The Rudolf Steiner Archive

During this Easter-Tide, a stately procession of events has been passing before our spiritual vision.¹ Amongst these events there have been those which represented the struggles of a soul. This soul, of its own free will, was about to pass through the Portals of Death, but, at the last moment, it was recalled to this mortal existence by the Easter message.

It seems to me that of all the impressions which the great poem Faust is likely to make upon the mind, the impression created by this episode will be the deepest and the most lasting.

And now—that is to say, today, after the transformation of the scenery, representing the world and its evolution, (N.B. At the words: ‘Christ has arisen,’ the black scenery is changed to red)—now, consider, what your souls have assimilated from this view into the hidden meaning of Faust. Consider this in connection with what I said yesterday, when I spoke of that true vision which must appear before the soul of man, as it approaches the symbolical representation of Christ Jesus at rest in the sepulchre. You will remember that we saw yesterday, that according to the extent a man is connected in his earthly evolution with the Luciferic or the Ahrimanic. world, so in a corresponding measure will his spiritual insight or his spiritual sensations be quickened.

We must consider that in Faust we meet at once with a soul which from the very first confesses that it is steeped in Ahrimanic wisdom and experience. In watching this soul, we see it tear itself away from its bondage in Ahrimanic wisdom and—from our spiritual level we may dare to express it thus—fly to the spring of Life, whose source is in Christ. What a tremendous movement in the history of a human soul is this, which is here presented to our spiritual vision! Let us pause and contemplate this human soul with all the powers of our spiritual understanding. There it lies before us with all the knowledge which it has assimilated during its investigation of the outward material world and its connections. There it lies before us, with all the knowledge and experience which it has been able to gain, to grasp by means of those instruments which the investigator of external nature uses in his endeavour to penetrate her secrets .... And to what goal has this soul arrived? To what has it attained with all its investigations with various instruments and also by means of the phial which contains the juices, which in this earthly life ‘do drunken make without delay.’ (Latham). We feel already that the Ahrimanic being is ruling at the side of the Faust-Soul, and we also feel how inseparable this Ahrimanic being is from earthly death. Does it not seem as if this human soul, so steeped in Ahrimanic knowledge, hesitates before the consequences of its Ahrimanic perception? And it is this perception and these consequences, which Ahriman is able to bestow upon mortal man, which find expression in the words:

‘Now hail, thrice hail, incomparable phial!
With reverent hand I bid thee to the trial.
In thee I honour human wit and skill.
Compendium of kindly, slumberous juices,
Essence compact of deadly, delicate uses,
Show now a favour at the master’s will!
I see thee, all the pain sinks into slumber;
I grasp thee, all the strife ceases to cumber;
The spirit’s flood ebbs with slow pulse away.
It draws me to the Deep, resistless streaming,
Full at my feet the glassy sea lies gleaming,
On to new shores, woos me the newer day.’¹

And this soul has already the vision of arrival upon the other shore, where perhaps it may find that which, as it is forced to believe, it cannot find on this earth through its Ahrimanic bondage. Already the soul sees itself sinking gently downwards to the other shore.

‘A flaming car floats down on wafting pinions
Hither to me. Ready to cleave am I
On pathways new, the ethereal dominions,
Borne to new spheres of pure activity.
That life divine, that bliss of God-like being,
Dar’st thou, but now a worm, make it thy goal?
Aye, thou hast but to turn thy face from seeing
The Earth’s sweet sun, with dauntless soul!
Be bold to wrench the brazen gates asunder,
Past which no mortal but is fain to slink!
’Tis time by deeds to show that e’en not under
The majesty of Gods, Man’s dignity need shrink.
To face yon gloomy cavern never tremble,
Where fancy dooms herself but self-bred torments to,
And though all Hell its flames assemble
About the narrow mouth, press boldly through;
Blench not, but blithely let the step be taken,
Were it with jeopardy, ne’er from the Naught to waken!’

And having grasped the other Ahrimanic instrument he is ready to make his way over into those regions of which he has learned in the Ahrimanic school, that he will never have any knowledge, so long as he is imprisoned in the physical body.

From this frame of mind the soul is suddenly snatched away by the sound of the Easter bells and the voices of the Easter choir. And Faust’s soul once more assumes the physical body, so that now it may seek in the secret meaning of physical life for that which, as a result of its search while in the physical body, it must take with it through the Portals of Death, so that it may carry it above into those spiritual regions where it will be needed for the soul’s further development.

What you have heard today from the first part of Goethe’s Faust, as well as much that belongs both to this part and to this scene, appeared in Goethe’s Faust, when it was first published in completed form in 1808. But Faust, a Fragment, by Goethe, had already appeared as early as 1790. This Fragment, however, was without the Gretchen scene, also without the scene we have been considering today,—the one containing the episode of such vast importance for Faust’s soul. In 1790 Goethe published his Fragment again without the Easter scene and without the monologue, which probes into the innermost secrets of the human soul on earth. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, it was discovered how much Goethe had completed in 1780 and even in 1770, also what he had completed in 1790. This was published under the insipid title of The Original Faust. In this Original Faust, of course, we do not find the Easter scene. We say ‘of course’ advisedly.—Why is the Easter scene not there? My dear friends! Goethe was the child of his time. In order to be able to depict the effect of the Christ-Impulse upon the soul of Faust, from his own standpoint and according to the essential quality of his own soul, it was necessary for him to reach maturity. And up to 1790 Goethe had not reached maturity. About 1790 that expansion of Goethe’s soul took place, which is reflected in the well-known Fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. This was written during that period of time extending from the first publication of Faust without the Easter scene, to the Second publication of Faust, which included it. An infinitely profound expansion of Goethe’s soul took place owing to the experience which he has related in the Fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. And not until he had undergone this experience, could Goethe understand how he should allow the Easter Resurrection scene to influence the soul of Faust.

Now, having gained an insight into this Faust soul itself, let us go to the opening lines of Goethe’s Faust which coincide fairly closely with the sequence of Goethe’s revelations about himself. We know that:

‘I have studied, alas I Philosophy,
And Jurisprudence, and Medicine too,
And, saddest of all, Theology,
With ardent labour, through and through I
And here I stick, as wise, poor fool,
As when my steps first turned to school.
Master they style me, nay, Doctor, forsooth,
And nigh ten years, o’er rough and smooth,
And up and down, and acrook and across,
I lead my pupils by the nose,
And know that in truth we can know—naught!’

Thus he had been a professor for ten years! We will take it for granted that he had followed the regular course necessary for a professorship. In this case he would have become a professor at the age of thirty. From his thirtieth year onward, he had been dragging his pupils by the nose around after him. Now recollect what I said yesterday.

Between the age of thirty and forty man will be faced with the Image of the Jupiter Existence, when the temptation of which I spoke yesterday will rise up before him. And a vision, a prophetic vision of that temptation passes before everyone, as they stand before the Christ lying in the sepulchre. Is it not this vision which is represented in the drama of Faust? Do we not see plainly, that he is standing before the Easter Mystery? And has he not reached the late thirties as regards age? May we not take it for granted that something is stirring amongst his perceptions and that something, a kind of foreshadowing of the Jupiter experiences with Lucifer and Ahriman which come to all who are brought face to face with the Easter Mystery.

In Goethe’s time, it was impossible to represent this as it can be represented today. But Goethe could represent the feelings which the Easter Mystery awakened in his heart, and these were the feelings which were stirring in the soul of Faust. And when Mephisto-Ahriman approaches him, does it not seem as if Faust realised how completely his soul is forfeited to the Ahrimanic powers? As if he must save himself from something? Yes I But from what? What is it from which he must save himself? May we not say that this was Goethe’s own experience? That after he had attained to maturity in body and soul, he had let work upon him the Faust-mood of his youth and in so doing, as far as it was possible in his times, Goethe had undergone the Easter experience as we recognise it today. Hence, the necessity for the insertion of the Easter scene into his Faust. By the insertion of the Easter scene between 1790 and 1800, Faust was transposed into the Christ-Consciousness.

What years were those which Faust had to endure? Which years were those from which he shrank so terribly that he was ready of his own accord to seize the phial? Those years which mark the second, that is, the descending, half of human life. That part of life when, as we have seen, man, as he is confronted with the vision of the Jupiter Existence, becomes aware that later, on Jupiter, he must carry with him the food that Christ can give him. Otherwise, he will have to suffer hunger during the second half of his life. What is it that Faust seeks? Nourishment for his soul during the second half of his life. We all seek for that as a matter of fact. Ever since the time when the Mystery of Golgotha disappeared from our earthly evolution, we have all been seeking it. For that which upon Jupiter will take a physico-psychic form, exists already in the depths of our souls and we must all share to some extent in this Faust-experience. We need a strength which we cannot obtain by those means which give us freedom only while we are mortals, and which afterwards lead us to Lucifer or Ahriman. It is the Christ-force, the Christ-strength, my dear friends! The Christ-strength which Christ Himself possessed, after he had passed through the Gates of Death. But Christ did not pass the second half of earthly life in the physical body. Christ came down and passed a part of the first half of human life in the physical body, but not the second part. Why did he not do this? Because this force which must be expended by man during the second half of his earthly existence, was to circulate into the earthly aura, so that all mankind might be able to find it in themselves during their earthly evolution. Through the Easter Mystery arises that which we require for the pilgrimage of our soul, our whole life long.

And now, mark the deep significance of this in Goethe’s Faust. Faust had acquired—and Goethe knew by what means, for he published Faust, the first time, without the Easter scene—had acquired all that can be learnt from a compact with Lucifer and Ahriman, all that makes it possible to liberate the soul. But he who has fathomed the depths of his own soul sees clearly that he can no longer live by them. In order to live any longer he requires something else. And Goethe having arrived at maturity was in a position to show, that what Faust needed was the Impulse of the Easter-Mystery. Does not the Easter-Mystery in all its profundity come before us as we note this alteration made by Goethe in his Faust, after he had attained maturity? The Easter-scene could not have found a place in the first edition of Faust in 1790, because at that time Goethe did not yet understand it.

How did the idea of this poetic drama arise in young Goethe’s mind, by means of which we have been led into such immeasurable depths? We know that Goethe as a young man was deeply impressed both by the puppet play of Faust, where the fate of Faust was merely enacted by dolls, and also by the popular drama of Doctor Faust. The latter, though quite a play for the people, sank deeply into Goethe’s soul. And in Goethe’s soul the question arose at once, ‘What is the meaning of this Faust’? This Faust must represent struggling humanity in general. The man, who by his struggles can probe into all the hidden paths of the life of the human soul, and who must find the way above into the clear heights of the spirit. That a secret path must be travelled by the human soul, the young Goethe was certain. For what Faust’s soul experiences, at the sight of the various signs, is nothing else, in fact, but a meditation—a meditation which in the end leads him to a vision of the Earth spirit ranging over and permeating the earth. The answer to the meditation is contained in the words:

‘In floods of being, in action’s storm,
Up and down I wave! '
To and fro I flee,
Birth and the grave,
An infinite sea,
A changeful weaving,
An ardent living;
The ringing loom of Time is my care,
And I weave God’s living garment there.’

Meditation and contra-meditation! This carries Faust at once into the very depths of life. But what about the way out? How is he to escape to the spiritual heights?

My dear friends, when we consider the greatness of Goethe’s conception of the struggling man—Faust—which owed its origin to the puppet play and to the popular drama, and then consider the form which this powerful conception took, after Goethe had realised the Easter Mystery in the depths of his own soul, the question arises: How much did Goethe contribute to Faust during his own life?

Again, when we consider the powerful conception aroused in Goethe’s mind through the influence of the Faust-impulse, the question arises: How has this conception been treated from the artistic and poetical point of view? Considering what I have said before, it will be helpful for our purpose to understand Faust from this standpoint also.

In 1790, Goethe published A Fragment, which ends approximately with the Cathedral Scene. But the scene which makes Faust so wonderful for us today was not there. Goethe composed it later and added it when he was in Rome. In 1787, he added the scene which is now called ‘The Witches' kitchen.’ From time to time he added different scenes to the original manuscript which was written over and corrected so much that by the time the later scenes were added, it was described by himself as a ‘dog-eared, time-stained manuscript.’ When Schiller at the end of the eighteenth century urged Goethe to take up Faust once more and finish it, Goethe replied, that after having left the old monster Faust for so long, it would be difficult for him to take up the threads of it again and finish it in a consistent manner. Goethe was afraid to insert into Faust, which represented himself, as he was and as he appeared to be up to 1790, the experiences he had undergone after he had reached maturity.

And now let us consider this first part of Faust in general. Is it not a work which, as a close study shows, has been woven together out of material collected at various periods of time? If we do not adhere too closely to traditional criticism, we shall see in Faust the most powerful conception of isolated human nature that has ever been given to the world. At the same time we must confess that from the artistic and poetical point of view Faust lacks unity, that it is throughout an inharmonious work. That everywhere there are gaps and chasms into which much might be inserted which is not there. Considered artistically, it is not even really finished. It is not, in fact, an artistically complete work. The great genius of Goethe could only gradually complete, in a fragmentary manner, the events which were passing in his own soul. And much as we must admire, the intense beauty of many of the scenes, just as little can we conceal from ourselves (that is, if we are impartial, and do not rely solely upon the traditional judgment passed by literature and history) that Faust as it stands is not in itself a harmonious work of art, but that it is patchy in many places and full of gaps and chasms, as a whole. Why is this, my dear friends? Why is this? Goethe, in advanced old age had once more undertaken to finish the second part of Faust. Isolated scenes for this were already completed, and these he incorporated with the Faust of his extreme old age. For example, the whole classical-romantic phantasmagoria, the Helena Interlude, was completed in 1799-1800, and many parts were written earlier still. Further, there is no ground whatever for saying, as some historians of literature say, that no one can ever understand Faust; or, to quote the words of a man who was by no means foolish, but, on the contrary, extremely clever, that ‘Faust is a bungling performance patched together by an old man in his dotage.’ It is not that, by any means. On the other hand, it is a work the scope of which was so tremendous that even the profound and long experience of life of Goethe himself was not sufficient to carry it out. Everyone may have his own opinion about even the very greatest in this world. Yes! Their own opinion. But why is this so? In a course of lectures given at the Hague, I pointed out that Faust is by no means anything new in the history of the world. Faust, as he existed in the popular drama which Goethe saw, and as he existed in the puppet play, represented a man descending into the very depths of spiritual experience in order that he might rise to the heights of knowledge. This representation was so realistic that it moved the greatest poet of modern times to invoke the aid of the Easter-Mystery in order to save the man’s soul.

The Faust of the popular drama was taken almost directly from real life. He is taken from Doctor George Faustus, a vagrant scholar who lived in the second half of the Middle Ages. This we learn from Tritheim von Sponheim and other celebrated men who had met him and who even had a certain respect for him—the respect commanded by a striking personality endowed with intellectual knowledge and some spiritual power. And it was not without reason that this Doctor Faust was so styled. I quote his titles below: ‘Master Georgius Sabellicus, the younger Faustus, Second Magician, the well-head of Necromancers, astrologer, cheiromancer, agromancer, pyromancer, the second in the hydric art.’

Thus he styled himself . At that time it was the custom to bear as many titles as possible, and a long list of similar high-sounding appellations might be compiled, from those borne by Giordano Bruno and many other famous spirits of the Middle Ages. If today we find it extraordinary that learned men like Tritheim von Sponheim and others, who were aware of the existence of the real Faust, should have believed that he was in communication with the demon-world and the secret earth forces, and that through them he could work wonders, we must recollect that even in Luther’s time such phenomena were not considered anything very extraordinary. We know, indeed, that Luther himself wrestled with the devil. We know that all this sort of thing, with its visions and marvellous tales, formed an important part of the life of those times. But there was a feeling in all this which contributed to fix the figure of Faust in the popular consciousness. I say ‘feeling’; not a ‘conception,’ not ‘an idea.’ The feeling that natural science is advancing, natural science which brings the Ahrimanic part of true activity before the human soul. And from that arose the feeling that Faust is, and, in fact, always was, a personality who is in league with the Ahrimanic Powers. Simultaneously the secret threads are seen by which Faust is bound to the Ahrimanic Powers, and the fate of Faust was seen to be inevitable after his surrender to these powers. It was felt and acknowledged that Lucifer and Ahriman were inseparably connected with the whole evolution of the human soul. So much remained from the ancient clairvoyance and clairvoyant experience. The figure of Faust was connected with the feeling of man’s dependence upon the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers. At this time this perception was already disappearing in the twilight, and such matters had already become confused and indistinct. Still the feeling arose that struggling humanity with all its endeavours and trials and in all the dangers to which its soul is exposed might be adequately represented in the figure of Faust. But the exact nature of the relationship of struggling humanity with Ahriman and Lucifer was no longer understood. Little by little that knowledge had vanished. Hence the wild confusion, which meets us as we take up the Faust Book of the Middle Ages. Here all the experiences and adventures which this popular hero is supposed to have gone through, are jumbled up in the greatest confusion with all lands of adventures and experiences with which the human soul could meet during its struggles on earth: besides all possible and impossible demons, elementary spirits as well as Lucifer and Ahriman. Truly, a grotesque hash or ragout!

When Lucifer and Ahriman could no longer be visualised, after they had been dismembered and ground into a pulp with all the elementary spirits of nature, the figure of Doctor Faustus was introduced into the mixture, namely, this popular Book of Faust. The keen insight and wide sympathies of Goethe enabled him to recognise the greatness of the root idea of this horrible mixture. He rescued it from the depths and brought it up to meet the fight of the Easter-Mystery.

It is really most interesting to notice how from time to time Lucifer and Ahriman are cut up and made into these ragouts. If we look back and seek for the prototype of Faust in olden times, we shall find it in the popular books of the age, which were in the hands of everybody; and they all dealt with such matters.

Augustine was a great favourite at the time when this book was patched, cobbled, glued together, which seems more as if it had been compiled by a bookseller whose one idea was to make as fat a book as possible, than written by a literary man or an author. But whoever he was he must have known his Augustine, that is to say, the biography of Augustine.

Now the whole development of Augustine appears to us very remarkable. At first he cannot understand what the essence of Christianity is. Then, by degrees, he works his way through the secret antagonism to Christianity which develops with the evolution of his soul, and turns first to see what the Manichean doctrine has to teach him. From one of the most important men of the Manichean sect, Augustine hears about the Manichean Bishop Faustus. And we can almost guess now who the Faust senior was, as distinguished from that other Faust, who, as I mentioned just now, styled himself Faust Junior. This is he whom Augustine once came across in ancient times and who as Faustus, Bishop of the Manicheans, preserved something of the earlier Manichean doctrine. And what was this? It was that which has since been devoured by Ahriman, so that mankind no longer understands the way in which man is connected with his soul, with the whole cosmos, with all the impulses from the stars. We may say that the girdle of knowledge leading to cosmic enlightenment, which shows how man was born out of the cosmos, which knowledge man must have if he would understand the Easter Mystery, was already sundered in the time of the Manichean Bishop Faustus. And it was possible for the compiler of the Horn-Book of Doctor Faustus to make Faust, the prisoner of Ahriman, arise out of the figure described by Augustine as the Manichean Bishop, Doctor Faustus. But as all these matters had become so confused, he did not understand that Ahriman was the adversary. We see traces of Ahrimanic danger glimmering through the plot of the popular drama, but they are very faint. It arouses, however, a distinct feeling that Faust is the representative of struggling humanity and that he is threatened with danger from the Ahrimanic powers.

And there was much in the figure of Faust as he was portrayed until the time of Goethe, which was borrowed from that Manichean Bishop, Faustus Senior. Many chapters of the ‘Faust Book’ appear to have been copied, very badly, it is true, directly from the book in which Augustine describes his own development and his meeting with the Bishop Faustus. So we can prove clearly that the Ahrimanic features in Faust spring from this source, and also that when the ‘Faust Book’ came to be written down, only the last faint impulse was left to imprint the Ahrimanic elements in human nature upon the figure of Faust.

And now what about the Luciferic element? How have the Luciferic elements been dismembered in those bits of the ragout, which were then cooked up in the hash of elementary spirits, with bits of Lucifer and bits of Ahriman, as I said before? Yes, we shall have to hunt if we wish to discover Faust’s connection with Lucifer. And we must also seek in history. For this we need not travel very far, only to Basle, where we can halt and find out how Lucifer has been dismembered for the ragout. It is related that Erasmus of Rotterdam met Faust at Basle. They wished to have a meal in the College, but they could not find the food they wanted. Then suddenly it occurred to Erasmus what he would like to have and he told Faust, who sat next to him and was going to dine with him. But they could not get what they wanted. Then the Faustsaga relates that Faust suddenly produced strange birds on the table, no one knew from whence, for they were unobtainable in the Basle Market—cooked, baked and ready to eat. Here we have a scene between Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faust, in which Faust has power to set before Erasmus birds which could not be bought either in Basle or the neighbourhood at that time. What does this mean? As it stands in the saga it is incomprehensible, one must say utterly incomprehensible. But if we go further and seek amongst the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, the matter becomes more comprehensible. Erasmus himself tells us that in Paris he made the acquaintance of a certain Doctor Faustus Andrelinus. This Faustus Andrelinus was not only an extraordinarily learned man, but an extraordinarily sensuous man. Erasmus soon became well acquainted with this Faust, but had no liking for the sensuous side of his character. However, he speaks of a meal which the two had together. Now, certainly, two learned gentlemen of that time such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Faustus Andrelinus would neither of them set before the other such a bird and in such a manner as Faustus is supposed to have put before Erasmus in Basle; we cannot entertain such an idea for a moment. It is probable that the tale has arisen from some kind of joke exchanged by the two during the meal. But we can see a little behind these joking words if we recollect that Faust—this time it really is Faust—had declared that he did not like what had been set before him and he would like to satisfy himself by eating strange birds and rabbits. Yes! Strange birds and young rabbits. Erasmus at once had the idea that this must have some hidden meaning. He behaved in exactly the same way as some theosophists do who meditate on the meaning of things and believe everything must have a meaning. Erasmus thought to himself: Might he not mean flies and ants? Now, he will forego the young rabbits, but the birds must really be flies, and these he particularly wished to partake of. Now we see daylight. Now the birds, through an astral change, have become flies. And in Goethe we find the figure of Mephisto as the god of flies. It only needs the presence of the spirit who rules these beings to bring them by magic to the place. And so we have found the connecting link between the incomprehensible Legend of Basle with the wonderful birds and the flies who came simply from the devil. And we need not be surprised that the devil should set flies before his guests. If we follow Erasmus a little further to his stay in Paris, we shall see more clearly the kind of soul possessed by Faustus Andrelinus. In Paris, Erasmus was not very willing to fall in with the views of this Faustus Andrelinus. However, he then had to go to London. From there he writes that he, Erasmus—can you believe it that he has now learnt how to behave in a salon, whereas before he had the manners of a rough peasant—that now he has learnt to bow and even how to move about upon the polished floors of the Court. And, yes!—Erasmus himself writes—that he is living in an atmosphere in which everyone kisses their neighbour on meeting and at parting. We see from this time that he wishes to please his Paris friend. He writes: ‘Come over here, and if the gout detains you, fly over in your magic car, through the air. That is one of your elements.’ Here is a reference to the Luciferic tendencies of Faust’s soul.

In Goethe’s account we meet the Luciferic influence and its temptations in the betrayal of Gretchen. Lucifer has now become so faint among the influences which surround Faust, that we are obliged to make these kind of literary investigations if we wish to prove the connection between the Faust in Paris and Lucifer. But in the Horn-Book of Faust we see clearly Faust as he stands—with Lucifer and Ahriman beside him—although showing faintly through the confusion of that time, all jumbled together into a ragout. Need we be surprised to find in the popular play and in the drama and even in Marlowe’s Faust a remnant of the original intuition belonging to those times, when by means of an atavistic clairvoyance, the connection of humanity with Lucifer and Ahriman was recognised? But all that had become confused and in the literary productions of which I have spoken was always represented in a confused manner. Goethe indeed perceived the profound connection, but then what was there that he could not do? He could not, however, separate Lucifer from Ahriman. He welded them into the mongrel being, Mephisto, of whom we cannot rightly say whether he be the devil, or Ahriman, or the real Mephisto, for Goethe has invested him with some of the Luciferic qualities. Goethe takes the ragout, so to speak, he perceives that both Ahriman and Lucifer reign there, but he cannot as yet tear them apart, he combines them both in what—from an occult standpoint—is the impossible figure of Mephisto, who is a cross between Lucifer and Ahriman. The time of which Goethe caught a glimpse when he became acquainted with the book of Faust, may be termed the last aftermath of the ancient cognisance of Lucifer and Ahriman. And Goethe’s Faust is the early dawn of a knowledge, not yet above the horizon, of Ahriman and Lucifer. It is dim and confused in the figure of Mephisto, who is a combination of Lucifer and Ahriman.

But already the need had arisen of showing how mankind may profit by what was poured into the earth-aura, when the Christ-Being passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, if man will permit this to work upon his soul. The Easter Mystery itself in Goethe’s Faust appears to us as the beginning of a new era in the spiritual life of humanity. About this work, in spite of the masterly way in which the theme is handled, there is always a feeling of confusion, something of that dim, misty, morning twilight, which we see below us, if we climb a mountain to see the sun rise earlier than we should have done had we remained below.

If we allow the Faust of Goethe to work upon our minds, we shall feel how one of the greatest of men, through his endeavours to revive the ancient knowledge, turns his soul to the Easter Mystery. And if we let it work on our souls in the right sense, my dear friends, we shall feel what takes place in the heart of a really great man, when that man’s heart is moved by the Easter Mystery—as was that of Goethe himself. We shall see also that in this early perception by Goethe of the Easter Mystery there is something which also demonstrates that after the red dawn into which the first faint, clear rays of the Easter Mystery are already streaming, the Sun of a new spiritual experience will rise. The human soul itself will arise from the grave of the darkened perception into which it had to descend.

In the course of its evolution the human soul will itself experience the Easter Mystery, the resurrection of the Christ-Impulse which lies buried in the deep underworld of its being, if it unites itself with the force gained by a contemplation of the Christ-Easter-Mystery.

Let us thus realise Goethe’s appeal; and after we have meditated on the tragedy of the Easter Mystery let us transform it into an appeal for a corresponding resurrection of spiritual experience in the hearts and souls of men, in the future. May the hearts and souls of men receive the deep Mysteries of Easter with joy I Yes, after the realisation of this, the greatest of all tragedies, may they experience with holy joy the glories of the resurrection of Christ in the depths of their own being.

May you, my dear friends, through these words which I have permitted myself to speak to you today, experience something of this perception in your souls, that the reason you are here, the reason why we are gathered together around our Bau,² dedicated as it is to spiritual investigation, is that you may thus, through the strength drawn into your souls, carry away into the future something of the Resurrection-Impulse that has appeared so plainly to us in the Easter Mystery, and towards which, as we have seen, the greatest minds of the past pressed so eagerly.

• 1. These lectures were given in connection with scenes from Goethe’s Faust, demonstrated in Eurhythmy.
• 1. The quotations from Faust in these lectures are (unless otherwise stated) taken from Latham’s translation.
• 2. The Johannes building or Goetheanum, at Dornach, Switzerland, then in course of erection, but later destroyed by fire.

This lecture is something like a continuation of that which I held about the origin of the human being. We come today back to times which are in the distant past, and we get to concepts which are very far to the present materialistic thinking. Hence, allow me that I tie on a few introductory words about the relation of my topic to the contemporary ideas.

It has absolutely to be clear to everybody who has penetrated and understood the scientific knowledge of the present that today the theosophical ideas about the origin of the earth can be taken as something very speculative, maybe even very fantastic. However, do not believe if one goes deeper into the matters that then a real contradiction appears between the scientific and the theosophical ideas. We have to get absolutely clear about the fact that the naturalist is only able to verify and to explain what takes place in the external sensory world and is to be grasped with the scientific reason. I am of the opinion completely that about such difficult questions, as this is one, also from the theosophical point of view only somebody should speak who is also familiar with the whole scientific education of our time, so that he has an idea of it, how much he violates the generally accepted ideas. However, I would like to put an example of mutual understanding on the top of my lecture for those who oppose these advanced views from the materialistic point of view.

It was at the end of the sixties, when for the last time an even if pessimistic; nevertheless, decidedly idealistic philosophy appeared which made a deeper impression on a bigger public. It was Eduard von Hartmann's (1842–1906) Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). I only want to say what has resulted historically. Hartmann bore down on the ideological ideas which originated from Darwinism. When one noticed which great impression the Philosophy of the Unconscious caused, many opposing writings appeared. Among these one appeared anonymously with the title The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Evolution (1872). The most significant philosophers said that it was the best writing against Eduard von Hartmann and his philosophy. The writing was sensational. The naturalists realised that it was written by a naturalist and that Eduard von Hartmann was disproved thoroughly. The second edition of the same anonymous writing appeared soon afterwards, however, with the name of the author, namely with the name of Eduard von Hartmann! It was an ingenious mystification! Indeed, I am not a Hartmannian or follower of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, but this philosophy stands higher and contains more than one can otherwise bring forward from the pessimistic side. Hartmann showed that one only needs to scale down his point of view to understand the matters in question still much deeper than the opponents. Thus spiritual science or theosophy may also express itself in such a way like those who believe to be the best naturalists. I have said this to show that one may also disprove theosophy in similar way. However, theosophy may give this rebuttal better than any other.

We have to take into consideration that we deal with very difficult chapters and that it is exceptionally laborious to penetrate into these regions. However, it is even more difficult to find the appropriate means of expression within our language only shaped for the external sensuous world. One has to use everything possible to dress the fine, subtle concepts and the views which are taken from purely spiritual worlds into clear language. Nevertheless, I attempt to pictorially and clearly express what is familiar to me as experience in these higher fields. You find the relevant periods of the big world evolution also shown in the theosophical literature. But you find them shown more schematically than I will do it today. I do not make any objection to this schematic description which may also be useful and gives clear concepts of this evolution to the reason. One can learn this from the theosophical manuals. However, I would like to describe it somewhat clearer.

