The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We will endeavour in contemplation to retrace the stages of man's evolution to the Logos by Whom this world was created.

Modern exoteric science goes back to the Stone Age—an epoch when man lived in caves, using shaped stones as his only instruments. His existence was primitive in the extreme, his horizon narrow, his thought limited to the search for food and means for defending his life.

Occult science leads us back beyond this Stone Age to the epoch of Atlantis. In those times, man's physical appearance was not at all the same as it is today. It is known that the brow of prehistoric man was not developed, for, in effect, the development of the brow and forehead runs parallel with the development of the brain and of thinking. In days of yore, the physical brain was much smaller than the corresponding ether-form which extended beyond it on all sides. In the course of evolution, the etheric and physical brains have become more or less equal in size. A certain centre in the etheric brain which is now inside the skull, was in the evolution of Atlantean man, this centre moved to the interior of the skull. It was a moment of cardinal importance, for as soon as man began to think, to be conscious of his own being and to say ‘I,’ he began to associate ideas and to calculate—which he could not do before. On the other hand, the earliest Atlanteans possessed a far stronger and truer memory. Their knowledge was based, not upon the relations between facts but on their memory of these facts. They knew, by their memory, that a certain event would invariably give rise to a series of others; but they did not grasp the causes of these facts, nor could they think about them. In addition to this powerful memory, they possessed another faculty—a mighty power of will. Today, man can no longer work directly with his will upon the life forces. He cannot, for example, hasten the growth of plants by an act of will. The Atlantean had this power and was, moreover, able to draw from the plants ether forces which he knew how to use. He did this instinctively, without the help of intellect and the faculties of logical reasoning which are associated today with what we call the ‘scientific mind.’ To the measure in which intellectuality, the faculty of reflective thought and calculation unfolded in the men of Atlantis, to that measure their powers of instinctive clairvoyance declined.

If we go still further back in the history of Atlantis, we come to a very remote period when expression through speech, that is to say, expression in articulate sounds, first became possible. This was the age when man began to walk upright, for speech and the expression of articulate sounds can only be a faculty of beings who stand upright.

Before the great Atlantean race, of which all European and Asiatic races were the offshoots, there existed another continent and other peoples, still nearer to the animal nature—the Lemurian race. Science only admits its existence as a hypothesis. Certain islands to the South of Asia and the North of Australia are, nevertheless, evidences of this continent; they are the metamorphosed remains of old Lemuria. The temperature of the Earth in those times was much higher than it is today. The atmosphere was vaporous, full of currents. In Lemuria, we find rudimentary human forms, breathing not through the nasal organs but through organs more like gills.

In the course of human evolution, organs are perpetually being transformed both as to character and appearance. Thus primitive man walked on four feet; he could not utter articulate sounds; he had no ears with which to hear. Movement in the semi-liquid, semi-gaseous element surrounding him was made possible by an organ which enabled him to float and swim. When the elements differentiated and man found himself on solid earth, this organ changed into the lungs, the gills into ears and the frontal parts of his structure into arms and hands—free instruments for action. Besides this, he began to utter articulate sounds—the words of speech.

This great transformation was of cardinal importance to man. In Genesis (II.7), we read: “And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” This passage describes the period when the gills once possessed by man changed into lungs and he began to breathe the outer air. Simultaneously with the power to breathe, he acquired an inner soul and with this soul, the possibility of inner consciousness, of becoming aware of the self living within the soul.

When man began to breathe air through the lungs, his blood was invigorated and it was then that a soul higher than the group-soul of the animals, a soul individualised by the Ego-principle, could incarnate in him to carry evolution forward to its fully human and then divine phases. Before the body breathed air, the soul of man could not descend to incarnation, for air is an element enfilled with soul. At that time, therefore, man actually inbreathed the divine soul which came from the heavens. The words of Genesis, in their evolutionary sense, are to be taken quite literally. To breathe is to be permeated with Spirit. This truth was the basis of the exercises given in ancient systems of yoga. These exercises were founded upon the rhythm of breathing, their purpose being to render the body fit to receive the impouring Spirit. When we breathe, we commune with the world-soul. The inbreathed air is the bodily vesture of this higher soul, just as the flesh is the vesture of man's lower being.

These changes in the breathing-process mark the transition from ancient consciousness which was merely a play of pictures, to consciousness as it is in our time. Sense perceptions are received from the body; consciousness has a purely objective character. Consciousness in pictures (imaginative) created its own inner content by means of an inherent, plastic force. The further we go into the past, the more we find the soul of man living, not within him, but around him. We reach a point when the sense-organs existed only in germ and when man merely received from external objects impressions which gave rise to attraction or repulsion, sympathy or antipathy. The movements of this being—whom we cannot really call ‘man’ in our sense of the word—were governed by these feelings of attraction or repulsion. He had no reasoning faculty and the pineal gland—an organ of cardinal importance in those times—was his only ‘brain’.

The existence of this imaginative consciousness is the answer to endless philosophical discussions on the objective nature and reality of the world and it is the refutation of all purely subjectivist philosophies, such, for instance, as that of Berkeley. Two poles of being and of life are essential to evolution. The ‘subjective universal’ becomes the objective universe; man proceeds, first, from the subjective to the objective and he will finally be led from the objective to the subjective by the development of Spirit-Self (Manas), Life-Spirit (Budhi), Spirit-Man (Atma).

Dream-consciousness is an atavistic survival of the picture consciousness of olden times. One quality of this picture consciousness is that it is creative. It creates forms and colours which do not exist in physical reality.

Objective consciousness is by nature analytic subjective consciousness is by nature plastic and has magical power. (This is indicated by the etymology of the word ‘image’). The subjective, plastic consciousness of man was thus superseded by objective, analytic consciousness. The procedure by which the soul (which, to begin with, enveloped man like a cloud) subsequently penetrated into the physical body, may be compared with that of a snail secreting its own shell and then shrinking back inside it. The soul first gave form to the body and then penetrated within this body, having prepared the organs of perception from outside. The power of sight with which the human eye is endowed today is the same power which once was exercised upon the eye from without, in order that it might take shape.

The change from outer to inner activity of soul is expressed by a hieroglyph. This is the sign of Cancer in the Zodiac, expressing a dual action or movement—one from without inwards, the other from within outwards.

The middle of the third (Lemurian) epoch was the time when the soul passed into its self-created dwelling place and began to ‘animate’ the body from within. Before this point of time we find an astral humanity indwelling a purely astral Earth. Before that again, man and Earth existed merely in a devachanic condition. There was as yet no picture consciousness. Cosmic thoughts poured into and through the being of man. His higher soul was still part and parcel of the whole Cosmos, participating in cosmic thought.

The further we retrace the parallel development of man and Earth, the more do we find them existing in a fluid, embryonic condition and the nearer to Spirit. Today, we have reached the lowest point on the curve of descent; man and Earth have reached the greatest degree of solidification and are about to re-ascend, through the action of individual will, towards the Spiritual.

What underlies this great process of evolution? Where was the home of human beings when, at the beginning, they existed merely in germ? Whence has man proceeded? Who created him? It is here that we must try to envisage a life and power of manifestation infinitely more sublime than all human, nay, than all planetary life. This power is the Logos.

In what does human and planetary life differ from the life of the Logos?—This question would seem to demand a flight into the unknown, into a universe of another order. And yet there are analogies which help us to understand or at least to divine something of the creative power of the Logos.

Let us try to envisage an all-embracing mind, a mind to which all earthly and planetary experiences are known. Such a mind could live through all and every form of evolution. But with this power alone, it could not rise beyond the point of the creation of man and of the planetary system. It would remain in the sphere of what can be and has been proved by man. Human intelligence cannot pass beyond this limit.

But we can rise to a consciousness other than that wherein our experiences are merely realised in the mind. There are certain states of creative activity in which the spirit of man can give birth to something new, something never seen before. Such, for instance, is the consciousness of a sculptor at the moment he conceives or sees in a flash the form of a statue before his inner eye. He has never seen a model, he creates his statue. Such too, is the consciousness of a poet who conceives a poem in one flash of inspiration, in creative, spiritual vision.

This creative power is not generated by any intellectual idea but rather by a spiritual sense,—Think of a hen sitting on its eggs. It is wholly given up to this brooding activity and is filled with a kind of warm, almost voluptuous pleasure in which there arises a dreamy pre-vision of the hatching of the little winged chicken. This bliss in the work of creation exists at every stage of cosmic life, and warmth pours from it. In the sphere of Cosmic Intelligence—which may be conceived as the world of thoughts accessible to the higher Self (Manas)—this warmth seems to pervade the whole universe, emanating from the creative life of soul (Budhi). We can divine the presence of a creative sphere in existence before our Earth and ‘brooding’ over it. This is to ascend from Spirit-Self to Life-Spirit, and from Life-Spirit to Spirit-Man.

The Ego or ‘I’ Principle of man is created by the third Logos.

We should try to conceive the power of the higher Ego as being suffused through the whole universe as a life-begetting warmth and then we reach the conception of the second Logos by Whom macrocosmic life is quickened and Who is reflected in the creative activities of the human soul.

The one primal source and centre of manifestation is the first Logos—the unfathomable Godhead.

In every age these three Divine principles have been represented in occultism by these three signs:—

In the two preceding talks I tried to explain the basic symbols in Goethe's profound fairy tale. We have seen, how Goethe, how the mystics of all times have given the truths which they counted among the deepest ones in characteristic coloured symbols.

Today you allow to me to add two other fairy tales: The New Melusine and The New Paris. It may seem that something unnatural, something worked out is in these fairy tales, but you will see, if you delve in these pictures that also here only an esoteric, mystic interpretation enables us to give an explanation.

Goethe inserted the fairy tale The New Melusine at a typical passage of Meister Wilhelm's Journeyman Years (1807, 1821, 1829). Who penetrates into Goethe's mind will never abandon himself to the superficial view that Goethe deals only with putting pictures next to each other like in a kaleidoscope, that it concerns a mere play with pictures. But he realises that Goethe expressed his most profound inside.

A man relates it who wants to develop his soul to higher capacities and, hence, “refrains from speaking as far as speech expresses something ordinary or accidental, however, another talent of speech has developed to him that has a intentionally prudent and pleasant effect.” Like this man, also Wilhelm Meister deals with secret societies, is directed by mysterious guides.

The man repeats and arranges the rich experiences of his life calmly. Imagination combines with it and gives life and movement to the events. He is a philosopher who speaks in this fairy tale to us, and at the moment when in the end of the story he gets the longing for developing his soul to a higher condition, he also understands the ideals of the philosophers.

Let now the fairy tale of The New Melusine pass our souls in its main trains which deeply lead us into Goethe's nature.

A young man gets to know a strange woman in an inn who deeply impresses him. He sees her carrying a small box and keeping it carefully. He asks whether he cannot do anything for her, to oblige her. She asks him to continue the journey with the small box instead of her because she has to stay here some days. However, he should always take a special room for the small box and close it with a special key, so that the door cannot be opened with any other key. He departs. On the way his money runs out; the lady appears and helps him. Again he spends the money; he believes that in the small box something could be that may be sold for money. He discovers a crack in the small box, looks into it, something bright gleams in it. He sees a chamber with many dwarfs, a girl among them. It exists in double figure (as lady and as dwarfish girl), outside in a big, inside in a small size. He is deeply horrified; the lady appears again, and he receives explanation about the small box. The lady says that her true figure is that of the dwarfish girl.

This race of dwarfs has been there long before the human beings, when the earth was still in the igneous state. It had not been able to hold their ground because a race of dragons waged war on them. To save the dwarfs a race of giants is created, however, these soon position themselves on the side of the dragons. Hence, for the protection of the dwarfs who withdrew into the mountains still a new race of the knights or the race of heroes as it is called in the original version had to originate. With it dragons and giants, on the one hand, dwarfs and heroes, on the other hand, face each other. However, the dwarfs become smaller and smaller, so that it became necessary that every now and then somebody of them comes to the upper world to get new force from the realm of the human beings.

The young man wants to combine with the lady, and after some other adventures she says to him that he himself must become a dwarf. She slips a ring on his finger, the young man becomes small like a dwarf and enters into the world which he has seen in the small box. Now he is united with the lady. But longing for the land of the human beings soon awakes in him, he gets a file, saws through the ring, shoots up suddenly and is a human being again.

Goethe makes an interesting remark at the end of the fairy tale when in the young man the longing awakes for being a human being again. This remark is important to understand the fairy tale. He lets the young man say: “now I understood for the first time what the philosophers might understand by their ideals by which the human beings are supposed to be tormented so strongly. I had an ideal of myself, and appeared to myself sometimes in the dream as a giant!”

We want to see now what Goethe wanted to say with this fairy tale. The race of dwarfs, created before dragons, giants and human being, leads us to the track. The people of the dwarfs “is still active and busy since time immemorial. But, in olden times, their most famous works were swords which pursued the enemy if one threw them to him, invisibly and mysteriously binding chains, and impenetrable shields. Now, however, they occupy themselves chiefly with things of comfort and finery.” There it is pointed to that which the mystics call the “sparklet” in the human soul, to the self of the human being, which God sank in the human body. This self of the human being had magic powers, secret magic forces once; now it serves to make the earth in all cultural works subject to the human being; in all that the human mind, the self works.

What is the small box? A world, a small world, indeed, but an entire world. The human being is a microcosm, a small world in a big one. The small box is nothing but a picture of the human soul. The human reason, the present consciousness, as we have got to know it in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake in the wife of the old man, designs pictures of the whole big world, pictures on the small scale. What is summarised in the human soul as the sum of the thoughts? It is the spiritual spark. If we saw into the human soul, we would discover the spiritual spark with the seeds of the future stages. This spark was enkindled in distant past in the human being who was only gifted with a vague dream consciousness. This spiritual spark which smoulders in the human soul preceded all physical states. Compared with the future size, with the perfection of the human being is that which lives today in him only seed, only something dwarfish.

There were other human races once; before our age the Atlanteans and the Lemurians lived et etcetera In the middle of the third, the Lemurian race the endowment with the spiritual spark, with the consciousness occurred. The self is in the human being the seed of the eternal which is able to rise by development of the human being to self-conscious life.

This consciousness came from another world, preceded the origin of the human being and was there earlier than the other components of the human being (kama manas). This self-consciousness is paired with passion even today. The true philosopher strives for freeing the divine in the human being from the sensuous, so that it realises its divine origin; manas is released from kama. Then this released manas develops buddhi from itself, the consciousness of being in the divine world to strive then to atma.

We know that this spiritual entity of the human being experienced the most different forms. One of these stages is called that of the dragons. Also in the Secret Doctrine by H. P. Blavatsky we hear of igneous dragons as symbols of the time in which the human being descended from his higher spirituality .

The way through the raw physical figure is shown with the giants. The human being must be refined, he rises up to finer and finer figures, he becomes the hero, the knight. These spiritual knights have always tried to form an alliance with the ideal of true humanity; they should live with the dwarfs in good harmony. “And it is found that afterwards giants and dragons, as well as the knights and dwarfs have always held together.”

Now the woman tells “that everything that has been big once must become small and decrease; thus we are also in the case that we always decrease since the creation of the world and become smaller, above all the royal family.” Hence, a princess of the royal house must be sent “every now and then to the country to get married with an honourable knight, so that the race of dwarfs would be refreshed again and saved from total expiration.” For the later-born brother has been so small, “that the attendants have lost him even from the nappies and one does not know where he has got to.”

Now a ring is brought the ring is always a symbol of the personality and by this ring the dwarf becomes a human being and combines with the spiritual knight.

In what way does the race of dwarfs develop? It goes through the physical humanity, through the different states of consciousness. In what way does the present consciousness develop? By the law of the karmic human development. We consider it at an example at first. The child learns to read and write; the efforts, the exercises which it does, all that passes; what has remained is the ability to read and to write. The human being has taken up the fruit of his efforts. What was outside at first, in the physical nature, has become a part of his.

“You are tomorrow what you think and act today” or as the Bible (Galatians 6:7) expresses it: “everyone reaps what he sows.”

We are the products of past times. Our soul would be empty if it did not collect experience from the external world. The soul would die away if it did not take up the lessons from the outside world.

If we want to make the things which we experience really our own, we must process them. This is the law of evolution and involution by which we increase our being. We have to collect force from the surroundings. We collect experiences in the outside world to make them our spiritual property. Then the mind processes the experience, which he has collected to return over and over again to the outside world, in the hours of leisure. Our concepts would atrophy if we withdrew from the outside world. It is a spiritual respiratory process, a “giving and taking.” We develop our inside world outwardly, we soak up the outside world. Goethe showed this evolution and involution process in this fairy tale in important way. The words of the young man concerning the ideals point to it. Ideals are what is not yet, what should be realised in future. What the human beings lifts out above all is the possibility that he puts ideals, is the possibility to approach a higher future. Because the human being gives reality the possibility to grow into a higher future, he cares for idealism.

Goethe also nicely expressed this truth in the fairy tale The New Paris. In this fairy tale Goethe speaks of himself. You find it in the outset of Poetry and Truth. Shortly before, in Poetry and Truth, the young child Goethe tries “to approach the great God of nature, the creator and preserver of heaven and earth” setting up an altar. “Natural products should represent the world allegorically, about these a flame should burn and signify the human soul longing for its creator.” The boy lights the flame of the little aromatic candles in the light of the rising sun. But he damages some things, and concludes that “it is generally dangerous to want to approach God on such ways.” It was a certain fact to Goethe that one can approach the divinity only if the human being awakes the abilities slumbering in him as we could show that in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Also in The New Paris he points to this way.

In the outset of the fairy tale, Goethe describes how the god Mercury appears to him as boy at Whitsun Sunday in the dream and gives him three nice apples, a red, a yellow and a green one. They change in his hand into precious stones and he sees three female figures in them for which he should select three worthy young men at Mercury's behest.

While he admires them, they disappear from him; the fourth female being appears, dances on his hand and gives him a slap on the forehead, because he wants to catch it, so that he loses consciousness.

When he awakes, he dresses himself festively to make visits and comes before the gate where he finds a strange gate in the wall. It has no key.

A man with a long beard opens from within; he resembles an Oriental, however, he crosses himself and shows in such a way that he is a Christian. He shows the marvellous garden to the boy. From the bushes the birds shout quite clearly: “Paris, Paris”, then again “Narcissus, Narcissus.”

The new Paris now sees an even more marvellous garden behind a kind of living wall. He asks whether he is allowed to enter. The old man permits it, after he has taken off hat and sword. Led by the hand of the old man, he sees even more marvellous things. He sees behind a fence of swords and partisans an even nicer garden, surrounded by a canal. Now he must put on another robe; he receives a kind of oriental costume. Three strange ropes are shown to him as warning. Now the swords and partisans put themselves over the water and form a golden bridge, and he enters. Over there the girl meets him that he has had dancing on his hand and which has escaped from him. It leads him to the three young ladies from the apples who are dressed here in suitable garments and play certain instruments.

The girl who he has recognised as belonging to him refreshes him with fruits. He delights in marvellous music. Then he and the girl begin a game with little warriors. Against the warning he and the girl gets in zeal; he destroys her fighters; they hurl themselves into the water, this foams, the bridge bursts on which the play took place, and the boy finds himself sodden and thrown out on the other side.

The old man comes, threatens with the three ropes which should punish that who betrays his trust. The boy escapes, while he says that he is chosen to find three worthy young men for the three young ladies. Now he is politely led out of the door. The old man shows him different marks to find the gate again. The significance of their positions to each other points to the medieval astrology/astronomy.

When the boy returns, the gate is no longer there, the three objects, plate, well and trees are differently positioned to each other. However, he believes to note that after some time they have changed their positions a little bit, and he hopes that once all marks will coincide. He closes typically: “Whether I can tell to you what takes place further on, or whether it is expressly forbidden to me, I cannot say.”

The fairy tale, which is written in 1811, shows in every line that we have to search something deeper in it. Not without reason Goethe tied it on the legend of Paris, changed it in such a way not without reason. The legend of Paris and Helena, of the Trojan War, is known. Paris has to pass the apple to the most beautiful one of three goddesses; in return he wins Helena. Goethe reversed the matter, three, later four young women are there for whom the new Paris should choose the young men. The boy is led into a kind of mystery that is triply enclosed, he must always meet new conditions. A kind of war game develops, an image not a real war. Let us now pursue the fairy tale step by step.

While Goethe says that the contents of the fairy tale come from the god Mercury, he points to the fact that he perceives that which he experiences in this fairy tale as a message of the divinity. Mercury says to the young man that he were sent by the gods to him with an important order.

Goethe always wants to represent the states of human consciousness by women. In this fairy tale are also four young women who meet the young man immediately in the beginning, as sent from the god Mercury. Significantly, Mercury gives him apples at first. The apples change into wonderful precious stones, namely a red, a yellow, and a green one. Then the three precious stones become three beautiful young women whose clothes have the colours of the precious stones. However, they waft away from the young man when he wants to retain them. But instead of theirs a fourth young woman appears who then becomes his guide.

Also in The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily Goethe points to four states of consciousness of the human soul using four female figures. In The New Paris these four women are characterised even more intimately by the mystic colours which they wear. If we want to understand the nature of these women closer as well as the colours which they wear, we have to look at states of consciousness which the human being has presently, and those which he can acquire to himself developing his soul forces.

Today, humanity lives on the earth in the mineral cycle; the human being is related to the mineral by means of his physical body. All substances that are found in the physical human body in chemical compounds may they be salts, sorts of lime, metals et etcetera-, are also found outside in nature. The human soul lives within this physical body. From incarnation to incarnation the human soul lives a life between birth and death again and again in a body that it receives at birth or already at conception.

In every incarnation, the human soul has to go through a plenty of experiences. It thereby becomes richer and richer. One can also say that it thereby becomes purer and purer, because the soul living originally in raw desires and impulses appears then within a cultural world in a new body again, lives differently in this cultural world than, for example, within a body that belongs to a savage tribe. The human soul lives now in kama-manas, that is in a spirituality that is still used, indeed, to satisfy the impulses and passions of the human being. But more and more the longing also arises in the human soul to ascend to a higher spirituality. This soul state is expressed in esotericism with the red colour which shines through from within no dead red colour , a bright one, illuminated from within. The red colour signifies the consciousness for the astral world in the initiatory knowledge. If the human being takes his soul contents, his inner soul-life less and less from the physical surroundings, if he kindles an internal, spiritual life in his soul, this life of the human soul is signified yellow, again a bright, beaming yellow colour.

If the human being has achieved to live no longer in his narrow stubbornness, if he feels linked in sympathy with the whole world, if he feels like merging in the universe, this state of the human soul is signified in esotericism with a nuance of green, with a bright green colour. This is the colour which shows the human soul in the aura if the single consciousness pours out itself in the whole world.

Thus these women who are also precious stones, are signs of that which the young man should make of his soul. The present consciousness that leads us to all knowledge produces the connection with these soul conditions. It is symbolised by the fourth figure, by the small figure that “steps dancing to and fro“ on the finger points of the young man. This is the usual reason. The human being penetrates to something higher with the help of his present consciousness, it is the guide in the sanctum. Only the fourth state of consciousness that is represented by the girl already exists; the other three exist only as rudiments, are to be developed. There is something that appears like remembrance in the soul; something lives in the soul that points back to former states. At especially ceremonious moments the human being penetrates into these former soul conditions. The young man has got a particular order from Mercury. Goethe points here to his mission. He remembers former initiations.

In the fairy tale it is now told how the young man is led in miraculous way to a place that he has not entered up to now nay, at which he has never looked in the surroundings well-known to him. An old man meets him, leads him in the inside of a nice garden; at first he leads him within the garden in the round of an external circle. Birds call to the young man, the chatty starlings in particular; “ Paris! Paris!” the ones call and “Narcissus! Narcissus!” the others. The young man would also like to penetrate into the inside of the garden, he asks the old man for it; this accepts his request only on condition that he takes off his hat and sword and leaves them behind.

After it the old man leads him closer to the centre of the garden. There he finds a golden lattice. Behind it he sees a gently flowing water which shows a big number of golden and silver fish in its clear depths. He wants to go further to find out the state of the centre of the garden. The old man accepts it, but only on new conditions: the young man must change. He receives an oriental garment which he likes. Besides, he notices three green little ropes, any tied in a special way, so that it seems to be a tool to just not very desired use. On his question for the meaning of the ropes the old man says that it is for those who betray his confidence which one would be ready to give them here. Now the old man leads him to the golden lattice; these are two rows of golden spits, an external one and an internal one; both fall mutually, so that a bridge originates on which the young man comes now into the centre. Music sounds from a temple, and when he enters it, he sees three female figures sitting in a triangle; the miraculous music sounds from their instruments. Also the little guide is there again and takes care of the young man.

These are three fields of existence in which the boy is gradually introduced by the old man. He enters into the first region, the astral world, coming from the world of the everyday life; there he finds the animals who call to him. But he wants to go further into the centre of existence. Something in his soul pushes him that he should develop higher and higher. He brings the disposition of this rise with him since his birth; there he has come from a world, in which he was a psychic-spiritual being, into the darkening of his psycho-spiritual being caused by the physical world. But the urge for the spirit has remained awake in his soul it points the soul to the fact that there is something that it remembers at solemn moments of life. There also the memory of former stages of existence appears and that from these a mission results for the present stage of existence. The boy feels that this mission is based on experiences of his former incarnations. “I once received the initiation,” he has brought this initiation from former stages of existence with him. The memory of a previous initiation appears in him he got in a previous life. There the master took him also with the hand and led him from stage to stage. There he also had to perform the symbolic action: taking off the hat and sword. He had to take off everything that connects him with everyday things of life in the physical world. Somebody who ascends to a chela, to a spiritual student has always to do that; in his inside he has to do it. This is why he/she is called a “homeless human being;” he has put away what the usual human being calls his home. This does not mean tearing out from life; he/she stands firmly on his/her position, but his/her own life is lifted out from the surrounding world.

When he wants to be led by the master further on, he gets to the second stage; he has to completely get changed to put away all clothes of his present existence. He is fitted with a new set of oriental clothes. This is an indication that all impulses to attain new wisdom have come from the East to humankind. (Ex Oriente lux.)

