The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would well understand if anybody considered the whole idea of this talk as an aberration. I would also understand if anybody said how one can abuse Goethe's name while making a relationship to spiritual science, because it is sufficiently known that Goethe's view is typical just because it is directed to the outer nature, and it regarded it as rather dubious to raise the lawfulness of the world to ideal heights, as Schiller did it. Then one can say how Goethe would have behaved negatively if one had related his mental pictures to that which accepts a concrete real spirit from particular inner experiences that places itself beside the natural world. I know very well that to the production of such relation such a rich spirit can be abused like Goethe. Since if one still brings in so many remarks of Goethe to confirm this or that own view, it is always possible of course to bring in other remarks of Goethe to confirm the opposite opinion. However, compared with all that I am allowed to mention from the start that I never wanted in case of my really long-standing occupation with Goethe and the Goethean worldview to state these or those contents of a Goethean sentence to confirm the worldview meant here. I always wanted to characterise the whole way, the inner structure of Goethe's soul life in its relation to the natural phenomena. Since it seems to me if one goes into the inner structure of Goethe's nature that one will also gain an understanding of the fact that such a spirit like Goethe expressed apparently opposite views about the same. One can always easily argue something can from the most different sides against the intention to connect Goethe with the investigation of spiritual life.

At first the philosophers feel called because of their ability of thinking if it concerns the investigation of the supersensible compared with the sensory. One has always reminded that Goethe characterised the whole way of his position to the world repeatedly while he said, he owes everything that he got as knowledge about the world to the fact that he never thought about thinking. With it, the whole philosophical attitude of Goethe seems to be condemned to many philosophically thinking people.

It seems necessary to reject Goethe's nature for the investigation of the world as far as one has to exceed with such an investigation what it presents immediately to the senses. On the other side, religious people who want to direct the soul to a world that is beyond the sensory, of course, are irked by such a concise sentence as he did. He always felt it unpleasant to the highest degree to speak of things of another world. He expresses himself even once about the fact in such a way that he says, as a spot is in the eye, which sees, actually, nothing, a cavity is in the human brain. If this hollow place, which actually sees nothing, dreams all kinds of stuff in the world, so one speaks of such nullities like of the things of another world. When Goethe said this, he also pointed to the fact, that such a person inclined to the spiritual like Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) was worried if one spoke only of the things of another world. Goethe agrees with Hamann in this respect completely. In the most vigorous way, Goethe refused to speak of the things of another world. Yes, the naturalists themselves, although on them the influence of Goethe has worked strongly, can refer if they stand quite sincerely on the ground of modern natural sciences to the fact that Goethe showed, for example, in his theory of colours that he never could penetrate into the strictly scientific way of research that this never was adequate to him, and that he came just thereby to a view deviating from the ruling theory of colours.

Now here it cannot be my task to justify the Goethean natural sciences. I have done this in a number of writings. Today it should be only my task to attach some connections from spiritual science to the Goethean natural sciences. Above all, I would like to go back to something that is exceptionally typical with this spirit for someone who approaches Goethe: the refusal of thinking about thinking. One has the sensation with the Goethean worldview where one only wants to recognise it, that Goethe himself was afraid instinctively of submitting the thinking itself to a consideration. He shrank from it as from something that constitutes, otherwise, the strength of his worldview. At such a place where Goethe characterises himself, you have to stop, because you can rather deeply look from here into the structure of the Goethean mind. If one considers just philosophically disposed people who have struggled with that which the thinking means for the human soul, you can realise if you make the thinking an object of observation like other objects of our world experience that you always evoke something in the soul that appears like an insurmountable obstacle. While you direct the thinking to the thinking itself, you cause a sum of uncertainties in the human being. Although you have always to ask yourself if you want to investigate the supersensible seriously: is this human thinking able to penetrate into the spiritual world?—You still face doubt, indecision.

As a single factual proof of it which could be increased a hundred times I would like to quote the sentence of a thinker who is less famous, indeed, who, however, is counted by those who know him among the deepest ones, among the most impressive thinkers of our time, Professor Gideon Spicker (1840-1912), the philosopher with the strange destiny who has worked his way out of a confessional ecclesiastical worldview to a free philosophical viewpoint. You can pursue how there once a thinking really soared by own power from a traditional viewpoint to a free one if you read his book At the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. The Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin that appeared in 1910 as a kind of philosophical autobiography. You find the following sentence there that describes a self-experience with the thinking:

“To whichever philosophy you confess—whether to a dogmatic or skeptical one, to an empiric or transcendental one, to a critical or eclectic one—any without exception takes an unproven and unprovable sentence as starting point, namely the necessity of the thinking. No investigation figures this necessity out one day, as deeply as it may prospect. One must accept it and one can reason it with nothing; every attempt to prove its correctness already requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a spooky darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know where from it comes nor where to it leads. It is uncertain whether a merciful god or a bad demon put it in the reason.”

This is a self-experience of a thinking which tried to bring to mind what is, actually, a thinking which has struggled to grasp the human being in the point where it thinks to find that in this point where the temporal, the transient of the human being is connected with the everlasting. To this point everybody must come who wants to approach the everlasting nature of the human being. However, what does Gideon Spicker find? He finds if one has arrived at the place where one can consider the thinking, indeed, the necessity of the thinking appears, but there also a bottomless abyss appears. Since beyond this thinking—what is there? Is it a merciful god or a bad demon who put the thinking in the reason? An abyss, a desolate darkness is that what Gideon Spicker sees. One can find out immediately that those who cannot get further with the pursuit of thinking than up to the thinking cannot still satisfy themselves within this thinking.

All that is like a spiritually instinctive experience in Goethe's healthy worldview. One cannot say that he was prepared in his inside one day to bring the bottomless abyss home to himself of which Gideon Spicker speaks. However, Goethe felt that such a thing could happen if one wants to solve the world riddles only with the mere thinking. Hence, he did not approach at all this point. We will see immediately which deeper impulses formed the basis of this Goethean instinct. For the time being I only wanted to point out that Goethe was very well at that point where the philosophers are if they want to investigate the everlasting in the human being and in the world that he avoided, however, this point, did not approach it.

You can understand Goethe's character immediately if he does not defer to things of another world. There just the oppose impulse appears with him who argued from immediate spiritual instinctiveness that one does not need to go out of the world which presents itself immediately to the senses to find the spirit. Goethe was clear in his mind that someone who is able to find the spirit does not need to search it in another world, and vice versa, that someone who feels nature as little filled with spirit so that he needs to reflect on another world can only find fantastic, dreamy things in another world but never really the spirit. Goethe searched the spirit so much within the things of this world that he had to refuse to search it in any other world. He already regarded the feeling that one must leave this world to get to the spirit as something brainless.

In particular, you get an impression of the kind of the Goethean world observation if you look at how Goethe behaved to the phenomena of nature how he searched the spirit and the spiritual life really in nature. You know that Goethe did not study the various fields of natural sciences during his school years but approached them only later in his life and that he had to manage the phenomena of nature with mental pictures that he had compiled in his life. Herman Grimm emphasised rightly as a significant characteristic feature in the life of Goethe that, while others are introduced by teachers gradually methodically in this or that scientific approach, Goethe approached scientific attempts as a ripe man by life praxis, so that he had to form own mental pictures of these or those natural phenomena with a certain maturity.

As a rule, he got to mental pictures, which deviated significantly from that what about the same things just the authoritative scientists of his time meant. One can say that the Goethean viewpoint is diametrically opposed not only to the natural sciences of his time but also to the natural sciences of the present in a certain respect.

It is inadmissible if from some side single remarks of Goethe are picked out repeatedly to prove the views of Haeckel or also of his opponents one-sidedly. One can prove and confirm everything with Goethe if one wants it. Goethe got to botany because he wanted to care about the agriculture in the Grand Duchy of Weimar, so out of life praxis. He got to geology by the Ilmenau (little town in Thuringia) mining, to physics because the scientific collections of the University of Jena had been assigned to him. Therefore, from necessity of life he tried to get mental pictures by which he could penetrate into the secrets of nature. You know that he formed views this way that found their confirmation partly in the course of the nineteenth century, as far as they point to outer scientific facts. However, Goethe did not get these views like other naturalists, but rather he was urged by his enclosing way of thinking to think in a way about certain natural processes and essentialities. You can say that immediately with his first, epoch-making discovery this is the case.

When Goethe became acquainted with zoology and human biology by observing the anatomical and physiological collections in Jena, he also familiarised himself with all kinds of teachings which were usual in natural sciences at that time about the human being as sensory being. One looked in those days still for outer differences of the human being and the animals. One looked in a way that the modern natural sciences do no longer understand.

One linked, for example, the difference to a detail, while one stated that in the upper jaw of the human being no intermaxillary existed, while all higher animals would have this bone. Goethe disliked this, simply because he could not imagine at first that the remaining skeleton of the human being would differ in such an unimportant detail. Now Goethe looked, while he himself became an anatomical researcher, while he investigated skeleton after skeleton and compared the human construction to the animals in relation to the upper jaw whether that had an inner significance what the anatomists said. Then Goethe could show really that there is no difference between the human and the animal skeletons in this respect. He already consulted the embryological research that became especially important later and showed that with the human being relatively early during the embryonic development the other parts of the upper jaw grow together with the intermaxillary so that it does not seem to exist with the human being. Goethe had become clear in his mind that it was right what he had felt first that the human being is different from the animals not by such an anatomical detail, but only by his whole posture. Of course, Goethe thereby did not become a materialistic thinker. However, he could get closer to the ideas that immediately suggested themselves to him, above all, by his acquaintance with Herder (Johann Gottfried H., 1744-1803) who wanted to extend an enclosing way of thinking to all world phenomena, so that the evolution of the world shows an inner necessity that finally generates the human being at its summit.

How can one imagine, Goethe thought in harmony with Herder, that in the evolution a big harmony, an inner lawful necessity prevails, and that then suddenly somewhere a line is drawn so that on this side of the line the complete animal development is and beyond this line the human development which should be different by such an unimportant detail? One can realise from how Goethe speaks, what was near and dear to him, actually. Not to make a single scientific discovery, but to behold a harmonious order in the whole enclosing nature, so that the details put themselves everywhere in a whole so that jumps are nowhere to be found in the evolution of the world. You can notice in a letter to Herder in which he informed his discovery joyfully with the words: “It is there too, the small bone!” that Goethe found something like a confirmation of his worldview in this single fact.

He continued this view just in relation on the animal forms. There he got also to single facts that were important, however, for him not as those, but confirmed his worldview only. He himself tells that he found an animal skull at his stay in Venice on a cemetery that showed him clearly that the cranial bones are nothing but transformed vertebrae. He thought that the ring-shaped vertebrae contain concealed possibilities of growth, can be transformed into the cranial bones that surround the brain. Goethe thereby got to the idea that the human being and the animal, the different beings of organic life generally, are built from relatively simple entities that develop in living metamorphosis into each other or diverge.

One can immediately receive the sensation with the research intentions of Goethe that he wanted to apply this idea of metamorphosis not only to the skeleton, but also to all other parts of the human being. He could carry out his research only on a special field because one human being cannot do everything, and because he worked with limited research means. Someone who knows Goethe's scientific writings knows that Goethe carefully indicated the cranial bones as transformed dorsal vertebrae. However, one can just have the feeling that Goethe's ideas advanced farther in this field. He would generally have had to carry the view in his mind that the complete human brain is only a transformed part of the spinal cord as a physical-sensory organ that the human formative forces are able to transform what is only a part of the spinal cord on a low level into the complex human brain.

I had this feeling when I received the task in the end of 1889 to incorporate the handwritten notes in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive into Goethe's scientific writings published until then. It was especially interesting to me to pursue whether such ideas have really lived in Goethe from which one could have the feeling that they must have been there, actually, with him. In particular, it interested me whether Goethe really had the idea to regard the brain as a transformed part of the spinal cord. Lo and behold, with the examination of the manuscripts it really resulted that Goethe had written the following sentence in a notebook with pencil like an intuition: “The brain is only a transformed cerebral ganglion.” Then the anatomist Bardeleben (Karl von B., 1849-1919) revised this part of Goethe's scientific writings.

Then Goethe applied the same way of thinking to the plant realm. There his views concerning the outer facts have found just as little contradiction as in anatomy. Goethe interprets, actually, the whole plant as composed of a single organ. This organ is the leaf. Backward and forward, the plant is always leaf. The coloured petal is the transformed green leaf, also the stamens and the pistil are to him only transformed leaves, and everything of the plant is leaf. That what lives in the plant leaf as formative force can accept all possible outer forms. Goethe explained this so nicely in his writing Metamorphosis of Plants (1790).

Howsoever one may behave now to the details with Goethe, the way is important how he generally did research. This was and is to many people something strange. Goethe himself was clear about that. Imagine how the human soul that looks at the organic world in Goethe's sense sees such an organ like the plant leaf changing into the petal, then into the filamentous stamen, even into the root. Imagine a simple ring-shaped dorsal vertebra fluffed and flattened by laws of growth, so that it is qualified for enclosing not only the spinal cord, but also the brain which itself is transformed from a part of the spinal cord, and that the inner mobility of his thinking is necessary. He probably felt what prevents us from looking at the world phenomena this way. Someone who has a rigid thinking who wants to develop sharply outlined concepts only forms the firm concept of the green leaf, of the petal and so on; however, he cannot go over from one concept to the other. In doing so, nature breaks into nothing but details. He does not have the possibility because his concepts have no inner mobility to penetrate into the inner mobility of nature.

However, thereby you become able to settle down in Goethe's soul and to convince yourself of the fact that with him cognition is generally something else than with many other people. While with many other people, cognition is joining of concepts which they form apart, cognition is with Goethe immersing in the world of the beings, pursuing that what grows and becomes and transforms perpetually, so that his thinking changes perpetually. Briefly, Goethe sets that in inner motion, which is mere thinking, otherwise. Then it is no longer a mere thinking. About that, I will speak in detail in the next talks. It matters that the human being arouses the only inferring thinking to the inner living thinking. Then thinking is a life in thoughts. Then one can also no longer think about the thinking, but then it generally changes into something else.

Then the thinking about the thinking changes into a spiritual view of thinking, then one faces the thinking as usual outer sensory objects, save that one perceives these with eyes and ears, while one faces the thinking mentally. Goethe wanted to go over everywhere from the mere thinking to the inner spiritual views, to the beholding consciousness as I have called it in my book The Riddle of Man. Hence, Goethe is dissatisfied because Kant said that the human being cannot approach the so-called “things in themselves” or generally the secret of existence, and that Kant called it an “adventure of reason” if the human being wants to ascend from the usual faculty of judgement up to the “beholding faculty of judgement.”

Goethe said, if one accepts that the human being can ascend by virtue and immortality—the so-called postulates of practical reason with Kant—to a higher region, why one should not stand the “adventure of reason” courageously while beholding nature? Goethe demands from the human being this beholding faculty of judgement. From this point, one can understand why Goethe avoided the thinking about the thinking. Goethe knew that if one wants to think about the thinking one is, actually, in the same position, as if one wanted to paint the painting. One could imagine that anybody wants to paint the painting even that he does it. However, then he exceeds the real painting.

In the same way, you have to exceed the thinking if it should become concrete. Goethe knew from a spiritual instinct that the human being can wake concealed forces and abilities in himself and get to the beholding consciousness, so that the spiritual world is around him, just as, otherwise, the sensory world is around his senses. Then you leave as it were not only your usual sensory life but also your usual thinking. Then you look at the thinking as a reality. You cannot think the thinking; you can behold it. Hence, Goethe always understood if philosophers approached him who believed to have the ability to look at the thinking spiritually. He could never understood if people stated, they could think about the thinking. Only a higher ability lets the thinking appear before the human being. Goethe had this ability. This simply shows the kind of his view of nature. Since the ability to put the thinking in living motion to pursue the metamorphosis of the things is on a lower level the same as the beholding consciousness on a higher level. Goethe felt thinking while looking. However, Goethe had a special peculiarity.

There are certain persons who have a kind of naive clairvoyance, a kind of naive beholding consciousness. Now it is far from my mind to state that Goethe had a kind of naive beholding consciousness only, but Goethe had a special disposition by which he differs from someone who only is able to get to the beholding consciousness by the conscious development of the deeper abilities of his soul. Goethe had this beholding consciousness not from the start as the naive clairvoyants have it, but he could put his thinking, the whole structure of his soul in such a motion that he could do research really not only externally and got thereby to physical laws grasped in thoughts, but he could pursue the inner life of the natural phenomena in their metamorphoses.

It is peculiar that this predisposition, if one wants to develop the ability of the spiritual beholding consciously, is impaired at first, it is even extinguished. Goethe had this natural predisposition in himself to develop a certain beholding consciousness gradually in himself with natural phenomena. He did not want such rules, as I have described them in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Goethe did not have the beholding consciousness from the start, but in the course of his development it was to him a self-evident fact to develop certain abilities unlike other people do. This naive talent would have been extinguished at first. If the talent does not exist, one does not want to extinguish it, and then one can quietly develop these abilities consciously. Because it existed with Goethe as an inner spiritual desire, he did not want to disturb it; he wanted that it was left to itself. Hence, his shyness to look at the thinking, which he only wanted to behold, with the thinking. Otherwise, one has to try to go to the point of thinking to grasp the thoughts themselves and to transform them gradually into forces of beholding.

This is a special peculiarity of Goethe that he felt those forces growing up which can be also developed artificially. He did not want to destroy this naive while he spread, I would like to say, too much consciousness about it. However, this shows that it is not unjustified to observe not only how his soul forces work internally, but also how his soul forces immerse in nature. Then without fail Goethe is a model of the development of the beholding consciousness, of those spiritual forces, which really lead into the spiritual world, into the everlasting.

If you settle in Goethe's natural sciences in such a way that you observe them not only externally, but that you try to observe how you yourself become, actually, if you activate such forces in yourself, you can also transfer that what Goethe pursued with his view of nature to the human soul itself. Then comes to light what Goethe omitted because his senses were directed outward at first, to nature which he considered spiritually in her spirituality, namely that one has to look at the human soul life also under the viewpoint of metamorphosis. Goethe became aware of nature due to his special predisposition, and because this predisposition was especially strong, he looked less after the soul life.

However, you can apply his way of looking at the world to the soul life. Then you are led beyond the mere thinking. Most people who deal with these things simply do not believe this. They believe that one can think about the soul exactly the same way as one can think about something else. However, one can direct thoughts only to that what can be perceived outwardly. If you want to look back at the soul itself, on that what activates the human thinking, then you cannot do it with the thoughts. You need the beholding consciousness that exceeds the mere thinking; you get to the Imaginative knowledge, as I called it in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other books. One cannot apply the same abstract, pale thoughts with which one grasps nature to the human soul life. One simply does not grasp it with them. Such thoughts are like a sieve, through which you pass the human soul life.

This occurred once in a great historical moment when Goethe and Schiller (1759-1805, German poet) met. Just in this point, you can realise what happens if you want to enter from Goethe's view of nature into a soul view. Schiller had written an important treatise, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1794). I want to indicate only briefly, which soul riddle Schiller had in mind. Schiller wanted to solve the problem of the artistic. He wanted to answer the question to himself: what happens, actually, in the human soul if the human being creates or feels artistically if he puts himself in the world of beauty? Schiller found, if the human being is only given away to his sensory drives, he is subject to the physical necessity.

As far as the human being is subject to the physical necessity, he cannot approach beauty and art. Also, not if he dedicates himself only to the thinking if he follows the logical necessity only. However, there is a middle state, Schiller thinks. If the human being impregnates everything that the sensory gives him with his being so that it becomes like the pure spirituality, if he raises the sensory to spirituality and presses the spirituality down into the sensory, so that the sensory becomes spiritual and the spiritual becomes sensory, then he is in beauty, then he is in the artistic. The necessity seems to be reduced by the desire, and the desire seems to be improved by the spirit. Schiller spoke a lot about his intention to Goethe to invigorate the human soul forces so that in the harmony of the single soul forces this middle state appears which enables the human being to create or feel the artistic. In the nineties, from the deeper acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller on, this important life riddle played a big role in the correspondence and in the conversations of Schiller and Goethe. In the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man Schiller tried to solve this problem philosophically. Goethe also dealt with this problem because this problem occupied Schiller so much. But Goethe had the beholding consciousness which Schiller did not have; this enabled him to submerge with his thoughts in the world of the things themselves, but also to grasp the soul life more intimately.

He could realise that the human soul life is much more extensive, is much more immense than that what one can grasp with abstract thoughts, as Schiller did in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Goethe did not want simply to put such dashes, such contours of thoughts to characterise this richly structured human soul life. Thus, a little work of quite different nature originated about the same problem.

It is very interesting to consider more closely this point of the acquaintance of Goethe and Schiller. What did Schiller want, actually? Schiller wanted to show that in every human being a higher human being lives, as compared with what the usual consciousness encloses is a lower one. Schiller wanted to announce this higher human being who carries his desires up to the spirit and brings the spirit down to the desires, so that the human being, while he connects the spiritual and sensory necessities, grasps himself in a new way and appears as a higher human being in the human being. Goethe did not want to be so abstract. However, Goethe also wanted to strive for what lives as a higher human being within the human being. This higher being in the human being appeared to him so rich in its single member that he could not grasp it with mere thinking, so he put it in mighty, important pictures. Thus, The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (1795) originated from forms at the end of Conversations of German Emigrants.

Someone who symbolises a lot in this fairy tale does not come close to its deeper sense. The different figures of this fairy tale, they are about twenty, are the soul forces, personified in their living cooperation which lift the human being beyond themselves and to the higher human being. This lives in the composition of The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Only in pictures, Goethe could grasp the problem that Schiller grasped in thoughts philosophically; but in pictures which are an entire world.

You do not need to grasp the soul life pedantically only in Goethean way, so, actually, only in poetic pictures, but one realises—just if one goes into the inner structure of the Goethean worldview if one applies this to the soul life in same way, as Goethe applied his ramble spirituality in the metamorphosis—that the metamorphosis of the soul forces grasps the human being vividly and leads him from the transient that he experiences in the body to the imperishable that he experiences as that which is in his inside and goes through births and deaths. The usual psychology deals a lot with the question: should one take the one or the other soul force as starting point? Is the will original, is the imagination, or is the thinking original? How should one imagine the mutual relation of imagination, thinking, feeling, and percipience? One applied a lot of astuteness to grasp the cooperation of the different soul forces in such a way as the outer natural sciences grasp the interaction of green leaf and petal or the interaction of cranial bones and cerebral ones without considering the inner transformation.

Somebody who can turn his view from the outside inwards with Goethean sense can behold the soul life; however, he has to do it even more vividly than to the outer life of nature because one can rest in the outer life as it were with the spiritual view. The outer life gives you the material; you can go from creation to creation. The inner life seems to disappear perpetually if you want to look at it. However, if you turn the ramble thinking inwards, which just becomes a beholding one, then that becomes what appears as thinking, feeling, willing, and as perceiving, nothing but something intrinsic that changes into each other. The will becomes a metamorphosis of the feeling, the feeling a metamorphosis of imagining, the imagining a metamorphosis of the perceiving and vice versa.

The development of the forces and abilities slumbering in the human being, of the meditative thinking, which leads into the spiritual world, is based on nothing but on the living pursuit of the inner metamorphoses of the soul forces. On one side that tries who wants to become a spiritual researcher to develop his imagination, his percipience in such a way that he leads the will which only slumbers, otherwise, in percipience and imagination, into this percipience and imagination repeatedly in such a way that he brings that consciously to mind what, otherwise, appears as an involuntary mental picture. Thereby the usually pale thinking or forced percipience changes into the pictorial beholding. Since one can behold the spiritual only in pictures. The will and the feeling that one can imagine only, otherwise, but not in their real nature are recognised, are transformed by the meditative life, so that they become an imagining life, a perceiving life.

Leading the imagination into the will, leading the will into the imagining, changing the will into imagination and vice versa, the transformation of the imagining into the will in inner liveliness, the transformation of the single soul forces into each other, this is meditative life. If this is pursued, that announces itself for the inner observation what cannot announce itself if one looks only at thinking, at feeling and willing side by side. If one looks at them side by side, only the temporal of the human being appears. If one learns to recognise how imagining changes into feeling and the will changes into imagining and perceiving, one gets to know the metamorphosis of the inner soul life, as vividly as Goethe pursued the metamorphoses in the outer nature. Then the everlasting of the human soul announces itself that goes through births and deaths. The human being thereby enters the everlasting.

What did Goethe want while he removed such a prejudice that the human being differs by a detail like the intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw from the animal? He did not want that the human being faces as an isolated being the remaining world, he wanted, completely in harmony with Herder, to survey nature as a big whole and to look at the human being arising from the whole nature. When Schiller had got rid of some prejudices towards Goethe and had reached a pure free recognition of his greatness, he wrote to Goethe, how he had to think about Goethe's way of looking at nature. Among the rest, he wrote the nice words: “You take together the whole nature to get light for the single; in the entirety of her phenomena you look for the explanation of the individual ... A great and really heroic idea which shows only too well, how much your mind holds together the rich whole of its mental pictures in a nice unity.”

It attracts Schiller's attention that Goethe wanted to understand the human being while he assembled him from that which is separated, otherwise, in the different beings of nature but which can change by inner formative forces so that the human being appears like a summary of the outer natural phenomena in his outer figure, the crown of the outer nature.

One has to form a correct mental picture of that which there Goethe wanted, actually, if one envisages the other side now that arises for the soul life. If one envisages the metamorphosis of the inner soul forces as Goethe envisaged the metamorphosis of the outer forms of the human being, that arises what appears in the human being as a summary of the metamorphosing soul forces from the underlying world of spiritual beings and spiritual processes, as on the other side if one looks at the human being as a physical being in the Goethean way, this human physical being arises as a summary of the physical world. As Goethe's natural sciences connect the outer human figure to the whole remaining physical world, a Goethean psychology connects the human soul to the everlasting, concrete, enclosing spiritual world and allows it to concentrate in the human being. Not while you take this or that sentence of Goethe to confirm your own view you can build a bridge between spiritual science and the Goethean world consideration, but while you try to solve the problem internally—vividly, not in the abstract—logically how does one come close to such a kind to delve into nature?

Goethe himself possessed this ability to delve into nature naively. If you search it by deepening in his way to look at the world, to bring it back to life in yourself, then you get to the necessity to extend that which Goethe had as disposition for the view of nature also to the world of the mental. Then you get by the human soul life to the everlasting spiritual world as Goethe got by the human natural life to his consideration of the outer physical world. You have to approach Goethe internally; you have to try to want that in love what he wanted concerning nature. Then you get around to wanting the same concerning the spiritual world whose image is the human soul world. You get around to looking from the human soul into the spirit as Goethe looked from the human nature into the remaining nature. In this sense, one can already say that one understands Goethe little if one takes him only in such a way as he behaved at first. Goethe himself did not want to be taken in such a way. Since Goethe was very close to the whole way that must appear again with spiritual research, he was close to it also in the non-scientific areas, in the area of art.

