The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends! Today an even greater number of friends of Anthroposophy have made their appearance here, who have never before attended, and so I am obliged, with a few introductory words, to speak about the principles of the school. It certainly must be considered with utter gravity, that with the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum a breath of fresh air has come into the Anthroposophical Movement. And the entrance of this fresh air must penetrate thoroughly into awareness, especially so for the members of our School of Spiritual Science. Yes, I have pointed it out time and again, but I know that there are many friends of Anthroposophy here today, who have not yet been informed of the matter, and so I must lay it out once again.

It is certainly so, and it has had to be declared again and again since the Christmas Conference, that the Anthroposophical Movement must be strictly distinguished from the Anthroposophical Society.

The Anthroposophical Movement represents the infusion into human civilization of spiritual intervention and spiritual life-impulses, that can and should come into being in our time directly out of the spiritual world. The Anthroposophical Movement is there, not because human beings desire that it be there, but rather because it appears appropriate to the spiritual powers controlling and guiding the world, working to ensure the proper course of human history, it appears appropriate to these spiritual powers, to allow spiritual light, light that can come appropriately through Anthroposophy, to flow today into human civilization.

To that end the Anthroposophical Society was established as a governing body, to govern anthroposophical wisdom and institutions. And it had to be emphasized, time and again, that Anthroposophy is something above and beyond the Society, and that the Anthroposophical Society is merely the exoteric governance.

This has changed since the Christmas Conference here at the Goetheanum. Since the Christmas Conference it is quite the opposite. And only because the case is quite different, am I ready to clarify, with the Executive Council¹ established at the Christmas Conference, am I able to carry out the work that is appropriate, the work moreover that needs to be taken up, and only so am I able to clarify, together with the Executive Council, the assumed functions of leadership of what was established at Christmas as the Anthroposophical Society. What has happened through all this, I can address in just one sentence. This sentence is, that since Anthroposophy will now govern throughout in the Anthroposophical Society, all that occurs now within the Anthroposophical Society must be Anthroposophy itself. Since Christmas, Anthroposophy must be what is done in the Anthroposophical Society. Every individual deed must henceforth have the immediacy of an esoteric character. The appointment of the Dornach Executive Council on Christmas Day was an actual esoteric implementation, an implementation that must be considered as having come directly out of the spiritual world. Only when this is kept in mind by our anthroposophical friends can the Anthroposophical Society, which was actually founded in this manner, only then can the Anthroposophical Society flourish.

And so the Executive Council in Dornach, as underscored since the Christmas Conference, is an initiative executive council. Understandably, governance must take place. But governance is not the first matter of business to be attended to, but rather the business of allowing, of doing everything to allow Anthroposophy to flow through the Anthroposophical Society. To accomplish this is the aim.

The installation of the Dornach Executive Council took place in just such a way within the Anthroposophical Society. And it must be quite clear that from now on relationships within the Anthroposophical Society cannot be built on just any sort of bureaucratization, but rather must be built throughout on humanization. The statutes containing various paragraphs were produced in this way at the Christmas Conference. One must be aware, when one is a member, and must give affirmation to this, or else as described in detail in the statutes, the Executive Council at the Goetheanum must do what it has to do. And the Anthroposophical Society is constituted this way today. It is grounded on human relationships.

It is a small matter, but I must again and again emphasize it, that a membership card has been handed out to each member, signed by myself, so that at least, since at first it is a somewhat abstract matter, it is nevertheless handled with some personal rapport. It would have been quite possible to have had a stamp used with my signature on it. I don't do this, even though it does not lead to equanimity, by and by appending my signature to twelve thousand member-cards, I don't do it, because in reality the most abstract personal relationships would be established, in not having paused for just once, for just a moment, for each individual member, to focus on the name borne on the member's card. And self-understandably, by doing this, all future relationships will be somewhat more humanistic, and will put a mark on the commencement of concrete effective work within our society.

In this regard it must also become clear, I must emphasize this also, it must lie within the awareness of the membership, I emphasize this as otherwise many transgressions will occur, it must lie within the awareness of the membership that when the name General Anthroposophical Society is used, that the affirmation of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum has been obtained first. Even so, if something or other of an esoteric nature is distributed from the Goetheanum in Dornach and broadcast, this should only happen on the basis of an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. Therefore, so that nothing will be claimed as going out in the name of the General Anthroposophical Society, that for those of us here, nothing given here as formulation and instructions will be claimed as having been authorized by the Goetheanum, that is, unless an agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in place. No abstract relationships will be possible in the future, only concrete relationships. Whatever goes out from the Goetheanum, must have the stamp of approval of the Goetheanum, made in concrete. This is why we need the title "General Anthroposophical Society", for someone may put out something about lectures that may have been held, or about formulations of various sorts given here, someone, as an active member of the Anthroposophical Society, might share a document prepared with the letterhead of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, or from Frau Wegman, and this must give the impression that the Executive Council at the Goetheanum is in agreement. It is really important for the Executive Council at the Goetheanum to be regarded as being at the center of the Anthroposophical Movement in the future.

Now and always, the relationship of this School to the Anthroposophical Society must be held in the consciousness of the membership. Someone may be a member of the Anthroposophical Society, if he has the inner heartfelt drive to get to know, to learn to live with, what goes through the world as anthroposophical ideas of wisdom and impulses of life. One undertakes no other commitment as such, other than taking up with heart and mind what has been bestowed by Anthroposophy itself. Out of this general membership, one can, when the time is right, for now a minimum of two years has been stipulated, one can after a time of having lived within the flow of the membership of the General Anthroposophical Society, one can then seek membership in the School of Spiritual Science.

In coming into this School of Spiritual Science, a person undertakes a really serious commitment to the Society, to anthroposophical endeavors, specifically, in becoming a member, he commits to being in truth a representative of anthroposophical endeavors before the world. This is essential in this day and age. Under any other conditions, the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science cannot readily commit itself to working together with someone as a member.

Do not think that this constitutes a limitation on your freedom, my dear friends. Freedom itself requires that all who here concern themselves with this remain free. And as members of the school can and should be free in this endeavor, so also must the leadership of the school be free, that is, in being able to establish with whom they can and will work, and with whom not. Therefore, when the leadership of the school, for one reason or another, is led to conclude that a member cannot be a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, then it must be possible, for instance, if admission is sought, to disapprove the admission, or if admission has already occurred, the person under discussion having already become a member, to say that the membership must be forfeited. This must be adhered to in the future unconditionally in the strictest sense, for through this in actual fact a free working relationship of the leadership of the school with the membership will be ushered in.

As has already been stated in the Members’ Supplement to the Goetheanum News, we are endeavoring step by step to make it possible for those unable to participate at the Goetheanum to take part in some way in the continuing work of the school. In great measure all that was possible would have already been presented, but there has been much to do here since the Christmas Conference, and we can only take the fifth step after the fourth, and not the seventh step after the first. We may look through various newsletters, and in what is released to peripheral members partake of what goes on here in the school. We have already started, and those in the school involved in medical affairs may participate by partaking of the newsletter Frau Dr. Wegman is sending out concerning the work of the school. Gradually other possibilities will emerge and I beg you to be patient in this respect.

The most comprehensive thing yet to be mentioned would be this, that the school in particular must not become attached to a mode of operation stemming from human impulses, but rather to a mode of operation from the side of the spiritual world. A resolution of the spiritual world is to be taken up with whatever means are possible. This School ought to be an institution of the spiritual world for the present day, as has been the case at all times in the mysteries. It must be pronounced today that this school itself must develop, so as to become what it actually can be in our time, a real mystery school. Thereby you will come to be the soul of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Along with this, moreover, it has already been pointed out in what manner the membership of the school is to be attached in earnest to the school. It is self-evident that whatever esoteric work has been going on will be taken into the work of the school. For this School is the fundamental esoteric bedrock and wellspring of all esoteric work within the Anthroposophical Movement. And to this end, various personalities of whatever background, in founding something esoteric in the world, must have the agreement of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum. These personalities must either come into full agreement with the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, or else they cannot in the least allow what emerges from the Goetheanum to flow into their impulses or into their teachings. Whoever seeks to strive esoterically under conditions other than these just mentioned, simply cannot be a member of this School. In this case such a person must be outside of the school, striving esoterically but by this School unrecognized, and he must himself be clear, that such undertakings can incorporate nothing of what wells up within and emanates from this school. Association with the school must be as thoroughly and concretely joined as possible. In this way each member of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach, each and every member, must make clear to himself, that the school must be able to be regarded in such a manner, that a member is actually a true representative of anthroposophical matters before the world, that every single member's exoteric involvement with Anthroposophy is just so, that it is dealt with as a member of the school.

The attempt has certainly been made at the Goetheanum, in the event of my no longer being in a leadership position, no longer being the President of the Anthroposophical Society, for the school to develop in a fashion similar to other schools. Solely by means of interpersonal relationships that will not be possible. Here one finds real esoteric substance, which just cannot be found in any other school. And of course, no attempt will be made to rush into some sort of concordance with schools of the world, but rather what should begin at once, is to bring up questions, whenever an honorably searching person of today, from some area of life or another, comes upon this substance, questions that just cannot be answered outside of the esoteric.

It must be so in the future, especially for members. It is simply the way it is, for with the Christmas Conference something actually occurred, and this occurrence must be taken seriously. It has occurred, and in the future, because initiatives ought to be disseminated from this site, from the Goetheanum, in fulfilling its mission, it must be taken most seriously, it must be maintained unconditionally as a standard in fulfilling its mission, it must be crystal clear, and in the future in all the falderal attended to by members of the School it must be hearkened to, and again and again attention must be drawn back to it, in order to have a firm yet free acquaintanceship with it, which is by name, that I am present as a representative of Anthroposophy that flows forth from the Goetheanum. Whoever does not do this with a will, whoever cannot take this up again and again in an unconstrained free and easy manner, mulling over Anthroposophy quietly until after quite some time being prepared, striving in some manner or another along the lines of this policy, whoever believes that he will progress by first disavowing us in order then to be led back to us, usually does not really return to us, and should rather just give up his school membership at once. Membership in the School in the future, I can assure you, will be taken most seriously. I believe that for the various members of the school who henceforth really take up Anthroposophy with a will, taking it up not just for any reason, but taking Anthroposophy up in their work, taking up Anthroposophy in their work in the manner of holding it dear in their hearts, that it will lead again and again to the following phrase coming to mind, that one should approach people with Anthroposophy not just as immediately present and obvious. It must be communicated, by mouth or in some other fashion, in such a way that people can choose merely to remain within their own point of view outside of the school.

All this is what I must once more set out before you. And it had to be mentioned here today, because there are many, many friends of Anthroposophy who until now have not taken part in the work of this School. And specifically, because so many friends are here today who are new to the Class, we have had to wait awhile to start the lesson, we also, before the lesson has even begun, have had to attend to this preamble, which is, in a certain sense, an introduction to today's lesson. I will be holding a second lesson, the date of which is still to be determined, but no other friends will be able to attend this second lesson, other than those who are here today. Also, I will ask any others, who may be coming later, to be patient. Essentially, we cannot accomplish anything, when each time, whenever a lesson is held here, if ever and again new members arrive. With today's lesson we must be considered ourselves fulfilled with those actually in possession of memberships at this time. Certainly, one can become a member, although at the next lesson only those can take part, who are also already in such a position today. Yes, only those will be in this day's continuation.

Well, I would like here and now to begin the declamation, but at first please take note of this, that initially you are merely witnessing the mantric formulation as a reference to what initially emerged throughout time in the mysteries, and then by way of the outgoing mysteries from there hence unto the stars, as the imprinted script unto the entire cosmos, and into human souls, resounding in human hearts, resounding as the great clarion call to human beings, to strive after a real insight, a real knowing of one's self. The clarion call is this, "O Man, know yourself!" It resounds out of the entire cosmos.

As we gaze out to the resting stars, to those stars that in especially significant script stand in the zodiac, to those resting stars which through their gathering together in certain forms bring to expression the great cosmic script, then for one who understands this writing, there will initially be inscribed the contents of the Word of Worlds "O Man, know yourself!"

As one gazes out upon those, that as wandering stars journey along their ways, initially the sun and the moon, although also the other wandering stars, among which are the sun and the moon, then may be revealed, wrapped into the journeying paths of these wandering stars, as also in the forms of the resting stars, the content of the world-strengthening, soul-daunting Word of Worlds, and just so in the movement of the heart’s-, the heart’s world-content, the contents of one’s innermost nature.

And we take part through what we experience in the elements around about us out in the circumference of the earth, as well as experiencing them through our skin, through our senses, through having them nearby us, moving in us, and acting in our own bodies as Earth, Water, Fire, Air, through all that will the impulse of willing be embossed in the following words.

In this way we may allow the Word of Worlds to be intoned to human beings, to work on our souls by means of these mantric words:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, nothing is known but what flows forth from the spiritual world. Whatever passes as knowing by mankind, but is neither fathomed from what emerges from the spiritual world, nor is shared by those who are able to quest within the spiritual world, is not real knowing. The human being must be clear about this, when he gazes around about the world, gazing in the realms of nature at the things that present themselves in color upon color, at the things that are revealed radiant and resplendent, at the things living overhead in the beaming stars, at the things presenting themselves in the warmth of the sun, and at the things that sprout forth out of the earth. In all of these things there is sublimity, grandeur, beauty, and the fullness of wisdom. And a person would be greatly in error, if he were to blithely pass by this beauty, sublimity, enormity, and fullness of wisdom. The person must, when an esoteric wishes to press on with him into real knowing, he must also have a sense of whatever is around about himself in the world, an open, free sense. For during the time between birth and death, during his earthly existence, he is obliged to draw his forces out of the forces of the earth, to carry out his work within the forces of the earth.

But so true it is, that the person certainly must take part in all that is around him in color after color, tone after tone, warmth after warmth, star after star, cloud after cloud, creature after creature in the external realm, so true it is, that the person looks there around about at all of the abundance, grandeur, sublimity, fullness of wisdom, and beauty imparted to him through the senses, and can nowhere find anything, of what he himself is. Directly then, as he has a real sense of the sublimity, beauty, and grandeur in his surroundings in life on earth, then he will immediately take notice, that nowhere to be found in this light, bright realm of earth is the innermost source of his own existence. It is elsewhere. And having a full, inward appreciation of this, this brings the person to the point of seeking an opening into the state of awareness in which he can grapple with what we call the threshold to the spiritual world. This threshold, that lies immediately before an abyss, this must be approached, and when there it must be remembered, that in all that surrounds a person on the earth in earthly existence between birth and death, the fountainhead of what it is to be a human being is not to be found.

Then one must know that on this threshold stands a spirit-form that is called the Guardian of the Threshold. This Guardian of the Threshold is concerned in a way for the welfare of the person, that the person does not come unprepared, without having thoroughly lived with and taken deep into his soul the things that I have already spoken about, that the man does not approach this threshold unprepared.

However then, when the person in all seriousness is really prepared for spiritual knowing, and it may be that he acquires it in clairvoyant consciousness, or it may be that he acquires it through healthy common sense, for in keeping informed both are possible. Whichever is the case, whether knowing about or seeing the Guardian of the Threshold, just then is it possible, that the Guardian of the Threshold may really reach out with a guiding hand and allow the person to look out over the abyss. There, where the person seeks his inner being’s true condition, his actual origin, lying there initially, however, on that side of the threshold, is uttermost darkness.

My dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we seek light, in order to see the origins of our own human essence in the light. Darkness however spreads out at first. The light that we seek must stream out of the darkness. And it streams out of the darkness only when we become aware of how the three fundamental impulses of our individual soul-life, namely thinking, feeling, and willing, are held together here in life on earth through our physical body. In physical earth existence thinking, feeling, and willing are bound together.

If I were to draw it bundled together schematically, I would draw it first with thinking [yellow], then with feeling [green] extending over into thinking, and then with willing [red] extending over into feeling. In this way the three are bound together in earthly existence.

The person must learn at heart that the three may separate from one another. And he will learn this when he steadfastly, more and more, takes the meditations recommended by this School as the forceful content of his life of soul. He will notice that it starts to happen. [It was once again drawn on the board.] Thinking [yellow] will become free, cast loose from its union with feeling, as will his feeling [green], as will his willing [red]. For the person learns to perceive without his physical body.

The physical body had been holding thinking, feeling, and willing together, drawn together into one another. [Around the first drawing an oval was drawn.] Here [by the second drawing of thinking, feeling, and willing] the physical body is not at hand.

Gradually, through the meditations that he receives here from the school, the person begins to feel himself outside of his body, and he comes into that state of being in which whatever the world is, for him will be the self, and whatever self was, for him will be the world. As we stand here on the earth in our earthly existence, we feel ourselves as human beings, we say, in that we become inwardly aware, that this is my heart, these are my lungs, this is my liver, this is my mouth. The various things that we call our organs, called by us our human organization, we label as our own. And we identify around about, there is the sun, there is the moon, there are the stars, the clouds, a tree, a stream. We denote these various things as being external to us, as we are bound up in our organs. We are quite distinct from those things that we identify externally as the sun, the moon, the stars, and so forth.

When we have prepared our soul sufficiently, so that we are able to perceive without the body, that is, distinct from the body, in the spirit-all, then a directly opposite awareness commences. We speak then of the sun as we speak here in earth existence of our heart, namely, that is my heart. We speak of the moon as that which forms my character. We speak of the clouds in a manner similar to speaking of our hair on earth. We call our organism all of what was a part of the whole surrounding world for the earthly man. And we identify outwardly, look there, a human heart, a human lung, a human liver, they are objective, they are the world. And as we here as men and women look out toward the sun and moon, as we gaze about in a physical body, so do we gaze about from the perspective of the world-all, in which the sun and moon and stars and clouds and streams and mountains are in us, and we look out at the person, who is our external world. The difficulty is only in the relationship of space. And this difficulty will be overcome.

And we may be sure, that as soon as we step out with our thinking out of our physical body, this thinking is at one with all that reveals itself in the resting stars. As we call our brain here, that it serves as the workhorse of our thinking, so do we begin to appreciate the resting stars, namely the resting stars of the zodiac, as our brain, when we are out there in the world and then gaze down upon the man external to us.

And those things that revolve as wandering stars, we perceive as just what our force of feeling is. Our power of feeling moves then in the coursing of the sun, the moon, in the coursing of the other wandering stars. Yes, between what we experience as thinking in the resting stars, and feeling, is the sun within ourselves [Between yellow and green on the second drawing, the sign of the sun was placed.] And between feeling and willing lies the moon, which we feel as being within ourselves. [Between green and red the sign of the moon was placed.] And quite simply, in meditating on these figures, lying within these figures is the force, ever more and more, for us to approach a spiritual perspective. One may come to this only when the substance of what I speak, of what I articulate here with these words, can actually be inwardly experienced, namely going out and beyond the physical body, extending oneself out over the cosmos, feeling the members of the cosmos, sun and moon, stars, and so forth, as one's own organs, and looking back at the person as being in the external world.

Dear friends, dear brothers and sisters, the thinking that people practice here on the earth between birth and death is just a corpse. It is not living. What a person otherwise likes to dwell on endlessly in his head about beauty, sublimity, and grandeur about the physical world in his vicinity, these thoughts do not live. But in pre-earthly existence they were living. They were living, these thoughts, before we descended into the physical world, while we were still living as beings of soul and spirit in the soul-spiritual world. Thoughts such as we have here upon the earth were full of life there, and our physical body is the grave in which the dead world of thoughts is buried, when we descend down upon the earth. And here we carry the thought-corpses within us. And with the thought-corpses, not with fully living thoughts, we think about what is in our sensory surroundings here upon the earth. But before our descent down into this physical world, there was active in us fully alive thinking.

My dear friends, one only needs, ever again and forever, with all of one's inner power and force, to thoroughly absorb this truth within. One comes to the point of developing in one's awareness a certainty that it is so. One learns to know the person as such. One learns to know him, so that one can gaze upon him, and say, there is the human head. [An outline of a head was drawn.] This human head is the base and the bearer for earthly corpse-thinking. They sprout forth, [It was drawn as an elongated form down to the right.] these thoughts, but dead, overlaid upon what has been taken in through the eyes, taken in through the ears, through the sense of warmth, taken in through other senses. This is how we regard thinking, in reference to the earth.

But gradually we learn to penetrate through this thinking. Behind it in the spirit-cell of the human head, there still reverberates true, living thinking, the thinking in which we lived before we descended into the physical world. As one gazes at a person, then most certainly one gazes initially at his dead thinking [Drawn as a red part of the head.]. But behind this dead thinking, in the head's spirit-cell, is living thinking. [Drawn as a yellow part of the head.] And this living thinking has brought along the primal force to construct our brain. The brain is not the producer of thinking, but rather the product of pre-birth living thinking.

And so, if one were to gaze with the proper awareness behind what the person reveals in the superficiality of his head's earthly dead thinking, looking into what is behind the spirit-cell, then one might gaze upon the living thinking which certainly is there. This is similar to an act of will coming to one's attention, willing as such in the human musculoskeletal system, for it is certainly there in us, but sleeping. We simply don’t know how a thought goes down, when it has the intention, the will, to make this or that happen in our muscles and elsewhere. Looking at what lives in us as willing, we behold willing in the spirit-cell as the thinking that lies behind sensually aligned thinking. However, the willing we behold there, which we are becoming aware of as thinking, is the creative force for our thinking-organ. There this thinking is no longer just human-thinking, there this thinking is world-thinking.

Understanding a person in this way, somehow being able to look behind earthly thinking, to the thinking which first made the foundation for earthly thinking in the brain, this allows sensual thinking to be cast off into the worldly void, and what emerges as an act of will is eternal thinking.

All of this brings us into the state of mind, within which we can allow the mantric words to work in us.

Look² behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened³ spirit cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

The imagination must gradually stand before you, my dear friends, the imagination that from the top of your head are streaming out the dead thoughts that are aligned with the sensory world. Behind this lies true thinking, at first merely as darkness, shining behind and through the sensory thinking, the true thinking that actually configured the brain, into which a person descends out of the spiritual world into the physical. It is however a sort of willing. And one sees, then, how willing ascends from a person [A few white lines were drawn from below upward.], spreading out then in the head, and then becoming world-thoughts, because what lives in willing as thinking, is even now world-thinking.

