The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

after a eurythmic presentation of the scenes “Midnight” and “Entombment”

Once again we have allowed a piece of Goethe's 'Faust' to pass before our minds. In the last lecture here, I tried to develop some of the spiritual-scientific principles that can help us understand it when I spoke about the nature of the lemurs, the fat and scrawny devils. On such occasions, we always try not just to seek out something for the understanding of this poetry, but to gain something from the poetry in terms of general spiritual significance, to look into those true realities that Goethe tried to reach with his “Faust”.

Today I would like to tie in a few observations with what has just passed before our soul. It may seem significant to us that this scene, which we have just seen come to an end, is not the last scene of Goethe's “Faust”, but that, as we know, it is followed by that other scene that we performed here some time ago. You remember: mountain gorges, forest, rock, solitude, holy anchorites, chorus, echo, forest that staggers along and so on, where we are led through the devout meditation of the Pater ecstaticus, Pater profundus, Pater Seraphicus, through the chorus of the blessed boys , where we meet the angels again, who in the scene we saw today carry Faust's immortal into the upper regions, where we also meet the trinity of the penitent women, Doctor Marianus, and Mater gloriosa as Gretchen's guide until the final chorus, the actual mystical chorus:

All that is transitory
is but a parable.

All this follows on from the scene we have seen today, which depicts the battle of the spirits of light with the spirits of darkness for the soul of Faust.

When attempting to explain Faust, one often proceeds from scene to scene, sometimes even from sentence to sentence, without asking the questions that could be asked and that would actually shed light on this great, powerful work of literature. Today we have seen how Faust's burial took place, how Mephistopheles-Ahriman has lost his game, how the soul has been carried up into the spiritual regions. From a certain point of view, one might ask: Could the Faust epic not actually end here? Do we not now basically know everything that it is about? Do we not know that Mephistopheles has lost his wager, that all the efforts he has made throughout the lifetime of Faust, which he has been able to accompany, are lost, that Faust's soul has been accepted into the region of light, that thus the words spoken by Lessing with regard to a Faust epic vis-à-vis the spirits of darkness: “You shall not win” have been fulfilled? Could we not believe that with this everything is actually over, that the Faust epic has found its end? — The question presents itself to our soul: Why then does the conclusion known to us now follow on from what we have seen today? — And by raising this question and then dealing with its answer, one touches on significant secrets of human life in its connection with the whole world. The fact that Goethe shaped this conclusion of Faust as he did shows precisely how deeply he penetrated into the foundations of his life in an age when spiritual science had not yet come into being, and into the secrets of human existence. Much, much lies in the scene that was presented today, and even more lies in the fact that this scene is followed by other final scenes. Much of it proves that Goethe knew the deepest secrets of existence, but that he was also compelled to present the secrets of existence in such a way that they are only accessible to those who want to delve deeper into spiritual life, into its essence. Quite deliberately, Goethe expressed much of it in veiled terms, as he himself said, enwrapped in the poetry of Faust. Much of what is said in veiled terms, so to speak, triggers hatred and opposition in dull-witted people who, out of fear and laziness, do not want to approach the knowledge of the spiritual world. However, as a result, Goethe's Faust poetry has remained more or less misunderstood for eighty-four years and will only gradually, when we can live towards the future, reveal itself to humanity in its depths. Yes, it can be said that spiritual scientific knowledge will only be able to trigger those artistic perceptions that can convey an understanding of the Faust poetry.

Let us first look back at the hauntingly impressive scene in which Faust beholds the four gray women: Want, Guilt, Hardship, and Worry. Let us be clear about the fact that Faust has this experience with the four gray women at a moment when he has gone through many, many spiritual life experiences, or rather, life experiences that have evoked spiritual understanding in him. Goethe imagines his Faust in the time that is presented for Faust through this final scene, having reached the age of one hundred. Today, Faust first stood before us with all the spiritualized experiences in his soul, as he stands on the balcony of his home, which he created at a workplace from which he wanted to do work for the human future. We look at his soul in such a way that all his feelings of satisfaction, all that he has been able to achieve for humanity by wresting a free country from the sea for free men, are summarized in his soul.

The stars hide their gaze and glow,
The fire sinks and burns low;
A chilling wind fans it,
Bringing smoke and haze to me.
Offered quickly, too quickly done!

Now, seemingly before his eyes, but in reality in an inner vision, what the appearance of the four gray women forms:

What floats in the shadows?

We have to imagine that through the deepening that Faust's soul has experienced, this soul has become capable of having the vision of the four figures — of lack, of need, of worry, of guilt — from the deep inner source itself. This “scene at midnight” is an inward experience in the truest sense of the word, an inward experience as it is evoked in Faust by the soul slowly beginning to detach itself from the body. For that is the strange mystery that Goethe quite evidently intended, that from the moment the three gray women speak the words:

The clouds roll by, the stars fade away!
Back there, back there! From afar, from afar,
Here comes he, the brother, here comes he, the - death,

— that from this moment on, death already really spreads over Faust's life. And we only understand this scene correctly if we think of Faust from then on as a dying man, as one in whom the soul is slowly detaching itself from the body. And it would be wrong to think that what follows is meant to be merely realistic in terms of the external senses. It is not. As we see Faust in the room of his palace, where worry has entered, we find, as he sits there, that the soul has already loosened itself to a certain extent from the body, that the experiences of physical life merge with the experiences that the soul has when it has already loosened itself from the body. And only then do we understand the strangely interwoven sentences when we consider this interplay of the spiritual world, in which Faust is already empathizing through his loosening soul, this interplay of the spiritual world with the physical-sensual world, in which Faust is still, because the soul is loosening, has not yet detached itself. Lack, guilt, and need were powerless; they were only the heralds of death. But the consuming worry remains where the vision is transformed in such a way that it is already the vision of the soul released from the body:

Four I saw coming, three only going;
I could not understand the meaning of the speech.
It sounded as if it said - distress,
A gloomy rhyming word followed - death.
It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled.

If one knows what Goethe felt when he heard the word gespensterhaft (ghostly), he who felt much more concretely than today's dull materialists, then one does not take such a word

It sounded hollow, ghostly muffled

not light, but important and essential, and seeks the feeling that Goethe had when he put these words into the mouth of Faust. Among other things, Goethe uses a beautiful word in which he expresses the following. He says: “Sometimes life seems to me as if distant past events were entering into the present consciousness, and then everything that is distant in the past appears like a ghost that has entered the present.” Goethe had a very concrete concept of what he called ghostly. Visionarily, millennia-old times of his own life stood before him, which he often believed he saw moving into his present life like ghosts. These are not assertions that I make out of arbitrariness; this can be strictly proven from what Goethe himself expressed when he spoke intimately about the experiences of his inner life.

Now the views and thoughts that Faust has, half in the spiritual world and half still living on the physical plane, flow together. If you could imagine the interplay between these two worlds, that is what it is like for Faust. He is now experiencing something that can actually only be experienced in this interplay between the two worlds, which would not have developed if he had distanced himself more from his physical body. He still feels bound by the events of the beyond to the events of physical life:

I have not yet fought my way into the open.

And now for the remarkable speech, which to many will seem like a mere contradiction, but which becomes understandable if one understands the experience to take place between physical life and spiritual life. The spiritual world sought to reach Faust throughout his life. Spiritual science in the true sense did not exist at that time. He tried to recognize the spiritual world by means of magic inherited from the Middle Ages, the same magic that brought him into contact with Ahriman-Mephistopheles in the way we have often discussed, and also in the last lecture. This magic, by which he entered the spiritual world, cannot be separated from Mephistopheles. If you look back at what happened around Faust, you will see everywhere that Mephistopheles has set the magical actions in scene. We cannot hope that Faust wants to hold on to this magic now that he is already halfway into the spiritual world:

Could I remove magic from my path,
Unlearn spells altogether.

Those spells that he has drawn from old books and that have already become Luciferian and Ahrimanic because they have been preserved from ancient times. In this way, he now finds, when he really enters the spiritual world, that what he has achieved was not what he was looking for after all. And now he looks back. He begins to look back, as one does when one's soul is relaxed. Now he begins to look back at the life that has just passed. The moment stands vividly before him, the moment before he reached for the medieval books, before he uttered the fateful word:

That is why I devoted myself to magic.

He has been protected by good powers that have guided him mercifully in the sense of the “Prologue to Heaven” from the fruits of that magic that he would have had to pluck if these merciful workings of special powers had not passed through his path through life. Now he already sees into the spiritual world, now he knows differently. This plays a role. With the present knowledge, he would make the path different:

If I, nature! were a man alone before you,
it would be worth the effort to be a human being.

He could not say this earlier, before he had loosened his soul from his body, not in this way. Then he had to go the whole way of error. Now he looks back and sees that it was indeed the path through the darkness of Mephistopheles. He looks back first to the time in his life when Mephistopheles had not yet crossed his path:

That was I otherwise,

— a man alone

eh' I's in the dark sought,
With sacrilegious word me and the world cursed.
Now the air is so full of such spooks,
that no one knows how to avoid it.

The full weight of what has happened now weighs on his soul.

Even when a day smiles at us with clear reason,
the night entangles us in dream images;
we return joyfully from the young meadow,

— so he has spent his life, half naked in the physical world, half already - albeit in the physical body -— transferred by Mephistopheles to the spiritual world, looking into the spiritual world, but always having to return to the physical world, because Mephistopheles cannot find it, nor can he convey it, the access, because he cannot properly find the connection.

A bird caws; what does it caw? Misfortune.

Only superstition can be found on this path.

Entwined by superstition morning, noon, and night –
It lends itself, it shows itself, it warns –
And so, intimidated, we stand alone.

But the path of superstition has always mixed with the strong path that Faust was able to walk through his own strong nature. And now he has the vision that could remain with him as his soul loosens more and more: the vision of worry. And try to feel how Goethe also lets the highest in language resonate in his words here. One would like to say that the whole of world history lies on our soul when we feel the weight of these words. Worry creeps in. Is anyone there? Faust asks.

Is anyone here?

The answer sounds:

The question demands yes!

Not a simple answer: Yes! The question demands Yes! I said: The whole of world history forces its way into our soul through the arrangement of the words. For how could one think of those magnificent scenes, where before the court Christ Jesus is asked: “Is it you, the Son of God?” He does not answer simply: Yes – but: “You say it!”

Now it is not expressed in an abstract word whom Faust is now experiencing:

I am here.

But it is in him. It is basically a soliloquy. And it is a deep soliloquy. Only gradually will humanity learn, through inner experiences, the full weight of this soliloquy. With what is to be given to humanity as spiritual science, insights will also come to humanity that will be linked to deep, deep feelings and sensations about life, feelings and sensations that the dull, dull materialism dreams of, nor does the easily acquired worldview that believes that everything has been gained with sentences that characterize the physical or spiritual-real. We have such sentences. We know that they have been achieved through difficult inner experiences. We keep them in our souls, we carry them with us through life. But they are not what they can and must truly be for the human soul if they are not accompanied by all possible moods, by those moods that often make our soul life appear as if it were living over an abyss. And when we have attained spiritual knowledge, we can never lose the concern that comes over us about the relationship of spiritual knowledge to the whole reality of life. Man must feel, especially when he enters the spiritual world, that it is a platitude to speak of it in false asceticism, that this earthly life is only a low one that one would most like to cast off. Man feels the whole deep meaning of this earth-life for eternity precisely through spiritual realizations: that this earth-life must be gone through in order that that which exists can be incorporated into the impulses which we carry through death into the sphere of eternity. But how could it be otherwise than that at the end of a life of trial, just at such a moment, when the soul is loosened, man becomes aware, in serious, grave concern, of what may become of his life just experienced, when he now has to go through the spiritual world with his soul, what the fruits of this life just lived may be. Faust has struggled through much, much. But he is great because now, when he has just entered the spiritual world and is half in it and half still feeling back to his physical existence on earth, he knows in the very significant comparison that arises between the physical and the spiritual in such a life-and-death situation:

I have only run through the world;
I seized every desire by the hair,
What was not enough, I let go,
What escaped me, I let go.
I only desired and only accomplished
And wished again, and so with might
stormed through my life; first great and mighty,
but now it goes wisely, goes deliberately.

Feel the harmony that now arises in his soul: how he has passed through the small and the great world, as it says in “Faust”, and with an overall view that is just opening up, as in the moment he feels a flood of spiritual illumination in his vision, he can survey with wisdom and deliberation all that he has gone through in the rush of the floods of life. And now: what does he see? What does he begin to see? —- He begins to see what he has experienced in the circle of the earth. Think back to what we have discussed about the review that overtakes the soul, which is now slowly overtaking Faust, at the beginning of the life after death. Think of this review. He sees his life on earth. He sees it in such a way that he has to say to himself:

The circle of the earth is well enough known to me.

What he had experienced on earth, he now sees. He is already halfway into the spiritual world. You can feel the words in this mood:

The view to the other side has vanished.

That is what one can say when looking back on earthly life. This is not a philosophical confession of materialism, but an immediate experience after death has already taken hold of the soul. Dopes who have become Faust commentators have interpreted this passage as if Faust, in his old age, were once again reverting to a materialistic creed. But now, in this situation, Faust would truly be a fool if he wanted to look back on life and now, with a blink, see that spiritual world, which is often described here by those fools who build this spiritual world in such a way that they simply write about their own kind, as is done in many confessions. He wants to stand firm on the result of his life. And now words of deep significance are actually falling, before which every semblance of materialism must fade, must fade completely. The vague mystics, those dreadful mystics who always speak of wanting to merge with the universe, of wanting to grasp eternity mystically in the chaotic darkness of the universe, which they call universal light, want to wander into eternity. The one who wants to grasp the spiritual life in a concrete way grasps it where it can be grasped in its concreteness. He does not become a fool, losing himself in vague distances that actually contain nothing but emptiness and empty space, and into which the soul dreams itself away. He will not be seduced into roaming into such eternities, but will grasp knowledge concretely. That which he recognizes can be grasped:

Thus he walks along the day on earth.

Consider how wonderful this sentence becomes when one considers that it marks the beginning of the retrospective view of earthly life: the vision walks along the day on earth. Now he has arrived at the point where he can find the right relationship to those haunting ghosts to which Mephistopheles has seduced him here.

When ghosts haunt,

– now in retrospect

he goes his way;
In walking on, he finds torment and happiness,
He! unsatisfied every moment.

We have to imagine the not yet fully completed, but now incipient review, that review, which is still full of the concern, through which fruits from the experienced earth day can be carried into the spiritual world. And always like this: over, over. Spiritual experience, but because he still clings to the body, also physical experience, so we find Faust. Care still holds him to the physical body. He is meant to enter consciously into the spiritual world, made conscious precisely by the burden of care. That is why he grows into the spiritual world in such a way that, while already bearing the spiritual world in his soul, he still believes that he can command the physical world. Those people who hold the banal contemporary view that man has always been essentially as he is now, do not know that many Greeks died as Faust dies, or rather, as Goethe had Faust die. We can prove from Greek literature that this death was almost a desirable one for the Greeks, like reliving some of the physical existence, while the soul has already been released. In Sophocles you can find words that suggest how the Greeks saw something special in such a death, not a sudden death, but a slow dying, in which consciousness is already dimming for the physical world, but what enters physical consciousness as twilight is gradually illuminated to see fully into the spiritual world. And Goethe did indeed try to incorporate much of the Greek element into the second part of his Faust. We may well imagine that he wanted something of what could be characterized as if he had wanted to depict Faust as a dying Greek. Thus, what he puts into the words in terms of feeling flows over from the spiritual world, even when he is still commanding here. And we can follow this further, follow how Goethe consciously presents what I have been talking about.

You saw Faust arrive at the scene where his grave is already being dug. Again, one can say that those commentators who accuse Goethe of bad taste by having the grave dug while Faust is still alive are not very tasteful themselves! That would, of course, be mere bad taste. We see the dying Faust. Then it is not bad taste, but a wonderful imagination, when we see the grave dug not only by the dying Faust but also by those half-spiritual creatures, the lemurs, of whose nature I spoke recently. But how does Faust speak? Well, I will first pass over the words that he speaks as he gropes his way out of the palace and toward the doorpost. I will draw your attention to the words that Faust speaks when he gives the order, so to speak, to dig the ditch that will divert the polluting swamp. At first, one might think that everything is meant physically. But Goethe was well aware that Faust speaks half out of spiritual consciousness, and that is how he wants these words to be understood. And what is revealed from this physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical consciousness? First of all, a wonderful sense of well-being in Faust. Consider what Faust says:

A swamp extends along the mountains,
Polluting everything already achieved;
To strip the foul pool too,
The last would be the highest achievement.
I open spaces for many millions,
Not to dwell securely, but actively and freely.

Beautiful, but now other words follow:

Green the field, fruitful; man and herd

At once at ease on the newest earth,

Immediately settled on the strength of the hill,

Which the bustling, industrious people have rolled up.

— these words are consciously set down, consciously out of the physical-spiritual, spiritual-physical. The paradisiacal land is the play of the spiritual into physical consciousness, then back into the physical again:

There is a raging flood right up to the edge.

Of course, it also means the external situation, but the fact that the words are chosen is something that Goethe was fully aware of when he did it.

Community pride rushes to close the gap.

And now some strange words:

Yes! I am completely devoted to this idea,
That is the ultimate wisdom:
Only he deserves freedom and life
Who must conquer it daily.
And so, surrounded by danger,
Spends childhood, manhood and old age his active years.
I would see such a teeming mass, standing on free ground with a free people. For a moment I would dare to say: Stay, for thou art so fair! The trace of my days on earth cannot perish in the eons of time.

One must hear this word repeated over and over again as a beautiful word that Faust utters because he feels: You have done something for the common good, you have worked. — And now he is overcome by the tremendous feeling of how this will continue to work through eons, how he has, as it were, founded his fame in his deeds, and he surrenders to his sense of well-being. It is often quoted. I have even heard it quoted by people who wanted to say something nice to someone else and quoted these words. You can also say: “The trace of my days on earth – that is, of your days on earth – will not perish in aeons.” And yet, however much this is understood as a beautiful saying, let us be clear about it: it is a purely Luciferic saying, a feeling of well-being in fame. We feel once more how Faust's soul is completely seduced by Lucifer, not only contemplating his deeds, but also feeling his glory through the aeons in a wildly spiritual and selfish way. This egotism grows to gigantic proportions and is still sealed:

In the anticipation of such sublime bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Truly, the devil is no drip. After such a Luciferian outburst, one might well think that the devil had him, for it is once again a completely Luciferian blissful feeling, a supreme eternal desire. And we must not think of the stupid devil, but of the clever Mephistopheles-Ahriman, when he now says, which is quite appropriate:

No desire satisfies him, no luck is enough for him,
So he continues to court after changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to it.

The soul has completely loosened itself, but has separated from the body with a Luciferian quality. It connects quite well with the no less inwardly voluptuous words that Faust utters as he steps out of the palace and gropes his way along the doorjamb:

How the clatter of spades disgusts me!
It is the crowd that indulges me.

One should not think that it is not tempting to think again in this last moment that the crowd indulges you! The Luciferic temptation is there once more, clearly there. And Mephistopheles is not stupid if he believes that now is the moment to follow up on that conversation in which Faust signed over his soul to him. They have conversed with each other: we recall the first part, where Faust, not yet out of the half-won spiritual consciousness, but out of the physical consciousness, said the words:

First thou dost smash to ruin this world,
The other may arise thereafter.
From this earth my joys gush forth,
And this sun shines upon my sorrows;
When I can part myself from them,
Then may what will and can come to pass.
I will hear no more about it,

I have only been running around the world.

