The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[Ladies and gentlemen!]

Hardly anything can make such a sublime impression as the Egyptians' idea of eternity, that man can enter the path of eternity. And on the other hand, there will hardly be a correspondence of two personalities of spiritual life in all details such as we could trace between Buddha on the one hand and the personality of Christ on the other.

However, anyone who wanted to go even further back into the old ideas of Indian religion would find that the Buddha as a personality, as he appears to us and as it is also according to the ideas of Indian religion, is only the last Buddha [of many]. It is therefore more a repetition than a first appearance of a [personality of such a nature]. Christians have lost this idea because they only know the one. We cannot follow the various Buddha figures in the life of the Indian religion.

We can only gain an insight into the origin of the Christian world once we have become aware of the origin of the Judeo-Christian idea, insofar as this is possible with an [esoteric] mystical deepening. In particular, we will become aware of how this idea of Christ living in the Egyptian religion was transformed into a historical event.

The Egyptian idea of Christ confronts us in the form that everyone who was found suitable by the Egyptian priesthood and whose talent could awaken the ability to undertake the ascent was subjected to the process of initiation by the Egyptian priests, the deeply initiated.

What does this process of initiation mean? One must first be clear what the whole basic idea of initiation is. According to the views of the Egyptian priesthood, it was intended to introduce people to the deepest secrets of existence, to the primal mysteries of the world. It is therefore the introduction of those who were admitted to initiation into that which was carefully kept hidden from the great multitude by the Egyptian priests and which was only communicated to those who wanted to make progress. Those who wanted to rise to the highest truths that could be conveyed in the Egyptian priestly schools and cults, to descend to the depths of the mysteries of the world, could only do so in a precisely prescribed way, because it was believed that only those who had gone through the entire sequence of stages could have the inner life to have certain views alive within them.

In abstract terms, this is the basic idea that leads to Egyptian initiation. It was believed that the person concerned should not only receive spiritual teachings, not only spiritual shells, for the reception of which it was sufficient if he could think logically, no, it was believed that the whole physical should also be transformed in such a way that his whole sensual perception served the spirit to a much higher degree than was the case with another.

The spiritual process that took place when the disciple was to be introduced to the Mysteries was often reminiscent of the Eleusinian drama of the Greeks and the ancient Osiris drama. The whole myth of Osiris and Isis, in which the ancient priests brought true - I do not say mere fantasy, but - imagination, insight into the deepest mysteries of the world, was to carry out practically what was to lead into this wisdom.

The cosmological, physiological and astronomical were not considered sufficient. It was believed that the whole body of man had to be transformed, that man had to be given a completely different view. They did not believe that man was born with fully developed abilities, as Western science believed. It was believed that man, as he had developed step by step up to now, had to be developed further so that life was not lost. It is therefore a matter of transforming body and mind in such a way that man can not only understand the highest knowledge logically and abstractly, but that he can also experience the deepest [life] of the world.

The priest depicted the entire development of the world in three symbols. First in the symbol of the pyramid. It has four sides. These correspond to the four elements: Earth, fire, water, air. At the top, these sides converge into a point. Each side is therefore represented by a triangle, in which the priest saw the three worlds represented externally.

In the pyramid he saw the physical nature, the primordial elements [and their] composition. In the sphinx, where animal and human are connected, he saw the symbol of the incarnation. The fact that an organic development from animal to human has taken place is again a theosophical view today.

Finally in the phoenix bird, which consumes itself in fire and then rises again from the ashes. It is the symbol of the soul. It is composed of the [mythical] primordial spirit, the [materialistic] skeleton of the world, the purely natural existence of the intermediate stages and the human soul, which is supposed to redeem the spirit from nature. The development presents itself in three stages: in the original spirit, the human soul and then in nature.

The individual human being is now included, integrated into this whole chain of development, and he should not only use his life, as the Egyptian priests were clear, to recognize the world, but to bring it a step forward. For they believed that if man is aware of his immense responsibility, he must not merely accept life, but that he must use it to do divine deeds when he works, to carry on the deeds of the gods.

With him who was at a sufficiently high level, who was as far as I have just indicated, the initiation was made. This initiation means nothing other than a repetition of the old myth of Isis and Osiris. We know that Osiris is one of the oldest gods of heaven and earth. Together with Isis, he rules heaven and earth. "Osiris can also incarnate in human form, so that they once lived as real people. They are said to have ruled our earth before the Hyksos invaded. They are therefore identical to the incarnated deities. Later, however, they all withdrew into service. That which was once worldly withdrew and was worshipped in service.

Osiris is murdered by his brother Seth-Typhon, who is the god of the abyss and fire. The god Seth-Typhon was tricked into murdering Osiris [in a coffin]. He was then dismembered and thrown out into the world.

When Isis realized this, she equipped a ship and gathered the pieces back together. Where she found a piece, she placed a church on it where it could be worshipped. Then she also found the heart again and was able to revive it through her love. It is just like in the Greek legend of Dionysus, where the heart also continued its development. Once again the god Osiris is resurrected through her love, once again [Isis] sees his head, once again a ray of light shines.

Through the ray of light, of love, she gives birth to her son Horus, who is thus in a sense a virgin-born son. He [replaces] his father. Isis and Horus continue to reign. Isis can even celebrate [the resurrection of Osiris] in a new body. Something takes place over his coffin that has been performed again and again as a kind of divine service. Thus, we are told, while their son Horus rules the people on earth, although he, according to the stay, completes his orbit on earth, also sits, as it were, at the right hand of the father.

I mean that the god Horus appears to us as the one who spiritually permeates the whole world and, according to the Egyptian priests, constitutes the soul of the world. This is a view that not only lived as a myth, but was actually dramatically presented in a tremendously grand and solemn manner to those who were to be accepted into the Egyptian priesthood. Once the imagination had been trained in a figurative way and the human spirit had assumed the form in which the god Osiris could fully live out, fully merge in the dust of the world and rise and be born on the other side, once the disciple had settled into these ideas, only then could he be led beyond the myth, then he was shown what is contained in the myth, then he was told that it is nothing other than the Logos himself, who has poured himself out into the infinite sea of worlds.

As a sign that the spirit had been poured into the infinite world sea - matter was imagined as a lake - the ceremonies were performed in places where there was a lake that represented the world sea in which the world spirit had become matter.

Horus was to be nothing other than the divine-human soul, which was poured into matter and was to bring matter back to its original existence. This cosmological truth, which relates to the individual human being, was handed down to the disciple. If he has not merely absorbed it in an abstract way, but if he has really lived into it, then he was considered worthy, since he does not merely grasp the external intellectual matter, but comprehends the great holiness of cosmology as something sublime, through which he himself believed to have become better.

Once the disciple had reached this stage, only then were the real processes undertaken with him, only then was he to experience that as a human being he is not only called to recognize, to be introduced into knowledge, but that this knowledge has to gain life.

This is expressed in a profound symbol in the Osiris myth and especially in the cult. Isis and Horus were depicted as people lying on the ground with their hands outstretched sideways. Below them they placed the cross [...]. This was the symbol for the resurrection of that which had fallen to the dust. In the cross we have the same idea as we have in Platonic philosophy, in which God, the All-Spirit, is crucified. Here it becomes a symbol and at the same time the awakener. Passing through the cross, at the coffin of Osiris, he will rise again and then be ruler anew.

This process took place for centuries in the Egyptian 'temples. The young priest was actually introduced to a new world. Mere recognition would be something egotistical. But the moment man realizes that he is only advancing a little in his development, he comes to the insight that he has made a living contribution to bringing the deity back from its envelope into its original form.

Once he had arrived here, the priest was to be shown that he must not only recognize, but that he must penetrate matter itself, that he must divinize matter, that he must not merely keep the spirit to himself, but that he must proceed from and spend the spirit for the salvation of matter.

This is one of the most important acts that should be indelibly inscribed in a soul seeking initiation. Only when this act had been completed, only when the human being had understood in a physical-spiritual way that he had to represent a symbol that had to represent eternity, the content of eternity according to Egyptian representation, only when the disciple had understood that he had nothing else to represent here as a human being in this life than a symbol of these eternal world processes, then he was able and worthy to embark on the path, which was the path of Egyptian initiation.

This process actually consisted of man allowing the process of re-awakening to take place in the physical world. This is the point to which the Egyptian priests progressed, and this is also what made the deepest impression on their disciples. They put the disciple into a three-day sleep. They completely freed the organism. The spirit should live for itself [during this time] and then take possession of its body anew. And then, when it took possession of the body again, it had the body in a new, spiritualized way. For this reason, those seeking initiation were asked to lie down on a wooden cross or simply to lie on the ground and spread out their arms. He was left in this position for three days. The fact that he regarded himself as a living symbol of resurrection was symbolized by the fact that he was carried towards the rising morning sun. The rising morning sun awakened the one who had been dead for three days to a new existence.

Now we must believe the reports we have, for what I am about to say cannot be proved experimentally. Now he had passed through the gate of death. Now he was worthy to be initiated into the deepest mysteries. It was this process which made man a symbol and through which the individual, small ego was extinguished, this process which placed him in the service of the divine world order. He had become a symbol for the eternal great world fact.

Through this, man practically experienced what Jakob Böhme wanted to say with the words: "He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies." Because his spirit was able to leave the body and take possession of it again, he was able to embark on the path to deification, to becoming Osiris himself, in a completely different way. We have seen from the Egyptian Book of the Dead how the Egyptians imagined eternal life in contrast to physical-sensual existence; we have seen how this initiation was brought about.

Now it is a question of making this priest a servant of humanity, so that already in this life he was brought a little further along the path of Osiris, that he did not merely transmit truth, but prepared his spirit, transformed it, so that what for others is merely external truth was for him a sacred truth, which was connected with quite different feelings and sensations. In fact, an Egyptian priest was something quite different from another person. He was a person who led a spiritualized, an internalized life because he had gone through the process of descending to the dead. He had left his body and had been in the realms of infinity, and after three days he had taken possession of his body again, awakened by the rising sun and by the father of heaven and earth, the god Ra. This process, which signifies initiation at the lowest level, was undoubtedly what the Essaeans also experienced in a higher degree. They knew the initiation process and undoubtedly took it over from Egypt with their views and customs.

The question now is: Why, how did it come about that the deepening of this ancient form of religion occurred in such a way that the undoubtedly much more exoteric worship of the Jews was again brought closer to the great worship of the Egyptians?

First of all, there are no historical, external indications. The same basis led to the birth of a Buddha so many hundreds of years ago and the same basis later led to the birth of a Christ. We must be clear about the fact that the entire Jewish spiritual life grew out of the Egyptian spiritual life. If you follow the first chapters of Genesis and the commandments in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, you will find the same striking correspondence between Buddha and Jesus that I mentioned the other day. He will find in the first five chapters of Genesis what was common practice in the Egyptian priestly world. But we must be clear about the way in which Genesis came to the Jews and how it was propagated by them.

The one thing that must be clear to anyone who knows how to read Genesis is that Moses probably knew the Decalogue in the form in which he gave it. This results from the great correspondence we have in the Decalogue and in the commandments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. And we must be clear that in ancient Egypt there was no other way to get this across than by being initiated.

Moses was an initiate. His task was to create other initiates in the Jewish priesthood. I will now show how even in outward appearances there is a similarity between Genesis and the ancient Egyptian myths. I will indicate one external feature which will speak sufficiently for the whole. You will see in what way the myths have been transformed. But a demonstration here would lead far too far.

The Osiris myth knows Osiris on the one side and Seth-Typhon on the other. Both are a kind of brother and sister. They are hostile to each other. They are both descended from heaven. They are sons of heaven. They are presented as incarnate deities. Next to Osiris we have Seth-Typhon. You also have this pair of brothers in Genesis as Cain and Abel.

The fact that we still have traces of the Egyptian priestly religion in Genesis is proven by the passage in the fifth chapter, which deals with the human race. Adam was 130 years old, fathered a son and named him Seth. It is the same figure. In him you have a real son of Adam. In Adam we only have to recognize a kind of god-man, actually only a figure of Ra, the highest heavenly god, translated more into human form. His sons are to be equated with the sons of Ra. [In the Seth of the Cain and Abel story we would see the Seth of the Osiris myth.] This correspondence is not accidental. It is clear that we are dealing with a profound correspondence.

I have only mentioned this to show the method. You can recognize the ancient Egyptian priestly religion in Genesis. This is how Genesis came about. The Egyptian priestly religion has been lost, but was later rebuilt from what was planted by tradition. This is why it is difficult for us to recognize the original form of what Moses handed down to us. But within the Egyptian priestly religion we can. When we reconstruct them, they correspond to the old mythical forms, to the oldest forms, so that we are in fact just as surprised by them as we were by the correspondence between the life of the Buddha and the life of the Christ.

This contemplation will give us a view of the actual reason for the emergence of the Christ figure. If we go back to the sacred books of the Indians, which were completed two thousand years before the birth of Christ, we find a most curious legend that confronts us in the form of the Indian Vedic literature. It introduces us to the whole Indian world view. You will find the legend of [Adhima] and [Heva]. The two were created as human beings on Ceylon in paradise. They are presented to us in full innocence. A serpent comes to them. It says to them: Why do you want to stay within these realms? They then wander through these areas and [Adhima] says to [Heva]: Let us see what kind of land this is that we see in the distance. - The serpent also invited them to do so and said: 'When you get there, you will be like Brahma and realize the deepest secrets of the world. - It all seems great to them. But when they get there, the whole thing dissolves into a kind of mirage and they are in harsh, barren realms. But they are comforted by Brahma, who tells them, after the world had appeared to them as an insubstantial reflection: I will send Vishnu to you.

It is the same as what we find in Genesis as the prophecy of God foretelling the coming of the Christ. You can find the sagas of the ancient Vedic literature in Genesis as well. This legend is intimately connected with the Indian world view. This Adam and Eve myth is in the deepest harmony with the teaching that has been propagated up to Buddhism and has become personal in Buddha, with the world view that what we perceive with our senses is basically a mirage, an illusion, a deceptive image and that man has a completely different goal in the eternal, in Nirvana. What is beyond nirvana is a vain appearance.

God himself made man, that is the meaning of the ancient myths. Brahma creates the first man in his own image. It is Brahma who incarnates in the first man. The primal human pair then descends further. It continues to connect with matter, and from the imprinting of the spirit in the dust arises the life that we recognize as human life.

This human life is nothing, since its only purpose is to give birth to the divine again. But a sacrifice is to descend to penetrate matter. [Brahma] must descend to attain his true, great life. This is expressed in the ancient Indian myth and this is also expressed in the Indian worldview, which sees everything in the world as illusory.

So you also have a similar harmony between the ancient myth of the Vedas and the [Jewish] worldview. They are in complete agreement with each other.

To grasp this view of the nothingness, of the mere appearance of the world, was one of the insights that the initiates were to be taught in a living way. He was not to see that which was to be seen in a coarse, crude manner. But that which the [non-initiated] people do not see, they should see. Wherever we go back to the mystical sources, be it in the ancient Vedas or in Genesis, wherever there is a deeper understanding, there is also the perception that we are dealing with a mere mirage - as in the Indian. [And this can only become what it must become when the deity appears in its form and when man not only contributes to bringing knowledge into the world, but also to permeating matter with spirit, so that not only the spirit becomes alive, but also that matter becomes alive with the spirit at the same time.

The fact that God himself has become dust is the fault of the serpent, which has to take up dust again and again. The dust-born is nothing other than the deity incarnating in matter and emerging from it again. We are dealing here with something that is not just a falling away, but a sacrifice. The deity pours itself out in order to be redeemed again. This falling away is depicted to us. The serpent is nothing other than the antitype of the deity, it is the deity in a different form. This is why the snake is the symbol for the initiation process in all religions. It consists in the fact that man not only recognizes, but that by recognizing he redeems matter from being mere matter, that he gives birth to spirit out of mere matter. The snake is the symbol for this process.

Goethe also used the symbol of the snake in the "Fairy Tale", but only at the time when he was familiar with the mystical symbols. In the myth of the Fall of Man, we are dealing with a view that we can trace both in ancient Egyptian priestly beliefs and in Genesis. We are dealing with ancient beliefs from which Buddhism and Christianity then arise. And when we look at the Egyptian priestly religion, we are dealing with a deification of man - as [with] Heraclitus.

This becoming immortal, this becoming God was the task that was to be symbolized by the three-day burial and the resurrection process. We see this process revived as a historical event in the story of Christ. We see what everyone who wanted to be initiated into the Egyptian mysteries had to go through, the coming to life after taking up the symbol of the cross, [in the Christ event] emerge in all [publicity] in an individual.

This could only take place in a time and in a community that had done the groundwork, as in Essaeanism, which could understand what was happening. From this we see that a necessary process took place, a process that must always occur if one could say - as the process took place with John the Baptist - that this is a Christ, as Brahma could say with Buddha. So it had to be prepared in advance.

In Essaeanism lived the belief [of the Egyptian initiates] that man could become divine if he stepped up to the judgment steps of Osiris in order to become God himself. To have this highest task, which man sets himself, once as a historical process before him as something lasting, that is what confronts us at the bottom of Essaeanism.

Now we come to pursue this. You must bear in mind that what took place in the Egyptian priest centuries ago, what took place in countless people, took place in a single process, but in such a way that we recognize in it exactly the plan of the Egyptian idea of eternity.

Let me add this one more passage in order to have a point of reference for the next time, namely that he who sought the entrance through the gate of death in order to enter the land of Osiris had to undergo a series of trials. He is led before 42 judges of the dead. These are nothing other than the people who have become "Osiris" in the realm of the dead; people who once lived and have already become "Osiris". He appears before them, so that the one who visits the world beyond appears before his most distinguished ancestors. And the one who is called to become an "Osiris" is nothing other than a new form, a renewed form, a link in the forty-two-membered series.

This series plays a role in the Essaean community. It is nothing other than what was already present here on earth. These 42 judges of the dead appear to us right at the beginning of the Gospel in a different form. They are nothing other than the 42 ancestors of Jesus. He has become "Osiris", the forty-second in the line. He is the one who is called to judge the living and the dead. This is why the most important progenitors of the human race are also cited as the progenitors of Jesus. It is a direct translation of an Essaean tradition that can be traced directly in the Gospel of Matthew. It is nothing other than the translation of the judges of the dead in Egyptian terms.

The fact that we are confronted with the incarnation of Jesus immediately after the genealogy has been presented: "[Mattan] begets Jacob, Jacob begets Joseph" and so on, may strike us. Next time, we will examine and get to know the reason for this.

[Answer to question:]

I just wanted to point out that we are dealing with two gender registers. One has gone through the Essaean view and the other from Matthew belongs to a different set of ideas and is linked to it.

42 members = 3 times 14 = 6 times 7 - at the boundary of the sixth round and at the entrance to the seventh round. The seven parts into which the ancient Egyptians divided man. The number 7 is not sacred because it is seven, but because they recognized the secret of the world in it. So it is not a superstition. Development is a continuous overcoming of matter by the spirit. Just as the globe once bore no people, but now people live on it, these people will develop more and more and progress to greater spirituality.

My dear friends,

We have been considering the human being's relation to the Guardian of the Threshold and have led our souls step by step to see what our relation is to the Guardian of the Threshold on the path of knowledge. Today we intend to enliven the situation of standing before the Guardian in order to advance a step further in this esoteric consideration.

I will repeat what has been considered in the previous lessons regarding this situation. Man leaves the physical world in which he develops his normal consciousness. He realizes that although this sensible-physical world can be wonderful, joyful as well as painful and full of suffering, it can also be majestic—and that he has every reason to consciously be a part of it. But he also realizes that he can never know himself if he merely directs his attention and his feelings to this physical world. He must say to himself: As wonderful as it is, with all its amazing variety of colors and forms, what I myself am, what my origin and being are, cannot be found in the scope of this environment.

Nevertheless, from all sides the words resound as the most important task in the life of the human being: O man, know thyself!

And it also becomes clear that in normal life we are protected from entering unprepared into the world which is the world of his real being. And the Guardian of the Threshold is the one who protects us from consciously perceiving his environment when we are sleeping at night, for what we would then perceive, unprepared, would be such a terrible shock that we would not be able to lead a normal human waking life.

The Guardian of the Threshold also makes it clear to us that he—the Guardian of the Threshold—is the true, the real gateway to the spiritual world.

Thus the person realizes that before he enters the kingdom of knowledge, he comes to an abyss, which at first seems bottomless. The support of the physical world ends here. He cannot cross it. One can only cross this abyss by freeing oneself from the physical, when one—symbolically speaking—“grows wings”, in order to cross the abyss as a psychic-spiritual being.

But the Guardian of the Threshold calls forth to him how to beware of the abyss, especially to be aware of the beasts which rise up as spiritual figures from this abyss, that one should realize that these beasts are the outer reflections of impure willing, feeling and thinking—that they first must be overcome. And in a graphic image one sees how his willing, feeling and thinking appear in three animals—one ghastly, one horrid to look at, and so forth.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold shows us how thinking, feeling and willing can strengthen themselves after having consciously determined to overcome the beasts. To enter the spiritual world, to visualize the spiritual world, we need to develop situation-meditations, in order to feel how the cosmos speaks to us, how the hierarchies speak to us, how at first everything foretells what awaits us there in the spiritual world.

And from what has entered our souls through the mantras, we will realize ever more that the human being must become different when he crosses the abyss, when he wishes to live into what is beyond the abyss. We will realize ever more: Here on earth we associate with the beings of the three nature kingdoms and with men; beyond we associate with disembodied souls and with the spirits of the higher hierarchies. It is a different kind of relating, which requires a different state of mind. [original: Seelenverfassung = soul-constitution].

It is again the task of the Guardian of the Threshold to strongly indicate how the human being must comport himself when faced with the fact that when he crosses the abyss and experiences something of the reality of the spiritual world, he must do so with a completely different state of mind.

The person will realize that two states of mind can be a reality within him: the one on this side of the abyss with normal consciousness; and the one beyond the abyss, outside the physical and etheric bodies—the state of mind in the purely spiritual world.

When the difference between these states of mind appears, great dangers await him, dangers which appear at first to be slight deviations from the normal state of mind which are always present within the psyche, but which are pathological deformities when carried to an extreme. Of course it must be emphasized: When the journey to the higher worlds is undertaken as it is carefully described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, in many shorter works which have appeared in anthroposophical circles, and in the second part of my An Outline Of Occult Science, then aberration from the normal condition of the mind cannot occur, not even in the slightest degree. The person will cross into the spiritual world in the full consciousness of normal human understanding, first in knowledge and also through initiation. But he must know how, in two ways, he may lose the everyday capacity for understanding, which holds him securely to life, if he does not adhere to the right guidelines into the spiritual world.

Here on this side of the threshold we are standing on the earth, on the solid earthly elements. The ground is beneath our feet, it is our support. Around us is the watery element, which also participates in the formation of our own bodies. In ordinary life this watery element cannot support us, but it interpenetrates us, transforms itself into our blood. It is contained in our growth, in our forces of nutrition. We breathe the air. The airy or gaseous element is all around us. Warmth is all around us: the warmth ether, the fourth element.

In ordinary life they are separate from each other. Where there is solid earth there is not water; where there is water there is not air; where there is air there is not water. Only fire—warmth—interpenetrates all. It is the only thing which interpenetrates everything.

The moment we leave the physical body—also with the first push, my dear friends—this separation of the elements ceases. We enlarge ourselves, we expand, and at the same time we are in earth, water, fire, air. We can no longer distinguish them from each other and the individual attributes of these four elements have ceased to exist. The earth is no longer our support, for it is no longer solid. The water no longer forms us, for its formative force has ended. Once in the spiritual world it is as though we were dissolving, as ice melts in warm water, for we have become one with the water. We could not float in it, for that would mean that we were still separate from it. The blood is no longer a separate element in the blood vessels, but our blood becomes one with the all-pervading watery element of the universe. And air: it ceases being the formative breathing force in us. Warmth ceases to enkindle us to an I, and make us feel that we are a Self within the warmth. It all ends. We must meet this ending of the differentiation between earth, water, air and fire in the right frame of mind.

Imagine that we have already flown over the abyss. We have arrived on the other side, my dear sisters and brothers. The Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us, we should turn around again and face him.

Imagine it vividly, my dear sisters and brothers. The person has arrived on the other side, where the truths and knowledge of the spirit will be revealed to him. He stands on the other side. The Guardian of the Threshold invokes him to turn around in order to receive the advice he needs now that he has been touched by the state of mind which is on the other side of the threshold, where one lives within the four elements: in earth, water, air, fire.

He encounters there—pardon the trivial expression, my dear sisters and brothers—the illusion of being in love with release from the solid earth, from the formative water force, from the creative force of air, from the selfhood awakening force of warmth; he feels delight in spiritual beatitude, dedicated to it and wishes to remain in this state of spiritual beatitude. It overcomes him because the Luciferic temptation is approachng him. Depending on his karma, he can be more or less susceptible to this temptation. If he is so susceptible that he is utterly in love with the experience of dissolving into earth, water, air and fire, the luciferic forces will apprehend him and he will no longer leave this state of mind. He succumbs to the danger of continuing in this state of mind when he returns to everyday life.

The Guardian of the Threshold must call out to him: You may not do that. You may not succumb to Lucifer. You may not merely feel the delight of bliss in dissolving in earth, water, fire, air. When you return to the physical world you must again take on the state of mind of ordinary consciousness; otherwise in the future you will be an unstable person in the physical world.

That is the luciferic danger, that upon return from the spiritual world, from beyond the threshold, one becomes an unstable, confused person, no longer versed in the ways of the world, a dreamer who confuses dreaming for idealism and who is contemptuous of ordinary consciousness. That you must not do. And the Guardian of the Threshold urgently admonishes us that we must resolve to live in the world, be it the earthly, be it the spiritual, in the way which corresponds to each.

But the Guardian of the Threshold adds a second admonishment: that when we cross over with separated thinking, feeling and willing, we must pay attention to what extent earthly inclinations are still present in this thinking, feeling and willing.

The person may be inclined to fixate on his experiences on this side of the threshold because of having the earth's support, and cross the threshold in a materialistic state of mind, cross with the congealed formative forces of water. If so, he can be plagued by earthly arrogance and say to himself: In life on earth I breathed, inhaled that breath from which the Father-God once created the human soul, human life. I can also do that if only I am freed from earthly limitations.

But if the person wants to bring over into the spiritual world what he has of creative divine force through his breath, he will succumb to the Ahrimanic temptation. Then he will not be able to return, because before he does so he will become faint. He will be more or less unconscious. His consciousness will be paralyzed. Because his consciousness has been paralyzed, he more or less becomes an instrument of the Ahrimanic powers in the spiritual world.

Although today humanity is crudely hardened by materialism, since the beginning of the Michael age it is almost being dragged over into the spiritual world by spiritual life itself. And what it means when the ahrimanic powers seize humanity when its consciousness is paralyzed, though otherwise in a fully waking state, has been amply demonstrated, my dear friends, by the outbreak of the great [first] World War.

When this World War broke out, I said to many people: The history of this war can not be written from the physical plane alone. Documents alone do not speak the truth, because of the thirty or forty men in Europe who directly participated in the outbreak of the war, many of them had dimmed consciousness at the decisive moments. They became instruments for the ahrimanic powers on this side. So that much of what happened during this war was instigated by the ahrimanic powers. The war can only be written about in an occult way.

What is seen—in many respects modified on this side of the threshold—in many leading personalities at the outbreak of this World War, can be observed in those who preserved the habits of the mind and carried them over beyond the threshold and whose consciousness became paralyzed, muted, and they became instruments of the ahrimanic powers.

It must be perfectly clear that the human being may not carry over to this side the state of mind applicable to beyond the threshold, and that he may not carry over to the other side the state of mind applicable to this side. Rather must he develop a strong inner human consciousness for each domain—for this side and for beyond the threshold.

That applies to all four elements in the Guardian of the Threshold's admonition. We shall now work on these admonitions in meditation.

So let us imagine, my dear sisters and brothers, that you are standing on the other side of the threshold. The Guardian beckons. You look at his face. At first he calls out to you, admonishing:

Where is the earth's solidity which supported you?

We no longer have it. But the inner heart is motivated to give an answer. But this heart can be innerly motivated in a threefold way to an answer from the cosmos.

It can be motivated from the Christ and his power. Then it answers:

I abandon its foundation—the earth's solidity, that is—as long as the spirit supports me.

That is the correct attitude, that I abandon the earth's support as long as the spirit carries me in the spirit-domain, as long as I am out of the body. But the heart can also be motivated by Lucifer. Then it answers:

I feel rapture, for from now on I do not need its support.

That is how one speaks with arrogance, with pride, as though he also does not need the support when he returns to the physical world.

Or the heart can be motivated by Ahriman. Then it answers:

I will hammer it down even harder—the support—with the spirit's power, and bring it over with me.

No one should recoil from meditatively calling to mind again and again all three answers in order to freely choose the first one. For he must feel: the inner self tends to waver to Lucifer, and to Ahriman. One must keep this in mind during meditation.

For the earth element the meditation must therefore contain:

[The first part of the mantra is written on the blackboard. (Writing is always shown in italics).]

1) The Guardian—speaks—Where is the earth's solidity, which supported you?

The Human heart must answer. If it is motivated by Christ, it answers:

Christ: I leave its foundation as long as the spirit supports me.

If the soul is motivated by Lucifer, it answers:

Lucifer: I feel rapture, for from now on I do not need its support.

Now the heart omits “as long as” if it wants to replace the temporal with the eternal, which transforms the sentence. If the heart is motivated by Ahriman, it answers:

Ahriman: I will hammer it down even harder—the support—with the spirit's power.

In order that the soul fully dedicate itself to what is coming, we have the Guardian of the Threshold's second admonition, which is related to water's formative force. This formative force of water forms the solid organs in us from the liquid elements. All that we consume for nourishment must first become liquid, from which the organs are formed. All our sharply contoured organs are formed out of the liquid element. This formative force terminates once we tread the realm beyond the threshold. The Guardian warns us that this is the case. He calls to us once we stand on the other side of the Threshold facing his stern countenance:

[The second part of the mantra is written on the blackboard.]

