The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The three lectures of today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow will be interconnected. Today I want to look at some things that will lay the groundwork for certain perspectives on man's relation to the cosmos and to all of life.

Consider the development of the human soul as we can observe it here between birth and death, living in the physical body. Among other things, we might notice that two properties, or complexes of energy, are necessary to the soul if it is to lead a fulfilling earthly life between birth and death—we have frequently directed our attention to such things.

What needs to be acquired, on the one hand, is memory. Just imagine that memory was not among our earthly possessions! You only need to consider how different our soul life would be if we could not look back to days past, all the way back to a certain moment after our birth, and could not retrieve what we have experienced from these more or less unplumbed depths. Our consciousness of our I, as we now possess it, is dependent on the way our experiences connect. I have drawn your attention to this frequently. Now, you all know that memory only begins to appear at a certain point in our earthly life. It is not present before then, and so all our experiences prior to that first remembered point in time are wrapped in forgetfulness. Therefore we can say: From a certain point in our earthly life onward, our soul life is related to our body in such a way that, in greater or lesser detail, our experiences can always be called up in us as memories—we can remember them.

This faculty of memory can only be developed under the influence of our earthly life, and developing a memory is one of the tasks of our earthly life. During that long period of our development when we were beings of the Moon, we did not have a faculty comparable to our earthly memory. In order for our organism to be able to develop memory, we have had to become a part of the organism of the earth, with all its forces deriving from the mineral realm. Memory develops as a result of the interaction between the human soul and the earthly, physical body. It is only during the Earth period of evolution that memory, in the form in which we develop it in our physical, earthly body, becomes necessary to the spiritual world. It only became necessary with the arrival of the Earth period because until then there were other things that took the place of memory. During the Moon period, for example, man's powers of dreamlike clairvoyance took the place of memory. Just imagine that every time you experienced something the experience would be written down in some particular place to which you always had access—as they occurred, all your experiences would be written down there, one after the other. Then all you would have to do to find an experience would be to look in that place where everything had been written down. And this is in fact the kind of experience undergone by man on Old Moon. Everything he experienced in his old, dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness was, so to speak, engraved in a subtle etheric substance. Everything that man was able to experience through his dreamlike, clairvoyant consciousness was written into the substance of the world. And whenever a human soul needed something comparable to our memory of today, it simply had to direct its dreamlike, clairvoyant awareness toward what was engraved in the fine etheric substance of the world. Man on Old Moon looked at the traces left behind by his own experiences in the way people of today look at the objects of the external world. All one had to do to see something one had experienced was simply to observe the world substance. There, written into the substance of the world, one found the previous contents of that old, dreamlike, imaginative consciousness.

This way of living in the world was therefore very different from today's. Just imagine that you could re-think everything you ever thought, because it was following you about like the tail of a comet—that is a translation of the actual experience of Old Moon into the terms of present-day thinking. This condition had to end because mankind needed to become individualised. Man had to learn to present himself as an individuality. He can only do this if his experiences remain his own property rather than being immediately engraved into the world substance. His experience must be engraved only into his own fine etheric individuality, his own fine etheric substance. So long as man lives on Earth, whatever is developed in his waking consciousness is accompanied by movements of his etheric body. The shape of the physical body marks the boundary of these accompanying movements. To a certain extent they are unable to pass beyond the limits of the skin. Thus, for the whole of life between birth and death, the fine etheric substance, whose movements accompany experiences of thoughts, ideas, feelings and experiences of will, is rolled up within the physical body. We have often described how it all unrolls and is received by the world substance when the physical body is laid aside in death. Then, after death, we can begin to look back on everything that has been engraved into our etheric individuality and watch it be absorbed into the substance of the cosmic ether.

I have briefly mentioned how things stand with memory, which develops in response to the physical body's forces of resistance. The situation is similar with respect to something else that is important for our life on earth and which we rightfully acquire for ourselves there.

In addition to memory, our life on Earth also requires us to develop habits. Habits are another thing that we did not yet possess on Old Moon in the form that we have them on Earth. On Old Moon we possessed neither memory nor the ability to form habits—not in the earthly form they have today. If you observe human development from childhood onwards, you will see how habits gradually begin to develop us certain actions are repeated again and again. As we are educated, we receive guidance which establishes certain actions as habits. At first these have to be learned, but once they have become habits our souls perform them more mechanically.

During the Earth period, if the I is to unfold properly, habits must be developed in the right way. What took the place of habits during Old Moon? During that period, every time we needed to accomplish something or whenever something was supposed to happen through us, we were directly influenced by one or the other being from the higher spiritual world. Our deeds were always held in check by the impulses we received from the beings of a higher world. At that time we were much more a member of the whole organism of the hierarchies than is the case now, in the Earth period.

If we had remained in this state, we should never have developed the power to be free, for every detail of our actions would depend on the impulses of higher beings. They would have to exercise their power whenever we acted. We can only receive into ourselves the gift of freedom by being released from the sphere of the beings of the higher hierarchies and by entering into a condition in which repeatedly[,] acts can become habits. In this manner it is possible for actions to originate in us. And so, acquiring the capacity to form habits is also intimately connected with the way humanity achieves inner freedom.

Even during the Earth period, the state we leave behind when we enter through birth into physical existence resembles our previous state on Old Moon. Up there in the spiritual world, before we are born and step down into earthly existence, we are powerfully influenced by higher spiritual impulses. There in the spiritual world it is always higher spiritual beings who guide us to what we need to do; they help us prepare an earthly existence that will proceed in accordance with our karma. When we enter the physical body we are torn from this world in which habits do not exist—this world which is subject only to the uninterrupted impulses of higher spiritual beings. To a degree we still possess an echo of our condition in the spiritual world when we enter physical existence. This expresses itself in the way we behave as children up to the age of seven. As children we follow habits less and are more under the influence of imitation. At first we begin to do things under the direct influence of what is happening around us: we imitate the examples that are shown to us. This is an echo of the way we had to act in the spiritual world. There it was necessary for us to receive an impulse for every single thing we did. That is why children imitate to begin with, directly following the impulses that come to them. Independence, the capacity of the soul to act independently, only emerges in the course of time, just like the capacity to live in accordance with habits.

Both memory and habits are important ingredients of our soul life. Both these significant elements of our soul life are metamorphoses. They are transformations of quite other conditions in the spiritual world. Memory is a transformation of the way imaginative dream experiences leave their traces behind them in the spiritual world; habit arises when one is torn free from the impulses of higher spiritual beings.

Looking at these matters in the way we have just done enables one to arrive at a concept of how differently constituted from the world on this side of the threshold is the world on the other side of the threshold. We need to be able to think in this way. Again and again it must be emphasised: On the other side of the threshold everything is different. We go to the trouble to characterise the spiritual world by using words that apply to the physical world, it is true. But again and again it must be made clear that we have to gradually accustom ourselves to shaping these pictures in a manner that is as different as possible from that in which we picture the physical world. Only in this way can we ever arrive at adequate and correct pictures of the spiritual world.

At the same time, considerations such as the preceding ones give us a glimpse of what is important and essential to our earthly existence. It is utter nonsense to believe that earthly existence should be valued lightly. I have already drawn your attention to this mistake, from various points of view. Like all the other phases of human development, earthly, physical existence has its purpose. We reap permanent, eternal gains from what our soul experiences by having a physical body and by way of what we experience under the influence of memory and habit, which are gifts of the physical body. Gradually, in the course of repeated Earth lives, we acquire these gains. Again and again, therefore, we have to more or less give up the power of memory and return to the state to which we were accustomed during Old Moon; we have to give back to the substance of the cosmos what has been engraved in us during our life on Earth. And this is what does happen as soon as we die. We have to submit ourselves to the impulses of the higher spiritual beings once more in order that the ability to follow their impulses can be translated into habit when we have returned to an earthly body.

At this point I should also to draw your attention to something I have already mentioned frequently in the past, for it is very, very important and cannot be repeated often enough. We acquire memory and habits during our life on Earth. For a start, let us look at memory. Considering it as we just have done, memory seems to be a natural gift of the Earth. And, as you know, a person can always develop the power and ability to remember, no matter how weak his memory seems at the time. Suppose that, as memory developed, nothing were to happen except what is entirely natural—nothing but what is precisely in accordance with the way in which it would develop under the influence of the mineral forces at work in the physical organism of the Earth. In that case we would not develop a memory such as the one to which we are accustomed. Normally we do much more than this—you all know that we do much more toward developing a memory. Perhaps it would be better to say, more is done to us. We learn things by heart. After a certain age we are required to learn things by heart, to memorise them. It makes a difference whether our memory is acquired by simply allowing it to develop more or less of itself, or whether we are required to do more than would just happen automatically. Eventually we retain a poem if we read it often enough or if it is recited to us frequently. But this is not sufficient for education these days; in addition we are required to memorise poems. Why, we are even punished if we have not memorised the poem assigned to us. This is how things are in the present cycle of human development.

I ask you, please, do understand what I am now saying. No one should go about saying that today I was thundering on about memorising, saying it should be done away with. That is not what I am saying! In our time it really is necessary for us to memorise certain things, for our cycle of development requires that our memory be trained in a quite particular way.

What, then, happens in our souls when memorising is brought in to help our natural inclination to acquire a memory? In this case, we summon Lucifer. And it is right that luciferic forces be called in to help build memory. Once more I want to emphasise that you are not to say: Oh, one must protect oneself from Lucifer; let us cease requiring our children to memorise anything! This is a bad habit that some have acquired. Again and again they express the belief that one must protect oneself from Lucifer and Ahriman by doing everything possible to prevent them from having access to us. The person who tries to protect himself from them is the one to whom they really do have thorough access! Luciferic and ahrimanic powers must be reckoned with in world development. They must retain their place in it; what matters is that this happen in the right way.

Let us look at a special case: Why is it necessary to call upon luciferic powers to help us to develop memory? The people of today are no longer aware of it but, in the past, in times not so long ago in the development of humanity, memory was of a different strength than is the memory of today. We need a relatively long time to memorise a longer poem. The ancient Greeks did not need so much time. Many of the ancient Greeks knew the Homeric poems from beginning to end. But they did not learn them in the fashion in which we memorise things today, for then the power of memory was constituted differently. How were things memorised during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? What happened in those days was a kind of repetition of what had happened to an even greater degree in the Atlantean period itself, and which I have described in my writings about development in the time of Atlantis. On Old Moon there were powers which made it possible to draw behind one the contents of dreamlike imaginative experiences, like the tail of a comet. These powers from Old Moon were carried over and were transformed from a more outward power, which involved interaction with the world, into a more inward power. As it was transformed into an inward power, memory began to awaken in Atlantean humanity and the world seemed to bestow it on them automatically. And in Atlantis man did not have to exert himself very much to develop his memory, for it was like a power which he encountered in his dealings with the external world and which flowed into him from there. This state of affairs was repeated during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. Then what had previously happened to him in his interactions with the world without his needing to do anything further about it, was to a certain extent repeated within the human being.

Now that man has entered the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, he finds it increasingly necessary to exert himself in order to acquire the power of memory. What came to him automatically during the time of Atlantis, and again during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, must now be made his own so that it can contribute to his individualisation and freedom. Whenever something is required that really corresponds to a previous ability—as when powers that were once natural are summoned to help build memory—we are dealing with a manifestation of Lucifer. Whenever we artificially call upon something in our age that was natural in the age of Greece, something like the effortless acquisition of memory, it becomes luciferic. But in order to summon up a strong impression of this luciferic element in your souls be aware of the role that Lucifer has played in the development of humanity. You must be aware of this as we describe these things. During the Greco-Roman times Lucifer was more or less kept within bounds. He was still in his rightful place. But he is no longer kept in his rightful place in the same way. Now, in order for man to be able to further develop his memory, it is necessary for him to enter into an agreement with Lucifer. Now it has become necessary for man to do something actively for his memory; during the Greco-Roman epoch memory came of itself without his needing to do anything further about it. Thereby what merely happened to the human being during the Greco-Roman epoch today has become a luciferic deed.

In the same moment that luciferic activity appears, however, the other side of the balance becomes active: the ahrimanic side. And, on the one hand, at the same time that humanity has been memorising things and thus calling on the assistance of Lucifer to build their memory it has, on the other hand, also been developing an ahrimanic support for memory by writing things down. On frequent occasions I have indicated that the people of the Middle Ages were not mistaken in feeling that printing was a particularly ‘black art.’

But everything that aids memory externally is to some degree ahrimanic. Again, I am not saying that it is right to flee from everything that is ahrimanic, although perhaps it is precisely in our circles that too much is done to call up Ahriman. One loves him far too much!

Herein lies the task of mankind—to establish a position of balance, and not believe that Lucifer and Ahriman are to be escaped without more ado! It is rather to confess, boldly, courageously and energetically, that these two kinds of beings are necessary to world development and that the powers coming from the ahrimanic and luciferic sides are there for man to put to use in his own activities and development. These are there for man to use, but it also is necessary for him to establish a balance between Lucifer and Ahriman in the most varied spheres. Lucifer and Ahriman must balance each other. So we must pursue our activities in such a way that they are able to balance one another. This is the reason why it was necessary for the luciferic and ahrimanic elements to intervene in Earth evolution. And from our previous studies we know that the description that stands at the beginning of the Old Testament is an important symbol for the intervention of the luciferic element. There it is described how woman tempts man and how the luciferic element intervenes—indirectly, through woman—in the development of the Earth. This is how the intervention of the luciferic element, which we locate in the Lemurian period, is symbolised in the Bible.

The intervention of the ahrimanic element followed after that, during the Atlantean period. And, just as a knowledge of the human being was required in the fourth post-Atlantean period in order to understand the biblical symbol of Lucifer, so today the fifth post-Atlantean period needs this knowledge in order to begin to understand the counter-symbol and be able to present it to the human soul in an adequately sketched, if incomplete, fashion. (I have mentioned this earlier.) Just as Lucifer stands at the side of Eve, so Ahriman stands at the side of Faust; and just as Lucifer approaches woman directly, so does Ahriman directly approach man. Just as man is tempted indirectly through woman, Gretchen is indirectly lied to through Faust. Since Ahriman is the one who is at work, lies are the means by which Gretchen is tempted. Ahriman is the spirit of deception whom we can picture as standing opposite Lucifer, the spirit of temptation. This is one way we can name them: Lucifer, the tempter, and Ahriman, the deceiver.

There is much in the world that is there purely for the purpose of protecting mankind from luciferic temptation. There are rules, teachings, descriptions of moral impulses, and institutions established in the course of human development—all these are there to protect mankind from luciferic temptations. Today, the right means for protecting oneself from the ahrimanic fall, the fall into untruth, are much less developed.

All the luciferic parts of the human being are related to the passions and emotions. Where falsehood and deception play a role, however, one can feel Ahriman at work in man's development. In our time it is not only necessary for people to arm themselves against luciferic challenges. They must also prepare themselves against the challenges of Ahriman, now that he has entered the field.

Some of this is contained in the Faust poems, which show how man can fall to Ahriman, even in such a matter as the misunderstanding of words. In his Faust, Goethe gives us a fine picture of how Faust passes through various ahrimanic dangers. There are various confusions between Lucifer and Ahriman, to be sure, but for reasons mentioned today and previously, Goethe was right to use Ahriman rather than Lucifer in his own Faust. There is much in both the first and second parts that is ahrimanic, right into such details as the role of misunderstood words. At the end of the second part there is a conversation. Faust believes the talk is about some diggings; but a grave is what is actually meant! ‘Graben’ (to dig, en-grave)—and ‘Grab’ (grave) are the words! Ahriman's impulse resounds here, right into the misunderstanding of ambiguous words. Goethe had an extraordinarily fine sense for representing ahrimanic impulses. In a manner more instinctive than conscious he wove untruth and distortion into those places in Faust where ahrimanic impulses are at work. It is very important to understand this.

Just as memory and habit are to a certain degree metamorphoses and transformations of modes of activity in the spiritual world, so also are there further capacities which we develop in the spiritual world which are transformations of what we have acquired here in the physical world and what has been revealed here. We have been characterising memory and habit as the results of transformations, as metamorphoses of spiritual experiences of an earlier time. But some things, for example, such as the relationship of our ideas to external objects, only appear for the first time in the physical world. Objects surround us. We picture them in our thoughts. What we call physical truth is the agreement of our ideas with the objects; this is truth on the physical level of existence. If we express an idea for which the physical plane does not provide a proper model, then it is not true. Whenever we speak of physical truths this always refers to an agreement between what we are thinking and the physical facts. In order to relate to the truth in this manner it is necessary for us to live in a physical body and be able to use it to look at external things. It would be nonsense to imagine that such a relation to the truth could already have existed on Old Moon. That is an accomplishment of life on Earth. Only when we acquire a physical body is something like this agreement between ideas and external objects possible. This, however, provides Ahriman with his field of action. And how does this provide him with it?

Matters such as those we have just been talking about give one a feeling for the interconnections between the spiritual world and the physical world. Ahriman has a proper task in the spiritual world and he should also exercise a certain influence on the physical world. But he should not actually enter the physical world! He should not be admitted to matters involving the agreement between external objects and the ideas we acquire through our physical bodies. He carried out certain activities on Old Moon. If he is allowed to carry out those same activities here on Earth he distorts the connection between our ideas and external objects. Wherever man is engaged in bringing his ideas into agreement with external objects and external facts Ahriman is supposed to keep his fingers off—if I may express myself symbolically. But he does not keep them off, not Ahriman—truly not! If he kept his fingers off there would be no lying in the world!

Now I am not sure whether it is necessary to prove that there is still lying in the world. But, if there is lying in the world, then it is proof that Ahriman is at work there in a manner in which it is not proper for him to work. This activity of Ahriman in the physical world is one of the things that humanity must overcome. You might say, though: There is much beauty in the world, but in some respects it really is a bungled job; if God the Father were entirely perfect He would have created human beings in such a way that they could not stoop to lying. Such a Father God would have told Ahriman that he is to have nothing to do with the physical world! And, as we have again heard today, Ahriman is not the only one who takes a certain pleasure in discovering what is wrong with the world. There are also philosophers of Pessimism about, philosophers who derive their views from the negative qualities of humanity. The nineteenth century produced not only some pessimistic philosophers, but also some who went beyond Pessimism to become representatives of ‘Miserable-ism.’ Among the other views of the world, that one also emphatically exists! Julius Bahnsen²⁹ was not only a pessimist, he was a ‘miserablist’.

Why, then, is Ahriman allowed into the physical world? In the last lecture I gave you an example of how strongly he is permitted to work in the world. As you will recall, I described how an event was arranged so that it would go according to an exact plan. This event was observed, not by the usual kind of audience, but by thirty young lawyers and students of jurisprudence—in other words, by men who were preparing themselves to become judges of human deeds. The event had been planned beforehand so that what was going to happen was known in detail. What the experiment demonstrated about establishing a correct relationship between how people think about happenings in the external world and what actually goes on is shown by what occurred after the event. The thirty were asked to describe what had happened. Twenty-six of them gave a false description; only four could give a true description and even their descriptions were only approximations of the truth. Thirty people witness an event that follows a carefully prepared plan and it is possible for twenty-six of them to give thoroughly false descriptions of it! That shows you how effective Ahriman is! There you can see how actively present he is! But what would happen if he were not there? Then we certainly would be some kind of lambs. We would feel the impulse to think of things exactly in accordance with the facts before us, and we would consistently allow ourselves to speak only about the facts we observe. But we would have to do this! There could be no talk of freedom! We would have to act in this way; we never could act otherwise; and we never could become free beings. If we are to be able to speak the truth as free beings it must be possible for us to lie, and we are therefore obliged to develop within ourselves the power to conquer Ahriman every time we speak. He has to be there, ‘provocative and active, doing his devil's work’. Those words should give you a picture of Ahriman's presence and of how error only occurs when we follow him directly instead of remembering that he is the one to be overcome as, provocative and active, he goes about his devil's work. Some speak about flight. They say, pulling long faces: ‘But is this not perhaps something ahrimanic? Oh, I must not have anything to do with this!’ In many cases, the only thing all this signifies is that the person in question is moving toward the comforts of Lucifer and leaving freedom behind.

What would help would be to acquaint oneself with the impulses that need to be overcome. To a certain extent we need Ahriman on one side and Lucifer on the other in order to bring about a balance between them.

These are the preliminary considerations I wanted to share with you today. They provide the necessary foundations for the spiritual-scientific vistas on life and the cosmos that will open out before us tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

• 29. Julius Bahnsen (1830 – 1881).

1. Do you know how the soul came into the world?
2. Do you know how the soul leaves the world?
3. Do you know the difference between the path of the fathers and the path of the gods?
4. Do you know why that world is not full?
5. Do you know why, at the fifth revelation, the waters begin to speak with the voice of man?

The three lower principles of man are held together and enclosed by the etheric sheath in the same way as the three upper principles are held together and enclosed by the auric sheath. It is the etheric body that prevents the physical cells from falling apart.

Prana is only a part of Shiva, enclosed and thereby separated, existing in its own right. Kama and Kama-Manas lie in the template of the etheric body, which, on the way back to an incarnation, is formed by the soul by drawing from the general Rupa-Manas and Kama-Stoff precisely those components that made up its Kama and Rupa body before its Arupa stay. Every soul has an arupa stay, because only through this it is soul, that is, a causal body, that the foundation for unselfish mental life is laid. Even the savage has the germ for this, and however small this germ is, it provides him with the passage through the arupa sphere, through Devachan. Our thoughts, building themselves into mental matter, usually still have undefined, imprecise forms because they have so many shells to break through, to push against.

We only take their essence, their germ, with us into the Arupa sphere, where they swell up and only then live their own life. Before each new incarnation, the human being must pass through the state of semen, that is, through the Arupa sphere of Devachan. On the way back, the seed must, through the magnetic power of its own previous formations, that is, actions, feelings and thoughts, clothe itself again with the substance of which they were composed. In the astral sphere, the thought image, which has become precise, finds the forms and templates that have been created by itself and assigned to it by Lipika, the Lord of Karma, according to eternal laws. The Maharajas supply the etheric substance to these templates, as it were, and they carry it from all four winds. This is how the lower personal covering, the etheric double body, is created, which then sinks into the physical body.

