The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Whoever follows the history of human development, not only in the usual documents and traditions, but goes rather deeper into things which though at first appearing only symptomatic of that development, really point the way to the inner and therefore true forces of evolution, will find renewed significance in a memorable scene at the end of the eighteenth century. An address based on the highest contemporary Science was given to the Natural Science Society at Jena by a very important Botanist of the day called Batsch. Two men, one some ten years older than the other, listened to this address, and it happened that they left the place together and fell into conversation. The younger said to the elder: ‘When one considers such an address, it shows once again how the scientific method of observation picks things to pieces, sets one by the side of another, and scarcely takes into consideration the homogeneous spiritual bond existing in all the different units.’ In other words it seemed wrong to the younger man that plant should be put side by side with plant without any reference to a higher something, which must also exist in the world, uniting the various plants.

The elder man replied: ‘It might perhaps be possible to find a method of studying nature, which goes to work differently, and which in spite of being a study which must lead to knowledge, has, as its aim, the unifying element, namely that which is absent in external observation by the various senses.’ The man took a pencil and a piece of paper from his pocket and at once drew a remarkable shape, a shape that resembled a plant, but no existing plant, to be seen or perceived by the outward physical senses, a shape which, as it were, exists nowhere and of which he said that it existed indeed in no individual plant, but was the ‘plant-hood,’ the proto-plant type which existed in all plants and represented the unifying element. The younger man looked at it and said: ‘Yes, but what you have drawn there is not an experience, not observation, that is an idea’—having in mind that only the human spirit could form such ideas, and that such an idea had no significance for external, so-called objective nature.

The elder man was unable to understand this objection at all, for he replied: ‘If that is an idea, then I see my ideas with my eyes!’ He meant that just as an individual plant is visible to the external sense of sight, and is an experience, so his proto-plant, although invisible by means of an external sense, was objective, existent in the outer world, living in all plants, the archetype in all individual plants. You know that the younger of these two men was Schiller, the elder Goethe.

This conversation is a symptomatic, significant indication of modern spiritual science.

What really prompted that reply of Goethe's to Schiller? There spoke in him the consciousness that one does not only grasp an external objective truth with that representation given by the external sense, and furnished by a limited understanding from external sense-perceptions, but that the human being, when he sets in motion higher spiritual forces, which are not applied to separate sense-observations, arrives at truth and reality just as one does by means of external sense perceptions.

We may well say that Schiller, who at that moment was incapable of realizing what lay behind, when he believed that Goethe had made his drawing in terms of subjectivity, has left us the finest testimony of man's capacity to scale the heights as revealed to him by Goethe. From that moment we see Schiller's ever increasing comprehension of Goethe's ideas. A letter of his provides a psychological document of the first importance, where he says: ‘For a long time, although from a distance, I have watched the progress of your spirit with ever renewed admiration, and noticed the path you have set yourself. You seek the necessity of nature, but on the most difficult road, from which indeed any weaker power would draw back. You take all nature as one in order to obtain light on each separate part, and you seek the explanation of the individual in the “all” of its phenomena. You ascend from the simple organism, step by step to the more complex, in order finally to erect genetically from the materials of all nature's structure the most complex of all, the human being. You seek to penetrate into his hidden technique, by re-creating him in the manner of nature. A great and truly heroic idea which sufficiently shows to what extent your spirit holds together the rich totality of its conceptions in a beautiful unity.’

Thus we may regard as a testimony to the objectivity of Goethe's idea-world that which in his consciousness brought forth such a reply, and which Schiller later confirmed in this letter.

It is remarkable that Heinroth, a psychologist who lived in the twenties of the nineteenth century and is to-day forgotten, uttered a very significant phrase about Goethe in his Anthropology, which is really a psychology—one of those phrases which are significant through their application, and throw great light on what they are meant to illumine. He used the phrase, speaking of Goethe's whole method of approach, ‘objective thinking’ and he enlarged upon the phrase by saying: Goethe's thinking is a quite peculiar thinking, really inseparable from the objectivity of things, resting quietly in objects, in which it is raised to ideas.

Now whoever is able to look into Goethe's whole spiritual organism—as we shall to-day and the day after tomorrow, when we shall try to penetrate still deeper into this question, when we shall consider more inwardly what we are to have presented to us to-day outwardly—will see that in this thought he adheres to facts without stopping merely at the surface of things and the experience of the senses, and finds within these facts the spiritual, the world of ideas. We see that for this reason Goethe's thought has become so important for a large part of our modern human development. We may say that there is something exceedingly remarkable in this effect of Goethe's spirit on the most diverse types of people, on the most varied views even on the different successive epochs.

Let us consider for a moment the point at issue and we shall see what unique results Goethe's spiritual standard has in fact produced. If we take three philosophers of German spiritual life, who are quite different from each other in their points of view, Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer, we find from a study of their mutual relationships and of their relationships to Goethe something quite remarkable about Goethe's influence on history. Fichte reveals himself as a thinker, wandering on remote heights, especially when he had finished his Foundation of Science at Jena in 1792. It is difficult to rise to an understanding of Fichte's peculiarity, it is difficult to penetrate to him, although everyone who has succeeded must admit that he has gained food for spiritual discipline from him to an extraordinary degree. But it is not for every man to ascend to such spheres of the purest concept. Fichte, who wandered on these heights of abstraction, particularly at that moment, sent his work to Goethe with the following significant words: ‘I see and have always seen in you the purest representative at the present stage of humanity of the spirituality of feeling. To your feeling therefore, philosophy rightly turns. The spirituality of your feeling is the normal standard for philosophy.’ Thus Fichte to Goethe.

Let us look now at another philosopher, at Schopenhauer, and let us see first how Schopenhauer stood to Fichte. They were, in truth, a hostile pair—at least Schopenhauer was very hostile to Fichte. Schopenhauer never wearied of abusing Fichte. To him he is a windbag, thinking and writing empty ideas. He repeatedly emphasizes how unreal and meaningless Fichte's philosophy is. In fact there could not be a greater contrast than these two. And Schopenhauer indeed went to Goethe to be taught. For a time he experimented together with Goethe in order to learn the fundamental physical concepts, and a good deal in his first work, and even in his chief work is derived from the impression Goethe made on him. If you know Schopenhauer, you know also with what homage he spoke of Goethe. Schopenhauer and Fichte—two great contrasts unite in Goethe, and he seems like the unifying force of each.

Let us take finally Hegel and Schopenhauer. Hegel is also difficult to reach with the understanding. He tries to create a fact-world of concepts in a comprehensive, systematic frame, and demands that man should lift himself to a stage where he grasps concept as fact, where he is capable of experiencing it directly. Schopenhauer finds in this something entirely worthless, merely a playing with abstract words. If we wish to know Hegel's relation to Goethe, we need mention only one instance and we shall see how they stand. There is a beautiful letter in which Hegel writes: ‘Goethe seeks behind the sense-revelations the actual spiritual phenomena, which he calls the proto-phenomena, as he calls the proto-plant the proto-phenomenon of the vegetable world. While he speaks from the heights of the spiritual world as philosopher and shows us what we can think and comprehend, he works himself on the other hand up to the point where he comes into touch with spirit-created thoughts. Thus Goethe's proto-phenomenon is united with what the pure, thinking philosophy derives from above.’

Here also we see a harmony between Hegel and Goethe, as between Goethe and Schopenhauer. In Goethe they find themselves united. And when we proceed from these older times to our own, what do we find?

In Goethe's lifetime research in Natural Science was different. More than then the only right method of strict Science to-day is considered to be a research relying on external sense-observations and the formal working out by the mind of what is limited by the obscuration of the results thus obtained. But a Haeckel, as he shows in every book, is determined to stand on the firm ground of Goethean world-conception, and so we see a more materialistically coloured philosophy emphasizing the importance of relying on Goetheanistic world-conception. You can find books to-day written on a basis for which the spirit is an absolute reality in the highest sense of the word, and in them you can trace the debt to Goethe. Spiritualistic and materialistic students can fight from opposite camps, but both believe they may look up to Goethe in the same way. He thus provides something which bridges the gulf between opponents.

These facts testify to the force of Goethe's world-conception, a force which has such an influence on others that though they do not understand each other, they find something in Goethe which they have themselves. Perhaps some of you know how widely apart Virchow and Haeckel stood from each other. But Virchow also, who saw eye to eye with Haeckel in so few things, has in an important address on Goethe equally found support in him. So in Goethe we see a power, which, in face of all the contradictions and struggles of world-conceptions, is able to show, that things are not what these representatives of science consider, and for which they so stubbornly fight.

It is just when you consider the relation of these important people to Goethe, that you realize that it is the same towards what is called knowledge as it is with different painters, sitting round a mountain, and painting it from different points of view. The resultant pictures must also of course be different, though it is the same mountain they paint. You will get a comprehensive idea of the mountain only by comparing the various representations with each other and compounding them into a whole. If you put yourself in the same position with regard to knowledge, you will see that Goethe does not select a single point of view, but rather scales the mountain and shows that it is possible to take up a position on the summit and there to find a comprehensive panorama, in which all views are revealed in their deeper consistency or interconnection.

It is this which makes Goethe's spirit so eminently modern, and if in plunging deep into Goethe we get the feeling that he appears to us a modern, it will be a sufficient justification if in our frequent studies here of spiritual science and a world-conception based on the spiritual, we consider what he did and wanted to do as a kind of invitation to penetrate deeper into his nature. If he is a stimulating spirit in so many respects, why should he not also be a stimulant for that spiritual tendency (Spiritual Stream) one of whose highest and most beautiful aims is a tolerant investigation into the different standpoints of world-conceptions, and which makes it a principle not to stand still on one fixed point, but, in order to find truth, to climb ever higher and higher by means of methods applied to inner development and growth of inner organs of perception, because thus alone can one see the deeper spiritual foundations? We shall now consider how far Goethe coincides with the deepest feelings of modern mankind on a narrowly limited subject. As an example we shall choose a feeling many of you know, which can be described by saying that there are many people to-day who strive to throw overboard old traditions, and create feelings, thoughts and ideas which lead direct to the present time. You will see at once what I mean when I remind you of a picture which many to-day cherish. You can take what attitude you like to the picture, but it is an expression of the contemporary age. I refer to the picture: ‘Komm, Herr Jesus, sei unser Gast’—‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ The picture lives not only in its creator, but also in those who would enjoy it; they feel the longing to see the figure of Jesus in their immediate presence, as is represented near the table. One might say that the picture has not only value for this age, but for all ages, that it is there eternally and cannot pass away and that every age has the right to put this figure into its own epoch. These few words alone will indicate the feeling which many have towards this picture.

Now one might believe that in these things Goethe belonged still to the ancients—a conclusion one would draw from his preference for the old art, with its old, sound, artistic traditions, and his preference for the Greeks; one might believe Goethe had no understanding of the emotion expressed in this picture—‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ In order to get a glance into Goethe's soul let us refer to a book by Bossi on Leonardo da Vinci's ‘Last Supper.’ Goethe wrote a criticism of this book, and in it there are significant words. Of this picture which is in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie cloister at Milan and in spite of recent restoration looks as if it would soon disappear, Goethe relates how he stood in front of it at a time when it still had a certain freshness. He describes the impression which he once got from this picture in his youth: ‘Opposite the entrance in the narrower wall, in the body of the hall stood the Prior's table, on each side the monks' tables, all raised from the floor on a dais, and now when you had come in and turned round, you saw the fourth table painted on the fourth wall, above the fairly low doors; and at it Christ and His Disciples, just as if they belonged to the company.’—He, summoned by the Dominicans in their sense and in their place, with the emotional thought ‘Lord Jesus, come and be our Guest.’ The whole, says Goethe, made a unified picture. And not to leave any doubt as to his meaning he adds: ‘It must have been a significant sight at meal-times, when the tables of the Prior and of Christ looked across at each other like two opposite pictures and the monks found themselves in between. And therefore the painter in his wisdom had to take the monks' tables as his model. And it is certain the table-cloth with its creases, its striped pattern and its open corners, was taken from the linen-room of the Cloister, and the dishes, plates, mugs and other utensils were copied from those the monks used. There was thus no question of approximation to an uncertain, old-fashioned costume. It would have been extremely clumsy to have made the Holy Company lie on cushions. No, it had to resemble the present; Christ was to take his Evening Meal with the Dominicans of Milan.’

And now let us ask whether Goethe had this understanding which we must call a modern understanding. He had it in that comprehensive manner which is another proof of how universal his powers are as against the sometimes one-sided powers which mutually exclude and fight each other.

We must put ourselves into Goethe's soul in this way and then we shall understand why Goethe stands so close to us and why we look up to him whenever the current attitude to deeper spiritual questions is under discussion. It was his deep consciousness that it is possible for man to awake in himself spiritual organs in order to ascend to higher conceptions, and thereby to gain something which not merely lives in the human spirit, but at the same time lies deeper.

Were it possible to enter upon Goethe's scientific studies, as you will find them discussed in detail in my book, Goethe's World-Conception, we should be able to show the working of his whole method. But to-day we want to approach him from another side. Goethe has expressed things here and there which indicate the deep foundation of his philosophy. We shall have to speak of this in the last two addresses of this winter's cycle on ‘Faust.’ [See note on publications at end of book. {There is none! - e.Ed}] He once said to Eckermann concerning Faust, that he had drawn him in such a way that the reader who is content only with externals has some satisfaction in the colourful scenes, but that he can also find behind the words the secrets which lie there. Here Goethe is pointing out in Part II that we have to differentiate between the external and the inner essential secret meaning. In accordance with ancient custom we describe the external as the exoteric and the other as the esoteric.

Now we shall approach Goethe by considering to-day in an external, exoteric way a work in which he expressed his whole ‘methodical thinking and willing;’ and the day after tomorrow we shall consider it esoterically.

It is a comparatively unknown little work of Goethe's to which we must go if we want to look into his deepest secrets of knowledge—we merely describe them as such. It is the little piece at the end of the ‘Conversations of German Emigrants,’ under the title, ‘Legends,’ from which the reader, if he strives to get Goethe's world-conception, will get the feeling that Goethe wishes to say more in it than appears from the scenes. For the thoughtful student this ‘Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily’ will provide riddle after riddle.

And now allow me to explain the chief features of this story, for I cannot talk about it unless we recall the important points, if we are to look more deeply into Goethe's philosophy. We shall therefore have to give a moment to the content of this little work; and after that we shall understand each other better in what we shall have to say. I have often had it said to me when I have lectured on this story, ‘I never knew there was a “legend” in Goethe's works;’ and so I repeat that it is contained in every edition of Goethe and constitutes the ending of the ‘Conversations of German Emigrants.’

Now to the scenes. A Ferryman lives by a River and to him come remarkable forms—Will-o'-the-Wisps. They want to be put across to the other side by the Ferryman in his boat. The Ferryman agrees to take them across. On the way they behave in a curious manner; they are restless and fidgety, so that he is afraid they will upset the boat. But they arrive safely and then they propose to pay him in an odd way. They shake themselves and golden pieces fall from them, and they are the reward for his trouble in taking them over. The Ferryman is not enthusiastic about the golden pieces and says: ‘It is a good thing that nothing has fallen into the river, for it would have surged up wildly. I cannot take this payment; I can be paid only with the fruits of nature.’ And he demands three Onions, three Artichokes and three Cabbages. They had to pay with fruits of the earth. We shall soon see what deep significance every point and every fact has.

The Ferryman continues: ‘Now you give me the extra trouble of taking down the river the golden pieces you've thrown about and I must bury them.’ Wherefore he takes them actually a short way downstream and buries them in the crevices of the earth. When they have been thus buried, another remarkable being comes along to them—the Green Snake, who crawls in and on and about the earth and through its crevices. Suddenly she sees the pieces of gold falling down through the cracks of the earth and thinks at first they are falling from Heaven. She therefore devours them and becomes, by thus taking the golden pieces into her own body, more and more luminous. As she comes to the surface she notices that she gives off a peculiar light in a marvellous manner and gleams like emerald and precious stones.

Now the Snake and the Will-o'-the-Wisps come together, the latter still shaking themselves and throwing away what they shake out, the Snake, having acquired a taste for gold, taking up and swallowing what the others throw about. The conversation between them is significant. The Snake calls herself a relative of the Will-o'-the-Wisps in a horizontal line, the Will-o'-the-Wisps call themselves relations of the Snake in a vertical line. They ask the Snake moreover if she could not inform them how to come to the Beautiful Lily. ‘Oh,’ says the Snake, ‘the Beautiful Lily is on the other side of the River.’ ‘Well, then we've done a fine thing,’ answer the Will-o'-the-Wisps, ‘we've just had a lift across because we wanted to come to the Beautiful Lily. If we could only find a Ferryman who would ferry us back again!’ And now follow very important words. ‘You will not find the Ferryman again, and if you did, be certain that he may indeed take you across, but not back again. If you want to get to the other side of the River, there are only two ways. Either you try at noon, when the sun is at its highest, to find a bridge over my own body, in order to cross’—The Will-o'-the-Wisps say, ‘We do not like journeying at midday’—‘Or you use the second way; for there is another possibility. At dusk you will find the huge Giant at a certain place. He has no strength in him, but when he stretches out his hand and its shadow falls across the river, you can cross over on the shadow. The shadow gives enough support to walk over on it. So if at midday you will not cross over me, you must find the Giant.’

The Will-o'-the-Wisps let themselves be told this, but the Snake has returned into the crevices, rejoicing in her increasing light-giving power through swallowing the gold.

And now the Snake notices something extremely odd. On descending again into the earth, she notices that where she had formerly found metals and so on, she now sees remarkable forms. Before, she had perceived them only through the sense of touch; now, being luminous, she can also see the things. She was able to feel pillars and also shapes like human beings, but till then she never really knew what there was in the underground caves. Now she enters again and her radiating light serves to illuminate everything.

On entering this large cavern under the earth, the Snake can at once perceive that there are four kingly figures standing in the four corners: a Golden King, a Silver King, a Brazen King, and in the fourth corner a Mixed King, put together in the gayest manner of all kinds of other metals.

The moment the Snake enters the cavern and lights up the figures, the Golden King puts the very significant question: ‘Whence comest thou?’

‘From the crevices, where the gold lives,’ answers the Snake.

‘What is more splendid than gold?’ asks the Golden King.

‘Light,’ is the Snake's reply.

The King asks further: ‘What is more comforting than Light?’

‘Speech.’

No one will doubt that these words are not meant to give just pictures, but that they also have a significant content.

As the Snake enters the cavern a crack opens in the Temple where the four Kings live and there enters the Old Man with the Lamp. He is asked why he comes at that moment, whereupon he says the remarkable words: ‘Do you not know that my lamp may illumine only what is already illumined? that I may not lighten the Darkness?’ After the Snake has lit up the objects in the room he may also come in with his wonderworking Lamp.

Now a conversation takes place between the Kings and the Old Man with the Lamp. He is asked:

‘How many secrets do you know?’

‘Three,’ he answers.

‘Which is the most important?’ asks the Silver King.

‘The open one,’ replies the Old Man.

‘Will you open it also to us?’ asks the Brazen King.

‘As soon as I know the Fourth.’

And now come the most significant words of the whole story:

‘I know the Fourth,’ said the Snake, and whispers something into his ear; whereupon the Old Man with a great voice cries out:

‘The time is at hand!’

There are a great number of attempts to solve the riddles of this story, and many people have tried to explain in one way or another what was felt to be a riddle even in Goethe's and Schiller's time. It is characteristic that Goethe and Schiller agreed about it and pronounced it explicitly in the words: the word that solves the story is in the story itself. So the solution has to be sought in the story itself, and in the course of my address it will be found to be so, though in a remarkable way. The Snake whispers something into the Old Man's ear, and what is whispered, but not spoken, is the solution of the riddle. The Old Man then says: ‘The time is at hand!’ So what we have to find out is what the Snake whispered to the Old Man in the subterranean Temple.

The Old Man now proceeds to the dwelling-place of his Wife. Through the power of the Lamp's light the most diverse materials are metamorphosed: stones into Gold, wood into Silver, dead animals into Precious Stones, but Metals are destroyed. He finds his Wife in an almost unconscious state. When he asks what has happened, she says: ‘There were quite extraordinary people here. One might have taken them for Will-o'-the-Wisps. They behaved pretty badly.’ ‘Well,’ says the Old Man: ‘considering your age, no doubt they were decently polite.’ Then she relates how the Will-o'-the-Wisps went for the Gold and licked it, so that they could shake it out again. ‘If it had been no worse than that—but just look at the Pug-dog. He ate of the golden pieces, was changed into precious stone, and died. Now he's dead,’ the Old Woman continues: ‘Had I known this before, I should not have promised them to pay their debt to the Ferryman, namely, three Cabbages, three Onions and three Artichokes.’

‘Well,’ says the Old Man, ‘take the Pug-dog and carry him to the Beautiful Lily, who has the quality of being able to change precious stone into life by touching it.’ So she takes the three times three fruits, to pay off the debt she has undertaken to the Ferryman, and takes the Pug-dog as well.

Now we come to a very significant point in the story. As she carries the basket, it seems unusually heavy, although anything dead has no weight for her; the basket with the dead dog alone would be no heavier than if it were empty; the living things, the Cabbages, Onions and Artichokes alone weigh down the basket. On the road to the Ferryman, another singular thing happens to her. The Giant holds his arm so that its shadow falls across the River, seizes one Cabbage, one Artichoke and one Onion out of the basket and devours them, so that she has now only two of each kind left. She proposes therefore to pay off only a part of the debt to the Ferryman. But he says that it is absolutely necessary to bring the whole of it at one time.

After considerable argument the Ferryman says there is a possible way out, namely, if she goes bail for the production of the three missing fruits. She must therefore put her hand into the river, as security that she will keep her promise. This she does, but notices that her hand as far as it is immersed in the River has become black and smaller. ‘Now it only looks like it,’ said the Old Ferryman, ‘but if you do not keep your word, it might become a fact. The hand will gradually dwindle and finally disappear, but without your losing the use of it. You will be able to do everything with it, but no one will see it.’ She prefers, however, to have a visible hand, even if it is useless. If she brings the tribute at the agreed time, the Ferryman says everything will be all right.

On the way to the Beautiful Lily, she meets a handsome Youth, who, however, as he says, has lost all his former power and strength, and we learn from their conversation how this has happened. The Youth had conceived the active desire to reach the Beautiful Lily. She had become his Ideal. But her lovely eyes had such a baneful effect that they deprived him of all his strength, and still he was ever attracted to her.

At length the two come to the Beautiful Lily. Everything, indeed, that surrounds her is highly indicative, but we can now select only a few points. The Beautiful Lily is the image of most perfect Beauty, but her touch possesses the power of killing everything that lives, and restoring to life everything that has gone through life and died.

The Old Woman now presents her requests. The Youth has come to satisfy his longing for the Beautiful Lily, but we see that she also feels a longing: she feels herself cut off from all living fruitfulness; in her garden flourish flowers, but only to the point of bloom, not to that of fruit; beautiful she is, but far from all life. The Old Woman then says something significant: she repeats what the Man in the subterranean Temple had said and that gives the Lily new hope. It was indeed the last moment in which she could receive any hope, for she had lost the last living thing, which had been a sort of link between her and the living. She had had a Canary in her neighbourhood, and had taken great care not to disturb it, since that would have killed it. But a Hawk had come near, the Canary fled from it and flew up against the Lily and was killed. And so the Beautiful Lily was reduced to complete spiritual loneliness and isolation from all that human beings have.

The Old Woman now gives the Pug to the Lily. The Lily touches him and thereby restores him to life. The Youth tries to calm his longing by embracing the Lily and thereby he is killed. Life is completely annihilated in him.

The Snake next forms a Magic Circle; and the Youth and the Canary are put inside it. By this means—and the Snake points this out significantly—what is hopeless is to be quickly altered, and in fact it is so. We learn that the Old Man with the Lamp now approaches and that through him a solution of the whole situation can be actually attempted. For there is still just time when he arrives; the bodies of the Canary and the Youth have not yet begun to decay.

The Old Man leads them towards the subterranean Temple, which the Snake had already reconnoitred. He says to the Will-o'-the-Wisps: ‘You are also there to help us. When we come to the Gates of the Temple, you will have to be the ones to unlock them.’ The Snake makes a bridge over the River and the whole company proceeds over it. Then we see, when they have arrived on the other side, that through the contact with the Snake, who now decides to sacrifice herself, the Youth becomes alive again, though not yet in possession of his spirit. And because the Snake is prepared to sacrifice herself, the Youth is translated into a remarkable state. He can see, but cannot understand what he sees. The Snake divides up into numerous wonderful precious stones, which the Old Man sinks in the River and thereby a bridge is formed over it. The procession moves on under the guidance of the Old Man into the subterranean Temple. As they enter we see that questions full of meaning are exchanged between the newcomers and the Kings. For instance: ‘Whence come ye?’ ‘From the World.’ ‘Whither are ye going?’ ‘Into the World.’ ‘What do ye want with us?’ ‘You to accompany!’ (i.e. the Kings.)

Now the group, with the Temple, begins to move. They go under the River and rise again, with the whole Temple, on the other side, and as when they have risen something that looks like woodwork falls into the Temple. It is the Ferryman's Hut. It changes and becomes a small Temple inside the large one. And now takes place a scene which is important for the Youth, who, you remember was until now alive, but not spiritualized.

We have seen that the first, the Golden King, represents Wisdom; the second or Silver one, Illusion, Semblance or Beauty; the third Brazen one, Strength or the Will. We now see a symbolic act taking place. The Youth is presented with three different gifts by the three Kings; the Brazen King with the Sword, accompanied by the significant words: ‘The Sword on the left hand, the right free,’—Will-power. From the Silver King he receives the Sceptre, with the words,—‘Tend the Sheep.’ We shall see that the Youth is filled with the feeling of the soul, which expresses itself in Beauty. The Golden King sets the Crown on his head, saying: ‘Recognize, Realize the Highest.’ And the power of imaginative thought enters the Youth. At this instant he is spiritualized, he gains his spirit and may be united with the Beautiful Lily. We are then also told that everything is made young.

What is still specially significant is the part played by the Giant, who has no strength in himself, but in his shadow. He staggers clumsily over the bridge and the King is indignant about it. But it turns out that the Giant's coming has a good meaning. Like the pointer of a great Sun-dial, he is held fast in the middle of the Temple Court. We see what strength we find in the Sun-dial, in the Giant pointing to and harmonizing Time, and we see how the bridge leading to the Temple across the River is made out of the Snake's body. We see also that not only pedestrians, but carts, horsemen and herds can cross to and fro. We are shown how the Youth, on being united with the Beautiful Lily, regains the strength of which her touch had deprived him, how he may now come near to her and embrace her and how happy and blessed they both are.

Who would not say, when he studies the scenes of the fairy tale: ‘These are riddles!’ For the moment we can get only a slight idea of what there is in this legend. But if we proceed historically, if we consider that it arose in the middle of the year 1800 at the beginning of his friendship with Schiller and what took place between Goethe and Schiller, we shall understand what Goethe set out to do in this story.

To this period belongs the production of a work, the fruit of a study of Goethe's world-conception, which became deeply important for the education and cultivation of German spiritual life; Schiller's letters on ‘The Æsthetic Education of Man.’ We can only outline Schiller's intentions in these letters.

He asks himself the question how man can succeed in developing his powers higher and higher, so that he can, in a free and perfectly human manner, penetrate the secrets of the world. This work is written in letter-form to the Duke of Augustenburg, and Schiller wrote this significant sentence in it: ‘Every individual human being, one may say, carries in him according to inclination and his destiny, a pure, ideal person, to find agreement with whose unchangeable unity in all its variations is the great task of his existence.’ And then Schiller tries to examine the means whereby man has to develop himself upwards to the higher stages of human existence.

There are two things that chain man and prevent a free view of the secrets of existence. One is the control by the senses, and the other is the insufficient development of the Reason. And Schiller explains these things thus: Take a person who is unaware of the compelling, logical part of concepts, or even the concept of duty, and follows only his inclinations and instincts. He cannot freely develop the powers of his nature, he is caught in the slavery of impulses, desires and instincts; he is unfree. But he also is not free who struggles with his desires, impulses and instincts, and follows only a purely conceptual and logical necessity of reason. Such a person becomes the slave either of the necessity of nature or the necessity of reason.

By what means can a man develop his inner powers? Schiller answers that he must develop his inner, divine states, strive to cleanse and purify them and make them correspond with what we call logic. When his impulses and instincts are purified so that he does willingly what he considers his duty, when the necessity of reason is no longer felt as compelling, then a man will act reasonably from force of habit, for then reason has led him down to the senses and the senses led him up again to reason.

Consider a man looking at a work of art. He sees something of the senses: but through every sense organ there is revealed to him something spiritual, for in the physical is expressed the spiritual which the artist has put into his work. Spirit and physical senses in the contemplation of beauty—these become the intermediaries. So art, life in beauty, becomes for Schiller a great means of education, a means of aesthetic education, a freeing of nature, so that it can unfold its own powers.

How, therefore, does a man develop himself in Schiller's sense? He must guide his nature down so that it proves true in physical nature, and train the sense up, so that it prove true in rational nature. Goethe uttered wonderful words concerning these letters: ‘Their effect on me is to show what I always lived or wished to live.’

It can be proved that Goethe was stimulated to write his fairy tale by Schiller's words in his aesthetic letters. Goethe expresses the same thing in it, in his own way. He did not wish to express the riddles of the soul in abstract ideas. For him they were too rich and too important to be grasped by natural necessity and in logic. Hence the need grew up in him to personify the different powers of the soul in the figures of his story. Goethe answers Schiller's question in this story and we shall see how wonderfully his psychology is revealed in it. We see in the presentation of the Will-o'-the-Wisps how the soul is always taking in and giving out, how certain powers are personified in the Snake, which works only on the ground like human research, human reason, and experience, which remain in the horizontal plane, while the idealist climbs to the heights. The power of the religious mood is characterized in the Old Man with the Lamp, and finally we see by means of the narrative events how Goethe shows the way in which each soul-power must work.

We shall see the day after tomorrow that Goethe shows how each soul-power must work together with the others, in order to formulate a complete picture of the soul, so that it can develop itself to human perfection, embracing all things. When man tries to grasp knowledge, but is immature, he is killed, like the Youth. There is such a thing as maturing towards knowledge. In the ‘Fairy Tale’ Goethe presents the evolution of the soul in a correct and pictorial way, by creating a parallel work to Schiller's ‘Æsthetic Letters.’ Goethe was aware that there is a goal for the development of the human soul, which in ancient times was called the ‘initiation into higher secrets.’ He knew such a thing is possible and that there are societies which develop the soul in secret places, in the Temples of Initiation. He shows also that humanity in the newer age must make it more and more possible to attain this Initiation, to develop the soul, and in larger spheres. He shows in the events that take place between the separate people, the progress of initiation up to the highest stages, to the point where the soul is capable of grasping the highest secrets. This is viewed exoterically, and purely historically.

By living with Goethe, Schiller experienced what Goethe had done in one of the most important periods of his life. And if Schiller had some difficulty in understanding Goethe, we must admit that what one said in an abstract answer in the Æsthetic Letters, and what the other had to say in a much more comprehensive way, in a way which is attained only by expressing oneself in scenes and persons, is one and the same thing. The Fairy Tale is Goethe-psychology in the deepest sense. We see that Goethe has become so fruitful through this method of his aspiration, that we still gladly take him as guide to-day. He still seems to us a man of the present. We read him as a writer of our time. He is so fruitful, because he has so much that belongs to all time in his work and his whole method. Thus his influence is consistent with that truth which he himself considered the real one, and he once uttered significant words when he said: ‘That which is fruitful alone is true.’

The meaning is that man must acquire such truths that when he enters upon life, they find confirmation by proving themselves fruitful. That was his criterion of truth: ‘That which is fruitful alone is true.’

These addresses, which are meant to bring Goethe nearer, ought to show us that he tested this saying himself, and those who go deeper into him will feel this. You will feel that there is something of genuine truth in Goethe, for he is fruitful, and what is fruitful is true.

Yesterday our theme was more connected with the external, exoteric aspect of spiritual science.¹⁷⁴ Today we will have some comments on the inner, esoteric aspect of spiritual science.

When one speaks to a large or also a smaller audience about the discoveries made in spiritual research, which is our mission today, people will soon ask where such knowledge comes from. How can one also come to learn something about the higher worlds oneself? The question is very much to the point. One has to understand, however, that one cannot make one's own observations at a very early stage, and certainly not before one is familiar with the important ideas in the science of the spirit. It is necessary first to make the acquaintance, in a way, of the general ideas and thoughts that are part of the anthroposophical approach. One must have made the effort to gain some idea, and it is possible for everyone to do so, that there is truth in anthroposophy. Finally one must have tried, using human logic, to grasp the inner connections in what is taught in the science of the spirit.

In principle there can be no objection today to someone wanting to ascend through the stages of higher knowledge himself. Yes, people talk a great deal of the dangers and obstacles one meets in occult development—which is the term used for our inner development. There is much talk of hatha-yoga and raja-yoga,¹⁷⁵ but this is really just theory. If the thing is done the right way, if the individual who guides such inner development is also entitled to do so, there is really no danger. It is important to do things the right way, that is what matters. A lecture like the one I am giving today is not designed to give instructions—please let me stress this—for these must always be from person to person. Giving such instructions is a tremendous responsibility, and receiving them one must understand that the chosen individual really deserves one's trust. This trust is absolutely essential.

Occult or inner human development will thus gradually take the individual through the stages of higher knowledge. Let me give you an outline of the essential aspects of this, for information, as I said, not in form of instructions.

When someone has reached the summit of understanding, when someone is up on the mountain top, he has an open view in all directions. That is how it is in physical existence and also in the process of gaining insight. One does not have that open view when one has not yet reached the top but is on the way up. As one climbs higher, one is able to perceive more and more, but a great deal continues to be hidden by the mountain. This image of a mountain is a good one for inner development. Everyone who seeks to ascend to levels of higher insight must start from a point that is right for him. This means, people are different on this earth, also in their physical, etheric and astral constitutions. The outer natures of a Hindu, a person from the Near East, a European or American differ, much more so than someone who does not have occult knowledge may think. Exercises suitable for the inner development of anyone who has the Hindu nature cannot be used in that way for a Western person. It was wrong, therefore, to transfer the Oriental yoga teaching to Europe. This has done much harm. A Hindu's much softer body can be developed in a very different way than a European organism which has grown much harder due to Western civilization. Human natures thus differ much more than you may think. An anatomist cannot tell you anything about this, but someone who is clairvoyant and looks inside knows how tremendously natures differ.

We can divide present-day humanity into three types. There are still those for whom the Oriental yoga initiation is essentially right, others for whom the gnostic Christian way is open, and finally those—and they are by far the greatest in number—for whom the way known as the Rosicrucian way from the 14th century is the right one. Please note, these ways do not lead to different insights, for once you are up on the summit all things are the same. But the ways that lead to the summit are and must be different.

Many things can be achieved by taking the gnostic Christian way, and it is possible to gain the most sublime insights. But the Rosicrucian way is suitable for modern people because they may find themselves in situations where doubts arise and trouble looms because of our present-day way of life, and these must be removed for the sake of the individuals concerned and for their work in the world. This is only possible if one goes through inner training based on the Rosicrucian method, which is the right one for the Western world.

Let me present some aspects of gnostic Christian initiation, so that you may see it as a field about which much can still be learned today. I am then going to go straight on to Rosicrucian training. We'll leave the Oriental yoga way aside for today.

The Christian way is laid down in a text that is little understood outside occult circles. The gospel of John gives a complete outline of the right way of Christian initiation.

John's gospel is one of the most profound texts in the world, but one has to be able to read it in the right way, that is, one should not think that just reading it is enough and the right thing to do. It is a book for life. Above all you have to understand that even the first words are not written just for people to read or for philosophical speculation. They are written for meditation. We have to have them the proper way, however, not in the usual translation. The first verses of John's gospel must be created out of the substance of the language so that one has not only the meaning of the sentences but also their sound quality. The sound quality or value still matters for genuine occult life.

To meditate, we enter deeply into particular formulas, sentences or even words. But meditation as an important means of inner development is not a matter of entering into something we are given by our occult teacher in a philosophical or intellectual way. It is a matter of entering into the actual sound qualities. If you were to think about a sentence your teacher has given you, you could only develop thoughts about it that you already have. You are, however, to have something new. That is the important point. Sentences given for meditation open up the gates to the world of the spirit for you. They are based on experience gained over hundreds of years. Every letter, every turn of phrase is known to have an effect on the soul. You therefore need to meditate those first sentences to the letter. Correctly translated they are:

In the origin was the word, and the word was with god, and a god was the word.

