeling: ‘Thou standest there below once more; in the place of the other being there stands there below a quite different man; he is a better man than thou; his astral body strives upward, it rises upward like smoke. Thy astral body strives towards the earth, it goes like smoke downward.’ He has a feeling of the Self which dwells within him as he thus looks down, and the following dreadful impression comes to him: Within thee a resolve is being formed, a dreadful resolve, the resolution to kill the other whom thou feelest to be better than thou. The student knows that this decision does not come entirely from the Self, for his Self is there above. It is another being that speaks out of the one there below; but this being suggests the decision to kill the other. And he again hears the voice which previously inspired him, but now it sounds as a dreadful, avenging voice: ‘Where is thy brother?’ And from this self bursts forth a voice hostile to the former. Previously the inspiration was as follows: ‘Through having united thyself with the beneficent powers of the other being, thou desirest to pour thyself downwards with them, and I will make thee the guardian of the other being.’ There now bursts forth from this being that one recognises as oneself the words: ‘I will not be my brother's keeper.’ First comes the resolve to kill the other, then the protest against the inspiring voice which said: ‘Because thou hast wished to unite thy coldness with that warmth I appoint thee to be the guardian of that other;’ the protest: ‘I will not be his guardian.’

When we have had this imaginative experience, we then know all of which the human soul is capable, and above all we know one thing: that, if perverted, the noblest things in the Spiritual world may become the most dreadful things in the physical world. We know that in the depths of the human soul, through the perversion of the noblest readiness to sacrifice, may arise the wish to kill our companion. From this moment we know what is meant in the Bible by the story of Cain and Abel—but only from this moment—for the story of Cain and Abel is none other than the reproduction of an occult experience, which has just been described. If the writer of the story of Cain and Abel had been able to describe what took place with man before the time of the story of Paradise from other reasons than those displayed in the course of the development of humanity, he would have described the first experience, the upper one (on the diagram). Thus he begins with the story of Paradise, and describes its reflection; for Cain felt in this manner towards Abel before that period in the development of the earth indicated by the story of Paradise, he felt towards him as it has been shown here above. And after the temptation, and after the loss of the vision which is regained in occult vision through the Paradise-Imagination, Cain's readiness to sacrifice had passed into what appears here below; his readiness to sacrifice had really changed into the wish to kill the other. The cry we read of in the Bible: ‘Am I to be my brother's keeper?’ is the reverse reflection of the other inspiration: ‘I will make thee the guardian of the other here below on the earth.’ From this you will be able to see that these typical experiences are certainly important; for they bring about a certain union between what we may be to-day and the interests common to all humanity. But at the same time they show us very clearly by what we experience in them in our pulsing soul-life, that the principal thing is to feel the colossal leap the development of humanity has made from what I described to you as the first, the pre-earthly imagination, as it were, to that which is presented in the story of Cain and Abel as an event in humanity after the expulsion from Paradise, after the expulsion through which the Guardian of the Threshold has become invisible for man. The knowledge of this leap in the development of humanity really first shows us what this earthly man is; for when we really feel through and through what has just been described, we gradually experience that this earthly man, as he now is here upon the earth, is the perversion of what he once was. And we then know with great certainty what we should have become if nothing else had intervened. If we had simply developed in this earthly evolution without anything further, we should have become aware of what this is the reflection on the earth. We were not to know this to begin with. It is really only in our present age that man is allowed to know of what the story of Cain and Abel is the reflection, that it is the reflection of a lofty sacrifice. All that was above, everything before Paradise was concealed, for the Guardian himself hid it from us, when, in other words, man was driven out of Paradise. This could only come about through the physical body and etheric body of man being now so permeated with forces that he does not carry out what appears as the reflection—for he certainly would carry it out if he were to feel all that is in the astral body. The physical body and etheric body so stupefy the human being that his wish to kill his fellow is not actualised. Consider what is said in this simple sentence: In that the good, progressive, divine Spiritual Powers gave man a physical and an etheric body, so that he cannot look back, something like a sort of stupefaction was at the same time poured over the wish for the war of each against all. The desire for this is not roused in the soul, because the physical body and etheric body of man were prepared in such a way that this desire is benumbed. A person cannot see his astral body; therefore this wish, too, remains unknown to him; he does not carry it out.

If we wish really to describe the interaction of the astral body and the self, we must describe things which not only actually remain hidden to human nature, but which must so remain. But what has been brought about through the stunning of this and similar wishes—wishes connected with the annihilation and destruction of human and other communal life on the physical plane? They have become debilitated; the human soul only perceives them in a weakened form; it only feels them to a slight extent. And the dim feeling of those wishes that would be something so terrible if man were to allow them free expression, as they really are—this is really our human earthly knowledge.

I am now giving you for the first time a definition of the nature of human earthly knowledge. It consists of the dim and dulled impulses of destruction. Shiva in his most terrible form, so far stupefied that he cannot freely find expression but is, as it were, made threadbare, compressed into the human world of ideas—this is the maya of the human being, this is the knowledge of man. Thus knowledge had to be so weakened—that is to say, the impulses and inner forces had to be so weakened—that the original terrible impulse—ruled by Ahriman, that Ahriman's power (for originally it is Ahriman who gives rise to this wish) should be so far weakened that he could not express himself through man, who would have thereby made himself permanently a servant of Shiva. The sum total of these forces had to be so weakened that its expression in man only enables him to transpose himself into the being of another with his conceptions and ideas. When we try to force an idea of our own into the being of another, when we try to imbue another with a conception of our own, this conception impressed into the nature of the other is the blunted weapon of Cain which was thrust into Abel. And because this weapon was thus blunted it was made possible for that which was at a bound reversed into its opposite, to pass over into evolution. And thus by a slower evolution, through ever-increasing strengthening of his knowledge, man reaches at last the experience of something he was not permitted to express in the physical world because it there became a destructive impulse; stage by stage he develops first ordinary knowledge, then imaginative knowledge, which enters more into the being of another, then inspirational knowledge, which penetrates still more into the being of another, till in intuitive knowledge he enters it entirely and lives on spiritually in the other being.

Thus we gradually struggle up to the comprehension of what this self really is. As to its innermost nature, the astral body is seen to be the great egotist; the self is more than that—it not only lives for itself, but wishes to pass over into others as well. And knowledge, such as is acquired on earth, is this dulled passion to enter into another, not merely to expand oneself and all that one is, but further to pass beyond oneself into another. It is egotism intensified and extended beyond itself.

If you bear in mind what the origin of knowledge is, you will then understand that there is always the possibility of misusing it, for if this is a true knowledge in the Self, the moment it goes astray it is misused. Only by progressing, and making this penetration into another more and more spiritual, and the renunciation by the astral body which has expanded to world-interests, of this penetration into another's being, only by leaving his constitution quite untouched and placing his interests higher than our own, can we make ourselves ready for higher knowledge. Moreover, we cannot recognise a being of the hierarchy of the angels, for instance, if we have not reached the stage when the inner being of the angels interests us more than does our own. As long as we have more interest in our own being than in the being of the angels, we cannot recognise them. Thus we must first educate ourselves up to world-interests, and then to interests that go even further, so that another can be more important and of more consequence than oneself. The moment we try to develop further in occult experiences, while yet remaining more precious to ourselves than the other beings we wish to know, that same moment we go astray. At this point, if you follow out this train of thought, you really come to a true conception of black magic; for black magic begins where occult activity is carried into the world without our first being in the position to expand our own interests into world-interests, without being able to value other interests more than our own.

Such things can really only be touched upon, so as to arouse conceptions concerning them; they are too important for more than this. I wished to show how we may gradually come to recognise in its true form, not in its maya, that which dwells within us as astral body and self; for what a man experiences inwardly as his astral body is not the true astral body, but merely the reflection of that in the etheric body. And what a man calls his self is not the true Ego, but a reflection of the Ego in his physical body. A man only experiences reflections of his inner being. If he were to experience the forms of his own inner astral body and Ego before he was sufficiently mature, impulses of destruction would be enkindled within him; he would become an aggressive being; the desire to injure would arise within him. And such things underlie all black magic. Although the paths followed by black magic are many, the effect they aim at is always something like a covenant with Ahriman or Shiva. We can only learn to recognise the astral body and Ego in their true form if at the same time we acknowledge the necessity of developing them and making them worthy of being what they ought to be. The innermost nature of the astral body is egotism; but it should become our ideal to be permitted to be an egotist because the interests of the world have become our own. It must be our ideal to be allowed to enter into another being because we do not intend to seek our own interests, but we find the other being more important than ourselves. Self-education must go so far that we feel this upper picture in all its occult-moral significance; that we so gradually transform this picture which is our self, that we can no longer be warmed by our own emotions, impulses, desires and passions, but that with living our life in the astral body we enter the frosty solitude; we then thereby open ourselves to the warmth, to the warm interest which streams forth from the other worlds, and wish to unite ourselves with the beneficent forces proceeding from this other being. This is at the same time the starting-point for a gradual raising of our self to the higher Hierarchies in their true form. We do not attain to the Beings of the higher Hierarchies if we are not in a position worthily to confront the Imagination and Inspiration which has been described, and to bear seeing its opposite picture; that is, the possibilities in the depths of human nature when it was cast down from the Spiritual into the physical world. If we refuse to look upon the twofold picture of Cain and Abel below—our own self, and the representative of our Higher Self—the mediator between our self and the higher Hierarchies—we cannot ascend. But when we are able to cultivate within our self the feeling indicated here, we then experience our Self, and this provides the entrance to the higher orders of the Hierarchies.

When I set myself to the task of speaking to you to-day on the contents of the Fifth Gospel, the concluding words of St. John's Gospel afford me a certain consolation. As you know, this concluding passage is to the effect that the events which took place around Christ Jesus are not by any means all recorded in the Gospels, for if in those days attempts had been made to record them all, the world itself could not have produced books in sufficient numbers. On one point, therefore, there can be no doubt, namely, that as well as what has actually been recorded, many other things may have happened. In order to make myself intelligible when I am speaking, as I wish to speak in these particular lectures, about the contents of the Fifth Gospel, I will begin to-day with narratives of the life of Jesus of Nazareth approximately from that time in his life of which indications have been given on other occasions, when brief portions of the Fifth Gospel have been communicated.¹

I want to speak to-day of certain happenings in the life of Jesus of Nazareth from about his twelfth year onwards. As you know, this was the year when the Zarathustra-Ego which had incarnated in one of the two Jesus children born at that time, had passed over, through a mystical act, into the other Jesus child—the child who is described at the beginning of St. Luke's Gospel. Our narrative begins, then, from that year in the life of Jesus of Nazareth when the Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel had received the Ego of Zarathustra. In the Gospel, this moment in the life of Jesus of Nazareth is indicated in the story that on a journey to Jerusalem for the feast, the Jesus child of St. Luke's Gospel was lost and when he was found he was sitting among the learned doctors and scribes, amazing them by his lofty answers. We, however, know why it was possible for him to give these astounding answers. It was because everything that welled up as it were from the Spirit into the Zarathustra-Ego like remembrances hidden in the soul, worked in such a way that Jesus of Nazareth was able at that time to give those astounding answers. We know too that after the death of the mother in the one family and of the father in the other, the two families amalgamated into one and that the Jesus child, endowed now with the Zarathustra-Ego, grew up in this family.

As the Fifth Gospel reveals, it was a truly remarkable development that took place during the following years. Those in the immediate environment of the young Jesus of Nazareth held him in highest repute because of the astounding answers he had given in the temple. They saw in him the future doctor of the law, one who would attain outstanding eminence among the learned scribes. Those around Jesus of Nazareth entertained the highest hopes of him. They began to drink in his every word. But in spite of this he became more and more silent—so silent, indeed, that he often caused great displeasure to those around him. Between the twelfth and eighteenth years of his life, however, a mighty struggle was going on within him. It was as though deep-lying treasures of wisdom were springing to life in his soul, as though the radiant sun of Zarathustrian wisdom had flashed up within him in the form of Hebrew learning. At first the boy listened with the greatest discernment and concentration and gave astounding answers to everything said by the many learned doctors and scribes who came to the house. To begin with, in the house at Nazareth too, he astonished the learned doctors who came there and who regarded him as a wonder-child. Then, however, he became more and more silent, merely listening to what others were saying without himself speaking a word. But while this was going on, great and sublime thoughts, ethical truths, and above all powerful moral impulses came to life in his soul during those years. What he heard from the learned scribes assembled in the house made a certain impression upon him—but one that caused him bitter sorrow, because he felt—mark well, even in those early years—that much uncertainty, much that tended to error was contained in what they said about the ancient traditions and the writings compiled in the Old Testament. Heaviness oppressed his soul when he heard that in ancient times the Spirit had descended upon the Prophets, that the word of God Himself had inspired those ancient Prophets and that now the inspiration had departed from a later generation. But to one thing he always listened with deep attention, because he divined that one day it would happen so to him. The learned doctors and scribes said many a time: “That sublime and mighty Spirit who once descended, for example, upon Elias, speaks no longer; but what still speaks” ... and many of the scribes still believed it to be an inspiration from spiritual heights ... “what still speaks is a feebler voice, yet a voice which many regard as issuing from the Spirit of Jahve himself.”

The “Bath-Kol” was the name given to that mysterious voice of inspiration—a voice feebler and less significant than that of the Spirit who had inspired the ancient Prophets. Nevertheless this voice represented something similar. Many of those around Jesus spoke in this way of the Bath-Kol and much concerning it is related in later Jewish writings. I now interpolate into this narration of the contents of the Fifth Gospel something that does not actually belong to this Gospel, merely for the purpose of explaining the nature of the Bath-Kol. At a somewhat later date, controversy broke out between two Rabbinic schools. The famous Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus upheld a certain doctrine and maintained in support of it that he was able to work miracles (this is related in the Talmud). He made a carob-tree rise out of the soil and take root again a hundred ells away; he made a stream flow backwards; and thirdly he called upon a voice from heaven to proclaim the truth of his doctrine. But nevertheless those in the opposing school of the Rabbi Joshua did not believe in it. And Rabbi Joshua retorted: “Even if Rabbi Eliezer does make carob-trees transplant themselves from one spot to another, even if he does make a stream flow backwards, even if he does call upon the Bath-Kol ... it stands written that the eternal laws of existence must be established through the mouth and in the heart of man; and if Rabbi Eliezer would convince us, let him not call upon the Bath-Kol but upon what the human heart can comprehend.” I narrate this story because it indicates that soon after the dawn of Christianity, respect for the Bath-Kol had greatly diminished in certain Rabbinic schools, although in a way it continued to be a voice of inspiration among the Rabbis and the Scribes.

As the boy Jesus listened to and pondered all these things, he himself became aware of the inspiration of the Bath-Kol. The remarkable thing was that because he bore within him the Zarathustra-Ego, Jesus of Nazareth was able very rapidly to absorb all the knowledge possessed by the others around him. Not only had he been able in his twelfth year to give astounding answers to the learned doctors, but he now heard the Bath-Kol within his own breast. But this very inspiration through the Bath-Kol gave rise to bitter, inward struggles in Jesus of Nazareth during his sixteenth and seventeenth years. For the Bath-Kol revealed to him—and he was convinced that he discerned it with all certainty—that in times to come the voice of the same Spirit who had inspired the ancient Hebrew teachers would speak no longer in the stream of events recorded in Old Testament history. And one day—it was a truly terrible experience in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth—he believed that the Bath-Kol made known to him the following: “I no longer reach to those heights where the Spirit can reveal to me the truth about the continued progress of the Jewish people!” It was a deeply moving and terrible moment for Jesus of Nazareth when the Bath-Kol seemed to be declaring to him that it could no longer continue the ancient revelations, that it was no longer capable of perpetuating the old Hebraic wisdom. Jesus of Nazareth felt as though all the ground were swept from under his feet, and many a day he said to himself: All the forces of soul which I believed had been bestowed upon me, only lead to the realisation that in the evolution of the Jewish people there is no longer the capacity to scale the heights of the Divine revelations.