Guardian: Where is the water's formative force which pervaded you?

The person answers if he is motivated in his heart by Christ:

My life extinguishes it, as long as the spirit forms me.

Christ: My life extinguishes it (“it” is the formative force), as long as the spirit forms me.

Again, modestly, “as long as” is used.

Now, when one is over there, out of the body, the spirit is beginning to form.

If the soul is motivated by Lucifer, it leaves out “as long as” and forms the sentence in a prideful, arrogant way:

Lucifer: My life melts it away—what is extinguished can be re-kindled; what melts remains melted—so I am released from it.

If the soul is motivated by Ahriman, it answers:

Ahriman: My life solidifies it, so I transfer it to the spirit-realm.

Observe, my dear sisters and brothers, how everything in mantric verses is innerly certain and meaningfully formed. Here [in the first verse] is: “I leave”, “I feel”, “I will”. The “I” speaks in the answer. In the second verse the I no longer speaks egocentrically, but it says: “My life”: “my life dissolves”, “my life melts”, “my life solidifies”. It is all appropriate to reality if correctly spoken in the spirit. The carelessness in formulating sentences, which is common in the physical realm, may not be brought over into the spirit-realm. In the spirit-realm all that is spoken must be precise and exact.

You must understand, my dear friends, the reality that this Esoteric School is not established by human will, but by the spiritual world, as I said at the beginning. Everything given here in the Esoteric School of the Goetheanum is only spoken through my lips, but is dictated by the spiritual world. It must be that way in every legitimately existing esoteric school—also in the present and in the immediate future, as it was in the ancient holy Mysteries. And this Esoteric School is the true Michael- School, the institution of those spiritual beings who possess the inspiration of Michael's cosmic will.

In respect to air, the Guardian of the Threshold speaks again, warningly: Where is the air's stimulating force which awakened you?—awakened you to existence.

Just as Jehovah formed a feeling being from a merely living being by means of living breath and the stimulating power of air, so can a human being become a feeling being through the stimulation exercised on his senses by the outer world. What, though, are the senses?

My dear sisters and brothers, the senses are nothing other than differentiated breathing organs. Eye, ear—all are refined breathing organs. Breathing expands to all the senses. As it lives in the lung, it lives in the eye. Except that in the lungs it combines with carbon, and in the ears with highly rarefied silica. Carbon dioxide is formed in the organism. [He draws on the blackboard: “Kohlensäure” = carbon dioxide (red)] In the senses, very fine silicic acid is formed [“Kieselsäure” = silicic acid, yellow.]

Man lives downward by converting oxygen to carbon dioxide. He lives upward into the zone of his sense-nervous system by combining oxygen with silica, forming very fine silicic acid. [green]. So we live in a way that when breath turns to blood, it generates carbon dioxide; when breath passes around the senses it generates silicic acid—downward and outward through breath: carbon dioxide; toward the senses and back from the senses to the breathing process in very fine doses of silicic acid.

The Guardian of the Threshold calls to us about all that is in the air:

Where is the air's stimulating force, which awakened you?

He who is motivated in his heart by Christ answers:

My soul breathes the air of heaven—no longer the air of earth, the air of heaven—as long as the spirit surrounds me.

The heart motivated by Lucifer answers:

My soul regards it not in the spirit's rapture.

The heart motivated by Ahriman answers:

My soul absorbs it, that I may learn divine creation.

As Jehovah once created with air, the ahrimanically-minded absorbs the air in order to carry it over to the spiritual world.

The Guardian speaks to the human being:

[The third part of the mantra is written on the blackboard:]

Guardian: Where is the air's stimulating force, which awakened you?

The heart motivated by Christ speaks:

Christ: My soul breathes the air of heaven, as long as the spirit surrounds me.

The heart motivated by Lucifer speaks:

Lucifer: My soul regards it not in the spirit's rapture.

The heart motivated by Ahriman speaks:

Ahriman: My soul absorbs it, that I may learn divine creation.

About fire, the warmth element, the Guardian now speaks the last of his element-words, warning the human not to lose himself in the warmth element as it is experienced in physical earthly existence, but also not to carry it over to the spiritual world.

Beforehand, my dear sisters and brothers, I want to draw your attention to the ascending direction:

“I” the human being says at first.

“My life” the human being says.

“My soul” says the human being.

Now the Guardian speaks warningly about the fire element:

[The fourth part of the mantra is written on the blackboard:]

Guardian: Where is fire's cleansing—or purification—which ignited your I?

Our I lives in what pervades us as warmth, as fire. In these esoteric classes, my dear sisters and brothers, I have already indicated once that his solid element remains in man's unconscious, the liquid element also, although one does feels pleasure at being in the liquid element; when sated or hungry, he also feels the liquid element's attributes. Man already feels the air element in his soul: he finds breathing difficult when the air's composition is not right and with breathing difficulty, angst. Warmth is something in which the human being feels completely immersed. He accompanies his cold and warm states with his whole I. Fire ignites the I.

The heart motivated by Christ answers:

Christ: My I blazes in God's fire, as long as the spirit ignites me.

Man does not need earthly-material warmth when the spirit enflames or ignites: the I blazes in divine fire, not in earthly warmth, not in earthly fire.

But the heart motivated by Lucifer answers:

My I has the force of flame through the spirit's solar power.

In immense pride the I—ensnared by Lucifer—wants to usurp for itself the fire element that comes from the sun, instead of only for the time the spirit sets it ablaze—keep it forever, never give it away.

Lucifer: My I has the force of flame through the spirit's solar power.

The heart motivated by Ahriman answers as though it wants to keep for itself the fire it had captured on earth and carry it over to the spiritual world—to master the spiritual world with the I-fire of the physical world.

Ahriman: My I has its own fire, which ignites through self-enfoldment.

The I wills not to blaze in the spirit, but to develop its own fire.

There is again an ascending direction in the formulation:

The person first says “I”:

I leave

I feel

I will

He then becomes more objective in that what is in him refers to “My”:

My life extinguishes

My life melts

My life solidifies.

He goes more within, what is within makes him objective:

My soul breathes

My soul cares not

My soul absorbs it.

Now he delves deeper into himself. And—note the difference, my dear sisters and brothers—before only “I” was said. Now the “I” becomes objective: “My I”, as though it were another, as if one were to speak of the other as a possession. One is more outside of the physical body—which disposes one to speak so egoistically of the “I”—and speaks:

My I

as of an object. That is the correct speech here.

One gets to know this way of speaking in all its intensity, my dear sisters and brothers, when one speaks with souls who have passed through the gates of death and have been a while in the spiritual world. They never say “I”, but they say “my I”. I have not yet heard a dead person say “I” after death, at most only shortly after death. But after a certain time after death they always say “my I”, for they see the I with the eyes of the gods. They become completely objective. It is characteristic. Therefore, an enunciation from a dead person who has been dead a long time can never be true if he says “I” and not “my I”. So the soul speaks this “my I” here in the fourth place when standing before the Guardian of the Threshold.

That, my dear friends, is the wonderful conversation at the threshold between the Guardian of the Threshold and the human being. It is distinctive. And this distinctiveness is really present when one stands before the Guardian of the Threshold in this situation. When one practices the meditation of this dialog in the right way, as has been described here, one must be able to intuitively hear it. Therefore, we meditate these words correctly, which have come to you here today as mantric words, my dear sisters and brothers, when in a sense we hear ourselves speaking the words after the Guardian has been heard in our souls. Thus we meditate first hearing the Guardian of the Threshold four times as I, II, III and IV, as earth, water, air and fire; then as when we let our own soul answer, but in such a way that first we hear the answer innerly ensouled by Christ, the second answer as the voice of the tempter, the third answer as the voice of the inflated materialistic Ahriman-spirit, which approaches the human being with the desire to carry the mineralized human being into the spiritual world.

Therefore, to end this esoteric lesson today, the way this is to be meditated resounds in us:

Where is the earth's solidity, which supported you?

I leave its foundation, as long as the spirit supports me.

I feel rapture, for from now on I do not need its support.

I will hammer it down even harder with the spirit's power.

Where is the water's formative force which pervaded you?

My life extinguishes it, as long as the spirit forms me.

My life melts it away, so I am released from it.

My life solidifies it, so I transfer it to the spirit-realm.

Where is the air's stimulating force, which awakened you?

My soul breathes the air of heaven, as long as the spirit surrounds me.

My soul regards it not in the spirit's rapture.

My soul absorbs it, that I may learn divine creation.

Where is fire's cleansing, which ignited your I?

My I blazes in God's fire, as long as the spirit ignites me.

My I has the force of flame through the spirit's solar power.

My I has its own fire, which ignites through self-enfolding.

One may say that the original idea of Festivals was to make people lift their eyes, turning them from dependence on earthly things to dependence on super-earthly ones. And it is consideration of the Easter Festival that can especially bring about such thoughts. In the course of the last four or five hundred years the civilization of the world has gone through a spiritual evolution which has inclined humanity to turn its attention more and more away from its connection with cosmic forces and cosmic powers. Human attention has been restricted increasingly to the study of those conditions prevailing between man and earthly forces and powers. It is also the case that with those means of knowledge which are considered legitimate to-day it is impossible to keep other connections in view. If anyone in pre-Christian times, or even in the first Christian centuries, who was closely associated with the Mysteries could have experienced our present-day knowledge, he would not in the least have understood—if he approached things with the thoughts and feelings of those days—how it was possible for people to live without a consciousness of their super-earthly, their cosmic connections.

I might here give an outline of many things which you find more fully described in different cycles of lectures; but as these present lectures are intended to give a more intimate understanding of the thought of Easter, I naturally cannot bring forward every particular but can only hint at how things are.

If we were to transfer ourselves in thought into the various ancient religious systems of the past, we might choose as an example that one most familiar to modern people, the ancient Hebrew-Jewish system; we would find, when these ancient systems are mono-theistic, the worship of the one Godhead. This is that Godhead of whom, in accordance with Christian acceptance, we call the Father.

Now, in all those religions in which the thought of this Father-God lived, there has existed more or less, but especially among the priests of the Mysteries, a connection between this God and the cosmic moon-forces, a connection with everything streaming down to earth as force from the moon.

Of this ancient consciousness of the connection between man and the moon forces, hardly anything has remained other than the stimulus given to the poetic fancy of the soul by the moon, and the number of months in the gestation period of man, in accordance with the ten lunar months as reckoned in medicine. But in the older ideas concerning such things a clear consciousness did exist, that when man came down from the spiritual world, where in pre-earthly times he had lived as a psycho-spiritual being, into physical life, he was filled with and strengthened by impulses that streamed to him from the moon. When a man considers what it is that has formed him as living being, what lives in him as the forces of nutrition and ˂ breathing, and as forces of growth generally, he must not look to the forces of the earth but to forces outside the earth.

It is easy for him to see how, when looking to earthly forces, these are connected with him. But if our body were not held together by forces outside the earth, if it did not receive its form from forces beyond the earth, what could the mere earthly forces do towards its preservation and cohesion (Zusammengehalt)?

The moment the non-earthly forces—those coming from beyond the earth—leave it, the body is exposed to the forces of the earth: it then perishes, disintegrates, and becomes a corpse. The forces of the earth can only make corpses of men, they cannot construct their human form. Those forces living in man, by which he is raised above what is earthly, so that between birth and death he can live on earth as a coherent organic form and not succumb to the forces of earth that lay hold of him at death and destroy him, against which he wages a life-long struggle here—for they must be struggled against—these forces he owes to the influences of the moon-world.

If on the one hand we can state theoretically that the moon contains the forces by which the human body is formed, we must realize on the other hand that ancient religions reverenced these as the divine Father-forces which were the means of bringing man into physical existence at birth. The ancient Hebrew Initiate had a distinct consciousness of the fact that the forces leading man to earthly existence streamed to him from the moon, maintained him on earth, and were torn from him as physical man when he passed through the gates of death.

A kindly feeling of love for these Father-forces, a looking up to them in the practice of their cult by means of prayers, etc., was the content of certain ancient monotheistic religions. These ancient mono-theistic religions were more consistent than people think. Such matters are very incorrectly represented in history, because history can only go by external documents, not by what is observed with the help of spiritual vision.

Those religions which looked up to the moon, and to that which existed in the moon as spiritual Beings, belonged to a later period. Compared with the opinions held by them concerning the moon, those held by earlier religions concerning the Sun-forces, and even the Saturn forces, of which I shall have something to say later, were very clearly defined, but they concerned themselves principally with the Sun-forces.

With these early religions we enter an historical field of study for which external documents no longer exist, lying as they do many thousands of years earlier than the foundation of Christianity. In order to provide this age with a name I have called it in my book, “An Outline of Occult Science,” the “Old Indian,” which was followed by the “Old Persian,” age. In these civilizations human development was very different from what it became later, and religious beliefs depended upon this development. During the last two thousand years and more we have developed so that we are not aware that a split has occurred in our earthly evolution. This has hardly been noticed. What takes place in the greater part of present-day humanity, inwardly, at about their thirtieth year, has also hardly been noticed. It has remained to a great extent in the subconscious; it has not entered into man's consciousness. Conditions were very different in a humanity that lived eight or nine thousand years before the foundation of Christianity. The development of individuals was then more continuous up to about the age of thirty. With the thirtieth year a great change took place. What I have now to say about this change has naturally to be spoken of somewhat crudely, but these simple descriptions are in accordance with the facts that concern us at the moment.

In those remote times the following might happen: A man might have contracted a friendship with someone (before his thirtieth year who was considerably younger than himself—perhaps three or four years younger. This man shortly afterwards experienced the change that took place about the age of thirty. It might happen, these two men not having seen each other for a long time, that the one who had experienced the change at his thirtieth year was spoken to by the other without his knowing who he was. His memory had been so completely changed. I have had to put this in the language of to-day, hence it may strike you as being somewhat crude. In olden times the control of certain arrangements (Einrichtungen) stood in close connection with the Mystery schools; and by these, in the small societies then existing, a register of the lives of the young people was kept, because they themselves forgot, owing to the great alteration (Umschwung) that had taken place in them, and had to be taught again what they had experienced in life before their thirtieth year. These men then knew: I have become a quite different being in my thirtieth year, I must go to “the registry” (a modern expression, of course) in order to learn what I had previously experienced. This is actually what happened! Through instructions they received, at the same time they were told: Before your thirtieth year the Moon-forces worked in you exclusively; after attaining this age the Sun-forces entered into the development of your earthly life. The Sun-forces work on man with an entirely different purport from the Moon-forces. What does present-day humanity know of the Sun-forces? Only the outer physical part. Man knows that they warm him, that they cause him to perspire; he knows besides this that people practise sun-bathing, that there is something therapeutic connected with the forces of the sun, but all this he learns in a merely external way. He has no idea what the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun do to him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the heathen Cæsars, had experienced something of these forces in the last lingering note of the Mysteries, and just when he desired to make proof of these experiences he was murdered on his expedition into Persia; so powerful in the early Christian centuries were the forces which desired all knowledge of such things to be lost.

It is therefore not to be wondered at that even to-day no knowledge concerning them can be acquired. While the Moon-forces are those which determine what man is, which permeate him with an inward necessity (Notwendigkeit), as to his actions, and determine his instincts, his temperament, his emotions and the nature of his physical-etheric body generally, the spiritual Sun-forces free him from this compulsion. They caused this necessity or compulsion to dissolve, as it were, and man became really a free being through the Sun-forces. In that ancient time to which I have referred, the difference between these two forces in human evolution was strictly defined. In his thirtieth year a man then became a Sun-man, a free man; up to his thirtieth year he was a Moon-man, and was not free. To-day these two conditions slide one into the other. To-day the Sun-forces work along with the Moon-forces even in childhood, and the Moon-forces continue to work on into later years; so that to-day these two things, compulsion or necessity and freedom, work one into the other. This was not always the case. In the early pre-historic times of which we are speaking the action of the sun and that of the moon were absolutely distinct in the course of a man's life. This is why it was said at that time concerning the greater part of humanity: a man was born not once but twice. For it was held to be abnormal, something pathological, if a man did not experience this great change of life in his thirtieth year. It came about in the course of human evolution that the second of these births—they were spoken of as the Moon-birth and the Sun-birth—that the Sun-birth was no longer so noticeable in man, and certain ceremonies were carried out, certain exercises and actions were performed on those who desired initiation into the Mysteries. Such persons then experienced, in the Mysteries, what could be no longer experienced generally by men, and they became the “twice-born.”

When this expression “twice-born” is found in Oriental literature to-day it is misleading. Any Oriental scholar, any Sanskrit expert, might be asked—I think Professor Beckh is present here and you can ask him—if it is not the case that, as a matter of fact, no Oriental science can clearly and distinctly put before you, in a few words, what the content of the expression “twice-born” really is. Formal explanations there certainly are in plenty, but what it means in substance no one knows. Only those who are aware that it reaches back to a reality know the reality I have just explained to you. In such things spiritual observation alone can speak. And when once it has spoken, I would like to ask all those who hold with what can be learned from documents, with everything external science can discover—I would like to ask, taking for granted that science has gone to work in an unprejudiced manner, if this science does not corroborate in every particular the investigations made by spiritual science? Your attention must, however, be directed to certain things which take precedence of all documentary science; for the understanding of life, of man, cannot be gained by a science of documents.

Let us turn our gaze back to a very far-off age when people spoke of the Moon-birth of man as creation through the Father. With regard to the Sun-birth, people were quite clear that in the spiritual Sunlight the power of Christ, the Son, was active, and that this was the power that freed people. Consider for a moment what this force, this Sun-force, does. It is the force that enables us as men on earth to make something out of ourselves. We would have been strictly confined within an unchangeable, natural—not fateful—necessity, if the liberating Sun-forces had not by their influence dissolved this necessity.

This fact was known to those who held the more ancient opinions concerning the world. They looked up to the sun and said: This eye of the world, from which the power of Christ streams forth, is the cause of my not having to remain always under that brazen necessity with which I was born from out of the forces of the moon, as a man whose whole life had to evolve under compulsion. It is the Christ-force looking down on me through that cosmic Sun-eye that enables me through my inner freedom to make something of myself during my life on earth, something I could not have been, through the Moon-forces which placed me here.

This consciousness that he could transform himself, could make something out of himself, is what men saw in the forces of the Sun.

I would like to add here, but only by way of parenthesis, that Saturn was also looked up to as a third source of birth. In the Saturn forces these men saw all that preserved them when they passed through the gate of death: the third earthly metamorphosis. Birth on earth, meaning birth through the Moon; the second birth, meaning birth through the Sun; the third birth, meaning Saturn birth or earthly death. Man was here upheld by the mighty forces of Saturn, forces then holding sway at the extreme limit of the planetary system of the earth. These forces preserved him, bore him out into the spiritual world, and provided a connecting link for his being, when the third metamorphosis took place. This was absolutely the mental outlook of the men of those ancient times.

But human evolution goes on. A time arrived when it was no longer known in the Mysteries how the Sun-forces affected mankind. Knowledge concerning these forces was preserved longest among the medical workers in the Mysteries. For the forces which in his ordinary development give man freedom, and the possibility of making something out of himself—the Sun- or Christ-forces—live also under various conditions in certain plants and in other earthly beings and things, and reveal in these earthly things properties of healing.

Generally speaking, all sense of their connection with the sun was lost to humanity; and while for a considerable time the consciousness still remained that man is dependent on the Moon-forces, or Father-forces, all consciousness of his dependence—or rather his liberation by means of the Sun-forces—had long been lost. What to-day we call Nature-forces, almost the only ones we do speak of when discussing our conceptions of the world, are but Moon-forces that have become entirely abstract. But the Sun-forces were still known to One, even Jesus of Nazareth, the bearer of the Christ, who lived His life in accordance with them. He knew them because he was ordained to receive these forces into his own body as they streamed to earth from the sun—forces which men had only been able to come in touch with in the Ancient Mysteries when they looked up to the sun. This I explained in the last lecture. What was of greatest importance was this, that in the thirtieth year of His life a change took place in the body of Jesus of Nazareth similar to that change which in primeval times took place in everyone, only it was but the reflection (Schein), as it were, of the Spiritual sun that shone into these men, while now the original Lord of the Sun, the Christ himself, came down into human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This fact lies behind the Mystery of Golgotha as the supremest event (Urergebnis) affecting all earthly life.

You will realise the full connection of these things when we now consider how the festival of Easter, which in those days was an entirely human concern, was actually carried out in the Ancient Mysteries—the Festival of Easter was, in fact, an initiation. The ceremony progressed through three stages. The first requirement, before the neophyte could attain true knowledge, before he could be initiated, was that through all that came to him from the side of the Mysteries he should be made so humble that people to-day can hardly form an idea of this deep, inner humility. People imagine to-day that they have the appearance, as regards knowledge, of being exceedingly modest, while for those who can see into the matter they are really possessed by pride. When about to enter upon initiation a man has, in the first place, to feel convinced that he cannot consider himself to be a man at all, but says rather: I have first to become a man!

It cannot be said of people to-day that at any point in their lives they consider themselves not to be men. But this was the first demand made on them, that they should hold themselves not to be men and should address themselves as follows: I certainly was a man before I came down into an earthly body; in pre-earthly existence I was a man of soul and spirit. The Soul-Spirit then entered a physical body, which it had received from its parents.

It, then, not clothed itself with the physical body—that would be to express it incorrectly—but it permeated itself with this physical body (durchdrungen mit diesem physischen Leibe). Men have really no idea of the manner and means by which the Soul-Spirit, in the course of long ages (das Geistig-Seelische durchsetzt das Physische), permeates the physical, permeates the nerves and sense-system, permeates the rhythmic-system, the digestive-system, and the limbs of man. They have no idea of this. They know very well that they are able to perceive the physical world by means of their senses. But what is a man capable of when he has reached the point where he has permeated his physical body so profoundly with his soul and spirit nature that he considers his development to be complete, when he is a fully evolved, fully developed man. ... What is he then capable of? At present he can certainly see external objects, he can hear external sounds, perceive through his skin things warm or cold, smooth or rough: he can perceive things outwardly; but he cannot perceive inwardly. He cannot look into himself with his eyes; he can at most remove the skin from a dead body and think that he sees into it, but he does not do so really. It is childish to think, for instance, here before me is a house, it has windows but I cannot see through them, so I will take all kinds of instruments, and, if I am strong enough, smash the house down, but then I will have only a heap of broken bricks before me, and these ruins are all I see. This is what people do to-day. They flay, they dissect people, in order to learn about them; but by such means they learn nothing. It is not the man at all they learn to know by such methods. If it is desired really to know something of man, you must be able to turn your eyes inwards and view him exactly as we view him to-day when we direct our eyes to him outwardly, and in the same way you must hear inwardly with your ears. All these activities taken together—those of the eyes, the ears, the whole skin as organ of touch, the organs of smell, etc., all these were called in the Mysteries the door to man (das Tor zum Menschen).

Initiation depended principally upon a person becoming aware that he knew nothing at all of human nature (vom Menschen); therefore, as he had no self-consciousness of human nature, he could not be a man. He had first to learn to look inward through his senses as ordinarily he looked outward. This was the first stage or degree of initiation in the ancient Mysteries. As soon as the pupil learnt to look thus inwards, in that same moment he became conscious of his pre-earthly existence. At that moment he knew: I am now “in my soul and spirit.”

The ordinary man looks outwards; instead of this the pupil of the Mysteries learnt to look inwards. In this inward gazing he became aware of what had entered into him in his pre-earthly existence, what had passed into him through his eyes, his ears, his skin, and so on. He was aware of these things, and through this was also aware of his pre-earthly existence. At this stage he was told that he would learn to know what we call natural science.

When we study natural science to-day, how do we do it? We are led to observe the things of Nature, to describe them, and so on. But this is much the same as if I were to meet a man again whom I had known long ago, and someone were to insist: You have to forget everything you did in company with this man; on seeing him again you are not to recall the intercourse you had with him. It is unbelievable that responsible people would do such a thing as this! I can indeed believe that occasionally this might be agreeable.... but under such conditions life could not go on. But this is imposed on the man to-day simply through the laws of civilization. For he knew the kingdoms of Nature; he knew them from their spiritual side before he came down to earth. To-day he is told to forget all that he knew of the mineral, plant, and animal world before he came down to earth, whereas the ancient Initiates taught him about them in what was called the first stage of the Mysteries. The Initiate said: Look at this piece of quartz. ... And then he did everything he could that might enable the pupil to recall what he had known about quartz before he came down to earth, what he had known, say, of the lily, the rose, etc. What was thus imparted as knowledge of Nature was a remembrance, a re-cognition (wieder erkennen). And anyone who had learnt the teaching regarding Nature as a remembrance of what he had seen before he descended into earthly life was received into the second degree.

In the second degree the pupil learnt Music, which at that time was Architecture, Geometry, Surveying, etc. For in what did this second degree of initiation consist? It comprised all that a man perceived when he not only looked inwards into himself with his eyes, or listened inwardly with his ears, but when he actually entered into himself (in sich hineinsteigt). The neophyte seeking initiation then said to himself: Thou enterest now into the grotto of the human temple (Tempelgrotte). He now learnt to know this grotto of the human temple. This was that physical part of him which was permeated by the soul and spiritual forces which were man before he came down into earthly life. Into this he now entered. He was told that this hidden place had three chambers. The first was the chamber of Thought; there he learnt all that was connected with this. ... Verily seen from outside the head is small.... when a man enters and sees it from within it is as vast as the whole universe. Here he learnt to know his spiritual nature. This was the first chamber. The second chamber was that in which he learnt to know Feeling. The third chamber was where he learnt to know Will.

He then learnt how a man is organised according to his instruments of thought, feeling, and will; he learnt what was of value on earth. Knowledge of Nature was not only of value on earth; man had already acquired knowledge of Nature before he came down to earth. But here we must remember that houses are not built above in the spiritual world as they are here with the help of earthly architecture. Over there, there is music, but it is spiritual Melos. Earthly music is something projected into earthly air; it is a projection of heavenly music, but as experienced by men it is earthly. It is the same when we measure things here on earth. We measure earthly space; the art of measuring, geometry, or surveying is an earthly science. It was important that those seeking initiation in the second degree should be made to realize that all talk of knowledge gained by mere earthly means, unless connected with geometry, architecture, or the art of surveying, is illusory; that true natural science is a recollection of pre-earthly knowledge; and that geometry, architecture, music, and the science of measuring are sciences that have to be learnt here on earth.

Thus in the second degree of initiation a man descended into his own self and learnt to know the men of the three chambers in respect of the single earthly incarnation, as he would otherwise learn to know them from outside, without descending into their inner being.

In the third degree the pupil learnt to know men, not simply by sinking down into himself (wenn er nun nicht bloss in sich untertaucht), by getting to know himself as spiritual being, but when this spiritual part of him learnt further to know the body. Therefore in all the Ancient Mysteries this degree was known as the gate of death. Here he learnt how it is with a man when he lays aside his earthly body; only there is a difference between actual death and that experienced during initiation. Why this must be I will explain in the next lecture; at present I only mentioned the fact.

When man really dies he lays aside his physical body. He is no longer bound to it, nor does he follow any longer the forces of the earth, having been freed from them. But while still bound to his physical body, as was the case in olden times at initiation, he had to attain liberation from the body (which at death comes of itself), and had to maintain it for a certain time through his own inner power. The attainment of those strong powers by which a man is able to maintain his soul in freedom, apart from the body, was necessary to initiation. It is these that give him a higher knowledge concerning the things he can never perceive through his senses, never think through his understanding. They place him as man in the spiritual world as the physical body places him as man in the physical world. He had then advanced so far as to be able to realize what he was as man of soul and spirit, to know that he had been initiated while still in earthly life. From this time onwards the earth for the Initiate was as a star existing outside humanity (Von da ab war die Erde ein ausser dem Menschen befindlicher Stern für den Initiierten), and in the ancient Mysteries he had before all else to learn to live with the sun instead of with the earth. He knew what he had received from the sun, and how the Sun-forces worked in him.

This third degree that I have just described was followed by a fourth. It affected the man seeking initiation in the following way: When on earth a person eats vegetables or game, when he drinks various things, he knows that such things were outside him and that now they are within him. He breathes the air; at first it is outside, then within him, then outside again. He is so closely bound up with the forces of the earth that he bears within him earthly substances and forces which otherwise were outside him. It was clearly explained to those seeking initiation in ancient times: Before initiation thou art a bearer of Earth, of vegetables, game, pork, etc. But when once initiated in the third degree, and when all those things have been imparted to thee that can be imparted to one who is free of the body, thou art no longer a bearer (träger) of cabbage, pork, or veal, but thou then dost become a bearer of those things which the Sun-forces give to thee.

That which the Sun-forces give spiritually was called, in all the Mysteries, Christos. Therefore, he who had surmounted the first three degrees of initiation—though on earth he might feel himself to be a bearer of cabbages—knew that he was a bearer of the Sun-forces and that he was called a Christophoros. In nearly all the Ancient Mysteries this was the name for those who had entered the fourth degree.

In the third degree certain things had to be grasped; the Neophyte had principally to realize that, in moments of knowledge, desire according to the physical body must cease, that as regards his physical body he belonged to the earth, but that really the earth has only to do with the destruction of his physical body, not with its construction. If the man of those former ages had been addressed in the words of to-day, he would have had things explained somewhat as follows (the sense would certainly have been made clear to him, but to you I can only say these things in the language of to-day, not in that of those former times): If you would know the teaching concerning substances, how these unite and separate, you must look up to the spiritual forces that from out the cosmos permeate all substance. This you cannot do unless initiated. For this you must have been initiated in the fourth degree. You must be able to perceive with the forces appertaining to Sun-existence; you can then study chemistry.