Toward this end one seeks ever more fully to understand, ever more inwardly to grasp, and ever more and more to bring to an inner anchorage the mantric thoughts which one places within the soul, with these words, in the following way. [The first stanza was written on the board.]

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit cell

Please note that one must gaze behind the thinking. [Behind was underscored.]

Willing ascends from bodily depths;

Now one must be strong in soul, to allow the customary sensory thoughts to be cast off.

Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

In these seven lines is contained most certainly the secret of human-thinking in its connection with the world-all.

One must not make a pretense of this, in just grappling with these things with the intellect. One must allow these things to live as meditations in the heart's depth. And these words have strength. They are constructed harmonically. Thinking, willing, worldly-void, willing, and world-thought creating [These words were underlined on the board.] are joined together here in an inner organization of thought, so that they can work effectively upon imaginative awareness.

Even as we can look behind the human head, the human head becoming a mediator in gazing into world-thought creating, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation, the physical representation, the imaginative representation of the human soul. Even as thinking is the abstract representation of the human spirit, so may we glance behind the human heart, as the representation of feeling. Even so we can gaze into feeling as it is related to the ways of earth in human earthly existence between birth and death. We can gaze into feeling, although here not behind feeling, but rather within feeling [drawing, a yellow oval]. Then, just as we may discern world-thought-creating behind spirit-cell-thinking, so we may grasp in feeling, the representation of the heart, we may truthfully grasp in feeling, streaming through feeling, something that goes in and out of a person from the entire cosmos. World-living is what we truly grasp, world-living that in men and women becomes human-soul-living.

As it must stand there [in the first verse], "behind thinking's sensory light," so must it now be called, "into feeling's" in the second mantra, which must become harmonically interwoven together with the first.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

[The second stanza was now written on the board.]

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Feeling is merely a waking dream. Feelings are not so well known to a person as are thoughts. They become known to him as the builder of dreams. In such manner are feelings dreams while awake. And just so are they called.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams

Living

Here [in the first verse] "willing" streams out of body's depths, although here streaming out of world distance into soul-weaving is "living." [The word living was underlined, and the mantric line was continued.]

streams from world afar;

[In the drawing four horizontal arrows were made.]

Now similarly, as here [in the first verse], thinking should be cast out through strength of soul into the world-void, we now allow feeling’s dreams to waft away, in order, however, to discern in feeling's fabric of soul, what streams in as world living. When feeling's dreams fully fade away in sleep, when the individual human feeling ceases, then moving within a person is world-living.

Living streams from world afar;

[The writing was continued.]

Through calm of heart in sleep

Here [in the first verse] we need strength of soul; here [in the second verse] we need complete inner peace in sleep to allow feeling's dreams to fade away, and for heavenly world-living to stream into the human soul.

Through calm of heart in sleep

[The writing was continued, and the words "waft away", "world living", and human-being's-power" were underlined.]

Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

In these seven lines is the whole secret of human feeling, how out of the unity into the trinity, it can itself contain self-understanding.

Even so we can gaze out upon the human limbs, in which willing manifests. There, when we gaze out upon these human limbs, in which willing manifests, [On the drawing, a white arrow was drawn up in elongated form.], there we cannot say "look behind" or "look into", there we must say, "look over," for thinking streams down from the head in willing. In customary awareness a person is not able to observe it, but streaming from the head into the limbs are thoughts, in order that willing can work in the limbs.

Then, however, when we observe willing working in the limbs, when we see in every arm movement, when we see in every leg movement, how the stream of willing streams, then we will also be aware, how in this willing a secret thinking lives, a thinking that grasps earthly existence immediately. Yes, it has been laid in the foundation of our being from earlier lives on earth, that just there, through the limbs, earthly existence is grasped, apprehended, so that through this apprehension we have present existence. Thinking sinks down into the limbs. And when we see it in the willful movement of the limbs, how it sinks down of its own accord, this thinking, then we may catch a glimpse of thinking in willing. [On the drawing, red was drawn downwards in elongated form.]

As we gaze out with the soul, it otherwise would be concealed from us, how thinking lives in arms, in hands, in legs, in feet, and in toes, and then we must see that this thinking is actually light. It streams, thinking as light streams through arms and hands, through legs and toes. And by itself it transforms willing, which otherwise lives in the limbs as sleeping willing. It transforms willing, and thinking appears as willing’s magical essence, which is transferred into a person from an earlier life on earth, carried by the spirit, into the present life on earth.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

It is a sort of conjuring, it is effective, magical, this unseen thinking in the limb's willing. A person begins to understand when he knows that thoughts, because we sleep in the will, that thoughts, even when not apparent in willing, are magically effective in the limbs as willing. And he begins to understand true magic, a magic that at first appears as thoughts, that lives through arms and hands, through legs and toes. [The third stanza was written on the board, during which the words "thinking", "transformed", "thinking", and "willing’s-magical-essence" were underlined.]

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

And in this is the secret of human willing, how such willing, formed out of the world-all, works magically, is contained in human beings.

And so, my dear friends, my dear brothers and sisters, we will observe this as a foundation, for the time still to be announced, when I will build further upon this foundation. We will observe this as a foundation, using it in meditation, as we allow the mantric words ever and ever again to be drawn through the soul.

Look behind thinking's sensory light,
How in the darkened spirit-cell
Willing ascends from bodily depths;
Through the strength of your soul
Let dead thinking flow into worldly void.
And the will, it shall arise
As world-thought-creating.

Look into feeling's wafting of soul,
How in the diminishment of dreams
Living streams from world afar;
Through calm of heart in sleep
Let human feeling waft away;
And world-living shall come alive
As human-being’s-power.

Look over willing’s bodily working,
How in sleeping fields of work
Thinking descends from forces of head;
Through soul-viewing brought to light
Let human willing be transformed;
And thinking, it shall appear
As willing’s-magical-essence.

• 1. der Vorstand
• 2. One may say Sieh in German, but in English one does not say “See over there,” or “see into your heart,” but rather “look over there,” or “look into your heart.”
• 3. Finstren is one of two variants of the uninflected comparative form of the adjective “dark” (finster). As this adjective is also sometimes inflected in German, meaning the ending of the word changes to express a grammatical function or attribute, it is confusing to translate, but a new ominous word such as darkling should not be invented. Dark or darkened seem to capture the meaning.

When I wrote my Occult Science, I was compelled to bring the evolution of the earth somewhat into line with present-day ideas. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one could have put it differently. For instance, in a certain chapter of this Occult Science the following might then have been found. One would have spoken otherwise of those beings whom one can describe as the beings of the first hierarchy: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. One would have called the Seraphim those beings who make no differentiation between subject and object, who would not say: there are objects outside myself, but: the world is, and I am the world and the world is I—who know of their own existence only by means of an experience, of which man has a weak idea when some experience carries him away in glowing rapture.

It is in fact sometimes difficult to explain to modern people what a glowing rapture is, for it was even understood better at the beginning of the nineteenth century than it is now. It still happened then that some poem or other, by this or that poet, was read, and the people acted through rapture—forgive my saying so, but it was so—as if they were mad! So much were they moved, so much were they suffused with warmth.

Nowadays people are frozen just when one thinks they should be enraptured. And this rapture of the soul—which was experienced particularly in Central and Eastern Europe,—if raised as a unifying element into the consciousness gives one an idea of the inner life of the Seraphim.

And we have to imagine the consciousness-element of the Cherubim as a completely purified element in the consciousness, full of light, so that thought becomes directly light, and illumines everything; and the element of the Thrones as bearing up the world in grace.

One would then have said: the choir of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones act together, in such a way that the thrones constitute a nucleus, and the Cherubim radiate their own luminous nature from it. The Seraphim cover the whole in a mantle of rapture, which streams out into all space.

But these are all beings: in the midst of the Thrones, round them the Cherubim, and in the periphery, the Seraphim. They are beings which mutually interplay and act and think and will and feel. And if a being possessing the necessary susceptibility had traveled through space where the thrones and Cherubim and Seraphim had thus formed a center, he would have felt warmth in different degrees and in different places; now higher, now lower warmth, but yet in a spiritual and psychic way; in such a way, however, that the psychic experience is at the same time a physical experience in our senses. Thus, when the being feels the warmth psychically, there really is present what you feel when you are in a heated room.

Such a union of the begins of the First Hierarchy did exist once upon a time in the universe. And this formed the system and existence of the “Saturnian Age.” Warmth is just the expression of these beings. The warmth is nothing in itself, it is only the evidence that these beings exist.

I should like to use a simile here which may perhaps help as an explanation. Suppose you are fond of somebody, you find his presence warms you. Suppose further there comes another man who has no heart at all and says: that person doesn't interest me in the least; I am interested only in the warmth which he spreads around. He does not say he is interested in the warmth the other sheds, but that nothing but the warmth interests him. He is talking nonsense, of course, for when the person who radiates warmth has gone, the warmth has gone also. It is there only when the person is there. In itself it is nothing. The person must be there for the warmth to be there.

Thus Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones must be there; otherwise warmth is not there either. It is merely the revelation of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Now at the time of which I speak, what I have just described to you did in actual fact exist. When one spoke of the element of warmth one was understood to mean really Cherubim, Seraphim and Thrones. That was the Saturnian Age.

Then one went further and said that only this highest hierarchy, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, has the might and the power to produce something of this kind in the Cosmos. And only by reason of the fact that this was done at the beginning of a terrestrial creation could evolution proceed. The Sun, as it were, of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones was able to a certain extent to direct the course of it. And this happened in such a way that the Beings produced by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy—the Kyriotetes, Exusiai and Dynamis—now surged into this space created and warmed in this Saturnian life by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Thus the younger—of course, the cosmically younger—Beings entered in; and theirs was the next influence. Whereas the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones revealed themselves in the element of warmth, the Beings of the Second Hierarchy were seen in the element of light. The Saturnian element is dark, but warm, and within the dark and gloomy world of the Saturnian existence arises light, precisely the thing that can appear through the sons of the Second Hierarchy , through the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

This is the case because the entry of the Second Hierarchy represents an inward illumination, which is connected with a densification of warmth. Air comes forth from the pure warmth-element, and in the revelation of the light we have the entry of the Second Hierarchy.

But you must get this clear: Actually Beings press in. Light is present for a Being with the necessary powers of perception. Light is what distinguishes the paths of these Beings. Under certain circumstances when light appears somewhere, there also appears shadow, darkness, dark shadow. So shadow also arose through the entry of the Second Hierarchy in the form of light. What was this shadow? The air. And actually till the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was known what the air is. Today one knows only that the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen, etc. which means no more than if one says, for instance, that a watch is made of glass and silver—whereby nothing whatever is said about the watch. Similarly nothing whatever is said about the air as a cosmic phenomenon when you say it consists of oxygen and nitrogen. But a great deal is said if one knows that from the cosmic point of view air is the shadow of the light. So that with the entry of the Second Hierarchy into the Saturnian warmth, one actually has in fact the entry of light, and its shadow, air. And where that happens is Sun. In the thirteenth and twelfth centuries one would really have had to talk in this manner.

The further stages of development are now conducted by the sons of the Third Hierarchy, the Archai, Archangels and Angels. These Beings bring into the luminous element with its shadow of air, introduced by the Second Hierarchy, another element resembling our desire, our urge to acquire something, our longing to have something.

Hence it came about that, let us say, an Archai or Archangel-Being entered and found an element of light, or rather, a place of light. In this place it felt, by reason of its sensitiveness to light, the urge towards and desire for darkness. The Angel-Being carried the light into the darkness, or an Angel-Being carried the darkness into the light. These Beings became the intermediaries, the messengers between light and darkness.

The result was that what formerly shone only in light, an trailed behind it, its shadow, the somber, airy darkness, now began to gleam in all colours, that light appeared in darkness, and darkness in light. It was the Third Hierarchy which conjured forth colour from out of light and darkness.

Observe, you have here something as it were historically documented to put before your souls. In the time of Aristotle one still knew—supposing one had pondered within the Mysteries on the origin of colours—that the Beings of the Third Hierarchy had to do with this. Wherefore Aristotle expressed in his Colour-Harmony that colour was a combined effect of Light and Darkness. But this spiritual element was lost—that the First Hierarchy was responsible for warmth, the Second for light and its shadow, the air, and the Third or the shining forth of colour in a world continuity. And there remained nothing but the unfortunate Newtonian theory of Colour, over which the initiated have smiled up to the eighteenth century, and which then became an article of faith with those who were just expert physicists.

In order to speak in the sense of this Newtonian theory, it is really necessary for one to have no knowledge at all of the spiritual world. And if one is still inwardly spurred by the spiritual world, as was the case with Goethe, one is utterly opposed to it. One states what is correct as Goethe did, then one storms dreadfully. Goethe was never so furious as on the occasion when he castigated Newton; he was simply furious about the wretched nonsense.

We cannot understand such things today, simply because anyone who does not recognize the Newtonian teaching concerning colour is looked upon by the physicists as a fool. But it was not really the case that Goethe stood quite alone in his own time. He alone uttered these things, but even at the end of the eighteenth century the learned knew perfectly well that the origin of colour lay in the spiritual world.

Air is the shadow of light. Just as when light radiates and, under certain circumstances, gives rise to deep shadow, so, if colour is present, and this colour works as a reality in the airy element, not merely as a reflection, not merely as a reflex-colour, but as a Reality; then the fluid, watery element arises from out of the real colour element. As air is the shadow of light, in cosmic thought, so water is the reflection, the creation of the element of colour in the Cosmos.

You will say you don't understand this. But just try to grasp the real meaning of colour. Red—well—do you believe that red in its real nature is only the neutral surface on generally regards it? Surely Red is something which attacks one. I have often discussed it. Red makes one want to run away; it pushes one back. Violet-blue one wants to pursue; it continually evades one, and gets ever darker and darker. Everything lives in colours. They are a world of their own, and the psychic element feels in the colour-world the necessity for movement, if it follows colours with psychic experience.

Today man stares at the rainbow. If one looks at it with the slightest imagination, one sees elemental beings active in it. They are revealed in remarkable phenomena. In the yellow certain of them are seen continually emerging from the rainbow, and moving across to the green. The moment they reach the underneath of the green, they are attracted to and disappear in it, to emerge on the other side. The whole rainbow reveals to an imaginative observer an outpouring and a disappearance of the spiritual. It reveals in fact something like a spiritual waltz. At the same time one notices that as these spiritual beings emerge in red-yellow, they do it with an extraordinary apprehension; and as they enter into the blue-violet, they do it with an unconquerable courage. When you look at the red-yellow, you see streams of fear, and when you look at the blue-violet you have the feeling that there is the seat of all courage and valor.

Now imagine we have the rainbow in section. Then these being emerge in the red-yellow and disappear in the blue-violet; here apprehension, here courage, which disappears again. There the rainbow becomes dense and you can imagine the watery element arises from it. Spiritual beings exist in this watery element which are really a kind of copy of the beings of the Third Hierarchy.

One can say that in approaching the learned men of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one must understand such things in this way. You cannot understand Albertus Magnus if you read him with modern knowledge, you must read him with the knowledge that such spiritual things were a reality to him and then only will you understand the meaning of his words and expressions.

In this way therefore air and water appear as a reflection of the Hierarchies. The Second Hierarchy enters in the form of light, the Third in the form of colour. But in order to enable this to be established, the lunar existence is created.

And now comes the Fourth Hierarchy. I am speaking now with the thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Now the Fourth Hierarchy. We never speak of it; but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one spoke freely of it. What is this Fourth Hierarchy? It is man himself. But formerly one did not understand by it the remarkably odd being with two legs and the tendency to decay that wanders about the world now; for then the human being of the present day appeared to the scholar as an unusual kind of being. They spoke of primeval man before the Fall, who existed in such a form as to have as much power over the earth as Angeloi, Archangeloi and so on, had over the lunar existence; the Second Hierarchy over the solar existence; the First Hierarchy over the Saturnian existence. They spoke of man in his original terrestrial existence, and as the Fourth Hierarchy. And with this Fourth Hierarchy came—as a gift form the higher Hierarchies of something they first possessed, and preserved, and did not themselves require—Life. And life came into the colourful world which I have been sketchily describing to you.

You will ask—But didn't things live before this? The answer you can learn from man himself. Your ego and your astral body have not life, but they exist all the same. The spiritual, the soul, does not require life. Life begins only with your etheric body; and this is something in the nature of an outer wrapping. It is thus that life appears only after the lunar existence, with the terrestrial existence, in that stage of evolution which belongs to our earth. The iridescent world became alive. It is not only then that Angeloi, Archangeloi, etc., felt a desire to bring light into darkness and darkness into light and so called forth the play of colours in the planets, but also they desired to experience this play of colour inwardly, and make it inward; to feel weakness and lassitude when darkness inwardly dominates over light, and activity when light dominates over darkness. For what happens when you r un? When you run it means that light dominates over the darkness in you; when you sit and are idle, the reverse happens. It is the effect of colour in the soul, the effect of colour iridescence. The iridescence of colour, permeated and shot with life, appeared with the coming of man, the Fourth Hierarchy. And at this moment of cosmic growth the forces which became active in the iridescence of colour began to form outlines. Life, which rounded off, smoothed and shaped the colours, called forth the hard crystal form; and we are in the terrestrial epoch.

Such things as I have now explained to you were really the axioms of those medieval alchemists, occultists, Rosicrucians, etc., who, though scarcely mentioned today in history, flourished from the ninth and tenth up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and whose stragglers, always regarded as oddities, existed into the eighteenth century and even into the beginning of the nineteenth. Only then were these things entirely covered up. The philosophical attitude to life of the time led to the following phenomenon:

Suppose I have here a human being. I cease to have any interest in him, merely take off his clothes and hang them on a clothes-dummy with a knob at the top like a head, and thereafter take no more interest in the human being. I say to myself further: That is the human being, what does it matter to me that anything can be put into these clothes; the dummy is, as far as I am concerned, the human being. So it was with the elements of Nature. People are no longer interested that behind warmth of fire is the First Hierarchy, behind light and air is the Second, behind the so-called chemical ether, colour-ether, etc. and water is the Third, behind life and the earth is the Fourth, or Man. Out with the clothes-horse and hang the clothes on it! That is the first Act. The second begins then with the school of Kant!~ Here begins Kantianism, here one begins, having the clothes-horse with the clothes on it, to philosophize concerning what “the thing in itself” of these clothes might be. And the conclusion is that one cannot recognize “the thing in itself” of the clothes. Very perspicacious! Naturally, if you have removed the man first, you can philosophize about the clothes, and this leads to a very pretty speculation: the clothes-horse is there all right, and the clothes hanging on it, so one speculates either in the Kantian fashion—one cannot recognize “the thing in itself”—or in the manner of Helmholtz, saying: these clothes cannot surely have form. There must be crowds of tiny whirling specks of dust, or atoms, in them, which by their movement preserve the clothes in their form.

Yes, this is the turn that later thought has taken. But it is abstract, and shadowy. All the same it is the kind of thought in which we live today; out of it we fashion the whole of our Natural Scientific principles. And when we deny that we think in terms of atoms, we are doing it all the more. For it will be a long time before it is admitted that it is unnecessary to weave a Dance of the Atoms into it, rather than simply to replace man into his clothes. But that is just what the resuscitation of Spiritual Science must attempt.

Today's lecture is to deal with the conditions that we must fulfill if we want to develop the forces and faculties slumbering within us and come to an experience and observation of the higher worlds. In the articles in the Journal “Lucifer-Gnosis” How does one attain knowledge of the Higher Worlds? [Now in book form], you have a picture of much that a human being has to fulfill when treading the path of knowledge, when wishing to press up into the higher worlds.

You remember the indications that were given in the interpretation of Goethe's Fairy Tale. We are concerned with the fact that human beings have soul forces of various kinds, and that from their development—that is, of thinking as such, of feeling as such, and of willing as such—depends our ascent on the one hand, and on the other hand our need to bring these into the right proportion by means of exercises. Willing, feeling and thinking must always be brought to development in exactly the right measure in knowledge of the different goals of spiritual life. For a definite goal, willing, for example, must step back, while feeling must come more strongly to the fore; for another goal, thinking must retreat, and again for another goal, feeling. All these soul forces must be perfected through occult exercises in the right proportion. The ascent into the higher worlds is connected with the development of thinking, feeling and willing.

Above all, it is a matter of refining and purifying thinking. That is necessary in order that thinking may no longer depend on the external sense-perceptions that can be gained on the physical plane. Yet, not only thinking but also feeling and the will can become forces of knowledge. In ordinary life, they go on personal paths; sympathy and antipathy take their way in accord with the individual personality, yet they can become, forces of knowledge. This may sound unbelievable for modern science! One can believe it more easily of thinking, especially of the descriptive thinking directed to sense-observation, but how can people admit that feeling can become a source of knowledge when they see how one person feels so, and another feels so, about the same things?

How can one admit that anything so vacillating, so dependent on personality as sympathy and antipathy can become an authority for knowledge and can be so far disciplined that they could grasp the innermost nature of a thing? That thought does so can be easily understood, but that when we confront something, and it arouses a feeling in us, this feeling can be of such a nature that not personal sympathy or antipathy speaks, but that feeling itself can become a means of expression for the inmost being of the thing—that seems hardly credible! And further, that the force of will and desire can also become means of expression for the inner nature—that above all, seems simply frivolous.

In the same way, however, as thinking can be purified and become objective, and hence a means of expressing facts in both the sense-world and the higher worlds, so, too, can feeling and willing become objective. Yet, there must be no misunderstanding. Feeling, as it exists in the ordinary life of modern man—in its direct content of feeling, does not become a means of expression of a higher world. This type of feeling is personal. The object of the occult exercises received by the student is to train feeling, alter and transform it, so that it becomes different from what it was when it was still personal. Yet, when a certain stage has been reached on the occult path through the development of feeling, one must not believe that one can state with knowledge: I have a being before me, and I feel something of this being—not that what one has there in feeling is a truth, a piece of knowledge.

