The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today we'll consider one of the greatest works in world literature, Dante's¹¹ Divine Comedy.¹² We have to understand that to gain even a little insight into this work we must go back to the 13th and 14th centuries. Goethe has Faust say:

The spirit of our times, as you will say,
is basically just the gentlemen's own mind
acting as mirror for the times.¹³

When someone wants to discuss a work written in earlier times he usually does so from his own point of view, finding in it the things that come from his own subjective feelings.

In the case of Dante's Divine Comedy we can see how hard it is to go back to the Middle Ages in one's mind. All kinds of interpretations are available, among them Cameri's translation into German.¹⁴ The introduction shows that Cameri was attempting something very difficult. He said the Divine Comedy was always spoiled for one because it was given theological interpretations. He himself had given it a purely human interpretation. Cameri was the ethic philosopher of Darwinism.¹⁵ Basing himself on Darwinism, he developed noble ethics which, however, were materialistic, with no awareness of spiritual powers in the world. The whole of his translation reflects a materialistic attitude. That is ‘the gentlemen's own mind acting as mirror for the times’.

But let us now really enter into the spirit of that past time. For once let us forget everything we have taken in from childhood and enter into those times. People both thought and felt very differently about things then. We have learned that the planets and the sun are one system and that this system is one of many. At school we learn that the sun is at the centre of this one system, with the planets orbiting around it. Abstract rational laws govern everything which is in orbit there, everything that lives and moves in the infinity of cosmic space around us. Anyone who thinks like that sees nothing but cosmic bodies orbiting in a vast empty space, cosmic bodies that have life forms on them.

The people who lived in Dante's time saw the world very differently. No one would then have thought of such abstract ideas. The earth was to them the centre of the whole world system. It was not only a solid planet, however, for within it were spirits that related to human beings. These were the powers that made man animal-like. They were at the centre of the earth. The different stages of ‘hell’, as it was called, were there. Dante described things that were wholly real to people in those days. He did not invent them. Anyone who thinks even for one moment that Dante believed it all to be mere superstition does not understand him. The idea people had at that time was that yonder, on the other side of the earth, the pull of gravity went in the opposite direction. In medieval times people thought of the forces that were in opposition to man, forces that removed him from everything there was by way of earthly gravity in mind and spirit. That was kama-loka, the purging fire.

Looking out from there into the starry heavens people had very different ideas then. The moon was not a mineral but the body of a spiritual entity and the abode of many spirits—a cosmic body. The spirits who lived there had gone through similar evolutional states as human beings, but had fallen deeper than man. Their vices were, however, of a more spiritual kind than the animal vices of humanity.

Mercury was also seen as a body encompassing a spirit. Just as we derive man from his innermost soul qualities, so did medieval people see the sun, the moon, mercury, venus, mars, jupiter and saturn as spiritual entities. People saw spirit everywhere then. The world was populated by spirits for them.

The Christ lived in the region of the fixed stars since he had left this world. Beyond the fixed stars was the empyrean, the tenth heaven, where the source of all being was. People thought the spirits which were not here on earth and in this body dwelt in some region or other beyond the earth. A warrior who had gone through death would have to be sought on Mars. Someone who had lived a contemplative life would be on Saturn. Those who had risen even higher had to be sought in the region of the fixed stars, where the Christ was after he died. Beyond this would be even higher spirits.

Dante wrote his Divine Comedy out of this way of thinking. Today people have simply no idea that people in his day still saw something of the spirit in everything material. For them, nothing was wholly physical and nothing purely spiritual. Interweaving matter and spirit was something entirely natural for them. If we enter into such a way of thinking we are alive to the feelings out of which the Divine Comedy was written. It is pointless to fight over whether Beatrice was just a symbol or Dante's lover. The two are not contradictory. Beatrice was a real person, and she also stood for all that is spirit. For someone not lead astray by learning she was the true personification of Theologia.

Let us consider the atmosphere in mind and spirit in which the work evolved. It gives sublime expression to 13th and 14th century strict Christian Catholicism, before the Church came to be divided. People like Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa,¹⁶ whose thinking was that of scholasticism. Dante was a student of scholasticism. He saw the world the way his teacher Thomas Aquinas did.¹⁷

What was the mission of Christianity? It was to create a new basic religious approach. Before that, a girdle of religious views spread around the whole world. Christianity brought a different basic approach to religion.

We have to go back a long way to enter into the basic tenor of Dante's work. About ten thousand years before the Christian era¹⁸ the vast continent known as Atlantis was gradually sinking. Theodor Arldt¹⁹ has given scientific proof of the existence of Atlantis in the journal Kosmos.²⁰ The Flood, as we call it, refers to that continent gradually becoming flooded. The ancestors of the people who now live in Europe and Asia lived on Atlantis. The mythologies of all these nations show profound similarities. German mythology speaks of Atlantis, calling it Niflheim, home of mists. A view of the world has come down through tradition that gives us the figure of Wotan, the ruler. Wotan is the same as Bodha or Buddha. And Veda and the Edda have the same linguistic origin, for example.

These views, which are, as it were, a sediment from the past, have something in common. Reincarnation was originally taken as a matter of course in all of them. Buddhism then spread among Mongol tribes, however, and not among Aryans. The Semitic element entered into the views of Aryan peoples, and reincarnation is unknown in this. The most sublime expression of this type of religion, which thinks in terms of one incarnation only, is Christianity. It is a characteristic feature of Christianity that it considers one incarnation only. This was not the case with esoteric Christian teachings, but the popular teaching did not include the idea of reincarnation. Ancient Judaism and Arabism knew nothing of reincarnation.

Knowing this, we have the basic tenor of Dante's magnificent work. It represents a vision beginning on Good Friday. That was the day to mark life's victory over death. People did not think of this in abstract terms. They would feel that the sun was given new powers of spring on Good Friday and at Easter. It rises, entering into the sign of the Ram or Lamb,²¹ letting the plant world come into active growth. The sun was considered to represent a particular spirit. People thought that the powers of spirit and soul related to the spirit of the sun body. And Good Friday night was felt to be the best time for the soul to enter the realm that lies beyond death.

Dante's work is a vision of the kind initiates know, something real in the world of the spirit. Dante was truly able to perceive the spiritual. He perceived the world of the spirit with spiritual senses. He gained his images as a strictly Catholic initiate. As he had his visions he brought into them the catholic world that had come alive in his organism, but he would see it in the spirit. People always see things of the spirit through the spectacles of personal experience. As the child's presence in the mother's womb relates to the physical level, so does one's presence in the world of the spirit relate to the things we know in the spirit here on earth. Our life on this earth is like a maternal womb in which we grow mature so that we may later arise in the spirit. The senses we have developed for things of the spirit depend on our life here on earth. Here we mature for the other world, preparing spiritual eyes and ears for the other world. Dante had thus developed his spiritual organs in the way made possible in a strictly Catholic world.

When we enter into the other form of existence we are able to perceive the things that are now inside us. They then become outwardly visible. We say that passions, instincts and drives are ours. When we have entered into the worlds of spirit, the contents of our soul organism become something that exists outside us, just like the objects we perceive around us in physical existence. The things that live in our souls become visible in symbolic form.

Dante wrote of three symbols representing three main qualities in his astral body, the body of drives or lower soul—a leopard, a lion, a she-wolf.²² His three main passions thus appeared to him in the form of three animals. This was no mere symbol, however. When man enters the astral level, his lower passions truly appear to him in the form of animals. The she-wolf represented one passion. This is the she-wolf who once suckled Romulus and Remus. It is the passion people adopted at the founding of the Roman nation, the passion which lives in everything connected with property—the desire to possess and on the other hand the right to have personal possessions. This passion was implanted in human beings at the time when the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. Before this, humanity gained the power of courage, indicated by the lion, which can become lust for power. Even earlier came the increased cunning that developed from priestly rule—the leopard, the ability shown by Odysseus.²³ When Virgil²⁴ came to meet Dante he said: cannot make those animals go away, least of all the she-wolf? He said so because Dante had grown up in what remained of those old Roman passions in Italy. Virgil, who had given a picture of the initiation process in his Aeneid,²⁵ had to be Dante's guide. It was from the works of Virgil that people learned most about the other world in those days. They saw that world as having three levels—hell, purgatory and heaven.

There are only two consistent views of the world—that of Augustine²⁶ and that of reincarnation and karma. Augustine said: ‘Part of humanity on this earth is destined to be good and part to be evil’. According to the other view we develop through many incarnations. These are the only two possible views. Dante took Augustine's view, according to which human beings prepare here on earth for a destiny that will be eternal. Because of this, life on earth is immediately followed by hell, purgatory or heaven. The one life was all that counted. The person was all that was considered.

If we go beyond the person we are beyond birth and death. The principle that enters at birth and departs again at death goes beyond the personal. It is the individual. Anything the individual has done wrong must be compensated for in a next life. If we take away reincarnation and karma, everything has to be compensated in a single life. If one looks for retribution for everything concerning one person, a counter image of the personal is created and that is hell. Hell is nothing but being utterly caught up in the personal. The counter image of the personal in this world is hell in the other world. The personal must not be caught up in this world to such an extent that it beautifies existence. Christianity brought the view that everything depends on the one life between birth and death. The earth world had therefore to be made into a vale of sorrows, and people had to be told to let go of earthly things. Art on the other hand was a pagan element that made people be caught up in the personal aspect. The artists of old sought to make this earthly realm beautiful. Someone who sees only the personal element will say: ‘This personal aspect must do away with all that is beautiful. The earth must be made less beautiful, the person must be torn away from all that belongs to this world.’ It was therefore perfectly logical for Homer and all the poets of antiquity to appear to Dante in hell.²⁷

Dante gave a true picture of avaricious and prodigal people on the astral level.²⁸ There people see their own passions in mirror images. On the astral level an avaricious person will see what he has done with his avarice in the image of a prodigal. The prodigal will see his attributes in the counter image of an avaricious person.

In the city of Dis, Epicurus represents the approach to life that aims to expand and develop this world.²⁹ The city of Dis stands for physical reality. There people are in coffins. The materialists are living dead. They have been saying that man is but a corpse. As dead souls they now have to lie in coffins.

From hell Dante is taken into purgatory. Princes who neglected their soul's salvation over affairs of state also need to be purified in the fire.³⁰ The strictly Catholic view is that the personality must be developed. Princes who have not done so must therefore languish in the fire.

The next region between purgatory and heaven Dante enters is the Garden of Eden.³¹ Here we are introduced to the truly Christian view, which is that the origin of the Church rests in the realm of the spirit. Anyone wishing to understand the medieval view of the ideal Church must organize himself in a higher way so that he may see its original image in the other world.³² Dante used the views of the heavenly hierarchies held by Dionysius the Areopagite³³ for this. Dionysius wrote of a ranking order of angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominations, thrones, cherubim, seraphim. The ranks in the temporal hierarchy of the Church were meant to reflect those heavenly hierarchies. Dante wrote of the hierarchies in symbolic form in the Garden of Eden.

Then Beatrice took on the role of guide.³⁴ We distinguish between a female element in the soul, which is inner soul nature, and a male element, which is the spiritual principle in the universe that impregnates the soul. The female soul draws us upwards. Medieval alchemists called the female aspect of the human being the ‘Lilium’.³⁵ This is also why Goethe spoke of the ‘beautiful Lily’ in his Tale.³⁶ In the Dantean way of thinking Beatrice represents the edifice of scholastic theology.

Spirits of the moon who had broken their spiritual vows were first of all brought before Beatrice.³⁷ They had broken their vow to serve only the spiritual and had fallen back into sensuality. In ancient Greek theosophy Mercury³⁸ was still the spirit who had a role to play when the ancient Atlanteans advanced to a concept of the I. The earliest Atlanteans were not yet conscious of the I. The personal comes under the sign of the god Mercury, Hermes. Man came to the personal level when he fell into I-nature, egotism. This also made us into people who want to have possessions and is the reason why Mercury was also the god of merchants.

On Jupiter Dante found the princes who exercised justice.³⁹ Something very important occurred on the sun.⁴⁰ Dante was shown the true nature of eternity on the sun; how to see the day known as the Day of Judgement. The Day of Judgement changes everything. Two people made their appearance—Thomas Aquinas and King Solomon. Thomas Aquinas represented life in terms of Christianity, of the New Testament, and King Solomon was the teacher of the Old Testament.

Christians saw the priesthood as a physical expression of what the Christ meant to them in spiritual development. After life on earth the Christ had gone away and was now triumphant in the fixed star heaven. Someone who has prepared his spiritual embryo here on earth so that he has spiritual vision is able to see the Christ in the fixed-star heaven. The disciple who had been most profoundly initiated, John, appeared as the teacher of this view.⁴¹ Only the Christ and Mary were able to take their bodies up into the fixed star heaven. A master also has his body fully in hand. Just as people are learning to master their passions with moral ideas in our present civilization, so does someone who has reached a higher level truly learn to control the physical body. Jesus and Mary had hallowed their physical body to such a degree that they were able to take it with them to the highest regions.

Then St Bernard⁴² became the guide for the higher regions where God is beheld and one enters wholly into the divine self. There Dante went beyond the teachings of the Church. He saw the three cycles, the threefold original essence of the world, father, son and spirit. They are called Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in Indian religion. Here the trinitarian nature of the universe became apparent, with Dante rising to pure vision in the spirit, to contemplation.

In the end we are shown how we live, move and are in God but must not presume to understand God.⁴³ In the end, Dante only wrote of growing certainty in the human ability to recognize God. For him, this work was the drama of the world seen from the other side.

• 11. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321).
• 12. Rudolf Steiner was here considering the fundamental aspect of La Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. He spoke of this in a very different style in the lecture given to the workers at the Goetheanum on 14 March 1923, published in GA 349, Vom Leben des Menschen und der Erde. Über das Wesen des Christentums (in process of publication). The influence of Brunetto Latini was discussed in a lecture given in Dornach on 30 Jan. 1915, published in GA 161, Wege der geistigen Erkenntnis und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (not yet translated) and a number of lectures given in 1924, especially in Dornach on 10 Sept. 1924, published in translation as Karmic Relationships vol. 4 (in GA 238). 10 lectures, Dornach 5-23 Sept. 1924. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1957. For the translation of this lecture I have followed the terminology used in Dante Aleghieri, The Divine Comedy, text with translation by Geoffrey L. Bickersteth. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1981. Translator.
• 13. Faust I, 577-578.
• 14. Cameri, B. Sechs Gesänge ausDantes Göttlicher Komödie, in German, with an introduction on Dante's use of alliteration. Vienna 1896.
• 15. Sir Bartholomaeus Cameri (1821–1909). See essay ‘Bartholomaeus Cameri, der Ethiker des Darwinismus’ (not translated) in GA 30, also in Steiner R. The Riddles of Philosophy (GA 18). Tr. F. C. A. Köllin. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1973.
• 16. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). See Steiner R. Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age (GA 7). Tr. K. E. Zimmer. Blauvelt: Steinerbooks 1980. Also Steiner R. The Origins of Natural Science (GA 326). Tr. M. St Goar, N. Macbeth. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1985.
• 17. Aquinas, Thomas (1225–1274). In his teachings high scholasticism reached its pinnacle. Rudolf Steiner spoke about him at Whitsun 1920 in Dornach (see The Redemption of Thinking. A study in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (GA 74). Tr. A. P. Shepherd, M. R Nicoll. London: Hodder and Stoughton 1956.) Concerning his relationship to Aristotle, see lecture given in Munich on 20 March 1908 (in GA 108, not available in English).
• 18. The first German edition said ‘thirty thousand years’. It is doubtful, however, if the figure was written down correctly. See Steiner R. Occult History (GA 126) lecture of 31 Dec. 1910. Tr. D. S. Osmond, C. Davy. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1957.2nd edn Rudolf Steiner Press 1982.
• 19. Arldt, Theodor, b. 1878, palaeontologist and palaeogeographer.
• 20. Das Atlantisproblem. Kosmos 1905; 2: Nr. 10.
• 21. Dante's Divine Comedy, Inferno 1,38f The general view held at the time was that the sun was in the Ram when god made the heavenly bodies move in orbits. Thus be the day when Dante set out on his journey would have been the first day of spring. (Comment on 1,38 in W. v. Wartburg's German translation). The German translation has ‘panther’ instead of ‘leopard’ (translator).
• 22. In Roman mythology, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, sons of Mars, who later founded Rome were suckled and reared by a wolf.
• 23. Odysseus or Ulysses, in Greek mythology king of Ithaca. Homer spoke of him in his Odyssey as being cunning and wise.
• 24. Divine Comedy, Inferno 1,94 f. Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro, 70–19 BC). Roman poet highly esteemed in the Middle Ages.
• 25. Virgi's Aeneid, a great epic about the role ofRome in ancient history, speaks of the wanderings of Aeneas after the sack ofTroy before he finally settled in Italy.
• 26. Augustine (354–430), greatest of the Latin church fathers. He taught that because of Adam's fall into sin humanity was incapable of goodness (original sin), with individual people chosen for eternal salvation by an act of grace (predestination). See Steiner R. Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity (GA 8) chapter on Augustine and the Church. Tr. H. Collison, rev. C. Davy, A. Bittleston. Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1992.
• 27. Divine Comedy, Inferno 4, 25 f
• 28. Inferno 7.
• 29. Inferno 10.
• 30. Purgatorio 7, 64 f.
• 31. Purgatorio 27, 124 f; 28 f.
• 32. Purgatorio 29 f.
• 33. Dionysius the Areopagite, member of the Areopagus, the highest judicial and legislative council in ancient Athens, converted to Christianity by Paul (Acts 17:34). The works published in his name in the 6th century were much venerated by scholastics and mystics and translated from Greek to Latin by Johannes Scotus Erigena in the 9th century. They include the treatises On Divine Names, On Mystical Theology, On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies, and 10 epistles. See also Steiner R. The Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World (GA 110) lecture given in Düsseldorf on 12 April 1909. Tr. R. Querido. New York: Anthroposophic Press 1983.
• 34. Purgatorio 30.
• 35. Purgatorio 30, 21.
• 36. Goethe's Tale (of the green serpent and the beautiful Lily) first appeared in the literary magazine Horen in 1795, concluding the story ‘Conversations of German emigrants’. See Allen PM, Allen J deRis, The Time is at Hand! Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press 1995., and Steiner R. Goethe's Standard of the Soul. As illustrated in the Fairy Story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily (GA 22). Tr. D. S. Osmond. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1925.
• 37. Paradiso 3.
• 38. Paradiso 5,91 - VII.
• 39. Paradiso 18, 70 f.
• 40. Paradiso 10-14.
• 41. Paradiso 26, 1-69; 31, 58 f
• 42. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). See Steiner R. A Sound Outlook for Today and a Genuine Hope for the Future. Lecture given in Berlin on 16 July 1918. Typescript translation C 50, Rudolf Steiner House Library, London: ‘Perhaps the most significant figure in the 12th century.’
• 43. Paradiso 33, 124 to the end.

There are some occult and spiritual-scientific truths I want to consider in connection with Richard Wagner's Parsifal.¹⁸⁵A strange, deep link exists between the phenomenon of the great artist Richard Wagner and the spiritual movement called Theosophy today. People are gradually beginning to realize that Richard Wagner and his works represent a great sum of occult power. But something else will also emerge in future, and that is that there is much more to the Richard Wagner phenomenon than he himself could possibly know. It is a mystery connected with many important figures, particularly artists, that a power lives in them of which they themselves have no knowledge.

If on the one hand we understand that there was much more to Richard Wagner than he himself was aware of, we must not forget, on the other hand, that he was not able to reach the ultimate level of wisdom, and that Richard Wagner's art therefore shows itself in quite a peculiar light to the occultist. When it comes to his works, one has to say to oneself that there is much more to them, something mysterious which lies behind it all.

It is indeed interesting to see the deeper currents in the background. Richard Strauss¹⁸⁶ said on one occasion that it was possible to see much more in Richard Wagner than people usually do. He put it more or less like this: ‘People who insist one should not look beyond Richard Wagner's work seem to me to be like people who also do not want to go beyond the flower they see. They will never know the secret of the flower. And is much the same with people who cannot think of anything further in the case of a great artist.’

Richard Wagner tackled subjects of tremendous significance. You keep finding names in his works that relate to very ancient sacred traditions. In Parsifal he achieved something that is closely bound up with the power that had such a strange influence in the last third of the 19th century.

To understand his figures and themes we must first cast an eye on profound secrets of human evolution, going back a few thousand years in history. All his life Richard Wagner made profound studies of human affairs and the secret of the human soul. In his youth he sought to explore the secret of reincarnation. The draft of a play he was working on in 1856 shows this. It was called The Victors.¹⁸⁷ Wagner stopped work on it later on, for he could not find a musical solution to the problem of the ‘victors’. A dramatic solution would have been perfectly possible. The story of the play was as follows. A young man in far distance India, Ananda by name, a Brahmin by caste, was loved by a girl called Prakriti who belonged to the lowest caste. Ananda became a pupil of the Buddha. He did not return Prakriti's love, which cast her into deep sorrow. Ananda withdrew from the world to dedicate himself to the religious life. A Brahman then told the girl why her fate was the way it was. In an earlier life she, a member of the Brahman caste, had rejected the love of this same young man, who was then of the lowest caste. Hearing this she, too, turned to the Buddha, and both of them were then pupils of the same teacher.

