| 266-I. From the Contents of Esoteric Classes I: 1904–1909: Esoteric Lesson
01 Dec 1906, Cologne Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| The cross sections of the five etheric streams and their connections with color, taste, and body regions are as follows: earth ether, square with only the corners distinct, yellow, sweet, bones and muscles; water ether, crescent moon at fifth day, white, tart, digestion; fire ether, equilateral triangle, red, hot, blood; air ether, circle, green, sour, nerves; thought (akasha) ether, two intersecting spirals—one is distinct, dark blue, bitter, lymph vessel system. |
| 266-I. From the Contents of Esoteric Classes I: 1904–1909: Esoteric Lesson
01 Dec 1906, Cologne Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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One of the most important guidelines that the masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings communicate to pupils through a teacher is: Learn to be silent and you'll get power; give up power and you'll get will; give up will and you'll get feeling; give up feeling and you'll get knowledge. An esoteric must place these occult propositions before his soul in all work and action, and then some day he'll experience that the four verses are true. One should note that the various forces can only be attained in sequence, so that one can never attain knowledge first and maybe then feeling and then will, and then power. For will arises from the renunciation of power, etc. We'll give an example from the life of a very rich Briton, Laurence Oliphant, who lived in the middle of the last century. He and his wife had a noble love for their poorer neighbors and moved by this feeling they gave most of what they had to them; and then they migrated to New York. There they made enough money to go to Mt Tabor near Haifa. Here a strange phenomena arose. Oliphant began to write some very interesting and strange books about Genesis that were some of the strangest things that were written about the Bible at the time. But he could only have these thoughts with the help of his wife. After she died Oliphant could only keep on working for a short time, and then the inspiration of his deceased wife no longer reached the physical plane. So this is an example of the validity of the second part of the verse just mentioned. We're always surrounded by five ether streams in the world around us on earth. They're called earth, water, fire, air and thought ethers. These etheric streams are also active in man: earth ether from the head to the right foot, from there water ether to the left hand, from there fire ether to the right hand, from there air ether to the left foot, and then thought ether back to the head. This is the occultist's sacred pentagram, the symbol of man. Its point is directed upwards, which indicates that the spirit streams to man from the heights. The pentagram is present in many flowers and other things in nature. The sign of black magic is a pentagram with one point at the bottom, through which magicians attract bad forces from the earth and send them out of the two top horns into the environment by means of their bad will in order to use soul and nature forces for their own egotistical, evil purposes. The cross sections of the five etheric streams and their connections with color, taste, and body regions are as follows: |
earth ether, square with only the corners distinct, yellow, sweet, bones and muscles; 
water ether, crescent moon at fifth day, white, tart, digestion; 
fire ether, equilateral triangle, red, hot, blood; 
air ether, circle, green, sour, nerves; 
thought (akasha) ether, two intersecting spirals—one is distinct, dark blue, bitter, lymph vessel system. | 202. The Search for the New Isis, Divine Sophia: The Magi and the Shepherds: The New Isis
25 Dec 1920, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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| Think of all shades of blue being absent from the world, and therefore of green looking different from what it does today, and you will realise that the world around the Greek did not appear to him as it appears to humanity today. |
| What gave the Magi their knowledge of the world of stars draws inwards, more backwards towards the brain and becomes our mathematical, mechanistic world (green in diagram). A crossing took place; what was inner knowledge, pictorial, naive, instinctive imagination in pre-Christian times becomes our external knowledge, perception through the senses. |
| What today is our ordinary knowledge through the senses, with which we see nothing but the green surface of grass, the brown skins of animals and the like—to this kind of knowledge when it was still inward, when it had not yet drawn outwards to the eyes, to the skin, there was revealed to the shepherds in the field the deep influence on the earth, the power with which the Christ would work in the earth, what the Christ was to be for the earth. |
| 202. The Search for the New Isis, Divine Sophia: The Magi and the Shepherds: The New Isis
25 Dec 1920, Dornach Tr. Unknown Rudolf Steiner |
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When it is a question of understanding the Event of Golgotha in the sense of the Christmas Mystery we may look in two directions: Towards the starry heavens with all their secrets on the one side and towards the inner being of man with all its secrets on the other. During these lectures I have spoken of how the Magi from the East recognised, from the starry heavens, the Coming of Christ Jesus upon the earth and of how from the visions arising out of man's inner being the simple shepherds in the field received the proclamation of this Saviour of mankind. And once again today we will turn our attention to these two directions whence, in reality, all knowledge comes to man—whence the highest knowledge of all, the knowledge of the very meaning of the earth, had to come. In the epochs which preceded the Mystery of Golgotha the attitude of the human soul to the universe and to itself was quite different from what it was after the Mystery of Golgotha. This fact, of course, is not very vividly apparent to an external study of history because the ancient form of knowledge belongs to ages lying long, long before, thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha. By the time the Mystery of Golgotha was drawing near, this form of knowledge had already become feebler, and truth to tell it was only individual, very outstanding men like the three Magi from the East who possessed such far-reaching knowledge as was then manifest. And on the other side it was only possible for men particularly sensitive to inner things like the shepherds—men of the people—to bring such visions out of sleep as these shepherds brought. But in both the Magi and the shepherds it was a legacy of that ancient knowledge through which men had once been related to the universe. Even in our time we could not say, especially not in regard to the actual present, that men give very clear expression to that form of knowledge which has entered into the evolution of humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. Speaking generally, however, what we are going to speak about this evening, holds good. The pre-Christian attitude to the starry heavens was such that men did not regard the stars in the prosaic, abstract way that is current nowadays. The fact that these men of olden times spoke of the stars as if they were living Beings was not due, as an imperfect science believes, to mere fantasy, but to a spiritual, although instinctive, atavistic perception of the starry heavens. Looking at the starry heavens in olden times men did not merely see points or surfaces of light but something spiritual, something that made them able to describe the constellations as they did, for to them the several planets of our system were ensouled by living beings. Men beheld the spiritual in the wide heaven of the stars. They saw the starry heavens as well as the mineral and plant kingdoms in their spiritual reality. It was with one and the same faculty of knowledge that men of old beheld these three regions of existence. They spoke of the stars as beings endowed with soul and also of the minerals and the plants as beings endowed with soul. We must not think that the faculties of knowledge in olden times were similar to ours. A little while ago I spoke to you about a stage of knowledge which, although it was not so very different from our own, is nevertheless difficult for many people today to picture. I said that the Greeks, in the earliest period of their culture, did not see the colour blue, that the heavens were not blue to them. They perceived the colours that lie more towards the active side, towards the side of red-yellow. Nor did they paint in the shades of blue known to us. Blue came only later into the range of human perception. Think of all shades of blue being absent from the world, and therefore of green looking different from what it does today, and you will realise that the world around the Greek did not appear to him as it appears to humanity today. For the men of much earlier times the surrounding world differed still more. And then from the world seen by men of old, the spiritual withdrew—withdrew from the worlds of stars, of minerals, of plants. The vivid active colours became duller and out of the depths there appeared what is experienced as blue. As the faculty for the perception of blue, of the darker colours arose, what the men of old experienced in the astrology which spoke to them in a living language, active and full of colour, changed into the grey, colourless geometry and mechanics which, drawing it as we do from our inner being, no longer enables us to read from the environment the secrets of the starry worlds. The ancient astrology was transformed into the world we picture today in the sense of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, into the world of celestial mechanics, of mathematics. That is the one side. The other side is that in those olden times men possessed a deep, inner faculty for perceiving what was streaming around them out of the earth—the fluids of the earth. The fluids of the earth, the qualities of earth announced themselves as the counterpart of the starry heavens to certain inner faculties of perception. Man in olden times was highly sensitive to the characteristics of the climate of his country, of the soil on which he lived. A chalk or granite soil was experienced as different radiations from the Earth. But this was not a dim feeling or experience; it arose like colours or clouds inwardly felt, inwardly experienced. Thus man experienced the earth's depths; thus, too, the soul in his fellow-man and the life of animals. The experiences were more living, more intense. It was with a faculty of external knowledge that man gazed into the spirituality of the starry heavens, into the spirituality of the minerals and plants, with his atavistic, instinctive clairvoyance; and it was with instinctive inner vision that he perceived what was living spiritually in the earth's depths. He spoke not merely of chalk soil but he experienced specific elemental beings: one kind from chalk soil, other kinds from granite or gneiss. He felt what was living in other human beings as an aura but an aura bestowed upon man from the earth; particularly did he feel the animals with their aura as beings of the earth. It was as though the ground, soil and the inner warmth of the earth continued on in the whole animal world. When a man of old saw the butterflies over the plants he saw them drawing along with them what was rising from the earth; as in an auric cloud he saw animal life flowing over the earth. All this gradually withdrew and the prosaic world remained for man's faculty of perception which now became external He began now to behold the world around him as we behold it, in its colours and so forth—without perceiving the spiritual. And what man had once seen through faculties of inner perception was transformed into our modern knowledge of nature; what he had seen spiritually through faculties of external knowledge was transformed into our modern mathematics and mechanics. Thus out of the qualities which the simple shepherds in the field brought to their inner vision we have developed the modern view of nature; and out of what the Magi from the East brought to their faculty of perceiving the Star, we have developed our dry mathematics and mechanics. The faculties of outer and inner perception were still so rich in individual men at that time that the mystery of the birth of Jesus could announce itself from these two sides. What really underlay this faculty of perception? During the period between death and a new birth, during the time through which we lived before entering through birth into earthly existence we have literally passed through the cosmic expanses. Our individuality was not then bound to the space enclosed by the skin; our existence was spread over cosmic expanses. And the faculty of magical vision still possessed by the wise men from the East was essentially a faculty which entered strongly into the human being from the period between death and birth—that is to say, it was a ‘pre-natal’ faculty. What the soul lived through before birth within the world of stars awakened to become a special faculty in those who were pupils of the Magi. And when the pupils of the Magi developed this particular faculty they were able to say: “Before I came down to this earth I had definite experiences with Mercury, with Sun, with Moon, with Saturn, with Jupiter.” And this cosmic memory enabled them to behold the spiritual in the whole external world as well, to see the destiny of man on earth. They saw it out of their memory of existence before birth within the world of stars. The faculties by means of which the earth's depths, the mysteries of the souls of men and of the nature of the animals were perceived, were faculties which at first developed in germinal form in the human being and which manifested for the first time after death—but they were youthful faculties, potentially germinal. Although it is after death that these faculties become particularly creative, in earthly life they arise as potentially germinal forces during the first period of earthly life, in the child. The forces of growth in the child which bud and sprout forth from the spiritual, these forces of the child withdraw in later life from the human being. They withdraw and we are then filled more with those forces which were there before birth. But after death these child forces appear again. It was only specially gifted men who retained them on into old age. I have already said here that such faculties of genius as we have in the later years of life are due to the fact that we have remained more childlike than those who do not have these faculties or have them in a lesser degree. The maintenance of childlike faculties on into later life equips us with inventive faculties and the like. The more we can retain childlike faculties in mature years, the more creative we are. But these creative forces appear again more particularly after death. Among individual peoples of pre-Christian times it had been possible for the after-death faculties to be fructified by those that had remained from before birth. Because such men allowed the kind of knowledge possessed by the Magi from the East to withdraw and the after-death knowledge to come more to the fore, and because the pre-birth faculties were able to fructify the after-death faculties, the gift of prophecy developed in these men, the gift of foretelling the future prophetically with the after-death faculties. Those whom we call the Jewish Prophets were men in whom the after-death faculties were particularly developed; but these faculties did not remain merely in the instinctive life as in the simple shepherds in the field to whom the annunciation was made, they were penetrated by those other faculties which had developed to greater intensity among such people as the Magi from the East, and which led to special knowledge relating to the secrets of the stars and the happenings in the heavens.
