The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We have come to the point in our studies where we heard that the human being who is descending from spiritual regions is clothed in an etheric body and has, for a brief moment, a pre-vision of the life that is awaiting him on earth. We have heard of the abnormalities and conditions to which this may give rise. Before proceeding, we will answer a question which may seem of importance to one who turns his spiritual gaze to Devacha: In what sense is there community of life among human beings between death and a new birth? For there is community of life, not only among men on the physical earth but also in the higher worlds. Just as the activities of human beings in the spirit-realm reach down into the physical world, so all the relationships and connections that are established between men on the earth stretch up into the spiritual world.

We will take a concrete example of this, namely the relationship between mother and child. Is there a relationship between them which endures? There is indeed and moreover a much more intimate, much firmer relationship than can ever be established here on earth. Mother-love, to begin with, is a kind of natural-instinct, it has something of an animal-like character. As the child grows up this relationship becomes a moral, ethical spiritual one. When mother and child learn to think together, when they share experiences in common, natural instinct with draws more and more into the background; it has merely provided the opportunity for the forging of that beautiful bond of union which is present in the very highest sense in the mother's love for the child and the child's love for the mother. The mutual understanding and love which unfolds here continues on into the regions of the spiritual world, even although, as the result of the one dying earlier, the other seems for a time to be separated from the dead. After this period has passed, the link that was on earth is equally vital and intimate. The two are together, only all the purely natural, animal instincts must have been outlived. The feelings and thoughts which weave between one soul and another on earth are not hindered in yonder world by the encasements that exist here. Devachan actually assumes a particular appearance and structure as a result of the relationships that are woven here on earth.

Let us take another example. Friendships and affinities are born from the kinship of souls; they continue on into Devachan, and from them the social connections for the next life develop. By establishing connections with souls here, we are therefore working at the form which Devachan receives. We have all of us worked in this way if bonds of love were forged between us and other men; thereby we create something that has significance not only for the earth but which also shapes conditions in Devachan. What happens here as the fruit of love, of friendship, of mutual inner understanding—all these things are building stones of temples in the spiritual region above and men who have this certainty cannot but be inspired by the knowledge that when, here on earth, bonds are forged from soul to soul, this is the foundation of an eternal “Becoming.”

Let us suppose for a moment that on some other physical planet there were beings incapable of mutual sympathy, incapable of forming bonds of love among one another. Such beings would have a very barren Devachan. Only a planet where bonds of love are forged between one being and another can have a Devachan rich in content and variety. A being who is already in Devachan and whose presence, it is true, cannot be experienced by ordinary men, has, according to his stage of development, greater or less consciousness of communion with those who have remained behind on the earth. There are, indeed, means whereby consciousness of these bonds of communion can be intensified. If we send thoughts of love-but not of egotistic love-to the Dead, we strengthen the feeling of community with them.

It is a mistake to assume that the consciousness of the human being in Devachan is dim or shadowy. This is not the case. The degree of consciousness once attained by a man can never be lost, in spite of darkenings which occur during certain periods of transition. The human being in Devachan has, through his spiritual organs, clear consciousness of what is happening in the sphere of the earth. Occultism reveals that the human being in the spiritual world lives together with what is taking place on the earth.

Thus we see that life in Devachan, if viewed in its reality, loses every element of comfortlessness; that the human being, when he ceases to regard it from his earthly, egotistical standpoint, can experience it as a condition of infinite blessedness—even apart from the fact that all freedom from the physical body, freedom from the lower nature in which he is enclosed here, brings with it a feeling of intense relief. The fact that these encasements have fallen away—this in itself brings a feeling of beatitude. Devachan is thus a time of expansion and expression in all directions; there is a richness and an absence of restriction that are never experienced on the earth.

We have heard that on his descent to a new birth, man is clothed with a new etheric body by Beings of a rank similar to that of the Folk-Spirits. This etheric body is not perfectly adapted to the reincarnating human being; still less perfectly adapted is the physical sheath he receives. We will now speak, in broad outline, of the incorporation of the human being into the physical world. Much of the subject baffles any attempt at outer description.

We have heard that in accordance with his qualities, the human being clothes himself with an astral body. Through what is contained in this astral body he is attracted to certain human beings on the earth; through the etheric body, he is drawn to the folk and to the family in the wider sense, into which he is to be reborn. According to the way and manner in which he has developed his astral body, he is drawn to the mother; the essence, the substance, the Organisation of the astral body draws him to the mother. The ego draws him to the father. The ego was present even in ages of remote antiquity, when the soul descended for the first time from the bosom of the Godhead into an earthly body. This ego has developed through many incarnations; the ego, the “I,” of one human being is distinct from the ego of another and at the present stage of evolution gives rise to the force of attraction to the father. The etheric body attracts the human being to the folk, to the family; the astral body attracts him particularly to the mother; the “I” to the father. The whole descent to the new incarnation is guided in accordance with these principles.

It may happen that the astral body is attracted to a mother but that the ego is not attracted to the corresponding father; in such a case the wandering continues until suitable parents are found.

In the present phase of evolution, the “I” represents the element of will, the impulse of perceptivity. In the astral body lie the qualities of phantasy or imagination, of thinking. The latter qualities, therefore, are transmitted by the mother, the former by the father. The individuality who is approaching incarnation, seeks out through his unconscious forces the parents who are to provide the physical body.

What has here been described takes place, in essentials, by about the third week after conception. True, this being who consists of “I,” astral body and etheric body is, from the moment of conception onwards, near the mother who bears within her the fertilised germ-cell; but it works in upon the germ-cell from outside. At about the third week the astral and etheric bodies take hold, as it were, of the germ-cell and now begin to participate in the work on the embryo; up to that time the development of the physical body proceeds without the influence of the astral body and etheric body. From then onwards these bodies participate in the development of the embryo and themselves influence the further elaboration of the human-germ. Therefore what was said about the etheric body holds good still more for the physical body and complete suitability is even less easy to obtain here. These significant facts shed light upon a great deal that happens in the world.

Up to this point we have been speaking of the normal evolution of the average man of modern times; what has been said does not altogether hold good of a man in whom occult development began in a previous incarnation. The higher the stage to which he attained, the earlier does he begin to work upon his own physical body in order to make it more suitable for the mission he has to fulfil on the earth. The later he takes command of the physical germ, the less control he will have over the physical body. The most highly developed Individualities, those who are the guides and leaders of the spiritual life of the earth take command already at the time of conception. Nothing takes place without their collaboration; they direct their physical body right up to the time of their death and begin to prepare the new body directly the first impetus for this is given.

The substances of which the physical body is composed are perpetually changing; after about seven years, every particle has been renewed. The substance is exchanged but the form endures. Between birth and death the substances of the physical body must continually be born anew; they are the ever-changing element. What we develop in such a way that death has no power over it, is preserved and builds up a new organism.

The Initiate performs consciously, between death and a new birth, what the average human being performs unconsciously between birth and death; the Initiate consciously builds up his new physical body. For him, therefore, birth amounts to no more than an outstanding event in his existence. He exchanges the substances only once, but then fundamentally. Hence there is considerable similarity of stature and form in such Individualities from one incarnation to another, whereas in those who are but little developed there is no similarity of form whatever in their successive incarnations. The higher the development of a man, the greater is the similarity in two successive incarnations; this is clearly perceptible to clairvoyant sight. There is a definite phrase for indicating this higher stage of development; it is said that such a man is not born in a different body, any more than it is said of the average human being that he receives a new body every seven years. Of a Master it is said: he is born in the same body; he uses it for hundreds, even thousands of years. This is the case with the vast majority of leading Individualities. An exception is formed by certain Masters who have their own special mission; with them the physical body remains, so that death does not occur for them at all. These are the Masters whose task it is to watch over and bring about the transition from one race to another.

Two other questions arise at this point, namely, that of the duration of the sojourn in the spiritual worlds, and that of the sex in consecutive incarnations.

Occult investigation reveals that the human being returns to incarnation within an average period of from 1,000 to 1,300 years. The reason for this is that the human being may find the face of the earth changed on his return and therefore be able to have new experiences. The changes on the earth are closely connected with certain constellations of the stars. This is a most significant fact. At the beginning of spring the sun rises in a certain zodiacal constellation. The sun began to rise in the constellation of Aries (the Ram) 800 years before Christ; before that epoch it rose in the adjacent constellation of Taurus (the Bull). About 2,600 years are required for the passage through one constellation. The circuit through the whole twelve constellations is known in occultism as a Cosmic Year.

The peoples of antiquity were deeply sensible of what is connected with this passage through the zodiac. With feelings of awe and reverence they said: When the sun rises in spring, nature is renewed after her winter repose; nature is awakened from deep sleep by the divine rays of the vernal sun. And they connected this young, fresh power of spring with the constellation from which the sun was shining. They said: This constellation is the bestower of the sun with its new vigour, it is the bestower of the new, divinely creative power. And so the Lamb was regarded as the benefactor of humanity by men who lived in an epoch now lying 2,000 years behind us. All the sagas and legends concerning the Lamb originated in that age. Conceptions of the Godhead were associated with this symbol. During the early centuries of our era, the Redeemer Himself, Christ Jesus, was depicted by the symbol of the Cross and underneath it the Lamb. Not until; the sixth century A.D. was the Redeemer portrayed on the Cross.

This is the origin, too, of the well-known myth of Jason and the quest of the Golden Fleece.

In the epoch preceding 800 B.C. the sun was passing through the constellation of Taurus; in Egypt we find the veneration of Apis the Bull, in Persia the veneration of the Mithras Bull. Earlier still, the sun was passing through the constellation of Gemini, the Twins; in Indian and Germanic mythology we find definite indication of the Twins; the twin goats drawing the chariot of the God Donar are a last remnant of this. Then, finally, we come back to the epoch of Cancer which brings us near to the time of the Atlantean Flood. An ancient culture passed away and a new culture arose. This was designated by a particular occult sign, the vortex, which is the symbol of Cancer and to be found in every calendar.

Thus the peoples have always had a clear consciousness of the fact that what proceeds in the heavens runs parallel with the changes taking place on the earth beneath. When the sun has completed its passage through one constellation, the face of the earth has changed to such an extent that it is profitable for the human being to enter a new life. For this reason the time of reincarnation depends upon the progress of the vernal equinox. The period required by the sun for its passage through one zodiacal constellation is the period within which the human being is twice incarnated, once as a man and once as a woman. The experiences in a male and a female organism are so fundamentally different for spiritual life that the human being incarnates once as a woman and once as a man into the same conditions of the earth. This makes an average of 1,000 to 1,300 years between two incarnations.

Here we have the answer to the question concerning the sex. As a rule, the sex alternates. This rule, however, is often broken, so that sometimes there are three to five, but never more than seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex. To say that seven consecutive incarnations in the same sex are the rule, contradicts all occult experience.

Before we begin to study the karma of the individual human being, one fundamental fact must be borne in mind. There is a common karma, karma that is not determined by the single individual although it is adjusted in the course of his incarnations. Here is a concrete example:—

When in the Middle Ages the Huns poured over from Asia into the countries of Europe and caused alarming wars, this too had spiritual significance. The Huns were the last surviving remnants of ancient Atlantean peoples; they were in an advanced stage of decadence which expressed itself in a certain process of decay in their astral and etheric bodies. These products of decay found good soil in the fear and the terror caused among the peoples. The result was that these products of decay were inoculated into the astral bodies of the peoples and in a later generation this was carried over into the physical body. The skin absorbed the astral elements and the outcome was a disease prevalent in the Middle Ages, namely, leprosy. An ordinary doctor would, of course, attribute leprosy to physical causes. I have no wish to dispute what such doctors say but their line of reasoning is as follows:—In a fight, one man wounds another with a knife; he had harboured an old feeling of revenge against him. One person will say that the cause of the wound was the feeling of revenge, another that the knife was the cause.—Both are right. The knife was the final physical cause but behind it there is the spiritual cause. Those who seek for spiritual causes will always admit the validity of physical causes.

We see that historical events have a significant effect upon whole generations and we learn how, even in fundamental conditions of health, improvements extending over long periods of time can be brought about.

As a result of technical progress in recent centuries there developed among the European peoples an industrial proletariat, and together with it, untold racial and class hatred. This has its seat in the astral body and comes to physical expression as pulmonary tuberculosis. This knowledge is yielded by occult investigation. It is often not within our power to help the individual among those who are subject to general karma of this kind. We are often compelled, with aching hearts, to see an individual suffering without being able to make him well or, happy because he is connected with the general karma. Only by working for the improvement of the common karma can we also help the individual. It should not be our aim to promote the well being of the single, egoistic self, but to work in such a way that we serve the well being of humanity as a whole.

Another example, directly connected with topical events, is the following—Occult observations have revealed that among the astral beings who participated in the various battles of the Russian-Japanese war, there were dead Russians, working against their own people. This was due to the fact that during recent times in the development of the Russian people, many noble idealists perished in the dungeon or on the scaffold. They were men of high ideals, but they were not so far developed as to be able to forgive. They died with feelings of bitter revenge against those who had been the cause of their death. These feelings of revenge were lived out in their Kamaloca period, for only in Kamaloca is this possible. From the astral plane after their death, they filled the souls of the Japanese soldiers with hatred and revenge against the people to whom they themselves had belonged. Had they already been in Devachan they would have said: I forgive my enemies! For in Devachan, with the clouds of hatred and revenge confronting them from without, they would have realised how terrible and how unworthy such feelings are.—Thus occult investigation reveals that whole peoples stand under the influence of their forefathers.

The idealistic strivings of modern times cannot attain their goals because they are willing to work only with physical means on the physical plane. So, for example, the Society for the Promotion of Peace, which sets out to bring about peace by physical methods alone. Not until we learn how to influence the astral plane too can we recognise the right methods; not until then can we work in such a way that when the human being is born again he will find a world in which he can labour fruitfully.

[ 1 ] Numerous facts combined to show us that the N philosophical wisdom of the Greeks rested on the same mental basis as mystic knowledge. We understand the great philosophers only when we approach them with feelings gained through study of the Mysteries. With what veneration does Plato speak of the “secret doctrines” in the Phaedo! “And it almost seems,” he says, “as though those who have appointed the initiations for us are not such bad people after all, and that for a long time they have been enjoining upon us that anyone who reaches Hades without being initiated and sanctified falls into the mire; but that he who is purified and consecrated when he arrives dwells with the gods. For those who have to do with consecrations say that there are many thyrsus-bearers,¹ but few really inspired. These latter are, in my opinion, none other than those who have devoted themselves in the right way to wisdom. I myself have not missed the opportunity of becoming one of these, as far as I was able, and have striven after it in every way.”

It is only a man who is placing his own search for wisdom entirely at the disposal of the condition of soul created by initiation who could thus speak of the Mysteries. And there is no doubt that a flood of light is shed on the words of the great Greek philosophers when we illuminate them from the Mysteries.

[ 2 ] The relation of Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 B.C.) to the Mysteries is plainly given us in a saying about him, to the effect that his thoughts “were an impassable road”, and that anyone entering upon them without ‘ being initiated found only “dimness and darkness”; but that, on the other hand, they were “brighter than the sun” for anyone introduced to them by an initiate. And when it is said of his book that he deposited it in the temple of Artemis, this simply means that initiates alone could understand him.² Heraclitus was called “The Obscure”, because it was only through the Mysteries that light could be thrown on his views.

[ 3 ] Heraclitus comes before us as a man who took life with the greatest seriousness. Even his features show us, if we can recall them, that he bore within himself intimate knowledge which he knew words could only suggest, not express. Out of this background arose his celebrated utterance, “All things are in flux,” which Plutarch explains thus: “We do not dip twice into the same wave, nor can we twice come in contact with the same mortal existence. For through abruptness and speed it disperses and brings together, not in succession but simultaneously.”

A man with such views has penetrated the nature of transitory things, for he has felt impelled to characterize the essence of transitoriness itself in the clearest terms. Such a description as this could not be given unless the transitory were being measured by the Eternal; and in particular, it could not be extended to man without an insight into his inner nature. Heraclitus has extended his characterization to man: “Life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and age are the same; this in changing is that, and that again this” In this sentence there is expressed full knowledge of the illusory nature of the lower personality. He says still more forcibly: “Life and death are found in our living even as in our dying.” What does this mean but that only a point of view based on the transitory can value life more than death? Dying is to pass, in order to make way for new life, but the Eternal lives in the new life, as in the old. The same Eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When we grasp this Eternal we look upon life and death with the same feeling. Life has a special value only when we have not been able to awaken the Eternal within us. The saying, “All things are in flux,” might be repeated a thousand times, but unless said in the mood of this feeling, it is empty sound. The knowledge of eternal growth is valueless if it does not detach us from temporal growth. It is the turning away from that love of life which impels toward the transitory that Heraclitus indicates in his utterance: “How can we say of our daily life, ‘We are;’ when from the standpoint of the eternal we know that ‘We are and are not’?”³ “Hades and Dionysos are one and the same,” says one of the Fragments. Dionysos, the god of joy in life, of germination and growth, to whom the Dionysiac festivals are dedicated is, for Heraclitus, the same as Hades, the god of destruction and annihilation. Only one who sees death in life and life in death, and in both the Eternal, high above life and death, can view the merits and demerits of existence in the right light. Then even imperfections become justified, for in them, too, lives the Eternal. What they are from the standpoint of the limited lower life they are only in appearance: “The gratification of men’s wishes is not necessarily a happiness for them. Illness makes health sweet and good, hunger makes food appreciated, and toil, rest” “The sea’s water is the purest and impurest, drinkable and wholesome for fishes, it is undrinkable and injurious to human beings.” Heraclitus is not primarily drawing attention to the transitoriness of earthly things, but to the splendor and majesty of the Eternal.

Heraclitus speaks vehemently against Homer and Hesiod, and the learned men of his day. He wished to show up their way of thinking which clings to the transitory. He did not desire gods endowed with qualities taken from a perishable world, and he could not regard as supreme that science which investigates the laws of growth and decay of things. For him, the Eternal speaks out of the perishable, and for this Eternal he has a profound symbol. “The harmony of the world returns upon itself, like that of the lyre and the bow.” What depths are hidden in this image! By the pressing asunder of forces and by the harmonizing of these divergent forces, unity is attained. One tone conflicts with another, but together they produce harmony. If we apply this to the spiritual world we have the thought of Heraclitus: “Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the death of mortals, dying the life of the immortals.”

[ 4 ] It is man’s original guilt to cling with his cognition to the transitory. Thereby he turns away from the Eternal, and life becomes a danger for him. What happens to him comes to him through life, but its events lose their sting if he ceases to set unconditioned value on life. In that case his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he were able to return from the so-called seriousness of life to his childhood. The adult takes many things seriously with which a child merely plays, but one who really knows becomes like a child. “Serious” values lose their value when looked at from the standpoint of eternity. Life then seems like play. On this account does Heraclitus say: “Eternity is a child at play, it is the reign of a child.” Where does the original guilt lie? In taking with the utmost seri- ousness what ought not to be so taken. God has poured himself into the world of objects. If we take these objects and leave God unheeded, we take them in earnest as “the tombs of God”. We should play with them like a child, but at the same time should earn- estly strive to call forth from them the Divine that sleeps spellbound within them.

[ 5 ] Beholding of the Eternal acts like a consuming fire on ordinary speculation about the nature of things. The spirit dissolves thoughts which come through the senses; it fuses them; it is a consuming fire. This is the higher meaning of the Heraclitean thought, that fire is the primary element of all things. This thought is certainly to be taken at first as an ordinary physical explanation of the phenomena of the universe. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not think of him in the same way as Philo, living in the early days of Christianity, thought of the laws of the Bible. “There are people,” he says, “who take the written laws merely as symbols of spiritual doctrines, who diligently search for the latter, but despise the laws them- selves. I can only reprove such, for they should pay heed to both, to an understanding of the hidden meaning and to the observation of the obvious one.” If the question is discussed whether Heraclitus meant by “fire” physical fire, or whether fire for him was only a symbol of Eternal Spirit which dissolves and rebuilds all things, then a wrong construction has been put upon his thought. He meant both and neither of these things; for spirit was also alive for him in ordinary fire, and the force that is physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in the human soul, which melts in its crucible mere sense-knowledge and engenders out of this the perception of the Eternal.

[ 6 ] It is very easy to misunderstand Heraclitus. He makes strife the father of things, but only of “things”, not of the Eternal. If there were no contrasts in the world, no conflicting interests, the world of becoming, of transitory things, would not exist. But what is revealed in this antagonism, what is poured out into it, is not strife but harmony. Just because there is strife in all things, the spirit of the wise should pass over them like a breath of fire, and change them into harmony.

From this point there shines forth one of the great thoughts of Heraclitean wisdom. What is man as a personal being? From the point of view just stated Heraclitus is able to answer. Man is composed of the conflicting elements into which Divinity has poured itself. In this state he finds himself, and beyond this becomes aware of the spirit within him, the spirit which is rooted in the Eternal. But the spirit is born for man himself out of the conflict of elements, and it is the spirit also which has to calm them. In man, nature surpasses her creative limits. It is indeed the same universal force that created antagonism and the mixture of elements which afterwards by its wisdom is to do away with the conflict. Here we arrive at the eternal dualism which lives in man, the perpetual contrast between the temporal and the Eternal. Through the Eternal he has become something quite definite, and out of this he is to create something higher. He is both dependent and independent. He can participate in the Eternal Spirit whom he beholds only in the measure of the compound of elements which that Eternal Spirit has effected within him. And it is just on this account that he is called upon to fashion the Eternal out of the temporal. The spirit works within him, but works in a special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of the human soul that a temporal thing should be able to act like an eternal one, should work and increase in power like an eternal thing. This is why the soul is at once like a god and a worm. Man, owing to this, stands midway between God and the animal. The productive and active force within him is his daimonic element—that within him which reaches beyond himself.

“Man’s daimon is his destiny.” Thus strikingly does Heraclitus make reference to this fact.⁴ He extends man’s vital essence far beyond the personal. The personality is the vehicle of the daimon, which is not confined within the limits of the personality, and for which the birth and death of the personality are of no importance. What is the relation of the daimonic element to the personality which comes and goes? The personality is only a form for the manifestation of the daimon.

