The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Very early on, I was drawn to Kant. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, I studied Kant very intensively, and before I went to the University of Vienna, I occupied myself intensively with the orthodox followers of Kant from the beginning of the nineteenth century, who have been completely forgotten by the official history of science in Germany and are hardly ever mentioned anymore. Then I immersed myself in Fichte and Schelling. During this time — and this belongs already to the external occult influences — the conception of time became completely clear. This realization had no connection with the studies and was directed entirely from occult life. It was the realization that there is a backward-going evolution interfering with the forward-going evolution — the occult-astral one. This realization is the condition for spiritual vision.

Then came the acquaintance with the agent of the Master.

Then an intensive study of Hegel.

Then the study of the newer philosophy as it had been developing in Germany since the 1850s, namely the so-called theory of knowledge in all its ramifications.

My childhood passed without anyone outwardly intending to do so, so that I never encountered anyone with a superstition; and when someone around me spoke of superstitions, it was always with a strongly emphasized rejection. I did get to know the church cultus, as I was called upon to assist at cultic services as an altar boy, but nowhere, not even among the priests I met, was there any real piety or religiosity. Instead, certain dark sides of the Catholic clergy kept coming to my attention.

I did not meet the master immediately, but first one of his disciples, who was completely initiated into the secrets of the effectiveness of all plants and their connection with the cosmos and with human nature. For him, dealing with the spirits of nature was something that was taken for granted, and it was presented without enthusiasm, but it aroused all the more enthusiasm.

The official studies were directed towards mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology, botany, mineralogy and geology. These studies offered a much more secure foundation for a spiritual world view than, for example, history or literature, which, in the absence of a specific method and also without significant prospects in the German scientific community at the time, stood there.

During his first years at university in Vienna, he met Karl Julius Schröer. At first, I attended his lectures on the history of German poetry since Goethe's first appearance, on Goethe and Schiller, on the history of German poetry in the 19th century, on Goethe's “Faust”. I also took part in his “exercises in oral and written presentation”. It was a kind of college college based on Uhland's institution at the University of Tübingen. Schröer came from German language research, had done significant studies on German dialects in Austria, he was a researcher in the style of the Brothers Grimm and in literary research an admirer of Gervinus. He was previously director of the Viennese Protestant schools. He is the son of the poet and extraordinarily meritorious pedagogue Christian] Oeser. At the time I got to know him, he was turning entirely to Goethe. He has written a widely read commentary on Goethe's “Faust” and also on Goethe's other dramas. He completed his studies at the German universities of Leipzig, Halle and Berlin before the decline of German idealism. He was a living embodiment of the noble German education. In him, the human being attracted. I soon became friends with him and was then often in his house. With him it was like an idealistic oasis in the dry materialistic German educational desert. In the external life, this time was filled with the nationality struggles in Austria. Schröer himself was far from science.

But I myself had been working since early 1880 on Goethe's scientific studies.

Then Joseph Kürschner founded the comprehensive work “Deutsche National-Literatur” (German National Literature), for which Schröer edited Goethe's dramas with introductions and commentaries. Kürschner, on Schröer's recommendation, entrusted me with the edition of Goethe's scientific writings.

Schröer wrote a preface for it, through which he introduced me to the literary public.

Within this collection, I wrote introductions to Goethe's botany, zoology, geology and color theory.

Anyone reading these introductions will be able to find the theosophical ideas in the guise of a philosophical idealism.

It also includes an examination of Haeckel.

My 1886 work, Erkenntnistheorie, is a philosophical supplement to this.

Then, through my acquaintance with the Austrian poet M. E. delle Grazie, who had a fatherly friend in Professor Laurenz Müllner, I was introduced to the circles of Viennese theological professors. Marie Eugenie delle Grazie has written a great epic “Robespierre” and a drama “Shadow”.

At the end of the 1880s, I became an editor of the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna for a short time. This gave me the opportunity to study the national psyche of the various Austrian nationalities in depth. The guiding thread for an intellectual cultural policy had to be found.

In all this there was no question of publicly emphasizing occult ideas. And the occult powers behind me gave me only one piece of advice: “All in the guise of idealistic philosophy”.

All this went hand in hand with my more than fifteen years of work as an educator and private teacher. My first contact with Viennese theosophical circles at the end of the 1880s had no lasting external effect.

During my last months in Vienna, I wrote my small paper: “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic”.

Then I was called to the then newly established “Goethe and Schiller Archives” in Weimar to edit Goethe's scientific writings. I did not have an official position at this archive; I was merely a contributor to the great “Sophien Edition” of Goethe's works.

My next goal was to lay the purely philosophical foundations of my world view. This was done in the two works: “Truth and Science” and “Philosophy of Freedom”.

The Goethe and Schiller Archives were visited by a large number of scholars and literary figures, as well as other personalities from Germany and abroad. I got to know some of these personalities better because I soon became friends with the director of the Goethe and Schiller Archives, Prof. Bernhard Suphan, and visited his house a lot. Suphan invited me to many private visits that he had from visitors to the archives. It was on one of these occasions that I met Treitschke.

But the friendship I formed soon after with the German mythologist Ludwig Laistner, the author of “Riddle of the Sphynx,” was much deeper. I had repeated conversations with Herman Grimm, who spoke to me a great deal about his uncompleted work, a “History of German Imagination.”

Then came the Nietzsche episode. Shortly before, I had even written about Nietzsche in an opposing sense.

My occult powers pointed out to me the need to let my interest in the true spiritual flow unnoticed into the currents of the times. One does not arrive at knowledge by wanting to assert one's own point of view absolutely, but by immersing oneself in foreign currents of thought.

Thus I wrote my book on Nietzsche by placing myself entirely in Nietzsche's point of view. It is perhaps for this very reason the most objective book on Nietzsche in Germany. Nietzsche as an anti-Wagnerian and an anti-Christian is also fully represented.

For some time I was considered the most uncompromising “Nietzschean.”

At that time the “Society for Ethical Culture” was founded in Germany. This society wanted a morality with complete indifference to all worldviews. A complete construct and a danger to education. I wrote a sharp article against this foundation in the weekly “Die Zukunft”.

The result was sharp replies. And my previous study of Nietzsche led to the publication of a pamphlet against me: “Nietzsche-Narren” (Nietzsche Fools).

The occult standpoint demands: “No unnecessary polemic” and “Avoid defending yourself wherever you can”.

I calmly wrote my book, “Goethe's World View,” which marked the end of my Weimar period.

Immediately after my article in “Zukunft,” Haeckel approached me. Two weeks later, he wrote an article in “Zukunft” in which he publicly acknowledged my point of view that ethics can only arise on the basis of a worldview.

Not long after that was Haeckel's 60th birthday, which was celebrated as a great festivity in Jena. Haeckel's friends invited me. That was the first time I saw Haeckel. His personality is enchanting. In person, he is the complete opposite of the tone of his writings. If Haeckel had ever studied philosophy, in which he is not just a dilettante but a child, he would certainly have drawn the highest spiritualistic conclusions from his epoch-making phylogenetic studies.

Now, despite all of German philosophy, despite all of Haeckel's other German education, Haeckel's phylogenetic thought is the most significant achievement of German intellectual life in the second half of the nineteenth century. And there is no better scientific foundation of occultism than Haeckel's teaching. Haeckel's teaching is great and Haeckel is the worst commentator on this teaching. It is not by showing Haeckel's contemporaries his weaknesses that one benefits culture, but by presenting to them the greatness of Haeckel's phylogenetic ideas. I did this in the two volumes of my:

“Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century), which are also dedicated to Haeckel, and in my small work: “Haeckel and his opponents”.

In Haeckel's phylogeny, only the time of the German intellectual life actually lives; philosophy is in a state of the most desolate infertility, theology is a hypocritical fabric that is not remotely aware of its untruthfulness, and the sciences, despite the great empirical upsurge, have fallen into the most barren philosophical ignorance.

From 1890 to 1897 I was in Weimar.

In 1897 I went to Berlin as editor of the “Magazine for Literature”. The writings “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century) and “Haeckel und seine Gegner” (Haeckel and his Opponents) already belong to the Berlin period.

My next task was to bring an intellectual current to bear in literature. I placed the Magazin für Literatur at the service of this task. It was a long-established organ that had existed since 1832 and had gone through various phases.

I gently and slowly led it in the direction of esotericism. Carefully but distinctly, by writing an essay for the 150th anniversary of Goethe's birth, “Goethe's Secret Revelation,” which only reflected what I had already hinted at in a public lecture in Vienna about Goethe's fairy tale of the “green snake and the beautiful lily”.

It was only natural that a circle of readers should gradually gather around the direction I had inaugurated in the Magazin. They did gather, but not quickly enough for the publisher to consider the venture financially promising. I wanted to give the young literary movement an intellectual foundation and was actually in the most lively contact with the most promising representatives of this movement. But on the one hand I was abandoned; on the other hand, this direction soon either sank into insignificance or into naturalism.

Meanwhile, contact with the working class had already been established. I had become a teacher at the Berlin Workers' Education School. I taught history and natural science. My thoroughly idealistic history method and my way of teaching soon became both appealing and understandable to the workers. My audience grew. I was invited to give a lecture almost every evening.

Then the time came when I, in agreement with the occult forces behind me, could say: You have given the philosophical foundation of the world view, you have shown an understanding of the currents of the time by treating them as only a complete believer could treat them; no one will be able to say: This occultist speaks of the spiritual world because he is ignorant of the philosophical and scientific achievements of the time.

I had now also reached the fortieth year, before the onset of which, in the sense of the masters, no one may publicly appear as a teacher of occultism. (Wherever someone teaches earlier, there is an error).

Now I could devote myself to Theosophy publicly.

The next consequence was that, at the urging of certain leaders of German socialism, a general assembly of the Workers' Educational School was convened to decide between Marxism and me. But the ostracism did not decide against me. In the general assembly, it was decided with all against only four votes to keep me on as a teacher.

But the terrorism of the leaders meant that I had to resign after three months. In order not to compromise themselves, they wrapped the matter up in the pretext that I was too busy with the Theosophical movement to have enough time for the labor school in.

Miss v. Sivers was at my side almost from the beginning of the theosophical work. She also personally witnessed the last phases of my relationship with the Berlin laborers.

Today we will take as our subject the different ranks of beings to which man belongs. Man, as he is at present is a developing being who was not always as he is now. There are not only stages of development lying before and behind him, but also beings co-existent with him, just as the child today has the old man beside him who is at another stage of development. Today we will deal with seven ranks of beings, and in this connection we must clearly differentiate between receptive and creative beings.

Let us take as an example a colour which we perceive with our eyes, for instance red or green. In this respect we are receptive beings. The colour must however first be produced in order that we may perceive it; we must therefore be confronted with another being who produces the colour, for instance red. Through this we recognise the different stages of beings. If we put together everything which approaches our senses, there must also be a soul to receive it; but conversely something must also be present in order that the sense impressions may be brought to us. There are beings who can manifest. These have a more god-like or deva-character. Beings whose nature is more adapted to receiving have a more element[al] character. God-like beings are of a manifesting nature. Elemental beings are of a receptive nature.

Here, in this domain, we have the creative wisdom which manifests outwardly, and the wisdom which is received by the human soul. Wisdom is in the light and discloses itself in all sense impressions. Behind what is revealed we must assume the revealers, beings of will nature; wisdom is that which is revealed.

Man is both receptive and creative. On the one hand, for instance with regard to all sense impressions, he is receptive, with regard to thinking however he is creative. Nothing gives rise to thoughts unless he first produces perceptions. Thus he is on the one hand a receptive being and on the other hand a creative being. This is an important difference. Let us imagine that man were to be in a position to create everything he perceives, sounds, colours and so on, just as today he creates thoughts. Today he is only creative in one sphere, in thinking, and in order to have perceptions he needs creative beings around him. In bringing forth his own being he was at first creative. In the beginning he himself created his own organism. For this he now needs other beings. Now man must incarnate in a bodily form determined from outside. Here he is closer to the elemental beings than to the sphere of perception and thinking.

Let us imagine for once that man were able to bring forth sounds, colours and other sense perceptions and also his own being. Then we should have the human being as he was before the Lemurian race, who is called the “pure” man. Man becomes impure through the fact that he does not produce his own being, but incorporates something other into his nature. This pure man was called Adam Cadmon. When at the beginning of Genesis the Bible speaks of man, it speaks of this pure human being. This human being had as yet nothing kamic (astral) within him. Desire first appeared after he had incorporated other elements into himself. Thus there arose the second stage of humanity, the kama-rupic man (man with an astral body). The higher animal is to be seen as at a lower stage of this development. Without warm blood no beings can possess an independent Kama-rupa (astral body). All warm-blooded animals are derived from man.

Thus to begin with we have the pure man who up to the Lemurian Age actually led a super-sensible existence and brought forth out of himself everything that lived and was part of him.

Present day cold-blooded animals and the plants have developed in a different way from the warm-blooded animals. Those which exist today are remnants of strange, gigantic beings. Some of these can be verified by science. They are decadent animals which are descended from those which the pure man made use of in order to incarnate in them, so that he might have a body for what is kamic (astral). At first the pure man had found no means of incarnating on the earth. He still hovered above what was manifested. From among these huge, powerful beings (animals) man made use of the most developed in order to incarnate in them. He attached himself to these beings and thereby he was in a position to bring into them his own Kama (astral body). Some of these beings developed further and then became the animals of Atlantis and present day humanity. However it was not possible for all of them to adapt themselves. Those who failed became the lower vertebrate animals; kangaroos for instance are such attempts as proved unsuccessful on the way to becoming man—like pottery vessels which are rejected and left behind.

Now man tried to introduce Kama into the animal forms. Kama is first to be found in the human form, in actual fact in the heart, in the warm blood and in the circulation of the blood. Attempts were made again and again and in this way there was an ascent from stage to stage. We see unsuccessful attempts for instance in the sloths, the kangaroos, the beasts of prey, the monkeys and apes. All these remained behind on the way. The warm-blooded animals are unsuccessful attempts to become human forms endowed with Kama. Everything in them which is of the nature of Kama, man also could have within himself; but he unloaded it into them, for he was unable to use this kind of Kama. There is an important occult axiom: Every quality has two opposite poles. So we find, just as positive and negative electricity complement one another, so we have warmth and cold, day and night, light and darkness and so on. In the same way every Kamic quality also has two opposite aspects. For instance man has cast rage out of himself into the lion, and this, on the other hand, when ennobled by him, can lead him upward to his higher self. Passion should not be annihilated, but purified. The negative pole must be led upwards to a higher stage. This purifying of passion, this leading upwards of its negative aspect was called by the Pythagoreans catharsis. At first man had within him the rage of the lion and the cunning of the fox. Thus the kingdom of the warm-blooded animals is a comprehensive picture of Kama qualities. Today the opinion is commonly held that the ‘Tat twam asi’ (‘That art thou’), is to be understood as something general and undefined, but one must conceive something quite definite underlying it. Thus in the case of the lion man must say to himself: That art thou. We have therefore in the kingdom of the warm-blooded animals spread out before us the kama-rupic human being. Previously there only existed the pure man: Adam Cadmon.

The philosopher of natural science, Oken, who in the first half of the 19th century was a professor in Jena, was acquainted with all these ideas and expressed them in a grotesque way in order to nudge people to attention. Here we find an example which points to a still earlier stage of human development, before man separated off from himself the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals. Oken connected the cuttlefish with the human tongue. In this analogy of the tongue with the cuttlefish one can find an occult significance. Now we also have beings who for the first time are, as it were, being conjured up as by-products. Man has ejected from himself the cunning of the fox and retained its opposite pole. In the fox's cunning however the germ of something else is beginning to develop, for example something similar to the way in which the black shadow of an object has a secondary shadow when light enters it from outside. We incorporated cunning into the fox out of our inner being. Now spirit is directed towards him from the periphery. The beings which in this way work from the periphery into what is kamic are elemental beings. What the fox has received from us, is in him animal; what coming from outside attaches itself to him from the spirit, is elemental being. On the one hand he originated through the spirit of humanity and on the other hand through an Elemental being.

Thus we differentiate: firstly, elemental beings, secondly, the kama-rupic man, thirdly, the pure man, fourthly, the man who in a certain respect has overcome the pure man, who has taken into himself what is outside and around him and is creatively active. He has contacted and taken into himself everything which is around him in earthly existence. This gives him the plans, the directions, the laws which create life. Once man was perfect and he will become so again. But there is a great difference between what he was and what he will become. What is around him in the outer world will later become his spiritual possession. What he has won for himself on the Earth will later become the faculty of being creatively active. This will then have become his innermost being. One who has absorbed all earthly experiences, so that he knows how to make use of every single thing and has thus become a creator, is called a Bodhisattva, which means a man who has taken into himself to a sufficient degree the Bodhi, the Buddhi of the earth. Then he is advanced enough to work creatively out of his innermost impulses. The wise men of the earth are not yet Bodhisattvas.²⁴ Even for such a one there always remain things to which he is still unable to orient himself. Only when one has absorbed into oneself the entire knowledge of the Earth, in order to be able to create, only then is one a Bodhisattva; Buddha, Zarathustra, for example, were Bodhisattvas.

When man ascends still further in evolution, so that he is not only a creator on the Earth, but possesses forces which reach out above the Earth, only then is he free to choose either to use these higher forces or to work further with them on the Earth. In this case he can bring into the Earth something coming from higher worlds. Such an epoch occurred before man began to incarnate, in the last third of the Lemurian Age. The human being had developed his physical, etheric and astral bodies. He had brought these members of his being with him from an earlier Earth evolution. The two next impulses, Kama and Manas, he could not have found on the Earth; they do not lie in its evolutionary sequence. The first new impulse (Kama) was only to be found as a force on Mars. It was added shortly before man incarnated. The second impulse (Manas) came from Mercury in the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans, with the original Semites. The stimulus of these new principles had to be brought to the Earth from other planets through still higher beings, through the Nirmana-kayas. From Mars they added Kama, from Mercury Manas. The Nirmana-kayas are yet another stage higher than the Bodhisattvas. The latter are able to order evolution which has continuity; but they cannot bring into it what comes from other regions, this can only be done by the Nirmana-kayas. [In] yet another stage higher than the Nirmana-kayas, stand those beings who are called Pitris. Pitris = Fathers. For the Nirmana-kayas can indeed bring something coming from other regions into evolution, but they cannot sacrifice themselves, sacrifice themselves as substance, so that on the following planet they can bring forth a new cycle. This can be done by the Pitris, beings who had evolved on the Moon and had now come over; they became the activating impulse towards Earth evolution. When man has gone through every possible experience, then he is in a position to become a Pitri. The next and even higher stage, the last that it is possible to mention, is that of the Gods themselves.

Thus we have seven ranks of beings: Firstly the Gods, secondly Pitris, thirdly Nirmana-kayas, fourthly Bodhisattvas, fifthly pure human beings, sixthly human beings, seventhly elemental beings. This is the sequence of which Helena Petrovna Blavatsky speaks.

Now we can add the question: What kind of organ is it which has made man kama-rupic? It is the heart with the veins and the blood that pulsates through the body. The heart has a physical part and an etheric part. Aristotle²⁵ speaks about this, for in earlier times it was only the etheric man which was held to be important. The heart has also an astral part. The etheric heart is connected with the twelve-petalled lotus flower. Not all the physical organs have an astral part; for example the gall bladder is only physical and etheric, the astral is lacking.

• 24. See: The Christ Impulse and the Development of the Ego Consciousness, lecture 1, 25.10.1909 and From Buddha to Christ 21.9.1911.
• 25. Here Rudolf Steiner is presumably referring to the minor scientific writings (Parva naturalia) ‘On Youth and Age, Life and Death’.

If we consider man's being in its entirety we have to begin with the physical body, then the etheric, then the astral body. The physical body of man can be seen by everyone. The etheric body becomes visible when the physical body is suggested away by a strong act of will. Then the space of the physical body remains filled with the etheric body. The occultist considers the etheric as actually being the lowest body. It is the body according to which the physical body is formed. Taking the descending line, the form of the etheric body is the reverse of the physical. It is only in the ascending line that they are identical. A woman has a masculine etheric body and a man a feminine etheric body.

