The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Translated by Peter Stewart

Allow me today to add something about the architectural idea of Dornach to what I said a few days ago. I have tried to interpret the sequence of columns and column capitals. The question can be raised: Why are there progressively seven columns on each side of the building? And one can think of all kinds of nebulous mysticism in relation to the number seven - just as anthroposophy is generally accused of bringing up all kinds of such things, which one thinks are rooted in all kinds of superstition. But to interpret the seven columns in any other than an artistic way would contradict what lay at the basis of the model's elaboration, of the original work. If one proceeds in such a way that the individual capitals emerge from one another, that is, each successive capital emerges from the previous one, as I described last time, then one concludes that in a certain respect a kind of conclusion is reached with the seventh column. This simply corresponds to the successive feelings in the creation of the form. If one wanted to make an eighth column, one would have to repeat the form - albeit on a higher level. And since everything in an organic building must be based on connecting with the creative forces of nature and of the world-being in general, it is only understandable that that number should emerge which is, so to speak, the leading number for manifold natural phenomena.

We have seven tones in the musical scale. The octave is the repetition of the prime. If we place the phenomenon of light in front of us in the familiar way, we have seven colours in the well-known colour scale where the light shades into colour. The newer chemistry sets up the so-called periodic system, which is also a structure of the atomic weights and properties of the chemical elements according to the number seven. And one who follows organic life finds these numbers everywhere. It is not some superstitious prejudice, but the result of deep observation. And if one's feeling is such that one simply surrenders oneself to observation, dreaming nothing, mystifying nothing, then one will also be able to find the right relationship to the sevenfold-ness of the columns. Everything here has been attempted in such a way that the principle of the organic has been firmly established.

Here you see how the organ has been placed within the whole building in such a way that it does not stand in a corner, but that it has grown out of the forms with the building, so to speak, so that the architecture and sculpture of the building approach the forms created by the arrangement of the organ pipes, do not encompass them, but let them grow out of themselves, so to speak.

What must be considered in such architecture and sculpture is the feeling for the material. It is absolutely a question of the fact that, especially when working in wood, this feeling for the material is perceived on the one hand as something connected with the specific quality of the material in which one is working. But then in wood, because one has essentially a soft form in which one works, one has at the same time, that which makes it easiest to overcome the form as such, and which makes that which is to be revealed, that which is to be revealed artistically, emerges most in such a way that when one works in wood one must directly enter into the secrets of the world's existence.

I just want to draw attention to the following. Assume that one wants to sculpt the human figure in wood. The building will finally be completed here in the east by the fact that under this motif, which is painted in the middle, there will be a wooden sculpture of the same motif.¹ There you will also see the figure of the Christ in connection with Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. So, it was a question of creating a thoroughly idealised and spiritualised human figure out of the wood. With the prerequisites I have just described, it is quite different to work on the head of the human form than on the rest of the organism. These things cannot be approached with abstract knowledge.

The shaping, the forming, is of course just as much within the laws of nature as everything else that in some way arranges nature according to number, measure and the like. When one forms the human head, one has the feeling everywhere: one must work out the form from within, one must try to base it on the feeling that the head is formed from the centre outwards. With the rest of the human organism one has the feeling that one must enter from the outside and, as it were, form the outer surfaces from the outside. One has the feeling that in the case of the head the essential surface is that which lies below, which is therefore inside, which gives itself its curves, its surfaces, from the inside outwards; whereas in the case of the rest of the organism one must consider the outer surfaces as the most important.

By feeling such things, one comes close to the secrets of nature, especially in art. And it must be emphasised again and again that what is called knowledge today cannot lead at all to a real unveiling of the secrets of nature, that in a living comprehension of the ideas which are given to one in laws of nature and the like, one always feels the necessity of ascending from these ideas to that which can only be grasped in an artistic contemplation. And basically, one must not think of the mysteries of the world in any other way than in such a way that so-called scientific knowledge is a stage, but that it must rise to a living artistic comprehension of the world if one really wants to come close to the mysteries of the world. We must not think as we often think today, that art has nothing to reveal of the mysteries of the world, that everything must be left to science.

The only real natural view is the one on which Goethe's conception of the world was based, and which I have already characterised from various sides, - the one that led Goethe to say: art is a revelation of the secret laws of nature, - which would not reveal themselves without the very existence of art.

And so, one could say: In a building like this, a kind of extract of the world's secrets is at the same time presented to the human being. For this reason, many artistic problems arose during the construction of this building. They arose as something self-evident, above all the problem of painting.

On the one hand, it was necessary to express the feelings that could recognise a portrayal of certain mysteries of the world, but on the other hand, one had to direct attention to the artistic means of expression. You do not see in the paintings of the large dome anything symbolic or fantastically speculative, however much some people might believe that. If you look at the painting here at the west end, you will see that there is something in the compositions of colours that looks peculiar.

Now you all know that when you close your eyes, you see something like a mysterious shadow-eye opposite the eye. That which every human being can have before them in this way when the eye is closed, like a kind of shadow-eye, can, however, when one’s inner seeing is particularly formed, come before the soul in a much more elaborate, much more substantial way. It is then, however, no longer as robust, as coarse as the two eyes which one sees as shadow-eyes when one's real eyes are closed, but it contains that which, in a certain way, can be seen spiritually when one's inner attention is directed towards that part of the periphery of the human being which is situated towards the eyes. It is that which then appears to this inspired inner gaze, one might say - a whole world. And the sensation already arises: by looking, as it were, into one's own power of vision, into one's own visual space with one's eyes closed as a human being, one sees before oneself something that is like the beginning of creation.

The beginning of creation is what confronts you here at the west end of the large dome.² And it is not a mere figment of the imagination that up there is the Tree of Paradise, above it a kind of Father-God, that then these two eye-shaped forms appear. All this is something that definitely comes before the inner eye, before the soul's eye with a deepened inner feeling.

In the same way, what you see in the large dome at the eastern end is a kind of impression of the self. This I, which is, if one may say so, a kind of trinity, also reveals itself in these inner perceptions in such a way that it goes on the one hand to the luminous clarity and transparency of the thinking I, on the other hand, at the other pole, as it were, to the will side, to the willing I, and in the middle to the feeling I. At first, this can be expressed abstractly as the thinking, feeling, willing I, as I have just said it, but it is to be felt concretely as a human being who is able to look with love at the colours of nature, who is able to look with devoted love at everything that confronts them in nature for all the senses. When one experiences the I in such a way that at the same time one lets it flow out into the whole of nature, one is aware of the following perceptions:

If you look at a plant in its green colour, in the colour of its blossom, then what you bring before your soul as an image of the plant is basically what you also find when you look, as it is called, into your own inner being. That which is spread out in nature as a carpet of colour, colours itself in that you look into your inner being. And if you, as a human being who loves the world, turn your gaze outwards, turn towards the vastness of the daylight, which stretches into infinite expanses of space, then you feel connected with these expanses of space. By connecting the colours and sounds of these expanses of space with yourself, and by feeling all the configurations that present themselves to you, you feel something that you cannot translate into a symbol with your intellect, but which you can also directly paint artistically and intuitively.

And again, when you let your gaze wander in the direction of the earth's surface, this horizontal plane, let it wander over trees that cover the earth, over all that which expresses itself in the moving trees when the wind rushes through them, then you feel your feeling I, and you get the impulse not to construct this I an abstract design, but to paint it in colours.

If you direct your gaze downwards, so that you feel connected with all that is fruitful on earth, you then feel the need to express your willing I in a colour that imposes itself on you quite naturally.

One must think of the configuration of the ceiling as having been expressed in this way. And because in this way the mystery of the world, which expresses itself in the relationship of the human being to the world, as it can be felt, has been brought here to the ceiling, it was natural that onto this ceiling was also painted some of that which can be felt out of these mysteries of the world.

You will therefore find individual areas covered with that which results from a spiritual cognition of world evolution. These figures that you see here on the left and on the right, which seem to represent mythological figures, they are meant to represent approximately the situation as it was before the great Atlantean catastrophe.

The materialistic theory of evolution is not at all correct in the light of spiritual observation. If we go back in the evolution of humanity, we first come back to the Greek-Latin period, which begins around the eighth century BC. We then come back to the Egyptian-Chaldean period, which begins around the turn of the fourth and third millennia before Christ. We return to older periods, and finally we come back to a time which, in terms of spiritual science, must be called the time of the Atlantean catastrophe. There was a great rearrangement of the continents. We gaze back in contemplation to a time in the evolution of the earth when that which is now covered by the Atlantic Ocean was covered by land. But at the same time, one comes back to a period of earthly evolution in which the human being could not yet have existed in the form in which they now exist, in a form shaped in the same way as the muscles and bones of today. If, for instance, you take sea creatures, jellyfish, which you can hardly distinguish from their surroundings, then you come to the material form in which the human being once was on earth, during the old Atlantean time, in which the earth was still covered everywhere with a permanent, dense fog, in which the human being lived and was therefore also had a completely different organic nature. And to the contemplative gaze, the clairvoyant gaze, there arise - if the word is not misunderstood - precisely these forms which are painted here on the left and right of the ceiling.

Something else has been attempted, I would like to say, as a painterly venture. Here you see a head.³ It is not true that when one paints naturalistically, a head must be closed off at the top because that is simply the way naturalistic human heads are. Here the head is not closed off at the top, for the soul and spirit of the ancient Indian, the first civilised human being after the Atlantean catastrophe, is painted here on the wall. And it was necessary to take the risk of not closing off the top of the head, but to leave it open, because in fact, when the Indian is grasped in their time, they present themselves in such a way that they feel in touch with the heavens through their primeval wisdom, that for them, I would like to say, the physical top of the head is lost in the unconscious, and they feel their soul to be reaching out into the vastness of the heavens. That is captured here in painterly form. And this ancient Indian felt connected with the so-called seven Rishis, who poured into them the wisdom of the world in seven rays.

Such things have been tried to be captured here on the ceiling of the auditorium through colours. You can see the truly artistic element that was to be attempted here in this building with regard to painting in the small dome here.

Attempts have been made to create what I would like to call - albeit in an as yet imperfect form - painting out of colour itself. And that seems to me to be connected with the future of the art of painting in general. On the one hand, in the further progress of humanity, we will come closer and closer to the spirit, and on the other hand we will strive more and more to find the spiritual in outer sensory reality.

Then, however, one will be compelled to penetrate oneself inwardly with that which is particularly needed in art: an intense sense of reality. With an intense sense of truth, artistically conceived, one is led to see the true essence of painting in that which is coloured. Is the line a truth? Is the drawing a truth: actually, it is not. Let us look at the line of the horizon: it is there when we capture in colours the blue sky above and the green sea below. If we paint the blue sky at the top and the green sea at the bottom, then the line comes into being by itself as the boundary of the two. But if I draw the line of the horizon with a pencil, that is actually an artistic lie. And you will find that if you have a feeling for the infinite fullness revealed by colour, you can actually create a whole world out of what is coloured.

Red is not just red, red is that which, when one confronts it, means an experience like an attack on our self from the outside world. Red is that which causes one’s soul to flee from that which thus reveals itself as red. Blue is that which invites us to follow it, and a harmony of red and blue can then result in a balance between moving backward and moving forward. In short, if the coloured is experienced, it produces a whole world. And out of the coloured, one can create the form by merely letting the colour in its mutual relationships have an effect on one.

In my first mystery drama, I had a person say that the form of the colour must be the deed in the kind of painting that we are striving toward.⁴ If you look at the small dome here, and if the tinting is just so, that you cannot see the individual figures with it at all, but merely let what is brought as a patches of colour onto this small dome have an effect on each other in their mutual relationships, then you will also get an impression: the impression of a ground of surging colours.

This is first of all that out of which the various forms arise. For those who are able to live into the life of the coloured within themselves, the truly human form, the actions between human forms, the relationships between human forms arise out of the coloured. One has the need to have a blue patch in a certain place, and orange and red nearby. And if one studies this inwardly, intuitively, something like this Faust-like figure, with a floating, angel-like figure in front of it, emerges of its own accord. And one gradually comes to the conclusion, that the blue patch of colour forms itself into a figure reminiscent of the medieval Faust. You will see everywhere in the painting of the small dome that the colouring is the essential thing, and that the forms that are with it have arisen from the colour. Whoever would say: Yes, but one must first think, interpret, if one really wants to feel these individual motifs - is right in a certain sense, if they feel at the same time that here is realised that which I have just characterised as an experiencing of the world of colours.

You can then see how this blue Faust-like figure has emerged here,⁵ underneath it a kind of skeleton, the brown figure, then this orange angel, actually a child, floating towards the face of Faust.

If one first takes the coloured as a basis and then rises from the coloured to the living, then, however, one is faced with the riddle of knowledge of the present human being. The figure of Faust is something that has survived from the 16th century. I would like to say that Faust expresses the protest of the modern human being, who seeks the secrets of the world within themself, versus the human being, who in the Middle Ages still stood in a completely different relationship to the world. The legend of Faust is not something that merely stands for itself alone.

Goethe took up this Faust legend because Goethe was a truly modern human being. But he also transformed the Faust legend of the 16th century. This Faust legend culminates in Faust's encounter with the devil, Faust's confrontation with the forces of the adversary of humanity, his struggle with them. This was intended to express how, as the human being approached modern times, they really became entangled in this struggle. The sixteenth century still felt that those who were brought into this struggle with the devil had to be defeated if they became involved with the devil in any way.

We have the polar opposite of the Faust legend in the Luther legend. Luther at the Wartburg - he is tempted by the devil just like Faust, but he throws the inkwell at the devil's head and drives him away. The Luther legend and the Faust legend are polar opposites for the 16th century.

As you know, anyone who comes to Wartburg Castle will still find the stain preserved from the ink that Luther poured on the devil's head. The custodians tell you, however, that this is always renewed from time to time. But it is there for the visitors.

After Lessing had already pointed out this necessary alteration of the Faust legend, Goethe then transformed the Faust legend of the sixteenth century and portrayed the man Faust as the one who, however, wrestles with the adversary of humanity, with Mephistopheles, but who does not fall prey to him, despite the fact that he responds to him in a certain way, but who achieves his human victory over this adversary who is hostile to humanity.

In this Faust legend, in the whole figure of Faust, is contained the riddle of knowledge of the modern human being. Really, what is called scientific knowledge is basically a caricature of knowledge. That which we develop today by taking possession of the laws of nature and expressing them in abstract propositions, is basically something in which, if we feel it profoundly, we feel to be completely lifeless. When we give ourselves over to abstract ideas, we feel something like a dead soul in us, like a soul corpse. And one who has enough lively feeling, feels in this soul corpse, precisely in what is valued today as the correct, as logical knowledge, something like the approach of death.

This is the feeling that underlies this figure here. And as the counter pole to death, there is the angel-like child floating towards us in orange.

Then the other figures, which are hidden in the whole harmony, are such that the next figures are more or less the figures of a Greek wisdom initiation: a kind of Pallas-Athena figure with the inspiring Apollo, an Egyptian initiate further up, with its inspiring being. Then we come to the whole region of evolving humanity, which strives to experience the human by perceiving duality in the world, good and evil, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. It is represented where this figure below, carrying a child in its hand, has above it the bright, seducing Lucifer and the dark, sinister Ahriman.⁶

This corresponds to the whole region of humanity which extends from Persia to Central Europe and the West, where the human being, if they strive cognitively, has to struggle with dualism, where all the doubts which are caused by being caught between truth and error, between good and evil, are triggered in one’s feelings.

If we approach the middle, in the east, we have this double form there. It is that which will one day grow out of the chaotic Russian. In the Russian soul we have, so to speak, the preparation for the soul-nature of the future, even if it has to work its way through the most diverse chaotic conditions. The human being exists in such a way that they basically always have a second person with them, and this also reveals itself to the contemplative gaze. Every Russian actually has their own human shadow which they carry with them. This then leads to feeling something like an inspiration from the gloomy soul, as is attempted here in the blue, on the other side in the orange angel figure and in the centaur-like figure that is above it. That relationship to nature and to the world, which the Russian soul has as a kind of soul of the future, is depicted there.

And all of this should come together to form the central image, which will then have its counterpart below in the wooden sculpture already mentioned. In the middle, in the east, you see the figure of Christ, above it the figure of Lucifer in red hues, below it, in various shades of brown, the figure of Ahriman. In this is to be felt what actually represents the essence of the human being.⁷

One does not get to know the human being if one only looks at how the human being’s external contours appear to the physical eye. In the physical, the soul and the spirit, the human being carries a trinity within. Physically the human being bears a trinity in the following way. Physically we have within us everything that constantly causes us to age while we are alive, that makes us sclerotic, that makes our limbs calcify, that makes death, as it were, always present in us with its force. That is the physical-ahrimanic working. If this were to get the upper hand, we would fall into old age even as children. But it works in us, and it works physically precisely because it is the solidifying, heavy, calcifying element that leads us towards death.

Above the figure of Christ, we see the figure of Lucifer. It is that physical element in the human being which brings about fever and pleurisy, which in a certain sense always cause us to dissolve, these are the forces of youth, which, if they alone were present, would dissolve the human being.

This polar, circular opposition can be perceived throughout the whole human being. If one feels it in colour, then one feels the luciferic upwards in a red hue, the ahrimanic downwards in a brown hue. And the human being themself is the equilibrium between the two. The human being is actually always the inner state of equilibrium, which, however, must be sought for at every moment, between that which dissolves in warmth, in fever-fire, and the hardening, petrification and solidification which brings death. One will only have a real physiology of the human being when one sees this polarity in each individual organ. Heart, lungs, liver, everything becomes comprehensible only when one sees them in this polarity.

Well, I mean, you can feel all that in what is painted on the ceiling. One could say: so these are symbols after all! - The Austrian poet, Robert Hamerling, composed a poem "Ahasver", in which he did not depict human figures in a naturalistic way, but in a spiritual way. He was accused of creating symbols and not real people. He defended himself by saying: "If at the same time one feels so vividly that the figures are living people after all, then they may make a symbolic impression, for who can prevent Nero from being a symbol of cruelty? But one cannot say that Nero was not a real human being because of that!”

These things must be seen in the right light. And to those who do not want something like this to emerge in a new way from the experience of colour, who find it too complicated to look into these things, one must answer: Yes, what should someone who has no sense of anything Christian experience, for example, in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper or Raphael's Sistine Madonna? Just as Christianity is necessary there, but even then, when Christianity is present, everything can be perceived from the coloured elements on the surface: so, when there is that very elementary, natural way of looking at the world, to which this building wants to bear witness, all that can be grasped not in abstract terms but in direct, living contemplation.

And that is what is really important about this building: that it is not fantasised about, not interpreted, but that the people who enter it, or who look at it from the outside, become absorbed in the forms, in the colours, and take in what is there in their immediate inner perception. Then we shall see, when we gradually find our way into this building, that it does indeed represent at least an attempt - everything is imperfect at the beginning - at least an attempt to come so close to the meaning of human evolution that it produces, precisely out of the spiritual life necessary for the present, something artistic, just as the various ages have produced something artistic out of their particular conception of the world.

Let us put ourselves back for a moment into the Greek heart, into the Greek soul. Let us put ourselves back into that soul which, with inner sincerity and honesty, could make the traditional statement: Better a beggar here on earth than a king in the kingdom of shadows. The Greek felt bound to the earth by the peculiarity of the spirit of the age. If one may say so, the Greeks appreciated everything that was on earth through the forces of the earth's gravity as something that adorned and covered this earth. They felt the forces of the earth's gravity. And in the building of their temples they expressed how they experienced the forces of this earthly gravity. When in primeval times, the human being looked up to the immortal, to the eternal in the human soul, they looked back to the ancestors. Those souls, which were the souls of the ancestors, the souls of the forefathers, gradually became for them the souls of the gods. And the graves of the ancestors remained for them a sacred place which enclosed something spiritual within itself. For a certain cultural current, the tomb is the first building, the building of the human soul that has left the earthly. In the construction of the Greek temple, one still feels something of an echo of the construction of the tomb. And the melancholy building of the tomb has risen in a joyful way in the building of the Greek temple, in that the departed human soul, which was once divinely worshipped as the ancestral soul, has become the god. The building over the ancestral grave, where the soul, the divinely worshipped ancestral soul was to be given a resting place, became the temple of the god Apollo, Zeus, Athena. And the temple enclosure became the extension of that which once existed as an ancestral tomb. As the ancestral soul became the god, so the tomb became the Greek temple. Just as the ancestral soul was looked upon as the past, and the building of the tomb thus took on a tragic aspect, so the building of the tomb became the building of the temple in its cheerfulness, in its joyfulness, because it had now become the envelope not of the departed soul but of the immortal soul of the gods existing in the present.

One can only think of a Greek temple as the dwelling house of the god. The Greek temple is not perfect in itself. There can only be a temple of Apollo, a temple of Zeus, a temple of Athena. The Greek went to the temple knowing that this was where the god lived.

If we leave out some of the architectural styles, we can then move on to the example of the Gothic building, the cathedral. Let us look again at the form of the cathedral: We no longer see in it any reminiscence of the tomb, at most this is preserved in an inorganic way through tradition, in that the altar is reminiscent of the gravestone, but this is brought into the whole in an inorganic way; the Gothic architectural idea is something different. The Greek temple is that which has shaped its forms through the conquest of the earth's gravitational forces. How could one form that which grows out of the construction of the tomb, that which rises over the earthly tomb, over that which has been lowered into the earth, in any other way than by conquering the forces of the earth's gravity through the force-dynamics, through the form of the building, by mastering in the supporting column, in the supported beam, the forces of gravity which are the forces of the earth. Later, feeling does not go to the earth, not to the ancestral soul that has disappeared: it lifts itself out and goes into the expanses of the world to the God above. Accordingly, the Gothic architectural forms take on their special form.