Mephistopheles says:

In this sense you can dare.
Connect yourself; you shall in these days
With joy my arts see,
I give you what no man has seen.

Faust:

What do you want, poor devil?
Was a human spirit, in its lofty striving,
Ever grasped by your kind?
But you have food that does not satisfy,
You have red gold that, without rest,
Like mercury, melts in your hand,
A game in which one never wins,
A girl who, at my breast,
With eyes already bound for the neighbor,
The beautiful gods of honor
That, like a meteor, disappear?
Show me the fruit that rots before it's broken,
And trees that turn green every day!
I'm not deterred by such a task,

Mephistopheles replies,

I can serve you with such treasures.
But, my good friend, the time is also coming
When we may feast on something good in peace.

And now the weighty words that Faust speaks:

If I can ever rest content on a lazy bed,
then let it be now around me!
If you can ever flatter me,
so that I may please myself,
you can betray me with pleasure;
that shall be the last day for me!
I offer the wager!"

Well, how is that not fulfilled? Fullest enjoyment, even in the anticipation of eternal fame, is there now.

Mephistopheles:

Top!

Faust:

And blow upon blow!
I shall say to the moment:
Stay, yet! Thou art so fair!

— Does he not say it? —

Then you may bind me in fetters,
Then I will gladly perish!
Then may the death knell toll,
Then you are free of your service,
The clock may stand still, the hands fall,
Let the time be past for me!

Mephistopheles:

Consider it well, we will not forget it.

And he does not forget it. He says it now, Mephistopheles, after Faust has enjoyed the highest moment:

No pleasure satisfies him, no luck pleases him,
So he continues to court changing forms;
The poor man wishes to hold on to the last, poor, empty moment.
He who so vigorously resisted me
Time becomes master, the old man lies here in the sand.
The clock stands still.

The situation has been completely fulfilled; for Faust says:

The clock may stand still, the hand may fall.

Mephisto:

The clock stands still –

The chorus of lemurs:

Stand still! She is silent as midnight.
The hand falls.

What was predicted when the bet was made has come to pass. Mephistopheles can accept that his work is done:

He falls, it is done.

From the mouth of Mephistopheles the words of the cross: “It is finished!” But immediately the chorus of the lemures, who give the voice of the earth:

It is past.

This fits dreadfully into the soul of Mephistopheles. He has said, “It is finished.” The chorus of lemurs answers him, “It is over.” That is the tremendous difference. Over – he does not want the word:

Over! A stupid word.
Why over?
Gone and pure nothingness, complete monotony!

These words are the key to what it is all about. Initially, Mephistopheles is talking to his lemurs; he believes it is done, but it is only over. And now he turns his attention to himself. He wants to understand the contradiction: done, over – he wants to understand it.

Gone and pure nothingness, perfect sameness!
What is the point of eternal creation!
To sweep away the created to nothing!
“There it is over!” What can be read in it?
It is as good as if it had not been,
And yet it goes in circles as if it were.
I would have loved the eternal emptiness for it.

As I said, these words contain what we are looking for. That Goethe chose such words, that he built the scene from the enjoyment of the highest moment, as it is presented, that he lets Mephistopheles converse with the lemurs in this way, testifies that Goethe was able to express something very profound, something so profound that even today it can only be touched upon, because it is this that determines why the last scene must follow. If the matter were as many commentators on Faust have supposed, that Mephisto has simply misunderstood, been tricked, then the last scene would truly be superfluous. Then the matter would be simple enough, then it would be that Faust had not thought that there could be such a high enjoyment as that which is expressed in the words:

Not in the aeons can the trace of my days on earth

Mephisto had not thought of that either; neither of them had thought of that. Neither of them had thought that Faust would ever say to the moment: “Stay, you are so beautiful.” But because it is something higher to feel the moment in this way, the stupid devil is cheated out of his wager: that is more or less how the interpreters of Faust explain it all together. — Well, then the devil would have lost the soul, the angels would have captured it — everything would be in order. We didn't need the last scene. And Goethe certainly wouldn't have written it, because he was a man of poetic economy. But you don't understand Faust if you take it so superficially. You only understand it if you fully realize: Yes, here Goethe wants to allow a Luciferian seduction, even when Death is already fully present, to approach Faust once more, a genuine Luciferian seduction. — And Lucifer is there again in the moment when Faust speaks:

In the anticipation of such supreme bliss
I now enjoy the highest moment.

Now follows the actual entombment and Mephisto's preparation to capture the soul with the demons. The angels arrive and triumph over the demons. The soul seems to be delivered and is carried away, but the poem is not over. What is actually going on? Yes, Goethe could not say what was going on there offhand. But there are many words in the poem through which he has made himself clear enough for those who want to understand. But the idea that is so easily formed of that choir of angels that is advancing to take the soul is not correct. It is not entirely incorrect that the angels who arrive are all too proud and now consider themselves the fullest spirits of light, and the devils – the fat and the scrawny devils – only despise, and now only consider themselves quite pious, so very good, so very pious. Goethe already indicated that he did not want to have the presentation just like that, by having Mephisto, who he truly does not depict as a completely stupid devil, say the words that are interspersed at one point:

The priestly mien will not dress you at all,

and especially the significant word:

They are devils, too, but in disguise.

They are also of Lucifer's race. This is not there for fun! As far as can be said at all, to what extent it is serious, we will continue to consider the matter tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is in the nature of the case that the subject of a lecture course like this one is inexhaustible. Matters could be elaborated and looked at more thoroughly. But since, unfortunately, we must come to an end, we have to be content with given guidelines and indication. Today, therefore, I shall only supplement the scanty outlines and hints already discussed to that in a certain sense the picture will be rounded out.

Proceeding once again from the being of man as viewed by spiritual science, we must say that we member man into physical body, etheric or formative forces body, astral body (which essentially represents the soul life) and ego. Let us be clear that properly speaking the physical body resides only in the small part of the human organization that we can describe as solid and sharply defined. On the other hand, all that pertains to liquid or fluid forms is taken hold of by the etheric body in such a way that it is in a constant process of blending, separating, combining, and dissolving. It is in perpetual flux. Then there are the gaseous, aeriform elements, such as are active in oxygen and other gases. In these, the astral body is at work. Finally, the ego organization is active in everything that has to do with warmth.

What I have just outlined cannot, however, be reduced to a diagram. We must clearly understand, for instance, that because the formative forces body pulsates through all fluid and liquid elements of the body, it also sweeps along the solid substances. Everything in the human organization is in close interaction, in constant interplay. We must always be aware of that. But now let us also remember that this human organization has been experienced in different ways in the course of evolution. This was one of the main themes of these lectures.

What is described today as the subject matter of external physics or mechanics, was originally attained through an inward experience of the physical body. Our present-day physics contains statements that originated because there once existed an internally experienced physics of the physical body. As I have explained a number of times, this inward physics was divorced from man and now continues to function merely as a science that observes outer nature. During the decline of the medieval alchemy the same thing happened with what lives inwardly in man by virtue of the etheric body. The work of this body in the fluids was once experienced, but now it is only dimly perceptible in the fantastic, alchemistic formulas that we find in ancient writings. Originally this was intelligent science, but inwardly experienced within the etheric. In a way, this is still in the process of being divorced from man, because as yet we really do not have a fully developed chemistry. We have many chemical processes in the world that we seek to understand, but only in a physical and mechanical way.

In the beginning man experienced all this inwardly by means of his organization, but in the course of time he cast it all out of himself. In this process of casting out all our science developed, from astronomy to the meager beginnings of modern chemistry. On the other hand, thinking, feeling and willing, the subject matter of abstract psychology (which today is no longer considered real) was in former times actually not experienced inside man. Man felt himself at one with the external world outside his own being, when he experienced the soul life. Thus what was corporeal was once experienced inwardly, whereas the soul element was experienced by leaving one's being and communing with the outer world. Psychology was once the science of that aspect of the world that affects man in such a way that he appears to himself as a soul being. Physics and chemistry were cast out of man, whereas psychology and pneumatology (which I shall discuss directly) were stuffed into him and lost their reality. They turned into subjective perceptions with which nothing could be done.

What was experienced together with the cosmos through the astral body (which leaves us in sleep) has become the subject of psychology. What man experienced as spirit in union with the universe was pneumatology. Today, as I have already pointed out, this has shrunk down to the idea of the ego or to a mere feeling. Therefore we now have as science of external nature what was once inner experience, while our science of man's inner nature is what was once external experience.

Now we must call to mind what is needed, on the one hand for physics and chemistry, and on the other for psychology and pneumatology, in order to develop them further in a conscious way, since man today finds himself in the age of the development of the consciousness soul. Take physics, for example, which in recent times has become mostly abstract and mechanical. From all that I have said you will have seen that the scientific age has increasingly felt impelled to restrict itself to the externally observed mechanics of space. Long ago, man accompanied motion by means of inward experience and judged it according to what he felt within as movement. Observing a falling stone, he experienced its inner impulse of movement in his own inner human nature, in his physical body. This experience, after the great casting out, led to the measuring of the rate of fall per second. In our attitude toward nature, the idea prevails that what is observed is what is real.

What can be observed in the outer world? It is motion, change of position.⁸³ As a rule, we let velocity vanish neatly in a differential coefficient. But it is motion that we observe, and we express velocity as movement per second, hence by means of space. This means, however, that with our conscious experience, we are entirely outside the object. We are not involved in it in any way when we merely watch its motion, meaning its change of position in space. We can do that only if we find ways and means to inwardly take hold of the spatial, physical object by an extending of the same method with which we separated from it in the first place. Instead of the mere movement, the bare change of position, we have to view the velocity in the objects as their characteristic element. Then we can know what a particular object is like inwardly, because we find velocity also within ourselves when we look back upon ourselves.

This is what is necessary. The trend of scientific development in regard to the outer physical world must be extended in the direction of proceeding from mere observation of motion to a feeling for the velocity possessed by a given object. We must advance from motion to velocity. That is how we enter into reality. Reality is not taken hold of if all we see is that a body changes its position in space. But if we know that the body possesses an inner velocity-impulse, then we have something that lies in the nature of the body. We assert nothing about a body if we merely indicate its change of position, but we do state something about it when we say that it contains within itself the impulse for its own velocity. This then is a property of it, something that belongs to its nature. You can understand this by a simple illustration. If you watch a moving person, you know nothing about him. But if you know that he has a strong urge to move quickly, you do know something about him. Likewise, you know something about him, when you know that he has a reason for moving slowly. We must be able to take hold of something that has significance within a given body. It matters little whether or not modern physics speaks, for example, of atoms; what matters is that when it does speak of them it regards them as velocity charges. That is what counts.

Now the question is: how do we arrive at such a perception? We can discuss the best in the case of physics, since today's chemistry has advanced too little. We have to become clear about what we actually do when, in our thinking, we cast inwardly experienced mechanics and physics into external space. That is what we are doing when we say: The nature of what is out there in space is of no concern to me; I observe only what can be measured and expressed in mechanical formulas, and I leave aside everything that is not mechanical. Where does this lead us? It leads us to the same process in knowledge that a human being goes through when he dies. When he dies, life goes out of him, the dead organism remains. When I begin to think mechanistically, life goes out of my knowledge. I then have a science of dead matter. We must be absolutely clear that we are setting up a science of dead matter so long as the mechanical and physical aspect is the sole object of our study of nature. You must be aware that you are focusing on what is dead. You must be able to say to yourself: The great thing about science is that it has tacitly resolved that, unlike the ancient alchemists who still saw in outer nature a remnant of life, it will observe what is dead I minerals, plants, and animals. Science will study only what is dead in them, because it utilizes only ideas and concepts suitable for what is dead. Therefore, our physics is dead by its nature.

Science will stand on a solid basis only when it fully realizes that its mode of thinking can take hold only of the dead. The same is true of chemistry, but I cannot go into that today because of the lack of time.

When we look only at motion and lose sight of velocity, we are erecting a physics that is dead, the end-product of living things is then our concern, and the end-product is death. Hence, when we look at nature with the eyes of modern mechanics and physics, we must realize that we are looking at a corpse.

Nature was not always like this. It was different at one time. If I look at a corpse, it would be foolish to believe that it was always in this condition. The fact that I realize that it is a corpse proves to me that once it was a living organism. The moment you realize that modern mechanics and physics lead you to view nature in this way, you will see that nature is now a corpse so far as physics is concerned. We are studying a corpse.

Can we attain to something living, or at least an approach to it? The corpse is the final condition of something living. Where is the beginning condition? Well, my dear friends, there is no way to rediscover velocity by observing motion. You may stare at differential coefficients as long as you will but you will not find it. Instead, you must turn back to man. Whereas formerly he experienced himself from within, you must now study him from without through his physical organism, and you must understand that in man—and especially in his physical and etheric organizations—the beginning of a living condition must be sought.

No satisfactory form of physics and chemistry will be attained save through a genuine science of man. But I expressly call attention to the fact that such a genuine anthropology will not be reached by approaching man with the methods of present-day physics and chemistry. That would only carry death back into man and make his body (his lower organization) even more dead than before.

You must study what is living in man, and not revert to the method of physics and chemistry. What is needed are the methods that can be found through spiritual-scientific research. Briefly stated, spiritual-scientific research will meet the historic requirements of natural science.

This historic requirement can be put in the following words: Science has reached the point of observing what is corpse-like in nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science must discover in addition to this the beginning of a living condition. This has been preserved in man. In former periods of evolution it was also externally perceptible. At one time, the processes of nature were totally different. Today, we walk around on the corpses of what existed in the beginning. But in the two lower bodies of man, the beginning condition has been preserved. There we can discover all that once existed, right back to the Saturn condition. An historical approach leads beyond the present state of science. It is quite clear why this is so. We are in the midst of a period of development. If, as is so frequently the case, we consider today's manner of thinking to be the most advanced and do not realize that the real course of events was very different, then we are looking at history the wrong way. As an example, a twenty-five year old person need not only be observed in the light of the twenty-five years that he has been alive,—one must also observe the element in him that makes it possible for him to live on. That is one point.

The other point is that our psychology has become very thin, while pneumatology has nearly reached the vanishing point. Again, we must know how far it has gone with these two sciences in the present age. If one speaks today of blue or red, of C-sharp or G, or of qualities of warmth, he will say that they are subjective sensations. That is the popular attitude; But what is a mere subjective sensation? It is a “phenomenon.” Just as we observe only motions in outer nature, we study only the phenomenon in psychology and pneumatology. And just as velocity is missing from motion in our external observation, the essential thing—the living essence—is missing from our observation of the inner soul life. Because we only study phenomena and no longer experience the living essence, we never get beyond mere semblance. The way thinking, feeling and willing are experienced today, they are mere semblance. Modern epistemologists have the man who wants to lift himself up by his own pigtail, or like the man in a railroad car who pushes against the wall without realizing that he cannot move the carriage in this way. This is how modern epistemologists look. They talk and talk, but there is no vitality in their talk because they are locked into the mere semblance.

I have tried to put a certain end to this talk. The first time was in my Philosophy of Freedom,⁸⁴ where I demonstrated how this semblance, inherent in pure thinking, becomes the impulse of freedom when inwardly grasped by man in thinking. If something other than semblance were contained in our subjective experience, we could never be free. But if this semblance can be raised to pure thinking, one can be free, because what is not real being cannot determine us, whereas real being would do so. This was my first effort. My second effort was at the Philosophical Congress in Bologna, when I analyzed the matter psychologically. I attempted to show that our sensations and thoughts are in fact outward experiences, rather than inward ones, and that this insight can be attained by careful observation.

These indications will have to be understood. Then, we shall realize that we must rediscover being in semblance, just as we must rediscover velocity in movement. Then, we will understand what this inwardly experienced semblance really is. It will reveal itself as the initial state of being. Man experiences this semblance; experiences himself as semblance and as such lives his way into semblance and thus transforms it into the seed of future worlds. I have often pointed out that from our ethics, our morals, born of the physical world of semblance, future physical worlds will arise, just as from today's seed the plant will grow.⁸⁵ We are dealing with the nascent state of being. In order to have a proper natural science, we must realize that psychology and pneumatology must understand what they observe as nascent states of being. Only then will they throw light on those matters that natural science wants to illuminate. But what is this “nascent” or “initial state?”

Now this nascent state is in the outer world, not within. It is what I see when I behold the green tapestry of plants, the world of colors—red, green and blue—and the sounds that are out there. What are these fleeting formations that modern-day physics, physiology and psychology regard only as subjective? They are the elements from which the worlds of the future create themselves. Red is not engendered by matter in the eye or the brain, red is the first, semblance-like, seed of future worlds.

If you know this, you will also want to know something about what will correspond in these future worlds to the corpse-like element. It will not be what we found earlier in our physics and chemistry, it will be the corpse of the future. We shall recognize what will be the corpse of the future, the future element of death, if we discover it already today in the higher organization of man, where astral body and ego are active. By experiencing the final condition there in reference to the initial one, we at last gain a proper comprehension of the nervous system and the brain insofar as they are dead, not alive. In a certain sense, they can be more dead than a corpse, inasmuch as they transcend the absolute point of death—especially in the case of the nervous system—and become “more dead than dead.” But this very fact makes the nervous system and the brain bearers of the so-called spiritual element—because the dead element dwells in them, the final state not yet even reached by outer nature—because they even surpass this final state.

In order to find psychology and pneumatology in the outer world, we shall have to discover how the inanimate, the dead, dwells in the human organism; namely, in the head organization and in part of the rhythmic organization, mainly that of breathing. We must look at our head and say of it that it is constantly dying. If it were alive, the growing, sprouting living matter could not think. But because it gives up life and constantly dies, the soul-spiritual thoughts, endowed with being, have the opportunity to spread out over what is dead as new living, radiant semblance.

You see, here lie the great tasks that, by means of the historical manner of observation result quite simply from natural science. If we don't take hold of them, we move like ghosts through the present development of science, and not with the consciousness that an epoch that has begun must find a way to continue. You can imagine that much of this is contained implicitly in what science has discovered. Scientific literature offers such indications everywhere. But people cannot yet distinguish clearly; they like what is chaotic. They don't care clearly to contemplate physics and chemistry on one hand, and psychology and pneumatology on the other, because then they would have to consider seriously the inner and outer aspects. They prefer to vacillate in the murky waters between physics and chemistry. Due to this, a bastard science has arisen that has become the darling of natural research and even philosophy; namely, physiology. As soon as the real facts are discovered, physiology will fall apart into psychology on the one hand—a psychology that is also a perception of the world—and on the other, into chemistry, meaning a chemistry that is also a knowledge of man.

When these two are attained, this in-between science, physiology, will vanish. Because today you have a morass in which you can find everything, and because by juggling a bit to the left or the right, it is possible to find a bit of a soul or a corporeal element, people do quite well. The physiology of today is what above all must disappear as the last remnant of former conceptions that have become muddled. The reason physiological concepts are so abstruse is that they contain soul and corporeal elements that are no longer distinguished, thus they can play around with words and even juggle the facts. One who aims for clear insight must realize that physiology amounts in the end to fibbing with words and facts.

