The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Jean Paul's personality

[ 1 ] There are works of the mind that lead such an independent existence that one can devote oneself to them without thinking for a moment of their author. One can follow the Iliad, Hamlet and Othello, Iphigenia from beginning to end without being reminded of the personality of Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe. These works stand before the viewer like beings with a life all their own, like developed human beings that we accept for themselves without asking about their father. In them, not only the spirit of creation but also that of the creator is constantly before us. Agamemnon, Achilles, Othello, Iago, Iphigenia appear before us as individuals who act and speak for themselves. Jean Paul's characters, these Siebenkäs and Leibgeber, these Albano and Schoppe, Walt and Vult always have a companion who speaks with them, who looks over their shoulders. It is Jean Paul himself. The poet himself also speaks in Goethe's Faust. But he does so in a completely different way to Jean Paul. What has flowed from Goethe's nature into the figure of Faust has completely detached itself from the poet; it has become Faust's own being and the poet steps off the stage after he has placed his double on it. Jean Paul always remains standing next to his figures. When immersing ourselves in one of his works, our feelings, our thoughts always jump away from the work and towards the creator. Something similar is also the case with his satirical, philosophical and pedagogical writings. Today we are no longer able to look at a philosophical doctrine in isolation, without reference to its author. We look through the philosophical thoughts to the philosophical personalities. In the writings of Plato, Aristotle and Leibniz, we no longer remain within the logical web of thought. We look for the image of the philosopher. Behind the works we look for the human being struggling with the highest tasks and watch how he has come to terms with the mysteries and riddles of the world in his own way. But this idiosyncrasy has been fully expressed in the works. A personality speaks to us through the works. Jean Paul, on the other hand, always presents himself to us in two forms in his philosophical writings. We believe that he speaks to us from the book; but there is also a person next to us who tells us something that we can never guess from the book. And this second person always has something to say to us that never falls short of the significance of his creations.

[ 2 ] One may regard this peculiarity of Jean Paul's as a shortcoming of his nature. For those who are inclined to do so, I would like to counter Jean Paul's own words with some modification: Every nature is good as soon as it remains a solitary one and does not become a general one; for even the natures of a Homer, Plato, Goethe must not become general and unique and fill with their works "all the halls of books, from the old world down to the new, or we would starve and emaciate from oversaturation; as well as a human race, whose peoples and times consisted of nothing but pious Herrnhutters and Speners or Antonines or Lutherans, would at last present something of dull boredom and sluggish advancement."

[ 3 ] It is true: Jean Paul's idiosyncrasy never allowed him to create works that have the character of perfection through the unity and roundness of their form, through the natural, objective development of the characters and the plot, through the idealistic representation of his views. He never found the perfect stylistic form for his great spiritual content. But he penetrated the depths and abysses of the human soul and scaled the heights of thought like few others.

[ 4 ] Jean Paul was predisposed to a life of the greatest style. Nothing is inaccessible to his fine powers of observation, his high flight of thought. It is conceivable that he would have reached the pinnacle of mastery if he had studied the secrets of art forms like Goethe; or that he would have become one of the greatest philosophers of all time if he had developed his decisive ability to live in the realm of ideas to greater perfection. An unlimited urge for freedom in all his work prevents Jean Paul from submitting to any formal fetters. His bold imagination does not want to be determined in the continuation of a story by the art form it has created for itself at the beginning. Nor does it have the selflessness to suppress inflowing feelings and thoughts if they do not fit into the framework of the work to be created. Jean Paul appears as a sovereign ruler who plays freely with his imaginative creations, unconcerned about artistic principles, unconcerned about logical concerns. If the course of a narrative, a sequence of thoughts, flows on for a while, Jean Paul's creative genius always reclaims his freedom and leads the reader down side paths, occupying him with things that have nothing to do with the main thing, but only join it in the mind of the creator. At every moment, Jean Paul says what he wants to say, even if the objective course of events demands something completely different. Jean Paul's great style lies in this free play. But there is a difference between playing with complete mastery of the field in which one moves, or whether the whim of the player creates formations which give the impression to those who look at things according to their own laws that one part of the formation does not correspond to the other. With regard to the Greek works of art, Goethe bursts out with the words: "I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws according to which nature proceeds and which I am on the track of", and: "These high works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, which have been produced by men according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God." One would like to say of Jean Paul's creations: here nature has created an isolated area in which it shows that it can defy its own laws and still be great. Goethe seeks to achieve freedom of creation by incorporating the laws of nature into his own being. He wants to create as nature itself creates. Jean Paul wants to preserve his freedom by not paying attention to the laws of things and imagining the laws of his own personality into his world.

[ 5 ] If Jean Paul's nature were not very cozy, his free play with things and feelings would have a repulsive effect. But his interest in nature and people is no less than Goethe's and his love for all beings has no limits. And it is attractive to see how he immerses himself in things with his feelings, with his rapturous imagination, with his lofty flight of thought, without, however, seeing through the essence inherent in these things. essence itself. One would like to apply the saying "love is blind" to the sensuality with which Jean Paul describes nature and people.

[ 6 ] And it is not because Jean Paul plays too little, but because he is too serious. The 'dream that his imagination dreams of the world is so majestic that what the senses really perceive seems small and insignificant compared to it. This tempts him to embody the contradiction between his dreams and reality. Reality does not seem serious enough for him to waste his seriousness on it. He makes fun of the smallness of reality, but he never does so without feeling the bitterness of not being able to enjoy this reality more. Jean Paul's humor springs from this basic mood of his character. It allowed him to see things and characters that he would not have seen in a different mood. There is a way to rise above the contradictions of reality and to feel the great harmony of all world events. Goethe sought to rise to this height. Jean Paul lived more in the regions in which nature contradicts itself and becomes unfaithful in detail to what speaks from its whole as truth and naturalness. Appear therefore

[ 7 ] Jean Paul's creations, measured against the whole of nature, appear to be imaginary, arbitrary, one cannot say to them: "there is necessity, there is God"; to the individual, to the individual, his sensations appear to be quite true. He has not been able to describe the harmony of the whole, because he has never seen it in clear outline before his imagination; but he has dreamed of this harmony and wonderfully felt and described the contradiction of the individual with it. If his mind had been able to vividly shape the inner unity of all events, he would have become a pathetic poet. But since he only felt the contradictory, petty aspects of reality, he gave vent to them through humorous descriptions.

[ 8 ] Jean Paul does not ask: what is reality capable of? He doesn't even get to that. For this question is immediately drowned out by the other: how little this reality corresponds to the ideal. But ideals that are so unable to tolerate the marriage with harsh reality have something soft about them. They lack the strength to live fully and freshly. Those who are dominated by them become sentimental. And sentimentality is one of Jean Paul's character traits. If he is of the opinion that true love dies with the first kiss, or at least with the second, this is proof that his sentimental ideal of love was not created to win flesh and blood. It always retains something ethereal. Thus Jean Paul hovers between a shadowy ideal world, to which his rapturous longing is attached, and a reality that seems foolish and foolish in comparison with that ideal world. Thinking of himself, he says of humor: "Humor, as the inverted sublime, does not destroy the individual, but the finite through the contrast with the idea. For it there is no single folly, no fools, but only folly and a great world; unlike the common joker with his side-swipes, it does not single out individual folly, but humiliates the great, but unlike parody - in order to elevate the small, and elevates the small, but unlike irony - in order to set the great alongside it and thus destroy both, because before infinity everything is equal and nothing is equal." Jean Paul was unable to reconcile the contradictions of the world, which is why he was also helpless in the face of those in his own personality. He could not find the harmony of the forces of the soul that were at work in him. But these forces of the soul have such a powerful effect that one must say that Jean Paul's imperfection is greater than many a perfection of a lower order. Jean Paul's ability may lag behind his will, but this will appears so clearly before one's soul that one feels one is looking into unknown realms when one reads his writings.

Boyhood and grammar school

[ 9 ] Jean Paul spent his childhood, from the age of two to twelve, in Joditz an der Saale, not far from Hof. He was born in Wunsiedel on March 21, 1763 as the son of the tertius and organist Johann Christian Christoph Richter, who had married Sophia Rosina Kuhn, the daughter of the cloth maker Johann Paul Kuhn in Hof, on October 16, 1761. Our poet was given the name Johann Paul Friedrich at his baptism. He later formed his literary name Jean Paul by Frenching his first two first names. On i. August 1765, the parents moved to Joditz. The father was appointed pastor there. The family had grown in Wunsiedel with the addition of a son, Adam. Two girls, who died young, and two sons, Gottlieb and Heinrich, were added in Joditz. A last son, Samuel, was born later, when the family was already in Schwarzenbach. Jean Paul describes his childhood in a captivating way in his autobiography, which unfortunately only goes up to 1779. All the traits that later emerged in the man were already evident in the boy. The rapturous fantasy, which is directed towards an ideal realm and which values reality less than this realm, manifested itself at an early age in the form of a fear of ghosts that often tormented him. He slept with his father in a parlor of the Joditz rectory, separated from the rest of the family. The children had to go to bed at nine o'clock. But the hard-working father only came to Jean Paul in the parlor two hours later, after he had finished his night's reading. Those were two difficult hours for the boy. "I lay with my head under the comforter in the sweat of ghostly fear and saw in the darkness the weather light of the cloudy ghostly sky, and I felt as if man himself were being spun by ghostly caterpillars. So I suffered helplessly for two hours at night, until finally my father came up and, like a morning sun, chased away ghosts like dreams." The autobiographer gives an excellent interpretation of this peculiarity of his childhood. "Many a child full of physical fear nevertheless shows courage of mind, but merely for lack of imagination; another, however - like me - trembles before the invisible world, because imagination makes it visible and shapes it, and is easily frightened by the visible, because it never reaches the depths and dimensions of the invisible. Thus, even a quick physical danger -- for example, a running horse, a clap of thunder, a war, the noise of a fire -- only makes me calm and composed, because I fear only with my imagination, not with my senses." And the other side of Jean Paul's nature can also be seen in the boy; that loving devotion to the little things of reality. He had "always had a predilection for the domestic, for still life, for making spiritual nests. He is a domestic shellfish that pushes itself quite comfortably back into the narrowest coils of the shell and falls in love, only that each time it wants to have the snail shell wide open so that it can then raise its four tentacles not as far as four butterfly wings into the air, but ten times further up to the sky; at least with each tentacle to one of the four satellites of Jupiter." He calls this peculiarity of his a "foolish alliance between searching far and searching near - similar to binoculars, which double the proximity or the distance by merely turning around". The boy's attitude towards Christmas is particularly significant for Jean Paul's character. The joys that the near reality offered him could not fill his soul, however great the extent to which they materialized. "For when Paul stood before the tree of lights and the table of lights on Christmas morning and the new world full of splendor and gold and gifts lay uncovered before him and he found and received new things and new and rich things: so the first thing that arose in him was not a tear - namely of joy - but a sigh - namely about life - in a word, even to the boy the crossing or leap or flight from the surging, playful, immeasurable sea of the imagination to the limited and confining solid shore was characterized by a sigh for a greater, more beautiful land. But before this sigh was breathed and before the happy reality showed its powers, Paul felt out of gratitude that he must show himself in the highest degree joyful before his mother; - and this glow he accepted at once, and for a short time too, because immediately afterwards the dawning rays of reality extinguished and removed the moonlight of imagination." Not as a child, nor in later life, could Jean Paul find the bridge between the land of his longing, which his imagination presented to him in unlimited perfection, and the reality that he loved, but which never satisfied him because he could not see it as a whole, but only in detail, in the individual, in the imperfect.

[ 10 ] On behalf of his mother, Jean Paul often visited his grandparents in Hof. One summer's day on his way home, as he looked at the sunny, glistening mountain slopes and the drifting clouds at around two o'clock, he was overcome by an "objectless longing, which was a mixture of more pain and less pleasure and a desire without memory. Alas, it was the whole man who longed for the heavenly goods of life, which still lay unmarked and colorless in the deep darkness of the heart and which were fleetingly illuminated by the incident rays of the sun." This longing accompanied Jean Paul throughout his life; he was never granted the favor of seeing the objects of his longing in reality.

[ 11 ] There were times when Jean Paul wavered as to whether he was born to be a philosopher or a poet. In any case, there is a distinctly philosophical streak in his personality. Above all else, the philosopher needs to reflect on himself. The philosophical fruits ripen in the most intimate inner being of man. The philosopher must be able to withdraw to this. From here he must be able to find the connection to world events, to the secrets of existence. The young Jean Paul also shows a budding tendency towards self-reflection. He tells us: "I have never forgotten the phenomenon within me, which I have never told anyone about, where I stood at the birth of my self-consciousness, of which I know exactly where and when. One morning, as a very young child, I was standing under the front door and looking to the left at the wood, when suddenly the inner face, I am an I, came before me like a flash of lightning from the sky, and remained shining ever since: then my I had seen itself for the first time and forever." All the peculiarities of Jean Paul's character and those of his creations are already to be found in the earliest traits of his nature. It would be wrong to look for the cause of the physiognomy of his spiritual personality in his growth out of the limited conditions of his upbringing. He himself considers it a happy coincidence that the poet spent his childhood not in a big city but in the village. This generalization is certainly daring. For Jean Paul, because of his individual nature, it was fortunate that he received his first impressions in the idyll of Jodice. For other natures, another is certainly the natural one. Jean Paul said: "Let no poet be born and educated in a capital, but where possible in a village, at most in a small town. The overabundance and overstimulation of a big city are for the excitable child's soul like eating dessert, drinking distilled water and bathing in mulled wine. Life exhausts itself in him in boyhood, and he now has nothing more to wish for than at most the smaller things, the villages. If I think of the most important thing for the poet, of love, he must see in the city, around the warm earthy belt of his parental friends and acquaintances, the larger cold turning and icy zones of unloved people, whom he encounters unknown to him and for whom he can kindle or warm himself as little as a ship's people sailing past another strange ship's people. But in the village they love the whole village, and no infant is buried there without everyone knowing its name and illness and sorrow; - and this glorious sympathy for everyone who looks like a human being, which therefore extends even to the stranger and the beggar, breeds a concentrated love of humanity and the right strength of heart."

[ 12 ] There was a real rage for knowledge in the boy Jean Paul. "All learning was my life, and I would have been happy to be taught like a prince by half a dozen teachers at once, but I hardly had the right one." Of course, the father who provided the elementary lessons was not the right man to satisfy this desire. Johann Christoph Christian Richter was an outstanding personality. He inspired his small parish, whose members were connected to him like a large family, with his sermons. He was an excellent musician and even a popular composer of sacred music. Benevolence towards everyone was one of his outstanding character traits. He did some of the work in his field and garden with his own hands. The lessons he gave his son consisted of letting him "merely learn by heart, sayings, catechism, Latin words and Langen's grammar". This was of little avail to the boy, who was thirsting for real spiritual nourishment. Even then, he sought to acquire on his own what was not available to him from outside. He created a box for himself in which he set up a "case library" "made entirely of his own little sedes, which he sewed together and cut out of the wide paper cuttings from his father's octave sermons".

[ 13 ] On January 9, 1776, Jean Paul moved to Schwarzenbach with his parents. His father was appointed pastor there by a patron, Baroness von Plotho. Jean Paul now went to a public school. The lessons there did not meet his intellectual needs any more than those of his father. The principal, Karl August Werner, taught the pupils to read in a way that lacked all thoroughness and immersion in the spirit of the writers. The chaplain Völkel, who gave him private lessons in geography and philosophy, provided a substitute for those in need of knowledge. Jean Paul received a great deal of inspiration from philosophy in particular. However, it was precisely this man to whom the young mind's firmly pronounced, rigid individuality came to the fore in a brusque manner. Völkel had promised to play a game of chess with him one day and then forgot about it. Jean Paul was so angry about this that he ignored his beloved philosophical lessons and never went to see his teacher again. At Easter 1779, Jean Paul came to Hof to attend grammar school. His entrance examination revealed an unusual maturity of mind. He was immediately placed in the middle section of the Prima. Soon afterwards, on April 135, his father died. Jean Paul had no real luck with his teachers in Hof either. Neither principal Kirsch nor deputy principal Remebaum, the primary school teachers, made any particular impression on Jean Paul. And once again he felt compelled to satisfy his mind on his own. Fortunately, his relationship with the enlightened Pastor Vogel in Rehau gave him the opportunity to do so. He placed his entire library at his disposal and Jean Paul was able to immerse himself in the works of Helvetius, Hippel, Goethe, Lavater and Lessing. He already felt the urge to assimilate what he had read and make it useful for his own life. He filled entire volumes with excerpts of what he had read. And a series of essays emerged from this reading. The grammar school pupil set about important things. What our concept of God is like; about the religions of the world; the comparison of the fool and the wise, the fool and the genius; about the value of studying philosophy at an early age; about the importance of inventing new truths: these were the tasks he set himself. And he already had a lot to say about these things. He was already dealing independently with the nature of God, with the questions of Christianity, with the spiritual progress of mankind. We encounter boldness and maturity of judgment in these works. He also ventured to write a poem, the novel "Abelard and Heloise". Here he appears in style and content as an imitator of Miller, the Sigwart poet. His longing for a perfect world that transcended all reality brought him into the path of this poet, for whom there were only tears on earth over broken hearts and dried up hopes and for whom happiness only lies beyond death. The motto of Jean Paul's novel already shows that he was seized by this mood: "The sensitive man is too good for this earth, where there are cold mockers - in that world only, which bears weeping angels, does he find reward for his tears."

[ 14 ] In Hof, Jean Paul already found what his heart needed most, participating friends: Christian Otto, the son of a wealthy merchant, who later became the confidant of his literary works; Johann Richard Hermann, the son of a toolmaker, a brilliant man full of energy and knowledge, who unfortunately succumbed to the efforts of a life rich in deprivation and hardship as early as 1790. Furthermore, Adolf Lorenz von Oerthel, the eldest son of a wealthy merchant from Töpen near Hof. In contrast to Hermann, the latter was a soft, sentimentalist full of sentimentality and enthusiasm. Hermann was realistically inclined and combined practical wisdom with a scientific sense. In these two characters, Jean Paul already encountered the types that he later embodied in his poems in manifold variations, as the idealistic Siebenkäs compared to the realistic Leibgeber; as Walt compared to Vult. On May 19, 1781, Jean Paul was enrolled as a student of theology in Leipzig.

University life

[ 15 ] Conflicting thoughts and feelings waged a fierce battle in Jean Paul's soul when he entered the classrooms of the high school. He had absorbed opinions and views through avid reading; but neither his artistic nor his philosophical imagination wanted to unfold in such a way that what he had absorbed from outside would have taken on a fixed, individual structure. The basic forces of his personality were strong but indeterminate; the energy was great, the creative power sluggish. The impressions he received aroused powerful feelings in him, drove him to make decisive value judgments; but they did not want to form themselves into vivid images and thoughts in his imagination.

[ 16 ] At university, Jean Paul only sought all-round stimulation. As the eldest son of a clergyman, it was part of the family tradition for him to study theology. If the intention of becoming a theologian ever played a role in his life, it did not last long. He wrote to his friend Vogel: "I have made it a rule in my studies to do only what is most pleasant to me, what I am least unskilled at and what I already find useful and consider useful. I have often deceived myself by following this rule, but I have never regretted this mistake. - To study what one does not love is to struggle with disgust, boredom and weariness in order to obtain a good that one does not desire; it is to waste one's powers, which one feels are made for something else, in vain on a thing where one can make no progress, and to withdraw them from the thing in which one would make progress." He lives at the university as a man of spiritual enjoyment who seeks only that which develops his dormant powers. He listens to lectures on St. John by Magister Weber, on the Acts of the Apostles by Morus; on logic, metaphysics and aesthetics by Platner, on morals by Wieland, on mathematics by Gehler; on Latin philology by Rogler. He also read Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Pope, Swift, Young, Cicero, Horace, Ovid and Seneca. The diary pages and studies in which he collects and processes what he has heard and read grow into thick volumes. He developed an almost superhuman capacity for work and a desire to work. He set down his views in essays that reflect his struggle for a free world view, independent of religious and scholarly prejudices.

[ 17 ] The insecurity of his mind, which prevented Jean Paul from finding his own way in the face of the contemplation and appropriation of the foreign, would probably have held him back for a long time from appearing before the public with his attempts at writing if the bitterest poverty had not driven him to the decision: "To write books in order to be able to buy books." Jean Paul did not have time to wait until the bitterness he felt as a Leipzig student about the deplorable state of life and culture had turned into a cheerful, superior sense of humor. Early mature works emerged, satires in which the grumbling, criticizing man and not the poet and philosopher speaks out of Jean Paul. Inspired by Erasmus' "Encomium moriae", he wrote his "Praise of Stupidity" in 1782, for which he was unable to find a publisher, and in the same year the "Greenland Trials", with which he first appeared in public in 1783. When one reads these writings, one has the feeling that here is a man who not only vents his resentment on what he encounters that is wrong, but who painstakingly collects all the weaknesses and dark sides, all the stupidities and foolishness, all the mendacity and cowardice of life in order to pursue them with his wit. The roots through which Jean Paul connected with reality were short and thin. Once he had gained a foothold somewhere, he could easily loosen it again and transplant his roots into other soil. His life was broad, but not deep. This is most evident in his relationship with women. He did not love with the full elemental force of his heart. His love was a game with the sensations of love. He did not love women. He loved love. In 1783 he had a love affair with a beautiful country girl, Sophie Ellrodt in Helmbrechts. One day he wrote to her that her love made him happy; he assured her that her kisses had satisfied the longing that his eyes had aroused in him. But he also writes soon afterwards that he only stayed a little longer in Hof because he wanted to be happy in this place for some time before he would be happy in Leipzig (cf. Paul Nerrlich, Jean Paul, p. 138 £.). As soon as he is in Leipzig, the whole love dream has faded. His later relationships with women were just as playful with the feelings of love, including those with his wife. His love had something ghostly about it; the addition of sensuality and passion had too little elective affinity to the ideal element of his love.

[ 18 ] The insecurity of the mind, the little connection of his being with the real conditions of life made Jean Paul a self-tormentor at times. He just flitted about reality; that is why he often had to go astray and reflect on his own personality. We read of a self-torture that went as far as asceticism in Jean Paul's devotional booklet, which he wrote in 1784. But even this asceticism has something playful about it. It remains stuck in ideal reverie. However profound the individual remarks he writes down about pain, virtue, glory-seeking, anger: one always has the impression that Jean Paul merely wanted to intoxicate himself with the beauty of his rules of life. It was refreshing for him to write down thoughts such as the following: "Hatred is not based on moral ugliness, but on your mood, sensitivity, health; but is it the other's fault that you are ill? ... The offending man, not the offending stone, annoys you; so think of every evil as the effect of a physical cause or as coming from the Creator, who also allowed this concatenation." Who can believe that he is serious about such thoughts, who almost at the same time wrote the "Greenland Trials", in which he wielded his scourge against writing, against clericalism, against ancestral pride in a way that does not betray the fact that he regards the wrongs of life as the effect of a physical cause?

[ 19 ] The bitterest need caused Jean Paul to leave Leipzig like a fugitive on October 27, 1784. He had to secretly evade his creditors. On November 16, he arrived in Hof with his mother, who was also completely impoverished.

