The Rudolf Steiner Archive

All festivals have a living meaning in Theosophy, which is also recovered for the materialistic worldview. People today have become accustomed to the conventional. Yet we can recognize that ancient wisdom has called the Theosophical worldview.

Our ancestors were endowed with different gifts; there was still a living connection with the sources of existence from which we ourselves come and to which we return. Easter had taken on a new form through Christianity. It is the most venerable festival among all peoples. But Easter is not only a festival since the times of Christianity; it existed much earlier. The goal that was striven for could be attained in the mysteries; that which was to come to consciousness was composed in the resurrection of faith. Empedocles describes it with the words: “When you leave the body and swing yourself to the free ether - to the resurrection faith - you will be an immortal spirit, having escaped death.

[That which passes through all of humanity as a collective consciousness and is expressed in its greatest representatives is summarized in the Christian belief in resurrection.

This is most strikingly and mysteriously found in the Easter faith in the mysterious places [of the mysteries. Where the sun gains power, victory over all obstacles of nature, there I must lead you. We are led to the ancient pyramids of the Egyptians, to the places of the Rishis. There has not been a single great spirit who did not believe in resurrection. Plato, Pythagoras, Giordano Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa drew from this belief in resurrection, and it gave them strength. The victory of the spirit over matter in the lowlands of the body? That is the belief from the cult of sacrifice of ancient mysteries. The soul conquers the body. In spring, the sun gains new strength, then it achieves victory over all obstacles in nature. The ancient Indian Rishis did not instruct, but they made new people. Only those who, through outstanding qualities, testified to the spirit in the outside world, were admitted to Easter. Man had to practise virtue, develop his intellectual powers and clarity of mind. He had to become so pure, so virtuous that one could say he had spiritualized himself to such an extent. Those who were found good by the priests were admitted to Easter, which is the festival of the knowledge and transformation of man's nature. It was to be made clear to them what happened to mystics.

We look at the body of man, only a part of it can be perceived with eyes. But we still have the etheric body, which is not quite like the physical body. When we look at the physical body, the space is filled with the second body, the etheric body, and the third, the astral body, [which surrounds and penetrates the physical body like a swirl of mist]. They both surround the physical body, and within it dwells the fourth, the [the ego of the] human being.

Let us consider the human being. He has only to do with his self-knowledge and his astral body, but this can be purified. - When we look at an undeveloped person, his etheric and astral body expresses the lower suffering, it rages through him. In a person who is aware of their moral duty, compassion for people arises; in this case, the colors green, bluish, violet, and reddish appear. Green is the color of thinking activity. Bluish violet is a sign of devotion and all [similar] feelings. The red coloration indicates desire. Orange-yellow means ambition.

The clairvoyant can recognize the level that a person has reached. When the undeveloped person begins to purify his thoughts, red hues appear. Through many incarnations, a person becomes astral within himself, he cultivates and refines himself. When a person is the creator of his astral body, he has triumphed over death. If a person is not yet the master of his astral body, then the physical and astral bodies dissolve in the cosmic mist. At death, the soul is dissolved again into the universe. The etheric body also dissolves. Why do the bodies dissolve? Because man has not yet power over his bodies. What a person has worked on in his astral body is eternal. What he has experienced in terms of purification during his physical existence, he takes with him, and in the new embodiment he brings these experiences with him again. The etheric body is the carrier of life; during life in the physical, the physical body is the ruler. Man cannot easily become the ruler over the life principle. Man knows nothing about the laws that take place in the body - blood, kidneys. All these processes are contingent on life. All physical processes affect the etheric body. Only when a person is liberated from the bodies does he begin the path of life.

For the chela, it is different: when one has undergone a transformation through the mysteries, one's etheric body does not disappear. The chela learns to work on his etheric body. He who begins to work on his etheric body, who has experienced initiation, will gain mastery over his etheric body. Man must work on his etheric body just as he worked on his physical body and his astral body before. When the disciple experiences the “die and become” in the secret schools, he has gained control over his astral body. The chela will conquer death because he has submitted to the mysteries. The chela is made insensitive to his physical body - it no longer exercises control over the chela; the body has then become soft and pliable.

It is a symbol that the mystic receives a new name because he belongs to the higher worlds. Thus the mystic appeared before his fellow human beings as a messenger, and what now appeared to him was an image of what surged within him.

The chela heard the music of the spheres with the vibrations of the universe; it was his own perception. He had experienced immortality. For three days the chela had to work on himself, then he could step before men as a messenger, a prophet. Then he had experienced within himself the mysterious life, the great word of the Logos, the spiritual sounding, ringing and vibrating of the universe: “When you leave the body and swing yourself to the free ether, you will be an immortal spirit, having escaped death!” Empedocles.

During the three days, such mystics had lived in the coffin of the living spirit of immortality. They had conquered death because they had animated their etheric body. It is not for nothing that one speaks of solar heroes, they are those who control their etheric body. Solar heroes exist in all religions. The sun that we see is only a part of the whole sun. One speaks of the sun as the “sounding” one, which sends us life; it is the victory over darkness, the victory over matter. When the chela has become a solar hero, he says, “I have seen the sun shine at midnight.” He sees the sun through the solid matter of the earth. This is not just to be understood figuratively; the sun is a role model for the hero who has learned to control his etheric body.

Goethe's “Faust” I, Prologue in Heaven: “The sun resounds in the brother spheres in the old way of song contest.” And in “Faust” II: “Listen, listen to the storm of the hours, the new day is already being born for the ears of the spirit.” Everywhere where initiation has taken place, one speaks of “sounding.

The word that Christianity gives us: “Blessed are those who believe, even if they do not see,” is intended to emphasize the way in which man has experienced initiation. Aristides, after experiencing initiation, says, “I feel the approach of the Godhead, my hand has touched it.” - Sophocles: “The truth of immortality is recognized only by those who are initiated.” Those who had not yet been able to be initiated hoped for the future life. It would be unthinkable for a slave to endure the hardships of his lot if he could not say to himself: Today I am a slave, but in the next life I will be a king.

Initiation is granted to all people; a character is formed from this awareness. Such a person is also called a “poor person” because he no longer possesses life; the kingdom of God had been absorbed into his inner being. Blessed are those who believe, even if they do not see. This saying will become clear to us when we recognize in the Easter Mystery a point in time that had not yet arrived before the appearance of Christ. That is what happened in Damascus: Saul became Paul. Who would have experienced that before Christ-Jesus was there! No one could have experienced it – unless they had gone to the mystery schools. All the teachings taught the same thing. But that is not what is important, what matters is that Christ was on earth.

[Krishna,] Hermes, Moses, Zarathustra, Buddha and all the other [honorable teachers] could say of themselves, “I am the way and the truth.” But Christ could say, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Therefore, no teaching was left behind. What is significant is that Christ lived. He had truly appeared. What permeated the mystic when he had conquered death had become flesh. The Logos had become flesh and had lived among us. The word, which otherwise only sounded to the initiate, had become flesh. Until now, only the priests had experienced it in the mystery temples. What was to become clear to all people later. That Christ lives had to take place in the world.

Outside in the world, on the historical stage, something has happened that took place in the depths of the mysteries and cults; what the individual was only allowed to see became an event that took place before everyone's eyes. The initiate knew the word that was spoken.

What took place as a historical event had previously been prophetically indicated. The prophetic coincided with what had taken place; it was now a proof of immortality, it was not just faith. The cross, which earlier only the disciple had seen, was now erected before everyone's eyes. Faith arose in Saul without him entering the mystery schools. What the mystery school student had to gain through training arose in him.

The Simplon and St. Gotthard tunnels would not have been possible if a Leibniz and a Newton had not lived before.

All limit the belief of mystical facts – now the divinity incarnated itself. So the life of Christ Jesus had to take place as a fact if such an event, which was to convert Paul, could take place. – That is why I called my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”.

That is the vision of the Paschal Mystery – it is not just that one speaks of the “humble man of Nazareth”, but it comes down to the fact that Christ Jesus lived, that he appeared in the flesh. It is the same as what lay at the basis of all people before humanity descended into density. That was the Fall of Man at the time the world was founded. Then the Word underlies what was there before the world was, and what will be there when all outer wisdom has perished. Paul first utters the word . Fichte says, “Fall upon me, all of you, rocks, and destroy me... for I am stronger than you when I fulfill my destiny.”

That was the experience in the mystery schools: the initiate penetrated through sensuality, he experienced that the Logos was there before the world was founded. He beheld the sounding Logos, he beheld life, he had attained the free ether. What he absorbed in the mysteries, what penetrated him, was the Word, which was there before the world was founded. (The whole world is based on the Word, the divine Logos. This Word was there before the world was.) When the initiate was made holy through to immortality, then the Word lived in him.

“My Father has loved me before the foundation of the world...”, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Composition of the Sun and the Moon. Astral body – lunar body.

The Easter faith should give us the strength to live towards the great Easter festival, which is born out of the deepest wisdom. These are events that defeat the dark existence and have content for all who are imbued by them. When the human being is illuminated by the light of the Easter faith, the victory over the darkness becomes tangible. The Easter festival is the victory of the light over the darkness.

The sun gains new strength in spring, reviving in man, victory over the lunar body.

It is hardly possible this year, to give a Whitsuntide lecture in the true sense of the word. Let us consider the essential character of Whitsuntide as depicted in that document of Christianity, the New Testament. We shall find that the outstanding feature of that Whitsun Festival was the pouring forth of the Spirit upon certain men called the Apostles. As a result of this outpouring of the Spirit, (so we learn from the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles), men assembled together at that Whitsuntide, ten days after the so-called Ascension, all speaking the most varied languages, and understanding each one for himself the news proclaimed to him so thoroughly, that the language sounded quite familiar to him, although it is expressly stated that each man could only speak his mother tongue. Thus the pouring forth of the Spirit at Whitsuntide appears as the outpouring of the Spirit of Love, Concord and Harmony upon all those who, assembled together from every comer of the earth, all spoke different languages. Or perhaps in order to catch the exact purport of the Bible words it would be better to express it thus: The message of the Whitsuntide revelation was so in tune with the human heart that each man could understand it, although he knew no other language than his own.

But this year, in nearly every case, the exact opposite of this is taking place in the world around us at this Whitsuntide. If only an interpretation might be vouchsafed, that we might know the meaning of this Whitsun revelation! We only need to reflect, that the world nineteen centuries after this Whitsun revelation has understood this Whitsun revelation in such a way, that this present Whitsuntide sees thirty-four nations speaking different languages, at war with one another, and therefore, in a sense, in complete contradiction to the spirit of the Whitsuntide Feast. Perhaps this question of language shows, at least to a certain extent, how the spirit of understanding has passed away from mankind, how that first Whitsun revelation has not as yet spread over the whole earth in a sufficiently penetrating and convincing manner, how it has not yet seized upon the souls of men. Perhaps that is the reason why it is now necessary that that revelation should speak to the souls of men under a new form, should speak more clearly, more urgently than it has done as yet, so that for the future its true meaning may be understood aright.

So then this year in the light of our Whitsuntide considerations, let us take up a more universal standpoint, a point of view which from a certain side will bring us nearer to the new Whitsuntide revelation, by this I mean Spiritual Science. For we must regard what we have learnt during those lectures as a "Whitsuntide revelation to humanity; we must accept Spiritual Science as a Whitsuntide revelation.

Let us consider now what wo know of the Mystery of Golgotha and allow this knowledge to sink deeply into our souls. What is the essential part of the Mystery of Golgotha? It is this. That a Spiritual Being who, as we know, belonged to the cosmic spheres, descended and underwent earthly fate and earthly life in a physical human body; that the Christ Being lived for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. By that three years’ experience in tho body of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ Being has, since the Mystery of Golgotha, been united with what we call the Earth-Spirit, with what we term the Earth- Aura. Thus the whole of our earthly evolution is divided into two epochs of evolution. There was the period before the Mystery of Golgotha, during which the Christ Spirit could only be faintly perceived when man through initiation rose above the earthly sphere so that he no longer perceived what lies within the earthly sphere alone, but also that in which the Earth did not as yet participate, though predestined for a distant future. The other period is the time after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha we know that man with his spiritual nature does not need to leave the Earth, but that he can remain within the earthly sphere and participate within the earthly sphere in the Impulse of the Christ Being.

We must clear the ground a little here. It is true that through the ages up to our own time, a portion of humanity has always been aware that the Christ-Impulse had united itself to the Earth-existence. A great change has taken place in the universal human consciousness, especially of those people who have felt something of the Christ-Impulse. The soul was filled with the belief that Christ is with man and that the human soul can unite itself with Christ, that the human mind can participate during its Earth-existence with that which is impregnated with the living Christ-Impulse. But a comprehension of what the Christ-Impulse means in the universal Earth-existence in the evolution of humanity can only be brought home to the human soul by Spiritual Science. For this the knowledge is necessary of how this Christ-Impulse works in the human soul, so that two spiritual impulses may in a sense be made to balance one another.

This is represented by the group which will be placed at the east end of tho Goetheanum. There you will see the Representative of humanity, the Representative of man, in so far as he is capable of experiencing the profoundest, that which a man does experience when the Christ-Impulse is a living reality in his soul. The principal figure in the group at the east of the building may be called the Christ, yet it may also be called the Representative of the innermost soul of man in general. This Spirit, Who speaks through a human body, is seen in connection with two other spiritual Beings, Lucifer and Ahriman. In a standing position, the Representative of humanity expresses His connection with Lucifer and Ahriman. Everything about this figure must be characteristic. Above all, when this figure is erected later on, you will be able to notice that the gesture of the left hand which is raised, and the gesture of the right hand which is lowered, are very noteworthy. You will understand these gestures when you see that Lucifer is falling from the rocks above, towards the summit of which the Representative of humanity raises his left arm—Lucifer falls, because he has broken his wings.¹

Now it is easy to believe that his wings are broken by the force which flows from the arm of the Representative of man. It seems as though this force streamed out towards Lucifer and broke his wings. That, however, would be a false interpretation. And I hope we shall succeed in making such a false interpretation of the plastic representation impossible. For the point is, not that Lucifer’s wings are broken by something that streams forth from the Christ-permeated man, but that Lucifer experienced something within himself when he felt the presence of the Christ, which led to his breaking his wings. Because he cannot bear the Christ-Impulse, the Christ-strength, he breaks his own wings. This is an incident which has been caused not by a conflict between Christ and Lucifer, but it is an incident in the inner life of Lucifer himself, something which Lucifer himself must experience; and there must not be a moment’s doubt as to the fact that it would be impossible for Christ to feel either hatred or animosity against Lucifer—Christ is the Christ. He only fills the world-existence with equanimity, He joins battle with no might in the world; but when the might of Lucifer comes near His Presence, might must join battle with itself. Therefore, the raised left hand does not work aggressively, neither does the left side of the countenance with its strange expression, but it is a token that in the cosmic connections Christ has something to do with Lucifer. It has, however, nothing of the nature of a battle about it. The battle only originates in the soul of Lucifer himself, he breaks his own wings, they are not broken by Christ.

It is the same thing with Ahriman, who cowers in a hole in the rocks beneath the Christ-Man on the right, where the earth is driven upwards, where the material, is, as it were, driven into man, but cannot gain further strength and is crippled because the Christ-power is near.

Again, the Christ-strength which pulses and flows through the arm into the hand, betrays no hatred towards Ahriman, rather does Ahriman cripple himself and by means of what is passing, that which lies hidden in his soul—the gold in the veins of the earth—draws round him like chains so that he makes himself fetters of the earth-gold and forges them on to himself. He is not fettered by Christ; he forges fetters for himself, as soon as he experiences the nearness of Christ.

These are the original relations between the Beings, given in brief outline, and these must be realised before the Christ-Impulse can be truly comprehended by the human soul.

A very simple comparison will make the Christ-Impulse clear in an abstract way. Take a pendulum. The pendulum swings to one side and swings back again as far as it can of its own weight, and then again swings back towards the opposite side as far as it can, till it meets a point which we may designate as a balancing point. This point would be a dead point, a resting point, if the pendulum did not swing towards the opposite side. Life is a pendulum, because it swings backwards and forwards towards both sides and has a resting place in the middle.

It is thus that we must think of the earthly evolution since Golgotha. The pendulum swings out towards one side, the Luciferic side. Then again towards the other side—the Ahrimanic side. And the balancing point in the middle is Christ.

That the importance of this fact must be grasped, can be proved from a notable historical event. We all admire the picture painted by Michelangelo, called ‘The Last Judgment.’ You know it from reproductions of the original, which is preserved in the Sistine Chapel. In this picture we see the Christ, painted with consummate master-skill, Christ triumphant, judging men; sending some to hell to meet the wicked spirits,—others, the righteous, to heaven. If we study the face of this Christ, we see anger there—earthly anger—and if we have assimilated Spiritual Science, if we have really welded its contents with love into our own souls, we are forced to exclaim today—notwithstanding our admiration of the marvellous creation of Michelangelo—‘That is no Christ, for Christ does not judge men! They pass judgment upon themselves,—as in the case of Lucifer and Ahriman—they experience the results of their own deeds, not the result of any conflict carried on against them by Christ.’

In the days when Michelangelo created his Christ, the time had not arrived for the recognition of Christ in His full perfection. Men were still groping in the twilight, so to speak. They attributed to Christ qualities which we today know must be assigned to Lucifer or Ahriman. Thus, we today can understand why people have found something Luciferic or Ahrimanic in the Christ of Michelangelo. For Christ as there represented is not free from these attributes, whereas the true Christ is entirely without them.

At the stage of advancement in spiritual knowledge to which mankind had attained in those days, it was not possible to produce a picture of Christ which should portray a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For, in the time of Michelangelo, the relationship existing between the Christ and Lucifer and Ahriman was not yet made known. Let us pause here and let this fact sink into our minds. Let us try and realise its full significance.

How often in our meetings have I emphasised the point that it shews a false perception to turn to Lucifer and say ‘I must fly from him,’ or to turn to Ahriman and say ‘I must fly from him.’ This attitude only means making terms with weakness. It would be forbidding the pendulum to swing backwards and forwards, wishing it to remain at rest for ever. We cannot escape the cosmic forces—by which I mean Lucifer and Ahriman—but we can adjust our position with regard to them. This we shall only be able to do when we understand the Christ-Impulse aright, when we recognise in the Christ Being the guide who will adjust our position with regard to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, which must some day be world-powers.

Now let us consider what it is that Lucifer brings into the life of man. Lucifer brings sensation, passion. and everything connected with the life of the feelings and of the heart. How dry, insipid and abstract life would be without the pulsation of keen sensation and intense feeling. Let us glance at the evolution of history. What a power passion, ‘noble passion,’ as it is often termed (and rightly so), has been in history. What influence feeling and sensation have had. Nevertheless, we cannot foster feeling or sensation without entering the sphere of Lucifer. Therefore, we must never enter this sphere without the guidance of the Christ-Impulse.

On the other hand we see how necessary it is, especially in these modern times, to understand more and more about the world, to cultivate science, to obtain the mastery over the external forces of nature and of all that exists within them. In these domains Ahriman is ruler. We should indeed remain stupid and dull if we could escape from the Ahrimanic element. There should be no question of avoiding the Ahrimanic element, but on the contrary, of entering the sphere over which Ahriman reigns, under the guidance of the Christ-Impulse. We must not endeavour slothfully to find the resting-place, but must strive to share in the living movement of the world’s pendulum; only we must be careful while moving with it that we take no step without the guidance of the Christ-Impulse. Knowledge of Christ is not possible until the relationship which exists between the Christ-Impulse and the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces is clearly understood by the human soul. This revelation of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic influence in the world is one of the tasks which the Spiritual Scientific movement must undertake, for it is aware that the Christ-Impulse is the foundation upon which it must take its stand. That is why you find nothing about the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements in the non-Christian theosophical teaching; but they were bound to appear as soon as the Spiritual Scientific Movement began seriously and earnestly to reckon with the Christ-Impulse.

I think that it is, indeed, extraordinarily important for the human soul to feel that Spiritual Science has the task laid upon it of bringing something really new into the human consciousness; something so new that by means of it we are able to compare it with such a great human creation as that of the Christ in ‘The Last Judgment’ of Michelangelo. The knowledge which is coming to us from Spiritual Science must appear as the new Whitsuntide revelation, in the true sense of the words.

At Easter we saw how one of the greatest masters of modern times, Goethe, endeavoured to bring his Faust, the representative of humanity, into relationship with the Christ-Impulse. And we saw that Goethe in his youth was not able to do this; that only in his mature old age did he succeed. Thus, as we study the spiritual life through all its multifarious stages up to the present day, it appears to us as a struggle, an unceasing struggle. It really makes one extremely humble when one considers how the master minds of humanity have striven to gain some idea, some conception of the true significance of the Christ-Impulse. It is borne in upon us how very humble we should be in our human endeavour to obtain a knowledge of the Christ-Impulse.

As we have seen, Goethe made a great point of bringing the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements, which are always working around man, into contact with Faust, his representative of humanity. And we have also seen that Goethe confused the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements with one another in his figure of Mephistopheles, so that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other therein. As we showed in the Easter Lectures, the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are confused and intermingled with one another in Mephistopheles, because at that time true understanding was as yet impossible for Goethe. Goethe had, in fact, during the whole of his life, been aware of the struggle going on within him to arrive at some understanding of the relationship of man to Lucifer and Ahriman. When Schiller asked him, at the end of the eighteenth century, to continue his Faust, Goethe reconsidered what he had written in his youth from the standpoint of his maturity and pronounced this work which he had put together at different times to be a hybrid—half-animal, half-man—thus it was that Faust appeared to him. He called his Faust, ‘a barbaric composition,’ in order to indicate the difficulty in going on with it. Here we have Goethe’s opinion of his own work! Goethe, who must have certainly known, better than his critics, said the Faust was a hybrid—half an animal, half a man—a barbaric composition 1

What I endeavoured to convey to you at Easter, which might very easily have been misunderstood, only leads back to the opinion of Goethe himself about his own work. Nevertheless, many learned men consider Faust to be a finished work of art, one which cannot be surpassed. This was not Goethe’s own opinion, neither can we accept it. Although we recognise in Faust a work of the very highest order, we must not evade the truth that the drama of Faust fails in its fundamental conception owing to Goethe’s mistake in confusing the personalities of Lucifer and Ahriman and blending them together into his figure of Mephistopheles.

But in spite of all this confusion Goethe was dimly aware that both Lucifer and Ahriman must appear. Only he mixed the two together and called the result Mephistopheles. Thus, in some of the scenes in Faust, Lucifer appears as Lucifer, whilst in others he appears as Mephistopheles or Ahriman. But Goethe was quite clear about one thing, viz:—that there is something that takes place in man under the influence of both Lucifer and Ahriman, of both Lucifer and Mephistopheles.

Let us consider the end of the first part of Goethe’s Faust. How does it end? Faust has loaded his soul with the blackest guilt imaginable; he has the life of a fellow-being upon his conscience. He has betrayed a fellow-creature. Here is sin indeed against himself and against a fellow-being!... The first part of Faust ends with the words, ‘Hither to me,’ pronounced by Mephistopheles, while at the same time a voice, appearing to come from heaven, cries faintly ‘Henry! Henry 1’ This ending to the first part of Faust tells us where Faust has arrived. He has fallen into the power of Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles has secured him. About that there is no possible doubt.

And now we come to the second part of Faust. The second part opens with a pleasing scene. ‘Faust is discovered lying on flowery turf, weary, restless, seeking sleep.’ Spirits appear; and from their songs we gather that it is spring time. Nature is in her most beautiful mood, even as she is today. To understand this mood we only need to go out of doors at this time of year. Nature at Whitsuntide! The Whitsuntide atmosphere I This Whitsuntide atmosphere works its effect upon Faust. And after a while he rises and continues his life-journey.