We understand the world of our desires as the 'fathers' path', which still chains us to enjoyment; only when we have become accustomed to regarding the three lower realms merely as a hall of learning and no longer demand anything from them, are we ready for the 'gods' path', which opens up life in the spirit.

Devajani, Pitrijani. As long as we still strive for selfish happiness, that world, Devajani, cannot be full. Only when we renounce the fruits of our deeds are we not bound to the world of the fathers, the world of Kama. The deed alone does not bind us.

The first sacrifice: the division of unity into trinity. The second and third: the outpourings of the third Logos; the fourth: the ensoulment by the second Logos; the fifth: the material world is spiritually fertilized by the first Logos, man arises, the Word becomes flesh.

We shall most easily understand the progress of humanity through the three incarnations, Saturn, Sun, and Moon, preceding the Earth, if we add a further survey of man in sleep, in dream.

When man is asleep the seer beholds the astral body with the ego enveloped in it as though floating over the physical body. The astral body is then outside the physical and etheric bodies, but remains connected with them. It sends threads, as it were, or rather currents into the universal cosmic body, and seems partly embedded in it. Thus in the sleeping man we have the physical, the etheric and the astral body, but this last sends out tentacles towards the great astral universe.

If we picture this condition as an enduring one, if here on the physical plane there were only human beings who had the physical body interpenetrated with the etheric body, while above hovered over them an astral soul with the ego, then we should have the condition in which mankind existed on the Moon. Except that on the Moon the astral body was not strongly separated from the physical body; it sank down into the physical body just as strongly as it expanded into the cosmos.

But if you picture a state of sleep where no dream ever comes then you have the condition in which humanity existed on the Sun. And if you now imagine that the human being has died, that even his etheric body is outside him, united to the astral body and ego, but yet that the link is not quite dissolved, so that what is outside, embedded in the whole surrounding cosmos, sends down its rays and works upon the physical substance—you then have the condition in which mankind existed on Saturn.

Below on the cosmic globe of Saturn there was only what we have in our purely physical body; it was surrounded, so to speak, by an etheric astral atmosphere, in which the egos were embedded.

Human beings were already actually in existence on Saturn but in a dull, dull consciousness. These souls had the task of maintaining in an active and mobile state something that belonged to them down below. They worked from above on their physical body, like a snail fashioning its shell; they acted from outside, just like an instrument, on the bodily organs. We will describe the appearance of that on which the souls above were working; we must give some little description of this physical Saturn, of Saturn in general.

I have already said that the part of the physical body elaborated then was the foundation of the sense organs. The souls outside worked upon the Saturn surface, upon what lived in man as rudiments of the senses. They were actually in the cosmic space surrounding Saturn below were their workshops, there they worked out the types for eyes and ears and for the other sense organs.

Now what was the fundamental quality of this Saturn-mass? It is hard to characterise, for we have scarcely a word in our language which is suitable; our words are quite materialistic, they are only adapted to the physical plane. There is one word however, that can express the delicate work that was carried out there. One can denote it with the expression: Reflection. The Saturn globe in all its parts had the quality of reflecting everything, such as light, tone, perfume, taste, that reached it from without; all was thrown back again; one perceived it in cosmic space as a reflection in the mirror of Saturn. One can only compare it with the effect of looking into the eye of our neighbour, when our own picture looks out from it towards us.

Thus all the human souls were aware of themselves, but not only as a picture in colour they perceived themselves in taste, in scent, in a definite feeling of warmth. Saturn was thus a reflecting planet. The human beings living in the atmosphere threw their essence and being into it and out of the pictures that then arose, the rudiments of the sense organs began to take form, for they were pictures that worked creatively.

Imagine yourself standing before a mirror from which your own figure confronts you, and that this figure begins to create, is not a dead form as in our modern lifeless mirror. There you have the creative activity of Saturn, there you have the kind of way the human beings lived on Saturn and accomplished their work.

This took place below on the Saturn globe; up above, the souls were in the deep trance consciousness of which I spoke yesterday. They knew nothing of this mirroring, they only occasioned it. In this dull trance consciousness they had within them the entire cosmic All, and thus the whole cosmic All was mirrored from their being. They themselves, however, were embedded in a basic substance of a spiritual nature, they were not independent but were only a part of the spirituality surrounding Saturn. They could not therefore have a spiritual perception, higher spirits perceived by means of them, they were the organs of perception for other spirits.

A whole number of higher spirits were in the surroundings of Saturn; all those whom Christian esotericism has called Divine Messengers, Angels, Archangels, Primal Forces, Powers of Revelation. All these were contained in the Saturn atmosphere. Just as the hand belongs to the organism so did the souls belong to these Beings, and just as little as the hand has an independent consciousness, so little had they at that time a consciousness of their own. They worked out of the consciousness of higher Beings, the consciousness of a higher world; they thus fashioned the forms of their sense organs, which then became creative, and they also moulded the Saturn substance. You must not think of this substance of Saturn as being as dense as the present human flesh. The densest condition that it could attain at all was not as dense as our present physical air. Saturn became physical, but only reached the density of fire, of warmth, the warmth in which our modern Physics no longer admits any matter to exist. Warmth, however, for the occultist is a finer substance than gas it has the characteristic of continuous expansion. And since Saturn consisted of this substance it had the power of spreading from within outwards, of raying out everything, of reflecting. Such a body radiates everything; it has no need to keep it all within itself.

Saturn was not a uniform substance but of such a composition that one could have perceived a differentiation, a configuration. Later the organs became rounded into cell-like balls, only that cells are small and those were large—as if you took a mulberry or blackberry. You could not as yet have seen on Saturn, for the reflecting process threw all light that came from outside back again. Within this Saturn mass all was dark, only towards the end of its evolution was it somewhat illumined. A number of beings were present in the surrounding atmosphere of Saturn; not only you yourselves were active on your sense organs. For the soul of man was not yet so far developed as to be able to work alone, you worked in conjunction with other spiritual beings, under their guidance, so to speak.

Certain beings worked on Saturn as independently as modern man; they stood then at the human level. They could not be formed like modern man, for warmth was the only substance of Saturn. In respect of their intelligence, their ego-consciousness, however, they stood at the level of present man though they could form no physical body, no brain. Let us observe them somewhat closer. The present-day human being consists of four members: Physical body, Etheric body, Astral body and the Ego, and, prefigured in the ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man (Manas, Budhi, Atma). The lowest, although of its kind the most perfect member on the Earth planet, is the physical body.

The next higher is the etheric body, then the astral body and the ego. Now there are also beings who have no physical body, whose lowest member is the etheric body. They have no need of the physical body in order to occupy themselves in our sense world; in compensation they have a member which is higher than our seventh.

Others have the astral body as their lowest member and in compensation a ninth, and again others who have our ego as lowest member, have in compensation a tenth member. When we consider the beings who have the ego as lowest member we must say that they consist of:

• Ego
• Spirit-Self
• Life-Spirit
• Spirit-Man.

Then come the eighth, ninth and tenth members, that which Christian esotericism calls the Divine Trinity:

• Holy Spirit
• Son or Word
• Father.

In theosophical literature one is accustomed to call these the three Logoi.

These beings, whose lowest member is the ego, are those who come into special consideration for us in the Saturn evolution. They were at the stage where humanity stands today. They could exercise their ego under the quite different conditions that I have described. They were the human beings of Saturn and the ancestors of our present humanity.

They irradiated the surface of Saturn with their ego-hood, their external nature, they were the implanters of ego-hood in the physical corporeality that was forming on the surface of Saturn.

Thus they made it their care that the physical body was prepared in such a way that it could later become the bearer of the ego. Only such a physical body as you have today, with feet, hands and head and the sense organs incorporated in it could be ego-bearer on the fourth stage, the Earth. To this end the nucleus of it had to be already implanted on Saturn. One also calls these ego-beings of Saturn, Spirits of Egoism. *[Later called by Dr. Steiner, Spirits of Personality.]

Egoism has a two-fold character; it is excellent and desirable or obnoxious and evil. If at that time on Saturn and on the succeeding planets the essential nature of egoism had not been again and again implanted, man would never have become an independent being who can say “I” to himself. Into your bodily nature there has been instilled ever since Saturn the sum of forces which stamps you as an independent being, cutting you off from all other beings. To this end had the Spirits of Egoism, the Asuras, to work.

Among them are to be found two kinds, apart from slight deviations. The one kind has elaborated egoism in a noble, self-reliant way, and has risen higher and higher in the perfection of the sense of freedom: that is the rightful independence of egoism. These spirits have guided mankind through all the successive planets; they have become the educators of men towards independence.

Now on each planet there are also Spirits who have remained behind in evolution, they have remained stationary and not wished to progress. You will recognise a law from this: If the most outstanding fall and commit the “great sin” of not advancing with evolution, then they become the very worst of all.

The noble sense of liberty has been reversed into wickedness, into its opposite. Those are the Spirits of Temptation, and they must be taken gravely into account; they lead to the evil side of egoism, even today they are still in our environment, these evil Spirits of Saturn. All that is bad draws its power from these Spirits.

When each planet has completed its evolution and becomes spiritual again, it is, so to speak, no longer in existence. It passes over into a condition of sleep in order to come forth once more. So too was it with Saturn. Its next incarnation is the Sun, a Sun which you would obtain if you were to mix together as in a cauldron all that is on the sun, the moon and the earth, together with all the terrestrial and spiritual beings. The Sun evolution is distinguished by the fact that the etheric body drew into the prepared physical body below. The Sun has a denser substantiality than Saturn, it is to be compared with the density of the present air. The human physical substance, your own body which you formed for yourselves, is to be seen on the Sun interpenetrated by the etheric body. You yourselves belonged to a body of air, as on Saturn to a body of warmth. Your etheric body was already down below, but your astral body with your ego was enveloped in the great general astral body of the Sun. And there you worked down into the physical and etheric bodies, just as today in sleep when your astral body is outside it works upon the physical and the etheric body. At that time you were elaborating the first rudiments of all that today are organs of growth, metabolism and reproduction. You were transforming the elements of the sense organs from Saturn, some of which maintained their character, while others were transformed into glands and organs of growth.

All organs of growth and organs of reproduction are sense organs taken hold of by the etheric body and transformed. When you compare the body of the Sun with Saturn you find a certain difference. Saturn was stiff like a reflecting surface, it rayed back everything that it received of taste, smell and all sense-perceptions. This was not so in the Sun. Whereas Saturn rayed back everything direct, without taking possession of it, the Sun permeated itself with it, and then rayed it back; being able to do so by virtue of having an etheric body. Its body, penetrated by an etheric body, did as the plant does today with the sunlight. The plant takes up the sunlight, permeates itself with it and then gives it back again. If it is put in some dark place, it loses its colour and languishes. There would be no green colouring matter without light. So it was with your own body on the Sun, it permeated itself with light and with other ingredients too, and as the plant sends back the light after having drawn strength from it, so did the Sun once upon a time ray back the light after having worked it over inwardly. But it not only permeated itself with the light, but with taste, scent, warmth, everything, and radiated it out again.

Hence your own body too was at the stage of the plant on the Sun. It had not the appearance of a plant in the modern sense, for this has only been formed on the Earth. What you bear within you as glands, organs of growth and reproduction, were upon the Sun as mountains and rocks are upon the Earth today. You worked upon them as one nowadays tends and cultivates a little garden. The Sun radiated back the ingredients of cosmic space, it shone in the loveliest colours, a wonderful tone rang forth, an exquisite aroma streamed out from it. The ancient Sun was a wonderful being in cosmic space. Thus at that time on the Sun men worked at their own substance like certain creatures, corals for instance, work from outside on their structure. This took place under the guidance of higher beings, for there were higher beings in the Sun's atmosphere.

We must concern ourselves with one special category who then stood at the level reached by men today. On Saturn we have the Spirits of Egoism who implanted the sense of freedom and self-reliance and stood at the human level. On the Sun it was other beings, who had as lowest member, not the ego but the astral body. They possessed astral body, ego, Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man and the eighth member, named in Christian Esotericism “Holy Spirit,” and finally the ninth member, the Son, “the Word” in the sense of St. John's Gospel. They had not as yet the tenth member and instead of this they had a lower member, the astral body. These were the Spirits who were active on the Sun, they guided all astral activity. They differ from modern man inasmuch as man breathes air, since air is in the earthly environment; these Spirits, however, breathed warmth or fire.

The Sun was itself a kind of being of air, surrounded by that substance which had previously formed Saturn-fire, warmth. The part that had densified had formed the gaseous Sun, and what had not densified was a surging sea of fire. These beings could live on the Sun and inhale and exhale warmth, fire; they were therefore called the Spirits of Fire. They stood at the human level on the Sun and they worked in the service of humanity. One calls them Sun Spirits or Fire Spirits. Man at that time was at the stage of sleep-consciousness, the Sun-Fire Spirits had already the ego consciousness. Since then they too have developed further and ascended to higher degrees of consciousness. One calls them in Christian Esotericism Archangels. And the highest evolved Spirit Who was on the Sun as Fire Spirit, Who today is still active upon the Earth, with very highly evolved consciousness, this Sun or Fire Spirit is the Christ. In the same way the most evolved Saturn Spirit is the Father God.

Christian Esotericism knows that there was incarnated in the body of flesh and blood of Christ-Jesus precisely such a Sun-Fire Spirit, and indeed the highest, the Regent of the Sun Spirits. That He might come on to the Earth He had to make use of a physical body, He had to live under the same earthly conditions as man, in order to be able to manifest here.

Thus on the Sun we are concerned with a Sun-body, as it were, a body of the Sun planet with Ego-Spirits, who are Fire Spirits, and with a Regent of the Sun, the most highly evolved, the Christ. While the Earth was the Sun, this Spirit was the central Spirit of the Sun; when the Earth was Moon, He was more highly developed, but He remained with the Moon; when the Earth was Earth, He was very highly developed and remained with the Earth. He forms thus the highest planetary Spirit of the Earth. The Earth today is His Body as at that time the Sun was. Therefore you must take St. John's words literally, “Whoever eats my bread, treads me under foot.” For the Earth is the Body of Christ. And when men who eat bread, taken from the body of the earth, walk upon the earth, then they tread under foot the Body of Christ. Take these words quite literally, as all religious documents must be taken. Only one must first know the true meaning of the letters and then seek for the spirit.

One thing more. Not all beings within this Sun-mass came to the stage of evolution of which I have spoken to you. Many stayed behind at the stage of the Saturn existence. They could not receive into themselves what streamed in from cosmic space and send it back after receiving it; they had to send it back direct, they could not permeate themselves with it. These beings therefore appeared on the Sun as a kind of dark intermixture, as something that could not send out its own light. Since they were enclosed in the Sun-mass surrounded by a mass sending out its own light, they worked as dark places. We must therefore distinguish between those places in the Sun which radiated out into cosmic space what they had received, and those which could radiate out nothing. Thus they worked as dark wedges within the Sun-mass, they had learnt nothing in addition to what they had on Saturn. Just as in the human body you do not find glands and organs of growth everywhere, but the body is interspersed with dead parts which have been incorporated, so was the Sun interspersed with these dark wedges.

Our present sun is the descendant of the Earth-Sun-body; it has cast out the moon and the earth and has retained the most advanced part. What was present in the former Sun-body as relics of Saturn are still to be found in the present sun, as the so-called sunspots. They are the last vestiges of Saturn, which remain in the shining sun-mass as dark portions. Our occult wisdom discloses the hidden spiritual sources of physical facts. Physical science substantiates the physical causes of the sunspots through its astronomy and astrophysics; the spiritual causes, however, lie in that residue remaining from Saturn.

We now ask what kingdoms were there on Saturn? Only one kingdom, the last traces of which are contained in the present mineral. When we speak of man's passing through the mineral kingdom, we must not think of the present mineral. The last descendants of the Saturn mineral must far rather be seen in your eyes, ears and other sense organs. Those are the most physical, the most mineral parts of you. The apparatus of the eye is like a physical instrument and even continues unchanged for some time after death.

The single Saturn kingdom progressed on the Sun to a kind of plant existence. Man's own body confronts us there growing like a plant. What was left behind as Saturn kingdom was a kind of mineral kingdom of the Sun, which had the form of stunted sense organs which could not reach their goal. But all these beings on the Sun, these developing human bodies, had as yet no nervous system within them. That was incorporated for the first time on the Moon by the astral body. Plants too have no nervous system. It is an error of physical science when it ascribes one to them.

But the astral bodies, especially those that proceeded from the Fire Spirits, sent a kind of stream into the substance that was down below as physical and etheric bodies. These light streams divided in tree-like forms. Their last traces are to be found in densified form as the organ we call the Solar Plexus. This goes back to the ancient in-streaming on the Sun, densified to substance and hence the name Solar-plexus.

You must picture the bodies which you had on the Sun as if currents from above streamed into you, currents interlaced as a branching tree. Thus the Sun is represented in the numberless interlacings which are your solar-plexus. These branches were represented in German mythology as the World Ash, which, however, means very much besides.

Then the Sun passed into a sleep-condition and was transformed into what in occult science we call the Moon. In this we have to do with yet a third incarnation of the Earth, which will again introduce to us a directing Central Spirit.

As the highest Regent of Saturn, the Ego Spirit appears to us as the Father God, the highest God of the Sun, the Sun-God, as Christ, so will the Regent of the Moon-stage of the Earth appear to us as the Holy Spirit with His Hosts, which in Christian esotericism are called the Messengers of the Godhead, the Angels.

We have completed two Days of Creation, which in the esoteric language are called:

• Dies Saturni
• Dies Solis

To them we must add: Dies Lunae (the Moon-Day).

The existence of a directing Godhead of Saturn, Sun and Moon has always been known.

The words Dies = Day and Deus = God have the same origin, so that Dies may be translated either Day or Godhead. One can just as well say for Dies Solis Sun-Day or Sun-God and mean by both the Christ Spirit.

In the preceding lecture I tried to present what I had to tell you about the Mystery of the Grail and its connections in such a way as to let you see how these things reveal themselves gradually to the seeker's soul. I have not withheld the various difficulties that must be gone through before that which may be called the result of research is given to the soul from out of the spiritual world. Of course I know very well that if modern psychology, which remains so superficial, gets hold of such descriptions, it will bring forward all possible—or rather the most impossible—objections. And I am well aware of all the doubts that can be raised, the curious assertions about all sorts of laws and associations of ideas and subconscious images. In spite of all this—and precisely in full consciousness of it—I have for once given you this unvarnished account, because for you, as anthroposophists, it should be important to be clear that the results to which one has to come in spiritual research are to be reached only after overcoming all the things which, as I told you yesterday, stand in the way. And the final result of spiritual research is not the outcome of ideas that have been put together, as might be supposed. For these ideas are like messengers leading to the final result and have nothing to do with the result itself.

I wanted to make these preliminary remarks because the latest publications show what happens again and again when these expositions are printed as lecture-courses. They are given to people outside our Movement, who then make the most senseless remarks about them and of course take pleasure in quoting from them out of context and so on. And let me also say—without the least wish to appear presumptuous—that because of our Movement a time has come when someone or other may think it profitable to attack us. And we can be sure that for such a purpose any means would serve.

I have said that the stellar script is to be found in the heavens, but it is not in any sense the Grail and it does not yield us the Grail. I have expressly emphasised—and I beg you to take this emphasis very seriously—that the name of the Grail is to be found through the stellar script, not the Grail itself. I have pointed to the fact that in the gold-gleaming sickle of the moon—as any close observer can see—the dark part of the moon emerges and is as though marked off from the bright sickle; and there, in occult writing, is to be found the name of Parsifal.

Now before we go further and try to interpret this sign in the heavens, I must draw your attention to an important law, an important fact. The gold-gleaming sickle becomes apparent because the physical rays of the sun fall on the moon. The illuminated part of the moon shines out as the gold-gleaming vessel. Within it rests the dark Host: physically, this is the dark part not reached by the sun's rays; spiritually, there is something else. When the rays of the sun fall on part of the moon and are reflected in gleaming light, something does nevertheless pass through the physical matter. This something is the spiritual element that lives in the sun's rays. The spiritual power of the sun is not held back and reflected, as the sun's physical power is; it goes through; and because it is resisted by the power of the moon, what we see at rest in the golden vessel is actually the spiritual power of the sun. So we can say: In the dark part of the moon we are looking at the spiritual power of the sun. In the gold-gleaming part, the vessel, we see reflected the physical power of the sun. The Spirit of the sun rests in the vessel of the sun's physical power. So in truth the Spirit of the sun rests in the vessel of the moon. And if we now recollect all that we have ever said about this Sun-spirit in relation to the Christ, then in what the moon does physically an important symbol will be manifest. Because the moon reflects the sun's rays and in this way brings into being the gold-gleaming vessel, it appears to us as the bearer of the Sun-spirit, for the Sun-spirit appears within the moon's vessel in the form of the wafer-like disc.

And let us remember that in the Parsifal saga it is emphasised that on every Good Friday, and thus during the Easter festival, the Host descends from Heaven into the Grail and is renewed; it sinks into the Grail like a rejuvenating nourishment—at the Easter festival, when Parsifal is again directed towards the Grail by the hermit; at the Easter festival, whose significance for the Grail has also been brought nearer to mankind again through Wagner's Parsifal.

Now let us recall how in accordance with an old tradition—one of those traditions of which I spoke yesterday as having arisen from the working of the Christ Impulse in the depths of the soul—the date of the Easter festival was established. Which is the day appointed for the Easter festival? The day when the vernal sun, which means the sun that is gathering strength—our symbol for the Christ—reaches the first Sunday after the full moon. How does the vernal full moon stand in the heavens at the Easter festival—how must it stand? It must begin, at least a little, to become a sickle. Something must be visible of the dark part; something of the Sun-spirit, Who has gained his vernal strength, must be within it. This means that, according to an ancient tradition, the picture of the Holy Grail must appear in the heavens at the Easter festival. It must be so. At the Easter festival, therefore, everyone can see this picture of the Holy Grail. According to a very ancient tradition, the date of the Easter festival is regulated with this in view.

