The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear brothers and sisters! Again, today, new members have come into the school. It is not possible each time to give the introduction, which concerns itself with the duties and the significance of this Michael School. Therefore, I must ask those members who undertake, in the manner about which I shall speak in conclusion, to give the mantric verses to the members who have newly entered, I must ask them to give to these new members the introduction which, of necessity, must be known to each one who wants to be a member of this school.

So let us once again today begin without further introduction by inscribing the words in our soul which sound forth to human beings open-minded enough to receive them, words which sound forth from everything that surrounds us in the realms of nature and in the hierarchies of the world. In the past these words sounded forth to human beings from all the stones, plants, clouds, and stars, from the sun and the moon, from springs and from solid rock. They sound confronting him in the present, they will resound confronting him in the future.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Now, my dear brothers and sisters, in describing the path of knowing we have arrived standing at the abyss of existence before the Guardian. The Guardian of the Threshold has made clear to us how all that surrounds us in the outer world can never reveal to us our own being. All gazing at the realms of nature, at all that appears downward emerging from the earth living and moving, at all that shines and speaks overhead from the realm of the stars, insofar as we can observe with the senses and with understanding, that gazing at all this can give us nothing which can give us clarity about the nature of our intrinsic self. In contrast to this brilliance in the sunshine, to this moving and living in the external world, which is so great and mighty, so beautiful and magnificent, our intrinsic self remains dark and distant for our true self-awareness.

Then is described to us how we approach closer and closer to the Guardian, who forms up for us as if out of cloudy conscious existence, emerging as a spirit-formation, showing our own counterpart, while also showing us what we as human beings must strive for, in order to come to true self-awareness.

We then stepped forth before the Guardian of the Threshold. He has shown us how the true form of our willing, feeling, and thinking reveals itself before the countenance of the gods. He has shown us how what lives within us as lack of courage and fear of knowing, as hate of knowing, as doubt in knowing, how these are indeed within us, because the configuration of the times in which we live has planted them in us. He has shown us the animal forms of our willing, feeling, and thinking. The Guardian of the Threshold worked upon us with shattering force, in order that this crushing, shattering experience might wake, out of the weaving and working of our own soul, might wake the very forces which lead to true self-awareness.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold raised us, showing us initially how our thinking that we have in ordinary life is the corpse of that living thinking which we bore within us before we descended out of spiritual-soul worlds into physical sense-existence. He shows us, the Guardian of the Threshold, how in our bodily being we are coffins for that living thinking that dies as we enter earth life, this thinking which lies as a corpse within the coffin. We use this corpse in ordinary abstract thinking that we carry within us between birth and death, to grasp the things of the physical sense world.

Precisely when we capture in mind how dead this thinking is, then we will proceed to capture in the dead thinking what we can learn about the corpse that lies before us. We look upon this corpse. We say to ourselves, as it lies there before us, as a corpse, it could never have come into existence. It is left over as the remains of a human being who was living in him spiritually, soulfully. The living human being, the ensouled human being, the thoroughly-spirited human being had to precede what lies here as a corpse. We only recognize the reality of the corpse when we are conscious of what went before it. And we approach the reality of our thinking when we become aware of it in its deadness and know that it is the corpse of that living thinking which was within us before we descended into physical-sensory conscious earth existence.

Then the Guardian reminds us how our feeling is only half living, but our willing is fully living, but that all this living comes to our consciousness externally.

In this way the Guardian of the Threshold reminds us that in order gradually to realize the living nature of thinking, we should look upward into the heights of heaven, that in order to realize the nature of feeling, we must look out into the widths of the world, and that we must look to the world depths, to the depths of earth, in order to approach the nature of willing.

But at the same time the Guardian shows us how we are placed with our thinking. As we look up into world-thinking, within which our earthly human thinking is rooted, between light and darkness, he shows how light can become dangerous for us if we give ourselves up to it one-sidedly, how darkness can become dangerous for us if we give ourselves up to it one-sidedly, how we must seek direction and purpose for our thinking between light and darkness. If it would find the truth, then in our feeling we stand midway between warmth and cold, and that if we give ourselves up to warmth, in the lustful glow of feeling, we ourselves can disappear, and on the other hand in the cold we can be hardened. The Guardian of the Threshold points out to us how we should walk the path of Christ between soul warmth and soul coldness.

The Guardian of the Threshold then instructs us that that when we seek willing in earth-depths we find ourselves between life and death, how life would let us vanish in powerlessness, how death would confine us in nothingness, how also for willing we must find the way in between. That, my dear brothers and sisters, since the most ancient mysteries, that is what has been described as the middle way along which the soul of man must walk, if the person would go further into the spiritual along its preordained paths.

We stand before the Guardian of the Threshold, the earnest first representative of Michael (for the actual leader of this our school is Michael) as he gives us further guidance as to how we can emerge from the appearance of thinking, from dead thinking into living thinking fraught with being. But we must become comfortable, we must first of all strictly abide by the laws which are inscribed for each esoteric student in golden letters, the gold which each student must grasp, which the Guardian of the Threshold now recapitulates for us.

He makes us aware how the yawning abyss of being is before us, how we must fly over it, as we cannot step across it with earthly feet, how we then will come into the spiritual world, which before us over there on the other side of the abyss of existence is deep night-bedecked darkness. But we must proceed across the yawning abyss of being into the deep, night-bedecked, cold darkness. Out of it must warmth, must light come into being for us, light which illuminates our own self, which warms our own self. We cannot find the stable support-point in the spirit, if we do not on each side, when we come into existence over there, if we do not remember the pledge that our soul takes on, when it is now in this situation, after having taken up the earlier admonition before the stern Guardian of the Threshold stand, who says to it:

Never forget that as long as you are a person of earth and cross over into the spiritual worlds, when you again return to this side you must submit to the laws of earth. You may not believe, when you enter the spiritual world with your thinking, when you return again and you undertake your work with your thinking in earthly surroundings, that you should fly around like a fantasy-filled dreamer within the earthly environment. You must keep the flying for your thinking when you are in the spiritual world. You must practice deep, inner, intimate modesty, always to want to be once again a human being among human beings, when you cross back over into the ordinary world of everyday consciousness. It is precisely out of such a modest wanting to remain in the world, not applying the laws of spiritual life to the customary world, that you will gain the strength to latch on to thinking in such a manner that it can serve you in ghostly, in spiritual worlds.

In this regard the Guardian of the Threshold instructs us further about thinking.

You stride into earth being’s helm
With deployment of your force of will;
Enter as thinker the earth domain,
And thought-power will show you yourself
As your intrinsic animality;
The fear of yourself
Must change you in courage of soul.

We must undergo this, as we allow the mantric dictum to work on us, we must experience it. We must, if we want to enter into earth being’s helm, which means the spirit of the earth, we must, my dear brothers and sisters, come initially to looking at our thinking as still animalistic. Fear of our intrinsic self that is still animal we must live into. Then the fear will give birth to its opposite courage, which we need. That is now the strong but serious admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, pressing, cutting deeply into our hearts. He admonishes us to feel this when we enter the element of the earth. In this way we begin to hear from the Guardian of the Threshold about the stepping into the elements.

He admonishes us further, that if we give ourselves over as feeling beings to the fluid element, to the world of water beings, while present there we should be aware, not of fear of our self, but should be aware that we sleep dreaming, that we are sleeping dreaming sleeping in this water element, in this fluid element, which sculpts us, as we have seen. And as soon as we become aware, that in this our human earth-feeling our existence-awareness is plant-like, then this feeling will bring us to awakening. Then it will show us how lame our self is. Then we will awaken, if we seriously have the modesty to look into the lameness of our selves.

The third is to feel ourselves in the air with our willing, first with thinking in the earth element, then with feeling in the water element, then with willing in the air element. In the air element we initially feel that we have only what our ordinary memory gives us, memory picture-formations. As picture-formations they rest in our thoughts, they are passive in our thoughts. Willingly, inwardly we must grasp them, and then grasp the air nature within the pictures. And a particular characteristic of soul will appear to us, when we feel ourselves in this way in the nature of air, as though the soul were frozen solid. Similar to thinking ourselves along the path of the earth, as we breath will and think ourselves along the path of the air into the essence of air, then we will appear to ourselves as if frozen solid. But precisely out of sensing this frigid death, there we go through, to us will come the spirit-fire we need in order in inner reality to grasp our willing.

They are profound dictums that the Guardian of the Threshold places there before the soul. Only if we regard them rightly and face the fear of ourselves, how we become insignificant when we feel ourselves thinking only in regard to the earth, only then will courage of soul for living thinking awaken in us. If we feel how lame we are, when we feel ourselves half-alive, lamed upon the earth, then the strength will grow in us that will let us awaken, so that we are as though awakened into spirited life with the feeling in which we were before we descended into physical earth existence. Then, when we descend into our memory, willing with our memory into air-weaving,¹ in that moment we feel ourselves sclerotic and shivering with cold. But precisely when we feel this cold shiver in us, out of the cold the opposite once again will awaken, spirit-fire, which will show us how upon the earth willing is sleeping in us, even though rooted in living willing, in which we were before we descended into earthly consciousness. Remembering we must know ourselves in our existence before we descended into physical earth existence.

In regard to this the Guardian of the Threshold instructs us. In regard to feeling is his word:

You live with water being
Only through feeling’s dream-weaving;
Surge awakening into water existence,
And the soul will reveal itself in you
As plant existence dank and dull;
Then lameness of yourself
Must lead you on to wakefulness.

In regard to willing the Guardian speaks.

You muse in wafting ways of air
Only in memory's picture-forming;
Enfold willingly airy being,
And intrinsic soul will threaten you
As cold observing stone;
Yet your selfhood's frigid death
Must weaken and yield to spirit fire.

[The mantra was now written on the blackboard, including corresponding underlined words.]

The Guardian utterly in earnest:

You stride into earth being’s helm
With deployment of your force of will;
Enter as thinker the earth domain,
And thought-power will show you yourself
As your intrinsic animality;
The fear of yourself
Must change you in courage of soul.

You live with water being
Only through feeling’s dream-weaving;
Surge awakening into water existence,
And the soul will reveal itself in you
As plant existence dank and dull;
Then lameness of yourself
Must lead you on to wakefulness.

You muse in wafting ways of air
Only in memory's picture-forming;
Enfold willingly airy being,
And intrinsic soul will threaten you
As cold observing stone;
Yet your selfhood's frigid death
Must weaken and yield to spirit fire.

We step from thinking into feeling, down into memory, when we allow this verse to work on us. And as we come down into the depths of memory, where otherwise the soul's life vanishes, as the memory pictures again come forth, there is the boundary, as a mirror is a boundary. What from outside comes into us, comes over something like a memory wall, then it returns back again. Just as one does not see behind the mirror, so one does not see behind the memory wall. But here the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes us that we are to break through what is otherwise a boundary in order to enter into the spiritual realm.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has led us further into our inner life with his admonishing dictums, and has allowed us time to process in the soul the content of these dictums, as we use these dictums in meditation, remaining at this stage for a long, long time, so that their inner force takes effect in us and really carries our “I” down through thinking, feeling, and remembering into what lies behind all remembering, then the Guardian directs us as to how we should behave, how we should conduct ourselves in regard to the external world.

He points us once again up to light, which lives in us merely in the apparent life of thoughts. It is the light which thinks in us. Light it is, that thinks in us. When light floods into us, it thinks in us. But in life on earth, light is mere appearance which thinks itself. If we go no further than this, untruthful spirit-being will bring us into self-delusion instead of into the truth of self-awareness. But it is just this we need to penetrate, that otherwise submerging in thinking in thinking we come only into self-delusion. We must infuse ourselves with the realization that when we merely sink down into thinking, we only come upon self-delusion. And precisely through taking stock of ourselves as earthly human beings stuck in self-delusion can we understand, being attentive in thinking, which absolutely is just what is needed to carry us over the abyss of existence, can we understand reflecting on the needs of earth with all its heavy burdens, and we will gradually find supports, in order to experience, to live into existence in thinking.

You hold of light’s radiant might
Thoughts alone fast within;
When light’s radiance thinks by itself in you,
So will untruthful spirit-being
Arise in you as self-delusion;
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Will hold you in humanity.

Let us proceed. The Guardian of the Threshold instructs us how initially in feeling we merely hold onto the wonderful universal fabric of the world chemism.² But if we merely hold onto this world forming in feeling, our spirit experience remains powerless. Self-possession is stifled, smothered if we merely stare fixedly in feeling at what has been crafted, has formed in the world. But if we begin to love, to love all that is already of value of the earth around us, then in feeling we find existence, and we save, save our humanity.

You hold of world chemism
Feelings alone fast within;
When world forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience
Smother your self-possession;
Yet loving the value of the earth
Will save your human soul.

Usually, we try to catch a glimpse of the value of the earth in thought, but we only hold fast to the appearance of light, if we don’t contemplate what the earth’s heavy needs are. We hold fast to what forms itself in the world only in vague feelings if we do not experience, if we do not live into this earth fabric in love in its forming and configuring.

And of world life, what can we hold fast through our willing? Our will remains in world life. But if initially we only hold on to it in willing, we once again do not penetrate into existence. If world living fully captures us, so will ruinous spirit rapture slay our self-experiencing. Yielding oneself up to the world's willing engenders spirit rapture, which kills us. Yet when we develop the will, spirit-devoted to higher worlds, if we align our will to just that, to thinking in the physical-sensory world that gods wield authority³ in us, who inspire, stimulate our willing, if we would be in service to the gods, then God allows his existence to wield authority in us as human beings, and we catch the scent, we sense⁴ in god-infused willing a true existence.

You hold of world life
Will alone fast within;
When world living fully captures you,
So will ruinous spirit rapture
Slay your experience of yourself;
Yet spirit-devoted earth-willing
Will allow the god in man to rule.

These are the three admonitions which in this most earnest moment the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us. [The mantra was now written on the board.]

The Guardian speaks as if the world word itself was resounding

You hold of light’s radiant might
Thoughts alone fast within;

It is as if the Guardian would make us take note of what we are actually doing. We are, he says, not yet beyond the mere forming of thoughts from light's appearance. [The writing continued:]

When light’s radiance thinks by itself in you,
So will untruthful spirit-being
Arise in you as self-delusion;
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Will hold you in humanity.

You hold of world chemism
Feelings alone fast within;

Once again, the admonition that only in vague blurry feelings do we have what is wonderfully forming the entire world. Into the micro-cosmos comes world-formation initially in the vagueness of feelings.

When world form feels itself in you,

not, therefore, when we in our feelings feel the world's form, but rather when world-form penetrates into us, the macrocosm penetrates into the microcosm –

When world forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience

Through this we become aware of our own powerlessness. [The writing continued.]

When world forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience
Smother your self-possession;
Yet loving the value of the earth
Will save your human soul.

We need this rescue, for we are just about to cross over. If we carry over only the thoughts contained in light’s appearance, if we carry over only the feelings contained in vague world forming, then the true light over there destroys the delusion of selfhood, destroys the powerless feeling, the sleeping, the spirit experience. We need to reflect on the needs of earth, on all that suffers on the earth, in order that we may pass over worthily into the spiritual world and not be destroyed by world thinking. We need love for all that is of worth on earth, in order that we are not ground to dust, if we cross over with our feelings vague and undistinguished.

And on to the third, we need the following for our willing. [The mantra was written on the blackboard.]

You hold of world life
Will alone fast within;
When world living fully captures you,

And it will do so over there.

So will ruinous spirit rapture
Slay your experience of yourself;
Yet spirit-devoted earth-willing
Will allow the god in man to rule.

We may not carry over there what we simply have here on this side. In the spiritual world we must carry over a stronger soul than we have over here. We must prepare the soul [The words set in quotation marks were underlined.]. For over there ,we find “light's radiant might”. It lives in our “thoughts.” But this does not suffice. We need to be “reflecting on the needs of earth.” Compassion toward all the woes of earth will hold us in “humanity”.

We need over there, as we come over into “world forming”, not merely our “feelings”, we need to be “loving the value of the earth”, for all that is already worthy on earth, then will our “human soul” be saved. Here [in the first verse] human existence is upheld. Here [in the second verse] the human soul is saved.

We must enter into full “world life” that in our “willing” has only a weak reflection, which is too thin to be able to cross over. And we must develop “spirit-devoted earth-willing” so that the “God in man” can rule. This is the progression.

Light's radiant might
World-gestalt
World life

Thoughts
Feelings
Will

We need

Reflecting on the needs of earth
Loving the value of the earth
Spirit-devoted earth willing.

Then we need

To hold yourself in humanity
To save your human soul
To allow the god in man to rule.

That, my dear brothers and sisters, is just what the Guardian lays on our soul, in order to develop what specifically is referred to as wings of the soul, in order to cross over.

We now have only one more obligation in the next esoteric lesson to be held on Wednesday, that we receive those mantras for our soul through the Guardian of the Threshold, who in this instance is Michael's representative at the threshold to the spirit land, those mantras which are the first which one speaks when one has arrived over there into the spiritual, which still remains before the human being as in these mantras, as deep, night-bedecked, cold darkness.

Today, however, after this has passed before our soul, we should reflect back on what speaks to from all beings, challenging us to all that the Guardian of the Threshold has set before us with such determination.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

And what comes before us in this way with the words of the Guardian of the Threshold, when we take it up in the right attitude, then it is indeed the Michael presentation of this rightfully established Michael School. Then Michael's existence wields in this room, blessing and strengthening all that here comes before our souls. In light of this, what in this way comes before our souls becomes furnished with Michael's Sign and Michael's Seal. This is Michael's Sign [The Michael Sign was drawn on the blackboard.] and Michael's Seal, which he impressed upon what has been the Rosicrucian sentiment of soul for hundreds of years, and what is expressed as the Rosicrucian sentiment in the following dictum.

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

This is so spoken with Michael's Seal, that we accompany the first words with this gesture [The lower seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], and we accompany the second words with another gesture [The middle seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard], and the third words we accompany with yet another gesture. [The upper seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard]. The first gesture signifies [upon the lower seal gesture was written]

I honor the Father⁵

the second gesture [upon the middle seal gesture was written]

I love the Son⁶

the third gesture [upon the upper seal gesture was written]

I unite with the Spirit⁷

In this way we may consider what has been spoken as having been spoken while being confirmed through Michael's sign, while being confirmed and attested through Michael's Seal, that just with this, and this, and this [The three seal gestures overwritten with the phrases above were indicated.], which is impressed on the Rosicrucian-Words.⁸ The dictums should be living in this way, through the sign of Michael, and should be sealed for all your souls, that which lives through the Michaelic-Rosicrucian-School. [The Michael sign was made, and accompanying the three seal gestures with overwritten word, the following words were spoken.]

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

My dear brothers and sisters, the mantric dictums which are given in this school may only be possessed by one who is a rightful member of this school, that is, whomever is in possession of a blue membership card. One who is not present at a lesson at which he or she might have been present according to the date of reception into the school, please take note, the verses of those lessons at which the person might have been present according to the date of that person’s admittance, such a one may receive these verses from another member who has received them in the proper way within the school. But, in this regard, it is necessary to obtain permission either from Frau Dr. Wegman or myself.

It is not an administrative regulation, but is fundamental in an occult school, that a real act should precede the handing on of something of this nature. The one, however, who wishes to ask permission from Frau Dr. Wegman or myself, can only be the one who wishes to give the dictums to another, not the one who wishes to receive them. One can, however, ask someone for the dictums. But one cannot then, as the one who wishes to receive them, ask further. One must then let that person who intends to hand them on ask further. It is of no use if the recipient asks.

Whomever writes down anything other than the mantras may keep it eight days, but after this one is in duty bound to burn it, because what should live in this school should live only within the school and should not leave it. All of these procedures have nothing to do with power or control, they are not arbitrary regulations. This is all grounded in occult laws. For if something of this kind gets into unauthorized hands, it ceases to have effectiveness for all those who have received it for effective use. If, therefore, misuse occurs, inasmuch as mantric dictums, or the content of what is given here, are transmitted to unauthorized persons, these mantric dictums and what is given here lose their effectiveness for those who are sitting here. This has to do with facts, not with something which is an arbitrary regulation.

I have still to announce the program for tomorrow. Once again at 9:30 the course on pastoral medicine, at 12 noon the course on speech formation, at 5:30 the theologians' course, and at 8 o'clock the members' lecture.

The Guardian, utterly in earnest

You stride into earth being’s helm
With deployment of your force of will;
Enter as thinker the earth domain,
And thought-power will show you yourself
As your intrinsic animality;
The fear of yourself
Must change you in courage of soul.

You live with water being
Only through feeling’s dream-weaving;
water existence,
And the soul will reveal itself in you
As plant existence dank and dull;
Then lameness of yourself
Must lead you on to wakefulness.

You muse in wafting ways of air
Only in memory's picture-forming;
Enfold willingly airy being,
And intrinsic soul will threaten you
As cold observing stone;
Yet your selfhood's frigid death
Must weaken and yield to spirit fire.

The Guardian speaks as if
the World Word itself resounded

You hold of light’s radiant might
Thoughts alone fast within;
When light’s radiance thinks by itself in you,
So will untruthful spirit-being
Arise in you as self-delusion;
Reflecting on the needs of earth
Will hold you in humanity.