A certain scholar has drawn a conclusion from this incident, for which there is certainly something to be said, although it is philistine and pedantic. The scholar puts it thus: ‘If you have a heavy load of guilt upon your soul, as was the case with Faust after his treatment of Gretchen, retire to a pleasant spot, lie down on the flowery turf, make some mountain excursions, and your soul vail then be healed and ready for fresh deeds.’ Speaking from the realistic, Ahrimanic point of view, there is certainly something to be said for this conclusion drawn by this scholar—Rieger—for, really, to all those who hold the purely materialistic view so popular at the present day, the second part of Faust must be unendurable after the first part in which Faust is depicted as having loaded his soul with such a terrible burden of sin. Unfortunately this, the greatest epic of humanity, is not taken literally enough, for Faust is the greatest epic of humanity in so far as it concerns the human personality. If it were only taken literally people would know that ‘Hither to me,’ is true... Mephistopheles has got hold of Faust. Because of this, Faust is lying on flowery turf, restless, seeking sleep. We must not imagine that Faust is freed from the powers of hell at the beginning of Part II. But Goethe strove after true spiritual knowledge. How very near Goethe was to spiritual knowledge we gather from a sentence in a letter written by him to his friend, the musician, Zelter. A most remarkable sentence! Goethe wrote, ‘Consider that with each breath that we draw, an etheric stream of life permeates our whole being, so that for very joy we can scarcely remember our sorrow.’

With each breath that we draw, an etheric stream of life does indeed permeate our inner being—that means nothing less than that Goethe knew all about man’s etheric body. But in his day he naturally only spoke about this to his own circle of friends.

First let us be quite clear as to Goethe’s position with regard to human nature in general. He studied this human nature and said: this human nature is capable of sin, for something exists within it which is subject to Mephistophelian influence, something appertaining to Mephistopheles. When Goethe studied the human beings who belonged to this sphere, he also became aware that something exists in human nature which can never fall under this influence, something which will be protected from the Ahrimanic and Luciferic influence. This it is with which the second part of Faust deals; this something in human nature, which can be protected from the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers. The man Faust, who was capable of sin, who had allowed himself to be led by Mephistopheles into the most trivial and commonplace pleasures of life, the man Faust who had betrayed Gretchen—had become a sinner. In our language we should say: this Faust would have to wait for the next reincarnation.

But there is a something in human nature which is a man’s higher self, and remains in communication with the spiritual powers of the world. The spiritual world-powers draw near to this eternal part in Faust. We must not think in a realistic way of Faust, as we see him at the beginning of Part II, simply as Faust become an older man. He really represents the higher self in Faust. His outward form is unchanged. But this outward form is now representative of that ‘something’ in Faust which could not fall into sin. This ‘something’ in Faust which could not fall into sin, now enters into relationship with the servants of the Earth-spirit.

From his youth upwards Goethe had been intensely anxious to be able to form some conception of human sin, of the evil in the world, and of what it is that floats over all, holding the balance against sin and evil. Thus Goethe, as he was to a certain extent forced to deliver up the one nature in Faust into the power of Mephistopheles (‘Hither to me’ ), ventured to turn to the other nature in Faust. We must be careful to make no mistake at this point. In the beginning of Part II the Faust who speaks is not the Faust whom wo met in Part I. It is another Faust, a second nature, who only outwardly bears the form of Faust, and who can participate in the spiritual which permeates our external world. Into that form, however, something must enter which has no immediate connection with the outward physical body of Faust, for the physical body retains, of course, so long as we remain in the same incarnation, all signs of the sins into which we have fallen. Perfect communion with the higher self can only be obtained by that within us which can make itself free of the physical body. Thus Faust has to undergo that transformation which we may term, ‘the transmutation of sin into higher knowledge.’ His sins he will have to carry with him into his next incarnation. In this earthly incarnation his guilt is the source of a higher knowledge which is opened to him, a more exact knowledge of life. Thus, the possibility of his higher self entering into connection with the spiritual forces which weave and interweave and permeate the world, opens out before Faust, notwithstanding that he bears on his soul a terrible load of guilt.

The higher self of Faust gets into communication with a spirit of the Earth-Aura. Goethe wished to convey at the same time, that the highest in man can never be seized by Mephistopheles (or, as we should say, by Lucifer-Ahriman). The highest is protected; it must be able to enter other spheres. Goethe meant it to be taken literally that this higher self in Faust could now communicate with the spiritual beings in the elemental world. We shall see to-morrow or the next day how this coincides with what I said in my Easter lectures. Now let us consider what relationship exists between these spiritual beings, which are under the leadership of the Air-spirit (for such is Ariel) and may thus be designated in general as Air-spirits—and the external events of nature. Let us see how they reveal themselves as a different order of spiritual beings from that of the self which in the super-earthly nature is not exposed to the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman.

‘When the spring-tide shower of blossom
Flutters down all men upon;
When on mortals from earth’s bosom
Smiles the fields’ green benison.’

Thus, when nature buds and blossoms in the Whitsuntide springtime, the elemental spirits come forth. Seen externally they are small; but as spirits they are great, for they are higher than that part of the human heart which may turn to the good or to the bad.

‘Elves great-souled though small of stature
Haste to help where help they can;
Good or evil be his nature...’

This is left for the next reincarnation, it does not concern the spirits.

‘Good or evil be his nature
Pity they the luckless man.’

They are only concerned with the higher self which is aloof from what takes place in karma or incarnation. But these spirits can only act in their own element, in which the being of man dwells only when his soul and spirit have left the external covering of the body. And now Goethe describes the duties of these elves in their spiritual greatness.

‘Ye round this head in airy wheel that hover,
In noble elfin-guise yourselves discover.
Soothe ye the bosom’s unrelenting strife,
Withdraw the bitter darts of self-upbraiding,
Purge ye his soul from horror of past life.’

This cannot happen to the Faust who is under the sway of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic influence. This purgation means, ‘Bring forth the higher self of Faust. Let it be there alone.’ And now it would seem as if Faust who is out of the body goes through something like an Initiation.

‘Four watches night hath’

From six o’clock in the evening till six o’clock in the morning the elves perform their task, bringing the soul, during the time between falling asleep and waiting. into communication with the spiritual forces which weave and interweave throughout the earthly existence.

‘Pause not—let each with kindly deeds be rife.’

each, that is, of the four watches which the soul experiences from the time of falling asleep till the time of awakening.

‘And first, lay ye his head on the cool pillow,
Bathe him in dew from Lethe’s waters drawn.
Soon will the cramp-racked limbs be lithe as willow
If new refreshed he sleep to meet the dawn.’

When he has accepted what the World-Spirit offers to him, when this spirit has penetrated to that part of Faust’s being where the higher self remains intact:

‘Fulfil the fairest elfin-rite
Give him again to the holy light.’

What occurs externally between his falling asleep and his awakening are real events, similar to an Initiation. And now we sec what takes place in the three periods: from six to nine; from nine to twelve; from twelve to three; from three to six. First we have the watch from six to nine o’clock.

‘When soft breezes swell, and vagrant
Haunt the green-embosomed lawn,
Twilight sheds its spices fragrant,
Sinks its mist like curtains drawn,
Breathes sweet peace, his heart composes
Like a child’s that rests from play,
On his eyes so weary, closes
Soft the portals of the day.’

The soul has gone. It is separated from the body. The second watch.

‘Now the Night more deeply darkles,
Linketh holy star to star.
Mighty torches, tiny sparkles
Glimmer near and gleam afar.
Glassed within the lake they glimmer
Gleam in Night’s unclouded round;
Throned aloft the Moon’s full shimmer
Seals the bliss of peace profound.’

Here we have a survey of the Harmony of the Spheres, the wisdom of the spheres, the great lights, the tiny sparks of light and the secrets of the Moon. All that we study in Spiritual Science about the secrets of the spheres is welded into the higher soul of Faust.

The third watch of sleep:

‘Now the hours are spent and over,
Weal and woe are swept away.
Dream of health! Thou wilt recover!
Trust the gleam of new-born day!
Vales grow green, and swell like pillows
Hill to shady rest to woo,
And in swaying silver billows
Waves the com the harvest to.’

This, as we have already said, is inwardly connected with the manifestations of Nature. Read my course of lectures on The Effect of Occult Development on the Bodies and Self of Man, given at the Hague, wherein it is shown that the human soul, when it rises out of the body, becomes one with the life and movement of outer existence. But this also points to the growth going on in the soul of Faust:

‘And in swaying silver billows
Waves the com [the soul of Faust] the harvest to.’

You will remember I have already told you that during sleep, man has the desire to return to the body.

Then comes the last watch of the night:
‘Wish on wish wouldst compass crowded,
Lift thine eyes to yon bright steep!’
The Sun can now be faintly perceived.
‘Only softly art thou shrouded
Cast away the shell of sleep!’

This is a very important line! A great poet does not make use of empty phraseology. What does ‘Cast away the shell of sleep’ mean? To the ordinary sleeper, sleep is not a shell; but it is a shell to those to whom the time between falling asleep and awakening is a time for the reception of the secrets of the universe.

‘Falter not! Thine heart embolden,
When the throng faint-hearted flees;
Nought is from the brave with-holden
Who is wise and swift to seize.’

And now the tremendous tumult which heralds the approach of the Sun reminds us of what Goethe wrote about this music of the Sun in the ‘Prologue in Heaven,’ in the first part of Faust.

‘The Sun with many a sister-sphere
Still sings the rival psalm of wonder,
And still his fore-ordained career
Accomplishes with sound of thunder.
The sight sustains the angels’ prime,
Though none may spell the mystic story:
Thy Works unspeakably sublime,
Live on, in all their primal glory.’

When the Sun rises and its light floods the physical plane, the soul, when it is out of the body, hears the approach of the Sun as the music of the spheres, as a special element in the music of the spheres. The spirits hear it, of course. Man cannot hear it, because he must hear through his physical ears. He is embodied in the physical plane and when the Sun reaches the physical plane the time has come for man to be awake. Then the spirits must retire. The words spoken by Ariel, the spirit of the air, to his servants, indicate the approach of the music of the spheres. The spirits can hear it. The man who is outside his body can hear it. Faust therefore hears this approach of the music of the spheres. After that he returns into his body. Then Ariel has to disappear. Ariel instructs his servants what they have to do: they have to disappear from the physical plane. For if the Sun, which they only know as the Sun of sound, were to strike them with his light, they would become deaf. The light would make them deaf, whereas they can hear the Sun of sound—in whoso tones, indeed, they live—without injury.

‘Hark! The Hours in storm are winging,
And, to spirit-ears loud-ringing,
Now the new-born day is springing;
Rocky portals clang asunder,
Phoebus’ wheels roll forth in thunder,
What a tumult brings the light!
Loud the trump of dawn hath sounded,
Eye is dazzled, ear astounded,
The Unheard no ear may smite.
Slip ye to your silent palace,
Deep within the flow’ret's chalice,
In the cliffs and 'neath the leaf!
If it reach you, ye are deaf!’

So the elves disappear. Faust returns to his body. But the guilty Faust has now become unconscious. He stands before us no longer. He has sunk down into the depths of Faust’s subconsciousness, where he will be preserved till the next incarnation. The Faust who had just passed through the experience of being in touch with the whole spiritual cosmos, must now make clear to himself the connection between his experience during the four watches of his sleep-life and his present perception of the world. He now lives in his body as the higher self.

Now, a man who, after sleeping all night without going through Faust’s experience, were to exclaim on awakening in the morning, ‘Thou Earth, through this night too hast stood unshaken!’ would be a fool; for no man expects the Earth to be anything else but ‘unshaken’ during the night. But if a man experiences what Faust experienced as his Initiation with the Earth-Spirits, then he has indeed experienced something which, as one can well believe, will have changed the whole earth for him. He will have become a new man. Or rather a new man will have been unveiled in him. ‘Oh I Earth! Thou wert unchanging throughout this night—in spite of what I have experienced’. To him the world appears quite new, because it is now revealed to a new man.

‘Life’s pulses newly quickened now awaken,
Softly to greet the ethereal twilight leaping;
Thou Earth through this night too hast stood unshaken,
And at my feet fresh breathest from thy sleeping.
Thou guides! me about with gladness, priming
My soul with stem resolve and strenuous keeping,
Onward to strive, to highest life still climbing.’

Now too, when the spirit has freed itself from that which must wait for the next incarnation!

‘Unfolded lies the world in twilight shimmer;
With thousand-throated song the woods are chiming;
The dales, wherethrough the mist-wreaths wind, lie dimmer,
Yet heavenly radiance plumbs the deeps unnumbered,
And bough and twig, new-quickened, bud and glimmer
Forth from the fragrant depths where sunk they slumbered;
Whilst hue on hue against the gloom still heightens,
Where bloom and blade with quivering pearls are cumbered
A very Paradise about me lightens !’

Here we have the man who I do not say has gone through Initiation, but in whom Initiation lives, and he has cause to see the world in a new light. He could not speak as he does if there were only left in him the man who was guilty and who during this incarnation must remain under this load of guilt.

‘Look up! The giant peaks that rise supernal
Herald the solemn hour; for them first brightens
The early radiance of the light eternal
Upon us valley-dwellers later showered. Now are the green-sunk Alpine meadows vernal
With radiance new, and new distinctness dowered,
And step-wise downward hath the splendour thriven.
He sallies forth [the sun, that is] and I mine overpowered
And aching eyes to turn away am driven.’

The higher self cannot now endure what the senses were able to endure. Faust cannot look at the Sun, for he has learnt so much that the Sun has now become something essentially different for him. Something connected with his earthly experiences now awakens within him.

‘Thus when a yearning hope, from fear and wonder
Up to the highest wish in trust hath striven,
The portals of fulfilment yawn asunder.’

What are these ‘portals of fulfilment?’ Those through which he passed during his recent sleep. But even the ordinary world seems to him now like a sea of flame, breaking forth from the eternal foundations:

‘Then burst from yonder depths where days ne’er dwindle
Excess of flame—we stand as smit with thunder.
The torch of life it was we sought to kindle,
A sea of fire, and what a fire! hath penned us.
Is't Love? Is't Hate?’

Love and hate we know already, but this experience is more than love or hate.

‘Is't Love? Is't Hate? That yonder glowing sparkle
In bliss and bale alternating tremendous
About us twines, till we the dazed beholders,
To veil our gaze in Earth’s fresh mantle wend us.’

He can no longer look at the Sun, he looks towards the waterfall which gives forth the colours of the rainbow and in which the Sun is reflected. He turns away from the Sun. He becomes a student of the world, as it appears to him like a reflection of the spiritual life. This world of which it is said, ‘All that is transient is but a parable.’

‘Nay then, the sun shall hide behind my shoulders.’

Before he had been looking towards it. He now turns to the waterfall.

‘The cataract that through the gorge does thunder
I’ll watch with growing rapture,’mid the boulders
From plunge to plunge down-rolling, rent asunder
In thousand, thousand streams, aloft that shower
Foam upon hissing foam, the depths from under.
Yet blossoms from this storm a radiant flower;
The painted rainbow bends its changeful being,

for what is united in the Sun, is here divided into seven colours.

‘Now lost in air, now limned with clearest power,
Shedding this fragrant coolness round us fleeing.
Its rays an image of man’s efforts render;
Think, and more clearly wilt thou grasp it, seeing
Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour!’

How greatly has Faust advanced during this night’s experience! He has advanced so far that he no longer wishes, like the Faust of Part I, to plunge into that life which flung him into sin and evil, but turns to its coloured reflection. This which appears to him as the ‘many-hued, reflected splendour’ is what we call Spiritual Science, and by means of it we shall wind gradually upward along the spiral way to reality.

The continuation of the Second Part is ‘Life in the many-hued, reflected splendour.’ It is folly to interpret this Second Part in a purely materialistic sense. We have here Faust whose higher self studies the many-hued reflections of life by means of the physical body, which he now bears with him on his journey through life, as something to be preserved in order that the higher self in him may be further developed; for that higher self alone can protect him from that which will reappear in a later incarnation.

Goethe found it very difficult to continue his Faust, after the words spoken by Mephistopheles toned forth, ‘Hither to me!’ But we see how Goethe strove to penetrate those mysteries which we today recognise as the Mysteries of Spiritual Science. We see how he approached them. And we can see in this Second Part of Faust, how, at first, Mephistopheles really has Faust in his toils, how Mephistopheles is behind all that happens at the Emperor’s Court, and how Faust, by the after-effects of Initiation working in him, gradually unloosens himself from the toils of Mephistopheles.

But there are other mysteries in this Second Part of Faust. Goethe himself said that he had introduced many secret things into the Second Part! These words of his have not been taken seriously enough. But we shall learn by degrees through Spiritual Science to take such words more seriously.

We must at least take one thing away with us from today’s lectures. Goethe endeavoured to advance beyond the First Part, to express in his Faust something of the atmosphere which is symbolically depicted there under the imagery of the Course of the Seasons.

As Whitsuntide approaches and the Spirits of the elemental world draw so near to man that it can be said of them:

‘When the Spring-tide shower of blossom
Flutters down all men upon;
When on mortals from earth’s bosom
Smiles the field’s green benison:
Elves great-souled, though small of stature,
Haste to help, where help they can.
Good or evil be his nature
Pity they the luckless man.’

That is the Whitsuntide atmosphere. The outpouring of the Spirit in the following lines, spoken by the choir, during the four watches of the sleep, from the time of falling asleep to the time of awakening.

Thus by means of Faust, we are able to demonstrate how urgent is the necessity for conveying to humanity the new Whitsuntide message which Spiritual Science has to deliver. This conception of Faust brings home to us vividly how complex are the threads which go to form the fundamental basis of human nature. In the depths of human nature something exists which is eternally opposed to the Ahrimanic and Luciferic world-powers and, in those depths, that something can be found by man, if he will place himself under the guidance of the Christ-Impulse.

Why do we speak of a ‘Threshold’? Why do we speak of a ‘Guardian of the Threshold’? Because actually, owing to the grace and wisdom of the guidance of the universe, all that works and wars and battles in our daily life was at first removed from the human soul. It is now, as it were, on the surface, beneath which elements are seething and warring and working. Even our daily experiences constitute a perpetual victory. But the victory has always to be won anew; and in the future it will only be won anew when man really knows that through which the good, wise direction of the universe has guided him; until now he has been unconscious of this. That something, which cannot be recognised in the ordinary life of the senses, but which can be experienced spiritually, must be found in the depths of the soul. It must be sought for in those depths of human consciousness where man’s essence is in touch with those world-forces which, in their spiritual greatness, transcend Good and Evil.

I have endeavoured to express this in a Whitsuntide apothegm which I have pieced together to show how man, in the secret recesses of his inmost being, possesses certain elementary powers, antagonistic to each other, and how that which exists in his consciousness is the victory over the warring elements in the depths of his soul-life.

The way in which these elements react in relation to the daily life of mankind I will speak of to-morrow or the following day. today I will close with this Whitsuntide apothegm which embodies that which is ever the vital principle of our Spiritual Science and which we have been considering today.

There, where knowledge gain'd by sense alone
Is no longer of avail,
Stands the Portal leading to life’s realities;
There do they become accessible to the soul.
The key whereby this door can be unlock'd
Is smelted by the soul that gains her strength in battle,
Battle waged in her own depths by cosmic Powers
Fighting against the powers of man,
If only that same soul herself can chase away the sleep
Which, at the very boundaries of the senses,
Enwraps the powers of knowledge in spiritual night.

• 1. Editorial Note. This group, designed and carved by Dr. Steiner, had not been placed in the Goetheanum when the fire broke out which destroyed the building.

following a eurythmy presentation of the first scene of the second part of “Faust”

It will be understood that it is hardly possible to give a Whitsun lecture in the usual sense this year, especially at this time, namely at Whitsun itself. Let us consider what characterizes the time of Whitsun in the document of Christianity, the New Testament. We will find that the significant characteristic of the Pentecost is that the Spirit is poured out on those who are called apostles. And the consequence of the outpouring of the spirit is, as we see from the second chapter of Acts, that the people of the most diverse languages, who are gathered together at the Feast of Pentecost, ten days after the so-called Ascension, each hears what is to be proclaimed to them in a way that sounds familiar to him, even though each one expressly emphasizes that he is only capable of his mother tongue.

And so the outpouring of the spirit at the Feast of Pentecost appears like the outpouring of the spirit of love, of unity, of harmony among those who speak the most diverse languages across the globe. Or, to put it better, to match the wording of the Bible, the matter could be put in the following way. One could say: In the Pentecost proclamation, something is given that resonates so powerfully with the human mind that everyone can understand it, even though they only understand their mother tongue.

Almost everyone feels that it contradicts what surrounds us at this year's Pentecost festival if only one interpretation of what this Pentecost proclamation can mean is given. We need only consider that nineteen centuries after this Pentecostal proclamation, the world has managed to follow this Pentecostal proclamation in such a way that this Pentecost now sees thirty-four different speaking peoples fighting with each other, in a sense completely contradicting the meaning of Pentecost. Perhaps this language of fact will at least lead a certain number of people to realize that the Pentecost message has not yet spread throughout the world in a far-reaching way, that it has not yet sufficiently taken hold of people's minds and that it must speak to the minds of men in a new form, more urgently, more meaningfully than it has spoken up to now, so that it can be understood in the future in the way in which it must be understood.

And so this year, as a Whitsun reflection, a general point of view will be taken, so to speak, a point of view that can bring us closer to the new Whitsun proclamation from a certain side, which we mean by spiritual science. For we must regard what has just been explained in the lectures that we have completed here as a Pentecostal proclamation to humanity; we must understand this spiritual science as a Pentecostal proclamation.

Let us take what we know about the Mystery of Golgotha and let it enter our soul. What is the essence of this Mystery of Golgotha? This essence of the Mystery of Golgotha consists in the fact that a spiritual entity, which we know to belong to the cosmic spheres, descended and underwent earthly destinies, earthly suffering in a physical human body, that the Christ-entity lived for three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Through what the Christ-being experienced in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, this Christ-being has been united since the Mystery of Golgotha with what we can call the spirit of the earth, what we can call the auric of the earth. So that for us the entire evolution of the earth breaks down into a time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when that which the Christ-spirit is can only be hinted at when man rises through initiation out of the earthly sphere, in order to perceive not that which lies within the earthly sphere, but that which the earth has no part in, which is only predetermined for it for a later future, and in the time after the Mystery of Golgotha. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we know that the human being, with his spiritual soul, does not need to flee from the earth, but can remain within the earthly sphere and can perceive within this earthly sphere the impulses contained in the Christ-being.

Now we must realize that for centuries until our time, a part of humanity has become aware that the Christ Impulse is connected with earthly existence. Something has changed in the collective consciousness of those human beings who have felt and sensed something of the Christ Impulse. Something has changed in the overall consciousness of these people. The belief has entered the soul that the Christ is with man, that the human mind can unite with the Christ, that the human mind can experience something within earthly existence that is vividly imbued with the Christ impulse. But an understanding of what the Christ impulse is in the entire earthly existence in the development of humanity must first really penetrate into human souls through spiritual science. And for this it is necessary to recognize how this Christ impulse works in the human soul in such a way that two other spiritual impulses are, as it were, kept in balance.

This is what our sculpture, which we are erecting in the east of our building, will have to depict. There we will place the representative of humanity, the representative of the human being insofar as this human being can experience the deepest things in himself, insofar as this human being can experience what one experiences when one has taken up the Christ impulse as a living impulse in one's soul. For my sake, the main figure in the building in the east can be called the Christ; he can also be called the representative of the internalized human being in general. But one will have to see this spirit, which speaks through a human body, in connection with two other spiritual entities, with Lucifer and Ahriman. The representative of humanity will have to express his relationship to Lucifer and Ahriman while standing upright. Everything about this figure must be purely characteristic. Above all, you will notice later, when this figure has just been set up, that the gesture of the raised left hand and the gesture of the lowered right hand are very special. This gesture of the hands will be understood when one sees how, above, on the rock toward whose summit the left hand of the Representative of Humanity is raised, the left arm rises, just as above, on this rocky summit, Lucifer falls from the reason that he breaks his wings.