We have seen the human being facing us as another being in very distant times taking on the physical dress only bit by bit not having his origin from the physical but from the psychic. We have seen the psychic leading the way of the physical, the psychic developing the forces in itself by which it can gradually clothe itself in this physical dress. All that has been shown. At the same time, we have drawn our attention to the fact that we can trace back the human being, as well as he faces us today, only through a certain number of periods.

We are within the fifth age of our physical earth development. Another age preceded it that took place on a continent which forms the bottom of the Atlantic today. And another age preceded this Atlantean age called the Lemurian age. At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, we find that, actually, that connects with the human being, as well as he had developed till then which we call our immortal spirit. This higher element, this higher nature of the human being which outlasts any physical corporeality and any psychic development in other words the eternal in the human being this has established itself in those days. If we want to express ourselves figuratively, we may call it a spiritual spark in the human nature, so that the human being faces us till then as the connection of soul and body. Up to the middle of the Lemurian age, our ancestors were bodily-psychic beings.

If we want to conceive a clear idea how these human ancestors were in some way, actually, we have to remember that the spirit is inseparably connected with any really higher thinking. Without spirit the human being could not count, without spirit he could not speak, without spirit no higher spiritual activity, never mind still higher activities would be possible. So that we deal with a human being till then who waited to become mind-endowed who did not yet have the immortal part who had, however, a soul-life that was completely different from ours. Our soul-life is infiltrated with spirit. If we want to call the human being who was not yet mind-endowed a human being and we want to do this for the sake of the shortness of time , we must say that his soul-life was vague that it was a more dreamy, pictorial soul-life. One can understand the soul-life of the human being at that time only if one traces it back one period more. In the time of which I have spoken now the human being is able to receive external body impressions, to perceive the surroundings. This perception developed only slowly and gradually.

If we trace back the Lemurians still farther, we find that the human ancestors have sensation already, indeed, that the external objects make impressions on them but that they could not connect ideas with these external percepts. If you imagine a soul-life like that of the dream, then you have something similar. However, it is not completely the same. For the pictorial ideas which surged up and down in the soul at that time were much clearer, much more original and more elementary, much more saturated than the confused dream pictures of the present-day average person are. Above all, these pictures in the human soul were dependent in certain way on that which took place around the human being. At that time, the human being was not yet able to associate a colour with an external object, he could not yet see the things coloured. He could not see that an object is green or red; the colour idea did not yet combine with the object. Nevertheless, colours still surged in the human soul. These colours had some resemblance to that which the clairvoyant knows if he develops certain capacities in himself. The clairvoyant sees not only the external physical, but also the feelings and instincts in the form of an aura. The physical human being is only one part of the human being. The physical human being is embedded like in a cloud in which all sorts of formations surge up and down. Only someone can see them who has the gift of clairvoyance in our theosophical sense not in the sense of spiritism. I pass some remarks about the acquisition of such capacities next time when I speak about the great initiates of the world. Any real initiation can be connected only with the gift of clairvoyance. The capacities of the great initiates originated from the gift of clairvoyance.

Today you have to be an absolutely reasonable person, before you become a clairvoyant. You must be able to think logically and clearly. Somebody who would attain the gift of clairvoyance without having developed the gift of the reasonable, clear thinking would receive a bad gift. He would be led to a world of fancies rather than to a higher spiritual world. There he would miss any control and would face it like the chaotic dream world. Not before you get into the habit of logical, clear, reasonable thinking, so that you walk through the spiritual things as the reasonable human being walks through tables and chairs, so that it is no longer anything special, you can understand that the gift of clairvoyance guides one into the riddle of the world. All occult schools have as a precondition that the human being is a quite reasonable, maybe a somewhat sober human being, so that he is the opposite of a daydreamer. Hence, we say that clairvoyance, the cognition of the astral auric world, is connected with the development of our spiritual abilities.

The view of the human being, as I have described it, was similar in the pre-Lemurian time. But it was not pervaded with consciousness. Only a dim consciousness existed in the human being. Indeed, at that time on this level he already felt what was hot and cold; he had a sense of touch and could perceive certain differences of density. He also had the gift of hearing. The sense of hearing is one of the oldest senses which humanity developed. But he did not yet have the sense of seeing. This still was, so to speak, an internal one. The colours lived as pictures in the human soul. If he came, for example, to a region which was colder than that he came from then in his soul a colour picture of darker colour shadings appeared. If he made it reversely, if he came from a colder air layer to a warmer one, then there was a yellowish or a yellowish-reddish colour picture. Thus those human beings had colour pictures which did not combine, however, with the surface of the bodies, but lived as uncertain colour pictures in the soul. This combined then with the surroundings of the human being.

But at that time the human being had something else. He had a fine sensitivity for that what took place emotionally in his surroundings. If we are here in a room, you do not sit there only as physical bodies, but also as souls. In each of you feelings and sensations live. These are also something real like the physical body is something real. What today the human soul has as sentient ability can no longer penetrate these forces of the feelings and sensation because just due to the further development of humankind the human being became clearer in his consciousness because he has developed his reason, his everyday view. But he has temporarily lost what existed in his soul. He will regain this ability maintaining his present reasonability and his clear waking consciousness. Once the whole humankind attains a state which today only the practical mystic, the clairvoyant has. In order to attain this state the human being had to go through a merely physical view, through a merely bodily percipience. In one respect humankind gets to a higher level, and in another respect it descends to a lower level in certain way.

At that time, the human being came from a vague, dim percipience. But this was at the same time mental-clairvoyant percipience. If now in the nearness of the human being any likeable feeling, anything emotional lived which you allow the expression emitted sympathy, then the human being received those bright colour pictures in himself. Bad feelings let arise darker colour pictures tending to blue, brownish, reddish colours. This was the interrelation of the inner soul-life with the external mental reality at that time. But at that time this external mental reality could just be perceived.

Only bit by bit the senses developed as they are today. With it the reason, the object consciousness came into being. The original gift of clairvoyance withdrew. At the same time, we come to a time where another development goes hand in hand with this development, the development of the so-called uni-sexuality. The human being was not always in such a condition as he is today concerning his reproduction. The bigger force which the soul had over the physical caused that the human being could produce a being of the same kind without resorting to another physical human being because he combined both sexes in himself. Hence, the transition was at the same time that of the mutual perception and that from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. At that time, the human brain was not yet developed in the same way as it is today. The human being was not yet such a cerebral being as he is today; at that time he also did not have such a perception as he has today. This is the time of which we have already spoken which is simultaneously the time of the creation of the human brain.

I have indicated last time that we do not sign Darwinism completely. We sign it in this respect that it shows the relationship of the physical human being with all other physical living beings on earth. But I have also indicated that we do not regard the imperfect animal living beings as ancestors of the present human beings, not even of the psycho-physical human beings. We have to regard these animal beings rather as branches of a common ancestor which resemble neither the modern human being nor the imperfect living beings, the animals of today.

In the time of which I have spoken, the higher mammals did not yet exist. The higher mammals have, just as the human being, only more imperfectly, a brain and a perception similar to the human one. Beings which have developed such a perception did not yet exist in this time. There were on the earth only beings with pictorial ideas, with a pictorial kind of soul formation, and basically everything was united in one single being, like in a common nodal point, that is today the human being and the higher animal realm. The human being was, in so far as it is a psycho-physical being, in a certain respect on the level of animality. But no present animal and also not the present human being resembles the human being of that time. However, the human being has developed so far that a part, a branch of the previous type has further-developed up to the present-day human beings. Other members of the beings of that time remained behind because of certain circumstances which I will especially show another time. They went back in their development, became decadent. These decadent beings are the higher animals.

I want to make this point clear to you and use the following for it: you know that there are regions in which Catholicism has degenerated to a kind of fetish service where it appears like adoring lifeless objects or pictures of saints. Nobody is able to state that this point of view, in proportion to the more perfect to which humankind has developed, is the same one. This fetish Christianity is a decayed Christianity. Thus it is also from the theosophical point of view considering different “savage” tribes. The materialistic history of civilisation regards them as ancestors of the civilised people. We regard them as decayed, decadent descendants of once advanced peoples. The same applies to the higher animals if we go back in time even farther. Once they were more perfect, they decayed. We come to a formation of the human realm which is different which shows the human being still undifferentiated from the other higher animal species, indeed, at a time which lies millions of years behind us.

How has it come to pass that the human being stopped in those days on the course of his development? Concerning his soul development the human being is completely the result of that which takes place round him. Simply imagine the room in which we are with a temperature higher than hundred degrees, and imagine also everything changing there! If you expand this thought to all the other natural conditions, it shows you that the human being is in truth completely dependent on the constellation and configuration of the forces within which he lives. He becomes another being if he is in another interrelation.

One made scientific attempts recently: one made butterflies hatch at temperatures at which they do not live, otherwise. One found that they change their colours and colour shadings. At higher temperatures even bigger changes are to be observed. Today the natural sciences are already a kind of elementary theosophy. Concerning theosophy there is no contradiction between the natural sciences and theosophy!

Thus the developmental levels of humankind also depended on the quite different developmental levels on our earth. Already the physicist says to you namely as a hypothesis that the farther we go back in the earth development, we come to higher and higher temperatures. The theosophist or the practical mystic sees really back to these primeval times, and he sees these conditions in the Akasha Chronicle as truth, like the average person sees table and chairs as truth before him. We come to a condition in which all substances on our earth are in quite different relations to each other than today.

You know that the substances if they are warmed up change their state. Solid substances become liquid, liquid ones become vaporous et etcetera Now we come back to much higher temperatures than we know on earth today. There the whole material world of our earth was different. Only someone who is set on the materialistic view and on the immediate view of our earth can get to the view that this is impossible. Who emancipates himself from our reality today also realises that life was possible in these higher temperatures of the earth .The human being really lived in these higher temperatures, indeed, in another way. He lived in the state of the “fire mist.” The bodies were a vaporous, soft mass which cannot really be compared with anything we know today. Thus we come back to quite different circumstances. One can still follow up this if one wants to get to know the origin of the earth. This origin is intimately connected with the whole development of the human being. If we go back, we find the human being in company of much lower animals which belong to the lower classes of our present-day animal realm which had, however, other figures in those days, were different from their present-day descendants. Because the earth became more solid and denser, they took on other shapes and characteristics. We have, if we observe what takes place in us with the bare rational eye, no idea how it looked at that time. An animal world, nevertheless, lived round the human being. As the human being takes up food from the physical world today, he also took up it in those days in similar way.

We have now to realise that what I tell now is something quite fantastic and strange for those who are not used to such ideas. The time has come to pronounce it once again. We stand on the point of evolution where again an idealistic world view will replace the purely materialistic one. Going back to these times, the whole materiality of our earth becomes different. At that time, the mass of the earth I ask you to not be too much astonished about what I say was still in connection with other heavenly bodies than it is the case today. Already somebody who thinks the present physical ideas without clairvoyance to an end understands that what I say is not completely inconsistent.

You need only to go back according to the Kant-Laplace theory to the time when the single planets do not yet circle the sun, have not yet developed from the primal nebula, and then you have a valiant, but correct hypothesis. We can also come back from the standpoint of the physicist to a time when the earthly materiality still was in contact with the materiality of the whole solar system. At that time, the human being was much more related with everything than he is today. In the Akasha Chronicle we find in this time that the earth was in a material connection of much more intimate kind with another heavenly body which circles the earth today, with the moon. It was a certain material interrelation between earth and moon.

If I may express myself roughly: what we have today as earth mass formed only because the crude materiality that we have in the moon was extruded as it were. Both bodies have differentiated from each other. You can imagine which immense shocks must have occurred there in the whole materiality! This cosmic shock is the counter pole, the correlative of what I have told, the correlative of the big living being with whose separation and change is connected that the human being went over from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. The whole separation did not take place in one go. Unfortunately, the reading of the theosophical literature offers so much opportunity to assume as if a heavenly body hurries out of the other. However, it is not a violent development. Slowly and gradually everything took place, in millions and millions of years. However, it is difficult to speak about figures because one must get to know the methods which the secret doctrine applies.

If we go back even farther, we find another interrelation that is harder to imagine and more intimate than that interrelation which today exists between sun and earth. But it existed in an older time. We want to take an idea in hand which makes it somewhat easier to us to illustrate this interrelation a little figuratively. If you see the sun and then imagine the sun limited within space is it really limited that way? Already a quite usual reflection can teach us that a real demarcation of the sun is basically not possible.

Does the sun really stop being where one sees its border? It does not stop there, its effect spreads through the whole planetary system. On our earth the sun has an effect. Does not belong that to the sun body what the sun makes on our earth, do not the etheric forces belong to it which spread on the earth and make life possible? Are these etheric forces not only the continuation of the etheric forces of the sun? Or their force of attraction? Does it not belong to the sun? There we see that if we understand the existence in an unrestricted way, we can realise that such an arbitrary limitation does not take place if we speak of a heavenly body like the sun. The effects which come from the sun were in the former times still quite different on the earth than they were later, and than they are today. They were in such a way that, if anybody could sit down on a chair and could have looked at the whole world edifice basically the physicist imagines this in such a way if he illustrates it to the children , he would not have perceived the sun and the earth as separate bodies, but he would have over-viewed the whole filled with perceptible contents; he would have seen that the earth is crystallised from the whole sun ball in later times.

If we go back to the times of the most distant earth past, we come to a point where that what has deposited in the lunar matter today was still connected with the earthly matter where the forces, which are pulled out today, were still efficient on the matter. These had effects on our physical bodies. They formed it in such a way that it reacted in quite different way to the forces and that in quite different way the effects on the bodily expressed themselves. In even earlier times the solar effect on the earth was there in an even more different way than today, also concerning growth. When the lunar body and the earth body were still united, we have all earth beings in a state which we only find with the animals which have the temperature of their surroundings approximately. The warm blood starts to develop to the same extent as the lunar matter withdraws from the earth.

If we go back farther to the times in which the solar body was still connected with the earth, we find within the human ancestors the effects which are preserved today in quite decadent forms of the lowest animals. The human being reproduced in those days by a kind of separation process. The human being existed in delicate matter, even more delicate than the fire mist. At that time, the reproduction happened as a kind of detachment. The daughter being had the same size as the mother being. The solar forces were in those days vital forces. They overpowered the material. They imprinted forms to the material. Thus we look, if we go back to the origin of our earth, at a time in which the human being was surrounded by subtler and subtler material states.

In the end, we get to a state which only the clairvoyant can envision where the most delicate etheric corporeality merges into astral being; as a pure soul-being the human being was placed in the earthly scene. The human beings who were formed like the physical aura were placed into the earthly scene. In the soul forces worked that imprinted forms into the matter soaking up the matter into themselves and forming it so that they became external seal impressions, a kind of shades of that what the souls were in the pure soul land. Now we have come back to the stage of our earth where the human being did not yet have the physical materiality where the human being only came in as an astral being into this physical world which was in those days of extremely delicate nature. Now we could go back to still much older states in which the human being did not yet have this astral existence. We could go back to purely spiritual states. Now, however, this should not interest us; for we do not want to pursue the human being, but the origin of the earth.

A few words more about the course backward. We meet the human being there, so to speak, still without material earth. He is not yet embodied in physical corporeality. There we would have to go back long periods if we wanted to find the human being at the former developmental stadia. The human being who was placed as a soul-being on the earth has the ability to draw the substance to himself in a particular way. If one were able to investigate the etheric man, one would perceive that his soul was already organised. It could already create forms. It had to develop for that for long times.

It had already gone through long developmental states. These have been completed on other heavenly bodies, of course. How have we to imagine such a development on other heavenly bodies? All the abilities which the soul had acquired were in such a way that they could work in the physical. It was led from former developmental states. The soul had to have already gone through physical states several times, because only within the physical world certain abilities can be developed. The human being could not speak and think today unless he had got into contact with the physical nature. What we work today becomes our ability later. I have often pointed to the child that learns to write and read. When the child has grown up, it can write and read. What was labour, what was intercourse with the outside world before has disappeared, but the fruit, the result has remained. This is the ability of writing and reading. What we have in the soul has originated from the intercourse with the outside world.

The theosophical world view calls it involution. If the human being again works out from within what he has acquired, we call it evolution. Between involution and evolution all life takes place. What the soul has done in the evolution is based on the fact that the abilities have emerged from the soul. These abilities were acquired once by involution. This involution took place again in another physical body. We have there an important moment that has happened on our earth; this is the moment when the human being was able to become a warm-blooded being from a cold-blooded one, because the lunar matter had emerged. This is the important point of the earth development. In all mystic schools this is emphasised. The human being takes the heat into him and reworks it inside. The myth which always shows the great truths figuratively preserved this in the Prometheus legend. Prometheus got down the fire from the heaven. This is the warmth of the human being that he got down there, not the external heat. Thus the human being had to get down all remaining abilities from the heaven, too.

I would like to lead you still to a point that is also very important for the earth development. This is the moment when the human being takes up in him what we have once got to know as the inside of the soul. We have seen that pictures have risen up in the human being which he associated with the objects. The human being possessed this ability to develop light in him in the first time. He acquired that sooner as well as he acquired the ability later to develop warmth. The human being developed the ability to sense light around him or still more properly speaking to sense the objects around him in the light. This took place on a planet which the theosophical world view calls “Moon.” However, this was not our physical moon. When the soul had acquired the ability of the inner light, the connection was there, and who knows the circumstances of the past, knows that it evoked the soul ability of seeing colours, the inner luminescence. We have to realise once how this abilities are connected. The development of warmth is connected with all life on our earth, with the present kind of reproduction, with the way the human being can bring something into real existence. Everything else is combining; only the reproduction is a real creating, and this is connected with warmth. We have a similar level of development when the inner luminescence appeared. The human being developed the luminescence on a previous planet. This was a luminescence from within like it is warmth from within today. It was luminescence. With it we have come to the most excellent characteristic of the human being in his pre-physical state on another heavenly body. Everything that went out from the human being was luminous as his aura shines today. The human being was a luminous being, and the perception of the human being was the perception of his luminescence. At that time, luminescence developed down to the physical. It was a physical luminescence of the human being.

How do we get our most significant ideas of the environment? Just by means of the visual percepts. You would nearly lose nine tenths of that what you know if you cancel the visual percepts. Because we have visual ideas today, wisdom can pour somewhat in us. With our lunar ancestors this was different. From them the light was emitted. The same was emitted from them that pours in us as light effects today. One calls our earth the universe of love in the mystic mythology because it is connected with forces of love. The universe of wisdom on which the light played the same role as today the warmth preceded this universe of love. The earth followed as a universe of love the universe of wisdom. The inner light is connected with the human will. The human being, who has certain desires, passions, sensations, and emotions, provides his aura, his astral body with particular colour shapes. These are subjected to the will in a broader sense. In those days, in the lunar period, the whole human being was an expression of will. The will flowed outwardly and came to the fore as that which shines.

Hence, our ancestors are the sons of will if we call these human beings of the universe of wisdom human beings. The children of love descended from the sons of will. The light played a similar role in those days as today the heat on the earth. One calls these luminous human beings within the luminous environment also the sons of the twilight. It was an especially luminous human being within the surrounding luminosity, an exchange of light took place as we have an exchange of warmth today. As we have a feeling of cold if it is cold one approximately had a feeling if it was darker all around than in the own inside. The will was the basis of that because the will basically found its expression in the whole surroundings. As today the human being is creative by love, he was creative in those days using his will. His will had an immediate influence on all surroundings. As powerless the creating human being is before the physical things of the outside world today because he has got to clearness in his consciousness and thereby the other soul forces have become more imperfect , as powerful the will was in those days. The human will had influence on the whole physical surroundings. Because it strives and is the upward trend in the development, this will strove for the higher. Thus that was caused, immediately from the living nature, what separated the centre of the heavenly body in two, so that at that time already a kind of invagination took place. One centre became two centres in a more mental way. We see this separation of the centres achieved in the later development in the separation of the earth and the moon.

These are sketchy indications I could give you. However, you will see that the matters coincide. Who tries to think consistently and strictly can admit this from the start. I myself might give a rebuttal as I have indicated it in the outset concerning Eduard von Hartmann. Habitual ways of thinking are something temporary. Who studies history of the Middle Ages, for example, not only the external one, because it is a wrong picture which is given to us, finds my explanations verified.

Goethe also says that it is basically only the historians' own spirit, in which the times are reflected. It is the task of theosophy to show the development in the past to receive an idea of the great human future. I have quoted Goethe, because he deeply looked into these mystic, mysterious connections of the world development. He used a strange figure, the “old man with the lamp” in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The lamp can only shine where another light shines. I have shown that as the incarnation of ancient wisdom. Now we come to an even more profound significance. It becomes clear to us what Goethe means with the light which spreads its light only where light is. Where the gift of clairvoyance is developed again, the lamp develops its whole magic force. There we get to that time when the human being becomes the flame to look back to this epoch in which he was a luminous being when the ability developed to bring light into existence. Goethe knew that this internal light was there once in the human being and that the present-day seeing of light is a later developmental state.

Before the human being could see the sun, he had to become an internally luminous being first; he had to develop light in himself to show light to the light. Goethe was a mystic; one does not know it only. At the head of his preface to the theory of colours he pronounces it using the words of an old mystic:

Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

We have seen that necessity must be thought of in connection with the past, that the world contains as much necessity as it does past. For, as we tried to recognize, the past is reflected in the present. And there was another element involved: we hope to be so strengthened by our striving for clarity about just such concepts as we have been considering that we will be fit to take up the study of the truths of spiritual science. It is disastrous in many respects to have a great longing for what we might term deep spiritual-scientific truths if we shy away from strengthening our minds and thinking by taking in and thoroughly mastering concepts of a demanding nature. They are what disciplines our souls and spirits. And if we take pains to remain inwardly true in the process, no danger can ever threaten us from genuine spiritual-scientific concepts.

I have already mentioned, however, how often many people's longing for spiritual-scientific truths is found to outweigh their longing to work their way through to substantial concepts. Right at the beginning of our efforts in spiritual science there were some individuals who declared that they could not attend my lectures because they sank into a kind of sleep-state as a result of the concepts being discussed. A few especially mediumistic natures even carried things to the point of having to leave the lecture hall in Berlin. And one woman was actually found collapsed in sleep outside the hall, so powerful had been the lulling effect of the search for clear concepts!

The reproach was once made to Goethe that he created “pallid concepts” with his ideas about the metamorphosis of plants and animals and the primal phenomena of color. In his “Prophecies of Bakis,” which I have already had occasion to discuss, he inserted a passage referring to this avoidance of what people were calling “pallid concepts.”¹ As a matter of fact, this quatrain was also greatly misunderstood by those who tried to interpret these “Prophecies of Bakis.” Goethe said, “Pallid dost thou appear to me”—the concept, the idea—“and to the eye dead. How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe expressed with such accuracy the way people react who don't like to listen to clearly defined concepts, and therefore fall asleep, and who are always wanting to hear grand-sounding words about mysterious matters of the kind that give them something to dream about but never challenge them to think. They say, “Pallid dost thus appear to me, and to the eye dead”; they say it to those who want to speak occasionally on more sharply defined concepts. And they ask them, “How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe answers them, Passive would be your enjoyment if I could show you perfection.

Only the lack of it lifts you to levels beyond your own self.

In other words, the absence of those perfections that delight the eye or the senses in general proves elevating. Deadness overtakes those who do not attempt to take in and energetically work through what people often refer to as “pallid concepts.” It is therefore necessary, if we are to banish all traces of Baroque mysticism from the spiritual science we are pursuing, to devote ourselves occasionally to a concern with concepts of the utmost precision.

Thus far I have been talking about necessity. The question is now whether all the concepts that we tend, in ordinary life, to lump together with the concept of necessity really all deserve to be so linked. People say that what is necessary happens. But is this actually always the case? I would like to answer with a comparison that will clarify the matter. Let us suppose that we have a river with a gradually rising mountain chain beyond it, and we notice a stream or brook starting to run down from the heights. Let's imagine that something prevents our seeing beyond this point. We study the course of the stream or brook as it conforms to the contours of the mountain range and can state that according to what we are able to see from our vantage point it is a matter of necessity that this brook flows into this river. The mountain's formation conditions this, so that our sentence, “This brook flows into this river,” would unquestionably state a necessary fact. But now let us imagine that somebody decided to regulate the course of this brook, diverting it so that it flows in another direction. That person would have obviated the necessity, which would then not have developed. My comparison is crude, but it is a fact in life and in evolution that necessities don't always have to happen. We have to keep happenings and necessities apart. Two different concepts are involved here.

Now let us return to several previous concerns. First, let us review the insight we arrived at yesterday: that the past affects the present, appearing in reflection in it. But let us recall still another occasion on which mention of mirror images was also in order. We have often made a point of describing what takes place in human perception during ordinary waking consciousness. Human beings are really always outside their bodies and their bodily functions with that part of them that is engaged in the cognitive process; they live inside the things under study, as I've often said. And the fact that a person comes to know something is due to the reflection in his body of this experience he has inside things. So we can say that we are outside our bodies with one part of our perception, and our experience within things is reflected in our bodies.

If we now imagine ourselves looking at the color blue, we experience the blue of a flower, of chicory for example, but we do so unconsciously except for the fact of its reflection in our eyes. Our eyes are a part of our reflecting apparatus. We see the experience that we have in the chicory by allowing it to be reflected in our eyes. And we experience tone similarly. The life we live in tone is experienced unconsciously, and only becomes conscious through being reflected by our hearing organism. Our entire perceptive organism is a reflecting apparatus.

This is what I tried to establish as philosophical fact at the last Congress of Philosophers at Bologna.²

Cognition is thus engendered by reflection from our organism, by a reflecting of what we experience. And as you mull over this concept of reflection, both the reflecting of the past in the present and the reflecting of our present experience through our perceptive organism, you will have to admit that what is thus added to a thing or to an event in the form of reflections is a matter of total indifference to them, something that in neither case has anything directly to do with them. As you observe a mirror image you can quite well imagine that everything in it is as it is whether or not it is under observation. Reflections are therefore elements added to what is reproduced in them. That is especially the case with cognition; whether we develop this or that particular insight is not of the least consequence to the mirror image.

Now imagine yourselves walking through a landscape. Do you believe that the landscape would be any the less beautiful or in any way less whatever it is if you were not passing through it and experiencing it as a series of reflections engendered by your organism? No, those are elements added to the landscape and matters of total indifference to it. But is it a matter of indifference to you? No, it is not. For by walking today through a landscape that is reflected in your inner being and experiencing what is thus reflected, you will have become to some extent a different person in your soul tomorrow. What you experienced—a matter of total indifference to the landscape—signifies for you the beginning of an inner richness that can keep on growing there.

But what does all this really mean? It means, with reference again to the landscape metaphor, that we can say, “This situation was thus and such up to this point.” The fact that you walked through the landscape is a further addition to it. The landscape is reflected in you, becoming a further experience in your soul. Now how did what is continuing to grow there come into being? It did so as the result of something quite new being added to what had previously occurred. Something was really engendered in your soul out of nothingness, for contrasted with what had previously occurred, the reflection is of course a nothingness, a real, absolute nothingness. In other words, you relate to something to which there was no necessity to relate. You are an addition to it. You are added to a necessary happening as a living element that relates to it in a way not conditioned by previous events, since you could have stayed away. In that case, all that you gained from the reflection would not have become a part of the situation.

As you ponder examples of this kind, you become acquainted with the concept of chance; the real concept of it is to be found there. And you also gather from such examples that beings, things endowed with being, have to come up against each other, really to collide, for chance to occur. But we see from this that such a thing as chance can occur in the universe. If that were impossible, the enrichment of soul described above could not take place.

In this sense chance is a thoroughly legitimate concept. It is a real occurrence in cosmic events, and it shows us that new aspects of relationship can be garnered in cosmic evolution as products of reflection. If it were impossible for one participant to be linked with others without bringing about reflection in the cosmic process, then the occurrence of everything comprised in the term chance would be wholly out of the question. If the meadow through which you pass were to act as the agent of your passage, pulling you there with strings, and no reflection were to come about in you as described because of the meadow's total indifference, but the meadow were instead actively to imprint its impression on you, then the outcome could be called law-abiding necessity. But though it is hard to imagine it, there could then be no such thing as a present! There would be no present! And what would come of that? Why, beings who have no desire for such a linking up cannot progress any further if they follow such a course. They have to go back again. That is indeed the law governing devils and ghosts; they have to go out again by the door through which they entered. Goethe's Faust depicts this; they can't introduce any new evolutionary waves, and must return to the place they came from. And it is due to the possibility that new evolutionary waves can be set in motion in the developmental process of the cosmos that freedom exists.

In all our cognitive experiences, except for a certain category of them, no pure reflection takes place; the reflection is imperfect insofar as all kinds of impulses are combined with it. Concepts formed on the basis of past cognitive experience are imperfect. Once we have arrived at a pure concept, we no longer need merely to recall it; we can always create it anew. Though it becomes habitual, it is a habit that has finished with the past, and new reflections are constantly being summoned up with it. The concepts we form are pure reflections, which come to us from the beyond as additions to the things perceived. Therefore, when we form an impulse into concepts, it can be an impulse to freedom. That is what I attempted to develop at greater length in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.³ That is exactly the thought developed there.

But the concept of chance necessarily includes the concept of freedom. We must accustom ourselves to entertaining sharply defined concepts, for these are of immense significance for life. I want to cite an instance that has often been discussed here, but it is especially illuminating in the present context. Let us assume that we are studying illness. We must invariably look at illness from the standpoint of the present, never from the standpoint of the past, i.e., of necessity. This means enlivening the standpoint of the present by giving help to the full extent possible. Only if the illness terminates in death may we bring in the concept of necessity, realizing that necessity was involved. Anything other than this is the living present. We must be rigorous in adopting the standpoint that necessity inheres in the past; life rules the present. This example shows us that if we try to illumine concepts with the help of more fruitful viewpoints, we will acquire a certain knack for dealing with them.