This was in the origin with god.

All things have come into being through it, and except by this, nothing of what has arisen has come into being.

In it was life, and the life was the light of humanity. And the light shone into the darkness, but the darkness did not grasp it.

There came to be a human being, sent by god, his name John.

He came to bear witness that he might bear witness to the light and that through him all might believe.

He was not the light but a witness of the light.

For the true light that enlightens all human beings was to enter into the world.

It was in the world, and the world came into being through it, but the world did not recognize it.

Into individual human beings (all the way to the I-human beings) it came, but the individual human beings (the I-human beings) did not receive it.

Those however who did receive it were able to reveal themselves through it to be god's children.

Those who put their trust in its name have come into being not out of the blood, not out of the will of the flesh, not out of the will of man, but out of god.

And the word came to be flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard its teaching, the teaching of the one son of the father, full of loving devotion and truth.

If we had more time together I could tell you many things about these first sentences. Hundreds and hundreds of people have gone through the things I am now telling you about this Christian initiation. It has become practical experience for thousands. Let me just briefly indicate some stages of Christian initiation.

The pupils would first of all be told: For weeks, months, years you must set some time aside every morning when you let these first lines of John's gospel come alive in your soul. Turn your attention away from everything that is going on around you during this time. You must turn blind and deaf to everything around you, and these words should arise in your soul as though you were hearing them, day by day, over and over again.

This exercise will first of all have a particular effect on the soul. Its magic brings it about that such a person suddenly finds his dreams becoming regular, assuming regular forms. And then a moment will come when the individual knows that he is not in a dream world. Instead he'll know that he has a new reality around him—imaginative astral reality. Just as in ordinary conscious awareness we see tree and shrub around us, so we now see the things experienced in yonder world. Initially like dream images, and then more and more in a living vision seen in the waking state, the pupil will see the first twelve chapters of John's gospel before him.

After this experience the teacher of Christian initiation will say to his pupil: ‘You must now prepare for the experience of the 13th chapter. Imagine a plant. This grows out of the mineral world. If it were able to think and have inner responses it would have to say to the mineral world: “I grow out of you. You may be a lower world than I am, but I could not possibly live without you.” And it would have to bend down to the mineral world in gratitude and say: “I thank you, stone! I owe to you my whole existence.”’ An animal would have to speak in the same way to the plant. And man would have to bend down to the lower worlds of nature and have the same inner response. And everyone who has advanced more on the social scale should bend down before those who are below him and say: ‘Without you I could not have life.’

The pupil has to practice giving himself up to this completely and do so for weeks and months. Then two symptoms will arise, which are the same for everyone. He will first of all experience both the external and the inner symptom as a particular fact. He will see himself as the thirteenth, who washes the feet of the twelve. In washing their feet, Christ Jesus sought to make this great truth apparent to the twelve. This wondrous inner experience comes to the human being in the process of initiation. It also goes as far as external symptoms. He will experience something that feels as if he was dipping his feet in water. Nobody needs to be afraid of this; it will soon pass.

When the pupil has gone this far, the teacher will come and say: ‘Now you must enter into another sphere of inner responsiveness. In life pain and suffering come to us from all directions. You must enter into a condition where you meet all the suffering and all the pain that are coming from all directions in this world as an upright human being, so that they cannot harm you. You must stay with these things for weeks and months.’ Then a time comes when an astral symptom shows itself. He'll see himself in a vision of the scourging, with a sensation rather like it felt all over the body, which will pass; but the result will be that the pupil lets this feeling enter into the whole of his body. With this he has reached a level of maturity where he is able to land upright as life plies its scourge.

For the third stage he is given the instruction: ‘You must now enter into an inner feeling of how things would be with you if you not only had to bear pain and suffering but had scorn and derision poured over all that is most sacred to you. You must be able to stand up, using the powers of your inmost soul, and have a centre in you that enables you to stand erect.’ A new vision will then come, where the pupil sees himself wearing the crown of thorns. The external symptom of this is a kind of headache. This indicates, right down into the limbs, that this great experience has come.

Then comes the fourth station. The earthly body must become an outside thing for the pupil. Most people feel it is their I. The body has to be like a piece of wood, something external. The pupil must learn to say not ‘I am walking through this door’, but ‘I carry the body through this door.’ His body must be very much an object to him. Having lived into this for weeks and months, the pupil will have a vision, an astral experience where he sees himself crucified. That is the fourth station. Stigmata will appear for a brief period during meditation as an external symptom on the hands, feet and in the right side—not the left, as is generally thought. They indicate that this degree of development has also entered into the flesh.

The stages that follow cannot be discussed, for we do not have words for them. The fifth stage is the mystic death, where the pupil will first truly have the experience of a black curtain between him and reality. He will feel lost in a way, utterly isolated, as it were, until insight is gained. It is as if the world of the flesh has vanished, and something like an impenetrable black curtain lies before the eye of the soul. This is a moment everyone must go through on this way to initiation. You encounter all the truly great suffering and pain that may rest deep down in the soul, and all the evil there is in the world. This is the descent into hell. Then it seems to the pupil as if the veil tears apart and he looks into the other world.

There follows the entombment, an experience where one feels at one with the planets, and the seventh level, of which we cannot speak, for the individual has to separate his thinking from his brain to have even an inkling of it. This is ascension into heaven.

My aim in giving you this description of Christian initiation was to help you understand what it is about. It is a way full of renunciation. It may be followed quietly, attracting no notice, and there are people among you who have gone through all this. It happens between the lines in life, as it were, and the more serious it is the less will it be visible on the outside.

People must go through the Rosicrucian initiation to be armed against anything that may come from the outside. Many of the things you read about this in books are apt to make you think that the Rosicrucians are really charlatans, for that is how learned people often describe them.

True Rosicrucians have recognized one another by a secret sign since the 14th century. They must never speak of the true nature of Rosicrucianism to an outsider. But from a particular point in time that came in the 19th century it has indeed become necessary to tell people the elementary aspects of Rosicrucian initiation. Human beings are very gradually growing up and developing the maturity they will need if they are to learn something about these things. We'll not be able to go into the question today as to why it has to be like this and why the more sublime secrets must still remain hidden.

Rosicrucian initiation is also in seven stages. These are 1) study, Rosicrucian study; 2) gaining imaginative perception; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) living experience of the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm; 6) entering wholly into the macrocosm, and 7) godliness.

Let me say once again that I can only give an outline, and no more.

Study is not the kind of learning we generally know. Instead one has to discover that there is a way of thinking that is still fluid and real, keeping out all sensory perceptions of the world around us. Western philosophers deny the existence of such a way of thinking.¹⁷⁶ They say it is only possible to think if the thought still has a residue of sensory perception in it. Those gentlemen do not know that other people have been able to do this, and they do not wish to believe it because they themselves are unable to think in this way. Man must learn to forget everything, to leave everything aside that influences the senses from the outside, yet without being an empty vessel. This is possible if one enters wholly into a pure thought content that has no sensual connection, as given by the spiritual scientist, and reflects on the thoughts that evolve. I have shown this way in my books, writing them in such a way that one element arises from another, as in a living being, so that one thought follows organically from another. You give yourself selflessly to the thought, and an inner separation results. Anyone who wishes to move to a higher level must read things written out of the science of the spirit in this way. Anyone who does not wish to reach a higher level may read them like an ordinary book. The former is the case because higher perception takes the human being into other worlds. You are now living on the physical plan—plan, not plane, for like the plan of a house it has nothing to do with being level. You thus come to different plans, into different worlds. At first you live here in the physical world, then you enter into the astral, imaginative world. It is a world we may describe as follows. Imagine a plant, green, with a red flower. You do special exercises that enable you not only to see what the senses see but to perceive how a cold flame form arises from the plant, is it were. You perceive floating colours. You thus perceive spiritual entities that you cannot perceive with the ordinary senses. Everything evaporates from the surface of things and becomes the expression of purely astral events. This world is much more real than our sense-perceptible world, for the world of the senses has been created out of that world of the spirit. This physical world has condensed out of the astral world. Matter is condensed spirit to the true occultist, and we can dissolve it again. The whole of our sense-perceptible world is condensed astral reality.

Behind this astral world is yet another world which may best be described by showing you how human beings come to gain living experience of it. When someone does the exercises I have described in my books, his dreams will first of all become regular. Try and enter into the nature of dreams. What is a dream? Let me give you some examples. They are taken from life, for I do not speak of other things.

Someone has dreamt he has caught a tree frog and then finds he has taken hold of a corner of his bed covers. The dream symbolized the occurrence. Another example is someone dreaming that he's in a dark, musty hole of a cellar full of spiders' webs. He wakes up with a headache. Some dreams may involve high drama. A student is standing at the door of the lecture theatre. Another one comes in jostles him, and a duel is fought with pistols. The shot rings out—and the chair next to the bed has fallen over. This minor incident has come to symbolic expression in the whole dramatic story of the dream. A farmer's wife dreams she's going to town and entering a church where the priest's sermon is of sublime things. Just when it gets really sublime, the priest begins to change. It looks as if he is growing wings and then he suddenly begins to crow. At that moment the farmer's wife wakes up and the cock is crowing outside. The cock's crow has been transformed and taken symbolic form in the dream.

Dreams are thus highly creative. Everything is chaotic in them. But life is given to this world and everything becomes harmonious and regular if you gain the certainty, up to a point, that this represents a reality. This is how it first shows itself, and later one takes things perceived in the world of dreams across into everyday life. Something develops which we may call ‘continuity of conscious awareness’.

Human beings also have dreamless sleep. The Rosicrucian pupil next learns to perceive entities and events around himself in a sleep state. The revelations of the spirit world sound forth from the darkness of dreamless sleep. In the Pythagorean schools this was called the world of the music of the spheres. The world of the spirit sounds forth. If you really want to hear something about the devachan, this must be such that it is described to you as a world of sound. Goethe, who had this degree of Rosicrucian initiation, knew of this: ‘The sun proclaims its old devotion in rival song with brother spheres.’ That is either nonsense or a higher truth. The physical sun does not resound, but the spirit of the sun is a real, resounding entity. And Goethe stayed with the metaphor; in part 2 of Faust, he wrote: ‘Resounding now for ears of spirit the new day is already being born.’ He wrote like that because the music of the spheres of which the Pythagoreans spoke was a reality to him. I can only refer to these things briefly. All things will speak to us, a new revelation will come forth.

Those are the stages the Rosicrucian pupil can reach by means of exercises. The worlds are always completely different, and someone who only knows the physical world can have no idea of the things one can learn in other worlds. One thing is the same for all worlds, however, and that is logical thinking. Our perceptions are entirely different in the astral, in the devachanic world, but the laws of thinking are the same in all three worlds. A Rosicrucian pupil must therefore first learn this way of thinking, so that he may keep to the proper path and not lose his way.

The 2nd stage consists in gaining imaginative perception. I can only tell you a few things that should explain what is meant by this. When you see a tear rolling down a cheek, you conclude that the soul is filled with sadness. When you see a cheerful face you conclude that the soul is cheerful. You draw these conclusions in relation to people. When you want to ascend to imaginative perception you must do this in relation to the whole world. The life of plants, animals and stones should express the physiognomy of the world soul for you. Some things must be like our cheerfulness, other things like tears wept by the earth spirit. This must become very real to the person. And much can be experienced in this way. The secret of the holy grail, the ideal of medieval Rosicrucian pupils, is connected with this.

Let us take an example. The Rosicrucian pupil would meet his teacher who would give him an exercise to do. I am going to put this in the form of a dialogue, though it has never been spoken dialogue. But what it conveys was practised and became living experience. It is entirely true and absolutely correct in every detail. The pupil would come to his teacher who would say to him: ‘Look at the plant. It extends its root into the soil, it grows upwards, opening its calyx at the top, and in there are its organs of fertilization and reproduction. Chastely and nobly and in purity it lets the sun's ray kiss it; the light, the sacred lance of love, which penetrates the calyx as a sunbeam and calls forth the potential that lies in the plant's organs of fertilization. You would have the wrong idea if in comparing the plant with a human being you were to think that the root is the head and the flower the lower part. Man is an inverted plant.’

The occultist thus sees the inverted plant in man and the inverted human being in the plant, with the animal between the two. ‘Look at the plant. It is the arm of the cross that goes down, the animal is the horizontal arm, and man the vertical arm.’¹⁷⁷ That is the original significance of the cross. It is the symbol for plant, animal and man as three realms of nature. Plato therefore wrote that the world's soul was crucified on the world's body. And the teacher would go on to say to the pupil: ‘Look at the human being, the human being in the flesh. What is this human flesh? Compare it with the matter contained in a plant. Plant matter is chaste and pure. Human flesh is full of passion and desire. Man is higher up on the evolutional scale, but this also means that he has taken in passion and desire.’ And the occult pupil would begin to intuit a future human being whose flesh would be pure and chaste again, like the chaste calyx of a flower which holds out its organs of fertilization to the sunbeam's sacred lance of love. Then his productive powers would reach out to the spirit just as today the plant reaches out to the lance of love, to the light. Those who sought to achieve this went through a transformation of the flesh. And so the pupil was presented with the great ideal of the human being who one day will be as pure and chaste as the plant. This ideal is called the holy grail. It is one of the images that speak to the heart and the whole soul. The pupil was able to rise higher not through thoughts but through images that influence the whole soul, captivating heart, mind and soul. Only then can imaginative perception be achieved.

The 3rd level involves learning the occult script. Something exists in this world which in occult life is called the vortex. It is to be found everywhere in nature and in the world of the spirit. Imagine you are looking up to the Orion nebula, which is a distinctive spiral. If you were a seer you would see that a vortex emerges like a figure 6, with a second vortex that is darker. The two intertwine. This also occurs in the world of the spirit.

We live in the age that follows the great Atlantean flood. Before that, our earliest ancestors were human beings of a very different kind. People imagine today that in those times human beings were just as they are now. But the physical conditions were completely different then. Atlantis was always in darkness, enveloped in masses of dense fog. It is important for you to know this. Old German mythology holds memories of Niflheim [land of mist] and Nibelungs [creatures of the mist]. Under those conditions the human constitution was very different. The Atlanteans also had a completely different culture. You might get an idea of this if I were to give you details of the way people heard articulated sounds in all things at that time. There were no moral laws. If someone wanted to know how to relate to a neighbour, he could not appeal to some authority or other; he would listen to the waves and then he would know.

It was a culture of which no trace seems to remain. It perished. When did this happen? We can see that in the heavens. About 8 centuries before the Christ was born the sun rose in the Ram. It takes about 2160 years to move through a sign of the zodiac. The sun moved into the sign of the Ram, or the Lamb, about 800 years before Christ. People felt the new constellation had brought them the new fruitfulness of spring, something new and good. We see from this that they felt the Lamb or the Ram to be important. Many things point to this, among them the legend of the Argonauts, in which the golden fleece plays such a role. The Christ himself is called the Lamb of God. The lamb was the symbol for offering veneration. Before that, the sun had been in the sign of the Bull, hence the veneration of the bull in Egyptian and Persian culture. Even earlier the sun passed through the sign of the Twins. In accord with this, duality played a great role in the Persian teachings of Ormazd and Ahriman. Traces of this still persisted in ancient Germanic culture. Before that, the sun was passing through Cancer. This was the period that followed the Atlantean flood. A vortex had occurred in the realm of the spirit.

This constellation with the occult sign of Cancer can still be seen in the calendar today. Many such signs are known to man. In reality this is nothing but a recreation of primal forces of nature. If you train your heart and mind to understand the occult signs you will steel your will with this occult script. You get to know the ways of the spirits that are behind nature. A faint echo remains in symbolic signs such as the pentagram and hexagram. One occult sign you often read about is the swastika.¹⁷⁸ The strange explanations given for it are quite unbelievable. In reality it is nothing but the sign for the astral sense organs, the wheels or lotus flowers, several of which are potentially present in the astral body—in the heart, the larynx, between the eyebrows. Astral vision begins when the last named of these wheels begins to turn. The swastika is the sign for this astral organ of perception.

The 4th level is called preparing the philosopher's stone. This is a reality. At the end of the 18th century someone who had got hold of something, but not exactly the right idea, put quite a good description of the philosopher's stone in a journal. He actually did not know himself how good it was. At that time a number of things from the occult school were wrongly made public, and so someone also described the philosopher's stone. This is actually something familiar to everyone, and many people handle it daily without having an idea. To help you see what this is about, follow me in a brief line of thought. Consider human breathing. We inhale oxygen, which changes our blue blood to red, and we exhale carbon dioxide, which means we are all the time exhaling poisonous matter. Plants on the other hand take up the carbon dioxide exhaled by humans and animals and retain the carbon to build up their bodies. They release the oxygen, so that humans can inhale it again. This is a cycle. Occultists attached great importance to this process. If you dig up a plant form that has become coal today you can see that the plant built up its body of carbon. Humans take in oxygen, changing blue blood into red; plants take in carbon dioxide and return the oxygen which humans then take in again.

Let us try and see what happens when the breathing process is regulated in a particular way in Rosicrucian training. The way in which it is done can only be passed on from person to person, but it is possible to speak of the effect. ‘A steady drip will hollow the stone’, as the saying goes. And that applies with the process I am now describing. The occult pupil is instructed by his teacher on doing his breathing exercises out of the spirit. It is an instruction, therefore, to regulate his breathing process in a particular way and this makes it possible for the human mind to expand a little as time goes on. It is something of which human beings normally know nothing and has to do with something that happens in the plant. The plant now becomes at one with him. Normally human beings exhale carbon dioxide and take in oxygen. The pupil must bring this to mind consciously. In his breathing he consciously experiences the change from carbon to oxygen, blue blood to red blood. He learns to do something in himself that is normally left to the plant. He will then be able to build up his own body. He learns to do so by means of regular breathing. This, then, is a real process in which the human being learns to purify his flesh also at the physical level. The alchemy of the human body lies in this. The human being is transformed into the vehicle for a pure, chaste incarnation that may be compared to a plant. The pupil is aware of something sublime, light and bright. He knows he only had to go through the flesh. That is the transformation of coal into diamond. You'll now understand the significance of bringing rhythm into the breathing in Rosicrucian training and know what was meant by the philosopher's stone. The regulated breathing process is the way to the philosopher's stone.

I am only touching on things lightly, but you'll understand that something profound lies behind the search for the philosopher's stone, something connected with the transformation of the whole of mankind, so that human beings will be different from the way they are today—they and the whole earth. That is how great and strong and firm, morally great, the powers of soul must be if man is to make the flesh, too, part of the process of redemption. We also have to redeem everything that exists around us, all creation.

The 5th level is to enter deeply into the relationship between microcosm and macrocosm. A great occultist of medieval times, someone we must first learn to read, used a beautiful image to show the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm. Paracelsus said: You see there the individual letters. Man is the word made up of the letters. And so we have to see man spread out in the whole of nature, and man himself as a compendium of nature. Paracelsus referred to a cholera patient as Arsenicus, for example, for the powers active in him are the same as those active in arsenic.

But there is more. When someone concentrates really hard on a particular part inside him, the point between the eyebrows—this, of course, is only a reference point—he will have a particular experience in which he is taken into the inner events of the great world. These correspond to the part which in the human microcosm lies between the eyes. And so the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm has to be experienced bit by bit. Entering deeply into his inner life, the pupil must get to know the outside world.

At the 6th and 7th levels the Rosicrucian pupil comes to be at one with the whole world. He gains true knowledge of the outside world. And his feelings and his whole soul become one with the outside world to the same degree. This is the condition known as godliness. The earth's body is then his body. And the pupil achieves the stage known as being at one with the universe. It is a long road along one particular path. Those who have gone through it become messengers of the spiritual world, speaking from real experience.

It is a road anyone can follow today—certainly in principle. It will take a long time for some, and a shorter time for others. One of the best theosophists, the late Subba Row, said about the time needed, which people ask about so often: ‘It is true that one person needed 70 incarnations, another 7 incarnations, someone else again 70 years or perhaps 7 years; there have been people who achieved it in 7 months, and some in just 7 days, depending on their karma from former lives on earth.’ Setting out on the road one must be patient and persevere, knowing that one will be exposed to great dangers unless one has first gone through character training.

Let me give you an analogy. Take a green liquid produced by mixing blue and yellow. You can separate the blue from the yellow by using a chemical agent. Before that, the individual properties of the two solutions were not apparent. Now they show those properties. And that is how it is with the human being. High and low qualities are mixed. The lower ones are prevented from taking full effect because the higher ones have been added. If you now separate the two by doing the exercises you may find that someone who until now was more or less bearable grows malicious and cunning and also shows a whole lot of other bad characteristics. This is something you have to understand. The danger can definitely be prevented by doing specific preliminary exercises that establish a particular inner morality full of character.

The pupil must first learn to keep strict control of his thoughts. He must practise making one thought the focus of his inner life for a long period, the more intensely so the better. He must stick with it and let all thoughts follow from it. This exercise must be done for at least five minutes every day. The more the better, but one should not overdo it.

2) It is necessary to be able to take initiative in one's actions. This is done by the pupil doing one particular thing on his own initiative every day. It may be something quite small and insignificant, for instance watering one's flowers. After a time one takes up another initiative.

3) One has to gain mastery over pleasure and pain. There must be no more of being on top of the world one moment and down in the dumps the next. This mastery will make you more subtly receptive, but you yourself must be the master, not your inner responses.

4)There is need to be positive. A Persian legend about Christ Jesus will show you what is meant. The Christ was walking with some of his disciples. A dead, partly decomposed dog was lying by the roadside. The disciples turned away and said: ‘How horrible that creature is!’ The Christ stopped, however, and said: ‘Look how beautiful the animal's teeth are!’ You can look for and find something beautiful in the ugliest things, something great in the smallest of things. One must always look for the positive side.

5) One has to learn to be completely unbiased towards anything new. Absence of bias to the highest degree. People tend to say: ‘I've never heard of this before, seen this before; I don't believe it!’ We have to learn in the widest possible sense never to say something is impossible. There should be a place in our hearts where one allows it to be possible, say, that the church tower is at an angle if someone says it is at an angle. We should at least consider it to be possible if we hear such a thing.

The 6th level consists in bringing the 5 qualities into harmony.

The pupil will then have developed such inner strength that he will be protected from anything occult training might otherwise do to him. It would be wrong to set limits to occult training and say: ‘All I want is the ethical value.’ Anyone wishing to enter into the higher worlds must follow the indicated route. The road to the most sublime insights is also the way of greatest compassion. We must gain such compassion from insight, not with phrases. When someone has broken a leg all the people standing around full of compassion will be of no use, only the one individual who knows what to do and does it properly. Merely to preach theosophy is like standing in front of the stove and saying: ‘It is your duty to get the room warm.’ And it is the same if you tell people to practise brotherly love. Just as you have to put wood in the stove and put a match to it, so you have to give people what they need if their souls are to unite in one great brotherhood, and that is insight. True insight is the fuel for the great brotherly union among human beings. Today we have the age of materialism, and because of this people have gone their separate ways.

• 174. Public lecture on spiritual research and its mission given in Vienna on 21 February 1907. Rudolf Steiner spoke on the same subject in Berlin on 11 October 1906 (see Supersensible Knowledge (GA 55); tr. R. Stebbing. Hudson & London: Anthroposophic Press & Rudolf Steiner Press 1987.
• 175. Hatha-Yoga uses mainly external methods such as holding one's breath and special body positions. Raja-Yoga is the 6th to 8th stages on the way to salvation in Sankhya philosophy—concentration, meditation, complete absorption.
• 176. Rudolf Steiner was probably thinking mainly of E. von Hartmann. See note 166.
• 177. Rudolf Steiner often referred to this, e.g. in a lecture he gave in Basel on 22 Nov. 1907 (in GA 100); Typescript notes EN 50 at Rudolf Steiner House Library, London. There he said: ‘You draw the plant vertically, pointing to the earth, the human being also vertically, but pointing away from the earth, and the animal horizontally.’ Also in Berlin on 29 May 1905, in The Temple Legend GA 93); tr. J. Wood. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1985. This is in contrast to the drawing for the lecture given in Leipzig on 16 February 1907 (in this volume); see note 168.
• 178. The next public lecture Rudolf Steiner gave was the one on 29 April 1906 (in this volume). There followed the fundamental course of lectures he gave on 22 August–4 September 1906 in Stuttgart (At the Gates of Spiritual Science; GA 95).

The Temptation is presented in the Gospel of St. Matthew as an account of a particular form of Initiation. The story is followed by indications of what Christ Jesus was to mean, firstly to His disciples. Not only was He to be the expounder of the ancient teachings in an entirely new form but a living force—if this word may be used—a health-giving force for men. This is demonstrated in the healings.

In the lecture yesterday we went on to consider a subject which, if it is to be understood, calls for a certain measure of goodwill arising from spiritual-scientific knowledge acquired through the years. We spoke of the unique, living quality of teaching imparted through the transmission of forces from Christ Jesus into the souls of His disciples. An attempt was made to express a great mystery in words of human language and to indicate the nature of the teaching given by Christ Jesus to His disciples. We may think of Christ Jesus Himself as a focal point, a focal centre, as it were, for forces that were to stream from the Macrocosm into the conditions of life on the Earth and into the souls of the disciples. Such forces could be marshalled only by powers that were concentrated in Christ Himself. Through Him, forces which otherwise stream into man unconsciously during sleep, streamed to the disciples as illuminating, life-giving forces of the Cosmos itself. To characterize these forces in any detail is of course only possible by studying the difference in cosmic constellations, and it is this mystery, as presented in the Gospel of St. Matthew, to which we shall give attention to-day. In the first place, however, it must be realised that the disciples had inevitably become wiser in regard to conditions on Earth because thc powers and forces of Christ Jesus had poured upon them. In diverse ways and degrees they had become more mature, had acquired more living wisdom.

A very significant phenomenon in the development of one of the disciples is presented to us, but to be understood it must be contemplated in a vast setting. And here the fact must be kept firmly in mind that the individual man himself progresses together with evolving humanity. In the post-Atlantean era we have passed through incarnation after incarnation in the ancient Indian, the ancient Persian, the Egypto-Chaldean and the Greco-Latin civilization-epochs, in order to receive some-thing from the environment and the prevailing conditions of the times. That is how progress is made.

What does development through the epochs of human evolution really mean? From elementary Anthroposophy we know of the different members of man's being: physical body, etheric body, astral body, sentient soul, intellectual or mind-soul, spiritual or consciousness-soul. The higher members still to be developed are Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man. Something quite definite is achieved for each of these members in thc several epochs of post-Atlantean civilization. Thus in the first epoch, forces enhancing the capacities of the etheric body were instilled into man. Such forces had been implanted in his physical body during the last periods of the Atlantean era and the first gifts to be bestowed in the post-Atlantean era were those imparted to the etheric body during the epoch of ancient Indian culture. During the epoch of ancient Persia, forces were implanted in man's astral body, or sentient body; during the Egypto-Chaldean and Greco-Latin epochs in the sentient soul and intellectual or mind-soul respectively; and we are living now in the age when the forces connected with this line of progress are gradually to be instilled into the spiritual or consciousness-soul. No very great advance has yet been made in this respect. In the future sixth post-Atlantean epoch the forces of the Spirit-Self will be implanted in human nature, and in the seventh epoch those of the Life-Spirit. And then we glimpse a far, far distant future, when Spirit-Man, or Atma, is to be inculcated into normal human nature.

We will now think of this process of development in relation to the individual human being. Those who knew the truth of these things from the Mysteries always pictured man as we must picture him now and as the disciples too had to learn to picture him through the enlightenment that had come to them from Christ Jesus. In a human being—either as he is to-day or also as he was at the time of Christ Jesus—there are rudiments or seeds, just as there are in a plant; they are already present when the plant has developed only leaves, and not yet flower and fruit. Looking at such a plant we know that although it now has leaves only, there already lie within it the germinal beginnings of flower and fruit, and that these will develop if growth proceeds in the normal and regular way. As surely as flower and fruit will grow out of the plant although at first it has green leaves only, as surely will the consciousness-soul arise in the human being—who in the days of Christ Jesus had developed only the sentient soul and the intellectual or mind-soul. The consciousness-soul then prepares to receive the Spirit-Self, in order that the highest triad may come as a new divine-spiritual gift to man. Therefore we can say: Through the contents and qualities of his soul, man's development is like that of a plant which, to begin with, has green leaves only but subsequently both flower and fruit. Out of sentient soul, mind-soul and spiritual or consciousness-soul, man unfolds something like a flower of his being, holding it in readiness to receive a divine power that comes down to him from above—this power being the Spirit-Self which enables him to reach further stages along the path leading to the heights of evolution.

In men who were living at the time of Christ Jesus the intellectual or mind-soul had developed in the perfectly normal way as their highest soul-principle; but although the intellectual or mind-soul was not able to receive into itself the Spirit-Self, there was to develop, as the child of the intellectual soul, the spiritual or consciousness-soul into which the Spirit-Self could descend.

What was the expression used in the Mysteries when referring to this flower that was to unfold from man's own nature? How was this growth defined in the environment of Christ Jesus when it was a matter of indicating that the disciples were to make a true advance in their development? Translated into our language, the expression used was ‘Son of Man’. The Greek has by no means the restricted meaning of our ‘son’ as ‘son of a father’ but signifies the successor of a living being, an entity that evolves from a living being like the blossom or flower of a plant on which hitherto there have been leaves only. Hence in the era before normally developed men had unfolded the consciousness-soul as the flower of their nature they had nothing of the ‘Son of Man’ in them. But there must always be some who are in advance of their generation, who already bear within them in an earlier epoch the knowledge and potentialities of a later one. In the fourth epoch—when normally only the intellectual or mind-soul had developed—there would always have been some among the leaders of men who, although their outward appearance was similar to that of others, had already unfolded the seed of the spiritual or consciousness-soul into which the Spirit-Self sends its radiance.—And there were indeed such ‘Sons of Men’. Hence it behooved the disciples of Christ Jesus to recognize and learn to understand the nature of these leaders.

To test how far this was understood by His intimate disciples, Christ Jesus asked them: Tell me, of which human beings it can be said that they are ‘Sons of Men’ in this generation?—That is approximately how the question would have to be formulated in accordance with the original Aramaic text of St. Matthew's Gospel. (I have already said that although the Greek version, if it is thoroughly understood, is certainly better than that produced by any modern scholarship, a great deal was inevitably obscured in the process of translation from the Aramaic original.) We must picture Christ Jesus standing before His disciples and asking them: Which individuals of the previous generations in the Greco-Latin epoch are held to have been ‘Sons of Men’? The disciples then spoke of Elias, John the Baptist, Jeremias, and other prophets. Through the power transmitted to them by Christ the disciples knew that those leaders of men had been the recipients of forces enabling them to become bearers of the ‘Son of Man’. On the same occasion, the disciple who is usually called Peter, gave still another answer.

To understand this answer we must keep firmly in mind what has been said in these lectures about the mission of Christ Jesus as indicated in the Gospel of St. Matthew, namely that through the Christ Impulse it was possible for men to develop Ego-consciousness in the fullest sense, to bring to blossom what is implicit in the am'. In other words : even in the actual process of Initiation, men were in future to retain all along the paths leading into the higher worlds the full Ego-consciousness normally possessed only on the physical plane. This was made possible through Christ's existence on the Earth. We can therefore say: Christ Jesus is the representative, the embodiment, of the power which imparts to mankind full consciousness of the ‘I am.’

I have already called attention to the fact that the interpretations of the Gospels put forward by rationalists, let alone by declared sceptics, do not usually emphasize the points of real significance. It is insisted that certain phrases in the Gospels and other books of the Bible were in existence previously, for example the Beatitudes. But the shade of meaning that was not there previously—and this is the gist of the whole matter—is that what could not then be attained by the human being in full Ego-consciousness, could now be attained by him through the Christ Impulse! This is of the very greatest significance. I have spoken of each Beatitude and have shown that the words of the first should be: ‘Blessed are they who are beggars for the spirit’—because a man is poor in spirit who on account of the advancing evolution of human consciousness can no longer look into the spiritual world with the old clairvoyance. But to such men Christ gives this consolation and enlightenment: Although they can no longer see into the spiritual world with the organs of the old clairvoyance, vision of the world will now be possible through their own Ego, for through themselves they will find the Kingdoms of Heaven! So too the second Beatitude: ‘Blessed are they that mourn.’ They will no longer be dependent upon the faculty of the old clairvoyance for reaching the spiritual world, for they will now achieve this by developing their own Ego. But in order that this may come to pass the Ego must take into itself more and more of the power that was anchored once on Earth in a unique Being—in Christ.

Men of the modern age ought really to give a little thought to the following.—It is not for nothing that Greek words of vital importance occur in every Beatitude: Thus the first sentence, ‘Blessed are they who are beggars for the spirit’, should be followed by the words: ‘In themselves’—or ‘through themselves’—‘they will find the Kingdoms of Heaven.’ The words, ‘In themselves’ are always accentuated, in the second sentence, in the third, and so on.

Forgive me if by a trivial analogy I now call attention to something of importance at the present time. People will have to resolve not to apply the word ‘auton’—as in our automobile—to machines only or to take it in an entirely external sense. They will have to understand in a spiritual sense too the quality or activity implied by ‘self-engendered activity’. Our contemporaries would do well to take this admonition to heart. They welcome ‘self-engendered activity’ in machines, but they should also learn what this activity implies in regard to inner experience which in all the Mysteries was beyond the reach of Ego-consciousness until the time of the Christ Event. Through self-engendered activity, man himself is now able by degrees to become a creator. And this is what the men of to-day will learn to under-stand if they fill themselves with the Christ Impulse.

Keeping this in mind we shall realise that another question put by Christ Jesus to the disciples was of very special importance. He had first asked: Who among the leaders of a former generation could be called a ‘Son of Man’?—and the disciples had spoken of certain individuals. He then put a further question, wishing to bring them gradually to the point of understanding His own nature, of understanding what He represented in regard to Egohood. This is implicit in the other question: ‘But whom say ye that I am?’ (Matt. XVI, 15). (Special importance must in every instance be attached to the words ‘I am’ in the Gospel of St. Matthew.) The answer given by Peter showed that he now recognized Christ not only as a ‘Son of Man’ but as the ‘Son of the living God’—and this translation can well be retained.

What is the difference between ‘Son of the living God’ and ‘Son of Man’? To understand this, certain facts already known to us must be elaborated.

As man evolves, the spiritual or consciousness-soul develops in him; in the consciousness-soul the Spirit-Self can become manifest. But when the consciousness-soul has developed in a man, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man must as it were come towards him, in order that this opening flower of his being may receive the higher triad. This ascent of man can also be likened to the development and growth of a plant.

Man's being comes to flower in the spiritual or consciousness-soul and Spirit-Self or Manas, Life-Spirit or Budhi, and Spirit-Man or Atma, stream towards him. This may be likened to a process of spiritual fertilization from above. Whereas man grows upwards from below with the other members of his being, unfolding the flower that is the ‘Son of Man’, if he is to progress even further and acquire full Ego-consciousness there must come to him from above the gift of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. And who is the representative of this gift from above, pointing to what man's nature will be in a far, far distant future? The first gift received is the Spirit-Self. He who receives the Spirit-Self coming from above—of whom is he the representative? He is the representative, the Son, of the God who lives, the Son of the Life-Spirit, the Son of the living God!

And now Christ Jesus asks: What is it that must come to men through my impulse?—It is the life-giving, Spirit-principle from above! Thus a distinction must be made between the Son of Man who has grown upwards from below the Son of God, the Son of the living God, who comes down from above. But the difficulty of this question for the disciples will be apparent to you when you realise that they were the very first to receive what the simplest of men since the time of Christ Jesus have received through the Gospels. It was only the living forces of Christ Jesus that enabled the disciples to assimilate all this teaching. The faculties they had already developed were not capable of answering the question: Of whom am I myself the representative? The Gospel then records that one of the disciples, Peter by name, gave the answer: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!’ At the moment of its utterance, this was an answer that did not issue from Peter's normal spiritual faculties.

Let us try to picture the scene vividly.—As He gazed at Peter, Christ Jesus realised the great significance of the fact that there should have come from this mouth an answer pointing to an immeasurably distant future. And then, perceiving the actual range of Peter's consciousness and of powers sufficiently developed to enable him to give such an answer through his intellect or through faculties acquired at stages leading to Initiation, Christ Jesus was bound to affirm: This answer does not spring from Peter's conscious knowledge; it is those deeper powers, only gradually transformed by man into conscious powers, that arc speaking here.