You hold of world chemism
Feelings alone fast within;
When world forming feels by itself in you,
So will powerless spirit experience
Smother your self-possession;
Yet loving the value of the earth
Will save your human soul.

You hold of world life
Will alone fast within;
When world living fully captures you,
So will ruinous spirit rapture
Slay your experience of yourself;
Yet spirit-devoted earth-willing
Will allow the god in man to rule.

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

I honor the Father
I love the Son
I unite with the Spirit

• 1. Lüfteweben
• 2. das Weltgestalten
• 3. walten
• 4. spüren
• 5. Ich bewundere den Vater
• 6. Iche liebe den Sohn
• 7. Ich verbinde mich dem Geiste
• 8. die Rosenkreuzer-Worte

[ 1 ] We have had the activity of higher spiritual Beings within our Cosmos, brought before our souls by means of two examples, that on ancient Saturn and that on the ancient Sun, which is the reincarnation, or the production of Saturn. It will now be necessary to explore the spiritual realm itself in which these higher spiritual Beings are, and consider their action and influence from still another point of view. During the first half of these lectures some things will have to be said which many of you have already heard. But even apart from the fact that there are many listeners here who have not yet heard some of the things which may be called introductory, it is necessary to repeat them, because we have to rise in these lectures to very high regions of spiritual life.

[ 2 ] From what has been said you will have seen that spiritual Beings of the most different kinds have to be active within a cosmic system which is in process of development. What in reality, is this ancient Saturn? Let us make a precise image of it. Of course ancient Saturn has nothing to do with the Saturn of the present day. You can easily imagine that in ancient Saturn were already included the germs of all that belongs to-day to the whole of our solar system; our Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and so on, all these bodies were within ancient Saturn and have evolved out of it. Imagine to yourselves a globe, or heavenly body which would have the sun as its central point and would reach so far outwards that the Saturn of to-day was contained in it, this globe, larger than our present solar system, would give you a correct idea of ancient Saturn. Our whole solar system came forth, out of ancient Saturn. One might even compare it — not exactly but approximately — with the general Kant-Laplace universal primeval mist, out of which, according to the opinion of many modern people, our solar system has formed itself. But the comparison is not quite accurate, for the majority imagine that a sort of gas was the starting point of our solar system, whereas we have seen that it was a body of warmth, not of gas. Ancient Saturn was a giant body of warmth.

[ 3 ] And so we heard yesterday, that when that ancient Saturn had transformed itself into the later Sun, the Cherubim began to be active from the surrounding circumference of the Universe. You have now to realise that those Cherubim, who were active, in the periphery of the Sun, were also already present in the periphery of ancient Saturn. Only they were not as yet called on to play their part — to put it trivially, they had not yet reached the stage when they could undertake something important, but they were present in the environment of Saturn. Still other Beings were around ancient Saturn, Beings of a degree still higher and still more sublime than the Cherubim, namely, the Seraphim, (Spirits of Love). The Thrones also came from the same region. But the Thrones, who are one grade lower than the Cherubim, let their substance flow downwards to form the warmth-substance of Saturn, as we have already shown. Thus we can imagine Saturn as a giant globe of warmth, surrounded by circles of spiritual Beings who are of a supremely high, sublime nature. Christian Esotericism calls them Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim. They are the Dhyanic Beings of the Eastern Teaching.

[ 4 ] Whence do these circles of sublime Beings come? Everything in the world, everything in the Universe has evolved. And if we want to form an idea of the place whence come the Cherubim, the Seraphim and the Thrones, we shall do well to turn our thought into our own solar system and to ask ourselves: What will some day become of our solar system? We wish now to give you a short sketch of the development of our solar system.

We know that it has come forth out of ancient Saturn, Saturn transformed itself into the ancient Sun, which again changed into the ancient Moon. In the time when the ancient Sun was Moon, a particular development began. This Moon for the time went forth out of the Sun. In the ancient Moon we have the first heavenly body, which is outside and separate from the Sun. The Sun was able to evolve higher, because it cast from it the coarser substances. The whole system then developed towards our present earth. Our earth came into being because, along with all the remaining Moon and Earth, it divided from the Sun the coarser substances and beings belonging to it. But evolution goes further. The beings who have now to dwell upon the Earth, separated from the Sun, and who have been thrown out of the Sun, although excluded from it are developing ever higher and higher. They have to pass through yet another condition, that of Jupiter. But through all this, they are gradually maturing towards re-union with the Sun. And when the condition of the Venus-development will have come, all the beings who now live and move upon our earth will be re-absorbed into the Sun, and the Sun itself will have reached a higher stage of development, just because it will have again redeemed all the beings it had formerly excluded. Then will come the Vulcan development, the highest state in the development of our system. These are the seven stages of evolution of our system: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. In the Vulcan development, all those Beings who have evolved out of the small beginnings of the Saturn existence, will be spiritualised in the highest degree, they will have grown not only as far as the Sun, but even higher than the Sun. Vulcan is more than Sun, and with this it has reached the maturity of sacrifice, the maturity necessary to self disintegration.

[ 5 ] The course of evolution is this: a Sun, which from the beginning is included in such a system, has at first to throw off its planets, being too weak to develop further without excluding them. It grows strong, absorbs its planets again, and grows into a Vulcan. Then the whole is dissolved, and from the Vulcan globe is formed a hollow globe which is something like the circles of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, etc. The Sun will thus dissolve in space, sacrifice itself, send forth its Being into the Universe, and through this will itself become a circle of Beings like the Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, which will then advance towards new creation.

[ 6 ] Why are the Thrones enabled. to give out of their substance what Saturn needs? Because they have prepared themselves in an earlier system, through seven conditions like those our solar system is now going through. Before a system of Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim can be evolved, it must have been a solar system at an earlier stage; which means, that when the Sun has got so far as to be reunited with its planets, it becomes itself a circle — a Zodiacal circle. That which we have come to know in the Zodiac, those great, sublime Beings, are the results that have come over to us from an earlier solar system. That which has formerly evolved within a solar system can now send down its influence out of universal space, and produce a new solar system, created out of itself. The Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are for us the highest Hierarchy among divine Beings, because they have already passed through their solar system evolution and have risen to mighty cosmic deeds of sacrifice.

[ 7 ] Hence it is that these Beings have come into the actual direct vicinity of the highest Godhead of which we can speak at all: the Trinity, the three-fold Divinity. Beyond the Seraphim we have to see that highest Divinity of which we find mention by almost all nations as the threefold Divinity — as Brahma, Shiva, Vishnu, as Father, Word, and Holy Ghost. From out [of] this highest Godhead, this most exalted Trinity, stream forth the plans for a new cosmic system. Glancing back at ancient Saturn we say to ourselves: before any of this ancient Saturn came into Being, the plan of it had grown within the divine threefold Unity. But the threefold Unity has need of Beings to execute its plan. These Beings must first prepare themselves for the task. The Beings who, are so to speak, nearest God Himself, who, as is beautifully expressed in Christian Western Esotericism, ‘bask in the light of God's countenance,’ are the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. These take up the plans of a new cosmic system streaming from the divine threefold Unity. This is naturally expressed more figuratively than it really is, for we have to express in human words such sublime activities, for which, in truth, this human language has not been created. No human words exist to express such sublime activity as that, for instance, when the Seraphim, in the beginning of our solar system received the highest plans of the divine Threefold Unity containing the evolution which our solar system has to pass through, namely Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Seraphim is a name which for those who understand it in its true sense, even in that of ancient Hebrew Esotericism, has always signified that the task of the Seraphim was to receive from the Trinity the highest ideas and aims for a system of worlds. The Cherubim, the next lower rank of the Hierarchies, had the task of building up in wisdom the aims and ideas which they received from the higher gods. Thus the Cherubim are spirits of highest wisdom, who understood how to transpose into workable plans, the inspirations given to them by the Seraphim. And the Thrones, the third grade of the Hierarchies, counting from above, had the task — naturally very figuratively expressed. — of putting things into action, so that what had been thought out in Wisdom — these lofty cosmic thoughts which the Seraphim had received from the Gods, and which the Cherubim had pondered over, should be transformed into active reality.

[ 8 ] We actually see, if we do but try to see with the soul, how the first realisation of the divine plan occurs with the down-flow of the fire-substance of the Thrones. Thus the Thrones appear to us as those Beings who have the power to transform into a primary reality that which has been first thought out by the Cherubim. This takes place because the Thrones allowed their own substance to flow from them, the substance of the primeval original world-fire, into the space, which had been chosen for the new world-system. If we speak very figuratively we can express it thus: An old solar system disappeared and died away. Within that ancient solar system the ranks of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones had evolved to the highest perfection. They then sought out, according to the inspiration received by them from the highest Threefold Unity, a Sphere within Universal space and said: ‘We will begin here.’ When the Seraphim took up the aims of the new world-system, the Cherubim worked out these aims, and the Thrones poured out of their own Being the primeval fire into that space. Thus we grasp the beginnings of our world-system.

[ 9 ] Other Beings, however, were also present in a certain way, in the former solar system, of which ours is the successor. But these Beings did not rise so high as the Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; they stopped on lower Stages, they had come over in a condition when they still had to pass through a certain development, before they could be creatively active, before they could offer sacrifice. These Beings are those of the Second threefold Hierarchy. The First threefold Hierarchy we have just been considering. The Beings of the Second threefold Hierarchy are: the Kyriotetes or Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom; then the so-called Mights, Dynamis (or, as Dionysius, the Areopagite, and after him the Teachers of the West call them, Virtutes, Virtues), or Spirits of Motion, and the Spirits of Form, who are also called by the Teachers of the West — Potentates, which mean Powers.

[ 10 ] We must now ask ourselves: When we glance back at ancient Saturn and see the first threefold Hierarchy surrounding it, where then are the Beings of that second threefold Hierarchy? Where can we search for the Dominions, Mights, and Potentates? We must look for them inside ancient Saturn. If the Thrones have reached, so to speak, to its boundary, we must look for the Dominions, Mights and Potentates, or the Spirits of Wisdom, Motion and Form, inside Saturn. Inside ancient Saturn, within the mass of it, again three ranks of Beings are active, — the Dominions, Mights and Potentates. They are spiritual Beings operating inside the Saturn substance.

[ 11 ] Now we must for once come to an understanding with the extraordinary fantastic modern theory of the origin of the world, and turn our minds again to the Kant-Laplace theory. It has put a mass of fog as a starting point for our solar system, and then has imagined that the whole of this giant mass of gas has begun to revolve. It finds it extraordinarily simple that with the rotation the outer planets gradually split off. At first there are rings. These then contract. The Sun remains in the middle, and the others rotate around it. They picture it quite mechanically. A very nice experiment is shown in the schools to make the thing clearer. It is shown how a solar system is formed in a small way, by taking a vessel full of water, throwing in a large drop of oil, then cutting a piece of paper, representing the equator, and putting a pin into it from above. Then the drop of oil is set into rotation. Small drops of oil split asunder and circle round, and the demonstrator shows it to pupils — sometimes quite old pupils — saying: ‘Now, you have here in small the formation of a world system.’ And the whole thing is made most illuminating. For what can illuminate one more than when one sees with one's own eyes how such a solar system is formed. Why should one not see that there was once upon a time a gigantic cosmic fog which in its rotation loosened the Planets around it, like those little drops, and made the miniature Mercury and Saturn loosen themselves from the large drop of oil. One must marvel at such a naive proceeding. For the man who tries to make the Kant-Laplace System so clear forgets one thing — sometimes it is very good to forget, only in this case it wont do — he forgets himself, he forgets he stood by and made the thing rotate. This is incredibly naive, but the simple-mindedness of modern, materialistic mythology is very great, greater than that of any other mythology. This will be realised in future times. There is someone who starts the whole thing, who makes it rotate. It is necessary if one can think at all, if one has not been forsaken by all the good Spirits of Logic, it is necessary to presume that spiritual powers are occupied out there with the rotation of the universal globes. Apart from the error in placing a primeval gas instead of a primeval fire at the outset, one cannot assume that that mass of gas began to whirl round of itself. One must ask: Where are the forces and powers which put movement into that mass which for us is of primeval fire, so that something begins to happen inside it? We have just enumerated them.

Spiritual forces work from without and from within our system. Those Beings who surround it, and who acquired their faculties in earlier systems, work from outside. Inside are Beings of less maturity, who differentiate the internal mass, who bring about what we had in our minds when we spoke of the shapes of warmth formed inside Saturn. They are Beings of highest intelligence who regulate all that happens there.

[ 12 ] What then is the task of the first Beings of the second threefold Hierarchy? The Spirits of Wisdom or Dominions, or Kyriotetes take that which the Thrones or Spirits of Will bring down out of Universal space, and regulate it so that a harmonious co-relation can come about between the single globe which is originating — between Saturn and the whole Universe. In the interior of Saturn everything has to be so regulated that it corresponds with what is outside. What the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, bring down to Saturn from the hand of God, must be so appointed that within Saturn these commands can be carried out, and these impulses become realities. The Spirits of Wisdom or Kyriotetes receive from the circumference of Saturn that which comes down through the mediation of the highest Hierarchy, so that they may transform it and make it harmonise with what is in the interior of Saturn.

[ 13 ] What is received by the Spirits of Wisdom, is further worked on and elaborated by Mights or the Spirits of Motion. And while the former inside Saturn hold, as it were, the highest command, the latter undertake the carrying out of these directions. Then the Powers or Spirits of Form — later we shall explain this more in detail, now we are characterising it only in a general way — provide that what is being formed according to the intentions of the Universe, should have duration, so long as it is needed, that it should not be destroyed again at once. These Powers or Spirits of Form are the maintainers — the supporters.

Thus the Dominions or Spirits of Wisdom are the directors inside Saturn; the Mights or Spirits of Motion are those who execute their directions; and the Powers or Spirits of Form are the supporters, the upholders of that which the Mights have built.

[ 14 ] Today, we shall omit how the third threefold Hierarchy works, (we have spoken of them before) the Spirits of Personality, the Archangels or Fire Spirits and the Angels. We shall turn our attention to-day, with our newly acquired knowledge, to the transition from ancient Saturn to ancient Sun. The most essential proceedings were explained at the last lecture. What happens when ancient Saturn becomes Sun, is that the primeval fire changes into a condition of gas or air, so that the ancient Sun consists of what is called the residue of the primeval fire. The primeval fire is intermingled with, and forms the basis of, what has thickened into gas or smoke. Thus two substances are to be found there: primeval fire and a part of that fire which has condensed to gas or smoke — call it what you will. This is the essential characteristic of the old Sun. We shall see that our Sun has grown into something different, through transitory conditions up to the present day; it has developed into something different, although there are people who imagine that the interior of our Sun to-day is also merely a sort of gas.

[ 15 ] If you enter into all the various theories at which our materialistic natural science arrives, you will, if you think, certainly be astounded. There is, for instance, a popular little book, which is much bought because of its cheapness, which claims that our present Sun has in its centre nothing solid, but only gas. Only, this gas — one could not believe it really, but it stands there in a little popular writing — this gas is as thick as honey or tar. The man who soars to such ideas that gas under conditions of pressure can become like honey or tar, I will willingly allow to wander about in such a sluggish land where the air is of the consistency of honey, but I would not wish him to have to move in an air that is a thick as tar! Materialistic theories have such excrescences as these.

[ 16 ] We are not speaking now of our present Sun, but of that ancient Sun which really consists of primeval fire and of what is called fire-mist or fire-air. You find this expression used in Faust, for Goethe knew it well, and you find the expression fire-mist also used in theosophical literature. We must think of the ancient sun as of a mixture of these two substances. This did not, however, happen of itself. Universal bodies do not condense of themselves; spiritual Beings have to bring about this process of condensation.

Which are the Spiritual Beings who carried over the condensation of the substance of ancient Saturn to the ancient Sun? These Beings whom we call the Dominions, or Spirit of Wisdom. It is they who now press inwards from outside and who originally pressed together the mighty mass of Saturn so that it grew smaller. The Dominions brought pressure to bear upon it, until the ancient Sun became the size of a globe, the mass of which, if you place the Sun in its centre, you must imagine as reaching out to Jupiter. Thus Saturn was a gigantic world-globe, which having our Sun in its centre would have reached as far as to the present Saturn, an enormous globe, as large as our present solar system. The Sun of which we have just spoken was a world-globe which stretched a far as the Jupiter of to-day. This point marks the boundary of the ancient Sun-world. You will do well if you picture those outer planets as boundary marks for the limits of the ancient Worlds. [ 17 ] You see that we are gradually approaching the theory of the planets, being led thereto through the activity of the hierarchies,

Let us go further. We know that the next condition is again one of condensation. The third condition of our World system is that of the Ancient Moon. Those of you who have given attention to the communications from the Akashic Record know that the ancient Moon had come into being because the Sun substance had condensed still more, as far as to the condition of water. The Moon contained no solid earth as yet, but was composed of fire, air and water. It had so coordinated the watery element. Gas or air was condensed in it to the element of water. Who effected this? That Hierarchy of spiritual Beings brought this about, whom we call Mights, Virtutes, or Spirits of Motion. Thus it happened through the Virtutes, that the mass of the ancient Moon contracted to the limits of the orbit of the present Mars. Mars is thus the boundary showing the size of the Moon. If you imagine a globe with the present Sun for its centre, and for its limit the orbit of the present Mars, you have the size of the ancient Moon. [ 18 ] We have reached the point when we must remember that when the ancient Moon was formed out of Saturn and Sun, something quite new took place. A part of the dense substance was now thrown out, and two globes came into being. One of the two took up the finer substances and Beings and became a finer Sun, the second became a denser Moon. This third condition of our planetary system developed in such a way that, for a time, it remained one single planet; then it threw off a planet from itself, which remained in its vicinity. At first, so long as it formed one single body, the Moon extended to the orbit of the present Mars; then the Sun contracted, and was encircled by another body; approximately in the place where the present Mars has its orbit, was more or less the periphery of the original single body.

[ 19 ] Through what did this division take place? Through what influence did a single globe split in two? It happened in the time of the domination of the Spirits of Motion, Mights, or Dynamis. For those who have already followed me in this domain, it is not new to hear that [in] the Cosmos things happen very much in the way they happen in ordinary human life. Where beings are evolving there are some who advance and others who remain behind, as many a father knows, who complains that his son in college lags behind whilst others are making good progress. We are concerned, therefore, with a difference in the ‘tempo’ of development. It is the same in the Cosmos. And through certain causes, which we shall learn later, now that the Mights or Virtutes have entered on their Mission, something came into play which is called in all Esotericism, and in all Mysteries, the ‘fight in Heaven.’ This ‘fight in Heaven’ forms an essential, and integral part of all Mysteries; it contains also the primeval Mystery regarding the origin of Evil. At a certain point of the Moon evolution the Mights or Virtutes had reached very different degrees of maturity. Some of them aspired to rise spiritually as high as possible; others again had remained behind, or at least had progressed normally in their development. Some of the Mights on the ancient Moon had progressed much further than their companions. The result of this was that these two classes of Mights divided. The more advanced ones drew out with the body of the Sun, and the others formed the Moon revolving around it.

We have now given a sketchy description of the fight in Heaven, the rending asunder of the ancient Moon, so that the planet accompanying the ancient Moon comes under the domination of those spirits of Motion or Might or Virtutes which had remained behind, and the ancient Sun under the domination of the advanced Virtutes.

[ 20 ] Something of this fight in Heaven still sounds in the first sentences of the divine Gita, where symbolically at the beginning of the battle can still be heard echoes of that mighty fight of the heavens. O, it was a mighty field of battle! From the time when the Dominions or Kyriotetes brought about the formation of the ancient Sun, up to the time of that of the ancient Moon, when the Mights or Dynamis took up their mission, all was a mighty field of battle; a gigantic fight reigned in Heaven. The Dominions had contracted the whole mass of our solar systems to the boundary of Jupiter, then the Virtutes or Mights contracted it to the boundary of the Mars of to-day. Between these two planetary frontiers in the heavens lies the great battlefield of the fight of Heaven. Look at that heavenly battlefield! Only in the nineteenth century has the physical eye discovered again, so to speak, the devastations produced by the Fight in Heaven. You have a host of small Planetoids scattered in between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. These are the wreckage of the battlefield of the fight in Heaven which was fought between the two points of Cosmic time when our Solar System was contracted first as far as Jupiter, then to Mars. And when our Astronomers direct their telescopes towards the heavenly spaces and still discover other planetoids, these are still the wreckage of that great battlefield, of that fight in Heaven between the advanced Virtutes and those who were less advanced, and which also brought about the severing of the Moon from the Sun.

[ 21 ] Thus, we see, when we consider the actions of the divine spiritual beings, how external things appear to us as the expression, the outward physiognomy of those divine spiritual beings.

During the past weeks we have been seeking to understand more and more what it means to say that the present age stands in the sign of the dominion of Michael. Thus we were led last time to show how the karma of a human being may work itself out in reality. We showed how difficulties of karma may even go so far that a human being cannot find the way between death and a new birth to live through all that is necessary for the weaving of karma by partaking in the events of the starry world.

