The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A common prejudice is expressed in the maxim: Human evolution moves forward in regular succession, the unfolding of historical events makes no leaps. This is connected with another prejudice; for we are also told that Nature makes no leaps. This is repeated over and over again; but it is untrue both for Nature and for History. We never see Nature making mighty progress without leaps. Her progress is not gradual; on the contrary, small processes are followed by important results, and the most important of all result from leaps. Many cases could be enumerated in which Nature advances in such a way, that we can observe a transition of forms into their exact opposite.

In History this is particularly important, because there we have two significant occurences, which gradually prepared, but then ebbed away, only to make their eventual advance in a forward leap:

1. The founding of the free cities at the beginning of the Middle Ages.
2. The great inventions and discoveries at the end of the Middle Ages.

History moves very quickly forward at the change from the 11th to the 12th century. New forms of society evolve from old ones. From the fact that many men left their homes, to settle in the cities, sprang up—throughout Germany, France, England, Scotland, and as far as Russia and Italy—cities with new conditions of life, new organisations, laws and constitutions. At the end of the Middle Ages we find the great discoveries, the voyages to India, America, etc., and the world-wide invention of printing. All this shows us what a radical change has been affected through the birth of the new spirit of Science—through Copernicus.

Two incisions were made by this; and if we are to study the Middle Ages thoughtfully, these two occurances must be place in the right light. They appear as leaps, but such an event is gradually prepared, until with the force of an avalanche it breaks forth, and rushes forward in a flood. If we pursue them step by step, it will become clear that these two events had been prepared in the life of the Germani. We shall see through what circumstances it was that such great power was given to the Franks, such influence over the configuration of European relationships. For this purpose we must understand the character of that race, the necessary metamorphosis of industrial relationships, and the powerful penetration of Christianity in the 4th century. These two things indicate the alteration in the life of the Germani. They condition the evolution of the Middle Ages. It would be useless to follow all the wanderings of the Germani, to see how Odoacer dethroned the last West Roman Emperor, how the Goths were driven out of Italy by the Emperor Justinian, how the Longobards seized possession of Northern Italy—we see the same circumstances enacted over and over again.

In the southern regions, where the Gemani found political and industrial conditions already firmly established, the idiosyncrasies of their own tribes disappeared; they lost all significance. We hear nothing more of the Goths, Gepidae, etc., they have vanished, even to their names. In contrast to this, the Franks had arrived at free, not yet fixed, condition, where serious appropriation was as yet non-existent, and through this political configuration, the Franks became the ruling race.

Now we must see how these developed in the empire of the Franks, that which we call the Merovingian kingdom. It was actually nothing but many small kingdoms, formed in the most natural way. The Merovingians remained as victors, after they had overcome the others who were originally their equals. All these kingdoms had been formed in the following way: some little tribe wandered in, subjugated the inhabitants and divided the land in such a way that all the members received small or large properties. Thus all dominion was based on land ownership. The most powerful received the largest domain. For the tilling of these properties, a great number of people were employed, some taken from the inhabitants, but part were prisoners of war, made into workers. Simply through this difference between the ownership of less of more land, were power relationships developed. The largest landowner was the king. His power was based on his property—that is the characteristic trait. Out of these powerful relationships, the relationships of rights were formed, and it is interesting to observe how this came about. Certainly we find among the Germanic tribes, laws founded on customs evolved in ancient times, before we have any knowledge of them. Among the smaller tribes all the people assembled to administer justice; later, the members of the tribe only came together on March 1st, to take counsel about their concerns. But now the great landowner was not responsible to the others for what he did on his own property. True, we find a conservative clinging to the old prescriptive laws among the different tribes. We find them preserved for long periods among the Saxons, Thuringians and Frisians, also among the Cheruscans, whose tribe kept them longer than has been generally believed. It was different where large landowning had developed, because the proprietor, absolute in his own domain, became also irresponsible. This irresponsibility gave rise to a new legal position, in which the jurisdiction of power, the authority of the police, was exercised. If another man committed an offence, he was called to account for it; if the irresponsible one did it, the same offence was looked upon as lawful. What was illegal among those without power, was legal among the powerful. They were able to change might into right.

Now, in this way the Franks could farther extend their power, and, especially in the northeast, could conquer great territories. At a time when war followed war, the less powerful were dependent on the protection of the mightier. Thus arose the fief and vassal system, which called forth a selection of powerful men. Then an arrangement for transferring certain rights by means of contracts sprang up.

The great landed property, the king's estate, required special legal conditions, which could be transferred to others by the king or the owner. Together with the land, the jurisdiction and the police authority would be transferred. King's law and the law of the small vassal came into being. As the result of this innovation we see the development of a powerful official class, not on a basis of stipend, but of land owning. Such justiciaries were the highest judges. In the beginning, when they still had to take into consideration the rights of powerful tribes, they were bound to respect ancient laws. Gradually, however, their position became that of an absolute judicature, so that, in course of time, side by side with the kingdom, there was formed in France a kind of official aristocracy which grew to be a rival of the kingship.

Thus in the 6th century, a rivalry developed between the sovereign and the new nobility, and this attained the greatest significance.

The original governing race, which sprang from the Merovingians, the large land owners, was succeeded by the Carlovingians who had originally belonged to the official aristocracy. They had been mayors of the palace to the ruling race, which had been overthrown by the rivalry of the aristocratic officials. Essentially, therefore, it was the possession of large property that was the basis of power relations; and the strongest moral current of the church, had to initiate its rule in this roundabout way through the large land owner.

It was the characteristic feature of the Frankish Church that, to begin with, it represented nothing but a number of large land owners; we see the rise of bishoprics and abbacies, and of vassals who placed themselves under the protection of the Church, in order to receive fiefs from it. Thus, side by side with the large, worldly land owners, clerical proprietors also arose. This is the reason why we see so little depth, and why the spiritual element which we find in Christianity is essentially due to foreign influence. It was not the Frankish race, but men of the British Isles who succeeded in creating those mighty currents which then flowed out eastwards. In the British Isles, many learned men and pious monks were deeply engaged in work. Real work was being done, as we may see, in particular, by the resumption of Platonism and its alliance with Christianity. We see mysticism, dogmatism, but also enthusiasm and pathos, issuing from here. From here come the first missionaries: Columba, Gallus and Winfried-Boniface, the converter of the Germans. And because these first missionaries had nothing in their mind but the spiritual side of Christianity they were not inclined to conform to the conditions of the Frankish tribes. Theirs was the healing virtue, and they found, especially through Boniface, their chief influence exercised among the East Germani. For this reason, Rome acquired an increasing influence at this time in the empire of the Franks. Two heterogenous elements combined together: the rugged force of the Germani and the spiritual strength of Christianity. They fitted in to each other in such a way that it seems wonderful how these tribes submitted to Christianity, and how Christianity itself modified its nature, to adapt itself to the Germani. These missionaries worked differently from the Frankish kings, who spread Christianity by force of arms. It was not forced into their souls as something alien; their places of worship and sacred customs were preserved; their practices and personalities so respected that old institutions were made use of to diffuse the new content. It is interesting to notice how what is old becomes the garment, what is new becomes the soul. From the Saxon tribe we possess an account of the Life of Jesus: all the details concerning the figure of Jesus were clothed in Germanic dress. Jesus appears as a German duke; his intercourse with the disciples resembles a tribal assembly. This is how the life of Jesus is presented in Heiland.

Ancient heroes were transformed into saints; ancient festivals and ritual customs became Christian. Much of what appears today as exclusively Christian was transferred at that time from heathen customs. In the Frankish empire, on the contrary, we see in ecclesiastical Christianity a means of consolidating power; a Frankish code of law begins with an invocation to “Christ, Who loves the Franks above all other peoples.” In the days when the British missionaries represented the moral influence of Christianity, the influence of the Roman Church also increased considerably. The Frankish kings sought alliance with the papacy. The Longobards had seized possession of Italy, and harassed the bishop of Rome, in particular. They were Aryan Christians. That was why the Roman bishop turned first to the Franks for help, at the same time tendering his influence to the Franks. So the Frankish king became the protector of the pope; and the pope anointed the king. Hence the Frankish kings derived their exalted position, their dignity, from this consecration by the pope. It was an enhancement of what the Franks saw in Christianity. All this took place in the west, in the 7th centure. This alliance between the papacy and the Frankish authority, formed a gradual preparation for the subsequent rule of Charlemagne. Thus we see the accomplishment of important spiritual and social changes. This alone, however, would not have led to an event which proved to be of the greatest importance, a material revolution: the founding of cities. For something was lacking in the Frankish Christian culture, although it had efficiency, intellect and depth.

That which we call Science, purely external Science, did not exist for them. We have followed a merely material and moral movement. What Science there was among them had remained at the same level as at their first contact with Christianity. And just as the Frankish tribes took no interest in the improvement of their simple agriculture, and never thought of developing it economically, similarly the Church only sought to build up its moral influence. Primitive tillage offered no special difficulties, such as, in Egypt, have led to the evolution of physics, geometry and technical science. Everything here was simpler, more primitive; thus the financial trading, which was already in use, gave place again to barter.

So European culture needed a new stimulus, and cannot be understood without taking this stimulus into account. Out of Asia, form the far East, whence Christianity once came, came now this new culture, from the Arabs. The religion founded there by Mahomet is, in its content, simpler than Christianity. The spiritual content of Mohammedanism is, essentially, based on simple monotheistic ideas confined to a divine fundamental Being, whose nature and form is not closely investigated, but to whose will men surrender, because they have faith. Hence this religion produces proud confidence in this will, a confidence which leads to fatalism, to a complete self-surrender. This is how it became possible for these tribes to extend Arabian rule, in a few generations, over Syria, Mesopotamia and North Africa, as far as to the realm of the Visigoths in Spain, so that, as early as the turn of the 7th to the 8th century, Moorish rulers were established there, and implanted their own culture in place of that of the Visigoths.

Thus something quite new, of an entirely different nature, flowed into European culture. The spirit of Arabism culture was not filled with dogma concerning angels and demons, etc., but precisely with that which was lacking in the Christian Germanic tribes namely, with external science. Here we find all such sciences—medicine, chemistry, mathematical thinking—well developed. The practical spirit brought over from Asia to Spain found employment now in seafaring, etc. It was brought over at a moment when an unscientific spirit had established its kingdom there The Moorish cities became centers of serious scientific work; we see here a culture which cannot fail to be admired by all who know it. Humboldt says of it: “This depth, this intensity, this exactitude of knowledge is unexampled in the history of culture.” The Moorish intellectuals had width of outlook and depth of thought; and not only did they, like the Germani, embrace Greek science, they developed it farther. Aristotle also contiuned to live among them, but with the Arabs, it was the true Aristotle who was honoured, with a wide outlook, as the father of Science. It is interesting to see how the Alexandrine culture, started in Greece, continued its existence here, and with this we tough upon one of the most remarkable currents in the human mind. The Arabs laid the foundations of Objective Science. From them, this flowed, in the first place, into the Anglo-Saxon monasteries in England and Ireland, where the old energetic Celtic blood now dwelt. It is strange to see what active intercourse had been introduced between them and Spain, and how, where profundity of mind and capacity to think were present, Science revived through the medium of the Arabs.

And it is a remarkable phenomenon that the Arabs who, to begin with, took possession of the whole of Spain, were soon outwardly conquered by the Franks under Charles Martel a the Battle of Poiters in 732. By this victory the physical strength of the Franks overcame the physical strength of the Moors. But the spiritual strength of the Arabs remained invincible; and just as, once, Greek culture rose triumphant in Rome, so Arab culture conquered the West, in opposition to the victorious Germani. Now, when the science which was needed to extend the horizon of trade and world intercourse, when city culture, arose, we see that it was Arab influence which made themselves felt here. Quite new elements flowing in sought to adapt themselves to the old.

We see expressed by Walther von der Vogelweide the perplexity which may assail anyone who follows, with an open mind, the conflicting currents of the Middle Ages. The poet saw how the Germanic tribes were striving for power, and how an opposing current was flowing from Christianity. That which flowed through the Middle Ages was transmuted by Walther von der Vogelweide into feeling, in the following sorrowful description:

No answer came into my mind
How men might come by these three things,
So that no man need to perish.
Two are honour and worldly goods;
These often do each other harm
The third, the chiefest of them all,
Is simply pleasing God. I longed to have them in one shrine
Alas, that that can never be!
For worldly goods and honour
Dwell not, within one human heart,
Together with the grace of God.
Hindrances are everywhere,
Faithlessness sets endless snares,
Haughty force lays all men low.
Thus Peace and Right are done to death.
Never will the Three find refuge
Till these two are healed and well.

We shall see shortly how difficult it was for the man of the Middle Ages to combine these three things in their heart, and how these three gave rise to the great struggles which rent that age asunder

At the start of the hour, various participatory questions and objections were presented. The stenographer didn't add to these words, but Rudolf Steiner had jotted down the following key words in one of his notebooks (See the fax page 38-40 NB 127 in the documentary supplements):

• Discussion
• Can we define religion?
• Impossibilities—
• Luther as an answer—
• Do without knowledge to reach religion!—
• Spine of the world—and turn to the divine—
• Gulf—world = God
• ?—another: Contrast between God and World isn't found
• Rel. Connection with God—3 ways

Thinking Feeling Willing

• Anthrop unclear: due to transformation of world through science or not making religion dependent on knowledge—so that people who have no knowledge, come short—Good faith =
• Dr Geyer: It is said: Anthrop in the world Religion belongs to God. Paradox
• Another: Can religion become independent?
  or Art—science?
  will religion stop being independent
• Another: if it repulses someone
  faith—endangered
  Secret—deepest being. Despite all unravelable difficulties on hand ... submit/go through to* the soul-like
• and another: religion—relation between one soul and God—but the effects change towards others—this is increased by Anthroposophy
• and another: ? leads us to God today?
• and another: Is a value judgement of Anthrop to religion both necessary? (Ist ein Wertunterschied z. A. u. Rel. beide nötig?)*
and another: Living relationship to concepts—are concepts in contrast with corrupted form—
• Main concept: Pledge faith
  Faith has knowledge content—gradually got lost
  awareness, which gives knowledge content—
  the results of today—

(*—words are abbreviated which can create various interpretations—Translator)

• To what extent does the Pauline contrast with the Pistis and Gnosis.—

Rudolf Steiner: I would prefer at best to answer you more concretely than in abstractions. First, I would like to approach a difficult question by saying the following.

In Anthroposophy we currently have very few people who are engaged in spiritual activity. Anthroposophy is in the beginning of her work and one can admit that in a relatively short time it may work differently into the human soul, compared with today. One thing is quite remarkable today, and perhaps you'll find that reprehensible, but it is perhaps much better to side with what appears currently than to express it with an abstract reprimand.

Anthroposophy is taught, recited, written in books and I have the basic conviction that the way those questioners here, at least some of them, require Anthroposophy to be a knowledge—and that such a knowledge which is understood by most, at least a good many, for the majority who interest themselves intensively in Anthroposophy, this is not yet the case. Many people today accept something which they have heard about in Anthroposophy, on good faith. Why do they do this? Why are there already such a large number of people who accept Anthroposophy on good faith? You see, among those the majority have acquired religious natures in a specified direction and without them actually claiming to understand things in depth, they follow Anthroposophy because they have become aware of a certain religious style throughout the leadership of Anthroposophical matters. It is just a kind of religious feeling, a religious experience, which brings numerous people to Anthroposophy, who are not in the position of examining Anthroposophy, like botanists who examine botany; this is what is promoted here.

One doesn't usually intensely observe that in relation to what I mean here, Anthroposophy is quite different to the other, the outer, more scientific sciences. Scientific knowledge is in fact quite so that one can say about it: take the human being into consideration and it will in fact be quite dangerous for faith, you'll impair faith. It is not just about science making you uncomfortable, but it is about having the experience of the mystery of faith being disturbed. In the practical handling of this question one finds, as far as it goes beyond where it is another kind of science, as is the case with Anthroposophy, that numerous people experience a consistent religious stance in the way Anthroposophy is presented. Despite it not wanting, as I often repeat, to be a religious education, it is nevertheless felt that it is moving in the direction where a religious feeling can go along with it. Actually, this idea that knowledge kills faith—I have much understanding for this—must be revised regarding Anthroposophy. One must first ask if it is not because Anthroposophy is a not conceptual knowledge, but a knowledge based on observation, that the relationship between faith and knowledge becomes something quite different. Let us not forget that this observation of knowledge killing faith has only been created on the hand of a science which is completely conceptual, completely intellectual. Intellectualism is for Anthroposophy only a starting point, it is only regarded as the basis and foundation, then one rises to observation quite indifferently whether it is one's own or a shared observation.

My view is that it is not necessary at all, to place a wall in front of Anthroposophy, that things should be accepted in good faith. This is not quite so. A certain shyness remains today, to shine a very thorough light into what is said by single anthroposophical researchers. When this shyness is overcome then one doesn't need some of other perception or clairvoyance. Just like one can take a dream as an error or a truth, even if one only experiences the dream for what it is, which is a perception; in the same way one can recognise the truth or error in a painted image. Basically, it's the same for life. This is not easily understood—those involved with spiritual research know. One gets much more out of life when one looks at things yourself rather than being told about them, because observation of life demands a great deal. Yet, these things need to be researched so they can enter into life.

Now, something like the viewpoints of conceptual knowledge which we are already familiar with, is what I noticed in the inquiries of our questioners, whose first point was: How can we define religion? One could—this is how it can be said in the course of the discussion—renounce knowledge, leave the world lying on its back and turn to the Divine because there is an abyss between the world and God, and so on. This is said about it.

Now if you are familiar with my arguments you will have found that I do not give definitions anywhere; in fact, I am sharply against giving definitions in Anthroposophy. Sometimes, since I speak about popular things, I conceptualise them. Even though I know quite well that definitions can certainly be a help in the more scientific or historic sense of today's kind of knowledge, even though I'm aware of the limited right of definitions, I remind myself how, within Greek philosophy, defining a human being was recommended. The definition is such that a human being is alive, that it has two legs and no feathers. So the next day someone brought along a plucked chicken and said, this is a human being.—You see how far a person is from the immediate observation, even with practical definitions. These things need to be examined.

That is the peculiarity of intellectualistic knowledge, and in it, is to be found many such things which have led to the judgement which sharpens the boundary between belief and knowledge even more. One needs to enter into the intricacies a bit more. You see, already in our simplest sciences are definitions which actually have no authority at all. Open some or other book on physics. You find a definition like the following: What is impenetrability? Impenetrability is the property of objects, that in the place where an object is present, another body cannot be at the same time.—That is the definition of impenetrability. In the entire scope of knowledge and cognition, however, not everything can be defined in this way; the definition of impenetrability is merely a masked postulate. In reality it must be said: One calls an object impenetrable when the place where it is in, can't at the same time be occupied by another object.—It is namely merely to determine an object, to postulate its individual character; and only under the influence of materialistic thinking, postulates masked as definitions are given.

All of this creates an entire sea of difficulties which current mankind is not aware of at all because people have really been absorbing it from the lowest grade of elementary school; mankind really doesn't know on what fragile ground, on what slippery ice he gets involved with, in reality, when educated through the current system of concepts. This conceptual system which is in fact more corrupt than theological concepts—a physicist often has no inkling that their concepts are corrupt—this is something which not only kills belief, but in many ways, it also kills what relates to life. These corrupt scientific concepts are not only damaging to the soul, but even harmful to physical life. If you are a teacher, you know this.

Therefore, it is no longer important that the spiritual scientist, the Anthroposophist has to say: Precisely this scientific concept must be transformed into the healing of mankind.—Here is where the Anthroposophist becomes misled, when the religious side insists that an abyss be created under all circumstances between belief and knowledge, because, between what one observes with the senses, and Anthroposophy, there is really a great abyss. This is what even from the anthroposophical side needs to be clarified.

Now I would like to consider this question from the religious side and perhaps as a result of me approaching it from the religious side, it will be better understood religiously. You see I can completely understand that the following may be said—that one must turn away from the world to find the way to God. The basic experience that exists, the paths that will have to be taken, those I know. I can also certainly understand when someone talks about how it would be necessary, in a certain sense, that the dew of mystery should cover anything with religious content. I would like to express myself succinctly only; it has already surfaced in the questions. Briefly, I can fully understand if someone strives in a certain way to place everything that can be known on the one side and on the other side, look for a religious path according to such fundamentals as are searched for by a whole row of modern evangelists. This search should take place not through events but in a far more direct way. In the elaboration of Dr Schairer, it was again correctly described: also in the questioning of Bruno Meyer which was given to me yesterday, it is expressed clearly. So, I can understand it well. But I see something else.

You see, what people take from Anthroposophy, quite indifferently now, how far their research comes or in how far they have insight—and as we said, it can be seen without being a researcher or an observer through what you get from Anthroposophy—means they must relinquish quite a few things from their "I," I mean from their egotism. In a certain sense selflessness belongs to this point of departure from one's self, when entering the world. One could say a person needs to radically tear out inborn egoism in order to really find a human relationship to the simplest Anthroposophical knowledge. A feeling for the world as opposed to an ego feeling for oneself must be developed to a high degree, and gradually grow just by following this apparent path of knowledge, which is not only similar to fervent love but equal to it; everything grows from here. Basically, one learns about true submission to objectivity by following anthroposophic content.

In opposition to this, I propose something else. One can relinquish all such involvement in the world, all such conceptual submission of oneself and then try, out of oneself, I don't want to call it "in feelings" but for instance how Dr Schairer expressed it, through "connecting to God" make one's way. One can try to stretch the entire sum of inner life, one could call it, electrically, to find what the direct communication with God is. Also there, I must say, I know what can be achieved by that strong relationship of trust in God, without entering into some kind of unclear mysticism, up to certain mystics who have remained with clear experiences. I've seen it before. Yet I find despite everything that is attempted in devotion to the world, in connecting to the world, in connecting to divine world forces and so on, a large part of egoism, even soul-filled egoism, remains. Someone can be extraordinarily religious out of the most terrible egoism. Prove it for yourself by looking with the eyes of a good psychologist at the religiosity of some monks or nuns. Certainly, you could say, that is not evangelistic belief. It may differ qualitatively, but in relation to what I mean now, it still differs qualitatively. If you prove this, you perhaps find the performing of a devotion to the utmost mortification, yet it sometimes harbours—the true observation of psychologists reveals this—the most terrible egoism. This is something questionable which can give up even a superficial view of an important problem. You see, to find an exchange with God in this way is basically nothing extraordinary because God is there and whoever looks for Him, will find Him. He will obviously be found. Only those who don't find Him are not looking for Him. One can find him, sure, but in many cases, one asks oneself what it is one has found. I may say out of my own experience: What is it?

In many cases it is the discovery the forces of the inner life, which only exists between birth and death. One is able to, with these forces which exist between birth and death, to be a very pious person. However, these forces are laid down with us in our graves, we have no possibility of taking these forces with us through the gate of death. Should we acquire thoughts of eternity, acquire thoughts of the supersensible, these we will take with us through the gate of death and while we do so, we must already have become selfless, as I have indicated. You see, this is something which is always questionable to me, when I discover it—what I can quite rightly understand—like Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion. Licentiate Bock has recently told me that with Schleiermacher one could discover something quite different. It would be lovely if something could happen, but according to the usual way Schleiermacher is interpreted, I find in the Schleiermacher way the reference and exchange with the Divine as only created through the forces which are lost when we die. What is this then, that is lost though death, my dear friends? Even if it's religious, if it is lost with death it is nothing more than a refined lust of the soul, an intensification of temporal life. One feels oneself better for it, when one feels secure with God.

You see, I want to speak religiously about the necessity to achieve a concept of belief which lives within the danger of connecting temporal forces to people. This of course has a relationship to the Divine. Here something terrible always appears to me in the great illusion within the numerous people's current lives which consist of people being unable to see how the rejection of a certain content, which must always have a content of knowledge—you could call this observational content, but finally this is only terminology—how the judgement of such content severely endangers religious life. Old religions didn't exist without content and their content of Christian teaching was once full of life, and it only turned into what we call dogma today, at the end of the fourth century after Christ. So one could say this distaste for content, this selfish fear of so-called wisdom—I'm fully aware of calling it "so-called wisdom"—that, my dear friends, always reminds me of people living in this illusion, that this fear of knowledge of the supersensible actually is also produced by materialism. Within this concept of faith, I see a materialistic following, I can't help myself; this following of materialism is no conscious following but something which exists in subconscious foundations of the soul as a materialistic following.

I really believe that it will be through religious foundations, particularly for the priest, if he could bring himself to it, to overcome the shyness of the so-called gulf between belief and knowledge. The world and God, and the gulf between them—yes my dear friends, this is indeed the deepest conviction of Anthroposophy itself; what Anthroposophy seeks, is to create a bridge between the two. When this gulf has been bridged, then only will the higher unity of God and world be possible. At first, from the outside, this abyss appears, and only when man has gone through everything which makes this bridging necessary, can the abyss be overcome, and only then does man discover what can be called the unity of God with the world.

Let's consider the religious connection with God. Would a religion—this question was asked in three ways and called thinking feeling and willing—would a religion still be approachable through Anthroposophy, which is dependent on knowledge, to people who do not have knowledge, or will they get a raw deal?—Anthroposophy certainly doesn't make religiousness dependent on knowledge. I must confess in the deepest religious sense I actually can't understand why a dependent religious life should exists beside Anthroposophy because the course of an anthroposophic life becomes such that firstly, of course, single personalities become researchers, who to some extend break through to the observation; then others will apply their healthy human minds to it—yes, this is what it is about. Just recently in Berlin this word was taken as evil from a philosophic view, and opposed on the grounds of the human mind being unable to understand anything super-sensory, and that the human mind which is able to understand something super-sensory, would surely not be healthy.—

A healthy human mind can simply look through the communications of spiritual researchers when he only wants to, if he doesn't put a spoke in his own wheel because of today's scattered prejudices. Certainly, there will be numerous other people who take it on good faith. Now, we can't compare something small with something big, but if this is only about using comparisons, one could perhaps do it. You see, I assume that the Being, Who we call the Christ, possesses an immeasurable higher content within, than human beings who call themselves Christians, and you have but trust in Him. Why should that be unjustified? That knowledge appears through this, knowledge which is not immediately clear, but which arrives in an earnest manner, that is to say as it comes out of personal research, clarifies what is discovered with no need to somehow try to understand why that would let people be given a raw deal. In this I actually find something which ultimately amounts to the fact that one can't acknowledge anything which one has not discovered oneself.

We won't get far in life at all if we are not also presented with something through other means than only direct observation. You see, it is obvious for a spiritual researcher to say: You, living in the present, haven't seen the deeds of Alexander the Great, but there is a connection between the life at present and the regarded-as-truth unseen deeds of Alexander the Great. Here a theologian objected: Yes, Alexander the Great don't interest me any longer, but that which is claimed in Anthroposophy I must see for myself, otherwise it doesn't interest me.—One can't say that everything of interest must always come from something observed. Just imagine if someone could only believe in his father and mother after he has looked at the truth of his belief in them. So, as I've said, I can't quite grasp something by applying precise terms to what is really meant; I would like to rather say, that I find a certain contradiction between, on the one hand, it is said that Anthroposophy wants to be wisdom and therefore appears dubious, and on the other hand, one could accept it, if you knew about things. This doesn't seem like quite a good match.