Through transforming the forces of our astral, etheric and physical bodies we rise to Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. This is an elementary teaching of Spiritual Science. The forces We shall eventually unfold in the astral body as Spirit-Self are already within the astral body, but they are there by the grace of divine-spiritual Powers; their development is not due to our own efforts and activity. So too there is divine Life-Spirit within our etheric body. Hence Christ says to Peter: It is not what is in your consciousness at this moment that spoke from your mouth, but something you will develop only in the future, something that is indeed within you but of which as yet you know nothing. What is part of your flesh and blood is not yet capable of uttering the words: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.’ Divine-spiritual powers lying deeply below the threshold of consciousness—indeed the very deepest powers in human nature—were speaking out of you at that moment.—It was the mysterious higher Powers in Peter—called by Christ the ‘Father in Heaven’—the Powers out of which Peter had indeed been born but of which he was not yet conscious, that spoke out of him. Hence the saying: ‘This has been revealed to you by the Father in Heaven, not by what you are at present as a man of flesh and blood.’

In these circumstances Christ was bound to say to Himself: ‘In Peter I have a disciple whose whole constitution is such that the Father-power within him has not yet been touched by forces already engendered by consciousness, by the operations of spiritual activity; this subconscious power is so strong in Peter that it can be his sure foundation when he surrenders himself to it. This is the important quality in him. It is also present in every human being, but will be raised into the conscious state only in the future. If what I have to impart to mankind, if that for which I am the impulse, is to unfold and lay hold of men, it must be founded upon the utterance made through the mouth of Peter: ‘Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God!’ Upon this rock in human nature, unharmed as yet by the surging waves of consciousness, upon the Father-power voicing itself in those words, I will build what must spring with ever-increasing strength from my impulse.’—

When this foundation is established, the humanity embodying the Christ Impulse will arise.—This is implicit in the words: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build that which can create a community of men faithful to the Christ Impulse!’

Glib discussions and debates about these words in St. Matthew's Gospel take place to-day, for nearly all over the world they are the subject of controversy. They must indeed not be taken lightly. They can be understood only when their meaning is drawn from the depths of the wisdom that is the wisdom of the Mysteries.

And now something else is indicated, namely that Christ Jesus does indeed build upon the deeper, subconscious power in Peter. Immediately afterwards He begins to speak of what is about to befall, and of the Mystery of Golgotha. The moment has already passed when the deeper nature in Peter was speaking; he now gives utterance to what has already become conscious in him. Now he cannot understand what Christ means, cannot believe that suffering and death are to ensue. And when the Peter who has developed his own conscious faculties is speaking, Christ must reprove him, saying: This is not uttered by a Divinity within you but by faculties you have developed in yourself as a human being; what these faculties have here produced is worthless, for its source is delusion; it comes from Ahriman, from Satan!—This is implied in the words: ‘Get thee behind me, Satan. Thou art an offence unto me; for thou savourest not the things that be of God but those that be of men.’ (Matt. XVI, 23). Christ uses the word ‘Satan’ for Ahriman, whereas elsewhere in the Bible the word ‘Devil’ applies to everything of a Luciferic nature. Christ uses the right word for the delusion to which Peter succumbs.

Such is the truth. But what does modern Bible exegesis make of these episodes? It has realised that Christ Jesus cannot have said to Peter at one minute: ‘You alone have recognized that a God is standing before you!’ and have called him ‘Satan’ the next. So some critics conclude that the word ‘Satan’ must have been interpolated at a later time and is therefore a falsification.—The fact of the matter is that the meaning attributed to this by modern philological research makes current opinion on the subject quite worthless. Only on the basis of a fundamental understanding of the Bible is it possible for any authentic statement to be made about the origins of the texts in question.

But between the two sayings I have quoted there is another, intelligible only in the light of an ancient, yet ever, new Mystery-teaching: that man as he is on Earth—not only the individual but every community of men—is a mirror-image of processes in the Macrocosm. Mention was made of this when we were speaking of the genealogy of Jesus of Nazareth. It was explained that the meaning of the words spoken to Abraham was: ‘Thy descendants shall be an image of the order of the stars in heaven.’ The order of the twelve constellations and of the movement of the planets through the Zodiac was to be repeated in the twelve tribes and in the history of the Hebrew people through three times fourteen generations. Thus in the sequence of the generations and the special heredity resulting from the blood-ties in the twelve tribes, there was to be an image of macrocosmic conditions. Such was the declaration made to Abraham.

At the moment when Peter, whose deeper nature had been able to understand that the Christ Impulse signified the down-flow of spiritual power through the Son of the living God—at that moment Christ knows that He can speak to those around Him of the beginning of something new arising on the Earth. Whereas it had been declared to Abraham that the image of cosmic conditions was to be formed by blood-kinship, this image was now to be replaced by one formed by relationships of an ethical, moral and spiritual character, giving expression to what man can attain through his Ego. When men understand, as the deeper nature in Peter understood, what the Christ truly is, they will not establish communities and institutions based entirely on the blood-tie but communities where the bond of love is woven from soul to soul. Just as in the blood of the Hebrew people and in the threads running through the generations, that which was ordained to be bound together in the human race was bound together and that which was ordained to be loosed was loosed according to the pattern of the Macrocosm, so there was now to arise through the conscious Ego, in the form of ethical, moral and spiritual relationships, the force that either looses the ties between human beings or binds them together in love. Human institutions were now to be created or harmonized by the conscious Ego. This is the meaning of the words spoken by Christ Jesus in continuation of the answer He had given to Peter: ‘Whatever you bind on Earth—whatever thc deeper nature in you binds—that shall be bound in Heaven, and whatever the same deeper nature in you looses on the Earth below, shall also be loosed in Heaven’ (see Matt. XVI, 19).

In ancient times the all-important factor in associations among human beings was blood-relationship. But men must now grow to the stage where the ties of real significance are of a spiritual, moral and ethical character. From this it follows that a community must mean something for an individual who has been a contributory factor in the founding of it. In the sense of Anthroposophy, we can say: the karma of the individual must be merged with the karma of communities. This will be known to you from what has been said in recent years. The idea of karma is not repudiated when I give something to one who is needy, nor when the karma. of an individual is shouldered for him by the community. The community can help to bear the fate of the individual. In other words, the following may happen in the moral sphere. A single member of a community commits a wrong. This will quite certainly be inscribed in his personal karma and be worked out in the great setting of world-existence. But someone else may come forward and say: ‘I will help you to work out this karma!’—The karma must be fulfilled, but the other person can help; whole communities can help the one who has committed a wrong. The karma of an individual may be so interwoven with the community that the community, regarding him as a member, deliberately shoulders§ the burden of his destiny, feeling for him and resolving that his lot shall be ameliorated. The attitude of the community may be: You, as an individual, have done wrong, but we will enter the lists for you; we take upon ourselves whatever will bring about the adjustment of your karma!—If ‘church’ is substituted for ‘community’, this means that the church assumes the obligation to take upon itself the sins of the individual, to share the burden of his karma. It is not a matter of what is to-day called ‘forgiveness of sins’, but of a real bond, an acceptance of the burden of sins. And the essential point is that the community consciously accepts this burden.

If the ‘binding’ and ‘loosing’ are understood in thiS sense, every case of forgiveness of Sins would entail an obligation on the part of the community. Thus a web is spun by the threads of individual karma being woven into the karma of the whole community. And this web, through what Christ brought down from the heights of the Spirit, is to be an image of the order prevailing in Heaven; that is to say, the karma of the individual is not to be bound with the collective karma in any fortuitous way but so that the community as an organism shall become an image of the order prevailing in Heaven.

This scene of Peter's avowal now begins to reveal an infinitely profound meaning to those who have a dawning understanding of it. It denotes the founding of thc humanity of the future—a humanity based upon the Ego-nature in man. What takes place in this intimate conversation between Christ and those who were closest to Him is that Christ transmits the power He Himself has brought from the Macrocosm to what the disciples are to establish. And from this point onwards the Gospel of St. Matthew recounts how the disciples are led upwards, step by step, to the stage where the powers of the Sun and of the Cosmos gathered together in the Christ Being can flow into them. We know that one form of Initiation is an expansion into the Macrocosm. And because Christ Himself is the impulse in this Initiation, He leads His disciples out into the Cosmos. While an individual aspirant is undergoing the process of this Initiation he passes consciously into the Macrocosm, gathering knowledge of it by degrees. Christ descends as it were from the Macrocosm, makes manifest its instreaming forces and conveys them to thc disciples.

In one part of the lecture yesterday I indicated how this takes place. Let us picture the scene as graphically as possible. While a man is asleep his physical and etheric bodies lie in the bed while his astral body and Ego pass out into the Cosmos and the forces of the Cosmos pour into these members of his being. If Christ were now to approach, He would be the One who consciously draws these forces to the sleeping man and illumines him. This is exactly what happens in a scene described in the Gospel. The disciples are in a ship in the fourth watch of the night. Then they see that the figure they had at first taken to be a spirit, is Christ, who enables the forces and power of thc Macrocosm to flow into them. How He leads the disciples to the stage where they can receive the forces of the Macrocosm is clearly portrayed.

The next scenes in St. Matthew's Gospel show how Christ leads the disciples step by step along the path taken by every would-be Initiate. It is as if Christ Himself is treading this path, leading His disciples by the hand to Initiation.—I will now say something that will enable you to realise how the disciples are led stage by stage into the Macrocosm.

Many things previously beyond man's ken become known to him through visions of the spiritual world, through clairvoyant faculties. Thus, for example, he is able to recognize the actual processes operating in the growth of plants. A materialist will say of a plant: Here I have a flower—let us say it is a fruit-bearing plant—and a seed will form in it. The seed can be extracted and laid in the soil; the grain eventually dissolves and a new plant, again bearing seed, appears. And so the process continues. Something passes over from the dissolving grain of seed into the new plant.—A materialist cannot possibly think otherwise than that something material, however minute, passes over. But it is not so. The truth is that in respect of its material, its substance, the old plant is entirely destroyed. A jump (Sprung) takes place and the new plant is an entirely new formation—in respect of material substance an absolutely new formation.

Facts of the very greatest importance are recognized and understood when this remarkable law is grasped. Jumps do actually occur in material conditions. This was expressed in the Mysteries in a very definite way. It was said: In passing into the Cosmos the aspirant for Initiation must at a certain stage acquire knowledge of the forces that bring about these ‘jumps’. Now certain processes in the Cosmos can be understood if the constellations are used as means of indication. The constellations are then like letters of a script. When we pass into the Cosmos in a particular direction we come to know the jumps that occur from forefather to successor—whether it be in the plant, animal or human kingdoms, or even in the realm of planetary existence. At the transitions of Saturn-evolution to Sun-evolution, of Sun-evolution to Moon-evolution, of Moon-evolution to Earth-evolution, everything material passed away. The spiritual remained and it was the spiritual that brought about the jumps. In small things and in great it is the same.

Two symbols have been used for this principle, one ancient and of a more pictorial, imaginative character, and another rather newer. You can find the newer symbol in calendars. As evolution advances, the past curls inwards like a vortex and the new phase emerges as a second vortex, unfolding from within outwards and leading on further. But the new phase is not actually joined to the old; between the end of the old phase and the beginning of the new there is a little ‘jump’ or ‘gap’ and only then does the process of evolution continue.

In the above figure we have two intertwining vortices and between them a little gap. This is the zodiacal sign of Cancer, symbolizing the process of growing out into the Macrocosm and the birth of a new shoot in some phase of evolution.

This principle was also represented by another symbol. Strange as it may seem to you, the symbol was an ass and its foal, the forefather and his offspring. This was meant to represent the actual transition from one condition to the other. Ancient delineations of the constellation of Cancer often consist of the figure of an ass and its foal. To know this is by no means without importance. It helps us to understand that another significant transition takes place when a man is rising to the stage leading into the spiritual world but must then be prepared for entirely new revelations. The stellar symbol correctly indicates this by portraying how when the physical sun passes through the constellation of Cancer and reaches the zenith, it descends again. And when the aspirant for Initiation first makes the ascent into the spiritual world and has acquired knowledge of its forces, he brings them down again in order to turn them to the service of humanity.

The Gospel of St. Matthew and the other Gospels too, tell how Christ Jesus presents this truth to the disciples. The way in which the story is told indicates that He is not using words alone but is presenting to them the Imagination, the living picture, of what He Himself is accomplishing as He approaches the height to which evolving humanity must in time ascend. He uses the image of the ass and its foal; that is to say, He guides the disciples towards an understanding of what corresponds in the spiritual life to the constellation of Cancer. This is a picture of something that has come to pass in the living, spiritual relationship between Christ and His disciples. So great is its majesty and its splendour that it cannot be expressed in the words of any human language but only through Christ Himself initiating the disciples into the conditions prevailing in the spiritual world and creating in physical conditions images of the Macrocosm He leads them to the point where the powers of one who is initiated become, in turn, of service to mankind. He is standing at the height that can only be indicated by the image of the Sun at the zenith of the sign of Cancer! No wonder that this chapter (XXI) of the Gospel of St. Matthew points to the supreme height now reached in Christ's earthly life, triumphantly proclaimed by the words: ‘Hosanna in the highest!’ Everything is ordained to the end that through what has here come to pass the disciples may grow to the stage where through the powers working in them there may unfold in men what Christ Jesus has brought into the evolution of humanity.

The story of the feast of the Passover is nothing else than an account of the living influx of the power that was to stream into the disciples, first as teaching and then into humanity as if by magic, as an outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is in this light that the continuation of the story, in the Gospel of St. Matthew is to be understood. Then we shall also realise that the writer of the Gospel was perpetually conscious of the need to point to the contrast between the living teaching brought from cosmic heights and imparted to the disciples, and the teaching suitable for those who were not yet ready to receive the forces of Christ Jesus Himself. Hence the utterances in the conversations with the Scribes and Pharisees which we shall be studying tomorrow. To-day, however, we will remind ourselves that after Christ Jesus has guided His disciples as far as possible along the path leading to the goal of all aspirants for Initiation, He holds out thc prospect that if they tread this path they themselves will pass into the spiritual world, into the Macrocosm. He tells them that they have within them the qualities necessary for subsequent Initiation, that Initiation is in store for them and that they will find the way into that world where they will recognize Christ more and more clearly as the Being who fills all spiritual space and was imaged in Jesus of Nazareth. Christ says to His disciples that they are approaching this Initiation, that they will become Initiates of humanity. He reminds them too that individual Initiation can be attained only if by dint of patience and endurance the inner nature is allowed to mature.

What is it that must grow in man's inner nature as its forces increase in strength and he develops a higher form of clairvoyance? His qualities must mature to the stage where he can receive into himself the forces of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. But when the power that makes him an Initiate, a participant in the Kingdoms of Heaven, will stream into him from above, depends upon the moment when he can become fully mature; it depends upon the karma of the individual. Who knows when the moment has come? It is known only to the very highest initiates, not to those at lower stages of Initiation. For any individuality who is ready to reach the spiritual world, the hour comes when he does so. Assuredly the hour comes, but in such a way that he is not aware of it—it comes like a thief in the night !

How does a man reach the spiritual world? In the ancient Mysteries—and in a certain respect it is so in the new—there were three stages of Initiation into the Macrocosm. When the first stage had been attained by the aspirant, the powers of the Spirit-Self became active in him and now he was not only a new man but had become one whose nature was said to be that of an ‘Angel—that is to say, a Being of the Hierarchy immediately above man. In the Mysteries of ancient Persia, a man possessing the powers of the Spirit-Self was called a ‘Persian’ because he was no longer a separate individual but belonged to the Angel of the Persian people. At the next stage of Initiation the Life-Spirit awakens. A man who had reached this stage was called a ‘Sun Hero’ in the Persian Mysteries, because he had developed to thc stage where he could receive the spiritual forces of the Sun streaming towards the Earth. But such a man was also called a ‘Son of the Father’. And one with whom Atma, or Spirit-Man, had made contact was called ‘Father’ in the ancient Mysteries. The three stages of Initiation were: Angel, Son or Sun Hero, Father.

Only the very highest Initiates, they and they alone are able to judge when the moment of Initiation can be reached. Hence Christ speaks to the following effect.—Initiation will be attained if you go forward on the paths along which I have led you. You will rise into the Kingdoms of Heaven, but the hour is known neither to the Angels in whom the Spirit-Self is working, neither to the Son in whom the Life-Spirit has awakened, but only to the very highest Initiates, those in whom the Father-principle is active.

Here again the words of St. Matthew's Gospel (XXIV, 36) are in absolute conformity with the tradition originating in the Mysteries. And we shall find that the proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing else than the prediction to the disciples that they will experience initiation. Christ Jesus indicates this very clearly in the text of the Gospel of St. Matthew. If the relevant passage is correctly interpreted it is quite evident that Christ is referring to certain teachings in circulation at that time on the subject of reaching the Kingdoms of Heaven. Men had taken this in the material sense, believing that it applied to the whole Earth, whereas they ought to have known that the Kingdoms of Heaven are reached by a few individuals only, through their Initiation. In other words, the opinion was held by some that the Earth would be transformed in a material sense into Heaven. And Christ draws special attention to this by speaking of the coming of those who would proclaim it. He calls them false prophets and false Messiahs! How strange it is that even to-day a few so-called Gospel critics spread the fable that the prospect of an approaching material Kingdom of God was a teaching given by Christ Jesus Himself ! Anyone able to read the Gospel of St. Matthew correctly knows that Christ Jesus was referring to a spiritual happening within the eventual reach of one who is approaching Initiation, but in the course of Earth-evolution becoming accessible to all those members of humanity who cleave to Him and in attaining higher stages of development bring about the spiritualisation of the Earth itself.

This aspect too must give us deeper insight into the structure of St. Matthew's Gospel. We shall then feel profound reverence for a Gospel from which, as from no other, we can learn unmistakably how the disciples of Christ Jesus were the first to receive teaching that was directed to the Ego itself. We picture Christ's disciples standing around Him and perceive how the forces of the Cosmos are working through the human body He bore. We picture Him guiding His disciples in a way that enables them to acquire the knowledge accessible to all who are approaching Initiation. We hear of human situations formed around Him. This is what makes St. Matthew's Gospel seem so near to us in a human sense. Through this Gospel we learn to know the man Jesus of Nazareth, the bearer of the Christ; we learn to know what Christ accomplished through His descent into the nature of Man. Even happenings in the heavenly worlds are presented in terms of human situations and relationships in the Gospel of St. Matthew.

In the final lecture tomorrow these things will be considered not only from the aspect of Initiation but from other aspects as well.

The two previous lectures were devoted to considerations intended to show how that tremendous change, which entered into the whole soul constitution of civilized mankind with the fifteenth century—that is, with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period—continued to have an effect on outstanding personalities. Let me introduce today's lecture with a brief summary of these preceding considerations. I showed how intensely a personality such as Goethe sensed the continuing vibrations of the great change, how he sensed that it was a concrete experience to find intellectual reasoning entering into the human soul. He sensed that it was necessary to come to terms with the intellectual element of the soul and he also had an inkling of the direct intercourse between human beings and the spiritual world which had preceded this intellectual stage. Even though it was no longer as it had been in the days of ancient atavistic clairvoyance, there was nevertheless a kind of looking back to the time when human beings knew that it was only possible for them to find real knowledge if they stepped outside the world of the senses in order to see in some way the spiritual beings who existed behind the sense-perceptible world.

Goethe invested the figure of his Faust with all these things sensed in his soul. We saw how dissatisfied Faust is by stark intellectualism as presented to him in the four academic faculties:

I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end ...

He is saying in different words: I have loaded my soul with the whole complexity of intellectual science and here I now stand filled with the utmost doubt; that is why I have devoted myself to magic.

Because of dissatisfaction with the intellectual sciences, Goethe invests the Faust figure with a desire to return to intercourse with the spiritual world. This was quite clear in his soul when he was young, and he wanted to express it in the figure of Faust. He chose the Faust figure to represent his own soul struggles. I said that although this is not the case with the historical Faust of the legend, we could nevertheless find in Goethe's depiction of Faust that professor who might have taught at Wittenberg in the sixteenth or even in the seventeenth century, and who had, ‘Straight or crosswise, wrong or right’, led his scholars by the nose ‘these ten years long’. This hypothesis allows us to see how in this educational process there was a mixture of the new intellectualism with something pointing back to ancient days when intercourse with the spiritual world and with the spiritual powers of creation was still possible for human beings.

I then asked whether—apart from what is given us in the Faust drama—we might also, in the wider environment, come up against the effects of what someone like Faust could have taught in the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries. And here we hit upon Hamlet, about whom it could be said: The character which Shakespeare created out of Hamlet—who in his turn he had taken from Danish mythology and transformed—could have been a pupil of Faust, one of those very students whom Faust had led by the nose ‘these ten years long’. We see Hamlet interacting with the spiritual world. His task is given to him by the spiritual world, but he is constantly prevented from fulfilling it by the qualities he has acquired as a result of his intellectual education. In Hamlet, too, we see the whole transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period.

Further, I said that in the whole mood and artistic form of Shakespeare's plays, that is, in the historical plays, we could find in the creativity of the writer of Shakespeare's plays the twilit mood of that time of transition. Then I drew your attention to the way in which Goethe and Schiller in Central Europe had stood in their whole life of soul within the dying vibrations of the transition, yet had lacked, in a certain sense, the will to accept what the intellectual view of the world had since then brought about in the life of human beings. This led them back to Shakespeare, for in his work—Hamlet, Macbeth and so on—they discovered the capacity to approach the spiritual world; from his vantage point, they could see into the world of spiritual powers which was now hidden from the intellectual viewpoint.

Goethe did this in his Götz von Berlichingen by taking the side of the dying echoes of the old time of the fourth post-Atlantean period and by rejecting what had come into being through intellectualism. Schiller, in the dramas of his youth, especially in Die Räuber (The Robbers), goes back to that time—not by pointing to the super-sensible world, but by endeavouring to be entirely realistic, yet putting into the very words characterizing Karl Moor something which echoes the luciferic element that is also at work in Milton's Paradise Lost.¹ In short, despite his realism, we detect a kind of return to a conception of reality which allows the spiritual forces and powers to shine through.

I indicated further that, in the West, Shakespeare was in a position—if I may put it like this—to work artistically in full harmony with his social environment. Hamlet is the play most characteristic of Shakespeare. Here the action is everywhere quite close to the spiritual world, as it is also in Macbeth. In King Lear, for instance, we see how he brings the super-sensible world more into the human personality, into an abnormal form of the human personality, the element of madness. Then, in the historical dramas about the kings, he goes over more into realism but, at the same time, we see in these plays a unique depiction of a long drawn-out dramatic evolution influenced everywhere by the forces of destiny, but culminating and coming to an end in the age of Queen Elizabeth.

The thing that is at work in Shakespeare's plays is a retrospective view of older ages leading up to the time in which he lives, a time which is seen to be accepted by him. Everything belonging to older times is depicted artistically in a way which leads to an understanding of the time in which he lives. You could say that Shakespeare portrays the past. But he portrays it in such a way that he places himself in his contemporary western social environment, which he shows to be a time in which things can take the course which they are prone to take. We see a certain satisfaction with regard to what has come about in the external world. The intellectualism of the social order is accepted by the person belonging to the external, physical earthly world, by the social human being, whereas the artistic human being in Shakespeare goes back to earlier times and portrays that aspect of the super-sensible world which has created pure intellectualism.

Then we see that in Central Europe this becomes an impossibility. Goethe and Schiller, and before them Lessing, cannot place themselves within the social order in a way which enables them to accept it. They all look back to Shakespeare, but to that Shakespeare who himself went back into the past. They want the past to lead to something different from the present time in which they find themselves. Shakespeare is in a way satisfied with his environment; but they are dissatisfied with theirs.

Out of this mood of spiritual revolution Goethe creates the drama of Götz von Berlichingen, and Schiller the dramas of his youth. We see how the external reality of the world is criticized, and how in the artistic realm there is an ebbing and flowing of something that can only be achieved in ideas, something that can only be achieved in the spirit. Therefore we can say: In Goethe and Schiller there is no acceptance of the present time. They have to comfort themselves, so far as external sense-perceptible reality is concerned, with what works down out of the spiritual world. Shakespeare in a way brings the super-sensible world down into the sense-perceptible world. Goethe and Schiller can only accept the sense-perceptible world by constantly turning their attention to the spiritual world. In the dramas of Goethe and Schiller we have a working together of the spiritual with the physical—basically, an unresolved disharmony. I then said that if we were to go further eastwards we would find that there is nothing on the earth that is spiritual. The East of Europe has not created anything into which the spirit plays. The East flees from the external working of the world and seeks salvation in the spirit above.

I was able to clothe all this in an Imagination by saying to you: Let us imagine Faust as Hamlet's teacher, a professor in Wittenberg. Hamlet sits at his feet and listens to him, after which he returns to the West and accustoms himself once again to the western way of life. But if we were to seek a being who could have gone to the East, we should have had to look for an angel who had listened to Faust from the spiritual world before going eastwards. Whatever he then did there would not have resembled the deeds and actions of Hamlet on the physical plane but would have taken place above human beings, in the spiritual world.

Yesterday, I then described how, out of this mood, at the time when he was making the acquaintance of Schiller, Goethe felt impelled to bring the being of man closer to the spiritual world. He could not do this theoretically, in the way Schiller, the philosopher, was able to do in his aesthetic letters, but instead he was urged to enter the realm of Imagination and write the fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Then Schiller felt the urge to bring the external reality of human life closer to the spirit—I might say experimentally—in Wallenstein (Wallenstein's Camp), by letting a belief in the stars hold sway like a force of destiny over the personality of Wallenstein, and in Die Braut von Messina (Bride of Messina) by letting a destiny run its course virtually entwined with a belief in the stars. These personalities were impelled ever and again to turn back to the time when human beings still had direct intercourse with the spiritual world.

Further, I said that Goethe and Schiller lived at a time when it was not yet possible to find a new entry into the spiritual world from out of a modern soul constitution. Schiller in particular, with his philosophical bent, had he lived longer and finished the drama about the Knights of Malta, would have come to an understanding of how, in an order like this, or like that of the Templars, the spiritual worlds worked together with the deeds of human beings. But it was not granted to Schiller to give the world the finished drama about the Knights of Malta, for he died too soon. Goethe, on the other hand, was unable to advance to a real grasp of the spiritual world, so he turned back. We have to say that Goethe went back to Catholic symbolism, the Catholic cultus, the cultus of the image, though he did so in an essentially metamorphosed form. We cannot help but be reminded of the good nun Hrosvitha's legend of Theophilus² from the ninth century, when Goethe in his turn allows Faust to be redeemed in the midst of a Christianizing tableau. Although his genius lets him present it in a magnificently grand and artistic manner, we cannot but be reminded, in ‘The Eternal Feminine bears us aloft’, of the Virgin Mary elevating the ninth-century Theophilus.

An understanding of these things gives us deep insight into the struggle within intellectualism, the struggle in intellectualism which causes human beings to experience inwardly the thought-corpse of what man is before descending through birth—or, rather, through conception—into his physical life on earth. The thoughts which live in us are nothing but corpses of the spirit unless we make them fruitful through the knowledge given by spiritual science. Whatever we are, spiritually, up to the moment when earthly life begins, dies as it enters our body, and we bear its corpse within us. It is our earthly power of thought, the power of thought of our ordinary consciousness.

How can something that is dead in the spiritual sense be brought back to life? This was the great question which lived in the souls of Goethe and Schiller. They do not bring it to expression philosophically but they sense it within their feeling life. And they compose their works accordingly. They have the feeling: Something is dead if we remain within the realm of the intellect alone; we must bring it to life. It is this feeling which makes them struggle to return to a belief in the stars and to all sorts of other things, in order to bring a spiritual element into what they are trying to depict. It is necessary for us to be aware of how the course of world evolution is made manifest in such outstanding personalities, how it streams into their souls and becomes the stuff of their struggles. We cannot comprehend our present time unless we see that what this present time must strive for—a new achievement of the spiritual world—is the very problem which was of such concern for Goethe and Schiller.

What happened as a result of the great transition which took place in the fifteenth century was something of which absolutely no account is taken in ordinary history. It was, that the human being acquired an entirely different attitude towards himself. But we must not endeavour to capture this in theoretical concepts. We must endeavour to trace it in what human beings sensed; we must find out how it went through a preparation and how it later ran its course after the great change had been fulfilled in its essential spiritual force.

There are pointers to these things at crucial points in cultural evolution. See how this comes towards us in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival.³ You all know the story. You know how crucial it was for the whole of Parzival's development that he first of all received instruction from a kind of teacher as to how he was to go through the world without asking too many questions. As a representative of that older world order which still saw human beings as having direct intercourse with the spiritual world, Gurnemanz says to Parzival: Do not ask questions, for questioning comes from the intellect, and the spiritual world flees from the intellect; if you want to approach the spiritual world you must not ask questions.

But times have changed and the transition begins to take place. It is announced in advance: Even though Parzival goes back several more centuries, into the seventh or eighth century, all this was nevertheless experienced in advance in the Grail temple. Here, in a way, the institutions of the future are already installed, and one of them is that questions must be asked. The essential point is that with the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period the situation of the human being changes. Previously it was inappropriate to ask questions because conditions held sway about which Goethe speaks so paradoxically:

The lofty might
Of Science, still
From all men deeply hidden!
Who takes no thought,
To him 'tis brought,
'Tis given unsought, unbidden!

In those times it was right not to ask questions, for that would have driven away the spirits! But in the age of the intellect the spiritual world has to be rediscovered through the intellect and not by damping down the processes of thought. The opposite must now come into play; questions must be asked. As early as Parzival we find a portrayal of the great change which brings it about in the fifth post-Atlantean period that the longing for the spiritual world now has to be born out of the human being in the form of questions to be formulated.

But there is also something else, something very remarkable, which comes to meet us in Parzival. I should like to describe it as follows. The languages which exist today are far removed from their origins, for they have developed as time has gone on. When we speak today—as I have so often shown—the various combinations of sounds no longer remind us of whatever these combinations of sounds denote. We now have to acquire a more delicate sense for language in order to experience in it all the things that it signifies. This was not the case where the original languages of the human race were concerned. In those days it was known that the combination of sounds itself contained whatever was experienced in connection with the thing depicted by those sounds. Nowadays poets seek to imitate this. Think, for instance, of ‘Und es wallet und siedet und brauset und zischt’.⁴ Poetic language has here imitated something of what the poet wants us to see externally. But this is mere derived imitation. In olden times every single sound in language was felt to have the most intimate connection with what was happening all around. Today only some local dialects can lay claim to giving us some sense for the connection between external reality and the words spoken in dialect. However, language is still very close to our soul—it is a special element in our soul.

It is another consequence of the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period that this has become deposited as something very deeply sensed within the human soul, again a fact which is left out of account by both philology and history. The fact that in the fourth post-Atlantean period human beings lived more within their language and that in the fifth post-Atlantean period this is no longer the case, brings about a different attitude by human beings towards the world. You can understand that human beings with their ego are linked quite differently to what is going on around them if, in using language, they go along with all the rushing of waves, the thundering and lightning, and whatever else is happening out there. This becomes ever more detached as the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period progresses. The ego becomes more inward, and language together with the ego also becomes more inward, but at the same time less meaningful as regards external matters. Such things are most certainly not perceived by the knowledge of today, which has become so intellectual. There is hardly any concern to describe such things. But if what is taking place in mankind is to be correctly understood, they will have to be described.

Imagine what can come into being. Imagine vividly to yourselves, here the fourth post-Atlantean period, and here the fifth. The transition is of course gradual, but for the sake of explanation I shall have to talk in extremes. In the fourth post-Atlantean period you have here the things of the world (green). The human being with his words, depicted within him, here in red, is still connected with the things. You could say he 'lives over' into the things through the medium of his words. In the fifth post-Atlantean period the human being possesses his words within his soul, separated off from the world.

Imagine this clearly, even almost in grotesque detail. Looking at the human being here in the fourth post-Atlantean period, you might say of him that he still lives with the things. The things he does in the outside world will proceed to take place in accordance with his words. If you see one of these human beings performing a deed, and if at the same time you hear how he describes the deed, there is a harmony between the two. Just as his words are in harmony with external things, so are his deeds in harmony with the words he speaks. But if a human being in the fifth post-Atlantean period speaks, you can no longer detect that his words resound in what he does. What connection with the deed can you find today in the words: I have chopped wood! In what is taking place out there in the activity of chopping we can no longer sense in any way a connection with the movement of the chopper. As a result, the connection with the sounds of the words gradually disappears; they cease to be in harmony with what is going on outside. We no longer find any connection between the two. So then, if someone listens pedantically to the words and actually does

what lies in the words, the situation is quite different. Someone might say: I bake mice. But if someone were actually to bake mice, this would seem grotesque and would not be understood.

This was sensed, and so it was said: People ought to consider what they actually have in their soul in conjunction with what they do externally; the relationship between the two would be like an owl looking in a mirror! If someone were to do exactly what the words say, it would be like holding up a mirror to an owl. Out of this, in the second half of the fourteenth century, Till Eulenspiegel arose.⁵ The owl's mirror is held up in front of mankind. It is not Till Eulenspiegel who has to look in the mirror. But because Till Eulenspiegel takes literally what people say with their dry, abstract words, they suddenly see themselves, whereas normally they do not see themselves at all. It is a mirror for the owls because they can really see themselves in it.

Night has fallen. In past times, human beings could see into the spiritual world. And the activity of their words was in harmony with the world. Human beings were eagles. But now they have become owls. The world of the soul has become a bird of the night. In the strange world depicted by Till Eulenspiegel, a mirror is held up before the owl.

This is quite a feasible way of regarding what appears in the spiritual world. Things do have their hidden reasons. If we fail to take note of the spiritual background, we also fail to understand history, and with it the chief factor in humanity today. It is especially important to depart from the usual external characterization of everything. Look in any dictionary and see what absurd explanations are given for Eulenspiegel! He cannot be understood without entering into the whole process of cultural and spiritual life. The important thing in spiritual science is to actually discover the spirit in things, not in a way that entails a conceptual knowledge of a few spiritual beings who exist outside the sense-perceptible world, but in a way which leads us to an ability to see reality with spiritual eyes.

The change which took place, between the time when human beings felt themselves to be close to the spiritual world and the later time when they felt as though they had been expelled from that world, can be seen in other areas too. Try to develop a sense for the profound impulse which runs through something like the Parzival epic. See how Parzival's mother dresses him in a simpleton's clothes because she does not want him to grow up into the world which represents the new world. She wants him to remain in the old world. But then he grows up from the sense-perceptible world into the world of the spirit.

The seventeenth century also possesses a kind of Parzival, a comical Parzival, in which everything is steeped in comedy. In the intellectualistic age, if one is honest, one cannot immediately muster the serious attitude of soul which prevails in Parzival. But the seventeenth century too, after the great change had taken place, had its own depiction of a character who has to set out into the world, lose himself in it, finally ending-up in solitude and finding the salvation of his soul. This is Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus.⁶ Look at the whole process of the story. Of course you must take the whole tone into account, on the one hand the pure, perhaps holy mood of Parzival, and on the other the picaresque, comical mood. Consider Simplicissimus, the son of well-to-do peasants in the Spessart region. In the Thirty Years’ War their house is burnt down. The son has to flee, and finds his way to a hermit in the forest who teaches him all kinds of things, but who then dies. So here he is, abandoned in the world and having to set off on his travels. He becomes immersed in all the events and blows of fate offered by the Thirty Years’ War. He arrives at the court of the governor of Hanau. Externally he has learnt nothing, externally he is a pure simpleton; yet he is an inwardly mature person for all that. But because externally he is a pure simpleton the governor of Hanau says to himself: This is a simpleton, he knows nothing; he is Simplicissimus, as naive as can be. What shall I train him to be? I shall train him to be my court fool.

But now the external and the internal human being are drawn apart. The ego has become independent in respect of the external human being. It is just this that is shown in Simplicissimus. The external human being in the external world, trained to be the court fool, is the one who is considered by all and sundry to be a fool. But in his inner being Simplicissimus in his turn considers all those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. For although he has not learnt a thing, he is nevertheless far cleverer than all those who have made him into a fool. He brings out of himself the other intellectuality, the intellectuality that comes from the spirit, whereas what comes to meet him from outside is the intellectuality that comes from reasoning alone. So the intellectualists take him for a fool, and the fool brings his intellectualism from the spiritual world and holds those who take him for a fool to be fools themselves. Then he is taken prisoner by some Croats, after which he roams about the world undergoing many adventures, until finally he ends up once more at the hermitage where he settles down to live for the salvation of his soul.