Wagner had intended to work on this theme in 1856. A year later the subject he had failed to deal with came to him in another way. He conceived the great idea of his Parsifal in 1857. It is a strange story of how the whole mystery of Parsifal came to Richard Wagner at one particular moment.¹⁸⁸ It was on Good Friday 1857 in the Wesendonk Villa on the Lake of Zurich. He saw nature outside growing, shooting and sprouting. And at that moment he understood the connection between nature coming to new life and Christ's death on the cross. That is the secret of the holy grail. From that moment, Richard Wagner lived with the idea of presenting the secret of the holy grail to the world in music.

To understand this unusual experience we must go back a few thousand years in history. Richard Wagner put down his beautiful thoughts on human evolution in writing under the title ‘Heroism and Christianity’.¹⁸⁹ Let us first of all consider the kind of teaching given in occult societies in the 16th or 17th century. There have been mystery centres at all times. The knowledge taught there was at the same time religion, a religion that was also wisdom. It is not possible to really understand the mysteries unless one understands that there is a world of the spirit.

The different realms of nature lie spread out around us—minerals, plants, animals and human beings. We consider the human realm to be the highest of the four. Just as there are realms around man that are lower than he is, so there are higher spirits above him, at many levels. The different levels of spirits that are above man have always been called ‘gods’. Wisdom was taught in the mystery centres in a way that made human beings able to commune with the gods at a conscious level. Such people would always and wherever mystery centres existed be called ‘initiates’. They were not merely given words of wisdom but experienced realities within those mysteries. Today's mystery centres are of a different kind than those of antiquity and medieval times.

An important mystery centre existed in a region of northern Spain at the time when the crusades began and a little before that. The mysteries of those times were called ‘late Gothic mysteries’. Their initiates were called Tempelisen or Tempeleisen or Knights of the Holy Grail. Lohengrin was one of them. The community of these Knights of the Grail was rather different from another knightly community. This had its seat in Britain, in Wales. All the stories of King Arthur and his Round Table have to do with this other initiate community.

In very early times, long before Christianity, a large population moved from west to east on this earth. This was a very long time ago. There was a time when Atlantis existed in a region that is now part of the Atlantic Ocean. Our far distant ancestors, the Atlanteans, lived there. The whole population of Europe and Asia, all the way to India, were descendants of the Atlanteans. Conditions of life on Atlantis were very different from those in which people lived later on. Atlanteans lived in a completely hierarchic system guided by such initiates. All government and rule came from the initiates in those times. One famous initiate school was in the north of present-day Russia. Its initiates were called trotts. Other schools were in western Europe, their initiates known as druids. All social institutions to control the masses of humanity came from these initiates.

Let us take a look at those very early schools. What kind of secret was taught in them? It is only the form of the teaching that changes with time. It is truly remarkable that the mystery which Richard Wagner experienced inwardly was taken to its highest development in those schools. It is the connection between nature coming alive in spring and the mystery of the cross.

The first thing pupils had to understand was that all power of bringing forth that lies outside the animal and human realms may also be seen in the plant world. In spring, the divine power of creation sprouts forth from Mother Earth. It had to be understood that there is a connection between the power that comes forth when the earth covers itself with a green carpet and the power of divine creation. The pupils would be told: ‘Out there you see a power in the flowers as they open that condenses in the seed. Countless seeds will come from the chalice of the flower, and put in the soil they will bring forth something new. One can now feel with the whole of one's being that the events that happen out there in nature are nothing else but the processes that also happen in the human and animal worlds, but in the plant this happens without desire and is wholly chaste.’

The infinite innocence and chastity slumbering in the flower chalices of plants had to live in the hearts of the pupils. They were then told: ‘The sunbeam opens the flowers. It brings forth the power from those flowers. Two things come together—the opening flower and the sunbeam. Other realms—the animal and human worlds—are between the plant world and the divine realm. All these realms are only the transition from the plant world to the divine realm. In the divine realm we see once again a realm of innocence and chastity, as in the plant world. In the animal and human worlds we see a realm of desire.’

And then the teachers would speak of the future: ‘The time will come when all lusts and desires shall vanish. Then the chalice will open from up above, just as the chalice of a flower opens, and it will look down on the human being. Just as the sunbeam enters into the plant, so will man's own purified power unite with this divine chalice.’

We can invert the flower chalice in our minds, letting it bend down from above, from heaven, and we can invert the sunbeam, so that it rises from the human being to the heavens. This inverted flower chalice was shown to be a reality in the mysteries and called the holy grail. The real chalice of a plant is the inverted holy grail. Everyone who gains occult knowledge comes to know that the sunbeam represents something known as the ‘magic wand’. The magic wand is a superstitious version of a symbol that represents a spiritual reality. In the mysteries this magic wand was known as the bloodstained lance. We are shown the origin of the grail on the one hand and of the blood-stained lance on the other, the original magic wand known to true occultists.

I am just touching on things of great profundity, significant truths that took place in that belt in northern and western Europe. Richard Wagner sensed a great deal of all this, as did his friend the Comte de Gobineau,¹⁹⁰ a deep thinker.

To say what lies at the base of the mysteries of which I have been speaking, it was knowledge of the fluid that streams in animal and human veins. Quite rightly, Goethe wrote ‘Blood is a sap of very special kind’ in his Faust.¹⁹¹ Many things are connected with the blood. We shall understand what blood signifies if we grasp and understand the tremendous revolution that has occurred in the mysteries. In earlier times, it was known among the European people that important things depend on the way people are related by blood. Because of this, progress and development was never left to chance in those times. All these things were arranged out of occult wisdom. It was known that if the development of small tribal communities was limited to that community, with no one coming in from outside, individuals born within that community would have special powers. The consequences of letting different kinds of blood come together were known in the mysteries. They also knew exactly which tribe was right for a particular area. They knew that common blood was the source of specific human powers.

When the ancient bonds of blood relationship were broken, something also happened in the mysteries. Purposes which before had been achieved by means of blood relationship were now replaced with two specific spiritual preparations in the great mysteries. The lesser mysteries had the outward symbols of these—bread and wine. The two preparations were substances which had an effect in the spirit that was similar to the physical effect of the blood in our veins. When the ancient clairvoyance had gone, these two preparations took its place. Having learned all of theosophical wisdom, initiates would then be given these symbols from the chalice of Ceridwen.¹⁹² The purified blood could then be given to human beings from the chalice opening up from above. This is the true mystery, which at the time remained with a very small body of people.

In other parts of Europe the mysteries fell into decline and were then made profane in a disgusting, repulsive manner. Their symbol of the offering was a dish in which a bleeding head was placed. It was thought that something might be aroused in a human being on seeing this head. It was black magic that was being performed, the opposite of the mystery of the holy grail.

It was known at that time that the element which streams upwards in the chalice of the flower also lived in the human blood. It had to become pure and chaste again, like the sap of a flower. In the degenerate mysteries this was given a crude, materialistic form. In the north, people needed the sublimated blood as a symbol, and in the Eleusinian Mysteries the wine of Dionysus and the bread of Demeter. The cup of the grail made into something abhorrent, with the bleeding head, may be found again in the story of Herodias and the head of John. She was laughing at the mystery made profane.

The true secret of the great mysteries went to the Tempeleisen in northern Spain, guardians of the Grail. King Arthur's knights were more concerned with worldly affairs, but it was possible to prepare the Tempeleisen to receive an even more sublime secret, the great secret of Golgotha, the mystery of world history.

Christianity had its origin in the most mixed of nations, the Galileans, who were wholly alien to and outside all blood community. The redeemer founded his kingdom entirely outside the old blood community, beyond all blood bonds. The sublimated blood, purified blood, sprouts from the sacrificial death, the purification process. The blood that gives rise to wishes and desires must flow, it has to be sacrificed, it must run.

The sacred vessel with the purified blood was taken to Spain, to the Tempeleisen on Montsalvatch. Titurel, the ancestor, received the grail; before, it had been longed for. Now the overcoming of the blood had happened. The purely physical nature of the blood had been overcome by the spirit.

You can only understand what happened on Golgotha if, unlike a materialist, you know blood to be composed not only of material elements. It is indeed highly remarkable that Richard Wagner was only able to find the sacred mood for his Parsifal because he knew that it was not only a matter of the Redeemer's death but of the blood which had been purified and was a little bit different from ordinary blood. He himself spoke of the connection between the Redeemer's blood and the whole of humanity: ‘Having seen that the blood of what is known as the “white race” had a special capacity for conscious suffering and pain, we must now recognize the saviour's blood as the essence of suffering consciously willed, divine compassion that flows for the whole human race as its source and origin.’¹⁹³

Richard Wagner also wrote: ‘The blood in the redeemer's veins must thus have flowed forth as the result of the utmost endeavour of the will, a divine sublimate of the human race itself to save that race which in its noblest parts was falling into decline.’

It was because the redeemer had come from the greatest mix of nations that his blood was the sublimate of all human blood, human blood in its purified form.

Richard Wagner approached the great original mystery in a way hardly anyone else had dared to do. It is the very vigour he brought to this that made him a great artist. He should not be taken for an ordinary musician but someone with profound insight who sought to recreate the deep secrets of the holy grail for modern humanity. Before Richard Wagner wrote his Parsifal, people in Germany knew little about the mysteries and the figures which Richard Wagner then presented.

The initiation into the mysteries was in three stages, through which the individual had to go. The first stage was known as ‘dumbness’, the second ‘doubt’, the third ‘godliness’. In the first stage the human being would be taken away from all prejudice in the world, and told of the power in his own soul, his own power of love, so that he might see the inner light shine out. The second stage was that of doubt. This state of doubting everything came at the second stage of initiation. At a higher level it was then elevated to become inner godliness. In this third stage the initiand was guided to be consciously with the gods.

Perceval—pass through the vale—that was the name given to such initiands in medieval times.¹⁹⁴ Parsifal had to learn all this from experience. Richard Wagner's strange genius made him feel this on that Good Friday in 1857, feel the thread that had to run through the whole of Parsifal's development.

The Tempeleisen represented the inner, the true Christianity as against the Christianity of the Churches. It is evident everywhere in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal that he wanted to show the spirit of that inner Christianity side by side with the Christianity of the Churches.

Remnants of the old profaned mysteries still existed in the Middle Ages. Everything that comes under this heading was epitomized in the name Klingsor. He was the black magician, in opposition to the white magic of the holy grail. Richard Wagner also showed him in opposition to the Tempeleisen.

Kundry is Herodias brought back to life. She symbolizes the power that brings forth nature, a power that can be both chaste and unchaste, but without direction. Chastity and lack of chastity have the same root, and it is a matter of ‘as the question, so the answer’. The productive power that shows itself in the flower chalice of the plant, going up through the other realms, is the same as in the Holy Grail. It merely has to go through purification in the purest, noblest form of Christianity, as we see it in Parsifal.

Kundry had to remain a black magician until Parsifal redeemed her. The whole confrontation between Parsifal and Kundry has the odour of the most profound wisdom. More than anyone else, Richard Wagner made it possible for people to take this in without knowing it. Richard Wagner was a missionary whose mission it was to give something full of significance to the world, without humanity being aware of this truth.

Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote his Parzifal as a plain and simple epic. That was sufficient in his day. People who had some degree of clairvoyance at that time understood Wolfram von Eschenbach. In the 19th century it was not possible to show the profound significance of the process in dramatic form. But there is a way of helping people's understanding without words, without concepts or ideas. This is through music. Wagner's music holds all the truths contained in Parsifal. The strange music written by Wagner would create quite specific vibrations in the ether bodies of those who listened to it. The ether body is connected with all the profound motions of the blood. Richard Wagner understood the secret of the purified blood. His melodies hold the vibrations that have to be in the human ether body when it becomes purified in the way that is necessary so that the secret of the grail may be received.

The strange way in which Richard Wagner was writing his books can only be understood if one goes into the realities that were behind Wagner. He knew very well that the human will receives a very special illumination from the spirit. He wrote that initially the will was a crude, instinctive element, but it gradually came to be refined. The intellect casts its light on the will and the human being becomes aware of pain and suffering, and this leads to purification. Referring to the ideas of his friend the Comte de Gobineau he wrote: "One cannot fail but realize the unity of the human race when reviewing its parts, and we are justified in saying that at its noblest it is the capacity of bearing pain and suffering in full awareness. In the light of this we ask where the outstanding nature of the white race lies, since we certainly must put it high above the others. With beautiful certainty, Gobineau perceives it to lie not in any exceptional development of its moral quality as such, but in a greater store of the fundamental characteristics from which those qualities arise. It would have to be sought in the fiercer yet also more delicate sensitivity of the will which reveals itself in a rich organization, in conjunction with the more astute intellect this requires; it will then be a matter of whether the intellect, under the impulses of a will that has great need, advances to clairvoyance, casting its own light back on to the will, and in this case subjugate it to become moral drive?

Richard Wagner was here speaking of the actual process in which the intellect casts its reflection on the will, and the human being become clairvoyant in the process.

Richard Wagner's work was to give religious depth to art and ultimately profound understanding of Christianity. He knew that Christianity was best presented through music. By rising to the inmost secrets of the world order we will on the one hand gain knowledge, but on the other also true godliness. There is a way of human development that teaches us the significance of this fact relating to Christianity.

• 185. See Rudolf Steiner's lectures given in Berlin on Richard Wagner and mysticism (in German, in GA 55) and on 22 and 19 March 1906 (in German, in GA 54).
• 186. Strauss, Richard (1864–1949). See Thomas, W. Richard Strauss und seine Zeitgenossen S. 46, 72, 75; München 1964.
• 187. Die Sieger. Entwurf, Zurich, Mai 1956, in Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen Band 11, Leipzig 1911. Wagner wrote to Mathilde Wesendonk from Paris in early August 1960: 'Only deep-thinking assumption of the transmigration of souls showed me the comforting point where everything finally comes together at one level of redemption, when the different lives lived, running separately but side by side in time have touched one another in understanding. According to the beautiful Buddhist belief the simple explanation of the absolute purity of Lohengrin is that he is a continuation of Parsifal who fought to gain his purity. In the same way Elsa would be at Lohengrin's level when reborn. The scheme for my Sieger has just presented itself to my mind as the final conclusion of Lohengrin. Here Savitri (Elsa) is wholly at Ananda's level. All the terrible tragedy of life would thus lie merely in the separateness of time and space. These, however, live only in our minds and have no reality beyond them. Someone with perfect clairvoyance would thus be able to explain even the greatest most tragic pain as mere error on the part of the individual. I believe this to be so. And in all truth it is wholly a matter of the pure and noble, which in itself is painless? Richard Wagner an Mathilde Wesendonk. Tagebuchblätter und Briefe 1853–1871. 36. Auflage S. 242. Berlin 1909.
• 188. ‘Lovely spring weather came; on Good Friday I woke up for the first time in this house to full sunshine. The small garden had grown green, the birds were singing, and I was finally able to sit on the parapet of the little house and enjoy the much longed-for quiet that held such promise. With my heart full of this, I suddenly said to myself that it was Good Friday and recalled the significance this reminder had held for me once before, in Wolfram's Parsifal. I had never taken the poem up again since that time in Marienbad when I developed the ideas for Meistersinger and Lohengrin. Now its ideal content came to me overwhelmingly, and with the Good Friday idea in mind I rapidly produced the outline for a whole dramatic piece, in three acts, and immediately made a few quick notes of it.' Wagner R. Mein Leben III. Band S. 133f Miünchen 1915.
• 189. Wagner R. Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen in 10 Banden, hersg. W. Golther. 10. Bd S. 275ff: ‘Ausfiihrungen zu Religion und Kunsf, 2. 'Heldentum und Christentum’. Leipzig o. J.
• 190. Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de (1816–82), considered the 'intellectual father, of Nietzsche and the actual inventor of ‘super-man’ and ‘supermorality’. His Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, 4 vols, was published in 1853–55; translated in 1915 and published in English as The Inequality of Human Races.
• 191. Faust 1, verse 1740.
• 192. Ch. W. Heckethom wrote in Geheime Gesellschqften, Geheimbilnde und Geheimlehren S. 60 (Leipzig 1900): Druid culture encompassed all religious and philosophical study known in those lands at the time. The principal deities may be said to have been male and female, the great father and the great mother Hu and Ceridwen, in every respect the same as Osiris and Isis or Bacchus and Ceres, etc. See Rudolf Steiner's public lecture given in Berlin on 6 May 1909, ‘The European mysteries and their initiates’ (GA 57) (Anthroposophical Quarterly 1964: 9:1).
• 193. See ref. 189, 10. Bd S. 282.
• 194. Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–1220) interpreted the name he gave to the hero of his epic poem V. 140.16 f. in this way.

The reflections which we are beginning today are intended to encourage all those who have found their way to anthroposophy to think about their current position. They will present an opportunity for contemplation, for self-reflection, through a characterization of the anthroposophical movement and its relationship to the Anthroposophical Society. And in this context may I begin by speaking about the people who are central to such self-reflection: yourselves. There are those who found this path through an inner necessity of the soul, of the heart; others, perhaps, found it through the search for knowledge. There are many, however, who entered the anthroposophical movement for more or less mundane reasons; but through a deepening of the soul they have subsequently perhaps encountered more within it than they at first anticipated. But there is something which all those who end up in the anthroposophical movement have in common. And that is that they are initially driven by their inner destiny, their karma, to leave the ordinary highway of civilization on which the majority of mankind at present progresses, to search for their own path.

Let us think for a moment about the conditions in which most people now grow up. They are born to parents who are French or German, Catholic or Protestant or Jewish, or who belong to some other faith, and may hold a variety of beliefs. But among parents is the almost unquestioned assumption, which remains unspoken and sometimes unthought, that their children will, of course, grow up like themselves. These kinds of feelings naturally engender a social ambience, indeed social pressures, which more or less consciously push children into the kind of life which has been mapped out by these more or less clearly defined beliefs. The life of a child then follows its natural course of education and schooling. And during this time parents once again have all kinds of beliefs which exert a decisive influence on their children's lives. The belief, for instance, that my son will, of course, enter the secure employment of the civil service, or that he will inherit the parental business, or that my daughter will marry the man next door. It simply lies in the nature of social circumstances that they are governed by impulses which arise in this way. People have no choice in the matter because that is the effect of the beliefs which govern life. It may not always be obvious to parents, but schooling and all the other circumstances of childhood and youth imprison the human being and determine his position in life. The institutions of state and religion make the adult.

If the majority of people were asked to explain how they got where they are today, they would not be able to do so, because there would be something unbearable about having to think deeply about such matters. This unbearable element tends to be driven underground into subconscious or unconscious areas of our soul life. At best, it will be dredged up by a psychiatrist when it behaves in a particularly recalcitrant manner down there in those unknown provinces of the soul. But mostly one's own personality, the Self, is simply not strong enough to assert itself against what one has grown into in this way.

Occasionally people have the urge to rebel when their situation as a trainee, or even following qualification, unexpectedly dawns on them. You might clench your fist in your pocket, or, if you are a woman, create a scene at home because of such disappointed life expectations. These are reactions against what people are forced to become. We also frequently seek to anaesthetize ourselves by concentrating on the pleasant things in life. We go to dances and follow this with a long lie-in, don't we? Time is then filled up in one way or another. Or someone might join a thoroughly patriotic party because his professional position demands that he belong to something which will reflect his values. We have already been enveloped by the state and our religion; now that must be supplemented by surrounding what one has unconsciously grown into with a sort of aura. Well, there is no need for me to go into further detail. That is roughly the way in which the people who move in the mainstream of life have grown into their existence.

But those who find it difficult to accept this end up on many possible and impossible byways. And anthroposophy is precisely one of these paths on which human beings are seeking to realize themselves; on which they want to live with such an understanding of themselves in a more conscious manner, to experience something which is under their control to a certain extent at least. Anthroposophists are for the most part people who do not walk along the highways of life. If we investigate further why that should be, we find that this is linked with the spiritual world.

Having relived the course of their lives in the spiritual world after death human beings enter a region where they become increasingly assimilated into the spiritual world, where their lives consist of working together with the beings of the higher hierarchies, where all their acts are related to this world of substantive spirit. But a time arrives when they begin to turn their attention to earth again. For a long time in advance of their birth, human beings unite on a soul level with the generations at the end of which stand the parents who give birth to them—not only as far back as their great-great-grandparents, but much further down the line of preceding generations. The majority of souls nowadays look down, as it were, to earth from the spiritual world and display a lively interest in what is happening to their ancestors. Such souls move in the mainstream of contemporary life.

In contrast, there are a number of souls, particularly at present, whose interest is concentrated less on worldly happenings as they approach a new life on earth than on the question of how they can develop maturity in the spiritual world. Their interest lies in the spiritual world right up to the moment before they find their way to earth. As a consequence, when they incarnate they arrive with a consciousness which has its origins in spiritual impulses. With their spiritual ambitions they outgrow their environment, and are thus predestined and prepared to go their own way.