Let us try for a moment to enter into the soul of the young Jesus of Nazareth at the time when these experiences were thronging in upon him. It was in his sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth years, when, partly for reasons connected with his handicraft and partly owing to other circumstances, he made many journeys about the country. On these journeys he came to know many regions in Palestine and places outside. Now in those times—and to clairvoyant sight this is clearly perceptible in the Akasha Chronicle—a certain Asiatic cult was very widespread in Western Asia and the regions round about, even in certain parts of Europe. It was a mixture of several different rites but in the main it represented the Mithras cult. Temples dedicated to the worship of Mithras were to be found in many widely scattered regions. The rites often contained elements of the Attis cult, but were in essentials a form of Mithraic worship. Temples and centres dedicated to the worship of Mithras and of Attis were numerous and widespread. It was a form of ancient heathen religion but comprised many practices and ceremonies common to Mithras- or Attis-worship. The fact, for example, that the Church of St. Peter in Rome stands over the site of one of these earlier places of worship shows that this cult had spread far and wide. Although to many Catholics it may sound sacrilegious, the truth obliges one to say that in its outward form the ceremonial practised in the Church of St. Peter in Rome and everything deriving from it, is by no means without resemblance to the ancient Attis cult on the site of which St. Peter's stands. And the cult centred in the Church of St. Peter is in many respects a continuation of the Mithras cult. When in his sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth years, Jesus of Nazareth began to journey about the country, he came to know these centres of heathen rites. Later on too, he discovered still more about them. In this way he learnt to understand the souls of the heathen peoples by actual, physical observation—if one may put it so. At that time, as the result of the mighty act whereby the Zarathustra-Ego had passed over into his soul, Jesus of Nazareth possessed, as it were by a process of natural development, a power of clairvoyance such as others could achieve only by intense effort and struggle. Therefore in witnessing these cults he experienced many things that remained hidden from others—many terrible things. Fabulous as it may seem, I have to testify that when the priest was enacting the rites of the cult at many a heathen altar and Jesus of Nazareth witnessed the whole act of worship, he saw that numbers of demonic beings were attracted to the spot. He discovered that many idols worshipped by the people were, in reality, images not of the good spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies but of demonic powers. He also perceived that many a time these demonic powers passed over into the believers participating in these rites. For reasons easy to understand, these things have not found their way into the other Gospels. And indeed it is only now, within our spiritual Movement, that such things can be disclosed, because it is only in our time that the human soul is ripe enough to understand the deep and overwhelming experiences which came to Jesus of Nazareth while he was still a young man.

These journeyings continued on through his twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-fourth years. It was always with feelings of bitter sorrow that he witnessed the power wielded by the demons—by the demons issuing as it were from Lucifer and Ahriman—that he witnessed how the heathen peoples had in many respects actually come to the point of taking the demons for gods, even of having in their idols the images of wild, demonic powers which, attracted by these images and rites, entered into the people while they prayed, and obsessed them. Many bitter experiences fell to the lot of Jesus of Nazareth. And these experiences led up to a certain culmination.

Round about the age of twenty-four, a new and heavy experience was added to that caused by the disillusionment in connection with the Bath-Kol. In narrating this experience of Jesus of Nazareth, I have to say that I am not yet in a position to indicate precisely at which place in his journeyings this came to pass. It was possible for me to decipher the scene with a high degree of certainty but I cannot to-day indicate the exact place. It seems to me that the event took place on a journey outside Palestine. But although I cannot say this with certainty, I must relate the scene. In the twenty-fourth year of his life, Jesus of Nazareth came to a place where, in a heathen cult, a certain Deity was worshipped. But the people round about were in a state of dire misery, afflicted with all kinds of terrible illnesses of soul and body. The priests had long ago forsaken this place of worship. And Jesus heard the people crying: The priests have forsaken us, the blessings of the sacrificial offering do not descend upon us and we are leprous and diseased because the priests have forsaken us.—Jesus of Nazareth grieved for the people and an infinite love for them flamed in his soul. The people around must have remarked something of this infinite love welling up within him; a deep impression must have been made upon the sorrowing people, who had been forsaken by their priests and, as they believed, also by their god. And now, as if at one stroke, there arose in the hearts of the majority of the people something that made them say as they recognised the expression of infinite love in the countenance of Jesus: Thou art the new priest who has been sent to us! And they pressed him towards the altar of the sacrifice, they placed him at the altar. And there he stood—at the heathen altar. The people besought him to offer the sacrifice, in order that the blessing of the god might come upon them. While this was happening, while the people were lifting him to the altar, he fell down as if dead. His soul was as if transported away and the people around who believed that their god had returned to them, witnessed the terrible spectacle that the one whom they had held to be the new priest sent from heaven, had fallen down as if dead. But the soul of Jesus was aware of being transported into spiritual realms, into the sphere of sun-existence. And now, as if resounding from the spheres of the sun, this soul heard words such as it had often heard through the Bath-Kol. But now the Bath-Kol was utterly transformed; moreover the voice came to Jesus of Nazareth from quite a different direction. And that of which he now became aware can—if one translates it into our language—be rendered in words which I was able to communicate for the first time when just recently we were laying the Foundation Stone of our building in Dornach. Certain occult duties exist! And obeying one such occult duty, I then communicated what came to Jesus of Nazareth through the now transformed voice of the Bath-Kol on the occasion of which I have been speaking. Jesus of Nazareth heard the words:

AUM, Amen!
Es walten die Übel,
Zeugen sich lösender Ichheit,
Von andern erschuldete Selbstheitschuld,
Erlebet im täglichen Brote,
In dem nicht waltet der Himmel Wille,
Da der Mensch sich schied von Eurem Reich
Und vergass Euren Namen,
Ihr Vater in den Himmeln.

AUM, Amen!
The Evils hold sway,
Witness of Egoity becoming free,
Selfhood-Guilt through others incurred,
Experienced in the Daily Bread,
Wherein the Will of the Heavens does not rule,
In that Man severed himself from Your Kingdom,
And forgot Your Names,
Ye Fathers in the Heavens.

In no other way can I render in the German language what Jesus of Nazareth heard at that time as the transformed voice of the Bath-Kol. Verily, in no other way than this! This was what his soul brought back when he awoke from the state of insensibility during which he was transported into the spiritual worlds on the occasion I have described. When Jesus of Nazareth had come to himself again and turned his eyes towards the crowd of wretched and miserable people who had brought him to the altar, they had all fled. And letting his clairvoyant vision widen into the distance he discerned a host of demonic powers and beings, all of them connected with the people. That was the second significant event, the second significant climax in the various periods of the life of Jesus of Nazareth since his twelfth year. Truly, my dear friends, the events which most deeply affected the soul of Jesus of Nazareth in his adult years cannot be said to have conduced only to inward elation, inward happiness! It was the lot of this soul before the Baptism in the Jordan to know human nature in its darkest depths.

From this journey, Jesus of Nazareth returned to his home, where the father had remained. The father died about this time—it was when Jesus of Nazareth was in his twenty-fourth year, or thereabouts. When Jesus came home his soul was still under the mighty impression of how demonic powers held sway in much that was contained in the old heathen religion. But just as it is the case that certain stages of higher knowledge can only be attained by plumbing the darkest depths of life, so too, in a certain sense, did it happen to Jesus of Nazareth. At a place unknown to me, in about the twenty-fourth year of his life, he had gazed into infinite depths of the human soul, he had gazed into souls in whom all the grief of the humanity of those times was as it were concentrated. He was also steeped in the wisdom which pierced his soul like red-hot iron but also imparted a faculty of clairvoyance powerful enough to gaze into the radiant worlds of the Spirit. And so this comparatively young soul was able to read the things of the Spirit with discerning, clear-sighted vision. Jesus of Nazareth had become one who gazed deeply into the mysteries of life, more deeply than any man living on the earth hitherto. Nobody before him had been able to witness to what degree of intensity human misery can reach. He had seen misery in its direst, most concentrated form ... had seen how sacred rites themselves can evoke all manner of demons! In very truth, no human being on the earth had ever gazed with such deep penetration at all this wretchedness as had Jesus of Nazareth; none had been capable of such infinite depth of feeling when confronted with those who were possessed by demons. Nor was any other being on the earth as ready as he to face the question: How, how can an end be made of this misery?

And so Jesus of Nazareth possessed not only the vision, the knowledge that is wisdom, but had in a certain sense become an Initiate through the experiences of life itself. This came to the knowledge of certain people who in those days had gathered together in an Order, known very widely as the Order of the Essenes. The Essenes were people who practised a kind of secret cult and secret tenets at certain places in Palestine. It was a strict, rigorous Order. One who desired to enter it was required to pass through a year, at the very least, of strict probation, to show by his conduct during this period, by his moral principles, by his obedience in worshipping the supreme Powers of the Spirit, by his sense of justice and of equality among men, by his disregard of earthly goods and the like that he was worthy to be initiated. There was a succession of grades through which he had to pass, leading to that Essenian life which strove to approach the spiritual world in a certain separation and aloofness from the rest of humanity, through strict monastic discipline and rules of cleanliness, in order that all impurity both in body and in soul might be purged. These principles were expressed in many symbolic rules of the Order. The deciphering of the Akasha Chronicle has shown that the name “Essene” derives from or at any rate is connected with the Hebrew word “Essin” or “Assin.” This means something like a trowel, a little shovel, because the Essenes always wore as their badge a little shovel—a symbol that has been preserved in many Orders to this day. And certain symbolic customs gave expression to their aims: they were not allowed to carry coins about with them nor to pass through any gateway that was either painted or had images in its neighbourhood. As the Essene Order at that time was to a certain extent recognised by the outside world, unpainted gates had been erected in Jerusalem so that the Essenes too might enter the city. If an Essene came to a painted gate he must always turn back. In the Order itself, ancient lore and ancient traditions were preserved, and concerning these the members kept strict silence. They were allowed to teach but only what they themselves had learned within the Order. Everyone who entered the Order must give to it all his worldly possessions. At that time the Essenes numbered from four to five thousand, and people from all parts of the then known world came to dedicate themselves to the austere life of the Order. If they possessed a house far away in Asia Minor or even farther off, they always presented it to the Essene Order which consequently became the owner of small properties, houses, gardens, even extensive fields, widely dispersed over the land. No one was accepted who did not present all he had to the community. Everything belonged to all the Essenes in common; no individual possessed anything for himself. A law that in the conditions of life to-day seems extraordinarily austere but is comprehensible none the less, was that an Essene might use the assets of the Order to help any who were in need, with the exception of members of his own family.

In Nazareth there was an Essene settlement which had been one of these gifts. The Essene Order, therefore, had come within the purview of Jesus of Nazareth. Tidings reached the centre of the Order of the profound wisdom that had sunk into the soul of Jesus of Nazareth in the way that has been described. Especially among the most eminent Essenes a certain attitude of soul prevailed. With a kind of prophetic inkling, they said: From among men living in this world a new soul must arise, one who will be a Messiah! Therefore they looked around for souls of outstanding wisdom. And they were deeply moved on being told of the wisdom that had come to flower in the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. No wonder, therefore, that without compelling Jesus of Nazareth to undergo the testings of the lower grades, the Essenes received him into their community—I will not say into the Order itself—as a kind of extern, or outside member, and that even the most learned Essenes spoke about the secrets without reserve to this wise young man. In the Essene Order, Jesus of Nazareth heard far, far deeper teachings concerning the secret lore than he had ever heard from the scribes and doctors of the law. He also heard many things that had already flamed up as illumination in his own soul, from the Bath-Kol. To put it shortly, a lively exchange of thought took place between Jesus of Nazareth and the Essenes. And in his intercourse with them from about the twenty-fifth to the twenty-eighth years of his life and even beyond, he came to know almost everything that the Essene Order could impart. For what was not communicated to him through words revealed itself to him in all manner of clairvoyant impressions. Great and impressive clairvoyant impressions came to Jesus of Nazareth, either within the Essene community itself or very shortly afterwards at his home in Nazareth where, in a more contemplative life, he yielded himself to what thronged in upon him from forces of which the Essenes had no inkling but which were experienced in his soul.

One of these experiences, one of these inner impressions must be brought into particularly strong relief because it can shed light upon the whole course of mankind's spiritual evolution. It was a great and significant vision into which Jesus of Nazareth was as if transported, in which the Buddha appeared to him as a real presence. It was indeed so: the Buddha appeared to Jesus of Nazareth as a result of the exchange of thoughts with the Essenes. And one can truly say that at that time, converse took place in the Spirit between Jesus and Buddha. It is possible, and moreover it is necessary to-day, to touch upon these deep mysteries of the evolution of humanity. In this discourse with Buddha in the Spirit, Jesus of Nazareth became aware of words coming from the Buddha, somewhat to this effect:—If my doctrine, as it actually is, were to be led to full fruition, then all human beings would have to live the life of the Essenes. But that cannot be. That was the fallacy in my doctrine. Even the Essenes can only make progress by separating themselves from the rest of humanity; their mode of life would not be possible were it not for the existence of human souls other than they. If my doctrine were fulfilled to the uttermost, men would all have to become Essenes. But that cannot be.—This was a momentous experience which came to Jesus of Nazareth as a result of his contact with the Essenes.

Another experience was that Jesus of Nazareth made the acquaintance of a man who was still young at that time, of almost the same age as himself. This man's association with the Essene Order had come about in quite a different way but he too was not an Essene in the strict sense of the word. This man, living as a kind of lay-brother with the Essene community, was John the Baptist. During the winter, he, like the Essenes, wore garments of camel's hair. But he had never been able inwardly and completely to exchange the doctrines of Judaism for those of the Essenes. As, however, the tenets practised by the Essenes and their whole mode of life made a deep impression upon him, he lived the Essene life as a lay-brother, allowed himself to be stimulated and inspired by his association with them and gradually grew to be all that the Gospels narrate of John the Baptist. Many conversations took place between Jesus of Nazareth and John the Baptist. It happened one day ... I know what it means to narrate these things so simply, but nothing can deter me for I know that they must be told ... it happened one day that while Jesus of Nazareth was conversing with John the Baptist, he saw the physical form of John the Baptist disappear and there came to him the vision of Elias. This was the second overwhelming experience in the community of the Essenes. But there were others as well.

For some time already, Jesus of Nazareth had witnessed a strange spectacle when he came to places where gates had been made for the Essenes, that is to say, gates without images or pictures. Jesus of Nazareth could not pass through such gates without great inner bitterness and sorrow. He saw these bare gates, but he perceived spirit-forms around them; at either side of these gates there always appeared to him the Beings we know in our theosophical studies under the names of Ahriman and Lucifer. And gradually the vision, the impression had been confirmed in his soul that the aversion of the Essenes for pictures on their gates must have something to do with the evocation of spiritual beings; that pictures on the gates were, in reality, images of Lucifer and Ahriman. Jesus of Nazareth had many times been aware of this.

Anyone who experiences such things will not find it good to brood upon them unduly; for they are too overwhelming. One also very soon feels that human thoughts cannot fathom their depths, that human thoughts are not capable of approaching them. But the impressions not only engrave themselves deeply into the soul—they become part of the soul's very life. One feels bound up as it were with the part of the soul in which such experiences have been gathered—bound up with the experiences themselves, and one carries them on through life.