Educator and years of travel

[ 20 ] Jean Paul spent two years in Hof surrounded by a housebound mother and the most oppressive family circumstances. Alongside the noisy bustle of his mother, the washing and scrubbing, the cooking and flattening, the whirring of the spinning wheel, he dreamed of his ideals. Only the New Year of 1787 brought partial redemption. He became a tutor to the younger brother of his friend Oerthel in Töpen near Hof. There was at least one person in Chamber Councillor Oerthel's house who was sympathetic to the idealistic dreamer, who had a slight tendency towards sentimentality. It was the woman of the house. Jean Paul remembered her with gratitude throughout his life. Her loving nature made up for some of the things that her husband's rigidity and roughness spoiled for Jean Paul. And even if the boy he had to educate caused the teacher many a worry due to his suspicious character, the latter seems to have clung to his pupil with a certain love, for he later said of the early departed that he had had the most beautiful heart and that the best seeds of virtue and knowledge lay in his head and heart. After two years, Jean Paul left Oerthel's house. We are not informed of the reasons for this departure. Necessity soon forced him to exchange the old schoolmaster's office for a new one. He moved to Schwarzenbach to give elementary lessons to the children of his old friends, the pastor Völkel, the district administrator Clöter and the commissioner Vogel.

[ 21 ] During his time in Hof and Töpen, Jean Paul's need for friendship bore the most beautiful fruit. If Jean Paul lacked the endurance of passion for devoted love, he was made for friendship that lived more in the spiritual element. His friendship with Oerthel and Hermann deepened during this time. And when they were taken from him by death in quick succession, in 1789 and 1790, he erected monuments to them in his soul, the sight of which spurred him on to ever new work throughout his life. The deep glimpses that Jean Paul was granted into the souls of his friends were a powerful stimulus for his poetic creativity. Jean Paul needed to lean on people who were attached to him with all their soul. The urge to transfer his feelings and ideas directly into another human soul was great. He could consider it fortunate that shortly after Oerthel and Hermann had passed away, another friend surrendered to him in loyal love. It was Christian Otto who, from 1790 until Jean Paul's death, lived through his intellectual life with selfless sympathy.

[ 22 ] Jean Paul himself describes how he spent the period from 1783 to 1790. "I enjoyed the most beautiful things in life, autumn, summer and spring with their landscapes on earth and in the sky, but I had nothing to eat or wear and remained anemic and little respected in Hof im Voigtlande." It was during this time that his "Auswahl aus des Teufels Papieren nebst einem notwendigen Aviso vom Juden Mendel" was written. In this book, the creative satirist appears alongside the polemicist. The criticism has partly been transformed into narrative. People appear instead of the earlier abstract ideas. But what is still laboriously struggling for embodiment here emerges in a more perfect form in the three stories written in 1790: "Des Amtsvogts Freudel Klaglibell gegen seinen verfluchten Dämon"; "Des Rektors Fälbel und seiner Primaner Reise nach dem Fichtelberg" and in the "Leben des vergnügten Schulmeisterleins Maria Wuz in Auenthal". In these three poems, Jean Paul succeeds in drawing characters in which humanity becomes caricature. Freudel, Fälbel and Wuz appear as if Jean Paul were looking at his ideal image of man in mirrors, which make all the features appear diminished and distorted. But in doing so, he creates afterimages of reality. Freudel depicts the t'ypus of man, who at moments when he needs the greatest seriousness and solemn dignity becomes ridiculous through the trickery of his absent-mindedness or chance. Another kind of human caricature, which judges the whole world from the narrowest perspective of its own profession, is characterized in Fälbel. A schoolmaster who believes that the great French social upheaval would have been impossible if the revolutionary heroes had commented on the old classics instead of reading the evil philosophers. The Auenthal schoolmaster Maria Wuz is a wonderful picture of stunted humanity. In his village idyll, he lives human life on a microscopic scale, but he is as happy and content as none of the greatest sages can be.

[ 23 ] It is difficult to decide whether Jean Paul was a good schoolmaster. If he was able to follow the principles he wrote in his diaries, then he certainly turned his pupils into what they were capable of becoming. But schoolmastering was certainly more fruitful for him than for his pupils. For he gained deep insights into young human nature, which led him to the great pedagogical ideas that he later developed in his "Levana". However, he would hardly have been able to endure the confines of the office for three years if he had not found in his visits to Hof a conductor that was entirely in keeping with his nature. He was a connoisseur of the intellectual pleasures that arise from relationships with talented and excitable people. In Hof, he was always surrounded by a crowd of young girls who swarmed around him and stimulated his imagination. He regarded them as his "erotic academy". He fell in love, as far as he could love, with each of the academy girls, and the intoxication of one love affair had not yet faded when another began.

[ 24 ] This mood gave rise to the two novels "The Invisible Lodge" and "Hesperus". Gustav, the main character of the "Invisible Lodge", is a nature like Wuz, who only outgrows Wuz's existence and is forced to allow his tender heart, which could be content in a narrowly defined circle, to be tortured by harsh reality. The contrast between ideal sensuality and what is really valid in life forms the basic motif of the novel. And this motif becomes Jean Paul's great problem in life. It appears in ever new forms in his creations. In "The Invisible Lodge", the ideal sensuality has the character of a deep emotionalism that tends towards sentimentalism; in "Hesperus" it takes on a more rational form. The protagonist, Viktor, no longer merely raves with his heart like Gustav, but also with his mind and reason. Viktor actively intervenes in the circumstances of life, while Gustav passively allows them to affect him. The feeling that runs through both novels is this: the world is not made for good and great people. They have to retreat to an ideal island within themselves and lead an existence outside and above the world in order to make do with its wretchedness. The great man with a noble nature, a brilliant mind and an energetic will, who weeps or laughs at the world, but never draws a sense of satisfaction from it, is one of the extremes between which all Jean Paul's characters are to be placed. The other is the small, narrow-minded person with a subaltern attitude, who is content with the world because his empty mind does not conjure up dreams of a greater one. The figure of Quintus Fixlein in the 1794 story "Life of Quintus Fixlein drawn from fifteen boxes of notes" approaches the latter extreme; the following poem "Jean Paul's biographical amusements under the brainpan of a giantess", written in the same year, approaches the former. Fixlein is happy with modest plans for the future and the most petty scholarly work; Lismore, the main character of the "Amusements", suffers from the disharmony of his energetic will and weaker ability and from the other between his idealistically lofty ideas of human nature and those of his fellow human beings. The struggle that arises when a strong will that transcends the boundaries of reality and a human attitude that grows out of the limited conditions of a petty existence collide was depicted by Jean Paul in the book "Blumen-, Frucht- und Dornenstücke oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs im Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschnappel" (Pieces of Flowers, Fruit and Thorns or the Marriage, Death and Wedding of the Poor Lawyer F. St. Siebenkäs in the Imperial Market Town of Kuhschnappel), published at Easter 1795. There are two people here who, because of their higher nature, do not know how to come to terms with the world. One, Siebenkäs, believes in a higher existence and suffers from the fact that this cannot be found in the world; the other, Leibgeber, sees through the nothingness of the world, but does not believe in the possibility of any kind of better. He is a humorist who thinks nothing of life and laughs at reality; but at the same time he is a cynic who cares nothing for higher things and considers all idealistic dreams to be bubbles of foam that rise from the muck of vulgarity as a haze to the scorn of humanity. Siebenkäs suffers at the hands of his wife Lenette, in whom philistine, narrow-minded reality is embodied; and Leibgeber suffers from his faithlessness and hopelessness. But he always rises above it with humor. He demands nothing extraordinary from life; that is why his disappointments are not great and why he does not consider it necessary to make higher demands of himself.

[ 25 ] Even before finishing "Hesperus", Jean Paul had swapped his teaching and educational work in Schwarzenbach for one in Hof. In the summer of 1796, he undertook a trip to Weimar. Like the heroes of his novels in the midst of a reality that did not satisfy them, Jean Paul felt at home in the city of muses. In his opinion, everything that reality could contain in terms of grandeur and sublimity should have been crowded together in this small town. He had hoped to meet giants and titans of spirit and imagination, as he had imagined them in his dreams to the point of superhumanity. And he did find geniuses, but only human beings. He was not attracted to either Goethe or Schiller. Both had already made their peace with the world at that time; both had realized the great world harmony that allows man to make peace with reality after a long struggle. Jean Paul was not allowed to find this peace. His soul was made for the lust of the struggle between ideal and reality. Goethe seemed to him stiff, cold, proud, frozen against all men; Schiller rock-faced and hard, so that foreign enthusiasm bounced off him. Only with Herder did a beautiful bond of friendship develop. The theologian, who sought salvation beyond the real world, could be a comrade to Jean Paul, but not the worldlings Goethe and Schiller, the idolizers of the real. Jean Paul felt the same way about Jacobi, the philosophical fisherman in the murky waters, as he did about Herder. Understanding and reason penetrate reality and illuminate it with the light of the idea; feeling clings to the dark, the unrecognizable, to the world of faith. And Jacobi reveled in the world of faith, as did Jean Paul. This trait of his spirit won him the hearts of women. Karoline Herder raved about the poet of sentimentality, and Charlotte von Kalb admired in him the ideal of a man.

[ 26 ] After his return from Weimar, Jean Paul's poetry lost itself completely in the vagueness of emotional indulgence and in an unworldly way of thinking and attitude in "Jubelsenior" and "Kampanerthal oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele" (1797). If the journey to Weimar had not strengthened his eyes for an unbiased contemplation of life, the varied wanderings that lasted from 1797 to 1804 did even less. He now lived successively in Leipzig, Weimar, Berlin, Meiningen and Koburg. Everywhere he established relationships with people, especially with women; everywhere he was welcomed with open arms. People were intoxicated by his ideas, which flowed from the depths of the emotional world. But the attraction they exerted on him soon wore off. He wrapped thick tentacles around the people he got to know, but soon drew these arms in again. In Weimar, Jean Paul spent happy days in the company of Frau von Kalb, Duchess Amalia, Knebel, Böttiger and others; in Hildburghausen, he carried his love game so far that he became engaged to Caroline von Feuchtersleben, only to part with her again soon afterwards. From Berlin he fetched the woman who really became his wife, Karoline, the second daughter of the senior tribunal councillor Maier. He entered into a marriage with her, which initially lifted him to the highest heights of happiness that a man can climb, and from which all happiness then disappeared to such an extent that Jean Paul only held on to her out of duty and Karoline endured it with submission and self-emptying. On her union with Jean Paul, this woman wrote to her father: "I never thought I would be as happy as I am. It will sound strange to you when I tell you that the high enthusiasm which carried me away when I met Richter, but which subsequently faded away as I descended into a more real life, is revived anew every day." And in July 1820, she confessed that she no longer had any right to his heart, that she felt poor and miserable in comparison to him.

[ 27 ] In Meiningen and Koburg, Jean Paul was able to get to know the peaks from which the world is ruled. The dukes in both places were on the most friendly terms with him. He was not to be missed at any court festival. Anyone seeking intellectual entertainment and stimulation joined him.

[ 28 ] Jean Paul's two most important poems, "Titan" and "Flegeljahre", were written during his years of wandering. His poetic power appears heightened, his imagination works in sharper outlines in these works. The characters are similar to those we encounter in his earlier works, but the artist has gained greater confidence in drawing and more vivid colors. He has also descended from depicting the outside of people into the depths of their souls. While Siebenkäs, Wuz and Fälbel appear like silhouettes, the Albano and Schoppe of the "Titan", the Walt and Vult of the "Flegeljahre" appear as perfectly painted figures. Albano is the man of strong will. He wants great things without asking where the strength to achieve them will come from. He has an addiction to breaking all the shackles of humanity. Unfortunately, it is precisely this humanity that is confined within narrow limits. A soft heart, an over-sensitive sensibility blunt the power of his imagination. He is unable to truly love either the rapturous Liana, with her fine nerves and boundless selflessness, or the ingenious, free-spirited Linda. He cannot love at all because his ideals make him demand more from love than it can offer. Linda wants devotion and nothing but devotion from Albano; but he thinks that he must first win her love through great deeds, through participation in the great war of freedom. He first wants to acquire what he could easily have. Reality in itself is nothing to him; only when he can combine an ideal with it does it become something to him. In view of the great works of art in Rome, it is not the secrets of art that open up to him, but his thirst for action awakens. "How in Rome a person can only enjoy and melt softly in the fire of art, instead of being ashamed and struggling for strength and action," he does not understand. But in the end this 'thirst for action only finds nourishment in the fact that it turns out that Albano is a prince's son and that the throne is his by inheritance. And his need for love is satisfied by the narrow-minded Idoine, who is devoid of any higher impetus. Opposite Albano is Schoppe, who is a body giver in a heightened form. He gives no thought to the nothingness of the world, for he knows that it cannot be otherwise. Life seems worthless to him; nothing has value for him but personal freedom and boundless independence. Only one struggle could have value for him, that for the unconditional freedom of the individual. He derides all other activities. Nothing frightens him more than his own ego. Everything else does not seem worth thinking about to him, not worth enthusiasm and not worth hatred; but he fears his ego. It is the only great mystery that haunts him. In the end, it drives him mad because it haunts him as a single being in the midst of an eerie void.

[ 29 ] Something of this fear of the ego lived in Jean Paul himself. It was an uncanny thought for him to descend into the depths of the mind and see how the human ego is at work to produce all that springs forth from the personality. That is why he hated the philosopher who had shown this ego in its nakedness, Fichte. He mocked him in his "Clavis Fichtiana seu Leibgeberiana" (1801).

[ 30 ] And Jean Paul had reason to shy away from looking into his innermost self. For in it, two egos engaged in a dialog that sometimes drove him to despair. There was the ego with the golden dreams of a higher world order, which mourned over the mean reality and consumed itself in sentimental devotion to an indefinite beyond; and there was the second ego, which mocked the first for its rapture, knowing full well that the indefinite ideal world could never be reached by any reality. The first ego lifted Jean Paul above reality into the world of his ideals; the second was his practical advisor, reminding him again and again that he who wants to live must come to terms with the conditions of life. He divided these two natures in his own personality between two people, the twin brothers Walt and Vult, and portrayed their mutual relationship in the "Flegeljahre". How little Jean Paul's idealism is rooted in reality is best shown in the introduction to the novel. It is not the concatenations of life that are supposed to make the enthusiast Walt a useful person for reality, but the arbitrariness of an eccentric who has bequeathed his entire fortune to the imaginative youth, but on condition that various practical obligations are imposed on him. Any failure to fulfill these practical obligations immediately results in the loss of part of the inheritance. Walt is only able to find his way through life's tasks with the help of his brother Vult. Vult attacks everything he starts with rough hands and a strong sense of reality. The two brothers' natures first complement each other for a while in a beautifully harmonious endeavor, only to separate later on. This conclusion again points to Jean Paul's own nature. Only temporarily did his two natures create a harmonious whole; time and again he suffered from their divergence, from their irreconcilable opposition.

[ 31 ] Never again did Jean Paul succeed in expressing with such perfection what moved him most deeply in poetry as in the "Flegeljahre". In 1803, he began to record the philosophical thoughts he had formed about art over the course of his life. This gave rise to his "Preliminary School of Aesthetics". These thoughts are bold and shed a bright light on the nature of art and artistic creation. They are the intuitions of a man who had experienced all the secrets of this creation in his own production. What the enjoyer draws from the work of art, what the creator puts into it: it is said here with infinite beauty. The psychology of humor is revealed in the most profound way: the hovering of the humorist in the spheres of the sublime, his laughter at reality, which has so little of this sublime, and the seriousness of this laughter, which only does not weep at the imperfections of life because it stems from human greatness.

[ 32 ] Jean Paul's ideas on education, which he set down in his "Levana" (1806), are no less significant. His sense of the ideal benefits this work more than any other. Only the educator really deserves to be an idealist. He is all the more fruitful the more he believes in the unknown in human nature. Every pupil should be a riddle for the educator to solve. The real, the educated should only serve him to discover the possible, the yet-to-be-formed. What we often feel to be a shortcoming in Jean Paul the poet, that he does not succeed in finding harmony between what he wants with his characters and what they really are: in Jean Paul, the teacher of the art of education, this is a great trait. And the sense for human weaknesses, which made him a satirist and humorist, enabled him to give the educator significant hints to counteract these weaknesses.

Bayreuth

[ 33 ] In 1804, Jean Paul moved to Bayreuth to make this town his permanent residence until the end of his life. He felt happy again to see the mountains of his homeland around him and to pursue his poetic dreams in quiet, small circumstances. He no longer created anything as perfect as the "Titan", the "Flegeljahre", the "Vorschule" and the "Levana", although his 'urge to be active took on a feverish character. Upsets about contemporary events, about the miserable state of the German Reich, an inner nervous restlessness that drove him to travel again and again, interrupted the regular course of his life. Half an hour away from Bayreuth, he had made himself a quiet home for a while in the house of Mrs. Rollwenzel, who cared for him like a mother and had made him famous. He needed the change of location in order to be able to create. While it was initially enough for him to leave his family home for hours every day and make the "Rollwenzelei" the scene of his work, this also changed later on. He traveled to various places: Erlangen (1811), Nuremberg (1812), Regensburg (1816), Heidelberg (1817), Frankfurt (1818), Stuttgart, Löbichau (1819), Munich (1820). In Nuremberg he had the pleasure of getting to know his beloved Jacobi, with whom he had previously only written, in person. In Heidelberg, his genius was celebrated by young and old alike. In Stuttgart, he became close to Duke Wilhelm von Württemberg and his talented wife. In Löbichau, he spent the most beautiful days in the house of Duchess Dorothea of Courland. He was surrounded by a society of exquisite women, so that he felt as if he were on a romantic island.

[ 34 ] The fascinating influence that Jean Paul exerted on women, which was evident in Karoline Herder and Charlotte von Kalb and many others, led to a tragedy in 1813. Maria Lux, the daughter of a republican from Mainz who had played a role in the Charlotte Corday catastrophe, fell passionately in love with Jean Paul's writings, which soon turned into an ardent love for the poet she did not know personally. The unhappy girl was dismayed when she saw that her feeling of admiration for the genius was turning more and more stormily into a passionate affection for the man, and gave herself up to death. Sophie Paulus' affection in Heidelberg made a deeply moving impression, if not an equally shattering one. In constant vacillation between moods of fiery love and admirable renunciation and self-control, this girl consumes herself until, at the age of twenty-five and unsure of herself, she offers her hand to the old A. W. Schlegel in a union that is soon shattered by the conflicting natures.

[ 35 ] The cheerful superiority that enabled him to create humorous images of life left Jean Paul completely in Bayreuth. What he still produces has a more serious tone. He is still unable to create characters who lead an existence appropriate to the ideal human nature he has in mind, but he does create characters who have made their peace with reality. Self-satisfied characters are Katzenberger in "Katzenbergers Badereise" (1808) and Fibel in "Leben Fibels" (1811). Fibel is happy, despite the fact that he only manages to write a modest book, and Katzenberger is happy in his study of abortions. Both are distorted images of humanity, but there is no reason to mock them, nor, as with Wuz, to look at their limited happiness with emotion. Schmelzle's "Des Feldprediger Schmelzles Reise nach Flätz", which was written before them (1807), differs from them. Fibel and Katzenberger are content in their indifferent, meaningless existence; Schmelzle is a discontented hare's foot who is afraid of imaginary dangers. But even in this poem there is nothing more of Jean Paul's great problem, of the clash between the ideal, fantastic dream world and actual reality. Nor is there any sense of a struggle between the two worlds in Jean Paul's last great poem, the "Comet", on which he worked for many years (1815 to 1820). Nikolaus Marggraf wants to make the world happy. His plans are indeed fantastic. But he never felt that they were just a dream. He believes in himself and his ideals and is happy in this belief. Essays written with reference to the political situation in Germany and those in which Jean Paul discusses general questions of science and life were written between the larger works. Some of them are collected in "Herbstblumine" (1810, 1815, 1820) and in his "Museum" (1812). The poet appears as a patriot in his "Freiheitsbüchlein" (1805), in the "Friedenspredigt" (1808) and in the "Dämmerungen für Deutschland" (1809).

[ 36 ] During his time in Bayreuth, Jean Paul's humorous mood increasingly gave way to one that took the world and people as they were, even though he only saw imperfections and small things everywhere. He is disgruntled about reality, but he bears the disgruntlement.

[ 37 ] The great humorist was not granted a cheerful old age. Three years before his end, he had to watch his son Max die, with whom he laid to rest a wealth of hopes for the future and most of his personal happiness. An eye ailment that afflicted the poet worsened in his last years until he became completely blind. The old man, who could no longer see the outside world, now immersed himself completely within himself. He now lived the life he thought no longer belonged to this world, even before death, and from the treasure trove of these inner experiences he drew the thoughts for his "Selina" or "On the Immortality of the Soul", in which he speaks like a transfigured person and believes he really sees what he has dreamed of all his life. Jean Paul died on November 14, 1825. "Selina" was not published until after his death.

Translated by Antje Heymanns

It lies in the nature of current scientific observations that the phenomena we want to dedicate today’s lecture to are basically not much talked about by current natural science. Yet every human being should feel that sleep is something how is placed among the phenomena of our life as if life’s greatest riddles are presented to us through it. Surely people always must have felt the mysteriousness and significance of sleep when they spoke of sleep as the ‘brother of death.’ Today, we have to limit ourselves to speaking of sleep as such, because the coming lectures will repeatedly lead us back to the contemplation of death in many ways.

All that man in a direct sense counts as belonging to his soul experiences, all imaginations that from morning to evening surge up and down, all emotions and feelings which constitute man’s soul drama, all pain and suffering, and the will impulses as well—all of it sinks down, as it were, into an indeterminate darkness when the human being falls asleep.

Some philosophers might doubt themselves, so to speak, when they talk about the nature of the soul, about the nature of the spirit that reveals itself in human nature. Yet, they have to admit that even if it had been firmly nailed down by definitions and ideas and showed itself to be well researched, it basically seems to disappear into nothing within the course of each day.

If we look at the manifestations of our soul life in the way one usually does so scientifically and also amateurishly, then we basically must say that these are extinguished during the state of sleep; they are gone. For someone who only wants to observe the physical expressions of the soul, the human being becomes on deeper reflection, so to say, all the more a riddle. Because the actual bodily functions, the bodily activities, continue during sleep. Only what we usually call the ‘soul’ discontinues.

The question then arises as to whether one is speaking about bodily and soul matters in the right sense when one includes what appears to be extinguished on falling asleep, when actually the soul aspect is included to the full extent. Or, if already the ordinary observation of life, apart from Spiritual Science or anthroposophical observations, could show us that the soul is active and proves to be effective even when it is enveloped by sleep. However, if one wants to gain some clarity about those concepts, or one could say, if one wants to observe the manifestations of life in this field in the right sense, one must place exact terms before one’s soul.