The similarity between Simplicissimus and Parzival has been recognized, but the crucial thing is the difference in mood. What in Parzival's case was still steeped in the mind-soul has now risen up into the consciousness soul. Now caustic wit is at work, for the comical can only have its origin in caustic wit. If you have a feel for this change of mood, you will be able to discover—especially in works which have a broader base than that of a single individuality—what was going on in human evolution. And Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did indeed secrete in Simplicissimus the whole mood, the whole habit of thought of his time. Similarly you can in a way find the people as a whole composing stories, and gathering together all the things which the soul, in the guise of an owl, can see in the mirror, and which become all the tall tales found in Till Eulenspiegel.

It would be a good thing, once in a while, to go in more detail into all these things, not only in order to characterize the various interconnections. I can only give you isolated examples. To say everything that could be said I should have to speak for years. But this is not really what matters. What is crucial is to come closer to a more spiritual conception of these things. We have to learn to know how things which are presented to us purely externally are also connected with the spirit. So we may say: That tremendous change which took place in the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period can be seen everywhere, vibrating through the cultural and spiritual evolution of mankind. As soon as you step back a bit from this turning- point of time, you come to see how all the different phenomena point to the magnititude of the change.

Only by taking the interconnections into account is it possible to understand what lies hidden in the figures brought by spiritual and cultural life out of the past and into the present. Take Lohengrin, the son of Parzival. What does it mean that Elsa is forbidden to ask after his name and origin? People simply accept this. Not enough deep thought is given to the question as to why she is forbidden to ask, for usually there are two sides to everything. Certainly this could also be described differently, but one important aspect may be stated as follows: Lohengrin is an ambassador of the Grail; he is Parzival's son. Now what actually is the Grail community? Those who knew the mystery of the Grail did not look on the Grail temple as a place solely for the chosen knights of the Grail. They saw that all those who were pure in heart and Christian in the true sense went to the Grail while they slept—while they were between sleeping and waking. The Grail was seen as the place where all truly Christian souls gathered while they slept at night. There was a desire to be apart from the earth. So those who were the rulers of the Grail also had to be apart from earthly life. Lohengrin, the son of Parzival, was one of these. Those who desired to work in accordance with the Grail impulse had to feel themselves entirely within the spiritual world. They had to feel that they belonged entirely to the spiritual world and certainly not at all to the earthly world. In a certain sense you could say that they had to drink the draught of forgetfulness.

Lohengrin is sent down from the Grail castle. He unites with Elsa of Brabant, that is with the people of Brabant. In the train of Heinrich I he sets out to fight the Hungarians. In other words, at the instigation of the Grail he carries out important impulses of world history. The strength he has from the Grail temple enables him to do this. When we go back to the fourth post-Atlantean period we find that all these things are different. In those days spiritual impulses played their part together with external impulses that could be comprehended by the intellect. This is hardly noticeable in the way history is told today.

We speak quite rightly today of meditative formulae, simple sentences which work in the human being's consciousness through their very simplicity. How many people today understand what is meant when history tells us that those required to take part in the Crusades—they took place in the fourth post-Atlantean period—were provided with the meditative formula ‘God wills it’ and that this formula worked on them with spiritual force. ‘God wills it’ was a kind of social meditation. Keep a look out for such things in history; you will find many! You will find the origins of the old mottos. You will discover how the ancient titled families set out on conquering expeditions under such mottos, thus working with spiritual means, with spiritual weapons. The most significant spiritual weapons of all were used by knights of the Grail, such as Lohengrin. But he was only able to use them if he was not met with recollections of his external origins, his external name, his external family. He had to transport himself into a realm in which he could be entirely devoted to the spiritual world and in which his intercourse with the external world was limited to what he perceived with his senses, devoid of any memories. He had to accomplish his deeds under the influence of the draught of forgetfulness. He was not allowed to be reminded. His soul was not permitted to remember: This is my name and I am a scion of this or that family. So this is why Elsa of Brabant is not allowed to question him. When she does, he is forced to remember. The effect on his deeds is the same as if his sword had been smashed.

If we go back beyond the time when everything became intellectual, so that people also clothed what had gone before in intellectual concepts, imagining that everything had always been as they knew it—if we go back beyond what belongs to the age of the intellect, we find the spiritual realm working everywhere in the social realm. People took the spiritual element into account, for instance, in that they took moral matters just as much into account as physical medicines.

In the age of the intellect, in which all people belong only to the intellect, whatever would they think if they found that moral elements, too, were available at the chemist's! Yet we need only go back a few centuries prior to the great change. Read Der arme Heinrich by Hartmann von Aue,⁷ who was a contemporary of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Before you stands a knight, a rich knight, who has turned away from God, who in his soul has lost his links with the spiritual world, and who thus experiences this moment of atheism which has come over him as a physical illness, a kind of leprosy. Everyone avoids him. No physician can cure him. Then he meets a clever doctor in Salerno who tells him that no physical medicine can do him any good. His only hope of a cure lies in finding a pure virgin who is prepared to be slain for his sake. The blood of a pure virgin can cure him of his illness. He sells all his possessions and lives alone on a smallholding cared for by the tenant farmer. The farmer has a daughter. She falls in love with the leprous knight, discovers what it is that alone can cure him, and decides to die for him. He goes with her to the doctor in Salerno. But then he starts to pity her, preferring to keep his illness rather than accept her sacrifice. But even her willingness to make the sacrifice is enough. Gradually he is healed.

We see how the spirit works into cultural life, we see how moral impulses heal and were regarded as healing influences. Today the only interpretation is: Ah, well, perhaps it was a coincidence, or maybe it is just a tale. Whatever we think of individual incidents, we cannot but point out that, during the time which preceded the fifteenth century, soul could work on soul much more strongly than was the case later; what a soul thought and felt and willed worked on other souls. The social separation between one human being and another is a phenomenon of intellectualism. The more intellectualism flourishes and the less an effort is made to find what can work against it—namely the spiritual element—the more will this intellectualism divide one individuality from another.

This had to come about; individualism is necessary. But social life must be found out of individualism. Otherwise, in the ‘social age’ all people will do is be unsociable and cry out for Socialism. The main reason for the cry for Socialism is that people are unsocial in the depths of their soul. We must take note of the social element as it comes towards us in works such as Hartmann von Aue's Der arme Heinrich. It makes its appearance in cultural works in which it can be sensed quite clearly through the mood. See how different is the mood in Der arme Heinrich. You cannot call it sentimental, for sentimentality only arose later when people found an unnatural escape from intellectualism. The mood is in a way pious; it is a mood of spirituality. To be honest about the same matters in a later age you have to fall back on the element of comedy. You have to tell your story as Christoffel von Grimmelshausen did in Simplicissimus, or as the people as a whole did in Till Eulenspiegel.

This sense of having been thrown out of the world is found everywhere, not only in poetic works arising out of the folk element. Wherever it appears, you find that what is being depicted is a new attitude of the human being towards himself. From an entirely new standpoint he asks: What am I, if I am a human being? This vibrates through everything. So from the new intellectual standpoint the question is asked over and over again: What is the human being? In earlier times people turned to the spiritual world. They truly sought what Faust later seeks in vain. They turned to the spiritual world when they wanted to know: What actually is the human being? They knew that outside this physical life on earth the human being is a spirit. So if he wants to discover his true being, which lives in him also in physical, earthly life, then he will have to turn to the spiritual world. Yet more and more human beings are failing to do this very thing.

In Faust Goethe still hints: If I want to know the spirit, I must turn to the spiritual world. But it does not work. The Earth Spirit appears, but Faust cannot recognize it with his ordinary knowledge. The Earth Spirit says to him: ‘Thou'rt like the Spirit which thou comprehendest, not me!’⁸ Faust has to turn away and speak to Wagner. In Wagner he then sees the spirit which he comprehends. Faust, ‘image of the Godhead’, cannot comprehend the Earth Spirit. So Goethe still lived in an age which strove to find the being of man out of the spiritual world. You see what came once Goethe had died. Once again people wanted to know what the human being is, this time on the basis of intellectualism. Follow the thread: People cannot turn to the spiritual world in order to discover what the human being is. In themselves, equally, they fail to find the answer, for language has meanwhile become an owl in the soul. So they turned to those who depicted olden times at least in an external fashion. What do we find in the nineteenth century?⁹ In 1836 Jeremias Gotthelf: Bauernspiegel; in 1839 Immermann: Oberhof, Die drei Mahlen, Schwarzwalder Bauern geschichten; George Sand: La Petite Fadette; in 1847 Grigorovich: Unhappy Anthony; in 1847-51 Turgeniev: Sportsman's Sketches.

We have here the longing to find in simple people the answer to the question: What is the human being? In olden times you turned to the spiritual world. Now you turned to the peasant. During the course of two decades the whole world develops a longing to write village stories in order to study the human being. Because people cannot recognize themselves, at best looking in the mirror as if they are owls, they turn to simple folk instead. What they can prove in every detail, from Jeremias Gotthelf to Turgeniev, is that everything is striving to get to know the human being. In all these village stories, in all these simple tales, the unconscious endeavour is to achieve a knowledge of man. From this kind of viewpoint spiritual and cultural life can become comprehensible.

This is what I wanted to show you in these three lectures, in order to illustrate the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period. It is not enough to describe this transition with a few abstract concepts—which is what was naturally done at first. Our task is to illumine the whole of reality with the light of the spirit through Anthroposophy. These lectures have beenan example of this.

• 1 . John Milton, 1608-1674. English poet and puritan politician. His epic poem Paradise Lost was finished by 1665.
• 2 . Lecture Twelve, Note 7
• 3 . Wolfram von Eschenbach, c.1170-1220. One of the greatest medieval German poets. Parzival was probably written between 1200 and 1210.
• 4 . #8216;And it bubbles and seethes, and it hisses and roars’, Der Taucher by Friedrich von Schiller, translated by E. Bulwer Lytton in The Poems and Ballads of Schiller, Leipzig 1844.
• 5 . Till Eulenspiegel, a popular German peasant jester, was supposed to have died in Winn in 1350. The first extant text of the chapbook in High German chronicling his escapades was published in 1515. The name ‘Eulenspieger means, literally, ‘owl's mirror’. (Tr.)
• 6 . Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, d.1676. German writer. Simplicissimus, published in 1669, is said to be the greatest German novel of the seventeenth century.
• 7 . Hartmann von Aue, c.1170-1213. Middle High German poet. Der arme Heinrich (Poor Henry).
• 8 . ‘Thou'rt like the spirit’: Faust Part One. The Study.
• 9 . Jerennas Gotthelf (A. Bitzius), 1797-1854; Karl Immermann, 1796-1840; George Sand (A.A.L. Dupin-Dudevant), 1804-1876; D.W. Grigorovich, 1818-1883; I.S. Turgeniev, 1818-1883.

I should like, my dear friends, to make a few remarks about the Walpurgis-night performed yesterday, which we shall be playing again tomorrow, because it seems to me important to have a correct idea of how this Walpurgis-night fits in with the whole development of the Faust poem. It is indeed remarkable that, having brought such calamity upon Gretchen—her mother killing herself with a sleeping-draught, her brother coming into his end through the fault of Faust and Gretchen—Faust should then flee, leaving Gretchen completely in the lurch, and knowing nothing himself of what is happening.

An incident of this kind has naturally made no small impression on those who have studied the Faust poem with most sympathy. I will read you what was said on the subject by Schröer who certainly studied Faust with great warmth of heart. (You will find a note on Schröer in my recent publication Riddles of Man.) He says concerning the “Walpurgis-Night”:

“We are to suppose of Faust urged on by Mephistopheles, has fled, leaving Gretchen behind in misery. Her mother was dead, her brother killed. Close upon all this followed her confinement. She lost her reason, drowned her child, and wandered around until she was arrested and thrown into prison. Although Faust could not have known what befell Gretchen after Valentine's death, yet he had parted from her in circumstances that make it appear very unnatural to see him now, two days after, strolling—as it appears in the text—at his ease on the Brocken. It is obvious, however that the Walpurgis-night was not written in close coordination with the poem as a whole. The poet is clearly no longer in a pathetic vein, but attacks his subject with a touch of irony. The underlying idea of linking this scene with the whole is quite clear. Mephistopheles takes Faust away to the Brocken to bewilder him and make him forget Gretchen. But the love in Faust is stronger than Mephistopheles can understand. The witch-apparitions did not attract him; in the midst of the frenzied confusion the image of Gretchen rises before him—this thought certainly does not arise with sufficient insistence in the whole Walpurgis-night take too great a place in relation to the dramatic action. It grew to an independent whole becoming all the more excessive by reason of the addition of the “Walpurgis-night Dream”. This of course applies only to the Walpurgis-night as part of the tragedy.”

Thus, even a man having a real love for Faust cannot explain to his own satisfaction how it comes about that, two days after the calamity, Faust is to be seen full of vigour walking with Mephistopheles on the Brocken.

Now I should like your here to set against against this, something purely external—that the Walpurgis-night belongs to the most mature part of Goethe's Faust. It was written in 1800–1. As a quite young man Goethe began to write his Faust, so for that we may go back to the beginning of the seventies of the eighteenth century—1772, 1773, 1774; it was then he began to write the first scenes. In 1800 or so he was all that older and had passed the great experiences, recorded, for instance, in the story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily written before the Walpurgis-night that he now adds to his Faust. The Walpurgis-night Dream was actually written a year earlier than the Walpurgis-night itself. We may therefore suppose that Goethe took it very seriously the fitting of the Walpurgis-night mysteries into Faust. But the difficulty of understanding it can never be overcome unless we bear in mind that Goethe's meaning was really of a spiritual nature.

I have a pretty considerable knowledge of the commentaries on Faust written up to the year 1900, but not so much of those that were later; but up to 1900 I know them almost all, though since that I have not gone so deeply into what has been written on the subject. This I do know, however, that no one has taken it from a spiritual point of view. It may be objected, no doubt, that is asking too much of us to suppose that, two days after such a great misfortune, Faust should have gone off on a ramble in this carefree way. But Goethe was really not the commonplace, imperturbable Monist he is often pictured; he was a man, as the details of this Walpurgis-night themselves show, deeply initiated into certain spiritual connections. Anyone familiar with these connections, can see that there is nothing dilettante about the Walpurgis-night; everything in it shows deep knowledge. To speak rather trivially, you can see that there is something behind it, that it is not an ordinary poem but written out of understanding for what is spiritual. Anyone with the certain knowledge, can easily judge by details whether realities are spoken of, whether a poet's description is the result of spiritual understanding, or whether he is just thinking out something about spiritual worlds and their connections—for instance, the world of witches. O ne must cultivate a little observation in such matters.

I will tell you a simple story—I could tell you hundred of the same time—to illustrate how it can be seen from details whether, in what one is dealing with, there is anything behind. It goes without saying that sometimes one may be mistaken; it depends on the way the matter is presented.

I was once in a gathering of theologians, historians, poets, and so on. In this assembly the following story was told. (This was all long ago, nearly thirty years, in the eighties of the nineteenth century). Once in a church in Paris a Canon was preaching in a very fanatical way against superstition. He would only concede what the Church conceded. Above all he wished to prevent people from believing things that were objectionable to him in particular. Now this Canon in his fanatical sermon tried to convince his hearers that Freemasonry was a very evil thing. (Catholic clergy, you know, very often preach about Freemasonry and its potential dangers). He now only wished to maintain that it is a very reprehensible doctrine, and that those connected with that are thoroughly bad men. He would not allow that there was anything spiritual in many of such brotherhoods. Now, a man is listening to this who had been taken there by a friend, and it seemed to him very strange that the Canon of a great community should be speaking thus to a large congregation, for he himself believed that spiritual forces do work through such societies. The two friends waited for the preacher after the sermon and discussed the matter with him. He, however, fanatically persisted in his opinion that all this had nothing to do with what is spiritual, that Freemasons were just evil men with a very evil doctrine. Then one of the two, who knew something about the matter said: I suggest, Your Reverence, that you should come with me at a fixed time next Sunday. I will put you in the private seat in a certain lodge, from which you can watch what is going on unseen. The preacher said: very well. But may I take sacred relics with me?—he was beginning, you see, to be frightened! So he took the relics with him and was led to the place where he could sit in concealment. At a given signal he beheld a very strange-looking individual with a pale face moving towards the presidential chair, and he moved without putting one foot before the other, but making himself glide forward.—this was all described very exactly and the man continued: now he set his relics to work, pronounced the blessing, and so on, so that there immediately arose a great disturbance in the assembly, and the whole meeting was broken up.

Afterwards, a very progressive priest, a theologian, who was present, declared that he simply did not believe in the thing, and another priest alleged that he had heard in Rome that ten priests there had taken an oath vouching for the Canon's veracity. But the first priest replied: I would rather believe that ten priests had taken a false oath than that the impossible is possible. Then I said: the way in which it was told is enough for me. For the way was the important thing with regard to the gliding.

You meet with this gliding in the Walpurgis-night also; Gretchen, when she again appears, also glides along. Thus with Goethe even such a detail is relevant. And every detail is presented in this way, nothing is irrelevant from a spiritual point of view.

What is it then we are dealing with? We are dealing with something which shows that, for Goethe, the question was not whether it would be natural for Faust, two days after the catastrophe, to be going for a pleasant country ramble on the Brocken. No, what we are dealing with is a spiritual experience coming to Faust during Walpurgis-night, an experience he could not avoid which came to him as the definite result of the shattering events through which he had passed. We must realize, therefore, that his soul has been snatched out of his body, and has found Mephistopheles in the spiritual world. And it is in the spiritual world that they wandered together to the Brocken, that is to say, they meet with those who are also out of their bodies when they go to the Brocken; for naturally the physical body of those who make this journey remains in bed.

In the days when such things were intensively practiced, those who wished to make this journey to the Brocken (the time for it is the night of April 30) rub themselves with a certain ointment whereby—as otherwise in sleep—the complete separation of the astral body and ego is brought about. In this way the Brocken journey is carried out in spirit. It is an experience of a very low type, but still experience that can be carried out. No one need think, however, that he can obtain information about the mixing of the magic ointment any more easily than he can obtain it about the way in which van Helmont, by rubbing certain chemicals into parts of the body, has contrived consciously to leave it. This leaving of the body has happened to van Helmont. But this kind of thing is not recommended to those who, like Franz in Hermann Barr's Ascension,¹ find it too tedious to do the exercises and to carry out the affair in the correct way. But I know well that many would consider themselves lucky were methods of this kind to be divulged to them!

Well then, my dear friends, Faust, that is, Faust's soul, and Mephistopheles, on the night of April 30, actually find themselves together with a company witches also outside their bodies. This is a genuine spiritual occurrence, represented by Goethe out of his deep knowledge. Goethe is not merely showing how one may have a subjective vision; to him it is clear that when a man leaves his body he will meet with other souls who have left theirs. Mephistopheles indicates this conclusively when he says:

In the realm of dreams and glamour
as it seems we now have entered.

They have actually entered another realm, they have entered the soul-world and there meet with other souls. And we naturally find them within this world as they have to be in accordance with the after effects of their physical life. Faust has to go back into his physical body. So long as the conditions are there are for man to go back into his physical body, that is, while he is not physically dead, so long does he bear about with him, on going out with his astral body, certain inclinations and affinities belonging to his physical existence. Hence, what Faust says is quite comprehensible, that is, how he is enjoying the Spring air of the April night just passing into May; naturally he is perfectly conscious of it since he is not entirely separated from his body, but only temporarily outside it. When a man is outside his physical body, as Faust was here, he can perceive all that is fluid and all that is of an airy nature in the world, though not what is solid. Of solid things he can only perceive the fluid in them. Man is more than 90% fluid, a column of fluid, and has in him quite a small percentage of what is solid. Thus you need not imagine that when outside he is unable to see another man; he can only see, however, what is fluid in him. He can perceive nature too, for nature is saturated with fluid. All that is here pictured that shows deep knowledge. Faust can perceive in this way. But Mephistopheles, that is Ahriman, as an Ahrimanic being has no understanding of the present earth; he belongs relate to what has lagged behind, and hence he feels no particular pleasure in the Spring. You remember how I explained to you in one of my last lectures that in winter a man can remember what is connected with the Moon. But what is connected with the present moon, now that it is Earth-Moon, does not particularly appeal to him. What has to do with the Moon, that unites itself with the former Moon-element, when fiery, illuminating forces issued from the Earth—that is man's element; the Will-o'-the-wisps not the moonlight. This reference to the Will-o'-the-wisps, issuing from the moon element still in the Earth, it is in accordance with the exact truth.

I draw your attention in passing to the fact that the first part of the manuscript of the Walpurgis-night is not clear owing to some negligence; in these editions there is everywhere something almost impossible. It did not occur to me until we were rehearsing that corrections would be needed even in the Walpurgis-night. In the first place, in these copies, the alternated song between Faust, Mephistopheles and the Will-o'-the-wisps, the alternate singing and the alternate dancing, are not assigned to the several characters. Now the learned people have made various distributions that, however, do not fit the case. I have allotted it all in such a way that what we so often find given to Faust belongs to Mephistopheles:

“In the realm of dreams and glamour,
As it seems, we now are entered.
Lead us truly through the clamor (this is said to the will-o'-the-wisps)
Thither where our aims are centered
Through the wide and desert spaces.”

Even in Schröer's version I find this given to Faust, but it really belongs to Mephistopheles—as it was spoken, you will remember yesterday. What comes next belongs to the Will-o'-the-wisps:

“Lo now! Lo! how swiftly races
Tree past tree! How the gigantic
Crags lean over, and the antic
Rocky snouts that stand in cluster
How they snort and how they bluster!”

Then it is Faust's turn where reference is made to these things reminding him of the shattering experience he has passed through:

“Through the stones and turf what lustre,
Stream and streamlet downward springing.
Hark! ’tis murmurs! Hark! ’tis singing.
Hark! ’tis love-plaints sweet and olden,
Voices from yon-days all golden!
All our hope, and love and longing
Echo, too, like tales once told in
Far-off times, comes faintly ringing.”

Then, strangely enough even Schröer assigns what comes next Mephistopheles: it belongs, of course, to the Will-o'-the-wisp:

Woo hoo! shoo-hoo! nearer hover
Cry of screech-owl, jay and plover.” and so on.

Schröer gives these lines to Mephistopheles, that is obviously wrong. That last lines should go to Faust:

“Nay, but tell me, are we biding
Still, or are we onward riding?
Cliffs and green trees are sliding,
Will-o'-the-wisps their number doubles,
Blown up like transparent bubbles.
All in giddy whirls are gliding.”

I will here point out that there are still mistakes in what follows. Thus after Faust has spoken the words:

“Now through the air the wind doth howl and hiss,
And with what buffets beats upon my shoulder!”

You will find a long speech given to Mephistopheles. But it does not belong to him (though assigned to him in all editions). Only the first three lines are his:

“Clasp thou the cliffs old ribs! Cling to the boulders!
Else will it hurl thee headlong into the deep abyss!
The night is thick with rack.”

The lines following are Faust's:

“Hark how the groaning woods do crack.
Startled fly the solemn owls ...” and so on.

Not until the final line does Mephistopheles speak again:

“... Hear'st thou voices o'er us?
Far and dear that sing in chorus?
All the magic mount along
Wildly streams the wizard song.”

This had to be corrected, for things must stand in their right form. Then I have taken upon myself to insert just one line. For there are some things, especially where witches are concerned, that really cannot be put on the stage, and so have thought fit to introduce a line that does not actually belong.

Now I must admit that it has distressed me a good deal to see how corrupt the rendering is in all the editions and how it has occurred to no one to apportion the passages correctly. It must be kept clearly in mind that Goethe wrote Faust bit by bit, and that much in it naturally needs correction, (he himself called it the confused manuscript). But the correction must be done with knowledge. It is not Goethe, of course, who is to be corrected, but the mistakes made publication.

From what has been said it will be clear that Mephistopheles makes use of the Will-o'-the-wisp's as a guide, and that they go into a world that is seen to be fluctuating, in movement, as it would be perceived were everything solid away. Now enter into all that that is said there. How much real knowledge is shown in the way all that is solid is made to disappear! How all this is in tune with what is said by the Will-o'-the-wisps, Mephistopheles and Faust, as being represented by Goethe as out of the body. Mephistopheles indeed has no physical body, he only assumes one; Faust for the moment is not in his physical body; Will-o'-the-wisps are elemental beings who naturally, since it is solid, cannot take on the physical body. All this that proceeds in the alternated song shows that he wishes to lead us into the essential being of the supersensible, not into something merely visionary but into the very essence of the spiritual world.

But mow our attention is drawn to how, when we are thus in the spiritual, everything looks different; for in all probability any ordinary onlooker would not see Mammon all aglow in the mountain, nor the glow within it. It is hardly necessary to explain that all here described shows that the soul pictured is outside the body. It is a real relation then between spiritual beings that we are shown, and Goethe lets us see what unites him with knowledge of the spiritual world. That Goethe could placed Mephistopheles so relevantly into his poem at all, proves that he has knowledge of these matters and that he knew perfectly well that Mephistopheles is a being who has lagged behind. Hence he actually introduces other retarded beings of that ilk. Notice this—a voice comes:

“Which way, comest thou here?”

A voice from below answers (and this means a voice proceeding from a being with sub-human instincts):

Over the Ilsensteep.
In the owlet's nest I took a peep
She had eyes like moons!”

Voice: to hell with a wanion!
Why so hot-foot thou ronyon?

Voice: She hath well-nigh flayed me!
See the wounds she hath made me!

Now notice that later the answers given by a voice above.

“Come with us, come, from the Felsenmere.”

Voices from below: “We would climb with you the mountain sheer.”

Voice from above: “Who calls from out the rocky cranny?”

And then we hear the voice of one who has clambered for three hundred years. That means that Goethe calls up spirits who are three hundred years behind. The origin of Faust lies three hundred years back; the Faust legend arose in the sixteenth century. The spirits left behind from that time appear, mingling now with those who come to the Brocken as witches in the present—for these things must be taken literally. Thus Goethe says: Oh, there are many such souls with us still, souls akin to the witch souls, for they are three hundred years behind. Since everything in the Walpurgis-night is under the guidance of Mephistopheles, it would be possible for young Mephistopheles beings to appear among the witch-souls. And then comes a present-day half witch, for the voice that earlier cried:

“Take me with you, take me up!
Three hundred years I've clambered zealous.”

is not that of a half-witch but of a being who is really three hundred years old. The witches are not as old as that although they go to the Brocken.—The half-witch comes slowly trotting up the mountain. Here then we meet something genuinely spiritual, something that has overcome time, that has remained behind in time. Many of the words are positively wonderful. Thus, one voice, the voice of the one who has been clambering for three hundred years, says:

“Yet I cannot reach the top.
Fain would I be beside my fellows!”

In these words Goethe very beautifully expresses how the witch-souls and the souls belonging to the dead who, in like manner, have remained so very much behind, are akin. These souls remaining behind would fain be with their fellows—very interesting!

Then we see how all the time Mephistopheles tries to keep Faust to the commonplace, the trivial; he tries to keep him among the witches' souls. But Faust wants to learn the deeper secrets of existence, and therefore wants more, wants to go farther; he wishes to get to what is really evil, to the sources of evil:

“Up yonder, though, I'd rather be!
The smoke with lurid splendour lit
Rolls on. The crowd streams to the devil,
What riddles there one might unravel!

For this deeper element Faust is seeking in Evil, Mephistopheles has no understanding; he does not want to take even Faust there because there things will naturally become rather—painful. It is all very well to be taken to the witches as a soul; but when a man like Faust, having been received into this company, goes still farther towards evil, he may discover things highly dangerous to many. For, in Evil, is revealed the source of much that exists on earth. That is why it was better for many people that the witches should be burnt. For although no one need practise witchcraft, yet by reason of the existence of witches and their being used to a certain extent for their mediumistic qualities, by certain people wishing to fathom various secrets, if their mediumistic powers went far enough the source of much that is in the world could be brought to light. Things were not allowed to go to these lengths, hence the witches were burnt. It was definitely to the interest of those who burned witches, that nothing could be divulged of what comes to light when those experienced in such matters probe deeper into witch secrets. Such things can only be hinted at. The origin of all sorts of things would have been discovered—no one who had not this to fear has been in favour of burning witches.

But, as we have said, Mephistopheles wishes to keep Faust more to trivialities. And then Faust becomes impatient, for he had thought of Mephistopheles as a genuine devil, who would not practice trifling magic arts upon him but, once he was out of his body, would take him right into Evil. Faust wants Mephistopheles to show himself as the Devil, not as a commonplace magician able to lead him only to what is trifling in the spiritual world. But Mephistopheles shirks this and is only willing to lead him to the trivial. It is exceedingly interesting to notice how Mephistopheles turns aside from actual Evil; that is not to be disclosed to Faust at this stage, and he directs his attention once more to the elemental. The following is a wonderful passage:

“See where yon snail comes creeping
She with her groping face hath nosed
Some inkling of my secret out.”

Wonderfully to the point is this jolt down into the sphere of smelling! It is actually the case that in the world into which Mephistopheles has led Faust, smelling plays a bigger part than seeing. Her ‘groping face’—a wonderfully vivid expression, for it is not the same sense of smell as men have, neither is it a face; it is as if one could send out something from the eyes to touch things with delicate rays. It is true, the lower animals have something of the kind, for the snail not only has feelers, but these feelers lengthen themselves into extraordinarily long etheric stalks with which an animal of this kind can really touch anything soft, but only touch it etherically. Think what deep knowledge this all is—in no way dilettante.

And now they come to a lively Club. We are still in the spiritual world, of course, and they come to this lively club. Goethe understood how to be one of those who can talk of the spiritual world without a long and tragic face, and how to speak with humour and irony when these are necessary and in place. Why should not an old General, a Minister (His Excellency), a Parvenu and an Author, discussing their affairs together while sipping their wine, find themselves by degrees so little interested in what is being said that gradually they fall asleep? Or, when they are still under the particular influence of what is going on at the Club—a little dicing perhaps, a little gambling—why then should not these souls so come out of their bodies that they might be found in a lively Club among others who have left their bodies? At a Club—the General, His Excellency the Minister, the Parvenu, and now the Poet as well; why not? One can meet with them for they are outside their bodies. And if one is lucky, one can really find such a party, for it is something like that in this sort of assembly, that they fall asleep in the midst of amusing themselves. Goethe is not ignorant of all this, you see. But Mephistopheles is surprised that here, through nature herself, through nothing more than a rather abnormal occurrence of ordinary life, these souls have come to be in this position. He is so surprised to come across it in this way, that he has to recall a bit of his own past. For this reason he becomes suddenly old on the spot, or in his present form he is not able to have this experience. The human world is meddling with him and this he does not want. He tells the will-o'-the-wisp it should go straight not zigzag, lest its flickering light should be blown out. The will-o'-the-wisp is trying to ape man kind by going zigzag. Mephistopheles wants to go straight—men go zigzag. So it disturbs him that, merely through an abnormal way of proceeding in life and not through any hellish machination, four respectable members of human society have appeared on the Brocken scene.

But then things begin to go better. First there enters the Huckster-witch, naturally also outside her body. She arrives with all her arts—so beautifully referred to here:

“No chalice but into the healthy frame
Hath poured the poison's slow-consuming flame;
No jewel but to shame beguiled some winsome woman,
No sword that hath not stabbed i’ the back the foeman.”

So now he feels himself again. This witch has certainly been properly anointed; he wants more feels quite in his element, addresses her as ‘Cousin’, but tells her:

“Nay, thou dost read the times but badly, Cousin,
For done is past, and past is done!
Only for novelties we clamour,
Should'st lay in novelties alone.”

He want something of more interest to Faust. But Faust is not at all attracted. He feels that he is in a very inferior spiritual elements and now says—what I asked you to notice, for it is wonderful:

“If only I don't take leave of my senses!”

(If only I don't loose consciousness!) That means he does not wish to go through the experience with a suppressed consciousness, in an atavistic way; he prefers to have the experience in full consciousness. In such a Witches' Sabbath the consciousness might easily be blunted, and that should not be. Think how deep Goethe goes!

And now references made to how the soul element has to leave the body, and how a part of the etheric body too must be lifted out, and what I might call a kind of Nature-initiation, that during the whole earth-evolution only happens in exceptional circumstances. Part of Faust's etheric body has gone out; and because a man's etheric body, as I have often told you already, is feminine, this is seen as Lilith. This takes us back to times when man was not constituted at all as he is now. According to legend Lilith was Adam's first wife and the mother of Lucifer. Thus we see here how Mephistopheles is making use of the luciferic arts at his disposal, but how something lower also enters in that, in the following speech amounts almost to a temptation. Faust moreover is afraid he may lose consciousness and losing consciousness he would fall very low—so that Mephistopheles would like to promote this. He has already brought Faust to the point of having part of his etheric body drawn out, which makes him able to see Lilith appear. But Mephistopheles would like to go still farther, and thus tempts Faust to the witch-dance, when he himself dances with the old witch, Faust with the young. But it all results in Faust not being able to lose consciousness—he is unable to lose it!

Thus we are given an accurate picture by Goethe of a scene taking place among spirits. When souls have left their bodies they can experience this, and Goethe knew how to represent it. But there are other souls who can enter such an assembly, and they to bring their earthly qualities with them. Goethe knew that in Berlin lived Nikolai, a friend of Lessing's. Now this Nikolai was one of the most fanatical, so-called enlightened men of his time; he was one of those who, had a Monist society then existed, would have joined it, would indeed have directed it, for men were like that in the eighteenth century, they made war upon everything spiritual. A man of that kind is like the ‘Proktophantasmist’. (You can look this word up in the dictionary). Thus Nikolai not only wrote The Joys of Young Werther in order from a free-thinkers point of view to make fun of Goethes's sentimentality in The Sorrows of Werther, but also wrote for the Berlin Academy of Science—to prove himself, one might say, a genuine monist—Concerning the Objectionable Nature of the Superstitious Belief in a Spiritual World. And he was in a position to do that, for he suffered from visions—he was able to see into the spiritual world! But he tried the medical antidote of the time; he had leeches applied to a certain part of his body, and low and behold the visions disappeared. Hence he was able to give a materialistic interpretation of the visionary in his discourse to the Academy of Science, for he could prove by his own case that visions can be driven away by the application of leeches; therefore everything is entirely under the influence of the material.

Now Goethe knew Nikolai, Friedrich Nikolai, bookseller and writer, who was born in 1733 and died in 1811, he knew him very well. So perhaps he was not blindly inventing. And that there should be no doubt that Nikolai is meant, he makes the Proktophantasmist say, after he has been drawn in as a spirit among the spirits, and has tried to talk them down:

“Are you still there? Well, well! Was ever such a thing?” They ought to have gone by now for he hoped to drive them away by argument.

“Pack off now! Don't you know we've been enlightening!” Today he would have said: we have been preaching Monism.

“This crew of devils by no rule is daunted.” Now he must see, for he really can see, since he suffers from visions. Such men are quite fit to join in the Walpurgis-night.

Again it is not as an amateur that Goethe has pictured this; he has chosen a man who, if things go favourably, can enter even consciously into the spiritual world on this last night of April, and can meet the witches there. And he must be such a one. Goethe pictures nothing in a dilettante way; he makes use of thoroughly suitable people. But they retain the bent, the affinities, they have in the world. Therefore even as a spirit the Proktophantasmist wants to get rid of the spirits, and Goethe makes this very clear. For as a sequel to the treatise about leeches and spirits, Friedrich Nikolai had also conjured away ghosts on Wilhelm von Humboldt's estate in Tegel. Wilhelm von Humboldt lived in Tegel, in the neighborhood of Berlin and the Friedrich Nikolai had fallen foul of him also, as one of the enlightened. Hence Goethe makes him say:

“We're mighty wise, but Tegel is still haunted.” Tegel is a suburb of Berlin; the Humboldt's any property there and it was there that the ghosts appeared in which Goethe was interested. Goethe also knew that Nikolai had described it, but as an enlightened opponent.

“I've swept and swept at this vain fancying,
Yet cannot sweep clean! Was ever such a thing?”

So even in the house of the enlightened Wilhelm von Humboldt in Tegel there are apparitions. Nikolai cannot endure this spirit despotism; it refuses to follow him and will not obey him:

“My spirit cannot discipline it.”

And to make it perfectly clear that with full knowledge he is describing just such a personality as Nikolai, Goethe adds:

“Alas, today 'tis useless. Now I know it.
At least I'll take a journey with them though.
And still I hope, ere my last step, to show
My mastery alike o'er devils and poet.”

For at that time Nikolai had taken a journey through Germany and Switzerland, of which he had written a description where was recorded everything noteworthy he came across. And there one can find many shrewd and enlightened remarks. Everywhere he contended particularly against what he called superstition. Thus even this Swiss tour is alluded to:

“And still I hope, ere my last step, to show
My mastery alike o'er devils and poet.”