The striving form of the gothic building is not the overcoming of weight: the most important thing in the form of the gothic building is mutual support. Nowhere do we actually see bearing, we see striving upward. We do not see weight, but a striving upwards toward heaven.

Therefore, the Gothic cathedral is not the dwelling place of any gods, like the Greek temple, but the Gothic cathedral is the meeting place of the faithful, the meeting place of the congregation. If one enters a Greek temple from which the image of the god has been removed, the Greek temple has no meaning. A Greek temple without the image of the god is meaningless. The image of the god must be supplemented in the imagination. If you go into a Gothic cathedral without mass being said and preached, or without a congregation praying together - it is not complete. The living congregation belongs there. And the word for cathedral, “Dom”, also expresses the flowing together of the congregation. Duma and Dom have the same origin. And when the Narodnaya Duma got its name, it was out of the feeling of working together, just as the Gothic cathedral got its name out of the feeling that people must flow together with their souls and together direct their feelings upwards in the direction of the striving Gothic forms.

We see how the perception of artistic forms demonstrates a certain progress in the course of human evolution. Today we no longer live in a time in which one feels as one did in the period when the Gothic flourished. Today we live in a time in which the human being must penetrate deeper into their own inner being. Today we can only establish a social community by each person experiencing "know thyself" in a higher sense than was previously the case - even if it resounds through the ages as the old Apollonian demand of "know thyself" - and fulfilling it in a deeper sense. Only by becoming individualities in the most intensive sense can we form human communities today.

When one immerses oneself in the forms of this Goetheanum, in a feeling way, what do they speak to us? What do they reveal to our gaze? If we want to speak about them, we must try to place before the human soul exactly the same thing that can be expressed through the anthroposophical world view as the mystery of the human being and the mystery of the world, as they reveal themselves to the human being, precisely through ideas, through concepts. The Greek temple represented the dwelling place of the God who descended to earth. The Gothic cathedral represented that which evokes in one the urge to feel "know thyself" and to be together with other people precisely out of this recognition.

When you enter this house, you should have the feeling: In the forms, in the paintings, in everything that is there, one finds the mystery of the human being, and one likes to unite with other people here, because here everyone finds that which reveals their human value, their human dignity, in which one likes to unite lovingly with other people.

In this way, this building wants to welcome all those who enter it, who approach it.

• 1. See the illustration in Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum. Published by Philos.-Anthrop. Verlag.
• 2. See the designs for the painting of the large dome in the first Goetheanum, picture 2 and 3.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner's designs for the large dome in the first Goetheanum (an art portfolio executed by Alinari in Florence), Plate VI: The Indian. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 4. The Portal of Initiation. A Rosicrucian Mystery, through Rudolf Steiner. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag)
• 5. See: Spiritual Science explanations of Goethe's Faust, Volume I (with 2 picture supplements: Faust, Flying child from the small dome of the burnt Goetheanum) Faust, the striving human being, and Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, with 104 illustrations. Philos. Anthropos. Verlag.
• 6. See Der Baugedanke der Goetheanum, Figure 75-79.
• 7. We refer to the colour print by Hanfstaengl of the design sketched by R. Steiner for this picture of the painting of the dome. (Philos.-Anthropos. Verlag am Goetheanum)

I have spoken about the form, substantiality and metallity of the mineral kingdom in so far as they are related to the different levels of consciousness in man. Before extending my observations to include certain metallic substances, I must make my position perfectly clear.

From what I have said it might readily be inferred that I was recommending the ingestion of these substances in the form of nutriments as a means of inducing states of consciousness that differ from the normal. When discussing methods of achieving spiritual insight through inner training and discipline, one often hears the remark: I would be only too glad to know something of other worlds and other states of consciousness, but it is too difficult to carry out the exercises which are recommended; they take up so much time.

A little later, perhaps, these people make a start. Then, after a time, the immediate demands of life intervene and they find they are unwilling to sacrifice their ingrained habits. By degrees they lose enthusiasm and the exercises are quietly dropped. Not surprisingly these people achieve nothing; they find the need to practise spiritual exercises excessively irksome.

When they hear, for example, that the qualities of certain metals are associated with other levels of consciousness, they feel more reassured. If a small dosage of copper is all that is required in order to preserve a spiritual link with another after death, then why not take it, they conclude, if it enables one to develop a higher level of consciousness.

The idea becomes all the more attractive when they hear that the practice adopted in the ancient Mysteries was not so very dissimilar, though in those days, of course, it was only carried out under the continuous and closest supervision of the Initiates. And when people are told of this, they wonder why these old practices are not revived. But they overlook the fact that in ancient times the whole physical organization of man was differently constituted. In those days, and even as late as the Chaldean epoch, he lacked our present intellectuality. Thoughts were not self-generated as today, but came to him through inspiration. Just as we realize today that we do not create the red of the rose, but receive the impression of the rose from without, so the men of ancient times were aware that thoughts were transmitted via external objects, they were “in-spired,” breathed into them. The reason for this was to be found in the different constitution of the physical organism, including even the composition of the blood. Therefore it was possible to administer highly potentized doses of those metals I have spoken of—homoeopathic doses as we call them today—in order to assist people in carrying out their spiritual exercises.

A man of the Chaldean epoch, we will suppose, has been prescribed highly potentized doses of copper. Before taking it—this was the general practice of the time—he was directed to perform certain specific spiritual exercises. In such cases, years rather than days of training were demanded of him before the highly potentized copper could be administered. And because his physical constitution was different from ours, he learned, through his training, to retrace the reactions upon the upper part of the body, of this finely distributed, highly potentized copper that was circ41ating in his blood stream. When copper was administered after this careful training, he felt inwardly that his words took on added warmth, because he himself had generated warmth in his larynx and in the nerves leading from the larynx to the brain.

Now because his physical make-up was different, he was able to react with such extreme sensitivity to what was taking place within him. If one were to administer highly potentized copper in similar circumstances today, it would of course take effect, but it would provoke a laryngeal condition and nothing further.

It is important, therefore, to understand the difference between the physical constitution of man in those times and that of today. Then one will no longer be tempted to induce other states of consciousness by administering medicaments, which was the normal practice in ancient times and was still frequently practised in the Middle Ages.

At the present time the only valid method is for man to have an inner perception of the nature, the essential being of copper as I indicated yesterday and thus develop a sensitive response to the colour of burnished copper, to the behaviour of copper in copper sulphate solution. By concentrating and meditating upon this response, he will ensure that he reacts in the right way.

But, you will object, in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, there is no indication of what preparatory steps should be undertaken in order to develop this response to copper. That is so. But in principle the directives are given in my book, though copper is not specifically mentioned. A description is given of how one should enter into the being of crystals, plants, etc. and the preparatory exercises are indicated. But of course no information is given of how to meditate on the nature of copper; a whole library (rather than a book) would be needed for that. Nor was it necessary, since directives have already been given—exercises to promote self-confidence, for example, and exercises in concentration upon some specific theme or object. Such exercises, in effect, are already covered by what I have just said about the nature of copper. There is no specific statement to the effect that one should meditate upon the nature of copper. It is suggested that some simple subject or theme should be selected for purposes of meditation morning and evening. That is tantamount to meditating upon the nature of copper. Only that is given as a subject for meditation which could refer to its metallic nature.

A meditation upon some specific theme such as “wisdom radiates in the light” has a decisive influence upon the inner life, if carried out in earnest. The effect would be the same as if someone were to explore the nature of copper from all angles and to concentrate on its physical aspect. In the first instance, our approach is from the moral standpoint, in the second, from the physical and chemical standpoint. It is far better for the non-chemist to enter the spiritual world from the moral standpoint.

It is necessary, therefore, to see things in their proper relationship, because it would be a mistake for the man of today to follow uncritically the methods of the ancient Mysteries in order to gain insight into the spiritual world. The right course for today is to replace the external, physical approach by a more moral and spiritual approach. With the development of his physical organism man's whole relationship to nature has been transformed. Composition of the blood, tissue fluid and the whole physical constitution are different today from those of the ancient Chaldeans. This cannot be proved by anatomical analysis. In the first place, the anatomist spends most of his time dissecting corpses. Recently a scientific congress raised a cry of alarm and clamoured for more corpses. Anatomists found there was a shortage of corpses for investigating the hidden secrets of life. But it would not be easy to procure Chaldean corpses in order to pursue these investigations! In the second place, with his crude technique, the anatomist would find no answer to the hidden secrets of life; these must be explored by spiritual means.

Since our physical body is differently constituted from that of the ancients, one point must be clearly established. It is still possible today to dispense highly potentized substances, metal potencies, for example. What is the reason for this? The explanation is that we have a deeper insight into the real being of nature. If we really understand the nature of the human body, we know that its functioning is modified by the metals I have mentioned—tin, copper, lead, and so forth. And I have shown how they modify, in the first instance, the conditions of consciousness.

Today, however, we are aware that changes take place in the body, even in normal life, if I may use such a mundane expression. Let us assume, for example, that we experience a change in that region of the body which radiates the activity of copper as I pointed out yesterday. Any such change is reflected in disturbances of the digestive organs, in the metabolic-limb system—in disturbances of the organs predominantly associated with metabolism, digestion and assimilation of nutrients. Every such disturbance in the human organization which we call dis-ease is also associated with the evocation of a different state of consciousness. The full implication of this must be borne in mind.

Now what is the significance of organic disease? I said yesterday that for the man of today his normal condition of waking consciousness lies in the heart centre. Other states of consciousness are associated with other organs, but they always remain in the subconscious. The region of the larynx, including the area extending from the larynx to the brain, lives continuously in a state of consciousness sequential to the normal state which I described yesterday. The region in the neighbourhood of the digestive organs shares the same time-scale as the dead after death. Man always participates in this state of consciousness. Everyone shares the after-death experiences of those he knew personally in life. But he experiences them below the heart, not in the heart. Therefore he knows nothing of this experience; it remains in the subconscious, below the threshold of consciousness. When some disturbance occurs, such as dyspepsia, for example, in that region where man is spiritually in touch with the dead, the consciousness below the heart centre is modified; it begins to operate too actively.

What then is the explanation of a certain kind of gastric disorder? From the physical angle it is simply a label for the practitioner's diagnosis. Now the point of view presented here is in no way directed against a purely physical approach to medicine. I recognize and appreciate its value. As Anthroposophists we do not adopt the attitude of the dilettante, the amateur or the charlatan who disparage or criticize orthodox medicine. We fully accept its findings. When a person suffers from a gastric disorder, the symptoms can be diagnosed physically; but as a result of his gastric condition he is more able to share in the life of the dead immediately after their death. Of course a physical diagnosis is made before therapeutic treatment can begin. From the spiritual standpoint we would say that such a person feels impelled to preserve, after their death, his spiritual link with the souls he has known on Earth. But he is unable to enter into the consciousness that lies below the heart. He is unaware that he is in communion with the dead.

That is the spiritual aspect of such a complaint. Gastric disorders arise because one is too much attached to the dead. Under such conditions one is dominated by the dead. We are strongly influenced by that world which, as I indicated yesterday, is so much more real than the physical world.

Let us imagine we have a balance in front of us. If the pointer is deflected, the zero reading is restored by loading the other scale-pan. The state of disbalance in a person who has developed such abnormal sensitivity in this consciousness below the heart that he is too attached to the dead—and he is quite unconscious of this—is analogous to the scale-pan that is loaded on the one side. Equilibrium is restored by adding an equivalent load to the other side.

Thus, if the consciousness below the heart is too active, the consciousness in the region of the larynx must be diminished; the heart lies between, it acts as a regulator and it is the knife edge on which the beam of the balance oscillates. Equilibrium is restored by administering copper. I have already pointed out that man's body today is constituted in such a way that the larynx reacts to copper.

The metabolic and laryngeal systems are as closely related as the two sides of the balance. One may be adjusted by means of the other. If suitable doses of copper are administered, the patient is inclined to withdraw somewhat from the realm of the dead and thereby benefits in health, whereas otherwise he is increasingly identified with it. That is the spiritual aspect of healing.

Today we know, therefore, that all substances have both a physical and moral aspect. The old Initiates could make use of the physical aspect for the benefit of their pupils but only after their pupils had undergone extensive training. It should no longer be used in the same way today. Today the moral attributes are the province of psychic development, the physical attributes that of the doctor. It is important that the man who is familiar with the physical side of substances and has occasion to make a detailed study of this aspect should also supplement his information by a knowledge of the moral side. This must be strictly adhered to for present day perception and for practical perception in the field of spiritual methods. The human organism has changed radically with the passage of time and the close relationship that used to exist between the knowledge of the moral and physical aspect of substances has been lost and must be restored again. I shall have more to say presently about the loss of this relationship.

The relationship between medical science with its predominantly physical outlook and spiritual science must none the less be different today from that of the remote past. In both cases this relationship must continue, but it will assume a different form today. It is upon the knowledge of such things that our ability to distinguish between the true and false paths in spiritual investigation depends.

A brief review of man's whole attitude to knowledge over the centuries may help to throw further light upon what I have already discussed.

Let us look at the evolution of mankind in retrospect, when the interpretation of knowledge and research was so very different. The enormous advances made in recent times in the knowledge of thermo- and electro-dynamics and of living organisms are c1assffied today under nature, natural history, natural science and, in England, natural philosophy. The way nature is presented in schools today is highly abstract. Nature is seen as a sum of “natural laws”—that is the expression used—which children are expected to memorize. And the abstract character of this study is carried over into life.

Consider how cold and abstract even the most enthusiastic student finds natural science today. In botany he is obliged to learn by heart lists of botanical terms for plants and plant species, in zoology, the names and classifications of animals and animal species. He soon forgets them and has to go over the ground again and again for examination purposes. And after the examination he often forgets them completely; should he need them again, he looks them up in a book of reference. It could hardly be said that a student of today has the same relationship to botany and zoology as he has to some personality to whom he is devoted. That is out of the question.

Nature today has become something vague and nebulous, a catalogue of laws of gravitation, heat, light, electricity, magnetism—the laws of mechanics. Natural science and natural history deal with the study of stones and plants. But natural science includes in addition the life and inner constitution of the organs of plants, animals and man of which we are admittedly ignorant. In brief, natural science and natural philosophy today include much that we claim to know and much of which we are totally ignorant.

Now this is a state of affairs that hardly inspires confidence; everything is so nebulous and confused, the thinking so superficial and abstract. Nowadays we strive manfully to master this abstraction we call “nature” and many, it must be admitted, have grown somewhat indifferent to this abstract approach. And if we do not belong to the younger generation which is in active revolt against what is being taught in our schools as natural science, we adopt an attitude of benevolent neutrality. This was not always the case. I should like now to characterize briefly the attitude to knowledge a few centuries ago.

When we look back to the ninth, tenth, eleventh and even to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we come across men—though they were considerably fewer at that time—whom we should describe today as savants, men adjudged to be the outstanding scholars of their day, who taught in the famous School of Chartres in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as Bernardus Silvestris, Bernard of Chartres, Alanus ab Insulis. These personalities were still fortunate enough at that time to be associated with Initiates, men who had profound insight into the mysteries of existence, such as the famous medieval Initiate Joachim of Fiore or that other illustrious personality known to the world as John of Hanville. [or Hauteville; in Latin, Altavilla. His work Architrenius (1184) is mentioned in one of Rudolf Steiner's notebooks. The work is a long epic describing the allegorical journey of a young man seeking the help and counsel of the Goddess Natura.]

I mention these names, to which many others could be added, in order to evoke the spirit of the age, in order to characterize the attitude towards knowledge that was prevalent at the time.

When we enter into the spiritual outlook of such personalities, we find that their conception of nature is wholly different from our own. In the case of the typical botanist, pathologist or histologist of today, the expression on his face belies any deep interest in the mysteries of pathology or anatomy; it reflects rather the memories of the dance he had attended the night before. We learn more about the festive occasion than about the mysteries of nature!

It was a very different matter to look into the eyes of a Joachim of Fiore, an Alanus ab Insulis or a Bernardus Silvestris. Tragedy was written on their countenances. They felt they were living in an epoch which had suffered irreparable loss. And the growing realization of this loss filled their hearts with tragic sorrow.

Or again, if we had looked at their fingers, fingers which the modern decadent world would describe as ‘nervous,’ sensitive fingers, which bore living witness to their desire to probe into those ancient mysteries, the loss of which was written on their faces, we should have perceived a yearning to revive the ancient wisdom of the past.

There were brief moments when they were able to conjure up pictures of those ancient times for their pupils; but they were only phantom images.

Now what I am about to depict to you is no poetic fantasy, but a reality. We can visualize Alanus ab Insulis of the School of Chartres, where the magnificent Cathedral still stands today, speaking to his pupils about nature and saying: Nature is a Being who eludes us when we draw near to her. Man now directs his energies to other ends; he no longer shares that intuitive understanding of nature which the sages of former times once possessed. Nature, in their eyes, was a majestic Being endowed with spirit, operating everywhere—where rock formations were created, where plants sprang out of the Earth, and jewelled stars sparkled in the heavens. Everywhere a Being of infinite grandeur was at work, who revealed herself in the wondrous form of a woman weaving nature's web. The ancients experienced this intuitively. From their descriptions we can still picture how nature appeared in their eyes, weaving and working in all around, in the manifestations of warmth, light, colour and life. They realized that the Goddess Natura was a divine-spiritual Being whose real essence could be known only through direct perception.

A personality such as Alanus ab Insulis was still able to present such conceptions to his pupils in the School of Chartres. But because the Initiates saw this old conception of the Goddess Natura gradually fade and die, saw replete with life and vitality the nature that we today regard as dead and abstract because we have lost touch with her, sorrow and tragedy were written on their faces.

Then, again, we hear of such men as Brunetto Latini, Dante's famous teacher. During his travels, through some strange karmic incident, he suffered a heat-stroke which produced a change of consciousness. This event was far more important for his development than the sufferings he endured when the last of the Guelphs were expelled from his native city. Because of this transformation of consciousness he was still able to perceive this Goddess Natura and described her in his book Tesoretto. He gives a graphic description, imaginatively inspired, of how, on his homeward journey to his native Florence, he came upon a hill in the midst of a desolate forest and on this hill he saw the Goddess Natura weaving at her loom. She revealed to him the significance of thinking, feeling and willing for the human soul the intrinsic nature of the four temperaments and the function of the five senses.

And the eyes of his spirit and soul were opened. This experience on his homeward journey from Spain to his native Florence under the influence of a depressed, pathological condition was a spiritual reality. As a result of this inward transformation, he saw the weaving life of the four Elements, fire, earth, water and air, the flux and movement of the planets and the soul emerging from the body into the Cosmos. All this he experienced under the influence of a spiritual teaching at the hands of the Goddess Natura.

These experiences were described by the men of that epoch with a clarity and concreteness that could scarcely be bettered today. At the same time, they felt that the ancients had experienced this knowledge in a different way and that in the course of time it had gradually been lost. In order to revive the knowledge of these mysteries it was necessary to induce a pathological condition. And they felt an irresistible urge to keep alive the real image of Natura.

And when in retrospect we review man's whole attitude to nature knowledge, we feel that our approach to nature is abstract, that nature is a catalogue of laws. We are proud if we can see these laws even to some extent as a related whole. If we look back a few centuries we see that a living relationship existed between man and a divine Being who was living, weaving and working in natural phenomena—in the rising and setting of the Sun, in the transmission of warmth to the stones and plants, a warmth that is actively operating within all this life, growth and proliferation. How different was a science that took into account the activities of the Goddess Natura. The mood in which the students of the School of Chartres—the majority were of the Cistercian Order—came out of their lectures was vastly different from the mood of students leaving their lecture-rooms today! Their response was vitally alive and a deeper expression of their inner being. And the same living reality is reflected in the descriptions of such men as Brunetto Latini, the celebrated teacher of Dante. The vigorous, creative spirit of the time can readily be imagined, for the characters and splendid pictorial descriptions of Dante's Commedia are inspired by the graphic descriptions of his teacher Brunetto Latini who owed his Initiation to a karmic incident. And the School of Chartres and other Schools were indebted to Initiates such as Joachim of Fiore and others for much of the instruction given at the time.

The term Natura was not used in our abstract sense; it implied something operating creatively in external sensible phenomena, but which remained veiled and escaped one's gaze.

Another factor must also be taken into consideration. Let us assume—and again I am describing a fundamental reality, not some poetic fantasy—that, as an elderly student, you had attended a course of lectures given by Alanus ab Insulis and had taken part in the discussions; the students had been dismissed and you were walking alone with Alanus ab Insulis discussing the problems at issue.

The conversation might have turned upon some particular point. You might have spoken of the Goddess Natura who manifests herself in the phenomenal world, but who is veiled from you. Then Alanus ab Insulis who had warmed to the discussion would have said: If we still shared in our life of sleep the condition formerly possessed by the ancients, we would be in touch with the hidden side of nature. Our sleep leads to oblivion; but it was precisely in the unconscious that the ancients were in contact with the hidden side of nature. Could we but experience again the clairvoyant sleep of the ancients, we should know the Goddess Natura.

And if, in a similar situation, you had been engaged in intimate conversation with Joachim of Fiore, he would have replied: our sleep is devoid of content, our consciousness is obliterated. It would be difficult therefore to know the Goddess Natura weaving and working in all created things. The ancients were aware of her hidden and her visible aspects. They never used the term Natura. They never maintained that the Being whose presence we vaguely sense, but do not know, was the Goddess Natura. They gave her another name—Proserpina, or Persephone.