Thus had Jesus of Nazareth carried on with him through life the two pictures of Ahriman and Lucifer that he had seen at the gates of the Essenes. To begin with, the only effect this produced was to make him realise that a mystery prevailed between these spiritual Beings and the Essenes. Moreover, since these experiences had come to Jesus of Nazareth, mutual understanding with the Essenes was not as easy as it had been before. For there was something in his soul of which he could say no word to the Essenes—something seemed lacking as they conversed together. For always there came in the way what he had experienced at the Essene gates. One day, after a memorable conversation on lofty spiritual matters, when Jesus of Nazareth was passing out through the gate of the main Essene building, there came before him the figures he recognised as Lucifer and Ahriman. And he saw Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing away from the gate of the monastery. And a question sank into his soul ... not as if he himself were asking it, but as if it were being driven into his soul with a mighty, elemental power: Whither are these Beings fleeing, whither are Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing? For he knew that the very sanctity of the Essene monastery was responsible for their flight; but the question: Whither are they fleeing?—ingrained itself into his very soul, burned like fire in his soul, and never left him. As he went about during the weeks following it was with him every hour, nay every minute. Whither are Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing? This was the question that burnt like fire in his soul when after that deep conversation he had gone through the main gate of the Essene building. What he did under the impress of this question, what he had heard as the now changed voice of the Bath-Kol when he had fallen as if dead at the altar of the heathen cult, and the significance of the happening of which I have just told you—of these things we will speak further in the lecture tomorrow.

• 1. See e.g. Gospel of St. John, Gospel of St. Mark, Gospel of St. Matthew, Gospel of St. Luke, and From Jesus to Christ. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co.

From our Studies of such an impulse in human life as is contained in man's calling or vocation and in all that is connected with it, you will have seen how difficult it is to make these matters clear. For in effect, so many things are here involved. We must bear in mind that all that is introduced into our life through the law of Destiny or Karma depends on countless factors. To this, indeed, the manifold nature of human life is due. In describing certain human aspects of our life's destiny by the word ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’ one remark must perhaps be made, namely this: We ought not to confuse what we may describe as man's calling or vocation with what is commonly spoken of as his office or position in the widest sense of the term. For it goes without saying, much confusion would arise, if, having in mind what one man or another represents in his official position, we applied to this the points of view which have here been brought to bear on the vocational life. Frequently, though by no means always, man has to pursue his vocation in some official position, and many an extraneous factor comes into play at this point in human life, mingling other Karmic threads with that one which we may call the ‘Karma of vocation.’ We are living in a time which is slowly undergoing a certain transformation. Nevertheless, in our time, the aspects we are here outlining for the ‘Karma of vocation’ are by no means exclusively predominant in placing a man into this or that position in life. As you are well aware, the Karma of vocation is still cut across in many ways by the Karma of classes, social castes, etc. Within such groupings, ambitions, vanities, the prejudices of himself and other people, and many other factors too, help to determine how a man is placed in his official post. All these things, entering into the Karma of vocation as extraneous factors, make it possible for Ahrimanic influences constantly to interfere with the true course of human activity. A man who has been placed at a certain post in life—who has become a Cabinet Minister for instance, or a Privy Councillor or the like (through circumstances which are well enough known, and need not be gone into here)—such a man need not by any means have the corresponding vocation. He can occupy a high position and yet his vocation may only be that of a ‘pen-pusher’—perhaps not even that. Nor must you imagine that the position then remains unoccupied. That is just the peculiarity of our time. In its materialistic interpretation of the just foundations of Darwinism, it has evolved such a theory of life as the ‘Selection of the Fittest,’ which is now being criticised so vehemently by Haeckel's pupil, Oskar Hertwig. (Our standpoint need not be that of the pessimist who adversely judges his own time and constantly refers back to the ‘good old days.’ We simply take our stand on the real facts.) While on the one hand the people of this age pride themselves on the ‘Selection of the Fittest,’ this age in its reality is dominated by the very opposite tendency—that of selecting the worst, the un-fittest, for the very posts in life which one would think the most important. Bitter as it may be for our time to hear it, this truth would be admitted, were it not for the fact that our time is impressed with a far-reaching belief in authority, combined with the greatest possible opportunism and slackness. I say again, it is a bitter truth, which would be recognised were it not for the prevalence of what is called ‘public opinion.’ (Public opinions, according to a 19th century philosopher, are private stupidities.) We should recognise the fact to which I here refer, were we not so much impressed by the public opinions with which we are fed to-day from such unclean sources. On this we must be clear, our age needs above all to be educated to a more intense grasp of life. The prevalent one-sidedness—the selection of the un-fittest—must be recognised for what it is, albeit these ‘un-fittest’ are overwhelmed with adulation by the aforesaid ‘public opinion.’

The offices are occupied, in fact, only too frequently by Ahriman-Mephistopheles. And you may well see from the further course of Goethe's Faust how Mephistopheles fulfils his office. Not until the end of his life does it become possible for Faust to free himself from Mephistopheles. Faust comes to the imperial court. He even makes an invention—most important for the last few centuries. He invents paper-money. Mephistopheles is the real inventor. Afterwards, Faust is conducted into the world of classical antiquity by Homunculus. Homunculus himself, once more, is brought into being with Mephistopheles' assistance. Faust even becomes a military commander and conducts wars. But from Goethe's manner of description in this act especially, we see that it is really Mephistopheles who conducts them. Only at the very end do we see Faust gradually free himself from Mephistopheles.

Though Faust is roaming through the world without any definite position—having vacated his professorship—nevertheless, we must admit, the whole way in which Mephistopheles stands at his side is not unlike the way the Mephistophelean forces frequently play into the life of mankind to-day.

That is the one thing which must be borne in mind, but there is another thing as well. It is by no means easy rightly to discover in human nature what it is that really works in Karmic evolution. Here, too, the development of natural science has reached a point, which must be attained once more by spiritual-scientific study.

Notably when it tries to enter into the life of the soul, the natural-scientific way of thought makes the most ghastly errors. Witness the rise to-day of a mistaken school of science, which ventures to approach the human life of soul, studying it in the spirit of mere natural science. This school of thought admits that the life of the soul does not merely take its course as it appears to man's present consciousness. It admits that much is there beneath the threshold of consciousness—or as they say, in the unconscious or subconscious—beating-up into the conscious life.

In former lectures we have mentioned specific things which are truly there in the subconscious, and surge up into consciousness like the clouds of smoke which arise in the Solfatara country when one sets a light to a piece of paper. Much indeed is present down below in depths of consciousness.

So we may say: There are those today, who, wishing to pursue a science of the soul, already divine the fact that dark unconscious faculties of soul—and failings of soul—must be included for any true explanation. But as these schools will not yet admit a comprehensive spiritual-scientific world-conception, they can only bring to light mistaken notions. Those who take this standpoint of a purely natural-scientific psychology, observe a human life,—how it has evolved. They have indeed departed from the belief that what a soul feels and wills, wherewith it is happy or unhappy, filled with joy or grief, depends only on what the soul itself has preserved in the immediate consciousness. So now they try to catechise the soul. Somehow they try to get out of human souls the joys and pains, the disappointments of life which they have some time undergone and in their every-day power of thought have forgotten. What is forgotten, so these theorists declare, has not therefore vanished. It is still burrowing on in the subconsciousness.

Cravings, above all, are burrowing in the subconsciousness—cravings which at some earlier time of life remained unsatisfied or were repressed. Take a concrete instance—it is a woman in her 30th year. At the age of 16 she fell in love. She evolved a strongly erotic craving (so says this school of science), but this craving, if she had given herself up to it—if it had been fulfilled—would have led into some bye-way of life. Influenced by education, by the exhortation of her parents, she repressed it. To put it tritely, she ‘swallowed it down’ in her soul's life. Then she lived on. Fourteen years have passed. Perhaps she has married meantime according to her station. For her daily thoughts and feelings it is long forgotten. But the forgotten has by no means disappeared. The soul is not exhaustively contained in what it knows. In the underlying levels of consciousness the thing is still there, and presently it finds expression. For though the lady in her outer life is happy, she suffers from an indefinable, pessimistic leaning, a partial weariness of life or something similar. She is, as they say, ‘nervous,’ neurasthenic, or the like.

Now they seek to introduce this kind of psychology into medical science. They try to cure such souls by catechising them. Such experiences, they say, abiding in the hidden depths of the soul's life and for the surface consciousness apparently forgotten, must be drawn forth. If this be done—if under the influence of a good catechiser (who must of course, after the prevailing notions of to-day, be a physician) the patient gets to grips with the thing—then it will all grow better.

Cures are indeed effected in this manner. Often indeed they are more or less real cures, though in the majority of cases they will prove to be only semblances of cures. (We can explain how this is on some other occasion.)

That is one kind of thing they seek for, down in the depths of the soul's life. Here is another: It is a man of 35 or 40, suffering from a certain weariness of life, a morbid indecision. He does not know why, and the people around him do not know why. He knows it least of all. One who busies himself with the aforesaid ‘science of the soul,’ will try in this case too, to rummage in the forgotten though not vanished depths of the inner life, and will elicit the fact that in his 15th, 16th or 17th year, may be, the man had this or that plan in life, which plan fell through. He was obliged to turn to another plan of life—not according to the one he cherished. In all that he daily feels and thinks and wills, he has apparently been reconciled to the change. But what a man consciously feels and thinks and wills is not the entire life of the soul. In hidden depths the disappointed plan lives on as a real force.

Once more, these people believe that they can effect a cure by catechising and bringing the disappointment to the surface, giving the man an opportunity to discuss the whole matter with his catechiser.

But there are many other things besides, which they believe are resting there in the soul's depths without man's consciousness being aware of it. In short, they have perceived the fact that consciousness is a small circle and the soul's life a far larger circle of which the consciousness comprises only a little part. Not only so, they also look in the very depths of the soul's life for something else which is not of the soul—which, it appears, a theologian recently described—with questionable taste—as ‘the animal slime at the bottom of the soul.’ Thus they find disappointments, suppressed craving's, broken plans of life and finally the ‘animal slime at the very bottom of the soul,’ which means: all that is rooted in life, coming, so to speak, from flesh and blood, from the hidden animal nature, and rising from the soul's foundation in an unconscious way (for the consciousness would naturally rebel against it and does indeed rebel).

There is of course some truth in this theory of the ‘animal slime.’ We often see it happening in life:—Consciousness says to itself, ‘I want nothing more; I want to discover this or that. Therefore I turn to this or that person.’ But the ‘animal slime’ is really at work, for it may well be animal cravings which are only camouflaged and masked by what the consciousness declares.

Moreover this school of science (‘science,’ I say, with a grain of salt) has conjectured that in these same unconscious regions we shall also find what comes from the individual's connection with race and nation, with all manner of historic residues which play their part in the human soul unconsciously, while consciousness behaves quite differently. In view of what is now surging through the world, we cannot even deny that these things are apparently confirmed by multitudinous examples. For who will fail to see how many a man declares by word of mouth lofty ideals of ‘right and freedom for the nations,’ while in his soul's reality that alone is active, which, stirring the slime in the soul's depths, arises out of such connections as the Psycho-analyst would analyse—or pretend to analyse—in the above directions.

Moreover, the theologians among the Psycho-analysts especially, include in the subconscious regions of the soul's life the ‘demonic’ element which, they allege, arises from still more hidden depths—from the mysterious depth of the ‘irrational.’ I am unaware how the natural scientists and the theologians among Psycho-analysts come to terms with one another. But the latter class too undoubtedly exists, and they especially are fond of saying that unknown demons are at work in the subconscious in the human soul, so as to make men Gnostics for example, or Theosophists. ‘Psycho-analyse the soul and penetrate to the foundations where the primeval slime resides and you will find it. Gnosis is a demonic teaching, likewise Psycho-analysis’ ... no, I beg your pardon, not Psycho-analysis. Psychoanalysis, according to these men and women (for ladies, too, are taking part in these things) Psycho-analysis is not included in the black list, but Theosophy and other things.

I do not wish to enter now into any detailed criticism of Psycho-analysis. I only wish to have pointed out that in the Psycho-analytic school we have the evidence, how modern research is driven to observe what works and weaves beneath the conscious portions of the soul. But the prevailing scientific prejudices can only result in the most wrong conclusions on these matters. Meanwhile these people are quite unwilling to consider the investigations of Spiritual Science. Consequently they will not discover how impossible it is truly to analyse what they find in the soul's life, so long as they are unaware that man's existence takes its course in repeated lives on Earth. For in their Psycho-analysis they try to explain, what is there at the bottom of the soul, out of one Earth-life only. No wonder they are then obliged to place it frequently in a distorted light.

For example, suppose we find disappointed plans of life, deep down within the soul. We ought first to consider what kind of meaning this wrecking of a plan in life may have for the human being's existence as a whole, which goes on through repeated lives on Earth. Then perhaps we shall discover that there are also working in the man's subconsciousness certain aspects of his life, which, by a true working of destiny, have prevented the fulfilment of his plan. And then we shall observe that the disappointed plan, which is still there in the soul's depths, is not merely destined to make the man ill in this incarnation, but to be carried through the gate of death when this life is at an end, and to become a potent force in the life between death and new birth. For only in the next life will it play its proper part. It may indeed be necessary for such a broken plan of life to be preserved and nurtured to begin with, in the depths of the soul, so that it may be strengthened and enhanced. Then between death and a new birth it will be able to rise to its true stature, till in the next life on Earth it assumes its predestined form, which, on account of other qualities within the soul, it was not able to assume in this life.

Then as to the so-called ‘animal slime at the bottom of the soul's life’ (though, as I said, the expression is by no means in good taste), undoubtedly such a thing is there. But I beg you to remember what I have explained, of the relation between the head of man and the remainder of his organism. The latter is in many respects connected with man's earthly life, his present incarnation, while the head is the result of former planes of evolution of the Earth itself, and is, moreover, related to the man's former incarnations. If you consider this, then you will understand how many things are working upward from the remainder of the organism (by virtue of the part it plays in the whole karmic connection)—things which are at a different stage of maturity than that which comes from the human head and from the nervous system. But the Psycho-analyst, who to begin with only ‘analyses’ the ‘slime,’ will go completely wrong. Analysing this ‘animal slime,’ as they call it, he is like a man who wants to know what kind of corn will grow on a given soil. He analyses the soil. He digs and finds a certain manure, with which the field was manured. He says, Now I know the manure, and out of this the corn will presently spring forth. But the corn does not grow from the manure, albeit the manure is necessary. The point is, what is imbedded in the basic slime; for that which is imbedded in it is generally destined to work on through the gate of death, into the next evolution on the Earth. It is not a question of investigating the animal slime itself. The point is, what is imbedded in it as a real ‘seed of the soul.’

Psycho-Analysis, so called, gives ample opportunity to observe how perilous are the prejudices of the present time. True, it is entering a realm to which the thought of our time is tending. For the soul can no longer rest satisfied with what the surface experience of consciousness provides. So do the men of our time find themselves driven to the very quarters where they should indeed investigate; but as they cannot understand spiritual science they have no guiding lines for such investigation. Therefore they rummage about in the most clumsy way in these realms which are assigned to them by their profession, or by their own agitations. They put everything in the wrong place, not knowing how to put in it the right. For this they could only do, if they were able to follow up the real Karmic threads as I have tried to indicate them now, in the one case and in the other. Above all when Psychoanalysis begins to burrow in the elemental realms, it proves itself appallingly unsound.

Nevertheless, the desire to pursue the continuous thread of destiny into its finer and more intimate ramifications is important. That which goes on in the conscious life of a man's soul, from the time he awakens until he falls asleep again, reveals very little of the Karmic stream which works on and on through his incarnations. What we experience consciously in waking life largely belongs to the present incarnation, and it is good so. For in the present incarnation man should be healthy and efficient. On the other hand, much of what is carried through the gate of death—as a seed which grows out of our experiences and trials and faculties acquired during the present life—plays a great part in our life from our falling asleep to our awakening, and very largely finds its way into our dreams. We must only be able to estimate the dream-formations truly. We say, Dreams are reminiscences,—and so they often are. But in the stream of our Karma they do not work in a simple and straightforward way. In their inherent forces they often signify the opposite of what appears upon the surface. Let me give you an example from literature to explain what I now mean.

