The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lines following are Faust's:

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

Not until the final line does Mephistopheles speak again:

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

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

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

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

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

“Which way, comest thou here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My spirit cannot discipline it.”

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

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

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

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

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

Mephistopheles is quite clear about such people, and says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report by Rudolf Steiner in Lucifer-Gnosis no. 34/1907

It was the task of the German Section of the Theosophical Society to organize this year's congress of the “Federation of European Sections”. It is therefore more fitting that here, from within the circle of the organizers, there is less talk of what has been achieved and more of what has been intended and striven for. For the organizers know only too well how little of what was achieved has been achieved, and how much has been achieved that could not be achieved on such an occasion. Therefore, the following should only be understood as a description of the underlying ideas.

Munich was chosen as the venue: the time was the days of Pentecost, May 18, 19, 20 and 21. The questions that the organizers asked themselves in their preparations were: How can the task of the Theosophical movement be expressed within the current spiritual life through such a congress? How can it give a picture of the ideals and aims of the theosophical work? Since the event is naturally limited by the circumstances, it can only provide a limited answer to these questions. It now seems particularly important that the comprehensive character of the theosophical movement be emphasized on such occasions. First of all, the focus of this movement is the cultivation of a worldview based on knowledge of the supernatural. And at such a congress, people come together who, in the spirit of such a worldview, work across all national borders and other human differences on spiritual ideals that are common to all of humanity. Mutual inspiration in the best sense will be the most beautiful fruit of such events. In addition, it will be shown how the theosophical work should really be integrated into the whole of life in our time. For the spiritual foundation of this movement cannot be called upon to express itself only in thoughts and ideas, in theories and so on; rather, as a content of the soul that has emerged in our time, it can have a fertilizing effect on all branches of human activity. Theosophy can only be grasped in the right sense if we set it the ideal of inspiring not only the imagination and the human soul, but the human being as a whole. If we wish to interpret its mission in this sense, we may recall how, for example, the world view of the corresponding time found expression in the buildings and sculptures (e.g. the Sphinx) of the Egyptians. The ideas of the Egyptian worldview were not only thought by the souls; they were made visible in the environment of the human eye. And think of how everything that is known of Greek sculpture and drama is the worldview of the Greek soul, shaped in stone and depicted in poetry. Consider how in medieval painting Christian ideas and feelings were revealed to the eye, how in the Gothic period Christian devotion took form and shape. A true harmony of the soul can only be experienced where the human senses are reflected in form, shape and color and so on as an environment, which the soul knows as its most valuable thoughts, feelings and impulses. Out of such thoughts arises the intention to give a picture of theosophical striving in the external form of the event at a congress. The room in which the meeting takes place can reflect the theosophical feeling and thinking around the visitor. According to our circumstances, we could not do more than sketch out what might be considered an ideal in this regard. We had decorated the assembly hall in such a way that a fresh, stimulating red formed the basic color of all the walls. This color was intended to express the basic mood of the celebration in an external view. It is obvious that some people will object to the use of “red” for this purpose. These objections are justified as long as one relies on an esoteric judgment and experience. They are well known to the esotericist, who nevertheless, in accordance with all occult symbolism, must use the color red for the purpose in question. For him, it is not a matter of what the part of his being feels that is devoted to the immediate sensual environment; but what the higher self experiences in the spiritual realm while the external environment is physically seen in red. And that is the exact opposite of what the ordinary sensation of “red” says. Esoteric knowledge says: “If you want to attune yourself in your innermost being as the gods were attuned when they gave the world the green plant cover, then learn to endure ‘red’ in your surroundings as they had to.” This indicates a reference to the higher human nature in relation to “red” that the genuine [esotericist] has in mind when he presents the two opposing entities of the creative world ground in the occult symbolism in such a way that, downward, the green as a sign of the earthly, upward the “red” as a sign of the heavenly (elohistic) creative powers. Much more could be said about the reasons for opposing this color, and much could be said in refutation of these arguments. However, it may suffice here to make this brief comment: this color was chosen in accordance with occultism.