A good deal could certainly be said on the subject of chance, and that will be done as time goes on. But for now I wanted to define the concept of chance and to clarify the extent to which it is valid. The easiest way to regard events after learning a little bit about karma is to say that everything is caused by karmic necessity. If someone has an incarnation at this point in time, then his life after death, and then his next incarnation, he calls something experienced in this second incarnation the consequence of the former life. But it is not absolutely necessary to look at things from the standpoint of the present; the consequence could be looked for further on, in the third incarnation. Something can occur then that we might be expecting to happen in the karma of the present incarnation. But an occurrence in the present incarnation may well be just the start of a karmic sequence, a reality generated by something presently living as a result of the reflection process. And the essential point here is that something is turned into a reality by a living element as a result of a reflection that is itself unreal. That is the way chance develops into necessity; when chance becomes a thing of the past, it is transformed into necessity.

On an occasion of great suffering, Goethe made a most beautiful statement, called by him “the word of a wise man.” He was speaking about the growth process of humanity, and said, “The rational world is to be looked upon as a single immortal individual engaged in a continuous bringing forth of what is necessary.” That is, bringing forth something, and when it has been brought forth, it is interwoven into the past and becomes necessity, “thus making itself the master of the element of chance.” A glorious saying to meditate upon! We can learn something from it too: Goethe wrote this sentence while experiencing great suffering, suffering that focused his entire feeling, his whole soul life, on the growth process of the human race, and caused him to ask what the actual course of this growth was. And there was wrung from his soul the realization that the rational world, the human race, brings forth what is necessary, and thus makes itself master over chance, in other words, incorporates chance forever into necessity.

I want to digress here for a moment. An insight such as I have just cited makes valuable material for meditation; it contains so much that flows into us as we meditate upon it. We shouldn't rest content with a mere abstract grasping of such a sentence, which emerged from Goethe's soul in his extreme old age, in 1828, when he was in the throes of great suffering. A great deal of life is packed into such a saying. And the digression I would like to make is this: our insights are always to be looked upon as grace bestowed upon us. And it is just those individuals who garner knowledge from the spiritual world who are aware what a matter of grace such knowledge is when they have prepared themselves to receive it, when their being reaches out to receive what flows to them from the spiritual world. One can experience over and over again how suitably prepared one must be for the reception of spiritual knowledge, how one must be able to wait for it, for one is not at just any and every moment in a condition to receive a particular insight from the spiritual world.

This fact must be stated in just such situations as ours, for it is only too easy for misconception to be piled upon misconception concerning the conditions under which supersensible insights flourish and can be fruitfully disseminated. Numbers of individuals come to me asking questions out of the blue about this or that, and often requesting information about matters that, at the time of questioning, are remote from my concern. They demand that I give them the most exact information. People are commonly convinced that a person who speaks out of a connection with the spiritual world knows about everything it contains and is always in a position to give out any information desired. And if he can't answer a question immediately, the comment is often made that the questioner is probably not supposed to be given the information, or something of the sort.

What we are dealing with here is too crude a conception of the relationship that exists between the spiritual world and the human soul. We should realize that “readiness for truth” is especially required for a direct reception of truths from the spiritual world. Misconceptions about these things must gradually be eliminated. Of course, people at some remove from the realm of truth in the life of the spirit feel a need to ask all sorts of questions, and answers can be given them from the investigator's store of memory, based on past research. But uninvestigated truths should not be requested out of the blue from spiritual researchers. Instead, it should be realized that the investigator feels requests for information about still unresearched matters to be like knife- cuts in his body, to use a physical analogy.

Definite laws govern everything that can lift human beings into the spiritual world. We need to familiarize ourselves with these laws to lessen misunderstandings about the flowing of spiritual truths into the physical world. Only by freeing ourselves from every trace of egoism—and this includes the desire for information on just any subject—will we create healthy conditions for the sort of movement this should and must be. Certain spiritual truths simply must be incorporated into the world today. But they should not encounter the kind of aspirations brought in from the world we formerly lived in or be pursued according to our erstwhile habits. The spiritual movement should not be undermined by them. In most cases, spiritual movements have been undermined by people's failure to adapt their habitual ways to spiritual truths, instead of bringing their accustomed habits to the reception of those truths. And so it could come about that a society was founded in the eighteenth century based upon what Jacob Boehme introduced into the spiritual life of Europe.⁴ It is now correctly reported that this society had a number of members, but only one—the founder of the society—survived. I certainly hope that more than one will do so in our case! But that was what happened in one attempt to establish a society. It is said, too, that a tremendous number of those who became members turned later on into really peculiar human beings. I don't want to go into all the further details reported about the adherents of that eighteenth century society at this point.

When we familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world, as we do in the process of absorbing spiritual science, we develop an ever growing sense of what it is to participate in it. And we prepare ourselves to make the right kind of understanding ascent into higher worlds by taking in, in the form of sharply defined concepts, the world we live in. Those who are unwilling to think as penetratingly about chance and necessity as we have been attempting to do here will not find it easy to rise to a conception of providence. For you see, we can learn a great deal from the spiritual beings who surround us.

The mental niveau of our time is that of mindlessness. I've tried to give you an idea of it by citing some of Fritz Mauthner's comments. I want to add one of the most curious remarks he has made so that you will see what an honest man is capable of, a man who not only says of the prevailing science of the day that it is the only science in existence and that we have overcome the ignorance of our stupid ancestors, but who honestly accepts the prevailing outlook and then goes on to draw some remarkable conclusions about a certain matter.

I once described Mauthner as “out-Kanting Kant.” He did not just write a Critique of Pure Reason, but a Critique of Language. He really got going on words. He invented a definition for the way a word moves from one category to another. I am deliberately citing an incorrect example from his Dictionary of Philosophy, but it is one that he himself held to be correct. The earlier periods of Latin civilization had a word for truth: veritas. Now Mauthner says that the word veritas was introduced into more recent German use, was simply taken over, to become the German word Wahrheit. He terms words in this category “borrowings” (literally “loan translations”). And he traces words thus borrowed through civilization after civilization with tremendous acuity and conscientiousness, tracking down their wanderings and transformations. He does an incredible amount of rummaging around in words. Nowhere does he share Faust's longing to behold “germs and productive powers”; he simply rummages around in words with utmost zeal.

He made attempts like the following: Let us imagine some people or other with its characteristic views. Mauthner cares only about the words derived from these views, for, to him, thinking consists of words. Now, he says, there are the words, but they can be traced back to another people. The second group, where we now come upon the words, borrowed them from the first group and transformed them. And he actually perpetrates the following: (I must cite the example, as it is really too nice for words to show you the way adherents of the present outlook must think to be faithful to it. It is vitally important not to pass lightly over things of this sort.) Mauthner traces various borrowings, looking for the various transformations that have come about in words. Among them the following:

Kaffee (“coffee”), borrowed from another language and still a foreign word in the sense that in German at least the way it is written and spoken is not homogeneous. “Potato” is an English loan from some Red Indian language; in the German Kartoffel there is either a borrowing or a bastardization based upon a shift in meaning; whereas in Erd-apfel (“earth-apple”) and Grum- or Bodebirn (“ground-pear”) we are dealing with cases of transliteration or of description.

The Romans adopted the Greek custom of crowning victors of a race, or on the occasion of a feast, with a wreath, and wreaths of flowers were also used elsewhere for these purposes. But it was only at the time of the Renaissance that the term “crown” was re-introduced in noun and verb form; there were poets' crowns and crowned poets, with the word “crown” signifying “wreath” as in Latin. The plant species used was native to Greece, and was imported, in historical times at least, both as a plant and as a word. The German Lorbeer (“laurel”) (the shrub, not the berry; “baccalaureus” became in turn the symbol of an academic title, the baccalauriat; in French, bachelier; its meaning twisted again to become the English “bachelor”) became the “vegetable of fame” of Speidel's jesting. And crowned poets from Petrarch to Tennyson were called “poets laureate.” The cheap laurel needed no replacement. The myrtle-wreath, which, as a result of faulty observation, or of a still more mistaken popular etymology, was regarded somewhere in the Orient as the symbol of sexual life and later became a chastity symbol, was more easily acquired in Germany as a weed than as a blossom; German brides therefore wear wreaths or crowns of the genuine leaves and false blossoms. Palms are replaced at Easter by pussy-willows as the only seasonal green plant available. And because palms, which in the Orient are the obvious plants for decorative purposes, have lent their name as a prefix to such terms as Palm Sunday and Palm Week in characterizations of the festival season, the green willow branches substituted for them have been designated “palm branches” and “palm catkins.”

As you see, Mauthner traces borrowed terms and words like these in their transmutations from one national region to another. And then he adds, “In the case of verbs too there is no end to the carry-over from Christianity to western peoples of such actual borrowings. The migration of the real facts of the Christian ritual and of Christian thinking may be studied in this book (cf. the article on Christianity).”

If we open the book to that article we come upon a remarkable sentence; “I want to state and demonstrate one thing only in regard to the development of Christianity as the creation of the Germanic and Germanic-Roman peoples, and to the way it still dominates western civilization, for the time being, in western usage, vocabulary and concerns. That is, that Christianity as a whole represents the most prodigious borrowing, or chain of borrowings, that it is possible to find in a scrutiny of history.”

What, then, is Christianity, according to Mauthner? A collection of borrowings! There were words at the time Christianity began. And if we want to find Christianity in Europe today, we'll have to make a search for borrowed words! What Mauthner is claiming is that Christianity is nothing but a collection of such borrowings. The whole civilization of Europe would have to have developed quite differently if certain words had just not happened to get borrowed! But the important thing to note here is that this finding is the logical consequence of current scientific assumptions. It is a consequence logically and honestly reached, and those who fail to draw it are simply less honest than Mauthner. Those who have adopted today's scientific outlook can only agree that all of Christianity means nothing more to them than a collection of borrowed words.

Somebody might object that Mauthner is only pointing out the fact that “coffee” entered our language as a borrowed word, but not how coffee itself was introduced into Europe. It is true that Mauthner didn't indicate that Christianity had to be introduced into Europe because it was a collection of borrowings. He made no assertion whatever on this score. This objection cannot be made without further ado; instead we have to say that those who think in the style of modern science are simply incapable of judging the matter. They are excluding themselves from any discussion of the issue; that is the point.

Small wonder, then, that a man who, in addition to all that I've had to say about him, is also really quite a clever fellow, says,

I don't go as far as James does (Psychology, p. 297) when he holds it impossible to improve memory.⁵ It would not be impossible to render the organs that serve memory capable of greater achievement by exercising them, as has been shown to be possible in the case of the muscles. It is certainly true that educational psychology, which believes that it can strengthen memory in the young by senseless exercises, is based upon the old associative psychology, which sees in memory the mental picture of a force, just as it does in the case of imagining other such mental pictures which this force learns to play with. If memory is nothing more than activity in the same sense that the soul is nothing more than its experiences, then nothing remains to be strengthened. Iron will that does not permit itself to forget useful knowledge and exerts itself to remember when remembering is required is a facet of character, and an individual's memory is in this sense unalterable, as character is. But quite aside from all such considerations, the pointless drilling that goes on in schools is every bit as senseless as the training of the wrong muscles for some special use of the limbs would be. A person who has learned nothing in his younger years except to walk on his hands can make no use of this capability later unless he intends to become a circus performer.

In Mauthner's opinion, schoolchildren receive training that teaches them a wrong use of their brains, analogous to a person's learning only to walk on his hands, an equally useless ability. But although this is clear to Mauthner, he has absolutely no suggestions as to what should take the place of this schooling. (I have explained to you how, in this respect too, furthering what we are developing in eurythmy is important).

Walking on their hands, with their heads down, is the chief training being given our young people. Bible verses (in the elementary grades), memorizing all the tributaries of some foreign river (in the middle school), tables and professional data presented in reference books (at the university level) form the memory training defended on the basis of an assumed strengthening of memory! On the occasion of my state examinations in the history of jurisprudence, I was required to list the 13 prerogatives of a cardinal in their God-ordained order, not forgetting the prerogative of a pallium woven by a particular group of nuns in a particular convent.

Schools should limit themselves to training character, to training it for the function of finding the easiest and best means of access to useful concepts of the real world.

By now we might expect this gentleman to be suggesting what the substitute for the above should be. People of any intelligence can only agree that the way mental training has been carried on ought not to continue, so they expect to hear what he suggests instead. But the article ends right there! There is nothing more! He has been chasing his pigtail in vain, to use yesterday's metaphor. Almost every article in his dictionary creates the impression that he is unsuccessfully chasing the pigtail hanging down behind him.

If we work our way through the concepts necessity and chance and learn to recognize that the human world is to be regarded as an “immortal individual” continuously bringing necessity about and thus establishing dominion over chance, and then add to this the concept that must be acquired if we are to understand how the spiritual world streams into the human soul, we gradually work our way through to a concept of something elevated above necessity and chance, and that is providence. It is a concept attained by a gradual working up to it.

I have often called your attention to the fact that merely looking at the world conveys nothing as to the effect of activities going on in it. It would be good to cultivate the right feeling for what I've just been saying by concerning ourselves in depth with the genius of language that lives behind words, instead of doing as Mauthner does in his concern with speech. Mauthner's data could even assist such an effort on occasion, for the tremendous zeal with which he has ferreted things out can sometimes bring a person contemplating the activity of the genius of language to significant insights that he might not otherwise become aware of. The genius of language does indeed guide us to a plane elevated above necessity and chance. A great deal we participate in goes on around us as we are speaking, without our having a true knowledge of it because we are incapable of lifting it fully into our consciousness. This is the spiritual world, holding sway around us. And to take just a random example, when we speak, these spiritual worlds speak too. We should make the attempt to be aware of this.

Let us try to make a small beginning with it. We have associated necessity with the past and chance with the immediate present. For if everything were necessity, it would also be of the past, and nothing new could ever come into being. That would mean that there could be no life. So if we involve ourselves and our own lives in the world's evolution, we would be confronted by necessity or the reflected past, and in our current life by what is called chance. These two interact. We have two streams: our present life, which we think of as simply chance, and the reflected past or necessity flowing along underneath it. What is considered real from the ordinary physical standpoint can only be related to the past, to necessity, if reality is taken to mean conformity with what already exists. The real has to belong to the past, to the necessary, while what is in the living process of coming into being always has to be freshly produced. Our life is lived in this, and we have to develop living concepts that flow out of necessity to deal with that life. Here, we cannot be onlookers at something corresponding to the concept; we can only live in it. When our own lives confront the stream of evolution, we can therefore preserve the past in the developing stream of life by now transforming the reflected picture into a present element. And we can make it into an ongoing present.

We can make a human virtue of transforming into ongoing life the past that has become rigid necessity, carrying reflections further, keeping them alive and evolving in ourselves. And what name do we give the virtue that carries the past into further life stages? Loyalty! Loyalty is the virtue related to the past, just as love is the virtue related to the present, to immediate living.

But speaking of these matters brings us to what I want to say about the genius of language that we need to become aware of. Wahrheit, the German word for truth, has no connection whatsoever with the Latin veritas; it suggests the past and necessity and ordinary truth, for it is related to the German bewahren (“to preserve”), to bewähren (“to hold good”), to währen, (“to last”), with all that is carried over into the present from the past. And there is a still stronger suggestion of the same meaning in the English language, which translates both the German wahr (“true”) and the German treu (“loyal”) as “true.” And if we want to describe someone telling the truth and being believed, the old German saying auf Treu und Glauben (“on trust,” “in good faith”) is still in use, with treu rather than wahr. Here we see the genius of language at work, and its work is wiser than what human beings do.

And when we ascend from the concept of loyalty to that of love, and then to what I have described in the past as grace, a state of being we have to wait for, we come to the concept of providence; we enter the world where providence holds sway.

If Fritz Mauthner were to concern himself with providence, he would of course search out the source from which it is borrowed and trace the connection of the German Vorsehung (“providence”) to sehen (“to see”) and vorhersehen (“to foresee”), and so on. But a person concerned with reality searches for the world indicated when the union of chance and necessity plays the dominant role rather than either one alone. And the world referred to is that in which there is no such thing as the past in our sense.

I have often told you that when we look into the spiritual world and see the past, it is as though the past had remained standing; it is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be simply the past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have any meaning. There is no longer a past, a present, and a future, but rather a state of duration. Lucifer remained behind during the moon evolution in exactly the same way that someone on a walk with another person may stay behind, either out of laziness or because his feet are sore, while his companion keeps on walking. Lucifer has as little directly to do with our earth existence as a person who stays behind has to do with places eventually reached by his companion. He stayed behind during the moon evolution, and there he still remains. In the spiritual world we cannot speak of past things, but only of a state of duration. Lucifer has remained as he was on the moon. All our concepts of necessity and chance change when we look into the spiritual world; providence holds sway there.

I wanted at least to particularize the realms in which what we call necessity, chance and providence are to be sought. This has been a beginning only, and we will return to these matters after spending some time on others. For we must devote ourselves occasionally to studies of a kind that more “mystically” oriented natures may consider unnecessary in a movement like ours. I must regard them as very necessary, however, because I believe that it is also essential for every genuine mystic to occupy himself with thinking.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, dramatist, and novelist. The quoted quatrain is from his poetry collection entitled The East-West Divan, published in 1819. The poems are influenced by ancient Persian and Arabian poetry.
• 2. Sixth International Congress for Philosophy, Bologna, 1911.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 4. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, German pantheist mystic. He was a shoemaker by profession and the first philosopher to write in German rather than in Latin.
• 5. William James, 1842–1910, American psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher. Published Principles of Psychology in 1890

My dear Friends,

Yesterday I was saying how in our study of Nature we have upon the one hand the purely kinematical, geometrical and arithmetical truths,—truths we are able to gain simply from our own life of thought. We form our thoughts about all that, which in the physical processes around us can be counted, or which is spatial and kinematical in form and movement. This we can spin, as it were, out of our own life of thought. We derive mathematical formulae concerning all that can be counted and computed or that is spatial in form and movement, and it is surely significant that all the truths we thus derive by thought also prove applicable to the processes of Nature. Yet on the other hand it is no less significant that we must have recourse to quite external experiences the moment we go beyond what can be counted and computed or what is purely spatial or kinematical. Indeed we need only go on to the realm of Mass, for it to be so.

In yesterday's lecture we made this clear to ourselves. While in phoronomy we can construct Nature's processes in our own inner life, we now have to leap across into the realm of outer, empirical, purely physical experience. We saw this pretty clearly in yesterday's lecture, and it emerged that modern Physics does not really understand what this leap involves. Till we take steps to understand it, it will however be quite impossible ever to gain valid ideas of what is meant or should be meant by the word “Ether” in Physics. As I said yesterday, present-day Physics (though now a little less sure in this respect) still mostly goes on speaking for example of the phenomena of light and colour rather as follows:—We ourselves are affected, say, by an impression of light or colour—we, that is, as beings of sense and nerve, or even beings of soul. This effect however is subjective. The objective process, going on outside in space and time, is a movement in the ether. Yet if you look it up in the text-books or go among the physicists to ascertain what ideas they have about this “ether” which is supposed to bring about the phenomena of light, you will find contradictory and confused ideas. Indeed, with the resources of Physics as it is today it is not really possible to gain true or clear ideas of what deserves the name of “ether”.

We will now try to set out upon the path that can really lead to a bridging of the gulf between phoronomy and even only mechanics,—inasmuch as mechanics already has to do with forces and with masses. I will write down a certain formula, putting it forward today simply as a well-known theorem. (We can go into it again another time so that those among you who may no longer recall it from your school days can then revise what is necessary for the understanding of it. Now I will simply adduce the essential elements to bring the formula before your minds.)

Let us suppose, first in the sense of pure kinematics, that a point (in such a case we always have to say, a point) is moving in a certain direction. For the moment, we are considering the movement pure and simple, not its causes. The point will be moving more or less quickly or slowly. We say it moves with a greater or lesser “velocity”. Let us call the velocity \(v\). This velocity, once more, may be greater or it may be smaller. So long as we go no farther than to observe that the point moves with such and such velocity, we are in the realm of pure kinematics. But this would not yet lead us to real outer Nature,—not even to what is mechanical in Nature. To approach Nature we must consider how the point comes to be moving. The moving object cannot be the mere thought of a point. Really to move, it must be something in outer space. In short, we must suppose a force to be acting on the point. I will call \(v\) the velocity and \(p\) the force that is acting on the point. Also we will suppose the force not only to be working instantaneously,—pressing upon the point for a single moment which of course would also cause it to move off with a certain velocity if there were no hindrance—but we will presuppose that the force is working continuously, so that the same force acts upon the point throughout its path. Let us call \(s\) the length of the path, all along which the force is acting on the point. Finally we must take account of the fact that the point must be something in space, and this “something” may be bigger or it may be smaller; accordingly, we shall say that the point has a greater or lesser mass. We express the mass, to begin with, by a weight. We can weigh the object which the force is moving and express the mass of it in terms of weight. Let us call the mass, \(m\).

Now if the force \(p\) is acting on the mass \(m\), a certain effect will of course be produced. The effect shows itself, in that the mass moves onward not with uniform speed but more and more quickly. The velocity gets bigger. This too we must take into account; we have an ever growing velocity, and there will be a certain measure of this increase of velocity. A smaller force, acting on the same mass, will also make it move quicker and quicker, but to a lesser extent; a larger force, acting on the same mass, will make it move quicker more quickly. We call the rate of increase of velocity the acceleration; let us denote the acceleration by \(g\). Now what will interest us above all is this:—(I am reminding you of a formula which you most probably know; I only call it to your mind.) Multiply the force which is acting on the given mass by the length of the path, the distance through which it moves; then the resulting product is equal to,—i.e. the same product can also be expressed by multiplying the mass by the square of the eventual velocity and dividing by 2. That is to say:

Look at the right-hand side of this formula. You see in it the mass. You see from the equation: the bigger the mass, the bigger the force must be. What interests us at the moment is however this:—On the right-hand side of the equation we have mass, i.e. the very thing we can never reach phoronomically. The point is: Are we simply to confess that whatever goes beyond the phoronomical domain must always be beyond our reach, so that we can only get to know it, as it were, by staring at it,—by mere outer observation? Or is there after all perhaps a bridge—the bridge which modern Physics cannot find—between the phoronomical and the mechanical?

Physics today cannot find the transition, and the consequences of this failure are immense. It cannot find it because it has no real human science,—no real physiology. It does not know the human being. You see, when I write \(v^2\), therein I have something altogether contained within what is calculable and what is spatial movement. To that extent, the formula is phoronomical. When I write \(m\) on the other hand, I must first ask: Is there anything in me myself to correspond also to this,—just as my idea of the spatial and calculable corresponds to the \(v\)? What corresponds then to the \(m\)? What am I doing when I write the \(m\)? The physicists are generally quite unconscious of what they do when they write m. This then is what the question amounts to: Can I get a clear intelligible notion of what the \(m\) contains, as by arithmetic, geometry and kinematics I get a clear intelligible notion of what the \(v\) contains? The answer is, you can indeed, but your first step must be to make yourself more consciously aware of this:—Press with your finger against something: you thus acquaint yourself with the simplest form of pressure. Mass, after all, reveals itself through pressure. As I said just now, you realize the mass by weighing it. Mass makes its presence known, to begin with, simply by this: by its ability to exert pressure. You make acquaintance with pressure by pressing upon something with your finger. Now we must ask ourselves: Is there something going on in us when we exert pressure with our finger,—when we, therefore, ourselves experience a pressure—analogous to what goes on in us when we get the clear intelligible notion, say, of a moving body? There is indeed, and to realize what it is, try making the pressure ever more intense. Try it,—or rather, don't! Try to exert pressure on some part of your body and then go on making it ever more intense. What will happen? If you go on long enough you will lose consciousness. You may conclude that the same phenomenon—loss of consciousness—is taking place, so to speak, on a small scale when you exert a pressure that is still bearable. Only in that case you lose, a little of the force of consciousness that you can bear it. Nevertheless, what I have indicated—the loss of consciousness which you experience with a pressure stronger than you can endure—is taking place partially and on a small scale whenever you come into any kind of contact with an effect of pressure—with an effect, therefore, which ultimately issues from some mass.

Follow the thought a little farther and you will no longer be so remote from understanding what is implied when we write down the \(m\). All that is phoronomical unites, as it were, quite neutrally with our consciousness. This is no longer so when we encounter what we have designated \(m\). Our consciousness is dimmed at once. If this only happens to a slight extent we can still bear it; if to a great extent, we can bear it no longer. What underlies it is the same in either case. Writing down \(m\), we are writing down that in Nature which, if it does unite with our consciousness, eliminates it,—that is to say, puts us partially to sleep. You see then, why it cannot be followed phoronomically. All that is phoronomical rests in our consciousness quite neutrally. The moment we go beyond this, we come into regions which are opposed to our consciousness and tend to blot it out. Thus when we write down the formula

we must admit: Our human experience contains the \(m\) no less than the \(v\), only our normal consciousness is not sufficient here,—does not enable us to seize the \(m\). The \(m\) at once exhausts, sucks out, withdraws from us the force of consciousness. Here then you have the real relationship to man. To understand what is in Nature, you must bring in the states of consciousness. Without recourse to these, you will never get beyond what is phoronomical,—you will not even reach the mechanical domain.

Nevertheless, although we cannot live with consciousness in all that, for instance, which is implied in the letter \(m\), yet with our full human being we do live in it after all. We live in it above all with our Will. And as to how we live in Nature with our Will,—I will now try to illustrate it with an example. Once more I take my start from some-thing you will probably recall from your school-days; I have no doubt you learned it.

Here is a balance (Figure IIa). I can balance the weight that is on the one side with an object of equal weight, suspended this time, at the other end of the beam. We can thus weigh the object; we ascertain its weight. We now put a vessel there, filled up to here with water, so that the object is submerged in water. Immediately, the beam of the balance goes up on that side. By immersion in water the object has become lighter,—it loses some of its weight. We can test how much lighter it has grown,—how much must be subtracted to restore the balance. We find the object has become lighter to the extent of the weight of water it displaces. If we weigh the same volume of water we get the loss of weight exactly. You know this is called the law of buoyancy and is thus formulated:—Immersed in a liquid, every body becomes as much lighter as is represented by the weight of liquid it displaces. You see therefore that when a body is in a liquid it strives upward,—in some sense it withdraws itself from the downward pressure of weight.

What we can thus observe as an objective phenomenon in Physics, is of great importance in man's own constitution. Our brain, you see, weighs on the average about 1250 grammes. If, when we bear the brain within us, it really weighed as much as this, it would press so heavily upon the arteries that are beneath it that it would not get properly supplied with blood. The heavy pressure would immediately cloud our consciousness. Truth is, the brain by no means weighs with the full 1250 grammes upon the base of the skull. The weight it weighs with is only about 20 grammes. For the brain swims in the cerebral fluid. Just as the outer object in our experiment swims in the water, so does the brain swim in the cerebral fluid; moreover the weight of this fluid which the brain displaces is about 1230 grammes. To that extent the brain is lightened, leaving only about 20 grammes. What does this signify? While, with some justice we may regard the brain as the instrument of our Intelligence and life of soul—at least, a portion of our life of soul—we must not reckon merely with the ponderable brain. This is not there alone; there is also the buoyancy, by virtue of which the brain is really tending upward, contrary to its own weight. This then is what it signifies. With our Intelligence we live not in forces that pull downward but on the contrary, in forces that pull upward. With our Intelligence, we live in a force of buoyancy.

What I have been explaining applies however only to our brain. The remaining portions of our body—from the base of the skull downward, with the exception of the spinal cord—are only to a very slight extent in this condition. Taken as a whole, their tendency is down-ward. Here then we live in the downward pull. In our brain we live in the upward buoyancy, while for the rest we live in the downward pull. Our Will, above all, lives in the downward pull. Our Will has to unite with the downward pressure. Precisely this deprives the rest of our body of consciousness and makes it all the time asleep. This indeed is the essential feature of the phenomenon of Will. As a conscious phenomenon it is blotted out, extinguished, because in fact the Will unites with the downward force of gravity or weight. Our Intelligence on the other hand becomes light and clear inasmuch as we are able to unite with the force of buoyancy,—inasmuch as our brain counteracts the force of gravity. You see then how the diverse ways in which the life of man unites with the material element that underlies it, bring about upon the one hand the submersion of the Will in matter and on the other hand the lightening of Will into Intelligence. Never could Intelligence arise if our soul's life were only bound to downward tending matter. And now please think of this:—We have to consider man, not in the abstract manner of today, but so as to bring the spiritual and the physical together. Only the spiritual must now be conceived in so strong and robust a way as to embrace also the knowledge of the physical. In the human being we then see upon the one hand the lightening into Intelligence, brought about by one kind of connection with the material life—connection namely with the buoyancy which is at work there. Whilst on the other hand, where he has to let his Will be absorbed, sucked-up as it were, by the downward pressure, we see men being put to sleep. For the Will works in the sense of this downward pressure. Only a tiny portion of it, amounting to the 20 grammes' pressure of which we spoke, manages to filter through to the Intelligence. Hence our intelligence is to some extent permeated by Will. In the main however, what is at work in the Intelligence is the very opposite of ponderable matter. We always tend to go up and out beyond our head when we are thinking.

Physical science must be co-ordinated with what lives in man himself. If we stay only in the phoronomical domain, we are amid the beloved abstractions of our time and can build no bridge from thence to the outer reality of Nature. We need a knowledge with a strongly spiritual content,—strong enough to dive down into the phenomena of Nature and to take hold of such things as physical weight and buoyancy for instance, and how they work in man. Man in his inner life, as I was shewing, comes to terms both with the downward pressure and with the upward buoyancy; he therefore lives right into the connection that is really there between the phoronomical and the material domains.