Thus the souls who descend from pre-earthly to earthly existence can be divided into two groups. One group, to which the majority of people today still belong, comprises those souls who can make themselves remarkably at home on earth; who feel thoroughly comfortable in their warm nest, which so fascinated them long before they came down to earth, even if it does occasionally appear unpleasant—but that is only appearance, maya.

Other souls, who may pass patiently through childhood—appearance is not always the decisive thing—are less able to make themselves at home, are homeless souls, and grow beyond the warmth of the nest much more than they grow into it. This latter group includes those who are subsequently attracted to the anthroposophical movement. It is therefore clearly predetermined in a certain sense whether or not one is led to anthroposophy.

The things which are being sought by these souls on the byways of life, away from the major highways, manifest themselves in many ways. If the others did not find it so agreeable to take the well-trodden paths and did not put such obstacles in the way of homeless souls, the numbers of the latter would be much more obvious to their contemporaries. But it is widely apparent today how many souls have a hint of such homelessness about them.

The tendency to such homelessness could be anticipated: the rapidly growing evidence of a longing in homeless souls for an attitude to life which was not laid out in advance; a longing for the spirit in the chaos of contemporary spiritual life. In sketching an outline of this gradual development, you can find in it, if you reflect, a little something of what I would like to describe as the anthroposophical origins of each one of you.

By way of introduction today I will do no more than pick out in outline some characteristic features. If you look back at the last decades of the nineteenth century—we could take any number of fields, but let us take a very characteristic one the cult of Richard Wagner began to take a hold. It is certainly true that much of this cult consisted of a cultural flirtation with new ideas, sensationalism and so on. But all kinds of people gathered in Bayreuth. One could see people who thought of the long journey to Bayreuth as a kind of modern pilgrimage. But even among the less fashionable there were those who were also homeless souls.

Now the essential effect of Wagnerianism on people—I speak not only about the musical element but about the movement as a cultural phenomenon—was to offer them something which went beyond all the usual offerings of a materialistic age. This gave people a feeling that here there was a gateway to a more spiritual world, a world differing from their normal environment. What went on in Bayreuth led to a great longing for more profound spiritual aspirations.

It was, of course, difficult at first to understand Richard Wagner's characters and dramatic compositions. But many people felt that they were created from a source very different from the crude materialism of the time. And the homeless souls who were driven in this particular direction were prompted into all kinds of dark, instinctive intuitions through what I might call the suggestive power of Wagnerian drama and specifically through the way of life that it introduced into our culture. Indeed, it is true to say that subsequent interpretations by theosophists of Hamlet or other works of art are very strongly reminiscent of certain essays which were written by Hans von Wolzogen, who was not a theosophist but a trained Wagnerian, in the Bayreuther Blätter.¹

Thus one can say that Wagnerianism was the reason why many people, possessed of a homeless soul, became acquainted with a way of looking at the world which led away from crude materialism towards something spiritual; and all those who became part of such a current, not because of a superficial flirtation with the idea but because of an inner compulsion of the soul, wanted to develop their experience of a spiritual world because they felt this kind of inner longing. They were no longer concerned with the certain evidence which underpinned the materialistic world view. That was true irrespective of their position in life, whether they were lawyers or artists, cabinet ministers, officials, parliamentarians or whatever—even scientists.

As I said, such homeless souls can be found everywhere. But Wagnerianism provides a particularly characteristic example of the presence of very many such souls.

I then encountered several of those people, whose first spiritual taste had been the Wagnerian experience, in Vienna² in the late 1880s, in a group which consisted entirely of such homeless souls. People no longer really appreciate the way in which that homelessness was visible for anyone to see even then, because many of the things which at that time required a great deal of inner courage have today become commonplace.

For example, I do not believe that many people today could imagine the following. I was sitting in a circle of such homeless souls and all kinds of things had already been discussed. One person started to speak about Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov,³ and spoke in such a manner that the group felt as if struck by lightning. A new world opened up: it was like suddenly finding oneself on a new planet. That is how these souls felt.

In all these observations of life which I am recounting by way of an introduction to the history of the anthroposophical movement, I never lost my connection with the spiritual world. It was always there. I mention this because it is the background against which I speak: the spiritual world accepted as self-evident, and human beings on earth perceived as images of their real existence as spiritual beings within the spiritual world. I was involved and came to know these people, not in order to observe them, but because that is how things naturally developed.

Having passed through their Wagnerian metamorphosis, they were involved in a second process of change. For example, there were among them three good acquaintances, intimate friends even, of H. P. Blavatsky,⁴ who were keen theosophists in the way that theosophists were when Blavatsky was still alive. But a peculiar quality adhered to theosophists at that time, the period following the appearance of Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. They all had a desire to be extremely esoteric. They had nothing but contempt for their normal life, including, of course, their work. The exoteric life, however, was not something which could be avoided. That was accepted. But everything else was esoteric. In that setting you spoke only to fellow initiates, only within a small group. And those who were not considered worthy of talking to about such things were seen as people with whom one spoke about the ordinary things in life. It was with the former that you discussed esoteric matters. They were people who, although they might be engineers from the moment they stepped into practical life, would avidly read a book like Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism.⁵ These people possessed a certain urge—partly still as a result of their Wagnerian past—to explain from an esoteric perspective everything which existed as legend and myth.

But as more and more of these homeless souls began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century, it was possible to see how the most interesting among them were not those who studied the writings of Sinnett and Blavatsky—with at most a nine-tenths honest mind—but those who did not wish to read for themselves because there were still great inhibitions about such things at that time, and who listened with gaping mouths when those who had been reading expounded on these things. And it was most interesting to observe how the listeners, who were sometimes more honest than the narrators, grasped these ideas with their homeless souls as essential spiritual nourishment; spiritual nourishment which they were able to transform into something more honest through the greater honesty of their souls, despite the relative dishonesty with which it was being presented to them. One could see in them the yearning to hear something completely different from what was offered in the ordinary mainstream of civilization. How they devoured what they heard! It was most interesting to observe how on the one hand the tentacles of mainstream life kept drawing people in, and how on the other they would appear at one of the meeting places—often a coffee house—and would listen with great yearning. The point is that the honest souls, the ones who had been subject to the vagaries of life, were there too.

The way in which souls unwilling to admit to their homelessness were unable to find their bearings was particularly evident towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. A person might, for instance, listen with profound interest to an explanation of the physical, etheric and astral bodies, kama manas, manas, buddhi and so on. At the same time he was obliged to write the article his newspaper expected, including all the usual goodies. It really became clear how difficult it was for some people to leave the mainstream of life. For there were several among them who behaved as if they wanted to slink away, and would prefer that no one knew where they had gone when they wished to attend what was most important and interesting to them in life. It was indeed interesting how spiritual life, spiritual activity, the yearning for a spiritual world began particularly to establish itself in European civilization.

Now you have to remember that circumstances in the late 1880s were really much more difficult than today. Even if it was less harmful, it was nevertheless more difficult then to admit to the existence of a spiritual world, because the physical world of the senses with all its magnificent laws was proven of course! There was no way of getting round that! All the proofs were there in the physics laboratories and the hospitals; all the evidence declared in favour of a world for which there was proof. But the world which could be proven was so unsatisfactory for many homeless souls, was useless to the inner soul, to such an extent that many crept away from it. And at the same time as this great contemporary culture was on offer to them by the sackful—no, by the ton, in giant quantities—they took what nips they could from what has to be seen as the flow of the spiritual world into modern civilization. It was not at all easy to speak about the spiritual world; a suitable point of entry had to be found.

If I may once again introduce a personal note. I had to find a suitable opportunity on which to build. One could not simply crash in on our civilization with the spiritual world. Especially in the late 1880s, I linked the points I had to make about the spiritual world, about its more intimate aspects, in many places with Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.⁶ If one used something which had been created by no less a person than Goethe, and when it was as obvious as it is in the Fairy Tale that spiritual impulses had flowed into it, that was a suitable basis. I certainly could not use what was then being peddled as theosophy, what had been garnered from Blavatsky, from Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism and similar books by a group of people who were undeniably hard-working. For someone who wanted to preserve his scientifically schooled thinking in the spiritual world this was simply impossible.

Neither was it easy in another respect. Why? Well, Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism was soon recognized as the work of a spiritual dilettante, a compendium of old, badly understood esoteric bits and pieces. But it was less easy to find access to a phenomenon of the period such as Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine. For this work did at least reveal in many places that much of its content had its origins in real, powerful impulses from the spiritual world. The book expressed a large number of ancient truths which had been gained through atavistic clairvoyance in distant ages of mankind. People thus encountered in the outside world, not from within themselves, something which could be described as an uncovering of a tremendous wealth of wisdom which mankind had once possessed as something exceptionally illuminating. This was interspersed with unbelievable passages which never ceased to amaze, because the book is a sloppy and dilettantish piece of work as regards any sort of methodology, and includes superstitious nonsense and much more. In short, Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine is a peculiar book: great truths side by side with terrible rubbish. One might almost say that it sums up very well the spiritual phenomena to which those who developed into the homeless souls of the modern age were subjected.

In the following period in Weimar⁷ I was, of course, occupied intensively with other things, although even then there were numerous opportunities to observe such searching souls. For particularly during this time all kinds of people came to the town to visit the Goethe and Schiller archive. It was possible to become acquainted with the good and bad sides of their souls in a remarkable way. I got to know some strange people, as well as those who were highly cultivated, refined and distinguished. My description of meeting Herman Grimm,⁸ for instance, appeared recently in Das Goetheanum.⁹ One had a better understanding of Weimar when Herman Grimm was there.

We need only think of his novel Unütberwindliche Mächte¹⁰ to see how Grimm also exhibited a strong drive for spiritual matters. If you read the end of his novel you can see how the spiritual world intermingles with the physical through the soul of a dying person. It is very moving, very magnificent. I have spoken about this in previous lectures.¹¹

Of course some strange people also passed through Weimar. There was a Russian state councillor, for example. No one could discover quite what he was looking for: it was something or other in the second part of Goethe's Faust. Exactly how he hoped to achieve that through the Goethe archive was impossible to elicit. It was also hard to know what to do to help him. In the end he was simply left to continue his search. Next to him was a very intelligent American, who loved to sit on the floor with his legs crossed—a very peculiar sight. It was possible to see such cameos of contemporary life in their most real form.

When subsequently I went to Berlin, destiny once again introduced me to a group of homeless souls, and I became involved to such an extent that this group asked me to hold the lectures which have now been published in my Eleven European Mystics.¹² They were people who found their way into the Theosophical Society at a somewhat later date than my Viennese acquaintances. Only a few of them studied Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine. But these people were well-versed in what Blavatsky's successor, Annie Besant,¹³ proclaimed as the theosophical ideas of the time.

So I found myself once again in a similar situation to the one in Vienna in the late 1880s, in which it was possible to observe such homeless souls. And anthroposophy at first grew up, one might say, together with—not in, but together with—homeless souls who had initially sought a new home in theosophy.

Tomorrow I will try to lead you further in this process of self-reflection which we have hardly begun today.

• 1. Bayreuther Blatter: official organ of the Wagner Association, founded in 1878.
• 2. cf. Rudolf Steiner. The Course of My Life. Translated by O. D. Wannamaker. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1970. Also Briefe I. (Dornach, 1955).
• 3. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821–1881, leading Russian novelist. cf. also lecture of 13 February 1915 in GA 174b. Rudolf Steiner speaks in some detail about Dostoevsky's book The Brothers Karamazov in the lecture of 13 February 1916 in GA 167; typescript (C42) in Rudolf Steiner House library, London.
• 4. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1831–1891. Her main works are Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Together with Col. H. S. Olcott, Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society on 17 November 1875 in New York, which soon thereafter moved its headquarters to India.
• 5. Alfred Percy Sinnett, 1840–1921. Esoteric Buddhism
• 6. J. W. von Goethe. Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1979. cf. Rudolf Steiner, Goethes Geistesart in ihrer Offenbarung durch seinen Faust und durch das Marchen von der Schlange und der Lilie (1918), GA 22. Also The Course of My Life, The Course of My Life, Chapter XXX.
• 7. From 1890 to 1896/7 Rudolf Steiner was employed at the Goethe-Schiller Archive to edit Goethe's scientific writings within the Weimar edition of Goethe's works. cf. Rudolf Steiner. The Course of My Life. Chapters XIII-XXIII. The Course of My Life, Chapter XIII–Chapter XXIII. Also Briefe I, idem.
• 8. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901. cf. The Course of My Life, p.150ff.
• 9. The article referred to is “Eine vielleicht zeitgemsse persnliche Erinnerung” in the periodical Das Goetheanum, Vol. 2, no. 43 of 3 June 1923. Reproduced in GA 36.
• 10. Herman Grimm. Unüberruindliche Machte. Berlin 1867.
• 11. In detail on 16 January 1913 in GA 62 (not translated). Also on 6 February 1915 in GA 161; typescript (Z140) in Rudolf Steiner House library, London.
• 12. In the winter of 1900/1901, Rudolf Steiner delivered 27 evening lectures in the Theosophical Library of Count and Countess Brockdorff. They were published as a collection in 1901 (GA 7) and appeared in English as Mysticism and Modern Thought. Revised edition: Eleven European Mystics. Translated by Karl Zimmer. Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971. cf. also Chapter XXX.
• 13. Annie Besant, 1847–1933. Was elected in May 1907 to succeed H. S. Olcott as President of the Theosophical Society.

Countless numbers of human beings have felt the Festival of Easter to be something that is related on one side to the profoundest feelings of the human soul and on the other to very profound cosmic mysteries. Our attention is attracted to the connection of this festival with the mysteries of the universe by the fact that it is what is called a moveable feast and has to be regulated year by year according to those constellations of which we propose to speak more exactly during the next few days. When it is noted how all through the centuries religious customs and ceremonies having an intimate connection with humanity have been associated with the festival of Easter, we realise the very special value that has gradually come to be placed on it in the course of man's historical development.

From early Christian centuries—not indeed from the immediate foundation of Christianity, but from its early centuries—this has been a festival of the greatest importance, one associated with the fundamental idea and the fundamental impulse of Christianity, as revealed to Christian consciousness in the fact of the resurrection of Christ.

The Festival of Easter is the festival of resurrection, but points to times even before Christianity. It points to festivals connected with the period of the Spring equinox, which have certainly had something to do with the fixing of Easter, a festival that was associated with the re-awakening of Nature and the reviving life of the earth.

With this we have reached the point where we will at once speak of “Easter as a page from the History of the Mysteries,” in so far as the subject is one that can be dealt with in words. As a Christian festival Easter is a festival of resurrection. The corresponding heathen festival, which took place approximately at the same time, was a kind of resurrection-festival of Nature, a re-awakening of the objects of Nature, which had slumbered, if I may so express it, during the winter. Here I must explain that the Christian festival of Easter is absolutely not a festival that, according to its inner meaning and nature, is comparable with the heathen festival held at the time of the Spring equinox; but if we think of it as a Christian festival, it coincides absolutely with very ancient heathen festivals that had their source in the Mysteries and occurred in the Autumn. The strangest thing regarding the fixing of Easter, which quite obviously, according to its whole content, is connected with certain procedures in the Mysteries, is that it directs our attention to a radical and profound misunderstanding that has come to pass in the general acceptance of one of the most important facts concerning our human evolution. This is nothing less than that the Festival of Easter has been confused, in the course of the early Christian centuries, with an entirely different festival, and has on this account been changed from an Autumn to a Spring festival. This fact indicates something prodigious in human evolution. But let us consider for a moment the content of the Easter festival. What is most essential in it? The most essential thing in it is: that the Being who stands in the centre of Christian consciousness, Christ Jesus, passed through death; of this Good Friday reminds us. Christ Jesus then rested in the grave during the period of three days; this represents the union of Christ with earthly existence. The time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is held by Christians as a solemn festival of mourning. Then Easter Sunday is the day on which the central figure for all Christendom rose from the grave, the day on which this fact is held in remembrance. The essential content of the Easter festival is: the death, burial, the repose in the tomb (Grabes-ruhe), and resurrection of Christ Jesus.

Let us now consider some of the features of the corresponding ancient heathen festival. Only by doing this can we arrive at an inner comprehension of the connection between the Festival of Easter and the living content of the Mysteries (Mysterien-wesen). In many places, among many people we find ancient heathen festivals which in outward form and ceremonial resemble absolutely the main features of those of the Christian Easter. From among numerous ancient feasts let us take that of Adonis. This was met with among certain peoples, and over long periods of the past, in Asia-Minor. A statue provided its central point. This statue represented Adonis the spiritual prototype of all youthful growing forces, all the beauty of man.

It is true that ancient peoples have in many respects confused the image with what it represented. In this way these old religions have frequently acquired a fetishlike character. Many people saw in the statue the actual god of beauty—the youthful forces of man, the evolving germinal powers revealing in splendid life all that was glorious in existence, all that man possessed or could possess of inner worth and inner greatness.

With mournful singing and ceremonies expressive of the profoundest human grief and woe the divine image was on this day (if the sea happened to be near) sunk beneath the waves, where it remained for three days; otherwise an artificial tank was constructed so that it could be lowered into it. During these three days profound quiet and sorrow lay upon the whole community of those who followed this religion. When the three days were over the image was raised again from the water. The earlier songs of sorrow were turned into songs of joy, into hymns about the risen god, the god who had come back to life.

This was an outward ceremony, one that deeply stirred the hearts of wide circles of people. It recalled, by means of an outward act, what happened to every one attaining to initiation in the Holy Mysteries. Every man attaining initiation in these ancient times was conducted into a special chamber. The walls were black; the whole room, in which was nothing but a coffin, was dark and gloomy. The aspirant for initiation was then laid in the coffin by those who had conducted him there with solemn dirges, and was treated as one about to die. He was made to realise that, now he was placed in the coffin, he had to pass through what a man experiences when going through the gates of death, and during the three days following. The arrangements were carried out in such a way that he who was in the act of being initiated reached full inner comprehension of what a man experiences in the first three days after death.

On the third day there rose in a particular place before the eyes of him who lay in the coffin a budding branch representing springing life. The former songs of woe turned into hymns of joy. The neophyte, who had experienced all this, now rose from the grave with a changed consciousness. A new language had been imparted to him and a new writing: the language and the writing of the spirit.

If what took place in the depths of the Mysteries to those about to experience initiation were to be compared with the religious ceremony performed outside, this would have to be done in a figurative way, though similar in form, to that which was experienced by carefully selected individuals in the Mysteries. And the ceremony—take that of the cult of Adonis, for instance—was explained to those participating in it in an appropriate way. It was a religious act that took place in the Autumn, and those who took part in it were instructed as follows: Behold it is Autumn; the earth now loses its green plants, all its leafy covering. Everything withers. Instead of the fresh, green, sprouting life which arose to deck the earth in Spring, all is now bleak and bare, or perhaps covered with snow. Nature is dying. But when all around you dies, you must experience that which in man resembles to some degree the death you see in surrounding Nature. Man also dies, Autumn comes to him also. When life draws to an end it is well that the human heart and soul of those who survive should be filled with deepest sorrow. And in order that the full seriousness of the passage through the gates of death should rise before your souls, that you not only experience death when it comes but that you are reminded of it again and again each year, for this reason you are shown every Autumn how that Divine Being who represents the beauty, youth, and greatness of man dies, how he goes the way of all natural things. But just at the moment when Nature is most desolate and dreary, when death is near, you have to remember something else. You have to remember that though man passes through the gates of death, though here in earthly existence he only experiences things of a nature similar to that which perishes in Autumn, that so long as he lives on earth he only experiences temporal things, when once he is withdrawn from earth his life will continue on into the wide spaces of universal ether. There he sees himself grow ever larger and larger—he becomes one with the whole world. During the three days his life expands to the confines of the universe. While here, earthly eyes are directed to the image of death, to that which is mortal and perishable; out there, after three days, the immortal soul awakens. About three days after death it rises again; it is born anew in the land of the spirit.

All this was brought about in the depths of the Mysteries through an impressive inner transformation of the body of the neophyte who had presented himself for initiation. The notable impression, the tremendous forward push that human life received in this ancient form of initiation, was the awakening of the inner soul-forces, the waking of sight. This brought to him the knowledge that henceforth he lives not merely in the world of the senses but in the world of the spirit.

The teaching that from this time onwards was given on suitable occasions to the pupils of the Mysteries I can describe somewhat as follows:—They were told: what takes place in the Mysteries is a picture of what takes place in the spiritual world, and what takes place in the cosmos is a model for that which takes place in the Mysteries. What everyone who was admitted to the Mysteries had to realise was: the mysteries veil in earthly acts performed by men, what is experienced by them in other states of existence, and in the wide astro-spiritual spaces of the cosmos.

