| 279. Eurythmy as Visible Speech: The Character of the Individual Sounds
25 Jun 1924, Dornach Tr. Vera Compton-Burnett, Judith Compton-Burnett Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
| The fact that there is a similarity between the words ‘mother-milk’ and ‘mother-tongue’ may well be looked upon as a riddle of this kind. It is clear that one would not say ‘father-milk’, but the reason for not saying ‘father-tongue’ is less apparent. Where are we to seek for this parallel between ‘mother-milk’ and ‘mother-tongue’? |
| In the ancient Mysteries there was still a living understanding of the words: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God’; there was still a living feeling for the creative power of the Word, of the Logos. (Logos is not to be translated ‘wisdom’; indeed, by doing so many modern scholars have betrayed their lack of understanding for these things. |
| Now, in the old Mysteries of Western Asia, Southern Asia and Africa it was said, when speaking about the sound f: When man utters the sound f he expels out of himself the whole stream of his breath. It was by means of the breath that the Gods created humanity, and the whole of human wisdom is contained m the air, in the breath. So that all the Indian was able to learn when through Yoga Philosophy he learned to control his breathing and as a result was able to fill himself with inner wisdom,—all this he felt when he uttered the sound f. |
| 279. Eurythmy as Visible Speech: The Character of the Individual Sounds
25 Jun 1924, Dornach Tr. Vera Compton-Burnett, Judith Compton-Burnett Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
Yesterday I attempted to portray the general character of speech as such and the character of this visible speech of eurhythmy in particular. To-day I should like to describe the characteristics of the individual sounds, for only when the character and inner nature of these sounds reveal themselves to us shall we be able to understand the elements of eurhythmy. To begin with I should like to draw attention to the fact that in the life of humanity, in the course of human evolution, there has always been a more or less definite consciousness of these things. It is only in our time that, as I said yesterday, we have become so shrivelled up with regard to our attitude towards speech. There has always existed a certain consciousness of all that lies in the progression of sounds as they occur in language, an understanding of the fact that in the consonants there lies an imitation of outer forms and that an inward experience is contained in the vowel sounds. This consciousness has been carried over more or less into the forms of the letters, so that in the formation of the letters in ancient languages,—in the Hebrew language, for example, particularly in the case of the consonants,—we may still see a sort of imitation of what takes place in the air, of what forms itself in the air when we speak. To a great extent this has been lost in all the more modern languages. (Among these I naturally include all those which, let us say, begin with the Latin language; the Greek language still retains something of what I mean.) Many things, however, still recall the time when an attempt was made to imitate in the forming of the letters that which actually lies in the formation, in the structure of the word; when a word was fashioned out of the consonantal element,—that is to say, the imitation of the external,—and out of the inner experience which had its source in the life of the soul. To-day it is only in certain interjections that we can still see dearly an instance of such imitation. Let us take an example which may serve to lead us more deeply into the real nature of eurhythmy. When we pronounce the sound h,—clearly, not merely as a breath,—we have a sound which really lies midway between the consonants and the vowels. This is always the case with sounds which have a special relation to breathing. Breathing was always felt to be something in which the human being lives partly in an inner experience and partly in an out-going experience. Now the h-sound, this simple breath sound, may be felt,—and was indeed felt by primitive man,—as the imitation, the forming in the air of a wafting process, as the imitation of the way in which the breath is wafted into the surrounding atmosphere. Everything which is experienced as a wafting process is expressed through some word in which the h-sound is present, because the h itself is felt as the wafting process. The vowel sound u can be felt as something which inwardly chills the soul, so that it takes on a certain rigidity and numbness. That is the inward experience lying behind u. U is the expression of something which chills, stiffens, benumbs; it is the sound which gives one the feeling of coldness. U, then, is the chilling, stiffening process. And the sch,—that is the blowing away of something. It is the sound in which one feels that something is blowing past. Now it is a fact that in certain districts, when an icy wind is blowing and one is numbed and stiff with the cold, people make use of the expression: husch-husch, husch-husch. In this interjection we still have an absolute experience of the h-u-sch: husch-husch. In primeval language all words were really interjections, ejaculations. Let us take another combination of sounds. You all know the sound r. If one experiences the r-sound in the right way, one feels it as a turning wheel: r-r-r-r. Thus the r expresses a rolling, a revolving; it is the imitation of anything which gives the impression of turning, rolling, revolving. We must think of it, picture it, like this:  Yesterday I spoke already of the sound a. I told you that a expresses wonder. The sch-sound has already been described; it is the blowing past of something. And now we are able to feel the word ‘rasch’ (swift). It is easy to picture it. When anything rushes past it creates a certain wonder and disappears, is blown away: rasch. So you see there is good reason for regarding the consonants as being an imitation. Here we have in the r the revolving, rolling, turning of something; in the vowel sound a the inner feeling of wonder: in the sch-sound something which goes away, which passes by.  From these examples you can already see that there is a certain justification for speaking of a primeval language, for you can feel that if human beings really experienced the sounds absolutely truly they would all speak in the same way; they would quite naturally, out of their own organization, describe things exactly in the same way. It is a fact, as Spiritual Science teaches us, that there was once upon the earth a primeval language. You all know myths and legends dealing with this, - but it is much more than a myth or a legend. There is really something which lies at the back of all languages, and which is, in the way I have described, the primeval language from which all other languages have been built up. When one turns one’s attention to certain facts of life and sees how, out of an infinite wisdom, they have been given similar names, then one is quite overwhelmed with the wisdom which reigns in the whole evolution of man, indeed in the whole evolution of the world. Consider the following, my dear friends,—and what I am now going to bring forward is no mere triviality, but it proceeds from out of a true and fundamental perception of the nature of man. For people who think deeply over the problems which present themselves to the understanding, certain things that bear somewhat intimate