Now let us try again to get our bearings with regard to developments that have taken their course below the surface of soul-life. Yesterday we said that the force which emerged in the Sibyls had to be moderated; it had to be permeated by the Christ Impulse; and in this moderated form it had to reappear, so that it might become the bearer of spiritual culture in later times. Now let us ask: Was Parsifal—as Chrestien de Troyes calls him—able to perceive in himself something of the Christ Impulse at work in the depths of his soul?

If we look back once more at the primal character of the ancient Hebrew Geology, one thing strikes us again and again. We shall grasp the spirit of this ancient Hebrew Geology only if we realise that the whole of Hebrew antiquity tried with all its might to hold fast to the geological character of its revelations. I have shown how these revelations must be looked for, and can everywhere be traced, in the activities and spiritual mobility of the Earth. The Hebrew endeavour was to keep at bay the elemental activities that derive from the stars and served to stimulate spiritually the power of the Sibyls. The influence of the stars was justified in the Astrology of the third post-Atlantean epoch, for humanity then retained so much of the old ancestral spirituality that when men devoted their souls to the elements, they absorbed a good influence from the stars.

During the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the power of the stars receded in face of the elements which surround the Earth in the atmosphere and everywhere else. The influx of the elements was felt in such a way that anyone who understood the spirit of the age, especially as the fourth epoch advanced further and further, was constrained to say to himself: “Let us guard ourselves against the influence that plays into the elements from the stars: it produces something like the unlawful Sibylline forces.” Through the Christ Impulse having poured itself out into the Earth's aura, the Sibylline forces were to be harmonised and rendered capable of again yielding lawful revelations. Never willingly did the true initiate of Hebrew antiquity look to the stars when he wished for a revelation of the spirit. He had vowed himself to the Jahve-god who belongs to the evolution of the Earth and (as I have shown in Occult Science) had become a moon god only in order to help the Earth forward.

In the moon festivals of the Jews it was made clear that the ‘Lord of the Earth’ shines down symbolically in his reflection from the moon. “But go no further”—that was the warning given by old Hebrew tradition to the pupil—“Go no further! Be content with what Jahve reveals in his moon symbol—go no further! The time has not yet come for drawing out of the elements anything more than is expressed in the moon symbol. Anything more would belong to the unlawful Sibylline forces.”

When all that has come over into Earth evolution from the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods is grasped in its natural aspect, then we find it symbolised in the old Hebrew tradition through Eve. Eve—the vowels are never clearly pronounced—Eve! Add to it the sign for the divine Being of Hebrew antiquity who is the Ruler of Earth-history, and we have a form which is quite as valid as any other—Jehve-Jahve, the ruler of the Earth who has his symbol in the moon. If we bring this into conjunction with what has come over from the Moon period and with its outcome for Earth evolution, we have the Ruler of the Earth united with the Earth Mother, whose powers are a result of the Moon period ... Jahve! Hence out of Hebrew antiquity there emerges this mysterious connection of the Moon forces, which have left their remains in the moon known to astronomy and their human forces in the female element in human life. The connection of the Ruler of the Earth with the Moon Mother is given to us in the name Jahve.

Now I should like to bring before you two facts which will perhaps indicate how, under the influence of the Christ Impulse, the Sibylline forces have been transformed in the subconscious depths of soul-life. I want to touch on a manifestation to which I called attention three years ago—three years almost to the day—the transformation of a Sibyl under the influence of the Christ Impulse. In the lectures printed under the title of Occult History: Personalities and Events in the Light of Spiritual Science,¹ I referred to the appearance of the Maid of Orleans. I pointed out how events of the greatest importance for the destiny of Europe in the subsequent era flowed from what the Maid of Orleans accomplished under the influence of her inspirations, fully permeated by the Christ Impulse, beginning in the autumn of 1428. From external history one can indeed learn that the destiny of Europe would have been very different if the Maid of Orleans had not appeared when she did, and only an entirely obsessed materialist, such as Anatole France, can deny that something mysterious came into history at that time.

I will not repeat here what can be read in history books; anyone who has listened to these lectures can see that something like a modern Sibyl emerged in the Maid of Orleans. It was the time—the fifteenth century—when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch begins; a time when the Christ Impulse had to emerge more and more from the subconscious depths of the soul. We can see in what a gentle, tender form, imbued with the noblest qualities of the human soul, the Sibylline power of the Maid of Orleans is revealed. I would like to take this opportunity of reading to you a letter written by a man who lived through these events, for it shows what an impression the Sibylline power of the Maid of Orleans made on those who had a heart and feeling for it. He was a man in the entourage of the King whom the Maid of Orleans liberated. After describing her achievements, he writes:

“This and much more has the Maid brought about, and with God's help she will accomplish still greater things. The girl is of appealing beauty and manly bearing; she speaks little and shows remarkable sagacity; when she speaks she has a pleasing, delicately feminine voice. She eats little and abstains from wine. She takes pleasure in fine horses and weapons and admires well-accoutered and noble men. To be obliged to meet and converse with large numbers of people is abhorrent to her; her tears often overflow; she loves a happy face, endures unheard of toil, and is so assiduous in the manipulation and bearing of weapons that she remains uninterruptedly for six days—day and night—in full armour. She says that the English have no right to France, and therefore—as she says—God has sent her to drive them out and conquer them, but only after previous warning. For the King she shows the deepest veneration; she says he is beloved by God, is under special protection, and will therefore be preserved. Of the Duke of Orleans, your nephew, she says that he will be delivered in a miraculous way, but only after a demand for his release has been made to the English who hold him prisoner.

With that, revered Duke, I bring my report to a conclusion. Still more wonderful things are happening and have happened than I can write of or describe to you in words. While I write this, the aforesaid Maid has already gone to the neighbourhood of the city of Rheims in Champagne, whither the King has hastily set off for his anointing and crowning under God's protection. Most respected and powerful Duke and greatly honoured master! I commend myself to you in all humility, while praying the Almighty to protect you and fulfil your desires. Written at Biteromis, the 21st day of June (in the year 1429).

Your humble servant
Percival,

Lord of Bonlamiulk, Counselor and Chamberlain of the King of the French and of the Duke of Orleans, Seneschal of Berry.”

So wrote a Percival to the Duke of Milan about the Maid. Anyone reading it will feel how we have here a description of a Christ-filled Sibyl.

That is one thing: the other to which I wish to call your attention is also a fact from the new times that the fifth post-Atlantean epoch brought in. It is something written by a man who, one might say, was justified in feeling himself permeated with the spirit of this new epoch—so much so that what he experienced unconsciously might be expressed as follows: ‘Yes, a time is coming when the old Astrology will live again in a new form, a Christ-filled form, and then, if one can practise it properly, so that it will be permeated with the Christ Impulse, one may venture to look up to the stars and question them about their spiritual script.’ Here was a man—as you will shortly see—who felt deeply that the Earth is not as modern materialistic geology portrays it, purely physical and mineral, but a living being, endowed not merely with a body, as the modern materialist wants us to believe, but also with a soul. He knew this in such a way that he could feel something like the following (although he could not have expressed it in these words, since the Spiritual Science of today was not then available): ‘The Christ Impulse has been received by the Earth-soul into its aura, and so a man whose soul feels imbued with the Earth's aura, and with the Christ Impulse, may again look up to what is written in the stars.’ And in fact this was done; men did look up to the stars. Although this approach brought with it a great deal of superstition, especially among the old astronomers who appeared at that time, yet we find a certain man, deeply bound up with the spiritual life of the new epoch, writing in this way:

“These and countless other changes and phenomena which take place on the earth are so exact and regular that they cannot be ascribed to a blind cause, and since the planets themselves know nothing of the angles which their rays make with the earth, the earth must have a soul. The earth is an animal.” [He does not mean an animal in the ordinary sense, but a living organism.] “One can observe in the earth a complete analogy with the parts of an animal body. Plants are its hair; metals are its veins; the waters of the sea are its drink. The earth has a formative power, a kind of imagination; it has movement, certain illnesses, and ebb and flow are its respirations. The soul of the earth seems to be a kind of flame; hence the subterranean warmth and the fact that without warmth there is no propagation. A certain image of the Zodiac and of the whole firmament is imprinted by God in the soul of the earth.

“This is the bond between the heavens and the earth, the cause of sympathy between heaven and earth; the archetypes of all these movements and functions are implanted by God the Creator in the earth. The soul is in the centre of the earth; it sends out forms or impressions of itself in all directions, and in this way experiences all harmonious changes and objects outside itself. As it is with the soul of the earth, so is it with the soul of man. All mathematical ideas and proofs, for example, are created by the soul from out of itself, or they would not have such a high degree of certainty and precision.

“The planets and their aspects have influence on the soul-powers of men. They stir up emotions and passions of all kinds, leading often to the most terrible actions and events. They have influence on conception, and therefore on human temperament and character; a great part of astrology has to do with this. Probably the sun does not only radiate light and warmth throughout the cosmos; it may also be the seat and centre of pure reason and the source of universal harmony. And all the planets are ensouled.

“In the whole creation there is a magnificent and wonderful harmony, in the realm of the senses as well as in the super-sensible, in ideas as well as in things, in the kingdoms of nature and in the gifts of Grace. This harmony is found both in things themselves and in the relations between them. The highest harmony is God, and He has impressed on all souls an inner harmony as his signature. Numbers, shapes, the stars and nature in general, harmonise with certain mysteries of the Christian religion. Thus for example in the cosmos there are three things at rest, the sun, the fixed stars and the intermedium, and all else is in movement; and so in the one God are Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The sphere represents the Trinity: the Father is the centre, the Son the surface, and the Holy Spirit the uniformity of the distance from centre to surface (the radius); and so it is with other mysteries. Without spirits and souls there would not be harmony everywhere. In human souls we find harmonious pre-dispositions of an endlessly varied kind. The whole earth is ensouled, and thus the great harmony is brought about, not only on earth but between the earth and the constellations. This soul works throughout the body of the earth, but it has its seat in a particular place, just as the human soul has its seat in the heart; and from this place, as though from a focus or source, its workings go out into the ocean and the atmosphere. Hence the sympathy between the earth and the stars; hence the regularity of nature's processes. The fact that the earth truly has a soul is shown most clearly by observing weather conditions and the aspects under which they habitually occur. Under certain aspects and constellations the air is always restless; if such aspects are not present, or are few or transient, the air remains quiet.”

Thus wrote a man in 1607; a man in whom lived and pulsed, as the new age came in, the Christ-filled Astrology which draws after it, merely as its shadow, astrological superstition. Thus wrote a man out of the most devout mood of soul; a man who knew that people had formerly made use—at first rightly and afterwards wrongly—of the forces that spring from the elemental world, the Sibylline forces we should now call them. For it cannot be denied, he wrote, that such spirits—he means spirits which maintain communication between the stars and the earth—establish themselves in the elements which surround the earth as its atmosphere. He continues:

“It cannot be denied that such spirits formerly imparted their oracular sayings to men through idols and oak-trees, out of groves and grottoes, through animals and so on; and sooth-saying from the flight of birds was not merely an art of deceiving the weak. Those spirits were active in guiding the birds through the air, and by this means, with God's permission, much was intimated to men in former times. Even today we hear stories of fateful birds, such as owls, vultures, eagles, ravens, but the more such stories are despised, the rarer they become. For these spirits cannot bear being despised, as according to the law of God and Christian teaching, they certainly deserve to be: they prefer to fly away and keep silent. From the beginning the lying Tempter was allowed to speak through animals: he spoke to Eve through the serpent and thus he led the human race astray. That was always the way of these spirits from then onwards: whenever they could speak to men through the bodies and movements of animals, through voices or portents, they misused this power, appropriating for themselves the reverence due to God and misleading unhappy men. And now, although Christ came to destroy the work of the Devil, and imposed silence on these spirits, and although they lost their temple-statues, their groves and their caves and the earth they had so long possessed, yet they are always here still in the empty air, and with God's permission they utter their scattered cries. Often they are God's scourges; often he allows certain things to be announced through them to men.”

The author of these words gives a gentle indication of how the spiritual revelations come to be permeated by Christ, for he writes in a frame of mind that can truly be called Christ-filled. In 1607 he spoke thus of the changes that had come about in the spiritual world. Who is this man? Is he someone who has no right to speak, someone we can leave unheard? No, for without him we should have no modern Astronomy or Physics: he is Johannes Kepler. And one would like to advise those who call themselves materialists or monists and look to Kepler as their idol—one would like to advise them to consider carefully, just for once, this passage in Kepler's writings. The greatest astronomical laws, the three Kepler laws, which dominate present-day Astronomy, are his. Yet you have heard how he speaks of the new influence which gradually enters into Earth evolution with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. We must all again get accustomed by degrees—having thoroughly absorbed the new influence—to recognise something of the spiritual activities connected with the stars.

What sort of time was it, then, when Parsifal entered the Grail Castle, still ignorant, not ready to ask questions—according to the later tradition taken up by Wolfram von Eschenbach? What sort of time was it when Parsifal entered the Castle, where Amfortas lay wounded and on Parsifal's arrival suffered unceasing pain from his wound? What was this time? The saga itself tells us—it was a Saturn time.² Saturn and the Sun stood together in Cancer, approaching culmination. So we see how in the most intimate effects a connection between the Earth and the Stars is established. It was a Saturn time!

And if we now ask how Parsifal gradually gains knowledge, what do we find? Who is he, this Parsifal? He is ignorant of certain things; he is held to be ignorant—but of what? Now we have heard that the Christ Impulse flows on as though through subterranean channels in the depths of the soul. Up above, the theological controversies go on, and from them traditional Christianity takes shape. Let us follow the personality of Parsifal, as the saga portrays him. He knows nothing about the surface course of events; he is kept in ignorance precisely of all that. He is protected from it. What he learns to know comes from sources active in the depths of the soul, as we heard yesterday. At first, riding away in ignorance from the Grail Castle, he learns it from the woman who mourns the dead bridegroom in her lap; then from the hermit, who is brought into connection with mystic powers; and from the power of the Grail, for it is on a Good Friday that he comes to the hermit; already the power of the Grail is working in him unconsciously. Thus he is one of those who know nothing of what has been going on externally; one of those who are led into relation with the influences flowing from unconscious sources to meet the new age. He is a man whose heart and soul were to receive in innocence, undisturbed by the effects of the external world on human life, the secret of the Grail. He is to receive the secret with the highest, purest, noblest forces of the soul. He has to meet someone who has not developed the soul-forces which could completely experience the Grail: he has to meet Amfortas. We know that Amfortas had indeed been marked out as the Guardian of the Grail, but he succumbed to the lower forces in human nature. And how he had succumbed is connected with the Guardianship of the Grail: he had killed his adversary out of lust and jealousy. These things are obvious, but as they are repeatedly misunderstood it must be said that Anthroposophy does not teach asceticism. Something much deeper lies behind.

As late as the third post-Atlantean epoch there were natural elemental forces which were taken into consideration not so much for the way in which they were expressed in daily life as for the connection they revealed with the spiritual world. The elemental forces that pulsed in the human blood and nervous system were raised into a relationship with the Mysteries. It was not a question of subjecting the senses to ascetic discipline, but of becoming aware of the Holy Mysteries. In the third post-Atlantean epoch one could still come to the Mysteries with the same forces which otherwise dominate men on Earth. But the time was at hand when the Holy Mysteries were to be revealed only to the pure and blameless forces of the soul; when men would find the possibility of rising above the bonds which tie them to an earthly calling. Anthroposophy does not seek to estrange anyone from the Earth; but it was then a question of raising oneself above those earthly ties and from the influence of the old Astrology. A man had to raise himself if he was to find the old Mysteries in the new way—with the powers of the innocent soul which had freed itself from everything earthly.

Over against the contrast set up by Hebrew antiquity, another contrast had to be created. Hebrew antiquity had rigorously insisted: “Nothing of the Sibylline forces, which were justified at one time in Astrology—nothing of them! Let us cleave to our earth-god, Jahve!” From this came a denial of all revelations from above and an acceptance of revelations from below; a fear of all that reveals itself from the heavens. This outlook had to prevail on Earth for a season; a certain opposition to anything that came from above had to establish itself. And in such forces as those of the Sibyls people saw the unlawful Luciferic forces coming from above. But presently, after the Christ had descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth, that which came from above was imbued with the Christ Impulse; men could venture again to look up to the heavens. And something else had come about through the union of the Ruler of Earth with the Moon-Mother. For the Christ, Who had poured Himself out into the Earth's aura, had become the Lord of the Earth.

Worldly concerns, such as were pursued at the court of King Arthur,³ could be approached with earthly forces, but it was not permitted to approach the concerns of the Holy Grail in this way, as Amfortas had found. Anyone who attempted it was bound to suffer pain. And since the working of the stars had been permeated by the Christ, a man had to be found who had remained untouched by the controversies in the external world, and through his karma stood at a point where his soul could be approached by Christ; a man, too, who was related to the forces indicated by the symbol of the Saturn time, with Saturn and the Sun standing together in the sign of Cancer. So it was that Parsifal, in whom the Christ Impulse was still working unconsciously, in the depths of his soul, comes with the power of Saturn; and the wound burns as it had never burnt before.

Thus we see how the new age declares itself; how the soul of Parsifal is related to the new, subconscious, historical impulse permeated by the Christ aura, the Christ Impulse, although he knows nothing of it. But the forces which had guided human history from below the surface were gradually to emerge; and Parsifal, accordingly, had to come by degrees to understand something that will never be understood unless it is approached with the pure and blameless forces of the soul, and not with traditional knowledge and scholarship. Then we can see—for this has by now come to the surface and is almost as familiar as the name of the Holy Grail itself—how it represents the renewing in a different form of what ancient Hebraism had fought in its day.

Let us set before us the Virgin Mother with the Christ upon her knees and let us then express it thus: He who can feel the holiness of this picture will feel the same for the Holy Grail. Above all other lights, all other gods, shines the Holy Vessel—the Moon-Mother now touched by Christ, the new Eve, the bearer of the Sun-spirit, Christ.

Think of the “what”, but still more of the “how”! And let us look into the soul of Parsifal: how, riding out from the Grail Castle, he encounters the sight of the bride and bridegroom, which brings him into connection with subconscious Christ forces. Let us look how the hermit at Eastertide, when the picture of the Grail is written in the heavens, in the stellar script, gives instruction to Parsifal's pure soul. Let us follow him as he rides on—as I emphasised yesterday—by day and night, looking at Nature by day and with the symbol of the Holy Grail often before him at night; how he rides on, having before him the gold-gleaming sickle of the moon, with the Host, the Christ Spirit, the Sun-spirit, within it. Let us see how on his way he is made ready to understand the secret of the Holy Grail by the concordance between the picture of the Virgin Mother with her bridegroom Son and the sign of the heavenly script.

Let us see how the permeation of the Earth's destiny with the Christ Impulse works together in his soul with the stellar script which has to be made new; let us see how all that is permeated with Christ is related to the forces of the stars. ... Since Parsifal had to enter the, Grail Castle at a Saturn time, it was inevitable that the wounds of the man, Amfortas, who had failed to abide rightly by the Grail should burn more fiercely.

Think of the “what”, but still more of the “how”! For it is not a question of characterising such things with the words I have been using, or with any words. There is no way of approach to the Grail through words of any kind, or through philosophical speculations. The only way is by changing all these words into feeling, by becoming able to feel in the Grail the sum of all that is holy, by feeling the confluence of that which came over from the Moon period, appearing first in the Earth Mother, Eve, and then newly in the Virgin Mother; of the Jahve-god who became Ruler of the Earth, and of the coming of the Christ Being, Who poured Himself into the Earth's aura and became the new Lord of the Earth; by feeling the confluence of that which works down from the stars, and is symbolised in the stellar script, with human evolution on Earth. If one takes all this into account and feels it as the consonance of human history with the stellar script, then one also grasps the secret that was to be expressed in the words entrusted to Parsifal in the saga: that whenever a King of the Grail, a truly appointed Guardian of the Grail, dies, the name of his accredited successor appears on the Holy Grail. “There it is to be read”—which means that it will be necessary to learn to read the stellar script again in a new form.

Let us try to make ourselves worthy to do this; let us try to read the stellar script in the form now given to us. For in fact it is nothing else than a reading of the script when we try to trace out human evolution through the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods, right up to the Vulcan period. But we must recognise in what connection we wish to decipher the stellar script today. Let us make ourselves worthy of it! For not in vain are we told that the Grail was at first carried away from its own place and for a season was not externally perceptible. Let us regard what we are permitted to study in our Anthroposophy as a renewed seeking for the Grail, and let us try to learn to understand the significance of that which formerly spoke as though out of the subconscious depths of the soul and rose gradually into the consciousness of men. Let us try to transform that by degrees into a new and more conscious language! Let us try to explore a wisdom which will disclose to us the connection between the earthly and the heavenly, not relying on old traditions, but in accordance with the way in which it can be revealed today.

And then let us be filled with a feeling of how it was that Parsifal came to the secret of the Grail. Afterwards the secret was kept hidden again, because men had first to seek for the connection of the Earth with cosmic powers in the most external field, the field of the most external science. Let us also understand how it was that a spirit such as Kepler's could in the meantime come to grasp what he set out in his mathematical-mechanical laws of the heavens; but what he added to this, being truly penetrated with the Christ Impulse, had to sink back into the subconscious depths of the soul. When we express what we know how to say today about our Earth-evolution and its connection with the Cosmos, we are speaking in Kepler's sense. Thus we have heard him say:

“Thus for example in the cosmos there are three things at rest, the sun, the fixed stars and the inter-medium, and all else is in movement; and so in the one God are Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The sphere represents the Trinity: the Father is the centre, the Son the surface, and the Holy Spirit the uniformity of the distance from centre to surface (the radius); and so it is with other mysteries. Without spirits and souls there would not be harmony everywhere. In human souls we find harmonious pre-dispositions of an endlessly varied kind. The whole earth is ensouled, and thus the great harmony is brought about, not only on earth but between the earth and the constellations. This soul works throughout the body of the earth, but it has its seat in a particular place, just as the human soul has its seat in the heart; and from this place, as though from a focus or source, its workings go out into the ocean and the atmosphere. Hence the sympathy between the earth and the stars; hence the regularity of nature's processes. The fact that the earth truly has a, soul is shown most clearly by observing weather conditions and the aspects under which they habitually occur. Under certain aspects and constellations the air is always restless; if such aspects are not present, or are few or transient, the air remains quiet.