A particularly important question to me is the following. Perhaps its difficulty has resulted from what I've said myself: A person experiences through the anthroposophic life at the same time something which can meet the religious need. The next question then comes: When art assumes religious form, when science and social life take on religious form, will religion stop being independent and gradually only become something which exists with everything else in the world?—Well, that seems to me or at least seemed to me to be a complete misjudgement of the religious when it is indicated that art will develop in future in such a way, in the anthroposophic sense, and that it will develop social life in such a way according to the anthroposophic sense, that religion as something independent will vanish. Religion has indeed other living conditions, quite other needs than Anthroposophy.

It was so that the old religious foundations always had wisdom in the background. One can say there is no old religion which doesn't have wisdom in its background, and because knowledge existed there, it is not involved in religion. Religion is only created through the relationship of man to what is known. When so much anthroposophic art produced in future is not looked at with a religious mood, it will never make a religious impression. One would never be able to cultivate religion, no matter how hard one tried, in order to say about the social life what can be said out of spiritual science, out of Anthroposophy, when in reality people don't experience in all earnest the meaning of the words: "What you do to the least of my brothers, you also do to me."—The most beautiful anthroposophical impulses could never become a reality in life, if so much should be done, it would remain an empty science if religious life wasn't cultivated.

However, something has to be taken into account. In Shairer's defences there are three images: The first image is that man can approach water in a dual manner, either as a chemist and analyst in H₂O, or one can drink water. The supersensible world analyses a person whether he comes as an Anthroposophist, or when he takes possession of a direct experience, then he is a religious person. The religious person equals someone who drinks the water, the Anthroposophist is someone who analyses water and finds H₂O. Dr Shairer's second image is the following: Let's assume I've deposited a large amount of bank notes or gold on the table and I count, divide it and so on, so I calculate the money; but I may also possess this money, that is another relationship. The person who calculates the money is an Anthroposophist; the one who possesses it all, is a religious person. Shairer's third image is particularly characteristic. A person could have studied every possibility of human health and illness; he could know every branch of medicine. The other person can be healthy. So the one who is healthy, is the religious person, and the one who studies everything about illness and health, is the Anthroposophist.

The three examples are, considered abstractly, are extraordinarily accurate but still, only thought about abstractly. They are actually only valid for today's common knowledge. You see, with the water analysis, something can be done. For someone who doesn't study Anthroposophy, it is useless. Because one has to, if one wants to approach it, begin by "drinking" it. Water in Anthroposophy is not there for mere outer analysis; it must be drunk at the same time. The activity of drinking and the activity of the analysing or synthesizing are the same. That one believes something else about it, results from the fact that recently an otherwise excellent man has written in "Tat" that he would have no interest in my statements regarding the Akasha-Chronicle unless I honour him with them in a splendid illustrated edition.—Yes, my dear friends, to use such an image at all, one must acknowledge that the Akasha-Chronicle can only exist for those who allow themselves to experience it spiritually. It can't be allowed to be compared in this way. Already upon this basis I'm quite sure that the modern bad habit of the cinema will not be applied to Anthroposophy—hopefully not.

Therefore, the comparison between drinking water and water analysis is relevant for ordinary science but has no relevance to Anthroposophy. The second image was about counting money and possessing money. This also is not quite so; it is tempting, but it doesn't work this way. I can namely possess money but when I'm too foolish to be unable to count it, then its possession doesn't matter much. Under some circumstances I could possess the whole world but if I can't enter into it, then under the circumstances the world can mean very little.

Now; the thing about medicine. Materialistic medicine can certainly be studied on the one hand while on the other hand one could be healthy. One could certainly, if it's your destiny, be sick despite anthroposophical medicine. However, the comparison on this basis is not entirely true for the reason that materialistic medicine, what one knows about it, actually has nothing to do with being healthy in earthly life, but it is a knowledge and from this knowledge action can result. With Anthroposophy it is namely so, that anthroposophical medicine has to certainly also be a deducted knowledge, but the human being is approached much more closely. Here is something which can be proven with great difficulty, and it is because of the following. Take for example, this is necessary, someone aged forty and recommend, for a start, that he should stop smoking and drinking wine or something, and say to him, it would in fact improve his health, he would live longer than he would otherwise. Now he dies aged 48; and people say he already died at 48, it didn't help him.—I can't prove that if he hadn't avoided wine, he could perhaps have died at 44 already. When one encounters such things, there are small stumbling blocks. It is extraordinarily difficult to deliver proof when that which is to be accomplished, must be created as proof out of the world.

People certainly sometimes think curiously about things. I knew an anatomist, Hyrtl, who was an extraordinary big man who equally had a stimulating influence on his students and had a long life after he retired. He became over 80 years old then he died in a small place into which he had withdrawn. Just after Hyrtl's death, a widow who was a farmer encountered a man and she said to him: "Yes, now Hyrtl has died, we liked him so much, but he studied so much, and that's why he had to die; it doesn't bode well if one studies so much."—To this the man asked: "But you husband, how old was he when he died?" She said: "45 years."—Now the man asked if her husband has studied more than old Hyrtl?—You see, similar things actually happen on closer examination.

Now I don't want to deviate from serious things and would like to say the following. For Anthroposophists it is not important that there should be a distinction between drinking water and water analysis, but there is in fact something where in place of abstract knowledge, of discursive knowledge, an experience occurs within the knowledge of analysis; yet it remains above all knowledge. Only the Leese licentiate has resented calling an experience knowledge while he claimed—not out of a Christian but out of another scientific dogma—he may never take what he has experienced as an object of knowledge. Well, I mean, the thing is, if you really understand what Anthroposophy is as a human experience, this alien-to-life of the scientific no longer applies.

In relation to the secret, the Mystery, I may here insert what I said yesterday. I said it is not so that Anthroposophic knowledge can be obtained and then through thoughts, change into ordinary knowledge. In order to have the correct relationship to it, one must repeatedly return to it. It exists in quite another kind of inner relationship to people than does scientific knowledge. There still exists something of a sacred shyness in the relationship people have to anthroposophical knowledge and it is certainly not the case that clarity is thus undermined according to what is attained through Anthroposophy. You see, basically it's like this: when we go through the Portal of Death and before we enter the Portal of Birth into this earthly world, we live in that world which Anthroposophy speaks about. That is in fact the reality. Through Anthroposophy we take part in the riddle of creation and in the riddle of death, to a certain degree. That one doesn't understand these things in the same way in which one understands ordinary intellectual knowledge, something else must make this possible. You are not going to be guided into such a world as some people suppose. I have heard among thousands of objections, also heard that it is said Anthroposophy wants to solve all world riddles, and when the time comes where there are no more riddles in the world, what will people do with this knowledge? Then the earth will not be interesting anymore; everything which one can know about the earth, exists in them being riddles.—

Certainly, in an abstract sense, this can be an objection. However, even understood abstractly, the riddles do not become smaller, but they become ever bigger. Life has not been made easier by entering into the spiritual world, but at first the immeasurability of the world and the immeasurability of knowledge becomes apparent. That is why, in the case of the Mystery there is no reduction or degradation of the Mystery, but there is actually an elevation of the Mystery. This at least is apparent in experience.

Regarding the question whether there's a difference in value between Anthroposophy and religion or if both are necessary, I would like to say the following. Value differences lead into a subjective area and one has no sure foundations if one wants to assert differences in value. In any case you may from the scant anthroposophic explanations which I've given today and before, actually say that Anthroposophy and religion are both necessary in the future and that Anthroposophy is only necessary for the foundation of the work, which you need towards the renewal of religious life. Anthroposophy itself doesn't want to appear as endowed with religion but it wants to offer every possible help when religious life wants to find renewal.

Now my dear friends, I could, as I see, not answer everything exhaustively, I still want to put some things on hold. I have certainly had feelings through experiences with which I now want to give an answer to the question, which perhaps has not already appeared in the question, for instance this: I also have my religious objections to the faith which serves only those human forces which actually die with us, and that one—according to my experience I can say this—also through religious instruction, say something in a sense of: avoid the world and develop something completely different—and precisely in this way, strongly refer to man's egoism.

I have experienced the following phenomenon. For example, a good Anthroposophist who tried to work with all his might in order to find a path in Anthroposophy, but without a necessary measure of selflessness and without enough self-confidence, when courage failed him, became a Roman monk. I'm not speaking hypothetically but from experience. Yes, this person has experienced nothing other than having failed due to a lack of selflessness which he would have needed and the lack of confidence which he would have needed. This is the strongest appeal to those forces which dissipate with death; it doesn't serve these forces to go through the gate of death with the soul, to penetrate to reality. People just want to go down to where they don't have to be so strong, so there arises a sinking courage, this attach-oneself-on-to-something which through its submission into activity brings a certain inner satisfaction—which is only a kind of inner desire or lust—to become a Roman monk.

It is indeed from a religious basis needed to say that the priest should give a person something which doesn't only work for his communications with God up to death, but beyond death. In this connection Anthroposophy must be honest throughout with its knowledge. If one could know more—which is possible—about what goes beyond the gate of death and what doesn't remain, where for instance one has a mystic like saint Theresa, with an involvement only with the transient, so one could, even if you weren't a mystic, prepare yourself for life after death, where one enters atrophied for being a mystic with desires in life. One does enter, but in such a way of course as one would enter into life without hands or feet.

Through Anthroposophical knowledge a religious impulse can be discovered. To all of this the shyness must be overcome to unite belief and knowledge, which is what Anthroposophy strives for.

I tried to show you last time how initiation took place in the ancient Druid Lodges. Today I should like to speak about a related subject, but one which may appear a little remote. But we shall see how our understanding of human development will grow ever more profound.

You have certainly gathered from the Friday lectures¹ that the sagas of the different nations have a very deep content, and that myths are an expression of profound esoteric truths. I should like to speak today about one of the most interesting sagas, which has to do with the whole development of our fifth Great Epoch. At the same time you will see how a pupil of spiritual science passes through three stages in the understanding of sagas.

To begin with, sagas live in a particular nation, and are understood exoterically in an outer literal meaning. Next, disbelief sets in with regard to their interpretation, and an attempt is made by scholars to arrive at a symbolic meaning. Behind these two interpretations, however, five others can be found, for every saga can be interpreted in seven ways. The third is the one that can be taken literally again up to a point. But certainly one must learn to understand the language of sagas first. Today I wish to speak about a saga which is not easy to understand; it is the Prometheus saga.

You will find something about it in a chapter in the second volume of H.P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, and from this conclude what a profound meaning lies hidden in it. Nevertheless, it is not always possible to write about ultimate truths in something which is to be published. Today we are able to take the subject a little further than did H.P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine.

Prometheus belongs to the world of the Greek sagas. He and his brother, Epimetheus, are the sons of one of the Titans, called Iapetus. And the Titans themselves are the sons of the oldest of the Greek gods, of Uranus and his wife, Gaia. A translation of the word Uranus would be the ‘heavens ‘ and of Gaia, the ‘earth’. I would emphasise especially that the Uranus of the Greeks is the same as Varuna of India. Prometheus, therefore, is one of the Titans and a descendant of the sons of Uranus and Gaia, likewise his brother, Epimetheus. The youngest of the Titans, Chronos or ‘Time’, usurped the throne from his father Uranus, and was himself dethroned by his son Zeus and, along with the other Titans, was cast into Tartarus or Hades. Only the two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, remained loyal to Zeus. They rallied round Zeus and fought against the other Titans.

Zeus, however, wished to destroy the race of man, which had become insolent. Prometheus became the protagonist of man. He pondered how he could give man something which would enable him to save himself and make himself independent of the help of Zeus. So, we are told, Prometheus gave man writing and the other arts and, more especially, he instructed him in the use of fire. Through this, however, he drew down the wrath of Zeus upon himself, and because of the wrath of Zeus he was chained to the Caucasus and made to languish there for a long time in great torment.

It is further recounted how the gods, with Zeus at their head, caused a female statue to be made by Hephaestus, the heavenly smith. This female statue was endowed with all the outward attributes of the man of the fifth great epoch. This female statue was Pandora. She was required to bring gifts to mankind, but in the first place to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. Indeed, Prometheus warned his brother about accepting the gifts, but Epimetheus let himself be persuaded and took the proffered presents. All the gifts were showered upon mankind; only one thing was retained: hope. The gifts consisted mostly of plagues and suffering for humanity; only hope was retained in Pandora's box.

Prometheus, therefore, was chained to the Caucasus and a vulture gnawed incessantly at his liver. Here he languished. He was aware, however, of something which was a pledge for his deliverance. He knew a secret which was unknown even to Zeus himself and which Zeus was anxious to learn. He would not disclose it, however, even though Zeus sent the messenger of the gods, Hermes, to him.

In the course of the tale his strange deliverance is recounted. We are told that Prometheus can only be set free through the intervention of an initiate. And such an initiate was the Greek Heracles; Heracles who performed the twelve labours. The enactment of these labours is the achievement of an initiate. They are the symbolic representation of the twelve tests which have to be performed by someone undergoing initiation. In addition, it is said that Heracles underwent initiation in the Eleusinian mysteries. He was able to rescue Prometheus. Someone else had to sacrifice himself, however, and the Centaur Chiron did this for Prometheus. He was suffering from an incurable illness. He was half beast and half man. He suffered death and thereby released Prometheus. That is the outer form of the Prometheus saga.

In this saga lies the whole history of the fifth Great Epoch and true mystery wisdom is revealed in it. This was actually recounted as a saga in Greece. But also in the mysteries it was so portrayed that the candidate for initiation was actually confronted by the destiny of Prometheus. And in this destiny he was enabled to visualise the whole of the past and the future of the fifth Great Epoch. An understanding of this is only possible when you take one thing into account.

It was only during the middle of the Lemurian epoch that what is described as human incarnation came about; incarnation in the sense in which people are born on earth today. Humanity of that time was under the leadership of great teachers and guides, whom we call the ‘Sons of Fire-Mist’. At present, humanity of the fifth Great Epoch is also led by great initiates, but our initiates today are of a different kind from the leaders of that time.

You must now become quite clear about what constitutes this difference. There is an enormous difference between the leaders of the two previous Root Races and the leaders of our present fifth Root Race. The leaders of those former Root Races were also united in a White Brotherhood. Its members, however, had not undergone their previous development on our Earth, but on other planets. They descended to Earth already in the state of more highly developed, mature human beings in order to instruct the rest of humanity, still in its infant stage, into the primal arts of which it had need. This time of instruction lasted throughout the third, fourth and even into the fifth epoch.

This fifth Great Epoch took its start from a handful of men, who had been sifted out from the previous Great Epoch. They were collected together and prepared in the Gobi Desert and from there radiated out over the whole of the world. The first of these leaders, who was the founder of this impulse in the development of mankind, was one of the so-called Manus—the Manu² of the fifth Root Race. This Manu was still one of that company of leaders who descended to earth at the time of the third Root Race—He was one of the leaders who underwent development not on the earth only, but who came to earth with fully developed maturity.

It is only during the fifth Root Race that the development is beginning to take place of such Manus as are akin to ourselves; who have risen, as it were, from the ranks of humanity. We have men, therefore, who are already great masters and advanced leaders of humanity, and we have those who are striving to become such. In the fifth Root Race we have Chelas and masters who have experienced all that can be undergone by human beings only since the middle of the Lemurian epoch. One of these great masters who are leaders of the fifth Root Race is predestined to take over the leadership of the sixth Root Race. The sixth Root Race will be the first great epoch to have as its Manu one who is a brother to earthly man. The earlier masters, the Manus from other worlds, are handing over their leadership to a fellow human being.

The development in the realm of the arts coincides with the dawn of the fifth Root Race. The man of Atlantean times had a quite different mode of life. He did not make inventions or discoveries as we do. He worked in quite a different way, It is only during the fifth Root Race that everything connected with technical science and the arts, in our sense of the term, has taken place. The most important discovery was the use of fire. Be clear on that point.

Just call to mind all the things in technology, industry and art which depend for their existence on the use of fire. I think that an engineer would be inclined to agree with me when I say that, without the use of fire, nothing of all our modern technology would be possible; so that we may say that the discovery of the use of fire was the main discovery which gave the impulse for all later discoveries.

To that you must add that at the time when the Prometheus saga arose, fire was comprehended as including everything which had to do with warmth. The causes of lightning and all other natural phenomena connected with heat were also included under that heading. The consciousness of the fact that man of the fifth Root Race himself stood under the Fire Sign³ came to expression in the saga of Prometheus. Prometheus himself is nothing else than a representative of the whole of the fifth Great Epoch.

The brother of Prometheus is Epimetheus. First let us translate these two words: Prometheus can be interpreted as being the one who thinks in advance, Epimetheus as the one who thinks about things after they have happened. Here you have expressed quite clearly the two activities of human thinking in the foresight and hindsight of these two human beings. The one with hindsight is the one who lets the things of this world work upon him and then thinks about them afterwards. A kind of thinking such as this is ‘Kama-manasic’ thinking (earthly consciousness, or intellectual soul activity). Considered from a certain point of view, this is what this kind of thinking is: letting the world work upon, one and thinking about it afterwards. The man of the fifth Root Race thinks chiefly in the manner of Epimetheus.

But in so far as a man does not merely let the things of his surroundings work upon him, but creates something for the future, is an inventor and discoverer, just so far is he a Prometheus, one who thinks ahead. There would never be any inventions made if men were all like Epimetheus. An invention comes about because man is able to create something which was not there previously. First of all the thought is there and then the thought is transformed into reality. This is Promethean thinking. Promethean thinking is the ‘Manas’ thinking of the fifth Root Race (the thinking of spiritual thoughts). Earthly thinking and spiritual thinking flow side by side in the fifth Root Race. Gradually the spiritual thinking will become more and more widespread.

This ‘Manas’ thinking of the fifth Root Race has one particular feature which we shall understand if we look back to the Atlantean epoch. At that time thinking was more instinctive and was still connected with the life forces. The people of Atlantean times were still able to transform the power inherent in seeds into a driving force. Just as man today has a kind of reservoir of power stored up in the coal seams, which can produce steam to drive locomotives and move loads, so Atlantean man had great storehouses of plant seeds containing a force which could be used to drive vehicles, as described by Scott-Elliot⁴ in his booklet about Atlantis. This art has been lost to mankind. The spiritual power of the Atlanteans could control living nature and make use of the latent power in seeds. The spiritual powers of the fifth Root Race are only sufficient to control the forces of the inorganic world of minerals. Thus the Manas of the fifth Great Epoch is bound up with the mineral forces in the same way as the man of Atlantean times was bound up with the life forces. All Promethean powers are chained to the rock, to the solid earth. For that reason, the apostle Peter is the ‘rock’ upon which Christ founded His Church. It is the same as the rock of the Caucasus. Man belonging to the fifth epoch has to seek his destiny on the physical plane alone. He is bound up with inorganic mineral forces.

Just try to imagine what is meant when one speaks about the technology of the fifth epoch. What is it there for? If you are able to form a comprehensive view of it you will see that, however great and impressive the result may be, when the forces of the intellect and Manas are applied to the inorganic mineral world, it is nevertheless, in the main, only self-interest and egoism which is the motive behind the application of all these forces of discovery and invention.

Start with the first discoveries and inventions and carry your thoughts through to the most modern inventions of the telephone and so on. You will see how great and mighty are the forces which have been put at our disposal, certainly—but to what end? What is it that is being conveyed to us from distant lands by means of railways and steamships? We transport foodstuffs; we order foodstuffs by telephone. Basically it is human greed and the substance of our wishes and desires which creates a demand for all these inventions and discoveries during the fifth epoch. It is this which must become dear to us in objective considerations. Then we will understand how it is that the higher human being, which has been placed into physical existence, is actually chained to matter during the fifth epoch, through the fact that man's astral body seeks its satisfaction within the realm of matter.

If you consider the principles of man's nature from an esoteric point of view, you will see that they stand in definite relationship to certain bodily organs. I shall elaborate on this theme still further, but today I will only indicate those specific organs with which our seven principles⁵ are connected.

First of all we have the so-called physical principle. This stands in occult relationship to the upper part of the human face, to the root of the nose. Man's physical frame—man was only astral at first and then incorporated into the physical—took its start from this point. The physical Organisation spread out and formed the base of the nose first of all, so that the occultist ascribes the mineral-physical to this part of the anatomy.

The second principle is Prana, the etheric parallel body. This is ascribed to the liver, with which it stands in occult relationship. Next comes the astral body, Kama, which has developed its activity in building up the digestive organs, having their seat in the stomach. If the astral body had not borne this particular character that it has in man, then the human digestive organs and stomach would not have had the special form which they have today.

If you behold the human being, first with regard to his physical body, next with regard to his etheric body, and thirdly with regard to his astral body, you there have the basis for what, as you see, is chained by the mineral fetters in the fifth Great Epoch.

Through his higher bodies, man frees himself again from these fetters and rises to higher worlds. Kama-Manas, in which the ego is active, works its way upwards again. Man frees himself again from the purely physical basis given by nature. For this reason there is an occult connection between this principle and that which raises man up again out of the physical, by which man is severed, so to speak, from the physical basis given by nature This occult connection is what exists between that principle in man and his umbilical cord. If this principle in man were not developed the embryo would never be severed from the body of its mother in the way it is.

It we, then proceed to Higher Manas, or Spirit Self, this is connected in a similar way with heart and blood circulation. Buddhi, or Life Spirit, has an occult connection with the larynx, with the larynx and the gullet. And Atma, or Spirit Man, has an occult connection with something which extends through man's whole being, namely the Akasha, or immortal part of man's being.

Those are the seven occult relationships. If you pay attention to these, then you will discover that the most important ones for our epoch are the relationships with the etheric and astral principles. And if you add to that what I said before about the Atlantean's control over the life forces—the life forces are those forces which weave in the etheric parallel body—then you will be able to understand that, in a certain way, Atlantean man was at a stage lower than we are. His etheric parallel body still retained its original connection with the etheric forces around him and he controlled with his own etheric body the Prana, or etheric forces of the outside world. Through the fact that man has progressed one stage higher, the field of his activities lies one stage lower. That is an occult law: that when, on the one hand, progress takes place, on the other hand, a retrograde step accompanies it. Whereas man previously worked upon the astral plane out of his etheric forces, he now has the task of working upon the physical plane out of his astral forces.

Now you will understand how profoundly these occult connections are symbolised in the Prometheus saga. A vulture is gnawing at the liver of Prometheus. Astrality is symbolised by the vulture, which truly devours the forces of the fifth epoch. The vulture gnaws at man's liver, at the foundation of his existence, and thus this energy belonging to the fifth Root Race really gnaws at the life forces of mankind, because man is chained to mineral nature, to the Petrine rock, the Caucasus. Through that, man has to pay for his affinity with Prometheus. And thereby man is obliged to become master over his own nature, so that he need no longer remain chained to the mineral world, to the Caucasus.

Only those who are initiated as human beings of the fifth epoch can bring release to fettered mankind. Heracles, who was a human initiate of this kind, had himself to press through to the Caucasus in order to free Prometheus. But this is how initiates raise up man from his fetters and all that is predestined to perish must sacrifice itself.

Man who still has an affinity with his animal nature, the Centaur Chiron, has to sacrifice himself. The man of previous epochs must be sacrificed. The sacrifice of the Centaur Chiron is just as important for the progress of the fifth epoch as the freeing through the initiate.

It is said that in the Greek mystery schools the future was foretold to the people. It was no vague, abstract account of what was to happen to man in the future, but instructions which would lead him along the pathway to the future, and he was shown what he had to do for his future development. And what still remained to be unfolded as human strength was portrayed in the mighty mystery drama of Prometheus.

One has to imagine the three races of the gods, Uranus, Chronos and Zeus, as three successive great leaders of humanity. Uranus denotes heaven, Gaia the earth. If we go back in time beyond the middle of the Lemurian epoch, we do not find man in the form we know him today, but one called Adam Cadmon⁶ by occult science, who is still asexual, and who had never belonged to the earth previously, who had not developed organs of sight for physical observation, but was still a part of Uranus, of the heavens. Through the union of Uranus with Gaia, man was born, man who descended to the earth and at the same time became involved in time. Chronos (Time) was the leader of the second divine race from the middle of Lemurian times until the beginning of Atlantis. These leading figures were symbolised by the Greeks, first under the name Uranus, then Chronos, and later Zeus. Zeus, however, is one of those leaders who underwent his training elsewhere than on the earth. He is one of the great immortals, as are all the rest of the Greek gods.

Mortal man has to learn to stand on his own feet during the fifth Great Epoch. He is represented by Prometheus. Man was the inaugurator of the arts and, above all, of the primal art of the use of fire. Zeus is jealous of him because he is predestined to produce his own initiates, who will take over the leadership in the sixth epoch. Mankind has first to pay for that, however. That is why the first great initiate of humanity must take upon himself the whole of life's suffering.

Prometheus is the archetypal initiate of the fifth epoch, who has undergone initiation, not only in knowledge, but also in deed. He it was who underwent the whole of suffering and will be released from his bondage by him who is becoming mature enough to set free the whole of humanity in gradual stages and to raise it up out of the mineral realm.

Great cosmic truths are thus portrayed to us in the sagas. That is why I said to you at the beginning: whoever reaches the third stage in their interpretation is able to take their meaning literally once more. ... [Here follow a few unclear sentences]⁷ In the case of the Prometheus saga one is confronted by the picture of the vulture gnawing at the liver. That is to be taken quite literally. The vulture really is gnawing at the liver of the people of the fifth epoch. It portrays the fight which is going on between the stomach and the liver. In every single human being of the fifth epoch, this Promethean struggle is being repeated. We can take what is here said in a completely literal sense. If this struggle were not present in the man of the fifth epoch, our destiny would be entirely different at the present day.

There are thus three ways of interpreting the sagas: firstly, the exoteric literal rendering; secondly, the allegorical one—the struggle within human nature; thirdly, the occult understanding, in which again the literal meaning can be taken. From this you can judge that all sagas—at least those which bear a significance of this kind—are derived from the mystery schools, and are no less than a representation of what was enacted therein as the great drama of human destiny. As I was able to show you in connection with the Druidic mysteries that [the saga of] Baldur was no less than a portrayal of what took place in the mysteries, so, in the saga of Prometheus, you have a portrayal of what was experienced by the pupil for initiation in the inner sanctuaries of the mystery schools of Greece to provide energy and new strength for life in the future.

• 1 . During 1904 Rudolf Steiner not only spoke at the regular Group Meetings, which took place on Mondays, but occasionally also on Fridays to a very small circle which gathered in the flat of Fraulein Klara Motzkus in the Schluterstrasse. The main subject dealt with was the myths and sagas. We do not have reports from all the lectures which were held there; at the most they are very fragmentary notes. These lectures of 1904, except for lecture 1 of 23rd May 1904, were all held for this small circle of friends. The May and June lectures of 1905 (lectures 11 to 14), and lecture 20 of 2nd January 1906, were held on the Mondays for the official Berlin Group. The October lectures of 1905 (lectures 15 to 19) were held for the General Meeting audience of the German Section.
• 2 . The name ‘Manu’ comes from the Sanskrit root ‘man’ = ‘thinking.’ In Indian theosophical terminology this denotes high spiritual beings, who have the task of forming new cultures or epochs. For further details concerning the Manu of the fifth epoch see Rudolf Steiner's Cosmic Memory, Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1971; Occult Science, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1969, and a lecture given in Heidelberg on 21st January 1909; Some Aspects of Reincarnation and the Life After Death, typescript copy Z 360.
• 3 . This is expressed in H.P. Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, Volume 3, ‘Esotericism,’ p. 330, in the following way: ‘Prometheus is a symbol and a personification of the whole of mankind in relation to an event which occurred during its childhood,—“Baptism by Fire”—which is a mystery within the great Promethean Mystery, one that may be at present mentioned only in its broad general features.’
• 4 . The Story of Atlantis, by W. Scott-Elliot, The Theosophical Publishing Society, London. See also: Cosmic Memory, Atlantis and Lemuria, by Rudolf Steiner, Rudolf Steiner Publications.
• 5 . These seven principles and the organs with which they are occultly connected are enumerated as follows:
  
  Physical body—base of the nose.
  Etheric body—liver.
  Kama or Kama-Rupa (astral body)—digestive system, stomach.
  Kama-Manas (astral-ego)—umbilical cord.
  Higher Manas (Spirit Self)—heart and blood circulation.
  Buddhi (Life Spirit)—larynx.
  Atma (Spirit Man)—the Akasha.
• 6 . Compare also: Man's Life on Earth and in the Spiritual Worlds, second lecture, Oxford, 22nd August 1922.
• 7 . The unclear sentences are as follows: ‘Every saga undergoes change. It derives from the most ancient tradition and undergoes change at a certain definite point. It is the same in the case of every saga, even those which can again be taken literally.’