If you yourself try to settle in the beholding consciousness, you realise that it is necessary above all that this settling does not perpetually disturb itself by all kinds of prejudices which are transferred from the sensory world or from the abstract, only logical thinking to the spiritual world. An important viewpoint of the investigation of the spiritual world is that you are able to wait. The soul can exert itself ever so much to investigate something in the spiritual world, it wants to investigate it absolutely, but it will fail, it will fool itself. It can exert itself ever so much unless in it those abilities have still matured which are necessary to the view of certain beings or certain facts, it will not yet be able to recognise them. Maturing, waiting is necessary until in the soul that has grown up which faces you in a certain area of the spiritual world. This is something that is necessary in a particular way for penetrating into the spiritual world. The spiritual researcher must have patience and energy to a high degree. I characterise other rules in later talks. Goethe was minded by his whole nature to be also as an artist in such a way that he waited everywhere.

Nothing is more interesting than to pursue those poetries of Goethe that he could not finish if one pursues how he got stuck with the Pandora, how he got stuck with the Natural Daughter which should have become a trilogy and became only one part. If you compare it to that which he finished brilliantly, like the second part of Faust or the Elective Affinities, one recognises his innermost nature. Goethe could not “do” anything, he had always to form that only to which he had advanced by the maturity of his being, and if he did not attain this maturity, he left it, and then he was not able to work on. Someone who creates artistically only combining can work on. Someone who lets the spirit create in himself like Goethe cannot advance sometimes just if he is great as Goethe was. Where Goethe had to stop, he was of particular interest for that who wants to penetrate into his inner being. If one pursues something like the Elective Affinities, one realises that that which lives in it existed already in relatively early time, but not the possibility to develop figures really that could embody this riddle of nature and human being. Goethe left them, and thus he handed over the Elective Affinities to a time when the persons did no longer live who could still have understood it because they had experienced the first youth impulses together with him.

Thus, Goethe was close to spiritual science by this real experience of the mental as it were, he was close to it by the desire not to stop at the abstract thinking but to advance from the thinking to reality, indeed, as a naturalist, but as a naturalist who searched the spirit. Therefore, he was so glad when during the twenties the psychologist Heinroth (Johann Christian H., 1773-1843, German anthropologist) said that Goethe had a concrete thinking. Goethe understood this straight away that he did not have a thinking that keeps on spinning a thread but that submerges in the things.

However, the thinking submerges in the things, it does not find abstract material atoms in them, but the spirit, as well as by the beholding consideration of the soul life the everlasting spirit of the human being is recognised. Therefore, Goethe's view envisaged what reveals itself within the world of the sensory as something spiritual. You can understand from those indications that Goethe did not want to think about the thinking because he only knew too well that one could only look at the thinking. One can also understand well that Goethe did not at all mean anything irreligious when he said that it is antipathetic to him to speak of the things of another world. Since he knew that these things of another world are in this world, penetrate it perpetually, and that someone who does not search these spiritual things and beings in nature who denies them in nature does not want to recognise the spirit in the phenomena of nature. Hence, Goethe did not want to look behind the natural phenomena, but he wanted to search everywhere in the natural phenomena. Hence, it was unpleasant to him to speak of an “inside of nature.”

So about many philosophical minded people look for the “thing in itself.” They face the world of the outer sensory perceptions; they recognise that they are only sensory perceptions, reflections of reality. There they look for the “things in themselves,” but not, while they withdraw from the mirror and search in that which the spirit can grasp as spirit, but while they smash the mirror to reach for the world of the dead atoms from which one can never grasp anything living.

This inside of nature was for Goethe completely beyond his imagination. Hence, with his review on all efforts which he had to do to penetrate into the spirituality of the natural phenomena, that severe quotation which he did about the great naturalist Haller who had become unpleasant to him because he had said once: “No created mind penetrates into the being of nature. Blissful is that to whom she shows her appearance only!” Goethe did not at all want to speak about nature this way. He answered to it:

“No created mind penetrates
Into the being of nature.”
O you Philistine!
Do not remind me
And my brothers and sisters
Of such a word.
We think: everywhere we are inside.
“Blissful is that to whom she shows
Her appearance only!”
I hear that repeatedly for sixty years,
I grumble about it, but covertly,
I say to myself thousand and thousand times:
She gives everything plenty and with pleasure;
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is everything at the same time.
Examine yourself above all,
Whether you are kernel or shell.

Goethe believes that someone who looks at nature as something that is an outside of the spirit cannot penetrate into the spirit of nature. While she shows her shell in her different metamorphoses to the human being, it reveals the spirit to him at the same time with her kernel. Spiritual science wants nothing to be in this respect but a child of Goethe, I would like to say. It wants to extend that which Goethe applied in such fertile way to the world of the outer natural phenomena also to the soul phenomena by which they immediately receive active life and reveal the internal spiritual, that spiritual which lives in the human being as his everlasting immortal essence. We look closer at this in the following talks.

I wanted to show this today. Not because one grasps Goethe in his single statements, one can call him a father of spiritual science—since in this way one could make him the father of all possible worldviews—, but while one tries to settle affectionately in that what appeared to him so fertile. Then one does not repeat what he already said, but then spiritual science appears rightly as a continuation of the Goethean worldview. It seems to me that it is in its sense if one ascends from the physical life to the spiritual life.

Goethe himself showed when he wanted to summarise his worldview in his essay about Winckelmann (Johann Joachim W., 1717-1768, German art historian and archaeologist) the living together of the human being with the whole universe as an interaction of spirits, while he said: “If the healthy nature of the human being works as a whole if he feels in the world as in a big nice and worthy whole if the harmonious ease grants a pure, free delight to him, then the universe would shout out and admire the summit of its own being and becoming if it could feel itself because it has attained its goal.” Thus, Goethe lively imagined the essence of the human being together with the essence of nature in interaction: nature, the world perceiving itself in the human being, the human being recognising himself as everlasting, but expressing his eternity in the temporality of the outer world. Between world and human being, the world spirit lives, grasping itself, knowing itself, even confirming itself in the sense of Goethe.

Hence, those who have thought in the sense of Goethe were never tempted to deny the spirit and to apply the Goethean worldview to confirm a more or less materialistic worldview. No, those who have understood Goethe have always thought that the human being, while he faces the things of nature and lives among them, lives at the same time in the spirituality into which he enters if he dies. These human beings have thought in such a way as for example Novalis (1772-1801) did.

Novalis, the miraculous genius, who wanted to submerge in nature in certain phases of his life in quite Goethean way, knew himself immersed in the spiritual world. His many remarks about the immediate present of the spirit in the sensory world go back to the Goethean worldview. Hence, I am allowed, while Goethe is put as it were as a father of a spiritual worldview, to close with a remark, which Novalis did completely in the Goethean sense that summarises that which I briefly outlined today as Goethean worldview in a way:

“The spiritual world is also not closed to us here. It is always manifest to us. If we can make our souls as elastic as it is necessary, we are like spirits among spirits!”

When man in his spiritual development gradually approaches the perception of the higher worlds, then he must - as I have often mentioned before - form new ideas

about his whole relationship to these higher worlds. We are accustomed to judging our whole relationship to the world in

such a way as we find our relationship to the world here on the physical plane. Here on the physical plane we humans clearly feel that we stand in relation to the other creatures of the various realms of this world in such a way that we look down, as it were, on the beings of these other realms. We perceive them; we feel that we, as human beings, are the highest link in this physical world and perceive the other entities. We then form concepts and ideas, notions of these entities.

I would like to say that we stand there, the world is outside of us; we perceive this world, we take in, as it were, what it gives us, and we then carry it with us in our soul through the world. The objects are outside, the beings are outside of us, and what they communicate to us through our perception of them, we then carry with us in our soul.

If we wanted to speak from the point of view of the earth's other creatures, we would have to say: we can perceive the beings of the different realms, the plant, animal and mineral realms; we perceive them.

Now it is so obvious for a person, who has become so accustomed to seeing his relationship to the world, to apply this directly when dealing with entities of the higher orders, of the higher hierarchies, for example. Man imagines: when he moves up into the higher worlds, then the angels, archangels, spirits of personality and so on are spread around him just as minerals, plants and animals are spread around him in the physical world. But that is not exactly how it is, I would say. We have to get used to imagining our relationship to the other, the spiritual world in a different way the moment we cross the threshold into the spiritual world. We must take completely seriously what has been said more than once: that the moment we take just one step into the spiritual world, that is, expand our ability to perceive, we grow together in a certain way with the beings around us, that we spread ourselves over them with our own being. And I have often used the trivial, not very beautiful, but apt expression: we creep into the beings, we grow together with them. Towards the beings of the physical plane we always feel as if we were outside them, and what we perceive of them goes into us. Towards the beings of the higher worlds we must feel that we go into them. And just as the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms allow themselves to be perceived by us, so we must allow ourselves to be perceived by the beings of the higher hierarchies; that is, we become objective objects of perception, beings of perception, for the beings of the higher hierarchies. I would like to say: just as the various animals are spread out for us out there in space so that we can look at them, we are looked at by the beings of the higher hierarchies. They look down on us. And that they look at us, we experience that; that is actually the perception of the higher beings. So one should always say - not: I perceive an angel - because that does not correspond exactly to the experience - but one should say: I feel, I perceive that I am perceived by an angel.

This experience is what we must consider carefully when we speak of the worlds that lie beyond the threshold of the spiritual world. Everyday language often has apt expressions for this, expressions that, I would say, are right in the middle of everyday life. When folk language draws our attention to the fact that, whatever we do, we are being observed – either, as we say in our modern consciousness, by God Himself, or, as we would have said in the past, by a being from the next higher hierarchy – as expressed, for example, in the beautiful folk saying:

Where I am and what I do,
God, my Father, is watching me.

This is indeed an apt expression for the facts discovered by spiritual science. And so, if one were to search the vernacular, especially for older expressions, one could draw the irrefutable conclusion from the very existence of such expressions that in earlier times, from an naive from a naive, original elementary observation of what is really the case with regard to the observation of man by the beings of the higher worlds, than man knows of this fact today in our materialistic age.

Now it seems obvious to ask how this is actually done when beings from the higher hierarchies observe us. It is quite interesting to reflect on this subject, even if it is perhaps a little out of the way. You will see tomorrow that we will ascend from this somewhat remote consideration to a very obvious subject, and so you will have to forgive me if today a somewhat remote consideration is adopted.

In addition to what I have just said, I would like to recall something else that has been discussed many times before. We human beings have, as an important soul ability during our life between birth and death, the memory within us, and I have often pointed out what all depends on the memory. At the moment when the memory of our recollections is broken, our entire coherent self would be disturbed. The continuing thread of our self would break. Such people - I have often pointed this out - who experience this, end up in very unfortunate life situations. So it can happen that someone suddenly has the thread of their memory broken by some elemental influences. This can happen without the mind or judgment suffering in the slightest; they can be preserved entirely. And so it may happen that such a person, no longer knowing who he was yesterday, no longer has the context of his experiences of yesterday, the day before yesterday and so on, but mind, goes to Basel, gets another ticket there, gets on the train and – well, now it would be difficult, but things have happened before – suddenly rediscovers who he actually is in Bombay. In between, he had done everything necessary to accomplish the journey from one place to the next, even to the place of a distant part of the world, quite cleverly. It was not his reason or his judgment that was lacking, but only the context of his memory. Such cases of illness have occurred many, many times. I myself have experienced it with a man I knew, how his memory was wiped one day and he traveled far around the world, then found himself in a Central European city after registering there, still with his memory wiped, in an asylum for homeless people. It took three weeks before he came to again, after his memory had returned.

This power of memory, this possibility of holding our experiences together, is one of the most important things we have on the physical plane. This power of memory is transformed at the moment when we either pass through the gate of initiation or when we pass through physical death. I will speak only of the latter case.

When we pass through physical death, we no longer need the kind of memory we had in the physical world, because we see there what has remained of events, what has been written in the Akasha Chronicle of the world. We need only look at something in the past; we do not need to remember. But the power of remembrance is there; it is only transformed into another, more active power of the inner soul life. The power is there.

It is very important that we have developed memory for our life on the physical plane in just the way we have it in the time between birth and death. It is of essential importance that our memory for the ordinary circumstances of life does not reach back into conditions that we have gone through between the last death and this time's birth. For only in this way can certain forces become condensed and, through this condensation, become the powers of memory, which function in just the same way as our memory between birth and death.

It is a purely human characteristic that we have such a memory, which essentially extends to the life between birth and death. No other being in the world has such a memory, has precisely such a memory, which works in such a way that when this being proceeds to its embodiment or - as we would have to say with angels - to its etherization, the memory lights up and then remains until another state, which with us humans is death. Other entities of other world orders have these same powers, which in us lie in the memory, developed in a completely different way.

Now it is extremely interesting to observe how, firstly, in relation to their ability to perceive, and secondly, in relation to their memory, we are very different from the entities of the next higher hierarchy, the entities of the hierarchy of the Angeloi. These angels perceive something different from what we humans accomplish, and certainly also from what underlies our deeds and actions on the physical plane; they look at us, they perceive us. We are objects of perception for them. But among other things, there is something particularly important that they perceive about us: that is the whole essence of our speech.

Our speaking is, after all, something more or less unconscious compared to what we regard as the process of our thinking, as the process of our ideas. Thinking in us humans occurs to a certain high degree consciously; speaking is not conscious to the same degree. It requires only a very slight self-observation to realize that we do not speak consciously to the same extent as we think consciously. If one wanted to speak as consciously as one thinks consciously - believe it or not - one would stutter something quite proper in the world. It is only because we do not always have to think about how to form one letter or another that we speak as fluently as we do. If we had to think first – I am not even talking about thinking in the physical body, but only in the astral body – if we had to think about what we have to do in our astral body when we form a t or a d or an h, then we would truly not be able to have the fluent speech that we have. It is precisely because we use language as something habitual that our consciousness does not pour over our speech in the same way that it pours over our thinking, over which it extends at least to a certain degree. To a certain degree, because consciousness does not extend completely over our thinking either.

Now, however, we actually represent something in the world precisely through our language. We humans just do not notice this. But just imagine you could withdraw to some cottage where you would have an apparatus through which you could perceive everything that is spoken by people on earth in one day; and to help you do that, let's assume the cottage would be set up so that you would not be disturbed by perceptions of anything else. So you would have some kind of apparatus that would only convey to you everything that is spoken on earth. So you would live entirely in what is spoken on earth.

Compare this with your environment as a human being. There you have the beings of the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms: that is your real world. If you were to sit in your little house as I said, everything that is spoken there would be your world; that would be the kingdom that extends around you.

It does not actually take much to feel at home in this realm through occult development, which is then, however, not a little house but a spiritual state of development. You then feel so at home in it that you know: you are now in a region where – I would say, excluding what people on the physical plane put into their words through their often quite convoluted concepts, thus excluding the world of concepts – the angels listen to how people speak. So you are in a world where you know: now the angels are listening to everything that people say.

This is definitely a real experience; it is just not properly noticed by those who undergo occult development, because very soon, at first, the state occurs in which one is stunned by the confused chatter. This causes, I might say, a kind of paralysis; as a result it is not observed enough. But it depends on whether one strengthens oneself inwardly again accordingly, and then one becomes aware of something quite different. One does not hear all the chatter and perceives something quite different. One is then in the region in which speech lives as lawfully as, let us say, minerals live lawfully in their natural laws here on the physical plane. One no longer perceives the useless talk, but one perceives the laws according to which speech is spoken.

Now, however, one has to overcome certain difficulties, because these perceptions break off every few moments, because one – and now I come to the other – would have to have the memory of the beings from the hierarchy of the angeloi if one wanted to perceive the lawfulness that reigns in the world, of which I have just spoken. If we were to descend into the world above which we stand and which we know as the mineral world, where we only have the law of order, if we were to enter it, we would at first be just as stunned in the mineral world as we are when we hear all the confused talking of mankind on earth. But we have already gone beyond this state of stupor through our human development; we only perceive the laws of the mineral world. We would also perceive the laws of speech, but the memory of the beings from the hierarchy of the Angeloi is needed for this. And so one can now experience in a very vivid way what the relationship is, I would say, between one layer of the world and another.

That is actually the essential thing in perceiving higher worlds, that when one comes from one world layer into another world layer, one feels transported into completely different circumstances, into completely different inner laws. That is the essential thing, that when one passes from one world into another, one says to oneself: it is not just that one comes into different regions of one and the same world, but one comes into another world in such a way that one is transported to the region where the angels observe the laws of human language on earth. One enters a region where, I might say, quite different concepts of time prevail than in our physical world, a region in which a longer memory thread is therefore also necessary.

And so it happens that I want to discover something from the other side of life, which became clear to some people from the physical side in the course of the 19th century, for example Jakob Grimm: namely, certain laws in the development of human language. In this way, one comes to extraordinarily interesting insights into the inner laws of the universe.

You see, when one speaks as a human being, one does not pay attention to the unconscious character of speaking - to the inner power of a letter, of a sound. This inner power, the play of the inner forces of the letter, of the sound, takes place in the subconscious, and as a human being, with our consciousness, we are outside this region, in which what is subconscious for us is conscious when we speak. But for the region of the angels, it is conscious. Let us assume, for example, that we pronounce a word in which the sound \(s\), or the English \(th\), which is phonetically equivalent to our \(s\), plays an important role. When we pronounce such a word in which the \(s\) or a \(th\) plays an important role, we, with our human consciousness, do not think of the cosmic forces that lie in the \(s\) or \(th \) lies, but we think of the concept that expresses itself in this context, in which the sound is contained, because our consciousness is not in the region where the sound \(s\) develops an inner essence. For us, the sound lies outside of our consciousness and is not an immediate experience; for the consciousness of the angels, however, the sound is an immediate experience. The angel experiences something very special in the power of the sound.

Now, we with our physical consciousness have before us such a word, which, I want to say, has as an important component this sound \(s\), \(ss\) or \(th\); the being from the hierarchy of the angeloi, by perceives this sound uttered by a human being, remembers with his higher memory earlier states of human speech, in far-off times, and he must bring together this sound, which is in this word, with the sound from which it has become. And there, with an \(s\) or \(th\), such a consciousness of this being from the hierarchy of the angels immediately remembers a \(t\); that is to say, there was once a time when the \(th\) or the \(s\) was a \(t\) and there was an even earlier time when the \(t\) was a \(d\).

Now imagine such a memory. So I said: an angel hears a word in which there is an \(s\) or an \(th\); now he immediately remembers the form of the word that was there once, in which there was a \(t\) in the place where the \(s\) or \(th\) is now; and furthermore, he remembers that in even earlier times there was a \(d\) in the same place.

This arises from a very definite fact, namely, that such transformations of sounds take place according to a very definite law, that the sound progresses, and in fact progresses in such a way that it first develops its power mainly out of the astral.

Now it has the following tendency: when it has lived for some time in the word in such a way that it has developed out of the astral, that is to say, when man has mainly used or uses his astral to produce a sound, then in later times there are people who no longer strain the astral but mainly the etheric in the same place, so that the sound is deposited in the etheric. And when a time has passed in which the person has lived in the ethereal, he comes to place the sound more and more in the physical, to place it in the physical.

This is very regular: if, for example, we look at any word that is spoken in such a way that a sound, a main sound in the word, is deposited in the etheric, then we can find in later times find – quite apart from the meaning, for the word itself can change its meaning – that in the same word the sound is later deposited in the physical, and still later again in the astral; still later it would be deposited again in the etheric.

The sounds have a tendency to progress in the course of development. And just as we observe the progression of the plant world from the greening leaf in spring to the emergence of the flower, to the development of the fruit, and again to the decay, so the being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi observes the progression of the sounds in the kingdom that I have characterized as the kingdom of language. They are, I might say, variously stationed in speech, in the kingdom of speech. Before any sound that is once stationed in the astral, the being from the hierarchy of the angels finds after some time that this sound appears entirely in the etheric, and after some time again in the physical. When it observes a sound at any time in the physical, after some time it is in the astral. So that there is really a rhythmic movement to be observed in the development of sounds, if one considers the realm of language; a rhythmic movement goes around like this (see drawing). This is the underlying basis for the law of sound change, which some of you may well know, which Jacob Grimm characterized in the 19th century in his own way, from a more materialistic point of view.

If we take this example – the transformation of the d into the t, then into the s, which has the same value as dastth – if we take this example, we see that the d is brought about by the fact that the whole human being, with all his four limbs, creates a center of gravity for himself, so to speak, in the astral: in this way he brings about the d. He brings about the t by creating a center of gravity for himself in the etheric. The s or th he produces by creating a center of gravity in the physical.

You see the interesting basis for such a progression, such a transformation of a word through the ages. I would like to show this with an example that is close at hand. Take, for example, the word: \(ϑήρ\), dius, animal. That is the same word, only at different times. Here (Greek) we have the word with a \(th\) \((ϑήρ)\); that would be the same \((ϑ)\) as our \(s\), the same as the English \(th\). The development would take place in such a way that it tends to go over here (Gothic): the \(th\) would become a \(d\) and, as it develops further, the \(d\) would become a \(t\): it becomes more ethereal. Now we have here in fact \(ϑήρ\) (Greek); 'here we have “dius” (Gothic) and here we have “Tier” (German). So the word in Greek is \((ϑήρ)\), the word in Gothic is (dius), the word in German is (Tier). It is the same word, exactly the same word. In Greek, it was centered in the physical. It tended to pass over into the astral in the next language, in Gothic; it tended to pass over into the etheric, becoming the word for “animal” in German.

Take another word, another example. Let us take Greek, which is equivalent to Latin here – let us take the word 'decem', for example. Here in Latin we have the word in the astral. If the word had the tendency to go over to the ethereal up to Gothic, the d would have to change into a t; and “taihun” it is also in Gothic. As it developed from Gothic into German, from the ethereal into the physical, the t would change into z, so it would be “zehn” in German.

Another word, which is very interesting, by the way: take the Greek word “ϑάνατος”. Since it has the \(th\), it would emphasize the physical aspect. It would tend to move into the astral and would then have to have the tendency in Gothic to have an \(d\) because it is astral. It is also called “dauthus”. And now it should, by developing into German, tend towards the ethereal and have a \(t\). It has that too! It is called “Tod” (death).

Let us now start from a word that is ethereal up here and has a τ in Greek: “\(τρεις\)” (treis). In Gothic it should have a th or an s. And it has that, because it is called “threis”. Here it is in the physical, now it goes into the astral, and there it should have a d in German. It has that too, it is called: “drei”.

From this you can see that, if you disregard everything that lives in language, all the meanings that live in language, there is something else special in language: a triad that emerges, I would say, much like a melody stretched out in time, a triad that can be found. If you have the starting point somewhere, then the other sounds that stood in the same place in the word at a different time resound.

Now I have chosen the simplest transformation here. But that is perfectly sufficient, because otherwise it would only become a little too complicated. Such laws of transformation underlie all language development; regulated down to the last detail, they underlie all language development; only that in the actual development, the most diverse developmental impulses cross each other. It is interesting to observe how progress in the development of language combines, in that certain languages progress faster or even make any progress at all, and certain languages do not make this progress.

Take, for example, the Greek word «\(ϑάνατος\)» (thanatos), «death». The regular progression is from th to d to t. At the d stands the Gothic: «dauthus. The English «death» is at the d, it has remained in the Gothic and has not undergone the further progression. But in German the word is found with \(T\): “Tod”. And so it is in general; if we pay attention, we find everywhere that the English, in the development of certain letters, has retained the nature of the Gothic, only it has thrown off the inner vitality, the inner soul of the Gothic. This law has been so observed that it has remained everywhere at the level of the Gothic. So when we write our “Tod” (death), we have to find the backward step of the Gothic in English; we have to go back one step. In German, we have a \(T\) in the etheric here at “Tod” (death). For English, we have to go back to the astral, and there we have to have a \(d\). In English, we have a \(th\) at the end of the noun “death”. We have to go back to the physical. If we were to take the adjective “dead”, we would have a dam at the end. If we continue the \(d\), as is correct in German, we would write it correctly by continuing it one stage further around (see drawing): then we would have a \(t\) at the end here, instead of a \(d\). That is also how it is written, the adjective in German is 'tot', dead.

There you see into a realm that is just as much spread around us as the three natural kingdoms: the mineral, the vegetable and the animal; that also has laws, also has laws of development, like the mineral, the plant and the animal kingdom; only that the time periods in which the rhythm is fulfilled – which is precisely expressed by a triangle – are just that: long. And in order to always hear the previous step resonate with the sound, the memory of a being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi is needed.

But there is something else connected with this. When you consider this law, you will have to say to yourself: If we turn our gaze back to the ancient Greek and Latin language forms and look at them in relation to today's German, insofar as the words have approximately retained their meaning, we see everywhere that the Greek and Latin language forms are two steps behind today's German, and that the Gothic language form is one step behind.

Much in the development of the world is based on the fact that what develops over time also develops in such a way that it remains in space alongside what develops in the various stages of time. Just as in the animal kingdom, the lower animals stand beside those that have developed to a higher level, so the older forms of language remain alongside the newer ones, or, one could also say, like a wild population that exists for a while alongside a more developed population. Thus, that which develops apart remains in the space alongside that which develops further. But then such a state of being combined with many other impulses, which have an effect on it.

The impulse illustrated by this triangle applies in particular to the development of the sounds \(d\), \(t\), \(th\) (\(s\), \(ss\)). A similar triangle also applies to the sounds \(b\), \(p\), and \(g\), \(k\), \(ch\). On the other hand, a triangle that would have to be drawn much larger applies to \(l\) and \(r\), for example. And for the vowels, if you want to follow the course of their development, completely different figures apply. But laws apply to all of them.

Let us assume, then, that what is temporal remains spatially juxtaposed; then it does not remain the case that in the newer simply the older lives on, because then we would still have the old Greco-Latin words alongside the newer ones that developed from them. For example, German developed in a straight line from Greek, at least in terms of most of its vocabulary. Did the Latin languages simply remain as they were? They did remain as they were, but not just as they were. They also underwent very extensive and significant changes: they rearranged the words, they did not leave the words as they were. While, for example, the word “\(ϑάνατος\)”, “death”, is simply the word that has developed further, this word is not as it was in Greek, it has not remained in Latin, but another word has because the original meaning that remained in the word “death” was not developed at all in the Latin languages; so that the word that one then has in the other language is not the same word at all. “Mort” is not the same word as ‘death’, but rather a very poor translation. But for what is actually contained in the word ‘death’, which has developed from ‘$advarog’, the Romance languages have no corresponding word at all. The word ‘death’ expresses something in which the corresponding ethereal really resonates. In the Romance languages, on the other hand, the same word has a completely different, non-ethereal resonance. It is very important to know that very significant transformations have taken place. From this you can see the ambiguity that lies in all lexicographic and grammatical translations, and the ambiguity that exists in the so-called exact understanding when translating from one language into another.

The underlying developmental laws here are extraordinarily profound and are connected to a different layer of consciousness than the one in which we usually live with our thinking, feeling and willing. But we do live to varying degrees in a different layer of consciousness with our thinking, feeling and willing. For example, we live almost entirely outside the layer of speech with our thinking. Our thinking has very little to do with our speaking. However strange it may sound, it is usually the case that when we have thoughts and utter a word, it has little more to do with the thought than the letters we write on paper have to do with the thought itself. Likewise, the spoken word is not much more connected to our thinking than a sign is to the thought.

The spoken word is much more closely connected with our feelings than with our thinking, and even more so with our intentions, because feeling belongs to a far more subconscious part of our soul than thinking, and intention belongs to an even more subconscious part of our soul life than feeling. When a person utters a word, it stands in relation to the thought, one might say, in such a way that it is not much more than a sign. It stands in a much more intimate relationship to feeling; it is much more closely connected with feeling; and it is especially connected with the will.