It will now be clear to you that the proclamation to the shepherds in the field and the knowledge of the Magi from the East were necessarily in agreement. The knowledge possessed by the Magi from the East was such that they were able to behold deep secrets of the starry heavens. Out of those worlds in which man lives between death and a new birth, out of those worlds whence came the faculties enabling them to penetrate the starry heavens, out of an enhancement of this knowledge this vision came to them: From that world which does not primarily belong to life between birth and death but to the life between death and a new birth—from that world a Being, the Christ, is coming down to the earth. The approach of Christ was revealed to the Magi out of their knowledge of the stars. And what was the revelation to the shepherds in the field whose special faculty was to experience the Earth's depths?—The Earth became something different when the Christ was drawing near. The Earth felt this approach of Christ, bore in herself new forces because of Christ's approach. The pure-hearted shepherds in the field felt, from out of the depths, what the Earth was reflecting, the way in which the Earth was reacting to the approach of Christ. Thus the cosmic expanses proclaimed to the Magi from the East the same as the earth's depths proclaimed to the shepherds. This happened at a time when remains of the old knowledge were still in existence. We are concerned here with men who were exceptional, even in those days, with men like the three. Magi from the East and these particular shepherds in the field. Both had retained, each in their own way, what had more or less disappeared from humanity in general. This was the reason why the Mystery of Golgotha, when its time was drawing near, could be proclaimed to them as it was. In studying these things we must add to the ordinary, historical view, the knowledge that comes from Spiritual Science. We must try, as it were, to fathom the expanses of space and the depths of the life of the soul. And if we fathom the expanses of space in the right way we begin to understand how the wise men from the East experienced the approach of the Mystery of Golgotha. If we try to plumb the depths of the life of soul we begin to understand how the shepherds received the tidings of what was coming so near to the earth that the earth herself became aware of the approach of these forces. The faculties connected with existence before birth, which were manifested in the Magi, correspond more to an intellectual element—different, of course, in those times from what it is today; they correspond more to knowledge. What worked in the shepherds corresponds more to will, and it is the will that represents the forces of growth in the universe. The shepherds were united in their will with the Christ Being Who was approaching the earth. We feel, too, how the stories of the wise men from the East—although they are so inadequately recorded in the modern Bible—we feel how they express the kind of knowledge with which the wise men approached the Mystery of Golgotha; it came from their consciousness to the external universe. We feel that the story of the proclamation to the shepherds points to the will, to the heart, to the life of inner emotion. “Revelation of the God from the heavens and Peace to those men on Earth who are of good will.” We feel the streaming of the will in the proclamation to the shepherds. The light-filled knowledge possessed by the Magi is of a quite different character. We realise the profundity and significance of the knowledge in the Magi and the proclamation to the shepherds as narrated in the New Testament when we try to fathom the nature of human knowledge and of human will—faculties connected with existence before birth and after death.
I have said that what was a world of spirit to the men of old—the stars, the minerals, the plants—I have said that this has become for us the tapestry of the sense-world; what was formerly inner knowledge has drawn to the surface. If we picture to ourselves the knowledge in the shepherds as being inward and what manifested in the Magi as being outward, it was this outward external knowledge in the Magi which reached out into space and there perceived the spirit The inner life leads to perception of the earth's depths. The inner kind of knowledge manifested in the shepherds (red in diagram) grows, during the further evolution of humanity, more and more outwards and becomes the external perception of today, becomes what we call empirical perception. What gave the Magi their knowledge of the world of stars draws inwards, more backwards towards the brain and becomes our mathematical, mechanistic world (green in diagram). A crossing took place; what was inner knowledge, pictorial, naive, instinctive imagination in pre-Christian times becomes our external knowledge, perception through the senses. What was once external knowledge encompassing the world of stars draws inwards and becomes the dry, geometrical-mathematical, mechanistic world which we now draw forth from within us.  Through inner enlightenment man of today experiences a mathematical, mechanistic world. It is only outstanding persons like Novalis who were able to feel and give expression to the poetry and deep imagination of this inner, mathematical world. This world of which Novalis sings the praises in such beautiful language is, for the ordinary man of today, the dry world of triangles and quadrangles, of squares and—sums and differences. The ordinary human being is prosaic enough to feel this world to be barren, dry; he has no love for it. Novalis, who was an outstanding person, sings its praises because there was still alive in him an echo of what this world was before it had drawn inwards. In those times it was the world out of which the Jupiter Spirit, the Saturn Spirit, the Spirit of Aries, of Taurus, of Gemini was perceived. It was the ancient light-filled world of stars which has withdrawn and in the first stage of its withdrawal becomes the world which seems to us to be dry, mathematical, mechanistic. The faculty that intensified in a different form in the shepherds in the field to a perception of the voice of the Angel in the heights has become dry, barren and feeble in us—it has become our perception of the external world of sense; with it today we perceive minerals and plants, whereas with the old faculty, although it was hardly articulate, men perceived the earth's depths or the world of men and animals. What today has faded into the mathematical-mechanistic universe, what was once astrology, contained such a power that the Christ was revealed to the Magi as a Being of the Heavens. What today is our ordinary knowledge through the senses, with which we see nothing but the green surface of grass, the brown skins of animals and the like—to this kind of knowledge when it was still inward, when it had not yet drawn outwards to the eyes, to the skin, there was revealed to the shepherds in the field the deep influence on the earth, the power with which the Christ would work in the earth, what the Christ was to be for the earth. We, my dear friends, must find the way whereby the inner faculty that is now dry mathematics may intensify pictorially to Imagination. We must learn to grasp the Imagination given us by Initiation Science. What is contained in these Imaginations? They are in truth a continuation of the faculty with which the Magi from the East recognised the approach of Christ. The Imaginations are the budding, the offspring of what the men of old saw in the starry constellations, the star-imaginations, the mineral imaginations, in gold, silver, copper. The men of old perceived in Imaginations, and their offspring are the mathematical faculties of today. The mathematical faculties of today will become those faculties which understand the Imaginations. Thus by the development of the inner faculties men will have to seek for the understanding of the Christ Being. But external perception must also be deepened, become more profound. External perception has itself descended from what was once the life of inner experiences, of instinct in man. The power which among the shepherds in the field was still inward, in their hearts, is today only in eyes and ears; it has shifted entirely to the external part of man and therefore perceives only the outer tapestry of the sense-world. This power must go still further outwards. To this end man must be able to leave his body and attain Inspiration. This Inspiration—a faculty of perception which can be attained today—will then, out of Initiation Science, be able to give the same as was given in the proclamation to the naive, inner knowledge of the shepherds in the field. Astrology as it was to the Magi, heart-vision as it was in the shepherds. With the knowledge that comes from Initiation Science through Imagination and Inspiration modern man will rise to the spiritual realisation to the living Christ. Men must learn to understand how Isis, the living, divine Sophia, had to disappear when the time came for the development which has driven astrology into mathematics, into geometry, into the science of mechanics. But it will also be understood that when living Imagination resurrects from mathematics, phoronomy and geometry, this means the finding of Isis, of the new Isis, of the divine Sophia whom man must find if the Christ Power that is his since the Mystery of Golgotha is to become alive, completely alive, that is to say, filled with light within him. We are standing before this very point of time, my dear friends. The outer earth will not provide man with those things which he has become accustomed to desire in modern times. The conflicts called into being by the terrible catastrophes of recent years have already changed a large part of the earth into a field where culture lies in ruins. Further conflicts will follow. Men are preparing for the next great world war. Culture will be wrecked in more ways. There will be nothing gained directly from what seems to modern humanity to be of most value for knowledge and the will External earth life, insofar as it is a product of earlier times, will pass away—and it is an entirely vain hope to believe that the old habits of thought and will can continue. What must arise is a new kind of knowledge, a new kind of willing in all domains. We must familiarise ourselves with the thought of the vanishing of a civilisation; but we must look into the human heart, into the spirit dwelling in man; we must have faith in the heart and the spirit of man in order that through all we are able to do within the wreckage of the old civilisation, new forms may arise, forms that are truly new. Nor will these forms arise if we do not bear in mind with all seriousness what it is that must happen for the sake of humanity. Read in the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and you will find it said that a man when he desires to attain higher knowledge must understand what is there called the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold. It is said that this meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold means that willing, feeling, thinking separate in a certain way, that a trinity must arise out of the chaotic unity in man. The understanding that must come to the pupil of Spiritual Science through his knowledge of what the Guardian of the Threshold is, must come to the whole of modern mankind in regard to the course of civilisation. In inner experience, though not in outer consciousness, humanity is passing through the region that can also be called a region of the Guardian of the Threshold. It is so indeed, my dear friends; modern humanity is passing over a threshold at which stands a Guardian, a Guardian full of meaning, and grave. And this grave Guardian speaks: “Cling not to what has come as a transplant from olden times; look into your hearts, into your souls, that you may be capable of creating new forms. You can only create these new forms when you have faith that the powers of knowledge and of will for this spiritual creation can come out of the spiritual world.” What is an event of great intensity for the individual who enters the worlds of higher knowledge, proceeds unconsciously in present-day mankind as a whole. And those who have linked themselves together as the anthroposophical community must realise that it is one of the most needed of all things in our days to bring men to understand this passing through the region which is a threshold. Just as man, the knower, must realise that his thinking, feeling and willing separate in a certain sense and must be held together in a higher way, so it must be made intelligible to modern humanity that the spiritual