We shall the better understand the real nature of the events of today and especially of the immediate future if, from a spiritual angle, we see them as the continuation of the events which took place during the early years of Christianity. This may seem paradoxical today. It is difficult to bring home to the majority of people how certain forces which at that time had been implanted in, and had made a deep impact upon the evolution of the Earth and Man, are still operative today, because, in the present climate of contemporary thought they fail to perceive the deeper impulses, the deep underlying forces that are at work in contemporary events. They prefer to approach everything from a purely superficial standpoint. These deeper spiritual forces are not accessible to mankind today because people are not prepared to investigate them. Anyone who wishes to penetrate a little beneath the surface events of our time will find, in many a published document and in the vicissitudes of fortune that befall those who are unaware of the motives that determine their actions, impulses that are often a continuation, a resurgence of certain impulses that were manifested especially in the early centuries of the Christian era. It is not even possible to characterize the outstanding examples of the resurgence of ancient impulses in our present age because people cannot endure their characterization. But those who study the first Christian centuries in Europe from a certain standpoint will be able to detect the forces that are emerging once again and are actively at work. I have therefore attempted to draw your attention to certain phenomena connected with the expansion of Christianity in the first centuries A.D., because, through the appropriate use of the ideas derived from them, much that is taking place today will immediately become clear to you.

I propose to add further information based upon our recent investigations which we can discuss in detail later. Let us first look at this new material so that our later enquiry may bear fruit.

I have often spoken to you of the remarkable fact that the early Roman emperors acquired Initiation by constraint and this explains many of their actions. Consequently they gained knowledge of certain facts connected with the great impulses of cosmic events, but they exploited this knowledge derived from the Mysteries to their own advantage.

It is most important to realize that the intervention of the Christ Impulse into the historical life of mankind was not merely an event on the physical plane which we can apprehend through a study of the historical facts, but was a genuinely spiritual event. I have already pointed out that the Gospel report that Christ was known to the devils has deeper implications than is usually recognized. We are told that Christ performed acts of healing which are described in the Gospels as the casting out of evil spirits. And we are constantly reminded that the devils knew who Christ was. On the other hand Christ Himself rebuked the devils and “suffered them not to speak for they knew He was the Christ.” (Mark I, 34; Luke IV, 41). The appearance of Christ therefore was not only a matter for the judgement of men. It is possible that at first people did not have the slightest inkling of what the coming of Christ presaged. But the devils—beings belonging to a super-sensible world—recognized Him. The super-sensible world therefore knew of His advent. The more informed leaders of the early Christians were firmly convinced that the coming of Christianity was not merely an event on the terrestrial plane but something that was related to the spiritual world, something which evoked a radical change in the spiritual world. Without a shadow of doubt the leading spirits of early Christianity were firmly persuaded of this.

Now it is a remarkable phenomenon that the Roman emperors, because of their forced initiation which gave insight into the spiritual world, had a presentiment of the far-reaching importance of the Christ Impulse. There were some emperors. however, who despite their irregular initiation, understood little of these secrets; but there were others who understood so much that they were able to divine something of the power and effectiveness of the Christ Mystery. And it was these more talented, the more perspicacious emperors who began to pursue a definite policy towards Christianity which was then gaining ground. Indeed the first emperor to adopt this policy was Tiberius who succeeded Augustus, though the objection might be raised that Christianity was not as yet widely diffused. This objection, however, is not valid for, when he learned of Christ's birth in Palestine, Tiberius—who had received a partial initiation into the ancient Mysteries—realized its significance. Let us consider for a moment that policy towards Christianity which began under Tiberius and was pursued by all the initiated emperors. Tiberius announced his intention to admit Christ to the Roman pantheon.

The Roman empire pursued a deliberate policy towards the worship of the gods. In essence it was as follows: when the Romans conquered a people they received the gods of the newly conquered people into their Olympus. They declared that these gods were also deserving of veneration and they were added to the Roman pantheon. The object of this policy therefore was to appropriate not only the material or temporal goods, but also the spiritual forces of the conquered peoples. The initiated Caesars saw in the gods something more than the mere external images; they had a deeper understanding than the people. They knew that the visible image of the gods concealed real spiritual powers pertaining to the different Hierarchies. Their policy was perfectly consistent and comprehensible, for the authoritarian principle of Rome was consciously reinforced by the power which was believed to derive from the assimilation of other gods. And, as a rule, the worship of other gods was accepted not only in an outward and exoteric way, but the Mystery-teachings of other peoples were also taken over by the Roman Mystery-centres and merged with the Mystery-cult of the ancient Roman empire. And since, at that time, it was generally held that it was neither right nor possible to govern without the support of the spiritual powers symbolized by the gods, this practice was taken for granted.

The aim of Tiberius therefore was to integrate the power of Christ, as he conceived it, with the impulses proceeding from the other deities recognized by him and his peoples. The Roman Senate thwarted his intention and nothing came of it. None the less the initiated emperors, Hadrian among them, made repeated efforts to achieve this goal, but constantly met with opposition from the dignitaries who could make their influence felt. And when we examine the objections raised against this policy of the initiated emperors we can form a good idea of what happened at this decisive turning-point in human evolution.

We witness here a remarkable coincidence. On countless occasions Roman writers, influential personalities and large sections of the Roman populace accused the Christians of profaning what others held to be sacred, and vice versa. In other words, the Romans repeatedly emphasized that the Christians were radically different in thought and feeling from the Romans and other peoples—for the other peoples together with their gods had been assimilated by the Romans. Thus everyone looked upon the Christians as people with a different make-up, people with different feelings and responses. Now this view could be dismissed as a calumny; suchlike accusations are always ready to hand, of course, when one takes a superficial view of history. But we cannot regard this view as a calumny when we realize that many of the opinions of earlier times and many of the contemporary opinions concerning the Mystery of Golgotha have passed over verbatim into Christian teaching. To put it more clearly, the Christians expressed their sentiments in words that could be found amongst many of their contemporaries. One of these was Philo of Alexandria (note 1), a contemporary of Christ, who probably had first-hand knowledge of what was later found in the Christian writings. Philo makes the following remarkable statement: “According to traditional teachings I must hate that which others love” (he is referring to the Romans) “and love that which others hate.” If you bear this statement in mind and turn to the Gospel of St. Matthew, you will find countless passages which echo this statement of Philo. And so we can say that Christianity has developed, as it were, out of a spiritual aura which required people to say, “we love what others hate”. This means—and this saying was quoted in the early Christian communities and served as one of the fundamental principles of Christian teachings—that Christians themselves openly acknowledged what others reproached them with. It was not therefore a calumny; it accorded with the Roman view: “the Christians love what we hate and hate what we love”. And the Christians, for their part, said exactly the same of the Romans.

It is clear therefore that something wholly different from anything that had been known before now entered human evolution—otherwise it would not have had so great an impact. Of course, if we wish to understand this whole situation we must realize that the new impulse had come from the spiritual worlds. Many who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, such as Philo, caught fleeting glimpses of it which they described each after his own fashion. And so many of the passages from the Gospels which are interpreted expediently today, as in the case of Barres, whom I mentioned at the conclusion of my last lecture, will be seen in their true light when we cease to interpret them to suit our convenience, but when our interpretation is determined by the whole spirit of the age. There are strange interpretations in Barres; indeed Biblical exegesis assumes very strange forms nowadays. Much that Philo says agrees closely with the Gospels and I would like to quote a passage which shows that because he was not inspired to the same extent as were the Evangelists later, his style was rather different from theirs. As a talented writer in the popular sense he made less heavy demands upon the reader than the Evangelists. In one notable passage Philo gave expression to something that was occupying the hearts and minds of the men of his time. He says: “Do not concern yourselves with the genealogical records or the documents of despots, take no thought for the things of the body; do not attribute to the citizen civic rights or civil liberties, which you deny to those of humble origin or who have been purchased as slaves in the market, but give heed only to the ancestry of the soul!” If the Gospels are read with understanding one cannot fail to recognize that something of this attitude of mind, albeit raised to a higher level, pervades the Gospels and why therefore an opportunist like Barres can write the passage I quoted to you in my last lecture. We should do well to bear his words in mind and I propose therefore to read them to you once again.

“It is a waste of time to look for the after-life. Perhaps it does not even exist. No matter how we approach the question we are never vouchsafed an answer. Let us leave all occultism to adepts and charlatans. Mysticism of every kind is totally irrational. Let us submit to the authority of the Church because, with the traditional teaching and practical experience of centuries she prescribes the code of ethics in which nations and children must be instructed. And finally we must submit because, far from exposing us to the dangers of mysticism, she actively protects us against them, silences the voices of the mystery teachings, expounds the Gospels and tailors the liberal anarchy of the Saviour to the needs of modern society.”

In the passage which I quoted from Philo we can see, since it is echoed again and again in the New Testament, what lies behind this whole movement. Philo's reference to the ancestry of the soul carries profound implications; he implies something that is opposed to the leading ideas of the Roman empire. For the Roman empire recognized only physical inheritance in its various forms, and the whole social order was founded on this principle. And suddenly the cry was raised: “Take no thought for the ancestry of the body but give heed only to the ancestry of the soul!” One could hardly imagine a more radical breach with the fundamental principles of the Roman empire, a greater contrast. And this contrast was raised to a higher level by the advent of Christ Jesus—indeed the world had been waiting for this moment—and was vigorously opposed to the existing world order of that time.

The Roman emperors would have been only too pleased to receive Christ into their pantheon as a new god amongst the other gods though He struck at the very roots of their society, for the Christ God who embodies a far deeper reality would thereby have become one of their own gods. But the initiated emperors soon realized that the advent of the Christ would be fraught with difficulties for them. When initiation of the emperors, as was the case in Rome after Augustus had been made obligatory by imperial decree, the forces of initiation exercised a powerful influence in the external world. They influenced the policies of the emperors and were operative in the measures and impulses which shaped society. The aims and intentions of the initiated emperors were more clearly defined, more uncompromising than those of the ordinary initiate. Suppose, for example, that one of the emperors who had received initiation had said: “Now John the Baptist baptized with water. Through this baptism by water the etheric body was loosened” (the initiated emperors were of course aware of this) “and the candidates for baptism thereby gained insight into the inner structure of the spiritual world.” They were aware that a decisive turning-point in the history of the world had now been reached. This was known to those whose etheric bodies had been loosened through total immersion. Let us now suppose that one of these emperors had said: “I accept the challenge”—such things were not unknown in the Mysteries “I am prepared to do battle against that which has entered the world at this decisive moment in history!”—One must realize how autocratic, self-willed, these emperors were. But they never dreamt for a moment that they might be powerless against the will of the gods; they were determined—and it was for this purpose they had themselves initiated—to try issue with the spiritual world-impulses and to stem the tide of world-evolution. Such things had already happened before; and they are happening before our eyes today, only people are unaware of it.

Here is a historical incident that confirms the hypothesis I have suggested above. In the age of Constantine, Licinius ruled over the Eastern part of the empire. He took it upon himself to challenge the gods. He decided to celebrate a cult act, for these ritual performances symbolized the struggle against the spiritual powers. The ceremony was intended to demonstrate publicly that he had undertaken to challenge the gods. In other words, he wished to ridicule baptism in the eyes of his fellow men (for it was baptism that had made known to the world that the turning-point in world-history had come), and so challenge Christianity and blunt the force of the Christian impulse. To this end a festival was organized at Heliopolis. It was arranged that an actor, Gelasius, should be dressed in the white robes of a priest and be immersed in water. It was to be presented as a spectacle, as a burlesque of Christian baptism. Gelasius, clothed in white, was immersed in the water and was taken out again. He was then exposed to the assembled populace as an object of ridicule. And what happened? Gelasius turned to the people and said: “I have now become a Christian and I will remain a Christian with all the strength at my command.” Licinius had received his answer from the spiritual world. Baptism was no longer an object of ridicule; the effects of baptism were demonstrated for all the world to see. He (Licinius) recognized that the critical moment in world history had arrived. This inititated Emperor had taken it upon himself to challenge the gods and had received his answer.

It is hardly possible for us today to form an idea of the significance of this answer. It was seen by all, even by the heathen, as a complete vindication of baptism, a valid answer, an answer that had to be reckoned with. And those who at that time were initiated into the secrets of world events received a momentary illumination from another source and were granted insight into the meaning and import of Christianity. Widely different customs which had an occult meaning had survived from ancient times. Under the Antonines, for example, the Sibyls delivered their oracles. People consulted them and took their instructions from them. One important oracle of the time of the Antonines predicted that Rome was doomed to destruction, that ancient Rome would not survive! Now oracular utterances, though often ambiguous and open to various interpretations, can be correctly interpreted. This particular oracle gave out this strange prophecy: “Rome will perish and the place where the city once stood will become the haunt of foxes and wolves.” This was a sign that had to be reckoned with. People naturally looked for a deeper meaning but they felt that the turning-point of world history had arrived. The might of Rome would be extinguished. Foxes and wolves would lord it amongst the ruins and take over in her place. Oracles of course often speak ambiguously, but occasionally, even in those times, the aura of initiation was transmitted through an ordinary, uninitiated sage, so that he frequently uttered remarkable prophecies which could only be construed as referring to the turning-point of world evolution.

In my last lecture I spoke of Nero and told you what this initiate emperor really thought. He wished to set the whole world on fire so that he might witness its destruction in person. If Rome as the centre of the world power was to be destroyed, at least he wished to determine for himself the manner of its destruction. Seneca once warned him in a remarkable statement which can be understood only if we are aware that the Roman emperors who were in possession of the principle of initiation believed themselves to be endowed with divine authority which the Christians refused to honour. Seneca, who knew no other way of bringing his message home to the tyrant, said to Nero: “You have absolute power, you have unlimited authority, you can even order the death of those whom you think may contribute in some way to the world order that will follow the downfall of Rome. But there is one thing a despot cannot do, he cannot compass the death of his successor.” These words had profound implications. Seneca was referring of course not to the potential successor if the occasion should arise, but to the actual successor. Seneca wished to indicate that death set a limit to the Emperor's power. The belief that Rome was doomed had an important influence, especially upon imperial circles.

The Christians reacted differently from the Romans to this tradition. We are here faced with a paradoxical situation. The Christians, for their part, championed the idea that Rome would not perish, that her dominion would endure to the end, which always implied the end of an era. It was the Christians, therefore, who upheld the view that the dominion of Rome would endure, that it would outlive the time of the foxes and wolves. Not that the Christians would have denied—if I may risk an oracular statement—that Rome would become the habitat of wolves and foxes They agreed that it was possible, but they maintained, on the other hand, that her power would endure.

We must bear in mind these different attitudes or opinions. Many of them in fact have proved to be correct. For example, the mother of Alexander Severus who was a pupil of Origen—although suspected of heresy, he was none the less regarded as a kind of Church Father—had managed to set up a kind of pantheon for her private use. In her private sanctuary she revered equally Abraham, Christ, Orpheus and Apollonius of Tyana and she considered the worship of these four deities was indispensable for her salvation. As a devoted pupil of Origen she found that this practice was in no way contrary to his teaching.

When we consider these different shades of opinion which I have tried to outline briefly, we find that they reflect the atmosphere of the first three centuries of our era. And during this period we find repeated attempts by initiated emperors to come to terms with Christianity and to incorporate Christianity into their religious system. Despite the recorded persecutions of the Christians this was the Imperial policy up to the fourth century.

Now in the fourth century a remarkable personality appeared on the scene in the shape of the Emperor Constantine (note 2), a contemporary of Licinius. He was an outstanding personality both politically and spiritually. I have indicated on other occasions how spiritual forces were at work in the personality of Constantine and to some extent guided him in the difficult administration of the Western empire. Today I should like to consider him from another standpoint.

His spiritual make-up was such that he was unable to find a right relationship to the principles of ancient initiation. In contrast to his predecessors and contemporaries he shrank from coercing the hierophants into granting him initiation into the ancient Mysteries. The Sibylline oracles and the prophecies of Rome's impending downfall weighed heavily upon his soul. He was also aware of the Christian teaching that Rome would endure to the end of time. He was well informed on these matters. But he shrank from initiation into the Mysteries; he shrank from carrying the war against the Christians into the realm of the Mysteries. This has significant implications.

What history tells of Constantine is extremely interesting and shows how he tried to find a modus vivendi with Christianity by other means, how he set himself up as the protector of Christianity and introduced Christianity, as he understood it, into the Roman empire. But he could not incorporate his form of Christianity into the old principle of initiation. He was faced with an insurmountable difficulty because the Christians themselves and their leaders were vigorously opposed to this. They felt, and many even realized, that the mission of Christianity was to unveil the ancient Mystery teachings which until then had been kept secret in the Mystery temples. It was their desire that the truths hidden in the Mysteries should be proclaimed to the whole world and should not be restricted to the temples. Fundamentally, the aim of these initiated emperors was to deny Christianity to the people and to restore it again to the Mystery temples. In that event, they believed, people would be initiated into Christianity in the same way as they had been initiated into the secrets of the ancient pagan Mysteries. It was difficult for Constantine to achieve his goal in face of the objectives pursued by the Christians. The Christians saw in the turning-point of world history an event of a spiritual, non-temporal order. And their claim that the Roman empire would endure must be understood as an expression of a wholly spiritual impulse. And this is clearly reflected in the secret teachings of the early Christians. In maintaining that the Roman empire would endure they sought to anticipate what actually came to pass. I pointed out recently that the deeper impulse of the Roman empire has not ceased, that it still lives on, not only in jurisprudence, but in other domains also, which, to those who do not probe more deeply, appear to be a new innovation. But in fact we are simply witnessing a prolongation, an extension of the driving forces behind Imperial Rome. Although the old Roman empire is no more, its spirit still lives on and bites deeply into our civilization.

Certain people maintain that we are haunted today and will always be haunted by the ghost of the old Roman empire. And this is accepted as a truism by the educated, even today, and is unlikely to change. The Christians wished to draw attention to this. But at the same time they contended that Christianity will always contain an element that is antagonistic to the Roman empire, for the spiritual impulse in Christianity will always be at odds with the materialism of Rome. And this contention of the Christians was prophetic.

You will now understand more clearly why the Senators and the Roman Emperors were alarmed, for they naturally associated the decline that was prophesied with the external empire which they saw slowly crumble under the impact of Christianity. And the emperor Constantine shared this view. Although not himself initiated, he was aware that a primordial wisdom had once existed in ancient times when man possessed atavistic clairvoyance. This wisdom had been transmitted to later ages, had been preserved by the priesthood, but had gradually become corrupted. In Rome too, Constantine said to himself: our social order embodies something that is associated with the institutions of this primordial wisdom, but we have simply buried it beneath the social order of a materialistic and secular empire. This was expressed in a pregnant symbol that is an “Imagination”, and not only an “Imagination”, but also an historical cult act, for these “Imaginations” often took the form of cult acts. People knew that in earlier times wisdom was not an arbitrary invention of man but was a revelation from the spiritual worlds. They knew that in primordial times priests had preserved this wisdom, not in Rome, of course, but across the sea in Ilion, in Troy where they originally dwelt. And this is expressed in the legend of the palladium, the so-called image of Pallas Athene which fell from Heaven in Troy, was preserved in a sanctuary, was then transferred to Rome and buried under a porphyry pillar. In all that was connected with this symbolical cult act people felt that they were able to trace back their civilization to the ancient wisdom which they had received from the spiritual world, but that they could not reach the heights which this wisdom had known in ancient Troy.

Such were the feelings Constantine harboured; and he also felt that even if he were to be initiated into the later Mysteries, they would be of little help to him; they would not lead him to the palladium, to the ancient primordial wisdom. He therefore decided to challenge the cosmic powers after his own fashion in order to save the Roman empire from destruction. He realized that this must be achieved in accordance with certain cosmic impulses and that it would have to take place in accordance with certain cult acts which were publicly enacted for all the world to see. He decided therefore to transfer the capital from Rome to the site of ancient Troy, to have the palladium dug up and taken back to Troy. The plan miscarried. Instead of establishing a new Rome on the site of Troy, he decided to found a new city, Constantinople, transfer the power to her and thus save declining Rome for future ages. By these means Constantine hoped to stem the tide of world evolution. He was prepared for Rome to become the habitat of foxes and wolves as the Sibylline oracle had foretold, but at the same time he wished to transfer the hidden impulses of Rome to a new site and so restore them to their original source. Constantine therefore embarked upon the ambitious plan to found Constantinople, and the work was completed in A.D. 326. He intended that the foundation of the city should coincide with this turning-point in world history. He therefore chose to lay the foundation stone at the moment when the Sun stood in the sign of the Archer and the Crab ruled the hour. He followed closely the indications of the cosmic signs. He wished to make Constantinople famous and to transfer to her the enduring impulse of eternal Rome. He therefore had the porphyry pillar (which was later destroyed by storms) transported to Constantinople. He ordered the palladium to be dug up and to be placed beneath the pillar. He also treasured among his possessions some relics of the Cross and a few nails that had originally secured the Cross. The relics of the Cross were made into a kind of frame to hold a much prized statue of Apollo and the nails into a nimbus with which he was crowned. This statue was set up on the porphyry pillar and an inscription was engraved on it which read somewhat as follows: That which sheds its beneficent influence here shall, like the Sun, endure for all time and proclaim the fame of its founder Constantine to all eternity! These things must of course be taken more or less imaginatively, but with this qualification, that they refer at all times to actual historical events.

This whole story has passed over into legend and, transmuted, lives on in the following legend: the palladium which is a symbol for a particular centre of primordial wisdom had been deposited originally in the secret Mystery Centres of the priest-initiates of Troy. It came to light for the first time when it was transported by circuitous routes from Troy to Rome. It saw the light of day a second time when it was transferred from Rome to Constantinople on the orders of Constantine. And those who believe the legend say that it will see the light of day a third time when it is transported from Constantinople to a Slavonic city. This legend is still vitally alive and survives in many things and under manifold forms. Today many things which appear in their purely physical aspects conceal a deeper layer of meaning.

Constantine therefore actively strove to prevent the downfall of the Roman empire in spite of his firm belief in the prophecy of the Sibylline oracle. He wanted to save Rome from herself.

In what I have told you I want you to recognize that in the historical personality of Constantine psychic impulses were at work which had significant and far-reaching effects. And bear in mind also what the earlier Christians and their leaders maintained: “The Roman empire will endure and the Christ Impulse we have received will also be realized and will ever be present amongst us.” Here we see two parallel phenomena of importance which have a significant bearing upon the different currents which have influenced the cultural development of the West. In particular you will be able to form an idea of the attitude towards the Roman empire in the early Christian centuries and in the age of Constantine, and of the sharply conflicting opinions on the way in which the future was envisaged. And you will perhaps find criteria which will enable you to see many of the later events in their true light. And we can only see many of these later events in proper perspective if we answer the following question: How far does the later development of Christianity up to now accord with its original intention and what must be done to bring it into closer rapport with that intention?

It remains for me to speak of a still more important moment in evolution in connection with the expansion of Christianity, the moment when an initiated Emperor called Julian the Apostate came face to face with this emergent Christianity. From the results of our historical enquiry we shall then be in a position to discuss in this context the further question: How can we prepare our souls to draw near to the Christ whose presence will be experienced in the etheric world in the present century? What steps must we take, especially in our present age, to draw near to Him?

In my next lecture I should like to discuss the trend of events under Julian the Apostate and to indicate the relation of our present age to the Etheric Christ in so far as it is permissible to touch upon this question today.

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NOTES BY TRANSLATOR

Note 1. Philo of Alexandria or Philo Judaeus (circa 30 B.C.–A.D. 40) was an important representative of Hellenistic Judaism. He believed that the Pentateuch had divine authority. In his “Allegories of the Sacred Law”, a commentary on Genesis, he regarded the characters in Genesis as allegories of states of soul. He is considered to be the first religious philosopher (cf. H. A. Wolfson, Philo. (2 vols.) 1947).

Note 2. Constantine was firmly convinced of his divine mission to rule over the world and to establish the orthodox teaching of the Church. He prided himself on having settled the Donatist conflict and the Arian heresy. On his initiative the Council of Nicaea was compelled to introduce the doctrine of the “filioque” which split the Church for a century and a half.

It must be answered, not to meet a human “need to know” but to meet man's universal need to become fully human. And in just what way one can strive for an answer, in what way the ignorabimus can be overcome to fulfil the demands of human evolution—this shall be the theme of our course of lectures as it proceeds.

To those who demand of a cycle of lectures with a title such as ours that nothing be introduced that might interfere with the objective presentation of ideas, I would like, since today I shall have to mention certain personalities, to say the following. The moment one begins to represent the results of human judgment in their relationship to life, to full human existence, it becomes inevitable that one indicate the personalities with whom the judgments originated. Even in a scientific presentation, one must remain within the sphere in which the judgment arises, within the realm of human struggling and striving toward such a judgment. And especially since the question we want above all to answer is: what can be gleaned from modern scientific theories that can become a vital social thinking able to transform thought into impulses for life?—then one must realize that the series of considerations one undertakes is no longer confined to the study and the lecture halls but Stands rather within the living evolution of humanity.

Behind everything with which I commenced yesterday, the modern striving for a mathematical-mechanical world view and the dissolution of that world view, behind that which came to a climax in 1872 in the famous speech by the physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, concerning the limits of natural science, there stands something even more important. It is something that begins to impress itself upon us the moment we want to begin to speak in a living way about the limits of natural science.

A personality of extraordinary philosophical stature still looks over to us with a certain vitality out of the first half of the nineteenth century: Hegel. Only in the last few years has Hegel begun to be mentioned in the lecture halls and in the philosophical literature with somewhat more respect than in the recent past. In the last third of the nineteenth century the academic world attacked Hegel outright, yet one could demonstrate irrefutably that Eduard von Hartmann had been quite right in claiming that during the 1880s only two university lecturers in all of Germany had actually read him. The academics opposed Hegel but not on philosophical grounds, for as a philosopher they hardly knew him. Yet they knew him in a different way, in a way in which we still know him today. Few know Hegel as he is contained, or perhaps better said, as his world view is contained, in the many volumes that sit in the libraries. Those who know Hegel in this original form so peculiar to him are few indeed. Yet in certain modified forms he has become in a sense the most popular philosopher the world has ever known. Anyone who participates in a workers' meeting today or, even better, anyone who had participated in one during the last few decades and had heard what was discussed there; anyone with any sense for the source of the mode of thinking that had entered into these workers' meetings, who really knew the development of modern thought, could see that this mode of thinking had originated with Hegel and flowed through certain channels out into the broadest masses. And whoever investigated the literature and philosophy of Eastern Europe in this regard would find that the Hegelian mode of thinking had permeated to the farthest reaches of Russian cultural life. One thus could say that, anonymously, as it were, Hegel has become within the last few decades perhaps one of the most influential philosophers in human history. On the other hand, however, when one perceives what has come to be recognized by the broadest spectrum of humanity as Hegelianism, one is reminded of the portrait of a rather ugly man that a kind artist painted in such a way as to please the man's family. As one of the younger sons, who had previously paid little attention to the portrait, grew older and really observed it for the first time, he said: “But father, how you have changed!” And when one sees what has become of Hegel one might well say: “Dear philosopher, how you have changed!” To be sure, something extraordinary has happened regarding this Hegelian world view.