Vischer, the aestheticist, tells a pretty little story in his book, Auch Einer. I quote it here because I am now speaking in a wider sense of the vocational life and all that is connected with it. Vischer relates a conversation between a father and his son. They are going for a walk together, and after the father has asked him many things the boy tells the following story: ‘Teacher told us one should always find out what kind of a job a man has. A man should have a proper occupation. By that you can recognise whether he is a sound and good man altogether.’ ‘Oh,’ said the father. ‘Yes, and after teacher had told us that in school, I dreamt I was walking past yonder lake, and in the dream I asked the lake what kind of a job it had. And the lake said: My job is to be wet.’ ‘Hm,’ said the father.

A witty story, revealing some knowledge of life in him who thought it out. The father said ‘Hm’ because he did not wish to spoil the boy. He did not wish to tell him what nonsense his teacher had been talking. No doubt he kept his thoughts to himself. He should have enlightened his son more wisely than the teacher. He should have said, One must not pass judgments in such a superficial way, for it may well be that one's judgment of what constitutes a ‘decent and proper occupation’ is mistaken, and one will thus be led to misjudge one's fellow-men. Or again, the man's career might somehow have been marred. In short, the father should have instructed the son. But in this case he did not need to do so. For in the young human being the dream can still work helpfully. The dream, which in this instance came to the boy's consciousness, is there as a real inner force, in place of such instruction. In the sub-consciousness the dream is working. And it works in such a way as to expunge from the soul the nonsense which the teacher created by his foolish teaching. This explains the forming of the dream in the boy's sub-consciousness, which is wiser than the surface consciousness. It spreads an atmosphere of laughable absurdity over the teacher's foolish exhortations. The lake says, ‘It is my job to be wet.’ That will work wholesomely. It will drive away the noxious effects to which such teaching might otherwise give rise.

In this case the dream is indeed a reminiscence; it follows in the very next night. But at the same time it is a corrector of life. Indeed the life of the astral body frequently works in this way. Beside the relics of what is there in the soul from the experiences of life, we should frequently find this factor. Especially where a mistaken education is at work, we can frequently detect in the sub-conscious forces of the soul this ‘corrector,’ who often works even in the same incarnation, especially in young human beings. But above all, this corrector is carried through the gate of death and there works on. There is really a kind of self-corrector in the human being. This must be borne in mind.

With all these things I only want to point out how much there is in the soul of man, pressing on from one incarnation to another. There is a whole complex of forces, working across from one incarnation to another. We must now consider what is the relation between this complex of forces and the human being of the present, inasmuch as his life continues between birth and death.

In this respect man is really a four-stringed instrument, on which the above-named ‘complex of Karmic forces’ plays. Physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego are the four strings, and Karma plays on them. According as the one or the other string is played on more or less intensely by the bow of Karma (if we may retain this analogy of the violin which also has four strings), so does the individual life arise. It may be more the etheric body or the astral body, or the etheric and the astral together, or the physical and the astral together, or the physical body and the Ego. In the most manifold ways, the four strings of human life can play together. Therefore it is so difficult if we desire to speak not in general and vague abstractions but in reality. It is so hard to decipher the several melodies of a man's life, for we can only decipher them if we are able to behold how the fiddle-bow of Karma plays on the four strings of Man.

Consider the human being in those years of life when the physical body and especially the etheric body are developing (as indicated in my little book Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy)—from the seventh to the fourteenth year—all these things are approximate. During this time we shall find certain peculiarities emerging, which distinguish this period of life especially. Certain things, we shall observe, are in a way consolidated during this time. True, many of these things already emerge in the first seven years of life—for all these things merge into one another. But it is only between the seventh and about the fourteenth year that we can observe it deeply and accurately. Certain inner characteristics become consolidated in the growing human being, expressing themselves through the corporeality, through the whole conduct and appearance as it expresses itself in the tenure of the body, in the gestures, in the behaviour as a whole. What is thus consolidated (not all, but a great part of it) causing the human being to be short and thickset, or to have shorter or longer fingers, or to tread in a certain way—with a firm step in one case, tripping it lightly in another (to describe the radical contrasts)—in short, all that is connected with the bodily aspect of deportment, is here intended. As I said, not all, but a great part of what thus appears in the growing human being comes from his Karma. It is the effect of his vocation in the former life on Earth. People who do not observe what I have now said, often make a great mistake, especially when they try to be clever, observing the child's behaviour, and wishing somehow to determine his occupation in this life from the way he deports himself. In this way it is easy to make the mistake of wishing to place him into a similar vocation to what he had in his preceding life on Earth. And that would not be wholesome for him. What we observe in this period of life are the effects of the former incarnation; and when this period is at an end, or even before (as I said, these things merge into one another), the astral body emerges in a very peculiar way, and reacts on what has been developing hitherto. Once we are aware of these facts as derived from spiritual science, we can observe them even outwardly on the physical plane. The astral body reacts. According to quite other Karmic forces, it transmutes that which resulted from the pure ‘Karma of vocation’ between the seventh and fourteenth year. Thus there are two forces in the human being in conflict with one another. The one set of forces mould and form him; these arise more from the etheric body. The others, counteracting and partly paralysing the former, come more from the astral body. Through these latter forces, man is impelled to transform what was stamped upon him by his vocational Karma of the former incarnation. We may say therefore: The working of the etheric body is formative. (All that appears as gesture, posture and deportment in the physical body comes from the etheric.) The working of the astral body is transformative. And in the interplay of the two forces, which are very decidedly in conflict with one another, much of the working of the Karma of vocation finds expression.

This, however, is woven together with other Karmic streams. For we must also bear in mind the physical body. As to the physical body, it is especially important to observe in the first epoch of life how the human being places himself through his Karma into the world. The kind of physical body we have depends on this. For by our Karma we place ourselves into a certain family, belonging to a certain nation and so forth. Thus we get quite a definite kind of body. But not only so. Think how much the course of our life depends on the situation into which we place ourselves, in that we enter a certain family. This already gives the starting-point of infinitely much in our life.

In effect, notably in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is developing, forces are working in (or rather, about) the physical body—forces which come not from the vocational aspect of our former incarnation, but from the way in which we lived with other human beings. In our former incarnation we stood in this or that relation to this or that human being. (I mean now, not in a particular part of our life—for that belongs to a different chapter—but throughout our life.) All this we assimilate. We carry it through the gate of death, and through these forces we bring ourselves once more into a certain family, a certain situation or set of circumstances. Thus we may say: That which places our physical body into life and works on through our physical body—that is what shapes the situations of our life. (It goes on working, of course, through our succeeding lives.) And now it receives a counter-force through the Ego. The Ego works so to annul the given situations of our life. It battles against all that determines our circumstances. Thus we may say: The physical body works so to create life's situation; and the Ego works to re-create it. In the working together of these two-battling one with another—another stream of Karma enters our life. For? there is always present in man on the one hand what strives to maintain him in a certain situation, and on the other, what strives to lift him out of it. Thus I would say, primitively speaking, 1 and 4, and 2 and 3, work upon one another. (See the diagram at the end.) And in manifold other ways the four strings play together. The way we come into connection with fresh human beings in a given life according to our Karma, depends on 1 and 4 and their connections. And this leads back in turn to our relationships of life in former lives. The way we find our connections in calling, work and occupation depends on 2 and 3 and on their mutual interplay.

To begin with I beg you to consider these things well. We shall then continue in the next lecture.

To the outwardly perceptible, visible world there belongs the invisible world, and these, taken together, form a whole. The marked degree to which this is the case first appears in its full clarity when we turn our attention away from the animals to the plants.

Plant-life, as it sprouts and springs forth from the earth, immediately arouses our delight, but it also provides access to something which we must feel as full of mystery. In the case of the animal, though certainly its will and whole inner activity have something of the mysterious, we nevertheless recognize that this will is actually there, and is the cause of the animal's form and outer characteristics. But in the case of the plants, which appear on the face of the earth in such magnificent variety of form, which develop in such a mysterious way out of the seed with the help of the earth and the encircling air—in the case of the plant we feel that some other factor must be present in order that this plant-world may arise in the form it does.

When spiritual vision is directed to the plant-world, we are immediately led to a whole host of beings, which were known and recognized in the old times of instinctive clairvoyance, but which were afterwards forgotten and today remain only as names used by the poet, names to which modern man ascribes no reality. To the same degree, however, in which we deny reality to the beings which whirl and weave around the plants, to that degree do we lose the understanding of the plant-world. This understanding of the plant-world, which, for instance, would be so necessary for the art of healing, has been entirely lost to present-day humanity.

We have already recognized a very significant connection between the world of the plants and the world of the butterflies; but this too will only come rightly before our souls when we look yet more deeply into the whole weaving and working of plant-life.

Plants send down their roots into the ground. Anyone who can observe what they really send down and can perceive the roots with spiritual vision (for this he must have) sees how the root-nature is everywhere surrounded, woven around, by elemental nature spirits. And these elemental spirits, with an old clairvoyant perception designated as gnomes and which we may call the root-spirits, can actually be studied by an imaginative and inspirational world-conception, just as human life and animal life can be studied in the sphere of the physical. We can look into the soul-nature of these elemental spirits, into this world of the spirits of the roots.

These root-spirits, are, so to say, a quite special earth-folk, invisible at first to outer view, but in their effects so much the more visible; for no root could develop if it were not for what is mediated between the root and the earth-realm by these remarkable root-spirits, which bring the mineral element of the earth into flux in order to conduct it to the roots of the plants. Naturally I refer to the underlying spiritual process.

These root-spirits, which are everywhere present in the earth, get a quite particular sense of well-being from rocks and from ores (which may be more or less transparent). But they enjoy their greatest sense of well-being, because here they are really at home, when they are conveying what is mineral to the roots of the plants. And they are completely enfilled with an inner element of spirituality which we can only compare with the inner element of spirituality in the human eye, in the human ear. For these root-spirits are in their spirit-nature entirely sense. Apart from this they are nothing at all; they consist only of sense. They are entirely sense, and it is a sense which is at the same time understanding, which does not only see and hear, but immediately understands what is seen and heard, which in receiving impressions, receives also ideas.

We can even indicate the way in which these root-spirits receive their ideas. We see a plant sprouting out of the earth. The plant comes, as I shall presently show you, into connection with the extraterrestrial universe; and, particularly at certain seasons of the year, spirit-currents flow from above, from the blossom and the fruit of the plant down into the roots below, streaming into the earth. And just as we turn our eyes towards the light and see, so do the root-spirits turn their faculty of perception towards what seeps downwards from above, through the plant into the earth. What seeps down towards the root-spirits, that is something which the light has sent into the blossoms, which the sun's warmth has sent into the plants, which the air has produced in the leaves, which the distant stars have brought about in the plant's structures. The plant gathers the secrets of the universe, sinks them into the ground, and the gnomes take these secrets into themselves from what seeps down spiritually to them through the plants. And because the gnomes, particularly from autumn on and through the winter, in their wanderings through ore and rock bear with them what has filtered down to them through the plants, they become those beings within the earth which, as they wander, carry the ideas of the whole universe streaming throughout the earth. We look forth into the wide world. The world is built from universal spirit; it is an embodiment of universal ideas, of universal spirit. The gnomes receive through the plants, which to them are the same as rays of light are to us, the ideas of the universe, and within the earth carry them in full consciousness from metal to metal, from rock to rock.

We gaze down into the depths of the earth not to seek there below for abstract ideas about some kind of mechanical laws of nature, but to behold the roving, wandering gnomes, which are the light-filled preservers of world-understanding within the earth.

Because these gnomes have immediate understanding of what they see, their knowledge is actually of a similar nature to that of man. They are the compendium of understanding, they are entirely understanding. Everything about them is understanding, an understanding however, which is universal, and which really looks down upon human understanding as something incomplete. The gnomes laugh us to scorn on account of the groping, struggling understanding with which we manage to grasp one thing or another, whereas they have no need at all to make use of thought. They have direct perception of what is comprehensible in the world; and they are particularly ironical when they notice the efforts people have to make to come to this or that conclusion. Why should they do this? say the gnomes—why ever should people give themselves so much trouble to think things over? We know everything we look at. People are so stupid—say the gnomes—for they must first think things over.

And I must say that the gnomes become ironical to the point of ill manners if one speaks to them of logic. For why ever should people need such a superfluous thing—a training in thinking? The thoughts are already there. The ideas flow through the plants. Why don't people stick their noses as deep into the earth as the plant's roots, and let what the sun says to the plants trickle down into their noses? Then they would know something! But with logic—so say the gnomes—there one can only have odd bits and pieces of knowledge.

Thus the gnomes, inside the earth, are actually the bearers of the ideas of the universe, of the world-all. But for the earth itself they have no liking at all. They bustle about in the earth with ideas of the universe, but they actually hate what is earthly. This is something from which the gnomes would best like to tear themselves free. Nevertheless they remain with the earthly—you will soon see why this is—but they hate it, for the earthly threatens them with a continual danger. The earth continually holds over them the threat of forcing them to take on a particular form, the form of those creatures I described to you in the last lecture, the amphibians, and in particular of the frogs and the toads. The feeling of the gnomes within the earth is really this: If we grow too strongly together with the earth, we shall assume the form of frogs or toads. They are continually on the alert to avoid being caught in a too strong connection with the earth, to avoid taking on earthly form. They are always on the defensive against this earthly form, which threatens them as it does because of the element in which they exist. They have their home in the earthly-moist element; there they live under the constant threat of being forced into amphibian forms. From this they continually tear themselves free, by filling themselves entirely with ideas of the extra-terrestrial universe. The gnomes are really that element within the earth which represents the extra-terrestrial, because they must continually reject a growing together with the earthly; otherwise, as single beings, they would take on the forms of the amphibian world. And it is just from what I may call this feeling of hatred, this feeling of antipathy towards the earthly, that the gnomes gain the power of driving the plants up out of the earth. With the fundamental force of their being they unceasingly thrust away the earthly, and it is this thrusting that determines the upward direction of the plant's growth; they push the plants up with them. It accords with the nature of the gnomes in regard to the earthly to allow the plant to have only its roots in the earth, and then to grow upwards out of the earth-sphere; so that it is actually out of the force of their own original nature that the gnomes push the plants out of the earth and make them grow upwards.

Once the plant has grown upwards, once it has left the domain of the gnomes and has passed out of the sphere of the moist-earthly element into the sphere of the moist-airy, the plant develops what comes to outer physical formation in the leaves. But in all that is now active in the leaves other beings are at work, water-spirits, elemental spirits of the watery element, to which an earlier instinctive clairvoyance gave among others the name of undines. Just as we find the roots busied about, woven-about by the gnome-beings in the vicinity of the ground, and observe with pleasure the upward-striving direction which they give, we now see these water-beings, these elemental beings of the water, these undines in their connection with the leaves.