So long as our conception is really limited to what happens here in the physical life on earth it is of course difficult for us to receive what we must receive if we are to take the idea of karma in real earnest. But we are living in the age of great decisions and great decisions must take place to begin with in the spiritual field. And in the spiritual field they will be rightly prepared, if out of the deeper anthroposophical spirit, single human beings have the courage to take their study of the spiritual world in real earnest—so much so that they can receive what is brought from the spiritual world and make use of it to understand the phenomena of the outer, physical life.

Hence for a number of months past I have not recoiled from bringing to you detailed facts out of the spiritual life, facts well fitted to enable you to understand the spiritual configuration of the present time.

To-day I will bring forward a few more things as it were to illustrate what I shall then have to say next Sunday, probably in conclusion, showing the whole karma of the spiritual life of the present time in its connection with the tasks and aims of the Anthroposophical Movement.

To begin with, however, I shall bring forward to-day certain facts whose connection with our main subject you will not at once perceive. Nevertheless you will recognise at once how deeply they characterise the spiritual life of the past. Many of these things will seem strange and far-fetched, but life in its totality bears many a paradox, seen from an earthly point of view.

The examples I shall choose to-day are not ordinary ones. For as a rule, a succession of earthly lives is not a continuous succession of historic personalities. It is not generally such that the continuous chain would be visible at all to superficial observation. Nevertheless there are certain successive earthly lives such that if we describe them one after another, we are at the same time giving descriptions of history.

It is seldom the case in such a high degree. But if we do find individualities for whom it is the case, if we can point to the several incarnations as to historic personalities, such an individuality enables us to learn a very great deal about karma. I have already given isolated cases of this kind as you know.

To-day I will tell you about a personality who lived at the end of the first Christian century. Already at that time he was a philosopher. As a philosopher he was most evidently one of the Sceptics, that is to say, he was one of those who really think nothing in the world is certain.

He belonged to that sceptical School which though it already saw the dawn of Christianity, stood altogether on the ground that it is impossible to gain certain knowledge, and above all that it is quite impossible to say with certainty whether a Divine Being could assume a human form or the like.

This individuality—his name in that incarnation is of no great importance, he was a certain “Agrippa”—this individuality in his incarnation in that time, gathered up into himself as it were, the whole of Greek Scepticism. Indeed if we use the word not in a contemptuous sense, but as a technical term, he was one whom we should even call a Cynic. I mean a Cynic not in his conception of life, for in that he was a Sceptic, but a Cynic in his way of taking things. For he was really very fond of making light and joking about most important things that met him in the world. In that life Christianity passed him by, leaving no trace. But a certain mood remained with him as he passed through the gate of death. This mood was not so much a result of his scepticism, for that was his philosophic conviction, a thing that one does not carry very far after one's death. But it lay in the deeper habits of his soul and spirit as an easy-going way of taking important events of life, a certain mischievous delight when things in the world which look important turn out to be not quite so important. This fundamental mood he carried with him into the life after death. Now as I told you yesterday, having passed through the gate of death, man first enters a sphere which leads him by and by into the region of the Moon, where there is the colony of the primeval wise Teachers of mankind. They had once lived on Earth though not in a physical body, nor had they taught in the way we conceive the teaching of later times. They had wandered over the Earth in an etheric body only. And their teaching was such that one man or another who was to receive instruction from them in the Mysteries felt it like an indwelling of these wise Beings of primeval times. He had the feeling: the wise Being has been with me just now. And as an outcome of this indwelling he then felt an inner inspiration. Such was the manner of the teaching given to a human being in those times.

We are referring to the most ancient time of earthly evolution, when the great primeval Teachers wandered upon Earth in their etheric bodies. Then, if we may put it so, they followed the Moon which had already separated as a heavenly body from the Earth. And it is their region which the human being passes, like the first station in his cosmic path of evolution after death. It is they who explain the laws of karma to him, for they have to do with all the wisdom of the past.

Now when the above-mentioned personality, the philosopher“Agrippa,” came into that region, it happened that there dawned upon him most intensely, the meaning of a former incarnation. The characteristic of that former incarnation which now made so great an impression on him as he looked back after death, was this, that in it he had still been able to see a very great deal of how the cults of Asia Minor and Africa proceeded out of the ancient Mysteries.

Now in this Christian time in his super-sensible life, this individuality went once more, with great intensity, through all that he had once undergone on earth in connection with many a decadent system of the Mysteries in Asia Minor. And so it came about that he now saw supersensibly, how in the ancient Mysteries the Christ had been expected (you must remember what I said, that in his life on earth he had not been touched by Christianity).

Now the Mysteries which he had witnessed—I mean the cults that proceeded from the Mysteries—had already grown external. He had in fact received the impressions of cults and religious institutions which were transmitted in the first centuries A.D., in a Christianised metamorphosis of course, to Roman Christianity. Please observe very carefully what I now mean. The point is that in this region after his death, there was prepared in this individuality an understanding for the external features of the cults and clerical institutions which had formerly been Pagan but were arising again in the first Christian centuries and passing over into the clearly defined Roman cult and ceremony with all the ecclesiastical conceptions that were connected with it.

Now this brought about in him a very peculiar spiritual configuration. In the further course of the life between death and a new birth we see him again, elaborating his karma most especially in the region of Mercury, so that he is able to see many things, not in an inward sense but in the sense of being gifted with outward intelligence. He gains a wide sweep of vision for many facts and relationships.

As we follow this individuality further, we find him again on earth. We find him as the Cardinal who carried on the Government of Louis XIV when Louis XIV was still a child, Cardinal Mazarini. We may study the Cardinal in all his greatness and splendour and with the external conception of Christianity into which he finds his way so readily, so naturally, under the woman who was Louis XIV's guardian.

He absorbs of Christianity all the external institutions, the Christian cult, the Christian pomp and grandeur. For him all these things are surrounded, as it were, with an Eastern glamour as of Asia Minor. Indeed we may say he rules Europe like one who in a former incarnation had strongly absorbed the character of Asia Minor.

But in this life Cardinal Mazarini did indeed have occasion to be more powerfully touched by the facts and circumstances. You need only remember that it was the time of the Thirty Years' War. Remember all the things that took place proceeding from Louis XIV. There was indeed a peculiar quality in this Cardinal Mazarini. He was a great statesman with a wide sweep of vision, yet on the other hand in the midst of a certain noise and confusion. We might say that he was intoxicated by his own deeds so that they seemed deeds of magnificent skill, but not coming out of the depths of the heart.

Now this life took a peculiar course in passing through the time between death and a new birth. We can actually see how in passing again through the region of Mercury, all that this personality had done was dissolved as in a cloud of mist. But there remained with him the ideas he had absorbed about Christianity and all he had undergone by way of scepticism in relation to knowledge. These things were transformed in his life between death and a new birth.“Science can never lead us to the final truths.” An intense feeling for knowledge of which there was a suggestion already in his former passage through Mercury, came and passed away again. And there was karmically developed in his life a peculiar mentality. It was a mentality which held fast with great tenacity to penetrating ideas which he had passed through before. But while he held fast to them, he could evolve for his next life on earth very few concepts with which to master and express them. As this personality passes through the life between death and a new birth one has the feeling: Whatever will he try to do in his next incarnation? Is there anything with which he is really united? One has the feeling: he may be more or less intensely united with all kinds of things and yet again with nothing. All the antecedents are there: the preceding life of scepticism, followed by his intense life in a Christianity with all its external details along the paths by which one becomes a Cardinal. All these things are deeply embedded in him. He will become a man rich in knowledge, yet able to come forward with concepts by no means profound. Moreover the map of Europe which he once ruled over is as though blotted out. One does not know how he will find his way to it again. What will he do with it? He will be altogether at a loss with it.

Yes, my dear friends, we have to enter into such things as these; we have to study what was undergone in passing through the life between death and a new birth in order that we may not err; in order that at length exact and true knowledge may be the outcome.

This personality is re-born in the approaching age of Michael, showing, if I may put it so, a strangely double countenance. He cannot be quite a statesman, nor quite a cleric, but is drawn strongly in both directions. I am referring to Hertling, who became Chancellor of the German Reich at a great age. In karmic sequence he had to use up in this way the remnants of his Mazarini nature. All the peculiar qualities with which he came to Christianity, and entered into it, came forth again in his Christian professorship at the present time.

By this example you may see in what strange ways the men of the present time built up their present individualities in past existences.

Anyone who did not research, but merely thought things out, would of course come to absolutely different conclusions. But we only understand karma when we can take these most extreme cases and connections, seeming almost paradoxical in the world of sense. They are there none the less in the spiritual world, even as that other fact is there, which I have often mentioned—I mean that Ernst Haeckel, who so violently fought against the Church, is the re-incarnation of Abbot Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory the Great. Here we see how indifferent a matter is the external content of a man's belief or theory in earthly life, for all these things are his thoughts. But if you study Haeckel, especially in connection with what he was as Abbot Hildebrand, as Gregory—(I believe he too is included among these pictures from Chartres)—you will see that there is in fact a real dynamic sequence.

I chose the above example in order that you might see how present individualities carry the past into this present time.

If you will afterwards observe the features of the Monk Hildebrand, who became Gregory the Great and whom you know from history, you will see how wonderfully the soul-configuration of Haeckel is contained in this countenance of Hildebrand, of Gregory the Great.

I will now take another example, which will probably be of great and deep value to you all. Though I almost shudder to speak of it in any easy way, yet I cannot but choose it, for it leads so infinitely deeply into the whole spiritual texture of the present time.

I will now mention another personality, of whom as I said, I almost shudder to speak in this way. And yet he is infinitely characteristic of all that is carried from the past into the present and of the way in which this happens. I have often referred—and it will be known to you from external history—to the Council of Nicæa, which was held in the 4th century, where the decision was made for Western Europe as between Aryanism and Athanasianism, and Aryanism was condemned.

It was a Council in which the important personalities were imbued with all the high scholarship of the first Christian centuries, and brought it forth. They did indeed dispute with deep and far-reaching ideas. For in that time the human soul still had quite a different mood and constitution. It was as a matter of course for the human soul to live directly within the spiritual world. And they were well able to dispute with real content and meaning as to whether Christ was the Son, of the same essence with the Father, or only of like essence with the Father. The latter was the standpoint of Aryanism. To-day we will not go into the dogmatic differences of the question. We will only bear in mind that it was a question of immensely deep and sharp-witted controversies, which were, however, fought out with the peculiar intellectualism of that time. When we to-day are clever and sharp-witted we are so as human beings. Indeed to-day, as I have often said, almost all men are clever. They are really dreadfully clever—that is to say, they can think. Is it not so? It is not saying much, but it is a fact that they can think: I may indeed be very stupid and still be able to think ... but the fact is the men of to-day can think. In those times it was not so. It was not that men could simply think, but they felt their thoughts as inspiration. He who was sharp-witted felt himself gifted by the grace of God, and his thinking was a kind of clairvoyance. It was still so even in the 4th century A.D., and those who listened to a thinker still had some feeling of the living evolution of his thought. Now there was present at the Council of Nicæa a certain personality who took an active part in these discussions, but at the end of the Council he was in a high degree disappointed and depressed. His main effort had been to bring forward the arguments for both sides. He brought forward weighty reasons both for Aryanism and for Athanasianism. And if things had gone as he wished, undoubtedly the result would have been quite different. Not a wretched compromise, but a kind of synthesis of Aryanism and Athanasianism would have been the outcome.—One should not construct history in thought, but this may be said by way of explanation.—It would probably have been a very much more intimate way of relating the divine in the inner being of man to the divine in the universe. For, in the way in which Athanasianism afterwards evolved these things, the human soul was very largely separated from its divine origin. Indeed, it was thought heretical to speak of the god in the inner being of man.

If, on the other hand, Aryanism alone had won the day, there would of course have been much talk of this god in the inner being of man. But it would not have been spoken of with the necessary depth of reverence, and above all, not with the necessary inward dignity. Aryanism alone would indeed have come to regard man at every stage as an incarnation of the god who dwells within him. But the same may be said of any animal, indeed of the whole world, of every plant, of every stone. This conception only has real value if it contains at the same time the active impulse to rise ever higher and higher in spiritual development, for then only do we find the god within. The statement that there is a divine within us at any and every stage of life can have a meaning only if we take hold of this divine in a perpetual upward striving of the self, by whom it is not yet attained.

But a synthesis of the two conceptions would undoubtedly have been the outcome if the personality to whom I now refer had been able to gain any decisive influence at the Council of Nicæa. He failed. Deeply dissatisfied, he withdrew into a kind of Egyptian hermitage, lived a most ascetic life, and was deeply imbued at that time in the 5th century with all that was the real spiritual substance of Christianity during that age. Indeed he was probably one of the best informed of Christians in his time, but he was not a wrangler. This is evident from the very way in which he came forward at the Council. He spoke as a man who quietly weighs and judges all aspects of the question, and is yet deeply enthusiastic for his cause, though not for this or that one-sided detail. He spoke as a man who—I cannot say was disgusted, that would not be the true expression—but as a man who felt his failure with extraordinary bitterness, for he was deeply convinced that good would only come for Christianity if the view for which he stood won its way through.

Thus he withdrew into a kind of hermitage. For the rest of his life he became a hermit, following however, in response to the inner impulses of his soul, a quite definite course of the inner life. It was that of investigating the origin of the inspiration of thought. His mystic penetration was in the effort to perceive whence thinking receives its inspiration. It became one great longing in him to find the source of thinking in the spiritual world, until at length he was filled through and through with this longing. And with this longing he died, without having reached any real conclusion, any concrete answer during that earthly life. No answer was forthcoming. The time was after all unfavourable.

Then, passing through the gate of death, he underwent a peculiar experience. For several decades after his death he could still look back upon his earthly life, and he saw it forever coloured by that element to which he had come at last. He saw it forever in the atmosphere of that which, looking backwards, came immediately next his death. He saw the human being thinking.

Still this was no fulfilment of the question. And this is most important. There was as yet no thought in answer to the question. But though there was no answer, he was able, after his death, to look, in marvellously clear imaginations, into the cosmic intelligence of the universe. The thoughts of the universe he did not see. He would have seen them if his longing had reached fulfilment. He did not see the thoughts of the universe, but he saw in pictures the Thinking of the universe.

Thus there lived through the journey between death and a new birth an individuality who was as in a state of equilibrium between mystic imaginative vision and his former sharp-witted thinking—a thinking, however, in perpetual flow, that had not reached its conclusion.

In the elaboration of the karma, his mystic tendency won the day to begin with. He was born again in the Middle Ages as a visionary, a woman, who unfolded truly wonderful insight into the spiritual world. For a time, the tendency of the thinker fell entirely into the background; the quality of spiritual vision was in the foreground. For this woman had wonderful visions, while at the same time she gave herself up mystically to the Christ. Her soul was penetrated, with infinite depth, by a visionary Christianity. They were visions in which the Christ appeared as the leader of peaceful hosts, not quarrelsome or contentious, but like the hosts of peace, who would spread Christianity abroad by their very gentleness—a thing which had never yet been realised on earth. It was there in the visions of this nun. It was a deep, intensive Christianity, but it found no place at all in what afterwards evolved as Christianity in its more modern form. Nevertheless during her life this nun, the seeress, came into no conflict with positive dogmatic Christianity. She herself grew out of it and grew into a deeply personal Christianity, which was afterwards simply non-existent on the earth. And thus, if I might put it so, the whole universe then faced her with the question: how should this Christianity be realised in a physical body in a new incarnation? And at the same time, long after the seeress had passed through the gate of death, there came over her again the echoes of the old intellectualism, the inspired intellectualism. The after-echoes of her visions were now, if I might put it so, idealised through and through, filled with ideas.

Then, seeking for a new human body, this individual became the individuality of Solovioff, Vladimir Solovioff.

Read the writings of Solovioff!—I have frequently described the impression they make upon a modern man and have said it again in my introduction to the German edition of his works. You may well try to feel it in his writing. You will feel how much there lies between the lines, how much of a mysticism which we may often feel even sultry and oppressive. It is a Christianity quite individual in its forms of expression. It shows quite clearly how it had to seek for a pliable, in all directions supple body, such as can be obtained only out of the Russian people.

Looking at these examples, I think one may indeed preserve the holy awe and reverence before the truths of karma, which should indeed be held sacred and virginal in the inmost depths of life. For one who has a true feeling for the contemplation of the spiritual world, these deep truths are, verily, not unworthily unveiled. I mean this in the sense of what is so often said about the sacred veils of truth, of which people say that they should never be drawn aside.

Anthroposophy has been reproached again and again, notably in theological circles, for drawing aside the veil of sacred mystery from secret and mysterious truths, and thus making them profane. But the more deeply we enter into the esoteric portions of the anthroposophical conception, the more do we feel that there can truly be no talk of profanation. On the contrary the world itself will fill us with a holy awe when we behold the lives of man one after another in the marvellous working of former into later lives. We must only not be profane in our inner life or in our way of thinking and then we shall not make such objections.

Read the writings of Solovioff against the background of the previous nun, with her wonderful visions and infinite devotion to the Being of Christ. See that ancient personality going forth with deep and bitter feelings from the Council where he had brought forward such great and important things. Discover in the soul and in the heart of this individual what I may call the twofold background of Christianity, now in its rationalistic, but inspired rationalistic form, and now again in its visionary form of seership. See all this in the background, and of a truth the lifting of the veil will not profane the secret.

A German romanticist once had the courage to think differently from all others about the famous saying of Isis:“I am that which was, that which is, and that which is to come, and my veil has no mortal yet lifted.”—To which the German romanticist replied: Then we must become immortal, that we may lift the veil!—While others all took the saying as it stood.

When we discover the truly immortal within us, the divine and spiritual, then may we draw near to many a secret without profaning it, to many a secret to which, with a lesser faith in the divine in our own being, we might indeed not draw near.

And this indicates the spirit which should go abroad ever more and more under the influence of such studies as our last and as this present one. For these spiritual studies are meant to work upon the life and action of those who bear their karma, in the way I have described, into the Anthroposophical Society.

Today I would like to return to much of that which I said in previous lectures and I would like to amplify, in the first place, certain ideas about the inner being of man, about the soul spiritual nature of man. You know that we speak in the first place of that particular member of the inner human being which we designate with an abstract expression as the ether body. Whereas the physical body of man is perceptible for the external senses to external science which is bound to the intellect and its observation, we know that the ether body is something of a super-sensible nature. Furthermore, we speak of the next member of human nature as the so-called astral body. We remember how often we have emphasized the fact that one cannot say that the inner being of man is completely unknown to us. Indeed, man perceives within his bodily existence in the physical world, he perceives his thinking, his feeling and his willing. He experiences it inwardly and he experiences this thinking, feeling and willing as being radiated through by his “I”. One can say that man inwardly perceives this thinking, feeling and willing. However one cannot say that you can actually perceive your astral body. Also one cannot say that you really perceive your “I”, because this “I”—and we have brought this to your attention in the course of these lectures—this “I” of which man speaks falls back into unconsciousness with every sleep and is actually only a reflection of the real “I”. Therefore, in a certain sense, it can he concluded also that this “I” with this thinking, feeling and willing, is in a similar way only an expression, a manifestation of the actual inner being of man, just as with the physical body what you have is a manifestation, an expression of the spiritual nature of that which we designate as the etheric body.

Now, man is obviously happy when, in reference to any given domain of knowledge, he has such a very tightly fit division which he can neatly preserve. Therefore people are so happy when they know that man consists of physical body, ether body, astral body and ego. However, in the man—and I want to emphasize this—all you have with these four expressions are just four words, nothing more than four expressions. And when you advance to real contemplation, then you must, in a certain sense, always pass beyond the borders which are so easily established by these expressions. you speak in a general way, to be sure you may say: Thinking, feeling and willing proceed in the astral body. However that is really only a one-sided abstract way in which the fact of thinking exhausts itself. Just as we as human beings stand in the first place within the physical world, so, to be sure, the impulse to the thinking which exist in the astral body is that impulse which proceeds from the “I”. However, the thinking develops itself as a thought only through the fact that we have the mobile ether body. Our whole thinking would remain unconscious to us as physical human beings if the astral body did not send its impulses into the ether body and the ether body in its mobility would be unable to take up the thought impulses of the astral body. And every thought again would simply just pass over in a transitory way without having the possibility of a memory if we did not have a physical body. You cannot say the physical body is the carrier of the memory. No. The carrier of the memory is the ether body. However, for us human beings, if our thinking were to merely flow along just as dreams flow along and if it were not possible to have it engraved in the physical materiality of the physical body, then our thoughts here in the physical body can assert themselves through the fact that we have this physical body. Thus you see how this thinking is actually a very complicated process. It has its impulses in the astral body, actually already in the “I”. These impulses continue themselves as forces in the ether body, call forth the thoughts, and the thoughts in their turn engrave their tracks into the physical body. And through the fact that they are imprinted, you can always fetch them out of the memory again during the physical life.