Hardly had Hegel himself departed when his school fell apart. And one could see how this Hegelian school appropriated precisely the form of one of our new parliaments. There was a left wing and a right wing, an extreme left and an extreme right, an ultra-radical wing and an ultra-conservative wing. There were men with radical scientific and social views, who felt themselves to be Hegel's true spiritual heirs, and on the other side there were devout, positive theologians who wanted just as much to base their extreme theological conservatism on Hegel. There was a center for Hegelian studies headed by the amiable philosopher, Karl Rosenkranz, and each of these personalities, every one of them, insisted that he was Hegel's true heir.

What is this remarkable phenomenon in the evolution of human knowledge? What happened was that a philosopher once sought to raise humanity into the highest realms of thought. Even if one is opposed to Hegel, it cannot be denied that he dared attempt to call forth the world within the soul in the purest thought-forms. Hegel raised humanity into ethereal heights of thinking, but strangely enough, humanity then fell right back down out of those heights. It drew on the one hand certain materialistic and on the other hand certain positive theological conclusions from Hegel's thought. And even if one considers the Hegelian center headed by the amiable Rosenkranz, even there one cannot find Hegel's philosophy as Hegel himself had conceived it. In Hegel's philosophy one finds a grand attempt to pursue the scientific method right up into the highest heights. Afterward, however, when his followers sought to work through Hegel's thoughts themselves, they found that one could arrive thereby at the most contrary points of view.

Now, one can argue about world views in the study, one can argue within the academies, and one can even argue in the academic literature, so long as worthless gossip and Barren cliques do not result. These offspring of Hegelian philosophy, however, cannot be carried out of the lecture halls and the study into life as social impulses. One can argue conceptually about contrary world views, but within life itself these contrary world views do not fight so peaceably. One must use just such a paradoxical expression in describing such a phenomenon. And thus there stands before us in the first half of the nineteenth century an alarming factor in the evolution of human cognition, something that has proved itself to be socially useless in the highest degree. With this in mind we must then raise the question: how can we find a mode of thinking that can be useful in social life? In two phenomena above all we notice the uselessness of Hegelianism for social life.

One of those who studied Hegel most intensively, who brought Hegel fully to life within himself, was Karl Marx. And what is it that we find in Marx? A remarkable Hegelianism indeed! Hegel up upon the highest peak of the conceptual world—Hegel upon the highest peak of Idealism—and the faithful student, Karl Marx, immediately transforming the whole into its direct opposite, using what he believed to be Hegel's method to carry Hegel's truths to their logical conclusions. And thereby arises historical materialism, which is to be for the masses the one world view that can enter into social life. We thus are confronted in the first half of the nineteenth century with the great Idealist, Hegel, who lived only in the Spirit, only in his ideas, and in the second half of the nineteenth century with his student, Karl Marx, who contemplated and recognized the reality of matter alone, who saw in everything ideal only ideology. If one but takes up into one's feeling this turnabout of conceptions of world and life in the course of the nineteenth century, one feels with all one's soul the need to achieve an understanding of nature that will serve as a basis for judgments that are socially viable.

Now, if we turn on the other hand to consider something that is not so obviously descended from Hegel but can be traced back to Hegel nonetheless, we find still within the first half of the nineteenth century, but carrying over into the second half, the “philosopher of the ego,” Max Stirner. While Karl Marx occupies one of the two poles of human experience mentioned yesterday, the pole of matter upon which he bares all his considerations, Stirner, the philosopher of the ego, proceeds from the opposite pole, that of consciousness. And just as the modern world view, gravitating toward the pole of matter, becomes unable to discover consciousness within that element (as we saw yesterday in the example of du Bois-Reymond), a person who gravitates to the opposite pole of consciousness will not be able to find the material world. And so it is with Max Stirner. For Max Stirner, no material universe with natural laws actually exists. Stirner sees the world as populated solely by human egos, by human consciousnesses that want only to indulge themselves to the full. “I have built my thing on nothing”—that is one of Max Stirner's maxims. And on these grounds Stirner opposes even the notion of Providence. He says for example: certain moralists demand that we should not perform any deed out of egoism, but rather that we should perform it because it is pleasing to God. In acting, we should look to God, to that which pleases Him, that which He commands. Why, thinks Max Stirner, should I, who have built only upon the foundation of ego-consciousness, have to admit that God is after all the greater egoist Who can demand of man and the world that all should be performed as it suits Him? I will not surrender my own egoism for the sake of a greater egoism. I will do what pleases me. What do I care for a God when I have myself?

One thus becomes entangled and confused within a consciousness out of which one can no longer find the way. Yesterday I remarked how on the one hand we can arrive at clear ideas by awakening in the experience of ideas when we descend into our consciousness. These dreamlike ideas manifest themselves like drives from which we cannot then escape. One would say that Karl Marx achieved clear ideas—if anything his ideas are too clear. That was the secret of his success. Despite their complexity, Marx's ideas are so clear that, if properly garnished, they remain comprehensible to the widest circles. Here clarity has been the means to popularity. And until it realizes that within such a clarity humanity is lost, humanity, as long as it seeks logical consequences, will not let go of these clear ideas.

If one is inclined by temperament to the other extreme, to the pole of consciousness, one passes over onto Stirner's side of the scale. Then one despises this clarity: one feels that, applied to social thinking, this clarity makes man into a cog in a social order modeled on mathematics or mechanics—but into that only, into a mere cog. And if one does not feel oneself cut out for just that, then the will that is active in the depths of human consciousness revolts. Then one comes radically to oppose all clarity. One mocks all clarity, as Stirner did. One says to oneself: what do I care about anything else? What do I care even about nature? I shall project my own ego out of myself and see what happens. We shall see that the appearance of such extremes in the nineteenth century is in the highest degree characteristic of the whole of recent human evolution, for these extremes are the distant thunder that preceded the storm of social chaos we are now experiencing. One must understand this connection if one wants at all to speak about cognition today.

Yesterday we arrived at an indication of what happens when we begin to correlate our consciousness to an external natural world of the senses. Our consciousness awakens to clear concepts but loses itself. It loses itself to the extent that one can only posit empty concepts such as “matter,” concepts that then become enigmatic. Only by thus losing ourselves, however, can we achieve the clear conceptual thinking we need to become fully human. In a certain sense we must first lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again out of ourselves. Yet now the time has come when we should learn something from these phenomena. And what can one learn from these phenomena? One can learn that, although clarity of conceptual thinking and perspicuity of mental representation can be won by man in his interaction with the world of sense, this clarity of conceptual thinking becomes useless the moment we strive scientifically for something more than a mere empiricism. It becomes useless the moment we try to proceed toward the kind of phenomenalism that Goethe the scientist cultivated, the moment we want something more than natural science, namely Goetheanism.

What does this imply? In establishing a correlation between our inner life and the external physical world of the senses we can use the concepts we form in interaction with nature in such a way that we try not to remain within the natural phenomena but to think on beyond them. We are doing this if we do more than simply say: within the spectrum there appears the color yellow next to the color green, and on the other side the blues. We are doing this if we do not simply interrelate the phenomena with the help of our concepts but seek instead, as it were, to pierce the veil of the senses and construct something more behind it with the aid of our concepts. We are doing this if we say: out of the clear concepts I have achieved I shall construct atoms, molecules—all the movements of matter that are supposed to ex-ist behind natural phenomena. Thereby something extraordinary happens. What happens is that when I as a human being confront the world of nature [see illustration], I use my concepts not only to create for myself a conceptual order within the realm of the senses but also to break through the boundary of sense and construct behind it atoms and the like I cannot bring my lucid thinking to a halt within the realm of the senses. I take my lesson from inert matter, which continues to roll on even when the propulsive force has ceased. My knowledge reaches the world of sense, and I remain inert. I have a certain inertia, and I roll with my concepts on beyond the realm of the senses to construct there a world the existence of which I can begin to doubt when I notice that my thinking has only been borne along by inertia.

It is interesting to note that a great proportion of the philosophy that does not remain within phenomena is actually nothing other than just such an inert rolling-on beyond what really exists within the world. One simply cannot come to a halt. One wants to think ever farther and farther beyond and construct atoms and molecules—under certain circumstances other things as well that philosophers have assembled there. No wonder, then, that this web one has woven in a world created by the inertia of thinking must eventually unravel itself again.

Goethe rebelled against this law of inertia. He did not want to roll onward thus with his thinking but rather to come strictly to a halt at this limit [see illustration: heavy line] and to apply concepts within the realm of the senses. He thus would say to himself: within the spectrum appear to me yellow, blue, red, indigo, violet. If, however, I permeate these appearances of color with my world of concepts while remaining within the phenomena, then the phenomena order themselves of their own accord, and the phenomenon of the spectrum teaches me that when the darker colors or anything dark is placed behind the lighter colors or anything light, there appear the colors which lie toward the blue end of the spectrum. And conversely, if I place light behind dark, there appear the colors which lie toward the red end of the spectrum.

What was it that Goethe was actually seeking to do? Goethe wanted to find simple phenomena within the complex but above all such phenomena as allowed him to remain within this limit [see illustration], by means of which he did not roll on into a realm that one reaches only through a certain mental inertia. Goethe wanted to adhere to a strict phenomenalism. If we remain within phenomena and if we strive with our thinking to come to a halt there rather than allow ourselves to be carried onward by inertia, the old question arises in a new way. What meaning does the phenomenal world have when I consider it thus? What is the meaning of the mechanics and mathematics, of the number, weight, measure, or temporal relation that I import into this world? What is the meaning of this?

You know, perhaps, that the modern world conception has sought to characterize the phenomena of tone, color, warmth, etc. as only subjective, whereas it characterizes the so-called primary qualities, the qualities of weight, space, and time, as something not subjective but objective and inherent in things. This conception can be traced back principally to the English philosopher, John Locke, and it has to a considerable extent determined the philosophical basis of modern scientific thought. But the real question is: what place within our systematic science of nature as a whole do mathematics, do mechanics—these webs we weave within ourselves, or so it seems at first—what place do these occupy? We shall have to return to this question to consider the specific form it takes in Kantianism. Yet without going into the whole history of this development one can nonetheless emphasize our instinctive conviction that measuring or counting or weighing external objects is essentially different from ascribing to them any other qualities.

It certainly cannot be denied that light, tones, colors, and sensations of taste are related to us differently from that which we could represent as subject to mathematical-mechanical laws. For it really is a remarkable fact,a fact worthy of our consideration: you know that honey tastes sweet, but to a man with jaundice it tastes bitter—so we can say that we stand in a curious relationship to the qualities within this realm—while on the other hand we could hardly maintain that any normal man would see a triangle as a triangle, but a man with jaundice would see it as a square! Certain differentiations thus do exist, and one must be cognizant of them; on the other hand, one must not draw absurd conclusions from them. And to this very day philosophical thinking has failed in the most extraordinary way to come to grips with this most fundamental epistemological question. We thus see how a contemporary philosopher, Koppelmann, overtrumps even Kant by saying, for example—you can read this on page 33 of his Philosophical Inquiries [Weltanschauungsfragen]: everything that relates to space and time we must first construct within by means of the understanding, whereas we are able to assimilate colors and tastes directly. We construct the icosahedron, the dodecahedron, etc.: we are able to construct the standard regular solids only because of the organization of our understanding. No wonder, then, claims Koppelmann, that we find in the world only those regular solids we can construct with our understanding. One thus can find Koppelmann saying almost literally that it is impossible for a geologist to come to a geometer with a crystal bounded by seven equilateral triangles precisely because—so Koppelmann claims—such a crystal would have a form that simply would not fit into our heads. That is out-Kanting Kant. And thus he would say that in the realm of the thing-in-itself crystals could exist that are bounded by seven regular triangles, but they cannot enter our head, and thus we pass them by; they do not exist for us.

Such thinkers forget but one thing: they forget—and it is just this that we want to indicate in the course of these lectures with all the forceful proofs we can muster—that the natural order governing the construction of our head also governs the construction of the regular polyhedrons, and it is for just this reason that our head constructs no other polyhedrons than those that actually confront us in the external world. For that, you see, is one of the basic differences between the so-called subjective qualities of tone, color, warmth, as well as the different qualities of touch, and that which confronts us in the mechanical-mathematical view of the world. That is the basic difference: tone and color leave us outside of ourselves; we must first take them in; we must first perceive them. As human beings we stand outside tone, color, warmth, etc. This is not entirely the case as regards warmth—I shall discuss that tomorrow—but to a certain extent this is true even of warmth. These qualities leave us initially outside ourselves, and we must perceive them. In formal, spatial, and temporal relationships and regarding weight this is not the case. We perceive objects in space but stand ourselves within the same space and the same lawfulness as the objects external to us. We stand within time just as do the external objects. Our physical existence begins and ends at a definite point in time. We stand within space and time in such a way that these things permeate us without our first perceiving them. The other things we must first perceive. Regarding weight, well, ladies and gentlemen, you will readily admit that this has little to do with perception, which is somewhat open to arbitrariness: otherwise many people who attain an undesired corpulence would be able to avoid this by perception alone, merely by having the faculty of perception. No, ladies and gentlemen, regarding weight we are bound up with the world entirely objectively, and the organization by means of which we stand within color, tone, warmth, etc. is powerless against that objectivity.

So now we must above all pose the question: how is it that we arrive at any mathematical-mechanical judgment? How do we arrive at a science of mathematics, at a science of mechanics? How is it, then, that this mathematics, this mechanics, is applicable to the external world of nature, and how is it that there is a difference between the mathematical-mechanical qualities of external objects and those that confront us as the so-called subjective qualities of sensation, tone, color, warmth, etc.?

At the one extreme, then, we are confronted with this fundamental question. Tomorrow we shall discuss another such question. Then we shall have two starting-points from which we can proceed to investigate the nature of science. Thence we shall proceed to the other extreme to investigate the formation of social judgments.

Jesus ben Pandira and Initiation among the Essenes. The secret of numbers. Reflection of cosmic conditions in human evolution. The secret of the blood in the line of descent, and the secret of cosmic space

Ww have to realize that Jesus ben Pandira was in no way related to the personality or individuality of either the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew or of the Gospel of Luke, or any other Gospel; he lived a hundred years before the Christ Event, and was stoned and hanged upon a tree. It is most important that he should not be confused with the Jesus of the Gospels.

Of Jesus ben Pandira it need only be stated that neither occult knowledge nor any clairvoyant faculties are necessary to prove his existence, for information in regard to this can be had from the Hebrew Talmud. Confusion with the actual Jesus has occurred at various times, even as early as the second century of the Christian era. Having stated emphatically that Jesus ben Pandira is not to be identified with the Jesus of the Evangelists, it is nevertheless necessary to establish the real historical connection of these two personalities. This is only possible by means of occult investigation; the connection between them only emerges after a study of the evolution of mankind and those who guide it.

Gazing upwards to those beings who lead human development, we come at last to a group of high individualities who, according to Eastern terminology, are called Bodhisattvas—for it is in the East where knowledge of them has been established. There are many Bodhisattvas; they are the great teachers of mankind. From the spiritual worlds they infuse into humanity through the Mystery schools what according to the degree of human ripeness is appropriate to each epoch. Bodhisattvas succeed one another throughout the ages. Two of them are of special interest to present humanity, one, who as son of King Sudhodana became Buddha; and the other, his successor in this dignity, who is still a Bodhisattva. Both Oriental wisdom and clairvoyant investigation agree that the latter's mission will extend over the next two thousand five hundred years, when this Bodhisattva will rise to the higher rank of Buddha as did his predecessor. This, the present Bodhisattva will then be exalted to the dignity of Maitreya Buddha. In the long line of Bodhisattvas we have to recognize the great guiding teachers of evolution, but they should not be confused with the source of their teaching, the source from which they themselves draw what they bestow upon humanity. Rather we have to picture a collegium of Bodhisattvas, and the centre of this collegium is the living source whence this teaching is derived. This living source is none other than He Whom we call the Christ, from Whom all Bodhisattvas receive what in due course they hand on to humanity. A Bodhisattva devotes himself principally to teaching, but upon attaining Buddha-hood he ceases to descend into incarnation, and his mission becomes different. In accordance with all Eastern philosophy it can be said that Gautama Buddha, who, in his last incarnation, was the son of King Sudhodana, has since then only experienced incorporation as far as the etheric body. In the course of lectures on the Gospel of Luke we explained what the next task of this Buddha was.

When the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke was born—the Nathan Jesus of whom Luke tells, and who is not to be confused with the Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew—the Being of the Buddha, who was then incorporated as far as the etheric body, entered into the astral body of the Nathan Jesus. It is therefore possible to say that having incarnated as Gautama Buddha, this Being did not come again as a teacher, but was henceforth present as a living force. He had become an actual force working from the spiritual world into our physical world.

To teach is one thing; to work as a living force with the forces of growth is something quite different. A Bodhisattva is a teacher up to the moment he attains Buddha-hood, from then onwards he becomes a vital force, filling with constructive power everything with which he is concerned. In this way the Buddha entered the organism of the Nathan Jesus as described by Luke. From the sixth century B.C. it is to the Buddha's successor, the coming Maitreya Buddha, that humanity must look for its teacher. His chosen instrument was the circle of the Therapeutæ and Essenes, and he poured down his inspiration especially through his disciple, Jesus, the son of Pandira, the purest, the most noted, the most exalted of them all. Thus we have to realize that the content of this Bodhisattva-teaching streamed forth into humanity through the Essenes.

The actual sect of the Essenes, as regards its profounder teaching, disappeared comparatively soon after the Christ Event, as external history testifies. Hence it need not sound improbable when I say that they were employed as a means for bringing down from the spheres of the Bodhisattvas what was necessary to prepare humanity to grasp the mighty event of the coming of Christ. The most important teaching man had received to aid him in the understanding of the Christ Event had its source in these communities. Jesus ben Pandira was chosen to receive inspiration from that Bodhisattva who was destined to become the Maitreya Buddha, and whose influence was active among the Essenes; he was inspired to impart a teaching that was to make comprehensible the Mystery of Palestine—the Mystery of Christ. External history knows little of the Essenes, more exact information regarding them is only possible with the aid of occult investigation; hence in a society like this I can speak without hesitation of secrets known to the Essenes and Therapeutæ that are needful to an understanding of the Gospel of Matthew.

These communities flourished a hundred years before the Christ Event, and taught how preparation was to be made for it. Their most important feature was the manner of their initiation. It was specially adapted to evoke an understanding, through clairvoyant perception, of the significance of Hebraism and Abrahamism as connected with the Christ Event. This was a mystery peculiar to these communities. The very purpose of their initiation was to impart clairvoyant perception in this connection. A follower of the Essenes had in the first place to attain full appreciation of the significance of what had come to pass in the Hebrew race through Abraham. Through his own individual vision, an Essene had to see in Abraham a true forefather of the race, one in whom a seed had been implanted which then, by means of the blood, percolated from generation to generation, as explained in the last lecture.

To understand how something of such great importance in human evolution could take place through a personality like Abraham, we must keep in mind a most important saying. This saying shows that whenever a man is destined to be a special instrument for human evolution he must be in direct contact with some divine spiritual being.

Those who attended the performance of the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, given at Munich, and those who have read it, know that one of the most important dramatic manifestations occurs where the hierophant informs Maria that her mission will only be possible after such an influx from a higher being has taken place. This was actually accomplished in her. What then took place may be called a separation of the higher from the lower principles, which made it possible for the latter to be possessed by a subordinate spirit. All this is to be found in the Rosicrucian Mystery Play, and if allowed to act on the soul, and not accepted lightly, it directs our attention to mighty secrets of human evolution.

Abraham having been selected for his great mission, the Spirit that had been recognized in early Atlantis as the Spirit who moved and lived in all the surrounding world had to enter into his inner organism. This happened for the first time in the case of Abraham, and therefore a change in man's spiritual perception then became possible for the first time. A divine Being implanted as it were a germ in Abraham's organism that was to enter all the other organisms descending from him in the direct line.

An Essene of that time would have said: The seed which actually formed the Hebrew people so as to fit them to be the vehicle for the mission of Christ, was first implanted in them by the mysterious Being only to be discovered when they looked back through the generations to Abraham. This Being worked as a kind of Folk-spirit from out the inner organism of Abraham in the blood of the Hebrew people. To reach some understanding of the crowning mystery of human evolution, it is necessary to rise to the Spirit who implanted this seed, and seek him where he was before he had entered into Abraham's organization. In order to rise to this Spirit who had organized and inspired the Hebrew people, to know him in his purity, the Essenes felt it to be necessary to pass through a certain training; they felt they must purify themselves from all that had come to human souls from the physical world since the time of Abraham. And further, an Essene would declare: The spiritual being which man bears within him, and all the other spiritual beings concerned with his development, are only to be seen in their purity in the spiritual world. As found in man, they have become defiled by the forces of the physical world.

From the point of view of the Essenes (which in a certain sphere of knowledge is absolutely correct), every single person then living had impurities in his soul from early times which disturbed his free vision of the Spiritual Being who had implanted the attribute in Abraham which has been described. Every Essene sought in his soul to be purified from what had entered him in this way, and which dimmed his vision of the Being who dwelt in the blood passing through the generations, the Being who could only be rightly seen after much purification. All the methods of their training were directed towards freeing the soul from its inherited tendencies and influences that clouded its vision and hid the spiritual inspirer of Abraham. Not only had man a spiritual being within him, but this being had been sullied through these inherited tendencies.

There is a law in Spiritual Science which was perceived by the Essenes through their clairvoyant investigation and spiritual vision: that hereditary influences only cease to be active when a man has passed through forty-two stages in the line of descent; only then has he purged his soul of inherited influences. What is inherited by man from father and mother, from grandfather and grandmother, and so on, becomes feebler the farther back the line is traced; beyond forty-two generations nothing more of this could be found, which means that the influence of inheritance is then lost. By careful training and inner exercises, the Essenes directed their attention towards eliminating the impurities of the forty-two generations. This meant a severe training on a mystical path of forty-two clearly defined degrees or stages. Once these were passed, the Essene knew he was freed from the influences of the world of sense, and had reached the point where he experienced his inner self; where he felt the centre of his being to be united with Divinity. Therefore said he: ‘In going through these forty-two stages I ascend to God—to the God with whom I am concerned.’

The Essenes and the Therapeutæ had a clear vision of man's path to a divine Being who had not as yet descended into matter; they alone knew the truth of the fact which can be described as the ‘Event of Abraham’ they knew it at least in so far as it was concerned with inheritance. They also knew that if a man was to rise to a Being who was to enter the line of inheritance he must reach a place where he was no longer steeped in matter he must pass through forty-two stages of development corresponding to the forty-two generations; then he would find that Being. The Essene knew something more; he knew just as man has to rise through these forty-two stages to reach Divinity, so this Divine Being must descend, in the reverse direction, through forty-two generations if He was to enter into physical humanity. If man required to rise through forty-two stages before attaining to God, God had to descend through forty-two stages in order to become a man among men. So taught the Essenes, and so taught above all Jesus ben Pandira, who was inspired by the Bodhisattva. Having learnt this we know the source whence flowed the knowledge given out by the writer of the Gospel of Matthew, and exactly why he traces back these forty-two generations.

Jesus ben Pandira, who instructed the Essenes in these matters, lived a century before these forty-two generations could be completed. He taught them that advance beyond a certain point on their journey through the forty-two stages was only possible if an historical event were connected with it, that any further achievement could only come by grace from above. A time, however, would come, he told them, when this would be a natural event; a man would be born who, through the power in his own blood, would be able to rise so high that divine Spiritual Forces could descend into him, which he had need of in order that he might make fully manifest the Spirit of the Race—the Spirit of Jahve—in the blood of the Hebrew people. Jesus ben Pandira taught them further; that if Zarathustra, he who would bring Ahura Mazdao, were to incarnate in human form, this could only come to pass if this human form had been so prepared that the Divine Spirit ensouling it had passed down through forty-two generations.

It is now apparent that the teaching concerning the descent through the generations with which the Gospel of Matthew begins had its origin among the sect of the Essenes. If these facts are to be fully understood we must refer to something still deeper in this whole connection.

Everything concerned with human evolution confronts us, as it were, from two sides, for the simple reason that man is a two-fold being. Seen during waking consciousness, when the four members of his being are united, the reason for man's dual nature is not at first discernible. But it is easily seen at night when one part, consisting of physical body and etheric body, remains in the physical world, and the other, composed of the astral body and ego, leaves it. Man is made up of these two parts. The human qualities and attributes of the physical world belong to the physical and etheric bodies alone, although the other members have a share in them during the waking state. When awake, man functions by means of his astral body and ego in the other two members; when asleep he leaves them to themselves. The moment that he falls asleep, however, the beings and forces of the cosmos begin to function in, and to permeate, the forsaken members, so that there is a constant influx from the cosmos into the physical and etheric bodies of man. That part of him, however, which is left sleeping in bed, is actually limited to the forty-two generations, during which time it is under the law of inheritance. Beginning with the first generation and taking all that then belonged to physical nature, we shall find at the end, if we trace this through forty-two generations, nothing of what was the most essential in the first case. Thus in six times seven generations are comprised all the active characteristics of the physical and etheric bodies of a man. The inherited tendencies found in these two bodies must be sought for among his ancestors, but only in the forty-two preceding generations; beyond that time they cannot be traced, all belonging to an earlier generation has disappeared.

Human evolution in time is based on a certain numerical relationship. If we consider this more closely we find everything concerning the physical body is limited to forty-two generations, because everything connected with evolution in time is connected with the number seven. The Essenes knew this. An Essene said to himself: ‘Thou must pass through six times seven stages—that is forty-two—thou wilt then have arrived at the last seven which complete the sevenfold count, making forty-nine stages in all.’ What lies beyond the forty-two stages cannot be attributed to the forces and beings active in the physical and etheric body. The whole evolution of these bodies is finished—in accordance with the sevenfold law—after seven times seven generations, but during the last seven of these a complete change has taken place, and nothing of the first generation remains. What we are now concerned with is something entirely new in the realm into which man enters after the forty-two generations. We are now no longer concerned with a human existence but with a superhuman one. The six times seven generations, therefore, are connected entirely with the earth, and the seven times seven that follows is connected with what is beyond the earth; that is fruit for the spiritual world.

Hence the people from among whom the Gospel of Matthew had its origin, expressed their thoughts somewhat in this way: ‘The physical body used by Zarathustra had to be so ripe at the end of forty-two generations that it was already on the verge of becoming spiritualized; it was at the point where deification could take place.’ This could have taken place at the beginning of the forty-third generation, but it did not; this body allowed itself to be used by another being, who, as the spirit of Zarathustra, incarnated on earth as Jesus of Nazareth. In the events capable of providing a fitting body and fitting blood for the soul of Zarathustra, in Jesus of Nazareth, everything was fulfilled in accordance with this mystery of numbers. Everything relating to the physical and etheric body in human evolution has been prepared in this way.