You will admit, we need some deepening of Science to take hold of these things. We cannot do it in the old way. The old way of Science is to invent wave-movements or corpuscular emissions, all in the abstract. By speculation it seeks to find its way across into the realm of matter, and naturally fails to do so. A Science that is spiritual will find the way across by really diving into the realm of matter, which is what we do when we follow the life of soul in Will and Intelligence down into such phenomena as pressure and buoyancy. Here is true Monism: only a spiritual Science can produce it. This is not the Monism of mere words, pursued today with lack of real insight. It is indeed high time, if I may say so, for Physics to get a little grit into its thinking.—so to connect outer phenomena like the one we have been demonstrating with the corresponding physiological phenomena—in this instance, the swimming of the brain. Catch the connection and you know at once: so it must be,—the principle of Archimedes cannot fail to apply to the swimming of the brain in the cerebro-spinal fluid.

Now to proceed: what happens through the facts that with our brain—but for the 20 grammes into which enters the unconscious Will—we live in the sphere of Intelligence? What happens is that inasmuch as we here make the brain our instrument, for our Intelligence we are unburdened of downward-pulling matter. The latter is well-nigh eliminated, to the extent that 1230 grammes' weight is lost. Even to this extent is heavy matter eliminated, and for our brain we are thereby enabled, to a very high degree, to bring our etheric body into play. Unembarrassed by the weight of matter, the etheric body can here do what it wants. In the rest of our body on the other hand, the ether is overwhelmed by the weight of matter. See then this memberment of man. In the part of him which serves Intelligence, you get the ether free, as it were, while for the rest of him you get it bound to the physical matter. Thus in our brain the etheric organisms in some sense overwhelms the physical, while for the rest of our body the forces and functionings of the physical organisation overwhelm those of the etheric.

I drew your attention to the relation you enter into with the outer world whenever you expose yourself to pressure. There is the “putting to sleep”, of which we spoke just now. But there are other relations too, and about one of these—leaping a little ahead—I wish to speak today. I mean the relation to the outer world which comes about when we open our eyes and are in a light-filled space. Manifestly we then come into quite another relation to the outer world than where we impinge on matter and make acquaintance with pressure. When we expose ourselves to light, insofar as the light works purely and simply as light, not only do we lose nothing of our consciousness but on the contrary. No one, willing to go into it at all, can fail to perceive that by exposing himself to the light his consciousness actually becomes more awake—awake to take part in the outer world. Our forces of consciousness in some way unite with what comes to meet us in the light; we shall discuss this in greater detail in due time. Now in and with the light the colours also come to meet us. In fact we cannot say that we see the light as such. With the help of the light we see the colours, but it would not be true to say we see the light itself,—though we shall yet have to speak of how and why it is that we see the so-called white light.

Now the fact is that all that meets us by way of colour really confronts us in two opposite and polar qualities, no less than magnetism does, to take another example—positive magnetism, negative magnetism;—there is no less of a polar quality in the realm of colour. At the one pole is all that which we describe as yellow and the kindred colours—orange and reddish. At the other pole is what we may describe as blue and kindred colours—indigo and violet and even certain lesser shades of green. Why do I emphasise that the world of colour meets us with a polar quality? Because in fact the polarity of colour is among the most significant phenomena of all Nature and should be studied accordingly. To go ahead at once to what Goethe calls the Ur-phenomenon in the sense I was explaining yesterday, this is indeed the Ur-phenomenon of colour. We shall reach it to begin with by looking for colour in and about the light as such. This is to be our first experiment, arranged as well as we are able. I will explain first what it is. The experiment will be as follows:—

Through a narrow slit—or a small circular opening, we may assume to begin with—in an otherwise opaque wall, we let in light (Figure IIb). We let the light pour in through the slit. Opposite the wall through which the light is pouring in, we put a screen. By virtue of the light that is pouring in, we see an illuminated circular surface on the screen. The experiment is best done by cutting a hole in the shutters, letting the sunlight pour in from outside. We can then put up a screen and catch the resulting picture. We cannot do it in this way; so we are using the lantern to project it. When I remove the shutter, you see a luminous circle on the wall. This, to begin with, is the picture which arises, in that a cylinder of light, passing along here, is caught on the opposite wall. We now put a “prism” into the path of this cylinder of light (Figure IIc).

The light can then no longer simply penetrate to the opposite wall and there produce a luminous circle; it is compelled to deviate from its path. How have we brought this about? The prism is made of two planes of glass, set at an angle to form a wedge. This hollow prism is then filled with water. We let the cylinder of light, produced by the projecting apparatus, pass through the water-prism. If you now look at the wall, you see that the patch of light is no longer down there, where it was before. It is displaced,—it appears elsewhere. Moreover you see a peculiar phenomenon:—at the upper edge of it you see a bluish-greenish light. You see the patch with a bluish edge therefore. Below, you see the edge is reddish-yellow.

This then is what we have to begin with,—this is the “phenomenon”. Let us first hold to the phenomenon, simply describing the fact as it confronts us. In going through the prism, the light is somehow deflected from its path. It now forms a circle away up there, but if we measured it we should find it is not an exact circle. It is drawn out a little above and below, and edged with blue above and yellowish below. If therefore we cause such a cylinder of light to pass through the prismatically formed body of water,—neglecting, as we can in this case, whatever modifications may be due to the plates of glass—phenomena of colour arise at the edges.

Now I will do the experiment again with a far narrower cylinder of light. You see a far smaller patch of light on the screen. Deflecting it again with the help of the prism, once more you see the patch of light displaced,—moved upward. This time however the circle of light is completely filled with colours, The displaced patch of light now appears violet, blue, green, yellow and red, Indeed, if we made a more thorough study of it, we should find in it all the colours of the rainbow in their proper order. We take the fact, purely and simply as we find it; and please—all those of you who learned at school the neatly finished diagrams with rays of light, normals and so on,—please to forget them now. Hold to the simple phenomenon, the pure and simple fact. We see colours arising in and about the light and we can ask ourselves, what is it due to? Look please once more; I will again insert the larger aperture. There is again the cylinder of light passing through space, impinging on the screen and there forming its picture of light (Figure IIb). Again we put the prism in the way. Again the picture of light is displaced and the phenomena of colour appear at the edges (Figure IIc).

Now please observe the following. We will remain purely within the given facts. Kindly observe. If you could look at it more exactly you would see the luminous cylinder of water where the light is going through the prism. This is a matter of simple fact: the cylinder of light goes through the prism of water and there is thus an interpenetration of the light with the water. Pay careful attention please, once more. In that the cylinder of light goes through the water, the light and the water interpenetrate, and this is evidently not without effect for the environment. On the contrary, we must aver (and once again, we add nothing to the facts in saying this):—the cylinder of light somehow has power to make its way through the water-prism to the other side, yet in the process it is deflected by the prism. Were it not for the prism, it would go straight on, but it is now thrown upward and deflected. Here then is something that deflects our cylinder of light. To denote this that is deflecting our cylinder of light by an arrow in the diagram, I shall have to put the arrow thus. So we can say, adhering once again to the facts and not indulging in speculations: By such a prism the cylinder of light is deflected upward, and we can indicate the direction in which it is deflected.

And now, to add to all this, think of the following, which once again is a simple statement of fact. If you let light go through a dim and milky glass or through any cloudy fluid—through dim, cloudy, turbid matter in effect,—the light is weakened, naturally. When you see the light through clear unclouded water, you see it in full brightness; if the water is cloudy, you see it weakened. By dim and cloudy media the light is weakened; you will see this in countless instances. We have to state this, to begin with, simply as a fact. Now in some respect, however little, every material medium is dim. So is this prism here. It always dims the light to some extent. That is to say, with respect to the light that is there within the prism, we are dealing with a light that is somehow dimmed. Here to begin with (pointing to Figure IIc) we have the light as it shines forth; here on the other hand we have the light that has made its way through the material medium. In here however, inside the prism, we have a working-together of matter and light; a dimming of the light arises here. That the dimming of the light has a real effect, you can tell from the simple fact that when you look into light through a dim or cloudy medium you see something more. The dimming has an effect,—this is perceptible. What is it that comes about by the dimming of the light? We have to do not only with the cone of light that is here bent and deflected, but also with this new factor—the dimming of the light, brought about by matter. We can imagine therefore into this space beyond the prism not only the light is shining, but there shines in, there rays into the light the quality of dimness that is in the prism. How then does it ray in? Naturally it spreads out and extends after the light has gone through the prism. What has been dimmed and darkened, rays into what is light and bright. You need only think of it properly and you will admit: the dimness too is shining up into this region. If what is light is deflected upward, then what is dim is deflected upward too. That is to say, the dimming is deflected upward in the same direction as the light is. The light that is deflected upward has a dimming effect, so to speak, sent after it. Up there, the light cannot spread out unimpaired, but into it the darkening, the dimming effect is sent after. Here then we are dealing with the interaction of two things: the brightly shining light, itself deflected, and then the sending into it of the darkening effect that is poured into this shining light. Only the dimming and darkening effect is here deflected in the same direction as the light is. And now you see the outcome. Here in this upward region the bright light is infused and irradiated with dimness, and by this means the dark or bluish colours are produced.

How is it then when you look further down? The dimming and darkening shines downward too, naturally. But you see how it is. Whilst here there is a part of the outraying light where the dimming effect takes the same direction as the light that surges through—so to speak—with its prime force and momentum, here on the other hand the dimming effect that has arisen spreads and shines further, so that there is a space for which the cylinder of light as a whole is still diverted upward, yet at the same time, into the body of light which is thus diverted upward, the dimming and darkening effect rays in. Here is a region where, through the upper parts of the prism, the dimming and darkening goes downward. Here therefore we have a region where the darkening is deflected in the opposite sense,—opposite to the deflection of the light. Up there, the dimming or darkening tends to go into the light; down here, the working of the light is such that the deflection of it works in an opposite direction to the deflection of the dimming, darkening effect. This, then, is the result:—Above, the dimming effect is deflected in the same sense as the light; thus in a way they work together. The dimming and darkening gets into the light like a parasite and mingles with it. Down here on the contrary, the dimming rays back into the light but is overwhelmed and as it were suppressed by the latter. Here therefore, even in the battle between bright and dim—between the lightening and darkening—the light predominates. The consequences of this battle—the consequences of the mutual opposition of the light and dark, and of the dark being irradiated by the light, are in this downward region the red or yellow colours. So therefore we may say: Upward, the darkening runs into the light and there arise the blue shades of colour; downward, the light outdoes and overwhelms the darkness and there arise the yellow shades of colour.

You see, dear Friends: simply through the fact that the prism on the one hand deflects the full bright cone of light and on the other hand also deflects the dimming of it, we have the two kinds of entry of the dimming or darkening into the light,—the two kinds of interplay between them. We have an interplay of dark and light, not getting mixed to give a grey but remaining mutually independent in their activity. Only at the one pole they remain active in such a way that the darkness comes to expression as darkness even within the light, whilst at the other pole the darkening stems itself against the light, it remains there and independent, it is true, but the light overwhelms and outdoes it. So there arise the lighter shades,—all that is yellowish in colour. Thus by adhering to the plain facts and simply taking what is given, purely from what you see you have the possibility of understanding why yellowish colours on the one hand and bluish colours on the other make their appearance. At the same time you see that the material prism plays an essential part in the arising of the colours. For it is through the prism that it happens, namely that on the one hand the dimming is deflected in the same direction as the cone of light, while on the other hand, because the prism lets its darkness ray there too, this that rays on and the light that is deflected cut across each other. For that is how the deflection works down here. Downward, the darkness and the light are interacting in a different way than upward.

Colours therefore arise where dark and light work together. This is what I desired to make clear to you today. Now if you want to consider for yourselves, how you will best understand it, you need only think for instance of how differently your own etheric body is inserted into your muscles and into your eyes. Into a muscle it is so inserted as to blend with the functions of the muscle; not so into the eye. The eye being very isolated, here the etheric body is not inserted into the physical apparatus in the same way, but remains comparatively independent. Consequently, the astral body can come into very intimate union with the portion of the etheric body that is in the eye. Inside the eye our astral body is more independent, and independent in a different way than in the rest of our physical organization. Let this be the part of the physical organization in a muscle, and this the physical organization of the eye. To describe it we must say: our astral body is inserted into both, but in a very different way. Into the muscle it is so inserted that it goes through the same space as the physical bodily part and is by no means independent. In the eye too it is inserted: here however it works independently. The space is filled by both, in both cases, but in the one case the ingredients work independently while in the other they do not. It is but half the truth to say that our astral body is there in our physical body. We must ask how it is in it, for it is in it differently in the eye and in the muscle. In the eye it is relatively independent, and yet it is in it,—no less than in the muscle. You see from this: ingredients can interpenetrate each other and still be independent. So too, you can unite light and dark to get grey; then they are interpenetrating like astral body and muscle. Or on the other hand light and dark can so interpenetrate as to retain their several independence; then they are interpenetrating as do the astral body and the physical organization in the eye. In the one instance, grey arises; in the other, colour. When they interpenetrate like the astral body and the muscle, grey arises; whilst when they interpenetrate like the astral body and the eye, colour arises, since they remain relatively independent in spite of being there in the same space.

When I tried in the last lecture to explain the influence exercised on man by the part of the Earth on which he as physical man develops, I had chiefly in mind to point out very distinctly that the whole Earth is an organism, an ensouled organism, permeated by spirit. For, as an organism has its separate, distinct differentiated members, each of which has a special task,—the arms have not the task of the legs, nor the heart that of the brain, and so on, if we consider the Earth as one whole, as an ensouled organism permeated by spirit, each part of the Earth has its own special task. The special task of the separate human organic members is perceptible in the form of these separate members. The arms are formed differently from the legs, the heart from the brain. This difference is not so marked as regards the Earth with respect to the physical. To an external materialistic geographer, who observes the separate continents or any other parts of the Earth arranged according to this or that point of view, it does not occur straight away that these different parts of the Earth have different sorts of activity; that only occurs to one who can, to a certain extent, grasp the nature of the psychic and spiritual element of the Earth. To understand this, really signifies rising concretely to the perception that the Earth is an ensouled, spiritual organism, and that man, living on Earth as physical man, is a member of this organism. All kinds of questions arise if one takes this into account, and he looks at the life of man as if it only ran its course once between birth and death, will not come to any very reasonable conclusions about them. For man, as physical man, can indeed only become a member of a particular part of the Earth. He would therefore be condemned to be quite specialized and differentiated by this particular part of the Earth, and would in a sense not be able to be in any way a complete whole, but only a part of the Earth's organism. On the other hand an important discovery results from this insight into the ensouled spiritualized part of the Earth; the discovery that the real deeper being of man, to which he says “I,” can in the real sense, only be connected indirectly with this differentiation of man over the Earth, that's the psycho-spiritual kernel of man's being in a sense only dwells in what is in us specialized through the peculiarity of the Earth. Thus man can obtain, from this very circumstance, the knowledge that his spiritual-psychic kernel cannot subsist in what immediately confronts us in man; that with which, in a sense, man confronts us, can only be the “dwelling place,” the dwelling place of man determined by virtue of the special circumstances of the Earth. I do not mention this because it might appear to those already acquainted with spiritual science as a very weighty truth; of course it cannot be that. But it is to show that a real searching into and pondering over the relationships of the Earth can lead man to build himself up in spiritual science, by this means, in a purely logical manner. For the belief that Spiritual Science can only be comprehensible to one who sees into the spiritual world, must be swept away as one of the most fatal prejudices. This is a prejudice which has over and over again to be taken into account. I might say, for the satisfaction of all the comfort-loving ones who, because they like to believe that they could never acquire clairvoyant cognition, would like to represent Spiritual Science chiefly as a kind of provisional arrangement, or as something which does not concern mankind at all, that in truth, comprehensive, penetrating thought can really understand the spiritually scientific. Only the thought must be really accurate and comprehensive! It must be prepared to relate the phenomena of life to what Spiritual Science confirms. He who brings what is within his grasp in the way of knowledge of the characteristic traits of the different nations of the Earth, and of the different inhabitants of the Earth, to bear upon what Spiritual Science says, will soon acknowledge that what was here explained in the last lecture is verified. We must really relate what life offers to this knowledge; we must be ready to test, free from prejudice, the teachings of Spiritual Science by the experience of life; then a reasonable penetration of the matter will lead to the acknowledgment of Spiritual Science.

It is very important to emphasize this at the present day. For we may say that traditions, containing many of the truths of Spiritual Science, are far more numerous than is usually believed. There is a certain opinion, however, which was fully justified up to the approach of the recent historical age—but which has also been propagated in our own times by many who possess Spiritual Scientific knowledge—the opinion that one should not communicate publicly certain deeper knowledge about life. I have often explained the reasons which people who know something of these things have, for thus withholding these communications, and I have also pointed out why these reasons no longer hold good at the present day. In a certain respect however these facts present a difficulty. For not only have we the opposition to Spiritual Science of by far the greatest part of mankind to contend with, but we also have to contend with the opinion of those who do know something;—the opinion that one who gives publicity to things which come from the fountain of Spiritual Science as one gives publicity to other truths, is wrong. Those who believe that the veil of secrecy over certain things must not be raised, will be healed of this error when they recognize the importance of what has been said, certainly in a somewhat scientific form, but clearly enough, it seems to me, in the foreword and introduction to my book “Riddles of Man.”

It is necessary to comprehend that the conception of truth and righteousness which most men still have today, will indeed have to be overcome. Most men have the idea: One thing is right—and another is wrong. But I must emphasize the fact over and over again, and have also done so more particularly in the preface to “Riddles of Man,” the man's separate view of things from one particular side is like a photograph of an object from one side only. If one photographs a tree, first from the one side and then another, the second picture is still a picture of the same tree, only it looks different. Now today, when men have become so very abstract, when they have become so accustomed to the theoretical, in spite of believing themselves to be men of reality, one view of a thing is reckoned as all-comprehensive, as comprising the whole reality. People believe that it is possible to express reality in thoughts—or in something else. They are particularly arrogant in this belief of being able to express the reality by means of thought. I mean the “arrogant” somewhat in the following sense. People say, “We today have the Copernican world-conception ... but with regard to the men who lived before Copernicus (this is not expressed so abruptly, but still they think it) they were all children (indeed we might say ‘duffers’), for they did not yet have the Copernican world-conception. That alone is correct, all the other world-conceptions are false.” This is an attitude which must be overcome. Even the Copernican world-conception is just one view, it is one definite way of making pictures, thoughts and ideas of things. Certainly there are men to-day, who oppose Spiritual Science as soon as they observe that it gives one a view, a real and regular view of a thing, by placing something else in opposition to it. No one will contest this who knows that there are different points of view about a thing. Today, however, many people wish for something else, something quite special, which may be compared somewhat to the person in the room saying: “When we have lighted up the room from one point and look at it from there, this gives only the view in perspective; it is not the reality; let us turn out the light and make the room quite dark and touch everything separately, then all who have thus touched the things will have the same opinion.” We all know that when we look at the room in the light, one who stands there has this view, and another who stands somewhere else has that view and so on. So today certain ideal of natural science would be to turn out the light and only ‘touch’ everything. Spiritual Science must certainly “turn the light” on to that. Thus the different points of view implies something surveyed from different places.

Now more especially by us should the effort be made to go about trying to form opinions from different points of view. This has already been striven after for many years. Many might object that the one contradicts the other, but that is precisely the essential thing, that in the above-mentioned sense one view should contradict another; for thereby we get an all-round view of a thing, which is what we want. But this is not at all easy, or people would prefer to have a little book, as slender as possible, in which a whole world-philosophy is tabulated. Or, if they wish to have world-philosophies discussed, they would like to have the same thing reeled off, over and over again. Of course this cannot be. Our printed cycles are increasing, are becoming more and more numerous, so that things may be illuminated from different sides, that we may obtain concepts and views from various sides, which only then give a complete picture of reality. We must certainly offend people in a certain respect (and what has just been said will make this comprehensible to you) if we have to repudiate more and more the accepted prejudices, by the truths of Spiritual Science. But chiefly when we thus ‘sin’ against the demand of certain occultists not to communicate important things publicly, we must speak about things which shock people, perhaps even anger and excite them; for these things, like many others, give offense for instance to all those who say that things can only be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect.’ Rather must we acquire the view that in the successive stages of the evolution of mankind there can never be a condition in which one can really say: “Now we have the absolute truth in regard to any particular matter for thought,” or: “We now know, what is absolute untruth.” There cannot be absolute truth or absolute truth. Searching great conceptions of life do not originate in order at last to give men what is ‘correct,’ so that they may now look arrogantly upon their forefathers as upon children; they spring up from very different reasons.

Let us call to mind something we all know. In the 15th century of our era, mankind entered the fifth cultural epoch of the Post-Atlantean development, which we call that of the “development of the human Consciousness or Spiritual Soul.” What especially appeared in the fifth cultural epoch began with the 15th century A.D. Till then it was the Intellectual or Rational Soul which, in the course of the cultural development of mankind was specially developed. In order then that the Spiritual Soul might arise, certain thoughts, certain kinds of concepts, took on a quite distinct character. Not because the Copernican world-philosophy is the absolutely correct one—I have affirmed often enough that it had to appear; and that in a certain respect it is the right one for us in accordance with the times. I shall declare again and again—not because it is the absolutely correct one did it appear, but because it serves the evolution of man, in that he can best attain the development of the Spiritual Soul if he allows the Copernican world-philosophy to enter his flesh and blood, if he reaches the point of being able to calculate certain constellations of stars through the Copernican world-philosophy, as has been done in more recent times.

What is then really good in the Copernican world-philosophy? Not that at last it has told us the truth in contradistinction to the ‘untruth’ of former centuries, but that it erected a spiritual wall between Earth and Heaven, between the physical world and the spiritual world. Of course this appears frightfully paradoxical, something which excites opposition as a matter of course among those who have the above-mentioned prejudices. But it is true that man has begun to conceive the circumference, a cosmic circumference of the Earth in the Copernican manner, in that by transferring the Copernican conceptions into the circumference of the Earth, he has constructed this spiritual wall which he cannot get through. He is cut off from the spiritual thereby, and can remain with his concepts limited to the environs of the Earth, and there he develops the Spiritual Soul. Thus, in order that man should limit himself as ‘egotistically’ as possible to what is earthly, the Copernican world-philosophy, which erects its virtual wall around the Earth, fell to his lot. The more completely the Copernican world-philosophy is developed, the more certain is it that, through external perception, man is cut off from the spiritual world; but it also becomes the more necessary that he should again through inner perception, and by animating his inner life, find the connection with the spiritual. Remarkable things, very remarkable things run parallel. When such things are uttered, it is rather difficult to follow them, but if in the whole wide world there are none but the anthroposophists to understand them, they must take all the more trouble to do so.

There exists today a something like a “Theory of Knowledge;” that particular philosophical science which is based on Kant is called “Theory of Knowledge.” Yet this theory of knowledge is really—one might say—a nail in the coffin of human knowledge. Take a main thought about the ordinary theory of knowledge which as a rule runs in the minds of people today. It is said: Over there is an object: but what is out there is really only the vibration of ether, it has nothing to do with color or sound but is the movement of the smallest particles in space. The air moves out there, soundless; these concussions of the air approach our ear,—Schopenhauer spoke somewhat disrespectfully of the theory of knowledge, he said that these concussions ‘drum’ on the ear—and afterwards become what we call ‘sound.’ All is silent without, there are merely ‘concussions’ in the air. Then there are waves of ether outside. They strike upon the eye. But the matter does not end there; the waves strike upon the eye and the image is produced on the retina. Man knows nothing of this image, however, until it is investigated by science. The processes continue further with the optic nerve. These can only be of a material nature however; they go as far as the membrane covering the brain and there a quite mysterious process takes place. Then the soul comes in to make a concept of what is outside, of what is ‘dark and silent,’ a shining and colored concept, a warm and cold concept and so on; it creates the objects there within itself, and ‘dreams’ the whole world.

It is very remarkable that that is the road along which the Theory of Knowledge would penetrate from the external material world to the human spirit. But what is really the substance of this Theory of Knowledge? It is strange: if one remains at the things which have sound and color (the Theory of Knowledge calls what uneducated people believe ‘simple realism’), then at least one has a resounding and a colored world. But now, through the Theory of Knowledge, one brings this world for example before one's eyes. One has the image on the retina; within one has only the continuation of the image in the workings on the optic nerve; in the cerebrum there is nothing of the outer world, but the inner being charms forth the whole world again from the ‘vibrations.’ This makes one feel it is Baron Münchhausen again drawing himself up by his own tuft of hair! First, everything is eliminated and one has nothing left but brain-vibrations; and afterwards the soul recreates the outer world which has first been put away; then like Münchhausen, one lays hold of oneself by one's own tuft of hair and draws oneself up. But this is ‘basic philosophical knowledge,’ anyone who has not this, does not stand at the height of present-day knowledge.

If we try to follow up the whole diversified world as far as man himself, what have we finally? The processes in the membrane covering the cerebrum are not nearly as complicated as those in the optic nerve; they are the simplest of all. If we investigate how the world is in man we come to something extremely simple. We look for the spirit, but yet only come to a spirit which ‘dreams’ the world. There we must make a leap for so far no one has succeeded in distilling the spirit. In the quest of the spirit we come first to the brain vibrations, and we must then make something, which is nothing. This is the method science has followed in order to get to the spirit from the external sense-world.

On the earth we have many different conditions of life, and of life-influences, before the manifold variety of which we stand in respect and awe. Then we observe the difference in human beings in the different parts of the world—no matter whether the individual human characters are sympathetic or unsympathetic to us—if we consider the differentiations in mankind, we find that it is really as diversified as the sense-world outside is in its relation to man. In that bygone period in which the so-called childish ‘duffers’ lived, men try to understand the multiplicity of the Earth by rising to Heaven, by rising from the sensible to the spiritual. This they no longer do today. As we ascend farther and farther away from the diversified Earth, we have the same feeling as if we were coming from the external sense-world to the human Spirit through the eye and the brain; we come to what Copernicanism represents to us as the great Spiritual Cosmos. Just as the physiological theory of knowledge adopted the method of erecting a barrier in the vibrations of the brain in order to avoid coming to the human soul by way of the outer world, so in the same way does Copernicanism board up the world spiritually in the direction of the spiritual world. If we wish to realize the value of a world-conception we must know the point of view from which it is conceived. The point of view of Copernicanism does not pretend to place the true in the place of the false, once and for all; but it ‘boards up the world with planks’ so that man shall cultivate his consciousness soul within this ‘earthly tenement.’ This is the secret of the matter. We must look at these things in cold blood and with energy. We must first be able to shatter in our own selves that on which the easy-going people, who accept the world-philosophies of today, believe themselves to stand so firmly. As long as we are not able to shatter this in ourselves, as long as we are not able to see that really through Copernicanism the world is ‘boarded up with planks’—so long shall we not reach the point of acquiring a relationship to Spiritual Science, for which many things are necessary.

Just imagine for a moment what the Cosmos consists of, apart from the Earth. According to the Copernican world-conception, it is a calculation! It can never be that to Spiritual Science but something that presents itself to spiritual cognition. Why have we a geology which believes that the Earth has only evolved from the purely mineral world? Because the Copernican world-conception has to produce the present-day materialistic geology. For it has nothing in itself which could prove that the Earth, from the point of view of the Cosmos or spiritual world, might be conceived as an ensouled, spiritualized being. A universe as conceived by Copernicus could only be a dead Earth! An animated ensouled and spiritualized Earth must be conceived as coming from a different Cosmos, really from quite another Cosmos from that of Copernicus. But of course one can only mention a few features of the Earth's being, as it appears when viewed from the Cosmos

Is it a quite unreal conception to imagine the Earth's being as coming from the Cosmos? It is no unreal conception, it is a very ‘real’ one. A conception which, for example, once existed in the imagination of Herman Grimm, but he excused himself immediately after having written it. In an essay written in 1858 he says: “One might imagine—(but he immediately adds: I am not presenting an article of faith, this is only a fancy picture)—that when the soul of man is freed from the body it moves around the Earth freely in the Cosmos and that in this free movement it would observe the Earth from the outside; what happens on the Earth would then appear to man in quite another light.” That was the fancy of Hermann Grimm.‘Man would become acquainted with all occurrences from a different point of view. For instance he would look into the human heart “as into a glass beehive.’ The thoughts arising in the human heart would spring up as from a glass bee-hive!” That is a fine picture. And he pictured further that this man who had hovered around the Earth for a time, and had looked at it from the outside, now reincarnated on the Earth. He would have a Father and Mother, a Fatherland and everything usual on the Earth, and would have to forget everything he had experienced from another point of view. And if he were perhaps an historian in the sense of today (Hermann Grimm is here describing from a subjective point of view) he could not then do otherwise then forget what went before, for one cannot write history with the other concepts.

This is a fancy which comes very close to the truth. For it is absolutely true that the human soul between death and rebirth is, as it were, floating around the Earth, and—as I have often depicted—conditioned by karmic relations, it looks down upon the Earth. The soul that has altogether the feeling that this Earth is an ensouled and spiritualized organism—and the prejudice that considers it as something without soul, something purely geological, ceases. And then the Earth becomes very greatly differentiated; to man's perception between death and rebirth it becomes so differentiated that in fact the East looks different from the American West. It is not possible to speak about the Earth to the dead, as one would to geologists; for the dead do not understand the geological conceptions. But they know that looking down from cosmic space at the East—from Asia across into Russia—the Earth appears as if covered with a bluey sheen; blue or bluish-mauve. Thus does that side of the Earth appear, seen from cosmic space. When we come towards the Western Hemisphere, to the American side, it then appears as more or less a fiery red. There we have a polarity of the Earth, as seen from the Cosmos. Of course the Copernican world-conception cannot of itself give this; but it is another perception, from a different point of view. It will be comprehensible to anyone who has this point of view, that this Earth, this ensouled Earth-organism, appears different in its Eeastern half from its Western half, when viewed from outside. In its Eastern half it has a blue covering, in its Western it has something like a flashing-forth from within outwards; hence the fiery red seen externally. Here you have one example by which man between death and rebirth can direct himself by what he then learns. He learns to know the configuration of the Earth, it's a different appearance when seen from the Cosmos and the spiritual world; he learns to realize that on one side it is bluish-violet, on the other fiery red. And in accordance always with the spiritual needs which he will develop from his karma, this knowledge decides for him where he will reincarnate. Of course one must imagine things as being much more complicated than this; but from such conditions does man between death and rebirth, develop the forces which occasion him to reincarnate in a child body having a certain inheritance.