relationship to life itself become riddles,—riddles which are simply passed over by the more blunted sensibilities of the average man. The fact that there is a similarity between the words ‘mother-milk’ and ‘mother-tongue’ may well be looked upon as a riddle of this kind. It is clear that one would not say ‘father-milk’, but the reason for not saying ‘father-tongue’ is less apparent. Where are we to seek for this parallel between ‘mother-milk’ and ‘mother-tongue’? There are always inner reasons for such things. It is true that the external reason may frequently prove deceptive, but for these intimate facts of human evolution inner reasons are always to be discovered. When the child comes into the world the mother’s milk is the best nourishment for the physical body. Such things do not properly belong to lectures on eurhythmy, but if we had the necessary time, and if we were to analyse the mother’s milk in the right way,—not with the dead methods of chemistry but with a living chemistry,—we should find out why it is that the mother’s milk is the best nourishment for the physical body of man during the first stages of life.—Indeed, speaking from the medical-scientific point of view, one may go so far as to say that the milk of the mother is the best means of building up, of actually giving form to the physical body. This is the first thing we have to realize. It is the mother’s milk which gives form to the physical body. And it is the ‘mother-tongue’,—we said yesterday that the mother-tongue corresponds to the etheric body,—it is the mother-tongue which develops and gives form to the etheric body. For this reason we have a similarity between the words. First there appears the physical body with its need for the mother’s milk and then the etheric body with its need for the mother-tongue. A deep wisdom lies hidden in such things. We find the deepest wisdom, not only in these word formations which can be traced back to ancient times, but also in many proverbial sayings and ideas. We should not look upon the wisdom concealed in old sayings and proverbs merely as superstition, but should recognize that very often wonderful and significant traditions are contained within them. Having said this, having made my meaning clear to you, let us now proceed to a description of the nature of the sounds. When we understand what the sounds represent, how the vowels are the expression of inward experiences and the consonants the imitation of the external world,—when we understand how this is the case in every, single instance,—then we are led to a threefold study of eurhythmy,—artistic, educational and curative. I shall make use of everything which could possibly serve to give you a vivid picture of the individual sounds as they really are, so that tomorrow you will be able fully to understand the plastic gestures which we make use of in eurhythmy. In a there lies a feeling of wonder, astonishment. In b, as I told you yesterday, we have the imitation of something which protects and shelters us from what is outside ourselves. In b we feel that we are enveloped in something. This can even be seen in the way that the letter is formed, only in modern writing the sheath is, as it were, doubled: B. B is always an enveloping, a kind of shelter. To put it somewhat crudely b might be said to be the house in which one lives. B is a house. In my characterization of the various sounds in speech-eurhythmy I shall take the German language as my starting point. I could just as easily take the sounds of more ancient languages, but we will make a beginning with the German sounds and see how these reveal themselves to us in their true nature.[1] Coming now to the sound c (ts),—I shall naturally not go into the formation of the written letters as these have mostly become degenerate and in any case, eurhythmists do not need to interest themselves so much in language from this point of view,—coming now to the sound c you will feel it to be some-thing which is in movement. It would be impossible to feel that with the sound c one would try to imitate anything which is in a state of rest. There is a certain force in the sound c; nevertheless, when you really experience what lies behind it, you will realize how impossible it would be to picture anything heavy in connection with it. It would never occur to you that with c you would wish to imitate something which would make you get into a great heat if you tried to lift it. On the contrary, the feeling that one has is that here is the imitation of something which is the reverse of heavy, which is really very light. It is the quality of lightness that is really imitated in the sound c. Thus one can say quite simply: In c we have the imitation of lightness. If you enter into the intimate nature of the different sounds, you will, in the case of c, have much the same feeling as if in a circus you saw weights,—apparently made of iron and marked so and so many hundredweight,—lifted up quickly and easily by the clown. Imagine that you were to approach such a weight, in the belief that it were made of iron and immensely heavy, and that you were to lift it up. You would approach it, and in suddenly raising it, you would produce a movement very similar to the sound c. We have the same thing in Nature; for sneezing is not at all unlike a c. Sneezing is a lightening process. It was said by the old occultists that the sound c in primeval language was the Regent of Health. And in Austria, when a person sneezes, we still have a saying: Zur Gesundheit (Your very good health). These are feelings which must be taken into consideration when studying the sounds, otherwise we shall not be able to come to any understanding of them in their reality. D,—how should we most naturally express d? d. d. d. If someone were to ask you where a thing was, and you knew, the movement you would make to show him would very nearly approach the eurhythmic movement for the sound d. And if you wished to indicate that you expected your questioner to be astonished at getting such a speedy answer, then you would say: da (there). If you leave out the astonishment, the wonder, then there remains just the d. In such a case you are not so conceited us to wish to call up in your questioner the feeling of wonder; you simply show him where the thing is. In expressing d in eurhythmy one makes what may be called an indicating movement raying out in all directions. It is not difficult to feel this. So that we may say: D is the pointing towards something, the raying out towards something. The imitation of this pointing, of this raying out, of this drawing attention to something, all this lies in the sound d. E is a sound which has always been of very special interest. As you already know e is the sound which gives expression to the feeling that something has been done to us and that we have to stand up against it. E: me will not allow what has been done to trouble us. Here it may be well to introduce the sound t, Tao, and to explain its significance. You are perhaps already aware that a deep reverence rises up in those who begin to understand what lies in this sound. This Tao, t, is really the sound which has to be felt as representing something of the greatest importance. We may even go so fir as to say that it contains within it creative forces, forces which also have a radiating, indicating quality, but with t it is more especially a radiance which streams from heaven down on to the earth. There is a weightiness about the sound, and at the same time also a radiance. Thus