These undine beings differ in their inner nature from the gnomes. They cannot turn like a spiritual sense-organ outwards towards the universe. They can only yield themselves up to the weaving and working of the whole cosmos in the airy-moist element, and therefore they are not beings of such clarity as the gnomes. They dream incessantly, these undines, but their dream is at the same time their own form. They do not hate the earth as intensely as do the gnomes, but they have a sensitivity to what is earthly. They live in the etheric element of water, swimming and swaying through it, and in a very sensitive way they recoil from everything in the nature of a fish; for the fish-form is a threat to them, even if they do assume it from time to time, though only to forsake it immediately in order to take on another metamorphosis. They dream their own existence. And in dreaming their own existence they bind and release, they bind and disperse the substances of the air, which in a mysterious way they introduce into the leaves, as these are pushed upwards by the gnomes. For at this point the plants would wither if it were not for the undines, who approach from all sides, and show themselves, as they weave around the plants in their dream-like existence, to be what we can only call the world-chemists. The undines dream the uniting and dispersing of substances. And this dream, in which the plant has its existence, into which it grows when, developing upwards, it forsakes the ground, this undine-dream is the world-chemist which brings about in the plant-world the mysterious combining and separation of the substances which emanate from the leaf. We can therefore say that the undines are the chemists of plant-life. They dream of chemistry. They possess an exceptionally delicate spirituality which is really in its element just where water and air come into contact with each other. The undines live entirely in the element of moisture, but they develop their actual inner function when they come to the surface of something watery, be it only to the surface of a water-drop or something else of a watery nature. For their whole endeavour lies in preserving themselves from getting the form of a fish, the permanent form of a fish. They wish to remain in a condition of metamorphosis, in a condition of eternal, endlessly changing transformation. But in this state of transformation in which they dream of the stars and of the sun, of light and of warmth, they become the chemists who now, starting from the leaf, carry the plant further in its formation, after it has been pushed upwards by the power of the gnomes. So the plant develops its leaf-growth, and this mystery is now revealed as the dream of the undines into which the plants grow.

To the same degree, however, in which the plant grows into the dream of the undines, does it now come into another domain, into the domain of those spirits which live in the airy-warmth element, just as the gnomes live in the moist-earthly, and the undines in the moist-airy element. Thus it is in the element which is of the nature of air and warmth that those beings live which an earlier clairvoyant art designated as the sylphs. Because air is everywhere imbued with light, these sylphs, which live in the airy-warmth element, press towards the light, relate themselves to it. They are particularly susceptible to the finer but larger movements within the atmosphere.

When in spring or autumn you see a flock of swallows, which produce as they fly vibrations in a body of air, setting an air-current in motion, then this moving air-current—and this holds good for every bird—is for the sylphs something audible. Cosmic music sounds from it to the sylphs. If, let us say, you are travelling somewhere by ship and the seagulls are flying around it, then in what is set in motion by the seagulls' flight there is a spiritual sounding, a spiritual music which accompanies the ship.

Again it is the sylphs which unfold and develop their being within this sounding music, finding their dwelling-place in the moving current of air. It is in this spiritually sounding, moving element of air that they find themselves at home; and at the same time they absorb what the power of light sends into these vibrations of the air. Because of this the sylphs, which experience their existence more or less in a state of sleep, feel most in their element, most at home, where birds are winging through the air. If a sylph is obliged to move and weave through air devoid of birds, it feels as though it had lost itself. But at the sight of a bird in the air something quite special comes over the sylph. I have often had to describe a certain event in man's life, that event which leads the human soul to address itself as “I”. And I have always drawn attention to a saying of Jean Paul, that, when for the first time a human being arrives at the conception of his “I”, it is as though he looks into the most deeply veiled Holy of Holies of his soul. A sylph does not look into any such veiled Holy of Holies of its own soul, but when it sees a bird an ego-feeling comes over it. It is in what the bird sets in motion as it flies through the air that the sylph feels its ego. And because this is so, because its ego is kindled in it from outside, the sylph becomes the bearer of cosmic love through the atmosphere. It is because the sylph embodies something like a human wish, but does not have its ego within itself but in the bird-kingdom, that it is at the same time the bearer of wishes of love through the universe.

Thus we behold the deepest sympathy between the sylphs and the bird-world. Whereas the gnome hates the amphibian world, whereas the undine is unpleasantly sensitive to fishes, is unwilling to approach them, tries to avoid them, feels a kind of horror for them, the sylph, on the other hand, is attracted towards birds, and has a sense of well-being when it can waft towards their plumage the swaying, love-filled waves of the air. And were you to ask a bird from whom it learns to sing, you would hear that its inspirer is the sylph. Sylphs feel a sense of pleasure in the bird's form. They are, however, prevented by the cosmic ordering from becoming birds, for they have another task. Their task is lovingly to convey light to the plant. And just as the undine is the chemist for the plant, so is the sylph the light-bearer. The sylph imbues the plant with light; it bears light into the plant.

Through the fact that the sylphs bear light into the plant, something quite remarkable is brought about in it. You see, the sylph is continually carrying light into the plant. The light, that is to say the power of the sylphs in the plant, works upon the chemical forces which were induced into the plant by the undines. Here occurs the inter-working of sylph-light and undine-chemistry. This is a remarkable plastic activity. With the help of the upstreaming substances which are worked upon by the undines, the sylphs weave out of the light an ideal plant-form. They actually weave the Archetypal Plant within the plant from light, and from the chemical working of the undines. And when towards autumn the plant withers and everything of physical substance disintegrates, then these plant-forms begin to seep downwards, and now the gnomes perceive them, perceive what the world—the sun through the sylphs, the air through the undines—has brought to pass in the plant. This the gnomes perceive, so that throughout the entire winter they are engaged in perceiving below what has seeped into the ground through the plants. Down there they grasp world-ideas in the plant-forms which have been plastically developed with the help of the sylphs, and which now in their spiritual ideal form enter into the ground.

Naturally those people who regard the plant as something purely material know nothing of this spiritual ideal form. Thus at this point something appears which in the materialistic observation of the plant gives rise to what is nothing other than a colossal error, a terrible error. I will sketch this error for you.

Everywhere you will find that materialistic science describes matters as follows: The plant takes root in the ground, above the ground it develops its leaves, finally unfolding its blossoms, within the blossoms the stamens, then the seed-bud. Now—usually from another plant—the pollen from the anthers, from the pollen vessels, is carried over to the germ which is then fructified, and through this the seed of the new plant is produced. The germ is regarded as the female element and what comes from the stamens as the male—indeed matters cannot be regarded otherwise as long as people remain fixed in materialism, for then this process really does look like a fructification. This, however, it is not. In order to gain insight into the process of fructification, that is to say the process of reproduction, in the plant-world, we must be conscious that in the first place it is from what the great chemists, the undines, bring about in the plants, and from what the sylphs bring about, that the plant-form arises, the ideal plant-form which sinks into the ground and is preserved by the gnomes. It is there below, this plant-form. And there within the earth it is now guarded by the gnomes after they have seen it, after they have looked upon it. The earth becomes the mother-womb for what thus seeps downwards. This is something quite different from what is described by materialistic science.

After it has passed through the sphere of the sylphs, the plant comes into the sphere of the elemental fire-spirits. These fire-spirits are the inhabitants of the warmth-light element. When the warmth of the earth is at its height, or is otherwise suitable, they gather the warmth together. Just as the sylphs gather up the light, so do the fire-spirits gather up the warmth and carry it into the blossoms of the plants.

Undines carry the action of the chemical ether into the plants, sylphs the action of the light-ether into the plant's blossoms. And the pollen now provides what may be called little air-ships, to enable the fire-spirits to carry the warmth into the seed. Everywhere warmth is collected with the help of the stamens, and is carried by means of the pollen from the anthers to the seeds and the seed vessels. And what is formed here in the seed-bud is entirely the male element which comes from the cosmos. It is not a case of the seed-vessel being female and the anthers of the stamens being male. In no way does fructification occur in the blossom, but only the pre-forming of the male seed. The fructifying force is what the fire-spirits in the blossom take from the warmth of the world-all as the cosmic male seed, which is united with the female element. This element, drawn from the forming of the plant has, as I told you, already earlier seeped down into the ground as ideal form, and is resting there below. For plants the earth is the mother, the heavens the father. And all that takes place outside the domain of the earth is not the mother-womb for the plant. It is a colossal error to believe that the mother-principle of the plant is in the seed-bud. The fact is that this is the male-principle, which is drawn forth from the universe with the aid of the fire-spirits. The mother comes from the cambium, which spreads from the bark to the wood, and is carried down from above as ideal form. And what now results from the combined working of gnome-activity and fire-spirit activity—this is fructification. The gnomes are, in fact, the spiritual midwives of plant-reproduction. Fructification takes place below in the earth during the winter, when the seed comes into the earth and meets with the forms which the gnomes have received from the activities of the sylphs and undines and now carry to where these forms can meet with the fructifying seeds.

You see, because people do not recognize what is spiritual, do not know how gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-spirits—which were formerly called salamanders—weave and live together with plant-growth, there is complete lack of clarity about the process of fructification in the plant world. There, outside the earth nothing of fructification takes place, but the earth is the mother of the plant-world, the heavens the father. This is the case in a quite literal sense. Plant-fructification takes place through the fact that the gnomes take from the fire-spirits what the fire-spirits have carried into the seed bud as concentrated cosmic warmth on the little airships of the anther-pollen. Thus the fire-spirits are the bearers of warmth.

And now you will easily gain insight into the whole process of plant-growth. First, with the help of what comes from the fire-spirits, the gnomes down below instill life into the plant and push it upwards. They are the fosterers of life. They carry the life-ether to the root—the same life-ether in which they themselves live. The undines foster the chemical ether, the sylphs the light-ether, the fire-spirits the warmth ether. And then the fruit of the warmth-ether again unites with what is present below as life. Thus the plants can only be understood when they are considered in connection with all that is circling, weaving and living around them. And one only reaches the right interpretation of the most important process in the plant when one penetrates into these things in a spiritual way.

When once this has been understood, it is interesting to look again at that memorandum of Goethe's where, referring to another botanist, he is so terribly annoyed because people speak of the eternal marriage in the case of the plants above the earth. Goethe is affronted by the idea that marriages should be taking place over every meadow. This seemed to him something unnatural. In this Goethe had an instinctive but very true feeling. He could not as yet know the real facts of the matter, nevertheless he instinctively felt that fructification should not take place above in the blossom. Only he did not as yet know what goes on down below under the ground, he did not know that the earth is the mother-womb of the plants. But, that the process which takes place above in the blossom is not what all botanists hold it to be, this is something which Goethe instinctively felt.

You are now aware of the inner connection between plant and earth. But there is something else which you must take into account.

You see, when up above the fire-spirits are circling around the plant and transmitting the anther-pollen, then they have only one feeling, which they have in an enhanced degree, compared to the feeling of the sylphs. The sylphs experience their self, their ego, when they see the birds flying about. The fire-spirits have this experience, but to an intensified degree, in regard to the butterfly-world, and indeed the insect-world as a whole. And it is these fire-spirits which take the utmost delight in following in the tracks of the insects' flight so that they may bring about the distribution of warmth for the seed buds. In order to carry the concentrated warmth, which must descend into the earth so that it may be united with the ideal form, in order to do this the fire-spirits feel themselves inwardly related to the butterfly-world, and to the insect-creation in general. Everywhere they follow in the tracks of the insects as they buzz from blossom to blossom. And so one really has the feeling, when following the flight of insects, that each of these insects as it buzzes from blossom to blossom, has a quite special aura which cannot be entirely explained from the insect itself. Particularly the luminous, wonderfully radiant, shimmering, aura of bees, as they buzz from blossom to blossom, is unusually difficult to explain. And why? It is because the bee is everywhere accompanied by a fire-spirit which feels so closely related to it that, for spiritual vision, the bee is surrounded by an aura which is actually a fire-spirit. When a bee flies through the air from plant to plant, from tree to tree, it flies with an aura which is actually given to it by a fire-spirit. The fire-spirit does not only gain a feeling of its ego in the presence of the insect, but it wishes to be completely united with the insect.

Through this, however, insects also obtain that power about which I have spoken to you, and which shows itself in a shimmering forth of light into the cosmos. They obtain the power completely to spiritualize the physical matter which unites itself with them, and to allow the spiritualized physical substance to ray out into cosmic space. But just as with a flame it is the warmth in the first place which causes the light to shine, so, above the surface of the earth, when the insects shimmer forth into cosmic space what attracts the human being to descend again into physical incarnation, it is the fire spirits which inspire the insects to this activity, the fire-spirits which are circling and weaving around them. But if the fire-spirits are active in promoting the outstreaming of spiritualized matter into the cosmos, they are no less actively engaged in seeing to it that the concentrated fiery element, the concentrated warmth, goes into the interior of the earth, so that, with the help of the gnomes, the spirit-form, which sylphs and undines cause to seep down into the earth, may be awakened.

This, you see, is the spiritual process of plant-growth. And it is because the subconscious in man divines something of a special nature in the blossoming, sprouting plant that he experiences the being of the plant as full of mystery. The wonder is not spoiled, the magic is not brushed from the dust on the butterfly's wing. Rather is the instinctive delight in the plant raised to a higher level when not only the physical plant is seen, but also that wonderful working of the gnome-world below, with its immediate understanding and formative intelligence, the gnome-world which first pushes the plant upwards. Thus, just as human understanding is not subjected to gravity, just as the head is carried without our feeling its weight, so the gnomes with their light-imbued intellectuality overcome what is of the earth and push the plant upwards. Down below they prepare the life. But the life would die away were it not formed by chemical activity. This is brought to it by the undines. And this again must be imbued with light. And so we picture, from below upwards, in bluish, blackish shades the force of gravity, to which the impulse upwards is given by the gnomes; and weaving around the plant—indicated by the leaves—the undine-force blending and dispersing substances as the plant grows upwards. From above downwards, from the sylphs, light falls into the plants and shapes an idealized plastic form which descends, and is taken up by the mother-womb of the earth; moreover this form is circled around by the fire-spirits which concentrate the cosmic warmth into the tiny seed-points. This warmth is also sent downwards to the gnomes, so that from out of fire and life, they can cause the plants to arise.

And further we now see that essentially the earth is indebted for its power of resistance and its density to the antipathy of the gnomes and undines towards amphibians and fishes. If the earth is dense, this density is due to the antipathy by means of which the gnomes and undines maintain their form. When light and warmth sink down on to the earth, this is first due to that power of sympathy, that sustaining power of sylph-love, which is carried through the air, and then to the sustaining sacrificial power of the fire-spirits, which causes them to incline downwards to what is below themselves. So we may say that, over the face of the earth, earth-density, earth-magnetism and earth-gravity, in their upward-striving aspect, unite with the downward-striving power of love and sacrifice. And in this inter-working of the downwards streaming force of love and sacrifice and the upwards streaming force of density, gravity and magnetism, in this inter-working, where the two streams meet, plant-life develops over the earth's surface. Plant-life is an outer expression of the inter-working of world-love and world-sacrifice with world-gravity and world-magnetism.

From this you have seen with what we have to do when we direct our gaze to the plant-world, which so enchants, uplifts and inspires us. Here real insight can only be gained when our vision embraces the spiritual, the super-sensible, as well as what is accessible to the physical senses. This enables us to correct the capital error of materialistic botany, that fructification occurs above the earth. What occurs there is not the process of fructification, but the preparation of the male heavenly seed for what is being made ready as the future Plant in the mother-womb of the earth.

I should like to carry to a still wider horizon the reflections I have already made here concerning the relationship between man and the cycle of Nature which was formed in ancient times under the influence of the Mysteries, and to go into what was believed in those times with regard to all that one as man received from the cosmos through this cycle of Nature. You may have gathered from yesterday's lecture as well perhaps as from the recollection of much that I could still say about such matters during the past Christmas season, in the Goetheanum which has now been taken from us—you may have gathered that the cycle of the year in its phenomena was perceived, and indeed today can still be perceived, as a result of life, as something which in its external events is just as much the expression of a living being standing behind it as the actions of the human organism are the manifestations of a being, of the human soul itself.