Around the etheric body appears the astral body. It is the outer form for the entire content of the soul; for passions, emotions, impulses, desires, joy, unhappiness, enthusiasm and so on. It manifests itself in forms of every description. The surrounding part shows cloud formations; it radiates the most varied colours. Frequently somewhat tattered formations are attached to it. The forms and colours are different and changing. Green shows sympathy and compassion for one's fellow men. The lower levels of the population show much red in the astral body, brownish red, brick red, blood red. Especially with droshky-drivers one can see such a red, indicative of the lower passions.

With every human being all the fluctuations of the astral body are enclosed in an egg-shaped sheath. This has an underlying blue colour and shows, as an important factor, a dark violet spot in the middle of the brain. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky calls this egg-shaped sheath the auric egg. In the case of little children the auric egg is predominant; in their case many bright, luminous clouds of colour appear within it. In the lower parts however little children also have dark clouds, indicating lower impulses. This is the inherited Karma that they have in common with their ancestors—‘the sins of the fathers’. These sins of the fathers are inherited down to the seventh generation. People's characteristics can be traced back as far as the seventh generation of forefathers. After the seventh generation heredity dies out. One reckons three generations to a century. The man of today therefore still shows certain good or bad qualities coming from what was good or bad in his ancestors of the 17th century. Thus one can look backwards on one's forefathers as far as two hundred years or rather more.

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To see how the auric egg has been formed we must consider the development of a cosmic body. The condition of the Earth lying nearest to our present studies is characterised as the physical condition. In Theosophical literature a condition of form is called a Globe and one therefore speaks of the physical Globe. As physical Globe the Earth is the fourth Globe in a development of seven states of being. Three other conditions preceded the physical Globe and a further three are still to follow. Before the Earth became physical it was astral. Everything living upon Earth was at that time present only in the astral. When man has gone through the Sixth and Seventh Root-Races (epochs) he will have become so spiritualised that he will again have an astral form. This future astral condition of form however will contain all the fruits of evolution.

Seven conditions of form together make up a Round. At the present time the Earth is going through its fourth Round and this is the mineral. During this time it is the task of mankind to work upon the mineral kingdom. A man is already working on the mineral kingdom when he takes a flint and hammers it into a wedge-shaped tool with which he makes other objects, when he transports rocks and builds pyramids out of the stones, when he makes tools out of metals, when he conducts electric current in a network over the earth; in all this man is working upon the mineral kingdom. Thus man puts into service the whole mineral kingdom. He makes the Earth into something entirely of his own devising. When the painter turns his mind to a combination of colours he is also working upon the mineral kingdom. We are now in the midst of this activity, and in the course of the next races (epochs) the Earth will have become completely transformed, so that eventually there will be no single atom on the earth that has not been worked upon by man. In earlier times these atoms became more and more solidified; now however they are becoming increasingly separated. Radioactivity did not exist in earlier times and could not therefore be discovered. It has only existed for a few thousand years, because now the atoms split up more and more.

When the Fourth Round comes to an end the entire mineral kingdom will have been worked upon by the hand of man. When it has been completely worked through by man, then, in order that the fruits of this work can be manifested, the Earth must pass over into an astral condition in which forms can develop. The Earth then passes over into a Mental Globe and then into the Higher Mental condition, the Arupic. It then disappears altogether out of these conditions into a shorter Pralaya. It then enters once more into a new Arupic condition, that of the next, the Fifth Round; then into a Rupic condition and then into an astral condition. After this it appears physically once more. Everything which man worked into the mineral kingdom during the Fourth Round reappears and grows up as the plant kingdom; for instance [the] Cologne cathedral will appear as a plant in the next Round.

Between the last Arupic condition of the Fourth Round and the first Arupic condition of the Fifth Round the earth goes through a Pralaya. Then in the Fifth Round the previous mineral kingdom appears in all its forms as the plant kingdom. In the Arupic condition of the Fifth Round everything is contained that man has worked over in the mineral Round. At first this reappears in the Arupic condition in the pure Akasha. This condition is in fact called ‘Akasha’. In the beginning of each new Round everything is to be found in the Akasha; later there are only imprints. Thus in these imprints we have the whole Earth with all its beings. In the transition from the Third to the Fourth Round, all the beings which came into existence in the Third Round also reappear.

With further development out of the Akasha everything has to assume a denser form. This takes place in the Rupa condition of the earth. This more material form is called in occultism, for example in certain passages from H.P. Blavatsky, the ether. In this Ether-Earth everything is contained. All beings were contained in thought, but nevertheless in the background the Akasha exists as a foundation. The ether densifies further to the Astral Light. In this Astral Light radiates the third Globe (condition of form), the Astral-Earth; it radiates in the purest Astral Light, and this Astral Light is in fact entirely composed of the same substance in which later man's auric egg shines out. This is especially the case with quite young children who are only a few months old. After this the Earth passes over into its present physical condition. Then, as the actual Earth, it becomes ever more and more physical. In the same degree however in which it becomes ever more physical, it separates off from itself the individual auric eggs for mankind. These differentiate themselves as though, in a vessel filled with water, one part of the water freezes to ice while the other part rises up in pearl-like water drops. Thus on the one side the physical earth separates off and on the other side the auric eggs become, as it were, pearl-like drops for human evolution.

At first the auric egg seems to be undifferentiated. Actually however it is not undifferentiated. It may be compared with the following: If we have a solution of cooking salt it appears as a uniform grayish mass; if we let it stand the beautiful cubic crystals of salt are precipitated. In the auric egg those forces were inherent which produced the etheric body, the Linga Sharira. Out of what became solid earth there also emerged later what had already gone through a development on the Old Moon. This contained as predisposition what eventually became the lower kingdoms as far as the first vertebrates, up to the snake. The vertebrate animals which followed were not there on the Old Moon; they were first added on the Earth. Thus the invertebrate animals emerged from the Earth when it densified to a physical condition, as did also the plants and mineral kingdom.

At the time when all these separated forms had emerged, mankind had entered into the Lemurian Age. The ever densifying human being developed from the first, the Polarian race, to the race of the Hyperboreans. This was followed by the Lemurian Age; it was then that the development of the vertebrate animals entered its first stage, and it is from that time that they have continued to evolve.

So we have to distinguish: firstly Akasha, secondly Ether, thirdly Astral Light, fourthly Earth, fifthly the Auric Egg.

This is called a spiral (Wirbel). Until the Earth stage, the fourth condition of form, the Earth became ever denser. At the price of this increasing densification, the Astral Light became individualised after the solid had thrust itself out. The Auric Eggs of human beings are the individualised Astral Light. One can therefore read in the Astral Light, not the deeds, but the emotions bound up with them; these one can read in the Astral Light. For example, Caesar conceived the idea of crossing the Rubicon and this roused in him certain feelings and desires. What took place at that time corresponds to a combination of astral impulses. The physical deeds on the physical plane have vanished for all eternity. Caesar's advance can no longer be seen in the Astral Light, but the impulse which drove him to it has remained there. The karmic (astral) correlations with what takes place on the physical plane remain in the Astral Light. One must accustom oneself to look away from all physical perceptions and only to see the karmic impulses. One must hold fast to these and consciously transpose them back into the physical. There is no purpose in looking for something which might be seen, as though one were looking at a photograph.

The greatest impulses of world history can however no longer be read in the Astral Light, for the impulses of the great initiates were passionless. Whoever therefore reads only in the Astral Light, for him the whole work of the initiates is absent: for example the content of the book ‘The Great Initiates’ by Edouard Schuré could not have been found in the Astral Light. Such impressions are only inscribed in the Ether. What one can read in the Astral Light in connection with what the initiates have done is based on an illusion, because one can only read the results of the lives of the great initiates in the impulses of their pupils. Pupils and even entire peoples have experienced strong and passionate emotions in regard to the actions of the great initiates and these have remained in the Astral Light. But it is so difficult to study the deepest motives of the great initiates because they are only present in the ether.

Cosmic events—metamorphoses such as those of Atlantis—remain at a still higher level, no longer in the Ether, but in the actual Akasha. That is the Akashic Chronicle. This latter is nevertheless connected in a certain way with the most earthly concerns of mankind. For the human being is connected with the great happenings of the Cosmos. Every single person is to be found sketched, as it were, in the Akashic Chronicle. What is present there continues further and works its way into the Ether and the Astral Light. The individual human being becomes ever more clearly discernible the more one seeks for him in the lower spheres. And one must study all these spheres in order to understand the real mechanism of Karma.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to briefly handle the questions that are burdening you. That is why I have called you together today. Are there any further questions?

A teacher: The school inspector has made an appointment for February. He would like to have a report on the teaching.

Dr. Steiner: You should keep the report as brief as possible. Certainly do not write a book, but something more like your lesson plans, containing only notes like, “binomial theorem” or “permutations.” Keep strictly to the subject.

You need to assume that such an official would view any diversion as incorrect, and that additional remarks would only make him angry. You need to assume that he has only a small amount of capacity within his soul. That is something officials cannot have due to their position. If you provide him with a long discourse that is different from the normal elementary school curriculum, you will be beating him over the head. We should never believe we could ever satisfy such people, really. Our position in regard to such people should be that we simply tell them that we do such and such. There is no reason to hope there will be any sort of insight from that side. There is more reason for hope in anyone other than a professional educator. It is better to tell how far you are, and what you have done, and leave out any other remarks.

A teacher: N.G. would like to attend school only for a half day and to use the remainder of the day to work on mechanical drawing.

Dr. Steiner: He is in the tenth grade. Of course, something of that sort could not be considered in the lower eight grades, but beginning only with the ninth grade. In such cases, we could look into the question of whether we accept part-time students who would only attend a few periods. That might be possible. He would, of course, not be a regular student, but only an auditor. We might even be able to see this as a solution to a more general problem. Those in a similar situation could attend the school as auditors.

A teacher: Should we put T.H. in the remedial class and have him attend the other subjects afterward?

Dr. Steiner: Put him in the remedial class, but then send him home after ten o’clock.

A teacher: The Independent Youth Group has asked about a pedagogical course in Jena over Easter.

Dr. Steiner: That depends upon what you want, and what you can do. Which of you in the faculty would and could do something? It would be good if we could propagate what we can refer to as “the Waldorf School Idea” and, in particular, if it would take root among younger people. It would be a good idea if the Waldorf School idea could become more widespread, so that people would see the Waldorf School as something special, something great.

A teacher: Wouldn’t it be better if we began something?

Dr. Steiner: That’s true, and if you can create something independent and win over youth for it, that would certainly be preferable. Without winning over youth, there is not much we can accomplish in the area of pedagogy. We need to win over youth, especially those in the youth movement. On the other hand, I have no doubt that if the youth movement in Jena approaches the Waldorf faculty, you would not be any less independent than if you were to begin it yourselves. What is important is what you do, and how you present yourselves. I think you could accomplish a great deal with such things.

I think that in something like that movement, we should not be overly concerned about the direction. Perhaps you know the wellknown anecdote about Bismarck. We could also apply it, with some reservations, to the Waldorf School movement. Here I am referring to the story about how Bismarck was invited to certain royal festivities simply because of his official position. As a not very high-born country squire, he could not sit at the high table, [but as High Chancellor, he sat with the Crown Prince]. But, when Mrs. Bismarck [who was a commoner] went along, members of the royal court complained that the Bismarcks should not sit up front at the high table. They went so far as to send the ceremonial master to Bismarck, but nothing could be done. Bismarck’s official position was such that he was entitled to sit closer, but nothing could be done about Mrs. Bismarck. Bismarck then said, “Well, you know, my wife sits where I sit, and you can seat me wherever you want. Wherever I sit is always the highest position.” I think that is similar to our own case. What is important is what we do. Is there anything more to say about individual students or classes?

A teacher asks about L.R. in the fourth grade. He had expressed some suicidal thoughts.

Dr. Steiner: He would be ripe for the remedial class, but let’s leave him in your class until I have seen him.

A teacher: The health of one of the first grade classes is very poor.

Dr. Steiner: In this class are the first children born during the war. However, since the children were simply divided according to the alphabet and the other first grade class is healthier, external circumstances could not be the only cause of the poor health in the class. The problem is in the humidity in the classroom and the heating.

A teacher: There are bad family situations.

Dr. Steiner: Among the children there are the most unfortunate circumstances, and these are then transmitted on to the others. There is not much we can change. However, we could improve the heating. Central heating would be best. We should try to do that. That is something we must do as part of the new construction.

A teacher speaks about D.M. in seventh-grade Latin class.

Dr. Steiner: You certainly accomplished a great deal with those you had today in Latin. You went through the entire reading from the beginning. That is quite good. They learned a relatively large amount. Who is this D.M.?

A teacher says something about the student.

Dr. Steiner: That’s the boy on the left toward the back. Now I remember.

A teacher: He likes to write with Greek letters, but doesn’t know what they mean.

Dr. Steiner: You should try to bring him away from that through something artistic. For instance, you could have him draw a top in a number of colors, red, orange, yellow, green, all seven. Then have him try to blend red into this so that he would have to use his intellect in connection with art. It is difficult to spend so much time with one boy, but you could also try to have him divide things into, say, subject, verb and object, and so forth, that can be exchanged with one another. In other words, have him do something that brings the intellect and art together. That might help. You could occupy him with such things.

A teacher: I am trying it with Amos Comenius.

Dr. Steiner: That is a good idea. You need to make it quite visible, so that both his intelligence and perception unite in it.

A teacher: I have completed La Fontaine’s Tales in the seventh grade. Some of them are rather suspect morally.

Dr. Steiner: Make a joke about that. You need to treat them as stories.

A teacher: It appears to me that La Fontaine is lacking in humor.

Dr. Steiner: You must create the humor from yourself, but, in certain situations, you can just as easily create a great deal of misunderstandings. What is important is that you attempt to be one with him. When you are done with him, I would undertake one of the major prose works. You could certainly do Mignet with those children.

A teacher: Should we do The Tempest after A Christmas Carol? Another teacher: I did The Tempest with each child taking a role.

Dr. Steiner: That is a real pedagogical problem. It depends upon how you do it. The children have the material, but they experience nothing more. On the other hand, this may be the best way of bringing them into the spirit of the language.

A teacher: I wanted to read Jules Verne with my ninth grade.

Dr. Steiner: I have nothing against Jules Verne if you treat him in such a way that the children do not become silly about it. But, you can certainly do it.

A teacher: Do you recommend that we do some short stories?

Dr. Steiner: That’s good for thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds. It is also what I meant when I mentioned Mignet. In English and French, you need to find some characteristic pieces to read.

A teacher: For economic reasons, we may need to use the school editions.

Dr. Steiner: You can obtain the material wherever you want. The main thing is that each student has their own book. Often, the school texts are simply poison for children. What is in the lower grade school books is often just terrible.

A teacher: K. was here for two years, and now he is leaving with very little knowledge. What kind of report should I give him?

Dr. Steiner: Write the truth in his report. Give the exact reasons why he is lagging behind. You can write all of that in it. You cannot keep him here. One day, the light will go on for him.

A teacher: You gave Biblical stories as the story material for the third grade. I don’t know how I should do that.

Dr. Steiner: Look at one of the older Catholic editions of the Bible. You can see there how to tell the stories. They are very well done, but of course you will have to do it still better. Here you have the opportunity to improve upon the terrible material in Luther’s translation. The best would be to use the Catholic translation of the Bible. In addition, I would recommend that you work somewhat with the translations before Luther’s, so that you can get past all of those myths about Luther’s Bible translation. There is something really wrong about all the laurels Luther has earned regarding the formation of the German language. That lies deep in the feeling of middle European people. If you go back to the earlier Bible translations and look at longer passages, you will see how wonderful they are in comparison to Luther’s translation which, actually, in regard to the development of the German language, held it back.

There is an edition of the Bible for students, the Schuster Bible. You can get it anywhere there is a Catholic majority. Before the story of Creation, you should begin with the fall of the angel. The Catholic Bible begins with the fall of the angel and only afterward with the creation of the world. That is quite beautiful, simple, and plain storytelling.

A teacher asks about a boy in the seventh grade who has amyotrophia (muscular atrophy).

Dr. Steiner: Treat him with hypophysis cerebri.

There is a question about an assistant for music class.

Dr. Steiner: We have only a few good musicians, but nevertheless, we do have some. I will keep my eye open on my trip.

Dr. Steiner speaks with Dr. Schwebsch about the problem of music and refers him to Eduard Hanslick’s book, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen and also an article by Robert Zimmermann about the aesthetics of music.

A question is asked about a gymnastics teacher.

Dr. Steiner: I think we need to be very careful about who we choose to teach gymnastics. It is important that we place gymnastics upon a broader foundation, so that it can be done in a more reasonable way. We need to find someone who is interested in that.

In the Christmas course in Dornach I showed how the soul slowly takes over the entire organism. That is something we need to take into account. I want to have this course printed as soon as possible, for there is considerable information about such questions. I had not previously had an opportunity to discuss them so exactly and in so much detail, that is, the formation of the organism, so that gymnastics teachers could actually understand them. I will look into this question further.

Marie Steiner wrote the following announcement for these performances: “Dear Friends! As a result of the interest shown by visitors to our eurhythmic performances in this new art form and the many requests to see them again, we have decided to give two further public performances on Sunday, March 23, at 5 p.m., and on Monday, March 24, at 8 p.m., in the carpentry workshop at the Goetheanum. We have decided to organize two evenings in order to give every member the opportunity to attend and to bring friends. The program includes a number of new performances, including a scene from “Faust”. Tickets at 3, 2, 1 francs are available at Hug & Co (Freiestrasse, Basel), at Fräulein Kessler (Reformgeschäft Arlesheim) and at the box office. We are grateful for any publicity for the event; for this purpose, programs are available at the Geering Bookstore (Bäumleingasse, Basel) and at the Dornach canteen.

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What is being attempted here can be compared with neighboring arts, with all kinds of dance-like arts and the like, and in relation to what has already been achieved, it will be found that ours is certainly the more imperfect of the two. But we would also be misunderstood if it were believed that we wanted to compete with any neighboring arts. We readily admit that in these neighboring arts, in terms of their nature, something much, much more perfect is already being achieved today than can be achieved in our country. But, as I said, it is not about such competition. The point is that something essentially new is to be inaugurated. And what we are seeking is based, just like everything else that is to develop in these rooms, on the Goethean world view developed for our present time, for our modern ideas and perceptions and feelings. That is why our building bears the name Goetheanum, and rightly so.

What we want to develop as the eurythmic art is, as far as we can see, truly derived from Goetheanism. However, if one wants to understand this Goethean basis of the eurythmic art, one must consider the whole great and powerful way in which Goethe's artistic sense, how Goethe's whole artistic direction is based on the grandiose of Goethe's world view, which is completely unlike today's sober direction, which is usually taken as the basis of world views. In order to characterize the basic impulse of our eurythmic art in a few words, I will have to point out what, I would like to say, I can show in a nutshell, which direction Goethe's ways of looking at things took when they wanted to penetrate into the essence of things, especially into the essence of living things. I will have to point out the very peculiarity of what is known as Goethe's theory of metamorphosis.

This doctrine of metamorphosis is based on the fact that living things are constantly transforming the individual elements they contain in their formation, so that all the individual elements of a living being are transformations of each other. And the whole, in turn, represents a single element only in a certain transformation. Goethe saw how the colored petals of a plant are only transformations, metamorphoses, of the green leaves, how even those organs that do not resemble leaves at all on the outside - such as the stamens or the pistil - are only transformed leaves, how the whole plant is basically a complicated leaf and how each individual leaf is a whole plant. For Goethe, the peculiar thing is that the parts of a living being are always a certain expression of the whole, and that the whole, in turn, is an expression of a single part.

Through such contemplation, one does indeed penetrate deeply into the essence of things. Thus Goethe not only contemplated the simple plant, he contemplated the animal creatures, and thus, at the summit of natural becoming and activity, he contemplated man himself.

Now, what Goethe has developed as a magnificent view of nature, as he has done in individual fields, can be transferred into artistic feeling. What I meant by the above is not a theoretical formulation of some thought, but the full realization of the feeling of metamorphosis in nature through the artistic sense. It is the full expression of what contemplation is through the power of artistic creation. Our eurythmic art is intended to bring Goethe's way of looking at things to artistic revelation in a special case, now transferred to another area. Only now we are not to go into the form, not to take something from the form, but from the activity.