One who has arrived at this wisdom looks beyond himself, backward and forward. The experience of the daimonic in himself proves to him his own immortality. And he can no longer ascribe to his daimon the sole function of occupying his personality, for the latter can be only one of the forms in which the daimon manifests itself. The daimon cannot be shut up within one personality; he has power to animate many. He is able to transform himself from one personality into another. The great idea of reincarnation springs as something obvious from the Heraclitean premises, and not only the idea, but the experience of the fact. The idea only paves the way for the experience. One who becomes conscious of the daimonic element within himself does not find it innocent and in its first stage: it has qualities. Whence do they come? Why have I certain propensities? Because other personalities have already worked upon my daimon. And what becomes of the work which I accomplish in the daimon if I am not to assume that its task ends with my personality? I am working for a future personality. Between me and the spirit of the universe, something interposes that reaches beyond me, but is not yet the same as Divinity. This something is my daimon. As my today is only the product of yesterday and my tomorrow will be the product of today, so my life is the result of a former and will be the foundation of a future one. Just as earthly man looks back to numerous yesterdays and forward to many tomorrows, so does the soul of the sage look upon many lives in his past and many in the future. The thoughts and aptitudes I acquired yesterday I use today. Is it not the same with life? Do not people enter upon the horizon of existence with the most diverse capacities? Whence this difference? Does it proceed from nothingness?

Our natural sciences take much credit to themselves for having banished miracle from our views of organic life. David Friedrich Strauss, in his Old and New Faith,⁵ considers it a great achievement of our day that we no longer think that a perfect organic being is a miracle issuing from nothing. We comprehend perfection when we are able to explain it as a development from imperfection. The structure of an ape is no longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors to have been primitive fishes that have been gradually transformed. Let us at least accept as reasonable in the domain of spirit what seems to us to be right in the domain of nature! Is the perfect spirit to have the same antecedents as the imperfect one? Does a Goethe have the same antecedents as any Hottentot? The antecedents of an ape are as unlike those of a fish as are the antecedents of Goethe's spirit unlike those of a savage. The spiritual ancestry of Goethe’s spirit is a different one from that of the savage. The spirit has evolved as has the body. The spirit in Goethe has more progenitors than the one in a savage. Let us take the doctrine of reincarnation in this sense and we shall no longer find it unscientific. We shall be able to explain in the right way what we find in our soul, and we shall not take what we find as if it were created by a miracle. If I can write, it is owing to the fact that I learned to write. No one who has a pen in his hand for the first time can sit down and write offhand. But one who has come into the world with the stamp of genius, must he owe it to a miracle? No, even the stamp of genius must be acquired. It must have been learned. And when it appears in a person we call it spirit. This spirit too must have gone to school; its capacities in a later life were acquired in a former one.

[ 7 ] In this form, and this form only, did the thought of Eternity live in the mind of Heraclitus and other Greek sages. There was no question with them of a continuance of the immediate personality after death. Compare some verses of Empedocles (490-430 B.C.). He says of those who accept the facts of existence as miracles:

[ 8 ] Foolish and ignorant they, for they do not reach far with their thinking,
Who suppose that what has never been can really come into being,
Or that beings there be that die away and vanish completely;
It is ne’er possible for being to begin from what is non-being,
Quite impossible also that being can fade into nothing; For wherever a being is driven, there will it remain in being.
Never will those believe, who have in these things been instructed,
That the spirits of men live only while what is called life here endures,
That only so long do they live, receiving their joys and their sorrows,
But that ere they were born they were nothing, and after they die they are naught.

[ 9 ] The Greek sage never even asked whether there was an eternal element in man, but only inquired of what this element consisted and how man can nourish and cherish it in himself. For from the outset it was clear to him that man is an intermediate creation between the earthly and the Divine. There was no thought of a Divine being outside and beyond the world. The Divine lives in man but lives in him only in a human way. It is the force urging man to make himself ever more and more divine, Only one who thinks thus can say with Empedocles:

[ 10 ] When leaving thy body behind thee thou soarest up into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, beyond the power of death.

[ 11 ] What may be done for a human life from this point of view? It may be introduced into the magic circle of the Eternal; for in man there must be forces which the merely natural life does not develop, and the life might pass away fruitless if the forces remained idle. To release them, thereby to make man like the Divine, this was the task of the Mysteries. And this was also the mission the Greek sages set themselves. In this way we can understand Plato’s utterance that “he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the nether-world will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods.” We have to do here with a conception of immortality the significance of which lies bound up within the universe. Everything man undertakes in order to awaken the Eternal within him he does in order to raise the value of the world’s existence. His enlightenment does not make him an idle spectator of the universe, imagining things that would be there whether he existed or not. The power of his insight is a higher one, a creative force of nature. What flashes up within him spiritually is something divine which was previously under a spell, and which, failing the knowledge he has gained, would have to lie fallow, awaiting some other exorcist. Thus the human personality does not live in and for itself but for the world. Life expands far beyond individual existence when looked at in this way. From within such a point of view we can understand utterances like that of Pindar, giving a glimpse of the Eternal: “Happy is he who has seen the Mysteries and then descends under the hollow earth. He knows the end of life, and he knows the beginning promised by Zeus.”

[ 12 ] We understand the proud features and solitary nature of sages such as Heraclitus, They were able to say proudly of themselves that much had been revealed to them, for ‘they did not attribute their knowledge to their transitory personality, but to the eternal daimon within them, Their pride had as a necessary adjunct the stamp of humility and modesty, expressed in the words, “All knowledge of perishable things is in perpetual flux like the things themselves.” Heraclitus calls the eternal universe a game: he could also call it the most serious of realities. But the word “serious” has lost its force through being applied to earthly experiences, On the other hand, the game of the Eternal leaves man that sureness in life of which he is robbed by such seriousness as derives from the transitory.

[ 13 ] A different conception of the universe from that of Heraclitus grew up, on the basis of the Mysteries, in the community founded by Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C. in Southern Italy. The Pythagoreans saw the basis of things in the numbers and geometrical figures into whose laws they made research by means of mathematics. Aristotle says of them: “They first developed mathematics; then, completely absorbed in it, they considered the roots of mathematics to be the roots of all things. Now as numbers are naturally the first thing in mathematics and they thought they saw many resemblances in numbers to things and to development,—more in numbers than in fire, earth, and water,—in this way one quality of numbers came to mean for them justice, another, the soul and spirit, another, time, and so on with all the rest. Moreover, they found in numbers the qualities and relations of harmony; and thus everything else, in accordance with its whole nature, seemed to be an image of numbers, and number seemed to be the first thing in nature.”

[ 14 ] The mathematical and scientific study of natural phenomena must always lead to a certain Pythagorean habit of thought. When a string of a certain length is struck, a particular tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numeric proportions, other tones will be produced. The pitch of the tones can be expressed in figures. Physics also expresses color relations in figures. When two bodies combine into one substance, it always happens that a certain definite quantity of the one body, expressible in numbers, combines with a certain definite quantity of the other. The Pythagoreans’ sense of observation was directed to such arrangements of measures and numbers in nature. Geometrical figures also play a similar role in nature. Astronomy, for instance, is mathematics applied to the heavenly bodies. One fact became important to the thought life of the Pythagoreans: that man, quite independently and purely through his mental activity, discovers the laws of numbers and figures; and yet, that when he looks around in nature, he finds that things obey the same laws he has ascertained for himself in his own mind. Man forms the idea of an ellipse, and ascertains the laws of ellipses. And the heavenly bodies move according to the laws which he has established, (It is not, of course, a question here of the astronomical views of the Pythagoreans. What may be said about these may equally be said of Copernican views in the connection now being dealt with.) Hence it follows as a direct consequence that the achievements of the human soul are not an activity apart from the rest of the world, but that in those achievements the cosmic laws are expressed. The Pythagoreans said: “The senses show man physical phenomena, but they do not show the harmonious order regulating these phenomena.” The human spirit must first find that harmonious order within itself if this spirit wishes to behold it in the outer world. The deeper meaning of the world, that which holds sway within it as ap eternal, law-obeying necessity, this makes its appearance in the human soul and becomes a present reality there. The meaning of the universe is revealed in the soul. This meaning is not to be found in what we see, hear, and touch, but in what the soul brings to light from its own unseen depths. The eternal laws are thus hidden in the depths of the soul. If we descend there, we shall find the Eternal. God, the eternal harmony of the world, is in the human soul. The soul element is not limited to the bodily substance enclosed within the skin, for what is born in the soul is nothing less than the laws by which worlds revolve in celestial space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality only serves as the organ through which the order of pervading cosmic space may express itself. There is something in the spirit of Pythagoras in what one of the Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, said: It is said that human nature is something small and limited, and that God is infinite. But who dares to say that the infinity of the Godhead is limited by the boundary of the flesh, as though by a vessel? For not even during our lifetime is the spiritual nature confined within the boundaries of the flesh. The mass of the body, it is true, is limited by neighbouring parts, but the soul reaches out freely into the whole of creation by the movements of thought.”

The soul is not the personality, the soul belongs to infinity. From such a point of view the Pythagoreans must have considered that only “fools” could imagine the soul force to be exhausted with the personality.

For them, too, as for Heraclitus, the essential point was the awakening of the Eternal in the personal. Enlightened knowledge for them meant intercourse with the Eternal. The more man brought the eternal element within him into existence, the greater must he necessarily seem to the Pythagoreans. Life in their community consisted in holding intercourse with the Eternal. The object of Pythagorean education was to lead the members of the community to that intercourse. Education was therefore a philosophical initiation, and the Pythagoreans might well say that by their manner of life they were aiming at the same goal as that of the Mystery cults.

• 1. Thyrsus, a staff entwined with ivy and surmounted by a pine-cone, or by a bunch of vine or ivy leaves, with grapes or berries. It is an attribute of Dionysos, or the Satyrs.
• 2. Edmund Pfleiderer has already collected the historical evidence for the relation of Heraclitus to the Mysteries. Cf. his book: Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee, Berlin, 1866.
• 3. Cf. Fragments of Heraclitus, No. 81.
• 4. Daimon is used here in the Greek sense. Today we would say “spirit”.
• 5. David Friedrich Strauss, Alter und Neuer Glaube.

What I have said during these evenings has been directed to showing, from the most various points of view, that that aspect of events which is generally accepted as the history of mankind is, in many respects, a superficial one. How, for an understanding of the present condition of affairs, it is peculiarly necessary that we should not be led into any illusions as to this superficial way of regarding mankind's historic evolution in these latter days. We must not on any account assume that what holds good, and what I am about to say, of the more or less final phase of the historic evolution covered by the Fifth post-Atlantean age,—that that holds good for the whole course of human history. We must have no such ideas. For this final phase, however, what I am about to say holds good

From the socialist side, it is always being pointed out that the whole course of human history is, in actual reality, to be traced in economic processes alone,—in the processes of industrial life, in the class-warfare that has resulted from the processes of economic life. And on the foundation of this economic matter-of-fact world, as a sort of superstructure upon it, are supposed to have grown up all those developments that we see in the way of Law, Moral Conventions, and especially spiritual life, including, of course, Art, Religion, Science, etc. As applied to the whole course of human history that is, of course, nonsense. One cannot but ask oneself: What has led to this nonsensical idea? V/hat has led to such a nonsensical idea is that, as a matter of fact, and in respect of this particular last phase of human evolution in our own modern times, the thing has a basis of truth in it. Amongst the events which ushered in this modern age we have to note those changes in our earthly evolution that I mentioned yesterday, which were brought about by the discovery of America, by the discovery of the sea-route to the East Indies. But, besides this, the latest phase of mankind's evolution must be marked by us as that of the great spiritual upheaval which was accomplished at the beginning of the modern age, and which we call The Reformation.

The time has come, my dear friends, when this Reformation, too, must be recognised for what it really was. And when one goes further into all that we were leading up to yesterday, and acquires a deeper view of history, not a merely superficial one, then, indeed, one finds that what is in appearance a spiritual transition at the beginning of the modern age—the Reformation—really rests, rests solidly, upon something that Is, after all, at bottom, economic in character. And it is just from a perception of this economic basis lying at the root of the Reformation, and from seeing nothing else, that the socialist view arose, that all historic evolution has been simply the outcome of class-warfare and of economic conditions.

If we examine, not by the light of illusion, but by the light of truth, what took place and the things that underwent a metamorphosis through the Reformation at the beginning of the modern period of historical development, we can but say: A tremendous shifting of status undoubtedly took place with considerable rapidity at this time, when the modern age was beginning. The way in which the shifting of the population took place was this; that the land and soil in Western Europe, particularly, were, before the Reformation set in, possessed by different peoples from those who possessed it afterwards. For those people who before the Reformation were the leaders, and on whom the social structure more or less depended, lost their position through the Reformation. All landed property before the Reformation was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, dependent on the lordship of the priesthood, and in all manner of ways. Before the Reformation, the lordship of the priests was remarkably powerful in determining the character, for instance, of economic conditions. Those who possessed landed estates possessed them to a very large extent as a sort of agents and under an obligation of some sort or another in connection with the offices of the Church.

Now, if one examines the actual course of history from a perhaps not very idealistic but therefore all the more truthful point of view, one finds that, with the Reformation, the old estates of the Church and Spiritual Orders were torn from those who held them, and transferred to the temporal lords. This was very largely the case in England. It was also very largely the case in Germany,—in what later on was Germany. In what later was Germany, many of the territorial Princes went over to the Reformation. But this was not Invariably,—not to put it too aggressively,—this was by no means invariably out of zeal for Luther or the other Reformers; it was a hungering for the estates of the Church, a craving to secularise the estates of the Church. Any number of estates that belonged to the spiritual power in the Middle Ages passed actually over to the temporal, the territorial princes. In England, it happened that a large number of those who had possessed land and holdings were dispossessed, evicted, and they emigrated to America. A large number of the American settlers—the point was alluded to yesterday in a different connection—were the evicted holders of landed property.

Economic conditions, then, played a leading part in the metamorphosis which went on under modern historic evolution, and which is commonly called the Reformation. On the face of it, the thing was like this:—Openly, people say that a new spirit must find Its way into men's hearts, that under the old church administration the temporal and spiritual have become too closely combined, that a more spiritual road to Christ must be sought, etc, etc. Whilst deeper down, less obviously on the surface, a shifting of economic strata is taking place through the transference of estates from spiritual to worldly owners.

Now this is connected with a fact whose roots stretch wide into the history of general evolution; and we can only understand these particular isolated facts of modern history when we glance back over a somewhat wider range of human evolution. We have only to glance back at that phase of human evolution which we term the Egypto-Chaldean age, which, as you know, ended in the middle of the 8th century before Christ, from which point the Graeco-Latin age began, lasting down to about the middle of the 15th century.

If we go back to the ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chaldean civilisation,—well there, we have as ruling powers quite a different type from what became the ruling powers later on. People nowadays take little account of the great upheavals that have come about in the course of historic growth. The powers that were peculiarly the ruling ones in that early age—the age that ended about the middle of the 8th century before Christ—were the sort of people who, in the traditional language of Spiritual Science, one would call “Initiates.” The Egyptian Pharaohs were, down to a certain date, invariably persons who were initiated. They were initiated into the secrets of cosmology, and regarded what they had to do on earth in the light of this cosmology When one says a thing of this sort to the modern man, he finds a certain difficulty in understanding it, for the simple reason that the modern man, from his own special mode of consciousness, thinks to himself: “It is all very well, but, after all, those Pharaohs, and the Chaldean initiates, too,—or so-called initiates—did a great many things that were highly reprehensible.” Well, one might, of course, argue that modern rulers, who are not initiates, also do a great many things that are hardly in accordance with the highest moral standards,—but that, here, would be obviously away from the point. One must, however, point out that in the world that lies beyond the senses the gods are not all good ones, but that there are also gods whose action is in every way contrary to men's interests, as commonly understood. So, one is by no means entitled to believe that anyone who is a real initiate must necessarily act from virtuous motives. And in speaking, as I am doing now, of the Pharaohs as Initiates, all that it must be understood to mean is that they acted on impulses inspired from the spiritual world. That these impulse's might often be very bad ones will be contested by nobody who has become in our sense acquainted with all the many divine, spiritual powers that lie behind the world of sense,—powers of a supersensible nature. But the true initiate,—he who could receive into his will, not merely receive into his consciousness, but into his will, what divine spiritual powers bestowed upon him,—he was in truth the ruler, down to the middle of the 8th century before Christ. Then began the age when, if one actually divests it of all the various illusions that pervade popular history,—when one may say that the real ruler was the Priest. The temporal ruler,—even when he was a Charlemagne—was always more or less dependent on the priesthood. Priest-rule was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, even in the middle-ages of European civilisation, the really determining element. It entered into everything, it made itself felt everywhere, and was for the social structure also the element which, above all others, was the determining one. And the people who possessed land and estates held them to a very large extent of the Priesthood. Such regular soldiers as there were in old days, before the middle of the 8th century B.C., were troops in the service of the Initiates. Such regular soldiers as there were in the 4th post-Atlantean age, in the Graeco-Latin age down to the middle of the 15th century, were, taken as a whole, mercenaries of the priest-lords. And all enterprises, too, such as the Crusades, were, as a whole essentially military expeditions undertaken, if I may so express it, on behalf of the ruling priesthood. In one way and another, everything that was done had some connection with the rule of the priesthood.

We may say, then, that in the Egypto-Chaldean age, the Rulers were of the Initiate type; from the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century down to the middle of the 15th century the rulers were of the Priest type. From this time on, the type that was really the ruling one for actual historic developments was the Economic man. The economic man was the one who ruled. It does not really matter by what name he was called. The farther on one goes in the history of mankind, the less do names matter. The thing that gave a man a sort of basis for domination was that he was in a position to play a part in the world of finance and industry. Just as the essential feature about the Priest and the Initiate of old days was that these respective types of ruler could intervene in economic affairs,—only they did so from higher motives,—so now the man of the economic type of modern times was able to intervene in practically every detail of the social fabric.

Yes, but along with that, there goes something else besides, something that I have already indicated in connection with the Initiate type of ruler. The Initiate type of ruler works through his will, receiving into his will the motive-forces of the higher worlds. With the Priest type, this is no longer the case. It was not, at bottom, the spiritual life that was realised in the priest type, but the intellectual life. And accordingly, in that civilisation where the priest type were markedly predominant, the markedly predominant, the essential element is the intellectual one.

In Asia, in the East, it is not the intellectual which is the essential thing, but the spiritual life. For even what we still have as civilisation there to-day, fallen as it is very greatly into decay, yet it is still the relics of what once was the civilisation of Initiate of what was a spiritual civilisation. When the religious impulse of the East was transplanted to Europe, it became merged in the intellectualist conception of the priesthood. From the initiation into the real facts, into the spiritual world, they produced—Theology, an intellectual extract of the facts of the spiritual world. But this priest type, which intellectually boiled down the facts of the spiritual world and made them known in an intellectual form, so all that the people really got was an intellectualised religious element, they were in their turn again replaced in the strict meaning of that term, at the beginning of the modern age, by the economic type of man. One can show in detail in many cases exactly how this economic type of man came to be top. I shall come to that presently. Now the question naturally arises: How does it come about that the course of historic evolution undergoes such considerable changes? How does it really happen? Well, at the bottom of that, again, there is something which makes it necessary for one not to rest content with a surface view of historic life, but to go deeper down. If one studies history at all,—what passes as history,—one sees at once that the historians are writing on the assumption, as I said before, that the psychic evolution of man has undergone no very great fundamental change whatever in the course of history. In the view of the materialist thinkers, there was once a time when the ape, or a creature like an ape, wandered about the earth; and then, through all sorts of accidents, though of course very slowly,—science relies a great deal on length of time nowadays,—this ape-like creature developed into—Man. But, once there, man has remained practically unaltered, according to them, in all that relates to his state of consciousness, to the condition of his soul. A modern man thinks of the ancient Egyptian as being perhaps rather more of a child, because he was not yet so “clever,” he did not know so much as the man of to-day; but in the general constitution of his soul, the modern man pictures the ancient Egyptian as being pretty much the same as himself. And yet, if we go back to the time before the 8th century B.C., the constitution of man's soul then was quite, quite different from what it was later on, after the middle of the 8th century B.C. If one takes the soul of the man of to-day, in its present conformation, and knows no other, one can really form no picture to oneself of what went on in the soul of the sort of man who lived actually before the 8th century B.C.

The people of that time were of such a kind as still to be in living connection with their previous incarnation. These people were so constituted,—unless, indeed, they belonged to one of the Hebraic tongues, when it was different,—but if they belonged to any of the wide-spread heathen nations, so-called “heathen nations,” then, for them, everything that went on in their souls was the outcome of previous incarnations, of previous lives upon earth. And they were distinctly conscious that what was going on in their souls was the spiritual fruits of the spiritual worlds. For people such as this, no doubt whatever existed that what was the principal part of themselves was not inherited from their father and mother, but had come down out of spiritual worlds and united itself with the part which came to them from their father and mother. The constitution of these peoples souls was one which rested entirely on a spiritual form of civilisation. Hence it was possible for social life, as it existed amongst them, to be guided and directed by their Initiates, by those who were to a certain degree initiated into spiritual things in a real, actual way, not intellectually through their thoughts. In those days, when one talked to anyone and spoke of spiritual facts, one was speaking of things with which he was quite familiar. Everybody, in fact, pictured himself as a centaur. His physical body he looked upon as having undoubtedly come about through transmission in the flesh; but, on top of all that, was what had come down out of the spiritual world. Everybody knew that. Everybody looked on himself as a sort of centaur.

Then came the age that began with the 8th century before Christ,—roughly speaking, with the foundation of Rome. In that age,—it Is a fact that we have already considered from other points of view,—in that age the spiritual contact of the real actual kind was lost. People, however, still retained through their Intelligence a kind of spiritual touch with the world of spirit. Man, indeed, no longer pictured himself actually as a centaur, as though a higher spiritual being came down from above and settled upon something else that was inherited through the blood; still, he was clearly conscious that his intelligence, his world of thought, was not dependent on his blood, not dependent on his physical body, but that it had a spiritual origin.

One cannot, for instance, properly understand that great philosopher, Aristotle, unless one knows that Aristotle, in calling the highest part of the human soul “Diagnosticon,” was clearly conscious that this, the highest part of the human soul, which is an intellectual part, has been rained down from the worlds of soul and spirit. Aristotle knew that quite well; indeed, everybody, even down into the early times of Christianity, knew this quite well. This consciousness, that the human intelligence is of a divine spiritual origin, this consciousness was not lost until the 4th century after Christ. It was in the 4th century after Christ that men first really ceased to believe that the power of thought they bear within them comes from above, and is rained down upon them at their birth out of the worlds of soul and spirit. It was a great change, that, in men's souls. If we look back at the first, second and third Christian centuries, we find the men of that time able to say to themselves: Of course, I was born of father and mother, but I know,—not merely, I have puzzled it out, but I know, just as I know that my eye sees the light, so I know that my intelligence comes from the gods. It was an immediate consciousness that people then possessed, just like the consciousness aroused by a direct perception.