Now one can easily believe that this breaking of the wings would be caused by the power emanating from the arm of the representative of humanity, as if, as it were, this power radiated out to Lucifer and broke his wings. That would be a false conception. And hopefully we will succeed in preventing this false conception from arising through the vivid description. For it is not a matter of something emanating from the fully Christianized human being that breaks Lucifer's wings, but rather that Lucifer experiences something within himself when he senses the proximity of the Christ, which leads to the breaking of his wings. Because he cannot bear the Christ-power, the Christ-impulse, he breaks his wings. It is a process that is not brought about by a battle between Christ and Lucifer, but it is a process within Lucifer himself, something that Lucifer must experience within himself, and there must be no doubt for a moment that it would be impossible for Christ to feel hatred or feelings of struggle against Lucifer. Christ is Christ and only fills the world-being with positive things, does not fight any power in the world! But it must fight against the power that now comes into its proximity as the power of Lucifer. Therefore, the hand raised on the left must not work aggressively, nor must the left half of the face work aggressively with this peculiar gesture. Rather, it is as if it is pointing out that, in the context of the world, Christ has something to do with Lucifer. But it is not a fight. The fight arises only in the soul of Lucifer himself. He breaks his own wings, they are not broken by Christ.

And it is the same with Ahriman, who crouches in a rocky cave under the right side of the thoroughly Christianized human being, under which the earth is driven upwards: the material that is driven into people, but which cannot gain strength and weakens because the power of Christ is near it.

In turn, the power of Christ, flowing through the arm into the hand, must betray nothing of hatred against Ahriman. It is Ahriman himself who weakens and who, through what is going on in his soul, wraps the hidden gold in the veins of the earth around him like fetters, so that he makes fetters out of the gold of the earth and forges them for himself. He is not forged by Christ, he forges himself on by feeling the proximity of Christ.

But this only lays bare, I might say, the primal relationship, which must be recognized so that what the Christ impulse is can really be understood by human souls.

A simple parable can be used to explain this Christ impulse in abstract terms. Imagine a pendulum. The pendulum swings to one side, then falls to the lowest point under its own gravity and swings to the other side, and so on until there is a point on this other side that we call the point of equilibrium. This point would be a dead point, a stationary point, if the pendulum did not now swing to the other side. There is life in the pendulum in that it swings to both sides and has a resting point in the middle.

Since the Mystery of Golgotha, we can imagine the evolution of the Earth in the following way: a pendulum swing to one side, to the Luciferic side, and a pendulum swing to the other side, to the Ahrimanic side. And the point of equilibrium is the Christ in the middle.

That this must first be recognized may be seen from a significant historical fact. We all admire the painting that Michelangelo called 'The Last Judgment'. You know it from reproductions of the original, which is in the Sistine Chapel. We see there, painted with magnificent mastery by Michelangelo, Christ, sending some to hell, triumphantly, to the evil spirits, and sending the others, the good, to heaven. And if we look into the face of this Christ, we see the wrath of the world in him. And if we have taken in spiritual science, if we have truly united in love with our minds everything that we have been able to take in of spiritual science so far, then today, despite our admiration for what Michelangelo created, we say: This is not Christ, because the Christ does not judge! People judge themselves, as Lucifer and Ahriman experience their own processes, not what is brought about by any kind of struggle of the Christ against them.

When Michelangelo created his Christ, the time had not yet come to recognize the Christ in true perfection. I might say that a lack of clarity still prevailed in people. In Christ Himself, something was seen of which we know today that it must be attributed to Lucifer or Ahriman. And we can understand something of it today when people have found something of Lucifer or Ahriman in the Michelangelo Christ, for He is not yet free, as Michelangelo portrays Him, from that of which the Christ is completely free.

If we take a good look at ourselves, we can see that from the perspective that gave birth to Michelangelo, it was impossible to create an image of Christ that corresponded to a true understanding of the mystery of Golgotha, because the one thing that had to be known was still unresolved: the relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman.

How often has it been emphasized in our circles that it is a false sentiment to point to Lucifer and say, “I want to flee from him,” or to point to Ahriman and say, “I want to flee from him.” That would only mean wanting to make a pact with weakness, would mean advising the pendulum to remain in a state of equilibrium, not to swing to the left or to the right, but always to remain at rest. We cannot escape the world forces that we call Lucifer and Ahriman; we just have to find the right relationship with them. And we find this right relationship when we understand the Christ impulse in the right way, when we see in the Christ Being the guide who can place us in the right relationship with the Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, which must one day be the powers of the world.

Let us consider everything that Lucifer brings into human life. He brings into it everything that is connected with perception, with the passions, with the life of feeling and of the emotions. Life would be dry, sober, abstract if it were not for the living sensation and feeling that permeate it. If we look at the development of history, we see what passion, often called the noble passion — and rightly so, the noble passion — has achieved in history, what feeling and sensation have achieved. But we are never able to cultivate feelings and sensations at all without entering the sphere of Lucifer. It is only because we never enter this sphere without the guidance of the Christ impulse.

And on the other hand, we see how necessary it has become, especially in more recent times, to understand the world more and more, to develop science, to master the external forces of nature. Ahriman is the master of that which is external science, of that which lives in the external forces of nature. And we would remain foolish and stupid if we wanted to flee the Ahrimanic element. It is not a matter of fleeing the Ahrimanic element, but of entering, under the guidance of the Christ Impulse, into that sphere in which Ahriman rules in the world. And thus not indolently seeking merely the point of rest, but to witness the living movement of the world pendulum, to experience it in such a way that we do not take a step without the guidance of the Christ Impulse. Knowledge of Christ is only possible when the relationship of the Christ impulse to the Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces of the human soul has become clear. Therefore, the proclamation of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic side of the world is part of what our spiritual scientific movement had to take up, since it was aware that it had to place itself on the ground of the Christ impulse. And that is why you cannot find anything in the non-Christian theosophical teaching about the Ahrimanic and Luciferic elements, because this Luciferic and Ahrimanic element had to arise at the moment when the spiritual scientific movement had to reckon with the Christ impulse in a serious way.

I think it is something extraordinarily important for the human soul to feel how spiritual science has the task of really bringing something new into human consciousness, something so new that we ourselves may measure it against such great creations of humanity as the Michelangelesque Christ of the “Last Judgment”. And what we have in mind through spiritual science must appear to us as the new Pentecostal proclamation in the true sense of the word.

Around Easter time, we saw how one of the great minds of modern times, Goethe, wrestled with the question of how to relate the one he presented as the representative of humanity, Faust, to the Christ impulse. And we have seen how Goethe was not yet able to do this in his youth, but only in his mature years. And so, in many ways, spiritual life, as it has developed up to the present day, appears to us as a struggle, as an unceasing struggle. It truly appears to us in such a way that we must become extremely modest when we see how the most exquisite spirits of humanity have labored to gain insights and perceptions of what the Christ Impulse signifies. We realize how modest we must be in our human striving for this knowledge of the Christ Impulse.

Goethe – as we have seen – was initially concerned with allowing what works around people as a Luciferic and Ahrimanic element to really take a back seat to his representative of humanity, to Faust. And we have seen how Goethe mixed up the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic element so that it is not easy to distinguish them in the figure of Mephistopheles. We have shown in the Easter lectures how the Luciferic and Ahrimanic elements are mixed together in the figure of Mephistopheles, because Goethe was not yet able to have a clear insight. Basically, Goethe felt throughout his life the striving within him to come to a clear understanding of the relationship between man and Lucifer and Ahriman. When, at the end of the 18th century, he was asked by Schiller, as a mature man, to continue his “Faust” and saw again what he had written in his youth, he called what he had put together at different times a tragelaph – half animal and half human; that is how his “Faust” appeared to him. And he called his “Faust,” to indicate the difficulty of continuing it now, “a barbaric composition,” so that we have the judgment of Goethe, who must have known more about his “Faust” than those who are not Goethe, that the “Faust” is a tragelaph, “half animal and half human,” that it is a “barbaric composition”! What I wanted to present at Easter, and what can so easily be misunderstood, ultimately leads back to a judgment of Goethe's own. Yes, of course, very clever people see in “Faust” a perfect work of art, see in “Faust” that which cannot be surpassed. It was not Goethe's opinion and must not be our opinion either. Even if we see in Faust a rise to the highest, we must realize that this Faust suffers above all in its inner composition from the fact that in his figure of Mephistopheles, Lucifer and Ahriman are mixed together in a completely inorganic way.

But despite all this intermingling, Goethe felt darkly: Lucifer and Ahriman should have appeared together. Goethe just mixed everything together and called it all “Mephistopheles”, so that in the individual scenes in “Faust” Lucifer is often Lucifer, in other parts Mephistopheles or Ahriman. But this was quite clear to Goethe: something is happening in the human being that is taking place under the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman, of Lucifer and Mephistopheles. Such things happen in people.

Now let us look at the end of the first part of Goethe's “Faust”. How does it end? Faust has incurred the most terrible guilt imaginable, has a human life on his conscience, has betrayed a person, incurred the terrible guilt, towards himself and towards the other person. And the last word of the first part of “Faust” is: “Her zu mir!” (To me!), at the same moment as, only through a voice as if from heaven, resounding: “Heinrich, Heinrich!” (Henry, Henry!) We therefore know from this end of the first part where Faust has come. He has come to Mephistopheles. Mephistopheles has him. There is no doubt about that.

And now we see the beginning of the second part. This beginning of the second part presents us with a charming scene: “Faust, tired, restless, lying on a flowery meadow, seeking sleep.” Ghosts appear. And from what they say, we get the impression: we are dealing with nature, yes really, with nature – we just need to go out at this time of year – and we have this nature. Whitsun nature, for example! Whitsun mood, for example! This Whitsun mood has an effect on Faust. And afterwards he continues on his journey through life.

A scholar made a comment about what Goethe had done, which, it can be said, has something to it, even though the remark is philistine and pedantic. The scholar said: When you have incurred a grave guilt, as Faust did towards Gretchen, then go to a charming region, to a flowery meadow, perhaps go on a mountain expedition, and your soul will be cured and capable of further deeds. One could say that, realistically Ahrimanically conceived, this saying of the scholar Rieger has much to be said for it. For it should actually be unbearable for all people who, in the usual sense of today, have a purely materialistic world view, to let the second part of “Faust” have an effect on them, after the great, powerful guilt that Faust has taken upon himself is characterized in the first part. But unfortunately, when it comes to the human and personal, we do not take humanity's greatest work of literature – for that is “Faust”, despite being a barbaric composition and a tragicomedy in its first part – we do not take it literally enough. If we took it literally enough, we would know that the line “Her zu mir!” (“To me!”) is true... Mephistopheles has Faust. As he has him, Faust is now lying on a flowery meadow, restlessly seeking sleep. We must not think of Faust as being separate from the infernal powers at the beginning of the second part. But Goethe was striving for true spiritual knowledge. How close Goethe was to spiritual knowledge may be seen from a passage in a letter that Goethe once wrote to his friend, the musician Zelter. It is a significant passage! Goethe writes: “Consider that with every breath an etheric Lethestrom permeates our entire being, so that we remember the joy only moderately, the suffering hardly.” With every breath, our inner being is indeed permeated by an etheric life stream, but that means nothing other than: Goethe knew very well about the etheric body that humans have. Of course, in his time he only brought this up in his circle of friends.

How Goethe stood by the entire human being, how he, looking at this human being, said to himself: This human being can become guilty, because something dwells in him that is under Mephistophelian influence, that belongs to Mephistopheles belongs. As Goethe looked at this human being, who belongs to this sphere, it was clear to him at the same time that something lives in human nature that can never fall prey to this influence, that can be protected from the Ahrimanic-Luciferic influence. And it is this element in Faust that can be protected from the influence of Ahriman and Lucifer that we are dealing with at the beginning of the second part. Faust, who was capable of guilt, who allowed himself to be drawn by Mephistopheles into the most trivial, most banal pleasures of life, who then tempted Gretchen, has become guilty. In our spiritual language we would say: This part of Faust must wait until the next incarnation.

But there is something in the nature of man that is his higher self, that remains in relationship to the spiritual powers of the world. Therefore, the spiritual powers of the world confront this eternal in Faust. We must not imagine the Faust that we see at the beginning of the second part in the realistic sense as Faust who has become so and so much older, but he is really only the representative of the higher self in Faust. He still wears the same form. But this form is the representative of something that could not have been guilty in Faust. This, which could not have been guilty in Faust, now enters into a relationship with the servants of the Earth Spirit.

From his youth, Goethe longed to gain an insight into the nature of human guilt, of evil in the world, and yet to know that something hovered over all that must have a balancing effect on guilt and evil. And so Goethe ventured, since he had to surrender, so to speak, Faust's one nature to Mephisto – “Come to me!” And we must be quite clear about this: now, at the beginning of the second part, it is not the same Faust that speaks as we know from the first part, but a different, a second nature that only externally bears Faust's form and that can enter into that which, as a spiritual being, permeates the external world. But what has no immediate connection with Faust's outer physical body must find its way into it. For the physical body naturally retains, as long as we remain in the same incarnation, all the signs of the guilt into which we have fallen. Only that in us which frees itself from the physical body can truly connect with what the higher self is. And so Faust must undergo this transformation, which we can call the transformation of guilt into higher knowledge.

He will carry what he bears as guilt into his next incarnation. For this incarnation, he bears the guilt as the source of a higher knowledge that opens up to him, a more precise knowledge of life. And so, despite bearing the most monstrous guilt on his soul, the possibility opens up for Faust that his higher self will be brought into connection with what pervades, lives through and interweaves the world as spiritual.

Faust's higher self comes into contact with a spirit of the earth aura. Goethe wanted to show, so to speak, that what is highest in man could not be grasped by Mephistopheles, we would say: Lucifer-Ahriman, — that must have been preserved, that must be able to enter into other spheres. And so Goethe is quite sincere when he says that this higher self in Faust now enters into a relationship with what the elemental world contains as spiritual beings.

We shall see later how this is connected with what has already been said here in the Easter lectures. But now let us consider how these spiritual beings, which are under the guidance of the air spirit, for such is Ariel, how these spirits, which we can thus call air spirits, are connected with the outer processes of nature, but how they reveal themselves as that which is another spiritual world, in contrast to the self that is not exposed to the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman in the supermundane nature:

When the blossoms of spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields of green blessing
All earth-borns flashes,

— so when nature sprouts and sprouts in the spring-whitsun time, then the elemental spirits come out. They are small for the external material, they are great as spirits, for they are exalted above that which in the human heart can fall prey to good or evil.

Small elf spirit size
Hasten where it can help;
Whether it be holy or evil...

— this is left to the next incarnation, it is not the concern of these spirits —

Whether he is holy or evil,
The man of sorrows laments...

The spirits are dealing with his higher self, which is preserved from what has to play out in karma or incarnation. But these spirits can only work in their own element, in which the human being is with his essence when he has left the outer bodily shells as a spiritual soul. And now Goethe explains what these elves, with their greatness as spirits, have to achieve:

You who hover around this head in airy circles,
Show yourselves here in a noble elfin way,
Calm the grim bouquet of your hearts;
Remove the glowing, bitter arrows of reproach,
His innermost being cleansed of the horror he has experienced.

This cannot happen to Faust, who is exposed to Ahriman-Lucifer. This purification is called: Bring out Faust's higher self, present it purely. - And now something that proceeds like an initiation with Faust, who is outside of his body, is taken seriously:

There are four pauses in the night,

— from six o'clock in the evening until six o'clock in the morning the elves fulfill their duty by connecting the soul from falling asleep to waking up with what spiritually permeates and interweaves earthly existence.

Now without delay, she fills it kindly.

— the four pauses that the soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up.

First sinks his head upon the cool pillow,
Then bathes him in the dew from Lethes flood;
Joints soon are the cramp-frozen limbs,
When he strengthened towards the day rests;

- when he has taken in what the spirit that permeates the world has to offer, when this spirit has entered into that which is preserved in Faust's being as a higher self.

The elves' most beautiful duty perform,
Give him back to the holy light.

What happens externally between falling asleep and waking up are real, actual processes, similar to an initiation. And now we see what happens in each of the three hours from six to nine, from nine to twelve, from twelve to three and from three to six. First, there is the break from six to nine:

When the air is gently warmed
Around the green-bordered square,
Sweet scents, veiled in mist
Dawn descends;
She softly whispers sweet peace,
Lulls the heart to child-like calm,
And to the eyes of this weary one,
Locks the day's gate shut!

The soul is gone, separated from the body.

The second part:

Night has already fallen,
Star joins star in holy union;
Great lights, little sparks
Glitter near and shine afar;
Glitter here in the lake, reflecting,
Shine above the clear night,
Sealing the deepest rest,
The moon's full splendor reigns.

The harmony and wisdom of the spheres are absorbed by the great lights, the small sparks. And the secrets of the moon, all that we absorb in spiritual science from the secrets of the spheres, is sunk into Faust's higher self.

The third part of sleeping:

The hours have already faded away,
Pain and joy have vanished away;
Feel it first! You will recover;
Trust the new day's view.
Valleys green, hills swell,
Bushes to shadowy rest;
And in swaying silver waves
The seed of the harvest undulates.

Inwardly connecting with the existence of nature; we have also spoken of this before. Read the last Hague cycle, how the human soul, when it rises from the body, becomes one with the surging and weaving of external existence. But it also means the becoming in the soul of Faust:

And in surging silver waves
The seed - the soul of Faust - surges towards the harvest.

And do you remember how I said that during sleep, man desires to re-enter the body? That is the last part of the night.

Desire to fulfill desires.
Look at the brightness there!

The sun can already be sensed.

You are gently embraced,
Sleep is a shell, throw it away!

An important sentence! A great poet does not write empty phrases! What does it mean: Sleep is a shell, throw it away!? — For someone who sleeps through an ordinary sleep, sleep is not a shell; for someone for whom this time from falling asleep to waking up becomes an absorption for the secrets of the world, sleep is a shell.

Do not delay to take heart,
When the crowd hesitantly roams;
Everything can be achieved by the noble,
Who understands and quickly seizes.

And now the tremendous roar that announces the approach of the sun, reminding us of what Goethe said in the “Prologue in Heaven” in the first part of “Faust” about this sounding of the sun:

The sun sounds in the old way
In brotherly spheres of singing,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.
Its sight gives strength to the angels,
When no one can fathom it;
Its incomprehensibly high works
Are glorious, as on the first day.

When the sun comes up and the light pours over the physical plane, the soul, when it is outside the body, hears this approach of the sun as music of the spheres, as a special element in the music of the spheres. Spirits hear it naturally. Man does not hear it because he must hear through his physical body. But that is incorporated in the physical plane, and when the sun is in the physical plane, that is the time when man can be awake. Therefore spirits must withdraw. What Ariel, the spirit of the air, now says to his servants, that is suggestive of the approach of the music of the spheres. The spirits can hear it. He who is outside of his body can hear it. Faust can still hear it, this rising of the music of the spheres. Then he returns to his body. Then Ariel has the task of disappearing. Ariel instructs his servants what they have to do: they have to disappear from the physical plane. Because when the sun, which they can only find as a sounding sun, strikes them with its light, they go deaf from it. They go deaf from the light, while they can easily bear the sounding sun, in whose tones they themselves live.

Hark! Hear the storm of the hours!
The new day is already born
for the ears of the spirit.
The gates of rock creak and clatter,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter;
What a roar brings the light!
It trumpets, it trompets,
The eye blinks and the ear is amazed,
Unheard-of things cannot be heard.
Slip to the flower corollas,
Deeper, deeper, to dwell in silence,
In the rocks, under the foliage;
If it strikes you, then you are deaf.

And now the elves disappear. Faust returns to his body. But Faust remains unconscious of his guilt. He does not stand before us. He has descended deep into Faust's subconscious and remains there until the next incarnation. Faust, who has just experienced being with the whole spiritual cosmos, must now realize how what he has experienced relates to the four breaks of sleep-life, to how he now perceives the world. He now lives as a higher self in his body.

A person who, after sleeping one night and not having everything within himself that Faust has within himself, a person who then, after waking up in the morning, would say: You, Earth, were also constant this night – would be a fool, because no one expects anything other than that the Earth was also constant this night. But indeed, if one has gone through what Faust experienced as an initiation with the spirits of the earth, then one has experienced something through which one could indeed believe that the whole earth had been transformed. Then it is justified to say that one has become a new person, or rather, that the new person has been awakened in one: “You, Earth, were also constant this night - despite what I have experienced. Then the world appears completely new, because it is indeed given to a new person.

Life's pulses beat freshly alive,
Gently welcoming ethereal dawn;
You, Earth, were also constant this night
And breathe newly refreshed at my feet,
You are already beginning to surround me with joy,
You stir and move a strong resolve,
To strive for the highest existence forever. —

Even now, when the mind has freed itself from what must be stored for the next incarnation!

In the twilight the world is already revealed,
The forest resounds with a thousand-voiced life,
Valley after valley a strip of mist has poured out;
But heavenly clarity descends into the depths,
And twigs and branches, freshly refreshed, have sprung
from the fragrant abyss where they slept submerged.
And color after color is released from the ground,
where flowers and leaves drip with dew,
A paradise is all around me.

This is what a person sees when he, I am not saying, undergoes the initiation, but when he lives the initiation. And he has reason to see the world anew. He would not utter the words he now speaks if only the person who had become guilty and who would live under the impression of this guilt in this incarnation were in him.

Look up! The mountain peaks
already announce the most solemn hour;
They may enjoy the eternal light early,
Which later turns down to us.
Now to the green meadows of the alp
new splendor and clarity is bestowed,
And step by step it has succeeded; –
She steps forward! – namely, the sun – and unfortunately already blinded,
I turn away, pierced through by eye pain.

The higher self is now unable to see what the senses were able to see, the sun. Nevertheless, Faust has learned so much that the sun is now something essentially different for him. And now something stirs within him that is connected with human knowledge:

So it is when a yearning hope
The highest wish,
Finds wings spread open at the gates of fulfillment.

What fulfillment gates? Only those that have become close to him during his sleep. But even the ordinary world now appears to him as if it were breaking like a blaze of flames from eternal reasons:

But now from those eternal depths
A blaze of fire breaks out, we stand amazed;
We wanted to light the torch of life,
A sea of fire embraces us, what a fire!
Is it love? Is it hate?...

We know this from the past, but what we are experiencing now is more than love and hate.

Is it love? Is it hate? The feelings that burn within us,
Alternating between pain and joy,
So that we look down at the earth again,
To hide ourselves in the most youthful veil.

He cannot look at the sun now; he looks at the waterfall, in which the sun is reflected, and which shows him the colors of the rainbow in an arc. He turns away from the sun. He becomes a world observer, just as this world shines in as a reflection of spiritual life – this world of which one can say: All that is transitory is only a parable of the eternal.

So let the sun remain behind me!

He has looked at it before. Now he turns to the waterfall.

The waterfall, breaking through the rock,
I look at it with growing delight.
From fall to fall it now rolls in a thousand,
Then again in a thousand streams,
Foam rushing high into the air.
But how wonderful it is to benefit from this storm,
The colorful arch of changing duration arches...

- which reflects in seven colors what is in unity in the sun.

Sometimes drawn in, sometimes dissolving into thin air,
spreading cool, fragrant showers around.
It reflects human endeavor.
Contemplate it, and you understand more precisely:
We have life in its colored reflection.

We have life in its colored reflection! – This is how far Faust has come after this night: he no longer wants to plunge into life as Faust did in the first part, when he was thrown into guilt and evil, but instead turns to its colored reflection. It is the same colored reflection that we call spiritual science, which appears to him only as a colored reflection, and through which we gradually ascend to experience reality.

What now follows, the second part, is the colored reflection of life at first. It is nonsense to understand this second part merely realistically. We have Faust, who, with his higher self, contemplates life through the physical body in its colorful reflection; he now carries this physical body through life as something he is preserving, so that everything in him can develop that, as his higher self, preserves him from that which comes in later incarnations.