Let us remind ourselves how, in midsummer, the time we know as St. John's, the people became aware under this ancient Mystery-influence of a certain relationship to their ego, an ego which they did not yet consider as exclusively their own, but which they viewed as resting still in the bosom of the divine-spiritual.

These people believed that by means of the ceremonies I have described, they approached their “I” at midsummer, although throughout the rest of the year it was hidden from them. Of course they thought of themselves as dwelling in their beings altogether in the bosom of the divine-spiritual; but they thought that during the other three-quarters of the year nothing was revealed to them of what belonged to them as their ego. Only in this one quarter, which reached its high point at St. John's, did the essential being of their own ego manifest itself to them as through a window opening out of the divine spiritual world.

Now this essence of the individual ego within the divine spiritual world in which it revealed itself was by no means regarded in such a neutral, indifferent—one may even say phlegmatic—way as is the case today. When the “I” is spoken of today, a person is hardly likely to think of it as having any special connection either with this world or any other. Rather, he thinks of his “I” as a kind of point; what he does rays out from it and what he perceives rays in. But the feeling a person has today in regard to his “I” is of an altogether phlegmatic nature. We cannot really say that modern man even feels the “egoity” of his “I”—in spite of the fact that it is his ego; for anyone who wants to be honest cannot really claim that he is fond of his “I.” He is fond of his body; he is fond of his instincts; he may be fond of this or that experience. But the “I” is just a tiny word which is felt as a point in which all that has been indicated is more or less condensed. But in that period in which, after long preparations had been made, the approach to this “I” was undertaken ceremonially, each man was enabled in a certain sense to meet his “I” in the universe. Following this meeting, then, the “I” was perceived to be once more gradually withdrawing and leaving the human being alone with his bodily and soul nature, or as we would say today, with his physical-etheric-astral being. In that period man felt the “I” perceptively as having a real connection with the entire cosmos, with the whole world.

But what was felt above all else with regard to the relationship of this “I” to the world was not something “naturalistic,” to use the modern term; it was not something received as an external phenomenon. Rather, it was something which was deemed to be the very center of the most ancient moral conception of the world. Men did not expect great secrets of Nature to be revealed to them at this season. To be sure, such Nature secrets were spoken of, but man did not direct his attention primarily to them. Rather, he perceived through his feeling that above all he was to absorb into himself as moral impulse what is revealed at this time of midsummer when light and warmth reach their highest point.

This was the season man perceived as the time of divine-moral enlightenment. And what he wanted above all to obtain from the heavens as “answer” to the performances of music, poetry and dancing that were carried on at this season, what he waited for was that there should be revealed out of the heavens in all seriousness what they required of him morally.

And when all the ceremonies had been carried out that I described yesterday as belonging to the celebration of these festivals during the time of the sun's sultry heat—if it sometimes happened that a powerful storm broke forth with thunder and lightning, then just in this outbreak of thunder and lightning men felt the moral admonition of the heavens to earthly humanity.

There are vestiges from this ancient time in conceptions such as that of Zeus as the god of thunder, armed with a thunderbolt. Something similar is linked with the German god, Donar. This we have on one side. On the other side, man perceptively felt Nature, I might say, as warm, luminous, satisfied in itself. And he felt that this warming, luminous Nature as it was during the daytime remained also into the night time. Only he made a distinction, saying to himself: “During the day the air is filled with the warmth-element, with the light-element. In these elements of warmth and light there weave and live spiritual messengers through whom the higher divine beings want to make themselves known to men, want to endow them with moral impulses. But at night, when the higher spiritual beings withdraw, the messengers remain behind and reveal themselves in their own way.”

And thus it was that especially at midsummer people perceived the ruling and weaving of Nature in the summer nights, in the summer evenings. And what they felt then seemed to them to be a kind of summer dream which they experienced in reality; a summer dream through which they came especially near to the divine-spiritual; a summer dream by which they were convinced that every phenomenon of Nature was at the same time the moral utterance of the gods, but that all kinds of elemental beings were also active there who revealed themselves to men in their own way.

All the fanciful embellishment of the midsummer night's dream, of the St. John's night dream, is what remained later of the wondrous forms conjured by human imagination that wove through this midsummer time on the soul-spiritual level. This then, in all particulars, was taken to be a divine-spiritual moral revelation of the cosmos to man.

And so we may say that the conception underlying this was: at midsummer the divine-spiritual world revealed itself through moral impulses which were implanted in man as Enlightenment (see diagram). And what was felt in a quite special way at that time, what then worked upon man, was felt to be something super-human which played into the human order of things.

From his inner participation in the festivities celebrated in that time, man knew that he was lifted up above himself as he then was into the super-human, and that the Deity grasped the hand that man as it were reached toward him at this season. Everything that man believed to be divine-spiritual within him he ascribed to the revelations of this season of St. John's.

When the summer came to an end and autumn approached, when the leaves were withered and the seeds had ripened, when, that is, the full luxurious life of summer had faded and the trees become bare, then, because the insights of the Mysteries had flowed into all these perceptions, man felt: “The divine-spiritual world is withdrawing again from man.” He notices how he is directed back to himself; he is in a certain sense growing out of the spiritual into Nature.

Thus man felt this “living-into” the autumn as a “living-out-from” the spiritual, as a living into Nature. The tree leaves became mineralized; the seeds dried up and mineralized. Everything inclined in a certain way towards the death of Nature's year.

In being thus interwoven with what was becoming mineral on the Earth and around the Earth, man felt that he himself was becoming woven together with Nature. For in that period man still stood closer in his inner experience to what was going on outside. And he also thought, he pondered in his mind about how he experienced his being woven-together with Nature. His whole thinking took on this character. If we want to express in our language today what man felt when autumn came, we should have to say the following—I beg you, however, to realize that I am using present-day words, and that in those days man would not have been able to speak thus, for then everything rested on perceptive feeling and was not characterized through thinking—but if we want to speak in modern terms we shall have to say: With his particular trend of thinking, with his feeling way of perceiving, the human being experienced the transition from summer to autumn in such a way that he found in it a passing from spirit-knowledge to Nature-knowledge (see diagram). Toward autumn man felt that he was no longer in a time of spirit-knowledge but that autumn required of him that he should learn to know Nature. Thus at the autumn equinox we have, instead of moral impulse, knowledge of Nature, coming to know Nature.

The human being began to reflect about Nature. At this time also he began to take into account the fact that he was a creature, a being within the cosmos. In that time it would have been considered folly to present Nature-knowledge in its existing form to man during the summer. The purpose of summer is to bring man into relation with the spiritual in the world. With the arrival of what we today call the Michaelmas season, people said to themselves: “By everything that man perceives about him in the woods, in the trees, in the plants, he is stimulated to pursue nature-knowledge.” It was the season in which men were to occupy themselves above all with acquiring knowledge, with reflection. And indeed it was also the time when outer circumstances of life made this possible. Human life thus proceeded from Enlightenment to Knowledge. It was the right season for knowledge, for ever-increasing cognition.

When the pupils of the Mysteries received their instruction from the teachers, they were given certain mottoes of which we find adaptations in the maxims of the Greek sages. The “seven maxims” of the Seven Wise Men of Greece are, however, not actually those which originated in the primeval Mysteries.

In the very earliest Mysteries there was a saying associated with midsummer: “Receive the Light” (see diagram). By “Light,” spiritual wisdom was meant. It designated that within which the human being's own “I” shone.

For autumn (see diagram), the motto imprinted in the Mysteries as an admonition pointing to what should be carried on by the souls was: “Look around thee.”

Now there approached the next development of the year, and with it, what man felt within himself to be connected of itself with this year. The season of winter approached. We come to midwinter (see diagram), which includes our Christmas time. Just as the human being in midsummer felt himself lifted out above himself to the divine-spiritual existence of the cosmos, so he felt himself in midwinter to be unfolding downward below himself. He felt as if the forces of the Earth were washing around him and carrying him along. He felt as though his will nature, his instincts and impulses were infiltrated and permeated by gravity, by the force of destruction and other forces that are in the Earth. In these ancient times people did not feel winter as we feel it, that it merely gets cold and we have to put on warm boots, for example, in order not to get chilled. Rather, a man of that ancient time felt what was coming up out of the Earth as something that united itself with his own being. In contrast to the sultry, light-filled element, he felt what came up then in winter as a frosty element. We feel the chilliness today, too, because it is connected with the corporeality; but ancient man felt within his soul as a phenomenon accompanying the cold: darkness and gloom. He felt somewhat as if all around him, wherever he went, darkness rose up out of the Earth and enveloped him in a kind of cloud—only up to the middle of his body, to be sure, but this is the way he felt.

And he said to himself—again I have to describe it in more modern words—man said to himself: “During the height of summer I stand face to face with Enlightenment; then the heavenly, the super-terrestrial streams down into the earthly world. But now the earthly is streaming upward.”—Man already perceived and experienced something of the earthly during the autumnal equinox. But what he perceived and felt then of earthly nature was in conformity in a certain sense with his own nature; it was still connected with him. We might say: “At the time of the autumn equinox man felt in his Gemuet, in his realm of feeling, all that had to do with Nature. But now, in winter, he felt as though the Earth were laying claim to him, as if he were ensnared in his will nature by the forces of the Earth. He felt this to be the denial of the moral world order. He felt that together with the blackness that enveloped him like a cloud, forces opposed to the moral world order were ensnaring him. He felt the darkness rise up out of the Earth like a serpent and wind him about. But at the same time he was also aware of something quite different.”

Already during autumn he had felt something stirring within him that we today call intellect. Whereas in summer the intellect evaporates and there enters from outside a wisdom-filled moral element, during autumn the intellect is consolidated. The human being approaches evil but his intellect consolidates. Man felt an actual serpent-like manifestation in midwinter, but at the same time the solidification, the strengthening of shrewdness, of the reflective element, of all that made him sly and cunning and incited him to follow the principle of utility in life. All this he was aware of in this way. And just as in autumn the knowledge of nature gradually emerged, so in midwinter the Temptation of Hell approached the human being, the Temptation on the part of Evil. Thus he was aware of this. So when we write here: “Moral impulse, Knowledge of Nature” (see diagram), here (at midwinter) we must write “Temptation through Evil.”

This was just the time in which man had to develop what in any case was within him by way of Nature: everything associated with the intellect, slyness, cunning, all that was directed toward the utilitarian. This, man was to overcome through Temperance (Besonnenheit).¹ This was the season then in which man had to develop—not an open sense for wisdom, which in accordance with the ancient Mystery wisdom had been required of him during the time of Enlightenment, but something else. Just in that season in which evil revealed itself as we have indicated, man could experience in a fitting way resistance to evil: he was to become self-controlled (besonnen—see preceding footnote). Above all else at the season of change which he passed through in moving on from Enlightenment to Cognition, from Knowledge of Spirit to Knowledge of Nature, he was to progress from Nature knowledge to the contemplation of Evil (see diagram, arrow on left). This is the way it was understood.

And in giving instructions to the pupils of the Mysteries which could become mottoes, the teachers said to them—just as at midsummer they had said: “Receive the Light,” and in autumn “Look around you”—now in midwinter it was said: “Beware of Evil.” And it was expected that through “Temperance,” through this guarding of oneself against evil, men would come to a kind of self-knowledge which would lead them to realize how they had deviated from the moral impulses in the course of the year.

Deviation from the moral impulses through the contemplation of evil, its overcoming through moderation—this was to come to man's consciousness just in the time following midwinter. Hence in this ancient wisdom all sorts of things were undertaken that induced men to atone for what they recognized as deviations from the moral impulses they had received through Enlightenment. With this, we approach spring, the spring equinox (see diagram).

And just as here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, midwinter) we have Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, so for the spring equinox we have what was perceived as the activity of repentance. And in place of Cognition, and correspondingly, Temptation through Evil, there now entered something which we could call the Return—the reversion—to man's higher nature through Repentance. Where we have written here (see diagram: midsummer, autumn, winter): Enlightenment, Cognition, Temperance, here we must write: Return to Human Nature.

If you look back once more to what was in the depths of winter the Temptation by Evil, you will have to say: At that time man felt as though he were lowered into the abysmal deeps of the Earth; he felt himself entrapped by Earth's darkness. Just as during the height of summer man was in a sense torn out of himself, his soul-nature being then lifted up above him, so now, in order not to be ensnared by Evil during the winter, his soul-being made itself inwardly free.

Through this there existed during the depths of winter, I might say a counter-image to what was present during the height of summer. At midsummer the phenomena of Nature spoke in a spiritual way. People sought especially in the thunder and the lightning for what the heavens had to say. They looked at the phenomena of Nature, but what they sought in these phenomena was a spiritual language. Even in small things, they sought at St. John's-tide the spiritual message of the elemental beings, but they looked for it outside themselves. They dreamed in a certain sense outside the human being. During the depths of winter, however, people sank into themselves and dreamed within their own being. To the extent that they tore themselves loose from the entanglement of the Earth, that is, whenever they could free their soul-element, they dreamed within their own being. Of this there has remained what is connected with the visions, with the inner beholding, of the Thirteen Nights following the winter solstice. Everywhere recollections have remained of these ancient times. You can look on the Norwegian Song of Olaf [&Åsteson]² as a later development of what existed quite extensively in ancient times.

Then the springtime drew near. In our time the situation has shifted somewhat; in those days spring was closer to winter, and the whole year was viewed as being divided into three periods. Things were compressed. Nevertheless what I am sharing with you here was taught in its turn. Thus, just as at midsummer they said: “Receive the light;” and in autumn, at Michaelmas: “Look around you;” just as at midwinter, at the time that we celebrate Christmas, they said: “Beware of the Evil,” so for the time of return they had a saying which was then thought to have effect only at this time: “Know thyself”—placing it in exact polarity to the Knowledge of Nature.

“Beware of the Evil” could also be expressed: “Beware, draw back from Earth's darkness.” But this they did not say. Whereas during midsummer men accepted the external natural phenomenon of light as Wisdom, that is, at midsummer they spoke in a certain way in accordance with Nature, they would never have put the motto for winter into the sentence: “Beware of the darkness”—for they expressed rather the moral interpretation: “Beware of Evil.”

Echoes of these festivals have persisted everywhere, so far as they have been understood. Naturally everything was changed when the great Event of Golgotha entered in.

It was in the season of the deepest human temptation, in winter, that the birth of Jesus occurred. The birth of Jesus took place in the very time when man was in the grip of the Earth powers, when he had plunged down, as it were, into the abysses of the Earth. Among the legends associated with the birth of Jesus, you will even find one which says that Jesus came into the world in a cave, thus hinting at something that was perceived as wisdom in the most ancient Mysteries, namely, that there the human being can find what he has to seek in spite of being held fast by the dark element of the Earth, which at the same time holds the reason for his falling prey to Evil.

It is in accord with all of this, too, that the time of Repentance is ascribed to the season when spring is approaching.

The understanding for the midsummer festival has quite naturally disappeared to a still greater extent than that for the other side of the year's course. For the more materialism overtook mankind, the less people felt themselves drawn to anything such as Enlightenment.

And what is of quite special importance to present-day humanity is precisely that time which leads on from Enlightenment, of which man still remains unconscious, toward the season of autumn. Here lies the point where man, who indeed has to enter into knowledge of nature, should grasp in the nature-knowledge a picture, a reflection, of a knowledge of divine spirits. For this there is no better festival of remembrance than Michaelmas.

If this is celebrated in the right way, it must follow that mankind everywhere will take hold of the question: How is spirit knowledge to be found in the glorified nature-knowledge of the present? How can man transform nature-knowledge so that out of what the human being possesses as the fruits of this nature-knowledge, spirit knowledge will arise? In other words, how is that to be overcome which, if it were to run its course on its own, would entrap man in the subhuman?