It was only after the fourth century that the feeling entered more and more into men's souls that up here, in this bony empty cavity,—for an empty cavity it is, as I have often had occasion to explain to you,—here, up here are seated the organs of intelligence, and this intelligence Is somehow connected with heredity, with blood-relation- ship. It was only during this period, when the transition was finally effected from a belief in the divine nature of the intelligence to a belief in its transmission along physical paths,—it was only then that what I may call the intellectualising of the religious impulse through the rule of the priesthood could be finally effected. And when the intellectualising process was very far advanced, and people had come to regard the intelligence as bound up solely with a man's bodily constitution, then it was all up with the rule of the priest, too. Priest-rule could only hold its ground so long as people could be made to understand the old traditions of the divinity of the intelligence. The economic type of man emerged at the moment, the epoch-making moment, when the belief in the divinity of the intelligence had vanished, and when man's feelings were leading him ever more and more to the belief that it was the physical man which is the actual vehicle, the organ for the evolution of thought. You should only know what a fight, priest-rule fought, and how it is still fighting even to-day. Anyone, for instance, who is acquainted with catholic theological literature, knows how priest- rule is still fighting—fighting with every conceivable philosophic argument—to maintain that the intelligence which has its seat in man is something additional that comes to him from without. Read any sort of catholic theological literature that you happen to come across, and you will find them no longer denying what, indeed, for the present- day man no longer admits of denial, that all the rest of his attributes are bound up with his bodily frame, but they cling fast to the intelligence as an exception, as something that is of a divine spiritual nature and has nothing to do with man's bodily frame. And yet, in the general consciousness of mankind it is not so. In respect of the general consciousness of mankind, a feeling has grown up ever more and more among men, a sense that it is our body, too, which enables us to think, which Is the basis of the intelligence as of other things. And so ever more and more man has arrived at a consciousness that he is really only a physical being. And it was only under the sort of spirituality which proceeds from regarding oneself as a merely physical being that it was possible for the economic type of man to make his way to the top.

And so there exist, you see, spiritual reasons deeper down for the economic type of man having come to the top. He has, however, come to the top, and in socialistic theories this fact has been handled and exploited to the disregard of all others. The business-man has been the ruling type ever since the Reformation; and from this you can see, too, what kind of spirit really is the ruling one in the various religious denominations that have come up since the Reformation Recognise quite clearly, without any illusions, what that spirit is, my dear friends: Temporal science is to permeate with its technique the whole of our external everyday life, and we do not mean to have the complete chain of this external science interrupted by all sorts of religious matter. Faith is to be kept very nicely in a special little box all to itself, and as far away from the external affairs of life as possible. Science, one thing,—a separate banking- account; Faith, another thing,—a separate banking-account, and they must never on any account be amalgamated. We want our faith; indeed, we want to be religious people, says the business type of man,—the more religious, the better, according to many of them; and one sees them going off very ostentatiously to church with their prayer-book under their arm. Oh, certainly! But then, that banking book,—religion must not intrude there, with that religion has nothing to do, except, perhaps, on the first page, where one always sees written in banking-books, “By the Grace of God,” but then that is only a little bit of blasphemy, of course. The complete chain must not be broken. Otherside [Otherwise?] people might perhaps find out that the Reformation was, in many respects, only a roundabout way of arriving at the secularisation and confiscation of Church estates and of claiming them for the temporal lord. Of course, if one were a German princeling, for instance, or an English lord, one could very well say: We are going to create a new historic epoch by taking away the land and estates from those who have hitherto held them. That is what the modern socialist says: We are going to expropriate the owners of landed property. But naturally people did not say that at the beginning of the new modern age; they did it, and threw a haze over it all with: We are founding a new religious faith. So people do not know their real reason for being religious; but it makes them feel comfortable to spread this illusion over the real grounds for their being so religious. That is how the economic type of man came up.

The consciousness that one is living out a spiritual life within one has gradually disappeared. That is the deeper-seated, spiritual root of the matter. If we go further hack still, before the third post-Atlantean age, which ended about the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century,—beginning in the 3rd to the 4th millennium B.C., we come again to a quite different conformation. Paradoxical as it may seem to the men of to-day, in the 4th or, 5th millennium B.C. there was not a man on earth who believed that what was transmitted from his father and mother was the essential part of him. At that time men were absolutely convinced that they were wholly, in respect of all essentials, descended from heaven, If I may so express it. That was men's rooted belief. They did not look on themselves as being of earthly origin; they looked on themselves as spiritual beings, sprung from a spiritual origin. And the period when men first began to feel themselves to be physical human beings in the body was designated by the Jews, “The Fall,” at the beginning of things, when Original Sin first overtook man. As a matter of fact, however, Original Sin has overtaken man more than once. It overtook him first at the beginning of the 3rd post-Atlantean age, when he ascribed one part of himself to his father and mother, to his blood, and merely believed that a spiritual something had come down on top of that. It overtook him for the second time when he began to regard his Intellectual part as more or less hereditary. That second “Fall” came about in the 4th century after Christ; for from that time on, intellectual capacity was regarded as something hereditary, as something bound up with the bodily nature. And there will be other “Falls” in the time to come.

Our task to-day is to return to spirituality by a different route. And, to do this, we must have the possibility, before anything else, of getting back to a spiritual form of intellectual life. We must have the possibility of attaching a sense to this existence on earth such that this sense itself is once more the revelation of a spiritual reality. Take, for instance, the things in my “Occult Science.” It cannot be said that the kind of intellectuality with which these are apprehended has a bodily origin; for it is not with the physical understanding that one arrives at what is there said about the universe and about man. It is a re-education of man back to that conception of his intellectual nature which is a spiritual one. And for this, modern mankind must first of all be willing to regain the faculty of looking on their Intellectual nature as something divinely spiritual. Then, Indeed, will it be possible to start on the road back to spiritualisation. It is a task upon which mankind must enter with full consciousness,—to return again to spiritualisation, and, first of all, to a thorough spiritualising of the intelligence. People must learn once more to think in such a way that their thought is permeated with spirituality. The best way to begin is by considering ethical concepts, and bringing them back to the moral imagination, to the moral intuitions, as I did in my “Philosophy of Freedom.” If in the moral sense one sees something which, as I expressed it in the “Philosophy of Freedom,” derives its impulses directly from the spiritual world, then that is a first beginning towards the spiritualisation of the intellect. I did this in my “Philosophy of Freedom” very cautiously and gently, for in the 19th century there was truly not much to be looked for as regards the spiritualising of anything. But this Is the road that will have to be taken.

The Economic type of man, who came up at the Reformation, regarded it as his special mission to make all intellectuality a matter merely of the body. What this business type of man really did during the Reformation period was to tear himself violently loose from the spiritual foundation of man's life on earth. One can see it illustrated in individual cases. At the beginning and during the first half of the 15th century, there was a man in England, Thomas Cromwell,—not Oliver Cromwell, but Thomas Cromwell, quite a different person,—who played a very important part in introducing the principles of the Reformation into England. There was one person, James I, who still made an effort to save the old dominion of the priesthood; and one best understands James I if one looks on him as a Conservator,—a man who was trying to conserve the rule of the priesthood. Only, his plans were thwarted by others. And amongst the people who came to the top at that time, and who were, so to speak, the earliest type of economic man, was Thomas Cromwell. It is impossible to understand Thomas Cromwell unless one recognises that he was one of those people who have a very short life between death and rebirth, before taking on a body here on earth again. And it is just those people who are unusually numerous among the ruling types coming to the top in modern times, who have had but a short life in the spiritual world before their present life here on earth.

As you know, I have often said here that one of the most significant phenomena in latter-day history is that for the ruling types it is the selection of the worst that takes place. You know that for years past I have taken occasion to tell you so repeatedly. Those who are, in reality, the rulers, the governors, are a selection of not the best. It has come about with the times that those who are really the best in this modern age have remained below, and those who have been selected for the top, for the leading positions, that is, are not infrequently anything but the best. Very often it has been a selection of the least fitted. And this selection of the least fitted has been founded, in so far as relates to their human nature, in the fact that they were fulfilling an earth-life which had only a very short space of time between the last life on earth and this one. It is a fact which one finds stamped upon many of the leading personages of modern times, that they have had a quick return to earth after a brief life in the spirit. In their preceding life between death and new birth they have received into them but little of spiritual impulse; but they are all the more impregnated with that which this earth alone can give. The Economic type, especially, have been men whose preceding spiritual life was a short one, who were permeated through and through with what the earth, as such, alone can give. I do not mean to say that there have not also In modern times been people who have passed a fairly long stage of time between death and birth and who are notable in modern times; but they have been thrust into the background. So the course of man's historic evolution fated it to be; such was the common karma of mankind.

And man's modern life was played out under these conditions. It is really pitiful, how frequently a phenomenon it is in modern times to see men who in their inward natures are far superior, looking up to men who are far, far worse than themselves, as special authorities. It is a common phenomenon. And these revered authorities are truly not people who in any way represent picked men of the best type. The time has indeed come when people must stop so naively chanting the praises of modern civilisation, and examine the plain, unadorned facts. Men must acquire the habit of considering life not in its more superficial aspect, but of considering it according to the inner configuration of men's souls. And this is just one of the facts that has to be considered, that one has to distinguish between the kind of men whose life in the spirit, between birth and deaths is a comparatively long one, and those whose life in the spirit has been comparatively short. One must consider people from their spiritual aspect. It is only by thus considering people from their spiritual aspect, that it becomes possible with clear consciousness to bring order into the social structure. Any really deep understanding of what is socially requisite to-day will only be acquired when such an understanding is sought for in a groundwork of spiritual knowledge.

In the last three days, I have made it my task to show you in what way the civilisation of our times must be regarded in respect of the possibility for mankind's further evolution. Our earth, as an earth with all that is upon It, has already entered on its downward stage, on the stage of its decline. I have often told you that keen-sighted geologists themselves have already noted this fact. It is even now possible to demonstrate by purely external physical science, and according to the most exact geology, that the earth has already begun to crumble away, that the ascending phase of its evolution is at an end, and that the solid ground we tread on is actually breaking up beneath us. But it is not only the mineral kingdom of the earth that Is breaking up; all organic life that moves upon the earth is more or less in a state of decomposition, of falling away. The bodies of plants, of animals, of men, these, too, are no longer in their ascending stage of evolution, but are going downhill. Our physical organisation is not now what it was, for instance, before the fourth century after Christ, or what it was in the times of ancient Greece. Our organisation is a perishable one, and along with us the earth is in its decadence. V/hat Is physical about the earth is in its decadence. I called attention to this phenomenon for the first time some years ago in a lecture at Bonn; but as a rule, not sufficient importance is attached to these things. The bodies we live in are crumbling away. But, as a set-off against this, we must reflect:

Our bodies are crumbling away; but it is just out of these crumbling bodies of ours that what is spiritual can best develop, if only we give ourselves up to it. In the old bodies, you see, it was like this, supposing I make a diagram: Here is the body (Diagram I black) and, all through, the body is permeated with its spiritual element; here is the spiritual element, all over It like this (red).

Now to-day it is like this (diagram II): our body, if we draw it diagrammatically, Is crumbling away in many places. It is crumbling, it is falling away; and everywhere the spiritual element is spurting out of it, escaping from the body. If we only set ourselves to do so, we can inwardly within our souls lay hold everywhere of the spiritual element, because of this crumbling away of our bodies. But it is absolutely necessary that we should not rely upon the physical. It is, on the contrary, absolutely necessary for us, because of this, our crumbling condition, to turn to the spiritual. Everything physical is breaking up; everything physical on earth has begun to go to ruin, and one dare not rely any longer on the physical nature. The only thing we have to look to Is just what, to use a homely phrase, is spurting out from the spiritual soul-element,—spurting out because the physical element is in ruin.

There is one thing to be learnt from this, my dear friends. We are connected through our bodies with the physical conditions of the earth; and the earth's conditions express themselves socially in economic conditions. Now, as everything is crumbling away, as everything is in decadence, so also, in a certain respect, economic conditions are in a state of decadence; and only a fool could believe that It Is possible to-day to regenerate economic conditions simply by means o economic conditions alone. Anyone to-day who dreams of bringing about an economic paradise on earth by purely economic measures, is much the same as someone who has a corpse in front of him and believes that he can galvanise it back into life, wake it up again. So you can take all the theories that are based on pure economics to-day, listen to people telling you how the economic life can be adjusted so as to work by itself according to its own laws, listen to them telling you about the conditions under which production Is to be carried on, how the transition is to be effected from private ownership to communal ownership, etc.,—it is all founded on the false belief that one can, regenerate the economic life out of the resources of the economic life itself. Whereas the truth is that in the economic life, as elsewhere, everything physical is of itself going to ruin.

When anything is going to ruin of itself, then all one can do is to keep putting it right from time to time. That means that we want a remedy from this economic life, which of Itself is in a constant state of break-down, if the economic life were left to itself; if one did what Lenin and Trotsky want to do with it, it would be continually breaking down, continually falling sick. And therefore, one must have the remedy constantly at hand, too, as a counteractant to the economic life. That is, one must have, beside it, the independent spiritual life. If you have a sick man, or someone who is continually liable to fall sick, then, alongside, you must continually have the doctor. If you have an economic life which, owing to the earth's evolution, is constantly ripe for its fall, when left to itself, then you need to counteract it with the continually healing power of the spiritual life. That is the inward connection. It is part of a sound cosmogony that we should acquire an independent spiritual life. Without this independent spiritual life, to act as a perpetual source of healing wisdom, alongside an economic life that is constantly liable to break down,—without this, mankind will never get further. To attempt to regenerate the economic life out of its own resources is sheer folly. We must establish a healing source in the form of an independent spiritual life beside this economic life, and bridge them both over with the neutral Life of Rights. We shall never arrive at any adequate understanding of what is necessary in the present day, unless we have learnt to perceive that the earth's physical life is already sinking to ruin. It is because this is not perceived that there are so many people to-day who believe that the economic life can be regenerated by all sorts of remedies conjured up out of the life of economics itself. They do not exist. The only possibility that does exist is continuously and unceasingly to keep the economic life going by means of the independent spiritual life established alongside it. And only those can trace all the mysterious interweaving of these threads in our life who have learnt to read it by the light of a really modern cosmogony.

Just reflect how serious the whole situation is, how one must look on and see men rushing to destruction, if they still persist in believing that the economic life can be regenerated out of itself,—if they will not acknowledge and turn to that which is spurting forth from the crumbling physical world, which is able to stand alone and to be a continual source of healing. People ask: What is the remedy for revolutions? Well, when the downward forces have accumulated in cries in quantity sufficient to make a revolution, then the revolution comes. The only way to counteract revolution is continuously and unceasingly to apply the counteracting force. And unless a spiritual life is established as a continual healing force to withstand the economic life, then the economic life comes to a head and breaks out in revolutions.

It is high time, indeed, my dear friends, that the things we are here dealing with should be taken In all their gravity, in their full weight, and that people should not have the idea that Spiritual Science is a thing to play with. It will not be played with. You cannot dish up real Spiritual Science as a Sunday afternoon sermon. What people are used to making out of the old religious creeds,—taking all sorts of teachings about reincarnation and karma to regale themselves with in the privacy of their own souls,—that cannot be got out of this teaching, not if it is taken seriously. This teaching means to lay hold upon actual life. This teaching is bent upon becoming deeds, by the very force of what it is. And so it is not in accordance with some private personal whim that what is living within our Spiritual Science must now find expression in all manner of social ideas as well. It is really a matter of course. It is all part of the same thing. Naturally, anyone who talks of development and evolution in the modern natural-science sense, and has not a glimmering notion that Evolution is first an ascent and then a descent, will not be ready either to understand that we are living in a downward stage with respect to the earth's evolution; and such a person will take what is on its downward path, and try to wring from it forces for a regeneration,—That is no longer possible.

What I have, above all, had at heart in the course of these three lectures, my dear friends, is that you might see in all its extent and reality the deep seriousness of Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it. With the things of Spiritual Science there can be no playing. it can only be played with when it is watered down to all sorts of mystical, eclectic stuff,—then you can play with the things of Spiritual Science. Those people do very wrong who go and think that they can play with it, for all that. The things of Spiritual Science cannot be played with,

There is a great deal of opposition from various quarters to whit this Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy stands for. it will meet with opposition from almost all those people who want to play, to “mysticise,” I should like to call it,—who want to mysticise with the life of Spiritual Science,—“mysticism,” “mysticise”. Those people who want to mysticise will not, in the long run, get on very well with Spiritual Science, because they do not like to be reminded of the seriousness of life. That is why Spiritual Science has so many opponents. To-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents; and to-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents, turning out to oppose it from every sort of mysticising hole and corner. There is now to be a renewed attack made on this Spiritual Science on the ground that it is scientific in character, and that all genuine experiences of the spirit-worlds must come through direct spiritual communication,—that nothing of a scientific nature, no sort of scientific concept, must enter into it, and so forth; there is a fresh attack on foot from the corner where we have done a good bit of work, but which still keeps on pouring out a succession of slimy stuff,—mysticising stuff, in this very direction. Another book has appeared from the Munich quarter,—though possibly from different publishers,—which is at bottom intended as an attack of this sort,—mystical book, called “The Living God.”

When one sees these things in the present day, in an age when the social situation is so critical, it shows how spiritual frivolity and cynicism of a spiritual kind have taken possession of men's lives. All that must be got rid of.

This is, indeed, the time when we must set ourselves in all seriousness to examine the most important question in life, and ask ourselves: What can we do, what can we do with all our might and main, to lay hold of those forces which are actually in accordance with the age?

My dear friends, here stands this Building of ours, here it stands, waiting for the world to take it seriously, with such seriousness as really to perceive that it has been built in the consciousness of a perishing age, and in order to receive and take up the spiritual essence out of this age as it falls. Here we must be swayed by no belief that it is possible to preserve what is old what is ripe to perish and fall away. The faith that must inspire us here is that out of the on-rushing ruin it is possible to save and bring forth the spiritual essence,—one which must be quite unlike the old. A little transformation of our civilisation cannot do it. We have to recognise, and boldly face the recognition, that it is only with the great impulses of civilisation that we can accomplish what will take mankind the necessary step forward towards the future. And we must take counsel with our own selves, how to find strength really to take up these new impulses. We must have courage to make plain to people, as well as we can, what is meant by the earth being in decadence, and that what has lasted on down into our days as civilisation, and which we have grown up with and become used to,—that this, too, is passing away in the ruin; but that out of this ruin we must rescue and bring forth a new spirituality, a spirituality that can be carried on with us into other worlds, when this earth has finally sunk and passed away.

To work with clear consciousness towards a regeneration of Art, of Science, of Freedom, that is a work that should centre round this Building. In erecting this Building an attempt has been made to bid in a sort of way, defiance to the Past, in the shapes and lines of it, and so forth. And in the same way, practically, we must have the courage to grasp all that can be got from the fact that the Building actually stands here. We shall never get right, my dear friends, if we go on clinging to little remedies. We shall only get right by resolutely and consciously keeping before men's eyes the necessity for a new form of spiritual civilisation, for that alone can be the true starting-point for a new form of social civilisation. For the social order cannot any longer be evolved out of the economic order, but only out of a spiritual element that shall have sunk into the economic one. And we must clearly realise that the Economic type of man is played out, and that another type must come to the top,—the type of man who is a World-man, one who is conscious that there lives within him not only what he has inherited through earthly descent, but who is conscious that there live within him, also, forces of the sun and the heaven of stars, forces of the world above the senses. In such forms as people can understand, we must bring this to their consciousness; and then alone shall we be doing something towards the real progress of mankind. By merely transmitting all sorts of mystical teachings we can do no good whatever. Our mysticism must be actual spiritual life—active spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to make you realise to-day. This Building at Dornach ought to be regarded as being, without undue pretensions, the actual starting-point for a great world—movement, a world-movement which Is altogether international, a world-movement which embraces every kind of branch of spiritual life. This Building at Dornach should be the starting-point from which -to cast off all fondness for what is perishing and to receive the impulse of that force which is making for an actual renewal of man's consciousness. If we could establish something of this sort in the world, which should form a starting-point from whence to take up the spiritual essence out of the ruin of the physical earth,—if we could say: We put up the Building at Dornach to be the monument of this starting-point, to attract people's eyes to our purpose there,—if only we could create something of this kind, then we should be fulfilling what lies in the very impulse of the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy. But we need to summon up our energies and create what shall speak to mankind in actual facts,—speak by facts in such a way as to make them see: “Look! We are aiming here at something that lies in the direction of actual progressive evolution in human consciousness, in science and art as well as in religion.” If we are in a position to speak from positive facts in this way, then we shall accomplish far more than by trying to throw ourselves into all sorts of things at which other people are aiming. We should realise that what we have to aim at is a new thing. If we are able to do this, then we shall be accomplishing a worthy task. But there we must commune with our souls, my dear friends, and try to set our hands in this way to the task of Anthroposophy.

More on this subject, then, next Friday at 7 o'clock.