Now, however, there are in man—and hence too in him who was to be the bearer of the Christ-being—not only a physical and an etheric body, but also an astral body and ego. Preparation therefore had to be made not only for a suitable physical and etheric body, but what was needful had also to be done to prepare a suitable astral body and ego. For such a mighty Event not one, but two personalities were necessary. The physical and etheric bodies were prepared in the case of the personality described in the Gospel of Matthew; the astral body and ego were prepared in another personality—the Nathan Jesus, of whom the Gospel of Luke relates. For the early years this was another personality. While the Matthew Jesus received a suitable physical and etheric organism, the Luke Jesus received the appropriate astral-body and bearer of the ego.

How could this come to pass? We have seen that the forces of the forty-two generations had to be prepared in order that the sheaths might come about which were necessary for the Jesus of the Matthew gospel. The astral body and ego had also to be prepared in order to appear later in the appropriate manner. How this happened we shall now explain.

As an introduction to the understanding of the Jesus of the Gospel of Luke, for whom special preparation had also to be made, let us consider the nature of sleep. The notion, derived from the assertions of lower clairvoyance, that the whole astral and ego-nature of man is contained within the nebulous appearance seen near the body of a sleeping man, is entirely erroneous. For it is a fact that during sleep, when man forsakes his physical and etheric sheaths, he expands, and is spread abroad through the whole cosmos. The mystery of the sleeping state is contained in the fact that the astral body expands through the whole stellar world, attracting towards it the purest cosmic forces; and these forces man brings with him when at the moment of awakening he plunges once more into his physical and etheric bodies. Hence he emerges from sleep strengthened by what he has derived from the whole cosmos.

If man were clairvoyant to-day in the highest sense—and this was the same at the time of Christ Jesus—what must then take place in him? Modern man is normally unconscious during sleep when with his astral body and ego he goes forth from his physical and etheric bodies; clairvoyant consciousness must, however, become capable of perception by means of the astral body and ego, without the aid of the physical and etheric bodies. It will then belong to the world the stars, and will not only perceive this world but actually enter into it. Just as the consciousness of the Essene had to rise through successive stages (at the root of which lay the number seven), so man must surmount the stages which enable him to perceive universal space clairvoyantly.

The dangers attending both courses of development I have often pointed out.

The development of the Essenes was fundamentally a penetration into the physical body and etheric body, that they might find their God. With them it was as if a man on awakening did not see the world around him, but plunged into his physical and etheric bodies in order to realize their forces; therefore to see what was external from within. Man's descent into his physical vehicles on awakening is not a conscious act, for at that moment consciousness is attracted to the environment, and is not directed to the forces within his physical and etheric bodies. The essential fact for the Essene was, that, disregarding his environment, he should dip down into his own physical vehicles and perceive all the forces that in the sense of occult science had their rise in the mystery of the six times seven generations.

Similar and even mightier exertions are necessary if a man is to ascend into the cosmos and discover its secrets. In penetrating into his own inner being he is only exposed to the danger of being overcome by the forces of this being, the desires and passions of its depths, of which he is ordinarily unaware and of which he does not dream. Ordinary training usually prevents knowledge of these forces—his attention being attracted to the emergence of the outer world on awakening, so that he should not be overcome by this. Another danger meets him when he experiences ‘expansion over the whole cosmos.’ He who experiences this moment, by retaining his consciousness during sleep, he who is able to perceive the spiritual world through the instrumentality of his astral body and ego, is confronted by a great danger. Like a man attempting to gaze at the sun, he is blinded and bewildered by the overwhelming grandeur of his experiences.

Just as the different stages of wisdom striven for by the Essenes, in order to learn of the hereditary tendencies in the physical and etheric bodies, were connected with the mystery of numbers (six x seven), so there was a secret number in the Mysteries of the Great World, showing how knowledge of these could be acquired. The best approach to these mysteries is through the stars themselves which, in their movements and groupings into constellations, provide a form of expression—a language. As, by passing through six times seven stages man attains the key to the mysteries of his own inner being; twelve times seven or eighty-four stages are necessary before he can rise to the spiritual mysteries of universal space. When we have surmounted the eighty-four stages we are no longer blinded by the complexity of these spiritual cosmic forces. Beyond these eighty-four stages we have attained that calm wherein a way may be found through the mighty labyrinth.

This was taught to a certain extent among the Essenes. A person having attained clairvoyance during sleep, as just described, could pour his being forth into something that is expressed in the mystery of numbers as twelve times seven. Anyone who has attained to the ‘twelve times seven’ degree is already in spiritual realms, for when he has completed the eleven times seven, he has already reached the verge of the Mysteries. As in the other, the seven times seven, he is already in the spiritual realm; so he is in the twelve times seven. On the latter path the spiritual realm is beyond the eleven times seven stage. Such are the number of the stages to be passed through by the astral body and ego. All this is imprinted in the starry script, seven is the number derived from the planets; they are seven in number; what man has to pass through in cosmic space is derived from the number twelve, the number of the Signs of the Zodiac.

As the seven planets group themselves within, and pass through the twelve signs, so if man is to live into cosmic space he must pass through seven times twelve, or rather seven times eleven stages, to attain spirituality. The Twelve Signs of the Zodiac may be pictured as forming a spiritual periphery in the centre of which is man himself. Now man does not reach the spiritual realm spread around him simply by advancing from a centre outwards; he must expand in spiral form; he must advance, as it were, in seven spiral movements. Each time he completes one spiral turn he has passed through all the twelve signs; he has in this way to pass through seven times twelve points. Man gradually expands in spiral form through the cosmos—this is naturally only an image for what man experiences—and in circling thus, on the seventh journey through the twelve signs, spirituality is reached. Then instead of regarding the cosmos from the central point of his own self; he regards it from the spiritual circumference—from twelve points of view—and from these different aspects he views the external world. It is not enough to see things from one point only, they must be considered from twelve aspects.

He who is in quest of what is divinely spiritual must guide his astral body and ego in this way through eleven times seven stages, and at the twelfth he is in the spiritual world.

If Divinity wished to descend and assume a human ego, it would likewise have to pass down through eleven times seven stages. So when the Gospel of Luke wished to describe the spiritual forces that prepared a human astral body and ego to be the bearer of the Christ, it had to relate how the divine force descended through eleven times seven stages. This is truly told in the Gospel of Luke. Because this Gospel tells of the personality for whom the astral body and ego were prepared, it is not concerned, like the Gospel of Matthew, with six times seven generations, but with eleven times seven successive stages through which is traced down, from God Himself; that which dwelt in the individuality of the Luke-Jesus. These seventy-seven different human stages can be counted in the Gospel of Luke.

Because the Gospel of Matthew describes the mystery of the descent of the divine force which worked constructively within the physical and etheric bodies, the ruling number in it must be six times seven. In the Gospel of Luke, because it describes the descent of the divine force which built the astral body and ego, the number must be eleven times seven. Such is the infinite depth of the origin of these facts as related in the Gospels. These Gospels of Luke and Matthew reveal the secrets of initiation; the descent by certain stages of the Divine Spirit into a human individuality, and correspondingly the successive stages by which an individual can reach forth into the cosmos.

It will be explained in the next lecture how a table of descent is also found in the Gospel of Luke; and why, in an age when the Mystery of Christ was imparted only to a few, it should have been demonstrated that there were seventy-seven generations from God and from Adam, down to the Jesus of this Gospel.

Everyone involved to any degree at all in social life will certainly feel that the moral aspect is one of the most important aspects in the entire field of education. At the same time, one realizes that it is precisely this aspect that is the most subtle and difficult one to handle, for it relates to the most intimate area of education.

I have already emphasized that educational practice needs to be built on real knowledge of, and insight into, the human being. The comprehension, perception and observation that I tried to characterize last night will give the knowledge necessary to train the child’s cognitional capacities. Practically speaking, knowledge of the human being, supported by the science of the spirit, will enable one to reach, more or less easily, the child’s powers of cognition. One will be able to find one’s way to the child. If, on the other hand, one wishes to appeal to a child’s artistic receptivity as described yesterday, which is equally important, it is necessary to find a way to each child individually, to have a sense for the way various children express themselves from an artistic comprehension of the world. When it comes to moral education, all of one’s skill for sensitive observation and all of one’s intimate psychological interest must be kept in mind, so that all the teacher’s knowledge of the human being and of nature can be put at the service of what each child brings forth individually. To reach children in a moral way, the only choice is to approach each child on an individual basis. However, with regard to moral education, yet another difficulty has to be overcome—that is, an individual’s sense of morality can only be appealed to through full inner freedom and with full inner cooperation.

This requires that educators approach moral teaching so that, when later in life the students have passed the age of formal education, they can feel free as individuals in every respect. What teachers must never do is to pass on to developing students the relics of their own brand of morality or anything derived from personal sympathies or antipathies in the moral realm. We must not be tempted to give our own ethical codes to young people as they make their way into life, since these will leave them unfree when it becomes necessary that they find their own moral impulses. We must respect and acknowledge the young person’s complete inner freedom, particularly in the realm of moral education. Such respect and tolerance truly demand a great deal of selflessness from educators, and a renunciation of any self-interest. Nor is there, as is the case in all other subject matters, the opportunity of treating morality as a subject in its own right; as such, it would be very unfruitful. The moral element must be allowed to pervade all of one’s teaching.

These difficulties can be overcome if we have truly made our own and imbued with spiritual science the knowledge that we bring to the pupils. Such knowledge, by opening one’s eyes to each individual child, is all-important, particularly in this moral sphere. Ideally speaking, moral education would have to begin with the first breath taken in by the newborn, and in a certain sense, this really is what must be done. The great pedagogue Jean Paul (who is far too little recognized, unfortunately) said that a child learns more of value during the first three years of life than during the three years spent at university. If these words were to be applied more to the moral aspect of education than to the cognitive and esthetic realms, they could be rephrased as follows: How an adult educator acts around the child is particularly important during the child’s first years, until approximately the change of teeth—that is, until we receive the child into our schools.

The first life period really needs to be examined closely. Those who have embarked on the path to a true knowledge of the human being will need to consider three main stages during this first life period. At first sight, they do not seem directly connected with the moral aspect, but they nevertheless shed light on the child’s entire moral life to come, right up to the point of death. In the first developmental phase of the child, the moral is tightly linked with the natural. In fact a crude psychology makes it difficult to notice the connection between later moral development and the child’s natural development during these first years. The three stages in the child’s development are usually not granted enough importance, yet they more or less determine the whole manner in which the child can become a human being inhabiting the Earth. The first one, when the child arises from what could be termed an animal-like existence yet in the human realm, is generally called “learning to walk.” In learning to walk, the child has the possibility of placing into the world the entire system of movements—that is, the sum of all potential movements that human beings can perform with their limbs, so that a certain equilibrium is achieved. The second stage, when the child gains something for the entire course of life, is “learning to speak.” It is the force through which children integrate themselves into the human environment, whereas by learning to walk, children learned to integrate themselves into the whole world through a whole system of movements. All of this happens in the unconscious depths of the human soul. And the third element the child appropriates is “learning to think.” However indistinct and childlike thinking may appear during the first life period, it is through learning to speak that the child gradually develops the capacity to make mental images, although in a primitive way at first.

We may ask: How does the child’s acquisition of the three capacities of walking, speaking, and thinking lead to further development, until the conclusion of the first life period when the permanent teeth appear? The answer seems simple enough at first, but when comprehended with some depth, it sheds tremendous light on all of human nature. We find that during this first life period, ending with the change of teeth, the child is essentially a being who imitates in a state of complete unconsciousness, finds a relationship to the world through imitation and through trial and error. Until age seven, children are entirely given over to the influences coming from their environment. The following comparison can be made: I breathe in the oxygen of the air, which is part of my surroundings, to unite, at the next moment, my bodily nature with it, thus changing some part of the external world into my own inner world, where it works, lives, and weaves within me. Likewise, with each indrawn breath, children up to the age of seven bring outer influences into their “inner soul breath,” by incorporating every gesture, facial expression, act, word, and even each thought coming from their surroundings. Just as the oxygen in my surroundings pulsates in my lungs, the instruments of my breathing, and blood circulation, so everything that is part of the surroundings pulsates through the young child.

This truth needs to stand before the soul’s eye, not just superficially, but with real psychological impact. For remarkable consequences follow when one is sufficiently aware of the child’s adaptation to its surroundings. I will discover how surprisingly the little child’s soul reverberates with even an unspoken thought, which may have affected my facial expression only fleetingly and ever so slightly, and under whose influence I may have slowed or speeded up my movements, no matter how minutely. It is astonishing how the small details that remain hidden within the adult’s soul are prolonged into the child’s soul; how the child’s life is drawn into the physical happenings of the surroundings, but also into the soul and spiritual environment. If we become sensitive to this fact of life, we will not permit ourselves even one impure, unchaste, or immoral thought near young children, because we know how imponderable influences work on children through their natural ability to imitate everything in their surroundings. A feeling for this fact and the attitude it creates are what make a person into a real educator.

Impressions that come from the company of adults around the child make a deep, though unconscious, imprint in the child’s soul, like a seal in soft wax; most important among them are those images of a moral character. What is expressed as energy and courage for life in the child’s father, how the father behaves in a variety of life situations, these things will always stamp themselves deeply into the child’s soul, and will continue their existence there in an extraordinarily characteristic, though subtle and intimate, way. A father’s energy will energize the entire organization of the child. A mother’s benevolence, kindness, and love, surrounding the child like an invisible cocoon, will unconsciously permeate the child’s inner being with a moral receptivity, with an openness and interest for ethical and moral matters.

It is very important to identify the origin of the forces in the child’s organization. As unlikely and paradoxical as this may sound to modern ears, in the young child these forces derive predominately from the nerve-and-sense system. Because the child’s ability to observe and perceive is unconscious, one does not notice how intensely and deeply the impressions coming from the surroundings enter its organization, not so much by way of various specific senses, as through the general “sensory being” of the child. It is generally known that the formation of the brain and of the nerves is completed by the change of teeth. During the first seven years the nerve-and-sense organization of the child could be compared with soft wax, in its plasticity. During this time, not only does the child receive the finest and most intimate impressions from the surroundings, but also, through the workings of energy in the nerve-and-sense system, everything received unconsciously radiates and flows into the blood circulation, into the firmness and reliability of the breathing process, into the growth of the tissues, into the formation of the muscles and skeleton. By means of the nerve-and-sense system, the child’s body becomes like an imprint of the surroundings and, particularly, of the morality inherent in them. When we receive children into school at the time of the change of teeth, it is as if we received the imprint of a seal in the way the muscles and tissues are formed, even in the rhythm of breathing and blood circulation, in the rhythm of the digestive system with its reliability or its tendency toward sluggishness; in short, in the children’s physical makeup we find the effects of the moral impressions received during the first seven years.

Today we have anthropology and we have psychology. Anthropology’s main concern is the abstract observation of the physical aspect of the human being, while that of psychology is the abstract observation of the human soul and spirit as entities separate from the physical body. What is missing is the anthroposophical perspective, which observes the human being—body, soul, and spirit—as a unity; a point of view that shows everywhere how and where spirit is flowing into matter, sending its forces into material counterparts. The strange feature of our materialistic age is that materialism cannot recognize matter for what it is. Materialism believes it can observe matter wholly externally. But only if one can see how soul and spiritual processes are everywhere streaming and radiating their forces into material processes, does one really know what matter is. Through spiritual knowledge, one learns to know how matter works and what its real nature is. One could answer the question, “What is materialism?” by saying, “Materialism is the one worldview that does not understand matter.”

This can be followed up even in details. If one has learned how to see the nature of the human being by viewing body, soul, and spirit as a unity, one will also recognize, in the formation of the muscles and tissues and in the breathing process, the ethical courage inherent in surroundings to which children have adapted during the first seven years. One sees, not only the moral love that warmed them, in the form of harmonious ethical attitudes in their environment, but also the consequences of disharmonious ethical attitudes and lack of love in the surroundings. Here a perceptive educator cannot help feeling that, by the time children are received by the school, they are already formed from the moral viewpoint—an insight that, taken seriously, could in itself engender a mood of tragedy. Given the difficult, disorderly, and chaotic social conditions of our time, it might almost seem preferable from a moral viewpoint if children could be taken into one’s care soon after birth. For if one knows the human being out of a sensitive and refined psychology, one realizes how serious it is that by the time the child loses the first teeth, moral predispositions are fixed. On the other hand, this very same psychological insight offers the possibility of identifying the child’s specific moral disposition and needs.

Children absorb environmental impressions, especially those of an ethical nature, as if in a dream. These dreams go on to affect the inmost physical organization of children. If children have unconsciously experienced and perceived courage, moral goodness, chastity, and a sense of truth, these qualities will live on in them. The presence of these qualities will be such that during the second life period, by the time children are in school, these qualities can still be mobilized.

I would like to illustrate this with an example: Let’s assume that a child has spent the earliest years under the influence of an environment conducive to introversion. This could easily happen if a child witnesses lack of courage and even downright cowardice in the surroundings. If a child has seen in the environment a tendency to opt out of life, witnessed dissatisfaction with life or despondency, something in the child’s inner being, so to speak, will evoke the impression of a continuously suppressed pallor. The educator who is not perceptive enough to observe such symptoms will find that the child takes in more and more intensely the effects of the lack of energy, the cowardice and doubt that has been witnessed in the surroundings. In some ways, even the child will exhibit such characteristics. But if one can view these things with greater depth, one will find that, what thus began as a distinct characterological disposition during the first seven years, can now be seized educationally and directed in a more positive way. It is possible to guide a child’s innate timidity, lack of courage, shyness or faintheartedness so that these same inherent forces become transmuted into prudence and the ability to judge a situation properly; this presumes that the teacher uses classroom opportunities to introduce examples of prudence and right judgment appropriate to the child’s age and understanding.

Now let’s assume that a child has witnessed in the surroundings repugnant scenes from which the child had inwardly recoiled in terror. The child will carry such experiences into school life in the form of a characterological disposition, affecting even the bodily organization. If such a trait is left unnoticed, it will continue to develop according to what the child had previously absorbed from the environment. On the other hand, if true insight into human nature shows how to reorient such negative characteristics, the latter can be transformed into a quality of purity and a noble feeling of modesty.

These specific examples illustrate that, although the child brings into school an imprint—even in the physical organization—of the moral attitudes witnessed in the earlier environment, the forces that the child has thus absorbed can be redirected in the most diverse ways.

In school we have an immensely important opportunity to correct an unbalanced disposition through a genuine, intimate, and practical sense of psychology, which can be developed by the educator who notices the various tendencies of character, will, and psyche in the students. By loving attentiveness to what the child’s nature is revealing, the teacher is in a position to divert into positive channels what may have developed as an unhealthy or harmful influence from the early environment. For one can state explicitly that, in the majority of cases, nothing is ever so negative or evil in an ethical predisposition that the child cannot be changed for the better, given a teacher’s insight and willing energy.

Contemporary society places far too little trust in the working of ethical and moral forces. People simply do not know how intensely moral forces affect the child’s physical health, or that physical debilitation can be improved and corrected through proper and wholesome educational practice. But assuming we know, for example, that if left uncorrected a characteristic trait in a child could turn into violence later on, and that it can be changed so that the same child will grow into a courageous adult, quick and ready to respond to life’s tasks—assuming that an intimate yet practical psychology has taught us these things, the following question will arise: How can we guide the moral education of the child, especially during the age of primary education? What means do we have at our disposal? To understand the answer, we will again have to look back at the three most significant stages in the development of the very young child.

The power of mental imagery and thinking that a child has developed until this point will continue to develop. One does not notice an abrupt change—perhaps at most, with the change of teeth, that the kind of mental imagery connected with memory takes on a different form. But one will notice that the soul and physical forces revealed in speech, which are closely linked to breathing and to the rhythmic system, will reappear, metamorphosed, during the years between the change of teeth and puberty. The first relationship to the realm of language is founded through the child’s learning to speak during the first years of life. Language here includes not just language itself in the restricted meaning of the word, for the entire human being, body, soul, and spirit, lives in language. Language is a symptom of the entire threefold human being.

Approximately between the ages of seven and fourteen years, however, this relationship to language becomes prominent in the child in an entirely different—even reversed—way. At that point, everything related to the soul, outwardly expressed through the medium of language, will reach a different phase of development and take on a different character. It is true that these things happen mostly in the unconscious, but they are nevertheless instrumental for the child’s entire development. Between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child wrestles with what lives in the language, and if he or she should speak more than one language, in all the languages spoken. The child knows little of this struggle because it remains unconscious. The nature of this wrestling is due to increasingly intense merging of the sounds issuing from the rhythmic system with the pupil’s thoughts, feelings, and will impulses. What is trying to evolve during this life period is the young adolescent’s hold on the self by means of language.

It is extremely important, therefore, that we understand the fine nuances of character expressed in the ways students bring their speech and language into the classroom. The general directions I have already presented regarding the observation of the pupils’ moral environment now sound back to us out of the tone of their voices, out of the very sound of their speech, if we are sensitive enough to perceive it. Through the way children use language, they present us with what I would call their basic moral character. Through the way we treat language and through the way students speak during lessons, every hour, even every minute, we are presented with the opportunity as teachers to guide what is thus revealed through speech, into the channels we consider appropriate and right. Very much can be done there, if one knows how to train during the age of primary education what, until the change of teeth, was struggling to become speech.

This is where we meet the actual principle of the growth and development that occurs during the elementary school age. During the first years up to the change of teeth, everything falls under the principle of imitation. At this stage the human being is an imitator. During the second life period, from the second dentition until puberty, the child is destined to surrender to what I would call the authority of the teacher. You will hardly expect me, the author of Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path, to plead for the principle of authority per se. But for the time between the child’s change of teeth and puberty, one has to plead for the principle of self-evident authority, simply because during these years the child’s very nature needs to be able to look up to what comes from the authority of the adult.

The very young child observes the surroundings unconsciously. One could almost say that a child breathes in the whole character of the environment during the first seven years. The next seven years are spent not so much breathing in the environment, but listening to what it has to say. The word and its meaning now become the leading motive. The word becomes the guiding principle as a simple matter of human nature. During this stage the child learns to know about the world and the cosmos through the mediation of the educator. Whatever reaches the pupils through the mouth of the teacher as authority represents the truth to them. They observe beauty in gestures, in general conduct and again in the words spoken around them. Goodness is experienced through the sympathies and antipathies engendered by those in authority.

These few words give the main direction for moral education during the age between the second dentition and puberty. If we attempt to give the child abstract moral values upon its way, we will encounter inner resentment, not because of any inherent shortcomings in the child, but because of a natural response. On the other hand, if we can create moral pictures for the child, perhaps taken from the animal kingdom, letting animals appear symbolically in a moral light, and possibly extending this approach to include all of nature, then we can work for the good of the child, particularly during the seventh, eighth, and ninth years of life. If we create vivid, colorful human characters out of our own imagination and allow our own approval or disapproval of their deeds to shine through our descriptions, and if we allow our sympathies and antipathies to grow into definite feelings in the children that will lead them over into a more general moral judgment of good and evil, then our picture of the world cultivates ageappropriate moral judgements based in perceptions and feelings. But this particular way of presenting the world is of the essence. During the first years, the child has learned from direct perception. As we reach the primary school age, whatever comes toward the child, to strengthen a moral feeling leading to moral judgment, must have passed through the medium of those in authority. Now the teacher and educator must stand before the child as representatives of the order of the world. The child meets the teachers in order to receive the teachers’ picture of the world, colored by their sympathies and antipathies. Through the feelings with which children meet the teachers, and through instinctual life, children themselves must find what is good and what is evil. The students have to receive the world through the mediation of the educator. The children are happy who, thanks to a teacher’s interpretation of the world can form their own relationship to the world.

Those who have been fortunate enough to have enjoyed such a relationship with their teachers in childhood have gained something of value for the rest of their lives. People who say that children should learn intellectually and through their own observations, free from the influence of authority, speak like flagrant amateurs; for we do not teach children merely for the years during which they are under our care, but to benefit their whole lives. And the various life periods, right up to the point of death, are mutually interrelated in very interesting ways.

If, because of their teachers’ natural authority, pupils have once accepted subject matter they could not yet fully comprehend with their powers of reasoning—for the intellectual grasp belongs to a later stage of development and works destructively if enforced too early—if they have accepted something purely out of love for their teachers, such content remains deeply preserved in their souls. At the age of thirty-five or forty perhaps, or possibly even later in life, it may happen that they speak of the following strange experience: Only now, after having lived through so many joys, pains, and disappointments, only now do I see the light of what I accepted at the age of eight out of my respect for my teacher’s authority. This meaning now resurfaces, mingling with the many life experiences and the widening of horizons that have occurred meanwhile. What does such an experience mean for later life? A sensitive and empathetic psychology tells us that such events give off life-invigorating forces even into old age. Education gains new meaning from knowing that such an expansion of childhood experiences into older ages brings with it a new stimulus for life: we educate not only to satisfy the short-term needs of the child while at school, but also to satisfy the needs of life as a whole. The seeds laid into the child’s soul must be allowed to grow with the child. Hence we must be aware that whatever we teach must be capable of further growth. Nothing is worse than our pedantic insistence that the child learn rigid, sharply outlined concepts. One could compare this approach with that of forcing the child’s delicate hands into an iron glove to stop them from growing. We must not give the child fixed or finished definitions, but concepts capable of expansion and growth. The child’s soul needs to be equipped with the kind of seeds that can continue to grow during the whole of the life to come. For this growth to take place, it is not enough just to apply certain principles in one’s teaching; one has to know how to live with the child.

It is especially important for the moral and ethical aspect of education that we remember, for the ages between seven and fourteen, that the child’s moral judgment should be approached only through an appeal to feelings called forth by verbal pictures illustrating the essentials of an inherent morality. What matters at this age is that the child should develop sympathy for the moral and antipathy for the immoral. To give children moral admonitions would be going against their nature, for they do not penetrate the souls of children. The entire future moral development is determined by those things that, through forming sympathies, become transformed into moral judgments. One single fact will show the importance of the teacher’s right relationship to the child with regard to moral development. If one can educate with a discriminating, yet practical, sense of psychology, one will notice that, at a certain time around the ninth or tenth year (the exact age may vary in individual cases), the children’s relationship to the world—an outcome of sympathies and antipathies that can be cultivated—will be such that they forget themselves. Despite a certain “physical egotism” (to give it a name), the child will still be fully open to environmental influences. Just as teachers need clear insight into the child’s developmental stages when they use observational methods in object lessons with children of nine or ten, such insight is particularly important when it comes to moral education. If one pays sufficient attention to the more individual traits emerging in pupils, an interesting phenomenon can be observed at that age: the awareness that the child has a special need for help from the teacher. Sometimes a few words spoken by the child can be like a call for help. They can be the appropriate signal for a perceptive teacher, who now must find the right words to help the child over the hump. For the child is passing through a critical stage, when everything may depend on a few words spoken by the teacher to reestablish the right relationship between pupil and teacher.

What is happening at this time? By wrestling with language, the young person becomes aware, very consciously, for the first time that “There is a difference between myself and the world.” (This is unlike the time during the first seven-year period when, unconsciously, the child first learned to refer to the self as “I.”) The child now strongly demands a new orientation for body, soul, and spirit vis-à-vis the world. This awareness happens between the ninth and the tenth year. Again, unconsciously, the child has a remarkable experience in the form of all kinds of seemingly unrelated sentiments, feelings, and will impulses, which have no outward relationship with the behavior. The experience is: “Here before me stands my teacher who, as authority, opens the world for me. I look into the world through the medium of this authority. But is this authority the right one for me? Am I receiving the right picture of the world?” Please note that I am not saying this thought is a conscious one. All this happens subtly in the realm of the child’s feelings. Yet this time is decisive for determining whether or not the child can feel the continued trust in the teacher’s authority necessary for a healthy development until the onset of puberty. And this experience causes a certain inner unrest and nervousness in the child. The teacher has to find the right words to safeguard the child’s continued confidence and trust. For together with this consolidation of trust, the moral character of the child also becomes consolidated. At first it was only latent in the child; now it becomes inwardly more anchored and the child attains inner firmness. Children grasp, right into the physical organism, something that they had perceived thus far as a self-evident part of their own individual self, as I described earlier.