And so, when we transfer Goethe's view to a certain higher area of human activity, the following emerges: When man unfolds, as he speaks, recites poetry, sings, in short, when he sets his larynx and neighboring organs in motion, that which man unfolds as the hidden activity that is only present in his larynx and neighboring organs, which he unfolds as such hidden activity, to which he does not turn his attention, man unfolds certain movements. He turns his attention to listening to what is spoken or sung. He does not turn his attention to these hidden movements. But he develops certain movements that, just as a single leaf is an entire plant, can express the activity of the whole human being. And the other way around: if you intuitively see what is mysteriously indicated in the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs, through which human speech, human song comes about, you can translate what you can intuitively see into movements of the whole human being. In a certain way, one can bring the human being into such a movement and shaping of the movements that he becomes entirely larynx.

That is what our eurythmic art is striving for. Please do not misunderstand me. It is not meant that it should be shown in a crazy way how one thing or another can be expressed through movements of the human body, but rather that just as mysteriously as that which emerges from the depths of the human larynx can reveal itself artistically, so, if one makes the whole human being the expression of that which otherwise only the larynx and its neighboring organs express, that which comes to light in the shaping of the whole human being can be artistic.

That is our eurythmy, what the human being brings to contemplation when he represents through his entire body those movements that are otherwise only present in the larynx and that would be expressed, for example, when one would , the air movements that arise when a person artistically shapes sound in speech or song in the voice, in the tone, a source of a new artistic element is thereby obtained from the ground, because all that is truly artistic is based on the discovery of such a natural foundation.

Goethe must have felt this when he made the following statement, which is very meaningful for his view and perception: “To whom nature reveals its manifest secret, he feels a certain longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.” The secret that is hidden in human speech and singing can actually be transformed into movements of the whole human being. In this way, the eurythmic art fulfills what Goethe wanted again when he said: “Art is based on a certain recognition, on the essence of things, when it allows us to reveal their inner laws in visible and tangible forms.

That which lives in the human soul should be revealed in visible forms through the art of eurythmy. But our eurythmic art is also an art of movement in which everything arbitrary is excluded. Other similar art forms, which, as I said, achieve more perfection in their own way than we can achieve today in our field, express in their gestures, in some mimic movement, that which is momentarily added to an inner soul emotion or the like, to a feeling, to a sensation. All this is not the case with us. We do not seek to depict any of the connections that arise between a gesture, a movement and an inner soul process. Just as music itself is based on an inner lawfulness, so the movement of our eurythmy is based on an inner lawfulness, and what is continuous in a presentation is as lawfully inner — not arbitrary - as melody or harmony in music itself is subject to inner laws.

Thus, when two individuals with different personalities perform the same thing in eurythmy, they will always perform it in the same way. The only subjective difference is that it is different from the way a Beethoven sonata is performed by two pianists. Of course, each individual brings their own subjectivity to what they perform. But the art of eurythmy is completely objective, based on its own laws. And if you find something represented by one artist, another artist would represent the same thing in exactly the same way, only varied according to subjectivity in the way suggested to you. This art of movement can therefore depict everything that is initially revealed through sound, sound sequences, modulation of sound, etc., through the movement of the individual human being. What accompanies our speech, especially when it is artistically formed, what warms this speech, as feeling is warmed by soul content, what this speech brings in rhymes, in rhythms - that, in turn, is expressed in our group movements. Groups always represent that which plays into the larynx from the rest of the human being, so that speech can be warmed, illuminated, and soul-filled, or also given rhythm or rhyming alliteration. Anything is possible in this way of expressing it through the art of eurythmy.

In this way, an art of movement that has been brought forth by human beings themselves is presented to our contemporaries. A work of art is created in the human being. The movements that we want to bring to light rest in the human being itself. Of course, all that is fundamental is only necessary for such an art to arise. But just as the larynx is necessary for the presentation of song and speech, and just as, in this presentation of song and speech, the artistic element comes to life in direct contemplation, so too can life come to life in that which arises from the inner, essential law of things, here of the human being itself, can only live in what emerges from the inner essential

Goethe says so beautifully: when man is placed at the summit of nature, he feels himself to be a complete nature, in order to bring forth a summit in turn. He absorbs symmetry, order and harmony in order to finally rise to the production of the work of art. In this way, the human being should not rise to the summit of the work of art, but create a work of art from his own inner possibilities of movement in this eurythmic performance. The important thing, dear audience, is that what is otherwise heard can be seen. Today we still present it in such a way that poems are recited or music is played on one side, so that one can hear and see at the same time on the stage the movements of the human being, which are carried out, so to speak, by the larynx that has become visible in the whole human being. That is the peculiar thing, that is also the more Goethean aspect of our eurythmic art.

As I said, everything we are able to present today is only the beginning. Pantomime and mime are completely excluded. Everything is based on an inner lawfulness. And if you do notice pantomime and mime, it is only because of an imperfection that must be eradicated later. Therefore, I ask you to also in this sense, what we can offer you today, to take. We are aware that everything is just a beginning, that everything is still quite imperfect. But we are convinced that, despite all the imperfections, the beginning of a new art movement, a new art activity has been created. Perhaps the principle still needs to be changed a lot. But we are convinced that something has been created that can become the seed of a future art. And we believe that what we can offer today as a beginning can, if fate permits, either be brought to an ever greater perfection by ourselves or by others, as with other arts. That is what I took the liberty of saying about today's performance. I would also like to add that we are very pleased that so many members of the audience have come today. In fact, so many people wanted to come that we had to turn some away. As a result, we will repeat today's performance next Sunday so that those who were unable to attend today can also get what is rightfully theirs. But that doesn't mean that there won't be another performance tomorrow at 8 a.m.

Here in Berlin, as well as in other localities where our Society has spread, much has been discussed that concerns the comprehensive realm of theosophy, that emanates, so to speak, from the high regions of clairvoyant consciousness, and it is natural that a desire should have arisen to do something toward a serious and adequate substantiation of our spiritual current.

The present General Assembly, which brings our members together here at the seventh anniversary of our German Section, may be taken as the proper occasion for contributing something toward strengthening the foundations of our cause. This I shall attempt to do at this time in the four lectures on Anthroposophy.

The lectures in Kassel on The Gospel of St. John, those in Düsseldorf on the hierarchies, those in Basel on The Gospel of St. Luke, and those in Munich on the teachings of oriental theosophy, were all occasions for rising to high altitudes of spiritual research and for bringing back spiritual truths difficult of access. What occupied us there was theosophy and, at least in part, its ascent to exalted spiritual peaks of human cognition.

It does not seem unjustifiable, given a gradually acquired feeling in the matter, to see something deeper in what is called the cyclical course of world events. At the time of our first General Assembly, when the German Section was founded, I delivered lectures to an audience composed only in part of theosophists; those lectures may be characterized as the historical chapter of anthroposophy. Now, after a lapse of seven years that constitute a cycle, the time seems ripe for speaking in a more comprehensive sense on the nature of anthroposophy.

First, I should like to make clear through a comparison what should be understood by the term anthroposophy. If we wish to observe a section of country, together with all that is spread out there in the way of fields, meadows, woods, villages, roads, we can do so by going about from village to village, through streets and meadows and woods, and we will always have a small section of the whole region in view. Again, we can climb to a mountain top and from there overlook the whole landscape. The details will be indistinct for the ordinary eye, but we have a comprehensive view of the whole.

That approximately describes the relation between what in ordinary life is called human cognition or human science, and what theosophy stands for.

While the ordinary search for human knowledge goes about from detail to detail in the world of facts, theosophy ascends to a high vantage point. This extends the visible horizon, but without the employment of quite special means the possibility of seeing anything at all would vanish. In my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, is set forth how one can reach this ideal peak without losing the power of clear vision.

But there is a third possibility, lying between the two described. It is to ascend part way, remaining half-way up. At the bottom you cannot survey the whole; you observe only details and see the top from below. At the top, everything is beneath you, and above you have only the divine heavens. In the middle you have something above and something below you, and you can compare the two views.

Any comparison lags and limps, but all that was intended at the moment was to place before you the manner in which in the first instance theosophy differs from anthroposophy. The latter stands in the middle, the former on the summit: it is the point of departure that is different. Thus far the comparison is helpful, but it is inadequate in characterizing what follows.

Devotion to theosophy necessitates rising above human points of view, above the middle, from self to higher self, and it implies the ability to see with the organs of this higher self. The peak attained by theosophy lies above man, ordinary human knowledge, below, and what lies half-way between, that is the human being himself: between nature and the spiritual world. What is above reaches down to him; he is permeated by the spirit. In contemplating the world from a purely human angle, he does not take his point of departure from the summit, but he can see it—see the spirit above. At the same time he sees what is merely nature beneath him; it reaches into him from below. There is a risk connected with theosophy; unless the above-mentioned means are employed to see with the higher self—not with the ordinary self—there is danger of losing contact with the human element, and this results in forfeiting the ability to see anything at all adequate, of recognizing reality below. This danger disappears, however, as soon as those means are employed. Then we can say that theosophy is what comes to light when the God within man says, “Let the God within you speak; what He reveals of the world is theosophy.”

Take your stand between God and Nature and let the human being in you speak. Speak of what is beneath as well as what is above you, and you have anthroposophy. It is the wisdom spoken by man.

This wisdom will prove an important fulcrum, a key to the whole realm of theosophy. After a period of immersion in theosophy, nothing could be more profitable than seriously to seek the firm center of gravity provided by anthroposophy.

All that has been said so far can be historically substantiated in many directions. We have, for example, the science calling itself anthropology. As it is practised, anthropology comprises not only the human being, but everything pertaining to him; all that can be gleaned from nature, everything necessary for understanding man. This science is based on moving about among objects, passing from detail to detail, observing the human being under a microscope. In short, this science, which in the widest circles is regarded as the only one dealing authoritatively with man, takes its view from a point beneath human capacities. It is chained to the ground; it fails to employ all the faculties at the disposal of man, and for this reason it cannot solve the riddles of existence.

Now contrast all this with what you encounter as theosophy. There one searches the most rarefied regions for answers to the burning questions of life. But all those who are unable to keep pace, whose standpoint is anthropology, consider theosophy an air-castle, lacking foundation. They are not able to understand how the soul can ascend step by step to that summit from which all is spread out beneath it. They cannot rise to the planes of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. They cannot ascend to the peak that is the final goal of human evolution.

Thus we find anthropology on the lowest step, theosophy on the summit. What becomes of theosophy when it wants to reach the top but is not in a position to do so with the right means? We can find the answer in the historic example of the German theosophist, Solger, who lived from 1770–1819. Conceptually, his views are theosophical, but what means does he employ to attain the summit? Philosophical concepts, concepts of human cerebration long since sucked dry and emaciated! That is like climbing a mountain for the purpose of observation, and forgetting to take your field-glasses; you can distinguish nothing whatever down below.

In our case the field-glasses are spiritual, and they are called imagination, inspiration, and intuition. Man's ability to reach that peak diminished more and more through the centuries—a fact that was clearly felt and acknowledged as early as the Middle Ages. Today it is felt too, but not acknowledged. In olden times that capacity to ascend existed, as you know, though only to a minor degree. It was based on a clairvoyant twilight condition in man. There really was an ancient theosophy of that sort, but it was written that such revelations from the summit should come to a close, that they should no longer be open to the ordinary means of cognition.

This old theosophy, which considers revelation a thing of the past, became theology, and thus we find theology running parallel with anthropology. Theology's ambition is to climb the heights, but for its means it depends upon something that was once revealed, was then handed down, and is now rigid; something incapable of continually revealing itself anew to the striving soul. Throughout the Middle Ages, anthropology and theology frequently opposed without rejecting each other, but in recent times the contrast is sharp. Nowadays theology is admitted along with anthropology as something scientific, but no bridge is found between the two. If we do not stop with the details but ascend half-way, we can establish anthroposophy by the side of theosophy.

Within modern spiritual life attempts have been made to practise anthroposophy, among other things, but again, as in the case of theosophy, with the wrong, inadequate means of a defunct philosophy. The meaning of philosophy can really no longer be understood by philosophers—only by theosophists. Historical contemplation alone yields this understanding. Philosophy can be comprehended only by contemplating its origin, as can be seen by an illustration. In former times there were the so-called Mysteries, abodes where the higher spiritual life was cultivated, where the neophytes were guided by special methods to spiritual vision. One such Mystery, for example, was in Ephesus, where the neophytes could learn through their training the secrets of Diana of Ephesus; they learned to look into the spiritual worlds. As much of such matters as could be made public was communicated to the profane and received by them, but not all of these realized that higher secrets had been revealed to them. One of those to whom such communications from the Mysteries of Ephesus had penetrated was Heraclitus. He then proclaimed these, by means of his partial initiation, in a way that could be generally understood. In reading the doctrines of Heraclitus, “The Obscure,” we still find immediate experience, the experience of the higher worlds, shining through between the lines. Then came his successors who no longer realized that those doctrines originated in direct experience. They no longer understood them, so they began to improve them, to spin them out in concepts. They began to speculate intellectually, and this method persisted through the generations. Everything we have in the way of philosophy today is but a heritage of ancient doctrines squeezed out and sucked dry of all life, leaving only the skeleton of the concepts. Yet the philosophers take that skeleton for a living reality, for something created by human thinking. There is, as a matter of fact, no such thing as a philosopher who can think creatively without having recourse to the higher worlds.

Just such a skeleton of concepts was all that the philosophers of the nineteenth century had to work with when they took up what may be called anthroposophy. The term actually occurred. Robert Zimmermann wrote a so-called Anthroposophy, but he constructed it of arid, empty concepts. Indeed, everything that has attempted to transcend anthropology without employing the right means has remained a shriveled web of concepts no longer connected with the subject.

Like philosophy, anthroposophy too must be deepened through theosophy; the latter must provide the means for recognizing reality within the spiritual life. Anthroposophy takes the human, the middle standpoint, not the subhuman, as does anthropology. A theosophy, on the other hand, as practised by Solger, though spiritual in its point of view, employs only inflated concepts, and when Solger arrives at the summit he sees nothing. That is spinning at the loom of concepts, not living, spiritual observation. It is something we do not intend to do. We aim in these lectures to confront the reality of human life in its entirety. We shall encounter the old subjects of observation, now illuminated, however, from a different point whence the view is both upward and downward.

The human being is the most important subject of our observation. We need but to contemplate his physical body to realize what a complicated being he is. In order to gain a sentient understanding of anthroposophy's aims, let us first ponder the following. The complicated physical body as we encounter it today is the product of a long evolution. Its first germinal potentiality came into being on old Saturn, and it evolved further on the old Sun, the old Moon, and the Earth. The etheric body was added to it on the Sun, the astral body on the Moon. Now, these members of the human being have changed in the course of evolution, and what we encounter today as the complicated physical human body, with heart, kidneys, eyes, ears and so forth, is the product of a long development. It has all grown out of a simple germinal form that originated on Saturn. Through millions and millions of years it has continually changed and been transformed in order that it might achieve its present perfection. If today we wish to understand a member or an organ of this physical body—say, the heart or the lungs—we can do so only on the basis of this evolution. Nothing of what we encounter today as the heart existed on the old Saturn. Only gradually did these organs assume their present form, one being developed and incorporated earlier, another later. Some organs we can actually designate Sun-organs, as having first appeared during the Sun evolution, others Moon-organs, and so on. If we would understand the present physical body of man we must assemble our concepts from the whole Universe—that is the theosophical method of observation.

How does anthropology set to work? Theosophy ascends to the ultimate heights and from this spiritual summit examines individual phenomena. Anthropology remains on the ground, takes its point of departure from the details, and now even investigates individual cells in their juxtaposition. Everything is mechanically lined up and the cells are studied individually, but this does not reveal their relative age. Yet, far from being immaterial, it is important to know whether a given group of cells developed on the Sun or on the Moon. Much more could be said concerning these complicated conditions. Consider, for example, the human heart. True, as constituted today it evolved late, but as regards its first germinal potentiality it is one of the oldest human organs. During the period of the old Sun, the heart was dependent upon the forces governing there. During the Moon period its development continued; then the Sun withdrew from the Moon, with which it had been united, and henceforth its forces acted upon the heart from without. Here the heart underwent a different development, so that from then on a Sun element and a Moon element can be observed in its tendencies. Then Earth, Sun, and Moon were united again and worked upon the heart. After a pralaya the Earth evolution followed, during which the Sun first withdrew again. This separation resulted in an intensification of the Sun's influence from without. Then the Moon withdrew as well and also acted upon the heart from without. So, being among the oldest human organs, the heart comprises a Sun element, a Moon element, a second Sun element during the Earth evolution, a second Moon element during the Earth evolution, and finally, after the withdrawal of the Earth, an Earth element—all corresponding to cosmic evolution.

If these elements of the heart accord, as in the cosmic harmony, the heart is healthy; if any one element preponderates, it is sick. All human sickness derives from disharmony among the elements within the organ in question while their cosmic counterparts are in harmony. All healing depends upon strengthening the element that lacks its share, or subduing superfluous activity, as the case may be, thereby bringing the elements into harmony again. But talking about this harmony is not enough. In order to effect it one must really penetrate into the wisdom of the universe; one must be able to recognize the different elements in each organ. That will suffice to give an idea of genuine occult physiology and anatomy, which comprehend the whole human being out of the whole cosmos and explain the details out of the spirit.

Occult physiology speaks of Sun and Moon elements of the heart, larynx, brain, and so forth, but since all these elements are at work upon man himself, something in him confronts us today in which all these elements are consolidated. If we look into the human being himself and understand these elements, we also understand the etheric body, the astral body, etc., the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul, as man is constituted today. That is anthroposophy, and in anthroposophy, too, we must start at the lowest step, gradually ascending to the highest.

Man's lowest member is the physical body that he has in common with the sensory world that is perceived through the senses and the sensory-physical mind. The theosophical point of view, starting from the universe, contemplates man in his cosmic contexts. In the matter of the sensory-physical world, anthroposophy must start from man, in so far as he is a sensory being. Only then can we deal appropriately with the etheric body, then the astral body, the ego, and so forth, and what is to be learned from them.

Observing the human being in this anthroposophical sense, we ask what it is that must first engage our interest. It is his senses, and it is through these that he acquires knowledge of the physical-sensory world. Starting from the physical plane, it is therefore these that anthroposophy must consider first. Let the study of the human senses then constitute our first chapter. Thereafter we will ascend to the study of the individual spiritual regions in man's nature.

Beginning with the study of the human senses, we at once find anthroposophy invading the territory of anthropology, for anthroposophy must invariably start from all that the senses tell us is real. But it must keep in mind that what is spiritual, influences man from above. In this sense it is genuine anthropology. Ordinary anthropology has thrown everything pertaining to the human senses into complete confusion, groping its way from detail to detail and examining only what is on the ground, so to speak. Important matters are disregarded because men have no Ariadne-thread to lead them out of the labyrinth of facts into the light. Anthropology cannot find its way out of this maze and must fall a victim to the Minotaur of illusion, for the saving thread can be spun only by spiritual research.

Even in the matter of the human senses, anthroposophy has a different story to tell than has external observation. At the same time it is interesting to note how external science has lately been forced by material facts to go to work more thoroughly, seriously and carefully. There is nothing more trivial than the enumeration of the five senses: feeling (touch), smell, taste, hearing, and sight. We shall see what confusion reigns in this enumeration. Science, it is true, has now added three more senses to the list, but as yet doesn't seem to know what to do about them. We will now list the human senses according to their real significance, and we will endeavor in the following to start laying the foundations of an anthroposophical doctrine of the senses.

The first sense in question is the one that in spiritual science can be called the sense of life. That is a real sense and must be as fully acknowledged as the sense of sight. What is it? It is something in the human being of which, when it functions normally he is not aware. He feels it only when it is out of order. We feel lassitude, or hunger and thirst, or a sense of strength in the organism; we perceive these as we do a color or a tone. We are aware of them as an inner experience. But as a rule we are conscious of this feeling only when something is out of order, otherwise it remains unobserved. The sense of life furnishes the first human self-perception; it is the sense through which the whole inner man becomes conscious of his corporeality. That is the first sense, and it must figure in the list just as does hearing or smell. Nobody can understand the human being and the senses who knows nothing of this sense that enables him to feel himself an inner entity.