The boy in his oriental clothes is endowed with the ancient wisdom which the old man with the lamp represents in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; he is endowed with a soul capacity remembering ancient initiatory states. He is led to the river that the soul world separates from the real spiritual world. The river of passions, the astral world, does not rage and roar, it is the “gently running waters which let see a big number of golden and silvery fish in its clear depths which gently moved to and fro, partly single ones, partly shoals of them.” This is an image how the human being can find valuable knowledge instead of raging passions if he has quietened down the astral world in himself.

Swords tilt downwards across the river separating the astral world from the internal, the spiritual realm. The human being has to sacrifice what he has, otherwise, for his protection. He has to sacrifice his personal ego; it has to become the bridge to the spiritual realm. He has to experience the “dying and growing.” Two rows of swords, an internal and an external row, tilt downwards and form the bridge which the boy crosses. This is an image of the fact that a lower and a higher ego-consciousness must join with each other to make the transition into the spiritual world possible to the human being.

Now we can also see why this fairy tale bears the name: The New Paris. It is Paris about whom the Greek mythology tells that before his birth the parents were scared by the prophecy that the fire of the boy, who is born, consumes everything. Hence, he is abandoned after his birth; a bearess nurses him for five days. He grows up and after various adventures he is recompensed, he got married to Helena. However, Helena is synonymous with Selene the daughter of the light of wisdom. Selene is the symbol of the moon. Thus the Greek mythology shows the union of the human being with the consciousness which should lead him to higher and higher stages in the marriage of Paris with Helena.

Narcissus is the other word which the chatty starlings called to the boy. About Narcissus it is told that he is the son of the river god Kephissos and a nymph. So Narcissus is not of earthly, but of supernatural origin.

One tells also that he once saw his image in the mirror of a spring. This delighted him so much that he always stared at himself only. He rejected all temptations of a nymph, approaching him, and he completely sank into his own image.

Narcissus is a symbol of the human ego which wants to insist on its separate existence, on its own self. If the human being remains concluded in his ego, hardens in his ahamkara, if he is not able to get out of his own little human being, if he looks always only into himself, has fallen in love with his own ego, then he does not get beyond himself, then he loses the consciousness that his ego has its real home in a spiritual world, then he cannot ascend to his spiritual home, he remains “a dull guest on the dark earth.” Then he cannot develop the higher consciousness in himself which leads him upwards, he must pine away. Only somebody who can combine with the higher female principle in his soul will thereby ascend. Paris gets married to the daughter of the light, to Selene-Helena. However, Narcissus fell in love with his own nature and rejects the union with the spiritual being, which approaches him as a nymph.

While the birds call the boy: “Paris – Narcissus,” he finds himself faced with the choice: what do you want to bear in yourself, the Paris nature or the Narcissus nature? This question is put to everybody who wants to become a chela, a spiritual student. Everybody must choose the way himself which his soul has to go.

The boy chooses the way of Paris, according to the urge working from a former incarnation in his soul; he wants to become the “new Paris.” Hence, he must also get to know the so-called threats of initiation if he chooses the way of initiation. They are shown symbolically with three ropes. In the initiatory schools, the ropes, which lie around the neck of the neophyte, show different symbols. Among other things, they represent the threefold nature of the human being in the world. What is due to this threefold nature of the human being laces itself around his neck if he breaks the confidence which is put in him with the initiation.
Since the young man wants to become the “new Paris,” he is allowed to be led by the old man who leads him over the bridge. He comes into the second circle which is flowed around by the river, the water of the astral world. There he finds a wonderful garden which appears to him like an image of heaven on earth. In the midst of this wonderful garden, he sees the innermost centre, a temple surrounded by porticoes from which a heavenly music issues forth. He has arrived at the region of the spiritual world which manifests itself sounding: in the region of the creative world word, which sounds through the world as the sphere-harmony. Here he finds the three women again who were sent to him by the god Mercury at first.

In the image which now the boy experiences is expressed what the human being can experience if he has attained the stage of initiation. The human being is able there to receive messages from higher worlds.
The woman in red turns first to the boy; the red stone gives him the strength that he can have insight in the spiritual world. This is the first stage of initiation. The second stage is not mere imagination, but life in the spiritual world. Indeed, there the human being still feels as a special being, he feels as a spirit among spirits, but still separated. He feels, so to speak, like a sound which is not yet part of a symphony. This stage is shown in the yellow robe.

Then the human spirit learns to adapt itself in the sphere-harmony, it learns to regard itself as a member of the spiritual world, as a sound that resonates in the world symphony. Then the human being gains the green stone; this represents the woman in green pictorially. You read in the fairy tale about this woman in green: “she was that who seemed to care mostly for me and to turn her play to me; however, I was not able to figure her out ..., she could behave howsoever, she gained little from me, because my small neighbour ... had completely taken me in for herself ... and although I saw the sylphids of my dream and the colours of the apples quite clearly in those three ladies, I probably understood that I would have no cause to retain them.”

Although the boy gets insight in those lofty realms by initiation, he feels that he has hard to work for the life in them. At first he must still dispute with his small guide, the fourth woman, the human reason.

This happens by a war game. You read in the fairy tale: the little one led the boy to the golden bridge; there the war game should take place. They put up their armies. Against the warning he and the girl get into zeal, the boy overcomes the troops of the little lady, “which running forth and back disappeared toward the wall finally, I do not know how.”

The Paris of the Greek mythology is the cause of the Trojan War, in which symbolically the decline of a human race and the rise of the new race is shown in which the ego of the single human being has to show its effectiveness. “The new Paris” is victorious in a fight which is, actually, a game that is only the image of a fight, which is nothing that has external reality. This war game between the human reason and that in the human being which carries the consciousness that issues from the divine is not anything that has external reality; it is something that lives only in spirit that is in such a way that it takes place like in the mirror image of spiritual events in the human soul. Goethe should announce the higher things which he beheld not in life but in the art. He should speak in mental pictures, in images.

After the fight, the boy meets the old man again, his first guide, and now the consciousness of his own deepest nature is kindled within him with such certainty that he can call the words to the old man which should live from now on in his inside. “I am a darling of the gods!” he calls. But he still wants to live with that what he requests from the old man as reward: he wants his guide, the small creature. He wants to lead his life as a human being striving for knowledge in such a way that the good human reason becomes his guide at first.

Then he is outdoors. The old man “indicated some objects at the wall, beyond the way, at the same time pointing backward to the little gate. I understood him well; he wanted that I memorise the objects to find the little gate again which shut behind me all of a sudden. I noticed thoroughly what faced me. Above a high wall, I saw the branches of ancient walnut-trees. ... The branches reached up to a flagstone; however, I could not read the inscription on it. It rested on a corbel; a niche in which an artificially worked well poured forth water from bowl to bowl... that disappeared in the ground. The well, the inscription, and the walnut-trees stood vertically about each another.”

The young man stands outdoors; looking back he remembers the experiences of his previous incarnation, and at the same time he looks at a moment in future. A second initiation follows after this one which he remembers; once the spiritual initiation followed the initiation of wisdom.

In the image of the tree, the flagstone with the inscription, the well from which the water flows, a symbol of knowledge is dressed which found its expression in mediaeval times in old astrological mysticism. It gives the boy the view to the future: if the same constellation of the stars happens again which allowed you to find the place where the human being is initiated, if the constellation of the stars in the future recurs for you, the gate is opened to you again, and then the initiation on higher level is repeated for you.

He looks at a moment of reality where he will live through what he has experienced as a prelude with the initiation. He looks at a distant future in which he appears on the scene and explains what he has experienced in former incarnations.

A certain constellation existed at the moment when he was initiated. These signs must recur if on a higher level the initiation is possible. Then the gate is visible again, and it depends on the permission, whether one is able to tell more about the future events.

One must take into consideration this fine mood, the intimate forces which play a role there speaking about this fairy tale.

As we see, Goethe also depicts the evolution of the human soul in these both fairy tales. On the one side, he expressed his conviction of soul development in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in coloured pictures which is valid to all human beings, on the other side, he puts the initiation of the higher secrets before our souls in these both fairy tales, The New Melusine and The New Paris, a Fairy Tale of a Boy, as it was commensurate with his own nature. An individual way of his own soul development is represented by Goethe in these two fairy tales. His whole later soul striving adequate to Goethe's attitude is included in the Fairy Tale of a Boy in particular.

In a fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons it was begun in 1792, but was not continued , Goethe likewise wanted to show a developmental way of the human soul. Also this fragment indicates the greatness of what he had to say, also here he points to a constellation. “Venus” and “Mars” are the last words of it which are kept to us.

A father sends his seven sons on a far journey in foreign countries that are not discovered by others. These are the seven basic members of the human being which theosophy refers to. The father gives his sons the wish with them: “happiness and welfare, good courage and glad use of the forces.” Every son has received own talents from nature; now he should apply them and seek his happiness and perfection by means of them, every brother in his way. In this fragment, The Journey of Megaprazon's Sons, the journey to the spiritual land of ancient wisdom should be shown that the human being can attain if he develops that from the basic members of his nature which is predisposed as rudiments in them; if he attains higher states of consciousness by this development. A found piece of the plan of the spiritual journey shows how Goethe wanted to depict this voyage.

So we have done some looks only at Goethe's most intimate inside and have discovered more and more profundities which shine through his marvellous poems.

So it is comprehensible if his contemporaries looked up at him like to a signpost to unknown worlds. Schiller and some others, they have recognised or, nevertheless, have anticipated what lived in him. However, many have passed without understanding him. The German still has a lot to do to exhaust what is manifested in his great spirits. But the words can apply to them only too well, which Lessing (1729–1781 expressed about Klopstock (1724–1803, German poet):

Who does not praise Klopstock?
But does anybody read him? No.
We want to be praised less
But be read all the more.

Our great spirits want to be recognised, and then they lead to intense spiritual deepening.

They also lead to the world view which theosophy represents. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of those who anticipated what lived in Goethe's soul welcomed the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita (1823) with the deepest understanding. “It is worthwhile”, he says “to have lived so long to take these treasures up in oneself.”

Thus those human beings who learnt from Goethe were prepared for the theosophical world view.

Oh, a lot can still be learnt from Goethe!

Before I continue to share some more of the Fifth Gospel with you, please allow me to make a few remarks about the announcement of this Fifth Gospel. The significance of what is to be brought to our time through occultism and spiritual science is by no means fully understood in the broader context of the present day, because there is still far too little inclination in wider circles to deal with those cultural elements of our time, namely the spiritual cultural elements and those that signify an ascent and are, so to speak, the beginning of a renewal of our spiritual life, and which yet can take no other form than that which leads to an acquaintance, however much it may still be frowned upon today, with the facts of concrete occult research.

Above all, I would ask you to bear in mind, in connection with the above, that such communications from concrete occult research must still be treated with a certain reverence today. Our time is not at all inclined to accept such things readily, and only by living with them, by feeling with them from the life impulses that we absorb in our anthroposophical togetherness, do our souls become suited to see these things in the right light. But if they are transferred to the unprepared, then what had to be handed over through the pressure of the public about the two Jesus boys shows how wild even the most well-meaning became. I will completely disregard the numerous foolish attacks that are directed against such things. How wildly and passionately such things have been received! Today it is inconceivable that knowledge can be gained from the spiritual world that is not abstract but is of such a concrete character as the research results communicated the day before yesterday. This is connected with the fact that our contemporary world-view literature has been seized by a superficiality of thinking and imagining.

Not to be unnecessarily critical, I mention one or the other of our branches in particular, but to draw our friends' attention to how miserable the situation is with pure logic of thought in our time. In our time, there is no discernment. More than one might think, especially since people are always complaining about the emancipation from all authority, people accept everything willingly and with pleasure on authority, especially in circles that often consider themselves the most educated today. One experiences such things again and again, which must be mentioned, even if only by taking up time that would otherwise be better used. I experienced something like this in Berlin at a lecture I gave in a worldview about Giordano Bruno, and where I had to mention - it was a long time ago - how little our time is suited to really getting into the thought structure of great personalities like Giordano Bruno. At the time, I drew attention to the aberration of thought, which is connected with an aberration of feeling, in a then famous book, in Harnack's “Essence of Christianity”.

In my public lecture yesterday, I pointed out that when I mention something in order to refute it, I do not mean to imply that the capacity or scientific nature of this personality is to be judged disparagingly. I just want to show how something significant can have a devastating effect through its suggestive power. So it was that in those days one of the most famous theologians of the present time recognized this writing, 'The Essence of Christianity', as something very significant. I will not go into details. For example, this writing defends the view of the resurrection of Christ Jesus, which goes something like this: Whatever may have happened in Palestine at the time, we can no longer know today, so there is no need to reconstruct the concept of resurrection; but the belief in the resurrection originated from this fact in Palestine. This belief is held, regardless of what may have happened that could have led to this belief.

The chairman of this Weltanschauungsbund told me after the lecture that he had read Harnack's “Essence of Christianity” carefully, but that he had not found this passage in the book. That would be a Catholic view. The Catholics say: It does not matter whether it is the Holy Robe in Trier or not, but it is the faith that it is the Robe that counts. He objected to it, but explained that it was not in the book. The next day I wrote him the page where it is of course stated. The learned gentleman simply skims over it. Everything that works as an authority by suggestion is so devastating today that people do not notice it, but those who truly call themselves anthroposophists must notice such things, because it is the most devastating thing in today's spiritual culture.

The name Eucken is known as the restorer of idealism. He has been awarded a famous prize. He should not be envied for that. He wrote a book entitled: “Can We Still Be Christians?” On one page, it says: “We, as educated people of the present, can no longer accept such things, that people speak of demons as they did in the time when Christ walked the earth. No educated person of the present can believe in demons.”

When a “educated” person of the present reads this, he feels very flattered. The man who paid him this compliment is his colleague. Does this educated person realize that a few pages further on in the same book, there is another sentence, “The contact between the divine and the human generates demonic powers”? That is so nicely accepted. If you quote this as nonsense, you hear the answer: He does not mean that in the sense of the demonic. When one hears this answer, one must be particularly saddened, because from this answer it becomes completely clear that today people use words in an unscrupulous way, without thinking about giving them the meaning that they should have. That is the terrible thing.

Therefore, it is only to be expected that such a distressing phenomenon has come to light as the book, which, despite being three thick volumes, is already experiencing a second edition, the book “Kritik der Sprache” by Fritz Mauthner, who, by writing a large philosophical dictionary, has become the man for many. Such phenomena must be discussed today, even if it is not pleasant. The “Critique of Language” is supposed to be the last significant critique of all philosophical worldviews. The book is quite significant in the sense of its external cleverness in the present. It is not disputed that it is an important book, full of witty aperçus. The whole of humanity's past worldviews are being lectured to. In his denunciation of a school of thought, with which I cannot sympathize either, the critic uses the following image in all seriousness: He who speaks of this school of thought is like a clown who climbs a free-standing ladder and then, having reached the top, wants to pull it up to himself. He will tumble down. — But I beg you: How do you do that if you have set up a ladder vertically and climbed up it and then pull it up to you and then tumble down? How do you carry out such a thought without being thoughtless? Most people do not notice this hollow thought because today there is little practice in logic. Otherwise one would notice that today in every second book on every twentieth page such unthoughts are found. This must also be mentioned because it is characteristic of how people think today, how thinking is suggestively influenced. I have given this example not without significance, because for those who can think, the whole book is written with the same logic, but one does not notice it. Many will not even notice the impossibility of this thought, but rather, as intellectual life is now, such a literary phenomenon will be trumpeted as something tremendously significant and many will believe that this is the case, study it, and from the sum of those who can think in such a way, the opponents of spiritual science are recruited.

I find it brutal that I am compelled to say this, but it must be said, because you should not be unaware of what is happening today. Even if not many will read the book, but what comes from it finds its way into many books and lectures and figures as logic. That is why it is so infinitely difficult, in view of the immature thinking of our time, not only to come up with spiritual-scientific thoughts, but also with the positive results of Akasha research, of which I spoke last time. This compelled me to utter the words that have just been used, that our friends should really feel the need to thoroughly and deeply penetrate each other's views – especially when it comes to dealing with things where ordinary thinking can no longer suffice – with the realization of the necessity of a strictly trained thinking. Otherwise it will, of course, take a long time before we can get through to the thinking fog of our time, which behaves so critically, with positive occult research. Of course, this can only be taken up by someone who has first prepared his soul through the results of spiritual science, which can be more deeply imprinted in thought. Only to such people can one speak of things that cannot be reached by mere thought, but which must be related as they result from Akasha research. Not incoherent, although they are only narrations, what I gave as the Fifth Gospel, they are related with what spiritual research has to give in strict thought structure, even if it does not appear so immediately.

The rejection of these concrete research results stems from nothing other than the fact that modern thinking is too dull to really penetrate the results of spiritual research. One should recognize that it is natural that a person who can form such thoughts as they have been mentioned is not at all able to really penetrate spiritual science. This is the guideline we should follow in the face of the many philosophical and ideological works that are currently being published. When dealing with such matters, we must be imbued with the idea that such things must reach at least a few souls in the present time, so that they may gradually find their way into the spiritual life of the present age.

I have often referred to the Mystery of Golgotha, to those moments of it which must be comprehensible to the most rigorous thinking if it is to engage in the contemplation of the historical evolution of humanity. We do not really have a contemplation of the historical evolution of humanity. Today we have no history, no insightful penetration into what has happened. Once we have that, then it will be recognized how, in the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, human development was indeed a descending one, and how through Golgotha an impulse occurred that gave humanity that rejuvenation that influenced the aging cultural forces. Contemplation of the specific events that took place in Palestine does not in fact detract from this general idea, but on the contrary elevates it by recognizing the specific events that took place.

The day before yesterday, I got to the point where Jesus of Nazareth, after the conversation he had with his foster mother and where the ego of Zarathustra had detached itself from the three bodies, which were then in a strange combination without a human earth ego, met the two Essenes. I have endeavored to describe this scene; I have described it up to the point where Jesus, after speaking to them, stood before them as if dissolving, and they beheld him like a mirage, from which the words resounded: “Your striving is in vain because your hearts are empty, because you have filled yourselves with the spirit that deceptively hides pride in the guise of humility.” When they had heard this, these two Essenes, their eyes were clouded for a while. They saw him again only after he had gone some distance. I could ascertain from the Akashic Records that the two Essenes were deeply affected by what they had experienced, and became silent from that day on and told the other Essenes nothing.

As Jesus walked a little further, he encountered a person who appeared to be in the deepest sorrow, oppression and distress. With bowed head and a physically oppressed body, the man approached Jesus. Then he heard the Being, which I characterized the day before yesterday as Jesus at that time, speak words to him that sounded as if they came from the deepest source of that Being. This oppressed man heard Jesus say: Why has your soul led you on this path? I knew you once, thousands and thousands of years ago, you were different then. — This man felt impelled to say certain things to this being, for as earthmen we cannot describe a being such as this, which consisted only of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, with the after-effect of the Zarathustra ego in these three bodies. We can only call it an entity. The despairing man felt impelled to say to this entity: 'In my life I have attained high positions and whenever I rose to a new position I felt very much at home in my element and often the feeling came over me: “What an extraordinary person you are, that your fellow human beings hold you in such high regard, that you have been able to achieve so much on earth. What a rare person you are! I was happy about everything. But then it happened quickly that I lost that happiness. One night it happened. And just when I had fallen asleep, a dream came over me that I brought into the dream the feeling that I was ashamed of myself for dreaming something like that. I dreamt that a being stood before me and asked me: Who has made you so great, brought you to such high honors? I was ashamed that such a question could be addressed to me in a dream, because it was so clear to me that I was a rare person and that I had naturally come to these honors through my great virtues. And when the being had spoken to me in this way, I was seized in my dream by an ever-increasing sense of shame before myself, in my dream – so said this despairing man. Then I fled, but no sooner had I escaped than the apparition stood before me again in a changed form and said: I have exalted you, brought you to honor. Then I recognized him as the tempter of whom the Scriptures tell that he was already the tempter in paradise. Then I woke up and since that moment I have had no peace. I left my dignity, my home, everything, and since then I have been wandering around the world without doing anything. And now, as a beggar, I come before you, a wandering man. And at that moment, when the man had spoken – so it says in the Akasha Chronicle – the apparition was before him again, introducing itself as Jesus of Nazareth, who at that moment again disappeared before his eyes. Then the apparition dissolved, and the man was left to his fate.

Jesus continued on his way. He then met a leper and, when the man approached him, had to say the words: “Why has your soul led you this way? I saw you differently thousands and thousands of years ago, many thousands of years ago. Yes, you were different then. The leper said: “Men everywhere have rejected me because of my leprosy. Therefore I had to wander around in the world and no one took me in. I was glad when they threw out scraps at my door or at my window, which gave me meager nourishment. But I could not sit still anywhere; I had to wander from place to place. Once, in the night, I came to a forest. There, as if from afar, a tree, shaped like a flame, glowed towards me. The light attracted me. As I drew nearer and nearer, a figure in the shape of a skeleton emerged from the glowing tree and spoke to me the terrible words: “I am you! I am consuming you. Then I was overcome by the most terrible fear; and since it permeated me so that I felt on me, as the leprosy scabs clashed and crackled together, the being felt what was happening to me and said: Why are you so afraid of me? You have lived many a life before, when you loved the pleasures of life, when many things created desires in your life, which brought you the joys of everyday life, when you revelled in the pleasures of everyday life; then you loved me, you loved me, you loved me deeply. You did not always know it, but you loved me, and because you loved me so, your soul was attracted to my nature. I became you and now may feed on you. - And my fear became even greater. Then the skeleton transformed into a beautiful archangel; I looked at him. Yes, he said, you loved me once. - Then I sank into a deep sleep and in the morning I found myself lying at the tree, awakening, and wandered further in the world, and now I find you. Since this apparition came to me, the leprosy has become ever worse. As he spoke, the skeleton of the dead man stood there again and covered Jesus, who disappeared and had to continue on his way through the urge that ruled in him. The man also had to go on.

After these three encounters – with the two Essenes, with the despairing man and with the leper – which Jesus of Nazareth had in the form of which I told you last time, he continued on his way and came to John at the Jordan. What is known from the other gospels took place: the Christ-being descended from cosmic heights, took possession of the three bodies of Jesus, in which the Christ-being was to remain for three years.

The next thing I have to tell is the story of the temptation. Here the Akasha Chronicle presents the matter in more detail than the other gospels. I must just mention in advance that I shall relate it as it presented itself to me, but that it may very easily be — because it is difficult to investigate such matters and one must be careful — that later on a correction might be necessary to modify the three stages of the temptation that I shall relate. Because the sequence can sometimes be easily mixed up when observing the Akashic Records, and I am not completely sure of the order. I will only tell the story to the extent that I know it exactly.

After Jesus Christ – for now the Christ was in Jesus – had withdrawn into solitude, the first being to approach him was Lucifer, as Jesus immediately sensed, for two important perceptions first played out in his soul. He remembered how Lucifer and Ahriman had fled from the Essene Gate to join the other human beings when he had stepped through the Essene Gate after a conversation with the Essenes. He had to think of that. The second sensation that passed through his soul reminded him of the desperate man he had met on the way to the Jordan, whom this figure hid and forced him, Jesus, to go on. He now knew how to recognize such things in occult perception: it was Lucifer whom I saw fleeing with Ahriman before the Essene gate; Lucifer stood between me and the despairing man; it is he who now stands before me again.

This story can give us an idea of how occult perceptions are made when they relate to the past. They are truly not something that can be received with the same cold objectivity as other things that are told. These things express deep secrets of the world, enter into all the powers of our soul life and touch not only our imagination and ordinary understanding. That is why it is so difficult to put the words at such a distance from the corresponding occult perceptions, from these researches, that one does not need to remain silent, but can still express the shattering result of the research in words of ordinary language. Only when it is necessary to communicate such things are they communicated.

So Lucifer stood before Christ Jesus. What took place can be expressed with the words of the other gospels – they are descriptions of spiritual processes: “If you acknowledge me, I will give you the kingdoms of this world.

Thus spoke Lucifer to Christ Jesus, in whom, to be sure, the divine essence of the Christ was now present, who could understand Lucifer, but in order to understand, had to make use of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth, as it had developed through the Zarathustra ego, which had permeated the astral body of Jesus, so that he could use it as a tool. Therefore, he did not hear the words as a god, so to speak, but only as a human being inspired by God: “Do you recognize me, then my angels will guard your every step.

We must now resort to what I once said in a lecture series, which has now also been published in print: that even in the old solar age, Lucifer was a being who, at that time, was equal to the Christ Being, so that So the Christ-being, who had now descended into a human body, had to feel the high cosmic rank that Lucifer had and had to feel him as an equal despite everything that had happened to him until he became the tempter. So that it can already be understood how Lucifer could address the demand to him: Recognize me. — When Lucifer speaks something like this, really says it in such a way that it pours into the human soul through occult channels, then all the forces of pride and arrogance that live in the human soul swell up powerfully. Therefore there is no other means – when the strongest temptation to succumb to feelings of arrogance and hidden pride arises – than to resist it with the most concentrated soul power.

“If you acknowledge me, I will give you all the realms that you now see around me.” These are vast realms of great splendor, these are whole worlds that Lucifer can spread out in such moments. These realms have only this one peculiarity: one can only feel desire for them out of the justified or unjustified arrogance of the soul. And one escapes only in the same way as Christ Jesus escaped in the past: by realizing this. For in that moment one feels nothing but the arrogance and pride that is in the human soul; all other feelings are paralyzed. But Christ Jesus escaped this temptation and pushed Lucifer away.

Then came the second attack. Now there were two of them. Once again, Christ Jesus had the feelings that allowed him to recognize who they were. The sensations arose again, as they had arisen in him at the two fugitives before the gates of the Essenes, and on the way to the Jordan at the appearance in conversation with the desperate and the skeleton image that had turned into the archangel. He knew that he now had the two tempters before him. The challenge, which the other gospels also correctly reproduce, was to him: “Throw yourself down, nothing will happen to you!”