Contemporary physiology, consisting on the one side of anthropology and on the other of an abstract psychology, is ignorant of the most fundamental facts. One can say that, until the second dentition, all organic formations and functions proceed from the nerve-and-sense system. Between the change of teeth and puberty, the child’s physical fitness or weakness depends on the good functioning of the rhythmic system, on the breathing and blood circulation. Between the ninth and the tenth birthdays, what previously was still anchored primarily in the breathing, in the upper part of the organism, basically shifts over to the blood circulation; this is the time when the wonderful number relationship of one to four is being developed, in the approximately eighteen breaths and the seventy-two pulse beats per minute. This relationship between breathing and blood circulation becomes established at this time of life. However, it is only the outer expression of deep processes going on in the child’s soul, and the reinforcement of the trust between teacher and child must become part of these processes, for through this trust the consolidation of the child’s inner being also occurs.

These interactions between physiological and moral development must be described in detail if one wishes to speak of moral education and of the relationship between pedagogy and morality. As an educator, whether or not I am aware of this particular point in a child’s life will determine whether or not I exercise a beneficial or a harmful influence for the rest of a person’s life.

I should like to show, as a comparison, how things done at this stage continue to affect all of the rest of life. You may have noticed that there are people who, when they grow old, exert an unusual influence on those around them. That there are such people is generally known. Such people don’t even need to say much when they are with others. Their mere presence is enough to bring what one may call an “air of blessing” to those around them. A grace emanates from them that brings about a relaxed and balanced atmosphere. If one has the patience and energy to trace the origin of this gift, one will find that it has developed out of a seed that came into being during childhood through a deeply felt respect for the authority of someone in charge. One could also describe it by saying that, in such a case, the child’s moral judgment had been enhanced by a feeling of veneration that gradually reached the level of religious experience. If a child, between the change of teeth and puberty, experiences the feeling of reverence for certain people, reverence tinged even with a genuine religious feeling that lifts moral feelings into the light of piety, expressed in sincere prayer, then out of this childlike prayer grows the gift of blessing in old age, the gift of radiating grace to one’s fellow human beings. Using pictorial language, one could say: Hands that have learned to pray in childhood have the gift of bestowing blessing in old age. These words, though symbolic and pictorial, nevertheless correspond to the fact that seeds planted in childhood can have an effect right to the end of life.

Now, for an example how the stages of human life are interrelated; one example in the moral realm is, as I said earlier, that the child’s ability to form mental images in the thinking process develops along a continuous line. Only memory will take on a different character after the change of teeth. Language, on the other hand, becomes somehow inverted. Between the second dentition and puberty, the young person develops an entirely different relationship to language. This new relationship can be properly served by bringing to the child at this time the grammar and logic inherent in language. One can tackle practically every aspect of language if, instead of rashly bringing to consciousness the unconscious element of language from early childhood, one makes this translation in a way that considers the child.

But what about the third relationship: the young child’s creation of an individual equilibrium with the external world after having learned to walk? Most people interpret the child’s attempt to use the legs for the first time in a purely external and mechanistic way. It is not generally known, for example, that our ability for spatial imagination and our capacity for mathematical imagery is an upward projection of our limbs’ potential movements into the intellectual sphere; in this projection, the head experiences, as mental activity, what is experienced in our limbs as movement. A deeply hidden soul element of the human being lives especially in this system of movement, a deep soul element linked to outer material forces.

After crawling on hands and knees, the child assumes the vertical position, lifting vertically the bodily axis, which in the case of the animals remains parallel to the Earth’s surface. This upright achievement of the child is the physical expression of the moral potential for human will forces, which lift the human being above the level of the animals.

One day a comprehensive physiology, which is at the same time anthroposophy, will learn to understand that moral forces express themselves in the way a child performs physical movements in space. What the child achieves by assuming the upright posture and thus becoming free of the forces that keep the animal’s spine parallel to the Earth’s surface, what the child achieves by rising into a state of equilibrium in space, is the physical expression of the moral nature of its will energy. It is this achievement that makes the human individual into a moral being.

The objection may be raised that during sleep the position of the human spine is also parallel to the Earth’s surface. However I am speaking here about the general human organization, and about the way spatial dimensions are organized into the human being. Through an accurate assessment of these matters, within this upright position the physical expression of human morality can be seen, which allows the human countenance to gaze freely into the world.

Let me compare what actually happens in the child with a certain phenomenon in nature. In the southern region of old Austria, (now part of Italy) there is a river named the Poik, whose source is in the mountains. Suddenly this river disappears, completely vanishes from sight, and surfaces again later. What appears as the second river does not have its own source, but after its reemergence, people call it the Unz. The Unz disappears again, and resurfaces as a river called The Laibach. In other words, this river flows, unseen, in the depths of the Earth for part of its journey. Similarly, what the child has absorbed from its surroundings in its early years rests unperceived during childhood sleep. During the first years of life, when the child is unconsciously given over to moral forces inherent in the environment, the child acquires the ability to use the limbs in an upright position, thus becoming free of animality. What the child puts into this newly won skill is not noticeable between the change of teeth and puberty, but reappears as freedom in the making of moral judgements, as the freedom of human morality in the will sphere. If the teacher has cultivated the right moral sympathies and antipathies in the child at primary school age—without, however, being too heavy-handed—then, during the time before puberty, the most important aspects of the will can continue their “underground existence.” The child’s individual will, built on inner freedom, will eventually become completely a part of a human sense of responsibility, and will reappear after puberty so that the young person can be received as a free fellow human being. If the educator has refrained from handing down interdicts, and has instead planted sympathies and antipathies in the pupils’ emotional baggage, but without infringing upon the moral will now appearing, the young person can transform the gifts of sympathies and antipathies according to individual needs. After puberty, the young person can transform what was given by others into moral impulses, which now come freely from individuality.

This is how to develop, out of real empathy with the human being, what needs to be done at each age and stage. If one does so properly between the seventh and fourteenth years by allowing moral judgements to mature in the pupil’s life of feeling, what was given to the child properly with the support of authority will be submerged into the human sphere of free will. The human being can become free only after having been properly guided in the cultivation of moral sympathies and antipathies. If one proceeds in this manner regarding moral education, one stands beside the pupils so that one is only the motivator for their own self-education. One gives them what they are unconsciously asking for, and then only enough for them to become responsible for their own selves at the appropriate age, without any risk or danger to themselves.

The difficulty regarding moral education to which I drew your attention at the beginning of today’s meeting, is solved in this way. One must work side by side with one’s pupils, unselfishly and objectively. In other words, the aim should be never to leave behind a relic of one’s own brand of morality in the psychological makeup of the pupils; one should try instead to allow them to develop their own sympathies and antipathies for what they consider morally right or wrong. This approach will enable them to grow rightly into moral impulses and will give them a sense of freedom at the appropriate age.

The point is to stand beside the child on the basis of an intimate knowledge and art of psychology, which is both an art of life and an art of spiritual endeavor. This will do justice not only to artistic, but also to moral education. But one should have due respect for the human being and be able to rightly evaluate a child’s human potential. Then one’s education will become a moral education, which means that the highest claim, the highest demand, for the question of morality and education is contained in the following answer: The right relationship between education and morality is found in a moral pedagogy whereby the entire art of education is itself a moral deed. The morality inherent in an art of education is the basis for a moral pedagogy.

What I have said so far applies to education in general, but it is nearest to our heart at the present time, when an understandable and justified youth movement has been growing apace. I will not attempt to characterize this youth movement properly in just a few words. For many of you here, I have done so already in various other places. But I wish to express my conviction that, if the older generation of teachers and educators knows how to meet the moral impulses of the younger generation on the basis of an art of education as outlined here, this problem of modern youth will find its proper solution. For in the final resort, the young do not wish to stand alone; they really want to cooperate with the older generation. But this cooperation needs to happen so that what they receive from their elders is different, something other, from what they can themselves bring; they need to be able to perceive it as the thing which their soul needs and which the older people can give.

Contemporary social life has created conditions regarding this question of the younger generation that I would characterize in this way: It is often said that the old should retain their previous youthful forces in order to get on better with the young. Today (present company, as always, excluded) the older generation appears excessively youthful, because its members have forgotten how to grow old properly. Their souls and spirits no longer know how to grow into their changed bodies. They carry into their aging bodies what they used to do in their young days, but the human garment of life no longer fits. If now the old and the young meet, the ensuing lack of understanding is not caused by old age as such, but, on the contrary, because the old have not grown old properly and, consequently, cannot be of much help to the young. The young expect that the old should have grown old properly, without appearing childish. When today’s young meet their elders, they find them not very different from themselves. They are left with the impression that, although the old people have learned more in life, they do not seem to understand life more deeply, to be wiser. The young feel that the old have not used their age to become mature, that they have remained at the same human level as the young themselves. Youth expects that the old should have grown old in the right way.

For this concept to enter social life properly, a practical art of education is needed, which ensures that the seeds planted in education bear fruit right into ripe old age, as I have described it in various examples. One has to be able to unfold the appropriate life forces for each stage of life. One must know how to grow old. When the old understand how to grow old properly, they are full of inner freshness, whereas if they have become gray and wrinkled while remaining childishly immature, they cannot give anything to the young that the latter don’t have already. This sheds some light on the present situation. One must only look at these things objectively. Basically, those who find themselves in this situation are quite innocent of the problems involved. What matters is that we tackle this most important and topical human problem by looking closely at our contemporary education, and in particular at the moral factor in education. Coming to terms with it is of great import, not only from the educational point of view, but for the entire social life.

When all is said and done, the moral education of the human being is the crown of all education and teaching. In Faust, Goethe puts the following strange words into the mouth of the Creator-God:

The good person, in darkest aberration,
is of the right path conscious still.

It is worth noting that although Goethe let these words be spoken by the Lord God Himself, pedantic minds could not resist nitpicking over them. They said, “‘The good person, in darkest aberration ... is conscious...’ ”; this is a contradiction in terms, for the darkest aberration is purely instinctive and certainly not conscious. How could Goethe write such words in his Faust?” So much for erudite barbarians. Well, I believe that Goethe knew very well what he had written in this sentence. He wanted to express the idea that, for those who look at the moral life without prejudice, morality is connected with the darkest depths of the human being, and that in this realm one approaches the most difficult area of the human being. In today’s meeting, we saw for ourselves the difficulty of approaching moral issues in practical education. In these areas the darkest realms of the human being are encountered. Goethe clearly recognized this, but he also recognized that what the moral person can achieve only through the brightest rays of the spirit light, has to be attained in the darkest depths of the soul. I would like to think that Goethe’s words consecrate the moral aspect of education, for what do they really say? They express a deep truth of life, into which I wish to condense all that has been said about the meaning of moral education.

I therefore will sum up in the sense of Goethe’s words what I outlined for you today by concluding as follows: If you wish to enter the land of knowledge, you must follow the Spirit-light of day. You must work your way out of the darkness into the light. If you wish to find your way to the land of art, you must work your way, if not to the dazzling light of the Sun itself, at least into the colored brightness that Spirit-light radiates into the world. For in this light and in this light alone is everything turned into art.

However, it would be sad if, before becoming a morally good person, I first had to work my way toward these two goals. To become a morally good person, the innermost kernel of the human being has to be taken hold of down to its deepest recesses, for that is where the right orientation is needed. And the following must be said too: True, in our search for knowledge, we must work our way toward the light, and the pursuit of art means striving toward the colorful light of day; but it is equally true that, in the moral life, the human being who has found the right orientation can be a good person without light, and also without brightness; it is possible to be a good person through all the darkness and obscurity of life. If, as “the good person,” one is “conscious of the right path still,” one will be able to find the right way through all existing darkness, into the light and into all the colorful brightness of the world.

Our studies of karma, which have led us lately to definite individual examples of karmic relationships, are intended to afford a basis for forming a judgment not only of individual human connections, but also of more general historical ones. And it is with this end in view that I would like now to add to the examples already given. Today we will prepare the ground, and tomorrow we will follow this up by showing the karmic connections.

You will have realised that consideration of the relation between one earth-life and the next must always be based upon certain definite symptoms and facts. If we take these as our starting-point, they will lead us to a view of the actual connections. And in the case of the individualities of whom I have ventured to tell you, I have shown where these particular starting-points are to be found.

Today I want, as I said, to prepare the way, placing before you problems of which we shall find the solutions tomorrow.

Let me first draw your attention to the peculiar interest that one or another personality can arouse. I shall speak of personalities of historical interest as well as of personalities in ordinary life; the very interest that some persons arouse in us will often urge us to find a clue to their life-connections. Once we know how to look for these clues in the right way, we shall be able to find them. As you will already have noticed from the way in which I have presented the cases, it is all a matter of seeking in the right way. Let us then not be deterred, but proceed boldly.

Whatever one's attitude to the personality of Garibaldi may be in other respects, there can be no doubt that he is an interesting figure in the history of Europe; he played, as we all know, a remarkable part in the events of the 19th century. Today, then, we will make a preparatory study of Garibaldi, and to begin with I will bring to your notice certain facts in his life which, as we shall find, are able to lead the student of spiritual science to the connections of which we shall learn tomorrow.

Garibaldi is a personality who participated in a remarkable way in the life of the 19th century. He was born in the year 1807 and he held a prominent and influential position on into the second half of the century. This means that the way he expresses himself as a man is highly characteristic of the 19th century.

When we come to consider the features of his life, looking especially for those that are important from a spiritual aspect, we find Garibaldi spending his boyhood in Nice as the son of a poor man who has a job in the navigation service. He is a child who has little inclination to take part in what the current education of the country has to offer, a child who is not at all brilliant at school, but who takes a lively interest in all sorts and varieties of human affairs. What he learns at school has indeed the effect of inducing him very often to play truant. While the teacher was trying in his own way to bring some knowledge of the world to the children, the boy Garibaldi much preferred to romp about out-of-doors, to scamper through the woods or play games by the riverside. On the other hand, if he once got hold of some book that appealed to him, nothing could tear him from it. He would lie on his back by the hour in the sunshine, absolutely absorbed, not even going home for meals.

Broadly speaking, however, it was the great world that interested him. While still quite young he set about preparing himself for his father's calling and took part in sea voyages, at first in a subordinate, and afterwards in an independent position. He made many voyages on the Adriatic and shared in all the varied experiences that were to be had in the first half of the 19th century, when Liberalism and Democracy had not yet organised the traffic on the sea and put it under police regulations, but when some freedom of movement was still left in the life of man! He shared in all the experiences that were possible in times when one could do more or less what one wanted! And so he also had the experience—I believe it happened to him three or four times—of being seized by pirates. As well as being a genius, however, he was sly, and every time he was caught, he got away again, and very quickly too!

And so Garibaldi grew up into manhood, always living in the great world. As I have said, I do not intend to give you a biography but to point out characteristic features of his life that can lead us on to a consideration of what is really important and essential. He lived in the great world, and there came a time when he acquired a very strong and vivid impression of what his own inner relationship to the world might be. It was when he was nearly grown up and was taken by his father on a journey through the country, as far as Rome. There, looking out from Rome as it were over all Italy, he must have been aware of something quite remarkable going through his soul. In his voyages he had met many people who were, in general, quite alive and awake, but were utterly indifferent to one particular interest—they were asleep as regards the conditions of the time; and these people made an impression on Garibaldi that nearly drove him to despair. They had no enthusiasm for true and genuine humanity, such as showed itself in him quite early in life—he had indeed a genius for warm, tender-hearted enthusiasm.

As he passed through the countryside and afterwards came to Rome, a kind of vision must have arisen in his soul of the part he was later to play in the liberation of Italy. Other circumstances also helped to make him a fanatical anti-cleric, and a fanatical Republican, a man who set clearly before him the aim of doing everything in his power to further the well-being of mankind.

And now, taking part as he did in all manner of movements in Italy in the first half of the 19th century, it happened one day that for the first time in his life, Garibaldi read his name in the newspaper. I think he was about thirty years old at the time. It meant a good deal more in those days than it would do now, to read one's name in the newspaper. Garibaldi had, however, a peculiar destiny in connection with this reading of his name in the newspaper, for the occasion was the announcement in the paper of his death-sentence! He read his name there for the first time when his sentence to death was reported. There you have a unique circumstance of his life; it is not every man who has such an experience.

It was not granted to Garibaldi—and it is characteristic of his destiny that it was not, considering that his whole enthusiasm was centred in Italy—it was not granted him at first to take a hand in the affairs of Italy or Europe, but it was laid upon him by destiny to go first to South America and take part in all manner of movements for freedom over there, until the year 1848. And in every situation he showed himself a most remarkable man, gifted with quite extraordinary qualities. I have already related to you one most singular event in his life, the finding of his name in the newspaper for the first time on the occasion of the announcement of his own death-sentence. And now we come to another quite individual biographical fact, something that happens to very few men indeed. Garibaldi became acquainted in a most extraordinary way with the woman who was to be the mainstay of his happiness for many years. He was out at sea, on board ship, looking landwards through a telescope. To fall in love through a telescope—that is certainly not the way it happens to most people!

Destiny again made it easy for him to become quickly acquainted with the one whom he had chosen through the telescope to be his beloved. He steered at once in the direction in which he had looked through the telescope, and on reaching land he was invited by a man to a meal. It transpired, after he had accepted the invitation, that this man was the father of the girl he had seen! She could speak only Portuguese, and he only Italian; but we are assured by his biographer, and it seems to be correct, that the young woman immediately understood his carefully phrased declaration of love, which seems to have consisted simply of the words—in Italian of course—“We must unite for life.” She understood immediately. And it really happened so, that from this meeting came a life-companionship that lasted for a long, long time.

Garibaldi's wife shared in all the terrible and adventurous journeys he made in South America, and some of the recorded details of them are really most moving. For example, the story is told of how a report got about that Garibaldi had been killed in battle. His wife hurried to the battlefield and lifted up every head to see if it were her husband's. After a long time, and after undergoing many adventures in the search, she found him still alive. It is most affecting to read how on this very journey, which lasted a long time, she gave birth to a child without help of any kind, and how, in order to keep it warm, she bound it in a sling about her neck, holding it against her breast for hours at a time. The story of Garibaldi's South American adventures has some deeply moving aspects.

But now the time came, in the middle of the 19th century, when all kinds of impulses for freedom were stirring among the peoples of Europe, and Garibaldi could not bring himself to stay away any longer in South America; he returned to his fatherland. It is well-known with what intense energy he worked there, mustering volunteers under the most difficult circumstances—so much so that he did not merely contribute to the development of the new Italy: he was its creator.

And here we come to a feature of his life and character that stands out very strongly. He was, in every relationship of life, a man of independence, a man who always thought in a large and simple way, and took account only of the impulses that welled up from the depths of his own inner being. And so it is really very remarkable to see him doing everything in his power to bring it about that the dynasty of Victor Emmanuel should rule over the kingdom of Italy, when in reality the whole unification and liberation of Italy was due to Garibaldi himself. The story of how he won Naples and then Sicily with, comparatively speaking, quite a small force of men, undisciplined yet filled with enthusiasm, of how the future King of Italy needed only to make his entry into the regions already won for him by Garibaldi, and of how, nevertheless, if truth be told, nothing whatever was done from the side of the royal family or of those who stood near to them to show any proper appreciation of what Garibaldi had accomplished—the whole story makes a deep and striking impression. Fundamentally speaking, if we may put it in somewhat trivial language, the Savoy Dynasty had Garibaldi to thank for everything, and yet they were eminently unthankful to him, treating him with no more than necessary politeness.

Take, for example, the entry into Naples. Garibaldi had won Naples for the Dynasty and was regarded by the Neapolitans as no less than their liberator; a perfect storm of jubilation always greeted his appearance. It would have been unthinkable for the future King of Italy to make his entry into Naples without Garibaldi, absolutely unthinkable. Nevertheless the King's advisers were against it. Advisers, no doubt, are often exceedingly short-sighted; but if Victor Emmanuel had not acted on his own account out of a certain instinct and made Garibaldi sit by him in his red shirt on the occasion of the entry into Naples, he himself would most certainly not have been greeted with shouts of rejoicing! Even so, the cheers were intended for Garibaldi and not for him. He would most assuredly have been hissed—that is an absolute certainty. Victor Emmanuel would have been hissed if he had entered Naples without Garibaldi.

And it was the same all through. At some campaign or other in the centre of Italy, Garibaldi had carried the day. The commanders-in-chief with the King had come—what does one say in such a case, putting it as kindly as one can?—they had come too late. The whole thing had been carried through to the finish by Garibaldi. When, however, the army appeared, with its generals wearing their decorations, and met Garibaldi's men who had no decorations and were moreover quite unpretentiously attired, the generals declared: it is beneath our dignity to ride side by side with them, we cannot possibly do such a thing! But Victor Emmanuel had some sort of instinct in these matters. He called Garibaldi to his side, and the generals, making wry faces, were obliged to join with Garibaldi's army as it drew up into line. These generals, it seems, had a terribly bad time of it; they looked as though they had stomach-aches! And afterwards, when the entry into a town was to be made, Garibaldi, who had done everything, actually had to come on behind like a rearguard. He and his men had to wait and let the others march in front. It was a case where the regular army had in point of fact done absolutely nothing; yet they entered first, and after them, Garibaldi with his followers.

The important things to note are these remarkable links of destiny. It is in these links of destiny that we may find our guidance to the karmic connections. For it has not directly to do with a man's freedom or unfreedom that he first sees his name in print on the occasion of his death-sentence, or that he finds his wife through a telescope. Such things are connections of destiny; they take their course alongside of that which is always present in man in spite of them—his freedom. These are the very things, however—these things of which we may be sure that they are links of destiny—that can give a great stimulus to the practical study of the nature and reality of karma.

Now in the case of a personality like Garibaldi, traits that may generally be thought incidental, are characteristic. They are, in his case, strongly marked. Garibaldi was what is called a handsome man. He had beautiful tawny-golden hair and was altogether a splendid figure. His hair was curly and gleaming gold, and was greatly admired by the women! Now you will agree, from what I have told you of Garibaldi's bride—whom he chose, you remember, through a telescope—that only the highest possible praise can be spoken of her; nevertheless, it seems she was not altogether free from jealousy. What does Garibaldi do one day when this jealousy seems to have assumed somewhat large proportions? He has his beautiful hair all cut away to the roots; he lets himself be made bald. That was when they were still in South America. All these things are traits that serve to show how the necessities of destiny are placed into life.

Garibaldi became, as we know, one of the great men of Europe after his achievements in Italy, and traveling through Italy today you know how, from town to town, you pass from one Garibaldi memorial to another. But there have been times when not only in Italy but everywhere in Europe the name of Garibaldi was spoken with the keenest interest and the deepest devotion, when even the ladies in Cologne, in Mainz and in many another place wore blouses in Garibaldi's honour—not to mention London, where Garibaldi's red blouse became quite the fashion.

During the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, Garibaldi, now an old man, put himself at the disposal of the French, and an interesting incident took place. His only experience, as we know, had been volunteer fighting, such as he had conducted in Italy and also in South America, yet on a certain occasion in this full-scale war he was the one to capture a German flag from under a pile of men who were trying to protect it with their bodies. Garibaldi captured this flag. But he had such respect for the men who had hurled themselves upon the flag to guard it with their own bodies, that he sent it back to its owners. Strange to relate, however, when he appeared in a meeting at some place or other soon afterwards, he was received with hisses on account of what he had done.

You will agree—this is not merely an interesting life, but the life of a man who in very deed and fact is lifted right above all other greatness in evidence in the 19th century! A most remarkable man—so original, so elementary, acting so evidently out of primitive impulses, and at the same time with such genius! Others working with him may perhaps have been better at leading large armies and doing things in an orderly way, but none of them in that deeply materialistic period had such genuine, spontaneous enthusiasm for what they were aiming at.

Here, then, is one of the personalities whom I would like to place before you. As I said, I shall give preparatory descriptions today, and tomorrow we will look for the answers.

Another personality, very well-known to you by name, is of exceptional interest in connection with investigations into karma. It is Lessing.

The circumstances of Lessing's life, I may say, have always interested me to an extraordinary degree. Lessing is really the founder of the better sort of journalism, the journalism that has substance and is really out to accomplish something. Before Lessing, poets and dramatists had taken their subjects from the aristocracy. Lessing, on the other hand, is at pains to introduce bourgeois life, ordinary middle-class life, into the drama, the life concerned generally with the destinies of men as men, and not with the destinies of men in so far as they hold some position in society or the like. Purely human conflicts—that is what Lessing wanted to portray on the stage. In the course of his work he applied himself to many great problems, as for example when he tried to determine the boundaries of painting and of poetry in his Laocoon. But the most interesting thing of all is the powerful impetus with which Lessing fought for the idea of tolerance. You need only take his Nathan the Wise and you will see at once what a foremost place this idea of tolerance has in Lessing's mind and life. In weaving the fable of the three kings in Nathan the Wise, he wants to show how the three main religions have gone astray from their original forms and are none of them really genuine, and how one must go in search of the true form, which has been lost. Here we have tolerance united with an uncommonly deep and significant idea.

Interesting, too, is the conversation between Freemasons, entitled Ernst und Falk, and much else that springs from Freemasonry. What Lessing accomplished in the way of critical research into the history of religious life is, for one who is able to judge its significance, really astounding. But we must be able to place the whole Lessing, in his complete personality, before us. And this we cannot do by reading, for example, the two-volume work by Erich Schmidt which purports to be a final and complete study of Lessing. Lessing as he really was, is not portrayed at all, but a picture is given of a puppet composed of various limbs and members, and we are told that this puppet wrote Nathan the Wise and Laocoon. It amounts to no more than an assertion that the man portrayed here has written these books. And it is the same with the other biographies of Lessing.

We begin to get an impression of Lessing when we observe, shall I say, the driving force with which he hurls his sentences against his opponents. He wages a polemic against the civilisation of Middle Europe—quite a refined and correct polemic, but at every turn hitting straight home. You must here observe a peculiar nuance in Lessing's character if you want to understand the make-up of his life. On the one hand we have the sharpness, often caustic sharpness, in such writings as The Dramatic Art of Hamburg, and then we have to find the way over, as it were, to an understanding, for example, of the words used by Lessing when a son had been born to him and had died directly after birth. He writes somewhat as follows in a letter: Yes, he has at once taken leave again of this world of sorrow; he has thereby done the best thing a human being can do. (I cannot cite the passage word for word, but it was to this effect.) In so writing, Lessing is giving expression to his pain in a wonderfully brave way, not for that reason feeling the pain one whit less deeply than someone who can do nothing but bemoan the event. This ability to draw back into himself in pain was characteristic of the man who at the same time knew how to thrust forward with vigour when he was developing his polemics. This is what makes it so affecting to read the letter written when his child had died immediately after birth, leaving the mother seriously ill.

Lessing had moreover this remarkable thing in his destiny—and it is quite characteristic, when one sets out to find the karmic connections in his case—that he was friends in Berlin with a man who was in every particular his opposite, namely, Nikolai.

Of Lessing it can be said—it is not literally true, but it is none the less characteristic—that he never dreamed, because his intellect and his understanding were so keen. On this account, as we shall see tomorrow, he is for the spiritual researcher such an extraordinarily significant personality. But there is something in the very construction of his sentences, something in the home-thrusts with which he lays his opponent in the dust, that really makes every sentence a delight to read.