life, the life of rights, and the economic life must separate from one another and a higher form of union created than the State as it has been up to now. No programmes, ideas, ideologies can bring individuals to recognise the necessity of this threefoldness of the social organism. It is only profound knowledge of the onward development of mankind that reveals this development to have reached a threshold where a grave Guardian stands. This Guardian demands of an individual who is advancing to higher knowledge: Submit to the separation in thinking, feeling and willing. He demands of humanity as a whole: Separate what has up to now been interwoven in a chaotic unity in the State idol; separate this into a Spiritual Life, an Equity State, and an Economic State ... otherwise there is no progress possible for humanity, and the old chaos will burst asunder. If this happens it will not take the form that is necessary to humanity but an ahrimanic or luciferic form. It is only through spiritual-scientific knowledge of the passing of the threshold in our present day that can give the Christ-form to this chaos. This, my dear friends, is something that we must say to ourselves at the time of Christmas too, if we rightly understand Anthroposophy. The little child in the crib must be the child representing the spiritual development towards man's future. Just as the shepherds in the field and the Magi from the East went after the proclamation to see how that which was to bring humanity forward appeared as a little child, so must modern man make his way to Initiation Science in order to perceive, in the form of a little child, what must be done for the future by the Threefold Social Organism based on Spiritual Science. If the old form of the state is not made threefold it will have to burst—and burst in such a way that it would develop on the one side a wholly chaotic spiritual life, completely ahrimanic and luciferic in character, and on the other side an economic life again luciferic-ahrimanic in character. And both the one and the other would drag the state in rags after them. In the Orient there will take place the development more of ahrimanic-luciferic spiritual states; in the West there will be the development more of ahrimanic-luciferic economic life—if man does not realise through the permeation of his being by Christ how he can avoid this, how out of his knowledge and out of his will he can proceed to bring about the ‘threefolding’ of what is striving to separate. This will be human knowledge permeated by Christ; it will be human willing permeated by Christ. And it will express itself in no other way than that the idol of the unitary state will become threefold. And those who stand properly in the spiritual life will recognise, as did the shepherds in the field, what it is that the earth experiences through the Christ. And those who stand rightly within the economic life, within the economic associations will unfold, in the true sense, a will that brings a Christ-filled social order. |
| 223. The Cycle of the Year as Breathing-Process of the Earth: Lecture IV
07 Apr 1923, Dornach Tr. Barbara Betteridge, Frances E. Dawson Rudolf Steiner |
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| You will find in Goethe's Faust the expression “es gruenelt” (It is beginning to get green). Who notices nowadays when it is growing green, when the greenness rising up out of the Earth in the spring, wells and wafts through the air? Who notices when it grows green and when it blossoms? Well, of course people see it today; the red and the yellow of the flowers please them; but they do not notice that the air becomes quite different when the flowers bloom, and again when the fruit is formed. |
| 223. The Cycle of the Year as Breathing-Process of the Earth: Lecture IV
07 Apr 1923, Dornach Tr. Barbara Betteridge, Frances E. Dawson Rudolf Steiner |
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| I have frequently referred recently to the connection the course of the year has with various aspects of human life, and during the Easter days I pointed especially to the connection with the celebration of festivals. Today I should like to go back to very ancient times and say more on this subject, just in relation to the ancient Mysteries. This can perhaps deepen in one way or another what we have spoken of before. To the people of very ancient periods on Earth, the festivals that took place during the year formed a very significant part of their lives. We know that in those ancient times the human consciousness worked in an entirely different way from that of later times. We might ascribe a somewhat dreamy nature to this old form of consciousness. And indeed it was out of this dream condition that those insights arose in the human soul, in the human consciousness, which then took on the form of myths and in fact became mythology. Through this dreamy, or we can also say instinctively clairvoyant consciousness people saw more deeply into the spiritual environment. But precisely through this more intensive kind of participation, not just in the sensible workings of Nature, as is the case today, but also in the spiritual events, people were all the more involved with the phenomena connected with the cycle of the year, with the differing aspects of Nature in spring and in autumn. I have pointed to this just in recent days. Today I want to share something entirely different with you in this regard, and that is, how the festival of Midsummer, which has become our St. John's festival, and the Midwinter festival, which has become our Christmas, were celebrated in connection with the old Mystery teachings. To begin with, we must be quite clear that the humanity of the ancient times of which we are speaking did not have a full ego-consciousness, as we do today. In the dreamlike consciousness, a full ego-consciousness was lacking; and when this is the case, people do not perceive precisely that which present-day humanity is so proud of. Thus the people of that period did not perceive what existed in dead nature, in the mineral nature. Let us keep this firmly in mind, my dear friends: It was not a consciousness that flowed along in abstract thoughts, but it lived in pictures; yet it was dreamlike. These people entered into, for example, the sprouting, burgeoning plant-life and plant-nature in spring far more than is the case today. Again, they felt the shedding of the leaves, their drying up in autumn, the whole dying away of the plant world; felt deeply also the changes the animal world lived through during the course of the year; felt the whole human environment to be different when the air was filled with butterflies fluttering and beetles humming. They felt their own human weaving in a certain way as being alongside the weaving and being of the plants and animal existence. But they not only had no interest, they had no proper consciousness for the mineral realm, for the dead world outside them. This is one side of the earlier human consciousness. The other side is this: that no interest existed among this ancient humanity for the form of man in general. It is very difficult today to imagine what the human perception was in this regard, that people in general took no particular interest in the human figure as a space-form. They had, however, an intense interest in what pertains to race. And the farther back we go into ancient cultures, the less do we find people with the common consciousness interested in the human form. On the other hand, they were interested in the color of the skin, in the racial temperament. This is what people noticed. On the one side man was not interested in the dead mineral world, nor, on the other, in the human form. There was an interest, as we have said, in what pertains to race, rather than in the universally human, including the outer form of man. The great teachers of the Mysteries simply accepted this as a fact. How they thought about it, I will show you graphically in a drawing. They said to themselves: “The people have a dreamlike consciousness by means of which they perceive very clearly the plant life in their environment.”—In their dream-pictures these people indeed lived with the plant life; but their dream consciousness did not extend to the comprehension of the mineral world. So the Mystery teachers said to themselves: “The human consciousness reaches on the one side to the plant life [see drawing], which is dreamily experienced, but not to the mineral; this lies outside human consciousness. And on the other side, men feel within them what still binds them with the animal world, that is, what pertains to race, what is typical of the animal. [See drawing]. On the other hand, what makes man really man, his upright form, the space form of his being, lies outside of human consciousness.” Thus, the specifically human lay outside the interest of these people of ancient times. We can characterize the human by thinking of it, in the sense of this ancient humanity, as enclosed within this space [shaded portion in drawing], while the mineral and the specifically human lay outside the realm of knowledge generally accessible to those people who carried on their lives outside the Mysteries.  But what I have just said applies only in general. With his own forces, with what man experienced in his own being, he could not penetrate beyond this space [see drawing], to the mineral on the one side, to the human on the other. But there were ceremonies originating in the Mysteries which brought to man in the course of the year something approximating the human ego-consciousness on the one side and the perception of the general mineral kingdom on the other. Strange as it may sound to people of the present time, it is nevertheless true that the priests of the ancient Mysteries arranged festivals by whose unusual effects man was lifted out above the plant-like to the mineral, and thereby at a certain time of year experienced a lighting up of his ego. It was as if the ego shone into the dream-consciousness. You know that even in a person's dreams today, one's own ego, which is then seen, often constitutes an element of the dream. And so at the time of the St. John's festival, through the ceremonies that were arranged for those among the people who wanted to take part in them, ego-consciousness shone in just at the height of summer. And at this time of midsummer people could perceive the mineral realm at least to the extent necessary to help them attain a kind of ego-consciousness, whereby the ego appeared as something that entered into dreams from outside. In order to bring this about, the participants in the oldest midsummer festivals—those of the summer solstice which have become our St. John's festival—the participants were led to unfold a musical-poetic element in round dances having a strong rhythmic quality and accompanied by song. Certain presentations and performances were filled with distinctive musical recitative accompanied by primitive instruments. Such a festival was completely immersed in the musical-poetic element. What man had in his dream-consciousness he poured out into the cosmos, as it were, in the form of music, in song and dance. Modern man can have no true appreciation of what was accomplished by way of music and song during those intense and widespread folk festivals of ancient times, which took place under the guidance of men who in turn had received their guidance from the Mysteries. For what music and poetry have come to be since then is far removed from the simple, primitive, elemental form of music and poetry which was unfolded in those times at the height of summer under the guidance of the Mysteries. For everything the people did in performing their round-dances, accompanied by singing and primitive poetic recitations, had the single goal of bringing about a soul mood in which there occurred what I have just called the shining of the ego into the human spirit. But if those ancient people had been asked how they came to form such songs and such dances, by means of which there could arise what I have described, they would have given an answer highly paradoxical to modern man. They would have said, for example: “Much of it has been given to us by tradition, for those who went before us have also done these things.” But in certain ancient times they would have said: “One can learn these things also today without having any tradition, if one simply develops further what manifests itself. One can still learn today how to make use of instruments, how to form dances, how to master the singing voice”—and now comes the paradox in what these ancient people would have said. They would have said: “It is learned from the songbirds.”