In such temptations, courage that overcomes all fears speaks in a grandiose way in man, which can also make man willful. Christ Jesus was also able to beat back these two tempters.

Then came a third attack. It proceeded from Ahriman alone. He now stood alone before Christ Jesus. And there came the temptation, which can be expressed in turn with the words of the other Gospels: “Make these stones become bread with my power.”

What was to be said in answer to this question of Ahriman – this is what distinguishes the further course of events in the Fifth Gospel from the way it is related in the other Gospels – could not be answered by Christ Jesus. This question remained partly unanswered, remaining as the last unsolved remnant of the temptation. From this arose an impulse that remained effective for the further experience of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The fact that he could not fully answer the last question of Ahriman during the temptation in solitude established the connection between Christ Jesus and the earthly events that are connected with Ahriman.

If you remember how Ahriman is the lord of death, how he spreads materiality before the soul through the kind of deception he creates, so that the soul accepts the material in the deception, if you remember what was said this summer about the deeds of Ahriman in the evolution of the earth, you will find it understandable that the deeds of Ahriman are embedded in the evolution of the earth. And so it happened that a connection was created by the unanswered rest of this question between the earthly walk of Christ Jesus and the whole evolution of the earth. As it were, connected with the evolution of the earth, in so far as Ahriman is interwoven with it, was Christ Jesus through this unanswered question.

Sometimes one has to describe things in trivial terms; but they are not meant to be trivial. Ahriman makes everything appear in the material world and is preserved in it. But the fact that he handles things in this way means that an event such as Christ Jesus turning stones into bread was not possible. Ahrimanic activity prevented it. It is the same phenomenon that makes it necessary for certain stages of earthly development, in so far as they are connected with Ahriman, to be overcome only in the course of time and with the complete penetration of earthly evolution by the Christ.

What is said in the Cosmic Lord's Prayer: “Self-debts incurred by others, experienced in daily bread,” is expressed in the Ahrimanic powers, of which it is said in this Lord's Prayer: “In which heaven's will does not prevail,” but Ahriman's will, so this must be treated within the earthly lawfulness and cannot be treated merely spiritually. These things are connected with this daily bread. In the outer social world this expresses itself in the fact that we actually need material things in the form of money, of mammon, the crudest image of the Ahrimanic fetter, which then prevents stones in the social life from becoming bread, and makes it necessary for man on earth to remain connected with the Ahrimanic, with the material.

You must develop this thought further yourselves: how the injunction 'Turn stones into bread' is connected with the function of money in the social order. But the fact that the Ahrimanic power remained connected with the earthly change of Christ Jesus in this way enabled Ahriman to later flow into the soul of Judas, and to lead indirectly through Judas to the events related in the other Gospels, which then, indirectly through Judas, made Christ Jesus recognizable to his persecutors. Ahriman in Judas actually brought about Christ's death, and the fact that he was able to do so stems from the question at the temptation that was not fully answered.

But now, in order to understand the whole of Christ Jesus' earthly life, one thing must be taken into account. The Christ-being had entered the three bodies, but not in the same way that the Christ-ego is connected to these three bodies as a human ego is connected to them. At the beginning of the three years of earthly life, the Christ-entity was only loosely connected with the three bodies of Jesus, and then it was drawn more and more into the three bodies. The development in the three years consisted in this, that slowly and gradually this Christ-entity, which at first only permeated the Jesus-entity like an aura, was more and more pressed into the three bodies. This Christ-entity was only pressed into the three bodies as tightly as a human ego shortly before His death on the cross. But this pressing in was a continuous sensation of pain throughout the three years. The process of this complete humanization, which lasted three years and led to the Mystery of Golgotha, was this being pressed into the three bodies. It was the pain of God that had to be felt on earth so that what was necessary could happen to introduce the Christ impulse into earthly evolution. What I said about Jesus' pain and suffering in His youth must be added to this.

When one speaks of divine pain, it could easily be that one is poorly understood today. Maeterlinck, for example, who says many a beautiful thing in his book “On Death,” which is sure to become famous, and who, after all, strove to explain things of the spiritual life with the means he had, could say that a disembodied soul cannot have pain, that only the mortal body can feel pain. That is the height of nonsense, for a body feels no pain, any more than a stone does. Pain is felt by the astral body with the I inside the physical body; besides, there are also mental pains and therefore pain does not stop after death. They can only no longer be caused by disturbances in the physical body, but for the soul they need not stop as a result.

What took place when the three bodies of Jesus were forced through with the Christ-Being, that was for the Christ-Being the highest pain. It will gradually become necessary for humanity to understand that in order to continue the evolution of the Earth from Golgotha, this Christ-Essence had to enter the aura of the Earth through pain, and humanity will have to feel its destiny connected with this Christ-pain. The connection of humanity with the Christ-pain will have to become more and more concrete. Only then will one understand how this pain continued to work in the earth aura in rejuvenating forces for the development of the earth since the mystery of Golgotha.

To understand this mystery of Golgotha better and better will be the task of progressive spiritual development. Some things that play a major role in present-day culture will indeed have to be overcome. We are currently facing a crisis in our understanding of Christianity, a real crisis. Of course, I am not talking about what can be said about Christianity by this or that popular theology. I would just like to draw attention to elementary events of incomprehension in the present. At one of those meetings in 1910, where the historical Christ was discussed, a much-talked-about theologian spoke to emphasize that the words of Christ Jesus' teaching were only summarized teachings that had existed before: “I will be grateful to you if I can be shown just one sentence among the sayings of Jesus Christ that was not already there in some form or other.” If a liberal theological investigator can prove today what that person claimed, he is a great man for our contemporaries, because how convincing it must be if one can really prove that all of Christ's sayings were said earlier by others, that they were therefore nothing new. To the one who sees things through, such a saying appears in a different light. Imagine that Goethe had made a poem, not yet written it down, only spoken it, and a child who was listening had shouted: These are all words that I have already heard. The theologian who hears nothing but what he already knows and does not realize what is important, because that stands above the sayings that were there before, as a Goethean poem stands above the individual words that the child has already heard. If one does not know what to consider the main thing, and believes that one is doing real theology today by adhering to words in this way, adhering to what is true, that the sayings have already “been there,” it is implied that we are in a deep crisis with regard to the understanding of Christianity, from which one can already understand that a real understanding of Christ can only come into the world when today's theology, which has the public office of watching over the understanding of Christ, first dies. That is what matters: that one learns to sense the full magnitude of the facts that took place around Golgotha.

The Akasha Chronicle shows us yet more significant things: Since the Christ-Being was not immediately closely connected with the bodies of Jesus, but only loosely and externally, the following could occur in the early days: At times the Christ-entity was externally connected with the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, was in such connection among the disciples and nearest followers, spoke with them. But that was not always necessary. The outer covers could be in any place and the Christ-entity could go away from them; it could then appear as a spiritual entity far away here or there. Many appearances of Christ are such that only the Christ-being appears to the disciples, the followers and also to others. Later, he often walked around the country with the disciples, teaching, speaking, healing. While he was walking with ten or fifteen or even more followers, and the Christ-being pressed more and more into his bodies, another phenomenon emerged. It was repeatedly shown that one or other of the disciples suddenly felt inspired. Then his face changed so that you could see from the outside how he took on a completely different physiognomy. And when something like that happened and he spoke the most glorious words of Christ, the actual outward appearance of Christ Jesus changed so that he looked like the simplest person in the group.

This was repeated over and over again. This is how it appears in the Akashic Records. As a result, the persecutors never knew who in the wandering group was the one they were actually looking for, so they faced the danger of seizing someone who was not the right one. Then the right one would have escaped. That is why the betrayal of Judas was necessary. As it is usually told, it is not very ingeniously told. For if you think about the situation, you ask yourself: Why was Judas' kiss necessary? It was only necessary for the reason I just hinted at.

Much that is mysterious is connected with the Christ's earthly human walk, but what makes the most harrowing impression shows when one turns one's gaze to his death. Here it must be said, and I say it without fear, because it is a fact for occult knowledge, that at the most important points in historical-spiritual events, the moral and physical world orders, which otherwise flow separately, touch each other again. When this was most strongly the case in the evolution of the earth, the Mystery of Golgotha occurred.

When Christ was nailed to the cross, a widespread eclipse occurred. It was not yet possible to determine from the Akasha Chronicle where it had come from, whether it was of earthly or cosmic origin. But it was there, and what such an eclipse means can be observed occultly during a solar eclipse. I do not want to say that it was a solar eclipse at that time; it could also have been a significant cloud eclipse. But it is different when the sun is eclipsed in the sky during the day than when it is simply night. But the effect of such a general eclipse can already be seen in the case of a solar eclipse caused by the moon, for example. During such an event, great occult changes take place in all living beings, humans, animals and plants; the entire structure, for example, between the physical body and the etheric body of plants changes, the whole world looks quite different and with it the earth aura. The last time it happened, it made a particularly moving impression on me when I was able to observe it during a solar eclipse during a short lecture cycle in Stockholm. It is a fact that great changes are taking place in that part of the Earth's aura where the eclipse is at its greatest. And it was through such a part of the Earth's aura that the Christ Impulse flowed into the evolution of the Earth at the time of the death of Christ Jesus on the cross. That is the wonderful, sacred event of the eclipse around the cross on Golgotha.

The other thing is what I already hinted at in Karlsruhe and what is also in the printed cycle of Karlsruhe, which is also shown in the Fifth Gospel, how the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth was, as it were, was absorbed by the physical earth, for when the body was laid in the tomb, an earthquake-like shaking of the earth did indeed take place, combined with a storm, so that a fissure in the earth opened up and received the body. The storm whirled in such a way that the peculiar winding and position of the cloths actually resulted, as described in the Gospel of John. The cleft caused by the earthquake closed up, and so the body could not be found, of course. Only the answer from occult regions could be given to those seeking: “He whom you seek is no longer here.” A similar event occurred later, when many in Europe set out as crusaders to seek the memory of Christ at Golgotha. They too received the answer, albeit not audibly, “He whom you seek is no longer here.”

For the Christ Impulse spiritually permeates the souls of men, and as a fact it also works in those who do not understand it. One should not speak only of the great teacher. What happened works as a fact and gave the great impulses for the further development of humanity. The task of true occult research in this field will be to learn to understand better and better how to seek the Christ differently, so that one would not have to be given the answer: “He whom you seek is no longer here.” But if one wants to seek Him in an ever more spiritual way, one will be able to find the true answer that corresponds to reality.

This is what I wanted to tell you today, and I believe that these communications are of great importance for the description of the mystery of Golgotha in contrast to the abstractions of theologians. The way these facts appear in the Akasha Chronicle shows that something very important happened at that time.

The occultist is convinced of the following: Once the minds of humanity have risen somewhat above all that now dominates souls with so much pride of knowledge and illogicality, as I had to characterize it at the beginning, once the minds of right thinking have become interwoven, then - despite what some might believe: What has thinking to do with receiving such communications and trying to recognize them? — then the mind will prepare itself to truly understand even those things that seemingly have nothing to do with thinking, because it is precisely through true thinking that the soul is imbued with the genuine sense of truth, which does not perceive what is given in these two lectures as ridiculous, but strives to accept it as carefully conducted research from the Akasha Chronicle.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1975. This lecture is the ninth of fifteen lectures in the volume The Riddle of Humanity. Topics included are: Enlivening the Sense Processes and Ensouling the Life Processes; Aesthetic Enjoyment and Aesthetic Creativity; and Logic and the Sense for Reality.

We have been concerned with getting to know the human being as he is related to the world through the realm of his senses and the organs of his life-processes, and we have attempted to consider some of the consequences of the fact which underlies such knowledge. Above all, we have cured ourselves of the trivial attitude which is taken by many people who like to regard themselves as spiritually minded, when they think they should despise everything that is called material or sense-perceptible. For we have seen that here in the physical world man has been given in his lower organs and his lower activities a reaction of higher activities and higher connections. The sense of touch and the Life-sense, as they are now, we have had to regard as very much tied to the physical, earthly world. The same applies to the Ego-sense, the Thought-sense and the Speech-sense.

It is different with the senses which serve the bodily organism only in an internal way; the sense of Movement, the sense of Balance, the sense of Smell, the sense of Taste, to a certain extent even the sense of Sight. We have had to accustom ourselves to regard these senses as a shadowy reflection of something which becomes great and significant in the spiritual world, when we have gone through death.

We have emphasised that through the sense of Movement we move in the spiritual world among the beings of the several Hierarchies, according to the attraction or repulsion they exercise upon us, expressed in the form of the spiritual sympathies and antipathies we experience after death. The sense of Balance does not only keep us in physical balance, as it does with the physical body here, but in a moral balance towards the beings and influences found in the spiritual world. It is similar with the other senses; the senses of Taste, Smell and Sight. And just where the hidden spiritual plays into the physical world, we cannot look to the higher senses for explanations, but have to turn to those realms of the senses which are regarded as lower. At the present day it is impossible to speak about many significant things of this kind, because today prejudices are so great. Many things that are in a higher spiritual sense interesting and important have only to be said, and at once they are misunderstood and in all sorts of ways attacked. For the time being I have therefore to abstain from pointing out many interesting processes in the realms of the senses which are responsible for important facts of life.

In this respect the situation in ancient times was more favourable, though knowledge could not be disseminated as it can be today. Aristotle could speak much more freely about certain truths than is now possible, for such truths are at once taken in too personal a way and awaken personal likes and dislikes. You will find in the works of Aristotle, for example, truths which concern the human being very deeply but could not be outlined today before a considerable gathering of people. They are truths of the kind indicated recently when I said: the Greeks knew more about the connection between the soul and spirit on the one hand and the physical bodily nature on the other, without becoming materialistic. In the writings of Aristotle you can find, for example, very beautiful descriptions of the outer forms of courageous men, of cowards, of hot-tempered people, of sleepyheads. In a way that has a certain justification he describes what sort of hair, what sort of complexion, what kind of wrinkles brave or cowardly men have, what sort of bodily proportions the sleepyheads have, and so on. Even these things would cause some difficulties if they were set forth today, and other things even more. Nowadays, when human beings have become so personal and really want to let personal feelings cloud their perception of the truth, one has to speak more in generalities if one has, under some circumstances, to describe the truth.

From a certain point of view, every human quality and activity can be comprehended, if we ask the right questions about what has been recently described here. For instance, we have said: the realms of the senses, as they exist in the human being today, are in a way separate and stationary regions, as the constellations of the Zodiac are stationary regions out in cosmic space as compared with the orbiting planets, which make their journeys and alter their positions relatively quickly. In the same way, the regions of the senses have definite boundaries, while the life-processes work through the whole organism, circling through the regions of the senses and permeating them with the effects of their work.

Now we have also said that during the Old Moon period our present sense-organs were still organs of life, still worked as life-organs, and that our present life-organs were then more in the realm of the soul. Think of what has often been emphasised: that there is an atavism in human life, a kind of return to the habits and peculiarities of what was once natural; a falling back, in this case into the Old Moon period. In other words, there can be an atavistic return to the dreamlike, imaginative way of looking at things that was characteristic of Old Moon. Such an atavistic falling back into Moon-visions must today be regarded as pathological.

Please take this accurately: it is not the visions themselves which are pathological, for if this were so, and if all that man experienced during the Old Moon time, when he lived only in such visions, had to be regarded as pathological—then one would have to say that humanity was ill during the Old Moon period; that during the Old Moon period man was in fact out of his mind. That, of course, would be complete nonsense. What is pathological is not the visions themselves, but that they occur in the present earthly organisation of the human being in such a way that they cannot be endured; that they are used by this earthly organisation in a way that is inappropriate for them as Moon visions. For if someone has a Moon vision, this is suited only to lead to a feeling, an activity, a deed which would have been appropriate on the Old Moon. But if someone has a Moon vision here during the Earth period and does things as they are done with an earthly organism, that is pathological. A man acts in that way only because his earthly organism cannot cope with the vision, is in a sense impregnated by it.

Take the crudest example: someone is led to have a vision. Instead of remaining calm before it, and contemplating it inwardly, he applies it in some way to the physical world—although it should be applied only to the spiritual world—and acts accordingly with his body. He begins to act wildly, because the vision penetrates and stirs his body in a way it should not do. There you have the crudest example. The vision should remain within the region to which it naturally belongs. It does not do so if today, as an atavistic vision, it is not tolerated by the physical body. If the physical body is too weak to prevail against the vision, a state of helplessness sets in. If the physical body is strong enough to prevail, it weakens the vision. Then it no longer has the character of pretending to be the same as a thing or process in the sense-world; that is the illusion imposed by a vision on someone made ill by it. If the physical organism is so strong that it can fight the tendency of an atavistic vision to lie about itself, then the person concerned will be strong enough to relate himself to the world in the same way as during the Old Moon period, and yet to adapt this behaviour to his present organism.

What does this mean? It means that the person will to some extent inwardly alter his Zodiac, with its twelve sense-regions. He will alter it in such a way that in his Zodiac, with its twelve sense-regions, more life-processes than sense-processes will occur. Or, to put it better, the effect is to transform the sense-process in the sense-region into a life-process and so to raise it out of its present lifeless condition into life. Thus a man sees, but at the same time something is living in his seeing; he hears and at the same time something is living inwardly in his hearing; instead of living only in the stomach or on the tongue, it lives now in the eye and in the ear. The sense-processes are brought into movement. Their life is stimulated. This is quite acceptable. Then something is incorporated in these sense-organs which today is possessed only to this degree by the life-organs. The life-organs are imbued with a strong activity of sympathy and antipathy. Think how much the whole of life depends upon sympathy and antipathy! One thing is taken, another rejected. These powers of sympathy and antipathy, normally developed by the life-organs, are now poured into the sense-organs. The eye not only sees the colour red; it feels sympathy or antipathy for the colour. Permeation by life streams hack into the sense organs, so we can say that the sense-organs become in a certain way life-regions once more.

The life-processes, too, then have to be altered. They acquire more activity of soul than they normally possess for life on earth. It happens in this way: three life-processes, breathing, warming and nutrition, are brought together and imbued with heightened activity of soul. In ordinary breathing we breathe crude material air; with the ordinary development of warmth it is just warmth, and so on. Now a kind of symbiosis occurs; when these life-processes form a unity, when they are imbued with activity of soul, they form a unity. They are not separate as in the present organism, but set up a kind of association. An inward community is formed by the processes of breathing, warming and nutrition; not coarse nutrition, but a process of nutrition which takes place without it being necessary to eat, and it does not occur alone, as eating does, but in conjunction with the other processes.

Similarly, the other four life-processes are united. Secretion, sustenance, growth and reproduction are united and also form a process embracing activity of soul. Then the two parties can themselves unite: not that all the life-processes then work together, but that, having entered into separate unities of three and four processes, they work together in that form.

This leads to the emergence of soul-powers which have the character of thinking, feeling and willing; again three. But they are different; not thinking, feeling and willing as they normally are on earth, but somewhat different. They are nearer to life-processes, but not as separate as life-processes are on earth. A very intimate and delicate process occurs in a man when he is able to endure something like a thinking back into the Old Moon, not to the extent of having visions, and yet a form of comprehension arises which has a certain similarity to them. The sense-regions become life-regions; the life-processes become soul-processes. A man cannot stay always in that condition, or he would be unfitted for the earth. He is fitted for the earth through his senses and his life-organs being normally such as we have described. But in some cases a man can shape himself in this other way, and then, if his development tends more towards the will, it leads to aesthetic creativity; or, if it tends more towards comprehension, towards perception, it leads to aesthetic experience. Real aesthetic life in human beings consists in this, that the sense-organs are brought to life, and the life-processes filled with soul.

This is a very important truth about human beings, for it enables us to understand many things. The stronger life of the sense-organs and the different life of the sense-realms must be sought in art and the experience of art. And it is the same with the processes of life; they are permeated with more activity of soul in the experience of art than in ordinary life. Because these things are not considered in their reality in our materialistic time, the significance of the alteration which goes on in a human being within the realm of art cannot be properly understood. Nowadays man is regarded more or less as a definite, finished being; but within certain limits he is variable. This is shown by a capacity for change such as the one we have now considered.

What we have gone into here embraces far-reaching truths. Take one example: it is those senses best fitted for the physical plane which have to be transformed most if they are to be led back halfway to the Old Moon condition. The Ego—sense, the Thought-sense, the immediate sense of Touch, because they are directly fitted for the earthly physical world, have to be completely transformed if they are to serve the human condition which results from this going back halfway to the Old Moon period.

For example, you cannot use in art the encounters we have in life with an Ego, or with the world of thought. At the most, in some arts which are not quite arts the same relationship to the Ego and to thought can be present as in ordinary earthly life. To paint the portrait of a man as an Ego, just as he stands there in immediate reality, is not a work of art. The artist has to do something with the Ego, go through a process with it, through which he raises this Ego out of the specialisation in which it lives today, at the present stage in the development of the earth; he has to give it a wide general significance, something typical. The artist does that as a matter of course.

In the same way the artist cannot express the world of thought, as it finds expression in the ordinary earthly world, in an artistic way immediately; for he would then produce not a poem or any work of art, but something of a didactic, instructive kind, which could never really be a work of art. The alterations made by the artist in what is actually present form a way back towards that reanimation of the senses I have described.

There is something else we must consider when we contemplate this transformation of the senses. The life-processes, I said, interpenetrate. Just as the planets cover one another, and have a significance in their mutual relationships, while the constellations remain stationary, so is it with the regions of the senses if they pass over into a planetary condition in human life, becoming mobile and living; then they achieve relationships to one another. Thus artistic perception is never so confined to the realm of a particular sense as ordinary earthly perception is. Particular senses enter into relationships with one another. Let us take the example of painting.

If we start from real Spiritual Science, the following result is reached. For ordinary observation through the senses, the senses of sight, warmth, taste and smell are separate senses. In painting, a remarkable symbiosis, a remarkable association of these senses comes about, not in the external sense-organs themselves, but in what lies behind them, as I have indicated.

A painter, or someone who appreciates a painting, does not merely look at its colours, the red or blue or violet; he really tastes the colours, not of course with the physical sense-organ—then he would have to lick it with his tongue. But in everything connected with the sphere of the tongue a process goes on which has a delicate similarity to the process of tasting. If you simply look at a green parrot in the way we grasp things through the senses, it is your eyes that see the green colour. But if you appreciate a painting, a delicate imaginative process comes about in the region behind your tongue which still belongs to the sense of taste, and this accompanies the process of seeing. Not what happens upon the tongue, but what follows, more delicate physiological processes—they accompany the process of seeing, so that the painter really tastes the colour in a deeper sense in his soul. And the shades of colour are smelt by him, not with the nose, but with all that goes on deeper in the organism, more in the soul, with every activity of smelling. These conjoined sense-activities occur when the realms of the senses pass over more into processes of life.

If we read a description which is intended to inform us about the appearance of something, or what is done with something, we let our speech-sense work, the word-sense through which we learn about this or that. If we listen to a poem, and listen in the same way as to something intended to convey information, we do not understand the poem. The poem is expressed in such a way that we perceive it through the speech-sense, but with the speech-sense alone we do not understand it. We have also to direct towards the poem the ensouled sense of balance and the ensouled sense of movement; but they must be truly ensouled. Here again united activities of the sense-organs arise, and the whole realm of the senses passes over into the realm of life. All this must be accompanied by life-processes which are ensouled, transformed in such a way that they participate in the life of the soul, and are not working only as ordinary life-processes belonging to the physical world.

If the listener to a piece of music develops the fourth life-process, secretion, so far that he begins to sweat, this goes too far; it does not belong to the aesthetic realm when secretion leads to physical excretion. It should be a process in the soul, not going as far as physical excretion; but it should be the same process that underlies physical excretion. Moreover, secretion should not appear alone. All four life-processes—secretion, sustenance, growth and reproduction—should work together, but all in the realm of soul. So do the life-processes become soul-processes.

On the one hand, Spiritual Science will have to lead earth-evolution towards the spiritual world; otherwise, as we have often seen, the downfall of mankind will come about in the future. On the other hand, Spiritual Science must renew the capacity to take hold of and comprehend the physical by means of the spirit. Materialism has brought not only an inability to find the spiritual, but also an inability to understand the physical. For the spirit lives in all physical things, and if one knows nothing of the spirit, one cannot understand the physical. Think of those who know nothing of the spirit; what do they know of this, that all the realms of the senses can be transformed in such a way that they become realms of life, and that the life-processes can be transformed in such a way that they appear as processes of the soul? What do present-day physiologists know about these delicate changes in the human being? Materialism has led gradually to the abandonment of everything concrete in favour of abstractions, and gradually these abstractions are abandoned, too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people still spoke of vital forces. Naturally, nothing can be done with such an abstraction, for one understands something only by going into concrete detail. If one grasps the seven life-processes fully, one has the reality; and this is what matters—to get hold of the reality again. The only effect of renewing such abstractions as elan vital and other frightful abstractions, which have no meaning but are only admissions of ignorance, will be to lead mankind—although the opposite may be intended—into the crudest materialism, because it will be a mystical materialism. The need for the immediate future of mankind is for real knowledge, knowledge of the facts which can be drawn only from the spiritual world. We must make a real advance in the spiritual comprehension of the world.

Once more we have to think back to the good Aristotle, who was nearer to the old vision than modern man. I will remind you of only one thing about old Aristotle, a peculiar fact. A whole library has been written about catharsis, by which he wished to describe the underlying purpose of tragedy. Aristotle says: Tragedy is a connected account of occurrences in human life by which feelings of fear and compassion are aroused; but through the arousing of these feelings, and the course they take, the soul is led to purification, to catharsis. Much has been written about this in the age of materialism, because the organ for understanding Aristotle was lacking. The phrase has been understood only by those who saw that Aristotle in his own way (not, of course, the way of a modern materialist) means by catharsis a medical or half-medical term. Because the life-processes become soul-processes, the aesthetic experience of a tragedy carries right into the bodily organism those life-processes which normally accompany fear and compassion. Through tragedy these processes are purified and at the same time ensouled. In Aristotle's definition of catharsis the entire ensouling of the life-processes is embraced. If you read more of his Poetics you will feel in it something like a breath of this deeper understanding of the aesthetic activity of man, gained not through a modern way of knowledge, but from the old traditions of the Mysteries. In reading Aristotle's Poetics one is seized by immediate life much more than one can be in reading anything by present day writers on aesthetics, who only sniff round things and encompass them with dialectics, but never reach the things themselves.