By way of introduction, I would like to mention in advance that on this topic as well, Spiritual Science or Anthroposophy is not in a position to make generalisations of the kind that people love to make today. If today we talk about the nature of sleep, then we will only talk about the nature of human sleep. In the last lecture, with regard to other fields, we have touched on this many times—Spiritual Science knows very well that which outwardly manifests itself in the same way, as this or that other appearance by different beings, can have quite different causes in the respective beings. We have indicated that this applies to death, to the whole spiritual life and to the formation of the spiritual life of animals and human beings. Today, it would go too far to also talk about the sleep of animals. Therefore, we want to say in advance that all we talk about today applies only to the sleep of human beings.

Through our consciousness, we can speak about soul manifestations within ourselves—anyone can feel this—because we are conscious of what we imagine, want, and feel. Now the question must arise—and this is extremely important particularly for today’s observations—whether we may readily combine the definition of consciousness as we use it for the ordinary consciousness of a human being in the present with the concept of the soul or the spirit in a human being? First, to express myself more clearly about these concepts, I like to draw a comparison. A man might walk around in a room and cannot see his own face in any spot in that room. The only place he can see his face is where he can look into a mirror. His own face appears as an image in front of him. Isn’t there an enormous difference for man whether he just walks around in a room and lives within himself or whether he sees what he expresses of this living also in a mirror image? It could probably be so with human consciousness in a somewhat extended way. The human being could, so to speak, experience his soul life—and he would only become knowledgeable or conscious of this soul-life itself, the way he lives it, when it confronts him like a mirror. This could very well be. Thus, we could say, for example, that it is quite possible that the human soul life continues regardless of whether the human being is awake or asleep. But that the waking state consists of the fact that the human being perceives his soul life through a mirroring, let’s say first of all, through a mirroring within his physicality and that he cannot perceive it in the state of sleep because it cannot be mirrored in his physical body.

Although we have not yet proven anything with this, at least we would have gained two concepts. We could differentiate between the soul life as such and becoming conscious of the soul life. We can think that for our consciousness, for our knowledge of the soul life, as we currently stand in our everyday human life, everything depends on us receiving the mirror image of our soul life through our physicality because if we do not receive this, we cannot know anything about it. We would then be wholly in a sleeping state. Now that we have gained these concepts, let us try to place the phenomena of waking and sleeping life a little before our soul.

Someone who is really able to observe life, will feel very clearly, and one would like to say, will ‘behold’ how the moment of falling asleep truly proceeds. He can perceive how the imaginations, the feelings weaken in their brightness, diminish in their intensity. But this is not the most essential. When a human being is awake, he lives in such a way that he creates order through his self-conscious Ego in his whole imaginative life, whereby he summarises, as it were, all ideas with his Ego. For at the moment when we in our waking life would not summarise all our ideas with our Ego, we would not be able to lead a normal soul life. We would have one group of ideas that we would relate to ourselves and call our concepts and another group we would look at as something foreign, like an external world. Only people who experience a split in their Ego, which for people today would be a state of sickness, could have such a tearing apart of their imaginative lives into different areas. For a normal person it is essential that all his ideas are in perspective related to a single point: the self-conscious Ego.

The moment we fall asleep, we feel distinctly that, at first, the Ego will be, so to speak, overwhelmed by imaginations despite these growing dimmer. The ideas assert their independence; they live an independent life. Single clouds of ideas, as it were, form within the horizon of consciousness, and the Ego loses itself in imaginations. Then man feels how the sense perceptions like seeing and hearing and so on become blunter and blunter, and finally, he feels how the will impulses are paralysed. Now, we must point out something clearly observed by just a few people. The human being feels furthermore, as he sees things with defined borders in his daily life, that at the moment of falling asleep, something asserts itself like a feeling of being locked up in a vague fog, which occasionally makes itself felt as cooling, or with other sensations in certain parts of the body: on the hands, on the joints, on the temples, on the spine etc. These are feelings that someone falling asleep can very well observe. They are, one would like to say, the kind of trivial experiences that one can have every evening when falling asleep if one wants to.

Better experiences are had by people who, through a finer developed soul life, more precisely observe the moment of falling asleep. They can then feel something like an awakening despite falling asleep. What I am about to tell you now, can be told by anyone who has acquired certain methods of really observing these things, because it is a common human phenomenon. The moment people feel like an awakening when they are slipping into sleep can really be described as follows: something like an expanding conscience, like morality, wakes up in the soul. This is indeed the case. This is particularly shown when people observe their soul concerning what they have experienced the previous day and with which they are satisfied in their conscience. In the moment of moral awakening, they feel this especially clearly. At the same time, this feeling is quite the opposite of the feeling during the day. While the feeling during the day shows itself by things approaching us, one who falls asleep feels as if his soul is pouring itself out over a world that is now awakening. This mainly includes a relaxation, a pouring out of feeling over that which the soul, through itself can experience in relation to its moral inner being as if through an expanding conscience. Then it is a moment of inner bliss, which appears to be much longer for the one falling asleep, when it is about dwelling on things with which the soul can agree. There is often a deep conflict when the soul has to reproach itself. In short, the moral human being who, during the day, is repressed through the strong sensory impressions, relaxes and feels himself very distinctly when falling asleep.

Everyone who has acquired a particular method, or maybe even only a feeling concerning such observations, knows that at this moment a certain longing awakens, which we could describe like this: One really wants this moment to extend into the indefinite, that it would never end. But then comes something like a ‘jolt’, a kind of inner movement. For most people, this is very difficult to describe. Of course, Spiritual Science can describe this inner movement quite precisely. It is, as it were, like a demand that the soul makes on itself: You must now relax even further; you must pour yourself out further. But by making this demand of itself, the soul loses itself for the moral life in its surroundings. This is like throwing a small drop of colour into water and dissolving it: the colour can still be seen at first. But once the drop distributes itself throughout the water, it pales more and more and finally, the colour display as such stops. So it is when the soul is just beginning to swell and live in its moral mirror image where it can still feel itself, but the feeling stops once the jolt, the inner movement, occurs, as the drop of colour loses itself in the water.

This is not a theory; it can be observed and is accessible to everyone, just like a natural scientific observation is exactly accessible to everyone. If we thus observe the process of falling asleep, we can certainly say that the human being intercepts, as it were, something when falling asleep that, afterwards, he somehow can no longer be conscious of. If I may be allowed to use both of my earlier constructed ideas—the human being has, as it were, a moment of parting from the mirror of the body in which the manifestations of life appear to him as mirror images and because he has no other means to mirror what otherwise is mirrored by the body, the possibility to perceive himself, ceases.

Again, it is possible to perceive in a certain sense the day’s happenings—if one does not want to be altogether stubborn and obstinate regarding what relates to the soul and the effect of what moves into an vague darkness. I have already pointed out in another context that someone forced to memorise this or that, i.e., learn things by heart, can do this much more easily if he sleeps on it more often, and that depriving oneself of sleep is the greatest enemy of memorisation. The possibility and the ability to memorise more easily even returns once we have slept on an issue and not want to learn something by heart in one go. This is also the case with other activities of the soul. However, we could convince ourselves very easily that it would be impossible to learn anything at all, to acquire anything when the soul is involved, if it weren’t for the inclusion of sleep states among our life states. The natural conclusion that has to be drawn from such phenomena is that our soul needs to withdraw from time to time from our physical body, in order to gain strength from an area that is not within our body, because the respective strengths within the body are being worn out. We must imagine that when we wake up in the morning from sleep, that from the state in which we were then, we have brought along strength to develop abilities, that we could not develop if we were constantly shackled to our bodies. This is how the effect of sleep shows itself in our ordinary nature, when one wants to think straight and not be obstinate.

What shows itself in general when one pauses in ordinary life, and for which one needs some good will to hold one’s life phenomena together, is shown very clearly and precisely when man goes through developments that are able to lead him to a real beholding of the spiritual life. Here I would like to elaborate on what occurs when a human being has developed the forces that lie dormant within his soul in order to reach a state in which he can neither perceive with the senses nor comprehend with the mind. This will be followed up in more detail in the lecture How does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World,¹ where the methods will be quite comprehensively covered. Right now though, we will highlight some of the experiences that a person, truly practising such exercises is able to have that endow his soul, as it were, with spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, and through which he can look into the spiritual world, which is not an object of speculation, but for someone who perceives with his senses, it is just as much an object as colours and forms, warmth and coldness, and sounds. How to attain true clairvoyance has already come to light in previous lectures. This spiritual development, these exercises, actually consist of a person bringing out of himself something that he has within himself, gains other organs of perception, jolting upwards, as it were, over the soul, as it is in its ordinary state, and thus perceives a world that is always around him but which cannot be perceived in the normal state. When a person undergoes such exercises, the first thing that changes is his sleep life. Anyone, who has done their own real spiritual research knows this. I would now like to talk about the very first stage of change in the sleep life of a person who is actually clairvoyant and engaged in spiritual research. The first beginnings of this possibility of spiritual research do not make the person appear very different from the normal ordinary state of consciousness because a person who performs these exercises, as we shall discuss later, will at first sleep like any other human being and is just as unconscious as anyone else. But the moment of waking up will show something very special to the one who has performed spiritual exercises. I will now describe to you some very concrete phenomena that are based on facts.

Let’s assume that a person who is practising these exercises is thinking very hard about something that another person could also be thinking about. He tries, maybe because he has a very difficult problem in front of him, to exert all his mental power to get to the bottom of it.

Perhaps he’ll be like a schoolboy: his mental power just isn’t sufficient to solve the problem. This could definitely happen. If he has now already obtained through his exercises more possibilities to experience the inner states of the soul in connection with the physical state, he will certainly feel something quite peculiar when he finds himself incapable to do something. Unlike usual, he perceives a resistance in his physical organs, for example in his brain. He properly senses that the brain puts up resistance against him, just as we feel resistance when we try to drive in a nail with a hammer that is too heavy. The brain then begins to gain a reality. The way man normally uses his brain, he would not feel it as if he were using an instrument, as is the case with a hammer, for example. A spiritual researcher feels his brain, he feels himself independent in relation to his thinking. That is an experience. But if he can’t solve a task, he feels that he is no longer able to carry out certain activities that he must perform when thinking. He feels very clearly that he is losing power over the instrument. This fact can be experienced very precisely.

If the spiritual researcher sleeps on the problem and then awakens, it will often happen that he feels up to the task without any further ado. But at the same time he also feels precisely that prior to waking up he has done something, that he has worked on something. He feels that he had been able to set something within him in motion during his sleep, that he had caused an activity. During the waking state he was forced to use his brain. He knows that. He can do nothing but use his brain when he is awake. But he was no longer able to use it properly, because—as I have described—it resisted him. During sleep, he feels, he is not dependent on using his brain. He was able to create a degree of flexibility without using the brain that was too tired or otherwise too heavily occupied. Now he feels something very peculiar: he perceives the activity that he has performed during sleep, albeit not directly. The Lord gives to his own, but not in their sleep. The spiritual researcher is not saved from having to solve his problem now in the waking state. It may come easily to him, but normally it is not so, and particularly not with things that simply must be solved by the brain.

Hence, the human being feels something that he has not known before in the sensory world—he senses his own activity, which presents itself to him in vivid pictures, in strange pictures that are in motion. It is just as if the thoughts he needs were living beings who would enter into all kinds of relationships with each other. Thus he senses his own, let’s call it, ‘mental activity’ that he undertook during sleep, like a series of pictures. This feeling is difficult to describe, as one is stuck in it in a quite peculiar way and has to tell oneself, ‘This is you yourself!’ But, on the other hand, one can distinguish this feeling very clearly from oneself, in the same way as one is able to distinguish a physical movement one makes from oneself. Thus one has pictures, imaginations of an activity performed before waking up. And now one can notice, if one has learned to watch oneself, that these pictures of an activity that was performed prior to waking up, connect themselves with our brain and turn it into a more flexible, more useful instrument, so that one will be able to complete something, which one could not do before because of a resistance, for example, to think certain thoughts. These are subtle things, but without them one won’t really get behind the secret of sleep. Thus, one feels that one has not performed an activity as in the awake state, but one that served the restoration of certain things in the brain which were worn out. The instrument has been restored in a way that was not possible before. One feels like a master builder of his own instruments.

The feeling during such an activity is significantly different from that during a daytime activity. The feeling one has about the day activities is comparable to copying something from a template or a model. There I am forced to follow the picture in front of me with every stroke or dot of colour. In regard to the things that appear as pictures at the moment of waking and that are, as it were, an illustration of an activity during sleep, one has the feeling of inventing the strokes, of creating the figures out of oneself, without being tied to a model. With such an occurrence one will have, as it were, intercepted what the soul did prior to waking up: one has intercepted the activity of brain regeneration. Because sooner or later one realises that what feels like a kind of coating the brain organs with what one remembers as figures is nothing other than a restoration of what has been damaged in the course of the day. One really has the feeling of being a master builder working on oneself.

Basically the difference between a spiritual researcher who perceives such things and an ordinary person is only that a spiritual researcher just perceives these things, whereas an ordinary person cannot pay attention to them and does not perceive them. The same activity that the spiritual researcher undertakes is performed by every human being, but the normal person doesn’t catch the moment when the organs are restored by the activity that takes place during sleep.

Let’s take such an experience and compare it to what was previously said about an increase in bluntness and dullness, and a reduction in brightness of the daily imaginative life at the moment of falling asleep. This latter phenomenon can only be viewed in the right light if one either frees oneself from today’s highly suggestive concepts of the world view that believes itself to be firmly based on natural science, or by actually accepting the available results of contemporary natural research. For example, in brain research, and according to the results of natural research, people who think more precisely can do nothing but acknowledge the independence of the spiritual from the physical. And it is very interesting that recently a popular book was published in which basically everything that has to do with spiritual life and the sources of spiritual life was presented wrongly and completely without any insight. But in this book, The Brain and the Human Being, by William Hanna Thomson,² a lot of smart things are said. It deals in particular with modern brain research and with many other things that are presented—for example, as I also have more often pointed out—with symptoms of fatigue, which are quite instructive. But I have already explained that muscles and nerves cannot get tired in any other way than through conscious activity. As long as our muscles only serve an organic activity they cannot become tired. It would be bad if, for example, the heart muscle and other muscles needed rest. We only become fatigued when we perform an activity that is not innate to the organism—such as an activity that belongs to the conscious life of the soul. Thus one has to say; if the soul life was born out of the human being like the heart activity, then the immense difference between fatigue and non-fatigue could not be explained. The author of the book therefore feels compelled to acknowledge that the soul relates to the physical no differently than a rider relates to his horse, i.e., that it is completely independent from the physical. This is an enormous concession from a person who thinks like a natural scientist. One could get very strange feelings if, forced by contemporary natural research, one has to confess to oneself that the relationship between the soul life and the body life must be imagined as being roughly the same as that of a rider to a horse. That is, according to the image that people had of a centaur in earlier times, when they still looked deeper into the spiritual realm.

It is not apparent that the author of the book would have thought of this, but again this thought comes to mind from the natural scientific conception, and one gets the feeling that such ideas stem from times when a certain clairvoyance still existed for many people. Today, however, certain imaginations about centaurs seem to be more compatible with what a gentleman once told me: He said:

‘The Greeks watched the Scythes, who came from the North, and other rider clans, perhaps when they emerged from a fog. They could not distinguish the shapes clearly, and so they thought that these had grown out of the horse.’ A materialist might be satisfied with such an explanation. But it is just contemporary natural scientific research that pushes for an acknowledgment of the independence of the soul from the physical.

One thing we can hereby definitely notice, and we can follow such things best if we recall certain occurrences before our soul that are not commonplace, but still exist and cannot be denied. The spiritual researcher knows how that common man in the country, at the hour of his death, suddenly began to speak in Latin, a language he had never really used and which one could prove he had only heard once in Church when he was a little boy. This is not a fable, but a reality. Of course he did not understand anything of it, when he had heard or recited it. And yet it is true. From this, the idea should be formed in every human being that what affects us in our environment contains something in addition to what we absorb into our normal consciousness. Because what we absorb into our ordinary consciousness is often dependent on our education, on what we comprehend and the like. But not only what we can comprehend unites itself with us, but we have in us the possibility to absorb endlessly more than what we take up consciously. We can even observe in every human being how at certain times he has ideas, that were not strongly noticed at the time he experienced them here or there, so that he may not remember them at all. But through certain things they re-appear, and may even place themselves into the centre of his soul life. We really have to acknowledge that what constitutes the extent of our soul life is endlessly more than what we can receive and embrace with our day consciousness. This is extraordinarily important. Because in this way our attention is steered towards something inside of us that can really only make a slight impression on our corporeality because it has hardly been noticed, and then again it lives on in us. In this way, we are pointed to the foundations of our soul life, which should actually exist for every reasonable person. Every rational person should tell himself that, what is in the world around him for his consciousness while he is consciously looking at the world, is basically dependent on the organisation of his sensory organs and on what he can understand. And no one is entitled to want to limit reality by what they can perceive. It would be completely illogical to want to deny the spiritual researcher that behind the physical world a spiritual world exists, simply for the reason that man is only allowed to speak about what he sees and hears and what he can think about, and he is never allowed to judge what he cannot perceive. Because the world of reality is not the world of the perceptible. The world of the perceptible is limited by the sensory organs. For this reason one should never —in the Kantian sense—speak of the limits of knowledge; or about what a human being may or may not know, but only about that what he has before of him in accordance with his organs of perception.

Considering this, one must say to oneself: Behind the colourful carpet of the sensory world, behind that which the warmth sense perceives as warmth or cold and so on, lies an infinite reality. Should therefore only what we perceive, or only the reality we perceive exert an influence on us? If we think that we are only shown a part or a section of the entire reality through our perception, then it is only logically tenable that there lies an infinite reality behind what can be given to us through our perception. However, this is also real for us, as we have been placed in it, so that what surges and lives outside and influences us, lives on for us. But what is our actual waking life like during the day? There really is no other way than to imagine the waking day life in this way, and to say; ‘We open our senses, our capacity to realise something immense and confront this immensity. Because each person has particular eyes, particular ears, and a certain sense of warmth, and so on, we are placing a particular section of reality in front of us. Anything else we reject, almost, as it were, fend it off, exclude it from us. So what does our conscious activity consist of? It consists of a defence against, or an exclusion of something different. And by straining our sensory organs, we are holding back something that we have not perceived. What we perceive is the remainder, are the remains of what is spreading itself around us, and what we, for the most part reject. In this way, we feel actively placed in this world, feel connected with it. Likewise, we defend ourselves through our sensory activity against a multitude of impressions, because, figuratively speaking, we are not able to bear the entire immeasurable infinity and take in only a section of it. If we think like this, then we must imagine quite different relationships between our whole organism, our entire bodily nature and between the external world, than those which we can perceive or comprehend with our intellect. Then it will not seem so unusual to think that the relationships, which we have with the outside world, live in us and that also the invisible, super-sensible or extra-sensible is active within us—and that the extra-sensible by being active in us, uses our senses to fabricate a section out of the entire immeasurable reality. Then our relationship to reality is completely different from how we are able to perceive it through our senses. Then there lies something of relationships with the outside world in our soul that does not exhaust itself through sensory perception, that eludes our waking daytime consciousness. Then it is with us as if we are stepping in front of a mirror with our inner being and have to say to ourselves:

‘Basically you are something completely different. The mirror only shows you the forms, maybe also the colours; but within you you are thinking. You are feeling within you. All of this the mirror cannot show you. It only shows you what is dependent on its laws. As a soul facing its organism, you are something completely different from what your senses show you; they limit you to what is according to their laws. When you face the world, as with a mirror—you are actually facing a world that is only made possible by the organisation of your senses!’

If you think this idea through to the end, then you will not be surprised to find that basically all life of our awake day consciousness depends very much on the organisation of our sensory organs and on our brain, just as what we see in a mirror depends on the quality of the mirror. Anyone who looks into a garden mirror and sees a caricature of their face looking towards them, will happily agree that the picture in the mirror is not dependent on them, but on the mirror. In the same way, what we perceive depends on the set-up of our mirroring apparatus, and our soul activity is limited, as it were, reflected back into itself by mirroring itself in our body life. Then it is no longer astonishing that the detail—and this can also be physiologically proven—is dependent on the physical body, whereby this or that happens one way or another in our consciousness. Because everything that the soul does in order for something to become conscious, to become knowledge for us, depends on the organisation of our body. Observation shows us that the concepts that we initially only constructed, actually correspond to the facts. The only difference is that our corporeality is a living mirror. We let the mirror in which we look be as it is. However, there is one way in which we can influence the reflection: if we breathe on the mirror, then it can no longer reflect properly. But the reflection in our physicality, which experiences the activity of our soul, is connected with the fact that when we reflect ourselves in our corporeality, the reflection itself is an activity, a process within our bodily nature, and that which appears as a reflection, we place as an activity before ourselves.

Thus the bodily life actually presents itself as if, in a certain sense, we would write down what we think and then would have the characters in front of us. This is how we write the activity of our soul into our physicality. What an anatomist can verify are only the characters, the external apparatus, because we do not completely observe our soul life if we only observe it within our physical life. We only observe it completely, if we do this independently from our physical life. This, however, can only be done by the spiritual researcher who observes the soul life as it shows itself mirrored into the waking day life at the moment of awakening. It shows that the soul life is like an architect, who builds something during the night, and acts as a dismantler during the day.

Now we have the soul life in the waking state and in the state of sleep before us. In the state of sleep we have to imagine it as independent from body life, like a rider is independent from the horse. But just like the rider uses the horse and uses up its strength, the soul consumes the activity of the body so that chemical processes run like letters of the soul’s life. With this we reach a point where the physical life, as it is limited in the senses, in the brain, is so diminished by us that we have exhausted it for the time being. Then we must begin the other activity, initiate the reverse process and again build up what has declined. This is the life during sleep—so that we, starting from the soul, perform two opposite activities on our body. So, during the awake state we have around us our world of flowing and ebbing concepts, joy and sorrow, feelings and so on. But while we have them in front of us, we wear out our physical life, we basically destroy it constantly. During sleep, we are the architects, we can restore what we have destroyed during our waking life.

So what does a spiritual researcher perceive? He perceives the architectural activity of rebuilding in curious pictures like a circular movement twisting around itself: a real process, that is the reverse of normal awake day life. It is really no fantasy when one speaks about recognising in these self-entwining movements the mysterious activity that the soul performs during sleep, which consists of reconstituting what we have destroyed during our day life—hence the recuperation through and necessity of the sleep life. So why is the sleep life such that it doesn’t enter into our consciousness? Yes, and why is it that we become conscious of our waking life? The reason for this is that for the processes we perform in our waking day life, we have got something like mirror images. However, when we are performing the other activity of rebuilding what has been worn out, we have nothing wherein this could be reflected. We are lacking a mirror for this. Only a spiritual researcher is able to show the underlying reasons for this. From a certain point onwards, the spiritual researcher experiences not only the soul activity, as I have described it, like a dream memory from sleep, but as if he was not dependent on the instrument of the body, so that he then can perceive an activity which only happens in the spirit. He can then tell himself: ‘Now you are not thinking with your brain, but you are now thinking in a completely different manner; now you are thinking in pictures, independent of your brain.’