—For they understood in a deep way the whole import of the songbirds' singing. My dear friends, mankind has long ago forgotten why the songbirds sing. It is true that men have preserved the art of song, the art of poetry, but in the age of intellectualism in which the intellect has dominated everything, they have forgotten the connection of singing with the whole universe. Even someone who is musically inspired, who sets the art of music high above the commonplace, even such a man, speaking out of this later intellectualistic age, says: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Indeed, my dear friends, the man of a certain period says this. The bird, however, would never say such a thing. He would never say: “The song that issues from my throat is my reward.” And just as little would the pupils of the ancient Mystery schools have said it. For when at a certain time of year the larks and the nightingales sing, what is thereby formed streams out into the cosmos, not through the air, but through the etheric element; it vibrates outward in the cosmos up to a certain boundary... then it vibrates back again to Earth, to be received by the animal realm—only now the divine-spiritual essence of the cosmos has united with it. And thus it is that the nightingales and the larks send forth their voices into the universe (red) and that what they thus send forth comes back to them etherically (yellow), for the time during which they do not sing;  but in the meantime it has been filled with the content of the divine-spiritual. The larks send their voices out over the cosmos, and the divine spiritual, which takes part in the forming, in the whole configuration of the animal kingdom, streams back to the Earth on the waves of what had streamed out in the songs of the larks and the nightingales. Therefore if anyone speaks, not from the standpoint of the intellectualistic age, but out of the truly all-encompassing human consciousness, he really cannot say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. The song that issues from my throat is my reward, and an ample reward it is.” Rather, he would have to say: “I sing as the bird sings who dwells in the branches. And the song which streams forth from his throat into the cosmic expanses returns to the Earth as a blessing, fructifying the earthly life with divine spiritual impulses which then work on in the bird world and which can only work in the bird world because they find their way in on the waves of what has been ‘sung out’ to them into the cosmos.” Now of course not all creatures are nightingales and larks; also of course not all of them send out song; but something similar even though it is not so beautiful, goes out into the cosmos from the whole animal world. In those ancient times this was understood, and therefore the pupils of the Mystery-pupils were instructed in such singing and dancing as they could then perform at the St. John's festival, if I may call it by the modern name. Human beings sent this out into the cosmos, of course not now in animal form, but in humanized form, as a further development of what the animals send out into cosmic space.—And there is something else yet that belonged to those festivals: not only the dancing, the music, the song, but afterward, the listening. First, there was the active performance in the festivals; then the people were directed to listen to what came back to them. For through their dances, their singing, and all that was poetic in their performances, they had sent forth the great questions to the divine spiritual of the cosmos. Their performance streamed up, as it were, into cosmic spaces as the water of the earth rises, forming clouds above and dropping down again as rain. Thus, the effects of the human festival performances arose and came back again—of course not as rain, but as something which manifested itself to man as ego-power. And the people had a sensitive feeling for that particular transformation which took place in the air and warmth around the Earth, just about the time of the St. John's festival. Of course the man of the present intellectualistic age disregards anything like this. He has something else to do than people of olden times. In these times, as also in others, he has to go to five o'clock teas, to coffee parties; he has to attend the theater, and so on; he simply has something else to do which is not dependent on the time of year. In the doing of all this, man forgets that delicate transformation which takes place in the Earth's atmospheric environment. But these people of olden times did feel how different the air and warmth become around St. John's time, at the height of summer, how these take on something of the plant nature. Just consider what kind of a perception that was—this sensitive feeling for all that goes on in the plant world. Let us suppose that this is the Earth, and everywhere plants are coming out of the Earth.  The people then had a subtle feeling awareness of what is developing there in the plant, of what lives in the plant. They had in the spring a general feeling of nature, of which an after-echo is still retained in our language. You will find in Goethe's Faust the expression “es gruenelt” (It is beginning to get green). Who notices nowadays when it is growing green, when the greenness rising up out of the Earth in the spring, wells and wafts through the air? Who notices when it grows green and when it blossoms? Well, of course people see it today; the red and the yellow of the flowers please them; but they do not notice that the air becomes quite different when the flowers bloom, and again when the fruit is formed. Such living participation in the plant world no longer exists in our intellectualistic age, but it did exist for the people of ancient times. Hence they were aware of it in their perceptive feeling when the “greening,” blooming and fruiting came toward them—not now out of the Earth, but out of the surrounding atmosphere; when air and warmth themselves streamed down from above like something akin to plant nature (shaded in drawing). And when air and warmth became thus plant-like, the consciousness of those people was transported into that sphere in which the “I” then descended, as answer to what they had sent out into the cosmos in the form of music and poetry. Thus the festivals had a wonderful, intimate, human content. This was a question to the divine-spiritual universe. Men received the answer because—just as we perceive the fruiting, the blossoming, the greening of the Earth today—they felt something plant-like streaming down from above out of the otherwise merely mineral air. In this way there entered into the dream of existence, into the ancient dreamy consciousness also the dream of the ego. And when the St. John's festival was past and July and August came again, the people had the feeling “We have an ego, but this ego remains up there in heaven and speaks to us only at St. John's time. Then we become aware that we are connected with heaven. It has taken our ego into its protection. It shows it to us when it opens the great window of heaven at St. John's time. But we must ask about it. We must ask as we carry out the festival performances at St. John's time, as in these performances we find our way into the unbelievably close and intimate musical and poetic ceremonies.”—Thus these ancient festivals already established a communication, a union, between the earthly and the heavenly. You see this whole festival was immersed in the musical, in the musical-poetic. I might say that in the simple settlements of very ancient peoples, suddenly, for a few days at the height of summer, everything became poetic—although it had been thoroughly prepared beforehand by the Mysteries. The whole social life was plunged into this musical-poetic element. The people believed that they needed this for life during the course of the year, just as they needed daily food and drink; that they needed to enter into this mood of dancing, music and poetry, in order to establish their communication with the divine-spiritual powers of the cosmos. A relic of this festival remained in a later age, when a poet said, for example; “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles, the son of Peleus,” because he still remembered that once upon a time the great question was put before the deity, and the deity was expected to give answer to the question of men. Just as these festivals at St. John's time were carefully prepared in order to pose the great question to the cosmos so that the cosmos might assure man at this time that he has an ego, which the heavens have taken into their protection, so likewise was prepared the festival at the time of the winter solstice, in the depths of winter, which has now become our Christmas festival. But while at St. John's time everything was steeped in the musical-poetic, in the dance element, now in the depths of winter everything was first prepared in such a way that the people knew they must become still and quiet, that they must enter into a more contemplative element. And then there was brought forth—in these ancient times of which outer history provides no record, of which we can only know through spiritual science—all that during the summer had been in the forming and shaping and imaging elements which reached a climax in the festivals in music and dance. During that time these ancient people, who in a certain way went out of themselves in order to unite with the ego in the heavens, were not involved in learning anything. Besides the festival, they were occupied in doing what was necessary for their subsistence. Instruction waited for the winter months, and this reached its culmination, its festival expression, at the time of the winter solstice, in the depth of winter, at Christmas time. Then began the preparation of the people, again under the guidance of pupils of the Mysteries, for various spiritual celebrations which were not performed during the summer. It is difficult to describe in modern terms what the people did from our September/October to our Christmas time, because everything was so very different from what is done now. But they were guided in what we would perhaps call riddle-solving, in answering questions that were put in a veiled form so that people had to discover a meaning in what was given in signs. Let us say that the Mystery-pupils gave to those who were learning in this way some kind of symbolic image, which they were to interpret. Or they gave what we would call a riddle to be solved, or some kind of incantation. What the magic saying contained, they were to apply to Nature, and thus divine its meaning. But especially there was careful preparation for what later took on the most varied forms among the different peoples; for example, for what was known in northern countries at a later time as the throwing of the runic wands so that they formed shapes which were then deciphered. People devoted themselves to these activities in the depth of winter; but above all, those things were cultivated that then led to a certain art of modeling, in a primitive form of course. Among these ancient forms of consciousness was a most singular one, paradoxical as it sounds to modern people, and it was as follows: With the coming of October, an urge for some sort of activity began to stir in people's limbs. In the summer a man had to accommodate the movements of his limbs to what the fields demanded of him; he had to put his hands to the plough; he had to adapt himself to the outer world. When the harvest had been gathered in, however, and his limbs were rested, then a need stirred in them for some other form of activity, and his limbs took on a longing to knead. Then people derived a special satisfaction from all kinds of plastic, moulding activity. We might say that just as an intensive urge had arisen at the time of the St. John's festival for dancing and music, so toward Christmas time an intensive urge arose to knead, to mould, to create, using any kind of pliant substance available in nature. People had an especially sensitive feeling, for example, for the way water begins to freeze. This gave them the specific impulse to push it in one direction and another, so that the ice-forms appearing in the water took on certain shapes. Indeed people went so far as to keep their hands in the water while the shapes developed and their hands grew numb! In this way, when the water froze under the waves their hands cast up, it assumed the most remarkable artistic shapes, which of course again melted away. Nothing remains of all this in the age of intellectualism except at most the custom of lead-casting on New Year's Eve, the Feast of St. Sylvester. In this, molten lead is poured into water, and one discovers that it takes