Until we admit this, we can't take the history of natural science seriously. Science does not proceed only from undetermined past ages to our time, it continues on from the present. History can only be understood, if one comprehends the further course of things, not in a superstitious, prophetic sense but by beginning now to do the right thing. And infinitely much needs to be set right, particularly in the domain of science. Natural science has grown tall; it is like a nice teenager, who at the moment is going through his years of unpolished adolescence, and whose guidance must be continued so that he will become mature. Science will mature, if murky areas like physiology disappear, and physics and pneumatology arise again in the way outlined above. They will come into being, if the anthroposophical way of thinking is applied in earnest to science. This will be the case, when people feel that they are learning something, when somebody speaks to them of a real physics, a real chemistry, a real psychology and pneumatology; when they no longer have the urge to comprehend everything concerning the world and the human being through bastardized chaotic sciences like physiology. Then, the development of human knowledge will once again stand on a sound basis.

Naturally, therapy is particularly affected and suffers under present-day physiology. You can well imagine this, because it works with all manner of things that elude one's grasp, when one begins to think clearly.

We cannot confront the great challenges of our time with a few anthroposophical catchwords and phrases. It also does not suffice to dabble with physiology on the borderline between psychology and chemistry. The only way to proceed is to apply the methods of spiritual-scientific anthroposophy to physics and chemistry. If you are lazy—forgive me for this harsh expression, I don't mean it in such a radical sense in this case—you say: These matters can only be correctly judged, if one is clairvoyant. Therefore I will wait until I am clairvoyant. I won't venture to criticize physics and chemistry or even physiology.

My dear friends, you need not have insights that surpass ordinary perception in order to know that a corpse is dead and that it must have originated in life. Neither do you need to be clairvoyant in order to analyze properly the true facts of today's physics and chemistry, and to refer them back to their underlying living element, once your attention is directed to the fact that this living element is to be found by studying the “lower man.” There you will have the supplement you need for chemistry and physics. Make the attempt, for once, really to study the mechanism of human movement.⁸⁶ Instead of constantly drawing axis of coordinates and putting the movements into them apart from man; instead of multiplying differential coefficients and integrals, make a serious attempt to study the mechanics of movement in man. As they were once experienced from within, so do you now study them from without. Then you will have what you need, to add to your outer observation of nature, in physics and chemistry.

In outer nature, those who proclaim atomism will always put you in the wrong. They even work themselves up to the very spiritual statement that when one speaks about matter in the sense of a modern physicist, matter is no longer material. The physicists, themselves are saying it;⁸⁷ our very opponents are saying it. In this case they are right, and if we in our replies to them stop short at the half-truths—that is to say, at the final conditions of being—we shall never be equal to that which issues from them.

Here lie the tasks of the specialists, here lie the tasks of those who have the requisite preliminary training, in one or another branch of science.

Then we shall not establish a physicized or chemicized Anthroposophy, but a true anthroposophical chemistry, anthroposophical physics. Then we shall not establish a new medicine as a mere variation on the old, but a true anthroposophical medicine.

The tasks are at hand. They are outlined in all directions. Just as the simple heart can receive the observations that are scattered everywhere in our lectures or lecture cycles, and that give spiritual sustenance, so too the need is to take up on every hand the hints that can lead us to the much-needed progress in the several domains of science.

In the future, it will not suffice if man and nature do not again become one. What physics and chemistry study in nature as the final state of being, must be supplemented by the state of being in “lower man” belonging to the realm of physics and chemistry—in man who is dependent on the physical and etheric bodies. It is important that this be sought. It is not important to single out as essential the valences of the structural formulas or the periodic law in chemistry, because these are but schemata. While they are quite useful as tools for counting and calculations, what matters is the following realization. If the chemical processes are externally observed, the chemical laws are not within them. They are contained in the origin of chemical processes. Hence, they are found only, if, with diligent effort, one tries to seek in the human being for the processes that occur in his circulation, in the activity of his fluids, through the actions of the etheric body. The explanation of the chemical processes in nature lies in the processes of the etheric body. These in turn are represented in the play of fluids in the human organism and are accessible to precise study.

Anthroposophy poses a serious challenge in this direction. This is why we have founded research institutes⁸⁸ in which serious, intensive work must begin. Then the methods gained from anthroposophy can be properly nurtured. This is also the main point of our medical therapy; namely, that the old, confused physiology finally be replaced with a real chemistry and psychology. Without this one can never assert anything about the processes of illness and healing in human nature, because every course of illness is simply an abnormal psychological process, and each healing process is an abnormal chemical process. Only to the extent that we know how to influence the chemical process of healing and how to grasp the psychological course of illness will we attain to genuine pathology and therapy. This will emerge from the anthroposophical manner of observation. If one does not want to recognize this potential in anthroposophy, then one only wants something a bit out of the ordinary and is unwilling to get to work in earnest. Actually, everything that I have sketched here is only a description of how the work should proceed, because a genuine psychology and chemistry come into being through work. All the prerequisites for this work already exist, because very man facts can be found in scientific literature that researchers have accidentally discovered but don't understand. Those of us who work in the spirit of anthroposophy should take up these facts and contribute something to their full comprehension. Take as an example what I emphasized yesterday⁸⁹ in speaking to a smaller group of people. The essential point about the spleen is that it is really an excretory organ. The spleen itself is in turn an excretion of the functions in the etheric body. Countless facts are available in medical literature that need only be utilize—and that is the point: they should be utilized—then the facts will be brought together and what is needed will result.

A single person might accomplish this if a human life spanned six hundred years. But by that time, other tasks would confront him and his accomplishments would long since be outmoded. These things must be attained through cooperation, through people working together. So this is the second task—we must see to it that this becomes possible. I believe that these tasks of the Anthroposophical Society will emerge most clearly and urgently from a truly realistic study of the history of natural science in recent times.

This history shows us at every turn that something great and wonderful has arisen through modern science. In earlier times, the truly inanimate dead aspects could never be discerned, hence, nothing could be made of them. In those times inward semblance could never really be observed; therefore, it couldn't be brought to life by human effort, and hence, one couldn't arrive at freedom. Today, we confront a grandiose world, which became possible only because natural science studies the dead aspects. This is the world of technology. Its special character can be discerned from the fact that the word “technique” is taken from the Greek. There, it still signifies “art,” implying that art reveals, where technology still contains spirit. Today, technology only utilizes spirit in the sense of the abstract, spirit-devoid thoughts. Technology could be achieved only by attaining a proper knowledge of what is dead. Once in the course of humanity's evolution it was necessary to concentrate upon the dead; it thus entered into the realm of technology. Today, man stands in the midst of this realm of technology that surrounds him on all sides. He looks out on it and realizes that here at last is a sphere in which there is no spirit in the proper sense. In regard to the spiritual element, it is important that in all areas of technology human beings experience this inner feeling, almost akin to one of pain over the death of a person. If feeling and sensation can be developed in knowledge, then such a feeling will arise, somewhat like the sensation one experiences when a person is dying and one sees the living organism turn into a corpse. Alongside the abstract indifferent cold knowledge, such a feeling will arise through the true realization that technology is the processing of the inanimate, the dead. This feeling will become the most powerful impetus to seek the spirit in new directions.

I could well imagine the following view of the future: Man looks out over the chimneys, the factories, the telephones—everything that technology has produced in wondrous ways in the most recent times. He stands atop this purely mechanical world, the grave of all things spiritual, and he calls out longingly into the universe—and his yearning will be fulfilled. Just as the dead stone yields the living fiery spark if handled correctly, so from our dead technology will emerge the living spirit, if human beings have the right feelings about what technology is.

On the other hand, one need only understand clearly what pure thinking is; namely the semblance from which can be brought forth the most powerful moral impulses—those individual moral impulses that I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom. Then, in a new way, man will face the feeling that was once confronted by Nicholas Cusanus and Meister Eckhart. They said: When I life myself beyond everything that I am ordinarily accustomed to observe, I come to “nothingness” with all that I have learned. But in this “nothingness” there arises for me the “I.” If man really penetrates to pure thinking, then he finds in it the nothingness that turns into the I and from which emerges the whole wealth of ethical actions, that will create new worlds. I can imagine a person who first lets all knowledge of the preset, as inaugurated by natural science, impress itself on him and then (centuries after Meister Eckhart and Nicholas Cusanus) turns his gaze inward and with today's mode of thinking arrives at the nothingness of his inner life. In it, he discovers that the spirit really speaks to him. I can imagine that these two images merge. On the one hand, man goes to the place where barren technology has left the spirit behind. There he calls out into cosmic expanses for the spirit. On the other hand, he stops, thinks and looks within himself. And here, out of his inner being, he receives the divine answer to the call he sent out into the distances of the universe.

When we learn, through a new, anthroposophically imbued natural science, to let the calls of infinite longing for the spirit, sent out into the world, resound in our inner being, then this will be the right starting point. Here, through an “anthroposophized” inner perception, we will find the answer to the yearning call for the spirit, desperately sounded out into the universe.

I did not want to describe the development of natural science in recent times in a merely documentary fashion. Rather, I wanted to show you the standpoint of a human being, who comprehends this natural-scientific development and, in a difficult moment of humanity's evolution, knows the right things to say to himself in regard to the progress of mankind.

• 83. See Drawings, pages 92, 95 and compare with the ones on page 125.
• 84. See footnote 45.
• 85. See Rudolf Steiner, The Karma of Vocation (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1984).
• 86. Literature: Adolf Fink has studied the mechanism of human movement and the heat produced by muscular work, and published in 1857, 1869, and 1882 Gesammelte Schriften, (1903–06 in German).
• 87. In the beginning of the century Rudolf Steiner pointed to the speech of the philosopher and Prime Minister A.J. Balfour of August 17, 1904, in front of the British Association, immediately after it was held; see Rudolf Steiner, Lucifer Gnosis (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1969), GA Bibl. No. 34, p. 467. Often Steiner also mentioned the lecture of Max Planck of 1910: “Die Stellung der Neueren Physic zur Mechanischen Weltanshaung” in Max Planck, Physikalische Abhandlungen und Vorträge (Brunswick, Germany, 1958), Vol. 3, pp. 30–46.
• 88. In 1920 a research institute was founded in Stuttgart for physics and chemistry, with a biological branch through the joint stock company “Der Kommende Tag.” A few years later it was transferred to Dornach. The first works from the Institute were published in Der Kommende Tag: Scientific Research Institute News. It contains Heft I (1921), “Milzfunktion und Blaettchen Frage” von L. Kolisko; Heft II (1923), “Der Villardsche Versuch” von Dr. Rer. Nat. R.E. Maier; Heft III (1923): “Physiologischer und Physicalischer Nachweis Kleinster Entitaeten” von L. Kolisko. Later works appeared in the volumes Gaea Sophia, Jahrbuch der Wissenschaftlichen Sektion der Freien Hochschule fuer Geisteswissenschaft am Goetheanum, Volume I (1926), etc.
• 89. From this scientific discussion of January 5 no known copy exists.

My dear Friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The great advances in natural science in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades, are rightly admired, as I have repeatedly mentioned in the lectures on spiritual science given here. And it is only right that the modern man, in order to get to know the present point of human development, likes to put himself in the mindset and the way of thinking from which these results, this progress of natural science, have been achieved. But by putting himself in this way of thinking, the modern man's thinking, his whole mind, takes on certain forms. And without detracting from our admiration for the progress of natural science, it must be said that in recent times this very immersion in the scientific way of thinking has, in many people, produced a kind of inability to be attentive to what knowledge of the nature of the human soul, of the human spirit itself, gives, what knowledge it gives about the most important, most incisive riddles of human existence.

If one follows the course of spiritual history from the points of view just mentioned, one not only gets a general idea of the inability just described. If we look in detail at what has been attempted in recent times with regard to the study of the soul, we immediately get the impression that minds that have been trained by the scientific way of thinking often pass by the points where the knowledge of the soul, the knowledge of the most important questions of existence, should open up. As an example today, I will mention the ideas of a thinker of recent times, whom I have often referred to here and who can indeed be considered one of those who have endeavored to go beyond the merely external, sensual existence and point to something that lives in the spiritual behind the sensual. I would like to start with certain thoughts that Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious, wrote down at the beginning of his psychology, his theory of the soul. He expresses how it is actually impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul, and how the difficulty of a psychology lies precisely in the fact that it is almost impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul. Let us allow Hartmann's thoughts to arise in this direction before our soul. He says:

“Psychology seeks to establish what is given; to do so, it must above all observe it. But observing one's own psychic phenomena is a peculiar matter, since it inevitably disturbs and changes what it focuses on to a lesser or greater degree. Anyone who wants to observe their own delicate feelings will, by focusing their attention on them, alter these feelings quite considerably.”

Hartmann therefore believes that you cannot observe the soul, because if you want to observe feelings, you have to observe the soul; but when you want to direct your attention to a tender feeling, it disappears into the soul; the soul withdraws, as it were, from the observation of the human being.

“Yes, even,” he says, “they can slip away from him underhand. A slight physical pain is intensified by observation.”

So he means: pain is a mental experience; but how can we observe it? How can we find out what is there when pain lives in the soul in such a way that when we start observing it, it becomes stronger. So it changes. By observing, we change what we want to observe. Or:

“Reciting the most familiar memorized material can falter or become confused in its sequence if the observation is trying to determine the course of this sequence.”

He means: It is a mental phenomenon when we recite something that we have memorized. But if we want to start observing what is actually happening while we are reciting, it does not work. So we cannot observe this mental phenomenon of reciting. Or he says:

"Strong feelings or even emotions, such as fear and anger, make it impossible to observe one's own psychological phenomena. Often, observation falsifies the result by introducing into what is given only that which it expects to find. It seems almost impossible to objectify one's psychic experiences of the present moment in such a way that one makes them the object of simultaneous observation; either the experience does not allow the simultaneous observation to arise, or the observation falsifies and displaces the experience.

We see here a personality that, as it were, recoils from the observation of the soul under the influence of thinking. If I want to grasp the soul, then I change the soul precisely through this soul activity of grasping. And that is why observation is actually not possible at all – so Hartmann thinks.

Now this is indeed an extraordinarily interesting example of the wrong track that this research in particular can take due to a certain inability. After all, what would we actually gain if we could truly observe, say, a tender feeling? A tender feeling would remain in the soul exactly what it is. By observing this tender feeling, we would experience nothing other than what this tender feeling is. Nothing about the soul; nothing at all about the soul. And it is the same with the other examples Hartmann cites. For it depends on the fact that what we should actually call soul never shows itself in what the moment offers. Rather, the soul can only truly appear to us when we are experiencing the changes of the individual soul experiences. If we wanted to observe what is present in the soul in a moment, we would be like the person who goes out into the fields at a certain time of year and sees the brown soil of the fields, spread out widely, and says to himself: this brown soil of the fields is what is actually spread out there. After a certain time, he goes out again. Now there are green shoots everywhere. If he is observing rationally, will he not say: Yes, then the brown soil that I saw recently did not show me everything that is actually there. Only by observing the changes that have taken place at different points in time can I understand what it actually is: that it is not just soil that has been spread, but that this soil has contained so many seeds that have sprouted and are sprouting.

Thus, the soul presents itself only when we become attentive: a delicate feeling is extinguished when I direct a strong thought of observation towards it. This interaction of the delicate feeling and the strong thought that observes it is the first manifestation of the workings and essence of the soul. So Eduard von Hartmann regrets not being able to observe that which changes, while he should be observing change. If he were to start from a point of view that allows him to look deeper into the life of the soul and into the connection between the life of the soul and the physical life than he is able to, then he would say the following about memorization, for example. He would recognize that memorizing is based on the fact that something of the soul has become engrained in the bodily process as a result of me having activated it many times, so that when I recite what I have memorized, the body automatically carries out what has to happen so that what I have memorized comes out again, so to speak without the soul having to be present. The person who is able to observe soul experiences knows that through memorization the soul element moves deeper into the bodily organization, so that there is more activity in the bodily realm than when we form present thoughts through direct contemplation that we have not memorized. When we form thoughts directly, I would say that we are working at a higher level in the soul than when we recite what we have memorized, where we bring forth more or less automatically what the soul has engraved in the body. But then, when we automatically run what we have buried from the soul into the body, we disturb this automatism when we intervene with a directly present thought that arises at a higher level, namely in the soul. It is when we enter with our thoughts from the soul into the automatism of the body, which takes place when reciting a piece of memorized material, just as if we were to insert a stick into a machine and disturb its operation.

When we grasp such things, which Hartmann regrets, we will immediately see how the various modes of activity of the soul and also of the body interact in man.

And Eduard von Hartmann says: “Observation often distorts the soul.” Well, in the course of the last few decades, popular science has basically more or less abandoned actual observation of the soul, at least methodical observation of the soul. But certain flashes of light have emerged. And such flashes of light have been had precisely by those who are not really recognized by regular school philosophers. Nietzsche, for example, had many such flashes of insight. In a certain, increasingly morbid and ingenious grasp of the soul's life, Nietzsche recognized how what takes place on the surface of it differs greatly from what takes place in the depths of human life. One need only read something like Nietzsche's arguments about the ascetic ideal to which some people devote themselves, and one will see what is actually meant here. How is the ascetic ideal often described? Well, you describe it in such a way that you have in mind what the person who devotes himself to asceticism in the usual sense imagines: how the person trains himself more and more to want nothing himself, to switch off his will and, precisely as a result, to become more and more spineless and selfless. From pursuing this train of thought, what is called the ascetic ideal is then formed. Nietzsche asks: What is actually behind this ascetic ideal in the soul? And he finds: The one who lives according to an ascetic ideal wants power, an increase of power. If he were to develop his ordinary soul life as it is, he would have less power – as he perceives it – than he wants. Therefore, he trains his will, seemingly to reduce it. But in the depths of the soul, it is precisely by diminishing the will that he wants to achieve great power, great effects. The will to power is behind the ideal of lack of will, of selflessness. So says Nietzsche. And there is indeed a flash of insight here, which should certainly be taken into account when judging, especially when it comes to self-knowledge of the human being.

Let us take a more obvious example than the one Nietzsche discussed in Asceticism. A person once wrote to me and often said: “I devote myself to a certain scientific direction; actually, I don't have the slightest sympathy for this scientific direction, but I consider it a mission, a duty, to work in this direction because humanity needs it in the present. I would actually rather do anything than what I am doing. I was not embarrassed to keep telling the man in question that, according to how he appeared to me, this was a superficial view of his soul about himself. Deep in the subconscious, in those layers of the soul's life of which he knows nothing, there lives in him a greed to carry out precisely that which he said he actually dislikes, that he only accepts as a mission. And in truth, I said, the whole thing seems to me that he regards this as a mission for the reason that he wants to develop these things out of the most selfish motives. So one can see, without going deeper into the soul life, that the superficial soul life almost falsifies the subconscious. But in this falsification lies a remarkable activity of the soul.

It was precisely from such trains of thought, as I have cited them, and from a failure to pursue such trains of thought further, as I have followed them up, that Eduard von Hartmann reached his hypothesis of the unconscious. He says: From what takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing, from what one has there as consciousness, one can actually gain no view of the real soul. But because one has only this, one must altogether renounce any view of the real soul-life and can only put forward a hypothesis. — Therefore Hartmann puts forward the hypothesis: Behind thinking, feeling and willing lies the unconscious, which can never be reached. And from this unconscious arise thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. But what is down there in the unconscious can only be the subject of thoughts that have a greater or lesser degree of probability, but which are only hypotheses. It must be said that anyone who thinks in this way simply blocks their own access to the life of the soul, to that which is beyond the ordinary life of the soul. For Hartmann correctly recognized that everything that enters into ordinary consciousness is nothing more than a mere image. And it is precisely one of Hartmann's merits that he emphasized time and again in the most eminent sense: What falls into ordinary consciousness arises from the fact that the soul, as it were, receives its own content mirrored from the body, so that we only have mirror images in what we experience in thinking, feeling and willing. And to talk about the fact that these mirror images of consciousness contain a reality is quite similar to the assertion that the images we perceive from a mirror are reality. Hartmann emphasized this again and again. We will come back to this point today. But Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers, countless people in general in the last decades and the immediate present, they blocked their own possibility of penetrating into the soul because, I would say, they had an indescribable fear of the path that can penetrate into the soul. This fear remains in the subconscious; in ordinary consciousness it protrudes in such a way that one conjures up numerous reasons that tell one: one cannot go beyond certain limits of knowledge.