“These and countless other changes and phenomena which take place on the earth are so exact and regular that they cannot be ascribed to a blind cause, and since the planets themselves know nothing of the angles which their rays make with the earth, the earth must have a soul. The earth is an animal. One can observe in the earth a complete analogy with the parts of an animal body. Plants are its hair; metals are its veins; the waters of the sea are its drink. The earth has a formative power, a kind of imagination; it has movement, certain illnesses, and ebb and flow are its respirations. The soul of the earth seems to be a kind of flame; hence the subterranean warmth and the fact that without warmth there is no propagation. A certain image of the Zodiac and of the whole firmament is imprinted by God in the soul of the earth. “

We see today how this picture of the Zodiac has been imprinted in the soul of the Earth, the aura of the Earth, and let us work gradually towards the other part of Kepler's world-picture—the part which had to remain in the subconscious depths of the soul but shows clearly that what we can give today as a cosmology is a fulfilment of it. Just as our Anthroposophy—or what Anthroposophy should mean to us—must be deeply grounded in the evolution of humanity, so is it inwardly connected with the admonition which resounds to us from the Holy Grail. And if we look at Europe, the Western land of ancient times, and see what memories of the Atlantean epoch lived on into post-Atlantean times; if we see how in the Greek world a last faint echo, sounded, showing how the Nathan Jesus had once been permeated by the Christ in the higher worlds, the Jesus who then descended and accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha—then, if we follow that out, we may ask: Whence did the Christ come? How did He come when He came from on high to be the Lord of the Earth? He passed from the West to the East, and from the East He returned to the West. His external physical covering came down from the realm of the higher Hierarchies. The Beings of those Hierarchies brought it down; it belonged to them. The Parsifal saga reminds us of this in a beautiful way when it says: “A host of Angels brought to Titurel the Holy Grail, the true Mystery of the Christ Jesus, of the connection between the Lord of the Earth and the Virgin Mother; and a host of Angels awaits it again in the realm of the higher Hierarchies.” Let us seek it there; and then we shall gradually come to understand what our anthroposophical world-conception is seeking; we shall gradually press on further and further towards a feeling, a perception, of the celestial aspect of the Holy Grail and thence to its human aspect, to the Mother with the Jesus, the Christ.

Thus we have tried to point the way a little into the realm of human history, in so far as human history is sustained by spiritual powers. And if you have perceived something of what I wished to arouse through my words, not only in your thoughts but in your feeling, the aim of this cycle of lectures will have been achieved. I could quite as well have called it “Concerning the Search for the Holy Grail”. It can be left to each individual to judge whether the religious faiths scattered over the Earth will one day find themselves in agreement with what is here meant by the harmony of all religions. And he can decide also whether what should be understood by the unity of religions is not more closely related to the secret of the Holy Grail, as we have tried to describe it, than is a great deal of talking about the unity of religions, which may in fact be about something quite different

Anyone who wishes to hold fast to a narrow creed will certainly not be immediately convinced by what has been said. This is because he pays heed to the superficial course of events, and so to the external aspect of the real deeds of Christ, which are themselves of a spiritual nature. How a man was led by his karma to the spiritual deeds of Christ; how Parsifal was driven along this path, wherein is prefigured the unity of religions on Earth—that is what we have wished to bring before our souls. And we should keep in mind that continuation of the Parsifal saga which says that when the Grail became invisible in Europe, it was carried to the realm of Prester John, who had his kingdom on the far side of the lands reached by the Crusaders. In the time of the Crusades the kingdom of Prester John, the successor of Parsifal, was still honoured, and from the way in which a search was made for it we must say: If all this were expressed in terms of strict earthly geography, it would show that the place of Prester John is not to be found on Earth.⁴

Was that meant to be a hint, in the European saga that continued the Parsifal saga, that since then, without our being conscious of it, the Christ has been working in the hidden depths of the East; that the religious controversies which take their course on the conscious level in the East could be assuaged by the out-flowings and revelations of the true Christ Impulse, as was meant to happen, in accordance with the Parsifal revelation, in the West? Was the sunlight of the Grail called upon to shine above all other gods on Earth, as is symbolically indicated by the fact that when the maiden carried in the gold-gleaming vessel, with the secret of the Grail within it, the radiance of the Grail outshone the other lights? Ought we to expect—quite contrary to current beliefs—that the Christ power, still working unconsciously, will appear in a changed form and as Ex oriente lux, in the old phrase, will meet with that which has appeared as light in the West? Should one light be able to unite with the other light? But for that it will be necessary for us to be prepared—we who are placed by karma in the geographical and cultural environment over which passed the path of the Christ, when in higher realms He had permeated Jesus of Nazareth in order to journey to the East. Let us look up and feel that the Christ passed through our heights before He was revealed on Earth! Let us make ourselves capable of so understanding Him that we shall not misunderstand what He will perhaps be able to say to us one day, when the time has come for His impulses to flow through other earthly creeds!

• 1. See Lectures II and III of this Course.
• 2. i.e., a period when the forces of Saturn work with particular strength.
• 3. See Cosmic Christianity and the Impulse of Michael, lectures III and VI. Given by Dr. Steiner in Torquay and London, August 1924.
• 4. The editors of the latest German edition (1960) call attention to the probability of certain gaps in the existing shorthand report of this concluding paragraph.

Today I would like to return to a few things concerning human principles. We must seek out what is in the world as it is in ourselves. A clock is a device that is only possible because of an intelligence that has designed it and put it together. It is foolish to say that the clock has given itself this wise arrangement. It would be equally foolish to say that man has created himself in his design.

We have a small organ in our ears, the 'Organ of Corti'. There are hairs on it; and the hairs are tuned to a certain tone. This sounds when a note is struck on the piano. The vibrations of the air are transferred to the hairs, which then resonate. The same is true of the eye. The eye is also a complex apparatus that has come into being through wisdom. Man is wisdom materialized in this way. The world has been made according to thought.

We call the wisdom in space 'cosmic wisdom' or ['Mahat']. Mahat is the sum of wisdom that is spread throughout the world. So it is a distillation of wisdom from the clock. This is just as man draws wisdom from nature.

Mahat is the archetype of wisdom. “Mala” is the image of Mahat in man. According to Indian teaching, it was like this: Brahma was initially alone, slumbering, then he awakened. One night of Brahma was over. The creative wisdom awakens in him. Nothing else existed yet except for the creative wisdom of Brahma. And this creative wisdom is Mahat. A solar system exists as a thought in the mind of Brahma. We think this cosmic thought after him.

Wisdom is present everywhere in the world. It flows from a kind of spiritual seed into our soul. Cosmic wisdom is in the soul. Mala lives in many. Mahat only lives once. When Mahat becomes individual, that is, becomes Mala, it needs a connecting link. That is Ahankara. Through Ahankara, every person is connected to the general wisdom of the world.

I withdraw into myself and step back from the external sense world. By breaking this bridge, I am allowed to look inward. Through Ahankara, I have within me that which is common to all. I have to go back to world wisdom. First, man finds Manas within himself and then he finds Ahankara, which leads him back to unity, to divine wisdom. When we go through Ahankara, you will realize that we are going through an important spiritual process. We generally go up more. It is the awareness that one's own self is a piece of the divine self. I then do not persist in my self, but I begin to feel as a link in the general Mahat. I am only because I was originally brought into the world by a divine thought. Ahankara leads to absorption in the world of God's thoughts. I and the Father are one. I do not speak because I want to, but because I let Ahankara flow in. For the physical sense world, we would be wrong to say, “I and the others are one.” Mahat is at the same time what we call Atma in Theosophy.

I think two thoughts. First: “I want to go to town tomorrow”; and second: “I want to visit a friend.” These are two thoughts that are present in my soul as one. So people are thoughts of Mahat. People are together in Mahat. Mahat has many Atmas, but all Atmas are together in Mahat. This Mahat of the world system in which we develop is the “third Logos”. And so we can say: we consist of three principles, firstly of Manas, secondly of Budhi and thirdly of Atma. When we rise to this, we are no longer individuals.

At the level of the Atma, we call the thought an image. Let us now try to grasp the difference even more clearly. What lives in us as thought is, in its true significance, a shadow image, in its true essence. It behaves like a shadow in relation to an object. The shadow image is only there when the lamp is there and I am there. But one can also sit in such a way that one only ever sees the shadow images. If we could go out into that sphere where the true essence of these shadows is, we would recognize the archetypes. And we also call these archetypes “spirits”. Spirit is a spiritual essence that is both thought and will. Thus it is a creative thought. The living entities are realities, they are individuality. An intellectual thought is what lives with kama manas. If we free the intellectual thought from the symbols, we are left with only a gray generality, an abstract thought. The soul must have passed through this abstract thinking. Then, instead of from below, new content flows in from above. When we walk down the street, our thoughts are stimulated from the outside. But they must also be able to receive impressions from within.

We can make ourselves passive, that is, we can surrender to Mahat, the third Logos. We then call this “spiritual” or “intuition.

In this way, the spiritual flows into us through Ahankara, through Manas. Therefore, Manas can be influenced from above, by Budhi, and from below, by Brahma, by the sense world. We thus have nine principles. Then we still have to deal with the tenth. The seventh principle is the third Logos. We can [also] only speak of seven principles. When a principle disappears downwards, one must enter from above.

Man has currently developed four principles. The fifth principle is emerging, and the following two are still quite undeveloped. What we discard below must be replaced above. Our consciousness does not fill the whole body. We have as little control over the manas body in Kamaloka as you have over the physical body here. After Devachan, Ahankara or Budhi occurs.

It is not as cold in Devachan as it is often made out to be, because the spirits that pass through do not feel. While we are attached to the particular in physical life and Kamaloka, here we feel the great, the whole, the great primal essence of the world, in which all things flow together. Ahankara comes to life all the more once we have freed ourselves from particularity in Kamaloka. The more Kama disappears, the more Budhi arises in us.

The development of Budhi is an essential development of the emotional life, but in such a way that the world of special interests is transformed into the world of common interests. The mystic calls this the purification of the astral body. It would be wrong to think that the mystic should become insensitive. On the contrary, one should not be cold towards the world, but aligned with the center, of which every single being is a part. We must become objective.

Justice in feeling is the same as what St. Paul calls the law. St. Paul says: Through the law sin entered into the world. Without the law sin would have been dead.

You will not be able to call the Kama nature of the lion or the tiger sinful. Because the animal is not capable of awakening in itself, ennobled, that which lives outside as Kama. It is different when the being is capable of uniting all special interests under the law. Budhi is subject to the law. If there were only animal kama natures, there would be no sin in the world.

Out of Budhi is born the law. So long as Kama appears only in nature, there is no sin. Only after there were beings through whom Budhi could work, that is, beings who could shape the law, was there sin. I use the power of feeling to come to the great unity of nature. The animal can find satisfaction in sensual pleasure. Man cannot, because Budhi demands more. Budhi is the sum total of the world of feelings. This has been distributed among the individual creatures. Not a single drop of the world of feelings should be lost. What remains unrefined is still alive, but our task is to lead it back to the common reservoir from which it emerged. That is why Theosophy demands joint action. Our task is to collect the feelings so that they can pass over to the new planet as a unity. What is left over from the moon has been left behind as the eighth sphere, unprocessed. This remainder of our moon is connected with the unprocessed part of our ancestors. It is what pulls us down. These are milestones that have to be dragged along, and this is what causes the delays in cosmic development. This also has to do with what we have come to know under the Brothers of Shadow and their influence.

You have heard, my dear friends, that our Drama Festival had to begin this year with a cancellation. To my great regret we have not been able to give the performance we had intended of The Soul Guardian (La Soeur Gardienne) by our dear friend Edouard Schuré. Even though there were many good reasons for this postponement, it was especially unfortunate in that just at this time, just in this place, the important message in our friend's work should have been brought before our hearts and souls. This dramatic presentation of the undercurrents and fluctuations in human evolution could have given us a better understanding of the tempestuous happenings of our own day as they come and go. The ordinary intelligence of western Europe, schooled nowadays only at the physical level, is unable to throw light on the deeper substrata of these events.

If you look carefully and ponder the events in eastern Europe, you will find significant issues agitating what one can call the folk souls there. What is happening can only be explained by studying the currents surging below the surface of the physical world into the lives of the peoples.³⁰ It is odd how little understanding of heart and soul the western Europeans—with all their intelligence—bring to the roots deep beneath these convulsive movements.

Because of these immediate happenings, therefore, it would seem to be a hint of destiny to see a drama that brings to the surface such national antagonisms. It would have been fascinating not only as an artistic creation but also as a stimulus to our understanding of present-day happenings. It would have brought before our soul vision two contrasting groups of characters: in one, the impulse from the ancient Celtic folk soul still to be found in western Europe; in the other, the genuine Franco-Roman element. We would have been able to see the waves surging out of occult depths playing into our human world and revealing themselves outwardly in the life of the senses. In Schuré's drama, in fact, we are shown that through certain happenings a falsehood is spreading abroad in the physical world, in such a way that relationships among the characters give expression to this untruth. Then—as if from unfathomed depths of soul life (in this case, from what is alive in the secrets of the blood)—a certain amount of truth pours into the false relationships of the sense world. The drama would have brought all this before our inner eye. It is indeed important in our time to let such things work on our hearts, for the force of national feelings lying below the surface is erupting before us right now here in Europe, and these feelings and forces cannot be understood unless we turn our soul vision upon them.

There is little difference, basically, in these outer happenings today from those that were agitating the hearts and minds of the peoples of eastern and southeastern Europe many centuries ago and are even now erupting fatefully into external life. One can say that destiny is being carried out imperceptibly for the outside world, a destiny connected with something that is only a symptom on the physical plane and can be expressed in four syllables. The seeds for what is now manifesting itself so fatefully were sown when that famous, much disputed filioque controversy, inflaming the emotions of the European peoples, divided them into a separate East and West. How can our modern mentality nowadays understand the contention that led to the division of eastern and western Europe: whether what is known as the Holy Spirit originates from the Father God above, as the Eastern church has it, or originates from both Father and Son (filio), as the West maintains?

There were valid reasons for the West at that time to add filioque to the origin of the Holy Spirit from the Father; involved in this were all the forces of culture and civilization developing for the future of Europe. The theological quarrels arising out of this Credo need not concern us here. Of importance are the soul events expressing themselves once upon a time in such a way that the former unified faith was divided between those who said that the Spirit comes from the Father and the Son, while others believed that the Spirit originates only from the Father.

That statement expresses what is working into our own time, bubbling and boiling under the surface, something that can be understood only when you venture a little way into the mysterious activity in the occult depths of the folk souls. At the moment that the dogma of the Spirit emanating from both the Father and the Son was enforced by the Carolingian sword—for it was not the papal church but the imperial power that was effective—at that moment the ground was laid within European culture for all those powerful, emotional waves we see surging upward today.

If we could have immersed ourselves in Schuré's drama, quite a few rays of light would have illuminated present happenings. The reason for postponing it was the otherwise happy circumstance that so many applications came in for The Guardian of the Threshold and The Soul's Awakening, the title of our latest play, that many friends would have had to be turned away if we had kept to the original program. It might have been possible to keep to it; everything was ready: the scenery was all finished, every costume was made—so that if the situation just described had not arisen, this third play could have been performed. But then a number of our friends would have had to be turned away from the festival, and it is naturally more fitting to postpone one of the dramas than to exclude from the events any of those who wish to be present.

What we would have gained from a performance of The Soul Guardian lies in the fact that it is the work of our highly esteemed friend, Edouard Schuré. When we hear this name, we should realize that through Schuré's book The Great Initiates (Les Grands Inities) and his other work, he has been in a sense the first standard-bearer of the western esotericism to which we have resolved to devote ourselves. Again and again, we should remember the influence that Edouard Schuré has had on our present-day culture and for the future of human development. Therefore not only do I wish from the depths of my heart but also from the hearts of all those friends assembled here to express our great joy in having Edouard Schuré here among us again for this Munich lecture and drama festival. He will be present at the morning lectures as well as on those occasions when we are all together; you will happily find yourselves then in the presence of the man whose lofty spirit, whose insight into esoteric relationships led him from inner conviction to place himself at our side again during the battle we have recently been saddled with,³¹ as you all know, a battle that we did not seek but that was thrust upon us. The close bond with Edouard Schuré was shown us, too, by his frank letter,³² which has been frequently printed also in our “Mittellungen” and in our friend Eugene Levy's excellent booklet Mrs. Annie Besant and the Crisis in the Theosophical Society. He stood with us in the struggle that has thrown significant rays of light on where the truth and where an enmity against the truth (for it must be called this) are to be found in connection with our endeavors.

It is altogether typical of the other side that after all this time they have decided to withdraw their senseless accusations of my being a Jesuit, but you can't help noticing their deep-seated reluctance and their desire to draw a veil over this admission. They couldn't accomplish this, however, without adding what one can well call an insulting disparagement of the contents of Edouard Schuré's public letter, written out of his earnest sense for truth. The difficulties of bringing about this Munich Festival, never in any case an easy task, have been increased by the strife thrust upon us (which we will not go into any further), strife that has cost us so much labor and thought and which was truly unnecessary, just as it is unnecessary to continue it.

It would be important now to note briefly for our friends what has been done to bring out the truth. Besides the letter just mentioned and our friend Levy's excellent book that can now be had also in German, I will mention the brochures by Dr. Unger, Frau Wolfram, Herr Walther, to be available with other books at the book table, writing truly wrung from our friends who undoubtedly had something better to do than to enter into an unnecessary battle for the truth. Therefore, for their sake, it is important for the pamphlets not only to be written but also to be read. The time will come, too, when those of our friends who are serious about the truth will have to know what has been happening, un-edifying as the knowledge may be. It is clear that all this has been holding up our work in Munich very badly.

When I come now to speak about this work—as I should like to do again this year—the following must be said: for the people carrying out backstage all the difficult, nerve-racking jobs for this festival, the canceling of one of the dramas did not make their tasks a whit easier. Since the organization as a whole had to be overturned, the work not only was not lessened but was decidedly increased. Therefore please don't assume that with the omission of one of the plays, the burden of the preparations will have been made lighter, for just this main part of the organization, under Fraulein Stinde and Grafin Kalkreuth and their assistants, was considerably more difficult.

This year too I feel the need to point wholeheartedly to the devoted, selfless way in which such a large group of our friends has dedicated itself to bringing about this Munich gathering of ours. It could never take place without the dedication of so many of our friends. This year, as in the past, preparations had to begin in June. Our crew of artists, the gentlemen Linde, Hass and Volckert, had again to devote an enormous amount of time to the work, which they delivered, as mentioned before, completely finished; with them, a whole troop of faithful individuals were busy, working quietly behind the scenes even before the scenery came into being. It is wonderful indeed and will ever and again be a wonder to encounter so much self-sacrifice in this work. To mention a typical example: one of our friends who was asked to undertake two important parts, one in The Guardian of the Threshold and The Soul's Awakening, the other in the Schuré drama, didn't really know whether his strength would hold out through the many necessary rehearsals of the three plays and yet he cheerfully took on the task. All these things bear witness to the selfless dedication that has been growing in a wide circle of friends in our Anthroposophical Society. All those who had to begin their tasks so early, the artist-painters, also Fraulein von Eckhardtstein in charge of the costumes, have been at it since June. The people taking part in the performances are at work the whole day, so that they can hardly undertake anything else. They will forgive me for not naming them all, for they are well known to our friends in the Anthroposophical Society. In view of the long, long list that I would have to read off, they will not be offended if this year again I speak in general about those who have contributed their help. I must say that my heart is overwhelmed with gratitude to them, as are the hearts of each one of you, I am sure, who have been able to enjoy what our friends have prepared for this Munich festival.

Even though to some extent our enemies are springing up on every side, we can also see how our work and our efforts are received ever more widely. Many friends have been attracted by what one can call a new branch of our endeavors, consisting of expressive gesture, expressive movement carried out with beauty and dignity, something one has usually termed art of the dance. A few of you have had the chance to discover what has been shown here as eurythmy and there will be a further opportunity, for at one of our social gatherings this week we want to show our friends something more of this branch of our activity.³³

This, dear friends, is in substance what I had to say in a personal way before beginning our lecture cycle.

• 30. Two short wars in the Balkan, 1912 – 1913, which prepared the way for World War I in 1914.
• 31. Struggles in the Theosophical Society.
• 32. To Charles Bleck, President of the Theosophical Society in France, March 1, 1913, announcing Schure's resignation from the Society which had offered him honorary membership in 1907.
• 33. See Rudolf Steiner, An Introduction to Eurythmy (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1984).

When I made some suggestions last Sunday for a renewal of our Christmas thinking, I spoke of the real, inner human being who comes from the spiritual world and unites with the body that is given to him from the stream of heredity. I described how this human being, when he enters the life he is to experience between birth and death, enters it with a certain sense of equality. I said that someone who observes a child with understanding will notice how he does not yet know of the distinctions that exist in the human social structure, due to all the relationships into which men's karma leads them. I said that if we observe clearly and without prejudice the forces residing in certain capacities and talents, even in genius, we shall be compelled to ascribe these in large measure to the impulses which affect mankind through the hereditary stream; that when such impulses appear clearly in the natural course of that stream, we must call them luciferic. Moreover, in our present epoch these impulses will only be fitted into the social structure properly if we recognize them as luciferic, if we are educated to strip off the luciferic element and, in a certain sense, to offer upon the altar of Christ what nature has bestowed upon us—in order to transform it.