The process that transforms feeling by way of occult exercises is a much more intimate and inward one. One who has changed feelings through exercises comes to Imaginative knowledge, so that a spiritual content reveals itself in symbols. The facts or beings of the astral world express themselves by symbols. Feeling becomes something different; it becomes Imagination, and astral pictures light up that express what is taking place in astral space. One does not see as one sees a rose, for instance, in the physical world with its color; one sees in symbolic pictures, and in fact, all that is brought before us in occult science is seen in pictures. The black cross with the wreath of roses and all such symbols are to bring to expression a definite fact, and they correspond just as much to astral facts as what we see in the physical world corresponds to physical facts. One therefore develops feeling, but knows in Imagination. And it is just the same with the will.

When one has reached the stage that can be reached to a certain extent through occult training, then if a being confronts one, one does not say, “It awakens in me a power of desire,” but one begins to perceive the nature of sound in Devachan.

Feeling is developed in us and astral vision in Imagination is the result. Will is developed in us, and the result is the experience of what comes about in devachanic spiritual music, the sphere-harmony from which there streams to us the inmost nature. Just as one perfects thinking and attains to objective thinking, which is the first step, so does one develop feeling, and a new world will emerge at the stage of Imagination. In the same way, one trains willing and there results in Inspiration the knowledge of Lower Devachan, until at length in Intuition there opens before us the world of Higher Devachan.

We can say, therefore, that as we lift ourselves to the next stage of existence, we are presented with pictures, but pictures that we cannot use as we use our thoughts. We do not ask, “How do these pictures correspond to reality?” Things are clothed in pictures of form and color, and through Imagination we must ourselves “unriddle” the beings who are showing themselves to us in symbols. In Inspiration, the things speak to us. There, we need not question nor try to find a solution in ideas that would be a carrying-over of the theory of knowledge from the physical plane. Rather, the inmost being of the thing itself speaks to us. When a human being confronts us, expressing his or her inmost nature to us, it is different from when we stand before a stone. We have to "unriddle" the stone and ponder about it.

With people, it is different; we experience their being in what they say to us. That is how it is in Inspiration. There, in Inspiration, it is not an abstract discursive thinking, but one listens to what the things say; they themselves express their being! It would have no meaning for someone to say, “When someone dies and I meet him again in Devachan, shall I know whom I meet?” For devachanic beings must look different and cannot be compared with what is on the physical plane. In Devachan, the being itself says what being it is, as if human beings should tell us not only their names but also let their natures flow out to us continually. That streams to us through the sphere-music and a non-recognition is not possible.

Now this is a certain opportunity for answering a question. Misunderstandings can very easily arise through the various theosophical presentations, and one can easily think that the physical, the astral and devachanic worlds are distinguished from one another spatially. We know, in fact, that where the physical world is, there is also the astral and the devachanic—they are in one another. Now the question could be asked, “Well, if everything is in one another, I cannot distinguish them as in physical space, where everything is side by side! If the ‘other side’ is in ‘this side’ how do I distinguish the astral world and the devachanic world from each other?” One distinguishes them through the fact that when one ascends from the astral pictures and colors to the devachanic world, the colors resound. What before was spiritually luminous becomes, henceforth, spiritual resounding. In experiencing the higher worlds there are also differences, so that when we rise up to these worlds, we can always recognize by definite experiences whether we are in this or that world.

Today we will characterize the differences between experiencing the astral world and the world of Devachan. It is not only that the astral world is known through Imagination and the devachanic through Inspiration, but we also know through other differences, too, which world we are in. A part of the astral world is the time during which a human being has to live through directly after death, which in anthroposophical literature we call the period of Kamaloca. What does it mean to be in Kamaloca? We have often tried to show this by description. I have often given the characteristic example of the epicure, who pines for the enjoyment that only the sense of taste can give him. With death, the physical body is stripped off and left behind, and so, too, the etheric body to a great extent, but the astral body is still present with its qualities and forces. These do not change immediately after death, but only gradually. If a person has longed for dainty foods, this longing remains, this pining for the enjoyment, but after death the soul lacks the physical instrument with which to satisfy it. The physical body with its organs is no longer there, and the soul must do without the enjoyment; it pines for something that it must go without. This holds good for all the Kamaloca¬experiences that consist, really, in a condition within the astral body when the soul still longs for the satisfaction that can be fulfilled only through the physical body. And because the soul has this no longer, it has to rid itself of the striving for these enjoyments; it is thus the period of becoming “disaccustomed”. The one who has died is freed from it only when this longing has been torn out of the astral body.

During the whole Kamaloca period, something lives in the astral body that can be called “privation”—deprivation in most varied forms, nuances and differences; that is the content of Kamaloca. Just as light may be differentiated into red, yellow, green, blue tones, so can privation be differentiated into the most varied qualities, and the characteristic of privation is the sign of the one who is in Kamaloca. However, the astral plane is not alone Kamaloca, but is far more comprehensive. Nevertheless, a human being who has lived only in the physical world and experienced solely its contents would never be able to experience the other parts of the astral world—whether after death or through other means—unless the soul had prepared itself. It can experience the astral world in no other way than through deprivation! One who comes up into the higher worlds and knows: “I am deprived of this or that and there is no prospect of supporting it,” experiences the consciousness of the astral world. Even if such a one had been able through occult means to enter the astral plane out of the body, he or she would always have to suffer privation there.

Now, how can one so develop and perfect oneself that one learns to know not only the part expressed in privation, the phase of feeling a lack, but that one experienced the astral world in the best sense—the part that is really brought to expression in the good, the best sense? A human soul can come into the other part of the astral world through the development of that which is the counterpart of deprivation! Therefore, the methods that awaken the forces in a human being that are opposed to privation will be the ones that will bring the soul into the other part of the astral world. These are the forces of renunciation. Just as privation can be conceived in manifold nuances, so, too, can renunciation. With the smallest renunciation that we take upon us, we make a step forwards in the sense that we evolve upwards to the good side of the astral world on the path of sacrifice.

When one renounces the most insignificant thing, it is an inculcation of something that contributes essentially to experiencing the good side of the astral world. Hence, in occult traditions so much weight is laid on the test carried out by the pupil of denying oneself this or that, the exercise of renouncing. Through this, the pupil gains entry into the good side of the astral world.

What is brought about in this way? Let us first remember the experiences in Kamaloca. Let us think that someone leaves the physical body, either through death or in some other way; then the physical instruments of the body are lacking to that person, who thus entirely lacks the power to satisfy some desire. Deprivation is felt, and this arises as an imaginative picture in the astral world. For instance, a red pentagon or a red circle appears. This is nothing but the image of what appears in the soul's field of vision and corresponds to the privation, just as in the physical world an object corresponds to what one experiences in the soul as concept of it. If someone has very low desires, then terrible beasts confront that person when out of the body. These frightful beasts are the symbols for the very debased desires. If one has learnt renunciation, however, then in the moment when through death or initiation one is out of the body, the red circle changes into nothing, because one permeates the red with the feeling of renunciation, and there arises a green circle. In the same way, through the forces of renunciation, the beast will vanish, and a noble image of the astral world will appear.

So what is given to one objectively—the red circle or horrible animal—he or she must change into its opposite through the developed forces of renunciation and resignation. Renunciation conjures out of unknown depths the true forms of the astral world. No one must believe, therefore, that if he or she wants in the true sense to lift oneself up into the astral world, the co-operation of one's soul forces is not necessary. Without this, one would attain to only one part of that world. Renunciation is essential—even all Imagination. One who gives up claims and renounces—this is what conjures forth the true form of the astral world.

In Devachan, one has Inspiration. And here, too, there is an inner difference for the parts of Devachan, which the soul cannot experience passively when experiencing them after death. Through a certain universal relationship, so much harm has not yet been done in Devachan; the astral world has the fearful Kamaloca in it, but Devachan has not that yet. That will first come about in the Jupiter and Venus conditions, when through the use of black magic and the like, a decadence will have set in. Then, in Devachan, an element will develop similar to what exists today in the astral world. Here, in Devachan in the present cycle of evolution, the situation is somewhat different. What first appears before a human being ascending on the path of knowledge from the astral world to Devachan, or when as a simple human being one is led there after death—what does such a one experience in Devachan? Bliss is experienced! That which changes from the color-nuances into tones—that under all circumstances is bliss. At the present stage of evolution, all in Devachan is a bringing forth, production, and in respect of knowledge, a spiritual hearing. And all producing is blissfulness; blissfulness is all-hearing of the sphere-harmony! The human being in Devachan will experience pure bliss—nothing but bliss.

When a human being is led upwards through the methods of spiritual knowledge, through the leaders of human evolution, the Masters of Wisdom and the Harmony of Feelings, or in the case of the ordinary human being after death, such a one will always experience bliss there. That is what the initiate must experience when he or she has come so far on the path of knowledge. But it lies in the future evolution of the world that it may not remain at mere bliss. That would signify an enhancement of the most refined egotism; the human individuality would always take into itself the warmth of bliss, but the world would not progress. In this way, beings would be developed who would harden in their souls. For the welfare and progress of the world, therefore, it must be possible for someone who through exercises enters Devachan, not only to experience all nuances of bliss in the sphere-music, but must also develop in oneself the feeling of the opposite of bliss. Just as renunciation is the counterpart of deprivation, so is the feeling of sacrifice related to bliss: sacrifice that is ready to pour out what is received as bliss—to let it flow out into the world.

Those divine Spirits, whom we call the Thrones, had the feeling of self-sacrifice when they began to play their part in the Creation. When they poured out on Saturn their own substance, they sacrificed themselves for the newly-arising humanity. What we have today as substance is the same as they streamed out on Saturn. And in the same way, the Spirits of Wisdom sacrificed themselves on the Old Sun. These divine Spirits have ascended into the higher worlds; they have taken in the experiences of bliss not only passively, but by passing through Devachan they have learnt to sacrifice themselves. They have not become poorer through the offering, but richer. Only a being living entirely in materiality, thinks that it loses itself through sacrifice; no, a higher, richer development is linked with sacrifice in the service of universal evolution.

So we see that the human being ascends to Imagination and Inspiration and enters that sphere where the whole being is permeated with ever-new nuances of bliss, where the soul experiences everything around it, in such a way that everything not only speaks to the soul, but that all around the soul becomes an absorption of the spiritual tones of bliss.

The ascent to the higher powers of knowledge is attained through the transformation of one's whole life of feeling. And occult training has this sole purpose: that through the rules and methods that have been given us by the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings, and which have been proved and tested for thousands of years, the human being's feeling and will are so transformed that he or she may be led up to higher knowledge and experience. When pupils gradually develop and transform the content of their feeling and will through occult methods, they attain to these higher faculties.

It should not be a matter of indifference to one who is within the Movement of Spiritual Science whether he or she has belonged to it for three or six or seven years. That has a definite significance. The feeling of a shared experience of this inner growth through its inner law must become real to the student. We must direct our attention to it; otherwise, its effects pass us by.

Performance at the Deutsches Theater, Berlin

Arthur Schnitzler has awakened the same feeling in me with all his creations: he neatly peels away everything that lies on the surface from the processes of life and leaves the content hidden beneath this surface. What he brings can only ever interest me because of this content; but this poet has no eye for this content itself. I had this feeling in particular with his new cycle of one-act plays.

The play "The Companion" presents a professor who has just lost his wife. Friends express their usual sympathy. A woman appears, demanding letters from the estate of the deceased. What is written in these letters is to remain a secret for the professor. But he believes he has long known what these letters bear witness to. The deceased wife was the mistress of his assistant. He has come to terms with this fact. It had seemed natural to him that he could only enjoy a brief happiness with a woman twenty years his junior. She was made to be a lover, not a companion, as he would have needed one. In his opinion, the two went their separate ways. But when the assistant appears at the professor's house after the funeral, it turns out that the truth is quite different from what the husband had suspected. This assistant had been in love with another woman for two years and had long since chosen her as his wife. So he did not treat the deceased as his mistress, no, as his prostitute. The professor would have accepted a love affair between the two, because it seemed natural to him. He would even have released the woman if the lovers had found the courage to demand it. But what is now revealed fills him with disgust and he shows the low-minded man the door. From conversations between the professor, the friend of the deceased and the assistant, we learn everything that has happened over the course of many years. These conversations are only the conclusion of a longer series of facts. The friend says that precisely because the professor has learned the full truth, he can now regain his peace. He now knows how little he possessed the woman who has just died. Now that she had passed away, he was no longer under the pressure of an unnatural marriage, and he did not need to mourn the death of the woman who had always been a stranger to him, who had only died in this house by chance. But what precedes this conclusion is, according to what we learn, not at all dramatic. For years a woman betrays her husband with another. In the end she even knows that the other is planning to marry someone else. The professor suspects something, but does nothing. And the seducer lives the life that touches him more deeply, outside the scene of the action. As atmospheric as Schnitzler knows how to make the conversations, nothing is gripping. The whole thing leaves you indifferent, because the facts are not based on any events that could evoke a deeper interest on their own.

The second one-act play "The Green Cockatoo" made even less of an impression on me. In a Parisian dive at the time of the revolution, down-and-out actors and sensationalist aristocrats gather every evening. On the evening we are shown the Bastille is stormed. The ex-comedians perform scenes of crime with the worst pathos, and the nobles get the creeps. Henri, one of the actors, has just married L&ocardie. He wants to portray how he killed the Duke of Cadignan because his wife was in love with him. He then learns that this infidelity is based on truth. The Duke arrives at the tavern at just the right time, and Henri really does kill him. As gripping as this may be for an audience with an eye for external theatrical effects, the whole thing is nothing but high jinks; it is reminiscent of shows that serve low taste and is boring in detail.

The best of the three one-act plays is "Paracelsus". The adventurous and mysterious 16th century personality uses hypnotism to carry out a prank in the house of an armourer. He suggests to the wife of the coarse, clumsy master craftsman that she must tell the truth for an afternoon. The husband then learns all sorts of edifying things about the heart of his "faithfully guarded" wife. Although the drawing of the characters is interesting and the process is not without a certain background, it seems to me to be nothing more than an extract of what can be said about Paracelsus and hypnotism in a salon conversation and accompanied by not exactly deep wit.

Report in the “Chronik des Wiener Goethe-Vereins” of December 15, 1891

Goethe Evening, November 27

On this day, Dr. Rudolf Steiner (who is currently involved in publishing part of Goethe's scientific writings for the great Weimar Goethe Edition at the Goethe Archive in Weimar) gave a lecture on the “secret in Goethe's riddle fairy tale in the ‘Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter’”.

After a brief introduction by the lecturer on the relationship between the “fairy tale” and the narrative, the conclusion of which it forms, and the indication of the fact that Goethe's view of the world and life is symbolically presented in it, Miss Adrienne Kola from the k. k. Hofburgtheater, so that despite the simplicity of the performance, not only the mysterious, mystical character that runs through the whole, but also the numerous individual highlights that the performance rises to, were fully expressed. One could hear it in the recitation of Miss Kola, to which one had to pay particular attention when it comes to an interpretation of the “Fairytale”.

Dr. Steiner followed the recitation with his own observations. The “Fairytale” presents, in a Goethean way, the solution of the same problem that Schiller also attempted in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man at that time: How does a person, dominated by the laws of nature and sensual existence, reach that highest state where he can partake of full, unrestricted freedom? Schiller undertook the solution of this task through a philosophical investigation, Goethe gave it in a vivid image filled with rich poetic content. The happy state that man will achieve when full freedom is his own is presented to us as the marriage of a young man to the beautiful lily, the queen in the realm of freedom. The young man rules, endowed with the three highest gifts that can belong to man: wisdom, piety and strength. The temple from which he rules the new kingdom rises above a river that separates the kingdom of freedom from that of natural necessity, sensual drive, passion, before that highest human goal is achieved. This river represents the state, custom, law and justice, which prevent people who have not yet been prepared for freedom from seizing it before they can understand and use it. Only at certain moments is it possible for man to cross over into that longed-for land. At noon, when the green snake coils itself over the river and serves as a bridge, and in the evening, at dusk, when the shadow of a great giant stretches across the river. The snake represents human selflessness and self-denial. Only in those moments when all selfish desires are stilled, when man selflessly loses himself in the objective world, is he worthy of freedom and also partakes of it. Opposite the snake are the so-called will-o'-the-wisps. They feed on gold, which (in the fairy tale) is the symbol of wisdom. But they cannot digest it and throw it away as worthless metal. The will-o'-the-wisps are the symbol of human selfhood, which becomes selfishness and does not take up the gold of wisdom for the sake of the latter itself, but only to shine and show off with it. False prophets, demagogues, teachers who lack the actual love of knowledge are meant by this. From their mouths, wisdom is an empty, insubstantial phrase. But if it is also grasped as such by a receptive mind, it is imbued with inner life and leads to the highest culture. The gold that the will-o'-the-wisp throws out is devoured by the snake and makes its body shine, so that in the space that it now illuminates, the light of the highest knowledge, which is indicated by the old man with the lamp, also shines. Only where there is receptivity for this light, i.e. in a space where there is already another light, does the same shine. The giant represents blind arbitrariness, the raw force of nature, which does not lead people into the realm of freedom through its own value and efficiency, but through those means that join them by chance, without inner necessity. This element, which is added to man merely by external natural force, is symbolized by the shadow, which man, after all, does not cast himself. When the time comes, that is, when man has grasped that he must not merely renounce his self for moments, but that selflessness must become his very nature and essence, then the state of complete bliss will set in. Then the snake does not merely lie across the river for a short time, but sacrifices itself and forms a permanent bridge from the realm of nature to that of freedom. The wanderers now cross over and over without compulsion, that is, they move equally well in both realms; they ennoble their natural obligations through freedom, and they perform their deeds of freedom as if they were to happen with natural force. A state of humanity has thus been achieved that Schiller strove for through the realization of his aesthetic society.

During the course of the lecture, Dr. Steiner shared three interpretations of the “fairytale” from Goethe's circle of friends, which were recorded by the poet himself in 1816, with the permission of Prof. Dr. Suphan, director of the Goethe and Schiller Archives.

[ 1 ] A kind of mysterious veil hangs over the manner in which spiritual needs were satisfied during the older civilizations by those who sought a deeper religious life and fuller knowledge than the popular religions offered. If we inquire how these needs were satisfied, we find ourselves led into the dim twilight of the Mysteries, and the individual seeking them disappears for a time from our view. We see that the popular religions cannot give him what his heart desires. He acknowledges the existence of the gods, but knows that the ordinary ideas about them do not solve the great problems of existence. He seeks a wisdom that is jealously guarded by a community of Priest-sages. His aspiring soul seeks a refuge in this community. If he is found by the sages to be sufficiently Prepared, he is led up by them, step by step, to higher knowledge in a way that is hidden from the eyes of the Profane, What then happens to him is concealed from the uninitiated. He seems for a time to be entirely remote from earthly life and to be transported into a hidden world.

When he reappears in the light of day, a different, quite transformed person is before us. We see a man who cannot find words sublime enough to express the momentous experience through which he has passed. Not merely metaphorically, but in a most real sense does he seem to have gone through the gate of death and to have awakened to a new and higher life. He is, moreover, quite certain that no one who has not had a similar experience can understand his words.

[ 2 ] This was what happened to those who were initiated into the Mysteries, into that secret wisdom withheld from the people, and which threw light on the greatest problems. This secret religion of the elect existed side by side with the popular religion. Its origin vanishes, as far as history is concerned, into the obscurity in which the origin of peoples is lost. We find this secret religion everywhere among the ancients as far as we know anything concerning them; and we hear their sages speak of the Mysteries with the greatest reverence. What was it that was concealed in them? And what did they unveil to the initiate?

[ 3 ] The enigma becomes still more puzzling when we learn that the ancients looked upon the Mysteries as something dangerous. The way to the secrets of existence led through a world of terrors, and woe to him who tried to gain them unworthily. There was no greater crime than the betrayal of secrets to the uninitiated. The traitor was punished with death and the confiscation of his property. We know that the poet Æschylus was accused of having reproduced on the stage something from the Mysteries. He was only able to escape death by fleeing to the altar of Dionysos and by legally proving that he had never been initiated.

[ 4 ] What the ancients say about these secrets is significant, but at the same time ambiguous. The initiate is convinced that it would be a sin to tell what he knows, and also that it would be sinful for the uninitiated to hear it. Plutarch speaks of the terror of those about to be initiated, and compares their state of mind to preparation for death. A special mode of life had to precede initiation, tending to give the spirit the mastery over sensuality. Fasting, solitude, mortifications and certain exercises for the soul were the means employed. The things to which man clings in ordinary life were to lose all their value for him. The whole trend of his life of sensation and feeling was to be changed.

There can be no doubt as to the purpose of such exercises and tests. The wisdom which was to be offered to the candidate for initiation could only produce the right effect upon his soul if he had previously purified the life of his lower sensations. He was introduced to the life of the spirit. He was to behold a higher world, but he could not enter into relations with that world without previous exercises and trials. These relations were the crucial point.

In order to judge these matters aright it is necessary to gain experience of the intimate facts concerning the life of cognition. We must feel that there are two widely divergent attitudes towards that which the highest knowledge gives. In the first instance, the world surrounding us is the real one. We feel, hear, and see what goes on in it, and because we thus perceive things with our senses, we call them real. And we reflect about events in order to get an insight into their connections. On the other hand, what wells up in our soul is at first not real to us in the same sense. It is merely thoughts and ideas. At the most we see in them only images of sense-reality. They themselves have no reality, for we cannot touch, see, or hear them.

[ 5 ] There is another relation to the world, A person who clings to the kind of reality described above will hardly understand it, but it comes to certain people at a certain moment in their lives. Their whole relation to the world is completely reversed. They then call the images that well up in the spiritual life of their souls truly real, and they assign only a lower kind of reality to what the senses hear, touch, and see. They know that they cannot prove what they say, that they can only relate their new experiences, and that when relating them to others they are in the position of a man who can see and who imparts his visual impressions to one born blind. They venture to impart their inner experiences, trusting that there are others round them whose spiritual eyes, to be sure, are still closed, but whose intelligent comprehension may be aroused through the force of what they hear. For they have faith in humanity and want to give it spiritual sight. They can only lay before it the fruits their spirit has gathered. Whether another sees them depends on his receptivity to what the spiritual eye sees.¹

There is something in man which at first prevents him from seeing with the eyes of the spirit. It is not primarily within his horizon. He is what his senses make him, and his intellect is only the interpreter and judge of them. The senses would ill fulfil their mission if they did not insist upon the truth and infallibility of their evidence. An eye must, from its own point of view, uphold the absolute reality of its perceptions. The eye is right as far as it goes, and is not deprived of its due by the eye of the spirit. The latter only allows us to see the things of sense in a higher light. Nothing seen by the eye of sense is denied, but a new brightness, hitherto unseen, radiates from what is seen. And then we know that what we first saw was only a lower reality. We see that still, but it is immersed in something higher, which is spirit. It is now a question of whether we sense and feel what we see, The person who lives only in the sensations and feelings of the senses will look upon impressions of higher things as a Fata Morgana, or mere Play of fancy. His feelings are focussed only on the things of sense. He 8rasps emptiness when he tries to lay hold of spirit forms. They elude him when he gropes for them. In short, they are thoughts only. He thinks them but does not live in them, They are images, less real to him than fleeting dreams, They rise up like bubbles while he faces his own reality; they disappear before the massive, solidly built reality of which his senses tell him.