Now, just consider—and we have often spoken about this situation—what the memory actually represents for man here in the physical body. As you know, man has experiences. He works these experiences over; then he goes away from these experiences. There comes a time when such experiences relate themselves to the human being as if we knew nothing about them, as if we no longer stood in relationship to them. However, there again comes the time when we are able to fetch the thought experiences out of our inner being. That which we have already experienced is present for us again in in the form of memory. Now, in the first place, man must believe the following. This process of memory belongs to him; it belongs to his soul. When we as human beings walk through the streets and associate in society, someone outside of us with external physical sense organs cannot really know what is hidden within us as our memories, that is, he cannot know what sort of experiences we have had. We carry these in our soul. I might say the sheaths of the physical body are so arranged that they cover over our soul for us. It is as if true physical body is a mantle which hides our soul and in which we can preserve these memories. They belong to us and they work in us through our whole life. We make the outside world into our own inner world. Then we carry this external world in the form of memories with us through existence. We carry these memories as our own possession.

Now, it would be a great mistake if one were to believe that this carrying of the memories through life really comprises the whole process. This is not the case. Darwin, for example, had the correct idea when he investigated to see if rain worms had a special task, and he discovered that rain worms are not there just to merely enjoy their existence but have the very important task of making the soil fruitful as they crawl through it. These are things which natural science certainly admits and this is a ground upon which natural science believes itself secure. Now, natural science, in so far as it does that, should not be criticized because it is really good when they enter into certain single details. However, the problem is that one builds world views upon such details. Obviously you must consider the saying about a man who digs for treasure and is happy when he finds rain worms. However, from the spiritual point of view one can ask the following: Was this activity through which man forms thoughts during his whole life and preserves them in his memory, has that any significance for the whole cosmos? Is this process of memorization only a process which occurs in ourselves? Now, the materialist says that obviously that is a process which only occurs in us. With death we put our physical body in the grave and then that which we have preserved in us as memory is obviously something which is rarely an extinguished thing. We are not going to enter into such a materialistic reply. We want to ask the question: Is our thinking process and memory process something quite different from that which occurs in our memory?

So it is. While we think, while we form thoughts and out of our experiences preserve these memories, during this time we occupy ourselves not only with our thoughts, but the whole world of the Third Hierarchy occupies themselves with our thoughts, the Hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. When we think, we think not only for ourselves, we think and we preserve our thoughts in our inner being in order that a field of activity should be created for Angels, Archangels and Archai. Whereas we believe that our thoughts live only in us, actually the three spiritual Hierarchies occupy themselves with our thoughts. The very smallest of that which we propose with our thoughts is something which concerns us. Even when we have forgotten the thoughts, they are in us and we again call these thoughts out of our memory. Just as we as human beings occupy ourselves on earth with our machines or with eating and drinking, so do the Angels, Archangels and Archai occupy themselves with a web which is formed from our thoughts; they work continuously on our thoughts. It is thus only the side of the activity of the thoughts which is turned toward us that we know about. There is in addition another side and this other side of our thoughts so appears for spiritual perception that we can say the following. While our thoughts which we have in our inner being occupy themselves from outside, the above mentioned spiritual beings weave these thoughts so that we, when we achieve this knowledge, can say the following of ourselves. Our thought process is acutely not something unnecessary for the world. Our thought process is something not only for ourselves, but it stands within the whole world development and contributes to it so that something new can continuously be woven into the world development. If we were not born as single individuals, if we had no thoughts, if we had not preserved memories in us, then at our death, that portion which would have been able to be woven out of our thoughts, that which we ourselves do not weave, that would be lost for world development. And when we pass through the portal of death—the elementary process I have often described—we put aside our physical body and this is given over to the elements of the earth in various ways. Our ether body remains with for a short time. It represents itself to our inner being as a great life tableau which is in front of us. Everything of that which we otherwise remember, that which has gone on in a time continuum becomes as a mighty panorama all at once, a mighty life tableau placed around us. Then, however, our etheric being is separated from us. It is, as it were, drawn out of us.

Now, who does that? Indeed, that is done by the beings of the three Hierarchies we mentioned and they weave it gradually into the cosmic ether so that after our death this web of the cosmic ether consists of that which we during our life between birth and death have added to it, also that which was worked over by the beings of these next three Hierarchies. The new webbing is taken away from us and is interwoven with the whole cosmic all. Every human being has a knowledge of this when he passes through the portal of death, since, for the human being after he has passed the portal of death, something enters which can be described in no other way than as follows. Now, you must see that the ether body is separated from him; his etheric web has been interwoven into the universal cosmic ether. That which he has carried in himself all through his life is now outside, it is external. And that is important. That person who knows these things indicates it with a short phrase which one should call forth before the soul in a meditative way. It can be described through a very essential process by saying the following. The inner being becomes the external, which means that which we always have felt as our thought life becomes external world. Just as here we are surrounded by rivers, mountains, trees, clouds, stones and stars, so after our death something occurs which one can characterize in following way. That which during our physical life has lived in in us now has become a portion of the external world so that it can now be perceived by us.

In addition to this ether body, we have the world of our astral body. This world of our astral body comes to our consciousness, in the first place, so that we feel it as thinking; we feel the world of the astral body as thinking. However, the thinking I have precisely characterized, indeed, sends its impulses down into the ether body so that the thinking itself cannot be conscious in the astral body. You can only become aware of feeling and willing in your astral body. You cannot be conscious of your thinking there, but you become aware of your thoughts in the ether body. It is very important that feeling and willing can become conscious for us, it has to go down into the ether body. Throughout our whole life we feel and we will, we foster feelings about certain experiences. These are processes in our astral body. That again is a very characteristic weaving, but now not just a web in thoughts as I have formerly described it but a web of perception, feeling and impulses toward willing. Higher beings also work in that which we have throughout our whole life as feeling and will impulses. Just as in our thinking beings of the Third Hierarchy work, so there work in our feeling and our will impulses the beings of the Second Hierarchy including the Thrones.

Just imagine how we stand in the world when we know these things how we feel ourselves inserted into the spiritual world. On the one side we say to ourselves: Man, you go through the world thinking, but your thinking in so far as it is turned to its inner side is only the one side of thinking. That which you think is substance for the work of the Angels, the Archangels, the Archai. In so far as we feel and will, we create substance for the Spirits of Form, the Spirits of Movement, the Spirits of Wisdom, the Thrones, or the Spirits of Will. Just as the human being cultivates the earth and works it over, he does not know that while he is working over the earth that it is only one side which is worked over, but on the other side actual processes are occurring which he does not know of with his normal consciousness. In a similar way, man believes that his feelings and his will impulses merely belong to him, but they are a field for the work of the indicated beings of the hierarchies.We are truly not merely physical body that only stands in connection with our environment, but we are also there as soul spiritual beings so this soul spiritual man can stand in connection with the environment. Normally one does not think about how our physical body belongs to our whole environment. But this is easy to work out.

In any given moment when you visualize yourself in a bodily way, you possess not only bones, blood, muscles and so on, but you also have a certain stream of air in yourself which you have breathed in and which you will soon breathe out. This belongs to you while you have breathed in; that was out of you in the previous moment, in the next moment it is again outside you. Just think of yourself without this stream of air. It is impossible to think in this way without realizing that you have this stream of air within you. It belongs to us, it is nonsense to think of the physical body as if it were only enclosed within the skin; whereas you are pointed to the fact that you live with the whole atmosphere environment. However, just as we through our physical body live with the atmosphere environment, with the warmth environment, so do we live with the environment of the Hierarchy of the Third Order through our thoughts and we live through our feelings and will impulses with the Beings of the Hierarchies of the Second Order and with the Spirits of Will. This is how we stand within the cosmic all.

Let us now turn our attention to passing through of the portal of death. We can then say the following. When man passes through the portal of death, we know that when his ether body is taken away from him, when the interweaving into the universal cosmic ether begins, then he has to live backwards three times as fast as he experienced during physical life between birth and death, in so far as during that period he perceives the effects of his experiences between birth and death. Thus, that which we have experienced in us during our physical life we do not perceive them just because we have perceived it here in physical life. We will perceive the feeling out of which we have executed an injury to someone else, not our feeling but that of the other person, that which we have lived through here in the physical life stands as a causative factor there and carries in itself the karma. We have not experienced the impression that our injury has made upon the other person's soul. We experience here, in the main, not that which our deeds, our actions, our thoughts have resulted in effects in the external world, we do not experience that here in the physical life, but we do experience that when we go through our backward vision in the time between death and a new birth. There we live through everything that is outside, not in the way it was experienced by us but in the way in which it was experienced by the external world with which we were in contact. Really everything which other human beings have perceived, have felt through our thoughts, through our words, we live through and because of this the external must become the inner in our new state of post mortem. Through this experience the effects of our thoughts, the effects of our deeds in life, the external effects now become inner which means something which we inwardly experience, something which is experienced by the spirit human being after death, because now he must live himself into that world in which he lived unconsciously during the time of his life.

In so far as he has an astral body, and the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy have worked upon his astral body, he must now live into that world in which his astral body gradually dissolves itself into the external, but now he experiences the external in an inward way, he really lives through it inwardly. He must learn between death and a new birth to work in that sphere in which the Spirits of the Second Hierarchy work, in which they prepare that which again can lead into a new incarnation. And, indeed, then we know that after the astral body has dissolved into the external world and man lives on further with his actual inner being in the time between death and a new birth.

When we want to understand something of this life between death and a new birth, we must make many points of view valid for ourselves. Our goal is not to be one-sided but to make various viewpoints valid so that gradually a comprehensive understanding of these processes can open themselves to us. Thus you must keep the following in view. Just as man through birth enters natural processes which around him in the mineral world, in the plant world, in the animal world, so he enters into a world where things are happening around him with the beings of the Hierarchies which we have mentioned. He is, as it were, enfolded into their activities and that which he has brought with him for them, they weave together so that it can become the foundation for his next incarnation.

You must realize that in this it is, I might say, very difficult to give our present age the correct concepts and ideas for reasons which I have often presented. The present age works precisely with the most reversed concepts in this realm. When a human being enters through birth into physical existence, he enters with certain characteristics. The present time speaks purely of heredity, and means physical heredity, and one speaks of this physical heredity in the following way. A man shows this or that characteristic. Therefore to find out where those characteristics come from, you must look for its ancestors. For example, there is a very industriously worked over book about Goethe, in which Goethe's characteristics are so presented that it has looked for one thing in this ancestor, another in that, one characteristic from a great-great grandmother, another from a great-great grandfather, and so on, as if everything that Goethe had had came to him through heredity. I have often said the following: When you say that the child has the qualities of his parents, it is just as wise a saying as a human being is wet when he falls into water and is then drawn out of it. Naturally he is wet from the water when he is taken out. In the same way he has the properties of his ancestors in him, because they have been led through his soul. There is no greater wisdom there either. Therefore to go back to causes is, for the logical aspect ultimately the most logical, because one can say the following: One wants to prove that the soul-spiritual properties come through heredity in so far as one shows that a genius like Goethe has the same characteristics which his ancestors had, but as we have said, it is no cleverer than the assertion that the man is wet after he has fallen into water.

Now, if you really want to prove that the properties of genius are concerned with heredity, then you would have to show how the descendents of a genius show the properties of the genius. In other words, if you have to prove that genius can be transmitted by heredity, that would be a proof. Look at Goethe's son. See if he has Goethe's genius. Now, behind all this there is a much deeper process. Just imagine this hypothesis, for example, just imagine that there are beings who are not able to see human beings and just imagine that one of these beings who cannot see the activity of man goes to Berlin and sees how watches are being produced everywhere. This being obviously has to say to himself: These watches produce themselves. And that is no wiser than people who say that you do not need any additional explanations about how human beings come into the world; that that occurs quite of itself in the course of propagation in the generations. These ideas can only be held by people who cannot see human beings, who cannot see that that which occurs here in the physical world is only the external expression of an activity which continuously flows down out of the spiritual world just as the activity of the watchmakers flow into the watches. Therefore that which precisely occurs here upon the earth, of which human beings in their foolishness believe that they occur completely for themselves, that is only an external physical process which is directed just as the activity of making watches is a directing activity, so the moment which I have called the Midnight Hour of Existence in my mystery dramas, from that moment on which lies within the middle between death and a new birth, there already begins that activity of the spiritual world, as it were, of inclining itself into the physical in order after centuries to lead the human being into physical existence. When man goes through the portal of death, there is the activity of a working over of that which the human being experienced in his last life which is exercised in the spiritual world. All this occurs in the first half of the life between death and a new birth. However, in the second half of the life between death and a new birth,
the preparation for the next incarnation begins. And now the following can be said about the situation.

That person who is born has ancestors; ancestors again have ancestors; these ancestors have ancestors. Just see how far this goes when you go through 30 generations. However, if you go through 30 generations, you will find that in many people, as it were, there already is the tendency which ultimately leads to the fact that man A is brought together with woman B and then they bring another human being into existence. And if the whole thing did not so occur through 30 generations, if the people had not married, A not coming together with B, therefore that human being who descends into a physical incarnation would not have ultimately been produced. From the whole working together of many people which finally peaks into two, the single individuality of the human being has been a participation in the spiritual world. Thus when we see that the son has the characteristic of his father, of his mother and then again the father's and mother's characteristics are led back to grandfathers and grandmothers and great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers and so on, that is because there has previously been an influence exerted on these great-great-grandparents through 30 generations by that individuality who then later on after many centuries wants to be born and this has all been determined according to the plan to find himself as a human being through the generations. All that is a participating activity and the fact that you have similar inherited characteristics emanates from the fact that through the generations that power works down through the spiritual world which finally comes to appearance in a certain human being. This individuality already works in a father, a mother, a grandfather, a grandmother, a great-grandfather, a great-grandmother, and ultimately one gets the qualities which come to expression. It is not the physical stream which makes the inheritance, but the physical stream is inserted in this way through inheritance. Therefore, precisely the reverse of that which the so-called natural scientific view maintains, is true. In order that Goethe ultimately comes to appearance through Johann Casper Goethe and his Frau Eiya, Beings of the Second Hierarchy have worked through 30 generations in such a way that Goethe could ultimately be produced. Naturally this applies not only for genius but for eveiy single human being.

Now, you can say that this is difficult to imagine, and you could also ask yourself how is this compatable with human freedom when we have already been determined 30 generations before we descend. I know it is very complicated, but you must remember that this is complicated for the normal consciousness which has been apportioned to you during your earth existence. You will remember that what we are dealing with is not only the individual himself, but the individual in community with the Spirits of Form, with the Spirits of Motion, and so on, and so it is worked out in such a way that freedom is not influenced. Naturally this works in such a way that it corresponds to the working of these Higher Hierarchies. The situation is just like that.

There is worked together that which we are able to give over as thoughts to the cosmic ether with that which we express during our earth existence in our feeling life and in our will life. Therefore Spiritual Science is not supposed to be a totality of knowledge, but above all it should be capable of bringing forth a certain soul mood. I have attempted to indicate this soul mood in the first part of my second mystery play, in the meeting between Capaius and Benedictus, when the goal is that man as a complete human being lives here upon the earth. In order that that can happen, Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits work together so that the human being is a goal for Gods and Gods, Spirits and Spirits. This feeling, I might say, the thankfulness, the gratitude to the spiritual universe, this feeling to know ourselves in the spiritual universe must flow into our souls through spiritual science. This must become as natural for us as it is natural for us to know about the connections with the physical world.

Science today has advanced so far that everyone is aware of the fact that man cannot just live on his own resources but needs the atmosphere, that he is a menber of the whole environment. When he is hungry or thirsty, then he notices that the external world is necessary in a physical way for his existence, that he stands within the external world, within a universal process. However, man also stands in a universal process in the spiritual world. When he thinks he stands within Angels, Archangels, Archai, and in so far as he feels and he wills, he then stands in a spiritual connection with the next higher Hierarchy. Just as the air stretches itself into man's physical body in so far as his physical nature is concerned, so the spiritual aspect of the activity of the so-called Hierarchies works in his soul.

Quite often you get a materialist raising the objection: Indeed, it may be true that a spiritual world does exist, but it does not help us to know anything about this spiritual world even when you tell us that thinking, feeling and willing stand in connection with the Higher Hierarchies. It does not matter, because in order to think we do not need to know about these Higher Hierarchies. We already think in the world without knowing anything about them. Man believes, thank God. If he had to wait until he knew about the breathing process in a theoretical way before breathing, then he also would not be able to think unless he knew about the breathing process. You think without knowing anything about these Higher Hierarchies. However, let us present a counter question. Can you really think without one having that? At the present time you see that people work with the inheritance of the ancient times; they work with that which they have inherited and they are still inventing machines from that. All this is an inheritance of an earlier age. Much of what we accomplish today is a result of what we have inherited in the past.

Recently we were in Hamburg and saw a picture done in the 13th, 14th century by Master Bertram and I want to tell you something about this picture. Let us go back to the biblical story of the fall into sin which we in spiritual science call Luciferic temptation. When a painter in our modern age paints the fall into sin, so he would paint Adam and Eve on either side of the tree and then, naturally, a serpent on the tree. According to whether he is an Impressionist, Cubist, Expressionist or any other ‘ist’, he would more or less paint this; he would paint it beautifully. But he will paint a serpent looking like any serpent which crawls in the grass; that is realism. But is it realism? Is it actually not realism? I cannot imagine any simple woman being deceived by such a serpent. We know from spiritual science that Lucifer is a being who had remained behind at the Moon development. Lucifer, during the Moon evolution, could not be seen with physical eyes such as we have upon earth, so the serpent could not be something which could be seen with the physical eye, not the serpent referred to in the Garden of Eden. Lucifer had to be seen inwardly. When you study the human being more accurately, you can see in every skeleton that it consists of two portions. You have the skull and the spinal column attached to it with the brain inside the skull and the spinal fluid in the spinal column, and the rest of the human being is attached to it. You can consider the human being only as being attached to it. You have the head like a small cosmic sphere attached to the whole thing. You can also say: Thank God that man through his own wisdom cannot contribute to this head coming into existence through his birth. It would look very strange if the anatomists and physiologists could contribute anything to produce this wonderful structure of the human head. This human head comes into existence between death and a new birth as in a large sphere which we could compare with our blue heavenly sphere, that in which our karma is woven and is an organization which as it goes towards incarnation, becomes smaller and smaller and then unites itself with the mother. That which then becomes our head is woven through by countless beings of the Hierarchies out of the whole cosmic all. It is a wisdom of the most immense magnitude, a wisdom which has embodied in it all the experiences. Our head is an inheritance of the Saturn, Sun and Moon incarnations. The earth with all its forces could not have been able to produce this head. It is only possible to bring into existence that which is added to the head, not the head with all its forces. The other part of the human being, not the head with the spinal column, but that which is attached to it actually is earth man. Now, how would a person with inner vision try to represent Lucifer actually as a Moon being? One would represent a human head and would attach something like a boned up spinal column to it, something like a serpent; and that is how Master Bertram in the 13th, 14th century presents Lucifer there on the tree between Adam and Even. In the Hamburg Museum you can see the picture represented just like that. So you see that the painter who painted this picture has the living knowledge
of the configuration of Lucifer within him. You can also see that it was not so very long ago that we still had the ancient atavistic clairvoyance which has now been lost.

I would like to present the situation from another side in order that you will see the assertion of the materialist who says that you do not need to know anything that comes out of the spiritual world, that all you need to do is use your thinking and feeling just as we breathe in the atmosphere and take in food for our hunger and thirst. I have often talked about the very significant criminal anthropologist, Benedict. He was the first to investigate the brains of criminals, naturally, after their death. He analyzed these brains in order to see if he could find some connections between the structure of the brain and criminal qualities. Benedict found that they all have a common characteristic, namely, their rear head lobes were too short and did not completely cover up the small brain. Just imagine this: the common qulaities of the criminal brain is to have a too short rear head lobe just as the apes also have it, something which does not cover the small brain. Obviously this actually is a property of the physical body and so from that you can conclude that there are two types of people being born, those having a correct rear head lobe and those with too short lobes. Those who have a correct rear head lobe do not become criminals and those with too short rear head lobes must become criminals. From the standpoint of the materialistic world conception you cannot raise any objection against this knowledge, but then all talk about morality is nonsense. Can we really punish people when we have to say that they have to be criminals because they have too short rear head lobes. You can see how materialism and all that can come about from it can gradually degenerate. You must extinguish all sorts of spiritual aspects from the social, ethical and juristic life, otherwise we are living in a complete lie, because there can be no objection against the facts which have just been presented.

Now, let us see how we approach the situation. To be sure, there are those who have correct rear head lobes and those with too short rear head lobes. However, there is an ether body there which can be developed in a quite different way and is much more mobile than the physical body. Behind the rear head lobes of the physical body there are the rear head lobes of the ether body and the human beings of the future will have to learn to distinguish between children who have too short rear head lobes and those who have longer rear head lobes. The educators will have to know in what characteristics a short hind head lobe manifests itself in the earliest years of childhood. These children will have to be educated in such a way that the ether lobes can be correspondingly developed and so form a counter weight. Then through the fact that you have developed the ether lobes strongly, they will prevent the damage which the physical lobes can produce when they are too short. So we can see that if spiritual science does not enter into our civilization, then as a result of materialism, all morality, all ethics, all justice would be meaningless. The spiritual would be extinguished from mankind's experience.