on shapes whose meaning is then supposed to be guessed. But that is the last abstract remnant of those wonderful activities that arose from the impelling force in Nature experienced inwardly by the human being, which expressed itself for example as I have related: that a person thrust his hand into water which was in process of freezing, the hand then becoming numb as he tested how the water formed waves, so that the freezing water then “answered” with the most remarkable shapes. In this way the human being found the answers to his questions of the Earth. Through music and poetry at the height of summer, he turned toward the heavens with his questions, and they answered by sending ego-feeling into his dreaming consciousness. In the depth of winter he turned for what he wanted to know not now toward the heavens, but to the earthly, and he tested what kind of forms the earthly element can take on. In doing this he observed that the forms which emerged had a certain similarity to those developed by beetles and butterflies. This was the result of his contemplation. From the plastic, formative element that he drew out of the nature processes of the Earth, there arose in him the intuitive observation that the various animal forms are fashioned entirely out of the earthly element. At Christmas man understood the animal forms. And as he worked, as he exerted his limbs, even jumped into the water and made certain movements, then sprang out and observed how the solidifying water responded, he noticed in the outer world what sort of form he himself had as man. But this was only at Christmas time, not otherwise; at other times he had a perception only of the animal world and of what pertains to race. At Christmas time he advanced to the experience of the human form as well. Just as in those times of the ancient Mysteries the ego-consciousness was mediated from the heavens, so the feeling for the human form was conveyed out of the Earth. At Christmas time man learned to know the Earth's form-force, its sculptural shaping force; and at St. John's time, at the height of summer he learned to know how the harmonies of the spheres let his ego sound into his dream-consciousness. And thus at special festival seasons the ancient Mysteries expanded the being of man. On the one side the environment of the Earth extended out into the heavens, so that man might know how the heavens held his “I” in their protection, how his “I” rested there. And at Christmas time the Mystery teachers caused the Earth to give answer to the questioning of man by way of plastic forms, so that man gradually came to have an interest in the human form, in the flowing together of all animal forms into the human form. At midsummer man learned to know himself inwardly, in relation to his ego; in the depth of winter he learned to feel himself outwardly, in relation to his human form. And so it was that what man perceived as his being, how he actually felt himself, was not acquired simply by being man, but by living together with the course of the year; that in order for him to come to ego-consciousness, the heavens opened their windows; that in order for him to come to consciousness of his human form, the Earth in a certain way unfolded her mysteries. Thus the human being was inwardly intimately linked with the course of the year, so intimately linked that he had to say to himself: “I know about what I am as man only when I don't live along stolidly, but when I allow myself to be lifted up to the heavens in summer, when I let myself sink down in winter into the Earth mysteries, into the secrets of the Earth.” You see from this that at one time the festival seasons with their celebrations were looked upon as an integral part of human life. A man felt that he was not only an earth-being but that his essential being belonged to the whole world, that he was a citizen of the entire cosmos. Indeed he felt himself so little to be an earth-being that he actually had first to be made aware of what he was through the Earth by means of festivals. And these festivals could be celebrated only at certain seasons because at other times the people who experienced the course of the year to some degree would have been quite unable to experience it at all. For all that the people could experience through the festivals was connected with the related seasons. Mark you, after man has once achieved his freedom in the age of intellectualism, he can certainly not come again to this sharing in the life of the cosmos in the same way that he experienced it in primitive ages. But he can nevertheless come to it even with his modern constitution, if he applies himself once more to the spiritual. We might say that in the ego consciousness which mankind has had for a long time now, something has been drawn in which could be attained only through the windows of heaven in summer. But just for that reason man must be learning to understand the cosmos, acquire for himself something else which in turn lies beyond the ego. It is natural today for people to speak of the human form in general. Those who have entered into the intellectual age no longer have a strong feeling for the animalistic-racial element. But just as this feeling formerly came over man, I should like to say as a force, as an impulse, which could be sought only out of the Earth, so today, through an understanding of the Earth which cannot be gained by means of geology or mineralogy but only once more in a spiritual way, man must come again to something more than the mere human form. If we consider the human form we can say: In very ancient times man felt himself within this form in such a way that he felt only the external racial characteristics connected with the blood, but failed to perceive as far as the skin itself (red in drawing); he did not notice what formed his outline. Today man has come so far that he does notice his outline, his bodily limits. He perceives his contour indeed as the typically human feature of his form (blue). Now, however, man must come out beyond himself; he must learn to know the etheric and astral elements outside himself. This he can do only through the deepening of spiritual science.  Thus we see that our present-day consciousness has been acquired at the cost of losing much of the former connection of our consciousness with the cosmos. But once man has come to experience his freedom and his world of thought, then he must emerge again and experience cosmically. This is what Anthroposophy intends when it speaks of a renewal of the festivals, even of the creating of festivals like the Michael festival in autumn of which we have recently spoken. We must come once more to an inner understanding of what the cycle of the year can mean to man in this connection; it can then be something even loftier than it was for man long ago, as we have described it. |
| 327. The Agriculture Course (1958): Lecture III
11 Jun 1924, Koberwitz Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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| This physical element which with the help of sulphur carries the influences of life out of the universal ether into the physical, is none other than oxygen. I have sketched it here in green. if you regard it physically, it represents the oxygen. It is the weaving, vibrant and pulsating essence that moves along the paths of the oxygen. |
| I could show you everywhere, how the nitrogen carries into these blue lines what is indicated diagrammatically in the green. But now, all that is thus developed in the living creature, structurally as in a fine and delicate design, must eventually be able to vanish again. |
| See how they tend to colour their leaves, not with the ordinary green, but often with a darker shade. Observe too how the fruit, properly speaking, tends to be stunted. |
| 327. The Agriculture Course (1958): Lecture III
11 Jun 1924, Koberwitz Tr. George Adams Rudolf Steiner |
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My dear friends, The earthly and cosmic forces, of which I have spoken, work in the farm through the substances of the Earth, needless to say. In the next lectures we shall pass on to various practical aspects, but before we can do so we must enter a little more precisely into the question: How do these forces work through the substances of the Earth? In the present lecture we shall consider Nature's activity quite generally speaking. One of the most important questions in agriculture is that of the significance of nitrogen—its influence in all farm-production. This is generally recognised; nevertheless the question, what is the essence of nitrogen's activity, has fallen into great confusion nowadays. Wherever nitrogen is active, men only recognise, as it were, the last excrescence of its activities—the most superficial aspects in which it finds expression. They do not penetrate to the relationships of Nature wherein nitrogen is working, nor can they do so, so long as they remain within restricted spheres. We must look out into the wide spaces, into the wider aspects of Nature, and study the activities of nitrogen in the Universe as a whole. We might even say—and this indeed will presently emerge—that nitrogen as such does not play the first and foremost part in the life of plants. Nevertheless, to understand plant-life it is of the first importance for us to learn to know the part which nitrogen does play. Nitrogen, as she works in the life of Nature, has so to speak four sisters, whose working we must learn to know at the same time if we would understand the functions and significance of nitrogen herself in Nature's so-called household. The four sisters of nitrogen are those that are united with her in plant and animal protein, in a way that is not yet clear to the outer science of to-day. I mean the four sisters, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and sulphur. To know the full significance of protein it will not suffice us to enumerate as its main ingredients hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. We must include another substance, of the profoundest importance for protein, and that is sulphur. Sulphur in protein is the very element which acts as mediator between the Spiritual that is spread throughout the Universe—the formative power of the Spiritual—and the physical. Truly we may say, whoever would trace the tracks which the Spiritual marks out in the material world, must follow the activity of sulphur. Though this activity appears less obvious than that of other substances, nevertheless it is of great importance; for it is along the paths of sulphur that the Spiritual works into the physical domain of Nature. Sulphur is actually the carrier of the Spiritual. Hence the ancient name, “sulphur,” which is closely akin to the name “phosphorus.” The name is due to the fact that in olden time they recognised in the out-spreading, sun-filled light, the Spiritual itself as it spreads far and wide. Therefore they named “light-bearers” these substances—like sulphur and phosphorus—which have to do with the working of light into matter. Seeing that sulphur's activity in the economy of Nature is so very fine and delicate, we shall, however, best approach it by first considering the four other sisters: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen. These we must first learn to understand; we shall see what they signify in the whole being of the Universe. The chemist of to-day knows little of these substances. He knows what they look like when he has them in his laboratory, but he knows practically nothing of their inner significance in the working of the Cosmos as a whole. The knowledge of modern chemistry about them is scarcely more than our knowledge of a man of whose outer form we caught a glimpse as we passed by him in the street—or maybe we took a snapshot of him, and with the help of the photograph we can now call him to mind. We must learn to know the deeper essence of these substances. What science does is scarcely more than to take snapshots of them with a camera. All that is said of them in scientific books and lectures is scarcely more than that. Let us begin with carbon. (The application of these matters to plant-life will presently emerge). Carbon indeed has fallen in our time from a highly aristocratic status to a very plebeian one. Alas, how many other beings of the Universe have followed it along the same sad way! What do we see in carbon nowadays? That which we use, as coal, to heat our ovens! That which we use, as graphite, for our writing. True, we still assign an aristocratic value to one modification of carbon, namely diamond, but we have little opportunity to value even that, for we can no longer afford to buy it! What is known about carbon nowadays