I have only mentioned two modifications of color, but there are of course other modifications besides those of color, many others. For the present I will only mention that in the center between the East and the West, for example, in our regions, the Earth is more of a green shade when seen from outside. So that this gives us a three-foldness which can throw a deal of light on the way in which man can determine, by what he beholds between death and rebirth, whether he is to appear in the East or West or elsewhere on the Earth.

If we bear this in mind we shall gradually gain the idea that in the relations between the man incarnated here in the physical body and the discarnate man, certain things come into play which, for the most part, are not taken into consideration at all. If we go into a foreign land and wish to understand the people, we must learn their language. If we wish to understand the dead you must gradually acquire the language of the dead. But this is at the same time the language of Spiritual Science, for it is spoken by all the so-called living and all of the so-called dead. It is this which passes to and fro between us and the beyond. It is particularly important to acquire pictures such as these of the universe, and not mere abstract concepts. We get a picture of the Earth if we imagine a sphere hovering in space, on the one side glowing bluish-mauve, on the other burning a flashing reddish-yellow, and between these a green zone. Pictorial representations gradually carry man over into the spiritual world. That is the point. One is of course obliged to set up pictorial representations when speaking seriously of the spiritual world, and it is further necessary not merely to think of such pictorial representations as a sort of fiction, but to make something out of them. Let us once again recall the bluish-violet glimmering Orient and the reddish-yellow flashing Occident. Here various differentiations come in. When a dead person in our present era observe certain places, then from the place which here on Earth is known as Palestine, as Jerusalem, something with a golden form, a golden crystal form, is to be seen in the middle of the bluish-mauve color and this becomes animated. That is the Jerusalem as seen from the spirit! This it is which also in the Apocalypse (speaking of imaginative conceptions) figures as the heavenly Jerusalem. These are not ‘thought-out’ things, they are things which can be observed, seen spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha appeared like what physical observation precedes when the astronomer directs his telescope to space and beholds something which fills him with wonder like, for example the flashing-up of new stars. Seen spiritually, from the Universe, the Event of Golgotha was the flashing-up of a star of gold in the blue aura of the Eastern half of the Earth. Here you have the Imagination for what I developed at the close of my lecture the day before yesterday. It is really a question of acquiring, by means of such Imaginations, ideas of the Universe which bring the human soul into union with the Spirit of the Universe.

Try to think with someone who has passed over, of the crystal form of the heavenly Jerusalem building itself up into golden splendor in the bluish-violet aura of the Earth, and that will bring you near to him; for that is something which belongs to the realm of the Imaginations into which she entered at death: “Out of God we are born, and in Christ we die.”

There are means by which we can shut ourselves off from the spiritual reality and there are means by which we can draw near to it. We can shut ourselves off from spiritual reality by trying to ‘calculate’ it. Certainly mathematics do belong to the realm of the spirit, pure spirit; but in their application to physical reality they are the means of cutting us off from the spiritual. In so far as you calculate, just so far do you cut yourself off from the spirit. Kant once said: “There is just the same amount of science in the world as there is mathematics.” But one might also say, from the other point of view, which is equally justifiable, that there is darkness in the world to the same degree as man has succeeded in judging the world by means of calculation. We approached the spiritual life when we press on from external perception, and particularly from abstract concepts, towards Imaginations, to pictorial ideas. Copernicus has led man to calculate the universe; the opposite perception must lead men once more again to picture the universe, to imagine a universe with which the human soul can identify itself, so that the Earth appears as an organism shining into the universe, blue-violet, with the heavenly Jerusalem radiating golden light on the one side, and the yellowish-red flashing on the other side.

Whence comes the blue-violet on the one side of the Earth-aura? When one sees this side of the Earth-sphere, the physical part of the Earth disappears from external view, the aura of light becomes transparent, and the dark part of the Earth disappears. This creates the blue which penetrates through. You can explain the phenomenon from Goethe's theory of color. But because in the Western Hemisphere the inner part of the Earth flashes up—flashes up anyway which verifies what I described the day before yesterday: namely, that in America man is determined by the subterranean element, by what is under the Earth—for that reason the inner part of the Earth rays out and flashes like a red-yellow shimmer, like a reddish-yellow sparkling fire radiating into the Cosmos. This is only meant to be a picture sketched in quite fine outlines, but it should show you that it is indeed possible to speak, not merely in ordinary abstract thoughts, but in very, very concrete concepts about the world in which we live between death and rebirth. Finally, all this is adapted to prepare our souls to obtain a connection with the spiritual world, with the higher Hierarchies; with that world in which man lives between death and rebirth. But I intend to speak specially about this tomorrow; today I should only like to mention just one other thing.

The present era of human evolution, the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, which exists for the development of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul, contains manifold secrets. One of these is especially well guarded by those who believe that such truths should not yet be communicated to the humanity of to-day. This again is somewhat difficult. But since in the whole wide world there is no one else inclined to receive such things, you must really condescend to recognize them. In the course of this culture epoch, which began in the 15th century of our era, a remarkable longing began to make itself felt in men, along which lives chiefly in the subconsciousness, but must ever more and more be brought up into consciousness. This longing proceeds from a very definite cause.

I have often said that man is a twofold being. He is a being composed of many more than two parts; but particularly he is a twofold being, and consists as such as head and the rest of the body. The head is in particular that to which we should apply the Darwinian theory, the head is that which can be traced back to animal forms. During the Old Moon period man had animal forms, not those of the present animal kingdom, but a more spiritual, etherical animal form. This has hardened into the human head, and now, when animals on the Earth are developing as they are, man is not developing under the same conditions as were suitable for the head, for that he has inherited; but, according to the requirements of the rest of his body. This however does not descend from the animals. The head descends from the animals, but only from the etheric animals. We therefore carry an animal nature in our head, but it is an etheric animality. That entered men's unconscious nature in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. They noticed more and more that there is something of the animal in man, but they could no longer think of it as anything spiritual. They got it into their heads that man must have ‘animal’ feelings, and this culminated in the Darwinian theory of the descent of man from the animal. This was not only expressed in the Darwinian doctrine of descent. The animal has a different perception from man; it stands in a more intimate connection with things than does man. Man is the superior being of the Earth just because he has cut himself off from the things so as to be obliged to build a bridge again from himself to them. The animal experiences the outer world much more inwardly than does man; if it were philosophically inclined it would not speak of ‘boundaries of knowledge,’ because there are no boundaries to knowledge for the animal such as those of which man speaks; these only exist because of the higher organization of man. The animal feels in a sense the whole universe within it through its group-soul; it has no boundaries of knowledge, knows nothing of them. Man began to feel more and more that he carries an animal within him. He did not wish to conceive this relation spiritually, supersensibly, etherically; he thought man was related to the animals physically. He then wanted to have a knowledge subconsciously, such as the animal has. He was however obliged to prove that he could not have that. The animal lives with the ‘thing in itself.’ The ‘thing in itself’ is unknown to man, when he says: “I should really like to be an animal, I should like to be as well off as the animal, but I cannot be as well off.” To affirm a ‘thing in itself’ which limits our knowledge, proceeds from the longing of man to feel himself animal, while he yet knows that he cannot have such a knowledge as the animal. This is the secret of Kantism. What can be said of the boundaries of knowledge is intimately connected with the impulse of modern humanity towards the consciousness of the animal. The Ancients knew that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge; for that reason they considered it good fortune to understand, for example, the language of the animals. You all know the fable connected with this.

That is one thing which the Ancients knew: that the animal has no boundaries of knowledge, in the sense in which man has them in modern times. But they knew something else as well: they knew that the beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angels are free beings, beings with freedom of will. And they knew that man is on the way to become an Angel. When the Earth shall have completed the Jupiter-stage man will have reached the stage of the Angel. He is now on the way to freedom. Freedom is developing within him. But what is left for the epoch which is gradually appearing with the evolution of the Spiritual Soul, if mankind turns away from his evolution to the stage of the Angels? There remains only the thought: freedom is an illusion! Man, in respect to his activity, is subject to the necessities of nature. To the degree in which boundaries of knowledge are erected does man turn away from his development to freedom. This is intimately connected with what has appeared—only in a coarser way—in the declaration of the descent of man from the animals; whereas in reality man has a very complicated descent, as I have often explained.

Today I have burdened you with some of the more difficult concepts. But they were necessary, and tomorrow we shall be able to speak principally on the connection between the present earthly life in the physical body and the life between death and rebirth, from a certain point of view. The concepts will then not be so difficult; but what you were so good as to listen to today in respect to more difficult concepts will help you tomorrow in regard to others.

If we wish to develop an understanding of spiritual investigation we must first of all have a clear idea about the different states of consciousness which it is possible for the human soul to experience. In his normal life on Earth today man enjoys a well-defined state of consciousness which is characterized by the fact that he experiences a clear distinction between waking and sleeping, which, though not coincident in time, correspond approximately with the imaginary passage of the Sun round the Earth, that is to say, with the duration of a single revolution of the Earth on its axis. At the present time, however, this correspondence has been interrupted to some extent. If we look back into the not very distant past with its ordered system of life we find that men worked approximately from sunrise to sunset and slept from sunset to sunrise.

This ordered existence has partly broken down today. In fact, I have known men who have reversed their habits of life; they slept by day and were awake by night. I have often enquired into the reason for this. The people concerned who, for the most part, were poets and authors told me that it couldn't be helped; that sort of thing was inseparable from literary composition. Yet when I came across them at night I never found them writing poetry!

Now I wish to emphasize that for the consciousness of today it is most important that we are awake during the daytime or for a corresponding period and that we sleep for a period equivalent to the hours of darkness. Many things are bound up with this form of consciousness, amongst them that we attach special value to sense-perceptions; they become for us the prime reality. Yet when we turn from sense-perceptions to thoughts we regard them as a pale reflection without the reality of sense-perceptions.

Nowadays we regard a chair as a reality. You can set it down on the floor; you can hear the noise it makes. You know that you can sit on it. But the thought of the chair is not regarded as real. If you bash a thought on the head, believing it to be located there, you hear nothing. Nor do you believe—and rightly so, given the present constitution of man—that you could sit down on the thought of a chair. You would be far from pleased if only thoughts of chairs were provided in this hall!

And many other things are connected with this experience of consciousness, a consciousness that is related to the orbital period of the Sun. Circumstances were different for those whose life-pattern was ordered and directed by the Mysteries, by the Chaldean Mysteries, for example, of which I spoke yesterday. Those people lived at a level of consciousness quite different from that of today.

Let me illustrate this difference by a somewhat trivial example. According to our calendar we reckon 365 days to the year; this is not quite accurate however. If we continued to reckon 365 days to the year over the centuries we would eventually get out of step with the Sun. We should lag behind the positions of the Sun. We therefore intercalate a day every four years. Thus, over relatively long periods of time we return approximately to congruency.

How did the Chaldeans deal with this problem in the very early days? For long periods they used a reckoning similar to ours, but they arrived at it in a different way. Because they reckoned 360 days to the year they were obliged to intercalate a whole month every six years, whereas we reckon a leap year, with an additional day, every four years. So they had six years of twelve months each, followed by a year of 13 months.

Modern scholars have recorded and confirmed these facts. But they are unaware that this chronological difference is bound up with profound changes in human consciousness. These Chaldeans who intercalated a month every six years instead of an extra day every four years, had a completely different outlook on the world from ourselves. They did not experience the difference between day and night in the same way. As I mentioned yesterday, their daytime experience was not as clear and vivid as ours. If someone with our present-day consciousness comes into this hall and looks around, he will, of course, see the people in the audience here in sharply defined outlines, some closer together, others further apart and so on.

This was not so amongst those who received their inspiration from the Chaldean Mysteries. In those days they saw a person sitting, for example, not as we see him now, for that was rare at that time, but surrounded by an auric cloud which was part of him. And whilst we, in our mundane way, see each individual in sharply defined outlines sitting on his chair and the whole so clear-cut that we can easily count the number present, the old Chaldeans would have seen each block of chairs to the right and left of the gangway surrounded by a kind of auric cloud, drifting like patches of mist—here a cloud, there a cloud and then darker areas and these darker areas would have indicated the human beings.

This kind of visual experience would still have been known in the earliest Chaldean times, though not in later periods. By day the old Chaldeans would have seen only the dark areas of this nebulous image. At night they would have seen something very similar, even in a condition of sleep, for their sleep was not as deep as ours. It was more dreamlike. Today, if someone were asleep and you were all sitting here, he would not see anything of you at all. In olden times this deep sleep was unknown; men would have seen the visionary form of the auric cloud to the right and left with the individuals as points of light within it. Thus the difference in the perception of conditions by day and by night was not so marked in those times as it is today. For this reason they were unaware of the difference between the sunlight during the daytime and its absence at night. They saw the Sun by day as a luminous sphere surrounded by a magnificent aura.

They pictured to themselves the following:—below was the Earth; everywhere above the Earth, water, and higher still the snows considered to be the source of the Euphrates. Over all this, they thought, was the air and in the heights was the Sun, travelling from East to West and surrounded by a most beautiful aura. Then they imagined the existence of something like a funnel, as we should call it today; in the evening the Sun descended into this funnel and emerged again in the morning.

But they actually saw the Sun in this funnel. The evening Sun was seen approximately as follows: a luminous, greenish-blue centre, surrounded by a reddish-yellow halo. This was the image they had of the Sun—in the morning the Sun emerged from the funnel, luminous in the centre and surrounded by a halo. It travelled across the vault of heaven, slipped into the funnel on the Western horizon, took on a deeper hue, displayed a halo projecting beyond the funnel and then was lost to view. People spoke of a funnel or hollow space because to them the Sun was dark or black. They described things exactly as they saw them.

And again a deep impression was made upon them in those early times when they looked back to the first six or seven years of their childhood and perceived how, during those years, they were still unmistakably clothed in that divine element in which they had lived before incarnation, how, between the seventh and fourteenth year they began to emerge from the spiritual egg until the process was finally completed in their twentieth year. It was only at this age that they really felt themselves to be Earth beings. And then they realized the more keenly the difference between day and night.

They observed in themselves periodic changes in development every six or seven years. This was in accordance with the lunar phases. The Moon phases of twenty-eight days corresponded with the pattern of their own life experience of periods of six or seven years. And they felt that a Moon phase of one month was equivalent, in the life of man, to a period of twenty-eight years (4 X 7 years). This they expressed in the calendar by inserting an intercalary month every seventh year. In brief, their calculations were based on the Moon, not the Sun.

Furthermore, they did not see external nature as we do today, sharply defined and devoid of spirit. The nature they observed both by day and by night was permeated by a spiritual aura. Today we have a clear, daylight consciousness; we see nothing by night. This is shown by the importance we attribute to the Sun which causes the alternation of day and night.

In the Mystery-wisdom of the ancient Chaldeans the emphasis was placed not on the Sun, but on the Moon, because its phases were a faithful reflection of their own growth to maturity. They felt themselves to be differently constituted at each stage—as children, as youth and as adults—but we no longer experience this today. On looking back there seemed to be very little difference between the first and second seven years. Nowadays children are so very clever that we cannot hit it off with them at all! Special methods of education will have to be devised in order to cope with them. They are as clever as grown-ups and everyone seems equally clever, whatever his age.

It was not so with the ancient Chaldeans. At that time children were still linked with the spiritual world; when they grew up they had not forgotten this relationship and realized that only later had they become earthly beings, after having emerged from the auric egg. So their calculations were based not on the Sun but on the Moon, on the quarterly phases reckoned in periods of seven which they observed in the heavens. Therefore every seven years they inscribed an intercalary month, a period calculated according to the lunar phases.

This outward sign in the history of civilisations, the fact that we intercalate an additional day every 4 years, whilst the Chaldeans intercalated an additional month every 7 years, indicates that in reality, though their day consciousness was not sharply divided from their night consciousness, they experienced none the less wide differences in their states of consciousness during the successive life-periods.

Today, when we wake in the morning and rub the sleep out of our eyes, we say: “I have slept.” The ancient Chaldeans felt that they awoke in their twenty-first or twenty-second year; then they began to see the world clearly and said: “I have been asleep up to this moment.” They believed that they preserved a waking consciousness up to their fiftieth year and that in old age they did not revert to their former condition but developed a fuller, clearer vision. For this reason the old men were looked upon as the sages, who, with the consciousness acquired since the age of twenty, now entered the realm of sleep, but remained highly clairvoyant.

Thus the old Chaldeans knew three states of consciousness. We experience two, with the addition of a third which we characterize as a dream condition: waking, sleeping, dreaming. A Chaldean did not experience these three conditions from day to day; he experienced a diminished condition of consciousness up to his twentieth year, then a consciously waking condition up to his fiftieth year. And then a condition where it was said of him: he is taking his earthly consciousness into the spiritual world. He has arrived at the stage when he knows much more, is wiser than other people.

Those advanced in years were looked up to as sages; today they are considered to be in their dotage. This tremendous difference strikes at the very roots of human existence. We must be quite clear about this difference for it is enormously important for the being of man. We do not survey the world simply through a single state of consciousness. We learn to know the world only when we understand the form of consciousness which, for example, was common to the children of ancient Chaldea. It resembled our own dream state, though it was more active, capable of stimulating the individual to action. Today it would be considered to be a pathological condition. This condition of waking consciousness that we find so prosaic today and take for granted was unknown in those times. I use the term prosaic advisedly, for to concentrate on the physical aspects of man and depict them in this guise is prosaic. This would not be readily admitted, of course, but it is so. In ancient Chaldea man was perceived both as a physical entity and as endowed with an aura, as I have described. And the sages saw beyond the physical into the souls of men.

This was a third state of consciousness which is extinguished today. It may be compared to a state of dreamless sleep. If we look at the situation historically, we find that we encounter states of consciousness very different from our own, and the further back we go, the wider are the divergences. By comparison, our normal states of consciousness today are nothing much to boast of. We set no store on what a person may experience in dreamless sleep because, as a rule, he has little to relate. There are few, very few, today who can tell us anything of their experiences in dreamless sleep. Dream life, it is said, is fantasy, mere coinage of the brain; the only desirable, the only reliable state is the condition of waking consciousness.

The ancient Chaldeans did not share this attitude. The childlike condition of consciousness with its fresh and vigorous dream life that invited positive action, was held to be the condition when children still lived in a paradisal state, when their utterances proceeded from the Gods. People listened to them because they had brought a wealth of information from the spiritual world.

In the course of time they reached the state of consciousness when they were Earth beings, but in their auras they were still beings of soul, spiritual beings. This was the condition of consciousness enjoyed by the seers or sages. When people listened to them they were convinced that they were receiving communications from the spiritual world.

And of those who rose ever higher in the Mysteries it was said that in their fiftieth year they transcended the purely solar element and entered into the spiritual world; from Sun-heroes they became Fathers who were in communion with the spiritual home of mankind.

Thus, from a historical perspective, I wished to indicate to you how mankind came to share these various states of consciousness.

In exploring the states of consciousness let us set aside for a moment the dreamless sleep of present-day man and examine the ordinary waking state with which you are familiar when you say: I am fully conscious, I see objects around me, hear other people speak to me, converse with them and so on.

And then let us take the second condition, known to all of you when you imagine yourself to be asleep, when dreams arise which are often so terrifying or so marvellously liberating that you are constrained to say if you are in a normally healthy state: these things are not part of ordinary, everyday life; they are a kaleidoscopic effect created by the play of natural fantasy, and force their way into man's consciousness in the most varied ways. The prosaic type will pay little attention to dreams; the superstitious will interpret them in an external way, the poetically endowed who is neither matter of fact nor superstitious, is still aware of this kaleidoscopic life of dreams. For out of the depths of uncorrupted human nature emerges something which does not have the significance attributed to it by superstitious people but which indicates, none the less, that, in sleep, experiences rise up from the instinctual life like mists or clouds—just as mountains rise up and after long ages disappear again. Only the difference is that all this takes place rapidly in dream life, whilst in the Cosmos dream pictures are slowly built up and slowly disappear.

Dreams have another peculiarity. We may dream of snakes all around us, of snakes entwined round our bodies. Cocaine addicts, for example, will have this dream-experience of snakes in an exaggerated form. The victims of this vice feel snakes crawling out of every part of their body even when they are awake.

When we observe our own life we realize that such dreams indicate some internal disturbance. Dreams about snakes point to some digestive disorder. The peristaltic movements of the intestines are symbolized in the dream as the writhing of snakes.

Again, a man may dream he is going for a walk and comes to a place where a white post stands—a white post or stone pillar which is damaged at the top. In his dream he feels uneasy about this damaged top. He wakes up to find he has toothache! Unconsciously he feels the urge to finger one of his teeth. (I am referring to the present-day man; the man of ancient times was above such things). The typical man of today decides to go to the dentist and have the decayed tooth filled.

What is the explanation of this? This whole experience associated with a painful tooth, indicating some organic disturbance, is symbolized in a picture. The tooth becomes a ‘white post’ that shows signs of damage or decay. In the dream picture we become aware of something that is actually situated within our organism.

Or again, we have a vivid dream that we are in a room where we feel suffocated; we feel restless and uneasy. Then suddenly—we had not noticed it before—we catch sight of a stove in the corner which is very hot. The room was overheated. We now know in the dream why we could not breathe—the room was too hot. We wake up with palpitations and a racing pulse. The irregular pulse was symbolized externally in the dream. There is some malfunctioning of the organism; we become aware of it, but not immediately, as we would have done in the daytime. We become aware of it through a symbolic picture. Or we may dream that there is bright sunshine outside. The sunlight disturbs us and we become uneasy, though normally we would welcome the sunshine. We wake up and find a neighbour's house on fire. An external event is not depicted as such, but is clothed in symbolic form.

Thus we see that a natural creative imagination is at work in dreams; external events are reflected in dreams. But we need not insist upon this. The dream can, so to speak, come to life and take on its own inner meaning and essential reality. We may dream of something that cannot be related to anything in the external world. When that point is reached in gradual stages, we say that a totally different world is portrayed in our dreams; we encounter quite other beings, demoniacal or beautiful and elf-like. It is not only the phenomenal world that appears in dream pictures, but a wholly different world invades us. Human beings can dream of the super-sensible world in the form of images perceptible by the senses.

Thus the consciousness of man today has a dream life alongside his ordinary waking life. Indeed, a disposition to dreaming makes us poets. People who are unable to dream will always be inferior poets. For in order to be a poet or artist, one must be able to translate the natural stuff of dreams into the imaginative fantasy of waking life.

Anyone, for example, whose dreams draw their symbolism from external objects, as in the dream where sunshine pouring into a room symbolized a neighbour's house on fire, will feel next day an urge to compose. He is a potential musician. He who experiences the palpitation of the heart as an overheated stove will feel impelled next day to turn to modelling or architectural design. He is the potential architect, sculptor or painter.

There is a connection between these things; in ordinary consciousness they are associated in the way I have described. But we can go further. As I have described in my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science—an Outline, this ordinary consciousness can be developed by undertaking certain spiritual exercises—we will speak of them later—so that by concentrating on certain precise concepts and linguistic relationships, our whole inner life of thinking, feeling and willing is given added life and vigour. Through these exercises thoughts become virtually tangible realities and feelings living entities.

Then begins the first stage of modern Initiation—we carry over our dreams into waking life. But at this point misunderstandings may easily arise. We set little store on the dreams of anyone who quite naturally indulges in daydreams. But he who, in spite of his day-dreaming, retains full awareness and yet can go on dreaming because he has made his feeling and thinking more lively and vigorous than others, such an individual has taken the first steps towards becoming an Initiate. When he has reached this stage, the following takes place. Because he is a sensible person, as sober and sensible as others in his waking life, he sees his fellow men, on the one hand, as they appear to normal consciousness, the shape of their nose, the colour of their eyes, their tidy or untidy hair and so on. On the other hand, he begins to dream of something else around them, something true, namely, he dreams their aura, the inner meaning of their relationships; he begins to see with the eye of the spirit. In full waking consciousness he begins to have dreams that are meaningful and in accordance with reality. His dreaming does not cease when he wakes up in the morning, continues through the day and is transformed in sleep. But it is fraught with meaning. He sees the true character of men's souls and the spiritual source of their actions. He lives in an activity that is otherwise associated with mere reminiscences or ordinary dreams. But these dreams are a spiritual reality.

A second state of consciousness is now added to the first. Waking dreams become a form of perception higher than the normal perception of everyday life. In full waking consciousness a higher reality has been added to the reality of everyday life. In ordinary dreaming something of reality is lost; it gives us only fragments of reality, born of fantasy. But in waking dreams, as I have described them, in which everything stands revealed—the individual human form, animals and plants, in which the deeds of men are seen to be full of meaning, thereby revealing their spiritual content—all this adds something to everyday reality and enriches it.

To the perception of ordinary consciousness is added a second consciousness. One begins to see the world in a different light and this is shown most strikingly when we look at the animal kingdom which now appears so utterly different that we wonder what we really saw before. Hitherto we had seen only a part of the animal kingdom, only its external aspect. Now a whole new world is added. In each animal species, in lions, tigers and all the various genera lies something that is akin to man. This is difficult to illustrate by comparison with a human being. Please try and follow me.

Let us suppose that you add to your body by tying a string to each finger of both hands and that to the end of each string at a fixed distance you attach a ball painted with various coloured patterns. You have now ten strings. Now manipulate the strings with your fingers so that the balls are agitated in all directions. Now do the same with your toes. Now practise leaping in the air and working your toes so skilfully that a wonderful pattern is created. Thus each finger will have become longer with a coloured ball at its tip, and every toe the same.

Imagine that you can see all this as part of your human form and the whole under the control of the soul. Each ball is a separate entity, but the moment you survey it all, you have the impression that it forms a composite whole. All these balls and strings are not a part of yourself like your fingers and toes. It all forms a single whole and you are in command. If you begin to manipulate the balls and strings in the way I have indicated, then you will see the lion-soul above and the individual lions attached to it like the balls, the whole forming a unity. Previously, if you had looked at the twenty balls lying there they would have represented a world unto themselves. Now add the human being as an activating agent and you create a new situation.

The same applies to your mode of perception. You see the individual lions moving about independently; they are the balls lying around as separate units. Then you see the lion-soul endowed with self-consciousness which, in the spiritual world, resembles a human being, and the individual lions seemingly suspended like the moving balls. These individual lions are manifestations of the self-conscious lion-soul.

Thus you perceive the higher forms of every creature in the animal kingdom. Animals have something akin to man in their make-up, a soul quality which belongs to a different sphere from that of the human soul. As you go through life you emphatically bear your psychic life with its self-consciousness wherever you go. You are at liberty to impose your ego on all and sundry. This the individual lion cannot do. But another realm exists, bordering on this realm of conflicting egos. In the spiritual world the lion-souls do precisely the same. To them the individual lions are so many balls dancing at the end of a string. Consequently, when we see the true nature of the animal kingdom with our newly acquired consciousness we get something of a shock.

We enter a new world and we say to ourselves: we too belong to this other world, but we drag it down to Earth. The animal leaves something of itself behind, its group-soul or species-soul; on Earth we see only the quadruped. We drag down to Earth what the animal leaves behind in the spiritual world and acquire in consequence a different bodily form. That which lives within us belongs also to this higher world, but as human beings we drag it down to Earth.

Thus we become acquainted with another world that we are first made aware of through the medium of animals. But we need an additional form of consciousness; we must bring our dream-consciousness into our waking life and then we can gain insight into the inner constitution of the animal kingdom.

This second world may be termed the soul-world, the soul-plane or astral plane, as distinct from the physical world. We become aware of this astral world through a different form of consciousness. We must familiarize ourselves with other states of consciousness so that we gain insight into other worlds which are not the world of our everyday existence.

It is possible to strengthen and vitalize the soul-life still further. We can not only practise concentration and meditation, as described in the books I have mentioned, we can also strive to expel again this reinforced soul-content. After the most strenuous endeavours to fortify the soul-life after strengthening the thinking and feeling, we reach the point when we are able to modify it again and finally to nullify it. We are then restored to the state called the state of “emptied consciousness.”

Now, normally, a state of emptied consciousness induces sleep. This can be demonstrated experimentally. First remove all visual impressions so that the subject is in darkness. Then remove all auditory impressions so that he is enveloped in silence. Then try to eliminate all other sense-impressions, and he will gradually fall asleep.

This cannot happen if we have first strengthened our thinking and feeling. It will then be possible to empty our consciousness by an act of will and still remain awake. Then the phenomenal world will no longer be present. Our ordinary thoughts and memories are forgotten—we are in a condition of emptied consciousness and a real spiritual world at once invades us. Just as our ordinary consciousness is filled with the colours, sounds and warmth of the sense-world, so a spiritual world fills this emptied consciousness. Only when we have consciously emptied our consciousness are we surrounded by a spiritual world.

Once again we owe to something in external nature a particularly vivid apprehension of the new consciousness and its relationship to a spiritual world. Just as we become aware of the next higher level of consciousness through our different perception of the animal kingdom, so we are now able to recognize this new level of consciousness in the plant kingdom which is entirely differently constituted.