With Nikolai it is just the opposite. Nikolai is an example of a true philistine. Although a friend of Lessing, he was none the less a typical philistine-bourgeois; and he had visions, most strange and remarkable visions.

Lessing, genius as he was, had no visions, not even dreams. Nikolai literally suffered from visions. They came, and they went away only after leeches had been applied. Yes, in extremity they actually applied leeches to him, in order that he might not be for ever tormented by the spiritual world which would not let him alone.

Fichte wrote a very interesting essay directed against Nikolai. He set out to give a picture of the typical German-bourgeois as shown in the personality of Nikolai. For all that, this same Nikolai was the friend of Lessing.

Another thing is very remarkable in Lessing. In his own Weltanschauung, Lessing concerned himself very much with two philosophers, Spinoza and Leibniz. Now it has often attracted me very much, as an interesting occupation for spare hours, to read all the writings in which it is proved over and over again that Lessing was a Leibnizian, and on the other hand those in which it is proved on still more solid ground that he was a Spinozist. For in truth one cannot decide whether Lessing, acute and discerning thinker as he was, was a Leibnizian or a Spinozist, who are the very opposite of each other. Spinoza—pantheist and monotheist; Leibniz—monadist, purely and completely individualistic. And yet we cannot decide whether Lessing belongs to Leibniz or to Spinoza. When we try to put him to the test in this matter, we can come to no conclusive judgment. It is impossible.

At the close of his life Lessing wrote the remarkable essay, The Education of the Human Race, at the end of which, quite isolated, as it were, the idea of repeated earth-lives appears. The book shows how mankind goes through one epoch of development after another, and how the Gods gave into man's hand as a first primer, so to speak, the Old Testament, and then as a second primer the New Testament, and how in the future a third book will come for the further education of the human race. And then all at once the essay is brought to a close with a brief presentation of the idea that man lives through repeated earth-lives. And there Lessing says, again in a way that is absolutely in accord with his character (I am not quoting the actual words, but this is the gist of it): Ought the idea of repeated earth-lives to seem so absurd, considering that it was present in very early times, when men had not yet been spoilt by school learning? The essay then ends with a genuine panegyric on repeated earth-lives, finishing with these beautiful words: “Is not all Eternity mine?”

One used to meet continually—perhaps it would still be so if one mixed more with people—one used to meet men who valued Lessing highly, but who turned away, so to speak, when they came to The Education of the Human Race. Really it is hard to understand the state of mind of such men. They set the highest estimation on a man of genius, and then reject what he gives to mankind in his most mature age. They say: he has grown old, he is senile, we can no longer follow him. That is all very well; one can reject anything by that method! The fact is, no one has any right to recognise Lessing and not to recognise that this work was conceived by him in the full maturity of his powers. When a man like Lessing utters a profound aphorism such as this on repeated earth-lives, there is, properly speaking, no possibility of ignoring it.

You will readily see that the personality of Lessing is interesting in the highest degree from a karmic point of view, in relation to his own passage through different earth-lives. In the second half of the 18th century the idea of repeated earth-lives was by no means a commonly accepted one. It comes forth in Lessing like a flash of lightning, like a flash of genius. We cannot account for its appearance; it cannot possibly be due to Lessing's education or to any other influence in this particular life. We are compelled to ask how it may be with the previous life of a man in whom at a certain age the idea of repeated earth-lives suddenly emerges—an idea that is foreign to the civilisation of his own day—emerges, too, in such a way that the man himself points to the fact that the idea was once present in very early times. The truth is that he is really bringing forward inner grounds for the idea, grounds of feeling that carry with them an indication of his own earth-life in the distant past. Needless to say, in his ordinary surface-consciousness he has no notion of such connections. The things we do not know are, however, none the less true. If those things alone were true that many men know, then the world would be poor indeed in events and poor indeed in beings.

This is the second case whose karmic connections we are going to study.

There is a third case I should like to open up, because it is one that can teach us a great deal in the matter of karmic relationships. Among the personalities who were near to me as teachers in my youth there was a man to whom I have already referred; today I should like to speak of him again, adding some points that will be significant for our study of karma.

There are, of course, risks in speaking of these matters, but in view of the whole situation of the spiritual life which ought to proceed from Anthroposophy today, I do not think such risks can be avoided.

What I am now going to tell you came to my notice several years after I had last seen the person in question, who was a greatly beloved teacher of mine up to my eighteenth year. But I had always continued to follow his life, and had in truth remained very close to him. And now at a certain moment in my own life I felt constrained to follow his life more closely in a particular respect.

It was when, in another connection, I began to take a special interest in the life of Lord Byron. And at that same time I got to know some Byron enthusiasts. One of them was the poetess, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, of whom I shall have much to say in my autobiography. During a certain period of her life she was a Byron enthusiast. Then there was another, a most remarkable personality, a strange mixture of all possible qualities—Eugen Heinrich Schmidt. Many of you who know something about the history of Anthroposophy will be familiar with his name.

Eugen Heinrich Schmidt first became known in Vienna during the eighties, and it was then that I made his acquaintance. He had just written the prize essay that was published by the Hegel Society of Berlin, on the Dialectics of Hegel. Now he came to Vienna, a tall, slight man filled with a burning enthusiasm, which came to expression at times in very forcible gestures and so on. It was none the less genuine for that. And it was just this enthusiasm of Schmidt's that gave me the required “jerk,” as it were. I thought I would like to do him a kindness, and as he had recently written a most enthusiastic and inspired article on Lord Byron, I introduced him to my other Byron enthusiast, Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. And now began a wildly excited discussion on Byron. The two were really quite in agreement, but they carried on a most lively and animated debate. All we others who were sitting round—a whole collection of theological students from the Vienna Catholic Faculty were there, who came every week and with whom I had made friends—all we others were silent. And the two who were thus conversing about Byron were sitting like this.—Here was the table, rather a long one, and at one end sat delle Grazie and at the other end, Eugen Heinrich Schmidt, gesticulating with might and main. All of a sudden his chair slips away from under him, and he falls under the table, his feet stretching right out to delle Grazie. I can tell you, it was a shock for us all! But this shock helped me to hit upon the solution of a particular problem.

Let me tell you of it quite objectively, as a matter of history. All that they had been saying about Byron had made a strong impression upon me, and I began to feel the keenest need to know how the karmic connections might be in the case of Byron. It was, of course, not so easy. But now I suddenly had the following experience.—It was really as if the whole picture of this conversation, with Eugen Heinrich Schmidt being so terribly impolite with his foot!—as if this picture had suddenly drawn my attention to the foot of Lord Byron, who was, as you know, club-footed. And from that I went on to say to myself: My beloved teacher, too, had a foot like that; this karmic connection must be investigated. I have already given you an example, in the affliction of the knee from which Eduard von Hartmann suffered, of how one's search can be led back through peculiarities of this kind. I was able now to perceive the destiny of the teacher whom I loved and who also had such a foot. And it was remarkable in the highest degree to observe how on the one hand the same peculiarity came to view both in the case of Byron and of my teacher, namely, the club-foot; but how on the other hand the two persons were totally different from one another, Byron, the poet of genius, who in spite of his genius—or perhaps because of it—was an adventurer; and the other a brilliant geometrician such as one seldom finds in teaching posts, a man at whose geometrical imagination and treatment of descriptive geometry one could only stand amazed.

In short, having before me these two men, utterly different in soul, I was able to solve the problem of their karma by reference to this seemingly insignificant physical detail. This detail it was that enabled me to consider the problems of Byron and my geometry teacher in connection with one another, and thereby to find the solution.

I wished to give these examples today and tomorrow we will consider them from the point of view of karma.

Good morning, gentlemen! Did you come up with anything that needs to be discussed today?

Question: Perhaps Dr. Steiner would say something about the essence of Christ, Ahriman and Lucifer in relation to man.

Dr. Steiner: To do that, we have to approach the nature of the human being from a completely different angle, otherwise it will naturally seem to you to be a kind of superstition. Based on what we have already discussed, I would like to say the following to you.

You see, gentlemen, today we have the notion that human beings are thoroughly homogeneous creatures. He is not; but man is actually constantly in a state in which he revives and dies again. One does not merely live at birth and does not merely die with death, but - as I have often explained to you - one dies continually and revives again.

Now, if we look at our head, for example, the head is actually entirely composed of what is called nervous substance. You know, nerves usually run through the organism only as threads, but the head is entirely made of nerves on the inside. If you draw it, it actually looks like this (drawing $. 220): the head, the forehead; the head is entirely made of nerves on the inside, a strong nerve mass; then some of this nerve mass goes through the spinal cord. But then the nerve threads go through the whole body. So what only goes through the whole body in threads is present in the head as a unified mass. That is the nerve mass.

If you now look at the inside of the human abdomen, for example, you will also see a great many nerves inside. There is the so-called solar plexus. There are a lot of nerves in there. But in the arms and hands and in the legs and feet, the nerves just run out in a thread-like manner.

If you now look again for something else, for the blood vessels, then you will find: in the head, the blood vessels are quite fine. In contrast, the blood vessels are particularly strong in the heart area; and then there are thick blood vessels in the limbs. So you can say: on the one hand we have the nervous system, on the other hand we have the blood system.

Now the thing is that we are born again and again from the blood, every day, every hour. Blood always signifies renewal. If we only had blood in us, we would be like beings that are constantly growing, getting bigger, fresh and so on. But, you see, gentlemen, if we were only nerves, if we were only made of nerves, we would be constantly exhausted, tired, we would actually be constantly dying. So we have two opposing principles in us, the nervous system, which makes us continually grow old, continually at the mercy of death, and the blood system, which is connected to the nutritional system, which makes us continually grow young and so forth.

The matter that I have explained to you now can also be further expanded. You know, in old age, some people become so that one has to say that they are calcified. Calcification occurs, sclerosis. It is very easy for people to no longer be able to move properly when their veins, as one says, calcify, that is, when the walls of their blood vessels calcify. And when the calcification is particularly severe, then the person is struck by a stroke, as they say. They get a stroke. The stroke that a person gets is only because their blood vessels have calcified and can no longer hold.

What actually happens to a person when their blood vessels calcify, when they become sclerotic? You see, it is as if the walls of their blood vessels want to become nerves. That is the strange thing. Nerves must constantly die off. Throughout our entire lives, nerves must be in the same state that blood vessels must not be in. Blood vessels must be fresh. The nerves must constantly tend to die off. If, on the other hand, a person develops nerves that are too soft, that are not sufficiently, if I may put it this way, calcified, that are too soft, then he goes crazy. So you see, the nerves must not be like the blood vessels and the blood vessels not like the nerves.

This is precisely what forces us to say that man has two principles within him. One is the nervous principle. This causes him to actually grow old all the time. From morning till evening, we actually get a little older each day. During the night, the blood renews itself. It goes like the pendulum of a clock: getting old, getting young, getting old, getting young. Of course, if we are awake from morning till night, we just get older, and if we sleep from night till morning, we get younger again; but a little something always remains. So the night makes up for it; but a little remains from each day of aging. And when that adds up to a sufficiently large sum in a person, then he really does die. That is the story. We therefore have two things in man that work against each other, growing old and growing young.

Now we can also look at it from a psychological point of view. I have explained it to you physically now. You see, when growing young takes hold too strongly in a person, then he gets pleurisy or pneumonia. It is namely the case that the things that are quite good, that are excellent when they remain within their limits, then, when they get out of hand, become illness. In a human being, illness is nothing more than an excess of something that he always needs. Fever comes from the fact that the process of growing young becomes much too strong in us. We can no longer tolerate it. We start to become too fresh with our whole body. Then we have a fever or pleurisy, which is a inflammation of the pleura, or pneumonia.

Now, the whole thing can also be looked at from a spiritual point of view. You see, a person can also dry up spiritually, or he can become as he otherwise becomes physically in a fever. There are certain qualities in a person - one does not like to hear them because so many people have them, especially today - and these are: one becomes pedantic, one becomes a Philistine. You know that there are Philistines today, after all. Philistines already exist. You become a philistine, you become a pedant. You become, while you should actually be a schoolmaster as a fresh guy, just dried up as a schoolmaster. Yes, that is again the same as when our blood vessels calcify, dry up. We can also dry up mentally. And then again we can also soften mentally. That is when you become a dreamer, a mystic or a theosophist. Yes, what do you want there? You don't want to think properly there. You want to reach out with your imagination into all the worlds without thinking properly. It's the same as when you get a physical fever. Becoming a mystic, becoming a theosophist, means becoming mentally feverish.

But we must always have both conditions within us. We cannot recognize anything if we cannot use our imagination, and we cannot work together in any way if we are not a little pedantic, if we do not register all sorts of things and so on. If you do it too much, you are a pedant, a philistine. If you do it just in the right measure, you are a real soul.

That is it, that one always has something that must be in the right measure in man, but which, if it gets out of hand, makes one physically or mentally ill.

The spiritual is the same, gentlemen. We cannot always sleep, we also have to wake up sometimes. Imagine what a jolt it is when you wake up! Just imagine what it is like when you are asleep: you lie there, you know nothing of your surroundings. If you have a good sleep, someone can even tickle you and you won't even wake up. Think what a difference that makes! Afterwards you wake up, you see everything around you, you hear everything around you. That is a big difference. Now when you wake up – yes, we must have this power to wake up in us; but if it is too strong, if one always wakes up, if one cannot sleep at all, for example, then the power to wake up is just too strong in us.

On the other hand, there are people who cannot wake up properly at all. There are people who doze and dream their whole lives, who might as well be asleep all the time. Yes, these people cannot wake up. We need to have the ability to fall asleep properly; but we must not have this ability to fall asleep properly too strongly. Otherwise we will sleep forever and never wake up again.

So we can say: we can distinguish certain conditions in people in three ways. Firstly, physically. On the one hand, we have the nervous system. This is constantly subject to hardening, to calcification. So we say:

You see, you are all already so old, with the exception of the only one sitting among you, that you must have calcified your nervous system a little. Because if you still had your nervous system today as you had it when you were six months old, you would all be crazy. You can no longer have such a soft nervous system. Those people who are crazy have a childlike nervous system. So we have to have the power of hardening, of calcification within us. And on the other hand, we have to have the power of softening, of rejuvenation. These two forces must maintain a balance.

If we look at the matter psychically, we can say that hardening corresponds to mental pedantry, philistinism, materialism, dry intellect.

We have to be able to see beyond all this. We have to be a little bit of a Philistine, otherwise we would be a Springing-ear. We have to be a little bit of a pedant, otherwise we would not even pick up our things properly. Instead of hanging our coat in the right closet, we would hang it in the stove or in the chimney. So being a little bit of a Philistine and a little bit of a pedant is all well and good, but it must not be too strong. Then we also have the strength in our souls for fantasy, for enthusiasm, for mysticism, for theosophy. If all these powers become too strong, then we become a fantasist, an enthusiast. We must not become that. But we must not lose all imagination either.

I once knew a person who hated all imagination, and he never went to the theater, for example, certainly not to the opera, because he said, “It's all not true.” He just had no imagination at all. Yes, but if you have no imagination at all, then you become a very dry subject, then you slink through life, not a real, true human being. So that must not degenerate again.

If we now look at it spiritually, we have the strength to harden when we wake up. When we wake up, we take our body firmly in hand and use our limbs. And the strength that is otherwise in the body in softening, in rejuvenation, we have in falling asleep. Then we sink into dreams. There we no longer have our body in hand.

You could say that people are actually constantly exposed to the danger of falling into one or the other, either into excessive softening or excessive hardening.

If you have a magnet, you know that the magnet attracts the iron. We say that we have two types of magnetism in the magnet. We also have positive magnetism and negative magnetism. One attracts the magnetic needle, the other repels it. They are opposite.

Not so in the physical, in the bodily, where we are not at all embarrassed about giving things names. We need names. I have now described something to you, physically, mentally and spiritually, that each of you can always perceive, always see, and be clear about. But we need names. When we have positive magnetism, we have to be clear that this is not the iron; this is inside the iron. Something invisible is inside the iron.

Anyone who does not admit that there is something invisible in the iron will say: “You are a foolish fellow! There should be magnetism in the iron inside? This is a horseshoe. I use it to shoe my horse. — Not true, such a person is an idiot who does not admit that there is something invisible in the iron inside, who shoes his horse with it. You can use this horseshoe for something completely different than for shoeing, if there is magnetism inside.

Now, in the same way, you see, there is something invisible, supersensory, in the hardening. And this invisible, supersensory, entity, which can be observed if one has the gift for it, is called ahrimanic. Ahrimanic are therefore the forces that would continually turn a person into a kind of corpse. If only ahrimanic forces were present, we would continually become corpses, and we would become pedants, completely petrified people. We would wake up all the time, we would not be able to sleep.

The forces that now soften us, rejuvenate us, bring us to fantasy, are the luciferic forces, these are the forces we need to avoid becoming a living corpse. But if only the luciferic forces were there, yes, we would remain children all our lives. So in the world we need the luciferic forces so that we are not already old at the age of three. In the world we need the ahrimanic forces so that we do not remain children all the time. These two opposing forces must be in man.

Now it is a matter of these two opposing forces having to be balanced. Where, then, does the balance lie? Neither of these forces should prevail.

You see, we are now writing, aren't we, 1923. The whole period from the turn of time until 1923 is actually such that humanity is in danger of falling prey to the forces of Ahriman. You only have to consider that today, wherever there is no spiritual science, people are educated in an Ahrimanic way. Just think, our children start school and have to learn things that seem very strange to them – I have already hinted at them – that they cannot possibly be interested in. I told you that they have always seen the father; yes, he looks like this, has hair, ears, eyes, and then they are supposed to learn that this (written): Father, is the father. It is completely foreign to them. They have no interest in it. And so it is with everything that children are supposed to learn in elementary school. They have no interest in it.

And this is the reason why we need to establish sensible schools where children can learn things that interest them. If teaching were to continue as it is today, then people would grow old very early, become old, because it is Ahrimanic. It makes people old. The way children are educated in school today is all Ahrimanic. It has been like this for nineteen hundred years, that the whole development of humanity is Ahrimanic. Before that it was different.

If you now go back, say, from the year 8000 to the turn of the century, it was different, people were exposed to the danger of not being able to grow old. There were no schools in the modern sense in those ancient times. There were only schools for those people who had already reached a respectable age and who were then to become real scholars. There were schools for them. In the old days there were no schools for children. They just learned by living. They learned from what they saw. So there were no schools, nor did anyone endeavor to teach children anything that was foreign to them. There was a danger that people would become completely Luciferian, that they would become fanatical, that is, Luciferian. And it was so. In those ancient times, there was much wisdom available, I have already told you that. But of course, this Luciferic had to be restrained, otherwise they would have wanted to tell ghost stories all day long! That was what people particularly loved.

So that one can say: from very ancient times, from about 8000 BC to the turn of time, was a Luciferic age, and then came an Ahrimanic age.

Let us now take a look at the Luciferian Age. You see, those who were scholars in those ancient times had certain concerns. Those who were scholars at that time lived in tower-shaped buildings. The Babylonian Tower, which is told to you in the Bible, is just one of these buildings. These scholars lived there. These scholars said: Well, we have it good here. We also want our imagination to run away with us. We always want to go into the ghostly, always into the Luciferian. But we have our instruments. We look out at the stars and see how the stars move. That reins in our imagination. Because if I look at a star and want it to go like that, it just doesn't go like that. So our own imagination is reined in.

So the scholars knew that they could let their imagination be tamed by the phenomena of the world. Or they had physical instruments. They knew: If I imagine that I have a very small piece of wood, heat it up a little, there will be a huge fire – I can say that in my imagination, but if I really do it, the small piece of wood will become a small fire.

So that was actually the purpose of these old educational institutions, to rein in the rampant imagination of these people. And the concern that these people had was that they said, “Yes, there are all the others now, but not all of them can become scholars!” And so they came up with the teachings, which were sometimes honest and sometimes dishonest. These are the old religious teachings, which are based entirely on science. Of course, the priests also went astray. And so the dishonest teachings - the honest ones have been partially, mostly lost - have come down to posterity. That was the restraint of the Luciferic.

And you know what the Ahrimanic element is. Today's science is moving more and more towards the Ahrimanic. In fact, all our science is something that makes us dry up today. Because this science, it only knows the physical, that is, the calcified, the material. And that is what is Ahrimanic in our whole civilization.

Between the two stands that which in the real sense we call the Christian. You see, gentlemen, the real Christian is too little known in the world. If one calls that Christian which is known in the world, then one would naturally have to fight the Christian, that is self-evident.

But the being of whom I also spoke to you last time, who was born at the turn of an era and lived for thirty-three years, this personality was not as people describe him, but he actually had the intention of giving such teachings to all people that would make possible a balance, an equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. And being Christian means seeking this balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic. You cannot really be a Christian in the way that people often call it today.

What does it mean, for example, to be Christian in the physical sense? To be Christian in the physical sense means that I acquire knowledge about the human being. The human being can also become ill. The human being gets pleurisy. What does it mean when he gets pleurisy? It means that there is too much of the Luciferic in him. If I know that there is too much of the Luciferic in him – if he gets pleurisy, then there is too much of the Luciferic in him – then I must say: if I have a balance (drawing $. 230) and it rises too sharply here, then I must take away the weights. If it sinks too low, I have to add weights. Now I say to myself: if a person has pleurisy, the Luciferic is too strong and the Ahrimanic too weak. I have to add something Ahrimanic, then it balances out again.

Let us assume, then, that I am saying to myself quite correctly: this person has pleurisy; how can I help him? I take, say, a piece of birch wood. Birch wood grows strongly in spring. Birch wood in particular is very good, especially when it is towards the bark; there are very good growth forces in the bark. I kill them, that is, I char the birch wood. Then I have birch charcoal. What have I made out of the fresh, ever-rejuvenating birch wood? I have made birch charcoal out of it; I have made Ahrimanic out of it. And now I make a powder out of this birch charcoal and give it to the person who has too much of the Luciferic in his pleurisy. Then I have added the Ahrimanic to what he has too much of the Luciferic.

You see, I have then created the balance. Just as I have to add something to the scales when they swing up too high on one side, so too have I added birch charcoal when there is too much of the Luciferic in the pleurisy. I have mineralized the birch wood by charring it. It has been made Ahrimanic.

Or suppose a person takes on such a tired, paralyzed appearance that I can say to myself: this person will be struck down soon. There is too much Ahrimanic in him. Now I have to give him something Luciferic to balance it out. What do I do in such a case?

You see, when I have a plant: there is the root. You know, the root is hard. It contains a lot of salts. That is not luciferic. The trunk and the leaves are not luciferic either. But I go further up, and there I have a smelling, a strong-smelling flower. It wants to get away, just as fantasy wants to get away, otherwise I would not be able to smell it at all. Now I take the juice from the flower. That is luciferic. Then I administer it in the right way, thus balancing out the ahrimanic, and I can heal him.

What does today's medicine do? Today's medicine, yes, it tries things out. A chemist comes up with the discovery of acetylphenetidine. I don't need to explain to you what that is; it is a complicated substance. Now one takes that into a hospital. There are thirty patients for my sake. You give all thirty patients acetylphenetidine, take the clinical thermometer, measure, note, and if something comes out, you consider it a cure.

But we have no conception of how things actually work in the human body. We cannot look inside the human body. Only when we know: in pleurisy there is too much of the Luciferic, so we must add the Ahrimanic; in apoplexy there is too much of the Ahrimanic, so we must add the Luciferic — then we have the right thing. That is what humanity lacks today. In this sense humanity is insufficiently Christian, because the Christian element is the element of balance. You see, I will show you what the Christian element consists of in the sphere of physical healing. The Christian element consists of seeking balance.

You see, that is what I wanted to show in this wooden figure, which is supposed to be under construction. At the top is Lucifer, the Luciferic, that is everything in man that is feverish, imaginative, asleep; and below is everything that wants to harden, the Ahrimanic. And in between is the Christ.

That is what brings one to what one should do in medicine, in natural science, in sociology, what one should do everywhere. And today it is just part of being human to understand how Luciferic and Ahrimanic is in human nature.

But what do people understand of these things? Once upon a time a very famous pastor in Basel, and even beyond, by the name of Frohnmeyer, a very famous pastor, presented a paper. He did not take the trouble to look at this figure, but he read in another paper, which perhaps had not been looked at either, but copied out, that there is a figure here, Luciferic at the top, Christ in the middle, and Ahrimanic at the bottom. There are three figures, one above the other, and, aren't there even more, Ahriman twice, Lucifer twice as well. But now this Frohnmeyer knew so well that he wrote: Steiner is doing something quite terrible out there in Dornach, a Christ figure that has Luciferian features at the top and animal characteristics at the bottom.

Now, the Christ-Figure has no Luciferic features at all, but a quite human head. But he has confused the two. He has believed, a Christ-Figure, which has Luciferic features above and animalistic ones below. — Now the Christ below is not finished at all, but is still a wooden block!

This is how this Christian pastor, who was striving for truth, described the matter, and now the whole world says that it must be true, because it is a pastor who wrote it! It is difficult to counter this when people do not want to understand. They always turn to the pastors because they believe what the pastors say. But here you have an example of slander that is so pathetic that you can't imagine anything worse than that.

And these people have strange views. Pastor Frohnmeyer wrote this. At the time he wrote this, Dr. Boos was still here at the Goetheanum. You know, Dr. Boos has a tendency to lash out. You may have your own opinion about whether you should lash out with a club or with a whisk. The whisk is softer, more luciferic, the mace is hard, more ahrimanic. So it depends on what you are supposed to hit. But now that he has told Frohnmeyer the truth, told the truth with the mace. Who gets a letter from Frohnmeyer? Me! I get a long letter from Dr. Frohnmeyer telling me to get Dr. Boos not to be so naughty to Dr. Frohnmeyer.

Just imagine what these people are capable of. It's unbelievable what they are capable of. They slander someone, as I told you, and then they turn to someone and say that action should be taken against the person who corrects the untruth!

That is precisely the difficulty, that the public, namely the bourgeois public, does not somehow make it convenient to see for themselves in these matters, but it is just accepted; because they are officially set up by the people concerned, it is right. That is why our civilization is so tremendously frivolous, so mean in many ways.

The point is that today's entire way of thinking must be brought into such a channel that one realizes again: with all this talk of Christianity, it is nothing, but one must take it factually. One must therefore know that medicine can become Christian if one knows, for example, the following. Let us say that someone shows very clearly that if a person has regularly eaten sugar, perhaps even as a child, they will develop liver cancer – this is the liver becoming Ahrimanic – and now one must know what to use against it: the corresponding Luciferic. Just as a person differentiates between warmth and cold, one must differentiate between becoming Luciferic and becoming Ahrimanic. If your limbs are numb, then you have become Ahrimanic. If you now apply warm compresses, warm cloths, then that is the Luciferic that counteracts it. And so, in all areas and under all circumstances, one must know what the human being is like. Then the medicine will become Christian.

In the same way, education and the school system must become Christian. This means that children must be educated in such a way that they do not become decrepit from an early age. So they must be introduced at school to things that are close to them, that they are interested in, and so on.

You see, if we look at it this way, then there is nothing superstitious about the use of the terms ahrimanic, luciferic, Christian. Rather than being something superstitious, it is something completely scientific. And that is what it is.