A turnaround must take place. The Michael festival must take on a particular meaning. This meaning emerges when one can perceive the following: Natural science has led man to recognize one side of world evolution, for example, that out of lower animal organisms higher more perfect ones have evolved in the course of time, right up to man; or, to take another example, that during the development of the embryo in the mother's body the human being passes through the animal forms one after the other. That, however, is only one side. The other side is what comes before our souls when we say to ourselves: “Man had to evolve out of his original divine-human beginning.” If this (see drawing) indicates the original human condition (lighter shading), then man had to evolve out of it to his present state of unfoldment. First, he had gradually to push out of himself the lower animals, then, stage by stage what exists as higher animal forms. He overcame all this, separated it out, thrust it aside (darker shading). In this way he has come to what was originally predestined for him.

It is the same in his embryonic development. The human being rejects, each in its turn, everything that he is not to be. We do not, however, derive the real import of present-day nature-knowledge from this fact. What then is the import of modern nature-knowledge. It lies in the sentence: You behold in what nature-knowledge shows you that which you need to exclude from knowledge of man.

What does this imply? It implies that man must study natural science. Why?—When he looks into a microscope he knows what is not spirit. When he looks through a telescope into the far spaces of the universe, there is revealed to him what spirit is not. When he makes some sort of experiment in the physics or chemistry laboratory, what is not spirit is revealed to him. Everything that is not spirit is manifest to him in its pure form.

In ancient times when men beheld what is today nature, they still saw the spirit shining through it. Today we have to study nature in order to be able to say: “All that is not spirit.” It is all winter wisdom. What pertains to summer wisdom must take a different form. In order that man may be spurred toward the spirit, may get an impulse toward the spirit, he must learn to know the unspiritual, the anti-spiritual. And man must be sensible of things that no one as yet admits today. For example, everyone says today: “If I have some sort of tiny living creature too small to be seen with the naked eye and I put it under a microscope, it will be enlarged for me so that I can see it.”—Then, however, one must conceive: “This size is illusory. I have increased the size of the creature, and I no longer have it. I have a phantom. What I am seeing is not a reality. I have put a lie in place of the truth!”—This is of course madness from the present-day point of view, but it is precisely the truth.

If we will only realize that natural science is needed in order from this counter-image of the truth to receive the impulse toward the truth, then the force will be developed which can be symbolically indicated in the overcoming of the Dragon by Michael.

But something else is connected with this which already stands in the annals in what I might call a spiritual way. It stands there in such a form, however, that when man no longer had any true feeling for what lives in the year's changing seasons, he related the whole thing instead to the human being. What leads to “Enlightenment” was replaced by the concept of “Wisdom” [called “Prudence” in English practice]; then what leads to “Knowledge” was replaced by the concept of “Courage” [“Fortitude”]; “Temperance” stayed the same (see diagram 1); and what corresponded to “Repentance” was replaced by the concept “Justice.”

Here you have the four Platonic concepts of virtue: Wisdom [Prudence], Fortitude, Temperance, Justice. What man had formerly received from the life of the year in its course was now taken into man himself. It will come into consideration just in connection with the Michaelmas festival, however, that there will have to be a festival in honor of human courage, of the human manifestation of the courage of Michael. For what is it that holds man back today from spirit-knowledge?—Lack of soul courage, not to say soul cowardice. Man wants to receive everything passively, wants to set himself down in front of the world as if it were a movie, and wants to let the microscope and the telescope tell him everything. He does not want to temper the instrument of his own spirit, of his own soul, by activity. He does not care to be a follower of Michael. This requires inner courage. This inner courage must have its festival in Michaelmas. Then from the Festival of Courage, from the festival of the inwardly courageous human soul, there will ray out what will give the other festivals of the year also the right content.

We must in fact continue the path further; we must take into human nature what was formerly outside. Man is no longer in such a position that he could develop the knowledge of Nature only in autumn. It is already so that in man today things lie one within the other, for only in this way can he unfold his freedom. Yet it nevertheless holds true that the celebrating of festivals, I might say in a transformed sense, is again becoming necessary.

If the festivals were formerly festivals of giving by the divine to the earthly, if man at the festivals formerly received the gifts of the heavenly powers directly, so today, when man has his capacities within himself, the metamorphosis of the festival-thought consists in the festivals now being festivals of remembrance or admonition.*³ In them man inscribes into his soul what he is to consummate within himself.

And thus again it will be best to have as the most strongly working festival of admonition and remembrance this festival with which autumn begins, the Michaelmas festival, for at the same time all Nature is speaking in meaningful cosmic language. The trees are becoming bare; the leaves are withering. The creatures, which all summer long have fluttered through the air, as butterflies, or have filled the air with their hum, as beetles, begin to withdraw; many animals fall into their winter sleep. Everything becomes paralyzed. Nature, which through her own activity has helped man during spring and summer—Nature, which has worked in man during spring and summer, herself withdraws. Man is referred back to himself. What must now awaken when Nature forsakes him is courage of soul. Once more we are shown how what we can conceive as a Michael festival must be a festival of soul-courage, of soul-strength, of soul-activity.

This is what will gradually give to the festival thought the character of remembrance or admonition, qualities already suggested in a monumental saying by which it was indicated that for all future time what previously had been festivals of gifts will become, or should become, festivals of remembrance. These monumental words, which must be the basis of all festival thoughts, also for those which will arise again,—this monumental saying is: “This do in remembrance of Me.” That is the festival thought which is turned toward the memory-aspect.

Just as the other thought that lies in the Christ-Impulse must work on livingly, must reform itself and not be allowed simply to remain as a dead product toward which we look back, so must this thought also work on further, kindling perceptive feeling and thought, and we must understand that the festivals must continue in spite of the fact that man is changing, but that because of this the festivals also must go through metamorphoses.

• 1. The third of the cardinal or “Platonic” virtues, called in Greek Sophrosyne, in English, Temperance or moderation, in German is Besonnenheit. According to Steiner, Besonnenheit is “enfilling one's impulses with the degree of consciousness possible.” “A man who rules his impulses through reflective thinking, feeling and perceiving is a man who is ‘besonnen.’” (From Das Raetsel des Menschen, 6th August, 1916). See also Spiritual Foundation of Morality by Steiner.
• 2. Because of Rudolf Steiner's lectures referring to “The Dream Song of Olaf &Åsteson” (December 26, 1911 and January 7, 1913), this unique poem of initiation experience has been translated into English.
• 3. Feste der Erinnerungen (a plural form). Erinnerung has two shades of meaning. One is “recollection” or “remembrance”; the other “admonition” or “reminder.” Both elements seem to apply in this passage.

Emil Bock: There are a couple of questions, about meanings in the seven sacraments for example, then also about the difference between Luther's idea of salvation and the idea of salvation in Anthroposophy, as seen in Paul's experience of Christ.

Constantin Neubaus asked Dr. Steiner to say something further about meaning in the sacraments and the consecration; he would be grateful to hear more about consecrated water, the Eucharist, the importance of the mass and prayers for the dead, and about celibacy and marriage.

A participant asked, with reference to what Dr. Steiner had related, having seen how the Host acquired an aura during the celebration: how would this be if the priest did not have complete dignity?

Another participant asked for some insight into the communications of the priest with those who have died.

Rudolf Steiner:These questions will all be addressed. In what sense are you referring to this communication with those who have died?

A participant: Like you also have in the Catholic Church, in relation to the priest's help with the dead, with the sacraments of the dying.

Another participant mentioned that the question has been raised several times regarding the cosmic significance of the sun and moon standing still in Joshua.

Another participant declared he had not understood something in the morning's lecture, regarding the statement: "The human beings ever more lost the capability to manifest the divine in themselves" and he wanted to know, what this meant: the divine manifesting itself within.

[ 1 ] Rudolf Steiner: This is only the explanation of a statement which should be taken this way: in olden times the earthly evolution of humanity experienced right into their very own form, that actually, if I could express it this way, their skin enveloped divine wisdom. This became particularly strongly expressed in the terminology being used, which is really a mystery-terminology: Man is a temple of God.—So, this immediate living-within something which originated out of the divine predecessor of human beings, was experienced in human beings. Then came the time when only a few chosen ones were ascribed with the possibility of experiencing such divinity. Actually, those who belonged to the mysteries during the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were completely convinced that people in their earthly form could no longer harbour a divine wisdom within, because of the decline gradually taking place up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Because of this, the time epoch can be characterised by saying: the earthly human being would have lost what had been its divine being in olden times, had the Mystery of Golgotha not taken place—in contrast to those with knowledge who said: the last one who comes from outside of this, to fill a human body, would become the first.—Then the earth would have been in a declining evolution, which means plunged into its downfall. This is what can be added as a clarification to the words.

[ 2 ] However, all these things which have been brought forward now—and I ask that you make notes in advance of such questions and remarks—are actually in need of real and factual answers before we can continue to enter into the essence of the sacraments. Allow me, as if by insertion, to enter a little into the essence of the sacraments today. In this way we will possibly find it easier to discover answers regarding the consecrated water, sign of the cross, the Eucharist, mass offering and so on.

[ 3 ] You do know of course that the Catholic Church acknowledges seven sacraments. This adaptation of seven sacraments—and we can only understand the sacramental when we approach them with such preparations as I would like to do now—these adaptations of the seven sacraments is based on the observation that we look at human life in seven stages. It is however impossible to enter into the essence of the sacraments, if you don't adapt a certain process in yourself, which has today more or less disappeared from current consciousness, a process which, I believe, also connects to that which is otherwise extraordinarily significant regarding our discussion content yesterday, because it relates to what I've only up to now fleetingly characterised as the actual foundation of Luther's soul battle.

[ 4 ] Speaking about evolution today, you actually have a one-sided imagination of it, to a certain extent. People believe, when they talk about evolution, they must have some starting point; and this starting point, like a seed, provides the second step, and from the second comes a third and so on. In this way evolution is considered to be a process of actually always going from one previous step resulting in the next one. This evolution concept is quite one-sided in contrast to reality because evolution does not happen this way. When you look at a plant and the condition of having fully developed its leaves, flowers, right up to organs of fruit, you could kind of think how this relates to the characteristics of the evolution concept. (He draws on the blackboard, on the left.) But you can't imagine it in the same way if you start from the root, actually from the seed, and then look for the seed in the flower once again. You have to admit: there is a condition in the unfolding growth process where it involves a greater unfolding outward, and there is another condition where it involves the slightest outwards unfolding. Then a rhythm of unfolding alternates with the reverse, where, in a way, the essence of the thing pulls back so that the outer sense perceptible element becomes the most inconspicuous imaginable, but the full power, so to speak, is concentrated to a point.

If you want to speak in the Goethean sense, you would say: At one stage in the unfolding, the spiritual is withdrawn and the sensory aspect developed in the farthest periphery (he draws on the blackboard) and here where growth has been drawn inward, is where the spiritual develops and the sensory is squeezed into the most inconspicuous germ imaginable. So, we certainly have to take into account that when we speak about a concept of development, we have to speak about rhythms, but we don't come right with the development concept if we actually look at what nature is. In that moment we come up with history, things get a bit more complicated. Take for instance the course of historic development in that time span which I've characterised yesterday, from Augustus to Luther. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Augustus ------------------------------------------ Luther

[ 5 ] It is extraordinarily important to visualise everything that was contributed in this period of time, outwardly and inwardly, in the outer cultural life and the inner spiritual and soul life, towards humanity. Just imagine, that in this time epoch there was also the infinitely significant mystic ... (stenographer record unclear, other than the name containing a B ) ... who lived at this time when the booklet was drafted which played a big role in Luther's point of view, called Theologia deutch, and then we can think about what directly resulted after this time as extraordinary, rising from the foundation of historical development in minds like Paracelsus, and Jakob Böhme, just afterwards. When we look at these things, then we have primarily the impression—we must have an impression—that there was during this period of western development a strong tendency towards turning inwardness. Souls turned inward. If you enter completely into such arguments as sermonized by for instance Johannes Tauler, you will discover an inward striving, a withdrawal from the outer things, a waiting until, one could call it, a sparkle arose which could then renew the human mind. I have also characterised this in my booklet about the Middle Age mystics. When you look at such inner striving as with Tauler, when you notice how he, after years during the course of his life, he had become ever more mature in his internalization, how he in quite a mysterious way met a person and how this person simply through an impression from something out of that already deepened interior was transformed, so that this created the occasion for a sermon which was described in such a way that all who listened in the church were as struck as if by a blow and some fell down as if dead. People were so struck within their souls that they fell into quite a faint.

If you envisage all of this you will find that during this time, an unbelievable internalization was happening in the lives of many people in the west. If I could tell you, my dear friends, in detail, what a roll this played in the entire development, in the reading, in interpretation, yes, even the dramatic performance of the gospel action of the Gospel of Luke, this inner most gospel, and when we look at the pastoral care of this time, then we certainly find the extraordinary characteristic of internalization being poured out over this entire time period. We then discover, as this period came to a close—it had prepared itself already from the 15th century onwards and came out in Luther's time—general culture took on a certain externalisation. In everything there developed the opposite of the internalisation of the Middle Ages. The people's gaze developed towards the outside; methods of observation were directed outward, less and less care and attention was applied to the inner life. So we have—and we are still within this process of externalisation in relation to cultural development—we clearly have historically two successive conditions which differ as much as the unfolded plant does from the plant contracted into the centre. So we have the same thing, in plants as in history, that during such a period of internalisation, like from Augustus to Luther—and this period of internalisation was particularly present despite everything I mentioned this morning—all the power which was inwardly concentrated, later comes out, later unfolds.

[ 6 ] My dear friends! Today we all work in what is outer culture, with forces which had been inwardly developed during the time from Augustinus to Calvin or up to Luther. When we look at developments in this way, then it disintegrates into an evolutionary state—that is the unfolding, it goes outwards—and a state of involution, so that the evolution is followed by involution. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Evolution
Involution

[ 7 ] Only when we do an overall study of the alternate rhythms from evolution to involution, we are able to fully understand development.

[ 8 ] The human being is a complicated being because he is actually a microcosm. What is regarded here as a concept of evolution and involution, takes on the most complicated form in the human being. This most complicated form we must first bring before our souls in a single imagination. Think for instance about birth. (He writes on the blackboard.)

1. Birth

[ 9 ] If we look at the meaning of the event of a birth, regarding the relationship formed out of embryonic life, to what is brought about between conception and actual birth, we have previous steps which were initially soul-spiritual in the human being, moving into the material aspect. There is an integration of the spiritual-soul orientation into the material orientation. This is certainly a complicated process which psychology hasn't yet studied properly, regarding its deeper meaning. I can admit that the development of the germ has not been studied completely. It is usually only studied by starting with the germ cell, briefly, the evolution is followed from the first germinal cell which has been fertilized through its formative elements up to the embryo's maturity when it is then pushed out. What is not fully studied is what actually happens in the mother's body in the Chorion and the amniotic glands as organs which are around the embryo and in their way are most perfect in the beginning of embryonic development but then become more complicated and are pushed out at the birth of the embryo.

What we have here in the germinal cell is certainly the rising evolution, while the involution is through the soul-spiritual of the organs by which they are first established in the mother's body, from the Chorion, from the Amnion, and then gradually moving to the actual egg nucleus, to the actual embryo, so that we have here an involution of the soul-spiritual into matter. This matter becomes pushed out and then we have the continuation of embryonic evolution. The embryo is born and now puts forward its forces, as I've already explained to you, which it had been developing during the embryonic phase. This continues into the development of speech and still remains available in our bodies until later. We carry within our entire earthly lifetime the forces that remain inside us as remnants of embryonic development: the forces of birth. These birth forces develop within us, evolve in us like a gift of nature. This happens, if I may use this expression which sounds somewhat trivial, out of itself. However, immediately, from taking our first breath, from being in contact with the outer world, other processes come into play, processes related to those of dying. From the beginning we also have forces of dying in us. In these forces of dying our soul-spiritual becomes involved in our exchanges with the outer world.