is very little when you consider its infinite significance in the Universe. The time is not so very long ago—only a few centuries—when this black fellow, carbon, was so highly esteemed as to be called by a very noble name. They called it the Stone of the Wise—the Philosopher's Stone. There has been much chatter es to what the “Stone of the Wise” may be. Very little has emerged from it. When the old alchemists and such people spoke of the Stone of the Wise, they meant carbon—in the various modifications in which it occurs. They held the name so secret and occult, only because if they had not done so, anyone and everyone would have possessed it—for it was only carbon. Why then was carbon the “Stone of the Wise?” Here we can answer, with an idea from olden time, a point we need to understand again in our time when speaking about carbon. It is quite true, carbon occurs to-day in Nature in a broken, crumbled form, as coal or even graphite—broken and crumbled, owing to certain processes which it has undergone. How different it appears, however, when we perceive it in its living activity, passing through the human or animal body, or building up the plant-body out of its peculiar conditions. Then the amorphous, formless substance which we see as coal or carbon proves to be only the last excrescence—the corpse of that which coal or carbon truly is in Nature's household. Carbon, in effect, is the bearer of all the creatively formative processes in Nature. Whatever in Nature is formed and shaped be it the form of the plant persisting for a comparatively short time, or the eternally changing configuration of the animal body—carbon is everywhere the great plastician. It does not only carry in itself its black substantiality. Wherever we find it in full action and inner mobility, it bears within it the creative and formative cosmic pictures—the sublime cosmic Imaginations, out of which all that is formed in Nature must ultimately proceed. There is a hidden plastic artist in carbon, and this plastician building the manifold forms that are built up in Nature—makes use of sulphur in the process. Truly to see the carbon as it works in Nature, we must behold the Spirit-activity of the great Universe, moistening itself so-to-speak with sulphur, and working as a plastic artist—building with the help of carbon the more firm and well-defined form of the plant, or again, building the form in man, which passes away again the very moment it comes into being. For it is thus that man is not plant, but man. He has the faculty, time and again to destroy the form as soon as it arises; for he excretes the carbon, bound to the oxygen, as carbonic acid. Carbon in the human body would form us too stiffly and firmly—it would stiffen our form like a palm. Carbon is constantly about to make us still and firm in this way, and for this very reason our breathing must constantly dismantle what the carbon builds. Our breathing tears the carbon out of its rigidity, unites it with the oxygen and carries it outward. So we are formed in the mobility which we as human beings need. In plants, the carbon is present in a very different way. To a certain degree it is fastened—even in annual plants—in firm configuration. There is an old saying in respect of man: “Blood is a very special fluid”—and we can truly say: the human Ego, pulsating in the blood, finds there its physical expression. More accurately speaking, however, it is in the carbon—weaving and wielding, forming itself, dissolving the form again. It is on the paths of this carbon—moistened with sulphur—that that spiritual Being which we call the Ego of man moves through the blood. And as the human Ego—the essential Spirit of man—lives in the carbon, so in a manner of speaking the Ego of the Universe lives as the Spirit of the Universe—lives via the sulphur in the carbon as it forms itself and ever again dissolves the form. In bygone epochs of Earth-evolution carbon alone was deposited or precipitated. Only at a later stage was there added to it, for example, the limestone nature which man makes use of to create something more solid as a basis and support—a solid scaffolding for his existence. Precisely in order to enable what is living in the carbon to remain in perpetual movement, man creates an underlying framework in his limestone-bony skeleton. So does the animal, at any rate the higher animal. Thus, in his ever-mobile carbon-formative process, man lifts himself out of the merely mineral and rigid limestone-formation which the Earth possesses and which he too incorporates in order to have some solid Earth within him. For in the limestone form of the skeleton he has the solid Earth within him. So you can have the following idea. Underlying all living things is a carbon-like scaffolding or framework—more or less rigid or fluctuating as the case may be—and along the paths of this framework the Spiritual moves through the World. Let me now make a drawing (purely diagrammatic) so that we have it before us visibly and graphically. (Diagram 6). I will here draw a scaffolding or framework such as the Spirit builds, working always with the help of sulphur. This, therefore, is either the ever-changing carbon constantly moving in the sulphur, in its very fine dilution—or, as in plants, it is a carbon-frame-work more or less hard and fast, having become solidified, mingled with other ingredients. Now whether it be man or any other living being, the living being must always be permeated by an ethereal—for the ethereal is the true bearer of life, as we have often emphasised. This, therefore, which represents the carbonaceous framework of a living entity, must in its turn be permeated by an ethereal. The latter will either stay still—holding fast to the beams of the framework—or it will also be involved in more or less fluctuating movement. In either case, the ethereal must be spread out, wherever the framework is. Once more, there must be something ethereal wherever the framework is. Now this ethereal, if it remained alone, could certainly not exist as such within our physical and earthly world. It would, so to speak, always slide through into the empty void. It could not hold what it must take hold of in the physical, earthly world, if it had not a physical carrier. This, after all, is the peculiarity of all that we have on Earth: the Spiritual here must always have physical carriers. Then the materialists come, and take only the physical carrier into account, forgetting the Spiritual which it carries. And they are always in the right—for the first thing that meets us is the physical carrier. They only leave out of account that it is the Spiritual which must have a physical carrier everywhere. What then is the physical carrier of that Spiritual which works in the ethereal? (For we may say, the ethereal represents the lowest kind of spiritual working). What is the physical carrier which is so permeated by the ethereal that the ethereal, moistened once more with sulphur, brings into it what it has to carry—not in Formation this time, not in the building of the framework—but in eternal quickness and mobility into the midst of the framework? This physical element which with the help of sulphur carries the influences of life out of the universal ether into the physical, is none other than oxygen. I have sketched it here in green. if you regard it physically, it represents the oxygen. It is the weaving, vibrant and pulsating essence that moves along the paths of the oxygen. For the ethereal moves with the help of sulphur along the paths of oxygen. Only now does the breathing process reveal its meaning. In breathing we absorb the oxygen. A modern materialist will only speak of oxygen such as he has in his retort when he accomplishes, say, an electrolysis of water. But in this oxygen the lowest of the super-sensible, that is the ethereal, is living—unless indeed it has been killed or driven out, as it must be in the air we have around us. In the air of our breathing the living quality is killed, is driven out, for the living oxygen would make us faint Whenever anything more highly living enters into us we become faint. Even an ordinary hypertrophy of growth—if it occurs at a place where it ought not to occur—will make us faint, nay even more than faint. If we were surrounded by living air in which the living oxygen were present, we should go about stunned and benumbed. The oxygen around us must be killed. Nevertheless, by virtue of its native essence it is the bearer of life—that is, of the ethereal. And it becomes the bearer of life the moment it escapes from the sphere of those tasks which are allotted to it inasmuch as it surrounds the human being outwardly, around the senses. As soon as it enters into us through our breathing it becomes alive again. Inside us it must be alive. Circulating inside us, the oxygen is not the same as it is where it surrounds us externally. Within us, it is living oxygen, and in like manner it becomes living oxygen the moment it passes, from the atmosphere we breathe, into the soil of the Earth. Albeit it is not so highly living there as it is in us and in the animals, nevertheless, there too it becomes living oxygen. Oxygen under the earth is not the same as oxygen above the earth. It is difficult to come to an understanding on these matters which the physicists and chemists, for—by the methods they apply—from the very outset the oxygen must always be drawn out of the earth realm; hence they can only have dead oxygen before them. There is no other possibility for them. That is the fate of every science that only considers the physical. It can only understand the corpse. In reality, oxygen is the bearer of the living ether, and the living ether holds sway in it by using sulphur as its way of access. But we must now go farther. I have placed two things side by side; on the one hand the carbon framework, wherein are manifested the workings of the highest spiritual essence which is accessible to us on Earth: the human Ego, or the cosmic spiritual Being which is working in the plants. Observe the human process: we have the breathing before us—the living oxygen as it occurs inside the human being, the living oxygen carrying the ether. And in the background we have the carbon-framework, which in the human being is in perpetual movement. These two must come together. The oxygen must somehow find its way along the paths mapped out by the framework. Wherever any line, or the like, is drawn by the carbon—by the spirit of the carbon—whether in man or anywhere in Nature there the ethereal oxygen-principle must somehow find its way. It must find access to the spiritual carbon-principle. Flow does it do so? Where is the mediator in this process?  The mediator is none other than nitrogen. Nitrogen guides the life into the form or configuration which is embodied in the carbon. Wherever nitrogen occurs, its task is to mediate between the life and the spiritual essence which to begin with is in the carbon-nature. Everywhere—in the animal kingdom and in the plant and even in the Earth—the bridge between carbon and oxygen is built by nitrogen. And the spirituality which—once again with the help of sulphur is working thus in nitrogen, is that which we are wont to describe as the astral. It is the astral spirituality in the human astral body. It is the astral spirituality in the Earth's environment. For as you know, there too the astral is working—in the life of plants and animals, and so on. Thus, spiritually speaking we have the astral placed between the oxygen and the carbon, and this astral impresses itself upon the physical by making use of nitrogen. Nitrogen enables it to work physically. Wherever nitrogen is, thither the astral extends. The ethereal principle of life would flow away everywhere like a cloud, it would take no account of the carbon-framework were it not for the nitrogen. The nitrogen has an immense power of attraction for the carbon-framework. Wherever the lines are traced and the paths mapped out in the carbon, thither the nitrogen carries the oxygen—thither the astral in the nitrogen drags the ethereal. Nitrogen is for ever dragging the living to the spiritual principle. Therefore, in man, nitrogen is so essential to the life of the soul. For the soul itself is the mediator between the Spirit and the mere principle of life. Truly, this nitrogen is a most wonderful thing. If we could trace its paths in the human organism, we should perceive in it once more a complete human being. This “nitrogen-man” actually exists. If we could peal him out of the body he would be the finest ghost you could imagine. For the nitrogen-man imitates to perfection whatever is there in the solid human framework, while on the other hand it flows perpetually into