If people today were to develop the relationship between thinking and speaking, then, as speakers of different languages, they would not be able to experience the collisions they do today, because the relationship between language and thinking does not have the same intimate character as it has with feeling and willing. This is because feeling and willing will only develop in the same way in the future in humans what thinking has already developed today. Wherever feeling and willing come into consideration, this close connection with speech also comes into consideration to a very great extent.

We are now in the process of developing thinking to a certain extent as something objectively living for us through the evolution of the consciousness soul. And by the end of our time frame, people will have progressed to the point where they will no longer perceive the relationship between thinking and speaking as something particularly intimate. But it will take much longer before the relationship between speaking and feeling, and especially between speaking and willing, can be felt as something objective. For a much longer time people will persuade themselves that they have to identify themselves in their humanity with their language, with their speech character through their feeling and willing than through their thinking.

If we really visualize how a word has its own inner life, a life so regulated by laws, as the word “\(ϑάνατος\)”, which becomes “death” and later “Tod”, if we imagine that it lives on like that, then you really have the possibility to form an idea of how an organism lives from Greek through Gothic up to German, an organism lives as we otherwise find an organism living from its childhood stage through a later youth stage to the stage of old age. When such an organism in language has passed through the three stages and returns, it does not continue in the same way, but the whole thing spiritualizes. Mind you, when d in t, t in th (s, ss) passes over, it does not return to its original stage, but now makes a lateral ascent. So you must not imagine the triangle in the plane (drawing). As it comes across, the d, t, th continues in this way and now advances in the spiral, thus always entering into other layers. So you must not imagine that a word that has advanced to th returns to d, but then the word dies and hands over its transformative powers to another realm. The word is born in the physical, in the etheric or in the astral, makes its circuit, dies and then reappears at a higher level as a different force, transformed. So that a word that we can trace from the Greek, from “\(ϑάνατος\)” to “death”, to the German “Tod”, now has the potential to die as a word. The word “Tod” will die. At the end of the period we call our fifth post-Atlantic cultural period, it will no longer be there, it will have died. But the power that formed it will pass over to the power of the human soul at a higher level and help people to understand the nature of death in the sense of our spiritual science. In order that the power to understand the nature of death in the sense of our spiritual science may arise in our soul, the word had to be born in Greek, then had to undergo development into a youth in Gothic, in English 'death', had to undergo development in German to the later age: 'Tod', and will come to the point where it will die. It will die and give up its strength to more spiritual powers of the soul.

And so, just as we direct our gaze to the emergence of a lamb, or let us say, a cow, an ox or a bull, and see how they gradually develop, reach a climax and die again, so the angel looks at the emergence of a word, at the life of a word, at the dying of a word. That belongs to his world, to his observation, just as the observation of, say, the plant, mineral or animal kingdom belongs to our world.

These are aspects through which I wanted to draw your attention to a life that is unconscious to us, only touches our consciousness, but which, at its higher levels, immediately develops a real life of its own, immediately becoming a being. A window or a door opens for us, as it were, to look in on how beings develop, elemental beings that are then reflected in our world in the form of our words. The angel turns his spiritual eye to ancient Greece, where he sees an elemental being being born out of the physical, he sees it etheralize, astralize, and he will see it die as our fifth post-Atlantean developmental period draws to a close. He sees this being in its development, and the fact that this being develops has an effect in the physical world. And this effect consists in the fact that the ancient Greeks said “\(ϑάνατος\)”, the Goths said “dauthus”, the English say “death”, and we in German say “Tod”. The transformation of this word is the imprint of an evolving being that progresses in its development in the physical world, etheric world, astral world. What we perceive in language is the reflection of the life of higher beings from a higher world, the reflection of their inner development in the world in which we find ourselves in the time between birth and death.

This will be the starting point for our remarks tomorrow.

My dear friends! It is important that the question which we had yesterday and actually have been considering during the past days from the side of Anthroposophy, we now approach from a religious side, but again I don't want to do it through definitions and explanations but in a more concrete way. It is important in fact, as you have probably already sensed, to find a way which must come out of religious experience. What belong to religious experiences are the reality of prayer and the reality of the examination of the word, first becoming visible for us in the examining of Gospel words. We will have to draw on the more inner elements of religious life, but we will adhere to these two, prayer and the examination of Gospel words, through examples that are far better than concepts.

Regarding prayer, my dear friends, one can from a religious standpoint say that a person who does not pray in our present time, cannot be a religious person. Certainly such a statement can be doubted from this point of view, but we don't want to enter into an abstract discussion but approach from a positive point of view, and this must always have some or other basis. So I would like to start from a kind of religious axiom, which for many can consist in feeling that without the possibility of praying it is not an inner religious experience, because in prayer a real union with the Divine must be sought, which interweaves and rules the world. It is important now to examine prayer.

We need to be clear that despite the general human differentiation in humanity, the care of a spiritual life also appears, according to the varied callings of different people. If prayer is also certainly something general and human, one can say that a special prayer is then again necessary for those who want to be teachers in the field of religious life, and this will bring us to the Breviary absolving. We want to speak about all these things because they are for you, namely young theologians, of imminent seriousness for the tasks that you are to set yourself, I'm not saying now, but which you can set yourself according to the demands of the time.

Regarding prayer, in order to reach clarity, I want to speak about the Lord's Prayer and inner experiences of the Our Father. It is important that we may not take our starting point today from experiences of ancient Christianity by examining the Lord's Prayer or bringing it to life inwardly; our basis must be about contemporary man, because we want to speak about the Lord's Prayer in a general human way. Yet one must be aware of the following. Let's accept we will start to say the Lord's Prayer according to the style in which we say the first sentence: "Our Father who art in Heaven." It is important what we feel and experience in such a sentence and what we can feel and experience with other sentences of the Lord's Prayer, for only then will this prayer become inwardly alive. What we are talking about here, in fact, first of all, is to have something like an inner perception of such a sentence, not really just something that appears in the symbols of the words, but something that lives in us in real words. The heaven is basically the entire cosmos and we make it perceptible when we say "Our Father in Heaven" or "Our Father who art in the Heavens" or "Our Father, You are in the Heavens," so that in saying these words they are permeated with the spirit; we are turning towards the spirit. This is the perception of what we need to visualize, when we say such a sentence as "Our Father in the Heavens." Such a similar experience is what we need with the words "Your kingdom come," because within us there needs to be, more or less as an intuitive feeling, the question: What is this kingdom? If we are Christians, we will gradually, in our striving, approach a perception of this kingdom—or expressed more appropriately, the kingdoms—and be reminded of what was mentioned yesterday, we are reminded of Christ's words which sound and ends in "the kingdoms of heaven." Already in the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, the Christ wants to speak to the people on the one hand and to the disciples on the other, about what the kingdom of heaven is. There has to be something lively about the phrase "Your kingdom" or "May Your kingdom come to us." When will the right thing come to life in us? The right thing will only become alive in us when we take such a sentence not as a thought, but when we make it alive as if we actually hear it within us, as if we apply what I have more than once spoken to you about recently. A path must be made from the concept to the word, because there is quite a different kind of inner experience when we, without outwardly saying the words, inwardly not only hold an abstract concept, but a lively experience of the sound, in whatever language it might be.

The entire Lord's Prayer becomes, so to speak, reduced out of the specificity of language, also when we in some or other language not only imagine the thought content but what is contained in the sound. This was stressed much more in earlier times regarding prayer, that the sound element becomes inwardly alive, because by the sound content becoming alive within, the prayer is transformed into what it should be, as an interactive conversation with the Divine. Prayer is never true prayer unless there is an exchange with the Divine, and for such an interactive conversation with the Divine, the Lord's Prayer is suited in the most immanent form because of its structure. We are so to speak outside of ourselves when we speak such sentences as "Our Father who art in the Heavens" or "Let Your kingdom come." We forget ourselves the moment we really make these sentences audible and alive within us. In these sentences we erase ourselves to a large extent simply by the content of the sentences, but we take hold of ourselves again when we read sentences of a different structure or make them inwardly alive. We take hold of ourselves again when we say: "hallowed be Your name." It is then actually a lively exchange with the Divine, because it transforms itself immediately as an inner deed in "hallowed be Your name."

On the one hand we have the perception that in "Our Father who art in Heaven" nothing is happening unless the sentence is thoroughly experienced. By us directing ourselves to inner listening, it enlivens our inner hearing for the name of Christ, like it did in pre-Christian times when the Jahve name had caused it, in the sense of what I had mentioned earlier about the beginning of the St John's Gospel. If we utter the sentence "Our Father who art in Heaven" within us in the right way in our time, then Christ's name mingles into this expression, then we inwardly give the answer to what we experience as a question: "Let this name be sanctified through us/ be hallowed by your name."

You see, it takes prayer to live correctly into the Lord's Prayer; it takes on the form of an exchange with the Divine, even so when we in the right way experience the perception "Your kingdom come." This kingdom can't primarily be taken up in the intellectual consciousness; we can only take it up in the will. Similarly, when we lose ourselves with the sentence "Your kingdom come to us" we discover, taking hold of ourselves, that the kingdom, when it comes, works in us, that the actual Divine will happens in the heavenly kingdoms, and therefore also where we are on earth. You see, you have an exchange with the godhead in the Lord's Prayer.

This conversational exchange prepares you firstly to have inner dignity in relation to the concerns the earth, and to bring it into a relationship with what has happened in this exchange, by connecting that to earthly relationships. Obviously to some of you it might appear that when I say "Hallowed by Your name" there's an enlivening of the Christ name. However, my dear friends, it is precisely here where the Christ Mystery lives. This Christ Mystery will not really be recognised for as long as St John's Gospel is not really understood. At the start of St John's Gospel, you read the words: "All things came into being through the Word and nothing of all that has come into being was made except through the Word." By ascribing the creation of the world to the Father God, you go against St John's Gospel. In the St John's Gospel you hold on to what you take as sure, that everything which exists as the world had been created through the word, thus in the Christian sense through the Christ, through the Son which the Father had substantially created, had subsisted, and that the Father has no name but that His name is actually that which lives in Christ. The entire Christ Mystery lives in these words: "Hallowed be your name" because the name of the Father is given in the Christ. We will still speak about this enough on other occasions, but I wanted to refer to it today, how in prayer a real inner conversational exchange with the Divine should be contained in the prayer itself.

Now we can go further and say: Nothing is given to us from the natural world merely by taking our daily food, our bread. We take our bread from nature with the conditions which I've mentioned; by our digestive processes, through regenerative processes we become earthly man on the earth, but that can't really live in us because life in God is different, the life of God lives in the spiritual world. After we have entered into a conversation with the Divine in the first part of the Lord's Prayer, we can now out of this mindset which has permeated us within, release the negative and say positively: "You give us our bread, which works in our everyday life, today." With this it means: what has been nature's processes and work in us as processes of nature, this is what should, through our consciousness, through our inner experience, become a spiritual process. In this way our mindset should be transformed. We should become capable of forgiveness towards those who have done something to us, who have caused damage. We would only be able to do this when we become conscious of how much we have damaged the Divine spiritual, and therefore should ask for the right mindset in order for us to handle what we have become guilty of, in the right way; we can only do this if we have become aware that we are continuously doing harm to the Divine through the mere nature of our being, and continuously need the forgiveness of those beings towards whom we have become guilty.

Now we can add the following, which is again an earthly thing, something which we want to link to the first thing we have related to: "Lead us not into temptation," which means: Let our connection to You be so alive that we may not experience the challenge to merge with mere nature, to surrender ourselves to mere nature, that we hold you firmly in all our daily nourishment. "But deliver us, from the evil." The evil consists of mankind letting go of the Divine; we ask that we are freed and let loose from this evil.

When we ever and again have such experiences of the Lord's Prayer as our foundation, my dear friends, then we deepen the Lord's Prayer actively towards an inner life, which enables us to create the mood and possibility in us which allows us not only to act from one physical human to another physical human but that we act as one human soul to another human soul. In this way we have brought ourselves into a connection of the Divine creation in others, and we learn through this, what it is to experience such words as: "The least thing you have done to my brothers, you have also done to Me." In this way we have learnt to experience the Divine in the earthly existence. However we must in a real way, not through a theory, but in a real way turn away from worldly existence because we become aware that earthly existence, as it was first given to mankind, is actually no real worldly existence but an existence stripped of the Divine, and that we will only have a real worldly existence after we have turned ourselves to God in prayer, having created a link to God in our prayer.

With this, my dear friends, the most elementary steps, the stairway, can lead to the conscious awakening of religious impulses in human beings. These religious impulses had to a certain extent been instilled in the human beings since primordial beginnings, but it concerns becoming aware of these impulses within, and that can only happen when a real exchange with the Divine in prayer comes about. The first meaningful discovery which one can make about the Lord's Prayer is that within its inner structure lies the possibility for a person to directly, with understanding, enter into a conversational exchange with the Divine. That is only a beginning, my dear friends, but it is so, however, that in the beginning, when it is really lived through, it is taken further and just when the question is taken religiously, it concerns wanting to find in our experience of the first steps, the strength to continue with the next steps through our own inner being.

It is quite different to speak from the point of view of knowledge than it is to speak from the religious viewpoint. When one speaks from the side of knowledge, one deals mainly with the content; when one speaks about Anthroposophy as a religious element, my dear friends, then we need to pay attention to Goethe's words: Not What we think, but more How we think!—and for this reason I said yesterday, Anthroposophy inevitably, as is its character, leads to a religious experience, it flows into a religious experience through the How, how its content is experienced. However, when one speaks from the religious angle, it is necessary now not to look first at What it is which lies in the spread ahead of us, but that one goes out from this How, one comes from the human subject, one has to illuminate this human subject.

When you have found the attitude of prayer, you can now go to the other side and find it in the reading of the Gospels as well. The meaning the Gospels have for religious development, we will of course still speak about. In any case, real Christians need to remain within inner childlike feelings today in order to understand the Gospels in a believable way, also without criticism. When as a theologian he applies criticism, he has to, because he comes from the Christian angle, be able to understand the Gospel without criticism. At least he must firstly become strong in his experiences of the Gospels, and then, armed with this strength, he only then applies criticism. That's actually the basic damage in Bible criticism and actually in the Gospel criticism of the 19th Century; people are not initially religiously strengthened before they apply criticism to the Gospels. As a result, they have arrived at a Gospel criticism which is nothing other than done in the modern scientific sense. Nothing is more clearly felt regarding this modern scientific sense, my dear friends, than the Gospel words of St Matthew 13, for in Matthew 13, I could say, the pivotal point of the whole chapter are words which encloses a mystery, and that perhaps in the entire evolution of Christianity it could never have been felt more deeply by religious people than today, when they come up against the world. It is in the words: He answered and said: for you it is possible, to understand the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven, but for those, whom I've just mentioned, the people around, it is not so.—To this an actually deep puzzle is connected: To him who has it, more will be given ... but he, who does not have it, nothing will be given: what would have been given to him, the little he has, will be taken from him.—These are extraordinarily deep words. Perhaps nowhere else in the evolution of Christianity can these words of giving and taking be so deeply felt—when one can really feel in a religious way towards the world and people—how just today, science has taken over nature and in the widest circles gained ever more authority; accepted to take away everything which could give the possibility of being able to spiritually hear with his ears or see with his eyes. This is not what man is supposed to do, in the scientific sense. Spirit should be obliterated in the sense of science, in the mood of our modern times. When we speak in the same way as modern theology speaks to people who are raised in scientific terms, we take away that little which they could have in religious feeling. When we counter what is done in the Faculty of Philosophy with what is done in enlightened theology today, we remove the last bit of what is religious.

This needs to be felt, experienced in deep profundity, because the mood of the time is such has made it necessary for theologians to eradicate the religious. It is very necessary that we listen in a lively way to these words of the Matthew Gospel. However, this leads us to the next question: How can we discover the truth content, the vital content of the Gospel in the right way? We must find the correct way so that we can find the truthfulness also in the details of the Gospel and with this truthfulness directly illuminate the content of our lives. You see, in the way I'm saying this, I'm formulating my words in a particular way. I'm thinking of Paul's' words "Not I but Christ in me" and see how it should be spoken now in relation to the understanding of the Gospels, and when the word is within the heart of truth: "Not I, but Christ in me," the Christ said, in order to align the people in the right direction: "I am the way, the truth and the life."—We may express the words of Paul, "Not I but Christ in me," and then we will approach the Gospel in a way which leads to the right way to access the truthfulness and through this find the vital content in the Gospels. We have to climb up to a certain level in order to bring to life Paul's words: "Not I, but Christ in me." We must try to ever and again let it be spoken out, when we want to understand the Gospel. My dear friends, if Christ had spoken in the theologians of the 19th Century, then quite a different theology would have resulted, than it did, because a different Gospel view would have resulted.

Having indicated the first steps to experiencing it further and continuing with the Matthew 13 Gospel, I would like to say a bit more. I stress clearly that this is the start of something we need to continue within ourselves, and here I want to again call your attention to the words "Think what? Think more how!"

By taking the 13th chapter of St Matthew's Gospel as our example, we must understand the situation: as soon as we approach the Gospel, we must renounce intellectualism and find our way into the descriptive element. Let us go straight away into the descriptive element and let's look at the verses leading up to this, in the verses 46, 47, 48, 49, 50 of the 12th chapter. These indicate how Christ Jesus is addressed: "See, your mother and our brother stand outside and want to talk to you"—and how he lifts his hand and points to his disciple and says: "Behold, in those souls live my mother and my brothers."—We want to go even deeper into these words, but first we need to clarify the situation. What we bring with us through birth into this life, the feeling which one can in the profoundest sense refer to as a child-like feeling, or as a brotherly feeling, this which we receive through the utmost grace, this is what is referred to here. Immediately the transition can be made towards which the most important aspect of Christianity is to lead; that we learn to extend, as best we can, the child-like, the brotherliness, to those souls with whom we have a spiritual connection. Wrong, it would be completely wrong, to feel this is somehow negative, when it is felt that only in the very least would that which lies in the childlike and brotherly feeling would be loosened and put in the place which lies in the feelings to the disciples. This is not what it is about, but it is rather about the human feeling lain into mankind as brotherhood, firstly only found in nature, therefore in that which we are born into this world as our first grace, in the feelings to our parents, to those we are bound through blood. We place ourselves positively towards it, and what we find in it, we carry over by ensouling it, towards all those with whom we want to have a Christian connection and want to live in a Christian community.

This is what comes over into the 13th chapter of the Matthew Gospel. With it we are immediately in a starting position. If we take the content from the 53rd to 58th verses of the St Matthew's 13th chapter of the Gospel, and lead it over to the following, then we find that the greatest importance is the Christ Jesus now returns to his hometown, and through the experience of being in his hometown, express the words which appear in the 57th line of the 13th chapter: He says: "A prophet is nowhere less accepted than in his hometown and in his own house." The 58th verse now continues with the line: "And he was not able to do many deeds of the spirit there, for the sake of their unbelief." When we understand this situation, we are immediately led to see how Christ Jesus stands amidst people who have not understood the words: "Behold, in those souls live my mother and my brothers."

They failed to understand these words; as the words were not understood in their time; they also don't lead the way to Christ Jesus. The way to Christ Jesus has to be looked for. At this point it is indicated in the Matthew Gospel which people would find the way and who would not be able to find it, but also, how it can be found. We really need to understand that for those who are unable to ensoul the feelings of blood relationships given through grace to mankind, would not be able to find the way; those who only want to be part of their fatherland and not part of God's land, will not be able to find their way to Christ Jesus. So we are placed between two concrete experiences in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 13, and out of this situation we must expect that in this 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel the relationship between the folk and Christ Jesus is stated, and how Christ Jesus as such can be discovered again by the folk.

Let's enter more deeply into this situation. Already in the first sentence we are drawn more intimately into the situation. It is important firstly, to be able to enter right into it. You are already standing in it if you take what leads up to it and away from it; it is important to stand completely within it: "On the day of Saturn Jesus left his home and sat down at the lake."—If this is read without a lively engagement and purpose, then the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel is not actually being read. First of all, what is happening there is on the day of the Sabbath, the day of Saturn. We will discover, my dear friends, that the enfolding of the liturgy is found throughout the year but it is not indifferent regarding how a priest applies the Gospel; we will see that the Gospels are placed in the course of the year in such a way that people can find a connection in the Gospel to what can be experienced in nature, otherwise you will not really give the words of the Gospels their correct inner power.

We will still talk about the details of the year's liturgy, but we need to get closer to these things. If you look at it spiritually, the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel speaks about the end of the world, that means the earthly world, and it is clearly indicated that it will happen in the manner of the prophecy. In the 35th verse it says: "That it might be fulfilled, that which is spoken by the prophet, who says: I want to open my mouth in parables and speak about the mysteries of the world's primordial beginning."—Here in the 13th chapter the end of the world should be spoken about. Christ Jesus chose the Sabbath because earlier people turned to it when they wanted to understand the beginning of the world, to compare it to the truths about the end of the world. The reception of these words needed an inner peace, it is indicated directly by the time setting. The effort of the preceding days must have taken place for man must be in need of rest in order to understand what would be said in the 13th chapter of Matthew's Gospel. He goes out of his home because he has something to say which goes further out than what can be said at home; this is the immediate recovery of verses 53 to 58. At home he couldn't have said anything. The writer of the Gospel is aware of indicating this in conclusion. You can't get close to the Gospel if you don't have the precondition that every word of the Gospel carries weight; it can't be indicated outwardly, you must try to let it enter into your inner life.

"He sat down beside the lake." You only realize what it means to sit beside the lake, how we are led in the wide world of experiences, when you sit at a lake and you are led away from everything which binds you to the earth. With the sensation of airspace, we already have too much abstraction which escapes us. Of course, experiences in the air spaces of the spirit leads us away from what chains us to the earth, but as human beings there is firstly something which escapes us.

We now have him sitting down beside the lake. Here he now gathers the folk, and speaks to them of the Kingdom of Heaven, in parables. The disciples start to understand that when Christ Jesus speaks to the people in the way in which he addressed the disciples, in the examination of the parables, then people would also be deprived of what they have, at least. He could give the people nothing if he gave them the solutions to the parables. So what does he have to do first of all? To start off with, he should not speak of a spiritual world content, but firstly speak about world content, spread out before the senses. He needs to speak about the grain seed, leading them through every possibility in the destiny of the kernel. He must lead them to the possibility that the seed can't develop roots, or only weak roots, or hardly any roots, and can be lamed by opposing forces to fully develop its roots.

My dear friends, you need to understand that you must speak in this way to people, because people first need to become inwardly alive towards what is usually thoughtlessly passed by. Their souls need to be lit up for the observation of the outer world. The soul remains dead and un-kindled if what lies externally, is not stirred up in inner words. People go thoughtlessly and wordlessly through the world. They look at the seed, which wilts. They see the seed which bears fruit, but they don't connect their seeing in such a way that it becomes alive as an inner seeing, an inner hearing. Only when we have transformed the experience of outer world into an inner image, only then do we have what can become preparation. The soul needs to be kindled by the external, the soul needs to revive itself in the external world. If you speak only about the meaning of nature, then you will firstly be speaking to deaf soul ears and blind soul eyes, and you will also take away the least which people have. You only give them something when they understand that you are speaking to their soul, speaking to their soul in the same way as Christ Jesus could speak to the disciples, having enlivened their souls through their participation in his life. The soul needs to be stirred, made to come alive towards the outer world and only after this enlivening is accomplished can you speak to the souls regarding interpretations placed before them as parables of nature. In this sense you link people initially to natural processes and try to transform the natural processes into images. Enliven everything which you can experience around you, imbue it in a sunny way.

From the moment we wake up in the morning, to the evening when we bring ourselves to rest, we are surrounded by sunshine. As unprepared individuals we have at first no inkling of what surrounds us in sunlight, which floods around us. We see sunlight reflected on single items, we initially see colours mirrored, but whether this imbuing sunshine floods through us as human beings experiencing colour, particularly activated and enlivened, we have no inkling of. We simply find ourselves in light from waking to going to sleep, and then we turn in a moonlit night to the moon, with open human hearts, and see how it is surrounded by stars that accompany it, and now return to the first experience which we could have that when you look at the sun, just when it is most lively with its light flooding around you, your eyes become blinded. The intensity of sunlight is so strong that it could, without hesitation, change eyes into suns.

If I look at the moon, then the moon throws the sunlight back to me, it sends the light back in such a way that I can take it in. The dazzling sunlight takes away the discretion. This discretion only remains while I'm looking at moonlight. The rays of the sun have such a majestic intensity that they do not have to rob me of my discretion when I turn towards them. I can turn to them when they are given again by the moon. How can I make this into an inner experience? I may and can, as a human being, unite myself with what the moon returns to me; I may, when I place it as a symbol in front of myself, have something with which I can unite myself. I can, with what I encounter in the moonlight, make myself an image with which I can unite myself. In other words, I may make an image of the sun, which has presented itself through the moonlight, and that is the Host, which I may consume. However, there is something so intense, so majestically great, that I can't be allowed to expose it immediately.

When I imagine this in images, I must present it in another way. I must determine a relationship which is not only visible as a similarity, and place it there, by becoming the nourishment for what the journey is allowed to become (the Host) surrounded with that which may only be looked at, with the monstrance (receptacle of the Host) [a drawing is done on the blackboard] and I have my relationship to the world born out of a dualistic comparison, a twofold kind, which I make into a kind of image with the inclusion of the monstrance. In the nourishment for the way, in the Host I have something with which I can unite. In what surrounds the Host I have an image of the weakened rays of the sun. Through communion there must appear in me what appears in the experience of the weakening, which I sense in moonlight, which I couldn't feel as a direct sun process, otherwise I would be blinded. In between both these is the communion: I place myself in the world context.

What the sun and moon have to say to one another, this is what is found in human beings, the human being stands right in it and enlivens it through communion.

So you can see, further than just the mentioned comparison, it is distilled into a symbol which can be experienced. If it is experienced in the right sense, that means, experienced in a way as one does with others, with the full understanding of the words "And he pointed over to his disciple and said: See, that is my parent and my brother," then to a certain extent the human community is placed within the sense of these words, then one works towards community building and this teaching, how community building can be achieved, we will discover again when we move forward in the interpretation of Matthew 13.

My dear friends, it is from inner knowledge—which an anthroposophical overview can give of human evolution—it is from my complete conviction that it would be especially bad for the present if we were to ignore the signs of the times today in order not to want to surrender to them. Just think, just when you allow your soul to look at Matthew's Gospel 13, you notice the following: the Catholic Church remains primarily fixed at the symbolism; what appeared in their community building was tied to the symbolism, the symbolism which lets you experience the kingdoms of the heavens. It didn't occur to anyone during the first centuries of Christianity's propagation, to speak about patience, that people could wait, and so on. I am obliged to say this. They were completely filled with the need for action, because they found the efficacy of symbolism and contribution of the symbol itself, as community building. They found within the symbolism what Christ wanted to indicate through the words which record the seven parables of the kingdom of God. They wanted through the symbolism make ears to hear and eyes to see before they started with the proclamation; you are standing within the living world of symbolism.

Today we are standing in a completely changed time. We read in Matthew's 13 Chapter that initially explanations of the parables would only be given to the disciples. This we can't do today. It would be impossible today because the Gospels are in everyone's hands and the meaning of the parables can be read by everyone. We really live in a completely changed time. We don't really notice this at all. We must in a new way understand what the Matthew Gospel Chapter 13, contains. In the sense of our time, we must consider the structure of Matthew 13. Firstly, we have Christ sitting in front of the people, he delivers the parables to them about the kingdom of heaven, and from the 36th verse it is written: "Then Jesus left the people and came home, and his disciples approached him and said: Explain the parable of the weeds on the fields. And he explained it to them."