How does the plant kingdom appear to normal consciousness? We see the verdant meadows pied with flowers growing out of the mineral Earth. We rejoice in the blue and gold, the red and white of the blossoms and in the living green. We delight in the beauty of the plant world spread out before us like a carpet. We are filled with joy and the heart leaps up as we behold the Earth clothed in this brilliant, multi-coloured garment of flowers and plants.

Then we lift our eyes to the dazzling Sun and the blue vault of heaven and see the familiar clear or cloudy daytime sky. We are not aware of any connection between the Earth and the heavens, between looking down upon the flower-decked fields and up at the sky. Let us assume we have felt intense joy at the sight of this carpet of flowers spread out before us in the daytime and that we wait through a summer's day until the fall of night. We now lift our eyes to the canopy of heaven and see the stars, arrayed in their manifold shining constellations, spread out across the sky. And now a new joyous exultation from on high invests our soul.

By day then, we can look down upon the growing plant-cover of the Earth as something that fills our heart with inward joy and exultation. We can then look up at night and see the canopy of heaven that appeared so blue by day now studded with shining sparkling stars. We rejoice inwardly at the celestial beauty that is revealed to our soul. This is the response of our ordinary consciousness.

If we have perfected the consciousness that is emptied of content and yet remains awake and that is permeated with the spiritual, we can then say to ourselves when by day we survey the plant-cover and by night look up at the glittering stars: Yes, in the daytime the rich hues of the flower-decked Earth delighted and enchanted me. But what did I really see?—Then we look up at the starry hosts of heaven. To the emptied, waking consciousness, the consciousness emptied of all earthly content, the stars do more than merely shine and sparkle, they assume the most varied forms, for there, in the higher spheres, is a wondrous world of quintessential being—everywhere movement and flux, grand, mighty, sublime. Before this spectacle we bow our heads in grateful reverence and reverent gratitude, acknowledging its sublimity. We have reached the mid-stage of Initiation. We know that the real origin of the plants lies in the higher spheres. That which, hitherto, we had taken to be nothing more than the sparkle and glitter of the separate stars, that is the true being of the plants. It seems as if now for the first time we have seen the real plant-beings; as if we were seeing only the dewdrops of the violet bathed in morning dew and not the violet as such. In looking at the single star we see the single sparkling dewdrop; in truth, however, a mighty world in flux and movement lies behind. We now know what the plant-world really is; it is not to be found on Earth, but out in the Cosmos, grand, mighty and sublime. And all that we saw by day in the multi-coloured carpet of flowers is the reflected image of the higher spheres.

And we now know that the Cosmos, with its flux and movement of real forms and beings is reflected on the surface of the Earth. When we look into a mirror, we see ourselves reflected and we know that the reflection is only of our outer form, not of our soul. The heavens are not reflected on Earth so definitely, but in such a way that they are mirrored in the yellow, green, blue, red and white of the plant colours. They are a reflected image, the faint, shadowy reflection of the heavens.

We have now come to know a new world. In the higher spheres are found the “plant-men,” beings endowed with self-consciousness. And so, to the phenomenal world and astral world, we can add a third, the real spiritual world. The stars are the dewdrops of this cosmic world and the plants are its reflected image. Their appearance is not their reality; in their manifestation here on Earth they are not even an entity, but, in relation to the endlessly manifold richness of that world of transcendence from whence shine forth the separate stars like dewdrops, simply a reflected Image.

And now we discover that, as human beings, we bear within us that which is the real being of the plants in the higher spheres. We bring down into this mirrored life what the plants leave behind in the world of spirit, for the plant-beings live in that world and send down to Earth their reflected images and the Earth fills them with earthly substance. We men bring our soul-nature, which also belongs to that higher world, into this world of images. We are not mere images, but we are also spiritual beings of soul here on Earth. On Earth we participate in three worlds. We live in the physical world, where the self-consciousness of animals is not to be found; at the same time we inhabit the astral world where their self-consciousness exists and this astral world we bring down into the physical world. We also inhabit a third world, the spiritual world where dwell the true plant-beings; but the plant-beings send only their reflected images down to Earth, whereas we bring down the realities of our soul-life.

And now we can say: a being who possesses body, soul and spirit here on Earth is a human being. A being with body and soul here on Earth, but whose spirit dwells in a second world bordering on the physical world and which for that reason has less reality, is an animal. A being with only a body in the physical world, the soul in the second world and the spirit in the third world, so that the body is only a reflected image of the spirit and is filled out with terrestrial matter, is a plant.

We now have an understanding of the three worlds in nature and we know that man bears these three worlds within himself. We feel to some extent the plants reaching up to the stars. As we look at the plants we say to ourselves: here is a being which manifests only its reflected image on Earth, an image detached from its true reality. The more we direct our gaze to the stars at night, the more do we see its true being in the higher worlds. When we look from Earth to Heaven and perceive the Cosmos to be one with the Earth, then we see the world of nature as a totality.

Then we look back at ourselves as human beings and say: we have insulated within our earthly being that element which, in the plants, reaches up to the heavens. We bear within ourselves the physical, astral and spiritual worlds.

To develop clear, objective perception, to follow nature through the different realms so that we come to know the spiritual world, to gain insight into man, so that we divine his spiritual essence—this is to undertake the first steps in spiritual investigation.

Among the mysteries of ancient times Ephesus holds a unique position. You will remember that in considering the part played by Alexander in the evolution of the West, I had to mention also this Mystery of Ephesus. Let us try to see wherein lies the peculiar importance of this Mystery.

We can only grasp the significance of the events of earlier and of more recent times when we understand and appreciate the great change that took place in the character of the Mysteries (which were in reality the source whence all the older civilisations sprang) in passing from the East to the West, and, in the first place, to Greece. This change was of the following nature.

When we look back into the older Mysteries of the East, we have everywhere the impression: The priests of the Mysteries are able, from their own vision, to reveal great and important truths to their pupils. The farther back we go in time, the more are these Wise Men or Priests in a position to call forth in the Mysteries the immediate presence of the Gods themselves, the Spiritual Beings who guide the worlds of the planets, who guide the events and phenomena of Earth. The Gods were actually there present.

The connection of the human being with the macrocosm was revealed in many different Mysteries in an equally sublime manner to that I pictured for you yesterday, in connection with the Mysteries of Hibernia and also with the teachings that Aristotle had still to give to Alexander the Great. An outstanding characteristic of all ancient Oriental Mysteries was that moral impulses were not sharply distinguished from natural impulses. When Aristotle points Alexander to the North-West, where the Spirits of the element of Water held dominion, it was not only a physical impulse that came from that quarter—as we to-day feel how the wind blows from the North-West and so forth—but with the physical came also moral impulses. The physical and the moral were one. This was possible, because through the knowledge that was given in these Mysteries—the Spirit of Nature was actually perceived in the Mysteries—man felt himself one with the whole of Nature. Here we have something in the relation of man to Nature, that was still living and present in the time that intervened between the life of Gilgamesh and the life of the individuality Gilgamesh became, who was also in close contact with the Mysteries, namely, with the Mystery of Ephesus. There was still alive in men of that time a vision and perception of the connection of the human being with the Spirit of Nature. This connection they perceived in the following way. Through all that the human being learned concerning the working of the elementary spirits in Nature, and the working of the Beings of Intelligence in the planetary processes, he was led to this conclusion: All around me I see displayed on every side the plant-world—the green shoots, the buds and blossoms and then the fruit. I see the annual plants in the meadows and on the country-side, that grow up in Spring-time and fade away again in Autumn. I see, too, the trees that go on growing for hundreds of years, forming a bark on the outside, hardening to wood and reaching downwards far and wide into the Earth with their roots. But all that I see out there—the annual herbs and flowers, the trees that take firm hold into the Earth—once upon a time, I, as man, have borne it all within me.

You know how to-day, when there is carbonic acid in the air, that has come about through the breathing of human beings, we can feel that we ourselves have breathed out the carbonic acid, we have breathed it into space. We have therefore still to-day this slight connection with the Cosmos. Through the airy part of our nature, through the air that gives rise to the breathing and other air-processes that go on in the human organism, we have a living connection with the great Universe, with the Macrocosm. The human being to-day can look upon his out-breathed breath, upon the carbonic acid that was in him and is now outside him. But just as we are able to-day to look upon the carbonic acid we have breathed out—we do not generally do so, but we could—so did the initiates of olden times look upon the whole plant-world. Those who had been initiated in the Oriental Mysteries, or had received the wisdom that streamed forth from the Oriental Mysteries, were able to say: I look back in the evolution of the world to an ancient Sun epoch. In that time I bore still within me the plants. Then afterwards I let them stream forth from me into the far circles of Earth existence. But as long as I bore the plants within me, while I was still that Adam Cadmon who embraced the whole Earth and the plant-world with it, so long was this whole plant-world watery-airy in substance. Then the human being separated off from himself this plant-world. Imagine that you were to become as big as the whole Earth, and then to separate off, to secrete, as it were, inwardly something plant-like in nature, and this plant-like substance were to go through metamorphoses in the watery element—coming to life, fading away, growing up, being changed, taking on different shapes and forms—and you will by this imagination call up again in your soul feelings and experiences that once lived in it. Those who received their education and training in the East at about the time of Gilgamesh were able to say to themselves that these things had once been so.

And when they looked abroad upon the meadows and beheld all the growth of green and flowers, then they said: We have separated the plants from ourselves, we have put them forth from us in an earlier stage of our evolution; and the Earth has received them. The Earth it is that has lent them root, and has given them their woody nature; the tree-nature in the world of plants comes from the Earth. But the whole plant-nature as such has been cast off, as it were, by the human being, and received by the Earth. In this way man felt an intimate and near relationship with everything of a plant-nature.

With the higher animals the human being did not feel a relationship of this kind. For he knew that he could only work his way rightly and come to his true place on the Earth by overcoming the animal form, by leaving the animals behind him in his evolution. The plants he took with him as far as the Earth; then gave them over to her that she might receive them into her bosom. For the plants he was upon Earth the Mediator of the Gods, the Mediator between the Gods and the Earth.

Men who had this great experience acquired a feeling that may be put quite simply in a few words. The human being comes hither to the Earth from the World-All. The question of number does not come into consideration; for, as I said yesterday, they were all and each within the other. That which afterwards becomes the plant-world separates off from man, the Earth receives it and gives it root. The human being felt as though he had folded the Earth about with a garment of plant growth, and as though the Earth were thankful for this enfolding and took from him the watery-airy plant element that he was able, as it were, to breathe on to her.

In entering into this experience men felt themselves intimately associated with the God, with the chief God of Mercury. Through the feeling: We have ourselves brought the plants on to the Earth, men came into a special relation with the God Mercury.

Towards the animals, on the other hand, man had a different feeling. He knew that he could not bring them with him to Earth, he had to cast them off, he had to make himself free from them, otherwise he would not be able to evolve his human form in the right way. He thrust the animals from him; they were pushed out of the way and had then to go through an evolution on their own account on a lower level than the level of humanity. Thus did the man of olden times—of the Gilgamesh time and later—feel himself placed between the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom. In relation to the plant kingdom he was the bearer, who bore the seed to the Earth and fructified the Earth with it, doing this as Mediator for the Gods. In relation to the animal kingdom he felt as though he had pushed it away from him, in order that he might become man without the encumbrance of the animals, who have consequently been stunted and retarded in their development.

The whole animal-worship of Egypt has to do with this perception. The deep fellow-feeling, too, with animals that we find in Asia is connected with it. It was a sublime conception of Nature that man had, feeling his relationship on the one hand with the plant world and on the other hand with the world of animals. In relation to the animal he had a feeling of emancipation. In relation to the plant he felt a near and intimate kinship. The plant world was to him a bit of himself, and he felt a sincere love for the Earth inasmuch as the Earth had received into herself the bit of humanity that gave rise to the plants, had let these take root in her, had even given of her own substance to clothe the trees in bark. There was always a moral element present when man took cognisance of the physical world around him. When he beheld the plants in the meadow, it was not only the natural growth that he perceived. In this growth he perceived and felt a moral relation to man. With the animal man felt again another moral relation: he had fought his way up beyond them.

Thus we find in the Mysteries over in the East a sublime conception of Nature and of Spirit in Nature. Later there were Mysteries in Greece, too, but with a much less real perception of Nature and of Spirit in Nature. The Greek Mysteries are grand and sublime, but they are essentially different from the Oriental Mysteries. It is characteristic of these that they do not tend to make man feel himself on the Earth, but that through them man feels himself a part of the Cosmos, a part of the World-All. In Greece, on the other hand, the character of the Mysteries had changed and the time was come when man began to feel himself united with the Earth. In the East the spiritual world itself was either seen or felt in the Mysteries. It is absolutely true to say that in the ancient Oriental Mysteries the Gods themselves appeared among the priests, who did sacrifice there and made prayers. The Mystery Temples were at the same time the earthly Guest Houses of the Gods, where the Gods bestowed upon men through the priests what they had to give them from the treasures of Heaven. In the Greek Mysteries appeared rather the images of the Gods, the pictures, as it were, the phantoms,—true and genuine, but phantoms none the less; no longer the Divine Beings, no longer the Realities, but phantoms. And so the Greek had a wholly different experience from the man who belonged to the ancient Oriental culture. The Greek had the feeling: There are indeed Gods, but for man it is only possible to have pictures of these Gods, just as we have in our memory pictures of past experiences, no longer the experiences themselves.

That was the fundamental feeling that took rise in the Greek Mysteries. The Greek felt that he had, as it were, memories of the Cosmos, not the appearance of the Cosmos itself, but pictures; pictures of the Gods, and not the Gods themselves. Pictures, too, of the events and processes on Saturn, Sun and Moon; no longer a living connection with what actually took place on Saturn, Sun and Moon,—the kind of living connection the human being has with his own childhood. The men of the Oriental civilisation had this real connection with Sun, Moon and Saturn, they had it from their Mysteries. But the Mysteries of the Greeks had a pictorial or image-character. There appeared in them the shadow-spirits of Divine-Spiritual Reality. And something else went with this as well that was very significant. For there was yet another difference between the Oriental Mysteries and the Greek.

In the Oriental Mysteries, if one wanted to know something of the sublime and tremendous experience that was possible in these Mysteries, one had always to wait until the right time. Some experience or other could perhaps only be found by making the appropriate sacrifice, the appropriate super-sensible ‘experiments’ as it were, in Autumn,—another only in Spring, another again at Midsummer, and another in the depth of Winter. Or again it might be that sacrifices were made to certain Gods at a time determined by a particular constellation of the Moon. At that special time the Gods would appear in the Mysteries, and men would come thither to be present at their manifestations. When the time had gone by one would have to wait, perhaps thirty years, until the opportunity should come again when those Divinities should once more reveal themselves in the Mysteries. All that related to Saturn, for example, could only enter the region of the Mysteries every thirty years; all that was concerned with the Moon about every eighteen years. And so on. The priests of the Oriental Mysteries were dependent on time, and also on place and on all manner of circumstances for receiving the sublime and tremendous knowledge and vision that came to them. Quite different manifestations were received deep in a mountain cave and high on the mountain top. Or again, the revelations were different, according as one was far inland in Asia or on the coast. Thus a certain dependence on place and time was characteristic of the Mysteries of the East.

In Greece the great and awful Realities had disappeared. Pictures there still were. And the pictures were dependent not on the time of year, on the course of the century, or on place; but men could have the pictures when they had performed this or that exercise, or had made this or that personal sacrifice. If a man had reached a certain stage of sacrifice and of personal ripeness, then for the very reason that he as a human being had attained thus far, he was able to have view of the shadows of the great world-events and of the great world-Beings.

That is the important change in the nature of the Mysteries that meets us when we pass from the ancient East to Greece. The ancient Oriental Mysteries were subject to the conditions of space and locality, whilst in the Greek Mysteries the human being himself came into consideration and what he brought to the Gods. The God, so to speak, came in his phantom or shadow-picture, when the human being, through the preparations he had undergone, had been made worthy to receive the God in phantom form. In this way the Mysteries of Greece prepared the road for modern humanity.

Now, the Mystery of Ephesus stood midway between the ancient Oriental Mysteries and the Greek Mysteries. It held a unique position. For in Ephesus those who attained to initiation were able still to experience something of the tremendous majestic truths of the ancient East. Their souls were still stirred with a deep inward experience of the connection of the human being with the Macrocosm and with the Divine-Spiritual Beings of the Macrocosm. In Ephesus men could still have sight of the super-earthly, and in no small measure. Self-identification with Artemis, with the Goddess of the Mystery of Ephesus, still brought to man a vivid sense of his relation to the kingdoms of nature. The plant world, so it taught him, is yours; the Earth has only received it from you. The animal world you have overcome. You have had to leave it behind. You must look back on the animals with the greatest possible compassion, they have had to remain behind on the road, in order that you might become Man. To feel oneself one with the Macrocosm: this was an experience that was still granted to the Initiate of Ephesus, he could still receive it straight from the Realities themselves.

At the same time, the Mysteries of Ephesus were, so to speak, the first to be turned westward. As such, they had already that independence of the seasons, or of the course of years and centuries; that independence too of place on Earth. In Ephesus the important things were the exercises that the human being went through, making himself ripe, by sacrifice and devotion, to approach the Gods. So that on the one hand, in the content of its Mystery truths, the Mystery of Ephesus harked back to the Ancient East, whilst on the other hand it was already directed to the development of man himself, and was thus adapted to the nature and character of the Greek. It was the very last of the Eastern Mysteries of the Greeks, where the great and ancient truths could still be brought near to men; for in the East generally the Mysteries had already become decadent.

It was in the Mysteries of the West that the ancient truths remained longest. The Mysteries of Hibernia still existed, centuries after the birth of Christianity. These Mysteries of Hibernia are nevertheless doubly secret and occult, for you must know that even in the so-called Akashic Records, it is by no means easy to search into the hidden mysteries of the statues of which I told you yesterday—the Sun Statue and the Moon Statue, the male and the female. To approach the pictures of the Oriental Mysteries and to call them forth out of the astral light is, comparatively speaking, easy for one who is trained in these things. But let anyone approach, or want to approach, the Mysteries of Hibernia in the astral light, and he will at first be dazed and stupefied. He will be beaten back. These Irish, these Hibernian Mysteries will not willingly let themselves be seen in the Akashic pictures, albeit they continued longest in their original purity.

Now you must remember, my dear friends, that the individuality who was in Alexander the Great had come into close contact with the Hibernian Mysteries during the Gilgamesh time, when he made his journey westward to the neighbourhood of the modern Burgenland. These Mysteries had lived in him, lived in him after a very ancient manner, for it was in the time when the West resounded still with powerful echoes of the Atlantean age. And now all this experience was carried over into the condition of human existence that runs its course between death and a new birth. Then later the two friends, Eabani and Gilgamesh, found themselves together again in life in Ephesus, and there they entered into a deeply conscious experience of what they had experienced formerly during the Gilgamesh time more or less unconsciously or sub-consciously, in connection with the Divine-Spiritual worlds.

Their life during this Ephesus time was comparatively peaceful, they were able to digest and ponder what they had received into their souls in more stormy days.

Let me remind you of what it was that passed over into Greece before these two appeared again in the decadence of the Greek epoch and the rise of the Macedonian. The Greece of olden time, the Greece that had spread abroad and embraced Ephesus also within its bounds, and had even penetrated right into Asia Minor, had still in her shadow-pictures the after-echo of the ancient time of the Gods. The connection of man with the spiritual world was still experienced, though in shadows. Greece was however gradually working herself free from the shadows; we may observe how step by step the Greek civilisation was wresting its way out of what we may call divine civilisation and taking on more and more the character of a purely earthly one.

My dear friends, it is only too true that the very most important things in the history of human evolution are simply passed over in the materialistic external history of to-day. Of extraordinary importance for the understanding of the whole Greek character and culture is this fact: that in the Greek civilisation we find no more than a shadow-picture, a phantom of the old Divine Presence wherein man had contact with the super-sensible worlds, for man was already gradually emerging out of this Divinity and learning to make use of his own individual and personal spiritual faculties. Step by step we can see this taking place. In the dramas of Æschylus we may see placed before us in an artistic picture the feeling that yet remained to man of the old time of the Gods. Scarcely however has Sophocles come forward when man begins to tear himself away from this conscious sense of union with Divine-Spiritual existence. And then something else appears that is coupled with a name which from one point of view we cannot over-estimate—but of course there are many points of view to be considered.

In the older Grecian time there was no need to make written history. Why was this? Because men had the living shadow of everything of importance that had happened in the past. History could be read in what came to view in the Mysteries. There one had the shadow-pictures, the living shadow-pictures. What was there then to write down as history?

But now came the time when the shadow pictures became submerged in the lower world, when human consciousness could no longer perceive them. Then came the impulse to make records. Herodotus,¹ the first prose historian, appeared. And from this time onward, many could be named who followed him, the same impulse working in them all,—to tear mankind away from the Divine-Spiritual and to set him down in the purely earthly. Nevertheless, as long as Greek culture and civilisation lasted, there is a splendour and a light shed abroad over this earth-directed tendency, a light of which we shall hear tomorrow that it did not pass over to Rome nor to the Middle Ages. In Greece, a light was there. Of the shadow-pictures, even the fading shadow-pictures of the evening twilight of Greek civilisation, man still felt that they were divine in their origin.

In the midst of all this, like a haven of refuge where men found clear enlightenment concerning what was present, as it were in fragments, in Greek culture,—in the midst stood Ephesus. Heraclitus received instruction from Ephesus, as did many another great philosopher; Plato, too, and Pythagoras. Ephesus was the place where the old Oriental wisdom was preserved up to a certain point. And the two souls who dwelt later in Aristotle and Alexander the Great were in Ephesus a little after the time of Heraclitus and were able to receive there of the heritage from the old knowledge of the Oriental Mysteries that the Mystery of Ephesus still retained. Notably the soul of Alexander entered into an intimate union with the very Being of the Mysteries as far as it was living in the Mystery of Ephesus.

And now we come to one of those historical events of which people may think that they are mere chance, but which have their foundations deep down in the inner connections of the evolution of humanity. In order to gain an insight into the significance of this event, let us call to mind the following. We must remember that in the two souls who afterwards became Aristotle and Alexander the Great, there was living in the first place all that they had received in a far-off time in the past and had subsequently elaborated and pondered. And then there was also living in their souls the treasure of untold value that had come to them in Ephesus. We might say that the whole of Asia—in the form that it had assumed in Greece, and in Ephesus in particular—was living in these two, and more especially in the soul of Alexander the Great, that is to say, of him who afterwards became Alexander the Great.

Picture to yourselves the part played by this personality. I described him for you as he was in the Gilgamesh time; and now you must imagine how the knowledge that belonged to the ancient East and to Ephesus, a knowledge which we may also call a “beholding,” a “perceiving,”—this knowledge was called up again in the intercourse between Alexander the Great and Aristotle, in a new form. Picture this to yourselves; and then think what would have happened if Alexander, in his incarnation as Alexander, had come again into contact with the Mystery of Ephesus, bearing with him in his soul the gigantic document of the Mystery of Ephesus, for this majestic document of knowledge lived with extraordinary intensity in the souls of these two. If we can form a idea of this, we can rightly estimate the fact that on the day on which Alexander was born, Herostratus threw the flaming torch into the Sanctuary of Ephesus; on the very day on which Alexander was born, the Temple of Diana of Ephesus was treacherously burnt to the ground. It was gone, never to return. Its monumental document, with all that belonged to it, was no longer there. It existed only as a historical mission in the soul of Alexander and in his teacher Aristotle.

And now you must bring all this that was alive in the soul of Alexander into connection with what I said yesterday, when I showed you how the mission of Alexander the Great was inspired by an impulse coming from the configuration of the Earth. You will readily understand how that which in the East had been real revelation of the Divine-Spiritual was as it were extinguished with Ephesus. The other Mysteries were at bottom only Mysteries of decadence, where traditions were preserved, though it is true these traditions did still awaken clairvoyant powers in specially gifted natures. The splendour and the glory, the tremendous majesty of the olden time were gone. With Ephesus was finally put out the light that had come over from the East.

You will now be in a position to appreciate the resolve that Alexander made in his soul: to restore to the East what she had lost; to restore it at least in the form in which it was preserved in Greece, in the phantom or shadow-picture. Hence his idea of making an expedition into Asia, going as far as it was possible to go, in order to bring to the East once more—albeit in the shadow form in which it still existed in the Grecian culture—what she had lost.

And now we see what Alexander the Great is really doing, and doing in a most wonderful way, when he makes this expedition. He is not bent on the conquest of existing cultures, he is not trying to bring Hellenism to the East in any external sense. Wherever he goes, Alexander the Great not only adopts the customs of the land, but is able too to enter right into the minds and hearts of the human beings who are living there, and to think their thoughts. When he comes to Egypt, to Memphis, he is hailed as a saviour and deliverer from the spiritual fetters that have hitherto bound the people. He permeates the kingdom of Persia with a culture and civilisation which the Persians themselves could never have produced. He penetrates as far as India.

He conceives the plan of effecting a balance, a harmony between Hellenic and Oriental civilisations. On every hand he founds academies. The academies founded in Alexandria, in Northern Egypt, are the best known and have had the greatest significance for later times. Of the first importance however is the fact that all over Asia larger and smaller academies were founded, in which the works of Aristotle were preserved and studied for a long time to come. What Alexander began in this way continued to work for centuries in Asia Minor, repeating itself again and again as it were in feebler echoes. With one mighty stroke Alexander planted the Aristotelian Knowledge of Nature in Asia, even as far as India. His early death prevented his reaching Arabia, though that had been one of his chief aims. He went however as far east as India, and also into Egypt. Everywhere he implanted the spiritual Knowledge of Nature that he had received from Aristotle, establishing it in such a way that it could become fruitful for men. For everywhere he let the people feel it was something that was their own,—not a foreign element, a piece of Hellenism, that was being imposed upon them. Only a nature such as Alexander's, able to fire others with his own enthusiasm, could ever have accomplished what he did. For everywhere others came forward to carry on the work he had begun. In the years that followed, many more scholars went over from Greece. Apart from Edessa it was one academy in particular, that of Gondishapur, which received constant reinforcements from Greece for many centuries to come.

A marvellous feat was thus performed! The light that had come over from the East,—extinguished in Ephesus by the flaming torch of Herostratus,—this light, or rather its phantom shadow, now shone back again from Greece, and continued so to shine until the dramatic moment when beneath the tyranny of Rome² the Schools of the Greek philosophers were ultimately closed. In the 6th century A.D. the last of the Greek philosophers fled away to the academy of Gondishapur.

In all this we see two elements interworking; one that had gone, so to speak, in advance, and one that had remained behind. The mission of Alexander was founded, more or less unconsciously, upon this fact: the waves of civilisation had advanced in Greece in a Luciferian manner, whilst in Asia they had remained behind in an Ahrimanic manner. In Ephesus was the balance. And Alexander, on the day of whose birth the physical Ephesus had fallen, resolved to found a spiritual Ephesus that should send its Sun-rays far out to East and West. It was in very truth this purpose that lay at the root of all he undertook: to found a spiritual Ephesus, reaching out across Asia Minor eastward to India, covering also Egyptian Africa and the East of Europe.

It is not really possible to understand the spiritual evolution of Western humanity unless we can see it on this background. For soon after the attempt had been made to spread abroad in the world the ancient and venerated Ephesus, so that what had once been present in Ephesus might now be preserved in Alexandria,—be it only in a faltering hand instead of in large shining letters—soon after this second blooming of the flower of Ephesus, an altogether new power began to assert itself, the power of Rome. Rome, and all the word implies, is a new world, a world that has nothing to do with the shadow-pictures of Greece, and suffers man to keep no more than memories of these olden times. We can study no graver or more important incision in history than this. After the burning of Ephesus, through the instrumentality of Alexander the plan is laid for the founding of a spiritual Ephesus; and this spiritual Ephesus is then pushed back by the new power that is asserting itself in the West, first as Rome, later under the name of Christianity, and so on. And we only understand the evolution of mankind aright when we say: We, with our way of comprehending things through the intellect, with our way of accomplishing things by means of our will, we with our feelings and moods can look back as far as ancient Rome. Thus far we can look back with full understanding. But we cannot look back to Greece, neither can we look back to the East. There we must look in Imaginations. Spiritual vision is needed there. Yes, we can look South, as we go back along the stream of evolution; we can look South with the ordinary prosaic understanding, but not East. When we look East, we have to look in Imaginations. We have to see standing in the background the mighty Mystery Temples of primeval post-Atlantean Asia, where the Wise Men, the Priests, made plain to each one of their pupils his connection with the Divine-Spiritual of the Cosmos, and where was to be found a civilisation that could be received from the Mysteries in the Gilgamesh time, as I have described to you. We have to see these wonderful Temples scattered over Asia; and in the foreground Ephesus, preserving still within its Mystery much that had faded away in the other Temples of the East, whilst at the same time it had already itself made the transition and become Greek in character. For in Ephesus, man no longer needed to wait for the constellations of the stars or for the right time of year, nor to wait until he himself had attained a certain age, before he could receive the revelations of the Gods. In Ephesus, if he were ripe for it, he might offer up sacrifices and perform certain exercises that enabled him so to approach the Gods that they drew graciously near to him.

It was in this world that stands before you in this picture that the two personalities of whom we have spoken were trained and prepared, in the time of Heraclitus. And now, in 356 A.D. on the birth-day of Alexander the Great, we behold the flames of fire burst forth from the Temple of Ephesus.

Alexander the Great is born, and finds his teacher Aristotle. And it is as though from out of the ascending flames of Ephesus a mighty voice went forth for those who were able to hear it: Found a spiritual Ephesus far and wide over the Earth, and let the old physical Ephesus stand in men's memory as its centre, as its midmost point.