It is otherwise with one who has altered his perceptions and feelings with regard to reality. For him that reality has lost its absolute stability and value. His senses and feelings need not become dulled, but they begin to doubt their unconditional authority. They leave room for something else. The world of the spirit begins to animate the space left.

[ 6 ] At this point a possibility comes in which may prove terrible. A man may lose his sensations and feelings of outer reality without finding a new reality opening up before him. He then feels himself as if suspended in the void. He feels bereft of all life. The old values are gone and no new ones have arisen in their place. The world and man no longer exist for him. Now, this is by no means a mere possibility. It happens at one time or another to everyone who seeks higher knowledge. He comes to a point at which the spirit represents all life to him as death. He is then no longer in the world, but under it, in the nether world. He is passing through Hades. Well for him if he sink not! Happy, if a new world open up before him! Either he dies away or he appears to himself transformed. In the latter case he beholds a new sun and a new earth. Out of the fire of the spirit the whole world has been reborn for him.

[ 7 ] It is thus that the initiates describe the effect of the Mysteries upon them. Menippus relates that he journeyed to Babylon in order to be taken to Hades and brought back again by the successors of Zarathustra. He says that he swam across the great water on his wanderings, and that he passed through fire and ice. We hear that the mystics were terrified by a flashing sword, and that blood flowed. We understand this when we know from experience the point of transition from lower to higher knowledge. We ourselves had felt as if all solid matter and things of sense had dissolved into water, and as if the ground were cut away from under our feet. Everything which we had previously felt to be alive had been killed. The spirit had passed through the life of the senses like a sword piercing a warm body; we had seen the blood of sensuality flow.

[ 8 ] But a new life had appeared. We had risen from the nether-world. The orator Aristides relates this: “I thought I touched the god and felt him draw near, and I was then between waking and sleeping. My spirit was so light that no one who is not initiated can describe or understand it.” This new existence is not subject to the laws of lower life. Growth and decay no longer affect it. One may say much about the Eternal, but words of one who has not been through Hades are “mere sound and smoke.” The initiates have a new conception of life and death. Now for the first time do they feel they have the right to speak about immortality. They know that one who speaks of it without having been initiated talks of something which he does not understand. The uninitiated attribute immortality only to something which is subject to the laws of growth and decay. The mystics, however, did not desire merely to gain the conviction that the kernel of life is eternal. According to the view of the Mysteries, such a conviction would be quite valueless, for this view holds that the Eternal as a living reality is not even Present in the uninitiated. If such a person spoke of the Eternal, he would be speaking of something non-existent, It is rather this Eternal itself that the mystics seek., They have first to awaken the Eternal within them, then they can speak of it. Hence the hard saying of Plato is quite real to them, that the uninitiated sinks into the mire,² and that only one who has passed through the mystical life enters eternity. And it is only in this sense that the words in Sophocles’ Fragment can be understood: “Thrice-blessed are the initiated who come to the realm of the shades. They alone have life there. For others there is only misery and hardship.”

[ 9 ] Is one, therefore, not describing dangers when speaking of the Mysteries? Is it not robbing a man of happiness and of a most precious part of his life to lead him to the portals of the nether-world? Terrible is the responsibility incurred by such an act. And yet ought that responsibility to be evaded? These were the questions which the initiate had to put to himself. He was of the opinion that his knowledge bore the same relation to the soul of the people as light does to darkness. But innocent happiness dwells in that darkness, and the mystics were of the opinion that that happiness should not be sacrilegiously interfered with. For what would have happened in the first place if the mystic had betrayed his secret? He would have uttered words and only words. The sensations and feelings which would have evoked the spirit from the words would have been absent. To accomplish what was lacking, preparation, exercises, trials, and a complete change in the life of sense would be necessary. Without this the hearer would have been hurled into emptiness and nothingness. He would have been deprived of what constituted his happiness without receiving anything in exchange. One may also say that nothing could have been taken away from him, for mere words would have changed nothing in his life of feeling. He would only have been able to feel and experience reality through his senses. Nothing but a life-destroying premonition would have been given him. This could only have been construed as a crime.³

The foregoing does not altogether apply to the attainment of spiritual knowledge in our time. Today spiritual knowledge can be conceptually understood, because in more recent times man has acquired a conceptual capacity that formerly was lacking. Nowadays some people can have cognition of the spiritual world through their own exeriences conceptually.

The wisdom of the Mysteries resembles a hothouse plant that must be cultivated and fostered in seclusion. Anyone bringing it into the atmosphere of everyday ideas brings it into air in which it cannot thrive. It withers away to nothing before the caustic verdict of modern science and logic. Let us, therefore, divest ourselves for a time of the education we gained through the microscope and telescope and the habit of thought derived from natural science, and let us cleanse our clumsy hands which have been too much occupied with dissecting and experimenting, in order that we may enter the pure temple of the Mysteries. For this a truly unprejudiced attitude is necessary.

The important point for the mystic is at first the soul mood in which he approaches that which he feels as the highest, as the answers to the riddles of existence. Just in our day, when only gross physical science is recognized as containing truth, it is difficult to believe that in the highest things we depend upon the keynote of the soul. It is true that knowledge thereby becomes an intimate personal concern. But this is what it really is to the mystic. Tell some one the solution of the riddle of the universe! Give it to him ready-made! The mystic will find it to be nothing but empty sound, if the personality does not meet the solution half-way in the right manner. The solution in itself is nothing; it vanishes if the necessary feeling is not kindled at its contact. A divinity may approach you: it is either everything or nothing. Nothing, if you meet it in the frame of mind with which you confront everyday matters; everything, if you are prepared and attuned to the meeting. What the divinity is in itself is a matter that does not affect you; the important point for you is whether it leaves you as it found you or makes a different man of you. But this depends entirely on yourself. You must have been prepared by a special education, by a development of the inmost forces of your personality for the work of kindling and releasing what a divinity is able to kindle and release in you. Everything depends upon the way in which you receive what is offered you.

Plutarch has told us about this education, and of the greeting which the mystic offers the divinity approaching him: “For the god, as it were, greets each one who approaches him with the words, ‘Know thyself!” which is surely no worse than the ordinary greeting, ‘Welcome!” Then we answer the divinity in the words, ‘Thou art” and thus we affirm that the true, primordial, and only adequate greeting for him is to declare that he is. In that existence we really have no part here, for every mortal being, during its existence between birth and death, merely manifests an appearance, a feeble and uncertain image of itself. If we try to grasp it with our understanding, it is like water which, when tightly compressed, runs over merely through the pressure, spoiling what it touches. For the understanding, pursuing a too definite conception of each being that is subject to chance and change, loses its way, now in the origin of the being, now in its destruction, and is unable to apprehend anything lasting or really existing. For, as Heraclitus says, we cannot swim twice in the same wave, neither can we lay hold of a mortal being twice in the same state, for, through the violence and rapidity of movement, it is destroyed and recomposed; it comes into being and again decays; it comes and goes. Therefore, that which is becoming can never attain real existence, because growth neither ceases nor pauses. Change begins in the germ, and forms an embryo; then there appears a child, then a youth, a man, and an old man; the first beginnings and successive ages are continually annulled by the ensuing ones. Hence it is ridiculous to fear the one death, when we have already died in so many ways, and are still dying. For, as Heraclitus says, not only is the death of fire the birth of air, and the death of air the birth of water, but the change may be still more, plainly seen in man. The strong man dies when he becomes old, the youth when he becomes a man, the boy on becoming a youth, and the child on becoming a boy. What existed yesterday dies today, what is here today will die tomorrow. Nothing endures or is a unity, but we become many things, whilst matter plays around one image, one common form. For if we were always the same, how could we take pleasure in things which formerly did not please us, how could we love and hate, admire and blame opposite things, how could we speak differently and give ourselves up to different passions, unless we were endowed with a different shape, form, and different senses? For no one can very well enter a different state without change, and one who is changed is no longer the same; but if he is not the same, he no longer exists and is changed from what he was, becoming someone else. Sense perception only led us astray, because we do not know real being, and mistook for it that which is only an appearance.⁴

[ 11 ] Plutarch repeatedly described himself as an initiate. What he portrays here is a condition of the life of the mystic. The human being achieves a degree of wisdom by means of which his spirit sees through the illusory character of sense life. What the senses regard as being, or reality, is plunged into the stream of becoming; and man is in this respect subject to the same conditions as all else in the world. Before the eyes of his spirit he himself dissolves; his entity is broken up into parts, into fleeting phenomena. Birth and death lose their distinctive meaning and become moments of appearing and disappearing, like any other happenings in the world. The highest cannot be found in the connection between development and decay. It can only be sought in what is really abiding, in what looks back to the past and forward to the future.

To find that which looks backward and forward means a higher stage of cognition. This is the spirit, which is manifesting in and through the physical. It has nothing to do with physical becoming. It does not come into being and again decay as do sense-phenomena. One who lives entirely in the world of sense carries the spirit latent within him. One who has pierced through the illusion of the world of sense has the spirit within him as a manifest reality. The man who attains to this insight has developed a new principle within himself. Something has happened within him similar to what occurs in a plant when it adds a colored blossom to its green leaves. True, the forces causing the flower to grow were already latent in the plant before the blossom appeared, but they only became a reality when this took place. In the same way, divine, spiritual forces are latent in the man who lives merely in his senses, but they only become a manifest reality in the initiate. In this consists the transformation that takes place in the mystic. By his development he has added a new element to the world as it had been. The world of sense made him a sense man, and then left him to himself. Nature had thus fulfilled her mission. What she is able to do with the forces operative in man is exhausted; not so the forces themselves. They lie as though spellbound in the merely natural man and await their release. They cannot release themselves. They vanish into nothingness unless man seizes upon them and develops them, unless he calls into actual being what is latent within him.

Nature evolves from the most imperfect to the perfect. She leads beings, through a long series of stages, from inanimate matter through all living forms up to physical man. Man looks around and finds himself a changeable being with physical reality; but he also senses within himself the forces from which this physical reality arose. These forces are not the changeable, for they have given birth to the factor of change. They are within man as a sign that there is more life within him than he can physically perceive. What can grow out of them is not yet there. Man feels something flash up within him which created everything, including himself; and he feels that it is this which will inspire him to higher creative activity. This something is within him; it existed before his manifestation in the flesh, and will exist afterwards. By means of it he became, but he may lay hold of it and take part in its creative activity.

Such are the feelings that animated the ancient mystic after initiation. He feels the Eternal and the Divine. His activity is to become a part of that divine creative activity. He may say to himself: “I have discovered a higher ego within me, but that ego extends beyond the bounds of my sense existence. It existed before my birth and will exist after my death. This ego has created from all eternity, it will go on creating in all eternity. My physical personality is a creation of this ego. But it has incorporated me within it, it works within me, I am a part of it. What I henceforth create will be higher than the physical. My personality is only a means for this creative power, for this divine that exists within me.” Thus did the mystic experience his birth into the divine.

[ 12 ] The mystic called the power that thus flashed up within him his true spirit, his daimon. He was himself the product of this spirit. It seemed to him as though a new being had entered him and taken possession of his organs, a being standing between his sense personality and the all-ruling cosmic power, the divinity.

The mystic sought this true spirit. He said to himself: “I have become a human being in mighty nature. But nature did not complete her task: this completion I must take in hand myself. Yet I cannot accomplish it in the crude kingdom of nature to which my physical personality belongs. What it is possible. to develop in that realm has already been developed. Therefore I must leave this kingdom and take up the building in the realm of the spirit at the point where nature left off. I must create an atmosphere of life not to be found in outer nature.”

This atmosphere of life was prepared for the mystic in the Mystery temples. There the forces slumbering within him were awakened, there he was changed into a higher creative spirit-nature. This transformation was a delicate process. It could not bear the untempered atmosphere of everyday life. But once completed, its result was that the human being stood as a rock, founded on the Eternal and able to defy all storms. But it was impossible for him to reveal his experiences to any one unprepared to receive them.

[ 13 ] Plutarch says that the Mysteries provided “the deep- est information and interpretation of the true nature of the daimons.” And Cicero tells us that from the Mysteries, “when they are explained and traced back to their meaning, we learn the nature of things rather than that of the gods.”⁵ From such statements we see clearly that for the mystics there were higher revelations about the nature of things than what popular religion was able to impart. Indeed, we see that the daimons, that is, the spiritual beings, and the gods themselves needed explaining. Therefore initiates went back to beings of a higher nature than daimons and gods, and this was characteristic of the essence of the wisdom of the Mysteries.

The people represented the gods and daimons in images borrowed from the world of sense reality. Would not one who had penetrated into the nature of the Eternal doubt the eternal nature of such gods as these? How could the Zeus of popular imagination be eternal since he bore the qualities of a perishable being? One thing was clear to the mystics: that man arrives at a conception of the gods in a different way from the conception of other things. An object belonging to the outer world compels us to form a very definite idea of it. Compared with this our conception of the gods is freer, even somewhat arbitrary. The control by the outer world is absent. Reflection shows us that what we set up as gods cannot be externally verified. This places us in logical uncertainty; we begin to feel that we ourselves are the creators of our gods. Indeed, we ask ourselves: What led us to venture beyond physical reality in our life of conceptions? The mystic was obliged to ask himself such questions; his doubts were justified. “Look at all representations of the gods,” he might think to himself. “dre they not like the beings we meet in the world of sense? Did not man create them for himself by giving or withholding from them, in his thought, some quality belonging to beings of the sense world? The savage lover of the chase creates a heaven in which the gods themselves take part in glorious hunting, and the Greek peopled his Olympus with divine beings whose models were taken from his own surroundings.”

[ 14 ] The philosopher Xenophanes (575-480 B.C.) drew attention to this fact with ruthless logic. We know that the older Greek philosophers were entirely dependent on the wisdom of the Mysteries. We will later prove this in detail, basing it on Heraclitus. What Xenophanes says may without question be taken as the conviction of the mystic. It runs thus:

[ 15 ] “Men, who picture the gods as created in their own human forms, give them human senses, voices, and bodies. But if cattle and lions had hands and knew how to use them like men in painting and working, they would paint the forms of the gods and give shape to their bodies like their own. Horses would create gods in horse-form, and cattle would make gods resembling cattle.”

[ 16 ] Through insight of this kind man may begin to doubt the existence of anything divine, He may reject all mythology and only recognize as reality what is forced upon him by his sense perception. But the mystic did not become a doubter of this kind. He saw that the doubter would be like a plant saying: “My crimson flowers are null and futile, because I am complete within my green leaves. What I may add to them is only adding illusive appearance.” Just as little also could the mystic rest content with gods thus created, the gods of the people. If the plant could think it would understand that the forces which created its green leaves are also intended to create crimson flowers, and it would not rest till it had investigated those forces and come face to face with them. This was the attitude of the mystic toward the gods of the people. He did not repudiate them or say they were futile, but he knew they had been created by man. The same forces, the same divine element, which are at work in nature, are at work in the mystic. They create within him images of the gods. He wishes to see the force that creates the gods; it does not resemble the popular gods; it is of a higher nature. Xenophanes alludes to it thus: [ 17 ] “There is one god greater than all gods and men. His form is not like that of mortals, his thoughts are not their thoughts.”

[ 18 ] This god was also the God of the Mysteries. He might have been called a hidden God, for the human being could never find him with his senses only. Look at outer things around you: you will find nothing Divine. Exert your reason: you may be able to detect the laws by which things appear and disappear, but even your reason will show you nothing divine. Saturate your imagination with religious feeling, and you may be able to create images which you take to be gods; but your intellect will pull them to pieces, for it will prove to you that you created them yourself and borrowed the material from the sense world. As long as you look at outer things simply in your capacity of a reasonable being, you must deny the existence of God; for God is hidden from the senses and from that intellect of yours which explains sense perceptions. God lies hidden, spellbound in the world, and you need his own power to find him. That power you must awaken in yourself.

These are the teachings which were given to the candidate for initiation. And now there began for him the great cosmic drama with which he was closely bound up. The action of the drama meant nothing less than the deliverance of the spellbound god. Where is God? This was the question asked by the soul of the mystic. God is not existent, but nature exists. And in nature he must be found. There he has found an enchanted grave. It was in a higher sense that the mystic understood the words “God is love.” For God has infinitely expanded that love, he has sacrificed himself in infinite love, he has poured himself out, fallen into number in the manifold of nature. Things in nature live and he does not live in them. He slumbers within them. He lives in man, and man can experience his life within himself. If we are to give him existence, we must deliver him by the creative power within us.

The human being now looks into himself. As latent creative power, as yet without existence, the Divine lives in his soul. In the soul is a place where the spellbound god may wake to liberty. The soul is the mother who is able to conceive the god by nature. If the soul be impregnated by nature she will give birth to the divine. God is born from the union of the soul with nature—no longer a hidden, but a manifest god. He has life, perceptible life, moving among men. He is the spirit freed from enchantment, the offspring of the spellbound God. He is not the great God, who was and is and is to come, yet he may be taken, in a certain sense, as his revelation. The Father remains in the unseen; the Son is born to man out of his own soul. Mystical knowledge is thus an actual event in the cosmic process. It is the birth of a divine offspring. It is an event as real as any natural event, only enacted upon a higher plane.

The great secret of the mystic is that he himself creatively delivers his divine offspring, but that he first prepares himself to recognize him. The uninitiated man has no feeling for the father of that god, for that Father slumbers under a spell. The Son appears to be born of a virgin, the soul having seemingly given birth to him without impregnation. All her other children are conceived by the sense world. Here the father may be seen and touched, having the life of sense. The divine Son alone is begotten of the hidden, eternal Father - God himself.

• 1. It was said above that those whose spiritual eyes are opened are able to see into the spiritual world. The conclusion must not on this account be drawn that only one who possesses spiritual sight is able to form an intelligent opinion about the results arrived at by the initiate. Spiritual sight is needed only for research. What is afterwards communicated can be understood by everyone who gives fair play to his reason and preserves an unbiased sense of truth. And such a person may also apply the results of research to life and derive satisfaction from them without himself having spiritual sight.
• 2. “The sinking into the mire” spoken of by Plato must also be interpreted in the sense referred to in the previous note.
• 3. What was said about the impossibility of o imparting the teachings of the Mysteries has reference to the fact that they could not be communicated to those unprepared in the same form in which the initiate experienced them; but they were always communicated to those outside in such a form as was possible for the uninitiated to understand. For instance, the myths gave the old form in order to communicate the content of the Mysteries in a way that was generally comprehensible.
• 4. Plutarch’s Moral Works, On the Inscription EJ at Delphi, pp. 17-18.
• 5. Plutarch: On the Decline of the Oracles; Cicero: On the Nature of the Gods.

The Churches call the faithful together the whole year through by the sound of bells. The sound of bells indicates the times, important dates, and also those hours in which the faithful are called to church. This sound of bells, so full of meaning—this call of the hours—ceases in certain churches in these days beginning with the festival of the entombment, of the sacrificial death of Christ; and the bells begin again only with the festival of the Resurrection of that Power of whom we have spoken as the Power which bestows meaning on the Earth.

The significance of the intervening time is celebrated in the following way. The discords of wooden instruments to some extent take the place of the bells during these days in which souls are asked to remember that the Power Who bestowed meaning on earthly development has united Himself through this sacrificial death with the depths of existence. The renewed sound of the bells at the festival of the Resurrection should signify how their music is sanctified and made significant through this meaning of the Earth and how they should ring forth for the rest of the Christian year to the consciousness of the faithful.

We have, my dear friends, from various aspects sought to draw near to the meaning and being of that Power, Who through the Mystery of Golgotha has flowed into the impulses of the Earth’s evolution. You will have seen from the various lectures, that every path of the soul to this power is but one of many, which aroused the sentiments and the feelings, so that they may become worthily receptive and bring understanding for what is revealed when the name of Christ is pronounced, when the Mystery of Golgotha is mentioned. We shall endeavour to-day to choose one of these ways. But, my dear friends, this can only be one way, for it is only by studying many ways leading to the Mystery of Golgotha that we can come to an understanding of it, to an understanding appropriate in some measure to the epoch in which we are incarnated. To-day let us choose the way which shall bring before our souls how peoples who as yet knew nothing of the Mystery of Golgotha, how these European peoples were obliged to receive this Mystery of Golgotha in accordance with what they had gone through in their hearts and souls as a preparation for it.

I have already intimated in some of my former lectures how at a definite time a deep feeling for nature was associated with European evolution, a nature-feeling radically different from that which spread over the southern countries of Europe and proceeded from Christianity itself, and which was in a certain sense connected with a sort of fleeing from Nature. In these southern countries into which Christianity had spread in the Greek and Roman Culture—the conception of sin, of guilt, became bound up with what flows into men, into the human soul from nature. ‘Away from nature into the regions of spiritual life, into the regions out of which the Christ has descended in order to bring salvation to mankind, in order to bring meaning to earthly evolution; in order to make men free from what is merely natural and to direct them to what can be hallowed among men, to what can save from the sins of nature’—these are words which can to a certain extent express this first Christian nature-feeling.