Recently in my public lectues I spoke about a forgotten thinker, Karl Christian Plunk. I do not intend to defend everything which Karl Christian Plunk has written in a dogmatic way. However, I have showed you how he worked out of a very deep spiritual consciousness and that he had a certain spiritual world conception. He died in 1880. Very few people bothered about his books. In 1912 the book entitled A TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN by Karl Christian Plunk appeared,a wonderful book. Since he died in 1880, this book had to be written before that. In the first edition of my RIDDLES OF PHILOSOPHY which was entitled WORLD AND LIFE VIEW OF THE 19TH CENTURY, I had already pointed in the year 1900 to Karl Christian Plunk. Plunk actually was an Idealist; he really was a man who lived in the spiritual world and wanted to bring into existence that which inserts itself in the world from the spiritual. I could mention many other examples, however, I am just pointing to Karl Christian Plunk. (An extract from Plunk's book TESTAMENT OF A GERMAN written in 1880 is given in which he spoke of the present war ‘1914–1918’) In this book he refers to the fact that in the future war, Germany will have to defend herself in the West and the South; how on all sides the enemy has national jealousy against the Center. The people will be jealous of the success and growth of the culture of Germany. How many people who had a materialistic concept could have thought like that? Very few of them. Yet, these are the very people who call the people who have a spiritual feeling, idealists.

When a spiritual researcher says: Today people are alright, they can still continue to think, because they have an inheritance of the ancient type of thinking and are able to invent machines. However, human beings will come to a standstill before 50 years is over. They will not be able to discover anything more unless they decide to take spiritual influences up into their thinking. They will reach a dead end. They will have to go to the next stage which will be a development of a spiritual scientific point of view, then they will be able to have new discoveries. Today we have machines only because we have inherited the ancient thinking in our consciousness. We see that the time demands that we allow ourselves to become fructified from the spiritual world. And only this fructification will make it possible to be able to understand the spiritual facts as anthroposophical spiritual science gives us. And unless this happens, the great world tasks will not be solved. I have often mentioned the fact that we are living in a time when the second appearance of Christ will occur shortly, the Etheric Christ Being, that second appearance of Christ upon earth. However, it is necessary to have a preparation in order that this event does not go by unnoticed.

Just recently when I gave a lecture, two people came to me after the lecture and said that they are very surprised about what I was saying and they thought that they would not expect a Theosophist to speak the same way that I spoke. They thought Theosophists would speak differently, because they were pacifists. They forgot the fact that ever since pacifism arose, we have had the bloodiest wars. We talked about illnesses and I tried to explain that illness is the reaction of nature in order to make man healthy, that before the appearance of illness there are unnatural relationships and illness is an attempt to compensate for these unnatural relationships. The illness is necessary, because the unnatural relationships were there. You must see that in all circles of materialism, it leads to the unfruitfulness of thinking.

Spiritual scientific truths must work in our feeling, in our soul mood in a fructifying way and there must be a number of people in our age who can hold them true out of an inner conviction to that which is a necessity for world evolution, that which comes out of spiritual science. Then there will be what should be, then the Christ when He appears in His new form will find those people whom He needs; and that must be. When he appears in His etheric figure, and when someone says that he has experienced the Etheric Christ, then he must not be grasped as being an idiot. It is very necessary today to give mankind a strong push forward, a push which is able to overcome the materialism and its consequences, and this century needs it, needs it in order to take up a new form. And we have as the signs of fire for this goal of mankind today the significant bloody events all around us. We take up spiritual science so that the sacrifice of all those people who have died as a result of this will not have died in vain. If we take up spiritual science, then all that which has gone an around us as a sacrifice of these souls in this war, will be some sort of compensation for it and that will contribute towards the elevation of mankind. that must be, that is why we have to express this invocation again and again.

From the Courage of the fighters,
From the blood on fields of battle,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the people's sacrifice:
There will ripen fruit of Spirit,
If souls will turn in consciousness
Towards the realm of Spirit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do they do this?

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

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

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

Rudolf Steiner: Today I would like to add a little more in answer to Herr Burle's question last Thursday. You remember that I spoke of the four substances necessary to human nutrition: minerals, carbohydrates, which are to be found in potatoes, but especially in our field grains and legumes, then fats, and protein. I pointed out how different our nutrition is with regard to protein as compared, for instance, to salt. A man takes salt into his body and it travels all the way to his head, in such a way that the salt remains salt. It is really not changed except that it is dissolved. It keeps its forces as salt all the way to the human head. In contrast to this, protein—the protein in ordinary hens' eggs, for instance, but also the protein from plants—this protein is at once broken down in the human body, while it is still in the stomach and intestines; it does not remain protein. The human being possesses forces by which he is able to break down this protein. He also has the forces to build something up again, to make his own protein. He would not be able to do this if he had not already broken down other protein.

Now think how it is, gentlemen, with this protein. Imagine that you have become an exceptionally clever person, so clever that you are confident you can make a watch. But you've never seen a watch except from the outside, so you cannot right off make a watch. But if you take a chance and you take some watch to pieces, take it all apart and lay out the single pieces in such a way that you observe just how the parts relate to one another, then you know how you are going to put them all together again. That's what the human body does with protein. It must take in protein and take it all apart.

Protein consists of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur. Those are its most important components. And now the protein is completely separated into its parts, so that when it all reaches the intestines, man does not have protein in him, but he has carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and sulphur. You see how it is?—now the man has the protein all laid out in its parts as you had the watch all laid out on the table. So now you will say, Sure! when I took that watch apart, I observed it very carefully, and now I can make watches. Likewise I only need to eat protein once; after that, I can make it myself. But it doesn't happen that way, gentlemen. A human being has his memory as a complete human entity; his body by itself does not have the kind of memory that can take note of something, it uses its “memory” forces just for building itself up. So one must always be eating new protein in order to be able to make a protein.

The fact is, the human being is involved in a very, very complicated activity when he manufactures his own protein. First he divides the protein he has eaten into its separate parts and puts the carbon from it into his body everywhere. Now you already know that we inhale oxygen from the air and that this oxygen combines with the carbon we have in us from proteins and other food elements. And we exhale carbon in carbon dioxide, keeping a part of it back. So now we have that carbon and oxygen together in our body. We do not retain and use the oxygen that was in the protein; we use the oxygen we have inhaled to combine with the carbon. Thus we do not make our own protein as the materialists describe it: namely, that we eat a great many eggs which then are deposited throughout our body so that eggs we have eaten are spread over our whole body. That is not true.

Actually, we are saved by the organization of our body so that when we eat eggs, we don't all turn into crazy hens! It's a fact. We don't become crazy hens because we break the protein down in our intestines and instead of using the oxygen that was in the protein, we use oxygen coming out of the air. Also, as we breathe oxygen in we breathe nitrogen in too; nitrogen is always in the air. Again, we don't use the nitrogen that comes to us in the hens' eggs; we use the nitrogen we breathe in from the air. And the hydrogen we've eaten in eggs, we don't use that either, not at all. We use the hydrogen we take in through our nose and our ears, through all our senses; that's the hydrogen we use to make our protein. Sulphur too—we receive that continually from the air. Hydrogen and sulphur we get from the air. From the protein we eat, we keep and use only the carbon. The other substances, we take from the air. So you see how it is with protein.

There is a similar situation with fat. We make our own protein, using only the carbon from the external protein. And we also make our own fat. For the fats too, we use very little nitrogen from our food. So you see, we produce our own protein and fat. Only what we consume in potatoes, legumes, and grains goes over into our body. In fact, even these things do not go fully into our body, but only to the lower part of our head. The minerals we consume go up into the entire head; from them we have what we need to build up our bones.

Therefore you see, gentlemen, we must take care to bring healthy plant protein into our body. Healthy plant protein! That is what our body needs in large quantity. When we take in protein from eggs, our body can be rather lazy; it can easily break the protein down, because that protein is easily broken down. But plant protein, which we get from fruit—it is chiefly in that part of the plant, as I told you on Thursday—that is especially valuable to us. If a person wants to keep himself healthy, it is really necessary to include fruit in his diet. Cooked or raw, but fruit he must have. If he neglects to eat fruit, he will gradually condemn his body to a very sluggish digestion.

You can see that it is also a question of giving proper nourishment to the plants themselves. And that means, we must realize that plants are living things; they are not minerals, they are something alive. A plant comes to us out of the seed we put in the ground. The plant cannot flourish unless the soil itself is to some degree alive. And how do we make the soil alive? By manuring it properly. Yes, proper manuring is what will give us really good plant protein.

We must remember that for long, long ages men have known that the right manure is what comes out of the horses' stalls, out of the cow barn and so on; the right manure is what comes off the farm itself. In recent times when everything has become materialistic, people have been saying: Look here! we can do it much more easily by finding out what substances are in the manure and then taking them out of the mineral kingdom: mineral fertilizer!

And you can see, gentlemen, when one uses mineral fertilizer, it is as if one just put minerals into the ground; then only the root becomes strong. Then we get from the plants the substance that helps to build up our bones. But we don't get a proper protein from the plants. And the plants, our field grains have suffered from the lack of protein for a long time. And the lack will become greater and greater unless people return to proper manuring.

There have already been agricultural conferences in which the farmers have said: Yes, the fruit gets worse and worse! And it is true. But naturally the farmers haven't known the reason. Every older person knows that when he was a young fellow, everything that came out of the fields was really better. It's no use thinking that one can make fertilizer simply by combining substances that are present in cow manure. One must see clearly that cow manure does not come out of a chemist's laboratory but out of a laboratory that is far more scientific—it comes from the far, far more scientific laboratory inside the cow. And for this reason cow manure is the stuff that not only makes the roots of plants strong, but that works up powerfully into the fruits and produces good, proper protein in the plants which makes man vigorous.

If there is to be nothing but the mineral fertilizer that has now become so popular, or just nitrogen from the air—well, gentlemen, your children, more particularly, your grandchildren will have very pale faces. You will no longer see a difference between their faces and their white hands. Human beings have a lively, healthy color when the farmlands are properly manured.

So you see, when one speaks of nutrition one has to consider how the foodstuffs are being obtained. It is tremendously important. You can see from various circumstances that the human body itself craves what it needs. Here's just one example: people who are in jail for years at a stretch, usually get food that contains very little fat, so they develop an enormous craving for fat; and when sometimes a drop of wax falls on the floor from the candle that the guard carries into a cell, the prisoner jumps down at once to lick up the fat. The human body feels the lack so strongly if it is missing some necessary substance. We don't notice this if we eat properly and regularly from day to day; then it never happens that our body is missing some essential element. But if something is lacking in the diet steadily for weeks, then the body becomes exceedingly hungry. That is also something that must be carefully noticed.

I have already pointed out that many other things are connected with fertilizing. For instance, our European forefathers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or still earlier, were different from ourselves in many ways. One doesn't usually pay any attention to that fact. Among other things, they had no potatoes! Potatoes were not introduced until later. The potato diet has exercised a strong influence. When grains are eaten, the heart and lungs become particularly strong. Grains strengthen heart and lungs. A man then develops a healthy chest and he is in fine health. He is not so keen on thinking as on breathing, perhaps; but he can endure very much when he has good breathing. And let me say right here: don't think that someone has strong lungs if he's always opening the window and crying, “Let's get some fresh air in here!” No! a person has strong lungs if he is so conditioned that he can endure any kind of air. The toughened-up person is not the one who can't bear anything but the one who can!

In these days there is much talk about being hardy. Think how the children are “hardened”! Nowadays (in wealthy homes, of course, but then other people quickly follow suit) the children are dressed—well, when we were children, we wore long breeches and were well covered—at the most, we went barefoot-now, the clothes only go down to the knee or are still shorter. If parents knew that this is the best preparation for later attacks of appendicitis, they would be more thoughtful. But fashion is a tyrant!—no thought is given to the matter, and the children are dressed so that their little dresses only reach to the knee, or less. Someday they will only reach to the stomach—that will be the fashion! Fashion has a strong influence.

But what is really at stake? People pay no attention to it. It is this: A human being is constituted throughout his organism so that he is truly capable of doing inner work on all the food he consumes. And in this connection it is especially important to know that a man becomes strong when he works properly on the foods he eats. Children are not made stronger by the treatment I have just mentioned. They are so “hardened” that later in their life—just watch them!—when they have to cross an empty square with the hot sun beating down on them, they drip with perspiration and they can't make it. Someone has not become toughened up when he is not able to stand anything; the person who can endure all possible hardships is the one who has been toughened up. So, in earlier days people were not toughened up; yet they had healthy lungs, healthy hearts, and so on.

And then came the potato diet! The potato takes little care of lung and heart. It reaches the head, but only, as I said, the lower head, not the upper head. It does go into the lower head, where one thinks and exercises critical faculties. Therefore, you can see, in earlier times there were fewer journalists. There was no printing industry yet. Think of the amount of thought expended daily in this world in our time, just to bring the newspapers out! All that thinking, it is much too much, it is not at all necessary-and we have to thank the potato diet for that! Because a person who eats potatoes is constantly stimulated to think. He can't do anything but think. That's why his lungs and his heart become weak. Tuberculosis, lung tuberculosis, did not become widespread until the potato diet was introduced. And the weakest human beings are those living in regions where almost nothing else is grown but potatoes, where the people live on potatoes.

It is spiritual science that is able to know these material facts. (I have said this often.) Materialistic science knows nothing about nutrition; it has no idea what is healthy food for humanity. That is precisely the characteristic of materialism, that it thinks and thinks and thinks—and knows nothing. The truth is finally this: that if one really wants to participate in life, above all one has to know something! Those are the things I wanted to say about nutrition.

And now perhaps you may still like to ask some individual questions?

Question: Dr. Steiner, in your last talk you mentioned arteriosclerosis. It is generally thought that this illness comes from eating a great deal of meat and eggs and the like. I know someone in whom the illness began when he was fifty; he had become quite stiff by the time he was seventy. But now he is eighty-five or eighty-six, and he is much more active than he was in his fifties and sixties. Has the arteriosclerosis receded? Is that possible? Or is there some other reason? Perhaps I should mention that this person has never smoked and has drunk very little alcohol; he has lived a really decent life. But in his earlier years he did eat rather a lot of meat. At seventy he could do very little work, but now at eighty-five he is continually active.

Dr. Steiner: So—I understand you to say that this person became afflicted with arteriosclerosis when he was fifty, that he became stiff and could do very little work. You did not say whether his memory deteriorated; perhaps you did not notice. His condition continued into his seventies; then he became active again, and he is still living. Does he still have any symptom of his earlier arteriosclerosis or is he completely mobile and active?

Questioner: Today he is completely active and more mobile than when he was sixty-five or seventy. He is my father.

Dr. Steiner: Well, first of all we should establish the exact nature of his earlier arteriosclerosis. Usually arteriosclerosis takes hold of a person in such a way that his arteries in general become sclerotic. Now if a man's arteries in general are sclerotic, he naturally becomes unable to control his body with his soul and spirit, and the body becomes rigid. Now it can also happen that someone has arteriosclerosis but not in his whole body; the disease, for instance, could have spared his brain. Then the following is the case. You see, I am somewhat acquainted with your own condition of health. I don't know your father, but perhaps we can discover something about your father's health from your own. For instance, you suffer somewhat, or have suffered (I hope it will be completely cured), from hay fever. That means that you carry in you something that the body can develop only if there is no tendency to arteriosclerosis in the head, but only outside the head. No one who is predisposed to arteriosclerosis in his entire body can possibly suffer an attack of hay fever. For hay fever is the exact opposite of arteriosclerosis. Now you suffer from hay fever. That shows that your hay fever—of course it is not pleasant to have hay fever, it's much better to have it cured: but we are talking of the tendency to have it—your hay fever is a kind of safety valve against arteriosclerosis.

But everyone gets arteriosclerosis to a small degree. One can't grow old without having it. If one gets it in the entire body, that's different: then one can't help oneself, one becomes rigid through one's whole body. But if one gets arteriosclerosis in the head and not in the rest of the body, then—well, if one is growing old properly, the etheric body is growing stronger and stronger (I've spoken of this before), and it no longer has such great need of the brain, and so the brain can now become old and stiff. The etheric body can control this slight sclerotic condition—which in earlier years made one old and stiff altogether; now the etheric body can control it very cleverly so that it is no longer so severe.

Your father, for example, does not need to have had hay fever himself, he can just have had the tendency to it. And you see, just this tendency to it has been of benefit to him. One can even say—it may seem a little far-fetched, but a person who has a tendency to hay fever can even say, Thank God I have this tendency! The hay fever isn't bothering me now, and it gives me permanently the predisposition to a softening of the vessels. Even if the hay fever doesn't come out, it is protecting him from arteriosclerosis. And if he has a son, the son can have the hay fever externally. A son can suffer externally from some disease that in the father was pushed inward.

Indeed, that is one of the secrets of heredity: that many things become diseases in the descendants which in the forefathers were aspects of health. Diseases are classified as arteriosclerosis, tuberculosis, cirrhosis, dyspepsia, and so forth. This can be written up very attractively in a book; one can describe just how these illnesses progress. But one hasn't obtained much from it, for the simple reason that arteriosclerosis, for instance, is different in every single person. No two persons have arteriosclerosis alike; everyone becomes afflicted in a different way. That is really so, gentlemen. And it shouldn't surprise anyone.

There were two professors¹¹ at Berlin University. One was seventy years old, the other ninety-two. The younger one was quite well-known; he had written many books. But he was a man who lived with his philosophy entirely within materialism; he only had thoughts that were stuck deep in materialism. Now such thoughts also contribute to arteriosclerosis. And he got arteriosclerosis. When he reached seventy, he was obliged to retire. The colleague who was over ninety was not a materialist; he had stayed a child through most of his life, and was still teaching with tremendous liveliness. He said, “Yes, that colleague of mine, that young boy! I don't understand him. I don't want to retire yet, I still feel so young.” The other one, the “boy,” was disrobed, could no longer teach. Of course the ninety-two-year-old had also become sclerotic with his years, his arteries were completely sclerotic, but because of his mobility of soul he could still do something with those arteries. The other man had no such possibility.

And now something more in answer to Herr Burle's question about carrots. Herr Burle said, “The human body craves instinctively what it needs. Children often take a carrot up in their hands. Children, grownups too, are sometimes forced to eat food that is not good for them. I think this is a mistake when someone has a loathing for some food. I have a boy who won't eat potatoes.”

Gentlemen, you need only think of this one thing: if animals did not have an instinct for what was good for them, and what was bad for them, they would all long since have perished. For animals in a pasture come upon poisonous plants too—all of them—and if they did not know instinctively that they could not eat poisonous plants, they would certainly eat them. But they always pass them by.

But there is something more. Animals choose with care what is good for them. Have you sometimes fattened geese, crammed them with food? Do you think the geese would ever do that themselves? It is only humans who force the geese to eat so much. With pigs it is different; but how thin do you think our pigs might be if we did not encourage them to eat so much? In any case, with pigs it is a little different. They have acquired their characteristics through inheritance; their ancestors had to become accustomed to all the foods that produce fat. These things were taken up in their food in earlier times. But the primeval pigs had to be forced to eat it! No animal ever eats of its own accord what is not right for it.

But now, gentlemen, what has materialism brought about? It no longer believes in such an instinct.

I had a friend in my youth with whom I ate meals very often. We were fairly sensible about our food and would order what we were in the habit of thinking was good for us. Later, as it happens in life, we lost track of each other, and after some years I came to the city where he was living, and was invited to have dinner with him. And what did I see? Scales beside his plate! I said, “What are you doing with those scales?” I knew, of course, but I wanted to hear what he would say. He said, “I weigh the meat they bring me, to eat the right amount—the salad too.” There he was, weighing everything he should put on his plate, because science told him to. And what had happened to him? He had weaned himself completely from a healthy instinct for what he should eat and finally no longer knew! And you remember?—it used to be in the book: “a person needs from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty grams of protein”; that, he had conscientiously weighed out. Today the proper amount is estimated to be fifty grams, so his amount was incorrect.

Of course, gentlemen, when a person has diabetes, that is obviously a different situation. The sugar illness, diabetes, shows that a person has lost his instinct for nutrition.

There you have the gist of the matter. If a child has a tendency to worms, even the slightest tendency, he will do everything possible to prevent them. You'll be astonished sometimes to see such a child hunting for a garden where there are carrots growing, and then you'll find him there eating carrots. And if the garden is far off, that doesn't matter, the child trudges off to it anyway and finds the carrots-because a child who has a tendency to worms longs for carrots.

And so, gentlemen, the most useful thing you can possibly do is this: observe a child when he is weaned, when he no longer has milk, observe what he begins to like to eat and not like to eat. The moment a child begins to take external nourishment, one can learn from him what one should give him. The moment one begins to urge him to eat what one thinks he should eat, at that moment his instinct is spoilt. One should give him the things for which he shows an instinctive liking. Naturally, if a fondness for something threatens to go too far, one has to dam it up—but then one must carefully observe what it is that one is damming up.