Thus we have before us this picture of ancient Asia with her Mystery centres, and in the foreground Ephesus and her pupils in the Mysteries. We see Ephesus in flames, and a little later we see the expeditions of Alexander that carried over into the East what Greece had to give for the progress of mankind, so that there came into Asia in picture-form what she had lost in its reality.

Looking across to the East and letting our imagination be fired by the tremendous events that we see taking place, we are able to view in a true light that ancient chapter in man's history,—for it needs to be grasped with the imagination. And then we see gradually rise up in the foreground the Roman world, the world of the Middle Ages, the world that continues down to our own time.

All other divisions of history into periods—ancient, medieval and modern, or however else they may be designated—give rise to false conceptions. But if you will study deeply and intently the picture that I have here set before you, it will give you a true insight into the hidden workings that run through European history down to the present day.

• 1. Herodotus of Halicarnassos, the first Greek historian, lived in the fifth century B.C. Wrote history of the Persian Wars.
• 2. Justinian, Byzantine Emperor from 527–565, son of a peasant, sent an edict to Athens in 529 forbidding the teaching of philosophy and law. Thereupon the last seven Athenian philosophers left the Roman Empire and emigrated to Persia.

Let us once more call up before our souls whither modern Initiation leads, after the first steps to Imaginative knowledge have been successfully taken. A man then comes to the point where his previous abstract, purely ideal world of thought is permeated with inner life. The thoughts coming to him are no longer lifeless, passively acquired; they are an inward world of living force which he feels in the same way as he feels the pulsing of his blood or the streaming in and out of the air he breathes. It is therefore a question of the ideal element in thinking being replaced by an inward experience of reality. Then indeed the pictures that previously constituted a man's thoughts are no longer mere abstract, shadowy projections of the outside world, but are teeming with an inward, vivid existence. They are real Imaginations experienced in two dimensions, as indicated yesterday, but it is not as though a man were standing in front of a painting in the physical world, for then he may experience visions, not Imaginations. Rather is it as though, having lost the third dimension, he were himself moving about within the picture. Hence it is not like seeing something in the physical world; anything that has the look of the physical world will be a vision. Genuine Imagination comes to us only when, for example, we no longer see colours as we do in the physical world, but when we experience them. What does this mean?

When you see colours in the physical world, they give you different experiences. You perceive red as something that attacks you, that wants to spring at you. A bull will react violently to this aggressive red; he experiences it far more vividly than does man, in whom the whole experience is toned down.

When you perceive green, it gives you a feeling of balance, an experience neither painful nor particularly pleasant; whereas blue induces a mood of devotion and humility. If we allow these various experiences of colour to penetrate right into us, we can realise how it is that when anything in the spiritual world comes at us in the aggressive way red does in physical life, it is something corresponding to the colour red. When we encounter something which calls up a mood of humility, this has the same effect as the experience of blue or blue-violet in the physical world. We can simplify this by saying: we have experienced red or blue in the spiritual world. Otherwise, for the sake of precision, we should always have to say: we have experienced something there in the way that red, or blue, is experienced in the physical world. To avoid so many words, one says simply that one has seen auric colours which can be distinguished as red, blue, green, and so on.

But we must realise thoroughly that this making our way into the super-sensible, this setting aside of all that comes to us through the senses, is always present as a concrete experience. And in the course of this experience we always have the feeling I described yesterday, as if thinking had become an organ of touch extending throughout the human organism, so that spiritually we feel that a new world is opening out and we are touching it. This is not yet the real spiritual world, but what I might call the etheric or formative-forces world. Anyone who would learn to know the etheric must grasp it in this way. For no speculation, no abstract reflection, about the etheric can lead to true knowledge of it. In this thinking that has become real we live with our own formative-forces or etheric body, but it is a different kind of living from life in the physical body. I should like to describe this other way by means of a comparison.

When you look at one of your fingers, you recognise it as a living member of your organism. Cut it off, and it is no longer what it was; it dies. If this finger of yours had a consciousness, it would say: I am no more than a part of your organism, I have no independent existence. That is what a man has to say directly he enters the etheric world with Imaginative cognition. He no longer feels himself as a separate being, but as a member of the whole etheric world, the whole etheric cosmos. After that he realises that it is only by having a physical body that he becomes a personality, an individuality. It is the physical body that individualises and makes of one a separate being.

We shall indeed see how even in the spiritual world we can be individualised—but I will speak of that later. If we enter the spiritual world in the way described, we are bound at first to feel ourself as just one member of the whole etheric Cosmos; and if our etheric body were to be cut off from the cosmic ether, it would mean for us etheric death. It is very important to grasp this, so that we may understand properly what has to be said later about a man's passage through the gate of death.

As I pointed out yesterday, this Imaginative experience in the etheric, which becomes a tableau of our whole life from birth up to the present moment of our existence on Earth, is accompanied by an extraordinarily intense feeling of happiness. And the flooding of the whole picture-world by this inward, wonderfully pleasurable feeling is a man's first higher experience.

We must then be able—as I also mentioned yesterday—to take all we have striven for through Imagination, through our life-tableau, and make it all disappear at will. It is only when we have thus emptied our consciousness that we understand how matters really are in the spiritual world. For then we know that what we have seen up to now was not the spiritual world, but merely an Imaginative picture of it. It is only at this stage of empty consciousness that—just as the physical world streams into us through our senses—so the spiritual world streams into us through our thinking. Here begins our first real experience, our first real knowledge, of the objective spiritual world. The life-tableau was only of our own inner world. Imaginative cognition reveals only this inner world, which appears to higher knowledge as a picture-world, a world of cosmic pictures. The Cosmos itself, together with our own true being, as it was before birth, before our earthly existence, appear first at the stage of Inspiration, when the spiritual world flows into us from outside. But when we have arrived at being able to empty our consciousness, our whole soul becomes awake; and in this stage of pure wakefulness we must be able to acquire a certain inner stillness and peace. This peace I can describe only in the following way.

Let us imagine we are in a very noisy city and hear the roar of it all around us. This is terrible—we say—when, from all sides, tumult assails our ears. Suppose it to be some great modern city, such as London. But now suppose we leave this city, and gradually, with every step we take as we walk away, it becomes quieter and quieter. Let us imagine vividly this fading away of noise. Stiller and stiller it becomes. Finally we come perhaps to a wood where all is perfectly silent; we have reached the zero-point where nothing can be heard.

Yet we can go even further. To illustrate how this can happen, I will use a quite trivial comparison. Suppose we have in our purse a certain sum of money. As we spend it from day to day, it dwindles, just as the noise dwindles as we leave the town. At length comes the day when there is nothing left—the purse is empty. We can compare this nothingness with the silence. But what do we do next if we are not to grow hungry? We get into debt. I am not recommending this; it is meant only as a comparison. How much have we then in our purse? Less than nothing; and the greater the debt, the more we have less than nothing.

And now let us imagine it to be the same with this silence. There would be not only the absolute peace of the zero-point of silence, but it would go further and come to the negative of hearing, quieter than quiet, more silent than silence. And this must in fact happen when, in the way described yesterday, we are able through enhanced powers to reach this inner peace and silence. When, however, we arrive at this inner negative of audibility, at this peace greater than the zero-point of peace, we are then so deeply in the spiritual world that we not only see it but hear it resounding. The world of pictures becomes a world of resounding life; and then we are in the midst of the true spiritual world. During the moments we spend there we are standing, as it were, on the shore of existence; the ordinary sense-world vanishes, and we know ourselves to be in the spiritual world. Certainly—I will say more of this later—we must be properly prepared so that we are at all times able to return. But there is something else to come—an experience previously unknown. Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is built on a foundation of cosmic suffering—of a cosmic element which can be experienced by the human being only as pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain. And when, through Initiation-knowledge, this cosmic experience of pain has made its impression upon us, then out of real inner knowledge we can say the following:

If we study the human eye—the eye that reveals to us the beauty of the physical world, and is so important for us that through it we receive nine-tenths of the impressions that make up our life between birth and death—we find that the eye is embedded in a bodily cavity which originates from a wound. What was done originally to bring about the eye-sockets could be done to-day only by actually cutting out a hollow in the physical body. The ordinary account of evolution gives a much too colourless impression of this. These sockets into which the eyeballs were inserted from outside—as indeed the physical record of evolution shows—were hollowed out at a time when man was still an unconscious being. If he had been conscious of it, it would have involved a painful wounding of the organism.

Indeed, the whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness, everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing, has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our feeling of pain.

When these facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have made a much simpler world.”

Strictly speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!

Genuine Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary, instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for completeness they need their physical limbs.

The world we meet in this way when we go on beyond Imagination into the stillness of existence, out of which the spiritual world reveals itself in colour and in sound—this world differs essentially from the world perceived by the senses. When we are living with it—and we have to live with the spiritual world when it is present for us—we see how all sense-perceptible, physical things and processes really proceed from out of the spiritual world. Hence as earthly men we see only one half of the world; the other half is occult, hidden from us. And through every opening, every happening, in the physical-material world, one might say, this hidden half reveals its spiritual nature first in the pictures of Imagination, and then through its own creative activity in Inspiration. In the world of Inspiration we can feel at home, for here we find the origins of all earthly things, all earthly creations. And here, as I have indicated, we discover our own pre-earthly existence.

Following an old image, I have called this world, lying beyond that of Imagination, the astral world—the name is not important—and what we bring along with us from that world, and have carried into our etheric and physical bodies, we may speak of as our astral body. In a certain sense, it encloses the Ego-organisation. For higher knowledge, accordingly, the human being consists of four members: physical body, etheric or formative-forces body, astral body, and Ego-organisation. Knowledge of the Ego, however, entails a further super-sensible step, which in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have called “Intuition”. The term Intuition may easily be misunderstood because, for example, anyone with imaginative, poetic gifts will often give the name of intuition to his sensitive feeling for the world. This kind of intuition is only a dim feeling; yet it has some relation to the Intuition of which I am speaking. For just as earthly man has his sense-perceptions, so in his feeling and his will he has a reflection of the highest kind of cognition, of Intuition. Otherwise he could not be a moral being. The dim promptings of conscience are a reflection, a kind of shadow-picture, of true Intuition, the highest form of cognition possible for man on Earth.

Earthly man has in him something of what is lowest, and also this shadow-picture of what is highest, accessible only through Intuition. It is the intermediate levels that are lacking in him; hence he has to acquire Imagination and Inspiration. He has also to acquire Intuition in its purity, in its light-filled inner quality. At present it is in his moral feeling, his moral conscience, that he possesses an earthly image of that which arises as Intuition. Hence we can say that when a man with Initiation-knowledge rises to actual Intuitive knowledge of the world, of which previously he has known only the natural laws, the world becomes as intimately connected with him on earth as only the moral world is now. And this is indeed a significant feature of human life on Earth—that out of a dim inner presentiment we connect with the highest realm of all something which, in its true form, is accessible only to enhanced cognition.

The third step in higher knowledge, necessary for rising to Intuition, can be achieved only by developing to its highest point a faculty which, in our materialistic age, is not recognised as a cognitional force. What is revealed through Intuition can be attained only by developing and spiritualising to the highest degree the capacity for love. A man must be able to make this capacity for love into a cognitional force. A good preparation for this is to free ourselves in a certain sense from dependence on external things; for instance, by making it our regular practice to picture our past experiences not in their usual sequence but in reverse order.

In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings, and we gradually enable the inner experiences of our soul and spirit to reach a point where soul and spirit break loose from the bodily and also from the etheric element. A man can well prepare himself for this breaking away if every evening he makes a backward survey of his experiences during the day, beginning with the last and moving back. When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.

You will probably say: “But there are so many hours during the day, full of experiences.” Then first try taking episodes—picturing, for instance, this going up and down stairs in reverse. One thus acquires inner mobility, so that gradually one becomes able to go back in imagination through a whole day in three or four minutes.

But that, after all, is only the negative half of what is needed for enhancing and training spiritually our capacity for loving. This must be brought to the point when, for example, we lovingly follow each stage in the growth of a plant. In ordinary life this growth is seen only from outside—we do not take part in it. We must learn to enter into every detail of plant-growth, to dive right down into the plant, until in our own soul we become the plant, growing, blossoming, bringing forth fruit with it, and the plant becomes as dear to us as we are to ourselves. In the same way we can go above the plants to picture the life of animals, and down to the minerals. We can feel how the mineral forms itself into the crystal, and take inward pleasure in the shaping of its planes, corners, angles, and having a sensation as of pain in our own being when the minerals are split asunder. Then, in our souls, we enter not only with sympathy but with our will into every single event in nature.

All this must be preceded by a capacity for love extending to mankind as a whole. We shall never be able to love nature in the right way until we have first succeeded in loving all our fellow-men. When we have in this way won through to an understanding love for all nature, that which made itself perceptible first in the colours of the aura, and in the resounding of the spheres, rounds itself out and takes on the outlines of actual spiritual Beings.

Experiencing these spiritual Beings, however, is a different matter from experiencing physical things. When a physical object is in front of me, for example this clock, I stand here with the clock there, and can experience it only by looking at it from outside. My relation to it is determined by space. In this way one could never have any real experience of a spiritual Being. We can have it only by entering right into the spiritual Being, with the aid of the faculty for loving which we have cultivated first towards nature. Spiritual Intuition is possible only by applying—in stillness and emptiness of consciousness—the capacity for love we can first learn in the realm of nature. Imagine that you have developed this capacity for loving minerals, plants, animals and also man; you are now in the midst of a completely empty consciousness. All around is the peace which lies beyond its zero-point. You feel the suffering on which the whole existence of the world is founded, and this suffering is at the same time a loneliness. Nothing yet is there. But the capacity for love, flowing up from within in manifold forms, leads you on to enter with your own being into all that now appears visibly, audibly, as Inspiration. Through this capacity for love you enter first into one spiritual Being, then into another.

These Beings described in my book, Occult Science, these Beings of the higher Hierarchies—we now learn to live in our experience of them; they become for us the essential reality of the world. So we experience a concrete spiritual world, just as through eye and ear, through feeling and warmth, we experience a concrete physical world.

If anyone wishes to acquire knowledge particularly important for himself, he must have advanced to this stage. I have already mentioned that through Inspiration pre-earthly spiritual existence rises up in our soul; how in this way we learn what we were before we came down into an earthly body. When through the capacity for love we are able to enter clairvoyantly into spiritual Beings, in the way I have described, there is also revealed that which first makes a man, in his inner experience, a complete being. There is revealed what precedes our life in the spiritual world; we are shown what we were before ascending to the last spiritual life between death and rebirth. The preceding earthly life is revealed, and, one after another, the lives on Earth before that. For the true Ego, present in all the repeated lives on Earth, can manifest only when the faculty for love has been so greatly enhanced that any other being, whether outside in nature or in the spiritual world, has become just as dear to a man as in his self-love he is dear to himself. But the true Ego—the Ego that goes through all repeated births and deaths—is manifest to a man only when he no longer lives egotistically for momentary knowledge, but in a love that can forget self-love and can live in an objective Being in the way that in physical existence he lives in self-love. For this Ego of former lives on Earth has then become as objective for his present life as a stone or a plant is for us when we stand outside it. We must have learnt by then to comprehend in objective love something which, for our present subjective personality, has become quite objective, quite foreign. We must have gained mastery over ourselves during our present earthly existence in order to have any insight into a preceding one.

When we have achieved this knowledge, we see the complete life of a man passing rhythmically through the stages of earthly existence from birth or conception till death, and then through spiritual stages between death and rebirth, and then returning again to Earth, and so on. A complete earthly life reveals itself as a repeated passing through birth and death, with intermediate periods of life in purely spiritual worlds. Only through Intuition can this knowledge be acquired as real knowledge, derived directly from experience.

I have had to describe for you—in outline to begin with—the path of Initiation-knowledge that must be followed in our time, at this present stage of human evolution, in order to arrive at true spiritual knowledge of the world and of man. But as long as human beings have existed there has been Initiation-knowledge, although it has had to take various forms in different evolutionary periods. As man is a being who goes through each successive earthly life in a different way, conditions for his inner development in the various epochs of world-evolution have to vary considerably. We shall be learning more about these variations in course of the next few days; to-day I should like to say only that the Initiation-knowledge which had to be given out in early times was very different from what has to be given out to-day. We can go back some thousands of years, to a time long before the Mystery of Golgotha, and we find how greatly men's attitude to both the natural world and the spiritual world differed from that of the present time, and how different, accordingly, was their Initiation-knowledge from what is appropriate today.

We have now a very highly developed natural science; I shall not be speaking of its most advanced side but only of what is imparted to children of six or seven, as general knowledge. At this comparatively early age a child has to accept the laws relating, let us say, to the Copernican world-system, and on this system are built hypotheses as to the origin of the universe. The Kant-Laplace theory is then put forward and, though this theory has been revised, yet in its essentials it still holds good. The theory is based on a primeval nebula, demonstrated in physics by an experiment intended to show the earliest conditions of the world-system. This primeval nebula can be imitated experimentally, and out of it, through the rotation of certain forces, the planets are assumed to have come into being, and the sun left behind. One of the rings split off from the nebula is thought to have condensed into the shape of the Earth, and everything else—minerals, plants, animals, and finally man himself—is supposed to have evolved on this basis. And all this is described in a thoroughly scientific way.

The process is made comprehensible for children by means of a practical demonstration which seems to show it very clearly. A drop of oil is taken, sufficiently fluid to float on a little water; this is placed on a piece of card where the line of the equator is supposed to come; a pin is run through the card and the card is whirled round. It can then be shown how, one after another, drops of oil detach themselves and rotate, and you can get a miniature planetary system out of the oil, with a sun left in the middle. When that has been shown to us in childhood, why should we think it impossible for our planetary system to have arisen out of the primeval nebula? With our own eyes we have seen the process reproduced.

Now in moral life it may be admirable for us to be able to forget ourselves, but in a demonstration of natural phenomena it is not so good! This whole affair of the drop of oil would never have worked if there had been no-one there to twirl the pin. That has to be taken into account. If this hypothesis is to hold good, a giant schoolmaster would have had to be there in the Cosmos, to start the primeval nebula revolving and keep it turning. Otherwise the idea has no reality.

It is characteristic of this materialistic age, however, to conceive only a fraction of the truth, a quarter, an eighth, or even less, and this fraction then lives with terribly suggestive power in the souls of men. Thus we persist to-day in seeing one side only of nature and of nature's laws.

I could give you plenty of examples, from different spheres of life, clearly showing this attitude towards nature: how—because a man absorbs this with the culture of the day—he considers nature to be governed by what is called the law of cause and effect. This colours the whole of human existence to-day. At best, a man can still maintain some connection with the spiritual world through religious tradition, but if he wishes to rise to the actual spiritual world, he must undertake an inner training through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition—as I have pictured them. He must be led by Initiation-knowledge away from this belief in nature as permeated throughout by law, and towards a real grasp of the spiritual. Initiation-knowledge to-day must aim at leading men from the naturalistic interpretation of the Cosmos, now taken for granted, to a realisation of its spirituality.

In the old Initiation-knowledge, thousands of years ago, the very opposite prevailed. The wise men of the Mysteries, the leaders in those centres which were school, church, and art-school at the same time, had around them people who knew nothing of nature in the Copernican sense, but in their soul and spirit had an instinctive, intimate experience of the Cosmos, expressed in their myths and legends, which in the ordinary civilisation of to-day are no longer understood. About this too we shall have more to say. The experience that men had in those early days was instinctive; an experience of soul and spirit. It filled their waking hours with the dreamlike pictures of imagination; and from these pictures came the legends, the myths, the sayings of the gods, which made up their life. A man looked out into the world, experiencing his dreamy imaginations; and at other times he lived in the being of nature. He saw the rainbows, the clouds, the stars, and the sun making its speedy way across the heavens; he saw the rivers, the hills arising; he saw the minerals, plants, animals.

For primeval man, everything he saw through his senses was a great riddle. For at the time of which I am speaking, some thousands of years before the Mystery of Golgotha—there were both earlier and later times when civilisation was different—a man had an inward feeling of being blessed when dreamlike imaginations came to him. The external world of the senses, where all that he perceived of rainbow, clouds, the moving sun, and the minerals, plants, animals, was what the eye could see, while in the starry world he saw only what the pre-Copernican, Ptolemaic system recorded. This external world presented itself to people generally in a way that led them to say: “With my soul I am living in a divine-spiritual world, but there outside is a nature forsaken by the gods. When with my senses I look at a spring of water, I see nothing spiritual there; I see nothing spiritual in the rainbow, in the minerals, plants, animals, or in the physical bodies of men.” Nature appeared to these people as a whole world that had fallen away from divine spirituality.

This was how people felt in that time when the whole visible Cosmos had for them the appearance of having fallen away from the divine. To connect these two experiences, the inward experience of God and the outer one of a fallen sense-world, it was not merely abstract knowledge they needed, but a knowledge that could console them for belonging to this fallen sense-world with their physical bodies and their etheric bodies. They needed a consolation which would assure them that this fallen sense-world was related to all they experienced through their instinctive imaginings, through an experience of the spiritual which, though dim and dreamlike, was adequate for the conditions of those times. Knowledge had to be consoling.

It was consolation, too, that was sought by those who turned eagerly to the Mysteries, either to receive only what could be given out externally, or to become pupils of the men of wisdom who could initiate them into the secrets of existence and the riddles that confronted them.

These wise men of the old Mysteries, who were at the same time priests, teachers, and artists, made clear to their pupils through everything contained in their Mysteries—yet to be described—that even in this fallen world, in its rising springs, in the blossoming trees and flowers, in the crystal-forming minerals, in rainbow and drifting clouds and journeying sun there live those divine-spiritual powers which were experienced instinctively in the dreamlike imaginations of men. They showed these people how to reconcile the godforsaken world with the divine world perceived in their imaginations. Through the Mysteries they gave them a consoling knowledge which enabled them once more to look on nature as filled with the divine.

Hence we learn from what is told of those past ages—told even of the Grecian age—that knowledge now taught to the youngest children in our schools, that the sun stands still and the earth circles around it, for instance, is the kind of knowledge which in the old Mysteries was preserved as occult. What with us is knowledge for everyone was for that age occult knowledge; and explanations of nature were an occult science. As anyone can see who follows the course of human development during our civilisation, nature and nature's laws are the chief concern of men today; and this has led the spiritual world to withdraw. The old dreamlike imaginations have ceased. A man feels nature to be neutral, not entirely satisfying, belonging not to a fallen, sinful Universe, but to a Cosmos that by reason of inner necessity has to be as it is. He then feels more sharply conscious of himself; he learns to find spirituality in that one point only, and he discovers an inner urge to unite this inner self with God. All he now needs—in addition to his knowledge of nature and in conformity with it—is that a new Initiation-knowledge shall lead him into the spiritual world. The old Initiation-knowledge could start from the spirit, which was then experienced by people instinctively, and, embodied in the myths, could lead them on to nature. The new Initiation-knowledge must begin with a man's immediate experience to-day, with his perception of the laws of nature in which he believes, and from there it must point the way back to the spiritual world through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition.

Thus, in human evolution, a few thousand years before the Mystery of Golgotha, we see the significant moment of time when men, starting out from an instinctive experience of the spirit, found their way to concepts and ideas which, as the most external form of occult science, included the laws of nature. To-day these laws of nature are known to us from childhood. In face of this indifferent, prosaic attitude to life, this naturalism, the spiritual world has withdrawn from the inner life of man. Today, Initiation-knowledge must point back from nature to the spirit. For the men of old, nature was in darkness, but the spirit was bright and clear. The old Initiation-knowledge had to carry the light of this brightness of the spirit into the darkness of nature, so that nature too might be illumined. Initiation-knowledge to-day has to start from the light thrown upon nature, in an external, naturalistic way, by Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Kepler, Newton and others. This light has then to be rescued, given fresh life, in order to open the way for it to the spirit, which in its own light must be sought on the opposite path to that of the old Initiation.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have a question?

Question: Has Mars' proximity to the earth anything to do with the weather? The summer has been so unbelievably bad! Have planetary influences in general any effect upon the weather?

Dr. Steiner: The weather conditions which have shown such irregularities through the years, particularly recent years, do have something to do with conditions in the heavens, but not specifically with Mars. When these irregularities are observed we must take very strongly into consideration a phenomenon of which little account is usually taken, although it is constantly spoken of. I mean the phenomenon of sunspots. The sunspots are dark patches, varying in size and duration, which appear on the surface of the sun at intervals of about ten or eleven or twelve years. Naturally, these dark patches impede the sun's radiations, for, as you can well imagine, at the places where its surface is dark, the sun does not radiate. If in any given year the number of such dark patches increases, the sun's radiation is affected. And in view of the enormous significance the sun has for the earth, this is a matter of importance.

In another respect this phenomenon of sunspots is also noteworthy. In the course of centuries their number has increased, and the number varies from year to year. This is due to the fact that the position of the heavenly bodies changes as they revolve, and the aspect they present is therefore always changing. The sunspots do not appear at the same place every year, but—according to how the sun is turning—in the course of years they appear in that place again. In the course of centuries they have increased enormously in number and this certainly means something for the relationship of the earth to the sun.

Thousands of years ago there were no spots on the sun. They began to appear, they have increased in number, and they will continue to increase. Hence there will come a time when the sun will radiate less and less strongly, and finally, when it has become completely dark, it will cease to radiate any light at all. Therefore we have to reckon with the fact that in the course of time, a comparatively long time, the source of the light and life that now issues from the sun will be physically obliterated for the earth. And so the phenomenon of the sunspots—among other things—shows clearly that one can speak of the earth coming to an end. Everything of the earth that is spiritual will then take on a different form, just as I have told you that in olden times it had a different form. Just as a human being grows old and changes, so the sun and the whole planetary system will grow old and change.

The planet Mars, as I said, is not very strongly connected with weather conditions; Mars is more connected with phenomena that belong to the realm of life, such as the appearance and development of the grubs and cockchafers every four years. And please do not misunderstand this. You must not compare it directly with what astronomy calculates as being the period of revolution of Mars,²¹ because the actual position of Mars comes into consideration here. Mars stands in the same position relatively to the earth and the sun every four years, so that the grubs which take four years to develop into cockchafers are also connected with this. If you take two revolutions of Mars—requiring four years and three months—you get the period between the cockchafers and the grubs, and the other way around, between the grubs and the cockchafers. In connection with the smaller heavenly bodies you must think of the finer differentiations in earth phenomena, whereas the sun and moon are connected with cruder, more tangible phenomena such as weather, and so on.

A good or bad vintage year, for example, is connected with phenomena such as the sunspots, also with the appearance of comets. Only when they are observed in connection with phenomena in the heavens can happenings on the earth be studied properly.

Now of course still other matters must be considered if one is looking for the reasons for abnormal weather. For naturally the weather conditions—which concern us so closely because health and a great deal else is affected by them—depend upon very many factors. You must think of the following. Going back in the evolution of the earth we come to a time of about six to ten thousand years ago. Six to ten thousand years ago there were no mountains in this region where we are now living. You would not have been able to climb the Swiss mountains then, because you would not have existed in the way you do now. You could not have lived here or in other European lands because at that time these regions were covered with ice. It was the so-called Ice Age. This Ice Age was responsible for the fact that the greatest part of the population then living in Europe either perished or was obliged to move to other regions. These Ice Age conditions will be repeated, in a somewhat different form, in about five or six or seven thousand years—not in exactly the same regions of the earth as formerly, but there will again be an Ice Age.

It must never be imagined that evolution proceeds in an unbroken line. To understand how the earth actually evolves it must be realized that interruptions such as the Ice Age do indeed take place in the straightforward process of evolution. What is the reason? The reason is that the earth's surface is constantly rising and sinking. If you go up a mountain which need by no means be very high, you will still find an Ice Age, even today, for the top is perpetually covered with snow and ice. If the mountain is high enough, it has snow and ice on it. But it is only when, in the course of a long time, the surface of the earth has risen to the height of a mountain that we can really speak of snow and ice on a very large scale. So it is, gentlemen! It happens. The surface of the earth rises and sinks. Some six thousand or more years ago the level of this region where we are now living was high; then it sank, but it is now already rising again, for the lowest point was reached around the year 1250. That was the lowest point. The temperature here then was extremely pleasant, much warmer than it is today. The earth's surface is now slowly rising, so that after five or six thousand years there will again be a kind of Ice Age.

From this you will realize that when weather conditions are observed over ten-year periods, they are not the same; the weather is changing all the time.

Now if in a given year, in accordance with the height of the earth's surface a certain warm temperature prevails over regions of the earth, there are still other factors to be considered. Suppose you look at the earth. At the equator it is hot; above and below, at the Poles it is cold. In the middle zone, the earth is warm. When people travel to Africa or India, they travel into the heat; when they travel to the North Pole or the South Pole, they travel into the cold. You certainly know this from accounts of polar expeditions.

Think of the distribution of heat and cold when you begin to heat a room. It doesn't get warm all over right away. If you would get a stepladder and climb to the top of it, you would find that down below it may still be quite cold while up above at the ceiling it is already warm. Why is that? It is because warm air, and every gaseous substance when it is warmed, becomes lighter and rises; cold air stays down below because it is heavier. Warmth always ascends. So in the middle zone of the earth the warm air is always rising. But when it is up above it wafts toward the North Pole: winds blow from the middle zone of the earth toward the North Pole. These are warm winds, warm air. But the cold air at the North Pole tries to warm itself and streams downward toward the empty spaces left in the middle zone. Cold air is perpetually streaming from the North Pole to the equator, and warm air in the opposite direction, from the equator to the North Pole. These are the currents called the trade winds. In a region such as ours they are not very noticeable, but very much so in others.

Not only the air, but the water of the sea, too, streams from the middle zone of the earth toward the North Pole and back again. That phenomenon is, naturally, distributed in the most manifold ways, but it is nevertheless there.