we can say: T is the streaming of forces from above downwards. Now it is, of course, possible for something which under certain conditions has to be felt as having great and majestic qualities also to make its appearance in ordinary everyday life. Let us take three sounds. Let us first take e as we have learned to know it. E expresses the feeling: Something has been done to me, but I stand up against it and assert myself. T, Tao: Something has burst in upon me. Let us try to show what is contained in this experience: Something has been done to me but I stand up against it—e. An event has taken place; it has suddenly burst in upon me—t: but it is soon over, it passes over; the blowing away of something—st. In this way we get the following combination of sounds: etsch. When do we make use of this expression? We use it when, for instance, somebody makes an important statement, which is, however, false, and we immediately jump to the conclusion that it is false. Now when we are in a position immediately to get rid of what has affected us, when this statement or whatever it is has burst in upon us like a flash of lightning but we destroy it and blow it away, then we say: etsch. Here you have an explanation of this combination of sounds. One feels the e particularly strongly, the being affected by something. One could not imagine saying itsch or atsch in such a case. But in an experience of this kind, when one has been affected by something but has been able immediately to get rid of it, then one obviously must use the expression: etsch. Now out of the way in which you form the movement for e, out of your knowledge of eurhythmy, you will be able fully to enter into the gesture that in many districts accompanies this expression. This gesture is really very similar to the eurhythmic movement for e. Etsch, etsch (showing the corresponding movement). Here we actually have the eurhythmic movement for e. Such movements are absolutely natural and instinctive. Thus behind the sound e there lies the experience of being affected by something and of withstanding it. Naturally when one describes such things the description tends to be awkward and inadequate. Everything depends on being able to feel what is meant. F is a sound which is somewhat difficult to experience in an age which has such a lifeless, dried-up conception of language. But it may perhaps be of assistance to us, my dear friends, if I remind you of a phrase which you will know and which is in fairly general use. People say, when somebody knows a thing upside down and inside out: Er kennt die Sache aus dern ff. (He knows it out of the ff.) An extraordinarily interesting experience lies behind this phrase. When one finds the man in the street making use of such an expression and compares it: with what was said in the old Mysteries the result is truly remarkable. (You remember I said that I should make use of everything which could help us to gain a true understanding of the sounds, whether my examples were drawn from a cultured or from a more primitive source,—the latter being the more fruitful, naturally.) In the ancient Mysteries there was still a living understanding of the words: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God’; there was still a living feeling for the creative power of the Word, of the Logos. (Logos is not to be translated ‘wisdom’; indeed, by doing so many modern scholars have betrayed their lack of understanding for these things. Logos must unquestionably be translated ‘Verbum’, ‘Word’,—only the word ‘Word’ must be understood in the right way, in the way in which I explained it yesterday.) Now, in the old Mysteries of Western Asia, Southern Asia and Africa it was said, when speaking about the sound f: When man utters the sound f he expels out of himself the whole stream of his breath. It was by means of the breath that the Gods created humanity, and the whole of human wisdom is contained m the air, in the breath. So that all the Indian was able to learn when through Yoga Philosophy he learned to control his breathing and as a result was able to fill himself with inner wisdom,—all this he felt when he uttered the sound f. In the old Indian Yoga practices the pupil had the following experience: he practised Yoga exercises, the technique of which consisted in this, that he became inwardly aware of the organization of man, inwardly aware of the fullness of wisdom. In uttering the sound f he became conscious of the wisdom contained in the Word. F can therefore only be rightly understood when one tries even to-day to understand a certain formula, which is very little known in the world, but which nevertheless did once exist and in the old I? Egyptian Mysteries ran somewhat as follows: If thou wouldst proclaim the nature of Isis, of Isis who contains within herself the knowledge of the past, present and future and from whom the veil can never entirely be lifted, then thou must do this in the sound f.— The making use of the process of breathing in order to fill oneself with the being of Isis, the experiencing of Isis in the out-going breath-stream,—this it is that lies in the sound f. So that f—not indeed exactly, but at any rate to some extent—can be felt as the expression of: I know.—But more lies in it than this. ‘I know’ is really only a feeble expression of what we should feel in the sound f. For this very reason the feeling for f was soonest lost. F may be felt somewhat as follows: Know thou, to whom I speak, when I say f to thee I would make thee aware that I can teach thee. Thou must know that I myself have knowledge.— It would therefore seem natural to you, absolutely natural, if, someone desirous of putting another right were suddenly to approach him giving vent to a sound similar to f. There are many interesting words, words which would well repay study, in which the sound f occurs in some connection or other. This study, however, you can carry out for yourselves; and you will continually be reminded of all that I have told you about the inner nature of the sound f. I have already spoken about the sound h; we know that it is the blowing, the wafting past of something. And now i. It is easy to feel i as an assertion of oneself, as positive self-assertion. In the German language there is a very happy example of this. It is our word for the expression of the; affirmation or the assertion of something: Ja (yes). Here certainly there is the indication of a consonantal element, but the i is nevertheless present and is followed by wonder, by amazement. Assent, affirmation, cannot be better expressed than by an assertion coloured by wonder. We said yesterday that the quality of wonder really represented man in his true being; and when we add to this the assertion of oneself: Ja, then we could not have a dearer, more definite expression of the affirmative. Thus in i we have the assertion of self. We shall see how important it is for eurhythmists to understand that behind the sound i there is always a vindication of oneself, an assertion of oneself. L is a very remarkable sound,—as I am pronouncing it now it contains a hint of e,—but I mean the pure sound l. Try to realize what you really do when you pronounce l. Try to, realize especially what you do with your tongue. You use your tongue in a very skilful way when you pronounce the sound l, l, l, l. You become aware of a creative, form-giving element when saying this sound. Indeed, if one were not too, terribly hungry, one might almost satisfy one’s hunger by, simply saying the sound l very distinctly