Let me clarify this situation completely. Firstly, the Christ speaks to the people in parables, which are clothed in outer events. He points to these parables for his disciples. He utters during these explanations meaningful words of mystery, which I have tried to bring closer to you. After he has returned home and spoke to his disciples about the parables of the weeds, he spoke to them about a number of other parables—about the treasure in the field, the priceless pearl, and some of the discarded fish found in the fishnet. Thus, he spoke about other parables to the disciples, after he had left the people. This all belongs to this situation: in the Gospels everything is important. We also have—let us place this clearly before our souls—the Christ at the lake, sitting in front of the people, telling them about the parables, then turning away, turning to the disciples, leading them into the situation in which he utters important mystery words, speaking to them alone away from the people, explaining the parables with the help of other parables, then, after he had again led them to the spirit-godly revelations, he asks if they had understood. Their answer is "Yes." Now the very next conclusion is—because everything else is just an introduction—: "Having been initiated into the scriptures you will conduct yourselves like a man who is master of his house, who takes out of his treasure that which he has experienced, but that part of what he has experienced which he has filled with life inwardly, so that he can add something new to it and then be able to present it to his listeners."

I wanted to show you the way towards understanding Matthew 13, and tomorrow we will speak further about the content of truth and content of life, which can be found in this way in the Gospels. I have only indicated as an insertion how symbolism is found in this way in a central symbol from which certainly everything has to be believed, my dear friends, that it should also become a central symbolism for those who want to bring it into the ritual in pastoral care. What is needed is something visible as a symbol, which is more than just a product of nature, and for this, words are necessary which are enlivening; and action is necessary which is more than a mere action of nature. In the context of our civilization today we have dead words, not enlivened words. We only have actions, also human actions, which only contain nature's laws. We have neither living words, nor actions permeated by Divine will. To both of these we need to come through prayer and in reading the Gospels on the one hand and real fulfilling of the ritual on the other hand.

More about this tomorrow.

[ 1 ] On reincarnation.

[ 2 ] In reality, the doctrine of reincarnation is an ancient teaching in the secret schools. It has only relatively recently been included in the scriptures. It is one of the most elementary teachings in the world. The processes of reincarnation themselves are not so simple. (See Rudolf Steiner's explanations about the etheric bodies of the rishis and so on).

[3] The reappearance of the /ch was carefully guarded among the secrets. In the infancy of the theosophical movement, one could hear strange things about reincarnation; it happened that at the coffee house at one table, there were re-embodiments of Emperor Joseph, Seneca and so on! These things are very confusing. One should cultivate the feeling in relation to them: “I receive many ideas, but I cannot dig deep enough to understand them. I actually understand nothing at all!” It is the best impulse to be shy about forming a final judgment.

[ 4 ] On the expressions: death and dying.

[ 5 ] In the Book of Job, Job's wife advises him not to remain good. One expression occurs: “Deny God and die.” These words encapsulate a whole world. We can only understand them if we know what was understood by “union with God.” It is the possibility of a life that cannot be extinguished by death, once union has been attained.

[ 6 ] By dying, the material process is not meant; one must approach this word with other feelings. Paul once said, “Then came the law, and I died.” We must realize what the concept of the law means. By death is meant the separation of that which is unkillable.

[ 7 ] In certain ages, it was understood to mean the submerging of the soul's consciousness into a lower state: when the soul enters embodiment, it enters into obscuration of consciousness.

[ 8 ] The soul can lead such a life that she never has to enter darkness again. Darkness is death, which occurs at the birth of the body. Souls that do nothing for themselves enter this re-death, that is, re-embodiment.

[ 9 ] It is the will of the masters to show clearly how modern thinking is deficient and inflexible and so infinitely far removed from the true facts.

[ 10 ] Not only is that Christian love, which helps those who have fallen into error, but there is an active Christian love that protects others from misunderstandings. In oriental wisdom there is a theory of knowledge so profound that we cannot even begin to understand it with our Kantian materialism. When we penetrate to pure knowledge, we have to say: without the eye, there is no light – so the world is our imagination. But without light, there is no eye either! It perceives light not by chance, because light is the creator of the eye: the eye is born of light. The objectification of light is the sun. Occultly, the sun corresponds to the eye in the microcosm. Likewise, voice (microcosmic) and fire (macrocosmic) correspond. The formation of formed matter can be correctly compared with the formation of sound or tone figures. These are reproductions of the original processes. Form is sound that has become rigid in matter. The clay had to first break through the primal fire. The mineral and animal world, in short, everything is clay (that has broken through the fire). Microcosmically, the fire pulses in the warmth of the blood. As the fire finds expression in the blood, the sound of the microcosm resonates from within (the voice) and corresponds to the matter forming out of the Logos.

[ 11 ] The wisdom of the primeval world is wiser than the thinking that has arisen in the course of the world. The wisdom that is in the things around us was imprinted on them on the moon. The task of the earth is the development of love. On Jupiter, love will reach us from everything. Evolution on earth is necessary to find love from within on Jupiter. On the moon, we have as poles: wisdom - error; on earth: love - selfishness.

[ 12 ] Saturn – Fire Sun – Air (gas) Moon – Water Earth – Earth (solid).

[ 13 ] Water and air developed independently of each other during the formation of the earth. Everything is condensed from the four elements. Evaporated water is intimately related to plants. Today we can only use inorganic forces (e.g. coal and so on), while the Atlanteans worked with plant forces. He knew how to draw the forces out of the seed and used them to move his vehicles. The forces of the plant seed are born of air and water. But how a person uses these forces depends on his or her morality. Wind and weather were closely related to this. If the forces were used well, then wind and weather were also good. When the Atlanteans became evil, they themselves brought about the catastrophe of the flood.

[ 14 ] Similarly, fire and earth were in connection for a certain time (Lemuria). These elements can intertwine in many different ways.

[ 15 ] You can have an idea of three-dimensional space. In the Platonic school, an important tenet is: God geometrizes. Basic geometric concepts awaken clairvoyant abilities. In the geometry of the situation, it is proved that the same point is everywhere in the vicinity: the infinitely distant point on the right is the same as the starting point on the left. That means, ultimately, the world is a sphere, you come back to the starting point. When I take geometric theorems, they turn into borderline concepts. Three-dimensional space reaches its point again. That is why point a in the astral world acts on point b without any connection.

[ 16 ] One introduces materialism into theosophy when, in order to arrive at the spiritual, one assumes that matter becomes thinner and thinner. This does not lead to the spiritual. But through such ideas as point a = point b, one arrives at ideas of the fourth dimension.

[ 17 ] As an example, we can think of the gall wasp with the thin waist 0-0, if the connection in the middle were not there and the two parts moved together, connected only by effect. Expand the concept: many fields of action goJo in multidimensional space.

[ 18 ] About the Number 40. “One in the egg” — what does that mean? It is written like this: 10. The exoteric reads it as ten, the esoteric: “One in the egg”.

[ 19 ] Imagine we have completed some cycle of development, for instance Saturn, Sun and Moon, and we are at the point where the evolution of the Earth begins. What man has gained from Saturn has become egg O0, from the sun as well: 0 0, from the moon as well: 0 0 0. After three completed cycles, a new one begins: 1000. This one undergoes sub-cycles.

[ 20 ] Cycle 6.5.4.3.2.1.

[ 21 ] We can also write in occult writing: 4321000. When we speak of 1000 years in occult writing, we mean that 3 cycles have emerged from the egg.

[ 22 ] This is an occult arithmetic that reflects cosmic facts. Everything from the cosmos is reflected in the physical and spiritual life of the earth. In our present cycle, man is moving towards the contemplation of the external world, towards a reversal of all contemplation. Where Maja occurs for consciousness, is the 4th cycle. Therefore, the 4 is the number of Maja and the cosmos.

[ 23 ] In all instances where 4 occurs in the Bible, this or that is overcome by Maja: 40 days of fasting, 40 days of wandering mean a certain overcoming. 40 = 4 from the egg. Whoever fasts for 40 days must have gone through an occult cycle. The more primitive the states of consciousness are, the less one can speak of boredom. This fades the more we go back in states of consciousness.

[ 24 ] Evolution does not presuppose a beginning or an end. Development proceeds in cycles without repetition, with something new being added in cyclic progression. A finite beginning or end is a last-ditch attempt to explain away sensual processes.

[ 25 ] The development of the part __creature, the evolvement of the whole God, is a false premise. Example: Father - son.

[ 26 ] The planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars remained behind before the separation of the sun. Mercury and Venus separated from the sun after the separation of the earth, to create dwelling places for higher beings.

[ 27 ] We can explain the canals of Mars through Germanic mythology: Germanic mythology reflects earlier conditions of the earth. In the earlier thinness of matter, regular processes took place that have now become irregular: for example, the twelve streams, the fire sparks and so on; these were developmental processes on earth. The same is true on Mars: the formation of canals is a still preserved, retained state that our earth also went through.

[ 28 ] Man has the task of attaining freedom; he can develop forces from all hierarchies, for example, from the angels Manas, from the archangels Budhi, and so on. Through his development, it becomes possible for higher hierarchies to take effect; it is precisely through this that he develops further. Man contains all hierarchies within himself as a microcosm.

[ 29 ] In the evolution on earth, everything repeats itself. Where Mars is today, the earth was in the state of the moon. Repeated on earth: the passage of Mars.

Today I should like to discuss a few things, speaking at times more generally, in connection with what was said yesterday and the day before. From those two lectures you will have been able to learn that spiritual science, as conceived here, is to be born, in our time and for the very near future, out of the deepest and most serious demands of human evolution. I have often mentioned that we are not concerned here with those ideals which originate in man's subjective nature, but rather with what is being deciphered from the spiritual history of the evolution of humanity; and from this spiritual history one can clearly see that the science of initiation, that is, the science which brings over its knowledge from beyond the threshold of the spiritual world, is absolutely necessary for the further evolution of mankind. But all that can be said today concerning a genuine knowledge of the spiritual world is opposed by those powers which stand for the antiquated; and the opposition of the people in whom these powers live must be overcome. The statement of the necessity for a complete transformation of learning and thinking with regard to the most important affairs of human evolution must be seriously and basically understood. Therefore I should like to ask you to attach special importance to the idea that it must be our purpose to overcome everything of a merely sectarian nature, still rampant even in the anthroposophical mind, and really to see the significance for the world and for humanity of anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science.

People today are still far from being awakened out of the sleep in which they were enfolded by that development which I have already described to you in certain of its fundamental characteristics, and which began about the middle of the 15th century. Certainly what was incorporated in the evolution of humanity during that time: namely, external physical science with its great triumphs, the materialistic conception of cosmic laws, and with it the mistaken social ideas so clearly evident today—all that has from this direction enveloped humanity in sleep continues to have a powerful effect; and a fruitful advance will not be possible unless mankind is shaken out of this sleep. Let us never forget that the knowledge of the spiritual has powerful enemies in all those who wish to be assured first of all—just from pure mental indolence—of the continuance of what they have been accustomed to think. We cannot say that we should take no notice when on the part of such people hostility and opposition to spiritual science as it is purposed here become more and more determined as this spiritual science becomes better known. To be sure, anyone might believe that such things should be allowed to pass entirely unnoticed; but that would be an utterly wrong view in our present time. We do not fail to notice noxious insects which approach us; we try to get rid of them, and often this must be done in ungentle ways. The mode of procedure must be decided in each individual case.

These things must also be understood out of the necessities of the time. Therefore it must be viewed with very special satisfaction in these times of ours, which are becoming ever more difficult, if there are nevertheless people who are possessed of sufficient power of will to stand up for our cause. But there are alas! still far too few people who fully comprehend the seriousness of what is now at stake in the evolution of humanity. On the one hand, there are those who do not intend to stir out of long-accustomed habits—not for any spiritual reasons, but from mental laziness and other such considerations; and on the other hand, there must be those who strongly oppose with their whole being whatever is ripe for destruction. We must not suppose that any sort of indulgence toward what is ready to perish can be allowed to hinder us today. In the last five or six years people could have learned that things belonging to the old order lead ad absurdum; and those who have not yet learned it will have abundant opportunity to do so in the immediate future. There must be in us the zeal for that which is to be implanted as something new in the evolution of mankind.

That a violent hatred would be manifest toward that anthroposophical spiritual science which has now been carried on in Europe for two decades, could be foreseen—anyone could foresee it who knew and knows that what we call anthroposophical spiritual science is intimately connected with the powers which must be summoned in the present and the very near future for the progress of humanity. This spiritual science must not be confused with sleepy-headedness, with that disposition to create for oneself a little sensual soul-enjoyment by means of spiritual ideas and concepts. We stand at the beginning. Against us rages the battle of the will to exterminate. In so far as we have understood the true impulse of our spiritual science, we have never intended to act aggressively; but we must not neglect whatever is necessary to meet the opposition of the aggressive element which will appear more and more from without. Here our courage must not give way; we must not try to proceed through indolence. It will not be easy to infuse truth into human evolution, and indulgence is positively not that with which to gird ourselves. Matters have come to a pretty pass indeed, as the recent events on the occasion of a lecture by Professor T. in Reutlingen prove. If the gentlemen who are the official representatives of Christianity are baffled, then they are ready to say, as a city clergyman did in the discussion: “Here Christ is mistaken!” Of course Professor T. is not mistaken; but if what he has to say does not agree with the revealed text of the Bible, then Christ is wrong, not Professor T. That is characteristic of the disposition we meet today, only people will not see it because it is uncomfortable to see it; and it could be found in all fields if only people were inclined to look for it.

For those who are able to see the relations in life, it is clear that the European calamity of recent years, although it has apparently played an external role, is inwardly connected with what people have become accustomed to think, and concerning which—please pardon the somewhat trivial, banal expression—concerning which people are so fond of saying: What glorious progress we have made! and smack their lips with satisfaction.

What is necessary is to become inwardly objective. Under the influence of modern culture people have lost objectivity. The personal is everywhere in evidence. When sometime the history of the last five or six years is written, that will be possible only from spiritual-scientific foundations, and then the chapters of this world history will show how enormously the personal element has influenced the great world-historical events. I said that it will be impossible without spiritual-scientific foundations to speak of the events of the last five or six years; and in support of this I need only refer to what I have frequently indicated here. Of the thirty or forty men in prominent leading positions who participated in 1914 in what is called the outbreak of the World War—people love inexact language nowadays, because it is adapted to cover up the truth; it was neither an “outbreak,” but something quite different, nor was it a “world war”; it was something entirely different, which will not come to an end for a long time yet—of the thirty or forty men who participated at that time, a large proportion were not entirely compos mentis, the forces of soul and spirit were not all functioning, and where the consciousness is clouded, there are doors by which the Ahrimanic powers have especially easy access to human resolutions and human intentions.

The Ahrimanic powers played an essential role in the beginning of those events of 1914. Even today anyone who is so minded could easily perceive, from following up events in a purely external way, how necessary it is to infuse spiritual knowledge into the evolution of humanity. But man is far removed by habits of thought, perception, and feeling from observing such things with absolute seriousness. There is on the one hand the fact—and more than that, the imminent fact—that the time is ripe for people to appear who are able to bring suitable and capable souls to meet those spiritual impulses which have been entering our physical world since the last third of the 19th century. Side by side with the fact that we have sailed into a materialistic time, there exists the other fact that the doors between the spiritual world and ours stand open since the last third of the 19th century, and that people who open their souls and minds to spiritual impulses can have relations with the spiritual world. To be sure, the number may be small of those whose consciousness is touched today by the spiritual world; but it is a fact that this spiritual world makes itself felt in many a human spirit. We may say that the next ten, twenty, thirty years, up to the middle of the century, will be years in which more and more people will have learned to listen to the still small voice, and so open their inner being to the impulses of the spiritual world which would enter.

Those people today who receive such impulses from the spiritual world, who know about the truths and the knowledge that must enter into human evolution, know the following also: If what we call science, and especially what we call art, is not fructified by the science of initiation practiced by such people, humanity will face a quick decline, a fearful decline. Let the kind of teaching that prevails in our universities continue for another three decades, let social questions be treated as they are now for thirty years more, and you will have a devastated Europe. You can set up ideals in this field or that as much as you please, you can talk yourselves hoarse about individual demands coming from one group or another, you can talk in the belief that with such urgent demands something will be done for humanity's future—it will all be in vain unless the transformation comes from the depths of human souls, from the thought of the relation of this world to the spiritual world. If in this regard there is not a change in learning, a change in thinking, then the moral deluge will overwhelm Europe!

The important thing is to realize what it would actually mean if a number of persons who look deeply into the knowledge from beyond the threshold were obliged to recognize that the confusion, the materialistic tendencies, the social errors, are going on and on—and people do not wish to alter their thinking and learning—it is important to realize what it would signify if these few persons possessing the science of initiation were compelled to see that humanity is going downwards because of sheer laziness in thinking and feeling. You should not be deceived as to the number of motives there are today for such a state of affairs in the so-called civilized world. There are many ruling motives—for is it not really natural to expect the humanity of our time in its pride to reject everything coming from the direction of the science of initiation? Humanity is so immensely clever in every single one of its individuals! humanity is so inclined to sneer at what can be won only by working upon the development of one's own soul. Humanity believes that without learning anything it knows everything. In neither the natural nor the social realm can the problems of the present time be solved without a fructifying of human thinking, feeling, and willing from the spiritual world. To many people today it seems positively like a creation of fancy when we speak of this science of initiation, or of anything like the threshold of the spiritual world. It is true, not everyone today can cross the threshold to the spiritual world; but no one would be prevented from perceiving the truth of what is said by those who have crossed that threshold. It is false reasoning when it is said again and again by one or another: How am I to know that what is presented by anyone as the science of initiation is correct, when I cannot myself see into the spiritual world? That is false reasoning. Common sense which is not led astray by the erroneous ideas of our time in the natural or the social sphere can decide of itself whether the element of truth rules in what anyone says. If someone speaks of spiritual worlds, you must take account of everything: the manner of speaking, the seriousness with which things are treated, the logic which is developed, and so on, and then it will be possible to judge whether what is presented as information about the spiritual world is charlatanism, or whether it has foundation. Anyone can decide this; and no one is hindered from making fruitful in the natural and social realms that which is brought over from the well-spring of spiritual life by those who have the right to speak of the principle of initiation.

Those forces of humanity's evolution which have so far guided man unconsciously, so that he has been able to advance, are becoming exhausted, and will be entirely exhausted by the middle of the century, approximately speaking. The new forces must be drawn from depths of souls; and man must come to understand that in the depths of his soul he is connected with the roots of spiritual life.

As to crossing over the threshold, naturally not everyone today can accomplish that, for the human being has become accustomed in the course of recent centuries to consider everything he encounters as taking place in time. But the first experience beyond the threshold is of a world in which time as we understand it has no significance. The time concept must be abandoned. Hence it is advantageous for people who wish to prepare themselves for an understanding of the spiritual world, to begin this training at least, by trying to picture backwards—let us say a drama, which outwardly starts, of course, with the first act and proceeds to the fifth—to picture it as starting at the end and going back to the beginning of the first act; to imagine and feel a melody, not in the succession in which it is played, but letting the tones run backward; to picture the daily experience, not from morning to evening, but running backward from evening to morning. In this way we seriously accustom our thinking to the canceling of time. In our daily life we are accustomed to picture the second event as occurring after the first, the third following the second, the fourth following the third, and so on; and our thinking is always an image of external happenings. If now we begin to think sometimes from the end toward the beginning, to feel from the end toward the beginning, we impose an inner compulsion upon ourselves, and this compulsion is good, for it forces us out of the ordinary sense world. Time runs one, two, three, four, and so on, in this direction. If we reverse our thinking, so that it goes from evening to morning, thus: instead of from morning to evening, then we are thinking against time. We cancel time.

If we are able to continue such thinking, going back in our life as far as we possibly can, we shall have gained very much; for only one who escapes from time can enter into the spiritual world.

We say that man is provided with physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. At first only the physical and etheric bodies come into consideration for the physical sense world. The etheric body still takes part in time in earth events; the astral body can be found only when we are freed from time. The physical body is in space; the ego, the true ego, can be found only when we have escaped from space, for the world in which the true ego lives is spaceless.

So there are two conditions belonging to the earliest experiences namely, that we become free from time and free from space when we cross the threshold to the spiritual world. I have often referred previously to various ways of attaining concepts which disregard space, when I have called your attention to the dimensions—not in such a childish way as four-dimensional space and the like are often spoken of by spiritists, but in a more serious way. Just consider how much of the content of your consciousness is lost when you are no longer in space and time. Your life is completely adjusted to space and time. The soul life of man, as well, is entirely accommodated to space and time. If you enter a world to which you are not adapted, the lack of adaptation implies sensations of pain and suffering; so that the first entrance into the spiritual world is not won without the vanquishing of pain and suffering. People fail to realize this, or else they shrink back in terror from the spiritual world because they are unwilling to enter the kind of abysmal world in which space and time do not exist.

When I thus call before your mental vision this first experience of life beyond the threshold, you become vividly conscious that there are indeed few people today who have sufficient inner courage to venture themselves, as it were, into the bottomless and timeless in actual experience. Certain people, however, are bound by their destiny to cross over the threshold; and without the wisdom which can be brought over from beyond the threshold no further progress is possible. From this you will feel what is necessary. It is necessary that what we call confidence of one man in another should be increased in the future. It would be a fundamental social virtue. In our time of social demands this virtue is one of the rarest, for although people demand that everyone shall serve the community, no one has confidence in another; the most unsocial instincts hold sway. In order that the general education of humanity shall progress in such a way that human beings may grow into the spiritual world, it will be necessary that those who may rightly speak of the science of initiation be given confidence—not confidence arising from blind belief in authority, but from common sense; for what is brought as information from beyond the threshold can always be comprehended if only common sense is really employed.

And then from the viewpoint of common sense, and keeping that in mind on the one hand, we must, on the other, constantly direct our attention to what confronts us today. Although not everyone says thus openly, “There the Christ is mistaken” yet the logic of the present life is characterized by this kind of talk. And when people say they cannot distinguish between what is announced with inner logic from the spiritual worlds and what the university professors say—then common sense is not in evidence, or at least there is no intention to use it. When anyone declares that Christ is mistaken, surely from his common sense a man can say without further ado that such a person can no longer be taken into account from this point of view.

We have lost a real science of the soul. We no longer have any; and I have pointed out—only recently in public lectures in Basel¹ and in other places—why we have lost the science of the soul. The science of the spirit became uncomfortable to the Catholic Church as early as the 9th century; and, as I have frequently explained, the spirit was abolished at the Eighth General Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 869. At that time the dogma was announced that, if a man is a true Christian, he must not think that he consists of body, soul, and spirit, but only of body and soul, and that the soul has spiritual qualities. Psychology still teaches that today, and believes that such teaching represents the point of view of unprejudiced science; but it is only repeating the dogma of 869. Even all that refers to the soul was monopolized by the confessional churches in the form of belief, in the form of creed or dogma. All knowledge pertaining to the soul that should come from man himself was monopolized by the denominational societies; and only external nature was left as the object of real knowledge, of free knowledge. No wonder we have today no science of the soul, for secular scholarship has devoted itself entirely to the science of nature, since the science of the soul was monopolized and the science of the spirit abolished. So we have no science of the soul. If we build upon the science that is the fashion today, we can make no progress; for if we build upon the word-psychology of our time (it really is not much more than that), we cannot come to a real understanding of what takes place in the soul. You know from my statement in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment that upon crossing over the threshold to the spiritual world, thinking, feeling, and willing become separated in the consciousness. In the ordinary present-day consciousness thinking, feeling, and willing form a sort of chaos; they are intermingled. At the moment when the threshold to the spiritual world is crossed, at the moment when one sets about acquiring the science of initiation through experience, thinking, feeling, and willing become independent powers in the consciousness. They become independent, and then one learns to know them.

Only then does one learn really to distinguish thinking from feeling and from willing.

Especially does one learn to distinguish thinking from willing. If we consider the thinking which is active in us as human beings, not according to its content, but as a force—if we consider the thinking force in us, we find that the very force with which we think is something like a shining into our life of that which we experienced in the spiritual world before birth, or before conception. And the will-nature in man is something embryonic, something germinal, which will come to complete development only post mortem after death. So we may say: If this (see diagram) is the course of human life between birth and death, then thinking, as it exists in man within the course of this human life, is only an appearance, for its true being lies in the time before birth, or before conception; and willing is only a germ, for what develops from this germ does so only after death.

Thinking and willing in human nature are fundamentally different.

If now someone appears possessing the logic of our time, which tends to classify and arrange everything systematically, he will say: “We have been told today that thinking is the force which comes from the life before birth, and that willing is the force which points to the life after death.” Now one has defined; by definition one has nicely drawn the line between thinking and willing. But nothing is accomplished by definitions, though their insufficiency is generally not observed. Many definitions, especially those which are considered scientific, appear very clever; but they all have a hitch somewhere—which recalls that definition once given in ancient Greece to the question, What is man? “Man is a two-legged creature without feathers.” Whereupon the next day a pupil brought a plucked fowl and said: “This is a man, for it is a two-legged creature without feathers.” Things are not so simple that they can be treated thus with the ordinary intellectual tools. You see we can say quite well, we must maintain, that what we experience as thinking has its true reality before birth, and that only something like a reflected image of it shines into us. Here a certain difficulty presents itself, but you will overcome it with a little effort of thought.

If you have a mirror here, and here an object—for example, a candle—you have here a reflected image. You can distinguish the image from the object, and will not take the one for the other. If in some way—let us say with a screen—you have the candle itself covered, you will see only the reflection in the mirror. The reflected image will do whatever the candle does, and so from the reflection you will be able to see what it does. You are accustomed to think spatially, and you can therefore easily imagine how the reflection of the candle is related to the reality. But the thinking force in us, as force, is a reflected image, and its reality is in the life before birth. The real force whose image we employ in this life, is in the life before birth. Therefore the principle of human consciousness which results from observing one's own consciousness is: I think, therefore I am not, cogito ergo non sum! That is based on the principle which must be grasped: that in thinking something of the nature of an image exists, and that the force of thinking belongs to the life before birth. Modern development began by setting up the opposite as the basic axiom of philosophy: Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am, which is nonsense. You see what tests modern humanity must go through; but we are at the crossroads, and we must learn to transform our thinking about the basic factors of the soul life.

Having thus in a certain way traced back thinking to its essential being, we might now be able to state something similar with regard to willing. When we regard the will-force between birth and death and what it becomes after death, we must conceive willing, not as reality and reflection, but as germ and completion. This provision: namely, that we have the image of thinking and the embryo of willing, alone gives us the possibility of The Riddle of Man, and Riddles of the Soul, as well as in the second edition of Philosophy of Spiritual Activity where these things are also treated philosophically.