We discover the second sense when we move a limb—say, raise an arm. We would not be human beings if we could not perceive our own movements. A machine is not aware of its own motion; that is possible only for a living being through the medium of a real sense. The sense of perceiving our own movements—anything from blinking to walking or running—we call the sense of our own movements.

We become aware of a third sense by realizing that the human being distinguishes within himself between above and below. It is dangerous for him to lose this perception, for in that case he totters and falls over. The human body contains a delicate organ connected with this sense: the three semicircular canals in the ear. When these are injured we lose our sense of balance. This third sense is the static sense, or sense of balance. (In the animal kingdom there is something analogous: the otoliths, tiny stones that must lie in a certain position if the animal is to maintain its equilibrium.)

These are the three senses through which man perceives something within himself, as it were; by their means he feels something within himself.

Now we emerge from the inner man to the point at which an interaction with the outer world begins. The first of such reciprocal relations arises when man assimilates physical matter and, by doing so, perceives it. Matter can be perceived only when it really unites with the body. This cannot be done by solid or fluid matter, but only by gaseous substances that then penetrate the bodily matter. You can perceive smell only when some body sends out gaseous matter that penetrates the organs of the mucous membrane of the nose. The fourth sense, then, is the sense of smell, and it is the first one through which the human being enters into reciprocal relationship with the outer world.

When we no longer merely perceive matter but take the first step into matter itself, we have the fifth sense. We enter into a deeper relationship with such matter. Here matter must be active, which implies that it must have some effect upon us. This takes place when a liquid or a dissolved solid comes in contact with the tongue and unites with what the tongue itself secretes. The reciprocal relationship between man and nature has become a more intimate one. We become aware not only of what things are, as matter, but of what they can induce. That is the sense of taste, the fifth sense.

Now we come to the sixth sense. Again there is an increase in the intimacy of the interaction. We penetrate still deeper into matter, things reveal more of their essence. This can only occur, however, through special provisions. The sense of smell is the more primitive of these two kinds of senses. In the case of smell, the human body takes matter as it is and makes no effort to penetrate it. Taste, where man and matter unite more intimately, is more complicated; then, matter yields more. The next step offers the possibility of penetrating still more deeply into the outer world. This takes place by reason of an external material substance being either transparent or opaque, or by the manner in which it permits light to pass through it, that is, how it is colored. An object that rays out green light is internally so constituted that it can reflect green light and no other. The outermost surface of things is revealed to us in the sense of smell, something of their inner nature in taste, something of their inner essence in sight. Hence the complicated structure of the eye, which leads us much deeper into the essence of things than does the nose or the tongue. The sixth sense, then, is the sense of sight.

We proceed, penetrating still deeper into matter. For example, when the eye sees a rose as red, the inner nature of the rose is proclaimed by its surface. We see only the surface, but since this is conditioned by the inner nature of the rose we become acquainted, to a certain extent, with this inner nature. If we touch a piece of ice or some hot metal, not only the surface and thereby the inner nature are revealed, but the real consistency as well because what is externally cold or hot is cold or hot through and through. The sense of temperature, the seventh, carries us still more intimately into the fundamental conditions of objects.

Now we ask ourselves if it is possible to penetrate into the nature of objects still more deeply than through this seventh sense. Yes, that can be done when objects show us not only their nature through and through, as in the case of temperature, but their most inner essence; that is what they do when they begin to sound. The temperature is even throughout objects. Tone causes their inner nature to vibrate, and it is through tone that we perceive the inner mobility of objects. When we strike an object its inner nature is revealed to us in tone, and we can distinguish among objects according to their inner nature, according to their inner vibration, when we open our inner ear to their tone. It is the soul of objects that speaks to our own soul in tones. That is the eighth sense, the sense of hearing.

If we would find an answer to the question as to whether there exist still higher senses, we must proceed cautiously. We must beware of confusing what is really a sense with other terms and expressions. For example, in ordinary life—down below, where much confusion exists—we hear of a sense of imitation, a sense of secrecy, and others. That is wrong. A sense becomes effective at the moment when we achieve perception and before mental activity sets in. We speak of a sense as of something that functions before our capacity for reasoning has come into action. To perceive color you need a sense, but for judging between two colors you do not.

This brings us to the ninth sense. We arrive at it by realizing that in truth there is in man a certain power of perception—one that is especially important in substantiating anthroposophy—a power of perception not based on reasoning, yet present in him. It is what men perceive when they understand each other through speech. A real sense underlies the perception of what is transmitted to us through speech. That is the ninth sense, the sense of speech.

The child learns to speak before he learns to reason. A whole people has a language in common, but reasoning is a matter for the individual. What speaks to the senses is not subject to the mental activity of the individual. The perception of the meaning of a sound is not mere hearing because the latter tells us only of the inner oscillations of the object. There must be a special sense for the meaning of what is expressed in speech. That is why the child learns to speak, or at least to understand what is spoken, before he learns to reason. It is, in fact, only through speech that he learns to reason. The sense of speech is an educator during the child's first years, exactly like hearing and sight. We cannot alter what a sense perceives, cannot impair anything connected with it. We perceive a color, but our judgment can neither change nor vitiate it; the same thing is true of the sense of speech when we perceive the inner significance of the speech sound. It is indispensable to designate the sense of speech as such. It is the ninth.

Finally we come to the tenth sense, the highest in the realm of ordinary life. It is the concept sense, which enables us perceptively to comprehend concepts not expressed through speech sounds. In order to reason we must have concepts. If the mind is to become active, it must first be able to perceive the concept in question, and this calls for the concept sense, which is exactly as much a sense by itself as is taste or smell.

Now I have enumerated ten senses and have not mentioned the sense of touch. What about it? Well, a method of observation lacking the spiritual thread confuses everything. Touch is usually tossed in with our seventh sense, temperature. Only in this meaning, however, as the sense of temperature, has it in the first instance any significance. True, the skin can be called the organ of the temperature sense—the same skin that serves also as the organ of the touch sense. But we touch not only when we touch [TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The verb tasten can mean “to touch.” Indeed, the sense of touch is der Tastsinn, but more often it signifies something like our “groping,” as one gropes in the dark by means of the sense of touch: “feeling around for something.” In this sentence the first “touch” is to be understood in this sense, the second (berühren) as meaning “to come in contact with.”] the surface of an object. We touch when the eye seeks something, when the tongue tastes something, when the nose smells something. Touching is a quality common to the fourth to seventh senses. All of these are senses of touch.

Up to and including the sense of temperature we can speak of touching. Hearing we can no longer describe as touching; at least, the quality is present only to a small degree. In the senses of speech and concepts it is wholly absent. These three senses we therefore designate as the senses of comprehension and understanding. The first three senses inform us concerning the inner man. Reaching the boundary between the inner and the outer world, the fourth sense leads us into this outer world, and by means of the other three we penetrate it ever more deeply. Through the senses of touch we perceive the outer world on the surface, and through those of comprehension we learn to understand things, we reach their soul. Later we will deal with other senses transcending these.

Below the sense of smell, then, there are three senses that bring us messages out of our own human inner being. The sense of smell is the first to lead us into the outer world, into which we then penetrate deeper and deeper by means of the others. But what I have described to you today does not exhaust the list of senses. It was only an excerpt from the whole, and there is something below and something above the ten mentioned. From the concept sense we can continue upward to a first astral sense, arriving at the senses that penetrate the spiritual world. There we find an eleventh, a twelfth and a thirteenth sense. These three astral senses will lead us deeper into the fundamentals of external objects, deep down where concepts cannot penetrate. The concept halts before the external, just as the sense of smell halts before the inner man.

What I have given you is an urgently needed foundation upon which to build cognition of the human being. Through its neglect in the nineteenth century, everything pertaining even to philosophy and the theory of knowledge has been most horribly jumbled. Merely generalizing, people ask what the human being can learn by means of the individual sense, and they cannot even explain the difference between hearing and sight. Scientists talk about light waves in the same way they do about sound waves, without taking into account that sight does not penetrate as deeply as hearing. Through hearing we enter the soul-nature of things, and we shall see that by means of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth senses we penetrate their spirit as well: we enter the spirit of nature. Each sense has a different nature and a different character.

For this reason a great number of expositions given today, especially in physics, concerning the nature of sight and its relation to its surroundings may be regarded unhesitatingly as theories that have never reckoned with the true nature of the senses. Countless errors have arisen from this misconception of the nature of the senses. That must be emphasized, because it is quite impossible for popular representations to do justice to what has here been set forth. You read things written by people who can have no possible inkling of the inner nature of the senses. We must understand that science, from its standpoint, cannot do other than take a different attitude. It is inevitable that science should spread errors, because in the course of evolution the real nature of the senses was forgotten.

This true nature of the senses is the first chapter of anthroposophy.

Yesterday, in the description of the development of the various cycles of earthly development, we reached a point which made us realise how the three celestial bodies, the Sun. the Moon and the Earth, gradually separated from one another. We began by considering this separation and stopped at the point where the Moon separated itself from the Earth, but we also tried to reach this same point by setting out from the present time and going back to the Atlantean epoch. Let us now consider the condition of the Earth at the time of Atlantis. Long, long epochs of time must be borne in mind, taking up millions of years, so that the great changes which took place, not only in the universe, but also upon the earth, need no longer surprise us.

Let:us consider once more the Earth, after its separation from the Moon. It was still enveloped by a volume of air, which presented, however, quite a different aspect from the present air. You must not think that this air inwardly resembled a glowing stove—although its temperature was far higher than is the case now. At that time many substances which are now solid existed within the Earth in a liquid state. An air thickly permeated with gases of the most varied substances, enveloped the Earth, an atmosphere which we might designate as fire-air, a repetition of the former Moon-condition,

When the Earth became independent after its separation from the present Moon, it was surrounded by a strange atmosphere which may be designated as fire-air, Through the fact that the Earth freed itself from the atmosphere which went away with the Moon, the beings who lived upon the Earth were able to attain certain higher stages of development. Within the atmosphere of the Earth the most advanced animal-men had reached a higher stage than the one which they had attained upon the Moon, and these were the beings who later developed into men. A great number of these animal-men remained behind upon the Moon-stage. As a result, they not only remained behind, but owing to the entirely new conditions which now arose, they sank half a degree below the level which they had previously attained, (animal-men could, only live upon the Moon) and thus they became animals. Animals did not as yet exist upon the Moon. We therefore have two kingdoms: Human beings—and the kingdom of animal-men, beings who had remained behind and had gradually sunk to the level of animals.

The same applies to the plant-animals. A certain number of these had developed to a higher stage, to that of animals; others had remained behind and changed into plants. A The kingdom of plant-minerals also followed this line of development: some became heavy minerals, while others ascended in their development to the level of plants.

Not everything arose in accordance with one standard of measure, for the animals which we know to-day arose, for instance, partly through the descending development of men-animals and partly through the ascending development of plant-animals. In the vegetable kingdom also we have side by side the plant-minerals in an ascending course of development and the plant-animals in a descending course. The plants now chiefly constituting the pleasant plant-carpet of our earth, arose through the ascending development of the Moon's plant-minerals; this is, for instance, the case with the violet. On the other hand, everything that gives us a decaying impression is in a descending development, whereas our green, leafy, plants will in future attain to higher stages.

Our minerals developed entirely upon the Earth; there were no minerals upon the Moon, such as exist to-day. The mineral kingdom is the former plant-mineral kingdom which sank down to a lower stage and which was embedded into the earth as a firm crust. When the Earth cast off the Moon, the substances which remained behind and which later on became
minerals, solid metals,. etc., were still an altogether liquid mass. The substances which at that time had already reached a solid state, were hurled out into the cosmic spaces, because, had it kept these substances, the Earth could not have developed, further. Then the first metals which reached a solid state were added. Sometimes they had most peculiar forms! What you now encounter in the mountains as granite or gneiss, at that time revealed quite clearly that it had arisen through the descending development of vegetable beings, of plants which had become stones.

You may gather from this that upon the Sun and upon the Moon the mineral kingdom was a vegetable kingdom. The vegetable kingdom has not developed out of the mineral kingdom, but minerals have developed out of the vegetable kingdom! The coal which is now dug out of the earth is nothing but a complex of petrified plant—plants which decayed and became stones, so that now they can be dug out of the earth as petrified plants. If you were to go back still further, you would see that once even the hardest stones were plants; and that they have arisen out of plants through the descending development of plants to the mineral kingdom.

A clairvoyant sees this in the following way: If you investigate gneiss, the mineralogist will tell you that it consists of feldspath, hornblende and mica—but he cannot go further. The clairvoyant says: Feldspath in gneiss appears to spiritual vision quite clearly as the petrified stalk and the green leaves of plants, the petrification of those parts which built them up; whereas the mica foundation is related to that part of the plants which still develops to-day as the plants sepals and corollae. When a modern occultist observes a piece of gneiss he will say: This is a petrified plant, and even as plants now possess leaves and flowers, etc., so the mica foundation of gneiss has developed out of the sepals and petals of ancient epochs.

Thus it can be explained how every mineral developed out of former plants. For the substances which came over from the ancient Moon were plants, which then became densified in the liquid mass of the Earth. Even as one can see the water in a receptacle freezing into solid ice, so it is possible to observe in the early stages of the Earth's development the gradual forming of solid masses. Thus the solid crust of the Earth slowly developed out of the liquid Earth. The further we proceed, the higher and purer become the beings who live upon the Earth, and those that were unable to ascend became petrified. It was the same both with animals and men. Man reached the stage of being able to transform his body in a still higher measure.

The Moon-men floated and swam about in a primordial ocean; they were predisposed to this swimming movement. This may sound strange to modern men, nevertheless it is true; and let it be said without reserve, that I do not wish to mitigate some of these apparently grotesque descriptions;, for generally people laugh at truths when they are revealed for the first time.

The human. being who swam about in this primordial ocean had as yet no eyes and endowed with sight such as we have to-day: man, indeed, received the foundation of sight upon Saturn, but in this primordial ocean he did not need to see; he had to orientate himself in other ways. The ocean contained all the food which he required for his life and also animals, some benevolently disposed towards him; and some not. At that time man still possessed an organ which now exists in the head, it is the size of a cherry and is called the pineal gland (in reality it is not a gland). Once upon a time, this organ was of immense size; it enabled man to orientate himself in the ocean and it protruded from his head like a lantern. Man moved about, by using this lantern-like organ in front; it was a sensitive organ, not an organ of sight. He used it when swimming about. Later on, he no longer needed it and so it shriveled.

At that time it was not possible to speak of an Ego foundation. In regard to everything which man did, he was still under the guidance of higher spiritual powers: We may compare him with the animals of to-day. From a spiritual-scientific aspect, we now look upon animals by saying that man differs from the animal through the fact that he has an individual soul; every man has his own soul, his individual Ego.

This is not the case with animals; for whole groups of animals have one soul in common. For instance, all the animals pertaining to the lion species have one soul, which lives in the astral world. Similarly all the animals of tiger-nature have a soul in common. In the case of animals we therefore speak of group souls. All the horses together have one group soul; these horses belong together. Even as the single fingers belong to the hand, so the animals belong to their group soul. Consequently we cannot speak of individual responsibility in the case of animals. Only of an individual soul can we say that it is either good or evil.

At that time, the human beings possessed a kind of group-soul embedded in the bosom of the Godhead. We must however realise that that which now lives in us as our Ego already existed in those early epochs, but it did not live within the human body.

Man's origin must be sought in two currents: that which came over from the Moon and continued to develop, constituted the animal-man who lived upon the Moon; but that which now lives in us as our individual soul, existed in those times in the higher realm, in the care of the Godhead,—only man's body lived below in the primordial ocean. Later on body and soul united; the soul descended and spititualised the body, so that man became an individual soul.

Imagine a receptacle containing water; in it are many many drops of water, but it is impossible to distinguish them. If you were to take many hundreds of small sponges dipping them into the water, the drops first contained in the volume of water would be individualised. Similarly imagine your spirituality soaring above the primordial ocean and compare your soul reposing in the bosom of the Godhead with the drops of water; the bodies absorb the souls, even as the small sponges absorb the drops of water; the souls thus became independent, in the same way in which the water becomes individualised into drops through the sponges. Below we have the primordial ocean with the floating-swimming bodies, and above there are the souls. We cannot describe this better than by saying: “And the Spirit of God moved (literally: brooded) over the face of the waters,” which means that he elaborated that which was below until it was able to take in the soul-drops.

The bodies themselves had to soar and float, and for this purpose the beings within them needed a special organ. At that time man had no lungs, but a kind of air-bladder; this kept him afloat in the ocean.

The fish which have remained behind upon that stage, have even to-day an air-bladder and no lungs. The lungs developed little by little, as the air freed itself from the moisture and man could raise himself above the water, so that he began to breathe in air. A long process, lasting millions of years, finally enabled man to breathe in the air through his lungs. This gave rise to the physical form capable of absorbing the soul. The more man became a being who breathed through lungs, the more he became capable of taking in the soul. You cannot express this better than with the words: “And God breathed His own breath into man's nostrils and he became an individual soul.”

At the same time this enabled man to develop something which he did not possess before; he became capable of forming red blood. Before that time all human beings had a constitution which gave them the same temperature as their environment; if they were surrounded by a higher temperature, they were adapted to it. Red blood did not exist at that time and the animals above the stage of amphibians are human bodies which have remained behind at a much later stage of development. After the epoch in which man began to develop red blood, the animals also began to develop into warm-blooded beings.

Even as a plant cannot develop out of a stone, but stones developed out of plants, so the animal developed out of man. Every being upon a lower stage developed out of beings who once stood upon higher stages, this is the theory of evolution. Man first had to transform himself into a being with red blood, and then he could leave behind the animals. You may literally see in animals the stages left behind in man's development. In every animal man perceives more or less a piece of himself which he has left behind. Paracelsus expressed this so wonderfully in the words: When we look about in the world, we see, as it were, the letters of an alphabet; in the human being alone these letters unite and form a word. Consequently the meaning of that which lies spread out in man's environment is to be seen in man himself.

You must then bear in mind the following: An apparently insignificant process (but in the light of spiritual science it is an extraordinarily important process) took place at that time: it already began in the early stages of the Earth's separation from the Moon, when the Earth was still connected with the Moon, and it consisted in a certain cooperation between Mars and the Earth. During the whole first half of the Earth's development, the forces of Mars streamed into the Earth, so that this first half is actually designated as the Mars condition of the Earth. Iron is connected with this passage through Mars and iron then began to play an entirely new role in the earthly process of evolution.

Iron plays a far more superficial part in plants, but you can see how things are connected: cosmically, the Earth passed through Mars and Mars gave it iron; iron was then stimulated to exercise the functions which it now possesses and iron appeared in the blood. The aggressive side of human nature, that which turns man into a warrior here on earth, is connected with the iron in the blood. The Greek myth knew this, for it designated Mars as the God of War.

The human body thus became capable of taking in the Ego; for without red, warm blood a body cannot be the bearer of an Ego. This is very important. Pulmonary breathing is the first condition for the formation of warm, red blood. The required processes then arose upon the earth and became embodied with the blood. Little by little, man developed so as to become a red-blooded being breathing through lungs, and then he left behind the other creatures, the lower warm-blooded animals.

In occultism, animals are not only differentiated in the ordinary way, but another differentiation is pointed out. We distinguish the “inwardly sounding animals”, those which can express their own pain and pleasure in sounds from the “non-sounding animals”. If you descend to the lower animals, you may still hear sounds, but these are purely external, produced by rubbing together certain parts of the body,or by climatic influences; these are sounds produced by external causes. Only the animals which branched off when man had developed into a warm-blooded being were able to express pain or pleasure through sounds coming from within.

This was the time when man's larynx was transformed into an organ of sound. The fact that outside the liquid earth substance became crust, produced an inner process in the human being; parallel with the external process of hardening, an osseous and cartilaginous skeleton developed within the human being out of the soft parts of his body. Beings with a skeleton did not exist before that time.