This was common knowledge in those days. What I have just described has been transformed into our abstract conception of nature. And what lived in the souls of such men as Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, John of Hanville, and above all in Brunetto Latini, was a transformation of the Goddess whom the ancients saw as Proserpina, the daughter of Demeter—the entire universe; Proserpina (the modern term sounds commonplace)—nature, nature who can live only half of her life in the upper world, who reveals only her physical and sensuous aspect to mankind, whilst the other half of her life is spent in those realms where man dwells in sleep, realms which man can no longer inhabit today because his sleep is emptied of true reality.

Our knowledge of nature, though we are unable to realize it owing to our present abstract conception, is an echo of what once lived in the old Greek myth of Persephone.

The fact that the men of sorrowful countenance were aware of this and that it could still be known in their day, shows how much the paths of knowledge have changed with the passage of time. As I said in the earlier part of my lecture, we can only develop the right feeling for, and sense the subtle distinctions in these things, when we review in retrospect the nature of the knowledge that once existed. I have quoted these examples, not with the idea of reviving ancient forms of knowledge, but in order to call attention to the kind of knowledge that was prevalent in former times.

If we can hold fast to the words which might have been spoken perhaps by Joachim of Fiore or John of Hanville: “What we regard as nature today, or whatsoever is veiled from us because we cannot apprehend it spiritually, this was once known as Proserpina,” and if this myth of Proserpina (for it has survived only as a myth) is renewed within us, then the images evoked by this myth awaken images of still earlier relationships. They are images from the time when man knew neither the abstract nor the tragic aspect of the Goddess Natura, when he saw Proserpina-Persephoneia herself, in her aspect of radiant beauty and tragic gloom.

And in what aspect did she appear in those far-off days of her prime? These were not the days of Plato's philosophy, nor of Socrates' dialogues, but much earlier times, when knowledge was far more vitally alive than at the height of Greek culture.

Let us try to envisage the different forms knowledge has taken in the course of human evolution so that we may see in the right perspective what we have already discussed from the standpoint of the present and which will be discussed in further detail in the course of these lectures.

Though of necessity our account will be brief and imperfect, let us try to envisage the nature of the Mysteries into which the Greek philosopher Heraklites was initiated, the ‘dark’ and ‘gloomy’ Heraklites as he was called, because, in later years, a psychic darkness had descended upon all that he had received at the hands of the Mysteries. Let us picture that period in the development of the Mysteries when the Greeks drew upon them for their imaginative vision and the creation of their myths. And let us picture to ourselves the Mysteries of Ephesus into which Heraklites had been initiated.

Knowledge from primeval times was still extant in Ephesus and persisted into Homer's time and even into the time of Heraklites' Initiation, though in an emasculated form. These ancient Mysteries were still actively flourishing. A strong and powerful spiritual atmosphere was present in that temple which was adorned on the Eastern side with the statue of the Goddess Diana, the Goddess of Fertility, who symbolizes the superabundant fertility of nature everywhere. When conversations were held, momentous secrets of existence, profound spiritual secrets were imparted to the pupils through the spoken word immediately after they had taken part in the Mysteries and had received the mighty impulses of the Mysteries from the ceremonies in the Temple of Ephesus. And these profound conversations were continued after the participants in the ceremonies had left the Temple. At the twilight hour, when nature invites to contemplation, they would follow the pathway leading from the Temple doorway into a grove with arboured walks, planted with dark-green trees in which paths fanning out from the Temple of Ephesus were gradually lost to view in the distance. I should like to offer you a somewhat inadequate picture of conversations of this kind.

It was not unknown for someone who had received a partial Initiation into the Mysteries of those times to enter into conversation with a pupil of either sex. Now you must realize that in those days equality of rights between the sexes, though forfeited immediately afterwards, was very much more a living reality than it is today. We can speak, therefore, both of male and female pupils at Ephesus. And in these conversations there was a lively interest in the spiritual aspect of the myth of Persephone. But how was such a conversation conducted? First, there was the teacher, the Priest-Initiate, who, from the spiritual impulses he had received, was empowered to speak of the contingencies in the world of forms, of the inter-relationships of entities in that world. Speaking from his Initiate knowledge he would say something like the following to his pupil.—It is now twilight, and sleep which reveals the spiritual world will soon overtake us. Look upon your human form in its totality. Beneath our feet are the plants and around us are the lengthening shadows of twilight and the dim green light of the temple grove. The first stars are beginning to shine in the heavens. Behold the majesty and grandeur of life's inexhaustible vitality in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath. Then behold yourself and remember that a whole universe lives and stirs within you, that all organic activity, all the changes and chances of your inner life bear witness every moment of the day to a plenitude of facts and to endless transformations of your being. Realize that you are a microcosm which, though spatially delimited, is richer in mystery and wonder than the macrocosm which you apprehend visually and intellectually. Learn then to feel and know this world within you. Realize that you are now looking out from your microcosmic world into the larger world that reaches from the Earth to the stars. Then sleep will overtake you; you will no longer be a prisoner of your own body, of your own world, but will inhabit that other world you now behold, a world that embraces the Earth and the stars. Your soul and spirit will have relinquished the physical body and you will be sharing the radiance of the stars and the exhalations of the Earth. You will ride the winds and think with star-radiance. You will now be living in the spiritual world and will look back upon your microcosmic self.

In ancient times it was possible for the teacher to speak to his pupil after this fashion, because the perception of the external world was not so sharply defined as now, and the life of sleep had not yet become a total blank. It was still crowded with experiences. When referring to this state of sleep, the teacher spoke of realities, saying: You are now in the presence of Proserpina, Persephone or Cora. Cora lives in the stars, in the rays of sunshine, in the moonbeams and the growing plants. Everywhere can be seen the activities of Persephone, for she has woven the garment of the universe. And behind it all is Demeter, her mother, for whom Persephone has woven this garment which you see as the external world.—The teacher did not use the term ‘nature;’ he preferred to speak of Persephone or Cora.

And continuing the dialogue with his pupil, the teacher went on: If someone were to remain awake for a longer period than yourself, then, whilst you were asleep, he would perceive the plants, mountains, clouds and stars—external manifestations of Persephone—exactly as you do now. Illusion lies in the manner of our seeing. It is not Persephone, not her creative activities in mountains, plants, clouds and stars that are illusory, but how you see them. And now the moment has come for sleep. Through your eyes, the organ of life's mysteries, Cora-Persephone will enter into you.—

These things were described so vividly because they had been so vividly experienced; so that, whilst falling asleep, the sleeper not only felt that sight, hearing and perception were being extinguished, but he was aware of Persephone sinking down through the eyes into the physical and etheric bodies from which his soul and spirit had withdrawn whilst he slept.

In waking life we live in the upper world, in sleep we live in the lower world. Persephone entered through the eyes of the sleeper into the physical and etheric bodies. She dwelt with Pluto, the Lord of sleep within the physical and etheric bodies. The sleeping neophyte experienced the activity of Pluto and Persephone. Through the instruction he had received he became aware of the entry of Cora through the gateway of the eyes. This became a living reality to him, and now he experienced the deeds of Pluto and Persephone during sleep. And whilst the neophyte experienced this, his teacher had corresponding experiences that were related to the world of forms.

Then, when teacher and pupil met together again, each had experience of his own particular insights. And when they discussed plants and trees, the teacher would describe how the forms arose, for they had been revealed to him in sleep. Then he would discuss in detail the configuration of the leaves and stems, of the whole nature-kingdom and the formative forces which work down into the Earth from above. And though the pupil had perhaps experienced different insights, he could probably follow his teacher when he spoke of the mysteries of chlorophyll and osmosis. Thus the conversations supplemented each other: in this vivid picture of the Goddess Persephone in the underworld, revealing her other aspect to man whilst he slept, these secrets were revealed to the human soul and entered into it.

Thus, in those far-off times, the pupil learned from the teacher and the teacher from the pupil. On the one hand, the teachings were of the spirit and soul, on the other hand, of soul and spirit. From this interchange of pooled experience they touched the highest flights of knowledge. When they shared these deepest insights, when next they saw the approach of dawn and the morning star shining in the East, sending shafts of light into the dark green grove whose avenues of majestic trees were gradually lost to view in the distant vista, their hearts were gladdened. They had dwelt for a brief hour in that realm we now call the realm of nature. And when they had talked of these things amongst themselves, they knew for certain they had held converse with Persephone. And they knew also that all that was later incorporated into the myth of Persephone was, in reality, the hidden source of man's knowledge of nature.

I can only indicate imperfectly the fascination of these conversations that were related to the Mysteries of Ephesus and were imbued with a vital, living knowledge of Persephone. But in the course of time this knowledge was toned down to the abstraction we know as nature today and men such as Joachim of Fiore were saddened by this tragic loss.

We can only understand the path leading to an understanding of the spiritual nature of man and the Cosmos when we draw attention to, and characterize, not only the separate states of consciousness within man's reach, but also show how these states have been transformed in the course of the evolution of mankind; when we realize how very different from our own was the knowledge ,that informed the conversations of those who had participated in the Mysteries in the Temple of Ephesus, and how different was the nature of the converse held with such personalities as Joachim of Fiore and Alanus ab Insulis; and how different today is the knowledge that we must strive to attain once more, in order through spiritual training to seek forms of knowledge which lead back from the Outer to the Inner, from the Above to the Below and then from the Inner to the Outer and the Below to the Above.

I should like during these few days to say something rather especially for the friends who have come here to attend the Easter Course,¹ and who have not heard much of what has connections. Those who were present at the lectures before Easter may find some repetitions but the circumstances make this inevitable.

I have been laying particular emphasis on the fact that study of the historical development of the life of mankind must lead on to study of the human being himself. All our endeavours aim in the direction of placing man at the centre of our study of the world. Two ends are attained thereby. Firstly, it is only in this way that the world can be studied as it truly is. For all that man sees spread around him in nature is only a part—gives as it were one picture of the world only: and to limit study of the world to this realm of nature is like studying a plant without looking beyond root, green leaf and stem, and ignoring flower and fruit. This kind of study can never reveal the whole plant. Imagine a creature that is always born at a particular time of the year, lives out its life during a period when the plant grows as far as the green leaves and no further, dies before the plant is in blossom and appears again only when roots and green leaves are there.—Such a creature would never have knowledge of the whole plant; it would regard the plant as something that has roots and leaves only.

The materialistic mind of to-day has got itself into a similar position as regards its approach to the world. It considers only the broad foundations of life, not what blossoms forth from the totality of earthly evolution and earthly existence—namely, man himself. The real way of approach must be to study nature in her full extent, but in such a way as all the time to realise that she must needs create man out of herself. We shall then see man as the microcosm he truly is, as the concentration of all that is to be found outspread in the far spaces of the cosmos.

As soon, however, as we study history from this point of view, we are no longer able to regard the human being as a resultant of the forces of history, as a single, self-contained being. We must take account of the fact that he passes through different earthly lives: one such life occurs at an earlier time and another at a later. This very fact places man at the centre of our studies, but now in his whole being, as an individuality. This is the one end that is attained when we look in this way at nature and at history.

The other is this.—The very fact of placing man at the centre of study, makes for humility. Lack of humility is due to nothing else than lack of knowledge. A penetrating, comprehensive knowledge of man in his connection with the events of the world and of history will certainly not lead to excessive self-esteem; far rather it will lead the human being to look at himself objectively. It is precisely when a man does not know himself that there rise up in him those feelings which have their source in the unknown regions of his being. Instinctive, emotional impulses make themselves felt. And it is these instinctive, emotional impulses, rooted as they are in the subconscious, that make for arrogance and pride. On the other hand, when consciousness penetrates farther and farther into those regions where man comes to know himself and to recognise how in the sequence of historical events he belongs to the whole wide universe—then, simply by virtue of an inner law, humility will unfold in him. The recognition of his place in universal existence invariably calls forth humility, never arrogance. All genuine study pursued in Anthroposophy has its ethical side, carries with it an ethical impulse.

Unlike modern materialism, Anthroposophy will not lead to a conception of life in which ethics and morality are a mere adjunct; ethics and morality emerge, as if inwardly impelled, from all genuine anthroposophical study.

I want now to show you by concrete examples, how the fruits of earlier epochs of history are carried over into later epochs through human beings themselves. A certain very striking example now to be given, is associated with Switzerland.

Our gaze falls upon a man who lived about a hundred years before the founding of Christianity.—I am relating to you what can be discovered through spiritual scientific investigation.—At this period in history we find a personality who is a kind of slave overseer in southern Europe.

We must not associate with a slave overseer of those times the feelings that the word immediately calls up in us now. Slavery was the general custom in days of antiquity, and at the time of which I am speaking it was essentially mild in form; the overseers were usually educated men. Indeed the teachers of important personages might well be slaves, who were often versed in the literary and scientific culture of the time. So you see, we must acquire sounder ideas about slavery—needless to say, without defending it in the least degree—when we are considering this aspect of the life of antiquity.

We find, then, a personality whose calling it is to be in charge of a number of slaves and to apportion their tasks. He is an extraordinarily lovable man, gentle and kind-hearted and when he is able to have his own way he does everything to make life easier for the slaves. In authority over him, however, is a rough, somewhat brutal personality. This man is, as we should say nowadays, his superior officer. And this superior officer is responsible for many things that arouse resentment and animosity in the slaves. When the personality of whom I am speaking—the slave overseer—passes through the gate of death, he is surrounded in the time between death and a new birth by all the souls who were thus united with him on earth, the souls of the slaves who had been in his charge. But as an individuality he is very strongly connected with the one who was his superior officer. The fact that he, as the slave overseer, was obliged to obey this superior officer—for in accordance with the prevailing customs of the time he always did obey him, though often very unwillingly—this fact established a strong karmic tie between them. But a deep karmic tie was also established by the relationship that had existed in the physical world between the overseer and the slaves, for in many respects he had been their teacher as well.

We must thus picture a further life unfolding between death and rebirth among all these individualities of whom I have spoken.

Afterwards, somewhere about the 9th century A.D., the individuality of the slave overseer is born again, in Central Europe, but now as a woman, and moreover, because of the prevailing karmic connection, as the wife of the former superior officer who reincarnated as a man. The two of them live together in a marital relationship that makes karmic compensation for the tie that had been established away back in the first century before the founding of Christianity, when they had lived as subordinate and superior officers respectively. The superior officer is now, in the 9th century A.D., in a commune in Central Europe where the inhabitants live on very intimate terms with one another; he holds some kind of official position in the commune, but he is everyone's servant and comes in for plenty of knocks and abuse.

Investigating the whole matter further, we find that the members of this rather extensive commune are the slaves who once had their tasks allotted to them in the way I told you. The superior officer has now become as it were the servant of them all, and has to experience the karmic fulfilment of many things which, through the instrumentality of the overseer, his brutality inflicted upon these people.

The wife of this man (she is the reincarnated overseer), suffers with a kind of silent resignation under all the impressions made by the ever-discontented superior officer in his new incarnation, and one can follow in detail how karmic destiny is here being fulfilled.

But we see, too, that this karma is by no means completely adjusted. A part only is adjusted, namely the karmic relationship between the slave overseer and his superior officer. This has been lived out and is essentially finished in the medieval incarnation in the 9th century; for the wife has paid off what her soul had experienced owing to the brutality of the man who had once been the superior officer and is now her husband.

This woman, the reincarnation of the former slave overseer, is born again, and what happens now is that the greater number of the souls who had once been slaves and had then come together again in the large commune—souls in whose destiny this individuality had twice played a part—came again as the children whose education this same individuality in his new incarnation has deeply at heart. For in this incarnation he comes as Pestalozzi. And we see how Pestalozzi's infinite humanitarianism, his enthusiasm for education in the 18th century, is the karmic fulfilment in relation to human beings with whom he had already twice been connected—the karmic fulfilment of the experiences and the sufferings of earlier incarnations.

What comes to view in single personalities can be clear and objectively intelligible to us only when we are able to see the present earthly life against the background of earlier earthly lives.

Traits that go back not merely to the previous incarnation, but often to the one before that, and even earlier, sometimes show themselves in a man. We see how what has been planted, as it were, in the single incarnations, works its way through with a certain inner, spiritual necessity, inasmuch as the human being lives not only through earthly lives but also through lives between death and a new birth.

In this connection, the study of a life of which I spoke to those of you who were in Dornach before Easter, is particularly striking and interesting—the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer presents a very special enigma to those who study the inner aspect of his life and at the same time greatly admire him as a poet. There is such wonderful harmony of form and style in his poems that we cannot help saying: what lives in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer always hovers a little above the earthly—in respect of the style and also in respect of the whole way of thinking and feeling. And if we steep ourselves in his writings we shall perceive how he is immersed in an element of spirit-and-soul that is always on the point of breaking away from the physical body. Study the nobler poems, also the prose-poems, of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and you will say to yourselves: There is evidence of a perpetual urge to get right away from connection with the physical body. As you know, in his incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, it was his lot to fall into pathological states, when the soul-and-spirit separated from the physical body to a high degree, so much so that insanity ensued, or at any rate conditions resembling insanity. And the strange thing is that his most beautiful works were produced during periods when the soul-and-spirit had loosened from the physical body.

Now when we try to investigate the karmic connections running through the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, we are driven into a kind of confusion. We cannot immediately find our bearings. We are led, first, to the 6th century A.D., and then again we are thrown back into the 19th, into the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation. The very circumstances we are observing, mislead us. I want you to realise the extraordinary difficulty of a genuine search for knowledge in this domain. If you are satisfied with phantasy, then it is naturally easy, for you can make things fit in as you like. For one who is not satisfied with phantasy but carries his investigation to the point where he can rely upon the faculties of his own soul not to play him false—for him it is no easy matter, especially when he is investigating these things in connection with an individuality as complex as that of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. In investigating karmic connections through a number of earthly lives it is no great help to look at the particularly outstanding characteristics. What strikes you most forcibly in a man, what you see at once when you meet him or learn of him in history—these characteristics are, for the most part, the outcome of his earthly environment. A man as he confronts us is a product of his earthly environment to a far greater extent than is generally believed. He takes in through education what is present in his earthly environment. It is the more intangible, more intimate traits of a man which taken quite concretely, lead back through the life between death and a new birth into former earthly lives.

In these investigations it may be more important to observe a man's gestures or some habitual mannerism than to consider what he has achieved perhaps as a figure of renown. The mannerisms of a person, or the way he will invariably answer you—not so much what he answers but how he answers—whether, for example, his first tendency is always to be negative and only when he has no other alternative, to agree, or whether again in quite a good-humoured way he is rather boastful ... these are the kind of traits that are important and if we pay special attention to them they become the centre of our observations and disclose a great deal. One observes, for instance, how a man stretches out his hand to take hold of things; one makes an objective picture of it and then works upon it in the manner of an artist; and at length one finds that it is no longer the mere gesture that one is contemplating, but around the gesture the figure of another human being takes shape.

The following may happen.—There are men who have a habit, let us say, of making a certain movement of the arms. I have known men who simply could not begin to do anything without first folding their arms. If one visualises such a gesture quite objectively, but with inner, artistic feeling, so that it stands before one as a plastic, pliable form, then one's attention is directed away from the man who is actually making the gesture. But the gesture does not remain as it is; it grows into another figure which is an indication, at least, of something in the previous incarnation or in the one before that. It may well be that the gesture is now used in connection with something that was not present at all in the previous incarnation—let us say it is a gesture used in picking up a book, or some similar action. Nevertheless, it is for gestures and habits of this kind that we must have an eye if we are to keep on the right track.

Now in the case of an individuality like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the point of significance is that while he is creating his poems there is always a tendency to a loosening of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body. There we have a starting-point but at the same time a point where we may easily go astray.

We are led, as I told you, to the 6th century A.D. We have the feeling: that is where he belongs. And moreover we find a personality who lived in Italy, who experienced a very varied destiny in that incarnation in Italy, who indeed lived a kind of double existence. On the one side he was devoted with the greatest enthusiasm to an art that has almost disappeared in this later age, but was then in its prime; it is only in the remaining examples of mosaics that we are still able to glimpse this highly developed art. And the individuality to whom we are first impelled, lived in this milieu of art in Italy at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th century A.D.—That is what presents itself, to begin with.

But now this whole picture is obscured, and again we are thrown back to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The darkness that obscures vision of the man of the 6th century now overshadows the picture of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the 19th; and we are compelled to look very closely into what Conrad Ferdinand Meyer does in the 19th century.

Our attention is then drawn to the fact that his tale Der Heilige (The Saint), deals with Thomas à Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England. We feel that here is something of peculiar importance. And we also have the feeling that the impression received from the earlier incarnation has driven us up against this particular deed of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. But now again we are driven back into the 6th century, and can find there no explanation of this. And so we are thrown to and fro between the two incarnations, the problematic one in the 6th century and the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation—until it dawns upon us that the story of Thomas à Becket as told in history, came up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mind owing to a certain similarity with an experience he had himself undergone in the 6th century, when he went to England from Italy as a member of a Catholic mission sent by Pope Gregory. There we have the second aspect of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in his previous incarnation. On the one side he was an enthusiastic devotee of the art that subsequently took the form of mosaic.—Hence his talent for form, in all its aspects. On the other side, however, he was an impassioned advocate of Catholicism, and for this reason accompanied the mission. The members of this mission founded Canterbury, where the bishopric was then established.

The individuality who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was murdered by an Anglo-Saxon courtier, in circumstances that are extraordinarily interesting. There was something of legal subtlety and craftiness, albeit still in the rough, about the events connected at that time with the murder.