‘Devils’ because he attacked the spirits; ‘poet’ because he attacked Goethe—in the “Joys of Young Werther”.

Mephistopheles is quite clear about such people, and says:

“To seek relief, as usual in a puddle
He'll seat himself, and when the leeches feast
Upon his rump, from all his brains that muddle
From phantoms and from fancy he's released.”

Also a reference to Friedrich Nikolai's leech theory. (You may read about it in the Transactions of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Nikolai delivered the lecture in 1799).

But now, when this affair is over, Faust sees a very ordinary phenomenon—a red mouse jumping from the beautiful witch's mouth. That is a very common phenomenon and a proof that Faust has remained completely conscious; for had he not been conscious but only dreaming, it would have remained a red mouse, whereas now he is able to change this vision called up by sense-instinct into what it should really be for him. Everything is transformed—I think this is most impressive—and the red mouse becomes Gretchen. The blood-red cord is still about her neck. The Imagination has grown clear, and Faust is able to pass from a lower imagination to the vision of the soul of Gretchen who, by reason of her misfortune, now becomes visible to him in her true form.

You may think as you like, my dear friends, the connections of the spiritual world are manifold and perhaps bewildering—but what I have just shown you in this changing of a lower vision of a red mouse into something lofty, true and deep, is pre-eminently a spiritual fact. It is highly probable that Goethe originally planned the whole scene quite differently represented. A little sketch exists in which it is differently represented—in the way Mephistopheles might have conjured up the scene before Faust. But Faust has been sufficiently conscious to elude Mephistopheles here, and to see a soul to whom Mephistopheles would never have led him. To Mephistopheles himself she appears as Medusa, from which you see that Goethe is wishing to show how two different souls can quite differently interpret one and the same reality—the one way true, the other in some respect false. His own base instincts giving colour to the phenomenon, Mephistopheles flippantly utters:

“Like his own love she seems to every soul.” And here again we find that this is a spiritual experience through which Faust had to pass. He is not just a vigorous man enjoying a walk, he is a man undergoing a spiritual experience; and what he now sees as Gretchen is actually what lives within him, while the other serves merely to bring this to the surface.

Now, Mephistopheles, wishing to lead Faust away from the whole, from what is now the deeper spiritual reality, takes him to something which he just introduces as an interlude, and which we must regard as the conclusion of the Walpurgis-night—a kind of theater and simply a stroke of Mephistopheles' magic art. This is “The Walpurgis-night's Dream”, that will be performed, but the whole of it is inserted into the Brocken scene to show how Mephisto wishes to get hold of Faust. This Walpurgis-night's Dream—about which I shall say no more today—was introduced by Mephisto in order to turn Faust's thoughts in a quite definite direction. But here we have a remarkable kind of poetical paraphrase. You remember how Mephistopheles says:

“Go to! slight Reason, now, and Science slight,
Wherein doth lie man's greatest might!
Let but the spirit of lies enamour
Thy soul of sorcery and glamour
And, pact or none, I hold thee tight—”

In the Walpurgis-night Dream everything is reasonable, but Faust has to be shown how to enjoy this reasonableness. Goethe has translated the Italian dilettare into the German dilettieren that is actually to divert; and Servilibus, a servant of Mephistopheles invented by Goethe, is to persuade Faust to find diversion in what is reasonable, that is, to treat it in a low and flippant way. Hence though the Walpurgis-night Dream is to be taken seriously it is said:

“We're just about to begin
A brand new piece. T'is the last of the seven;
To give so many is the custom here.
A dilettante wrote it. Even
The players are dilettante too.
Excuse my vanishing. As dilettante t'is my diversion
To pull the curtain up.”

This then is the way Mephistopheles tries to tempt Faust to despise the reasonableness of the Walpurgis-night Dream. That is why he places it before him in this kind of aura. For it suited Mephistopheles cunningly to introduce the rational into the Brocken; he finds that right for in his opinion it is where it belongs.

So you see in Goethe's poem we are dealing with something that really rises above the lower spiritual world and shows us how well Goethe was versed in spiritual knowledge. One the other hand, it may bring to our notice the necessity of acquiring a little spiritual science—for how else can we understand Goethe? Even eminent men who love Goethe can otherwise merely conclude that he is a bit of a monster—they don't say it, they are silent about it, and that is one of the lies of life—such a monster that he takes Faust, two days after causing the catastrophe with Gretchen's mother and brother, for a pleasant walk on the Brocken. But, we must constantly repeat, Goethe was not the commonplace, happy-go-lucky man he has hitherto appeared. On the contrary, we must accustom ourselves to recognise more in him than that, something quite different, and to realise that much concealed in Goethe's writings has yet to be brought into the light of day.

• 1. See lecture 10th December, 1916. Also Cycle XLIII, lecture 3

The German Section of the Theosophical Society was responsible for organizing this year's congress of the “Federation of European Sections”. It is therefore more fitting that here, from within the circle of the organizers, there is less talk of what has been achieved than of what has been intended and striven for. For the organizers know only too well how little of what can be set as a goal on such an occasion has been achieved. Therefore, the following should be taken with a grain of salt, as a mere description of the underlying ideas.

Munich was chosen as the venue; the time was the days of Pentecost, May 18, 19, 20 and 21, 1907. The questions that the organizers asked themselves in preparing for the event were: How can such a congress express the task of the Theosophical movement in the present spiritual life? How can it present a picture of the ideals and aims of the theosophical work? Since the event is, of course, limited by the circumstances, it can only provide a limited actual answer to these questions. It now seems particularly important that the comprehensive character of the theosophical movement be emphasized on such occasions. The central point of this movement is the cultivation of a world view based on knowledge of the supersensible. And at such a congress, people come together who, in the spirit of such a world view, work across all national and other human boundaries on spiritual ideals that are common to all of humanity. Mutual inspiration in the best sense will be the most beautiful fruit of such events. In addition, it will be shown how the theosophical work should really be integrated into the whole of life in our time. For the spiritual basis of this movement cannot be called upon to express itself only in thoughts and ideas, in theories, etc.; rather, as a content of the soul that has emerged in our time, it can have a fruitful effect on all branches of human activity. Theosophy can only be properly understood if we set it the ideal of stimulating not only the imagination and the human soul, but the whole human being. If we wish to interpret its mission in this way, we may recall how, for example, the world view of the time found expression in the buildings and sculptures (such as the Sphinx) of the Egyptians. The ideas of the Egyptian worldview were not only thought by the souls; they were made visible to the eye in the environment of the human being. And consider how everything known of Greek sculpture and drama is the worldview of the Greek soul, shaped in stone and depicted in poetry. Consider how medieval painting presented Christian ideas and feelings to the eye, how Gothic art gave form and shape to Christian devotion. True harmony of the soul can only be experienced where the human senses are reflected in form, shape and color, etc., as the environment that the soul knows as its most valuable thoughts, feelings and impulses.

From such thoughts arises the intention to also give a picture of the theosophical striving in the external form of the event at a congress. The Rauzz, where the gathering takes place, can reflect the theosophical feeling and thinking around the visitor. According to our circumstances, we could not do more than sketch out what could be an ideal in this direction. We had decorated the assembly hall in such a way that a fresh, stimulating red formed the basic color of all the walls. This color was intended to express the basic mood of the celebration in an external view. It stands to reason that many will object to the use of “red” for this purpose. These objections are justified as long as one relies on an esoteric judgment and experience. They are well known to the esotericist, who nevertheless must use the color red for the purpose in question, in accordance with all occult symbolism. For him, it does not depend on what the part of his being feels that is devoted to the immediate sensory environment, but on what the higher self experiences in secret while creating in the spiritual, while the external environment is seen physically in red. And that is the exact opposite of what the ordinary sensation about “red” says. Esoteric knowledge says: “If you want to attune yourself in your innermost being as the gods were attuned when they gave the world the green plant cover, learn to bear ‘red’ in your environment as they had to.” This indicates a connection between the higher human nature and the color red, which the genuine esoteric has in mind when he represents the two opposing entities of the creative world-ground in occult symbolism in such a way that downward the green as a sign of the earthly, upward the “red” as a sign of the heavenly (elohistic) creative powers. Much more could be said about the reasons for opposing this color red, and much more could be said in refutation. However, it may suffice here to note that this color was chosen in accordance with occultism.

On the walls (on both sides and at the back wall) were placed the so-called seven apocalyptic seals in a size corresponding to the room. They represent certain experiences of the astral world in pictures. There is a reason for this. At first, some viewers may think that such pictorial representations are ordinary symbols. But they are much more than that. Anyone who simply wants to interpret what is depicted in them symbolically with the mind has not penetrated the spirit of the matter. One should experience the content of these seven pictures with one's whole soul, with one's undivided mind; one should shape it inwardly in one's soul according to form, color and content, so that it lives inwardly in the imagination. For this content corresponds to very specific astral experiences of the clairvoyant. What he wants to express in such pictures is not at all an arbitrary symbol, or even a straw-thin allegory, but something that is best illustrated by way of comparison. Take a person in a room illuminated by a light in such a way that his shadow is visible on a wall. The shadow is in some respects similar to the person casting the shadow. But it is a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional being. Just as the shadow relates to the person, so what is depicted in the apocalyptic seals relates to certain experiences of the clairvoyant in the astral world. The seals are silhouettes of astral processes, of course in a figurative sense. Therefore, they are not arbitrary representations of a single person, but anyone who is familiar with the corresponding supersensible processes will find their silhouettes in the physical world. Such things cannot be invented in their essential content, but are taken from the existing teachings of the secret scientists. A student of these matters may have noticed that some of our seals correspond with what he finds in this or that work, but not others. The reason for this is that some of the imaginations of occult science have already been communicated in books; but the most important part, and the true part, may only now, in our time, be made public. And part of the theosophical work must consist in handing over to the public much that has hitherto been kept strictly secret by the appointed custodians. This is demanded by the evolution of the spiritual life of our time from the exponents of occult science.

It is the evolution of humanity, the expression of which in the astral world must form one of the most essential foundations of occult knowledge, as expressed in these seven seals. The Christian esotericist will recognize them in a certain way in the descriptions of the “Revelation of St. John”. But the form they presented in our festival hall corresponds to the secret-scientific spiritual current that has been the leading one in the West since the fourteenth century. The mysteries of existence, as depicted in these pictures, represent ancient wisdom; the clairvoyants of the various epochs of humanity see them from different points of view. Therefore, according to the necessary developmental needs of the times, the forms change somewhat. In the “Revelation of St. John” it is “set in signs” what is to happen “in brief”. He who is able to read a secret-scientific form of expression aright knows that this signifies nothing other than a reference to the secret-scientific signs for certain imaginations that can be experienced in the astral world and that are connected with the nature of man as it reveals itself in time. And the Rosicrucian seals also represent the same thing.

Only very sketchily, with a few words, shall the infinitely rich content of the seals be interpreted. Basically, everything – even the seemingly most insignificant – in these pictures means something important. – The first seal represents man's entire evolution on earth in the most general way. In the Book of Revelation, this is indicated in the words: “And having turned I saw seven golden lampstands; and in the midst of the seven lampstands one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about the paps with a golden girdle. His head and hair, however, were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes like a flame of fire. His feet were like brass glowing in a furnace, and his voice like the sound of rushing waters. He had seven stars in his right hand, and out of his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword; and his face shone like the bright sun.” In general terms, such words point to the most comprehensive secrets of human development. If one wanted to describe in detail what each of the deeply significant words contains, one would have to write a thick volume. Our seal depicts such a volume. Only a few hints are given: Among the physical organs and forms of expression of man, there are those that, in their present form, represent the downward stages of development of earlier forms, and which have thus already exceeded their degree of perfection. have already passed their peak of perfection; others, however, represent the initial stages of development; they are now, so to speak, the rudiments of what they are to become in the future. The esotericist must know these secrets of development. The organ of speech represents an organ that will be something much higher and more perfect in the future than it is at present. When pronouncing this, one touches on a great secret of existence, which is often also called the “mystery of the creative word”. This gives a hint of the future state of this human speech organ, which will one day, when the human being has spiritualized, become a spiritual organ of production (procreation). In myths and religions, this spiritual production is indicated by the appropriate image of a “sword” coming out of the mouth. Thus, each line and each point on the image means something that is connected with the mystery of human development. The fact that such pictures are made does not merely arise from a need for a sensualization of the supersensible processes, but it corresponds to the fact that living into these pictures – if they are the right ones – really means an arousal of forces that lie dormant in the human soul, and through the awakening of which the representations of the supersensible world emerge. It is not right for the supersensible worlds to be described only in schematic terms in Theosophy; the true way is to evoke such images as are given in these seals. (If the occultist does not have such images at hand, he should give a verbal description of the higher worlds in appropriate images.)

The second seal, with its corresponding accessories, represents one of the first stages of development of humanity on earth. In its primeval times, humanity on earth had not yet developed what is called the individual soul. What still exists in animals today is still present: the group soul. Anyone who can follow the old human group souls on the astral plane through imaginative clairvoyance will find the four types of group soul that are represented in the four apocalyptic animals of the second seal: the lion, the bull, the eagle, and the man. This touches on the truth of what is often so dryly allegorized in the four animals. The third seal represents the mysteries of the so-called harmony of the spheres. Man experiences these mysteries in the interval between death and a new birth (in the “spirit realm” or what is called “Devachan” in the usual theosophical literature). However, the presentation is not given as it is experienced in the “spirit realm” itself, but as the processes of this realm are reflected in the astral world, as it were. It must be emphasized that all seven seals are experiences of the astral world; but the other worlds can be seen in their reflections in the astral. The angels blowing trumpets in the picture represent the spiritual primal beings of the world phenomena; the book with the seven seals indicates that in the experiences illustrated in this picture, the riddles of existence are “unsealed”. The “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” represent the stages of human development through long earth cycles.

The fourth seal represents, among other things, two pillars, one rising from the sea and the other from the earth. These pillars hint at the secret of the role played by red (oxygen-rich) blood and blue-red (carbon-rich) blood in human evolution, and how this blood changes in line with human evolution from distant primeval times to distant future times. The letters on these pillars hint at this evolutionary secret in a way known only to the initiated. (All interpretations of the two letters given in public writings, or even in certain societies, remain only a superficial exotic interpretation.) The book in the cloud points to a future state of man in which all his knowledge will be internalized. In the “Revelation of St. John” we find the significant words: “And I took a little book out of the angel's hand and devoured it...” The sun in the picture points to a cosmic process that will take place at the same time as the marked future stage of humanity; the earth will enter into a completely different relationship with the sun than the present one in the cosmos. And everything is depicted in the picture in such a way that all the arrangements of the parts, all the details, etc., correspond exactly to specific real processes.

The fifth seal represents the further development of man in the future in a cosmos in which the conditions just indicated will have occurred. The future human being, who will have a different relationship to the sun than the present one, is represented by the “woman who gives birth to the sun”; and the power that he will then have over certain forces of the world, which today express themselves in his lower nature, is represented by the “sun woman” standing on the beast with the seven heads and ten horns. The woman has the moon under her feet: this points to a later cosmic relationship between the sun, earth and moon.

The sixth seal represents the evolved human being with even greater power over the lower forces of the universe. The way the image expresses this is reminiscent of Christian esotericism: Michael holds the dragon bound.

Finally, the seventh seal is that of the “Mystery of the Grail,” as it was in the esoteric current beginning in the fourteenth century. In the picture, there is a cube representing the spatial world, from which the world serpent rises on all sides, insofar as it represents the higher forces acting in the lower; from the snake's mouth comes the world line (as a spiral), the symbol of the purified and refined cosmic forces; and from it, the “holy grail”, which is faced by the “dove”: all this points - and quite appropriately - to the mystery of the world's creation, of which the earthly is a lower reflection. The deepest mysteries lie in the lines and figures, etc. of this seal.

Between each two seals, a column was inserted. These seven columns could not be executed in three dimensions; they had to be painted as a substitute. However, they are definitely intended as real architectural forms and correspond to the “seven columns” of the “true Rosicrucian Temple”. (Of course the arrangement in Munich does not correspond exactly to that in the “Rosicrucian Temple of Initiation,” for there are two of each column, so that if one walks from the back wall toward the front, one passes through fourteen columns, two of which are always facing each other. This is only a hint for those who know the true facts; we should only give a general idea of the meaning of this column secret.) The captains of these columns represent the planetary evolution of our solar system. Our Earth is, after all, the fourth embodiment in a planetary evolutionary system, and in the ways in which it is configured, it points to three future embodiments. (More exact details about this can be found in the articles in this journal that are headed “From the Akasha Chronicle”. The seven successive embodiments of the earth are designated by the Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan conditions. In the usual esoteric descriptions, the Vulcan condition is omitted as being too far in the future. For reasons which it would take too long to explain here, the evolution of the earth is divided into a Mars and Mercury condition. (These reasons can also be found in the Essays on the “Akasha Chronicle”. These seven embodiments of the Earth: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus are now expressed in esotericism by seven pillared capitals. The inner life of each of these stages of development is expressed in the forms of these capitals. Here too, the intention is that one should not study the forms of the capitals intellectually, but entirely through the feelings, in real artistic experience and in the imagination. For every line, every curve, everything about these forms is such that when you immerse yourself in them, you awaken dormant powers in your soul; and these powers lead to ideas about the great mysteries of the world, which underlie the cosmic and the related evolution of humanity on earth. Anyone who might criticize the design of such columns should consider that, for example, the Corinthian and the Ionic columns have also emerged from the embodiment of the secrets of existence, and that such facts are only unknown to the materialistic way of thinking of our time. From the way the motifs of world evolution are expressed in these column capitals, one can gauge how esotericism is to have a fruitful effect on art. The ancient columns, too, are born out of esotericism. And the architecture of the future will have to present to people what the esoteric world view of Theosophy can give as a hint today.

In Munich, for example, an attempt has been made to sketch out an interior in the spirit of the Theosophical worldview; of course, only some of the relevant information could be provided, and even that only in general terms, and above all not in the appropriate arrangement. But the aim was only to evoke something of what is essential. Among the esoteric devices in our meeting room were two columns standing at the front of the hall. What they suggest can be seen from the description of the fourth seal, on which the two columns can also be found. They point to the mystery of blood and contain the “mystery of the development of humanity”. The color of the pillars is connected with the blood secret. One is red; the other is a deep blue-red. Esoteric science writes four deeply significant sayings on these two pillars. When the human soul immerses itself in these four sayings, then whole secrets of the world and of humanity well up from their depths. Many books would have to be written to exhaust the full meaning of these sayings, for not only is every word significant, but so is the symmetry of the words, the way they are distributed among the four sayings, the intensifications that lie within them, and much more, so that only long, patient devotion to the matter can exhaust what lies within. The four proverbs of “Pillar Wisdom” in English are:

"In pure thought you find
the self that can sustain itself.

"If you turn your thoughts into images,
you experience the creative wisdom.

"Condense feeling into light,
you reveal the forming power.

"If you objectify the will to essence,
you create in the world's being.

We also tried to express the basic mood that we wanted to express in our “inner space” in the program book that was given to visitors. There is no need to say anything more about the red color of the cover of this book, after the significance of the red color in esoteric symbolism has been discussed above. On this cover (in the upper left corner) there is a black cross entwined with red roses in the blue oval field; to the right of it are the letters: E.D.N. - J.C.M. - P.S.S.R. — These are the first ten letters of the words by which true Rosicrucianism is summarized in a single sentence: “Ex deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.” The cross symbol, entwined with roses, expresses

exoterically expresses the meaning of Rosicrucianism. In view of the attitude of our Society to Rosicrucianism, it seems necessary to point out the serious misunderstandings which have been brought against it. Here and there, on the basis of historical tradition, an attempt has been made to form a conception of Rosicrucianism. Of those who have thus formed an opinion of it, some look upon it with a certain benevolence; but most regard it as charlatanry, enthusiasm, or something similar, perhaps even worse. It may readily be conceded that if Rosicrucianism were what it appears to those who know of it only from historical documents and traditions, it would certainly not be worthy of the attention of any rational man. But at present nobody knows anything at all about true Rosicrucianism who has not approached it through the means of occult science. Outside the circle of occult science there are no real documents about it, which is the name of the spiritual current mentioned here, that has set the tone in the West since the fourteenth century. Only now may we begin to share some of the secrets of Rosicrucianism with the public. By drawing from this source in Munich, we naturally did not want to present it as the only true source of the theosophical movement, but only as one of the paths by which spiritual knowledge can be sought. It cannot be said that we have given preference to this source in a one-sided way, while the theosophical movement should take into account all forms of religion and paths to truth equally. But it can never be the task of the theosophical movement to study the variety of religions as a pastime; it must use religious forms to arrive at their unity, at its essence; and we did not want to show what Rosicrucianism looks like, but through it we wanted to show the perspective to the one core of truth in all religions. And this is precisely the true mission of the Theosophical movement.

In the program book, there are five drawings. These are the motifs of the first five of the seven capitals mentioned above, converted into vignettes. In these five drawings, too, there is something of what is called “occult writing”. Those who immerse themselves in the line forms and figures with all their soul will inwardly perceive something of what are known as the important states for the knowledge of human development (Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars and Mercury states).

This should describe the intentions of the conference organizers in preparing the framework within which the festivities were to take place. The venue for the event was the Tonhalle (Kaim-Säle), which seemed particularly suitable for this event.

The account of the proceedings of the congress must be preceded by the expression of the deepest dissatisfaction felt by all the participants at the presence of Mrs. Besant. The much-admired woman had just returned to Europe after spending two years in her Indian field of activity; and Munich was the first place where the European members were allowed to greet her again and hear her powerful speech. The German committee of the Congress had invited Mrs. Besant to preside over the honorary committee; and so the esteemed leader gave the assembly its consecration and imparted to it the mood that her whole being radiates to all those around her and to whom the magic of her words penetrates.

Our visit to the congress was a thoroughly satisfying one. We had the great pleasure of welcoming many members of the other European sections, as well as those of the Indian section. The members of the German section were present in large numbers. Officially the British Section was represented by its General Secretary, Miss Spink; the French Section by its General Secretary, Dr. Th. Pascal; the Dutch Section by its General Secretary, Mr. Fricke; the Italian Section by its General Secretary, Prof. Dr. Penzig; the Scandinavian Section by its General Secretary, A. Knös; and the Hungarian Section by its General Secretary, D. Nagy.

The opening of the congress took place on May 18, 1907 at 10 o'clock in the morning. It began with a musical introduction. Emanuel Nowotny played the Toccata in F major by Joh. Seb. Bach on the organ. — Thereupon the Secretary General of the German Section had to greet the participants on behalf of the German committee. He greeted Mrs. Besant and emphasized the significance of the fact that the Munich Congress enjoyed her visit. After greeting the representatives of the other sections and the German visitors, the speaker spoke words of love, appreciation and thanks to the founding president H. S. Olcott, who had passed away in February. In this opening address, reference was also made to the comprehensive mission of the Theosophical movement in the spiritual life of the present day, and the necessity was emphasized that the cultivation of spiritual life must form the basis of the Theosophical work. After that, the representatives of the European sections and the other fields of work spoke: from England (Mr. Wedgwood), from France (Dr. Th. Pascal), from the Netherlands (Mr. Fricke), from Italy (Prof. Penzig), from Scandinavia (Mr. A. Knös ), Hungary (Mr. D. Nagy), Bohemia (Mr. Bedrnizek), Russia (Miss Kamensky, Mrs. Forsch, Miss N. v. Gernet), Bulgaria, Belgium (and 2 others).

As at previous congresses, each speaker spoke in his or her national language.

Mrs. Besant then took the floor to greet the German section and to emphasize the essence of the Theosophical movement, as well as to point out in a few forceful sentences the spiritual life and its fundamental importance for society.

The Saturday afternoon was dedicated to lectures and talks by Mr. Alan Leo, Dr. Th. Pascal, Michael Bauer, Mr. James Wedgwood and Miss Kamensky. Mr. Alan Leo read his essay on 'Astrology and Personal Fate'. It dealt with the esoteric nature of astrology and spoke luminously of free will in relation to predetermined fate, showing the way in which planetary forces influence human life. Dr. Th. Pascal set out the results of his long inner research in the theosophical field in a thoughtful essay. It was fascinating to follow the subtle arguments of intimate trains of thought. Michael Bauer spoke about the relationship between nature and man. This very meritorious leader of our Nuremberg branch showed in his soulful and spirited way how the inner essence of nature and man's own inner being are interlinked in their depths. Mr. Wedgwood read his essay on “The Value of the Theosophical Society”. He explained how the study of occultism elevates man to an awareness of his higher destiny by giving him a knowledge of his place in the world process. What matters is the perspective that occultism gives the human soul. (No summary of the contents of the individual lectures and papers will be given here, as these will appear in detail in the “Congress Yearbook”. Miss Kamensky read her fascinating paper on “Theosophy in Russia” that same afternoon. Her brief but meaningful remarks showed how many Theosophical ideas are to be found in Russian literary and intellectual life. The work was a prime example of how to identify the seeds in a nation's intellectual life that only require spiritual light in order to grow into theosophy in the right way. The first day of the congress came to a close with the artistic performances of the evening. Joh. Seb. Bach's Prelude and Fugue in B minor, performed by Emanuel Nowotny on the organ, opened the evening. Marie von Sivers then recited the monologue from the beginning of the second part of Goethe's Faust, “Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig...” as an example of poetry arising from esoteric sources. The two members, Mrs. Alice v. Sonklar and Toni Völker, presented Robert Schumann's “Pictures from the East” on the piano, which seem quite suitable for promoting mystical moods. Miss Gertrud Garmatter then sang two songs by Schubert in her charmingly sensitive way: “To Music” and “You are the Peace”. And Miss Toni Völker concluded the evening with her beautiful artistic performance on the piano: Scarlatti's “Pastorale and Capriccio”.

On Sunday, May 19, the morning assembly was introduced by the atmospheric Trio in E-flat major by Joh. Brahms (1st movement), played by Miss Johanna Fritsch (violin), Marika v.Gumppenberg (piano) and Hermann Tukkermann (French horn). Mrs. Besant then gave her momentous lecture: “The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society.” She explained the role played by phenomena through H.P. Blavatsky at the beginning of the Theosophical Society, and how important they were at a time of doubt about higher worlds. She emphasized how the observation of phenomena related to higher worlds can never be dangerous if approached with the same spirit of research that is applied to observations in the physical world. She emphasized how little good it would do for the Theosophical Society if, for fear of the danger posed by psychic powers, it left the pursuit of the goal of “studying those forces in the world and in man that are not accessible to sensory observation” to other societies. It would be quite impossible to convey the manifold content of this lecture within the framework of a short report. Therefore, as with all earlier and later lectures of the congress, reference must be made to the “Yearbook” of the “Federation of European Sections”, which will appear following this lecture.

The second lecture of the morning was Dr. Rudolf Steiner's lecture on “The Initiation of the Rosicrucian”, in which the method of attaining knowledge of supersensible worlds in the sense of esotericism, which has set the tone in the West since the fourteenth century, is discussed and at the same time the necessity of these methods for the present period of development of humanity is shown.

On Sunday afternoon (5 p.m.), Edouard Schuré's “Sacred Drama of Eleusis” was performed. The German organizers considered this performance to be an especially important part of the congress. After all, it was able to show in an impressive way how theosophical ideas and feelings come to life in true, high art. Edouard Schuré is the great French artist and writer who, through his works in so many directions, communicates the theosophical spirit to our contemporaries. Schuré's works 'Les Grands Inities' (the great initiates) and 'Sanctuaires d'Orient' (the sanctuaries of the Orient) are completely 'Theosophy in the noblest sense of the word'. And Schuré's theosophical way of looking at things is fully transformed into a vital creative power when he works as an artist. He has that relationship between imagination and fantasy that is the basic secret of all great art. Edouard Schuré's truly mystical drama “The Children of Lucifer” is a shining example of how a world view striving for the heights of knowledge is completely transformed into artistic figures. Only a mind of this kind could undertake what Schuré did, to resurrect the “sacred drama” of Eleusis before the soul and the eye of the present man. This drama leads us to the door of that ancient time, where knowledge, religion and art still lived in one, where imagination was the faithful witness of truth and the sacred guide to piety; and where the reflection of imagination fell on this imagination in a transfiguring and revealing way. In Edouard Schuré there lives a modern artistic soul, in which the light of that mystery time shines, and so he was able to recreate what the priestly sages showed the audience in the “Drama at Eleusis” in Greece's distant past: the deep mystery of the world, which is reflected in the meaningful events of Eros' seduction of Persephone and her abduction by Pluto; of Demeter's pain and the advice she from the “Goddess of Transformations”, from Hekate, to go to Eleusis; from Demeter's initiation of Triptolem to the priesthood in Eleusis; from Triptolem's daring journey into Pluto's realm to the liberation of Persephones and from the emergence of a “new Dionysos”, who arises from Zeus' fire and the light of Demeter through the sacrifice of Triptolemos.

The congress organizers tried to present the drama evoked by Schuré to the visitors in German. It was made possible by the dedicated work of a number of our members and by the beautiful, loving kindness of Bernhard Stavenhagen, who created a wonderful musical accompaniment to the Schuré drama. Stavenhagen sent a musical introduction to each of the four acts, which prepared the audience for the dramatic action in an atmospheric way. With true congeniality, this important composer has absorbed the basic motifs of the mystery and rendered them musically. This musical performance was received with great enthusiasm by the participants of the congress. The willingness to make sacrifices with which members of the German section worked on this performance can be judged from the fact that all the roles were played by members. Miss v. Sivers played the part of Demeter, Miss Sprengel was Persephone, Miss Garmatter Eros, Frau v. Vacano Hekate, Mr. Stahl Pluto; for the part of Triptolemus we were able to the participation of our member, the excellent actor Mr. Jürgas, who created an impressive figure; Baroness v. Gumppenberg played Metanira, Dr. Peipers played Zeus, and Miss Wollisch played Dionysos. These are only the main roles, however; the choruses that intervene in the plot were also composed of members. Special recognition must be given to our esteemed member, Mr. Linde, who took on the laborious task of creating the decorations.

The morning of Monday began with the recitation of Goethe's poems “Song of the Spirits over the Waters” and “Prometheus” by Richard Jürgas, whom the participants now got to know as an excellent reciter, just as they had become acquainted with his acting skills the night before. Then the participants had the great joy of hearing the second lecture by Mrs. Besant, in which she spoke about the relationship of the Masters to the Theosophical Society. From her rich spiritual experience, she described the relationship of great individuals to spiritual progress and the way such individuals participate in the progress of the Theosophical Society. It is also impossible to give a picture of the far-reaching content of this lecture in a few words. Again, we must refer you to the Yearbook for more information. After this lecture, our member Frau Hempel delighted the participants with an excellent performance of her vocal art. This was followed by a lecture by Dr. Carl Ungers, who spoke very interestingly about working methods in the theosophical branches and explained the relationship of the non-clairvoyant theosophist to the messages of the clairvoyants, showing how the writing “Theosophy” by Dr. Rudolf Steiner can provide a basis for shaping this relationship in the right way. Later that morning, Mrs. Elise Wolfram gave her lecture on the occult basis of the Siegfried saga. She showed subtly and vividly how the deeper spiritual development of Europe is expressed in the myth, how Germanic and even older mystery wisdom has taken shape in Siegfried. The speakers' insightful interpretations were suitable for allowing the audience to enter into the mysterious life of part of the Nibelungen saga.

In the afternoon, Mrs. v. Gumppenberg read Mr. Arvid Knös's essay, “Absolute and Relative Truths”; then Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave his lecture, “Planetary Evolution and Human Evolution”. He described the development of the earth through three planetary conditions that preceded its present form and then pointed to the connection between the development of the earth and that of man. He also showed how one could know something about the future of development.

The evening was again devoted to purely artistic performances. The Sonata in G minor by L. van Beethoven was performed by Chr. Döbereiner (cello) and Elfride Schunk (piano). Afterwards, Gertrud Garmatter's excellent singing performance could be heard again (two songs: Weylas Gesang by Hugo Wolf and Frühlingsglaube by Franz Schubert). This was followed by solos for viola da gamba with piano, namely ı. Adagio by Händel and 2. the Aria con variazioni composed by A. Kühnel in 1645. Both pieces were performed by Chr. Döbereiner (Viola da Gamba) and Fräulein Elfride Schunk (piano). A brilliant performance on the piano by the Italian member Mr. Kirby closed the evening.

On Tuesday morning, the program began with Johanna Fritsch and Pauline Frieß performing the “Adagio from the Violin Concerto” op. 26 by Max Bruch. Mr. Richard Jürgas then recited some poems full of intimate feeling and mystical moods by our dear member Mia Holm. -— The rest of the morning was filled with a free discussion on the topic: The necessity of cultivating occultism within society. Mr. Jules Agoston from Budapest, Bernhard Hubo, Ludwig Deinhard, Dr. Carl Unger, Michael Bauer, D.Nagy, Mr. Wedgwood, Miss Severs and Mrs. Elise Wolfram took part in the discussion. The discussion was introduced by Jules Agoston, who emphasized the necessity of maintaining the spiritualist experiment; following on from this, Bernhard Hubo developed a contrary point of view based on his many years of experience; Ludwig Deinhard discussed the necessity of acquainting theosophical circles with scientific attempts to penetrate into the deeper foundations of the soul. It is impossible to report here on the rich and varied addresses of the above-mentioned speakers. Nor is it possible to do so with regard to the stimulating points of view that Mr. Nerei from Budapest gave in the afternoon during the discussion on “educational issues”. Following these points of view, Dr. Rudolf Steiner also spoke about education. — Mrs. Douglas-Shield spoke about the relationship between “Theosophy and Christianity”.

The closing act of the congress took place on Tuesday at 9 p.m. It began with the spirited and heartfelt Adagio in D major by our dear member and head of the Stuttgart lodge I: Adolf Arenson, which was performed by Mr. Arenson himself (piano), Dr. Carl Unger (cello) and Johanna Fritsch (violin). This was followed by: Tröstung (Consolation) by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, performed by Hilde Stockmeyer, Ave verum by Mozart performed by Gertrud Garmatter, the recitation of a poem by Mrs. Ripper, solos for violin by J.S.Bach, by Johanna Fritsch and Pauline Frieß, and variations on the chorale Sei gegrüsst, Jesu gütig, for organ by J.S.Bach, by Emanuel Nowotny. The Congress then drew to a close with short closing addresses by the representatives of the individual sections: Mr. Wallace spoke for the British section, Mlle Aime Blech (representing Dr. Pascal, who had to leave earlier due to his state of health) for the French section, Mr. Fricke for the Dutch section, and Prof. Dr. Penzig for the Italian section. Mrs. Besant then addressed some deeply moving words to the participants, and finally Dr. Rudolf Steiner spoke the closing words, in which he thanked the participants, especially those from foreign sections, for coming, and also expressed his warmest thanks to all those whose selfless work had made the congress possible.

And these thanks must be expressed to many, especially to Miss Sofie Stinde, who, as secretary of the congress, has done tireless and important work; to Countess Pauline Kalckreuth, who has worked tirelessly on all the preparatory work and tasks. Above all, we have these two to thank for the fact that we were able to pursue the above-mentioned intentions at all, and that we were able to achieve what has been achieved. Adolf Arenson took care of the musical part of the program. Our dear member Clara Rettich devoted herself selflessly to the task of painting the seven apocalyptic seals according to the occult instructions given to her; in the same way, Karl Stahl took on the task of painting the seven pillars in the hall. It is impossible to mention all the numerous workers individually by name. But it should not go unmentioned that dear members had set up a buffet in an adjoining room and did the necessary work, which greatly enhanced the convivial get-together, through which members are to come together after all.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner was authorized, at his request, and indeed unanimously and out of the enthusiasm of the audience, to thank Monsieur Ed. Schuré, the poet of the “Drama of Eleusis”, and Bernhard Stavenhagen, the composer of the musical part, on behalf of the congress.

The sculptures by our highly talented member, the sculptor Dr. Ernst Wagner, who strives for the highest artistic goals, were an excellent artistic presentation for the congress. The sculptures he provided for our exhibition were placed in the area around the main hall, and, with the red wall of the hall providing an atmospheric background, they had an inwardness. The following works of art were present: Portrait bust, Woman praying, Portrait bust, Relief for a sepulchral chapel, Bust, Sepulchral relief, King's child, Dissolution, Sibyl, Relief for a sepulchral niche, Portrait bust, Pain, Christ mask, Mask “Death”, Bronze statuette. Except for these works of art, only the following could be accommodated in the main hall: the interesting symbolic painting “The Great Babylon” by our member Mr. Haß, which was placed above the boardroom, and a carpet by Ms. Lehmann, which fascinating utilization of mystical ideas in the applied arts, and finally a relief by M. Gailland depicting Colonel Olcott, and a sketch of H.P. Blavatsky by Julia Wesw-Hoffmann.