The European peoples North of the Alps were inwardly inspired by quite a different feeling for nature, when they received Christianity. It was impossible for them simply to flee from nature, merely to connect nature with the conception of sin and guilt. For them, nature had grown to be far too full of meaning through long centuries for them merely to be able to flee from it. It had become for them something with which they had grown together, so that when they received Christianity they could, it is true, turn to a different world from that of nature, but they could not merely say without further ado: ‘Let us flee from nature.’ This fleeing from nature, this gazing into and striving after the regions of the spirit caused them lamentation and suffering of soul, caused them sadness, while always in the background of the glories of the heavenly kingdom they mourned over that which must be lost within the regions of nature. And when we ask the reason why such a feeling was in the depth of their soul we find it in the way in which these souls were bound to nature, in a past lying proportionately not far behind them—a past which lay a far shorter time behind them than was the case in the Eastern and Southern peoples—we find that behind them lay a quite peculiar union with nature. It was as if in their hearts, in their souls, there still lived something of all the holy feeling of comfort in their union with nature, their union too with the divine in Nature. And the sadness, the pain and the lamentation came from this, that they felt it was through an iron Cosmic necessity that that was lost which had once bound them with the holy, the divine in nature. Their feeling was not merely that nature should be charged with sin and guilt, their feeling was rather that in losing nature they had lost something of infinite value. It was not the feeling that they should turn away from nature, it was much more the sorrowful feeling that something which is holy in nature, had itself turned away from the human heart and soul. They felt that what they had formerly honoured in connexion with nature, they must now experience in a different way through raising themselves to the Mystery of Golgotha.

It was an infinitely more real, more tragic feeling which Christianity felt in these regions than in the regions south of the Alps and in the East.

We shall make clear, my dear friends, what was the meaning of that ancient nature-feeling in the best way, when we glance at what is felt, like a premonition of the Christ’s divine death of sacrifice within the European peoples. We understand this best when we look back at the significance of the death of Balder, and of his exile in the under world, in the world of Hel, in Niflheim. I have often intimated that it is difficult to-day to re-awaken in our souls all that is connected with the Balder-Myth of this particular ancient Sun god, who was revered and worshipped by the peoples of Europe. And it is indeed difficult to make this clear in an age when it is generally believed that the human soul, in which alone human development takes place, has always seen just as it sees to-day, has always had such experiences as it has to-day. We must rise, my dear friends, to the thought that the experiences possible for the soul in olden times were quite different from those which are possible in a later age, and that this is connected with the entire life of natural existence. Just picture to yourselves that man’s soul of old saw through his eyes into nature quite differently from when he looks at nature with his eyes to-day and man’s soul heard through his ears something different in olden times from what he hears to-day when he listens to nature. Let us make the transition clear by choosing a simile, which, taken at random, can still make the difference clear. To-day you look at nature with your eyes, you see the green of the plants, the blue-green of the forests, the blue of heaven, the many-coloured brightness of the carpet of flowers. Imagine that a revolution were to come into human evolution through an iron necessity in such a way that the possibility of seeing colours should cease, that the whole of nature would appear only grey upon grey, that you would look up to heaven and see another different shade of grey, as if you looked at grey meadows and were to see only different shades of grey, black and white instead of the coloured carpet of flowers. Imagine such a revolution in seeing nature, and you would have a comparison for what in fact appeared in time, when the possibility of beholding in the meadows all the manifold elementary beings which are bound up with the growing and weaving and being of nature, of the flowers and the blossoms, disappeared. At such a time through a mighty revolution in the perception of nature men could no longer look up to the stars and see in them the spiritually living planetary Spirits weaving round the stars in the ether. I have often declared that to say nature makes no jumps is one of the most untrue assertions. It is untrue, for just as there was a jump from the green leaf to the flower, so the loss of the old clairvoyance was a mighty jump in human evolution. From the old clairvoyance where elementary spirits were seen weaving and living where we to-day see only the coloured carpet of flowers, men passed over to the later sight. That was a mighty jump. And those people who constituted the population of Europe, when the Mystery of Golgotha took place in the East, had still a living feeling that an old clairvoyance of this kind had once existed, that their ancestors had lived under conditions in which they could see the beings weaving in the meadows and the forests and in the infinite expanse of the starry heavens. Now all this had vanished and died away.

They had a feeling that when in earlier days men lifted their eyes to the Moon at night, it did not simply appear in the form of the clear sickle; but this clear sickle was surrounded by living planetary spirituality which had much to reveal to the human soul. And they felt that this had vanished in the times in which they now must live.

And when the human soul asked what had happened that nature was thus deprived of the gods, that darkness extended where spiritual light had been, the leader of the people replied: ‘There was once in the world of gods, Balder, who united in himself the force of the sunlight. But Balder, on account of the hatred of the dark elements, had to transfer his dwelling place which he had extended to the horizon of men’s Earth, to Hel in the underworld. The force of vision of the old times vanished. The clear sunlight was submerged, the shining radiance of the old gods was lost, and only the dead semblance of the sunlight was reflected through the light of the Moon’s sickle. The world has become material. Nature over which men lament, over which they mourn, which they charge with the conceptions of sin and guilt, this nature appears like the mourning survivor which was once united with the divine and which sent into all souls the ray of the divine.’ And thus arose the feeling which the people had when they heard the death-song of the old Sun god Balder. He is no longer there outside perceptible to our vision; the god Balder has gone into the underworld, and for us he has left behind the nature which mourns. But where has he gone? Where is the kingdom of Hel, that realm of darkness into which Balder has withdrawn? Where is it? Our materialistic age will only be able to prepare itself for such ideas by acquiring conceptions of this nature.

Let us ask ourselves, my dear friends, what it meant in primeval times when people said, turning towards nature: ‘Balder is there’? What did it mean? It meant something really actual, something which, however, those will not understand who believe that human civilisation has been in all ages what it is to-day. When man in primeval times saw the meadows, he knew that those living elementary spirits of which I have spoken appeared to him there, he could not always see them, he could only see them at certain times. How was it then when man at certain times could see these elementary spirits? That was no mere seeing, that was not a dead reception of what was seen, but it was united with a living feeling, with a living perception. People went through the forests, they gazed at the spirits, at the elementary beings, but they did not merely see them. I might say they absorbed the essence of these spirits into their souls, they felt their breath as a spiritually psychic draught of refreshment. They felt themselves drawing into their etheric bodies the breath that came from the elementary spirits which they saw in the forest and in the meadows. ‘They make us young,’ thus could they feel, when they went out in the morning and when the lingering dawn made the elementary spirits of the forest visible. They made men young, they bestowed force upon them. And this force then lived on in them. Men took part in this rejuvenation which the spirits brought about. They took part in it. But what happened to all these rejuvenating forces? They vanished from the outer world, man could only have a sad, half-conscious connection with them. Where did they go? They worked further, but they worked to a certain extent unseen, unheard; they worked, but they worked upon human nature in such a way that man with his consciousness had no longer a part in their working. And as the time drew on when man became aware of this, he had to say to himself: ‘Within my nature, forces are at work of which formerly I not only knew that they worked in darkness upon me, but I could clearly perceive and observe the flowing of these forces from the outer world into myself.’ The god Balder has withdrawn into the kingdom of Hel, into man’s own darkness, into the subterranean depths of man’s soul. Where is Balder? The priest who had to explain the Mystery to man when he asked: ‘Where is Balder?’ had to say: ‘Balder is not in the visible world. Because you as man needed those shaping forces, those rejuvenating forces, which formerly you were able to take up half-consciously, these work now without your knowledge in your inner being, so that you perceive nothing of them through your faculty of knowledge. Because you needed these forces in your invisible being, Balder has vanished from the kingdom of the visible, has withdrawn himself to the world of your own subconscious inner nature.’ Then the feeling came over man, which we can designate with the following words: ‘Thus I as man stand in the kingdom of Hel with a part of my nature. I cannot see how the forces which shape my life out of the kingdom of Hel intervene in my psychic bodily nature; the god Balder is in the underworld, he is with Hel, he works upon me in the invisible. Vanished is the vision of Balder's kingdom of the Sun.’ That is the mood of lamentation, of sadness which must call forth suffering of soul, for that is no fortuitous egoistic human lamentation, it is the lamentation which man feels in connexion with the cosmos; it is a cosmic lamentation, a cosmic sadness, a cosmic suffering.

And now came the news that that which had thus withdrawn into the kingdom of Hel had been newly revived through another power which we can find again when we gaze deeply into our own inner being, into which the old power of Balder had vanished. Balder is in the kingdom of Hel, but the Christ has gone down into the kingdom of Hel, into the kingdom of mankind’s own subconscious human nature; there He calls Balder to life. And when man has steeped himself deeply enough in that which he has become in the course of earthly evolution, then he finds again the rejuvenating shaping forces. ‘You find again what you have lost, for the old Balder has descended into your own kingdom of darkness. The Christ has found him there, he has brought to life again that which once was yours through Balder’s power.’ Thus could the priest proclaim to the men who felt the deep secrets of the message of the Mystery of Golgotha in these regions.

And the Easter message appeared like a memory, like a sacred memory of primeval holy times, but a memory which gave new life. The people were able to say: ‘That power of the old Balder was too small to extend over the whole of human evolution. A higher power had to appear in order to give again to men what they had to lose in Balder.’ So rang out in the announcement of the Christ, the remembrance of the old Balder and of his death; so there rang out the resurrection of the ancient glory in the human soul, which had disappeared through Balder’s death; that power, which has now been newly awakened.

We must, my dear friends, approach more nearly to that which the Mystery of Golgotha is, as the meaning of earthly evolution, so that we ask ourselves: ‘With what perceptions, with what feelings did. historical humanity meet the historical Christ?’ For the point is not that we should gain an abstract idea of the nature of Christ or of the Mystery of Golgotha, but the point is that we should be able to answer the question for ourselves: ‘What can that Impulse bring to life in the deepest depth of the human sold, that Impulse which has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha?’

Let us look at it, this Mystery of Golgotha and see how it is still celebrated by the different religious creeds of the old world. On Good Friday is celebrated Christ’s entombment. The bells are silent; silence is spread over the Earth. The man who lived in the centuries I have described said to himself: ‘Mute, without sound has the world become, Christ has descended into those parts of the human soul-existence and of cosmic-existence, into which Balder had to descend because his power did not suffice for the complete elevation of the human soul. There He is below, in the mysterious depths in which I myself stand, when I gaze upon the subconscious shaping forces in my own inner nature.’ The human heart can thrill mysteriously when it reflects: ‘The impulse of Golgotha has departed from this silent world. It rests below where you yourself are. Wait, wait and this impulse of Golgotha will unite with you in the spiritual worlds to which your soul may belong, if it will only descend with Balder into its own depths. It will call Balder to life in these days. And in your inner being, O man, you shall find again what has vanished and faded away with the vanishing of Balder out of the world around into your own depths. Take up, O man, the living conception of the Christ who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha, Who will be able to rise again not to your external eyes, but indeed to your soul’s vision, if it becomes conscious of its inner being, which came down from the Moon, from out of the Sun—as that elementary force, that shaping force which makes the soul alive. Wait, wait till He rises again, the re-awakener of Balder. A world was once yours, in which your senses had only to be directed to nature around you and the life-giving ensouling force flowed out of the elementary part of this outer nature to meet you, without any effort of your own. A kingdom of the Spirit was woven through all natural existence, and you yourself lived, if you waited for the right moment, not only in nature bereft of Spirit; you lived in what is behind nature, of which it is only the expression; you lived in the life of nature. Now when you find no longer the spiritual in nature, you must seek it through plunging into and calling to life your own inner being with the force which has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. O Nature, you were once full of expression, so full of expression that man’s real true home could be seen in your forms. Balder has taken this home with him, it is no longer there, it is in realms which your outer sight does not behold. But this ancient kingdom exists, of whose forms, surrounding nature was once the expression—this kingdom still exists. But you do not find it, when you go the way of nature only; you find it when you unite yourself with the Impulse which has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. Nature is not just sinful and guilty; she is forsaken by that home which man must seek, inwardly permeated by the power of the Christ.’

And in these Christian times we could fancy, my dear friends, that some memory of the death of Balder still comes through to us, connecting itself with tho message of the Mystery of Golgotha—it seems to us as though the sound of lamentation, of sadness towards nature, as we have described it above, has only very gradually become lost and died down. Certainly in the Christian conception, the mood which looks solely up to the self-sacrificing Christ, up to the heavenly home, is also present. And in European peoples gradually the mood becomes distinct, which looks upon nature as the child on a lower level, but not as the forsaken child. But if we listen to the impression the words give (not merely in their abstract sense), at the time when in the eighth and ninth centuries the announcement of the Mystery of Golgotha had been already spread over certain regions of Europe—when we listen to the way in which it is said that we cannot find our true home in the earthly world, then we can still feel something of the old tragic mood towards nature, bereft of Balder. As we have said, we must listen not only to the words and to the abstract sense of the words, but to the way there rings through the words what is felt concerning nature and what is felt concerning a different home of the human soul than nature can now be. Something of this kind still rang out, even after Christianity had been spread abroad. That this could be perceived even after people had tried to spread Christianity in the form in which it had been received in the East, we can see from the many publications of the eighth and ninth centuries, if we only attend to the feeling in them. We have some so-called European Gospels, belonging to these times, and one of these is the ‘Gospel-Harmony,’ the so-called ‘Diatessaron’ of Otfried, a monk living in Alsace, who had learned the Mysteries of Christianity through Hrabanus Maurus, and who had then tried to transcribe into the language of his home what the Gospel meant for him, what the message of the death and resurrection of the Christ had become for him. Otfried was born in Weissenburg in Alsace. He had translated what the Gospel had become to him in his feeling, into a language which was at that time spoken in Alsace. Let us listen to one or two extracts, my dear friends, of what just in connection with our study to-day may interest us from the Christian message of this Alsatian monk in the ninth century; and let us try to hear not only the abstract sense of the words, but to hear through the words what can be felt as sorrow concerning man’s forsaken home of nature.

(Dr. Steiner here read the poem in its original language.) He then continued: Let us try to give the poem in our modern language as nearly as we can:

We sorrow and suffer want for much that was dear to us,
And bitter times are now our heritage;
In our sorrow we grieve in this land here below,
Held in bondage manifold by our sins.
Care and sorrow are here our portion;
Of all knowledge of our home bereft,
Our plaints go up, we orphans all forsaken!
Alas I thou strange land, how hard thou art,
A hard Mother ever do I find thee;
Bereft and full of care we wander.
Within me ever have I felt that nothing dear I find in thee,
I find in thee none other good, but cause for constant lamentation,
Heart full of care and pain both great and manifold.

Thus from the soul of this monk sounds forth what was felt with regard to nature.

It is to-day difficult, my dear friends, very, very difficult to recall to mind the way in which the great festivals were raised above the whole horizon of daily life in an age in which people still felt in a more living way, the memory of Balder’s death; and to realise what they welcomed—after they had experienced the sad time when they were forsaken—what they received once again from Him Who passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. They had first known the whole bitterness of death, when the old elementary life forces no longer blossomed forth for human sight from the regions of Earth, when the Earth in its forms seemed to fashion death only, death with which Balder had united himself. And now, when they instituted the festivals of Good Friday and Holy Saturday, up to the Resurrection on Easter Sunday, and when they represented this death which they had first learnt to know in its bitterness, they felt that it concealed the triumphant force of Life which had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and which always should permeate those souls attuned to the sad and glorious festivals of these days, in which, according to the saying of Angelus Silesius, there should be a ‘celebration’ of the passage of the Christ through death, and of His resurrection. Infinitely more living was the power of Christ’s death and sacrifice when they were still brought into connection with the dead Balder. In the kingdom of the zEsir, looking down upon the earth from Breidablik, his stronghold, was Balder, like unto the silvery sun-moonlight, Balder in his power of giving life to the elemental nature of the Earth; into the dark depths had he gone on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Holy Saturday night. The gaze was directed to Balder’s new kingdom of death, but with the knowledge: ‘There beneath in the kingdom of death, rests the germ which unites itself with the evolutionary impulses of the Earth, and which will bring forth a new life, when it rises again. It is that death which is experienced in the germinal force of the plants, dead in the depths of the Earth; that force which brings forth the new plants again.

Like mighty words of God had the news come to men, who had learned to comprehend death in the fate of their Balder. Three days long they could feel that that had become active which had killed Balder, and which Balder himself had not been able to conquer. On this account the feeling must be of a special kind which brings life to our souls in the silence of the world for these three days through which we are now passing. Of a special kind must this feeling be; it must express itself somewhat in this way: that for the sake of man’s further development, death must intervene in earthly evolution in a more and more intense way; that nature once radiant as Paradise must become dark and silent as death around man, but that the eternal power of life triumphant ripens in nature’s graveyard. Thus we see it during these three days. He rests beneath, the Christ, in the dark abyss of nature permeated with death. There within we follow Him, because we know that we extend with a part of our own nature into this abyss of universal being and because we know: ‘When we unite ourselves with that, which in us would otherwise be death alone, by means of the Power which has experienced the Mystery of Golgotha, only then shall we bear upwards that part of us which extends beneath into the abyss of the universal death of nature.’ So we step down into the depths and know that we must differentiate our feelings; that we are not acting rightly if we do not distinguish between the different feelings for certain days. Rather should we learn to recognise: Now is the time when the soul must unite itself with that which it can learn concerning death, concerning the death which made it necessary, which from an iron necessity brought it about, that the Christ descended to death.

We shall to-morrow direct our attention to the Mystery of Golgotha from another side; for, as we have said, many ways lead up to the summit where the deep meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha becomes gradually more and more comprehensible. It can only become comprehensible when we not merely place before us one-sidedly the triumphant Christ, but when we also place before our soul the Christ Who unites Himself with death. And what death signifies for the whole of human life, my dear friends, may become perhaps a little clearer, when we deepen ourselves in the feelings which we can experience in the Balder Myth, when we realise what Balder is, what the life-giving Sun-force is, working in the elemental world, after it has experienced death. If we still keep alive in the soul this feeling of the loss of Balder, in that we say: ‘What should we have to feel in a world yet to come when we recollect that the Gods were there once, they let us see the surrounding world in the coloured brilliancy of the senses, but now all is grey on grey.’ That would have been so, if the Christ had not come into the world. That it will not be so, the triumphant power of Christ will bring about. That which to-day men do not believe, they will some day believe: that which to-day can only work as Christ power in the human heart itself, will become actively felt, permeating the whole cosmos, namely, the earthly part of the cosmos, in so far as this cosmos gives rejuvenating, life-giving force to men. Of this we shall speak further to-morrow, my dear friends.

To-day, however, let us call before us how right it is, in regard to the feeling of the human soul in connection with the cosmic Christ, to ponder over what the Gospel says concerning the cosmic power of the Christ; when this Gospel reveals how the Christ is an universal cosmic Power, and how He commanded the winds and the waves. The people of the eighth and ninth centuries had a special feeling just for this aspect of the Christ working through the winds and the waves. They said: ‘It was Balder indeed who brought it about that we once saw the weaving and living elemental world around us in its wonderful working. Balder is dead. But Christ has the power, when we take Him up into our soul-forces, again to awaken that which was lost through Balder’s death. As Balder appeared through the winds and the waves, so the Christ also appeared in the winds and the waves. It is no abstract soul force, it is a force that works through the winds and the waves.’

If we listen attentively to the Gospel text of the ‘Heliand,’ a second Gospel poem of the ninth century, we can still hear this feeling implied if not expressed. ‘Out in nature Balder lived.’ Certainly the poet of the Heliand had long ago abolished this Balder, he had no interest in spreading with the abstract intelligence this idea among his people; he wished rather to stamp it out. But in the way in which he lays stress upon the words, in the way in which he becomes earnest when he wants to bring before us how the power of Christ works through nature, through the winds and the waves, just there it seems as if, even if he did not consciously perceive it himself, we must be conscious of the following: ‘A force has worked through the winds and waves, the power that is greater than Balder, the power that has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha.’ And we also find something of this in the words in which he describes the scene where Christ stills the winds and the waves, according to the Gospel story. That makes a special impression on him. There he chooses—especially when he turns in his mystic way to the feeling the soul can have for nature’s activity, in that through Christ, nature has become divine—he chooses quite special words in which the greatness of Christ can be impressed upon the soul, through which the peculiar cosmic power of Christ can speak to the soul.‘

‘When the people saw how Christ had commanded the winds and the waves’ ... (the Heliand expresses with special warmth how the people felt towards this Christ Power, this Christ Being, this Christ personality which passed through the Mystery of Golgotha.) ‘When the people saw how Christ had commanded the winds and the waves, the people began amongst themselves to wonder and some spake with these words: “What a mighty man this is, that the winds and the waves obey His words; They both pay heed to His message!” This Child of God had delivered the people out of their distress, and had saved them. The ship sailed on—the wooden ship—the disciples and the people came to land and said: God be praised! And they glorified His, namely, God’s, magical power.’

So says this poet of the Heliand, in one of the first Gospel poems which tells of the greatness of the Christ, Who to-day lies symbolically in the depths of the realms of death.

My dear Friends,

I am told that the phenomenon with the prism—at the end of yesterday's lecture—has after all proved difficult for some of you to understand. Do not be troubled if this is so; you will understand it better by and by. We shall have to go into the phenomena of light and colour rather more fully. They are the real piece de resistance, even in relation to the rest of Physics, and will therefore provide a good foundation.

You will realize that the main idea of the present course is for me to tell you some of the things which you will not find in the text-books, things not included in the normal lines of the scientific study and only able to be dealt with in the way we do here. In the concluding lectures we shall consider how these reflections can also be made use of in school teaching.

What I was trying to explain is in its essence a special kind of interplay of light and dark—i.e. the unimpaired brightness and on the other hand the dimming or clouding of the light. I was trying to show how through the diverse ways in which light and dark work together—induced especially by the passage of a cylinder of light through a prism—the phenomena of colour, in all their polar relation to one-another, are brought about.

Now in the first place I really must ask you to swallow the bitter pill (I mean, those of you who found things difficult to understand). Your difficulty lies in the fact that you are always hankering after a phoronomical treatment of light and colour. The strange education we are made to undergo instils this mental habit. Thinking of outer Nature, people will restrict themselves to thoughts of a more or less phoronomical character. They will restrict their thoughts to what is arithmetical, spatially formal, and kinematical. Called on to try and think in terms of qualities as you are here, you may well be saying to yourselves: Here we get stuck! You must attribute it to the unnatural direction pursued by Science in modern time. Moreover—I speak especially to Waldorf-School and other teachers—you will yourselves to some extent still have to take the same direction with your pupils. It will not be possible, all at once, to bring the really healthy ideas into a modern school. We must find ways of transition.