For anyone who really wants to penetrate into the life of the soul needs not to stop at ordinary consciousness, but to move on to what I have called “visionary consciousness” in the lectures I have given here, a consciousness that is, to a certain extent, higher than ordinary consciousness. I have chosen the following comparison: During sleep, man lives in images. The images of the dream that arises from sleep become conscious to a certain degree. I said in previous lectures: the essential thing is that in these images that he experiences in his dreams, man is not able to relate his will to the things around him. At the moment of waking up, when a person enters from dream consciousness into waking consciousness, what remains of the images and perceptions is basically the same as it is in the dream; only now the person enters into a relationship with their surroundings through their will, and they integrate what otherwise only exists as images in their dream into their sensory environment. Just as a person wakes up from dream consciousness into ordinary waking consciousness, so too can he bring himself, through certain soul activities, to wake up from ordinary waking consciousness to a “visionary consciousness,” whereby he does not integrate himself into the ordinary world of the senses, but with his soul powers into the spiritual world. This intuitive consciousness is the only way by which man can penetrate into the beyond of soul phenomena.

I might say that the most enlightened minds of the present believe that one would be committing a sin against knowledge if one were to speak of a human being's ascent to such an intuitive consciousness. And for many of the philosophical minds of the present day in particular, this intuitive consciousness is simply condemned by the fact that such a person says: Yes, it is just like clairvoyance! — Now the thing is that — in order to tie in with something — it is perhaps best characterized by characterizing the tremendous progress that has taken place in man's attitude to reality from Kant to Goethe. In doing so, one does indeed commit a sin against the spirit of many a philosopher. But this sin must be committed at some time. Kantianism is, after all, what began to erect barriers to human knowledge within the development of the continental spirit. The “thing in itself” is to be presented as something absolutely otherworldly, which human knowledge cannot approach. That is what Kantianism wants, and that is what many people in the 19th century wanted with Kantianism, right up to the present day and including the 20th century. In a few short sentences, Goethe has put forward something tremendously significant against this principle of Kantianism. And if one really wants to evaluate German intellectual life, one could consider Goethe's short essay “On the Power of Judging by Intuition”, which is usually printed in the natural scientific writings of Goethe, as one of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy, for the simple reason that what is alive in this short essay is the starting point for a tremendous development of human intellectual life. In this essay, “On the Power of Judgement,” Goethe says something like this: Yes, Kant excludes the human being from the thing in itself and only allows the categorical imperative to enter into the soul, commanding him what he should do. But if, in the moral sphere, one should rise to thoughts about freedom and immortality, why should it be closed to man to raise himself directly in knowledge to that world in which immortality and freedom themselves are rooted? — Goethe calls such a power of judgment, which transports itself into such a world, the contemplative power of judgment. Now, in his contemplation of natural phenomena, Goethe continually exercised this power of judgment. And in the way he observed plant and animal forms, he set a magnificent example of the use of this power of judgment. Kant saw this power of judgment as something demonic, which one should leave alone, which one should pass by. He called the use of this power of contemplative judgment “the adventure of reason.” Goethe countered: “Why should one, after making the effort I have, to recognize how the spirit lives and moves in natural phenomena, why should one not bravely face this adventure of reason?”

This is, of course, only the beginning, but it is the beginning of a development that proceeds as I have characterized it in these lectures. Today, too, I would like to point out that in my writings, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”, in “The Occult Science in Outline”, in my last book, “The Riddle of Man”, you will find information and hints about what the soul has to undertake in order to find within itself, as it were, the strength to awaken from ordinary waking consciousness to observing consciousness in the same way that one awakens from dream consciousness to ordinary waking consciousness. Just as the soul must exert itself by virtue of the natural forces given to it in order to awaken from the dream-life, in which man is passively surrendered to the succession of images, into the waking consciousness, so can it, by taking itself in hand and applying to itself all that I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” She can strengthen herself to awaken within a world that is now just as different in comparison to the ordinary waking consciousness as the ordinary sense world of the waking consciousness is different from what one experiences in the mere world of images in a dream. Out of the ordinary waking consciousness and into a world of intuitive consciousness: this is the path that the most outstanding thinkers of modern times have avoided so much. And we have the peculiar phenomenon that precisely the most enlightened minds have remained with Kant and have not found the way from Kant to Goethe, in order to advance vividly into the realm of the seeing consciousness, which is only the development at a different level of what Goethe meant by contemplative judgment.

But then, when the human being rises to such an awakening in the seeing consciousness, then he first reaches what I have already characterized in my lectures as imaginative knowledge, which is not called “imaginative” because it represents only something imagined, but because one lives in images; but in images that are not taken from the sensual outer world, but from a more powerful, more intense reality than the outer sensual reality. When a person develops the strength within themselves to reach this imaginative knowledge, it means that they truly live in what I have called in earlier lectures the ethereal in the sense of spiritual science. Through ordinary waking consciousness, we become aware of the external sense world. In imaginative consciousness, we enter into a completely different world, in which, so to speak, other things live and move than in the ordinary sense world.

Now it is certainly difficult for those who have no idea of this seeing consciousness to form an idea of it. And it will probably be the same for some of my honored listeners who have told me in recent times that these lectures are difficult to understand. They are not difficult with regard to what is communicated, but they are difficult for the reason that they speak of something that is not there for ordinary consciousness.

They speak of the results of perception that are based on the research of the seeing consciousness. But one can also gain an approximate idea in the ordinary consciousness of that which is actually the very first of the seeing consciousness. Imagine yourself — and basically anyone can do this — in a very vivid morning dream from which you wake up, and try to remember such a dream in which you have tried, I would even say, to really live in the dream, more or less subconsciously trying to really live in it. Then you will have experienced that what you feel as thoughts, as if they were banished to your body, and of which you have to say to yourself, “I feel my thoughts as though they were thought by me,” you will have to think about that, so to speak, spread out over the images of the dream as they flood in. You cannot distinguish yourself from what is flooding in the images of the dream, as you can distinguish yourself in sensual consciousness, so that you can say, “I stand here and I think about the things that are out there.” You do not perceive something outside and think about it, but you have the direct experience: in what is flooding up and down, the forces live that otherwise live in my thinking. It is as if you yourself were immersed in the surging life, so that the surging, the form of the surging, everything that is there is formed like weaving, living thought forces: objective life and weaving of thought forces. This, what can only be imagined in the dream life, I would like to say, can be perceived very distinctly in the seeing consciousness as a first impression. There really the possibility ceases to think: There outside are the objects and there inside in my head I think about the objects. No, there one feels embedded in something, what one would like to call a surging substantial sea, in which one is a wave. And that, what thought power is, is not only in one, that is outside, that drives this surging and surging, that goes outward, inward. That is to say, one sometimes feels connected to it, sometimes in such a way that the power of thought flows outside without one.

What one achieves – whereby, in a sense, a substantial element is connected with what otherwise only lives in us as thought – that is what should really be called ether. For the ether is nothing other than a finer substantiality, but one that is so permeated everywhere that thought is at work in it, that in reality thoughts outside fill the ether itself. Only in this way, through the development of consciousness, does one arrive at what should really be called ether. But then one also arrives at a more intimate relationship between one's own soul and the environment. In sensory observation, one can never enter into such an intimate relationship with one's surroundings as in this experience of the observing consciousness, which now really has no boundaries between inside and outside, but flows in and out - into and out of one's own soul life - that which is ether filled with thoughts and thoughts of the soul.

But only when one has entered into this intuitive consciousness can there be a higher self-knowledge. And here I now touch on something that again belongs to the significant results of spiritual research; but it will also be transferred to scientific research, insofar as it will find confirmation of this, as it will find confirmation of those results of spiritual research that I have presented in previous lectures. Man is a complex being, even if we look at him only externally and physically. If Goethe's approach had already been fruitful earlier, if it had not been overgrown by the 19th-century materialism hostile to spirit and soul, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis would also have been applied to man himself. Goethe made a very beautiful distinction between the green leaf and the colored petal of a flower, which are the same thing, only at different levels of existence, one being only a transformation product, a metamorphosis of the other. If we start not from a merely theoretical reception, but from the intuition that lived in Goethe, in that he applied the idea of metamorphosis in the simplest way, to the plant, and now applies this metamorphic applies this view of metamorphosis to man in all the complexity of his being, one comes to recognize that man, by having a head and a remaining organism, is a very remarkable creature.

When we observe the human being as he develops from an early age, from early childhood onwards, we encounter many things that are full of meaning and that are still not sufficiently appreciated by science today. Let us just emphasize the fact that in early childhood the part of the human being that develops most physically is the head. The head grows throughout life in such a way that it increases fourfold, while the rest of the organism grows twentyfold from its childhood state. Consider, then, how different the pace of growth is for the head and for the rest of the organism. This is due to the fact that the head and the rest of the organism are two different metamorphoses of one and the same, but in a very peculiar way. The head appears in man, as he begins his physical life, immediately in a certain perfection; the rest of the organism, on the other hand, appears with the greatest conceivable imperfection, and must first develop slowly to the degree of perfection that it is to achieve in physical life. Thus the head and the rest of the organism undergo quite different periods of development. I have already mentioned how spiritual science shows the origin of this. The human head points back to a long preceding spiritual development. When we enter our physical existence through conception and birth, we come from a spiritual world as soul-spiritual beings. What we go through during our spiritual development in the spiritual world contains a sum of forces that initially express themselves primarily in the head; therefore, what appears in the head as something so perfect and needing little further perfection points to a development that the person has already undergone.

The rest of the organism is, as it were, the same at an initial stage. It is in the process of developing the powers which, if they could reach full development, would tend to make the whole of the rest of the organism what the head is physically. However paradoxical it may sound, that is how it is. The head shows that it is a transformed remaining organism; the remaining organism shows that it is a head that has not yet become. In a sense, just as the green leaf is a petal that has not yet become a flower, and the colored petal is a transformed leaf. And that which the human being develops through his remaining organism, that is incorporated into the soul. And when a person passes through the gate of death, it enters into a spiritual world, undergoes a development between death and a new birth, and in a later life becomes one of the powers that then develop in the head, just as the head of the present has developed out of the organism of an earlier life on earth.

Now you may ask: How can such a thing be known? Something like this can be known as soon as a person enters into intuitive consciousness. For then something really occurs that compels one to see the human being as this duality: the head human being and the human being of the rest of the organism. And the head is, so to speak, a tool of the etheric world, as I have just described it, and the rest of the organism is also a tool of this etheric world.

The human being not only has his physical organism as a kind of section of the whole physical world, but he also has, held together by the physical organism, an etheric organism within him that can only be perceived if one ascends to imaginative knowledge, as I have described. But then, when what is ethereal really becomes vivid, then one encounters the great difference between what underlies the etheric body of the human being and the head and what underlies the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And just as the head and the rest of the organism have very different growth rates, so that which lives and is active in the etheric body of the head and that which lives in the etheric body of the rest of the organism has very different inner developments of strength, which evoke different inner imaginations. And when one enters the imaginative world at all, then the imagination of the etheric body of the head interacts with the imagination of the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And this living interaction in the human etheric organism is the content of a higher self-knowledge. The fact that the human being comes to truly recognize himself in this way also enables him to evaluate certain soul experiences in the right way. If what I have stated were not as I have described it, the human being would never be able to have what is called a memory. The human being would be able to form ideas from sensory impressions, but these would always pass by. The fact that a person can remember something that he has once experienced is based on the fact that the etheric body of the head, in interaction with the etheric body of the rest of the organism, causes that which takes effect in the etheric body of the head to bring about changes in the etheric body of the rest of the organism that are permanent and that work their way up into the physical organism. Every time something takes hold in the soul and bodily life of a person that belongs to memory, a change first occurs in the etheric organism that can be imagined through imaginative knowledge; but this change continues into the physical organism. And through this alone we have the possibility of again bringing up certain thoughts, that what is sent from the ether organism of the head into the other ether organism is imprinted in the physical body. Only by the fact that something has made impressions in our physical body are we able to retain it in our memory. But what happens in the physical organism in the manner described, can only be observed by the seeing consciousness. This can only be observed if the observing consciousness continues the exercises that are characterized in the books mentioned, if the observing consciousness rises from mere imaginative knowledge to what I have called “inspired knowledge”. Through imaginative knowledge we enter into a world of surging ether, which is animated by thoughts that permeate it. If we continue the exercises, we will gain more strength in our soul life than is necessary for this imaginative knowledge, and then we will not only perceive a surging thought life in the ether, but we will also perceive beings within this surging thought life, real spirit beings, which do not reveal themselves in any physical body, but which only reveal themselves in the spiritual. But by coming to the real perception of a spiritual world, we also come to the possibility of achieving what can be called: to look at the actual human being as well as at things from the outside, to really face oneself, not just to feel what I have now called one's own thought life in the surging ether, in one's own ether organism, but to perceive oneself among other spirit beings as a spirit being in the spiritual world. When this happens, something occurs that is difficult to even characterize, but that can be understood with some good will.

When you imagine something and hold the image in your mind, and later you recall this image, you say you are remembering. But as I have just explained, this is based on something that is happening in the physical organism. It is just that we cannot follow it with our ordinary consciousness. But if we ascend into the consciousness of vision, then we come, as it were, to see what happens behind the memory, what happens in man in the time that elapses from the moment when he conceived a thought that has now disappeared as it were, and lives only down in the physical organism until it is brought up again. All that lives beyond the thought that is remembered is not perceived if one cannot lift oneself out of oneself through the seeing consciousness and, as it were, look at oneself from the other side. So that one not only sees a thought going down and sensing it coming back up, but perceiving everything that happens in between while the thought is going down and coming back up. This is only possible for the inspired consciousness; it is possible for the beholder who has made it possible for himself not only to look outward while living in the physical body, but to look even within the body of man himself while living in the spirit. Thus man reaches, on the one hand, a beyond of the soul, which assures him that he lives in the spirit. But man also reaches the beyond of the soul, which works in what lives unconsciously from the disappearance of a thought until the reappearance of the same, what lives down there as what Eduard von Hartmann calls the “unconscious”, and which he believes can never be reached by consciousness. It cannot be reached by ordinary consciousness because the thought is reflected in the organism beforehand; but if one gets behind this reflection, if one goes beyond oneself and lives in the observing consciousness, then one experiences what really happens in a person between the moment of conceiving the thought and the moment of remembering it. And this we will now hold fast, what man can perceive, as it were, beyond that stream through the seeing consciousness, which is usually limited to him by memory. For we see well: there we enter through the seeing consciousness into a beyond of the soul.

Let us keep this thought in mind and look at many other endeavors that have emerged in the scientific age from the same point of view.

Not only does the scientific world view, I might say, take such erroneous paths to the soul life as I have characterized it, but in a certain respect it also takes erroneous paths when it wants to explore what lies beyond the senses. In this respect, scientific research is indeed in a strange position at present when it forms a world view. It has actually come to the conclusion that everything that lives in consciousness is only an image of reality. It starts from an incorrect idea; but this incorrect idea, despite its incorrectness, gives a certain insight that is correct, namely that everything that lives in consciousness is an image. Scientific research starts from the idea that out there is a reality of vibrating, thoughtless ether atoms, completely without spirit or soul. We have found the ether to be a surging, thought-filled life; the scientific world view starts from the thoughtless, soulless ether. These vibrations impress our senses, effects arise in us, conjuring up the colorful, resounding world for us, while outside everything is dark and silent. Now, however, thinking, on which this world view is based, wants to get behind these images. What does it do? What it does there can be compared to someone -— well, let's say a child - looking into a mirror. Mirror images come towards him, his own and the images of his surroundings. And now the child wants to know what actually underlies these mirror images. What does it do? Yes, what is actually underlying them is behind the mirror, it says; so it will either want to look behind the mirror. But there it sees something quite different from what it was actually looking for. Or it may well smash the mirror to see what is behind the glass. The same is true of the scientific view of the world. It has the whole carpet of sense phenomena before it, and it wants to know what actually lives behind the sense phenomena. It goes so far as to approach the substance, the matter. Now it wants to know what is out there, apart from the senses. But that is merely as if it wanted to smash the carpet, which is like a mirror. She would not find what she was looking for behind it. And if someone were to say: “I have red through the eye, and behind it are certain vibrations in the ether,” he is talking just like someone who believes that the origin of what shines in the mirror is behind the mirror. Just as when you stand before a mirror you see the image of yourself in the mirror, and you are together with what is in the surroundings, and with what also reflects itself of yourself, so you are together in the soul with what is behind the sense phenomena. If I want to know why other things are reflected with me, I cannot look behind the mirror, but I have to look at those who are to my left and right, who are of the same nature as I am, who are also reflected. If I want to explore what is out there behind the sensory phenomena, I must explore that in which I myself am involved; not by breaking the mirror, but by exploring that in which I myself am involved.

Indeed, ingenious and wonderful trains of thought have been developed over the airwaves in relation to natural science. But all these trains of thought have led to nothing, to the realization that the path of physical research leads only to the same thing that is seen in the sense perception, only that because some things are too fine or too fast to be perceived by the senses. One comes to no ether. This is clear today after the beautiful research with the pumped tubes, the vacuum tubes, where one thought one had the ether in one's hands; for today one knows that nothing else comes about through these experiments than radiant matter, not what can be called ether. I would even say that ether research in particular is undergoing the greatest revolution today. For one will never arrive at anything other than that which reflects, by way of physical research. If one wants to get further, then one must consider that which reflects with a community — but one can only do that with the seeing consciousness. And that is what lives in the ether that is truly inspired by thought. Therefore, when one asks about the beyond of the senses, one finds only one answer through the seeing consciousness. For when one recognizes the surging thought-inspired ether within oneself through imaginative knowledge, then one also comes to seek it behind the red, behind the sound, behind all external sensory perception; no longer the dead ether of today's physical conception, which is just fading away, but the living, thought-inspired ether. Behind what the senses perceive, lives the same thing that is found in us when we penetrate down into that which lives in us between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. We do not reach the beyond of the senses by the methods of modern physics, but by finding what is beyond the senses in our own being, by learning to recognize: the same process works in our own being between the grasping of a thought and the reminiscence of a thought, which lives outside and which penetrates my eye when I perceive red. Behind this red is the same thing that is in me between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. The beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul leads into the spiritual.

I had to lead you through a deducted train of thought today because I wanted to say something in the context of these lectures about the perspective that must arise from spiritual science. I wanted to show how true self-knowledge leads to the beyond of the soul, but also how, when one steps into the beyond of the soul, one also stands in the beyond of the senses, and how one thereby finds the way into the spiritual world through the observing consciousness. And once we enter this spiritual world, the intuitive consciousness discovers that which also plays a role in our soul life and which I have described in the previous lectures as that which, as our destiny, rises and falls in our experiences. In this way, the life of fate is linked to the moral life, to what happens in destiny. When we first know that behind the experience of the senses there is not a spiritless reality, but a reality inspired by the spirit, then our moral life will have just as much place in this spiritual world, which lies beyond the soul and beyond the senses, as the material world, which we perceive all around us, has in this outer world.