Through observation, through thinking, we allow dying processes to be integrated into us. This is the opposite process of the developmental process at birth. Like humanity developed since the time epoch a bit before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, humanity experienced those changes of which I have spoken, and people had to a certain extent turn the involution processes into something holy, in contrast to the contrasting evolutionary processes. Evolution is natural, it is a gift of nature; that which is given to us at birth and continues to work, is a gift of nature. If we begin to feel the involution process starting to take hold of us as a dying process is, then it must be sanctified since that divination of the world which I spoke to you about this morning, which means, it must be included into what comes out of the Christ impulse. So we see since the development of Christianity something which should be added into the sacraments due to this dying process, and that is the sacrament of baptism. We will still speak about the ritual involved. In order for us to say: what is an evolutionary process at birth, the baptism should take place as a process of involution. We should add to this rhythm in which we are placed in at birth, the repulsion through the pendulum of baptism. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Baptism

[ 10 ] The second evolutionary process which appears in our lives, which shows itself to great effect is when a person reaches puberty, when the physical body and astral body reach a certain development and the astral body starts in its development to introduce something quite particular, when also that which separates in the sleeping state, comes into a new relationship. During the state of sleep the physical body and ether bodies remain in bed while the astral body and ego leave. Human life consists of the intimate relationship between the physical and the ether bodies, but in a more loose connection to both the astral body and ego. While in a state of growing these four members are united, in the state of sleep the astral body and ego goes out so that their relationship is looser. However, this relationship comes into a modification, it only really matures in the 14, 15 or sixteenth year, then it comes in a real alternating process with what happens in sleep with the physical body lying asleep in bed.

The right harmony only appears around the age of 14, 15 or 16. The young person is taken hold of, by an inner strength, through which the physical body is permeated with the soul-spiritual, which means the astral with the ego-being. This is outwardly expressed in adolescence, and it is only an outer revelation while a complete transformation takes place in the whole person. This event which appears as an evolutionary process can be called maturity. (He writes on the blackboard.)

2. Maturity (adolescence)

[ 11 ] This is the evolutionary process. The corresponding process of involution as related to maturity, just as baptism relates to birth, is confirmation. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Confirmation

[ 12 ] Confirmation also has the task—and we will see with this in mind what a fitting ritual it can be—the task in the Christian sense to what can be given to the ego and astral body through which everything has evolved in a modified way between the ego and astral body, between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, having developed with the coming of maturity.

[ 13 ] We enter with this into an age in life where we have something else in relation to development. Our soul-spiritual becomes immersed in the physical bodily nature. The physical body captures our soul-spiritual; the soul spiritual is as a result connected in a certain way with the physical body. This is the condition of our development, because we, when we want to examine it as an evolutionary process, describe it as the soul-spiritual incorporation into the human being. We could say: the third evolutionary process is the incorporation. (He writes on the blackboard.)

3. Incorporation

[ 14 ] Added to this, if we now look for the corresponding process of involution, then we must above all see, my dear friends, that the human being, through the immersion of his soul-spiritual into the physical body, has evolved an admirable power in his being, continually being in the state of oscillation in which there is a return to the soul-spiritual, in the repetition of the re-immersion into the physical bodily nature so that it contains a rhythm, which threatens him to be either lost in the ecstatic soul-spiritual aspect or to fall back into the animalistic, in complete incorporation. Human beings need something which stand opposite this evolutionary process as a process of involution, and this process is reception to Holly Communion. The process of involution for the incorporation is Holy Communion. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Holy Communion

[ 15 ] In our discussion about evolution and what the case has been up to now, we could say the following. It is so, that the human being in his soul-spiritual nature, confronts the physical bodily nature at every moment; at every moment the human being must take care to move in the correct rhythm so that his or her soul-spiritual nature is not allowed to sink into animalism, or that the physical is left alone and to a certain extent the unworldly rises into the soul-spiritual which would weaken the soul-spiritual. Bringing the altar sacraments into the right rhythm is what the human being must look for in the reception of sacraments.

[ 16 ] With this, not the entire human evolution is given, because the complete human evolution includes that we not only in a single moment stand in this swing between the soul-spiritual and the physical bodily nature, but the complete development includes that we also, in time, could swing back again. We need reminders of previous earthly incarnations and earthly experiences. You only need to look at psychopathology and you will see what it means for people when their normal true recollection is ruined, undermined, somehow erased. These recollections certainly develop early and only those things connected to these recollections, intimately felt completely within, getting to complete grasps with it, only really happens after puberty. This is the difference, which today's modern psychology doesn't consider, between for instance what is present in a child's life of recollections up to 15 and 16 years of age, that it is different to what comes later when memories are again gathered so that through the recollections gathered, the I is actually firmly consolidated. In brief, we see that this becomes more and more consolidated, this which we call life's recollections. It's one of our necessities; it evolves out of our being—as humans. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Life's recollections

[ 17 ] The corresponding process of involution is experienced in Christianity as the sacrament of repentance. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Repentance

[ 18 ] Here the recollections of life are permeated with Christ; the process of recollection being permeated with Christ, lifts it into the moral realm. Not only is the person's I consolidated, but he is—through his complete lifting of his recollections towards bringing them into account in moral terms, through the process of the sacrament and developed through ritual, by developing the process towards the sacrament and asserting it through ritual worship—he is lead to the involution process of repentance. This process in the Catholic Church comprises various stages which all clearly start with a recollection. Repentance in Catholicism exists in the examination of conscience, in repentance, in the serious intention to discard the mistakes of which one has become aware in oneself, in what confession is—we still have to discuss this—and the retribution one imposes on oneself or is imposed by on one of the pastors. Through these steps, complete repentance comes about, and it is the expression for what the process of involution is supposed to be with regard to the process of the totality of memory's evolution, this means, what makes up the power of recollection in the human being.

[ 19 ] Here we have created, my dear friends, processes involved in the evolution of the human being since birth, and then we have that which he now returns to in a natural way as an act of involution. We have a succession of evolutions. Through memory the sequence of evolution enters deeply into inner man. Memory therefore represents an internalisation of what has unfolded outwardly through birth. Here we come to the fifth of a naturally unfolding process of involution; we come to death, which concludes the life of the individual. (He writes on the blackboard.)

5. Death

[ 20 ] Earlier evolutionary processes we've always contrasted with sacramental action and processes of involution; however, the evolutionary processes have gradually become similar to processes of involution. The process of involution during repentance is in a certain way the outer unfolding of quite an inner decisive recollection process; it is the process of involution which is slowly approached by the process of evolution. We need, when we now want the sacramental action for this natural involutionary process of death, to introduce it in a somewhat cultic, ritualistic form, in which something of a spiritual side of nature's knowledge can be perceived, which serve to confront the dying person and manage to do something to the dying person which is simultaneously stimulated in his soul-spiritual life, stirred by the natural processes of his physical bodily being. It shall, expressed in a rhythm, let the physical-bodily aspect disappear upon death, and the soul-spiritual in turn take shape. For certain reasons, which we will still discuss, one can always see in oils, in everything oil-like, that something leads back to the soul-spiritual. In nature as well, oiling processes are regarded as processes of salvation. Therefore, the holy last anointment is performed here. (He writes on the blackboard.)

Last anointment

[ 21 ] We can add, so to speak, the process of evolution to that of involution. [ 22 ] Thus, we have exhausted the individual life of a human being, and there are still two human relationships left that are no longer of an individual nature. The one relationship is where the human being, standing here on earth in his physical bodily being, actually treasures a soul-spiritual relationship in heaven, so that the umbilical cord to his soul spiritual, which had been severed, so to speak, now again is reconnected to the soul-spiritual. This doesn't involve individual people; it involves the relationship of exchange with the heavenly-spiritual. This is something which is present in all people, albeit unconsciously. If we were to be completely severed from the soul-spiritual, we would never find our way back, it is a deep process of involution which is eternally present in us, quite a hidden process, even more hidden than what happens in the inner soul life when the organism passes through death; for this reason it is a process which in the course of individual lives of people do not become conscious at all. For this, an outer evolutionary process must be looked for and this evolutionary process is given in the ritual of priest ordination. As the sixth one, we have a process which is given out of itself, as I said - you could call it a connection—and corresponding as its counter impulse or the outer evolutionary process, in the priest ordination. (He writes on the blackboard.)

6. Reconnection: Priest ordination

[ 23 ] Now as the seventh one we have an image of the earthly relationship given as a relationship between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily: this relationship is in nature's way given as the relationship between a man and a woman. For each true observation of the relationship between a man and a woman it is so, that the balance in the feminine swings more to the soul-spiritual side, and in the male, more to the physical-bodily nature. Yes, it is so. On earth, to a certain extent, the relationship is expressed between the human being and the spiritual world, and it is, I could say, that the woman has made one less step down into the physical life, than the man. One must say it actually differently, one must say: The descent into earthly life can be depicted by a definite boundary; the woman doesn't quite arrive at the boundary while the man crosses over it. This is actually the contrasting difference between a man and woman, expressed in a physical way. There is a certain boundary to reach, the woman doesn't quite manage it and the man crosses over it. Both bear a kind of imperfection within, between them a state of tension exists as a result. When this state of tension which exists naturally in a relationship between a man and woman, searches for a sacramental evolutionary value—this is a deeply hidden process of involution which we are pointing out here, when we indicate the manly and womanly—then we are given the sacrament of marriage. (He writes on the blackboard.)

7. Man and woman: marriage

[ 24 ] This is what has always been in Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism, in so far as it is to be applied to man, that man enters this world endowed with values partly through evolution, partly through values of involution, and to this must always be added, through the sacraments, the values of evolution to involution, and values of involution to evolution. Man equally speaks out of the foundation of his experience: the human being steps with his incomplete being fully into earthly existence; he or she must first be made into a complete being. He or she expresses their incompleteness at birth, in puberty, in incarnation, in memory and in death. To these things the human being, in order to live as complete physical-bodily-soul-spiritual beings, has to add, through sacramental ways, the baptism, confirmation, sacrament at the altar, repentance and last anointment.

With regard to the social sphere, man stands in an exceptional state of priesthood, where through outer signs done in a sacramental way, also in the priest ordination, the deeply hidden value of involution is present. In the healing of marriage, the sacrament should express how that which is only given in an incomplete value as involution in a man and a woman, is to be complemented by an external sacramental action.

[ 25 ] I ask you to take what I have initially presented to you not in a one-sided naturalistic way, otherwise you could of course say, it was all presented in a one-sided naturalistic way. If you grasp the outer natural world and the inner moral-religious world as one unit, then we always have a sacramental evolution value for an inner moral-religious value. By contrast, what we have as an expression of an outer form of evolution, is what we need to search for as a value of involution, that means, an internalisation in human beings of the outer evolution. For us it is really necessary to again accomplish the values of involution, through the sacraments.

My dear friends, why do moral and religious truths have so little power for modern man? They have little power because it is necessary that what come to man is not merely admonishment and a commandment, but that he becomes aware in this approach of an actual penetration with the Godhead taking place. This can take place in human consciousness only in sacramental actions.

[ 26 ] So, you have asked me to speak about these sacraments. The questions asked for, today, have largely not been answered, but they were spoken about as thoughts and experiences forming the foundations of what is sacramental. These fundamental experiences and fundamental thoughts as sacramental are alive no longer, basically no longer since the time—obviously, of course, with good reason—since the sacramental has become a subject of discussions. If today it can't be somehow intentional to take up all the sacraments outside the Catholic Church, then it must be considered how to again accomplish a real cult, a real ritual, because only these, as we will still see, actually can have a community building effect.

This is what I wanted to speak about as a foundation. We will go further into the questions which had been asked.

(Blackboard notes:)

1. Birth—Baptism
2. Adolescence—Confirmation
3. Incorporation—holy Communion
4. Life's recollections—Repentance
5. Death—Last anointment
6. Reconnection—Priest ordination
7. Man and Woman—marriage

What the original state of what is called “ancient wisdom” was and how it came to earth is today's topic.

There are two kinds of knowledge and realization. Let us imagine the inventor of a clock: he makes one, two, three clocks according to the plan that was originally present in his mind. First there was the thought, then the actual reality. This is one way of knowing something.

To get to know the other way, let us imagine that the watchmaker has died; the watches are there and someone else studies them, figures out the plan and makes other watches. He has the same knowledge but has obtained it in a different way; for him, the sensory perception was first, then the idea; for the other man, the idea was first.

These two ways of acquiring knowledge also exist in the great universe. Such a thought, which corresponds to the laws of reality and is there before the sensory object, is called “intuitive thought”. It is born of the spirit itself, a child of the mental world. The other is a child of the sensory world, it is called “inductive thought.

Now let us see how the difference between the above and the disciples would manifest itself. The inventor will be able to communicate his thoughts because he is the shaper, the creator, because he was there when the sensual arose from the mental. The one who has imitated will also / gap in the transcript /

The same difference is between the first teachers of humanity and all later ones. For the first teachers of humanity were involved in creation, were among those who formed, they participated when the world was still a cosmic thought. They [gap in the transcript]

The first Arhat or Maha were involved in the creation of the world. In the middle of the third root race, when the human kingdom came into being, A also embodied himself.

They brought knowledge from the workshop with them, and that is “ancient wisdom”; they brought with them what they had experienced.

The knowledge that one gains afterwards is the same as that which the original great spirits have from the laws of creation themselves. [Gap in the transcript] If you really know something, then you also have the laws by which the world is created. Manas and Mahat are therefore the same in content. Only Manas is in us: I. And Mahat is spread out as a tableau over the whole world. Only the way they are is different, the content is the same. The more we increase in knowledge, the more /gap in the transcript]

What was taught at that time from the creative activity of the sculptors was the first wisdom, and it is therefore more than all science can acquire. This occult sentence, that the world has its origin in cosmic thoughts and that knowledge culminates in human thought formation.

The I enters into the formation of the world; outside of the I - Mahat. The I, the creator, encompasses Mahat. The development consists in the I expanding its sphere over the whole of Mahat, and in the end Mahat itself is within the I. What is the difference? Beginning: Mahat is outside of the I, end: Mahat is in the I.

The only difference between the beginning and the end is that the ego sacrificed itself as a special being and, as a result of this sacrifice, acquired Mahat as its content.

The process of world formation consists in the fact that the I, which was previously excluded from Mahat, afterwards has Mahat as its content. Not Mahat, but the I has undergone a development. Meaningful sentence: The world is enclosed in cosmic thought formation [gap in the transcript], the I is outside.

This is only partly true, because in reality the ego is a part of Mahat. With us, every thought is a part of Mahat; let us try to symbolize one as content. Let us take the sentence: Evolution consists in the fact that each part of Mahat grows to such an extent that it becomes identical with the whole Mahat. The assimilation of all individuals to the whole Mahat takes place. The great sacrifice takes place. The whole Mahat gives its essence to all parts, that is development. The purpose of the world is that the whole gives its essence to each of its parts. It is certain that the whole was perfect at the beginning; but if it had no parts, it would remain as it is. Since it has them, it has given each of the parts its whole being, so that its own perfection is ultimately contained in each of its parts.

Beginning: Mahat is outside the “I”

End: Mahat is in the “I”

The only difference between the beginning and the end is that the “I” sacrificed itself as a separate being and, as the result of this sacrifice, received Mahat as its content.

Evolution consists of each part of Mahat growing to such an extent that it becomes identical with the whole Mahat. The “great sacrifice” takes place: the whole Mahat gives its essence to all its parts. This is development.