Supposing that someone to-day, wishing to take a degree in chemistry or in pharmacy, had first to submit to the necessity of feeling as a cabbage feels with regard to the forces of the sun, how absurd this would seem! But this was a fact. It was made absolutely clear that with such forces as people have in life, and which are generally employed during life, only geometry, surveying, music, and architecture can be studied ... not chemistry. If people speak of studying chemistry to-day, they speak in an entirely external way. All talk of chemistry has been entirely external ever since the time when the ancient initiation-wisdom was lost. This is a fact. It is enough to drive to desperation those who really wish “to know,” when they have to learn modern official chemistry, for it is founded only on assertion, not on any inward understanding of the matter. If men were only unprejudiced they would acknowledge that something else is needed, that people must be able to understand or realize differently if they wish to study chemistry. It is the modern timidity regarding knowledge or realization (erkennen) that has been implanted in people that holds them back from such an impulse.

After this a man was ripe. When sufficiently ripe to become Astronomos, which was a still higher grade (for to learn something of the stars externally, through calculations and the like, was considered absolutely unreal), he knew that in the stars spiritual beings dwelt who can only be known when physical perception has been overcome, when geometry has also been overcome, when man actually lives in the universe (Weltenall) and learns the spiritual nature of the stars—he was then a “Risen One.” He could then see how the Moon-forces and the Sun-forces actually work within earthly humanity.

I must therefore endeavour to-day to help you to understand from two sides how Easter was experienced inwardly in the ancient Mysteries—how this Festival did not take place at any fixed season of the year but when a man attained a certain degree of development. Easter was then experienced by him as a resurrection of his soul and spirit-nature out of the physical body, as a rising into the spiritual universe (Weltenall). It was thus that those who still knew something of the wisdom of the Mysteries at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha regarded this Mystery. They said: What would have happened to mankind if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place? In olden times it was possible for man to be initiated into the secrets of the cosmos, for in quite ancient times he experienced a second birth naturally, as one might say, when he was about thirty years old. At that time at least there were still memories of this, and there was a science of the Mysteries which preserved in its traditions what an earlier age had experienced. All this had faded and been forgotten by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Mankind would have become entirely decadent, if the Power to which Initiates of the Mysteries rose when they became Christophoroi had not entered into One Jesus of Nazareth—so that it has remained on the earth ever since—and men, through Jesus Christ, have been able to unite themselves with it.

Thus what rises before our eyes to-day in the Festival of Easter had already formed a part of the history of the Mysteries. Men will only know the real meaning of Easter when they revive this ancient portion of the history of the Mysteries. They will only approach an understanding of the real meaning of Easter when they endeavour in some way at least to understand what men seeking initiation experienced in olden times. Such an Initiate said to himself: Through initiation I have become aware of how sun and moon work in me in their reciprocal relations to each other; I now know that I have been formed as physical man in a certain way; that I have eyes of a certain kind, a nose, a whole bodily form constructed within and without as it is; and the fact that this form is able to grow and continue to grow to-day through the nourishment it receives depends on the Moon-forces. All I require comes from them. That I am inwardly free, that I can be active as a free being within my bodily nature, that I can transform myself, take myself in hand, depends upon the Sun-forces, upon the Christ-forces. These I must stimulate, if I wish to achieve consciously by my labour what the Sun-forces accomplished in me under other conditions through a sort of natural necessity.

From this we can understand how man still looks up to Sun and Moon to-day and from their reciprocal constellations fixes the time of the Easter Festival. This method of reckoning is something that has remained from former times. People ask: When is the first Sunday following the first full moon after the Spring equinox? And they fix the Easter Festival of the year on the first Sunday after the full moon; indicating thereby that people see something in the structure, in the form of the Easter Festival, that comes from the cosmos and must accord with it. The thought of Easter must be grasped once more. It can only be understood when people look back to the content of the Ancient Mysteries, where man was first made aware of what took place when he looked into himself: the door of humanity! When he entered into himself, living inwardly in himself: the three-chambered inner man! When he made himself free: the Gate of Death! When he moved freely in the spiritual world: when he was a Christophoros.

The Mysteries themselves went back to a time when free human development had to find a place. And the time is now come when the Mysteries have to be found once more. They must be found again. People must realize consciously that preparations have to begin now, by which they can be found again.

Out of this consciousness the “Christmas Session” (Weihnachtstagung) was held, for it is an urgent necessity that a place should exist on the earth where Mysteries can once more be established. The Anthroposophical Society in its further development must provide the means for a renewal of the Mysteries. Your task, my dear friends, must be to co-operate towards this end, doing so out of the right consciousness. This demands that life be considered according to its three stages—according to the stage in which a man looks into the nature of men; according to the stage when he strives towards the inner being of men; according to the stage in which he is in that state of consciousness which otherwise he only experiences in the reality of external death.

As a remembrance of the lesson that has been given here to-day, let us take with us the following words, allowing them to work powerfully in our souls:—

Stand before the portals of the lives of men,
Behold on their lintels words of power.

Live in the inward souls of men,
Feel in this realm the beginning of worlds.

—otherwise world-beginning is not always perceived, but only what is in the world—

Ponder the earthly-end of man;
Find in it the Spirit's turning-point.

In these words you have the essence of to-day's lesson—

Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte;
Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte.

Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern;
Fühl' in seinem Kreise Welt beginnen.

Denk an des Menschen Erdenende;
Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.

Continuing our studies on the great works of Art, we will show some further slides today, supplementing those that were shown last week. Today I propose in the main to supplement what I endeavoured to explain last week, of the connections and contrasts between the Mid-European, or Northern, and the Southern Art. I tried to show how the specifically artistic quality is always influenced by the character of the South or of the North, while, on the other hand, there were continual interpenetrations of the Southern and Mid-European impulses, layer upon layer, as it were, so that it is by no means easy now to see how these things really worked together. Spiritual scientific investigations will in course of time have to bring more and more light into these matters.

Today I wish to draw attention to the contrasts from certain other points of view. You will remember what I emphasised last time. From underlying impulses of the Mid-European spiritual life, there arose what we may call the art of expression—expression of Will and Intelligence—the power to express the ever-mobile life of the soul. The soul in movement—that is the goal of the Mid-European impulse; while the Southern (which was, however, influenced at a very early stage by the Mid-European) looks more to all that enters our perceptions from the Divine-spiritual in the Cosmos, which finds expression in the power of composition, and in features which transcend the human.

It is a characteristic abuse of our time to consider Art—even the plastic Arts—far too much from the mere point of view of the narrative and subject matter, while appreciating far too little the specifically artistic qualities. At the same time there is another equally pernicious error. Art is very frequently severed nowadays from the general life of culture and civilisation, and treated as though it were something that lives a life apart. This, too, is wrong. For we need only have a feeling for the specifically artistic qualities, for all that works in form and colouring, in composition and the like—we need only wean ourselves of the tendency to explain everything symbolically, or in other artificial ways; we need but feel—before such pictures as Dürer's ‘St. Jerome,’ or ‘Melancholia,’ for example,—how infinitely deeper is the mysterious ebb and flow of the masses of light themselves, than any artificial symbolism we may choose to read into these pictures. Then we shall recognise that the specifically artistic qualities that come to expression in the great works of Art, are also living in the whole general life of civilisation. Out of the common feeling of his time the artist works into the spheres of form and color and expression. The time itself works through the soul of the artist. The whole culture of the age finds expression in the characteristic works of Art.

We saw last time how the Mid-European, or Northern element, works its way upwards more or less independently, while at the same time it grows together with all that is brought to it through the Church—through Christianity from the side of Rome. Until the 12th and 13th centuries we witness the development of a unique artistic life in Middle Europe, uniting the more Roman or Latin elements with a strongly individual characterisation of all that is life and movement in the human soul. We cannot understand what took place until the 12th and 13th centuries if we merely consider what we know of the spread of Christianity in the succeeding time. For the whole spread of Christianity was a very different thing in those earlier centuries from what it afterwards became. It was only in later times that the rigidly dogmatic qualities which so repel us, came into prominence, though, needless to say, there were all manner of excesses even before the twelfth century. And while in Middle Europe the systemmatising, formal tendency of Rome was always felt like a foreign body, still the Christian impulses found their way most wonderfully into the soul-life of the people—especially into the more subconscious, feeling elements of the soul.

This entry of Christianity into the soul found expression especially in the sphere of Art, where there was a wrestling for plastic power of expression.

Here we may point to a truth which can be characterised in two very simple statements which are, none the less, very far-reaching. We may ask this question: To what does Art appeal among the Southern peoples? To what did it appeal already in antiquity? And elsewhere in the South, in the period of its decline and in its resurrection from the early to the late Renaissance? To what does Art appeal in the more southern regions? It appeals to the fancy and imagination. This statement is of infinite importance. The appeal is to the life of the fancy and the imagination, which is present in the souls of the southern people with a slight, suggestion of a sanguine temperament in these respects. Thus in the southern regions we see the Christian ideas entering, above all, into the imaginative life, and borne by fancy into the realm of Art.

Needless to say, such a statement must not be pressed too far. I would say, the statement itself should be artistically understood.

Only so, my dear friends, could it come about that in the time of the Renaissance artistic fancy rose to such great heights of creation, while the moral life, as we showed in a recent lecture, fell to the state revealed in the attacks of Francis of Assisi, and later of Savonarola. The situation stands before us when we contrast the fiery attacks of Savonarola which were all in vain, with the infinitely rich life of Christian vision and imagination in the plastic works of Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo and many others.

Art in the North speaks differently and appeals to a different element of soul, namely, to mind and feeling. Once more, these things must not be pressed; nevertheless, in such a statement guiding lines are given for the understanding of whole epochs of History. However we may believe that Christianity contains a peculiar, morally religious impulse of the soul, this impulse did not find its way into the element of fancy and imagination in the Southern culture which reached such giddy heights in the Renaissance. But in the North, the centuries until the 12th—nay, the beginning of the 13th—reveal in Art the progressive appeal of Christianity, and especially the tragic elements of Christianity, to human heart and feeling. The Art of the Italian Renaissance strives to make the countenance of Christianity itself as fair as possible—that, after all, is the essential element in the Renaissance Art: But the centuries to which I now refer, in Middle Europe, are all devoted to the striving to realise the Story of the Passion—with all its tragedy and drama, until the tragic story becomes their very own in heart and soul.

Down to the Carolingian period in Middle Europe, Mid-European paganism continually breaks through into the life of feeling. But in the centuries from that time onward until the 12th and 13th there arises out of the very soul of Middle Europe an inherently Christian Feeling for all human life. And the strange thing is that from the 13th century onward a certain decline can be observed. Yet, as I explained last time, even now when another element once more overwhelms it, there is still the constant striving for the Mid-European soul to assimilate into its deepest inner life all things that come to it, so that, after all, there is a continuity of work and progress in the best souls, from the 11th century on into the 15th and 16th.

The gradual entry of Christianity into the life of the people is also recognisable, or, rather, would be recognisable, if the dramatic representations which did, indeed, grow more and more significant toward the 13th century, had been preserved. All that we now bring to light again—the Christmas and Easter Plays, and Plays of the Three Wise Men—are of a later date, and are but a faint reflection of those earlier ones which tended to a more universal presentation of the Christian world-conception. The Play concerning Anti-Christ, of the 12th century, which has been found at Tegernsee in Bavaria, and a later Play on the Ten Virgins, these, too, are but echoes of Plays that were presented everywhere, dramatising the Biblical stories and the sacred legends. Out of this life with the Christian world-conception as a whole, there arose the works of Art which we shall see again today and which we say last time. There followed what I might call a slow and silent working towards the deepening of the soul's life and its artistic power of expression. It finds expression wonderfully in Dürer's representations of the Passion, and notably in the head of Christ Himself as conceived by Dürer and others. It will be a satisfaction to me if we can show these pictures, too, on some future occasion; we do not possess them at present.

If we study the progress of artistic penetration in pictures of the countenance of Christ till Dürer's time, and in other things as well, we find there was really attained in Mid-Europe at that time an astonishing degree of maturity. It lies inherent in the subtle difference between the Mid-European and Northern, and the Southern life, which developed, as it were, the last phases of the Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch—(albeit the Fifth epoch already shone into the Renaissance);—the South in its deepest tendencies of feeling was still expressing the last phases of the Fourth; while in Mid-Europe and the North the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch was preparing. What afterwards became the expression of the individual, and of all that is mobile in the human soul—the soul in movement and emotion—all this was working its way up from unconscious depths.

Here we see the whole life of the two regions in their essential difference. We need only bear in mind how much in the Southern Art is due to the fact that there still existed a living atavistic perception of what plays from spiritual regions into the realms of sense. For this was, indeed, preserved in what are known to us of the Byzantine forms of Art—in all the suggestive forms and figures that have come down to us. Take, for instance, what works upon us with such suggestive power in the Art of the Mosaics, and in all that is connected with the name of Cimabue. Here it is more the Christ Figure that works upon us. In Middle Europe it is, rather, the life of Jesus that is presented to us, for the artistic forms are created directly out of the inner life of the soul.

Superhuman as is the Byzantine type of Christ, inwardly human is the Christ type which was afterwards worked out by Dürer.

The Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, including the latest flower (in the Italian Renaissance) has essentially the quality of looking upward to the superhuman and typical; the superhuman and generic nature of the soul, setting aside the individually human. The Southern peoples brought to their Art, in a far higher degree, the ancient, the generic nature of the soul in its superhuman and divine quality.

In the Northern Art, on the other hand, we see the strong decided striving of the individual, as it works its way upwards out of every single human soul. The more these things are understood, the more this will be confirmed.

The southern life still contains mankind as a whole. Think how intensely an Athenian was an Athenian, or a Spartan a Spartan, so that Aristotle rightly called man a “Zoon politicos”—a political animal. The “political animal” was developed to its greatest height in Rome, where, we might say, man lived more in the streets than in his own house; and with his soul-life, also, he lived more in the life that surrounded him than in the house of his own soul. Such, truly, was the Southern imagination as it worked in the world of space. From the very outset men live together, live together as a whole, and the life of Art itself arises out of this principle. This is a feature common to all the Southern Art. They decorate the churches and the public squares; everywhere we see how they reckon with the fact that the people run gladly together, crowd gladly into the churches, or in the public squares, drawn thither by their very temperament and expecting what will there be set before them. To possess themselves fully, they need this life in the outer world, this living with the group-soul nature—with all that is most eminently political—in the right sense of the word.

All this is different in Middle Europe. In Middle Europe man lives within himself; seeks his experiences in his own house and home, even the house of his soul. And if he is to dedicate himself to the group-nature, his heart must first be conquered for it, he must in some way be summoned to it. Many of the underlying impulses of Gothic architecture will be found to lie in this direction. The buildings erected by Gothic architecture stand there not because the people are already running together of their own accord, but, on the contrary, because they must first call the people, bring them together, as it were, through mysterious and suggestive influences. This is expressed in the very forms of the Gothic. The individuals must first be called to the group-life. And the same thing lies inherent in the whole treatment of light and darkness which I described to you the other day. In the elemental surging and interweaving of the light into the darkness, man finds an element into which he can enter to free himself from his own separate existence; albeit he can carry his individual existence, his individuality with him into this very element, because it is so akin to the nature of the soul.

In all these things we find the distinguishing feature of the Northern as against the Southern Art. Hence the striving—the successful striving—of the Northern Art to express inwardness of life and soul. We need only call to mind the portraits, the Madonnas, for instance, of Van Eyck. These Madonnas—their facial expression altogether determined by a turning inward of the life of the human soul—this speaking from an inwardness of soul in the countenance and gesture—all this, Raphael would never have painted. Raphael raises what he paints beyond the human; Van Eyck lifts it into the still more deeply human, so as to seize the human emotions with his paintings, the human hearts of those who see them. Once more it is a question of grasping the human soul.

The priesthood until the 12th and 13th centuries were well aware of these possibilities of the human soul in Europe. They reckoned with these things. They worked with the heart and mind of the people. And without a doubt, much that arose out of this wrestling for artistic powers of expression, came about through the co-operation of the religious orders with that inner life and character of the people which we have here described. We must by all means understand how these more Northerly qualities of artistic creation are connected with the protesting folk-soul of the North, rising up in opposition against the Roman element.

Luther went to Rome. But he saw nothing of the sublime heights of artistic creation; he saw only the moral degradation there. And this implies very much. No doubt he met one or another of the great painters of Rome on the Square of St. Peter's, but what concern had they for him, these men who created out of al altogether different mood of soul, something to which he had no inner relationship. And yet, Luther's very radical one-sidedness was in another way the product of the same Mid-European characteristics which, if I may say so, wrestled most sublimely in the realm of plastic, pictorial expression, and attained an artistic height that stands, in a certain way, so magnificently and independently side by side with the Art of the Italian Renaissance. (We need make no comparisons, for they are always trivial.)

We will therefore now show a few more pictures, supplementing those we showed last week. First we will show some wood-sculptures from the very beginning of the 13th century. They are at Halberstadt.

Look at this Crucifixion Group. I will only say one thing to characterise what is most important. In this group you can see how deeply the story of the Passion had found its way into their lives by that time. There is Mary, there is St. John, and in the center the Christ, looking down towards her. If you could see the face you would see an infinite deepening of soul in the expression, an overwhelming depth. In Mary, if you have a feeling for these things, you will recognise at once the flowing together of the more Roman, priestly conception with the Mid-European depth and tenderness of feeling. Here it is recognisable in a most wonderful way. We shall presently show the face of Mary in detail.

This group reveals how they contrived, out of the specifically Mid-European creative impulse of the soul, to mould the Christianity which had conquered the Mid-European country. We will now show the detail.

Wonderfully characteristic is the expression of the face. The expression in the Southern Art is such that the eyes look far out into the world; in the Northern Art the soul, as it were, presses forward into the look of the eyes from within. Here the two are altogether interwoven—united with one another. A tenderness of soul in the expressions hovers gently, wonderfully, over a more Latin, Roman rounding and perfection of the features.

These things must not be pressed. But I beg of you to observe in all the following pictures how very differently the clothing and drapery is treated in the Mid-European Art and in the Southern. Undoubtedly, such things must not be pressed too far; yet it is true to say that in all the Southern Art the drapery rather surrounds and veils the human form, follows the lines of the form closely, continuing, as it were, the bodily forms. In the Mid-European Art the treatment of the drapery is different. It proceeds from the emotion and movement of the soul. According to the gesture of the hand and the whole attitude of the figure, the quick, mobile life of soul is continued into the raiment. The latter adheres less closely to the body. It does not seek, as in the Southern Art, to veil or to express the forms of the body. It is, rather, like a continuation of the living experience of the soul. You will see this more and more distinctly as we go on into the following centuries.

We have now come to the famous:

This, too, is in the wood, and dates from the first third of the 13th century. None the less, you will see in it a wonderful progression from the former group whose subject is so similar. Observe the communion of soul between the Mary and the Christ-Figure. See how the faith in the Christian world-conception, deeply united with the human soul, appears in the St. John and in the Mary-Figure, as the power that overcomes all things. The Christian world-conception had entered into the souls of these people so as to become an universal historic conception of all earthly evolution. See how Adam, down here, receives the Blood of the Redeemer dropping downward from the Cross. Study the face of Adam, how he is touched by the influence of Grace which he can now receive inasmuch as he may catch the Blood of the Redeemer flowing from the Cross. You will realise with what infinite depths Christianity had found its may into the lives of these people. It had risen to a universal and truly Cosmic conception.

Angels carry the Cross. God the Father descends with the Dove, setting His seal upon the fact that what He had given to the Earth in His Son gives, at this moment, the whole Earth its meaning. In this group with all its artistic perfection we see how deeply Christianity had found its way into Middle Europe,because they tried again and again to permeate it with the human heart and feeling,—to permeate it from within the human soul.

On the other hand, in the South, it was permeated by fancy and imagination, thus producing that peculiar permeation, so free from the moral element—(or shall we say, in order not to give offence, so free from moral cant)—which comes to expression in the Renaissance in the South.

If you were to make a study of the progress in the representation of the Christ-Figure, this Head of Christ would be an important station. Also the Head of Christ in the Cathedral of Amiens, and afterwards, the Head of Christ by Albrecht Dürer.

We now pass to some sculptures which are found at Freiburg in Saxony, also dating from the first third of the 13th century. They show an altogether different aspect, though here, too, it is the sacred history, and a deep striving for inwardness. It is not too much to say that one loves to dwell on every single face. The next picture:

shows us two figures. The one, the figure of a woman, is hard to interpret. Perhaps she is an “Ecclesia.” The other is said to be Aaron. These things are not essential. The figures are undoubtedly connected, allegorically or in some other way, with the Christian world-conception. Once more, observe the deepening of the soul's life. The contrast of expression between the face on the left, and that on the right is particularly fascinating from this point of view.

Supplementing what we showed last time of the Cathedrals at Naumburg and Strasburg, we will now show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Bamberg. Here, to begin with, we have two.

See how directly the dramatic element, the living movement of soul, is expressed in the attitudes, representing the interchange between one soul and another. C. single moment is presented to us, while at the same time the two contrasting characters are well expressed.

The composition is by no means great, but the expressiveness of soul is marvellous. He must remember that this dates from about 1240. Spiritual scientific research will in course of time be confirmed, in that it does not suggest—as many people still do today—that the Mid-European element, in its presentation of the Christian world-conception, was in any high degree influenced by the Southern. That, indeed, is not the case. On the contrary, the very opposite is true.

The different streams are not as yet clearly seen by external history. It is not seen, for instance, what I pointed out the other day—how the Northern impulses worked down even into the creations of Raphael and Michelangelo. Artistically, this conception is altogether a product of the Northern spirit.

This example shows how the worldly and the religious elements played into one another. This was, indeed, the case, especially at the time with which we are now dealing. The worldly and the religious were brought together in the effort which I characterised just now. The souls of men had to be won over; the individual souls must first be called—must by some means be gathered together, if they are to look up in community, in congregation, to the spiritual world. Likewise, they must first be called if they are to express reverence in one way or another, for something in the outer worldly sphere.

Hence the worldly is brought together with the ecclesiastical element. Here, then, we see the Emperor Heinrich, the Empress Kunigunde, and, on the left, St. Stephen.

Needless to say, these things presuppose, as a rule, the naivete of the common people, their blind devotion and dependence. Today, in the fond belief of our contemporaries, these things are overcome. Inwardly, they are present all the more. On the part of the great lords themselves there is very frequently the underlying idea (not unconnected with very human qualities, which shall be nameless), that they themselves stand just a little nearer to the various Saints and supersensible powers than ordinary mortals do.
We will now show a detail, the middle figure of this picture.

The Old and the New Testament were always conceived in unison, as the promise and the fulfilment. Follow the detail of these figures.

And now another figure from the same Cathedral.

A figure of Mary, showing—from whatever point of view you may consider it—how richly the qualities which I described before, come to expression in this stream of Art. You must remember that this was done about the year 1245. What would you look for in the South at that time? The next Picture, from the Cathedral at Bamberg again, represents the figure of:

A favorite representation at that time. Last time we saw the corresponding figure from the Cathedral at Strasburg. The figure of the Church is conceived with a certain inner freedom. Her soul is free, she gazes freely far into the world, with wisdom.

This figure is in contrast, as we saw last time, with the Synagogue, who is represented once more with bound and downcast eyes. The whole posture is intended to represent this contrast in every detail, even to the sweep of the drapery.

Look at the lower portion of the dress, how well it is adapted to the movement of the soul. We will insert the 'Church' once more, in order that you may compare the draperies:

And now a worldly, or secular figure from the same Cathedral.

Study the expression well. The head, which we will now show in detail, is most wonderful:

We now pass on to the 14th century, and see what had occurred by that time. We have a few figures from the Cathedral at Cologne, first half of the 14th century.

It is easy to see that a certain decline had taken place. The next picture is also from Cologne:

Going further in the 14th century we now come to a figure of St. Paul by a master known as the “Master of the Clay Figures.” These figures were executed in burnt earthenware.

Having now shown the rise, and to some extent the decline of a stream of evolution complete in itself, we will give a series of pictures from the Chartreuse de Champmol at Dijon, which are really great of their kind. Most, if not all of them are the independent work of the Dutch sculptor, Sluter, or else done under his direction. He brought to the Chartreuse at Dijon, from the Netherlands, an almost unique power of individual characterisation. From many points of view we see this individualising tendency in his work.

Here especially you see the Art of individual characterisation. Compare this Madonna and Child of Sluter's with the next picture (Moses) and realise the power of one and the same man to characterise these two.

Remember that this Chartreuse at Dijon was built in 1306 to 1334; it was therefore the beginning of the 14th century. Compare this with Michelangelo's Moses—for why should these things not be placed together—they are, indeed, comparable.

And now by the same artist as before—Sluter.

To live with the prophetic figures so as to achieve this degree of individualisation, was, indeed, most wonderful. We will now show one of the figures in detail:

These are by the same artist. The age was especially great in the creation of tomb monuments. We will show the detail of the upper part:

The figures round the base of the tomb which were formerly so small, are wonderfully executed when you come to see them in detail.

Such is the individual characterisation of all the single figures round the base of the tomb. Here is another group.

We now go on to an artist of the 15th century. (We must go according to the pictures we possess at the moment.) The last pictures, you remember, were by an artist of the early 14th century. With the Cologne Master, and the Master of the Clay Figures who made the group we saw before, we came to the 14th century. We now pass on into the 15th. Here, then, we have two figures by Hans Multscher:

This is about the middle of the 15th century. The next is a Madonna, by the same artist (Multscher).

And now we go further and further in what I described just now as the elaboration of the Christian subjects with deep inwardness of soul. The following are figures carved in wood, at Blutenburg (end of the 15th century). The art of characterisation has, indeed, attained its ideal to a marvellous extent.

The figure of Mary, carved in wood—end of the 13th century:

This, then, is the time when Michelangelo and Raphael were born. The next picture, too, is from Blutenburg.

The time when these highly individual figures were created was also especially great in wood-carving, with which they decorated the Choristers' seats in their churches. We will give two examples from the Frauenkirche in Munich, end of the 15th century.

We now come to the sculptor who worked at the end of the 15th century.

And this was the time when the High Renaissance in Italy had not as yet begun. These works were created about 1490–1495.

This St. Elizabeth—created in the early 16th century—is now in the (Germanisches Museum, at Nuremberg.)

This, too, dates from the beginning of the 16th century.

There are wonderful types among these twelve Apostles; one would like to study every single head alone:

Finally, we give two examples of the sculptor—Veit Stoss—early 16th century, who worked in Cracow and also in Southern Germany, creating his plastic works in many different materials.

The next picture is in Nuremberg,. “The Angel's Greeting,” it is called.

I will also show three paintings by Hans Baldung, also known as Hans Grun, who worked in Dürer's workshop at the beginning of the 16th century—about 1507–1509.

His pictures reveal once more, in the sphere of painting, how everything is turned towards the life of the soul.

Hans Baldung was also a portrait painter of no mean order. Here you have an example.

Here you see how the same master cultivated the art of portraiture. He was a pupil of Dürer's, who subsequently lived at Strasburg, and at Freiburg in Breisgau. He did some wonderful paintings of the Life of Christ, and of the Mother of Christ. You will find a picture by him at Basel—“Christ on the Cross.”

This picture, then, is of the early 16th century—the time of Raphael and Michelangelo in Rome.

My dear Friends, the more we multiply these pictures, the more should we see, from this juxtaposition of the Northern and Southern Art, what an immense revolution took place at the turn of the fourth and fifth Post-Atlantean Epochs. And the more should we realise how infinitely rich in content is the simple statement that at that historic moment Civilisation passed from the development of the Intellectual, or Feeling Soul into that of the Spiritual Soul. Infinitely much is contained in such a simple statement. But we only learn to understand these things of Spiritual Science rightly when we follow them into the several and detailed domains of human life.

In conclusion, my dear Friends, I still wish to speak a word of solemn remembrance to you on this day. The day after tomorrow is the anniversary of the death of our dear friend, Fraulein Stinde, and in our hearts we will not forget to think on that day of all that came into our Movement through the work of this dear and valued member.

And we will also turn our thoughts to her soul as she works on in the Spiritual Worlds—deeply and lovingly connected as she is with our Movement. On this day especially we will deepen the thoughts and feelings of our hearts which are directed to her.

I only wished to add this word of remembrance to remind you of the day after tomorrow.

In memory of all that unites us with our dear friend—with the soul of our dear Sophie Stinde—let us now rise from our seats.

Emil Bock opened the discussion hour and formulated the following questions:

1. Out of the previous lecture this morning, how can we take the power of formative speech to which we still need to gain access, and accomplish a new speech technique, perhaps new forms and a new gestural technique?
2. How do we actually now really speak of a new understanding of the Bible, of a new Bible text? Furthermore, we ask Dr Steiner on occasion to discuss in more detail the two chapters from the synoptic Gospels, Matthew 13 and Mark 13.
3. What is the reality behind the Apostolic succession, the tradition and the ordination of priests in the technical sense, and how can such a reality be made more accessible again in the future?

Rudolf Steiner: With regards to the first question: You would already have seen, my dear friends, that out of what I said this morning, that in the illustration, the soul contents related to the supersensible and also what leads to the power of formative speech, must be searched for. Regarding the power of speech formation: we actually have no direct understanding of sound anymore today; we basically have no more understanding for words, so our words remain signs. Naturally our starting point needs to be out of the spiritual milieu of our time. Man must be responsible for these intimate things out of what currently is available. Precisely such a question brings us naturally into the area of the purely technical. First of all one has to make the understanding for the sound active again, within oneself. One doesn't easily manage the free use of speech when one isn't able to allow the sound as such, to stir within oneself. I would like to continue in such a way that I first draw your attention to certain examples.