The spiritual researcher can only experience something like what has been described earlier, when he experiences that everything that envelops him as something nebulous when he falls asleep does not disappear. Instead, if he is able to limit and withdraw his inner activity, then the mist that is perceptible at his temples, at his joints, at his spine, becomes something that reflects what he is doing—similar to the reflection of what we experience during our physical life.

The whole difference between true clairvoyance and ordinary waking day life consciousness is that the waking day life requires a different mirror for the soul activity to come to consciousness and uses our bodily nature for this purpose. However, the activity of the clairvoyant, when it radiates as an activity of the soul, is so strong that the emitted ray will be withdrawn into itself. In this way, as it were, a mirroring on one’s own inner experience, on a spirit organism, takes place. Basically, our soul is within this spirit organism during the night, even if we are not spiritual researchers. It pours itself into it. And we will not be able to cope with our whole sleep life, when it is not clear to us that indeed our physical processes—all that anatomy, physiology is able to research—cannot bring about anything but a reflection of our soul processes; and that these soul processes always, from falling asleep until waking up, live a spiritual existence. If we think differently we won’t be able to cope at all. We must therefore speak, as it were, of a secret soul life that cannot enter at all into the consciousness conveyed through our body. Thus, when one notices in a person that ideas appear in his consciousness that he has ignored for a long time, one has to say: There is something else in a human being, apart from the conceptions of his conscious soul life, to which he has paid attention when he took them in.

I have already suggested once, that it is child’s play to refute things that are a reality for a spiritual researcher. And yet they are true. Spiritual research has to say that in regard to the human being we have to deal with a human physical body that we can see with eyes, grasp with hands, and that is also known to anatomy and physiology. In addition, we have an inner member of the human being, the astral body, the carrier of everything that the human being consciously absorbs, what he really experiences during the day life, so that he can receive it reflected by the body. Between the astral body and the physical body lies the carrier of ideas that remain ignored for years, and are then brought up into the astral body to be realised. In short, between the astral body, the carrier of consciousness, and the physical body, the etheric body of man is active. This etheric body is not only the carrier of conceptions that have gone unnoticed, but in general the builder of the entire physical body.

What actually happens during sleep? The astral body, the carrier of consciousness, lifts itself together with the Ego out of the physical body and the etheric body, so that a split in the human nature occurs. During day life when man is awake, the astral body and the Ego are within the physical body and the etheric body. And the processes of the physical body work like mirroring processes, through which all that happens in the astral body comes to consciousness. Consciousness is a reflection of the experiences through the physical body, and we should not confuse consciousness with the experiences themselves. When, during sleep, the astral body of an ordinary human being leaves, it is at first not able to perceive anything in the world of the astral. The human being is unconscious there.

What ability does the spiritual researcher now acquire when things during sleep become conscious to him, even though he does not rely on his brain? He attains the ability to perceive and to mirror his soul activity in something that for him weaves and lives between things, so that during the awake day consciousness this something can be perceived in the same way as his own etheric body. The human etheric body is woven from that through which the clairvoyant person perceives; so that for a clairvoyant person the outer world becomes reflective, just as for the soul life of a normal person the physical body becomes reflective.

Now there are intermediate states between waking and sleeping. One such intermediate state is the dream. With regard to its origin, spiritual research shows that indeed dreaming is based on something similar to clairvoyance, whereby the latter is something trained, while dreaming is always imaginary. When a person leaves with the astral body, he loses the ability to obtain a reflection of his soul life through the physical body. However, under certain abnormal circumstances, which occur for everyone, he can obtain the capability to receive his soul experiences reflected through the etheric body. Indeed we must consider not only the physical body as a mirroring device, but also the etheric body. As long as the outer world makes an impression on us, it is indeed the physical body which acts as mirroring device. However, if we become still within ourselves and digest the impressions the outer world has made on us, then we work within ourselves and yet our thoughts are still real. We live our thoughts, and also feel that we are dependent on something more subtle than our physical body, namely on the etheric body. Then the etheric body is that what reflects itself in us in solitary pondering, which is not initially based on external impressions. But we are within our etheric body during our awake day consciousness; we perceive what is mirrored, but we do not perceive directly the activity of the astral body. In the intermediate state between waking and sleeping, we do not have the ability to receive external sensory impressions. But because we can still receive something that is connected to our etheric body in some way, the etheric body can mirror what we experience in our soul with our astral body. This then are the dreams that show irregularity because the human being is in a completely unusual situation during this process.

If we contemplate this, then much in our dream-world will become clear that would otherwise remain mysterious about it. We must therefore imagine the foundations of the soul life as being closely connected with the dream life. While the physical body is the mirror of the soul life and our daily interests have an impact on this, we are often connected in the remotest way through the etheric body to experiences, which we have long since left behind, and of which we become only dimly aware because the day life has a strong impact on us. Thus they remain something extremely unknown to us. However, if we are examine dreams that are based on really good observation, many peculiar things can be shown to us. For example, a good composer experiences an image, where a somewhat diabolical figure plays a sonata to him. He wakes up and is able to write down the sonata. Something became active in him that has worked like something foreign. And this was possible, because there was something in him for which the composer’s soul was ready, but which could not become effective during the awake day life, because physical life was only an obstruction and not suited as a mirror. Here we can see that the bodily life is an inhibitor and in this lies its significance. In our daily life we are only able to experience that for which the bodily life, figuratively speaking, is ‘oiled like a machine.’

The physical life is always a hindrance to us, but we manage to use it to a certain extent. After all, one does need ‘inhibitions’ everywhere. When a locomotive rides over the tracks, it is the hampering, the friction, through which it can drive, because the wheels could not turn without friction. In reality, our bodily processes are what confronts our soul life in a hampering way, and these frictional processes are at the same time mirroring processes. When we are ready in our soul for something but have not yet managed to oil our machine well, then the awake day life is a good ‘brake shoe’. But when we leave our physical body, then our etheric body is able to bring what lives in our soul life to expression—and this will appear to us as something quite foreign as it is of a more subtle nature. Then, once it is strong enough, it forces itself into the dream life, as was the case with the composer. This has less to do with the daily interests than with the hidden interests, that lie more remote in the subtle foundations. For example, in the following—note, that I am just telling you something that has actually been observed—A woman dreams, and although she has children whom she loves very much, and a husband, who loves her extraordinarily, she experiences with great joy that she gets engaged for a second time and all related events she goes through. What does she dream? She dreams experiences that are very far from her current life, that she has once gone through but cannot recognise, because the normal interests of the day are only connected with the physical body. And, what has continued to live on in her etheric body will now, perhaps because a joyful emotion has triggered the dream, be mirrored by the etheric body through another event.

A man dreams that he goes through childhood experiences, and these childhood experiences are wonderfully mirrored. One of these, especially important to him because it went close to his heart, causes him to wake up. At first the dream is very dear to him, but soon he falls asleep again and dreams on. A whole sum of unpleasant experiences now pass through his soul, and a particularly painful event wakes him up. All of this is extremely far from his present experiences. He gets up, and because he feels very shaken by the dream, walks around in the room for a while, but then he lies down again and now he has dream experiences, which he has not yet had. All events that he went through get muddled up, and he now experiences something completely new. The whole turns into a poem, which he can even write down and set to music afterwards. That is a very real fact. Now it shouldn’t be too difficult, with the concepts we have already gained, to imagine what has happened there. For a spiritual researcher it is thus; at a very specific moment in his life the man suffered a kind of break in his development—he had to give up something that lay in his soul. But even if he had to give it up, it did not disappear from his etheric body as a result of that. It was just that his ordinary interests were so strong that they pushed it back. And, where it was strong enough through inner elasticity, it forced itself out through the dream, because there the human being is freed from the hindrances of the awake day life. This means, that the respective man was truly once very close to reach what was expressed in the poem; but then it had been deadened.

Thus we can see illustrated in our dreams the independence of our soul life from our outer bodily life. We must realise that this is proof that the idea of the mirroring of the soul life in the physical life is entirely justified. In particular, the circumstance that the interests in which we are involved do not engrave themselves in a straight line in our direct experience, shows us that apart from the life, as it is lived on a daily basis, there is another life running alongside, that I have called, for a more conscious, finer observation, a kind of awakening. In it lives everything that for our spiritual life is already abstract, immaterial like our conscience that is independent of physical life—everyone can feel this. Yet during our day life this other life turns out to be very limited by our daily interests. During sleep, our soul also reveals itself as being completely filled with its moral quality. There is a real living into the spiritual, what we can describe as a jolt, as an inner movement. What we call Spiritual Science research will result in something for us through which we can consciously settle into the world that the normal human being unconsciously settles into every time he falls asleep.

People must gradually familiarise themselves with the fact that the world is far wider than what we can grasp with our senses and follow with our intellect; and that the sleep life is an area that we need because just our noblest organs, which serve our imaginative life, are worn out by our daily life. During sleep we restore them, so that they can face the world strong and vigorously and are able to mirror our soul life for us in the waking day life. Everything that is characteristic of the soul life could become clear to us through this. Who wouldn’t know that one feels wearied and tired after a good, deep sleep? People often complain about this; but it is not a symptom of an illness at all and is actually quite understandable. After all, the complete recovery through sleep only occurs an hour or an hour and a half later. Why? Because we have worked well on our organs, so that they are not only able to cope for a few more hours but for the whole day. And immediately after waking up we are not yet ready to use them, we first have to “grind them in.” Only after a while we can use them well. One should speak about a particular type of weariness in a certain way, saying that one could be happy that one can settle back into the reconditioned organs in an hour and a half. Because from sleep comes to us what we need—the architectural forces for the organs that have been worn out and used up during the day.

So we may now say that our soul life is a life of independence, a life of which we have something like a reflection through our consciousness during our waking day life. Consciousness is a reflection of the interactions of the soul with its environment. During the waking day life we are lost to our surroundings, to something foreign, are devoted to something that is not ourselves. But during sleep—and this is the nature of sleep—we withdraw from all outer activity to work on ourselves. The comparison is apt; the ship which has served shipping while it was at sea will be rebuilt and repaired when it arrives in port.

Someone who believes that during sleep nothing happens to us, could also think, that nothing needs to be done to the ship when it returns to port from a voyage. But when the ship sails again, he will see what happens, if it has not been repaired. This is how it would be if our soul did not work on us during sleep. We are brought back to ourselves when we sleep, while during the day life we are lost to the outside world. A normal human being is just not able to perceive what the soul is doing during sleep in the same way as he perceives the outside world during the day.

In the lecture How to attain Knowledge of the Higher World? we will see that also in the spirit a mirror image can be attained as a realisation, through which man can then come to perception in the higher worlds. All this illustrates that the soul, just when it is not conscious of itself and knows nothing of its own activity, but is busy with itself, works on itself, and independently of the physicality, obtains those forces which serve precisely to build up the body.

Thus we may summarise what we have said, and characterise the nature of the soul with words that from the knowledge of the nature of sleep can build a kind of foundation for many things in Spiritual Science:

The soul itself restores
Enveloped still in sleep
Flees into spirit worlds
When senses constrictions
Oppress it! ³

• 1. GA 60 Lecture 7. How Does one Attain Knowledge of the Spiritual World?, 15 December 1910, Berlin.
• 2. William Hanna Thomson, Brain and Personality, 1907, published in Germany under the title Das Gehirn und der Mensch, Verlag K R Langewiesche, Düsseldorf, 1910.
• 3. Poem translated by Norbert Mulholland.

Notes from the estate of Margareta Morgenstern

Our culture will increasingly sink into confusion. Lawyers, for example, will have a hard time finding their way out of the resulting chaos. People will become gaunt in body and soul and bald at thirty, thirty-three; they will become more and more desolate inside. The method of general time-saving comes over from America. No more thought is given to the work because the machine takes over all the manual labor, for example, in passing on bricks and so on, and so on.

Consider the shepherds in the fields in earlier times, when they slept in the open, whether in a hut or in an open field. They had the starry sky above them, and they still knew something of the cosmic connections. They saw not only this or that constellation, as people do today, but they still saw spiritual beings there. They knew they were united with them when they slept. They interacted with them from the cosmos. Matter is not an obstacle for spiritual beings to penetrate. Therefore, it is nonsense when it is said that the lodge rooms should not be aired, “because otherwise demons could enter.” A young member once asked: “Well, can't they just as easily come through closed doors and windows?”

When we sleep, we are still in the same situation as the shepherds in the fields of old, only we are usually unaware of it: spiritual beings work within us.

Some of us old folk, when we were young, met a real farmer and got into conversation with him. Of course, not every farmer felt this influence, and it was not easy for one who knew about it to open up to another. But when it happened, and in those days it could happen quite often, then such a farmer would say: “I have to rub the sleep out of my eyes so that the sun can enter me, so that I can wake up, otherwise I won't wake up.” When evening came, the sun went down and vespers were rung first, then they became sleepy, tired.

And the seasons, their change was felt quite differently in the past than it is today. People lived with the sun because they were still aware that we owe our ego powers to the sun. If we do not have these ego powers, then we fall asleep.

But more and more, people should free themselves from such bondage.

The Copernican system of the world. Just as if you were walking along the street to this room, and someone comes and asks you, “Are you walking?” - and you answer, “I don't know, I first have to observe whether I come to other houses.” - and you compare the time and the rows of houses and check whether you are walking or not. The same applies to the Copernican system of the world; it seeks a point of support in the universe.

After a hundred years many of you sitting here, even if not embodied, will become helpers for those confused souls who today no longer believe in a spiritual world and its workings.

... That is why it is said, because I want to give you the best I have to say from the spiritual worlds in these hours. We should draw strength for our outer life from these gatherings. Just the thought of it should give us strength for our outer life, strength for our thinking, purification for our feeling, strength for our will.

No matter what people do in the present, when they are reborn they will have a strong inclination and longing for their previous incarnation. They will experience something of this, want to know something, regardless of whether they are now striving spiritually or materialistically. We are currently at such a turning point in history, which leads people from an incarnation in which they want to know as little as possible about reincarnation and karma, to an incarnation in which they will have the most vivid sense of this: the whole life I am living now is hanging in the balance for me if I cannot know anything about my last incarnation.

And the people who now most of all rail against reincarnation and karma will writhe in agony in the next life because they cannot explain to themselves how the life they are now living could have come about. Theosophy is not practiced in order to acquire a certain longing for the previous life, but to awaken understanding for what will one day happen to all of humanity when the people who are alive today will be there again. The people who are theosophists today will share the tendency with the others to want to remember again; but they will have other insights and thus inner harmony in relation to their soul life. Those who today reject Theosophy will want to know about it and will feel something like an inner torment for something they do not understand. However, they will not grasp anything of what torments them; they will be at a loss, inwardly disharmonious. And it will have to be said to them in the next life: 'You will only learn to recognize what causes the torment when you imagine that you might actually have wanted this torment.

Of course, no one would wish for this torment, to go through it. But those who are materialists today will begin to understand their bleakness, their inner contrition, their torment in the next life when they follow the advice of the knowing ones, who will tell them: Imagine that this life, which you would now like to flee, is what you would have wanted yourself. Because you used to think that belief in an afterlife is futile, nonsensical, it has become futile, nonsensical and agonizing. You have planted the very thought in yourselves that makes this new life so bleak and so empty for you. Thus materialism will have a karmic effect in the next life. Thoughts that deny re-embodiment today are transformed into inner emptiness in the next life.

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 …

[ 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.

Before I begin a new chapter, I will, as I said last time, insert something and add something to the Christmas reflection that I gave in the Monday lectures. You remember how I connected the meaning of Christmas with the whole development of our cultural epochs, and how it is precisely through this that Christmas acquires its meaning in the turn of an era, both backwards and forwards.

Today I would like to talk about a festival that seems to have less significance for newer peoples than Christmas, about the festival of the “Three Kings,” which is celebrated on January 6, about the festival of the Magi who come from the Orient and greet the newly born Jesus of Nazareth. This festival of epiphanies will become more and more important as people come to understand the true, actual symbolism of this festival as well. We are dealing here with something important. You can see this from the fact that a very developed symbolism underlies this festival of the three Magi from the Orient. This symbolism, like all mysteries, was kept very secret until the fifteenth century, and until then no special hints were given. From the fifteenth century onwards, however, some light is shed on this festival of the Magi from the Orient, in that exoteric illustrations have appeared depicting the Three Holy Kings as a Moor - an inhabitant of Africa - that is Balthasar; then a white man - a European - that is Melchior; and an Asian king who has the skin color of the inhabitants of India - that is Caspar. They bring gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ Child in Bethlehem as their offerings.

These are three very significant offerings, and that sounds together with the meaningful symbolism of this festival of January 6. Esoterically, however, the festival is a very important one. January 6 is the same date on which the so-called Osiris Festival was celebrated in ancient Egypt, the festival of the rediscovered Osiris. As is well known, Osiris is overcome by his opponent Typhon, he is sought and found by Isis. This rediscovery of Osiris, the son of God, is represented by the festival of January 6. The Feast of the Epiphany is the same festival, only it has become Christian. We also find this festival among the Assyrians, Armenians and Phoenicians. Everywhere it is a festival associated with a kind of general baptism, where rebirth takes place out of the water. This already indicates the connection with the rediscovered Osiris.

What is the missing Osiris anyway? The missing Osiris represents the transition that took place between the times before the middle of the Lemurian race and the times after the middle of the Lemurian race. Before the middle of the Lemurian race, there was no man endowed with Manas. It was only in the middle of the Lemurian period that Manas descended and fertilized man. In every single human being, a tomb is created for the Manas, which is divided into humanity, for Osiris, who is depicted as dismembered. So many graves are shown in Egypt - that is the manasic deity, which has been divided and dwells in man. “Tombs of Osiris are the human bodies in the Egyptian secret language. Manas is not liberated until the re-appearing love can liberate Manas.

What is the re-appearing love? That which came into being with the Manas fertilization in the middle of the Lemurian period - something before and something after - that was the drawing of the passion principle into humanity. Before that time, there was no actual principle of passion. The animals of the preceding times were cold-blooded. And man himself was not yet endowed with warm blood at that time. Comparatively speaking, the people on the moon were like fish, and the people of the third round were the same warmth with their surroundings.

“The Spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters,” says the Bible of this time. The principle of love was not yet within the beings, but outside as manifesting earthly Kama and earthly passion. That is selfish love. The first bringer of love free of selfishness is now Christ, who was to appear in Jesus of Nazareth.

Who then are the Magi? They are the Initiates of the three preceding races, the Initiates of Humanity up to the appearance of the Christ Being, of Love free from selfishness, of the resurrected Osiris. The Initiates were beings endowed with Manas, they are Magi. They offer gold, incense, and myrrh as a sacrifice. And why do they appear in the three colors black, white, and yellow? Black as Africans, white as Europeans, yellow as Indians. This is related to the root races. Blacks are the remnants of the Lemurian race, yellows are the remnants of the Atlantean race, and whites are the representatives of the fifth root race, the Aryans. Thus, in the three kings or magi, we have the representatives of the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and the Aryans. They bring three offerings: the European brings gold, the symbol of wisdom and intelligence, which was expressed primarily in the fifth root race. The initiates of the fourth root race, the Atlanteans, have as their offering that which is most important to them. They no longer had a direct connection with the deity, but rather a kind of suggestive influence, something like a universal hypnosis. This connection with the deity is maintained by sacrifice. The feeling must rise so that God also fertilizes the feeling. This finds its symbolic expression in the incense. This is the general symbol for sacrifice, which has something to do with intuition.

In esoteric language, myrrh is the symbol of self-denial. What does self-denial mean, what does resurrection mean, as in the example of the resurrected Osiris? I would refer you to Goethe, who says:

And as long as you do not have that,
this dying and becoming,
you are only a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

Jakob Böhme expresses the same idea with the words:

He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies.

Myrrh is now the symbol of the dying away of the lower life and the resurrection of the higher life. It is therefore offered by the initiate of the third root race. There is a deep significance in this. Remember who Jesus of Nazareth is. A highly developed chela is born in him. In the thirtieth year of his life, he dedicated his life to the descending Christ, the descending Logos. The Magi foresaw all this. It is a great sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth that he exchanges his ego with the ego of the Second Logos. This occurs for a very specific reason. Only when the sixth sub-race has been reached will the possibility gradually arise for the human being, the human body, to be ready from early childhood to receive something like the Christ principle. Only in the sixth root race will humanity be so fully mature that the bodies do not need to be prepared and prepared for years, but are capable of receiving the Christ principle from the very beginning. In the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race, the body still had to be prepared for thirty years. This is just as it was in the Nordic regions, where Sig's body was prepared so that Sig could and did make his body available to a higher being.

In the sixth root race, it will be possible for man to make his body available to such a high being as Jesus did when founding Christianity. When Christianity was founded, it was still necessary for a chela to sacrifice his ego, to mortify it, to send it up into the astral realm so that the Logos could dwell in the body. This is something that is also illuminated by the last moment on the cross, when you consider the last words: Who else could understand the words:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? [Matthew 27:46]

You will find in this an expression of the fact that it has taken place. At the moment when Christ dies, God has left the body, and the body of Jesus of Nazareth utters those words - the body that was so highly developed that it could express this fact. Therefore, an incredibly great event is expressed in these words. And all this is expressed in the myrrh, which is the symbol of sacrifice, of self-denial, of the sacrifice of the earthly in order to bring forth the higher.

In the middle of the Lemurian period, Osiris had to find his grave, Manas had to enter into people. Under the guidance of the magicians, people had to be educated until the Budhi principle, the principle of love, shone forth in Christ Jesus. Budhi is heavenly love. The lower, sexual principle is ennobled by Christian love. Thus the Kama principle has been glorified and purified in the fire of divine love.

The fact that we are dealing with Melchior, with the principle of wisdom, the intelligence of the fifth root race, is symbolized by the gold – this expresses the sacrifice. The fact that we are dealing with a principle of cult sacrifice is expressed by the incense. This is the principle of the fourth root race, the Atlanteans. This will then be further developed until Christianity will have fulfilled its task in the sixth root race, which will again have a sacramentalism so that it will fulfill the sensual existence with cultic acts, with sacrificial acts. The sacraments have indeed lost most of their meaning today, the sense for them is no longer there. It will be there again for them through what is symbolized by the incense: the higher human being is born. In the Lemurian race, Osiris finds his death; in the seventh root race, he rises again.

So you see that the Feast of the Epiphany, through what it proclaims with its sacrifice, is the story of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth root races.

What guides the Magi and where are they led? They are led by a star and are led to a grotto in Bethlehem. This is something that only someone who is familiar with the so-called lower or astral mysteries can truly understand. To be guided by a star means nothing other than to see the soul itself as a star. But when do you see the soul as a star? You see the soul as a star when you can perceive it as a luminous aura. Then the soul is a star. What kind of aura glows in such a way that it can guide? First you have the aura that only glows, that only has a dull light. It cannot guide. Then you have the higher aura, the intelligence aura. It has a fluid light, a swelling light, but it is not yet guiding. But the bright aura, permeated by Budhi, is truly a star, something radiant and guiding. In Christ, the Budhi star, shining in racial development, rises in the progress of humanity. What shines for the Magi is none other than the soul of Christ Himself. The Second Logos Himself shines for them, and He shines above the grotto in Bethlehem.