You know very well, my dear friends, how even in ordinary life the sound of something remains with you. You may once have heard a name without paying any particular attention to it ... but later on a whole association of ideas is called up in your mind when this name is mentioned. In a similar way, through the peculiar circumstances of this man's connection with what later became the archbishopric of Canterbury—the town of Canterbury, as I said, was founded by the mission of which he was a member—these experiences lived on, lived on, actually, in the sound of the name Canterbury. In the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation the sound of this name—Canterbury—came to life again, and by association of ideas his attention was called to Thomas à Becket, (the Lord Chancellor of Canterbury under Henry Plantagenet) who was treacherously murdered. At first, Thomas à Becket was a favourite of Henry II, but was afterwards murdered, virtually through the instigation of the King, because he would not agree to certain measures.

These two destinies, alike in some respects and unlike in others, brought it about that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer transposed, as it were, into quite different figures taken from history, what he had himself experienced in an earlier incarnation in the 6th century—experienced in his own body, far from what was at that time his native land. Just think how interesting this is! Once we have grasped it, we are no longer driven hither and thither between the two incarnations. And then, because again in the 19th century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer has a kind of double nature, we see how his soul-and-spirit easily separates from the physical. Because he has this double nature, the place of his own, actual experiences is taken by another experience in some respects similar to it ... just as pictures often change in the play of human imagination. In a man's ordinary imagination during an earthly life, the picture changes in such a way that imagination weaves in freedom; in the course of many earthly lives it may be that some historical event which is connected with the person in question as a picture only, takes the place of the actual event.

Now this individuality whose experience in an earlier life worked on through two lives between death and rebirth and then came to expression in the story Thomas à Becket, the Saint,—this individuality had had another intermediate earthly life as a woman at the time of the Thirty Years' War. We have only to envisage the chaos prevailing all over Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War and it will not be difficult to understand the feelings and emotions of an impressionable, sensitive woman living in the midst of the chaos as the wife of a pedantic, narrow-minded man. Wearying of life in the country that was afterwards Germany, he emigrated to Graubünden in Switzerland, where he left the care of house and home to his wife, while he spent his time sullenly loafing about. His wife, however, had opportunity to observe many, many things. The wider historical perspective, no less than the curious local conditions at Graubünden, worked upon her; the experiences she underwent, experiences that were always coloured by her life with the bourgeois, commonplace husband, again sank down into the foundations of the individuality, and lived on through the life between death and a new birth. And the experiences of the wife at the time of the Thirty Years' War are imaginatively transformed in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's tale, Jürg Jenatsch.

Thus in the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer we have something that has gathered together out of the details of former incarnations. As a man of letters, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer seems to be an individuality complete in itself, for he is an artist with very definite and fixed characteristics. But in point of fact it is this that actually causes confusion, because one's attention is immediately directed away from these very definite characteristics to the elusive, double nature of the man.

Those who have eyes only for Conrad Ferdinand Meyer the poet, the famous author of all these works, will never come to know anything of his earlier lives. We have to look through the poet to the man; and then, in the background of the picture, there appear the figures of the earlier incarnations.

Paradoxical as it will seem to the modern mind, the only way in which human life can be understood in its deeper aspect is to centre our study of the course of world-events around observation of man himself in history. And man cannot be taken as belonging to one age of time only, as living in one earthly life only. In considering man, we must realise how the individuality passes from one earthly life to another, and how in the interval between death and a new birth he works upon and transforms that which has taken its course more in the subconscious realm of earthly life but for all that is connected with the actual shaping of the destiny. For the shaping of destiny takes place, not in the clear consciousness of the intellect, but in what weaves in the subconscious.

Let me now give you another example of how things work over in history through human individualities themselves.

In the first century A.D., about a hundred years after the founding of Christianity, we have an exceedingly significant Roman writer in the person of Tacitus. In all his work, and very particularly in his ‘Germania’, Tacitus proves himself a master of a concise, clear-cut style; he arrays the facts of history and geographical details in wonderfully rounded sentences with a genuinely epigrammatic ring. We may also remember how he, a man of wide culture, who knew everything considered worth knowing at that time—a hundred years after the founding of Christianity—makes no more than a passing allusion to Christ, mentioning Him as someone whom the Jews crucified but saying that this was of no great importance. Yet in point of fact, Tacitus is one of the greatest Romans.

Tacitus had a friend, the personality known in history as Pliny the Younger, himself the author of a number of letters and an ardent admirer of Tacitus.

To begin with, let us consider Pliny the Younger. He passes through the gate of death, through the life between death and a new birth, and is born again in the 11th century as a Countess of Tuscany in Italy, who is married to a Prince of Central Europe. The Prince has been robbed of his lands by Henry the Black of the Frankish-Salic dynasty and wants to secure for himself an estate in Italy. This Countess Beatrix owns the Castle of Canossa where, later on, Henry IV, the successor of Henry III the Black, was forced to make his famous penance to Pope Gregory.

Now this Countess Beatrix is an extraordinarily alert and active personality, taking keen interest in all the conditions and circumstances of the time. Indeed she cannot help being interested, for Henry III who had driven her husband, Gottfried, out of Alsace into Italy before his marriage to her, continued his persecution. Henry is a man of ruthless energy, who overthrows the Princes and Chieftains in his neighbourhood one after the other, does whatever he has a mind to do, and is not content when he has persecuted someone once, but does it a second time, when the victim has established himself somewhere else.—As I said, he was a man of ruthless vigour, a ‘great’ man in the medieval style of greatness. And when Gottfried had established himself in Tuscany, Henry was not content with having driven him out but proceeded to take the Countess back with him to Germany.

All these happenings gave the Countess an opportunity of forming a penetrating view of conditions in Italy, as well as of those in Germany. In her we have a person who is strongly representative of the time in which she lives, a woman of keen observation, vitality and energy, combined with largeness of heart and breadth of vision.

When, later on, Henry IV was forced to go on his journey of penance to Canossa, Beatrix's daughter Mathilde had become the owner of the Castle. Mathilde was on excellent terms with her mother whose qualities she had inherited, and was, in fact, the more gifted of the two. They were splendid women who because of all that had happened under Henry III and Henry IV, took a profound interest in the history of the times.

Investigation of these personalities leads to this remarkable result: the Countess Beatrix is the reincarnated Pliny the Younger, and her daughter Mathilde is the reincarnated Tacitus. Thus Tacitus, a writer of history in olden times, is now an observer of history on a wide scale—(when a woman has greatness in her she is often wonderfully gifted as an observer)—and not only an observer but a direct participant in historical events. For Mathilde is actually the owner of Canossa, the scene of issues that were immensely decisive in the Middle Ages. We find the former Tacitus now as an observer of history.

A deep intimacy develops between these two—mother and daughter—and their former work in the field of authorship enables them to grasp historical events with great perspicacity; subconsciously and instinctively they become closely linked with the world-process, as it takes its course in nature as well as in history.

And now, still later on, the following takes place.—Pliny the Younger, who in the Middle Ages was the Countess Beatrix, is born again in the 19th century, in a milieu of romanticism. He absorbs this romanticism—one cannot exactly say with enthusiasm, but with aesthetic pleasure. He has on the one hand this love for the romantic, and on the other—due to his family connections—a rather academic style; he finds his way into an academic style of writing. It is not, however, in line with his character. He is always wanting to get out of it, always wanting to discard this style.

This personality (the reincarnated Pliny the Younger and the Countess Beatrix) happens on one occasion brought about by destiny, to be visiting a friend, and takes up a book lying on the table, an English book. He is fascinated by its style and at once feels: The style I have had up till now and that I owe to my family relationships, does not really belong to me. This is my style, this is the style I need. It is wonderful; I must acquire it at all costs.

As a writer he becomes an imitator of this style—I mean, of course, an artistic imitator in the best sense, not a pedantic one—an imitator of this style in the artistic, aesthetic sense of the word. And do you know, the book he opened at that moment, reading it right through as quickly as he possibly could and then afterwards reading everything he could find of the author's writings—this book was Emerson's Representative Men. And the person in question adopted its style, immediately translated two essays from it, conceived a deep veneration for the author, and was never content until he was able to meet him in real life.

This man, who really only now found himself, who for the first time found the style that belonged to him in his admiration for the other—this reincarnation of Pliny the Younger and of the Countess Beatrix, is none other than Herman Grimm. And in Emerson we have to do with the reincarnated Tacitus, the reincarnated Countess Mathilde.

When we observe Herman Grimm's admiration for Emerson, when we remember the way in which Herman Grimm encounters Emerson, we can find again the relationship of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. In every sentence that Herman Grimm writes after this time, we can see the old relationship between Pliny the Younger and Tacitus emerging. And we see the admiration that Pliny the Younger had for Tacitus, nay more, the complete accord and understanding between them, coming out again in the admiration with which Herman Grimm looks up to Emerson.

And now for the first time we shall grasp wherein the essential greatness of Emerson's style consists, we shall perceive that what Tacitus displayed in his own way, Emerson again displays in his own special way. How does Emerson work? Those who visited Emerson discovered his way of working. There he was in a room; around him were several chairs, several tables. Books lay open everywhere and Emerson walked about among them. He would often read a sentence, imbibe it thoroughly and from it form his own magnificent, free-moving, epigrammatic sentences. That was how he worked. There you have an exact picture of Tacitus in life! Tacitus travels, takes hold of life everywhere; Emerson observes life in books. It all lives again!

And then there is this unconquerable desire in Herman Grimm to meet Emerson. Destiny leads him to Representative Men and he sees at once: this is how I must write, this is my true style. As I said, he had already acquired an academic style of writing from his uncle Jacob Grimm and his father Wilhelm Grimm, and he then abandons it. He is impelled by destiny to adopt a completely different style.

In Herman Grimm's writings we see how wide were his historical interests. He has an inner relationship of soul with Germany, combined with a deep interest in Italy. All this comes out in his writings.

These are things that go to show how the affairs of destiny work themselves out. And how is one led to perceive such things? One must first have an impression and then everything crystallizes around it. Thus we had first to envisage the picture of Herman Grimm opening Emerson's Representative Men. Now Herman Grimm used to read in a peculiar manner. He read a passage and then immediately drew back from what he had read: it was a gesture as though he were swallowing what he had read, sentence by sentence. And it was this inner gesture of swallowing sentence by sentence that made it possible to trace Herman Grimm to his earlier incarnation. In the case of Emerson it was the walking to and fro in front of the open books, as well as the rather stiff, half-Roman carriage of the man, as Herman Grimm saw him when they first met in Italy—it was these impressions that led one back from Emerson to Tacitus. Plasticity of vision is needed to follow up things of this kind.

My dear friends, I have given you here another example which should indicate how our study of history needs to be deepened. This deepening must really be evident among us as one of the fruits of the new impulse that should take effect in the Anthroposophical Society through the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must in future go bravely and boldly forward to the study of far-reaching spiritual connections; we must have courage to reach a vantage-point for observation of these great spiritual connections. For this we shall need, above all, deep earnestness. Our life in Anthroposophy must be filled with earnestness.

And this earnestness will grow in the Anthroposophical Society if those who really want to do something in the Society give more and more thought to the contents of the News Sheet that is sent out every week into all circles of Anthroposophists as a supplement to the weekly periodical, Das Goetheanum. A picture is given there of how one may shape the life in the Groups in the sense and meaning of the Christmas Meeting, of what should be done in the members' meetings, how the teaching should be given and studied. The News Sheet is also intended to give a picture of what is happening among us. Its title is: ‘What is going on in the Anthroposophical Society’, and its aim is to bring into the whole Society a unity of thought, to spread a common atmosphere of thought over the thousands of Anthroposophists everywhere. When we live in such an atmosphere, when we understand what it means for all our thinking to be stimulated and directed by the ‘Leading Thoughts’, and when we understand how the Goetheanum will thus be placed in the centre as a concrete reality through the initiative of the esoteric Vorstand—I have emphasised again and again that we now have to do with a Vorstand which conceives its task to be the inauguration of an esoteric impulse—when we understand this truly, then that which has now to flow through the Anthroposophical Movement will be carried forward in the right way. For Anthroposophical Movement and Anthroposophical Society must become one. The Anthroposophical Society must make the whole cause of Anthroposophy its own.

And it is true to say that if once this ‘thinking in common’ is an active reality, then it can also become the bearer of comprehensive, far-reaching spiritual knowledge. A power will come to life in the Anthroposophical Society that really ought to be in it, for the recent developments of civilisation need to be given a tremendous turn if they are not to lead to a complete decline.

What is said concerning successive earthly lives of this or that individual may at first seem paradoxical, but if you look more closely, if you look into the progress made by the human beings of whom we have spoken in this connection, you will see that what is said is founded on reality; you will see that we are able to look into the weaving life of gods and men when with the eye of spirit we try in this way to apprehend the spiritual forces.

This, my dear friends, is what I would lay upon your hearts and souls. If you take with you this feeling, then this Easter Meeting will be like a revitalising of the Christmas Meeting; for if the Christmas Meeting is to work as it should, then all that has developed out of it must be the means of revitalising it, of bringing it to new life just as if it were present with us.

May many things grow out of the Christmas Meeting, in constant renewal! May many things grow out of it through the activity of courageous souls, souls who are fearless representatives of Anthroposophy. If our meetings result in strengthening courage in the souls of Anthroposophists, then there will grow what is needed in the Society as the body for the Anthroposophical soul: a courageous presentation to the world of the revelations of the Spirit vouchsafed in the age of Light that has now dawned after the end of Kali-Yuga; for these revelations are necessary for the further evolution of man. If we live in the consciousness of this we shall be inspired to work courageously. May this courage be strengthened by every meeting we hold. It can be so if we are able to take in all earnestness things that seem paradoxical and foolish to those who set the tone of thought in our day. But after all, it has often happened that the dominant tone of thought in one period was soon afterwards replaced by the very thing that was formerly suppressed. May a recognition of the true nature of history, and of how it is bound up with the onward flow of the lives of men, give courage for anthroposophical activity—the courage that is essential for the further progress of human civilisation.

• 1. Easter as a Chapter in the Mystery-Wisdom of Man. (on-line as: The Easter Festival in Relation to the Mysteries) Dornach, 19th–22nd April, 1924.

I have designated what is called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis as an effort to gain knowledge in the soul realm by inadequate means of cognition. Perhaps nothing is so well adapted to show how, at the present time, everything urges the attainment of the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, and how on the other side, subconscious prejudices lead men to oppose a spiritually scientific consideration of the facts. Yesterday I showed you by definite examples what grotesque leaps modern erudition is obliged to take when it ventures upon soul problems, and how to detect these leaps in the mental processes of modern scholars. It was pointed out that one of the better psychoanalysts—Jung—divided patients into two classes: the thinking type, and the feeling type. From this starting point he assumed that in cases of the thinking type, subconscious feelings force their way up into consciousness and produce soul conflicts—or in the opposite type, that thoughts in the subconscious mind arise and conflict with the life of feeling.

Now it might be suggested that these things will be fought out in scientific discussion, and that we might wait until people make up their minds to overcome the subconscious prejudice against anthroposophical spiritual science. But passive waiting becomes impossible in that such things do not confine themselves to the theoretical field, but encroach upon life practice and cultural development. And psychoanalysis is not content to occupy itself with therapy alone, which might be less dubious since there seems to be little difference—I said seems—between it and other therapeutical methods; but it is trying to extend itself to pedagogy, and to become the foundation of a teaching system. This forces us to point out the dangers residing in quarter-truths in a more serious manner than would be called for by mere theoretical discussion.

Much that relates to this matter can be decided only with the passage of time, but today we shall have to enlarge the scope of our examination in order to throw light upon one aspect or another. First of all I wish to call to your attention that the facts which lie before the psychoanalyst really point to an important spiritual sphere which present-day man does not wish to enter in an accurate and correct manner, but would prefer to leave as a sort of nebulous, subconscious region. For our present sickly, materialistically infected approach, even in this domain, likes nothing better than a vague, mystical drifting among all sorts of incomplete or unexecuted concepts. We find the most grotesque, the most repulsive mysticism right in the midst of materialism, if you take mysticism to mean a desire to swim about in all sorts of nebulous thinking, without working out your world-conception into clear, sharply outlined concepts. The domain into which recognized facts are pushing the psychoanalysts is the field of extra-conscious intelligence and reasoning activity. How often I have dealt with these matters—without going into details, but merely mentioning them, since they are taken for granted by students of spiritual science. How often I have reminded you that reasoning, intellectual activity, cleverness are not confined to the human consciousness, but are everywhere, that we are surrounded by effective mental activity as we are surrounded by air, interwoven with it, and the other beings as well.

The facts before the psychoanalyst might easily refer to this. I quoted to you yesterday the case described by Jung in his book, Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prosesse. It had to do with a woman who, having left an evening party with other guests, was frightened by horses, ran in front of them along the street to the river where she was rescued by passers-by, brought back to the house that she had left, where she had a love scene with her host. From the standpoint of Freud or Adler the case is easily explained on the basis of the love-drive or the power-drive, but this diagnosis does not reach the vital point. Its foundation is reached only by realizing that consciousness does not exhaust the cleverness, calculation, the artfulness of what penetrates man as intelligence, and by realizing that the laws of life are not limited by the laws of consciousness.

Consider this case. We can at least raise the question: What did the woman really want, after she had been one of the party, and had seen her friend depart for the health resort? She wanted the opportunity for what actually happened, she wanted a legitimate excuse to be alone with the master of the house. Of course this had nothing to do with what was in her consciousness, what she realized and admitted. It would not have been “proper,” as we say. Something had to be brought about that need not be avowed, and we shall reach the real explanation by allowing for her subconscious, designing intelligence, of which she was herself unaware. Throughout the entire evening she had wanted to bring about a conversation with her host. If one is less clever a poor choice is made of means, if more clever a better choice. In this case it may be said that in the woman's ordinary consciousness, which admitted scruples as to what was proper or improper, allowed or not allowed, the right means could not have been chosen for the end in view. But in that which was stored below the layer of the ordinary consciousness the thought was incessantly active: I must manage a meeting with the man. I must make use of the next opportunity that presents itself in order to return to the house.

We may be sure that if the opportunity with the horses had not offered itself, supported by association with the earlier accident, she would have found some other excuse. She needed only to faint in the street, and would have been brought back to the house at once, or she would have found some other expedient. The subconsciousness looked beyond all the scruples of the ordinary consciousness, taking the attitude that “the end justifies the means,” regardless of whether they would or would not harmonize with ideas of propriety and impropriety.

In such a case we are reminded of what Nietzsche, who surmised many of these things, called the great reason in contrast with the small reason, the all-inclusive reason that does not come into consciousness, that acts below the threshold of consciousness, leading men to do many things which they do not consciously confess to themselves. Through his ordinary outer consciousness the human being is in connection first with the world of the senses, but also with the whole physical world, and with all that lives within it. To the physical world belong all the concepts of propriety, of bourgeois morality, and so forth, with which man is equipped.

In his subconsciousness man is connected with an entirely different world, of which Jung says: the soul has need of it because it is related to it, but he also says that it is foolish to inquire about its real existence. Well, it is this way: as soon as the threshold of consciousness is crossed, man and his soul are no longer in merely material surroundings or relations, but in a realm where thoughts rule, thoughts which may be very artful.

Now Jung's view is quite correct when he says that modern man, the so-called man of culture, needs particularly to be mindful of these things. For present culture has this peculiarity, that it forces down numerous impulses into the subconsciousness, which then assert themselves in such a way that irrational acts—as they are called—and irrational general conduct result. When the “power-urge” or the “love urge” are mentioned, it is because in the moment that man and his soul enter the subconscious regions they come nearer to the realm where these instincts rule; not that they are in themselves causes, but that man with his subconscious intelligence plunges into regions where these impulses are effective.

That woman would not have gone to so much exertion for anything that interested her less than her love affair. It required an especial preoccupation for her subconscious cunning to be aroused. And that the love impulse so often plays an important role is due simply to the fact that the love interest is so very common. If the psychoanalysts would only turn more of their attention in other directions, cease to concentrate upon psychoanalytic sanatoriums, where the majority of the inmates seem to me to be women—(the same reproach is cast upon anthroposophical institutions but, I think, with less justice),—if they were more experienced in other fields, which is of course sometimes the case, if there were a greater variety of cases in the sanatoriums, a more extensive knowledge might be obtained.

Let us assume that a sanatorium was equipped for giving psychiatric treatment especially to people who had become nervous or hysterical from playing the stock market. Then the existence of other things in the subconscious mind could be established with as much reason as the love-urge, introduced by Freud. Then it would be seen with what detailed cunning, and artful subconscious processes, the man acts who plays the stock market. Then, through the usual methods of elimination, sexual love would be seen to play a very small part, yet the subtleties of subconscious acuteness, of subconscious slyness, could be studied at their height. Even the lust for power could not always be designated as being the primary impulse, but altogether different instincts would be found ruling those regions, in which man submerges himself with his soul. And if in addition a sanatorium could be equipped for learned men who had become hysterical—forgive me!—it would be found that their subconscious actions seldom lead back to the love-motive. For those with any thorough knowledge of facts in this field realize that, under present conditions, scholars are seldom driven to their chosen science by “love,” but by quite different forces which would show themselves if brought to the surface by psychoanalysis. The all-inclusive fact is that the soul is led from the conscious down into the subconscious regions where man's unconquered instincts rule. He can master these only by becoming aware of them, and spiritual research alone can lift them into consciousness.

Another inconvenient truth! For of course it forces the admission, to a point far beyond what the psychoanalyst is prepared to admit, that man in his subconscious mind may be a very sly creature, far more sly than in his full consciousness. Even in this field, and with ordinary science, we may have strange experiences. There is a chapter on this subject in my book Riddles of the Soul In it I deal with the strictures upon Anthroposophy, found in a book entitled Vom Jenseits der Seele,¹ and written by that academic individual Dessoir. This second chapter of my book Riddles of the Soul will be a nice contribution to thinking people who would like to form an opinion of present scholarly ethics. You will see when you read this chapter what kind of opposition must be encountered. I will mention, of all the points therein indicated, one or two only which are not unconnected with our present theme.