The minerals outside are the counterpart of the bones. The Earth perpetuated this epoch in the masses of rock and man in his skeleton. Man then gradually became an upright walking being, thus changing over from his former horizontal position into a vertical one. He turned round, so that his front extremities became organs of work, and his other extremities were used for walking. There is a connection in all this, for no being without a sound-producing larynx and an upright walk can be an Ego-being.

Animals were predisposed for this, but they degenerated. Consequently they could not transform themselves into beings endowed with speech, for speech is connected with a larynx located in a in a body having an upright position. We may gather this through a primitive fact. Many dogs are undoubtedly cleverer than parrots, yet a parrot learns more, because its larynx is in a more vertical position. Parrots and starlings learn to speak a little, because their larynx is located vertically.

This shows you that the Earth and man advance to ever new stages of development. The atmosphere also changed: a condition developed in which the Earth was surrounded by a misty, foggy air. This took place at the time, when the Lemurians saw their continent crumbling away, so that they wandered out to Atlantis and became Atlanteans.

During this, phase of evolution; in which man acquired the first elements of speech, which were, to be sure, sounds expressing mere feelings, the soul emerged more and more. Essentially speaking, the Atlantean had a dull kind of clairvoyance. As he came out of the sub-earthly ocean, his eyes developed to the extent of enabling him to participate in the light raying out from the sun through the masses of mist. Physically, his power of sight and perception developed more and more, but he gradually lost his old clairvoyance. The most advanced race of the Atlanteans developed in a certain region of the Earth's surface during the last third of the Atlantean era, which was a significant close of phase of evolution.

In view of the existing conditions, the Atlantean who traveled more to the West, became inwardly neutral natures, cold and indifferent, and developed later on into the copper coloured population of America. The others who traveled further South, became the black Negro population, and those who turned to the East became later on the yellow Malayan population. These populations concentrated themselves in the most unfavourable places which prohibited a further development. But the peoples who lived in a region now occupied by Ireland, and further West, in a country now covered by the ocean, reached the highest stage of development. The mixtures of not and cold streams which existed there, permitted the human body to develop in the best and speediest manner. A pronounced Ego-feeling, a first foundation of such a feeling, developed from the still magical will power of those epochs. It was then that man first learned to say “I”. The human beings then also learned the first foundations of counting and of arithmetic, and they developed the first capacity of forming judgments and of combining thoughts.

There were always Beings among them who had progressed further, who were the leaders of humanity and their relationship to man was that of Beings who belonged to a higher realm. These Beings became the teachers and guides of men and it was they who induced them to migrate towards the East. From the site which lay in the neighbourhood of present-day Ireland certain peoples had already migrated to the East, settling as far as Asia. Now the most highly developed masses of peoples began to migrate to the East, and everywhere along their journey they formed colonies, the most powerful of these colonies, with the most highly developed culture, existed in the neighbourhood of the present Gobi desert. Later on, a certain number of peoples travelled from there to many parts of the world: one group went to the present India; where they encountered an indigenous yellow-brown race, with whom they became partly united.

It was after the Atlantean flood, that this colony travelled South and founded the first culture of the post-Atlantean epoch, the first culture of our own age. The most advanced teachers who went with this colony, the first great teachers of ancient India, are called the ancient Indian Rishis. The Hindoos of to-day are the descendants of that ancient population, but if we wish to discover traces of this culture we must go far back into times which are not known to history; the Vedas, for example, already belong to a later epoch, for nothing was recorded in those early days.

The ancient Hindoo nation represents the first cultural group after the Atlantean age and consequently they resembled the Atlanteans most of all. The Atlantean was a kind of dreamer; his consciousness was dull, he did not have any power of judgment and self-consciousness and like a dreamer he wandered about half consciously. The ancient Hindoos were the first to overcome this condition, but they were still partly rooted in it. The ancient Hindoo longed to experience the spirit realm of past times and yearned for the clairvoyance which the Atlanteans still possessed. In ancient India the early Yoga training still consisted of a kind of dulling of human consciousness, which transferred the human being back to the times when he could still perceive in his environment spiritual beings. The Hindoo longed for this clairvoyance of ancient Atlantis and in the Yoga training the Rishis taught him the methods of producing clairvoyance, though these methods followed another line of development.

The Atlantean did not possess any power of judgment, whereas in India the power of judgment had already awakened; but men loved, so to speak, that which they had already overcome and they knew how to conjure it up again, by dulling their consciousness and by recalling that which they had seen in earlier epochs. The culture of ancient India preserved this through its highest representatives. The Hindoo did not seek to enhance his consciousness, but he dimmed it down to a dreamy state, and this explains the passivity of the Hindoo character. It would be a great disadvantage, indeed harmful, if modern culture were to take hold in a greater measure of life in India.

During the first epochs, the human beings did not perceive minerals; and what the Atlantean saw least clearly of all ,was the mineral kingdom. Through his visions, the spirit-world was the one which existed for him, and this world lived in everything. He perceived the human being surrounded by colours—by sympathetic colours if he liked him. This was the world which the Hindoo tried to conjure up again. But human progress requires that man shall enter more and more into a relationship with that which exists upon the earth in the world of matter, The Atlanteans did not need any instruments; they orientated themselves through their clairvoyance and they attributed no importance whatever to physical instruments. The Hindoo followed the Atlantean in this, and consequently he looked upon the physical world as Maya, as a kind of illusion and lie. He had no interest in the world which is accessible to the ordinary senses. He asked the dream-like world of the Spirit to rise up before him.

The progress from this Indian culture to the next cultural epoch, i.e. the Persian one preceding the time of Zarathustra, consisted in the fact of humanity learning to appreciate external reality. A second colony went out from the Gobi desert and founded a kingdom in Asia minor which existed in remote times and which gave birth to the kingdom of Zarathustra. The Persian began to perceive the existence of a world in which he had to be active. The Divine essence appeared to him as something which he had to overcome, against which he had to measure his strength. From the spiritual world he drew the forces which he needed in order to work in this world. The world appeared to him as something dark, which had to be transformed with the aid of the good forces. The Hindoo established a science pertaining exclusively to the spiritual world, which told him nothing about the external reality. But to the Persian this external reality presented another aspect, it was something which had to be constantly transformed through his own work.

The third colony which went out from the Gobi desert went further West into Asia Minor and founded the Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian cycle of culture. In addition to the earlier science of the Spirit, these nations also possessed a science of the physical world. An astrology and geometry arose in Egypt which taught the Egyptians how to treat and cultivate the earth. Science extended to spheres which the Hindoo still looked upon as a world of illusion. Now this world of illusion had become a world calling for the keenest thought, for a manner of thinking connected with physical things. When the Hindoo immersed himself in the starry world, this world was to him only the expression of the Godhead. But the Chaldean loved the physical World; to him it was a part of the Godhead into which he penetrated and immersed himself. This activity leading him from the divine into the physical world appears to us in the Babylonian-Assyrian culture.

We have now reached a point leading us to the fourth cultural cycle, which we designate as the Graeco-Latin culture. The human being is now included in the external perception, The Egyptian knew that the world was not a chaos, but that it was fraught with meaning and that it had been constructed throughout immeasurable aeons of time. The sphinx and the pyramid expressed great cosmic thoughts. The ancient Egyptian concealed his knowledge of these truths in images: he created the sphinx, which faces us like a riddle of evolution itself: the development of man's higher essence from earlier animal-like conditions. This was the wisdom which the Egyptian spoke out into the world in his own way. In ancient Egypt you may find calculations and measurements,which were drawn directly from heaven. The cities were built in such a way that the Egyptian expressed in these constructions a sacred order of laws and they sought to express in images the cosmic laws which governed the universe. This did not as yet include the individual human essence, which only begins to unfold in Greek art, and which shows us that man now takes hold of his own being as an immediate reality and seeks to create it as an image in space.

Man became more and more familiar with the world which the Hindoo designated as Maya. He began to face his own self. Within the world which in ancient India was considered as an illusion, the Greek created a world of realities and realised that he had to create it without the help of the Gods; more and more he united himself with the external reality and out of his own strength he permeated the external reality with a divine essence. If you study the Greek “polis” you do not find in it any trace of jurisprudence. Man had to establish this during the Roman epoch as “Roman right” which governed the private social intercourse of men, as Roman citizens.

The human being thus acquired an ever greater knowledge of that which takes place in the world of external reality.

The fifth cycle of culture is the one in which we now live, with our materialistic civilisation. It is the time in which man has descended most profoundly into the external world. Compare, our age with preceding ones: We know, to be sure, how to apply the forces of the spiritual world to our physical environment—we carry the spiritual world into it. But in the light of spiritual science this presents strange aspects. Think of the time when the human being still produced his flour by grinding corn between two stones—he did not apply much spiritual power to do this. In ancient Egypt and Chaldea he still immersed himself in the wisdom of the heaven; he still learned a great deal concerning the spiritual significance of the earth itself and of the starry sky. The Greek still placed into the world of physical reality the idealised human form. What is the aspect of our own time? A great amount of spiritual power is used to produce modern natural science with its technical appliances. How great is the difference between obtaining food by primitive means, and obtaining it from America with the aid of telephone, engines, etc.! Yet these complicated technical means are after all used to satisfy the same needs also felt by animals and which animals are able to satisfy by primitive means! Try to investigate how many of the modern inventions really serve spiritual life, and how much spiritual power is used for the sake of furthering material life! What an enormous amount of spiritual power must human beings develop at the present time for the satisfaction of material requirements! There is no great difference whether an animal satisfies its hunger by grazing, or whether man obtains his food from America or Australia through all kinds of means.

This is hot an adverse criticism, for this had to come. Man had to submerge himself in the physical world. The Hindoo still looked, upon it as an illusion, but modern man considers the physical world as the only reality. We have reached the deepest point in our descent and this rendered possible the greatest progress upon the physical plane: This descent, however, must not be in vain, even from a spiritual aspect!

A new element has now arisen, an element that was implanted into the world during the first third of the post-Atlantean epoch: it is the rise of Christianity, the most significant influence in the whole development of the earth. In the light of occultism, everything which proceeded is only the preparation for Christianity. Buddha, Hermes, and so forth, prophetically pointed towards Christianity, for Christianity must lift man out of his deepest entanglement with matter. And it will raise man out of this entanglement. Man's ascent from matter begins again. The task of spiritual science is to help in this ascent into the spiritual world.

The next epoch of our Post-Atlantean culture will bring still more inventions and discoveries; but man will more and more perceive mere letters in the physical world. A genuine Christianity will speak of the external world as condensed Spirit, and the Spirit will once more arise out of matter. We shall then no longer say that the external world is an illusion, for we shall recognise it fully and lose nothing, and yet rise up to a higher spiritual world.

Christianity will contribute most of all towards this course of development. During the sixth epoch, great masses of men will be deeply moved and seized by truths which are now revealed to few, and this will give mankind an insight into the spiritual world. What now exists as thought will in future be a real force. Many people will have this power of thought during the sixth epoch of culture. The theosophical Christianity of to-day will spread among great masses of men. These thoughts will grow stronger and stronger and they will have a creative influence upon the human form.

Once upon a time the human body had quite a different aspect from that which it has to-day; indeed, if I were to describe to you this human body of ancient times, you would be greatly surprised. Because it was still soft, the Ego could exercise a far greater influence upon it. Modern man has only retained an insignificant rest of the psychic influence of will upon his body, for instance, when you are seized by sudden fright you grow pale, because the inner soul-condition penetrates as far as the blood and your complexion changes. But other bodily conditions can show you how little we are now able to control our body. With the gradual ascent into the spiritual world this will change; man's body will become softer and softer and he will once more be able to influence the thoughts which now still exist so sparsely, will gradually grow stronger; these thoughts will then be able to transform even the body. Man will be able to mould his own body—but this will only be the case in a very distant future.

Sex arose in the human being only during the Lemurian age; before that time he was bi-sexual, both male-and female. With the incorporation of the Ego, the human being was split into two sexes. We shall learn to know this better, when we shall consider more closely the development of the human blood. This will lead us to the problem of the division into sexes and also to the fact that the now existing division of the sexes will again disappear.

Thus we look into a future in which the human being will exercise quite a different influence upon his body.

What is, for example, that which sends the blush of shame into our face? What is it? A last remnant of the influence which man once exercised over his body. Man will more and more be able to work consciously into his body, and then will come the time when he will be able to transform the muscle of his heart into one which obeys' him.

Science describes the heart as a mere physical apparatus: as a pump. But the blood does not only stream through the body because the heart pumps the blood through it; everything which constitutes the blood depends upon the soul; the blood pulses more or less quickly according to our feelings, and it is the blood which produces the movement of the heart. But in future the human being will have a conscious influence upon the heart; therefore the heart is an organ which is now at the beginning of its development. The heart is a muscle with a spiritual development, an organ through which the human being will be able to express himself as he develops towards a higher stage, thus exercising a creative influence upon his whole body.

The heart is only at the beginning of its development, and for this reason it is a cross to materialistic science. Materialistic science tells you: all the muscles through which you move, are formed of transversal strips, but all those muscles which move automatically consist of longitudinal strips. The heart however is a peculiar organ upsetting every calculation! It is an automatic muscle, nevertheless it has, even to-day, transversal fibres.

To-morrow I will show you how certain things can be explained in the light of spiritual science.

Spiritual science thus throws light upon that which surrounds us. We shall redeem everything which has become matter from its present rigid condition. This is how the thought of redemption, may be grasped in its deepest essence! Man has developed to an ever higher stage, leaving behind him certain kingdoms in the course of this development. He will become powerful and redeem that which he has left behind; he will help to redeem the earth! But if he is to redeem the earth he must not despise it, but unite himself with it.

To-day I wish to continue with the subject I placed before you the day before yesterday. We were tracing the thread of evolution which enters into the spiritual life of the present time, and we left off with the individuality of Julian the Apostate. I told you that this individuality was next incarnated in one who is only known by legendary accounts, whose secret is contained in the Parsifal legend, in the name of Herzeleide. In this life as Herzeleide, the soul of Julian the Apostate entered into a far deeper inner life. The soul-life of the individuality was deepened, as was indeed necessary after the many storms and inner moods of opposition which he had undergone in his life as Julian the Apostate.

But this later life of which I told you—this life as Herzeleide—spread itself out over the former life as Julian the Apostate like a warm embalming cloud. Thus the soul grew more intense and deep and inward, and grew richer, too, in manifold impulses of the inner life.

Now this soul was among those who had carried over something of the ancient Mysteries. Julian had lived within the substance of the ancient Mysteries at a time when their light was still radiant in many ways. Thus he had received into himself much spirituality of the cosmos. All this had been as it were pressed back during the incarnation as Herzeleide; but it was none the less pressing forth in the soul, and thus we find the same individuality again in the 16th century; we find arising in him once more, in a Christianised form, what he had undergone as Julian the Apostate. For the same individuality reappears in the 16th century as Tycho de Brahe, and stands face to face with the Copernican world-conception which emerges within Western civilisation at that time.

The Copernican world-conception pictures the universe in a way, which if followed to its logical conclusions would tend to drive all spirituality out of the cosmos in man's conception of it. The Copernican world-picture leads at length to a mechanical, machine-like conception of the universe in space. It was after all in view of this Copernican picture of the world that the famous astronomer said to Napoleon: he had searched through all the universe and he could find no God. It is, indeed, an entire elimination of spirituality.

The individuality of whom I am now speaking, who had now returned as Tycho de Brahe, could not submit to this. Thus we see Tycho de Brahe accepting in his world-conception what is useful of Copernicanism, but rejecting the absolute movement of the earth ascribed to it according to the Copernican world-picture. In Tycho de Brahe we see these things united with true spirituality. When we consider the course of his life, it is indeed evident how a karma from ancient time is pressing its way forth with might and main into this life as Tycho de Brahe, seeking to enter the substance of his consciousness. Such is his spirituality. We remember how his Danish relatives sought to hold him fast at all costs in the profession of a lawyer, and we see how, living as a tutor, he steals the hours by night in which to commune with the gods. And here an extraordinary thing appears. All this is contained in his biography. We shall see presently how deeply significant it is for a true estimate of this individuality of Tycho de Brahe—Julian—Herzeleide. With the most primitive instruments contrived and manufactured by himself, he discovers considerable errors in calculation which had entered into the determination of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. We have this remarkable scene in the life of Tycho de Brahe. As a young man with the most primitive instruments with which other people would not dream of trying to accomplish anything, he feels impelled one day to seek the exact places of Saturn and Jupiter in the heavens. In his case all these things are strongly permeated with spiritual content. And this spiritual content leads him to a conception of the universe such as we must have if we are striving once again to the modern science of Initiation, when at length we come to speak of spiritual beings as we speak of physical men on earth. For in reality we can ever meet them, and there is in fact only a difference in quality of being as between those individualities who are now on the physical plane and those who are discarnate, living between death and a new birth.

These things kindled in Tycho de Brahe an extraordinarily deep and penetrating vision of spiritual connections. I mean the connections which appear when we no longer regard everything on earth as though it were caused by earthly impulses alone, and on the other hand consider the stars only in mathematical calculations, but when we perceive the interplay of impulses from the stars with the historic impulses within mankind. In Tycho de Brahe's soul there lived instinctively what he had brought with him from his life as Julian the Apostate. In that former life it had not been permeated with rationalism or intellectualism. It had been intuitive, imaginative—for such was the inner life of Julian the Apostate. With all this he succeeded in doing something that made a great sensation.

He could make little impression on his contemporaries with his astronomic opinions, differing as they did from Copernicus, or with his other astronomical achievements. He observed countless stars and made a map of the heavens which alone made it possible for Kepler afterwards to reach his great results. For it was on the basis of Tycho de Brahe's mapping of the stars that Kepler discovered his famous laws. But none of these things could have made so great an impression on his contemporaries as a discovery relatively unimportant in itself, but very striking. He foretold almost to the day the death of the Sultan Soliman, which afterwards occurred as he had foretold it. Here we see ancient perceptions working into a later time in a spiritual intellectuality. Perceptions which Julian the Apostate had received light up again in modern time in Tycho de Brahe. Tycho de Brahe is indeed one of the most interesting of human souls. In the 17th century he passed on through the gate of death and entered the spiritual world. Now in the spiritual currents which I have described as those of Michael, this being, Tycho de Brahe—Julian the Apostate—Herzeleide, constantly emerges. In one or another of the super-sensible functions he is in fact always there. Hence too we find him in those great events in the super-sensible world at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century which are connected with this stream of Michael.

I told you already of the great super-sensible School of instruction in the 15th, 16th centuries which stood under the aegis of Michael himself. Then there began for those who had been within this School a life which took its course in such a way that activities and forces unfolded in the spiritual world worked down into the physical, worked in connection with the physical world. For example, in the time that immediately followed the period of the super-sensible School of Michael, an important task was allotted to an individuality of whose continued life I have often spoken—I mean the individuality of Alexander the Great.

I have already spoken, here at Dornach too, of Lord Bacon of Verulam as the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid. We know how intense and determining an influence Bacon's conceptions had on the whole succeeding evolution of the spiritual life, notably in its finer impulses and movements. Now the remarkable thing is this, that in Lord Bacon himself something took place which we may describe as a morbid elimination of old spirituality. For such spirituality he had after all possessed when he was Haroun al Raschid.

And thus we see, proceeding from the impulse of Lord Bacon, a whole world of daemonic beings. The world was literally filled supersensibly and sensibly with daemonic beings. (When I say “sensibly” I meant not, of course, visibly, but within the world of sense.)

Now it chiefly fell to the individuality of Alexander to wage war against these daemonic idols of Lord Bacon, Francis Bacon of Verulam. And similar activities, exceedingly important ones, were taking place on earth below. For otherwise the materialism of the 19th century would have broken in upon the world in a far more devastating way even than it did. Similar activities, taking place in the spiritual and in the physical world together, were allotted to the stream of Michael, until at length at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century there took place in super-sensible regions what I have already described as the enactment of a great and sublime super-sensible ritual and ceremony.