The cave is nothing other than the dwelling of the soul: the body. The astral seer sees the body from the inside. For the astral seer, everything is reversed, and everything is seen in reverse. For example, one sees 365 instead of 563. Thus one sees the human body as a grotto, as a cave, and so the star of Christ, the soul of Christ, shines in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is to be imagined as a reality taking place in the astral. It is a process in the lower mysteries. There the Christ-soul actually shines as an auric star, and it leads the initiated of the three races to Jesus in Bethlehem.

This is a festival that has been celebrated every year on January 6th. It is one of those hinted at in “Light on the Path”. Each year, a number of festivals take place. This is one of them, in which the star of Bethlehem rises for the wise men. The first four sentences from “Light on the Path” are the center of the four celebrations:

Before the Masters can speak the voice, it must unlearn the wound.

This is the preparation for the fifth round. This sentence appears at the entrance to the temple. And then comes the great fact. The festival of the sixth of January will grow more and more. People will understand more and more what a magician is and what the masters are. Then, from the understanding of Christianity, we will arrive at the understanding of Theosophy. These days, on January 6, the festival of the great Magi, the masters, will also take place among the Theosophists. The New Year is the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus, because the Christ had not yet been born. The Jewish New Year is in October. But the festival of the circumcision of Jesus of Nazareth has been taken over into Christianity. The fact that Jesus was also a Jew before that is celebrated with the New Year festival in Christianity.

[Notes presumably from the answering of questions at the lecture on December 30, 1904]

On the next planet, man reaches psychic consciousness, on the following planet, super-psychic consciousness, and on the seventh planet, spiritual consciousness. The adept can artificially place himself in these states of consciousness.

The crucifixion caused pain to the Christ.

On the devachan plane, one does not feel only one's own pain and suffering, but one can perceive and feel the whole pain of humanity. All other suffering is felt, one is above one's own suffering. Of the levels of consciousness:

1. The daytime consciousness.
2. A duller, dream-filled consciousness.
3. Dreamless sleep consciousness, the sleep trance of mediums. 4. Deep trance or [induced] trance; can be achieved by mediums; chains of worlds. 5. Psychic consciousness – this is the consciousness one has when one sees life. 6. Superpsychic consciousness, in which one can make the astral body stand.

The physical body has passed through the seven stages. The astral body will pass through them in the future. Beyond spiritual consciousness stands mastery. Spiritual consciousness is equivalent to chelaship.

Esoterically, the conditions that preceded our development on earth are the old lunar and solar conditions.

What is now our inner life was once around us. The mystic has within himself what was once spread around him on the outside. The teaching that flowed out of Budhi is called esoteric Buddhism.

The consciousness that undergoes 343 stages corresponds to a Pitri development. The planetary chain

Physical states of consciousness.

Kama was first in the air, it was the passion for the good. Atavism is when one lags behind in earlier stages of development.

A distinction is made between states of consciousness, states of life and states of form.

An individuality is a being that is fertilized with manas.

States of consciousness in planetary development:

1. deep trance consciousness
2. dreamless sleep consciousness
3. psychic consciousness
4. waking state
5. archetypal state of consciousness

The states of consciousness in humans:

1. consciousness during a deep trance
2. consciousness during dreamless sleep
3. consciousness during dream-filled sleep
4. waking consciousness
5. psychic state of consciousness
6. super-psychic state of consciousness
7. spiritual state of consciousness

The beings have their form from the mineral kingdom. They are a center only in that life becomes conscious. The soul extends into the body. The lower has life only in that the higher is absorbed into it, spreads into it. Consciousness arises from the higher spreading over life and death. Consciousness means as much as Dhyanic. Substance means as much as balance. Beings of consciousness are something all-encompassing – angels of circulation – planetary Dhyanis. Our Earth also has its Dhyani.

At the end of the seventh round, the Earth will be so far advanced that plants and animals will be given to man. Consciousness and form are in balance when the form is directed by consciousness. The uncontrolled form strives up to consciousness.

Elemental spirits are beings that are more powerful in form than in consciousness and life. The opposite of this are the Dhyanis. The elemental spirits are the inhibiting forces. All parasitic beings are filled with elemental beings, for example mistletoe, then the spider, which spins its matter out of itself. Everything parasitic is an expression of the eighth sphere of the moon. - Nightmare. Sphinx.

In the Atlantean race, the Turanians became familiar with the elemental spirits.

Consciousness, life and form - every being must pass through these in many times - in seven stages each.

States of consciousness:

1. Trance consciousness is the all-consciousness, it is the dullest state of consciousness, it corresponds to the forms of crystals and stars, but not of humans.
2. Dreamless sleep is less dull, but narrower, a plant consciousness is present. It is an extraordinary sign of [...] no world systems are perceived there.
3. Dream-filled sleep – in this state, consciousness is not as comprehensive but it is already present in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.
4. The waking state – it encompasses mineral, plant, animal and human.
5. Psychic consciousness – it is the consciousness of the astral world. Here one not only sees the sour face, but also has the sour feeling.
6. Superpsychic consciousness.
7. Spiritual consciousness – this is endowed with direct perception of the spiritual.

The seven kingdoms and what is established in them:

1. The first elemental kingdom – existence is established
2. The second elementary realm – life asserts itself
3. The third elementary realm – sensation or consciousness asserts itself outwardly
4. The mineral kingdom – being becomes objective
5. The plant kingdom – life becomes objective
6. The animal kingdom – sensation and consciousness become objective
7. The human kingdom - higher consciousness and the ego have become objective.

Form states:

1. The arupic form
2. The rupic form
3. The astral form
4. The physical form
5. The plastic form - it is not rigid, but from the inside outwards making itself valid.
6. The intellectual form
7. The archetypal form

Life, form and consciousness - the present waking state of the earth. The seven globes - the phase states. We are changing from physical-seeing beings into beings that can also see into the higher realms of being; we are entering the region of permeability. We can now see only a part of the cosmos. When someone says today that a celestial body is visible, it means that it is in the fourth state, in the state of the mineral kingdom. World year - world month - world day.

Consciousness corresponds to the sun, form to the moon, life to the earth.

There are 7 x 7 = 49 metamorphoses of life that give consciousness. These make up one world year. On the higher level, consciousness is form again.

The animals that have the skeleton on the outside belong to the lunar epoch - cancer development.

We have already considered certain aspects of man's life between death and rebirth, and a short time ago an account was given of the relationship between Christian Rosenkreutz and Buddha. This was done because since the time indicated then, the Buddha has been connected with the planetary sphere of Mars and because the human being, after experiencing the Christ Event in the Sun sphere between death and rebirth, passes into the Mars sphere and there undergoes an experience connected with Buddha in the form that is right for the present age, though not, of course, for the age when the individuality of whom we are now thinking lived on the Earth as Gautama Buddha. Genuine enlightenment about the being of man and his connection with the evolution of worlds is possible only if our understanding keeps abreast of that evolution.

We know that in the post-Atlantean era there have so far been five main consecutive epochs during which the human soul has undergone significant experiences. These epochs are: the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean, the Graeco-Latin, and our own. We also know that in each such epoch the next is prepared—as it were in germ. In our present epoch the sixth post-Atlantean period is already slowly being prepared in the souls of men. The preparation consists in human souls being helped to understand what is now spreading in the world in the form of occult teachings, of Spiritual Science. In this way not only will a knowledge of the being of man that is necessary for the future be promulgated but there will also be an ever deepening understanding of the Christ Impulse. Everything that contributes to this increasing understanding of the Christ Impulse is comprised for the West in what may be called the Mystery of the Holy Grail. This Mystery is also closely connected with matters such as the one spoken of recently, namely, the mission for Mars being delegated by Christian Rosenkreutz to Buddha. This Mystery of the Holy Grail can impart to men of the modern age knowledge that will help them to understand the life between death and rebirth in the way that is right for our time. This understanding depends upon resolute efforts to answer a question of vital importance, and unless we try to carry this question to greater depths than has hitherto been possible, we shall be unable to make further progress in our studies of man's life between death and the new birth. The question is this: Why was it that even in areas where Christianity was proclaimed in its deeper aspect, certain teachings were left in the background—teachings that must be introduced today into the presentation of Christianity in its more advanced form?

You are aware that everything connected with the subject of reincarnation and karma was left in the background not only in the outer, exoteric presentations of Christianity but also in the more esoteric expositions of past centuries. And many people who hear about the content of anthroposophical views, ask: How comes it that although Rosicrucianism must, we are told, be included in everything that occultism has to give—how comes it that hitherto, indeed until our own time, Rosicrucianism did not contain the teachings of reincarnation and karma? Why had these teachings now to be added to Rosicrucianism?

To understand this we must again consider man's relationship to the world. The prelude to the advanced study we hope to reach in these lectures is already to be found in the book Occult Science—an Outline But we must now consider closely how man is related to the world in our own main epoch, in the epoch that was preceded by the planetary stages of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon.

We know that the human being on Earth consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and the ‘I’ or Ego, together with everything that belongs to these members. We know, too, that when an individual passes through the gate of death he leaves behind him, first of all, his physical body; then, after a certain time, most of the etheric body dissolves into the cosmic ether and only a kind of extract of it remains with him. The astral body accompanies him for a considerable time but again a kind of sheath of that body is cast off when the Kamaloka period is over. After that the extracts of the etheric and astral bodies are subject to the further transformation undergone by the human being between death and rebirth. In the innermost sphere the human ‘I’ remains unchanged. Whether the human being is passing through the period between birth and death in the physical body, through the period of Kamaloka when he is still completely enveloped by the astral body, or through the period of Devachan which lasts for the greater part of the time between death and rebirth—it is the ‘I’ or Ego which, basically speaking, passes through all these periods. But this ‘I’, the real, true ‘I’, must not be confused with the ‘I’ which the human being on Earth recognises as his own. Philosophers have a good deal to say about this ‘I’ of man in the physical body, which they think they understand. They say, for instance, that the ‘I’ is the principle that remains intact although everything else in the human being changes. The true ‘I’ does indeed remain but whether this can be said of the ‘I’ of which the philosophers speak is another matter altogether. Anyone who insists on referring to the persistence of that ‘I’ of which the philosophers speak is refuted by the simple fact that during the night the human being sleeps, for then the ‘I’ of the philosophers is extinguished, is simply not there. And if during the whole period between death and rebirth conditions were the same as they are during sleep at night, to speak of the permanence of man’s soul during that period would be meaningless. Fundamentally speaking, there would be no difference between the ‘I’ not being there at all or merely continuing to live knowing nothing of itself, as if it were something external. In the question of immortality it cannot be a matter of the ‘I’ simply being there, but it must also have some knowledge of itself. Thus the immortality of the ‘I’ of which human consciousness is first aware is refuted by every sleep at night, for then this ‘I’ is simply extinguished. The real, true ‘I’ lies much deeper, much, much deeper! How can we form an idea of this real ‘I’, even if we cannot yet claim to have any knowledge of occultism?

We can form a valid idea if we say to ourselves: the ‘I’ must be present in the human being even when he cannot yet say ‘I’, when he is still crawling on the floor. The real ‘I’—not the ‘I’ of which the philosophers speak—is already present and manifests itself in a very striking way.

Our observation of the human being during the first months or even first years of his life will seem to external science to be quite without significance. But for one who is intent upon acquiring knowledge of the nature of man, this observation is of supreme importance.

To begin with, the human being crawls about on all fours and very special effort is required on his part to lift himself out of this crawling position, out of this subjection to gravity, into the vertical position and maintain this. That is one thing. The second is the following: We know that in the first period of his life the human being is not yet able to speak and has to learn how to do so. Try to remember how you first learnt to speak, how you learnt to utter the first word of which you were capable and to formulate the first sentence. Try to remember this, although without clairvoyance you will be as little able to remember it as you can remember how you made the first effort to lift yourself from the crawling into the vertical position. And a third capacity is thinking. Remembrance does indeed go back to the time when you were first able to think, but not before that time.

Who, then, is the actor in this process of learning to walk, to speak and to think? The actor is the real, true ‘I’! Now let us observe what this real ‘I’ does.

Man was ordained from the very beginning to walk upright, to speak and to think. But he is not at once capable of this. He is not immediately the being he is intended to become as a man of the Earth. He does not at once possess the capacities that enable him to participate in the evolving culture of mankind; he has to acquire these capacities gradually. In the earliest period of his life there is a conflict between the spirit living within him when he stands permanently upright and the spirit living within him while he is still under the sway of gravity and crawls on all fours, while his faculties of speaking and thinking are still undeveloped. When the human being reaches the level ordained for him, when he can stand upright, walk, speak and think, he is an expression of the form proper to mankind. There is, in fact, a natural correspondence between the true form of man and the faculties of standing and walking upright, speaking and thinking. It is impossible to conceive of any other being who can walk as man does, that is to say with a vertical spine, and who can speak and think. Even a parrot is able to talk only because its form is upright. The fact that it is able to talk is connected fundamentally with the vertical position. Animals with an intelligence much greater than that of a parrot will never learn to talk because their backbone is horizontal, not vertical. Other factors too, of course, play their part. The human being is not at once able to adopt the posture ultimately ordained for him. The reason for this is that after the exertions made by his real ‘I’ or Ego which have enabled him to think, to speak and adopt the upright posture, the human being is ultimately embedded, as it were, in the spheres of the Spirits of Form, the Exusiai. These Spirits of Form, known in the Bible as the Elohim, are the Beings from whom the human form actually stems; it is the form in which the human ‘I’ has its natural habitation and asserts itself during the first months and years of life.

But there is opposition from other Spirits who cast man down to a level below that of these Spirits of Form. To what category do these other Spirits belong?

The Spirits of Form are the Beings who enable man to learn to speak, to think and to walk upright. The Spirits who cast him down, causing him to move about on all fours and to be incapable in his earliest years of speaking and thinking in the real sense, are Spirits whom he has to overcome in the course of his life, who give him, to begin with, a perverted form. These Spirits ought really to have become Dynamis, Spirits of Movement, but fell behind in their evolution and have still not reached the level of the Spirits of Form. They are Luciferic Spirits who have come to a standstill in their evolution, who work upon man from outside, consigning him to the sway of gravity out of which he must lift himself with the help of the true Spirits of Form.

Observing how a human being comes into existence through birth, in the efforts he makes to acquire capacities which he will need later on in life, we can perceive the true Spirits of Form battling with those other Spirits who ought already to have become Spirits of Movement but have remained at an earlier stage. We see the Spirits of Form battling with Luciferic Spirits who in this sphere are so strong and forceful that they suppress the consciousness belonging to the Ego. Otherwise, if Luciferic Spirits did not suppress this consciousness, the human being at this stage of his life would realise: You are a warrior; you are aware of your horizontal position and consciously desire to stand upright, to learn to speak and to think! All this is beyond his power because he is enveloped by the Luciferic Spirits. There we have a dim inkling of what we shall gradually come to recognise as the true ‘I’, in contrast to an ‘I’ which merely appears in the field of our consciousness.

At the beginning of this series of lectures it was said that we should endeavour to vindicate to healthy human reason what occultism and seership have to say about the nature of man. But this healthy human reason must be willing to recognise how during the earliest periods of his life the human being is only gradually finding his bearings in the physical world. Which part of him is most completely formed? His stature as a whole is still not particularly noticeable because there is inconsistency between the human being himself and his outer form. By his own efforts he has to make his way into the form destined for him. Which part of him is most completely finished—not only after but also before birth? The head! The head is the most fully developed of all the physical organs, even in the embryo. Why is this? The reason is that the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, the Spirits of Form, pervade and weave through all the organs of the human being quite differently in each case—the head in one way, the trunk to which the legs and arms are attached, in another. There is an essential difference between the head and the rest of man's physical body. If we observe the human head with clairvoyance a remarkable difference is revealed between the head and, for example, the hand. When we move a hand, the physical hand and the etheric hand move together. But when a certain stage in the development of clairvoyance has been reached, the clairvoyant can hold the physical hands still and move the etheric hands only. To hold mobile parts of the body still and move only the corresponding etheric parts is a specially important exercise. If this is achieved, the clairvoyance of the future will develop to further and further stages, whereas to indulge in any way in unconscious, convulsive movements is a resurgence of Dervish practices which are already obsolete. Repose of the physical body is the requirement of modern clairvoyance; convulsive movements of every kind were characteristic of epochs now past. It would be a very noteworthy achievement if a clairvoyant were, for example, to hold his hands quite still in a certain position—perhaps crossed over the breast—and yet maintain complete mobility of the etheric hands. He would be keeping his physical hands still while engaging in all kinds of super-sensible activities with the etheric hands. This would be an indication of very marked development, coming to expression in conscious control of the hands.

Now there is one organ in man in which, even if he is not clairvoyant, the etheric part moves freely while the corresponding physical part remains immobile. This organ is the brain around which the cosmic Powers have placed the hard skull; the lobes of the brain would certainly like to move but they cannot. Thus the brain of an average human being is permanently in the condition of a clairvoyant who while he holds his physical hands still, moves the etheric hands only. The brain is seen by a clairvoyant to be something that comes out of the head like writhing snakes. Every head is, in fact, a Medusa head. This is a very real phenomenon. The essential difference between the human head and the rest of the body is that in respect of the rest of the body the human being will need to undergo a lengthy process of evolution to achieve what has already been achieved by the head in the way of ordinary thinking. In a certain respect the strength of thinking lies in the ability of the human being, while he is thinking, to bring the brain to rest even down to the finer, invisible movements of the nerves. The more thoroughly he can keep the brain at rest while he is thinking, including the more delicate movements of the nerves, the subtler, more deliberate and more logical his thoughts will be.

So we can say that when the human being passes into physical existence through birth, it is his head that is the most perfect because in the head there has already been achieved what in the case of the hands—the part of the human being which expresses itself through gestures—can be achieved only in the future. In the evolutionary period of Old Moon the brain was still at the stage of the hands at the present time. On the Old Moon the head was still exposed in several places and not yet enclosed by the skull. Whereas it is now fixed and static in a kind of prison, it could then expand outwards on all sides. All this applies, of course, to the conditions of existence in the Old Moon epoch, when man was still living in the fluid or watery element that had not yet condensed to the solid state.¹ Even in a certain period of the ancient Lemurian epoch, when man had reached the stage of evolution recapitulating the Old Moon period—even then it was still the case that at the top of the brain there appeared not only the organ we have often mentioned, but a kind of efflux of thoughts. A formation like a fiery cloud was still to be seen over the head of man even as late as the Atlantean epoch. Without super-normal clairvoyance, simply with the clairvoyant faculty possessed by every single human being at that time, an Atlantean could see whether a man was or was not a thinker in the sense of that ancient epoch. Over the head of a man who was a thinker there was a luminous, fiery cloud but no such phenomenon was present in the case of one who was not.

These are matters of which we must have knowledge if we are to understand the transformation that takes place in man’s nature when, after living in a physical body, he dies and passes into the other period of existence between death and the new birth. All the forces that have been at work to enable a human being to come into existence disappear when he is already in the physical world; but they become all-important when he has laid aside his physical body. During his life between birth and death man is quite unaware of the forces which moulded the physical brain. But everything of which he is aware between birth and death vanishes and is of no significance when he passes through the gate of death. He lives then within the forces of which he is unconscious during his physical life on Earth. Whereas during this physical life he experiences his ‘I’ as pictured during the waking state, in the period between death and the new birth he experiences that higher ‘I’ of which we can have a dim inkling when we contemplate how a human being learns to walk, to speak and to think. While a man is on Earth he is unaware of this ‘I’; it does not penetrate into his consciousness. What thus remains entirely concealed we can follow back as far as birth and before birth, even still further back, when we contemplate the life that takes its course after death. That which is most completely hidden because it has built up the human being and vanishes while he is living on Earth is most fully in evidence when he is no longer on Earth, namely during the period of his existence after death. The forces of which we can have a faint inkling only, the forces which, working from within, enable the human being to walk, which launch the sounds of speech, which make him into a thinker and mould the brain into becoming the organ of thinking—these are the forces of supreme importance during man's existence between death and the new birth. It is then that his true ‘I’ comes to life. Of this we will speak in the next lecture.

• 1. See Occult Science—an Outline, pp. 137–161 in the Rudolf Steiner Press 1963 edition. The section on the Old Moon period of evolution is included in Chapter IV.

Dear attendees! At the beginning of today's lecture, I would like to present two images to your minds: one that you may know from the course of your life and the other that may arise on the basis of the lecture held here the day before yesterday. One of the images that I would like to evoke in your minds is Raphael's Sistine Madonna, which you all know well. We see this wonderful picture, the Madonna with the Christ Child, and we first try to intuitively place ourselves in what this picture wants, namely by looking at this picture more closely, we see how figures rise out of the mysterious mysterious cloudy sky that extends over the Madonna and Child, figures arise, let us say angelic figures, which appear to us as spiritual companions of the child, who is held by the mother.

And then the feeling can arise in our soul: the painter mysteriously wanted to depict something as a background from which the human riddle stands out, and not just this human riddle, insofar as the human being is placed in the universe, but also, through the fact that the child is added to the mother, insofar as the human being reaches out to create from within himself.

Let us first place this picture objectively before our soul and see if today's lecture, which is supposed to deal with the human riddle and the riddles of the world, could provide anything like a point of contact with what the artist has undoubtedly created here out of a deep feeling about the riddle of the world. And we realize that Raphael is picking up on something that has always occupied people like a riddle of the world when we consider that the whole configuration of this picture, everything that lives in this picture, is like a re-emergence reappearance on a higher artistic and religious level of what already confronts us in the ancient Egyptian land, born out of Egyptian feeling and thinking about the human riddle, in the form of Isis holding the child Horus in her arms.

And so we could cite many more examples of similar symbolisms, showing how the riddle of the world, the riddle of the connection between the human being and the world, is symbolized in the human mother with the child at different times. This is the first image that we want to paint for our souls to prepare us for today's lecture.

The other image should emerge from what we looked at the day before yesterday. Let us imagine a clairvoyant person who has developed his soul to such an extent by developing the powers and abilities that lie dormant within the inner being of today's normal person that he can produce those images, those thoughts within himself that make it possible for the higher worlds to appear to him in their facts, in their essences, so that out of the twilight darkness, out of the bosom of the world's existence, a completely new world steps forth before his soul, new in relation to the outer physical world, a world that shows people that behind our physical things there are entities and forces that are the very foundations of this physical existence, and entities and forces that step out of this bosom of world existence and that truly have no less concrete, real existence than that which we can hear with our ears and see with our eyes. This is how we imagine the clairvoyant in relation to the world, stepping out of the twilight of spiritual existence into a new world of forms, of higher realities, created in knowledge through him, as it were, as a document of what the human soul is capable of in terms of establishing its relationship with the world.

Is it not something that we can describe in the clairvoyant as a spiritual birth, as something on a higher level, on a more spiritualized level, which we find so wonderfully symbolized on the physical level in the Madonna with the Child? For that is what we want to contemplate today, my dearest audience, how man enters into this world around him.