The exhibition of a series of artworks and reproductions of such artworks that have a particular connection to theosophical thought took place in the adjoining room. Here you could see: etchings by Hans Volkert; reproductions of two pictures by Moreau; reproductions of two pictures by Hermann Schmiechen; a statuette: The Master, by Heymann; a picture: From Deep Distress, by Stockmeyer; reproductions of various pictures by Watts; three reproductions of works by Lionardo; pictures by Kalckreuth the Elder, by Sophie Stinde (landscapes); by Haß (After the Storm, Fairy Tale: The King's Daughter, The Storm Cloud, Five Fir Tree Studies); a reproduction of Knopf, the painter. The next congress of the Federation will take place in Budapest in two years (1909), at the kind invitation of the Hungarian members.

... In the first period after the great Atlantean catastrophe, the life of man was intimately connected with the spirit; each human being could be told the nature of his Karma, according to the moment of his birth. At that time astrology was not the dilettantism it often is to-day, but signified rather a living participation in the deeds of the stars. And from this living participation, the way in which each human being had to live was revealed to him out of the Mysteries. Astrology had a living significance for the experience of each human life. Then came a time about the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, in which men no longer experienced the secrets of the starry heavens, but experienced instead the course of the year. What do I mean by saying that men experienced the “course of the year”? It means that they knew through immediate perception, that the earth is not the coarse lump modern geology sees in it. No plants could grow on the earth, if it were what geology imagines; even less could animals or human beings appear on it—this would be quite impossible; for according to geologists the earth is a mineral, and there can be direct growth out of the mineral only when the whole universe works upon it, when there is a connection with the whole universe. In ancient times men knew what to-day must be learned over again, namely, that the earth is an organism and has a soul.

You see, this earth soul too has its particular destiny. Suppose that it is winter where we are, Christmas-time or the time of the winter solstice,—then that is the time in which the soul of the earth is completely united with the earth. For when the earth is decked with snow, when as it were, a frosty cloak envelops the earth, then the earth-soul is united with the earth, rests in the interior of the earth. We find then, that the soul of the earth, resting within the earth, maintains the life of countless elemental spirits. The modern naturalistic conception which thinks that the seeds sown in autumn simply lie there until next spring is quite false, the elemental spirits of the earth must preserve the seeds throughout the winter. This is all connected with the fact that the soul of the earth is united with the body of the earth throughout the time of winter.

Let us take the opposite season: midsummer time. Just as man draws in the air and exhales it, so that it is alternately within him and outside him, so does the earth inhale its soul during the winter. And during the time of mid-summer in the height of summer, the soul of the earth has been exhaled entirely; breathed out into the wide spaces of the universe. The body of the earth is then, as it were, “empty” and does not contain the earth-soul; the earth shares with its soul in the events of the cosmos, in the course of the stars, etc. For this reason Winter Mysteries existed in ancient times, in which one experienced the union of the earth-soul with the earth. There were Summer Mysteries too, in which it was possible to perceive the secrets of the universe, when the soul of the initiate followed the soul of the earth out into the cosmic spaces and shared in its experiences with the stars.

The old traditional remnants still extant to-day can show that men used to be conscious of such things. Long ago,—it happened to be actually here, in Berlin—I often used to spend some time with an astronomer who was very well known, and who agitated violently against the very disturbing idea that the Easter Festival should fall on the Sunday immediately after the first full moon of spring; he thought it terrible that it did not fall each year, let us say on the first Sunday of April. It was of course useless to bring forward reasons against this idea; for what underlay it was this: If Easter falls each year on a different date, a frightful confusion comes about in the debit and credit of account books! This movement had even assumed quite large proportions. I have mentioned here before that on the first page of account books one generally finds the words “With God”, whereas as a rule, the things contained in such books are not exactly “with God”. In the times in which the Easter Festival was fixed according to the course of the stars,—the first Sunday after the spring full moon was dedicated to the Sun—there was still the consciousness that the soul of the earth is within the earth during the winter, and outside in the cosmic spaces during midsummer time, while in spring it is on its way out towards cosmic space. The Spring Festival, the Easter Festival, cannot therefore be fixed on a particular day, in accordance with earthly things alone, but must take into account the constellations of the stars. A deep wisdom lies in this, coming out of an age in which men were still able to perceive the spiritual nature of the year's course through an ancient instinctive clairvoyance. We must again come to this. And we can come to it again, in a certain sense, if we grasp the tasks of the present time by connecting them with what we have discussed and studied together here.

On several occasions I have stated here that amongst the spiritual Beings with whom man is united every night in the way I have described—for instance, with the Archangels through speech—there are some Beings who are the ruling spiritual powers for a particular period of time. During the last third of the nineteenth century, the Michael period began, that period in which the spirit otherwise designated in writings as Michael, has become the most important one for the concerns of human civilisation. Such things repeat themselves periodically. In ancient times, something was known about all these spiritual processes. The old Hebrew period spoke of Jahve. But it always spoke of the “countenance of Jahve or Jehovah” and by “countenance” it meant the Archangels, who were actually the mediators between Jahve and the earth. And when the Jews were awaiting the Messiah on earth, they knew: the Michael period, in which Michael is the mediator for Christ's activity on earth, is here; only the Jews misunderstood this in its deeper connection. Since the seventies of the nineteenth century the time has once more come on earth in which the Michael force is the ruling spiritual power in the world, and in which we must understand how to introduce the spiritual element into our actions, and how to arrange our life out of the spirit. “Serving Michael” means that we should not organise our life merely out of the material, but that we should be conscious that Michael, whose mission it is to overcome the base Ahrimanic forces, must, as it were, be our genius in the development of our civilisation.

Now he can achieve this if we remember how we can link again in a spiritual sense to the course of the seasons. There is really a deep wisdom in the whole world process, manifested in our being able to unite the Festival of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus with the Spring Festival. The historical connection (I have often stated this) is absolutely correct: the Spring Festival, i.e. the Easter Festival, can only fall on a different day each year, because it is something that is seen from the other world. It is only we on earth who have the narrow-minded conception that “time” is continuous, that every hour is just as long as another. We determine time mathematically, by our earthly means alone, whereas for the real spiritual world, the cosmic hour is endowed with life. One cosmic hour is not like another, but shorter or longer than another. Hence we are always likely to err when we try to determine from the earth what should be determined from a heavenly standpoint. The Easter Festival is rightfully determined in accordance with the heavens.

What is the nature of this festival? It is the festival that should remind us, and once did remind people in the most living manner, that a Divine Being descended to the earth, took His dwelling in the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, in order that during the time in which mankind was approaching the Ego evolution, human beings might find their way back, in the right way, through death into spiritual life. This I have often described. Thus, the Easter Festival is the festival in which man contemplates death and the immortality which follows it, through the Mystery of Golgotha. We look at this springtime festival aright when we say: The Christ has strengthened man's immortality through His own victory over death; but we human beings understand the immortality of Christ Jesus in the right way only when we acquire this understanding during our life on earth, i.e. if we awaken to life within our souls our connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and are able to free ourselves from the materialistic conception which takes away from the Mystery of Golgotha all its spiritual nature. To-day the “Christ” is hardly taken into consideration, but only “Jesus”, “the simple man of Nazareth.” One would almost blush before one's own scientific knowledge if one were to admit that the Mystery of Golgotha contains a spiritual mystery in the midst of earth-existence, namely, the Death and Resurrection of the God.

But when we experience this in a spiritual manner, we prepare ourselves to experience other things also in a spiritual manner. It is for this reason so important for modern man to gain the possibility of experiencing the Mystery of Golgotha above all as something entirely spiritual. He will then be able to experience other spiritual things, and will find through the Mystery of Golgotha the paths leading into the spiritual worlds. At the same time, man must understand the Resurrection in connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, while he is still alive; and if he is able to understand the Resurrection in his feelings while he is alive, this will also enable him to pass through death in the right way. This means that death and resurrection, contained in the Mystery of Golgotha, should teach man to invert the relationship: to experience resurrection inwardly, within the soul, during life, so that after having experienced this inner resurrection in his soul, he may go through death in the right way. This experience is the exact opposite of the Easter experience. At Easter we should submerge ourselves in Christ's Death and Resurrection. But as human beings we must be able to submerge in what is given to us as the resurrection of the soul, in order that the risen human soul may go through death in the right way. Just as in the spring we acquire the real Easter feeling in seeing how the plants spring up and bud, how Nature reawakens to life and overcomes winter's death, so we are able to acquire another feeling when we have lived through the summer in the right spirit and know that the soul has ascended into cosmic spaces; that we are approaching autumn, that September and the Autumn Equinox are drawing near; that the leaves which were shooting so green and fresh in the spring, are now turning yellow and brown, are withering away; that the trees stand there almost bare of their leaves; Nature is dying. Yet we understand this dying Nature when we look into the fading process, when the snow begins to cover the earth: and say: the soul of the earth is withdrawing again into the earth and will be fully within the earth when the winter solstice has come.

It is possible to experience this autumn season just as intensely as we experience springtide. Just as we can experience the Death and Resurrection of the God in the Easter season in spring, so can we experience in the autumn the death and resurrection of the human soul, i.e. we experience resurrection during our life on earth in order to go through death in the right way. Moreover, we must understand what it means for us and for our age that the soul of the earth is exhaled at midsummer into the world's far spaces, is there united with the stars and then returns. He who fathoms the secrets of the earth's circuit during the course of the year will know that the Michael force is now descending again through the Nature-forces—the Michael force which did not descend in former centuries. Thus we can face the leafless autumn, inasmuch as we look towards the approach of the Michael force out of the clouds. The calendars show on this day the name of “Michael”, and Michaelmas is a country festival: yet we shall not experience the present spiritually, linking human events on earth with Nature's events, until we understand again the year's course and establish festivals of the year as they were established in the past by the ancients, who were still endowed with their dreamy clairvoyance. Men of old understood the year, and out of such mysteries, which I could to-day outline only briefly, they founded the Christmas, Easter and Midsummer (St. John) festivals. At Christmas time we give each other presents and do certain other things as well; but I have often explained in the Christmas and Easter lectures I have given here, how very little people still receive to-day from these festivals, how everything has taken on a traditional, external form. When, however, the festivals which we celebrate without understanding them, will again be understood, then we shall have the strength to establish out of a spiritual understanding of the year's course, a festival which only now for present-day humanity, has real significance: this will be the Michael Festival. It will be a festival in the last days of September, when autumn approaches, the leaves wither, the trees grow bare and Nature faces death,—just as it faces a new budding life at Easter time,—and when we experience in Nature's fading life, how the soul of the earth is then united with the earth and brings with it Michael out of the clouds. When we acquire the strength to establish such a festival out of the spirit,—a festival that brings with it once more a feeling of fellowship into our social life,—then we shall have established it spiritually: for we shall then have founded something in our midst which has the spirit at its source. Far more important than other reflections on social conditions—which can lead to no results in our present chaotic conditions, unless they contain the spirit—would be this: that a number of open-minded people should come together for the purpose of instituting again on earth something proceeding out of the universe, as, for instance, a Michael Festival. This would be the worthy counterpart of the Easter Festival, but a festival taking place in autumn, an Autumn Festival. If people could determine upon something, the motive to which can be found only in the spiritual world, something which can kindle feelings of fellowship amongst those who assemble at such a festival—arising out of the fullness and freshness of the human heart through immediate contact—then something would exist which could bind men together again socially.

For in the past, festivals used to bind human beings strongly together. Just think, for instance, of all that has been done and said and thought in connection with festivals for the whole of civilisation.

This is what entered physical life through the establishment of festivals directly out of the spirit. If men could determine in a dignified worthy way to establish a Michael Festival during the last days of September, this would be a most significant deed. But the courage would have to be found amongst them not merely to discuss external social reforms, etc., but to do something that connects the earth with the heavens, that reconnects physical with spiritual conditions.

Thus something would again take place amongst men, constituting a mighty impulse for the continuation of our civilisation and our whole human life; because the Spirit would once more be introduced into earthly conditions.

There is naturally no time to describe to you the scientific, religious and artistic experiences which could arise, just as in the ancient festivals—through such a new festival, established in a great and worthy way out of the spirit. How much more important than all that is going on to-day in the shape of social tirades would be such a creating out of the spiritual world. For what would that imply? It implies a great deal for an insight into man's inner nature if I can fathom his way of thinking, if I can really understand his words aright. If to-day one could see the working of the whole universe when autumn approaches, if one could decipher the whole face of the universe, and acquire creative force out of it, then the establishment of such a festival would reveal, not only the will of human beings, but also the will of Gods and Spirits. Then the Spirit would again be among mankind!

Because one has to consider the supersensible human being as the core of the human being, it is quite natural that the knowledge of the supersensible human being is human self-knowledge. However, with this human self-knowledge you face a very strange paradox. On the one side, you face the necessity of understanding the human being as a supersensible being; on the other side, any usual cognitive ability is bound to the sensory appearance. What he grasps with his reason is also bound to the sensory appearance. One could say without thinking, self-knowledge demands the view of the human being with cognitive abilities that are far away from his consciousness at first. In so far as the human being becomes aware of himself as a supersensible being, he has to acknowledge in a certain sense that everything that he performs in life arises from his supersensible being. On the other side, one could say, everything that appears in his consciousness appears sensorily “veiled” in a somewhat improper sense. Hence, one misunderstands spiritual-scientific research and speaking about the supersensible so easily and so often. Since the today's considerations will show that one cannot approach the true nature of the human being with the usual abilities of the everyday consciousness. Yes, one has even to say that that kind of knowledge which has developed so greatly on scientific basis rather misleads concerning the self-knowledge than to lead this self-knowledge in the right way. Since just if the well-schooled scientific way of thinking approaches the human self-knowledge, one notices that it can fail too easily. We want to take an example as starting point.

In the very interesting booklet The Subconscious Self and Its Relation to Education and Health by Louis Waldstein (1853-1915) is talk of various things that also strike the scientist if he gets to know the human life in its development in the different relations. We have spoken in a former talk about the revelations of the unconscious, of the subconscious. The example that I want to bring in is that of a naturalist, and the way in which he speaks about that is completely scientific. The author of this booklet wants to point to a certain place how this subconscious being plays a peculiar, vague role. Waldstein chooses the following example. He says, I stood before the shop-window of a bookstore. Because I am a naturalist, I just looked at a book about mollusks. At this moment when I saw this book, I started smiling to myself, and I was surprised why I did this, because a book about mollusks has nothing humorous.—He continues: I closed my eyes to investigate what maybe proceeded in my surroundings. When I turned the view away from the book, I heard the tones of a barrel organ quite soft in the distance. It played the melody of a song that one played when I danced my first quadrille. At that time, I did not care with which sympathies or antipathies I met this melody; since I was occupied very much to make my dance steps well arranged. At that time, I was not at all especially careful on what entered half my consciousness musically. Still the fact that I must smile standing before the book about mollusks after decades proves that the impression, which at that time that melody had done still, has continuing effects; and if I had not closed my eyes, but had been content with the astonishment, I would not have known then why I smiled standing before the book.

One realises how mysteriously such things have continuing effects in the subsoil of the soul life, how much generally exists in the human being that comes up only quite fantastically in the consciousness; one realises how difficult it is to get to real self-knowledge. Since to which danger do you expose yourself, if you want to practise introspection? To the danger that you have to deal with all possible completely blurred subconscious things which you have maybe taken up decades ago which have a lasting effect which work only in the deepest subsoil of the soul like a mood that comes up then and nuances what you now observe in yourself.

Waldstein and others bring in numerous such examples. You find those also in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. Such examples are very suitable to be rather careful about introspection. Since even some people believe to get with introspection also to a real knowledge of the human being. Some people also believe while bringing up such memories from their subconsciousness that they do all possible clairvoyant discoveries.

Now one has to be careful also in another respect. You can realise, for example, that some who claim to figure this or that out by their supersensible knowledge of their inside express this supersensible knowledge in pictures which are got, for example, from telegraphs or railways or as the case may be. From it, one would see that the supersensible with its pictures had just to wait to appear, until the railways were invented. Someone who does not approach the supersensible research uncritically will also be able to know easily how frivolously one proceeds in this field now and again, and how it is really soothing that thorough scientific thinking points to the fact that such contents which somebody regards as revelation of higher worlds sometimes are nothing but what the person concerned has taken up once in any blurred way at a younger age

• what he regards, however, as a revelation what did not come to his consciousness at that time

• what changed in multiple way

• what he does not recognise again,

• what now, which has come about in supersensible way.

In my book I have pointed out that, actually, everything works on the human being and that sometimes in something that the one regards as an inspiration is nothing but the transformation of a shop sign at which he did not properly look when passing by in the street, but which penetrated only into his subconscious.

With it, one points to an area of human life that one has to consider rather carefully and rather critically just by somebody who seriously wants to expand his research to the supersensible world. However, on the other side, all these memories, these subconscious images point to something else, it is as it were the side effect of something quite different. There I have to return more exactly to something that I have already mentioned here in the course of these talks: the relation between memory and the usual mental pictures. A very usual kind of thinking that has played a big role also in science, in particular in psychology, is that the human being has experiences while facing the outside world. These experiences evoke mental pictures in him. Now he has these mental pictures. After some time he “remembers.” Now one imagines this process very often in such a way, as if these mental pictures, which he had once and which he has somewhere in the subsoil of the soul, come up again as recollections in his consciousness. One thinks very often, more or less consciously or subconsciously, that that which appears in the recollection is nothing but the same mental picture which one had once, and which was down there anyhow and comes up again in the consciousness. However, someone who knows to practise real observation in this field has to regard this way of thinking as something rather childish and dilettantish.

Since if we face an outer phenomenon if we have an experience of the smallest or biggest kind, which evokes perception and mental pictures by the perception in us, this “activity”—I want to call it provisionally so—is accompanied by another activity of which we do not become aware usually. This activity is yet another one; it accompanies the conscious imagining activity and causes something in us that leads to memory. However, you have to observe properly. The most trivial observation in this area is that if you consider the difference of imagining, which can be completely easy, and memorising. Remember only what the young people who have to “cram” for an exam have to do, so that they have not only the mental picture, but also keep it in mind. There quite weird performances are carried out sometimes. Think of the play, which takes place between the human hands and the head if anybody has to cram something. Of course, that is only an outer sign of what I mean. But in truth it is in such a way that during the imagining activity another activity is still there which does not get to our consciousness and exercises an effect on our organism which consists of something quite different than of forming mental pictures. Later if we remember that again which we have imagined once, this mental picture completely originates anew. It originates as it were from the “sign,” from the “engram”—if I am allowed to use this expression—which that activity can exercise which accompanies the imagining activity on our organism. As we face the object of the outside world and form, inwards directed, our mental picture, we face our organs while remembering.

What happens there what is different from our imagining as the outer object is different from our mental picture is changed into the mental picture anew. Somebody who is able to observe the organisation of the human mind and its effectiveness knows that that which forms as a mental picture appears and disappears, while it is imagined. If anything is reminded, the mental picture has not slept down there and appears again, but from something quite different that happens below in the organism the mental picture is anew formed. What I want to show there is that we have to see something in that accompanying activity, which goes along with it, actually, in the subsoil of our conscious life and is connected with something that always emerges with the memories from our subconscious. As well as everything that appears in the world has its concomitants which appear like the caricature of the real now and again, is that which I have mentioned from the writing by Waldstein also such a concomitant of the quite normal regular way how the human being works in the memories. I would like to say, what proceeds subconsciously, so that the human being has a memory, appears in such things if it overflows or if anything remains indistinct or blurred like the sounds of a barrel organ that still generate an effect making Waldstein smile. That which is there rather conceals the things than that it explains them. Since the point is that it is a very normal activity, which is very necessary for the human being, namely that which forms the basis of the human memory. This is something that accompanies our whole conscious life perpetually, but we do not turn our attention upon this accompanying activity in the usual life. The accompanying activity is due to our organisation.

It is a kind of touchstone of the real supersensible research to consider such a thing like this accompanying activity forming memory. Since that which normally works in the subconscious can be changed into something conscious on the first level at first. Changing something unconscious into something conscious is one of the capacities that lead to the real investigation of the supersensible. What remains usually subconscious must be brought up in the consciousness. Thereby it already becomes different. The exercises, which I have described in my book, which one has to go through to put the soul in such a condition that it can face the supersensible, consist of many things. However, one can illustrate something elementary showing that this first elementary is related to a quite normal activity which remains, however, usually subconscious. One has to carry out the activity consciously which is carried out there unconsciously, but quite normally to form the memory. For that, it is necessary that you are able to refrain from that activity which causes the usual mental pictures bound to the senses. You must be able to withdraw as it were from this imagining. However, you are not able to do this if you cannot replace it with another kind of imagining. You attain this, while you focus on self-developed mental pictures that are easily understandable.

I say "easily understandable" mental pictures; this is exceptionally important. Self-chosen, self-developed, easily understandable mental pictures must be because just any subconscious, everything about which one cannot know to which blurred perception it is due must be removed. However, you never are sure—one sees this from this example—that this blurred, subconscious weaving of the soul life is blanked out if you do not focus on a mental picture which you can really figure out at the moment where you yourself have formed it, so that you know, any part of this mental picture has arisen from your immediate will which you have unfolded at this moment. “Self-chosen” does not mean of course “self-made;” you can get such mental pictures from an experienced spiritual researcher, and he is able to know best of all how they can be adapted to the individuality of the human being concerned. However, it matters that you intermingle the mental picture with the thoughts and experience in the soul that you have nothing in the soul but this mental picture. It also matters that these mental pictures occupy our consciousness if possible in very versatile way so that this mental picture is present in every atom, I would like to say. This is particularly fulfilled if you take such mental pictures in your consciousness that stimulate you to make the thoughts versatile.

A growing plant, for example, is a good mental picture; not staring at something resting, but at something that is in motion or that has any relations to each other. Thereby we are protected that our consciousness becomes idle while staring at the mental picture. Since it matters for the investigation of the supersensible world that everything that is done as preparation has to be done completely consciously from start to finish that in no way the consciousness is anyhow darkened. Hence, it belongs to the first requirements of the future spiritual researcher that he eliminates everything from that soul activity which should lead him to spiritual research—of course, not from the remaining life—that can decrease the consciousness anyhow. It is particularly important that in this living in easily understandable mental pictures, in this “meditating,” nothing prevails in the consciousness that may darken it. It is the first requirement that anything dreamy, all thoughts, arising from the inside, which one likes, are eliminated from the preparations of spiritual-scientific research. Furthermore, everything has to disappear that could anyhow darken the consciousness of percipience. What you want to aim at must not deal anyhow, for example, with staring a luminous point by which one could get to a certain hypnotic condition, or with that which some people even feel as a rather nice preparation: looking at a “crystal ball” and the like. The opposite of all suggestive or hypnotic conditions you have to exercise if you prepare yourself for spiritual research. You can learn from that: if you often hear from people who are also “followers” of spiritual science and say that you have to lose yourself if possible eliminating the own being to a dreamy “devotion,” then it is that “spiritual science” which may cause a lot of ease which does not at all lead, however, to the investigation of the supersensible world.

I have to draw attention sometimes to such things; since even people who want to be serious critics of spiritual research confuse it with its opposite. Even a critic (Max Dessoir, 1867-1947, German philosopher) who has made a great stir confuses this spiritual research with its opposite, and he describes them in Beyond the Soul (1917), with those phenomena which belong by no means to the spiritual world according to the methods of spiritual research. However, it is strange that just this critic brings in an example of his own soul life that he continued speaking for a while when he held a lecture and then only realised that he had continued speaking without his thoughts having gone along. You can be quite sure that such a lecturer has not understood any trace of that which I mean here with spiritual research.

Of course, you have to develop that further what I have given now, but it matters to emphasise the essentials. The essentials and important of that what you experience internally this way is the following:

While you evoke such mental pictures more and more in your soul and mind how the soul is active different than with the outer percipience, the big, important fact manifests itself to you from a certain point on that you are now inside such a soul activity which remains usually unaware and leads in the usual life to the formation of memory. You have pushed one level down as it were what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining. You have not considered what you experience, otherwise, in the imagining, and you have considered what accompanies this imagining else. You have pushed your whole ego-consciousness one level down where, otherwise, this is done what leads to memory, and you get to know this way what takes place usually perpetually below in the soul what you do not consider in the usual consciousness. I have repeatedly shown also here what the fact depends on that the human being is able to form memories. Everybody knows what it means to the human being if his memory power is disturbed pathologically for a time. You get to know a level of soul experience which represents something subconscious to the usual life, and which still cannot be denied, because it is there in its effects which, however, is a particular experience if you settle in that which you have woken by meditating.

This experience is a shaking one for someone who generally has a feeling of such things. You experience that you have reached that level where memory lives that you have approached something in your being that proceeds, otherwise, rather unconsciously that normally never enters even approximately in your consciousness by its nature. This memory-forming force is related to the formative force in us in a way. Since while the force of growth is far away from the usual imagining, it is near by the memory-forming force. Always something immediately grows together that is, otherwise, separated: the force of growth and the memory-forming force to a compound thing which you have in yourself and which you get to know this way. We carry this perpetually in ourselves.

The usual consciousness does not suspect at all that the same force which accompanies the human being as force of growth, as formative force is—increased and refined—the same to which you appeal if you form memories. However, it is something compound. If you get to know the thing, it presents itself as something compound. Since you learn to distinguish that which is combined as force of growth and as memory-forming force; it is as it were a duality that co-operates as a unity. While you dwell on the thing, you discover: what you bring up as memory is, actually, subconscious knowledge, a deeper level of consciousness in which our usual ego does not live. However, this consciousness penetrates the force of growth.

The force of growth and the memory-forming force face each other closer than our conscious knowledge and the outer physical world. However, our conscious knowledge of the outer physical world is more distant from each other; we cannot build the bridge from the one to the other. That which we want to get from there, which we bring to mind by meditations, carries its own object in itself, but it is something that is related to our knowledge. We learn to figure a duality out. However, this duality appears, the further you advance in your soul life, very clear to the beholding consciousness. You behold the force of growth this way. You behold it—to use a good old quotation of Troxler (Ignaz Paul Vital T., 1780-1866, Swiss physician and philosopher)—as the true human corporeality compared with the physical corporeality. In our usual consciousness, we perceive the physical corporeality. This subconsciousness perceives this corporeality in us.

Do not misunderstand me, I have called this corporeality the body of formative forces in the magazine Das Reich. I called it the “etheric body” previously. Because certain people take exception to expressions, I have tried to come closer with the term to that which it concerns and I have called that which is closest to the physical body and accompanies our whole life as formative- forces the “body of formative forces.” One can call that which does not live in our usual consciousness which is always closer to this body of formative forces, and to which one gets by meditation the “astral body” for certain reasons; but one can also call it the “soul,” which works a level deeper than the usual consciousness.

As the chemist separates a compound substance into the different elements, or as the physicist splits the white sunlight into different colours, we have the nature of the human being divided into the physical body that one perceives with the outer senses, into the body of formative forces that is the first supersensible member of the human being, and into the astral body or soul that subconsciously knows about the work of the body of formative forces, but shines in the usual consciousness only in the memory pictures . From all that the real ego is separated which swims on this triple human being, which knows nothing about that which the soul knows about the bodily, which separates, however, from the soul and which then forms the usual consciousness, and which is spiritual. The fact that this ego-being must be separated as a particular member from the other members turns out only if you advance further with the recommended exercises. I have described how one puts self-formed, clear mental pictures into the soul. It is advantageous if one takes versatile mental pictures and tries to feel, to experience what can be just experienced resting in such mental pictures.

These are two things. The one is that you become aware that there is such a weaving and living in the human being as it is similar to the memory formation. The other is what you experience if you look internally at this experience. It is as if you proceed in such a way that you form the mental pictures on one side, the thinking on the other side, which becomes memory then. This is a particular experience. Someone who goes through it who trains himself as spiritual researcher in the real sense knows that this is a particular experience. Since an element stops from a certain moment on prevailing in this soul life, which, otherwise, is significant always for our soul life: the spatial element. If you reflect that in the usual consciousness almost only spatial images are available, then you realise how much the usual consciousness is dependent on space. This experience, which attaches itself to such mental pictures, as I have developed, causes gradually to know yourself lifted out of space and being in only temporal processes. This is like a significant progress of the human soul life: to know yourself in the tides of time, because this causes to figure the stream of time out really. I said, the whole results in recognising the relationship of the memory power with the forces of growth. You are put just in this.

Something else is still important. I said, it is a double: to have these mental pictures—and to pay particular attention on what you experience there, how you really experience the mental pictures becoming versatile, the living in time, since then you are with your ego in this imagining life.

You are not only in an imagining life, but also generally in a life, which is mixed with the real forces working in time. Then you have got at an ego-experience that is completely different from the usual ego-experience. Someone who knows the usual ego-experience by appropriate introspection knows how narrowly it is bound to the human corporeality, and I have described last time to which elements of the corporeality the ego is bound at first: that it concerns equilibrium relationships, so spatial relations. However, you cannot stay at this experience, but you properly get into the course of time.

Very few people regard anyhow what I have indicated now. Thus, some philosophers assume that our ego is that ego which remains in any experience from birth to death. However, this weird concept of the permanent usual ego as Bergson (Henri B., 1850-1941) designed it can be easily disproved. Every dreamless sleep disproves this assertion. This is why one is not able to build up something on the usual ego-experience if one wants to recognise the human being. However, one carries the ego--experience into the course of time.

If one carries the ego into the course of time if to the other experience of the mental subconscious and the memory-forming body this new ego-experience appears, then it does not count any more that every sleep interrupts this ego-experience, but then something else counts. Then turns out that with our ego-idea also the following is associated.

I have shown last time from which vague feeling this ego-idea appears. It has to be inspired as it were. It is not there in the dreamless sleep. How is it inspired? It is inspired when we approach our corporeality with our soul again. Our corporeality stimulates our ego in the usual consciousness from without. We collide in the usual consciousness with our body; this stimulates our ego-idea. This ego-idea must not be considered as something permanent. However, with that which I have portrayed as new ego-experience the situation is quite different. This lives in the tides of time, it is lifted out from space. This is just inspired, while the human being inspires the experience at one moment in time and not with the spatial collision with his corporeality, but in the collision with the experience of another moment in time. This ego-experience about which I have spoken now is identical with the fact that if I wake I collide in mysterious way with that moment in time at which I have fallen asleep. This forms the basis of the new ego-experience that we experience ourselves at different, at consecutive moments in time that we bridge the time, even if it is discontinuous if sleep disturbs it.

These are the essentials of this ego-experience. Because we immerse the ego in the soul, as far as this is related with the conditions of growth, thereby we immerse the ego itself in the conditions of growth. We advance to that in the ego, which accompanies us from birth to death; we penetrate into the continual stream of ego-experience. What philosophy only concludes else about which one only judges, this is experienced. One defends himself even against the fact that Eduard von Hartmann talks of the fact that if one wants to observe a feeling it is disturbed and changes.

If Eduard von Hartmann notices this, he just wants to exclude that the ego can live in this stream of time. He wants to prove just with it that for the ego-experience the stream of time gets lost to him. However, it does not get lost, but is just gained with it. Yes, someone who can practise introspection spiritual-scientifically knows that the ego-experience that is there at this moment interrelates with former moments in time.

Do not take it as tomfoolery or as boast, if I tell an own experience which seems to be very simple if it is experienced which shook me again recently. I finished a book in 1894 in which I pointed out wholly philosophically that the human thinking is already something spiritual: my Philosophy of Freedom. At that time, I was a young man of 33 years. Now recently the necessity has arisen to work through this book again, to go through everything again that penetrated my soul at that time and to observe at the same time how the ego-experiences of today relate to the quite same ego--experiences of those days.

If you succeed in realising how something similar appears in time while experiencing again and encountering the revived experiences as usually at awakening, then you can just realise with such an example how the ego is inspired exactly the same way as in the corporeality at awakening, while it meets something of it again that existed in the stream of time. Someone who cannot observe this does not imagine at all what he experiences if he does not have the ego in the stream of space, but if he is forced to think it according to the mental pictures in the Philosophy of Freedom that many people regard as “abstractions.” I call them the most concrete, most living mental pictures because the Philosophy of Freedom develops nothing but living concepts. This is the ego-experience due to the interrelation of the one moment in time with the other moment in time. There begins that what you can pictorially call the transition to the inner musical experience of the world. It is, as if you interrelate a tone of a melody to the other tones of the melody if not only this originates that the tone shakes the air as it were, experiences itself in space, but if a tone interrelates with the other tone. It is impossible actually to look different at the inner weaving and living of this highest member of the human being from to proceed to such a musical experience of the one moment of time through the other.

The whole human being is thereby divided into (1) the physical body, (2) the body of formative forces working in the memory, which spiritualises the body of formative forces like a subconscious knowledge, (3) the actual soul or astral body, and (4) the ego. Then we have tried to look at the supersensible, and with it you have the complete human being. With it, you also have the suggestion how you have to experience, so that you can directly behold the permanent in the human being. There is no interpretation or philosophical analysis of the usual ego useful; you have to carry this ego into another sphere, you have to experience it anew on quite different conditions. That ego which you experience this way is an ego that is independent from the spatial corporeality at the same time, and it can gradually perceive, while you continue your exercises, that in the tides of time which lives in the human being only temporally, not spatially.

If I am allowed to insert something for those who know of such things: one has pointed out in the present philosophy that one does not approach the soul if one wants to grasp it substantially, but only if one grasps it as a passage through a process. In particular, Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, German psychologist and philosopher) pointed to that. However, Wundt pointed to the fact abstractly that one does not approach the soul if one considers it as a substance, but that one has to observe it in the living process.

However, it does not concern to visualise it only in the mental process by abstractions but to submerge with the own ego in the mental process and to experience it. Then one can gradually pursue this mental process also beyond those times in which it is busy in the spatial-physical. If you have learnt to let collide the experience of one moment in time with the other moment, then you can also gradually develop the ability in yourself to let collide the inner experience of the ego generally with the stream of time where the spatial-bodily-has only originated in the stream of heredity. Then the stream of time extends beyond the spatial-bodily, then you behold in the stream of time in which the ego weaves in the life before birth and in the life after death.

To somebody who experiences that which I have described now in principle something occurs internally that one can compare with the experience, which probably Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) might have had when he stood at the beginning of the modern scientific way of thinking and asserted this. The human beings up to Giordano Bruno looked at the cosmic space, saw the blue firmament and regarded it as a real border of space. It was significant that in Giordano Bruno's soul the idea appeared first: there is really nothing at all; only our view, only the conditions of our sense perception cause that we see a blue bowl there; in truth it extends to infinity, the blue firmament is only a border of our view. This also applies to the temporal. Birth or conception and death become the borders of the temporal firmament at which we look which our sense. What we regard as our world in which we live with our ego, with our supersensible human being, this is beyond this temporal firmament beyond death on one side, beyond birth or conception on the other side. Today we face this great leap forward of the human knowledge where in similar way as centuries ago the spatial illusion was removed the illusion is now removed that birth and death are borders beyond which one cannot get.

You have to do this leap. Then it opens the view of the real life of your supersensible being. However, you have to consider particularly: someone who wants to become a spiritual researcher as I have described here has to pursue with the highest critical introspection always what could keep him from coming objectively into this spiritual world. He can be very easily kept from it. It is advantageous not to use mental pictures for meditation, which evoke feelings and emotions. Somebody who uses mental pictures, which excite him very strongly, can deceive himself very easily. Hence, you should avoid for the preparation that religious impulses are brought in the exercises. Strange to say—it will be fine with some people—those mental pictures are the very best which touch us the least concerning our emotional life. If you become engrossed in geometry in such versatile mental pictures where the figures can accept different forms, or in such mental pictures, as I have shown them in the Philosophy of Freedom, then that furthers us in this field. With it, I do not want to say that spiritual-scientific research is not concerned with the religious life. However, it concerns that one gets to that religious internalization and deepening for which just spiritual science can also be the preparation best of all because one does not take it as starting point, but proceeds with very unemotional and incurious mental pictures on the way of research, and if you are in the spiritual world, the view which can already be a mighty help just for the religious deepening comes to you from this spiritual world. Thus, you have to use particular mental pictures, which are not associated with the griefs and concerns of human life and which you can easily understand. However, these never are the mental pictures, which excite us easily, because there everything imaginable appears from the subconscious in the soul. One has to exclude this subconscious above all.