In the super-sensible world at that time a cult was instituted and enacted in real imaginations of a spiritual kind. Thus we may say: At the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century there hovers in the immediate neighbourhood of the physical world of sense a great super-sensible event, consisting in super-sensible acts of ritual, an unfolding of mighty pictures of the spiritual life of beings of the universe, the Beings of the Hierarchies in connection with the great ether-workings of the universe and the human workings upon earth. I say“in the immediate neighbourhood,” meaning of course, adjoining this physical world in a qualitative, not in a spatial sense. It is interesting to see how at a most favourable moment a little miniature picture of this super-sensible cult and action flowed into Goethe's spirit. Transformed and changed and in miniature we have this picture set down by Goethe in his fairy story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily ...

There was, then, a great super-sensible action in which those above all took part who had partaken in the stream of Michael, in all the revelations super-sensible and sensible, of which I told you. Now here again and again the individuality who was last present upon earth in Tycho de Brahe, plays a very great part. And it was his constant striving to preserve the great and lasting impulses of what we call paganism, of the old life of the Mysteries. It was his striving to preserve it in effect towards a better understanding of Christianity. He had entered Christianity when he lived as the soul of Herzeleide. Now it was his striving to introduce into the Christian conception all that he had received through his Initiation as Julian the Apostate. For it was this especially which seemed so important to the souls of whom I have spoken. The many souls who are now to be found in the Anthroposophical Movement or strive towards this Movement with sincerity are united with all these spiritual streams. By its very essence and nature they feel themselves attracted by the School of Michael, and Tycho de Brahe had a great influence in this. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, especially at the end of the 19th century, these souls have descended to the earth, prepared not only to feel the Christ as He is felt in the various Confessions, but to feel Him and behold Him as the Cosmic Christ in His universal majesty and glory. The souls were prepared for this even supersensibly, between death and the new birth. They were prepared by such influences as that of Tycho de Brahe, of the soul who was last incarnated in Tycho de Brahe.

This individuality therefore played an extraordinarily important part continuously within the stream of Michael.

You see, the souls were constantly looking towards the approaching dominion of Michael. They were looking towards it in the old super-sensible School of the 15th and 16th centuries, and they were looking towards it again during the enactment of that super-sensible ceremony which was to introduce and, as it were, to consecrate from the spiritual worlds the subsequent Michael dominion upon earth. Now as I have already indicated, a large number of Platonically gifted souls have remained in the spiritual worlds since the time they worked in Chartres. (I have placed here for your inspection to-day other pictures of the series from Chartres which I received. They are pictures of the Prophets and also of the wonderful architecture of Chartres.) The individualities of the teachers of Chartres, who were of a Platonic tendency, remained in the spiritual world. It was more the Aristotelians who descended to the earth, finding their way largely into the Dominican Order. Then, after a certain time, they united again with the Platonists in the spiritual world and went on working together with them supersensibly, from the spiritual world. Thus we may say: the souls of Platonic character have remained behind. They have not appeared again on earth, not at any rate the more important individualities among them. They are waiting till the end of this century. But on the other hand, many who felt themselves drawn to what I have described as the Michael deeds in the super-sensible, have come down and entered the stream of the Anthroposophical Movement inasmuch as they have felt sincerely drawn on earth to such a spiritual Movement.

We may say in truth: what lives in Anthroposophy was kindled first by the Michael School of instruction in the 15th, 16th centuries, and by the great religious act that took place in the super-sensible at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. It was in vision of that super-sensible action that my Mystery Plays came into being, and for this reason the first Mystery Play, different as it is from Goethe's fairy story of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, nevertheless reveals distinctly similar features. For a thing that would contain real impulses of a spiritual kind cannot be arbitrarily conceived. It must be seen and worked out in harmony with the spiritual world.

Thus we stand here within the Anthroposophical Movement to-day, having entered into the dominion of Michael which has now begun. We stand here in this Movement, called to understand the essence of this reign of Michael, called to work in the spirit of his working through the centuries and the thousands of years. At this moment of great significance he has begun his earthly rulership once more and we are called to work in his direction. Such is the inner esoteric impulse of this stream of Michael, whose working to begin with for this century, is very clearly foreshadowed.

But you must see that if we take Anthroposophy in its present content and trace it backward, we find little preparation for it upon earth. Go back just a little way from what appears as Anthroposophy and try to find its sources in the course of the 19th century, for instance. If you do so open-mindedly, if your vision is not clouded by all manner of philological contrivances, you will not find the sources. You will find isolated traces of a spiritual conception which it was always possible to use like little germinating seeds, though very sparingly, within the great texture of Anthroposophy. But you will find no real preparation for it within the earthly sphere.

All the greater was the preparation in the super-sensible. You are well aware how Goethe's working (even after his death, though in my books it may not seem so) contributed to the forming and shaping of Anthroposophy. It is indeed true that the most important things in this respect took place within the super-sensible. Nevertheless we can trace the spiritual life of the 19th century backward in a living way till we come to Goethe, Herder, and others, nay even to Lessing. And we find after all that what was working in isolated spirits of the end of the 18th and first half of the 19th century was, to say the least of it, imbued with a strong spiritual atmosphere, even if it appeared in great abstractions as in Hegel, or in abstract pictures as in the case of Schelling.

You may read in my Riddles of Philosophy how I described Schelling and Hegel. I think you will recognise that I was seeking to point to something of the soul and spirit in this evolution of world-conceptions which could then enter into the Anthroposophical stream. In the book Riddles of Philosophy, I tried indeed to take hold of those abstractions of the philosophers with full heart and mind. Perhaps I may specially draw your attention to the chapter on Hegel, and to the things I said of Schelling.

But we must go still deeper to perceive the origin of certain remarkable phenomena that appeared in the spiritual life of the first half of the 19th century. They were lost sight of, they were obliterated in what then came forth as the materialistic spiritual life of the second half of the century. Nevertheless, in however abstract conceptions, there did appear something that contained a hidden spiritual life and being.

Most interesting, and increasingly so the more one enters into him, is the philosopher Schelling. He begins almost like Fichte, with pure, clear-cut ideas, saturated through and through with will. For such was Fichte. Johann Gottlieb Fichte was one of the few figures of world-history—indeed in a certain respect he is perhaps unique—who combined the greatest conceptual abstractions with enthusiasm and energy of will. He is an extraordinarily interesting figure. Short and thick-set, under-grown a little owing to the privations of his youth, one would see him marching along the street with extraordinary firmness of step. He was all will, and will and will again, and his will lived itself out in the description of the most abstract concepts. And yet with these most abstract concepts he could achieve such a thing, for instance, as his Addresses to the German Nation, with which he inspired countless people most wonderfully.

Schelling appears in an almost Fichte-like way, not with the same power, but with a similar way of thought. But we very soon see Schelling's spirit expand. In his youth he speaks like Fichte of the“I” and the “Not I” and other such abstractions and inspires the people of Jena with these things. But he soon departs from them. His spirit grows and widens and we see entering into him conceptions, albeit fanciful, which nevertheless tend almost to spiritual imaginations. Thus he goes on for a while. Then he enters deeply into such spirits as Jacob Boehme, and writes something altogether different in style and tone from his former works. He writes The Foundations of Human Freedom—which is a kind of resurrection of the ideas of Jacob Boehme.

Then we see almost a kind of Platonism springing up in Schelling's soul. He writes a philosophic dialogue entitled Bruno which is truly reminiscent of Plato's Dialogues, and deeply penetrating. Interesting too is another short work Klara, wherein the super-sensible world plays a great part. Then for a very long time Schelling is silent. His fellow philosophers begin to look on him, if I may put it so, almost as a living dead man. He published only his extraordinarily deep and significant work on the Samothracian Mysteries, once again an expansion of his spirit; but he lives on in simple retirement at Munich, until at length the King of Prussia summons him to lecture on philosophy at the University of Berlin. And of the philosophy he now proclaimed Schelling said that he had gained it in the silence of his retirement through the course of decades.

Now, therefore, Schelling appeared in Berlin, proclaiming that philosophy which was afterwards included in his posthumous works as the Philosophy of Mythology, and the Philosophy of Revelation. He made no great impression on the Berlin public, for the whole tenor of his lectures in Berlin was really this: Man, however much he thinks and ponders, can attain nothing in the sphere of world-conceptions; something must enter his soul, inspiring and imbuing his thought with life as a real, spiritual world.

Suddenly, in place of the old rationalistic philosophy there appears in Schelling a real awakening of the ancient philosophy of the gods of mythology, a reawakening of the old gods in a very modern way, and yet with old spirituality quite evidently working in it. All this is very strange. And in his Philosophy of Revelation he evolves ideas of Christianity which do contain, in however abstract a form, important inspirations and suggestions for what must afterwards be said by Anthroposophy, directly out of spiritual vision, on many points of Christianity.

Schelling is most certainly not to be passed over in the easygoing way of the Berlin people. Indeed he cannot be passed over at all, but the Berlin folk passed him over quite easily. When one of his descendants got engaged to the daughter of a Prussian minister (an external, but at any rate a karmically connected event) a Prussian functionary who heard of it remarked:“I never knew before why Schelling ever came to Berlin. Now I know.”

Nevertheless one can well come into inner difficulties and conflicts in following Schelling thus through his career. Moreover the last period in his life, dreadfully as it is generally treated in the histories of philosophy, is always dealt with in a chapter by itself, under the title: Schelling's Theosophy.

I myself again and again returned to Schelling. For me a certain warmth always proceeded from what lives in him, in spite of the abstract form. Thus at a comparatively early age I entered deeply into the above-mentioned philosophic dialogue, Bruno, or On the Divine and Natural Principle of Things.

Since the year 1854, Schelling was in the spiritual world again. And he came especially near to one through this dialogue, Bruno, if one entered into it, and lived through it, also through his Klara, and notably through his essay on the Samothracian Mysteries. One could easily come really near to him in spirit.

And at length, as early as the beginning of the eighteen nineties, it became fully clear to me: However it may have been with the other personalities who worked in the sphere of philosophy during the first half of the 19th century, in Schelling's case it is absolutely clear that a spiritual inspiration did really enter in. Spiritual inspiration worked and entered into his work continually.

Thus one might attain the following picture.—To begin with, down in the physical world, one could see Schelling, as he passed through the manifold vicissitudes of life, through a long period, as I said above, of loneliness and isolation, treated in the most varying way by his fellow men, now with immense enthusiasm, and now again with scorn and derision; Schelling, who really always made a significant impression whenever he appeared again in public—the short, thick-set man, with the immensely impressive head, and eyes which even in extreme old age were sparkling with fire, for from his eyes there spoke the fire of Truth, the fire of Knowledge. And this Schelling whom one can distinctly see—the more so, the more one enters into him—had certain moments when inspiration poured into him from above.

Most clear and visible it became to me when I read Robert Zimmermann's review of Schelling's book on the Ages of the World. From Zimmermann, as you know, is derived the word Anthroposophy, though his Anthroposophy is a tangled undergrowth of abstract concepts. I had the very greatest regard for him, and yet, when I read this review, I could not help breaking out into the sigh—“Pedant that you are!”

Then I returned to the book itself, Schelling's Ages of the World, which is indeed somewhat abstractly written, but in which one may clearly recognise something like a description of ancient Atlantis—quite a spiritual description, containing spiritual realities, however much distorted by abstractions.

Thus you see in Schelling's case again and again there is something working in from higher worlds, so that we must say: Down there is Schelling, but in the higher worlds something is taking place which influences him from above. In Schelling's case what is a general truth becomes most visible, namely that in spiritual evolution there is a perpetual interplay of the spiritual world above with the earthly world below. And once in the eighteen nineties I was most intensely concerned in finding the spiritual foundations of the age of Michael and of other things.

At that time I myself was entering a phase of life in which I could not but experience intensely the world immediately adjoining our physical world of sense. I could only hint at these things in my autobiography, but I have hinted at them there. That adjoining world is separated, if I may so describe it, only by a thin wall from the physical, and in it the most gigantic facts are happening, nor are they at all powerfully separated from our world. It was at the time when I was in Weimar. On the one hand I entered most intensively into the social life of Weimar in all directions; but at the same time I felt the inner necessity to withdraw into myself. These two sides of my life went parallel with one another. And at that time, in the very highest degree, it happened that my experience of the spiritual world was always more intense and strong than my experience of the physical. Already as a young man I had no great difficulty in quickly comprehending any philosophy or world-conception that came into my sphere. But a plant or a stone, if I had to recognise it again, I had to look at, not three or four times, but fifty or sixty times. I could not easily unite my soul with that which in the physical world is named by physical means. And this had reached its highest point during my Weimar period.

It was long, long before the Republican Constituent Assembly took place in Weimar, and at that time Weimar was really like a spiritual oasis, quite different from any other place in Germany. In that Weimar, as I said in my autobiography, I did indeed experience intense moments of loneliness. And once again—it was in 1897—wishing to investigate certain matters, I put my hand on Schelling's Divinities of Samothrace, and his Philosophy of Mythology, simply to receive a stimulation, not in order to study in the books. (Just as one who researches in the spiritual world, if for instance, he wishes to make researches on the periods of the first Christian centres, in order to facilitate matters may lay the writings of St. Augustine or of Clement of Alexandria under his head for a few minutes in succession. You must not laugh about these things. They are simply external methods to assist one, external technicalities that are not directly connected with the real thing itself. They are an external stimulation, like any technical mnemonic.) Thus at that time I took into my hand Schelling's Divinities of Samothrace, and his Philosophy of Mythology. But the real subject of my study at that moment was that which was taking place spiritually in the course of the 19th century, and which afterwards poured down so as to become Anthroposophy.

And at that moment, when I was really able to trace Schelling's life, his biography, his evolution through his life, it was revealed to me—not yet quite clearly, for these things only became clear at a far later date, when I wrote my Riddles of Philosophy—it was revealed to me, I could already perceive, although not quite clearly, how much of Schelling's writing was written down by him under inspiration, and that that inspiring figure was Julian the Apostate—Herzeleide—Tycho Brahe. He has not appeared again himself on the physical plane, but he worked with tremendous strength through the soul of Schelling. Then I became aware how greatly Tycho Brahe had progressed in his life as Tycho Brahe. Through Schelling's bodily nature little could penetrate; but once we know how the individuality of Tycho Brahe hovered over him as an inspirer, we read the lightning-flashes of genius in the Divinities of Samothrace quite differently. We read the flashes of genius above all in the Philosophy of Revelation, and in Schelling's interpretation of the ancient Mysteries, which is, after all, magnificent of its kind. And especially if we enter deeply enough into the curious language he uses in these passages, then presently we hear, no longer the voice of Schelling but the voice of Tycho Brahe! Then indeed we become aware how, among other spirits, this Tycho Brahe, especially the individuality who was in Julian the Apostate, played a great part, and contributed many things. For by his genius many a thing arose in the spiritual life of modern time which worked in turn as a stimulus, and whence we were to borrow at least the external form and expression for the spirit and teachings of Anthroposophy.

Another of the writings of German philosophers which made a great impression on me was Jakob Froschhammer's book, Die Phantasie als Welt-Prinzip, a brilliant book at the end of the 19th century, brilliant because this courageous man, having been driven from the Church, and his writings placed in the Index, was no less courageous in the face of science, for he revealed the kinship of the creative principle of fancy working purely in the soul when man creates artistically, with the force that works within as the force of life and growth. In that time it was indeed an achievement. Froschhammer's book on fancy or imagination as a world-principle, as a world-creative power, is indeed a work of great importance.

Thus I was greatly interested in this man, Jakob Froschhammer. Once more I tried to get at him in a real sense, not only through his writings, and once again I found that the inspiring spirit was the same who had lived in Tycho Brahe and in Julian the Apostate. And so it was in a whole number of personalities in whose working we can see a certain preparation for what then came forth as Anthroposophy.

But in each case we need the spiritual light behind, the light which works within the super-sensible. For what came to earth before remained, after all, in a world of abstraction. It is only now and then, in a spirit such as Schelling, or in a man of courage like Jakob Froschhammer, that the abstractions suddenly grow concrete.

And to-day, my dear friends, we may look up to what is working there in spiritual realms, and we may know how Anthroposophy stands in relation to it. And well we know how we are being helped by that which we perceive when we extend our spiritual research into the detailed realities of spiritual life in the course of history. Well may we know it. Here upon earth, striving honestly towards Anthroposophy, there are numbers of souls who have always stood near to the stream of Michael. Added to these, in the super-sensible world, are numbers of souls who have remained behind, among them the teachers of Chartres. And between those who are here in the world of sense, and those who are above in the spiritual world, there is a decided tendency to unite their work with one another.

And now if we would find a great helper for those things which we must investigate for the future of the 20th century, if we would find one who can advise us in relation to the super-sensible world, if we need impulses that are there within that world, it is the individuality of Julian the Apostate—Tycho Brahe who can help us. He is not on the physical plane to-day; but in reality he is always there, always ready to give information on those matters especially which concern the prophetic future of the 20th century.

Taking all these things together it does indeed emerge that those who receive Anthroposophy in a sincere way at the present time are preparing their souls to shorten as far as possible the life between death and a new birth, and to appear again at the end of the 20th century, united with the teachers of Chartres who have remained behind.

We should receive into our souls this consciousness: That the Anthroposophical Movement is called to work on and on, and to appear again not only in its most important, but in nearly all its souls, at the end of the 20th century. For then the great impulse will be given for a spiritual life on earth, without which earthly civilisation would finally be drawn into that decadence, the character of which is only too apparent.

Out of such foundations, I would fain kindle in your hearts something of the flames that we require, so that already now within the Anthroposophical Movement we may absorb the spiritual life strongly enough to appear again properly prepared. For in that great epoch after shortened life in spiritual worlds we shall work again on earth—in the epoch when for the salvation of the earth the spiritual Powers are reckoning in their most important members, in their most important features, on what Anthroposophists can do.

I think the vision of this perspective of the future may stir the hearts of Anthroposophists to call forth within themselves the feelings which will carry them in a right way, with energy and strength of action and with the beauty of enthusiasm, through the present earthly life; for then this earthly life will be a preparation for the work at the end of the century when Anthroposophy will be called upon to play its part.

We only learn to know the beings of the sense-world when we observe them in the way they live and act, and it is the same with those beings about which I have been speaking and shall continue to speak in these lectures, the elemental beings of nature. Invisibly and super-sensibly present behind what is physical and sense-perceptible, they participate in all the happenings of the world just as, or rather in a higher sense than do the physical, sense-perceptible beings.

Now you will readily be able to imagine that to these beings the world appears somewhat other than to the beings of the sense-world, for they do not possess a physical body such as is possessed by these latter. Everything which they grasp or perceive in the world must be different from what enters the human eye. This is indeed the case. The human being experiences the earth, for instance, as the cosmic body upon which he moves about. He even finds it slightly unpleasant when through some atmospheric condition or other, as occasionally occurs, this cosmic body becomes softened and he sinks into it even in a slight degree. He likes to feel the earth as something hard, as something into which he does not sink.

This whole way of experiencing things, this whole attitude towards the earth, is, however, completely alien to the gnomes; they sink down everywhere, because for them the whole earth-body is primarily a hollow space through which they can pass. They can penetrate everywhere; the rocks, the metals, present no hindrance to their—shall I say swimming around. There are no words in our language which really express this wandering about of the gnomes inside the body of the earth. It is just that they have an inner experience, an inner perception, of the different ingredients of the earth; when they wander along a vein of metal they have a different experience from when they take their way along a layer of chalk. All this, however, the gnomes feel inwardly, for through all such things they penetrate unhindered. They have not the least idea that the earth exists. Their idea is that there is a space within which they perceive certain experiences; the experience of gold, the experience of mercury, of tin, of silica, and so on. This is to express it in human language, not in the language of the gnomes. Their language is far more perceptive; and it is just because their whole life is spent in journeying along all the veins and seams—ever and again journeying along them—that they acquire the very pronounced intellectuality about which I have spoken to you. Through this they acquire their all-comprehensive knowledge, for in the metals and in the earth everything outside in the universe is revealed to them; as though in a mirror they experience everything which is outside in the universe. But for the earth itself the gnomes have no perception, only for its different constituents, and for the different kinds of inner experience which they offer.

Because of this the gnomes have a quite particular gift for receiving the impressions which come from the moon. It is towards the moon that they continually direct their attentive listening, and in this respect they are—I cannot say the born—it is so difficult to find the appropriate words—but the inherent neurasthenics. Of course, what for us is an illness is for these gnome-beings their actual life-element. For them this is no illness; it is simply a matter of course. It is what gives them that inner sensibility towards all those things of which I have spoken. But it also gives them their inner sensitivity towards the phenomena connected with the phases of the moon.