You see, when we say "head" (Kopf) in German, we hardly have anything else in mind than the total perception of what reaches us through the ear, which indicates the head. When we say "foot" (Fuss) it is hardly any different to what we experience in the tonality and sound content in relation to some foot. Now we only need, for instance, to refer to the Romance languages where head is testa, tête, foot is pedum, pied, and we get the feeling at the same time that the term is taken from something completely different. When we say the word Kopf in German, the term has come out of the form, from looking at the form. We are not aware of this any longer, yet it is so. When we say Fuss, it is taken from walking where furrows are drawn in the ground. Thus, it has come into existence out of a certain soul content and coined in a word. When we take a word formation like, let's say, "testament" and all other word formations which refer in Romance language terms to head, testa, then we will feel that the term Kopf in the Romantic languages originate through the substantiation and thus not out of the form, but through the human soul with the help of the head, and particularly activating the mouth organs. Pied didn't originate from walking or drawing furrows but from standing, pressing down while standing. Today we no longer question the motives which have come out of the soul and into speech formation. We can only discover what can be called, in the real sense, a feeling for the language when we follow the route of making language far more representational than it is currently, abstraction at most. When someone uses a Latin expression in terminology, some Latin expressions are even more representational, but some people use them to denote even more. For example, today one can hardly find the connection between "substance" and "subsist" while the concept of "subsist" has basically been lost. Someone who still has the original feeling for substance and subsistence would say of the Father-God, not that He "exists" but that he "subsists."

Researching language in this way and in another way which I want to mention right now, in order to develop a lively feeling for language again, leads then to something I would like to call a linguistic conscience (Sprachgewissen). We need a linguistic conscience. We speak really so directly these days because as human beings we act more as automatons towards language than we do as living beings. Until we are capable of connecting language in a living way to ourselves, like our skin is connected to us, we will not come to the right symbolization. The skin experiences pain when it is pricked. Language even tolerates being maltreated. One must develop a feeling regarding language that it can be maltreated because it is a closed organism, just like our skin. We can gain much in this area, when we have a lively experience in some or other dialect.

Consider how often we have performed the Christmas Plays, and in these plays there is a sentence spoken by one or more of the innkeepers. When Joseph and Mary come to Bethlehem in search of lodging, they are refused by three innkeepers. Each one of the three innkeepers says: Ich als a wirt von meiner gstalt, hab in mein haus und ligament gwalt.—Just imagine what this means to a person today. He could hear: "I as a host of my stature ..."—and think that what the host is saying means he is an attractive man, or something like that, or a strong man who has stature within his hostel, in his house. This is certainly not meant. If we want to translate that into High German we'll have to say: "I as a host, who is placed in such a way as to have abundant comfort, I am not dependent on such poor people finding lodgings within, with me." This means: "I as a host in my social position, in my disposition." This shows them it is necessary not only to listen to him—words one often enough hears in speech—but to enter into the spirit of the language. We say Blitz" (lightening) in High German. In Styria a certain form of lightening is called 'heaven's lashers' (Himmlatzer). In the word "Blitz" there is quite another meaning than in the word Himmlatzer.

So we start becoming aware of different things when we approach the sense of speech. You see, such an acquisition of the sense of language sometimes leads to something extraordinarily important. Goethe once uttered a sentence, when already in his late life, to the Chancellor von Müller, a statement which has often been quoted and is often used, to understand the entire way in which Faust, written by Goethe, originated. Goethe said that for him the conception of Faust had for 60 years been clear "from the beginning" (von vornherein); the other parts less extensively. Now commentary upon commentary have been written and this sentence was nearly always recalled, because it is psychologically extraordinarily important, and the commentators have it always understood like this: Goethe had a plan from the beginning for his Faust and in the 60 years of his life—since he was twenty or about eighteen—he used this plan, he had "from the start," to work from.

In Weimar I met August Fresenius who bemoaned the fact that it was a great misfortune, if I could use such an expression, which had entered into the entire Goethe research, and at the time I had urged an unusually thoughtful and slow philologist to publish this thing as soon as possible in order that it doesn't continue, otherwise one would have a few dozen more such Goethe commentaries. It is important to note that Goethe used the expression "from the start" in no other way than in a descriptive way, not in the sense of a priori but "from the beginning" in a very descriptive manner so that in the strictest sense one could refer to Goethe not having an overall plan, but that "at the beginning" he only wrote down the first pages (i.e. to begin with) and of the further sections, only single sentences. There can be no argument of an overall plan. It very much depends on how one really experiences words. Many people have, when they hear the word vornherein totally have no conscience that it has a vorn (in front) and a herein (in) and that one sees something spiritual when one pronounces it. This simple dismissal of a word without contemplation is something upon which a tremendous amount depends, if one wants to attain a symbolic manner of speech. Precisely about this direction there would be extraordinarily much to say.

You see, we have the remarkable appearance of the Fritz Mauthner speaking technique where all knowledge and all wisdom is questioned, because all knowledge and wisdom is expressed though speech, and so Fritz Mauthner finds nothing expressed in speech because it does not point to some or other reality. How harsh my little publication "The spiritual guidance of man and of mankind" has been judged in which I mention that in earlier times, all vowel formation expressed people's inner experiences, and all consonant unfolding comes from outer observed or seen events. All that man perceives is expressed in consonants, while vowels are formed by inner experiences, feelings, emotions and so on. With this is connected the peculiar manner in which the consonants are written differently to the vowels in Hebrew. This is also connected to areas where more primitive people used to dwell, where they have not strongly developed their inner life, so predominantly consonant languages occur, not languages based on vowels. This extends very far, this kind of in-consonant-action of language. Only think what African languages have from consonants to click sounds.

So you see, in this way we gain an understanding for what sounds within language. One would be brought beyond the mere sign, which the word is today. Only with today's feeling for language which Fritz Mauthner believes in, can you believe that all knowledge actually depends on language and that language has no connection to some or other reality. A great deal can be accomplished when one enters into one's mother tongue and try to go back into the vernacular. In the vernacular one finds much, very much if you really behave like a human being, that is, respond to what you feel connected to the language. In the vernacular one has the rich opportunity to feel in speech and experience in sound, but also the tendency towards the descriptive, and you have to push it so far that you really, one could say, get into a kind of state of renunciation in regard to expressions that are supposed to phrase something completely separate from human experiences.

Something which thoroughly ruins our sense of language is physics, and in physics, as it is today, it only aspires to study objective processes and refrains from all subjective experience, there it should no longer be spoken at all. According to physics, when one body presses (stoßen) against another, for example in the theory of elasticity, then you are anthropomorphising, because the experience of pressure as soon as you sense sound, means you're only affected by the same kind of pressure as the pressure your own hand makes. Above all, one gets the feeling with the S-sound that nothing other can be described as something like this (a waved line is drawn on the blackboard). The word Stoß" (push/impacts—ß is the symbol for ss—translator) has two s's, at the end and beginning; it gives the entire word its colouring; so when the word Stoß or stoßen (to push/thrust) is pronounced one actually can feel how, when your ether body would move, it would not only move but be shoved forwards and continuously be kept up.

Thus, there are already methods through which one comes to the power of speech formation, which is then no longer far from symbolizing, for the symbolum must be hacked out of the way so that one experiences language as a living organism, because much is to be experienced within language. Someone recently told me that there are certain things in language which only need to be pronounced and one is surprised at how they reveal themselves as self-evident.

The Greeks recited in hexameter. Why? Well, hexameter is an experience. A person produces speech, as I've already said, in his breathing. However, breathing is closely connected to other elements of rhythm in the human being; with the pulse, with blood circulation. On average, obviously not precisely, we have 18 breaths and 72 heat beats; 72 equals 4 times 18. Four times 18 heart beats gives a rhythm, a collective inner beat. In a time when man sensed in a more primordial and more elementary way according to what was taking place within him, man experienced, when he could, in uttering the relationship of the heart beat to the breathing, bring the totality of himself into expression. This relationship, not precisely according to time, this relationship can be brought to bear; you only have to add the turning point as the fourth foot (reference plate 3 ... not available In German text) then you have a Greek hexameter half-line, in the ration of 4 to 1 as a pulse beat to breathing rhythm. The hexameter was born out of the human structure, and other measures of verse were all born out of the rhythmic system of the human being. You can already feel, when you treat language artistically, how, in the process of treating human speech in an artistic way, language is alive. This makes it possible to acquire a far more inner relationship to language, yet also far more objectivity. The most varied chauvinistic feelings in relation to language stops, because the configurations of different languages stop, and one acquires an ear for the general sound. There are such things which are found on the way to gaining the power of creative speech. It does finally lead to listening to oneself when one speaks. In a certain way it's actually difficult but it can be supported. For various reasons it seems to me that for those who are affected by it, it is also necessary not to treat the Scripture in the way many people treat it today. You will soon see why I say these things.

In relation to writing, there are two kinds of people. The majority learn to write as if it's a habit of staking out words. People are used to move their hands in a certain way and write like this: in the majority. The writing lesson is very often given in such a way that one just comes to it. The minority actually don't write in the sense of reality, but they draw (a word is written on the blackboard: Kann [meaning can; be able to]). They look at the signs of the letters simultaneously as being written, and as an artistic treatment of writing, it is far more an intimate involvement. I have met people who have been formally trained to write. For instance, once there was a writing method which consisted in people being trained to make circles and curves, to turn them and thus acquire a feeling of connecting them and so form letters out of them. Only in this way, out of these curves, could the letters come about. With a large number of them I have seen that they, before they start writing, make movements in the air with their pen. This is what brings writing into the unconsciousness of the body. However, our language comes out of the totality of the human being and when one spoils oneself by writing you also spoil yourself for the language. Precisely the one who is dependent on handling the language needs to get used to the meditation that writing should not be allowed to just flow out of his hand, but he should look at it, really look at what he is writing, when he writes.

My dear friends, this is something which is extraordinarily important in our current culture, because we are on our way to dehumanizing ourselves. I have already received a large number of letters which have not been written with a pen but with the typewriter. Now you can imagine the difference between a letter written with a typewriter or written with a pen. I'm not campaigning against the typewriter, I consider it as an obvious necessity in civilization, but we do also need the counter pole. By us dehumanizing ourselves in this way, by us changing our relationship towards the outer world in an absolute mechanistic and dead manner, we need in turn to take up strong vital forces again. Today we need far greater vital forces than in the time in which man knew nothing yet about the typewriter.

Therefore, for someone who handles words, he must also acquire an understanding for the continuous observation, while he is writing, that what he is writing pleases him, that he gets the impression that something hasn't just flowed out of a subject but that, by looking simultaneously at it, this thing lives as a totality in him. Mostly, the thing that is needed for the development of some capability is not arrived at in a direct but in an indirect way. I must explain this route because I have been asked how one establishes the power for speech formation. This is the way, as I have mentioned, which comes first of all. As an aside I stress that language originates in the totality of mankind, and the more mankind still senses the language, so much more will there be movement in his speech. It is extraordinary, how for instance in England, where the process of withdrawal of a connection with the surroundings is most advanced, it is regarded as a good custom to speak with their hands in their trouser pockets, held firmly inside so they don't enter the danger of movement. I have seen many English people talk in this way. Since then I've never had my pockets made in front again, but always at the back, for I have developed such disgust from this quite inhuman non-participation in what is being said. It is simply a materialistic criticism that speech only comes from the head; it originates out of the entire human being, above all from the arms, and we are—I say it here in one sentence which is obviously restricted—we are on this basis no ape or animal which needs its hands to climb or hold on to something, but we have them as free because with these free hands and arms we handle speech.

In grasping with our arms, creating with our fingers, we express something we need in order to model language. So it has a certain justification to return mankind to its connection with language, bringing the whole person into it, to train Eurythmy properly, which really exists in drawing out of the human organism what is not fulfilled in the human body, but is however fulfilled in the ether body, when we speak. The entire human being is in movement and we are simply transposing though the eurhythmic movements, the etheric body on to the physical body. That is the principle. It is really the eurythmization of something like a necessity which needs to be regularly brought out of the human being, like the spoken language itself. It must stand as a kind of opposite pole against all which rises in the present and alienate people towards the outer world, allowing no relationship to be possible between people and the outer world any more. The eurythmization enables people in any case to return to being present in the language and is on this basis, as I've often suggested, even an art. Well, if you take into account the things I've just proposed, then you arrive at the now commonplace speech technique basically under the scheme of pedantry.

The great importance given to teaching through recitation and that kind of thing, only supports the element of a materialistic world view. You see, just as one would in a school for sculpture or a school of painting not really get instructions of the hand movements but corrects them by life forces coming into them, so speech techniques must not be pedantically taught with all kinds of nose-, chest- and stomach resonances. These things may only be developed though living speech. When a person speaks, he might at most be made aware of one or the other element. In this respect extraordinary atrocities are being committed today and the various vocal and language schools can actually be disgusting, because it shows how little lives within the human being. The formation of speech happens when those things are considered which I mentioned. Now if the question needs to be answered even more precisely, I ask you to please call my attention to it.

Now there is a question about new commentary regarding the Bible, in fact, how one can arrive at a new Bible text.

You see, the thing is like this, one will first have to penetrate into an understanding of the Bible. Much needs to precede this. If you take everything which I have said about language, and then consider that the Bible text has originated out of quite another kind of experience of language than we have today, and also as it was experienced centuries before in Luther's time, you can hardly hope to somehow discover an understanding of the Bible through some small outer adjustment. To understand the Bible, a real penetration of Christianity is needed above all, and actually this can only emerge from a Bible text as something similar for us as the Gospels had once appeared for the first Christians. In the time of the first Christians one certainly had the feeling of sound and some of what can be experienced in the words in the beginning of St John's Gospel which was of course experienced quite differently in the first Christian centuries as one would be able to do today. "In the primal beginnings was the Word"—you see, today there doesn't seem to be much more than a sign in this line, I'd say. We come closer to an understanding when we substitute "Word," which is very obscure and abstract, with "Verb" and also really develop our sense of the verb as opposed to the noun. In the ancient beginnings it was a verb and not the noun. I would like to say something about this abstraction.

The verb is quite rightly related to time, to activity, and it is absurd to think of including a noun in the area which has been described as in "the primal beginning." It has sense to insert a verb, a word related to activity. What lies within the sentence regarding the primal origins is however not an activity brought about by human gestures or actions, because it is the activity which streams out of the verb, the active word. We are not transported back into the ancient mists of the nebular hypothesis by the Kant-Laplace theory, but we will be led back to the sound and loud prehistoric power. This returning into a prehistoric power is something which was experienced powerfully in the first Christian centuries, and it was also strongly felt that it deals with a verb, because it is an absurdity to say: In the prehistoric times there was a noun.—We call it "Word" which can be any part of speech. Of course, it can't be so in the case of St John's Gospel.

In even further times in the past, things were even more different. They were so that for certain beings, for certain perceptions of beings one had the feeling that they should be treated with holy reserve, one couldn't just put them in your mouth and say them. For this reason, a different way had to be found regarding expression, and this detour I can express by saying something like the following. Think about a group of children living with their parents somewhere in an isolated house. Every couple of weeks the uncle comes, but the children don't say the uncle comes, but the "man" comes. They mean it is the uncle, but they generalise and say it is "the man." The father is not the "man"; they know him too well to call him "man." In this way earlier religious use of language hid some things which they didn't want to express outwardly because one had the inner reaction of profanity, and so it was stated as a generalization, like also in the first line of St John's Gospel, "in the beginning was the Word." However, one doesn't mean the word which actually stands there but one calls it something which has been picked out, a singular "Word." It was after all something extraordinary, this "Word." There are as many words as there are men, but children said, "the man," and so one didn't say what was meant in St John's Gospel, but instead one said, "the Word." The word in this case was Jahveh, so that St John's Gospel would say: "In the primal beginnings was Jahveh," so one doesn't say "God," but "the Word."

Such things must be acquired again by living within Christianity and what Christianity has derived from the ritual practice of the Old Testament. There is no shortcut to understanding the Gospels; a lively participation in the ancient Christian times is necessary for Gospel understanding. Basically, this is what has again become enlivened through Anthroposophy, while such things have in fact only risen out of Anthroposophic research. We then have the following: In the primordial times was he word—in primordial time was Jahveh—and the word was with God—and Jahveh was with God. In the third line: And Jahveh was one of the Elohim.—This is actually the origin, the start of the St John Gospel which refers to the multiplicity of the Elohim, and Jahveh as one of them—in fact there were seven—as lifted out of the row of the Elohim. Further to this lies the basis of the relationship between Christ and Jahveh.

Take sunlight—moonlight is the same, it is also sunlight but only reflected by the moon—it doesn't come from some ancient being, it is a reflection. In primordial Christianity an understanding existed for the Christ-word, where Christ refers to his own being by saying: "Before Abraham was, I am" and many others. There certainly was an understanding for the following: Just as the sunlight streams out of itself and the moon reflects it back, so the Christ-being who only appeared later, streamed out in the Jahveh being. We have a fulfilment in the Jahveh-being preceding the Christ-being in time. Through this St John's Gospel becomes deepened through feeling from the first line to the line which says: "And the Word became flesh and lived among us." Even today we don't believe a childlike understanding suffices for the words of the Bible, when we research the Bible by translating it out of an ancient language until we penetrate what lies in the words. Of course, one can say, only through long, very long spiritual scientific studies can one approach the Bible text. That finally, is also my conviction.

Basically, the Bible no longer exists; we have a derivative which we have put together more and more from our abstract language. We need a new starting point in order to try and find what really, in an enlivened way, is in the Bible. For this I have suggested an approach which I will speak about tomorrow, in the interpretation of Mathew 13 and Mark 13. You will have to state in any case that even commenting on the Bible makes it necessary to deal with the Bible impartially. If it is stated that something is mentioned which had only taken place in the year 70, therefore the relevant place could not have been mentioned before other than what had happened after this event, this could be said only if it is announced at the beginning of the Bible explanation that the Bible will be explained completely from a materialistic point of view; then it may be done like this. The Bible itself does not follow the idea that it should be explained materialistically. The Bible itself makes it necessary that the foreseeing of coming events is first and foremost ascribed to Christ Jesus himself, and also ascribed to the apostles. Thus, as I've said, this outlook is what I want to enter into tomorrow on the basis of Mathew 13 and Mark 13, by giving a little interpretation as it has been asked for.

Another question asks about the reality behind the apostolic succession and the priest ordination. This question can hardly be answered briefly because it relates deeply to the abyss which exists between today's evangelist-protestant religious understanding and all nuances of Catholic understanding. It is important that in the moment when these things are spoken about, one must try to acquire a real understanding beyond the rational or rationalistic and beyond the intellectualistic. This is acquired even by those who have little right to live in the sense of such an understanding. In the past I have become acquainted with a large number of outstanding theosophical luminaries, Leadbeater also among them, about whom you would have heard, and some other people, who worked in the Theosophical Society. I have recently had the opportunity—otherwise I would not have worried about it again—to experience, that some of these people are Catholic bishops; it struck me as extraordinary that a part of them were Catholic priests. Leadbeater in any case had, after various things became known about him, not exactly the qualification to become a Catholic bishop. Still this interested me about how people become Catholic priests. One thing is observed with utmost severity, which is the succession. In order for me to see which people have the right to be Catholic bishops, I was given a document which revealed that in a certain year a Catholic bishop left the Catholic church, but one who was ordained, and he then ordained others—right up to Mr Leadbeater—and ordination proceeds in an actual continuation, in an absolutely correct progress; they actually have created a "family tree" by it. I don't want to talk about the start of the "family tree" but you must accept that if it would be a natural progression that there once was an ordained bishop in Rome who dropped away, who then however ordained all the others, so all these Theosophical luminaries would refer back to a real descent of their priesthood to that which once existed. Therefore, awareness of this succession is everywhere present and such things are, according to their understanding, taken completely as the reality.

Something like this must be taken as a reality within the Roman Catholic Church. The old Catholic church more or less didn't have the feeling—but within the Roman Catholic church it is certain accepted this way—that the moment the priest crosses the stole he no longer represents a single personality or attitude but he is then only a member of the church and speaks as a representative, as a member of the church. The Roman Catholic Church considered itself certainly as a closed organism, where the individual loses his individuality through ordination; they see it this way increasingly.

Now something else is in contrast to this. You may think about what I've said as you wish, but I can only speak from my point of view, from the viewpoint of my experience. I have seen much within the transubstantiation. Today in the Catholic Church there is quite a strict difference according to which priest would perform the transubstantiation, yet I have always seen how during the transformation, during the transubstantiation, the host takes on an aura. Therefore, I have come to recognise within the objective process, that when it is worthily accomplished, it is certainly fulfilled. I said, you may think about this as you wish, I say it to you as something which can be looked at from one hand, and on the other hand also as a basic conviction of the church being valid while it was still Catholic, when the evangelist church hadn't become a splintering off. We very soon come back to reality when we look at these things and it must even be said within the sacrament of mass being celebrated there is something like a true activity, which is not merely an outer sign but a real act. If you now take all the sacraments of mass together which had been celebrated, you will create an entirety, a whole, and this is something which stands there as a fact. It is something which certainly touches things, where the evangelical mind would say: Yes, there is something magical in the Catholic Mass.—This it does contain. It also contained within it the magical part, one can experience in the evangelist mind as something perhaps heathen. Good, talk to one another about this. In any case this underscores it as being a reality, which one can't without further ado, without approaching the bearer of this reality, celebrate a mass. I say celebrate; it can be demonstrated, one can show everything possible, but one can't celebrate with the claim that through the mass what should happen at the altar will only happen when it is read without any personal imprint, in absolute application.

You see, it is ever present there where one works with the mysteries; it is simply so, when one works with the mysteries. Just as no Masonic ceremony may be carried out by a non-Mason in the consciousness of the Freemason, nor may a non-ordained person in true Catholicism work from out of Catholicism and perform with full validity the ceremony in consciousness.

This is where we are being directed and must consult. I want you to take note that in this case the Catholic rules were actually very strict. Please don't take things up in such a way as if I am saying this towards pro-Catholicism; I only want to point out the situation. It isn't important for us to be for, or opposed, to Catholicism, because it's about something quite different. Particular customs were very strictly adhered to in the Catholic Church—not at all what is today in Rome's mood and procedure. If a priest became so unworthy as to be excommunicated, then his skin would be ripped off, scraped off from his fingers where he had held the sacred host in his hands. His skin would be scraped off. Sometimes such things are referred to but legally it is so, and I know such processes quite well, that after the priest's excommunication the skin of the fingers which touched the host, were scraped off. You can certainly set the objective instead of the succession that goes from the apostles through the priesthood to the priest celebrating today. You can set that which goes through consecration and through the sacraments themselves. You can exclude priesthood, but you can only exclude that by taking things objectively, right to a certain degree, objectively, that the priest no longer may have skin on his fingers when he is no longer authorised to celebrate the sacrificial mass.

Isn't it true, if you have Catholic feeling, it is something as definite to you as two plus two making four? It is something definite according to religious feeling. When you don't have that then you as modern people must have a certain piety, which says to you the Catholic church has also just preserved the celebration of mass and if this is carried outside the circle to which it had been entrusted—other circles have not preserved the sacrifice of mass—if it is being performed in other circles it is pure theft. Real theft. These things must also be understood from such concepts. I believe to some it appears very difficult to understand what I am saying but in conclusion it has as such a certain validity which needs to be achieved through understanding. We don't have to worry about it here because you can experience the mass according to what there is to experience. As far as the training of a new ritual is concerned, it would not be disturbed at all by this, that the Catholic mass regards the mass to be something so real that it may certainly not to be removed from the field of Catholicism.

This is firstly something which I wanted to say during our limited time. When I speak about the mass itself, and I will do so, I will still have a few things to add.

The evolution of Art in Middle Europe up to the time when Dürer and Holbein entered this stream of evolution is one of the most complex problems in the history of Art. Especially in Dürer's case—to speak of all the elements that culminate in him, we have to deal with a whole series of interpenetrating impulses. Another difficult problem is the relation of this artistic evolution to that other one, the culmination of which we considered a short while ago: the Italian Renaissance, the great masters of Italy.

Needless to say, we can do no more than emphasise a few salient points. To understand what is really important in the evolution of this European Art, we must realise, above all, the existence of a peculiar talent, a peculiar activity of fancy, of imagination which had its mainsprings in Middle Europe. I mean that Central Europe which we may conceive extending approximately from Saxony to Thuringia, to the sea, to the Atlantic Ocean. Peculiar impulses of artistic fancy or imagination proceed from this region of Middle Europe. As impulses of fancy they go back into very olden times. In a certain way they were undoubtedly at work even at the time of the first spread of Christianity in the more Southern regions. These Northern impulses of the imagination stand in clear contrast to those of a specifically Southern nature. The difference is not easy to characterise, but we may describe it somehow thus: the Southern impulses of imagination are rooted in a certain power of perception for the quiet form, the form at rest, inasmuch as form, and color too, spring forth from deeper manifestations which lie hidden, in a certain sense, behind what is directly, physically perceptible. Accordingly, whatsoever the Southern imagination seeks to reproduce in Art, it tends rather to raise it above the level of the individual. It tends to raise the Individual into the Typical, the Universal, into a realm where the more special, earthly and human qualities will melt away. It is a striving to reveal how something that lies beneath the outer objects works into their forms and colors. This impulse of imagination also evolves a certain tendency to come to rest in the well balanced composition—placing the figures side by side in certain mutual relationships—a power of composition which, as you know, reaches its highest eminence in Raphael.

The Mid-European impulse of artistic fancy is of a very different kind. Tracing it back into the oldest time, we find that to begin with it makes no immediate effort to take hold of the form as such, or to achieve a restfulness of composition. Its interest is in the quick event which it portrays; it seeks to express what comes from the soul's impulses, to portray how the living Will of man expresses itself in gesture and in movement—not so much in the well-measured Form that is appropriate to human nature, but in the gesture in which the soul itself is living, in which it seeks to find expression itself as in its own sign or token. Such is the Northern impulse of artistic fancy. He who is sensitive to these things will always feel through it the working of ancient runes, where twigs or treetrunks or the like were thrown together, to express something through their positions as they fell. The sign or token, and the inner life which it contains underlies this kind of imagination, which is able, therefore, to unite itself far more with the individual expression of the soul's life; with all that springs directly from the Will-impulse of the soul. Little is left to us of what was there in olden times,—I do not mean so much as finished works of Art but as ideas of human life and cosmic processes. All this was exterminated root and branch with the spread of Christianity. Little is left of what wls contained in the old Paganism. Once more, I do not mean perfect works of plastic Art—nor will I say symbolical—but rather sign-like representations of their ideas about the world and life. If more of these things had been preserved, even the outer world would feel how the essential thing in the Northern Art is this imagination working more from within outward—from the impulses of Will and not contemplative vision. This imagination, working forth from the impulse of the Will, must be regs.rded as the fundamental note in all the cultural life that spread from the North towards the South. And, I may say, more than is generally realised, spread out in this direction. The time will come when men will see and unravel how much of these Northern impulses lies hidden, above all, in the art of the Renaissance. It is hard to recognise in the finished and extant works of Art, whether of the North, or of the South, or Spain, the true nature of the impulses that they contain. For these impulses flowed together from many quarters. Consider, for instance, all that is living in the famous “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. Compare it with the earlier pictures of the Last Supper which were derived more purely from the Southern spirit. See what dramatic life and movement he has expressed in the relations of the several figures, see the individual characters of soul which shine out of these faces. Then you will realise, working in all this, a Northern impulse that spread mysteriously towards the South. Something is here poured out, needless to say, poured out into the purely Southern imagination—albeit correspondingly toned down—which we observe again in quite another sphere in Shakespeare. For Shakespeare's figures are certainly born out of the Northern Spirit. They always express the individual human being himself, they no longer contain what comes, as it were, out of the Supersensible, using the human figure and human action like a mere instrument for its expression.

But we may go still further, my dear friends. Strange though it may sould today, if we observe Michelangelo's wonderful foreshortenings in the Sistine Chapel we cannot but realise, even in this element of movement, an impulse coming from the North. These impulses were but submerged and overlaid by Southern ones. We can see a special instance of this process in Raphael, whose imagination, growing up amid the loneliness of the Umbrian Hills, had remained, after all, more or less purely Southern. All that Raphael observed in Leonardo, in Michelangelo—influenced as they were by Northern impulses—all this he took and rounded off and ‘classicised’ if I may put it so, into his marvellous composition.

These are a few bare indications of profound problems, which if we cannot master we do not understand the medieval Art at all. For the same reason, more than elsewhere we find in the oldest extant medieval Art the expression of the word itself in signs quite naturally wedded with the plastic arts. The artistic elaboration of letters into exquisitely printed miniatures, in the biblical works created in Europe at that time, give us a feeling of something absolutely natural. In the oldest period of Christian culture we find the monks—all of whom undoubtedly absorbed Mid-European impulses—decorating their litanies and other books in this way, causing the letters, as it were, to blossom forth into miniature paintings. This was no mere external habit. It sprang straight from the feeling of an inner connection between sign and picture. The sign or token wedged its way into pictorial description, as it were. Now the ‘sign’, once again, is a direct expression of the human Will, the human life of soul. Here, therefore, we have the natural transition from that which seeks expression in sentences and words to that which flows into the painted miniature or into the sculptured ivories with which they decorate the covers of their books. Truly, in all these things there blossomed forth something that was afterwards no longer there for Mid-European Art. In every case these miniatures reveal a creation with inner life and impulse of the soul, combined with a certain naivete, a certain uncouth simplicity in respect to what the South could reproduce with such abundant skill; I mean, what lives in the Form itself, in the Form that belongs to the pure human nature before the movement and mobility expressing the individual life of the soul, works from within and pours itself into the nature of these forms. Take any of these miniatures in the old Bibles. Again and again you will see it is the artist's impulse to express, albeit through the traditional biblical figures, what he himself may have experienced in soul. A guilty conscience, for example—all such experiences of the soul are expressed magnificently in the older Mid-European miniature painting. This, as I said, is combined with great uncouthness in point of Form; I mean that human form to which man himself, through his own individuality, does not contribute, but in which the Divine and spiritual being that underlies all Nature is revealed.

Now the impulse which I have just characterised rayed out again and again from Middle Europe, and as it did so it lost itself in what was raying outward meantime from the South. It lost itself, for instance, in the spread of Christianity and Romanism. Moreover, that which rayed out from Middle Europe was fertilised in turn from the South. All that was gained from the South by way of mastery of Form and of Color, too, inasmuch as it manifests the underlying spirituality of nature, all this entered into the flower of the Northern impulse. Thus did the several impulses grow into one another, layer upon layer, interweaving.