Spiritual science today, when it develops these things, is still seen as something paradoxical; the things I have described are, so to speak, considered foolishness; and yet they can be considered just as much as facts, simply by looking at them as if one wanted to describe an external event. But this approach of spiritual science is only digging in one epistemic tunnel from one side; from the other side, natural science digs into the mountain. If the two strive in the right direction, they will meet in the middle. And I would like to say: in a kind of negative way, those who cultivate natural science do come to meet those who cultivate the humanities; for remarkable things have come about among natural scientists in recent times. Those who think they are firmly grounded in natural science research because they know what has been discovered up to twenty years ago do not yet know much about what natural scientists actually do. But if you look more closely, you will make some very strange discoveries in the course of scientific thinking. For this very reason, I have today cited Eduard von Hartmann as a thinker who at least points to a beyond the senses and a beyond the soul. He just does not admit that it is possible for the observing consciousness to penetrate beyond the senses and the beyond of the soul. Therefore he says, dipping it into a general sauce of knowledge - knowledge sauce, one says nowadays! -: What lies beyond the senses and beyond the soul is the unconscious. He now puts forward quite questionable hypotheses about it. But these are only truths of thought. Thought does not reach into these worlds. Only the seeing consciousness reaches into them, as I have described. But at least Hartmann does advance to at least a presentiment of the fact that in the beyond of the senses and in the beyond of the soul there is something spiritual, even if he did not bring it to consciousness. When he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1868, he offered a critique of the already then rampant materialistic interpretation of Darwinism. “Materialistic Darwinism” — not what Darwin found in the way of individual facts, that is not under discussion here — believes that it can explain how the more perfect arise from imperfect, simplest living creatures by leaving out everything of a spiritual nature, as they say, through mere selection, through mere struggle for existence. Due to the fact that the perfect ones develop by chance and overcome those that remain imperfect by chance, the perfect ones gradually prevail; this is how something like a developmental series from the imperfect to the perfect arises. As early as 1868, Hartmann explained that such a play of purely external natural necessities, which can also be called chance, is not sufficient to explain the development of organisms, but that certain forces must be at work, even if unconsciously, when a living being develops from imperfection to perfection. In short, he sought a spiritual element in evolution, that spiritual element that can really be found beyond the senses and beyond the soul, he hypothetically assumed. He assumed it only hypothetically, because at that time one had not yet penetrated to the stage of direct intuitive consciousness.

When the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published, which criticized Darwin's theory of chance in a sharp-witted way, a large number of scientifically minded people came forward to oppose this “dilettante thinker” Eduard von Hartmann. A dilettante philosopher who doesn't understand anything of what Darwinism has brought, and who speaks so glibly from his own intellectual standpoint! And among those who criticized Hartmann at the time was Oscar Schmid, a professor in Jena. Haeckel himself was also among them. Haeckel himself and numerous of his students were now highly astonished that among the many writings that, in their opinion, brilliantly refuted Eduard von Hartmann, who talked such amateurish nonsense, there was also a writing by an anonymous author – by a man who did not name himself. And Haeckel said: He should come forward! And others also said: He should come forward and we would accept him as one of our own! It is so wonderful that a scientific paper has now been published in this way against the nonsense of the “philosophy of the unconscious”! — And a second edition of this paper “The Unconscious in the Light of Darwinism” was published. And the author called himself – it was Eduard von Hartmann! You see, there were reasons why people no longer declaimed: He calls himself us and we consider him one of us. They now kept quiet about him. That was a fundamental lesson that had to be taught to those who believe that the one who talks about the spirit does so because he does not understand their science. It became quite quiet now. But something else was noticed: in 1916 a very interesting work was published that can be said to stand at the pinnacle of the field it discusses. This work is called: 'The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance'. And this work - well, who wrote it? Well, it is by the often mentioned most brilliant Haeckel student, by Oscar Hertwig, the Berlin professor of biology. We are witnessing the strange spectacle that the next generation of Haeckel's students, the generation of students of which he himself was most proud, is already writing books to refute the Darwinian theory of chance, which at the time when they turned against Hartmann was precisely the one prevailing in the Haeckel circle. And what does Hertwig do, whom I myself knew as one of the most loyal Haeckel students with his brother Richard? He adopts what can be called a “materialistic interpretation of the Darwinian theory” and refutes it piece by piece, quoting Eduard von Hartmann at several points. Hartmann now reappears in Oscar Hertwig's writing “The Becoming of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance” and is honored again. In the past, when he was not known, people said: He calls himself unconscious, and we consider him one of us. And now we are beginning to come back to what Hartmann still put into the unconscious. Now we are beginning to recognize the spiritual in what is there sensually.

However, this book “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig” is indeed strange. For while all earlier materialistic interpretations of Darwinism boiled down to saying: We have perfect organisms, we have imperfect organisms; the perfect ones have developed from the imperfect ones through their external natural forces, Hertwig comes back to to the fact that in the perfect organism, if one goes back microscopically to the first germ, one can prove that Nägeli's view is correct, that in the first germ the perfect organism is already distinguished from the imperfect organism. For there is already something quite different in the perfect organism than in the imperfect one, which one believes the perfect one has developed from. Microscopic research has gone to a limit, but it has achieved nothing more than to come across a mirror, and has not progressed further than the limit of the sensory world. The consequence will be that many people who stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world view will not merely state, as Hertwig does: the materialistic interpretation of Darwinism is impossible. Rather, they will acknowledge: If we want to arrive at anything that explains the sense world and lies behind it, then we cannot stop at ordinary consciousness; we cannot get out of the sense world, not even with as many telescopes as we want. We can only get out of the sense world if we arm ourselves with the seeing consciousness.

But in general, even philosophers have not yet gone very far in arming themselves with the soul to the point where they would recognize that the seeing consciousness can sprout forth from this ordinary consciousness, just as the waking consciousness sprouts forth from the dream. Today philosophers are even less qualified to penetrate to these things. I have often said that I only act in opposition to those whom I basically respect very much. Therefore, I may say: It is only because of this inability to think in a way that is in accordance with the spirit and reality, that one would strive for this seeing consciousness, that people are considered great philosophers today who, basically, their whole thinking and meditating only swim around in what surges up and down in this ordinary consciousness, without even feeling the need to get beyond mere talk of surging ideas. And so it has also come about that someone who revels in the surface of the surging and swaying ideas, as Eucken did, for example, can be regarded as a great philosopher today. It is just one of the things that one has to characterize by saying that this clinging to ordinary consciousness has also taken away from man the sharpness of thought that allows him to see that there are not such limits to knowledge as Kant states, but such limits that one must reckon with in order to transcend them through the seeing consciousness. That is why those who declaim about all kinds of spiritual worlds, but who, within the ordinary consciousness, come to nothing but what Eduard von Hartmann long ago recognized as mere ordinary consciousness operating in images, are regarded as great philosophers today.

And so much could be shown in the present day that would draw attention to the fact that, I would say, the admirable scientific way of looking at things has led us away from the paths that lead to the soul. For some, however, it has been quite the opposite. There are people in the present who sense what I have said today. For example, there is a personality in the present who senses that what lives in the soul between birth and death in the form of thinking, feeling and willing is only something that is conditioned by the body, while the eternal comes from the comes out of the spiritual world, enters into existence through birth, transforms itself in the body so that it works in the body, and then leaves again through death, and that what works in the body is not the true soul. The personality that I mean recognizes this. But it says that in what lives in ordinary consciousness, we only have images. This personality calls it “events”. Behind these lie the primal factors that are experienced in the seeing consciousness as beyond the soul and beyond the senses. But the personality that I mean does not want to go into this seeing consciousness. And so it stands before the occurrences, again, I would like to say, smashing a thick mirror over and over again, and saying: Behind it the primal factors must be. But it rages. And by raging against the mirror surface and not wanting to come to the seeing consciousness, it believes that all philosophy has only raged. With Fichte one can see (I have spoken about this in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man)) that he did not rave, but that he pointed to the seeing consciousness in an important point. The personality I am referring to now, which does recognize the image-nature of ordinary consciousness, says: “He who cannot laugh (at Fichte) cannot philosophize either.” And as this personality lets all philosophers from Plato and Heraclitus to the present day pass before it in their interrelations, it calls these philosophies “The Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. And there is an interesting sentence on page 132: “We have no more philosophy than an animal, and only the frantic attempt to arrive at a philosophy and the final surrender to not-knowing distinguish us from the animal.”

That is the judgment of one personality about all philosophy, about all attempts to penetrate into the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses! This is truly a raging man who, in his rage, believes that others are raging. Therefore, because he speaks so beautifully about philosophy, he is currently a university professor of philosophy! Philosophy is currently being taught in such a way as to express itself in such a phenomenon.

I know very well that for some people what I am saying seems bitter. I can fully understand that. I can understand all the bitterness and also all the paradoxes. But it must be pointed out once and for all that in the present time there is the necessity to emerge from what is enclosed in the mere sense world and to submerge into what leads beyond the soul, beyond the senses. For it is not the world that sets up limits to our knowledge. What sets up the limits of knowledge is man himself.

Sometimes one can make very interesting discoveries, such as what the human being is like when he does not even want to look at what, as a seeing consciousness, leads to the very essence of the soul. I have just given a sample of a philosophical view of a university professor Richard Wahle, who wrote the “Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. I could mention another: the famous Jodl. The man would certainly - he is no longer alive - regard everything that has been said here today, and that is said here at all, as the most complete madness. But he does speak about the soul in the following way: “The soul does not have states or capacities, such as thinking, imagining, joy, hatred, and so on, but these states in their totality are the soul.” Very ingenious! And the whole of Jodl's philosophy is permeated by this ingenuity. Only this definition of the soul is no more valuable than if someone were to say: It is not the table that has corners and edges and a surface, but corners and edges and a surface are the table.

And that is the quality of most of the thoughts that now live in that tangle of mere thought-webs, which are, however, only a product of the body because they do not want to penetrate to the observing consciousness, where one first discovers the soul. Today, however, one will still find that such a view takes many revenge. I have called the world-view represented in these lectures Anthroposophy. This is in reference to the “Anthroposophy” of Robert Zimmermann, who was also a university professor, but who was equally opposed to Anthroposophy. For what would Robert Zimmermann have said about the Anthroposophy that is presented here? Well, he would say what he has already said about Schelling: the philosopher must remain within that which can be attained through thought. He must not appeal to something that requires a special training of the soul! One can speak in this way, then one is just practicing an anthroposophy like Robert Zimmermann did. You will find a thicket of thoughts in it; it will not interest you, because not a word is said about all the questions of the soul and the spirit. Of what I have discussed in these lectures, what is connected with the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses, what is connected with the question of the immortality of the human soul, with the question of fate — none of this is contained in that anthroposophy. For the whole of the thinking of this last century has, on the one hand, admittedly produced the great advances of natural science, which cannot be sufficiently admired, but on the other hand, it has also produced the attitude of mind towards knowledge that the youthful Renan, when he left college, expressed as his conviction when he had been led astray in his religious ideas by the insights of the modern scientific way of thinking. At that time he said: “The man of the present day is aware that he will never know anything about his highest causes or his destiny.” That is ultimately the confession of many today, except that because the confession has been around for so long, very many have become numb to it and do not feel how such a confession eats away at the soul when it is new. This confession has blocked the paths to the beyond of the soul and to the beyond of the senses that are characteristic of today. Ernest Renan, after all, was someone who felt how it is possible to live with such a blockage. And so, as an old man, he made a strange statement:

The non-recognition of the observing consciousness does not lead to the knowledge of the origin and essence of man, just as the breaking of a mirror does not lead to the knowledge of those beings who are reflected in it. Renan felt this. He felt that where earlier times sought the spiritual origin of man, his world view posits a nothing. His mind protested against this by him declaring in old age that he would rather know that there is a hell than believe that nothingness is real. As long as only the mind protests in this way, as long as humanity will not get beyond the limitations of the world view that has so far blocked the paths to the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul. Only when humanity declares its willingness to develop such strong thinking and imagining that the soul can strengthen itself for what is, in the seeing consciousness, a living continuation of what Goethe suggested in his concept of the contemplating power of judgment, and which Kant regards as an adventure of reason, only when humanity decides to to advance to this realization of thoughts, to the whole soul world, in order to penetrate into spiritual reality with the seeing consciousness, then not only a mere protest of the mind, but a protest of knowledge will arise against the powers of compulsion of that so-called monism, which wants to split man off from a knowledge of his actual being. And I think that today we can already feel the inner nerve that lives in the spiritual-scientific debates in such a way that we are living at the starting point of those upheavals in human soul life that lead out of the realization of the already admired natural scientific world view into the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul, into the actual place of origin of the human being, into the spirit.

And thus man will again be able to link that which lives in his destiny, in his moral existence, to the origin of the world, just as he can link that which lives in the outer necessity of nature. And in this way man will ascend to a truly unified and also truly satisfying view of nature and soul, because as spirit he speaks to spirit.

In recent years, anthroposophical spiritual science has found an external center for its work in Dornach, near Basel. The creation of this center, called the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, was the result of the expansion of anthroposophical spiritual science. After many years of me and others spreading this spiritual science in the most diverse states and places, initially in an ideal form through lectures or similar, around 1909 or 1910 the inner necessity arose to bring to the souls of our fellow human beings what is meant by this spiritual science by means of other means of revelation and communication than those of mere thoughts and words. And so it came about that a series of mystery dramas were performed, initially in Munich. These were written by me and were intended to present in pictorial, scenic form the subject matter that anthroposophical spiritual science must speak of in its entirety.

We have been accustomed throughout the entire course of education in the civilized world over the last three to four centuries to seek knowledge primarily through external sensory observation and by applying the human intellect to this external sensory observation. And basically, all our newer sciences, insofar as they are still viable today, have come about through the effects of the results of sensory observation with intellectual work. After all, the historical sciences do not come about in any other way today either. Intellectualism is the one thing the modern world has confidence in when it comes to knowledge. Intellectualism is the one thing that people have become more and more accustomed to.

And so, of course, people have increasingly come to believe that all the results of knowledge that come before the world can be completely revealed through intellectual communication. Indeed, there are epistemological and other scientific disputes in which it is apparently proven that something can only be valid before the cognitive conscience of contemporary people if it can be justified intellectually. That which cannot be clothed in logical-ideational intellectual forms is not accepted as knowledge. Spiritual science, which really did not want to stop at what is rightly asserted in science as the limits of scientific knowledge, and which wants to penetrate beyond these limits of knowledge, had to become more and more aware that the intellectual way of communicating could not be the only way. For one can prove for a long time with all possible sham reasons that one must imprint all knowledge in intellectual form if it is to satisfy people; one can prove this for a long time

prove it and back it up with spurious reasons – if the world is such that it cannot be expressed in mere concepts or ideas, that it must be expressed through images, for example, if you want to know the laws of human development, then you have to get at something other than the presentation through the word in the theoretical lecture; you have to move on to other forms of presentation than the presentation in intellectual forms.

And so I felt the necessity to express that which is fully alive, namely in the development of humanity, not only in theory through the word, but also through the scenic image. And so my four mystery dramas came into being, which were initially performed in ordinary theaters. This was, so to speak, the first step towards a broader presentation of that which actually wants to reveal itself through this anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, through the cause of spiritual science itself.

Not in my own case – I may say that without hesitation – but in the case of friends of our cause, the idea arose in the course of this development, which made an external, theatrical presentation necessary, to prepare a place of our own for the work of this spiritual science. And after many attempts to found such a place here and there, we finally ended up on the Dornach hill near Basel, where we received a piece of land for this purpose from our friend Dr. Emil Grosheintz, and we were able to build this ach Hill, we were able to establish this School of Spiritual Science, which is also intended to be a house for presenting the other types of revelation of what is to come to light through this spiritual science; this School of Spiritual Science, which we call the “Goetheanum” today.

Now, if some association or other had set about creating such a framework, such a house, such an architecture, prompted by the circumstances, what would have happened? They would have turned to this or that architect, who might then, without feeling or sensing anything very intensely and without recognizing the content of our spiritual science, have erected a building in the antique or Gothic or Renaissance style or in some other style, and they would have handed down in such a building, which would have been built out of quite different cultural presuppositions, the content of spiritual science in the most diverse fields. This could well have happened with many other endeavors of the present time and would undoubtedly have happened. However, this could not happen with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

When we opened our first series of courses on a wide range of subjects at the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach last year, I was able to speak of how, through this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only what is science in the narrower sense is to come before humanity, how this spiritual not only draws from the achievements of human sensory observation and the human intellect, but draws from the whole, from the fullness of humanity, and draws from the sources from which religion on the one hand and art on the other also emerge.

This spiritual science does not want to create an abstract, symbolic or a straw-like allegorical art, which merely forces the didactic into external forms. No, that is absolutely not the case. Rather, what is expressed through this spiritual science can work through the word, can shape itself through the word. Spiritual processes and spiritual beings in the supersensible world can be spoken of by resorting to ideas and the means of expressing ideas, to words. But that which stands behind it, which wants to reveal itself in this way, is much richer than what can enter into the word, into the idea, pushes into the form, into the image, becomes art by itself, real art, not an allegorical or symbolic expression. This is not what is meant when we speak of Dornach art.

When Dornach art is mentioned, it is first of all a reference to the original source from which human existence and world existence bubble forth. What one experiences in this original source, when one gains access to it in the way often described here, can be clothed in words, shaped into ideas, but it can also be allowed to flow directly into artistic expression, without expressing these ideas allegorically or symbolically. That which can live in art or, as I could expand on but need not today, in religion, is an entirely identical expression of that which can be given in an idealized representation. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is thus predisposed from the outset to flow as a stream from a source from which art and religion can also flow in their original form. What we mean in Dornach when we speak of religious feeling is not just a science made into a religion, but the source of elementary religious power, and what we mean by art is, in turn, also an elementary artistic creation.

Therefore, when some visitors to the Goetheanum or especially those who only hear about it defame our Dornach building and say that one finds this or that allegorical, symbolic representation there, it is simply defamation. There is not a single symbol in the entire Dornach building. Everything that is depicted has been incorporated into the artistic form, is directly sensed. And basically, I always feel somewhat as if I am merely presenting a surrogate when I am expected to explain the Dornach building in words. Of course, if one speaks outside of Dornach, one can make statements about it as one might speak about chapters of art history, for example. But when one sees the building in Dornach itself, I always feel that it is something surrogate-like, if one is also supposed to explain it. This explanation is actually only necessary to convey to people the special kind of language of world view, but the Dornach building has flowed out of it just as, let us say, the Sistine Madonna has flowed out of the Christian world view, without anything being symbolized, but only in such a way that the artist has truly lived in accordance with his feelings, his ideas.

Hamerling, the Austrian poet, was also reproached for using symbolism after he wrote his “Ahasver”. He then rightly replied to his critics: What else can one do when one portrays Nero quite vividly, as a fully-fledged human being, rather than as the symbol of cruelty! For history itself has portrayed Nero as a symbol of cruelty, and there is no mistake in giving the impression of the true, real symbol of cruelty when Nero is portrayed as a living being. At most, there could be an artistic defect in presenting some straw allegory instead of a living entity. Even if the world depicted in Dornach is the supersensible world, it is the supersensible reality that is portrayed. It is not something that seeks to symbolically or allegorically implement concepts. This is the underlying reality, and at the same time it indicates why a house could not be placed here in any old way for this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Any architectural style would have been something external to it, because it is not mere theory, it is life in all fields and was able to create its own architectural style.