Yesterday I endeavoured at the conclusion of our consideration of Scholasticism to point out how in a current of thought the most important things are the problems which presented themselves in a quite definite way to the human soul, and which, when you think of it, really all culminated in the desire to know: How does man attain the knowledge which is essential to his life, and how does this knowledge join up with that which at the time governed the dispositions of men in a social aspect? How does the knowledge which can be won join up with the contents of faith of the Christian Church in the West? The militant Scholiasts had to deal first of all with human individuality which, as we have seen, emerged more and more, but which was no longer in a position to carry the experience of knowledge up to the point of real, concrete, spirit-content, as it still flickered in the course of time from what survived of Neoplatonism, of the Areopagite, of Scotus Erigena. I have also pointed out that the impulses set in motion by Scholasticism still continued in a certain way. They continued, so that one can say: The problems themselves are great, and the manner in which they were propounded (we saw this yesterday) had great influence for a long time. And, in point of fact—and this is to be precisely the subject of to-day's study—the influence of what was then the greatest problem—the relationship of men to sensory and spiritual reality—is still felt, even if in quite a different form, even if it is not always obvious, and even if it takes to-day a form entirely contrary to Scholasticism. Its influence still lives. It is still all there to a large extent in the spiritual activities of to-day, but distinctly altered by the work of important people in the meantime on the European trend of human development in the philosophical sphere. We see at once, if we go from Thomas Aquinas to the Franciscan monk who originated probably in Ireland and at the beginning of the fourteenth century taught at Paris and Cologne, Duns Scotus, we see at once, when we get to him, how the problem has, so to speak, become too large even for all the wonderful, intensive thought-technique which survived from the age of the real master-ship in thought-technique—the age of Scholasticism. The question that again faced Duns Scotus was as follows: How does the psychic part of man live in the physical organism of man? Thomas Aquinas' view was still—as I explained yesterday—that he considered the psychic as working itself into the physical. When through conception and birth man enters upon the physical existence, he is equipped by means of his physical inheritance only with the vegetative powers, with all the mineral powers and with those of physical comprehension; but that without pre-existence the real intellect, the active intellect, that which Aristotle called the “nous poieticos” enters into man. But, as Thomas sees it, this nous poieticos absorbs as it were all the psychic element, the vegetative-psychic and the animal-psychic and imposes itself on the corporeality in order to transpose that in its entirety—and then to combine living for ever with what it had won, from the human body, into which it had itself entered, though without pre-existence, from eternal heights. Duns Scotus cannot believe that such an absorption of the whole dynamic system of the human being takes place through the active understanding. He can only imagine that the human bodily make-up exists as something complete; that the vegetative and animal principles remain through the whole of life in a certain independence, and are thrown off with death, and that really only the spiritual principle, the intellectus agens, enters into immortality. Equally little can he imagine the idea which Thomas Aquinas toyed with: the permeation of the whole body with the human-psychic-spiritual element*. Scotus can imagine it as little as his pupil William of Occam, who died at Munich in the fourteenth century, the chief thing about him being that he returned to Nominalism. For Scotus the human understanding had become something abstract, something which no longer represented the spiritual world, but as being won by reflection, by observation of the senses. He could no longer imagine that Reality was the product only of the universals, of ideas. He fell back again into Nominalism, and returned to the view that what establishes itself in man as ideas, as general conceptions, is conceived only out of the physical world around him, and that it is really only something which lives in the human spirit—I might say—for the sake of a convenient comprehension of existence—as Name, as words. In short, he returned again to Nominalism.

That is really a significant fact, for we see: Nominalism, as for instance Roscelin expounds it—and in his case the Trinity itself broke in pieces on account of his Nominalism—is interrupted only by the intensive thought activity of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and others, and then Europe soon relapses again into the Nominalism which is really the incapacity of human individuality, ever struggling to rise higher and higher to comprehend as a spiritual reality something which is present in its spirit in the form of ideas; so to comprehend it as something which lives in man and in a certain way also in things. Ideas, from being realities, become again Names, merely empty abstractions.

You see the difficulties which European thought encountered in greater and greater degree when it opened up the quest of knowledge. For in the long run we human beings must acquire knowledge through ideas—at any rate, in the first stages of knowledge we are bound to make use of ideas. The big question must always crop up again: How do ideas enable us to attain reality? But, substantially, an answer becomes impossible if ideas appear to us merely as names without reality. And these ideas, which in Ancient Greece, or, at any rate, in initiated Greece were the final demonstration, coming down from above, of a real spirit world, these ideas became ever more and more abstract for the European consciousness. And this process of becoming abstract, of ideas becoming words, we see perpetually increasing as we follow further the development of Western thought. Individuals stand out later, and for example Leibnitz, who actually does not touch upon the question whether ideas lead to knowledge. He is still in possession of a traditional point of view and ascribes everything to individual world-monads, which are really spiritual. Leibnitz towers over the others because he has the courage to expound the world as spiritual. Yes, the world is spiritual; it consists of a multitude of spiritual beings. But I might say that that particular thing which in a former age, with, it is true, a more distinctive knowledge not yet illuminated by such a logic as Scholasticism had, that moreover which meant in such an age differentiated spiritual individuals, was for Leibnitz a series of graduated spiritual points, the monads. Individuality is saved, but only in the form of the monads, in the form, as it were, of a spiritual, indivisible, elemental point. If we exclude Leibnitz, we see in the whole West an intensive struggle for certainty concerning the origins of existence, but at the same time an incapacity everywhere really to solve the Nominalism problem.

This is particularly met with in the thinker who is rightly placed at the beginning of the new philosophy, in the thinker Descartes, who lived at the opening or in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn everywhere in the history of philosophy the basis of Cartesian philosophy in the sentence: Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. There is something of Augustine's effort in this sentence. For Augustine struggles out of that doubt of which I have spoken in the first lecture, when he says: I can doubt everything, but the fact of doubt remains and I live all the same while I doubt. I can doubt the existence of concrete things round me, I can doubt the existence of God, of clouds and stars, but not the existence of the doubt in me. I cannot doubt what goes on in my soul. There is something certain, a certain starting point to get hold of. Descartes takes up this thought again—I think, therefore I am. In such things one is, of course, exposed to grave misunderstandings, if one has to set something simple against something historically recognized. But it is necessary. Descartes and many of his followers—and in this respect he had innumerable followers—considers the idea: if I have a thought-content in any consciousness, if I think, I cannot get over the fact that I do think. Therefore, I am, therefore my existence is assured through my thinking. My roots are, so to speak, in the world-existence, as I have assured my existence through my thought. So modern philosophy really begins as Intellectualism, as Rationalism, as something which wants to use thought as its instrument, and to this extent is only the echo of Scholasticism, which had taken the turning towards Intellectualism so energetically.

Two things we observe about Descartes. First, there is necessarily the simple objection: Is my existence really established by the fact that I think? All sleep proves the contrary. We know every morning when we awake that we must have existed from the evening before to the morning, but we have not been thinking. So the sentence: I think, therefore I am—cogito ergo sum—is in this simple way disproved. This simple fact, which is, I might say, a kind of Columbus' egg, must be set against this famous sentence which found an uncommon amount of success. That is one thing to say about Descartes. The other is the question: What is the real objective of all his philosophic effort? It is no longer directed towards a view of life, or receiving a cosmic secret for the consciousness, it is really turned towards something entirely intellectualistic and concerned with thought. It is directed to the question: How do I gain certainty? How do I overcome doubt? How do I find out that things exist and that I myself exist? It is no longer a material question, a question concerned with the continual results of observing the world, it is a question rather that concerns the certainty of knowledge. This question arises out of the Nominalism of the Schoolmen, which only Albertus and Thomas suppressed for a certain time, but which after them appeared again. And so these people can only give a name to what is hidden in their souls in order to find somewhere in them a point from which they can make for themselves, not a picture or conception of the world, but the certainty that not everything is deception and untruth; that when one looks out upon the world one sees a reality and when one looks inward upon the soul one also sees a reality. In all this is clearly noticeable what I pointed to yesterday in conclusion, namely, that human individuality has arrived at intellectualism, but has not yet felt the Christ-problem. The Christ-problem occurs for Augustine because he still looks at the whole of humanity. Christ begins to dawn in the human soul, to dawn, I might say, on the Christian Mystics of the Middle Ages; but he does not dawn clearly on those who sought to find him by that thought which is so necessary to individuality—or by what this thought would produce. This process of thought as it comes forth from the human soul in its original condition is such that it rejects precisely what ought to have been the Christian idea for the innermost part of man; it rejects the transformation, the inner metamorphosis; it refuses to take the attitude towards the life of knowledge in which one would say: yes, I think and I think first of all concerning myself and the world. But this kind of thought is still very undeveloped. This thought is, as it were, the kind that exists after the Fall. It must rise above itself. It must be transformed and be raised into a higher sphere. As a matter of fact, this necessity has only once clearly flashed up in one great thinker, and that is in Spinoza, follower of Descartes. Spinoza really did make a deep impression on people like Herder and Goethe with good reason. For Spinoza, although he is still completely buried apparently in the intellectualism which survived or had survived in another form from the Scholiasts, still understands this intellectualism in such a way that man can finally come to the truth—which for Spinoza is ultimately a kind of intuition—by transforming the intellectual, inner, thinking, soul-life, not by being content with everyday life or the ordinary scientific life. And so Spinoza reaches the point of saying to himself: This thought replenishes itself with spiritual content through the development of thought itself.. The spiritual world, which we learned to know in Plotinism, yields again, as it were, to thought, if this thought tends to run counter to the spirit. Spirit replenishes thought as intuition. And I consider it is very interesting that this is what Spinoza says: If we survey the existence of the world, how it continues to develop in its highest substance, in spirit, how we then receive this spirit in the soul by raising ourselves by thought to intuition, by being so intellectualistic that we can prove things as surely as mathematics, but in the proof develop ourselves at the same time and continue to rise so that the spirit can come to meet us, if we can rise to this height, then, from this angle of vision we can comprehend the historic process of what lies behind the evolution of mankind. And it is remarkable that the following sentence stands out from the writings of the Jew Spinoza: The highest revelation of divine substance is given in Christ. In Christ intuition has become Theophany, the incarnation of God, and the voice of Christ is therefore in truth the voice of God and the path to salvation. In other words, the Jew Spinoza comes to the conclusion that man can so develop himself by his intellectualism, that the spirit comes down to him. If he is then in a position to apply himself to the mystery of Golgotha, then the filling with the spirit becomes not only intuition, that is, the appearance of the spirit through thought, but intuition changes into Theophany, into the appearance of God Himself. Man is on the spiritual path to God. One might say that Spinoza was not reticent about what he suddenly realized, as this expression shows. But it fills what he had thus discovered from the evolution of humanity with a kind of tune, a kind of undercurrent of sound, it completes his Ethics.

And once more it is taken up by a sensitive human being. We can realize that for somebody who could also certainly read between the lines of this Ethics who could sense in his own heart the heart that lives in this Ethics, in short, that for Goethe this book of Spinoza's became the standard. These things should not be looked at so purely abstractly, as is usually done in the history of philosophy. They should be viewed from the human standpoint, and we must look at the spark of Spinozism which entered Goethe's soul. But actually what can be read between Spinoza's lines did not become a dominating force. What became important was the incapacity to get away from Nominalism. And Nominalism next becomes such that one might say: Man gets ever more and more entangled in the thought: I live in something which the outer world cannot comprehend, a something which cannot leave me to sink into the outer world and take upon itself something of its nature. And so it is that this feeling, that one is so isolated, that one cannot get away from oneself and receive something from the outer world, is already to be found in Locke in the seventeenth century. Locke's formula was: That which we observe as colours, as tones in the outer world is no longer something which leads us to reality; it is only the effect of the outer world on our senses; it is something in which we ourselves are wrapped also, in our own subjectivity. That is one side of the question.

The other side is seen in such minds as that of Francis Bacon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where Nominalism becomes such a penetrating philosophy that it leads him to say: one must do away with man's false belief in a reality which is, in point of fact, only a name. We have reality only when we look out upon the world of the senses, which alone supply realities through empiric knowledge. By the side of these, those realities on which Albertus and Thomas have built up their theory of rational knowledge play no longer a really scientific part. In Bacon the spiritual world has, so to speak, evaporated into something which can no longer well up from man's inmost heart with the certainty and safety of a science. The spiritual world becomes the subject of faith, which is not to be touched by what is called knowledge and learning. On the contrary, knowledge is to be won only by external observation and by experiment, which is, after all, only a more spiritual kind of external observation.

And so it goes on till Hume, in the eighteenth century, for whom the connection between cause and effect becomes something which lives only in human subjectivity, which men attribute to things from a sort of external habit. We see that Nominalism, the heir of Scholasticism, weighs down humanity like a mountain. What is primarily the most important sign of this development?

The most important sign is surely this, that Scholasticism stands there with its hard logic, that it arises at a time when the sum of reason is to be divided off from the sum of truth concerning the spiritual world. The Scholiast's problem was, on the one hand, to examine this sum of truth concerning the spiritual world, which, of course, was handed down to him through the faith and revelation of the Church. On the other hand, he had to examine the possible results of man's own human knowledge. The point of view of the Scholiasts overlooked at first the change of front which the course of time and nothing else had made necessary. When Thomas and Albertus had to develop their philosophies, there was as yet no scientific view of the world. There had been no Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Copernicus or Kepler; the forces of human understanding had not yet been directed to external nature. At that time there was no cause for controversy between what the human reason can discover from the depth of the soul and what can be learned from the outer empiric sense-world. The question was only between the results of rational thought and the spiritual truths as handed down by the Church to men who could no longer raise themselves through individual development to this wisdom in its reality, but who saw it in the form handed down by the Church simply as tradition, as Scripture, etc. Does not the question now really arise: What is the relation between the rationalism, as developed by Albertus and Thomas in their theory of knowledge, and the teaching of the natural scientific view of the world? We may say that from now on the struggle was indecisive up to the eighteenth century.

And here we find something very remarkable. When we look back into the thirteenth century and see Albertus and Thomas leading humanity across the frontiers of rational knowledge as contrasted with faith and revelation, we see how they show step by step that revelation yields only to a certain part of rational human knowledge, and remains outside this knowledge, an eternal riddle. We can count these riddles—the Incarnation—the filling with the Spirit at the Sacraments, etc.—which lie on the further side of human knowledge. As they see it, man stands on one side, surrounded as it were by the boundaries of knowledge, and unable to look into the spiritual world. This is the situation in the thirteenth century. And now let us take a look at the nineteenth century. We see a remarkable fact: in the seventies, at a famous conference of Natural Scientists at Leipzig, Dubois-Raymond gave his impressive address on the boundaries of Nature-Knowledge and soon afterwards on the seven world-riddles.

What has the problem now become? There is man, here is the boundary of knowledge; but beyond the boundary lies the material world, the atoms, everything of which Dubois-Raymond says: We do not know what this is that moves in space as material. And on this side lies that which is evolved in the human soul. Even if, compared with the imposing work which shines as Scholasticism from the Middle Ages, this contribution of Dubois-Raymond, which we find in the seventies is a trifle, still it is the real antithesis: there the search for the riddles of the spiritual world, here the search for the riddles of the material world; here the dividing line between human beings and atoms, there between human beings and angels and God. We must examine this gap of time if we want to see all this that crops up as a consequence, immediate or remote, of Scholasticism. From this Scholasticism the Kantian philosophy comes into being, as something important at best for the history of the period. This philosophy, influenced by Hume, still has to-day a hold on philosophers, since after its partial decline, the Germans raised the cry in the sixties, “Back to Kant!” And from that time an uncountable number of books on Kant have been published, and independent Kantians like Volkelt, Cohen, etc.—one could mention a whole host—have appeared.

To-day we can, of course, give only a sketch of Kant; we need only point out what is important in him for us. I do not think that anyone who really studies Kant can find him other than as I have tried to depict him in my small paper Truth and Knowledge. At the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies of the eighteenth century Kant's problem is not the content-problem of world-philosophy in full force, not something which might have appeared for him in definite forms, images, concepts, and ideas concerning objects, but rather his problem is the formal knowledge-question: How do we gain certainty concerning anything in the outer world, concerning the existence of anything? Kant is more worried about certainty of knowledge than about any content of knowledge. One feels this surely in his Critic. Read his “Critic of Pure Reason,” his “Critic of Practical Reason,” and see how, after the chapter on Space and Time, which is in a sense classic, you come to the categories, enumerated entirely pedantically, only, we may say, to give the whole a certain completeness. In truth the presentation of this “Critic of Pure Reason” has not the fluency of someone writing sentence on sentence with his heart's blood.

For Kant the question of what is the relation of what we call concepts, of what is in fact, the whole content of knowledge to an external reality, is much more important than this content of knowledge itself. The content he pieces together, as it were, from everything philosophic which he has inherited. He makes schemes and systems. But everywhere the question crops up: How does one get certainty, the kind of certainty which one gets in mathematics? And he gets such certainty in a manner which actually is nothing else than Nominalism, changed, it is true, and unusually concealed and disguised—a Nominalism which is stretched to include the forms of material nature, space and time, as well as universal ideas. He says: that particular thing which we develop in our soul as the content of knowledge has nothing really to do with anything we derive from things. We merely make it cover things. We derive the whole form of our knowledge from ourselves. If we say event A is related to event B by the principle of causation, this principle is only in ourselves. We make it cover A and B, the two experiences.

We apply causality to things. In other words, paradoxical though it sounds—though it is paradoxical only historically in face of the vast following of Kant's philosophy—we shall have to say: Kant seeks the principle of certainty by denying that we derive the content of our knowledge from things and assuming that we derive it from ourselves and then apply it to things. This means—and here is the paradox—we have truth, because we make it ourselves, we have subjective truth, because we produce it ourselves. And it is we who instil truth into things. There you have the final consequence of Nominalism. Scholasticism strove with universals, with the question: What form of existence do the ideas we have in ourselves, have in the outer world? It could not arrive at a real solution of the problem which would have been completely satisfactory. Kant says: All right. Ideas are merely names. We form them only in ourselves but we see them as names to cover things; whereby they become reality. They may not be reality by a long way, but I push the “name” on to the experience and make it reality, for experience must be such as I ordain by applying to it a “name.”

Thus Kantianism is in a certain way the expansion of Nominalism, in a certain way the most extreme point and in a certain way the extreme collapse of Western philosophy, the complete bankruptcy of man in regard to his search for truth, despair that one can in any way learn truth from things. Hence the saying: Truth can exist only in things if we ourselves instil it into them. Kant has destroyed all objectivity and all man's possibility of getting down to the truth in things. He has destroyed all possible knowledge, all possible search for truth, for truth cannot exist only subjectively.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a consequence of Scholasticism, because it could not acquiesce in the other side, where there appeared another boundary to be crossed. Just because there emerged the age of Natural Science, to which Scholasticism did not adapt itself, Kantianism came on the scene, which ended really as subjectivity, and then from subjectivity in which it extinguished all knowledge, sprouted the so-called Postulates—Freedom, Immortality, and the Idea of God. We are meant to do the good, to obey the categoric imperative, and so we must be able to. That is, we must be free, but as we live here in the physical body, we cannot be. We do not attain perfection so that we may carry out the categoric imperative, till we are clear of the body. Therefore, there must be immortality. But even then we cannot realize it as human beings. Everything we are concerned with in the world, if we do what we ought to, can be regulated only by a Godhead. Therefore, there must be a Godhead. Three postulates of faith, whose source in Reality it is impossible to know—such is the extent of Kant's certainty, according to his own saying: I had to annihilate knowledge in order to make room for faith. And Kant now does not make room for faith-content in the sense of Thomas Aquinas, for a traditional faith-content, but for an abstract one: Freedom, Immortality, and the Idea of God; for a faith-content brought forth from the human individual dictating truth, that is, the appearance of it.

So Kant becomes the fulfiller of Nominalism. He is the philosopher who really denies man everything he could have which would enable him to get down to any kind of Reality. This accounts for the rapid reaction against Kant which for example, Fichte, and then Schelling, and then Hegel produced, and other thinkers of the nineteenth century. You need only look at Fichte and see how he was necessarily urged on to an experience of the soul that became more intensive and, one might say, ever more and more mystical in order to escape from Kantianism. Fichte could not even believe that Kant could have meant what is contained in the Kantian Critics. He believed at the beginning, with a certain philosophic naïveté that he drew only the final conclusion of the Kantian philosophy. His idea was that if you did not draw the “final conclusions,” you would have to believe that this philosophy had been pieced together by a most amazing chance, certainly not by a thoughtful human brain. All this is apart from the movement in Western civilization caused by the growth of Natural Science, which enters upon the scene as a reaction in the middle of the nineteenth century. This movement takes no count at all of Philosophy and therefore degenerated in many thinkers into gross materialism. And so we see how the philosophic development goes on, unfolding itself into the last third of the nineteenth century. We see this philosophic effort coming completely to nothing and we see then how the attempt came about, from every possibility which one could find in Kantianism and similar philosophies, to understand something of what is actually real in the world. Goethe's general view of life which would have been so important, had it been understood, was completely lost for the nineteenth century, except among those whose leanings were toward Schelling, Hegel and Fichte. For in this philosophy of Goethe's lay the beginning of what Thomism must become, if its attitude towards Natural Science were changed, for he rises to the heights of modern civilization, and is, indeed, a real force in the current of development.

Thomas could get no further than the abstract affirmation that the psychic-spiritual really has its effect on every activity of the human organism. He expressed it thus: Everything, even the vegetative activities, which exists in the human body is directed by the psychic and must be acknowledged by the psychic. Goethe makes the first step in the change of attitude in his Theory of Colour, which in consequence is not in the least understood; in his Morphology, in his Theory of Plants and Animals. We shall, however, not have a complete fulfilment of Goethe's ideas till we have a spiritual science which can of itself provide an explanation of the facts of Natural Science.

A few weeks ago I tried here to show how our spiritual science is seeking to range itself as a corrective side by side with Natural Science—let us say with regard to the theory of the heart. The mechanico-materialistic view has likened the heart to a pump, which drives the blood through the human body. It is the opposite; the blood circulation is living—Embryology can prove it, if it wishes—and the heart is set in action by the movement of the blood. The heart is the instrument by which the blood-activity ultimately asserts itself, by which it is absorbed into the whole human individuality. The activity of the heart is a result of blood-activity, not vice-versa. And so, as was shown here in detail in a Course for Doctors we can show with regard to each organ of the body, how the realization of man as a spirit-being really explains his material element. We can in a way make real the thing that appeared dimly in abstract form to Thomism, when it said: The spiritual-psychic permeates all the physical body. That becomes concrete, real knowledge. The Thomistic philosophy, which in the thirteenth century still had an abstract form, by rekindling itself from Goethe continues to live on in our day as Spiritual Science.