Evolution, therefore, did not take place continuously but more or less by sudden starts. Again and again we feel impelled to ask: What would have evolved if, instead of these sudden impacts, there had been a continuous process of evolution? We have the following feeling, for example (though, needless to say, these are mere hypotheses); What would have been the outcome if that which was contained, during the early Carolingean and Ottonian periods, in the miniatures and sculptured ivories above described, had been enabled to evolve straightforwardly to a great Art? What actually took place was very different; the Romanesque and Classical carried forward on the advancing wave of Christianity, poured itself out into all this, bringing with it in architecture and in sculpture, the impulse of Form which we described just now—the Southern impulse. Then were the Northern impulse of movement and expression, and the Southern of form and color wedded to one another (though when I speak of color in the Southern impulse I must qualify once more:—Color as the manifestation of the underlying Spiritual that is expressed in Nature, not of the individual).

But there was yet another thing. We may say that with the decline of the Ottonian period the first Northern impulse came to an end. The classical and Romanesque grew into it, spreading into the tributary valleys of the Rhone and Rhine. Into these regions especially, but further afield as well, a Classical impulse found its way. The two impulses coalesced and attained their height towards the 12th and 13th centuries. Then from the West emerged another impulse, which had been preparing in the meantime. Once more, then, the impulse of contemplative Vision—the Southern impulse, properly speaking,—was wedded in mid-European Art with that impulse of movement which, as I described just now, sprang essentially from the element of Will. But meanwhile in the West a different impulse was preparing, and grew into the union of the other two, till from the 12th and 13th centuries it was completely interwoven with the united impulse which I characterised just now, raying outward from the basins of the Rhone and the Rhine. This other impulse, prepared in the West, also resulted from the flowing together of two distinct impulses. It appears in the sublime forms of the Gothic. Truly, in Gothic Art once more two impulses have come together. The one is carried thither from the North. It contains, if I may describe it so, a practicality of life, a cleverness in skill and understanding, a certain realism. It comes to Europe on the Norman waves of culture. The other impulse comes from Spain, and more especially from Southern France. Thus we have coming from the North an element of intelligence, utility and realism (but we must not confuse this with the later realism; this early realism sought to understand the Universe, the Cosmos, and wanted to see all earthly things in their connection with the heavenly). From the South, on the other hand, and concentrated most of all in Southern France, there came what we may describe as the mystical element, striving upward from the earthly realm and reaching up to Heaven. Hence the peculiar nature of the Gothic, for these two elements have grown together in it, a mystical element and an intellectual. No one will understand the Gothic who cannot see in it on the one hand this mystical element which, concentrated in the South of France, grew especially in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. It brings into the Gothic Art that mysterious quality of striving upward from below, while united with it, on the other hand, there is an element of cool intelligence and craftsmanship, which is never absent from the Gothic. The sublime upward striving of the Gothic forms is mystical; their interlacings, and ingenious relationships come from another quarter, adding to the mystical element the height of craftsmanship.

Thus in the Gothic the one side and the other are peculiarly united. These impulses which poured themselves into the Gothic flowed over again from the West, notably in the 12th and 13th centuries, to permeate once more the artistic creation of Mid-Europe.

But we must bear in mind another thing in this connection. It is true that in the natural course of civilisation there was always a tendency for things to interweave with one another, layer upon layer; for every impulse always tends to spread. The Classical element of Form is interwoven, for example, in the works proceeding from the Gothic. But this is only the one tendency. In Middle Europe there always remained a certain impulse of revolt which is especially to be observed in Art. Again and again, this impulse tends to bring out a strong element of Will and Movement and expression. Thus, after all, that which flows inward, both from the South and West, is ever and again more or less repelled, pushed back again. In Middle Europe they felt the Classical and in later times even the Gothic as a foreign element.

What is it, essentially, that they feel as a foreign element? It is that which in any way tends to blot out the individuality. They feel in the Roman and Classical something that is hostile to the individual. Nay, in later times they even feel in the Gothic an element beneath which the individual must groan and soffocate. In the artistic life especially, there is in Middle Europe the mood which afterwards finds expression in another sphere, in the Reformation,—a mood already voiced by spirits such as Tauler or Valentin Weigel. Perceiving how the Gothic and the Classical wedged their way into the Mid-European principle and completely overwhelmed it, we must say that in the centuries before Dürer, the Mid-European principle as such, in its own impulses, failed and fell and was unable to come forth, being overwhelmed by the other. Yet it lived on; in thoughts and feelings it was always present. It is the same element which speaks so eloquently out of the subsequent conceptions of Nature, seeking to unite with bold intelligence Heaven and Earth—seeking to comprehend all other things by laws discovered also on the Earth.

But in the heart of it all something quite different is holding sway; it comes to expression very beautifully in the words of Goethe's Faust. Imagine Faust in his study, which we may naturally conceive in Gothic forms. He has studied all that we might describe as Romanism and Classicism, Over against it all he sets the human individuality—the self-supporting individuality of man. Yet how does he contrast it? To understand how Faust opposes the human individuality to all these things in the midst of which he finds himself, we must realise that to this day there thrives almost unnoticed, in Middle Europe, something that unites this country most wonderfully with the East. When today we read or hear of the part that was played in the primeval Persian culture by light and darkness—Ormuzd and Ahriman—we take these things too abstractly. We fail to realise how the men of earlier ages stood in the midst of real and concrete forces. Real light, real darkness, in their mutual interplay, were a direct real experience to the men of former days; and this experience stood nearer to the impulse of Movement and enpression than to the Southern one of Form and composition, where things are placed in quiet balance side by side.

In the creative weaving of the World, light and darkness weave together. Influences of light and dark ray out upon all that lives and moves on Earth, as man and animal. Through light and shade, and through their mutual enhancement to the world of color, we feel the connection between the inner expression of the soul of man that flows into his movements, and something Heavenly and Spiritual which lies far nearer to this human impulse of movement than anything the Southern Art is able to express. Man walks along, man turns his head. With every step, with every turning of the head, new impulses of light and shade appear. When we study this connection between light and movement we enter into something which, as it were, links earthly Nature with the elemental. In this interplay of elemental with earthly Nature the man of Middle Europe lived with a special intensity whenever he could rise to creative fancy. Hence, though the fact has scarcely been observed as yet, color arises very differently in Middle Europe than it does in the South. Color, in the Southern Art, is color driven outward from the inner nature of the being to the surface. That which arises from the artistic imagination of Mid-Europe is cast on to the surface by the interplay of light and darkness; it is color playing over the surface of things. Many things as yet imperfectly realised will only be understood when we perceive this difference in coloring; when we perceive how on the one hand the color is cast on the object and plays over its surface, while on the other hand it surges from within the object to the surface. The latter is the Southern Art of color. Color in Mid-European art is color cast on to the surface, springing from the interplay of light and shade, glistening forth out of the weaving and willing of the light and darkness. As all these things interpenetrate, layer upon layer, the several impulses are not so easily perceived; yet they decidedly exist.

This impulse in Mid-Europe is connected in its turn with what I would call the magical element which we find in the old Persian civilisation. For the interplay of light and shade—light and darkness—is deeply connected with the ancient Persian wisdom of the Magi. Here we have the mysterious manifestations of the life of soul and spirit, as it works at the same time in man himself and in the elemental weaving of the light and shade that play around the human being. It is as though his inner being entered into a hidden relationship with the light and shade that play around him, and with the glistening life of color that springs from light and darkness. This is a thing that lies forever in the element of Will; it brings the quality of magic into connection with the feelings of the soul. And man himself, through this, comes into relation with the elemental beings—those beings who, to begin with, manifest themselves within the elements. Therefore Faust, having turned away from all the philosophic, medical, legal and theosophical studies coming to him from the South, gives himself up to magic. But in doing so he must stand firm and secure within himself. He must not be afraid of all the influences in the midst of which a man is placed when he would stand firm on his own personality alone. He must have no fear of Hell or of the Devil, he must march firmly on through light and darkness. Think how beautiful this feature is: Faust himself working and weaving in the wondrous twilight of the morning! Think how the play of light and darkness enters the famous monologue of Goethe's Faust. It is a wonderful artistic inspiration, intimately connected with the Mid-European impulse. It is equally a poem or a painting, out of the very depths of the Mid-European principle.

Here, again, we have a connection between Man and the naturalistic life and being of the Elements. This is a trait that also played its part in Mid-European conception of the Christian tradition coming upwards from the South. Like a perpetual rebellion, this element wedges itself in; this element by which Mid-Europe is akin to Asia, to an ancient Asiatic civilisation.

All these different influences play into one another; and now into the midst of all this evolution, Albrecht Dürer, an absolutely unique figure in the history of Art, comes upon the scene. Born in 1471, he died in 1526.

I have studied Dürer again and again, as an individual figure, it is true, but placed as he is in the whole context of Mid-European culture, I could never understand him in any other way. Through the infinite and countless channels whereby the unconscious life of the human soul is connected with the life and civilisation around him, Dürer is related to his environment.

We see him at an early age in his portrait of the Jungfer Furlegerie (above) bringing out the light and shade of the figure, modelling this most wonderfully. Here we already recognise the working of the impulse I described just nau. Here and throughout his life, Dürer is particularly great in expressing what arises from the above-described experience and sympathy of man with elemental Nature. He brings this element into all that he absorbs from biblical tradition. At the same time, he has great difficulty in adapting himself to the Southern element. We might say, it is a right sour task for him. How different in Leonardo's case: It seems perfectly natural to Leonardo to take up the study of anatomy and physiology, and so receive into his faculty of outward vision uhat was formerly given to a more occult sensitiveness, as I explained in the last lecture. For Dürer it is a sour task—this study of anatomy, this studious mastery of the forms in which the Divine and spiritual, transcending the individual human being, comes to expression in the human figure. It does not come natural to him to make these studied forms his min, so as to re-create the human figure, as it were, after the pattern first created by God. That is not Dürer's way. His way is rather this: to trace in all existing things the inner movement, the impulse of Will; to follow up uhat brings the human nature into direct connection with all things moving in the outer world,—with light and shade and all that lives therein. This is Dürer's kingdom. Hence he always creates out of the element of movement, whereto his oun original artistic fancy is directed.

Is it not perfectly natural for the everyday, workaday things of human life to have found their vay into the evolution of these impulses? An Art which mainly seeks to express the Divine that works in man, the Universal type that transcends the human individual,—such an Art will of its own inherent impulses be less inclined to portray uhat in the everyday life of man stamps itself upon his form and figure,—from his everyday calling, from the familiar experiences of his life. In the Mid-European Art, on the other hand, this element plays a great part, and in this respect a special impulse proceeded from the districts which we now call the Netherlands. Thence came the practical impulse, if I may call it so, permeating the artistic imagination with all that is stamped upon the human being by the familiar reality of earthly things, so that in his gestures, nay, his form and mien and physiognomy, he grow, together pith this earthly kingdom.

Such impulses flowed together in Mid-Europe, in ways most manifold; and only as we disentangle them (Which would require, of course, far more than these few abstract sketches), do we come to true understanding of what is characteristic in Mid-European Art. We shall still have to bring out many a single point; for these things cannot all be said, we can but hint at them.

We will now begin with the period when the Classical impulse grew together with the Mid-European. We shall see some of the sculptured figures in the Cathedral at Naumburg in Germany, representing individual human beings of that time.

Especially in these sculptured works, you see most beautifully combined on the one hand, the perfect striving for expressiveness of soul, and on the other hand the relatively perfect mastery of form which they had absorbed by this time from the South. You will see this especially in these sculptures of the Cathedral at Naumburg, belonging to the thirteenth century. At that time the Mid-European feeling had grown together in Mid-Europe with the power of form which they received from the Classical. While on the other hand, the same Mid-European feeling blossomed forth in the creations of Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eichenbach. Remembering that this was the time which brought to the surface these great poets, we shall have before us a clearer picture of the stream of civilisation which was then flowing over Central Europe.

Wonderfully, in this work, you see the life of the soul poured out into the facial expression.

Intensely individual expressiveness of soul, not in the least immersed in any Universal type, is here united with a high technique of Form—a faculty which, as I said, they had received from the South.

We will now turn to works derived more out of the Gothic thinking. We will show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Strassburg.

These figures are far more adapted to the surrounding architecture than the ones we saw just now. The expression is still most decidedly determined from within, but the forming of the figures is also called forth by the surrounding architecture. We observe this feature even more if we go further West.

It is characteristic of that time to represent the Church as the power that overcometh. Again and again you will find these motifs of conquered demons or the like.

The Church is represented in the figure of this woman.

Please impress upon your minds not only the head with its peculiar expression, but the whole gesture of the figure. We will show the Church once more so that you may compare and see the wonderful contrast of the soul's life expressed in the two figures, Synagogue and Church.

As a further instance of the working-together of Southern and Mid-European impulses, we will now give some examples of the School of Cologne. The Cologne Master of uncertain identity, often known as the Master Wilhelm, combines great delicacy of form and line with tender intimacy of expression, as you will see in the following:

Observe, too, the lower figures, see how the forms are created out of movement and gesture. The following well-known picture of the Virgin in the Cologne Museum is by the same Master.

I beg you to observe, in all the following pictures, how these Masters love to express the life of the soul, not only in facial expression and in gesture, but especially in the whole forming of the hands. That epoch, more than any other, was working at the perfection of the hands, in relation to the inner life. I mention this especially because it is brought to a great height in Dürer who with the greatest joy portrays all that the soul can bring to expression in the hands.

In this Cologne Master, we truly see a pure permeation of the Southern element of Form with Mid-European expressiveness of the soul. We will now go on to the Master who came from Constance to Cologne, in whom the element of expression rebels once more against the element of Form, albeit this later Master learnt very much from his predecessor—from the creator of the last two pictures.

I refer, of course, to Stephen Lochner, who, deeply rooted as he is in the Art of expression, if I may say so, adapts himself with a certain revolutionary opposition to what he learns in Cologne from the former Master and his pupils.

Here, then, ye have the works of Stephen Lochner following on those we showed just now. However closely he adapts himself to them, we see in him a new beginning—once more, a fresh creation from within. He came to Cologne in 1420. He who became more or less his teacher there—the Master of the “Veronica” and of the “Madonna of the Sweet Pea”—had died about 1410. In 1420 Stephen Lochner came to Cologne.

A wonderful picture by Stephen Lochner: Mary in a bower of roses. Observe the immense mobility of the figures and the attempt to bring movement into the picture as a whole. We can only reproduce it in light and shade; far more is expressed in the coloring. See the mobility that comes into the picture by the spread veil, out of which God the Father looks down on the Madonna and the Child. See how every angel does his task,—what movement this brings into the whole picture. The picture grows into a composition born out of the very movement. In the Southern impulse you have composition born of restfulness; movement comes into it only when the Northern impulse is added. Here, in this work of Stephen Lochner's, everything is inner movement from the outset.

We will now show some examples of the work of another Master—one who received strong impulses from Flanders, from the West. The Western impulses are clearly visible in him. I refer to Martin Schongauer, who lived from 1420 to 1490. Here you will see the same artistic tendency, combined, however, with the Western impulse from Flanders.

You see how this brings in a far more realistic element.

This essentially visionary picture is conceived most realistically and with great individuality. It is, indeed, an extraordinarily true Imagination which enables the artist to embody in such realistic figures the human passions, the content of a temptation. Side by side with the human figure he places that which lives as a reality in the astral body when temptation comes upon us.

Here, again, you have a temptation of Saint Anthony. This one, however, is by Grünewald, who lived from 1470 to 1529. In Grünewald you will admire more or less the culminating point of all that flowed together in the preceding efforts. Real individual expression is combined with great technical power. Grünewald, in many respects, is far more influenced by the Southern imagination than Schongauer. It is most interesting to compare the two “Temptations,” Their subject is the sable. We might even conceiyg,them as the Temptation which came to him on the one day in the former picture, and that which comes on the following day in this one The point is not the detailed subject but the artistic treatment as such which shows, undoubtedly, a higher perfection in this artist than in the forMer.

This is the central picture in the famous Isenhaimer Altar, now at Colmar. Observe, to the very smallest detail, how the characterisation always flows from the expression. Even the little animal down here partakes in the whole action. Study the flowing of the soul into the hands.

One wing of the Isenheimer Altar. Another temptation of St. Anthony, also by Matthias Grünewald.

This is the other wing of the same Altar:

Next is the Predella of the Isenheimer Altar. The representation of character in these works of Art is perfect in its kind.

Also a part of the same Altar-piece.

This, then, is Master Grünewald who represents in a certain respect the very summit of what we have seen coming over, evolving more and more, from the thirteenth century into the fifteenth, and on into the sixteenth.

We will now pass on to a different element, where with comparatively less technical ability (for in these last pictures the technical ability is very great) we find a nee effort to express what I called just now the “rebellion” in individual characterisation. We will pass on to Lucas Cranach, who, though with far less ability, brings out the expressiveness and inner life of the soul with revolutionary impulse. He shows how the soul finds outward expression even in the everyday, workaday life of man. In Lucas Cranach this impulse is especially active.

Here you have the purest Reformation mood, although it is a Madonna,—it is the mood of the Reformation through and through. To a high degree, the human element outweighs all other considerations. Look at the figures, both of Mother and Child, and you will see that this is so.

An individual human being is painted here to show how he reveres the Christ. A personality with both feet on the ground, he expresses as a deliberate Will-impulse of the soul the reverence he feels for the Christ. The whole conception shows how this very soul comes to expression in the human feeling. The man's identity is known, it is Albrecht von Brandenburg.

We now come to the most eminently mediaeval artist, Albrecht Dürer.

More in the period of his youth.

Study once more the hand; observe how the very hair is arranged to bring out the effects of light and darkness.

Here you have Dürer's Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit. The conception is truly born out of the whole spirit of the age—a conception reaching far beyond all thought, and yet in some way it was mastered by that time. The conception is here worked out in Dürer's way, with his wonderful drawing. Study it carefully, and you will see how everywhere, even in his drawing, he is aiming at the light and shade, and arranges the composition accordingly.

For a definite reason we will now once more show Raphael's famous picture known as ‘Disputa,’ which is familiar to you all.

You know what is characterised in this picture: Below, the College of Theologians engaged in the study of the truths of Theology; and there bursts into this gathering the Revelation of the Trinity; Father, Son and Spirit. !le see three stages, as it were: the Spiritual Beings rising ever higher,—those who have passed through the Gate of Death, those who are never incarnated. We see the composition of the figures down below arranged quite in the Southern way; the fundamental conception of the picture is expressed in a restful composition, the various figures balanced side by side; the very movement flows into this state of rest. Now let us return again to Dürer's ‘Holy Trinity,’ painted almost at the same time as this.

Compare this composition with the other. Once more you have three stages, but the composition here arises out of movement. It is wonderfully contrasted with the other, the Southern composition created almost simultaneously with this. The picture is in Vienna, the coloring is very beautiful. It is quite untrue to suggest that in creating this composition Dürer was influenced in any way by anything he had received from the South. On the contrary, the Southern painters can frequently be shown to have been influenced by Northern compositions—if not by Dürer's own. Indeed, in one instance it can be historically proved:—

For his Crucifixion (undoubtedly a later picture), Raphael had Dürer's drawings before him. Needless to say, we make no such assertion in this case; but the idea that Dürer himself was influenced must be rejected. The motif lay in the whole spirit of the time; it existed in the widest circles, and this work of Dürer's is thoroughly a product of the Mid-European impulse.

Here we see Dürer, too, as a master in characterisation. The picture represents Jesus among the Doctors of the Law, but needless to say, the heads of the characters are surch as the artist saw around him in his own environment.

This is the famous picture of the four Apostles. The excellence of the picture lies in the sharp characterisation of the difference of the four Apostles, in temperament and character.

This is the center-piece of the ‘Paumgartner altar.’

I have inserted this picture because it shows Dürer's conception of movement,—movement proceeding directly out of the human being.

This is the famous picture of the Christian knight, or, as it is often called: ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel,’—the Knight, Death and the Devil. Observe how entirely this picture is a product out of the age. Compare it with the passage from ‘Faust’ to which I just now referred.

“Tis true, I am shrewder than all your dull tribe, Magister, doctor, priest, parson and scribe; Scruple or doubt comes not to enthral me, Neither can devil nor hell now appal me.”

There you have the character who will fear neither Death nor the Devil, but go his way straight forward through the world. So, indeed, he must be represented—the Christian knight who has revolted thoroghly against all the doctors, masters, scribes and priests that have encumbered him. He has to go his way through the world alone, fearing neither Death nor the Devil that stand across his path. He leaves them on one side, and perseveres on his way. ‘The Christian Knight’ this picture should be called. Death and the Devil stand in the way; he marches over them, passes them by unfalteringly. The same mood of the time, out of which the monologue in Goethe's "Faust" is consciously created, comes to expression in this picture by Dürer.

Look at this thoroughly medieval room. The composition is born purely out of the light and darkness, and it is consciously intended so. Look at the light that floods the room. Placed into the light, there is the dog asleep, getting least light of all, more or less in the shade. Then the lion, as it were, a creature of more [?ill; he seems to be dreaming, and there is much light on his face. The contrast of the two animals is intentionally thus expressed in their relation to the light that falls upon them. And now contrast with these St. Jerome himself. On him the light is also falling, but at the same time he seems to ray it back again out of himself. Man and animal—saint and animal—are contrasted simply by being placed in the light. So, too, the skull. Dog and lion, saint and skull; the whole composition is ordered with respect to the light and shade.

It is like a very history of evolution, magnificently expressed by placing the different figures thus into the light. It is one of the greatest qualities in Dürer to bring out with such creative power mthe inherent force of composition that lies in the interplay of light with different objects and living creatures. Of course, the main figures do not alone make up the composition. But we must especially adraire in this picture the bringing out of the force of composition which lies inherent in the light and shade.

Of course, you must not take such a statement as beyond cavil, but this picture seems placed into the world for the express purpose of showing what Dürer intended in his treatment of light and shade, his power of composition out of light and darkness. As if to show what he intends, he puts together the angular body of the polyhedron and the round sphere. In the sphere he shows how light and darkness work together; he lets the light fall on the sphere in a quite peculiar way. Having studied the distribution of the light on the sphere, you may proceed to observe how the effects of light expressed in the folds of the garment correspond to those of the spherical surface. Dürer lets them fall in such a way as to express in the arrangement of the folds all that comes to expression by way of light and shade on the simple surface of the sphere. Now let us go on to the polyhedron, and compare this in turn. According to the angle of the surface, it is light, half-dark, quite dark, and brilliantly illumined. Then he sets down a being of more fleeting form, once more in order to portray the falling of the light upon the surfaces, even as he showed it in the polyhedron. So that in every place you have the question: What says the light to this object? What says the light to this being? You may compare the effect of light and shade in every case as in the Polyhedron and in the sphere. In this picture Dürer has created a work of immense educational value. You cannot do better than use this picture if you want to teach the art of shading. Up here, to the right of the bat that carries the word, ‘melancholia,’ he lets a source of light appear—something that is self-luminous, in contrast to the reflected light expressed on all the other surfaces.

(At this point some one interposed the question: Has the picture any deeper meaning?)

Why should this not be deep enough? Why look for any deeper meaning? If you only study the magical and mysterious qualities of light in space, you will find in this a far deeper meaning than if you set to work with symbolic and mysterious interpretations. Such interpretations lead us away from the true domain of Art. Even if deeper meanings can be seen in it—as, for instance, in the table of planetary figures on the right, and other things of that kind,—it is far better simply to associate these things with the character and setting of the time. It was natural in that age to put such things as these together. But we do better to remain within the sphere of Art than to look for symbols. I even think there is considerable humour in this picture, inasmuch as the title (somewhat amateurishly translated, I admit) may be intended to convey, as a more humorous suggestion, the words, ‘black colouring.’ What he really meant with the word ‘Melancholia’ was something like ‘black coloring.’ In a rather hidden way (though, as I said, this is a little amateurish) the word may well be held to designate ‘black coloring’ or ‘blackness.’ That, at any rate, is far more likely than that it was intended to express some profound symbol. Dürer was concerned with the artistic treatment—the plastic quality, the forming of the light. Please do not think there is no depth in this plastic treatment of the light; do not look out for artificial symbolical interpretations. Is not the world deep enough if it contains such light-effects as these? They, indeed, are far deeper than any mystical contents we might hunt for in this picture because it happens to be entitled ‘Melancholia.’

We now pass on to Holbein, an artist essentially different from Dürer. Born in Augsburg, he then lives in Basle, and afterwards loses himself—disappears, as it were,—in England. He is a realist in an especial sense. Even where he creates a composition, he carries his strong realism into the clement of portraiture. At the same time he strives to express what I referred to just now; the things of everyday in the life of the soul. I beg you to observe how the milieu, the calling, the whole environment in the midst of which a man is living, is stamped upon his soul and character. Holbein expresses this in a wellnigh extreme way; he seeks to draw it forth out of the soul, creating the whole human being out of the very time in which he lives.

Here, again, you have the same motive. An actual human being of the time (it is the Burgomaster of Basel, Herr Mayer, with his family) is shown worshipping the Madonna. This picture is in Darmstadt. There is a very good copy in Dresden, so good that for a long time it passed as a second version by Holbein himself. Here you will see the extreme realism of Holbein, whereas in Dürer there are those elements which we tried to characterise before—quite universal elements. I'm sorry we have no slides of Holbein's ‘Dance of Death.’ Perhaps we may show these another time, for Holbein is especially great in his treatment of the motif of Death:

In conclusion, I will show you something which, while not in direct connection with the other, belongs, nevertheless, to the same artistic context.

This sculpture of the Madonna, which is in Nuremburg, reveals to perfection what the Mid-European art could achieve in gesture and tenderness of feeling. It is by an unknown artist. You must imagine this Madonna, opposite her, perhaps, St. John, a great Cross with the Christ in the center; for this Madonna of Nuremberg belongs undoubtedly to a Crucifixion group. Here you have the very flower of German Art in the 16th century or perhaps a little later. Much of the tenderness in the Madonnas which we showed today will be found again in this one, especially in the unique posture.

We have tried to show you, my dear friends, all those things which, seen in the connection I have tried to indicate, bring out in clear relief the individuality of Dürer. One only learns fully to recognise Dürer when one considers him in connection with the time—his own time and the time before him. More than is generally imagined, there lives in Dürer the greatness of that impulse which led, in another sphere, to the assertion and rebellion that we associate with Faust. In Dürer, indeed, there lived, artistically speaking, a goodly piece of Faust.

You will get a real feeling of the time in which Dürer lived and out of which he was born, if you take such pictures as his ‘St. Jerome,’ his ‘Melancholia,’ and his ‘Christian Knight,’ and many another, and compare them with the mood that goes out from the first monologues of Goethe's Faust—which must, of course, be placed in the whole setting of the time, even as Goethe himself intended it. Nay, more, you could compare Dürer's ‘St. Jerome’ with certain actual pictures of Faust and you would find a real connecting link. When I spoke of Dürer's creating out of light and shade, I certainly did not mean it in a banal sense. Needless to say, anyone who wishes to imitate some fragment of reality can work out of the light and shade. This is one of the most characteristic features in Dürer, while on the other hand he also has in him the longing for individual characterisation which is so remarkably expressed in his ‘Heads of Apostles.’

We have thus tried to bring before you a few of the important points in the old Christian Art. On the next occasion we shall refer to some others which entered the main stream here or there. Then we shall see the whole in its totality.

The spiritual-scientific movement has arisen in our time not because of the arbitrary act of this or of that individual, of this or of that society, but because it is connected with the whole evolution of humanity and, as such, it should be considered as one of the most important of cultural impulses. If we would penetrate into the mission of the spiritual-scientific movement, we must transfer ourselves into the past and future of mankind.

Just as the individual human beings have evolved, from the moment when they first descended as individual souls from the bosom of the Godhead, so mankind as a whole has also evolved. Consider the differences, the changes and the development which may be observed upon the surface of the earth in the course of thousands of years! Consider how entirely things have changed during that time! Generally speaking, this is difficult to realise and to grasp quite clearly.

We should first explain that what we are accustomed to name “mankind” is only the product of the so-called fifth root-race. This was preceded by another human race, the fourth root-race, which lived on a continent that should be thought of as lying between present-day Europe and America. This continent was Atlantis. Here our ancestors had quite a different form and an entirely different civilisation. The ancient Atlantean did not possess a developed intellect and mind, but he was equipped with fine somnambulistic-clairvoyant forces. Logical power, a combining intellect, science and art, such as they exist now, did not exist in ancient Atlantis, for man's faculties of thought and feeling were quite different. At that time, he could not have combined thoughts, nor could he have reckoned, counted, or read; as men do now; yet certain somnambulistic-clairvoyant spiritual forces lived in him. He could understand the language of Nature and could hear God speak to him in the murmuring waves; he could understand the rolling thunder, the rustling forest, the delicate aromas of the flowers; he could understand this language of Nature and was in the whole of Nature. At that time, no law or jurisprudence were needed to come to an understanding with one's neighbour; the Atlantean just went out and listened to the sounds of the trees and of the wind and these told him what he had to do.

Folk-lore, which never contains anything haphazard or thought-out, has preserved the memory of ancient Atlantis in a beautiful way, when it speaks of “Nibelheim”, for instance, in the Nibelung Poem. In a delightful way it speaks of the Rhine and all these rivers as waters which have remained behind from the mists of ancient Atlantis. And the wisdom of Atlantis is referred to in the treasure which lies buried below their waves, On this continent, which was situated between America and Europe, we must seek the seminary of the ancient adepts, Those who were suited to be the pupils of the great individualities whom we call the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony-Feelings, were trained in these schools.

The seminary which flourished during the fourth Atlantean sub-race, this first school of adepts, would now be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There, the pupils were taught in quite a different way from now. At that time, a powerful, influence could pass from man to man, through the force which still lay in the spoken word.

Simple folks of to-day still possess a fine feeling for the inner, spiritual and occult power of words. But it is impossible to compare the present power of words with that of the past. For in the past, this was something tremendous, and the word alone awakened forces in the soul of the pupil. A mantram of to-day has no longer the force of earlier times, when words were not so permeated by thoughts, as is the case to-day. The influence which went out from these words awakened the soul-forces of the pupil; one might call this a human initiation through the powerful effect of the language of Nature. ... A clear language was also spoken there by the smoke from substances such as incense, etc.