and over and over again. We feel l to be something absolutely real, as real, for, example, as if we were to eat a dumpling—a specially nice, soft dumpling—and were to allow it to melt on the tongue with a feeling of great satisfaction. We can have a like experience, when we pronounce the sound l, l, l, very distinctly. There is: something creative, something form-giving in this sound. And the sculptor is very much tempted when working on the figures which he is creating to make a movement of the tongue similar to the movement which the tongue makes when forming the sound l. Though of course the sculptor does not say l aloud; he only makes a similar movement with his tongue. And anyone able to feel the shape of a nose, for instance, with his tongue,—where the feeling for form, the feeling of l is so strong,—such a one would undoubtedly be very successful in modelling noses! It was said in the old Mysteries that l is the creative, form-giving element in all things and beings,—the force which overcomes matter in the creation of form. You will easily feel that the diphthong ei (German ri, English i (as in sight)) corresponds to an affectionate caress. When dealing with a child one often makes use of this sound. Ei, ei—an affectionate caress. I shall next have to describe the sound m, and we shall see that m has the quality of entering right into something, of taking on the form of something outside itself. Let us now suppose, my dear friends,—and here again I am not merely trifling but what I have to say is drawn from out of the history of the ages,—let us suppose that we had some sort of substance and determined that this substance should be the means of transforming matter, of giving form to matter. Let us put the story together. In the first place we demand of this substance that it shall transform matters and give it form and shape. That la to be its main attribute. It is to give form to matter, but in such a way that it clings closely and lovingly to something other than itself, in much the same way as when one caresses a little child: ei, ei,—this is the expression of a caressing quality. The substance must cling to something. And this clinging quality must be retained; the substance must as it were take on a form which is foreign to it, so that it appears exactly the same as this external form; it imitates this form quite exactly. And now let us suppose that we express this transformation of matter into form by means of a combination of sounds. We say l. The clinging quality, ei. The taking on of some external form: m. Thus we have a word: Leim (putty) which is quite specially characteristic of the German language, quite apart from any other consideration. It is upon such combinations of sound behind which there lies hidden the active, evolving genius of language, that the life of this genius of language really depends. It occurs from time to time that when in some language or other a word already exists, although perhaps in a vague, indefinite form, that this word is metamorphosed and introduced again into a language of a later development. The original feeling: underlying the word, however, remains unchanged, and is retained by the people speaking the later language. An understanding of language is a much more complicated matter than is usually supposed. To-day people treat language in a really terrible fashion. In ordinary everyday life which rests upon superficiality and convention such a treatment of language is perhaps not out of place; but its effect upon the human soul is nothing short of devastating, how utterly devastating it is impossible to say. For instance, somebody wishes to translate a book or a poem. So he proceeds to hunt in the dictionary or to search his memory in order to discover the corresponding words. And having more or less transposed it in this way he calls it a translation. But it would really be more correct to call it a mistranslation,—for this is a wrong track altogether. Nothing is more appalling than this method of transferring something from one language into another. Let us therefore study this question from the following point of view. Assuming that there was once a primeval language (alike of course for all men),—and there is no doubt that this language did exist,—assuming that there was once a primeval language, then the question naturally arises: How is it that the, many different languages came into being? How does it come about that if we take a German word, the word ‘Kopf’ (head) for instance, and translate this into Italian, we have to say ‘testa’? We have the German word ‘Kopf’ and the Italian word ‘testa’. When we begin to enter into the true nature of language we must ask ourselves the question: How is it that the Italian feels the sounds in ‘testa’ which are totally different from those felt by the German when he makes use of the word: ‘Kopf’? According to the rules of translation the two words should have the same significance. If the word ‘Kopf’ were really to be experienced, then the Italian, and even the Chinese would perforce have to say ‘Kopf’ also. How then can the origin of the different languages be explained? What I am now going to say may make you double up with laughter, but it is nevertheless true. The German makes use of the word ‘Kopf’; the Italian would also make use of this word if he wished to designate the same thing. But he does not wish to do so. The German point of view lies outside his field of vision. What the German expresses in the word ‘Kopf’, that to which he gives the name ‘Kopf’ does not occur in the vocabulary of the Italian language. Were the Italian desirous of expressing the same thing, he, like the German would say: ‘Kopf’. What then does the German mean when he says: ‘Kopf’? He means to describe the form, the rounded form of the head. It is easy to feel this rounded form in the word ‘Kopf’. Later on when we have studied the sound k and all that we need in this connection, we shall be able to realize more dearly that it is the rounded form which is meant here. Now when the word ‘Kopf’ is shown in eurhythmy try to see how this rounding appears in the middle of the word. (Demonstration). The German describes as ‘Kopf’ the round form of the head as it rests on the shoulders. Were the Italian to have the same experience, he also would say ‘Kopf’ not ‘testa’. What then does he experience? The Italian does not experience the rounded form, but he feels what is implied in a statement, in a testimony; he is more aware of what underlies the word ‘testament’. Thus the act of making a testimony, making a declaration, an affirmation, this it is which is felt by the Italian and for this reason he says: ‘testa’. He means something totally different from the German. The words ‘Kopf’ and ‘testa’ only appear to describe the same thing; in reality they are fundamentally different. In the one case, in the German word, the form of the head is described as it rests upon the shoulders. And in German, if one wishes to lay emphasis upon the roundness of the form one can make use of an expression which has in it at the same time a certain element of contempt and say: ‘Kohlkopf’. (Cabbage-head. Block-head.) You will agree with me that here there can be no shadow of doubt that the rounded form is meant. But the head as it rests upon the shoulders is not felt as a round form by the Italian; he feels it to be something which makes an assertion, a declaration. For this reason he says: ‘testa’, and feels in this word all that I have described. This lack of understanding