The most diverse minds in the development of humanity have always reflected on this, have examined how man's relationship to the surrounding world actually is. Today, because older ideas in this direction are rather far removed from contemporary human thinking and it is difficult to bring to life not only the concept of such older ideas but also the right nuance of feeling that these old ideas conjure up before us, I do not want to tie in with older ideas, for example, only with the idea that a man often misunderstood today, Paracelsus, had about the relationship between man and the world. Like many others, he regarded the human being as a microcosm, as a small world, in contrast to the great world, the macrocosm. But we only want to recall with a few words what all those who regarded the human being as a small world, as a microcosm, in relation to the great world, the macrocosm, actually thought.

They had the idea that all laws, all the various chains of facts that spread out into the world, not only in the physical world but also in the spiritual world, that all these chains of facts and laws are contained in man as if in an extract, as if in another form on a small scale, that man himself is, as it were, such an extract, such an essence of the existence of the world in all its individual forms. Everything that can be found in the world can be rediscovered in man. As I said, we don't have to go that far if we want to present this idea of the small world of man, of the microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, as one that the best minds have had.

We need only recall a personality who was close to us in relatively recent times, whom we were able to mention here the day before yesterday in a different context. We need only pick up where Goethe left off and that wonderful friendship between Schiller and Goethe. When this began, Schiller felt an intense need to rise to the peculiar way in which Goethe viewed the world, how he had shaped the relationship between man and the world for himself. So Schiller writes at the beginning of the beautiful, great friendship, so significant for intellectual history:

For a long time now, I have been observing, albeit from a considerable distance, the course of your intellectual life and looking up to it with ever-renewed admiration. What you saw in the face of a great nature is this: you endeavor to get to know all the details of nature, of the surrounding world, in order to build up spiritually, through the combination of these details from the totality of phenomena, the most complicated being that stands before us, man. Schiller calls this a truly heroic idea, as it had emerged from his contemplation of Goethe's genius.

What is Schiller thinking of? He is thinking of the fact that Goethe studies the whole world around him, finding the same law everywhere in this thing and a different law in that thing. And then, when you create a harmony in your mind, where these laws, which are distributed among the most diverse beings and things in the world, work together, then you can roughly have an idea, an idea, of what really lives spiritually in a human being. And Goethe himself sensed so rightly that in man, more or less externally and internally, the whole universe has created something like a mirror image of itself.

We see this when Goethe, for example, points it out in his beautiful book about Winckelmann: When man lives in all of nature and becomes aware of healthy nature as a whole, when harmonious pleasure gives him pure, free delight, then the universe itself, if it could contemplate itself through man, would exult as having reached its pinnacle and would admire its own becoming and essence. And in another passage, Goethe says: When man looks at the nature around him and takes everything around him, in terms of measure and number and order and harmony, he is able to create within himself a higher nature in nature, something that transcends nature and yet is the meaning of this world, of this nature. That is what Goethe had in mind.

Thus we see that even a spirit of the modern world, even if it expresses this only in such general ideas, is thoroughly imbued with the fact that everything that is scattered around in the world works together in man, and that out of man a new world is born, which, when we come to think of it, must appear to us as an essence, an excerpt, a small world compared to the great world.

In the most real conceivable way, the theosophical or spiritual scientific world view shows us the world of the supersensible, as explored by the methods mentioned the day before yesterday, in connection with the sensible that spreads out perceptibly before our sense organs. In the most real sense, this research shows us that everything that seems to answer the great riddles posed by the universe is indeed present in man. Man himself can be regarded as the magic key by which we can unlock the most intimate secrets of the world around us. To gain an insight into what has just been said, we must first consider some aspects of the human soul, as we have already discussed in another lecture.

Since we are always dealing with new listeners, we must first say a few words about the nature of man, and then show how this nature of man, when viewed so completely, in all its parts and members, as is possible through theosophy or spiritual science, appears to us as a true extract, as an extract of the whole development of the world according to physical and spiritual facts and entities.

If we look at the human being in the theosophical sense, in spiritual science, we see that he is not the single-membered being that external, sensory observation shows us, that only adheres to the outer organs of perception and to the mind, the intellect, which links the outer perceptions together.

But if we now ask ourselves: how does the physical body of man differ from the rest of physical nature? How does it differ from the mineral world, when we consider that this physical body of man, which in all its parts as a physical body contains nothing other than what the rest of physical nature contains outside? If we look at even the most beautiful form of a mineral, at some particularly wonderfully shaped mineral as a crystal, if we look at this mineral form! It exists as a form, as a whole, as it presents itself to us, through the physical and chemical substances and forces, and does not perish through these physical and chemical substances and forces. This form must be destroyed from the outside, whether by external intervention of some kind or other, or by the intervention of the world around it; the form of the mineral, held together by its own forces and laws of a physical nature, must be destroyed from the outside.

This is not the case with the human form, nor is it the case with the form of any living being. The human form of the physical body – we will not consider the other living beings, which concern us little today – does not follow at all the way man lives, between birth and death, these physical and chemical substances and forces that are in him. When does the physical human body follow the physical substances and forces? When? Then it follows the physical substances and forces when the human being departs at death, when the physical body is a corpse. Then they stir and emerge in their full validity – these physical substances and forces within him. According to the spiritual scientific view, between birth and death man has within him at every moment a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body.

Therefore, from the point of view of spiritual science, we speak of a second part of the human being that permeates this physical body and is a fighter against the disintegration of the physical body in each of us. The fact that the physical substances and forces between birth and death or between conception and death do not follow their own laws, but as it were contradict themselves, is because the etheric or life body, as the second link of the human being, is this constant fighter against decay. In terms of spiritual science, we have to imagine that at death the physical body is abandoned by the etheric or life body. As a result, the physical substances and forces become active and dynamic. But the etheric body enters its world.

For someone who relies solely on their intellect, this etheric body is, at best, a mere speculation, at most something that can be achieved through thinking. Today there are already many people who, based on pure scientific knowledge, have long since abandoned the view that one is dealing only with a conglomeration of physical substances and forces in a human being. These people speculate and think their way to something that is behind physical substances and forces, and instruct them in their particular organization in every living being. So for such thinking it remains speculation.

For the development of the human being that was unveiled here the day before yesterday, for what we can call the developed consciousness of the seer, this etheric or life body is a reality, something that belongs to him, that confronts him when, for example, he has developed imaginative thinking. Then he can perceive how a truly real being emerges from the physical human body in death. But no one should form an idea of this etheric or life body as if it were actually a kind of physical body, only very thin, very nebulous. No, in no way can it be perceived physically; it can only be perceived by the open eye of the seer, it is only visible and perceptible to spiritual eyes. This is therefore the second link of the human being, and it is of great importance that this double of the human physical body be regarded as a special real entity.

From the point of view of spiritual science, the objection may not be raised: One can indeed recognize that these life phenomena that occur in man are something special; but they are precisely functions, activities of the physical body, its complicated interaction. No! For spiritual science, the opposite is the case; that which occurs physically, which appears as a physical activity of the organism, is an emanation of the spiritual. Everything that occurs in the physical body, be it blood circulation, the regular activity of the respiratory system, or the activity of the digestive system, is the result of the forces that have developed out of this etheric body or life body. It is the higher part, and we will have to explain in more detail how we think of the next link in the human being, how we have to regard the higher links as the active, the doing part, so to speak.

Even in terms of the material, for spiritual science, the physical body is something that has crystallized out of the etheric body in the course of development, just as a piece of ice crystallizes out of water . It is thus, as it were, a condensation of the etheric body, and all the forces that keep the blood circulating, all the forces that are active in the physical body, are born out of the etheric body. This etheric body or life body – and I ask you not to confuse the term “ether” with what physicists call “ether”, because the hypothetical ether of physics has at most the name in common with it – is shared by humans and plants. Plants and every living being also has such a life body or etheric body.

But now we rise to the third link of the human being. We get an immediate idea of this when we imagine a person standing before us and ask ourselves: Is this person standing before us really nothing more than what the outer eyes can see and the ears can hear in his voice, what the hands can feel? Is there nothing else within these skin? Well, this person's soul can tell us that there is something quite different within these skin: a creature, a sum of desires, instincts and passions, a sum of pleasure and suffering, of ideas, of moral ideals, of intellectual ideas – all of this lives there before us.

And for primitive man, what has just been mentioned is truly a higher, more direct reality than what lives as muscles or bones or blood in his body, of which he may have only a very vague idea as a primitive man. Much closer to his soul, much more real to him is what has just been mentioned, as a sum of pleasure and pain, of instinct, desire and passion. We describe this sum as the third element of the human being, and we now want to use this third element to clarify how spiritual science must relate to what we are citing here as real elements of the human being.

The materialistic thinker or even the merely realistic thinker will say: Instinct, desire and so on are produced by the interaction of forces in the human body. What we call the third link would only appear as a result of physical activity, just as the advancing of the hand of a clock appears as a result of the mechanical arrangement of the movement. For someone endowed with clairvoyant consciousness, in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, this third aspect of the human being is what is called – please do not be put off by the term – the astral body. This is a fact. For while in death the etheric body is clairvoyantly seen to separate from the physical body, thereby leaving the physical body to the physical substances and forces, the developed consciousness of the observer sees the astral body of the evening when the person falls asleep, moving out of the physical body and the etheric body, which remain connected during ordinary sleep, and this astral body, this third link of the human being, this sum of drives, desires, passions, instincts and pleasure and suffering, passes into a world in which the person cannot perceive, but in which he lives between the moment of falling asleep and the moment of waking up.

Now, of course, someone who only wants to rely on his senses may ask: Can you imagine that mere passions, mere desires, mere instincts are floating somewhere? Yes, that is precisely what humanity will gradually have to incorporate more and more into its thought habits if it wants to advance to a real knowledge of the supersensible world, that an existence of this soul-like being for itself is quite possible, just as just as we have seen earlier that the physical body appears as a kind of condensation of the etheric body, so too the etheric body appears as a condensation of this soul-spiritual structure, which we now address as the astral body.

You can form an idea from ordinary life, when you decide to think impartially and confidently, of how the soul and spirit affect the physical. We take two well-known inner soul experiences, we take what is called the sense of shame and what is called the sense of fear. Shame — the person blushes; fear — the person turns pale. What do these sensations mean in the first instance, in physical terms? The blood of someone who, as we say, blushes, has a very specific movement to fulfill; it is driven, so to speak, from the inside of the body to the surface; the opposite occurs when someone turns pale with fear.

Only those who engage in errant speculation could seek the causes of mental states in the physical. The unbiased and clear-thinking person will ask: What is happening in the soul? A sense of shame is a soul experience, something purely of the soul; a sense of fear is something purely of the soul. What do they do? They produce a physical activity, they produce an activity in the movement of the blood, it is a physical process, brought about by something of the soul. That is the natural way of thinking in this field, that is, so to speak, the last remnant of how we have to think about the soul in its effect on the material. Just as the movement of the blood and its location are truly changed under the influence of the soul, so we must now only imagine that basically all material events are caused and conditioned by their soul-spiritual causes, which lie behind them and which the human being only does not perceive as easily everywhere as in this primitive case, but which can serve as an example.

Now spiritual science shows, when you become more and more involved in it, that not only external activities and processes are caused by spiritual and soul forces, but that matter itself crystallizes out of the spirit, so that everything that physically confronts us in terms of substance and force appears to us, roughly speaking, as a condensation of the spiritual and soul. And so this astral body of man is that which we must hold fast in its independence, which we have to address as an independent link that creates means of expression in the physical and etheric bodies.

And within this astral body we then see the fourth link of the human being. When we look at the astral body, we can say that although it is not as developed in animals as it is in humans, the human being shares this body with the animal. Just as the human being shares their physical body with the mineral world and their etheric body with plants, they share their astral body with animals. But then there is a fourth element of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, whereby he differs from all the creatures and entities that are closest to him in the physical world. This is what we call the actual “Ichträger” in spiritual science.

I have already mentioned this here before; today it is only to be [referred to] so that we can treat the subject as we have posed it. There is a name in our language that differs from all other names. You can say “bell” to every bell, “desk” to every desk, “clock” to every clock - everything can be given a name from the outside. There is only one thing that cannot be named, and in our language this one thing bears for every human being the name, the simple name 'I'. The name 'I', if it is to describe the innermost part of your own being, can never reach your ear from the outside; no one can ever call out 'I' and mean you.

Here, in the very naming, you have something that can lead you to the character of this most human link of the human being, the fourth link, through which man is the crown of earthly creation. Those who have felt that the human inner being announces itself, that it must be experienced from within, through spiritual perception, have always seen in this I-being something like a drop from the ocean of divine substance. That is why this “I” or “I am” was designated by certain religions, which had an insight into these things, as the ineffable name of God in the human breast, ineffable to the outer world; it can only resound when the divine in man becomes aware of itself. What carries this “I” in man, this I, which, for example, is elevated to the divine by the God of the Old Testament in the famous word [Jehovah], we therefore also call the “I-bearer”, the innermost part of man, by which he differs from the entities and forces around him.

Thus, we imagine the human being as he stands before us today, as a four-part creature, as the Pythagorean school already imagined him, as a being that consists first of all of the physical body, which we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands, which physical science investigates. This physical body should not be belittled in any way by the great and admirable results of theosophy or spiritual science, but fully recognized. We then have as the second link of the human being the etheric or life body, as the third link of the human being the astral body and as the fourth link the I-bearer.

During sleep, the I-bearer leaves the physical body and the etheric body with the astral body, the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed, the astral body and the I live in the world of the spiritual, gathering strengths to bring the phenomena of human life, which are expressed in fatigue, back into balance and to descend again into the physical or etheric body in the morning, in order to make use of the physical organs and to connect with the physical world outside through them.

In death, however, we see again how the physical body remains behind and the I, the astral body and the etheric body leave the human being. Later — this can only be told today — a large part of the etheric body detaches like a second corpse, so that the person only lives on with something like an essence of the etheric body, a spiritual existence, in which certain members of the astral body later detach themselves as a third, invisible corpse. This would now lead to a description of human life after death; today it should only be hinted at.

Thus, when we consider the human being in its entirety from a theosophical or spiritual scientific point of view, we have these four members before us. Now we want to weigh these four members of the human being a little in their mutual relationship, according to their values.

From a certain point of view, someone might say: The physical body is the lowest link in the human being, it is the external physical, the etheric body is already more spiritual and finer, the astral body even more spiritual, the I is the most spiritual. So we could say: the I is the most spiritual and perfect, the physical body is the most imperfect. But this is only true in one respect. In another respect – and this is what matters when we want to consider the human being in relation to the universe – the physical human body is precisely the most perfect link in human nature. If only we really look at it not with our mere intellect, but with our whole soul, immersing ourselves in its wonderful complexity, then we will see how this physical body is essentially more perfect in its way than the astral body.

Consider the astral body, the bearer of lust and suffering, of desire and passion, in its relation to the physical body only – one might say – in broad strokes, then you have to say to yourself: What a miracle this human heart is, what a miracle this human brain is, and the way all the individual physical organs of the human being strive together! What the human being's astral body, the seat of instinct, desire and passion, often does in the face of these wonderful harmonious voices of the individual physical human organs and their harmony! It is often the troublemaker, it is the thing that brings disorder and disharmony into the physical human body. Pleasure, desire - none of that adheres to the physical body, all of that adheres to the astral body.

And now consider what pleasures and passions the astral body urges people towards, how people actually perpetually attack their physical body through their passions, pleasures and desires, how many of the things people consume for pleasure are true poisons for the heart! How wonderful it is that this physical body has an organ in its heart that is so marvelously constructed that it can often withstand the attacks of the astral body for decades!

In its way, the physical body is the most perfect link that man has today, even if it is the lowest. Then comes the etheric body – it is one degree less perfect than the physical human body; the astral body is much less perfect, and the actual ego – oh, that is the baby among the links of human nature, is still the most imperfect part of human nature today, this ego, which man can hardly grasp, which for many is considered so incomprehensible that what was said the day before yesterday by the great philosopher Fichte applies: Most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than an ego; it takes something to grasp this ego, to consider it real, it is actually a point - one might say.

Consider how much you can think when you see a person in their physical form, how much you can think when anatomy, physiology and so on present the person to you! How much content the physical build of a person has, how little content the I has for most people! In the distant future, these higher, supersensible aspects of the human being will certainly become richer and richer, and the time will come when the ego will be just as real as the physical body is today. But the ego is now in the very beginning of its development. It is, so to speak, only a baby and must become more and more substantial as the human being develops from the present into the distant future. The astral body is more developed, but it is still imperfect in some respects. The good and evil of human nature rests in the astral body, and only when evil is completely overcome by good will the astral body have the perfection that the physical body already has today.

Therefore, in the sense of spiritual science, we regard the physical human body as the oldest link in human nature, as the link in human nature that existed before the other human links were present, in a very, very distant past. But now comes the essential part. Back then, in the very distant past, it was not physical, it was spiritual. And just as, in the comparison made the day before yesterday, ice gradually crystallizes out of water as a solid, so the original spiritual, which was as spiritual as today's I, the human spiritual I, gradually became the present physical human body, the complicated body, differentiating itself more and more and structuring itself more and more.

Thus we go back to a very distant past, when man actually had only the physical body of what he now has, but this in a spiritual sense. And so we are originally in a completely spiritual world, there is still nothing of what we today call material and physical. The human physical body, as it is visible to our eyes and tangible to our sense of touch today, is a condensation of an originally spiritual substance that rested in a spiritual environment, just as today our physical human body rests in its physical environment, in the physical external world. Yes, spiritual science also leads us back to a spiritual origin in relation to the physical human body; this physical human body has undergone transformations, metamorphoses, to its present stage.

The human existence in which the physical human body was spiritual in the most distant past, in its first stage, before an etheric body or an astral body had been added to it, not to mention an I, is called, however strange it may sound to you, because you immediately think of an external world body, the Saturn body of man. Spiritual science gave this name to that most ancient past of man when the physical human body developed out of the spiritual womb of the world. In this first stage of human existence, man's Saturn existence, the physical human body was still simple and primitive.

And now comes the second stage: the etheric or life body is integrated into the physical human body. For this, the physical human body must already have been raised to a higher level; it must be able to permeate the etheric or life body, so that we can say: At this second stage of human existence, the human being consists of a physical body and an etheric body. He is roughly on a par with today's plants, but he is not a plant. The human being never passed through the plant existence as it is today. Rather, even when he consisted only of the physical and etheric bodies and when he was at the level of the plant existence, he was quite different. This stage of existence is called in spiritual science the solar existence. These are expressions that have to be accepted because the heavenly bodies do indeed have something to do with what we call Saturn, solar existence and so on.

Then there is a third stage of human existence, the astral body joins the physical body and the etheric body, and the human being rises to the level of animality. In spiritual science we call it the moon existence. So now we have the human being before us at the level of animality, consisting of the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body.

But now something very peculiar occurs at each stage of this human existence. Originally, in the sense of spiritual science, only the human being actually existed. In the distant past, the human being, who has the most perfect physical body among the beings that surround us, developed this physical body, often transformed itself, and by transforming itself when it incorporated the etheric body, and again when it incorporated the astral body, it has reached ever higher perfection.

At each such stage, certain beings are left behind that cannot keep up with the development. At the time when man incorporated the etheric body into his physical body, certain human beings who previously had only a physical body remained at the stage where they had only a physical body. They did not acquire the ability to incorporate an etheric body, and so they remain, as it were, stuck in the cosmic evolution of the world. It is true that not only do young people in grammar school or secondary school have to repeat a year, but this concept of not keeping up applies to the whole of cosmic existence.

Those beings who remained at the first stage of human development, when the human being integrated his etheric body, are humans who are one step behind, they have been thrown out of human development, as it were, and have fallen into decadence. These beings are the ancestors of our present-day animals. Thus, at the beginning of evolution, of development, we have man as the firstborn of our creation and we have the animal world as the second-born creation, as that which did not come along and therefore always remained behind.

We must visualize very precisely how this lagging behind occurs in the course of development. The world view that adheres to the external substance will see the imperfect next to the perfect and, if it thinks correctly in a Darwinian-materialistic way, it will come to the conclusion that the perfect humans have gradually developed from the imperfect animal.

This conclusion is logically on the same level as if someone – it is only a comparison, but logically it is quite true – saw two people next to each other, one of whom is ragged and down-and-out, but the other is talented and applies this talent to the benefit of his fellow human beings, so that he has become a useful member of human society. He sees an imperfect and a perfect human being side by side and concludes: Since the perfect comes from the imperfect, the perfect man comes from the imperfect or at least from something similar. Facts can very soon refute him, can show him that the two people are brothers, that they perhaps have a common pair of parents, that one has risen by developing the abilities within him, while the other has descended.

This is how it is in all of creation. We have, so to speak, endowed the human being with the ability to integrate higher and higher members of his being in the very first, most original world design. He first received his physical body spiritually, in pure spirituality. This physical body became able, after some time, to integrate the ether body if it remained within the line of development. Those human ancestors, if I may use the term, of course in a different sense than in ordinary cultural history, who did not keep up, were still at the stage of the mere physical body at the time when man had already incorporated his ether body had already incorporated its etheric body, and always remained one step behind, so during the stage of the moon-being, the next stage, they first incorporated the etheric body when man was already incorporating the astral body. So they always remained one step behind. Those beings, then, who during the third stage of human existence, when man incorporated the astral body, still remained on the first stage, who therefore could not even take up an etheric body, were thrown out of the development and were later placed alongside humans as the plant kingdom.

Thus, when we look at the animal kingdom, we see, as it were, degraded humans who have not reached their developmental goal, humans who have fallen into decadence. Not does the present man descend from some animal creatures, but on the contrary, the animal creatures have descended in this way, in that they have not kept up with evolution, they have retained certain forms that man has progressed beyond, they have descended brothers of man. The entire plant kingdom contains within itself beings that are nothing other than what man has secreted from himself. So we see the animals as human beings and say: We have progressed beyond this stage, they have retained the stages by depriving themselves of the possibility of advancing to an ever higher stage, and in the same way we overlook the plant kingdom and say: It has been secreted from the human kingdom and descended. The fourth stage of human existence is when the physical body, after four transformations, the etheric body, after three transformations, and the astral body, after two transformations, has taken up the actual I. This is our present earthly existence. It is carefully prepared by four stages of the development of the physical body, which has become more and more perfect, so that it could become the carrier of the etheric body and the astral body, and these themselves have gradually become so perfect that they could become the carrier of that which now appears as the baby of human nature, as the spiritual that must be protected, so to speak, by its covers. It was only during this last pause that the I incorporated itself, although this also happened in the most distant past, to which no geology can lead today; only clairvoyant hindsight, achieved in the way described the day before yesterday, leads us back to where the other bodies, through transformation, could become protective covers for the I. It was at this same moment that the last supply, so to speak, arrived, which had remained at the very first stage of human existence; there the mineral kingdom appeared as the last of the realms. This was a tremendous moment in the ongoing development of humanity. When, within himself, man first saw his ego light up in a dull, dim consciousness, the mineral kingdom arose around him in its present form.

If we look at it spiritually, we must therefore imagine that the development was exactly the opposite of how it is usually imagined. Today it is of course easy to say from the point of view of a purely material world view: the plants need the mineral kingdom as a basis, the animals need the plant kingdom as a basis. Certainly, in their present physical forms they need this basis. But they did not need it in their spiritual stages of existence. When man was still spiritual, he did not need to eat and drink, nor did he need to breathe. When he began to breathe, the possibility of breathing already existed, even if it was different from today. When the plant kingdom was in its first stage, it did not yet need the soil of the mineral kingdom. It was only when the mineral kingdom was there that it formed the solid foundation, and then the other kingdoms also became more and more physical.