It was quite difficult for Goethe to continue his “Faust” after Mephistopheles' word had been spoken: “Come to me!” But we see how Goethe strives to penetrate the secrets that we today recognize as the secrets of spiritual science. How he approaches them. And then follow this second part, how Mephistopheles really has Faust at first, how Mephistopheles is everywhere in what happens at the “imperial court” and so on. And how, through the after-effects of the initiation living in him, Faust gradually breaks away from Mephistopheles in the course of the action of the second part. But these are further secrets of the second part. Goethe himself said that he had mysteriously included much in this second part! — People have not taken the word seriously enough. Through spiritual science, they will now gradually learn to take such words more and more seriously.

But there is one thing you will have gathered from today's reflections, and that is that Goethe, in his “Faust”, strives to go further in this respect than in the first part, to express something in his “Faust” of the mood that is really symbolically hinted at here in the course of the seasons.

When Pentecost approaches, and when the spirits of the elemental world draw near to men in such wise that it may be said of them:

When the blossoms' spring rain
Over all, floating sinks,
When the fields' green blessing
All earthly born,
Little elves, size of a ghost,
Hurry, where they can help,
Whether holy or evil,
The unfortunate man laments them.

Pentecostal mood! Outpouring of the spirit in the next sentences, which the choir speaks, in the four times of sleep from falling asleep to waking up!

Thus we also show through this Faust from a certain point of view the necessity that humanity be handed down little by little what spiritual science wants to proclaim to it as a new Pentecost message. Faust is so well suited to show us how complicated that is, which exists down there at the bottom of human nature. It lives down there in human nature, which is constantly exposed to the Ahrimanic-Luciferic powers of the world, and there lives that which man can find when he places himself in the guidance of the Christ impulse.

Why do we speak of a threshold? Why do we speak of a guardian of the threshold? We speak of it because, as if by a grace of the wisdom-filled steering of the world, what struggles and rumbles and wages war in our everyday lives was initially withdrawn from the human soul, down there on the deep underground of the human soul. It is as if there were a surface, and below it rumbles and fights and wages war in our everyday life. And even what we live through in our everyday life is a continuous victory. Only it must be fought for again and again. And in the future it will only be fought for again if people will know that which has unconsciously guided them up to now, a benevolent, wisdom-filled world guidance. In the depths of the soul we must really find that which is not known in ordinary everyday life, but which the spiritual can experience. In those human depths where the human being is connected with those powers of the world that transcend good and evil with their spiritual magnitude.

I would like to express this with a Whitsun saying, in which I have combined how man, at the bottom of his soul, has elemental powers that oppose each other, and how that which lives in his consciousness is victory over that which wages war down there in the depths of his soul.

We will speak tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, about how these things relate to the context of human life. Today, however, I would like to conclude with this Whitsun saying, which basically expresses what always lives as the innermost nerve in our spiritual science, and to which we have also referred today:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
Which reveals the realities of life
To the soul's existence;
The soul creates the key,
When she grows strong within herself
In the struggle that world powers
on their own ground
with human forces,
When they banish through themselves
the sleep that envelops the powers of knowledge
at the boundaries of their senses
with a spiritual night.

Man's striving and searching for the spirit is ancient, as old as the thinking, feeling and sensing of humanity itself. But at the most diverse times in human development, people had to give themselves the most diverse forms of answers to the great riddle questions of existence, which are also precisely the riddle questions about the spirit. In our time, what is called spiritual science or, as it has become accustomed to being called, theosophy, wants to give an answer to these great riddles of existence, and it wants to give an answer that corresponds to the feelings and needs of present-day humanity.

Contemporary humanity wants to know, wants to include in its understanding and knowledge of feelings that which is connected with the higher forms of existence. From the outset, it must be assumed that suspicions and belief in relation to the spirit or, as one can also say, in relation to the supersensible world, will lose nothing when the clarity of knowledge is poured out over what man has to say in relation to these questions.

The fact that behind everything sensual, behind everything physical, there is a supersensible, a superphysical, is basically only denied by a small number of people today. But when we approach these questions, then not only either the admission or the rejection of the spiritual, of the supersensible, mingles in what fills the human heart, but the most diverse feelings mingle in everything that comes into consideration comes into consideration, the most varied feelings mingle, not only in the answers, but already in the questions the most varied feelings mingle: above all, doubt and timidity mingle with what comes into consideration.

There are many people who say: Of course, we have to assume that behind the world that appears to our eyes, that we can perceive with our senses at all, that behind this world there is another one that makes the meaning of this sensual world understandable to us. But we humans cannot penetrate this supersensible world through our own research, through our own science. In recent times, spiritual science or theosophy has emerged as a message to man that shows not only that there is a supersensible world behind the sensory world, but also that man is capable of penetrating into this supersensible world through his own research. In doing so, we have drawn the attention of those present to the question that we shall deal with today: Where and how can we find the spirit at all?

Those who, from the outset, dogmatically doubt the possibility of human knowledge rising up into the spiritual world cannot, in principle, even raise this question properly. Theosophy or spiritual science does not want to bring anything completely new to humanity. If it were to claim to do so, it would be giving a poor account of itself, for who would want to believe that truth and wisdom have been waiting for our present time to be recognized and studied? Therefore, spiritual science or theosophy also shows that throughout all periods of human spiritual development, in the most diverse forms, the one, eternal truth and wisdom has been striven for by people and possessed to a certain degree, that only the perceptions and feelings change in the different ages – and therefore the old truth must approach humanity in ever new forms.

And so, without much preparation, let us approach the question of where and how to find the spirit in this spiritual or theosophical sense. We only need to point out that the search for the spirit depends on man finding the right tool to search for this spirit. You know, my dear audience, that in what is called external science, what is called the science of nature, there are tools, instruments, through which the external riddles of existence are gradually revealed to man. You know how man peers into the life of the smallest creatures through what is called a microscope; you know what wonders of space have been revealed to man by those instruments we call telescopes. These external instruments have indeed brought about something like external wonders in human knowledge for a long time. And you can also appreciate it when you think about the things that man is dependent on to grasp and comprehend the external mysteries of nature through such tools. In terms of the spirit, there are no such external tools; there is only one tool, the one that Goethe refers to in the well-known “Faust” poem with the words:

Mysterious in the bright day
Nature cannot be robbed of her veil,
And what she may not reveal to your mind,
You cannot force from her with levers and screws.

And Goethe points out in this sentence that all those tools and instruments that are composed of external, sensual things – however useful they may be for revealing the outer secrets of the world – cannot reveal the primal secret of existence, they cannot reveal the questions and riddles about the spiritual. But there is an instrument, only this instrument must be prepared. What is this instrument?

This instrument, through which man can penetrate into the spiritual world, is none other than man himself, not as man is in the average life, but as he can make himself when he applies the methods and means of secret science to himself. In this, esoteric science assumes that the magic word that moves so many minds and souls in relation to the outer world today is not taken entirely seriously and honestly. Today, there is much talk of evolution. It is said that the highest of sentient beings, the human being, has gradually developed from imperfect states to its present height. Through the study of natural science, attempts are being made to look back into the distant primeval times of humanity. It is said that in these distant primeval times, man was an imperfect being and gradually developed.

Theosophy or spiritual science in the broadest and therefore most honest sense of the word sees in man not only the powers and abilities that are in this person's normal life today, but it sees in him dormant abilities and powers that can be developed, that can be drawn out of the soul. And so it starts from the premise that this soul of man does not have to remain as it is, but that it can be shaped, and that in this way the abilities and powers that initially lie dormant in the human soul in a normal way can be called out of this soul, and then, when they are called forth, they enable the person to see something completely different in his environment, to perceive something completely different than he can recognize with his sensory eyes, with his sensory organs of perception. And so spiritual science speaks of a possible awakening of the human soul, of an awakening of the forces and abilities slumbering within it, by man applying such means to himself as we will have to cite later. Through this he comes to make such an instrument for the perception of the spiritual world out of himself.

What is an awakening? We can best imagine what an awakening, a development of the abilities lying dormant in the soul, is by first placing an image before our soul. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, this hall by seeing the colors of the walls, the lights, by perceiving the other objects, these roses here and everything that is around you, what is perceptible, the sound that is recognizable to the ears. We bring a man born blind into this hall. The colors, the perceptions of light, which are evident to you, are hidden from this man born blind. Let us assume that we have the good fortune to operate on this man born blind here in this hall. Gradually, a whole new world would reveal itself to him around him. What he might have been able to deny before is now there for him.

Perhaps, if he had been a doubter, an unbeliever, he could have said before: You tell me about colors, you tell me about lights. There is only darkness around me. I do not believe in the fantastic stuff of light and colors you tell me about. The moment the organs are opened, the world he previously thought was a fantasy is there. It is there in the same space where there was darkness for him before.

Something similar happens to a person when they make themselves an instrument to perceive a higher world. If they apply the methods that will be mentioned below to themselves, then it is not sensory or physical organs of perception that are opened to them, but spiritual and soul ones. And that which was always around them before, which they just could not perceive, becomes perceptible to them. What Goethe called the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears develops from the soul, and a new world opens up before him [the human being]. The great moment of awakening occurs for him, that moment which is described to us in the deeper wisdom of all peoples and all different eras of the various peoples as the one through which the human being could become a messenger from another world.

There have always been people whose soul powers were awakened. In different periods they were called initiates. They were the ones who could tell what is fact in the other worlds, in the supersensible worlds, to the one who was perhaps not exactly in that place. Initiates, awakened ones have existed at all times. They were the seekers, the researchers of the spirit.

Now, one could say, and this objection will always be raised, one could say: Yes, what use is it to other people if there are a few awakened ones who can tell of higher worlds, who bring the message of the supersensible, if not all people can see into these worlds? Now, when today within the theosophical school of thought it is said that this or that is the case in the spiritual worlds, then many a person says: What use is it to me if others can see into the spiritual world but I cannot? I do not concern myself with these spiritual worlds at all, since I would only have to believe what others tell me.

This is not a valid objection. This objection would only apply, my esteemed audience, if supersensible powers of the human soul were just as necessary for understanding and insight as they are for research into the higher worlds. To penetrate into the higher world as a researcher, it is necessary that the person slowly and gradually, with patience and energy and perseverance, makes himself an instrument to look into the other world with spiritual eyes, to listen with spiritual ears. But then, when the one who has looked into the other world comes and tells the secrets of the higher worlds, then everyone is capable, with ordinary human logic, with common sense, if he is only unbiased enough, without being led astray by all kinds of prejudices, of realizing that what is said about the higher world is true. This can be recognized and understood. However, it can only be researched through the development of the human being himself into an instrument of spiritual research. For man, my honored audience, is not designed for error and doubt, but for truth. And when the initiates tell us about what is going on in the higher worlds, and the human being listens and just gives himself to his unbiased soul, then he senses, long before he can see into the spiritual world himself, that what is communicated about these worlds is true.

How can a person now reshape his inner being, his soul, so that these higher worlds become an experience for him, open to observation and direct exploration? If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper. After all, it is no less a question than this: how does a person develop the ability to see the spiritual world, how does he acquire the abilities that are also called clairvoyant? Let us start with what is an experience for the normal person: the external world of the eyes and the other external organs of perception. You know that a person perceives an object of the ordinary sensory world by directing his sensory organs towards the object, and once he has perceived it, he can retain an idea, an image of this object in his soul.

You are looking at this bouquet of roses. By fixing your eyes on this bouquet, it is a perception for you. You experience its existence, you are with it. You now turn around, and the image of this bouquet of roses remains with you as a mental image. It may be pale compared to the direct perception, but the image remains with you and you may carry this image for a long time until it disappears, so to speak, from your memory. But this is how a person relates to their experiences of the external world in general. We can say: in relation to the external sense world, a person experiences things in such a way that they actually encounter the objects first, and then the image of these external objects forms in their soul.

But precisely the opposite must occur, my dear audience, in relation to the supersensible world and everything that is connected with the great goals of supersensible development, as well as with the dangers that we will point out. All of this ultimately comes down to the fact that man must start by developing a certain kind of inner life, by first bringing about certain changes in his soul, certain experiences that he would otherwise not have in everyday life, in order to see the supersensible world. Then the great moment can come for him when – just as the outer, sensory light comes to the blind-born who have undergone an operation – the spiritual, supersensible world begins to make an impression on him.

The soul is not transformed into such an instrument of higher spiritual experience in an outward tumultuous way, not through outward events, but quietly within itself, in the course of an intimate inner life; and many a person who in life in this or that profession among people, of whom those around him knew nothing but that he had this or that position in life, has led or is leading a second life within himself. This second life consists in the fact that he has transformed his soul into such a characterized instrument of higher perception. When a person has gradually come so far, then he must develop a certain level of knowledge within himself, which external science, external experience, does not know at all. Spiritual science speaks of the fact that all external knowledge is knowledge of objects. It is precisely the kind of knowledge that arises when a person encounters the objects of the world and connects the ideas to them.

The next higher knowledge is called imaginative knowledge in spiritual science, and there is nothing fantastical, as we shall see in a moment, associated with this imaginative knowledge, not even anything that could even approximately be described by the mere word imagination. However, it must be clear that the path is the opposite of that of external experience, of external perception.

There are two means that must be applied intimately to the soul in order to advance it inwardly. These two means consist in man not abandoning himself to the mere outer life, but taking this soul life into his own hands through the inner powers of the soul, and initially directing this soul life through the inner powers of the will.

To fully understand what this is about, let us consider the following: We try to imagine how our soul life would be different if one or other of us had been born not in the year of the nineteenth century and not in the city of Europe, but a hundred years earlier and in a completely different city. We imagine how different objects around the person would affect him, how different ideas, sensations and feelings would then fill his soul. Think for a moment about how much of what fills your soul from morning till evening can be traced back to external impressions of place and time, and then imagine for a moment all the things in your soul that are not somehow connected to some external object in your environment, to some external event of your time. Ask yourself how much remains in the soul of a person, in the soul of many people, if they disregard what affects them in their immediate environment. Everything that affects the soul from the outside, everything that affects us because we were born and develop in a certain time and in a certain place, can contribute nothing, absolutely nothing, to the inner unfolding, to the inner awakening of the soul.

Completely different conceptions must enter into the life of the soul, conceptions that are independent of external impressions; and the most effective conceptions are initially those which are called imaginative or perhaps pictorial-symbolic. Such conceptions were always those which the teachers of supersensible abilities gave to their pupils, and by living in these conceptions, the pupils developed their souls upwards into the higher worlds.

We do not wish to speak in generalities, but to make ourselves understood by means of an example. Let us place before our minds, here and now, a symbol, a picture, which the pupils, under the influence of their spiritual science teachers, have long used to develop their souls higher. This is a picture, of which there are countless numbers, but we wish to make clear, by means of this one picture, how the soul is affected. The picture is simple to describe, and yet it has a magical effect on the soul.

Imagine a black cross. This black cross is adorned at the top, where the beams cross, with roses, with red roses. This is called the Rosicrucian symbol. When the disciple, as it were, becomes blind and deaf to the external environment, when he can, for a while, however short, refrain from all that can make an impression on his eyes, on his ears and on the other senses , when he is completely absorbed in himself and also erases the memory of everyday experiences and now fills himself completely with the one pictorial representation of the Rosicrucian – what happens to the soul?

Let us first answer this question. To do so, we must first understand something that can help us to understand the profound symbol of the Rosicrucian. However, what I am about to say is not what is important for the inner development to clarify this symbol or image, but rather the inner deepening and immersion of the soul. Nevertheless, we must explain the symbol to ourselves.

I will try to present this Rosicrucian symbol to you in the form of a dialogue, as the teacher would have spoken to his student in the field of spiritual science. This conversation, as I relate it, did not take place in the form in which I relate it, because what is implied in it always took place over long periods of time. Nevertheless, by retelling it in this way, we can get a sense of what happened.

Imagine that the teacher says to the student: Take a look at a plant, a plant that takes root in the ground, grows out of the ground, out of the root, with green leaves. And now compare the human being with this plant. Look at the human being in his present form, pervaded by red blood. Look at the plant and see how its life organs, its leaves, are permeated with the green sap, chlorophyll. Compare the two. You find the plant insensitive, immobile; you find the human being mobile, sensitive. You find that the human being has an inner life filled with pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. You say that the human being stands at a higher level of existence than the plant. How did the human being come to a higher level of existence, how was he able to develop within himself that which could be called self-awareness, his ego? The plant has not developed such self-awareness, such an ego, as it stands before us.

The human being was only able to develop his higher consciousness to the point of self-awareness by accepting something else. In this higher development, the human being accepted the passions, the drives, the instincts, the desires. The plant does not have these. Although the plant does not have an inner life of thoughts and feelings, it stands in a certain respect higher than man in its kind; chaste and pure, without sensual urges and desires, without instincts and passions. And by imagining how the green plant sap flows through it, we say: this green sap is for us at the same time the symbol of the pure, chaste nature of plants. And as the pure, chaste nature of plants develops upward to man, so in man a self-awareness, an inner life, is developed. But this pure chastity is transformed at the same time into the life of desire. Man has partly risen higher, partly sunk lower.

Now the teacher continues to the student: But do not just look at the person as he stands before you in the present; look at a distant, very distant human future, at a human goal! Man has the goal of striving higher and higher, step by step, and overcoming what he had to accept in his development to date: to purify and cleanse the instincts, desires and passions, so that one day, while maintaining his consciousness, his self-aware nature, he is pure and chaste within himself, like the plant being at his level, in his way. What the human being is to achieve again in the future is overcoming, purifying what he had to accept, so to speak, shedding, taking away from himself that through which he has become lower than the chaste plant being, and only in this way can he revive in himself a higher nature, a higher human being, which today slumbers in him. Once again we can refer to Goethe when we want to draw attention to the deepest meaning of this development of humanity. We can say, and we fully capture the meaning of what the spiritual teacher said to his pupil with these words of Goethe's. We can draw attention to the words in Goethe's West-Eastern Divan:

And as long as you do not have this,
this dying and becoming!
If you are only a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

“Stirb und Werde”: What does that mean? Stirb und Werde is a deeply symbolic word. It expresses approximately that which has now been said in the symbolum, it expresses that man wants to let die that which he has taken on in order to reach a higher level, to bring it to a higher flowering, his lower nature, and a higher nature is to be driven out as a flowering of the supersensible.

If we now look at the plant, it becomes a symbol for us in a certain form, a clear symbol of this human development. We see how the rose plant develops into its red blossom. The green sap of the plant changes before our eyes, so to speak, as it shoots into the blossom, into the red sap of the blossom. If we now imagine, symbolically, that we are always in the conversation between the teacher and the disciple, we think of the human being in terms of the passions and drives that are bound to his red blood, so purified and cleansed that this red blood flows through the veins in chastity and purity, like the red sap through the rose petal. Then we have in the rose itself the symbol of the higher human nature.

This is expressed in the rose cross, the “die and become” of the lower man, the shedding and casting off of what man has taken on in the black cross. The “becoming” at a higher level of development of the innermost spiritual nature of man is also reflected in the pure, chaste plant-juice in the roses that adorn the Rosicrucian cross. Thus we have explained this picture intellectually from one side. Much more could be said about it.

Now someone could, of course, say – and it would be a very easy objection to raise – that everything that has been said about the Rose Cross does not correspond to scientific conceptions. Certainly, my dear audience, it does not correspond to external scientific conceptions, but the Rose Cross is not there to express some outer fact in accordance with truth. What matters is not such a representation of the outer world, but that the person who, precisely because the Rosicrucian cross corresponds to no outer reality, allows this cross to enter his soul, becomes completely absorbed in this Rosicrucian cross and, as if below the threshold of consciousness, feels and experiences everything we have said here. His soul becomes something other than it was before. Such symbols have this effect on the human soul, precisely because they do not correspond to any external reality. They stimulate the soul to so-called imaginative knowledge, to that knowledge which represents the first step in the ascent to the higher worlds.

I have been able to present only the Rosicrucian cross as an example. We could cite a hundred other examples. The disciple must gradually familiarize himself with these symbols, just as someone who wants to learn to read must become acquainted with letters and signs. Only in this way can he attain a higher form of existence, and then such a one, who has the patience and persistence to live himself into the pictorial representations of such symbols, has a special experience.

To get an idea of what kind of experience a person has when they are awakened, we need to gain some insight into human nature. This nature offers man the great riddles of existence, and it is precisely in what he experiences daily, so to speak, and what can present him with the deepest riddles, that he passes by indifferently. These riddles of existence are encapsulated in four words: waking and sleeping, life and death. These four words describe the greatest riddles of life.

Of course, it is not possible in a short hour to discuss in detail how one, in terms of spiritual science, should think about the nature of man in relation to these four words. But what should be mentioned is what the one who is able to explore the spirit in the way described today experiences in man and his changes in everyday life. Is not this everyday life, with its alternation of waking and sleeping, a mystery? We see how, from morning till evening, a person is filled with the impressions of the day, how all his senses are constantly taking in perceptions. We see how the person then processes his external impressions with his mind. But we see how, in the evening, when he falls asleep, the person sees all his impressions of the day and all the experiences of the soul sink away. We see how man sinks, as it were, into the sea of temporary forgetfulness of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, but also of all perceptions of everyday life, of sounds, of warmth and so on, which fill his soul from morning to evening, how he sees all his inner soul experiences fade away and, as it were, unconsciousness surrounds him.

Now it would, of course, be foolishness – an easily understandable foolishness – to say that a person ceases to exist in the evening and is reborn in the morning. What is at issue is rather that man is a complex being, a being not merely consisting of those limbs, the eyes with which we see, the hands with which we can feel, but that in addition to this physical body we have even higher, superphysical perceptual faculties. When a person falls asleep at night – and we will now only consider the transition from waking to dreamless sleep, leaving the intermediate state and the state filled with dreams to one side – when a person falls asleep, part of their being remains in bed and another part, the one that cannot be seen with any external eye, withdraws; the very vehicle of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure and passion, the vehicle of sensory perceptions, withdraws, and during the night it is outside the physical human body.

In spiritual science, we call that which leaves the physical body when we fall asleep the astral body. Don't be put off by this word; it has nothing to do with the stars, it is simply the supersensible part of the human nature, which withdraws in the evening and leaves the physical body to itself. The human being truly exists from the evening when he falls asleep until the morning when he wakes up. He sleeps and the consciousness of which we shall now speak, which is developed here as clairvoyant consciousness at awakening, emerges like a fine but spiritual luminous form as the astral body itself when the person falls asleep. In the spiritual world, the human being is present in his spiritual essence, which is around him.

Why does man not see these facts and entities when he is in his astral body at night among spiritual facts and entities? For the same reason that a blind person does not see colors and light. Imagine your eyes being closed to your physical body! The world around you is dark and gloomy, colorless. Think away the ears! The world is mute and soundless. And if you think away all the organs, the world gradually becomes a nothing. Only that is there for man, for which he has organs, nothing else! When, let us say, the luminous cloud of the astral body withdraws from the physical body at night, the human being has no organs in his astral body with which to perceive in the spiritual world. The result of this is unconsciousness and darkness around him.

What happens when a person does not live an ordinary, normal life, but allows himself to be affected by what has just been described to you through the one symbol, when he devotes himself to such things in his soul , when he develops his soul with calmness and perseverance in such a way that, while becoming deaf and blind to his external surroundings, he is able to immerse himself completely in his inner life, which is called a life of meditation and concentration? What happens then? This is something that clairvoyant consciousness can observe. An indeterminate astral body becomes a definite one. What happens in the astral body is as if the physical body were to gradually develop eyes within it. In the manner described, spiritual eyes and ears are incorporated into the astral body; an indeterminate cloud becomes a structured astral organism. The consequence of this is that the human being now no longer experiences nothing, but that what enters spiritually for the sensual body when the eyes and ears are incorporated into it. This now occurs for the astral body.