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

It is the development of humanity, the expression of which in the astral world must form one of the most essential foundations of occult knowledge, which is expressed in these seven seals. The Christian esotericist will recognize them in a certain way in the descriptions of the “Revelation of St. John”. But the form they presented in our festival hall corresponds to the secret-scientific spiritual current that has been the dominant one in the West since the fourteenth century. The mysteries of existence, as they are reflected in these images, represent ancient wisdom; the clairvoyants of the various epochs of humanity see them from different points of view. Therefore, according to the necessary developmental needs of the times, the forms change somewhat. In the “Revelation of St. John” it is “set in signs” what is to happen “in brief”. Those who know how to read a secret-scientific form of expression properly know that this means nothing other than a reference to the secret-scientific signs for certain imaginations that can be experienced in the astral world and that are related to the nature of man as it reveals itself in time. And the Rosicrucian Seals also represent the same. Only very sketchily, with a few words, shall the infinitely rich content of the seals be interpreted. Basically everything - even the seemingly most insignificant - in these pictures means something important. The first seal represents man's entire evolution in the most general way. In the “Revelation of St. John” this is indicated with the words: “And being turned, I saw seven golden candlesticks; and in the midst of the seven candlesticks one like unto the Son of Man, clothed with a garment down to the foot, and girt about upon his chest with a golden girdle. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like brass glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the rushing of many waters. And he had seven stars in his right hand; and out of his mouth came a sharp, two-edged sword; and his face shone like the bright sun.” In general terms, such words point to the most comprehensive secrets of human development. If one wanted to present in detail what each of the deeply significant words contains, one would have to write a thick volume. Our seal depicts such things. Among the physical organs and forms of expression of the human being, some represent, in their present form, the downward stages of development of earlier forms, and have thus already passed their peak. Others, however, represent the initial stages of development and are, as it were, the rudiments of what they are to become in the future. The esotericist must know these secrets of development. The organ of speech represents an organ that will be much higher and more perfect in the future than it is at present. By pronouncing this, one touches on a great secret of existence, which is often also called the “mystery of the creative word”. This gives a hint of the future state of the human speech organ, which will become a spiritual organ of production (procreation) when the human being is spiritualized. In myths and religions, this spiritual production is indicated by the appropriate image of a “sword” coming out of the mouth. In this way, every line and every point in the picture signifies something that is connected with the secret of human development. The fact that such pictures are made does not merely arise from a need for a sensualization of the supersensible processes, but it corresponds to the fact that living into these pictures - if they are the right ones - really means an arousal of forces that lie dormant in the human soul, and through the awakening of which the representations of the supersensible world emerge. It is not right for the supersensible worlds to be described only in schematic terms in theosophy; the true path is to awaken the imagination to the images presented in these seals. (If the occultist does not have such images at hand, he should verbally describe the higher worlds in appropriate images.) - The second seal, with the appropriate accessories, represents one of the first stages of development of humanity on earth. In its primeval times, humanity on earth had not yet developed what is called the individual soul. What was still present at that time, and what is still found in animals today, is the group soul. Anyone who can follow the old human group souls on the astral plane through imaginative clairvoyance will find the four types of group soul represented in the four apocalyptic animals of the second seal: the lion, the bull, the eagle and the man. This touches on the truth of what is often so dryly allegorized in the interpretation of the four animals. The third seal represents the secrets of the so-called harmony of the spheres. Man experiences these secrets in the interval between death and a new birth (in the “spirit land” or what is called “Devachan” in the usual theosophical literature). However, the account is not given as it is experienced in the “spirit realm” itself, but rather as the events of this realm are reflected in the astral world. It must be noted that all seven seals are experiences of the astral world; however, the other worlds can be seen in their reflections in the astral. The angels blowing trumpets in the picture represent the original spiritual beings of the world phenomena; the book with the seven seals indicates that the mysteries of existence are “unsealed” in the experiences illustrated in this picture. The “four horsemen of the Apocalypse” represent the stages of human development through long earth cycles. The fourth seal represents, among other things, two pillars, one rising from the sea and the other from the earth. These pillars hint at the secret of the role played by red (oxygen-rich) blood and blue-red (carbon-rich) blood in human development, and how this blood changes in line with human development from distant primeval times to distant future times. The letters on these pillars point to this developmental secret in a way known only to the initiated. (Old interpretations of the two letters given in public writings or in certain societies remain only a superficial, exoteric interpretation.) The book in the cloud points to a future state of man in which all his knowledge will be internalized. In the Book of Revelation we find the significant words: “And I took a little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up...”