You really penetrate into a spiritual experience this way where you can find that being in the human being only which lives in the freedom of will which lives in the immortal soul being. Every human being bears it in himself. However, you can recognise it only in such ways as I have described.

In the next talk, I want to go on talking from this point about the important questions of the human soul life: about the freedom of will and about the immortality of the soul. I want to show how one advances from the supersensible human being to a real conception of the life of this supersensible human being, of the life in the real perpetuity, and the life in the freedom of will. People have argued so much about freedom of will and immortality because one did not want to get involved with creating the necessary preparations first to enter the field of human experience which you have to enter if you want to gain a view of that from which only freedom of will originates, and in which only that rests which goes through births and deaths in the human being. You have to recognise first how in the human life the temporal runs during this life on earth. Then you also find the ways to get beyond this life on earth.

Such research can become fertile for the most important, most practical fields of life, for example, for education. One does not at all consider this field from the temporal experience of the soul, although one wants to make modern ideas fertile for it today. Someone who can look from one time of human experience to another finds a metamorphosing life in the soul life. He finds, for example: if he has grown old and looks back at former times and then at more distant times, and if he looks not only outwardly, but experiences it internally, then he notices how the inner mental object changes what originates from an object of the soul life at a moment in time.

One notices: what works in the childhood mainly as will what is expressed as wish works in the later life in the experience of life, works in the thinking. What we have later as fifty years old humans as experience of life is a transformed will life of our childhood. As the petal of the plant is a transformed green leaf in the sense of the Goethean metamorphosis outwardly, but as the leaf does not remain green, but becomes red with the rose, that changes which is wish with the child into experiences of life in the later age. And vice versa: what the child thinks changes into willpower in the later life. If you know this coherence, you can imagine how you can work on the child!

If you fulfil every senseless wish of a child and induce it that it atomises its will in all directions, then you make it relatively idiotic early in later age because the atomised will cannot change into experience of life which expresses itself in a quiet life of thought later.—This metamorphosis of the inner life manifests itself to spiritual beholding as usually spatial relations manifest themselves. One also learns to recognise that one has to try to lead the thoughts of the child, so that it does not become a limp, weak human being later, but takes up such mental pictures that lead to a certain willpower. Someone who possibly believes that by suggestion of the will the will, and by suggestion of the life of thought the thoughts are strengthened is on a quite wrong track; he does not know the weaving and living of the supersensible human being. Here is a point—and we could bring in countless ones—where real penetrating into the reality of existence leads immediately to life praxis. Somebody who wants to stop at the outer reality resembles a person who has a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron before himself and says about it, this is a horseshoe-shaped piece of iron. However, another says to him, this is a magnet. The former means, I see nothing of it, I see a horseshoe only, and I want to shoe my horse with it.—He does not see the magnet. What can the other do who can add the invisible to reality!

Thus, the world is interspersed with something invisible. However, everywhere reality is fulfilled with a stream of existence that one only recognises if one gets a relation of the supersensible in the human being to the supersensible in the surrounding existence. The fact that many things make a particularly unreal impression in our time is due to the fact that the human beings believe to face the stream of reality immediately. This should be “a scientific view.” However, they do not realise what lives in the depths of reality. Hence, they cannot acknowledge that which weaves in the human life as something real. Someone who has a recognising sense for that which goes forward in the present who can compare subtler, more intimate events to the catastrophic events which have now become the human misfortune is reminded very much of how necessary it is just in our time that understanding of the supersensible relation of the human being to the world gains ground again in humanity. If you ask yourself how it has happened, actually, that this understanding is not there, then you can characterise it in the following way.

It is not there. Today people are regarded as especially clever, and those who are far away from reality are clever in certain respect. I can call a book in which, actually, from start to finish no tone of reality is included, and which contains the knowledge of the whole world, nevertheless, strictly speaking from its point of view, because it is a dictionary, a philosophical one: that by Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923, German author) which is an idol of knowledge not so much of the experts but of numerous laymen or—if I am not allowed to say this—“journalists.” However, someone who approaches this book with sense of reality can get a peculiar feeling. Start reading any article, read it to the end: you have turned around in a circle.

It is, as if you have looked at something that blinded you; then you turn around and look again. However, you get to nothing at all. You ask yourself with every article why it is written, actually? It is to everybody with sense of reality a torture to read this pretentious book. Nevertheless, it is a very clever book. I could praise the astuteness, the cleverness of this book; but a book has come about which reminds you with every article of the good Munchausen who wanted to pull himself out of a swamp on his own shock of hair. This book is also typical for many things that are thought in the present and are done for a long time, and what removes the human beings from reality, from the supersensible. However, in this supersensible the spiritual, the real is flowing. Why did the human being diverge from reality?

Nothing can face the real Christianity and the real piety more understanding than spiritual science. However, take the reality that is often associated with the development of the last two millennia, there you get stuck into the idea: you have to search the spirit beyond outer nature, have to consider the outer nature as something that you must avoid if you want to get to the spirit. Go back to the older centuries, and you realise that one withdraws from the outer nature and her secrets; one looks for other ways and does not look for the spirit that is spread out in nature. Then natural sciences came; other necessities appeared to the human consciousness concerning the concept of nature. However, the former centuries had made sure not to see the spirit in nature; one wanted to find it apart nature. Now she faced the human beings and she was divested of spirit. Now one investigated that nature which one had divested of spirit. This takes place since four to five centuries. Because one saw everything approaching the human being from this spirit-divested nature with a certain necessity, the human being was also divested of spirit. The spirit-divested nature became the vampire of the human spirit. Nature entered in science and her facts became irrefutable. I have often said that the human beings have to admire the results of natural sciences; but nature must not be considered as spirit-divested, otherwise, it becomes the vampire, and one can no longer find what lives in the human being as spirit. Then you find what the barrel organ plays. That which the barrel organ plays is below in the organic. There one grasps the organic life only, one side of life only, not the other side that we have taken as starting point today that already has the supersensible stream in the memory.

Yesterday I spoke of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. To-day I propose to speak of certain cognate matters, and in such a way that the present lecture will be comprehensible in itself.

Everything that will have to be achieved in the present epoch of evolution as a preparation for spiritual happenings in the near and more distant future, is connected with what, among anthroposophists, I have often called the Michael Event. And in connection with this Michael Event I want to speak to-day about something that concerns the Anthroposophical Movement.

In speaking of a happening such as this Michael Event, it must always be remembered that the world develops by stages. When we study the evolution of the world with the faculties which man's earthly life between birth and death enables him to possess to-day, we see humanity evolving on the Earth, we see ancient peoples arising from still earlier peoples; we see that from the background of very ancient Oriental civilisations, from the Indian, the Chinese, the Arabian and the Chaldean-Egyptian peoples, the Greeks and the Romans gradually emerge; then we come to the Middle Ages and finally to our own age—our modern age with all its aberrations but also with its great technical achievements. Yet not only is there this external development of the peoples but as it were behind it, evolution is also taking place. We can perceive evolution being passed through not only by mankind but also by spiritual Beings who are connected in certain ways with the evolution of humanity. In their ranks are those Beings called the Angeloi—the Angels in Christian terminology. They are directly connected with the individual human being. They lead, or guide him in so far as he needs guidance, from one earthly life to another and are his Guardians, his Protectors, whenever and wherever he needs their protection. Therefore, super-sensible though they be and imperceptible to earthly sight, the Angeloi are directly connected with mankind's evolution.

In the next immediately adjacent spiritual realm, the Beings whom we call the Hierarchy of the Archangeloi, the Archangels, unfold their activity. The Archangeloi have to do with much that also plays a part in the evolution of humanity. They have to do, not with the individual human being, but with groups of human beings. Thus, as I have said in many anthroposophical lectures, the evolution of the peoples is under the rulership of Archangelic Beings. But it is also the case that certain epochs in Earth-evolution receive their essential impulses from individual Archangeloi. For example, during the three centuries preceding the last third of the nineteenth century, namely during the nineteenth, eighteenth, seventeenth centuries and part of the sixteenth, we must think of the civilised world as being essentially under the dominion of the Archangel known to Christians capable of speaking of these things, as Gabriel. This period was therefore the Age of Gabriel.

This particular Gabriel Age is of great significance for the whole evolution of mankind in modern times, for the following reason. Since the Mystery of Golgotha took place it has been possible for men on the Earth to have this realisation: Through the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ, the sublime Being of the Sun, has come down to the Earth. He has descended from the Sun to the Earth, entering into the body of Jesus and uniting Himself with Earth's destiny. But although the Christ Being has remained united with the Earth, it has not been possible through the succeeding rulerships of Archangeloi from the time of the Mystery of Golgotha until that of the dominion of Gabriel, for the Christ Impulse itself actually to lay hold of the inner physical and etheric forces of mankind. This became possible for the first time under the Gabriel impulse which began to work about three hundred years before the last third of the nineteenth century. Thus, in reality, it is only since that time that by way of the forces of heredity themselves the Christ Impulse has been able to penetrate humanity inwardly. As yet this has not been achieved.

Gabriel rules over the whole realm of the physical forces of heredity within humanity. He is the super-sensible Spirit who is connected essentially with the sequence of the generations, who is—if I may put it so—the great Guardian Spirit of the mothers who bring children into the world. Gabriel has to do with births, with the embryonic development of the human being. The forces of Gabriel work in the spiritual processes underlying the physical process of propagation. And so it is only since this recent Gabriel rulership that the physical propagation of mankind on Earth has come into connection in the real sense with the Christ Impulse.

From the end of the eighteen-seventies, the rulership of Michael begins. It is a rulership altogether different in character from that of Gabriel. Whereas the rulership of the Archangel in the three preceding centuries comes to expression in spiritual impulses working in the physical, Michael is the Archangel who in his rulership has paramountly to do with the powers of the intelligence in mankind, with everything, therefore, that concerns the intellectual, the spiritual evolution and culture of mankind. In any study of the earthly circumstances of humanity it is extremely important to realise that the Gabriel rulership which in the spiritual sphere has an effect upon what is most deeply physical, is always followed by the regency of Michael, who has to do with the spiritual element in culture. The Archangel Gabriel, therefore, is the Divine Guardian of the process of physical propagation. The Spirit who has to do with the development of the sciences, of the arts, of the cultural element of the epoch, is the Archangel known in Christianity as Michael. Over those civilisations which are predominant in every epoch, seven successive Archangel-rulerships take place. Six other such rulerships have therefore preceded the present rulership of Michael. And if, beginning with Gabriel, we go backwards through these rulerships, we come to an epoch when Michael again held sway. Every such rulership, therefore, is always the repetition of earlier, identical rulerships, and the evolution of the Archangels themselves takes place through this cyclic progress. After a period of about two thousand years, the same Archangel always assumes the rulership again within the predominating civilisation.

But these periods of rulership, each of which lasts for a little over three hundred years, are essentially different from one another. The difference is not always as great as it is between the Michael rulership and the Gabriel rulership, but the rulerships are, nevertheless, essentially different. And here we can say: Each reign of Gabriel is preparatory to an age when the peoples become more widely separated from one another and more differentiated. In the age following his dominion the nationalistic tendency also becomes accentuated. So, if you ask yourself why it is that such strong nationalistic feeling is asserting itself to-day under the rulership of Michael, which has now begun, the answer is that preparation took place spiritually a long time ago; the influence worked on and then began to decline, but the after-effects—often worse than the event itself—continue. It is only by degrees that the impulse of Michael can make its way into what is, to a great extent, a legacy from the past reign of Gabriel. But always when an age of Michael dawns, a longing begins to arise in mankind to overcome racial distinctions and to spread through all the peoples living on the Earth the highest and most spiritual form of culture produced by that particular age. Michael's rulership is always characterised by the growth of cosmopolitanism, by the spread of a spiritual impulse among peoples who are ready to receive it, no matter what language they speak. Of the seven Archangels who send their impulses into the evolution of humanity, Michael is always the one who gives the cosmopolitan impulse—and at the same time the impulse for the spreading of whatever is of most intrinsic value in a particular epoch.

If we turn now to past times in the evolution of humanity, asking ourselves in what period the previous Michael Age occurred, we come to the epoch which culminated in those cosmopolitan deeds springing from the impulse of the lofty spiritual culture of Greece, whose fruits were carried over to Asia through the campaigns of Alexander. There, developing from the foundations of the ancient culture, we see the urge to take the spiritual culture of Greece—the little land of Greece—over to the Oriental peoples, to Egypt; there is an urge to spread a cosmopolitan impulse in this way among all the peoples able to receive it. This cosmopolitan impulse, this urge of the earlier Age of Michael, to spread over the world all that the Greek culture had achieved for humanity, was of the very greatest possible significance. The crowning triumph of that Age was represented, in a certain sense, by the city of Alexandria in its prime, standing yonder in North Africa.

These things came to pass in the preceding Age of Michael. Thereafter the other six Archangels assume in time their dominions. And in the last third of the nineteenth century, at the end of the seventies, a new Michael Age begins. But never yet in the whole of earthly evolution has the difference between two Ages of Michael been as great as that between the Michael Age at the time of Alexander and the one in which we have been living since the end of the seventies of the last century. For between these two reigns of Michael falls the Event which gives Earth-evolution its true meaning: the Mystery of Golgotha.

Let us now consider what it is that Michael has to administer in the spiritual Cosmos. It is Michael's task to administer a power that is essentially spiritual, reaching its zenith in man's faculty of intellectual understanding. Michael is not the Spirit who, if I may put it so, cultivates intellectuality per se; the spirituality he bestows strives to bring enlightenment to mankind in the form of ideas, of thoughts—but ideas and thoughts that grasp the spiritual. His wish is that man shall be a free being, but one who discerns in his concepts, in his thoughts, what comes to him as revelation from the spiritual worlds.

And now think of the Michael Age at the time of Alexander. As I have so often said, human beings in our day are extremely clever—that is to say, they form concepts, they have ideas; they are intellectual, possessing as it were a self-made intellectuality. People were clever, too, in the days of Alexander. Only if in those times they had been asked: Whence do you derive your concepts, your ideas?—they would not have said: We have produced them out of ourselves. ... No, they received into themselves the spiritual revelations, and together with these revelations, the ideas. They did not regard the ideas as something which man evolves out of himself, but as something revealed to him in his spiritual nature. The task of Michael at that time was to administer this heavenly Intellectuality—in contrast to earthly Intellectuality. Michael was the greatest of the Archangels who have their abode on the Sun. He was the Spirit who sent down from thence to the Earth not only the Sun's physical-etheric rays but, within them, the inspired Intellectuality. And in those past days men knew: the power of Intelligence on Earth is a gift of the Heavens, of the Sun; it is sent down from the Sun. And the one who actually sends the spiritual Intellectuality down to the Earth, is Michael. In the ancient Sun Mysteries this wonderful Initiation-teaching was given: Michael dwells on the Sun; there he administers the Cosmic Intelligence. This Cosmic Intelligence, inspired into human beings, is a gift of Michael.

Then came the epoch when man was to be made ready to unfold intellect out of his own, individual force of soul; he was not merely to receive the Cosmic Intelligence through revelation but to evolve Intelligence out of his inner forces. Preparation for this was made by Aristotelianism—that remarkable philosophy which arose in the twilight period of Greek culture and was the impulse underlying the campaigns of Alexander the Great in Africa and Asia.

By means of Aristotelianism, earthly Intelligence emerged as though from the shell of the Cosmic Intelligence. And from what came to be known as Aristotelian Logic there arose that intellectual framework on which the thinking of all subsequent centuries was based; it conditioned human intelligence.

And now you must conceive that through this single deed the Michael Impulses culminated: the earthly-human Intelligence was established, while, as a result of the campaigns of Alexander, the culture of Greece was imprinted upon those peoples who at that time were ready to receive the cosmopolitan impulse.

The epoch of Michael was followed by that of Oriphiel. The Archangel Oriphiel assumed dominion. The Mystery of Golgotha took place. At the beginning of the Christian era, those human souls who had been conscious of the leadership of the Archangel Michael in Alexander's time and had participated in the deeds of which I have just spoken, were gathered around Michael in the realm of the Sun. Michael had relinquished his dominion for the time being to Oriphiel, and in the realm of the Sun, together with those human souls who were to be his servants, Michael witnessed the departure of Christ from the Sun.

This, too, is something of which we must be mindful.—Those human souls who are connected with the Anthroposophical Movement may say to themselves: We were united with Michael in the realm of the Sun. Christ, who hitherto had sent His Impulses towards the Earth from the Sun, departed from the Sun in order to unite Himself with earthly evolution!—Try to picture to yourselves this stupendous cosmic event that took place in realms beyond the Earth: it lies within the mighty vista open to those human souls who at that time were gathered around Michael as servants of the Angeloi, after his rulership on Earth had ended. In the realm of the Sun they witnessed the departure of the Christ from the Sun. “He is departing!” ... such was their great and overwhelming experience when He left in order to unite His destiny with the destiny of earthly humanity.

Truly it is not only on the Earth but in the life between death and rebirth that the souls of human beings receive the impulse for the paths they take. Above all was it so in the case of those who had lived through the time of Alexander. A great and mighty impulse went forth from that moment in cosmic history when these souls witnessed the departure of Christ from the Sun. They saw clearly: the Cosmic Intelligence is passing over gradually from the Cosmos to the Earth! And Michael, together with those around him saw that all the Intelligence once streaming through the Cosmos was now sinking down, stage by stage, upon the Earth.

Michael and those who belonged to him—no matter whether they were in the spiritual world or incarnate for a brief earthly life—were able to visualise the rays of the Intelligence arriving, in the eighth century of the Christian era, in the earthly realm itself. And they knew that down upon the Earth the Intelligence would unfold and develop further. Now, on the Earth, the appearance of the first ‘self-made’ thinkers could be observed. Hitherto, great human beings who were ‘thinkers’ had received their thoughts by way of Inspiration; the thoughts had been inspired into them. Only now, from the eighth century A.D. were there those who could be called ‘self-made’ thinkers—those who produced their own thoughts out of themselves. And within the Archangelic host in the realm of the Sun, the mighty proclamation rang forth from Michael: The power belonging to my kingdom and under my administration in this realm is here no longer; it streams downwards to the Earth and must there surge onwards!

From the eighth century onwards this was the spectacle of the Earth as witnessed from the Sun. And within it was the great mystery: The forces which are pre-eminently the forces of Michael have descended from the Heavens and are now upon the Earth. This was the profound secret which was known to Initiates in Schools such as those I spoke of yesterday, for example, the renowned School of Chartres. In earlier times, when men wished to discover the true nature of Intelligence they had been obliged, in the Mystery Centres, to look upwards to the Sun. Now the Intelligence was upon the Earth, though not as yet very clearly perceptible. But gradually there was recognition that human beings were now evolving who possessed an individual intelligence of their own. One of those in European civilisation in whom the first sparks of personal thinking were alight was Johannes Scotus Erigena. I have often spoken of him. But there had been a few others, even before him, whose thoughts were not merely inspired, who no longer received revelations, but who could be called self-made thinkers. And now this individual thinking became more and more widespread.

There was a possibility in Earth-evolution of making this self-produced thinking serve a particular end. Consider what it represented: it was in actuality the sum-total of those impulses from Michael's realm in the Heavens which had found their way to the Earth. And for the time being Michael was called upon to allow the Intelligence to unfold without his participation. Not until the year 1879 was he to re-assume his rulership. In the meantime, the Intelligence developed in such a way that at the first stages he could not have exercised his dominion. His influences could not be exerted over men who were unfolding their own, individual thoughts. His time had not yet come.

This profound secret of the descent of the pan-Intelligence in the evolution of humanity was known in a few Mystery Centres over in the East. And so, within these particular Oriental Mysteries, a few chosen pupils could be initiated into this secret by certain deeply spiritual, highly developed men. Through dispensations of a nature which it is difficult for the earthly intellect to comprehend, the illustrious Court of which I have spoken at the Goetheanum and in other places, came into touch with this secret of which certain Oriental Mysteries were fully cognisant. In the eighth and at the beginning of the ninth century, under the leadership of Haroun al Raschid, this Court wielded great power over in Asia. Haroun al Raschid was a product of Arabian culture, a culture tinged with Mohammedanism. The secret of which I have spoken found its way to some of Haroun al Raschid's initiated Counsellors—or to those who possessed at least a certain degree of knowledge—and the brilliance of his Court was due to the fact that it had come in touch with this secret. At this Court were concentrated all the treasures of wisdom, of art, of the truths of religious life to be found in the East—coloured, of course, by Mohammedanism. In the days when, in Europe, at the Court of Charlemagne who was a contemporary of Haroun al Raschid, men were occupied in collating the first rudiments of grammar and everything was still in a state of semi-barbarism, there flourished in Baghdad that brilliant centre of Oriental, Western Asiatic spiritual life. Haroun al Raschid gathered around him men who were conversant with the great traditions of the Oriental Mysteries. And he had by his side one particular Counsellor who had been an Initiate in earlier times and whose spiritual driving forces were still influenced by the previous incarnations. He was the organiser of all that was cultivated at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in the domains of geometry, chemistry, physics, music, architecture, and the other arts—above all, a distinguished art of poetry. In this renowned and scintillating assembly of sages, it was felt, more or less consciously: the earthly Intelligence that has come down from the Heavens upon the Earth must be placed in the service of Mohammedan spiritual life!

And now consider this: from the time of Mohammed, from the time of the early Caliphs onwards, Arabian culture was carried from Asia across North Africa into Europe, where it spread as the result of warlike campaigns. But in the wake of those who by means of these campaigns spread Arabism as far even as Spain—France was affected by it and, spiritually, the whole of Western Europe—there also came outstanding personalities. The wars waged by the Frankish kings against the Moors, against Arabism, are known to all of you ... but that is the external aspect, that is what happens in external history ... much more important is it to know how the spiritual streams flow on perpetually within the evolution of mankind.

Haroun al Raschid and his wise Counsellor passed through the gate of death. But after their life between death and rebirth they continued to pursue their earthly aims in remarkable ways. It was their aim to introduce Arabian modes of thinking into the European world with the help of the rudiments of the Intelligence now spreading in Europe. And so after Haroun al Raschid had passed through the gate of death, while his soul was traversing spiritual, starry worlds, we see his gaze directed unswervingly from Baghdad across Asia Minor, to Greece, Rome, Spain, France and then northwards to England. Throughout this life between death and rebirth his attention was directed to the South and West of Europe. And then Haroun al Raschid appeared again in a new incarnation—becoming Lord Bacon of Verulam. Bacon himself is the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid who in the intervening time between death and rebirth had worked as I have just described.

But the other, the one who had been his wise Counsellor, chose a different direction—from Baghdad across the Black Sea, through Russia and then into Middle Europe. The two individualities took different paths and directions. Haroun al Raschid passed to his next earthly goal as Lord Bacon of Verulam; the wise Counsellor during his life between death and a new birth did not divert his gaze from the sphere where influences from the East can be increasingly potent, and he appeared again as Amos Comenius (Komenski), the great educational reformer and author of “Pan-Sophia.” And from the interworking of these two individualities who had once been together at the Court in Baghdad there subsequently arose in Europe something which unfolded—more or less at a distance from Christianity—in the form of Arabism derived from influences of that past time when the Intelligence had first fallen away from Michael on the Sun.

What came outwardly and physically to expression in wars was, as we know, repelled by the Frankish kings and the other European peoples. We see how the Arabian campaigns which with such a powerful initial impetus were responsible for the spread of Mohammedan culture, were broken and brought to a halt in the West; we see Mohammedanism disappearing from the West of Europe. Nevertheless, divested of the outer forms it had assumed and the external culture it had founded, this later Arabism became modern natural science, and also became the basis of what Amos Comenius achieved for the world in the domain of pedagogy. And in this way the earthly Intelligence, ‘garrisoned’ as it were by Arabism, continued to spread right on into the seventeenth century.

Here we have indicated something that lies as sub-strata of the soil into which we to-day have to sow the seeds of Anthroposophy. We must ponder deeply over the inner and spiritual reality behind these things.

In Europe, while this stream was flowing over from Asia as the spiritual continuation of that Illustrious Court of Baghdad, Christianity was also developing and spreading. But the spread of Aristotelianism in Europe was fraught with great difficulties. The natural science of Aristotle had been carried to Asia by the mighty deeds of Alexander and the impulses flowing from Hellenistic spiritual life, but here it had been seized upon by Arabism. In Europe, within the expanding Christian culture, Aristotelianism was at first known in a diluted form only. Then, in the manner which I have already indicated, Aristotelianism joined hands with Platonism—Platonism, which was based directly upon the ancient teachings of the Greek Mysteries.

But at the very outset, Aristotelianism spread in Europe by slow degrees while Platonism took the lead and prompted the establishment of schools, one of the most important being the School of Chartres. At Chartres, the scholars of whom I spoke yesterday—Bernard Sylvestris, Bernard of Chartres, John of Salisbury and, foremost among them all, Alanus ab Insulis—were all working in the twelfth century. In this School men spoke very differently from those whose teachings were merely an echo of Arabism. The teachings given in the School of Chartres were pure and genuine Christianity, illumined by the ancient Mystery-wisdom still remaining within reach of men. And then something of immense significance took place. The leading teachers of Chartres, who with their Platonism had penetrated deeply into the secrets of Christianity and who had no part in Arabism, went through the gate of death. Then there took place, for a brief period at the beginning of the thirteenth century, a great ‘heavenly conference.’ And when the most outstanding of the teachers—foremost among them Alanus ab Insulis—had passed through death and were in the spiritual world, they united in a momentous cosmic deed with those who at that time were with them but who were destined in the very near future to come into earthly existence for the purpose of cultivating Aristotelianism in a new way. Among those preparing to descend were individualities who had participated with deep intensity of soul in the working of the Michael Impulse during the time of Alexander. And at the turn of the twelfth century we may picture, for it is in keeping with the truth, a gathering-together of souls who had just arrived in the spiritual world from places of Christian Initiation—of which the School of Chartres was one—and souls who were on the point of descending to the Earth. In the spiritual realms, these latter souls had preserved, not Platonism, but Aristotelianism, the inner impulse of the Intelligence deriving from the Michael Age in ancient times. Now, in the spiritual world, the souls gathered together ... among them, too, were souls who could say: We were with Michael and together with him we witnessed the Intelligence streaming down from the Heavens upon the Earth; we were united with him too in the mighty cosmopolitan Deed enacted in earlier times when the Intelligence was still administered from the Cosmos, when he was still the ruler and administrator of the Intelligence.

And now, for the time being, the teachers of Chartres handed over to the Aristotelians the administration and ordering of the affairs of the spiritual life on Earth. Those who were now to descend and were by nature fitted to direct the earthly, personal Intelligence, took over the guidance of spiritual life on Earth from the Platonists, who could work truly only when the Intelligence was being administered “from the Heavens.”

It was into the Dominican Order above all that those individualities in whose souls the Michael Impulse was still echoing on from the previous Age of Michael, found their way. And from the Dominican Order issued that Scholasticism which wrestled through many a bitter but glorious battle to master the true nature and operation of the Intelligence within the human mind. Deeply rooted in the souls of those founders of Dominican Scholasticism in the thirteenth century was this great question: What is taking place in the domain of Michael?

There were men, later on known as Nominalists, who said: Concepts and ideas are merely names, they have no reality. The Nominalists were under an Ahrimanic influence, for their real aim was to banish Michael's dominion from the Earth. In asserting that ideas are only names and have no reality, their actual aim was to prevent Michael's dominion from prevailing on Earth. And at that time the Ahrimanic spirits whispered to those who would lend their ear: The Cosmic Intelligence has fallen away from Michael and is here, on the Earth: we will not allow Michael to resume his rulership over the Intelligence! ... But in that heavenly conference—and precisely here lies its significance—Platonists and Aristotelians together formed a plan for the furtherance of the Michael Impulses.—In opposition to the Nominalists were the Realists of the Dominican Order who maintained: Ideas and thoughts are spiritual realities contained within the phenomena of the world, they are not merely nominal.

If one understands these things, one is often reminded of them in a really remarkable way. During my last years in Vienna, one of my acquaintances among other ordained priests was Vincenz Knauer, the author of the work, Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, which I have often recommended to Anthroposophists. In the nineteenth century he was still involved in this conflict between Nominalism and Realism. He was trying to make it clear that Nominalism is fallacious and he had chosen a very apt example to illustrate his arguments. It is also given in his books. But I remember with deep satisfaction a certain occasion when I was walking with him along the Wahringstrasse in Vienna. We were speaking about Nominalism and Realism. With all his self-controlled enthusiasm which had something remarkable about it, something of the quality of genuine philosophy in contrast to the philosophy of others who had more or less lost this quality—Knauer said on that occasion: I always make it clear to my students that the Ideas made manifest in the things of the world have reality—and I tell them to think of a lamb and a wolf. The Nominalists would say: A lamb is muscle, bone, matter; a wolf is muscle, bone, matter. What receives objective existence in lamb-flesh as the form, the idea of the lamb—that is only a name. “Lamb” is a name there and not, as idea, a reality. Similarly, as idea, “wolf” is not anything real but only a name. But—Knauer went on—it is easy to refute the Nominalists for one need only say to them: Give a wolf nothing but lamb's flesh to eat for a time and no other food whatever. If the idea “lamb” contains no reality, is only a name, and if the lamb is nothing but matter, the wolf would gradually become a lamb. But it does not do so! On the contrary, it goes on being the reality “wolf.” In what stands there before us as the lamb, the idea “lamb” has, as it were, gathered the matter and brought it into the form. Similarly with the wolf: the idea “wolf” has gathered the matter and cast it into the form.

This was the fundamental issue in the conflict between the Nominalists and the Realists: the reality of what is apprehensible only by the intellect.

Thus we see that it was the task of the Dominicans to work in advance, at the right time, for the next Michael rulership. And whereas in accordance with the decisions of that heavenly conference at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Platonists—the teachers of Chartres, for example—remained in the spiritual world and had no incarnations of significance, the Aristotelians were to work at that time for the cultivation of the Intelligence, on Earth. And from Scholasticism—which only much later, in the modern age, was distorted, caricatured and made Ahrimanic by Rome—from Scholasticism there has proceeded all intellectual striving in so far as it has kept free from the influence of Arabism.

So at that time when these two streams of spiritual life are to be perceived in Middle and Western Europe: on the one side, the stream with which Bacon and Amos Comenius were connected; on the other side, the stream of Scholasticism that was and is Christian Aristotelianism takes its place in the evolution of civilisation in order to prepare, as was its task, for the new Age of Michael. When, during the rulership of the preceding Archangels, the Schoolmen looked up into the spiritual realms they said to themselves: Michael is yonder in the heights; his rulership must be awaited. But some preparation must be made for the time when he once again becomes the Regent of all that which, through the dispensation of cosmic evolution, fell away from him in the Cosmos. This time must be prepared for! ... And so a stream began to flow which, though diverted into a false channel through Ultramontanism, continued and carried with it the impulse of preparation proceeding from the thirteenth century.

It was a stream, therefore, whose source is Aristotelian and whose influence worked directly on the ordering of the Intelligence that was now in the earthly realm. With this stream is connected that of which I spoke yesterday, saying that one who had remained a little longer with Alanus ab Insulis in the spiritual world, came down as a Dominican and brought a message from Alanus ab Insulis to an older Dominican who had descended to the Earth before him.

An intense will was present in the spiritual life of Europe to take strong hold of the thoughts. And in realms above the Earth these happenings led, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to a great, far-reaching Act in the spiritual world where that which later on was to become Anthroposophy on the Earth was cast into mighty Imaginations. In the first half of the nineteenth century, and even for a short period at the end of the eighteenth, those who had been Platonists under the teachers of Chartres, who were now living between death and rebirth, and those who had established Aristotelianism on Earth and who had long ago passed through the gate of death—all of them were united in the heavenly realms in a great super-earthly Cult or Ritual. Through this Act all that in the twentieth century was to be spiritually established as the new Christianity after the beginning of the new Michael Age in the last third of the nineteenth century—all this was cast into mighty Imaginations.

Many drops trickled through to the Earth. Up above, in the spiritual world, in mighty, cosmic Imaginations, preparation was made for that creation of the Intelligence—an entirely spiritual creation—which was then to come forth as Anthroposophy. What trickled through made a very definite impression upon Goethe, coming to him in the form, as it were, of little reflected miniatures. The mighty pictures up above were not within Goethe's ken; he elaborated these little miniature pictures in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Truly, it opens up a wonderful vista! The streams I have described flow on in such a way that they lead to those mighty Imaginations which take shape in the spiritual world under the guidance of Alanus ab Insulis and the others. Drops trickle through, and at the turn of the eighteenth century Goethe is inspired to write his Fairy Tale. It was, we might say, a first presentation of what had been cast in mighty Imaginations in the spiritual world at the beginning of the nineteenth, indeed by the end of the eighteenth century. In view of this great super-sensible Cult during the first half of the nineteenth century, it will not surprise you that my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—which in a certain respect aimed at giving dramatic form to what had thus been enacted at the beginning of the nineteenth century—became alike in outer structure to what Goethe portrayed in his Fairy Tale. For having lived in the super-earthly realms in Imaginative form, Anthroposophy was to come down to the Earth. Something came to pass in the super-earthly realms at that time. Numbers of souls who in many different epochs had been connected with Christianity came together with souls who had received its influences less directly. There were those who had lived on Earth in the Age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place and also those who had lived on Earth before it. The two groups of souls united in order that in regions beyond the Earth, Anthroposophy might be prepared. The individualities who, as I said, were around Alanus ab Insulis, and those who within the Dominican stream had established Aristotelianism in Europe, were united, too, with Brunetto Latini, the great teacher of Dante. And in this host of souls there were very many of those who, having again descended to the Earth, are now coming together in the Anthroposophical Society. Those who feel the urge to-day to unite with one another in the Anthroposophical Society were together in super-sensible regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century in order to participate in that mighty Imaginative Cult of which I have spoken.

This too is connected with the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement. It is something that one discovers, not from any rationalistic observation of this Anthroposophical Movement in its external, earthly form only, but from observation of the threads that lead upwards into the spiritual realms. Then one perceives how this Anthroposophical Movement descends. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries it is, in very truth, the “heavenly” Anthroposophical Movement. What Goethe transformed into little miniature images in the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily were drops that had trickled through. But it was to come down in the real sense in the last third of the nineteenth century, since when Michael has been striving—but now moving downwards from the Sun to the Earth—to take hold of the earthly Intelligence of men.

We know that since the Mystery of Golgotha Christ has been united with the Earth—with humanity on Earth. But, to begin with, He was not outwardly comprehended by human beings. We have seen also that in the age of Alexander the last phase of the rulership of Michael over the Cosmic Intelligence was taking place. By the eighth century A.D., the Cosmic Intelligence had descended to the Earth. In accordance with the agreements reached with the Platonists, those who were connected with Michael undertook to prepare this earthly Intelligence in Scholastic Realism in such a way that Michael would again be able to unite with it when, in the onward flow of civilisation, he would assume his rulership at the end of the seventies of the nineteenth century.

What matters now is that the Anthroposophical Society shall take up this, its inner task—this task which is: not to contest Michael's rulership of human thinking! Here there can be no question of fatalism. Here it can only be said that men must work together with the Gods. Michael inspires men with his own being in order that there may appear on the Earth a spirituality consonant with the personal Intelligence of men, in order that men can be thinkers—and at the same time truly spiritual. For this and this alone is what Michael's dominion means. This is what must be wrestled for in the Anthroposophical Movement. And then those who are working to-day for the Anthroposophical Movement will appear again on Earth at the end of the twentieth century and will be united with the great teachers of Chartres. For according to the agreement reached in that heavenly conference at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Aristotelians and the Platonists were to appear together, working for the ever-growing prosperity of the Anthroposophical Movement in the twentieth century, in order that at the end of this century, with Platonists and Aristotelians in unison, Anthroposophy may reach a certain culmination in earthly civilisation. If it is possible to work in this way, in the way predestined by Michael, then Europe and modern civilisation will emerge from decline. But verily in no other way than this! The leading of civilisation out of decline is bound up with an understanding of Michael.

I have now led you towards an understanding of the Michael Mystery reigning over the thinking and the spiritual strivings of mankind. This means—as you can realise—that through Anthroposophy something must be introduced into the spiritual evolution of the Earth, for all kinds of demonic, Ahrimanic powers are taking possession of men. The Ahrimanic powers in many a human body were exultant in their confidence that it would no longer be possible for Michael to take over his rulership of the Cosmic Intelligence which had fallen down to the Earth. And this exultation was particularly strong in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Ahriman already believed: Michael will not again recover his Cosmic Intelligence which made its way from the heavens to the Earth. And this exultation was particularly strong in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Ahriman already believed that Michael would not again recover his Cosmic Intelligence which made its way from the Heavens to the Earth. Verily, great and mighty issues are at stake! For this reason it is not to be wondered at that those who stand in the midst of this battle have to go through many extraordinary experiences.