For the phenomena of light and colour, let us now begin again, but from the other end. I take my start from a much disputed saying of Goethe's. In the 1780's a number of statements as to the way colours arise in and about the light came to his notice. Among other things, he learned of the prismatic phenomena we were beginning to study yesterday. It was commonly held by physicists, so Goethe learned, that when you let colourless light go through a prism the colourless light is analyzed and split up. For in some such way the phenomena were interpreted. If we let a cylinder of colourless light impinge on the screen, it shows a colourless picture. Putting a prism in the way of the cylinder of light, the physicists went on to say, we get the sequence of colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue—light blue and dark blue,—violet. Goethe heard of it in this way: the physicists explain it thus, so he was told—The colourless light already contains the seven colours within itself—a rather difficult thing to imagine, no doubt, but that is what they said. And when we make the light go through the prism, the prism really does no more than to fan out and separate what is already there in the light,—the seven colours, into which it is thus analyzed.

Goethe wanted to get to the bottom of it. He began borrowing and collecting instruments,—much as we have been doing in the last few days. He wanted to find out for himself. Buettner, Privy Councillor in Jena, was kind enough to send him some scientific instruments to Weimar. Goethe stacked them away, hoping for a convenient time to begin his investigations. Presently, Councillor Buettner grew impatient and wanted his instruments back. Goethe had not yet begun;—it often happens, one does not get down to a thing right away. Now Goethe had to pack the instruments to send them back again. Meanwhile he took a quick look through the prism, saying to himself as he did so: If then the light is analyzed by the prism, I shall see it so on yonder wall. He really expected to see the light in seven colours. But the only place where he could see any colour at all was at some edge or border-line—a stain on the wall for instance, where the stain, the dark and clouded part, met the lighter surface. Looking at such a place through the prism he saw colours; where there was uniform white he saw nothing of the kind. Goethe was roused. He felt the theory did not make sense. He was no longer minded to send the instruments back, but kept them and went on with his researches. It soon emerged that the phenomenon was not at all as commonly described.

If we let light pass through the space of the room, we get a white circle on the screen. Here we have cut it out very neatly; you see a pretty fair circle. Put a prism in the way of the body of light that is going through there,—the cylinder of light is diverted, (Figure IIc), but what appears in the first place is not the series of seven colours at all, only a reddish colour at the lower edge, passing over into yellow, and at the upper edge a blue passing over into greenish shades. In the middle it stays white.

Goethe now said to himself: It is not that the light is split up or that anything is separated out of the light as such. In point of fact, I am projecting a picture,—simply an image of this circular aperture. The aperture has edges, and where the colours occur the reason is not that they are drawn out of the light, as though the light had been split up into them. It is because this picture which I am projecting—the picture as such—has edges. Here too the fact is that where light adjoins dark, colours appear at the edges. It is none other than that. For there is darkness outside this circular patch of light, while it is relatively light within it.

The colours therefore, to begin with, make their appearance purely and simply as phenomena at the border between light and dark. This is the original, the primary phenomenon. We are no longer seeing the original phenomenon when by reducing the circle in size we get a continuous sequence of colours. The latter phenomenon only arises when we take so small a circle that the colours extend inward from the edges to the middle. They then overlap in the middle and form what we call a continuous spectrum, while with the larger circle the colours formed at the edges stay as they are. This is the primal phenomenon. Colours arise at the borders, where light and dark flow together.

This, my dear Friends, is precisely the point: not to bring in theories to tamper with the facts, but to confine ourselves to a clean straightforward study of the given facts. However, as you have seen, in these phenomena not only colours arise; there is also the lateral displacement of the entire cone of light. To study this displacement further—diagrammatically to begin with—we can also proceed as follows.

Suppose you put two prisms together so as to make them into a single whole. The lower one is placed like the one I drew yesterday, the upper one the opposite way up (Figure IIIa). If I now made a cylinder of light pass through this double prism, I should of course get something very like what we had yesterday. The light would be diverted—upward in the one case, downward in the other. Hence if I had such a double prism I should get a figure of light still more drawn out than before. But it would prove to be rather indistinct and dark. I should explain this as follows. Catching the picture by a screen placed here, I should get an image of the circle of light as if there were two pushed together, one from either end. But I could now move the screen farther in. Again I should get an image. That is to say, there would be a space—all this is remaining purely within the given facts—a space within which I should always find it possible to get an image. You see then how the double prism treats the light. Moreover I shall always find a red edge outside,—in this case, above and below—and a violet colour in the middle. Where I should otherwise merely get the image extending from red to violet, I now get the outer edges red, with violet in the middle and the other colours in between. By means of such a double prism I should make it possible for such a figure to arise,—and I should get a similar figure if I moved the screen farther away. Within a certain distance either way, such a picture will be able to arise—coloured at the edges, coloured in the middle too, and with transitional colours.

Now we might arrange it so that when moving the screen to and fro there would be a very wide space within which such pictures could be formed. But as you probably divine, the only way of doing this would be to keep on changing the shape of the prism. If for example, taking a prism with a larger angle, I got the picture at a given place, if I then made the angle smaller I should get it elsewhere. Now I can do the whole thing differently by using a prism with curved instead of plane surfaces from the very outset. The phenomenon, difficult to study with the prism, will be much simplified. We therefore have this possibility. We let the cylinder of light go through the space and then put in its way a lens,—which in effect is none other than a double prism with its faces curved. The picture I now get is, to begin with, considerably reduced in size. What then has taken place? The whole cylinder of light has been contracted. Look first at the original cross-section: by interposing the lens I get it narrowed and drawn together. Here then we have a fresh interaction between what is material—the material of the lens, which is a body of glass—and the light that goes through space. The lens so works upon the light as to contract it.

To draw it diagrammatically (Figure IIIa, above), here is a cylinder of light. I let the light go through the lens. If I confronted the light with an ordinary plate of glass or water, the cylinder of light would just go through and a simple picture of it on the screen would be the outcome. Not so if instead of the simple plate, made of glass or water, I have a lens. Following what has actually happened with my drawing, I must say: the picture has grown smaller. The cylinder of light is contracted.

Now there is also another possibility. We could set up a double prism, not as in the former instance but in cross-section as I am now drawing it (Figure IIIb),—the prisms meeting at the angle. I should again get the phenomenon described before, only in this instance the circle would be considerably enlarged. Once again, while moving the screen to and fro within a certain range, I should still get the picture—more or less indistinct. Moreover in this case (Figure IIIb, above and on the right) I should get violet and bluish colours both at the upper and at the lower edge, and red in the middle,—the opposite of what it was before. There would again be the intermediate colours.

Once more I can replace the double prism by a lens,—a lens of this cross-section (Figure IIIb). The other was thick in the middle and thin at the edges; this one is thin in the middle and thick at the edge. Using this lens, I get a picture considerably bigger than the cross-section of the cylinder of light would be without it. I get an enlarged picture, again with colours graded from the edge towards the centre. Following the phenomena in this case I must say: the cylinder of light has been widened,—very considerably thrust apart. Again: the simple fact.

What do we see from these phenomena? Evidently there is an active relation between the material—though it appears transparent in all these lenses and prisms—and what comes to manifestation through the light. We see a kind of interaction between them. Taking our start from what we should get with a lens of this type (thick at the edge and thin in the middle), the entire cylinder of light will have been thrust apart,—will have been widened. We see too how this widening can have come about,—obviously through the fact that the material through which the light has gone is thinner here and thicker here. Here at the edge, the light has to make its way through more matter than in the middle, where it has less matter to go through. And now, what happens to the light? As we said, it is widened out—thrust apart—in the direction of these two arrows. How can it have been thrust apart? It can only be through the fact that it has less matter to go through in the middle and more at the edges. Think of it now. In the middle the light has less matter to go through; it therefore passes through more easily and retains more of its force after having gone through. Here therefore—where it goes through less matter—the force of it is greater than where it goes through more. It is the stronger force in the middle, due to the light's having less matter to go through, which presses the cylinder of light apart. If I may so express myself, you can read it in the facts that this is how it is. I want you to be very clear at this point it is simply a question of true method in our thinking. In our attempts to follow up the phenomena of light by means of lines and diagrams we ought to realize that with every line we draw we ourselves are adding something which has nothing to do with the light as such. The lines I have been drawing are but the limits of the cylinder of light. The cylinder of light is brought about by the aperture. What I draw has nothing to do with the light; I am only reproducing what is brought about by the light's going through the slit. And if I say, “the light moves in this direction”, that again has nothing to do with the light as such; for if I moved the source of light upward, the light that falls on the slit would move in this way and I should have to draw the arrow in this direction. This again would not concern the light as such. People have formed such a habit of drawing lines into the light, and from this habit they have gradually come to talk of “light-rays”. In fact we never have to do with light-rays; here for example, what we have to do with is a cone of light, due to the aperture through which we caused the light to pass. In this instance the cone of light is broadened out, and it is evident: the broadening must somehow be connected with the shorter path the light has to go through in the middle of the lens than at the edge. Due to the shorter path in the middle, the light retains more force; due to the longer path at the edge, more force is taken from it. The stronger light in the middle presses upon the weaker light at the edge and so the cone of light is broadened. You simply read it in the facts.

Truth is that where we simply have to do with images or pictures, the physicists speak of all manner of other things,—light-rays and so on. The “light-rays” have become the very basis of materialistic thinking in this domain. To illustrate the point more vividly, we will consider another phenomenon. Suppose I have a vessel here (Figure IIId), filled with liquid—water, for example. On the floor of the vessel there is an object—say, a florin. Here is the eye. I can now make the following experiment. Omitting the water to begin with, I can look down at the object and see it in this direction. What is the fact? An object is lying on the bottom of the vessel (Figure IIIc). I look and see it in a certain direction. Such is the simple fact, but if I now begin explaining: there is a ray of light proceeding from the object to the eye, affecting the eye, and so on,—then, my dear Friends, I am already fancying all kinds of things that are not given.

Now let me fill the vessel with water or some other liquid up to here. A strange thing happens. I draw a line from the eye towards the object in the direction in which I saw it before. Looking in this direction, I might expect to see the same as before, but I do not. A peculiar thing happens. I see the object lifted to some extent. I see it, and with it the whole floor of the vessel lifted upward. We may go into it another time, as to how this effect can be determined, by which I mean measured. I now only refer to the main principle. To what can this effect be due? How shall I answer this question, purely from the facts? Having previously seen the thing in this direction, I expect to find it there again. Yet when I look, I do not see it there but in this other direction. When there was no water in the vessel I could look straight to the bottom, between which and my eye there was only air. Now my sighting line impinges on the water. The water does not let my force of sight go through as easily as the air does; it offers stronger resistance, to which must give way. From the surface of the water onward I must give way to the stronger resistance, and, that I have to do so, comes to expression in that I do not see right down as before but it all looks lifted upward. It is as though it were more difficult for me to see through the water than through the air; the resistance of the water is harder for me to overcome. Hence I must shorten the force and so I myself draw the object upward. In meeting the stronger resistance I draw in the force and shorten it. If I could fill the vessel with a gas thinner than air (Figure IIIe), the object would be correspondingly lowered, since I should then encounter less resistance,—so I should push it downward. Instead of simply noting this fact, the physicists will say: There is a ray of light, sent from the object to the surface of the water. The ray is there refracted. Owing to the transition from a denser medium to a more tenuous, the ray is refracted away from the normal at the point of incidence; so then it reaches the eye in this direction. And now the physicists go on to say a very curious thing. The eye, they say, having received information by this ray of light, produces it on and outward in the same straight line and so projects the object thither. What is the meaning of this? In the conventional Physics they will invent all manner of concepts but fail to reckon with what is evidently there,—with the resistance which the sighting force of the eye encounters in the denser medium it has to penetrate. They want to leave all this out and to ascribe everything to the light alone, just as they say of the prism experiment: Oh, it is not the prism at all; the seven colours are there in the light all the time. The prism only provides the occasion for them to line up like so many soldiers. The seven naughty boys were there in the light already; now they are only made to line up and stand apart. The prism isn't responsible. Yet as we say, the colours are really caused by what arises in the prism. This wedge of dimness is the cause. The colours are not due to the light as such.

Here now you see it again. We must be clear that we ourselves are being active. We, actively, are looking with our eye,—with our line of sight. Finding increased resistance in the water, we are obliged to shorten the line of sight. What say the physicists on the other hand? They speak of rays of light being sent out and refracted and so on. And now the beauty of it, my dear Friends! The light, they say, reaches the eye by a bent and broken path, and then the eye projects the picture outward. So after all they end by attributing this activity to the eye: “The eye projects ...” Only they then present us with a merely phoronomical conception, remote from the given realities. They put a merely fancied activity in place of what is evidently given: the resistance of the denser water to the sighting force of the eye. It is at such points that you see most distinctly how abstract everything is made in our conventional Physics. All things are turned into mere phoronomic systems; what they will not do is to go into the qualities. Thus in the first place they divest the eye of any kind of activity of its own; only from outer objects rays of light are supposed to proceed and thence to reach the eye. Yet in the last resort the eye is said to project outward into space the stimulus which it receives. Surely we ought to begin with the activity of the eye from the very outset. We must be clear that the eye is an active organism.

We will today begin our study of the nature of the human eye. Here is a model of it (Figure IIIf). The human eye, as you know, is in form like a kind of sphere, slightly compressed from front to back. Such is the eye-ball, seated in the bony cavity or orbit, and with a number of skins enveloping the inner portion. To draw it in cross-section (Figure IIIf). it will be like this. (When looking at your neighbour's eye you look into the pupil. I am now drawing it from the side and in cross-section.) This then would be a right-hand eye. If we removed the eye from the skull, making an anatomical preparation, the first thing we should encounter would be connective tissue and fatty tissue. Then we should reach the first integument of the eye properly speaking—the so-called sclerotic and the transparent portion of it, the cornea. This outermost integument (I have here drawn it) is sinewy,—of bony or cartilaginous consistency. Towards the front it gets transparent, so that the light can penetrate into the eye. A second layer enveloping the inner space of the eye is then the so-called choroid, containing blood-vessels. Thirdly we get the inner-most layer, the retina so-called, which is continued into the optic nerve as you go farther in into the skull. Herewith we have enumerated the three integuments of the eye, And now behind the cornea, shown here,—embedded in the ciliary muscle—is a kind of lens. The lens is carried by a muscle known as the ciliary muscle. In front is the transparent cornea, between which and the lens is the so-called aqueous humour. Thus when the light gets into the eye it first passes through the transparent cornea, then through the aqueous humour and then through this lens which is inherently movable by means of muscles. From the lens onward the light then reaches what is commonly known as the vitreous body or vitreous humour, filling the entire space of the eye. The light therefore goes through the transparent cornea, through the aqueous humour, the lens itself and the vitreous humour and from thence reaches the retina, which is in fact a ramification of the optic nerve that then goes on into the brain, This, therefore, (Figure IIIf),—envisaging only what is most important to begin with—would be a diagrammatic picture of the essential parts of the eye, embedded as it is in its cavity within the bony skull.

Now the eye reveals very remarkable features. Examining the contents of this fluid that is between the lens and the cornea through which the light first has to pass, we find it very like any ordinary liquid taken from the outer world. At this place in the human body therefore—in the liquid or aqueous humour of the eye, between the lens and the outer cornea,—a man in his bodily nature is quite of a piece with the outer world. The lens too is to a high degree “objective” and unalive. Not so when we go on to the vitreous body, filling the interior of the eye and bordering on the retina. Of this we can no longer say that it is like any external body or external fluid. In the vitreous humour there is decided vitality,—there is life. Truth is, the farther back we go into the eye, the more life do we find. In the aqueous humour we have a quite external and objective kind of fluid. The lens too is still external. Inside the vitreous body on the other hand we find inherent vitality. This difference, between what is contained in this more outward portion of the eye and what is there in the more contained parts, also reveals itself in another circumstance. Tracing the comparative development of the eye from the lower animals upward, we find that the external fluid or aqueous humour and the lens grow not from within outward but by the forming of new cells from the surrounding and more peripheral cells. I must conceive the forming of the lens rather in this way. The tissue of the lens, also the aqueous humour in the anterior part of the eye, are formed from neighbouring organs, not from within outward; whilst from within the vitreous body grows out to meet them. This is the noteworthy thing. In fact the nature of the outer light is here at work, bringing about that transformation whereby the aqueous humour and the lens originate. To this the living being then reacts from within, thrusting outward a more living, a more vital organ, namely the vitreous body. Notably in the eye, formations whose development is stimulated from without, and others stimulated from within, meet one-another in a very striking way.

This is the first peculiarity of the eye, and there is also another, scarcely less remarkable. The expanse of the retina which you see here is really the expanded optic nerve. Now the peculiar thing is that at the very point of entry of the optic nerve the eye is insensitive; there it is blind. Tomorrow I shall try to show you an experiment confirming this. The optic nerve thence spreads out, and in an area which for the right-hand eye is a little to the right of the point of entry the retina is most sensitive of all. We may begin by saying that it is surely the nerve which senses the light. Yet it is insensitive to light precisely at its point of entry. If it is really the nerve that senses the light we should expect it to do so more intensely at the point of entry, but it does not. Please try to bear this in mind.

That this whole structure and arrangement of the eye is full of wisdom—wisdom, if I may so put it, from the side of Nature—this you may also tell from the following fact. During the day when you look at the objects around you—in so far as you have healthy eyes—they will appear to you more or less sharp and clear, or at least so that their sharpness of outline is fully adequate for orientation. But in the morning when you first awaken you sometimes see the outlines of surrounding objects very indistinctly, as if enveloped with a little halo. The rim of a circle for example will be indistinct and nebular when you have just awakened in the morning. What is it due to? It is due to there being two different kinds of things in our eye, namely the vitreous body and the lens. In origin, as we have seen, they are quite different. The lens is formed more from without, the vitreous body more from within. While the lens is rather unalive, the vitreous body is full of vitality. Now in the moment of awakening they are not yet adapted to one-another. The vitreous body still tries to picture the objects to us in the way it can; the lens in the way it can. We have to wait till they are well adapted to each other. You see again how deeply mobile everything organic is. The whole working of it depends on this. First the activity is differentiated into that of the lens and the vitreous body respectively. From what is thus differentiated the activity is thereupon composed and integrated; so then the one has to adapt itself to the other.

From all these things we shall try gradually to discover how the many-coloured world emerges for us from the relation of the eye to the outer world. Now there is one more experiment I wish to shew today, and from it we may partly take our start tomorrow in studying the relation of the eye to the external world. Here is a disc, mounted on a wheel and painted with the colours which we saw before—those of the rainbow: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. First look at it and see the seven colours. We will now bring it into rotation. I can turn fairly quickly and you still see the seven colours as such—only rotating. But when I turn quickly enough you can no longer see the colours. You are no doubt seeing a uniform grey. So we must ask: Why do the seven colours appear to us in grey, all of one shade? This we will try to answer tomorrow. Today we will adduce what modern Physics has to say about it,—what is already said in Goethe's time. According to modern Physics, here are the colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. We bring the disc into rotation. The single impression of light has not time enough to make itself felt as such in our eye. Scarcely have I seen the red at a particular place, the quick rotation brings the orange there and then the yellow, and so on. The red itself is there again before I have time to rid myself of the impressions of the other colours. So then I get them all at once. The violet arrives before the impression of the red has vanished. For the eye, the seven colours are thus put together again, which must once more give white.

Such was the scientific doctrine even in Goethe's time, and so he was instructed. Bring a coloured top into quick enough rotation: the seven colours, which in the prism experiment very obediently lined up and stood apart, will re-unite in the eye itself. But Goethe saw no white. All that you ever get is grey, said Goethe. The modern text-books do indeed admit this; they too have ascertained that all you get is grey. However, to make it white after all, they advise you to put a black circle in the middle of the disc, so that the grey may appear white by contrast. A pretty way of doing things! Some people load the dice of “Fortune”, the physicists do so with “Nature”—so they correct her to their liking. You will discover that this is being done with quite a number of the fundamental facts.

I am trying to proceed in such a way as to create a good foundation. Once we have done this, it will enable us to go forward also in the other realms of Physics, and of Science generally.

Published in The Golden Blade, 1977. It is the seventh of twelve lectures in the volume Goetheanism as an Impulse for Transformation ... Human Science and Social Science.

It seems that it would be useful to consider matters concerned with the social life of the present in the light of our recent studies of Goethe. The nineteenth century represents a very significant turning-point in the history of mankind, particularly in relation to the social life of our own time. The middle of the century brought a much greater change in ways of thinking than is generally appreciated. When considering this change one could certainly start from personalities who were not German, for example Shaftesbury and Hemsterhuis. But these examples from England or Holland would not lead us so deeply into our theme as the study of Goethe can do. At the present time, when so much—far more than people realise—is tending towards the destruction of all that springs from middle Europe, it may be of use to link up with these things, which should live on in humanity in a way quite different from the way imagined by most Germans today.

If one looks at the present situation honestly and without prejudice, one cannot help feeling oppressed if one remembers a saying by Herman Grimm—the saying of an outstanding man who lived not very long ago. For this one need not be a German, but one needs to have some feeling for the culture of middle Europe. Herman Grimm once said that there are four personalities to whom a German can look if he wishes to find, in a certain sense, the direction for his life. These four are Luther, Frederick the Great, Goethe and Bismarck. Grimm says that if a German cannot look in the direction given by these four personalities, he feels unsupported and alone among the nations of the world.

In the nineties many people had no doubt at all that this remark was correct (though I was not one of them), but today it can give us a feeling of oppression. For one must admit: Luther does not live on effectively in the German tradition; Goethe has never been a living influence, as we have often had to emphasise, and Frederick the Great and Bismarck belong to conditions which no longer exist. Thus—according to Herman Grimm's remark—the time would have come already in which a German would have to feel unsupported and alone among the nations of the world. People do not feel deeply enough to realise fully in their soul what this signifies: less than three decades ago something could be taken as a matter of course by an enlightened spirit—and today it is quite impossible. If present-day men were not so superficial, many things would be felt much more deeply. It can sometimes be heartbreaking how little the events of the world are felt.

Looking back before the nineteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, we can observe a significant impulse. It was the impulse working in Schiller when he wrote his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; this was the time, too, when Goethe was stirred by his dealings with Schiller. They led Goethe to express the impulse which lay behind Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters” in his own tale, The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.” You can read about the connection between Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters” and Goethe's fairy-tale in my recent small book on Goethe.