This man makes all sorts of objections to this and that, founded upon passages taken from my books. In a very neat connection he tells how I distinguish consecutive periods of culture: the Indian, the old Persian, the Chaldean-Egyptian, the Graeco-Latin, and now we live in the sixth, he says, “according to Steiner.”

This forces us to refute these misstatements in a schoolmasterly manner, for it shows us the only way to get at such an individual. How does Max Dessoir come to assert, in the midst of all his other nonsense, that I said we are living in the sixth postatlantean culture period? It may be easily explained if you have any practice in the technique of philological methods. I was connected for six years and a half with the Goethe Archives in Weimar, learned there a little about the usual procedure, and could easily show, according to philological methods, how Dessoir came to attribute to me this statement regarding the sixth culture period. He had been reading my book Occult Science, an Outline, in which there is a sentence leading to a description of our present fifth postatlantean culture period. In it I say that there are long preparations and, in one section, that events taking place in the 14th and 15th centuries were prepared in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. About five lines further on I say that the sixth century was a preparation for the fifth culture period. Dessoir, reading superficially, turned back hastily as scholars do, to the place that he had noted in the margin, and confused what was said about the culture period with what had been stated further back about the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Thus he says “sixth culture period” instead of fifth because his eye had moved backward a few lines.

You see with what a grand superficiality such a person works. Here we have an example of how such “scholarship” may be philologically shown up. In this literary creation such mistakes run through the entire chapter. And while Dessoir affirms that he has studied a whole row of my books, I could prove, again philologically, which ones of mine compose this “whole row.” He had read—and but slightly understood—The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for he devotes a sentence to it that is utter nonsense. And he read Occult Science, but in such a way as to bring out the kind of stuff that I have described. He read in addition the small work The Spiritual Guidance of Man, and the little pamphlets on Reincarnation and Karma, and Blood is Quite a Special Fluid. These are all that he read, as may be shown by his comments. He read nothing else. These are our present ethics of scholarship. It is important once in a way to expose, in such a connection, the erudition of the present day. Out of the long list of my books he chooses a very small number, and founds upon them, with quite perverted thinking, his whole statement. Many of our scientists today do exactly the same thing. When they write about animals, for example, they usually have for a foundation about as much material as Professor Dessoir extracted from my books.

Quite a pretty chapter could be written from observations of Dessoir's subconscious mind. He himself, however, in a special passage in his book, permits us to take account of his subconsciousness. He relates rather grotesquely that when he is lecturing it often happens that his thoughts go on without his full conscious direction, and that only by the reaction of his audience does he recognize that his thoughts have taken a line independent of his attention. He tells that quite naively. But only think! From this fact he embarks upon extended consideration of the many peculiarities of human consciousness. I have pointed out somewhat “gently” that Dessoir thus strangely reveals himself. I said at first: It cannot be possible that he means himself. In this case he must simply be identifying himself with certain clumsy lecturers, and speaking in the first person. It would be imputing to him a good deal to suppose that he is describing himself. But he really does exactly that. Well, in the discussion of such matters many odd things must be noted.

He disposed of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by one remark, with the addition of a sentence that is Dessoirish, but did not originate with me. The whole matter is crazy. He says at the same time “Steiner's first book, the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.” This forces me to point out that this book forms the close of a ten year period of authorship, and to offer this incident as an example of academic ignorance, and ethics. I know of course that although I have shown how incorrect his statements are, people will say again and again: “Well, Dessoir has refuted Steiner.”—I know it very well. I know that it is speaking against walls to try to break through what men imagine they have long since got rid of—belief in authority!

But this chapter alone will prove the difficulties against which spiritual science must struggle because it insists upon clear, sharply outlined concepts, and concrete spiritual experiences. There is no question of logic with such an individual as Dessoir, and a lack of logic characterizes in the broadest sense our present so-called scientific literature.

These are the reasons why official learning, and official spiritual trends, even if they work themselves away from such inferiority as the university psychiatry or psychology, are not in a position to make good because they lack the smallest equipment for a genuine observation of life. So long as it is not realized how far from genuine research and from a sense for reality that really is which poses as scientific literature—I do not say, as science, but as scientific literature—and often forms the content of university and especially of popular lectures—so long as this authoritative belief is not broken through, there can be no cure. These things must be said, and are compatible with the deepest respect for real scientific thinking, and for the great achievements of natural science. That these things are applied to life in such contradictory fashion must however be recognized.

After this digression let us return to our subject. Dessoir takes the opportunity to combine objective untruth with calumny in his remark regarding the little pamphlet Spiritual Guidance of Man. He feels it to be especially irritating that I have indicated important subconscious action of spiritual impulses by showing that a child while building its brain manifests greater wisdom than it is conscious of later. A healthy science ought to take its starting point from such normal effects of the subconscious, yet it needs something in addition. If you take up the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find mention of the Secret of the Threshold. In the explanation of this “secret” it is stated that in crossing the threshold into the spiritual world a kind of separation takes place, a sort of differentiation of the three fundamental powers of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. Remember in the part dealing with the Guardian of the Threshold, the explanation that these three forces, which act together in ordinary consciousness in such a way that they can hardly be separated, become independent of each other. If I sketch them, this narrow middle section (see drawing) is the boundary between the ordinary consciousness and that region in which the soul lives in the spiritual world. Thinking, feeling, and willing must be so drawn as to show this as the range of will (red), but bordering upon the realm of feeling (green), and this in turn borders upon the realm of thinking (yellow). But if I were to indicate their direction after crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, I should have to show how thinking (yellow) becomes independent upon the one hand; feeling (green, right) separates itself from thinking, will becomes independent too (red, right), as I sketch it here diagrammatically, so that thinking, feeling, and willing spread out from one another like a fan.

You will find this described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. That these three activities, which before passing the threshold border upon each other but work separately, interact in the right way and do not come into confusion is due to the fact that the threshold has, so to speak, a certain breadth in which our

ego itself lives. If our ego acts normally, has perfect soul health, then the interaction of thinking, feeling, and willing is so regulated that they do not collide with one another, but mutually influence each other. It is the essential secret of our ego that it holds thinking, feeling, and willing beside each other, so that they can affect each other in the right way, but do not mix in any accidental fashion. Once across the threshold into the spiritual world there is no danger of this since the three faculties then separate.

Certain philosophers (such as Wundt, for example), insist that the soul must not be described as threefold because it is a unity. Wundt, too, confuses everything. The facts are that in the spiritual world thinking, feeling, and willing originate in a threefold manner, yet in the soul on earth they act as a unity. That must be taken into consideration, and if it be claimed, as recently reported, that Anthroposophy recognizes three souls though there exists but one, and that Anthroposophy has therefore no reasonable argument—then the answer must be that the unity of man is not impaired by the fact that he has two hands.

But now we are considering the relation of the ego to the soul-forces that work within it, and their action beyond the threshold of consciousness in the spiritual world. (Drawing, middle and right). An opposite condition may be brought about if the ego has been weakened in any way. Then the threshold is crossed, as it were, in the opposite direction (See drawing, left). Then thinking swerves aside (yellow, left), mingles with feeling (green, left), and willing (red, left), and confusion results. This happens if thinking is exposed in any way to the danger of not being properly confined, so that it asserts itself unwarrantably in the consciousness. Then, because the ego is not working as it should, thinking slides into the sphere of feeling or of will. Instead of working side by side, thinking mixes itself with feeling, or will, the ego being for some reason unable to exert its normal power.

This is what has happened in the cases described by the psychoanalysts as hysterical or nervous. Thinking, feeling, and willing have swung to the opposite side, away from the healthy direction that would lead them into the spiritual world. If you have any gift for testing and proving you may easily see how it comes about. Take the case of the girl sitting by the sickbed. Her strong ego-consciousness was reduced by loss of sleep and anxiety. The slightest thing might cause thinking to leave its track alongside of feeling and to run over into it. Then thought would be at once submerged in the waves of feeling, which are far stronger than the waves of thought, and the result in such a case is that the whole organism is seized by the tumult of feeling. This happens in the instant that thinking ceases to be strong enough to hold itself apart from feeling.

It is seriously demanded of the human being that he learn more and more to hold his thinking apart from the waves of feeling and will. If thinking takes hold subconsciously of the waves of feeling something abnormal results. (See drawing: at the right is the superconscious, in the middle the conscious, at the left the subconscious). This is extremely important.

Now you may readily imagine that in this modern life, when people are brought into contact with so much that they do not properly understand and cannot appraise, thoughts continually run over into feelings. But it must be remembered that thinking alone is oriented upon the physical plane; feeling is no longer confined to the physical plane, but stands in connection, by its very nature, with the spiritual plane as well. Feeling has really a connection with all the spiritual beings who must be spoken of as real. So that if a man with inadequate concepts sinks into his feeling-life, he comes into collision with the gods—if you wish to express it thus—but also with evil gods. And all these collisions occur because a man is submerged with no reliable means of knowledge. He must so submerge if he spends more time in the sphere of feeling than in the ordinary sphere of reason. In the sphere of feeling man cannot emancipate himself from his connection with the spiritual world. Even if, in this materialistic age, he does free himself in the realm of the intellect, he always enters the region of feeling with inadequate concepts, and so he must become ill.

What then is the real remedy, and how are men to be restored to health? They must be guided to concepts that reach out to include the world of feelings; that is to say that modern man must again be told of the spiritual world, and in the most comprehensive terms. Not the individually adapted therapeutic instructions of the psychoanalysts are meant, but the spiritual science which is applicable to all humanity. If the concepts of spiritual science are really accepted—for not everyone takes them in who only listens to lectures, or reads about them—but if they are really absorbed there will be no further possibility of the chaotic intermingling, in the subconscious, of the three spheres of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing, which is the basis of all the hysteria and nervousness noted by the psychoanalysts.

For this, however, a man needs the courage to approach a direct experience of the operation of spiritual worlds, the courage to recognize that we are living now in a crisis that is connected with another (the established date being 1879), another crisis with painful consequences from which we are still suffering. I told you yesterday that many things must be considered from standpoints other than the materialistic ones of our own time, and I chose Nietzsche as an illustration.

Nietzsche was born in 1844. In 1841 the battle began in the spiritual world, of which I have already spoken, and Nietzsche was for three years in the midst of it, absorbing from it all possible impulses, and bringing them down with him to earth. Richard Wagner, born in 1813, took at first no part in it. Read Nietzsche's early writings, and notice the combative tone, almost every sentence showing the after-effects of what he experienced spiritually from 1841 to 1844. It gave a definite coloring to all the writings of Nietzsche's first period.

It is further of importance—as I have also explained—that he was a lad of sixteen when Schopenhauer died, and started at that time to read his works. A real relation ensued between the soul of Schopenhauer in the spiritual world and that of Nietzsche on earth. Nietzsche read every phrase of Schopenhauer so receptively that he was penetrated by every corresponding impulse of their author. What was Schopenhauer's object? He had ascended into the spiritual world in 1860 when the battle was still raging, and wanted nothing so much as to have the power of his thoughts continued through his works. Nietzsche did carry forward Schopenhauer's thoughts, but in a peculiar way. Schopenhauer saw when he went through the gate of death that he had written his books in an epoch threatened by the oncoming spirits of darkness, and with the struggle before him of these spirits against the spirits of light, he longed to have the effects of his work continued, and formed in Nietzsche's soul the impulse to continue his thoughts. What Nietzsche received from the spiritual world at this period contrasted strikingly with what was happening upon the physical plane in his personal relations with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche's soul life was composed in this way, and his career as a writer.

The year 1879 arrived. The battle that had been going on in the spiritual realms began to be transferred to earth after the fall of the spirits of darkness. Nietzsche was exposed by his whole Karma (in which I include his relations with the spiritual world), to the danger of being driven by the spirits of darkness into evil paths. He had been inspired by the transcendent egoism of Schopenhauer to try to carry on his work. I do not mean to say that egoism is always bad. But when Wagner rose into the spiritual world in 1883 the spirits of darkness were below, so he came into an entirely different atmosphere, and he became Nietzsche's unselfish spiritual guide. He let him enter what was for him the proper channel, and allowed him to become mentally deranged at exactly the right moment, so that he never came consciously into dangerous regions. That sounds paradoxical, but it was really the unselfish way in which Wagner's soul affected Nietzsche from the purer realms above, rather than the manner in which Schopenhauer's soul acted, he being still in the midst of the battle, up in the spiritual world, between the spirits of darkness and the spirits of light. What Wagner wanted to do for Nietzsche was to protect him, so far as his Karma permitted, from the spirits of darkness, already descended upon earth.

And Nietzsche was protected to a great extent. If his last writings are read in the right spirit, eliminating the things that have sprung from strong oppositions, great thoughts will be discovered. I tried in my book Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time, to show the mighty thought impulses, detached from all his resisting impulses.

Yes, “the world is deep.” There is really some truth in Nietzsche's own saying: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day divines.” So we must never try to criticize the wide regions of the spiritual life by means of our ordinary consciousness. The wise guidance of the worlds can be understood only if we can enter into that guidance, free from egoistic thoughts, even if we can fit the development of tragic happenings into the scheme of wisdom. If you wish to look into the heart of things you will come upon many uncomfortable places.

In future whoever wishes to evaluate a life like Nietzsche's will make no progress if he describes only what happened in Nietzsche's environment on earth. Our view of life will have to extend to the spiritual world, and we shall be pushed to this necessity by the kind of phenomena that the psychoanalyst today tries to master by such inadequate means of knowledge, but never will control. Therefore human society might be driven into regions of great difficulty if it yields to psychoanalysis, particularly in the field of pedagogy.

Why should this be? Consider the fact that thinking slips down into the sphere of feeling. Now as soon as a man lives with his soul in the sphere of feeling, he is no longer in the life that is bounded by birth and death or by conception and death, but lives in the whole world, the extended world. This represents the usual life span (See drawing, a); within the realm of feeling he lives also in the period from his last death to his birth into this present life (See drawing, b); and with his will he lives even in his previous incarnation (Drawing, c).

Think of the relation to pupil or patient of an instructor who wishes to proceed by the method of psychoanalysis. When he tries to deal with soul contents which have slipped down into the realm of feeling he lays hold, not only upon the man's individual life, but upon the all-inclusive life which extends far beyond the individual. For this all-encompassing life, however, there are between men no connections that may be handled by means of mere ideas. Such connections lead instead to genuine life-relationships. This is very important. Imagine the existence of such a connection between a psychoanalytic instructor and pupil. What takes place could not be confined to the realm of ideas which are conveyed to the pupil, but real karmic connections would have to be established because one is really encroaching upon life itself. It would be tearing the individual in question out of his karma, changing the course of his karma. It will not do to handle that which extends beyond the individual in a purely individual manner. It must be treated instead in a universally human way. We are all brought together in a definite epoch, so there must be a mutual element which acts as soon as we go beyond the individual. That is to say: a patient cannot be treated by psychoanalysis, either therapeutically or educationally, as between individuals. Something universal

must enter, must enter even the general culture of the period, something which directs the soul to that which would otherwise remain subconscious; and that which draws the subconsciousness upward must become the milieu—not a transaction between individuals.

Here, you see, lies the great mistake that is being made. It has a terrific range and is of immense importance. Instead of trying to lead them to the attainable knowledge of the spiritual world which is demanded by the times, the psychoanalysts shut all the souls who show any morbid symptoms into sanatoriums, and treat each one in the individual manner. It can lead only to the forming of confused karmic connections—what takes place does not bring to light the subconscious soul content, but simply forms a karmic tie between doctor and patient because it encroaches upon the individual.

You understand: we are dealing here with real, concrete life, with which it does not do to play, which can only be mastered if nothing is striven for in this field except what is humanly universal. These things must be learned by direct relations of human beings with the spiritual world. Therefore it would be useful if people were to stop talking abstractly as Jung does, saying that a man experiences subconsciously everything that mankind has been through, even all sorts of demons. He makes them into abstract demons, not realities, by saying that it is stupid to discuss their possible existence. He makes them into abstract demons, mere thought demons that could never make a man ill. They can exist only in consciousness, and can never be subconscious. That is the point: that people who give themselves up to such theories are themselves working with so many unconscious ideas that they can never happen upon the right thing. They come instead to regard certain concepts as absolute, infallible; and I must ever repeat that when ideas begin to become absolute, men get into a blind alley, or reach a pit into which they fall with their thinking.

A man like Dr. Freud is obliged to stretch the sexual domain over the entire human being in order to make it account for every soul phenomenon. I have said to various people with psychoanalytic tendencies, whom I have met: A theory, a world-concept must be able to hold its own when you turn it upon itself, otherwise it crumbles into nothingness. The simple fallacy, if you extend it far enough, is an example. A Cretan says: All Cretans are liars. If it is said by a Cretan, and it is true, then it would be a lie, which causes the saying to annul itself. It will not do for a Cretan to say “All Cretans are liars,” expecting the sentence to pass unchallenged. That is only a sample of absolutizing. But a theory should not crumble when turned upon itself. Just as the statement that all Cretans are liars would be a lie if made by a Cretan, so does the theory of universal sexuality crumble if you test it out by applying it to the subject itself. And it is the same with other things. You can understand such a principle for a long time without applying it vigorously, in accordance with reality. But it will be one of the particular achievements of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that it cannot be turned in this manner against itself.

• 1. Beyond the Limits of the Soul. (This book has not been translated into English. Ed.)

Automated Translation

Today I would like to add a few words to the lectures I have given here in the last few days. In earlier lectures I often spoke of a genius of language. And you already know from my book 'Theosophy' how, when spiritual essence is spoken of in the anthroposophical context, real spiritual essence is meant, and so also in what is referred to as the genius of language, real spiritual essence for the individual languages is meant, into which man lives and which, as it were, gives him the strength from the spiritual worlds to express his thoughts, which initially exist as a dead inheritance of the spiritual world in him as an earthly being. Therefore, it is particularly appropriate in the anthroposophical context to seek a meaning in what appears as formations in language, a meaning that even comes from the spiritual worlds to a certain extent independently of man.

Now, I have already pointed out the peculiar way in which we describe the actual element of the artistic, of beauty, and its opposite. We speak of the beautiful and speak of its opposite in the individual languages, of the ugly. If we were to describe the beautiful in a way that is entirely appropriate to the ugly, then, since the opposite of hate is love, we would have to speak not of the beautiful, but of the lovely. We would then have to say the lovely, that ugly. But we speak of the beautiful and the ugly and, based on the genius of language, make a significant distinction by designating the one and its opposite in this way. The beautiful, if we take it in the German language for the moment – a similar one would have to be found for other languages – is related as a word to that which shines. That which is beautiful shines, that is, carries its inner being to the surface. That is the essence of beauty: it does not hide, but brings its inner being to the surface, to the outer form. So that what is beautiful is that which reveals its inner being in its outer form, that which shines, that which radiates light, so that the light reveals what radiates out into the world, the essence. If we want to speak of the opposite of beauty in this sense, we have to say: that which hides itself, that which does not shine, that which withholds its essence and does not reveal to the outside world in its outer shell what it is. So when we speak of beauty, we are describing something objectively. If we were to speak just as objectively about the opposite of beauty, we would have to describe it with a word that means “that which hides itself, that which appears outwardly as other than it is.” But here we depart from the objective and approach the subjective, and then we describe our relationship to that which hides itself, and we find that we cannot love that which hides itself, we must hate it. That which shows us a different face than it is is the opposite of beauty. But we do not describe it, so to speak, from the same background of our being; we describe it from our emotion as that which is hateful to us because it hides itself, because it does not reveal itself.

If we listen carefully to language, then the genius of language can reveal itself to us. And we must ask ourselves: What are we actually striving for when we strive for the beautiful, in the broadest sense, through art? What are we actually striving for? The mere fact that we have to choose a word for the beautiful that comes from us, from the genius of language – for the opposite we do not go out of ourselves, we remain within ourselves, remain with our emotions, with hatred – the mere fact that we have to go out of ourselves shows that in the beautiful there is a relationship to the spiritual that is outside of us. For what seems? That which we see with our senses does not need to shine for us, it is there. That which shines for us, that is, which radiates in the sensual and announces its essence in the sensual, is the spiritual. So, when we speak objectively of the beautiful as beautiful, we grasp the artistically beautiful from the outset as a spiritual that reveals itself through art in the world. It is the task of art to grasp what appears, the radiance, the revelation of that which, as spirit, permeates and lives through the world. And all real art seeks the spiritual. Even when art, as it may, wants to depict the ugly, the repulsive, it does not want to depict the sensual repulsive, but the spiritual that announces its essence in the sensual repulsive. The ugly can become beautiful when the spiritual reveals itself in the ugly. But it must be so, the relationship to the spiritual must always be there if an artistic work is to have a beautiful effect.

Now, let us look at a single art form from this point of view, let us say painting. We have considered it in the last few days, in so far as painting reveals the spiritual essence through the color grasped, that is, through the radiance of the color. One may say that in those times when one had a real inner knowledge of color, one also surrendered to the genius of speech in the right way in order to place color in a worldly relationship. If you go back to ancient times, when there was an instinctive clairvoyance for these things, you will find, for example, metals that were felt to reveal their inner essence in their color, but were not named after earthly things. There is a connection between the names of the metals and the planets, because, if I may put it this way, people would have been ashamed to describe what is expressed through color only as an earthly thing. In this sense, color was regarded as a divine-spiritual element that is only conferred on earthly things in the sense in which I explained it here a few days ago. When gold was perceived in the color of gold, then one saw in gold not only an earthly thing, but one saw in the color of gold the sun announcing itself from the cosmos. Thus one saw in advance something going beyond the earth, even when perceiving the color of an earthly thing. Only by going up to the living things, one attributed their own color to the living things, because the living things approach the spirit, so there spiritual is also allowed to shine. And with the animals one felt that they have their own colors, because spiritual-soul in them appears directly.