For instance, perhaps in your own opinion you are giving a child every nice thing, and yet the moment that child comes to the table he cannot help jumping up on his chair and leaning over the table to sneak a lump of sugar! That's something that must be regarded in the right way. For a child who jumps up on his chair to sneak a lump of sugar obviously has something the matter with his liver. Just the simple fact that he must sneak a bit of sugar, is a sign that his liver is not in order. Only those children sneak sugar who have something wrong with their livers—it is then actually cured by the sugar. The others are not interested in sugar; they ignore it. Naturally, such a performance can't be allowed to become a habit; but one must have understanding for it. And one can understand it in two directions.

You see, if a child is watching all the time and thinking, when will Father or Mother not be looking, so that I can take that sugar: then later he will sneak other things. If you satisfy the child, if you give him what he needs, then he doesn't become a thief. It is of great importance from a moral point of view whether one observes such things or not. It is very important, gentlemen.

And so the question that was asked just now must be answered in this way: One should observe carefully what a child likes and what he loathes, and not force him to eat what he does not like. If it happens, for instance, as it does with very many children, that he doesn't want to eat meat, then the fact is that the child gets intestinal toxins from meat and wants to avoid them. His instinct is right. Any child who can sit at a table where everyone else is eating meat and can refuse it has certainly the tendency to develop intestinal toxins from meat. These things must be considered.

You can see that science must become more refined. Science must become much more refined! Today it is far too crude. With those scales, with everything that is carried on in the laboratories, one can't really pursue pure science.

With nutrition, which is the thing particularly interesting us at this moment, it is really so, that one must acquire a proper understanding for the way it relates to the spirit. When people inquire in that direction, I often offer two examples. Think, gentlemen, of a journalist: how he has to think so much—and so much of it isn't even necessary. The man must think a great deal, he must think so many logical thoughts; it is almost impossible for any human being to have so many logical thoughts. And so you find that the journalist—or any other person who writes for a profession—loves coffee, quite instinctively. He sits in the coffee shop and drinks one cup after another, and gnaws at his pen so that something will come out that he can write down. Gnawing at his pen doesn't help him, but the coffee does, so that one thought comes out of another, one thought joins on to another.

And then look at the diplomats. If one thought joins on to another, if one thought comes out of another, that's bad for them! When diplomats are logical, they're boring. They must be entertaining. In society people don't like to be wearied by logical reasoning—“in the first place – secondly—thirdly”—and if the first and second were not there, the third and fourth would, of course, not have to be thought of! A Journalist can't deal with anything but finance in a finance article. But if you're a diplomat you can be talking about night clubs at the same time that you're talking about the economy of country X, then you can comment on the cream-puffs of Lady So-and-So, then you can jump to the rich soil of the colonies, after that, where the best horses are being bred, and so on. With a diplomat one thought must leap over into another. So anyone who is obliged to be a charming conversationalist follows his instinct and drinks lots of tea.

Tea scatters thoughts; it lets one jump into them. Coffee brings one thought next to another. If you must leap from one thought to another, then you must drink tea. And one even calls them “diplomat teas”!—while there sits the journalist in the coffee shop, drinking one cup of coffee after another. You can see what an influence a particular food or drink can have on our whole thinking process. It is so, of course, not just with those two beverages, coffee and tea; one might say, those are extreme examples. But precisely from those examples I think you can see that one must consider these things seriously. It is very important, gentlemen.

So, we'll meet again next Wednesday at nine o'clock.

• 11. The philosopher Karl Ludwig Michelet, 1801–1893, and the theologian and philosopher Eduard Zeller, 1814–1908. See Rudolf Steiner, Study of Man: General Education Course, Stuttgart, Aug. – Sept. 1919. Anthroposophic Press, New York. See also The Younger Generation: Educational and Spiritual impulses for Life in the Twentieth Century, Stuttgart, October 1922. Anthroposophic Press, New York.

A round room in the little house in the wood, described in the “Soul's Probation,” as Felix Balde's home. Dame Balde, Felix Balde, Capesius, Strader, are seen seated at a table on the left of the stage. Later appears the Soul of Theodora. The room is the natural colour of the wood and has two pretty arched windows.

Dame Balde:
We shall not know again her beauteous self
Or feel her radiant nature till we too
reach some day the world to which she hath
So early from our sight been stol'n away.
A few short weeks ago we still could hear
With joy in this our house the graciousness
That streamed so warmly through her every word.

Felix Balde:
We both, my wife Felicia, and myself,
Loved her indeed from out our inmost soul,
So can we share and understand thy grief.

Strader:
Dear Theodora, she so often spoke
Throughout the last hours of her life on earth
Of Dame Felicia and of Felix too;
She was so closely intimate with all
That life brought to you here from day to day.

Now must I grope my further path alone.
She was the sum and meaning of my life,
And what she gave, can never die for me.—
And yet—she is not here—

Felix Balde:
Yet can we still
With thee send out our loving thoughts to her
Into the spirit-worlds, and thus unite
Her soul with ours through all the days to come.
But, I must own, it was a shock to us
When we were told her life on Earth was o'er.
These many years there hath been granted me
A gift of insight which doth often show
In unexpected moments quite unsought
What inward strength doth lie in all men's lives;
In her case hath this gift deceived me sore.
For ne'er indeed could I think otherwise,
Except that Theodora would be spared
To spend on Earth for many years as yet
That love through which she hath in joy and grief
Shown herself helpful to so many men.

Strader:
'Tis very strange how all hath come to pass;
As long as I have known her, had she lived
Ever the same sound healthy mode of life.
But since the time she first became aware
Of Something strange, unknown, that threatened her
And tried to enter and oppress her mind,
She grew immersed in dark and sullen thought,
And suffering poured itself through all her life.
Her body's powers were sapped, as one could see
By some great struggle in her inmost soul.
She told me—when in my anxiety,—
I plied her oft with many questionings—
She felt herself exposed to fearful thoughts
Which frightened her and worked like fire within.
And what she said besides—'tis terrible,
For when she rallied all her powers of thought
To find the cause of all this suffering
There always came before her spirit's gaze
Thomasius ... whom we both honoured so,
And yet from this impression aye remained
The strongest feelings which spake clear to her
That she had cause to fear Thomasius.

Capesius (spoken as in a trance):
According to the strict decree of
Fate Thomasius and Theodora ne'er
Could meet in earthly passion in this life.
'Twould be indeed opposed to cosmic laws
If one desired to make the other feel
Aught that was not on spirit only based.
Within his heart Thomasius doth break
The stern decree of mighty powers of Fate:
That he must never harbour in his soul
Thoughts that might bring to Theodora harm.
For he doth feel what he ought not to feel
And, through his disobedience he doth form
E'en now the powers which can deliver o'er
His future life unto the realms of dark.
When Theodora had been forced to come
To Lucifer, she learnt unconsciously
That through the Light-bearer, Thomasius
Was filled with sensual passion for herself.
Maria, who had been by Fate's decree
Entrusted with Thomasius' spirit-life,
And Theodora, at the same time met
Within that realm which fights against the gods—
Maria from Thomasius had to part,
And he through strength of this false love was forced
To be in bondage unto Lucifer.
What Theodora thus experienced
Became consuming fire within her soul
And working further caused her all this pain.

Strader:
Oh tell us, Father Felix, what this means.
Capesius speaks in such a manner strange
Of things which are incomprehensible;
And yet they fill my soul with dread and fear.

Felix Balde:
Capesius, when treading o'er the path,
Which he hath found most needful for his soul
Learns ever more and more to exercise
Those special gifts of spirit which are his;
His spirit lives in touch with higher worlds
And passeth by unnoticed all those things
Through which the senses speak unto the soul.
'Tis but by habit that he doth perform.
All that hath been his custom in this life.
He still is wont to visit his old friends
And likes to while away long hours with them,
And yet whenever he is at their side
His being seems in meditation lost.
But what he sees in spirit aye is true
So far as mine own searching of the soul
Can testify to proving of the truth.
And therefore in this case I do believe
That owing to these spirit-gifts, he could
Perceive within the depths of his own soul
The truth of Theodora's destiny.

Dame Balde:
It is so strange, he never notices
What those around him may be mentioning;
It seems his soul is from his body loosed
And gazeth only on the spirit-world;
And yet some word will often bring him back
Out of this strange abstraction, and he'll tell
Of things that seem to come from spirit-realms
And somehow be connected with that word.
Apart from that, whatever one may say
Makes no impression on his mind at all.

Strader:
Ah! if he speaks the truth—how terrible—

(Theodora's Soul appears.)

Theodora's Soul:
Capesius hath been allowed to know
Of my existence in the spirit-world:
It is the truth which he makes known to you.
We must not let Thomasius transgress:
Maria hath already set alight
The sacrifice of love in her strong heart;
And Theodora from the spirit-heights
Will send out rays of blessing from Love's power.

Felix Balde:
Dear Strader, thou must now be calm and still;
She wants to speak to thee; I understand
The signs she gives to us: so now attend.

Theodora (after making a movement with her hand towards Strader):
Thomasius hath powers of seership,
And he will find me in the spirit-realms.
This must not be until he is set free
From earthly passions in his search for me.
In future he will also need thy help,
And that is what I now request of thee.

Strader:
My Theodora, who dost even now
Turn to me as of old in love, say on
What thou desirest, and it shall be done.

(Theodora makes a sign towards Capesius.)

Felix Balde:
That shows she cannot now say any more,
But wisheth us to hear Capesius speak.

(Theodora vanishes.)

Capesius (as in a trance):
Thomasius can Theodora see,
If he doth choose to use his spirit-eyes.
Therefore her death will not destroy in him
This passion which is harmful to himself.
Yet will he have to act quite otherwise
Than he would act if Theodora still
Lived in the body on this earth of ours.
He will with passion strive toward the light
Which is revealed to her from spirit-heights
Although she hath no knowledge of the earth.
Thomasius is set to win that light
That through him Lucifer may gain it too.
This light divine would then help Lucifer
To keep for evermore within his realm
The knowledge which Thomasius has won
Through earthly powers so successfully.
For Lucifer, since first the Earth began
Hath ever sought for men who have acquired
Wisdom divine through instincts that were false.
He wills now to unite pure spirit-sight
With human knowledge, which, if treated thus
Would turn to evil, though 'twere good itself.
Thomasius however even now
May be turned back from this his evil way,
If Strader gives himself to certain aims
Which shall in future spiritually guide
All human knowledge, that it may approach
And join itself to knowledge that's divine.
If he would have these aims revealed, he must
As pupil unto Benedictus turn.

(Pause.)

Strader (to Felix Balde):
O father Felix, give me thine advice.
Hath Theodora really trusted this
Unto Capesius to tell to me?

Felix Balde:
These last few days I have most earnestly
Held converse often with mine inmost self
To try to clear my thoughts about this man.
Gladly I'll tell thee all I know myself.
Capesius is living in true wise
The life of spirit-pupilship, although
From his behaviour it seems otherwise.
He is already destined by his fate
Much to accomplish in the spirit-life.
And only can fulfil the duties high
To which his soul hath been already called,
If he prepares his spirit for them now.
And yet it lay quite near his nature too,
Instead of seeking light on spirit-paths,
Unto false science to devote himself,
Which can just now make blind so many souls.
The solemn Guardian on the Threshold grim,
Which marks the world of sense from spirit-worlds,
Had duties of a most especial kind
When to the gate Capesius found his way.
To such an earnest seeker must the gate
Needs open, but behind him shut at once.
The means he used in former times to win
Power for himself within the world of sense
Could no more help him in the spirit-realms.
He best prepares himself for service high
Which he one day must render to mankind
When he ignores our presence and our talk.

Dame Balde:
There is but one thing he still notices.
I mean the stories that I used to tell
So often to him and through which he felt
Refreshed and reawakened to new thought
When his soul seemed bereft of all ideas.

Capesius:
Such stories find their way to spirit-lands
If in the spirit also they are told.

Dame Balde:
Then, if I can collect myself enough
To speak my stories out within myself
I'll think of thee with love: so that they then
May also in the spirit-land be heard.

Curtain

What every esoteric is heartily interested in is success for his meditative efforts. Everyone is successful, even if he doesn't notice it. Budding esoterics often complain about pains. These pains are disorders that arise in the body because the physical and etheric bodies aren't in the right contact with each other. These pains were already there before, except that the man hadn't felt them since he was coarser and more robust. He feels them now as an esoteric since he's finer and more sensitive. An esoteric must learn to bear such pains. Of course one has to know whether or not the disease should be treated.

Why is it that one knows one's physical body so little? Because one lives in it and only perceives it with one's feelings. One sees with one's eyes and so one can't observe them. Once an esoteric gets to the point where he withdraws from the physical with his soul and spirit he'll be able to observe his physical body. We're helped to do this if we concentrate our thoughts on a point as much as possible and then immerse our self in this point and live in it for awhile. A strengthening of thought power occurs through such concentration and thereby one can gradually get to the point of observing one's physical body.

Then we must become familiar with our etheric body. This is more difficult, for the etheric body does not have a skin like the physical body—it's a fine tissue that sends out its streams everywhere into the outer world and it's imprinted by everything that goes on in the outer world, often without the man's knowledge. One learns to feel the etheric body by doing the second auxiliary exercise. It's outer impressions that ordinarily drive a man to act. He sees a flower on a meadow, and he stretches out a hand to pick it because it pleases him. But as esoterics we must get to the point of doing this or that out of an impulse that we give ourselves. Then one will see that it's the etheric body that induces the hand to move. One feels that one's etheric body awakens in this way. Through this awakening etheric body one gradually learns to experience oneself in an etheric world. Every time I grab something or bump into it this is really an attack on the outer world. A non-esoteric has no inkling of this for the Guardian of the Threshold protects him from this knowledge, but an esoteric makes his etheric body increasingly independent so that it experiences itself in the etheric world. His organs get finer and he gets the feeling that spaces aren't only filled with physical objects but by countless elemental beings who make themselves noticed through bumping, pricking and burning. One must make room for oneself everywhere in this elemental, etheric world by stretching out, withdrawing, pushing, striding forwards, etc., and such movements must occur with the full consciousness that one wants to make them out of one's own being. That's the second thing: initiative actions. One without an initiative will who can't make room for himself in the etheric world can do just as little there as one who wants to dance on a stage that has chairs standing all over it. The chairs must be removed first. That's what one learns in the spiritual realm through the second exercise. We must do just the opposite to become aware of our astral body. We must hold back desires that are living in the astral body, we must develop equanimity with respect to them. We must create absolute calm in us. Only then do we feel the outer astral world bumping into our inner astral world. Just as we bump into the etheric world by reaching into it by ourselves in our will, so we feel the outer astral world by remaining quiet in ourselves, by quieting all wishes and desires. Before the astral body gets to this point it stuns itself with a cry. We know that pain arises when the physical and etheric bodies aren't in the right contact with each other. The astral body feels this as pain. A small child cries when he feels pain. He tries to drown out the pain by crying. An adult might say “ouch.” If a man could let his pain stream completely into the sound's vibrations changes would arise in the etheric body's formation through sound oscillations so that he would become unconscious and feel no pain. But the good Gods made men weaker, and that's good, otherwise there would be no pain and also no articulated speech. An esoteric must get to the point where he can bear pain and everything else that's stimulated in him from outside with equanimity. Then he won't attack the outer world, but it'll attack him. Since he has developed complete calm the attacks only touch his physical and etheric bodies, and the astral body remains untouched. It becomes free and one can observe it. So I get to know my astral body through the equanimity exercise. Finally I must also get to know my ego. I can't feel my ego, because I'm living in it. That's why we must pour it out into the world. I become familiar with my ego through what we call positivity. If we look at a rotting dog's beautiful teeth like Christ Jesus did then we don't see the ugliness, but we dive down so far into everything that we arrive at the good. Thereby we get away from our ego and can observe it. The ego is love and will. Through the developed will we get to know the substance of all things that originate in the divine world. Through love we learn to experience the essence of things. Thus through will and love we press forward to cognition that's free of the personal ego. As a spiritual ego we learn to dive down into the being and substance of all things that come from the spiritual Father ground; that includes our own ego. Our ego looks at us from all created things. The pupil attains the swan stage when he can experience that. At the fifth stage we develop spirit self or manas. There we mustn't cling to what we previously saw, heard and learned. We must learn to ignore all of that, to receive what approaches us as if we were completely emptied of previous things. Manas can only be developed if one learns to feel that everything that we acquired through our own thinking is of little value in comparison with what we can acquire when we open ourselves to the thoughts that stream in out of the cosmos that was woven by the Gods. Everything that surrounds us arose from these thoughts of the Gods. We hadn't been able to find them through our previous thinking. The things concealed them for us. Now we get an inkling of the divine that's behind everything like a hidden riddle. We begin to see how few of these riddles we had fathomed. And we find that we really have to remove everything that we've learned so far from our soul, that we must approach everything quite open-mindedly, like a child—that the divine riddles that surround us are only given to the open-mindedness of the soul. The soul must become childlike to be able to press into the kingdoms of heaven. Then hidden wisdom or manas streams towards the childlike soul like a gift of grace from the spiritual world.

A man doesn't have to go further, since he makes contact with the spiritual world through these five stages. Through continual repetition of these five exercises a harmony of interaction between the various capacities that are to be attained through them must now be produced. This is brought about by the sixth exercise.

These exercises are of the very greatest importance. A soul can find its way into spiritual worlds through them. You'll find references to these five exercises everywhere in the books and lectures. And no esoteric class would have to take place if everyone read them attentively and awakened the forces of these exercises to life in his soul. They serve as a support for the specially given exercises.

An esoteric must be very attentive even to the smallest things. He must observe everything conscientiously in a quite different way than it's done in the physical world, as soon as he approaches spiritual worlds. For things in the spiritual realm are much more subtle and fine than in the physical one. That's why an esoteric must keep on doing these exercises and repeatedly rouse himself to new efforts and observations, for otherwise he can't get insights into the spiritual world. And an esoteric must especially be patient. Many people think that after they've exercised for a short time they should then get into the spiritual world, that all portals to it will be open to them. But just consider that a significant impulse or idea takes 19 years to be inwardly well grasped and understood. If an esoteric thinks that after some exercising he'll soon be mature enough for entry into spiritual worlds, then it's as if a child who'd just learned to speak would say: It's boring to have to wait for years until I become a man. I want to be a man right away.

Another thing that one has to learn in esoteric life is truthfulness. One who hasn't already learned it in physical life will have a lot of trouble in his ascent into the spiritual world since he must leave his logical thinking and everything that's connected with the intellect behind, and he's not corrected by facts in the spiritual world as he is here in the physical world. The good Gods wanted to educate man to be truthful when they placed him in the physical world, where every lie—that is, everything that doesn't correspond to the facts—is corrected by facts. The inclination for truthfulness can only be acquired in the physical world and not in the spiritual one. Finally an esoteric must try to habitually acquire a good memory. The etheric body is the preserver of memory, but without the physical body it wouldn't be able to preserve it very well. The nerves get an impression and this must be written into the physical body. The latter is as it were the recording apparatus for what a man wants to retain. And when he wants to remember something he penetrates the physical body with the etheric body to the place where what's supposed to be remembered is inscribed, the memory picture becomes alive and the man reads it from the physical body. Students repeat something they have to memorize until it has been inscribed. Then it may happen that when they for instance learn: “There stood a castle so high and grand” ... they press it forcibly into the physical body with the help of the sounds.

Such inscribing and reading must become habitual in the sense that it becomes an inner habit to permeate all of one's deeds with attentiveness and reflection.

One can't use the physical body as a memory organ for spiritual experiences; habitual activities must replace it. We must summon the nuance of feeling that belongs to this before our soul.

The content of what flows to a meditator when he makes himself empty after a meditation—also of the meditation's influence—is a matter of merit. A meditation will never be the same twice. What flows to us will depend upon our morality, love of truth, and on how we've lived since the last meditation. If we didn't remain entirely truthful or if we've let anger or aggravation arise in us, then nothing from the spiritual world can stream into us. We get what we deserve. If we trace these things attentively we'll always find the reason why we weren't graced with the spirit in some untruth, in some surging up of anger, or the like.

Through occult study, undertaken in the appropriate way, it is possible in our time to learn, as it were, what might be called the Fifth Gospel. If you turn your souls to some of what has been said over the years in relation to the Mystery of Golgotha, you will also have encountered, among some of what has been said to explain the four Gospels, something that is not in the Gospels as a message about the life of Christ Jesus. From the series of facts mentioned in this regard, I will mention only the story of the two Jesus boys. But there are many other things that can be found today in the purely spiritual records and that are important for our time. It is so important for our time that it seems desirable for the prepared souls to get to know it little by little. For the time being, however, what is told from these sources must remain within our circle. But it may nevertheless be understood as if it were destined to pour into the souls of our present time in such a way that one receives a much more vivid picture of the work of Christ Jesus than has been possible until now.

If you take what I said in the introduction to the first lecture, you will have gathered from it the impression that in our time a much more conscious grasp of the figure of Christ Jesus is necessary than was the case for earlier times. If it should be objected that it would be contrary to the Christian development to bring forward something new about the life of Christ Jesus, then it is only necessary to recall the end of the Gospel of John, where it expressly says that in the Gospels the things that have happened are only partially recorded, and that the world could not bear the books that would be necessary if everything that has happened were to be recorded. From such things one can receive the courage and strength to actually do what is necessary in an age to present new facts about the life of Christ Jesus. And one can know from such things that it is only narrow-mindedness when something is said against such a presentation.