Stranger things have been said about the Anthroposophical Movement than about any other spiritual Movement. The curious statements made indicate in themselves that with its spirituality and its connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, it is beyond the comprehension even of some of the most enlightened minds of the present day.—Does anyone ever tell you that he has seen a man who is black and white at the same time? I hardly think you would regard him as sane if he said such a thing to you. But to-day people are quite capable of writing in a similar strain about the Anthroposophical Movement. In his book, The Great Secret [Le Grand Secret. Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1921. The passages concerned have been translated from the German version of Maeterlinck's book from which Dr. Steiner was quoting. The original French of these passages will be found on page 182 of the present volume.], Maurice Maeterlinck, for example, taking me to be the pillar of the Anthroposophical Movement, applies in regard to myself a kind of logic entirely similar to that used by someone who claims to have seen a man who is black and white, a European and a Moor at the same time. Now a man can be one of the two, but certainly not both simultaneously! Yet Maeterlinck says: “What we read in the Vedas, says Rudolf Steiner, one of the most erudite and also one of the most confusing among contemporary occultists ...” If somebody were to say he had seen a man who was a European and a Moor at the same time, he would be considered crazy; but Maeterlinck uses the words “erudite” and “confusing” in juxtaposition. He also says: “Rudolf Steiner who, when he does not lose himself in visions—plausible, perhaps, but incapable of verification—of the prehistoric ages, and in astral jargon concerning life on other planets, is a clear and shrewd thinker who has thrown remarkable light on the meaning of this judgement” (he is referring to Osirification) “and of the identification of the soul with God.” In other words, therefore: when Rudolf Steiner is not talking about Anthroposophy, he is a clear and shrewd thinker. Maeterlinck allows himself to say this—and other remarkable things too, for example the following: “Steiner has applied his intuitive methods, which amount to a kind of transcendental psychometry, in order to reconstruct the history of the Atlanteans and to reveal to us what takes place on the sun, the moon and in other worlds. He describes the successive transformations of the entities which become men, and he does so with such assurance that we ask ourselves, having followed him with interest through the introductions which denote an extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind, if he has suddenly gone mad or if we are dealing with a hoaxer or with a genuine seer.” ... Now just think what this means.—Maeterlinck states that when I write books, the introductions are admittedly the product of an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” But when he reads on he does not know whether I have suddenly gone mad or whether I am a hoaxer or a genuine seer. Well, after all I have not written only books! It is always my custom to write an introduction to each book first. Very well, then ... I write a book. Maeterlinck reads the introduction and I seem to him to have an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” Then he reads on, and I turn into someone who makes him say: I don't know whether Rudolf Steiner has suddenly gone mad or whether he is a hoaxer or a seer. Then it happens again ... I write a second book: when he reads the introduction Maeterlinck again accepts me as having an “extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind.” Then he reads the further contents and again does not know whether I am a lunatic or a hoaxer or a seer. And so it goes on ... But suppose everybody were to say: when I read your books you seem, at the beginning, to be very clever, balanced and logical, but then you suddenly go mad! People who are logical when they begin to write and then as they write on suddenly become crazy, must indeed be extraordinary creatures! In the next book they switch round, are logical at the beginning and later on again lunatics! There seems to be a rhythmical sequence ... well, after all there are rhythms in the world!

Such examples indicate how the most enlightened minds of the present age receive what must be established as the Michael Epoch in the world and what has to be done in order that the Cosmic Intelligence which in accordance with the World-Order fell away from Michael in the eighth century A.D., may again be found within earthly humanity. The whole Michael tradition must be renewed. Michael with his feet upon the Dragon—it is right to contemplate this picture which portrays Michael the Warrior, defending the Cosmic Spirit against the Ahrimanic Powers under his feet.

This battle, more than any other, is laid in the human heart. There, within the hearts of men, it is and has been waged since the last third of the nineteenth century. Decisive indeed will be what human hearts do with this Michael Impulse in the world in the course of the twentieth century. And in the course of the twentieth century, when the first century after the end of Kaliyuga has elapsed, humanity will either stand at the grave of all civilisation—or at the beginning of that Age when in the souls of men who in their hearts ally Intelligence with Spirituality, Michael's battle will be fought out to victory.

Today I would like to speak to you about the Waldorf School, founded by our friend Mr. Molt. You well know, from the announcements distributed about this school, that our intention is to take a first step along the path we would want the cultural life of the Threefold Social Organism to take. In establishing the Waldorf School, Mr. Molt has, to a large extent, felt motivated to do something to further the development of inner spirituality. He hopes to do something that will point the way for the present and future social tasks of the Threefold Social Organism. Obviously, the Waldorf School can be successful only if it is completely inspired by the Spirit that aspires toward the threefold nature of the social organism. It is easy to comprehend that such a first step cannot immediately be perfect. And along with this insight, belongs an understanding. We would so very much like to see this understanding offered to the founding of this school, at least from a limited group for the present. The work needed for the Waldorf School has already begun. It has begun with those who have offered to help and whom we have taken under consideration to contribute pedagogically to the Waldorf School. They are now attending a recently begun seminar in preparation for the work there. Gathered in this seminar are only those who, as a result of their talents and bearing, appear capable of working in the cultural movement which the Waldorf School should serve. Of course, they appear particularly called to work in the pedagogical area. Nevertheless, the Waldorf School must be offered understanding, at least from a small group for the present. You will notice more and more as you become aware of social reality that the mutual understanding of people regarding their work will be a major factor in the social life of the future. So, it seems to me that those persons who have themselves shown interest are most suitable to participate in the discussions, to be held here today and next Sunday, concerning the efforts of the Waldorf School.

Indeed, it seems to be of the utmost importance that something more comes about to encourage this understanding. Unquestionably, all parents who want their children to attend the Waldorf School have a broad interest in what this school should achieve. It appears to me to be a particular need that, before the opening of the Waldorf School in the first half of September, we meet again, along with all the parents who want their children to attend. Only what is rooted in the understanding of those involved in such initiatives with their souls and with their whole lives can flourish in a truly socially oriented social life.

Today I would like to speak with you about the goals of the Waldorf School and, to some extent, the desired instructional methods. With the Waldorf School we hope to create something that, in our judgment, needs to be based upon the particular historical stage of human development of the present and near future. You should not misunderstand the establishment of the Waldorf School by believing that everything in the old school system is bad. Nor should you believe that our starting point for the establishment of the Waldorf School is simply a criticism of the old school system. It is actually quite a different question.

In the course of the last three to four centuries a social life has been formed: a state/rights life, a spiritual/cultural life, an economic life, which have assumed a certain configuration. This social life, particularly the educational system, “resists,” we might say, the renewal of our social relationships, as I have recently so often argued. In the last three to four centuries the educational system has become so completely dependent upon the state that we could say that it is, in a quite peculiar way, a part of the state. Now, we can say that to a certain extent—however, only to a very limited extent—the educational institutions to which people have become accustomed were at one time appropriate to the configuration of the states of the civilized world. But what we strive for here is a transformation of the present social configuration. The understanding that is to form the basis of future social life requires that the system of education not remain in the same relationship to the state that it has had until now. For if we strive for a social form of economic life, the need to remove cultural life from the influence of politics and economics will be all the more urgent. This applies in particular to the administration of the educational system. People have felt this need for a very long time. But all pedagogical aspirations in the most recent past, and particularly at present, have something oppressive about them, something that hardly considers the general point of view of cultural life. This has all come about through the peculiar way in which government officials in the most recent past, and especially at present, have publicly addressed such pedagogical aspirations.

Naturally, the Waldorf School will have to reconcile itself with current institutions and public opinion concerning education and teaching. We will not immediately be able to achieve all that we wish to achieve—quite understandably we will, on the whole, find it necessary to comply with the present requirements of public education. We will find it necessary that the graduates of our school reach the level demanded for transfer to institutions of higher education, in particular, the universities. We will, therefore, be unable to organize our educational material so that it represents what we find to be the ideal of a truly humane education. In a manner of speaking, we will be able to use only the holes that still remain in the tightly woven web that spreads over the educational system. In these holes we will work to instruct the children entrusted to the Waldorf School, in the sense of a completely free cultural life. We plan to take full advantage of every opportunity presented. We most certainly will not be able to create a model school. However, we can show to what degree inner strengthening and a truly inner education of the child is possible, when it is achieved solely out of the needs of the cultural life, and not through something imposed from outside.

We will have to struggle against much resistance, particularly regarding the understanding that people can offer us today. We will have much resistance to overcome, precisely because, regarding present-day understanding, as I have often mentioned here, people just pass each other by. Yet, we repeatedly experience, precisely in the area of education, that people elsewhere also speak about a transformation of the educational system from the same point of view as represented here. The people who are involved at present with the latest principles of education listen and say, “Yes, that is exactly right, that is what we wanted all along!” In reality, they want something completely different. But today we are so far removed from the subjects about which we speak, that we listen and believe we mean the same things with the same words, when, in actuality, we mean just the opposite.

The power of the empty phrase has had a prolonged reign and has become very strong in our civilized world. Haven't we experienced this in the greatest measure? And into this reign of the empty phrase has been woven the most terrible event that has occurred in world history—the horrible catastrophe of the war in the past years! Just think about how closely the empty phrase is connected with this catastrophe! Think about the role it has played, and you will arrive at a truly dismaying judgment about the reign of the empty phrase in our time.

So today, in the pedagogical area also, we hear, “What is important is not the subject matter, but the pupil,” from those who strive for something quite different from what we intend.

You know that since we have no choice but to use the words in our vocabulary, we too will often have to say, “The important thing in education is not the subject matter, but the pupil.” We want to use the subject matter in our Waldorf School in such a way that at each stage of instruction it will serve to improve the human development of the pupil regarding the formation of the will, feeling and intellect, rather than serving to provide superficial knowledge. We should not offer each subject for the sole purpose of imparting knowledge. The teaching of a subject should become an art in the hands of the teachers. The way we treat a subject should enable the children to grow into life and fill their proper place. We must become aware that each stage of human life brings forth out of the depths of human nature the tendency toward particular powers of the soul. If we do not educate these inclinations at the relevant age, they cannot, in truth, be educated later. They become stunted, and render people unable to meet the demands of life connected with will, connected with feeling, connected with intellect. People cannot rightly take up the position into which life places them. Between the change of teeth and sexual maturity, that is, in the period of real education, it is particularly important to recognize the powers of soul and body that children need to develop in order to later fulfill their places in life.

Someone who has absorbed the pedagogical thoughts of the last decades could hear everything that I have now said, and say, “Exactly my opinion!” But what he or she does pedagogically on the basis of this opinion is not at all what we desire here. In the present, we commonly speak past each other, and thus we must, in a somewhat deeper way, attempt to draw attention to the real intention of the Waldorf School.

Above all, people are obsessed, we could almost say, with the need to take everything absolutely. By that I mean the following: If we speak today about how people should be educated in this or that way (we only want to speak about education; but we could, in various ways, extend the same considerations to other areas of life), we always think that education should concern something that is absolutely valid for humanity. We think it must be something that, so to speak, is absolutely right, something that, if it had only been available, would have been used, for example, for the people in Ancient Egypt or in Ancient Greece. It must also be useful in four thousand years for the people who will live then. It must also be useful in China, Japan, and so forth. This obsession of modern people, that they can set up something absolutely valid, is the greatest enemy of all Reality. Thus we should keep in mind, we should recognize, that we are not people in an absolute sense, but people of a quite particular age. We should recognize that people of the present age are, in their soul and physical body, constituted differently from, for example, the Greeks and Romans. Modern people are also constituted differently from the way in which people will be constituted in a relatively short time, in five hundred years. Thus, we do not understand the task of education in an absolute sense. Rather, we understand it as emerging from the needs of human culture in the present and near future.

We ask how civilized human beings are constituted today and base our viewpoint concerning methods of education upon that. We know quite well that a Greek or Roman had to have been raised differently, and, also, that people will have to be raised differently again in five hundred years. We want to create a basis of upbringing for our present time and the near future. We can really dedicate ourselves to humanity only if we become aware of these real conditions for human development and do not always keep nebulous goals in mind. Thus, it is necessary to point out what threatens human development, especially in connection with the educational instruction of the present, and what, in the present time, we want to avoid.

I have just pointed out that some people say, “The subject matter is not important, the pupil is important. The way the teacher acts in instructing the pupil is important. The way the subject matter is used for teaching, for educating, is important.” At the same time, however, we see a remarkably different direction in the very people who say this. We see a tendency that, to some extent, thoroughly paralyses and negates their demand of “more for the pupil than for the subject matter.”

People who say such things perceive that, as a result of specialization, science has gradually moved beyond normal intellectual comprehension. They see it taught in a superficial way, purely for the sake of knowledge, without any attention to the pupil. So now people say, “You may not do that. You must educate the pupil according to the nature of young people.” But how can we learn how the pupil needs to be treated? People expect to learn this from the very science that was formed under the regime they want to fight! They want to know the nature of the child, but they employ all kinds of experimental psychologies, those methods science developed by forcing itself into the very situation people desire to remedy. So, following the path of experimental psychology, they want to conduct research at the universities to determine which special methods are right for pedagogy. They want to carry experimental pedagogy into university life, to carry in all the one-sidedness that science has assumed. Yes, people want to reform! People want to reform because they have a vague feeling that reform is necessary. But this feeling arises out of the very spirit that has brought about the old methods they now want to keep. People would like to found an educational science, but they want to base it upon that scientific spirit that has arisen because people were not brought up correctly.

People still do not see the very strong forces at work in the development of our culture. People do not at all see that even though they have the best intentions they become involved in such conflicts and contradictions. Although some people may have another view about this, we can nevertheless say that Johann Friedrich Herbart is in many ways one of the most significant people in the pedagogical field. Herbart’s pedagogical writing and work place him in a position very unusual in recent times. His book, Allgemeine Padagogik [Pedagogical theory], appeared in 1806, and he continued to learn through his own pedagogical work after that. The 1835 Survey of his pedagogical lectures shows how he advanced in his understanding of pedagogical problems. We can say that a good portion of the pedagogical development in the second half of the nineteenth century stemmed from the impulse of Herbart’s pedagogy, since, for example, the whole Austrian educational system has been inspired by it. In Germany, too, a great deal of the spirit of Herbart’s pedagogy still lives today in views on education. Thus today, if we want to orient ourselves to the idea that we live in a particular cultural age, we must confront the content of Herbart’s pedagogy, and discover what a pedagogical force, a pedagogical reality, actually is.

To properly understand Herbart, we can say that all his thoughts and ideas stand fully within that cultural period that, for the true observer of human development, clearly ended in the mid-fifteenth century. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, we stand in a new epoch of human civilization. But, we have not followed the impulses that bloomed in the fifteenth century and have, therefore, achieved little; and what was active before the fifteenth century continues in our lives. It has brilliantly, significantly, continued in our pedagogical life in all that Herbart worked out and all that he inspired. Human development during the long period that began in the eighth century B.C. and ended in the middle of the fifteenth century AD. can be characterized by saying that intellect and feeling were instinctive. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, humanity has striven toward a consciousness of personality and toward putting itself in charge of its own personality. For the present and future, the most important change in the historical impulse of human development is the decline of instinctive understanding. No change is more important than the decline of the instinctive soul activity of the Greco-Roman age, and the beginning of the new epoch in the fifteenth century! The particular considerations which prove what I have just said are presented in my writings and publications. Here we must accept as a fact that as of the middle of the fifteenth century, something new began for humanity, namely the aspiration toward conscious personal activity, where previously an instinctive understanding and soul activity were present. This instinctive understanding and soul activity had a certain tendency to cultivate intellectual life one-sidedly. It could seem strange to say that the time in which understanding was instinctively oriented, led to a peak of a certain kind of education, an overdevelopment of human intellectuality. But you will not be amazed by such an idea if you consider that what affects a person intellectually need not always be something consciously personal, that instinctive intelligence in particular can come to the highest degree of expression. You need only remember that people discovered paper much later than wasps did through their instinctive intelligence, for wasp nests are made of paper, just as people, with their intelligence, make paper. Intellect need not affect only people. It can also permeate other beings without necessarily simultaneously bringing the personality, which should develop only just now in our age, to its highest level.

Now obviously, in a period in which intelligence endeavored to develop itself to its highest level, the desire was also present to permeate the educational system, and everything that the educational system permeates, with the intellect. Those who now examine Herbart’s pedagogy find that it emphasizes that the will and feeling should be educated. However, if you do not simply remain with the words, but if you go on to Reality, you will notice something. You will notice that an education based upon discipline and order, as is Herbarts pedagogy, desperately requires something. It should educate the will, it should educate the feeling. However, what Herbart offers in content is, in truth, suited only to educating the intellect. What he offers as pedagogical principles is instinctively felt, most particularly by Herbart himself, to be insufficient to comprehend the whole human; it comprehends only the human as an intellectual being. Thus, out of a healthy instinct he demands over and over again that there must also be an education of the feeling and will.

The question is, can we, with this as a foundation, really teach and educate the feeling and will in an appropriate way, in a way befitting human nature? I would like to point out that Herbart assumes that all pedagogy must be based upon psychology and philosophy, that is, upon the general world conception and understanding of the human soul life. Herbart’s thinking is thoroughly oriented to the abstract, and he has carried this abstract thinking into his psychology. I would like to examine Herbart’s psychology with you by means of a simplified example.

We know that in human nature three basic forces are at work: Thinking, Feeling and Willing. We know that the health of the human soul depends upon the appropriate development of these three basic forces, upon each of these basic forces coming into its own. What in Herbart’s philosophy develops these basic forces? Herbart is really of the opinion that the entire soul life first opens in the conceptual life—feeling is only a conceptual form for him, as is willing, endeavoring, desiring. So you hear from Herbart's followers, “If we try to drink water because we are thirsty, we do not actually desire the real substance of the water. Rather, we try to rid ourselves of the idea that thirst causes in us and to replace it in our soul with the idea of a quenched thirst. Thus, we do not desire the water at all. Instead, we desire that the idea of thirst cease and be replaced with the idea of quenched thirst. If we desire a lively conversation, we do not actually desire the content of this conversation. Rather, we long for a change in our present ideas and are really trying to obtain the idea that will occur through a lively conversation. If we have a desire, we do not have it as a result of basic forces at work in our soul. Rather, we have the desire because a particularly pleasant idea easily arises in our consciousness and easily overcomes the opposing inhibitions. This experience is desire. The ideas cause everything. Everything else is, in truth, only what the activity of the ideas reveals.” We can say that the whole Herbartian way of thinking, and everything which has been built upon it—and more than you think has been based upon the Herbartian way of thinking—is permeated by an unconscious belief that the true life of the soul takes place in the struggle between restraint and support of ideas. In this way of thinking, what appear to be feeling and willing exist only as emotions of the life of ideas. We should not be confused that many modern people who are concerned with pedagogy oppose teaching and bringing up children in this way, and yet direct their efforts only toward the life of ideas. They say they oppose it, of course, but they do not act accordingly; they base everything they do on the thought, “Conceptual ideas are what matter!” The strangest thing we can experience today is the lives of people caught in such contradictions. People preach and lecture today that we should indeed look at the whole person, that we should be careful not to neglect the soul life, the life of feeling and willing! Yet, if we return to what is practiced, precisely those who talk so much about the development of feeling and willing, are the ones who intellectualize teaching and education. These people do not understand even themselves because what they say is so far from the subject and has become just empty phrases.

We must look at these things intensely when we try to meet the demands of our cultural period, particularly regarding teaching and education.

So, I now come to the main point! People say that the subject matter does not matter so much as the pupil. But, as I have already mentioned, they want to study the pupil with a science of education that uses the methods of an imbalanced science. However, they do not even come close through the superficially oriented science of the last centuries. They need a very different orientation to understand humans. This other orientation is sought by our Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We want to replace the superficial anthropology, the superficial understanding of humanity, with something that studies the whole person, the physical, emotional and mental essence. Certainly, today people emphasize, even literally, the mental and the emotional, but they do not understand it. People do not pay any attention at all to the fact that something like the Herbartian philosophy, particularly as it regards the soul, is quite intellectually based, and therefore, cannot be integrated into our cultural period. On the other hand, Herbart wants to base his work on philosophy. But that philosophy upon which he builds likewise ended with the period that concluded in the middle of the fifteenth century. In our time, a philosophy founded in spirituality needs to have room. Out of this new philosophy, the soul and spirit can be so strengthened that we can link them to what we learn through anthropology regarding the physical aspects of humans. For in our time, the knowledge concerning the physical aspects of humans is truly great, even though it barely mentions the soul.

If you look at modern psychology with healthy common sense, you have to ask what you could really gain from it. There you will find disputes about the world of thinking, the world of feeling, the world of willing. But what you will find about these words, “thinking, feeling, willing,” is only word play. You will not become any wiser concerning the nature of thinking, feeling and willing if you search through modern psychology. Thus you cannot base a genuinely good pedagogy upon modern psychology. First, you must go into what is pertinent about the true nature of thinking, feeling and willing. To do that, the outdated scholastic spirit so prevalent in modern psychology is not necessary; what is necessary is a real gift for observing human life. What we observe today in psychology and in pedagogical laboratories appears to be efforts carried by the best of intentions. These efforts have nonetheless taken the direction they have taken because, fundamentally, the ability to pursue a true observation of people is lacking. Today most of all, people would like to put the developing child in a psychological laboratory and superficially study inner development, because they have lost the living relationship between people. A living way of observing is necessary for life, and it has largely been lost.

Today people talk about the spirit and soul in much the way that they speak about external characteristics. If we meet a child, a person of thirty-five and an old person, we say, “This is a person, this is a person, this is a person.” Although the abstract idea of “a person” is often useful, a real observation distinguishes a reality in the end, namely, that the child will become a person of thirty-five years and that a person of thirtyfive will become old. True observation must be quite clear concerning the difference in this development. Now, it is relatively easy to distinguish a child from a person of thirty-five and from an elderly person. However, a true observation of such differences concerning the inner aspects of people is somewhat more difficult. Thus, in the present, we often become entangled in questions of unity and multiplicity that arise, for example, from the three aspects of the soul life. Are thinking, feeling and willing completely separate things? If they are, then our soul life would be absolutely divided into three parts. There would be no transition between willing, feeling and thinking, and, therefore, human intellect, and we could simply delineate, as modern people do so easily, these aspects of human soul life. For the very reason that we cannot do that, Herbart tries to treat thinking, feeling and willing uniformly. But he has biased the whole thing toward abstractions, and his whole psychology has turned into intellectualism. We must develop an ability to see, on the one side, the unity of thinking, feeling and willing and, on the other side, the differences between them.

If, having sufficiently prepared ourselves, we now consider everything connected with human willing and desiring, then we can compare this willing with something that stands farther away in the life of the soul, namely, the intellect. We can ask ourselves, “How is the life of willing, the life of desiring, related to the intellectual life of concepts?” Slowly we realize that a developmental difference exists between willing and thinking, a developmental difference like the one that exists, for example, between the child and the elderly person. The elderly person develops from the child; thinking develops from willing. The two are not so different from one another that we can put them next to each other and say, the one is this, the other is that. Rather, they are different from one another in the way that developmental stages are different. We will first be able to correctly understand the life of the human soul in its unity when we know if an apparently pure desire, a pure willing that appears in the human soul, is a youthful expression of the life of the soul. There the soul is living in a youthful stage. If intellectual activity appears, if ideas appear, then the soul is living in the condition that presupposes an unfolding of the will, a development of the will. The life of feeling exists in between, just as the thirty-five-year-old person exists between the child and the elderly person. Through feeling, the will develops itself into intellectual life. Only when we grasp that willing, feeling and thinking, in their liveliness, in their divergence, are not three separate capacities of the soul, which Herbart resisted but which has never been properly corrected, do we come to a true grasp of human soul life.

However, our observations indeed easily deceive us if we view the life of the soul from this standpoint. Our observations easily deceive us because in this life between birth and death we can never allow our understanding to remain fixed if we use a living awareness of life as a basis. Those who want to believe that life between birth and death proceeds so that intelligence simply develops out of the will, stand on quite shaky ground. We see how intelligence gradually reveals itself out of basic human nature in the growing child. We can only develop intelligence, including the intelligence developed through education, if we are conscious that what children experience after birth is the idea, the consequence, of their experiences before birth, before conception. We only understand what develops into will during life between birth and death if we are aware that people go through the Portals of Death into a spiritual life, and there further develop the will.

We cannot really educate people if we do not take their total life into account. We cannot really educate people if we merely say to ourselves, “We want to develop what the future will need.” In saying this, we do not take the constitution of human nature into account. Every child, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, reveals through its physical body what had developed in the life before birth, before conception. We will never gain a correct view of the will if we do not become conscious that what begins to appear as will is only a seed which develops in the physical body as in a fertile soil, but does not come to full fruition until we lay aside the physical body. Certainly, we must develop moral ideas in people. However, we must be clear that these moral ideas, embedded in the will as they are between birth and death, do not mean nearly as much as they seem, for their real life first begins when we leave this body.

Modern people are still shocked that, to obtain a complete understanding of humanity, it is necessary to consider all that humans endure before birth and after death along with what presently lives in people. This is necessary if we are to achieve an integration of humans into the whole, including into the temporal world. If we do not include that, if we consider people the way modern anthropology considers them—only in their existence between birth and death—then we do not consider the complete person, but only a portion. We cannot educate this portion of a person for the simple reason that we stand before the growing child and try to educate something we don't understand. Characteristics want to develop according to the standards set by the experiences before birth, but no one pays attention to that. We cannot solve the riddle of the child because we have no idea about what is in the child from the life before birth, and we do not know the laws of development that first unfold when the child has gone through death.

A main requirement of modern education must be to work out of a science that takes the whole person into account, not one that claims to see the pupil instead of the subject matter, but sees only a faceless abstraction of the person. What we will use as the basis of the educational system is truly not one-sided mysticism, but simply a full observation of all of human nature and the will to really comprehend the whole person in education. If we tend, as Herbart does, toward the one-sided development of the intellect, then the formation of willing and feeling must remain untrained and undeveloped. In this case, we would believe that through the acquisition, creation and development of certain ideas, we can call forth the restraint and support of the ideas he speaks of when he speaks of feeling and willing. We cannot do that; we can only develop the outdated will, that is, through an intellectual education we can only develop intellectualism. We can develop feeling only through a relationship that itself arises out of a genuine rapport between teacher and pupil. We can develop the will only by becoming conscious of the mysterious threads that unconsciously connect the pupil and teacher. Creating abstract principles of education for the development of feeling and willing can lead to nothing if we disregard the necessity of permeating the teachers and instructors with characteristics of mind and will that can work spiritually—not through admonition, that is physical—on the pupil. So, too, we must not build the educational relationship one-sidedly on intellectualism. It must depend wholly upon the person-to-person relationship. Here you see that it is necessary to expand everything that is connected with education. We must, therefore, take into account that the intimate relationship between teacher and pupil can be formed, thus raising the statement, “We should not simply pass on information, we should educate the pupil,” above the empty phrase. We can do this only if we become conscious that, if this is the goal, the teacher’s life cannot depend upon political or economic whims. It must stand on its own two feet to work out of its own impulses, its own conditions.

The leaders of modern society only vaguely feel what Anthroposophy and the realm of the Threefold Social Organism assert. Since these leaders of modern society uncourageously shun the thought of allowing themselves really to grasp life, to grasp it in the way striven for through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, they are also unable to recognize, even with all good will, the full nature of human beings. They cannot bring themselves to say, “We must base the educational system in particular upon a real recognition and a real experiencing of spiritual impulses.” It is interesting to see the leaders agonizing their way through modern culture toward a freeing of the educational system. It is interesting to see how they are unable to free themselves, because they really do not know what to do; they live in contradiction because they want reform through a science founded upon outdated concepts.

I have a book in front of me, entitled Entwicklungs-Psychologie und Erziehungswissenschaft [Developmental psychology and pedagogy], by Dr. Johann Kretzschmar, who actually wants to do something new in instruction, who feels that instructional methods do not really fit the social mood of the times. Let’s examine something characteristic about this man. He says:

If we proceed in this way from the standpoint of independent, investigative science [and here he means a pedagogy that is thoroughly based upon an outdated science] then not only will the teacher training and school work be influenced, but also the position of the teacher, the pedagogue, in the state, in the school administration. First of all, it is obvious, in principle, that the teacher, like a doctor, must hold a position of trust regarding the state and community. They must admit that education—just like health care—is something in which primarily the opinion of the scientifically trained expert must be the standard, not the wishes of political and religious parties; further, the leadership of the school is less an administrative activity than a scientific function...

What does this man feel, then? He feels that administrative activity, however much it may be a state function, cannot extend so far into education that there is only an administrative knowledge, with too little understanding of human nature, in the impulses of the instructors and teachers. He would like to see administration replaced with what we can learn scientifically about human nature. Therefore, from a vague feeling he says:

... further, the leadership of the school is less an administrative activity than a scientific function, that consequently cannot be prescribed in every detail by means of official decrees. Communities and the state must have full trust that the faculty will competently carry out their responsibilities, that they are aware of the full extent of their duties and are, thus, completely independent of external influences. This trust is revealed in that—insofar as the internal affairs of the school organization are concerned—along with the directors, the teachers will also come into their own, that is, the teachers will not be considered as subordinates, as employees. The proper appreciation of pedagogical activity will thus show itself in the question of the regulation of school supervision. Neither the theologian nor the academic can be considered as the suitable person for the leadership and supervision of the school; [One only wonders then, how does he not get around to understanding that he, too, cannot be appointed as a school supervisor by the state, that he, too, must be removed from his position in the school system?] both must be completely placed in the hands of experts, of pedagogues. [Yes, why shouldn't those from the pedagogical field direct the schools first hand? Why is there first the detour through something that, in principle, cannot relevantly partake in the discussions!] That the institutions for handicapped persons, the schools for the mentally retarded, etc., should be directed neither by ministers nor by doctors, hardly needs any particular proof. Most important now is the influence of the faculty on educational legislation...

The influence of the faculty on educational legislation will quite certainly be the greatest when the teachers themselves make the laws concerning education in the self-administered cultural realm of the Threefold Social Organism.

You see in all this a dull movement toward what only the impulse of the Threefold Social Organism has the courage to really want to implant in the outside world. The best of modern people recognize the need for what the impulse of the Threefold Social Organism wants. But, the stale air of today’s public life constricts the spiritual breathing of these modern people. They never complete their thoughts because prejudices weld everything together in the unified state. And so, one can read that the legislation

... will have to point out that the influence of the school on the home must be supported and strengthened by the state, that under certain circumstances, difficult or antieducation parents are to be forced into the proper rearing of their children. The school board would thus look to the state to sanction not only the board’s overseeing of the school system, but also the support and protection of the teachers...

People wonder, “Yes, why shouldn't the teachers be able to do all this?” As I just said, they do not sense the free breath that permits free cultural life. The enfeeblement of thought in the old unified state has brought people so far that they don't even think about what an absurdity it is to want the state to first order, then protect and support what the cultural members of the social organism should manage. Isn't the idea that the teacher “should be protected and supported by the state” so typical? That is the same as saying, “We don't dare to bring about this condition which would be so desirable; we want to be forced.” But the motivation does not come. For on that side from which we should expect it, exists no understanding—obviously, quite justifiably—for what really should happen.

This increased influence of the state upon child rearing [now he wants an even greater influence by the state upon what the teacher and educator should do] lies quite logically in the direction of historical development.

Yes, it really does lie in the direction of historical development, but for it to be healthy, historical development must take a course different from the one that it is now on. Consider, for instance, a plant that, in the sense of Goethean metamorphosis, would only produce green leaves, never going on from the green foliage leaf to the colored flower leaf. Such a plant would never reach the goal of its development. In a similar sense, we must take account of the fact that historical development cannot always continue in the same way, but rather that one stage of development must supersede another.

There was a time when the state had no direct interest in the education system, a time when it first expressed an interest in compulsory schooling and formal education. The modern state, regarded as a constitutional state in that the people are directly involved in legislation, must put particular value not only upon the political, but also upon the general education of its members.

Inasmuch as the educational possibilities of the school are limited, the state must expand its influence into all areas of upbringing, to the family and environment of the child. [Now the state should be a co-educator in parallel to what cultural life is itself able to do. You see how you can have vague feelings that are correct, and how you can arrive at a point of view that is in such contrast to that toward which you, from a healthy point of view, should strive.] That area of pedagogy that is of the greatest value to the state is, of course, pedagogical sociology; [Now he wants to make social life the yardstick of pedagogy, while, in actuality, the social desires of people must arise from correct education so that they are available for the rehabilitation of social life.] it shows, on the one hand, the influence of education on public welfare and, on the other hand, sheds light on the extent to which the development of the child is not simply a matter of systematic education, but also depends upon the co-educators. The school board must also be reminded time and again of the importance of pedagogical sociology, since the Board's advice will be all the more indispensable to the state as the state’s influence upon education increases.

Here Kretzschmar understands that the state will find it increasingly more necessary to pay attention to education. Yet, we shall not hear directly from an institution that can be developed out of the school system itself; rather, the state should do it. Then he points out that the state can also give orders. Thus, what in our time actually demands to develop freely and independently is to be curtailed.

There is something particularly interesting in this book. Obviously a person as well-intentioned as Kretzschmar is will also be aware that we must change teacher training. He notes that in the schools of education, not everything is as he would like to have it. He notices it, and says that there is much that we must change. He notes that the universities treat pedagogy as a secondary subject, but pedagogy includes much that, in his opinion, should not be treated in a subsidiary fashion. Rather, we must integrate it into the universities as an independent department. Now, he thinks, the four schools have already been augmented. The School of Natural Science has been formed out of the School of Philosophy, the School of Political Science has been formed out of the School of Law. He wonders if it would be possible to expand one of these schools to include Pedagogy.

There are universities today that, along with the four main schools—that is, the Theological, Philosophical, Medical and Law Schools—also have Political Science and Natural Science Schools. Kretzschmar thinks that the creation of an independent School of Education could lead to all kinds of problems. With which school could Pedagogy be joined? It is so characteristic that he concludes that it is most appropriate to join Pedagogy with Political Science and create a new School of Political-Educational Science!

You see, so great is the pressure working on people that everything should emanate from the state, that such an enlightened man as this believes it best to make pedagogy a part of political science. I have said it here before: people continually strive to be not what they are by nature, but what they can be through the blessing of the state. They are not to be free citizens, but people somehow included with their rights in the state. People strive to be members of the state. That fulfills the thought, “People must be educated so that they may become good members of the state.” Where should we better place pedagogy than as a part of political science? It is interesting that a man who has such completely correct feelings concerning what should happen, draws such opposite conclusions from his premises than you would think.

Today I have characterized the resistance against which we will have to struggle if we are to create a school such as the Waldorf School is to be. It goes against the thoughts of people, even the best people. It must oppose them, for otherwise it would not work in the direction of future development. We must work in the direction of future development, particularly in the areas of culture and education.

We have no desire to create a school with a one-sided philosophical viewpoint. Anyone who believes that we wish to form an “Anthroposophical school” or spreads that idea, believes or spreads a malignment. That is not at all what we want, and we will prove it. If people try to meet us as we try to meet everything, then religious instruction in the Waldorf School for Protestant children will be taught by the local Protestant minister, Catholic instruction given by the Catholic priest, Jewish by the rabbi. That is, we will not engage in propagating any particular point of view. We do not want to bring the content of Anthroposophy into our school; we want something else. Anthroposophy is life, it is not merely a theory. Anthroposophy can go into the formation, into the practice of teaching. Insofar as Anthroposophy can become pedagogical, to the extent that, through Anthroposophy, teachers can learn skills to teach arithmetic better than it has been taught, to teach writing, languages, geography better than they have been taught, to the extent that a method should be created for this school through Anthroposophy—to this extent we strive to bring in Anthroposophy. We aspire to methodology, to instructional reform. That is what will result from a true knowledge of the spiritual. We will teach reading, we will teach writing, and so forth, in a manner appropriate to human nature.

Thus, we can turn our backs on what people will probably insinuate, that through a school we want to subject children to anthroposophical propaganda. We do not want that. For we know quite well that already the resistance we need to overcome is nearly immeasurable. We will only strive to teach as well as it is possible to teach when enlivened by anthroposophical impulses. Thus it will not disturb us if we must meet certain demands that come from here and there, for example, that people designated by the confessions must give religious instruction for the different confessions.