But now you can go back to older times, when people felt artistically not outwardly but inwardly. You see, you don't get any painting at all. It's almost foolish to say, to paint a tree green, to paint a tree – to paint a tree and paint it green, that is not painting; because it is not painting for the very reason that whatever one accomplishes in imitating nature, nature is always more beautiful, more essential. Nature is always more full of life. There is no reason to imitate what is out there in nature. But then, real painters don't do that either. Real painters use the object to, let's say, make the sun shine on it, or to observe some color reflection from the surroundings, to capture the interweaving and interlacing of light and dark over an object. So the object you paint is actually only ever the reason for doing so. Of course you never paint, say, a flower that is standing in front of the window, but you paint the light that shines in through the window and that you see in the same way as you see it through the flower. So you actually paint the colored light of the sun. You capture that. And the flower is only the reason for capturing that light.

When you approach the human being, you can do it even more spiritually. Taking a human forehead and painting it like a human forehead – as you believe you see a human forehead – is actually nonsense, it is not painting. But how a human forehead is exposed to the sun's rays as they fall, how a dull light appears in the highlight, how the chiaroscuro plays – all that, in other words, that the subject provides the occasion for, that passes in the moment, and that one must now relate to a spiritual, to capture with color and brush, that is the task of the painter.

If you have a sense of painting, when you see an interior, for example, it is not at all about looking at the person kneeling in front of an altar. I once visited an exhibition with someone. We saw a person kneeling in front of an altar. You saw him from behind. The painter had set himself the task of capturing the sunlight streaming in through a window just as it would fall on the man's back. Yes, the man who was with me to look at the picture said: I would prefer to see the man from the front! Yes, that's right, there is only a material, not an artistic interest. He wanted the painter to express what kind of person it is and so on. But you are only entitled to do that if you want to express what can be perceived through color. If I want to depict a person on a hospital bed, in a particular illness, and I study the color of the face in order to capture the appearance of the illness through the senses, then that can be artistic. If I also want to depict, let's say, in totality, to what extent the whole cosmos comes to expression in human incarnate, in human flesh color, that can also be artistic. But if I were to imitate Mr. Lehmann, as he sits there in front of me, firstly I wouldn't succeed, would I, and secondly it's not an artistic task. What is artistic is the way the sun shines on him, how the light is deflected by his bushy eyebrows. So that's what matters, how the whole world affects the being I paint. And the means by which I achieve this is chiaroscuro, is color, is capturing a moment that is actually passing and fixing it in the way I described yesterday.

In times not so far removed from our own, people felt these things very keenly, as they could not imagine representing a Mary, a Mother of God, without a transfigured face, that is, without a face overwhelmed by the light and which emerges from the ordinary human condition through the overwhelming of the light. She could not be depicted in any other way than in a red robe and a blue mantle, because only in this way is the Mother of God placed in the right way in earthly life: in the red robe with all the emotions of the earthly, , the soul in the blue cloak, which envelops her with the spiritual, and in the transfigured face, the spiritualized, which is overwhelmed by the light as the revelation of the spirit. But this is not grasped in a truly artistic way as long as one only feels it as I have just expressed it. I have now, so to speak, translated it into the inartistic. One only feels it artistically in the moment when one creates out of the red and out of the blue and out of the light, by experiencing the light in its relationship to the colors and to the darkness as a world unto itself, so that one actually has nothing but the color, and the color says so much that one can get out of the color and the light-dark the Virgin Mary.

But then you have to know how to live with color, color has to be something you live with. Color has to be something that has emancipated itself from the heavy material. Because the heavy material actually resists color if you want to use it artistically. That is why it goes against the whole idea of painting to work with palette colors. They always become so that they still show a heaviness when you have applied them to the surface. You can't live with the palette color either. You can only live with liquid color. And in the life that develops between the person and the color when he has the color liquid, and in the peculiar relationship that he has when he now applies the liquid color to the surface, a color life develops, one actually grasps from out of the color, the world is grasped out of the color. Only then does the picturesque emerge, when you grasp the radiance, the revelation, the radiance of the color as a living thing, and only then do you actually create the shape on the surface from the radiating life. A world emerges all by itself. Because if you understand color, then you understand an ingredient of the whole world.

You see, Kant once said: Give me matter, and I will create a world out of it. Well, you could have given it to him long ago, the matter, you can be quite sure that he would not have made a world out of it, because no world can be created out of matter. But more can be created out of the undulating tools of colors. A world can be created from them, because every color has its immediate, I would say personal and intimate relationship to some spiritual aspect of the world. And today, with the exception of the primitive beginnings made in Impressionism and so on, and especially in Expressionism, but these are just beginnings, the concept of painting, the activity of painting, has been more or less lost to us in the face of the general materialism of the time. For the most part today, one does not paint, but rather one imitates shapes by means of a kind of drawing and then paints the surface. But these are painted surfaces, they are not painted, they are not born out of color and light and dark.

But one must not misunderstand the matter. If someone goes wild and simply tinkers with the colors next to each other, believing that he is achieving what I have called overcoming drawing, then he is not at all achieving what I meant. For by overcoming the drawing I do not mean having no drawing, but to get the drawing out of the color, to give birth to it out of the color. And the color already gives the drawing, one must only know how to live in the color. This living in the colored then leads the real artist to be able to disregard the rest of the world and give birth to his works of art out of the colored.

You can go back, for example, to Titian's “Assumption of Mary”. There you have a work of art that, I might say, consists of the transgression of the old principles of art. There is no longer the living experience of color that one still has with Raphael, but especially with Leonardo; but there is still a kind of tradition present that prevents one from growing too strongly out of this life in color. Experience this “Assumption of Mary” by Titian. When you look at it, you can see that the green cries out, the red cries out, the blue cries out. Yes, but then look at the individual colors. If you take the interaction of the individual colors even in Titian, you still have an idea of how he lived in the colors and how he really gets all three worlds out of the colors in this case. Just look at the wonderful gradation of the three worlds. Below are the apostles who experience the event of the Assumption of Mary. Look at how he manages to capture them in color. You can see how they are bound to the earth in the colors, but you don't feel the heaviness of the colors; instead, you only feel the darkness of the colors at the bottom of Titian's painting, and in the darkness you experience the apostles' being tied to the earth. In the way Mary is treated in color, you experience the intermediate realm. She is still connected to the earth. If you have the opportunity, look at the picture and see how the dull darkness from below is incorporated as a color in the coloring of Mary, and how then the light predominates, how the uppermost, the third realm already receives in full light, I would like to say, the head of Mary, shining with full light, lifting up the head, while the feet and legs are still bound down by the color. Observe how the lower realm, the intermediate realm and the heavenly realm, this reception of Mary by God the Father, is truly gradated in the inner experience of color. You can say that in order to understand this picture, one must actually forget everything else and look only at the color, because the three-tiered nature of the world is brought out of the color here, not conceptually, not intellectually, but entirely artistically. And one can say: It is really the case that, in order to grasp the world in a painterly way, it is necessary to grasp this world of radiant shine, of radiant revelation in chiaroscuro and in color, in order to emphasize, on the one hand, what is earthly-material, to emphasize the artistic aspect of this earthly-material aspect, and yet, on the other hand, not to let it rise to the spiritual. For if it were allowed to reach the spiritual plane, it would no longer be appearance, but wisdom. But wisdom is no longer artistic; wisdom lifts it up into the uncreated realm of the divine.

One would therefore like to say: In the case of the real artist, who depicts something like Titian in his “Assumption of Mary”, when one looks at this reception of Mary, or rather of Mary's head by God the Father, one has the feeling that one should no longer go further in the treatment of the light. It is a very fine line. The moment you start going further, you fall into intellectualism, which is unartistic. You can no longer add a line, I might say, to what is only hinted at in the light, not in the contour. Because the moment you go too far into the contour, it becomes intellectualized, that is, inartistic. Towards the top, the picture is in fact in danger of being inartistic. Painters after Titian also fell prey to this danger. Look at the angels up to Titian. When we go up to the heavenly region, we come to the angels. Look at how carefully the transition from color is avoided. You can still say that the angels in the pre-Titian period, and in a sense in Titian, are just clouds. If you cannot do that, if you cannot distinguish between being and appearance, even in the uncertainty, when you have already fully arrived at the being, at the being of the spiritual, then it ceases to be artistic.

If you go back to the 17th century, it will be different. There, materialism itself is already having an effect on the representation of the spiritual. There you can already see all the angels, I might say, painted with a certain non-artistic, but routine verve in all possible foreshortenings, to which you can no longer say: Couldn't they also be clouds? Yes, here reflection is already at work, here the artistic aspect already comes to an end.

And again, look at the apostles below, and you will get the feeling that, in fact, only Mary is artistic in the “Ascension of Mary”. Above, there is a danger that it turns into pure wisdom, into the formless. If one really achieves this, holding the formless and making it formless, then, I would say, on one side, towards one pole, there is the perfection of the artistic, because it is boldly artistic, because one ventures to the abyss where art ends, where one lets the colors blur from the light, where, if one wanted to go further, one could only begin to draw. But drawing is not painting. So there, towards the top, one approaches the realm of wisdom. And one is all the greater an artist the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the wisdom into the sensual, the more one, if I want to express myself in concrete terms again, the more one can still incorporate the possibility that the angels one paints can still be addressed as concentrated clouds that shimmer in the light in such and such a way and the like.

But if we start at the bottom of the picture and go up through the actual beauty, Mary herself, who is really floating up into the realm of wisdom, then Titian is able to depict her beautifully because she has not yet arrived, but is just floating up. It all appears in such a way that one has the feeling that if she swings up a little more, she will have to enter into wisdom. Art has nothing more to say there. But if we go down a little further, we come to the Apostles, and with the Apostles I said to you: the artist seeks to depict the earthly aspect of the Apostles through the use of color. But there he runs into the other danger. If he were to place his Mary even further down, he would not be able to depict her in her inner, self-sustaining beauty. If Mary were down there, for example, one would not understand the purpose. If she were sitting among the apostles, yes, she could not look as she does in the middle between heaven and earth. She could not look at all like that. You see, the apostles are standing below in their brownish coloration, and Mary does not fit in with them. For we cannot really stop at the fact that the apostles below have the heaviness of the earth in them. Something else must happen. This is where the element of drawing begins to intervene strongly. You can see this in Titian's characterized painting, where drawing begins to intervene strongly. Why is that?

Yes, you can no longer depict beauty in the brown, which actually goes beyond color, as you can in the case of Mary; something that no longer falls entirely within beauty must be depicted. And it must be beautiful in that something other than what is actually beautiful is revealed. You see, if Mary were sitting down there or standing among these apostles in the same coloring, it would actually be insulting. It would be terribly insulting. I am speaking only of this picture. I am not saying that Mary standing on the earth must be artistically offensive everywhere, but in this picture it would be a slap in the face for anyone looking at it artistically if Mary were standing down there. Why? You see, if she were painted in the same colors as the apostles, one would have to say that Mary was portrayed by the artist as virtuous. That is indeed how he portrays the apostles. We cannot have any other idea than that the apostles are looking up in their virtue. But we cannot say that about Mary. With her, it is so self-evident that we must not express her virtue. It would be just as if we wanted to depict God as virtuous. Where something is self-evident, where it becomes something that is being itself, it must not be depicted merely in outward appearance. Therefore, Mary must float away, must be in a realm where she is exalted above the virtuous, where one cannot say of her, in what appears in the color, that she is virtuous, any more than one could say of God himself that he is virtuous. At most, he can be virtue itself. But that is already an abstract sentence, that is already philosophy. It has nothing to do with art. But in the apostles below, we have to say that the artist succeeds in depicting the virtuous people through the color treatment itself in the apostles. They are virtuous.

Let us again try to get close to the matter through the genius of language. Virtue, what does it actually mean to be virtuous? To be virtuous is to be useful; because virtue is related to being useful. To be useful, to be useful, to be good for something, that is to be up to something, to be able to do something, to be able to do something, that is to be virtuous. But of course it ultimately depends on what one means in connection with virtuous, as for example Goethe also presented it, who speaks of a trinity: wisdom, appearance and power, that is, in this sense, virtuousness. Appearance = the beautiful, art. Wisdom = that which becomes knowledge, formless knowledge. Virtue, power = that which is truly useful, that which can do something, whose rule means something.

You see, this trinity has been revered since time immemorial. I could understand when a man told me a good many years ago that he was already sick of it when people spoke of the true, the beautiful and the good, because everyone who wants to say a phrase, an idealistic phrase, speaks of the true, the beautiful and the good. — But one can refer back to older times when these things were experienced with all human interest, with all human soul interest. And then, I would like to say, one sees, but in the manner of the beautiful, of the artistic, in the Titian painting above, wisdom, but not just wisdom, but still shining, so that it is still artistic, so that it is painted; in the middle, beauty; and below, virtue, the useful. Now we may ask the useful a little about its inner essence, its meaning. If we follow these things, we come, through the genius of speech, to the depth of the speech soul that creates among human beings. If we approach it only externally, it might occur to us that someone who had once been to church and listened to a sermon, where the preacher explained to his congregation in an outwardly phrase-like way how everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful. The adult was waiting at the church door and when the pastor came out, he asked him: “You said that everything in the world is good and beautiful and purposeful according to your idea. Am I also growing well?” The pastor said: “You have grown very well for an adult!” — Well, if you look at things in this external way, you won't get to the depths of them. Our way of looking at things today is in fact so superficial in so many fields. People today fill themselves completely with such external characteristics, namely with such external definitions, and do not even realize how they go around in circles with their ideas. For the virtuous person, it is not about being good at anything at all, but about being good at something spiritual, about placing ourselves in the spiritual world as human beings. The truly virtuous person is the one who is a whole human being because he brings the spiritual within him to realization, not just to manifestation, to realization through the will. But then we enter a region that, although it is human, also enters the religious, but no longer lies in the realm of the artistic, least of all in the realm of the beautiful. Everything in the world is formed in polarity. Therefore, we can say of Titian's painting: at the top he exposes himself to the danger of going beyond the beautiful, where he goes beyond Mary. There he is at the abyss of wisdom. Downwards, he is at the other abyss. For as soon as we depict the virtuous, that which man, as a being of his own essence, is meant to realize out of the spiritual, we in turn come out of the beautiful, out of the artistic. If we try to paint a truly virtuous person, we can only do so by somehow characterizing virtue in outward appearance, for my part by contrasting it with vice. But the artistic portrayal of virtue no longer actually shows any art; in our time it is already a falling out of the artistic.

But where is not everywhere in our time a falling out of the artistic, when, I would like to say, simply life circumstances are reproduced in a raw, naturalistic way, without the relationship to the spiritual really being there. Without this relationship to the spiritual, there is no artistry. Therefore, in our time, this striving in Impressionism and Expressionism is to return to the spiritual. Even if it is often done awkwardly, even if it is often only a beginning, it is still more than that which works with the model in a crude naturalistic way, which is inartistic. And if you grasp the concept of the artistically beautiful in this way, then you will also be able to accommodate tragedy, for example, and grasp tragedy in general in its artistic reach into the world.

A person who lives according to his thoughts, who leads his life in an intellectualistic way, can never become tragic. And a person who lives a completely virtuous life can never truly become tragic either. A person can become tragic if they have some kind of inclination towards the demonic, that is, towards the spiritual. A personality, a person, only begins to become tragic when the demonic is present in him in some way, for better or for worse. Now we are in the age of the freeing of the human being, where the human being as a demonic human being is actually an anachronism. That is the whole meaning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, that the human being grows out of the demonic to become a free human being. But as the human being becomes a free human being, the possibility of the tragic, so to speak, ceases. If you take the old tragic figures, even most of Shakespeare's tragic figures, you have the inner demonic that leads to the tragic. Wherever man is the manifestation of a demonic-spiritual, wherever the demonic-spiritual radiates through him, reveals itself, wherever man becomes, as it were, the medium of the demonic, there the tragic was possible. In this sense, the tragic will have to cease more or less, because humanity, having been set free, must break away from the demonic. Today it does not yet do so. It is falling ever deeper into the demonic.

But this is the great task for our time, the mission of our time, that human beings grow out of the demonic and into freedom.

But if we get rid of the inner demons that shape us into tragic personalities, we will be all the less able to get rid of the external demonic. For the moment man enters into a relationship with the external world, something demonic also begins for the modern human being. Our thoughts must become ever freer and freer. And when, as I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, thoughts become the impulses for the will, the will also becomes free. These are the polar opposites that can be set free: free thoughts and free will. But in between lies the rest of humanity, which is connected with karma. And just as the demonic once led to tragedy, so too can the experience of karma lead to a deep inner tragedy, especially in modern man. But tragedy will only be able to flourish when people experience karma. As long as we keep our thoughts to ourselves, we can be free. When we clothe our thoughts in words, the words no longer belong to us. What can become of a word that I have spoken! It is taken up by the other person, who surrounds it with different emotions and different feelings. The word lives on. As the word flies through the people of the present, it becomes a force that originated from a person. That is its karma, through which it is connected to the world, which in turn can be discharged back onto it. The word, which leads its own existence because it does not belong to us, because it belongs to the genius of language, can cause tragedy. Today, in particular, we see humanity, I would say, everywhere in the disposition to tragic situations through the overestimation of language, through the overestimation of the word. The peoples are divided according to language, want to be divided according to language. This is the basis for a huge tragedy that will befall the earth before the century is out. This is the tragedy of karma. If we can speak of the tragedy of the past as a tragedy of demonology, we must speak of the tragedy of the future as the tragedy of karma.

Art is eternal; its forms change. And if you accept that there is a relationship to the spiritual from the artistic point of view, you will understand that the artistic is something through which one can enter the spiritual world, both in creating and in enjoying. A true artist can create his picture in a lonely desert. It makes no difference to him who looks at the picture, or whether anyone looks at it at all, because he has created in a different community, he has created in the divine spiritual community. Gods have looked over his shoulders. He has created in the company of gods. What does it matter to the true artist whether any human being admires his picture or not? That is why one can be an artist in complete solitude. But on the other hand, one cannot be an artist without really placing one's own creature in the world, which one then also regards in terms of its spirituality, so that it lives in it. The creature that one places in the world must live in the spirituality of the world. If one forgets this spiritual connection, then art also changes, but it changes more or less into non-art.

You see, you can only create art if you have the work of art in the context of the world. The old artists were aware of this, who, for example, painted their pictures on the walls of churches, because there these pictures were guides for the believers, for the confessors, there the artists knew that this is in the earthly life, insofar as this earthly life is permeated by the spiritual.

It is hard to imagine something worse than creating for exhibitions instead of for such a purpose. Basically, it is the most terrible thing to walk through a painting exhibition or a sculpture exhibition, for example, where all kinds of things are hung or placed next to each other in a chaotic manner, where they don't belong together at all, where it is actually meaningless that one is next to the other. By painting having found the transition from painting for the church, for the house, to painting, I would like to say, already there, it loses its proper meaning. If you paint something within the frame, you can at least imagine looking out through a window and what you see is outside, but it is no longer anything. But now painting for exhibitions! You can't talk about it anymore. Isn't it true that a time that sees anything at all in exhibitions, sees anything possible, has just lost the connection with art. And you can see simply from what intellectual culture has to happen in order to find the way back to the intellectual-artistic. The exhibition, for example, can certainly be overcome. Of course, individual artists feel disgust for the exhibition, but we live in a time when the individual cannot achieve much unless the judgment of the individual is immersed in a worldview that in turn people in their freedom, in full freedom, as worldviews once permeated people in less free times and led to the emergence of real cultures, while today we have no real cultures.

However, a spiritual worldview must work on the development of real cultures and thus also on the development of real art, and have the highest interest in doing so.

Dear attendees! Before I begin with the lecture, I would like to apologize to the esteemed attendees: My voice has suffered a little lately due to a very common cold. It could be that it suffers disturbances during the lecture and would do all sorts of somersaults. I kindly ask for your understanding in this regard. I hope that my voice will improve during the lecture.

What I would particularly like to emphasize in the first part of these reflections on social issues is the true nature of what actually lives in the social demands of the present. For a discerning person, when he considers human affairs, especially the affairs of the human life itself, it very, very soon becomes clear how that which man actually wills and strives for in the most comprehensive sense masks and hides itself externally in all sorts of forms that do not directly represent that which actually lives as an impulse in the soul.

Therefore, one must particularly try to explore the true nature of what actually lives in human souls when faced with social phenomena.

Social issues – no one, esteemed attendees, will be able to deny that they have been discussed for decades, not only discussed within circles in which one discussed this or that more or less seriously, that they were discussed by the world parties, world classes, world destinies. Much, much has been achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century in terms of what can be taught to solve these pressing issues that have become truly burning in the present.

In particular, however, it is the terrible catastrophe that has befallen humanity in recent years, which, with regard to what is alive in the social question, could have a galvanizing, enlightening effect on many a human soul.

One could see, dear honoured attendees, how the social question played into this war catastrophe, one could say, right where the most immediate causes of this war catastrophe came into question. Much of what is connected with the starting point of this war catastrophe will, one may still doubt today, be the subject of a social pathology, or rather, the subject of a social psychiatry. But much of the mental state of personalities who had a part, a living part, in the initial currents of this catastrophe can be traced back to their fear, to their whole relationship in general, to what they saw coming as the modern proletarian, social movement.