They follow the changes in the moon-phenomena with such close attention—I have already described their power of attention to you—that it actually alters their form. When, therefore, one follows the existence of a gnome, one receives quite a different impression at full moon from that one receives at new moon, and again at the intermediate phases.

At full moon the gnomes are ill at ease. Physical moonlight does not suit them, and at that time they thrust the whole feeling of their being outwards. They circumscribe themselves, as it were, with a spiritual skin. At full moon they press the feeling of their existence towards the boundary of their body. And in full moonlight, if one has imaginative perception for such things, they really appear like little shining, mail-clad knights. They are clad in a kind of spiritual armour and this it is which presses outwards in their skin to arm them against the moonlight which so displeases them. But when the time of new moon approaches the gnome becomes transparent, wonderful to see, inwardly irradiated with a glittering play of colours. One sees within him, as it were, the processes of a whole world. It is as though one were to look into the human brain, not as an anatomist investigating the fabric of the cells, but as one who perceives inside the brain the shimmering and sparkling of the thoughts. That is how these transparent little folk, the gnomes, appear to one, its though the play of thoughts is revealed within them. It is just at new moon that the gnomes are so particularly interesting, for each of them bears a whole world within himself; and one can say that within this world there actually lies the mystery of the moon.

If one unveils it, this moon-mystery, one comes upon truly remarkable discoveries, for one reaches the conclusion that at the present time the moon is continually approaching nearer—naturally you must not take this in a crude way, as though the moon would collide with the earth—but each year it does in fact come somewhat nearer. Each year the moon is actually nearer the earth. One recognises this from the ever more vigorous play of the moon-forces in the gnome-world during the time of the new moon. And to this coming nearer of the moon the attentiveness of these goblins is quite specially directed; for it is in producing results from the way in which the moon affects them that they see their chief mission in the universe. They await with intense expectation the epoch when the moon will again unite with the earth; and they assemble all their forces in order to be armed in readiness for the epoch when the moon will have united with the earth, for they will then use the moon substance gradually to disperse the earth, as far as its outer substance is concerned, into the universe. Its substance must pass away.

Because they hold this task in view these kobolds or gnomes feel themselves to be of quite special importance, for they gather together the most varied experiences from the whole of earth-existence, and they hold themselves in readiness, when all earthly substance will have been dispersed into the universe,—after the transition to the Jupiter-evolution—to preserve what is good in the structure of the earth in order to incorporate this in Jupiter as a kind of bony support.

You see, when one looks at this process from the aspect of the gnomes, one gains a first stimulus, a first capacity, to picture how our earth would appear if all the water were taken away from it. Just consider how, in the western hemisphere, everything is orientated from north to south, and how, in the eastern hemisphere, everything is orientated from east to west. Thus, if you were to do away with all the water, you would get in America, with its mountains and what lies under the sea, something which proceeds from north to south; and looking at Europe you would correspondingly find that, in the eastern hemisphere, the chain of the Alps, the Carpathians and so on, runs in the east-west direction. You would get something like the structure of the cross in the earth.

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When one gains insight into this, one receives the impression that this is really the united gnome-world of the old Moon. The predecessors of our Earth-gnomes, the Moon-gnomes, gathered together their Moon-experiences and from them fashioned this structure, this firm structure of the solid fabric of the Earth, so that our solid Earth-structure actually arose from the experiences of the gnomes of the old Moon.

These are the things which reveal themselves in regard to the gnome-world. Through them the gnomes acquire an interesting, an extraordinarily interesting relationship to the whole evolution of the universe. They always carry over the firm element of a preceding stage into the stage which follows. They are the preservers in evolution of the continuity of the firm structure, and thus they preserve the firm structure from one world-body to another. It belongs to the most interesting of studies to approach the super-sensible world from the aspect of these spiritual beings and to observe their special task, for it is through this that one first gains an impression of how every kind of being existing in the world shares in the task of working upon the whole formation of the world.

Now let us pass over from the gnomes to the undines, the water-beings. Here a very remarkable picture presents itself. These beings have not the need for life that human beings have, neither have they the need for life that the animals have even though instinctively, but one could almost say that the undines, as also the sylphs, have rather a need for death. In a cosmic way they are really like the flying creature which casts itself into the flame. They only feel their life to be truly theirs when they die. This is extraordinarily interesting. Here on the physical earth everything desires to live, for all that has life-force in it is prized. It is the living, sprouting life that is valued. But once we have crossed the threshold, all these beings say to us that it is death which is really the true beginning of life. This can be felt by these beings. Let us take the undines. You know, perhaps, that sailors who travel a great deal on the sea find that in July, August and September—further to the west this is already the case in June—the Baltic Sea makes a peculiar impression, and they say that the sea is beginning to blossom. It becomes, as it were, productive; but it produces just those things which decay in the sea. The process of decay in the sea makes itself felt; it imparts to the sea a peculiar putrefactive smell.

All this, however, is different for the undines. It causes them no unpleasant sensations; but when the millions and millions of water-creatures which perish in the sea enter into the state of decomposition the sea becomes for the undines the most wonderful phosphorescent play of colours. It shines and glitters with every possible colour. Especially does the sea glitter for them, inwardly and outwardly, in every shade of blue, violet and green. The whole process of decomposition in the sea becomes a glimmering and gleaming of the darker colours up to the green. But these colours are realities for the undines, and one can see how, in this play of colours in the sea, they absorb the colours into themselves. They draw these colours into their own bodily nature. They become like them, they themselves become phosphorescent. And as they absorb the play of colours, as they themselves become phosphorescent, there arises in the undines something like a longing, an immense longing to rise upwards, to soar upwards. Upwards they soar, led by this longing, and with this longing they offer themselves to the beings of the higher hierarchies—to the angels, archangels and so on—as earthly sustenance; and in this sacrifice they find their bliss. Then within the higher hierarchies they live on further.

And thus we see the remarkable fact that each year with the return of early spring these beings evolve upwards from unfathomable depths. There they take part in the life of the earth by working on the plant-kingdom in the way I have described. Then, however, they pour themselves, as it were, into the water, and take up by means of their own bodily nature the phosphorescence of the water, the element of decomposition, and bear it upwards with an intensity of longing. Then in a vast, in a magnificent cosmic picture, one sees how, emanating from earthly water, the colours which are carried upwards by the undines and which have spiritual substantiality, provide the higher hierarchies with their sustenance, how the earth becomes the source of nourishment in that the very essence of the undines' longing is to let themselves be consumed by the higher beings. There they live on further; there they enter into their eternity. Thus every year there is a continual upstreaming of these undines, whose inner nature is formed out of the earthly sphere, and who radiate upwards, filled with the longing to offer themselves as nourishment to the higher beings.

And now let us proceed to the sylphs. In the course of the year we find the dying birds. I described to you how these dying birds possess spiritualized substance, and how they desire to give this spiritualized substance over to the higher worlds in order to release it from the earth. But here an intermediary is needed. And these intermediaries are the sylphs. It is a fact that through the dying bird-world the air is continually being filled with astrality. This astrality is of a lower order, but it is nevertheless astrality; it is astral substance. In this astrality flutter—or hover might be a better word—in this astrality hover the sylphs. They take up what comes from the dying bird-world, and carry it, again with a feeling of longing, up into the heights, only desiring to be inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies. They offer themselves as that which supplies breathing-existence to the higher hierarchies. Again a magnificent spectacle. With the dying bird-world, this astral, inwardly radiant substance is seen to pass over into the air. The sylphs flash like blue lightning through the air, and into their blue lightning, which assumes first greener, then redder tones, they absorb this astrality which comes from the bird-world, and dart upwards like upward-flashing lightning. And if one follows this beyond the boundaries of space, it becomes what is inhaled by the beings of the higher hierarchies.

Thus one can say: The gnomes carry one world over into another in regard to its structure. They progress, as it were in a direction—the expression is only used as a comparison—which is horizontal with evolution. The other beings—the undines, the sylphs—carry upwards what they experience as bliss in yielding themselves up to death, in being consumed, in being inhaled. There they continue to live within the higher hierarchies; within them they experience their eternity.

And when we pass over to the fire-beings, only think how the dust on the butterfly's wings seems to dissolve into nothing with the death of the butterfly. But it does not really dissolve into nothing. What is shed as dust from the butterfly's wings is the most highly spiritualized matter. And all this passes over like microscopic comets into the warmth-ether which surrounds the earth, each single particle of dust passes like a microscopic comet into the warmth-ether of the earth. When in the course of the year the butterfly-world approaches its end, all this becomes glittering and shimmering, an inner glittering and shimmering. And into this glittering and shimmering the fire-beings pour themselves; they absorb it. There it continues to glitter and shimmer, and they, too, get a feeling of longing. They bear what they have thus absorbed up into the heights. And now one sees—I have already described this to you from another aspect—how what the fire-beings carry outwards from the butterfly's wings shines forth into world-space. But it does not only shine forth; it streams forth. And it is this which provides the particular view of the earth, which is perceived by the higher hierarchies. The beings of the higher hierarchies gaze upon the earth, and what they principally see is this butterfly-and-insect-existence which has been carried outwards by the fire-beings; and the fire-beings find their highest ecstasy in the realization that it is they who present themselves before the spiritual eyes of the higher hierarchies. They find their highest bliss in being beheld by the gaze, by the spiritual eyes, of the higher hierarchies, in being absorbed into them. They strive upwards towards these beings and carry to them the knowledge of the earth.

Thus we see how these elemental beings are the intermediaries between the earth and the spirit-cosmos. We see this drama of the phosphorescent uprising of the undines, which pass away in the sea of light and flame of the higher hierarchies as their sustenance; we see the up-flashing of the greenish-reddish lightning, which is in-breathed there where the earth continually passes over into the eternal, the eternal survival of the fire-beings, whose activity never ceases. For whereas, here on earth, it is particularly at a certain time of the year that butterflies die, the fire-beings see to it that what it is their task to look to is poured out into the universe throughout the entire year. Thus the earth is as though cloaked in a mantle of fire. Seen from outside the earth appears fiery. But everything is brought about by beings who see the things of the earth quite differently from how man sees them. As already mentioned, man's experience of the earth is of a hard substance upon which he walks about and stands. For the gnomes it is a transparent globe, a hollow body. For the undines water is something in which they perceive the phosphorizing process, which they can take into themselves and feel as their life-element. Sylphs see in the astrality of the air, which emanates from dying birds, that which makes their lightning flashes more vivid than they would otherwise be, for in itself the lightning of these sylphs is dull and bluish. And then again the disintegration of butterfly existence is something which continually envelops the earth as though with a sheath of fire. When this is beheld it is as though the earth were surrounded by a wonderful fiery painting; and, on the other side, when one looks upwards from the earth, one beholds these lightning flashes, these phosphorescent and evanescent undines. All this makes us say: Here on earth the elemental nature-spirits live and weave; they strive upwards and pass away in the fire-mantle of the earth. In reality, however, they do not pass away, but there they find their eternal existence by passing over into the beings of the higher hierarchies.

All this, however, which at first appears like a wonderful world-picture is the expression of what happens on earth, for initially it is all played out upon the earth. We human beings are always present in what is there taking place; and the fact is—even if in his ordinary consciousness man is at first incapable of grasping what surrounds him—that every night we are involved in the weaving and working of these beings, that we ourselves take part as ego and as astral body in what these beings are carrying out.

But it is the gnomes especially which really find it quite an entertainment to observe a person who is asleep, not the physical body in bed, but the person who is outside his physical body in his astral body and ego, for what the gnome sees is someone who thinks in the spirit but does not know it. He does not know that his thoughts live in the spiritual. And again for the undines it is inexplicable that man knows himself so little; likewise with the sylphs, and likewise with the fire-beings.

On the physical plane, you see, it is certainly often unpleasant to have gnats and the like buzzing around one at night. But the spiritual man, the ego and astral body—at night these are surrounded and woven about by elemental beings; and this being surrounded and woven about is a constant admonition to man to give an impetus to his consciousness in order to know more about the world.

Now, therefore, I can try to give you an idea of what these beings—gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings—mean with their buzzing about, of what happens when we begin to hear what amuses them in us, and of what they would have us do when they admonish us to give a forward impetus to our consciousness. Yes, you see, here come the gnomes and speak somewhat as follows:

You dream your self,
And shun awakening.

The gnomes know that man possesses his ego as though in a dream, that he must first awaken in order to arrive at his true ego. They see this quite clearly, and call to him in his sleep:

You dream your self

—they mean during the day—

And shun awakening.

Then there sounds forth from the undines:

You think the deeds of angels

Man does not know that his thoughts are really with the angels

You think the deeds of Angels
And know it not.

And from the sylphs there sounds to sleeping man:

Creative Might shines to you,
You divine it not.
You feel its strength

—the strength of Creative Might—

And live it not.

Such approximately are the words of the sylphs, the words of the undines, the words of the gnomes.

The words of the fire-beings:

Divine Will offers you strength,
You accept it not.
With its strength you will,

—with the strength of Divine Will—

Yet thrust it from you.

The aim of all these admonitions is to give man a forward impetus in regard to his consciousness. These beings, which do not enter into physical existence, wish man to make a move onward with his consciousness, so that he, too, may participate in their world.

And when one has thus entered into what these beings have to say to man, one also gradually understands how they give expression to their own nature, somewhat in this way:

The gnomes:

I maintain the life-force in the root,
It creates for me my body's form.

The undines:

I bestir the water's power of growth,
It forms for me substance of life.

The sylphs:

I quaff the airy force of life,
It fills me with the power of being.

And the fire-beings—there it is very difficult to find any kind of earthly words for what they do, because their sphere is far removed from earthly life and earthly activity.

Fire-beings:

I consume¹ the striving power of fire,
Into soul-spirit it releases me.

You see, I have endeavoured to the best of my ability to give you an idea of how these beings of the elemental kingdom characterize themselves; and of the admonitions which they impart to man. But they are not so unfriendly to man as only to suggest to him what is negative in its nature, but pithy and positive sayings also proceed from them. And man experiences these sayings as being of immense, of gigantic import. In such matters as these you must acquire a sense for whether a saying is uttered merely in human words, however beautiful they may be, or whether it sounds forth as though cosmically from the whole mighty chorus of the gnomes. It is the whole manner of its arising which brings about the difference. And when man hearkens to the gnomes after the admonitions which I have written down have been imparted to him, then there sounds towards him from the massed chorus of the gnomes:

Strive to awaken.

Here the significance is the mighty moral impression created by such words when they stream through the universe, arising from the massed chorus of infinitely many single voices.

And from the undine chorus resounds:

Think in the spirit.

With the chorus of sylphs things are not so simple. When the gnomes appear like shining armoured knights in full moonlight there resounds from them as though from earth-depths:

Strive to awaken.

When the undines soar upwards filled with the longing to be consumed, then in this upsoaring there sounds back to the earth:

Think in the Spirit.

But for the sylphs, in that, up above, they allow themselves to be inhaled, disappearing in bluish-reddish-greenish lightning into the world-light, then, as they flash into the light and therein disappear, from the heights there sounds down from them:

Live creatively breathing existence.

And as in fiery anger—but anger which is not felt to be annihilating, but rather as something which man must receive from the cosmos—as in fiery but at the same time enthusiastic anger, the fire-beings carry what is theirs into the fire-mantle of the earth, their words resound. Here the sound is not like that of single voices massed together, but from the whole circumference there resounds as with a mighty voice of thunder:

Receive in love the Will-Force of the Gods.

Naturally, one can turn one's attention away from all this; then one does not perceive it. Whether or no man does perceive such things depends upon his own free decision. But when man does perceive them he knows that they are an integral part of cosmic existence, that something actually occurs in that gnomes, undines, sylphs and fire-beings unfold their evolution in the way described. And the gnomes are not only present for man in the way I have already portrayed, but they are there to let their world-words sound forth from the earth, the undines to let their world-words soar upwards, the sylphs theirs from above, the fire-beings theirs like a chorus, like the massing of a mighty uplifting of voices.

Yes, this is how it could appear when transposed into words. But these words belong to the Word of worlds, and even though we do not hear them with ordinary consciousness, these words are yet not without significance for mankind. For the primeval idea which had its source in instinctive clairvoyance, that the world was born out of the Word, is indeed a profound truth, but the world-word is not some collection of syllables gathered from here or there; the world-word is what sounds forth from countless, countless beings. Countless, countless beings have something to say in the totality of the world, and the world-word sounds forth from the concordance of these countless beings. It is not the general abstract truth that the world is born out of the Word that can bring this to us in its fullness. One thing alone can do this, namely that we gradually arrive at a concrete understanding of how the world-word in all its different nuances is composed of the voices of individual beings, so that these different nuances contribute their sound, their utterance, to the great world-harmony, the mighty world-melody, in the Word's act of creation.

When the gnome-chorus allows its “Strive to awaken” to sound forth, this—only transformed into gnome-language—is the force which is active in bringing about the human bony system, the system of movement in general.

When the undines utter “Think in the spirit”, they utter—transposed into the undine-sphere—what pours itself as world-word into man in order to give form to the organs of digestion.

When the sylphs, as they are breathed in, allow their “Live creatively breathing existence” to stream downwards, there penetrates into man, weaving and pulsating through him, the force which endows him with the organs of the rhythmic system.

And if one attends to what sounds inwardly—in the manner of the fire-beings—from the fire-mantle of the world, then one finds that this sounding manifests as image or reflection. It streams in from the fire-mantle—this sounding force of the word. And every nerve system of every man, every head I would add, is a miniature image of what-translated into the language of the fire-beings—rings out as: “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. This saying, “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”, this is what is active in the highest substance of the world. And when man is experiencing his development in the life between death and a new birth, this it is which transforms what he brought with him through the gate of death into what will later become the human organs of the nerves and senses. So we have:

System of movement

Chorus of gnomes: Strive to awaken

Metabolic organization

Undines: Think in the Spirit

Rhythmic system

Sylphs: Live creatively breathing existence.

Nerve-senses system

Fire-beings: Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods.

Thus you see that what lies beyond the threshold is akin to our own nature, you see how it leads us into the creative divine forces, into what lives and works in all forms of existence. And when one calls to mind what an earlier epoch divined, and is expressed in the words:

The power of life, the seeds behold;
Turn thee away from words' cramped mould.²

—one is impelled to say that all this must become actuality in the further course of the development of mankind. We cramp all knowledge into words if we have no insight into the germinating forces which build up the human being in the most varied ways.

We can therefore say that the system of movement, the metabolic system, the rhythmic system, the system of nerves and senses merge into a unity in that they resound in harmony. For there sounds upwards from below: “Strive to awaken”; “Think in the Spirit”—and from above downwards, mingling with the upward-striving words, “Live creatively breathing existence”; “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”.

This “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods” is the calm creative element in the head. Then what strives from below upwards in “Think in the Spirit”, from above downwards in “Live creatively breathing existence”, in their combined activity is what so works and weaves that it creates an image of the way in which human breathing passes over in a rhythmical way into the activity of the blood. And what implants into us the instruments of the senses, this is what streams from above downwards in “Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods”. But what works in our walking, in our standing, in our moving of the arms and hands, everything in fact which brings man into the manifestation of his element of will, this sounds forth in “Strive to awaken”.

Thus you see how man is a symphony of that world-word which can be interpreted on its lowest level in the way I have presented it to you. Then this world-word ascends to the higher hierarchies, whose task it is to unfold other aspects of this world-word in order that the cosmos may arise and develop. But that which has, as it were, been uttered as a call into the world by these elemental beings is the final reverberation of that creative, upbuilding, form-giving world-word which lies at the base of all activity and all existence.

Gnomes:

You dream your Self,
And shun awakening.

I maintain the life-force in the root,
It creates for me my body's form.

Undines:

You think the deeds of Angels
And know it not.

I bestir the water's power of growth,
It forms for me substance of life.

Sylphs:

Creative might shines to you,
You divine it not;
You feel its strength
And live it not.

I quaff the airy force of life,
It fills me with the power of being.