There was then a far more direct connection between the souls of teacher and pupil. The written signs in the Adept-School of ancient Atlantis were imitations of the phenomena of Nature, written by the hand in the air, these signs had their effect and also influenced the spirit of the population, arousing forces in the soul.

Thus every race has its task in the evolution of humanity. The task of our race, the fifth root-race, consists in adding Manas to the four members of the human being. That is to say, the understanding must be awakened through concepts and ideas. Every race has its own task: the Atlantean race had the task of developing the Ego. Our race, the fifth root-race, or the post-Atlantean era, must develop Manas, the Spirit-Self.

But the achievements of Atlantis did not die, when Atlantis was submerged, for the essence of everything that existed in the Atlantean School of Adepts was rescued by a small group of men. Under the guidance of the Manu, this small group journeyed into a region now known as the Desert of Gobi. And this small number of men then prepared copies of the former culture and teachings, but in a more intellectual form; the earlier spiritual forces were transformed into thoughts and signs. The various streams of culture then journeyed out from this centre like rays, or beams. First came the pre-Vedic Indian culture, which transformed for the first time the in-streaming wisdom into thoughts.

The second culture which went out from this ancient School of Adepts was the old Persian culture; the third one, the Chaldean-Babylonian culture with its wonderful star-wisdom, its lofty sacerdotal wisdom. The fourth culture to flourish was the Graeco-Latin one, with its personal colouring, and finally the fifth culture, which is our present one. The sixth and seventh lie in the future.

I have now characterised our task in the evolution of humanity: What once existed in the form of cosmic wisdom, must be transformed into thoughts and brought down to the physical plane.

When the old Atlantean listened, between the tones sounding round him, he could hear the NAME of what he recognised as divine: “TAO”, In the Egyptian Mysteries this sound was transformed into thoughts, script and signs—the Tao-sign, the Tao-books. Everything in the form of knowledge, writing and thought first came into the world during the post-Atlantean age. Before that time, nothing could have been written down, for the understanding for it would not have been there.

Now we are living in the middle of the Manas-development. It is the task of our race to develop intellectual culture, and at the same time to develop egoism in its extremest form. Though it sounds grotesque, we may say that never before was there so much intellectual power in the world, and yet so little capacity of inner vision as at the present time. Thought is at the greatest distance from the inner essence of things; it is far away from inner spiritual vision.

When the Atlantean priest wrote a sign in the air, its chief effect was on the pupil's inner soul-experience.

The personal element came more to the fore during the fourth, the Graeco-Latin epoch. In Greece, the personal element developed in art, and in Rome we find it in the structure of the government, etc. In our time, we experience egoism, the dry personal, intellectual element. But our task to-day is to grasp the occult truths in Manas, in the purest element of thought. The comprehension of the spiritual in this finest distillation of the brain is the true mission of our age. To render thought so forceful that it acquires something of an occult power is the task which has been given us. This task must be fulfilled, so that we may be able to take our place in the future.

Mighty flames of fire destroyed ancient Lemuria, and mighty floods ancient Atlantis. Our civilisation will also perish, through the war of all against all. This is what we must face. Our fifth root-race will perish, because egoism will reach its highest pitch. But at the same time, a small group of men will develop the power of Budhi, of the Life-Spirit, through the force of thought, in order to carry over Budhi into the new civilisation. Everything that is productive in the striving human being will grow stronger and stronger, until his personality reaches the summit of freedom. At present, every individual must discover in himself a kind of guiding spirit in the soul's inner depths:—This is Budhi, the power of the Life spirit. Were we to approach the future by taking up the cultural impulses as in earlier epochs, we should face the disintegration of humanity.

What do we see now at the present time?

Everyone wants to be his own master: Egoism, selfishness have been pushed to the extreme. A time will come when no other authority will be recognised except one which men recognise freely, whose power is based upon free confidence. The Mysteries which were founded upon the power of the spirit, are called the MYSTERIES OF THE SPIRIT; the Mysteries of the future, which will have trust as their foundation, are called the MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER. These will mark the end of our civilisation. The new impulse of the power of confidence must come, otherwise we approach human disintegration, a universal cult of the Ego and of egoism.

In the times of the Mysteries of the Spirit, which were founded upon the rightful power, authority and might of the Spirit, there were certain wise men who possessed wisdom, and only the soul who passed through difficult probations could be initiated by them. In future, we approach the Mysteries of the Father, and we must strive more and more that each single human being should attain wisdom.

Will this counter-act egoism and the threatening disintegration? Yes! For only when we reach the highest wisdom, in which there are no differences, no personal opinion and no personal standpoint, but ONE VIEW only, will men agree. If they were to remain as they are at present, following their different standpoints, they would become more and more disunited. The highest wisdom always produces a unanimous view among all men. Real wisdom is ONE, and it unites men again, whilst leaving them as free as possible, without any coercive authority. Just as the members of the great WHITE Brotherhood are always in harmony with one another and with humanity, so all men will one day be one, through this wisdom. Only this wisdom can establish the true idea of brotherhood. Spiritual science therefore has only one task: to bring this idea to men, by developing now the Spirit-Self and later on the Life-Spirit. The great goal of the spiritual-scientific movement is to make it possible for man to attain freedom and true wisdom; its mission is to let this truth and wisdom flow into men.

The modern movement of spiritual science began with the most elementary teachings. Many important things have been revealed in the years which have passed since the founding of this movement, and much that is even more important will be revealed. The work of the spiritual-scientific movement, is therefore to allow a gradual flowing out of wisdom of the great white brotherhood that had its origin in Atlantis. Such work has always been prepared for through long periods of time. The whole activity of the great founders of religions was a preparation for the ONE great event, for the appearance of Christ-Jesus.

Spiritual science seeks to be the testamentary executor of Christianity. And so it will be. When the Mysteries of the Father have been fulfilled, that is, when the development of Budhi is accomplished in every individual human being, then each one will discover within himself his own deepest being—ATMAN, the Spirit-Man.

The coming of Christ-Jesus was prepared for by the sequence of the founders of religions, by Zarathustra, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras. All their teachings pursue the same aim: To let wisdom flow into humanity, but in every case, in the form most suited to each people respectively. The essentially new element is not found in what Christ said; the new element in the appearance and teaching of Christ-Jesus is the force that lay in Him to awaken into LIFE all that, formerly was only teaching.

Christianity has brought men the power to be united in free-willed recognition of the authority of Christ-Jesus, whilst maintaining the greatest possible individualisation, so that they are able to join together in brotherly union through faith in Him, in His manifestation and in His divinity.

Between the Mysteries of the SPIRIT and those of the FATHER, stand the MYSTERIES OF THE SON. Their seminary was the School of St. Paul, who had appointed Dionysios as its leader. This school flourished under him, for Dionysios taught these Mysteries in a very special way, whereas St. Paul propagated the teaching exoterically.

Let us now seek an explanation from another side, so as to understand the meaning of the words: The MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER will come. In the old Atlantean schools for adepts the teachers were not men, but beings higher than man, They had completed their development upon earlier planets, and these beings, who had come down to the earth from other planetary developments, instructed a group of chosen men in the MYSTERIES OF THE SPIRIT. In the MYSTERIES OF THE SON, Christ Himself appeared as a teacher in the most solemn celebrations and was therefore also a teacher who was not a man, but God. But in the MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER, those who will become teachers will be men, These men, who develop more quickly than the others, will be the true Masters of Wisdom and of Harmony; they are called “The Fathers”, in the Mysteries of the Father, the guidance of mankind passes from beings who have descended from other worlds into the hands of men themselves. This is significant.

It is the task of spiritual science to prepare men to form a centre for this end, to prepare them for a universal wisdom, for an authority built only on trust and confidence, and to develop an understanding for this, to begin with, in a small nucleus of humanity.

The development of the materialistic civilisation reached its climax in the nineteenth century, and that is why the impulse of spiritual science entered the world at that time. Through spiritual science, something was called into life—and now exists—which counter-acts materialism: It is the counter-movement in the direction of spirituality. Spiritual science is nothing new, and even the spiritual-scientific movement is not new; it is only the continuation of what has already existed.

Materialism and egoism bring disintegration to humanity, for the individual human being only regards his own interests. Wisdom must therefore reunite the human beings who have thus become separated. Wisdom brings them together in fullest freedom and exercises no coercion whatever. This is the task of the spiritual-scientific movement in our time.

We must realise that wisdom must be acquired quite concretely. We all know the example of the stove which was given the task of heating a room. If we explain this to the stove in words as moving as possible, and entreat it to warm the room, it will not obey us unless we heat it; only then will it be able to fulfil its task. Similarly, all talk of brotherhood and of brotherly love is useless; only through KNOWLEDGE we draw nigh to the goal. Individual human beings, and mankind as a whole, can only reach the path of wisdom and of brotherhood through knowledge.

We have now followed this path by considering three kinds of Mysteries. Spiritual science must be able to awaken an understanding for such things in a small nucleus of humanity, so that when the sixth race appears this understanding can be awakened in all men. This is the task which spiritual science must fulfil.

A small part of the fifth root-race will forestall the course of evolution, it will spiritualise Manas and unfold the Spirit-Self. The majority, however, will reach the summit of selfishness. Only this nucleus of humanity, that develops the Spirit-Self, will become the seed of the sixth root-race, and the most advanced of these, the Masters, as we call them, who have grown out of mankind, will then be the leaders of humanity. The movement for spiritual knowledge strives towards this goal.

At the present time, opposition to what I will call anthroposophical knowledge of the Spirit comes mainly from two sides. I alluded briefly in the lecture yesterday to the antagonism of natural scientific thinking which maintains that supersensible knowledge is beyond the reach of human faculties. From this side, therefore, Anthroposophy is regarded as unworthy of any serious consideration.

We shall be more concerned to-day with opposition of a different character. It comes from people who feel that Anthroposophy deprives them and their fellow-believers of their inward connection with Christ. In their own way, such people are usually very devout Christians and it is from their very piety that the antagonism is born. They feel that man's relation to Christ should be the outcome of simple, naive devotion of the heart and soul and that this is disturbed and confused when intellectual knowledge is brought to bear upon the Christ Being. The one desire of such people is that the strivings of simple human hearts shall be left undisturbed by any attempt to speak of Christ in terms of intellectual understanding.

Due-respect must, of course, be paid to such feelings. Nevertheless, in their attitude to Anthroposophy these people are entirely in error. If they realised the truth, they would find that Anthroposophy helps them to tread the Path to Christ; they would find that all the longings which draw them to Christ in simplicity and devoutness of heart are inwardly strengthened by what Anthroposophy has to say concerning Him.

I should like to illustrate this from different points of view.—We will think; to begin with, of the character of the religions life, of the religious consciousness of men in different epochs of human evolution on the Earth.

Let us go back to ancient times.—You will see later that this historical survey is not superfluous but will actually clear away many misunderstandings prevail and at the present time. Evidence and knowledge concerning these very ancient epochs cannot be obtained from historical documents but only through the methods of Spiritual Science of which I spoke yesterday through the development of those faculties of inner perception described yesterday as the means whereby the supersensible nature of man and his supersensible destiny are revealed. We find that in these olden tithes, men were instructed by these who were disciples of the Mysteries. External documents have practically no information to give about the ancient Mysteries, far such indications as still exist are of very much later date and tell us nothing of what the Mysteries really were.

The Mysteries were centres of spiritual life and culture in which religion and science were a unity. Sheer veneration, superhuman in its intensity, went out from the pupils to their great Teachers, or Gurus in these Mysteries. And when other men desired to satisfy their inner longings for religion, they turned to those who were the pupils of these Teachers, receiving from them the knowledge of the universe and its laws which the disciples of the Mysteries had acquired through deep devotion. In order to throw light upon what, in the present age too, can be true piety and true veneration of Christ, I should like to speak briefly about the attitude and relation of a pupil in olden times to his Guru or Teacher in the Mysteries.

We find, first of all, that these Teachers were regarded by their pupils as being divinely inspired. When they spoke with the fire of inspiration that had been kindled in them in the Mysteries and through the sacred rites, their pupils felt that the words were not uttered by men but that the Divine Powers of the universe were speaking out of human lips.

This was not a symbolic conception but an actual experience in the pupils of the ancient Mysteries. And you can imagine the depth and intensity of veneration in such a pupil when he knew that a Divine Being, a God—not a human being—was speaking to him through the lips of his Teacher. Strange as it seems to us to-day, the following was the typical attitude of the pupils of the ancient Mystery-teachings.—They held the view: In still earlier epochs of the evolution of mankind, in the initial stages of this evolution, Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves descended—in the spiritual sense, of course—to the Earth. These Divine-Spiritual Beings did not incarnate in bodies of flesh but by way of spiritual knowledge entered into communion with those who were the first Gurus, the first Teachers in the Mysteries; and the primary instruction concerning what must be taught to men in order that they may enter into real connection with the spiritual world, came from these Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves. Thus, it was held that the teachings once transmitted to men by the Gods themselves had - passed down the generations to the disciples of the Mysteries in every epoch.

You will say this amounts to an assertion that the origin of human wisdom lies in supersensible worlds. But here we come to a domain that is still wrapped in complete obscurity. Think, for example, of the explanation usually given of the origin of speech. There are people who believe, in accordance with the Darwinian theory, that human speech has evolved from the sounds uttered by animals. But there are and have been men—above all it was so up to a comparatively recent past—who attribute a divine origin to human speech.

I shall not enlarge upon this particular point for it would lead too far to-day. It is enough to say that what gave rise to these feelings of deep reverence in the disciples of the Gurus was the conviction that the teachings received from their lips had once been imparted to mankind by the Gods themselves.

What was the aim and goal of this kind of discipleship? Discipleship itself consisted in this: the pupil gave himself up to his Guru in utter veneration and devotion; the Guru was the link connecting him with the spiritual worlds; this Teacher was regarded as the one and only channel for the Divine. The pupil felt that whatever qualities he himself possessed, whatever powers he unfolded were due to his Teacher; he felt that he owed everything to his Teacher. From the Teacher he received instruction—primarily concerning the direction of his thoughts. His thoughts must not be concerned with the material world of sense but through the power implanted in his soul by the Guru, using what were then legitimate methods of suggestion, the heart and soul, of the pupil were directed entirely to the Supersensible. In acts of ordinary sense-observation, thoughts strike as it were against the external objects ... when we think about a table or a tree, our thought strikes against the table or the tree ... But under the influence of the Guru the pupil's thoughts became translucent, so that he saw nothing that is in the physical world but with the vision of thought he gazed into those supersensible worlds I described to you yesterday in terms of ,modern Initiation-science, It was essential, too, for the pupil to experience the reality of these supersensible worlds, and to this end instruction was given him concerning speech. When we speak in ordinary life, we share with others, thoughts that are either of our own shaping or have been conveyed to us in some way; in short what flows into our speech has its origin in the physical world. The Guru imparted to his pupil certain mantric utterances, words half-declaimed, half-spoken, the purpose of which was to educate him to pay attention not so much to the meaning of the words but rather to experience the currents of the Divine Cosmos itself in the flowing sentences. The mantram itself was uttered in such a way that the divine realities in the world and in the human being might pour through the words; the actual meaning of the words of the mantram was of no importance. Thus, by making his thoughts translucent, the pupil was to become capable of beholding the Divine. When declaiming the mantrams, he was not to heed! the meaning of the words, but the divine power streaming through them was to flow over into the acts performed in the sacred rites. The pupil's will was to be directed to the Divine through the rites and ceremonial. Even to-day you can find an indication of this in the Buddha posture. The position in which the limbs are held is quite unsuitable for earthly activities; indeed, the human being is lifted away from the earthly world and, I together with the acts he is performing inwardly is led upwards to the Divine.

What was the aim of such procedure? The soul of the pupil, directed in this threefold way to the Divine, was to become capable of turning evil, sin and human transgression in the direction of .those supersensible worlds described to you yesterday, I told you that with modern Initiation-science, too, man can penetrate into the worlds in which he lives as a being of soul-and-spirit before entering earthly-existence; he descends from these worlds in order to unite with a body provided by the father and mother, and when he has passed through the gate of death, returns thither to prepare for another life on Earth. The aim of these godlike Teachers in the ancient Mysteries was not only to turn the gaze of the pupil towards the supersensible worlds but to kindle in him a force of thinking akin to prayer, a force born of the divine power flowing in the mantric utterances, a force of deepest veneration while performing the sacred rites. Imbued with this power the pupil was then able to turn the tide of sinfulness on the Earth towards the supersensible worlds. These pupils in turn imparted to other human beings what they themselves had been taught in the Mysteries and thus the content of civilisation in those ancient times took shape.

Now upon what basic assumption did these teachings rest? The basic assumption was that the world in which man lives here on Earth does not, like the Divine world, encompass his whole being. In those olden times the Guru taught his pupil: This world in which you are living between birth and death comprises the other kingdoms of nature, but not the deeper being of man. And apart altogether from the conception that human activities between birth and death were fraught with sin, the pupil was taught to realise None of my experiences here in the world between birth and death, none of the deeds I perform are an expression of my full manhood, for that belongs to supersensible worlds.

Every pupil in those ancient times knew with complete certainty in certain moments of life that before descending to the Earth he had lived in a supersensible world and would return thither after death. This clarity of insight was due to a primitive, dreamlike clairvoyance which he need not acquire by effort since it was a natural faculty in all human beings. Thus, the pupil knew: When my actions and life are concerned only with what exists here, on the physical Earth, my full manhood is not in operation. I must guide the forces within me to those spiritual worlds where they truly belong.

The aim of the ancient Mysteries was that by the ceremonial rites and the divine power flowing through the sounds of the mantrams, the forces which man on the Earth cannot turn to good account in his actions should be led upwards and away from the earthly world to the super-earthly, supersensible worlds—for it is there and there alone that man lives in the fullness of his being.

The Gurus brought home to their pupils that when the human being has passed through the gate of death he knows that his actions and achievements on Earth fall short of what his full manhood demands; he knows that compensation must be made in the spiritual world for actions which on the Earth are full of imperfection and fraught with unwisdom.

Knowledge of the supersensible worlds includes the realisation that what remains imperfect on the Earth can be raised nearer to perfection in the supersensible worlds.

But as we shall see, conditions in the days of the ancient Mysteries were quite different and this difference must be recognised and understood to-day. The pupils in those olden days learned from their Teachers that when man has passed through the gate of death and has lived for a certain time in the supersensible world, a sublime. Spiritual Being comes before him, a sublime Being Whose outer expression is the Sun and its forms of manifestation. Hence the sages of the ancient Mysteries spoke of the Divine Sun Being. Just as we say that the soul of a man expresses itself in his physiognomy and play of countenance, so did the men of old conceive the Sun with its movement and forms of manifestation to be the physiognomic expression, the revelation of the sublime Sun Being Who was hidden from their sight on Earth but Who came before them after their death, helping to make more perfect their shortcomings and imperfect achievements in earthly life. “In deepest piety of heart, put your trust in the sublime Sun Being Whom you cannot find on the Earth, Who will be found only in the spiritual worlds ... put your trust in the mighty Sun Being in order that after your death He may help you to take the right path through the spiritual world.” ... In such manner did the Gurus of ancient times speak of the Being by Whom all the imperfections of men are made good.

When the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching, this ancient wisdom had already fallen into decay; little of it remained, save traditions and vestiges here and there. But Initiates-in the old sense of the word still existed—men who clung with the same devotion and pious faith to the Divine Father God by whom in days of yore the Divine Messengers, the Teachers of the first Gurus, had been sent down to Earth. These Initiates were well aware of the deep consolation that had been given to the pupils of the ancient Mysteries when they were told: After death you will find the sublime Sun Being—He Who helps you to transmute and make perfect all shortcoming of earthly life, Who takes away from you the bitter realisation that you have fallen away from the Divine World-Order. Those who were Initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, knew that this same sublime Sun Being had come down to the Earth, had taken Manhood upon Himself in Jesus of Nazareth and since the death on Golgotha must be sought no longer in the supersensible worlds but among men on the Earth. This was how the Initiates spoke at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and on in to the third century of our era. To those who were willing to listen, they were able to say The Being from Whom true healing comes and for Whom you are longing, was within the reach of men in days of yore. Through a Divine Deed this Being came down to the Earth, into a human body and has lived since then as a supersensible reality within the evolution of mankind. And whereas the pupils in olden times had been obliged to go to the Mysteries and there be stimulated by the sacred rites to lift their gaze to the supersensible world, men of later time must learn on the Earth itself to make direct connection with the Christ Being Who descended to the Earth and became Man as other men.

Such was the mood and attitude kindled among men by those who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha and also by many who were Initiates in the first three centuries of Christendom. Historical records have little help to offer because all real evidence of the teaching was exterminated. But supersensible perception as it was described to you yesterday leads to the knowledge that in the first three Christian centuries, this was the attitude and feeling prevailing in men who were willing to listen to the Initiates still living in those times ... And then this truly Christian feeling died away and must in our time be called to life again.

The veneration of the pupil for his Guru in olden days had been a means whereby men had learned to look upwards to the Divine. The Teacher or Guru was regarded as the channel by which the Divine streamed down to the Earth and as the one who, in turn, guided into the spiritual world the feelings of devotion and reverence in the human heart. These feelings and experiences passed along the stream of heredity from generation to generation and were guided by those who became the first Teachers of Christianity no longer to a Guru in the old sense but to the Christ Who had descended from spiritual worlds and in Jesus of Nazareth had taken Manhood upon Himself. Few people to-day realise the deep inwardness and intensity of devotion which characterised these early Teachers of Christianity.

This feeling of reverence and devotion continued through the centuries, directed now to the Being of Whom Christianity proclaimed that He had passed through the Death on Golgotha in order that henceforward mankind might find Him on Earth.

The goal and aim of the modern Initiation-science of which I spoke to you yesterday is to approach this Christ Mystery, this Mystery of Golgotha, with true understanding.

Medieval Christianity was, it is true pervaded by piety and religious devotion that were really like a continuation of the veneration paid to the Gurus of old, but the dreamlike clairvoyance once possessed by human beings had faded away. Apart altogether from historical records, anthroposophical Spiritual Science is able to investigate the life of man as it was in those far distant ages of the past. At certain moments in their lives it was possible for human beings to pass into a state of dreamlike clairvoyance in which they became aware of the world from which they themselves had descended to their earthly existence. But this knowledge that the soul belongs to Eternity had gradually been lost. Under the influence of this knowledge men would never have been able to unfold consciousness of human freedom. Consciousness of freedom—which is an integral part of full manhood—was destined to arise in man when the time was ripe. The epoch when this feeling of freedom dawned was that of the Middle Ages; but by that time the old consciousness which could never have experienced the reality of freedom, was fading away. For when man looked upwards to his existence as a being of soul among other beings of soul in pre-earthly life, he was aware only of dependence, he had no feeling of freedom. The ancient clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world grew dim and in this twilight condition of consciousness humanity unfolded that feeling of freedom which in our modern civilisation has reached a certain climax. But in this condition the gaze of mankind could not penetrate into those supersensible worlds whence Christ had descended into Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, true Christian worship rested, to begin with, upon tradition; men relied upon historical tradition and upon the power that had come down through the generations from the veneration once paid to the Gurus. The deep reverence for the Divine that had once lived in men could be directed, now, to the Being Who had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this twilight condition of consciousness, men were gradually evolving a science of physical nature such as ancient times had never possessed and in consequence of this, even the faintest inkling that a spiritual world is accessible to human cognition, even that faded away.

The supersensible knowledge of which I. spoke yesterday is an actual extension of knowledge of the world of nature. And all the faculties developed by a man through meditation and concentration in such a way. that he penetrates into the spiritual world as a knower—all these faculties are immeasurably strengthened when, as one belonging to the modern age, he does not content himself with what natural science has to say about the external world but wrestles inwardly with it, assimilating these exact, scientific thoughts but endeavouring, then, to unite them with the innermost forces of his own being. A certain attunement or attitude of soul then arises—to begin with, it is not easy to define. But if this attitude becomes the keynote of meditation and concentration in the sphere of thought and in the sphere of will, then the soul is led upwards into the spiritual worlds and understanding of supersensible reality is attained. We learn to look away from the Earth of which natural science teaches us, into a supersensible world which belongs to the Earth and must be recognised as an integral part of the Earth—above all when it is a matter of understanding man and man's life on Earth.

Questions of far-reaching import then arise in one who is struggling to acquire anthroposophical knowledge. And as he seeks to find answers, he is led towards an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Having raised his consciousness away from the Earth, having unfolded a faculty of perception outside the physical body and of action through the power of ideal magic, such a man is able to behold the Spiritual. With consciousness that has become independent of the body, he is able to penetrate into a spiritual world with knowledge and with power of will.

If a man who is equipped with this inner understanding of the spiritual world turns his attention again to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha as an Event on the Earth, his thought—unlike that of many modern theologians—will not be concerned only with the man Jesus of Nazareth. His conception of what came to pass in the Mystery of Golgotha is no longer materialistic because he has acquired the power of supersensible vision and sees the man Jesus of Nazareth as the bearer of the Divine Christ—the Divine-Spiritual Christ Being. Because the Divine-Spiritual is a direct reality to this modern “Theosophia,” it can recognise in the man Jesus of Nazareth the Christ Who is a Spiritual Being and must always be conceived as such. With the knowledge and understanding of the Super-Earthly he has acquired, a man is then led to Christ, beholding in Him the super-earthly, Divine Principle, the God-Man.

Through an understanding of the realities of the spiritual world, modern Anthroposophy leads the way to Christ—leads to Him after due preparation. In order to make this quite clear I want to speak of erroneous and true ways by which a man of the present age may approach the spiritual world ... There were men in days long since gone by whose inspiration proceeded directly from the Mysteries; then the spiritual consciousness of humanity grew dim but even with this darkened consciousness men still gazed into certain spheres of pre-earthly existence and strove to let a spiritual power stream from their sacred rites. But the successors of those godly, pious men of old have become, in the modern age, people who endeavour by extremely questionable means to contact the spiritual world. The godly men of earlier times confined themselves to the realm of the soul, turning their eyes of soul to the supersensible worlds; this mood of holiness and of piety persisted in the feelings of those devotees of Christianity of whom I spoke at the beginning of the lecture and who desire to cling to their naive, simple piety. Such an attitude is naive to-day because in his natural consciousness the human being no longer has any vision of supersensible existence. This naive piety no longer leads men upwards into the supersensible worlds, for their consciousness remains in the earthly, physical body. It is characteristic of this naive piety that it clings to the feelings, to the sentient experiences, coming to the soul when it sinks into itself, into its own human nature. This will, it is true, lead a man to the realisation that the physical body consists not only of flesh and blood, but that the Spiritual too, is present—the Spiritual which truly pious men would fain send upwards to the Divine. But those who are misguided successors of the pupils of the old Gurus endeavour through mediumistic practises to kindle this spiritual force.

What kind of person is a medium? A medium is one who lets the Spiritual speak out of the physical body, write by means of the physical hands or manifest in some other way. The very fact that mediums speak or write while their ordinary consciousness is dimmed, indicates that the human body is not wholly physical, that a spiritual force issues from it, but of a mechanical, inferior kind. A medium desires not only to experience the Spiritual in the body but strives to bring the Spiritual to physical manifestation. And the spiritual force that is present. in the body does indeed become articulate when the medium speaks or writes. The peculiarity about mediumistic people is that they become extremely talkative, they love to talk and to write at tremendous length ... but all these manifestations of the Spiritual through the body contain a great deal that ordinary logic will regard as highly questionable. These mediums are themselves the proof that it is not right for modern man to fall back upon ancient methods of establishing connection with the Divine-Spiritual but that he must seek in an altogether different way.

This different way of approach to the spiritual world is that of anthroposophical Spiritual Science and I will speak of one particular aspect. If a man takes natural science in earnest, regarding its results as truly great achievements of modern civilisation, then in his efforts to draw near to the spiritual worlds he will, to begin with, find it extraordinarily difficult to speak of the Spiritual at all, to entertain thoughts concerning it, let alone to indulge in any kind of automatic writing. When through meditation and concentration a man becomes aware of the Spirit within him, he will prefer to keep silent—to begin with, at any rate. Whereas a medium becomes talkative and lets the Spiritual become articulate through his own organs of speech, when supersensible knowledge of the Spirit begins to dawn in one who is a conscientious, scientifically trained thinker, he would rather keep silent about the subtle and delicate experiences of which his soul becomes aware. He even prefers to forbid thoughts from intruding because thoughts have been associated with earthly, physical things. He prefers not to let thoughts stream into his soul because he has an inner fear lest half-consciously he may apply to spiritual realities, thoughts that are connected with outer, physical things; he is afraid that when thoughts are applied to spiritual reality, this spiritual reality will not merely slip away but that it will be profaned, distorted. Least of all will he take to writing—for he knows that in days of yore, when worship of the God became potent, spiritual deed in the sacred rites, men did not resort to writing—which is a bodily act. Writing first became a custom when the human intellect and reasoning faculty were directed to the material world of sense and to one who has any knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual it is an activity which goes very much against the grain. And so when a man begins to become aware of the reality of the Divine-Spiritual, of the supersensible world, he stills his thoughts; he is literally silent as far as speaking is concerned; and he abstains from writing about matters pertaining to the Divine.

I said before, my dear friends, that it is permissible for me to speak of these things because they are the results of my own experience along a path of development which had led on from natural science to a comprehension and actual perception of the spiritual worlds and of the Mystery of Golgotha as spiritual reality. But you will realise that the Mystery of Golgotha presents difficulties to everyone who tries to approach it in the light of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. The Mystery of Golgotha as it reveals itself in the course of human history must be conceived in all its stupendous majesty and glory as an historical fact. Within the man Jesus of Nazareth, a God passed through death on Golgotha and we must learn to contemplate in a picture from which every element of sense-life is absent, this, the greatest of all Events in history. But it is exceedingly difficult to wrestle through in thought to this sense-free comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha, to present it in words or write of it.