is very general among translators. As a rule we translate without paying any attention to the fact that we should transpose ourselves into the whole atmosphere of the other language in order to catch its exact shades of meaning. Just think how external it is when one translates according to a dictionary. One misses just those things which are most essential and passes them by in sublime unconsciousness. Let us now return to the sound m,—that sound which makes such a wonderful ending to the sacred Indian word Aum. M contains within it the element of comprehension, of understanding. In the way in which the sound is carried on the stream of the breath we feel that it conforms itself to everything and understands everything. M signifies that which is deeply felt and understood. I remember that my village schoolmaster said mhn when he wanted to show that I had answered a question rightly. At such times he always said mhn,—i.e., he understood; it, he agreed with it; the hn was only the expression of his satisfaction. M, therefore, may be said to be the expression of, agreement. It clings to something and is in agreement with it, as the m at the end of the word Leim. It is clear from these few examples that in each sound there lies concealed a whole world of experience. And we can easily:, realize that if we were to express ourselves by means of sounds only, instead of using our ordinary words, we should indeed have a simpler and more primitive language, but it would be one which would combine with this simplicity a much deeper intimacy and understanding. As eurhythmists it is very necessary that you should gradually feel your way into the real nature of the sounds; for eurhythmy does indeed consist of a plastic formation of movement and gesture. Such movements are, however, in no way arbitrary nor transient. On the contrary the movements of eurhythmy are cosmic in their nature, they are full of significance, they, could in no way be other than they are. In the next lecture I shall describe to you the other sounds which I have not touched upon to-day, and then gradually we shall consider the main characteristics of the actual movements which we use in eurhythmy. We shall see how these movements express in their very essence exactly the same as is expressed by the sounds themselves as they are breathed into the air, as they take shape in the air.  |
| 122. Genesis (1959): The Harmony of the Bible with Clairvoyant Research
26 Aug 1910, Munich Tr. Dorothy Lenn, Owen Barfield Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
| The human body, which hitherto had consisted solely of warmth, was now endowed with something expressed as follows: And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul—or, let us say, a living being. |
| The Jahve-man is the descendant of the Elohim-man in precisely the same way as the son is the descendant of the father. The Bible tells us this in the fourth verse of the second chapter, which says “Those who are to follow are the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the heavenly man.” |
| But if you take a modern translation, you find the remarkable sentence: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Usually we find the whole hierarchy of the Elohim called “God,” and Jahve-Elohim called “the Lord God”—the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. |
| 122. Genesis (1959): The Harmony of the Bible with Clairvoyant Research
26 Aug 1910, Munich Tr. Dorothy Lenn, Owen Barfield Rudolf Steiner |
|---|
From all that has been said in the last few days, and especially from what was said yesterday, you will have gathered at about what time we have placed the Genesis story. In fact we have pointed out that the first momentous words of the Bible mark the moment when we should say in terms of Spiritual Science that the substance constituting the earth and sun, hitherto one body, makes ready to separate. Then follows the separation, and during its course what is described in the opening verses takes place. The biblical description of the creation then goes on to cover all that happens until far on into the Lemurian age, right up to the separation of the moon. What has been described by Spiritual Science as coming after the withdrawal of the moon, that is, at the end of Lemuria and in the beginning of Atlantis, took place after the “days” of creation. We pointed that out yesterday. We also pointed out the deep significance of the statement that man received in his body the imprint of the earth-moon-dust. This coincided with the cosmic event which we have called the advancement of the Elohim to become JahveElohim. We had to think of this advance as more or less coinciding with the beginning of the moon's activity from outside. Thus we must think of the process of the moon's separation, and its activity from without, as associated with that Being who represents the Elohim as one undivided entity, with Him whom we call Jahve-Elohim. The first phase of the action of the moon upon the earth coincides with the imprinting of the earth-moon material into the human body. The human body, which hitherto had consisted solely of warmth, was now endowed with something expressed as follows: And the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul—or, let us say, a living being. We must not fail once again to notice the aptness, the grandeur, the power of the biblical words! I have impressed upon you that the proper earthly incarnation of man depended upon his being able to wait in his spiritual nature in spiritual surroundings until suitable conditions were present in the earth itself; so that it was his late assumption of his bodily nature which enabled him to become a mature being. Had he come down into his body earlier, let us say, during the events of the fifth “day,” he could only have become a being resembling physically the beings of the air and of the water. How does Genesis describe the being of man? Wonderfully! The passage is a model of accurate and appropriate wording. We are told that the group-souls who descended into earthly matter on the fifth “day” became living creatures—became what we today call living creatures. Man did not descend at that time. The group-souls who still remained above in the great reservoir of the spirit did not descend until later. And even on the sixth “day” it was the animals nearest to man, the earth-animals proper, which came down first. Thus man was not able to descend into solid matter even during the first part of the sixth “day,” for if he had imprinted the earth-forces into himself at that time he would have become a creature physically resembling the animals. The group-souls of the higher animals descended first and populated the earth, as distinct from the air and the sea. Only after that, little by little, came about conditions favourable to the formation of the prototype of humanity. How was it achieved? It is conveyed to us in memorable words when we are told that the Elohim set about combining their activities in order to make man after the image I have described to you. This earth-man arose because the Elohim, each with his different capacity, worked together as a group to achieve a common purpose. Man began by being the common purpose of the Elohim as a group. We must try to get a closer idea of what man was like on the sixth “day.” He was not yet as he is today. The physical body which we find in man today only came later with the inbreathing by Jahve of the breath of life. The event which is described as the creation of man by the