Fire-beings:

Divine Will offers you strength,
You accept it not.
With its strength you will,
Yet thrust it off from you.

I consume the striving power of fire,
Into soul-spirit it releases me.

Chorus of gnomes: Strive to awaken!
Undines: Think in the Spirit!
Sylphs: Live creatively breathing existence!
Fire-beings: Receive in love the Will-Power of the Gods!

GNOMEN

Du träumst dich selbst,
Und meidest das Erwachen.

Ich halte die Wurzelwesenkraft,
Sie schaffet mir den Formenleib.

UNDINEN

Du denkst die Engelwerke
Und weisst es nicht.

Ich bewege die Wasserwachtumskraft,
Sie bildet mir den Lebensstoff.

SYLPHEN

Dir leuchtet die Schöpfermacht,
Du ahnst es nicht;
Du fühlest ihre Kraft
Und lebst sie nicht.

Ich schlürfe die luft'ge Lebekraft,
Sie füllet mich mit Seinsgewalt.

FEUERWESEN

Dir krafter Götterwille,
Du empfangst ihn nicht.
Du willst mit seiner Kraft,
Und stosset ihn von dir.

Ich däue die Feuer strebekraft,
Sie erlöst mich in Seelengeistigkeit.

GNOMENCHOR: Erstrebe zu wachen
UNDINEN: Denke in Geiste
SYLPHEN: Lebe schaffend atmendes Dasein
FEUERWESEN: Empfange liebend Götterwillenskraft.

• 1. Here Rudolf Steiner coins a word from verdauen, to digest: däuen—ich däue, to express, not ordinary digestion, but a fiery consuming process.
• 2. Goethe: Faust, Part I, Scene I.

My dear friends,

First let us recite the verse which reminds us of what comes from the cosmos itself as an invitation to knowledge:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.

Who speaks so vastly cosmic?
Who speaks so deeply heartfelt?
Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Is it you yourself who
In feeling space, in experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow?

Self-knowledge, my dear sisters and brothers, is what, in a spiritual sense, can lead to cosmic knowledge. And it has often been said that understanding must exist for true spiritual cosmic knowledge to stream out of the spiritual world itself; that we must understand that the person who is able to transmit such knowledge from the spiritual world must approach the threshold; that the Guardian of the Threshold stands at the threshold, the Guardian who protects the person in normal consciousness from entering the spiritual world unprepared.

But it is just when one gets to know this Guardian – at first by means of healthy human understanding – then later in its true form, in its real essence, then the Guardian makes known to us the admonishments if we wish to enter the spiritual world in the right way, and then to stand within the experiences of the spiritual world.

It has also often been said that this living in the spiritual world is mostly mistakenly imagined, because one wants something different than really standing within the spiritual world. One wants something which is similar to the sense perceptible world. It is super-sensible though, and can therefor not lead to envisioning something similar to what is seen through the senses. This imaginative-super-sensible envisioning is only an image. It must lead to a real experience of the spiritual world. And many of you, my dear sisters and brothers, have this experience of the spiritual more so than you think. You are only not aware of it. You do not pay attention to how the spirit acts and weaves within psychic experience. It works and weaves. And it is a matter of mustering the intimate mindfulness necessary for perceiving this working and weaving.

Therefore more and more real indications should be given to enable you to feel how the human soul lives in the spiritual world – for knowledge is meant to flow to you directly from the spiritual world through these class lessons, my sisters and brothers. And the following can be such an indication.

Take any of the mantras or other verses and recite it. It doesn't matter much which one it is, it can be any mantra you are familiar with. For your meditation select any mantra and recite it in the fairest way you can. Do it therefor not loudly, but in a soft, gentle manner:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.

And then, once you have recited such a mantra to yourself, try to sense how the reciting reacts within you. Try to come to the point where you can sense the speaking, that you sense the difference in your bodies between when you are silent and when you are speaking. Try to sense the speaking in your organism, how it passes through. You will sense it as all kinds of pressure and wave currents in the speech organs.

And when you have sensed this, ask yourselves: When I think something, due to someone talking to me or some other event that makes an impression on me relative to the present: Can I also sense that?

Well, if you have learned to sense speaking, then you will easily be able to sense the thinking which is directly induced by the immediate present. It is lighter and more delicate to sense than speaking, but it can be sensed. And you can learn to sense, to feel thinking by sensing speech.

Then, just as you can sense speech, you can also sense thinking. Then you will be able to touch, touch internally that is, perceive internally, thus: [draws: white outline of a profile]. When speaking is sensed so that it must be moved here [red], you will sense thinking here above [green]. That is, the sense of thinking is moved somewhat up against the back of the head.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

It is good to practice such an exercise, for it acts as a guide to intimate self-observation.

And now you proceed, my dear sisters and brothers, to make a thought active, a remembrance-thought, one which you had days, weeks or months ago and which you can activate just as well now, and try to sense, to feel such a remembrance-thought. And you will have the sensation: I feel this under the region of speech, I feel it here below, under the region of speech [yellow]. And you will then say to yourselves: When I speak, I experience it in the region of my speech organs; when I think, I experience it above in the head, when I remember, I experience it under the region of speech.

When this becomes an intimate experience for you, when you really feel it, then you have grasped something spiritual, which can be the beginning of a progressively increasing spiritual understanding. But a substantial seclusion from the outer events of the day is necessary in order to sense this. It is not good to say: Yes, but in order to achieve such seclusion I'll have to take a few weeks off and go to where there are no people, where nothing can bother me, where I will have absolute peace and quiet, for example in a hut on Mont Blanc. It is not good to think like that, because you will never progress that way. It is better to stand within the tumult of life, exposed to what life brings from morning to night and nevertheless dedicate by strength of soul a period of time, be it ever so short, when you are completely outside of the world's tumult, but at the same time within it, purely by means of your inner force. That is best. To withdraw in solitude in order to have peace is not what works best, but rather to create solitude through one's own forces. That is what definitely and securely can lead to the goal. This is a good foundation for meditating in the right way.

You have learned mantras, my dear sisters and brothers, which are spoken quietly from the soul. The first mantras in these lessons were like that. We have however advanced to mantras which partly ring out to us from the soul and also partly must be imagined as resounding to us from out of the distant universe; where we therefor do not inwardly meditate speaking, but where we inwardly meditate hearing. We imagine ourselves as being transferred to where we hear what is being spoken to us whether it is by the cosmos or by the spirit-beings. And it is just this transferring to a condition in which other beings speak to us that creates the condition which is conducive to feeling that we are in the spiritual world.

Today's mantras will be given with this objective. The mind, the soul should imagine itself as being perfectly silent. But the soul should also imagine itself to already be on the other side of the threshold standing before the Guardian in the spiritual world. And, although being perfectly silent itself, it hears three sounds. The first sound comes from the distant universe; the second from the Guardian. And the third comes from the beings who will be identified later in the mantra. That is how the mantra which is presented to your souls today is to be understood.

Thus, coming from all sides of the distant universe:

Listen to the field of thinking.

It's a question of becoming enlightened concerning the true nature of thinking through a spiritually cosmic experience.

Then the Guardian speaks. After the resounding to us from the distant universe – we must experience this situation spiritually – the Guardian speaks the next three lines:

The one who wants to shows to you

The paths from life on earth to life

On earth in spirit light does speak.

That is the Guardian speaking.

Then the angel who shows us the path from earthly life to earthly life speaks:

Behold your senses' shining radiance.

This is the being who as an angel-being, as angelos, guides us from incarnation to incarnation. It speaks of these goals. We hear them in inner contemplation.

Again the Guardian speaks:

The one who wants to carry you,

Your soul conveyed to souls

in regions matter-free, speaks.

And the next lines are spoken by the being who watches over us from the hierarchy of Archangels:

Behold the forces working in your thinking.

That goes above, to where the Archangels are.

First we had “Behold your senses' shining radiance.” This means that for the senses the sun shines and the senses do not; in reality, though, our senses also shine, except that while our senses are shining we are not aware of it. So the being who belongs to us from the ranks of angels admonishes us: “Behold your senses' shining radiance.”

In general we think in normal consciousness; but we do not apprehend thinking; we do not sense it, we do not feel it. The being who belongs to us from the ranks of the archangels admonishes us: “Behold the forces working in your thinking.”

Now we ascend to where the Archai are. The Guardian advises us that we should listen to the admonishment of the being from the ranks of the Archai. The next three lines are those of the Guardian:

The one speaks who among spirits

in earth-distant fields of creation

Desires to give you the ground of being.

I could also say the “throne of being”, but “ground of being” is better, for it is what is to be given to you by the one who wants a spiritual ground in the spiritual field for you, just as here in the sensory field you are standing on physical ground.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has thus spoken, the being from the ranks of the Archai speaks:

Behold the imagery of remembrance.

That is third. First we should see the radiance of the senses, then the forces of thinking working in us, then what lies deep down, below speech, in the memory images: “Behold” the imagery of remembrance.

Thus have we listened with quiet souls to the threefold voice speaking to us: speaking from the cosmos in the very first lines: “Listen to the field of thinking”. Then to the intervening three lines by the Guardian of the Threshold, and then to the beings who belong to us from the ranks of the hierarchies, always using paradigmatic lines which are meant to speak to the deepest levels of our being. Together it is like this:

Listen to the field of thinking:

The one who wants to shows to you

The paths from life on earth to life

On earth in spirit light does speak.

Behold your senses' shining radiance.

The one who wants to carry you,

Your soul conveyed to souls

in regions matter-free, speaks.

Behold the forces working in your thinking.

The one speaks who among spirits

in earth-distant fields of creation

Desires to give you the ground of being.

Behold the imagery of remembrance.

[The first mantra is written on the blackboard. The word “thinking” in the first line is underlined as well as the last lines of 1,2,3.]

I. Listen to the field of thinking:

1.) The one who wants to show to you

The paths from life on earth to life

On earth in spirit light does speak.

Behold your senses' shining radiance.

2.) The one who wants to carry you,

Your soul conveyed to souls

in regions matter-free, speaks.

Behold the forces working in your thinking.

3.) The one speaks who among spirits

in earth-distant fields of creation

Desires to give you the ground of being.

Behold the imagery of remembrance.

Therewith we have inwardly experienced the admonishments resounding from the three lower hierarchies for our self-knowledge:

the first from the hierarchy of the Angeloi

the second from the hierarchy of the Archangeloi

the third from the hierarchy of the Archai.

[“Angeloi” is written beside part 1, “Archangeloi” beside part 2, “Archai” beside part 3.]

Before the exercise begins, concentration in the soul [mind] can be achieved by imagining a definite image, this image [drawing begins on the image above]: an eye looking upward [eye] and perceiving the higher hierarchies [arc], from which the cosmic forces stream into the eye [upper rays], which then perceives the circle of the lower hierarchies [wavy line], which reach up to the higher hierarchies and send the rays on the human beings [lower rays].

We call this image to mind and hold it there: the eye looking upward, the two lines – the circular one, the wavy one – the descending rays. And while doing the exercise, without thinking about it, the image remains before our soul: the image of the upward looking eye.

Then we hear again, resounding from all sides of the cosmos:

Perceive the field of feeling.

The Guardian then speaks the next three lines:

The one who speaks as thought

From the sun-rays of the spirit

Recalls you to cosmic existence.

It is now a higher language, the language that resounds from higher hierarchies. Whereas there [indicates the first mantra] we are made more attentive to what is already within us, in this mantra we are spoken to by the Guardian in a manner which does not only call us to observe our senses, our thinking and our memories, but we are now meant to hear how we are being called into cosmic being itself. This resounds from the hierarchy of the Exusiai.

Then the one who belongs to us from the hierarchy of the Exusiai speaks:

Feel in your breath life awakening.

Again the Guardian speaks the next three lines:

The one speaks who gives to you

From the stars' living forces

Cosmic being in spirit kingdoms.

Then the being from the hierarchy of the Dynamis speaks:

Feel in your blood's weaving waves.

We must feel the world's weaving movement continued in the weaving waves of our blood.

And the Guardian speaks once more, now advising us that we should listen to what the being from the rank of Kyriotetes says:

The one speaks who wants to create

In the light of the divine heights

The sense of spirit from earthly will.

Then this being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes speaks:

Feel the earth's mighty resistance.

For only if we feel this mighty resistance of the earth's forces can we enter correctly into the world of pure spirit.

Therefore the experience of this mantra must be felt:

Perceive the field of feeling:

The one who speaks as thought

from the sun-rays of the spirit

calls you to cosmic existence:

Feel in your breath life awakening.

The one speaks who gives to you

From the stars' living forces

Cosmic being in spirit kingdoms:

Feel in your blood's weaving waves.

The one speaks who wants to create

In the light of the divine heights

The sense of spirit from earthly will.

Feel the earth's mighty resistance.

It is the ascent to the rank of the second hierarchy where self-knowledge asserts itself in us, where the Guardian advises us that a being from the ranks of the Exusiai will speak to us.

Well, my dear sisters and brothers, we think in earthly life; our thoughts are almost nullities. But when a being from the ranks of the Exusiai thinks, he is thinking us. Our I is being thought. And it, our I, exists as a thought by a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. When on earth we speak “I” to ourselves, where are we looking? Yes, this I: when we say “I” [drawing: circle with the word “Ich”, yellow], we are looking back at this Ich [red arrows], and say the word “I” [Ich]. But for a being from the ranks of the Exusiai [green line] this I-thought is a real thought. We exist in that we are thought by beings from the ranks of the Exusiai. And when we say “I” to ourselves we are confirming that we are being thought by divine beings. And it is in this being thought by divine beings that our higher being consists.

Then: A being from the ranks of the Dynamis reminds us that the spiritual existence we receive from him as a gift comes from the life-forces taken from the stars.

And a being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes reminds us that what exists in us on earth as will is taken out to the heavenly heights and after the transformation which it undergoes there it is returned to us so that we can then also use it as spirit-will. Earthly will is only a transformation of spirit-will. Earthly will is constantly being taken up and brought down again. Above it is heavenly will; below it is earthly will. Finally the Guardian reminds us that a being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes is saying: “Feel the earth's mighty resistance.” When we feel the earth's resistance, we feel the benefit, the grace inherent in the bestowing of forces from the heavenly heights.

[Mantra II is written on the blackboard. In the first line “feeling” is underlined, and the last lines of Parts 1,2 and 3 are also underlined.]

II.) Perceive the field of feeling:

1.) The one who speaks as thought

from the sun-rays of the spirit

calls you to cosmic existence:

Feel in your breath life awakening.

2.) The one speaks who gives to you

From the stars' living forces

Cosmic being in spirit kingdoms:

Feel in your blood's weaving waves.

3.) The one speaks who wants to create

In the light of the divine heights

The sense of spirit from earthly will.

Feel the earth's mighty resistance.

This, then, is the second mantra (recites it):

Perceive the field of feeling:

The one who speaks as thought

from the sun-rays of the spirit

calls you to cosmic existence:

Feel in your breath life awakening.

The one speaks who gives to you

From the stars' living forces

Cosmic being in spirit kingdoms:

Feel in your blood's weaving waves.

The one speaks who wants to create

In the light of the divine heights

The sense of spirit from earthly will.

Feel the earth's mighty resistance.

The first resounds from the ranks of the Exusiai

The second from the ranks of the Dynamis

The third from the ranks of the Kyriotetes

[Exusiai is written alongside part1; Dynamis alongside part 2, Kyriotetes alongside part 3.]

And finally, in order to remember the image we have placed before us after all this has taken place within us, and in order to have a clear experience of it, we recall the image – although we realize that it has been before us during the whole exercise – but we want to place it once more before our souls.

[In the image already drawn on the blackboard, the eye, arc, upper rays, wavy lines, lower rays are drawn again.]

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

The ascent to the ranks of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones will be added to these in the next class lesson. But now it is appropriate to clarify the meaning of the whole.

My dear sisters and brothers, at the beginning of today's lesson the words from cosmic-being instructed us to practice self-knowledge. Self-knowledge, it was said, leads to world-knowledge; but only if the Self can be in connection with the world.

But the Self does not exist in relation to an external natural entity or process, but alone in relation to the spiritual world. That is where the beings of the hierarchies are. So if we really wish to penetrate into our Self, into our I, then we must experience it together with the beings from the hierarchies and not with external nature. For what we can call our I in external nature is only the distant echo of the I. The true I exists in the same realms as these beings of the higher hierarchies. Therefore in entering the realm of self-knowledge we must also enter the realm of the higher hierarchies. Then we must hear the speech of the higher hierarchies.

The admonishments of the Guardian of the threshold always intervene in order that we do this with all our strength, that we do not make it into a mere bloodless theory. In order that the whole content in the meditation appear before us in all its majesty, we hear the two – and as we will soon hear, three – forceful admonishments from the cosmos: “Behold the field of thinking”, “Behold the field of feeling”.

Only if we feel the language in such a living, threefold way, and if we experience ourselves within the spiritual world as described in the mantras, then these things will be able to help us advance. For only then will we feel them with the right attitude. We must seek this mental attitude above all. For inner consecration must be there if the meditation is to contribute to initiation. And this inner consecration comes only from the attitude through which we are displaced from the outer world for a while and live exclusively within the content and elements of the meditation. If we can do this so that self-knowledge is not merely an inner brooding, but is an explicit conversation with the universe, the Guardian and the Hierarchies, then we will find ourselves in possession of true self-knowledge.

Basically, we should even avoid thinking about such things if we cannot simultaneously evoke the appropriate mental attitude. We should only think about what has been presented today if we can really evoke this inner attitude in the soul, which consists in simply feeling that the sublime majesty from the universe, from the cosmic distances, comes to us like cosmic thunder; that a softly admonishing voice intervenes which comes from the Guardian of the Threshold; and that then one of the beings of the Hierarchies urgently speaks.

Only when we remember this and when we evoke the feeling related to this remembering, should we even think of these mantras or create an inner connection with them, so that we do not desecrate them inwardly, desecrate their force – that we do not think of them with the usual, dry, common way of thinking, which we would think if we did not first evoke the appropriate attitude, the inner mood.

And we therefore should achieve the inner mental attitude to feel that human self-knowledge is something solemn, earnest and holy and that these things should only be spoken internally by the soul – let alone externally – when they are felt to be earnest, solemn, consecrated.

It is a great hindrance to progress on the esoteric path that so much is spoken about these things in a cliquish manner, even with a whiff of vanity and gossip, when this earnest, solemn attitude of consecration has not been developed. We don't realize then that in esoteric life everything depends on the pure, absolute truth prevailing. Whoever does not recognize this – that in esoteric life truth, absolute truth must prevail – can do nothing in esoteric life; that one cannot merely speak of the truth and then regard things as one does as usual in profane life. That happens when we make these things the object of idle gossip.

And this idle gossip which is so much practiced is what throws so many hindrances and obstructions on the esoteric path. And we must necessarily bring together everything related to self-knowledge with an earnest, solemn consecrated attitude. Then we will have allowed the words to correctly work on our souls which were spoken at the beginning of the Class lesson and will be repeated now at the end:

O man, know thyself!

Yes, that is a guide to self-knowledge:

O man, know thyself!
So resounds the cosmic-word.
You hear it strong in soul,
You feel it vast in spirit.

Who speaks so vastly cosmic?
Who speaks so deeply heartfelt?

Does it work through distant radiant space
Into your senses' sense of being?
Does it ring through waves of time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Is it you yourself who
In feeling space, in experiencing time

Create the Word, feeling foreign
In space's psychic vacancy,
Because you lose the force of thought
In time's destructive flow?

Essentially it is a question. The answer is found in the mantras given today.

O Mensch, erkenne dich selbst!
So tönt das Weltenwort.
Du hörst es seelenkräftig,
Du fühlst es geistgewaltig.

Wer spricht so weltenmächtig?
Wer spricht so herzinniglich?

Wirkt es durch des Raumes Weitensgtrahlung
In deines Sinnes Seinserleben?
Tönt es durch der Zeiten Wellenweben?
In deines Lebens Werdestrom?

Bist du es selbst, der sich
Im Raumesfühlen, im Zeiterleben

Das Wort erschafft, dich fremd
Erfühlend in Raumes Seelenleere,
Weil du des Denkens Kraft
Verlierst im Zeitvernichtunsstrom.

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