Ladies and gentlemen, if I may interpose here a personal experience, it is as follows: it is meant merely as an illustration. When at the end of the eighties I spoke in the “Wiener Goethe-Verein” on the subject “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic,” there was in the audience a very learned Cistercian. I can speak about this address, for it has appeared in a new edition. I explained how one had to take Goethe's presentation of Art, and then this Father Wilhelm Neumann, the Cistercian, who was also Professor of Theology at Vienna University, made this curious remark: “The germ of this address, which you have given us to-day, lies already in Thomas Aquinas!” It was an extraordinarily interesting experience for me to hear from Father Wilhelm Neumann that he found in Thomas something like a germ of what was said then concerning Goethe's views on Aesthetics; he was, of course, highly trained in Thomism, because it was after the appearance of Neo-Thomism within the Catholic clergy. One must put it thus: The appearance of things when seen in accordance with truth is quite different from the appearance when seen under the influence of a powerless nominalistic philosophy which to a large extent harks back to Kant and the modern physiology based on him. And in the same way you would find several things, if you studied Spiritual Science. Read in my Riddles of the Soul which came out many years ago, how I there attempted as the result of thirty years' study, to divide human existence into three parts, and how I tried to show there, how one part of the physical human body is connected with the thought and sense organization; how the rhythmic system, all that pertains to the breathing and the heart activity, is connected with the system of sensation, and how the chemical changes are connected with the volition system: the attempt is made, throughout, to recover the spiritual-psychic as creative force. That is, the change of front towards Natural Science is seriously made. After the age of Natural Science, I try to penetrate into the realm of natural existence, just as before the age of Scholasticism, of Thomism—we have seen it in the Areopagite and in Plotinus—human knowledge was used to penetrate into the spiritual realm. The Christ-principle is dealt with seriously after the change of front—as it would have been, had one said: human thought can change, so that it really can press upwards, if it discards the inherited limitation of knowledge and develops through pure non-sensory thought upward to the spiritual world. What we see as Nature can be penetrated as the veil of natural existence. One presses on beyond the limit of knowledge, which a dualism believed it necessary to set up, as the Schoolmen set up the limit on the other side—one penetrates into this material world and discovers that this is in fact the spiritual world, that behind the veil of Nature there are in truth not material atoms, but spiritual beings. This shows you how progressive thought deals with a continued development of Thomism in the Middle Ages. Turn to the most important abstract psychological thoughts of Albertus and Thomas. There, it is true, they do not go so far as to say concerning the physical body, how the spirit or the soul react on the heart, on the spleen, on the liver, etc., but they point out already that the whole human body must be considered to have originated from the spiritual-psychic. The continuation of this thought is the task of really tracing the spiritual-psychic into each separate part of the physical organization. Philosophy has not done this, nor Natural Science: it can only be done by a Spiritual Science, which does not hesitate to bring into our time thoughts, such as those of the high Scholiasts which are looked upon as great thoughts in the evolution of humanity, and apply them to all the contributions of our time in Natural Science. It necessitates, it is true, if the matter is to have a scientific basis, a divorce from Kantianism.

This divorce from Kantianism I have attempted first in my small book Truth and Science, years ago, in the eighties, in my Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, and then again in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Quite shortly and without consideration for the fact that things, when they are cursorily presented appear difficult, I should like to put before you the basic ideas to be found in these books. They start from the thought that truth cannot directly be found, at any rate in the observed world which is spread round about us. We see in a way how Nominalism infects the human soul, how it can assume the false conclusions of Kantianism, but how Kant certainly did not see the point with which these books seriously deal. This is, that a study of the visible world, if undertaken quite objectively and thoroughly leads to the knowledge that this world is not a whole. This world emerges as something which is real only through us. What, then, caused the difficulty of Nominalism? What gave rise to the whole of Kantianism? This, the visible world is taken and observed and then we spread over it the world of ideas through the soul-life. Now there we have the view, that this idea-world is to reproduce external observations. But the idea-world is in us. What has it to do with what is outside? Kant could answer this question only thus: By spreading the idea-world over the visible world, we make truth.

But it is not so. It is like this. If we consider the process of observation with an unprejudicial mind, it is incomplete, it is nowhere self-contained. I tried hard to prove this in my book Truth and Science, and afterwards in aThe Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. As we have been placed in the world, as we are born into it, we split the world in two. The fact is that we have the world-content, as it were, here with us. Since we come into the world as human beings, we divide the world-content into observation, which appears to us from outside, and the idea-world which appears to us from the inner soul. Anyone who regards this division as an absolute one, who simply says: there is the world, here am I—such a one cannot cross at all with his idea-world to the external world. The matter is this: I look at the visible world, it is everywhere incomplete. Something is wanting everywhere. I myself have with my whole existence arisen out of the world, to which the visible world also belongs. Then I look into myself, and what I see thus is just what is lacking in the visible world. I have to join together through my own self, since I have entered the world, what has been separated into two branches. I gain reality by working for it. Through the fact that I was born arises the appearance that what is really one is divided into two branches, outward perception and idea world. By the fact that I am alive and grow, I unite the two currents of reality. I work myself to reality by my acquiring knowledge. I should never have become conscious if I had never, through my entry into the world, separated the idea-world off from the outer world of perception. But I should never find the bridge to the world, if I did not bring the idea-world, which I have separated off, into unity again with that which, without it, is no reality.

Kant seeks reality only in outer perception and does not see that the other half of this reality is in us. The idea-world which we have in us, we have first torn from external reality. Nominalism is now at an end, for now we do not spread Space and Time and ideas, which are only “Nomina” over our external perception, but we return to it in our knowledge what we took from it on entering into our earth existence.

Thus is revealed to us the relation of man to the spiritual world in a purely philosophical form. And he who reads my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, which rests entirely on the basis of this knowledge-theory of the nature of reality, of this transference of life into reality through human knowledge, he who takes up this basis, which is expressed already in the title of Truth and Science, that real science unites perceptions and the idea-world and sees in this union not only an ideal but a real process; he who can see something of a world-process in this union of the perception and idea-worlds—is in a position to overthrow Kantianism. He is also in a position to solve the problem which we saw opening up in the course of Western civilization, which produced Nominalism and in the thirteenth century threw out several scholastic lights but which finally stood powerless before the division into perception and idea-world.

Now one approaches this problem of individuality on ethical ground, and hence my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity has become the philosophy of reality. Since the acquisition of knowledge is not merely a formal act, but a reality-process, ethical, moral behaviour appears as an effluence of that which the individual experiences in a real process through moral fantasy as Intuition; and there results, as set forth in the second part of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, the Ethical Individualism, which in fact is built upon the Christ-impulse in man, though this is not expressed in the book. It is built upon the spiritual activity man wins for himself by changing ordinary thinking into what I called “pure thinking,” which rises to the spiritual world and there produces the stimulus to moral behaviour. The reason for this is that the impulse of love, which is otherwise bound to the physical man, becomes spiritualized, and because the moral ideals are borrowed from the spiritual world through the moral phantasy, they express themselves in all their force and become the force of spiritual love. Therefore, the Philistine-Principle of Kant had to be resisted. Duty! thou exalted name, that knowest nothing of flattery, but demandest strict obedience—against this Philistine-Principle, against which Schiller had already revolted, the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity had to set the “transformed Ego,” which has developed up into the spheres of spirituality and up there begins to love virtue, and therefore practises virtue, because it loves it of its own individuality.

Thus we have a real world-content instead of something which remained for Kant merely a faith-content. For Kant the acquisition of knowledge is something formal, for the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, it is something real. It is a real process. And therefore the higher morality is linked to a reality—but a reality to which the “Wertphilosophen” like Windelband and Rickert do not attain at all, because they do not see how what is morally valuable is implanted in the world. Naturally those people who do not regard the process of knowledge as a real process, also fail to provide an anchorage for morality in the world, and arrive, in short, at no kind of Reality-Philosophy. The philosophical basic principles of what we call here Spiritual Science have really been drawn from the whole course of Western philosophical development. I have to-day tried really to show you how that Cistercian Father was not altogether wrong, and in what way the attempt lies before us to reconcile the realistic elements of Scholasticism with this age of Natural Science through a Spiritual Science, how we laid stress on the transformation of the human soul and with the real installation of the Christ-impulse into it, even in the thought-life. The life of knowledge is made into a real factor in world-evolution and the scene of its fulfilment is the human consciousness alone—as I explained in my book, Goethe's Philosophy. But this, which is thus fulfilled is at the same time a world-process, it is an occurrence in the world, and it is this occurrence that brings the world, and us within it, forward. So the problem of knowledge takes on quite another form. Now our experience becomes a factor of spiritual-psychic development in ourselves. Just as magnetism functions on the shape of iron filings, so there functions on us that which is reflected in us as knowledge; it functions at the same time as our form-principle, and we grow to realize the immortal, the eternal in ourselves, and the problem of knowledge ceases to be merely formal. This problem used always, borrowing from Kantianism, to be put in such a way that one said: How does man come to see a reproduction of the external world in this inner world? But knowledge is not in the least there for the purpose of reproducing the external world, but to develop us, and such reproduction of the external world is a secondary process.

In the external world we suffer a combination in a secondary process of what we have divided into two by the fact of our birth, and with the modern problem of knowledge it is exactly as when a man has wheat or other products of the field and examines the food value of the wheat in order to study the nature of the principle of growth. Certainly one can become a food-analyst, but what function there is in wheat from the ear to the root, and still further, cannot be known through the chemistry of food values. That investigates only something which follows the continuous growth which is inherent in the plant.

So there is a similar growth of spiritual life in us, which strengthens us, and has something to do with our nature, just like the development of the plant from the root through the stem, through the leaf to the bloom and the fruit, and thence again to the seed and the root. And just as the fact that we eat it must not affect the explanation of the nature of plant growth, so also the question of the knowledge-value of the growth-impulse we have in us may not be the basis of a theory of knowledge; rather it must be clear that what we call in external life knowledge is a secondary result of the work of ideas in our human nature. Here we come to the reality of that which is ideal; it works in us. The false Nominalism and Kantianism arose only because the problem of knowledge was put in the same way as the problem of the nature of wheat would be from the point of view of bio-chemistry.

Thus we can say: when you once realize what Thomism can be in our time, how it springs up from its most important achievement in the Middle Ages, then you see it springing up in its twentieth century shape in Spiritual Science, then it re-appears as Spiritual Science. And so a light is already thrown on the question: How does it look now if one comes and says: We must go back to Thomas Aquinas, he must be studied, possibly with a few critical comments, as he wrote in the thirteenth century. We see what it means sincerely and honestly to take our place in the chain of development which started with Scholasticism, and also what it means to put ourselves back into the thirteenth century, and to overlook everything that has happened since then in the course of European civilization. This is, after all, what has really happened as a result of the Papal Encyclical of 1879, which enjoins the Catholic clergy to regard the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the official one of the Catholic Church. I will not here discuss the question: Where is Thomism? for one would have to discuss, ladies and gentlemen, the question: Is the rose which I have before me, best seen if I take no notice of the bloom, and only dig into the earth, to look at the roots, and overlook the fact that from this root something is already sprung—or if I look at everything which is sprung from this root?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, you can answer that for yourselves. We experience all that which is of value among us as a renewal of Thomism, as it was in the thirteenth century, by the side of all that which contributes honestly to the development of Western Europe. We may ask: Where is Thomism to be found to-day? One need only put the question: What was Thomas Aquinas' attitude to the Revelation-content? He sought a relationship with it. Our need is to adapt ourselves to the revelation-content of Nature. Here we cannot rest on dogma. Here the dogma of experience, as I wrote already in the eighties of last century, must be surmounted, just as on the other side must the dogma of revelation. We must, in fact, revert to the spiritual-psychic content of man, to the idea-world which contains the transformed Christ-principle, in order again to find the spiritual world through the Christ in us, that is, in our idea-world. Are we then to rest content to leave the idea-world on the standpoint of the Fall?

Is the idea-world of the Redemption to have no part? In the thirteenth century the Christian principle of redemption could not be found in the idea-world; and therefore the idea-world was set off against the world of revelation. The advance of mankind in the future must be, not only to find the principle of redemption for the external world, but also for human reason. The unredeemed human reason alone could not raise itself into the spiritual world. The redeemed human reason which has the real relationship with Christ, this forces itself upward into the spiritual world; and this process is the Christianity of the twentieth century,—a Christianity strong enough to enter into the innermost recesses of human thinking and human soul-life.

This is no Pantheism; this is none of those things for being which it is to-day calumniated. This is the most serious Christianity, and perhaps you can see from this study of Thomas Aquinas' philosophy, even if in certain respects it was bound to digress into the realm of the abstract, how seriously Spiritual Science concerns itself with the problems of the West, how Spiritual Science always will stand on the ground of the Present, and how it can stand on no other, whatever else can be brought against it.

These remarks have been made to demonstrate that a climax of European spiritual evolution took place in the thirteenth century with High Scholasticism, and that the present age has every reason to study this climax, that there is a vast amount to be learnt from such a study, especially with regard to what we must call in the highest sense the deepening of our idea-life; so that we may leave all Nominalism behind, so that we may find again the ideas that are permeated with Christ, the Christianity which leads to the spiritual Being, from whom man is after all descended; for if man is quite honest and open with himself, nothing else can satisfy him but the consciousness of his spiritual origin.

Today we first have to talk about Jesus' conversation with his foster mother, who had gradually come to an understanding with her son. A tremendous change had taken place in her. The spirit of the other Mary, the physical mother of Jesus from the spiritual worlds, had descended upon her. She now carried it within her. The conversation between Jesus and his mother proves to be of great significance for the real understanding of the mystery of Golgotha from the point of view of spiritual scientific research. The mother understood Jesus better and better. It was a kind of intuitive understanding. Now Jesus was able to speak about the threefold pain he had experienced. What he said was like a kind of summary of what had been going on in his soul since the age of twelve. He spoke to his mother about his experiences from the age of twelve to eighteen. He spoke of the great teachings of Bath-Kol. He spoke of how no one had been able to understand him, how he could not speak of what was pushing him to tell someone. He told his mother that even if the old teachings had been there, the people to understand them would have been lacking.

Then he spoke of the second kind of painful experiences. He spoke of those events before the ruined sacrificial altar, he spoke of how he had penetrated into the old mysteries, in which the divine spiritual beings had descended directly, and how a descent had taken place in this respect as well. Instead of the good old pagan gods, demons were present at the sacrificial feasts. He spoke of the great cosmic events, of the Our Father in reverse, as it were. It was an extraordinary conversation he had with his mother. He spoke of how he had had to recognize how Lucifer and Ahriman fled before the gates of the Essenes and came to the other people who could not follow the strict rules of the order. He spoke of all this. It was like a retelling of his life so far. It was a conversation that was shaped by the fact that the words were not just words of the narrative, that the words did not just contain what usually lies in words, but what he said was the innermost experience expressed in words, pain and suffering expressed in words, transformed into infinite love, pain that had been transformed into love and goodwill. These words flowed over to the mother like realities. It seemed like a piece of the soul itself that passed from Jesus to the mother. In just a few hours, everything that was more than a mere experience came together. It was a cosmic experience in the truest sense of the word. Jesus of Nazareth could only speak words, but a part of his soul lay in these words. And much would have to be related if one wanted to characterize what the Akasha Chronicle gives. So it came about in the course of this conversation that it stood clearly before Jesus' soul at which point the development of mankind had arrived. Now it dawned on him with an ever clearer awareness that the Zarathustra soul was in him. Thus he felt how he, as Zarathustra, had gone through the development of humanity at that time. What I am saying to you now were not the words that Jesus spoke to his mother, but he expressed himself in a way that she could understand. What he felt there made the secret of human development clear to him. The impression of how Jesus feels and experiences this inwardly while speaking to his mother is incomparable. He speaks to his mother about how each human age has its own particular powers and that this is of great importance. There was once a human age, the ancient Indian culture, when people were particularly great because their whole lives were glowing with the childlike, sun-like powers of early childhood. Today, we still have some of these powers in us from our first to seventh year.

Then there was a second period, the ancient Persian time, which was inspired by the forces that now work in humans between the ages of seven and fourteen. Then Jesus turned His attention to the third age, the Egyptian time, in which the forces ruled that now work in man from the age of fourteen to twenty-one, when the sentient soul plays a major role in the individual development. In this Egyptian time, the astronomical and mathematical sciences were cultivated.

And now the question arose in Jesus: In what age do we now live, what can a person experience between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-eight? And he sensed that what dominated the outer life were the forces that had been poured out over Greco-Latin culture, but that these were also the last forces. The meaning of the individual human life stood in its full impact before the eyes of Jesus of Nazareth. From the twenty-eighth to the thirty-fifth year, man then passes the middle of life and begins to live towards his old age. There are no new life forces left; the inherited forces of the gods are exhausted. The ascending forces are there up to this point, they are consumed up to the middle of life. What now? Nowhere was there anything new to be seen from which forces for humanity could arise. Humanity would wither away if nothing new happened. Jesus had to live through this crisis for a certain time, and then the Zarathustra ego, whose possession had only recently flashed before him, dissolved. He had identified himself so completely with the evolution of humanity that the Zarathustra ego left him during his words to his mother. Only the three veils remained, and Jesus became again what he had been at the age of twelve, but with everything that he had been able to absorb through his experiences as Zarathustra. Now it was like an impulse that drew him to the Jordan to John the Baptist. And there descended into Jesus of Nazareth that which had to flow rejuvenatingly into the process of humanity so that humanity would not wither away: the Christ-Being. This Christ impulse moved in at a time when people were least prepared to receive it. With their minds, people could feel drawn to Christ, but there was no longer any of the wisdom and power of the earlier ages. So Christ initially only worked as a power, not as a teacher. But even today, humanity is not particularly far in its understanding of the Christ impulse.

The effectiveness of Christ did not initially depend on the understanding that was shown to him. For three years, the Christ essence descended upon Jesus of Nazareth. That a God entered a human body was not only a matter for human beings, it was also a matter for the higher hierarchies. Until then, no God had experienced being incarnate in a human body. That is the staggering thing: the life of a God in a human body during these three years. But it was necessary for the advancement of humanity to become possible again.

At first the Christ-Essence was only loosely connected with the man Jesus of Nazareth, but more and more densely it united with his body until the crucifixion in a continuous development. Since then, humanity has not increased in understanding of spiritual things. Otherwise, a contemporary event such as Maeterlinck's book “On Death” would be impossible. That is a foolish book. It says: When man is disembodied, then he is indeed a spirit, then he can no longer suffer. — That is just the opposite of the truth. It is always the spirit that must suffer, not the body. As the individuality increases, so do the pains, the feelings. It is therefore impossible for today's man to understand the pain suffered by the embodied God.

One of the women wanted to look for Jesus in the grave. He was a spiritual body. Christ was not to be sought with physical senses. The Crusades in the Middle Ages were a repetition of this search. It was the same vain search. And it was precisely at the time of the Crusades that German mystics arose who sought to reconnect with Christ in the right way. Christ also worked where his teaching was not; he worked as a power in all of humanity. After the baptism in the Jordan, the Christ was still loosely bound to the body of Jesus. The first to meet him was Lucifer. He brought into play all the powers that can be developed in an entity in terms of inciting pride. “If you acknowledge me, I will give you all the kingdoms of the earth.” This attack was quickly repulsed. For the second temptation, Lucifer and Ahriman came together, wanting to evoke fear and anxiety in Christ with the words, “Throw yourself down.”

The third time Ahriman appeared alone with his demand: “Say that these stones become bread.” This question of Ahriman left an unresolved remainder; it was not completely answered. That this could not happen is connected with the innermost forces of the development of the earth, insofar as human beings are part of it.

There is something here like the money question. This is connected with the Ahrimanic question. Ahriman retained some of his power over Christ Jesus. This was shown in Judas Iscariot. This unresolved question is at work in the betrayal of Judas.

It was also mentioned that it was only possible in the darkness for the Christ impulse to communicate itself to Earth at the crucifixion. Whether it was a solar eclipse or whether the darkness came from something else cannot be said with certainty today. Finally, a very urgent request for these revelations to be kept secret.

With respect to our Burgtheater art
Performance at the Burgtheater, Vienna

As gratifying as it generally is when the management of our Burgtheater remembers from time to time that an art institute of the first rank has the duty to present the works of its greatest poets to the German people, we cannot congratulate them on the revival of "The Maccabees". We do not fail to recognize that we are dealing here with the creation of a true and genuine poet, we know that traces of a tremendous talent are evident everywhere: but as a drama the "Maccabees" are weak, and on the stage they do not make a real impact. It is characteristic of Otto Ludwig's character that he wanted to turn a material into a drama that could not be more unfavorable for this purpose. The spiritual direction of Judaism is inaccessible to actual tragedy. The religious Jew has no ideas or ideals. He lives for a God who remains an inanimate, thoughtless abstraction to him. The Jew lacks all understanding for the real world of the immediate present, from which the tragic conflicts and actions arise. This is why Otto Ludwig, for all his masterly characterization, which we have to admire in his "Maccabees", was unable to deepen a single figure into a truly captivating tragedy. He was even less able to depict a dramatic development and plot. These are only possible where the spiritual nature, the world of ideas intervene directly in reality, where man also loves what he strives for, where he is passionately devoted to what he recognizes and reveres as the highest. The Jew fights for a God whom he does not know, whom he does not love. He does not act; he obeys slavishly. The life turned towards the unknown Jehovah and alien to reality therefore also causes interest in the latter to die. And so there is a lack of the richness of life that the drama needs. Every dramatic motif is soon worn out, for it loses its significance when it has fulfilled its task of glorifying Jehovah: it must be replaced by a new one. With this, however, all organic development comes to an end. A monotonous, inconsistent basic idea dominates the whole, next to which the real events appear arbitrary, without inner coherence. This was the case with Otto Ludwig's "Maccabees". The plot is disjointed, arbitrary, without an inner organic structure. New motifs have to be conjured up again and again in order to continue the stalled development. We first see how Leah, the wife of the Jewish priest Mattathias, is insatiably ambitious to bring the service of Jehovah into the hands of her descendants and how this ambition completely dominates her. Of her seven sons, Judah is a kind of hero who devotes his whole being to saving the glory of God's name against the Syrians who oppress the Jews and want to force them into paganism. Eleazar, his brother, his mother's particular favorite, is an ambitious striver who goes over to the Syrians in order to gain prestige and power through them. This seems to create a tragic conflict. But since it is not enough, the poet has to introduce a completely new moment into the plot later on. Judah, who fights successfully against the enemies and appears as the champion of the Jewish spirit, is confronted by the fanatical Jehoiakim, who knows only the de-spiritualized letter and disturbs the former's circles by preventing the Jews from fighting on the Sabbath. Everything that has been achieved is called into question again. Again we have the beginnings of a dramatic entanglement: but again it proves too weak to lead to an end. First a party hostile to the Maccabees must arise, which betrays the Jews to the Syrians and, in order to arouse faith in the Syrian king, snatches the children from Leah to hand them over to the enemies. After suffering many hardships, Leah appears before King Antiochus to plead for the freedom of her children. The king gives her the choice of either having them renounce the faith of their fathers or consigning them to death by fire. After a harrowing battle of the soul, the mother decides on the latter. This is how the plot actually begins three times, and we always lose all interest in the thread that continues from the beginning. A whole series of weaknesses in the play could also be mentioned. Mattathias' death, which drags on for an entire act, seems boring, the appearance of the Roman Aemilius Barbus seems far-fetched, the scene between Judah and his wife in the fourth act, where he addresses her as the "little rose of Saron", even tasteless.