Elohim took place before the earth-dust had been imprinted into his bodily nature. What was he like—this man brought into existence by the Elohim, still in the Lemurian age? Remember what I have often said about the character and nature of the man of today. It is only as regards his higher members that their physical humanity is the same in all men. As regards their sex we must distinguish. The male has a feminine etheric body, and the female a masculine etheric body. How did it come about? This differentiation, this separation into male and female, came about relatively late, after the “days” of creation. There was no such differentiation in the human being who arose on the sixth “day” as the common purpose of the Elohim. At that time all human beings had a bodily nature in common. We can best describe it (so far as representation is possible at all) by saying that the physical body was more etheric and the etheric body somewhat denser than is the case today. A differentiation between physical and etheric, a densification on the side of the physical, only occurred later under the influence of Jahve-Elohim. You will appreciate that we cannot speak of the human creation of the Elohim as separately male and female in the sense of today; the Elohim-man was at the same time both male and female, undifferentiated. Thus man, in the sense expressed by the Elohim in the words Let us make man, was still undifferentiated, still male and female at the same time. Through this deed of the Elohim the bisexual man was created. That is the meaning of the words translated male and female created he them. The words do not refer to man and woman in the sense of today, but to the undifferentiated man, the male-female man. I am well aware that countless biblical commentators have objected to this interpretation and have sought to throw ridicule on what earlier distinguished commentators have maintained—which is nevertheless the truth. They take exception to the view that the Elohim-man was male-female, and that therefore the male-female is what was made in the image of the Elohim. I should like to ask such commentators on what they base their view. It cannot be upon clairvoyant investigation, for that will never give anything other than what I am saying. If it is upon external investigation, I should like to ask them how, in face of tradition, they justify any other interpretation. At least people ought to be told what the biblical tradition is. When through clairvoyant investigation one first discovers the true facts, then life and light breaks into the text, and minor discrepancies in the tradition no longer matter, because knowledge of the truth enables one to read the text correctly. But it is very different if one approaches the matter from the point of view of philology. One must nevertheless understand clearly that, even as late as the early centuries of the Christian era, there was nothing in the first chapters of the Bible to mislead anyone into reading the text as it is read today. There were no vowels at all, and the text was in such a condition that even the division into separate words had yet to be made. The dots which in Hebrew signify the vowels were only inserted later. Without the preparation which Spiritual Science gives, what claim has anyone to offer an interpretation of the original text, of which he can say conscientiously, and with scholarship, that it is reliable? Thus in the Elohim-creation we have man at a preparatory stage. All the processes which are included in a term such as “human propagation” were at that time more etheric, more spiritual. They remained at a higher level. It was the deed of Jahve-Elohim which first made man into what he has become today. That had to be preceded by the creation in due order of other, lower beings. Thus the animals became living creatures by what one might almost call a premature act of creation. The same expression nephesch, living creature, is applied to these animals as is ultimately applied to man. But how is it applied to man? At the moment when Jahve-Elohim intervenes and makes man into the man of today, it is said that Jahve-Elohim imprints n'schamah. It is through having a higher member implanted into him that man himself becomes a living being.   Note what a very fruitful concept the Bible, of all books, introduces into the theory of evolution! Of course it would be foolish not to recognise that, as regards his external form, man belongs to the highest stage of the animal kingdom. This small concession may be made to Darwinism. But the essential thing is that man did not become a living being in the same way as the other, lower beings, whose nature is described as nephesch; man was first endowed with a higher member of his being, a previously prepared soul-spiritual element. Here we come to another parallel between the ancient Hebrew doctrine and our own Spiritual Science. When we speak of the human soul, we distinguish between sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul. We know that these first arose in their soul-spiritual form during the first three “days” of creation. It was then that their characteristic tendencies were formed. But this inner soul-nature was not clothed in physical form, was not, so to say, impressed into a physical body until much later. Thus we have to understand that first there arises the spiritual, that this spiritual is then invested with the astral and then gradually condenses into the etheric-physical; it is only then that what was previously spiritual is imprinted into the body as the breath of life. Thus what was implanted as a seed into the human being by Jahve-Elohim had already been prepared earlier. It was there in the womb of the Elohim. Now it is imprinted into man, whose bodily nature had been built up from another direction. Thus it is something which enters into man from without. This impress of n'schamah first made it possible to implant in man the predisposition to, the rudiments of, the ego nature. For these old Hebrew expressions nephesch, ruach, n'schamah correspond to our spiritual scientific terms sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul respectively. Thus this further evolution is very complicated. We must think of all that happened on the six “days” of creation, that is to say, we must think of the work of the Elohim before they advanced to Jahve-Elohim, as having taken place in higher, spiritual realms; and what we can see today in the world as physical man first came about through the deed of Jahve-Elohim. Of all this which we find in the Bible—and again now in clairvoyant perception—and which first enables us to understand the inner nature of man, the Greek philosophers still had a consciousness derived from their various initiation centres—Plato especially, but even Aristotle still knew something of it. Anyone familiar with the works of Plato and Aristotle knows that in Aristotle there was still an awareness that man first became a living being through the introduction of a higher soul-spiritual member, whereas the lower animals went through different evolutionary processes. Aristotle expressed it somewhat as follows. He says that the lower animals became what they were through other processes of evolution; but that at the time when the forces which are active in the animal were able to become effective, the human soul-spiritual being, which still hovered in higher regions, was not yet allowed to acquire an earthly body, otherwise it would have remained at the animal stage. The human being