In their physical form, these realms emerged last. Our entire world was formed out of the spiritual, and now we see a wonderful affinity between the fourfold human nature and everything around us. We look at our physical body and then look out at the surrounding world of the mineral kingdom. We look at all crystals, at all minerals, regardless of whether they look back at us from the atmosphere above the earth, in cloud formations and air currents, regardless of whether these inanimate formations look back at us in the water waves of the stream or whether they come to meet us as a trickling spring, whether they face us as formed minerals or as plants and so on.

We see the whole physical world around us and ask ourselves: What are we related to? We are related in that what lives around us in the physical world is, in a certain sense, the stuff and substance of our organism when we look at it spiritually. What is around us outside has come about, so to speak, in such a way that it has separated out as the most incapable and coarse, which has not gone through all these stages of development from the physical body to the reception of the ether body and the astral body and so on. We can visualize this as if we have a substance in which some salt, for example a colored salt, is dissolved, and we bring the substance to cool. The salt falls down and covers the ground and is stored at the bottom as the coarsest. So we see how the mineral kingdom separates out from what, as spirit, forms the origin of all existence, as the coarsest - and this is related to our physical body. Then we see the plant body and look inside ourselves and know that we carry an etheric body within us; we know that the plant kingdom is the remaining etheric nature of man. We feel related to everything that is outside. We know from the animals: these are the remaining astral bodies, they are set aside from human nature. Finally, after this unusable material has been separated out, we have, as the beings who must be called the highest on the physical plane, rearranged and reshaped all these three ancestral stages of human development in such a way that, in the end, the I could be taken up into the protective sheaths as the actual spiritual being of the human being.

Thus we look around us and find everything that we have in our human existence in the realms of the world, the sensual and the supersensible, except for that which is our I, which we can only find in the spiritual itself. Thus, we see how, through this complete examination of humanity, we come to understand our relationship with the whole surrounding world in a way that, one might say, does not belittle but rather elevates the human being. Yes, we can even give a reason why this had to be so, why the other realms had to be singled out. Since time does not allow otherwise, we can only take a cursory look at our future.

We can ask: Why? Is there a reason why man has to separate the other kingdoms from himself in the course of development, and what is the significance of this? There is a significance that we can understand by making a comparison. Imagine that something coarse is mixed into a substance that has dissolved. If we want to have the substance in its pure form, we have to allow it to cool down. Thus, man had to bring himself up by separating out everything that was unusable to absorb an ego in the other realms; he had to create a foundation on which he could develop. In the future, of course, he will have the task of redeeming these other realms, he will have to gradually raise them to his own spirituality. This can only be mentioned today, because what should particularly come to our minds today is that in the human being before us, the whole physical and spiritual world, insofar as we can reach it at first, is not only reflected, but that he has this whole world around him because, basically, the other realms have been separated out of him, because, figuratively speaking, they are flesh of his flesh and blood of his blood, even if this is meant in a spiritual sense.

And so man feels his way into the whole of his environment, and on a higher level he regards everything that lives in him as born out of the spiritual womb of the world, and just as the bark around the living core of the tree is structured and protects it, so the spiritual in man has protected itself through the coarser natural kingdoms, as it were, as the bark of human existence, and just as the bark is only the lignified soft parts of the tree, the other kingdoms, that which surrounds man, that which has developed out of the original human nature in the sense described today. Thus man learns that he is born out of the bosom of the whole existence of the world. It is not surprising that at the stage of clairvoyant consciousness he feels like a begetter of new worlds, for the worlds that surround us and on which we walk have developed out of us in the distant past.

The future world that will be around man will also be born out of man. Clairvoyant consciousness gives birth to it spiritually and has it before it, and then it is as if, out of the twilight darkness of the spiritual womb of the world, figures emerge before the clairvoyant consciousness, which are still spiritual today and will only descend into the physical world in the future. We see the spiritual that is around us populating itself with spiritual forms, and this spiritual will appear to us as a higher realm compared to what is already mysteriously hinted at on a lower level in human creativity today, and there the image is put together in a wonderful way from the artist's intuition. Raphael also did this partly out of tradition: what emerges as a feeling is what Raphael has secretly incorporated into his painting about human destiny; the twilight of the womb of the world – the spiritual figures are born above, and as the sensual embodiment, as the most important physical embodiment of what dawn of the universe and becomes more and more perfect in his physical form, appears to us in the mother with the child, who has the strength to shape within herself the mysterious laws that have come into being through all human evolution, so that he brings forth his repetition from within himself.

Anyone who can feel something like this will understand how the spiritual in the clouds and the physical in the Madonna with the child, as a great symbol of human destiny in this mysterious child, comes to us, and then one learns in front of this picture that, even if it is unconscious in the artist, it is born out of the feeling and sense of how man is a world in itself, but one that is intimately related to the greater environment, a small world, a microcosm, in relation to the greater world. One feels how the artist has incorporated this into his painting, and one then feels how what man receives through his position in relation to the surrounding nature can come to us again in human creations, as for example in true art, man brings us something like a solution to the riddle of the world in his own way. And when this riddle of the world speaks to us symbolically through Raphael's Sistine Madonna, we feel very strongly the words of Goethe, which we have already quoted and which lead us so well into the microcosmic human being and into the macrocosmic wholeness of the world. We feel what Goethe felt when he presented this human being as the actual solution to the whole mystery of the world, in that he said that when a person perceives the healthy world in its entirety around them, takes measure and number and order and harmony together and generates a new, higher world from this world, they thus give meaning to the outside world. And in all its details, down to the deepest feeling, theosophy or spiritual science shows us that in fact man contains within himself in a certain respect everything that we find outside in the world, that man himself is the solution to the riddle of the world, that man is the answer when we ask about the actual riddle of the world.

In the highest sense, my esteemed audience, the question can be put like this: let us look out into the world! It appears wonderful to us in all its fields, in all its realms, it presents us with nothing but questions. Where is the answer? Everything asks us – where should we look if we want the answer? The answer is always before us. We only need to be able to interpret this answer in the right way, through spiritual science. This answer to the riddle of the world is “man”. This was also in the mind of the ancient poet when, beholding the world around him, he spoke the beautiful words:

Many mighty things live here on our earth; but nothing is mightier than man.

Today, we want to talk about some things that might be outside the normal sphere of deliberation but that will clarify, from a different perspective, some of the material that we have heard about in earlier lectures. The overall message discussed today is meant to shed light on much of what we’ve heard before and will hear in the future. Today, we will talk about the hierarchy of beings that exist in the world and are above the human being. We have occasionally mentioned such beings in the context of the Earth’s evolution. Now we will look at them in a different context, namely from the perspective of those beings’ characteristics, their purpose, and their work.

Nowadays there is a certain convenience in terms of world-view, as many people do not want to put any other beings between themselves and the Godhead. It is so incredibly comfortable to imagine a mineral kingdom, a plant kingdom, an animal kingdom, and a human kingdom, and then, without much ado, to climb up to the all-pervading God, about whom one believes to have a more or less correct consciousness or feeling. For the real Science of the Spirit it is not that convenient—between humans and the entity, about which we have a presentiment that it might be the Godhead of the world, it needed to insert beings at the most diverse stages of perfection. This hierarchy has been repeatedly hinted at. In Christian Esotericism¹/6^th Century, probably by Severus, the Patriarch of Antioch. Compare the introduction in the referenced volume, pages 13-14. they have the following names: Angels, Archangels, Primordial Forces, Powers, Virtues, Dominions, Thrones, Cherubims, Seraphims. These are nine different kinds of beings, to which man is connected right at the bottom of the hierarchy. Only if we look upwards beyond the realm of the Seraphim can we divine what we address as the Godhead.

Do not believe that it is insubstantial and meaningless if it is said that it is a convenience of the worldview to simply ascend from the human being to the Godhead without involving these beings. If human beings had not forgotten to study and acknowledge them, then the aberrations of materialism would not have occurred. Although it is possible to combine some sort of religious feeling, a kind of dark religious sentiment, with the immediate ascent from human being to deity, but it is never possible to arrive in this way at a real understanding of the world; a true picture of the evolution of the world can never be combined with this. For this reason, humanity has now lost its understanding of the world. There is an aspect in religion that is based only on feelings and vague emotions that will always allow itself to be denied in the face of materialistic ideas. The Theosophical world-view re-opens an understanding of the world by teaching mankind again about these beings. In this way, a reference point is created in order to counter the denial of a higher world. People who today struggle against acknowledging this world are increasingly preparing the ground for the most banal, disastrous materialism. The materialists themselves are really the victims—the real perpetrators are those who, out of convenience, do not want to know anything about what exists between mankind and the Godhead.

Now that you know the reason why we must talk about these higher beings today, we will look at their characteristics in a free aphoristic way. First, we will examine the angels, the Angeloi, the divine messengers, who stand closest to human beings. They differ from human beings mostly through their faculties of perception and recognition. A human being perceives and acts out his deeds within a world that consists of the four realms of nature; namely among the minerals, plants, animals and human beings. This is the nature of his perception; these are his acts of will.

The angels, who stand one stage above the human beings, differ from them in that the mineral realm does not exist for their perception. Their perceptive faculty begins with the plant kingdom and then progresses further to the animal, the human, and to their own angel kingdom. Within these four kingdoms the life of the angels takes place. What the human being perceives as a mineral filling a spatial area is for these beings empty space, blank space. If you remember how in my book Theosophy I’ve described how, in Devachan, man perceives the mineral world, namely as empty space, then you roughly understand the kind of perception these beings have, who live permanently in such a world. The minerals do not present an obstacle for them—they are able to walk through them; they are not interested in them. The mineral realm is too far beneath them. Their awareness only begins with the plant kingdom and extends to their own realm.

AAs angelic beings, they call themselves “I”. By being so constituted they will, through their actions, make something clear to us that we already know. When the human being goes through the portal of death, he will first encounter the curious experience of the memory picture. It presents itself thus: When the human being dies, he first gets the feeling that he will grow and grow increasingly, and this enlargement is accompanied by the appearance of the memory picture. Once the picture ends, something like a kind of extract—like a fruit of life—remains. This will create a type of germinal force for the construction of the human being in his next incarnation. This is a kind of etheric, internally structured essence that remains with him as the essence of all his experiences in the etheric body and will accompany him through the eternities. If we also remember that the human being, after having passed through the Kamaloka, takes this essence with him to Devachan, and that he is not passive there but has his essential tasks to fulfil, then the deeds of those beings who are standing one level above us will become quite clear. The human being only reincarnates once he can experience something new, once he can take a new fruit into himself. The Earth goes through many transformations. Therefore, it is wrong that it is not necessary to come repeatedly as some people believe. A human being can always experience something new that he will take with him into eternity.

What is causing the transformation of the Earth’s surface? Who is working on the transformation of the Earth? How does it happen that a completely different picture of the plant world emerges in a particular area, with completely different living conditions? Just imagine, for example, how the area where Munich is located now must have looked 3,000 years ago and how human beings on the physical plane continuously change the face of the Earth with their physical powers. But because man only changes the mineral kingdom, you can imagine that other changes have to arise from Devachan. And from there, once again, it is the human beings who, coming from the spiritual, consistently transform the Earth. But they could not do it by themselves. They would not know what the face of the Earth should look like, or what condition it should be in. They are only able to do this under the leadership of higher beings. Those higher beings who guide and lead them are the beings that we call angels. They deal with what exists in a human being during the presence in Devachan in a different form. They guide and lead the eternal Ego of man. And because they, due to their nature are able to reach down into the world of plants, they can achieve the transformation of the Earth.

Now it will be easy to comprehend that these beings are always leading, guiding beings for the human Ego. They do not even interrupt their leadership when the Ego gets incarnated again. The Ego is regulated and led by such entities. Therefore, the naive belief that a protective being exists for the higher Ego is not unfounded. We know however, that the entities we call angels were still human beings when they were on the Moon. From human beings, they have evolved higher. Knowing this it is easy to understand that man also is on the way to becoming such a higher being himself and will be one on Jupiter. Thus, there is something in man, that works today towards a higher existence and is on the way to become such a being. He will then be of a nature similar to such angelic beings. Here we are looking deeply into the spiritual development of the world. However, what we have in front of us as a list of names, these should not be considered to be something permanent—but a description only of hierarchical levels.

When we now focus higher up on the archangels, we arrive at beings that once again have a different faculty of perception and a different type of activity. For them, even the plant world is not of interest, as it is not perceptible. Their perception only begins with the animal world. This is their lowest realm—followed by the human, angel and archangel realms—these are the four realms of these beings. Thus, we can say we are looking up to such sublime beings who reach down with their deeds only as far as the animal kingdom. They live in the animal and human kingdoms and so on, but their deeds do not reach down into the plant kingdom.

These facts were known to the earlier consciousness of human beings. We are allowed here to look deeply into the emotional life of earlier peoples and times. Just as our ancestors still felt aware of the deeds of angels in plants, they felt aware of the deeds of archangels in animals. For this reason, ancient people, such as the Egyptians, worshipped certain animals. This was an expression of the knowledge of mankind. Whoever looks at the curious figures, the subject of Egyptian animal worship, will stand in awe of the deep wisdom of those people. Not without reason did they connect these animals with higher beings and mankind. Let us keep in mind how the life of humans was always connected to the life of animals, how progress on Earth is connected to animals—certain aspects of man’s development depend on animals—then we will comprehend the deep foundation of animal worship.

What is the responsibility of the archangels? Nowadays, some people are still saying that something like a Folk Spirit exists. But for most people, this has become just empty talk, something abstract. Most people do not know a lot about the fact that a nation is actually led by a real Folk Spirit. This Folk Spirit is an archangel, for whom the whole nation is one body, just as a human body is for the human spirit. The Folk Spirits are the tribal spirits. Whilst the angels guide and lead individual people through their incarnations, the archangels lead the lives of whole groups, entire nations. Now we will understand why the Egyptians felt that the deity gave them certain animals as companions. It is because the lives of whole groups of people are deeply connected to the lives of certain animal species. They correctly saw the deeds of the Folk Spirit in this. They worshipped the power of the Folk Spirit, who had sent the animal companion to them.

You might ask me, if one could imagine a being that perceives all the separate organs of a human being but is unable to perceive him as a whole entity; such being would be unable to comprehend that these organs form a whole. So you could say, certainly, maybe today with his current perception man does not directly perceive the angels and archangels, but he might perceive what their organs, their ears, and their eyes are. Or, we might imagine that angels perceive plants, animals, humans and angels. What then are their sense organs? Maybe people could even perceive the sense organs of angels? Where are these? They exist and they can be perceived by human beings. Man just doesn’t know this.

The sense organs of the angelic beings will become understandable when I tell you that man himself has two eyes to see the mineral world with, but can not see the his eyes directly on himself. The sense organs are made for perception, but they do not perceive themselves. Thus, it is with the angels in the mineral world. Their sense organs can be found in the mineral physical world, but they do not perceive that world themselves. The sense organs of the angels are our precious gemstones. These are mysterious tools for angelic beings to perceive with. Thus, these organs lie within the mineral world. In the same way that the human being has his sense of feeling and his sense of touch, these beings possess their sense of feeling, which expresses itself in the carnelian; and their facial sense in the chrysolite. They simply do not perceive within the mineral world because their sense organs are in it. Even in this regard, we can find some dim consciousness amongst the ancient people who ascribe particular properties to certain precious stones. These properties derive from the presence of angels in them.

Therefore, what we mean by Folk Spirit is a very real presence within the beings who we call archangels. Let us now focus on the Primordial Forces, who are even one level higher. What is their responsibility with regard to the evolution of mankind? When looking at their faculties of perception, we have to say that the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are non-existent for them. The lowest realm that they perceive is the human realm. Including this, their perception stretches over four kingdoms—the human realm, the angel realm, the realm of the archangels, and their own realm. They reach down only as far as the level of human beings. Let us visit their activities. Again, we find an expression to which man has no real connection: the Spirit of an Epoch, of a Time. Each epoch has its own unique characteristics. For example, think of our post-Atlantean time. In five Epochs, the Spirit of Time has changed. Among the Indians, the Zeitgeist (the Spirit of Time) did not want to acknowledge the physical world, considering it to be Maya. This was immediately after a dawning clairvoyance had sunk in and the human being had stepped into the physical world. From then onwards, we see how man conquers the world bit by bit.

During the second epoch, amongst the Persians, man becomes aware that the Earth is a field of his work. He realises that he has to imprint his spirit on the material world. He confronts the benevolent spirit Ormuzd as a servant—time overcomes the evil Ahriman.

Then follows the third epoch, the Egyptian-Chaldaean-Babylonian time, where the spirit continues to work. The sciences appear. The human being not only understands the world as his working field, but he searches for its laws. The Egyptians discover geometry. The Chaldean is searching in outer space for a pattern of the movement of the stars, the world in its material substantiality, is thought to be pervaded by laws, that is, by spirit.

In the fourth epoch, the Greek era, man conquers one more piece of this other world through art. Greek art is something special because here the human being imprints his own “I-form” onto the material matter. Then, once again, a new epoch followed. We can continue to move on step by step, and would see how the Spirit of the Time changes itself. Just like the face of the Earth is transformed by the angels who are guiding the human “I”, and the archangels are leading the people of nations, so the consecutive epochs are determined by the Primordial Forces. Those beings that are standing behind the processes are incredibly important to observe. Separate human individuality is something different—and its work under the influence of the Spirits of the Epoch is something else again. Think of Giordano Bruno.² What has happened through him, has not been done by him alone. Had he incarnated three centuries earlier or later, he would have been an equally gifted individual, but he would have had to do something quite different, led by the Spirit of his Time. The Spirits of Time, who are an expression of the Primordial Forces that reach down into the human being, are positioning these people in the places where they belong. If you look at the individual human being as a tool of the Primordial Forces, as material of these Spirits, then you will understand their work. Wherever man appears in a large or small position, they have to be judged accordingly, for man is to the Primordial Forces what the minerals are to us. For all those concerned with the Science of the Spirit, the question always arises to what extent this or that personality is the material of the Spirits of the Epoch. One can gain deep insight into the workings and weaving of evolution when one observes how people are placed in the appropriate positions in the world.

Let us now ascent to the Powers, for whom man as such is no longer there at all. We can then imagine in a different way what is involved in the development of the forces of nature. The lowest realm that would possibly be accessible by the Powers’ perception is that of the angels. Angels are to these highly sublime beings what the mineral kingdom is to us. On other occasions, we have already pointed out the workings of these Powers: Everything that goes beyond the individual human being, that is connected to the affairs of the whole planet, are the deeds of these Powers. If we trace our Earth back to the time when it, and with it the human being, emerged as a gradually forming entity, then we return to the Primordial Forces.

But if we wish to look at the life and emergence of the Earth itself, then we have to return to the Powers. They have nothing to do with individual human beings, but rather with the planetary genesis. We find these Powers in the Sun and Moon forces within ourselves. We know that humanity as such stands under the influence of these Sun and Moon forces. If the Sun forces only would work, the warm, fiery, light-giving Sun forces, then the human being would develop very fast—he would rush through one life. The delaying force is the force of the Moon, compelling him to take on form. If only these forces were at work, man would live only once, have only one incarnation, then he would die and mummify in his form. Earth would be covered by statues. If solely the Sun forces were at work, man would also go through only one incarnation, but in this incarnation he would live through all that he would otherwise go through in countless incarnations.

The collaboration of both forces establishes the right balance so that the human being can develop the way he does. The Moon on its own would cause mummification. Now the Moon rules the one incarnation; the Sun rules the subsequent incarnations from the outside, whilst the angels work from the inside. The nature and weaving of the Powers is revealed to us here. They are quite correctly described in the Bible as the Spirits of Light or Elohim, who existed before the Earth was created. One of them is Yahweh, who forces the human beings into form. In the working and weaving of the Powers, we see what is connected to the life of the whole planet. Here we have an opportunity to gain deep insight into the foundation of our world’s evolution.

However, we have also already heard that certain beings always remain behind in their development. The current Powers were previously Primordial Forces on the Moon. But there are Primordial Forces of the Moon that did not complete their set tasks and who came onto the Earth as Primordial Forces. They had not developed fast enough, although they were candidates to become Powers. The most outstanding of these Primordial Forces, who could actually be at the level of the Powers, is the entity commonly called Satan. Thus, he is at the rank of the Primordial Forces and could even be a Power. Amongst the Spirits that move the world forward, this Epochal Spirit works against the others. He is such a force on Earth as would have fitted on the old Moon, and he is still intimately connected with the forces of the old Moon. He is the Master of all obstacles and inhibitions that are placed in the path of the progressive Epochal Spirits. You will comprehend what it means when it was said that, in his life, Jesus Christ had to first overcome Satan, the Opponent of Progress, just at the moment of the greatest progress. Christ wanted to lead mankind in a mighty step forward, but first he had to overcome this adversary as the inhibitor and disruptor of this development, who wanted to prevent the Primordial Forces of our Earth from advancing further. Christian Esotericism calls these unlawful Primordial Forces Satanic Powers.

What is often called Providence presents itself quite definitively in detail as a group of beings. If man would once again be able to research the connection between sensory appearances and spiritual beings, he would understand many things better. Everything that appears to us in this world is an expression of spiritual beings.

You know, for example, that the planets, the celestial bodies, perform certain movements around themselves and around others. Why does this happen? The movement of the Earth around its axis was not always there. Why did it come about? The reason is that the human being at its present stage of development needs the alternation between day and night, between sleeping and waking. The macrocosm is most intimately connected to the microcosm—through the division of time, life is being regulated. During the time of the old Moon, it was quite different. There was a completely different time allocation, a quite different alternation between day and night, because the old Moon moved entirely differently. Those beings who nowadays direct these movements, have prepared these already in their own lives. Spiritual beings are behind those movements which are their deeds. In the future, mankind will recognise a deep wisdom in those movements.

A deep wisdom lies in the so-called “orbit” of the Earth around the Sun. Man will one day realise that something incredibly significant is happening there. Aren’t you surprised that I am saying “so-called” orbit. What is today taught in schools about the way the Earth moves around the Sun, is only the result of a mathematical example. It is not absolutely true. One day this explanation will also take on quite different forms. Even from a historical perspective people could inform themselves that it is not like that. It is quite a strange issue with the system of Copernicus.³ He founded his beliefs on three basic principles, of which only two were adopted by today’s science, and the third one was dropped under the table. In reality, the Sun races with high speed through space towards the constellation of Hercules. A movement, as it is usually described, is only feigned by the fact that the planets also move along. The true path of the Earth forms a corkscrew line⁴ . What is called theobliquity of the ecliptic is the gravity line between Sun and Earth. One has forgotten that the Earth turns once a year around the axis of the ecliptic, and this rotation combines itself with the corkscrew turn. Copernicus still differentiated between those two things, but nowadays it is not done anymore. The movement with the ecliptic was dropped. Therefore, it is not compatible with the facts when one says that the Earth turns around the sun. In reality, it is a corkscrew movement.