Although the play is weak enough as a drama, the individual characters are at times masterfully drawn and offer the actors ample opportunity to show off their skills and, in particular, their artistic conception. We do not want to neglect to look at the artists involved. Above all, Ms. Wolter deserves the honor of the evening. Her Lea is a masterpiece; and what captivated us in the play was to a large extent the interest in the performance of this artist. In her whole being, in her figure, voice, manner of speaking, indeed in every gesture, Ms. Wolter has something of the idealized art of acting. She makes a powerful impression on anyone with taste, and would do so even if she refrained from such naturalistic amusements as drinking to fortify herself before appearing before Antiochus. She reminds us of her coquetry in Götz, which does not enhance her noble play. Even if Lea does not appear as elaborate as Stuart or Orsina, we must still count her among the best we have ever seen at the Burgtheater. The scene where she is tied to a tree by the enemy party so that she does not follow her children and the scene before Antiochus are magnificent in every respect.

With regard to Roberts as Judah, we cannot join the chorus of Viennese critics. It has always seemed incomprehensible to us what Speidel and the critics who follow him find in this actor. We can never be interested in the intellectual working through of the roles, which does not lead to anything more than a mannered portrayal that lacks all style. So we didn't get any impression of his Judah either. He sought his effect through a special development of the vocal means, which failed to materialize because he ultimately lacked the strength. Mr. Wagner's Eleazar was played without understanding. Nowhere could one find that he was touched by Otto Ludwig's deep spirit. The turnaround at the end, where he goes into himself and yet seeks death with the brothers, was without the necessary psychological deepening of the portrayal. We did not dislike Jojakim Schreiners, just as we generally find that this actor receives too little critical attention. Devrient is not quite up to the role of Antiochus. This time Baumeister was very insignificant as Aemilius Barbus. We have never seen this brilliant actor so bad. It was almost incomprehensible.

At the end, we have to ask a few questions: why didn't Mr. Krastel play Judah, who seems more suitable for this role than any of his colleagues? Why wasn't Mr. Reimers given the role of Eleazar? Why did the setting up of the idol at the end of the second act have to be turned into a ridiculous caricature by the production?

If one could object to Emperor Wilhelm II's proclamation to the Prussian people that it was too general, that it lacked the individual character that would have presented the new ruler's principles of government to the people with complete certainty, then the opposite must be said of the words of heavy content that were addressed to the German people from the throne on Monday. They leave us unclear about no more important question, they show in the most definite way which path the ruler of Germany wants to take. The Emperor did not pronounce a program for the future, but pointed to what already existed in order to say that he would endeavor to continue the work begun with such great fortune and blessing by his immediate ancestors. And in this sense, the 'Throne Speech' delivered in the German Reichstag can be called a truly magnificent message to the German people. A commendable, satisfying historical trait runs through it, which testifies to the new ruler's deep insight into the incontrovertible truth that only that government can be truly beneficial which places itself at the service of historical necessity. The thread of history must not be broken anywhere, and it is a grave mistake to stage reforms from the top down, bypassing the proper development. Individual inclination must take a back seat to the higher duty imposed on the ruler by history. The new ruler possesses the selflessness necessary to rule in the sense indicated. He wants to continue to act in the same way that led his grandfather to such successes and that his exalted father also described as the right way. The events of recent years are a guarantee that the German people will fully understand the views of their Emperor. The Germans have a truly conservative mind, which, averse to hollow radicalism, is geared to the healthy further development of what already exists, which is within the realm of possibility. They know that there is little to be gained from haste in the field of politics. It is not doctrinaire measures that are grafted onto the Reich's legislation like templates that can benefit the Reich in the future, but only the consolidation of state conditions in the spirit of the German people. This is the raison d'état adopted by Emperor Wilhelm I in wise recognition of Bismarck's tremendous statesmanlike genius, and his grandson, guided by the best of intentions, is probably large enough to recognize the necessity of his great chancellor's idea of the state for the Reich. - And in this the members of all parties must agree with him, in the spirit of the Emperor's words: "It will be my endeavor to continue the work of imperial legislation in the same spirit as my esteemed grandfather began it."

The Emperor's words on the German-Austrian alliance seem to us to be of even greater significance: "Our alliance with Austria-Hungary is public knowledge. I adhere to it in German loyalty, not merely because it has been concluded, but because I see in this defensive alliance a basis of European balance and a legacy of German history, the content of which is supported today by the public opinion of the entire German people and corresponds to the traditional European law of nations, as it was undisputedly valid until 1866." These are sentences that must fill every German with the deepest joy. We would not have dared to hope that the unified feeling of all Germans would be expressed with such certainty from the throne. The Germans in Austria had to cheer loudly when they came across this passage. They could never want more than for the awareness of the unity of the two Central European empires to reach so far up to the thrones. Thanks to the new ruler that he understood how to speak such truly balmy words to his people!

Every sentence of this speech sounds like something taken from world history. "We share the same historical ties and the same national needs of the present with Italy. Both countries (Austria-Hungary and Italy) want to hold on to the blessings of peace in order to live in peace in the consolidation of their newly won unity, the development of their national institutions and the promotion of their welfare." Thus the Emperor spoke about the alliance of the three monarchies, again emphasizing the necessity of the development of circumstances and taking full account of the aspirations of the popular spirit and national sentiment.

And if it is true what is claimed from so many sides, that the new ruler is particularly inclined towards the military profession, then he showed all the more how he knows how to subordinate his personal inclinations to his duty. "Our army should secure peace for us and, if it is nevertheless broken, be able to fight for it with honor. With God's help, it will be able to do so with the strength it has received through the most recent military law unanimously passed by you. It is far from my heart to use this strength for wars of aggression. Germany needs neither new war glories nor any conquests, now that it has finally won the right to exist as a single "and independent nation."

Whoever is interested in the prosperous development of the German people must be deeply disgusted by the unworthy party bickering of recent weeks. Friedrich this way - Wilhelm that way, it was believed that the Emperor and the then heir to the throne could be brought down to the selfish aspirations of the parties. It was only forgotten in the case of the former that he was far too noble a nature to be affected by the flattery of one side or the blasphemies of the other. Had he come to the German throne in good health, he would have represented an ethical power that would soon have made the position clear to the quarrelling parties. Unfortunately, he was not granted the opportunity to prevent the abuse that was made of his name. And Emperor Wilhelm II? Well, last Monday he announced to the whole world that his aspirations have nothing in common with the views of the party that would so like to portray him as one of its own. He has shown that he puts himself at the service of completely different ideas than the narrow-minded goals of Muckertum. Hopefully the people will now realize how much party egoism falsifies the truth, and how all sides trumpet what they would like to be true to the world.

A German ruler who placed himself in the service of a party would soon have to realize how he could do nothing against the necessity of development. Circumstances would force him out of the party framework, which, whatever it might be, was too narrow for the imperial government. It is Bismarck's great points of view, into which the new ruler has settled from his youth, which he cannot separate from the existence of the German Empire. In the German Emperor's mind, the will of the people must become the principle of government, not party spirit. The deep understanding that the Emperor has expressed for this ensures the fulfillment of his wish, as can be seen from the concluding words of the throne speech: "Trusting in God and in the fortitude of our people, I am confident that for the foreseeable future we will be granted the opportunity to preserve and consolidate in peaceful work what was fought for under the leadership of my two predecessors on the throne, who rested in God!"

Yesterday we tried to penetrate the relationship between what is called wisdom in the spiritual scientific sense, immediate, direct knowledge of the spiritual worlds, and that religious document that is the most important for our culture, the Bible. Today, let us take a look at some specific facts that can illustrate this relationship to us, that can show us how, if we understand this relationship in this way, we can indeed arrive at a new understanding of this religious document. You will understand that it is impossible to even touch on such a broad subject in summary, considering all the things that could be considered. It will therefore be best if we try to pick out individual things in particular to see how certain things that are also told in this biblical document can be understood through direct insight into the higher worlds and how one can then find that which one can grasp so immediately and directly in this religious document.

I would like to start with a very specific individual fact, a fact that has already been touched on here in a different context. I would like to show you how spiritual science introduces us to a certain law of human development. Today, this law is even already suspected by the more materialistically colored natural science. Spiritual science has known the law for long, long times and regards life from the point of view of this law. If we want to characterize this law in one word, we say: This law expresses the development of the spiritual life of humanity. You know that the idea of development is something that has had a truly fascinating effect on the external science of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. You know that external science has been completely moved into this perspective and that as a result the development of the simplest living beings up to the most complicated ones has become understandable.

Spiritual science has always had this idea of development, only much more comprehensive, much more universal than this natural science of the nineteenth century.

Spiritual science says: Everything is in the process of development. Everything develops from simple, very simple forms in the distant past to those forms that are so intricately interwoven that humans are still far from being able to comprehend them today. Spiritual science speaks above all of a development of human consciousness itself, and it is important that we follow the development of this human consciousness through its various stages. For this will cast a spotlight on certain chapters of the biblical records. What the vast majority of individuals today call consciousness is, for spiritual science, a state of consciousness that has developed from other forms of consciousness. We describe this present human state of consciousness as the so-called waking daytime consciousness, or also the object consciousness. Why? If we want to characterize this consciousness that a person has today from morning, when he wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, we have to say: This consciousness acquires its knowledge as follows: First, it acquires its perceptions of the objects through the external senses, of the objects in space and in the time around us, and our mind, which is limited to the sensory world, processes the perceptions that the human being receives through the external senses; and through such perceptions and such processing of perceptions in our conscious mind, we form the treasures of our knowledge, which are stored in our memory and guide and accompany us through life.

However, there are other forms of consciousness besides this state of consciousness; this state of consciousness is one that humanity has not always had in the past, and we have to look back to recognize the development of this state of consciousness, to times in the distant, distant past, to times that lie far, far behind our own.

In the past, people had a different form of consciousness, and at one point a different state of consciousness. How we perceive today, how we think today, has developed from other forms of consciousness, and the state of consciousness that once existed in humanity, but which today's state of consciousness has replaced, is called pictorial consciousness, the imaginative consciousness of the distant past.

The higher imaginative consciousness of which I spoke yesterday is not meant here. If we want to understand how this earlier pictorial consciousness relates to the consciousness that the initiate, who has undergone the inner spiritual development, already has today and that all of humanity will have at some future stage, if we want to recognize the two levels of consciousness If we want to recognize the two stages of imaginative consciousness, these two phases of the development of our consciousness in their relationship, we have to say: what we will speak of here precedes our own and is a dim, more dream-like clairvoyance. In that very distant past, people had a dream-like clairvoyance, and from this, today's object consciousness has only just developed; and a future state of consciousness stands before our soul, which the initiate already has today and which all of humanity will have in the distant future, in that man will have today's object consciousness and clairvoyance, both in bright, clear clarity. Early man, our ancient ancestor, had a consciousness that could not yet calculate in the same way that today's consciousness can. But instead he had a kind of dull, dream-like clairvoyance. He could see more into the spiritual and soul-life of his surroundings, either continually or in specially evoked states. He could receive images of what was spiritually and soul-wise in his environment. Today's object consciousness only sees spiritual entities when they are physically embodied externally.

I can best describe the former clairvoyance to you by means of an example. A person approaches another; the second harbors feelings of antipathy in his soul towards the approaching person. Modern man can only guess at what lives in the soul from external sensory perceptions. In the dim clairvoyance that man of ancient times had, however, a picture in color and form appeared freely floating before the clairvoyant gaze, indicating to him what the other felt towards him. The innermost attitude of a being was clothed in a color and form floating in space for the spiritual eye, just as certain ether vibrations express themselves today for the physical eye through color and form.

There are times in the distant past when this clairvoyance was developed to a certain extent. Today, however, we can only look back in history to a time when the last remnants of this somnambulistic clairvoyance, so to speak, were still present in people. These remnants were present in times not much more than a thousand years ago. We find such dim clairvoyance in every people in its initial stage, and it is from this dim clairvoyance that the myths and legends and fairy tales that originated among peoples in the early days were born. These myths and sagas did not come into being through that abstract thing we call the child's creative imagination, but out of the remnants of this former clairvoyance, as a reproduction of what an original, dim clairvoyance originally saw in all, all peoples from whom today's humans descended. This dim clairvoyance is connected with other conditions in the development of mankind, and if we want to characterize this development that has taken place in the transition to our present object consciousness, then we have to point to an external event that has taken place in our physical world and that is an expression of this transformation of that consciousness into our present one. This found expression in what we can call the transition from near-marriage to distant-marriage. In ancient times, among the most diverse peoples, there was an age in which what we call consanguineous marriage was common practice, a matter of course. People lived in small tribes and married within these small tribes, and it was considered somewhat immoral and incorrect to marry outside one's tribe; so in those times, related blood mixed with related blood, and those times these times of close marriage prevailed were also the times when the last remnants of a dim form of clairvoyance were present.

It is an extremely important moment in the development of all peoples: the transition from close marriage to distant marriage. One could point out how this is expressed in the most diverse myths and legends, how the whole cycle of the Siegfried saga is connected with that transition from close marriage to distant marriage, but that would be going too far today. What is important for us is the effect of foreign blood on foreign blood, which is that the original clairvoyance is killed; and this consciousness, which we know today, which is characterized by calculating, combining, logical thinking, this achievement emerged from that mixing of foreign blood with foreign blood!

Thus, we can trace in all ancient times how a different form of living together is linked to a different state of consciousness and vice versa. It has also been pointed out that even today, under certain circumstances, the last vestiges of this clairvoyance remain; I have already referred to the conversation between Rosegger and Anzengruber. I will take it up again here: Rosegger, the amiable and significant descriptor of what he sees around him in farm life and elsewhere, is a descriptor based on external sensory observation. Compare this with Anzengruber, and you will see that Anzengruber is able to present figures from folk life with wonderful plasticity, so that they stand on their own two feet with wonderful truth and naturalness. Now Anzengruber never saw the things he describes with his senses, he never lived among the farmers. Now Rosegger said to Anzengruber: You know, it seems to me that if you went out into the farming world and observed what happens there, you would be able to describe it even better. Anzengruber, on the other hand, replied: No, then I probably wouldn't be able to describe it at all. I have never seen farmers, but my ancestors were farmers, all my ancestors were farmers, and so the peasantry still lives and stirs in my blood, and I describe what my fathers saw, my ancestors, it runs down to me in my blood, and that is how I describe peasant life.

There you have the last remnants of what was once present in a much higher degree in all humanity. If you realize this, you will have to say: the way Anzengruber worked had the effect that a dark power of consciousness lives down in the blood through his ancestors to himself, and that lives itself out in him. Imagine this state of consciousness intensified, intensified to such an extent that the son can really remember what the father experienced, yes, what the grandfather experienced, then you have characterized that dim state of clairvoyance after a certain side, which once belonged to all our ancestors. There is a much higher, a real memory in the blood of what the ancestors had experienced, and as true as it is that today's man with his object consciousness can only store what he himself has experienced since childhood, it is just as true, incredible and grotesque as it may appear to today's materialistic way of thinking, it is true that there was a time when there was a dim awareness that the following generations remembered what their father, grandfather, ancestor and great-ancestor had experienced. Not just a vague feeling of it rumbled in the blood that had come from marriage between relatives, it was a real memory of it. Now let's see: what was the result of such a very different state of consciousness? The result of this was a very different naming than what takes place within humanity today. Today, man calls his ego that which holds together the experiences of his person since his youth. It was different then. Imagine those people who had a clear memory of what their ancestors had experienced; they also used the term “I” to describe what had been experienced in their ancestors over the generations. So someone was telling the experiences of his grandfather as those of his own “I” – if you want to express it radically. So he said: My “I” does not end with my birth, it extends up the generations, and that is why in such distant times, of which, however, no reports and documents report, what was remembered was given a uniform name, and so we must first learn to understand the meaning of the naming for those ancient times. Names were not only given to individual persons in those days; the whole context of all experiences in which one was present had a name in one's memory. When we know that there were names that designated many generations that went back centuries, then we understand an important chapter in which the patriarchs lived through the centuries.

Adam is not a person like those who live today as personal human beings on our physical earth. Adam was that which lived through generations and found expression in the collective memory. He did not denote a tribe or race, but that which passed through the generations as a common memory of consciousness in the old dim clairvoyance.

Thus it becomes clear that we need only understand the naming of ancient times, then it becomes bright within us in what the documents of the Bible tell us from this chapter of the history of creation. In those ancient times of dim clairvoyance, man did not attach much importance to his own personal experiences; they were only a small part of that great circle of experience to which he felt he belonged. He spoke of that which his consciousness overlooked as a unified entity. And so, just as when you talk to another person today, that person appears to you as something real, and the succession of generations as a whole appears more or less abstract, so to those people the individual person was insignificant, and what was important to him was what held his consciousness, reaching back over generations, together. Thus, in the patriarchal names, we do not have names for individual personalities, but rather a designation of a sum of beings. Thus, something in the Bible shines for us, which we recognize in its true sense when we face it equipped with higher spiritual-scientific knowledge. That is the way in which the person who recognizes it can look at the Bible. He first sees how it was in ancient times, and then, when he can understand correctly, he finds that the description of the Bible is just the same, wants to say the same thing. At that time, those who wrote down these records simply described what they were aware of.

Another example: in spiritual science, we follow the human being in his development far, much further back than to the point in time we have just discussed. Since I have often spoken about the idea of development here, I hope I will not be misunderstood today. Spiritual science traces the human being far, far back, and when it traces the human being back, it always comes across such human beings through long, long periods of time, where the physical body of the human being is the expression of the soul living in the physical body of the human being. But then, going further and further back, we come to a point in human development when this is no longer the case, when we can see how, so to speak, the paths of physical development and of soul-spiritual development separate further backwards. The spirit and the soul of man are rooted in the spiritual world, and when I use the expression of descending from the spiritual world, those who have already penetrated deeper into theosophy know that this expression is only figurative, an expression for something spiritual in a language that is only suitable for the external material. We are coming to times in the development of humanity when we see how the human soul and spirit is still united with other spiritual and soul-like entities. Out of spiritual entities, man's soul and spirit are born. There is a point in our earthly development when these human soul and spirit have only just entered this physical body, but we must not believe that this physical body, as it has taken in the soul and spirit, has not also undergone a long, long development.

At this point, two developmental currents meet. One of these currents is that of the physical world: We see how physical entities – headed by the physical human body – develop up to a certain level of perfection. Then there comes a point in time when this physical human body has become so perfect that it is now able to accommodate this spiritual-soul entity, which has developed to such an extent that it could find expression in the physical human body. since that spirit, that soul, has moved within the human body from the imperfect form that that body had, up to the present human form, the soul and spirit itself has worked in the human body through long, long periods of time. And through the forces through which they worked, the soul and spirit within the human body developed this body ever higher and higher, to its present form. Soul and spirit are, so to speak, the transformers and redevelopers of the human body. From that time on, we can also characterize the form of the physical human body, as it existed at that time, suitable for receiving the soul-spiritual, today, without any religious document, but only from the developed abilities of the seer.

These two human body in such a way that the human body as yet without a human soul was certain — I know how I shock all those who have only a materialistic way of thinking; but that does not matter; but if we want to know the truth, we have to tackle this great difference . The reasons why materialistic science may find this strange and grotesque are already known to the spiritual researcher himself, he has already dealt with them, otherwise he would not dare to tell such things – they are formed quite differently than he later became. But the earth was also shaped quite differently in those ancient times.

I will speak only of a single thing in the human body and its transformation at that time. Before that time, it was necessary for the human body to have an organ that still exists today in a last rudiment and remnant, in the swim bladder of fish. Since the physical human ancestor had to move by floating and swimming on the earth, he needed such a organ. The physical human ancestor had this organ in ancient times. This organ has transformed itself in the course of human physical development into the lungs. This has enabled man to breathe in and process the air as he does today. Connected with this is what we know about other processes in the body that have some kind of relationship to this lung breathing. We see the transition from the old gill breathing, which is still present in human embryonic development, to lung breathing, which is the preparation for red blood, which plays such an important role in human beings as well as in the life of nations. This moment of capturing the oxygen in the air through the lungs is also the moment of the human being being endowed with a human soul. Only then was he a suitable vessel for what we call a human soul.

These things took place over long, long periods of time: the transformation of the swim bladder into lungs that are able to process the oxygen in the external air. Now, if an observer wanted to describe this important moment of development in emotional and sensory terms, he could have said: “With the inhalation of the air, we breathed in the divine soul.” That is indeed how our ancestors felt, they gratefully felt the breath as the inspirer. You see, that is why the legends and myths of all peoples saw the body of the deity in the air, which had given man his individual consciousness. In the drifting air, the one who sees out of dull clairvoyance or out of the developed consciousness of the seer, sees the body of the animating deity, that deity of which his individual soul is a part. Imagine that all this extended over long, long periods of time, what was expressed pictorially in such legends and myths.

This image for all that I have described to you can be found again in the biblical record: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.

Yes, why then clothe such a powerful fact, which goes through millions of years of development, in such an image? Yes, it is not unimportant in which image such a fact is presented to the consciousness at a particular stage of development. In the form in which it was expressed just now, it would not have been understood by anyone at that time. At that time it was necessary to speak in images, in imaginations. Everything, absolutely everything is in development! You will only understand what that means when I tell you how it all affects you.

Those who have already delved deeper into the theosophical teachings know that the human soul is not embodied only once, but passes through human bodies over and over again, going through many, many lives. They know that That which is in you today as soul has developed over and over again through life and life; that which is able to understand and comprehend this great law of becoming human in you today would understand nothing, absolutely nothing, would not have the ability to grasp such concepts if you had not also listened before or more often to how others have described this same process of becoming world in images and imaginations. Only this enabled this soul to understand the concept of it in today's incarnation.

Everything that only later appears in concepts must first be brought to humanity in imaginations, in images. The wisest of humanity, the leaders of the people, have known all that we describe today. But for the majority it had to be brought in images, because they had a dim clairvoyance and could not yet absorb these things in concepts, but only in images, and that was to be given in this form: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7)

Let us now ask ourselves: What does Jahve, Jehovah stand for? Jehovah is the expression for that which we perceive as the individual, the I-giving. At the same time, it has the secondary meaning “the blowing one,” “the one blowing in the air,” and there you have the Yahweh himself, that is, the deity who gave man the I: “I am who am” (Ex 3:14). And if you go from there up to the Central European old legends and myths, you will find that there you also have the Wotan, who rides in the air storm, the Wotan who blows. Thus, the blowing spirit, the spirit that blows in the air, was always felt to be the bringer of human consciousness.

This is only one of the concepts we can develop. Going further back into the distant past, we would arrive at the line of development of the spiritual core of the human being, and from there to spirit itself. Even in those ancient times, the old consciousness looked back to the time when the soul and spirit were still united with the original divine spirituality; our spiritual-soul human ancestor was within this. What you call your self today, your most intimate inner being, was at that time, when it had not yet united with your body, was at that time in that divine primordial being within it. Above all, it was in a state that we must describe as being without gender. Spirit and soul have no gender. They acquire gender when they take on a physically formed body, but their innermost being is not gender-related. This soul also underwent development, and every spiritual researcher looks back on this as well, and saw man and woman united in one before the two genders appeared to us in the outside world. The spirit of man, the spirit that was not yet sexual, united both sexes within itself.