When Schiller wrote these “Letters”, his intention was not merely to write a literary essay, but to perform a political deed. At the beginning of the “Letters” he refers to the French Revolution and tries in his own way to say what may be thought about the will behind it, and behind the whole revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. He had no particular expectation as to what would be achieved through a great political change, of which the French revolutionaries hoped so much. He hoped much more for a thorough self-education of man, which he regarded as a necessity of his time.

Let us consider once more the basic conception of these “Letters.” Schiller seeks to answer, in his own way, the question: how does man achieve real freedom in his social life? Schiller would never have expected that men would be led to freedom simply by giving the right form to the social institutions in which they lived. He asks rather that by work upon himself, by self-education, man should reach this condition of freedom within the social order. Schiller believed that man has first to become inwardly free before he can achieve freedom in the external world. And he says: Man has his existence between two powerful influences. On one side he faces the influence coming from physical nature; this Schiller calls the influence of natural necessity. It includes everything produced by the sense-nature of man in the way he desires and so on. And he says: If a man obeys this influence, he cannot be free.

Opposed to the influence of the senses there is another—the influence of rational necessity. Man can commit himself to follow rational necessity, as the other pole of his existence. But then he cannot be a truly free man, either. If he follows in a logical way this rational necessity, it is still something that compels him. And if this rational necessity is consolidated into the laws of an external State, or something of that kind, in obeying such laws he is still compelled. So man is placed between reason and sensuality. His sensuality is a necessity for him, not a freedom. His reason is also a necessity, though a spiritual one; under it, he is not free.

For Schiller, man can be free only if he does not follow in a one-sided way either the influence of the senses or that of reason, but succeeds in bringing the influence of reason into closer accord with his humanity; when, that is, he does not simply submit like a slave to logical or legal necessity, but makes the content of the law, the content of rational necessity, truly his own.

Here Schiller, in comparison with Kant, whom unfortunately he otherwise followed in many ways, is a much freer spirit. For Kant regarded absolute obedience to what he calls duty—that is, rational necessity—as the highest human virtue. “Duty, thou great and sublime name ”, Kant says, on the only occasion when he becomes poetical, “having nothing that flatters or attracts us...” Schiller says: “I serve my friends willingly, and unfortunately I like to do it. And so it often worries me to find that I am not virtuous.” That is his satirical comment on Kant, who would regard serving one's friends as a duty. Schiller means that while an unfree man may serve his friends as a duty, in obedience to the “categorical imperative,” a free man carries his humanity so far that he does it because he likes to do it, out of love, as an inner matter of course.

Thus Schiller seeks to draw down rational necessity into his human realm, so that a man does not have to submit to it, but is able to practise it as a law of his own nature. The necessity of the senses he seeks to raise up and spiritualise, so that the human being is not simply driven by his sensuality, but can ennoble it, so that he may give it expression, having raised it to its highest level. Schiller believes that when sensuality and reason meet at the centre of his being, man becomes free.

It seems as if present-day man is not properly able to share what Schiller felt when he described this middle condition as the real ideal for human beings. If a mutual permeation of rational necessity and the necessity of the senses were constantly achieved, Schiller held, this ideal condition would be expressed in the creation and appreciation of art.

It is very characteristic of the time of Schiller and Goethe to seek in art a guide for the rest of human activity. The spirit of Goethe rejects everything Philistine and seeks for an ideal condition which is to be achieved in the likeness of genuine art. For the artist creates in a visible medium.  Even if he creates in words, he is working in a sense-perceptible medium. And he would produce something terribly abstract if he gave himself up to rational necessity. He must learn what he is to create from the material itself, and from the activity of shaping it. He must spiritualise the sense-perceptible by giving matter form. Through the formal pattern (Gestalt) that he gives it, matter is enabled to have an effect, not just as matter, hut in the same way that the spiritual has an effect. Thus the artist fuses spiritual and perceptible into one creation. When all that men do in the external world becomes such that obedience to duty and to the law comes about through an inclination akin to that of the artist, and when all that comes from the senses is permeated by spirit, then for individual human beings, and also for the State and the social structure, freedom is achieved, as Schiller understands it.

So Schiller asks: how must the various powers of the soul—rationality, sensuality, aesthetic activity—work together in man, if he is to stand as a free being in the social structure? A particular way for the forces of the soul to work together is what Schiller thought should be aimed at. And he believed that when human beings in whom rational necessity permeates sensual necessity, and sensual necessity is spiritualised by rational necessity—when these human beings form a social order, it will turn out to be a good one, by necessity.

Goethe often talked with Schiller, and corresponded with him, while Schiller was writing his “Aesthetic Letters.” Goethe was a quite different man from Schiller. Schiller had tremendous inner passion as a poet, but he was also a keen thinker. Goethe was not in the same way a keen abstract thinker and he had less poetic passion, but he was equipped with something that Schiller lacked: with fully human, harmonious instincts. Schiller was a man of reflection and reason; Goethe was a man of instinct, but spiritualised instinct. The difference between them became a problem for Schiller. If you read his beautiful essay on “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” you will always feel that Schiller might just as well have written, if he had wanted to become more personal: On Goethe and Myself. For Goethe is the naive poet, Schiller the sentimental poet. He is simply describing Goethe and himself.

For Goethe, the man of instinct, all this was not so simple. Any kind of abstract philosophical talk, including talk about rational necessity, sensual necessity and the aesthetic approach—for these are abstractions if one contrasts them with one another—was repugnant to Goethe in his innermost being. He was willing to engage in it, because he was open to everything human and because he said to himself: A lot of people go in for philosophising, and that is something one must accept. He never rejected anything entirely. This is most evident when he has to talk about Kant. Here he found himself in a peculiar position. Kant was regarded by Schiller and many others as the greatest man of his century. Goethe could not understand this. But he was not intolerant, or wrapped up in his own opinion. Goethe said to himself: If so many people find so much in Kant, one must let them; indeed, one must make an effort to examine something which to oneself seems not very significant—and perhaps one will find a hidden significance in it after all. I have had in my hands Goethe's copy of Kant's Critique of Judgement; he underlined important passages. But the underlinings became fewer well before the middle, and later disappear altogether. You can see that he never reached the end.

In conversation about Kant, Goethe would not let himself become really involved in the subject. He found it disagreeable to talk about the world and its mysteries in terms of philosophical abstractions. And it was clear to him that to understand the human being in his development from necessity to freedom was not as simple as Schiller had believed. There is something very great in these “Aesthetic Letters,” and Goethe recognised that. But it seemed to him too simple to ascribe all the complications of the soul of man to these three categories: rational necessity, aesthetic impulse, sensual necessity. For him there was so much more in the human soul. And things could not simply be placed side by side in this way.

Hence Goethe was stirred to write his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which not only three but about twenty powers of the soul are described, not in concepts, but in pictorial forms, open to various interpretations. They are headed by the Golden King, who represents (not symbolises) wisdom, the Silver King who represents beautiful appearance, the Bronze King, who represents power, and Love who crowns them all. Everything else, too, indicates soul-forces; you can read this in my article.

Thus Goethe was impelled to conceive this path for the human being from necessity to freedom in his own way. He was the spiritualised man of instinct. Schiller was the man of understanding, but not in quite the usual sense: in him understanding was led over into perception.

Now if we consider honestly the course of history, we can say: this way of looking at things, developed by Schiller in an abstract philosophical way, by Goethe in an imaginative and artistic way, is not only in its form, but also in its content, very remote from present-day men. An intimate older friend of mine, Karl Julius Schröer, who was once responsible for examining candidate teachers for technical schools, wanted to examine these people on Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters:” they were going to have to teach children between the ages of ten and eighteen. They staged a regular agitation! They would have found it quite natural to be questioned about Plato and to have to interpret Platonic Dialogues. But they had no inclination to know anything about Schiller's “Letters on Aesthetic Education,” which represent a certain culmination of modern spiritual life.

The middle of the nineteenth century was a much more incisive point in man's spiritual history than people can realise today. The period before it is represented in Schiller and Goethe; it is followed by something quite different, which can understand the preceding period very little. What we now call the social question, in the widest sense—a sense that humanity has not yet grasped, but should grasp and must grasp later on—was born only in the second half of the nineteenth century. And we can understand this fact only if we ask: why, in such significant and representative considerations as those attempted by Schiller in his “Aesthetic Letters” and represented pictorially by Goethe in his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, do we find no trace of the peculiar way of thinking we are impelled to develop today about the structure of society—although Goethe in his “Tale” is evidently hinting at political forms?

If we approach the “Aesthetic Letters” and the “Tale” with inner understanding, we can feel the presence in them of a powerful spirituality which humanity has since lost. Anyone reading the “Aesthetic Letters” should feel: in the very way of writing an element of soul and spirit is at work which is not present in even the most outstanding figures today; and it would be stupid to think that anyone could now write something like Goethe's fairy tale. Since the middle of the nineteenth century this spirituality has not been here. It does not speak directly to present-day men and can really speak only through the medium of Spiritual Science, which extends our range of vision and can also enter into earlier conditions in man's history. It would really be best if people would acknowledge that without spiritual knowledge they cannot understand Schiller and Goethe. Every scene in “Faust” can prove this to you.

If we try to discover what main influence was then at work, we find that in those days the very last remnant, the last echo of the old spirituality, was present in men, before it finally faded away in the middle of the nineteenth century and humanity was thrown back on its own resources. It lived on in such a way that a man like Schiller, who thought in abstractions, possessed spirituality in his abstract thinking, and a man who had spiritualised instincts, such as Goethe had, had it living in these instincts. In some way it still lived. Now it has to be found on the paths  of spiritual knowledge; now man has to find his way through to spirituality in freedom. That is the essential thing. And without an understanding of this turning-point in the middle of the nineteenth century, one cannot really grasp what is so important today. Take, for example, Schiller's way of approaching the structure of society. Looking at the French Revolution, he writes his “Aesthetic Letters,” but when he asks, “How should the social order develop?”, he looks at man himself. He is not dealing with the social question in a present-day sense.

Today, when the social question is under review, it is usual to leave out the individual human being, with his inner conflicts, his endeavours to achieve self-education. Only the social structure in general is considered. What Schiller expected to come about through self-education is expected to come through alterations in outer conditions. Schiller says: If men become what they can become at the midpoint of their being, they will create a right social structure as a matter of course. Today it is said: If we bring about a right social structure, human beings will develop as they should.

In a short time the whole way of feeling about this has turned round. Schiller or Goethe could not have believed that through self-education men could bring about a right social structure if they had not been able to feel in man himself the universally human qualities that social life requires. In every human being they saw an image of human society. But this was no longer effective. In those days beautiful, spiritual descriptions of the best self-education could be written—it was all an echo or in a sense a picture of the old atavistic life, but the power to achieve real results was not in it. And today's way of thinking about the best social conditions is equally powerless. It places man in an invented, thought-out social structure, but he is not effectively present there. We must look at human society in general, we must look out at the world and find ourselves there, find the human being.

This is something that only real Spiritual Science can do, in the most far-reaching sense. Take what is objected to most of all in my Occult Science: the course of evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth; everywhere man is there. Nowhere do you have the mere abstract universe; everywhere man is in some way included; he is not separated from the universe. This is the beginning of what our time instinctively intends, out of impulses that remain quite dark. The time before the middle of the nineteenth century looked at man, and believed it could find the world in man. The time after the middle of the nineteenth century looks only at the world. But that is sterile; it leads to theories which are entirely empty of man. And so Spiritual Science is really serving those dark but justified instincts. What men wish for, without knowing what they want, is fulfilled through Spiritual Science: to look at the external world and to find there the human being. This is still rejected, even regarded with horror; but it will have to be cultivated, if any real recovery in this connection is to come about in the future.

At the same time there must be a development also in the study of man. A real understanding of the social organism will be achieved only when one can see man within it. Man is a threefold being. In every age—except for our own—he has been active in a threefold way. Today he concentrates everything upon a single power in himself, because he has to stand entirely on the single point of his own self in this age of consciousness, and people feel that everything proceeds from this single point. Each man thinks to himself: If I am asked a question, or if life puts a task before me, I myself form a judgment, out of myself. But it is not the entire human being who judges in this way. The human organism has a “man in the middle,” with something above it and something below it; and it is the “man in the middle” who has the capacity to form a judgment and to act on it at any moment. Above is Revelation: what is received through religion or some other form of spiritual revelation and viewed as something higher, something super-sensible. Below, underneath the faculty of judgment, is Experience, the totality of what one has passed through.

Present-day man takes little account of either pole. Revelation—an old superstition that must be overcome! To experience, also, he pays little attention, or he would be more aware of the difference between youthful not-knowing and the knowing that comes through experience. He often gathers little from experience because he does not believe in it. Most people today, when they have grey hair and wrinkles, are not much wiser than they were at twenty. In life a man may get cleverer and cleverer, and yet be just as stupid as before. But experience does accumulate and it is the other pole from revelation. In between stands immediate judgment.

Today, as I have often said, one reads critical judgments written by very young people who have not yet looked round in the world. Old people may write lengthy books and the youngest journalists may review them. That is no way of making progress. Progress can be made when what is achieved in later life is taken as a guide, when age is held to be more capable of judgment through the experience that has been acquired.

Thus man is a threefold being in practical life. If you read my book, Riddles of the Soul, you will find that revelation corresponds to the head of man, the man of nerves and senses; immediate judgment corresponds to the breast man; experience corresponds to the man of the extremities. I could also say: the man of the life of nerves and senses, the man of the rhythmical life, and the man of metabolism. No consideration is given today to this threefold nature of man, and so there is no recognition of what corresponds to it in cosmic terms. This cannot be discerned because of the general unwillingness to rise from the sense-perceptible to the super-sensible.

Today, when a man eats—that is, unites external nourishment with his organism—he thinks: There inside is the organism, which cooks the stuff and takes from it what it needs, and lets the rest pass away unused, and so it goes on. On the other hand, I look out into the world through my senses. I take up the perceptible and transform it by my understanding; I take it into my soul, as I take nourishment into my body, What is out there, what eyes see and ears hear, I then carry within me as a mental picture; what is out there as wheat, fish, meat or whatever, I carry inside me, after having digested it.

Yes, but this leaves out the fact that the substances used in nourishment have their inner aspect. The experience of food through our external senses is not related to our deeper being. With what your tongue tastes and your stomach digests, in the way that can be confirmed by ordinary scientific research, you can maintain your daily metabolism; but you cannot take care of the other metabolism, which leads for example to the change of teeth about the age of seven.

The essential thing in this other metabolism lies in the deeper forces at work in it, which are not observed today by any chemical study. What we take as food has a deep spiritual aspect, and this is very active in man, but only while he sleeps. In your foods live the spirits of the highest Hierarchies, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Hence in your food you have something cosmically formative, and therein lie the forces which provide imperceptibly for the change of teeth, for adolescence, and for the later transformations of the human being. Only the daily metabolism is brought about by the things known to external science. The metabolism which goes through life as a whole is cared for by the highest Hierarchies. And behind the sense-perceptible world are the beings of the Third Hierarchy: Angels, Archangels, and Archai. Hence we can say: sense-perception, Third Hierarchy: foodstuffs, First Hierarchy: and in between is the Second Hierarchy, which lives in the breathing, in all the rhythmic activities of the human organism.

The Bible describes this quite truly. The spirits called the Elohim, together with Jahve, are led into men through the breath. The ancient wisdom was quite correctly aware of these things, in an atavistic way. Thus you are led through a real study of man into a true cosmology.

Spiritual Science re-inaugurates this way of looking at things. It looks for man again in the external world, and brings the entire universe into man. This can be done only if one knows that man is really a trinity, a threefold being. Today both revelation and experience are suppressed; man does not do them justice. He does not do justice to his sense-perceptions, or to the foods he eats, for he regards them merely as material objects. But that is an Ahrimanic distortion, which ignores the deeper life that underlies all created things, of which foodstuffs are an example.

Spiritual Science does not lead to a contempt for matter, but to a spiritualisation of it. If anyone were to look at food with contempt, he would have to learn that Spiritual Science says, in a way that would seem grotesque to him: the highest Hierarchies, Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, they are alive in nutriments.

In our time threefold man is put together in an unclear, chaotic way, and made into a single entity. In social terms, a precisely corresponding picture arises when everything is brought under the single entity of State legalism. In fact, society should be seen as a trinity, composed of three members. First, economic activity, the natural foundation of life. Second, legal regulation, which corresponds to the middle element in man, his rhythmic nature. Third, spiritual life. Now we can see a trend towards making these three realms into one. Economic life, it is said, must be brought gradually under the control of the State. The State should become the only capitalist. Spiritual life came long ago under the dominion of the State. On the one hand we have man, who does not understand himself, and on the other the State, which is not understood, because man no longer finds himself within the social structure.

These three elements—economic life, legal regulation, spiritual life—are as radically different as head, breast and limbs. To burden the State with economic life is as if you wanted to eat with your lungs and heart, instead of with the stomach. Man is healthy only through the separation and co-operation of his three systems. The social organism, too, can be healthy only when the three elements work independently side by side, and are not thrown together in a single entity.

All legal regulation, which corresponds to the breathing, rhythmic system in man, represents a quite impersonal element, expressed in the saying: All men are equal before the law. Nothing personal comes into this; hence it is necessary that all human beings should be concerned with this middle realm and that everyone should be represented there. People are inclined to stop at this point, leaving a certain sterility on either side. We have to breathe; but we are not human beings unless nourishment is added to the breathing process from one side and sense impressions from the other. We must have a State, which rules through law, impersonal law. But economic life, which is half-personal, wherever men participate in it, and spiritual life, which is entirely personal, must work into the State from either side, or the social organism will be just as impossible as if man wanted to consist only of breathing.

This must become a new, fundamental doctrine: that the social structure has three members. You cannot live as human beings without eating; you have to receive your food from outside. You cannot maintain the State without bringing it the necessary nourishment from what human beings produce spiritually. This spiritual productivity is for the State what physical food is for individual men. Nor can you have a State unless you give it a certain natural basis on the other side in economic life. Economic life is for the State exactly like the element brought to the breathing process in human beings through sense-perceptions.

You can see that real knowledge of man and real knowledge of the social structure depend upon one another; you cannot reach one without the other. This must become the elementary basis for social insight in the future. The sin committed in relation to man by leaving out Revelation and Experience is committed by Socialist thinkers today when they leave out of  account the half-personal element in which fraternity must rule and on the other side ignore spiritual life, where freedom must rule; while the impersonal element of the law must be ruled by equality.

The great mistake of current Socialism is its belief that a healthy social structure can be brought about by State regulation, and particularly by socialising the means of production. We must appeal to all the powers of the social organism if we are to create a healthy social structure. Side by side with Equality, which is the one aim today, and is absolutely right for everything which has the character of law, Fraternity and Freedom must be able to work. But they cannot work without a threefold social order. It would be just as senseless to ask the heart and lungs to think and eat, as it is to ask an omnipotent State to direct economic life and to maintain spiritual life. The spiritual life must be independent, and co-operate only in the same way as the stomach co-operates with the head and with the heart. Things in life do work together, but they work together in the right way only if they can develop individually, not when they are thrown together abstractly.

The facts of the present time really prove that this insight must be achieved. It is very much worth observing how people at the present time do not see the connection between materialism on the one hand and abstract thinking on the other, particularly in relation to the social question. One great reason for the rise of materialism is that the State has gradually taken possession of all the academic institutions which were originally free corporations. If you go back to the times when such things were founded, from an atavistic feeling originating in clairvoyance, you will see how the necessity of co-operation between these three elements was still felt. Only since the sixteenth century has everything flowed into one, with the rise of materialism.

In earlier times, if a man wanted to be an outstanding jurist, he went to a university distinguished for the law, perhaps to Padua; if he wanted to be an outstanding physician, he went to Montpellier or to Naples; if he wanted to be an outstanding theologian, he went to Paris. These institutions did not belong to a particular State, but to humanity, and represented an independent member of the social organism.

Again, every school that is immediately under the power of the State is an impossible institution, and in the end unhealthy. Every undertaking concerned with production is unhealthy when managed by the State. You cannot pour anything into the lungs, not even water when you are thirsty. If this happens, you see how unhealthy it is.

Today people pour all kinds of economic and even spiritual undertakings into the realm which should be responsible only for the legal regulation of existing affairs. The radical parties go as far as wishing to separate the Church from the State, because they hope that people will be really interested only in what the State does. Then, in this clever, roundabout way, the Church could be expected to fade away entirely. But if you suggest to these people that schools need to be independent in order to restore productivity to spiritual life, they will contradict this very vehemently.

Every arrangement which makes for an intervention from the legal side into the spiritual life must lead to sterility. And in the same way it is false if the legal organisation intervenes in the initiatives necessary for economic life. The police, security, everything which belongs to social rights—not private rights and not penal law, which belong to the spiritual life—all these belong to the system of legal regulations. Everything economic forms an independent system and must be organised cooperatively, in a way that is half-personal. All spiritual life must be a matter for human individuality; in no other way can it flourish.

Schiller describes the middle condition that lies for man between the demands of rational necessity and the demands of this sense-life, and he relates this ideal to the creation and appreciation of art. In his “Aesthetic Letters” he says boldly that man is fully man only when he is playing, and he plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the word. Schiller regards playing as the ideal condition, but of course you have to think of playing as Schiller does: that the necessity of reason is transformed into inclination, and inclination is raised to a spiritual level like that of reason. He calls the earnestness of life a game, in his sense of the word, for then one acts like a child who is playing, not obeying any duty but following one's impulses, and yet following them freely, because the necessities of life do not yet intervene in childhood.

A summit of human achievement is indicated in Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters”: man is fully man only when he is playing, and he plays only when he is man in the fullest sense of the word. On the other hand, when we have to begin with the concrete reality of the entire cosmos in order to find man in it, it is necessary that we should say to ourselves: man will achieve real progress for humanity only when he can take the smallest things in everyday life, even the most everyday game, and understands how to raise them into the great seriousness of cosmic existence. Therefore it has to be said: a turning-point in the history of mankind has come in this present time, where earnestness is knocking most solemnly at our doors.