The sun in the picture points to a cosmic process that will take place at the same time as the marked future stage of humanity; the earth will enter into a completely different relationship with the sun than it currently does in the cosmos. And everything is depicted in the picture so that all the arrangements of the parts, all the details and so on, correspond exactly to specific real processes. The fifth seal represents the further development of man in the future in a cosmos in which the conditions just indicated will have occurred. The future human being, who will have a different relationship to the sun than the present one, is represented by the “woman who gives birth to the sun”; and the power that he will then have over certain forces of the world, which today express themselves in his lower nature, is represented by the “sun woman” standing on the beast with the seven heads and ten horns. The woman has the moon under her feet: this points to a later cosmic relationship between the sun, earth and moon. The sixth seal represents the evolved human being with even greater power over the lower forces of the universe. The way the image expresses this is reminiscent of Christian esotericism: Michael holds the dragon bound. Finally, the seventh seal is that of the “Mystery of the Grail”, as it was in the esoteric current beginning in the fourteenth century. In the picture there is a cube, representing the world of space, from which the world serpent arises from all sides of the cube, insofar as it represents the higher forces living out in the lower: From the mouth of the snake comes the world line (as a spiral), the symbol of the purified and refined world forces; and from this arises the “holy grail,” which is confronted by the “dove.” All of this points - and quite appropriately - to the mystery of the creation of the world, of which the earthly one is a lower reflection. The deepest mysteries lie in the lines and figures and so on of this seal. Between each two seals a column was inserted. These seven columns could not be executed in plastic form; they had to be painted as a substitute. But they are definitely intended as real architectural forms and correspond to the “seven pillars” of the “true Rosicrucian temple”. (Of course, the arrangement in Munich does not quite correspond to that in the “Rosicrucian Temple of Initiation”, because there each such column is duplicated, so that when one walks from the back wall towards the front, one passes through fourteen columns, two of which are always facing each other. This is only a hint for those who know the true facts; for us, only a general idea of the meaning of this column secret should be awakened). The capitals of these columns represent the planetary development of our solar system. Our Earth is, after all, the fourth embodiment in a planetary developmental system, and in the ways it is configured it points to three future embodiments. (More exact details about this can be found in the articles in this journal headed 'From the Akasha Chronicle'. The seven successive embodiments of the Earth are referred to as the Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan states. In the representations commonly used in esoteric studies, the Vulcan state is omitted as being too far in the future, and for reasons that would take us too far afield to discuss here, the Earth's development is divided into a Martian and a Mercury state. (These reasons can also be found in the essays on the “Akasha Chronicle”. These seven embodiments of the earth: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus are now expressed in esotericism by seven column capitals. The inner life of each of these states of development is depicted in the forms of these capitals. Here, too, the intention is that one should not delve into the forms of the capitals intellectually, but entirely through the feelings, in a truly artistic experience and in the imagination. For every line, every curve, everything about these forms is such that when you immerse yourself in them, you awaken dormant powers in your soul; and these powers lead to ideas about the great mysteries of the world that underlie the cosmic and related human development of the earth. Anyone who might criticize the design of such columns should consider that the Corinthian and Ionic columns, for example, also emerged from the embodiment of the secrets of existence, and that such facts are only unknown to the materialistic way of thinking of our time. From the way the motives of world development are expressed in these column capitals, one can gauge how esotericism is to have a fruitful effect on art. The ancient columns, too, are born out of esotericism. And the architecture of the future will have to present to people what the esoteric worldview of Theosophy can give as a hint today.