Later on a significant high-point in comprehending aesthetic activity of man was reached in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). It was a time given more to abstractions. Today we have to add the spiritual to a thinking that remains in the realm of idealism. But if we look at this more abstract character of the time of Goethe and Schiller, we can see that the abstractions in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters embrace something of what has been said here. With Schiller it seems that the process has been carried down more into the material, but only because this material existence requires to be penetrated more deeply by the power of the spiritual, taken hold of intensively. What does Schiller say? He says: Man as he lives here on earth has two fundamental impulses, the impulse of reason and the impulse that comes from nature. Through a natural necessity the impulse of reason works logically. One is compelled to think in a particular way; there is no freedom in thinking. What is the use of speaking of freedom where this necessity of reason prevails? One is compelled to think that three times three is not ten, but nine. Logic signifies the absolute necessity of reason. So, says Schiller, when man accepts the pure necessity of reason, he submits to spiritual compulsion.

Schiller contrasts the necessity of reason with the needs of the senses, which live in everything present in instinct, in emotion. Here, too, man is not free, but follows natural necessity. Now Schiller looks for the condition midway between rational necessity and natural necessity. This middle condition, he finds, emerges when rational necessity bows before the feelings that lead us to love or not to love something; so that we no longer follow a rigid logical necessity when we think but allow our inner impulses to work in shaping our mental images, as in aesthetic creation. And then natural necessity, on its side, is transcended. Then it is no longer the needs of the senses which bring compulsion, for they are ensouled and spiritualised. A man no longer desires simply what his body desires, for sensuous enjoyment is spiritualised. Thus rational necessity and natural necessity come nearer to one another.

You should, of course, read this in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters themselves; they are among the most important philosophical works in the evolution of the world. In Schiller's exposition there lives what we have just heard here, though with him it takes the form of metaphysical abstraction. What Schiller calls the liberation of rational necessity from its rigidity, this is what happens when the senses are reanimated, when they are led back once more to the process of life. What Schiller calls the spiritualisation of natural need—he should really have called it “ensouling”—this happens where the life-processes work like soul-processes. Life-processes become more ensouled; sense-processes become more alive. That is the real procedure, though given a more abstract conceptual form, that can be traced in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. Only thus could he express it at that time, when there was not yet enough spiritual strength in human thoughts to reach down into that realm where spirit lives in the way known to the seer. Here spirit and matter need not be contrasted, for it can be seen how spirit penetrates all matter everywhere, so that nowhere can one come upon matter without spirit. Thinking remains mere thinking because man is not able to make his thoughts strong enough, spiritual enough, to master matter, to penetrate into matter as it really is.

Schiller was not able to recognise that life-processes can work as soul-processes. He could not go so far as to see that the activity which finds material expression in nutrition, in the development of warmth and in breathing, can live enhanced in the soul, so that it ceases to be material. The material particles vanish away under the power of the concepts with which the material processes are comprehended. Nor was Schiller able to get beyond regarding logic as simply a dialectic of ideas; he could not reach the higher stage of development, attainable through initiation, where the spiritual is experienced as a process in its own right, so that it enters as a living force into what otherwise is merely cognition. Schiller in his Aesthetic Letters could not quite trust himself to reach the concrete facts. But through them pulses an adumbration of something that can be exactly grasped if one tries to lay hold of the living through the spiritual and the material through the living.

So we see in every field how evolution as a whole is pressing on towards knowledge of the spirit. When, at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, a philosophy was developed more or less out of concepts, longings were alive in it for a greater concreteness, though this could not yet be achieved. Because the power to achieve it was inadequate, the endeavour and the longing for greater concreteness fell into the crude materialism that has continued from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the present day. But it must be realised that spiritual understanding cannot reside only in a turning towards the spiritual, but must and can overcome the material and recognise the spirit in matter. As you will see, this has further consequences. You will see that man as an aesthetic being is raised above earthly evolution into another world. And this is important. Through his aesthetic attitude of mind or aesthetic creativity a man no longer acts in a way that is entirely appropriate for the earth, but raises the sphere of his being above the sphere of the earth. In this way through our study of aesthetics we approach some deep mysteries of existence.

In saying such things, one may touch the highest truths, and yet sound as if one were crazy. But life cannot be understood if one retreats faint heartedly before the real truths. Take a work of art, the Sistine Madonna, the Venus of Milo—if it is really a work of art, it does not entirely belong to the earth. It is raised above the events of earth; that is quite obvious. What sort of power, then, lives in it—in a Sistine Madonna, in a Venus of Milo? A power, which is also in man, but which is not entirely fitted for the earth. If everything in man were fitted only for the earth, he would be unable to live on any other level of existence as well. He would never go on to the Jupiter evolution. Not everything is fitted for the earth; and for occult vision not everything in man is in accord with his condition as a being of the earth. There are hidden forces which will one day give man the impetus to develop beyond earth-existence. But art itself can be understood only if we realise that its task is to point the way beyond the purely earthly, beyond adaptation to earthly conditions, to where the reality in the Venus of Milo can be found.

We can never acquire a true comprehension of the world unless we first recognise something which there will be increasing need to recognise as we go forward to meet the future and its demands.

It is often thought today that when anyone makes a logical statement that can be logically proved, the statement must be applicable to life. Logic alone, however, is not enough. People are always pleased when they can prove something logically; and we have seen arise in our midst, as you know, all kinds of world outlooks and philosophical systems, and no-one familiar with logic will doubt they can all be logically proved. But nothing is achieved for life by these logical proofs. The point is that our thinking must be brought into line with reality, not merely with logic. What is merely logical is not valid—only what is in keeping with reality.

Let me make this clear by an example. Imagine a tree-trunk lying there before you, and you set out to describe it. You can describe it quite correctly, and you can prove, beyond a doubt, that something real is lying there because you have described it in exact accordance with external reality. But in fact you have described an untruth; what you have described has no real existence. It is a tree-trunk from which the roots have been cut away, and the boughs and branches lopped off. But it could have come into existence only along with boughs and blossoms and roots, and it is nonsense to think of the mere trunk as a reality. By itself it is no reality; it must be taken together with its forces of growth, with all the inner forces which enabled it to come into being. We need to see with certainty that the tree-trunk as it rests there is a lie; we have a reality before us only when we look at a tree. Logically it is not necessary to regard a tree-trunk as a lie, but a sense for reality demands that only the whole tree be regarded as truth. A crystal is a truth, for it can exist independently—independently in a certain sense, for of course everything is relative. A rosebud is not a truth. A crystal is; but a rosebud is a lie if regarded only as a rosebud.

A lack of this sense for reality is responsible for many phenomena in the life of today. Crystallography and, at a stretch, mineralogy are still real sciences; not so geology. What geology describes is as much an abstraction as the tree-trunk. The so-called “earth's crust” includes everything that grows up out of it, and without that it is unthinkable. We must have philosophers who allow themselves to think abstractly only in so far as they know what they are doing. To think in accordance with reality, and not merely in accordance with logic—that is what we shall have to learn to do, more and more. It will change for us the whole aspect of evolution and history. Seen from the standpoint of reality, what is the Venus of Milo, for instance, or the Sistine Madonna? From the point of view of the earth such works of art are lies; they are no reality. Take them just as they are and you will never come to the truth of them. You have to be carried away from the earth if you are to see any fine work of art in its reality. You have to stand before it with a soul attuned quite differently from your state of mind when you are concerned with earthly things. The work of art that has here no reality will then transport you into the realm where it has reality—the elemental world. We can stand before the Venus of Milo in a way that accords with reality only if we have the power to wrest ourselves free from mere sense-perception.

I have no wish to pursue teleology in a futile sense. We will therefore not speak of the purpose of Art; that would be pedantic, philistine. But what comes out of Art, how it arises in life—these are questions that can be asked and answered. There is no time today for a complete answer, only for a brief indication. It will be helpful if we consider first the opposite question: What would happen if there were no Art in the world? All the forces which flow into Art, and the enjoyment of Art, would then be diverted into living out of harmony with reality. Eliminate Art from human evolution and you would have in its place as much untruth as previously there had been Art.

It is just here, in connection with Art, that we encounter a dangerous situation which is always present at the Threshold of the spiritual world. Listen to what comes from beyond the Threshold and you will hear that everything has two sides! If a man has a sense of reality, he will come through aesthetic comprehension to a higher truth; but if he lacks this sense of reality he can be led precisely by aesthetic comprehension of the world into untruth. There is always this forking of the road, and to grasp this is very important: it applies not only to occultism but to Art. To comprehend the world in accordance with reality will be an accompaniment of the spiritual life that Spiritual Science has to bring about. Materialism has brought about the exact opposite—a thinking that is not in accord with reality.

Contradictory as this may sound, it is so only for those who judge the world according to their own picture of it, and not in accordance with reality. We are living at a stage of evolution when the faculty for grasping even ordinary facts of the physical world is steadily diminishing, and this is a direct result of materialism. In this connection some interesting experiments have been made. They proceed from materialistic thinking; but, as in many other cases, the outcome of materialistic thinking can work to the benefit of the human faculties that are needed for developing a spiritual outlook. The following is one of the many experiments that have been made.

A complete scene was thought out in advance and agreed upon. Someone was to give a lecture, and during it he was to say something that would be felt as a direct insult by a certain man in the audience. This man was to spring from his seat, and a scuffle was to ensue. During the scuffle the insulted man was to thrust his hand into his pocket and draw out a revolver—and the scene was to go on developing from there.

Picture it for yourselves—a whole prearranged programme carried out in every detail! Thirty persons were invited to be the audience. They were no ordinary people: they were law students well advanced in their studies, or lawyers who had already graduated. These thirty witnessed the whole affair and were afterwards asked to describe what had occurred. Those who were in the secret had drawn up a protocol which showed that everything had taken place exactly as planned.

The thirty were no fools, but well-educated people whose task later on would be to go out into the world and investigate how scuffles and scrimmages and many other things come about. Of the thirty, twenty-six gave a completely false account of what they had seen, and only four were even approximately correct ... only four!

For years experiments like this have been made for the purpose of demonstrating how little weight can be attached to depositions given before a court of justice. The twenty-six were all present; they could all say: “I saw it with my own eyes.” People do not in the least realise how much is required in order to set forth correctly a series of events that has taken place before their very eyes.

The art of forming a true picture of something that takes place in our presence needs to be cultivated. If there is no feeling of responsibility towards a sense-perceptible fact, the moral responsibility which is necessary for grasping spiritual facts can never be attained. In our present world, with its stamp of materialism, what feeling is there for the seriousness of the fact that among thirty descriptions by eyewitnesses of an event, twenty-six were completely false, and four only could be rated as barely correct? If you pause to consider such a thing, you will see how tremendously important for ordinary life the fruits of a spiritual outlook can become.

Perhaps you will ask: Were things different in earlier times? Yes, in those times men had not developed the kind of thinking we have today. The Greeks were not possessed of the purely abstract thinking we have, and need to have, in order that we may find our place in the world in the right way for our time. But here were are concerned not with ways of thinking, but with truth.

Aristotle tried, in his own way, to express an aesthetic understanding of life in much more concrete concepts. And in the earliest Greek times it was expressed, still more concretely, in Imaginations that came from the Mysteries. Instead of concepts, the men of those ancient times had pictures. They would say: Once upon a time lived Uranus. And in Uranus they saw all that man takes in through his head, through the forces which now work out through the senses into the external world. Uranus—all twelve senses—was wounded; drops of blood fell into Maya, into the ocean, and foam spurted up. Here we must think of the senses, when they were more living, sending down into the ocean of life something which rises up like foam from the pulsing of the blood through life-processes which have now become processes in the soul.

All this may be compared with the Greek Imagination of Aphrodite, Aphrogenea, the goddess of beauty rising from the foam that sprang from the blood-drops of the wounded Uranus. In the older form of the myth, where Aphrodite is a daughter of Uranus and the ocean, born from the foam that rises from the blood-drops of Uranus, we have an imaginative rendering of the aesthetic situation of mankind, and indeed a thought of great significance for human evolution at large.

We need to connect a further idea with this older form of the myth, where Aphrodite is the child not of Zeus and Dione, but of Uranus and the ocean. We need to add to it another Imagination which enters still more deeply into reality, reaching not merely into the elemental world but right down into physical reality. Beside the myth of Aphrodite, the myth of the origin of beauty among mankind, we must set the great truth of the entry into humanity of primal goodness, the Spirit showering down into Maya-Maria, even as the blood-drops of Uranus ran down into the ocean, which also is Maya. Then will appear in its beauty the dawn of the unending reign of the good and of knowledge of the good; the truly good, the spiritual. This is what Schiller had in mind when he wrote, referring especially to moral knowledge:

Nur durch das Morgentor des Schoenen
Dringst du in der Erkenntnis Land.*

* Only through the dawn of beauty canst thou penetrate into the land of knowledge.

You see how many tasks for Spiritual Science are mounting up. And they are not merely theoretical tasks; they are tasks of life.

LET us dwell again today a little on the considerations already referred to as the so-called Three Meetings. We have said that the two alternate states of sleeping and waking, in which man lives in the short course of twenty-four hours, are not only what they seem to external physical life, but that during every one of these two-fold periods man has a meeting with the Spiritual world. We explained this by saying that the ego and the astral bodies, which are separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep—being breathed forth as it were, on going to sleep and breathed in again on waking—that these during the hours of sleep meet with the world we reckon as belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi. To this world our own human soul will also belong when it has formed the Spirit-Self; in this rules as highest directing principle, that which in the life of religion we are accustomed to call the Holy Spirit. We have gone somewhat minutely into the meeting which man has with the Holy Spirit in the Spiritual world, during each one of his normal periods of sleep.

Now, we must very clearly understand that in the course of the development of the human race, during the evolution of the earth, changes have taken place with regard to these things. What then actually takes place while man is asleep? Well, I think I made that clear in the last lecture, from the standpoint of what takes place within man. Considered in his relation to the universe, man in a certain sense, imitates that rhythm in the world-order, which is established in any one part of the earth by the fact that one half of the twenty-four hour period is day and the other half night. Of course, it is always day in some part of the earth, but a man only lives in one part of it, and in respect to this the rule given holds good: wherever he lives, he imitates the rhythm between day and night in his own rhythm of sleeping and waking. The fact that this rhythm is broken through in modern life, that man is no longer compelled to be awake at day and asleep at night, is connected with his progress in evolution, in the course of which he raises himself above the objective course of the world, and now only has within him the one rhythm of day and night,—no longer the two rhythms working together. These rhythms work in a certain sense at one time for the universe, for the Macrocosm, and at another for man, for the Microcosm; but they are no longer in unison. In this way man has, in a certain respect, become a being independent of the Macrocosm.

Now, in those olden times, when, as we know, there was a certain atavistic clairvoyance in man, he was then more in harmony with the great course of the world-order, with respect to this rhythm. In olden times people slept all night, and were awake all day. For this reason the whole circle of man's experience was different from what it is now. But man has had in a sense to be lifted out of this parallel with the Macrocosm, and being thus torn away he has been compelled to stimulate an inner independent life of his own. It cannot be said that the main point was, that as in those days man slept at night he did not then observe the stars; for he did observe them, notwithstanding the fables of external science with respect to worship of the stars. The essential thing was that man was then differently organised into the whole world-order; for, while the sun was at the other side of the earth and consequently did not exercise its immediate activity on the part of the earth on which he lived, a man was then able in his ego and astral bodies—which were outside his physical and etheric bodies—to devote himself to the stars. He thus observed not merely the physical stars, but perceived the Spiritual part of the physical stars. He did not actually see the physical stars with external eyes; but he saw the Spiritual part of the physical stars. Hence we must not look upon what is related of the ancient star-worship, as though the ancients looked up to the stars and then made all sorts of beautiful symbols and images. It is very easy to say, according to modern science: In those olden times the imagination was very active; men imagined gods behind Saturn, Sun and Moon; they pictured animal forms in the signs of the Zodiac. But it is only the imagination of the learned scientists that works in this way, inventing such ideas True it is, however, that in the state of consciousness of the egos and astral bodies of the ancients, this did seem to them to be as we have described, so that they really saw and perceived those things. In this way man had direct vision of the spirit which is the soul of the universe; he lived with it. In reality it is only as regards our physical and etheric body that we are suited for the earth; the ego and astral body in their present condition are suited to the spirit that ensouls the universe, in the manner described. We may say that they belong to that region of the universe; but man must develop so far as really to be able to experience the innermost being of his ego and astral body, and to have experiences within them. For this purpose the external experience which was present in olden times, had to disappear for a while, it had to be blurred. The consciousness of communication with the stars had to recede; it had to be dimmed, so that the inner being of man could become powerful enough to enable him, at a definite time in the future, to learn so to strengthen it that he may be able to find the spirit, as spirit. Just as the ancients were united every night, when asleep, with the spirit of the stellar-world, so was man once connected with that spirit in the course of every year; but as time went on, in the course of the year he came in touch with a Higher Spirit of the world of the stars, and also in a sense with what went on in that world. While asleep at night the forms of the stars in their calm repose worked upon him; in the course of the year he was affected by the changes connected with the sun's course through the year; connected, as one might say, through the sun's course with the destiny of the earth for the year, caused by her passage through the seasons, and especially through the summer and winter.

You see, although some traditions are still extant relating to the experiences man formerly went through when asleep at night, there are but few remaining of those yet more distant times (or rather few traced back to their origin), when men took part in the secrets of the year's course. The echoes of these experiences still persist, but they are little understood. If you seek among the myths of the different peoples you will constantly come across that which proves that man then knew something of a conflict between winter and summer, summer and winter. Here again external erudition sees nothing but the symbolic creative imagination of the ancients; it says, we in our advanced times have gone much further than that! These were, however, real experiences which man went through, and they played a significant and profound part in the whole Spiritual civilisation of the ancient past. There were mysteries in which the knowledge of the secrets of the year were taught. Let us just consider the significance of such mysteries. These were not the same in the very ancient times as they became later, in the times when the history of ancient Egypt and of ancient Greece and to some extent even the earlier Roman history was enacted. We will, therefore, consider those mysteries which passed away with the older civilisations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome.

In these mysteries there was still a consciousness of the connection of the earth with the whole universe. At that time it was customary for suitable persons to be subjected to a definite Psychical process—but this could no longer be done today. They could then, during a certain number of days—in winter—be sent to certain definite localities, there to serve in a sense as receiving stations for the universe, the supra-earthly universe, and to receive what it is able to communicate to the earth at such times, if the times could provide a sufficiently receptive receiving-station. Our present Christmas time was then not precisely the most important time, though approximately so but the exact time does not signify for the moment. Let us assume the time to be between the 24th December, and the early days of January. This season is one in which, through the special position of the sun to the earth, the universe conveys something to the earth that it does not at other times. At this season the universe speaks in a more intimate way to the earth than at other times. This is because the sun does not unfold its summer-force at this time; the summer-force has in a certain respect, withdrawn. Now, the leaders of the ancient mysteries took advantage of that time to make it possible in certain organised places with the help of specially prepared persons, to receive the inner secrets of the universe, which came down to the earth during this intimate duologue. This may be compared today with something certainly much more trivial, yet the two can be compared. You know that what is known as ‘wireless telegraphy’ rests upon the fact that electric waves are set in motion, which are then further transmitted without wires, and that in certain places an instrument called a coherer is installed, which, by its peculiar arrangement makes it possible for the electric waves to be received and the coherer is then set in action. The whole thing depends entirely on the arrangement and formation of the metal filings in the coherer which are then shaken back into place when the waves have passed through it. Now, if we assume that the secrets of the universe, of the supra-earthly universe, pass through the earth at the special time alluded to, it would be necessary to have an instrument for receiving them; for the electric waves would pass by the receiving-station to no purpose, unless the right instrument attuned to receive them were there! Such an instrument is needed to receive what comes from the universe. The ancient Greeks used their Pythia, their priestesses for this purpose; they were trained for the purpose and were very specially sensitive to what came down from the universe, and were able to communicate its secrets. These secrets were then later on taught by those who perhaps, had long been unable themselves to act as receivers. Still the secrets of the universe were given out. This, of course, took place under the sign of the holy mysteries, a sign of which the present age, which has -no longer any feeling for what is holy, has no conception. In our age the first thing would obviously be to ‘interview’ the priests of the mysteries!

Now, what was above all demanded of these priests? It was necessary in a certain sense that they should know that if they made themselves acquainted with what streamed down from the universe for the fructification of earth-life, and especially if they used it in their social knowledge, they must be capable, having thereby become much cleverer, of establishing the principal laws and other rules for government during the coming year.

It would at one time have been impossible to establish laws or social ordinances, without first seeking guidance from those who were able to receive the secrets of the Macrocosm. Later ages have retained dim and dubious echoes of this greatness in their superstitious fancies. When on New Year's Eve people pour melted lead into water to learn the future of the coming year, that is but the superstitious remains of that great matter of which I have described. Therein the endeavour was made so to fructify the spirit of man that he might carry over into the earth what could only spring from the universe; for it was desired that man should so live on the earth that his life should not merely consist of what can be experienced here, but also of what can be drawn from the universe. In the same way, it was known that during the summer time of the earth we are in a quite different relation to the universe, and that during that season the earth cannot receive any intimate communications from thence. The summer mysteries were based upon this knowledge, and were intended for a quite different purpose, which I need not go into today.

Now, as I have said, even less has come down to us in tradition concerning the secrets of the course of the year, than of those things relating to the rhythm between day and night, and between sleeping and waking. But in those olden times, when man still had a high degree of atavistic clairvoyance, through which he was able to experience in the course of the year the intimate relations between the universe and the earth, he was still conscious that what he thus experienced came from that meeting with the Spiritual world, which he cannot now have every time he sleeps. It came from the meeting with the Spiritual world in which dwell those Spiritual beings we reckon as belonging to the world of the Archangels—where man will some day dwell with his innermost being, after he has developed his Life-Spirit, during the Venus period. That is the world in which we must think of Christ, the Son, as the directing and guiding principle. (Man had this meeting in all ages, of course, but it was formerly perceived by means of atavistic clairvoyance.) We have, therefore, called this meeting, which in the course of the year man has in any part of the earth where he makes Christmas in his winter: the meeting with the Son. Thus in the course of a year, a man really goes through a rhythm which imitates that of the seasons of the year, in which he has a meeting and a union with the world of the Son.

Now we know that through the Mystery of Golgotha, that Being whom we designate as the Christ has united Himself with the course of the Earth. At the very time this union took place, the direct vision into the Spiritual world had become blurred, as I have just explained.

We see the objective fact: that the Event of Golgotha is directly connected with the alteration in the evolution of mankind on the earth itself. Yet we may say that there were times in the earth's development when, in the sense of the old atavistic clairvoyance, man entered into relation with Christ, through becoming aware of the intimate duologue held between the earth and the Macrocosm. Upon this rests the belief held by certain modern learned men, students of religion, with some justification:—the belief that an original primal revelation had once been given to the earth. It came about in the manner described. It was an old primeval revelation. All the different religions on the face of the earth are fragments of that original revelation, fragments fallen into decadence. In what position then are those who accepted the Mystery of Golgotha? They are able to express an intense inner recognition of the Spiritual content of the universe, by saying: That which in olden times could only be perceived through the duologue of the earth with the cosmos, has now descended; it dwelt within a human being, it appeared in the Man, Jesus of Nazareth, in the course of the Mystery of Golgotha. Recognition of the Christ who dwelt in Jesus of Nazareth, recognition of that Being who was formerly perceptible to the atavistic clairvoyance of man at certain seasons of the year, must be increasingly emphasised as necessary for the Spiritual development of humanity. For the two elements of Christianity will be then united as they really should and must be, if on the one hand Christianity, and on the other humanity, are each to develop further in the right way. The fact that in the old Christian traditions the Legend of Christ Jesus was part of the yearly celebration of the Christmas, Easter, and Whitsuntide Festivals, is connected with this; and, as I stated in a former lecture, the fact that the Festival of Christmas is kept at a fixed date, while Easter is regulated according to the heavenly constellations, is also connected with this. Christmas is celebrated in accordance with the earth-conditions, it is kept in what is always the very depth of winter and this hangs together with the meeting with Christ, with the Son, which meeting really takes place at that season. Christ, however, is a Being belonging to the Macrocosm. He descended from thence, yet is One with it; and this is expressed in the fixing of Easter by the heavens in spring, according to the constellations of sun and moon;—for the Easter Festival is intended to show that Christ belongs to the whole universe, just as Christmas should point to the descent of Christ to the earth. So it was right that what belongs to the seasons of the year through their rhythm in human life, should be inserted into the course of the year as has been done. For this is so profound a thing, as regards the inner being of man, that it is really right that these Festivals relating to the Mystery of Golgotha, should continue to be held in harmony with the rhythm of the great universe, and not be subject to the alteration which in modern cities has taken place in the hours of sleeping and waking.

Here we have something in which man should not as yet exercise his freewill, something in which each year the consciousness should come to him, that, though he can no longer come into touch with the great universe through atavistic clairvoyance, there is still something living within him which belongs to the universe and expresses itself in the course of the year.

Now, among the things which are perhaps the most found fault with in Spiritual Science by certain religious sects, is, that according to Spiritual Science the Christ-Impulse must once again be bound up with the whole universe. I have often emphatically stated that Spiritual Science takes nothing away from the traditions of religion with respect to the mystery of Christ Jesus; but rather adds to them the connection which surrounds that mystery extending, as it does, from the earth to the whole universe. Spiritual Science does not seek Christ on the earth alone, but in the whole universe.