They understood little of what was alive in this social movement; but they saw it coming. What had a determining influence on those judgments, which were partly responsible for this terrible catastrophe, was not so much what was alive in this social movement, which had only just emerged in 1914, as what had become established in some of the souls of leading personalities under the influence of the emerging social movement.

Then again, esteemed attendees, on the one hand we see many things developing during the last four and a half years. So that, I would say, certain leading circles continued to fear the approaching social movement. But on the other hand, we see how hopes are being raised that what could not come from other world currents might perhaps come from the international socialist world movement, a balancing of the disharmonies that have come to light in this catastrophe. And now, now that this catastrophe has developed into a crisis, which short-sighted minds may mistake for an end, but which is by no means an end, now a large part of educated Europe is faced with the historical, with the actual necessity of taking a stand on what is hidden in the social problem. And must one not, when one follows these things with an unprejudiced eye, must one not say: something tragic is befalling the minds of precisely those who must now feel compelled to comment on the social problem from the immediate present? For decades, through diligent thought and diligent observation of social phenomena, some believed they had grasped a judgment, a power of judgment. Now that the question has become urgent, now that the question in the life of facts, let us say, is growing more urgent with each passing day: unbiased observation cannot say otherwise! And so at least one thing seems to emerge, especially from the role that social movement has played in the last catastrophic events of humanity – one thing seems to emerge from all this: that for a long, long time, people of all classes, of all professions, will have to deal seriously with what is today called social demand. This may justify, esteemed attendees, that I, who has been allowed to speak about subjects in spiritual science for years here in Bern, take the opportunity to speak about this social problem in the narrower sense, based on the foundations of this spiritual scientific research. If I may start with a personal comment, I would just like to say this: it is certainly not, as some might believe, from a purely theoretical method of knowledge, but rather from a theoretical work of knowledge that I would like to speak here about the social problem, as this social problem came to me when I through years among proletarians teachers at a workers' training school was, and from there, to teach and work had just among the proletarian population itself in the trade union, in the cooperative and also within the political movement, instructing, teaching.

Yes, esteemed attendees, I had the opportunity to observe what I believe is of primary importance to observe if one wants to understand the social question. Above all, I had the opportunity to observe, to witness, what I would call the proletarian state of mind.

Those who get to know this proletarian state of mind may be struck by the following conviction: You see, dear attendees, much that is urgent, astute and industrious has been written precisely the field of socialists and non-socialists in the course of the last few decades - actually already in the second half of the nineteenth century, and then through the twentieth century, as far as we have progressed in this twentieth century. This extensive literature expresses what is being thought within the modern proletariat as a social question.

If we compare what is expressed in the literature with what an unbiased observation of life reveals to those who can observe this life, we first discover a strange, highly conspicuous and instructive contradiction within the modern proletarian social movement.

Nothing is heard more often in literature, in speeches, in articles by socialist writers and agitators than a certain underestimation of everything intellectual, everything spiritual! The socialist side in particular emphasizes that everything that man thinks, everything that man somehow works out spiritually in himself, that this is nothing more than, so to speak, I would say, the cloud that rises from the great, only realities of the economic struggles of mankind.

How the individual classes struggle with each other economically, what takes place in economic life, that is the only true reality. Like clouds, those formations that develop as human thoughts arise, arise as that which is called knowledge, that which is called art, and so on.

Am I saying something particularly new to anyone who has somehow dealt with these things when I express this assertion in relation to all socialist literature and all socialist work? Because, dear attendees, a vivid observation shows that within the entire historical development of humanity, there has never been a party movement, a class movement, that has started from thinking, from knowledge, as intensely as the particular proletarian-socialist movement! Yes, it can be said, without exaggeration, that the modern socialist movement is the one that seeks to rest, in a quite unique way, on what is scientifically based. However strange it may sound, the modern socialist movement is the one that, in contrast to all other similar movements in world history, starts from a scientific basis in the most eminent sense, from a foundation of ideas!

As there are so many contradictions in life, indeed, as life itself consists of the interaction of contradictions, so – one could say – it is also there. People consciously say: We think nothing of thoughts; in the unconscious lie the reasons from which this movement has emerged: from thought. One has only to observe with true love for the facts and with true love for the observation of human nature to see how the proletarian soul was touched by an understanding of such difficult, such exact precision - at least an attempt at exactness is made - such exact thought work as that of Karl Marx ; one must see with love for the facts, with love for the observation of human nature, how the proletarian mind has been tried in an astute way to understand where Karl Marx, the leader of the modern proletarian movement, the theoretical leader, was actually mistaken.

It can be said that if you were a little tired of the superficiality of so-called bourgeois intellectual circles within contemporary human society and entered the circles of the proletariat, you could already notice the transition – the transition from the superficial, lightly veiled scientificity of an education that is only superficially constructed, to the intense striving to get behind the secrets of the immediate life that surrounds you in the modern proletarian world. One sensed, I would say, the approach of a terrible disaster, by the fact that one saw how little inclination there was, especially among the intellectual, leading people, to find understanding for what really lives in the proletarian soul.

One could feel a pang of heartache when one saw the paths the leading class of humanity took to look into the proletarian soul: they went to the theater to see Hauptmann's “Weavers.” Aesthetic enjoyment of proletarian situations – that was what they sought as understanding.

They had little conception of this – or they sought little conception. The real secret is that the modern proletariat has been penetrated by the strictest scientific thinking, the heaviest scientific artillery, which many intellectuals today avoid because it is uncomfortable for them, and this thinking has been able to penetrate the modern proletarian soul; one seeks little thought about the fact that this is so. If one took things seriously, one could feel for decades that there was too little understanding for what was emerging as the looming disaster.

Now, esteemed attendees, what is the reason for the contradiction that I have indicated, that on the one hand the thought is almost denied by the modern proletarian and that, however, this proletariat is entirely based on thoughts, has a sense and interest and attention for the thought life - what is the reason for this contradiction? I believe that observation of life shows that this contradiction lies in the fact that this movement is not so much concerned with what people imagine, what these economic or social goals are, but that it is more a matter of what the soul of the living person who belongs to the modern proletariat actually is.

And I must say: No word has spoken more intensely to my soul than all the astute discussions of economic issues, which I believe I can dignify; but more indicative of what lives in the time, has always seemed to me to be a word that can be heard everywhere within the modern proletarian movement: it is the word that says: the modern proletariat has advanced in the development of humanity to class consciousness. What does it actually mean, as the word is used directly? It wants to say: the modern proletarian does not live instinctively as—say—in the old patriarchal life, in the old craft life, as an apprentice or journeyman; the modern proletarian worker does not live instinctively within the social structure; but he lives in such a way that he knows what he means within this social structure, how he is a special class—precisely the class of employees in relation to the other classes, the classes of the employers. That he does not merely live instinctively within this social structure, in the way he knows he is placed within it, but has something of class consciousness, is what the word “class-conscious proletariat” is initially intended to express.

But when you get right down to it, the term “class-conscious proletariat” is just a mask for something else entirely. We would recognize this other thing if it were not for the fact that modern humanity has lost not only the ability to recognize the full reality of the course of human events, but also the concepts that necessarily had to be discarded. Today, I would say, people are almost obsessed with a very comfortable instinct for knowledge. This instinct for knowledge aims to link cause and effect in the simplest possible way everywhere: there is the cause - there is the effect; the effect follows from the cause. And then it continues, possibly in a very subjective way, perhaps adding to justify this straightforward progression of knowledge along the thread of cause and effect: “Nature doesn't make leaps.” Of course, anyone with even a little insight knows that nature makes leaps everywhere. But such a word is simply used up. Nature does develop successive green color leaves after green color leaves; but then it makes the leap to the green sepal, and then the even greater leap to the petal, then to the stamens and so on. And so one would notice refutations of the convenient sentence “Nature does not make leaps” in all of life, in all of nature's processes.

Where would we end up if we were to observe human life in such a bare way as it develops in the physical world, so bare that we follow events in a straight line according to the immediately preceding cause and the immediately following effect? Do we not see in the individual human life how a particular crisis occurs when the teeth change around the seventh year? Do we not see how a significant crisis occurs when a person reaches sexual maturity? Do we not see how, in between, there is more of a calm succession of cause and effect? And how then, at the change of teeth, at sexual maturity - there are also other crises in later years, even if they are less noticeable - all these things show how, in such times, nature truly makes leaps. In this respect, an unbiased observer of natural processes will still have a great deal to do in the future. By throwing overboard, and rightly so, what belongs to ancient metaphysics, one has at the same time lost the possibility of viewing historical development in such a way as to see and perceive the real impulses contained in it, just as one can perceive such changing impulses as they assert themselves in the human tooth change, in human sexual maturity.

For the truly impartial observer, it is evident from the course of human historical development that there are special times when the human soul undergoes a transformation and new impulses enter into the human soul.

One such age was the one that roughly coincides with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this respect, the history as it is presented in schools is in many ways a “convenient fable”. It does not point to the magnificent transformations that have taken place in the soul conditions of human beings in successive ages. Once we move from the blinkered history that prevails today to an unblinkered history, we will see how very different the inner soul state of a person in the eleventh or twelfth century AD was from that of a person in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth century! History cannot be viewed in such a way that one can simply trace cause and effect in a straight line; but such crises – crises that are fundamentally connected with the organization of the whole of humanity – such crises must be acknowledged, as one must acknowledge such crises, such fundamental upheavals, in the partial development of the human natural organism.

And that which lives there, I would say, as an elementary impulse in the modern development of humanity, has not been portrayed anywhere except in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which I represent. On the other hand, however, modern development has been repeatedly and justifiably presented in such a way that modern life as a whole, and economic life in particular, has undergone a transformation on the one hand through modern technology, and on the other hand through the advent of the capitalist economic order, as it emerged in the wake of modern technology.

I do not need to characterize these two impulses in the development of modern humanity in more detail here, because this has often been presented: modern technology and modern capitalism – many sides have aptly described what these two impulses of modern development mean with regard to the emergence of this modern proletarian consciousness. But this modern proletarian consciousness must not only be traced back to these two economic impulses: to modern technology, to modern machine production, to modern capitalism – but it must be seen as that which, as a kind of partial phenomenon, had to emerge in a very elementary way in the development of man. It is the result of those revolutions in the organism of human development, that inner revolutionary impulse of which I said that it manifested itself in the development of modern humanity around the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries. The other classes have taken relatively little part in what broke into modern humanity. The modern proletarian has been pushed by his very necessities of life, especially in his state of mind, to take up this impulse, which arose from the forces of human development in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, this impulse into his soul.

What was this impulse? Well, this impulse cannot be characterized in any other way than to say: Much of, indeed, all of what has been thought and felt and invented by people in earlier times more instinctively, more from the subconscious, intuitive powers of the human soul, is consciously being lived through by humanity from this crisis in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth century. The conscious inner clarity of the human soul is developing more and more. This is what the human personality has been relying on since that time.

The transition from an instinctive life to a conscious life was particularly true of the modern proletariat. Just observe how this modern proletariat is separated from what is natural and what is humanly produced. Contrast this with the old crafts, with the old relationship of man to nature, with the direct, natural, original production, where man is connected with what he works, what he does, how a personal relationship develops between man and his labor.

It is an interesting study to see how the modern age has torn apart what used to be connected: man and his work. And most of all, the modern proletarian experiences this, who is placed in front of the machine, next to the machine! There is now an extremely impersonal relationship between man and the thing with which he works! And in the most impersonal way, he is placed in the whole social organism, in that he is a member of an economic order that does not arise from the impulses of personalities, that does not arise from the personal impulses of human individuals, but that arises, one might say, objectively, from the workings of capitalism itself. Man is torn away from what used to constitute his joy in his occupation, what used to constitute his zeal, his enthusiasm for his occupation, what constituted the honor that he associated with his occupation, and so on; and a completely abstract, sober relationship between man and his occupation has arisen. Because this is not the case for the other estates and classes, because this in particular comes out, comes into its own among the proletarians, that is why it is the proletarian above all who is pointed out, in his soul the actual impulse of modern times, consciousness, to develop.

Behind the saying “class-conscious proletariat” lies the other fact that the proletarian, above all, through his world position, through his being placed in human development, aspires particularly to modern human consciousness, to consciousness of human dignity. The old estates are not so detached from what used to be their joy, used to be their thoughts of human dignity and honor from their actions. The modern proletarian, because no interest can connect him with his means of labor, is thrown back on himself as a mere human being. It is in him that this impulse of the transition from unconsciousness, from the instinctive social life to the conscious social life, develops.

One could say, esteemed attendees, how Christianity broke out in an unknown province of the Roman Empire, how it spread first to the educated countries, Greece and Rome, but took much less root there than it did among the barbarian peoples with their simple – as one often says from a haughty point of view, childlike – state of mind, and how Christianity in the simple minds of the Germanic and other tribes descending from the north, the most significant impulse of human development, the transition from instinctive life to life in full human consciousness, cannot develop most intensely in the other classes, but most intensely – even if the other classes may otherwise have greater prerequisites for intellectuality and so on: What the new impulse actually is in the development of humanity can develop most intensely in the modern proletarian precisely because of the proletarian's unfavorable position in general human development. The modern proletariat is moving against the educated world of today, just as the Germanic Christians once moved against the Roman and Greek world. One can say that human consciousness, consciousness of human dignity, is actually hidden behind the words: “class-conscious proletariat”.

Thus, dear attendees, for those who can observe life, it is not just any economic demand, it is not just some abstract notion, it is not just some one-sided economic impulse, but the living human being is at the center of this modern social proletarian movement, the modern proletarian himself with a special way of consciously striving for the realization of true human dignity. And it is from this deeper class consciousness that the true form of social demands develops, which are often masked behind mere economic disputes and economic demands.

If you know this modern proletariat, dear attendees, one thing stands out above all. It is striking that this proletariat is the aspiring population, the more educated classes, which, as I mentioned at the beginning, can truly be said to It is founding a social movement that is based entirely on science and on thought. In his class consciousness, in his striving for conscious human dignity, the modern proletarian also strives for real knowledge, for real inner thought deepening.

But where does this deepening of thought lead him? Here, ladies and gentlemen, is a point that the modern proletarian himself, being more devoted to external work, does not really notice – but it is noticed by someone who may justifiably call himself a spiritual proletarian – and it is a point that provides a particularly deep insight into the state of mind of the modern proletariat , and actually into the whole structure of modern socialism: the fact is that everything spiritual, everything that man acquires in terms of concepts, artistic experiences and otherwise, is perceived by the modern proletarian, and also by the theoretical leaders of the modern proletariat, as - as they themselves always say - as “ideology”; ideology - a spiritual life that is not convinced that among the real forces and entities that pulsate and interweave the world, there is also objective, real spirit - no: a spiritual life that is nothing more than the subjective reflection of external material and economic reality. Not that an effective spirit penetrates into our humanity, which leads us not only to have a kind of brain digestion, but to have thoughts and feelings within this brain digestion, it is not a real spirit that leads us to develop a life of thought, a different inner spiritual life - no: this spiritual life is mere ideology. Nothing of spiritual reality corresponds to it. All that lives in ideas is only the mirror of material processes, economic processes.

One could even say that the modern proletarian is, in a sense, inwardly happy in theory that he can be such an enlightened person, no longer believing in old metaphysical entities, but knowing that everything that is spiritual life for people is ideology, bubbles that rise from the material and economic world of facts. And yet, what the modern proletariat brings into the whole social structure depends in many ways on its perception and recognition of intellectual life as ideology in the way I have described.

But why is that so? Of course, the proletarian himself thinks that in doing so he has made a special contribution of his own to human development. But that is not the case. The modern proletarian has inherited only what the other classes were able to hand over to him in this particular field. At the same point in time that I mentioned to you – the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth century – when humanity went through a significant crisis, moving from a mere instinctive life to an inwardly soulful conscious life. At the same time, a phenomenon can be observed in the leading classes and leading personalities: spirituality loses its driving force in relation to what the human being can think and research further.

In this way, we touch on a very significant secret of the whole of recent human development. We must look back, esteemed attendees, to those times when everything that man researched, everything that man thought about the individual facts of nature and human life, how all of this was incorporated into an overall world view, which was also permeated by religious impulses into the most minute branches of human knowledge and research, how a common impulse spreads through what was a central religious feeling and what wanted to know and research about individual parts of the world.

In the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries, with the advent of modern times, the spirituality of man loses its momentum. Just imagine what it means, for example, for the Church, which, out of its own initiative and on the basis of its last old impulses, very commendably founded universities and all sorts of other institutions, that this Church, out of the old world view, has no momentum that could fruitfully spread beyond what the Brunos and the Galileis have produced. Outer knowledge, knowledge of the world and its facts, comes to the fore. And the old spirituality does not possess the impetus to place the center of the human being, the center of the human soul and spirit, in a truly appropriate, human relationship to this new spiritual life. And so it is not religious, not general human impetus, not real spirituality that lives in this science, in this wide universe, that lives. Under the influence of this loss of spirituality, the newer spiritual life becomes ideology.

And the modern proletarian has inherited the fate of those times when there was no proletariat in the modern sense, to inherit the spiritual world only in the form of ideology, to inherit the spiritual world in such a way that in the relationship of man to the spiritual world no longer lives the recognition of the real spiritual forces and entities that permeate and animate the world.

This is the great, perhaps tragic error of the modern proletariat: it believes that it has a special proletarian achievement in interpreting spiritual life as an ideology, but that it has precisely the peculiar inheritance of the old class in it. The modern proletariat has adopted the particular way in which people relate to science from the bourgeoisie and the other classes!

But it turns out that because the other classes have certain old traditions, the modern proletarian is at the top of his personality, it turns out that the modern proletarian must take the impulses more seriously, and to a quite different degree. Here again lives a significant social problem, which will not be exhaustively illuminated by popular science and popular observation of such things for a long time to come.

Of course, the other classes, too, if they are Christian, have only one ideology in their spiritual lives today. But they are not so honest; they still believe they have something of the old religious impulses, of the old driving force that emanates from the center of the soul and penetrates into that which man researches and recognizes beyond the individual facts. The modern proletarian has simply taken an extremely radical view of ideology. The consequence of this is that the appreciation of this spiritual life is, after all, a very superficial one. And this way of relating to the spiritual life is the reason for the feeling that this spiritual life is actually only something that seems to be an addition to the serious life of man, but that it consists only of materialistic and economic processes.

Must not a view that takes the spiritual life seriously as an ideology, must not this view think quite differently about everything spiritually achieved in the course of human development than the other classes, who, still arising from other impulses, have recognized this spiritual life?

There is a terribly revolutionary element in the view of spiritual life as an ideology, the consequences of which, one might say, people today still dare not dream of! There could be a very uncomfortable awakening from this oversleeping of what is revealed in this point in relation to the social question. The loss of a living, real spirituality, the descent of spiritual life to a mere ideology, that is the first thing I would like to mention among the true forms of social demands.

The second, however, dear attendees, lies in the realm of public political life. Again, one could say: In the consciousness of the proletarian lives a kind of mask; in the depths of the soul lives something completely, completely different.

What has struck people, and also the modern proletariat, most of all in the more recent development of humanity is the inundation of all conditions by modern machine technology and by modern capitalism. Certainly, it is these things that have struck the modern proletarian most of all at first. As if by historical suggestion, his attention was fixed on this. And he understood that Karl Marx, in a special study of economic processes, also wanted to explain to the modern proletarian how he actually comes to his social position.

And yet, the second essential form of social demands that now arises cannot be understood from economic life alone. It is not the economic structure, not the economic conditions that drive this second true form of social demand into the soul of the proletarian, but this second social demand lies in the direct further development of that which, some time ago, already led to the abolition of of the old slavery, which later led to the abolition of serfdom, and which must necessarily lead to the end of something that the modern proletarian, economically misinterpreting it, perceives as the most degrading in his position.

What was the essential thing about the slave? He was not recognized in his full human dignity; he was considered a commodity by his master. And in a certain way, serfdom in feudalism is also still a commodity. In the most insistent way, one could say that the last remnant of this unworthiness of the human being lives in the consciousness of the modern proletarian, in that it is clear to him what his labor power is. No longer is he as a human being in serfdom, as in slavery, but rather that which is his labor power is a commodity in the modern social process.

Just as one otherwise buys this or that commodity within the capitalist economic system, in that the commodities come onto the market, circulate through the market according to supply and demand, so too does one buy the commodity “labor power” on the labor market. Nothing has been more forcefully absorbed by the modern proletarian from the Marxist doctrine than this perception that his labor power is equal in relation to the economic process, equal to the commodity.

The same impulses that led to the abolition of slavery, the same impulses that led to the end of serfdom, live in a different form in the modern proletariat and actually strive towards a possibility of divesting human labor of the character of a commodity within the human social structure.

I know a great many people in the present day – when I explain to them what I have just said about human labor power and its relationship to the commodity, they say they cannot understand how it should be possible, through any measures, to divest the labor power of the craftsman of the character of the commodity, of the character of a commodity.

Plato and Aristotle, the most enlightened Greeks, the great philosophers, could not imagine a human society without slaves in it. In the Middle Ages, certain people could not imagine a human society without serfs in it. Today, many people still cannot imagine a humane social structure without labor power being included as a commodity. How this can be achieved will be discussed by me tomorrow, dear attendees, as part of the attempts at a solution that I will try to characterize. Today I just want to point out that the second demand in its true form within modern proletarian social life is that human existence requires that human labor no longer be a commodity, that it can no longer be bought by capitalists in such a way that they give money for a certain amount of labor, which the worker must then make available to him, just as the farmer makes available the goods that he, the farmer, obtains from his field, just as the merchant makes available as capital what he has in his shop. The modern proletarian feels – he may not express it clearly, he may present it in some national scientific guise, but that is how the modern proletarian feels – that it cannot continue to be the case that human labor power has its commodity price in the economic structure of human society. That is the second link.