the element of life. Now you can see into the human breathing process. Through it man receives into himself the oxygen—that is, the ethereal life. Then comes the internal nitrogen, and carries the oxygen everywhere—wherever there is carbon, i.e., wherever there is something formed and figured, albeit in everlasting change and movement. Thither the nitrogen carries the oxygen, so that it may fetch the carbon and get rid of it. Nitrogen is the real mediator, for the oxygen to be turned into carbonic acid and so to be breathed out. This nitrogen surrounds us on all hands. As you know, we have around us only a small proportion of oxygen, which is the bearer of life, and a far larger proportion of nitrogen—the bearer of the astral spirit. By day we have great need of the oxygen, and by night too we need this oxygen in our environment. But we pay far less attention, whether by day or by night, to the nitrogen. We imagine that we are less in need of it—I mean now the nitrogen in the air we breathe. But it is precisely the nitrogen which has a spiritual relation to us. You might undertake the following experiment. Put a human being in a given space filled with air, and then remove a small quantity of nitrogen from the air that fills the space, thus making the air around him slightly poorer in nitrogen than it is in normal life. If the experiment could be done carefully enough, you would convince yourselves that the nitrogen is immediately replaced. If not from without, then, as you could prove, it would be replaced from within the human being. He himself would have to give it off, in order to bring it back again into that quantitative condition to which, as nitrogen, it is accustomed. As human beings we must establish the right percentage-relationship between our whole inner nature and the nitrogen that surrounds us. It will not do for the nitrogen around us to be decreased. True, in a certain Sense it would still suffice us. We do not actually need to breathe nitrogen. But for the spiritual relation, which is no less a reality, only the quantity of nitrogen to which we are accustomed in the air is right and proper. You see from this how strongly nitrogen plays over into the spiritual realm. At this point I think you will have a true idea, of the necessity of nitrogen for the life of plants. The plant as it stands before us in the soul has only a physical and an ether-body; unlike the animal, it has not an astral body within it. Nevertheless, outside it the astral must be there on all hands. The plant would never blossom if the astral did not touch it from outside. Though it does not absorb it (as man and the animals do) nevertheless, the plant must be touched by the astral from outside. The astral is everywhere, and nitrogen itself—the bearer of the astral—is everywhere, moving about as a corpse in the air. But the moment it comes into the Earth, it is alive again. Just as the oxygen does, so too the nitrogen becomes alive; nay more it becomes sentient and sensitive inside the Earth. Strange as it may sound to the materialist madcaps of to-day, nitrogen not only becomes alive but sensitive inside the Earth; and this is of the greatest importance for agriculture. Nitrogen becomes the bearer of that mysterious sensitiveness which is poured out over the whole life of the Earth. It is the nitrogen which senses whether there is the proper quantity of water in a given district of the Earth. If so, it has a sympathetic feeling. If there is too little water, it has a feeling of antipathy. It has a sympathetic feeling if the right plants are there for the given soil. In a word, nitrogen pours out over all things a kind of sensitive life. And above all, you will remember what I told you yesterday and in the previous lectures: how the planets, Saturn, Sun, Moon, etc., have an influence on the formation and life of plants. You might say, nobody knows of that! It is quite true, for ordinary life you can say so. Nobody knows! But the nitrogen that is everywhere present—the nitrogen knows very well indeed, and knows it quite correctly. Nitrogen is not unconscious of that which comes from the Stars and works itself out in the life of plants, in tim life of Earth. Nitrogen is the sensitive mediator, even as in our human nerves-and-senses system it is the nitrogen which mediates for our sensation. Nitrogen is verily the bearer of sensation. So you can penetrate into the intimate life of Nature if you can see the nitrogen everywhere, moving about like flowing, fluctuating feelings. We shall find the Treatment of nitrogen, above all, infinitely important for the life of plants. These things we shall enter into later. Now, however, one thing more is necessary. You have seen how there is a living interplay. On the one hand there is that which works out of the Spirit in the carbon-principle, taking an forms as of a scaffolding or framework. This is in constant interplay with what works out of the astral in the nitrogen-principle, permeating the framework with inner life, making it sentient. And in all this, life itself is working through the oxygen-principle. But these things can only work together in the earthly realm inasmuch as it is permeated by yet another principle, which for our physical world establishes the connection with the wide spaces of the Cosmos. For earthly life it is impossible that the Earth should wander through the Cosmos as a solid thing, separate from the surrounding Universe. If the Earth did so, it would be like a man who lived on a farm but wanted to remain independent, leaving outside him all is growing in the fields. If he is sensible, he will not do so! There are many things out in the fields to-day, which in the near future will be in the stomachs of this honoured company, and—thence in one way or another—it will find its way back again on to the fields. As human beings we cannot truly say that we are separate. We cannot sever ourselves. We are united with our surroundings—we belong to our environment. As my little finger belongs to me, so do the things that are around us naturally belong to the whole human being. There must be constant interchange of substance, and so it must be between the Earth—with all its creatures—and the entire Universe. All that is living in physical forms upon the Earth must eventually be led back again into the great Universe. It must be able to be purified and cleansed, so to speak, in the universal All. So now we have the following:— To begin with, we have what I sketched before in blue (Diagram 6), the carbon-framework. Then there is that which you see here the green—the ethereal, oxygen principle. And then—everywhere emerging from the oxygen, carried by nitrogen to all these lines there is that which develops as the astral, as the transition between the carbonaceous and the oxygen principle. I could show you everywhere, how the nitrogen carries into these blue lines what is indicated diagrammatically in the green. But now, all that is thus developed in the living creature, structurally as in a fine and delicate design, must eventually be able to vanish again. It is not the Spirit that vanishes, but that which the Spirit has built into the carbon, drawing the life to itself out of the oxygen as it does so. This must be able once more to disappear. Not only in the sense that it vanishes on Earth; it must be able to vanish into the Cosmos, into the universal All. This is achieved by a substance which is as nearly as possible akin to the physical and yet again as nearly akin to the spiritualand that is hydrogen. Truly, in hydrogen—although it is itself the finest of physical elements—the physical flows outward, utterly broken and scattered, and carried once more by the sulphur out into the void, into the indistinguishable realms of the Cosmos. We may describe the process thus: In all these structures, the Spiritual has become physical. There it is living in the body astrally, there it is living in its image, as the Spirit or the Ego—living in a physical way as Spirit transmuted into the physical. After a time, however, it no longer feels comfortable there. It wants to dissolve again. And now once more—moistening itself with sulphur—it needs a substance wherein it can take its leave of all structure and definition, and find its way outward into the undefined chaos of the universal All, where there is nothing more of this organisation or that. Now the substance which is so near to the Spiritual on the one hand and to the substantial on the other, is hydrogen. Hydrogen carries out again into the far spaces of the Universe all that is formed, and alive, and astral. Hydrogen carries it upward and outward, till it becomes of such a nature that it can be received out of the Universe once more, as we described above. It is hydrogen which dissolves everything away. So then we have these five substances. They, to begin with, represent what works and weaves in the living—and in the apparently dead, which after all is only transiently dead. Sulphur, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: each of these materials is inwardly related to a specific spiritual principle. They are therefore very different from what our modern chemists would relate. Our chemists speak only of the corpses of the substances—not of the real substances, which we must rather learn to know as sentient and living entities, with the single exception of hydrogen. Precisely because hydrogen is apparently the thinnest element—with the least atomic weight—it is really the least spiritual of all. And now I ask you to observe: When you meditate, what are you really doing? (I must insert this observation; I want you to see that these things are not conceived “out of the blue”). The Orientals used to meditate in their way; we in the mid-European West do it in our way. Our meditation is connected only indirectly with the breathing. We live and weave in concentration and meditation. However, all that we do when we devote ourselves to these exercises of the soul still has its bodily counterpart. Albeit this is delicate and subtle, nevertheless, however subtly, meditation somewhat modifies the regular course of our breathing, which as you know is connected so intimately with the life of man. In meditating, we always retain in ourselves a little more carbon dioxide than we do in the normal process of waking consciousness. A little more carbon dioxide always remains behind in us. Thus we do not at once expel the full impetus of the carbonic acid, as we do in the everyday, bull-at-the-gate kind of life. We keep a little of it back. We do not drive the carbon dioxide with its full momentum out into the surrounding spaces, where the nitrogen is all around us. We keep it back a little. If you knock up against something with your skull—if you knock against a table, for example—you will only be conscious of your own pain. If, however, you rub against it gently, you will be conscious of the surface of the table. So it is when you meditate. By and by you grow into a conscious living experience of the nitrogen all around you. Such is the real process in meditation. All becomes knowledge and perception—even that which is living in the nitrogen. And this nitrogen is a very clever fellow! He will inform you of what Mercury and Venus and the rest are doing. He knows it all, he really senses it. These things are based on absolutely real processes, and I shall presently touch on some of them in somewhat greater detail. This is the point where the Spiritual in our inner life bearing to have a certain bearing on our work as farmers. This is the point which has always awakened the keen interest of our dear friend Stegemann. I mean this working-together of the soul and Spirit in us, with all that is around us. It is not at all a bad thing if he who has farming to do can meditate. He thereby makes himself receptive to the revelations of nitrogen. He becomes more and more receptive to them. If we have made ourselves thus receptive to nitrogen's revelations, we shall presently conduct our farming in a very different style than before. We suddenly begin to know all kinds of things, all kinds of things emerge. All kinds of secrets that prevail in farm and farmyard—we suddenly begin to know them. Nay more! I cannot repeat what I said here an hour ago, but in another way I may perhaps characterise it again. Think of a simple peasant-farmer, one whom your scholar will certainly not deem to be a learned man. There he is, walking out over his fields. The peasant is stupid—so the learned man will say. But in reality it is not true, for the simple reason that the peasant—forgive me, but it is so—is himself a meditator. Oh, it is very much that he meditates in the long winter nights! He does indeed acquire a kind