If the corkscrew line were a straight line, then progress would be immensely faster—Earth would have to travel along its path with incredible speed, and that would be exactly what the human being couldn’t cope with.

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If the Earth would really pass through those spaces in a straight line, then man would become old immediately. As it is, the movement was amended in a wise way by the leading Spirits. The absolute progress is being delayed through a different way of movement. As you can see, there lies deep wisdom in the cosmos—this wisdom is the expression of the leading Spirits. We have been given angels and archangels as governors of our evolution. The forces that are working from incarnation to incarnation, that push man further, so that he will not become mummified, these are the governors of the future rotation times of Jupiter. Such Spirits that are standing above the human being and regulate his life, are therefore called the “Spirits of the Rotation of Time”, because their deeds will find expression later in the rotation times of the celestial bodies. The way the stars move today can be seen as the results of what higher beings have done in former times. In today’s humanity you can already recognise the future times of rotation. With this a tremendous spiritual life enters the celestial space, when we learn to look at it in this way.

Today, we only wanted to look at the characteristics of beings up to the Powers. We can imagine how the external is the expression of something internal. When what is said here fills humanity again, then much will change. We have now an immense low in academic education. The external progress is incompatible with the spiritual life. This would lead to a tremendous low if such truths were not made known and used to enlighten the science. People no longer know where to go with their materialistic science. Recently, a psychology book⁵ was published—one should not think that such a book has no effect just because the author is still unknown. The book explains that the law of the conservation of forces also applies to the soul, and that the inner manifestations of the soul consist only of a transformation of food. He roughly says, “For 10 years, it has been known with certainty that the so-called law of the conservation of forces is identical with the effects of the nervous system. One can prove that all that man absorbs in the form of energy from the consumption of food, is completely identical to that which he produces in work. Since one can prove exactly the same thing happens inside man as elsewhere in the world, there can, therefore, be no soul being. We are only dealing with the conversion of food into energy, which is given off again to the outside.”

This is a very smart conclusion. Just as well one could say: In front of a Bank are two people counting money that is carried in and out. The amounts are equal, therefore inside the bank there are no staff. But is not staff needed to manage everything? This example is on the same level as the psychologist’s opinion and a large part of what figures as science today. Everyone who even somehow considers this matter can imagine what a spiritual culture that thinks so little would lead to. It is necessary to possess spiritual knowledge, for only here the single real impulse is given to the development of humanity. If the human being does not find out what is behind the manifestations, then the world cannot be understood. One must arrive at the great, far-reaching, all-embracing laws, at the relationships of beings and worlds.

• 1. Refer to Dionysius Areopagita: The Hierarchies of the Angels and the Church, Barth Publishing House, Munich 1955. Dionysius Areopagita was a student of the Apostle Paul, by whom he was initiated into Christian esoteric. Initially his teachings were conveyed only verbally, and were written down only in the 5^th 1
• 2. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600, Italian Philosopher.
• 3. Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473-1543, astronomer, founder of the modern heliocentric view of the cosmos.
• 4. See also to the more detailed description, of later years, of this topic inCorrespondences between Microcosm and Macrocosm. Man—Hieroglyph of the Universe, GA 201, and in The Relation of the different Branches of Natural Science to Astronomy, GA 323. 4
• 5. em>Outline of Psychology, Leipzig, 1908, by Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), Professor of Philosophy in Halle, Leipzig. Ebbinghaus’ views, that Rudolf Steiner summarised, can be found in his book, page 37, in the section headed Interaction and Parallelism. He says there, “Since about one decade.... the preservation of energy in higher beings, for example in dogs, yes, recently also in humans, has been proven by experiments..... the source of the energy flow lies in the food consumed”. Ebbinghaus’ presentation culminates in the sentence, “Also in the organism of the human being there is consequently no space for the free activity of independent souls”.

It now falls to me to speak of things that have arisen in the course of our anthroposophical life, of spiritual scientific research gleaned from the Akasha Chronicle and related to the life of Jesus. In Kristiania, I have already compiled some material about the life of Christ Jesus. I have also communicated various things in other cities, and I would like to say a few words to you as well, from certain points of view. In general, I emphasize that it will not be easy to talk about it, because direct results are still quite badly noted in the present, even if it is generally admitted that there is a spirit that one speaks of abstractly. But when one gives concrete messages from the field of the spiritual development of the world, one finds not only well-meaning critics, but also those who have gone wild, as was the case with the message about the two Jesus children, which is very plausible for the objective thinker. Therefore, I ask that today's messages be treated with reverence, because if they are presented outside of our context, they may be misunderstood and experience fierce opposition.

But there are also aspects according to which one feels obliged to communicate these things. One aspect is that in our time there is a real need for a renewal of the understanding of Christ Jesus, a renewed looking into what actually happened in Palestine, what took place as the Mystery on Golgotha. But there is yet another aspect. This is that occult insight is interwoven with the whole attitude that flows from spiritual science, and this brings us the realization of how infinitely healthy and invigorating it is for the human soul when they can often think of what they can consider to be one of the greatest events. It can be a help to these souls to remember the Mystery of Golgotha, to remember the concrete things, to remember what can still be investigated in detail today. And today one can still investigate things with occult insight. So I would like to emphasize the spiritual value of remembering such events and would like to go into some of the things that emerge from the Akasha Chronicle as a kind of gospel, as the Fifth Gospel. The four others were not written simultaneously either; they were written under the inspiration of the Akashic Records. We live today in an age in which the words of Christ Jesus are being fulfilled: “I am with you always.” In special times, he is especially close to us, proclaiming new things that have been fulfilled at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Today I want to speak of what is called the Pentecost event. For me, it was the starting point of the Fifth Gospel. I first turned my gaze to the souls of the apostles and disciples, who were not only gathered according to tradition, but were truly gathered at the time of Pentecost. There one saw that there was something in their souls that they felt like a strange coming to themselves. For they knew something that had happened to them. They said to each other: We have experienced something in a remarkable way. — For they looked back on experiences that they had gone through as in a higher dream, in a different state of consciousness. In a higher sense it was as it is in a lower sense for the individual human being when he has experienced something while dreaming and remembers it and says to himself: I have gone through this dream and now afterwards it becomes clear to me before waking consciousness. - So it was also at the Feast of Pentecost that they said to themselves: It was as if the ordinary consciousness had been put to sleep. The events emerged as if in memory, which they knew they had experienced, but they had not experienced them with their ordinary daily consciousness. They knew that now. So they now remembered: We once walked with him who was so dear, so precious and valuable to us. Then, at a certain point in time, it was as if he had been taken from us. It seemed to them as if the memory of walking with Jesus on the physical plane had been interrupted, and as if they had experienced what followed as if in a dream.

Going back in time, they experienced what is described in the Protestant doctrine as the Ascension, and going back further, they experienced being with Christ Jesus in a certain way. They now knew: We were together, but we were like dreamers back then; only now can we fully know how we were with him. — They experienced the time they had spent with him like dreamers after the resurrection. They now experienced this in their memories. Then they went back and experienced for themselves what the resurrection and death on the cross was. I can say that there is a tremendous, profound impression when one first sees, as at the Feast of Pentecost, the souls of the apostles looking back at the event of Golgotha. And I must confess that at first I had the impression of not looking directly at the Mystery of Golgotha, but of looking into the souls of the Apostles as they had seen it, looking from the Feast of Pentecost: after all, they had not actually experienced it with their physical eyes, had not consciousness, but only afterwards did they realize that the Mystery of Golgotha was there, for their physical consciousness ceased to be aware of it some time before Christ Jesus had to undergo all that is described as flagellation, crowning with thorns and crucifixion. If the expression is not misunderstood because it is relatively trivial, I would still like to use it: the disciples had dozed off and dreamt through what had happened.

It was touching to see how, for example, Peter accomplishes what is described as a denial. He denies Christ, but not out of a moral defect; rather, he is as if in a dream. In fact, in his ordinary consciousness, the connection with Christ does not exist. He is asked: “Do you belong to Christ Jesus?” At that moment he does not know, for his etheric body had undergone such a transformation that he is not aware of the connection at that moment. He endures the whole time and walks with the Risen One. What the Risen One accomplishes in his soul penetrates deeply into his soul, but it only becomes conscious in retrospect at the Feast of Pentecost. Now the meaningful words that Christ Jesus speaks sound differently in the soul, the words that he speaks to Peter and James as he takes them with him up the mountain: “Watch and pray!” And indeed they fell into a kind of different state of consciousness, into a kind of dream trance.

When they were together and in consultation, Christ Jesus was also among them in the etheric body, without them knowing it, and He spoke with them and they with Him, but for them it all happened as if in a dream. It only became a conscious event in retrospect at the Feast of Pentecost. First they went with Him, then consciousness disappeared and afterwards they woke up again. They thought: First he went to his death on the cross and died on the cross, then what the resurrection is took place, and he came again in his spiritual body, dealt with us and let the secrets of the world trickle into our souls. Now all this is presented to us, which we have experienced in the other state of consciousness.

Above all, two impressions are deeply significant. There are the hours before death. Of course, it is tempting to make all kinds of scientific objections; but if you imagine that, by directing your gaze to the Akasha Chronicle, the events are objective reality, then you may relate them. First of all, there is one thing that presents itself. Before one's death, one sees an eclipse lasting several hours spreading over the earth, which gives the clairvoyant the impression of a solar eclipse; but it could also have been an eclipse of the clouds. Then one can perceive how, at the moment of dying on the cross, the Christ Impulse, passing through this eclipse, unites with the earth aura. The connection of the cosmic Christ impulse with the earth aura can be seen in this eclipse before his death. Then one has that great, powerful impression, as this entity, which lived in the body of Jesus, now pours itself out over the spiritual-soul aura of the earth, so that the souls of men are now, henceforth, as if drawn into it. To see in spirit the cross on Golgotha, and to see the Christ pour out over earthly life through the darkened earth, is an enormously overwhelming impression; for one sees in the picture that which had to take place for the development of mankind on earth.

And now the Entombment: here one can follow, as I already mentioned in the Karlsruhe cycle, how a natural event presents itself as the outer expression of a spiritual event. When Christ lay in the tomb, a mighty earthquake with a whirlwind came over the earth. It was particularly significant that it turned out, also from the Akasha Chronicle, what we today call the Fifth Gospel: that after the whirlwind the cloths lay in the tomb, as it is faithfully described in the Gospel of John. What I have now described, the apostles experienced as the Mystery of Golgotha when looking back at their own encounters with Christ after the resurrection. At Pentecost, they first experienced for their consciousness what they had gone through as if in a dream. |

Christ Jesus was truly alone when He accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha, for His disciples had not only fled, but their consciousness had also fled. They were in a kind of dream state and experienced the events in such a way that it was only at Pentecost that they had a full retrospective in their consciousness. In a peculiar way they experienced this meeting with Christ after the resurrection, so that they saw the following in pictures: Here and there we were with him, he spoke; only now do we realize this. But now they experienced something strange. They saw the pictures of their experiences with Christ as they corresponded to their being together after the resurrection. But to them it was as if another one always showed up in alternation: an image always appeared that reminded them of a physical togetherness that they had experienced as if in a dream trance. But two events always presented themselves to them: a being together after the resurrection and a being together before they had fallen into a trance, when they were still in the physical body with Christ, recognizable to the physical consciousness. The events appeared to them as two superimposed images. One showed a memory of a physical event, the other a reawakening of what they had gone through with Christ in a different state of consciousness. This superimposition of two images made it clear to them what had actually taken place in time. What had taken place for the development on earth was clearly evident to them at the Feast of Pentecost. If one wants to describe what they went through, one is confronted with two grandiose and profound events. What had taken place was evoked by the Pentecost event. But that which had been in the cosmos earlier is now on earth, that is what presented itself to them. All this only becomes clear to us when we see it in the Akasha Chronicle.

Let us start with the experiences that a person has. Before descending to a new earthly incarnation, a person first experiences spiritual facts. He then goes through the state of the germ and birth, passes through the material body into physical life on earth and finally returns to the spiritual world. This is the development of his soul. These stages are different for every being. We will try to apply them to the Christ-being.

Christ passes through his states in a different way. From his baptism to the mystery of Golgotha there is a kind of germinal state. His dying on the cross is his birth, his life with the apostles after his resurrection is a wandering on earth. The transition into the earth aura is what the transition into the spiritual world is for the human soul. Exactly the opposite occurs for Christ. He seeks the opposite for his destiny. The human soul goes from the earth into the spiritual world, the Christ goes from the spiritual world into the earthly sphere, unites with the earth in order to pass over into the earth aura through the great sacrifice. This is the transition of the Christ to Devachan. And now in the earth aura, the Christ lives his self-chosen Devachan. Man ascends from earth to heaven; the Christ, conversely, descends from heaven to earth to live with men. This is his Devachan.

The fact that the God has thus entered into His earthly existence, appeared to the minds of the Apostles and disciples at Pentecost, in the image of the Ascension, actually of the descent to earth, as one of the last events. Thus it was clear to their feelings what had happened, what fate had befallen the evolution of the earth. At Pentecost, the Apostles felt transformed and filled with a new awareness: that was the descent of the Spirit, the inner illumination of a spirit-filled realization.

Of course, when recounting these events, one can appear to people to be a dreamer or a fantasist, but on the other hand it is understandable that the great events that have taken place in earthly life cannot be expressed in ordinary terms. Then the disciples saw, looking back, only now understanding, the three-year life of Christ Jesus from the baptism of John to the mystery of Golgotha. I would like to make a few remarks about this life.

I would like to start with a description of the events as they present themselves to the observer of the Akashic Records. Before the baptism of John in the Jordan, the spiritual gaze falls on an event of a very special kind in the life of Jesus, into which the Christ had not yet poured himself. At that time, Jesus, in his thirtieth year, had a conversation with his stepmother or foster mother. From the age of twelve, he was not with his biological mother, but an ever deeper bond had developed between Jesus and his stepmother. I have already related the experiences of Jesus from the age of twelve to eighteen, to twenty-four, to thirty. These were profound events. Here I would like to tie in with an event that took place before the baptism of John. It is a conversation with the foster mother. It was a conversation in which Jesus of Nazareth let his soul pass before his mother, everything he had experienced since the age of twelve. There he was able to tell her, so that his words were imbued with deep, powerful feelings, what he had actually experienced in his soul, more or less alone. He told her vividly and forcefully. He spoke of how, during these years, from his twelfth to his eighteenth, the high teachings of God, once revealed to the Hebrew prophets, had come as an illumination to his soul. For that is what had come to Jesus as an inspiration during the period from his twelfth to his eighteenth year. It had begun when he had been in the temple among the scribes. It was an inspiration, as it was once revealed to the prophets in the great, ancient times. It happened that he had to suffer pain under the impression of these inner realizations. It had become deeply ingrained in his soul: the old truths were given to the Hebrew people at a time when their bodies were such that they could understand them. But now their bodies were no longer suited to receive it, as they were in the time of the old prophets.

A word must be pronounced that characterizes the tremendously painful experience in the life of Jesus; in the abstract, one must say it, although it is an enormously incisive word. There was a language in the Hebrew period that came down from the spiritual-divine realm. Now the old language rose up again, shining forth from the soul, but there was no one to understand it. One would preach to deaf ears when speaking of the greatest teachings. This was Jesus' greatest sorrow; he described it to his stepmother.

Then he described a second event that he had experienced on his travels during his eighteenth to twenty-fourth year in the regions of Palestine where pagans lived. He traveled around and worked as a carpenter. In the evening he sat with the people. It was a gathering that people did not experience with anyone else. Through the great pain, something had developed in him that finally transformed into the magic of love that flowed through every word. This magic of words worked in conversation with people. What had such a great effect was that something like a mysterious power was poured out between his words. It was so significant that long after he had left, the people sat together again in the evening and it seemed to them as if he were still there, more than just physically. They sat together and had the impression, had the shared vision, as if he were reappearing. So he remained alive among the people in numerous places, he was spiritually present.

Once he arrived at a place where there was an old pagan cult altar. The sacrificial altar had fallen into disrepair. The priests had left because a terrible disease had taken hold of the people there. When Jesus came there, people gathered. Jesus announced himself through the impression he created as something special. The gentile people had rushed there and gathered around the altar, expecting a priest to offer a sacrifice. Jesus told his stepmother this. He saw clearly what had become of the gentile sacrificial service. He saw, as he looked over the people, what had gradually become of the gentile gods: evil, demonic entities, that is what he saw at that time. Then he fell down and now, in a different state of consciousness, he experienced what happened during the pagan sacrifices. The old gods were no longer there, as they had been in earlier times, but demonic entities appeared, feeding on the people and making them ill.

He had experienced this in a different state of consciousness after he had fallen. Now he told all this, and also how the people had fled, but also how he saw the demons withdraw. Theoretically, one can determine that the old paganism had declined and no longer contained the great wisdom of the past. But Jesus experienced this in direct vision. Now he could tell his mother: If the voice of heaven were to come down to the Hebrews again, as it once came to the prophets, there would be no one to understand it; but the pagan gods no longer come either. Demons have taken their place. Today, even the pagan revelations find no one who could receive them. — That was the second great pain.

In moving words, he described to his mother the third great sorrow he had experienced, when he was allowed to join the Essene community. These people wanted to work their way up to seeing by perfecting the individual human soul, and thus to learn from the divine worlds what would otherwise be impossible for Jews and Gentiles to perceive. But only a few people could experience this, and that could be achieved through the way of life that had become established among the Essenes. Yet Jesus had united with the occult community of the Essenes for a time. When he left them, he saw Lucifer and Ahriman fleeing from the Essene gate into the rest of the world. He had also had a visionary conversation with Buddha within the Essene enclosure. And now he knew: there is a way to ascend to where one unites with the Divine-Spiritual, but only a few can reach it. If everyone wanted to achieve it, everyone would have to renounce it. Only a few can achieve it at the expense of the many, by freeing themselves from Lucifer and Ahriman; but then Lucifer and Ahriman go to the other humanity. It was not possible, either according to the Jewish or the Gentile or Essene tradition, to open up the essential connection with the divine spiritual world to humanity in general.

During this conversation, Jesus' whole soul was united with all the pain. All the strength of his ego lay in these words. Something passed from him to his adoptive mother, so strongly was he connected with what he was saying. His being passed over to his mother with his words, so that he was as if outside of his ego, had stepped out of his ego. The mother became something completely different as a result. While something had gone out of him, the mother had received a new self that had sunk into her, she had become a new personality.

If one now investigates and tries to find out what this process consisted of, a strange thing emerges: the physical mother of this Jesus, who had been in the spiritual world since he was twelve, had now descended with her soul and completely spiritualized and filled the soul of the adoptive mother so that she became another. But he felt as if his ego had left him: the Zarathustra ego had passed over into the spiritual world. Driven by the urge to do something, Jesus now went to the Jordan, impelled by inner necessity, to John the Baptist, the Essene. And John performed the “baptism in the Jordan. The Zarathustra-I had gone out and the Christ-Being descended: He had been imbued with the Christ-Essence. The adoptive mother had been imbued with the soul of that mother who had dwelt in the spiritual world. But He now walked on earth in the bodies of Jesus, He, the Christ. This connection was not immediately and completely established; both happened gradually.

I will tell the individual events from which it can be seen how the Christ was initially only loosely connected to the body of Jesus and gradually became more and more firmly connected to it. Once you have become acquainted with the suffering and pain of Jesus from the age of twelve to thirty, you are only now becoming acquainted with the tremendous increase in this pain of Jesus, now that in the following three years God connected more and more with man. This continuous, ever more intense connection of the God with the human being was an equally intense increase of pain. That unspeakable thing had to happen to make it possible for humanity to ascend to the spiritual powers of origin, that is shown by the suffering of the God during the three years that he stayed on earth.

It is not to be expected that there will be much understanding for these events in the present time. There is a book that should be read because of its paradox: 'Death', by Maurice Maeterlinck. This book says that the spirit cannot suffer, only the body can suffer. In fact, the physical body can suffer no more than a stone. Physical pain is mental pain. Only that which is spiritual, which has an astral body, can suffer. That is why a God can suffer much more than a human being. The Christ experienced sufferings unto death, the most intense of which occurred when the Christ united with the presence of Jesus. He conquered death by merging with the earth aura.

Earlier I described in a more abstract way how the Christ event stands at the center of the evolution of the earth. This most important event loses nothing when it is considered in its concrete reality. Everything comes to life when all the facts are described, but it must be seen correctly. Once the Fifth Gospel is available – humanity will need it, perhaps only after a long time – people will look at this most important event in a different way. The Fifth Gospel will be a source of comfort and health, a book of strength. At the end of the fourth gospel there are words that indicate that more will come: the world would not be able to grasp the books that would have to be written. - This is a true word. One can take courage in another way when new facts about Palestine come to light, because the four gospels actually came about in the same way as the fifth, except that this fifth will appear two thousand years later.

Once the Fifth Gospel is here, it will be no different from the others in the way it came about. But there will be people who will not recognize it because the human soul is selfish. Suppose Shakespeare's work “Hamlet” was unknown and “Hamlet” appeared today: today people would scold him. And so the Fifth Gospel will have to struggle through. People need something that those who want to understand will really understand. It will only be necessary to acknowledge that, as in the past, revelations can only come from the spirit. But the means and ways to do so are different. In this respect, our time has special tasks.

In what period did what I have described take place? It could only take place in the same period as the one in which it occurred: the fourth post-Atlantean period. If it had occurred in the third or second period, for example, there would have been numerous people who were familiar with the ancient wisdom of the Indians, for whom the wisdom would have been self-evident. Christ would have been less understood in the Persian and still less in the Egyptian period. But understanding was completely lost in the fourth period. Therefore, the teaching could only penetrate minds as a matter of faith. It was the worst time for understanding, which people were furthest from. But the effects of Christ do not depend on what people can understand. For Christ was not a teacher of the world, but He Who, as a spiritual Entity, had accomplished something, Who had descended into the aura of the Earth in order to live among men. This can be symbolized in the soul when the women came to the tomb and the spiritual Being said to them: “He whom you seek is not here!”

This was repeated when a large group of Europeans went on a crusade to the Holy Sepulchre. There people went to the physical sites of Golgotha. They were also told: “He whom you seek is no longer here! for he had gone to Europe. While the pilgrims were drawn to Asia by their hearts, Europe began to awaken intellectually, but the understanding of Christ was on the wane. It was only in the 12th century that the demand for proofs of God's existence arose. What does this tell us about more recent times? Do you ever need to prove who the thief is when you catch him in your garden? You only need proof if you do not know him. People sought proof of God when they had lost their understanding; because what you know, you do not need to prove.

Christ was there, permeating the souls. Everything that has happened historically has happened under the influence of the Christ, because the souls lived in the Christ impulse. Now humanity must enter into a conscious grasp of the events of the time. Therefore, humanity must get to know the Christ even better. Linked to this is the realization of the man Jesus of Nazareth. This will become more and more necessary. It is not easy to speak about this, but in a certain respect it is something that presents itself as a higher duty in the present time: to speak to a few souls about the man Jesus of Nazareth, to speak about what we can call the Fifth Gospel.