But now there are also electric currents in the universe; for when we generate wireless electric currents on the earth we are only imitating what is also present in some way in the universe. Suppose a current from the universe is present, let's say, here in Switzerland, where we have a certain temperature. If a current of this kind comes in such a way that it brings warmth with it, the temperature here rises a little. Thus the warmth on earth is also redistributed by currents from the universe. They too influence the weather.

In addition, however, you must consider that such electromagnetic currents in the universe are also influenced by the sunspots. Wherever the sun has spots, there are the currents which affect the weather. These particular influences are of great importance.

Now in regard to the division of the seasons—spring, summer, autumn, winter—there is a certain regularity in the universe. We can indicate in our calendar that spring will begin at a definite time, and so on. This is regulated by the more obvious relationships in which the heavenly bodies stand to one another. But the influences resulting from this are few. Not many of the stars can be said to have an influence; most of them are far distant and their influence is only of a highly spiritual character.

But in regard to weather conditions the following may be said. Suppose you have a disc with, let's say, four colors on it—red, yellow, green, blue. If you rotate the disc slowly, you can easily distinguish all the four colors. If you rotate it more quickly, it is difficult but still possible to distinguish the colors. But if you rotate the disc very rapidly indeed, all the colors run into each other and you cannot possibly distinguish one from the other. Likewise, the seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter can be distinguished because the determining factors are more or less obvious. But the weather depends upon so many circumstances that the mind cannot grasp all of them; it is impossible, therefore, to mark anything definite in the calendar in regard to it—while this is obviously quite possible in regard to the seasons. The weather is a complicated matter because so many factors are involved.

But in old folklore something was known about these things. Old folklore should not be cast aside altogether. When the conditions of life were simpler, people took an interest in things far more than they do today. Today our interest in a subject lasts for 24 hours ... then the next newspaper comes and brings a new interest! We forget what happens—it is really so! The conditions of our life are so terribly complicated. The lives of our grandparents, not to speak of our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, were quite different. They would sit together in a room around and behind the stove and tell stories, often stories of olden times. And they knew how the weather had been a long time ago, because they knew that it was connected with the stars; they observed a certain regularity in the weather. And among these great-grandparents there may have been one or two “wiseacres”, as they are called. By a “wiseacre” I mean someone who was a little more astute than the others, someone who had a certain cleverness. Such a person would talk in an interesting way. A “wiseacre” might have said to a grandchild or great-grandchild: Look, there's the moon—the moon, you know, has an influence on the weather. This was obvious to people in those days, and they also knew that rainwater is better for washing clothes than water fetched from the spring. So they put pails out to collect the rainwater to wash the clothes—my own mother used to do this. Rainwater has a different quality, it has much more life in it than ordinary water; it absorbs bluing and other additives far better. And it wouldn't be a bad idea if we ourselves did the same thing, for washing with hard water can, as you know, ruin your clothes.

So you see, these things used to be known; it was science in the 19th century that first caused people to have different views. Some of you already know the story I told once about the two professors at the Leipzig University:²² one was called Schleiden and the other Fechner. Fechner declared that the moon has an influence on the earth's weather. He had observed this and had compiled statistics on it. The other professor, Schleiden, was a very clever man. He said: That is sheer stupidity and superstition; there is no such influence. Now when professors quarrel, nothing very much is gained by it and that's mostly the case also when other people quarrel! But both these professors were married; there was a Frau Professor Schleiden and a Frau Professor Fechner. In Leipzig at that time people still collected rainwater for washing clothes. So Professor Fechner said to his wife: That man Schleiden insists that one can get just as much rainwater at the time of new moon as at full moon; so let Frau Professor Schleiden put out her pail and collect the rainwater at the time of the next new moon, and you collect it at the time of full moon, when I maintain that you will get more rainwater. Well, Frau Professor Schleiden heard of this proposal and said: Oh no! I will put my pail out when it is full moon and Frau Professor Fechner shall put hers out at the time of new moon! You see, the wives of the two professors actually needed the water! The husbands could squabble theoretically, but their wives decided according to practical needs.

Our great-grandparents knew these things and said to their grandchildren: The moon has an influence upon rainwater. But remember this: everything connected with the moon is repeated every 18 or 19 years. For example, in a certain year, on a certain day, there are sun eclipses and on another day moon eclipses; this happens regularly in the course of 18 to 19 years. All phenomena connected with the positions of the stars in the heavens are repeated regularly. Why, then, should not weather conditions be repeated, since they depend upon the moon? After 18 or 19 years there must be something in the weather similar to what happened 18 or 19 years before. So as everything repeats itself, these people observed other repetitions too, and indicated in the calendar certain particulars of what the weather had been 18 or 19 years earlier, and now expected the same kind of weather after the lapse of this period. The only reason the calendar was called the Hundred-Years' Calendar was that 100 is a number which is easy to keep in mind; other figures too were included in the calendar according to which predictions were made about the weather. Naturally, such things need not be quite exact, because again the conditions are complicated. Nevertheless, the predictions were useful, for people acted accordingly and did indeed succeed in producing better growing conditions. Through such observations something can certainly be done for the fertility of the soil. Weather conditions do depend upon the sun and moon, for the repetitions of the positions of the moon have to do with the relation of these two heavenly bodies.

In the case of the other stars and their relative positions, there are different periods of repetition. One such repetition is that of Venus, the morning and evening star. Suppose the sun is here and the earth over there. Between them is Venus. Venus moves to this point or that, and can be seen accordingly; but when Venus is here, it stands in front of the sun and covers part of it. This is called a “Venus transit”.²³ (Venus, of course, looks much smaller than the moon, although it is, in fact, larger.) These Venus transits are very interesting because for one thing they take place only once every hundred years or so, and for another, very significant things can be observed when Venus is passing in front of the sun. One can see what the sun's halo looks like when Venus is standing in front of the sun. This event brings about great changes. The descriptions of it are very interesting. And as these Venus transits take place only once in about a hundred years, they are an example of the phenomena about which science is obliged to say that it believes some things that it has not actually perceived! If the scientists declare that they believe only things they have seen, an astronomer who was born, say, in the year 1890 could not lecture today about a Venus transit, for that has not occurred in the meantime, and presumably he will have died before the next Venus transit, which will apparently take place in the year 2004. There, even the scientist is obliged to believe in something he does not see!

Here again, when Venus is having a special effect upon the sun because it is shutting out the light, an influence is exercised upon weather conditions that occurs only once about every hundred years. There is something remarkable about these Venus transits and in earlier times they were regarded as being extraordinarily interesting.

Now when the moon is full, you see a shining orb in the sky; at other times you see a shining part of an orb. But at new moon, if you train your eyes a little—I don't know whether you know this—you can even see the rest of the new moon. If you look carefully when the moon is waxing, you can also see the other part of the moon—it appears bluish-black. Even at new moon a bluish-black disc can be seen by practiced eyes; as a rule it is not noticed, but it can be seen. Why is it that this disc is visible at all? It is because the part of the moon that is otherwise dark is still illuminated by the earth. The moon is about 240,000 miles from the earth and is not, properly speaking, illuminated by it; but the tiny amount of light that falls upon the moon from the earth makes this part of the moon visible.

But now no light at all radiates from the earth to Venus. Venus has to rely upon the light of the sun; no light streams to it from the earth. Venus is the morning and evening star. It changes just as the moon changes but not within the same periods. Only the changes are not seen because Venus is very far away and all that is visible is a gleaming star. Looked at through a darkened telescope Venus can be seen to change, just as the moon changes. But in spite of the fact that Venus cannot be illuminated from the earth, part of it is always visible as a dull bluish light. The sun's light is seen at the semi-circle above—but this is not the whole of Venus; where Venus is not being shone upon by the sun, a bluish light is seen.

Now, gentlemen, there are certain minerals—for instance, in Bologna—which contain barium compounds. Barium is a metallic element. If light is allowed to fall on these minerals for a certain time, and the room is then darkened, you see a bluish light being thrown off by them.

One says that the mineral, after it has been illuminated, becomes phosphorescent. It has caught the light, “eaten” some of the light, and is now spitting it out again when the room is made dark. This is of course also happening before the room is dark, but the light is then not visible to the eye. The mineral takes something in and gives something back. As it cannot take in a great deal, what it gives back is also not very much, and this is not seen when the room is light, just as a feeble candle-light is not seen in strong sunlight. But the mineral is phosphorescent and if the room is darkened, one sees the light it radiates.

From this you will certainly be able to understand where the light of Venus comes from. While it receives no light from this side, Venus is illuminated from the other side by the sun, and it eats up the sun's light, so to say. Then, when you see it on a dark night, it is throwing off the light, it becomes phosphorescent. In days when people had better eyes than they have now, they saw the phosphorescence of Venus. Their eyes were really better in those days; it was in the 16th century that spectacles first began to be used, and they would certainly have come earlier if people had needed them! Inventions and discoveries always come when they are needed by human beings. And so in earlier times the changes that come about when phosphorescent Venus is in transit across the sun were also seen. And in still earlier times the conclusion was drawn that because the sun's light is influenced at that time by Venus, this same influence will be there again after about a hundred years; and so there will be similar weather conditions again in a region where a transit of Venus is seen to be taking place. (As you know, eclipses of the sun are not visible from everywhere, but only in certain regions.) In a hundred years, therefore, the same weather conditions will be there—so the people concluded—and they drew up the Hundred Years' Calendar accordingly.

Later on, people who did not understand the thing at all, made a Hundred Years' Calendar every year, then they found that the details given in the calendar did not tally with the actual facts. It could just as well have said: “If the cock crows on the dunghill, the weather changes, or stays as it is!” But originally, the principle of the thing was perfectly correct. The people perceived that when Venus transits the sun, this produces weather conditions that are repeated somewhere after a hundred years.

Since the weather of the whole year is affected, then the influences are at work not only during the few days when Venus is in transit across the sun but they last for a longer period. So you see from what I have said that to know by what laws the weather is governed during some week or day, one would have to ask many questions: How many years ago was there a Venus transit? How many years ago was there a sun-eclipse? What is the present phase of the moon? I have mentioned only a few points. One would have to know how the trade winds are affected by magnetism and electricity, and so on. All these questions would have to be answered if one wanted to determine the regularity of weather conditions. It is a subject that leads to infinity! People will eventually give up trying to make definite predictions about the weather. Although we hear about the regularity of all the phenomena with which astronomy is concerned—astronomy, as you know, is the science of the stars—the science that deals with factors influencing the weather (meteorology, as it is called) is by no means definite or certain. If you get hold of a book on meteorology, you'll be exasperated. You'll be exclaiming that it's useless, because everyone says something different. That is not the case with astronomy.

I have now given you a brief survey of the laws affecting wind and weather and the like. But still it must be added that the forces arising in the atmosphere itself have a tremendously strong influence on the weather. Think of a very hot summer when there is constant lightning out of the clouds and constant thunder growling: there you have influences on the weather that come from the immediate vicinity of the earth. Modern science holds a strange view of this. It says that it is electricity that causes the lightning to flash out of the clouds. Now you probably know that electricity is explained to children at school by rubbing a glass rod with a piece of cloth smeared with some kind of amalgam; after it has been rubbed for some time, the rod begins to attract little scraps of paper, and after still more rubbing, sparks are emitted, and so on. Such experiments with electricity are made in school, but care has to be taken that everything has been thoroughly wiped beforehand, because the objects that are to become electric must not even be moist, let alone wet; they must be absolutely dry, even warm and dry, for otherwise nothing will be got out of the glass rod or the stick of sealing-wax. From this you can gather that electricity is conducted away by water and fluids. Everyone knows this, and naturally the scientists know it, for it is they who make the experiments. In spite of this, however, they declare that the lightning comes out of the clouds—and clouds are certainly wet!

If it were a fact that lightning comes out of the clouds, “someone” would have had to rub them long enough with a gigantic towel to make them quite dry! But the matter is not so simple. A stick of sealing wax is rubbed and electricity comes out of it; and so the clouds rub against one another and electricity comes out of them! But if the sealing wax is just slightly damp, electricity does not come out of it. And yet electricity is alleged to come out of the clouds—which are all moisture! This shows you what kind of nonsense is taught nowadays. The fact of the matter is this: You can heat air and it becomes hotter and hotter. Suppose you have this air in a closed container. The hotter you make the air, the greater is the pressure it exerts against the walls of the container. The hotter you make it, the sooner it reaches the point where, if the walls of the container are not strong enough, the hot air will burst them asunder. What's the usual reason for a child's balloon bursting? It's because the air rushes out of it. Now when the air becomes hot it acquires the density, the strength to burst. The lightning process originates in the vicinity of the earth; when the air gets hotter and hotter, it becomes strong enough to burst. At very high levels the air may for some reason become intensely hot—this can happen, for example, as the result of certain influences in winter when somewhere or other the air has been very strongly compressed. This intense heat will press out in all directions, just as the hot air will press against the sides of the container. But suppose you have a layer of warm air, and there is a current of wind sweeping away the air. The hot air streams toward the area where the air is thinnest.

Lightning is the heat generated in the air itself that makes its way to where there is a kind of hole in the surrounding air, because at that spot the air is thinnest. So we must say: Lightning is not caused by electricity, but by the fact that the air is getting rid of, emptying away, it's own heat.

Just because of this intensely violent movement, the electric currents that are always present in the air receive a stimulus. It is the lightning that stimulates electricity; lightning itself is not electricity.

All this shows you that warmth is differently distributed in the air everywhere; this again influences the weather. These are influences that come from the vicinity of the earth and operate there.

You will realize now how many things influence the weather and that today there are still no correct opinions about these influences—I have told you about the entirely distorted views that are held about lightning. A change must come about in this domain, for spiritual science, anthroposophy, surveys a much wider field and makes thinking more mobile.

We cannot, of course, expect the following to be verified in autopsies, but if one investigates with the methods of spiritual science, one finds that in the last hundred years human brains have become much stiffer, alarmingly stiffer, than they were formerly. One finds, for example, that the ancient Egyptians thought quite definite things, of which they were just as sure as we ourselves are sure of the things we think about. But today we are less able to understand things in the winter than in the summer. People pay no attention to such matters. If they would adjust themselves to the laws prevailing in the world, they would arrange life differently. In school, for instance, different subjects would be studied in the winter than in the summer. (This is already being done to some extent in the Waldorf School.)²⁴ It is not simply a matter of taking botany in the summer because the plants bloom then, but some of the subjects that are easier should be transferred to the winter, and some that are more difficult to the spring and autumn, because the power to understand depends upon this. It is because our brains are harder than men's brains were in earlier times. What we can think about in a real sense only in summer, the ancient Egyptians were able to think about all year round. Such things can be discovered when one observes the various matters connected with the seasons of the year and the weather.

Is there anything that is not clear? Are you satisfied with what has been said? I have answered the question at some length. The world is a living whole and in explaining one thing one is naturally led to other things, because everything is related.

Question: Herr Burle says that his friends may laugh at his question—he had mentioned the subject two or three years ago. He would like to know whether there is any truth in the saying that when sugar is put into a cup of coffee and it dissolves properly, there will be fine weather, and when it does not dissolve properly there will be bad weather.

Dr. Steiner: I have never made this experiment, so I don't know whether there is anything in it or not. But the fact of the sugar dissolving evenly or unevenly might indicate something—if, that is to say, there is anything in the statement at all. I speak quite hypothetically, because I don't know whether there is any foundation for the statement, but we will presume that there is.

There is something else that certainly has meaning, for I have observed it myself. What the weather is likely to be can be discovered by watching tree frogs, green tree frogs. I've made tiny ladders and observed whether they ran up or down. The tree frog is very sensitive to what the weather is going to be. This need not surprise you, for in certain places it has happened that animals in their stalls suddenly became restless and tried to get out; those that were not tethered ran away quickly. Human beings stayed where they were. And then there was an earthquake! The animals knew it beforehand, because something was already happening in nature in advance. Human beings with their crude noses and other crude senses do not detect anything, but animals do. So naturally the tree frog, too, has a definite “nose” for what is coming. The word Witterung (weather) is used in such a connection because it means “smelling” the weather that is coming.

Now there are many things in the human being of which he himself has no inkling. He simply does not observe them. When we get out of bed on a fine summer day and look out the window, we are in quite a different humor than when a storm is raging. We don't notice that this feeling penetrates to the tips of our fingers. What the animals sense, we also sense; it is only that we don't bring it up to our consciousness.

So just suppose, Herr Burle, that although you know nothing about it, your fingertips, like the tree frogs, have a delicate feeling for the kind of weather that is coming. On a day when the weather is obviously going to be fine and you are therefore in a good humor, you put the sugar into your coffee with a stronger movement than on another day. So the way the sugar dissolves does not necessarily depend upon the coffee or the sugar, but upon a force that is in yourself. The force I'm speaking of lies in your fingertips themselves; it is not the force that is connected with your consciously throwing the sugar into the coffee. It lies in your fingertips, and is not the same on a day when the weather is going to be fine as when the weather is going to be bad. So the dissolving of the sugar does not depend upon the way you consciously put it into your coffee but upon the feeling in your fingertips, upon how your fingertips are “sensing” the weather. This force in your fingertips is not the same as the force you are consciously applying when you put the sugar into your coffee. It is a different force, a different movement.

Think of the following: A group of people sits around a table; sentimental music, or perhaps the singing of a hymn, puts them into a suitable mood. Then delicate vibrations begin to stir in them. Music continues. The people begin to convey their vibrations to the table, and the table begins to dance. This is what may happen at a spiritualistic séance. Movements are set going as the effect of the delicate vibrations produced through the music and the singing. In a similar fashion the weather may also cause very subtle movements, and these in turn may influence what happens with the sugar in the coffee. But I am speaking quite hypothetically because, as I said, I don't know whether it is absolutely correct in the case of which you are speaking. It is more probable that it is a premonition which the person himself has about the weather that affects the sugar—although this is not very probable either. I am saying all this as pure hypothesis.

A spiritual scientist has to reject such phenomena until he possesses strict proof of their validity. If I were to tell you in a casual way the things I do tell you, you really wouldn't have to believe any of it. You should only believe me because you know that things which cannot be proved are not accepted by spiritual science. And so as a spiritual scientist I can only accept the story of the coffee if it is definitely proved. In the meantime I can make the comment that one knows, for instance, of the delicate vibrations of the nerves, also that this is how animals know beforehand of some impending event—how even the tree frog begins to tremble and then the leaves on which it sits also begin to tremble. So it could also be—I don't say that it is, but it could be—that when bad weather is coming, the coffee begins to behave differently from the way it behaves when the weather is good.

So—let us meet next Wednesday.²⁵ After that, I think we'll be able to have our sessions regularly again.

• 21. The “synodic” revolution, that is, the time between two successive conjunctions or oppositions to the sun, varies with Mars between 2 years 34 days and 2 years 80 days, the average time therefore being 2 years 50 days.
• 22. Matthias Jakob Schleiden, 1804–1881. Naturalist. Gustav Theodor Fechner, 1801–1887. Naturalist; founder of psychophysics. See his publication “Professor Schleiden und der Mond,” Leipzig 1856.
• 23. There is a period of 243 years 2 days in which the intervals between the Venus transits are 8 years, 121.5 years, 8 years and 105.5 years. The last transit took place December 6, 1882. According to astronomical calculation the next transit will be on June 7, 2004.
• 24. The Waldorf School, Stuttgart, Germany, opened in 1919 under Rudolf Steiner's guidance. There are now more than 300 schools in the international Waldorf School movement.
• 25. This lecture was postponed to Thursday, September 18th

What may be most comforting to us Germans in the hard-pressed situation in which we currently find ourselves is the awareness that our nation rests on foundations that can never be damaged by any external power. The German nation is one that is not dependent on physical means of power alone for its development. The "strong roots of our power" rest in the depths of the people's soul, which is not accessible to any opponent. And so we experience the joy that, while the external power and living conditions are decidedly unfavorable to us, German poetry is flourishing among us in a way that we have rarely experienced since classical times. The Germans of Austria have the good fortune to possess a poetic phenomenon whose poetry reaches the highest level of art and at the same time must be regarded as the most wonderful outflow of the German national spirit. The fact that we are dealing with a female poet is of no consequence. Those who do not know from the outset are simply like almost all critics: they consider M. E. delle Grazie - the name of our poetess - to be a pseudonym, and it does not even occur to them to think that the powerful Germanic figures of the epic "Hermann" - which is the most important achievement of the brilliant poetess - that this powerful language did not originate from a poet in her prime. We are dealing here with a powerful phenomenon. Delle Grazie is as original as only a spirit formed from the never-ending source of German essence can be, she is as powerful and deep in her characterization as only the German spirit with its loving immersion in the human heart and mind can be. She depicts the Roman depravity that confronts noble German morality with such bitterness as only the noble-minded German is capable of, who on his moral high ground knows no mercy for the unfair, for the bad, but only contempt. The poet has succeeded in creating characters in "Hermann" that are truly of the flesh and blood of our people. The whole poem is borne by the majesty of German sentiment, by the most beautiful idealism.

The sweet hope of all German sons
United in this heroic song;
I wrote it with the bold vigor of youth
You know the hot all-powerful urge,
My deepest love and my deepest love,
My own feeling rests in this song!

This is how the poet praises her work. She wants to send this deepest longing and feeling of hers to all German lands:

Go forth, O song, and glide boldly determined
Through all the tides that blue in the sea,
Welcome also those German shoots,
Who build their hut far away in the jungle.
Proclaim to them that in the homeland
The last chain breaks weak and powerless -
From the Alpine summit to the northern edge
Awaken the German courage, the German spirit!

It is the collapse of Roman rule through the youthful strength of the German people that the epic describes to us. Treachery and deceit fight against German nobility and German manly virtue. Struggle and victory are described with a poetic power that is unique to genius. The poet finds the right tone for every situation. No less for the scenes of battle than for the wonderful depictions of nature, which, when inserted in the right place, give the poetry its greatest advantage. It thus becomes a reflection of Germanic folk life, which also unfolded in an intimate alliance with nature. The crown of the poem, however, is the last song: Peace. Up to this point, Hermann has been presented to us as the hero with the highest martial virtues. Here, in the last canto, we get to know the other side of the German man. He immediately sheds all the roughness of the hero when selfless love pours into his heart. After the brilliant victory, Hermann's union with Thusnelda takes place.

The priest lifts his piously transfigured eyes
And now blesses the blissful couple...

"In autumn you fought with a bloody shield,
But today you are adorned with Freia's oak wreath!"

Surrounded by his warriors, the hero celebrates his marriage.

In battle he fought like a fierce warrior,
But now love transfigures his face
He gazes at the star-studded sky,
He raises the polished sword and speaks:
"May the Star of Concord never fade,
Its holy glimmer nourish our glow.
Freedom float over these lands
And direct our gaze heavenward,
Let the spirit of the ancestors tie all bonds
And sweeten our blurred ore of arms! Let love spread its golden wings,
Loyalty increase her gods' hoard
And victoriously through the wide fields ring
The German song, the free German word!"

The beautiful song concludes meaningfully with a dream of Hermann's: Germania, "the proud, shining Germania", appears to our hero and reveals the future to him. Here, the poet's brilliant imagination is revealed in the wonderful addition and interpretation she gives to the Balder saga. Our ancestors have created an uplifting divine figure in Balder. Balder is the god of love, of peace, who perished in the battle against evil. Germania announces to Hermann that this Balder will reappear:

"The god of peace will rise from death! He comes with his ether-bright shield,
When all the princes of heaven perish!"

She lets Balder, our dearest god, awaken again before his eyes "in the green legendary grove of the Orient".

Christus, then, is Balder, once overcome by evil, for whose return the German people longed because they already knew him, because they were prepared for him by their own legend of the gods. Is there a more beautiful way of expressing the idea that it was precisely the German people who were most receptive to pure, unadulterated Christianity, that this noblest of all cultural creations could never take root in the depraved world of the south because they were simply not receptive there? Christianity, transfigured by the Germanic essence, then appears to Hermann as the champion of a new culture that unites German love and the German spirit with the "beautiful form of the Greeks". The goddess then prophetically predicts to him:

"As long as the oaks lift their crowns,
The larks sing and the roses bloom
As long as you walk on light paths,
Surrounded by a golden ray of sky,
As long as the freedom of the Teutons lives,
As long as the German ideal triumphs!"

Delle Grazie is the singer of that love which expresses itself most purely in the selfless nature of the German. Her poetic mission is to show how pure human love is the source of all that is great, to show how all that is noble and good can ultimately be traced back to the victorious power of this love. What is so far apart in terms of subject matter, such as "Hermann" and the Old Testament story of "Saul", which she turned into a tragedy, is united by this fundamental trait of her poetry. Many objections have been raised against "Saul". But the most important thing has been little noticed. It is the tragic trait of a very special kind that delle Grazie knew how to put into the figure of Saul. In the midst of a people whose religion knows no freedom of spirit, Saul wants to unfurl the banner of love. He wants to oppose the dark Jehovah, the God of revenge and slavery, who does not love his people but only punishes them and is therefore not loved but only feared by them, with the God of nobler humanity. Saul senses Christianity, he senses the basic trait of it, which later found its symbol in the Redeemer, the "image of love-declared humanity". The hero must perish as a result. "Hermann" and "Saul" complement each other; they show how pure love unfolds in different times. That is what is significant about our poet, what is genuinely artistic, that it is problems that reach deep into the workings of the world that she seeks to solve in these, her two most important poems. The latter are followed by a small volume of "Poems". Of these, "The Nile", "Adam and Eve", "Thirst" and "Hashish" can be regarded as masterful. It is always a sign of a poet's original power when the imagination works in such a powerful way, as is the case with delle Grazie. The mere contemplation of a photograph of the ancient colossal statue "The Nile" in the Vatican allows the whole history of Egypt to pass before the poet's mind in the most marvelous poetic images. "Adam and Eve" is a magnificent myth that depicts the longing of the sexes for each other and the delight of the first meeting of man and woman, culminating in a thought of the most far-reaching significance. The voice of God resounds to the first human beings who find each other and see themselves in the midst of the most glorious creation:

I, I called this wonderful becoming,
I created the beautiful world, the vast sea.
I lifted the dark globe from the depths,
I gave the sun its golden glow,
Without me everything would lie lifeless and sleep,
Without me everything would be desolate and dark,
Everywhere are my blessed impulses,
Everywhere is the trace of my goodness.
I am the pure everlasting love,
I am the noble spirit of nature! But even if my works are beautiful and glorious,
You alone show all my power:
In your breast dwells all my strength,
In you I have kindled the holy spirit.

The view expressed in the poem "Thirst" is just as magnificent. It describes a journey through the desert. Merchants accompanied by slaves move across the vast sandy expanse. They are longing for an oasis. Not a drop of water has touched their tongues for a long time.

Full of sorrow and fear of death
The rich merchants look to the earth.

The whole terrible situation of the people is now described.

"O Allah, Allah, have mercy!"
O they cry out involuntarily, for already
They see in their minds their pale carcasses
Adorning the glowing ground of the desert.
...
"O joy, honor, happiness and wealth,
What are you in the face of death?" ...
"Oh how beautiful, oh how glorious
It is up here in the realm of golden light,
But you must go down
Into the cold, eerie darkness."

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So the rich merchants. But there are beings in the course who do not fear death, who see it as salvation. They are the slaves. They are not attached to earthly life, because: "What is life for them without freedom?" They feel a different "thirst" than their masters, they thirst for freedom.

Welcome to them is pale death,
They do not fear it, oh no,
They rejoice and cheer him! Perhaps that over there in his kingdom
The beautiful freedom blooms for them too.

The last of the poems in the collection, "Hashish", truly contains all the qualities of the highest poetic power. It shows us how the poet receives poetic consecration at the throne of God himself. The whole thing is a dream that leads her through infinite space directly to the seat of the divine. Poetic talent is revealed above all when the poet succeeds in transforming real objects into images of extraordinary beauty. For example, when she addresses the moon, which she reaches on her journey:

We are already near you, friendly moon,
And wonderfully, you seem quite different to me now
Than otherwise seen from a lofty vantage point
And scientifically described in many a book! [...] you are just a small gondola,
Shimmering through infinite space,
And all rapturous, enamored poets
To the beautiful realm of divine dreams!

The reader will have seen from the above where delle Grazie's significance lies: in the grandeur of his vision, in his German idealism and in a rich imagination that moves primarily in the regions of the spiritual. We must now mention a fourth of the poet's works, "The Gypsy Woman", a novella. It does not occur to us to defend the deficiency of form and the improbability of the situations in this little work. The son of a landowner is enchanted by the beauty of a girl from this gang at a party where a band of gypsies is providing music and dancing. This girl, an orphan, is not a real gypsy, even according to her comrades. They don't really know how she got into the gang. A rare phenomenon in a gypsy society: a very noble girl, capable of the most beautiful feelings, who has been passionately in love with the landowner's scion ever since they met. After some time, they meet again. The relationship continues, the girl is seduced and then abandoned. The unfaithful man marries Etelka, the daughter of a magistrate. When the couple is blessed by the priest, the gypsy woman appears, mad to assert the rights of her heart. She is thrown into prison. An old gypsy, whose fatherly advice she usually listens to, but not when the seducer approaches, frees her. The madwoman grabs the old man's dagger, rushes into the unfaithful man's house and murders him. She and her liberator flee, pursued by the lord of the manor's people. The old man is killed by a stone thrown at him, the girl plunges the dagger into her own heart.

In spite of all the shortcomings of this little work, if you want to be unbiased, you will find the heartfelt tones with which the poet knows how to depict human relationships and the conflicts they entail, even when they take place within a despised, neglected class of people.

If we consider that the creator of all this is only at the beginning of her twenties, then no assumption we make about the glorious things she will yet give our people will be too bold. In any case, it is the duty of every German who has a heart and mind for the education of his people to follow the development of this spirit. A nation that produces such blossoms has nothing to fear. Not of the present, not of the future. When we are told from some quarters that the German people have played their part and that it is now the turn of younger peoples, we reply: we have nothing ageing about us as long as such youthful life is developing in our midst.