It is indeed not easy to understand why certain religious confessions so strongly condemn this connecting of the Christ-Impulse with Cosmic Events. This attitude would be comprehensible if Spiritual Science wished to do away with the traditions of Christianity; but as it only adds to them, that should not be a reason for censure. So it is, however; and the reason is that people do not wish anything to be added to certain traditions.

There is, however, something very serious behind all this, something of very great importance to our age. I have often drawn your attention to the fact, which is also mentioned in the first of my Mystery Plays, that we are approaching a time in which we can speak of a Spiritual return of Christ. I need not go more fully into this today, it is well known to all our friends. This Christ Event will, however, not merely be an event satisfying the transcendental curiosity of man, but it will above all bring to their minds a demand for a new understanding of the Christ-Impulse. Certain basic words of the Christian faith, which ought to surge through the whole world as holy impulses—at any rate through the world of those who wish to take up the Christ-Impulse—are not understood deeply enough. I will now only call to your remembrance the significant and incisive words: ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ These words will take on a new meaning when Christ appears in a world which is truly not of this world, not of the world of sense. It must be a profound attribute of the Christian conception of the world to cultivate an understanding of other human views and conceptions, with the sole exception of rough and crude materialism. Once we know that all the religions on the earth are the remnants of ancient vision, it will then only be a question of taking seriously enough what was thus perceived; for later on, because mankind was no longer organised for vision, the results of the former vision only filtered through in fragmentary form into the different religious creeds. This can once again be recognised through Christianity. Through Christianity a profound understanding can be gained, not only of the great religions, but of every form of religious creed on the earth. It is certainly easy to say this; though at the same time very difficult to make men really adopt these views. Yet they must become part of their convictions, all the wide world over. For Christianity, in so far as it has spread over the earth up to the present time, is but one religion among many, one creed among a number of others. That is not the purpose for which it was founded; it was founded that it might spread understanding over the whole earth. Christ did not suffer death for a limited number of people, nor was He born for a few; but for all. In a certain sense there is a contradiction between the demand that Christianity should be for all men and the fact that it has become one of many creeds. It is not intended to be a separate creed, and it can only be that, because it is not understood in its full and deep meaning. To grasp this deep meaning a cosmic understanding is necessary.

One is compelled today to wrestle for words wherewith to express certain truths, which are now so far removed from man that we lack the words to express them. One is often obliged to express the great truths by means of comparisons. You will recollect that I have often said that Christ may be called the Sun-Spirit. From what I have said today about the yearly course of the sun, you will see that there is some justification for calling Him the Sun-Spirit. But we can form no idea of this, we cannot picture it, unless we keep the cosmic relation of Christ in view, unless we consider the Mystery of Golgotha as a real Christ-Mystery, as something that certainly took place on this earth, and yet is of significance for the whole universe and took place for the whole universe.

Now, men are in conflict with one another about many things on the earth, and they are at variance on many questions; they are at variance in their religious beliefs, and believe themselves to be at variance as regards their nationality and many other things. This lack of unity brings about times such as those in which we are living now. Men are not of one mind even with regard to the Mystery of Golgotha. For no China-man or Indian will straightway accept what a European missionary says about the Mystery of Golgotha. To those who look at things as they are, this fact is not without significance. There is, however, one thing concerning which men are still of one mind. It seems hardly credible, but it is a commonplace truth and one we cannot help admitting, that when we reflect how people live together on the earth, we cannot help wondering that there should be anything left upon which they are not at variance; yet there still are things about which people are of one mind, and one such example is the view people hold about the sun. The Japanese, Chinese, and even the English and Americans, do not believe that one sun rises and sets for them and another for the Germans. They still believe in the sun being the common property of all; indeed they still believe that what is supra-earthly is the common property of all. They do not even dispute that, they do not go to war about these things. And that can be taken as a sort of comparison. As has been said, these things can only be expressed by comparisons. When once people realise the connection of Christ with these things which men do not dispute, they will not dispute about Him, but will learn to see Him in the Kingdom which is not of this world, but which belongs to Him. But until men recognise the cosmic significance of Christ, they will not be of one mind with respect to the things concerning which unity should prevail. For we shall then be able to speak of Christ to the Jews, to the Chinese, to the Japanese, and to the Indians,—just as we speak to Christian Europeans. This will open up an immensely significant perspective for the further development of Christianity on the earth, as well as for the development of mankind on the earth. For ways must be found of arousing in the souls of men, sentiments which all people shall be able to understand equally.

That will be one thing demanded of us in the time that shall bring the return, the Spiritual return, of the Christ. Especially with respect to the words: ‘My Kingdom is not of this world,’ a deeper understanding will come about in that time; a deeper understanding of the fact that there is in the human being not only what pertains to the earth, but something supra-earthly, which lives in the annual course of the sun. We must grow to feel that as in the individual human life the soul rules the body, so in everything that goes on outside, in the rising and setting stars, in the bright sunlight, and fading twilight, there dwells something Spiritual; and just as we belong to the air with our lungs, so do we belong to the Spiritual part of the universe with our souls. We do not belong to the abstract Spiritual life of an outgrown Pantheism, but to that concrete Spirituality which lives in each individual being. Thus we shall find that there is something Spiritual which belongs to the human soul, which indeed is the human soul; and that this is in inner connection with what lives in the course of the year as does the breath in a man; and that the course of the year with its secrets belongs to the Christ-Being, who went through the Mystery of Golgotha. We must soar high enough to be able to connect what took place historically on the earth in the Mystery of Golgotha, with the great secrets of the world—with the Macrocosmic secrets. From such an understanding will proceed something extremely important: a knowledge of the social needs of man. A great deal of social science is practised in our day, and all sorts of social ideals mooted. Certainly nothing can be said against that, but all these things will have to be fructified by that which will spring up in man, through realising the course of the year as a Spiritual impulse. For only by vividly experiencing each year the image of the Mystery of Golgotha, parallel with the course of the year, can we become inspired with real social knowledge and feeling.

What I am now saying must certainly seem absolutely strange to people of the present day, yet it is true. When the year's course is again generally felt by humanity as in inner connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, then, by attuning the feelings of the soul with both the course of the year and the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha, a true social ruling will be the true solution, or at any rate the true continuation of what is today so foolishly called (in reference to what is really in view) the social question. Precisely through Spiritual Science people will have to acquire a knowledge of the connections of man with the universe. This will certainly lead them to see more in this universe than does the materialism of today.

Just those very things to which least importance is attributed today, are really the most important. The materialistic biology, the materialistic Natural Science of today compares man with the animal; though it certainly does admit a certain difference,—in degree. In its own domain it is of course right; but what it completely leaves out of account is the relation of man to the directions of the universe. The animal spine—and in this respect the exceptions prove the rule—the animal spine is parallel with the surface of the earth, its direction is out into the universe. The human spine is directed towards the earth. For this reason man is quite different from the animal, above and below. The ‘above and below’ in man determine his whole being. In the animal the spine is directed to the infinite distances of the Macrocosm; in man the upper part of the head, the brain, and man himself are inserted into the whole Macrocosm. This is of enormous significance. This brings about what establishes a relation between the Spiritual and bodily in man, and through this his Spiritual and bodily parts are made subject to the conditions of above and below. I shall have more to say on this subject, but today I will merely just allude to it in a sketchy way. This ‘above and below’ characterises what we may call ‘the going out of the ego and astral body during sleep.’ For man with his physical body and etheric body is really inserted into and forms part of the earth while he is awake. During the night time he, with his ego and astral body is in a certain sense, inserted into that which is above.

Now we may ask: well, how is it then with other opposites to be found in the Macrocosm? There is also the opposite which in man can be described as ‘before and behind.’ In respect to these, too, man is inserted in a different way into the whole universe than is the animal or, indeed the plant. Man is inserted in such a way that he corresponds both before and behind to the course of the sun. This ‘before and behind’ is the direction which corresponds to the rhythm in which man takes part in living and dying. Just as man expresses in a sense a living relation of the ‘above and below’ in his sleeping and waking, so in his living and dying does he also express the relation of ‘before and behind.’ This ‘before and behind’ is in correspondence with the course of the sun; so that for man, ‘before’ signifies towards the east, and ‘behind’ towards the west. East and west form the second direction of space, that direction of which we really speak when we say that the human soul forsakes the human body not in sleep, but at death. For the soul on leaving the body goes towards the east. This is only still to be found in those traditions in which, when a man dies it is said: he has ‘entered the eternal east.’ Such old traditional sayings will some day, as indeed they are even now, be looked upon by learned men as merely symbolic. Some such platitudes as the following will be uttered: ‘The sun rises in the east,’ and is a beautiful sight; therefore, when it was desired to speak of eternity, the ancients spoke of the east! Yet this corresponded to a reality, and indeed one more closely connected with the yearly course of the sun than with the course of the day.

The third difference is that between the inner and the outer. Above and below, east and west, inner and outer. We live an inner life and we live an outer life. The day after tomorrow (15 March, 1917) I shall give a public lecture on this inner and outer life, entitled: ‘The human soul and the human body.’ We live an inner and an outer life. These form just as great opposites in man as above and below, east and west. Whereas in the course of the year man has more to do with what I might call a representative delineation of the whole course of life, we may say that when we speak of an inner and outer life in connection with the life and death of man, we refer to the whole course of his life, especially in so far as it has an ascending and a descending development. We know that up to a certain age a man goes through an ascending development. His collective growth then ceases, it remains at a standstill for a while, and then retrogrades. Now it hangs together with the collective course of a man's life, that at its early stages his whole body is then more connected in a natural, elemental way, with the Spiritual. I might say that at the beginning of his life a man is constituted in the very opposite way from what he is at the middle of his life, when he attains the zenith of his ascending development. In the first part of his life a man grows, thrives, and increases; afterwards his descending development begins. This is connected with the fact that the physical forces of man are then no longer in themselves forces of growth, for with the forces of growth are also intermingled the forces of decay. The inner nature of man is then connected in a similar way with the universe, as at his birth, at the beginning of his life, his outer bodily nature is connected with the universe. A complete turning round takes place. That is why at the present day a man goes through in a state of unconsciousness, in the middle of his life, the meeting with the Father-Principle, with that Spiritual Being whom we reckon as belonging to the Hierarchy of the Archai. He then meets with that Spiritual world in which he will dwell when he has completely developed his Spirit-Man.

Now, one might ask: Is this too in any way connected with the whole universe? Is there anything in the life of the universe connected in a similar way with the meeting that occurs in the middle of a man's life with the Father-Principle, as the meeting with the Spirit is connected with the rhythm of day and night, and the meeting with the Son with the rhythm of the year? That question might be asked. Well, now, my dear friends, we must bear in mind and hold firmly to the fact that, as regards the meeting with the Father-Principle, and also as regards that with the Spirit-Principle, man is lifted above rhythm, rhythm does not run quite parallel with man. For men are not all born at the same time, but at different times, therefore, the course of their lives cannot be parallel; but they can inwardly reflect some Spiritual Cosmic happening.

Do they do this?

Well, you see, if we recall what is stated in the little book: Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, and in other books and courses of lectures, we shall know, that in the first seven years man more particularly builds up his physical body, in the next seven years his etheric body, in the next seven years his astral body. Then for seven years he forms the sentient soul; from twenty-eight to thirty-five he forms the intellectual or reasoning soul; and during this period he has the meeting with the Father-Principle. It takes place during that time;—not that it extends over the whole period, but it occurs during those years;—so that we may say: a man prepares for it in his twenty-eight, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth years. In the case of most people the meeting takes place in the deepest subconscious regions of the human soul. Now, we must assume that this corresponds to something that takes place in the universe; that is, we must find in the universe something representing a course, a rhythm. Just as the rhythm of day and night is one of twenty-four hours, and the course of the year one of three hundred and sixty-five days, so we ought to be able to find something of a like nature in the universe, only that would have to be more comprehensive. All this is connected with the sun, or at least with the solar system. Just as the twenty-eighth twenty-ninth, and thirtieth years are more comprehensive than the period of twenty-four hours; and the three hundred and sixty-five days than any other period, so something yet greater must be connected with the sun, something corresponding with this third meeting. Now, the ancients rightly considered Saturn as the most distant planet from our solar system; it is the furthest away. From the standpoint of materialistic astronomy it was quite justifiable to add Uranus and Neptune to our system; but they have a different origin and do not belong to the solar system; so that we may speak of Saturn as the outermost Planet of our system. Now let us consider this. If Saturn forms the boundary of the solar system, we may say that in its circuit round the sun, it travels round the outermost boundaries of the solar system. When Saturn travels round this and returns to the point from which he started, he describes the extreme limits of the solar system. When he has traveled round the Sun and returned to his starting point, he then occupies the same relation to the sun as he did at first. Now Saturn, (as may be said, according to the Copernican Cosmic System) takes from twenty-nine to thirty years to complete his course, which is thus of about that duration. Here then, in the circuit of Saturn round the sun, which is not yet understood today—(the facts are really quite different, but the Copernican Cosmic System has not yet gone far enough to understand these) in this course of Saturn we have a connection, extending to the furthest limits of the solar system, with the course of a human life, which is thus an image of the Saturnian circuit in so far as the life-course of man leads to the meeting with the Father. That also leads us out into the Macrocosm. In this way, my dear friends, I think I have shown you that the innermost being of man can only be understood when considered in its connection to the supra-earthly. The supra-earthly, being Spiritual, is organised into that which in a sense it turns towards us visibly. But that which it manifests visibly is also merely an expression of the Spiritual. The raising of man above materialism will only take place when knowledge has progressed far enough to raise itself above the mere comprehension of earthly connections, and ascends once more to the grasp of the world of the stars and the sun.

I have already pointed out on a former occasion, that many things of which the present scholastic wisdom does not allow itself to dream, are connected with these things. Today men believe they will some day be able to generate living beings in their laboratories from inorganic matter. Materialism makes the most of this today. But it is not necessary to be a materialist to believe that a living being can be created out of inorganic matter, in the laboratory; for the alchemists, who certainly were not materialists, testified that they could make Homunculi; but today this is taken in a materialistic sense. The time will come, however, when it will be realised and inwardly felt, on approaching a man at work in his laboratory—(for living beings will indeed be produced in the laboratory from that which has no life)—on approaching such a man we shall feel ourselves compelled to say: ‘Welcome to the star of the hour!’ For this cannot be brought about at any hour; it will depend on the constellations. Whether life arises from the lifeless, will depend on the forces that do not belong to the earth, but come from the universe. Much is connected with these secrets. We shall speak of these things again in the near future, for it is now possible to say somewhat on these subjects, concerning which de Saint-Martin, who was called ‘The unknown philosopher’ says in many passages of his book on Truth and Error, that he thanks God that they are shrouded in secrecy. They cannot remain shrouded in secrecy however, for man will need them for his further development; but one thing is necessary, my dear friends, it is necessary that men should once more acquire that earnestness and feeling for the holiness of all these things, without which the world will not make the right use of such knowledge.

We will speak of these things again in the next lecture.

We had before us yesterday a succession of children to whom we gave our attention. It is in this way for the most part that the study of the treatment of abnormal children has necessarily to be pursued—namely, in relation to particular examples. Abnormality manifests in all possible directions, and each single case is a case by itself. The only way you can begin to learn how to deal with such children is to devote yourself to an individual case, and thereby, as time goes on, gradually acquire the skill that will be needed for dealing with other cases.

You will remember the boy of twelve years old who was brought before us yesterday and whom I had to describe as a kleptomaniac. I explained to you how spiritual vision can discern, in the case of such a kleptomaniac, that on account of hindrances in the astral body, he has no means of access to the capacity for judgement that ordinarily belongs to human beings in the world. In this connection, you must realise that everything which has to do with morality, everything of which it can be said that our conception of it must needs include moral impulses, comes to expression within Earth existence alone. We really could say—it would of course be misunderstood by the superficial thinking of the present day—that where the Earth comes to an end, where one goes out beyond into the super-sensible realm, moral judgements such as we are familiar with on Earth cease to exist; for the reason that out there, in the realm of the super-sensible, morality is, so to say, a complete matter of course. Moral judgements begin only where there is a possibility of choice between good and evil. For the spiritual world, good and evil are simply characteristic qualities. There are good beings and there are bad beings. As little as you can say of a lion that he ought, or ought not, to be lion-like, just so little can you say, when you have come away from the Earth, that good and evil ought or ought not to be as they are. To speak in this way pre-supposes the possibility of choice, of saying Yes or No, a possibility which comes in question solely within the organisation of man and where human beings are living socially together. Now, in the case of an illness such as kleptomania, owing to the hindrances of which we spoke, the person in question has not evolved his astral body far enough to enable him to develop a sensitivity to moral judgements. Consequently, the moment a boy of this kind feels a particular interest in some object, he sees no reason at all why he should not take it. He does not understand that it may “belong” to someone, the idea of “mine and thine” has no meaning for him. His astral body does not get far enough into the physical world for him to be able to appreciate the concept of possession.

We have here exactly the same kind of phenomenon as when someone is colour-blind. It's no use talking about colours to one who is colour-blind; and it would have just as little sense to speak in the higher world about possession and non-possession. The child does not find his way far enough into the physical world for him to be able to attach any meaning at all to what he hears people say about “possessing” things. What is particularly strong in him is the idea of discovery—the idea that he has lighted upon some object or other which astonishes him, which fills him with delight and interest. But there his capacity for forming ideas comes to a full stop. The truth is that up to now his astral body has not penetrated to the region of the will, but has remained more or less in the intellectual sphere. We have evidence of this in the fact that the organs of the will are deformed at the side. Consequently, whatever he finds good intellectually he at once turns into will. Let the same defect show itself in the intellect, and you will find the children are dull and stupid; but when, as here, it shows itself in the will, they are kleptomaniacs.

An abnormality of this kind is very difficult to contend with. For at the age of life when it would be important to make a strong stand against the failing, it generally escapes notice altogether. At this early age, the child is naturally imitative, doing what he sees done around him, and so one may easily fail to discern in his behaviour the tendency to kleptomania. Only after the change of teeth, will the tendency begin to be apparent. When the change of teeth has taken place, the child is however even then not far enough out yet on the physical plane to develop a sense for any moral judgement other than: What I like is good, what I don't like is bad. His judgements, that is to say, are entirely aesthetic. It will therefore be for the teacher to awaken in the child the feeling for the good—the meaning of “good”—by bringing it about that the child looks up to him and takes him for his pattern and example. That is why in our Waldorf School education we take particular care that authority shall make itself felt in this age of life. Quite as a matter of course it should come about that the child regards his teacher with devotion. The teacher will then speak of things that are “good” always in such a manner as to arouse the child's interest and enjoyment, and of things that are “bad” in such a manner as to arouse his antipathy. For this to achieve the desired result, it is of course essential that there be first the natural acceptance of the teacher's authority. If this is necessary in the case of a so-called normal child, it is in the very highest degree necessary in the case of such a child as we are considering. In all education nothing contributes so much to true progress as that the child has trust and confidence in the one who is his teacher; and in dealing with abnormal children it is absolutely essential that this right relationship between child and teacher can be relied on from the outset.

In a course of study such as we are now engaged in, we must not omit to point out how important it is, when dealing with quite little children, to make careful observation of the whole way in which their development takes place. If we notice that a little child grows very happy and animated on account of something he has learned—learned, I mean, before the change of teeth—if we notice, for instance, that a child who is learning to speak takes inordinate pleasure in some new sound he has learned to utter, then we must be prepared for the possibility that things may go wrong with that child! Children who later on become kleptomaniacs, develop this kind of egotism in the tender age of early childhood; they will perhaps click their tongue with satisfaction, when they have acquired a new word. This is rare with very young children, but it certainly can occur.

One has to learn to be able to look ahead and see what may be the outcome of such a trait in future years. Far more important for the doctor as well as for the educator, than the principles upon which he has to work—although a knowledge of these is, of course, to be taken for granted—far more important for him is that he should acquire a sensitive perception for what is going on in the world around him. You must not, you see, be like Wulffen;¹ you must be ready to appreciate what a vast deal depends on the environment of a growing child. Take, for instance, such a case, where a very little child has the habit I spoke of just now: he clicks his tongue with satisfaction over some new thing he has learned. This delight at acquiring something in the intellectual sphere will change, about the time of the second dentition, into a conspicuous vanity; the child will grow vain and conceited in relation to other things as well. It should indeed be a matter for grave concern, for instance, if at about the time of the change of teeth a child develops—as it were, from an inborn tendency—a hankering after fine clothes. Symptoms of this nature should be carefully noted. But let us now consider two kinds of environment into which such a child may grow up.

The child may be born in a region—we will imagine for the purpose some quite small territory—where people are accustomed to live in an easy-going way and let things take their course, and where they look upon the militia as something that is necessary for the defence of their territory, but that arouses in them no enthusiasm or at best an enthusiasm that has to be artificially stimulated. There will then develop in every child as a matter of course, during the period between the seventh and fourteenth years, a feeling for what is expected of him as a member of the community. The boy grows up; and if particular care has not been taken that he is able to look up with love and respect to his teacher (for parents, as you know, do not always concern themselves about such a matter in this period of the child's life), then the tendency which we have seen at work in the intellectual sphere slips down now into the will, and it is quite possible that kleptomania may ensue.

And now let us see, on the other hand, what happens when a child of this kind grows up, not in a country where the militia is regarded as a somewhat troublesome burden, but in a region where the child finds himself surrounded by a kind of Prussianism. (As you will see, I am giving just characteristic features of a particular case.) Militarism is here looked upon by no means merely as a necessity, but as something that gives one tremendous pleasure, something that thrills one with wonder and admiration and to which one is loyal through thick and thin. The child does not remain at home in the family, he is sent to school and then later to the University. And now the trait that was not at all advantageous to the other boy turns out to be of great advantage to him. The disposition of which we have spoken and which was already present in him as a child finds its fulfilment and expression when he becomes a researcher in natural science. He is engaged in preparing microscopic slides; he will look round in all directions for objects to bring under the microscope, and in this regular—and at the same time irregular—way, satisfy his longing to acquire things for himself. The impulse will experience its full satisfaction. For the boy has found his way into a milieu within which the habit of stealing has no place; if things are “taken”, then it is things with which one does not associate the concept of stealing. The kleptomania will in this case go on developing beneath the surface. The boy becomes later a lecturer in physiology, he becomes the most famous physiologist of his time. Something of the kleptomaniac propensity remains with him for life, but it is associated in him with a kind of enthusiasm for war. This enthusiasm now changes however the sphere of its activity, finding its way especially into the imagery he uses in his lecturing; these are all about fighting and going to war. And then, strangely enough, this tendency may in certain circumstances degenerate into a kind of vanity. A feeling may get hold of him that his rhetorical figures are his own possession and that no one else has a right to use them. Suppose some daring and rather mischievous student of his, who is a bit of a genius, ventures in his examination to use the very same figures of speech. That student will certainly be failed. And if he should go so far as to click his tongue at the same time, then things will go very badly with him.

Once we have the insight to see and understand things of this kind when we meet them in life, the insight itself will guide us to the right method of dealing with them. We must resolve to make ourselves acquainted with life in all its manifold shades and varieties. Then we shall be ready to notice quickly when traits begin to show themselves that point in this or that direction.

I have already spoken to you of a good curative measure that can be employed in the psychological sphere. You have to cultivate your power of invention and tell the boy a story, in which this characteristic of his plays a part. You tell him of people who do the same kind of thing, and then you make it clear that all the time they are only digging a pit for themselves into which they afterwards fall. If the dramatic character of the story be developed with real enthusiasm, you can attain your end in this way, provided you sustain the effort without any slackening. In addition, you will at the same time need to treat such a child therapeutically; he must receive injections with hypophysis cerebri and honey, because, as you saw, the temporal lobes are stunted and we must do all we can to encourage forces of growth that shall counteract this deformation.

Very good results can also be obtained from the use of Curative Eurythmy; but it must be carried out with tremendous energy. All the movements that belong to the vowels, the boy must be got to make with his legs. For what we have to do is to expel from the will the intellectual element, and at the same time impel into the will the striving, the taking pains, that lives in the vowel sounds.

Finally, it is most important that by virtue of the authority we have with the child, we should find it possible to speak with him quite plainly and unreservedly on the matter, showing him how objectionable such a habit is. But this must not be done too early. It has to be brought home to the child's intellect, and by attempting it too early we can easily spoil everything. We must go to work with our stories in the first place, and then gradually lead over to this appeal to the intellect.

It is most difficult to point to any success in these measures, for the good results are simply not noticed. The truth is, however, that many a kleptomaniac would never have been one at all, if early on, so soon as symptoms began to show themselves, those in charge of the child had at once begun telling the right kind of stories. Such stories always work; but we must have patience. One can be quite sure that in such a case as this boy, good results can be achieved—although, if the habit is deeply ingrained, perhaps only after a very long time.

And now for the other difficult child of whom I was speaking yesterday, who is not yet quite a year old, the case of hydrocephalus. Treatment has indeed in this instance been very difficult so far. For what do we observe in this child? What strikes us about him? First and foremost, excessive excitability and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system. This it is that has made possible such a prodigious enlargement of the head. Marked irritability of nerves and senses will always be found to express itself in an enlargement of the head. We must however be careful here to look at relative and not absolute measurements. If a person who is predisposed to be small altogether, has a head of the same size as that of a big, tall person, then he has what is for him a large head. This must not be forgotten when we are considering cases that are not abnormal. The child we saw yesterday is abnormal. The inordinate sensitiveness and irritability of the nerves-and-senses system, which are so evident in him, have been induced by the conditions under which he was living in the embryo time; I described these conditions to you yesterday, explaining them as due to the uneven way in which the influences of mother and father co-operated in the embryo.