What man achieves through patient meditation and concentration in such pictorial and other representations through the corresponding teaching of spiritual science, that was called the process of purification in circles where people knew something about spiritual science. Why purification or catharsis? For the reason that man from now on in terms of his development was no longer dependent merely on external impressions and then must remain unconscious and has no external impressions, but because he now, when he leaves out all impressions, as it is in sleep, nevertheless has a world around him. Because he can be purified and refined and still have experiences, just spiritual experiences. This is the first step, which is achieved by such means as we have described.

But there must also be a second stage in spiritual development if man is to become a real clairvoyant. We will be able to understand this stage, this higher stage, when we realize that when we fall asleep, not only a physical part remains. Even in this physical body, which remains in bed at night when we fall asleep, we have a superphysical, a supersensory. The easiest way to understand this – and today it can only be mentioned – is to go deeper and deeper into theosophy. You will see that this is being elevated to the level of proof despite all the objections of external science. The easiest way to understand this is to compare the human being as he stands before us with some external physical object.

What is the physical body of man is, has the same forces and materials as the external inanimate so-called mineral bodies. But there is a huge difference between the people and a mere mineral being. You can see a mineral being that has a certain shape. How can the form disappear? By being smashed or destroyed from the outside. From the outside, the form must be destroyed. What is the human physical body – and we are now speaking of the human being, otherwise we would have to say that it is the same for every living being – what is the human physical body, it is also made of physical forces and substances, just like the outer nature, but when these forces and substances are left to themselves, what do they do? They dissolve the form, they disintegrate.

What can be called the dissolution of the form of the physical human body occurs at death. When a person dies, what remains before our eyes, before the external senses, is a physical body; this now disintegrates into the physical and chemical substances that are within it. But it is no longer a human body, it is a corpse; and while a stone retains its form through the forces and substances at work in it, the human body will disintegrate and dissolve the moment it is left to its own physical and chemical substances. Spiritual science shows us that from the moment of its formation until the moment of death, an enduring fighter lives in our body, as it does in every living being. This fighter continually works to prevent the physical body from disintegrating during our lifetime. Just as we see the astral body floating out of what remains in bed when the person falls asleep in the evening, so we see that which remains in the physical body during sleep floating out at death. In this way, death differs from ordinary sleep. That which we find in life as a fighter against the disintegration of our body, we call the etheric or life body in relation to the physical, and the difference between sleep and death now becomes clear to us.

During sleep, not only the physical body but also the etheric or life body remains lying, and from these two the astral body rises with self-awareness. So every night. In the morning, when the person wakes up, his astral body descends again into the physical body and into the etheric or life body and uses the organs, the eyes, the ears and so on. When a person passes through the gate of death, only the physical body remains, which is now a corpse, and the etheric body lifts off with the astral body. Such is the difference between sleep and death.

The fact that the etheric body, with what this etheric body has experienced in the earthly, is raised up, enables the human being to pass over into a spiritual world after his death, in which he continues to live. But this question should not concern us, what the human being takes with him from his life into the other existence, but rather what is connected with the where and how of the spiritual researcher.

The etheric body does not emerge even during sleep, but remains with the physical human body. The astral body, on the other hand, floats out during sleep, and when the person wakes up, it re-enters the physical body. At the moment when the astral body, through the contemplation described to you, through that meditative life, when it acquires imaginative knowledge in symbolic and other representations, for example, at that moment when the astral body receives its spiritual and so forth, he brings these into the etheric body in the morning, and the result of this is that the person does not wake up in the morning with the feeling, “You were unconscious.” Instead, when he awakens, he says, I was in a spiritual world among spiritual things and beings, I was in my true home, in that world from which my soul and spirit come just as my physical body is from the physical world.

The second, higher stage of clairvoyant life contributes to the fact that the astral body, with what it develops at night under the influence of the inner life, illuminates the etheric body. This is called enlightenment. These are the first two stages of clairvoyant life.

At first, there is the realization that the person does not wake up from the sea of unconsciousness, but with the memory that he was among spiritual beings during the night. He knows that there was a spiritual world around him; and then he comes further and further so that during the day, in his physical body, he can see around him that which is around us, which fills space just as much as the physical world, that he can see the spiritual world around him between and through physical things. Thus man does not find the spirit through external perception, but he finds it by awakening his soul through precisely defined methods and means, which could only be explained by an example today. He brings the forces and abilities slumbering in him to a higher level, finds the spirit in himself, and thus can perceive the spiritual world in the spirit that he has awakened in himself.

Thus, through the development of a new consciousness, through purification and enlightenment, the human being lives his way up into the spiritual world. And again, imagination, this immersion in images, is only the preparation for the perceptions of the actual spiritual world. For here we are faced with an important fact of inner experience. Someone might raise the question: Yes, but what a person has in his inner life at first are only unreal images, only pictures, only symbols. — Of course, at first they are. But if he assimilates these symbols in the right way in his life, then the time comes when he can say to himself: Now, now I have arrived at the moment when I no longer have only my real ideas, but now, because I have made something specific out of my life, an objective world flows in on me.

Only experience itself, observation, can teach one to distinguish between how long one lives in mere ideas and when one arrives at the spiritual facts and spiritual entities that come from outside. Just as you can distinguish in the sensual life between mere conception and the perception of reality, so too there comes a moment when you can distinguish through experience the inner life of mere conception in the imagination from outer [supernatural] reality.

One could indeed say: In the physical world, the existence of real things can be proven. No, it can only be experienced; it can never be proved by experience. The mere idea in the sensual world is to be clearly distinguished from perception, and if someone wanted to claim, as a false philosophy does, that our world consists only of ideas, he may consider what a difference there is between the idea of a glowing steel and the perception of a glowing steel. He can clearly see the difference that exists. Imagine being in front of a glowing piece of steel and try to determine such clear and correct concepts from it. The philosophical prejudice that the world is our imagination cannot be proven, only the reality of things can be experienced.

Just as things are outside of us and become our ideas when we face them, so too the inner, intimate life that arises through meditation and concentration in those images and in other ideas, which of course cannot be described here due to the limited time, but can only be illustrated by the example of the Rosicrucian , then man, when he practices the inner life, can see the time approaching when he says: I no longer have a Rosicrucian before me, but I have reached the moment when spiritual beings approach me who are just as real as the external sensual things when I imagine them. This is experienced, and what he does is a preparation. This is indeed how the life of the soul unfolds during awakening.

When ascending into the spiritual world, the opposite of what happens in external reality occurs. In external reality, we first have the objects and the experience; then we form the ideas. In the higher, spiritual, supersensible world, we must first transform our imaginative life and then wait patiently until we are able to allow the truth, the spiritual, the supersensible reality to take effect on our soul. And it will depend entirely on whether the person has practised a corresponding development of character, parallel to meditation and concentration, and has maintained such certainty and stability by that time that he can distinguish between imagination, hallucination and reality at the decisive moment. Ultimately, only life can give this distinction. Just as the fool is a fool who mistakes his imagination of the rose for a real rose, so man can naturally hallucinate and have illusions in the spiritual realm, even more easily, of course, if he does not retain inner security until the decisive point. But if he retains his inner strength and certainty, so that he does not waver for a moment, and says to himself: Only when something comes to meet me in my prepared soul is reality, I speak of spiritual reality; everything else I regard only as preparation; only then will he be able to distinguish spiritual reality from deception just as surely at the decisive moment as the outer man can distinguish between imagination and reality.

So, my honored attendees, today we should deal with the question: Where and how can we find the spirit? It is not by constructing some external instrument that one can find the spirit, but by transforming oneself into an instrument for perceiving the spiritual world. And so it is true that the soul's inner powers are capable of development, that, to speak again in Goethe's sense, spiritual ears can develop out of this soul, just as sensory ears and eyes develop out of the body.

Thus man finds the higher world through his own higher development. Even if today only a few can make themselves spiritual instruments for the exploration of the spiritual world, these few can still tell of the facts of the spiritual world. Since the human soul is not designed for delusion and error, but for truth, the communication of the spiritual world can be received by unbiased thinking in such a way that man first receives a presentiment of the truth of the spiritual world. Then there is the hope that, with appropriate instruction, he can gradually make himself such an instrument of spiritual perception over the course of a long, austere life. The best preparation is to begin with, to absorb and understand, in pure, unbiased thinking, in sound mind, what the spiritual researcher can grasp in the spiritual world.

Then, through such intellectual preparation, the presentiment and hope of higher experience will arise, and the human being will have in his feelings that which solves the riddles of the higher worlds and reveals the secrets of these riddles. And he will feel, experience, the truth of Goethe's words, who stood more than is usually believed in these spiritual worlds and secrets, which Goethe also expresses in his life poem, in “Faust”, at the point where he says that the sage speaks. Yes, it is precisely by living in the facts that each of us can find for ourselves within ourselves the confirmation of the words of this wise Goethe, for spiritual science offers messages about the spiritual world and awakens the hope of one day passing through the gate that currently separates human beings from these worlds. And so it will come true, through what is today called theosophy or spiritual science, when it becomes more familiar with humanity, what Goethe has the wise man say in “Faust”:

The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undeterred
The earthly breast in the morning dawn!

My dear friends,

The fact that we have spoken of the transformation of energy and force assumed by modern physics makes it necessary for us to turn our attention to the problem of indicating what really lies behind these transformations. To aid in this, I wish to perform another experiment to be ranged alongside of yesterday's. In this experiment we will perform work through the use of another type of energy than the one that is immediately evident in the work performed. We will, as it were, bring about in another sphere the same sort of thing that we did yesterday when we turned a wheel, put it in motion and thus performed work. For the turning of the wheel can be applied in any machine, and the motion utilized. We will bring about the turning of a wheel simply by pouring water on these paddle, and this water by virtue of its weight will bring the paddle wheel into motion. The force that somehow or other exists in the running water is transformed into the rotational energy of the wheel. We will let the water flow into this trough in order to permit it to form a liquid surface as it did in previous experiments. What we show is really this, that by forming a liquid surface below we make the motion of the wheel slower than it was before. Now, it will slow down in proportion to the degree to which the lower level approaches the upper level. Thus we can say: if we indicate the total height of the water from the point \(a\) here where it flows onto the wheel by \(h\) and the perpendicular distance to the liquid surface by \(h'\) then we can state the difference as \(h-h'\). We can further state that the work available for the wheel is connected in some way with the difference between the two levels. (The sense in which this is so we will seek in our further considerations.) Yesterday in our experiment we also had a kind of difference in levels, \(t-t'\). For you will recollect we denoted the heat of the surroundings at the beginning of our experiments by \(t'\) and the heat we produced in order to do work to raise and lower a bell, this we denoted by \(t\). Therefore you can say: the energy available for work depends on the difference between \(t\) and \(t'\). Here too, we have something that can be denoted as a difference in level.

I must ask you to note especially how both these experiments show that wherever we deal with what is called energy transformation, we have to take account of difference in level. The part played by this, what is really behind the phenomenon of energy transformation, this we will find only where we pursue further the train of thought of yesterday. As we do this we will illuminate so to speak, the phenomena of heat and take into account that which Eduard von Hartmann set aside before he attempted a definition of physical phenomena. In this connection we must emphasize again and again a beautiful utterance of Goethe's regarding physical phenomena. He gave utterance to this in various ways, somewhat as follows: what is all that goes on in outer physical apparatus as compared to the ear of the musician, as compared to the revelation of nature that is given us in the musician's ear itself. What Goethe wishes to emphasize by this is that we will never understand physical things if we observe them separately from man himself. According to his view, the only way to attain the goal is to consider physical phenomena in connection with the human being, the phenomena of sound in connection with the sense of hearing. But we have seen that great difficulties arise when we try in this way to bring the phenomena of heat in connection with the human being—really seek to connect heat with the being of man. Even the facts that have led to the discover of the so-called modern mechanical theory of heat support this view. Indeed, that which appears in this modern mechanical theory of heat took its origin from an observation made on the human organism by Julius Robert Mayer. Julius Robert Mayer, who was a physician, had noticed from blood-letting he was obliged to do in the tropical country of Java, that the venous blood of tropical people was redder than that of people in northern climes. He concluded correctly from this that the process involved in the coloration of blood varies, depending on whether man lives in a warmer or cooler climate, and is thus under the necessity of giving off less or more heat to his surroundings. This in turn involves a smaller or greater oxidation. Essentially he discovered that this process is less intense when the human being is not obliged to work so intensely on his environment. Thus, the human being of the tropics, since he loses less heat to his environment, is not obliged to set up so active a relation with the outer oxygen as when he gives off more heat. Consequently man, in order to maintain his life processes and exist at all on the earth in the cooler regions, is obliged to tie himself in more closely with his environment. He must take in more oxygen from the air in the colder regions where he works more intensely in connection with his environment than in the warmer zones where he labors more intensely in his inner nature.

Right here you get an insight into the inner workings of the whole human organization. You see that it has only to become warmer and the human being then works more in his inner individuality than he does when his environment is colder and he is thereby obliged to link his activities more intimately with his outer environment.

From this process in which we have represented a relation of man to his environment, there proceeded the observations that resulted in the theory of heat. These observations led Julius Robert Mayer to submit his small paper on the subject to the Poggnedorfschen Annalen. From this paper arose the entire movement in physics that we know about. This is strange enough since the paper that Mayer handed the Poggnedorfschen Annalen was returned as entirely lacking in merit. Thus we have the odd circumstance that physicists today say: we have turned physics into entirely new channels, we think entirely otherwise about physical things than they did before the year 1842. But attention has to be called to the fact that the physicists of that time, and they were the best physicists of the period, had considered Mayer's paper as entirely without merit and would not publish it in the Poggnedorfschen Annalen. Now you can see that it might be said: this paper in a certain sense brings to a conclusion the kind of view of the physical that was, as it were, incompletely expressed in Goethe's statement. After the publication of this paper, a physics arises which sees science advancing when physical facts are considered apart from man. This is indeed the principle characteristic of modern views on the subject. Many publications bring this idea forward as necessary for the advance of physics, stating that nothing must enter in which comes from man himself, which has to do with his own organic processes. But in this way we shall arrive at nothing. We will however continue our train of thought of yesterday, a train of thought drawn from the world of facts and one which will lead us to bring physical phenomena nearer to man.

I wish once more to lay before you the essential thing. We start from the realm of solids and find a common property at first manifesting as form. We then pass through the intermediate state of the fluid showing form only to the extent of making for itself a liquid surface. Then we reach the gaseous bodies, where the property corresponding to form manifests itself as condensation and rarefaction.

We then come to the region bordering on the gaseous, the heat region, which again, like the fluid, is an intermediate region, and then we come to our \(X\). Yesterday we saw that pursuing our thought further we have in \(X\) to postulate materialization and dematerialization. It is not difficult then to see that we can go beyond \(X\) to \(Y\) and \(Z\) just as, for instance, we go in the light spectrum from green to blue, from blue to violet and to ultra violet.

And now it is a question of studying the mutual relations between these different regions. In each one we see appearing what I might call definitely characteristic phenomena. In the concrete realm we see a circumscribed for; in gas a changing form, so to speak, in condensations and rarefactions. This accompanies, and I am now speaking precisely, this accompanies the tone entity, under certain conditions. When we pass through the warmth realm into \(X\) realm, we see materialization and dematerialization. The question now arising is this: how does one realm work into another?

Now I have already called your attention to the fact that when we speak of gas, the phenomena there enacted present a kind of picture of what goes on in the realm of heat. We can say therefore, in the gas we find a picture of what goes on in the heat realm. This comes about in no other manner than that we have to consider gas and heat as mutually interpenetrating each other, as so related that gaseous phenomena are seized upon in their spatial relationship by the heat entity. What is really taking place in the realm of heat expresses itself in the gas through the interpenetration of the two realms. Furthermore we can say, fluids show us a relationship of forces similar to that obtaining between gases and heat. Solids show the same sort of relationship to fluids do to gases and as gases do to heat.

What then, comes about in the realm of solids? In this realm forms appear, definite forms. Forms circumscribed within themselves. These circumscribed forms are in a relative sense pictures of what is really active in fluids. Now we can pass here to a realm \(U\), below the solid, whose existence we at the start will merely postulate; and let us try to create concepts in the realm of the observable. By extending our thinking which you can feel is rooted in reality, we can create concepts and these concepts springing from the real bring into us a bit of the real world.

What must take place if there is to be such a reality as the \(U\) realm? In this realm there must be pictured that which in solids is a manifested fact. In a manner corresponding to the other realms the \(U\) realm must give us a picture of the solids. In the world of solids we have bodies everywhere, everywhere forms. These forms are conditioned from within their own being, or at least conditioned according to their relation to the world. We will consider this further in the next few days. Forms come into being, mutually inter-related.

Let us go back for a moment to the fluid state. There we have, as it were, the fluid throwing out a surface and thus showing its relation to the entire earth. In gravity therefore, we have to recognize a force related to the creation of form in solids. In the \(U\) realm we must find something that happens in a similar manner to the form-building in the world of solids, if we are to pursue our thinking in accordance with reality. And this must parallel the picturing of the fluid world by solids. In other words: in the \(U\) world we must be able to see an action which foreshadows the solid world. We must in some way be able to see this activity. We must see how, under the influence of forms related to each other something else arises. There must come into existence as a reality what further manifests as varying forms in the solid world. We really have today only the beginning of such an insight. For, suppose you take a suitable substance, such as tourmaline, which carries in itself the principle of form. You then bring this tourmaline into such a relation that form can act on form. I refer to the inner formative tendency. You can do this by allowing light to shine through a pair of tourmaline crystals. At one time you can see through them and then the field of vision darkens. This you can bring about simply by turning one crystal. You have brought their form-creating force into a different relation. This phenomena, apparently related to the passage of light through systems of differing constitution, shows us the polarization figures. Polarization phenomena always appear when one form influences another. There we have the noteworthy fact before our eyes that we look through the solid realm into another realm related to the solid as the solid is to the liquid. Let us ask ourselves now, how come it is that under the influence of the form-building force there arises in the \(U\) realm that which we observe in the polarization figures as they are called, and which really lies in the realm beneath the solid realm? For we do, as a matter of fact, look into a realm here that underlies the world of the solids. But we see something else also.

We might look long into such a solid system, and the most varied forces might be acting there upon each other, but we would see nothing. It is necessary to have something playing through these systems, just as the U realm plays through the world of solids in order to bring out the phenomenon. And the light does this and makes the mutual inter-working of the form-building forces visible for us.

What I have here expressed, my friends, is treated by the physics of the 19th century in such a way that the light itself is supposed to give rise to the phenomenon while in reality the light only makes the phenomenon visible. Looking on these polarization figures, one must seek for their origin in an entirely different source from the light itself. What is taking place has nothing whatever to do with the light as such. The light simply penetrates the \(U\) realm and makes visible what is going on there, what is taking place there as a foreshadowing of the solid form. Thus we can say we have to do with an interpenetration of different realms which we have simply unfolded before our eyes. In reality we are dealing with an interpenetration of different realms.

And now the facts lead us to the same point which we reached, for instance, in the realm of the gaseous by means of the forces of form. Our concepts of what has been said will be better if we consider condensation and rarefaction in connection with the relation of tone to the organ of hearing. We must not feel it necessary to identify these condensations and rarefactions in a gaseous body entirely with what we are conscious of as tone. We must seek for something in the gas that uses the condensations and rarefactions as an agency when these are present in a suitable fashion. What really happens we must express as follows: that which we call tone exists in a non-manifested condition. But when we bring about in a gas certain orderly condensations and rarefactions, then there occurs what we perceive consciously as tone. Is not this way of stating the matter entirely as though I should say the following: we can imagine in the cosmos heat conditions where the temperature is very high—about 100°C. We can also imagine heat conditions where very low temperatures prevail. Between the two is a range in which human beings can maintain themselves. It is possible to say that wherever in the cosmos there is a passage from the condition of high temperature to a condition of low temperature, there obtains at some intermediate point a heat condition in which human beings may exist. The opportunity for the existence of man is there, if other necessary factors for human existence are present. But we would on no account say: man is the temperature

Variation from high to low and the reverse variation. (For here the conditions would be right again for his existence.) We would certainly not say that. In physics, however, we are always saying, tone is nothing but the condensation and rarefaction of the air; tone is a wave-motion that expresses itself as condensation and rarefaction in the air. Thus we accustom ourselves to a way of thinking that prevents us from seeing the condensations and rarefactions simply as bearers of the tone, and not constituting the tone itself. And we should conceive for the gaseous something that simply penetrates it, but belongs to another realm, finding in the realm of the gaseous the opportunity so to manifest as to form a connection between itself and our higher organs. Concepts formed in this way about physical phenomena are really valid. If however, one forms a concept in which tone is merely identified with the air vibrations, then one is naturally led to consider light merely as ether vibrations. A person thus passes from what is not accurately conceived to the creation of a world of thought-out fantasies resulting simply from loose thinking. Following the usual ideas of physics, we bury ourselves in physical concepts that are nothing more than the creation of inaccurate thinking.

But now we have to consider the fact that when we pass through the heat realm to the \(X\), \(Y\) and \(Z\) realms, we have to pass out into infinity and here from the U region we have also to step into the infinite.

Recollect now what I told you yesterday. In the case of the spectrum also, when we try to get an idea of it as it exists ordinarily, we have to go from the green through the blue to the violet and then of to the infinite, or at least to the undetermined. So likewise at the red end of the spectrum. But we can imagine the spectrum in its completeness as a series of 12 independent colors in a circle, with green below and peach-blossom above, and ranged between these the other colors. When we can imagine the circle to become larger and larger, the peach blossom disappears above and the spectrum extends on the one hand beyond the red and on the other beyond the violet. In the ordinary spectrum therefore, we really have only a part of what would be there if the entire color series could appear. Only a portion is present.

Now there is a very remarkable thing. I think, my friends, if you take as a basis the ordinary presentation of optics in the physic books and read what is there given as explanation of a special spectral phenomenon, namely the rainbow, you will be rather uneasy if you are a person who likes clear concepts. For the explanation of the rainbow is really given in such a manner that one has no foundation on which to stand. One is obliged to follow all sorts of things going on in the raindrop from the running together of extremely small reflections that are dependent on where one stands in relation to the rainbow. These reflections are said really to come from the raindrops. In brief you have in this explanation an atomistic view of something that occurs in our environment as unity. But even more perplexing is the fact that his rainbow or spectrum conjured up before us by nature herself, never occurs singly. A second rainbow is always present, although sometimes very completely hidden. Things that belong together cannot be separated. The two rainbows, of which one is clearer than the other, belong of necessity together, and if one is to explain this phenomenon, it is not possible to do so simply by explaining one strip of color. If we are to comprehend the total phenomenon we must make it clear to ourselves that something of a unique nature is in the center and that it shows two bands of color. The one band is the clearer rainbow, and the other band is the more obscure bow. We are dealing with a representation in the greatness of nature herself, which is an integral portion of the “All” and must be comprehended as a unity. Now, when we observe carefully we will see that the second rainbow, the accessory bow, shows colors in the reverse order from the first. It reflects, so to speak, the first and clearer rainbow. As soon as we go from the partial phenomenon as it appears in our environment, to a relatively more complete one, when we conceive of the whole earth in its relation to the cosmic system, we see in the rainbows a different aspect. I wish only to mention this here—we will go into it more completely in the course of our lecture. But I wish to say here that the appearance of the second bow converts the phenomenon into a closed system, so to speak. The system is only an open one so long as I limit my consideration to the special spectrum arising in the \(U\) portion of my environment. The phenomenon of the rainbow really leads me to think of the matter thus, that when I produce a spectrum experimentally, I grasp nature only at one pole, the opposite pole escapes me. Something has slipped into the unknown, and I really have to add to the seven-colored spectrum the accessory spectrum.

Now hold in mind this phenomenon and the ideas that arise from it and recollect the previous ideas that we have brought out here. We are trying to close up the band of color that stretches out indefinitely on both sides, and bring the two together. If now, we do a similar things in this other realm, what happens? (See sketch at end of Chapter) Then we will pass from solids to the U region and beyond, but as we do this we also come back from the other end of the series and the system becomes a closed one. But now, when the downward path and the upward one come together to make a closed system, what does that form for us? What happens then?