Of course, one can perhaps draw a historical line retrospectively by characterizing the essence of ancient architecture in terms of its load-bearing and supporting function, then moving on to the Gothic period and showing how architecture there moves beyond mere load-bearing and supporting, and how the buttress is freed from mere load-bearing and supporting by the pointed arch and the cross-ribbed vault, how a kind of transition to the living is found. In Dornach, however, an attempt has been made to develop this life to such an extent that the pure dynamic, metric and symmetrical of earlier forms of building have been truly transferred into the organic.

I am well aware of how much can be written from the point of view of ancient architecture against this allowing of the geometric, metric, symmetrical forms to be transformed into organic forms, into forms that are otherwise found in organic beings. But nothing is naturalistically modeled on any organisms; rather, it is only an attempt to immerse oneself in the organically creative principle of nature. Just as one can become familiarized with the bearing and supporting when the columns are covered by the crossbeams, and with the entire configuration of the Gothic style in the buttresses, in the ribbed vaulting and so on, so one can also familiarize oneself with the inner forms, the forming of nature that is present in the creation of the organic. If one can find one's way into this, then one does not arrive at a naturalistic reproduction of this or that surface form found in the organic, but one arrives at finding surfaces from what one has directly represented architecturally, which are integrated into the whole structure in the same way that, say, the individual surface on a finger is integrated into the whole human organism.

This is therefore the basic feeling that can be gained from the Dornach building, to the extent that this has been achieved in the first attempt at this new architectural style. What has been striven for is perhaps best expressed as follows: In relation to the smallest detail, the greatest formal context is conceived in such a way that each thing is, at the place where it is situated, as it must be. You need only think, for example, of the earlobe on your own body. This earlobe is a very small organ. If you understand the whole organism, you will say to yourself: the earlobe could not be any different than it is; the earlobe cannot be a little toe, it cannot be a right thumb, but in the organism, everything is in its place, and everything in its place is as it emerges from this organism.

This has been attempted in Dornach. The entire structure, the entire architecture, is conceived as part of a whole, and each individual part is formed in its own place in such a way that it is exactly what is needed at that place. Although there are many objections that could be raised, the attempt has been made, as I said, to make the transition from mere geometric-mechanical construction to building in organic forms. As I said, this architectural style could be incorporated into other architectural styles, but that doesn't really get you anywhere. In particular, the creator doesn't get anywhere with it. Something like this simply has to arise from the naive, from the elementary. Therefore, when I am asked how the individual form is conceived from the whole, I can only give the following answer. I can only say: look at a nut, for example. The nut has a shell. This nut shell is formed according to the same laws around the nut, around the nut kernel, according to which the nut itself, the nut kernel has come into being, and you cannot imagine the shell differently than it is, once the nut kernel is as it is.

Now one knows spiritual science. One presents spiritual science out of its inner impulse. One forms it into ideas, one brings them together in ideas. So you live in the whole inner being of this spiritual science. Forgive me, it is a trivial comparison, but it is a comparison that illustrates how you have to create out of naivety if you want to create something like the building in Dornach: you stand inside it as if in the nut kernel and have within you the laws by which you have to execute the shell, the building.

I often used to make another comparison. You see, in Austria we have a special kind of cake called 'Gugelhupf'. I don't know if that expression is also used here. And I said that one should imagine that anthroposophical spiritual science is the Gugelhupf and the Dornach building is the Gugelhupf pan in which it is baked. The cake and the pan must harmonize with each other. It is right when both harmonize, that is, when they are according to the same laws as nut and nut shell.

Because Anthroposophical spiritual science creates out of the whole, out of the fullness of humanity, it could not have the discrepancy within itself of taking an arbitrary architectural style for its construction and speaking into it. It is more than mere theory; it is life. Therefore, it had to provide not only the core but also the shell in the individual forms. It had to be built according to the same innermost laws by which one speaks, by which mysteries are presented, by which eurythmy is now presented. Everything that is presented in words, that is seen performed in eurythmy, that is seen performed in mystery plays, that is otherwise presented, must resound and be seen throughout the hall in such a way that the walls with their forms, that the paintings that are there, say yes to it as a matter of course; that the eyes, so to speak, absorb them like something in which they directly participate. Each column should speak in the same way as the mouth speaks, proclaiming anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Precisely because it is science, art and religion at the same time, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to establish its own architectural style, disregarding all conventional architectural styles. Of course, one can criticize this to no end; but everything that appears for the first time is imperfect at first, and I can perhaps assure you that I know all the mistakes best and that I am the one who says: if I were to rebuild the building a second time, it would be based on the same spirit, on the same laws, but it would be completely different in most details and perhaps even as a whole. But if anything is to be tackled, it must be tackled once, as well as one can at that particular moment. It is only by carrying out such a work that one really learns to know the actual laws of one's being. These are the laws of destiny of spiritual life and spiritual progress, and these have not been violated in the erection of the building at Dornach.

Now the building rises up on the Dornach hill (Fig. 1). Its basic forms had to be sensed first, emerging from the Dornach hill. That is why the lower part is a concrete structure (Fig. 4). I tried to create artistic forms out of this brittle material, and yet some have felt how these forms connect to the rock formations, how nature merges with the building forms with a certain matter-of-factness. Then, on the horizontal terrace, up to which the concrete structure extends, the wooden structure rises. This wooden structure consists of two interlocking cylinders, which are closed off by two incomplete hemispheres that are, as it were, interlocked in a circle, so that two hemispheres, two consecutive hemispheres, enclose the two cylindrical spaces as if they were placed one inside the other. A larger room, the auditorium, a smaller room, the one from which eurythmy is performed, mysteries are played and so on. Between the two rooms is the speaker's podium. This is initially the main building.

Of course, I must not fail to mention that in recent years numerous friends, particularly from this or that scientific field, have now found each other from almost all scientific fields, who have seen through and recognized how natural science, mathematics, history, medicine, jurisprudence, sociology, and the most diverse fields can be fertilized by anthroposophical spiritual science. So that a real Universitas must attach itself to Dornach, and for this the building, for which we have been able to provide for the time being, is nothing more than a large lecture hall, with the possibility of working in this lecture hall, which is intended for about a thousand people, in other ways than through the mere word.

That the building has this dualistic form, I would say, consisting of two cylinders crowned by hemispheres, can be sensed from the whole task that spiritual science, as we understand it in Dornach, must set itself. After all, this is based on what is called inner human development. One does not arrive at this anthroposophical spiritual science by merely using one's ordinary everyday power of judgment - although, of course, full reliance is placed on this - or by using the ordinary rules of research; but rather by

you must bring to the surface the powers slumbering in the soul, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, and really ascend to that region where the supersensible powers and entities of existence reveal themselves to you. This revealing of the supersensible world to the sensory world, which expresses itself in the fact that the thousand listeners or spectators sit there and on the other side exactly that which gives knowledge of supersensible worlds is communicated, this whole thing, transformed into feeling, expresses itself in the double-dome building in Dornach. It is not meant to be symbolic in any way. That is why I can also say: Of course one could also express this thought differently, but that is how the artistic expression of this basic thought presented itself to me at the time when it was needed.

In a sense, by approaching it from the environment, in the external form of the wooden structure growing out of the concrete, which is a double dome, one sees in the configuration, in the design of the surfaces, what is actually meant by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The fact that they really tried not to calculate with abstract concepts, but with artistic perception, may become clear to you from the fact that - in the time when it was still possible before the war - Norwegian slate was obtained with all possible efforts to cover the two domes. Once, when I was on a lecture tour in 1913 between Christiania and Bergen, I saw the wonderful Voss slate. And this Voss slate now shines in the sunshine from the double domes, so that one actually has the feeling: this greenish-greyish shine of the sun, which reflects itself there, actually belongs in this whole landscape. It seemed to me that the care that had been taken to bring out the shine of the sun in the right way in such a landscape was something that showed that account had been taken to present something worthy in this place, which, as a place, as a locality, has something extraordinary about it.

I will now take the liberty of showing you a series of slides of what has been created as this Goetheanum in Dornach. They are intended to show in detail how what I have just explained, how the Dornach building idea has actually been realized. The Dornach building idea should present the same thing to the beholder in the outer spatial form in the picture, as it unfolds to the listener through the word, so that what one hears in Dornach is the same as what one sees in Dornach. But because it should really present a renewal out of spiritual life, a renewal of everything scientific, it also needed, in a sense, a new art.

Now the first picture (Fig. 4): You see here the building, the dome is somewhat covered here, here the concrete substructure. When one approaches via a path that leads from the northwest towards the west gate, one has this view. This is therefore the concrete substructure with the entrance; here one goes in first. Further back in this concrete building are the storage rooms. After you have taken your things off, you go up the stairs that lead through this room, to the left and right, and first come to a vestibule – which you can also enter from the terrace through the main gate – and from there to the auditorium. Here you see, starting from this terrace and going up, the wooden structure covered with Nordic slate (Fig. 10). You can see from the shape above the main entrance in the west that an attempt has been made to incorporate something here that really does look like an organic form growing out of the whole of the building. It is not some random thing found in the organic world, copied from nature, but an attempt to explore organic creation itself. The aim is to devote oneself to organic creation in nature in order to have the possibility of forming such organic forms oneself and to shape the whole into an organic form without violating the dynamic laws. I would like to emphasize: without violating the dynamic or mechanical laws.

Anyone who studies interior architecture with us in Dornach will see everywhere that, despite the fact that columns, pillars and so on are organically designed, it is precisely in this organic design that what is properly supported and properly weighted is expressed, without it being expressed in the thickness of the columns or in the heaviness of any load. The correct distribution of load and support is achieved without the aid of organic forms, so that one has the feeling, as it were, that The building feels both the load and the support at the same time. It is this transition to the appearance of consciousness, as it is in the organic, that had to be striven for in this building, out of the anthroposophical-spiritual-scientific will. So without in any way violating the mechanical, geometric, symmetrical laws of architecture, the form should be transformed into the organic.

The next picture (Fig. 5): Here you see the concrete structure from a slightly further point and more from the west front; here the terrace, then the main entrance. The same motif appears here. The second dome, the smaller one, which is for the stage, is covered here; on the other hand, you can see, as it were, what is adjacent to it. Where the two domed structures connect, there are transverse structures on the left and right with dressing rooms for the actors in mystery plays or eurythmy performances, or offices and the like. These are therefore ancillary buildings here. We will see in a moment in the floor plan how these ancillary buildings fit into the overall building concept.

The next picture (Fig. 7): Here you see the building from the southwest side: again the West Gate, the great dome, another tiny bit of the small dome, to the south the southern porch; here the whole front between west and south.

The next picture (Fig. 3): Here you see the two domed rooms, the auditorium, from the other side, from the northeast, one of the transverse buildings from the front, here the small domed room and here the storage rooms that adjoin the small domed room to the east; furthermore, the terrace, and below the concrete building. This is the porch that leads to the west gate, which you have just seen.

The next picture (Fig. 2): This is the strange building that is particularly heavily contested. This is what you see when you look at the building from the northeast side: you then see this heating and lighting house. It is also the case that one was obliged to form something out of the brittle concrete material, and that one said to oneself, out of artistic laws, out of artistic feelings: There I am given everything that is necessary as a lighting machinery, as a heating machinery: that is the nut kernel to me, around which I have to form the nutshell, to form the necessary for the smoke outlet. It is, if I may express myself in such a trivial way, this principle of the formation of the nutshell is fully implemented. And anyone who complains about something like that should consider what would be there if this experiment had not been carried out, which may still have been imperfectly successful today. There would be a red chimney here! A utilitarian building should be created in such a way that one first acquires the necessary sense of material and then finds the framing from the determination.

The next picture (Fig. 20): Here I take the liberty of showing the layout of the whole. The main entrance from the west: you enter the auditorium through a few vestibules. This auditorium holds chairs for nine hundred to a thousand listeners or spectators. Here you can see a gallery that is closed inwards by seven columns on each side. Only one thing is symmetrical here: namely, in relation to the west-east axis. This is the only axis of symmetry. The building's motifs are only designed symmetrically in relation to this axis of symmetry, the east-west axis; otherwise there is no repetition. Therefore, the columns are decorated with capital and base motifs that are not the same, but are in progressive development. I will show this in detail later. So if you have a first column on the left and right, a second column on the left and right, the capital and base are always the same as those of the right column when viewed from the left, but the following columns always have different capitals, different bases and different architrave motifs above them (Figs. 33-54).

This is absolutely the case, and it has emerged as a necessity from organic building. And this is based on an artistic interpretation of Goethe's principle of metamorphosis. Goethe has indeed developed this metamorphosis theory - which, in my firm conviction, will still play a major role in the science of the living - in an ingenious way. Anyone who still reads his simply written booklet “Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of the Plant” from 1790 has before them a grandiose scientific treatise that, according to today's prejudices, simply cannot be sufficiently appreciated. If one wants to express it simply, one must say: Goethe sees the plant as a complicated leaf. He now begins with the lowest leaf, which is closest to the ground, follows the leaves upwards to the heart leaves, which are shaped quite differently than the foliage leaves, then the petals, which are even colored quite differently, then the stamens and pistils, which are shaped quite differently. Goethe says: “Everything that appears in such seemingly different metamorphoses in the leaves of the plant is such that it can be traced back to an ideal similarity and only appears in different metamorphoses for the external sense impression. Basically, the plant leaf always repeats the same basic form; only in the external sensual perception is the ideal similarity differently formed, metamorphosed.

Now, of course, people come and see seven columns – deep mysticism! Yes, there are definitely members of the Anthroposophical Society who, in all sorts of dark, mysterious allusions, talk about the deep mysticism of these seven columns and so on. But there is nothing in it but artistic feeling. When you arrive at the seventh column, this motif of the seventh column is exactly the same as that of the first column – if you really create as nature has created – as the seventh is to the first. And just as the first motif is repeated in the octave, the seventh, you would have to repeat the first motif if you were to move on to the eighth.

Here you can see the boundary between the large and small domes; there is the lectern, which can be retracted because it has to be removed when the theater is in use. Here again there are twelve columns in the perimeter, here the boundary of the small domed room, here the two transverse buildings for dressing rooms and so on.

The next picture (Fig. 21): Here I have made a section through the middle. One enters from the west through the vestibules. Here is the stage area, and rising up from here is the auditorium, the rows of seats, again the seven columns, and here the great dome is connected to the small one by a particularly complicated mechanical structure. Here are the storerooms, the concrete substructure, the dressing rooms for taking off clothes. Here you go in, and then there are the stairs; here you come up and there is the main gate through which you enter.

The next picture (Fig. 22): Here I have taken the liberty of presenting my original model in cross-section. The whole building was originally modeled by me in 1913. Here you see the auditorium with its seven columns, the vestibules, here only hinted at the interior of the great dome, which was then painted; here in the small dome room, the capitals everywhere – I will show them in detail in a moment – here the architrave motifs above them; here the plinth motifs, always emerging metamorphically from one another. So, as I said, it is 'only' a line of symmetry, the central axis of the building. Otherwise, no repetitions can be found, except for what is located on the left and right.

The next picture (Fig. 10): seen from the terrace, the view of the West Gate, the main entrance gate, with two wings, which are necessary [gap in shorthand].

The next picture (Fig. 12): there is such a wing structure, the northern one [seen from the northeast]. Dr. Großheintz's house is also located here, an entire concrete building with about 15 rooms, a family house where I tried to create a residential house out of the concrete material by integrating it into this concrete material. It is near the Goetheanum and was built for the person who donated the land. You can see here how I tried to metamorphose the motif. Everything about this building emerges from the other, like a plant leaf, so to speak, in its form from the other form: it is entirely in the artistic sense the work of metamorphosis.

Next image (Fig. 14): This is one of the side wings, the south wing. Here you can see how the motif above the west entrance appears in a completely different form. It is the same idea, but completely different in form. It is just as, say, the dyed flower petal is the same idea as the lowest green leaf of the plant, and yet in external metamorphosis it is something completely different. In this way, one can indeed sense this organic building-thought by living and finding one's way into the metamorphic by giving oneself up to it, but understanding it in a feeling-based way, not in an abstract, intellectual way. This should not actually be explained, but everything should be given by the sight itself.

Once the building is finished, those who are familiar with the anthroposophical attitude and feeling will not perceive the building as symbolic at all, but as something that flows from this overall attitude. Of course one would say that it should flow out of the “generally human”; but this generally human is only a foggy and fanciful construct, a fantasy. The human is always the concrete. Someone who has never heard of Christianity naturally does not understand the Sistine Madonna either. And someone who has no sense of Christianity would never understand the Last Supper in Milan in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. It is certainly possible to use language to imagine what was given, but apart from that, there is nothing symbolic about the entire structure; all the forms are metamorphosed variations of one another.

Next picture (Fig. 11): Here you see such a lateral transverse structure, viewed from the front, that is, here from the south side. Up here in a substantially modified metamorphosis is the motif that is also above the west entrance. All these motifs are in various metamorphoses, so that the whole architectural idea is carried out organically. Likewise, if you were to study the columns, you would find a basic form, and this is always metamorphosed, just as, in the end, the skull bones of humans are a metamorphosed transformation of the bones of the spinal cord, as everything in the organism is a metamorphosed transformation right down to the last detail.

The upper part (Fig. 14) of the southern transverse structure seen on its own; this motif, which was just a little smaller there, is now a little larger.

Next picture (Fig. 23): Here you can see part of the staircase. You would enter through the main entrance below, into the concrete building, and go up these stairs. Here you can see the banister and here a pillar. On this pillar you can see how the attempt is made to shape the supporting pillar in an organic form, how the attempt is made to give the pillar the form that it must have after the opposite exit, because there is little to carry; the form that it must have where it is braced, where the entire weight of the staircase lies. Of course, something like this can only be formed geometrically. But here, for once, an attempt should be made to shape the whole thing as if it were alive, so that, as it were, the glow of consciousness of bearing and burdening lies within; with every curve, everything is precisely and intuitively measured for the place in the building where it is located.

Especially if you look at this motif here (Fig. 24): there are three half-circular channels on top of each other. Believe it or not, but it is true: when someone goes up there and enters the auditorium, they must have a certain feeling. I said to myself, the one who goes up there must have the feeling: in there, I will be sheltered with my soul, there is peace of mind to absorb the highest truths that man can aspire to next. That is why, based on my intuitive perception, I designed these three semicircular channels in the three perpendicular spatial directions. If you now go up these stairs, you can experience this feeling of calm. It is not modeled on it – it is not that at all – but only later did I remember that the three semicircular channels in the ear also stand in these three directions perpendicular to each other. If they are violated, a person will faint: they are therefore connected with the laws of equilibrium. It was not created out of a naturalistic desire for imitation, but out of the same desire, which is modeled on the way the channels are arranged in the ear.