But here is a peculiar fact from which you must see how little the indolent, everyday thinking suffices for entering into reality. We have grasped the essential nature of thinking; but when we do grasp this essential nature of thinking, we must say at the same time: This thinking is not mere thinking, but in it is also a force of willing. With the very inner being with which we think we will at the same time. It is principally thinking and has an undertone of willing; but in the same way, our willing has an undertone of thinking. We have in fact two different things in us: something which is chiefly thinking but has an undertone of willing; and something which is chiefly willing but has an undertone of thinking (see Diagram No. IX). When you consider the reality, you will not be able to form pure concepts which can be arranged systematically, but in a certain sense the one is always at the same time the other. Only when you come to an understanding of these things do you begin to perceive certain relations of man with worlds which are beyond those seen with our eyes and heard with our ears, but within which we live no less than in the world of the senses. We cannot say that other worlds than the sense world do not concern us; we are in their midst. We must realize that, while we are walking about here on this earth, we walk through the spiritual worlds exactly as we walk through the physical air.

Relations—I say—with the spiritual worlds result when one sees into these delicate details of human soul-life. Through that which is more thinking and has only an undertone of willing we are connected with a certain kind of spiritual existence of the spiritual worlds. And with another kind of spiritual worlds we are connected through that which is more willing and less thinking. That has indeed its deeper significance; for what we discover in this way manifests itself in human life; and the differentiations which exist in the world arise because the one or the other force of human nature is always developed more in one direction or another. Those forces, for example, existing in the willing which has an undertone of thinking were pre-eminently developed in the ancient Hebraic culture; and those forces of the human soul-being which are based essentially in the thinking which has an undertone of willing were developed in what is called the ancient pagan culture. At the present time we have the two streams flowing side by side; we have in the civilized world the two streams intermingling: one, a continuation of ancient paganism, in the conception of nature; and the other, which comes from the ancient Hebrews, we have in the social viewpoint of the present, in our ethical and religious concepts.

This dualism also exists today in the individual human being himself. On the one hand, man worships nature in a pagan fashion; and on the other—without finding a proper basis in nature, except that he carries over his habits of thought into so-called social science, or sociology—he ponders on the social life, even the ethical life. And when he philosophizes, he says that in one realm he finds freedom and in the other natural necessity, between which there is supposed to be no bridge; he finds himself in a ghostlike region between the two, and the confusion is terrible.

But in many respects this confusion is the content of the life of the present time, of the life that is perishing. What is lacking in this present life of ours? We have a conception of nature: it is merely the continuation of ancient paganism; we have a moral social conception: it is merely the continuation of the Old Testament. Christianity was an episode which was at first historically understood; but today it has fallen through the sieve of human culture, so to speak. In reality, Christianity does not exist; for with the people who frequently speak of Christ you can do as I recommended in connection with Harnack's Nature of Christianity. Wherever Harnack writes “Christ” in this book, you can strike out the word “Christ”, and substitute “God the Father,” or you can even replace it with a merely pantheistic “God,” or anything of the kind, and generally speaking there will be no essential contradiction. Where there is contradiction, he is talking nonsense, with predicates unrelated to subjects. All these things must be said today, for it must be thoroughly understood here what the content of the future consciousness must be.

Likewise, you see what the present theory of evolution is: that man has evolved from lower beings, and so forth; that these lower beings have developed themselves up to him. Certainly you need only to refer to my Occult Science to see that in one sense that must be said even by us. The fact is, however, that when we consider the human head, we see that this human head as we carry it on our shoulders today is already devolving, not evolving. If our entire organism (please understand me clearly now)—if our entire organism were to have the same organization as our head, we should have to be continually dying. We live only by means of the vital force in the rest of our organism, which is constantly being sent up into the head. The forces through which we finally die have their being in our head—are in our head. The head is an organism that is perpetually perishing; it is in retrogression. For this reason that which pertains to soul and spirit can attain its development in the head. If you represent the head in a sketch, you must do it thus: its ascending evolution has already passed over into a retrograde process; here is a void (see illus.).

Into this void, into what is being continuously destroyed, the soul and spirit enter. That is literally true: it is owing to our head that we have soul and spirit, because our head is already perishing. That is to say, in our head we are perpetually dying; and the undertone of willing, which is a quality of our thinking, lies in our head; but this undertone of willing is a continuous stimulus, a constant impulse to dying, to the overcoming of matter.

Now when we die, this willing really begins; and when our body is given over to the earth, that which played its role in our head between birth and death is carried on through our whole body, even physically in the earth-body. You carry your head on your shoulders, my dear friends, and in it the process goes on automatically which is accomplished when you are committed to the earth by fire or decomposition, only in life this process is constantly being revived, and hence obstructed, by what is sent up from the rest of the organism. After death the same process continues which you carry on in your body between birth and death. It is continued in the earth: the earth thinks according to the same principles as the thinking you do with your human head, owing to the fact that your body becomes decomposed in the earth, that corpses are put into it. When we pass through the gate of death, we carry into the physical earth, by means of our decomposing corpse, the process which we seize for ourselves during our life between birth and death. That is a truth of modern science, and people must know such truths in the future. The science of the present time is childish regarding such things, for it does not even think about them, investigate them.

And inversely, what we have in our head as evolution through destruction, is the continuation of that which existed before birth, or before conception. The destruction begins only with birth, for only then do we have a head—before that there was no destruction. Here we are really touching the edge of an extraordinarily significant mystery of cosmic existence. What exists in our head, through which we come into relation with other people and with external nature, is the continuation of something which exists in the spiritual worlds before we enter into the physical body. If anyone understands that perfectly, then he comes to comprehend how forces play into this physical world from the spiritual worlds. That is most clearly seen when these things are considered concretely, rather than in the abstract. Let me give an example:

In 1832 Goethe died. The period belonging to the first generation after his death, that is, up to 1865, was not such that many forces from his spirit influenced it. (This is merely a representative example; of course the forces of other men are active also.) Thus, up to the year 1865 anyone who directed his attention to Goethe's soul would have noticed little influence coming from his forces to the earth. Then after the first thirty-three years the forces began to come from him out of the spiritual worlds into our earth evolution; and they became stronger and stronger up to the year 1898. If we follow it further, beyond this period, we can say: The first period of influence of Goethe's super-sensible forces upon our earth civilization is, then, 1865 to 1898 (as I have said, up to 1865 it was insignificant, then it began). After thirty-three years we have in 1931 the end of a further period, which would be the second; and 1964 would be the end of the third period.

From such an example it can really be learned how relatively soon after a man has passed through the gate of death the forces which he then develops take part in what is going on here on earth. Only we must know how these forces take part. Anyone who works spiritually—really spiritually—knows how the forces of the spiritual worlds cooperate with the forces he uses. When I said day before yesterday that the middle of this century will be an important point of time, the statement was made—as in the example just given—on the basis of observations from which it can be seen how forces from the spiritual world pervade the physical world.

The middle of this century, however, will coincide with that point of time when the atavistic forces still remaining from before the middle of the 15th century will have fallen into the worst decadence; hence humanity must resolve before the middle of this century to turn toward the spiritual. We still meet many people today who say: “Why does misfortune come? Why do the Gods not help?” The fact is, we are in the period of humanity's evolution in which the Gods will immediately help if men turn to them, but in which the Gods are compelled by their laws to deal with free men, not with puppets.

Now I have reached the point to which I referred yesterday. When, let us say, a man with vision—even in the Greek epoch and up to the middle of the 15th century—alluded to the phenomena of birth and death, he could point to the divine world, he could point out that man's destiny between birth and death is woven out of the divine worlds. Today we must speak differently: we must say that man's destiny is determined by his previous earth-lives; and through the manner in which he is conditioned by his destiny he creates the forces through which the divine worlds can approach him. Our thinking must be the opposite of that of earlier times regarding the relation of man to the divine-spiritual worlds: we must learn to seek in man the sources from which the powers are developed which will enable one or another divine being to approach him. We have now reached this momentous point of time in earth-evolution. What takes place outwardly must today be understood as an expression of inner occurrence, which can be comprehended only from the point of view of spiritual-scientific insight. You see it is possible today for every person to observe, I might say the ultimate consequences of events. There have been plenty of people murdered in the last four or five years—at least ten or twelve million in the civilized world, probably more; three times as many have been made cripples in the different countries—our civilization has certainly done a grand job! But we must gradually come to recognize these things as the mouth of the stream, as it were, and we shall have to seek the source in what is going on in human souls in connection with that opposition to the will of the spiritual world to break into our world,—the spiritual world which would bear the being of man into the future. In our time everything must be observed from this point of view; that is, must be treated profoundly.

We might say that many events might perhaps be more correctly evaluated if we were to alter the viewpoint. Roughly speaking—and I say this now as something intended to give this lecture an entirely appropriate conclusion, as indeed the nuance has been given to these three lectures by the gratifying presence among us of a number of our English friends—we can speak today of victors and vanquished. It is an obvious point of view, but perhaps not the most important one. Perhaps there is another, a much more important point of view, which might be taken from the following.

I once read aloud here from this same platform a thesis of Fercher von Steinwand,² that German-Austrian poet, who in the sixth decade of the 19th century expressed his opinion about the future of the German people. The lecture is noteworthy because it was given before the ruling King of Saxony and his ministers. In this sixth decade—those who were there at the time heard it—Fercher van Steinwand said that his German people is predestined some time in the future to play a role somewhat like that which the Gypsies were playing then. It was a deep glimpse into the evolution of humanity which Fercher van Steinwand had. These things can be looked in the eye with complete objectivity; and if this is done, perhaps another point of view will be chosen than the one frequently taken today. It will be asked: What is to be said about the changed conditions—changed among the so-called vanquished, changed among the so-called victors? Well, the actual victor is Anglo-Americanism; and this Anglo-Americanism, through the forces which I have publicly characterized here is destined for world-dominion.

Now we can ask: Since the German people will be excluded from sharing the things by means of which the external world will be ruled in the future, what really happens in that case? The responsibility—not that of the individual, naturally—the people's responsibility for events concerning the whole of human society ceases. Not that of the individual, but the people's responsibility ceases among those who are down-trodden—for they are that. The responsibility ends, and it becomes all the greater on the other side; that is where the actual responsibility will rest. The outer dominion will be easily won; it is won by means of forces for which the victors can take no credit. The external passing over of the external dominion is accomplished as the final natural necessity; but the responsibility will be something of deep significance for souls. For the question is already written down in humanity's book of destiny: Will there be found among those upon whom the external dominion devolves as by an external necessity, a sufficiently great number of people who feel the responsibility, so that into this external, materialistic dominion, into this culmination of materialistic dominion, may be transplanted the impulses of the spiritual life? And that must not happen too slowly! The middle of this century will be a very significant point of time. The whole weight of the responsibility should be felt, if one is chosen, as it were by outer natural destiny, to enter upon the dominion of materialism in the external world,—for that is what it will be. For this dominion of materialism bears within it at the same time the seed of destruction. The destruction which has begun will not cease; and “entering upon external dominion” means taking over the forces of destruction, the forces of human illness, and living in them. That which will bear humanity into the future will come forth from the new seed of the spirit, and will have to be fostered. Therefore, the responsibility rests directly upon that side to which falls world-dominion.

Our thinking today must not be superficial concerning these things, but thorough; neither must we merely seem to be spiritual while in reality we are materialistic. Two things are very frequently heard in our time: One is, “Why talk of social ideas; no bread comes from ideas!” It is a cheap objection that is very often made. And the other is, “When the people are working again then everything will be all right; then the social question will have a different appearance.” Both statements are disguised materialism, for both have the purpose of denying the spiritual life.

In the first place, what differentiates us from the animal world? The animals go around and get their food, so far as there is any, according to their implanted instincts. If there is not enough, they must starve. In what way is man better off? He works on the production of food. At the moment he begins to work, thought begins; and only when thought begins, does the social question begin also. If a man is to work, he must have an incentive for it; and the incentives that have existed up to the present time will no longer exist in the future. New incentives will be required for work; and the question is not at all a matter of everything's being all right when the people work again—no; but when, arising from a feeling of world-responsibility, men shall have thoughts which sustain their souls, then the forces proceeding from these thoughts will be carried over from hand to will, and work will result. Everything depends upon thoughts, and thoughts themselves depend upon our opening our hearts to the impulses of the spiritual world. Of responsibility and of the significance of thoughts much must be said in our time. Therefore I wished in this lecture to lay stress upon just this aspect.

Since destiny is now such, my dear friends, that one really cannot get away when one wishes to travel, we shall still be here tomorrow. Therefore, at eight o'clock tomorrow night I will speak to you especially about the anthroposophical foundation, the spiritual-scientific, occult foundation of the social question. Thus I shall be able before leaving to speak to our friends on the social question, but I shall explain its deeper foundations from the spiritual-scientific point of view.

• 1. On November 10, 1919: The Spirit as Guide through the Sensible and Supersensible Worlds.
• 2. Compare: Entwickelungsgeschichtliche Unterlagen zur Bildung eines sozialen Urteils (not yet translated).

Yesterday we referred to the important turning point in human evolution at the beginning of the third mystery epoch, when man's participation in the cosmic things in transubstantiation and in the act of consecration of man began to occur in the astral body. This is that member of the human being which leaves the physical body as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, and which is unreceptive for percepts from the environment during the time of the separation.

Let's try to get a clear idea of how this astral body functions in present-day man. It is the member which transmits the thoughts which enable us to understand the world. For thoughts about one's environment disappear as soon as one's astral body leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

We can round out this idea if we realize that the ego-organization—the actual ego in man as he is today—is the receiver of sense impressions. However, the latter are obliterated when the ego-organization leaves the physical and etheric bodies.

So that we can say: here are the physical and etheric bodies of the human being, and during sleep the astral body and ego-organization are outside. The ego-organization gives us our sense percepts and sensations when we are awake. There is no sense perception during sleep, because the ego-organization is not in the physical and etheric bodies and because the ego is not receptive for impressions from the environment during that time. Likewise, the astral body gives us thoughts when it is in the physical and etheric bodies, but when it is outside it is not sensitive to things in the world and it gives us no impressions.

However, it was this astral body which became receptive for what I described to you, during the third mystery epoch when man was to connect himself with divine, spiritual beings through cultic words and through everything the priest did in the way of preparatory exercises. It became receptive for the elaboration of the transubstantiation in itself during communion, and after the transubstantiation was elaborated it became receptive for apocalyptic things.

The same kind of thing has to happen in the ego-organizations of people from the present epoch on. Even though this ego-organization can only experience sense impressions in ordinary consciousness, it must be constituted in such a way that it experiences transubstantiations and in such a way that it can participate in apocalyptic things through the latter.

People can really become receptive for these things today, that is, someone can really become a priest if he takes in ideas which are true spiritual copies of the supersensible world. Therewith we have described the esoteric or inner connection between the esotericism which rightfully exists today and what must live in a priest's soul. We have described what can make the Christian Community a bearer of an important part of the new mysteries. We must only consider how the Anthroposophy which is approaching human beings today is really constituted.

I have often used an analogy. I said that people are inclined to accept things which are supported by outer perceptions and experiments today, but they don't want to accept things which are not supported in this way. However, anyone who has this attitude is like a person who says: every rock on earth must be supported so that it won't fall down and therefore the planets in the universe must also be supported so that they won't fall down. Of course, since it's taught in a traditional and authoritative way, people believe that the planets in the universe mutually carry each other without supports. However, many people doubt that Anthroposophical truths support and carry each other, and that they don't have to be supported by outer observations and experiments.

As soon as one sees that Anthroposophical truths are valid because they all support each other, so that the truths mutually support each other, in that moment one will stop saying: I can't see anything in the spiritual world yet and therefore I can't understand the content of Anthroposophy. Instead one will begin to understand Anthroposophy through the fact that its truths mutually support each other, and one will then work one's way further into it.

The main thing which can and must put this body of priests on its inner path today is the task of penetrating what is given about the spiritual world. If it does tread this path, we should make it clear to ourselves that the attitude of soul which someone gets into if he takes possession of Anthroposophy in an honest way enables him to approach the Apocalypse. It enables one to approach it in such a way that one can say: It's true that the Apocalypse exists, but if I let it work upon me, each one of its images or Imaginations becomes united with my own ego. And then comes the moment where this Apocalypse can be a creation of the human ego and not just a personal experience. However, we must try to approach the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way. There's no other context which leads to it today.

We will now try to grasp a few of the main points in the Apocalypse in a spiritual way, if I may put it that way. “I am Alpha and Omega.” Expressed in an ancient form: one only understands alpha or A if one knows that a sound or letter as a component of a word was not the abstract, separate and meaningless thing back then, that we experience today. A sound was something which deserved to have a name. Mankind has treated The sounds of language which really enclose a great mystery in a peculiar way.

Mankind has treated the sounds of language in the way that a policeman treats a criminal. A long time ago it numbered the letters in the way that we give numbers to criminals when they are put into their cells, so that they lose their names and get numbers. Sounds have lost their identity through the numbering process. This is a pictorial way of putting it, but a true one nevertheless.

For if we go back before the late Hebraic period when they first gave numbers to the sounds, we find that mankind was fully aware that it is quite right for a sound to have a name, and that one can say alpha to it because it is a divine, supersensible being. If we want to find out what this first letter alpha of the so-called alphabet really is, we will have to go through a kind of spiritual development or conceptual development.

You know that Anthroposophy goes back in earth evolution through Moon, Sun to Saturn. It tries to dig up things in the world which are connected with the evolution of man. We find the first cosmic human germ on Saturn, which became the present human body after manifold transformations during Sun, Moon and earth. Man was present on Saturn in his first, germinal form.

For anyone who honestly and seriously wants to see the true state of affairs in this area, it's no doubt quite important to ask what men really experienced on old Saturn. Man experienced successive conditions of warmth. Man absorbed various states of warmth and cold. He existed in states which really only told him something about warmth conditions in the cosmos, for although they also told him many spiritual things, they only disclosed a limited region of the spirit through differentiated warmth and cold.

If we go on from Saturn to Sun, we find that man's organism has become differentiated. During Sun existence man lives in a physical body which is differentiated into warmth ether and air. Differentiation also occurs within as man becomes filled with a richer content. He not only perceives the differentiated warmth like on old Saturn, but something like an inner life emerges. Man perceives the warmth on the Sun with his old perception and he also perceives an inner breathing rhythm in himself which in turn is an expression and a reflection of cosmic secrets.

Just look at how the human being becomes richer as he evolves from Saturn to Sun. He also gets richer as he evolves from Sun to Moon and from Moon to Earth. And he will continue to get richer as he develops on Jupiter and up to Vulcan.

Let's ask ourselves what the relation of man to the world is on ancient Saturn. On old Saturn man's relation to the world is such that he perceives a very large number of different warmths, but qualitatively he perceives very little. Not much of the world is in man. Man is present as man and he is just a man, as it were; not much of the world is in him yet. As he moves forward through Sun, Moon, earth and on to Jupiter his inner life becomes filled with the world more and more, and therefore it is richer. We already have a large part of the world in us here on earth. And when the earth gets to the stage where it will pass away again, man will have elaborated a large part of the macrocosm and he will bear it in him as earthly copies.

We bear it within us already, but people are not usually aware of this. When a human being moves upwards through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition to a knowledge of the spirit, his inner soul life becomes ever more magnificent. Look at how little man knows about the human eye in his ordinary consciousness. But this eye is a whole cosmos, and like the macrocosm all of its details are marvelous and great. Every single organ in man becomes unveiled in a wonderful way in his physical body already. So that when an initiate looks around him he sees a world with the elements down below and its sun, moon and stars up above. If he looks into himself he sees that the eye, ear, lung, liver and every other organ is a world in itself, and that man's physical body is a marvelous interaction of worlds. Some of these worlds are finished, others are just beginning, some are sensory, others are half supersensible or entirely supersensible. Man really bears ever more worlds in himself as he works his way through one evolution after another.

Thus we can distinguish man at the start of old Saturn evolution, where he is just beginning, where he is man, although he doesn't bear the world in himself yet. The first thing which man acquired during old Saturn evolution was a perception of the circumference of the warmth body which he felt that he was. So that in a schematic way we can say that man feels that he is warmth on old Saturn, but after he has felt that he is a warmth mollusk he gradually feels something like an accumulation of warmth, like an outer skin, a warmth skin, a somewhat cooler sheath than the warmth which is in him. He feels manifold degrees or intensities of warmth within him, and the warmth skin is the coolest.

We express this in our present language, but this language is abstract and it doesn't conjure up the greatness of such a mental image before our soul, if we look into the course of time and we want to go back to old Saturn. However, people who are moved by a perception of these things at all are also moved by the awe with which such things were looked upon in the ancient mysteries. In the ancient Greek chthonic mysteries, they still spoke of Saturn men who didn't have a warmth skin yet, and then of men who had taken the first part of the world into their warmth skins; for the latter had a certain structure and form which imitated the world. This was the first thing from the world.

What do man's experiences which he had while he was still a warmth man look like from a subjective, psychic viewpoint? They are like absolute amazement about the world. If one wants to describe them, one has to call them complete amazement. For one cannot grasp warmth in any other way than as sheer amazement. Outwardly it is warmth and inwardly it is complete astonishment. It's only because people have become as blockheaded as old Kant was, that they speak of a thing in itself which can't be explained. The thing in itself of warmth is astonishment;' and Saturn man is astonishment just as much as he is warmth. He lived in amazement or astonishment about his own existence, for he was just entering into this existence. This is alpha; the Saturn warmth man who is living in amazement. And the first thing which man experiences as the housing of the world, namely his skin, is beta,—building, this building or house. Man was a man in his house, and the house or temple or skin was the first thing from the world: beta.

If we go through the alphabet like this, we go through the whole world. When man gradually absorbs everything which the world was and unites it with his being, until by Vulcan he will become united with the whole wide world to which he belongs, he will be the one he was at the beginning of Saturn evolution plus the whole world. He will be alpha and everything else too. But everything else amounts to the whole world. This is omega—man and everything in him which is the world. The “I am alpha and omega” describes what man will be at the end of the Vulcan period. At the end of Vulcan evolution, man will be able to say: I am alpha and omega. Let's look at the Mystery of Golgotha from the vantage point of what we have placed before ourselves as the beginning, middle and end of human evolution. At the Mystery of Golgotha or approximately the halfway point in world evolution, we have the being who dwelt in Jesus' body at the stage of development that man will be in at the end of Vulcan evolution. We have a being as god which man will be at the end of Vulcan evolution.

What is the difference between God's existence and man's existence? The difference between a god's existence and a man's existence is that the god already is what the human being will be later on in time. Don't say that this brings the god down to the human level and makes him into a human being. It doesn't. Because for supersensible perception, time is a simultaneous reality, if you'll permit me to use this paradoxical expression. The difference between man and God is the one which existed at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. One shouldn't relate different times or beings from different times when one looks at these things.

A great deal of what is in writings like the Apocalypse is expressed in the language which was used in the mysteries, and it can only be understood if it is deciphered. On the other hand, one shouldn't blame the author of the Apocalypse for speaking in mystery language, for it was customary for people to do this at that time. People still knew that sounds are supersensible beings and that alpha is the supersensible human being when he was first created, and that when one goes from alpha to beta one is turning away from man and towards the world, including the divine world, and that if one goes through all the sounds to omega one has the entire divine world in omega.

It's rather shocking that we're surrounded by experiences today which we consider to be trivialities. For instance, all the sounds are basically trivialities for us. Someone who only knows the alphabet doesn't know very much. The ABCs are trivialities. However, these trivialities point to divine, spiritual beings at the starting point, and our trivial letters are the descendents of what were once divine, spiritual beings for mankind. The whole alphabet was a number of such divine spiritual beings. Sounds were gods who assailed men from all sides with their din. The sounds AB were man in his house, and so on. Man with the whole world was alpha to omega. When someone uttered a sound he felt that it permeated him with spirituality.

A last remnant of this life of a divine, spiritual element in sounds still existed in the intonation of cultic language during the third mystery epoch. They still understood this completely in very ancient times. When someone successively intoned what has now become our abstract, traditional alphabet, he was intoning the cosmic word. He intoned everything which exists and he connected himself with all the gods: In the beginning was the word. And when Christ says “I am alpha and omega,” he could say “I am the word” and mean the same thing.

You can see that the Apocalypse is written in a mystery language, and it uses terms which remind us of the long period during which man felt that the macrocosm was a speaking universe. We have obscured the sounds of our language and made them trivial, whereas men used to know that they were something very spiritual. We must be able to feel what happened there. What happened? The sounds exist, but the gods are no longer in them as far as men are concerned. The gods have left the sounds. Our sounds contain Ahrimanic beings in a demonic way. The popular idea that the fixed sounds of our language are connected with black magic is not entirely unfounded. This idea of the people is a healthy one. For our sounds are now Ahrimanic gods. The gods who were once in them left, and Ahrimanic beings moved in. People will permeate language with more and more Ahrimanic powers if they don't find their way back to the gods in this sphere.

We must approach the Apocalypse with such feelings about, language. This is the only way that the real greatness and power of what is placed, before our souls in the Apocalypse can become manifest to us. For what does the author of the Apocalypse want to do? He wants to do the same thing that all those who speak out of a true knowledge of the Christ want to do. He wants to place the Christ before mankind. He draws attention to the fact that he is there. He begins by saying that he exists. For if one takes the first words of the Apocalypse and translates them into our language in accordance with their real meaning, they read: Look at the manifestation of Christ Jesus: Look over there; I want to show you the vision of Jesus Christ which God has given.

Thus the first thing which is pointed out is that the author of the Apocalypse wants to let Christ appear to humanity in an apocalyptic way. But he also points out that he doesn't just want to report about the appearance or the Imagination of Jesus Christ, which presupposes vision, but he also wants to indicate that the divine world power which placed this phenomenon into the world and made it visible also expressed it in words.

God has sent these words by his angel unto his servant John, and they are like an interpretation of the vision of Jesus Christ. This is how we must read the beginning of the Apocalypse.

Two things are really being said here. An Imaginative element in Christ is mentioned, and something is said about what Christ's tidings are. And what John affirms and testifies to in his second sentence is the vision of Christ and the interpretation of this vision. The Christ in a picture and the Christ in words. The author of the Apocalypse wants to place the Christ before human beings in a picture and in words.

Therewith we are also made aware of something which was quite obvious to people at that time, although most people today have lost sight of it completely. Our impoverished psychologists speak of sense percepts and ideas. To make the thing as poor as possible, people let the sense percepts arise through the senses and they say that ideas are created within. Everything is subjective and there is nothing cosmic there at all; they make a Kantian world out of a rich one, and they completely forget that man is standing in the whole world.

The intuitive element in our words has shriveled into impoverished ideas: the second thing or so-called supersensible percept which John affirms, testifies to and tells us about is what the Apocalypticer places there as the manifestation of Christ. So that we have to say “Behold the manifestation of Jesus Christ which is given by God, for this is how God must be shown to you (I will interpret this later). He has put it into words and has sent it to his servant John via his angel. John has affirmed God's words and the manifestation of Jesus Christ in the way that he saw it. He wants to give mankind what he has seen and a letter he received from God.”

We must approach Christian writings in this concrete way again. If you really want to become priests out of the deepest and most honest impulses in your heart you will have to see to it that these writings become concrete. For the fact is that people are basically dishonest when they say they understand the gospels the way they are translated today. The Apocalypse begins in the way that I said. One translation of the beginning of the Apocalypse reads, “This is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him to show his servants, and he has interpreted it and sent it to his servant John by his angel;” this is how it reads. And then the whole world is told that this is what the Apocalypse says. But no one can really make any sense out of these words. The same goes for most of the gospels, because one wants to explain things to people with wording which doesn't tell one what's really there anymore. This is why the idea gradually arose that one shouldn't penetrate very deeply into the gospels. For how can one really do that? No matter what modern language one reads the gospels in, one can't really read them if one is honest about it. For the modern versions tell one nothing.