I want to look back once more at our recent observations. We have tried to get some picture of how the human life of spirit, the human soul life, and the human life of the body are to be comprehended. When we visualize the human soul life, that is, what the human being feels occurring within himself as thinking, feeling, and willing, then of course we find that the thinking component, or what we experience directly as the content of our thoughts, occurs between the physical body and the etheric body, that feeling occurs between the etheric body and the astral body, and willing between the astral body and the I. We thus see that our thoughts, insofar as we are fully conscious of them, represent only what glimmers up to us from the depths of our own being and really can give the waves of the soul life only their form. Something like shadows is cast upward from the depths of the human being, filling our consciousness and constituting the content of our thoughts.

Were we to depict the matter schematically, we could render it in this way: physical body (see diagram, blue), etheric body (orange), astral body (red), and I (violet). Then we would have the thought content between the physical body and the etheric body. From my descriptions in the last lectures, however, you have realized that this thought content in its true nature is something much more real than what we experience in consciousness. What we experience in consciousness is, as I have said, only something that generates waves from the depths of our being up to the I. They rise up to the I. The feeling content lies between the etheric body and the astral body and in turn also rises up to the I; and the will content is located between the astral body and the I. It lies the closest to the I. We can say that the I has its most immediate experience of itself in the will, while feeling content and thought content rest in the depths of our being and only send their waves lapping upward into the I.

Now we also know, however, that the content of our willing, as experienced by us, is experienced dully. Of the will, as it manifests itself in an arm movement, in a leg movement, we know as little as we do of what happens between going to sleep and awaking. The will lives in us dully, and yet it lives really within the I as the I's most immediate neighbor. If we perceive the will consciously or, let us say, in an awake manner, we do so only through the projected thought shadows that come up from the depths of our being. The mental images that we experience consciously are the shadow pictures of a deep weaving of the soul but they are still only shadow pictures, while we experience the will in a most immediate way, though dully. We can have a waking, conscious perception of the will, however, only through the shadowy thought pictures.

This is how the matter appears to us when we study our human nature while focusing in particular on the inner depths. We see, I would like to say, how little of ourselves we contain in our consciousness, how little rises upward from our inner being to our consciousness. We understand, as it were, only little of what we are like on the inside in terms of our I, and we really perceive only the hue that our thought content casts upward into this dull, will-oriented I.

With our ordinary consciousness, we can actually see as an immediate reality little more of this thought-filled, dull I than what we feel of it shortly before awakening or shortly after dropping off to sleep. It is precisely into this dull I, however, that the world of sense perceptions breaks upon awakening. Just try to become aware once of how dull your life is between going to sleep and awakening, so that you experience this dullness almost as a void. Only upon awakening, when you open your senses to the outside world, will you be in a position—thanks to your sense impressions—really to experience yourself as an I. Now the appearance [Schein] of the sense perceptions penetrates the I. Now the appearance of the sense perceptions fills that dull being that I have just described, so really the I lives as a fully conscious entity in the earthly human being only when we are in a state of interaction with the outside world through our sensory pictures and through all that has penetrated our senses; and coming from within as the most illuminating response we can muster is the shadowed content of our thoughts.

One can say, then, that the sense perceptions penetrate in from without. The content of our willing is perceived only dully. The feeling content rises upward and unites with the sense impressions. We see red, and it fills us with a particular feeling; we see blue, we hear the notes C-sharp or C and have an accompanying feeling. Then, however, we also reflect on what these sense impressions are. The thought content, which comes from within interweaves itself with the sense impressions. Something from within unites with something from without. That we live in the fully awake I, however—this we actually 'owe to the appearance of the senses (Sinneschein), and to this our I contributes just so much by way of response from within as I have been able to describe here.

Let us note well this appearance of the senses. Let us look upon it and realize clearly that it is entirely dependent on our physical existence. It can fill us only as we, in waking condition, put forward our physical body to meet the outer world. This appearance of the senses ceases at the moment we lay down our physical body upon passage through the portal of death, as we have already discussed in the previous studies.

Our I, then, is awakened, as it were, between birth and death through the appearance of the senses. Of our actual nature as awake, earthly human beings, we can possess only so much as is enlivened by the appearance of the senses. Imagine vividly how the being that is the human I grasps this appearance of the senses—which is, after all, only an appearance—and interweaves it with our actual human being. Now consider how there an outer becomes an inner—you can see it, for example, when you dream; consider how a delicate tissue is spun inside of us, as it were, into which the sense impressions weave. The I appropriates what comes in through the sense impressions. The outer becomes inner. Only what does become inner, however, can carry the human being through the portal of death.

It thus is only a delicate tissue to begin with that the human being carries through the portal of death. His physical body he lays down. It had mediated the sense impressions for Therefore the sense impressions are only appearance, for the physical body is laid aside. Only so much of the appearance as the I has taken up into itself is borne through the portal of death. The etheric body is also laid aside a short time after death. When that happens, however, our being also lays aside what is between the physical body and the etheric body. This at first dissolves, as we have seen, in the cosmos at large, constituting only the seed for further worlds, but it does not really continue to live together with our human essence after death. Only what has crested upward like waves and has combined itself with the appearance of the senses continues to live. When this is pondered, one can acquire an approximate mental image of what the human being carries through the portal of death.

Because this is so, one must answer the question, “How can someone build a connecting bridge to a departed person?” in the following way: this connecting bridge cannot be built at all if we send abstract thoughts, non-pictorial mental images over to the departed human being. If we think of the departed one with abstract mental images—what is that like? Abstract mental images retain almost nothing of the appearance of the senses; they are faded, but also there lives in them nothing of an inner reality but only what is cast up to them from the inner reality. Only a tinge of the human essence resides in mental images. Therefore, what we grasp with our intellect is in truth much less real than what fills our I in the appearance of the senses. What fills our I in the appearance of the senses makes our I awake, but this wakeful content is only interspersed with the waves that crest upward from our inner being. If we therefore direct abstract, faded thoughts to a departed person, he cannot have community with us; he can do so very well, however, if we picture to ourselves quite intimately and concretely how we stood with him on such-and-such a spot, how we talked with him, how he asked us for this or that in his particular way. The thought content, the pallid thought content, will not yield much, but it will be much more effective if we develop a fine sensitivity for the sound of his speech, for the special kind of emotion or temperament with which he held conversation with us, if we feel the living, warm togetherness along with his wishes—in short, if we picture these concrete things but in such a way that our mental images are pictures: if we see ourselves, as we stood or sat together, as we experienced the world with him. One might easily believe that it is precisely the pallid thoughts that arc across death's gap. This is not the case. The vivid pictures arc across. In pictures from the appearance of the senses, in pictures that we have only owing to the fact of our eyes and ears, our sense of touch, and so on—in such pictures there stirs something that the dead person can perceive. For at death he has laid aside everything that is only abstract, pallid, intellectual thinking. Our pictorial mental images, insofar as we have made them our own, we do take with us through death. Our science, our intellectual thinking, all of that we do not take along through death. A person may be a great mathematician, may have myriad geometrical conceptions—all this he lays aside just as he does his physical body. The person may know a great deal about the starry skies and the surface of the earth. Insofar as he has absorbed this knowledge in pallid thoughts it is laid aside at death. If, as a learned botanist, a person crosses a meadow and entertains his theoretical thoughts about the flowers of the meadow, then this is a thought content that fulfills him only here on earth. Only what strikes his eye and is colored by his love for the flowers, what is given human warmth by the union of the pallid thought with the I experience, is carried through death's portal.

It is important that one know what can be acquired here on earth as real, human property in such a way that one can carry it through the portal of death. It is important that one know how the whole of intellectualism, which has comprised the centerpiece of human civilization since the middle of the fifteenth century, is something that has significance only in earthly life and that cannot be borne through the portal of death. One thus can say: the human race has lived throughout the past ages of which we have spoken—beginning with the Atlantean catastrophe, throughout the long ages of the ancient Indian civilization, the ancient Persian civilization, through the Egyptian-Chaldean times, and then through our era up to our time—the human race has not lived in all this time, that is to say up to the first third or so of the fifteenth century, such an outspokenly intellectual life as the one we hold so dear today as our civilized life. Before the fifteenth century, however, human beings experienced much more of everything that could be borne through the portal of death. Precisely what they have become proud of since the fifteenth century, precisely what makes life worth living for the cultured, the so-called cultured, world today, is something that is obliterated upon death. One could really ask, what is the characteristic feature of modern civilization? The most characteristic feature of all, which is so praised as having been brought about through Copernicanism, through Galileanism, is something that must be laid aside at death, something that the human being really can acquire only through earthly life, but also something that can be only an earthly possession for him. By developing himself up to modern civilization, man has attained precisely this goal of experiencing here between birth and death all those things that have significance only for the earth. It is very important for modern man to understand thoroughly that the content of what is regarded most highly, and especially in our schools, has an actual significance only for earthly life. In our ordinary schools, we instruct our children in everything that is modern civilization, not for their immortal soul but only for their earthly existence.

Intellectualism can be grasped correctly in the following manner. When the human being awakens in the morning, the sensory pictures come streaming in to him. He notices only that the thoughts interweave these sensory pictures like a delicate net, and he is actually living in pictures. These pictures vanish immediately when he falls asleep in the evening. His thought life vanishes too, but the appearance of these sensory pictures is nevertheless essential, for he takes with him through death as much of this as his I has made its own. What comes from within—the thought content—remains, as you know, for a few days after death in the form of a brief recollection, so long as the human being still bears the etheric body. Then the etheric body dissolves itself into the far reaches of the cosmos. There is a brief experience for the human being immediately after death regarding his pictures that contain the senses' appearance, insofar as his I has made it his own: he feels these pictures interwoven then by strong lines with what he has made his own through his knowledge. He lays this brief experience aside, however, along with his etheric body, a few days after death. Then he lives into the cosmos with his pictures, and these pictures become interwoven into the cosmos in the same way in which they were interwoven into his own being before death. Before death, the pictures in the sense perceptions are formed from within. They are grasped by the human being, I might say, insofar as it is delimited by his skin. After death, after passage of the few days when one still experiences the thought life—because one still has the etheric body, before the etheric body's dissolution—after these days the pictures become in a certain way larger. They expand in such a way that they now are absorbed from without, as it were, while during earthly life they were absorbed from within. Schematically one could draw the entire process, as shown below.

If this is the bodily boundary of the human being (see drawing, bright) acid he has his impressions in the waking state, then his inner experiences are formed by the sense impressions within his being. After death, the human being experiences his boundary as an encompassing feeling; but his impressions wander out of him, as it were. He senses them to be in his surroundings (red). Thus a person who during earthly life could say, “My soul experiences are inside of me,” now says to himself, after death, “My soul experiences are in front of me,” or, said better, “They are all around me.” They merge with the surroundings. Because of this they also become inwardly different. Let us say, for example, that this person, because he loves flowers, has strongly impressed upon himself in ever-repeated sense impressions a rose, a red rose; then, when after death he experiences this wandering out, he will see the rose larger, visibly larger, but it will appear to him greenish in color. The inner content of the picture also changes. Everything that the person has perceived of nature's green, insofar as he really has experienced this green nature with human participation, not merely with abstract thoughts, now becomes for him after death a gentle reddish environment of his whole being. The inner, however, wanders out: what the person calls his inner being he will have after death in his environment outside.

These realizations, then, which concern the human being, insofar as he in turn is connected to the world itself, we can acquire through spiritual science. Only by acquiring these insights do we receive a picture of what we ourselves actually are. We cannot get a picture of what we ourselves really are if we know ourselves only as we are between birth and death, with our inwardly woven thoughts. For these are the things that as such fall away at death. Of the senses' appearance there remains only what I have just depicted to you, and it remains in the way I have described.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, when the materialistic outlook and world conception of civilized humanity had reached a culmination, as I have often emphasized, there was much talk of how the human being, when he founds a religion or when he speaks of something divine-spiritual in the outer world, really only projects his inner being to the outside. You need only read such a thoroughly materialistic writer as Feuerbach,¹⁵ who had a strong influence on Richard Wagner, in order to recognize how this materialistic thinking sees nature as being all there is out there. That is to say, this materialistic attitude sees only the appearance of nature in the form in which it presents itself to us between birth and death and then believes that all thinking about the divine-spiritual is only the inner being of man projected outward. The result is that man feels comfortable only with the concept of the divine-spiritual as a projection of his inner being. This seeming insight received the name anthropomorphism. It was said that the human being is anthropomorphic; he pictures the world according to what lies within him. Then, of course, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the more representative among these materialistic thinkers coined a slogan that was meant to illustrate how splendidly advanced the world of human beings had now become in our modern age. They said: “The ancients believed that God created the world. We moderns, however, know that man created God; that is, God is a projection of man's inner being.” They said and believed this precisely because all they knew of our inner side was what has significance between birth and death. I reality it was not just an erroneous opinion that they formed; rather, they had formed a world view that was in fact anthropomorphic, for they had no other notions of the divine-spiritual than those that the human being had managed at last to cast, to project, out of himself.

Compare with that everything that I have described, for example, in my book, An Outline of Occult Science. There you will not see the world described like our human mental images from within. What I describe there as Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth evolutions the human being does not carry within him. One must first treat what the human being experiences after death, that is, what he can place in front of himself. There is nothing anthropomorphic here. This Occult Science is presented cosmomorphically; that is, the impressions are such that they are actually experienced as existing outside of the human being. These things therefore cannot be understood by those people who can experience in their conceptions only what lies within the human being, as has come to be the case especially in the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. This age perceives only what resides in the inner being of man and projects it outward. Never will one be able to describe an outer world as I do in that chapter of my Occult Science where the Saturn evolution is treated—not even in the simplest, most elementary phenomenon—if one only projects outside what exists in the inner being of man.

You see, the human being lives, for example, in warmth. Just as he perceives the world in color through his sense of sight, so he also perceives the world in warmth through his sense of warmth. He experiences the warmth in his human inner being, I might call it, insofar as it is delimited by his skin. Already, however, he is abstracting in his perception. Warmth perceived in the life of the world really cannot be pictured otherwise than by grasping it in its totality. There is always something adhering to warmth, however, which in terms of human experience can be expressed only by referring to the sense of smell. Warmth, perceived objectively outside ourselves, always has something of scent associated with it too.

Now read the chapter in my Occult Science about that process of our earth that lives chiefly in warmth: where these things are described you will find simultaneous mention of scent impressions. You see from this that warmth is not described in the same way in which man experiences it in intellectualism. It is placed outside the human being, and what he experiences here between birth and death as warmth comes back after death as a scent impression.

Light is something that the human being experiences really quite abstractly here on earth. He experiences this light by surrendering to a continuous deception. I'd like to point to it here too: I have written—let me see, it must be thirty-eight years ago now—a treatise, very young and green, in which I attempted to describe how people speak of light. But where is the light anyway? Man perceives colors; those are his sense impressions. Wherever he looks: colors, he perceives some shadings of colors even when he knows it is a shade. But light—he lives in light, and yet he doesn't perceive the light; through the light he perceives colors, but the light itself he does not perceive. You may gauge the degree of the illusions in which we live in this regard in the age of intellectualism when you consider that our physics offers a “theory of light”; then we attempt to give it some substance by considering it “a theory of light.” It has no substance. Only a theory of color has substance, not a theory of light.

Only the entirely healthy nature-appreciation of Goethe could suffice to create not a science of optics but a theory of color. We open our physics books nowadays and there we see light being created from scratch, as it were. Rays are constructed and reflected, and they perform all kinds of tricks. But it isn't real! One sees color. One can speak of a theory of color but not of a theory of light. One lives in light. Through the light and in the light we perceive color, but nothing of the light. No one can see the light. Imagine being in a space with light streaming through it, but there is not a single object in this space. You might as well be in the dark. In a space that is completely dark you would perceive no more than in the naked light, nor would you be able to differentiate between the two. You could differentiate only through an inner experience. As soon as a human being has gone through the portal of death, however, then, just as he perceived the scent that accompanied warmth he now perceives something about the light for which we in our present-day intellectual language do not even have an appropriate word. We would have to say: smoke [Rauch]; a flooding forth—he really perceives it. Hebrew still had something like that: Ruach. This flooding forth is perceived. That which alone could justifiably be called air is perceived there.

If we now consider what appears everywhere in our earthly circumstances as chemical reactions, we perceive them in their appearances, these chemical workings, these chemical etheric workings. Spiritually seen, without the physical body—again, therefore, after death—they provide what is the content of water.

And life itself: it is what comprises the content of the earth, of the solidity. Our entire earth is perceived from the viewpoint of the dead person as a large, living being. When we walk about here on earth, we perceive its separate entities, insofar as they are earthly entities, as being dead. On what do we base our perception of dead things at all, however? The entire earth lives, and it reveals itself immediately to us in its life if we glimpse it from the other side of death. If that is our earth, we only see a very small portion of it at any one time and are oriented to seeing just this small portion—only when we hover about it in spirit and moreover have outwardly an ability to perceive from without, so that the impressions are enlarged, do we perceive it as a whole being. Then, however, it is a living being.

With this, I have directed your attention to something that is extraordinarily important to call to mind

You see, I had a conversation once with a gentleman who said that we now know, finally, thanks to the theory of relativity, that we could just as well imagine the human being to be twice as large as he really is; it's all relative, everything just depends on the human viewpoint.

This is a completely unrealistic way of looking at the matter. For let us say—the picture doesn't quite fit, but let us say—if a ladybug is crawling about on a person, it has then a particular size in relation to that person. The ladybug doesn't perceive the entire human being but, in keeping with its own size, just a small portion of the person. And so for the ladybug the person on which it is crawling about is not living but rather is just as dead to the ladybug as the earth is to the human being. You must also be able to think this thought the other way around. You must be able to say to yourself: in order to be able to experience the earth as being dead, the human being must be of a particular size upon the earth. The size of the human being is not a coincidence in relation to the earth but is completely appropriate to man's entire life upon the earth. Therefore you cannot think of man—for example, in keeping with the relativity theory—as being big or little. Only if you think and imagine quite abstractly, quite intellectually, that man is big or little; only then can you say, “If we were organized a bit differently, man might appear twice as big,” and the like.

This stops when we take up a conception that goes beyond the subjective and that can keep in mind man's size in relation to the earth. After death the whole human being expands out into the universe and after a time following death man becomes much larger than the earth itself. Then he experiences it as a living being. Then he experiences chemical workings in everything that is water. In the airiness he experiences light, not light and air separately from one another but light in the air, and so on. The human being experiences, then, different pictures from those of our waking life between birth and death.

I said that we can take with us through death nothing of all that our soul has acquired in an intellectual way. Before the fifteenth century, however, man still possessed a kind of legacy from ancient times. You know, of course, that in ancient times this legacy was so great that the human being still had an atavistic clairvoyance, which then paled and dulled, withered away, and which has passed over into complete abstraction since the middle pf the fifteenth century. What the human being took with him through death of this divine legacy, however, is what actually gave man his being. Just as the human being here assimilates physical matter when he enters earthly existence via birth, or rather conception, so also was it the divine essence that he brought with him and carried again through death that gave him—the expression, if I may use it at all, is unusual, but will help make this clear to you—gave him a certain spiritual weight (a polar opposite, naturally, of any physical weight). The divine essence which he brought along and took with him through death gave him a certain spiritual weight.

The way people are being incarnated now, if they are really members of civilization, they no longer have this legacy with them. At most you can still detect it here and there: those people who are not really of our civilization (and they are becoming ever fewer) still have it in them. And it is a serious matter indeed for the evolution of humanity that the human being essentially loses his being through what he acquires through intellectual civilization. He is heading toward this danger, that after death he will, to be sure, grow outward so as to have the aforementioned impressions, but he can lose his actual being, his ‘I’, as I have already described yesterday from a different viewpoint. There is really only one avenue of rescue for this being, for modern and future man, and it may be recognized in the following: if we wish, here in the sense world, to take hold of a reality that makes thinking so powerful that it is not merely a pale image but has inner vitality, then we can recognize such a reality issuing from within the human being only in the kind of pure thinking that I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as forming the basis for action. Otherwise we have in all human consciousness only the senses' appearance. If we act freely out of pure thinking, however, such as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, if we really have in pure thinking the impulses for our actions, then we give to this otherwise “appearance” thinking, to this intellectual thinking—in that it forms the basis of our actions—a reality. And that is the one reality that we can weave purely from within out into the senses' appearance and can carry with us through death.

What, then, are we really taking with us through death? What we have experienced here between birth and death in true freedom. Those actions that correspond to the description of freedom in my Philosophy of Freedom form the basis for what man can carry through death in addition to the senses' appearance, transformed in the way that I have described. Thereby he regains his being. By freeing himself from being determined in the world of the senses, he regains a being after death; he is thereby a real being. If we acquire this being, it is freedom that saves us as human souls from soul-spiritual death, saves us especially for the future.

Those people who abandon themselves only to their natural forces, that is, to their instincts and drives—I have described this from a purely philosophical standpoint in my Philosophy of Freedom—live in something that falls away with death. They then live into the spiritual world. To be sure, their pictures are there. They would gradually have to be taken by other spiritual beings, however, if the human being did not develop himself fully along the lines of freedom so that he might again acquire a being such as he had when he still possessed his divine-spiritual legacy.

The intellectual age thus is inwardly connected with freedom. That is why I could always say: the human being had to become intellectual so that he might become free. The human being loses his spiritual being in intellectualism, for he can carry nothing of intellectualism through the portal of death. He attains freedom here through intellectualism, however, and what he thus acquires in freedom—this he can take through the portal of death.

Man may think as much as he wants in a merely intellectual way—nothing of it goes through death's portal. Only when the human being uses his thinking in order to apply it in free deeds does that amount of it that he has acquired from his experiences of freedom go with him through death's portal as soul-spiritual substance, which makes him a being and not a mere knowing. In thinking, through intellectualism, our human essence is taken from us, in order to let us work through to freedom. What we experience in freedom is in turn given back to us as human essence. Intellectualism kills us, but it also gives us life. It lets us arise once again with our being totally transformed, making us into free human beings.

Today I have presented this as it appears in terms of the human being himself. What I have thus characterized today in terms of the human being alone I shall connect tomorrow with the Mystery of Golgotha, with the Christ experience, in order to show how in death and resurrection the Christ experience can now pour into the human being as inner experience. More of this tomorrow.

• 15. Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804–1872.