Thus we have the one point of the incarnation of man in the sense of the soul, the spirit, entering the physical, appropriately prepared body, and an earlier, equally salient point: the incarnation of the soul, the spiritual man himself, and how from an even earlier spiritual state the asexual, spiritual-soul man emerged from the one original spirituality.

Thus we see the incarnation twice: once above in the spiritual world, once below on the physical plane. This twofold human becoming for our Earth appears to us in the mirror image in the description in the biblical document; we see it truly in that twofold human becoming in biblical history.

First, the human becoming in the spiritual-soul world: the biblical writer says of that time: man came into being as a male-female being. (Genesis 1:27) And then this male-female being, which was of a spiritual and soul nature, came down into the physical world, and there we are dealing with the physical body, which now simultaneously begins to breathe. Thus we see how a twofold form of human incarnation entered into the Bible. We now recognize that if one wanted to describe the truth, then this is how this twofold human incarnation would have to be described.

Now let us consider another case that comes closer to what touches us even more intimately, which introduces us introduces us to the New Testament and familiarizes us with the mystery of Golgotha, with Jesus Christ. You will easily be able to see that another element remains that is still present as a shared humanity that will not be destroyed if close marriage is destroyed. It is true that the love that attaches people to close marriage can only exist through shared blood, but there is a love that is more comprehensive and higher than that of blood. Thus there is something in humanity that is truly common, that exists as a common bond of humanity, even when that bond is severed, a bond that is more comprehensive than the love that is woven through blood relationship. When that human ancestor looked back at the time of the near marriage, it was a generational, tribal self that he designated as I. The boundaries of the tribes stretched further and further; tribes became nations, and the consciousness of the tribes was destroyed, and a common bond, which was no longer so strong, embraced the people, a national consciousness. It was most clearly and distinctly evident in that body of people who are called the Hebrew.

The tendency to expand the national consciousness to include that which holds all humanity together, the force that brings people together beyond the nation state, only came to Earth with the appearance of Christ Jesus. Even today man cannot clearly recognize what lives in all men as a common bond, but a future will come, still far distant from us, in which the consciousness will be so vividly present in a large number of people, the consciousness of brotherhood without blood. And to prepare this consciousness to act as a real power in preparation for this brotherhood, that is the mission of Christianity. If, therefore, the God who was felt in ancient times as the blowing one is also called the one who gave the I, then we must call the God who lives in that consciousness, which is not so dimly , but which will develop to feel and clearly recognize that which is common to all of humanity, we must describe this human consciousness and describe it, when we speak in the Christian sense, as the Christ consciousness. The Christ consciousness denotes, as it were, an I that embraces all of humanity in a common consciousness. There is a sentence: “If anyone does not leave wife and child and mother and brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) This must not be understood in a trivial, ascetic sense. It must be understood in such a way that Christianity paves the way for an all-encompassing human brotherhood, which is not based on blood ties, but on the fact that a person says brother to every human being, not in the everyday sense , but to gain an awareness that is not enclosed and limited within the blood ties, that gradually extends to more and more people in our later life, and is ultimately able to embrace all of humanity. Therefore, if one calls Jehovah the god of the people, then one comes to call Christ Jesus the god of humanity, the god of all humanity, the “Son of Man”. He, the Master, had to prepare the bond of love for all mankind.

If Jehovah is called a national god, then the Christ, who was embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, must be called the Son of Man, as He called Himself. Thus you see the truth of the word “Before Abraham was, I Am” or, better, “I AM” (John 8:58), who has brought the forces of humanity for the first time, which embrace all of humanity, who is able to bring about all of humanity's brotherhood.

How did this great event come about through external real facts, through real events? The Son of Man has been embodied in a human personality. Spiritual science points this out to us again. It points out to us, if we understand it correctly, what is called prophecy, that which underlies all of this. Only the initiate can and can clearly recognize this, but humanity can have a feeling for it, an awareness of it, since the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth.

What is prophecy? Do not believe that what the Christian can know since the appearance of Christ Jesus on earth has only just begun in those times. The one who is a true Christian and does not want to stop at what Christianity, for example, tells its believers today, knows that he is one with what Augustine said. That which is called Christianity today is the religion that has always been called the true religion in ancient times. But not all people have been able to understand this religion since ancient times; in ancient times there were always only a few who were chosen to be initiated into the great mysteries. They became the prophets of a certain time, able to see what must happen in the future. Initiation means: to develop those higher abilities in man that lie dormant in every human being!

And now a law that tells us: That which moves down into the physical world in the future is already present today in the spiritual world, and that which lives today in the spiritual world will one day descend into the physical regions. But because the one who becomes an initiate already ascends today into the spiritual regions, he can perceive in spirit today that which will descend into the physical world in the future. He can see it today from above and now say: This will happen in the future. Initiation is now attained in a certain sequence, only according to the methods prescribed in spiritual science and also in all great religions. There have been such methods of initiation in all times, just as there have been initiates in all times.

There is a tremendous difference in the initiation principle between those ancient pre-Christian times and the post-Christian times. In those pre-Christian times, much less of those methods was written down, but they were passed on through the tradition in those schools, which are called the mystery schools. Those who were recognized as being ready to be accepted into these schools were introduced to them in stages, undergoing severe tests, and were initiated into what what is called a mystery, a thing from which two things developed in the future: the school on the one hand and the church on the other – science and religion.

So you have a rough idea of those ancient wisdom schools where initiates were initiated, but it was prescribed step by step what the one who wanted to be initiated had to do first, and what he then had to go through as a second step, up to the highest step of the spiritual worlds.

You now have an idea of those wisdom schools, in which those entities work that underlie our physical world. There were ancient initiation rites, a canon of initiation in each school of initiation. Those who were deemed suitable to become students of the sacred mystery doctrine were accepted into this school of initiation and went through the stages that led them up into the spiritual worlds. The life of such a person was strictly prescribed. Imagine this life: Once he had been initiated into the mysteries, he had to lead a life in which everyday experiences were of no significance, while what he experienced in terms of the initiation methods was of great importance for the life of such a person.

Those who had reached a certain level of initiation was called a sun man, because his life had to be lived in such a regulated way that he could not stray from his path; just as the sun cannot deviate from its path, so the one who has made it to the level of a sun hero on his path of initiation is just as sure. He shares the truths of the spiritual world from his own experience; he is a leader of humanity.

The myths and legends contain this and tell us again and again about sun heroes, and when they speak of such people, when they agree with each other even among the most diverse peoples, what is described to us is what made him a sun hero. Then such a story seems to us like a repetition of the canon of initiation, and so in those ancient times a principle was formed in relation to the life of the initiate that is just the opposite of the principle of the biographers of today. For those who told something about the lives of the great leaders of humanity in ancient times, it was important to blur what made them appear as special beings, what made them become solar heroes, what they had to go through according to the initiation rite, and what all of them went through in the same way. The goal of this initiation was also to develop in those initiated a living vision of the all-human ego, of the unified consciousness, but the chosen ones only had it.

Only a few people could achieve this. Now, in the course of time, an event was to occur in development that what could be achieved individually in the old days, within the mysteries, could now be achieved by all of humanity in general. And this event was precisely the Mystery of Golgotha. How did that come about? We will understand this if we look into the mysteries: then, when he had experienced all these things at first hand, which one had to experience before that great final moment of initiation, then the time came when he was placed by the initiating priest-hierophant in such a state that he could experience in the clearest clarity of vision that which raised him above his tribe and people, and into what he has in common with all humanity.

You know from other lectures that the human being consists of the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I and its higher members. During sleep, the physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and during sleep the astral body with the higher limbs of human nature is out. Then, when the etheric body also separates from the physical body, death occurs. That is the spiritual difference between sleep and death. But then, when the person to be initiated had come so far that he could undergo the last stage of initiation, the hierophant, the initiating priest, led him to it, so that for a short time of three and a half days the etheric body could also leave, so that the physical body was in a kind of state of death. The result of this was that someone who had been prepared through the necessary stages could experience everything that was prepared for him in his own vision, and he could experience the higher worlds in real vision. Then, after three and a half days, the one to be initiated was called back to the ordinary physical, and now he was one who could proclaim, from his own experience, the secrets of the higher worlds to those who wanted to hear it. From his lips flowed the word of the spiritual world; he had become a witness that there is a spiritual world, that life in the spirit can conquer death. For he himself was in that world in which one gains the conviction that life will always conquer death. And again and again, the one who had thus traversed the spiritual worlds in three and a half days, again and again the initiate came back when he was awakened, with an exclamation that would be something like in German: “My God, my God, how You have glorified me.”

In ancient times, anyone who wanted to become such a proclaimer of spiritual wisdom from their own experiences had to enter into the mysteries and experience them outside of their physical body. Only in this way could it be done in the ancient, pre-Christian times. This is the world-historical moment of Christianity: that in the one event of Golgotha, everything that the one to be initiated experienced during the three and a half days was drawn into the physical world as a historical fact of physical reality. The Mystery of Initiation has become physically real in the Mystery of Golgotha. The sequence of initiations could be physically experienced in the physical world by the one who had the consciousness of the unity of humanity, the Son of Man. Physically, he could experience what was only possible for people to experience outside of their physical body before his appearance.

Thus, the mystery of initiation, having become physical, shines out to us from the event of Golgotha. So how will those who wanted to describe this mystery present the special events of the life of Christ Jesus? They knew that the one who, as the Son of Man, brought the secrets into the physical world, also had to experience these stages of initiation in the sense of the initiation canon here in the physical world, which the one to be initiated had always experienced outside of his physical body. Thus, the life of this unique being, who appeared only once in the development of humanity, had to be described in such a way that it was, of course, a reflection of the ancient initiation canon.

Now the various forms had been written down, fixed in different ways, in different forms of ritual, of rite, but all leading back to a unified mode of development. This mode of initiation, which also represents the life of Christ Jesus, was one that underlay all mystery schools, and it is only natural that it was applied to the external physical life of Christ Jesus, for this is truly how it happened. They describe to us something which they have taken from the old initiation canon, as they had received it in the mystery schools. Therefore, we find in the Gospels various outwardly seemingly divergent forms of the initiation canon, which appear as the biography of Christ Jesus.

Thus, we see in the Gospels the fixed initiation canon , and in Christ Jesus, whom they describe, we see the only Son of Man who presents that which others could only experience within the mysteries, outside of them in the physical life, in order to make their blessings accessible to all people. The sentence that life conquers death, which the initiate had experienced in the higher worlds, was outwardly manifested by Christ Jesus in the physical world, and is now accessible to all people in the same way.

Spiritual science knows that the gospel is history, extraordinary history, and at the same time a symbol. That is precisely the essential point, that here the symbol has become outer reality, that what had previously only taken place symbolically in the higher worlds, that it has become outer historical truth in the Mystery of Golgotha. Very few people want to understand that historical Christianity is so historical, and that it is also symbolic. Once this is understood, one can penetrate deeply into the spirit and meaning of the New Testament, and then one sees that the spirit and meaning of these documents is so infinitely deep that one can only gradually penetrate into its deepest depths. Let us look at a few more passages in this light. We recognize the three and a half days in the three and a half days, as it is reported (John 11), that Lazarus had already been dead when the Lord resurrected him, and we recognize again in another place those words – for that is how they should actually be translated – that Christ Jesus speaks on the cross at the moment when he arrives at the last act of his life in the physical body: “My God, my God, how hast thou glorified me”, for that is what these words should mean — and not “how hast Thou forsaken me” (Matt. 27,46, cf. Psalm 22,1; Mark 15,34), which is only an inaccurate rendering.

Thus we see that spiritual science, in its turn, becomes acquainted with initiation, experiences that life in the spirit conquers death, that this life, this wisdom, in its turn, makes understandable makes the deep meaning of the New Testament understandable, and so the wisdom-filled deepening of humanity within the theosophical movement will again lead to an appreciation, to a valuation of the biblical documents, of both parts of them.

Precisely because this wisdom will testify to the truth of this testament independently of it, it will have such a significant effect when you rediscover this truth in the Bible.

Thus will the man who penetrates it through theosophical study rediscover the value of this book, which could no longer be appreciated by someone who had lost touch with the spiritual world. And so no other biblical research, criticism, and so on, will be able to bridge the gap between scholars and believers than this spiritual science or and it will bridge this gulf and will bring a wisdom that will understand everything, everything that is expressed in the mighty words of the biblical documents. It will bring the solution to the great riddle of existence that is sought by the intellect and the mind in the Bible. And this will be recognized in the Bible, that it was and is the actual basis for the actual culture of humanity. Thus the Bible will again become a book that will be recognized in its full significance and value, and one will no longer be able to approach it indifferently, but with awe for the great, infinite sources of wisdom that bubble forth in it.

Thus, who is able to penetrate into the spiritual world independently will be filled with ever deeper and deeper awe in the face of this book, and it will become for him in turn a book of proclamation, which must be understood ever deeper and deeper, and a book in which the greatest riddles of man and of the development of humanity find their solution. Thus the Bible will rise higher and higher in value through wisdom, and if this movement succeeds in pointing people to the direct path to knowledge, then this reference will at the same time be something of immense value for the whole religious life of the broadest humanity.

The conquest of wisdom will at the same time be a reconquest of that charter which after all underlies our culture, that is to say, of that which lives as the spirit of our culture.

Then this penetration into wisdom, this conquest of the spiritual worlds through wisdom, will at the same time be the conquest of these valuable sources for wisdom, the conquest of the Biblical charters themselves.

An esoteric should realize what he is really doing wit the exercises that are given to us. We've often mentioned that an esoteric is trying to loosen the etheric body and in general the four bodies from each other. This can happen in an esoteric and an exoteric way.

One can prepare the physical body sufficiently through diet, breathing exercises, etc. so that it ejects or squeezes out the etheric body. Our vegetarian way of living is basically intended to support the physical body in this striving. These are exoteric ways to loosen the bodies. The esoteric ones are our exercises. And here one has to say that the latter are the main thing. In our materialistic age many a materialist would gladly follow the most extensive dietary rules, would do breathing exercises for hours if he could attain something that way. To exert oneself spiritually is much more inconvenient, and here the spiritual inertia often becomes evident.

If we would squeeze out our etheric body by merely physical means the physical body couldn't give it anything to take with it, and it would go out into the unknown empty. Then states arise where for instance we can't grasp something with our thinking when we want to think it through. Our etheric brain can't use the physical one properly. It's as if we were swimming in water and wanted to grab something that kept on eluding us. Under such conditions a sensible esoteric will tell himself that he must first create order here through suitable willed concentrations and thought exercises. Even in normal development some things will arise of which we must tell ourselves that it's a temporary suffering. For through the pulling out of the etheric body and physical body undergoes something similar to a plant that has its sap withheld from it for awhile. It dries up. And although one doesn't see it physically, part of the physical body dries up and if it has predispositions for diseases, they appear. But if the etheric body has permeated itself rightly with spiritual truths it thereby receives new forces, and they have a healing effect on the physical body. One can observe that cuts and other wounds in the physical body heal more easily if the man permeates himself with spiritual truths or if he just lets the theosophical way of thinking work on him.

So at first we work on the astral body through our meditations. This is the builder of our nervous system that runs towards the spinal cord, or as one says today—goes out from it. Through an imprint from the astral body we're now supposed to bring about the unfolding of lotus flowers in the etheric body, which are connected with each other and thereby create a cord up front, as it were.

This front cord is only present etherically-astrally and can only be formed through concentration and meditation. That's why they're the most important part of our esoteric development.

The drinking of alcohol is very harmful for an esoteric. Alcohol must definitely be avoided. It's good to support development through a vegetarian diet, for this lifting out of the etheric body is not at all easy today. Many modern vocations are expressly designed to drive the etheric body firmly into the physical body, so that it often pains a clairvoyant to see something like that. The food one gets in hotels has the same effect.

We're supposed to acquire a new thinking, feeling and willing through esoteric work on ourselves. We must tell ourselves that when we've gotten up the courage to tread the esoteric path we must make a jump over an abyss. We must let a thought that we have thought through pass over into our feelings and then permeate the latter with it completely so that we don't carelessly say something that we haven't fully grasped. A frequently heard statement that's misused more than most is: I am a Christian. An esoteric should realize that being a Christian is a distant ideal that he must constantly try to attain. To live like a Christian mainly means to accept whatever destiny may bring us with equanimity, to never grumble about the Gods' work, and to joyfully accept whatever they send. It means to let the sentence “Look at the birds of the air, they don't sow, reap or store in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them” pass over into your flesh and blood. We're living in accordance with this saying if we thankfully accept what's given to us. If we don't do that it becomes blasphemy in our mouth. We should realize that if we don't prepare ourselves sufficiently for the leap over the abyss and into spiritual regions we can do so much damage through words and thoughts that the Gods have to destroy worlds to make the damage good again. For what is ruined must be destroyed in order to be created anew.

We arose from the spirit—Ex Deo nascimur. And when we jump over the abyss we express this through, In Christo morimur—with the firm confidence that we come to live again over there in the Holy Spirit—Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. But because we should always keep the name of the holiest one—who was always connected with our earth—so holy that we don't say it unworthily, there's an esoteric version of the Rosicrucian verse in which the name is omitted:

Ex Deo nascimur
In … morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

There are certain facts in the evolution of mankind which are hardly noticed in outer life. As a result there is misunderstanding of much that is being fulfilled in the spiritual depths underlying human evolution. It has been shown that the mystical Christ-experience—such an experience as a man may have when by profound, inner life he permeates his soul experiences with what we have called the Christ substance—was not always possible, but became so in the course of time. The historical descent into incarnation of the Christ was a necessary in preparation for the presence of the mystical Christ in the soul. It is not correct to say that in pre-Christian times the mystical Christ experience had always been possible; individuals such as Meister Eckhart and other similar personalities with their inner mystical experiences are only possible in the Christian epoch; such experiences would not have been possible at an earlier time. Abstract thinking will be fundamentally unable to understand this; only concrete and spiritually realistic thinking dealing with facts would find its way to these things. Again, the description of the Luciferic beings and the Christ can only be comprehensible if we assume that a change took place in the whole human organisation. A change, it is true, not to be realised by the external senses or the outer reason, but none the less a radical change. This was accomplished during the last thousand years before the appearance of Christ and during the centuries following His appearance. Since the Atlantean catastrophe man has essentially changed. And although in the present cycle of humanity the important thing is that man, on incarnation depends for his perception of the world, so far as his outer experiences are concerned, upon the instruments which are at his disposal in the envelopes of the physical, etheric and astral bodies, yet the nature of his perception and realisation through subsequent epochs depends upon the changes which this organisation undergoes. There is no such thing as a conception of the world which holds good for all times. Men's perception of the—world is conditioned by his organisation.

Now let us call up before our minds the most radical change in the nature of man, which has occurred since the Atlantean catastrophe. Before this the different members of our human nature were connected otherwise than they grew to be later on. The etheric body did not co-operate with the physical body during the Atlantean era in the way it has done since. Formerly the etheric body of the head, for instance, extended further above the physical head, and the progress of evolution is expressed by the very fact that the etheric and physical bodies grew more alike and their connection closer and closer. Now it is in the etheric body that all the forces necessary for the organisation of the physical body reside, all those forces which unite the members of the physical body and produce harmony between them. In the humanity of Atlantis the forces of the etheric body and especially of the head worked at the building of the physical body from outside. Later these forces drew within the space filled by the physical body and at the present day they work more in man's inner being, animating and stimulating it. But this was only a matter of development. And if we wish to understand the old Indian culture we must clearly realise that the conditions were quite different from what they became during the Chaldean-Egyptian epoch. But in humanity of the Graeco-Latin epoch, there was such a complete permeation of the physical body by the etheric body, that in no part of the human Organisation would clairvoyant consciousness have perceived the etheric body extending far beyond the physical body. This had not been the case with the old Indians. Their clairvoyant vision perceived the etheric body still extending, especially as regards the head, out beyond the physical body. Hence a native of Old India saw the world quite otherwise than did a native of Old Egypt. A man belonging to the Graeco-Latin people saw the world much as it is to be seen today, i.e. as a sense-tapestry of colours, shades, etc. But the whole of this world which lies spread out before the present day sense-perceptions, was to the Indian spirit of the olden times finely permeated by what we might today call the misty cloud characteristic of etheric nature. It arose from all things, for they all looked as if they were burning, and a fine misty smoke arose out of each form. The manner of perceiving then was what might be called a seeing of the etheric element, which was spread out over everything like dew or hoar frost. That peculiar kind of sight was then natural. At the present day the human soul can only attain to it by means of special exercises given by spiritual science. The object of the progressive evolution of mankind through the different periods of civilisation is to cause the etheric body to descend deeper and deeper into the physical body. Thus the whole manner of human perception alters, for all human perception depends upon the way in which the etheric body is organised. And this in its turn is connected with the fact that the Luciferic beings manifesting within the earth and within the soul have risen to the state of cosmic beings, and that the Christ-Being Who was formerly a cosmic being descended into incarnation in a human body and has now become an inner being.

This permeation of the Apollonian with the Dionysian principle—this transposition, as it were—only became possible because of a corresponding change in the human Organisation. It was a change that not only affected the past, but was also a preparation for the future. We live in a time when the most complete inner permeation of the physical by the etheric body is already a thing of the past; a time when the tendency of evolution is in the opposite direction. We live in an era in which the etheric body is slowly emerging from the physical body. The normal development of humanity will in the future consist in the gradual emergence of the etheric body from the physical body; the time will come when the human Organisation will once again wear the appearance which it wore in grey primeval ages, and we shall again see the etheric body spreading out beyond the human physical body. We are in the middle of this transition, and many of the more subtle diseases characteristic of the present time would be understood if this were known. But all this has a meaning and corresponds with great cosmic laws, for man could not attain the goal of his evolution unless he thus underwent a transposition of the constituent parts of his Organisation. Now everything within us is permeated by our whole surroundings; and by the divine spiritual beings in the spiritual world sending their currents down into us, just as the physical elements of the earth send their currents into our physical organisation. At the time when the etheric body was outside the physical body, currents were perpetually pouring into this etheric body man experienced this consciously as a cosmic revelation, as something revealed to him inwardly. These currents descending into his etheric body from the spiritual world also worked at the perfecting of his physical body.