One has to go back to what is really there, just as we did this for the first two sentences and as we will continue to do it. Or some people might say that one has to go back to the Greek for certain parts of the gospels. Now, with all due respect to our contemporaries, who take great pains to understand Greek, the fact is that no one understands Greek any more today, because we don't have the same things in us which the Greeks had when they spoke or listened.

We're basically like sacks of flour when we listen to someone or when we speak ourselves. We remain just as quiet inwardly as flour in a sack should, if it is packed properly. This was not the case with the Greeks. The consciousness of a Greek vibrated when he listened to someone. He became alive inwardly and he spoke out of this vitality. The words which he heard and spoke were alive; they were still living bodies. Not to speak of oriental people. The latter are decadent today but unlike European people they can still perceive and understand things inwardly in a vital way when they speak or hear.

Just listen to an ordinary oriental like Rabindranath Tagore and watch how he presents the inner weaving and life which can exist in language.

Today one has language in such a way that one even thinks one has it if one takes a dictionary and a German word stands on one side and the English word on the other. People very calmly place the English words where the German words are. They are blissfully unaware that one steps over an abyss here and that one comes into an entirely different world, and that one really has to treat what lives in language as something which is divine.

People have to become aware of this again. Then they will decide to go back to what vibrates out of writings like the Apocalypse, which conjures up a vision of Jesus Christ before our soul. If we can see this mighty vision it's as if the clouds, which could give us wonderful things, suddenly became concentrated and took on human and angelic forms, and the past, present and future welled out of the clouds' substances as they go past and revealed the world's content of spiritual substances, which includes human beings. This is how the manifestation of Jesus Christ is presented.

The vision is there and we fall silent before it, so that we become united with the world and are no longer conscious of ourselves, and so that we confront the vision until nothing but the vision remains, while we become insignificant.

Then when we perceive the Father God who has given the vision we find that he holds back the inspiring words behind the vision. The words are the interpretation of the vision and they are his secret; but the time is at hand and God gives the secret to an angel, and he brings it down to men as an epistolary message from God on the path on which Inspirations from God generally come down.

As soon as a man becomes quiet and disappears and becomes immersed in the vision and begins to be not in himself, and he takes in God's letter, which he first has to open, which is sealed with seven seals, which he takes in as a letter with seven seals which has been sent to him by the godhead—as soon as he does this he becomes the letter, because he gets to the point where he looks upon the contents of the letter as his own ego-being. Then he stands before the vision with God's ideas and concepts and with spiritual mental images.

If you imagine John the priest in this way, with the vision of Jesus Christ before him, disappearing selflessly, if you see him receiving the letter of God that is sealed with seven seals from the angels there, and if you see the resolve arising in him to unseal God's letter and to communicate its contents to mankind—you have the picture or Imagination which stands at the beginning of the Apocalypse. For we must interpret the words which stand there in what we receive in such a way that it is like the Imagination I described. This is what the author of the Apocalypse wants to say. That is why he says, “Blessed is he that reads and hears the words in the macrocosm and who takes in and preserves what is written in the book, when he understands it. For the time for this has come.”

It has come. It is not just chance that we're discussing the Apocalypse in this context; it lies in the karma of the community for Christian renewal.

WE have come in our studies to the point where the Earth has passed through its so-called Moon-stage. We have also seen that a kind of sleep-state of the whole system followed the Moon stage of the Earth. One must of course realise that all the beings which inhabit the planet share with it this transitional, intermediate state. During this time they pass through experiences differing from those of the actually external state of evolution. We will try to be clear as to how the beings have undergone various things in this transition between the Moon-stage of the Earth and the actual Earth evolution.

We have seen that three kinds of beings lived on the Moon, physical ancestors, so to say, of our present Nature-kingdoms. There existed a kind of plant-mineral, animal-plant and man-animal; man himself on this Old Moon was in a state of not yet developed ego-consciousness. So far man had not attained to an “I” dwelling within a body.

Now during this transitional period something very important came about in the spiritual part of man—if I may thus express it.

If we form a true picture of the Old Moon sphere, we could describe it as a being which itself possessed a sort of life, somewhat like a tree, upon which all manner of living things exist. The Moon was itself a kind of homogeneous plant-mineral. Its rocks were in fact only a hardening of the plant-mineral like mass, and its animal-plants grew out of the mass, while what we can call the men-animals circled around the Moon. We must at the same time be clear that the Ego-consciousness still lived more or less in the atmosphere of the Moon in the Fire-mist, that it was still a part, a member, of a higher being, in whom existed all the egos which today are to be found in bodies separated by the skin one from another. Thus as yet there were no human beings going about as today, equipped with ego consciousness. On the other hand, however, something else was much more fully developed than on the Earth.

You know that what is called Folk-soul, Race-soul, has become a somewhat abstract idea today. Many think nowadays that the individual soul of man that dwells in his body is the actual reality. And if one speaks of German, French, Russian National-souls, people look on that as more or less an abstraction, as a comprehensive concept, embracing the characteristics which the individual members of these nations possess. To the occultist this is not so at all. What one calls the Folk-soul, as the German, French, Russian Folk-soul, is to him an absolutely independent entity. It is only that in our present Earth-existence the Folk soul is purely a spiritual being, perceptible only to one who can ascend to the astral plane; there you could not deny it, for there it is present as an actual living being. You would encounter the Folk-soul there, as on the physical plane you encounter your friends.

On the Moon it would have still less occurred to you to deny this Group-soul, for at that time it had a still more real existence. It was the Folk-soul, the Race-soul, which guided the bloodstream down into the bodies, into those beings which circled round the Moon. It is the destiny of our age to deny the existence of such beings as possess an actual life on the astral plane, and are not perceptible here on the physical plane. And we are at the very height of this materialistic evolution which prefers to deny such beings as Folk-souls and Race-souls.

Recently among other things a very characteristic book has appeared, which has attracted a good deal of publicity. It is a book which has been praised and considered, with justice, to be a true expression of our abstract objective thinking, since it is written as out of the soul of modern man. Such a book had to be written sooner or later. It denies everything that cannot be seen with the eye or felt with the hands. It is a scandalous book from the standpoint of the occultist, a notable book, however, from the standpoint of present-day methods of thought! I refer to Mauthner's Critique of Language. In his book a clean sweep is made of everything which cannot be grasped with the hand. Our age had to produce such a book as a kind of necessity. That is not meant as criticism, it is only to point out the contrast between the occult mode of thought and the present time. You can find in it the exact opposite of all occult methods of thought, it is the most amazing product of a dying cultural stream of the present day, and from this point of view it is quite excellent.

You will understand that on this Old Moon a more common consciousness prevailed than here on Earth. On Earth a man feels himself as an individual, on the Moon this was not the case. On the Moon the Group-soul was active, which then appeared on the Earth in such an attenuated form as Folk-soul; hence the whole Moon-globe had a common consciousness in a high degree. This common consciousness on the Moon felt itself as feminine. And now you know that the Moon was irradiated by the Sun, and the Sun was experienced as the masculine. This is preserved in the old Egyptian myth, for instance, Moon as feminine-Isis; Sun Osiris, masculine. An ego-consciousness, however, enclosed in the human body was altogether lacking. That was contained in the Moon's atmosphere.

Now during the intermediate state from Moon to the Earth, various beings worked in from the atmosphere of the Moon, and made the human etheric body and human astral body ready to possess an ego-consciousness. Now what happened when the Sun again shone forth in which were still contained the Moon and the Earth? In the environment of this now newly awakened Sun-globe were the beings who today form your souls, and during the intermediate stage they had incorporated the ego consciousness into the astral and etheric bodies. As yet the physical body did not possess it, and this emerged at first as the man-animal as it had been on the Moon. Thus these two parts were no longer in harmony. On the Moon they had still harmonised. What had now descended into the astral and etheric bodies was no longer quite in harmony with what existed below as physical, and the consequence of this was that before a harmony could arise the earlier states of Saturn, Sun and Moon had to be recapitulated. Thus we have three recapitulations before our actual Earth could appear.

To begin with, the Saturn existence came forth with the physical bodies of the animal-men, but in a certain respect no longer as simple as they were on Saturn. At that time the sense organs existed as rudimentary germs; now the glandular and nerve organs were present in addition, but they were incapable of taking in what was above. A short recapitulation of the Saturn existence had to take place. The Spirits of Ego-hood and independence must work once more on the physical bodies, in order to implant in them the power of taking up the Ego. In the same way the Sun-state must be passed through, so that these physical bodies in respect of the organs formed on the Sun were capable of receiving an Ego. And in the same way the Moon condition was repeated in order to make the nervous system fitted for it. Thus there was first a kind of repetition of the Saturn stage. In this the beings who were earlier animal-men now wandered on the Earth like automata or a kind of machine. Then began the time when this repeated Saturn condition went over into the Sun condition; there these human bodies were like sleeping plants. Next entered the repetition of the Moon-state, where the Sun had already released itself. Everything remained behind that had earlier already detached itself as Moon. Once again then the whole Moon-cycle was repeated, except that now the capacity to receive an Ego was implanted into the beings.

This repetition of the Moon-cycle was for the Earth, if one may say so, an evil period of its evolution, for considered spiritually, the ego-hood had been implanted into the human body consisting of physical body, etheric body and astral body, but without the refining power of thought. During the time when the Sun had already withdrawn and the Earth had not yet cast out the Moon, man was in a condition in which his astral body was the bearer of the most savage lusts, for every bad force was implanted in him and there was no counterbalance. After the separation of the Sun there was a globe in which, if one wished to express it today, the human beings were still entirely group-souls, but of the most sensual order with the worst instincts.

During this passage through a veritable hell, and under the influence of the departed pure Sun forces (not only of the physical sun, but also of the Sun-beings, who had withdrawn to the Sun) the recapitulating Moon gradually matured so far that it could throw out the terrible instincts and powers, and retain on the Earth whatever was capable of evolving. With the departure of the present moon all those sensual forces went away; therefore in the present moon you have the remains, in its spiritual significance, of all the evil influences which were at that time present in the human realm; and therefore too the moon is looked upon as having a detrimental influence.

Thus it was everything capable of evolution that remained on the Earth after the separation of the Sun and the Moon.

Let us consider first the animal-men themselves. They were gradually matured far enough for the Ego to be incorporated Thus we now have wandering on the Earth the human being who consisted of four members (physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego). It is now for the first time that the earlier swimming, floating position changes and man begins gradually to arrive at the upright position. His spine, his spinal nerve-cord, became vertical, in contrast to the completely horizontal position which it had during the Moon period, and with this rise into an upright position went parallel the widening out of the mass of the spinal marrow into the brain; and yet another development ran parallel with it. For the floating, swimming motion which man had both in the Moon period and during the repetition of the Moon period when the Fire-mist forces were still present in the environment, he needed a kind of swimming bladder, and this was actually a part of man's composition, as is the case with the fishes of the present day. But now the Fire-mist (we have called it “Ruach”) was precipitated. This took place quite gradually and slowly. The air, to be sure, was still filled with thick vapour, but the worst was precipitated and with this began the time when from a gill-breather man became a lung-breather. The swimming bladder was transformed into lungs. Through this man became capable of receiving into himself the higher spiritual beings, namely, the first rudiments of that which stands above the Ego-Spirit-Self or Manas. This metamorphosis of the swimming bladder into the lungs is expressed in the Bible in the wonderful monumental words: “And God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” Here is expressed what had taken place in the human being during millions of years. And all the beings which we have learnt to know, the plant-animals as well as the animal-men of the Moon and their descendants during the Moon period of the Earth, all of them as yet had not red blood. What they possessed resembled the blood of the present day lower creatures which is not yet red. Blood-like substance flowed in and out of them from above. In order to be able to harbour the red blood in themselves something else was necessary. We shall understand that when we know that until the casting out of the Moon in the evolution of our planet no part had been played by iron. Till then there was no iron on our planet, it received it when the planet Mars passed through our Earth, and so to say, left iron behind. Hence the influence of iron in the red blood is derived from Mars.

Legend has preserved this well by ascribing to Mars the qualities which iron brought to the blood—strong and warlike forces. Thus the influence which came in then with the change in the breathing process, was supported by the introduction of iron into our evolution. This was of the utmost importance in our terrestrial evolution. Under these influences the human organism was perfected to the point of beginning to purify and refine the bodies which it had earlier received on Saturn, Sun and Moon. It began to work first, of course, on the body which had been last received, the astral body, and this purification of the astral body constitutes our present civilisation.

If you could observe that human being, still in process of transforming the lungs and taking the first steps towards the development of red blood, you would find him very dissimilar to the present human form. He was so different that one really hesitates to describe man at that period, for it would appear grotesque to the present day materialistic thinker. He had more or less the development of an amphibian, a reptile, which was just beginning to breathe through lungs, and from the former floating, swimming motion was learning little by little to raise and support himself on the earth. When we say that man in the Lemurian Epoch had a mode of progression that alternated between a hop, scarcely to be called a step, and then a flight into the air, we have the nearest approach to some memory of it in the old Saurians. Nothing remains to be discovered by the geologist as solidification's or fossils, for the body was quite soft, it contained as yet no kind of bony structure.

And now how did the Earth appear, after having freed itself from the Moon? It had formerly been surrounded by fire-mists, as in a seething steaming vessel, and then by degrees the dense watery vapours withdrew. The Earth was now covered by a very thin hardened crust, beneath which lay a bubbling churning sea of fire, the remains of the fire-mist of the former atmosphere,. Then gradually tiny islands emerged, the first beginnings of our present mineral kingdom. Whereas on the Moon a plant-mineral kingdom still existed, there now appeared the earliest foundations of our modern rocks and stones in consequence of the hardening, mineralising of this mass. Earlier still the animal-plant kingdom had developed more or less to our present plant kingdom. And the beings on the Moon who were animal-men had divided into two groups, one of which had kept pace with evolution and taken on the human form. But there were some who had not advanced with evolution; these are the present higher animals, they had stayed behind at an earlier level and since they could not share in the advance, they fell back more and more. All our present mammals are relics of the Moon animal-men who stayed behind. You must therefore never imagine that the human being was ever such an animal as those existing on earth today. The bodies of those animals were not at that time capable of receiving the I, the Ego; they had remained with the group nature of the Moon. The last which had almost achieved the additional principle of the earth, but which nevertheless proved later on too weak to be the vehicle of an individual soul, are the apes, the present Ape species. They too, however, were never actual ancestors of mankind, but beings which had degenerated.

Thus in the old Lemurian Age, the Earth was a kind of fiery mass, in which the modern mineral was for the most part dissolved and fluid, as is iron in an iron-foundry, and out of this developed the first mineral island masses. Upon these there wandered, half hopping, half hovering, the forefathers of man. The Spirit-Self endeavoured little by little to gain possession of this human being.

So we must picture the ancient fiery period of the Earth as a time m which a last echo still lingered of the forces of the Moon, which then gradually disappeared. They were manifested in the mastery which the human will possessed over the substances and forces of nature. On the Moon, of course, man was still fully united with nature and the Group-soul moulded the conditions of human existence. That was now no longer the case, but there still continued a magical connection between human will and the forces of fire. If the human being had a mild character, then, through the will, he acted on the natural element of fire in a calming manner, and in this way more land could be deposited. The passionate man, on the other hand, worked with his will magically in such a way that the fire-masses became fierce and turbulent and tore up the thin earth crust. Now once more the whole savage, passionate power that was peculiar to man on the Moon and during the repetition of the Moon-period on the Earth burst forth in the newly arisen individual human souls. The passions had such an effect on the fiery masses that they became ungovernable; a great part of the land on which the Lemurians dwelt was destroyed, and only a small number of the inhabitants of Lemuria were preserved and could continue the human race.

All of you were living in those times; your souls are the very ones which saved themselves from the raging fiery mass of Lemuria. The portion of humanity which had been saved, migrated into the land which we know as Atlantis, and the main part of which stretched between the present Europe and America; from there the human race multiplied and spread. Gradually the Earth's atmosphere had so changed that every trace of the old “Ruach” had gone, and the air was only saturated by dense masses of vapour. The Germanic legend has preserved the memory of this in the Nivelheim or Nebelheim, a land that was permanently permeated by similar heavy clouds of mist (Nebelmist).

Now what had been working in from outside during the Lemurian Age? At first, in the Saturn period it was the beings which we call Spirits of Egoism, of the sense of independence. During the Sun, it was the Archangels, the Fire-Spirits: during the Moon those beings which were, so to speak, the good spirits of the Moon time, for which the Christian designation is Angel, and which are called in Theosophy “Spirits of Twilight.” We have designated the outstanding Leader of these spirits as the “Holy Spirit” or the “Holy Ghost,” the Regent of the Fire Spirits as the “Christ,” that of Saturn as the “Father God.”

Thus the last Who had been at work with His hosts was the Spirit named in Christianity “the Holy Spirit,” the Regent of the Moon-evolution, the Spirit who was still present during the Earth's repetition of the Moon-period. It was the same Spirit who had formed man from without, and who now sent a ray of his own essence, so to say, into the human being. We have to distinguish two kinds of spirits in the beginning of the Lemurian Age: the spirits who prepare the lower bodily nature, who implant the ego-consciousness, who fashion the human sheaths, and that Spirit who himself drew into man at the moment when the human being learnt to breathe physically.

Now if you think that everything which on Saturn formed a kind of fiery mass surrounded by a finer atmosphere, was gaseous on the Sun, and then on the Moon was surrounded by those masses of fire-mist, then you must regard the evolutionary process of the Earth as one of purification, even as the evolution of humanity itself is a purifying process. What one calls air today only gradually became free of all that filled it as a kind of steam and smoke. We must be clear that what separated itself out from the atmosphere are the substances from which all bodies have built themselves up. The air is the purest of what has remained behind, it is the best corporeal medium for the guiding Spirits of the Moon, whom one calls “Angel” in Christian terminology. Therefore in the purified air, in the air which had been refined, men felt the bodily nature of the new guiding Spirit of the Earth, the Spirit Who now was Leader, Jehovah. In the stirring of the wind men experienced that which led and guided the Earth. And so they lived over into the Atlantean times, on the continent which forms the present bed of the Atlantic Ocean, sensing in the breath which they drew, the bodily nature of the Godhead.

That magical influence which the human beings had upon the Fire-ocean, upon the processes of the Earth, gradually disappeared, but in the early Atlantean Age another connection remained instead. A man still possessed a certain magical power over the growth of plants. If he lifted his hand, which at that time had a quite different form, above a plant, he was able to bring it to rapid growth, through the influence of his will. He stood in intimate relation with the being of Nature. The whole life of the Atlantean was in accordance with Nature.

What today is called the power of synthesis, the intelligence, logical thinking, was not yet in existence. On the other hand man had developed other things to a high degree, memory, for instance, of the marvelous development of which we can nowadays form not the slightest idea. Man could not calculate, not even that 2 x 2 = 4, but he knew it out of his memory; on each occasion he remembered the previous experience. Another memory lingering into Atlantean times was that although a man no longer felt the Folk-soul directly within him as on the Moon yet he experienced the influence of the old Folk Souls, Race-souls. This influence was so strong that it would have been quite impossible in those times for anyone who belonged to one Race or Folk-soul ever to unite with one who belonged to another race. There was a deep antipathy between the peoples of the various Folk-souls, love only existed between those belonging to the same. We may say that the common blood which earlier in the Moon-period had been poured down from the Folk-soul was the basis of this kinship. And men remembered not only in some dim way, but quite clearly, the experiences of their forefathers, they felt members of the chain of ancestors just as you feel your hand to be a member of your organism. This feeling of kinship was a part of evolution inasmuch as in this transitionary period which we have been considering and which took place when the Sun withdrew and the Moon was cast out, another important event took place. It is connected with all that was proceeding on the Earth as a sort of hardening process. The mineral kingdom appeared and at the same time a similar hardening took place in the interior of human nature. Something more solid formed itself by degrees out of the soft mass, and hardened first to cartilage and then to bone. And not until this bony structure was formed did the human being begin to walk.

With the insertion of the skeleton another process ran parallel. In consequence of the advance of human evolution on the casting out of the Moon and the retention of only what was able to develop, two different forces arose in the beings inhabiting the Earth. The Sun and Moon were now outside and their influences affected the Earth from without. From this intermingling of the Sun-forces and the Moon-forces, which had previously been in the body of the Earth, but now streamed in from without, the sex-life made its appearance. For all the forces connected with sex come under the influence of the Sun and Moon.

The still united Sun, Moon and Earth of ancient times could from its activity be looked on as of feminine nature and this was fructified, so to say, by the forces of the Sun itself. The Sun experienced itself as male, the Moon as female. Now the Moon drew out, the forces of the two mingled. In a general way we can describe all the beings which arose up to the departure of the Moon as being of a feminine nature, for all the fructifying forces came from without, from the Sun-force. Only upon an Earth, which had cast out the Moon, so that the Sun shone upon quite a different cosmic body, could the former undifferentiated female divide into male and female. With the solidifying, bone-forming process, therefore, took place the differentiation of the sexes. And with this was given the possibility of perfecting the Ego in the right way.

[ 1 ] Something like A veil of secrecy conceals the manner whereby spiritual needs were satisfied for those within the older civilizations who sought a deeper religious and cognitive life than was offered by the religions of the people. We are led into the obscurity of enigmatic cults when we inquire into the satisfaction of these needs. Each individual who finds such satisfaction withdraws himself for some time from our observation. We see that the religion of the people cannot give him what his heart seeks. He acknowledges the gods, but he knows that in the ordinary conceptions of the gods the great enigmas of existence are not disclosed. He seeks a wisdom which is carefully guarded by a community of priest-sages. He seeks refuge in this community for his striving soul. If the sages find him mature they lead him step by step to higher insight, in a manner hidden from the eyes of those outside. What happens to him now is concealed from the uninitiated. For a time he appears to be entirely removed from the physical world. He appears to be transported into a secret world. And when he is returned to the light of day a different, entirely transformed personality stands before us. This personality cannot find words sufficiently sublime to express how significant his experiences were for him. He appears to himself as though he had gone through death and awakened to a new and higher life, not merely figuratively, but in highest reality. And it is clear to him that no one can rightly understand his words who has not had the same experience.

[ 2 ] Thus it was with those persons who through the Mysteries were initiated into that secret wisdom, withheld from the people, and which shed light upon the highest questions. This “secret” religion of the elect existed side by side with the religion of the people. So far as history is concerned, its source fades into the obscurity where the origin of peoples is lost. We find this “secret” religion everywhere among ancient peoples insofar as we can gain insight concerning them. The sages of these peoples speak of the Mysteries with the greatest reverence. What was concealed in them? And what did they reveal to one who was initiated into them?

[ 3 ] The enigma becomes still more puzzling when we realize that at the same time the ancients regarded the Mysteries as something dangerous. The way leading to the secrets of existence went through a world of terrors. And woe to him who tried to reach them unworthily. There was no greater crime than the “betrayal” of these secrets to the uninitiated. The “traitor” was punished with death and confiscation of property. We know that the poet Aeschylus was accused of having brought something from the Mysteries to the stage. He was able to escape death only by fleeing to the altar of Dionysus and producing legal evidence that he was not an initiate.²

[ 4 ] What the ancients say about these secrets is rich in meaning and can be variously interpreted. The initiate is convinced that it is sinful to say what he knows and also that it is sinful for the uninitiated to hear it. Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about to be initiated, comparing their state of mind to a preparation for death. Initiation had to be preceded by a special mode of life. This aimed at bringing sensuality under the control of the spirit. Fasting, solitary life, mortification and certain exercises of the soul served this purpose. The things to which man clings in ordinary life were to lose all value for him. The whole course of his experience and feeling had to take a different direction. There can be no doubt about the meaning of such exercises and tests. The wisdom to be offered to the neophyte could produce the right effect upon his soul only if he had previously changed his lower world of experience. He was inducted into the life of the spirit. He was to behold a higher world. He could find no relationship to this world without previous exercises and tests. Everything depended just on this relationship. Whoever wishes to understand these things correctly must have known by experience the intimate facts of the life of cognition. He must know by experience that two widely divergent relationships are possible in relation to what is offered by the highest cognition. The world surrounding man is his real world at first. He feels, hears and sees its processes. Because he perceives them with his senses he calls them real and thinks about them in order to gain insight into their connections. On the other hand, what rises in his soul is not real to him at first in the same sense. It is “mere” thoughts and ideas. At most, he sees in them pictures of material reality. They themselves have no reality. One cannot touch them; one cannot hear nor see them.

[ 5 ] Another relationship to the world exists. A person who clings at all costs to the kind of reality described above, will hardly grasp it. It enters the lives of certain people at a certain moment. Their whole relationship to the world is reversed. They call truly real the images which arise in the spiritual life of their soul. They assign only a lower form of reality to what the senses hear, touch and see. They know they cannot prove what they say. They know they can only recount their new experiences. And they know that in recounting them to others they are in the position of a man who can see and who imparts his visual impressions to one born blind. They undertake the communication of their inner experiences, trusting that they are surrounded by others, who, although their spiritual eye is still closed, have a logical understanding which can be strengthened through the power of what they hear. They believe in humanity and wish to open spiritual eyes. They can only offer the fruits their spirit itself has gathered; whether another sees the fruits depends upon whether he has comprehension for what is seen by a spiritual eye.^c4 Something existing in man at first prevents him from seeing with the eyes of the spirit. First of all he is not here for this purpose. He is what his senses represent him to be, and his intellect is only the interpreter and judge of his senses. These senses would fulfill their mission badly if they did not insist upon the truth and infallibility of their evidence. From its own point of view, an eye must uphold the absolute reality of its perceptions, otherwise it would be a bad eye. The eye is quite right, so far as it goes. It is not deprived of its rights by the spiritual eye. This spiritual eye allows us to see what the material eye sees, but in a higher light. Nothing the material eye sees is denied. But a new radiance, hitherto unseen, shines from it. Then we know that what we first saw was but a lower reality. We see this still, but it is immersed in something higher, in the spirit. Now it is a question of whether we experience and feel what we see. Whoever is able to bring living experience and feeling to the material world only, will regard the higher world as a Fata Morgana or as “mere” phantasy-images. His feelings are directed entirely toward the material world. When he tries to grasp spirit images, he seizes emptiness. When he gropes after them, they withdraw from him. They are “mere” thoughts. He thinks them; he does not live in them. They are pictures, less real to him than fleeting dreams. Compared with his reality they are like images made of froth which vanish as they encounter the massive, solidly-built reality of which his senses tell him. It is a different matter for the person whose experience and feelings with regard to reality have changed. For him that reality has lost its absolute stability, its unquestioned value. His senses and his feelings need not become blunted. But they begin to doubt their absolute authority; they leave space for something else. The world of the spirit begins to animate this space.

[ 6 ] At this point a dreadful possibility exists. A man may lose his experience and feeling of direct reality without finding any new reality opening before him. He is then suspended in a void. He seems to himself dead. The old values have disappeared and no new ones have taken their place. The world and man no longer exist for him. This is by no means a mere possibility. At some time or other it happens to everyone who wishes to attain higher cognition. He reaches a point where to him the spirit interprets all life as death. Then he is no longer in the world. He is beneath the world—in the nether world. He accomplishes the—journey to Hades. It is well for him if he is not submerged. It is well for him if a new world opens before him. Either he disappears, or is confronted by a new self. In the latter case a new sun and a new earth appear to him. Out of spiritual fire the whole world has been reborn for him.