There are two opposite points of view: one is concerned with the differences occurring in mankind through heredity and conditions of birth; the other with the fact that the real kernel of a man's being holds within it at the beginning of his earthly life the essential impulse for equality. This shows that the human being is only observed correctly when he is observed through the course of his whole life, when his development in time is really taken into account. We have pointed out in another connection that the developmental motif changes in the course of life. You will also find reference to this in an article I wrote called “The Ahrimanic and the Luciferic in Human Life,” where it is shown that the luciferic influence plays a certain role in the first half of life, the ahrirnanic in the second half; that both these impulses are active throughout life, but in different ways.

Along with the idea of equality, other ideas have recently been forced into prominence in a tumultuous fashion, in a certain sense precipitating what should have been a tranquil development in the future. They have been set beside the idea of equality, but they should really be worked out slowly in human evolution if they are to contribute to the well-being of humanity and not to disaster. They can only be rightly understood and their significance for life rightly estimated if they are given their proper place in the sequence of a man's life.

Side by side with the idea of equality, the idea of freedom resounds through the modern world. I spoke to you about the idea of freedom some time ago in connection with the new edition of my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. We are therefore able to appreciate the full importance and range of this impulse in relation to the innermost kernel of man's being. Perhaps some of you know that it has frequently been necessary, from questions here and there, to point to the entirely unique character of the conception of freedom as it i is delineated in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. There is a certain fact that I have always found necessary to emphasize in this connection, namely, that the various modern philosophical conceptions of freedom have made the mistake (if you want to call it a mistake) of putting the question thus: Is the human being free or not free? Can we ascribe free will to man? or may we only say that he stands within a kind of absolute natural necessity, and out of this necessity accomplishes his deeds and the resolves of his will? This way of putting the question is incorrect. There is no “either-or.” One cannot say, man is either free or unfree. One has to say, man is in the process of development from unfreedom to freedom. And the way the impulse for freedom is conceived in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, shows you that man is becoming ever freer, that he is extricating himself from necessity, that more and more impulses are growing in him that make it possible for him to be a free being within the rest of the world order.

Thus the impulse for equality has its greater intensity at birth—even though not in consciousness, since the latter is not yet developed—and it then decreases. That is to say, the impulse for equality has a descending development. We may make a diagram thus:

At birth we find the height of the impulse for equality, and it moves in a descending curve. With the impulse for freedom the reverse is true. Freedom moves in an ascending curve and has its culmination at death. By that I do not mean to say that man reaches the summit of a freely-acting being when he passes through the gate of death; but relatively, with regard to human life, a man develops the impulse for freedom increasingly up to the moment of death, and he has achieved relatively the greatest possibility of becoming free at the moment he enters the spiritual world through the gate of death. That is to say: while at birth he brings with him out of the spiritual world the sense of equality which then declines during the course of physical life, it is just during his physical lifetime that he develops the impulse toward freedom, and he then enters the spiritual world through the gate of death with the largest measure of this impulse for freedom that he could attain in the course of his physical life.

You see again how one-sidedly the human being is often observed. One fails to take into account the time element in his being. He is spoken of in general terms, in abstracto, because people are not inclined today to consider realities. But man is not a static being; he is an evolving being. The more he develops and the more he makes it possible to develop, so much the more does he fulfill his true task here in the course of physical life. People who are inflexible, who are disinclined to undergo development, accomplish little of their real earthly mission. What you were yesterday you no longer are today, and what you are today you will no longer be tomorrow. These are indeed slight shades of differences; but happy is he in whom they exist at all—for standing still is ahrimanic! There should be shades of difference. No day should pass in a man's life without his receiving at least one thought that alters his nature a little, that enables him to develop instead of merely to exist. Thus we recognize man's true nature—not when we insist in an absolute sense that mankind has the right to freedom and equality in this world—but only when we know that the impulse for equality reaches its culmination at the beginning of life, and the impulse toward freedom at the end. We unravel the complexity of human development in the course of life here on earth only when we take such things into consideration. One cannot simply look abstractly at the whole man and say: he has the right to find freedom, equality, and so forth, within the social structure. These things must be brought to people's attention again through spiritual science, for they have been ignored by the recent developments that move toward abstract ideas and materialism.

The third impulse, fraternity, has its culmination, in a certain sense, in the middle of life. Its curve rises and then falls. (See diagram.) In the middle of life, when the human being is in his least rigid condition—that is, when he is vacillating in the relation of soul to body—then it is that he has the strongest tendency to develop brotherliness. He does not always do so, but at this time he has the predisposition to do so. The strongest prerequisites for the development of fraternity exist in middle life.

Thus these three impulses are distributed over an entire lifetime. In the times we are approaching it will be necessary for our understanding of other men, and also—as a matter of course—for our so-called self-knowledge, that we take such matters into account. We cannot arrive at correct ideas about community life unless we know how these impulses are distributed in the course of life. In a certain sense we Will be unable to live our lives usefully unless we are willing to gain this knowledge; for we will not know exactly what relation a young man bears to an old man, or an older person
to one in middle life, unless we keep in mind the special configuration of these inner impulses.

But now let us connect all this with lectures⁵ I gave here earlier about the whole human race gradually becoming younger. Perhaps you recall that I explained how the particular dependence of soul development upon the physical organism that a human being has today only during his very earliest years was experienced in ancient times up to old age. (We are speaking now only of post-Atlantean epochs.) I said that in the ancient Indian cultural epoch man was dependent upon his so-called physical development into his fifties, in the way that he is now dependent only in the earliest years. Now in the first years of life man is dependent upon his physical development. We know the kind of break the change of teeth causes, then puberty, and so on. In these early years we see a distinct parallel in the development of soul and of body; then this ceases, vanishes. I pointed out that in older cultural epochs of our post-Atlantean period that was not the case. The possibility of receiving wisdom from nature simply through being a human being—lofty wisdom which was venerated among the ancient Indians, and could still be venerated among the ancient Persians—that possibility existed because the conditions were not the same as they are now. Now a man becomes a finished product in his twenties; he is then no longer dependent upon his physical organism. Starting from his twenties, it gives him nothing more. This was not the case in ancient times. In ancient times the physical organism itself gave wisdom to man's soul into his fifties. It was possible for him in the second half of life, even without special occult training, to extract the forces from his physical organism in an elemental way, and thus attain a certain wisdom and a certain development of will. I pointed to the significance of this for the ancient Indian and Persian epochs, even for the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, when it was possible to say to a boy or girl, or young man or young woman: “When you are old you may expect that something will come into your life, will be bestowed upon you simply by your having become old, because one continues to develop up to the time of death.” Age was looked up to with reverence , because a man said to himself: With old age something will enter my life that I cannot know or cannot will while I am still young. That gave a certain structure to the entire social life which only ceased when during the Greco-Latin epoch this point of time fell back into the middle years of human life. In the ancient Indian civilization man was capable of development up to his fifties. Then during the ancient Persian epoch mankind grew younger: that is, the age of the human race, the capacity for development, fell back to the end of a man's forties. During the Egypto-Chaldean epoch it came between the thirty-fifth and the forty-second year. During the Greco-Latin epoch he was only capable of development up to a point of time between the twenty-eighth and the thirty-fifth year. When the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, he had this capability up to the thirty-third year. This is the wonderful fact we discover in the history of mankind's evolution: that the age of Christ Jesus when he passed through death on Golgotha coincides with the age to which humanity had fallen back at that time.

We pointed out that humanity is still becoming younger and younger; that is, the age at which it is no longer capable of development continues to decrease. This is significant, for example, when today a man enters public life at the particular age at which humanity now stands—twenty-seven years—without having received anything beside what he took in from the outside up to his twenty-seventh year. I mentioned that in this sense Lloyd-George⁶ is the representative man of our time. He entered public life at twenty-seven years. This had far-reaching consequences, which you can of course discover by reading his biography. These facts enable one to understand world conditions from within.

Now what strikes you as the most important fact when you connect what we have just been indicating—the increasing youthfulness of the human race—with the thoughts we have brought before our souls in these last days in relation to Christmas? The state of our development since the Mystery of Golgotha is this, that starting from our thirtieth year we can really gain nothing from our own organism, from what is bestowed upon us by nature. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, we would be going about here on earth after our 30th year saying to ourselves: Actually we live in the true sense only up to our thirty-second or thirty-third year at most. Up to that time our organism makes it possible for us to live; then we might just as well die. For from the course of nature, from the elemental occurrences of nature, we can gain nothing more for our soul development through the impulses of our organism. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, the earth would be filled with human beings lamenting thus: Of what use to me is life after my thirty-third year? Up to that time my organism can give me something. After that I might just as well be dead. I really go about here on earth like a living corpse. If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, many people would feel that they are going about on earth like living corpses. But the Mystery of Golgotha, dear friends, has still to be made fruitful. We should not merely receive the Impulse of Golgotha unconsciously, as people now do: we should receive it consciously, in such a manner that through it we may remain youthful up to old age. And it can indeed keep us healthy and youthful if we receive it consciously in the right way. We shall then ' be conscious of its enlivening effect upon our life. This is important!

Thus you see that the Mystery of Golgotha can be regarded as something intensely alive during the course of our earthly life. I said earlier that people are most predisposed to brotherliness in the middle of life—around the thirty-third year, but they do not always develop it. You have the reason for this in what I just said. Those who fail to develop brotherliness, who lack something of brotherliness, simply are too little permeated by the Christ. Since the human being begins to die, in a certain sense, in middle age from the forces of nature, he cannot properly develop the impulse, the instinct, of brotherliness—and still less the impulse toward freedom, which is taken up so little today—unless he brings to life within himself thoughts that come directly from the Christ Impulse. When we turn to the Christ Impulse, it enkindles brotherliness in us directly. To the degree to which a man feels the necessity for brotherliness, he is permeated by Christ.

One is also unable alone to develop the impulse for freedom to full strength during the remainder of one's earthly life. (In future periods of evolution this will be different.) Something entered our earth evolution as human being and flowed forth at the death of Christ Jesus to unite Itself with the earthly evolution of humanity. Therefore Christ is the One who also leads present-day mankind to freedom. We become free in Christ when we are able to grasp the fact that the Christ could really not have become older, could not have lived longer, in a physical body than up to the age of thirty-three years. Suppose hypothetically that He had lived longer: then He would have lived on in a physical body into the years when according to our present earth evolution this body is destined for death. The Christ would have taken up the forces of death. Had he lived to be forty years old, He would have experienced the forces of death in His body. These He would not have wished to experience. He could only have wished to experience those forces that are still the freshening forces for a human being. He was active up to His thirty-third year, to the middle of life; as the Christ He enkindled brotherliness. Then He caused the spirit to flow into human evolution: He gave over to the Holy Spirit what was henceforth to be within the power of man. Through this Holy Spirit, this health-giving Spirit, a human being develops to freedom toward the end of his life. Thus is the Christ Impulse integrated into the concrete life of humanity.

This permeation of man's inner being by the Christ Principle must be incorporated into human knowledge as a new Christmas thought. Mankind must know that we bring equality with us out of the spiritual world. It comes, one might say, from God the Father, and is given to us to bring to earth. Then brotherliness reaches its proper culmination only through the help of the Son. And through the Christ united with the Spirit we can develop the impulse for freedom as we draw near to death.

This activity of the Christ Impulse in the concrete shaping of humanity is something that from now on must be accepted consciously by human souls. This alone will be really health-giving when people's demands for refashioning the social structure become more and more urgent and passionate. In this social structure there live children, youths, middle-aged and old people; and a social structure that embraces them all can only be achieved when it is realized that human beings are not simply abstract Man. The five-year-old child is Man, the twenty-year-old youth, the twenty-year-old young woman, the forty-year-old man—at the present time to undertake an actual observation of human beings, which would result in a consciousness of humanity in the concrete, human beings as they really are. When they are looked at concretely, the abstraction Man-Man-Man has no reality whatsoever. There can only be the fact of a specific human being of a specific age with specific impulses. Knowledge of Man must be acquired, but it can only be acquired by studying the development of the essential living kernel of the human being as he progresses from birth to death. That must come, my dear friends. And probably people will not be inclined to receive such things into their consciousness until they are again able to take a retrospective view of the evolution of mankind.

Yesterday I drew your attention to something that entered human evolution with Christianity. Christianity was born out of the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, and the Roman body. These were the sheaths, so to speak, of Christianity. But within Christianity is the living Ego, and this can be separately observed when we look back to the birth of Christianity. For the external historian this birth of Christianity has become very chaotic. What is usually written today about the early centuries of Christianity, whether from a Roman Catholic or a Protestant point of view, is very confused wisdom. The essence of much that existed in those first Christian centuries is either entirely forgotten by present theologians or else it has become, may I say, an abomination for them. Just read and observe the strange convulsions of intellectualism—they almost become a kind of intellectual epilepsy—when people have to describe what lived in the first centuries of Christianity as the Gnosis.⁷ It is considered a sort of devil, this Gnosis, something so demonic that it should absolutely not be admitted into human life. And when such a theologian or other official representative of this or that denomination can accuse anthroposophy of having something in common with gnosticism, he believes he has made the worst possible charge.

Underlying all this is the fact that in the earliest centuries of Christianity gnosticism did indeed penetrate the spiritual life of European humanity—so far as this was of importance for the civilization of that time—and, moreover, much more significantly than is now supposed. There exists on the one hand, not the slightest idea of what this Gnosis actually was; on the other hand, I might say, there is a mysterious fear of it. To most of the present-day official representatives of any religious denomination the Gnosis is something horrible. But it can of course be looked at without sympathy or antipathy, purely objectively. Then it would best be studied from a spiritual scientific standpoint, for external history has little to offer. Western ecclesiastical development took care that all external remains of the Gnosis were properly eradicated, root and branch. There is very little left, as you know—only the Pistis Sophia and the like—and that gives only a vague idea of it. Otherwise the only passages from the Gnosis that are known are those refuted by the Church Fathers. That means really that the Gnosis is only known from the writings of opponents, while anything that might have given some idea of it from an external, historical point of view has been thoroughly rooted out.

An intellectual study of the development of Western theology would make people more critical on this point as well—but such study is rare. It would show them, for instance, that Christian dogma must surely have its foundation in something quite different from caprice or the like. Actually, it is all rooted in the Gnosis. But its living force has been stripped away and abstract thoughts, concepts, the mere hulls are left, so that one no longer recognizes in the doctrines their living origin. Nevertheless, it is really the Gnosis. If you study the Gnosis as far as it can be studied with spiritual scientific methods, you will find a certain light is thrown upon the few things that have been left to history by the opponents of gnosticism. And you will probably realize that this Gnosis points to the very widespread and concrete atavistic-clairvoyant world conception of ancient times. There were considerable remnants of this in the first post-Atlantean epoch, less in the second. In the third epoch the final remnants were worked upon and appeared as gnosticism in a remarkable system of concepts, concepts that are extraordinarily figurative. Anyone who studies gnosticism from this standpoint, who is able to go back, even just historically, to the meager remnants—they are brought to light more abundantly in the pagan Gnosis than in Christian literature—will find that, as a matter of fact, this Gnosis contained wonderful treasures of wisdom relating to a world with which people of our present age refuse to have any connection. So it is not at all surprising that even well-intentioned people can make little of the ancient Gnosis.

Well-intentioned people? I mean, for instance, people like Professor Jeremias of Leipzig, who would indeed be willing to study these things. But he can form no mental picture of what these ancient concepts refer to—when, for example, mention is made of a spiritual being Jaldabaoth, who is supposed with a sort of arrogance to have declared himself ruler of the world, then to have been reprimanded by his mother, and so on. Even from what has been historically preserved, such mighty images radiate to us as the following: Jaldabaoth said, “I am God the Father; there is no one above me.” And his mother answered, “Do not lie! Above thee is the Father of all, the first Man, and the Son of Man.” Then—it is further related—Jaldabaoth called his six co-workers and they said, “Let us make man in our image.” Such imaginations, quite self-explanatory, were numerous and extensive in what existed as the Gnosis. In the Old Testament we find only remnants of this pictorial wisdom preserved by Jewish tradition. It lived especially in the Orient, whence its rays reached the West; and only in the third or fourth century did these begin to fade in the West. But then there were still some after-effects among the Waldenses and Cathars⁸ that finally died out.

People of our time can hardly imagine the condition of the souls living in civilized Europe during the first Christian centuries, in whom there lived not merely mental pictures like those of present-day Roman Catholics, but in a supreme degree vivid, unmistakable echoes of this mighty world-picture of the Gnosis. What we see when we look back at those souls is vastly different from what we find in books that have been written about these centuries by ecclesiastical and secular theologians and other scholars. In the books there is nothing of all that lived in those great and powerful imaginative pictures describing a world of which, as I have said, people of our time have no conception. That is why a man possessing present-day scholarship can do nothing with such concepts—for instance, with Jaldabaoth, his mother, the six co-workers, and so on. He does not know what to do with them. They are words, word-husks; what they refer to, he does not know. Still less does he know how the people of that earlier age ever came to form such concepts. A modern person can only say, “Well, of course, the ancient Orientals had lively imaginations; they developed all that fantasy.” We ourselves must marvel that such a person has not the slightest idea how little imagination a primitive human being has, what a minor role it plays, for instance, among peasants. In this respect the mythologists have done wonders! They have invented the stories of simple people transforming the drifting clouds, the wind driving the clouds, and so on, into all sorts of beings. They have no idea how the earlier humanity to whom they attribute all this were really constituted in their souls, that they were as far removed as could possibly be from such poetic fashioning. The fantasy really exists in the circles of the mythologists, the scholars who think out such things. That is the real fantasy!

What people suppose to have been the origin of mythology is pure error. They do not know today to what its words and concepts refer. Certain, may I say, clear hints concerning their interpretation are therefore no longer given any serious attention. Plato pointed very precisely to the fact that a human being living here in a physical body has remembrance of something experienced in the spiritual world before this physical life. But present-day philosophers can make nothing of this Platonic memory-knowledge; for them it is something that Plato too had imagined. In reality, Plato still knew with certainty that the Greek soul was predisposed to unfold in itself what it had experienced in the spiritual world before birth, though it still possessed only the last residue of this ability. Anyone who between birth and death perceives only by means of his physical body and who works over his perceptions with a present-day intellect, cannot grant any rational meaning to observations that have not even been made in a physical body but were made between death and a new birth. Before birth human beings were in a world in which they could speak of Jaldabaoth who rose up in pride, whose mother admonished him, who summoned the six co-workers. That is a reality for the human being between death and a new birth, just as plants, animals, minerals, and other human beings are realities for him here in this world, about which he speaks when he is confined in a physical body. The Gnosis contained what was brought into this physical world at birth; and it was possible to a certain extent up to the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, that is, up to the eighth century before the Christian era, for human beings to bring very much with them from the time they had spent between death and a new birth. What was brought in those epochs from the spiritual world and clothed in concepts, in ideas, is the Gnosis. It continued to exist in the Greco-Latin epoch, but it was no longer directly perceived; it was a heritage existing now as ideas. Its origin was known only to select spirits such as Plato, in a lesser degree to Aristotle also. Socrates knew of it too, and indeed paid for this knowledge with his death.

Now what were the conditions in this Greco-Latin age in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? Only meager recollections of time before birth could now be brought over into life, but something was brought over, and in this Greek period it was still distinct. People today are inordinately proud of their power of thinking, but actually they can grasp very little with it. The thinking power that the Greeks developed was of a different nature. When the Greeks entered earthly life through birth, the images of their experiences before birth were lost; but the thinking force that they had used before birth to give an intelligent meaning to the images still remained. Greek thinking differed completely from our so-called normal thinking, for the Greek thinking was the result of pondering over imaginations that had been experienced before birth. Of the imaginations themselves little was recalled; the essential thing that remained was the discernment that had helped a person before birth to find his way in the world about which imaginations had been formed. The waning of this thinking power was the important factor in the development of the fourth post-Atlantean period, which continued, as you know, into the fifteenth century of the Christian era.

Now in this fifth epoch the power to think must again be developed, out of our earthly culture. Slowly, haltingly, we must develop it out of the scientific world view. Today we are at the beginning of it. During the fourth post-Atlantean period, that is, from 747 B.C. to 1413 A.D.—the Event of Golgotha lies between—there was a continual decrease of thinking power. Only in the fifteenth century did it begin slowly to rise again; by the third millennium it will once more have reached a considerable height. Of our present-day power of thought mankind need not be especially proud; it has declined. The thinking power, still highly developed, that was the heritage of the Greeks shaped the thoughts with which the gnostic pictures were set in order and mastered. Although the pictures were no longer as clear as they had been for the Egyptians or the Babylonians, for example, the thinking power was still there. But it gradually faded. That is the extraordinary way things worked together in the earliest Christian centuries.

The Mystery of Golgotha breaks upon the world. Christianity is born. The waning thinking power, still very active in the Orient but also reaching over into Greece, tried to understand this event. The Romans had little understanding of it. This thinking power tried to understand the Event of Golgotha from the standpoint of the thinking used before birth, the thinking of the spiritual world. And now something significant occurred: this gnostic thinking came face to face with the Mystery of Golgotha. Now let us consider the gnostic teachings about the Mystery of Golgotha, which are such an abomination to present-day, especially Christian, theologians. Much is to be found in them from the ancient atavistic teachings, or from teachings that are permeated by the ancient thought-force; and many significant and impressive things are said in them about the Christ that today are termed heretical, shockingly heretical. Gradually this power of gnostic thought declined. We still see it in Manes⁹ in the third century, and we still see it as it passes over to the Cathars—downright heretics from the Catholic point of view: a great, forceful, grandiose interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha. This ebbed away, strangely enough, in the early centuries, and people were little inclined to apply any effort toward an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. These two things, you see, were engaged in a struggle: the gnostic teaching, wishing to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha through powerful spiritual thinking; and the other teaching, that reckoned with what was to come, when thought would no longer have power, when it would lack the penetration needed to understand the Mystery of Golgotha, when it would be abstract and unfruitful. The Mystery of Golgotha, a cosmic mystery, was reduced to hardly more than a few sentences at the beginning of the Gospel of St. John, telling of the Logos, of His entrance into the world and His destiny in the world, using as few concepts as possible; for what had to be taken into account was the decreasing thinking power.