Now I would like to recall what I have often stated here in this place: that at the beginning of our era two Jesus children were born. We already know this, and we also know that the one of the two Jesus boys was born in such a way that the I, the spirit-being of Zarathustra, was embodied in him, and that this Jesus boy then lived with this spirit-being of Zarathustra until about the age of twelve, until that the point in time that the Gospel of Luke describes in such a way that the parents led Jesus to Jerusalem, then lost him, and that he was found among the scribes, to whom he interpreted the teachings in a way that amazed them and the parents, and which they themselves were called to interpret. I have drawn attention to the fact that this scene, as described in the Gospel of Luke, in reality indicates that the ego of Zarathustra, which had lived for about twelve years in the one Jesus child, moved over into the other Jesus child, now also twelve years old, , who until then had been of a completely different nature; so that we now have that Jesus-child who comes from the Nathanic line of the house of David, and who did not have the Zarathustra-ego within him until the twelfth year, but from now on has it within him.

It is now possible, by means of what I have often spoken of and which can be described as reading in the Akashic Records, to gain further insights into the life of the Jesus child, now endowed with the Zarathustra ego. In doing so, one can distinguish three periods in the life of this Jesus. The first period extends roughly from the age of twelve to eighteen, the second from eighteen to twenty-four, and the third from about the age of twenty-four to the moment marked by the baptism of John in the Jordan, that is, to around the age of thirty.

Let us imagine that this Jesus, who was now twelve years old and had the Zarathustra ego within him, presents himself before the scribes of the Israelite people as an individual who has an elementary knowledge of the essence of Jewish doctrine and the essence of ancient Hebrew law, and that he is able to speak about it in an appropriate way. So this ancient Hebrew world lived in the soul of that Jesus-child. All that had come down in the way of knowledge about the relation of the Hebrew people to their God, which is usually understood as the proclamation of the God of the Hebrew people to Moses, lived in him. If we speak in sketchy terms, we can therefore say: A rich treasure from the holy teaching of what was in the Hebrew people lived in Jesus; and with this treasure, with this knowledge, he lived, doing his father's trade, in Nazareth, devoted to what he knew so well, processing it in his soul.

Now the Akasha Chronicle research shows us how, for him, what he knew in this way became a source of various mental doubts and mental pains, how he felt, especially in the deepest sense, more and more thoroughly and with severe inner struggles of the soul , how once, in quite different times of human evolution, a grandiose proclamation, a grandiose revelation flowed down from the spiritual worlds into the souls of those who, endowed with quite different soul powers, could receive such a teaching. It was especially brought home to the soul of Jesus that there had once been people with quite different soul powers who could look up to the revealing spiritual powers and understand in a completely different way what was revealed there than the later generation to which he himself belonged, the derived one, which had less soul powers to lead up in order to process what had once been led down. Often the moment came when he said to himself: All this was once proclaimed, one can still know it today; but one can no longer grasp it as fully as those who received it at the time grasped it. And the more of this was revealed to him inwardly, the more of it he was able to grasp in his soul, as he now received it when he stood before the Jewish scribes and interpreted their own law to them, the more he felt the inability of the souls of his time to find their way into what was ancient Hebrew revelation. Therefore, the people, the souls of his time, the peculiarities of these souls of his time seemed to him like the descendants of people who had once received great revelations, but who could no longer reach up to this revelation. What had once been brightly and warmly drawn into these souls, he could often tell himself, now faded, and in many ways seemed dull, while the souls had felt it in the deepest sense before. This is how he felt about much of what now emerged more and more in his soul through inspiration.

This was the life of his soul from the age of twelve to eighteen, that she penetrated deeper and deeper into Jewish teaching, and could be less and less satisfied by it, yes, that it caused him more and more pain and suffering. It fills the soul with the deepest tragic feeling when one considers how Jesus of Nazareth had to suffer because of what had become of an ancient sacred teaching in a later generation. And often, as he sat there quietly dreaming and pondering, he said to himself: “The teaching once descended, the revelation once given to men; but now men are no longer here to comprehend it! This sketchily characterizes the spiritual mood of Jesus of Nazareth. This was at work in the contemplation of his soul in those moments that remained to him during the time he spent as a craftsman, as a carpenter or joiner in Nazareth.

Then came the time from the age of eighteen to twenty-four, when he traveled around in nearby and somewhat more distant areas. He not only touched places in Palestine, but also outside Palestine, while working in his trade in a wide variety of places. During these years, in which the human soul, so freshly surrendered, absorbs much from its surroundings, he got to know many people and many human attitudes, and learned how human souls lived with what remained for them as an ancient and sacred teaching, that is, with what they could understand of it. And it is understandable from the outset that on a mind that had been through six years of what I just told, all the inner joys, sufferings, and disappointments weighing on the soul, had to make a very different impression than on the minds of other people. Every soul was a mystery for him that he had to solve; but every soul was also something that told him that it was waiting for something that had to come.

Among the various regions he touched, there were also some that belonged to the paganism of that time. One scene in particular made a deep impression on us, gleaming out of the spiritual painting of his wanderings inside and outside Palestine during the period from his eighteenth to his twenty-fourth year. There we see him arriving at a pagan place of worship, a pagan place of worship such as was built to the pagan gods under this or that name in Asia, Africa and Europe. It was one of those places of worship whose ceremonies were reminiscent of the way in which they were also practiced in the mysteries, but there they were practiced with understanding, whereas in these pagan places of worship they had often degenerated into a kind of external ceremony. But there was one such place of worship that Jesus of Nazareth came to that was abandoned by its priests, where the cult was no longer practiced. It was in a region where people lived in need and misery, in sickness and toil; their place of worship was abandoned by the priests. But when Jesus of Nazareth came to this place of worship, the people gathered around him, the people who were often plagued by illness, misery and need, but who were especially plagued by the thought: This is the place where we once gathered, where the priests sacrificed with us and showed us the effect of the gods; now we stand before the abandoned place of worship.

A peculiar trait in the soul of Jesus comes to the spiritual observer. On other walks, it could be seen that Jesus was received everywhere in a very special way. The basic mood of his soul spread something that had a mild and beneficial effect on the people in whose circles he was able to stay. He traveled from place to place, worked here and there in this or that carpenter's workshop, and then sat with the people with whom he talked. Every word he spoke was understood in a special way, because it was spoken in a very special way; it was imbued with the mildness and benevolence of the heart. Not so much the what, but the how, cast something like a magic spell over the souls of men. Everywhere warm relations were formed with the wanderer. They did not take him like any other person; they saw something special shining from his eyes, and they felt something special speaking from his heart.

And so it was as if in the people who stood around their altar in hardship and misery and need and saw a stranger had come, as if in every soul the thought had come to life: a priest has come to us who now wants to perform the sacrifice at the altar again! That was the mood that surrounded him, caused by the impression his arrival made. It was as if he had appeared to the heathens as a priest who would perform their sacrifice again.

And behold, as he stood there before the assembled crowd, he felt, at a certain moment, as if he had been transported, as if he had been brought into a special state of mind – and he saw something terrible! He saw, at the altar and among the crowd that was gathering around him in ever greater numbers, what can be called demons, and he recognized what these demons meant. He recognized how the pagan sacrifices had gradually developed into something that magically attracted such demons. And so, when Jesus came to the altar, not only the people had come, but also the demons that had gathered at the altar during the earlier sacrifices. For this he recognized: that although such pagan sacrifices originated from what could be done in the old pagan times and at good places of worship to the true gods, insofar as they were recognizable for the pagan times, but that these sacrifices had gradually fallen into decline. The secrets had degenerated, and instead of the sacrifices flowing to the gods, these sacrifices and the thoughts of the priests attracted demons, Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces, which he now saw around him again, after he had been transported to a different state of consciousness. And when those gathered around him had seen how he had been transported into this other state of consciousness and had therefore fallen, they fled. But the demons remained.

In a more urgent way than the decline of the old Hebrew teaching, the decline of the pagan mysteries had thus come before the soul of Jesus of Nazareth. From the age of twelve to eighteen, he had experienced within himself how that which was once given to humanity so that it warmed and enlightened the soul could no longer work and thus led to a certain desolation of the soul. Now he saw how the old beneficent workings of the gods had been replaced by demonic workings of a Luciferian and Ahrimanian kind. He saw the decay of paganism in what he had spiritually perceived around him. Imagine these experiences of the soul, this way of learning what had become of the influence of the old gods and of people's intercourse with the old gods; imagine the feeling that is produced in this way: humanity must thirst for the new, for it becomes wretched in its soul if nothing new comes!

And Jesus of Nazareth had, after the demons had, so to speak, beheld him and then followed the fleeing man, a kind of vision, a vision of which we shall speak again, in which the process of human development resounded to him from the spiritual heights in a special way. He had the vision of what I will share in a future lecture, which is like a kind of macrocosmic Lord's Prayer. He felt what had once been proclaimed to humanity in the pure Word, as pure Logos.

When Jesus of Nazareth returned home from this journey, it was around the time – as spiritual research suggests – that the father of Jesus of Nazareth had died. In the following years, from the age of twenty-four until the time marked as that of John the Baptist in the Jordan, Jesus of Nazareth became acquainted with what can be called the Essene doctrine and the Essene community. The Essenes were a community that had set up their headquarters in a valley in Palestine. The central headquarters was in a remote location. But the Essenes had branches everywhere; there was also something of a branch in Nazareth. The Essenes had set themselves the task of developing a particular way of life, a particular spiritual life, which was to be in harmony with the external life, whereby the soul could develop to a higher point of view of experience, whereby it could come into a kind of community with the spiritual world. In certain degrees one ascended to that which the Essene community wanted to give its members, its co-confessors, as the highest: a kind of union with the higher world.

The Essenes had thus developed something that was intended to cultivate the human soul in such a way that it could grasp what could no longer be grasped through the natural course of human development: the ancient connection with the divine spiritual world. The Essenes sought to achieve this through strict rules that also applied to their external way of life. They sought to achieve this by strictly withdrawing, as it were, from contact with the external world. Such an Essene had no personal property. The Essenes had come together from all possible parts of the world at that time. But anyone who wanted to become an Essene had to give up what possessions he had to the Essene community; only the Essene community had possessions, property. So if someone in a particular place owned property and wanted to become an Essene, he handed over the house and whatever land it included to the Essene community. This meant that the community had property in a wide variety of places. There was a peculiar principle in the Essene community that would certainly cause offence today, given our views, but which was necessary for the Essenes to achieve what they wanted. They cultivated the life of the soul by devoting themselves to a pure life, a life of devotion to wisdom, but also a charitable life of love. Thus, wherever they went - and they wandered around the world to fulfill their task - they performed good deeds. Part of their teaching was healing the sick. They practiced healing everywhere in the manner of that time. But they also did a lot of material charity. And there that principle was in force, which cannot be imitated in our present social order, and probably should not be imitated: an Essene could support anyone he considered in need, but not a family member.

The goal of the Essenes was to perfect the soul in order to reconnect it to the spiritual world. This goal was designed to keep the temptations of Ahriman and Lucifer from approaching the soul of the Essenes. We could also characterize the Essene ideal by saying that the Essene tried to keep away from himself everything that can be called Luciferic and Ahrimanic temptations. He tried to live in such a way that what is Ahrimanic drawing down into sensuality, into the outer world, into materialistic life, could not approach him at all. But he also tried to live a life of bodily purity so that the temptations and temptations arising from the soul could not affect this soul. So he tried to lead such a life that Lucifer and Ahriman could not reach the Essene soul.

The way Jesus of Nazareth developed led to a relationship with the Essenes that would not have been possible with any other person, and would not have been possible at all in the years I am talking about here, if he had not become an Essene himself. Jesus of Nazareth was even allowed to enter the most sacred and lonely rooms at the central place of the Essenes, as far as that was at all possible within the strict rules of the Essene order, and was allowed to hold conversations with the Essenes that they otherwise only held among themselves. In the process, he was able to familiarize himself with the deepest rules of the Essenes. Thus he came to know how the individual Essene felt and strove and lived, and above all, he learned to feel – and this is something of what it comes down to – what existed as the furthest possibility for a soul of his time, to penetrate again through perfection to the ancient sacred revelation. He came to know all of this.

One day, when he left the Essene assembly, he had a momentous experience. As he went out of the gate of the secluded Essene dwelling, he saw two figures fleeing from either side of the gate, and he sensed that they were Lucifer and Ahriman. And more often this was repeated to him like a similar vision. The Essenes were, after all, a very numerous order of people. They had their settlements everywhere in the way I have described. Therefore, they were also respected as such in a certain way, although they led their social life in a very different way than the other people of that time. The cities they visited made special gates for them; because the Essene was not allowed to go through a gate where there was a picture on it. If he wanted to enter a city and came to a gate where there was an image, he had to turn back and enter the city at a different place where there was no image. This played a certain role in the entire system of the Essene doctrine of perfection, because it was the case that nothing of a legendary, mythical or religious nature was allowed to be depicted in the image. The Essene wanted to flee from the Luciferian aspect of pictorial impulses. So it was that on his wanderings, Jesus of Nazareth came to know the imageless Essene communities. And again and again, at these imageless Essene communities, he saw how Lucifer and Ahriman had placed themselves there as invisible images where visible images were frowned upon. These were significant experiences in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

What did these significant experiences lead to for him in connection with the numerous conversations he was able to have with the Essenes, who had attained a high level of perfection? It led to something that was again extremely depressing, deeply, deeply depressing for his soul, which caused him endless torment and pain. It occurred to him that he had to say to himself: Yes, there is a strictly closed community; there are people who strive to get in touch with the spiritual powers, with the divine spiritual world, in the present. So there is still something among people in the present that seeks to regain this connection. But at what cost? The fact that this community of the Essenes led a life that other people could not lead. For if all men had led the life of the Essenes, the life of the Essenes would not have been possible. And now a connection occurred to him that had an extremely depressing effect on his soul: Where do Lucifer and Ahriman flee to, he said to himself, when they flee from the gates of the Essenes? They flee to where the souls of other people are! So that is what humanity had come to: a community that had to separate itself if it wanted to find a connection to the divine spiritual world. And because they set themselves apart, because they set themselves apart in such a way that they can only develop in their entire social cohesion by excluding other people from themselves, they condemn other people, only to sink all the deeper into what they, this Essene community, fled. The fact that the Essene community rose meant that the others had to fall all the more! Because the Essene led a life in which Lucifer and Ahriman could not come into contact with him, Ahriman and Lucifer were able to come to the other people precisely by tempting and enticing them.

That was Jesus of Nazareth's experience with an esoteric order. What could be experienced in his time with Jewish law had already been experienced in his soul in earlier years. What the pagan cults of his time had come to, he had also experienced in his soul in earlier years, when the world of demons had come before his soul at a significant moment. Now he had to experience at what cost humanity of his time had to seek its approach to the divine-spiritual secrets of the world. Thus we live in a time – that came bitterly before his soul – in which those who seek the connection with the Divine-Spiritual must do so in close community and at the expense of other people. Thus we live in a time in which the cry of longing for such a connection with the Divine-Spiritual World can become all people's. That had weighed heavily on his soul.

And as this lay so heavily on his soul, he once had a spiritual conversation with the soul of the Buddha within the Essene community. The whole way of life of the Essene community was very similar to the way of life that Buddha had brought into the world. And Jesus saw himself face to face with Buddha and heard himself saying of Buddha: 'The path that I have given to mankind cannot bring the connection with the divine spiritual world to all people; for I have founded a teaching that, if it is to be understood and experienced in its higher aspects, makes necessary such a separation as is contained in this teaching. With the utmost clarity and force, Jesus of Nazareth realized that Buddha had founded a teaching that presupposes that, in addition to those who profess the innermost part of this teaching, there must be other people who cannot profess this innermost part. For how could Buddha and his disciples have gone with an offering bowl in hand and collected alms if there had not been people who could have given them alms? He now heard from Buddha that his teaching was not one that every person in every situation in life could develop.

The possibilities for development that existed in his time were experienced by Jesus of Nazareth in the three periods of his life before his baptism in the Jordan by John the Baptist. He did not experience them in the way that one learns something, but in the way that one experiences something when one comes into direct, very close contact with these things. He had come into very close contact with the ancient Jewish law when it had flashed up in him in an inspirational way, and he had been able to experience within himself something like an echo of the revelations that had been made to Moses and the prophets. But he had also been able to experience how it was no longer possible for a soul of his time, with the physical organization of that time, to fully grasp these things. Different times had come than those in which one could fully absorb the ancient Jewish law. And how the decline of the pagan mysteries had brought about the demonic world, he had also experienced through the closest contact, through an experience in the supersensible world, in which he had summoned not only the people who had been plunged into need and misery by the ruined place of worship, but also the demons who had gathered around the sacrificial site instead of the good old pagan powers. And how it was impossible for man, in spite of the demands of the coming time, to learn anything of the deepest secret knowledge of the Essene order, he had experienced during the six years before the baptism of St. John.

What one gains in this area from the contemplation of the Akasha Chronicle is the realization that here, through inner spiritual experience, something has been suffered that could never have been suffered by any other soul on earth. Perhaps there is not full understanding in our time for this very word that I have just spoken. Therefore, I would like to interject something here. In the further course of the messages from the Fifth Gospel, I will have to explain how these sufferings increased tremendously in the time between John the Baptist's baptism in the Jordan and the Mystery of Golgotha. Our time could easily object: But why should such a high soul suffer at all? Because our time has strange ideas about these things. And when I come to discuss the full depth of Jesus' suffering and, later, of Christ's, I must draw your attention to many misunderstandings that arise.

I have already mentioned several times, including here, that a book by Maurice Maeterlinck has recently been published, “On Death”, which should be read for the sake of seeing how absurdities such a person, who has otherwise also written good things in the field of spiritual life, can write. Among many absurdities, Maeterlinck's book also asserts that a spirit that has no body cannot suffer because only a physical body can suffer. From this Maeterlinck draws the conclusion that a person who has left his body cannot suffer in the spiritual world. Anyone who thinks like this could easily come to the conclusion that the Christ-being, after it had entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth, could not suffer. Nevertheless, I will have to describe next time the deepest suffering of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

It is certainly strange how a person with sound reason can believe that a physical body can suffer. After all, only the soul in the physical body can suffer, because the physical body cannot have pain and suffering. What pain and suffering is, is located in the soul-spiritual part of a body, and physical pain is precisely that which is caused by irregularities of the physical organism. Insofar as the physical organism is an organism, they are irregularities. You can have a strained muscle in it and so on; but the physical body, the physical organization, does not suffer, even if matter is dragged from one place to another. Just as a straw bag cannot suffer when the straw is thrown around, so a physical body cannot suffer. But because a spiritual-soul being is in the body, the spiritual-soul part suffers from the fact that something is not as it should be. So it is the spiritual-soul part that suffers; and it is always the spiritual-soul part. And the higher the spiritual-soul stands, the more it can suffer, and the higher it stands, the more it can suffer from spiritual-soul impressions.

I say this so that you can try to form an impression, a feeling, of how the Zarathustra essence suffered during these years from the experience that the old revelations have become impossible for what the human soul needs in modern times. First of all, there was the infinite suffering that confronts us, which cannot be compared to any suffering on earth, when we look at the part of the life of Jesus of Nazareth that we are considering today in the manner of the Akasha Chronicle.

At the end of the period that I last characterized, Jesus of Nazareth had a conversation with his mother. This conversation with the mother was decisive for what he now undertook: the path to the one with whom he had already entered into a kind of relationship through his relationship with the Essene order, which he undertook as a walk to John the Baptist. I will talk about this conversation with the mother, which is then decisive for what follows in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, next time.

Let me say in conclusion today: consider the messages of this Fifth Gospel as something that is given as well as it can be given, because the spiritual forces of our time require that a number of souls know about these things from now on. But also consider what is given with a certain reverence. For I have already mentioned here how wild the external spiritual life in Germany became, even among the most honest thinkers, at the moment when a publication was first made only about the two Jesus children. Such things, which are taken from the spiritual world, which come directly from spiritual research, the public outside our movement cannot yet tolerate them at all. And the things come to meet one in the most varied ways, which are perceptible like a wild passion, and which want to ward off something that comes out of the spiritual world like a new proclamation. It is not necessary that through careless chatter these things be also belittled and ridiculed, as has happened to the story of the two Jesus children, for these things should be sacred to us.

It is actually not at all easy to talk about these things in the present, precisely in view of the fact that these things are most strongly resisted. And basically it is, after all, what I have often characterized: the infinite laziness of the human soul in our time, which does not want to go into the details of spiritual research and therefore does not want to gain any insight into the possibility of coming to such things. It is already the case in the present that, on the one hand, the longing for revelations from the spiritual world lies hidden in the depths of the human soul, and that, on the other hand, the conscious part of the human soul in our time becomes most passionately negative when such revelations from the spiritual world are spoken of.

Consider the words I said at the end of today's reflection and take them as a guide to how we want the things we speak about in the Fifth Gospel to be taken.