What comes to us along this path is inner reverence and awe as we contemplate the great Mystery enacted on Golgotha. This reverence pours through the soul of one who in the way I have described, has silenced his thoughts and words, who feels the deepest awe when the power of the Spirit within him draws him to the Mystery of Golgotha. Feelings of profound reverence and awe pour through the soul of such a man ... it is as though he dares not approach so stupendous a Mystery. Thus the path of anthroposophical Spiritual Science leads not only to knowledge ... although to begin with it is knowledge which directs our gaze into yonder supersensible worlds. But this knowledge streams into the life of feeling, becomes holy awe; it becomes a power that lays hold of the human soul far more deeply than any other power, more deeply even than the veneration paid to the Guru by his pupils in olden times. And this feeling grows, first and foremost, into a longing and a yearning to understand Christ Jesus on Golgotha. What, to begin with, was supersensible vision in the life of soul is transformed through inner metamorphosis into feeling. This feeling seeks the God-Man on Golgotha and can find Him through the vision of the Spiritual already acquired. Man also learns to understand Jesus of Nazareth, realising that, in him, Christ may be seen as a reality within earthly existence. And so anthroposophical Spiritual Science brings knowledge of the Spiritual Christ Being but at the same time the deep and true reverence for the Divine which arises from this knowledge of the Supersensible.

When a man first becomes aware of the power of supersensible knowledge he prefers to be silent in his thoughts and words, not in any way to use his bodily faculties as an instrument for voicing his experiences. Nevertheless, having reached a transitional stage, when he resolves to speak of his inner life, he experiences something which justifies him in speaking of the spiritual nature of Christ Jesus. At this transitional stage he makes the resolve to give the Spiritual definite form in his thoughts, to speak and to write about the Spiritual. And the experience that now comes to him is that he feels as it were lifted out of his physical body whenever he is speaking or thinking about the Spiritual. The physical body is an essential instrument in ordinary thinking and speaking, but now, at this higher stage, a man is aware of being removed in a certain way from his physical body. Whereas a medium feels himself entirely within the physical body and even deadens his consciousness in order to remain within the physical while allowing the Spiritual to manifest through the body, a man who has attained real knowledge of the Supersensible lifts himself out of his physical body in an enhanced and more delicate state of consciousness. Because he is experiencing the reality of the spiritual world, he finds it exceedingly difficult to take hold of the physical world; his faculty of speech and the natural flow of his thinking elude him; he cannot find the way to his limbs or his physical body. He must now undergo the experience of trying to find his bearings in this physical world once again and therewith the thoughts and the language in which to express the realities of the supersensible world of which he has become aware. But having had this experience, a man feels as though he must enter life anew, as though he must pass through a second, self-engendered birth. He learns to know the inner depths of human nature for he has entered into these depths a second time in order to create an instrument for thinking and speaking of spiritual reality. Penetrating thus into his organism with supersensible knowledge, a man realises that there too he will find Christ inasmuch as Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. He now has some understanding not only of the Christ Who once came down to the Earth and passed through death, but if he has really fathomed the depths of his own being, there too, he experiences Christ Who died in order that His Power might flow into all mankind.

This is the experience that comes, with far greater assurance now, to a man possessed of supersensible knowledge. And he can clothe the knowledge of Christ thus acquired in words which contain profound truth: “Not I but Christ in me.” For he knows: On Golgotha, Christ died; through His death Christ entered into the human forces of birth and has lived since His death in the very being of man. The modern Initiate therefore knows the truth of these words of St. Paul, knows that he will find Christ within himself if he does but succeed in fathoming the depths of his own manhood.

In order to make men Christians in the real sense, the Initiate need not demand that they should all have reached his own level. Equipped with this understanding and knowledge of Christ, he can also discover new paths for simple-hearted piety. Men of simple piety can indeed find Christ, only their path to-day cannot be quite the same as that which led in days of yore to the adoration outpoured at the feet of the Guru. The piety that befits the modern age must be an inward piety, for man is no longer called upon to send up into a supersensible world, his feelings of reverence for the Divine; he must penetrate within his own being in order there to find Christ Who since the Mystery of Golgotha has been on the Earth as the Living Christ.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science can say to a man of simple piety: “If you do but penetrate deeply enough into your own being, you will find Christ; this is no illusion because by his Death on Golgotha Christ did indeed descend into these depths of your innermost self.” One who is schooled in Spiritual Science knows that in speaking thus to a man of simple piety, he is saying what is true; he knows that he is not playing upon the emotions of the other but pointing to a goal within his reach. It is perfectly possible for simple, godly men to tread the path which leads, in the modern age too, to supersensible knowledge.

Whereas in earlier times, reverence and veneration for the Guru made the thoughts of the pupil translucent, enabled divine power to resound in the mantrams and the rites to become potent deed, a man who desires to find the true path to Christ in our modern age must, above all else, inwardly deepen his soul. He must learn to look within himself in order that he may find and become aware of inner reality when he turns his gaze away from the world of sense. And within him too, he will find the power that carries him through the gate of death, inasmuch as here, on the Earth, knowledge of this power has come to him through devotion to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Guru of olden times said to his pupils and through them to all human beings: When you pass through the gate of death you will find the sublime Sun Being Who makes good the imperfections of Earth-existence. The teacher of modern times says: If here on the Earth, with inner reverence and deep devotion of heart you establish connection with Christ Who has descended, and with the Mystery of Golgotha, you will be inwardly filled with a power that does not die with you, but bears you through death and will work together with you towards the fulfilment of what cannot be wholly fulfilled on Earth while you are living in a physical body. What in olden times was wrought by the sublime Sun Being will be wrought, now, by Christ's power within your own being from which the body has been cast off at death. Christ's power will work in human imperfections on Earth and men will be drawn together in the social life through their recognition of Him. For the power that streams from Christ, the power upon which anthroposophical Spiritual Science is able to shed the light of understanding, can enter into the actions and the will of men and thereby flow into their social life.

There is much talk to-day of social reform and social progress. Who will be the great Reformer of the social life when men's actions are performed in the name of Christ Jesus and the world becomes truly Christian? Who will be the mighty Reformer, having the power to establish peace amid social strife on Earth? The Christ—He and He alone can bring peace, when men lead a social life hallowed by acts of consecration, when as they look up to Christ they do not say “I,” but rather: When two or three, or many, are gathered together in the name of Christ, then He is in the midst of us Activity in the sphere of social life then becomes a veritable hallowing, a continuation of the sacred acts of cult and rite in olden times. Christ Himself in very truth will be the great social Reformer, since He works to-day as a living reality within the being of man.

The social life must be permeated with the Christ Impulse ... Men of simple piety long to find Christ's power within the soul so that what they do in the social life may be done in Christ's name. These men of simple piety can still be sure of their ground when a modern Initiate says to them: The power you can find through your simple piety of soul when you meditate upon your own being and upon the Christ Who lives within you—this power streamed from the Death on Golgotha, from Christ Himself. It works as the Christ Impulse in the deeds you perform in social life, because Christ is present among men as a Living Reality when they find the way to Him. They are led to Him through that deep inner love which links human hearts together and brings a supersensible element into feeling, just as the light that is kindled within a man's being brings a supersensible element into knowledge.

And so men of simple piety need say no longer that their path is disturbed by the knowledge imparted by anthroposophical Spiritual Science. If natural science were to continue along purely external paths, this simple piety would in the course of time die out altogether; but if natural science itself can lead on to knowledge of the Supersensible and thereby to knowledge of the Christ as a supersensible Being, then all truly pious men will be able to find that for which they long: assurance in their life of soul, certainty that their deeds and actions are in harmony with the Christ Impulse. That for which pious and godly men yearn can be imbued through anthroposophical Spiritual Science with all the certainty of knowledge. This Spiritual Science has therefore the right to insist that it does not disturb the path of simple godliness or lead men away from Christ. Seeking as it does to lead the way to the spiritual world by working with and not against modern science, Anthroposophy has this message to give: Mankind must not go forward into the future without Christ but with him—with Christ as a Being Who is known and recognised, Whose reality is felt and Whose Impulse men resolve to make effective in the world.

[ 1 ] The significance of the Mysteries in the spiritual life of Greece can be seen in Plato's conception of the world. There is only one means of understanding him fully: he must be placed in the light which shines forth from the Mysteries. The later pupils of Plato, the Neoplatonists, attribute to him a secret teaching, to which he admitted only those who were worthy, and then strictly under the “seal of silence.” His teaching was considered secret in the same sense as the Mystery wisdom. Even if Plato himself is not the author of the seventh Platonic Epistle, as some people assert, this makes no difference for our purpose; it need not concern us whether Plato or someone else expresses the attitude of mind contained in this letter. This attitude of mind was inherent in his conception of the world. It says in this Epistle: “But this much I can certainly declare concerning all these writers, or prospective writers who claim to know the subjects which I seriously study, whether as hearers of mine or of other teachers, or from their own discoveries; it is impossible, in my judgment at least, that these men understand anything about this subject. There does not exist, nor will there ever exist, any treatise of mine dealing therewith, for it does not at all admit of verbal expression like other studies, but, as a result of continued application to the subject itself and communion therewith, it is brought to birth in the soul on a sudden, as light that is kindled by a leaping spark, and thereafter it nourishes itself.”³⁰ These words could only indicate a powerlessness in the use of words due to personal weakness, if one could not find in them the sense contained in the Mysteries. What Plato never wrote and never intended to write about must be something that defies expression in writing. It must be a feeling, a sensation, an experience that cannot be conveyed in a moment, but is attained through “continued application ... and communion.” The intimate training Plato was able to give to the elect is indicated here. For them fire flashed forth from his words; for the others, only thoughts. It is of great consequence how one approaches Plato's Dialogues. They mean more or less according to one's frame of mind. To Plato's pupils more than the mere literal sense of his expositions was conveyed. Where he taught, the participants experienced the atmosphere of the Mysteries. The words had overtones which vibrated with them. But these overtones needed the atmosphere of the Mysteries. Otherwise they died away unheard.

[ 2 ] In the center of the world of Plato's Dialogues stands the personality of Socrates. We need not touch on the historical aspect here. What matters is the character of Socrates as represented by Plato. Socrates is a person sanctified through death for the cause of truth. He died as only an initiate can die, one to whom death is but a moment of life like other moments. He meets death as any other occurrence of earthly existence. His behavior was such that not even in his friends were the feelings usual to such an occasion aroused. Phaedo says in the Dialogue on the Immortality of the Soul: “For my part, I had strange emotions when I was there. For I was not filled with pity as I might naturally be when present at the death of a friend; since he seemed to me to be happy, both in his bearing and his words, he was meeting death so fearlessly and nobly. And so I thought that even in going to the abode of the dead he was not going without the protection of the gods, and that when he arrived there it would be well with him, if it ever was well with anyone. And for this reason I was not at all filled with pity, as might seem natural when I was present at a scene of mourning; nor on the other hand did I feel pleasure, as was our custom when we were occupied with philosophy—although our talk was of philosophy—but a very strange feeling came over me, an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and of pain together, when I thought that Socrates was presently to die.”³¹ And the dying Socrates instructs his pupils about immortality. His personality, knowing by experience the valuelessness of life, here acts as proof of a quality very different from all logic and intellectual reasoning. It is not as though a man were conversing—for this man is at the point of crossing the threshold of death—but as though the eternal truth itself which had made its abode in a transitory personality, were speaking. Where the temporal dissolves into nothingness we seem to find the air in which the eternal can resound.

[ 3 ] We hear no proofs of immortality in the logical sense. The whole dialogue is directed toward leading the friends to the point where they can behold the eternal. Then they will need no proofs. Is one to prove that the rose is red to someone who sees it? Is one to prove that the spirit is eternal to someone whose eyes have been opened so that he can see this spirit? Socrates indicates living experiences. First of all it is a meeting with wisdom itself. What is the aim of the person who pursues wisdom? He wishes to free himself from all that his senses offer him in everyday observation. He wishes to seek the spirit in the material world. Is not this a fact which can be compared to dying? “Other people”—this is Socrates' opinion—“are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be reluctant when that came for which they had been eagerly practicing all along.”³² To reinforce this, Socrates asks one of his friends, “Do you think a philosopher would be likely to care much about the so-called pleasures, such as eating or drinking? ... Or about the pleasures of sexual desire? ... Do you believe such a man would think much of the other cares of the body—I mean such as the possession of fine clothes and shoes and the other personal adornments? Do you think he would care about them or despise them, except so far as it is necessary to have them? ... Altogether, then, you think that such a man would not devote himself to the body, but would, so far as he was able, turn away from the body and concern himself with the soul? ... To begin with, then, it is clear that in such matters the philosopher, more than other men, separates the soul from association with the body”³³ After this Socrates is entitled to say: Striving for wisdom is comparable to dying, in that man turns from physical things. But where does he turn? He turns to the spiritual. However, can he expect the same of the spirit as of his senses? Socrates explains himself on this: “Now, how about the acquisition of intelligent insight? Is the body a hindrance or not, if it is made to share in the search for wisdom? What I mean is this: Have the sight and hearing of men any truth in them, or is it true, as the poets are always telling us, that we neither hear nor see accurately? ... Then, when does the soul attain to truth? For when it tries to consider anything in company with the body, it is evidently deceived by it.” All that we perceive with³⁴ the physical senses comes into existence and dies away. And this coming into existence and dying away is the cause of our being deceived. But if we examine objects more thoroughly with intelligent insight, then we partake of the eternal in them. But the physical senses do not convey to us the eternal in its true form. They deceive us when we rely implicitly upon them. They cease to deceive us if we confront them with logical insight, making everything conveyed by the senses subject to examination by this insight. But if logical insight is to judge the statements of the senses, must not something live within this insight which transcends the perceptions of the senses? Hence what is true and false in objects is judged by something in us which opposes the material body, and therefore is not subject to its laws. Above all, this something must not be subjected to the laws of growth and decay, for it bears truth within itself. Truth cannot have a yesterday and a tomorrow; it cannot be this on one occasion and that on another, as material things are. Hence truth in itself must be eternal. As the philosopher turns away from the transitory material world, and turns to truth, he approaches an eternal element, dwelling within him. If we immerse ourselves wholly in the spirit, then we live entirely in truth. The material world around us is no longer present in its material form only. “Would not that man,” asks Socrates, “do this most perfectly who approaches each thing, so far as possible, with the reason alone, not introducing sight into his reasoning nor dragging in any of the other senses along with his thinking, but who employs pure, absolute reason in his attempt to search out the pure, absolute essence of things, and who removes himself, so far as possible, from eyes and ears, and, in a word, from his whole body because he feels that its companionship disturbs the soul and hinders it from attaining truth and wisdom? ... Well, then, this that we call death, is it not a release and separation from the body? But, as we hold, the true philosophers and they alone are always most eager to release the soul, and just this—the release and separation of the soul from the body—is their study ... Then, as I said in the beginning, it would be absurd if a man who had been all his life fitting himself to live as nearly in a state of death as he could, should then be disturbed when death came to him ... In fact, then, the true philosophers practice dying, and death is less terrible to them than to any other men.”³⁵ Socrates also bases all higher morality on the liberation of the soul from the body. One who obeys only the demands of his body is not moral. Who has courage? asks Socrates. He has courage who not only disregards his body but follows the demands of his spirit when this endangers his body. And who is self-restrained? He who is “not excited by the passions and in being superior to them acts in a seemly way. Is self-restraint therefore not a characteristic of those alone who despise the body and pass their lives in philosophy?”³⁶ And thus it is with all virtues, according to Socrates.

[ 4 ] Socrates proceeds to characterize intelligent insight itself. What does cognition really mean? Doubtless we attain cognition through forming judgments. Very well, I form a judgment about something; for instance, I say to myself, This thing that stands before me is a tree. How do I arrive at such a statement? I shall be able to do so only if I already know what a tree is. I must remember my idea of a tree. A tree is a material thing. If I remember a tree, I remember a material object. I say that a thing is a tree if it reminds me of other things I have perceived before, and which I know to be trees. Memory enables me to reach cognition. Through memory I can compare the various material things with each other. But in this my cognition is not exhausted. If I see two similar things I form the judgment, These things are similar. But in reality two things are never completely similar. Wherever I find similarity it is only relative. Therefore I think of similarity without finding it in material realty. The thought of similarity helps me toward judgment, as memory helps me toward judgment and cognition. Just as I remember trees when I see a tree, so I remember the thought of similarity when I see two similar things. Therefore thoughts arise within me like memories which are not gained from material reality. All cognition not derived from this reality is based on such thoughts. The whole of mathematics consists only of such thoughts. It would be a poor geometrician who could relate mathematically only what he sees with his eyes and grasps with his hands. It follows that we have thoughts which do not stem from transitory nature, but which arise from the spirit. And precisely these thoughts bear the stamp of eternal truth upon them. What mathematics teaches will be eternally true, even if the whole universe were to collapse tomorrow, and a totally new one arise. The present mathematical truths might not be applicable to the conditions prevailing in a new universe, nevertheless they would remain true in themselves. Only when the soul is alone with itself can it bring forth such eternal truths out of itself. The soul therefore is related to truth, to the eternal, and not to the transitory, the seemingly real. For this reason Socrates says, “When the soul reflects alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these, it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom ... Then see, if this is not the conclusion from all that we have said, that the soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and ever unchanging, and the body, on the contrary, most like the human and mortal and multiform and unintellectual and dissoluble and ever-changing ...Then if it is in such a condition, the soul goes away into what is like itself, into the invisible, divine, immortal and wise, and when it arrives there it is happy, freed from error, folly, fear, fierce loves and all the other human ills and, as the initiated say, lives in truth through all after-time with the gods.”³⁷ Here we cannot undertake to show all the paths along which Socrates guides his friends to the eternal. All these paths breathe the same spirit. All are intended to show that man finds one thing when he follows the paths of transitory sense perception, and another when his spirit is alone with itself. Socrates points to the archetypal nature of the spirit for those who listen to him. If they find it they can see with spiritual eyes that it is eternal. The dying Socrates does not prove immortality: he simply demonstrates the essence of the soul. It then becomes evident that growth and decay, birth and death have nothing to do with this soul. The essence of the soul lies in truth, but truth itself cannot grow and decay. The soul has as much to do with growth as the crooked has to do with the straight. Death, however, belongs to this process of “growth.” Therefore the soul has nothing to do with death. Must we not say that the immortal assumes mortality as little as the straight assumes crookedness. Continuing from this, Socrates says, “If the immortal is also imperishable, it is impossible for the soul to perish when death comes to meet it. For, as our argument has shown, it will not admit death and will not be dead, just as the number three, we said, will never be even.”³⁸

[ 5 ] Let us trace the whole development of this dialogue, in which Socrates leads his listeners to the point where they are able to see the eternal in the human personality. The listeners absorb his thoughts; they search within themselves for something in their own inner experiences through which they can say “yes” to his ideas. They put forward the objections that spring to their minds. What has happened to the listeners when the dialogue has reached its end? They have found something in themselves which they did not possess before. They have not merely absorbed an abstract truth; they have gone through a process of development. Something has come to life within them which was not alive in them before. Is not this comparable to an initiation? Does not this throw light on the reason why Plato expressed his philosophy in the form of dialogue? These dialogues are intended to be nothing but a literary form of the proceedings in the Mystery places. What Plato himself says at various points convinces us of this. As a teacher of philosophy, Plato wanted, insofar as possible through this medium, to be what the initiator was in the Mysteries. Well does Plato know himself to be at one with the methods of the Mysteries! He considers his method to be the right one only if it leads to the place to which the mystic should be led! He expresses this in the Timaeus: “All men who possess even a small share of good sense call upon God always at the outset of every undertaking, be it small or great: we therefore who are purposing to deliver a discourse concerning the Universe, how far it is created or is uncreated, must needs invoke gods and goddesses (if so be that we are not utterly demented), praying that all we say may be approved by them in the first place, and secondly by ourselves.”³⁹ And to those who seek along such a path, Plato promises “that the Godhead, as Savior, makes it possible that such a distant and difficult investigation—one so prone to error—can be accomplished through an enlightened philosophy.”⁴⁰

[ 6 ] The Timaeus in particular reveals to us the relationship of Plato's world conception with the Mysteries. At the very beginning of this dialogue, reference is made to an “initiation.” Solon is “initiated” into the creation of worlds by an Egyptian priest, and also into the manner in which myths that have been handed down, express eternal truths in picture form. “There have been and there will be many and divers destructions of mankind,” (thus the Egyptian priest instructs Solon) “of which the greatest are by fire and water, and lesser ones by countless other means. For in truth the story that is told in your country as well as in ours, how once upon a time Phaethon, son of Helios, yoked his father's chariot, and, because he was unable to drive it along the course taken by his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth and himself perished by a thunderbolt -that story, as it is told, has the fashion of a legend, but the truth of it lies in the occurrence of a shifting of the bodies in the heavens which move round the earth, and a destruction of the things on the earth by fierce fire, which recurs at long intervals.”⁴¹ This point in the Timaeus clearly refers to the relationship between the initiate and the myths of the people. He perceives the truths hidden in their pictures.

[ 7 ] The drama of the world's creation is presented in the Timaeus. Whoever wishes to retrace the paths leading to this creation comes to the point of divining the archetypal force from which everything has sprung. “Now to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed; and having discovered Him, to declare Him unto all men were a thing impossible.”⁴² The mystic knew what was meant by this “thing impossible.” It indicates the drama of God. God is not present for him in the materially comprehensible world. There He is present as nature. He lies spell-bound in nature. According to the ancient mystics, only he can approach Him who awakens the divine within himself. Therefore He cannot so easily be made comprehensible to everyone. He does not appear in person, even to those who approach Him. This is what the Timaeus says. The Father has created the world out of the cosmic body and the cosmic soul. In perfect proportions He has united harmoniously the elements which came into being when He offered His own, separate existence by diffusing Himself. Thus the body of the world came into existence. On this body of the world, the soul of the world is stretched in the form of a cross.⁴³ This soul is the divine element in the world. It has met with death on the cross in order that the world may exist. Plato is able to call nature the tomb of the divine element.⁴⁴ This is not a tomb containing something dead, but something eternal, for which death only gives the opportunity to express the omnipotence of life. Man sees this nature in the right light when he approaches it in order to deliver the crucified soul of the world. It must be raised from death, the spell must be lifted from it. Where can it come to life again? Only in the soul of the man who is initiated. In this way wisdom finds its right relationship to the cosmos. The resurrection, the deliverance of the Godhead: this is cognition. The evolution of the world from the least to the most perfect is traced in the Timaeus. An ascending process is represented. The beings develop. God reveals Himself in this development. The process of creation is a resurrection of God from the tomb. Man makes his appearance in this stream of evolution. Plato shows that with man something special has arrived. True, the whole world is divine. And man is no more divine than the other beings. But in the other beings God is concealed, and in man He is manifest. The end of the Timaeus reads: “And now at length we may say that our discourse concerning the Universe has reached its termination. For this our Cosmos has received the living creatures both mortal and immortal and been thereby fulfilled; it being itself a visible Living Creature embracing the visible creatures, a perceptible God made in the image of the Intelligible, most great and good and fair and perfect in its creation—even this one and only begotten world.”⁴⁵

[ 8 ] But this one and only begotten world would be incomplete if it did not have among its images the image of the Creator Himself. Only out of the soul of man can this image be born. It is not the Father Himself who can be born of man, but the Son, the offspring of God living in the soul, who is like unto the Father.

[ 9 ] Philo of whom it was said that he was Plato reborn, called the wisdom born of man, the “Son of God;”⁴⁶ this wisdom lives in the soul and contains the intelligence that exists in the world. This world-intelligence, the Logos, appears as the book in which “has been inscribed and engraved the formation of the world.”⁴⁷ Further it appears as the Son of God, who “followed the ways of his Father, and shaped the different kinds, looking to the archetypal patterns which that Father supplied.”⁴⁸ In the manner of Plato, Philo speaks of this Logos as the Christ: “For since God is the first and sole King of the universe, the road leading to Him, being a king's road, is rightly called royal. This road you must take to be philosophy ... the philosophy which the ancient circle of ascetics pursued in hard-fought contest, eschewing the soft enchantments of pleasure, engaged with a fine severity in the study of what is good and fair. This royal road then, which we have just said to be true and genuine philosophy, is called in the Law, the utterance and word of God.”⁴⁹

[ 10 ] Philo experiences this as an initiation when he sets forth on the path to meet the Logos who is, for him, the Son of God. “I feel no shame in recording my own experience, a thing I know from its having happened to me a thousand times. On some occasions, after making up my mind to follow the usual course of writing on philosophical tenets, and knowing definitely the substance of what I was to set down, I have found my understanding incapable of giving birth to a single idea, and have given up without accomplishing anything, reviling my understanding for its self-conceit, and filled with amazement at the might of Him Who is, to Whom is due the opening and closing of the womb of the soul. On other occasions, I have approached my work empty and suddenly become full, the ideas falling in a shower from above and being sown invisibly, so that under the influence of the divine possession I have been filled with corybantic frenzy and been unconscious of anything, place, persons present, myself, words spoken, lines written. For I obtained language, ideas, an enjoyment of light, keenest vision, pellucid distinctness of objects, such as might be received through the inner eye as the result of clearest cognition.”⁵⁰ This is the description of a path to cognition which is so arranged that whoever takes this path is conscious that he becomes one with the divine when the Logos comes to life within him. This is clearly expressed in the words: “When the mind is mastered by the love of the divine, when it strains its powers to reach the inmost shrine, when it puts forth every effort and ardor on its forward march, under the divine impelling force it forgets all else, forgets itself and fixes its thoughts and memories on Him alone Whose attendant and servant it is, to Whom it dedicates incense, the incense of consecrated virtues.”⁵¹ For Philo there are only two paths. Either man can pursue the material world which is offered by perception and intellect, but then he is limited to his own personality, he withdraws from the cosmos; or he can become conscious of the all-embracing cosmic powers, experiencing the eternal within his personality. “One who runs away from God takes refuge in himself. There are two minds, that of the universe, which is God, and the individual mind. One who flees from his own mind flees for refuge to the Mind of all things. For one who abandons his own mind acknowledges all that makes the human mind its standard to be naught, and he refers all things to God. On the other hand, one who runs away from God declares Him to be the cause of nothing, and himself to be the cause of all things that come into being.”⁵²

[ 12 ] Plato's “dialogue on love,” the Symposium, also describes an “initiation.” Here love appears as the herald of wisdom. If wisdom, the Eternal Word (Logos), is the Son of the Eternal Creator of the world, then love has a maternal relationship with this Logos. Before it is possible for even a spark of the light of wisdom to light up in the human soul, there must be an unconscious longing, which draws the soul toward the divine. Man must be drawn unconsciously toward that which, when raised into consciousness, subsequently brings him supreme joy. What Heraclitus designates as the daemon in man is united with the idea of love. In the Symposium men of the most varied status, possessing the most varied views on life, speak of love; the man in the street, the politician, the scientist, the poet of comedy, Aristophanes and the serious poet, Agathon. Each has his conception of love according to how he experiences life. How they express themselves reveals the stage at which their “daemon” stands. Through love one being is drawn to another. The manifold variety of things into which the divine unity is diffused strives through love toward oneness and harmony. Love therefore has a divine quality. Hence each man is capable of understanding it only insofar as he has partaken of this divine quality. After these men, representing varying stages of maturity, have declared their views on love, Socrates takes up the discussion. He considers love from the viewpoint of a thinker capable of cognition. For him love is not a god. But it is something leading man to God. Eros, love, is no god for him. God is perfect, and therefore possesses beauty and goodness. But Eros is only the longing for beauty and goodness. Therefore he stands between man and God. He is a “daemon,” a mediator between the earthly and the divine. It is significant that Socrates does not pretend to give his thoughts when he speaks about love. He says he is only recounting a revelation about it, which a woman gave him. He has conceived an idea of love's nature through mantic art.^c7 The priestess Diotima awakened in Socrates the daemonic force which was to lead him to the divine. She “initiated” him. This passage in the Symposium is most revealing. We must ask, Who is this “wise woman” who awakens the daemon in Socrates? We should not think of mere poetic fantasy here. No actual wise woman could have awakened the daemon in the soul if the force for this awakening were not within the soul itself. We must seek this “wise woman” in the soul of Socrates himself. There must, however, be a basis which allows what brings the daemon to birth in the soul to appear as a being in external reality. This force cannot work in the same way as the forces we can observe in the soul as belonging to it and at home with it. We see that it is the force of the soul before it has received wisdom, which Socrates represents as the “wise woman.” It is the maternal principle which gives birth to the Son of God, Wisdom, the Logos. The unconscious force of the soul is presented as a feminine element, which allows the divine to enter consciousness. The soul which as yet lacks wisdom is the mother of what leads to the divine. This leads us to an important idea of mysticism. The soul is recognized as the mother of the divine. With the inevitability of a natural force it unconsciously leads man toward the divine. This point throws light on the conception held in the Mysteries regarding Greek mythology. The world of the gods is born in the soul. Man regards as his gods what he himself creates in the form of pictures. But he must progress to another idea. He must transform into pictures of the gods the divine force present in himself which is active before the creation of these pictures of the gods. The mother of the divine appears behind the divine, and this is none other than the original force in the human soul. Man places goddesses beside his gods. Let us look at the myth of Dionysus in the light of the above. Dionysus is the son of Zeus and a mortal mother, Semele. Zeus tears the premature infant from the mother as she lies slain by lightning, keeping him in his own thigh until he is mature. Hera, the mother of the gods, stirs up the Titans against Dionysus. They dismember the boy. But Pallas Athene rescues the still beating heart and brings it to Zeus. Thereupon Zeus begets the son for the second time. In this myth we have an exact description of a process which takes place in the depths of the human soul. Whoever wishes to speak in the sense of the Egyptian priest who instructs Solon about the nature of a myth could speak as follows: What you tell us, that Dionysus, the son of a god and a mortal mother, is dismembered and is born again, may sound like a fable, but what is true about it is the birth of the divine and its destiny in the human soul. The divine unites with the temporal-earthly soul of man. As soon as this divine element, Dionysus, comes to life, the soul experiences a great longing for its true spiritual status. The consciousness which once again appears in the image of a female divinity, Hera, is jealous of the birth out of a better consciousness. It stirs up the lower nature of man—the Titans. The child of god, still immature, is dismembered. It is present in man as a dismembered material-intellectual science. But if in man sufficient higher wisdom (Zeus) is at work, it cherishes and cares for the immature child, which then is born again as the second son of god (Dionysus). Thus out of science, out of the dismembered divine force in man, is born the harmonizing wisdom, which is the Logos, the son of God and of a mortal mother, who is the transitory soul of man striving unconsciously for the divine. We are far from the spiritual reality represented in all this as long as we see in it only a mere process of the soul and take it as a picture of this process. In this spiritual reality the soul does not merely experience something within itself; it is completely disconnected from itself and participates in a cosmic process which in truth takes place outside itself and not within it.