Those who in olden times were not admitted to the Mysteries, who on account of the degree of ripeness they had acquired in life were not fitted to receive direct vision of the spiritual world, had communicated to them in the ceremonies carried on in the Mysteries—that is in pictures—what was suited to them. So the purpose of the Mystery-Festival, which we have come to know as the one corresponding to the festival of Adonis, was for the purpose of arousing in the consciousness of men, or at least for placing before their eyes in pictures, the certainty that at the time of autumnal decay, when death overtakes everything in Nature, it also overwhelms Adonis, the representative of all youth and beauty, all the grandeur of the human soul. The god Adonis dies also. He passes into the water, into the earthly representative of the cosmic ether. But just as after three days he rises out of the water, or is taken from it, so the human soul is raised out of the water of the world; or in other words, out of the cosmic ether, some three days after passing through the gates of death. The secret of death is what these Ancient Mysteries sought to reveal, aided by the appropriate Autumn festival. It was clearly demonstrated and made obvious through the fact that the first half—the one side of the religious ceremony—accorded with dying Nature, but the other half with its opposite, with what is most essential to man's own existence. It was intended that man should look upon dying Nature so as to realise that, though to outward seeming he dies, according to inner reality he rises again in the spiritual world. The meaning of these old heathen festivals that were associated with the Mysteries was to reveal the truth concerning death.

In the course of human evolution a most important thing now took place, which was, that what the pupil passed through on a certain plane in regard to the death and resurrection of the soul when preparing himself for initiation into the Mysteries was consummated by Christ Jesus down to the physical body (bis zum Leibe). For how did the Mystery of Golgotha appear to one who was an adept in the Mysteries? Such an adept gazed into the ancient Mysteries. He saw how anyone preparing for initiation was led according to the state of his soul through death to resurrection, which meant to the awakening of the higher consciousness of his soul. The soul dies so that it may rise again in a higher state of consciousness. What has to be firmly maintained here is that the body does not die, but that the soul dies so that it may be awakened to a higher consciousness.

What the soul of every man experienced who passed through initiation was experienced by Christ Jesus as far as to the body; that simply means, it was experienced on a different plane, for Christ was no earthly man, but a Sun-being within the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and could experience in every part of his human nature what the ancient Initiate of the Mysteries experienced in his soul. Those who still existed as “Knowers” of the ancient Mysteries, who were conversant with the ceremony of initiation, were such men as have even to this day a deep understanding of what happened on Golgotha. What could such men say of it? They could say: Through thousands of years men have been brought to the secrets of the spiritual world through the death and resurrection of their souls. The soul was separated from the body during the ceremony of initiation. Through death it was led to everlasting life. What was experienced there by a few exceptional men has been experienced in the body by a Being who came down from the Sun at the baptism in Jordan and entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That which for long thousands of years had been an ever-recurring procedure of the Mysteries had now become an historic fact. The most essential fact for men to know was this: that because the Being who entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth was a Sun-being, that which could only take place as regards the souls, and in the soul-experiences of those presenting themselves for initiation, could now take place as far as bodily existence. In spite of the death of the body, in spite of the dissolving of the body of Jesus of Nazareth in the mortal earth, a resurrection of Christ could take place, because the Christ rose higher than the souls of those seeking initiation. Such men could not take their bodies into the deep regions of sub-material existence (tiefe Regionen des Untersinnlichen) as Christ Jesus did; and for this reason they could not rise so high at resurrection as the Christ did; to make the infinite difference of this apparent, the ancient ceremony of initiation was enacted as an historic fact for all the world to see on the place of consecration—on Golgotha.

In the early Christian centuries only a few people were aware that a Sun-Being—a Cosmic Being—had lived in Jesus of Nazareth, and that the earth had thereby been fructified (befruchtet); that a Being had actually descended to earth from the sun—a Being such as until then it had been possible to see only in the sun from the earth, through methods employed in the centres of initiation. The most essential fact regarding Christianity as accepted by those who had a real knowledge of the ancient mysteries was expressed as follows: The Christ to whom we could rise through initiation, the Christ we could find when we rose to the Sun in the ancient Mysteries, has descended into a mortal body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. He has come down to earth. At first it was more what might be described as a holy attitude of mind—a solemn feeling of reverence, experienced in mind and soul, that made some understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha possible at the time. What formed the living content of human consciousness at that time gradually became, through events we shall learn of later, a festival of remembrance recalling the historical event of Golgotha.

As this memory developed, people lost the consciousness, more and more, of Christ as a Sun-Being.

Adepts in the wisdom of the Mysteries could not be in any uncertainty as to the nature of Christ. They knew well that true Initiates, those who had been initiated and had therefore become free from their physical bodies and had experienced death in their souls, rose as far as the Sun-sphere, and that there they found the Christ, that from Him, the Christ in the Sun, their souls received the impulse to resurrection; they knew who the Christ was, because they had raised themselves up to Him. These ancient Initiates, who understood what took place during initiation, knew from what took place on Golgotha that the same Being who formerly had to be sought in the Sun had now come down to men on earth. How did they know this? Because the proceedings in the Mysteries, undergone by the neophyte that he might rise to Christ in the sun, could no longer be carried out in the same way as before, for the simple reason that human nature had in the course of time become different. The ancient ceremony of initiation had become impossible because of the way in which the being of man had evolved. The Christ could no longer be sought in the Sun according to the methods of ancient initiation. He therefore came down to earth, there to accomplish a deed through which men might now find Him. That which is contained in this Mystery (Geheimnis) belongs to the most sacred things that can be spoken of on earth.

For how actually did the Mystery of Golgotha appear to men living in the centuries immediately following it? In ancient places of initiation men looked up towards existence on the Sun (Sonnendasein) and became aware, through initiation, of the Christ in the Sun. They looked out into space in order to draw near to Christ.

If I represent diagrammatically how evolution progresses in the ensuing years, I must represent it in time; that means I must represent the earth—in one year, in another, in a third year, as progressing in time. Spatially, the earth is always there, but the passage of time must be represented thus. (A diagram was shown).

The Mystery of Golgotha then took place. Let us suppose that a man who lived in the 8th century, instead of looking out from the Mysteries to the Sun in order to find Christ, looked to the turning-point of time at the beginning of the Christian era, looked to the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, he was then able to see the Christ in an earthly happening—in the Mystery of Golgotha. What had previously been perceived spatially had now, because of the Mystery of Golgotha, to be seen in time. (Sollte nun zeitliche Anschauung werden.) This was the fact of greatest importance.

It is especially when our souls are affected by all the things which took place in the Mysteries, and which were an image of the death of man, and the resurrection that followed, and when added to these we consider the form of the religious procedure, more especially at the festival of Adonis (which was again an image of what took place in the Mysteries), that we realise how these three things, united and raised to their highest aspect, were concentrated within the historic deed on Golgotha.

There now was seen on the outward plane of history what formerly had been enacted in deep inwardness in the sacred precincts of the Mysteries; what formerly had only been for Initiates was now there for all mankind to see. No longer was an image required that had to be sunk symbolically in the sea and raised from it again. Instead, men were to have the memory of what had actually happened on Golgotha. Instead of the outward symbol connected with an event that was experienced in space, inward, intangible, formless thoughts were to arise—thoughts that lived only in the soul, thoughts of the historical deed done on Golgotha.

In the centuries that followed we now become aware of an extraordinary development in humanity. The penetration of mankind into what was spiritual declined more and more. The spiritual content of the Mystery of Golgotha could no longer find a place in the souls of men. Evolution tended towards the training of a materialistic intelligence. Men lost the inward emotional understanding of such things as, for instance, that where the transitory quality of external Nature is revealed—at the moment when the life of Nature is seen to be most desolate and as if dying—is exactly the moment when the vitality of the spirit becomes most apparent. Mankind also lost understanding of the external festivals of the year: understanding that the coming of Autumn, bringing as it does death to the outward things of Nature, is the time when it is most easy to realize that the death of all these things is connected with the resurrection of what is spiritual.

Along with this, Autumn lost the possibility of being the season of resurrection; it lost the possibility of directing the mind, by way of the fleeting things of Nature, to the everlasting quality of the spirit. Man has need of the support of substance. He needs the support of that which does not die in Nature but springs again, the germinating power of seeds which fall to the ground in Autumn but rise again. Man accepts substance as a symbol of what is spiritual, because he is no longer capable of being stirred by substance to perceive spirit in its reality. Autumn has no longer power to demonstrate the immortality of spiritual things, as compared to the mortality of natural things, through the inner force of the human soul. Man has need of the support of Nature, of external resurrection. He likes to see how plants spring from the earth, how the strength of the sun increases, and the coming of light and warmth; he needs the resurrection of Nature in order to cultivate thoughts of resurrection.

But with this the direct connection linking it with the festival of Adonis disappears, as also that which can link it with the Mystery of Golgotha. That inner experience that comes to every one at earthly death loses power when the soul knows: man passes through earthly death, and during the three days that follow undergoes certain experiences of a very solemn nature; but later the soul is filled with inner joy and happiness, because it knows that after these three days it rises from death to spiritual immortality.

The power contained in the festival of Adonis was lost. Humanity was so organised at one time that this power could be developed with the greatest intensity. When looking on the death of the god, men saw the death of all that was beautiful in humanity, the death of all its splendour and youthful powers. With great sadness the god was laid beneath the waves on a day of mourning—Good Friday (Char-Freitag, Day of Mourning). People felt the deep solemnity of this, because it was intended to evoke in them realization of the frailty of all natural things. But it was intended that this feeling regarding the mortality of natural things should then be changed into a feeling concerning the super-sensible resurrection of the human soul after three days. As the god, or rather the likeness of the god, was raised from the water, the well-instructed believer saw in this image the representative of the human soul a few days after death. Behold! they said to him, what happens in spirit to those who die. What happens is brought before your soul in the likeness of the risen god—the god of beauty and of youthful vigour.

This outlook, which was bound up so deeply with the destiny of humanity, was brought directly before the human spirit every Autumn. It would not have been thought possible at that time to associate this with external Nature. What could be experienced in spirit was represented symbolically in ceremonial acts. But the image of a former time had to be effaced, it had to emerge again as memory—as formless, inward, soul-felt memory of the Mystery of Golgotha, which represented the same thing; at first men had not the power to carry out this change, because the spirit had passed into the subconscious part of human souls (in die Untergründe der Seele des Menschen ging). So things remained until our day; men had need of the support of external nature. But external nature provides no image—no complete image of the destiny of man after death. Thoughts about death persisted. Thoughts about resurrection faded more and more. Even if people spoke of resurrection as part of their belief it was not a vital fact in the lives of the men of later times. But it must become so once more; it must become so, because the Anthroposophical outlook stirs men's minds to true thoughts concerning resurrection.

If on one side it is said, at the appropriate season, thoughts on Michael are precious to the soul of the Anthroposophist as bringing thoughts of annunciation, if thoughts concerning Christmas give depth to his soul, those on Easter must be specially thoughts of joy. For Anthroposophy must add to the thought of death the thought of resurrection. She must herself become like a festival of resurrection within the souls of men, bringing an Easter spirit into their whole outlook on life. This Anthroposophy will do, when people have realised how the old thoughts of the Mysteries can live on in rightly conceived thoughts of Easter; when they have acquired a right understanding of the body, soul, and spirit of man, and of the destiny of these in the physical, psychic, and spiritual heavenly worlds.

Speech Exercise:

In the vast unmeasured world-wide spaces,
In the endless stream of time,
In the depths of human soul-life,
In the world’s great revelations:
Seek the unfolding of life’s great mystery.

RUDOLF STEINER: The first four sentences have a ring of expectation, and the last line is a complete fulfillment of the first four. Now let’s return to the other speech exercise:

Proxy prized
bather broomstick
polka pushing
beady basket
prudent pertness
bearskin bristled

RUDOLF STEINER: You can learn a great deal from this. And now we will repeat the sentence:

Dart may these boats through darkening gloaming

RUDOLF STEINER: Also there is a similar exercise I would like to point out that has more feeling in it. It consists of four lines, which I will dictate to you later. The touch of feeling should be expressed more in the first line:

Lulling leader limply
liplessly laughing
loppety lumpety
lackety lout

RUDOLF STEINER: You must imagine that you have a green frog in front of you, and it is looking at you with lips apart, with its mouth wide open, and you speak to the frog in the words of the last three lines. In the first line, however, you tell it to lisp the lovely lyrics “Lulling leader limply.” This line must be spoken with humorous feeling; you really expect this of the frog.

And now I will read you a piece of prose, one of Lessing’s fables.¹

The Oak

One stormy night the raging north wind pitted its strength against a magnificent oak, which now lay on the ground. A number of low bushes lay shattered beneath it. A fox, whose lair was not far away, saw it next morning. “What a tree!” he cried, “I never would have thought it had been so big!”

RUDOLF STEINER: What is the moral of this fable?

Someone suggested: That it is not until someone is dead that we see how great that person was. Another suggested: That, until the great are overthrown, the small do not recognize what they were.

Rudolf Steiner: But why then choose the fox, who is so cunning?

Because the cunning of the fox cannot compare with the magnificence of the tree.

RUDOLF STEINER: In which sentence would you find the moral of the fable in relation to the cunning of the fox? “I never would have thought it was so big!” The point is, he had never even looked up; he had run round the bottom of the trunk, which was the only part of the tree he had noticed, and here the tree had only taken up a small space. Despite cunning, the fox had only seen what is visible around the foot of the tree.

Please notice that fables—which by their very nature are enacted in their own special world—can be read realistically, but poems never.

Now the problem I placed before you yesterday brings us something of tremendous importance, because now we must consider what measures to take when we notice that one group of children is less capable than another in one or another subject or lesson. I will ask you to choose from any part of the period between six and fourteen, and to think especially of, let’s say, a group of children who cannot learn to read and write properly, or those who cannot learn natural history or arithmetic, or geometry or singing. Consider what course you will pursue in the class, or in your general treatment of the children, both now and later on, so that you can correct such shortcomings as much as possible.

Several teachers contributed detailed suggestions.

RUDOLF STEINER: The examples you mention might arise partially from general incompetence. On the other hand, it could also be a question of a particular lack of talent. You could have children who are perhaps extraordinarily good at reading and writing, but as soon as they come to arithmetic they do not demonstrate any gift at all for it. Then there are those who are not so bad at arithmetic, but the moment you begin to call on their power of judgment, such as in natural science, their powers are at an end. Then again there are children who have no desire to learn history. It is important to notice these specific difficulties.

Perhaps you can find a remedy in this way: When you notice that a child, right from the beginning, has little talent for reading and writing, you would do well, anyway, to get in touch with the parents and ask them immediately to keep the child off eggs, puddings, and pastry as much as possible. The rest of the diet can remain more or less as it was. When the parents agree to try to provide the child with a really good wholesome diet, however—omitting the items of food mentioned above—they might even cut down on the meat for awhile and give the child plenty of vegetables and nourishing salads. You will then notice that, through a diet like this, the child will make considerable gains in ability. You must take advantage of this improvement, and keep the child very busy when the diet is first changed.

But if you notice that a mere change of diet doesn’t help much, then, after you have talked it over with the parents, try for a short while, perhaps a week, to keep the child entirely without food for the whole morning, or at least the first part of the morning when the child should be learning to read and write—to allow learning on an empty stomach—or maybe give the child the minimum of food. (You should not continue too long with this method; you must alternate it with normal eating.) You must make good use of this time, however, when the capacities will most certainly be revealed, and the child will show greater ability and be more receptive to what you are teaching. If you repeat a cure of this kind several times over the year, you will see that the powers of a fairly young child undergo a change. This applies to the first years of school life. I ask you to consider this very seriously.

Generally speaking, you should be very aware that the foolish ways many parents feed their young children contributes greatly to the lessening of their faculties, especially with phlegmatic and sanguine children. Perpetually overfeeding children—and this is somewhat different at the present time,² but you should know these things—stuffing them with eggs, puddings, and starchy foods is one of the things that makes children unwilling to learn and incapable of doing so during the early years of their school life.

A teacher asked about cocoa.

RUDOLF STEINER: Why should children drink cocoa at all? It is not the least bit necessary except to regulate digestion. Things like this are needed sometimes for this purpose, and cocoa is better than other remedies for children whose digestion works too quickly, but it should not be included otherwise in children’s diet. These days children are given many things that are unsuitable for them.

You can experience some very strange things in regard to this. When I was a teacher in the eighties, there was a young child in the house; I did not actually teach him, since I had only the older children; he was a little cousin. He was really a nice lovable child with bright ideas. He could have become a gifted pupil. I saw him a good deal and could observe for myself how witty and gifted the child was. One day at table this little fellow—although he was scarcely two years old—had two little dumplings, and when someone said to him, “Look Hans, now you already have two dumplings,” he was clever enough to answer, “And the third will follow in a minute.” That’s what the little tyke said!

Then another thing: he was very fond of calling people bad names. This did not seem very important to me in a child of that age—he would soon grow out of it. He had gotten into the habit of being particularly abusive to me. One day as I was coming in the door (he was a little older by this time) he stood there and blocked the way. He couldn’t think of any name bad enough for me, so he said: “Here come two donkeys!” That was really very smart of him, wasn’t it?

But the boy was pale; he had very little appetite and was rather thin. So, on the advice of an otherwise excellent doctor, this child was given a small glass of red wine with every meal. I was not responsible for him and had no influence in this extraordinary way of treating a child’s health, but I was very concerned about it. Then in his thirty-second or thirty-third year I saw this individual again; he was a terribly nervous man. When he was not present I enquired what he had been like as a schoolboy. This restless man, although only in his thirties, had become very nervous, and demonstrated the lamentable results of that little glass of red wine given to him with his meals as a boy. He was a gifted child, for a child who says “Here come two donkeys” really shows talent.

Frau Steiner interjected, “What an impudent boy!”

RUDOLF STEINER: We needn’t bother with impudence, but how does this really come about? It’s amazing. He can find no word bad enough, and so he makes use of number to help him. That shows extraordinary talent. But he became a poor scholar and never wanted to learn properly. Thus, because of this method of treatment—giving him wine as a young child—he was completely ruined by the time he was seven years old.

This is what I want to impress upon you at the beginning of our talk today—that, in relation to a child’s gifts and abilities, it is not the least unimportant to consider how to regulate the diet. I would especially ask you, however, to see that the child’s digestion does not suffer. So when it strikes you that there is something wrong with a child’s capacities, you must in some tactful way find out from the parents whether or not the child’s digestion is working properly, and if not you should try to put it in order.

Someone spoke about the children who are not good at arithmetic.

Rudolf Steiner: When you discover a special weakness in arithmetic, it would be good to do this: generally, the other children will have two gymnastics lessons during the week, or one eurythmy lesson and one gymnastics lesson; you can take a group of the children who are not good at arithmetic, and allow them an extra hour or half-hour of eurythmy or gymnastics. This doesn’t have to mean a lot of extra work for you: you can take them with others who are doing the same kind of exercises, but you must try to improve these children’s capacities through gymnastics and eurythmy. First give them rod exercises. Say to them, “Hold the rod in your hand, first in front counting 1, 2, 3, and then behind 1, 2, 3, 4." Each time the child must change the position of the rod, moving it from front to back. A great effort will be made in some way to get the rod around behind at the count of 3. Then add walking: say, 3 steps forward, 5 steps back; 3 steps forward, 4 steps back; 5 steps forward, 3 steps back, and so on. In gymnastics, and also perhaps in eurythmy, try to combine numbers with the children’s movements, so they are required to count while moving. You will find this effective. I have frequently done this with pupils.

But now tell me, why does it have an effect? From what you have already learned, you should be able to form some ideas on this subject.

A teacher commented: Eurythmy movements must be a great help in teaching geometry.

RUDOLF STEINER: But I did not mean geometry. What I said applied to arithmetic, because at the root of arithmetic is consciously willed movement, the sense of movement. When you activate the sense of movement in this way, you quicken a child’s arithmetical powers. You bring something up out of the subconscious that, in such a child, is unwilling to be brought up. Generally speaking, when a child is bad both at arithmetic and geometry, this should be remedied by movement exercises. You can do a great deal for a child’s progress in geometry with varied and inventive eurythmy exercises, and also through rod exercises.

Comment: Where difficulties exist in pronunciation, the connection between speech and music should be considered.

RUDOLF STEINER: Most cases of poor pronunciation are due to defective hearing.

Comment: Sanguine students do not follow geography lessons very well because their ideas are vague. I recommend taking small portions of a map as subjects for drawing.

RUDOLF STEINER: When you make your geography lessons truly graphic, when you describe the countries clearly and show the distribution of vegetation, and describe the products of the earth in the different countries, making your lessons thoroughly alive in this way, you are not likely to find your students dull in this subject. And when you further enliven the geography lessons by first describing a country, then drawing it—allowing the children, to draw it on the board and sketch in the rivers, mountains, distribution of vegetation, forest, and meadow land, and then read travel books with your pupils—when you do all this you find that you usually have very few dull scholars; and what’s more, you can use your geography lessons to arouse the enthusiasm of your pupils and to stir up new capacities within them. If you can make geography itself interesting you will indeed notice that other capacities are aroused also in your pupils.

Comment: I have been thinking about this problem in relation to the first three grades. I would be strict with lazy children and try to awaken their ambition. In certain cases children must be told that they might have to go through the year’s work a second time. Emulation and ambition must be aroused.