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

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

When you transform thought into image,
you experience creative wisdom.

If you condense feeling into light,
you reveal the forming power.

If you reify will into being,
you create in the world's being.

We tried to express the fundamental mood that we wanted to express in our “inner space” in the program book that was given to visitors. After the significance of the red color in esoteric symbolism has been discussed above, there is no need to say anything more about the red cover of this book. On this cover (in the upper left corner) there is a black cross entwined with red roses in a blue oval field; to the right of it are the letters: E. D. N. - J. C.M. - P. S. S. R. - These are the ten initial letters of the words by which true Rosicrucianism is summarized in a single sentence: “Ex deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.” The cross symbol, entwined with roses, expresses the meaning of Rosicrucianism in an esoteric way. In view of the relationship that our event has established with Rosicrucianism through such things, it seems necessary to point out serious misunderstandings that are brought to it. Here and there, people have tried to form an idea of Rosicrucianism based on historical tradition. Of those who have formed an opinion of it in this way, some at present look upon it with a certain benevolence; but most look upon it as charlatanry, enthusiasm or something of that kind, perhaps worse. It may readily be conceded that If Rosicrucianism were what it appears to be to those who know of it only from historical documents and traditions, it would certainly not be worthy of the attention of any rational man. But at the present time no one knows anything about true Rosicrucianism who has not approached it through the medium of occult science. Outside the circle of occult science there are no authentic records of it, for the name stands for the spiritual current mentioned here, which has set the tone in the Occident since the fourteenth century. Only now may we begin to communicate to the public some of the secrets of Rosicrucianism. In drawing from this source in Munich, we naturally did not want to present it as the only true source of the theosophical movement, but only as one of the paths by which spiritual knowledge can be sought. It cannot be said that we gave preferential treatment to this source, while the theosophical movement should take all forms of religion and paths to truth into equal consideration. But it can never be the task of the theosophical movement to study the diversity of religions as an end in itself; it must reach the unity of religions, their core, through their forms; and we did not want to show what Rosicrucianism is, but through Rosicrucianism we wanted to show the perspective to the one core of truth in all religions. And this is precisely the true mission of the Theosophical movement. In the program book one finds five drawings. They are the motifs of the first five of the seven capitals mentioned above, transposed into vignette form. In these five drawings, too, there is something of what is called “occult writing”. Those who immerse themselves in the line forms and figures with all their soul will inwardly perceive something of what are known as the important states for [the] realization of human development (Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars and Mercury states).

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

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

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

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

As at previous congresses, each speaker spoke in their national language.

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

The Saturday afternoon was devoted to lectures and talks by Mr. Alan Leo, Dr. Th. Pascal, Michael Bauer, Mr. James Wedgwood and Miss Kamensky. Mr. Alan Leo read his paper on “Astrology and Personal Fate”. The esoteric nature of astrology was discussed and free will was clearly explained in relation to predetermined fate, showing the way in which planetary forces influence human life. Dr. Th. Pascal presented the results of his long inner research in the theosophical field in a thoughtful essay. It was stimulating to follow the subtle arguments of intimate trains of thought. Michael Bauer spoke about the relationship between nature and man. This very meritorious leader of our Nuremberg branch showed in his warm-hearted and spirited way how the inner essence of nature and man's own inner being are interlinked in their depths. Mr. Wedgwood read his paper on “The Value of the Theosophical Society.” He explained how the study of occultism elevates man to an awareness of his higher destiny by giving him a knowledge of his place in the world process. It depends on the perspectives that occultism gives to the human soul. (No summary of the contents of the individual lectures and papers will be given here, as these will appear in detail in the “Congress Yearbook”. Miss Kamensky read her fascinating paper on “Theosophy in Russia” that same afternoon. Her brief but meaningful remarks showed how many Theosophical ideas are to be found in Russian literary and intellectual life. The work was a prime example of how to seek out those seeds in a nation's intellectual life that only require spiritual light in order to grow into Theosophy in the right way.