[ 13 ] Platonic wisdom and Greek mythology unite; so, equally, do Mystery wisdom and mythology. The gods that they created were the objects of the religion of the people; the history of their coming into existence was the secret of the Mysteries. No wonder that it was accounted dangerous to “betray” the Mysteries. This meant “betraying” the origin of the gods of the people. And the right understanding of this origin is wholesome; misunderstanding is destructive.

• 30. Plato, Epistle VII, 341 C.
• 31. Plato, Phaedo, 58 E.
• 32. Plato, Phaedo, 64 A.
• 33. Plato, Phaedo, 64 D.
• 34. Plato, Phaedo, 65 B.
• 35. Plato, Phaedo, 66 A, 67 D, 67 E.
• 36. Plato, Phaedo, 68 C.
• 37. Plato, Phaedo, 79 D, 80 B, 81 A.
• 38. Plato, Phaedo, 106 B.
• 39. Plato, Timaeus, 27 C.
• 40. Plato, Timaeus, 48 D.
• 41. Plato, Timaeus, 22 C, 22 D.
• 42. Plato, Timaeus, 28 C.
• 43. Plato, Timaeus, 36—“... like a great cross †.” Here Plato refers to the Greek letter &Chi, “Chi.”
• 44. Plato, Cratylus 400 BC: “... some say it (the body) is the tomb of the soul, their notion being that the soul is buried in the present life.” The Greek words for “body” and “tomb” suggest a mystical similarity between the two. This was a part of the Orphic doctrine.
• 45. Plato, Timaeus, 92 C.
• 46. Philo of Alexandria, De Profugis, I, 562. Philo or otherwise known as Philo Judaeus, a Jewish philosopher, was born at Alexandria in Egypt, c. 10 B.C., where he spent most of his life. In the year 40 A.D., he headed a Jewish embassy to Rome to petition the Emperor Gaius to refrain from requiring homage from the Jews as a divinity. Eusebius and other Church Fathers advanced a tradition that in Rome Philo met St. Peter, but this is not confirmed. Philo was the most important representative of Hellenistic Judaism, and his many writings extant are brilliant expositions of the Mosaic law and the Jewish religion.
• 47. Philo, Legum allegoriarum, Allegorical Interpretation, Lib. I, 19. (Includes commentary on Genesis 2:1–17)—“Book is Moses' name for the Logos of God in which has been inscribed and engraved the formation of the world.”
• 48. Philo, De confusione linguarum, The Confusion of Tongues, 63. A part of Philo's Allegories of the Sacred Laws, though published under a separate title. The work contains a commentary on Genesis 11:1–9
• 49. Philo, De poseritate, Caini, The Posterity and Exile of Cain, 101, 102. A part of Philo's Allegories of the Sacred Laws, this work includes commentary on Genesis 4:16–25.
• 50. Philo, De migratione Abrahami, The Migration of Abraham, 34, 35. Commentary on Genesis 12:1–6.
• 51. Philo, Quod a Deo mittantur somnia, On Dreams, that they are sent by God, II, 232. A commentary on the two dreams of Jacob, Genesis 28 and 29, and Book II refers to dreams of Joseph, the chief butler, the chief baker, and Pharaoh, Genesis 37, 40, 41.
• 52. Philo, Legum allegoriarum, Allegorical Interpretation, III, 29. See Note 47, above.

  [ 11 ] Plato's world-conception aims to be a form of cognition which in its whole nature is religion. It brings cognition into relationship with the highest man can reach through his feelings. Plato allows cognition to be valid only when it completely satisfies man's feelings. Then it is not pictorial knowledge; it is the content of life. It is a higher man in man. The personality is but an image of this higher man. In man himself the superior, the archetypal man is born. And with this another secret of the Mysteries is expressed in Plato's philosophy. The Church Father Hippolytus points to this secret: “This is the great and ineffable mystery of the Samothracians (the guardians of a particular Mystery-cult) which it is permissible only for the initiated to know. For the Samothracians expressly hand down, in the Mysteries that are celebrated among them, that Adam is the archetypal man.”

• 53. Hippolytus, born probably 2nd half of 2nd century A.D. in Rome; according to legend he was a Roman soldier converted by St. Lawrence. Died c. 326 in Rome. Steiner's reference is to Hippolytus' The Refutation of All Heresies, Book V, ch. 3. Otherwise known as the Philosophumena, Book I was long printed with the works of Origen, Books 2 and 3 have been lost, and Books 4 through 10 were found in ms. form at Mount Athos by a Greek scholar in 1842.
• c7. In ancient mysticism “Mantic” signifies everything relevant to knowledge gained through “spiritual eyes.” On the other hand, “Telestic” is the indication of the paths which lead to initiation.

Translated by Peter Stewart

Allow me today to add something about the architectural idea of Dornach to what I said a few days ago. I have tried to interpret the sequence of columns and column capitals. The question can be raised: Why are there progressively seven columns on each side of the building? And one can think of all kinds of nebulous mysticism in relation to the number seven - just as anthroposophy is generally accused of bringing up all kinds of such things, which one thinks are rooted in all kinds of superstition. But to interpret the seven columns in any other than an artistic way would contradict what lay at the basis of the model's elaboration, of the original work. If one proceeds in such a way that the individual capitals emerge from one another, that is, each successive capital emerges from the previous one, as I described last time, then one concludes that in a certain respect a kind of conclusion is reached with the seventh column. This simply corresponds to the successive feelings in the creation of the form. If one wanted to make an eighth column, one would have to repeat the form - albeit on a higher level. And since everything in an organic building must be based on connecting with the creative forces of nature and of the world-being in general, it is only understandable that that number should emerge which is, so to speak, the leading number for manifold natural phenomena.

We have seven tones in the musical scale. The octave is the repetition of the prime. If we place the phenomenon of light in front of us in the familiar way, we have seven colours in the well-known colour scale where the light shades into colour. The newer chemistry sets up the so-called periodic system, which is also a structure of the atomic weights and properties of the chemical elements according to the number seven. And one who follows organic life finds these numbers everywhere. It is not some superstitious prejudice, but the result of deep observation. And if one's feeling is such that one simply surrenders oneself to observation, dreaming nothing, mystifying nothing, then one will also be able to find the right relationship to the sevenfold-ness of the columns. Everything here has been attempted in such a way that the principle of the organic has been firmly established.

Here you see how the organ has been placed within the whole building in such a way that it does not stand in a corner, but that it has grown out of the forms with the building, so to speak, so that the architecture and sculpture of the building approach the forms created by the arrangement of the organ pipes, do not encompass them, but let them grow out of themselves, so to speak.

What must be considered in such architecture and sculpture is the feeling for the material. It is absolutely a question of the fact that, especially when working in wood, this feeling for the material is perceived on the one hand as something connected with the specific quality of the material in which one is working. But then in wood, because one has essentially a soft form in which one works, one has at the same time, that which makes it easiest to overcome the form as such, and which makes that which is to be revealed, that which is to be revealed artistically, emerges most in such a way that when one works in wood one must directly enter into the secrets of the world's existence.

I just want to draw attention to the following. Assume that one wants to sculpt the human figure in wood. The building will finally be completed here in the east by the fact that under this motif, which is painted in the middle, there will be a wooden sculpture of the same motif.¹ There you will also see the figure of the Christ in connection with Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. So, it was a question of creating a thoroughly idealised and spiritualised human figure out of the wood. With the prerequisites I have just described, it is quite different to work on the head of the human form than on the rest of the organism. These things cannot be approached with abstract knowledge.

The shaping, the forming, is of course just as much within the laws of nature as everything else that in some way arranges nature according to number, measure and the like. When one forms the human head, one has the feeling everywhere: one must work out the form from within, one must try to base it on the feeling that the head is formed from the centre outwards. With the rest of the human organism one has the feeling that one must enter from the outside and, as it were, form the outer surfaces from the outside. One has the feeling that in the case of the head the essential surface is that which lies below, which is therefore inside, which gives itself its curves, its surfaces, from the inside outwards; whereas in the case of the rest of the organism one must consider the outer surfaces as the most important.

By feeling such things, one comes close to the secrets of nature, especially in art. And it must be emphasised again and again that what is called knowledge today cannot lead at all to a real unveiling of the secrets of nature, that in a living comprehension of the ideas which are given to one in laws of nature and the like, one always feels the necessity of ascending from these ideas to that which can only be grasped in an artistic contemplation. And basically, one must not think of the mysteries of the world in any other way than in such a way that so-called scientific knowledge is a stage, but that it must rise to a living artistic comprehension of the world if one really wants to come close to the mysteries of the world. We must not think as we often think today, that art has nothing to reveal of the mysteries of the world, that everything must be left to science.

The only real natural view is the one on which Goethe's conception of the world was based, and which I have already characterised from various sides, - the one that led Goethe to say: art is a revelation of the secret laws of nature, - which would not reveal themselves without the very existence of art.

And so, one could say: In a building like this, a kind of extract of the world's secrets is at the same time presented to the human being. For this reason, many artistic problems arose during the construction of this building. They arose as something self-evident, above all the problem of painting.

On the one hand, it was necessary to express the feelings that could recognise a portrayal of certain mysteries of the world, but on the other hand, one had to direct attention to the artistic means of expression. You do not see in the paintings of the large dome anything symbolic or fantastically speculative, however much some people might believe that. If you look at the painting here at the west end, you will see that there is something in the compositions of colours that looks peculiar.

Now you all know that when you close your eyes, you see something like a mysterious shadow-eye opposite the eye. That which every human being can have before them in this way when the eye is closed, like a kind of shadow-eye, can, however, when one’s inner seeing is particularly formed, come before the soul in a much more elaborate, much more substantial way. It is then, however, no longer as robust, as coarse as the two eyes which one sees as shadow-eyes when one's real eyes are closed, but it contains that which, in a certain way, can be seen spiritually when one's inner attention is directed towards that part of the periphery of the human being which is situated towards the eyes. It is that which then appears to this inspired inner gaze, one might say - a whole world. And the sensation already arises: by looking, as it were, into one's own power of vision, into one's own visual space with one's eyes closed as a human being, one sees before oneself something that is like the beginning of creation.

The beginning of creation is what confronts you here at the west end of the large dome.² And it is not a mere figment of the imagination that up there is the Tree of Paradise, above it a kind of Father-God, that then these two eye-shaped forms appear. All this is something that definitely comes before the inner eye, before the soul's eye with a deepened inner feeling.

In the same way, what you see in the large dome at the eastern end is a kind of impression of the self. This I, which is, if one may say so, a kind of trinity, also reveals itself in these inner perceptions in such a way that it goes on the one hand to the luminous clarity and transparency of the thinking I, on the other hand, at the other pole, as it were, to the will side, to the willing I, and in the middle to the feeling I. At first, this can be expressed abstractly as the thinking, feeling, willing I, as I have just said it, but it is to be felt concretely as a human being who is able to look with love at the colours of nature, who is able to look with devoted love at everything that confronts them in nature for all the senses. When one experiences the I in such a way that at the same time one lets it flow out into the whole of nature, one is aware of the following perceptions:

If you look at a plant in its green colour, in the colour of its blossom, then what you bring before your soul as an image of the plant is basically what you also find when you look, as it is called, into your own inner being. That which is spread out in nature as a carpet of colour, colours itself in that you look into your inner being. And if you, as a human being who loves the world, turn your gaze outwards, turn towards the vastness of the daylight, which stretches into infinite expanses of space, then you feel connected with these expanses of space. By connecting the colours and sounds of these expanses of space with yourself, and by feeling all the configurations that present themselves to you, you feel something that you cannot translate into a symbol with your intellect, but which you can also directly paint artistically and intuitively.

And again, when you let your gaze wander in the direction of the earth's surface, this horizontal plane, let it wander over trees that cover the earth, over all that which expresses itself in the moving trees when the wind rushes through them, then you feel your feeling I, and you get the impulse not to construct this I an abstract design, but to paint it in colours.

If you direct your gaze downwards, so that you feel connected with all that is fruitful on earth, you then feel the need to express your willing I in a colour that imposes itself on you quite naturally.

One must think of the configuration of the ceiling as having been expressed in this way. And because in this way the mystery of the world, which expresses itself in the relationship of the human being to the world, as it can be felt, has been brought here to the ceiling, it was natural that onto this ceiling was also painted some of that which can be felt out of these mysteries of the world.

You will therefore find individual areas covered with that which results from a spiritual cognition of world evolution. These figures that you see here on the left and on the right, which seem to represent mythological figures, they are meant to represent approximately the situation as it was before the great Atlantean catastrophe.

The materialistic theory of evolution is not at all correct in the light of spiritual observation. If we go back in the evolution of humanity, we first come back to the Greek-Latin period, which begins around the eighth century BC. We then come back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, which begins around the turn of the fourth and third millennia before Christ. We return to older periods, and finally we come back to a time which, in terms of spiritual science, must be called the time of the Atlantean catastrophe. There was a great rearrangement of the continents. We gaze back in contemplation to a time in the evolution of the earth when that which is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean was covered by land. But at the same time, one comes back to a period of earthly evolution in which the human being could not yet have existed in the form in which they now exist, in a form shaped in the same way as the muscles and bones of today. If, for instance, you take sea creatures, jellyfish, which you can hardly distinguish from their surroundings, then you come to the material form in which the human being once was on earth, during the old Atlantean time, in which the earth was still covered everywhere with a permanent, dense fog, in which the human being lived and was therefore also had a completely different organic nature. And to the contemplative gaze, the clairvoyant gaze, there arise - if the word is not misunderstood - precisely these forms which are painted here on the left and right of the ceiling.

Something else has been attempted, I would like to say, as a painterly venture. Here you see a head.³ It is not true that when one paints naturalistically, a head must be closed off at the top because that is simply the way naturalistic human heads are. Here the head is not closed off at the top, for the soul and spirit of the ancient Indian, the first civilised human being after the Atlantean catastrophe, is painted here on the wall. And it was necessary to take the risk of not closing off the top of the head, but to leave it open, because in fact, when the Indian is grasped in their time, they present themselves in such a way that they feel in touch with the heavens through their primeval wisdom, that for them, I would like to say, the physical top of the head is lost in the unconscious, and they feel their soul to be reaching out into the vastness of the heavens. That is captured here in painterly form. And this ancient Indian felt connected with the so-called seven Rishis, who poured into them the wisdom of the world in seven rays.

Such things have been tried to be captured here on the ceiling of the auditorium through colours. You can see the truly artistic element that was to be attempted here in this building with regard to painting in the small dome here.

Attempts have been made to create what I would like to call - albeit in an as yet imperfect form - painting out of colour itself. And that seems to me to be connected with the future of the art of painting in general. On the one hand, in the further progress of humanity, we will come closer and closer to the spirit, and on the other hand we will strive more and more to find the spiritual in outer sensory reality.

Then, however, one will be compelled to penetrate oneself inwardly with that which is particularly needed in art: an intense sense of reality. With an intense sense of truth, artistically conceived, one is led to see the true essence of painting in that which is coloured. Is the line a truth? Is the drawing a truth: actually, it is not. Let us look at the line of the horizon: it is there when we capture in colours the blue sky above and the green sea below. If we paint the blue sky at the top and the green sea at the bottom, then the line comes into being by itself as the boundary of the two. But if I draw the line of the horizon with a pencil, that is actually an artistic lie. And you will find that if you have a feeling for the infinite fullness revealed by colour, you can actually create a whole world out of what is coloured.

Red is not just red, red is that which, when one confronts it, means an experience like an attack on our self from the outside world. Red is that which causes one’s soul to flee from that which thus reveals itself as red. Blue is that which invites us to follow it, and a harmony of red and blue can then result in a balance between moving backward and moving forward. In short, if the coloured is experienced, it produces a whole world. And out of the coloured, one can create the form by merely letting the colour in its mutual relationships have an effect on one.

In my first mystery drama, I had a person say that the form of the colour must be the deed in the kind of painting that we are striving toward.⁴ If you look at the small dome here, and if the tinting is just so, that you cannot see the individual figures with it at all, but merely let what is brought as a patches of colour onto this small dome have an effect on each other in their mutual relationships, then you will also get an impression: the impression of a ground of surging colours.

This is first of all that out of which the various forms arise. For those who are able to live into the life of the coloured within themselves, the truly human form, the actions between human forms, the relationships between human forms arise out of the coloured. One has the need to have a blue patch in a certain place, and orange and red nearby. And if one studies this inwardly, intuitively, something like this Faust-like figure, with a floating, angel-like figure in front of it, emerges of its own accord. And one gradually comes to the conclusion, that the blue patch of colour forms itself into a figure reminiscent of the medieval Faust. You will see everywhere in the painting of the small dome that the colouring is the essential thing, and that the forms that are with it have arisen from the colour. Whoever would say: Yes, but one must first think, interpret, if one really wants to feel these individual motifs - is right in a certain sense, if they feel at the same time that here is realised that which I have just characterised as an experiencing of the world of colours.

You can then see how this blue Faust-like figure has emerged here,⁵ underneath it a kind of skeleton, the brown figure, then this orange angel, actually a child, floating towards the face of Faust.

If one first takes the coloured as a basis and then rises from the coloured to the living, then, however, one is faced with the riddle of knowledge of the present human being. The figure of Faust is something that has survived from the 16th century. I would like to say that Faust expresses the protest of the modern human being, who seeks the secrets of the world within themself, versus the human being, who in the Middle Ages still stood in a completely different relationship to the world. The legend of Faust is not something that merely stands for itself alone.

Goethe took up this Faust legend because Goethe was a truly modern human being. But he also transformed the Faust legend of the 16th century. This Faust legend culminates in Faust's encounter with the devil, Faust's confrontation with the forces of the adversary of humanity, his struggle with them. This was intended to express how, as the human being approached modern times, they really became entangled in this struggle. The sixteenth century still felt that those who were brought into this struggle with the devil had to be defeated if they became involved with the devil in any way.

We have the polar opposite of the Faust legend in the Luther legend. Luther at the Wartburg - he is tempted by the devil just like Faust, but he throws the inkwell at the devil's head and drives him away. The Luther legend and the Faust legend are polar opposites for the 16th century.

As you know, anyone who comes to Wartburg Castle will still find the stain preserved from the ink that Luther poured on the devil's head. The custodians tell you, however, that this is always renewed from time to time. But it is there for the visitors.

After Lessing had already pointed out this necessary alteration of the Faust legend, Goethe then transformed the Faust legend of the sixteenth century and portrayed the man Faust as the one who, however, wrestles with the adversary of humanity, with Mephistopheles, but who does not fall prey to him, despite the fact that he responds to him in a certain way, but who achieves his human victory over this adversary who is hostile to humanity.

In this Faust legend, in the whole figure of Faust, is contained the riddle of knowledge of the modern human being. Really, what is called scientific knowledge is basically a caricature of knowledge. That which we develop today by taking possession of the laws of nature and expressing them in abstract propositions, is basically something in which, if we feel it profoundly, we feel to be completely lifeless. When we give ourselves over to abstract ideas, we feel something like a dead soul in us, like a soul corpse. And one who has enough lively feeling, feels in this soul corpse, precisely in what is valued today as the correct, as logical knowledge, something like the approach of death.

This is the feeling that underlies this figure here. And as the counter pole to death, there is the angel-like child floating towards us in orange.

Then the other figures, which are hidden in the whole harmony, are such that the next figures are more or less the figures of a Greek wisdom initiation: a kind of Pallas-Athena figure with the inspiring Apollo, an Egyptian initiate further up, with its inspiring being. Then we come to the whole region of evolving humanity, which strives to experience the human by perceiving duality in the world, good and evil, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. It is represented where this figure below, carrying a child in its hand, has above it the bright, seducing Lucifer and the dark, sinister Ahriman.⁶

This corresponds to the whole region of humanity which extends from Persia to Central Europe and the West, where the human being, if they strive cognitively, has to struggle with dualism, where all the doubts which are caused by being caught between truth and error, between good and evil, are triggered in one’s feelings.

If we approach the middle, in the east, we have this double form there. It is that which will one day grow out of the chaotic Russian. In the Russian soul we have, so to speak, the preparation for the soul-nature of the future, even if it has to work its way through the most diverse chaotic conditions. The human being exists in such a way that they basically always have a second person with them, and this also reveals itself to the contemplative gaze. Every Russian actually has their own human shadow which they carry with them. This then leads to feeling something like an inspiration from the gloomy soul, as is attempted here in the blue, on the other side in the orange angel figure and in the centaur-like figure that is above it. That relationship to nature and to the world, which the Russian soul has as a kind of soul of the future, is depicted there.

And all of this should come together to form the central image, which will then have its counterpart below in the wooden sculpture already mentioned. In the middle, in the east, you see the figure of Christ, above it the figure of Lucifer in red hues, below it, in various shades of brown, the figure of Ahriman. In this is to be felt what actually represents the essence of the human being.⁷

One does not get to know the human being if one only looks at how the human being’s external contours appear to the physical eye. In the physical, the soul and the spirit, the human being carries a trinity within. Physically the human being bears a trinity in the following way. Physically we have within us everything that constantly causes us to age while we are alive, that makes us sclerotic, that makes our limbs calcify, that makes death, as it were, always present in us with its force. That is the physical-ahrimanic working. If this were to get the upper hand, we would fall into old age even as children. But it works in us, and it works physically precisely because it is the solidifying, heavy, calcifying element that leads us towards death.

Above the figure of Christ, we see the figure of Lucifer. It is that physical element in the human being which brings about fever and pleurisy, which in a certain sense always cause us to dissolve, these are the forces of youth, which, if they alone were present, would dissolve the human being.

This polar, circular opposition can be perceived throughout the whole human being. If one feels it in colour, then one feels the luciferic upwards in a red hue, the ahrimanic downwards in a brown hue. And the human being themself is the equilibrium between the two. The human being is actually always the inner state of equilibrium, which, however, must be sought for at every moment, between that which dissolves in warmth, in fever-fire, and the hardening, petrification and solidification which brings death. One will only have a real physiology of the human being when one sees this polarity in each individual organ. Heart, lungs, liver, everything becomes comprehensible only when one sees them in this polarity.

Well, I mean, you can feel all that in what is painted on the ceiling. One could say: so these are symbols after all! - The Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, composed a poem "Ahasver", in which he did not depict human figures in a naturalistic way, but in a spiritual way. He was accused of creating symbols and not real people. He defended himself by saying: "If at the same time one feels so vividly that the figures are living people after all, then they may make a symbolic impression, for who can prevent Nero from being a symbol of cruelty? But one cannot say that Nero was not a real human being because of that!”

These things must be seen in the right light. And to those who do not want something like this to emerge in a new way from the experience of colour, who find it too complicated to look into these things, one must answer: Yes, what should someone who has no sense of anything Christian experience, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper or Raphael's Sistine Madonna? Just as Christianity is necessary there, but even then, when Christianity is present, everything can be perceived from the coloured elements on the surface: so, when there is that very elementary, natural way of looking at the world, to which this building wants to bear witness, all that can be grasped not in abstract terms but in direct, living contemplation.

And that is what is really important about this building: that it is not fantasised about, not interpreted, but that the people who enter it, or who look at it from the outside, become absorbed in the forms, in the colours, and take in what is there in their immediate inner perception. Then we shall see, when we gradually find our way into this building, that it does indeed represent at least an attempt - everything is imperfect at the beginning - at least an attempt to come so close to the meaning of human evolution that it produces, precisely out of the spiritual life necessary for the present, something artistic, just as the various ages have produced something artistic out of their particular conception of the world.

Let us put ourselves back for a moment into the Greek heart, into the Greek soul. Let us put ourselves back into that soul which, with inner sincerity and honesty, could make the traditional statement: Better a beggar here on earth than a king in the kingdom of shadows. The Greek felt bound to the earth by the peculiarity of the spirit of the age. If one may say so, the Greeks appreciated everything that was on earth through the forces of the earth's gravity as something that adorned and covered this earth. They felt the forces of the earth's gravity. And in the building of their temples they expressed how they experienced the forces of this earthly gravity. When in primeval times, the human being looked up to the immortal, to the eternal in the human soul, they looked back to the ancestors. Those souls, which were the souls of the ancestors, the souls of the forefathers, gradually became for them the souls of the gods. And the graves of the ancestors remained for them a sacred place which enclosed something spiritual within itself. For a certain cultural current, the tomb is the first building, the building of the human soul that has left the earthly. In the construction of the Greek temple, one still feels something of an echo of the construction of the tomb. And the melancholy building of the tomb has risen in a joyful way in the building of the Greek temple, in that the departed human soul, which was once divinely worshipped as the ancestral soul, has become the god. The building over the ancestral grave, where the soul, the divinely worshipped ancestral soul was to be given a resting place, became the temple of the god Apollo, Zeus, Athena. And the temple enclosure became the extension of that which once existed as an ancestral tomb. As the ancestral soul became the god, so the tomb became the Greek temple. Just as the ancestral soul was looked upon as the past, and the building of the tomb thus took on a tragic aspect, so the building of the tomb became the building of the temple in its cheerfulness, in its joyfulness, because it had now become the envelope not of the departed soul but of the immortal soul of the gods existing in the present.

One can only think of a Greek temple as the dwelling house of the god. The Greek temple is not perfect in itself. There can only be a temple of Apollo, a temple of Zeus, a temple of Athena. The Greek went to the temple knowing that this was where the god lived.

If we leave out some of the architectural styles, we can then move on to the example of the Gothic building, the cathedral. Let us look again at the form of the cathedral: We no longer see in it any reminiscence of the tomb, at most this is preserved in an inorganic way through tradition, in that the altar is reminiscent of the gravestone, but this is brought into the whole in an inorganic way; the Gothic architectural idea is something different. The Greek temple is that which has shaped its forms through the conquest of the earth's gravitational forces. How could one form that which grows out of the construction of the tomb, that which rises over the earthly tomb, over that which has been lowered into the earth, in any other way than by conquering the forces of the earth's gravity through the force-dynamics, through the form of the building, by mastering in the supporting column, in the supported beam, the forces of gravity which are the forces of the earth. Later, feeling does not go to the earth, not to the ancestral soul that has disappeared: it lifts itself out and goes into the expanses of the world to the God above. Accordingly, the Gothic architectural forms take on their special form.

The striving form of the gothic building is not the overcoming of weight: the most important thing in the form of the gothic building is mutual support. Nowhere do we actually see bearing, we see striving upward. We do not see weight, but a striving upwards toward heaven.

Therefore, the Gothic cathedral is not the dwelling place of any gods, like the Greek temple, but the Gothic cathedral is the meeting place of the faithful, the meeting place of the congregation. If one enters a Greek temple from which the image of the god has been removed, the Greek temple has no meaning. A Greek temple without the image of the god is meaningless. The image of the god must be supplemented in the imagination. If you go into a Gothic cathedral without mass being said and preached, or without a congregation praying together - it is not complete. The living congregation belongs there. And the word for cathedral, “Dom”, also expresses the flowing together of the congregation. Duma and Dom have the same origin. And when the Narodnaya Duma got its name, it was out of the feeling of working together, just as the Gothic cathedral got its name out of the feeling that people must flow together with their souls and together direct their feelings upwards in the direction of the striving Gothic forms.

We see how the perception of artistic forms demonstrates a certain progress in the course of human evolution. Today we no longer live in a time in which one feels as one did in the period when the Gothic flourished. Today we live in a time in which the human being must penetrate deeper into their own inner being. Today we can only establish a social community by each person experiencing "know thyself" in a higher sense than was previously the case - even if it resounds through the ages as the old Apollonian demand of "know thyself" - and fulfilling it in a deeper sense. Only by becoming individualities in the most intensive sense can we form human communities today.

When one immerses oneself in the forms of this Goetheanum, in a feeling way, what do they speak to us? What do they reveal to our gaze? If we want to speak about them, we must try to place before the human soul exactly the same thing that can be expressed through the anthroposophical world view as the mystery of the human being and the mystery of the world, as they reveal themselves to the human being, precisely through ideas, through concepts. The Greek temple represented the dwelling place of the God who descended to earth. The Gothic cathedral represented that which evokes in one the urge to feel "know thyself" and to be together with other people precisely out of this recognition.

When you enter this house, you should have the feeling: In the forms, in the paintings, in everything that is there, one finds the mystery of the human being, and one likes to unite with other people here, because here everyone finds that which reveals their human value, their human dignity, in which one likes to unite lovingly with other people.

In this way, this building wants to welcome all those who enter it, who approach it.

• 1. See the illustration in Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum. Published by Philos.-Anthrop. Verlag.
• 2. See the designs for the painting of the large dome in the first Goetheanum, picture 2 and 3.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's designs for the large dome in the first Goetheanum (an art portfolio executed by Alinari in Florence), Plate VI: The Indian. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 4. The Portal of Initiation. A Rosicrucian Mystery, through Rudolf Steiner. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 5. See: Spiritual Science explanations of Goethe's Faust, Volume I (with 2 picture supplements: Faust, Flying child from the small dome of the burnt Goetheanum) Faust, the striving human being, and Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, with 104 illustrations. Philos. Anthropos. Verlag.
• 6. See Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, Figure 75-79.
• 7. We refer to the colour print by Hanfstaengl of the design sketched by R. Steiner for this picture of the painting of the dome. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag am Goetheanum)