RUDOLF STEINER: I wouldn’t recommend you to give much credit to ambition, which cannot generally be aroused in children. In the earliest school years you can make good use of the methods you suggest, but without overemphasizing ambition, because you would then later have to help the child to get rid of it again. But you must primarily consider food and diet, and I need to say this again and again.

Perhaps the friends who speak next will consider the fact that there are many children who in later life have no power of perceiving or remembering natural objects properly. A teacher may despair over some pupils who can never remember which among a number of minerals is a malachite or a hornblende, or even an emerald—who really have no idea of how to comprehend natural objects and recognize them again. The same is true also in relation to plants and animals. Please keep this in mind also.

Comment: I have noticed that with the youngest children you often find some who are backward in arithmetic. I like best to illustrate everything to them with the fingers, or pieces of paper, balls, or buttons. One can also divide the class without the children knowing anything about it; they are divided into two groups, the gifted ones and the weaker ones. We then take the weaker ones alone so that the gifted children are not kept back.

RUDOLF STEINER: In that case, Newton, Helmholtz, and Julius Robert Mayer would have been among the backward ones!

That doesn’t matter.

RUDOLF STEINER: You are right. It doesn’t matter at all. Even Schiller would have been among the weaker ones. And according to Robert Hamerling’s teaching certificate, he passed well in practically everything except German composition; his marks for that subject were below average!³

We have heard how eurythmy can help, and now Miss F. will tell us how she thinks eurythmy can be developed for the obstinate children, for they too must learn eurythmy.

RUDOLF STEINER: These suggestions are all very good. With regard to the children who resist doing eurythmy, there is still another way to get them to take pleasure in it. Besides allowing them to watch eurythmy frequently, try to take photographs of various eurythmy positions. These must be simplified so that the child will get visual images of the human being doing eurythmy forms. Pictures of this kind will make an impression on the children and kindle their abilities in eurythmy. That was why I asked Miss W. to take pictures of this kind (I don’t mean mere reproductions of eurythmy positions, but transformed into simple patterns of movement that have an artistic effect). These could be combined to show children the beauty of line. You would then discover an exceptionally interesting psychological fact—that children could perceive the beauty of line that they produced themselves in eurythmy, without becoming vain and coy. Although children are likely to become vain if their attention is drawn to what they have themselves done, this is not the case in eurythmy. In eurythmy, therefore, you can also cultivate a perception of line that can be used to enhance the feeling of self without awakening vanity and coquettishness.

Someone spoke of how he would explain the electric generator to children. He would try to emphasize in every possible way what would show the fundamental phenomenon most clearly.

RUDOLF STEINER: That is a very important principle, and it is also applicable to other subjects. It is a good principle for teaching, but to a certain extent it applies to all children in the physics lessons. It has no direct connection with the question of dealing with backward pupils. In physics the backward ones, especially the girls, are certain to put up a certain amount of opposition, even when you show them a process of this kind.

Question: Since food plays such a very important role, would Dr. Steiner tell us more about the effect of different foods on the body.

RUDOLF STEINER: I have already spoken of this, and you can also find many references in my lectures. It would perhaps lead us too far afield today to go into all the details of this subject, but most of all one should avoid giving children such things as tea and coffee.

The effect of tea on our thoughts is that they do not want to cohere; they flee from one another. For this reason tea is very good for diplomats, whose job in life is just to keep talking, with no desire to develop one thought logically out of another. You should avoid sending children’s thoughts into flight by allowing them to indulge in tea.

Neither is coffee good for children, because it disposes them to become too pedantic. Coffee is a well-known expedient for journalists, because with its help they can squeeze one thought out of another, as it were. This would not be the right thing for children, because their thoughts should arise naturally, one from another. Coffee and tea are among the things to be avoided. The green parts of a plant and also milk may be considered especially important food for children, and they should have white meat only, as far as possible.

Comment: When a child has difficulty in understanding, the teacher should offer a great deal of individual help, and should also inquire about how the child does in other subjects; but if too much time is spent with the duller children, the difficulty would arise that the others are left unoccupied.

RUDOLF STEINER: Please do not overestimate what the other children lose because of your work with the less gifted ones. As a rule, not much is lost provided that, while you present a subject properly for the duller children, you also succeed in getting the brighter ones to pay attention to it also. There is really then no serious loss for the more talented children. When you have a right feeling for the way in which a subject should be introduced for the weaker ones, then in one way or another the others will profit by it.

Comment: Whenever there is lack of interest, I would always have recourse to artistic impressions. I know of one child who cannot remember the forms of different minerals—in fact he finds it difficult to form a mental image of any type of formation. Such children cannot remember melodies either.

RUDOLF STEINER: You have discovered the particular difficulty found in children who have no perception of forms and no power of retaining them in memory. But you must distinguish between forms related to the organic world and those connected with minerals, which in fact run parallel to the forms of melodies. The important thing is that here we touch on a very, very radical defect, a great defect in the development of the child, and you must consider seriously how this defect can be fundamentally healed. There is an excellent way of helping these children to remember organic forms in nature—the forms of plants and animals; draw caricatures for them that emphasize the characteristics of a particular animal or plant. These drawings must not be ugly or in bad taste, but artistic and striking; now have the children try to remember these caricatures so that, in this roundabout way through caricature, they begin to find it easier to remember the actual forms. You could, for example, draw a mouse for them like this. Give it teeth and whiskers too if you like!

Then there is also another way of possibly helping children to grasp forms: have them understand from inside what they cannot grasp from outside. Let’s suppose, for example, that a child cannot understand a parallelepiped from outside.⁴ The child cannot remember this form. You say to the child: imagine you are a tiny little elf, and that you could stand inside of this form as if it were a room. You allow the child to grasp from inside what cannot be understood from outside. This the child can do. But you must repeat this again and again.

With forms of this kind, which also appear in minerals, this is relatively easy to do, but it is not as easy when it comes to perceiving color or any other quality of the mineral. In that case you can help the child to understand merely by letting the imagination see that a small thing is very large indeed. Have the child repeatedly try to picture some little yellow crystal as a gigantic crystallized form.

When you are dealing with the element of time, however—in music, for example—it is not such an easy matter. Let us for the moment suppose that you have not yet made any progress in improving the children’s grasp of spatial forms. Now, however, if you want to use caricature in musical form, you will only succeed when you introduce an arithmetical process, making the intervals infinitely larger and drawing out each sound for a very long time; thus by greatly increasing the time between each sound, you can produce the melody on a much larger scale, which will have an astonishing effect on the children. In this way you will achieve something, but otherwise you will not be able to effect much improvement.

Questions for tomorrow:

1. How can I treat the higher plants from a natural-scientific viewpoint in the same spirit shown yesterday for the animals, for cuttlefish, mouse, and human beings?⁵

2. How can I introduce mushrooms, mosses, and lichens into these lessons?

These two questions can perhaps be answered together. It is a case of applying the same methods for the plants as those I spoke of yesterday. It is not a question of object lessons, but of the proper teaching after the ninth year, when natural history is introduced into the curriculum.

• 1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), German dramatist, poet, critic, editor, and translator.
• 2. Due to the food shortages in Germany in 1919.
• 3. Robert Hamerling (1830–1889) was a distinguished German poet and a personal friend of Rudolf Steiner.
• 4. A parallelepiped is a solid with six sides, all of which are parallelograms.
• 5. See Practical Advice to Teachers, lecture 7.

Today I would like to examine certain other aspects of our subject.

I have often dealt with the genius of language, and you know from my book Theosophy that we refer to real spiritual entities when we speak of spiritual beings in an anthroposophical context. Thus “genius of language” designates the spiritual entity behind any specific language, an entity with whom man can become familiar and through whom he can receive, from the spiritual world, strength to express his thoughts which, at the outset, are present in his earthly self as a dead heritage from that higher world. It is, therefore, appropriate for anthroposophical students to seek, in the formation of language, a meaning which is independent of man because rooted in the spirit.

I have already drawn attention to the peculiar way the German language designates the beautiful and its opposite. We speak of the opposite of the beautiful (das Schoene) as the ugly or hateful (das Haessliche). Were we to denote the beautiful in the same way we would call it—since the opposite of hate is love—the lovely or loving. As it is, we make a significant difference. In German the word beautiful (das Schoene) is related to shining (das Scheinende). The beautiful shines; brings its inner nature to the surface. It is the distinguishing quality of the beautiful not to hide itself, but to carry its essence into outer configuration. Thus beauty reveals inwardness through outer form; a shining radiates outward into the world. If we were to speak, in this sense, of beauty's opposite, we would call it the concealed or non-radiant, that which holds back its being, refusing to disclose it in any outer sheath. To put it another way, “the beautiful” designates something objective. If we were to treat its opposite just as objectively, we would have to speak of concealment, of something whose outer aspect belies what it really is. But here subjectivity enters, for we cannot love what conceals itself, showing a false countenance; we must hate it. In this way the ugly calls up quite a different emotional reaction than the beautiful; we do not respond to it out of the same recesses of our nature.

Thus the genius of language reveals itself. And we should ask: When in the broadest sense we strive for the beautiful in art, what is our goal? The very fact that the German word for “beautiful” proceeds outward (as its opposite suggests a remaining within our emotions, our hate) means that the beautiful bears a relation to the spiritual outside us. For what shines? What we apprehend with our senses does not need to shine for us; it exists. It is the spiritual that shines, radiating into the sensory, proclaiming its being even in the sensory. By speaking objectively of the beautiful, we take hold of it as a spiritual element which reveals itself in the world through art. The task of art is to take hold of the shining, the radiance, the manifestation, of that which as spirit weaves and lives throughout the world. All genuine art seeks the spirit. Even when art wishes to represent the ugly, the disagreeable, it is concerned, not with the sensory-disagreeable as such, but with the spiritual which proclaims its nature in the midst of unpleasantness. If the spiritual shines through the ugly, even the ugly becomes beautiful. In art it is upon a relation to the spiritual that beauty depends.

Proceeding from this truth, let us consider one of the arts: painting. Recently we dealt with it insofar as it reveals the spiritual-essential through shining color. In ancient times man, by surrendering in the right way to the genius of language, showed his inner knowledge of color in his vocabulary. When an instinctive clairvoyance prevailed, he felt that metals revealed their inner natures in their colors, therefore gave them, not earthly names, but names connecting them with the planets. Otherwise people would have felt ashamed. For man looked upon color as a divine-spiritual element bestowed upon earthly substances only in the sense of our recent lectures. Perceiving the gold in gold's color, he saw not merely the earthly in that metal but the sun proclaiming itself from the cosmos in its gold color. Indeed, from the very start man saw something transcending the earthly in the colors of earthly objects. But it was only to living things that particular colors were ascribed, for living things approach the spirit in such a way that the spiritual shines forth. Animals were felt to have their own colors because in them the spirit-soul element manifests directly.

In ancient times, when man's artistic sense was not outward but inward, he painted not at all. To paint a tree green is not true painting for the reason that however well one imitates her, nature is still the essential thing; nature is still more beautiful, more vital; it needs no copy. A real painter never imitates. He uses an object as a recipient or focus of the sun, or to observe a color reflex in that object's surroundings, or to catch, above it, an interweaving of light and darkness. In other words, the thing painted is merely an inducement. For example, we never paint a flower standing in front of a window; we paint the light which, shining in at the window, is seen through the flower. We paint the sun's colored light; catch the sun.

In the case of a person, this can be done still more spiritually. To paint a human forehead the way one believes it should look is nonsense; this is not painting. But to observe how the sun rays strike that forehead, how color shows up in the ensuing radiance, how light and darkness intermingle, to capture with one's paint brush all that interplay: this is the task of the painter. Seizing what passes in a moment, he relates it to the spiritual.

If, with a sense for painting, we look at an interior view, the matter of most importance is not the figure or figures therein. I once accompanied a friend to an exhibition where we saw a painting of a man kneeling before an altar, his back toward us. The painter had given himself the task of showing how sunlight falling through a window struck the man's back. My friend remarked that he would much rather see a front view. Well, this was only material, not artistic, interest. He wanted the painter to show the man's character, and so forth. But one is justified in doing this only if one expresses all perceptions through color. If I wish to paint a human being sick in bed with a certain disease, and study his facial color in order to apprehend how illness shines through the sensory, this may be artistic. If I want to show, in totality, the extent to which the whole cosmos manifests in the human flesh color, this may also be artistic. But if I try to imitate Mr. Lehman as he sits here before me, I will not succeed; moreover, this is not the task of art. What is artistic is how the sun illumines him, how light is deflected through his bushy eyebrows. Thus for a painter the important thing is how the whole world acts upon his subject; and his means of holding fast to a transitory moment are light and darkness, the whole spectrum.

In times not so long ago one could not imagine a presentation of Mary, the Mother of God, without a face so transfigured it had passed beyond the ordinary human state; a face overcome by light. One could not imagine her clothed otherwise than in a red garment and blue cloak, because only so is the Mother of God placed rightly into earthly life; the red garment depicting all the emotions of the earthly, the blue cloak the soul element which weaves the spiritual around her; the face permeated and transfigured by spirit, overcome by light as a revelation of the spirit. We do not, however, properly and artistically take hold of these truths if we stop with what I have just described. For I have translated the artistic into the inartistic. We feel them artistically only if we create directly out of red and blue and the light by experiencing the light, in its relationship to colors and darkness, as a world in itself. Then colors speak their own language, and the Virgin Mary is created out of them.

To achieve this one must live with color; color must become emancipated from the heavy matter opposing its innermost nature. Palette colors are alien to true painting in that, when used on a plane surface, they have a down-dragging effect. One cannot live with oil-based colors, only with fluid colors. When a painter puts fluid colors upon a plane, color—owing to the peculiar relationship between man and color—springs to life; he conceives out of color; a world arises out of it. True painting comes into being only if he captures the shining, revealing, radiating element as something living; only if he creates what is to be formed on the plane out of this element. For to understand color is to understand a component part of the world.

Kant once said: Give me matter, and out of it I shall create a world. Well, you could have given him matter endlessly without his ever being able to make a world out of it. But out of the interplaying medium of color a world of sorts can indeed be created, because every color has direct relationship with something spiritual. In the face of present-day materialism, the concept and activity of painting have—except for the beginnings made by impressionism and, still more, by expressionism—been more or less lost.

For the most part modern man does not paint, he imitates figures with a kind of drawing, then colors the surface. But colored surfaces are not painting for the reason that they are not born out of color and light and darkness.

We must not misunderstand things. If somebody goes wild and just lays on colors side by side in the belief that this is what I call “overcoming drawing,” he is mistaken. By “overcoming drawing” I do not mean to do away with drawing, but to let it rise out of the colors, be born from the colors. Colors will yield the drawing; one simply has to know how to live in colors. Living so, an artist develops an ability—while disregarding the rest of the world—to bring forth works of art out of color itself.

Look at Titian's “Ascension of Mary.” This painting stands at the boundary line of the ancient principle of art. The living experience of color one finds in Raphael and, more especially, in Leonardo da Vinci, has departed; only a certain tradition prevents the painter from totally forsaking the living-in-color.

Experience this “Ascension of Mary.” The green, the red, the blue, cry out. Now take the details, the individual colors and their harmonious interaction, and you will feel how Titian lived in the element of color and how, in this instance, he really created out of it all three worlds.

Look at the wonderful build-up of those worlds. Below, he has created out of color the Apostles experiencing the event of Mary's ascension. One sees in the colors how these men are anchored to the earth; colors which convey, not heaviness in the lower part of the painting, only a darkness which fetters the watching ones to earth. In the color-treatment of Mary one experiences the intermediate realm. A dull darkness from below connects her feet and legs with the earth; while, above her, light preponderates. This third and highest realm receives her head and radiates above it in full light, lifting it up. Thus are set forth, through inner color experience, the three stages of lower realm, middle realm, and the heights where Mary is being received by God the Father.

To understand this picture we must forget everything else and look at it solely from the standpoint of color, for here the three stages of the world are derived from color not intellectually but artistically. True painting takes hold of this world of effulgent shining, of splendid manifestation in light and darkness and color, in order to contrast what is earthly-material with the artistic. But the artistic is not permitted to reach the spiritual. Otherwise it would be not “shine” but wisdom. For wisdom is no longer artistic, wisdom leads into the formless and therefore undepictable realm of the divine.

With artistry like Titian's in “The Ascension of Mary,” we feel, on beholding the reception of Mary's head by God the Father, that now we must go no further in the treatment of light; we must halt. For we have reached the limit of the possible. To carry it further would be to fall into the intellectualistic, the inartistic. We must not make one stroke beyond what is indicated by light, rather than contour. The moment we insist on contour, we become intellectualistic, inartistic. Near the top this picture is in danger of becoming inartistic. The painters immediately after Titian fell prey to this danger. Look at the depiction of angels right up to the time of Titian. They are painted in heavenly regions. But look how carefully the painters avoided leaving the realm of color. Always you can ask yourself in regard to these angels of the pre-Titian age, and of Titian too: Couldn't they be clouds? If you cannot do that, if there is no uncertainty about existence, being, or semblance, shine, if there is an attempt fully to delineate the essence of the spiritual, artistry ceases.

In the seventeenth century it was otherwise, for materialism affects the presentation of the spiritual. Now angels began to be painted with all kinds of foreshortenings, and one can no longer ask: Couldn't that be clouds? When reason is active, artistry dies.

Again, look at the Apostles below: one has a feeling that in this “Ascension of Mary” only Mary is really artistic. Above, there is the danger of passing into the formlessness of pure wisdom. If one attains the formless one attains, in a certain sense, the zenith of the artistic. One has dared to press forward boldly to the abyss where art ceases, where the colors disappear in light, and where, if one were to proceed, one could only draw. But drawing is not painting. Thus the upper part of the picture approaches the realm of wisdom. And the more one is able to express, in the sensory world, this wisdom-filled realm, and the more the angels might be taken for billowy clouds shimmering in light, the greater the art.

Proceeding from the bottom of the picture to the really beautiful, to Mary herself rising into the realm of wisdom, we see that Titian was able to paint her beautifully because she has not yet arrived at, but only soars up toward, the realm of wisdom; and we feel that, were she to rise still higher, she must enter where art ceases. Below stand the Apostles. Here the artist has tried to express their earth-fettered character. But now a different danger threatens. Had he placed Mary further down, he could not have depicted her inward beauty. If Mary were to sit among the Apostles, she could not appear as she does as a kind of balance between heaven and earth; she would look different. She simply does not fit among the Apostles with their brownish tones. Not only are they subject to earthly gravity; something else has entered: the element of drawing takes hold. This you can see in Titian's picture. Why is it so?

Well, brown having already left the realm of color, it cannot express Mary's beauty; something not belonging entirely to the realm of the beautiful would be injected. If Mary stood or sat among the Apostles and were colored as they are, it would be a great offense. I am now speaking only of this picture and do not maintain that when standing on earth Mary must be in every instance, artistically speaking, an offense. But in this picture it would be a blow in the face if Mary stood below. Why?

Because if she stood there colored like the Apostles we would have to say that the artist presented her as virtuous. This is the way he presents the Apostles; we cannot conceive of them otherwise than looking upward in their virtue. But this for Mary would he inappropriate. With her, virtue is so self-evident that we must not express it. It would be like presenting God as virtuous. If something is self-evident, if it has become the being itself, we must not express it in mere outer semblance. Therefore Mary soars up into a region beyond all virtues, where we cannot say of her, through colors, that she is virtuous, any more than we can say of God that He is virtuous. He may, at most, be virtue itself. But this is an abstract, philosophical statement having nothing to do with art. With the Apostles, however, the artist succeeded in representing, through his color treatment, virtuous human beings. They are virtuous.

Let us look at how the genius of language reflects this truth. Tugend (virtue, in German) is related to taugen (to be fit, in German). To be fit, to be able to cope with something morally, is to be virtuous. Goethe speaks of a triad: wisdom, semblance and power. Art is the middle term: semblance, the beautiful; wisdom is formless knowledge; virtue is power to carry out worthwhile things effectively.¹

Since ancient times this triad has been revered. Once, years ago, a man said to me—and I could appreciate his point of view—that he was sick and tired of hearing people speak of the true, the beautiful and the good, for anyone in search of an idealistic expression mouthed the phrase. But in ancient times these realities were experienced not externally but with complete soul participation. Thus in the upper region of Titian's picture we see wisdom not yet transcendent, radiating artistically because of the way it is painted. In the middle, beauty; below, virtue, that which is fit. What is the inner nature of the fit? Here is manifest the genius, the profundity, of the languages active among men. If we proceeded in an exterior way we might be reminded of a certain hunchback who went to church and listened to a priest describing quite externally how everything in the world is good and beautiful and fit. Waiting at the church door, the hunchback asked the priest: You said the idea of everything is good—have I, too, a good shape? The priest replied: For a hunchback you have a very good shape.

If things are considered as externally as this, we shall never penetrate to the depths. In many fields modern observation proceeds so. Filled with external characteristics and definitions, men do not know that their ideas turn round and round in circles.