Now that which descended into the etheric body of man and was experienced as the most inward element of his being, was the influence of the Luciferic world, a great and powerful inheritance brought over from the old ages of the pre-Atlantean evolution. The fact that these Luciferic influences had become so much darkened that man, at the very time when Christ appeared, could perceive nothing of them unless he had reached a high grade of initiation, is explained by the fact that the etheric body drew more and more inside the physical body and became one with it; and man learned to make increasing use of the physical organs as instruments. It was therefore necessary that the divine spiritual being shortly to appear on earth, should be manifest on the physical plane as a figure able to be perceived physically, incarnate like other physical beings upon the earth. Only thus could mankind have at that time understood a God appearing in a body because it had become accustomed to consider true only what could be observed by means of the instrument of the human physical body. This had to come to pass before those who surrounded the Christ could say by way of emphasising an event, ‘We have placed our hands in His wounds, and our fingers in the prints of the nails.’ This certainty yielded by the senses had to live as a feeling in those men, a feeling which gave the stamp of truth to the event. To that sort of testimony a man of the old Indian age would have attached no importance; he would have said: ‘The spiritual perceived by means of the senses means nothing much to me; in order to realise the spiritual there must be ascent to a certain grade of clairvoyant cognition.’ Understanding of Christ therefore had gradually to be developed like everything else in the world.

The Luciferic impulse, however, which man formerly had in his etheric body gradually became exhausted. That which he had brought with him out of primeval ages when his etheric body did not as yet dwell entirely in the physical body, but was still outside and received the Luciferic influence through the portion that still was outside, was gradually used up. In order that the etheric body might slip into the physical body it had to lose the capacity of realising the higher worlds through its etheric organs. Therefore at a certain epoch it is true to say of our human ancestors that they were still able to see into the spiritual worlds, and what they saw is preserved in their literature. There was, as it were, a primeval wisdom. The reason why later this was not more directly attainable was, that as the etheric body was taken up into the physical body, man could only make use of his physical senses and of his physical reason. Clairvoyant power was paralysed. The faculty of seeing into the spiritual world was therefore only possible in the initiates who ascended to the super-sensible worlds by means of systematic training.

The reverse process is now being enacted. Mankind is entering a condition in which the etheric body is to a certain extent drawing itself out of the physical body again; but it must not be thought that it now receives spontaneously everything which in earlier times it possessed as an ancient heritage. If nothing else happened but its withdrawal, the etheric body of man would just leave the physical body and would retain in itself none of the forces which it formerly possessed. In the future it will be born from out of the human physical body. If the human physical body did not add something to it, this etheric body would be empty, barren. The future of human evolution will be that men will, as it were, allow their etheric body to leave their physical bodily nature, and they will eventually have the possibility of being able to send it out empty. What does that mean? The etheric body is the force-bearer, the energiser of all that takes place in the physical body. It must not only provide forces for the physical body when it is entirely concealed within it, but at all times; it must provide forces for the physical body even when it is again partly outside it. If the etheric body is left empty it cannot react upon the physical body, for it would then have no strength with which to react. The etheric body must, after it has passed through the physical body, have obtained its forces from within the physical body. The forces with which the etheric body can react again upon the physical body, must have been drawn from within the latter. The task of present-day humanity is to absorb into itself that which can only be acquired through activity in a physical body. That which is gained within the physical body accompanies evolution, and when man in future incarnations lives in organisms wherein the etheric body is to a certain extent released from the physical body, he will experience in his consciousness a kind of memory through the partially liberated physical body.

Now let us ask ourselves, what enables the physical body to hand something on like an heirloom to the etheric body? What enables a man to send such forces into his etheric body that some day he will be in a position to bear an etheric body itself and able to send back certain forces into the physical body from outside? Suppose man's life, let us say, from 3000 BC to our own era, and on to 3000 AD had been such that nothing more was added to him than what would have been his without the coming of Christ; he would then have experienced in his physical body nothing that might bestow a power on the etheric body when it is released from the physical body. That which a man can hand on is what he can gain within the physical world through the Christ event. All association with the Christ principle and the experiences we may have in connection with the appearance of Christ, sink down into the life of the soul in the physical world and the soul as well as all that is physical are prepared in such a way that there can flow into the etheric body that which it will need in the future. Therefore the Christ event had to take place; to permeate the human soul in order that men should be able to understand their future evolution. That which is in the physical body today sends out forces into the etheric body; and the etheric body, nourished by the physical experiences of the Christ, will take up these forces, in order again to become clairvoyant and possess the life-forces which will sustain the physical body in the future. Hence what man experiences of Christ through the reversal of the principles has its proper bearing upon the future of human evolution.

But this alone would not suffice. By passing through the Christ experience in our own souls, by becoming more and more familiar with the Christ, and by letting Him grow more and more into our soul experiences, we do indeed thus influence the etheric body, and pour streams of force into it. Now if this etheric body withdraws and enters into a wrong element it will undoubtedly have the Christ force, but if it does not meet there the forces which are able to work in a sustaining and enlivening way upon the Christ principle which has entered it, it will find itself in a sphere in which it cannot live. The outer forces would destroy it. It would, being permeated with the Christ, and having entered an unsuitable element, be faced with its own destruction, and would react destructively upon the physical body. Furthermore the etheric body must make itself fit once more to receive the light out of which it originally sprang forth, the light from the realm of Lucifer. Whereas by an inner experience man formerly saw Lucifer appear through the veil of his soul-life, he must now prepare himself to be able to experience Lucifer as a cosmic being in the world around him. From having been a sub-terrestrial god, Lucifer becomes a cosmic god. Man must prepare himself in such a way that his etheric body is provided with such forces as make Lucifer a fructifying and a beneficent element, instead of a destructive one. Man has to pass through the Christ experience, but in such a way that he becomes capable of recognising in this world the spiritual fabric of which the world was created.

Training such as spiritual science offers, is fully empowered to prepare the whole nature of man again to understand the light of Lucifer's realm, because only thus can the human etheric body receive life forces adequate to it. Christ was influencing man even before He appeared upon the earth. As long ago as the age when Zarathustra was pointing up to Ahura Mazdao, the force of Christ was radiating down. And from the other direction there shone the power of Lucifer,

That is reversed as we have seen; in the future the forces of Lucifer will stream in from outside, while the Christ will dwell within. The human Organisation must again be influenced from two sides. The old Indian realised on the one side ‘That thou art,’ and on the other side ‘I am the all’ and knew that the world which he saw outside was the same as that within. In ancient Indian times this was realised as an abstract truth; it will be realised on earth as a concrete experience of the soul when the time is accomplished, when by means of suitable preparation, that which was manifest prophetically, among the ancient Indians, shall come to life again in a new form. Thus does human evolution proceed in the post-Atlantean epoch.

Hence it is clear that the evolution of humanity does not move in a straight line, but runs its course, as does everything in nature. I have given the example of a plant, which grows but cannot develop its fruit unless a new factor comes into its development. Here is a picture which shows that other influences must come in from another side. There is no such thing as an evolution which proceeds along a straight line. The Luciferic and the Christ principles had to overlap one another. Those who seek to find an undeviating evolution can never understand the world evolution; only those who notice the divided streams and how they mutually fructify each other can really understand evolution. During the old Indian civilisation, when man was in a certain sense differently organised, his outlook was different. What man's outlook then was can only be definitely experienced by means of that kind of clairvoyant research which is suitable for the present age. And clairvoyance is a power which today has to be acquired by effort, although it was at one age a natural faculty. It is very difficult indeed, even for those who have a thorough knowledge of spiritual science to understand how much the soul-experiences in the old Indian age different from those of later times, and one can only try to clothe this difference in words which approximate to the real sense.

When man looks out into the world today he perceives it through his various senses. We cannot here go into all that modern science has to say about sense-perception; it will suffice to hold in our mind the usual conception that man perceives the outer world by means of his various senses, and gathers the different impressions together by means of the spiritual faculty that is bound up with the physical brain. Think this over a little, and it will become evident that there is a great difference in the character of the different sense-perceptions; compare, for instance, the sense of hearing with that of sight. It is evident that as regards hearing, if we look in the outer world for the facts corresponding to it, we find matter in movement, air in regular motion. If our instrument of hearing is brought into contact with this air which is in motion we experience what is called hearing. But the inner experience of hearing and the air in motion without, are two very different things. Now sight is not such a simple thing as hearing, though physicists have made it appear to be so. Their postulate, built up by analogy runs somewhat as follows: Let us take, they say, one of the finer substances which moves just as does the air outside. But the realistic thinker sees a great difference, viz. that as regards the ear, one can very easily detect what moves outside. It can easily be proved that something really does move outside—as far as the ear is concerned—by putting little paper riders on a violin string and striking it. But nobody can see for himself the existence of vibrations in the ether. It is a hypothesis; it exists only as a theory of physics and is non-existent for the realistic thinker. Sense perception by means of sight is a very different thing. What is perceived through light is much more objective than what is sense through hearing. We perceive light as colour, we perceive it spread out in space; but we cannot, as in the case of sound, go into the outer world in search of external processes. Such distinctions as these are readily overlooked by man of modern times. The old Indian, possessing a finer consciousness of the whole outer world, could not have overlooked this. He perceived all these delicate external distinctions. I only want to point out that there are characteristic and essential differences between the realms of the various senses. If we consider the German language it may strike us that with the same word we express an inner soul experience and an impression that comes, in a sense, from outside (I admit that this happens in incorrect speaking). That word is the word ‘feeling.’ We speak of the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. When speaking of feeling in a superficial way we mean the sense of touch, but call it feeling and add that which is experienced by this sense to the outer sense experiences. Again, inspired by the genius of speech, we define in a much more spiritual sense than is generally realised, an inner soul experience by the wood ‘feeling.’ Experiences of joy or pain are defined as feelings. This particular feeling of which we are here speaking is an intimate soul experience; the other feelings, produced by the sense of touch, are always caused by some external object. The other feeling may be associated with an external object, but it can be seen that an external object is not the only cause, because the effect upon one person is different from the effect upon another. We have two experiences, one connected with the external sense the other bound to the inner. These two at the present day appear to be widely divided, but this was not always the case. Here we come to another view of what has previously been described in an external sense. We have described how the etheric body slips in and out again. This is connected with the fact that something takes place in the inner being of man. Today these two experiences, the experience of ‘feeling’ within one and the experience caused by personal contact with an external object which we also describe by the word ‘feeling’ are widely divided. The further we go back in the evolution of humanity, that is to say, the further the etheric body is outside the physical body, so much the nearer are these two experiences to one another. They are only widely divided in mankind today. In the Indian epoch this difference did not exist to the same extent. At that time the inner experience of feeling and the outer were more like each other. Why was that?

If you meet a man today who has an evil thought about you (let us say you dislike him and he has the same sort of feeling towards you), you will, as a general rule, if you are only provided with the external senses and the physical brain, not be deeply aware of his feelings, of his sympathies and antipathies. If he should strike you, you would be aware of it, because your sense of feeling would notice it. In the old Indian times there was a different state of things. Man then was so organised, that be was not only aware of that which is felt by the present crude sense of touch, but also of that which today has withdrawn into his inner being; he was still able to sense what someone else felt about him. Through sympathetic comprehension of another individual's feelings he awakened in his soul just such an experience as we have through the sense of touch. He felt the physical-psychical process. On the other hand that which we call our inner feeling was not so far developed in those days; it was still more closely connected with the outer world. Man had his sorrows and joys which in many respects corresponded more to outer happenings; but he could not retire so deeply into his inner being as he can today. At the present time, inner soul experience is to a far greater extent severed from the whole surroundings than formerly was the case. At the present time a man may find himself in a position in which he is surrounded by circumstances which could be better; but because of his inner soul life being severed from his surroundings he may perhaps feel inward pain without any real cause on account of his way of looking at the world.

This would have been impossible at the time of the old Indian epoch of civilisation. At that time the inner impressions were a much truer reflection of what went on in the outer environment, for man's feeling was then to a greater extent bound up with the external world. The reason for this was that in those olden times, for example, man, in his whole make up, stood in a very different relation to light. The light surrounding us has not only its external physical aspect, but, like everything physical, is also permeated by soul and spirit. The course of human evolution was such that the soul and spirit of the outer world withdrew more and more from man and gradually the physical part came to be all that was perceptible. Man came to perceive light as a fluid pouring into his Organisation from all sides, and within this light streaming through him, he felt its soul. Today the soul of the light is stopped by the human skin. The Indian organisation was permeated by what lives as soul within the light, and man realised the soul of the light. That light was the bearer of what could be perceived as sympathy and antipathy in other beings, which has now withdrawn with the soul of the light away from men. This was connected with other experiences. Today when men inhale and exhale they can, at the most, know of the existence of breath through the mechanical working. If it is at all chilled they see it becoming watery. This is a mechanical way of seeing the breath. Improbable as it may appear to the man of today, it is nevertheless true that by means of occult research we can substantiate the fact that most of the old Indians had quite a different conception of what their breath signified. The soul of light had not as yet withdrawn from what went on around men of that time; so that they perceived the air as it was breathed in and breathed out in different light and dark shades of colour. They saw the air pouring in and out again like flames of fire. We may therefore say that even the air itself has become something quite different, by reason of the change that has taken place in man's conceptual life.

Air today is something that is only perceived mechanically by men through the resistance it offers, because they are no longer directly aware of the soul of the light which permeates the air. Man has parted even from this last remnant of instinctive perception. The old Indian would not have called that which is breathed in and out merely ‘air’; he would have called it ‘fire air,’ because he saw it in varying degrees of fiery radiations.

There again we have an example of how even in external experiences the transformation in the constitution of man in the course of evolution is manifest. These are intimate, hidden processes in human evolution, and we can never understand the Vedas, if we do not understand how and in what sense the words are used. If we read the words contained in them without knowing that they described what could then be seen, the words would lose all sense, and our interpretation would be completely wrong. We must always take the realities into consideration when we approach the study of ancient documents. That which lives in the human soul alters in character with the course of time. And now a certain fact will be comprehensible which could not have been so without these statements, statements which are quite independent I of any proofs to be established by physical research. Look into the eastern writings and see how the Elements are there enumerated. They are placed in the following order: earth, water, fire, air, and ether. Only in Greek times do we find a different order which to us today is the obvious one and upon which we base all our understanding, viz. earth, water, air, fire and the other ethers. Why is this so? The old Indian consciousness saw, just as man sees today what is manifested through the solid (that which we call the earth), through the fluidic, or water, to speak in the spiritual sense. But what we today call air, to the old Indians was fire, for they still saw the fire in the air—they described what they saw as fire. We no longer see this fire in the air; we only feel it as heat. Everything has changed since the fourth post Atlantean epoch. So it was that only when they went a little higher in the series of the elements the Indians came to an element in which at that time there appeared to mankind what we today call air—the air to us being penetrated by light, but not revealing the light. In respect to fire and air, man's vision has been entirely reversed. What we have said about Christ and Lucifer crossing each other—that Christ the cosmic being has entered within the human soul, while Lucifer who at first was within man has become a cosmic being—holds good in all departments of life. That which in the first post-Atlantean epoch was what we call fire, is at the present day perceivable as air, and that which we today see as fire, was then seen as air. That which underlies human evolution is expressed not only in great things but also in small ones. These things must not be put down to chance; we can see into the profundities of what happens in the course of the evolution of mankind, if we look at things from the only real point of view—that of spiritual science. The Indian consciousness was one which felt the unity of that which lies deep down in the soul with that which is outside it; hence the Indian lived to a greater degree in his environment. The last echoes of what existed in the ancient Indian as instinctive sight are to be found in the rudimentary ‘clairvoyance’ possessed today by those men who have what we call second sight. Suppose when walking along the street anywhere, there enters the mind the thought of a certain man whom at the moment we cannot physically see, and we meet him a little further on. Why was the thought of him in the consciousness before he was seen? It is because his influence has entered into the sub-consciousness, whence it ascended into the consciousness as a complete thought. Today man possesses in rudimentary form what was once of great significance in his life. In earlier times there existed a much closer connection between inner and outer feeling. These are some more detailed instances of my oft-repeated statements that humanity has evolved out of the old dim clairvoyance into the full consciousness of the senses we now possess, and humanity in the future will once again evolve a fully conscious clairvoyance. This will be attained in such a way that man will consciously experience it; he will know that his etheric body goes forth out of him and that he can use the organs of the etheric body just as he can the physical body.

In earlier, more spiritual ages, when men had more wisdom than has modern abstract materialistic science, they were always conscious that there was an old clairvoyance to the possessors of which the world became transparent. They felt that man had lost this old sight and had entered into his present state. Formerly, men did not express their knowledge in abstract formulae and theories, but in mighty, vivid pictures. The Myths are not ‘thought out’ or invented, but are the expressions of a profound primeval wisdom acquired by spiritual vision. In ancient times there was consciousness of the fact that at a still earlier epoch man had embraced the whole world in his feeling, and this is expressed in the Myths. The ‘clair-sentience’ of the old Indian was the last remnant of an original, dim clairvoyance. This was known; but what was not known, was that this clairvoyance—let us summarise it so—withdraws little by little, giving way to the external life which is confined to the world of the senses. The more important Myths express this very fact. It was known, for instance, that there were mystery places, leading the way to the sub-terrestrial spirits and that there were others leading up to the cosmic spirits. There was a sharp distinction between them. Men who were not initiated knew nothing of this, just as today men who do not seek along the right paths have no idea that there is such a thing as Mystery Wisdom. A certain amount of information filtered out. With regard to the mysteries it is true to say that the further we go back into olden times, the more significant does their age of splendour appear. Even the Greek Mysteries do not belong to the most brilliant period. The mysteries themselves had fallen into decadence.

Nevertheless the people knew that that which came from those places where clairvoyant consciousness was still active was connected with the spiritual substance which streams through the world and animates it; they knew that where clairvoyant consciousness still prevailed, something could be experienced about the world which was possible in no other way.

And even in the period of their decadence clairvoyant consciousness was cultivated in these oracle-places, and from them information was conveyed to mankind such as cannot be experienced by ordinary sense-methods, and intellectual conceptions bound up with them. Yet it was also known that man is developing, that that which could be attained by the old clairvoyance, useful and practicable in ancient days, was no longer adequate for later times. The Greeks had a deep consciousness of the fact that that which came from the oracles certainly aroused curiosity, that men would fain know something about the hidden connections of the world, but that they had departed from the right method of using such clairvoyant information; that man's relation to the world was different from what it had formerly been and that therefore no good could originate from clinging to the results of the old clairvoyance. This is what the Greeks wanted to express and they did so in magnificent pictures. One such picture is the Oedipus legend. Through an oracle (that is to say, from a place in which secret connections, hidden from the human gaze, were clairvoyantly perceived), the father was told that if a son were born to him, disaster would result, that this son would murder his father and marry his mother. This son was born. The father tried to prevent what had been seen clairvoyantly from coming to pass. The son was sent away, and brought up in another place, but he came to know the oracle that is to say, something entered his soul which could only be known by means of clairvoyance. The Greek consciousness would say: Something still continues to enter into man from olden times, but the human organisation has already progressed so far that it is no longer adapted to this sort of clairvoyance, and cannot make use of it. Oedipus listens to the oracle, but acts in such a way that it is all the more certainly fulfilled. Men can no longer handle the results of clairvoyance; the spiritual world has withdrawn and the old clairvoyance is no longer of service to them. But there has always existed a consciousness that things will one day entirely change and that what comes from spiritual worlds will once again mean something to humanity; men have felt that what comes from these spiritual worlds will be covered over by sense life only for a time. Of these facts consciousness has existed; and has been expressed in the Myths by the forces of human evolution which created them. We have seen that the Christ event, when the two forces, the Lucifer principle and the Christ principle, crossed each other, was the decisive one in human evolution. The Christ event was the turning point, when that which comes from out of the Cosmos, from the fountain of the spirit, was to be poured as a ferment into human evolution. It had been lost, but it had to be poured in again as a ferment. That which was harmful to mankind, that which made it into something evil, is poured in as a ferment and transformed into good. The evil has to drop into the fructifying spiritual power inherent in human evolution and work with it for the good. That too has been expressed in the Myths. There is another legend which runs somewhat as follows: A certain man and wife were told by an Oracle that they would have a son, who would bring disaster upon his whole people. This son was to murder his father and marry his mother. This son was born to the mother. On account of the warning, this son was sent away too; he was put upon the island of Kariot and was found by the Queen of that island. And because she and her husband had no son, she adopted him. But later on a son was born to her. Then the foundling thought he was wrongly treated and he killed the real son. He was obliged to flee from the island of Kariot, and he went to the court of Pilate in Palestine, where he obtained employment as overseer of Pilate's household. He quarreled with his neighbour, of whom he knew nothing beyond the fact that he was his neighbour. In the course of this quarrel he killed him and later married the widow. Only then did he learn that it was his real father whom he had killed and that it was therefore his mother whom he had married. The story tells us that he saw his entire existence ruined but did not behave like Oedipus; for he was overcome by remorse and went to the Christ and the Christ received him; this was Judas Iscariot, Judas from Kariot. And the evil which dwelt in Judas became a leaven in the whole of evolution. For the deed of Palestine is connected with the betrayal by Judas; Judas is bound up with the whole event; he belongs to the twelve that are not thinkable without him. Here we see that the sayings of the oracle were indeed fulfilled, and further that they are embodied in universal evolution in the form of evil which is transformed and lives on as good.

The story (which is in reality wiser than external science) indicates in the most significant way that there is such a transformation in human nature in the course of time, and that the same thing has to be regarded differently at different epochs. In speaking of the fulfillment of an oracular saying we must not relate it in the same way when speaking of the time of Oedipus as when speaking of the time of Christ. The same fact is at the one period the story of Oedipus at another, in the time of Christ; it becomes the story of Judas. Only when we know the spiritual facts lying at the foundation of the evolution of the world and of humanity do we understand the results of those spiritual facts which are manifest to external historical conceptions. All phenomena of the sense-world, all external sense impressions or manifestations of the human soul can be comprehended by us when we understand their spiritual basis. That which the investigator of spiritual worlds discovers he gladly hands on as a stimulus to those who are willing to take it from him and who will then examine the external facts which confirm it. If what is discovered in the spiritual world be true, it is confirmed in the physical world. But every true explorer of the spiritual life will say that in communicating his knowledge of the higher world he facilitates and desires the testing of all external facts in the light of his assertions. If what I have said about the re-incarnation of Zarathustra for instance be compared with external history, it will be found that what has been said stands every test, if sufficiently careful search is made in external history. External life becomes comprehensible only when there is knowledge of the inner, the spiritual.