I will try as follows to lead you to an understanding of this: suppose you really go in one direction in the sense indicated in our diagrams. Let us say we go out from the sphere where, as we have explained in these lectures, gravity becomes negative. We have, let us say, arrived in one of the realms. From this realm, suppose we go downward, and imagine that we pass through first the fluid and then the solid realms. Now when we go further, we must really come back from the other side—it is difficult to show this diagrammatically. Since we come back from the other side, that which belongs to this other side has to insert itself into the realm from which we have just passed. That is to say, while I pass from the solid to the U region, if I want to represent the whole cycle I must bend what is at the other end of the series around and thrust it in here. I can picture it in this way. From the null sphere I go through the fluid into the solid and then into the U region. Returning then, I come to the same point from the other side. Or, I might say: I observe the gas, it extends to here where I have colored with blue (referring to the drawing at end of Chapter). But from the other side comes that which inserts itself, interpenetrates it from the cosmic cycle, but appearing there only as a picture. It impregnates the gas, so to speak, and manifests as a picture. The fluid in its essence interpenetrates the sphere of the solid, and attains a form. Similarly, form appears in the gas as tone and this we have indicated in our diagram. Turn over in your minds this returning and interpenetration in these world-processes. You will of necessity have to think not of a world-cycle only, but of a certain sort of world-cycle. You will have to think of a world cycle that moves from one realm to another, but in which any realm shows reflection of other realms. In this way we get a basis for thinking about these things that has a root in reality. This way of thinking will help you, for instance, to see how light arises in matter, light which belongs to an entirely different realm; but you will see that the matter is simply “overrun” by the light, as it were. And you will then, if you treat these things mathematically, have to extend your formulae somewhat.

You may, if you will, consider these things under the symbol of ancient wisdom, the snake that swallows its own tail. The ancient wisdom represented these things symbolically and we have to draw nearer to the reality. This drawing nearer is the problem we must solve.

My dear friends,

Yesterday we carried out an experiment which brought to your attention the fact that mechanical work exerted by friction of a rotating paddle in a mass of water has changed into heat. You were shown that the water in which the paddle turned became warmer.

Today we will do just the opposite. We showed yesterday that we must in some ways seek an explanation for the coming of heat into existence upon the expenditure of work. Now let us follow the reverse process. We will first of all heat this air (see Figures at end of Chapter) using a flame, raise the pressure of the vapor, and thus bring about a mechanical effect by means of heat, in a way similar to that by which all steam engines are moved. Heat is turned into work through pressure change. By letting the pressure come through from one side we raise the bell up and by letting the vapor cool, the pressure is lessened, the bell goes down again and we have performed mechanical work, consistive in this up and down movement. We can see the condensation water which reappears when we cool, and runs into this flask. After we have let the entire process take place, after the heat that we have produced here has transformed itself into work, let us determine whether this heat has been entirely transformed into the up and down movement of the bell or whether some of it has been lost. The heat not changed into work must appear as such in the water. In case of a complete transformation the condensation water would not show any rise in temperature. If there is a rise in temperature which we can determine by noting whether the thermometer shows a temperature above the ordinary, then this temperature rise comes from the heat we have supplied. In this case, we could not say that the heat has been completely changed over into work; there would be portion remaining over. Thus we can ascertain whether the whole of the heat has gone over into work or whether some of it appears as heat in the condensate. The water is 20° and we can see whether the condensate is 20° or shows a higher temperature indicating a loss of heat to this condensate. Now we condense the vapor; the condensate water drops in the flask. A machine can be run in this way. If the experiment succeeds fully, you may determine for yourselves that the condensate shows a considerable increase in temperature. In this way we can demonstrate, when we carry out the reverse of yesterday's experiment, that it is not possible to get back as mechanical work in the form of up and down movement of the bell all the heat left over. The heat used in producing work does not change completely, but a portion always remains.

We wish first to grasp this phenomenon. Now let us consider how ordinary physics and those who use ordinary physical principles handle these things.

We have at the beginning to deal with the fact that we in fact do change heat into work and work into heat just as it is said we do. As previously stated an extension of this idea has been made. It is supposed that every form of so-called energy—heat energy, mechanical energy, and the experiment may be made with other forms—that all such energies are mutually changeable the one into the other. We will for the moment neglect the quantitative aspect of the transformation and consider only the fact. Now, the modern physicist says: It is therefore impossible for energy to arise anywhere except from energy of another sort already present. If I have a closed system of energy, let us say of a certain form, and another energy appears, then this must be considered as transformation of the energy already present in the closed system. In a closed system, energy can never appear except as a transformation product. Eduard von Hartmann, who, as I have said, expressed current physical views in the form of philosophical concepts, states the so-called first law of the mechanical theory of heat as follows: “A perpetuum mobile of the first kind is impossible.”

Now we come to the second series of phenomena illustrated for us by today's experiment. This is that in an energy system apparently closed, we have one form of energy changing over to another form. In this transformation however, it is apparent that a certain law underlies the process and this law is related to the quality of the energy. In this case of heat energy, the relation is such that it cannot go over completely to mechanical energy, but there is always a certain amount unchanged. Thus it is impossible in a closed system to transform completely all the heat energy into its mechanical equivalent. If this were possible the reverse transformation of mechanical energy completely into heat energy would also be possible. We would then have in a closed energy system one type of energy transformed into another. This law is stated, again by Eduard von Hartmann, as follows: A closed energy system in which for instance, the entire amount of heat could be changed into work, or where work could be completely changed into heat, when a cycle of complete transformation could exist, this would be a perpetuum mobile of the second type. But, says he, a perpetuum mobile of the second type is impossible. Fundamentally, these two are the principle laws of the mechanical theory of heat as this theory is understood by thinkers in the realm of physics in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century.

“A perpetuum mobile of the first type is an impossibility.” This concept is intimately connected with the history of physics in the 19th century. The first person to call attention to this change of heat into other forms of energy or vice-versa was Julius Robert Mayer. He had observed, as a physician, that the venous blood showed a different behavior in the tropics and in the colder regions, and from this concluded that there was a different sort of physiological work involved in the human organism in the two cases. Using principally these experiences, he later presented a somewhat confused theory which as he worked it out meant little more than this, that it was possible to transform one type of energy into another. The matter was then taken up by various people, Helmholtz among others, and further developed. In the case of Helmholtz a characteristic form of physical-mechanical thinking was taken as the starting point for these things.

If we consider the most important treatise by which Helmholtz sought to support the mechanical theory of heat in the forties of the 19th century, we see that such ideas as expressed by Hartmann are really postulated as their foundation. A perpetuum mobile of the first type is impossible. Since it is impossible the various forms of energy must be transformations of each other. No form of energy can arise from nothing. The axiom from which we proceed—“a perpetuum mobile of the first type is impossible”—can be changed into another: the sum of the energy in the universe is constant. Energy never is created, never disappears, it is only transformed. The sum of the energy in the universe is constant.

These two principles fundamentally, then, mean precisely the same thing. “There is no perpetuum mobile of the first type.” “The sum of all the energy in the cosmos is constant.” Now applying the method of thinking that we have used before in all our observations, let us throw a little light on this whole point of view.

Note now, when we make an experiment with the object of transforming heat into what we call work, that some of the heat is lost so far as the transformation is concerned. Heat reappears as such and only a portion of it can be turned into the other energy form, the mechanical form. What we learn from this experiment we may apply to the cosmos. This is what the 19th century investigators did. They reasoned somewhat as follows: “In the world about us work is present and heat is present. Processes are continually going on by which heat is transformed into work. We see that heat must be present if we would produce work. Only recollect how great a part of our technical achievements rest on the fact that we produce work by the use of heat. But it always comes out that we cannot completely transform heat into work, a portion remains as heat. And since this is so, these remainders not capable of yielding work, accumulate. These non-transformable residues accumulate. And the universe approaches a condition in which all mechanical work will have been turned into heat.”

It has even been said that the universe in which we live is approaching what has been learnedly called its “warmth-death.” We will speak in coming lectures of the so-called entropy concept. For the present our interest lies in the fact that certain ideas have been drawn from experiment bearing on the fate of the universe in which we find ourselves.

Eduard von Hartmann has presented the matter very neatly. He says: physical observation shows that the world-process in the midst of which we live, exhibits two sorts of phenomena. In the end, however, all mechanical work can be produced, and the universe will have to come to an end. Thus says Eduard von Hartmann; physical phenomena shows that the world process is running down. This is the way he expresses himself about the conditions within which we live. We live in a universe whose processes preserve us, but which has a tendency to become more and more sluggish and finally to lapse into a state of complete inaction. I am merely repeating Eduard von Hartmann's own words.

Now we must make clear to ourselves the following point. Is there ever really the possibility of calling forth a series of processes in a closed system? Note well what I am saying. If I consider the totality of my experimental implements, I certainly am not myself in a vacuum, in empty space. And even when I believe myself to be standing in empty space, I am still not entirely certain but that this empty space is empty only because I am unable to perceive what is really in it. Do I therefore ever really carry out my experiments in a closed system? Is it not so that what I carry out in the simplest experiment has to be thought of as dovetailed into the world process immediately around me? Can I conceive of the matter otherwise than in this fashion, that when I do all these things it is as though I took a small needle and pricked myself here? When I prick myself here I experience pain which prevents me from having an idea that I would otherwise have had. It is quite certain indeed, that I cannot consider merely the prick of the needle and the reaction of the skin and muscles as the whole of the process. In such a case I would not be placing the whole process before my eyes. The process is not entirely contained in these factors. Imagine for a moment that I am so clumsy as to pick up a needle, prick myself and experience the pain. I will pull the needle away. What appears thus as an effect is very definitely not comprehended when I hold in mind only what goes on in the skin. The drawing back of the needle is in reality nothing other than a continuation of what I apprehend when I hold before my mind the first part of the process. If I wish to describe the whole process, I must take into account that I have not stuck the needle into my clothes, but into my organism. This organism must be considered as a regulating whole, calling forth the consequences of the needle prick.

Is it legitimate for me to speak of an experiment such as we have before our eyes in the following way: “I have produced heat, and caused mechanical work. The heat not transformed remains over in the condensation water as heat.” It is not in this way that I stand in relation to the whole thing. The production or retention of heat, the passage of it into the condensation water are related to the reaction of the whole great system as the reaction of my whole organism is to the small activity of being pricked with the needle. What must be taken into account especially is: That it is never valid for me to consider an experimental procedure as a closed system. I must keep in mind that this whole experimental procedure falls under the influence of energies that work out of this environment.

Consider along with this another fact. Suppose you have to begin with a vessel containing a liquid with its liquid surface which implies an action of forces at right angles to this surface. Suppose now that through cooling, this liquid goes over into a solid state. It is impossible for you to think of the matter otherwise than that the forces in the liquid are short through by another set of forces. For the liquid forces are such as to make it imperative that I hold this liquid, say water, in a vessel. The only form assumed by the water on its own account is the upper surface. When by solidification a definite form arises it is absolutely necessary to assume that forces are added to those formerly present. More observation convinces us of it. And it is quite absurd to think that the forces creating the form are present in some way or other in the water itself. For if they were there they would create the form in the water. They are thus added to the system, but must have come into it from the outside. If we simply take the phenomenon as it is presented to us we are obliged to say: when a form appears, it represents as a matter of fact a new creation. If we simply consider what we can determine from observation we have to think of the form as a new creation. It is simply a matter of observation that we bring about the solid state from the fluid. We see that the form arises as a new creation. And this form disappears when we change the solid back into a liquid. One simply rests on that which is given as an observable fact. What follows now from this whole process when one makes it over into a concept? It follows that the solid seeks to make itself an independent unit, that it tends to build a closed system, that it enters into a struggle with its surroundings in order to become a closed system.

I might put the matter in this way, that here in the solidification of a liquid we can actually lay our hands on nature's attempt to attain a perpetuum mobile. But the perpetuum mobile does not arise because the system is not left to itself but is worked upon by its whole environment. The view may therefore be advanced: in space as given us, there is always present the tendency for a perpetuum mobile to arise. But a counter tendency appears at once. We can therefore say that wherever the tendency arises to form a perpetuum mobile, the opposite tendency arises in the environment to prevent this. If you will orient your thinking in this way you will see that you have altered the abstract method of modern 19th century physics through and through. The latter starts from the proposition: a perpetuum mobile is impossible, therefore etc. etc. If one stands by the facts the matter has to be stated thus: a perpetuum mobile is always striving to arise. Only the constitution of the cosmos prevents it.

And the form of the solid, what is it? It is the impress of the struggle. This structure that forms itself in the solid is the impress of the struggle between the substance as individuality which strives to form a perpetuum mobile and the hindrance to its formation by the great whole in which the perpetuum mobile seeks to arise. The form of a body is the result of opposition to this striving to form a perpetuum mobile. It might be better understood in some quarters if, instead of perpetuum mobile, I spoke of a self-contained unit, carrying its own forces within itself and its own form-creating power.

Thus we arrive at a point where we have to reverse completely the entire point of view, the manner of thinking of 19th century physics. Physics itself, insofar as it rests on experiment, which deals with facts, we do not have to modify. The physical way of thinking works with concepts that are not valid and it cannot realize that nature strives universally for that which it holds as impossible. For this manner of thinking it is quite easy to consider the perpetuum mobile as impossible, but it is not impossible because of the abstract reasons advanced by the physicists. It is impossible because the instant the perpetuum mobile strives to establish itself in any given body, at that instant the environment becomes jealous, if I may borrow an expression from the realm of morals, and does not let the perpetuum mobile arise. It is impossible because of facts and not because of logic. You can appreciate how twisted a theory is that departs from reality in its very foundation postulate. If the facts are adhered to, it is not possible to get around what I presented to you yesterday in a preliminary sketchy way. We will elaborate this sketchy presentation in the next few days.

I said to you: we have, to begin with, the realm of solids. Solids are the bodies which manifest in definite forms. We have, touching on the realm of the solids as it were, the realm of fluids. Form is dissolved, disappears, when solids become liquids. In the gaseous bodies we have a striving in all directions, a complete formlessness—negative form. Now how does this negative form manifest itself? If we look in an unbiased manner on gaseous or aeriform bodies we can see in these that which may be considered as corresponding to the entity elsewhere manifested as form. Yesterday I called your attention to the realm of acoustics, the tone world. In the gas, as you know, the manifestation of tone arises through condensations and rarefactions. But when we change the temperature we also have to do with condensation and rarefaction in the body of the gas as a whole. Thus if we pass over the liquid state and seek to find in the gas what corresponds to form in the solid, we must look for it in condensation and rarefaction. In the solid we have a definite form; in the gas, condensation and rarefaction.

And now we pass to the realm next adjacent to the gaseous. Just as the fluid realm borders on the solid, and just as we know how the solid pictures the fluid, the fluid gives the foreshadowing of the gaseous, so the gas pictures the realm which we must conceive as lying next to the gaseous, i.e. the realm of heat. The realm lying next above heat, we will have to postulate for the time being and call it the X region.

If now, I seek to advance further, at first merely through analogy, I must look in this X region for something corresponding to but beyond condensation and rarefaction (this will be verified in our subsequent considerations.) I must look for something else there in the X region, passing over heat, just as we passed over the fluid state below. If you begin with a definitely formed body, then imagine it to become gaseous and by this process to have simply changed its original form into another manifesting as rarefaction and condensation and if then you think of the condensation and rarefaction as heightened in degree, what is the result? As long as condensation and rarefaction are present, obvious matter is still there. But now, if you rarefy further and further you finally pass entirely out of the realm of the material. And this extension we have spoken of must, if we are to be consistent, be made thus: a material-becoming—a spiritual-becoming. When you pass over the heat realm into the X realm you enter a region where you are obliged to speak of the condition in a certain way. Holding in mind this passage from solid to fluid and the condensation and rarefaction in gases you pass to a region of materiality and non-materiality. You cannot do other than enter the region of materiality and non-materiality. Stated otherwise: when we pass through the heat realm we actually enter a realm which is in a sense a consistent extension of what we have observed in the realms beneath it. Solids oppose heat—it cannot come to complete expression in them. Fluids are more susceptible to its action. In gases there is a thorough-going manifestation of heat—it plays through them without hindrance. They are in their material behavior a complete picture of heat. I can state it thus: the gas is in its material behavior essentially similar to the heat entity. The degree of similarity between matter and heat becomes greater and greater as I pass from solids through fluids to gases. Or, liquefaction and evaporation of matter means a becoming similar of this matter to heat. Passage through the heat realm, however, where matter becomes, so to speak, identical with heat leads to a condition where matter ceases to be. Heat thus stands between two strongly contrasted regions, essentially different from each other, the spiritual world and the material world. Between these two stands the realm of heat. This transition zone is really somewhat difficult for us. We have on the one hand to climb to a region where things appear more and more spiritualized, and on the other side to descend into what appears more and more material. Infinite extension upwards appears on the one hand and infinite extension downward on the other. (Indicated by arrows.)

But now we use another analogy that I am bringing before you today because through a general view of individual natural facts a sound science may be developed. It will perhaps be useful to array these facts before our souls. (See below.)

If you observe the usual spectrum you have red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

Infra red——————————roygrbiv——————————Ultra Violet

You have the colors following each other in a series of approximately seven nuances. But you know that the spectrum does not break off at either end. If we follow it further below the red we come to a region where there is more and more heat, and finally we arrive at a region where there is no light, but only heat, the infra red region. On the other side of the violet, also, we no longer have light. We come to the ultra violet where chemical action is manifested, or in other words effects that manifest themselves in matter. But you know also that according to the color theory of Goethe, this series of colors can be bent into a circle, and arranged in such a way that one sees not only the light from which the spectrum is formed, but also the darkness from which it is formed. In this case the color in the middle is not green but the peach-blossom color, and the other colors proceed from this. When I observe darkness I obtain the negative spectrum. And if I place the two spectra together, I have 12 colors that may be definitely arranged in a circle: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. On this side the violet becomes ever more and more similar to the peach blossom and there are two nuances between. On the other side there are two nuances between peach blossom and red. You have, if I may employ the expression, 12 color conditions in all. This shows that what is usually called the spectrum can be thought of as arising in this way: I can by any suitable means bring about this circle of color and can make it larger and larger, stretching out the upper five colors (peach blossom and the two shades on each side) until they finally disappear. The lower arc becomes practically a straight line, and I obtain the ordinary spectrum array of colors, having brought about the disappearance of the upper five colors.

I finally bring these colors to the vanishing point. May it not be that the going off into infinity is somewhat similar to this thing that I have done to the spectrum? Suppose I ask what happens if that which apparently goes off into infinity is made into a circle and returns on itself. May I not be dealing here with another kind of spectrum that comprehends for me on the one hand the condition extending from heat to matter, but that I can close up into a circle as I did the color spectrum with the peach blossom color? We will consider this train of thought further tomorrow.

When today man speaks of the “word” he means, as a rule, only the weak human word, which, in the presence of the majesty of the universe is of little significance. But we know that the John Gospel begins with the deeply significant words: “In the Primal Beginning was the Word, the Logos. And the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.”

Anyone who meditates on this significant commencement of the John Gospel must ask himself: What is really indicated when the Word is placed at the very beginning of all things? What is really meant by this Logos, this Word? And how is this meaning connected with our puny human word, so insignificant in the presence of the majesty of the universe?

The name of John is connected with the city of Ephesus, and he who, equipped with Imaginative insight into world history confronts these significant words: “In the Primal Beginning was the Logos. And the Logos was with God. And the Logos was a god,” is continually referred back along an inner path to the ancient temple of Diana of Ephesus. To him who is initiated to a certain degree in the cosmic mysteries that which sounds forth as a riddle in the first verses of the John Gospel points to the Mysteries of the Temple of Artemis or Diana at Ephesus; so that it must seem to him, through enquiry of the Mysteries of Ephesus something could be obtained which would lead to the understanding of the beginning of the John Gospel.

Let us therefore today, equipped with what has been brought before our souls in the last two lectures, look for a while into the Mysteries of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. Let us look back into a time six or seven centuries or even earlier before the Christian era, in order to see what was done in this sanctuary so sacred to the ancients. We find that the instruction given in the Mysteries at Ephesus centred in the first place in that which sounds forth in human speech. We learn what took place in those Ephesian Mysteries not from any historical presentation (for human barbarism has taken sufficient care for the destruction of historical records), but we learn it from the Akashic Record, that Chronicle of etheric thought accessible to spiritual cognition, in which the events of the world's history are inscribed.

In this Record there comes again and again to our perception the way in which the pupil was directed by the teacher to concentrate on human speech. Again and again the pupil was urged as follows: “Learn to feel in your own instrument of speech what really takes place in it when you speak.”

The processes which take place when a man speaks cannot be apprehended by coarse perceptions, for they are delicate and intimate. Let us consider first of all the external side of speech, for it was with this external side of speech that the instruction given in the Ephesian Mysteries began.

The attention of the pupil was first directed to the way in which the word sounds forth from the mouth. He was told over and over again: “Notice what you feel when the word sounds forth from the mouth.” The pupil had first to notice how, to a certain extent, something from the word ascends in order to take up into itself the thought of the head; and then, how something from the same word descends into man so that he might experience inwardly the content of feeling.

Again and again the pupil was directed to drive the greatest possible range of speaking through his throat, and at the same time to observe the surging up and sinking down, which is to be perceived in the word which presses forth from the throat. He had to make a positive and a negative assertion, “I am-I am not.” This he had to force through his throat in the most articulate way possible, and then observe how, in the words “I am” the feeling of that which rises is predominant while in the words “I am not” the feeling of that which descends prevails.

The pupil's attention was then directed even more closely to the intimate inner feeling and personal experiences of the word. He had to experience the following: From the word there mounts up towards the head something like heat, and this heat, this fire, catches hold of the thought. Downwards there flows something like a watery element, this pours downwards, as a glandular secretion pours forth within man. It was made clear to the pupil in the Mysteries of Ephesus that man makes use of the air in order to let the word sound forth. But in speaking, the air transforms itself into the next element, into fire, into heat, and draws down the thought from the heights of the head and envelopes it.

Again, because an alternating condition arises—this sending up of fire, and the sending down of that which is embodied in the word—the air, like a glandular secretion, trickles downwards as water, as a fluid element. By means of this latter process the word becomes inwardly perceptible, man can feel it inwardly. The word trickles downwards as a fluid element.

The pupil was then led into the actual mystery of speech; and this mystery is connected with the mystery of man. This mystery of man is today barricaded off from scientific men, for science places as the crowning point of all thought the most incredible caricature of a truth, namely, the so-called law of the conservation of energy and of matter. In man matter is being continually transformed. It does not remain. The air which is driven forth from the throat is transformed as it goes, alternately into the next higher element, into the element of heat or fire, and again into the element of water, Fire-Water-Fire-Water.

The pupil at Ephesus was made to notice that when he spoke, a series of waves poured forth from his mouth; fire-water-fire-water; but this is nothing more nor less than the striving of the word upwards towards thought, and the trickling downwards of the word towards feeling. Thus in man's speech thought and feeling weave, in that by this living wave-movement of speech the air is rarefied into fire on the one hand, and again it is condensed into water, and so on.

When in the Mysteries of Ephesus this great truth was brought before the soul of the pupil by means of his own speech it was intended that he should feel the following:

“Speak, oh Man! and thou revealest through thyself the evolution of the world.”

At Ephesus when the pupil went in at the door of the Mysteries he was always exhorted with these words:

“Speak, oh Man! and thou revealest through thyself the evolution of the world.”

When he went out again this statement was made to him in another form:

“The evolution of the world is revealed through thee, oh Man! when thou speakest.”

And the pupil gradually felt as if he, with his own body, were as a veil over the cosmic mysteries which sounded from his breast and lived in his speech, as if he with his own body were enclosing these mysteries of the cosmos.

This was brought before the pupil as preparation for the really deeper mystery, because through this preparation he was able to realize that the individual human being was inwardly connected with the mysteries of the cosmos. The saying “Know Thyself” gained a sacred significance because it was uttered not merely theoretically, but because it was inwardly, solemnly felt and experienced.