In respect to virtue it is not a question of fitness for just anything, but of fitness for something spiritual, so that a person places himself into the spiritual world as a human being. Whoever is a complete human being by reason of his bringing the spiritual not merely to manifestation but to full realization through his will is—in the true sense—virtuous. Here we enter a region which lies within the human and religious, but no longer within the artistic, sphere, and least of all within the sphere of the beautiful. Everything in the world contains a polarity. Thus we can say of Titian's picture: Above Mary he is in danger of passing beyond the beautiful, there where he reaches the abyss of wisdom. Below, he comes to the brink of the other abyss. For as soon as a painter represents the virtuous, meaning that which man realizes through his own being, out of the spiritual, he again leaves behind the beautiful, the artistic. The virtuous human being can be painted only by characterizing virtue in its outer appearance, let us say by contrasting it with vice. But an artistic presentation of virtue as such is no longer possible.

Where in our age do we not forsake the artistic? Simple life conditions are reproduced crudely, naturalistically, without any relation to the spiritual, and without this relation there is no art. Hence the striving of impressionism and expressionism to return to the spiritual. Though in many cases clumsy, tentative, exploratory, it is better than the inartistic copying of a model.

Furthermore, if one grasps the concept of the artistically-beautiful, one can deal with the tragic in its artistic manifestations. The human being who acts in accordance with his thoughts, who lives his life intellectualistically, can never become really tragic. Nor can the human being who leads an entirely virtuous life. The only tragic person is one who in some way leans toward the daimonic, that is to say, toward the spiritual, whether in a good or bad sense. Today in this age when man is in the process of becoming free, daimonic man, that is man under the influence of tutelary spirits, is an anachronism. That man should outgrow the daimonic and become free is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean age. But as he progresses in freedom the possibility of tragedy diminishes and finally ceases. Take ancient tragic characters, even most of Shakespeare's: they have a daimonism which leads to the tragic. Wherever man had the appearance of the daimonic-spiritual, wherever the daimonic-spiritual radiated and manifested through him, wherever he became its medium, tragedy was possible. In this sense the tragic will have to taper off now; a free mankind must rid itself of tutelary spirits. This it has not yet done. On the contrary, it is more and more falling prey to such forces.

But the great task and mission of the age is to pull human beings away from the daimonic towards freedom. The irony is that the more we get rid of the inner daimons which make us tragic personalities, the less do we get rid of external ones. For the moment modern man enters into relation with the outer world, he encounters something of the nature of daimons. Our thoughts must become freer and freer. And if, as I say in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, thoughts become will impulses, then the will also becomes free. These are polaric contrasts in freedom: free thoughts, free will.

Between lies that part of human nature which is connected with karma. And just as once upon a time the daimonic led to tragedy, so now the experiencing of karma can lead to inmost tragedy. Tragedy will flourish when man experiences karma. As long as we live in our thoughts we are free. But the words with which we have clothed our thoughts, once spoken or written, no longer belong to us. What may happen to a word I have uttered! Having absorbed it, somebody else surrounds it with different emotions and sensations, and thus the word lives on. As it flies through the world it becomes a power proceeding from man himself. This is his karma. Because it connects him with the earth, it may burst in on him again. Even the word which leads its own existence because it belongs not to us but to the genius of language may create the tragic. Just in our present time we see mankind at the inception of tragic situations through an overestimation of language, of the word. Peoples wish to separate themselves according to language, and their desire provides the basis for the gigantic tragedy which during this very century will break in upon the earth. This is the tragedy of karma. If past tragedy is that of daimonology, future tragedy will be that of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if in everything artistic there is some relationship to the spiritual, you will understand that with the artistic we place ourselves, creatively or through enjoyment, in the spirit world. A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert. He does not worry about who will look at his picture or whether anybody at all will look at it, for he creates within a divine-spiritual community. Gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company. What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture. A person may be an artist in complete loneliness. Yet he cannot become one without bringing, by means of his creation, something spiritual into the world, so that it lives in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this basic connection, art becomes non-art.

To create artistically is possible only if the work has a relationship to the world. Those ancient artists who painted pictures on the walls of churches were conscious of this fact; they knew that their murals stood within earth life insofar as this is permeated by the spirit; that they guided believers.

One can hardly imagine anything worse than painting for exhibitions. It is horrible to walk through a picture or sculpture gallery where completely unrelated subjects appear side by side. Painting lost meaning when it passed from something for church or home to an isolated phenomenon. If we paint or view a picture in a frame, we can imagine ourselves looking out through a window. But to paint for exhibitions—this is beyond discussion. An age which sees value in exhibitions has lost its connection with art. By this can be seen how much waits to be done in culture if we would find our way back to the spiritual-artistic. Exhibitions must be overcome. Of course some individual artists detest exhibitions. But today we live in an age when the individual cannot achieve very much unless his judgment grows out of a world-conception permeating fully free human beings; just as world-conceptions permeating people in less free ages led to the rise of genuine cultures. Today we have no real culture.

Only a spiritual world-conception can build up true culture, the indubitably artistic.

• 1. The English word virtue, derived from the Latin vir, man, carries a similar connotation of power. (Translators)

In the short lecture before the eurythmy performance this morning, I pointed out how modern man’s relation to the celebration of the festivals has gotten ever deeper into materialism. Of course, in order to see this a much deeper view of materialism must be taken. The most threatening symptom is not that man is infected by materialism but he is infected by the superficiality of our time, and this is far more dangerous.

This superficiality exists not only in relation to the spiritual views of the world, but also in relation to materialism itself. One usually only pays attention to its most superficial phenomena. In this regard I pointed out this afternoon, for example how, in olden times people were still receptive to the moods which could be experienced in the course of the year and which came to be expressed in the festival celebrations. These moods were embodied in the winter solstice festival, the spring festival, the St. John’s festival and the Michael festival—these were embodied in ritual-like celebrations in which these moods were embedded, and they took hold of man as he consciously experienced the course of the year.

Thereby something was given to the soul which today is only given to man’s body. We all still participate in the course of the day. When the sun sends its golden rays announcing the dawn we eat our breakfast. When it is at its highest point and pours out its warmth and light with special love over mankind, we eat lunch, and so on through midday, snack, and supper. In those daily festival events, we accompany the course of the sun through the day by co-experiencing in our souls the fiery trip of the sun around the world. We participate in this fiery ride around the world by overcoming the craving for food with the contentment of feeling satiated. And so the mood for the physical organism exists in a very decided and definite way at different times of the day. We can call breakfast, snack, dinner, snack, supper, the festivals of the day. The human physical organism accompanies what takes place between earth and cosmos.

In a similar way the course of the year was experienced intensively in the soul in olden times through instinctive clairvoyance. Actually, certain things played from one sphere over into the other. You need but remember what has been left as remnants of these festivals: Easter eggs, stuffed geese, etc. The lower bodily region plays into the soul region which ought also to experience the course of the year. Well, the easiest way to stimulate interest in the course of the year in our materialistic time would be by making available—I do not want to say “Easter eggs”,—but “stuffed turkeys.”

But this is not the way it was meant in olden times with regard to festival moods. They were attuned, rather, to soul-hunger and soul satisfaction. The soul of man needed something different at Christmas, Easter, St. John’s, and Michaelmas time. And one can really compare the content of the celebration to a kind of satisfying the hunger of the soul at different seasons.

So as we look at the daily path of the sun, we can say that it is related to what serves the needs of the body; as we look at the yearly course of the sun, we can say that it is related to what serves the needs of the soul.

If festivals are to become alive again, it would have to happen out of a much more conscious condition, out of an awakening of the soul as it is striven for in anthroposophical endeavors. We cannot just base a renewal of the Festivals on old history; we would have to rediscover them through a new knowledge, a new world-conception, out of our own soul-being. But, besides the body and soul, we also differentiate the human spirit.

However, for modern man it is already difficult enough to have a clear picture when someone speaks of the soul. Everything becomes a sort of indefinite fog. Already in the nineteenth century when they began to speak of psychology, they began to speak of a soul-science without a soul. Fritz Mauthner, the great language critic, found that we really do not know anything about the soul, we only experience something indefinite, certain thoughts and feelings, but really nothing of a soul reality. We ought not, therefore, to use in the future the world “soul” but “dis-soul” (Geseel). Mauthner advises, that in the future, when a poet intends to write a real work he ought not to say: “Sing immortal Soul, the sinful man’s redemption,” but rather, “Sing immortal What-cha-macall-it, the sinful men’s redemption”—if in the future it still would make sense to speak of something like that.

Today we can really say that modern man knows nothing more of the connection of his soul with the sun’s yearly course. He became a materialist in this region, also. He sticks to the festivals of the body which follow the daily course of the sun. The festivals are celebrated out of traditional habits but no longer experienced. Yet we have, besides a body, also a soul, and yes, also a spirit.

Let us now take into consideration the historical epochs. Those epochs, which reach far beyond the course of the year, encompassing centuries, are co-experienced by the human spirit, if it experiences them at all. In olden times they were most certainly experienced. He who knows how to enter, carried by the spirit, into the way the course of time was followed in the past knows how it was said: at this or that time some personality appeared out of the heights of the world and revealed the spirit again. And this spirit entered as the sunlight enters the physical. If such an epoch then entered its twilight phase, something new appeared.

Historical epochs are related to the evolution of the human spirit, as the course of the sun through the year is related to the soul evolution. Of course, wherever such metamorphoses, such changes in spirit evolution occur, it must happen through fully conscious cognition. Today, one would like to ignore such metamorphoses completely. One is outwardly touched by the effects, but one does not wish to consider seriously those changes emanating from the spirit which are nevertheless expressed in the outer events.

It would be helpful to pay attention to a certain direction of thinking and feeling appearing in children and young people, which was unknown to earlier generations, and which, when looked at properly in the course of the development of humanity, can really be compared to the course of the year. Therefore it would be good to listen to what the different ages proclaim as a need, to listen to the way in which a new age arises and how human beings demand something different from what might have been demanded in ages gone by. But just for this contemporary man has a very inadequate organ.

When we approach the festival mood in the right way out of a contemporary consciousness, the great relationships of life can again fill our souls. When we, for example, let something like the St. John’s mood really enter our soul, then we try to gain for our soul what will be met by the cosmos.

Certainly, the great world connections have become a matter of indifference for modern mankind. There is no heart for getting to know the great world relations. It is quite evident how the spirit of littleness, narrowness, I would like to say, the spirit of the microscope, the spirit of atomizing appears, which, when mentioned in the way I do, seems paradoxical.

I would like to point to something definite in relation to the St. John’s mood which, however, seems quite far-fetched. What is more obvious (even if one has not developed an organ for the course of the year) than the impression of growing plants, growing trees: when spring comes, things sprout, grow, everything goes from leaf to blossom. All this growing makes the impression as though the cosmos, with its sun forces, calls upon the earth to open itself to the cosmos, and this happens at St. John’s time.

Then begins a retreat of the sprouting, and we approach the time when the earth collects the growing forces into itself, when the earth withdraws from the cosmos. How obvious it is that from the received impressions one gets the picture that the snow-cover belongs to winter, when the being of the plants crawls, so to speak, into the earth; that it belongs to summer for the plants to grow towards the cosmos. What is more natural than to get this idea—although in a deeper sense the opposite is correct—that the plants sleep in winter and wake in summer.

I do not wish to speak now about the correctness of this sleeping and waking. I wish to speak only of the impression one receives, which leads to the thought that summer belongs to growing vegetation, and winter to the withdrawal of growth. In any case, a kind of world-feeling develops in which one is engaged in relating to the warming, bright force of the sun when seeing this force again in the greening, blossoming plant-cover of earth, and immersing into the feeling of being an earthly hermit with regard to the cosmos when the plant cover is replaced with snow in winter. In short, by so feeling, one tears oneself free with one’s consciousness from earth existence. One places oneself in a larger relation to the universe.

Now comes modern research—and what I am saying now is in no way critical, on the contrary—now comes modern research and shrugs its shoulders whenever great cosmic connections are referred to. Why should one feel elevated to divine radiating warming forces of the sun when the trees are shooting, becoming green, when earth covers itself with a cover of plants? Why should one have to sense a cosmic relation on seeing this plant cover? It is disturbing. One cannot bring such sentiments into harmony with a materialistic consciousness. Plant is plant. It seems like stubborness of the plant to blossom only in spring, or to be ready in summer to bear fruit. How does this actually work? One is supposed to be concerned not only with the plant but with the whole world? If one is to feel, to know, one is supposed to be concerned with the whole world, not only with the plant? That doesn’t sit right. Is one not already making an effort to avoid dealing with substances existing in powder or crystal forms, but rather just to deal with atomic structures, atomic cores, with electromagnetic fields, etc.? One tries to deal with something enclosed, not with something that points in so many directions. In the case of the plant is one supposed to admit that a sensing is needed that reaches to the whole cosmos? It is really awful if one cannot narrow one’s view to a singular object! One is used to, when using the microscope, to have everything limited to a narrow view. Everything takes place in the small enclosure. It must be possible to look at a plant by itself, not in connection to the whole cosmos!

And look, at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century the scientists succeeded to an extraordinary degree in this region. It was known, of course, from some plants in hothouses, greenhouses, that the mere summer and winter aspects of the plant could be overcome. But on the whole, not enough could be discovered about the plant needing a certain winter rest. Discussions about tropical plants occurred. The researcher, who did not want to know about plants being connected with the cosmos, maintained that the tropical plant grows throughout the year. The others, more conservative, said: one thinks this because plants have their winter rest at different times, some only for eight days. This being so, makes it imperceptible when a certain species is dormant. Long detailed discussions concerning tropical plants took place. In short, one became aware of a tremendous discomfort concerning the relation of plants to the cosmos.

But the most interesting and grandiose experiments in this direction were made exactly at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, when one succeeded in driving the stubborness out of the plants in the case of a great number of not only annuals, but also trees, which are much stronger: to drive out the cosmic stubborness from the plant. It was possible to do this in plants known as annuals by creating certain conditions. In the case of most of the trees growing in the temperate zone, conditions could be established which caused them to remain green all year round, to give up their winter sleep. This then provided the basis for certain materialistic explanations. In this way really magnificent accomplishments were achieved.

It was discovered that the cosmic element could be driven out of trees if they were brought into enclosed spaces, given enough nourishing minerals, making it possible that plants in winter-time, when the soil is poor in minerals, can find this nourishment. If enough moisture, warmth, and light is supplied, the trees will grow. However, one tree in Central Europe was defiant: the Blood Beech. It was approached from all sides to give up its independence and subjected to isolation in a prison. It was provided with everything necessary, but remained stubborn, and demanded nevertheless its winter rest. But it was the only one that still resisted.

And now we must record that in the twentieth century, in 1914, the beginning of the war, another great historical event occurred: the immense, mighty accomplishment of the most capable researcher, Klebs, who was able to compel the Blood Beech to give up its independence. He simply was able to bring it into an enclosed space, provide the necessary nutrients, warmth and light, which could be measured, and the Blood Beech submitted to the demands of research.

I am not mentioning this phenomenon in order to criticize it, for who can help but wonder at this most diligent scientific labor. Besides, it would be silly to try to disprove the facts. They exist and are there. It is not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, but something quite different.

Why should it not be possible if somewhere on neutral ground the necessary condition for hair-growing existed, to grow hair outside the human or animal realms? Why not? One need only bring about the conditions. I know many would rather have hair growing on their heads than in some culture, but we can imagine it to be possible. Then it would no longer be necessary to bring anything that happens on earth together with what happens in the cosmos.

With all due respect to research, one must look deeper. Aside from what I said recently about the being of the elements, I would like to say something more today. One must be clear that, for example, the following is the case: we know that once earth and sun were one body. Of course this is long ago, during the Saturn and Sun periods. Then there was also a short repetition of those periods during the Earth period. But something remains behind which still belongs there. And this we bring forth again today. And we bring it forth from the repetitious condition on earth not only by heating our rooms with coal, but we bring it forth by using electricity. For, what remains from those times after Old Saturn and Old Sun, when the sun and earth were one, that provided the basis for what we have today on earth as electricity. We have in electricity a force which is sun-force, long connected with the earth, a hidden sun-force in the earth.

Why should not the stubborn Blood Beech, when approached forcefully enough, be induced to use not the sun that radiates from the cosmos, but to use the sun force retained within the earth, the Old Sun force, electricity?

Looking in this way we become aware of the necessity of deeper knowledge. As long as man could believe that the sun force comes only from the cosmos, man arrived at the perception of the relationship of the plant world to the cosmos. Today, when from a materialistic point of view, one would like to separate from the cosmos what so easily can be seen as cosmic effect, one must, if one looks at the seeming independence of the plant, have a science which recalls that cosmic relation between earth and sun which once existed, but in a different form. By being narrowed on the one hand by the microscope, we simply need a much wider expansion on the other hand, and especially the details show how much we need an expanded view.

The problem is not a dilettantic anthroposophical opposition to progress in research. But since progress in research necessarily leads through one’s own nature, it can bring us to the often mentioned “night-crawler view” and prevent that wide view of the great cosmic historic connections between earth and sun, which enables us to be conscious not only of the present sun, but also of the Sun of long past conditions. Everywhere we need the polarity, the counter-pole: not opposition to research, but the spiritual counterpole is what is needed. This is the position we need to take. And I would like to say it is also the mood of St. John’s time. When we inscribe clearly into our sentiment that we now have to live in a world-historic St. John’s mood, we carry our gaze into cosmic distances. That is what we need in spiritual cognition. Nothing is gained by mere talking about spirit; what is important is real penetration into the concrete phenomena of the spiritual world. What we bring forth by pointing to Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions, etc., has a tremendous supporting force regarding historic cognition.

When our attention is called to such brilliant results of materialistic science as those discovered by Klebs, that even the stubborn Blood Beech can be compelled to grow with electric light, this will lead us, without spiritual science, to the point where we will shatter everything into pieces and have a very narrow view. The Blood Beech will stand before us, growing in electric light, and we will know nothing except what this very narrow picture tells us.

With spiritual science, however, we can say something else: Klebs took the sunlight from the Blood Beech. He then had to give her electric light, which is actually ancient sun light. Our view is not narrow, but greatly enlarged. So, those who do not want to know of the soul experience will say glibly that one day is just like the next. There is breakfast, snack, dinner, snack, supper,—it is even nice when at Christmas time we get a nice cake—but basically every day is a repetition of the previous day. In fact material man sees only the day. But what about cosmic connections? Let us free ourselves of such a world view. Let us become clear that the stubborn Blood Beech no longer needs the sun. If we imprison her and give her enough electricity, she will grow without the sun. No! She will in fact not grow without the sun. But we need to seek the sun in the right way when we do something like that. And we must be clear that it is different when the Blood Beech grows in the sunlight or when ahrimanic sunlight, originating from long-past, is forced upon her. And we recall what has often been mentioned as the two polarities of Lucifer and Ahriman.

With an adequately wide view of these things we will not admire our brilliance at having overcome the stubbornness of the beech, but go much further. We will progress on to the sap of the beech, and investigate its effect on the human organism, investigate both the beech we permitted to be stubborn and the one which we treated with electric light, and we might discover something very special about the healing forces of one as opposed to the other. But we must do this by considering the spiritual!

But of what concern is this to people today? One has an admirable interest in research. One sits in the classroom, is an experimental psychologist, writes down all kinds of words which must be remembered, examines memory, experiments with children, and arrives at most interesting information. Once the interest is awakened, everything is interesting, depending on the subjective point of view. Why should it not be possible that a stamp collection is more interesting than a botanical collection? Since this is so, why not also in other realms? Why should the tortures to which children are subjected when they are experimented with, be not interesting? But the question everywhere is, whether or not there are higher responsibilities, and whether it is really justified to experiment with children at a certain age. The question arises: what is one ruining? And the greater question: what damage is done to the teachers, when instead of asking of them a living, heartfelt relation, one asks of them an experimental interest out of the results of experimental psychology. So everything depends, in such research, on whether or not one has the right relation to the sense world, and also to the supersensible world.

Now certain people who emphasize the necessary objectivity of research will assert that there are some who find it immoral when Klebs takes the stubbornness out of the Blood Beech. This would not occur to me. I wouldn’t dream of it. Everything that is done ought to be done, but one must have a counterweight for it. In the time when one emancipates oneself with regard to the growing beech tree from the cosmos, one must on the other hand, in a civilization which does such things, also have a sense for how the spiritual progress of man takes place. One must have a sense for the epochs of time, like ours. I do not want to limit research, but one must feel the necessity of a counter measure. There must be an open heart for the fact that at certain times spiritual impulses want to reveal themselves. When on the one hand materialism takes over and great achievements result, then those who are interested in such achievements should also be interested in the achievements of research about the spiritual worlds.

This lies in the inner nature of Christianity. A true view of Christianity sees, after the Mystery of Golgotha, the continuing of the Christ being in the earth, in the Christ force, the Christ impulse. And this means that when autumn comes, when everything dries up, when the growing and sprouting in nature ceases, ceases for the senses, then one can see the growing and sprouting of the spirit which accompanies man during the winter time.

But in the same way one must learn to sense how, although justifiable, the view for detail is narrowed in a certain way, the view for the totality for the great whole is narrowed. With regard to Christianity this is the St. John’s mood. We must sense with understanding that the St. John’s festival mood is the starting point for that occurrence which lies in the words: He must increase, I must decrease.