Thus the gnostic interpretation of Christianity gradually died out, and a different conception of it arose, using as few concepts as possible. But of course the one passed over into the other: concepts like the dogma of the Trinity were taken over from gnostic ideas and reduced to abstractions, mere husks of concepts.The really vital fact is this, that an inspired gnostic interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha was engaged in a struggle with the other explanation, which worked with as few concepts as possible, estimating what humanity would be like by the fifteenth century with the ancient, hereditary, acute thinking power declining more and more. It was also reckoning that this would eventually have to be acquired again, in elementary fashion, through the scientific observation of nature. You can study it step by step. You can even perceive it as an inner soul-struggle if you observe St. Augustine,¹⁰ who in his youth became acquainted with gnostic Manichaeism, but could not digest that and so turned away to so-called “simplicity,” forming primitive concepts. These became more and more primitive. Even so, in Augustine there appeared the first dawning light of what had again to be acquired: knowledge starting from man, from the concrete human being. In ancient gnostic times one had tried to reach the human being by starting from the world. Now, henceforth, the start must be made from man: knowledge of the world must be acquired from knowledge of the human being. This must be the direction we take in the future. I explained this here some time ago and tried to point to the first dawning light in humanity. One finds it, for instance, in the Confessions of St. Augustine—but it was still thoroughly chaotic. The essential fact is that humanity became more and more incapable of taking in what streamed to it from the spiritual world, what had existed among the ancients as imaginative wisdom and then was active in the Gnosis, what had evoked the power of acute thinking that still existed among the Greeks. Thus the Greek wisdom, even though reduced to abstract concepts, still provided the ideas that allowed some understanding of the spiritual world. This then ceased; nothing of the spiritual world could any longer be understood through those dying ideas.

A man of the present day can easily feel that the Greek ideas are in fact applicable to something entirely different from that to which they were applied. This is a peculiarity of Hellenism. The Greeks still had the ideas but no longer the imaginations. Especially in Aristotle this is very striking. It is very singular. You know there are whole libraries about Aristotle, and everything concerning him is interpreted differently. People even dispute whether he accepted reincarnation or pre-existence. This has all come about because his words can be interpreted in various ways. It is because he worked with a system of concepts applicable to a supersensible world but he no longer had any perception of that world. Plato had much more understanding of it; therefore his system of concepts could be worked out better in that sense. Aristotle was already involved in abstract concepts and could no longer see that to which his thought-forms referred. It is a peculiar fact that in the early centuries there was a struggle between a conception of the Mystery of Golgotha that illuminated it with the light of the supersensible world, and the fanaticism that then developed to refute this. Not everyone saw through these things, but some did. Those who did see through them did not face them honestly. A primitive interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha, an interpretation that was rabid about using only a few concepts, led to fanaticism.

Thus we see that supersensible thinking was eliminated more and more from the Christian world conception, from every world conception. It faded away and ceased. We can follow from century to century how the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to people as something tremendously significant that had entered earth evolution, and yet how the possibility of their comprehending it with any system of concepts vanished—or of comprehending the world cosmically at all. Look at that work from the ninth century, De Divisione Naturae by Scotus Erigena.¹¹ It still contains pictures of a world evolution, even though the pictures are abstract. Scotus Erigena indicates very beautifully four stages of a world evolution, but throughout with inadequate concepts. We can see that he is unable to spread out his net of concepts and make intelligible, plausible, what he wishes to gather together. Everywhere, one might say, the threads of his concepts break. It is very interesting that this becomes more noticeable from century to century, so that finally the lowest point in the spinning of concept-threads was reached in the fifteenth century. Then an ascent began again, but it did not get beyond the most elementary stage. It is interesting that on the one hand people cherished the Mystery of Golgotha and turned to it with their hearts, but declared that they could not understand it. Gradually there was a general feeling that it could not be understood. On the other hand the study of nature began at the very time when concepts vanished. Observation of nature entered the life of that time, but there were no concepts for actually grasping the phenomena that were being observed.

It is characteristic of this period, at the turn of the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, halfway through the Middle Ages, that there were insufficient concepts both for the budding observation of nature and for the revelations of saving truths. Think how it was with Scholasticism in this respect: it had religious revelations, but no concepts out of the culture of the time that would enable it to work over these religious revelations. It had to employ Aristotelianism; this had to be revived. The Scholastics went back to Hellenism, to Aristotle, to find concepts with which to penetrate the religious revelations; and they elaborated these with the Greek intellect because the culture of their own time had no intellect of its own—if I may use such a paradox. So the very people who worked the most honestly, the Scholastics, did not use the intellect of their time, because there was none, none that belonged to their culture. It was characteristic of the period from the tenth to the fifteenth century that the most honest of the Scholastics made use of the ancient Aristotelian concepts to explain natural phenomena; they also employed them to formulate religious revelations. Only thereafter did there rise again, as from hoary depths of spirit, an independent mode of thinking—not very far developed, even to this day—the thinking of Copernicus and Galileo. This must be further developed in order to rise once more to supersensible regions.

Thus we are able to look into the soul, into the ego, so to speak, of Christianity, which had merely clothed itself with the Jewish soul, the Greek spirit, and the Roman body. This ego of Christianity had to take into account the dying-out of supersensible understanding, and therefore had to permit the comprehensive gnostic wisdom to shrink, as it were—one may even say, to shrink to the few words at the beginning of the Gospel of John. For the evolution of Christianity consists essentially of the victory of the words of St. John's Gospel over the content of the Gnosis. Then, of course, everything passed over into fanaticism, and gnosticism was exterminated, root and branch.

All these things are linked to the birth of Christianity. We must take them into consideration if we want to receive a real impulse for the consciousness of humanity that must be developed anew, and an impulse for the new Christmas thought. We must come again to a kind of knowledge that relates to the supersensible. To that end we must understand the supersensible force working into the being of man, so that we may be able to extend it to the cosmos. We must acquire anthroposophy, knowledge of the human being, which will be able to engender cosmic feeling again. That is the way. In ancient times man could survey the world, because he entered his body at birth with memories of the time before birth. This world, which is a likeness of the spiritual world, was an answer to questions he brought with him into this life. Now the human being confronts this world bringing nothing with him, and he must work with primitive concepts like those, for instance, of contemporary science. But he must work his way up again; he must now start from the human being and rise to the cosmos. Knowledge of the cosmos must be born in the human being. This too belongs to a conception of Christmas that must be developed in the present epoch, in order that it may be fruitful in the future.

• 5. Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 11 Jan. 1918, Ancient Myths, Their Meaning and Connection with Evolution, GA 180 (Vancouver, Steiner Book Centre, 1971).
• 6. David Lloyd-George: 1863–1945. British statesman. Elected to Parliament 1890; Prime Minister during World War I. One of the “Big Four” statesmen at Paris Peace Conference 1919.
• 7. Gnosis: esoteric knowledge in Greco-Latin world of the 2nd century A.D.
• 8. Waldenses and Cathars: heretical Christian sects in western Europe, 12th and 13th centuries. They joined the Reformation movement during the 16th century.
• 9. Manes: 216–274 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Nurnberg, 25 June 1908, Apocalypse of St. John, GA 104 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977).
• 10. Augustine: 354–430 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 22 May 1920, The Redemption of Thinking, GA 74 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 11. Scotus Erigena: 810–877 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18 (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1973).

Before I go further in the explanation of apocalyptic writings, I must again repeat that this explanation can be of real value only to those who have been in the Theosophical Movement for a considerable time and who approach the theosophical view of the world with a certain sympathetic understanding. A great deal will have to be said here that may well cause opponents to attribute all kinds of phantastic things to Theosophy, and which, to begin with, will be regarded by rationalistic thinkers as so much brain-spinning. Familiarity with the nature of theosophical thought and feeling is essential if what is said in connection with the Apocalypse is not to be misunderstood.

What I have said about the relation of Christianity to Jesus [the] Christ and about the relation of the writer of the Apocalypse to Jesus must be kept firmly in mind if we are to understand what follows.

The keystone for a true understanding of the place of Christianity in the world lies in the saying: Blessed are those who believe even though they do not see.

As I have already said, the significance of this utterance lies in the fact that what formerly took place in the deep secrecy of the Mystery-Temples was carried through Christianity on to the great arena of the world. “This does not gainsay in the very slightest the historic actuality of the happenings in Palestine between the years 1 and 33 A.D. The standpoint of those who see to the root of these things will far rather be that the familiar Christian tradition is historic truth. In this respect, therefore, Theosophy is in agreement at every point with what Christians believe. But the historic fact at the beginning of our time-reckoning is something else as well, and we understand it rightly when we think of it as a mystical fact, when we realise that the way of the Passion, the Death, the Resurrection, the Ascension, are historic happenings which were formerly enacted in the Mysteries.

There is a word in the Bible which indicates how the ancient mystery is related to its own fulfilment, to Christianity. In Christianity, everything that pointed to Christ before His actual appearance is called: the Promise. Those who understand these things know that “Promise” means nothing else than that what took place in Palestine had been “Promised” in the secrecy of the Mysteries. We can understand it from the very words of ancient scripts. Think only of the Mysteries of Greece. What was enacted in those Mysteries, in deep secrecy, and experienced only by the Initiates, was the Passion, Dying and Resurrection of the “Son of God.” They experienced it through the preparation they had undergone, through their training on higher planes. Thus in the Mysteries the Initiate beheld the Passion, the Dying and the Resurrection of the Son of God. This was portrayed before their eyes of spirit. That is the Promise. And then this Promise was fulfilled—in Palestine. This is the explanation of the utterance: blessed not only are those who were seers in the Mysteries, but also those who are able to believe not merely in the Word revealed to the Mystics, but in the Word made Flesh. That is the meaning of this utterance. It is from this point of view that we must understand the relation in which John the Apocalyptist stands to the Mysteries of antiquity and to the Christian Mystery. Light will then be thrown on many a passage.

It is said in the Apocalypse that seven seals are opened. What does the opening of seals mean, in the language in which the Apocalypse is written?

Since time immemorial, the secret of the Sons of God becoming man was announced prophetically to the mystics. And in the language of the Apocalypse, the presentation of this secret on the physical plane is called the opening of a seal. In the language of occultism, the opening of a seal means nothing else than the proclamation of something that was formerly made known only to the Initiates and presented only within the Mysteries. The picture given is correct in its very details. What is later revealed was in earlier times beheld within the Mysteries. During the time of the Mysteries there was no book which recorded what happened in the Mysteries. This came only later. Such a book is the Gospel. The Gospel contains what was formerly presented in the Mysteries, and what is written there is “unsealed” for those who are ready for it.

And who will be ready? Here is something that you must grasp in its whole setting in the Apocalypse. Something is proclaimed to seven Communities. You have heard that these seven Communities are representatives of the seven sub-races of the Fifth Root Race. Who, then, are the Proclaimers? And who are those to whom the proclamation is made? Here we must think from the esoteric point of view of the appearance of Christ as compared with other appearances. (If you have read the last number of the magazine “Lucifer” you will there find something that I will now briefly repeat.)

The evolution of mankind stands under the direction of mighty Leaders who guide its onward progress. In the language of esotericism these Leaders are called Manus. A Manu, therefore, is the Being who at the beginning of a race gives the great impulse, the direction in which the race is to evolve. We are living now in the Fifth Root Race. When, after the destruction of the Fourth Root Race (the Atlantean) this Fifth Root Race began its development, the great impulse was given by the Manu of the Fifth Root Race. The Manu is not in the same sense a man among men as other outstanding human individualities. Even before mankind on the earth was filled with spirit, the Manu had already reached a lofty stage of development. It was in the Third Root Race, when in the middle of the Lemurian epoch the human spirit flashed up for the first time in the human body, that such leaders came to the human race. When men were young, when they were still children, they could not lead themselves. But their leaders were not of the same nature as themselves. These Beings who had already reached a higher stage of development in an evolution that is not that of man, were so advanced, that they could be leaders of the human race before the spirit had incarnated in the bodies of men.

These were superhuman Beings. These superhuman beings are of two kinds. The one kind, who were already leaders at the time when, in respect of the Spiritual, men were still children, these Beings had already advanced so far that they had reached a stage which will be reached by humanity only in the far distant future. These highly developed individualities, the Manus, are called in the language of esotericism, “the Holy Spirits.”

The second category of Beings were already nearer to man's level, but still superhuman. They are called, “Sons of God.” And the next group of individualities were those who were already men among men.

If we go back to the middle of the Lemurian epoch and survey man's whole evolution, we find three grades of individualities who have something to do with humanity. There is a group of very lofty individualities who long, long ago, in the far past, had already passed through the stages of evolution which man will attain only in the distant future. They are the “Holy Spirits.” A second group are the “Sons of God.” They stand nearer to man but are nevertheless far more exalted than he. And the third group are those who, as human beings were still children, but were nevertheless the most advanced among those early men. They are the “Fathers” or “Pitris.”

We have therefore three grades of beings and these three grades of beings are the guides and leaders of mankind.

If we now go back once again to the beginning of the Fifth Root Race, we find the superhuman Manu, by whom the great impulse was given. But in the course of the Fifth Root Race, something very significant comes to pass, namely that in the course of the Fifth Root Race, men themselves progress so far that a few of them will be able to take into their hands the spiritual guidance of the human race. Those whom we call “Fathers” or “Elders,” will then be able to guide and lead men as formerly they were led by the superhuman Beings. Thus the guidance and leadership of mankind passes over from the Manus to those who are “Human Brothers,” “Brothers of Men.”

The Holy Spirits, the Sons of God, the Fathers, become the leaders of the human race in the successive epochs of time. The “Fathers” are also called “Elders.”

When the Word took on human form, so says the writer of the Apocalypse, this Word, the Logos, took on human form as the “Son,” just as formerly the Word took on human form as a Spirit, or since Christian esotericism calls the Spirit “Angel,” before the Word became Flesh, the Word was an “Angel.” This is Christian esotericism. First, the Word or the Logos is an Angel, then the Word became Flesh as Son, and then the Word will become “Elder” or “Father.” These are the successive stages. The Christian Initiates have always understood this. But their words must be rightly understood.

Paul, one of the greatest Christian Initiates, could only hint at these profound secrets. But he gave an indication of what I have just been saying. When the Word was still an Angel, the Word was still on the super-sensible plane. The Word is spoken from out of the clouds, from the super-sensible, when Commandments are proclaimed. The age of the “Law” is the age of the “Promise.” The time of the Law was when the Word was an Angel. Then the Word became Flesh and later on the Word will become “Elder” or “Father.” Paul was an Initiate, and proclaimed this in the Epistle to the Galatians in the following words:

Many people who are naturally fitted to receive Anthroposophy in our present age will find it necessary to clear away various contradictions that may arise in their minds. In particular, the soul can be brought up against a certain contradiction when it wants to take seriously the memories of such a season of festival as that which includes Christmas and the New Year. When we take these memories seriously, then it becomes clear to us that at the same time as we try to gain knowledge, we must penetrate into the spiritual history of mankind if we are to understand rightly our own spiritual evolution. We need only take a certain thought, and we shall find it on the one hand full of light, while on the other it makes us disturbingly aware of how contradictions, difficulties, must pile up before the soul of anyone who wants to accept in the right sense our anthroposophical knowledge concerning man and the evolution of the world.

Among the varied forms of knowledge that we try to reach through our anthroposophical studies we must of course include knowledge of the Christ; knowledge of the fundamentally important impulse—we have called it the Christ Impulse—which came in at the beginning of our era. And we are bound often to ask ourselves how we can hope to penetrate more effectively, with deepened anthroposophical knowledge, into the course of human evolution, in order to understand the Christ Impulse, than those who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha were able to do. Was it not much easier for them to penetrate into this Mystery, whose secret is specially bound up with the evolution of humanity, than it is for us, at this great distance in time? That might be a troublesome question for persons who want to seek an understanding of Christ in the light of Anthroposophy. It might become one of those contradictions which have a depressing effect just when we want to take most earnestly the deeper principles of our anthroposophical knowledge. This contradiction can be cleared away only when we call up before our souls the whole spiritual situation of humanity at the beginning of our era.

If we try—at first without any kind of religious or similar feeling—to enter into the psychic disposition of man at that time, we can make a most peculiar discovery. We can say to ourselves that we will rely on what cannot be denied even by minds most given over to externals; we will draw on the old tradition as found in history, but we will try to penetrate into that part of it which embraces the purest spiritual life. In this way we may hope to lay hold of essential elements in the evolution of humanity. Let us therefore try to enter quite historically into the endeavours that were made by men, say two hundred years before the Mystery of Golgotha and a hundred and fifty years after it, to deepen their thinking in order to understand the secrets, the riddles, of the world. Then we realise that during the centuries before and after the Mystery of Golgotha a change of far-reaching significance occurred in the souls of men with regard to the life of thought. We find that a large part of the civilised world received the influence of that which Greek culture and other deepened forms of thinking had achieved some centuries previously.

When we consider what mankind had accomplished in this way by its own efforts, not in response to any impulse from without, and how much had been attained by men called “sages” in the Stoic sense (and a good many personalities in Roman history were so ranked), then we are bound to say: These conquests in the realm of thought and ideas were made at the beginning of our era, and Western life has not added very much to them. We have gained an endless amount of knowledge concerning the facts of Nature and have been through revolutions in our ways of thinking about the external world. But the thoughts, the ideas themselves, through which these advances have been made, and with which men have tried to discern the secrets of existence in external, spatial terms, have really developed very little since the beginning of our era. They were all present—even those of which the modern world is so proud, including the idea of evolution—in the souls of that period. What might be called an intellectual laying hold of the world, a life of ideas, had reached a certain summit, and not only among particular individuals, such as the pupils of Socrates a little earlier; it had become popular in a limited sense and had spread widely over Southern Europe and other regions. This deepening of thought is truly astonishing.

An impartial history of philosophy would have to pay special attention to this triumph of human thinking at that time.

But if we now take these highly significant advances in the realm of ideas, and on the other hand the secrets bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha, we become aware of something different. We realise that as the story of the event on Golgotha became known in that age, an immense wrestling of thought with that Mystery occurred. We see how the philosophies of the period, especially the Gnostic philosophy in its much profounder form, struggled to bring all the ideas it had gained to bear on this one purpose. And it is most important to let this struggle work upon us. For we then come to recognise that the struggle was in vain; that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared to human understanding as though it were dispersed through far-distant spiritual worlds and would not unveil itself.

Now from the outset I would like to say that when in these lectures I speak of the Mystery of Golgotha, I do not wish to invest this term with any colouring drawn from religious traditions or convictions. We shall be concerned purely with objective facts that are fundamental to human evolution, and with what physical and spiritual observation can bring to light. I shall leave aside everything that individual religious creeds have to say about the Mystery of Golgotha and shall look only at what has happened in the course of human evolution. I shall have to say many things which will be made clear and substantiated later on.

In setting the Mystery of Golgotha by the side of the deepest thought of that time, the first thing that strikes one is what I expressed by saying: The nature of this Mystery lies far, far beyond what can be reached by the development of thinking. And the more exactly one studies this contrast, the more is one brought to the following recognition. One can enter deeply into the thought-world that belongs to the beginning of our era; one can try to bring livingly before one's soul what thinking meant for those men of Greece and Rome; one can call up before one's soul the ideas that sprang from their thinking, and then one comes to the feeling: Yes, that was the time when thought underwent an unprecedented deepening. Something happened with thought; it approached the human soul in a quite new way. But if then, after living back into the thought-world of that time and recreating it in one's soul, one brings clairvoyant perception to bear on this experience, then suddenly something surprising emerges. One feels that something is happening far, far away in the spiritual worlds and that the deepening of thought is a consequence of it.

We have already called attention to the fact that behind our world lie other worlds—the Astral, the Devachanic, and the Higher Devachanic. Let us first remind ourselves that these three worlds lie behind our own! Then, if the clairvoyant state of soul is raised to full activity within oneself, the impression is received that neither in the Astral world nor in the lower Devachanic world can a complete explanation of the deepening of thought at that time be found. Only if one could place one's soul in the higher Devachanic world—so says clairvoyant insight—would one experience what it is that streams through the other two worlds and penetrates right down into our physical world.

On this physical plane there is no need to be aware, while steeping oneself in that past world of ideas, of anything told concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. One can leave that quite out of account and ask simply: No matter what happened over there in Palestine, what does external history indicate? It shows that in Greece and Rome an infinite deepening of thought took place. Let us put a circle round this Greek and Roman thought-world and make it an enclosed island, as it were, in our soul-life—an island shut off from everything outside; let us imagine that no report of the Mystery of Golgotha has reached it. Then, when we inwardly contemplate this world, we certainly find there nothing that is known to-day about the Mystery of Golgotha, but we find an infinite deepening of thought which indicates that here in the evolution of humanity something happened which took hold of the innermost being of the soul on the physical plane. We are persuaded that in no previous age and among no other people had thinking ever been like that! However sceptical anyone may be, however little he may care to know about the Mystery of Golgotha, he must admit one thing—that in this island world that we have enclosed there was a deepening of thought never previously known.

But if one places oneself in this thought-world, and has a clairvoyant faculty in the background, then one feels truly immersed in the individual character of this thought. And then one says to oneself: Yes, as this thinking flowers into idea, with Plato and others, as it passes over into the world we tried to enclose, it has a quality which sets the soul free, which lays hold of the soul and brings it to a loftier view of itself. Whatever else you may apprehend in the external world or in the spiritual world makes you dependent on those worlds; in thinking you take hold of something which lives in you and which you can experience completely. You may draw back from the physical world, you may disbelieve in a spiritual world, you may refuse to know anything about clairvoyant impressions, you may shut out all physical impressions—with thoughts you can live in yourself; in your thinking you lay hold, as it were, of your own being!