What must we do in order to bring the child nearer to normality? Everything that could excite or irritate the nerves-and senses system must be shut out for as many hours of the day as possible. Accordingly we have had the child in a dark room, a room that is completely darkened, so that as he lies there, he is all the time in the quiet and the dark, receiving no impressions. As a matter of fact, I overestimated at first the results that could be attained by these means, for the child is actually not yet responsive to light. His sensitivity to light is exceedingly weak; on this account the exclusion of light is of less importance than might have been presumed. Nevertheless, this is the right principle to go on—to let the child live in the quiet and in the dark, having around him as few impressions as ever possible; then the impulse for quick and restless movement—an impulse of the will—will be aroused from within, and will work counter to the nerves-and-senses system. This then will be the first rule we set out to follow. Another thing we must do is to try to influence the nerves-and-senses system through the appropriate agencies. We have been using gneiss as an internal remedy. Quartz itself, used directly, would induce shock, and that we must at all costs avoid; with gneiss, the effects of the influence of quartz are more distributed. In quartz, the forces are strongly “radiant” in their working, sharp and spear-like; whereas when the same forces are distributed as in gneiss, they are mild in their working and spread out in the organism, reaching the periphery with a lighter touch. Gneiss in a high potency can here lead to the desired result. And then we must try to calm down the excited state of the nerves in the region also of the will. For in a very little child the whole human being, you must remember, is nerves-and senses system. This can be achieved by giving poppy baths. Baths are prepared, using the common field poppy.

When you see before you a state of affairs such as shows itself in this child, two things must go hand in hand the whole time—observation of the case, and whatever therapy is possible. You are dealing, you see, with an individual case. You will be in a better position to appreciate the importance of what I am saying if I tell you now what further symptoms have presented themselves to our observation. To begin with, we noticed that during the time of the treatment by injection the temperature dropped. Shortly afterwards the head was found to have increased in size. The child was sleeping by day and crying in the night. That changed when we began to give poppy baths in the evening. The fæces are hard, and a difference can be noticed according as the baths are given in the daytime or at night. The connection of astral with physical body is quite different morning and evening.

What we have to do is to bring order into the processes whereby what comes from the digestive system works into the brain. You will easily realise that mother's milk is not able under all circumstances to benefit a child of this kind in the same way that it does another child. (Normally, you know, mother's milk has an inherent tendency, a natural readiness to transfer itself from the digestive system to the nerves-and senses system.) We therefore discontinued mother's milk at the beginning of March, and the child was from then on nourished by other means. Nectar was given—the content of the nectaries found in the flowers of certain plants. Nectar has the effect of strengthening the ego in the region of the will. By administering a nourishment that develops—with something even of the dynamic of a parasite—in the region of the blossom, we make appeal to the inner individuality of the child, we try to call forth this inner individuality and bring it to activity. We have had some measure of success in this direction. But I must warn you how necessary it is, when one has a plan of this kind on hand, to decide on a suitable time for carrying it out, and then prepare oneself thoroughly for the occasion. Set-backs can always occur, and these are misjudged by anyone who looks at the matter from a layman's point of view. We have it here on record that for some days the child was having nectar and the fæces became softer. Afterwards diarrhoea ensued. The nectar was then discontinued. The diarrhoea stopped, and a condition set in during the night of 11th-12th June, that brought a kind of crisis. The child was crying, and blinking, and passing a great deal of water; the body sank in with every expiration; there were attacks of cramp in the left leg, while the left arm grew tense and rigid; the fontanels were also quite taut, and the reflex actions more pronounced. Hot compresses were applied, and compresses of poppy juice, after which the child fell asleep, and his condition on the following day was good. Appetite and evacuation of the bowels were in order.

You must understand that it is impossible to steer clear of such crises—unless one is prepared to steer clear of all hope of a cure! For the very work we have to set ourselves to do in the organism is bound at some time or other to express itself in such a crisis. When this happens, it is of course necessary immediately to intervene—as Frau Dr. Wegman did. After the application of hot compresses and poppy juice compresses the crisis will subside in a proper way. The only advice that can be given for a crisis of this nature is on no account to allow yourself to be alarmed or thrown off your guard. There are moments in such a case when everything depends on prompt and immediate action.

I would like to tell you of an interesting little experience that I had on this occasion. News reached me from another quarter that the child was in a very bad way. Frau Dr. Wegman herself said nothing about it; I was accordingly reassured, and was confident that the condition was taking its inevitable course. For one must, you know, retain the whole time a mood of readiness for the natural development of the illness; that is essential. And then one can listen quite quietly to someone or other who, without any real understanding of the case, is frightened and disturbed at the turn the illness is taking. In cases like this, where anything may happen, we must first be perfectly clear in ourselves that we are doing what requires to be done; if this is so, then we can also rest assured that everything is as it should be. It is of course most important to be watchful for crises and, when they come, to give them every care and attention; but we must know that they will certainly occur in a case of this kind. Feelings of pity and the like, which tend to make one agitated and upset, cannot help. It is never of the least use to be overcome with a feeling of pity, that way we merely get bewildered and distraught; the one and only thing that can help is to face the situation quite objectively and do what has to be done.

And now let us go a little further into the subject of treatment. As we have seen, it is not possible to do anything much yet in the way of psychological-pedagogical treatment; we have only one possibility in this direction, namely, to help psychologically by giving rest and, as far as possible, darkness. It is important however to find a way of bringing into the organism the principle of disintegration. We must replace the strong tendency that is at work there towards the watery element, towards fluidity by the principle of disintegration. Water does not fall asunder or disintegrate; it flows and spreads. We want to call upon forces that can promote disintegration, that can aid and encourage it. Such are the forces of lead. In lead we have a most effective means of inducing decomposition, disintegration. Whenever you see that upbuilding forces are rampant in the very place where breaking-down forces should be at work—and is not a preponderance of upbuilding over breaking-down forces the fundamental phenomenon to be observed in a giant-embryo such as this little child?—whenever you see this, you may always start on a course of medical treatment with lead. Lead, especially when injected, can have extraordinarily good results.

Let me describe to you how lead takes effect in the organism. Lead has, of course, long been known as a remedy; for thousands of years those who have had any understanding of such things have pointed to the medicinal influence of lead. The knowledge of its beneficial working has however been tending gradually to disappear—although now in our own time it is coming into notice again in a most remarkable way, from quite a new quarter. But now consider for a moment—where, in the whole earth, are the most powerful forces of disintegration to be found? We find them where radium occurs. And from radium we get, along with helium, an intermediary product which, undergoing further transformation, produces lead. Here, then, you have the inner connection. In the great world outside, in the cosmos, the most powerfully working forces of cleavage produce in lead the substance in which these forces of cleavage are ultimately concentrated. If therefore you bring lead into the human body, you are bringing into it cosmic destruction, cosmic disintegration. Think what this means. You introduce the lead, by means of injection, into the blood-circulation. In the circulation of the blood we have an immediate reflection of the structure of the universe. The 25,000 years that the sun takes to go round the universe—these 25,000 years we have in the circulation, in the pulsation of the blood.² And now you bring disintegrating forces straight into the organism. The cosmos, as we know, gives itself time to work; nevertheless, if we have a real insight into the matter, it will be evident to us that the introduction of such a substance as lead can be of real help.

Treatment for this child will therefore be as I have described. We have also used hypophysis, applying it to the legs as an ointment; the formative, shaping forces that are active in the secretion of hypophysis counteract deformation. We shall in this way “form” while we heal. We have of course at the same time to see that the right stimulation is provided in order for the remedies to be able to work.

One can, you know, be very thankful that we have now surmounted a first crisis; one can be glad of the crisis that occurred between the 11th and 12th July, when the child manifested the symptoms we described. He will in all probability have to go through many such crises, and we must be very watchful to see that we cure the child, in the positive sense. For it is, you know, quite possible for a cure to take place in a negative sense. It comes to this—we have to cure, not for death, but for life. It is indeed a most delicate matter ever to deal with an organ therapeutically.

I would like also at this point to draw your attention to the fact that nothing could be achieved by puncturing and letting water flow out; the trouble then only starts again and grows even more serious than before. Obviously, however, so long as we have not yet ourselves attained any success in diminishing the size of the head, it is not for us to begin criticising other methods of treatment.

This is going to be a particularly interesting case, and for me personally it has as a matter of fact quite a special interest. For, whenever I think of this little fellow, whenever I look at him, it is not merely this child that I see before me. Imagine to yourselves this child grown to be thirty years old. He would then be an adult human being. It might well happen. He would be about six times as big as he is now. The head would be perhaps three-and-a-half times its present size, and the rest of the body six times. Imagining this, I see before me a man whom I actually did have before me when I was a boy of six years old. We used to meet constantly, for he was always there at the station when the trains arrived. He was obliged to use crutches, because his body could not carry his head. The whole muscular system that is involved in walking had not developed properly. He had an immense head. The man had in fact remained an embryo, he was a thirty-year-old embryo.

The reason why this man made such a remarkable impression on me as a little boy was that he was unbelievably clever. I did so enjoy talking to him! A deformity is of course a bit of a shock to a boy of seven or eight years old; but then, on the other hand, the man was, as I have said, astonishingly clever. One could learn a great deal from him; and all his judgements were pervaded with a great gentleness. This gentleness and mildness seemed to overflow from him—like his head! When he spoke—his sentences were not unduly drawn out, they took the normal length of time to utter, but as he spoke them, it was almost as though he had some sugary moisture on his lips, as though he were rubbing his lips together and tasting the sweetness all the time. There was indeed something quite original about the man. He was moreover genuinely inventive. Inventions of many kinds were attributed to him—which he was said to have made first on a small scale. Altogether, a most interesting personality. In course of time he had become less sensitive about his abnormality, he had grown accustomed to it. After all, he lived, you see, in a village, where a person of this kind is regarded with a certain measure of understanding. I have in fact never yet come across a village where some afflicted child had not grown up in this manner, becoming the child of the whole village, and receiving constant care and help from those around.

If we should have a child of this kind to look after, who is rather older than the little fellow we are considering, we would have to adopt other measures, such as I described to you in part when I told you how I had to treat the hydrocephalic boy of eleven years old who was given into my care, and who was in time completely healed.

Now let us go on to the next—the little girl who was rather unruly and troublesome. This child weighed 41 lb. at birth, was a nine months child and was breast-fed for seven months. She learned to walk in her first year, and learned also to speak at the proper time. When a year and a half old, she ceased to wet the bed at night, but wet herself by day. At the age of three-and-a-half she had an attack of influenza with headache and high fever, and three weeks later developed measles. The mother had influenza at the same time and was nervous and worried. The child's appetite is bad. She sometimes has disturbing dreams.

We have here a condition that is frequently to be met with among these children; we might even describe the little girl as a “normally” abnormal child. Our chief concern must be to see that the astral body receives the right form and configuration that will enable it to fit itself into the ether and physical bodies in a harmonious manner. To achieve this end, we always give arsenic baths—that is, we use arsenic externally; and occasionally we administer arsenic internally as well. The treatment has the effect of harmonising the relationships of astral body, ether body and physical body. Then, to ensure that the externally administered arsenic shall really strike home, we reinforce it by applying mustard compresses to the feet before and after the bath, using also grated horse-radish for this purpose. I should add that in the latter case, you must make sure that the horse-radish is not grated until immediately before use. It is most important that it should be freshly grated; if allowed to stand for some hours, it loses its efficacy.

Coming to the psychological aspect of the case, we must try to cure the child of the habit of being so excited. For she is still always restless and excited; I don't think the environment here has so far had any marked influence on her. We must break her of this habit. Altogether, the breaking of some habit or trait of character in a child can often lead to most salutary results—a fact that should not be overlooked. In the case we are considering, a great deal can be achieved by bringing the child to be quiet and still at the very moment when something is being told her of a kind that generally makes her excited and restless—even if, in order to keep her still, we have to resort to mechanical means. First of all, therefore, we observe, when we are relating some story, what things in the story particularly excite the child. Then, we compel her to restrain herself and not get excited, to become inwardly a little stiff and hold herself in. If we can bring this about we shall find, as time goes on, that the characteristic trait in the child is somehow being broken down. Instead of evincing excitement, she will begin even to show signs of weariness when the story is told. We let this weariness work—say, for a week or two; and then for a while we simply let the child go her way, treating her as though she were quite normal. After a time there will be some return of the excitability; then we shall have to set to work all over again, and repeat our course of treatment. The pauses are necessary; otherwise, if we go straight on without interruption, a reaction will come. The weariness, the slight signs of depression, will, if we push too far with our treatment, lead on to conditions of bodily depression, and we shall harm the child rather than heal.

We have now come to the point where I can indicate for you the principle that underlies the psychological treatment of all such children. We have to be ready and attentive, watching what is there in the child, realising that the abnormalities of soul are symptoms of what is going on within him, symptoms of the behaviour of ether body, astral body, ego organisation, etc. I say “etc.”; what do I mean? For when we divide the human being into

1. Physical body
2. Ether body
3. Astral body
4. Ego organisation
5. Spirit-Self

we generally go on to say, do we not, that the spirit-self has not yet been evolved by man and does not therefore immediately concern him. We read about it of course in the books, but in the present epoch, man reaches only as far as the ego organisation, and so we have no call to trouble about the spirit-self. But, my dear friends, that is not a true and full picture of the situation. Human beings, we say, reach as yet only as far as the ego organisation; but not all the beings with whom we humans have to do, come only as far as the ego and no further! When we are dealing with growing children, we are necessarily brought into contact with beings who attain to the spirit-self, beings who are further on in evolution than man. If we set out to develop Waldorf School pedagogy and really mean our work to have life, then we must appeal not only to the human beings who are congregated there in our school, but also to spiritual beings who are more highly developed than man, spiritual beings who show quite clearly that they have evolved to the spirit self. In dealing with a growing child, we shall particularly have to do with one specific class of such beings, namely, the beings to whom we give the name of “Genius of Language”. Were it left to the human beings themselves to hand on language to the next generation, man would pine away and perish. Being lives in language, as truly as ever being lives in man himself. Along with speech and language something enters into man, wherein beings live whose whole life bears unmistakably the stamp of the spirit-self, even as man in his life bears the stamp of the ego organisation. These beings inspire us; they live in us through the fact that we speak.

Think how in Eurythmy we have to develop an artistic speaking in order for a visible speech and language to arise. We are really very far from comprehending what speech is in its fullness! A little part of the working of the Genius of Language we elaborate in Eurythmy, so as to enable a visible speech to come to birth. And then again in Curative Eurythmy—think how we appeal there to what these beings can achieve with the spirit-self, in the intuitive stimulation of man's will!

It is really so: the moment we begin to speak of education, we have immediately to make our appeal to spirits who have evolved the spirit-self. And whenever we try to elucidate what lies hidden in speech, we are actually describing the spirit-self. I would therefore recommend anyone who is setting out to educate abnormal children, to meditate upon what he can read in our books, about the spirit-self. He will find this a good material for meditation. It is a prayer to those spiritual beings who are of the same kind as the Genius of Language.

Such spiritual beings are verily present among us. Say, we come into the schoolroom. If our behaviour and gestures as we enter give adequate expression to what we are feeling and experiencing in our soul, then they have an immense influence upon the child. And they are moreover a proof that we are connected with the spiritual beings who bear within them the spirit-self.

There is a habit that is all too common among people today—I am far from suggesting you should start inveighing openly against it; in matters of this kind, one must adopt a completely objective attitude, the same objective attitude as is required in dealing with the crises that occur in the little child. It is nevertheless a fact that when whole communities of people have a habit of keeping their hands in their trouser pockets and so avoiding any use of gesture, it means nothing else than that they want to be God-forsaken, they want to be left alone by the Gods—the Gods who are next above the spirit-man. It means, they would rather not have any knowledge of the beings who have developed the spirit-self—even as man has developed the I organisation. And one of the first things that happens to such persons is that their speech begins to be slovenly. This, is, in fact, the great danger that faces the civilisation of the West—the danger that speech and language, instead of being developed to become what they should become, deteriorate and grow slovenly.

In dealing with the growing child it is of the very first importance to see that he speaks clearly and distinctly, and this is more than ever necessary in the case of the abnormal child. We must on no account overlook the smallest sign of slovenliness of speech. In all your dealings with abnormal children, make it a rule to be watchful of how they speak, mindful always that their speech shall be clear and distinct and well-formed. Your watchfulness will react favourably on the condition of the child.

And then for the very young child who does not yet speak himself, it is good if he hears well-formed speech spoken around him—unless of course special instructions have had to be given that he is to be left still and quiet! And for children between the ages of seven and fourteen whom we have received into our care as abnormal, we need not have the slightest hesitation in bringing to them just as much as ever we can in the way of good speaking and recitation. To listen again and again to good speaking, well-ordered and articulate, is for abnormal children an absolute need, a need that springs from the inherent nature of the abnormality itself.

• 1. See Lecture 2
• 2. The exact number is 25,920.

The earthly and cosmic forces of which I have spoken work in the processes of Agriculture through the substances of the Earth. And we shall only be able to pass on to the difficult practical applications during the next few days if we occupy ourselves rather more closely with the question of how these forces work through the Earth's substances. But first we must make a digression and enquire into the activity of Nature in general.

One of the most important questions that can be raised in discussing production in the sphere of Agriculture is that concerning the significance and influence of nitrogen. But this question concerning the fundamental nature of the action of nitrogen is at present in a state of the greatest confusion. When one observes nitrogen today in the ordinary way one is only looking at the last offshoots, as it were, of its activities, its most superficial manifestations. We overlook the natural interconnections within which nitrogen is at work; nor indeed can -we help so doing if we remain enclosed within one section of Nature. To gain a proper insight into these connections we must bring within our survey the whole realm of Nature, and concern ourselves with the activity of nitrogen in the Universe. Indeed—and this will emerge clearly from my exposition—while nitrogen as such does not play the primary part in plant-life, it is nevertheless supremely necessary for us to know what this part is, if we wish to understand plant-life.

In its activities in Nature nitrogen has, one might say, four sister-substances which we must learn to know if we wish to understand the functions and significance of nitrogen in the so-called economy of Nature. These four sister-substances are the four substances which in albumen (protein), both animal and vegetable, combine with nitrogen in a way which is still a mystery for present-day science. The four sister-substances are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur. If we wish to understand the full significance of albumen, it is not enough to mention the ingredients hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon: we must also bring in sulphur, that substance the activities of which are of such profound importance for albumen. For it is sulphur which acts within the albumen as the mediator between the spiritual formative element diffused •; throughout -the Universe and the physical element. Indeed, if we want to follow the path taken by the spirit in the material world, we shall have to look for the activity of sulphur. Even if this activity is not so visible as those of other substances it is still of the utmost importance because spirit works its way into physical nature by means of sulphur: sulphur is actually the bearer of spirit. The ancient name “sulphur” is connected with the word “phosphor,” (which means bearer of light) because in the old days men saw spirit spreading out through space in the out-streaming m the light or the Sun. Hence, they called the substances which are linked up with the working of light into matter, like sulphur and phosphorus, the “light bearers.” And once we have realised how fine (delicate) is the activity of sulphur in the economy of nature we shall more easily understand its fundamental nature when we consider the four sister-substances—carbon. hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, and the part they play in the workings of the Universe. The modern chemist knows very little about these substances. He knows what they look like in a laboratory, but is ignorant of their inner significance for cosmic activities as a whole. The knowledge which modern chemistry has of these substances is not much greater than the knowledge we might have of a man whose external appearance we had noticed as he passed us in the street, and of whom we had perhaps taken a snapshot, whom we call to mind with the help of the snap-shot. For what science does with these substances is little more than to take snap-shots of them, and the books and lectures of to-day about them contain little more than this. We must learn to know the deeper essence of these substances.

Let us therefore start with carbon. The bearing which these things have upon plants will soon be made clear. Carbon, like so many beings in modern times, has fallen from a very aristocratic position to one that is extremely plebeian. All that people see in carbon nowadays is something with which to heat their ovens (coal) or something with which to write graphite. Its aristocratic nature still survives in one of its modifications, the diamond. But it is hardly of very great value to us today, in this form, because we cannot buy it. Thus, what we know of carbon is very little in comparison with the enormous importance which this substance possesses in the Universe. And yet, until a relatively recent date, a few hundred years ago, this black-fellow.—let us call him so—was regarded as worthy to bear the noble name of “Philosopher's Stone.”

A great deal of nonsense has been spoken about what was really meant by this name. For when the old Alchemists and their kind spoke of the Philosopher's Stone they meant carbon in whatever form it occurs. And they only kept their name secret because if they had not done so, all and sundry would have found themselves in possession of the Philosopher's Stone. For it was simply carbon. But why should it have been carbon?

A -view held in former days will supply us with the answer, which we must come to know again. If we disregard the crumbled form to which certain processes in nature have reduced carbon (as in coal and graphite) and grasp it in its vital activity in the course of serving the bodies of men and animals and as it builds up the body of the plant from its own inherent possibilities, the amorphous and formless substance which we generally think of as carbon will appear as the final outcome, the mere corpse of what carbon really is in the economy of Nature. Carbon is really the bearer of all formative processes in Nature. It is the great sculptor of form, whether we are dealing with the plant whose form persists for a certain time or with the ever-changing form of the animal organism. It bears within it not only its black substantiality, but, in full activity and inner mobility it bears within it the formative cosmic prototypes, the great world-imaginations from which living form m Nature must proceed. A hidden sculptor is at work in carbon, and in building up the most diverse forms in Nature, this hidden sculptor makes use of sulphur. If, therefore, we regard the activities of carbon in Nature in the right way, we shall see that the cosmic spirit which is active as a sculptor “moistens” itself, as it were, with sulphur, and with the help of carbon builds up the relatively permanent plant form and also the human form which is dissolved at the moment it is created. For what makes the human body human, and not plant-like, is precisely the fact that at each moment, through the elimination of carbon, the form it has taken on can be immediately destroyed and replaced by another, the carbon being united to oxygen and exhaled as carbon-dioxide. As carbon would make our bodies firm and stiff like a palm tree, the breathing process wrenches it out of its stiffness, unites it with oxygen and drives it outwards. Thus, we gain a mobility which as human beings we must have. In plants, however (and even in annuals) carbon is held fast within a fixed form.

There is an old saying that “Blood is a very special fluid.” We are right in saying that the human ego pulsates in the blood, and manifests itself physically in doing so; or speaking more strictly it is along the tracks provided by the carbon, in its weaving and working, and forming and unforming of itself that the spiritual principle m man, called the ego, moves within the blood, moistening itself with sulphur. And just as the human ego, the essential spirit of man, lives in carbon, so also does the world-ego live (through the mediation of sulphur) in that substance that is eyer forming and unforming itself—carbon. The fact is that in the early stages of the Earth's development it was carbon alone which was deposited or precipitated. It was not until later that, for example, lime came into existence, supplying man with the foundation for the creation of a more solid bony structure. In order that the organism which lives in the carbon might be moved about, man and the higher animals provided a supporting structure in the skeleton which is made of lime. In this way, by making mobile the carbon form within him, man raises himself from the merely immobile mineral lime formation which the' earth possesses and which he incorporates in order to have solid earth-matter within his body. The bony lime structure represents the solid earth within the human body.

Let me put it in this way: Underlying every living being there is a scaffolding of carbon, more or less either relatively permanent or continually fluctuating, in the tracks of which the spiritual principle moves through the world. Let us make a schematic drawing of this so that you can see the matter quite clearly before you. (Drawing No. 6) Here is such a scaffolding which the spirit builds up somehow or other with the help of sulphur. Here we have either the continuously changing carbon which moves in the sulphur in highly diluted form, or else we have, as in the plants? a more or less solidified carbon structure which is united with other ingredients. Now as I have often pointed out, a human or any other living being must be penetrated by an etheric element which is the actual bearer of life. The carbon structure of a living being must therefore be penetrated by an etheric element which will either remain stationary about the timbers of this scaffolding or retain a certain mobility. But the main thing is that the etheric element is in both cases distributed along the scaffolding.

This etheric element could not abide our physical earth world, if it remained alone. It would slide through instead of gripping what it has to grip in the physical earthly world, if it were without a physical bearer. (For it is a peculiarity of earth conditions that the spiritual must always have physical bearers. The materialists regard the physical bearer only, and overlook the spiritual. To an extent, they are right, because it is indeed the physical bearer which is first met with. But they overlook the fact that it is the spiritual which makes necessary everywhere the existence of a physical bearer). The physical Dearer of the spiritual which works in the etheric element (we may say that the lowest level of the spiritual works in the etheric); this physical bearer which is permeated by the etheric element, and “moistened” as it were with sulphur, introduces into physical existence not the form, not the structure, but a continuous mobility and vitality. This physical carrier which, with the help of sulphur, brings the vital activities out of the universal ether into the body is oxygen.

Thus, the part which I have coloured green in my sketch can be regarded, from the physical point of view, as oxygen, and also as the brooding_? vibrating etheric element which permeates it. It is in the track of oxygen that the etheric element moves with the help of sulphur.

It is this that gives meaning to the breathing process. When we breathe, we take in oxygen. When the present-day materialist talks of oxygen all he means is the stuff in his test-tube when he has decomposed water through electrolysis. But in oxygen there lives the lowest order of the supersensible, the etheric element; it lives there when it is not killed, as e.g. in the air around us. In the atmosphere around us the living principle in the oxygen has “been killed in order that it may not cause us to faint. Whenever too great a degree of life enters into us, we faint. For any excess of the ordinary growing forces within us, if it appears where it should not be, will cause us to faint or worse. If therefore we were surrounded by an atmosphere which contained living oxygen, we should reel about as though completely stunned by it. The oxygen around us has to be killed. And yet oxygen is from its birth the bearer of life, of the etheric element. It becomes the bearer of life as soon as it leaves the sphere in which it has the task of providing a surrounding for our human external senses. Once it has entered into us through breathing, it comes alive again. The oxygen which circulates inside us' is not the same as that which surrounds us externally. In us it is living oxygen, just as it also becomes living oxygen immediately it penetrates into the soil, although in this case the life m it is lower in degree than it is in our bodies. The oxygen under the earth is not the same as the oxygen above the earth. It is very difficult to come to any understanding with physicists and chemists on this subject, for according to the methods they employ the oxygen must always be separated with its connection with the soil. The oxygen they are dealing with is dead, nor can it be anything else. But every science which limits itself to the physical is liable to this error. It can only understand dead corpses. In reality oxygen is the bearer of the living ether and this living ether takes hold of the oxygen through the mediation of sulphur.