This means that the impressions upon man of everything that is accomplished by empirical research must decline. As the sense details are ever more enhanced, the impression of the spirit must be more and more intensified. And the sun of the spirit must shine more and more into the human heart, the more the impressions of the sense world decline.

The St. John’s mood must be experienced as the entrance into spirit impulses and as exit from the sense impulses. In the St. John’s mood we must learn to sense wherein something weaves and wafts like a soft wind, wafts the spiritually demonic out of the sensible into the spiritual, and from the spiritual into the sensible. And through the St. John’s mood we must learn to form our spirit light so that it does not stick like tar to the solid contour of ideas, but finds itself in weaving, living ideas. We must learn to notice the lighting up of the sensual, the dimming of the sensual, the lighting up of the spiritual in the dimming sensual. We must learn to experience the symbol of the June bug: the lighting up has its meaning as does the dimming of the light.

The lightning bug lights up, dims down, but by dimming down it leaves behind in us the living life and weaving of the spirit in the twilight evening, in the dusk. And when we see in nature everywhere the little waves as in the symbolic lighting up and dimming of the lightning bug, we will find the right St. John’s mood if it is experienced with clear, bright, full consciousness. And this St. John’s mood is necessary, for we must in this way pass through our time if we do not want to fall into the abyss, pass through in such a way that the spirit becomes glowingly alive and that we learn to follow it.

The St. John’s mood:—towards the future of the earth and mankind! No longer the old mood which understands only the growing and sprouting on the outside, which is pleased when it can imprison this growing and sprouting under electric light what otherwise was thriving in the sunlight. Rather we must learn to recognize the lighting up of the spirit so that the electric light becomes less important than it is today, so that the St. John’s gaze becomes sharpened for that old sunlight which will appear when we open ourselves to the great spiritual horizon, not only to the narrow earthly horizon, but the great horizon from Saturn to Vulcan.

If we allow the light of the great horizon to shine in the right way, then all the trivialities of our time will appear in this light, then we will go forward and upward; but if we cannot make this decision we will go backward and downward.

Today everything revolves around human freedom, human will. Everything revolves around the independent decision of either going forward or backward, upward or downward.

[ 1 ] During these fateful times, in central European cities, I have had to give lectures based on some of the views developing in me for thirty-five years about the thought-worlds of a series of German and Austrian personalities. I wanted to speak about personalities in whose thoughts urgent life questions were striving for a solution, and in whose spiritual struggles the essential nature of the German people (Volkheit) also revealed itself. I would like to take what I expressed there as the leading thoughts for this book. This book is meant to speak about the striving of the human spirit for knowledge of its own being, in connection with seekers who pursued neither their own personal infatuations in knowledge nor arbitrary aesthetic inclinations, but rather thoughts that arise from an irresistible, healthy urge of human nature and are native to the heart's needs of a people, in spite of the spiritual heights toward which those seekers were striving. We will be speaking, to be sure, about personalities whose sense for the realities of life is often denied by those who do not want to acknowledge that the human being is confused and incapacitated by the surface of reality if he cannot confront it with understanding for the spirit holding sway in the depths. Thoughts struggling for a knowledge of the spirit are often repellent to that attitude of soul which is far too eager to cite Goethe in opposing such thoughts: “Gray, dear friend, is all theory—and green the golden tree of life.” That attitude of soul disregards the fact that these words come from Goethe's sense of humor and are put into the devil's mouth as a teaching the devil considers good for a pupil of his.

It does not affect a life-sustaining thought to be called gray by a view catering to comfortableness in thinking; this view regards the grayness of its own theory as the golden radiance of the green tree of life.

[ 2 ] It goes against the feeling of many to speak about the effects of a people upon the world views of personalities who spring from this people. To do so, they believe, contradicts the obvious truth that knowledge of the true is a treasure of life possessed by all men in the same way. This is really just as valid for the highest thoughts of a world view as it is for the commonplace truth that two times two is four. But just because this is so obvious, one should not suppose without going further into the matter, that this obvious fact has been overlooked by someone seeking, within the being of the thinkers of a people, the roots of the people from which these thinkers stem. The human spirit, after all, lives not only in the abstract formation of certain concepts; it also draws its life from forces which souls, out of their most intimate experiences, allow to sound along with the insights born from these experiences. Goethe felt this when he wrote to a friend: “To judge by the plants and fish I have seen in Naples and Sicily, I would, if I were ten years younger, be very tempted to make a trip to India, not in order to discover something new, but rather to contemplate in my own way what has already been discovered.” Goethe in fact knows how something already discovered can be seen in a new light when it is regarded in a new way. And what humanity develops in the way of thoughts for its spiritual life about questions of knowledge speaks not only about what people are seeking, but also about how they seek. Someone receptive to such thoughts feels in them the soul pulse that heralds the life from which they shine into our reason. Just as it is true that in a thought one also learns to know its thinker, it is evident that in a thinker one can behold the people from which the thinker has arisen.

As to the content of truth dwelling in a thought and as to whether a mental picture (Vorstellung) has grown from the roots of genuine reality: these can certainly be determined only by powers of knowledge that are independent of place and time. Still, as to whether a particular thought, as to whether an idea leading the human spirit in a certain direction, arises within a certain people: this does depend upon the sources from which the spirit of this people can draw. Karl Rosenkranz certainly did not want to prove anything about the truth of Hegel's thought from the fact that he brought these thoughts into connection with the German folk spirit, when in 1870 he wrote his book Hegel as the German National Philosopher. He held the view he had already expressed in his description of Hegel's life: “A true philosophy is the deed of a people ... But at the same time, for philosophy, insofar as it is philosophy, the particularities of its folk origins are of no importance at all. There, the universality and necessity of its content and the perfection of its proof are alone of significance. Whether the true is recognized and expressed by a Greek or German, by a Frenchman or an Englishman, carries no weight for the true itself, as true. Every true philosophy, therefore, as a national philosophy is at the same time a universally human one and, in the larger course of humanity, an indispensable part. It has the power to spread absolutely through all peoples, and for every people there comes the time when that people must acquire for itself the true philosophy of the other peoples, if it wants in other ways to further and assure its own progress.”

[ 3 ] One's antipathy to the folk aspect of the thoughts in a world view can also assume other forms. Out of a recognition of the folk aspect of such thoughts one can raise an objection against their cognitive value. One might believe that such thoughts are thrust thereby into the realm of imagination, and that one must speak of them in the same way as of a German poetry, for example, whereas it would be inadmissible to speak in the same sense of a German mathematics or a German physics. There are people who see every world view—every philosophy—as a poetic work in concepts (Begriffsdichtung). Such people do not need to concern themselves with the objection that arises out of the feeling described above. But what this book presents is not written from that point of view. This book takes the position that no one can speak seriously about a world view who does not ascribe a cognitive value to it, who does not presuppose that its thoughts stem from realities common to all people. One can also say: “That is correct, in general; but a world view valid and common to all people is an ideal that has nowhere been realized as yet; all existing world views still carry with them what has been imposed upon them by the imperfection of human nature.” But we can dispense with any discussion here of imperfections existing in world views because of that human factor. For, it is certainly not our intention, in the folk characteristics of the thoughts in world views, to seek excuses for the weakness of such thoughts, but rather grounds for their strength. Therefore, we can leave out of our considerations here the assertion that thinkers, in fact, just as they are dependent upon their personal standpoints, are also dependent upon what adheres to them from their people; and that, just because of this, they cannot win through to a universally human world view. This book speaks about a series of personalities in such a way that their thoughts are acknowledged as really having universal human validity. What are characterized as errors or as one-sided views are spoken of only insofar as one can see in them roundabout ways to the truth. If an unconditionally valid objection could spring from the feeling mentioned above, such an objection would be justified with respect to the way in which the thoughts in world views are brought into connection, in this book, with the essential being of the German people.

But one can understand the reply that must be made to this feeling only if one can free oneself from a belief which also causes serious misapprehensions in other ways. This belief is that the diverse thought-configurations of thinkers who are searching into questions of how to view the world are in fact just so many different, mutually incompatible world views.

[ 4 ] Out of this belief the natural-scientifically minded person often opposes the mystic, and the mystic often opposes the natural-scientifically minded person. The scientist believes that natural-scientific knowledge alone is the true result of research into reality; it is from this knowledge that one must gain thoughts able to bring understanding of the world and of life, so far as this understanding is attainable to man. The mystic adheres to the view that the true being of the world reveals itself only to mystical experience, and that the thoughts of the natural-scientifically minded person cannot lay hold of genuine reality. The “monist” is content only when he pictures the existence of a unified foundation for the material and the spiritual world. One kind of monist sees this foundation consisting in the material elements and their effects, in such a way that spiritual phenomena become for him manifestations of the material world. Other monists ascribe true being only to the spirit, and believe that everything material is only a kind of spirituality. The dualist sees in any such unification a misunderstanding both of the essential being of matter and of the spirit. In his view, both must be regarded as regions of the world that are more or less independent in themselves.

A long list would result if one wanted to characterize even just the most outstanding of these supposed world views. Now there are in fact many people who believe they have gone beyond all talk of world views. They say: “I guide myself in knowledge according to what I find within reality; what some world view or other considers reality to be does not concern me.” Such people do indeed believe this; but their behavior shows something totally different. They do, in fact, more or less consciously, or even unconsciously, adhere in the most definite manner to one or another world view. Even though they do not express or think this world view directly, they do develop their picture of the world along its lines and oppose, reject, or treat the mental pictures of other people in a way corresponding to this “world view.”

[ 5 ] A misapprehension of the relationship of man to the world outside him underlies the conscious or unconscious belief in any such supposed world views. The person who is caught up in this misapprehension does not distinguish rightly between what man receives from the outer world for the formation of his thoughts, and what he brings up out of himself when he forms thoughts.

[ 6 ] When one notices that two thinkers express different thoughts about the questions of life, one all too readily has the feeling: If both were bringing true reality to expression in their thoughts, they would have to say the same thing, not something different. And one thinks that the difference cannot have its basis in reality but must lie only in the personal (subjective) way thinkers grasp things. Even though this is not always openly acknowledged by those who speak about world views, this opinion does underlie—more or less consciously, or even unconsciously—the spirit and style of their words. In fact, the thinkers themselves for the most part live in just such a preconception. They express their thoughts on what they consider reality to be, regard these thoughts as their “system” and rightful world view, and believe that any other direction in thought is based on the personal peculiarities of the thinker.

The presentation in this book has a different view as its background. (This view, to be sure, can at first be presented here only as an assertion. I hope the reader will be able to find in the book itself some substantiation for this assertion. In many of my other books I have made every effort to bring much more of this substantiation.) Two divergent directions in thought, in their essential nature, can often be understood only by regarding their differences to be like those between two photographs of one tree taken from two different sides. The pictures are different; their differences, however, are not based upon the nature of the camera, but rather upon the position of the tree relative to the camera. And this position is something lying just as much outside the camera as the tree itself. The pictures are both true views of the tree. The divergent elements of two world views do not prevent them both from bringing true reality to expression.

The confusion in ideas arises when people do not understand this, when they make themselves—or are made by other people—into materialists, idealists, monists, dualists, spiritualists, mystics, or even into Theosophists, and when they mean to express by this that one arrives at a true view about life's sources only if one's whole way of thinking is in tune with one of these concepts. But it is reality itself that one wants to know from one side through materialistic ideas, from another side through spiritual ideas, from a third side as a unity (monon), from a fourth as a duality. The thinking person would like to encompass the essential being of reality through one way of picturing things. And when he notices that he undertakes this in vain, he gets around this fact by saying: All our mental pictures about the roots of real life have a personal (subjective) form, and the essential being of the “thing-in-itself” remains unknowable.

So much confusion in our thought life could be cleared up by realizing that many a person, in speaking of a world view different from his own, is like someone who—knowing a picture of a tree taken from one side, and being presented with a picture taken from another side—does not want to admit that it is a “correct” picture of the same tree! [ 7 ] Many “practical” people, to be sure, seek refuge from such tormenting philosophical questions by saying: “Let those fight about these things who have the leisure and the desire for it; that doesn't affect reallife; real life does not have to bother about that,” But only those can speak in this way, after all, who have absolutely no inkling of how far removed their thoughts are from the real driving powers of life. It is such people whose picture stood before the soul of Johann Gottlieb Fichte when he spoke the words: “Although, within the sphere that ordinary experience has drawn around us, people themselves are thinking more universally and judging more correctly, perhaps, than ever, still the majority of them are totally confused and blinded as soon as they are supposed to go even a short distance outside that sphere. If it is impossible to rekindle in them the spark of higher genius once that has been extinguished, then one must let them remain peacefully within that sphere, and, insofar as they are useful and indispensable within that sphere, let their value, in and for that sphere, remain undiminished. But when they themselves now demand that everything to which they cannot lift themselves be brought down to their level, when they demand, for example, that all printed matter should be like cookbooks, arithmetic books, or service regulations, and when they decry everything that cannot be used in this way, then they themselves are in error in a major way.—We others know, perhaps as well, perhaps even better than they, that ideals as such cannot appear in outer reality. We only assert that reality must be judged according to ideals and, by those who feel the strength within them to do so, must even be changed according to ideals. When people cannot convince themselves of this fact, very little is lost to them, given that they already are who they are; and mankind loses nothing. It merely becomes clear that such people cannot be counted upon in any plan to ennoble mankind. Mankind will doubtless proceed on its way; and may benevolent nature hold sway over such people and bring them rain and sunshine at the right time, wholesome nourishment and undisturbed circulation of their juices, and also clever thoughts!”

It is actually a disaster when the ideas, fruitful for life, of the individual world views are kept at a distance from this life by the belief that their differences prove them all to be subjectively colored by the thinkers' ways of picturing things. Through this a semblance of justification is given to the talk of those opponents of ideas just characterized. It is not the content of thinkers' world views that condemns these world views to fruitlessness for life, but rather the belief, following in their wake, that a particular direction in thought must reveal all of reality or else these are all views with a merely personal coloring.

This book would like to show the extent to which the truth—and not just personally colored views—lives in the ideas of individual thinkers, in spite of their differences.

[ 8 ] Only by trying to know how far reality reveals itself in its relation to man through different ways of picturing things does one also struggle through to a sound judgment about what originates in the being of the thinker who is observing the world. One sees how the nature of one thinker is moved toward one relationship between extrahuman (objective) reality and man, and how that of another thinker is moved more toward a different relationship. First of all one sees the sharply marked, personal direction of a personality's thought. Because one notices how his world view is based upon a personal tendency in thought, one is tempted to believe that his world view is therefore only a personal (subjective) way of picturing things. But if one recognizes how a personal tendency in thought, in fact, moves the thinker to adopt a particular viewpoint through which extrahuman (objective) reality can place itself in a particular relationship to him, then one wrests oneself from the confusion into which one can fall by looking at the different world views.

[ 9 ] Many people will perhaps reply to this: Yes, from a certain point of view, all that is completely obvious and does not need to be stated beforehand. But the person who says this is often precisely the one who, in his judgments and actions, violates this view of truth and reality everywhere.

[ 10 ] But the view we have presented is not meant to justify every human opinion that regards itself as a world view. Actual errors, faultiness in the sources of knowledge, viewpoints from which only a beclouded fantasy would want to create thoughts for a world view: all this will in fact reveal itself in the light toward which our view is pressing. By seeking to experience the extent to which the one reality manifests itself in divergent human thoughts, our view can also hope to see where a human opinion is rejected by reality itself.

[ 11 ] If one senses how the forces of a people work in the thinkers of a people, then this sense stands in complete harmony with the view presented here. A people does not want to decide how a thinker is to shape his thoughts; but, together with other forces determining his viewpoint, his people affects the relationship to existence through which reality, in one direction or another, manifests itself to him. His people need not cloud his power of vision; it can prove particularly able to put the thinker belonging to it in a place where he can develop a certain way of picturing the truth common to all mankind. His people does not want to judge his knowledge; but it can be a faithfully supportive adviser on the way to truth. Indications about the extent to which this can be sensed with respect to the German people are meant to be given in this book by portraying a series of personalities who have arisen out of this people. The author of this book hopes that one will recognize his sense that a loving, thoughtful penetration into the particular soul nature of one people does not necessarily lead to a non-recognition and disregard for the being and worth of other peoples. At another time it would be unnecessary to state this specifically. It is necessary today in view of the feelings that are expressed from many sides about what is German.

[ 12 ] It is completely natural for the author of this book to speak about the part played in spiritual life by both German and German-Austrian personalities; he is, after all, a German-Austrian by birth and education, who lived his first three decades of life in Austria, and then a period of time—which will soon be just as long—in Germany.

In his book The Riddles of Philosophy he has expressed his thinking on the place held by most of the personalities discussed in this present book within the general spiritual life. It was not his intention to repeat here what he said there. He can readily understand that someone could hold a different view than he does about the choice of the personalities portrayed. But, without striving for completeness in anyone direction, he wanted simply to portray some things that have become perception and life experience for him.

Rudolf Steiner
Berlin, May 1916

Addition, for the Second Edition of 1918

[ 13 ] If, as an observer, one confronts the “thinking, observations, and contemplations” of a personality, one can sense that one is observing forces at work in the soul of such a personality which give the direction and particular characteristics to his way of picturing things, but which he himself does not make into a content of his thinking. This sense must not lead to the vain opinion that one can place oneself as observer above the personality observed. The fact that, as an observer, one has a different viewpoint than the observed personality makes it possible for one to say many things that the other has not said—that he has indeed not confronted in his own thinking, but has left within his unconscious soul life—because through his not saying certain things, what he did say attained its full significance. The more significant what a man has to say is, the more extensive is that which holds sway unconsciously in the depths of his soul. What is unconscious in this way, however, sounds forth in the souls of those who penetrate into the thinking and contemplations of such a personality. And they may also raise it into consciousness, because for them it can no longer hinder what they want to say.

[ 14 ] The personalities with whom this book is concerned seem, to a particularly strong degree, to be of the kind that stimulate one to press on through what they have said to what they have left unsaid. Therefore the author of this book, from the viewpoint he has taken, believed he could make his presentation a complete one only by adding the final chapter, “New Perspectives.” He believes that in doing so he has not introduced something into the views of these personalities that does not belong there, but rather has sought the source from which these views, in the true sense of their thought content, have flowed. In this case what was left unsaid is a rich seed bed from which what has been said grew as individual fruits. If, in observing these fruits, one also becomes aware of the seed-bearing ground from which they have sprung, then precisely through this one will realize how—with respect to what the soul must experience in dealing with the most significant riddles of man—one can find in the personalities portrayed in this book a profound stimulus, powerful indications in sure directions, and strengthening forces in gaining fruitful insights. By looking at things in this way one can overcome the aversion to the seeming abstraction of the thoughts of these personalities that prevents many people from approaching them at all. One will see that these thoughts, regarded in the right way, are filled with a boundless warmth of life—a warmth that the human being must seek if he really understands himself rightly.

[ 1 ] The loneliness I then experienced in respect to that which I bore in silence within me as my world-conception, while my thoughts were linked to Goethe on one side and to Nietzsche on the other – this loneliness was my experience also in relation to many other personalities with whom I felt myself united by bonds of friendship but who none the less energetically opposed my spiritual life.

[ 2 ] The friend whom I had gained in early years but whose ideas and my own had become mutually so divergent that I had to say to him: “Were that true which you think concerning the essential reality of life, then I had rather be the block of wood under my feet than a man” – this friend still continued bound to me in love and loyalty. His welcome letters from Vienna always carried me back to the place which was so dear to me, especially because of the human relationships in which I was there privileged to live.

[ 3 ] But if this friend undertook in his letters to speak about my spiritual life, a gulf then opened between us.

[ 4 ] He often wrote me that I was alienating myself from what is primal in human nature, that I was “rationalizing the impulses of my soul.” He had the feeling that in me the life of feeling was changed into a life of mere thought, and this he sensed as a certain coldness proceeding from me. Nothing which I could bring to bear against this view of his could do any good. I could not avoid seeing that the warmth of his friendship gradually diminished because he could not free himself of the belief that I must grow cold as to what was human since I passed my soul-life in the region of thought.

That, instead of being chilled in this life of thought, I had to take with me into this life my full humanity in order by this means to lay hold upon reality in the spiritual sphere – this he would never grasp.

[ 5 ] He failed to see that the purely human persists, even when it is raised to the realm of the spirit; nor could he see how it is possible to live in the sphere of thought; it was his opinion that one can there merely think and must lose oneself in the cold region of abstractions.

[ 6 ] Thus he made me out a “rationalist.” In this view of his I felt there was the grossest misunderstanding of what was reached by my spiritual paths. All thinking which turns away from reality and spends itself in the abstract – for this I felt the innermost antipathy. I was in a condition of mind in which I would develop thought drawn from the sense world only to that stage at which thought tends to veer off into the abstract; at that point, I said to myself, it ought to lay hold upon the spirit. My friend saw that I moved in thought out of the physical world; but he failed to realize that in that very moment I stepped over into the spiritual. Therefore, when I spoke of the really spiritual, this was to him quite non-existent, and he received from my words merely a web of abstract thoughts.