When the pupil had in this manner to a certain extent ennobled and elevated his own human nature, in that he felt it as a veil covering the mystery of the cosmos, he could be led still further into that which extends the cosmic mystery as it were over the expanses of the cosmos. Here let us recall what was said in the last lecture.

I have pictured to you a condition in the evolution of the earth in which the following occurred. We know that in the former condition of the earth there existed as an essential substance for the earth-evolution at that stage all that unpretentious chalk which we also have in the Jura mountains. In the chalk deposits, in the limestone rocks of the earth we have that which we wish now to consider. We must think of the earth surrounded by that which in the last lecture I called fluid albumen. We know that the cosmic forces worked into this fluid albumen in such a way that it coagulated into definite forms. And you have heard that while this condition of the earth existed there took place in a denser substance to an enhanced degree what we today have in the rising of the mist and the falling of the rain. The chalky element rises upwards, permeates that which had condensed in the fluid albumen, filling it with chalk so that it took on bony formations, and in this way the animals developed in the course of evolution on the earth. The animals were drawn down from the still albuminous atmosphere by that which lives spiritually in the element of chalk.

I also said that when man unites himself with the metals of the earth, then he feels everything which then happened as part of his own being; it is like a memory which rises within him. As regards this stage of evolution he does not feel himself as a tiny man enclosed in a skin; he feels himself as embracing the whole earth-planet. To express this in a somewhat grotesque way I should say: Man feels essentially his head as encompassing the whole earth-planet.

The processes which I pictured in the last lecture man feels as taking place within himself. But how does he feel this within him? All that I have pictured to you as the rising of the chalk, the union of this chalk with the coagulated albumen, again its descent and the drawing down with it the animals to the earth, is so experienced by man that he hears it. He experiences it inwardly. Only you must conceive of it as inner experience. He hears it. This creation which arises when the chalk fills out the coagulated albumen and makes it gristly and bony—that which is thus formed is something heard and felt as if through the ear. The mystery of the world is heard.

In actual fact man experiences in memory, through the memory produced by the metals, the past of the earth, as though one heard resounding what I have described and in this resounding there lives and weaves world-happenings.

What is it then that man hears? These world-happenings, in what form do they reveal themselves? They reveal themselves as the Word of the cosmos, as the Logos. The Logos sounds forth, the macrocosmic Word in this rising and falling of the chalk. And when man is able to hear this speech within him he perceives something else besides. The following becomes actually possible.

We stand before a human or an animal skeleton. That which the science of anatomy has to say about these forms is very superficial, it is really disgracefully superficial. What can we say when, with inner connection with its natural and spiritual being we look at a skeleton? We say: Do not merely look at it. It is shocking merely to look at the forms—the spinal column with its wonderfully moulded vertebrae piled one upon another, with the ribs proceeding from it which bend and curve in front and are so wonderfully articulated together; the way in which the vertebrae are changed into the bones of the skull, the articulation of which is still more difficult to perceive; how the bow-shaped ribs enclose the cavity of the chest; how ball-shaped joints are formed for the bones of the arm and the bones of the leg. Confronted with this mystery of the skeleton we cannot do otherwise than say something quite clearly defined.

We must say to ourselves: Do not merely look at all this but listen to it; listen how one bone changes into another. An actual speech is here.

If at this point I may make a personal observation it is this: Something very wonderful comes before us if, with a feeling for these things, we enter a natural history museum, for there we have a wonderful collection of musical instruments, forming a mighty orchestra, which resounds in a most wonderful symphony. I experienced this very strongly when I visited the museum at Trieste. There, owing to a quite special arrangement of the animal skeletons (which was done instinctively) the effect was that from one end of the animal the mysteries of the moon resounded, and from the other the mysteries of the Sun. The whole was as though permeated by resounding suns and planets. There one could feel the connection between this bony system of chalk composition, the skeleton, and that which once rang forth to man out of the weaving universe, when he himself was still one with this universe, when it rang forth as the mystery of the world, rang forth to man at the same time as his own mystery.

The creatures which then arose, first of all, the animal creatures, thereby revealed their essential being, for the Being of the animal-kingdom lived in the Logos, in the resounding cosmic mystery. It was not two separate things which one perceived. One did not perceive the animals, and then in some other way the Being of the animals; that which spoke was the arising and development of the animals themselves in their own Being.

The pupil of the Ephesian Mysteries could take into his heart and soul in the right way for that age what could then be made clear to him concerning the Primal Beginning, when the Word, the Logos was active as the very essence and being of all things. The pupil was able to receive this mystery because he had prepared for it by ennobling and elevating his human nature, in that he had been able to feel himself as a covering or veil of the tiny reflection of this cosmic mystery which lay in the sounding forth of his own speech.

Let us now endeavour to feel how this development of the earth passed over from one level as it were to another. Let us consider this. In the element of chalk we have something which at that time was still fluid; the chalk ascended as vapour and fell in drops again as rain. The chalk was of a fluid nature. As it ascended it transformed itself into air; when it descended it changed into solid substance. It is one stage lower than in the human picture, where we have air transforming to heat and water. In that primeval condition the element of water was active, i.e. the chalk, still fluid was rarefied to air and condensed to solid substance; as in our throats today the air rarefies to heat and condenses to water. That which lived in the world rose from water to air. In primeval times it lived in water, rarefied itself to air and condensed to solid substance.

Thereby it is possible for us human beings to comprehend this mystery of the world in miniature. When this mystery was the great and mighty maya of the world it was one stage lower. The earth condensed everything. The chalk became denser, etc. We human beings could not have admitted this densifying tendency into our own inner being, even if it had come to us in miniature. We could only admit it when it had risen a stage higher, from water to air, and therewith in its surging upwards into the element of heat or downwards into water, which is now the denser element.

Thus the great world, the macrocosmic Mystery became the microcosmic Mystery of human speech, and it is to this cosmic Mystery, the translation into maya, into the great world, that the beginning of the John Gospel points:

“In the Primal Beginning was the Logos; and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was a god.”

For this it was that still lived and was active in the tradition of Ephesus, also when the evangelist, the writer of the John Gospel could read in the Akashic Record about Ephesus that for which his heart thirsted, the right form in which to clothe what he wanted to say to humanity concerning the mystery of the beginning of the world. We can now go a step further.

We may recall what was said last time, that, preceding the chalk there was the silica, which now appears in quartz. In this silica the plant-forms appeared, those cloud-like formations becoming green and fading away. And if, as I said, a man at that time could have looked out into the expanses of the cosmos he would have seen the arising of the animal-creation and those primeval plants which became green and then passed away. All this was perceived by man as an inner experience. He perceived it as part of his own being. In addition to hearing that which sounded forth in the animal creation as something living within himself man could in a certain sense inwardly accompany what he heard sounding forth, just as in his own head, in the human breast and head he can ascend with words through the heat in order to grasp thought. He could thus accompany that which he heard resounding in the creation of the animals after what he had experienced in the arising of the plants.

This was the remarkable thing: man experienced the process of the development of the animals in the vapourising and descending chalk. And when he traced further that which was in the silica as the plant-beings becoming green and fading away, the cosmic Word became the cosmic Thought, and the plants living in the silicious element added the Thought to the resounding Word.

One took as it were a step upwards, and to the resounding Logos the cosmic Thought was added; just as today, in the sounding word in speech, in the waves of speech (fire-water-fire-water) thought is grasped in the fire.

If you were to study certain diseased conditions of the sense-organs of the head, or of the sense-organs in general you would be able to observe the curative effects of silicic acid. Silicic acid then appears to you among the secrets of the cosmos as the thought-element in the original primeval plant-creation, and I might even say that this is the sense-perception of the earth in regard to the structure of the cosmos. In a wonderful way there is actually expressed microcosmically in the man of today that which once was macrocosmic, that which was the arising and evolution, the working and weaving of the world.

Only think for a moment how man lived then, still one with the cosmos, in unity with the cosmos. Today when man thinks, he has to think in isolation with his head. Within are his thoughts and his words come forth. The universe is outside. Words can only indicate the universe. Thoughts can only reflect the universe. When man was still one with the macrocosm this was not the case, for he then experienced the universe as if in himself. The Word was at the same time his environment. Thought was that which permeated and streamed through his environment. Man heard, and the thing heard was World. Man looked up from what he heard, but he looked up from within himself. The Word was first of all sound. The Word was something which struggled, as it were, to be solved like a riddle; in the rising of the animal creation something was revealed which struggled for a solution. Like a question the animal-kingdom arose within the chalk. Man looked into the silicic acid, and the plant-creation answered with that which it had taken up as the sense nature of the earth, and solved the riddles which the animal creation presented. These beings themselves mutually answered each other's questions. One being, in this case the animal, puts a question: the other beings, in this case the plants, supply the answer. The whole world becomes speech.

And we may now say: this is the reality at the beginning of the John Gospel. We are referred back to the primal beginning of all that now exists. In this Primal beginning, in this Principle, was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was a god, For it was the creative Being in it all.

It is really the case that in that which was taught the Mystery-pupils at Ephesus concerning the primeval Word lies that which led to the opening sentences of the John Gospel. It is indeed very fitting for Anthroposophists to turn their attention today to these secrets which rest in the lap of time; for in a certain sense, in a very particular sense, that which stood here on the Dornach hill as the Goetheanum had become the centre of anthroposophical activity. The pain we feel today must continue to be pain, and will do so in everyone who was able to feel what the Goetheanum was intended to be. But to one who is striving upwards in his knowledge towards the spiritual all that takes place in the physical world must at the same time be for him an external manifestation, a picture of the spiritual which lies behind it. And if, on the one hand, we have to accept this pain, on the other hand, we as human beings striving after spiritual knowledge must be able to turn what has caused this pain into an opportunity for looking spiritually into a revelation which leads us into greater and greater depths. This Goetheanum was to have been a place in which one hoped to have spoken, and in which we have spoken again and again of those things which are connected with the opening words of the John Gospel:

“In the Primal Beginning was the Word—the Logos—and the Word was with God, and a god was the Word.”

Then the Goetheanum was destroyed by fire. This terrible picture of the burning Goetheanum arises before us. The pain may give birth to the summons to look ever more deeply into that which lives in the power of our thought, into this burning Goetheanum of New Year's Eve. That is an experience, painful though it is, which leads us into greater and greater depths. That which we wished to have founded in this Goetheanum, which with some things I have said is connected with the John Gospel, these already form an enclosure within these burning consuming flames. And it is an important impulse which we may grasp: Let these flames be for us the occasion to look through them to other flames, those flames which once long ago consumed the Temple of Ephesus. Let us look upon them as a summons to us to try and fathom that which stands at the beginning of the John Gospel. Urged by this painfully sacred impulse, let us look back from the John Gospel to the Temple of Ephesus—which once was also burned down—and then in the Goetheanum flames, which speak indeed so painfully we shall receive a monition from that which streams into the Akasha with the burning flames of the Ephesian Temple.

Even today, if we look back on that night of misfortune, to those fierce flames of the Goetheanum conflagration, do we not still find in them the molten metals of the musical instruments which speak a language so pure and holy? Do we not find in these molten metals those musical instruments which conjured into the flames those wonderful colours—variously speaking colours—colours closely connected with the metals? Through connection with the metals something arises like memory in the earth-substance. This memory we have of that which was consumed with the Temple at Ephesus. And just as these two conflagrations may be connected, so the longing to investigate the meaning of “In the Primal Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and a god was the Word” may be connected somewhat with the words which again and again were made clear to the pupil at Ephesus: “Study the mystery of man in the small word, in the micrologos; thereby thou shalt make thyself ripe to experience in thyself the mystery of the macrologos.”

Man is the microcosm as contrasted with the world which is the macrocosm, but he also bears within him the mysteries of the cosmos, and we can decipher the cosmic mystery contained in the first three verses of the John Gospel if we bear in mind in the right sense that into which, as into many other things also, the flames of the Goetheanum condensed, as if in written characters:

“Behold the Logos
In the burning fire
Seek the solution
In the house of Diana.”

The Akashic Record of the fire of last New Year's Eve speaks these words very clearly, together with many others; and they make on us the demand to establish in the microcosm the micrologos, so that man may gain the understanding of that out of which his whole being has been formed—the macrocosmos—through the macrologos.

Rudolf Steiner: It seems to me that these questions you have written down are largely rooted in matters that have already been discussed.

Regarding the change of cult colors [1st question]: The point, as I told you, is that the cycle is that the time before Christmas is essentially blue, that at Christmas you have the light color; then the light color remains until Lent, when it turns black. Then we have mainly red during the Easter season, and then we move on to light colors for the Pentecost season. That is how it was presented the last time. So for what I call the festive season, we have the light color during the summer; if there are no special occasions, the color remains white. At Pentecost it is white with yellow edges. That remains essentially so until we have to move on to the blue color.

Emil Bock: The color we are using now is already a light one.

Rudolf Steiner: What I have suggested to you now is what I would advise you to use at all times for the regular trade fair because this violet that you have now is the color that you can actually use all year round on every occasion, whereas you could not do that with any other color.

Emil Bock asks about the spiritual essence of colors. Why these colors cannot be used.

Rudolf Steiner: If we take the color red, which would occur at the resurrection on Easter Sunday, we have in the red color that which characterizes the activity from the spiritual world, and in contrast to the red color, in the blue color we see the gradual decline of the physical into the spiritual world. These are the two color contrasts; therefore, the Advent is blue, the time immediately after Easter until Ascension Day is red, as the contrast. Then we have the other colors in such a way that they always have some other aspect. We have the universal color white, or light, at Christmas, which the Catholic Church has taken as the color of innocent children, but this is wrong, since white represents light as such, that is, the reappearance of the sun, the solstice. Then we have the black color, the color that moves toward the time of the Passion, which represents the darkening that culminates in death. Then in summer we don't actually have white, but light colors. If you don't go back to the old mystery tradition, then of course we don't actually have green. If we went back to what you call “cultic optics” – one would have to call it the cultic Gloria – then you would have a light green for summer, around Midsummer. But that is no longer used. But it could be reintroduced, a light yellow-green. But then you actually have all the colors. The thing is that everything else depends on the color of the chasuble, everything else.

Now you are also asking about the other vestments here [2nd section of questions]. You have other vestments for the priest: the vestment for the afternoon service on Sundays. Have I not yet explained this? It is like this: a cope of this cut (see drawing on page 202) has the color of the chasuble that is worn down here. For you, since you will still be wearing the original garment for some time, which can always be worn on any occasion, it should be the color of the braids.

The stole is worn under the mantle. It is better if you do not wear the alb at baptisms and when hearing confessions, but instead wear a shortened alb, so that you have an alb up to the knee. This is the priestly garment for these acts such as baptism, hearing confessions, anointing. Funerals should actually be performed in this mantle. The alb and stole are worn under this mantle. Now, what else I noticed: the alb has the belt around here and this belt is also the color of the chasuble, and this then makes it possible for you to cross the stole where it should be worn at the front. But that would be all the garments you need.

Table 4

The sleeves are not important, but it is difficult to get a robe for every single thing now. Therefore, I am putting together here the things that I consider practically possible and that can serve quite well. The sleeves are really not important. Of course, you could also baptize in a kind of surplice that is sleeveless. All of this can be arranged at some point. But for now, having Alba and a surplice, which of course can have sleeves, the chasuble and a mantle like that for the Sunday afternoon service, which essentially consists of the reading of a short passage from the Gospel and a short sermon, during which the mantle is taken off. Then it is put on again and a psalm is read. This will be the Sunday afternoon or evening service. Everything else depends on the color of the chasuble, that is, the covering of the chalice and the cloth covering the altar; the altar server also wears a chasuble. Now you have a chasuble that I imagined you could use to celebrate every Mass in at first. You cannot think about going through the whole process for quite a long time. A chasuble already costs a small capital in Germany today. So I think you would do best if you used this color, which could be a little lighter – it turned out a little dark – and read every mass in it.

Emil Bock: It is a safe guide for us to hear that violet should take the place of blue at Christmas and reddish yellow at Easter.

Rudolf Steiner: I said that at Christmas a bright white is decisive; perhaps a very light violet. I said that at Christmas the point of view has always changed. Essentially, one has to hold that white should characterize the rising of the sun; that is a different point of view. The point of allowing light violet to enter is this: at Christmas you read the prime mass; you read it in light violet. I only said reddish yellow because I wanted to distinguish it from violet red. There are these two reds: vermilion, which I use for the very bright, shining red, in contrast to the more blue-based carmine red.

The color of the trim? It is best to choose the trim that represents the complementary color, as you have it now. And the length of the robe: to just above the knee. The surplice goes to the knees. Under this robe you wear the alb. You only wear the surplice when you are officiating. Tunic, surplice, stole. Then you wear the beret. The beret is actually the outward sign of priestly dignity. You do not wear the beret as a vestment, but as an external badge. The beret is actually an official badge, not a priestly one. You do not need to wear it during the service. In the Old Testament you had to wear it because you had to be covered. But you wear it when you walk around the church to the altar and take it off when you come to the altar. It is actually what, like Athena's helmet, outwardly demonstrates your dignity. — During the sermon? Yes, you wear it during the sermon. You also preach with it. You preach with the beret. If we had come to the point where some of you were preaching, then you would have needed it. You wear the beret at funerals and at baptisms, but you take it off during the ceremony. You go to the ceremony with your beret on and you leave the ceremony with your beret on.

[Regarding the third section of questions:] I will talk about oil tomorrow; I have talked about wine and bread, and about salt. I have also already spoken about Mercury and so on. – Ashes? Well, the thing is that the actual ashes are on their way to being crushed into an atomistic form. If you produce ashes when burning any substance (the drawing has not survived), then these ashes are on the path of matter to prepare itself to become receptive to spirit again. That is, the ashes, driven far enough in their incineration process, become capable of receiving an image of the universe and forming a kind of cell. [Gap in the stenographer's notes.] It is the case that the ashes are what serves the purpose of the regeneration of the cosmos.

[Regarding the question: What substances and objects are consecrated before cultic use, on what occasion and by what words?] – I have already said that. Actually everything should be consecrated. But we need nothing more than to allow the consecration to be a completely free act, as I have done, in a similar way to the chasubles. So in this way everything should be consecrated.

Interjection: water and wine?

Rudolf Steiner: No, not that, but everything that is used as an auxiliary object in cults. Emil Bock: What about water, salt and ashes in the baptismal ritual?

Rudolf Steiner: That is for baptism. It is necessary that you include in baptism the whole transformation that has taken place in the evolution of the earth through the Mystery of Golgotha; that is what matters in this matter.

Emil Bock: That first the Christ is indicated by the water, and only then the cosmic foundation by the salt?

Rudolf Steiner: Through water, we are led to the Father-God. It is the same process that has taken place through a truly profound fact, in that the female moon and the male sun have passed in the newer times into the female sun and the male moon. Thus you have a transition, a metamorphosis, that is in it.

Emil Bock: While one must think of the Father God in the case of salt, here it is the water. Water – generative power; salt – sustaining power; ash – renewing power. You related the water to the Father, the salt to the Christ, the ash to the Spirit.

Rudolf Steiner: There is a slight difficulty here because we cannot properly express what is there in time. If I describe: physical body, etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul, spirit self, life spirit, spiritual human being, I also put them in that order; it looks as if I am putting them in succession.

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But that is not true. I would have to combine two currents here (it is drawn on the board) if I want to draw it correctly. I would have to do it like this: physical body, etheric body, astral body; sentient soul, intellectual soul, consciousness soul; and now I would no longer have to draw the spirit self in one plane, but in a different direction, turning it around here and drawing it three times in a different direction. I would have to do it like this:

Plate 4

This is also the case in the formula [of the baptismal ritual]. If you take the same sequence: water – Father, salt – Christ, ashes – Spirit; you will not get the real fact that you want. You have to [think] you live in the community of Christ through the birthing power of water, through the sustaining power of salt, through the renewing power of ashes. Now you turn the whole idea around, you come from a completely different side: in the Father's World Substance, in the Christ's stream of words, in the Spirit's radiance of light. - It is not possible for you to relate these things directly to one another, they are out of alignment with one another.

[Regarding the last question of the third section:] Holy water and incense at the grave? – incense is only there to take over the connection to the spiritual world. Incense is burnt. You follow the path of the soul from the physical body until the soul reaches the spiritual world. You follow it by means of incense. You go from what is still below to what is above. And in holy water we have regeneration again.

[Regarding the fourth question:] Use of a monstrance. Do you really need these devices? These were originally devices that remained fixed, that simply belonged to the architecture of the altar and represented the sun with the moon, and which were then transformed into a container that was used at solemn masses to initiate and conclude the mass and that was carried by Catholics in processions.

Emil Bock: I believe that we do not have that need, but we recalled that you said that we should strive for this symbolum first.

Rudolf Steiner: I said for the sermon that you should have this symbol as a guiding symbol: sun and moon, because by this you have the will to connect the physical cosmos with the spiritual cosmos at one point. It can also be used as a fixed symbol in your worship, when you perform the worship, either architecturally or painted: the monstrance as the connection of the sun with the moon. You have the same symbol, for example, among the “seals and pillars”, and you will also find it again in the Apocalypse: the woman who is on the moon, the sun in front of the constellation of the Virgin, which points to midsummer, when it approaches the Christmas season. Here you also have the sun, with the moon below it. This is the same as the monstrance. This is what I meant, you have to work towards this symbol. You will find opportunities to use this symbol everywhere, in speech and in representation. But I think that this is one of the points where, in the use of this symbol... [Gap in the stenographer's notes]. The Catholic Church today does not admit this whole context and uses the monstrance like an idol that is worshipped, which has its center where the consecrated host is carried. I don't think you have a need for it. Otherwise, what I said about not making it too Catholic will come about. But the symbolum is something to which you should pay special attention. [The next question in the fourth section:] Is it possible to use wooden chalices? — Of course you can use wooden chalices.

Emil Bock: Where should the confession take place?

Rudolf Steiner: It can take place anywhere. It is very difficult to perform this half cultic act without a stole, and you cannot wear the stole without at least a surplice as something else. You can speak to the people at first, that is a counsel, but then, in order to maintain the priestly dignity, put on the surplice and stole before you summarize the matter in the sentences in which it should culminate. That is how it should be, but for the time being you can simplify it. You can do it by giving the advice without the stole and then putting on the stole by letting it culminate in a cultic act. This makes a very solemn impression.

[The next questions:] Why the touching of the left cheek at the parish communion? — This is a special form of laying on of hands. And: Why the signs on the forehead, chin and chest of the infant? — This is the acceptance into the three powers of the Trinity. Perhaps it should be mentioned that you have to get the congregation used to making the three crosses on the forehead, chin and chest at the same time as you make the sign [sign of the cross]. You make the sign on the person to be baptized first at the baptism.

Emil Bock: Why these three parts of the body?

Rudolf Steiner: These three parts of the body express – of course, here too we are dealing with a shift – that when we make the triangle on the forehead, we are dealing with the human head system, with the past, if we make the square on the chin, it has to do with the future, because this actually represents the metabolic system, and under this we have to do with the chest system, with the present. However, in reality these things shift, they are not arranged in this way. But there is a trinity everywhere. You can even find this in pictures in the Catholic Church. You often find the Father depicted at the top, with the dove below and the crucifix above, which does not mean that this is a systematic order. As soon as you approach the spiritual, you are not always able to maintain a systematic order in terms of space or time. I think I have already made it clear to you that in the spiritual realm, numbers do not correspond to our numbers at all. You have strange experiences, for example, that two times two is not four in the spiritual world.

Next question: Is it possible to burn incense using bowls instead of the usual censer? — You can, of course, burn incense with whatever you can handle. This form of censer is the most convenient to use. Once you have mastered the technique, it is extremely easy; you can direct it so easily. You can use it to burn incense with anything that you can use to burn incense with, without burning yourself; because you don't get burned with the incense burner, it is very comfortable. Once you have some practice, it is excellent. I have never found a prescription for the shape of the incense burner anywhere. The prescription consists of burning incense, not of the incense burner. The only prescription is that you burn incense.