had to wait; in him the lower, the animal stages, had to be ousted from their sovereignty through the implanting of the human member. To express this Aristotle made use of the word φθειρεσθαι (phtheiresthai). By this he meant to say, “Of course, superficially speaking, man has the same bodily functions as the animal, but in the animal these functions are supreme, whereas in man the bodily functions have been dethroned and have to follow a higher principle.” That is the meaning of the word φθειρεσθαι. The same truth lies behind the biblical story of the creation. Through the implanting of n'schamah the lower members were dethroned. In the bearer of his ego man has acquired a higher member. But his earlier, more etheric nature was thereby brought down a stage and became differentiated. Man acquired an external, bodily member, and an inner, more etheric member; the one became denser and the other more rarefied. The principle was repeated in man which we have come to recognise as running through the whole of evolution. We saw how warmth condensed to air and rarefied to light, how air condensed to water and rarefied into sound-ether and so on. The same process takes place in man at higher levels. The male-female becomes differentiated into man and woman, and moreover in such a way that the denser physical body appears on the outside, the more rarefied, etheric, invisible body goes inwards. We could also call this the progress from Elohim-man to man the creation of Jahve-Elohim. The man we know today is the creation of JahveElohim, and the sixth “day” of creation corresponds with the Lemurian age, in which we speak of the male-female human being. Now the Bible speaks of yet a seventh “day” of creation, and we are told that on this seventh “day” the Elohim rested. What does that actually mean? We only understand it aright if we realise that this is the very time when the Elohim rise, when they experience their promotion to become Jahve-Elohim. But we must not conceive Jahve-Elohim as the entire hierarchy of the Elohim united; we must understand that the Elohim give up, so to speak, only a part of their Being to the moon-Being, and hold the rest in reserve; and that in this older part of their Being they continue their own further evolution. So far as this part of them is concerned, their work is no longer devoted to the creation of man. That part of the Elohim which has become Jahve-Elohim continues to work on man. The other part does not work directly upon the earth, it devotes itself to its own evolution. That is what is meant by rest from earthly work, by the Sabbath day, by the seventh “day” of creation. And now we must call attention to something else of importance. If everything that I have just been saying is correct, then we must regard the Jahve-man, the man into whom Jahve impressed his own Being, as the direct successor of the more etheric, more delicate man who was formed on the sixth “day.” Thus there is a direct line from the more etheric man, who is still male-female—from the bi-sexual man—to the physical man. Physical man is the descendant, in a densified form, of the etheric man. If one wanted to describe the Jahve-man who passes over into Atlantis, one would have to say: “And the man who was formed by the Elohim on the sixth ‘day' of creation developed further into the unisexual man, the Jahve-man.” Those who followed after the seven “days” of creation are the descendants of the Elohim-men, and thus of what came into being during the first six “days.” Again the Bible is sublime when, in the second chapter, it tells us that the Jahve-man is in fact a descendant of the heavenly man, the man who was formed by the Elohim on the sixth “day.” The Jahve-man is the descendant of the Elohim-man in precisely the same way as the son is the descendant of the father. The Bible tells us this in the fourth verse of the second chapter, which says “Those who are to follow are the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the heavenly man.” That is what it really says. But if you take a modern translation, you find the remarkable sentence: These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. Usually we find the whole hierarchy of the Elohim called “God,” and Jahve-Elohim called “the Lord God”—the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. I ask you to look at this sentence carefully and try honestly to find a reasonable meaning for it. Anyone who claims to do so had better not look on ahead in his Bible, for the word used here is tol'doth, which means “subsequent generations”; and the same word is used in the later chapter which tells of the subsequent generations of Noah. Thus here it is speaking of the Jahve-men as the descendants, the subsequent generations, of the heavenly Beings, in the same way as there it speaks of the descendants of Noah. Thus this passage must be translated something like this: “In what follows we are speaking of the descendants of the heaven-and-earth beings who were created by the Elohim and further developed by Jahve-Elohim.” Thus the Bible too looks upon the Jahve-men as the descendants of the Elohim-men. Anyone who wants to presuppose a fresh account of the creation, because it says that God created man, should also look at the fifth chapter, which begins This is the book of the generations (the word used there is the very same as in the other passages—tol'doth), and should assume a third account there—thus making his Rainbow Bible really complete! That way you will get a whole knocked up out of Bible fragments, but will no longer have the Bible. If we could go on longer, we should be able to elucidate what is said in chapter five too.  Thus, when we go deeply into these things, we see that there is full agreement between the biblical account of the creation and what we can establish through Spiritual or Occult Science. This leads us to ask why the Bible account is in a more or less pictorial form. What do these pictures represent? And then we realise that they too are the result of clairvoyant experience. Just as today the eye of the seer gazes in the super-sensible upon the origin of our earth existence, so too did those who originally composed the Bible story gaze upon the super-sensible. It was by clairvoyant experience that the facts originally given to us were acquired. When we set to work to construct prehistory from the point of view of purely physical observation, we start from the traces of it which are extant and discoverable by external means, and the farther back we go in physical life and physical origins the more hazy the physical forms become. But in this misty element spiritual Beings hold sway. And man himself in his spiritual part was originally within them. And if we pursue our study of its origin as far back as the times described in Genesis, we come to the original spiritual condition of our earth itself. The “days” of creation refer to spiritual stages of development, only to be grasped by spiritual investigation. What the Bible is telling us is that the physical is little by little formed out of the spiritual. When the seer gazes upon the facts which are described for us in Genesis, he finds to begin with only spiritual processes. The physical eye would see absolutely nothing; it would gaze into a void. But, as we have seen, time goes on. Little by little for the seer the solid crystallises out of the spiritual, just as ice is formed out of water and solidifies. Out of the flowing sea of the astral, of the Devachanic, emerges what can now be seen by