[ 7 ] I was deeply grieved by the fact that, when I was really uttering that which had for me the profoundest import, yet to my friend I was talking of a “nothing.” Such was my relationship to many persons.

[ 8 ] What so entered into my life I had to perceive also in my conception of the understanding of nature. I could recognize as right only that method of nature-research in which one applies one's thought to the task of looking through the objective relationships of sense-phenomena; but I could not admit that one should by means of thought elaborate concerning the region of sense-perception hypotheses which then are to be referred to a supersensible reality but which, in fact, constitute a mere web of abstract thoughts. At that moment in which thought has completed its work in fixing that which is rendered clear by the sense-phenomena themselves, when rightly viewed, I did not desire to begin with the framing of hypotheses, but in perception, in the experiencing of the spiritual which in reality lives, not behind the sense world, but within it.

[ 9 ] What I then held firmly as my own view in the middle of the 'nineties I later set down briefly as follows in an article I published in 1900 in No. 16 of the Magazin für Literatur: “A scientific analysis of our activity in cognition leads ... to the conviction that the questions which we have to address to nature are a result of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities, and for this reason we can become aware of the world only in fragments. Each piece, of and for itself, is a riddle; or, otherwise expressed, it is a problem for our understanding. But the more we come to know the details, the clearer does the world become to us. One act of becoming aware makes clear the others. Questions which the world puts to us and which cannot be answered with the means which the world gives us – these do not exist. For monism, therefore, there are on general principles no limits to knowledge. At one time this or that may not be clarified, because we are not yet in position, as to either space or time, to find the things which are there concerned. But what is not found to-day may be found to-morrow. Limits determined in this manner are only accidental, such as will vanish with the progress of experience and of thought. In such cases the formation of hypotheses legitimately comes into play. Hypotheses should not be formed in regard to anything which by its nature is inaccessible to our understanding. The atomic hypothesis is utterly without foundation when it is considered, not merely as an aid to abstract thought, but as a declaration regarding real being beyond the reach of our qualitative experience. A hypothesis must be merely an opinion regarding a group of facts which, for accidental reasons, is inaccessible to us but which belongs by nature to the world given to us.”

[ 101 ] I stated this view regarding the forming of hypotheses because I wished to show that “limitations of knowledge” were not proven, and that the limitations of natural science were a necessity. At that time I did this as to the understanding of nature only in a side reference. But this way of forming thoughts had always laid down the road for me to advance farther by means of the knowledge of spirit beyond that point at which one dependent upon the knowledge of nature reached the inevitable “limitation.”

[ 11 ] A contentment of soul and profound inner satisfaction were mine at Weimar by reason of the artistic element brought into the city by the art school and the theatre, and the musical people associated with these.

[ 12 ] In the teachers and students of painting in the art school there was revealed what was then struggling out of the ancient traditions toward a new and direct perception and reflection of nature and life. A good many among these painters might properly have been considered “seekers.” How that which the painter had as colour on his palette or in his colour-pot could be applied to the surface in such a way that what the artist created should bear a right relationship to Nature as she lives and becomes visible to man's eyes in creating – this was the question which was constantly heard in the most varied forms, in a manner stimulating, often pleasantly fanciful, and from the artistic experience of which there originated the numerous paintings that were displayed by Weimar artists in the frequent art exhibitions.

[ 13 ] My artistic experience was not then so broad as my relation to experiences in the realm of knowledge. Yet I sought in the stimulating intercourse with the Weimar artists for a spiritual conception of the artistic.

[ 14 ] To retrospective memory, that which I then experienced in my own mind seems very chaotic – when the modern painter who sensed the mood of light and atmosphere and wished to give these back took up arms against the “ancients” who knew from tradition how this or that was handled. There was in many of them a spiritualized striving – derived from the most primitive forces of the soul – to be “true” in the reproduction of nature.

[ 15 ] Not thus chaotic, however, but in most significant forms appeared to my mind the life of a young painter whose artistic way of revealing himself harmonized with my own evolution in the direction of artistic fantasy. This artist, then in the bloom of youth, was for some time in the closest intimacy with me. Him also life has borne far away from me; but I have often recalled in memory the hours we spent together.

[ 16 ] The soul-life of this young man was all light and colour. What others expressed in ideas he uttered by means of “colours in light.” Indeed, his understanding worked in such a way that he combined things and events of life as one combines colours, not as mere thoughts combine which the ordinary man shapes from the world.

[ 17 ] This young artist was once at a wedding festival to which I also had been invited. The usual festival speeches were being made. The pastor took as content of his talk the meaning of the words bride and groom. I endeavoured to discharge the duty of speaking – which rested upon me because I was a frequent visitor at the friendly home from which the bride came – by talking of the delightful experiences which the guests were permitted to enjoy at that home. I spoke because I was expected to speak. And I was expected to make the sort of speech “belonging to” a wedding feast. So I took little pleasure in “the role” I had to play. After me arose the young painter, who also had long been a friend of the family. From him no one expected anything; for everybody knew that such ideas as are embodied in toasts simply did not belong to him. He began somewhat as follows: “Over the glimmering red crest of the hill the glance of the sun poured lovingly. Clouds breathing above the hill and in the gleam of the sun; glowing red slopes facing the sunlight, blending into triumphal arches of spiritual colours giving a pathway to earth for the downward striving light. Flower surfaces far and wide; above these the air, gleaming yellow, slips into the flowers awakening the life in them ...” He spoke in this way for a long while. He had suddenly forgotten all the wedding merriment about him and begun “in the spirit” to paint. I do not know why he ceased thus to speak in painter fashion; I suppose his coat-tail was pulled by someone who was very fond of him, but who also wished equally that the guests should come to a peaceful enjoyment of the wedding roast meat.

[ 18 ] The young painter's name was Otto Fröhlich. He often sat with me in my room, and we took walks and excursions together. While Otto Fröhlich was with me, he was always painting “in the spirit.” In his company one could forget that the world has any other content than light and colour.

[ 19 ] Such was my feeling about this young friend. I know that whatever I had to say to him I placed before his mind clothed in colours in order to make myself intelligible to him.

[ 20 ] And the young painter really succeeded in so guiding his brush and so laying on the colours that his pictures were in a high degree a reflection of his own luxuriant, living colour fantasies. When he painted the trunk of a tree, there appeared on the canvas, not the delineated shapes of a picture, but rather that which light and colour reveal from within themselves when the tree-trunk gives them the opportunity to manifest their life.

[ 21 ] In my own way I was seeking for the spiritual substance of colour in light. In him I was forced to see the secret of the being of colour. In Otto Fröhlich there stood beside me a man who individually bore instinctively within him as his experience that which I was seeking for the taking up of the colour-world through the human soul.

[ 22 ] It gave me pleasure to be able through this very search of mine to give the young friend many a stimulus. The following was an instance. I myself experienced in a high degree the intensive colours which Nietzsche describes in the Zarathustra chapter on “the most hateful man.” This “Valley of Death,” described like a painting by Nietzsche, held for me much of the secret of the life of colour.

[ 23 ] I gave Otto Fröhlich the advice to paint poetically the picture done by Nietzsche in word colours of Zarathustra and the most hateful man. He did this. And now something really remarkable came to pass. The colours concentrated themselves, glowing and very expressive, in the figure of Zarathustra. But this figure as such did not come out fully, since in Fröhlich the colours themselves could not yet unfold themselves to the extent of creating Zarathustra. But so much the more living did the colour variations boil up into the “green snakes” in the valley of the most hateful man. In this part of the picture all of Fröhlich lived. But now the “most hateful man” There it would have required the line, the characteristic of painting. This Fröhlich refused. He did not yet know how there actually lives in colour the secret of causing the spiritual to take on form through the very handling of the colour itself. So “the most hateful man” became a reproduction of the model called by the Weimar painters “Füllsack.” I do not know whether this was really the name of the man always used by the painters when they wished to deal with the characteristically hateful; but I know that “Füllsack's” hatefulness was no longer merely conventional, but had something of genius in it. But to place him thus unchanged as a copy in the picture where Zarathustra's soul revealed itself shining in countenance and in apparel, when the light conjures forth true colour-being out of its intercourse with the green snakes – this ruined the painting of Fröhlich. Thus the picture failed to become what I had hoped might come to pass through Otto Fröhlich.

[ 24 ] Although I could not but realize the sociability in my nature, yet at Weimar I never felt in overwhelming measure the impulse to betake myself where the artists, and all who felt socially bound up with them, spent the evenings.

[ 25 ] This was in a romantic “Artists' Club” remodeled out of an old smithy opposite the theatre. There, united together in a dim-coloured light, sat the teachers and students of the Academy of Painting; there sat actors and musicians. Whoever sought for sociability must feel himself impelled to go to this place in the evenings. And I did not feel so impelled just for the reason that I did not seek companionship, but thankfully accepted it when circumstances brought it to me.

[ 26 ] In this way I became acquainted with individual artists in other social groups, but did not come to know the artistic world.

[ 27 ] To know certain artists at Weimar in those days was of vital value. For the tradition of the Court and the extraordinarily sympathetic personality of the Grand-duke Carl Alexander gave to the city an artistic standing which drew to Weimar, in one relation or another, everything artistic which was active in that period.

[ 28 ] There, first of all, was the theatre with the good old traditions – disinclined in its leading representatives to allow a naturalistic flavour to come into evidence. And where the modern would fain show itself and expunge many a pedantry, which nevertheless was always associated with good traditions, there modernity was kept far away from that which Brahm propagated on the stage and Paul Schlenther through the press as the “modern conception.” Among these “Weimar moderns” the chief of all was that wholly artistic noble fire-spirit, Paul Wiecke. To see such men take in Weimar the first steps of their artistic career gave one an ineradicable impression, and was a comprehensive school of life. Paul Wiecke used the basement of a theatre which, because of its traditions, annoyed the elemental artist. Very stimulating hours have I spent at the home of Paul Wiecke. He was on terms of intimate friendship with my friend Julius Wahle, and because of this I came very close to him. It was often delightful to hear Wiecke grumbling over almost everything that he must endure when he had to do the dress rehearsals for a new performance. Then, with this in mind, to see him play the role that he had so abused, and which nevertheless, through his noble endeavour after style and through his beautiful spiritualizing fire, afforded one a rare enjoyment.

[ 29 ] Richard Strauss was then making his beginning in Weimar. He was second director along with Lassen. The first compositions of Richard Strauss were performed in Weimar. The musical craving of this personality revealed itself as a piece of the very spiritual life of Weimar. Such a joyful unreserved acceptance of something which in the act of its acceptance became an exciting problem of art was then possible at Weimar alone. Round about one the peace of the traditional – a highly prized and worthy mood; now enters amid this Richard Strauss with his Zarathustra Symphony or even his music for the buffoon. Everything wakes up in tradition, reverence, worth; but it wakes up in such a way that the assent is lovable, the dissent harmless – and the artist can find in the most beautiful way the reaction to his own creation.

[ 30 ] How many hours long we sat at the first performance of Richard Strauss's music drama Guntram, in which the lovable and humanly so distinguished Heinrich Zeller played the leading role and almost sang himself out of voice!

[ 31 ] Indeed, this profoundly sympathetic man, Heinrich Zeller – even he had to leave Weimar in order to become what he did become. He had the most beautiful elemental gift of song. He needed for his unfolding an environment which, with the utmost patience, permitted that such a gift should in developing itself experiment over and over again. And so the evolution of Heinrich Zeller is to be numbered among the most human and beautiful things which one could ever experience. Besides, Zeller was such a lovable personality that one must count the hours one could spend with him among the most stimulating possible.

[ 32 ] And thus it came about that, although I did not often think of going in the evening to the Artists' Club, yet, if Heinrich Zeller met me and said I must go with him, I always yielded gladly to this demand.

[ 33 ] The state of things at Weimar had also its dark side. That which is traditional and peace-loving often held the artist back as if in a sort of seclusion. Heinrich Zeller became very little known to the world outside of Weimar. What was at first suited to enable him to spread his wings later crippled these wings. And so it was always with my dear friend Otto Fröhlich. He needed, like Zeller, the artistic soil of Weimar, but the dim spiritual atmosphere absorbed him too much in its artistic comfort.

[ 34 ] And one felt this “artistic comfort” in the pressure of Ibsen's spirit and that of other moderns. There one shared with everything – the battle waged by the dramatist, for example, in order to find the style for a Nora. Such a seeking as one could there observe occurs only where, through the propagation of the old stage traditions, one meets with difficulties in the effort to represent what comes from poets who have begun, not like Schiller with the stage, but like Ibsen with life.

[ 35 ] But one also shares in this reflection of this modernism out of the “artistic comfort” of the theatrical public. One ought to find a middle way between the two circumstances: first, that one is a dweller in “classical Weimar,” and, on the other hand, that what has made Weimar great has been its constant understanding for the new.

[ 36 ] It is with great happiness that I remember the productions of Wagner's music dramas at which I was present in Weimar. The Director von Bronsart developed a specially understanding devotion to this type of theatrical productions. Heinrich Zeller's voice then reached its most exquisite value. A remarkable gift as a singer belonged to Frau Agnes Stavenhagen, wife of the pianist Bernhard Stavenhagen, who was also for a long time director at the theatre. Frequent music festivals brought the representative artists of the time and their works to Weimar. One saw there, for example, Mahler as director at a music festival when he was just getting his start. Ineradicable was the impression of the way in which he used the baton – not aiding music in the flood of forms, but as the experience of a supersensible hidden something visibly pointing amid the forms.

[ 37 ] What came before my mind from these Weimar events – seemingly quite unrelated to me – is really deeply united with my life. For these were excitations and states which I experienced as pertaining in the deepest manner to me. Often afterwards, when I have encountered a person, or the work of a person, with whom I have shared experiences at his beginning at Weimar, I have recalled with gratitude this Weimar period through which so much became intelligible because so much had gathered from elsewhere there to pass through its germinal stage. Thus I then experienced in Weimar the artistic strivings in such a way that in regard to most of these I had my own opinion, often very little in harmony with those of other persons. But at the same time I was just as intensely interested in everything which others felt as in my own feelings. Here also there came to pass within me a twofold mental life.

[ 38 ] This was a genuine discipline of the mind, brought to me by life itself in the course of destiny, in order that I might find my way out from the “either or” of abstract intellectual judgment. This sort of judgment erects barriers separating the mind from the spiritual world. In this there are not beings and occurrences which admit of such an “either or” judgment. In the presence of the supersensible one must become many-sided. One must not merely learn theoretically, but must take everything to dwell in the innermost emotions of the soul's life, in order to view everything from the most manifold points of view. Such standpoints as materialism, realism, idealism, spiritualism, as these have been elaborated in the physical world by personalities with abstract ways of thinking into comprehensive theories in order that they may signify something for things in themselves, – these lose all interest for one who knows the supersensible. He knows, for example, that materialism cannot be anything else but the view of the world from that point from which it reveals itself in material phenomena.

[ 39 ] It is a practical training in this direction when one finds oneself in the midst of an existence which brings the life whose waves beat outside of one's own so inward as to become as close as one's own judgments and feelings. But for me this was true of much in Weimar. It seems to me that at the close of the century this ceased to be true there. Until then the spirit of Goethe and of Schiller still rested upon everything. And the lovable old Grand-duke, who moved about with such distinction in Weimar and its vicinity, had as a boy seen Goethe. He truly felt very strongly his “Your Highness,” but he always showed that he felt himself a second time ennobled through the work that Goethe did for Weimar.

[ 40 ] It was the spirit of Goethe which worked so powerfully from all directions at Weimar that to me a certain side of the experience of what was happening there became the practical mental discipline in the right conception of the supersensible worlds.

Spengler speaks of the sleeping plant-life and uses expressions such as these: “A plant has Being without Waking-being. In sleep all beings become plants: the tension with the environment is extinguished, the rhythm of life goes on. A plant knows only the relation to the When and Why. The pressing of the first green tips out of the winter-earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole mighty process of blossoming, giving out aroma, shining, ripening: all this is the wish for the fulfilling of a destiny and a continuous yearning question after the When.”

In contrast to this is the awakeness of animals and men. Awakeness develops an inner life. But this is torn away from cosmic being. It seems as though, in the experiences of awakeness, nothing remains of the urging, driving cosmic forces which become destiny in the plant-world. This feeling of being torn away is fully worked out in Spengler's views.

In the life of men, the plant-like element continues to work. It rules in the subconscious activities which appear as the results of the mysterious forces of the “blood.” Out of the “blood” arises what lives as the element of destiny in mankind. In contrast to this, what is formed by waking consciousness appears as a chance addition to the true Being. Spengler finds sharply etched words to describe the insignificance of waking consciousness in relation to the really creative plant-like forces in human nature: “Thinking gives itself much too high a rank in life because it does not notice or recognize other methods of apprehension and thereby loses its unprejudiced view. In truth all professional thinkers—and in all cultures almost these alone are vocal—have, as. a matter of course, held cold abstract reflection to be the activity by which men attain to ‘last things’.” Rather than being profound, it is a fairly easily achieved insight which Spengler expresses with the words: “But though man is a thinking being he is far from a being whose whole life consists in thinking.” This is as true as “that two and two are four.” But for any truth it is important just how one places it into life-connections. And Spengler never once inserts thinking into life: he places it beside life. He does this because he grasps it only in the form in which it appears in modern scientific research. There it is abstract thinking. In this form it is reflection on life, not a force of life itself. Of this thinking one may say that what works formatively in life comes out of the sleeping plant-element in man; it is not the result of waking abstraction. It is true that “The real life, history, knows only facts. Life-experience and human knowledge address themselves only to facts. The acting, willing, struggling man, who daily asserts himself against the facts and makes them useful to himself or succumbs to them, looks down on mere truths as something insignificant.”

But this abstract thinking is only a phase in the development of human life. It was preceded by a picture-thinking, which was bound up with its objects and pulsed in the deeds of men. Admittedly this thinking works in a dreamlike way in conscious human life, but it is the creator of all the early stages in the various cultures. And if one says that what appears as the deeds of men in such cultures is a result of the “blood” and not of thinking, then one abandons all hope of grasping the driving impulses of history and plunges into a clouded materialistic mysticism. For any mysticism which explains the occurrence of historical events through this or that quality of soul or spirit is clear in comparison to the mysticism of the “blood.”

If we take up such a mysticism, we cut off the possibility of rightly evaluating that period of time in which human evolution progressed from the earlier pictorial forms of thinking to the abstract method. This is not, in itself, a force which drives us to action. While this worked toward the formation of scientific research, men were subject, in their actions, to the after-effects of the old impulses springing from picture-thinking. It is significant that in occidental culture during recent centuries abstract thinking continually grows while action remains under the influence of the earlier impulses. These take on more complicated forms but produce nothing essentially new. Modern men travel on railroads in which abstract thoughts are realized, but they do so out of will-impulses which were working already before railroads existed.

But this abstract thinking is only a transitionary stage of the thinking capacity. If we have experienced it in its full purity, if we have absorbed in a full human way its coldness and impotence, but also its transparency, then we shall not be able to rest content with it. It is a dead thinking, but it can be awakened to life. It has lost the picture-quality which it had as a dream-experience, but it can attain this again in the light of an intenser consciousness. From the dream-like picture, through fully conscious abstraction, to an equally fully conscious imagination: this is the evolutionary course of human thinking. The ascent to this conscious imagination stands before the men of the Occident as the task of the future. Goethe gave a start toward it when, for the understanding of the forming of plants, he demanded the idea-picture of the archetypal plant. And this imaginative thinking can engender impulses to action.

One who denies this and stops with abstract thinking will certainly come to the view that thinking is an unfruitful appendix to life. Abstract thinking makes the cognizing man a mere spectator of life. This spectator-standpoint shows itself in Spengler. As a modern man he has lived himself into this abstract thinking. He is a significant personality. He can feel how, with this thinking, he stands outside of life. But life is his main interest. And the question arises in him: What can a man do in life with this thinking? But this points us to the tragedy in the life of modern man. He has raised himself to the level of abstract thinking, but he does not know how to do anything for life with it. Spengler's book expresses what is a fact for many persons, but which they have never noticed. The men of our culture are fully awake in their thinking, but with their awakeness they stand there perplexed.

Spengler's Decline of the West is a book of perplexity. The author has a right to speak of this decline. For the forces of decay, to which others passively succumb, work actively in him. He understands them, yet he refuses to come to those forces of ascent which can be achieved in waking. Therefore, he sees only decline and expects the continuation of this in the mystic darkness of the “blood.”

An alarming trait runs through Spengler's presentation. Accomplished intellectual soul-constitution, grown confused concerning itself, approaches the events of the historical life of man only to be repeatedly overpowered by these facts. The agnosticism of modern times is taken with such complete earnestness that it is not only formulated theoretically but raised to a method of research. The various cultures are so described that each sets before us a picture which drives us to flee from our own Waking-being. But this flight is not into the fruitful dreams of the poet, which plunge into life and transform cold thinking into spirit; much more is it a flight into an artificial and oppressive nightmare. Glittering abstract thinking, which is afraid of itself and seeks to drown itself in dreams!