But then—and it cannot be otherwise if one enters with clairvoyant perception into this sea of thought, as I might call it—a feeling of the isolation of thought comes over one; a feeling that thought is still only thought; that it lives first of all only in the soul, and that one cannot draw from it the power to go out into a world where the ground of the rest of our being—the ground of what else we are—is to be found. In the very moment when one discerns the grandeur of thought, one discerns also its unreality. Then one can see also how in the surrounding world that one has come to know through clairvoyance, there is fundamentally nothing to sustain thought.

Then why should thought be there at all? The physical world can do nothing but falsify it. Those who wish to be pure materialists, who refuse to ascribe to thought any primal reality of its own, should really prefer to prohibit it. For if the natural world is the only real world, thought can only falsify it. It is only because materialists are illogical that they do not embrace the only theory of cognition that goes with monistic Materialism—the refrain-from-thinking, think-no-more theory. But to anyone who immerses himself with clairvoyant perception in the world of thought there comes this disquieting awareness of the isolation of thought, as though he were standing quite alone with it. And then only one thing remains for him; but it does remain. Something comes towards him, even though it be from a far spiritual distance, separated from him by two worlds; and it becomes apparent—so the clairvoyant soul says to itself—that in this third world lies the true origin, the fountain-head, of that which is in the life of thought. For clairvoyant souls in our time it could be a powerful experience to immerse themselves, alone with their thinking, in the time when thought underwent its deepening; to shut out everything else, including knowledge of the Mystery of Golgotha, and to reflect how the thought-content on which we still nourish ourselves came forth in the Graeco-Roman world.

Then one should turn one's gaze to other worlds and feel rising over the Devachanic world a star that belongs to a higher spiritual world; the star from which rays out the power that makes itself felt in the thought world of Graeco-Roman antiquity. Then one feels oneself here on Earth, but carried away from the world of today and plunged into the Graeco-Roman world, with its influence spreading out over other regions at that time, before the Mystery of Golgotha. But as soon as one lets the spiritual world make its impression on one, there appears again, shining over Devachan, the star (I speak symbolically), or the spiritual Being of whom one says to oneself: Yes, the experience of the isolation of thought, and of the possibility of thought having undergone such a deepening at the beginning of our era—this is a consequence of the rays that shine out from this star in the higher spiritual world. And then comes a feeling which at first knows nothing of the historical tradition of the Mystery of Golgotha but can be expressed thus: Yes, you are there in the Graeco-Roman world of ideas, with all that Plato and others were able to give to the general education of mankind, with what they have imparted to the souls of men—you feel yourself living in the midst of that. And then you wait ... and truly not in vain, for as though deep in the background of spiritual life appears the star which sends forth its rays of power; and you can say that what you have experienced is a result of that power.

This experience can be gone through. And in going through it one has not relied on any kind of tradition, but has quite impartially sought the origin of what took place in the Graeco-Roman world. But one has also had the experience of being separated by three worlds from understanding the root-causes of that Graeco-Roman world.

And then, perhaps, one turns to the men of that time who tried in their own way to understand the change. Even the external scholarship of today has come to recognise that in this period of transition at the beginning of our era some religious-philosophic geniuses lived. And they can best be encountered by looking at Gnosticism. The Gnosis is known in the most varied ways. Externally, remarkably little is really known about it, but from the available documents one can still get an impression of its endless depth. We will speak of it only in so far as it bears on our present considerations.

Above all we can say that the Gnostics had a feeling for what I have just described; that for the causes of what happened in that past epoch one must look to worlds lying infinitely far away in the background. This awareness was passed on to others, and if we are not superficial we can, if we will, see it glimmering through what we may call the theology of Paul, and in many other manifestations also.

Now, anyone who steeps himself in the Gnosis of that period will have great difficulty in understanding it. Our souls are too much affected and infected by the fruits of the materialistic developments of the last few centuries. In tracing back the evolution of the world they are too readily inclined to think in terms of the Kant-Laplace theory of a cosmic nebula, of something quite material. And even those who seek for a more spiritual conception of the world—even they, when they look back to the beginning of time, think of this cosmic nebula or something similar. These modern people, even the most spiritual, feel very happy when they are spared the trouble of discerning the spiritual in the primal beginnings of cosmic evolution. They find it a great relief, these souls of today, when they can say to themselves: “This or that rarefied form of material substance was there to start with, and out of it everything spiritual developed side by side with everything physical.” And so we often find souls who are greatly comforted when they can apply the most materialistic methods of inquiry to the beginning of the cosmos and arrive at the most abstract conception of some kind of gaseous body.

That is why it is so difficult to enter into the thoughts of the Gnosis. For what the Gnosis places at the beginning of the world carries no suggestion of anything at all material. Anyone thoroughly attuned to modern education will perhaps be unable to restrain a slight smile if he is invited to think in the sense of the Gnosis that the world in which he finds himself, the world he explains so beautifully with his Darwinism, bears no relation to a true picture of how the world began! Indeed, he will hardly be able to help smiling when he is asked to think that the origin of the world resides in that cosmic Being who is beyond all concepts, not to be reached by any of the means that are applied nowadays to explaining the world. In the primal Divine Father—says the Gnosis—lies the ground of the world, and only in what proceeds from Him do we find something to which the soul can struggle through if it turns away from all material conceptions and searches a little for its own innermost depth. And this is Silence: the eternal Silence in which there is neither space nor time, but silence only.

It was to this duality of the primal Father and the Silence preceding time and space that the Gnostic looked up; and then, from the union of the primal Father with the Silence, as it were, he conceived other existences proceeding: one can equally well call them Worlds or Beings. And from them others, and again others, and again others—and so on through thirty stages. And only at the thirtieth stage did the Gnostic posit a condition prior to our present mentality—a condition so delightfully explained by Darwinism in terms of that mentality. Or, strictly speaking, at the thirty-first stage, for thirty of these existences, which can be called Worlds or Beings, precede our world. “Aeon” is the name generally given to these thirty Beings or Worlds that precede our own.

One can get a clear idea of what is meant by this Aeon-world only by saying to oneself: To the thirty-first stage there belongs not only what your senses perceive as the external world, but also the way in which your thinking as physical man tries to explain the sense world. It is easy enough to come to terms with a spiritual conception of the world if one says: Yes, the external world is certainly Maya, but with thinking we penetrate into a spiritual world—and if one hopes that this thinking really can reach the spiritual world. But according to the Gnostic this is not so; for him, this thinking belongs to the thirty-first Aeon, to the physical world. So not only sense perception, but human thinking, lies outside the thirty Aeons, who can be looked up to through the stages of spiritual evolution, and who reveal themselves in ever-mounting perfection.

One can easily imagine the smile that comes to a Monist, standing at the summit of his time, if he is asked to believe in thirty preceding worlds—thirty worlds with a content entirely different from anything his thinking can conceive. But that was the view of the Gnostics. And then they asked themselves: How is it with this world?

We will disregard for a while what we have ourselves said about the world in the sense of the early twentieth century. What I am now telling you must not be taken as offering a convincing world-picture. In the Anthroposophy of the twentieth century we have naturally to get beyond the Gnosis, but just now we want to sink ourselves in it.

Why is this surrounding world, including the human faculty of thinking about it, shut off from the thirty Aeons? We must look, said the Gnostic, to the lowest but still purely spiritual Aeon. And there we find the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. She had evolved in a spiritual way through the twenty-nine stages, and in the spiritual world she looked up to the highest Aeon through the ranks of spiritual Beings or Worlds. But one day, one cosmic day, it became evident, to her that if she was to maintain a free vision into the spiritual world of the Aeons, she had to separate something from herself. And she separated from herself that which existed in her as desire. And this desire, being no longer present in the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom, now wanders through the realms of space and permeates everything that comes into being in the realms of space. Desire does not live only in sense perception, but also in human thinking, and in the longing that looks back to the spiritual world; but always as something cast out into the souls of men. As an image, but as an image of the Divine Sophia cast out from her, lives this desire, Achamod, thrown out into the world and permeating it.

If you look into yourself, without raising yourself into spiritual worlds, you look into the desire-filled world of Achamod. Because this world is filled with desire, it cannot disclose within itself that which is revealed by looking out into the world of the Aeons. Far, far away in the world of the Aeons—so thought the Gnosis—the pure spirituality of the Aeons engenders what the Gnostics called the Son of the Father-God, and also what they called the pure Holy Spirit. So we have here another generation, as it were, another evolutionary line, different from that which led to the Divine Sophia. As in the propagation of physical life the sexes are separate, so in the progression of the Aeons another stream took its origin from a very high level in the spiritual world: the stream of the Son and the Holy Spirit stemming from the Father. So in the world of Aeons there was one stream leading to the Divine Sophia and another to the Son and the Holy Spirit. If one rises through the Aeons, one comes eventually to an Aeon from whom there arose on the one hand the succession leading to the Divine Sophia, and on the other the succession leading to the Son and the Holy Spirit. And then we ascend to the Father-God and the Divine Silence.

Because the human soul is shut off with Achamod in the material world, it has in the sense of the Gnosis a longing for the spiritual world, and above all for the Divine Sophia, from whom it is separated through being filled with Achamod. This feeling of being separated from the Divine, of not being within the Divine—this feeling is actually experienced, according to the Gnostic, as the material world. And the Gnostic sees originating from the divine-spiritual world, but bound up with Achamod, what one might call (to borrow a Greek word) the Demiurgos, the cosmic Architect.

This Demiurgos is the real arch-creator and sustainer of that which is permeated with Achamod and the material. The souls of men are woven into his world. But they are imbued also with longing for the Divine Sophia. As though in the far distance of the Aeon-world appear the Son and the Holy Spirit in their pure divine spirituality, but they appear only to someone who has—in the sense of the Gnosis—raised himself above everything in which is embodied Achamod, the desire that pervades space.

Why is there this longing in the souls that have been drawn into the world of Achamod? Why, after their separation from the divine-spiritual world, do they feel a longing for it? The Gnostics also asked themselves these questions, and they said: Achamod was cast out from the Divine Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, but before Achamod had completely become this material world, where men now live, there came to her something like a brief raying-out of light from the Son of God; and then immediately the light vanished again. For the Gnostic this was an important concept: that Achamod—the same Achamod that lives in the souls of men—had been granted in the primal remote past a glimpse of Divine light, which had then immediately disappeared. But the memory of it lives on today in human souls, however deeply enmeshed in the material world the soul may be. “I live in the world of Achamod, the material world”, such a soul might have said. “I am surrounded with a sheath drawn from the material world, but when I sink into my inner being, a memory comes to life within me. The element that holds me bound to the material world longs after the Divine Sophia, the Divine Wisdom; for the being of Achamod, which lives in me, was once illuminated by a. ray from the Son of God, who dwells in the world of the Aeons.”

We should try to picture clearly to ourselves such a soul as this, a disciple of the Gnosis. There were such souls: they are not a hypothetical invention. Anyone who studies history with understanding will come to realise through the external documents that many souls of this kind lived in that period.

. We need to see clearly why there are such strong objections nowadays to what I have been saying. What will a thoroughly level-headed man of today have to say about the Gnosis? We have already had to listen to the view that the theology of Paul gives an impression of rabbinical subtleties, far too intricate for a sensible Monist to concern himself with—a Monist who looks out proudly over the world and draws it all together with the simple concept of evolution or with the still simpler concept of energy, and says: “Now at last we have grown up; we have acquired the ideas which give us a picture of the world based on energy, and we look back at these children, these poor dear children, who centuries ago built up the Gnosis out of childishness—they imagined all sorts of spirits, thirty Aeons! That is what the human soul does in its time of nursery play. The grown-up soul of today, with its far-reaching Monism, has left such fancies far behind. We must look back indulgently at these Gnostic infantilisms—they are really charming!”

Such is the prevailing mood today, and it is not easily teachable. One might say to it: Yes, if a Gnostic, with his soul born out of the Gnosis, were to stand before you, he might also take the liberty of expressing his outlook, somewhat like this: “I understand very well how you have become so proud and arrogant, with your ideas of evolution and energy, but this is because your thinking has become so crude and simple and primitive that you are satisfied with your nebulae and your entirely abstract concepts. You say the words ‘evolution’ and ‘energy’ and think you have got something, but you are blind to the finer spiritual life that seeks its way up into that which rises through thirty stages above anything you have.”

But for us the antithesis mentioned at the beginning of this lecture becomes all the sharper. We see on the one hand our own time, with its quite crude and primitive concepts, and on the other the Gnosis. And we have seen how the Gnosis employs endlessly complicated concepts—thirty Aeons—in order to find in the course of evolution the Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and to find in the soul the longing for the Divine Sophia and the Holy Spirit.

Then we ask ourselves: Is it not from the deepening of thought in the Graeco-Roman world that we have gained what we have carried so splendidly far in our thoughts about energy and evolution? And in this Gnosis, with its complicated ideas, so unsympathetic to the present day, are we not looking at something quite strange? Are not these colossal contrasts? Indeed they are. And the contradiction, lying like a weight on the soul, becomes even greater if we reflect on what was said about clairvoyant souls: that they can transpose themselves into the thought-world of the Greeks and Romans, and then see the world with the star, of which we have spoken. And mingled everywhere with this deepening of Greek thought we find that other deepening which the Gnosis exemplifies. Yet when we look at this with the aid of what Anthroposophy should give us today, and are yet powerless to understand what the star should signify, separated as we are from it by three worlds—and if we ask the Gnostics: Have you understood what happened at that time in the historical evolution of humanity? ... then, standing on the ground of Anthroposophy, we cannot take the answer from the Gnostics, for it could never satisfy us; it would throw no light on what is shown to the clairvoyant soul.

It is not my wish that you should treat our considerations today as offering an explanation of anything. The more you feel that what I have told you is not an explanation; the more you feel that I have put before you contradiction after contradiction and have shown you only one occult experience, the perception of the star, the better will you have understood me for today. I would wish you to see clearly that at the beginning of our era there appeared in the world something which influenced human understanding and was yet far, far from being understood; I would like you to feel that the period at the beginning of our era was a great riddle. I want you to feel that in human evolution there happened something which seemed at first like a deepening of thought, or a discovery of thought; and that the root causes of this are a profound enigma. You must seek in hidden worlds for that which appeared in the Maya of the physical sense-world as a deepening of Graeco-Roman thought. And it is not an explanation of what we have heard, but the setting out of a riddle, that I wished to give you today. We will continue tomorrow.

When we wander at this time of year through the streets of large cities, we find them full of all sorts of things which our contemporaries want to have for their celebration of the approaching Christmas festival. Indeed, it is one of the greatest festivals of the year which humanity can celebrate: the festival which commemorates the most powerful impulse in the evolution of mankind. And yet, if we contemplate what will take place in the coming days in large cities such as ours, we may well ask: Does all of this correspond rightly to what is meant to flow through the souls and hearts of man?

If we don't give ourselves up to illusions but simply face the truth, then perhaps we cannot help but admit to ourselves: All these preparations and celebrations of the Christmas festival which we see in our time fit in very poorly on the one hand with all other happenings of modern civilization around us; and on the other hand they fit in equally poorly with what should live in the depth of the human heart as a commemorative thought of the greatest impulse which humanity received in the course of its evolution.

So it is perhaps no overstatement if we express the following view: There is a lack of harmony in what our eyes perceive, when we wish to permeate ourselves with the Christmas mood, and wish to receive this Christmas mood from what we can see in today's environment. There is a discord in seeing the streets bedecked with Christmas trees and other decorations in preparation for the festival, and then seeing modern traffic rushing through the midst of it all. And if modern man does not feel the full extent of this discord, the reason may well be that he has disaccustomed himself to be sensitive to all the depth and intimacy which can be connected with this approaching festival. Of all that the Christmas festival can do to deepen man's inner nature, basically no more is left today, especially for the city dweller, than a last faint echo. He is hardly in a position to feel even vaguely its former greatness. His habits prevent him from perceiving this greatness any longer, a greatness to which humanity had become accustomed in the course of centuries.

It would be totally wrong if we would look with pessimism at the fact that times have changed, and that in our modern cities it has become impossible to develop that mood of profound intimacy which prevailed in earlier times with regard to this festival. It would not be right to allow such a pessimistic mood to arise, for at the same time we can feel an intimation—in our circles this feeling should certainly be present—that humanity can once again come to experience the full depth and greatness of the impulse which belongs to this festival. Seeking souls have every reason to ask themselves: “What can this ‘Christ festival’ mean to us?”. And in their hearts they can admit: Precisely through Spiritual Science something will be given to humanity, which will bring again, in the fullest sense of the word, that depth and greatness which cannot be any more today. If we don't succumb to illusion and phantasy we must admit that these can no longer exist at present. What has become often a mere festival of gifts cannot be said to have the same meaning as what the Christmas festival meant to people for many centuries in the past. Through the celebration of this festival the souls used to blossom forth with hope-filled joy, with hope-borne certainty, and with the awareness of belonging to a spiritual Being, Who descended from Spiritual heights, and united Himself with the earth, so that every human soul of good will may share in His powers. Indeed, for many centuries the celebration of this festival awakened in the souls of men the consciousness that the individual human soul can feel firmly supported by the spiritual power just described, and that all men of good will can find themselves gathered together in the service of this spiritual power. Thereby they can also find together the right ways of life on earth, so that they can mean humanly as much as possible to one another, so that they can love each other as human beings on earth as much as possible.

Suppose we find it appropriate to let the following comparison work on our souls: What has the Christmas festival been for many centuries, and what should it become in the future? To this end, let us compare, on the one hand, the mood which social custom creates nowadays in certain parts of the world around us, with the mood that once permeated the Christmas festival. On the other hand, let us compare this mood of the present time with what can come about in the soul as a renewal of this festival, made as it were timeless, through Spiritual Science.

For a modern urban dweller it is hardly possible to appreciate truly the full depth of what is connected with our great seasonal festivals. It is hardly possible to experience that magic which like a gentle breeze permeated the mood of soul of those who believed that they bore the Christ in their hearts during the great festivities surrounding Christmas or Easter. Today it has become very difficult indeed, especially for the city dweller, to sense anything of this magic, which permeated humanity like a gentle spiritual breeze during those seasons. For those who have had the opportunity of experiencing even a little of this magic wind which permeated the soul mood in those times this will most certainly be a wonderful, glorious memory. As a young child I was able to behold the last remnants of such a magic wind as it permeated the souls, the mood, of country folk in certain remote German villages. When the Christmas season approached I could behold how something arose in the deepest, innermost soul life of young and old, which differed essentially from the feelings and sentiments that prevailed during the rest of the year. When Christmas approached this could still be sensed quite distinctly in certain farming villages as recently as a few decades ago. The souls had then a natural way of making themselves inwardly beautiful. And they really felt something like this: “Into deepest night-enveloped darkness has the physical sunlight descended during autumn. More outer physical darkness has come about. Long have the nights become, shortened are the days. We must stay home much of the time. During the other seasons we used to go outside, to the fields, where we would feel the golden rays of the morning sun coming to meet us, where we could feel the warmth of the sun, where we could work with our hands during the long days of summer. But now, we must sit inside much of the time, we must feel much, much darkness around us, and we must often see, as we look outside through windows, how the earth is being covered with its winter garment.”

It is not possible to depict in detail all the beautiful, the wonderful soul moods which awoke in the simplest farm homes on Sunday afternoons and evenings as the Christmas season approached. One would have to depict very intimate soul moods. One would have to tell how many, who had been involved in a good share of fights and mischief during the rest of the year, would feel a natural restraint in their souls, as a result of being filled with the thought: “The time of Christ draws near.” They would feel: Time itself is becoming too holy to allow mischief to occur during this season.—That is only a minor aspect of what was extensively present in past centuries, and what could still be seen in its last remnants in those remote villages in recent decades. When the celebration of Christmas retreated into the homes as a family festival you would see there no more than a little display representing the stable in Bethlehem. The children would enjoy everything connected with it, as they saw Joseph and Mary, with the shepherds in front, and the angels above, sometimes done in a very primitive way. In some villages you would find such a display of the “manger” in almost every home. What had thus retreated into the homes was more or less a last echo of something which we will touch upon later.—And when the main days of the Christmas festival, the 25th and 26th of December, had passed and Epiphany, the festival of the Three Kings, approached, you could still see a few decades ago small groups of actors wandering from village to village—the last actors to present plays of “the Holy Story.” The actual Christmas plays had already become quite rare, but a last echo of “The Play of the Three Kings” could often still be seen, as it might be even today (1910) in some remote villages. There were the “Three Holy Kings”, wearing strange costumes, different for each one, with paper crowns and a star on their heads. Thus would they move through the villages, seldom lacking humor, but with humor and reverence together. With their primitive voices they would awaken all those feelings which the soul should feel in connection with what the Bible tells of the great Christ Impulse of human evolution.

The essential thing is that a mood prevailed during the Christmas season, the days and weeks surrounding the Christmas festival, to which the heart was given over, a mood in which the whole village would participate, and which enabled people to take in with simple immediacy all the representations that were brought before their souls. Grotesque, comedy-like presentations of sacred scenes, such as have become customary in our time in imitation of the Passion Plays of Oberammergau, would have met with no understanding in those days. The memory and the thought of the great periods of humanity were then still alive. It would have been impossible to find anyone willing to experience the events of the Holy Night and of the Three Kings during any other days of the year. And it would have been just as impossible to accept the Passion story at any other time but Easter. People felt united with what spoke to them from the stars, the weeks, the seasons, what spoke out of snow and sunshine. And they listened to tales of what they wanted to feel and should feel, when the so-called “Star-Singers” went around, wearing paper crowns on their heads, and lately wearing simply a white jacket. One of them used to carry a star, attached to a scissor-like device, so that he could project the star some distance out. Thus they would wander through the villages, stopping at various homes, to present their simple tales. What mattered most was that just at this time people's hearts were rightly attuned, so that they were able to take in everything that was supposed to permeate their souls during this season. I myself have still heard quite a few times these “Star-Singers”, reciting their simple poems as they wandered through the villages, and this is for me still a beautiful memory. An example follows *:

In God's Name now our tale begins.
From Orient came the Holy Kings.
They ride with speed on distant ways,
Four hundred miles in thirteen days.
They ride by Herod's palace-walls
As Herod from his window calls:
Whither go ye, relax your speed!
To Bethlehem our journey does lead.
Ye Holy Three Kings be guests of mine,
I will draw plenty of beer and wine,
I will serve venison roast and fish;
To know of the newborn king is my wish.
In truth, we cannot tell just where;
We have to follow the star we bear:
Over the house the star will shine bright.
Over the mountains the holy men ride.
There found they Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Who is the Savior of all the world.¹

The whole village would take part in such things. As certain lines were recited the star would be projected far out. This star of Christmas, of the Three Kings, was an expression of the consonance of the season, the festivity, and the human hearts. That was a great thing, which had spread through centuries like a magic breath of air over large parts of the earth and into the simplest hearts and minds. We must try to place something like this before our souls. As seekers after spiritual knowledge we are able to do so, because through our years of contemplative work on this great event we were able to develop again a feeling for the real power which was thereby given for all of mankind and for the whole evolution of the earth. And it is to this event that our thoughts should be directed during this festival season.