So how did this develop historically? Yes, it is true that from the earliest Christian times until the 12th, 13th century, even into the 14th century, Christians were forbidden to read the Bible. It was forbidden to read the New Testament. Only the priests were allowed to read it. The general believers were not allowed to read the Bible. Why? Yes, because the clergy knew that the Bible had to be read correctly. The Bible was written at a time when people did not think as they do today, but rather in images. So you have to read the Bible correctly. If people were to read the Bible without being properly prepared, they would notice that the Bible has four testaments: the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Luke, and the Gospel of John. Now, they contradict each other. Why do they contradict each other? Yes, gentlemen, you just have to understand it correctly. Even in the 4th or 5th century, a person who was not half-witted could see that they contradict each other.

But imagine that I have photographed Mr. Burle from the front and show you all the picture. Now, from the picture, you know Mr. Burle. Now someone comes along and takes a picture of him from the side, so that you see the profile, right? I show you this, and you would all say: “That's not Mr. Burle, he looks quite different; you have to look at him from the front, that's how he looks. But what you show me from the side, that's not Mr. Burle!” Yes, that is also Mr. Burle, but only from two different sides! And if I were to photograph him from behind, you would say, “But he also has a nose, not just hair!” But that is from different sides!

If you now “photograph” spiritual events from different sides, they will also look different. You just have to know that the Gospels describe from four different sides. Therefore, they must contradict each other, just as a picture of Mr. Burle from the front, from the side, from behind differs from each other.

But now the times have come when people have said: It is inconceivable that people should first have to prepare themselves in order to read the Gospels. Nowadays we prepare ourselves for nothing at all. We allow ourselves to be prepared at school, we allow ourselves to be trained; but once we have progressed beyond this training, after fourteen or fifteen years, there is nothing more to prepare, we must understand everything. Well, that is the normal view today.

Why should that not lead to people seeing that the Goetheanum is a place where not children are involved in preparation, but old, balding guys who still want to be prepared? Yes, a school that is not attended by children but only by old people must be a madhouse! — You see, that is what they say because they cannot imagine that people still want to learn something. And that is what we must realize: in order to read something like the Gospels, one must first be properly prepared for it, because it is meant to be pictorial. Just as if someone today wanted to read a Chinese document, he would first have to learn the letters. If you wanted to take the Gospels as they are written, it would of course be nonsense, just as Chinese writing is a scribble if you do not look at it properly. But if you understand things correctly, you realize that everything in Christianity is about learning to balance the Ahrimanic with the Luciferic in the right way, so that one does not dominate the other.

And that is why anthroposophy does not hesitate to speak of Christianity in this sense. It emphasizes that Christianity is not just about constantly mentioning the name of Christ and so on. That is what people criticize about anthroposophy: that it speaks so little of Christ. Well, I always say: Yes, you see, anthroposophy does not talk much about Christ because it knows the Ten Commandments. And you talk so much about Christ because you don't even know the commandment: You shall not speak the name of the Lord your God in vain.

If a Christian pastor preaches today, the name of Christ is uttered continually. One should only speak it when one really understands what it means! That is it, isn't it, that distinguishes anthroposophy from it, which really wants to be Christian in the right sense, but without superstition, without being sanctimonious, just really scientific, in this sense really only wants to be scientific. And in this way it also regards what took place between the old time, which was Luciferic, and the new time, which is Ahrimanic, it regards this event in Palestine as the decisive one for world history.

And when people will once again understand what actually happened on Earth, then I would venture to say that they will truly come to themselves. People are now beside themselves with their entirely external science. We will continue to talk about this next Wednesday at nine o'clock. That is what I wanted to say in response to the question. I believe that one can understand the whole thing.

Gentlemen, at our last session I started to answer your question about the inner organs of man. Of course, this subject must be seen from a broad perspective and treated from its foundations. We saw how William Windom, who died while delivering a speech, expressed his own inner condition by reading it off, as it were, from his body. After citing another case, we found in examining certain facts about the course of human life that the mortality rate is highest in man's infancy, that human beings die most frequently in their early years. In the period from birth up to the change of teeth at age seven, the mortality rate is at its peak, though it diminishes with the third, fourth and fifth years.

The human being is healthiest from the time of his change of teeth to puberty. This is indeed so, and if we ourselves are careful to prevent the causes of ill health, such as bad posture, which can lead to curvatures, and foul air, which can afflict the internal organs, we can count on children to be healthiest during their school years. The illnesses that do befall them then are for the most part due to external causes. Not until the teens does the danger again arise when man can fall ill from processes arising within his own constitution.

These illnesses, however, are quite different from those of early childhood.

I have mentioned that infants are highly susceptible to suppuration of the blood. It can become so purulent that symptoms of jaundice appear. In children, irregular digestion frequently results in diarrhoea. They also get thrush—those little white pustules in various places—and another, completely different kind of illness, so-called infantile convulsions. A childhood disease that is particularly prevalent these days is infantile paralysis, which can also affect adults. It is extremely damaging; the children cannot move their legs and become quite paralyzed. This disease is increasing rapidly. Perhaps you have read that schools have had to be closed in the province of Thüringen because of an epidemic there.

Thus, we can see that childhood illnesses have a distinctive character; they are quite different from the diseases man gets in later life. Scarlet fever and measles are specifically childhood illnesses, though adults, too, can contract the latter. But we must now ask ourselves why children are particularly susceptible to all these illnesses.

We can explain this susceptibility only if we know how forces work in the human body. When we examine the human embryo in the first, second or third months of pregnancy, we see that it is utterly different form what the human being later becomes. In the first and second months the child is all head; the other organs are only appendages to the head. What later turn into limbs, hands and feet are little stumps, and the actual lung and abdominal region are not yet functioning.

You see, if you take the human embryo (a sketch is drawn here) it looks like this. It is enclosed in a kind of sack, to which are attached blood vessels from the body of the mother. These blood vessels penetrate throughout the embryo, which the mother supplies with blood and nourishment. The other matter is supplementary and is later discarded. In comparison to the rest of the body the embryo's head is huge. See (pointing to the drawing), this is the head; the rest consists of appendages not yet functioning. This part will later become the heart and digestive system. The blood circulation is provided from outside, from the mother. These little stumps will develop into hands and feet. So we can say that the embryo is all head. Its other organs are insignificant because the mother's system provides all the nourishment and air. Hence, during the first few months, the embryo consists primarily of a head.

People are surprised that mental illnesses are hereditary. In fact, mental illnesses are always based on physical ailments; they arise from a malfunctioning of the body. Neither the spirit nor the soul can fall ill. Though mental illnesses are always rooted in physical problems, people wonder how they can occur through heredity, which indeed they can do. If a parent, particularly the mother, suffers from tuberculosis or another disease like arteriosclerosis, which admittedly occurs rarely in younger persons, the children do not necessarily become afflicted with these illnesses but instead can suffer from mental deficiencies. People are surprised about this, but need it puzzle us, gentlemen? Whatever the child can inherit must be inherited first of all from its head. Therefore, if the mother is consumptive, one need not be surprised that her condition is not passed on to the lungs of the unborn child, which, after all, are not even functioning yet. The condition is rather carried over into the head and comes to expression in the brain. Thus, nobody should be surprised that the disease inherited is quite different from that of the parent. Venereal disease, for example, can appear in children as an eye disease. It is no wonder, for when the child's head is developing, its eyes are exposed to what afflicts the parents; its eyes are in an environment that's venereally diseased! So it is not at all surprising.

When the child is born, everyone knows that the most completely formed part of it is its head. In the succeeding years it is the rest of the body that grows the most; the head has much less growing to do than the other organs. This fact tells us how, in reality, the inner organs of man function. Materialistic science cannot form an accurate conception of this because it fails to realize that all growth proceeds from the head. In the child everything is regulated from the head. We can see this most clearly in the embryo, which is nothing more than a head. But even after birth all inner processes are regulated from this part of the body. The digestion, the blood circulation and all other activities in human organization are directed by the head.

Suppose that a child is born whose blood circulation is too slow. For some reason, through some hereditary factor, it can happen that the child's blood circulation is too slow. Let us imagine this case. (See drawing.) Here is the child's heart, and here, its arteries; through both the blood is travelling too slowly. The heart is being formed from the head, but even when the head functions perfectly, the circulation can still be too slow. Thus, even though the heart is properly developed, the blood doesn't flow into it correctly. This is often the case in earliest infancy. The head is perfectly developed, but the blood flows too slowly into the heart. Poor circulation may result simply from keeping the child in stifling air. It cannot breathe properly, and its circulation slows down. The blood circulation may slacken also if the baby is not properly nourished. Then its blood cannot thoroughly penetrate the body. The head may be in excellent shape and try to form the heart aright, but the blood circulation remains sluggish. What happens in such instances is that, because the blood is not circulating well enough, certain substances that normally would be pushed down from the heart into the kidneys and expelled remain in the body; they stay in the blood. When these substances that should have been discharged stay in the system, the blood suppurates.

In the seventh, eighth or ninth years, this danger is not so acute as it is in the earliest years of childhood. You see, the fact that a child has its second set of teeth shows that its body is sufficiently strong; if it were not, the teeth would not come in properly. Why? Well, you must understand that what is contained in a tooth comes out of the whole body. The second teeth emerge from within the whole system; they are the product not just of something in the jaw but of the whole body. This is true only of the second teeth, however, for the first teeth, the so-called milk teeth, are completely different. They are the result of heredity, of the fact that the child's mother and father have teeth. Only after the milk teeth are expelled in the course of the first seven years does the child get its own teeth. The body must make the second teeth for itself.

Actually, a child nine or ten years old already has its second body. It has already completely discarded the one it had inherited, and comes into possession of its own body only around the age of seven. During these first seven years it demonstrates that it was born with enough resistance to tolerate air and nourishment. After it has built up its body and produced its second teeth, the danger of falling ill is no longer so acute. The danger is most acute in earliest infancy while it is learning to cope for itself in breathing, eating, that is, everything that once was done for it within the protection of the mother's womb. In these early years the head is actually in good shape; only with age does it become less perfect. In old age the head doesn't work as well as it did in infancy. It must think and occupy itself with the surroundings and so something often goes amiss. But the infant does not yet need to learn anything, go to school or possess skills. The head works only on the child's own body, and in most cases it does this quite well. During these tender years, however, when the human being is just becoming used to the world, the rest of the body is quite vulnerable. Modern science also has described these matters but not quite as I have, for what I tell you is exact. Popular science does not really comprehend the whole process and cannot explain why the human being is most vulnerable in its earliest years. It cannot come to terms with this fact because it explains away the soul and spirit.

In reality, soul-spiritual elements are united with the child, mainly with the head, while it is still in the mother's womb and after birth. The forces that work on the child from within the head are invisible soul-spiritual forces. Should any of you think that this is merely an arbitrary opinion, you would be committing the same error as one of the following men. Suppose one man says, “Here is a piece of iron,” and the other says, “Fine! I'll shoe my horse with it.” The first man then says, “No, it would be stupid to shoe your horse with this. It's a magnet, and it has a hidden force. Magnets are used for quite other things than for shoeing horses!” The one man thinks the piece of iron should be used for a horseshoe, while the other knows that it is a magnet containing an invisible force. Well, the person who says, in accordance with materialistic science, “The head is nothing but a bit of bones and brains,” is just like the fellow who says of the magnet, “This is a horseshoe.” Indeed, it is not a horseshoe, nor is the head of the infant just flesh and bone. Within it invisible forces are working like a sculptor to build up the whole organism. The human form is among those things the child keeps as an inheritance, but the forces that, during the first seven years, tirelessly build up this form from the head are brought into the world not from the parents but from quite another source.

Suppose a man received these forces from his parents. Well, gentlemen, if a parent is a genius, does that make the child a genius as well? Or if a child is a genius, does that mean the parents were also highly gifted? Not at all! Goethe, for example, was certainly a genius, but his father was a dreadful philistine, and his mother was a kind and pleasant woman who could tell a good story but surely was no genius. Goethe's son was rather stupid; he was no genius either. Whatever pertains to the soul and spirit is not hereditary; it is brought into this world from quite other realms and then is united with the part that is inherited. Aside from the time he spends in his mother's womb, man lives before birth as a being of soul and spirit.

The only reason people disavow this today is that all through the Middle Ages the Catholic Church forbade anyone to ascribe to man a life of soul and spirit before birth. It assumed that the soul was created at birth by a God whose nature was also assumed. So throughout the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church forbade the concept of pre-existence, as it was called, meaning “existence before, prior to birth.” Modern materialistic science has merely followed suit and then congratulated itself on its cleverness. Now people think they are extraordinarily clever to hold this opinion; unfortunately, they fail to realize how they were conditioned to do so.

In truth, man not only inherits a physical existence from his parents and forebears but also brings into the world a soul-spiritual element that works within him. If one does not acknowledge that the soul-spiritual aspect is present before birth, one cannot see that the same soul and spirit remain after death; at most, one can believe it. Knowledge of the immortality of the soul is dependent on knowledge of its existence before birth. If one maintains that the soul came into being with the creation of the body, then, of course, a divine creator would have the privilege of letting the soul disappear upon the body's dissolution. If, however, it is the soul that builds up the body in the first place, then it certainly remains unaffected when the body dies.

Thus, the existence of the human soul follows readily from all the aspects that one can correctly observe. Indeed, how could the soul die, since it is the soul itself that builds up the physical body! One would have to investigate far different regions to discover whether or not the soul can perish. In future lectures we shall consider this question and find that it cannot die in these realms either. It obviously cannot die with the body because it is the soul that built it up.

We have now become acquainted with illnesses that originate because the soul-spiritual element works out of the head, and the body is malfunctioning. But the blood circulation can also be too slow. Stagnation sets in and the blood then suppurates. Still, something entirely different can happen, too. The infant may be too weak to absorb nourishment through its intestines into its blood. Because the body is too weak, nourishment does not pass through the villi and the child becomes afflicted with diarrhoea. What should have been absorbed to remain longer in the body is expelled. Because the food was not properly digested, diarrhoea results, and the substance is discharged unchanged. This is connected with something else. Obviously, a child can get diarrhoea in different degrees, and it may even get summer cholera. Whatever the degree, however, it is only the first stage. If the child cannot digest its food for a considerable length of time, its inner organs cannot be built up properly. The head constantly wants to work on them, but the inner organs cannot be correctly constructed because the necessary substances are lacking. Say you were working on a statue and ran out of clay but continued to make empty-handed motions in the air. In a like manner the head starts to move and fidget around when the child lacks the substance from which its organs can be built. It wants to form the heart or stomach but can only aimlessly fidget about because the substances the head should have received have been eliminated causing diarrhoea.

The educated but materialistic scientist faces a complete puzzle here. He examines the child, discovers diarrhoea and prescribes some medication to stop it. As a result, food will merely accumulate in the intestines because they cannot be absorbed, and the child will get nothing more than a swollen stomach. If one were to examine the organism further, one would discover that the heart is malformed, that it is an empty pouch, or that the lungs are empty sacks. They want to be formed but lack the necessary substances. The forces originating from the head that penetrate into the lungs, which may now be empty sacks, need something to grasp and work with. I can grasp this chair and shake it or, without having taken hold of it, I can merely fidget about like an idiot. But what happens when the head forces fidget about in the lungs? Convulsions occur. A rational explanation of convulsions must acknowledge that the head is fidgeting around and finds no support. Diarrhoea may be explained materialistically but convulsions can no longer be accounted for along these lines.

All this demonstrates that in the infant the soul-spiritual processes are at their height of activity. Later, this activity subsides. Up to the child's sixth or seventh years, however, these spiritual forces are so active that they can separate minute amounts of matter from food that will constitute the second teeth. Imagine having to do that yourself! You would have to be clever enough to distinguish the magnesium salts and carbonates contained in the food. Even if you could do that you would first have to analyse the teeth chemically and learn from them themselves. The teeth made artificially today are not living teeth; no one really knows how teeth are produced. Yet minute portions of the nourishment the child receives up to its seventh year are withdrawn to make the second teeth. Furthermore, to correctly separate the various substances you would need to know not only the chemical composition of food and teeth but also the activity in the stomach. What happens to the minute particles secreted in the second or third years? How do you retain them long enough in the blood stream so that, at just the right time, during the sixth and seventh years, they will penetrate the jaws to build up the teeth? All this that must be accomplished is done unconsciously by the child's soul and spirit. No one here would feel insulted if I said that you cannot produce or make one hair grow on your head. But a child can. It drives the proper substances to the spot where the hair takes root and then offers them to the light, for hair grows under the influence of light. All this occurs in the child, but modern science is unwilling to consider these aspects. It leaves people in the dark by refusing to acknowledge that soul-spiritual forces work within the organism that originate, not from the parents, but from the spiritual world.

Let us return to this matter of hair. Man normally grows hair only on certain parts of his body, but once, ages ago, he was covered completely with a shaggy growth of hair. Why did he lose it? I will not give you a theory, which anyone can dream up, but merely point out some facts. Consider another creature, the pig. When pigs are free in nature, they are covered with hair, but domesticated pigs lose it. In their natural habitat wild boars grow thick coats of fur; when they are domesticated and in surroundings not originally their own, they lose it. Man, like the domesticated animals, did not originally live under today's conditions. But there was a time when, under the influence of light and warmth, he grew hair all over his body, and we may witness this fact today in an embryo a few months old. During the first months of pregnancy the whole embryo, insofar as it is only a head, is covered with hair. Later, the hair disappears. I have already explained how plants in their first stage of growth utilize light and warmth from the previous year. Likewise, the child has hair on account of the light and warmth emanating from the mother. Only later is it lost. So a consideration of hair, too, can show us how forces of soul and spirit work on the body.

I have said that the human being is most healthy during the school years, between the ages of seven and fourteen. Why is this so? Only those children who can develop those strong forces that produce the second teeth survive. During that period, the child unfolds vigorous forces, but they must first be acquired in the earliest years through radical adaptation. Everything that the head accomplishes within the organism is most pronounced during those early years. Though the child is unaware of its activity, the head must really exert itself and be a great artisan. It has to overcome the body's constant resistance all by itself because it gets no support in its continual and taxing efforts during the first seven years. This tremendous strain causes all those illnesses I have told you about.

Let us now suppose that the circulation of the blood is malfunctioning, not on account of its absorbing too little nourishment, but because it absorbs too much. This can also happen. Indeed, the parents, who often think it is best to stuff the baby with food, may not be as wise as the organism. They can hardly be reproached for this practice, though, because it is usually quite difficult to tell when the child has had enough. Children know their limits, as a rule, through their own inherent wisdom and instinct. If the mother produces too much milk, however, and it is fed to the child, its instinct will become uncertain through eating too much. Now, if too much food is absorbed by the system, the head cannot keep up; it cannot handle too large an amount and will try to eliminate the surplus. The food has already been absorbed into the blood through the intestines, however, so the head cannot eliminate the surplus in the normal way. What does it do then? It discharges the superfluous substances through the skin. Measles and scarlet fever are the result.

These illnesses differ completely from diarrhoea and convulsions. A child gets the latter because it does not receive enough food and its forces fidget around aimlessly within the body. When too much food is absorbed, however, it must somehow be eliminated, occasionally even through the lungs. Diphtheria and pneumonia are the body's defence measures used to rid itself of substances it cannot otherwise eliminate through the skin. When one understands the human being and the processes that occur in the body, one finds it quite natural that an infant is susceptible to these illnesses.

A child can be afflicted with yet other diseases. Take the case of a child who is too weak to produce his second teeth. His milk teeth were inherited and required no effort from his system. Now, it can happen that the forces unable to produce the new teeth are diverted into the lungs. The lungs become inflamed and the child gets pneumonia. You see, the human body is extremely complicated, and when a child falls ill with pneumonia the doctor should examine the condition not only of the lungs but also of the kidneys, stomach, etc. When an illness arises, one must always examine the whole body and not just the part immediately affected.

When a child has reached the age of seven, however, its breathing processes have become sufficiently developed to function without the intervention of the head. In the infant the head must constantly regulate the breathing. It must not only build up the teeth but also care for the organs of breathing. When the head has been relieved of these tasks at age seven or eight, the child is now in a position to breathe properly. It is of utmost importance to realize that with the second teeth the child can bring order into its breathing, and can receive its second lungs and bronchi, as it were, which have by now been built up. The child no longer breathes with a weak inherited organism but with the new one that has been built up. Now it is in quite a different situation; now it has support. It is one thing if the child has inherited from, say, a weak mother and father, a breathing apparatus that must be directed from a head that is too weak, and it is quite another thing if it has properly built up a second apparatus suited to its needs. A head that is too weak simply cannot build up the lungs properly. Thus, because from age seven to fourteen the organs of breathing are in such fine shape, the individual is then at his healthiest. The positive aspect of these years is that the breathing process is at its best. With the onset of puberty, however, some of the nourishment is now diverted to this development. In the younger child substances are not yet absorbed through the later processes of puberty, but now digestion must take a completely new form. The reason is easily understood, for something completely new has come into play and its food is diverted in a new direction. From the age of puberty onward the mature organs of breathing cause the digestive organs to readjust so that the right counter-pressure is exerted from the stomach and intestines, since some of what earlier constituted the overall pressure was diverted. Now, the proper counter-pressure must come about. No wonder that anaemia and other illnesses afflict girls of this age since the organism must take time to adjust.

From age seven to fourteen the child enjoys its greatest protection from illness. In earlier years the head must make a tremendous effort to work into the rest of the organism and it must adjust to this task. Then, during the school years, the child is at its healthiest. The second breathing system is unhindered and can freely distribute the oxygen to the benefit of both the brain and the digestion. As I have mentioned before, things can be upset only through outside causes—activities in school and the like.

But now the child reaches puberty. Look at a boy. Up to this point he has perfected his body and is as healthy as a human being can be. He has successfully renewed his organism and everything has gone smoothly. But with the onset of puberty his metabolism begins to affect his whole body. The processes of digestion begin to work upward into his breathing system and, as a result, his voice changes. At the age when he must again reform his organism, the metabolic system becomes influential. This is expressed in a deepening of the voice. He must make new exertions and again illnesses threaten.

You see, only when we observe the human being in this manner are we able to answer the question one of you gentlemen posed last time. Otherwise, we cannot even think about it, let alone learn anything. But knowing now that it is the head that works the most during the first seven years, what conclusion may we reach? You must understand that, while the head is developed in the mother's organism, it is not merely formed by conception and substance but by the whole universe. The mother's substances represent only the foundation on which the form occurs. The head is a representation, an image of the universe. Its roundness indicates the working of the whole universe, and it is no idle fancy that the starry heavens work upon the skull, which is sometimes covered by a stupid looking hat. It is as true as this fact that I've mentioned to you before. Suppose we have a compass; the magnetic needle always points north, not just anywhere. Now, no one thinks that the needle contains the forces that determine its position. Everyone agrees that it is the magnetic forces of the earth, and that the needle takes its direction from these earthly forces. Everyone comprehends that. Yet, in regard to human embryonic development, men falsely think it all arises from conception. It would be just as clever to think that the direction pointed to by the magnetic needle was determined by its own forces.

The human head represents the whole cosmos, and this it is that has worked upon it. In addition, these forces bestowed by the universe continue to work within the child through its head. To build up the lungs, for example, the head must receive the right forces from the universe. To perfect the kidneys, forces must be received from far-off regions, from Jupiter, for instance. This is no idle fancy. It can be investigated just as other, physical matters can be investigated. Thus, when a child is born, it carries within its head all the forces of the universe.

Of course, it is nonsense to say that the moon, sun or Jupiter have an influence on an organ, or to cast a horoscope thinking the planet Jupiter, for example, is dominant. The head is formed from the whole universe, and the forces that work on the human being during the first seven years have been given to the head from the cosmos. During the next seven years, man becomes increasingly accustomed to the earth's atmosphere, so that whereas before he was influenced by the stars, he is now influenced by the air.

After this period the substances of digestion and the metabolic system play such an important part that they can even affect the voice. What does this mean? It is all a result of what we absorb through digestion from the earth. I have already explained to you this process of how, for example, substances from the earth must first be made lifeless within the intestines. This becomes man's main task when he reaches puberty. At that time he becomes dependent on the earth. As males we owe our voices first of all to the air, but the deepening results from the action of earthly substances. We can be born on earth because originally we were beings of the stars. After birth we let the forces we have brought with us from the starry worlds echo within our organisms. Then we become beings of the air. Only at puberty are we assigned to the earth to become its beings. Only then do we become attached to those things that fetter us to this planet. Thus, you see the course of man's descent to the earth from the cosmos.

Often materialists blindly fantasize about human development. They do not realize that man gradually accustoms himself to the earth and then, in old age, grows away from it. For what happens in old age? The forces we possess in advanced age we also possessed in youth. They hardened the bones while the other parts stayed pliable. But in old age the forces contained in the bones pass into the rest of the body, and the initial result is arteriosclerosis. The arteries harden, and the brain can calcify. Actually, the brain must always contain a minute amount of what arises through calcification. The child would be dull if its brain lacked these minute traces of calcium secreted by the pineal gland. The soul could not act; it would not have the substances in which to work. But if later in old age too much calcium is secreted and calcification occurs, the soul again cannot direct matters because it encounters too much resistance. This can result in paralysis or apoplexy or some other kinds of stroke. One can also become senile, since one can no longer take hold of and use the brain. Calcification in other parts of the body has the same effect, lifting one out of the region of the earthly forces. Thus we can see how man, up to the end of puberty, grows into the forces of the earth and how, later, when the secreted deposits become increasingly resistant and the soul's activity is impeded, he grows away from the earth.

So you see that it is, in fact, possible to discover what man has received and brought down from the universe. But one must not fall for superstitions such as a certain star is influencing the lung of a thirty-five year old man even though the lung has indeed been built up by the forces that initially descended from the stars into the head of the infant.

By examining such things scientifically, one arrives at a real science of the spirit. A spiritual science exists, and it can be studied just like any other science. We can belittle ancient times as much as we like, but in those days people did know something. Granted, we cannot bring back the past; what was right for people then is not so for us today. But if once again we have men who understand the world and man, men who know that the human head is not just produced in the mother's womb as a kind of pinhead, then we shall also have better politicians. You see, gentlemen, a person who knows nothing of these matters and of the nature of the human being cannot be a good politician simply because he will not know what people need. It is absolutely essential that once more there be men who really know something about the world. This is what we must strive for.

Schools must again teach people something of value. Today, much importance is placed on learning the skills required for making machines. Nothing can be said against this from the standpoint of spiritual science because it is quite worthwhile. But the skills needed to cope among human beings are neglected. An abstract social science, ignorant of man's needs, was invented and this is taught instead. Above all, one must study man as we have done here, but unhappily what I told you is not taught. Look back on your own school days! Where is something like this taught today? That is what our age lacks. Teaching men the things they learn today is about as good for them as feeding them rocks instead of bread. Maybe the stomach of a goose can take rocks but that of a human being cannot! To do so would ruin the digestive system, and when you teach men what is being taught today, you actually ruin their heads. You know that the arm becomes weak if it is unused, and the head also becomes weak if it is not used in the right way. While the head was developing in the mother, it received forces from the stars. If it is told nothing about them, if it entertains no thoughts of them, it grows weak, just as muscles do when they are not exercised. If the child learns nothing of the real world, it remains weak. The worst thing about conditions today is that people have weak heads and do not understand anything about one another. They separate themselves according to social standing and do not speak to those of other classes. This is like training a man to become an athlete while neglecting his biceps. If, in educating men, I leave their heads weak, they will not know the very thing that matters most. This is how things stand.

When children have finished building up their organisms with inherent, unconscious wisdom and have received their second teeth, it is of utmost importance to impart to them something that they have previously employed unconsciously. Then do they become proper human beings, people who can direct their thoughts properly and conceive of spiritual science in the right way. Once social thinking is ruined, nothing rational can be achieved. But if we make use of a genuine science of the spirit, much can be improved in that respect.