We now have pointed out two extreme polarities: On the one hand the scaffolding of carbon within which the human ego—the highest form of the spiritual given to us here on earth, displays its forces or with the case of plants the world-spiritual which is active in them. On the other hand, we have the human process of breathing, represented in man by the living oxygen which carries the ether. And beneath it we have the scaffolding of carbon which in man permits of his movement. These two polarities must be brought together. The oxygen must be enabled to move along the paths marked out for it by the scaffolding; it must move along every track that may be marked out for it by the carbon, by tne spirit of carbon; and throughout Nature the oxygen bearing the etheric life must find the way to the carbon bearing the spiritual principle. How does it do this? What here acts as the mediator?

The mediator is nitrogen. Nitrogen directs the life into the form which is embodied into the carbon. Wherever nitrogen occurs its function is to mediate between life and the spiritual element which has first been incorporated in the carbon substance. It supplies the bridge between oxygen and carbon—whether it be the animal and vegetable kingdoms, or in the soil. That spirituality which with the help of the sulphur busies itself within the nitrogen is the same as we usually refer to as astral. This spirituality, which also forms the human astral body, is active in the earth's surroundings from which it works in the life of plants, animals and so on. Thus, spiritually speaking we find the astral element or principle placed in between oxygen and carbon; but the astral element uses nitrogen for the purpose of revealing itself in the physical -world. Wherever there is nitrogen there the astral spreads forth in activity. The etheric life-element would float about in every direction like clouds and ignore the framework provided by the carbon were it not for the powerful attraction which this framework possesses for nitrogen; wherever the lines and paths have been laid down in the carbon, there nitrogen drags the oxygen along; or more strictly speaking, the astral in the nitrogen drags the etheric element along these paths. Nitrogen is the great “dragger” of the living principle towards the spiritual. Nitrogen is therefore essential to the soul of man, since the soul is the mediator between life, i.e. without consciousness and spirit. There is, indeed, something very wonderful about nitrogen. If we trace its path as it goes through the human organism, we find a complete double of the human being. Such a “nitrogen man” actually exists. If we could separate it from the physical we should have the most beautiful ghost imaginable, for it copies in exact detail the solid shape of man. On the other hand, nitrogen flows straight back into life.

Now we have an insight into the breathing process. When he breathes, man takes in oxygen, i.e. etheric life. Then comes the internal nitrogen, and drags the, oxygen along to wherever there is carbon, i.e. to wherever there is weaving and changing form. The nitrogen brings the oxygen along with it in order that the latter may hold on the carbon and set it free. The nitrogen is thus the mediator whereby carbon becomes carbon-dioxide and as such is breathed out. Only a small part, really of our surroundings consists of nitrogen, the bearer of astral-spirituality. It is of immense importance to us to have oxygen in our immediate surroundings, both by day and by night. We pay less respect to the nitrogen around us in the air which we breathe because we think we have less need of it, and yet nitrogen stands in a spiritual relation to us.

The following experiment might be made: One could enclose a man in a gas-chamber containing a given volume of air, and then remove a small quantity of nitrogen, so that the air would be slightly poorer in nitrogen than it normally is. If this experiment could be carefully carried out it would convince you that the necessary quantity of nitrogen is at once restored, not from outside, but from inside the man's body. Man has to give up some of his own supply of nitrogen in order to restore the quantitative condition to which the nitrogen is “accustomed.” As human beings, it is necessary that we should maintain the right quantitative relation between our whole inner being and the nitrogen around us; the right quantity of nitrogen outside us is never allowed to become less. For the merely vegetative life of man a less quantity than the normal will do. because we do not need nitrogen for the purpose of breaming. But it would not be adequate to the part it plays spiritually; for that the normal quantity of nitrogen is necessary.

This shows you how strongly nitrogen plays into the spiritual and will give you some idea of how necessary this substance is to the life of the plants. The plant growing on the ground has at first only its physical body and etheric body but no astral body; but the astral element must surround it on all sides. The plant would not flower if it were not touched from outside by the astral element. It does not take in the astral element as do men and the animals but it needs to be touched by it from outside. The astral element is everywhere, and nitrogen, the bearer of the astral, is everywhere; it hovers in the air as a dead element, but the moment it enters into the soil it comes to life again. Just as oxygen comes to life when drawn into the soil, so does nitrogen. This nitrogen in the earth not only comes to life but becomes something which has a very special importance for Agriculture because—paradoxical as it may seem to a mind distorted by materialism—it not only comes to life but becomes sensitive inside the earth. It literally becomes the carrier of a mysterious sensitiveness which is poured out over the whole life of the earth. Nitrogen is that which senses whether the right quantity or water is present in any given soil and experiences sympathy; when water is deficient it experiences antipathy. It experiences sympathy when for any given soil the right sort of plants are present, and so on. Thus, nitrogen pours out over everything a living web of sensitive lire. Above all nitrogen knows all those secrets of which we know nothing in an ordinary way, of the planets Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on, and their influences upon the form and life of plants, of which I told you yesterday, and in the preceding lectures. Nitrogen that is everywhere abroad, knows these secrets very well. It is not at all -unconscious of what emanates from the stars and becomes active in the life of plants and of the earth. Nitrogen is the mediator which senses just as in the human nerves and senses system, it also mediates sensation. Nitrogen is in fact the bearer of sensation. Thus, if we look upon nitrogen, moving about everywhere like fluctuating sensations, we shall see into the intimacies of the life in Nature. Thus, we shall come to the conclusion that in the handling of nitrogen something is done which is of enormous importance for the life of plants. We shall study this further in the subsequent lectures.

In the meantime, there is, however, one thing more to be considered. There is a living co-operation of the spiritual principle which has taken shape within the carbonic framework with the astral principle working within nitrogen, which permeates that framework with lire and sensations, that is, stirs up a living agility in the oxygen. But in the earthly sphere this co-operation is brought about by yet another element, which links up the physical world with the expanses of the cosmos. For the earth cannot wander about the Universe as a solid entity cut off from the rest of the Universe. If the earth did this it would be in the same position as a man who lived on a farm, but wished to remain independent of everything that grew in the fields around him. No reasonable man would do that. What to-day is growing in the fields around us tomorrow will be in human stomachs, and later will return to the soil in some form or another. We human beings cannot isolate ourselves from our environment. We are bound up with it and belong to it as much as my little finger belongs to me. There must be a continuous interchange of substances, and this applies also to the relation between earth with all its creatures and the surrounding Cosmos. All that is living on earth in physical shape must be able to find its way back into the Cosmos where it will be in a way purified and refined. This leads us to the following picture. (Drawing No. 6)

We have in the first place the carbon framework (which I have coloured blue in the drawing), then the etheric oxygenous life-element (coloured green) and then, proceeding from the oxygen and enabled by nitrogen to follow the various lines and paths within the framework, we have the astral element which forms the bridge between carbon and oxygen. I could indicate everywhere here how the nitrogen drags into the blue lines which I have indicated schematically with the green lines. But the whole of the very delicate structure which is formed in the living being must be able to disappear again. It is not the spirit which disappears, but that which the spirit has built up in the carbon and into which it has drawn the etheric life borne in the oxygen. It must disappear not only from the earth, but dissipate into the Cosmos. This is done by forming a substance which is allied as closely as possible to the physical, and yet is allied as closely as possible to the spiritual; This substance is hydrogen. Although hydrogen is itself the most attenuated form of the physical substance, it goes still further and dissipates physical matter which, borne by sulphur, floats away into that cosmic region in which matter is no longer distinguishable. One may say then: Spirit has first become physical and lives in the body at once in its astral form and reflecting itself as ego. There it lives physically as spirit transformed into something physical. After a time, the spirit begins to feel ill at ease. It wishes to get rid of its physical form. Moistening itself once again with sulphur it feels the need of yet another element by means of which it can yield up any kind of individual structure and give itself over to the cosmic region of formless chaos where there is no longer any determinate organisation. This element, which is so closely allied both to the physical and to the spiritual, is hydrogen. Hydrogen carries away all that the astral principle Has taken up as form and life, carries it out into the expanses of the Cosmos, so that it can be taken up again from thence (by earthly substance) as I have already described. Hydrogen in fact dissolves everything.

Thus, we have these 5 substances which are the immediate representatives of all that works and weaves in the realm of the living and also in the realm of the seemingly dead, which in fact is only transiently so: Sulphur, Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen, each of these substances is inwardly related to its own particular order of spiritual entity. They are therefore something quite different from which our modern chemistry refers to by the same names. Our chemistry speaks only of the corpses of these substances, not of the actual substances themselves. These we must learn to know as something living and sentient, and, curiously enough, hydrogen, which seems the least dense of the five and has the smallest atomic weight, is the least spiritual among them.

Now consider: What are we actually doing -when we meditate? (I am compelled to add this to ensure that these things do not remain among the mists of spirituality). The Oriental has meditated in his own way. “We in Middle and Western Europe meditate in ours. Meditation as we ought to practise it only slightly touches the breathing process; our soul is living and weaving in concentration and meditation. But all these spiritual exercises have a bodily counterpart, however subtle and intimate. In meditation, the regular rhythm of breathing, which is so closely connected with man's life, undergoes a definite if subtle change. When we meditate we always retain a little more carbon-dioxide in us than in the ordinary everyday consciousness. We do not. as in ordinary life, thrust out the whole bulk of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere where nitrogen is everywhere around us. We hold some of it back.

Now consider: If you knock your head against something hard, like a table, you become conscious only of your own pain. But if you gently stroke the surface of the table, then you will become conscious of the table. The same thing happens in meditation. It gradually develops an awareness of the nitrogen all around you. That is the real process in meditation. Everything becomes an object of knowledge, including the life of the nitrogen around us. For nitrogen is a very learned fellow. He teaches us about the doings of Mercury. Venus, etc. because he knows, or rather senses them. All these things rest upon perfectly real processes. And as I shall show in greater detail, it is at this point that the spiritual working in the soul activity, begins to have a bearing upon Agriculture. This interaction between the soul-spiritual element and that which is around us is what has particularly interested our dear friend Stegemann. For, indeed, if a man has to do with Agriculture it is a good thing if he is able to meditate, for in this way he will make himself receptive to the manifestations of nitrogen. If one does become receptive in this way, one begins to practise Agriculture in quite a different way and spirit. One suddenly gets all kinds of new ideas; they simply come, and one then has many secrets in large estates and smaller farms.

I do not wish to repeat what I said an hour ago, but I can describe it in another way. Take the case ox a peasant who walks through his fields. The scientist regards him as unlearned and stupid. But this is not so, simply because—forgive me but I speak the truth—simply because instinctively a peasant is given to meditation. He ponders much throughout the long winter nights. He acquires a kind of spiritual knowledge, as it were, only he cannot express it.. He walks through his fields and suddenly he knows something; later he tries it out. At any rate this is what I found over and over again in my youth when I lived among peasant folk. The mere intellect will not be enough, it does not lead us deep enough. For after all Nature's life and weaving is so fine and delicate that the net of intellectual concepts—and this is where science has erred of recent years—has too large a mesh to catch it.

Now all these substances of which I have spoken, Sulphur, Carbon, Nitrogen, Hydrogen are united in albumen. This will enable us to see more clearly into the nature of seed formation. Whenever carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen are present in leaf, blossom, calyx or root they are always united to other substances in some form or other. They are dependent upon these other substances. There are only two ways in which they can become independent. One is when the hydrogen carries all individual substances out into the expanses of the Cosmos and dissolves them into the general chaos; and the other is when the hydrogen drives the basic element of the protein (for albumen) into the seed formation and there makes them independent of each other so that they become receptive of the influences of the Cosmos. In the tiny seed, there is chaos, and in the wide periphery of the Cosmos there is another chaos, and whenever the chaos at the periphery works upon the chaos within the seed, new life comes into being.

Now look how these so-called substances, which are really bearers of spirit, work in the realm of Nature. Again, we may say that the oxygen and nitrogen inside man's body behave themselves, in an ordinary way, for within man's body they manifest their normal qualities. Ordinary science ignores it, because the process is hidden. But the ultimate products of carbon and hydrogen cannot behave in so normal a fashion as do oxygen and nitrogen. Let us take carbon first. When the carbon, active in the plant realm enters the realms of animals and man, it must become mobile—at least transiently. And in order to build up the fixed shape of the organism it must attach itself to an underlying framework. This is provided on the one hand by our deeply laid skeleton consisting of limestone, and on the other hand by the siliceous-element which we always carry in our bodies; so that both in man and in the animals carbon to a certain extent masks its own formative force. It climbs up. as it were, along the lines of formative forces of limestone and silicon. Limestone endows it with the earthly formative power, silicon with the cosmic. In man and the animals carbon does not, as it were, claim sole authority for itself, but adheres to what is formed by lime and silicon.

But lime and silicon are also the basis of the growth of plants. We must therefore learn to know the activities of carbon in the breathing, digestive and circulatory processes of man in relation to his bony and siliceous structure—as though we could, as it were, creep into the body and see how the formative force of carbon in the circulation radiates into the limestone and silicon. And we must unfold this same kind of vision when we look upon a piece of ground covered with flowers having limestone and silicon beneath them. Into man we cannot creep; but here at any rate we can see what is going on. Here we can develop the necessary knowledge. We can see how the oxygen element is caught up by the nitrogen element and carried down into the carbon element, but only in so far as the latter adheres to the lime and silicon structure. We can even say that carbon is only the mediator. Or we can say that what lives in the environment is kindled to life in oxygen and must be carried into the earth by means of nitrogen, where it can follow the form provided by the limestone and silicon. Those who have any sensitiveness for these things can observe this process at work most wonderfully in all papilionaceous plants (Leguminosae), that is, m all the plants which in Agriculture may be called collectors of nitrogen, and whose special function it is to attract nitrogen and hand it on to what lies below them. For down in the earth under those leguminosae there is something that thirsts for nitrogen as the lungs of man thirst for oxygen—and that is lime. It is ä necessity for the lime under the earth that it should breathe in nitrogen just as the human lungs need oxygen. And in the papilionaceous plants a process takes place similar to that which is carried out. By the epitheliumfissue in our lungs lining the bronchial tubes. There is a kind of in-breathing which leads nitrogen down. And these are the only plants that do this. All other plants are closer to exhalation. Thus, the whole organism of the plant-world is divided into two when we look at the nitrogen-breathing. All papilionacae are, as it were., the air passages. Other plants represent the other organs in which breaching goes in a more secret way and whose real task is to fulfil some function. We must learn to look upon each species of plant as placed within a great whole, the organism of the plant-world, just as each human organ is placed within the whole human organism. We must come to regard the different plants as part of a great whole, then we shall see the immense importance of these Papilionacae. True, science knows something of this already, but it is necessary that we should gam knowledge of them from these spiritual foundations, otherwise there is a danger, as tradition fades more and more during the decades, that we shall stray into false paths in applying scientific knowledge. We can see how these papilionacae actually function. They have all the characteristics of keeping their fruit process which in other plants tends to be higher up in the region of their leaves. They all want to bear fruit before they have flowered. The reason is that these plants develop the process allied to nitrogen far nearer to the earth {they actually carry nitrogen down into the soil) than do the other plants, which unfold this process at a greater distance from the surface of the earth. These plants have also the tendency to colour their leaves, not with the ordinary green, hut with a rather darker shade. The actual fruit, moreover, undergoes a kind of atrophy, the seed remains capable of germinating for a short time only and then becomes barren. Indeed, these plants are so organised as to bring to special perfection what the plant-world receives from Winter and not from Summer. They have, therefore, a tendency to wait for Winter. They want to wait with what they are developing for the Winter. Their growth is delayed when they have a sufficient supply of what they need, namely, nitrogen from the air which they can convey below in their own manner. In this way one can get insight into the becoming and living which goes in and above the soil.

If in addition you take into account the fact that lime has a wonderful relationship with the world of human desires, you will see how alive and organic the whole thing becomes. In its elemental form as calcium, lime is never at rest; it seeks and experiences itself; it tries to become quick-lime, i.e. to unite with oxygen. But even then, it is not content; it longs to absorb the whole range of metallic acids, even including bitumen, which is not really a mineral. Hidden in the earth, lime develops the longing to attract everything to itself. It develops in the soil what is almost a desire-nature. It is possible, if one has the right feeling in these matters, to sense the difference between it and other substances, lime fairly sucks one dry. One feels that it has a thoroughly greedy nature and that wherever it is, it seeks to draw to itself also the plant-element. For indeed everything that limestone wants lives in plants, and it must continually turn away from the lime. What does this? It is done by the supremely aristocratic element which asks for nothing but relies upon itself. For there is such an aristocratic substance. It is silicon. People are mistaken in thinking that silicon is only present where it shows its firm rock-like outline. Silicon is distributed everywhere in homeopathic doses. It is at rest and makes no claim on anything else. Lime lays claim to everything, silicon to nothing. Silicon thus resembles our sense-organs which do not perceive themselves but which perceive the external world. Silicon is the general external sense-organ of the earth_? lime the representing general which desires; clay mediates between the two. Clay is slightly closer to silicon, and yet it acts as a mediator with lime. Now one should understand this in order to acquire a knowledge supported by feeling. One should feel about lime that it is a fellow fall of desires, who wants to grab things for himself; and about silicon that it is a very superior aristocrat who becomes what the lime has grabbed, carries it up into the atmosphere, and develops the plant-forms. There dwells the silicon, either entrenched m his moated castle, as in the horse-tail (equisetum), or distributed everywhere in fine homeopathic doses, where he endeavours to take away what the lime has attached. Once again, we realise that we are in the presence of an extremely subtle process of Nature.

Carbon is the really formative element in all plants; it builds up the framework. But in the course of the earth's development its task has been rendered more difficult. Carbon could give form to all plants as long as there was water below it. Then everything would have grown. But since a certain period, lime has been formed underneath, and lime disturbs the work, and because the opposition of the limestone had to be overcome, carbon allies itself to silicon and both together, in combination with clay, they once again start on their formative work.

How, in the midst of all this, does the life of a plant go on? Below is the limestone trying to seize it with its tentacles, above is the silicon which wants to make it as long and thin as the tenuous water-plants. But in the midst of them is carbon which creates the actual plant-forms and brings order into everything. And just as our astral body brings about a balance between our ego and etheric body, so nitrogen works in between, as the astral element.

This is what we must learn to understand—how nitrogen manages things between lime, clay and silicon, and also between what the lime is always longing for below, and what silicon seeks always to radiate upwards. In this way the practical question arises: What is the correct way of introducing nitrogen into the plant-world? This is the question which will occupy us tomorrow and which will lead us over to deal with the different methods of manuring the ground.

Good morning, gentlemen! Now we want to add to what we have looked at. I told you at the end of the last lesson that people mainly object: It may all be true about life before we enter an earthly body, and also about previous earthly lives, but why can't we remember it? And now I will first answer this question in detail today, why we cannot remember, and what this memory is like.

Now we must first consider something about the human body, because it is really a matter of expressing ourselves scientifically.

You see, in this respect, when it comes to the question of repeated lives on earth, people today are downright strange even when it comes to judging people who knew or know something about these repeated lives on earth. There was a very great spirit within German civilization, Lessing, who lived in the 18th century. This Lessing has achieved an extraordinary amount spiritually. He is still generally recognized today. And when the professors of German literary history lecture at the universities, they often lecture on Lessing for months. They also know that one of Lessing's researchers, as they say, a book can also be found in the Social Democratic literature, by Franz Mehring, “The Lessing Legend”. There Lessing is presented from a different point of view. You can't say that what is presented there is correct; but in any case, there is even a very thick book about Lessing within the Social Democratic literature by Franz Mehring. In short, Lessing is cited as a very great man. But this Lessing, whose plays are still performed everywhere in theaters today and are highly esteemed, wrote a shorter work when he was already very old: “The Education of the Human Race.” And at the end it says that one actually cannot come to terms with the contemplation of the soul at all, that one cannot really know anything correct about the soul life without the assumption of repeated earth lives, and that one comes there, when one continues to think, actually to those views which primitive people already had. They all believed in repeated earth lives. That is something that people only abandoned later, when they became “modern.” And Lessing said: Why should something be stupid just because the oldest, the earliest people believed it? — In short, Lessing himself said that he can only come to terms with the soul life of man if he adheres to this ancient belief in repeated lives on earth.

Now, as you can imagine, this is a terrible embarrassment for our so-called researchers today. Because these researchers say: Lessing was one of the greatest men of all times. But the repeated lives on earth, that's nonsense. — Yes, how do you get around that? — Well, Lessing was already old then. He became weak-minded. We don't accept repeated lives on Earth! You see, that's how people are. As long as something suits them, they accept it and label the person in question a great man. But if he has just said something that does not suit them, then he has become weak-minded for the time.

But sometimes very strange things happen. For example, there is a great naturalist, William Crookes. Now, I don't agree with everything he says, but in any case he is considered one of the greatest naturalists. He lived in our time, at the end of the 19th century. Now, he always dealt with natural science in the morning. He had to go to his laboratory, and he made great discoveries there. We would not have had all of this, Röntgen and so on, if he, Crookes, had not done the preliminary work. But in the afternoons, he always occupied himself with soul-searching. As I said, I don't agree with everything, but at least he occupied himself with it. People had to say, didn't they: Yes, he must have been clever in the morning and stupid in the afternoon, stupid and clever at the same time! That's the way things are.

Now there is something else. You will hear everywhere – I have already dealt with this when I was talking about colors – that natural scientists consider Newton to be the greatest natural scientist of all time. He is not, but they consider him to be so. Now there is another embarrassment. This Newton, whom people consider the greatest naturalist, has now also written a book about what usually forms the end of the Bible, about the Apocalypse. So again an embarrassment!

In short, those people who reject any possibility of soul-searching are in for a terrible embarrassment when faced with the greatest naturalists and the greatest historians, because if someone really takes science seriously, they have no choice but to extend this science to the soul. And for that you find opportunity everywhere. I have told you: you just have to observe. Now you cannot always foresee everything in everyday life, especially if you have not learned it first. But nature and sometimes humanity also do experiments for us that you should not artificially induce, but once they are made, you can study them. You can follow them, at least be inspired by them. Now there is an experiment that is actually important, characteristic, if one wants to accept something about the soul life of man. Everyone accepts the physical body, because otherwise they would all have to deny the human being. One does not argue about that. Everyone has one. Today, natural science says: the physical body is the only one, we have to explain everything according to the physical body.

Now there is something that, when we observe it correctly, suddenly shows us that the human being also has the other three bodies: the invisible etheric body, the astral body and the ego. There is one thing that can be observed quite scientifically – there are many things, but one in particular, that can be observed quite scientifically and that then shows how a person can actually get into states where it shows us that an etheric body is present and an astral body and an ego.

You see, there are people in Europe who feel the need to numb themselves. Now, of course, many other means are used. I have told you that now, for example, cocaine is used to numb the senses; but in Europe, opium has always been used to numb the senses. There have always been people who, when they were not satisfied with life or when they had too many worries, didn't know what to do, and so they got high on opium. They took a little opium, always just a small amount of opium. What happened then? First of all, when someone takes a small amount of opium, they enter a state of inner experience; they no longer think, they begin to dream in wild images. They like this very much, it does them a lot of good. These dreams become more and more intoxicating. For some, it is the case that they get the gray misery, that they begin to behave like a sinner; another begins to rage, to race, that he even gets murderous. And then people fall asleep. So this consumption of opium actually consists of people being brought violently, by means of an external poison, into a state that consists of slowly drifting off to sleep.

When we look at everything that actually happens to a person, we can see that the person first has very excited dreams, then begins to fantasize, and then falls asleep. So something has gone from him. What has gone from him is what makes him a rational human being, what lives in him so that he is a rational human being. That is gone. But before it goes away, and even after it has gone, he lives in the most desolate, agitated dreams. After some time he wakes up and he is restored to a certain extent until he starts taking opium again. So he makes himself, only stormy, into a sleeping person.

Now we can see that when a person falls asleep from the effects of opium, it is not the faculty that makes him rational that is at work in him, but rather the faculty that gives him life; otherwise he would not be able to wake up again, otherwise he would have to die. It is the faculty that gives him momentary life that is at work in him. And one can see how there is also a certain struggle in the body during the night, so that one can wake up again. So there is something at work in man where reason is not present; that which in turn animates the body. Through the poison, the body surbs something. That drives out reason. But the vitalizing principle is still in him, otherwise he could not wake up again. So what has been affected by a small amount of opium? The vitalizing principle. With a small amount of opium, the etheric body is affected.

Now imagine someone takes too much or deliberately poisons themselves with opium. The same thing does not happen, but – and this is quite remarkable – what happens last with a small amount of opium happens first with a large amount. The person falls asleep immediately. So it does not slowly draw away the rational, but the rational comes out quickly, very quickly. But now something remains in him that was not in him at all when he took a small amount of opium. You can see that again.

Physical body Aetheric body: weak opium use Astral body: strong opium use I: habitual opium use

Let us assume that someone takes so much opium that he is actually poisoned. First of all, he falls asleep. But then the body begins to become restless and unruly, he snores, snorts; then cramps set in. And you notice something very peculiar: the face turns completely red and the lips turn completely blue.

Now remember everything I told you last time. I told you that all breathing disturbances occur during exhalation. Now, what does snoring, for example, consist of, first rattling, then snoring – what does it consist of? You see, snoring is something people do who cannot exhale properly. When a person breathes out properly, when it is out of the mouth, then the air goes in, then after a while it goes out again; then the uvula, which you can see when you look into the mouth, is inserted into the air passage. And then at the top there is something that rises and falls, the soft palate; it moves. The uvula and soft palate are constantly moving as a result of inhaling and exhaling when it is normal and correct. But if the inhalation is incorrect and the exhalation is incorrect, if there is belching, then the soft palate and uvula start to tremble, which causes the rattling and then the snoring.