The third link is that the modern course of human development has led to an overestimation of the external, economic life, just as it has led to an underestimation of the spiritual life by decreeing that spiritual reality is a mere ideology. Precisely because of this, I might say, because of a certain lack of balance, economic life has leaped upward on the other side. As if by a mighty suggestion of world history, people's attention was directed to economic life itself. And so it happened: people were drawn away from everything else and devoted their attention entirely to economic life.

From ancient times, a certain spiritual life has emerged. But this spiritual life, as I have shown, has lost its momentum and has degenerated into ideology. What else has emerged from ancient times? Certain state, as they are called, political connections of the public legal system; how man can find a relationship to man within a certain territory as a citizen or as something else within the social structure. Furthermore, a certain economic order has emerged. This economic order, however, has been given its special character by modern technology, by the modern circulation of commodities in the sense of the capitalist economic order.

This is what has broken into modern life in such an overwhelming way, overwhelming all else. That – as I said – the gaze of modern man was fixed only on this economic life, as if hypnotized, dulled the spiritual life in him, on the one hand, to ideology. On the other hand, state life, public legal life, loses all content for him if it is not filled with what is the only reality for him: material economic life.

Under the influence of this third real form of modern social demands, we see the call for nationalization, for socialization, first of all of the means of production, then of the enterprises and so on, and so on. Simply, the state has also more or less lost its content in the old sense in the eyes of modern man, who is hypnotized by economic life.

Thus we see that in recent times it has become desirable for certain classes to nationalize certain branches of public work, as they say. Then, in theory, the modern proletariat next proceeds radically to demand the socialization of the whole of economic life, and thus of life itself.

And so we see that these three figures emerge as the true ones within the social demands of modern times, out of the necessities of life. On the one hand, we see what the life of feeling goes through when the spiritual is reduced to mere ideology. We see how there is a tendency to hypnotically focus on mere economic life and to want to radically merge the state, the political realm and economic life because only then does the state have content for those who believe that all social reality is exhausted in economic reality when the state is a large economic system.

But we see, I want to say, how three sparks of light complement what we see as the proletarian movement: we see three real figures, three social demands: one that shines forth from the spiritual life; the second, it shines forth from the life of public law, from which only the real relationship of the equal human being to the equal human being can arise, from which the position that labor must have in the social structure must also follow. And thirdly, we see the economic body itself.

Thus, from the real three forms of social demands, we see the threefold form of the social question arise at the same time. This threefold nature of the social question can only be a spiritual, a political, and an economic one. And only by considering these three, which have acquired a very specific configuration within modern proletarian consciousness, can we arrive at possible solutions for what is going through the world today as a social impulse, so that for a long time to come people of all professions, people of all walks of life, people of all social classes will have to deal with it.

A consideration of the true nature of social demands, as we have practiced it today, can only lead us to seek solutions to the social question from the full, unbiased reality of intellectual, state, and economic life.

This more important part of the social question of the present day will now occupy us tomorrow, when I will try, just as I have tried today, to characterize the true form of the social demands, when I will try to present possible social solutions to you.

Automated Translation

You all know the Greek temple motto “Know Thyself”. It contains the deepest wisdom of life and is brought home to people again and again. Although it can be a beneficial guide through life, it can also be misunderstood. “Know Thyself” is a truth. It should not be understood as meaning that a person should brood and think within themselves, thinking that they are already a finished person. Rather, it is an invitation to develop the inner slumbering powers of the soul, to increase and expand them, to develop the talents and seeds. Striving and searching are much better tools for self-knowledge than believing that everything is already finished within us.

Let us consider how a person develops from birth to death, as it truly is.

For anyone who hears about the nature of man from a spiritual-scientific point of view, these things appear to be associated with manifold doubts and challenges. I can only give you a brief sketch here. That which the materialistic mind regards as only one link in the human being for the spiritual researcher. We call this the physical body. It is composed of the same substances and forces as minerals and stones. But a stone, a mineral, these inanimate bodies have the ability and power to maintain themselves through themselves. The physical body of man does not have that. It is precisely because of its physical and chemical powers that it is impossible for him to do so; as a corpse, he decays. We can understand the actual principle of life as an entity that fights every moment to prevent the disintegration of the physical body. We call this entity the etheric body; it is, as it were, the architect of the physical body, ordering the chemical and physical substances. In the past, it was common in natural science to speak of this principle of life as life force. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, it became fashionable to speak of living matter as if it were assembling itself, just as if a house were putting itself together out of wood and bricks. Just as a house is built according to the architect's plan, so the forces of the etheric body are used to build the physical body. The etheric body is thus the second link in the human being.

The third is the astral body. It is the bearer of all desires, passions, pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow. But what makes man the crown of creation is the power to say “I”, which is the fourth link in the human being. These four parts of the human entity have been observed for thousands of years and universally recognized as the expression of the forces that make up the divine human being. These four parts are explained in all schools of initiates. Pythagoras first made it clear to his students that the human being consists of these four parts, only then were they allowed to learn about the higher levels. With that, they had to take an oath: to receive the higher secrets with seriousness, dignity and fervor. This oath-like formula reads: “I swear by the one who has imprinted in our hearts the holy wisdom, the sublime pure symbol, the primal source of nature and all creation of the gods.

The human being at the lowest level, the “savage”, already has these four entities, as does the average European, an idealist like Schiller and also a spiritual person like Francis of Assisi. They differ in that the “savage” initially follows his instincts and passions and surrenders to them. The person who has progressed further in their development, in whom the I, the center of their being, has already worked on developing the three limbs and thus already had a refining effect on their desires and passions, has already realized that they can follow certain things and not others. He has developed a second limb of his astral body, and thus a fifth, his spiritual self, the manas.

But man can also work in the etheric or life body through all the impulses of art, and there he also develops a second limb, and that is the sixth limb of man: the Budhi, that is the spirit of life, are the religious impulses that transform the etheric body unconsciously. This transformation has been taking place since the human race came into being. The etheric body is the carrier of memory, of habits and of what is called conscience. This transformation takes place more slowly than that in the astral body; and these activities can be compared with the minute hand on a clock in the latter and with the hour hand in the former.

Imagine yourself back at the age of eight and compare what you have learned in terms of concepts and life experience since then. It is an enormous amount. That is the change in your astral body. But if I had a violent temper as a child, it has not changed that much. Our ego can only slowly work on the life body. This happens unconsciously. The higher disciple, however, consciously works at transformation. He receives guidance to change his habits and temper. Once the disciple has learned to consciously transform certain basic traits, for example, to change a domineering nature into a humble one, he can hope to ascend higher and higher, and higher gates will open for him. This is relatively difficult, but it is even more difficult to work within his physical body. What power does he have over his pulse, his breathing, over the functions of his physical body? What the disciple learns to develop towards higher development is the seventh limb, the spiritual man, Atma. Thus man then consists of seven limbs.

We will now consider how these seven members develop in the period from birth to death. Man begins his existence with physical birth; actually, he only continues life in the womb, but even this is only a continuation of previous life. Before physical birth, man was surrounded on all sides by the mother's body, which also supplied him with forces and juices. When the physical body emerges, it pushes back the maternal covering; while it was protected before, it now enters the physical world. The eye and ear had formed, but man could not perceive light and sound; he only learns this in the physical world. He has changed his scene through birth.

But with this birth, only the one link, the physical body, is born. Now there is a second and a third birth for man. When man is born, he is still surrounded by an invisible etheric and astral covering. Just as this covering is pushed back in the womb and at birth, so too is the etheric covering pushed back when the teeth change and the etheric body is fully born. This is the second birth. It takes place slowly and accompanies the time when the milk teeth are replaced by other teeth. When a person has left his etheric body, he is still surrounded by the astral body. The third birth occurs at puberty. Then the astral cover is pushed back and the person becomes receptive to astral influences. These are important moments that must be taken into account. The first seven years: the first epoch. The second epoch – from seven to fourteen years – is essentially different, and so is the third, from fourteen to twenty-one years. Then the human being develops his astral body in a free way through the I that lies behind it.

In the first epoch, physical organs have to be formed up to a certain point. Although the human being continues to grow even then, the growth up to the seventh year and after is very different. The change of teeth is a kind of final year. By then, the human being has been given the direction that he retains, the basis of his form remains. What a person has not developed by the age of seven can no longer be made up for. Only one aspect is to be considered. Up to the age of twenty-one, development will be more educational in nature, then it will take on a different character. What makes it so that the organs of the human being receive the right imprint? The surrounding world does it. Goethe says that the eye is formed by light itself. Light is the creator, the shaper. The ear forms sound and so on. What light and air can create in a human being is most intensively formed in the first epoch until the teeth change. A suitable environment is creative for the physical body of the human being.

For example, it is not irrelevant whether a child is surrounded by invigorating or dulling colors. A nervous, excited child should therefore be surrounded by lively colors, reddish, reddish-yellow colors. It depends on what has a creative effect on the child. Here is an example. If you look sharply at a white cloth with red spots and then look away from it, you perceive the opposite color and see green spots. This green has a beneficial effect. Therefore, an excited child should wear a red dress, while a calm child should be dressed in dull colors. It depends on the stimulation of the inner forces. A perfect doll does the child a disservice, because the imagination is no longer active. And the child has a sense of well-being in shaping the internal organs, and that is what is taken away from him. The child must take pleasure in its surroundings. You cannot do enough to bring joy and happiness into the first epoch of life. Not asceticism.

Another thing is love. The love that surrounds the child blends into its etheric and astral sheaths. It even brings favorable instincts.

Here I would like to mention food. Do not think that children should be overfed with eggs. This food spoils the favorable instincts for nourishment. The less a child is overfed with eggs, the healthier its instincts for nourishment will be. Spiritual science is considered a practical thing that gives you practical guidance here in life.

In the second epoch – from the change of teeth to sexual maturity – the astral body is actually born. Until now, the life body – ether body – has been shrouded; now everything that is memory and habit must emerge so that the child can become a useful member of human society. If you want to influence the child with something similar before then, it would be like trying to supply light and sound to the child in the womb from the outside. You cannot do it. But it is the time until the seventh year when joy and pleasure, desire and instinct are guided in the right direction. You have to write two magic words in his heart: imitation and example. These are the two forces at work. A role model must be given, not a command.

Here is an example. The parents discovered that their well-behaved child had taken their money. The parents called it stolen. But the child had bought gifts for poor children. He had done what he saw his parents doing. In the physical environment, nothing should be done that the child should not imitate. Teaching is of no use at this age; it only takes effect when the etheric body is uncovered. Jean Paul calls the example the greatest slogan of education. You may ask a world traveler, and he will say that he has learned more from his mother or wet nurse in his early years than from all his travels. Under the protection of the outer physical environment, which love works into the outer shell, infinite powers develop. Jean Paul also says here: Look at the child, it learns the language and also the spirit of the language in inner education. What would man have achieved for later language formation if such power were preserved for him. The child has language-forming power; for example, it calls the person who makes the bottles, the flascher - and other things. The worst thing is if you don't keep the right order in education. Jean Paul says: “Consider the words the child uses” and then ask whether his father can explain it philosophically. This is how the talent for imitating letters comes about, but the child only learns to understand the meaning of the letters after the seventh year.

During the time between the seventh year and sexual maturity, memory, inclination and character are transformed. There are three aspects to consider: thinking, willing and feeling. These are fed by different teachers. The thinking that he has instinctively developed through the etheric body must be transformed. He has learned language, but now the meaning of what is spoken must be taught to him, the meaning of what he has imitated in forms. Therefore, didactic instruction should not be started too early, only when it is imaged in the child. Then the feeling and mind should be worked on with things that are called history. Try to let the child look up to the great personalities of world history. Religion is to be made the indispensable basis of education. The human being undergoes a process of will formation that appears to him as the primal being of the divine essence. The absorption of pictorial representations must form concepts, not the abstract form. Today it is not easy for the teacher to find the comparison for death, like from chrysalis to butterfly: the chrysalis opens and out flies the moth. In this way, the soul separates from the body at death. What one believes oneself has an effect on the child. Goethe says: “Everything that is transient is only a parable.” This is the image of the butterfly. There is a point of view where the spiritual person really believes it. Then the child is shown the supersensible image through a sensory image.

From this point of view, I would like to talk about a matter that is being presented very strangely today. What concern does the “stork's nest” pose? Our highly enlightened contemporaries say today that we must not teach children such lies. That is not the case. In five hundred years, our descendants will say of us: What strange people they are, who have crudely depicted the physical event. That is much more of a lie. The stork's nest image comes from a time when it was known that the process found spiritual expression in it. From the spiritual realm, the soul comes down, and that is the most important thing in this process. All going down and all going up is associated with flying beings. So it was also the flying being, the stork. The little song “Fly, beetle, fly” and so on - “Pommerland” means children's land – tells us about the flying scele that the mother brings out of the children's land. All fairy tales bring spiritual truth in a form that the child can understand. What is important is that the powers be developed. If in the first epoch the two magic words imitation and example must work, then in the second epoch it is succession and authority. The question of schooling will become a question of the teacher. Each person must choose the teacher who allows him to follow in the footsteps to Mount Olympus. What the child believes is what matters. The truth must be expressed in person, must have become flesh. Authority is the magic word in which the child's conscience, character and temperament are vividly recreated in the teacher.

With sexual maturity, the astral body is born. What confronts the human being in the world is laid bare within him. The time of the birth of the astral body is when the sexes become aware of what separates them; the child himself becomes acquainted with the relationship between male and female and learns to distinguish between them. Therefore, at that time, as little as possible of all this should be dealt with in theory. It is a mistake to think that a person only needs a period of exposure to the world from the age of fourteen onwards in order to become mature enough to judge for themselves. The astral body must mature, mature under the authority of the world, which has to add what it has to give. And then comes into consideration what the maturation brings about, the forces. From the fifteenth to the sixteenth year, ideal forces must be developed, life forces and desires. Whatever his ideal is, that is his strength. As the astral body matures, the muscular system strengthens. And just as school ends with sexual maturity, so the apprenticeship ends with the twenty-first year. After the apprenticeship, the birth of the free ego actually follows. It is there that the human being enters the world as an independent worker, where the wandering time begins. He must learn to work independently before he has matured, to influence life as a master.

During all this time, the human being is in a state of growth, and just as the human being continues to grow in his external organs until the age of twenty-eight, or even thirty, he also has an inner growth, because the body is the expression of the soul. This is how a person develops a foundation. First, the child develops by imitating a role model, then by following authority in their apprenticeship, and in their travels in free association. Then comes a time when everything in the person is exposed; this is the actual time of manhood and womanhood. From then on, the influence from outside ceases to a certain extent. At the age of thirty, fat begins to accumulate in the body and the person begins to broaden. This is a sign that the forces to be active within have diminished.

In the thirty-fifth year, the person begins to process the forces within him or herself beneficially. Until then, he works on the temporal part of his soul, which he brought with him from previous embodiments. From the age of thirty-five onwards, he begins to work on the eternal part of his soul. That is why everything we have learned only bears fruit from the age of thirty-five onwards, and we have something to give to the world. It is the time when we become firm within ourselves and gain weight within ourselves. If up to that time man must learn through the world and through life, then only from the thirty-fifth year onwards can the world learn from him. The youth should be advised, but only he who has risen above the sun's height can advise. Then he can give more than he takes from it. This is because the astral body comes out with sexual maturity, then it can work inwardly in its etheric body. As long as the muscles are still growing, this is not possible. When the muscles are no longer left to the body itself, the life body – ether body – becomes more and more solid, and it gives what is worked in it to the environment. Particularly gifted people can do this before the age of thirty-five, but it only has weight from the age of thirty-five. The ancient Greeks would never have allowed a person to guess before that time. Doing well, but not guessing. In all secret schools, all students before the age of thirty-five only entered the preparatory program.

Only when the powers had been released could they rise higher. When man grows old in this world, he only becomes young for the immortal one. It is a great fortune – a healthy developed person, he will have something modest around him and will choose his hero until then, whom he will emulate to reach Olympus. In particular, this must be a cause for great caution when young people with the highest knowledge of the world want to work in the world. This requires maturity and standing in the spiritual world. More and more, people internalize themselves, and there are no specific periods for this. Those who undergo a certain training – even if their hair has already turned white and their skin is wrinkled and withered – may still be the youngest. Those who have the youth of the soul will acquire the greatest powers even in old age. Even when memory declines, the formative power begins to weaken, the power of ideals dies, then one saves one's strength for all that, and they serve the cultivation of the immortal. Old age withers outwardly and brings forth the eternal in man.

This is also proof of human continuity. What grows and develops is the indestructible, incorruptible core of the human being. The more the environment loses interest in it, the more important what the person says and thinks at this age is for the world. That is why the ancients took the elders as their guides, also for the social order. They had the say, the thinking, that should remain, the imperishable in the perishable.

That is why spiritual science allows us to see this life in the right light. It gives us not only theories, but something that gives us strength and security in life, confidence in the great future of the world. Then the course of a person's life, with its ascents and deaths, has something very meaningful about it when we know how to live with this wisdom, according to the sublime saying: know thyself. It shows him how the world creates him and how he works out of himself. It shows us how we owe our existence to the world, but also that we can give. The bliss of taking and giving shows us this path.

Every meditation has been handed down by great initiates for millennia; it's the path into super-sensible worlds. Each one gives us a picture of initiation, if only as a weak reflection. It's a picture of what we'll someday have, albeit a very faint picture.

So that the meditation can work into and upon us in the right way we should imagine the meditational material as pictorially as possible in a spiritual picture that we create for ourselves. For instance, when we receive the meditation:

we should try to strip off everything that fetters us to the sense world at these moments and devote ourselves as much as possible to these pictures and live in them.

Meditation should be the most important and sacred event of the day for us. If we immerse ourselves in these pictures as much as possible and let them live in us, then depending on how intensive and serious we are in this and on our karma we'll sooner or later experience a moment in which we notice that these pictures and ideas are realities, that they are a world in which we suddenly find ourselves and that's quite different from the outer world. We find that we're on the other side of things, as it were. Meditators who haven't advanced to vision yet will find that as soon as they begin to meditate they are attacked by thoughts about their surroundings and everyday life. All noises seem to become more disturbing and all stray images and thoughts become more insistent. It wouldn't do any good to fight them, because powers stand behind them. It would be as if one wanted to defend oneself against a swarm of bees by punching them: they would just attack one even more.

There's an occult way of silencing these unwanted thoughts, and that is to clearly imagine a shining Mercury staff with a black snake winding around it and then a white snake winding against the other one. The black snake symbolizes the materialistic thoughts of the lower self that disturb one, and the bright one the divine thoughts of the higher self. And when we place this symbol with its whole significance before our soul—where the bright snake coils against the black one—then all disturbances will disappear and we can immerse ourselves in our meditation. Those who have attained clairvoyance are disturbed by wild animal visions that are very ugly or sometimes seductively beautiful and that comes from passions and desires. Here too the mental image of the Mercury staff is the only antidote.

Depending on karma we'll sooner or later have the feeling that our I is being torn to pieces when we devote ourselves completely to our meditation. This feeling must arise and it's quite right up to a point. We ordinarily feel like a unit in an enclosed physical body, but we must consider that we are very composite and complicated, and that the spiritual world to which we mostly belong isn't anything simple. Thrones, Kyriotetes, Dynamis and Exusiai worked on our physical, etheric, astral bodies and I on Saturn, Sun, Moon and earth, respectively. All kinds of high spiritual beings worked on our physical body on old Sun and Moon. Some built our larynx, others the heart or the liver; reproductive organs were created by some beings and the digestive apparatus by others, and so on. At a certain stage a meditator gets the feeing that he divides and gets into the hands of all of these powers and loses himself in them. One who hasn't attained vision yet will then have a nothing feeling, as if the meditation was not bearing any fruit. This is depressing, but there's no great danger here either for the meditator or the meditation. A clairvoyant will hear the voice of a figure and then also see it, and this will whisper to him that the world that he sees is an illusion that he's creating himself. This is the temptation that approaches him from the other side and doesn't want him to ascend into spiritual worlds but tries to hold him back in the sense world forcibly. And this temptation is a great danger. The occult way to combat this is to imagine the rose cross. The rose cross is the symbol for the Mystery of Golgotha. The cross, the symbol of death, out of which with the blood that flowed out of the five wound-roses sprout as a symbol of life. If we bring this symbol and its whole significance before our soul we'll have an unbeatable weapon against the power that leads us into temptation. And why? Because Christ through his death, at the moment when his blood flowed, united himself with the earth's astral body and brought it new life and light. He lives in this astral body as the astral light that shines in darkness. When we've attained vision we see in this astral light. Thus the rose cross is the symbol for the light that conquers the powers of darkness.

We see objects with our physical eyes because they're dark and they reflect light. But when we attain vision through our meditation, the dark sheath that covers objects will get thinner and thinner. We'll see the astral light in them shine, the light in the darkness, and they'll thereby disclose their interior to us. We'll know the forces that are at work in them and we'll live with them. We'll not only see a red, cubic crystal from outside, but we'll feel the forces that build it up and spread red light over its surface through green light. If someone wanted to get inside by breaking it apart he would only create more outer surfaces. One only presses inside if one sees in astral light. To be able to stand this astral light neophytes had to prepare themselves in a kind of a sleep in a grave. After seeing the astral light, Paul was without sight for three days.

If our meditation is done correctly, it should leave us spiritually strengthened. We often have no feeling that this occurred, but every meditation has an effect sooner or later and we often harvest the fruits unexpectedly years later. One who doesn't greedily and impatiently demand growth but is satisfied with little, will always receive a spiritual strengthening.