[ 7 ] Thus the initiates describe what happened to them through the Mysteries. Menippus relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order to be taken to Hades and brought back again by the successors of Zoroaster. He says that on his travels he swam across the great water and that he passed through fire and ice. We hear that the mystics were terrified by a drawn sword and that “blood flowed.” We understand such sayings when we know the point of transition from lower to higher cognition. We ourselves have felt how all solid matter, all the material world, has dissolved into water; we have lost the ground from beneath our feet. Everything we had previously experienced as living has been killed. The spirit has passed through material life as a sword pierces a warm body; we have seen the blood of sensuality flow.

[ 8 ] But a new life has appeared. We have climbed up from the nether world. The orator Aristides relates, “I thought I touched the god and felt him draw near, and I was then between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light that one who is not ‘initiated’ cannot speak of it nor understand it.” This new existence is not subject to the laws of lower life. Growth and decay do not affect it. Much may be said about the eternal, but one's words will be “but sound and smoke,”³ who does not speak of the same thing as those who speak of it after the journey to Hades. The initiates have a new conception of life and death. Now for the first time they are entitled to speak about immortality. They know that whoever speaks of immortality without the knowledge gained through initiation does not understand it. The uninitiated attribute immortality only to something which is subject to the laws of growth and decay. The mystics did not desire to gain the mere conviction that the kernel of life is immortal. In their view, such a conviction would be worthless. This is because they believed the non-mystic simply does not have the eternal living within him. If he were to speak of the eternal, he would speak of nothing. The mystics seek the eternal itself. They must first awaken the eternal within themselves; then they can speak of it. Therefore Plato's severe saying has full reality for them: Whoever is not initiated is submerged in the mire,^c5 and he alone enters eternity who has experienced mystical life. Only in this way can the words in the fragment from Sophocles be understood:

“Thrice happy they, who, having seen these rites,
Then pass to Hades: there to these alone
Is granted life, all others evil find.¹

[ 9 ] Are not dangers described in speaking of the Mysteries? Is it not robbing men of happiness, of the most valuable part of life, to lead them to the gate of the nether world? Terrible is the responsibility incurred by such an act. And yet, may we shirk this responsibility? These were the questions the initiate had to ask himself. In his opinion his knowledge was to the soul of the people as light is to darkness. But in this darkness dwells innocent happiness. The mystics were of the opinion that this happiness should not be interfered with wantonly. For what would have happened in the first place had the mystic “betrayed” his secret? He would have spoken words, nothing but words. Nothing at all would have happened through the experiences and feelings, which should have evoked the spirit from these words. For this, preparation, exercises, tests and the complete change of sense-experience would have been necessary. Without these, the hearer would have been flung into emptiness, into nothingness. He would have been deprived of what gave him happiness without being able to receive anything in exchange. It might be said that one could not have taken anything from him. For certainly mere words could not change his life of experience. He could only have experienced reality through the objects of his senses. One could have given him nothing but a dreadful, life-destroying apprehension. This could be regarded only as a crime.^c6 The above is no longer fully valid today for the acquisition of spiritual cognition. The latter can be understood conceptually because modern man has a capacity to form concepts which the ancients lacked. Today people can be found who have cognition of the spiritual world through their own experience; they can be confronted by others who comprehend these experiences conceptually. Such a capacity for forming concepts was lacking in the ancients.

Ancient Mystery wisdom is like a hothouse plant which must be cherished and cared for in seclusion. To bring it into the atmosphere of everyday conceptions is to put it in an element in which it cannot flourish. It withers away to nothing before the caustic verdict of modern science and logic. Let us therefore divest ourselves for a time of all the education we have received through the microscope, telescope and the ways of thought derived from natural science; let us purify our hands which have become clumsy and have been too busy dissecting and experimenting, so that we may enter the pure temple of the Mysteries. For this a truly unprejudiced mind is necessary.

[ 10 ] For the mystic, everything depends primarily upon the frame of mind in which he approaches what he feels to be the highest, the answers to the enigmas of existence. Particularly in our time, when only things pertaining to physical science are recognized as deserving cognition, it is difficult to believe that for the highest things, everything depends on a frame of mind. Cognition thereby becomes an intimate concern of each personality. For the mystic, however, it is so. Tell someone the solution of the world-enigma! Hand it to him ready-made! The mystic will consider it nothing but empty sound if the individual does not confront this solution in the right manner. The solution is nothing in itself; it disintegrates if it does not kindle in his feeling the particular fire which is essential. Let a divine being approach you! It may be nothing or everything. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind in which you confront everyday things. Everything, if you are prepared and attuned to it. What it is in itself is a matter which does not concern you; the point is whether it leaves you as you were or makes a different man of you. But this depends solely on you. You must have been prepared by the education and development of the most intimate forces of your personality so that what the divine is able to evoke may be kindled and released in you. What is brought to you depends upon the reception you prepare for it. Plutarch has given an account of this education; he has spoken of the greeting the mystic offers the divine being who approaches him: “For the god addresses each one of us as we approach him here with the words ‘Know Thyself,’ as a form of welcome, which certainly is in no wise of less import than ‘Hail;’ and we in turn reply to him ‘Thou art,’ as rendering unto him a form of address which is truthful, free from deception and the only one befitting him alone, the assertion of Being. The fact is that we really have no share in Being, but everything of a mortal nature is at some stage between coming into existence and passing away, and presents only a dim and uncertain semblance and appearance of itself; and if you apply the whole force of your mind in your desire to apprehend it, it is like unto the violent grasping of water, which, by squeezing and compression, loses the handful enclosed, as it spurts through the fingers; even so Reason, pursuing the exceedingly clear appearance of every one of those things that are susceptible to modification and change, is baffled by the one aspect of its coming into being, and by the other of its passing away; and thus it is unable to apprehend a single thing that is abiding or really existent. ‘It is impossible to step twice in the same river’ are the words of Heraclitus, nor is it possible to lay hold twice of any mortal substance in a permanent state; by the suddenness and swiftness of the change in it there ‘comes dispersion and, at another time, a gathering together;’ or, rather, not at another time nor later, but at the same instant it both settles into its place and forsakes its place; ‘it is coming and going.’ Wherefore that which is born of it never attains unto being because of the unceasing and unstaying process of generation, which, ever bringing change, produces from the seed an embryo, then a babe, then a child and in due course a boy, a young man, a mature man, an elderly man, an old man, causing the first generations and ages to pass away by those which succeed them. But we have a ridiculous fear of one death, we who have already died so many deaths, and still are dying! For not only is it true, as Heraclitus used to say, that the death of fire is birth for air, and the death of air is birth for water, but the case is even more clearly to be seen in our own selves: the man in his prime passes away when the old man comes into existence, the young man passes away into the man in his prime, the child into the young man, and the babe into the child. Dead is the man of yesterday, for he is passed into the man of to-day; and the man of to-day is dying as he passes into the man of to-morrow. Nobody remains one person, nor is one person; but we become many persons, even as matter is drawn about some one semblance and common mold with imperceptible movement. Else how is it that, if we remain the same persons, we take delight in some things now, whereas earlier we took delight in different things; that we love or hate opposite things, and so too with our admirations and our disapprovals, and that we use other words and feel other emotions and have no longer the same personal appearance, the same external form, nor the same purposes in mind? For without change it is not reasonable that a person should have different experiences and emotions; and if he changes, he is not the same person, he has no permanent being, but changes his very nature as one personality in him succeeds to another. Our senses, through ignorance of reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be is.”⁵

[ 11 ] Plutarch often shows himself to be an initiate. What he portrays for us here is an essential condition of the life of a mystic. Man acquires a wisdom by means of which his spirit sees through the illusory character of material life. Everything the material nature regards as existence, as reality, is plunged into the stream of evolving life. And man himself fares the same as the other things of the world. He disintegrates before the eyes of his spirit; his totality is dissolved into parts, into transitory phenomena. Birth and death lose their distinctive significance; they become moments of coming into existence, and decay like everything else which happens. The highest cannot be found in connection with growth and decay. It can only be sought in something truly lasting, which looks back to what has been and forward to what is to come. To find what looks backward and forward is a higher stage of cognition. It is the spirit, which is revealed in and through the material world. This spirit has nothing to do with material growth. It does not come into existence nor decay in the same manner as do sense phenomena. Whoever lives only in the world of the senses has this spirit latent within him; whoever sees through the illusory character of the world of the senses has it as a revealed reality within him. Whoever achieves this insight has developed a new organ within him. Something has taken place in him, as in a plant which at first has only green leaves and then puts forth a colored blossom. Certainly, the forces through which the flower developed were already latent in the plant before the blossom came into existence, but they became reality only when this latter took place. Divine spiritual forces also are latent in the purely material man, but they are a revealed reality only in the mystic. Therein lies the transformation that has taken place in the mystic. By his development he has added something new to the existing world. The material world has made a material man of him and then left him to himself. Nature has fulfilled her mission. Her potential connection with the forces working within man is exhausted. But these forces themselves are not yet exhausted. They lie as though spellbound in the purely natural man, awaiting their release. They cannot release themselves; they vanish into nothing if man himself does not grasp them and develop them further, if he does not awaken to real existence what slumbers hidden within him. Nature evolves from the least to the most perfect. Nature leads beings by an extensive series of stages from the inanimate through all forms of life up to material man. Man in his material nature opens his eyes and becomes aware of himself in the material world as a real being, capable of transforming itself. He still observes in himself the forces out of which this material nature is born. These forces are not the object of transformation because they gave rise to the transformation. Man bears them within himself as an indication that something lives within him, transcending his material perception. What may come into existence through these forces is not yet present. Man feels something light up within him which has created everything, including himself; and he feels that this something will spur him to higher achievement. It is within him; it existed before his material appearance, and will be there after it. Through it he has come into being, and he may grasp it, and himself participate in his creation. Such feelings lived in the ancient mystic after initiation. He felt the eternal, the divine. His deeds will become a part of the creative activity of the divine. He may say to himself: I have discovered a higher “I” within me, but this “I” surpasses the boundaries of my material growth; it existed before my birth, it will exist after my death. Creatively this “I” has worked throughout eternity; creatively it will work in eternity. My material personality is a creation of this “I.” But it has incorporated me within it; creatively it works in me; I am a part of it. What I am now able to create is something higher than the material. My personality is only a medium for this creative force, for this divine, within me. In this way the mystic experienced his apotheosis.

[ 12 ] The mystic named the force thus kindled within him, his true spirit. He was the result of this spirit. It seemed to him as though a new being had entered him and taken possession of his organs. This was a being which stood between his material personality and the Sovereign Power of the cosmos, the Godhead. The mystic sought his true spirit. He said to himself, I have become man in the great natural world. But nature has not completed her task. I myself must take over this completion. However, I cannot do this in the gross realm of nature to which my material personality also belongs. Whatever can develop in this realm has developed. Therefore I must escape from this realm. I must continue to build in the sphere of the spiritual, where nature has stood still. I must create for myself a breathing space which cannot be found in outer nature. This breathing space was prepared for the mystics in the Mystery temples. There the forces slumbering within them were awakened; there they were transformed into higher creative spirit-natures. This transformation was a delicate process. It could not endure the rough elements of the outdoors. When the process was completed, through it man had become a rock grounded in the eternal, able to defy all storms. But he was not permitted to believe that he could communicate his experiences in their direct form to others.

[ 13 ] Plutarch informs us that in the Mysteries “it is possible to gain the clearest reflections and adumbrations of the truth about the daemons.”⁶ And from Cicero we learn that “those occult Mysteries ... when interpreted and explained prove to have more to do with natural science than with theology.”⁷ From such communications we see clearly that for the mystic there existed a higher insight into natural science than the religion of the people could give. Moreover this shows that the daemons, that is, the spiritual beings, and the gods themselves required explanation. Beings are approached who are of a higher nature than the daemons and gods. And this is in the nature of Mystery wisdom. The people pictured gods and daemons in images taken entirely from the world of material reality. Surely one who could penetrate the essence of the eternal was bound to lose confidence in the eternalness of such gods! How could Zeus, as the people pictured him, be eternal when he had the characteristics of a mortal being?—One thing was clear to the mystic: man attains his idea of the gods in a different manner from his ideas about other things. An object in the external world compels me to form a definitive idea of it. In contrast to this the formation of ideas of the gods has something free, even arbitrary, about it. The compulsion of the external world is lacking. Reflection teaches us that with the gods we imagine something for which there is no external control. This puts man into a state of logical uncertainty. He begins to feel that he is the creator of his gods. He even asks himself: How do I come to transcend physical reality in my world of ideas? The mystic must devote himself to such thoughts. The doubts which then beset him were justified. He could think to himself: Let us simply look at all these ideas of the gods. Are they not similar to the creatures we meet in the world of the senses? Has not man created them by mentally adding or subtracting this or that quality essentially belonging to the world of the senses? The barbarian who loves hunting creates a heaven for himself in which the most glorious hunts of the gods take place. The Greek peoples Olympus with divinities having their prototype in the reality which is well known to him.

[ 14 ] The philosopher Xenophanes (575–480 B.C.) referred to this fact with crude logic. We know that the older Greek philosophers were absolutely dependent on Mystery wisdom. This will be demonstrated in relation to Heraclitus in particular. For this reason the saying of Xenophanes can be accepted without reservation as a conviction based on mystic knowledge. He says:

[ 15 ] “But men have the idea that gods are born,
And wear their clothes, and have both voice and shape.
But had the oxen or the lions hands,
Or could with hands depict a work like men,
Were beasts to draw the semblance of the gods,
The horses would them like to horses sketch,
To oxen, oxen, and their bodies make
Of such a shape as to themselves belongs.”⁸

[ 16 ] Through such insight man may become doubtful of everything divine. He may reject the legends of the gods and acknowledge as reality only that which his material perceptions compel him to acknowledge. But the mystic did not become such a doubter. He understood that the doubter was like a plant which said to itself: My colored blossom is vain and worthless, for I am complete in my green leaves; what I add to them only increases the illusory appearance. But neither could the mystic remain content with the gods thus created, the gods of the people. If the plant could think, it would understand that the forces which had created the green leaves are also destined to create the colored blossom. And it would not rest until it had investigated these forces for itself in order to see them. So it was for the mystic in relation to the gods of the people. He did not deny them nor declare them to be vain, but he knew that they were created by man. The same natural forces, the same divine elements which work creatively in nature also work creatively in the mystic. In him also they engender ideas of the gods. He wishes to see this force which is creating gods. It is not like the gods of the people; it is something higher. Xenophanes also indicates this:

[ 17 ] “One God there is, 'midst gods and men supreme;
In form, in mind, unlike to mortal men. ”⁹

[ 18 ] This God was also the God of the Mysteries. He could be called “a hidden God,” for nowhere—so it was thought—is He to be found by the purely material man. Direct your gaze outward toward objects; you find no divinity. Exert your intelligence; you may understand the laws by which things come into existence and decay, but your intellect shows you nothing divine. Saturate your fantasy with religious feeling; you can create pictures of beings which you may take to be gods, but your intellect dissects them for you, for it proves to you that you yourself created them, and borrowed the material for their creation from the material world. Insofar as you, as intellectual man, consider the things about you, you must deny the gods. For God is not there for your senses or intellect, which explain material perceptions. God is magically concealed in the world. And you need His own force in order to find Him. This force you must awaken within yourself. These are the teachings which a neophyte of ancient times received. Then began for him the great cosmic drama in which he was engulfed alive. This drama consisted of nothing less than the release of the spellbound God. Where is God? This was the question the mystic put before his soul. God is not, but nature is. He must be found in nature. In nature He has found an enchanted tomb. The words, “God is Love,” are grasped by the mystic in a higher sense. For God has carried this Love to its uttermost. He has given Himself in infinite Love; He has diffused Himself; He has divided Himself into the manifold variety of natural things; they live, and He does not live in them. He rests in them. He lives in man. And man can experience the life of God in himself. If he is to let Him come to cognition he must release this cognition creatively in himself. Man now gazes into himself. As a hidden creative force, as yet unincarnated, works the divinity in his soul. In this soul is a place where the spellbound divinity can come to life again. The soul is the mother who by nature can conceive the divinity. If the soul is fructified by nature it will give birth to a divinity. Out of the marriage of the soul with nature a divinity will be born. This is no longer a “hidden” divinity; it is revealed. It has life, perceptible life, and walks among men. It is the released spirit in man, the offspring of the spellbound divinity. It is not the great God, who was, is and will be, but it can be taken as His revelation in a certain sense. The Father rests in concealment, the Son is born to man out of his own soul. Thus mystic cognition is a real event in the cosmic process. It is the birth of an offspring of God. It is an event as real as any other natural event, only on a higher level. This is the great secret of the mystic, that he himself creatively releases his divine offspring, but he also prepares himself beforehand to acknowledge this divine offspring created by himself. The non-mystic lacks the experience of the father of this offspring. For this father slumbers under a spell. The offspring appears to be virginally born. The soul appears to have borne him without fructification. All its other offspring are conceived by the material world. In their case the father can be seen and touched. He has material life. The divine offspring alone is conceived of the eternal, hidden Father—God Himself.

• 2. Aeschylus was acquitted by the Areopagus on a charge of revealing the Eleusinian Mysteries. When charged with betraying the Mysteries, he replied, “I said the first thing which occurred to me.” Cf. Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea III, 1. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata II, 14: “Aeschylus, who divulged the Mysteries on the stage, was acquitted when being tried in the Areopagus on his showing that he had not been initiated.”
• c4. It is said above that those whose spiritual eyes are opened can behold the realm of the spiritual world. It should not, however, be concluded from this that a logical judgment about the results of initiation can be formed only by one who himself has “spiritual eyes.” These are necessary only for research. When the results of the research are communicated, everyone can understand who allows his intelligence and unprejudiced sense of truth to speak. Such a person also can use these results in life and gain satisfaction from them without as yet possessing “spiritual eyes” himself.
• 3. Goethe, Faust, Part I, 3456–3458: Feeling is all in all;
  Name is but sound and smoke,
  Beclouding Heaven's glow.
  —Priest translation, 1941, p. 101
• c5. The “sinking into the mire” of which Plato speaks must also be interpreted in the sense of the previous comment.
• 1. Sophocles, Fragment 719.”
• c6. What is said about the impossibility of communicating teachings of the Mysteries refers to the fact that they cannot be communicated in the form in which the initiate experiences them to anyone who is unprepared. But they always have been communicated in the form in which they could be understood by the non-initiate. For example, the myths provided the ancient form for communicating the content of the Mysteries in a generally comprehensible manner.
• 5. Plutarch, Moralia, De E apud Delphos, 392 A–E. (The E at Delphi, 17 and 18.)
• 6. Plutarch, Moralia, De defectu oraculorum, 417 C. (The Obsolescence of Oracles, 14.)
• 7. Cicero, De natura Deorum I, 119.
• 8. Xenophanes, Elegaic Poems 14, 15.
• 9. Xenophanes, Elegaic Poems (On Nature) 23.

If we want to understand the migrations of the fifth post-Atlantic races, we must be aware that it is difficult to see clearly in this chaos. Descendants of all previous races have settled here, and we are already working in the fourth [root] race with a population that is spreading out in a radiating manner, as it were, and is itself mixed with descendants of other races. In the fifth race, the situation is most complicated. Everywhere we find remnants of populations that once already had a culture. As far as we look at the peoples of the southern Asian continent, we have remnants of the ancient Lemurian population. In the interior of Australia, their descendants can still be found. In western and northern Asia, in Central Asia and southern Europe, we find remnants of the fourth Atlantic epoch. This is the soil into which the branches of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch sink. So here we have the result of two currents: the Lemurian-Aryan on the one hand, and the Atlantean-Aryan on the other. All these cultures, however, have absorbed an even older one; Siberia, Scandinavia, northern Russia, China even have remnants of the Hyperborean culture. These mixtures are difficult to unravel. Let us try to trace the course of the Aryan cultural impact.

From a point in Central Asia, near the Gobi and Khamo deserts, this cultivation spread outwards in a radius. It was a decidedly priestly culture that prepared a spiritually highly educated race to enter the chaos of nations, to send out colonies from which new civilizations would arise. This small tribal people emerged from the fifth sub-race, the Ursemites of the fourth Atlantic epoch. We must bear in mind that these Ursemites were given their specific task, which is expressed in the Law of Manu, to offer to people in the broadest sense what is expressed in the words of Jesus: 'The kingdom of God does not come with external gestures, but the kingdom of God is among you'. Everything that came before was only a preparation for this point in time. It was what became the guiding tendency of Christianity: the sanctification of the personality, the full descent to the physical plane. This mission first had to be carefully prepared.

From the very beginning, the Manu in the root race placed very little emphasis on what goes beyond birth and death in man. These teachings had played an important role in the past and were now slowly dying out to gradually disappear. The Manu of the fifth post-Atlantic epoch wanted to lead people down to the physical plane in order to understand the physical heart, brain, and lungs. So these teachings, which went beyond birth and death, slowly faded in the first three post-Atlantic cultures. For even a Manu cannot direct fate and events as he wills, but must accomplish everything in accordance with the great laws of nature. Two things were available to him: the culture that still existed from the Lemurian population in southern Asia, and the remnants of the Atlantean culture in Africa. He sent his colonies there with initiated priests. Some to India, others to Africa. He gave them the teaching of non-reincarnation, the teaching [about life] between birth and death. In fact, the oldest Vedas contain nothing of what goes beyond birth and death. He said to himself: “Peoples who know nothing about reincarnation are coming together with those who have a precise knowledge of it. The result will be the right one.

In Egypt, they came together with the Atlanteans, who did not have such a sharp doctrine of reincarnation. For while the last Lemurians had trained them to the highest degree, it had already been distorted by the Atlanteans; with them, everything had come to a head in memory; the memory of the Atlanteans was so sharp that it outweighed everything else, that all that was physical lived in them through inheritance. So in this first excerpt we have two branches: the Indo-Aryans and the Hamites.

In India, the immigrating Indo-Aryans, who came with the old teaching of the word revealed by God - Veda word - took up the doctrine of reincarnation, and in Brahmanism we have what comes out so beautifully as the doctrine of reincarnation. This was brought about by the Manu. Meanwhile, the subjugated Lemurians became pariahs, and the Indians became the four castes. This is the principle of the initiates: the blending of the new with the old, here the powerful manasic spirituality with the doctrine of reincarnation.

In the Hamitic branch – Noah's three sons Shem, Ham and Japheth – the doctrine of reincarnation receded somewhat. It was less clear on the surface. The Egyptians placed more emphasis on the preservation of corpses. The inheritance system was more emphasized, which places the main value on physical continuity. The value of the individual life was emphasized and already transformed the ancient Rishi doctrine. A less decided doctrine of reincarnation mixed here with the doctrine of personality.

The second migration consists in the fact that a new branch was sent out, as it were. We can follow it if we first look eastward to the Medes and Persians and then to the tribe that passed through Chaldea and found its historical expression in the migrations of Abraham - from Ur in Chaldea. On the one hand, the tribe that went west also came into contact with the remnants of the Atlantic culture, namely with the fourth sub-race of the Atlanteans, the Turanian population, who had been engaged in agriculture.

Thus a peculiar mixture arises. Grafted onto that Turanian branch was the practice of magic – and it had to be grafted on firmly! From here came the teachings of the Medes and Bactrians. Here the first Zarathustras were active, endeavoring to use the external techniques of magical time in the service of external culture. The result is a mighty flourishing of agriculture and viticulture; in them we have the revival of the old magical skills.

A colonist branch goes further west and came across remnants of the undrawn Ursemites of the Atlantean race, and these form what is called the ancient Semitic tribe: Chaldeans, Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs. They form a new Semitic culture.

The most significant events occurred first among the Medes and Persians. They are contained in an ancient saga that has undergone many transformations and finally comes to us in the form of Cyrus: King Astyages had a daughter, Mandane, who married not a Mede but a Persian. The father dreamt that a tree was growing out of his daughter's womb. The dream was interpreted to mean that the Persian tribe would overshadow the Median tribe. The ancient saga of Cyrus has a uresoteric meaning. Cyrus represents the agricultural Persians in contrast to the non-agricultural Medes, and the [peasant] signifies that agriculture will win out: ancient culture will pass to the farmers.

How this came about can be seen from the institution of the Persian character. Physically strong they should become. There were no Lemurians here; the Atlanteans had prepared the ground for the development of personality. The Persians emphasized personal virtues above all. It is a remarkable trait that they had lessons in telling the truth; this was a main subject for boys, along with gymnastic exercises. And that is very important. They were preparing for what would lead to personal prowess reaching its peak.

Now we come to the point where the original Semitic element mixed with the new. Priest-Rishis migrated over and found decadent Old Semites and also decadent Akkadians. Thus the Manu formed a new branch by combining his immigrants with the decadent Semites, those who had developed arithmetic during their Atlantean heyday. What emerged from this was the Chaldean wisdom. [...] Astrology, astronomy, the observatories, the calendar, weights and measures emerged. The immigrants who had encountered the Akkadians, the ancient trading people, were used to create new colonies in this mixture. These were the Phoenicians.

Another excerpt followed: A colony of Rishis with followers went over to Europe. Here he found the old Hyperborean element, and in the south the Atlantic one. The Hyperboreans had already mixed with the Atlanteans; so only a small remnant of them remained. In the south, Hyperborean was almost non-existent. Here, on the soil of ancient Greece, the Pelasgian population arose with a kind of nature service that is reminiscent of Egyptian practices in many ways; only here it is more of a local cult instead of an ancestral cult: we find sacred trees, sacred caves; it is more closely tied to nature. There was a belief that the sacred is more closely tied to the place than to the tribe - Zeus of Dodona and others. The physical place becomes sacred. That was the new formation.

In Italy, too, a mixture of ancient Atlantean and Rishi culture is being brought into the physical plan again. Here, what had developed in the Atlanteans as a social being and as an attachment to technical culture penetrated: in the social legislation and technical skill of the Etruscans.

In the north, the mixture of Hyperborean and Rishi culture gave rise to the new formation of Celtic culture. What was found was an Atlantean-Hyperborean culture that was of little use. A new influence had to be given, and the result is the Celtic mixture with the Druid culture. This has so much spirituality because it absorbed the highly spiritual, which went beyond the spirituality of the Atlantic and Lemurian. Because it had the Hyperborean element in it, the Celtic could not quite withstand it and was absorbed by the later cultures.

We now come to the third sending forth. It is very complicated. It goes partly into what was previously prepared by the first two. We have preserved it in the representations of different peoples. Wherever the strong, powerful people are already in the foreground in the traditions. Thus, above all, a group of initiates went west and fertilized the already fertilized pre-Semitic element once again. Because it is about summarizing everything that was originally poured into the great idea of state-building. The result of this third sending out according to this poetry is Genesis, the Old Testament.

Another dissemination was the one that went to Asia Minor and formed what is preserved in Trojan culture and its daughter cultures, one of which is Albalong culture. These initiates had the task of taking over state formation as soon as it suited the various peoples.

We have thus become acquainted with three groups of initiates, the first of which had the task of creating the religious culture, the second of creating the material cultural basis - Persia - and the third of forming the state and consolidating the passions. This happens in forms adapted to the different peoples, as in Troy, or Alba Longa, or the theocratic state of Palestine. But essentially these were only preparations, made with peoples who were not called to form states. Among the people who were most called upon to carry the spiritual out onto the physical plane through their culture, the formation of states was least successful: the Greeks are above all the people of art. The highest personal thing brought out onto the physical plane: that is art. The initiate of the third group - in the case of the Greeks - is the hero, the strong man.