You enter from the west side, go up the stairs, here are the three perpendicular semicircular canals, and here again these pillars. Of course, it often happens in life – I have experienced it many times – that when people in a city have seen an actor or actress in certain roles, and later another actor or actress has come along who could be good, better, more interesting or different, they judge them based on the earlier ones. If they did everything exactly like the earlier ones, they were good; if they did it differently, they were bad, no matter how good they might be in themselves. And so, of course, people judge such a thing according to what they are accustomed to, and do not know that when something like this is erected, every effort is made to make it look as if it were supported in different ways on different sides, and that this is derived from the overall organic structure of the building. Some found it thin and called it rachitic, others thought it resembled an elephant foot, but could not call it an elephant foot either, and so someone came up with the name “rachitic elephant foot” based on their own intuitive feeling. This is what happens so often today when some attempt is made to bring something new out of the elementary.

Next image (Fig. 27): If you go up the stairs, you will come to the vestibule before entering the large domed room. Here you can already see the beginning of the timber construction. At this height, there would be a concrete terrace, with the concrete structure below. You can see from this column how the capital, with all its curves, is precisely adapted to the location, not just schematically in space, but dynamically. The curves at the exit have to express a different form of support than those on the opposite side of the building, where the columns have to brace against them. That is why all these wooden forms, column capitals, architraves and so on had to be made by our friends from the Anthroposophical Society over many years of work. All this is handcrafted, including, for example, the ceiling, which does not have just any schematic form, but is individually designed on all sides in its curves and surfaces, hollowed out differently in one spatial direction than in the other spatial direction. And all this according to the law, just as the ear is hollowed out differently at the front than at the back, and so on.

Next picture (Fig. 30): Now we have entered and are standing in the room that is the auditorium. If we turn around and look backwards, we see the organ room here, which you can see in more detail in other pictures. But here you only have the model, not as it can be seen now in the building, where a lot has been added. I have tried to integrate this organ in such a way that one does not have the feeling that something has been built into the rest of the space, but rather that at this point what is presented here as the organ case and the organ itself has literally grown out of the whole. That is why the architecture and sculpture are adapted to the lines created by the rest, i.e. the organ pipes and so on.

Next image (Fig. 28): You are now, so to speak, in the auditorium, looking from the auditorium at the columns. Here is the organ motif, here are the first two columns with their capitals. We then come to the altered, metamorphosed capitals of the second, third, fourth columns and so on – I will show this in detail in a moment – above them always the architrave motif and below the base motif. Next image (Fig. 29): The pictures were taken at different times. The construction has been going on since 1913, when the foundation stone was laid, and the pictures show it in various stages. Here again, if you turn around in the auditorium and look to the west, the upper part, the organ motif; the first and second columns with capitals on the left and right, the capitals and the architraves above them are quite simply designed. In the following, I will show one column and the one that follows, and then each column with the column capital on its own, so that you can see how the following column capital always emerges metamorphosically from the preceding one. This particularly emphasizes the fact that, basically, the individual column cannot be judged on its own, but only the entire sequence of columns in their successive form can be judged.

Next image (Fig. 34): Here you see the first column by itself, simply from bottom to top in the forms, simply from top to bottom. You see a very simple motif.

Next image (Fig. 35): Here you see the first motif, the first capital with the architrave above it; here the second, emerging organically from the first. The motif, which goes from top to bottom, grows; in growing, it metamorphoses, and so does the motif from bottom to top. To a certain extent, one has to feel one's way into the forces that are at work when an upper plant leaf is created in its form, metamorphosed compared to the lower one; in the same way, this first simple plant motif develops into a more complicated one. What matters is that you take the whole sequence of motifs, because each one always belongs with the other; in fact, all seven belong together and form a whole.

Next image (Fig. 36): Here you see the second column by itself. The next motif always emerges metamorphically from the previous one. I will now show the second and third columns.

Next picture (Fig. 37): the second and third columns, again the third capital motif with the architrave motif above it is more complicated, so that you really get this complicated form in your feeling if you do not want to explain it symbolically or approach it with some intellectual things, but with feeling. Then you will see the emergence of one from the other.

Next image (Fig. 38): The third column by itself.

Next image (Fig. 39): The third and fourth columns, that is, the capitals of these with the architrave motif. Here one could believe that the search was for this architrave motif to form a kind of caduceus. But it was not sought, it is simply sensed, as these meeting forms, when they continue to grow, continue to complicate, as they become there, and then the sensation of this motif, which resembles the caduceus, arises by itself. Likewise, as if this continues to grow: from bottom to top, things simplify, from top to bottom they complicate; then this form arises, which I will now show again in isolation.

Next image (Fig. 40): The fourth column.

Next image (Fig. 41): The fourth and fifth column. As can be seen from this, if you imagine it growing downwards, this form emerges, and it becomes simpler from the bottom up, and I would say that it grows in a more complex form upwards. That is the strange thing! When you think of development, you believe, from a certain false idea of development that has gradually formed, that development proceeds in such a way that you first have a simple thing, then a more complicated one, and then an increasingly complicated one, and that the most perfect thing is the most complicated. If you now put yourself in the right place in the developmental impulses with artistic perception, you see that this is not the case at all; that you must indeed advance from the simple to the more complicated; but then you arrive at the most complicated in the middle of the development, and then it becomes simpler as it approaches the more perfect.

That was, my dear attendees, while I was working on the models for these things, an extraordinary surprise for me. I had to go from the simple to the complicated - you see, we are here at the fourth and fifth pillars, so roughly in the middle of the seven pillar forms - and I had to have the most complicated thing in the middle and then go back to the simpler. And if I go back, as nature itself creates, I also find the human eye, but the human eye, although it is the most perfect, is not the most complicated. In the eye of certain lower animal forms, for example, we have the fan, the xiphoid process. The eye of certain lower animal forms is more complicated in some respects than the perfect human eye. In nature, too, it does not happen that one goes from the simpler to the more complicated and then further to the most complicated, but by observing things further, one comes back to the simpler. The more perfect is simpler again. And that turns out to be an artistic necessity in such a creative process.

Next image (Fig. 42): The fifth column in itself.

Next image (Fig. 43): Now the fifth and sixth columns. You can see that here the capital of the fifth column is still relatively complicated; if it continues to grow, it becomes simpler again: so that this sixth column, although more perfect in its design, is nobler, is simpler again. The same applies to the architrave motif.

Next image (Fig. 44): This sixth column stands alone.

Next image (Fig. 45): Sixth and seventh column, considerably simplified again. Next image (Fig. 46): The seventh column on its own, again simplified.

Next image (Fig. 47): This is the seventh column, the architrave motif; here is the gap between the large and small domed rooms; here is the curtain. Then the first column of the small domed room, and here we enter the small domed room.

Now that we have gone through the orders of the columns in the large domed room, I will show you the figures on the pedestals, which have also grown out of each other in a metamorphosing organic way. I will show them in quick succession.

Next image (Fig. 48): Here I show the figures on the pedestals in succession. First pedestal.

Next image (Fig. 49): Each one always emerges metamorphically from the other: Second plinth.

Next image (Fig. 50): If you now imagine the changes, this is what happens: Third base.

Next image (Fig. 51): Fourth pedestal, again more complicated. And now the simplifications begin with the pedestal figures, in order to arrive at perfection.

Next image (Fig. 52): Fifth pedestal. Next image (Fig. 53): Sixth pedestal. Next image (Fig. 54): This seventh pedestal figure is relatively simple again.

Next image (Fig. 55): Now, here you can see into the small dome room from the auditorium. You can still see the last column of the auditorium, then the columns and architraves of the small dome room. That is the end of the large dome room, here the center of the small dome room. Here, a kind of architrave is formed between the two central columns of the small dome, but [above it] is not some kind of symbolic figure. If you want to see a pentagram in it, you can see it in every five-petalled flower. We have [below] synthetically summarized all the lines and curves that are distributed on the individual columns. Above, the small dome is then painted. I will have more to say about this coloring.

The next picture (Fig. 56): individual columns of the small domed room. Here the gap [for the curtain]. It is seen here on the left when entering from west to east. Here is the architrave of the small domed room. Here, as you can see, the capitals of the large domed room are not repeated, they correspond to the overall architectural concept. Since the small dome room is smaller and every organ that is smaller in the organic context also has different forms, this is also clearly evident here in the formation of the whole.

The next picture (Fig. 64): Here again is the view into the small domed room, the last two columns of the large domed room; the same motif that you have just seen in a different aspect, and here the small dome. Of course, nothing of the paintings can be seen here, only the situation could be hinted at. The bases of the small columns have been converted into seats.

The next picture (Fig. 67): Here the orders of columns continue to the left and right; this is in the middle in the east, directly under the small domed room, where all the lines and curves found elsewhere are synthetically summarized in the most diverse forms. This is a kind of architrave, a central architrave; below it is the group I will talk about, a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group, the central figure of which represents a kind of human being. Above it is the small domed room.

The next picture (Fig. 69): We now come to the painting of the small domed room. Now, by speaking to you about the painting of the small domed room, I can only show you the pictures of this small domed room. In the painting of the large domed room, I have not yet fully succeeded in doing this, but in the painting of the small domed room, I have tried to realize to a certain extent what I had a character in my mystery dramas express about the new painting: that the forms of color should be the work, that is, that one should really pull oneself together to fully perceive the world of color as such.

Dear attendees! If you look at the world of colors, it is indeed a kind of totality, a world of its own. And if you feel very vividly into the colorful, then I would say red and blue and yellow speak to each other. You get a completely lively feeling within the world of colors and you get to know, so to speak, a world of colors as an essential one at the same time. Then drawing stops, because in the end you perceive drawing as something insincere. What then is the horizon line? If I draw it with a pencil, I am actually drawing an untruth. Below is the green surface of the sea, above is the blue surface of the vault of heaven, and when I put these down as color, the form arises, the line arises as the boundary of the color.

And so you can create everything out of the colored that you essentially want to bring onto the wall as painting – be it the wall of the spheres as here or the other wall. Do not be deceived because there are motifs, because there are all kinds of figures on it, even figures of cultural history. When I painted this small dome, it was not important to me to draw these or those motifs, to put them on the wall; what was important to me was that, for example, there is an orange spot here in different shades of orange: the figure of the child emerged from these color nuances. And here it was important to me that the blue was adjacent: the figure emerged, which you will see in a moment. It is definitely the figure, the essence, drawn entirely from the color. So here we have a flying child in orange tones, here would be the gap between the large and small domed rooms, and the child is, so to speak, the first thing painted on the surface of the small dome. But by seeing these motifs, you will best understand the matter if you say to yourself: I can't actually see anything in it, I have to see it in color. Because it is felt and thought and painted entirely out of color.

The next picture (Fig. 70): Here you see the only word that appears in the whole structure. There is no other inscription to be found anywhere; everything is meant to be developed into art, into form. But here you will find the “I”. Out of the blue, a kind of fist figure has emerged, that is, the 16th-century human being. The whole cognitive problem of modern man has really emerged from the perception of color before the soul. This cognitive problem of modern man can only be perceived in the abstract, if one perceives as it is often portrayed today; it is different from what we can grasp of natural laws today.

It [the problem of knowledge] intrudes into our soul when we do not merely view things scholastically as abstractions, but when we strive with our whole being to immerse ourselves in the riddles and secrets of the world, as we must in order to be fully human, in order to become aware of our human dignity. Then it places itself beside the striving human being, the one striving for knowledge, who in Faust really, I would say, strives out of the mysterious, mystical blue, strives for the fully conscious I that speaks. The older languages have the I in the verb; for this epoch one is justified in letting a word appear; otherwise there is no word, no inscription or the like in the whole structure, everything is expressed in artistic forms. But the child and birth, and the other end of life, death, are placed alongside the person striving for knowledge. Above it would be the Faust figure you have just seen, below it Death, and further over towards us this flying child. This skeleton here (Fig. 71) in brownish black, in the Faust book in blue, the child (Fig. 72) in various shades of orange and yellow.

The next picture (Fig. 73): Here you see a compilation: below the skeleton, here Faust, here this child, whom you saw individually, above it a kind of inspirer, an angel-like figure, which I will show as an individual, then other figures join here. As I said, the necessity arose for me to depict the striving of the people of the last centuries from the color surfaces that I wanted to place in just that position. Here then is the striving of the Greeks. You will see it in detail.

The next picture (Fig. 74): the genius in blue-yellow, who is above the fist-shape, as if inspiring the fist-shape from above. We would then come across the striving child. The next picture (Fig. 75): then a kind of Athena figure, taken out of a brownish-orange with light yellow. It is the way in which Greek thinking has become part of the whole world of knowledge and feeling. This figure that we have here is inspired by a kind of Apollo figure, just as Faust was previously inspired by his angel (Fig. 76); this brings us back to Greek thinking.

The next picture (Fig. 76): The inspiring Apollon. Particular care has been taken here with the bright yellow, through which this Apollo figure has been created out of color. I tried to give this bright yellow a certain radiance through the type of technical treatment.

The next picture (Fig. 77): Here you see two figures, which now inspire the Egyptian initiate, who recognizes the tables and feels the world. The man on the right is depicted in a somewhat darker color, I would say a reddish brown, and the Egyptian initiate, who is below him, is also depicted in this way.

The next picture (Fig. 78): The Egyptian knower, that is, the counter-image for those ancient times, which in our case is Faust, who strives for knowledge.

The next picture (Fig. 79): Here you see two figures that I am obliged to always assign certain names to in spiritual science because they keep recurring. One should not think of nebulous mysticism here, but only of the necessity of having a terminology; just as one speaks of north and south magnetism, so I speak of the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. When we stand face to face with a human being, we cannot grasp his whole being at once, nor with all the powers of knowledge. He has within him two opposing polarities: that which in him constantly strives towards the rapturously false mysticism, false theosophy, that which always seeks to rise above itself towards the unreal , the unfounded, the nebulous - the Luciferic - and that which makes him a Philistine, that which predisposes him to the spirit of heaviness - the Ahrimanic, which is painted here with its shadow. The Luciferic is painted in the yellow-reddish color, the Ahrimanic in the yellow-brownish. It is the dualism of human nature. We can have it physically, physiologically: Then the Ahrimanic in man is everything that ages him, that brings him to sclerosis, to calcification, that makes him ossify; the Luciferic is everything that, when it develops pathologically, brings one to fever, to pleurisy, that thus develops one towards warmth. Man is always the balance between these two. We do not understand the human being if we do not see in him the balance between these two, the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic.

In particular, however, the Germanic-Central European culture that came over Persia is confronted with this duality in its knowledge. Hence the recognizing Central European, who has the child here (Fig. 82) – we will see him in more detail – is inspired by this duality of the Luciferic-Ahrimanic, with which he must come to terms through his inner tragic destiny of knowledge. Here this kind of dualism is seen again in the smaller figure, shaped like a centaur. I painted this during the war, and one sometimes has one's private ideas; the ill-fated fabric of Woodrow Wilson's fourteen points grew out of the abstract transformation of dualism. Here in Switzerland, too, I have repeatedly spoken of the world-destroying nature of these fourteen points: Therefore, I took the private pleasure of immortalizing Mr. and Mrs. Wilson in these figures. But, as I said, this is of little importance.

The next picture (Fig. 81): Here you see the Ahrimanic figure brought out and the shadow above it. In spiritual terms, this is everything that drives man to materialism, to philistinism, to pedantry, what he becomes when – be it expressed in the extreme – he has only intellect and no heart, when all his powers, his soul powers, are directed by the intellect. And if man did not have the good fortune that his outer body is more in balance, his outer body would actually be determined by the soul, he would be an exact expression of the soul: All those people who feel materialistically, feel pedantically, who are almost completely absorbed in the intellect, would look like that on the outside. Of course, they are protected from this by the fact that their body does not always follow the soul, but the soul then looks like this when you see it, when you feel it physically.

Next image (Fig. 80): The Luciferic, worked out of the yellow, worked out of the yellow into the bright. This is what a person develops when he shapes himself one-sidedly according to the visionary, one-sidedly according to the theosophical, when he grows beyond his head; one often finds it developed in some members of other movements who always grow half a meter with their astral head above their physical head so that they can look down on all people. This is the other extreme, the other pole of man.

Here at the bottom, so to speak, is the Germanic initiate (Fig. 82), the Germanic knower in his tragedy, which lies in the fact that duality has a particularly strong effect on him: the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic; as an addition, again, the naivety of the child. This is what emerged for the artistic sensibility. It was worked out of the brown-yellow; the child is kept in the light yellow.

Next picture (Fig. 83): Here we are already approaching the center of the domed room. This man would stand here with the child, and further towards the center are these two figures, which are one. Of course, this does not refer to the current Russian culture or lack of culture, which is corrupting people and the world, but rather the Russian culture actually contains the seed for something future. At present it is overshadowed by what has been imported from the West, by what should indeed disappear from the earth as soon as possible if it does not want to drag the whole of Europe with it into the abyss. But at the bottom of Russian nationality lies something that is guaranteed a future. It should be expressed through this figure, which has its double only here. That which lives in Russian nationality always has something of a double about it. Every Russian carries his shadow around with him. When you see a Russian, you are actually seeing two people: the Russian, who dreams and who is always flying a meter above the ground, and his shadow. All of this holds future possibilities. Hence this characteristic angel figure, painted out of the blue, out of the various shades of blue. Above it, a kind of centaur, a kind of aerial centaur. Here this figure, everything in the indefinite, even the starry sky above this Russian man, who carries his doppelganger with him.

Next image (Fig. 85): We have now passed the center here. This is the same centaur figure – when facing east, located on the left – as the earlier one on the right of the center. This angel figure is the symmetrical one to the one you have just seen. This one, however, is painted in a yellowish orange, and below it would now be the Russian with his doppelganger, but symmetrical to what was shown before.

Next image (Fig. 86): Now we are standing in the middle of the small domed room. Once again, on the other side, the Russian motif. Here, you can see the figure of Ahriman lying in a cave; and here, at the top, the representative of humanity. One can imagine him as the Christ. I have formed him out of my own vision as a Christ-figure. Lightning flashes come out of his right hand and surround Ahriman like the coils of a snake. His arm and hand go up to Lucifer, who is painted emerging from the reddish-yellow.

Next image (Fig. 87): Here you can see the figure of Lucifer a little more clearly. Below would be the figure of Christ, reaching up with his arm; this is the face, painted in yellow-red. So it is the Luciferic in man that strives beyond his head, the enthusiastic, that which alienates us from our actual humanity by making us alien to the world, bottomless.

Next image (Fig. 88): Ahriman in the cave. His head is surrounded by lightning serpents that emanate from the hand of Christ, who is standing above them. Here the wing, the brownish yellow, is painted more in the brownish direction, in places descending into the blackish blue.

Next picture (Fig. 89): Here I am now showing you my first sketch for the plastic figure of Christ. You see, I tried to make Christ beardless, but Christ pictures have only had a beard since the end of the fifth or sixth century. Of course, no one has to believe me. It is the Christ as he presented himself to me in spiritual vision, and there he must be depicted beardless.

Next image (Fig. 90): The painted head of Christ between Ahriman and Lucifer, the images that I have just shown. Painted in the dome room above is Christ between Ahriman and Lucifer, and below it will later be – it is still far from finished – the nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group (Fig. 93), in the middle of which is the representative of humanity, the Christ, with his right arm lowered and his left arm raised, in such a way that this position, like embodied love, is placed between Ahrimanic and Luciferic forces.

Next picture (Fig. 92): This is the first model, made in plasticine, for the Christ, en face, that is, for the representative of humanity, who is to stand in the middle of the wooden group (Fig. 93). But I would like to explicitly note that it will not be somehow obvious that this is the Christ; rather, one will have to feel it from the forms, from the artistic aspect. Nothing, absolutely no inscription, except for the “I” that I mentioned earlier, can be found in the entire structure.