A participant: Can you put the incense bowl on the altar?

Rudolf Steiner: You must burn incense yourself, it must be your deed. But the shape of the censer, there is no rule about that.

[Regarding the question:] The right and left sides of the altar in their alternation during the act of consecration. — This is how it is: if you start from the right side of the altar based on the Gospel reading [i.e. from the left as seen by the faithful], then you proclaim – in the understanding that the proclamation is about the cross – to where the eye looks; active on the right, passive on the left. The remaining things depend on whether one speaks more to the heart, then one speaks to the left, or to the mind, then one speaks to the right. The change is on the right side of the altar, that is, to the left of the faithful [as seen from their perspective].

Emil Bock: Is the consecration addressed to the mind?

Rudolf Steiner: The consecration is directed to the mind. The missal lies on the right side. The consecration itself takes place in the middle. The book lies where the gospel book lies. But to understand it, the highest clarity is needed. The action is already directed to the mind. You also have to look at it in such a way that you have to distinguish whether a believer comes into consideration more in an action than in the reading of the Gospel, or the priest, who always looks to the other side. What is right and left for the believer is not for the priest. The light comes from the east. So it is a matter of either the original concept, that the altar itself is placed to the east, or the newer concept, that the church choir is in the east. The correct thing is to orient the altar to the east, that the altar is the east of the church and that the believer looks to the east. From the very earliest days of Christianity, the altar was always erected over the grave of some founder of a community or some martyr, so that in fact there never was an altar in the Christian church that was not intended as a gravestone. One celebrates mass over the grave of a revered person. The altar also has the form of a gravestone, and is thus intended as a memorial.

Emil Bock: For us, there is no objection to having a movable table?

Rudolf Steiner: You will have a movable altar as long as you do not have the main mass in a specially built building for it. You have many altars in large churches, and they are directed in all possible directions. Whether you place one altar in the room or many, it makes no difference.

[Regarding the fifth question:] What is the more precise distribution of the pericopes for the gospel reading over the course of the year? — It is good to read the Gospels in such a way that you distribute them throughout the [church] year. Leave the letters, the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse for those parts of the year that are not exhausted by the Gospels. You cannot transfer anything from the Gospel to the time of July or August. Nothing from the Gospels fits there.

A participant: So the Epistle is read instead of the Gospel?

[Another question is asked, but the stenographer only noted:] because of the name?

Rudolf Steiner: The gospel is the whole of the New Testament. I have also used [the expression] in this way. Until the end of the Apocalypse, I call it the “gospel”. The gospels go until Pentecost. It is not true that if they continue, they do not mean anything that falls on the day. I would consider a uniform order of pericopes to be incorrect. The Catholic Church has done this because it wanted to have hierarchical authority. They will not need that at all. The letters of Paul and the Apocalypse are used outside of the church year. Then you will find some clues in the festivals that I have recorded in my calendar. I have included festivals that are to be regarded as Christian festivals, not as Roman Catholic ones. There you will notice some clues. Otherwise one would first have to study the matter carefully. The Catholic Church has simply distributed everything. You should not stick to it, but you should start there with the freedom of teaching.

[Regarding your questions:] Is it the duty of parishioners to communicate? — I would not consider it right to introduce a duty, but I would consider it right for you to work in such a way that no one fails to communicate. - Is it possible to exclude parishioners from communion? What would be the point of that?

Emil Bock: We just wanted to think these things through. Some of us have considered that someone has been accepted into the community who would not have been accepted as a member at another point in time. If this person now wants to come to communion, can they always be admitted?

Rudolf Steiner: It is to be assumed that in those cases that are not, I would say, self-evident cases, you always have the opportunity to have some kind of consultation with these people. That will happen automatically, and then you will have to prepare him in the right way. If you have a murderer who is to be executed the next day, you will not refuse him Communion for that reason. That is about the most radical case. It cannot be right for you to refuse Communion. It will be very difficult for you to have any jurisdiction over the community at all – the church never had that, the political community always lent itself to it – you will never have it. The church has never burned a heretic; it has only said that he is a heretic and worthy of death. The church itself never burned heretics.

A participant asks about church discipline. If a parishioner continues to live an immoral life but wishes to take part in Holy Communion, do one have the right to exclude them?

Rudolf Steiner: In my opinion, the only way to do that would be to oblige him, if he wants to take communion, to accept counseling from you, not in community with the other believers. In this way, you would exercise disciplinary power that is more aimed at ensuring that he does not lose contact with the community, that he is only allowed to sit in a certain place, for example, away from the others when the mass is read. If he puts up with it, it will have the desired effect. The others who don't put up with it leave the church. That is a different kind of punishment. For those who don't put up with it, refusing to take communion is also effective.

[Next question:] Is it advisable to make the ritual texts available to the parishioners? The Credo? - The Credo must of course be made available to all parishioners, they should only hear the rest.

A participant: Can the text be read in community meetings?

Rudolf Steiner: There is no need to exclude that, but it should be made clear that the text is for listening and not for reading. I gave the friends who wanted it prayers for young children. With these prayers, I gave the instruction that the children should not learn or read them by heart; they are spoken in front of the children. They should take them in by listening, not by learning, because: however much is learned in this way, it is ineffective. It must be a process that only works through listening. The cult text should also be heard and seen in this way. You can, of course, explain it, but you have to understand that the cult text should be heard, so that the cult text has no meaning if it is not heard. If someone reads it, it is not a cult text at all; he must hear it from someone else. If he reads it, it would only be a cult text if he heard it at the same time from the transcendental world; then it would become a cult text for him. But if someone living on the physical plane reads the text, it is not a cult text.

A participant: What if a member of the community asks for the text?

Rudolf Steiner: This can only have a meaning if you consider it good for the development of his soul. Then it is not used as a cultic text, but as a meditation.

Esteemed attendees! Eight days ago, I described the structure of the realm that everyone who enters the state between two embodiments has to pass through, the so-called mental realm or the world of Devachan. I have described to you that we have to distinguish three different areas, and I have also noted that the words we have at our disposal in our ordinary language are insufficient to convey our perceptions in the mental realm, so that we are often only able to express what can be perceived in this realm, which man passes through between two embodiments, only in hints and sometimes only allegorically. Those who, as initiates, know about this region describe it in words that are more suggestive than descriptive. Therefore, you must also accept the descriptions I gave last time more as a suggestion, because it is almost inexpressible for someone whose mind is open to the devachanic world.

I have described three regions of Devachan and remarked that these would correspond to three regions on our earth: the solid mountainous region of Devachan, which is the continental region of Devachan; the liquid ocean region of Devachan; and the region of the aerial sea.

One of the German poets who knew something about this country, as I mentioned last time, was Goethe. Goethe described this country more externally through his Mephistopheles. But even from this description, you can see that Goethe knew how difficult it is to speak of this country. He describes it by having Mephistopheles point out to Faust what he will find there. Mephistopheles says the following:

And even if you swam across the ocean
And saw the boundlessness there,
You would still see waves breaking on the shore,
even if you dread your own demise.
You would still see something! You would see, in the green expanse
of the calm seas, dolphins gliding by;
you would see clouds passing by, the sun, moon and stars.
You will see nothing in the eternal, empty distance,
not hear the step you take, find nothing solid where you rest!

We can see this – for those who look at it rationally – as an approximate description of this realm. In another passage, Mephistopheles says to Faust:

Take this key!
The key will sense the right place;
Follow it down: it will lead you to the mothers.

The realm of the mothers was also spoken of in the time of Plutarch; for Goethe it is the realm of the uncreated. That is why he has Mephisto say to Faust:

Then sink! I could also say: rise!

So Devachan is not above or below, but everywhere.

Escape from the originated
Into the realm of the formless!
Delight thyself in what has long ceased to be!

That is the description of a European. I will now give you the description of a Hindu sage; it is colored in an oriental way, but nevertheless the same content; it says: There are many thousands of world systems. A realm of bliss underlies this world. The realms are bounded by seven rows of fences, they are ruled by the Tathagata, and they belong to the Bodhisattvas. The waters flow through these realms and have seven properties.

I have described three realms of Devachan, which correspond to our solid land, our ocean and the air sea. I have said that in Devachan the land looks different from our present land, and I have said that we find forms there that we also see here, but embedded like a seal impression. This continent forms the foundation of Devachan. Within it moves the living ocean; pink-hued, it permeates all being and forms the source of life for all forms, all structures that are to arise as plants, human beings and animals. The etheric body is of a very special kind in Devachan. We see our physical etheric body as blue; the etheric body in Devachan is reddish and radiant. It is characterized by an extraordinary sentience that rests in each of its atoms, animating every single atom. Everything that asserts itself in the aura is sentient life. All the pain and pleasure I have experienced in the lower realms is expressed in the air circle of Devachan. He who perceives on this plane, he understands what an initiate of the Christian religion, Paul, says: All creatures groan in pain, awaiting adoption. The air is also permeated by a spherical sound, by music, which the ancient Pythagoreans called the harmony of the spheres. Those who have already heard this harmony, which is the expression of the harmony of the cosmos, hear it everywhere, although it is drowned out by the noise of everyday life. This is expressed in the description of the Hindu sage as fences.

Now we come to the fourth region of the spiritual realm. This is a very special realm; the creators and inspirers of all things are at work there. The so-called akasha substance is the substance, the clay from which everything is formed. This is an image that all magicians speak of. Goethe also speaks of it in the passage where he speaks of fire air. It is the substance that has the greatest plasticity, the substance into which one can impress material forms on one side and spirit on the other. It is the substance that was no longer known since the beginning of Christianity, no longer known until the Theosophical Society appeared. When the first request was made to Sinnett to make these things known to the Western world, we hear in his book “The Occult World” a description of this matter, which is said to contain magical powers. And we read there how the Master himself expresses it, that Western cultural people will only come to understand the meaning of the Akasha matter with difficulty and slowly.

As I described eight days ago, the devachan world can be divided into three lower realms and three higher realms. The three higher realms resonate and shine into the three lower realms. If we have designated the lower devachan realms – in theosophical language 'rupa realms' – as mainland, ocean, and airspace, then beyond the fourth realm – [akasha] – the three highest realms of devachan expand, which in theosophical language are called 'arupa realms'. In addition to everything that is on this side of Devachan – that is, the astral realm and the physical realm – the original states are present in the higher Devachan. These Arupa realms are inhabited by beings of the most exalted kind. The masters of the original Christian wisdom still described these realms; they were known in Christian wisdom until the 13th century; then knowledge of them was lost. No one understands the Christian wisdom of earlier centuries if they do not recognize that some of the writings speak of the three highest realms of Devachan. These three realms are, as I said, inhabited by exalted beings who guide and direct all the events in the lower realms.

In the fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe also hints at the first level of the higher Devachan. You can read there: — This is one of the most profound words that Goethe spoke. From the kingdom of light in Devachan arises the so-called kingdom of conversation, that realm in which not only light, but also the stream of knowledge flows as light, and through this stream the higher beings in man express the eternal truths, through it the conversation of the cosmos resounds. This brings us to the higher realm in which the words for this conversation are, as it were, generated, in which the voice resounds in which lies the origin of the world, which men speak of as the “Word” from which the worlds have emerged. In the realm of conversation, of the light of knowledge, live a series of most exalted beings, which in Christian wisdom have been called the Exusiai. These are entities that are difficult to describe with an expression of the Occident. These entities become visible in the garment of the light of knowledge. I have already indicated that Moses appeared to such a being in the burning bush. This points to a being of the Exusiai. The garment of these entities is woven from the substance of this realm; they become visible and proclaim the truth to those who are ready to hear it.

We now ascend to even higher regions. There we meet beings who can no longer become visible, but who can speak to the person when he becomes ready to hear them. The first teachers of Christian wisdom called them Dynamis. These are beings who radiate widely as creative forces. In the next realm we find the rulers, the Kyriotetes. Thus we have the hierarchy of these exalted beings, sounding in the three highest realms of Devachan. In Christian esotericism, there are indications that these insights were still alive in the first centuries of Christianity, but that they have been lost because there have been fewer and fewer Christian initiates.

Also in the realm I have described earlier, in the air circle of Devachan, there are entities whose clothing is woven from the air circle of Devachan, but which have quite opposite qualities to those we humans possess. It is difficult to describe the qualities of these entities that live in the air circle of Devachan. If we ascribe sensations to men, we must ascribe to these beings that they do not receive or accept sensations, but that they carry sensations out through the air circle. They are therefore beings of a completely different nature. Wherever they go, they radiate forces of sensation, whereas sensations flow in to us humans. Only in this way can I describe what characterizes these beings. In Christian esotericism, this was expressed by calling these beings archangels. Today this expression is no longer understood. It must not be applied to physical powers, that would be superstition. It must be applied to the devachanic beings who carry the message of feeling through the sphere of Devachan and spread everywhere that which is purest feeling.

The ocean of Devachan is comparable to a rose-colored stream that pours over everything. It is animated by a series of entities called messengers, called Angeloi. These do not carry the sensation, they carry life through the realms of Devachan, they are life-bearers.

And the solid realm, the continental realm of Devachan is animated and ensouled by the beings that are called Archai in Christian esotericism – in English, primal forces. The lower realm of Devachan, the solid realm, the continental realm, is animated by these Archai. They are the ones who breathe life into everything.

These are the entities that are called the hierarchies of the archai, the archangeloi and the angeloi in Christian esotericism. These entities are encountered by people whose devachanic senses are open, but they are also encountered by every person who has died and goes through the conditions of the interim between two embodiments. I have already pointed out that when a person has laid down his body, he has to spend some time in the astral world. I will come back to this. I would now just like to say what takes place in this country, where a person is prepared to enter Devachan. Everything that a person has brought with him from the physical world is purified by the Kamakräfte in the astral world. Even the so-called sense of self slowly dissolves in the astral world; all chaotic forces dissolve when a person is to enter devachan.

I will now mention once more the four higher realms of the astral realm, which are also called the sympathy layers. They are filled with fine astral matter, with the matter of sympathy – in contrast to the matter of egoism of the lower three levels. In the fourth realm, egoism dissolves, and in the fifth realm, sensual pleasure dissolves. In this fifth part of the astral realm, man learns to admire the beauty of the world, not because it is pleasant, but because everything eternal and pure should be beautiful. And in the sixth astral realm, man comes to know the deeper forces of compassion, benevolence, and devotion to the world. In the seventh realm, all the life that man has taken with him from the lower realms melts away like snow in the sunlight. And then man has to pass through the four lower stages of Devachan, which I have described earlier. Life on these four stages has great significance.

I have said that the primal forces, the archai, are to be found in this first realm of Devachan. It is with these that man makes contact. We find the disembodied souls there, gathering new strength for their later life. Everything that has held people together in family ties, in tribal affiliations, in national associations, in state federations, in short, everything that more or less points to blood relationship in the human race, all that is spiritualized in this realm of the primal forces, so that the person is purified by what he has learned and can be endowed with higher abilities. The purpose of the realm of Devachan is to enable people to develop the higher abilities they have acquired during their life on Earth. People should gain experience in the physical world, and these experiences should be transformed into abilities. We should emerge from the school of life improved and strengthened.

Now the human being moves into the second region of Devachan. The ocean of Devachan is the realm that is all-uniting. Just as water connects the lands, so in Devachan the flowing, rose-colored water connects all that has boundaries in the lower realm. Boundaries are erected wherever there are family, tribal, national or state associations. These demarcations must be, but at the same time, the sense of belonging together, the harmony of all beings, must be established. The beings must come together in the stream that flows through everything. When man enters into this stream that flows through everything, he enjoys the fruits of what he has sown. There everyone will find that which elevates him above the limitations of existence; man is purified from that which must cling to man within the earthly realm. He is led to acquire new abilities. They are only germs, but the flowers that arise from them are the abilities that he develops and brings with him into the new life.

The third is what I have described as the air circle of Devachan. Man also enters this air circle between two embodiments. Where within the aura the deep sighing of nature can be heard, where every thunder roll means an evocation of pain, where the sunlight corresponds to what we call eternal bliss and beatitude, there the seed is sown that will later, at the time of re-embodiment, sprout into the sense of philanthropy, of noble humanity. Here active and understanding devotion arises, laboring love, and this is the plant that thrives here above all others, that man develops within himself. Here man will see in his fruits what he has experienced in the selfish world. Here he becomes a working human being, the human being who first knows the words humanity and philanthropy in the full sense of the word.

Then comes the fourth kingdom [Akasha], the kingdom of the sound of all world existence. Here man learns to recognize that which gives form and shape to beings and things in the whole of world existence. Here man learns to recognize how sound joins tone to form a symphony, how natural force joins natural force and transforms itself into “tools”. Here man gets to know the beings that discover and invent. Here he not only learns to recognize what the forces are as such, but he gets to know them as living entities. Here the human being permeates himself with the living, productive creative power. He learns to recognize not only the expressions of human existence that are created here, but also the human institutions that make the human sphere come alive and suitable for human life. In all of this, laws live that are experienced in the Akasha as living beings. By immersing himself in their splendor, man immerses himself in the fourth realm of Devachan in the way the weaving is done “at the whirling loom of time”. He learns to recognize this.

These are the four stages in which the human being lives out what he has prepared in his earthly existence and develops new abilities. This marks an important moment for the human being. When he has passed through this fourth realm, the moment has come when he is transferred to the other side of our world system, into the actual realm of the spiritual, into the realm where impressions are formed from the other side. A human being can only spend a short time there; only those who have already reached a higher level of development remain for a longer period. The as yet undeveloped human beings only have a momentary glimpse in this higher realm, and then descend again into the lower realms to gain experience there, so that when they return, they will stay there longer and longer. When man enters this kingdom again, then the abilities that were formerly limited by the material world develop. I call it an important moment because what was formerly held together by matter is completely discarded and removed. What was once narrow now becomes wide, what was once stuck together and inside each other now unfolds; it becomes fluid, man becomes free. The abilities are no longer restricted by the material world. This can only be compared to a plant, for example, which cannot grow freely, but has to grow between crevices and has to adapt to the shape of the crevices; it grows upwards, but is restricted by the crevice. It is the same for the human soul. Suppose the crevice softens and softens, allowing the plant to unfold a little more. Has the human soul entered the Akashic realm: there is absolute equality. For the one whose devachanic eye is open, it is wonderful to see how the soul unfolds during the transition from the Akashic realm to the higher realms of Devachan. We see it as a fine, ethereal substance in the middle of an egg-shaped or spherical, floating substance. It sheds layer after layer. The fine color of the Akasha is removed, and the pure being unfolds, radiant in the new light, in a light that cannot be described in earthly words. It takes on a completely free form. Every ability that was constrained in earthly life and that was not completely free even in the lower realms of Devachan is now released. The person becomes free in all directions. He can bring all his abilities to full growth. The more abilities a person develops, the more he “swells up” and the more he takes with him into the new embodiment. As long as he is allowed to linger there, he also makes the acquaintance of the Masters of Wisdom and Compassion. This is the realm where, by grace, he may receive from even more exalted beings the intentions that underlie the cosmos. From here they weave the garment of the world, which is woven from the fabrics of the lower devachan realms, from the astral realm and the realm of earthly substances. Up there, the intentions and basic lines of cosmic development are preordained, and there, too, those who have developed their abilities in the course of evolution can make acquaintance with the threefold sequence of entities I have enumerated.

In the first sphere of upper Devachan, he learns from the entities that have ascended to Exusiai about the miracle flower that springs from the seeds of the universe. He learns how it grows; he learns about the eternal forces of the universe. In this sphere, he meets the beings who have the power of thought; he sees how thought works through them.

The next higher sphere is the home of the entities of Dynamis. They not only have the power of thought, but also the power of the source; they are the beings who, as it were, have the seeds of thought. Compare the exusiai with the flower. Then go to the seed, which is now transparent, bright and clear, but which also has the power to become a flower. The spiritual power of the whole universe is in the hands of the Dynamis. That is why they are called power rays. Thus, through these entities, the seed of thought can be formed, and then, from the other side, the whole can be imagined into the Akasha, which is the sound of the whole world structure. This is how it is formed, as Goethe has it described by Faust, there where the mothers sit, enthroned in solitude and working at the glowing tripod. I already said that in Plutarch's time this realm was also called the realm of mothers. If you read about the realm of mothers in Plutarch, a completely new meaning will emerge from this story.

In the highest realm, the beings we call Kyriotetes resound. Only the most highly developed can gain a brief insight into this realm. There, everything is in harmony and unity; all peculiarity has disappeared.

The Exusiai, the Dynamis, the Kyriotetes, these are the three highest realms in which man's abilities are completely freed. We enter these realms in the meantime between two embodiments in order to draw strength from what lies on the other side for our work in the world of

What happens in this world, what we ourselves do and achieve, is the world of results, the world of effects. The world of causes lies beyond the earthly. When we

return to a new incarnation, new strength for our existence flows to us from the world of causes, and everything that a person accomplishes in this world, everything that shines within him as moral ideals, as abilities for creative work, as active human love, and compassion for all beings, and for the control of natural forces in technology, all this rests in the hidden depths of the human soul; it has been brought there from the realm of the higher Devachan, where the causes of the effects in this world are found.

In the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, Goethe wonderfully suggests this when he speaks of the river – which we can compare with the Akashic current – and calls the opposite bank the garden of the flower, the garden of the beautiful lily. The messages of the Hindu sage also speak of such a flower. It is the power that permeates the entire Devachan. From this flower grow fruits, and the fruits are the archetypes for this world. If man wants to work, he must draw strength from these fruits by finding nourishment in them. Then man comes to development; he becomes effective and powerful.

As I said, Theosophy is not meant to draw man away from the world. It does not want to transfer him to a realm in which he becomes weak and feeble for earthly existence; it does not want that. It wants something quite different. It wants to point him to a realm in which he can draw strength and abilities to be strong and capable of his work in earthly existence. A man who does not know what lies behind and before him in evolution is like a blind man who gropes along, not knowing whither he gropes nor what he encounters. And a man who knows his way backwards and forwards resembles a seeing man.

The particular beings we will encounter later will be the subject of the next lectures. We will hear more about life in Devachan, about individual experiences and about the influence of the Devachanic world on our world. From these introductory lectures it should be clear that Theosophy is not a doctrine that is alien to reality, but one that is friendly to reality and full of creative power, because it does not lead man away from earthly existence, but rather equips him with powers that live in earthly existence but are not visible in earthly existence. Man must recognize this if he aspires to the realms that cannot be entered by one who is attached only to the sensual world. And to all natures hostile to the spiritual realm, to all those who say that there is nothing beyond the sensual world, we want to call out the Goethean saying:

Go on! We will fathom it:
In thy nothingness I hope to find the All.

Esoteric exercises are the technique of spiritual life. Maya = maha-a-ya = great-non-existence.

We've only become dwellers on earth through the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman; otherwise our egos would have remained in spiritual regions, and our bodies on the earth's surface would have been directed from those regions.

Even though Lucifer and Ahriman combat the direct working of the divine spirit, they're nevertheless wanted by the spirit, for it's only through such resistance that the ego becomes fully objective in the physical world. Without Ahriman we wouldn't see a plant's green as such, but only the spiritual being that's in the plant. A single plant is like a hair in the earth's body.

Our egoism only arises through Lucifer and Ahriman. It must live in us and come to full expression, for only in this way can all of life become fully developed physically. But we should be aware that every action of ours has a selfish coloration. Our sympathy drives us to help others, but we don't like to be sympathetic.

There's no point in the world space where there's no force.

Men's etheric brains vary more than leaves on a tree. The shining points in them are like a photo of the heavens that's full of stars.

The effect of atma, buddhi, and manas is elaborated in the human eye (as in the great seal on a one dollar bill, with buddhi on the left, manas on the right, and atma at the apex).

This symbol also works on us at night. There we should try to keep the chaotic impressions of the day as far away as possible.

We shouldn't chatter about theosophy while we're eating or at other everyday occasions. It should be a holy thing for us.