of method—a method of spiritual perception. Only he cannot express it. It suddenly emerges in him. We go through the fields, and all of a sudden the knowledge is there in us. We know it absolutely. Afterwards we put it to the test and find it confirmed. I in my youth, at least, when I lived among the peasant folk, could witness this again and again. It really is so, and from such things as these we must take our start once more. The merely intellectual life is not sufficient—it can never lead into these depths. We must begin again from such things. After all, the weaving life of Nature is very fine and delicate. We cannot sense it—it eludes our coarse-grained intellectual conceptions. Such is the mistake science has made in recent times. With coarse-grained, wide-meshed intellectual conceptions it tries to apprehend things that are far more finely woven. All of these substances—sulphur, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen—all are united together in protein. Now we are in a position to understand the process of seed-formation a little more fully than hitherto. Wherever carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen occur—in leaf or flower, calyx or root—everywhere they are bound to other substances in one form or another. They are dependent on these other substances; they are not independent. There are only two ways in which they can become independent: namely, on the one hand when the hydrogen carries them outward into the far spaces of the Universe—separates them all, carries them all away and merges them into an universal chaos; and on the other hand, when the hydrogen drives these fundamental substances of protein into the tiny seed-formation and makes them independent there, so that they become receptive to the inpouring forces of the Cosmos. In the tiny seed-formation there is chaos, and away in the far circumference there is chaos once more. Chaos in the seed must interact with chaos in the farthest circles of the Universe. Then the new being arises. Now let us look how the action of these so-called substances—which in reality are bearers of the Spirit—comes about in Nature. You see, that which works even inside the human being as oxygen and nitrogen, behaves itself tolerably well. There in the human being the properties of oxygen and nitrogen are living. One only does not perceive them with ordinary science, for they are hidden to outward appearance. But the products of the carbon and hydrogen principles cannot behave quite so simply. Take, to begin with, carbon. When the carbon, with its inherent activity, comes from the plant into the animal or human kingdom, it must first become mobile—in the transient stage at any rate. If it is then to present the firm and solid figure (man or animal), it must build on a more deep-seated scaffolding or framework. This is none other than the very deep-seated framework which is contained, not only in our bony skeleton with its limestone—nature, but also in the silicious element which we continually bear within us. To a certain extent, the carbon in man and animal masks its native power of configuration. It finds a pillar of support in the configurative forces of limestone and silicon. Limestone gives it the earthly, silicon the cosmic formative power. Carbon, therefore, in man himself—and in the animal—does not declare itself exclusively competent, but seeks support in the formative activities of limestone and silicon. Now we find limestone and silicon as the basis of plant growth too. Our need is to gain a knowledge of what the carbon develops throughout the process of digestion, breathing and circulation in man—in relation to the bony structure and the silicious structure. We must somehow evolve a knowledge of what is going on in there—inside the human being. We should be able to see it all, if we could somehow creep inside. We should see the carbonaceous formative activity raying out from the circulatory process into the calcium and silicon in man. This is the kind of vision we must unfold when we look out over he surface of the Earth, covered as it is with plants and having beneath it the limestone and the silica—the calcium and silicon. We cannot look inside the human being; we must evolve the same knowledge by looking out over the Earth. There we behold the oxygen-nature caught up by the nitrogen and carried down into the carbon-nature. (The carbon itself, however, seeks support in the principles of calcium and silicon. We might also say, the process only passes through the carbon). That which is living in our environment—kindled to life in the oxygen—must be carried into the depths of the Earth, there to find support in the silica, working formatively in the calcium or limestone. If we have any feeling or receptivity for these things, we can observe the process most wonderfully in the papilionaceae or leguminosae—in all those plants which are well known in farming as the nitrogen-collectors. They indeed have the function of drawing in the nitrogen, so to communicate it to that which is beneath them. Observe these leguminosae. We may truly say, down there in the Earth something is athirst for nitrogen; something is there that needs it, even as the lung of man needs oxygen. It is the limestone principle. Truly we may say, the limestone in the Earth is dependent on a kind of nitrogen-inbreathing, even as the human lung depends on the inbreathing of oxygen. These plants—the papilionaceae—represent something not unlike what takes place on our epithelial cells. By a kind of inbreathing process it finds its way down there. Broadly speaking, the papilionaceae are the only plants of this kind. All other plants are akin, not to the inbreathing, but to the outbreathing process. Indeed, the entire organism of the plant-world is dissolved into two when we contemplate it in relation to nitrogen. Observe it as a kind of nitrogen-breathing, and the entire organism of the plant-world is thus dissolved. On the one hand, where we encounter any species of papilionaceae, we are observing as it were the paths of the breathing, and where we find any other plants, there we are looking at the remaining organs, which breathe in a far more hidden way and have indeed other specific functions. We must learn to regard the plant-world in this way. Every plant species must appear to us, placed in the total organism of the plant-world, like the single human organs in the total organism of man. We must regard the several plants as parts of a totality. Look on the matter in this way, and we shall perceive the great significance of the papilionaceae. It is no doubt already known, but we must also recognise the spiritual foundations of these things. Otherwise the danger is very great that in the near future, when still more of the old will be lost, men will adopt false paths in the application of the new. Observe how the papilionaceae work. They all have the tendency to retain, to some extent in the region of the leaf-like nature, the fruiting process which in the other plants goes farther upward. They have a tendency to fruit even before the flowering process. You can see this everywhere in the papilionaceae; they tend to fruit even before they come to flower. It is due to the fact that they retain far nearer to the Earth that which expresses itself in the nitrogen nature. Indeed, as you know, they actually carry the nitrogen-nature into the soil. Therefore, in these plants, everything that belongs to nitrogen lives far more nearly inclined to the Earth than in the other plants, where it evolves at a greater distance from the Earth. See how they tend to colour their leaves, not with the ordinary green, but often with a darker shade. Observe too how the fruit, properly speaking, tends to be stunted. The seeds, for instance, only retain their germinating power for a short time, after which they lose it. In effect, these plants are so organised as to bring to expression, most of all, what the plant-world receives from the winter—not what it has from the summer. Hence, one would say, there is always a tendency in these plants to wait for the winter. With all that they evolve, they tend to wait for the winter. Their growth is retarded when they find a sufficiency of what they need—i.e., of the nitrogen of the air, which in their own way they can carry downward. In such ways as these we can look into the life and growth of all that goes on in and above the surface of the soil. Now you must also include this fact: the limestone-nature has in it a wonderful kinship to the world of human cravings. See how it all becomes organic and alive! Take the chalk or limestone when it is still in the form of its element—as calcium. Then indeed it gives no rest at all. It wants to feel and fill itself at all costs; it wants to become quicklime that is, to unite its calcium with oxygen. Even then it is not satisfied, but craves for all sorts of things—wants to absorb all manner of metallic acids, or even bitumen which is scarcely mineral at all. It wants to draw everything to itself. Down there in the ground it unfolds a regular craving-nature. He who is sensitive will feel this difference, as against a certain other substance. Limestone sucks us out. We have the distinct feeling: wherever the limestone principle extends, there is something that reveals a thorough craving nature. It draws the very plant-life to itself. In effect, all that the limestone desires to have, lives in the plant-nature. Time and again, this must be wrested away from it. How so? By the most aristocratic principle—that which desires nothing for itself. There is such a principle, which wants for nothing more but rests content in itself. That is the silica-nature. It has indeed come to rest in itself. If men believe that they can only see the silica where it has hard mineral outline, they are mistaken. In homeopathic proportions, the silicious principle is everywhere around us;.moreover it rests in itself—it makes no claims. Limestone claims everything; the silicon principle claims nothing for itself. It is like our own sense organs. They too do not perceive themselves, but that which is outside them. The silica-nature is the universal sense within the earthly realm, the limestone-nature is the universal craving; and the clay mediates between the two. Clay stands rather nearer to the silicious nature, but it still mediates towards the limestone. These things we ought at length to see quite clearly; then we shall gain a kind of sensitive cognition. Once more we ought to feel the chalk or limestone as the kernel-of-desire. Limestone is the fellow who would like to snatch at everything for himself. Silica, on the other hand, we should feel as the very superior gentleman who wrests away all that can be wrested from the clutches of the limestone, carries it into the atmosphere, and so unfolds the forms of plants. This aristocratic gentleman, silica, lives either in the ramparts of his castle—as in the equisetum plant—or else distributed in very fine degree, sometimes indeed in highly homeopathic doses. And he contrives to tear away what must be torn away from the limestone. Here once more you see how we encounter Nature's most wonderfully intimate workings. Carbon is the true form-creator in all plants; carbon it is that forms the framework or scaffolding. But in the course of earthly evolution this was made difficult for carbon. It could indeed form the plants if it only had water beneath it. Then it would be equal to the task. But now the limestone is there beneath it, and the limestone disturbs it. Therefore it allies itself to silica. Silica and carbon together—in union with clay, once more create the forms. They do so in alliance because the resistance, of the limestone-nature must be overcome. How then does the plant itself live in the midst of this process? Down there below, the limestone-principle tries to get hold of it with tentacles and clutches, while up above the silica would tend to make it very fine, slender and fibrous—like the aquatic plants. But in the midst—giving rise to our actual plant forms—there is the carbon, which orders all these things. And as our astral body brings about an inner order between our Ego and our ether body, so does the nitrogen work in between, as the astral. All this we must learn to understand. We must perceive how the nitrogen is there at work, in between the lime—the clay—and the silicious—natures—in between all that the limestone of itself would constantly drag downward, and the silica of itself would constantly ray upward. Here then the question arises, what is the proper way to bring the nitrogen-nature into the world of plants? We shall deal with this question tomorrow, and so find our way to the various forms of manuring. |