Next image (Fig. 98): This is from the left side of this group of woodcuts [taken from the execution model]: Here is Lucifer striving upwards, and above him a rock creature emerging from the rock, so to speak, the rock transformed into an organ. Here is Lucifer; here Christ would stand; here is the other Lucifer, and that is such a rock creature. It is a risk to make it completely asymmetrical, as asymmetries in general play a certain role in these figures, because here the composition is not conceived in such a way that one takes figures, puts them together and makes a whole – no, the whole is conceived first and the individual is extracted. Therefore, a face at the top left must have a different asymmetry than one at the top right. It is a daring thing to work with such asymmetries, but I hope that it will be felt to be artistically justified if one ever fully comprehends the overall architectural idea.

Next image (Fig. 99): Here you can see the model of the Ahriman head. It is the original wax model that I made in 1915. It is an attempt to shape the human face as if the only things present in the human being were the aging, sclerotizing, calcifying forces, or, in the soul, that which makes the human being a philistine, pedant, materialist, which lies in him by being an intellectualizing being. If he had no heart at all for his soul life, but only reason, then he would present this physiognomy. We do not get to know the nature of a human being by merely describing it in the way that ordinary physiology and anatomy do. This one-sided approach provides only a limited insight into the human being. We must move on to an artistic appreciation of form, and only then do we get to know what lives and breathes in a person, what is truly there. You can never get to know the human being, as is attempted in the academies, anatomically or physiologically; you have to ascend to the artistic – that is part of artistic recognition – and must recognize, as Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him who is open to them, he feels the deepest yearning for her most worthy interpreter, art.” Not only the abstract word, not only the abstract idea and the abstract thought, but also the image gives something of what the forces of nature are, what is really contained in the secrets of nature. One must ascend to the artistic, otherwise one cannot recognize nature. The building may rightly call itself the “Goetheanum” for the reason that precisely such a Goethean understanding of nature also strives for an understanding of the world. Goethe says: Art is a special way of revealing the secrets of nature, which could never be revealed without art.

Next image (Fig. 101): The figure of Lucifer above, here the chest, wing-like. It is the case that one really has to immerse oneself in all of nature's creativity if one wants to give plastic form to something like this figure of Lucifer. Nothing can be symbolized, nothing can be allegorized, nothing can be thought and the thought put into earlier forms, but one must really delve into how nature creates, one must know the nature of the human rib cage, the lungs, one must know the organ of hearing, then the atrophied flight tools that the human being has in his two shoulder blades. All of this must be brought into context, because a person would look quite different if they were not intellectually developed, if the heart did not hypertrophy and overgrow everything: The heart, the hearing organs, wing-like organs, everything would be one. Those who do not merely accept the naturalistic, but also what is ideal, spiritual in the beings, will see in such art only that which reveals the secrets of the world and of existence in the Goethean sense. Up there you can see the hands of this asymmetrical rock creature.

Next image (Fig. 103): Here you can see a building in the vicinity of the Goetheanum. It was originally built to carry out a kind of glass etching. Now it serves as a kind of office space, and eurythmy rehearsals and eurythmy lessons are also given there. In the wooden wall of the large domed room, there are glass windows between every two columns, and these glass windows are not made in the old glass window art, but in a special art, which I would call glass etching. Panes of glass of the same color are engraved with a diamond-tipped stylus that is clamped into an electric machine, and the artist actually works here as an etcher on glass, as he otherwise works as an etcher on a plate, only on a larger scale. So that you scratch out in the monochrome glass plate, thus working the motif in question into the light. This is how we got these glass windows, which have different glass colors, so that there is a harmonious effect. When you enter the building, you first come to one glass color, then to the other, to certain color harmonies. These glass windows had to be ground here; accordingly, this house was built, which, except for the gate and the staircase, is individually designed in every detail. Here we do not have the earlier castles that are otherwise present, but a special form of castle has been used (Fig. 105). So it is individually designed down to the last detail. Next picture (Fig. 104): The gate to this house just shown; below the concrete staircase.

Next image (Fig. 110): Here you see one of these glass windows, which is executed in green. The motifs here are created out of green panes of the same color. The etching is actually only, I would say, a kind of score. This is then a work of art when it is in its place and the sun shines through. So the artist does not finish the work of art, but only a kind of score: when the sun shines through, this etching achieves what, together with the sunbeam shining through, actually creates the work of art. This again marks something that emerges from the whole building idea of Dornach and is physically expressed here.

The Dornach building is built on a fundamentally different architectural idea from other buildings. The walls of the previous buildings are closing walls, artistically also conceived as closing walls. No wall in Dornach is conceived in this way; the walls in Dornach are designed in such a way that they are artistically transparent, so that one does not feel closed in when one is inside the building. All the walls, so to speak, open up through the artistic motifs to the whole great world, and one enters this building with the awareness that one is not in a building but in the world: the walls are transparent. And this is carried out in these glass windows right down to the physical: they are only a work of art when the sun shines through them. Only together with the sunbeam does what the artist has created become artistic.

Next picture (Fig. 113): Another window sample, taken from the same-colored glass pane. The fact that these windows are there means that the room is again illuminated with the harmoniously interwoven rays, and one can, especially when one enters the room in the morning hours, when it is full of sunshine, really feel something through the light effects in the interior, which cannot be called nebulous, but in the best sense inwardness, an impression, an image of the inwardness of the existence of the world and of human beings. For just as, for example, in Greek temple architecture there stands a house that can only be conceived as the house that no human being actually enters, at most the forecourt as a hall of sacrifice, but which is the dwelling place of the god, just as the Gothic building, regardless of whether it is a secular or a church building, is conceived as that which is not complete in itself, but which is complete when it has become a hall for assembly and the community is within it, the whole building idea of Dornach, as I have developed it here in its details, should work so that when a person enters this space, they are just as tempted to be in the space with other people who will look at what is presented and listen to what is sung, played or recited.

Man will be tempted, on the one hand, to feel sympathy with those who are gathered, but the question or the challenge that is as old as Western culture will also arise: know thyself! And he will sense something like an answer to this in the building around him: know thyself. The attempt has been made to express in the building forms, in an artistic and non-symbolic way, that which the human being can inwardly experience.

We have already experienced it: when, for example, an attempt was made to recite - to eurythmy or to recite to oneself - the space that I showed you as the organ room, when an attempt was made to recite into it, or when an attempt was made to speak of the intermediate space between the two dome spaces, the whole room took these things in as a matter of course. Every form is adapted to the word, which wants to unfold recitatively or in discussion and explanation. And music in particular spreads out in these plastic-musical formal elements, which the building idea of Dornach is meant to represent.

In conclusion, I would just like to say, my dear attendees: With these details, which I have tried to make clear to some extent through the pictures, I wanted to present to your souls what the building idea of Dornach should be: a thought that dissolves the mechanical, the geometric, into the organic, into that which itself presents the appearance of consciousness, so that this consciously appearing element willingly accepts that which arises from the depths of human consciousness.

However, this means that something has been created that differs from previous building practices and customs, but in the same way that spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy also wants to place itself in the civilization of the present day: as something that feels related to the emerging forces of the rising sun, and at the same time wants to strongly oppose the terribly devastating forces of decline of our time. Thus, that which wants to live in the teaching of anthroposophy, the whole world view of anthroposophy, also wants to express itself through the building forms. What is to be heard in Dornach through the spoken word should also be seen in the forms. Therefore, no arbitrary architectural style was to be used, no arbitrary building constructed: it had to grow out of the same spiritual and intellectual background from which the words spoken in Dornach arise. The whole idea behind the building, the whole of the Dornach building, is not to be a temple building, but a building in which people come together to receive supersensible knowledge.

People say that just because one is too poor to find words for the new, one often says: that is a temple building. But the whole character contradicts the old temple character. It is entirely that which is adapted in every detail to what, as spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense, wants to step out into the world. And basically, every explanation is a kind of introduction to the language, to the world view, from which the artistic concept has emerged. I believe that artistically, the building expresses its own essence and content, even if it is still often perceived today as something that is not justified in terms of what is considered acceptable in terms of architectural style, forms and artistic language. Only someone who has already absorbed the impulse, the entire civilizing character of spiritual science, will understand that a new architectural idea had to emerge from this new world view. And as badly as contemporaries sometimes take it, something like this had to be presented, just as anthroposophical spiritual science had to be talked about.

And so, in the manner of a confession, today's discussion, which sought to point to the building of Dornach and to these thoughts, may simply conclude with the words: something was ventured that had not been done before as a building idea, but it had to be ventured. If something like this had not been ventured, had not been ventured at various points in time, there would be no progress in the development of humanity. For the sake of human progress, something must be ventured first. Even if the first attempt is perhaps beset with numerous errors – that is the very first thing that the person speaking here will admit – it must nevertheless be said: something like this must always be ventured again in the service of humanity. Therefore, my dear attendees, it has been ventured out there in Dornach, near Basel.

Translated by Diane Tatum, revised

Among the various instructions which the teacher gives the pupil, Imagination was the second named. This consists in man's not passing through life as happens everyday, but in the sense of Goethe's saying: “All that is transitory is but a likeness;” behind every animal and every plant something that lies behind should arise for him. In the meadow saffron, for example, he will discover a picture of the melancholy soul, in the violet a picture of calm piety, in the sunflower a picture of strong, vigorous life, of self-reliance, of ambition. When a man lives in this sense, he raises himself to imaginative knowledge. He then sees something like a cold flame ascend out of a plant, a color picture, which leads him into the astral plane. Thus the pupil is guided to see things which present to him spiritual beings from other worlds. It has already been said, however, that the pupil must strictly follow the occult teacher, for this alone can tell him what is subjective and what objective. And the occult teacher can give the pupil the necessary steadiness which is given of itself by the sense-world, as it continuously corrects errors. It is different, however, in the astral world; there one is easily subject to deceptions; there one must be supported by one who has experience. The teacher gives a series of instructions to a pupil who wishes to follow the Rosicrucian path. In the first place, he gives him precise instruction when he has begun to reach the stage of imaginative development. He tells him: strive first of all to love not merely a single animal, nor form a particular relationship with a single animal, or to experience this or that with one or another animal. Seek rather to have a living feeling for whole animal groups. Then you will receive through this an idea of what the group-soul is. The individual soul which with men is on the physical plane is with the animals on the astral plane. The animal cannot say “I” to itself here on the physical plane.

The question is often asked: “Has the animal no such soul as man?” It has such a soul, but the animal-soul is above on the astral plane. The single animal is to the animal-soul as the single organs are to the human soul. If a finger is painful, it is the soul that experiences it. All the sensations of the single organs pass to the soul. This is also the case with a group of animals. Everything that the single animal experiences is experienced in it by the group-soul. Let us take, for instance, all the various lions: the experiences of the lion all lead to a common soul. All lions have a common group-soul on the astral plane, and so have all animals their group-soul on the astral plane. If one inflicts a pain on a single lion or if it experiences enjoyment, this continues up to the astral plane, as the pain of a finger continues to the human soul. Man can raise himself to a comprehension of the group-soul if he is able to fashion a form that contains all individual lions, just as a general concept contains the individual images belonging to it.

The plants have their soul in the Rupa region of the Devachanic plane. By learning to survey a group of plants and gaining a definite relationship to their group-soul, a man learns to penetrate to plant group-souls on the Rupa plane. When the single lily, the single tulip is no longer something special for him, but when the individuals grow together for him into living, densified imaginations, which become pictures, then the pupil experiences something quite new. What matters is that this is a quite concrete picture individually formed in the imagination. Then man experiences that the plant-covering of the earth, that some meadow strewn with flowers, becomes something completely new to him, that the flowers become for him an actual manifestation of the spirit of the earth. That is the manifestation of these different plant group-souls. Just as the human tears become the expression of the inner sadness of the soul, as a man's physiognomy becomes an expression of the human soul, so the occultist learns to look on the green of the plant covering as the expression of inner processes, of the actual spiritual life of the earth. Thus certain plants become for him like the earth's tears, out of which wells forth the earth's inner grief. There pours a new imaginative content into the soul of the pupil just as someone may tremble and feel moved at the tears of a companion.

A person must go through these moods. If he endures such a mood vis-à-vis the animal world then he raises himself to the astral plane. When he immerses himself in the mood of the plant world he raises himself to the lower region of the Devachanic plane. Then he observes the flame-forms that ascend from the plants; the plant-covering of the earth is then veiled by a sum of images, the incarnations of the rays of light which set upon the plants.

One can also approach- the dead stone in this way. There is a fundamental experience in the mineral world. Let us take the mountain crystal, glittering with light. When one looks at this, one will say to oneself: In a certain way this represents physical material, so too is the stone physical material. But there is a future perspective to which the occult teacher leads the pupil. The man of today is still penetrated by instincts and desires, by passions. This saturates the physical nature, but an ideal stands before the occultist. He says to himself: Man's animal nature will gradually be refilled and purified to a stage where the human body can stand before us just as inwardly chaste and free of desire as the mineral that craves nothing, in which no wish is stirred by what comes near it. Chaste and pure is the inner material nature of the mineral. This chastity and purity is the experience that must permeate the pupil on gazing at the mineral world. These feelings vary as the mineral world shows itself in different forms and colors, but the fundamental experience which permeates the mineral kingdom is chastity.

Our earth today has a quite particular configuration and form. Let us go back in the evolution of the earth. It once had a completely different form. Let us immerse ourselves in Atlantis and still further back: we come there to ever higher temperatures, in which metals were able to flow all around as water runs along today. All the metals have become these veins in the earth because they first flowed along in streams. Just as lead is hard today and quicksilver is fluid, so lead was at one time fluid and quicksilver will one day become a solid metal. Thus the earth is changeable, but man has always participated in these various evolutions. In the ages of which we have spoken, physical man as yet was not in existence. But the etheric body and astral body were there; they could live in the higher temperatures of that time. The sheaths gradually began to form with the cooling process, enveloping man.

While something new was always being formed in man during the earth's evolution, something correspondingly new had also been formed outside in nature. The rudiments of the human eye had first arisen in the Sun evolution. First the etheric body formed itself and this again formed the human physical eye. As a piece of ice freezes out of water, so are the physical organs formed out of the finer etheric body. The physical organs were formed within man while outside the earth became solid. In every age the formation of a human organ took place parallel with the formation of a particular configuration outside in nature. While in the human being the eye was called for, in the mineral kingdom the chrysolite was formed. One can therefore think that the same forces which outside articulated the nature of the chrysolite in man formed the eye.

We cannot be satisfied in the particular case with the general saying that man is the microcosm and the world is the macrocosm; occultism has demonstrated the actual relationship between man and the world. When the physical organ for the reasoning faculties was formed in the Atlantean age, outside lead solidified; it passed from the fluid to the solid state. It is the same forces which hold sway in the solidifying of lead and in the organ of intelligence. One only understands man when one can recognize the connections between the human being and the forces of nature. There is a particular group within the socialist movement, a group that has distinguished itself by its moderation from the socialists. It is the temperate ones who have always retained a good deal of the reasoning faculties. This special group in the socialist movement consists of the printers, and this is so because printers have to do with lead. The tariff-union between workers and employer was first worked out among the printers. Lead brings about this frame of mind if it is taken in small quantities.

Another case can be cited from the experience where, in a similar way, one could observe the influence of the nature of a metal upon a man. It had become noticeable to a man how easily he discovered analogies in every possible thing. One could conclude that he had much to do with copper, and that was the case. He blew the bugle in an orchestra and therefore had to with an instrument that contains much copper.

When someday the relationship of the external lifeless world to the human organism is studied, it will be found that a relationship exists between man and the surrounding world in the most varied ways: for instance, the relationship of the senses to the precious stones. There exist certain relationships of the senses to precious stones based on the evolution of the senses. We have already found a relationship between the eye and the chrysolite. There is also a relationship between the onyx and the organ of hearing. The onyx stands in a remarkable relation to the oscillations of man's ego-life, and occultists have always recognized this. It represents, for instance, the life that goes forth from death. Thus in Goethe's “Fairy-tale,” the dead dog is changed into onyx through the old man's lamp. In this intuition of Goethe's lies the outcome of an occult knowledge. Therein lies the relationship of the onyx to the organ of hearing. An occult relationship exists further between the organ of taste and the topaz, the sense of smell and jasper, the skin-sense as man's sense of warmth and the cornelian, the productive power of imagination and the carbuncle. This was used as the symbol for a productive power of imagination, which arose in man at the same time as the carbuncle in nature.

Occult symbols are drawn deep out of real wisdom and if one only penetrates into occult symbolism one finds genuine knowledge there. He who knows the significance of a mineral finds entry to the upper region of the Devachanic plane. When one sees a precious stone and is permeated by the feeling of what the precious stone has to say to us, then one finds entry to the Arupa regions of Devachan. Thus the gaze of the student widens and more and more worlds dawn for him. He must not be satisfied with the general indication, but little by little he must find entry into the whole world.

One finds also in German literature how an instinctive intuition regarding the mineral forces is shown by poets who were miners, for example by Novalis, who had studied mining engineering. Kerning has chosen many miners as types for his occult personalities. There is also the poet, Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, that remarkable spirit who from time to time immersed himself artistically in the secrets of nature, particularly in his tale, “The Mines of Falun.” One will feel many echoes here of the occult relationships between the mineral kingdom and man, and much too that indicates how occult powers take hold in a remarkable way of artistic imagination.

The mystery-center is the essential birthplace of art. In the astral realm the mysteries were actual and living. There one had a synthesis of truth, beauty, and goodness. This was so to a high degree in the Egyptian mysteries and those in Asia, as well as in the Greek mysteries, especially the Eleusinian. The pupils there actually beheld how the spiritual powers submerged themselves in the various forms of existence. At that time there was no other science than what one thus beheld. There was no other goodness than that which arose in the soul as one gazed into the mysteries. Nor was there any other beauty than that which one beheld as the gods descended.

We live in a barbaric age, in a chaotic age, in an age devoid of style. All great epochs of art were working out of the deepest life of spirit. If one observes the images of the Greek gods one plainly sees three distinct types: first there is the Zeus type, to which Pallas Athena and Apollo also belong. In this type the Greeks characterized their own race. There was a definite modeling of the oval of the eye, the nose, the mouth. Secondly, one can observe the circle that may be called the Mercury type. There the ears are completely different, the nose is completely different, the hair is woolly and curly. And thirdly there is the Satyr type, in which we find a completely different form of the mouth, a different nose, eyes, and so on. These three types are clearly formed in the Greek sculpture. The Satyr type is to represent an ancient race, the Mercury type the race following, and the Zeus type the fifth race.

In the earlier times, the spiritual world view permeated and saturated everything. In the Middle Ages it was still a time when this came to expression in handicraft, when every door-lock was a kind of work of art. In external culture we were still met by what the soul had created. The modern age is entirely different; it has brought forward only one style, namely, the warehouse. The warehouse will be as characteristic for our time as the Gothic buildings—for instance, Cologne Cathedral—were for the Middle Ages of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The cultural history of the future will have to reckon with the warehouse as we have to with the Gothic buildings of the Middle Ages. New life comes to its expression in these forms. The world will be filled again with a spiritual content through the diffusion of the teachings of spiritual science. Then later, when spiritual life comes to expression in external forms, we shall have a style which expresses this spiritual life. What lives in spiritual science must stamp itself later in external forms. Thus we must look on the mission of spiritual science as a cultural mission.