So you can see that it has something to do with breathing, because someone who merely gets high on a little opium enters the other states that I have described to you: a kind of opium delirium, a frenzy. He falls asleep slowly. But if he now falls asleep quickly through the intense enjoyment of opium, he comes to snoring, to convulsions; the face turns red, the lips blue. If you remember all that I have told you, you will ascribe great significance to the fact that the face turns red and the lips blue. For I have told you: Man has red blood because oxygen is inhaled. When the blood mixes with oxygen, it turns red; when the blood mixes with carbon, it turns blue. When it is exhaled, it is blue. So when you see someone with a red face and blue lips, what does that mean? Yes, there is too much inhaled air in the face, too much red blood, which comes from the inhalation. And the lips are blue, what does that mean? There is too much of the blood that is supposed to come out. It stops there. This could continue to the point in the lungs where the carbon dioxide is released, where the carbon dioxide can be exhaled. — So you have a person poisoned by opium, and their breathing is labored throughout. And this is shown on the one hand by the red blood in the face, and on the other hand by the blue blood in the lips.

This is extremely interesting, gentlemen. What are the lips? You see, the lips are very peculiar organs on the face. If you have a face, you actually have to draw it like this, with the skin turned outwards all over. But on the lips, it is actually a piece of inner skin. The inside comes outwards. There is a piece of inner skin. A person opens up their insides by having lips. If your lips are blue instead of red, it means that all your insides are too full of blue blood. —So you see: when someone is poisoned with opium, the body works in such a way that it sends all unused blood outwards – it pushes to the surface – and sends all blue blood inwards.

These things were also known once by primitive people, the story of blue blood going inward. If someone has too much blue blood inside, they said: the person who has too much blue blood inside is first of all someone who has little of the soul, from whom the soul has gone out. That is why “blue-blooded” became a term of abuse. And when the people called the aristocrats “blue-blooded”, they meant: their soul has gone. —- It is very strange how in folk wisdom these things live in a wonderful way. It is very interesting. You can learn an enormous amount from language.

Now you can see: there is something that works in humans that does not work in plants, for example. Because if you introduce a toxin to a plant, the toxin stays somewhere at the top and does not spread. For example, you can find a very poisonous plant in the so-called belladonna, in the deadly nightshade. Yes, the deadly nightshade leaves its poison at the very top; it does not allow it to spread throughout the plant. When a person takes such a poison, it takes hold of the body in such a way that it drives the red blood outwards and the blue blood inwards. Yes, the plants are alive too. Those plants have their etheric body within them, have within them what is left blue, what comes from the weak consumption of opium, not the strong. That is only caused by the sensation in humans. If the plant had blood, it would also have such a sensation, like humans and animals. Humans and animals have it without the use of opium, when the etheric body fights with the physical one; the blood is immediately pushed outwards, and something remains in the body, and that causes this disorder in the body. And that is the astral body. So that one can say: the astral body is influenced by heavy opium use.

Now there is still a third kind of opium consumption. This opium consumption is even very widespread in the world, although not in Europe, more for example among a certain type of Turks and namely in Asia and Hinterindien, with the Malay peoples. There these people take only such strong quantities of opium that they can just still tolerate it, that they wake up properly again, and do not die from it. In this way they experience everything that the opium eater experiences in a strange and interesting way. Only they gradually get used to it, and so they experience the story more consciously. The Turks then say: Yes, when I enjoyed opium, I was in paradise. — That is already the case in these fantastic interpretations. And the Malays in the Far East also want to see all that. So they get used to taking opium because they want to see all that too. This can be done for a relatively long time, and then you end up saying to yourself, “Well, there is something else.”

But now one must say: if these people, who always habitually eat the opium – they eat it habitually – if these fantasists would only see that, then after a while they would get the story. But, you see, it is very strange. These people are descended from the first people on earth who still knew something about the eternal soul, about the soul that passes through the various earthly lives. They knew something about it. Now that has been lost to people. These people, who have not gone through European civilization, put themselves into a state through the consumption of opium in order to feel something of the eternity of the soul. It is indeed terrible, but they repeatedly introduce an illness into themselves. Because the healthy body in the present, if it does not exert itself spiritually, cannot know anything at all about the immortality of the soul, these people gradually ruin their body, so that gradually the soul is pushed out.

Now one can observe something very peculiar when looking at such people who habitually take opium in this way and can therefore endure it for a period of time: after some time they become quite pale. Even if they used to have a good skin color, now they become pale.

1 This means something quite different for the Malay than for the European. The Malay really does look like a ghost when he turns pale, because he is yellowish-brown. Then, after a while, the people become as if they were hollow around the eyes. Then they begin to lose weight, after they have already started to lose their ability to walk properly; they just limp along. Then they begin to lose their will to think, become very forgetful. And last of all, they get the stroke.

These are the symptoms. It is very interesting to observe them. Before the limbs become stiff, so that they can no longer walk properly, they develop severe constipation; in other words, the bowels no longer function. From the way I have described this, you can see that the whole body is gradually undermined.

Now there is something very peculiar. Not much experience has been gathered in this respect, because people do not pay attention to it; but this experience could be gained very easily. We know how these people become habitual opium eaters, it has been described many times. But now people should just try it out – they do this very often in another respect today: if they give the same dose of opium that a person has for habitual consumption to an animal, then the animal will either become somewhat lively, thus entering the first stage, where the etheric body is disturbed, or it will enter the second stage if it gets enough, and die. The animal does not have what the opium eater, the habitual opium eater has, as I described to you last. The animal does not have that.

What does this show, gentlemen? Yes, this shows that when the opium, as strong as it is there, enters the astral body and causes an improper relationship between blue and red blood, then in the animal blue and red blood shoots in a horizontal direction in a confused manner. In the upright man, in the one who has learned to walk, the blue and red blood does not shoot in quite that direction (it is shown), but more so, because he is erect, into each other; no longer horizontally, but from top to bottom, from bottom to top. This causes that man can also become a habitual opium eater.

But now I have told you: It is because man is upright that he has an ego. The animals have no ego because they have a horizontal back. So what is it that is influenced by this habitual opium eating? The ego. So we can say: I - habitual opium eating. And now, through opium, we have discovered all three bodies of man, which are supersensible: for weak opium consumption, the etheric body; for strong consumption, the astral body; and for habitual opium consumption, the I. You can, if you can only observe correctly, develop this wonderfully in a scientific way.

But now you can also see: a Malay with his habitual opium consumption comes to something huge. He comes to the I. And what does he get? What does this Malay or this Turk look forward to when he habitually consumes opium? What does he look forward to? Yes, he looks forward to it because then his memory awakens in a wonderful way. He quickly reviews his entire life on earth and much more. On the one hand, it is terrible because he achieves it by making his body sick; on the other hand, however, the desire to get to know the self is so strong in him that he cannot resist. He is already pleased when this vast memory is established.

But let me explain: if a person does something too much, it ruins him. If a person works too much, it ruins him; if a person thinks too much, it ruins him. And if a person continually evokes a memory that is too strong, it ruins his body. All the symptoms I have described to you are simply the result of the memory being too strong. That is there at first. And later on – as I have described to you – the person becomes careless about how he walks. He no longer remembers inwardly how to put one foot in front of the other. That is unconscious memory, of course. And then he becomes forgetful. So the very thing he achieves ruins him. But one can see, become aware, recognize that the ego is present when the habitual consumption of opium is there.

What does today's natural science do? Well, if you open a book, you will also find a description of what I have told you; you will find a description that with a small amount of opium the person goes into delirium and so on, that with a large amount of opium the person first falls asleep and then his body is immediately destroyed. He dies after his face has turned red and his lips blue. And with habitual opium consumption, all these things also occur. But what do these people describe? They only describe the physical body, what happens there; they describe that the opium eater rattles, has convulsions, snores. They describe how the habitual opium eater loses weight, can no longer walk, becomes forgetful, and finally suffers a stroke because the memory destroys his brain; we have to look at it that way. All this is described, but it is all attributed to the physical body.

But that is nonsense; otherwise, everything physical would have to be attributed only to the physical body. We also see all the phenomena that occur in plants. But we cannot say that a human being is merely a plant. For when opium is taken in large quantities, the effect is seen in the astral body, and only in the human being does that which is present in habitual opium use become apparent. If animals would benefit from habitual opium consumption, if they did not immediately perish from it, then you would see that there are many animals that would simply enjoy the opium found in plants. Why would they enjoy it? Yes, because the animals distinguish between what they want to eat and what they don't want to eat by habit. So if the animals would benefit from it, they would eat the opium that is found in the plants. If they don't do it, it's only because they don't benefit from it.

All this can be recognized through natural science. But now the question is: can all this, the memory that the Malay produces through illness, be achieved through healthy means? We must remember that the original inhabitants of the earth knew that people live on earth again and again. And Lessing, as I told you earlier, said: Why should it be stupid just because the original people believed in it? These original people, they didn't have abstract thoughts like we do. They didn't have any natural science. They looked at everything mythologically. When they looked at a plant, they didn't study: there are such and such forces in it, but they said: there is such and such spirituality in it. They saw everything in images. They lived more in the spiritual in general. ... (Gap in the shorthand.) The fact is that with progress, man can develop in such a way that he lives more in the physical. Only through this could he become a free man, otherwise he would always have been influenced. People in prehistoric times were not free; but they still saw spiritual things. Now we, gentlemen, as we are now, we really have the abstract thoughts that we are drilled in since school. You see, we can even say that the most important activities that humanity is so proud of today are actually something abstract.

Yesterday I said to the teachers here: Yes, when the child turns about seven years old, it should learn something. It should learn, after having learned all its life so far, that the person standing in front of it, whom it knows, is the father – it should now learn that this here (it is written) means “father”. The child should learn this all of a sudden. It has nothing at all to do with this “father.” These are very strange signs that have nothing to do with the father! The child is suddenly supposed to learn this. It resists it. Because the father is this and that man who has hair like this, a nose like this; it has always seen it. The child resists the fact that what is written should now mean “father.”

The child has learned to say “Ah!” when it is amazed. Now it is suddenly supposed to understand that this is an A. It is just very abstract, has no relation to what the child has known so far. You first have to create a bridge for the child to come up with something like this. I'll tell you how to create the bridge.

For example, you say to the child: Look, what is that? - (See drawing.) If you draw this for the child and ask him: What is this? - What will the child say? - A fish! That's a fish! He will not say: I don't recognize that. He cannot say: I recognize the father in that (in the written word “father”). But he recognizes the fish in it (in the drawn fish).

Now I say: Pronounce the “F” for me just once, now omit the i and the later one, just say the F with which the fish begins. Now, I will draw this for you: F. I have singled out the F from the fish. The child first draws the fish and then the F. It is important to avoid abstraction and to remain within the image. The child naturally enjoys learning in this way. This can be done with every letter. It is just a matter of gradually acquiring the skill.

At our Waldorf School, one of the teachers once explained very beautifully how the Roman numerals gradually came into being. Suddenly, it was not possible with V. How can a V be made? Now, see what is there here? (Dr. Steiner holds up his hand.) Of course, you say: a hand is still a hand. But is there not something in it? 1, II, III, III, V fingers. Now I draw this hand on the blackboard (see drawing) in such a way that I have stretched out the two things (the thumb and the four other fingers next to it). Now I have a hand in which the V is included; five is the pronounced number. Now I make it a little simpler, and you have recognized the Roman numeral V from the hand that has five fingers.

So you see, gentlemen, it is important that we are suddenly placed in a completely abstract world today. We learn to write, we learn to read; this has nothing to do with life. But as a result, we have forgotten what people had who could not yet read and write.

But now you must not say, as the other people outside of our opponents' kind do: Steiner told us in his hour that people were cleverer when they did not yet have writing and reading; then they immediately say: yes, he wants people to no longer learn to write and read! I do not want that. People should always keep pace with civilization, and certainly learn to write and read. But one should also not lose what one can necessarily lose by writing and reading. One must first come to understand through spiritual means what human life is.

And now I want to tell you something very simple about two people. One of them takes off his clothes in the evening and takes off his shirt collar, which has two little buttons, one in the front and one in the back. I use an example that is close to me because I wear a shirt collar like that. One person, he does it quite thoughtlessly, unfastens his first button, his second. Now he goes to bed. In the morning, yes, he walks around the room looking for and asking: Where are my shirt buttons? — He doesn't find them. He doesn't remember. Why? Because he did it thoughtlessly.

Now another. He has not exactly got into the habit of always putting his shirt buttons in the same place - you can do that, but that would mean making yourself lazy - but he says to himself: When I take off my shirt, I put one of the buttons next to my candlestick and the other one over there. So he turns his thoughts to it, doesn't just put them down thoughtlessly, but turns his thoughts to it. Yes, he gets up in the morning, goes straight to where he put them, doesn't need to search the whole room: where are my shirt buttons, where did I put my shirt buttons? What's the difference? The whole difference is that one person has thought about the matter and remembers it, while the other has not thought about it and does not remember it. Yes, but you can only remember it in the morning. It is of no use to lie down at night wanting to remember, you can only remember it in the morning if you thought about it in the evening.

Now it is said: Yes, but one cannot remember it; and if a person does not have a memory of previous earthly lives, then he cannot have had any previous earthly lives. — But in this way one can also say: A person cannot calculate, one can prove that a person cannot calculate – and now someone introduces a small child of four years as proof and shows that it cannot calculate at all. He is a human being and yet cannot calculate! One will say: He will certainly learn to calculate. If one knows human nature, one knows that he will learn to calculate. — If someone today points out a person who cannot remember his earlier lives on earth, one must say: Yes, but nothing has been done in the past to help people remember. On the contrary, there are still so many stragglers from earlier times today who want to keep people ignorant, so that they know nothing of the spiritual, so that they do not know at all what they are supposed to remember in the next life on earth, so that they become quite confused, like the man with the shirt button. First, man must learn to think in life, so that he can remember later.

So anthroposophy is there to make people aware of what they should remember later. And those who want to prevent anthroposophy want to keep people stupid so that they do not remember anything. And that is the important thing, gentlemen, to realize that man must first learn to apply thoughts correctly. Today people demand that thoughts be defined and that books contain correct definitions. Yes, gentlemen, even in ancient Greece people knew this. One man in particular wanted to teach people how to define. Today, in school, they say: You have to learn: What is light? I once had a classmate; we went to elementary school together, then I went to a different school and he trained as a teacher at the teacher's seminary. I met him again when I was seventeen; by then he was already a fully-fledged teacher. I asked him: What did you learn about light? He said: Light is the cause of the seeing of bodies. There is nothing to be said against that. You might just as well say: What is poverty? Poverty comes from pauvret@! That is about the same as someone defining it that way. But you have to learn a lot of such stuff.

Now, in ancient Greece, someone once ridiculed such clever learning. The children learned at school: What is a human being? A human being is a living creature that has two legs and no feathers. Now a particularly clever boy thought about it, took a rooster, plucked it and the next day he brought it to the teacher in its plucked state and said: “Teacher, is this a human being? It has no feathers and two legs!” That was the strength of the definition. So the things that are still in our books today are more or less in line with the definitions.

In all books, even in the social books that are written, the conditions of life are described in much the same way as the definition is given: A human being is a living creature that has two legs and no feathers. Then we draw further conclusions. Of course, if you start with a book that gives a definition, you can logically conclude all sorts of things from it; but it will never apply to humans, but may apply to a rooster that has just been plucked. Such are our definitions! The important thing is to see things as they really are.

In reality, the matter is such that one must say, as here for example (Schema page 183): physical body; etheric body, which is affected by weak opium consumption; astral body with strong opium consumption; I with habitual opium consumption. And when one now practices spiritual science, when one really learns to know the human being in such a way that one does not merely describe as in a dream: Such conditions arise —, but that one is familiar with them. The astral body is at work, the etheric body is at work, the I is at work - then one has right thoughts, not just definitions. And then, if one has absorbed right thoughts today, in the present life on earth, one remembers aright in the present life on earth. Just as one now only gradually remembers earlier earth lives with difficulty, as I have described it, so one will later remember them well if one does not make oneself ill, as through the consumption of opium, if one does not influence the body, but rather brings the soul through spiritual exercises to really get to know the spiritual.

So you see how truly a spiritual science arises in anthroposophy. You just have to bear in mind that anthroposophy is not about practising superstition. So, for example, when people find something extraordinary reported somewhere about spiritual things, they start saying: That's how it is when a spiritual world betrays itself. - But the spiritual world betrays itself in people! When people sit around a table and make it knock, they say: There must be a ghost in it. But when four people sit around, there are four ghosts! You just have to get to know them! But on the contrary, you'd rather knock people unconscious; there must be a medium among them. Look at the newspaper clipping you gave me a few weeks ago. For example, it describes how somewhere in England people were very much alarmed because during the night things fell off the racks, window panes were smashed, and so on. “Spiritual demons must be at work,” said the people. - What struck me most about the story - even though one can only say more precisely when one has seen it - but what struck me most about the story was that it was also mentioned that the people had a whole army of cats! Now, if you have a whole army of cats, and two or three of them get rabies, you should see how these “ghostly apparitions” all go! But as I said, you would have to know the details first; only then can you go into it.

You see, I was once very much urged to attend a spiritualistic seance. Well, I said I would do this because you can only judge such things when you have seen them. There was now a medium, he was actually terribly famous, a very famous medium, and after the people had sat down, had first been slightly numbed by some music that had been played – they all sat there numbed – the medium began, just as the people wanted, to make flowers fly down from the air all the time! Now every medium has a so-called impresario, if he is a real medium. Well, the people paid their mite after they had had their enjoyment. The main thing for those who had organized it was that the mite was left behind. And I said – people are terribly fanatical then, they start to scuffle with you when you want to enlighten them, they are the worst – but I said to some sensible people, they should investigate once, but not at the end, but at the beginning; there they will find the flowers in the impresario's hump inside! – So you will find things everywhere.

One must rise above superstition, gentlemen, if one wants to speak of the spiritual world. One must not fall for anything anywhere, neither for rabid cats nor for a hunchbacked impresario, but one can only access the spiritual world by no longer falling for anything superstitious and by proceeding with real science everywhere.

[ 1 ] The soil out of which the spirit of Christianity grew is to be sought in the wisdom of the Mysteries. It was only necessary for the fundamental conviction to become widespread that this spirit must be introduced into life in a greater measure than had come to pass through the Mysteries themselves. But such a conviction was present in many circles. We need only look at the rule of life of the Essenes and Therapeutae who had been established long before the beginning of Christianity. The Essenes were a closed Palestinian sect, whose numbers at the time of Christ were estimated at four thousand. They formed a community which required that its members should lead a life which developed a higher self within the soul, and through this bringing about a rebirth. The novice was subjected to a strict test to ascertain whether he was sufficiently mature to prepare himself for a higher life. If he was admitted he had to undergo a period of probation. He was required to take a solemn oath that he would not betray to strangers the secrets of the discipline. The latter was designed to quell the lower nature in man so that the spirit slumbering within him might be awakened more and more. Whoever had experienced the spirit in himself up to a certain stage rose to a higher degree in the order and enjoyed a corresponding authority conditioned by fundamental convictions and not by external compulsion. Similar to the Essenes were the Therapeutae, who lived in Egypt. All the relevant details of their discipline are contained in a treatise by the philosopher Philo, About the Contemplative Life.⁷⁰ (The dispute concerning the authenticity of this work must now be regarded as settled and it may be rightly assumed that Philo truly described the life of a community existing long before Christianity and well known to him. On this subject see G. R. S. Mead's Fragments of a Faith Forgotten.) We need look at only a few passages from Philo's treatise in order to see what their objective was. “The dwellings of the community are very simple, merely providing shelter against the two great dangers,—the fiery heat of the sun and the icy cold of the air. The dwellings are not close together as are those in towns, for proximity is irksome and unpleasing to those who are seeking solitude; nor are they far apart, because of the fellowship which is so dear to them, and also for mutual help in case of an attack by brigands. In each dwelling is a consecrated room, called a sanctuary or monasterion (closet or cell) in which in solitude they are initiated into the mysteries of the sanctified life ... They also have works of ancient authors, the founders of their way of thinking, and who left behind them many details concerning the method used in allegorical interpretation ... The interpretation of the sacred scriptures is based upon the underlying meaning in the allegorical narratives.”⁷¹ Thus we see that what had been striven for in the narrower circle of the Mysteries had become the concern of a community. But naturally its strict character has been weakened by being shared.—The communities of the Essenes and Therapeutae form a natural transition from the Mysteries to Christianity. Christianity, however, wished to extend to humanity as a whole what these communities had made the concern of a sect. This of course prepared the way for a still further weakening of its strict character.

[ 2 ] From the existence of such sects it becomes evident how far the time was ripe for the comprehension of the Mystery of Christ. In the Mysteries the neophyte was artificially prepared so that at the suitable stage the higher spiritual world would arise in his soul. Within the community of the Essenes or Therapeutae, by means of a suitable way of life, the soul sought to prepare itself for the awakening of the “higher man.” It is then a further step to struggle through to the intimation that a human individuality might have developed to higher and higher stages of perfection in repeated lives on earth. Anyone who had arrived at such a presentiment of this truth would also be able to feel that in Jesus a being of high spirituality had appeared. The higher the spirituality the greater the possibility of accomplishing something of importance. Thus Jesus' individuality could become capable of accomplishing the deed which is so mysteriously signified in the Gospels by the event of his Baptism by John, and which, by the manner of its presentation, is so clearly marked out as something of the utmost importance. The personality of Jesus became able to receive into its own soul Christ, the Logos, so that He became flesh in it. Since this Incarnation the “Ego” of Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, and the outer personality is the bearer of the Logos. This event of the “Ego” of Jesus becoming the Christ is represented by the Baptism by John. During the time of the Mysteries, “union with the Spirit” was the concern of a few neophytes only. Among the Essenes a whole community cultivated a life by which its members were able to attain this “union;” through the Christ event something,—that is, the deeds of Christ,—was placed before the whole of humanity so that the “union” became a matter of cognition for all mankind.

• 70. Philo, De vita contemplativa, About the Contemplative Life, or the Fourth Book of the Treatise Concerning the Virtues, critically edited with a defense of its genuineness by F. C. Conybeare, M.A., Oxford, 1895. This work is of great interest because it “contains the sole account of an ascetic community known as the Therapeutae having their home on the shores of Lake Mareotis.”
• 71. Philo, De vita contemplative, 24, 25, 29, 28.

We'll first address the Spirit of the Day. One can look upon it as especially good fortune if an esoteric class can be held on a Friday.

Great embracing Spirit, in your life I live with the earth's life.
In you am I.
You are.
I am in you.
Our leader has brought me to you.
I live in you.
Your spirit is an image of my own being.
You are.
Spirit has found the embracing spirit.
Divine bliss strides on to new world creation.
You are. I am. You are.

Great embracing Spirit
May my I raise itself from below upward,
May it get an inkling of you in the all-embracing.
May the spirit of my being be illumined
By the light of your messengers.
May the soul of my being be enkindled by the fire flames of your servants.
May the will of my I grasp
Your creatorword's force.
You are.
May your being permeate my will
That my I be grasped by an understanding of your light's shining,
Your life's love-warmth
And your being's creator words.
You are.

We're in divine, etheric spheres at night with our astral body and ego, from which we bring down strength for our physical life. We are connected with divine, spiritual beings there That's why when we wake up in the morning we should never have banal, everyday, egotistical thoughts right away For if we do, we cut ourselves off from spiritual beings and forces in which we were immersed during sleep. Before we go back to any action in daily life, to any thought about physical existence, we should devote ourselves to our meditation as we forget ourselves and become immersed in those regions. Every meditator should make it his sacred duty to do his meditation right after awakening, or at least his first thought should be to think thankfully about sublime beings.

An even holier duty, if there can be such for every esoteric pupil, is to make it clear to himself that he is doing a great injustice to all men and to higher spiritual beings if he approaches meditation with impure thoughts and feelings. For this pollutes spiritual spheres. The forces that must be used to eliminate this pollution again are withdrawn from mankind's progress.

One can do one's exercises with considerable concentration and yet be unholy within oneself. Doing a meditation like this is merely a matter of will. Of course, the latter should be consolidated and developed. But the whole inner life must be consecrated, so that only sacred, sublime things live in our soul. Just as one shouldn't go into meditation with impure thoughts and feelings, so one shouldn't go to sleep in the evening with such things. We're polluting divine worlds if we take thoughts of pride, vanity and arrogance with us. We should go to sleep with thoughts of reverence and thanks towards divine beings because we couldn't live for a minute while our ego and astral body are outside if such beings did not maintain our physical and etheric bodies in the meantime. We should go to sleep with reverence towards great divine beings.

An esoteric differs from an exoteric in that God lives in him consciously, in that he really lets God's force become active in him. This doesn't happen through the ideas he makes of God. Such ideas can harm a man when he later goes into higher worlds. For instance, he wants to find the Christ there in accordance with the ideas that he's made of him, and thereby doesn't recognize the real Christ, for he's different from the ever so high ideas that one can make of him.

Arrogance, pride and vanity in particular are qualities that an esoteric should get rid of. An esoteric pupil who thinks that he's already gotten rid of arrogance, pride, etc., must know that these qualities are still present in a subtle way. There is a certain vanity in the thought that one has laid these qualities aside and has advanced a great deal in one's development which is much worse than vanity in outer life, for it's intensified and applied to higher spiritual things. We can, however, be proud of a clear, logical and correct thinking—if it's unsubjective.

We're living in a very special, important time. It's a time of preparation for the Christ who will become perceptible in the etheric. We must prepare ourselves so that we can see him there. Men who don't have the good fortune to come to theosophy now won't be able to experience this event.

As we've been hearing for the last few days, we arose from higher spiritual forces. We descended from the laps of the Gods. Knowing this, we can place the Rosicrucian verse before our souls: Ex Deo nascimur—we're born from God. A sentence should stand right next to it that makes us feel very small; we should give ourselves up and lose ourselves entirely and devote ourselves to Christ. And if this mood lives in our soul rightly, we can have Ex Deo nascimur and next to it: In Christo morimur—in Christ we die. And the third sentence of this Rosicrucian saying gives us a wide view of how we can consciously develop the spirit—the Holy Spirit—in us: Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus—we'll live again and again in the Holy Spirit. And if we make this Rosicrucian verse the basic mood of our meditation we'll then take in the following verse with full understanding and with holy feelings: In the spirit lay the germ of my body …