So we may expect to gain some understanding of how in times past the whole Christmas season was immersed in a festive mood, especially among the people of Germany and Western Europe, and how this festive mood was achieved by the simplest means. But perhaps only the spiritual seeker can understand today what was essential in those ancient Christmas plays. What I have presented to you just now as the “Star-Song” is, in fact, only a last remnant, a last ruin. If we would go back several centuries we would find vast regions where Christmas plays were performed when this time approached, in the presentation of which entire villages took part. As regards our knowledge of these Christmas plays we may well say that we were merely in a position of collecting something that was rapidly vanishing.

I myself had the good fortune of having an old friend who was such a collector. From him I heard many stories of what he encountered as a scholarly collector of Christmas plays, especially in German-Hungarian regions. In certain “language islands” in Hungary the German language had been kept alive both as a mother tongue and for colloquial speech, up to the time of the so-called magyarization in the fifties and sixties of the nineteenth century, when the Hungarian language was imposed. There one could still find many of the Christmas plays and Christmas customs which had vanished long ago into the stream of oblivion in the German motherland. Individual colonists, who migrated into Slavic regions during the previous centuries, had preserved their ancient heritage of Christmas plays, and they renewed them, whenever they could find the right people to play the parts, always recruiting the players from among the villagers themselves. I can still well remember—and perhaps you will take my word for it—with how much enthusiasm the old professor Schröer spoke of these Christmas plays, when he told of having been present when these people performed these plays during the festival season.

We can say without exaggerating, that an understanding of the inner nature of the artistic element in these plays can only be reached by actually visiting these village people and witnessing how they have given birth to the simple artistry of such Christmas plays out of a truly most holy mood. There are people today, who believe that they can learn the art of speech and recitation from this or that teacher. They will go to all sorts of places in order to learn certain breathing exercises which are considered to be the right ones for this purpose. And there exist nowadays dozens of “right” breathing methods for singing and for declamation. These people believe that it is essential for them to make a real automaton of their body or their larynx. Thus they cultivate art in a materialistic way. I would only hope that this strange view will never really take root in our circles; for these people have no idea how a simple, yet true art was born out of a most reverent mood, a prayerful Christmas mood.

Such art was actually performed by village lads who engaged in good-for-nothing pranks and behaved in a very loose way during the rest of the year. These very same lads would act in the Christmas plays with a most profound Christmas mood in their souls and hearts. For, these simple people, who lived beneath their thatched roofs, knew infinitely more about the relation of the human soul, even the whole human being, and art, than is known today in our modern theaters or other art institutions, no matter how much ado surrounds these things. They knew that true art has to spring from the whole human being; and if it be sacred-art then it must spring from man's holy mood of devotion. That, indeed, these people knew! And this can be seen, for example, in the “four principle rules”, found in those regions which Schröer could still visit.

As the months of October or November approached, in the regions of Upper Hungary, one person who knew the Christmas plays would gather those people who he felt were suitable to perform them. These plays were passed on by oral tradition. They were never committed to writing. That would have been considered a profanation. And during the Christmas season some people were considered suited, of whom one would perhaps not have thought so at other times: really roguish good-for-nothing lads, who had been involved in all sorts of mischief during the rest of the year. But during this time of the year their souls immersed themselves in the required mood. The participants had to abide by some very strict rules during the many weeks of rehearsals. Anyone who wanted to take part had to adhere strictly to the following rules.—Try to imagine life in these villages, and what it would mean not to be allowed to participate in these Christmas plays. “Anyone wishing to act in the plays must:

1. stay away from the girls,
2. sing no bawdy songs during the entire Holy Season,
3. lead a decent life,
4. obey my orders.

A fine will be levied for all violations, and also for each error in memorizing your lines.”²

Do you recognize in this custom something like a last echo of the kind of consciousness that prevailed at the holy sites of the ancient mysteries? There too, one knew that wisdom cannot be achieved by mere schooling. Likewise, an awareness prevailed here that the whole human being, including his mind and morals, must be cleansed and purified, if he wished to partake in art in a worthy way. These plays had to be born out of the whole human being! And the attunement to the Christmas mood brought about something like this, brought about that devotion and piety would take hold even of the most roguish lads.

These Christmas plays, of which I have just told you, and which Schröer and others could still observe and collect, were the last remains of more ancient plays, indeed, merely the last ruins. But through these plays we can look back into earlier times, into the 16th, 15th, 14th century and even further, when the relations between villages and cities were quite different. Indeed, in the Christmas season the souls of village people would immerse themselves into an entirely different mood through what these plays would offer them, as they presented with the simplest, most primitive means the holy legend: the birth of Christ with all that belongs to it according to the Bible. And just as Christmas day, the 25th of December, was preceded in the church calendar by the “Day of Adam and Eve”, so what was considered the actual Christmas play was preceded by the so-called Paradise play, the play of Adam and Even in Paradise, where they fell victim to the devil, the snake. Thus in the most primitive regions where such plays were performed, people could gain an immediate insight into the connection between the descent of man from spiritual heights to the physical world—and that sudden reversal which was bestowed on man through the Christ Impulse, upward again towards the spiritual worlds.

Suppose when reading the Epistles of St. Paul you would sense the greatness of the Pauline conception of man, who descended as Adam from the spiritual world to the world of the senses, and then, of the “new Adam and Christ, in whom man ascends again from the world of the senses into the world of the spirit. This can be sensed and felt in Paul in a grandiose way. The simplest people, even down to the children, could sense this in an intimate, loving, fulfilling way in the depth of their hearts and souls when they beheld in this season in succession first the fall of man in the Paradise play of Adam and Eve, and then the revelation of Christ in the Christmas play. And they felt profoundly the mighty turning point that had occurred in the evolution of humanity through the Christ Event. A reversal of the path of evolution, that was the way the Christ Event was experienced! One path, that led so to say from heaven to earth, was the path from Adam to Christ; another path, that leads from earth to heaven, is the oath from Christ to the end of earth time. That is what many thousands of people felt in a most intimate way, when the two plays which I have just characterized were so primitively performed before their eyes. These people really could then experience the complete renewal of the human spirit in its very essence through the Christ-Impulse. Perhaps you can feel in all of this a kind of echo of something that was once felt in regard to this reversal of the entire progress of humanity through certain words which have come down to us from very ancient times, from the first Christian centuries. These words were often spoken, even in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, in those regions of Europe where Christianity had spread. There people felt something tremendous when words such as these were spoken:

Ave maris Stella
Dei mater alma
Atque semper virgo
Felix coeli porta

Sumens illud Ave
Gabrielis ore
Funda nos in pace
Mutans nomen Evae!

Ave (I greet you) star of the sea
Divine youthful mother³
And virgin eternal
Thou happy portal of heaven.

Receiving this “Ave” (greeting)
From the mouth of Gabriel
Be thou our foundation for peace
By reversing the name Eva!

When these words were spoken people felt man's path from heaven to earth through the Fall—and the ascent of man through Christ from earth to heaven. They felt this even in the names of the two female characters, the name Eva (Eve) and the name they associated with the mother of Jesus, with which one greeted her so to say: Ave! Ave is the reverse of the name Eva. When you spell Ave backwards you have Eva. That was felt in its full significance. These word; express what people sensed in the most elementary phenomena of nature, and at the same time, what they saw in the human elements of the Holy Legend:

Ave, star of the sea,
Divine young mother
And virgin eternal
Thou happy portal of heaven.

Receiving this “Ave”
As a greeting from Gabriel
Be thou our foundation for peace
By reversing the name Eva!

In such simple words one felt the greatest mysteries, the greatest secrets of human evolution. And in the reversal of the name Eva to Ave people would feel in a subtle way that same truth which we can learn in a grandiose way from the Epistles of Paul when we read his words about Adam, the “old” Adam, and Christ, the “new” Adam. This was the mood in the days of the Christ-festival when these plays were performed one after the other in that primitive way: the “Paradise play” which shows us the Fall of man, and the “Christmas play” which awakens the hope for the future, in which each single human soul can share by taking up the force that lies in the Christ-Impulse. But it should be perfectly clear that to feel this requires a mood, an inner attunement, which simply cannot exist in this way anymore today. Times have changed. Back then it was not as impossible to look towards the spiritual worlds as it is today. For, that fundamentally materialistic trait, which permeates today the minds of the simplest as well as the most sophisticated people did not exist then. In those times the spiritual world was accepted as self-evident. And likewise a certain understanding was present of this spiritual world and how it differs from the world of the senses. Today people can hardly conceive how one could feel spiritually as late as the 15th or 16th century, and how an awareness of spirituality was present essentially everywhere.

We intend to present such a Christmas play in our art center. It is one from the region known as the Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz). If we succeed, understanding can again be awakened, also in the outer world, for the spiritual mood that lives in such plays. For us, certain lines in such a Christmas play should become signposts, as it were, by which we recognize the spiritual sensitivity of the people who were to understand the Christmas play at the festival season. For example, if in one or another Christmas play Mary, expecting the Jesus-child, says, “The time has come, I see a little child”, this means she clairvoyantly beheld the child in a vision in the days preceding the birth. Thus it is in many Christmas plays. And I wonder where you could find a similar tale today for such an occasion. The time when a conscious connection with the spiritual world was present is no more. You should appreciate this fact neither with optimistic nor with pessimistic feelings. Nowadays you would have to go very far afield, to the most remote and primitive rural areas, to find instances of a vision of the child that is to be born in a few days. But it does still happen!

What people brought to the Christmas season by these primitive memories and thoughts of the greatest event of human evolution, this could only be carried by a mood such as we described. Therefore, we must find it quite understandable that in the place of this former poetry, this simple primitive art, we have today the prose of electric railways and automobiles, speeding forth so grotesquely between rows of Christmas trees. An aesthetically sensitive eye must find it impossible to view these two kinds of things together: Christmas trees, Christmas sales, and cars and electric trains running through their midst! Today this impossible situation is naturally accepted as a matter of course. But for an aesthetically sensitive eye it remains nevertheless something impossible. Even so, we want to be friends of our civilization, not enemies. We want to understand that it must be so as a matter of course.

But we want to understand too how much this is connected with the materialistic trait which has pervaded not only those who live in the city, but those who live in the country as well. Oh, by listening carefully, we can actually detect how this materialistic mood has taken hold of human minds. When we go back to the 14th or 13th century we find that people knew full well that something spiritual is meant when such a thing as the tree of knowledge in paradise is mentioned. They understood rightly what was presented in the Paradise play. When they were shown the tree of knowledge or the tree of life they knew to what to relate it spiritually. For in those days superstition about such matters had not yet spread to the extent it did later, in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. In fact it can be historically documented that already in the 15th century, in the vicinity of the city of Bamberg, people went out into the apple orchards on Christmas night because they expected to see physically, materially, that a specially chosen apple tree would bloom that night. Thus people's minds became materialistic, in the period beginning in the 13th or 14th century and extending into the 16th and 17th century. This happened not only in the cities, but also in the souls of simple country folk.

Even so, much of the ancient poetry found its way into the homes, with the Christmas tree. But what wafted through the ancient villages as a most sacred mood, like a mystery, has become merely external poetry, the poetry of the Christmas tree, still beautiful, yet merely an echo of something much greater.

Why is this so? Because in the course of time humanity must evolve, because what is most intimate, what is greatest and most significant at one time, cannot remain so in the same way for all times. Only an enemy of evolution would want to drag what was great in one time over into other times. Each period of time has its own special mission. In each period we must learn how to enliven in ever new ways what should enter the souls and hearts of man. Our time can only appreciate that real Christmas mood, which I have sketched here in brief outline, if this mood is seen as a historic memory, a thing of the past. Yet, if we do accept the symbol of the Christmas tree also into our own festival gatherings, we do so precisely because we connect with Spiritual Science the thought of a new Christmas mood of mankind, of progressively evolving mankind. For Spiritual Science means to introduce the secrets of Christ into the hearts and souls of man in a way that is appropriate for our time. Even though modern conveyances rush past us when we step outdoors, or perhaps will even fly away with us through the air—and soon these things will awaken humanity quite differently to the most sobering and terrifying prose—nevertheless men of today must have a chance to find again the divine-spiritual world, precisely by an even stronger and more meaningful deepening of the soul. This is the same divine-spiritual world which in bygone centuries appeared before the eyes of those primitive minds when they saw at Christmas time the Holy Child in the manger. Today we need other means to awaken this mood in the soul. Certainly we may like to immerse ourselves in what past times possessed as ways to find the Christ Event, but we must also transcend what depends on time. Ancient people approached the secrets of Nature by merging with her through feeling. That was only possible in a primitive time. Today we need other means.

I would still like to give you some idea how people felt their way into nature when the Christmas festival approached. They did this quite primitively, yet they could speak in a very real and living way out of their sensing and feeling of the elements of Nature. If I may share with you a little “Star Song”, you will perhaps feel only through one single line, how the elements of Nature spoke out of the soul—the rest of the song is rather primitive. But if you listen more carefully you will be able to observe this Nature mood in several other lines.

Namely, when the one who gathered his actors for the Christmas play, or for the Three Kings play, would wander with them, and when they would then perform at some place, they would first extend a greeting to those who were assembled there. For, the sort of abstract attitude which prevails today between actors and audience did not exist in those earlier times. People belonged together, and the whole gathering was enveloped by an atmosphere of community. Therefore the actors would start by greeting in a primitive way those who were present, as well as those of the community who were not there. This really would bring out the Christmas mood.

The Star-Song

The star singer:

Beloved singers mine, let's gather as a clan
Like fritters in a frying pan,
Beloved singers mine, take up your place,
We want to pass our while with singing in this space.
Beloved singers mine, so strong and smart,
With greetings do we want to start.
Let us greet God-Father on His highest throne
And let us greet also His only Son.
Let us greet the Holy Spirit by name
And then greet all three together again.

Joseph and Mary enter the stage.

Let us greet Joseph and Mary mild,
And we also greet the little child.
Let us greet the ox and also the ass,
Which stand near the crib with straw and grass.
Let us greet them through sunlight and moonshine
That shine on the sea and the river Rhine.
Let us greet them through foliage and grassy blade,
Through the holy rain that has wet us all made.
Let us greet the emperor and his crown,
And him who made it, a master of great renown.
Let us greet the squire, Sir Palfi by name,
Also his officers we greet the same.
Let us greet our fathers of the church, so stern,
Because this play they allowed us to learn.
Let us greet the judge and the jury elect
With worthy honor and respect.
The whole honored community we greet
All who together here we meet.
Let us greet the honored council of this place
By God ordained to serve in this space.
Let us greet them through the roots, large and small,
Which are in the earth, many and all.
Beloved singers mine, turn now to another thing.
To greet the star we shall now sing.
Let us greet the slats, so carefully matched,
To which our star is then attached.
Let us greet the scissors that can stretch out far
By which can wander around the star.
We greet all the little slats of wood
As many as make our star look so good.
Beloved singers mine, harken well to my words
We sang to the star and to all of its parts.
Now we greet our master singer with glee
And also his hat which here you see.
Let us greet our teacher, who indeed,
With God's help taught us what we need.
Beloved singers mine, note well this thing,
To all of these we did now sing.

Now I ask you, please notice what this means: to call upon Nature in such a way that one greets everyone whom one wishes to greet with a certain mood in one's heart, a mood which arises from: “the roots, large and small, which are in the earth, many and all.” That is empathy for Nature's own mood.—Thus we must recognize that people in those days were connected with all that was holy, with all that was great and spiritual, right down to the roots of trees and grass. If you can enter into such a feeling, then, through a line such as the one I have just cited, you will feel something grandiose in the secrets of the evolution of mankind. The times are past when such feelings were naturally present, when they were a matter of course. Today we need to make use of other means. We need ways which will lead us to a well-spring in human nature that lies deeper, to a wellspring of human nature which, in a certain sense, is independent of external time. For the course of modern civilization makes it impossible for us to be bound by the seasons. Therefore, if you truly understand the mood which was felt in olden times as the Christ mood of the holy Christmas night, you will also be able to understand our intent, as we attempt to deepen artistically what we can gain from Spiritual Science. We strive to enliven that well-spring in the human mind which can take in the Christ Impulse. No longer can we awaken this great impulse directly within our souls during the Christmas season, even though we would be happy if we could. Yet we constantly search for it. If we can see a “Christ-festival of the progress of humanity” in what Spiritual Science is intended to be for mankind, and if we compare this with what simple people could feel when the Child in the crib was displayed during the Holy Christmas Night then we must say to ourselves: Such moods and feelings can awake in us too, if we consider what can be born in our own soul when our inner-most wellspring is so well attuned to what is sacred, so purified through spiritual knowledge, that this wellspring can take in the holy mystery of the Christ Impulse.

From this point of view we also try to discover true art which springs from the spirit. This art can only be a child of true devotion, a child of the most sacred feelings, when we feel in this context the eternal, imperishable “Christ festival of humanity”: How the Christ-Impulse can be born in the human soul, in the human heart and mind. When we learn to experience again through Spiritual Science that this Christ Impulse is a reality, something which can actually flow into our souls and hearts as a living strength, then the Christ Impulse will not remain something abstract or dogmatic. Rather this Christ Impulse, which comes forth from our spiritual movement, will become something able to give us solace and comfort in the darkest hours of our lives, able also to give us joy in the hope that when Christ will be born in our soul at the “Christmastide of our soul”, we may then look forward to the Eastertide, the resurrection of the spirit in our own inner life.

In this way we must progress, from a material attitude which has entered and taken hold of all minds and hearts, towards a spiritual attitude. For, that renewal, which is necessary to counterbalance today's prosaic ways of life, can only be born out of the spirit. Outside, the traffic of cars may move by, electric trains may speed on, perhaps even balloons may fly across the sky. Nevertheless, in halls such as these, it will be possible that something of a holy mood lives and grows. This can however only happen as a result of what has flowed to us from spirit knowledge throughout the entire year. When this fruit of the entire year brings Christ closer to us, as could happen in former times in a much more childlike mood, then we may rightly hope that in a certain sense these halls will be “cribs”. We may then look upon these halls in a similar way as the children and the grown-ups used to look on Christmas eve upon the cradle that was set up for them at home, or in still earlier times, in the church. They used to look at the little Child, at the shepherds before Him, and at “the ox and also the ass which stand near the crib with straw and grass”. They felt that from this symbol strength would stream into their hearts, for all hope, for all love of man, for all that is great in mankind, and for all goals of the earth. If on this day, which shall be consecrated and dedicated to remembering the Christ Impulse, we can feel that our earnest spiritual scientific striving throughout the entire year has kindled something in our hearts, then on this day our hearts will feel: “These our meeting halls are truly cradles! And these candles are symbols! And just as Christmas is a preparation for Easter, so these cradles, by virtue of the holy mood that fills them, and these candles, through the symbolism of their light, are meant to be a preparation for a great era for humanity, the era of the resurrection of the most Holy Spirit, of truly spiritual life!”

So let us try to feel that in this Christmas season our meeting halls are cradles, places in which, secluded from the outer world, something great is being prepared. Let us learn to feel that if we study diligently throughout the year, our insights, our wisdom, can be condensed on Christmas eve into very warm feelings, which glow like a fire, fueled by what we have gained throughout the whole year by immersing ourselves into great teachings. And let us feel that thereby we nurture our remembrance of the greatest impulse in human evolution. Let us also feel, therefore, that in these halls we may have faith that what now begins to burn within such a confined cradle as a holy fire, and as a light, filled with certainty of hope, will find its way to all mankind at some future time. Then this fire and this light will be strong enough to extend its power even to the hardest, most down to earth prose of life, to permeate it, to enkindle it, to warm it, to enlighten it! Thus can we feel here the Christmas mood as a mood of hope in anticipation of that World-Easter-mood which is to express the living spirit, needed for a renewal of humanity.

We best celebrate Christmas when we fill our souls in the coming days with this mood: In our Christmas we spiritually prepare the “Easter festival of all mankind”, the resurrection of spiritual life. Yes indeed, cradles shall our places of work become at Christmas time! The child of light is to be born, whom we have nurtured throughout the entire year by immersing ourselves into the wisdom-treasures of Spiritual Science. In our places of work Christ is to be born within the human soul, in order that spiritual life may be resurrected at the great Eastertide of humanity. In its very essence humanity must come to feel spirituality as a resurrection, by virtue of what streams forth as Christmas mood from our halls into all humanity, in the present time as well as in the future.

• 1. From “Deutsche Weihnachtspiele aus Ungarn”, described and communicated by Karl Julius Schröer, Vienna, 1862, “Oberschützener Sternsinger” (The Star-Singers of Oberschützen), p. 160.
• 2. See “Weihnachtspiele aus altem Volkstum; Die Oberufer Spiele” (G.A. 43, Dornach 1965), Christmas Plays from Oberufer, translated by A.C. Harwood, Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 3. A more conventional translation of alma is ‘bountiful’, but Rudolf Steiner translates it as ‘young’.