Those who look at the historical development of humanity only in terms of the sequence of cause and effect, as is customary today, will not be able to gain from history itself that which it can be in terms of forces, of impulses for the individual human being, if one tries to penetrate into the true essence of this historical becoming. Historical development can only reveal itself to someone who is able to perceive a wise working through the succession of facts. Today it is almost the case that one is of the opinion that anyone who sees a wise event in the context of the world and especially in the historical development of humanity is indulging in superstition and attributing to things something that only he himself has thought up. However, one must not impose one's own ideas onto things. One must not force one's way of thinking onto things, but one must try to let things speak for themselves. If one is open enough, one will perceive something like an active wisdom everywhere in historical development, especially at significant turning points in human evolution.

Now, one of the things that has emerged from history is, above all, the establishment of the individual festive days of the year, especially the great festive days. It is striking when we realize that Christmas is a so-called fixed feast, falling every year near the winter solstice, on December 24 and 25. In contrast to this, Easter is a so-called movable feast, which appears to be arranged according to the constellation of the sun and moon, the observation of which is thus, to a certain extent, brought in from the extra-terrestrial cosmos. It is the case that if a person takes these festive days of the year seriously, they have a meaning for their life, they are significant in their life. That is what they should be. Meaningful, penetrating thoughts should arise on these festive days. Profound feelings and emotions should well up from the heart and soul. It is precisely through what we experience inwardly during such festive seasons that we should feel connected to the passage of time and to that which is effective in the course of time.

Now, these festive seasons have been fixed for certain historical reasons, and one has to reflect on such a fact that Christmas is an immovable festival and Easter is a movable one, that Christmas falls at a time when the earth is, so to speak, most closed off from the influences of the extraterrestrial cosmos. When the sun has the least effect on the earth, when the earth, out of its own forces, which it has retained from the summer and autumn season, produces its own covering for the shortest days, when the earth, out of itself, makes what it can with its own forces with the least influence from the cosmos, we celebrate Christmas. |

When the time begins again when the earth experiences the most significant influences from the extraterrestrial cosmos, when the warmth of the sun, the light of the sun, causes vegetation to grow out of the ground, when heaven, so to speak, works together with the earth to weave the earth's garment, then we celebrate Easter. And in that such conceptions have emerged from the thoughts of humanity, not in an abstract way conceived by the one or the other arbitrarily, but from thoughts that have, as it were, permeated humanity through long epochs, that have developed themselves, into the historical evolution something has flowed that, when recognized, at the same time evokes the possibility of deeply venerating it, the possibility of looking back to the times of our ancestors with reverence, devotion, and love. And by drawing attention to something like this, one can indeed say: Contemplation of the active wisdom in historical becoming allows those forces and impulses to emerge from this history that can then, in the right way, become rooted in the human soul and work in the human soul in the right way.

Christmas, as we celebrate it today at the shortest time of the year, on December 24th and 25th, has only been celebrated in the Christian Church since the year 354. It is not usually thought about in a forceful way that even in Christian-Catholic Rome in the year 353, Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Christ, was not celebrated on that day. It is one of the most interesting aspects of historical reflection to see how this Christmas celebration has become established, out of a historical instinct and from deeper sources of wisdom, which may have worked largely unconsciously.

Something similar, but fundamentally different, was celebrated before: January 6, which was the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ. And this Feast of the Epiphany of Christ meant the remembrance of the baptism of John in the Jordan. This Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated in the first centuries of Christianity as the most important. And only from the time I have indicated does the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ, the Feast of the Baptism of John in the Jordan, so to speak, wander through the twelve holy nights back to December 25 and is replaced by the Feast of the Birthday of Christ Jesus. This is connected with deep, meaningful inner processes of the historical development of Christianity.

What does the fact that in the first centuries of the Christian worldview the memory of the baptism of John in the Jordan was celebrated indicate? What does this baptism of John in the Jordan mean? This baptism of John in the Jordan signifies that from the heights of heaven, for extraterrestrial, cosmic reasons, the entity of the Christ descends and unites with the entity of the man Jesus of Nazareth. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan therefore signifies a fertilization of the earth from cosmic expanses. This baptism of St. John in the Jordan signifies an interpenetration of heaven and earth. And in celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, we celebrated a supersensible birth, the birth of the Christ in the thirty-year-old man Jesus.

In the first centuries of Christian development, attention was focused primarily on the appearance of Christ on earth, and of less importance, alongside this view of the appearance of an extraterrestrial Christ-being in the earthly realm, was the earthly birth of the man Jesus of Nazareth, who only received the Christ in his own body when he was thirty years old. This was the conception in the early centuries of Christianity. In these centuries, therefore, the descent of the supermundane Christ was celebrated. And an attempt was made to understand what had actually happened in the course of his incarnation.

If we allow the historical development up to the Mystery of Golgotha to take effect on us, it presents itself in such a way that in primeval times humanity was endowed with an original wisdom of a supersensible kind, an original wisdom that one must have the deepest reverence for if one is able to contemplate it in its entire inwardness, in its entire essence. In the first, only externally childlike appearing wisdom of mankind, an infinite amount is revealed not only about the earthly, but above all about the extra-earthly, and how the extra-earthly affects the earth. Then one sees how, in the course of the development of mankind, this light of primeval wisdom shines less and less in human minds, how people increasingly lose touch with this primeval wisdom. And this primeval wisdom has faded and disappeared from the human mind precisely in the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. All phenomena of historical development in Greek and especially in Roman life show in the most diverse ways that precisely the best of humanity were aware that a new heavenly element must enter into earthly life so that the earth and humanity could continue to develop.

For the unprejudiced observer, the entire evolution of mankind on earth falls into two parts: the time that waited for the Mystery of Golgotha, waited not only in the simple, childlike minds of men, but waited with the highest wisdom — and in the part that then follows on from the Mystery of Golgotha, in which we are immersed and for which we hope for an ever broader and broader fulfillment, again in the supersensible world, again in the influence of the extraterrestrial cosmic reality on earthly events within the evolution of the earth. Thus the Mystery of Golgotha stands at the very center of earthly evolution, giving it its true meaning.

I have often tried to express this pictorially for my listeners by saying that one should look at something like the significant painting by Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper in Milan, which unfortunately no longer exists in its artistic perfection. How one sees the Redeemer within His Twelve, how one sees Him contrasted on one side with John and on the other with Judas, and how one then has the whole thing before one in its coloring. And here, precisely with regard to this most characteristic image, when contemplating the Mystery of Golgotha, one must say: If any being were to come down to Earth from a foreign heavenly body, it would in the outer reality, would be amazed, for we must assume that such a being from another planet would have a completely different environment around it, and it would be amazed at all the things that human beings have created on earth. But if he were to be led to this picture, in which this Mystery of Golgotha is shown in its most characteristic form, he would intuitively sense something of the meaning of earthly existence from this picture, simply through the way in which Christ Jesus is placed among his twelve disciples, who in turn represent the whole human race.

One can sense the way in which the Mystery of Golgotha actually gives meaning to the evolution of the earth from the most diverse backgrounds. But one only fully senses that this is the case when one can rise to the vision that with the baptism of John in the Jordan a supersensible being, the Christ, has entered into a human being. This is how the Gnostics saw it, not with the world view that we are again trying to gain today through anthroposophy, but with their world view, which was the last remnant of the ancient wisdom of mankind. One might say that so much of the instinctive wisdom of humanity remained that, in the first centuries after Christ's appearance, a number of people were still able to grasp what actually happened with the appearance of Christ on earth. The wisdom that the Gnostics had can no longer be ours. We must, because humanity must be in a state of continuous progress, advance to a much more conscious, less instinctive view of the supersensible as well. But we look with reverence at the wisdom of the Gnostics, who had retained so much of the first instinctive primal wisdom of man that one could grasp the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha.

From this comprehension of the full significance of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the central phenomenon of John's baptism in the Jordan, the first great festival was established. But it was already so arranged in the developmental history of mankind that the ancient wisdom was dying out and becoming paralyzed. And it was precisely in the fourth century A.D. that one could do nothing with this ancient wisdom. Yesterday I presented another point of view, showing how this ancient wisdom gradually darkened. In a certain sense, the fourth century is the one in which man made the first beginning of being completely dependent on himself, having nothing around him for his contemplation other than what the senses can perceive and what the combining mind can make of the sensory perception. In order to gain its freedom, which could never have been gained through dependence on unearthly things, if ancient wisdom had not been paralyzed, humanity had to lose ancient wisdom, had to be thrown into materialistic observation. This materialistic outlook first appeared at dawn in the fourth century A.D. and grew stronger and stronger until it reached its culmination in the nineteenth century.

Materialism also has its good side in the history of the development of mankind. The fact that man no longer had the supersensible light shining into his mind, the fact that he was dependent on what he saw with his senses in the world around him, gave rise to the independent power within him that tends towards freedom. It also appeared wise in the developmental history of humanity that materialism has emerged. But precisely at the time when materialism took hold of the earthly nature of man, it was no longer possible to understand how the influence of the extraterrestrial, the heavenly, in the symbol of John's baptism in the Jordan presented itself to humanity. As a result, people lost their understanding of the meaning of the Feast of Epiphany, January 6, and resorted to other explanations. All the feelings and emotions that were related to the Mystery of Golgotha were no longer associated with the supermundane Christ, but began to be associated with the earthly Jesus of Nazareth. And so the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ became the Feast of the Epiphany of the Child Jesus. Admittedly, the development has taken a course that has now reached a peripeteia, which must create new necessities in the striving of humanity for our present-day world view.

We see how, as early as the 4th century, human beings' full and wise comprehension of the impossibility of comprehending the appearance of Christ was already confronted with it. But human feeling, human perception, human emotion and will develop in the course of history at a slower pace than thoughts. While thoughts had long since ceased to be directed towards the appearance of Christ, hearts still turned to this appearance of Christ. Deeply intimate feelings lived on in Christendom. And these profound feelings now formed the content of historical development for many centuries. And these profound feelings expressed it - but as if from instinctive impulses - what a significant event the appearance of Christ was for the development of the earth. The festival of the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth was connected to the Adam and Eve Day, the festival of the beginning of the earth of mankind. Adam and Eve Day falls on December 24, and Jesus' birthday celebration on December 25. In Adam and Eve, people saw the beings with whom the evolution of the earth began, the beings who descended from spiritual heights, who became sinful on earth, who became entangled on earth in material events, who lost their connection with the supersensible worlds. The first Adam was spoken of in the Pauline sense; and the second Adam was spoken of as the Christ: that man can only be fully man in the post-Christian era if he unites within himself the forces that fell away from God through Adam and the forces that through Christ bring him back to God. This was expressed by bringing together the Adam and Eve festival and the Jesus birthday festival. The sense of this connection, which gives earthly life its true meaning, has been preserved in a heartfelt way over the centuries.

One example of this is the occurrence of the very heartfelt 'Paradeisspiele' (Paradise Plays) and 'Christi-Geburtspiele' (Plays about the Nativity), of which we have brought samples to be performed here, which date from the last Middle Ages, from the beginning of the modern era, when German tribes living in the western regions took them with them to the east. In present-day Hungary, such tribes settled. We find such tribes north of the Danube in the Pressburg area, we find them south of the Carpathians in the so-called Spiš area, we see them in Transylvania. We find mainly Alemannic-Saxon tribes in these areas. We then find Swabian tribes in the Banat. All these German tribes took with them the one thing from their original homeland that had been imbued with the most heartfelt sentiments, which united humanity during these centuries with the most important experience on earth.

But human wisdom increasingly took a course that also intertwined the Christ event with the materialistic conception of the world. In the nineteenth century we see the rise of a materialistic theology. The criticism of the Gospels begins. The possibility of having an inkling — as must be the case with supersensible representations — that what appears as an imagination of the supersensible is different depending on whether it is viewed from one point of view or another, is lost. One has no conception of the fact that the sages of former centuries must also have recognized the so-called contradictions in the Gospels and that they did not criticize them in a critical way. One sinks philistinely into these contradictions in the Gospels. One resolves the contradictions, one removes everything supersensible from the Gospels. One loses the Christ out of the story of the Gospel. One tries to make something out of the story of the Gospels, something like an ordinary, profane story. Gradually, one can no longer distinguish what the theological historians say from what a secular historian like Ranke says about the Mystery of Golgotha.

When one looks for the figure of Jesus in the famous historian Ranke, as he presents him as the simple but most outstanding human being who ever walked the earth, when one reads all the lovingly described in Ranke's profane history, one can hardly tell the difference between this and what the materialistic theologians of the 19th century had to say about Jesus. Theology is becoming materialistic. Precisely for enlightened theology, the Christ disappears from the view of humanity. The “simple man from Nazareth” is gradually becoming that which only those who undertake to describe the essence of Christianity want to point to. And Adolf Harnack's description of the essence of Christianity has become famous.

In this book, “The Essence of Christianity” by Adolf Harnack, there are two passages that could be truly devastating for anyone who has a sense for the real essence of Christianity. The first is that this theologian, who wants to be a Christian, says that the Christ does not actually belong in the Gospels, that the Son does not belong in the Gospels; only the Father belongs in the Gospels. And so Christ Jesus, who walked the earth in Palestine at the beginning of our era, becomes simply the human proclaimer of the Father's teaching. The Father alone belongs in the Gospels, says Adolf Harnack, and yet he believes himself to be a Christian theologian! One must say: the essence of Christianity has completely disappeared from this “Essence of Christianity”, I mean that which Adolf Harnack describes, and actually such a view should no longer call itself Christian.

The other thing that can have a devastating effect in this writing “The Essence of Christianity” occurred to me once when I was present at a lecture given in a society called the Giordano Bruno Society. In connection with the remarks of a speaker there, I had to say how the most important part of the essence of Christianity has disappeared from modern theology. I had to point to Harnack's remark in this book “The Essence of Christianity,” where he says: Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, the idea of resurrection, the Easter faith, emerged from this event; and it is this faith that we want to hold on to. — So the resurrection itself has become unimportant to modern Christian theologians. They do not want to concern themselves with this resurrection as a fact. Whatever may have happened in the Garden of Gethsemane, people have begun to believe that the resurrection occurred there, and it is not the resurrection that we want to hold on to, but this belief.

I pointed out at the time that the essence of Christianity had been expressed by Paul, who said, based on his experiences outside Damascus: And if the Christ had not been resurrected, we would all be lost. Not the man Jesus is the essential thing in Christianity, but the supersensible entity, which through the baptism of John in the Jordan entered into the man Jesus, which arose from the tomb at Gethsemane, and which became visible to those who had the capacity for such visibility. Paul, as the latest of them, saw it, and Paul refers to the risen Christ. I therefore had to point out at the time how the remark of one of the most famous modern so-called Christian theologians fails to see the very essence of Christianity, its supersensible nature. The chairman of the society replied to me in a most peculiar way at the time. He said that such a thing could not be contained in Harnack's book, for Harnack was a Protestant theologian, and if Harnack asserted such a thing, it would be on a par with an assertion that could only come from the Catholic side, for example, about the Holy Robe of Trier. For the Catholic, it is not important whether it can be proven that this holy robe in Trier really comes from Jerusalem, but rather that faith is attached to this holy robe. The chairman of this society was so embarrassed that he did not even admit that this remark was in Harnack's book. I told him that since I did not have the book at hand, I would write him the page number on a postcard the next day. This is also characteristic of the modern thoroughness with which books are read that have an importance in the first place. You read a book and believe that it makes a significant impression on life, and you do not even notice one of the most important remarks, but you think it is impossible that it could be in it. It is in it! All this proves to us how the supersensible Christ has been thrown out of the evolution of humanity by a theology that is becoming ever more materialistic, how people have clung only to the outward physical appearance of the man Jesus.

Now, the festive customs and dedications of the simple minds that resorted to Christmas plays were beautiful; they arose from sacred feelings. Even if people could no longer provide each other with more information about the full meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha, they also had it in their hearts where they outwardly adhered to the material appearance of the child Jesus. And in this form, the celebration of the birth of Christ is beautiful and heartfelt.

The thought that destroys the Christ in the man Jesus is not beautiful and, from the highest point of view, it is not true, even from the Christian world view. It is as if the wisdom-filled guidance of humanity had first taken into account what had to happen in order for the materialistic view and thus the development of humanity to freedom to begin and continue. Just as materialism had to come in order to liberate humanity, so the Feast of the Epiphany, which can only be understood through supersensible vision and falls on January 6, had to be moved back to the Feast of the Nativity, December 25.

The twelve holy nights lie in between. In a sense, humanity made its way back through the entire zodiac by going through a twelvefold number, at least in the symbol, when this festival was moved.

Today, by summarizing everything that is connected with the Christ through the man Jesus, we can certainly unfold all the intimacy and depth of feeling for Christmas. And in my Christmas meditation yesterday, I wanted to express in words what is beneficial in this respect for the present time. But we must, after materialism has celebrated its highest triumphs in theology, after Christ Jesus has become, precisely for enlightened theology, only the simple man Jesus, again find our way back to the intuition of the supersensible, extraterrestrial Christ-being.

If you come with this point of view, then you will make enemies of precisely the materialistic theology of today. Just as the sun materially sends down its light from extraterrestrial cosmic expanses, so the spiritual sun of Christ descended to men and united with Jesus of Nazareth. Just as one can see the revelation of the soul and spirit in the outer physiognomy of man, in his facial features and in his gestures, so one can see the outer physiognomy in that which takes place in the cosmos, in the gestures that are into the cosmos through the course of the stars, in that which, as the inner warmth of the soul of the universe, manifests itself externally through the radiation of the sun, in that one can see the outer physiognomy of what permeates the whole world spiritually and soulfully. And in the concentrated spiritual descent of Christ upon the earth, one can see the inward aspect as the outward physiognomy of the concentrated rays of the sun streaming down upon the earth. And one will understand in the right way when it is said: The solar nature of Christ descended upon the earth.

We must come back to this supersensible understanding of Christ. We must learn to direct our thoughts back to the other birth, which took place as an extra-terrestrial birth through the baptism of St. John in the Jordan, despite the heartfelt devotion we wish to preserve for the birthday of Jesus, for which Christmas alone has become. We also want to learn to understand what takes place in the Jordan baptism of John in a meaningful historical symbol before our soul, as well as what happened in the stable of Bethlehem or in Nazareth. We want to learn to understand the words as they are communicated in the Gospel of Luke in the right way: This is my son, today he was born to me. — We want to learn to understand the Christmas mystery in such a way that it becomes for us again the source of understanding for the appearance of Christ on earth. We want to learn to understand the birth of the spirit in addition to the memory of our physical birth.

Such an understanding can only gradually arise from a general spiritual comprehension of the mysteries of the universe. We must gradually struggle towards a spiritual conception of the mystery of Golgotha. To do this, however, we need insight into the origin of such impulses within the earthly development of humanity, as there was in the 4th century AD, when the Feast of the Epiphany of Christ was moved from January 6 to the day of Jesus' birthday on December 25 out of the innermost need of developing humanity. One must learn to see how the wise guidance of human history works there. One must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Then one will recognize the wise guidance in human history without superstition, and without bringing one's own fantasies into it. One must learn not only to immerse oneself in history with abstract ideas and to look at cause and effect, but one must learn to devote oneself to this historical development with one's whole being. Only then will we understand what makes our time a truly transitional time, a time in which a spiritual world view must again be wrested from the materialistic view, and a natural elevation to the supersensible must again be wrested. And an expression for this elevation to the supersensible will be a new understanding of the appearance of Christ on earth, the mystery of Golgotha.

Thus for the modern man who is really able to delve into the spirit of the time, Christmas has a twofold significance: it is that which has been approaching through recent history since the 4th century AD, that which has produced such wonderful has produced such wonderful beauties precisely in the simple, unadorned folk tradition, and that which still arouses our heartfelt delight today when we see it again in the renewal of folk plays such as we are attempting through our anthroposophical science. It is all that human warmth and affection has poured into life through the centuries during which the idea of Christianity has taken on more and more materialistic forms, until in the 19th century it has come so far that it must turn around through its own absurdity and return to the spiritual. This gives us, as people of today, the second thing about Christmas: in addition to the feeling that we have for the traditional Christmas that has been handed down since the 4th century AD, for this heartfelt feeling that we want to feel with, a new Christmas should be born from our contemporary understanding, a second Christmas to the old Christmas.

The Christ shall be reborn anew through humanity. Christmas is traditionally a celebration of the birth of Jesus; in spirit it shall become a celebration of the birth of a new conception of Christ, not new in relation to the first centuries, but new in relation to the centuries since the 4th century AD. And so Christmas itself should not be just a celebration of the memory of the birth, but, as it is experienced from year to year in the near future, it should become a direct, contemporary birthday celebration, the celebration of a present-day event. This birth of the new Christ-idea must come to pass. And Christmas must become so intense that every year at this very time man will be able to reflect anew and with special intensity on the fact that a new Christ-idea must be born.

Christmas must become a festival not of remembrance but of the present, a consecration of that which the human being experiences as a birth in his immediate present. Then it will truly enter into our more recent historical becoming, then it will strengthen itself more and more in this historical becoming of humanity, also into the future, which will have such need of it. Then it will become a consecration of the world.