the physical eye. Thus, as clairvoyant observation proceeds, within the picture which to begin with has to be understood as purely spiritual, the physical emerges like a crystallisation. It follows that at an earlier time physical eyes would not have been able to discover the human being. Right up to the sixth and seventh “days” of creation, that is, right up to our Lemurian age, man could not have been seen by the physical eye; at that time he only existed spiritually. That is the great difference between a true theory of evolution and a fancy one. The fancy one assumes only a physical process of development. But man did not originate by lower beings evolving to human stature. It is utterly absurd to imagine that an animal form can be transformed into the higher, human form. During the time when the animal forms came into being, forming their physical bodies below, man had already long been in existence, but it is only later that he descends and takes his place beside the animal natures which had descended much earlier. Anyone who cannot look upon evolution in this way is beyond help; he is hypnotised as it were by modern concepts, he is influenced, not by natural scientific facts, but by contemporary opinion. If we want to connect the coming into being of man with that of all other creatures, we must say that first there appear two branches, the birds and the marine animals;1 then, as a special offshoot, come the land animals; the birds and marine animals came into existence on the fifth “day” of creation, the land animals on the sixth. And then came man, only not by producing the same line further, not as a continuation of the series, but by a descent upon the earth. That is the true theory of evolution, and it is contained more exactly in the Bible than in any modern textbook which surrenders to materialistic fantasy. These are a few fragmentary remarks such as always seem to be required in the last lecture of a Cycle. To follow up adequately every aspect of such a theme as this would take months; there is so very much in this Genesis story of creation. In our Cycles we can never do more than touch upon things, and that is all I have attempted to do this time. I should like to emphasise once more that it has not been so very easy for me to give this particular course; nor will any of my hearers readily realise how difficult it is to reach the depths upon which the Bible story is based, how hard it is to find the true parallel between already ascertained spiritual scientific facts and the corresponding passages in the Bible. If one works conscientiously, the task is an extraordinarily exacting one. It is so often assumed that the eye of the seer reaches with ease everywhere—that one has only to look, and everything follows of itself. An inexperienced person often thinks, when confronted with a problem, that he will easily be able to solve it, whereas the further he probes the more numerous are the difficulties which present themselves. This is so even in ordinary, external research, and when one leaves the physical and plunges into clairvoyant investigation, then the real difficulties begin to show themselves, and with them the feeling of the great responsibility incurred in speaking of these things at all. Nevertheless I think I may say that I have not made use of a single word in the whole of this Cycle which cannot stand, which is not as far as it goes an adequate expression in our own language of the right way to conceive these things. But it was certainly not easy. There is much that I could still say. Especially something which has been borne in upon us at every stage during these lectures—and that is the need for anthroposophical teaching so to permeate our hearts as to lift us with all the strength of our inner life to ever higher forms of perception, to an ever larger-hearted comprehension of the world. Whether we become better men in the intellectual, feeling and moral spheres—that is the touchstone for the fruitfulness of what we gather in the spiritual-scientific field. To study the parallel between spiritual-scientific investigation and the Bible can be particularly fruitful; for it enables us to experience how we ourselves are the “primal cause,” the “primal state,” as Jacob Boehme would have said, in that super-sensible spiritual womb whence also came those very Elohim who developed into Jahve-Elohim, into that higher form of evolution, in order to bring about the great goal of their activity, which we call man. Let us comprehend our origin with due reverence, but also with a due sense of our responsibility. The Elohim and Jahve-Elohim gave their highest forces to the beginning of our evolution. Let us look upon this our origin as laying upon us an obligation to absorb into our human nature more and more of the spiritual forces which in the course of subsequent evolution have entered into the development of the earth. We have spoken of the influence of Lucifer. Because of this influence something which lay in the womb of that spirituality in which man too originated remained there for the time being; it came forth later in the incarnation of the Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Since that time the Christ has worked in the earth as another divine principle. And contemplation of the great truths of Genesis ought to point us to the duty of taking more and more into our own being the spiritual Being of the Christ; for only by permeating ourselves with the Christ principle shall we be able to fulfil our human task; only so shall we become on the earth more and more what we were predisposed to be in those times with which the biblical story of creation is concerned. Thus such a series of lectures as this can not only give us knowledge, but can stir forces in our souls. Even if we forget much of its detail, may what we have learnt through a closer examination of the biblical story of creation go on working as power in our souls. I may perhaps be allowed to say this at the close of these lectures, during which we have tried to immerse ourselves in our anthroposophical life. Let us try to take with us the strength which should flow from this teaching. Let us carry it away with us, let us fructify our outside life with this strength. Whatever we may be doing, in whatever worldly profession we may be engaged, this strength can warm and ripen our creative activity as well as intensify our joy, our happiness. No one who has rightly grasped the sublime origin of human existence can go on living without taking this knowledge as a germinal force of blessing and joy for the rest of his life. When you try to carry out deeds of love, let the truth about the mighty origin of men shine forth from your eyes, and thus you will best reveal what anthroposophical teaching is. Our deeds will proclaim its truth, rejoicing those around us, conferring blessing, refreshment and health upon our own spirit, soul and body. We ought to be better, stronger, healthier human beings through having absorbed anthroposophical teaching. May this above all be the effect of this Cycle! It should be a seed which sinks into the soul of the hearer only to spring up again and bear fruit for those around us. Thus we go our separate ways, while our spirits remain united, and we try to work together to translate this teaching into life. Let us permeate ourselves with this spirit, without weakening, until the moment when we are able to meet again not only in the spirit but in the flesh.
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