Over there in Asia, the peoples had already mixed repeatedly. And those who had received the highest legislation, the Jews, had mixed so much that they had already become hypertrophied. In contrast, in Europe, in central Italy, there had been a simpler mixture. We find a very strong Atlantic element there. The Etruscan colony had cooperated with Alba Longa, the priest state, and brought about Rome. Here there was simple racial formation and a great deal of Atlanticism in it. The two traits were enough to establish what is called the Etruscan-Roman culture, with the priestly influence that had to lead to the institution of the Pontifex Maximus. The conditions were simple, and so the people of the Roman Republic emerged, who developed personal bravery purely for themselves. The Roman citizen, the cives, was the fully-fledged human being who felt entirely as a personality. The Greeks had to feel themselves above all as wise men and artists. When they cultivated what most emerges from the personality, oratory and law, they had to perish. Private law and oratory, eloquence, were only developed to perfection in Rome. The Greek first sensed [...] and then developed the perfect personality by representing it in his gods. The Roman represents in his person the perfected personality as a citizen, as a real human being. The works of Greek sculptors, so to speak, arise in the Romans and come to life.

Thus, in Rome something was being prepared that the Lodge of the Initiates could use to give a further impetus. The highest peak of spiritual life had to be taken for this purpose. This could only be found where most spiritual impacts had occurred, namely in the Near East. There spirit was grafted onto spirit:

1. The self-impact: the fifth sub-race of the Atlantians Ursemites on the first sub-race of the Aryan population.
2. The move into the area of the Euphrates and Tigris.
3. The patriarchal period - the time of the heroes.
4. The theocracy.

This wonderful mixture is expressed in all branches of intellectual life. The new influence there could only come from a personality who came from far away, not from their own country.

The lodge carefully selected the family from which an initiate was to come. The old Rishi culture had prepared, foretold the initiate who must now come. It was written in the Sibylline books.

Thus, in secret, away from Judaism, in Galilee, the Messiah of the fourth sub-race was being prepared. There in Galilee, Judaism had never gained a firm foothold; it had not penetrated there. The Galileans are very mixed in racial character. It was important that He should have nothing of the Galilean, that He should come as from the hidden. That is why the apocrypha tell of him as being a son of his mother, and speak of his unchaste birth. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean. He was initiated to the third degree of a disciple. Now it was a matter of making him the highest initiate for everything that was to be realized on the physical plane. This was done by taking possession of the whole personality by another, who represents the whole fifth root race, by the Christ. In the Greco-Latin culture, the whole fifth post-Atlantic epoch emerged, and this is symbolically represented in the descent of the dove. If one wanted to express the truths at issue here, one could only choose the highest form.

The Manu said to himself, “I will make the fourth sub-race into a union of all the previous impacts and endow it with the spirit of the entire fifth root race. The Christ can do this, who is the actual impact of the entire fifth root race. The Manu prepared it, and Christ, as it were, entered into what had been prepared. The revelation of the actual secret of the fourth race was to take place. Earlier it had only been prepared, the highest initiates had seen it, the others prepared. That was the darkness into which the light came.

If we survey the development, we have results that are prepared by the fact that the first three sub-races are gradually educated to become personalities - until in the fourth the most profound part of the personality is seized, as the equality of all people before God.

Initiates who were sent out were not begotten by the father and mother of the race in question. They were sexless everywhere.

This is really said in the Gospel of John:

He came to that which is His own, but His own did not receive Him. And as many as received Him, to them He gave power to become the sons of God, even to those who believe in His name: <5>they were born, not of flesh and blood, nor of the will of man, but of God.

Christ is the inwardly divine principle; he must pour himself into forms and takes the form of the law from the theocratic state, from Judaism. The Jews could not accept the new forms, they already had their own; that was the highest. But He had to accept them, step by step He had to emerge onto the physical plane. So He expressed His wisdom through the wisdom of ancient Judaism. Now this wisdom had to be understood. This wisdom could be understood where the physical plane had already been conquered, where philosophy existed. That is why the first church fathers came from the Greeks. In their philosophy, they had developed the ability to understand that which emerged on the physical plane. When the will emerged in the personality, they could also understand this personality.

The people who had formed a Zeus, who had incarnated a God in their art of sculpture, could also understand the idea of an incarnated God. This idea could only come to life through the Roman people. The human being who had formed the personality could have this idea. That was the Roman.

The Christ Himself is formed in the Jewish people, He is understood through Greek gnosis and the Greek apostles: Paul and the Greek evangelist John. But all this could not have led to the spread of Christianity on the physical plane, but at most to an understanding. The Romans, who adopt Greek culture, destroy Jerusalem, go to Asia, become Christians.

So:
The Jews form Christ.
The Greeks understand Christ.
The Romans become Christians.

Therefore, Christianity spread only after the destruction of Jerusalem and has a specifically Roman form. In Rome, the physical vessel for the Christ had already been prepared, namely the state, which was already founding the empire, and the priest who could administer it, the Pontifex Maximus. This brings us to the fourth sub-race. We have seen that it was carefully prepared. The fifth sub-race is still in the process of being formed.

We have reached the summit or center. The following teachers are therefore those who have to preserve what has been created in order to apply it again on the particular physical. It is a matter of some initiates specifying these summits for the individuals. Thus we have preserved the Christian tradition in the Brotherhood of the Holy Grail. Christianity is constantly degenerating and degenerating. So it is a matter of continually giving new impetus from what is called the Mount Montsalvatsch, the Grail. These impacts take on a different character. Again, it is the Rishis who experience the actual teaching in a Christian way and only ever want to protect original Christianity from degeneration.

In this way, the most diverse attempts at regeneration have been made. The first attempt can be traced back to an initiate who cannot yet play a historical role because this is still prehistory. However, he is mentioned in legend. He is the German apostle Boniface. He is the source of the original form in which Christianity came from Ireland to Germany, with a mixture of Druidic culture, Indian influence, and the impact of Dionysius the Areopagite.

A new influence was given and a new possibility created by the initiate known as Lohengrin. This initiation proceeded from a very complicated point of view, as all initiations become complicated. For it was necessary to connect the original Christianity, which had developed continuously from Dionysius the Areopagite through Scotus Eriugena up to scholasticism and mysticism. This current could indeed have an effect on peoples through preaching; but gradually it had been lost to the people because it went to the highest heights of thought. Therefore, a fertilization had to be brought from the original spiritual element. A high point had been reached, but it was also an impasse, and in order to have an effect on the initiate Lohengrin, a new fertilization from the Orient had to be brought about through the crusades. The essential thing that emerged from this is the Knights Templar, the actual messengers of the Holy Grail. They build a place of wisdom at the site of Solomon's Temple and after they are prepared there, they become servants of the Holy Grail, are initiated there by the Grail. This happens at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and is prepared in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Now we are in the preparatory stage of the fifth sub-race, the Germanic-English. From the Temple service we can see that it is about the application of Christianity to a new race. The service of the Temple Knights prepares for the transition of Christianity to full externality [...] in Christianity, which later leads to Protestantism. This helps us to understand the actual confession of the Knights Templar and their secret cult. They said to themselves: The Christ represented by the Western Church means nothing to us, because he is the Christ on the cross. But we proclaim the Christ who walked in Jerusalem and received initiation from the Baptist; our teachers about Christ are therefore not church teachers and church fathers, but John the Baptist, the initiator himself. Therefore, the main ceremony consisted of spitting out the crucifix symbol of Western worship and the unconsecrated wafer. This symbolized the contempt of Roman Christianity, the one that had developed into Catholicism, and it was prepared to turn away from Catholic Christ back to evangelical Christ. That was one principle. Another was:

1. We again accept the belief in the elementary forces of the world.
2. We believe that the destinies of men are a result of the interrelationships of the stars and that man himself is born out of the great interrelationships of the stars, the laws of nature.

Out of these two principles the culture of the Anglo-German race has developed: the religious-Protestant on the one hand, the scientific of the physical world on the other.

But this was only the vessel. The content came in a roundabout way

through the Moors. So here we have a Semitic influence again. There were five Semitic influences that provided the content. The mold was always prepared.

The Rosicrucians guarded the common basis of what diverged into a purely secular science and a materialistic religion. They were the ones who wanted to hold together. The Rosicrucians essentially studied evolution in the concrete within the fifth sub-race, prepared social legislation and will be the actual leaders of the sixth sub-race.

Editor's/Translator's note: By the time Rudolf Steiner had given the first nineteen First Class Lessons (Volumes One and Two), so many new members had joined, or wanted to join, that he felt it necessary to recapitulate the lessons already given rather than continue to advance. However, although the mantras (verses) used are the same as in Volume One, the descriptions are sufficiently different to justify a new volume. Furthermore, much new and valuable material is introduced, which is not in the previous volumes.

As it turns out, many more friends have come to this Class Lesson—and probably will to the next lessons as well—who had not attended the previous ones. So, it would be impossible to simply continue in the same way as we have with the previous lessons. But it is also true that a repetition of these Class Lessons will not be a disadvantage for those members of this esoteric school who participated in the earlier lessons, because the content of this esoteric school is such that it works again and again on the soul. Therefore, for those who today are experiencing a repetition, it also constitutes a continuation.

But for all those who are here for the first time it means something else: it means an acquaintance with the beginning of the esoteric path.

And even those who are far advanced on the esoteric path see in it the advantages of their continued striving, in that again and again they return to the beginning. This return to the beginning is always also the endeavor to reach a more advanced stage. We should therefore consider this lesson of today in that sense. And so for the members of the School who are here for the first time, the meaning of the School must be explained beforehand.

As the impulse of the Christmas Conference with the spiritual laying of the foundation stone of the Anthroposophical Society took place in this hall, from now on an esoteric breath is to flow through the whole Anthroposophical Society—as I said yesterday—an esoteric breath that can already be noted in everything undertaken within the Anthroposophical Society since Christmas. The nucleus of this esoteric activity of the Anthroposophical Society must be the Esoteric School. This Esoteric School, coming from the entire character of anthroposophy, is to take the place of what has been previously attempted as the so-called Free School for Spiritual Science, which cannot exactly be described as having been successful.

It was at the time when I did not yet personally have the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, and thus had to entrust those who wanted to try something, to let them try. In the future, this cannot continue. The intention of what was formed together with me as the Christmas impulse was that the Free School for Spiritual Science, with its various sections, would form an esoteric nucleus for all the esoteric work in the Anthroposophical Society.

An esoteric school, however, is not founded as an earthly entity. An esoteric school can only be one if it is the earthly reflection of what has been founded in the super-sensible worlds. And it has often been declared among anthroposophists that in the succession of the reigning hierarchy of Archangels, those who reign over human spiritual life, the Archangel Michael took over this guidance during the last third of the nineteenth century. And it was made known that this guidance has a very special significance for the spiritual life and evolution of humanity on earth.

It is the case that in human evolution life is guided successively by seven Archangels who together comprise the spiritual ruling substance of the planetary system, to which the sun, earth and moon also belong. The impulse of one of these Archangels lasts about three to four centuries. And when we consider the Archangel under whose impulse the spiritual life of the present stands, when we consider Michael, we have the Archangelos who possesses the spiritual force of the sun in everything he does and supports.

Previously, again lasting for three to four centuries—that is, from the last third of the nineteenth century back through three to four centuries—was the reign of the Archangelos Gabriel, who mostly bears the moon's forces in his impulses.

And going further back we come to the centuries in which a kind of revolution against spiritual activity and spiritual being in humanity took place during the middle ages, even by those who were the bearers of civilization—the reign of Samuel, who had his impulses in the Mars forces.

When we go even further back we come to the era in which a medicinally oriented alchemy deeply influenced spiritual life under the rule of the Archangelos Raphael, who bears the Mercury forces in his impulses.

And when we go even further back, we are approaching more and more the Mystery of Golgotha, but have not yet reached it. We find there the reign of Zachariel, who bears the Jupiter forces in his impulses, and the reign of Anael—with whom we are getting very close to the Mystery of Golgotha—who bears the Venus forces in his impulses. Then we come to the time when the brilliance of the Mystery of Golgotha asserted itself against a profound spiritual darkness on earth—under the reign of Oriphiel, who bears the Saturn forces in his impulses.

Then we come back to the previous reign of Michael, that coincides with the great international, cosmopolitan impulses through Alexander the Great and Aristotle, which until that point was brought to humanity by means of the Greek mysteries and spirituality, and was then brought by Alexander over to Asia, to North Africa, so that what was the spiritual life of a small territory streamed out to the whole civilized world of those times. For it is always an attribute of a Michael era that what had previously blossomed in one place streams out to other localities in a cosmopolitan manner.

Thus, after having completed the cycle of successive Archangeloi epochs, we always return to the same Archangelos. We can go back further—again through the succession of Gabriel, Samuel, Raphael, Zachariel, Anael, Oriphiel—and would come again to Michael. And we would find that after the Michael era streams over us, an Oriphiel era follows.

So, my dear friends, we should be aware that the Michael impulse lives in the way characterized in everything which is spiritual activity and being in the present. But it is a more important Michael era than the previous ones. I would like to emphasize this.

When the Anthroposophical Society was placed at the service of the esoteric during the Christmas Conference, its esoteric nucleus, this Esoteric School, could only be founded by the spiritual power which is incumbent for its guidance at this time. Thus, we are in this Esoteric School as one which the spirit of the times himself, Michael, has founded; for it is the Michael-School of the present.

And only then, my dear friends, can you correctly understand what is being said here—when you are aware that nothing else is being said but what the Michael stream itself wishes to bring to humanity in the present time. All the words which will be spoken in this School are Michael words. Michael will is all that is willed in this School. You are all students of Michael in that you are present in the right way in this School. Only then, when you are aware of this, is it possible to be present in this School in the right way—with the correct disposition and attitude, feeling yourselves to be members not only of what enters the world as an earthly institution, but as a heavenly institution.

It is of course therefore a condition that every member of this School accept certain self-evident responsibilities. It is a property of the Christmas impulse of the Anthroposophical Society, that it has taken on the characteristic of complete openness. Therefore, nothing is demanded of members of the Anthroposophical Society other than what they themselves demand: that they receive through the Anthroposophical Society what flows within the anthroposophical spiritual movement. One does not take on further responsibilities when one becomes an anthroposophist. The responsibility for being a decent person is taken for granted.

It is otherwise when one seeks to enter this School. Then, based on the truly occult spirit of this School, the member assumes the responsibility of being a worthy representative of anthroposophy before the world with all his thinking, feeling and willing. One cannot otherwise be a member of this School.

That this is taken seriously, my dear friends, can be seen by that fact that since the short existence of this School in twenty instances temporary expulsions have already taken place. This strict measure will have to continue to be followed in the same way. One cannot play around with true esoteric matters; they must be realized with utmost earnestness. In this way, through this School the earnestness that is absolutely necessary for the anthroposophical movement to spiritually prosper can stream into it. That is what I wanted to say as an introduction.

If you—I'm speaking now to those of you who are here for the first time—if you receive the words spoken here as real messages from the spiritual world, as truly Michael-words, then you will be here in the right way, in the only way you should be here.

And so now we want to bring to our souls the words which resound to the human being when he objectively observes everything in the world that surrounds him—in the world above, in the middle and below. Let us look at the mute kingdom of minerals, at the sprouting plant kingdom, at the mobile animal kingdom, at the thinking kingdom of humanity on earth; let us direct our gaze to the mountains, to the seas, to the rivers, to the effervescent springs, to the shining sun, to the gleaming moon and the sparkling stars. If the human being keeps his heart open, if he can listen with the ears of soul, the admonishment resounds to him which is contained in the words which I shall now speak:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

And when we let the meaning and the spirit of these words work in us, then we feel the desire to go into the springs from which our true humanity flows. To really understand these words means to crave the path that leads to those waters from which the human soul flows—to seek the source of human life.

In seeking, my dear sisters and brothers, you will be rewarded to the extent it lies in your karma. But the first step will be to understand the inner meaning of the esoteric path. This esoteric path will be described in Michael-words here in this School. It will be described in such a way that everyone can follow it, but not that everyone must follow it, rather that it be understood; for such understanding is in itself the first step. Therefore, what Michael has to say to present-day humanity will flow in mantric words. These mantric words will at the same time be words for meditation.

Again, it will depend on karma how these words for meditation work for each individual. And the first thing is to understand that from the spoken words about human self-knowledge the desire arises to direct one's attention to the sources of human existence: O man, know thyself! Yes, this desire must awaken. We must seek: Where are the sources of what lives in the human soul, what our humanity actually is?

At first, we must observe the surroundings that have been given us. We must look around at all the little things we have been given, at all the great things we have been given. We observe the mute stone, the worm in the earth, we look at all that grows and exists and lives around us in the kingdoms of nature. We look up to the powerfully glittering stars. We listen to the turbulent thunder.

It is not by being ascetic that we can solve the riddle of our own humanity; it is not by despising the earthworm, the stars glittering in space, not by despising them as outer sensible phenomena and instead seeking an abstractly chaotic path; but when we develop a feeling for the transcendence of what shines down on us from the stars, for all that enters through the senses and becomes our perception: beauty, truth, purity, transcendence, magnificence and majesty. When you can stand there as an observer of all that surrounds you—of the plants, of the stones, of the animals, of the stars, of the clouds, of the seas, of the springs, of the mountains—and can absorb their majesty and greatness and truth and beauty and radiance, then can you first say with complete intensity: Yes, great and powerful and majestic and glorious are the worms that crawl under the earth, the stars that glitter above in heaven's space. But your being, O man, is not among them. You are not in what your senses reveal to you.

And then we direct our questioning gaze, laden with riddles, to the far distance. From here on, the esoteric path will be described in imaginations. We direct our gaze to the distance. Something like a path is shown, a path that leads to a black, night-cloaked wall that reveals itself as the beginning of deepest darkness. And we stand there, surrounded by the majesty of sensory perception, marveling at the greatness and majesty and radiance of sensory perception, but not finding our own being in it, with our gaze directed to the limits of sensory perception. But black, night-cloaked darkness begins there. But something in our heart tells us: Not here, where the sun reflects its light from all that grows and moves and lives, but there, where black, night-cloaked darkness is staring at us, are the sources of our own humanity. From out of there the answer must come to the question: O man, know thyself!

Then we go, hesitating, towards the black darkness and become aware that the first being who confronts us stands where the black, night-cloaked darkness begins. Like a previously unseen cloud formation taking shape, it becomes human-like, not weighted by gravity, but human-like nevertheless. With earnest, very earnest gaze, it meets our questioning gaze. It is the Guardian of the Threshold. For between the sun-radiating surroundings of humanity and that night-cloaked darkness there is an abyss, a deep, yawning abyss. The Guardian of the Threshold stands before us on this side of the abyss. We call him this for the following reason.

Oh, every night while sleeping the human being with his I and with his astral body is in that world that with imaginative gaze now appears as black, night-cloaked darkness; but he doesn't realize it—his soul-senses have not opened. He doesn't realize that he lives and acts among spiritual beings and spiritual facts between falling asleep and awakening; were he to consciously experience without further preparation what there is to experience there: he would be crushed! The Guardian of the Threshold protects us—therefore he is the Guardian of the Threshold—protects us against crossing the abyss unprepared. We must follow his admonitions if we wish to tread the esoteric path. He encloses the human being in darkness every night. He guards the threshold so that the human being does not, when falling asleep, enter into the spiritual-occult world unprepared.

Now he stands there—if we have sufficiently internalized our hearts and delved deeply into our souls—there he is, admonishing us as to how everything is beautiful in our surroundings, but that in this beauty we cannot find our own being and that we must seek beyond the yawning abyss of existence in the realms of night-cloaked, black darkness; that we must wait until it becomes dark here in the sunlit radiant realm of sensory light and it becomes light for us there, where now there is still only darkness.

That is what the Guardian of the Threshold reveals to our souls. We are still at a certain distance from him. We look at him, and perceive his admonishing words still from a distance, which resound so:

Where on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
Is shaped from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

That is the Guardian of the Threshold's first admonishment, the earnest admonishment that tells us that our surroundings are beautiful and grand and sublime, radiant with light, sun-filled; but that this radiant, sun-filled world is for the human being the true darkness; that we must seek there, in the darkness, that darkness becomes light, so that humanity, illuminated from out of the darkness, can approach us, so that the riddle of humanity may be solved from out the darkness. The Guardian of the Threshold continues:

And from out of the darkness comes light,
—you in image-shape revealed—
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, imparting strength,

The Spirit-Messenger, who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his anciently potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard, with the last line underlined.]

The Guardian speaks:

Where on earthly ground, color on color
Life is manifest in creation;
Where from earthly matter, form on form,
The lifeless is given shape;
Where sentient Beings, strong in will
Warm themselves in joy of existence;
Where you, O man, your bodily being
Is shaped from earth and air and light.

There your true being enters
Deep, night-cloaked, cold darkness;
You ask in the dark sweeping expanse
No longer, who you are and were and will be.
For your own being the day grows dimly
To the soul's night, to spirit-darkness;
And you turn with angst of soul
Toward the light that from darkness streams.

And from out of the darkness comes light,

(The continuation of this phrase follows after a few lines. What comes now is an intermediate clause.)

— you in image-shape revealed,
Your likeness manifesting you,
Yet also a parable of you,
Earnest spirit-words in cosmic ether
Heard by your heart, imparting strength —

(The intermediate clause has ended; the phrase “And from the darkness comes light” continues.)

The Spirit-Messenger,
(the Guardian of the Threshold) who alone
Can light for you the way;
Before him the fields of sense widen,
Behind him yawn the abyss-depths.

And before his dark spirit-fields,
Hard by the yawning abyss of being,
Resounds his anciently potent creative words:
Behold, I am the only gate to knowledge.

For it is the Guardian himself who, once he has imparted to us this first admonition: to feel light as darkness, darkness as light, indicates the feelings and sensations which can come anciently potent from our souls. He speaks them aloud, does the Guardian, as his gaze becomes even more earnest, as he stretches out his arm and hand to us, he speaks further with these words:

From the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,

(We feel ourselves impelled to take a few steps closer to the Guardian.)

From the stages of the course of time,
Which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers,
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O you man, know thyself!

It is different if we first hear these words from sensory beings, and if we correctly understand the words which resound: “O man, know thyself!”, or if they now resound before the terrible abyss of existence from the mouth of the Guardian of the Threshold himself. The same words: two different ways to grasp them. These words are mantric, for meditation, they are words which awaken the capacity in the soul to come near to the spiritual world, if they are able to ignite the soul.

[The mantra is written on the blackboard and the title and last line are underlined.]

The Guardian at the abyss

From the distant beings in space
Who experience existence in light,
From the stages of the course of time,
Which finds expression in creating,
From the depths of heart-felt feeling
Where in the Self the world is fathomed:

They resound in the speech of the soul,
They gleam in the spirit-thoughts,
From divine curative powers,
In the cosmic formative forces
The undulating existential words:
O you man, know thyself!

While the Guardian is saying these words, we have moved close to the yawning abyss of being. It is deep. There is no hope of crossing the abyss with the feet given us by the earth. We need freedom from earthly gravity. We need the wings of spiritual life in order to cross over the abyss. By at first beckoning us to the yawning abyss of existence, the Guardian of the Threshold made us aware of how our Self, before being illuminated and purified for the spiritual world, where actually today we are everywhere surrounded by hate for the spiritual world, by mockery of the spiritual world, by cowardice and fear of the spiritual world—the Guardian makes us aware of how this, our Self, which wills and feels and thinks, is constituted today in our present evolutionary cycle in its threefold character of willing, feeling and thinking. We must first recognize this before we can become aware, in real self-knowledge, of our true Self, which is implanted in us by the gods.

All three beasts, which arise from the abyss one after the other, appear to us as seen from the viewpoint of the eternal divine force of healing: human willing, human feeling, human thinking. As they appear one after the other—willing, feeling, thinking in their true form—the Guardian explains them:

We are standing at the edge of the abyss. The Guardian speaks—the beasts rise up:

Yes, you must beware of the abyss;
Otherwise its beasts will devour
You, if you pass by me in haste.
Your cosmic age has placed them there
In you as enemies of knowledge.

Behold the first beast, the crooked back,
The bony head, the scrawny body,
His skin is all a dullish blue;
Your fear of creative spiritual being
Begat the monster in your will;
Knowledge bravery alone will overcome it.

Behold the second beast, it bares
Its teeth in a warped face, scornfully it lies,
Yellow with gray spots is its body;
Your hate of spiritual revelation
Begat this weakling in your feeling;
Your flame for knowledge must subdue him.

Behold the third beast, with cloven muzzle,
Its eye is glassy, posture slouching,
Dirty-red its form appears to you;
Your doubts in the power of spiritual light
Begat this ghost within your thinking;
Your creative knowledge must make it yield.

Only when you've defeated the three
Will wings sprout upon your soul
To fly the abyss over,
Which separates you from the knowledge fields
To which your heart desires
to consecrate itself in healing.

I will write these mantric words on the blackboard next time.

When one has heard this directly from the mouth of the Guardian, one may return, remembering, to the point of departure. There exists everything before the soul that all beings in our surroundings say, if we understand them correctly; what all beings in the most distant past already said to humanity, what all beings say to humanity in the present, and what all beings will say to the human beings of the future:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the Cosmic-Word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it firm in spirit.

Who speaks with such cosmic might?
Who speaks with such depth of heart?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through weaving waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

It's you yourself who,
In feeling space, in experiencing time,

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In the soulless void of space
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow.

These are the words of the Michael-School. When they are spoken, Michael's spirit flows in waves through the room in which they are spoken. And his sign is what confirms his presence.

Michael-Sign (red)

Then Michael leads us to the real Rosicrucian School, which shall reveal the secrets of humanity in the past, in the present and in the future through the Father-God, the Son-God and the Spirit-God. And then pressing the seal on the words “rosae et crucis”, the words may be pronounced:

Ex deo nascimur

In Christo morimur

Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

accompanied by the sign of Michael's seal, which are for the first words “Ex deo nascimur” [See note]:

secondly by the words “In Christo morimur”:

thirdly by the words “Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus”:

As we say the words “Ex deo nascimur”, we feel them confirmed by the seal and sign of Michael—

“Ex deo nascimur” by this sign [makes the gesture—see note]:

I esteem the Father

“In Christo morimur” by this sign:

I love the Son

“Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus” by this sign:

I bind myself to the Spirit

That is what the signs mean.

Michael's presence is confirmed by his seal and sign.

Michael-Sign [see note]

The mantric words written on the blackboard may only be kept by those who are legitimate members of the School, that is, who have been issued the blue certificate. No one else may possess these words. Of course, those may have them who for some reason cannot attend a particular session of the School, or because of the distance from their homes cannot attend. As members of the School they can receive them from other members.

However, in each case permission to pass on these words must be obtained. The one who is to receive the words may not request permission, but only the one who passes them on. He or she obtains permission either from Dr. Wegman or from me. This is not a mere administrative measure, but must be the basis for every passing on of the words that permission must be granted either by Dr. Wegman or by me. The words may not be sent by letters, but only personally; they may not be entrusted to the mail.

Note: It is not possible to determine from the stenographic records of the seven Repetition Lessons exactly when during each lesson, Rudolf Steiner drew the Michael-Sign and the Michael-gestures with their corresponding words, or when he made the signs and the gestures.