The first day of the conference ended with an evening of artistic performances. Johann Sebastian Bach's “Prelude and Fugue in B minor”, performed by Emanuel Nowotny on the organ, opened the evening. After that, Marie von Sivers recited the monologue from the beginning of the second part of Goethe's Faust, “Des Lebens Pulse schlagen frisch lebendig...”, as an example of a poem written for esoteric reasons. The two members, Ms. Alice von Sonklar and Ms. Toni Völker, performed Robert Schumann's “Pictures from the East” on the piano, which seem very suitable for promoting a mystical mood. Miss Gertrud Garmatter then sang two songs by Schubert, “An die Musik” and “Die schöne Müllerin”, in her charmingly sensitive way, and Miss Toni Völker concluded the evening with her beautiful artistic performance on the piano: “Pastorale and Capriccio” by Scarlatti.

On Sunday, May 19, the morning session was opened by the atmospheric Trio in E-flat major by Johannes Brahms (1st movement), played by Miss Johanna Fritsch (violin), Marika v. Gumppenberg (piano) and Mr. Tuckermann (French horn). Mrs. Besant then gave her momentous lecture: “The Place of Phenomena in the Theosophical Society”. She explained the role phenomena played in the early days of the Theosophical Society through H. P. Blavatsky, and how important they were in a time of doubt about higher worlds. She emphasized how the observation of phenomena related to higher worlds can never be dangerous if approached with the same spirit of research that is applied to observations in the physical world. She emphasized how little good it would do for the Theosophical Society if, for fear of the danger posed by psychic powers, it abandoned the pursuit of the goal of “studying those forces in the world and in man that are not accessible to sensory observation” to other societies.

It would be quite impossible to convey the manifold content of this lecture within the framework of a short report. Therefore, as with all earlier and later lectures of the congress, reference must be made to the “Yearbook” of the “Federation of European Sections”, which will appear following this lecture.

The second lecture of the morning was Dr. Rudolf Steiner's lecture on “The Initiation of the Rosicrucian”, in which the method of attaining knowledge of supersensible worlds in the sense of esotericism, which has set the tone in the West since the 14th century, is discussed and at the same time the necessity of these methods for the present period of human development is shown.

On Sunday afternoon (5 p.m.), Edouard Schuré's “Sacred Drama of Eleusis” was performed. The German organizers considered this performance to be an especially important part of the congress. It impressively demonstrated how theosophical ideas and sentiments can be expressed in true, high art. Edouard Schuré is the great French artist and writer who, through his works in so many directions, communicates the theosophical spirit to our contemporaries. Schuré's works “Les Grands Initiés” (“The Great Initiates”) and “Sanctuaires d'Orient” (“The Sanctuaries of the Orient”) are completely theosophical in the noblest sense of the word. And Schuré's theosophical way of looking at things is fully transformed into a vital creative power when he works as an artist. Within him lives that relationship between imagination and fantasy on which the basic secret of all high art is based. Edouard Schuré's truly mystical drama “The Children of Lucifer” is a shining example of how a world view striving towards the heights of knowledge can be fully realized in artistic form. Only a mind of this kind could have undertaken what Schuré did, to resurrect the “sacred drama” of Eleusis in the mind and eye of the modern man. This drama leads us to the door of that ancient time, where knowledge, religion and art still lived in one, where imagination was the faithful witness of truth and the sacred guide to piety; and where the reflection of imagination fell on this imagination in a transfiguring and revealing way. In Edouard Schur there lives a modern artistic soul, in which the light of that mysterious time shines, and so he was able to recreate what the priestly sages showed the audience in the “Drama at Eleusis” in Greece's distant past: the deep mystery of the world, which is reflected in the meaningful events of Eros' seduction of Persephone and her abduction by Pluto; of the pain of Demeter and the advice she to go to Eleusis, to seek advice from the “Goddess of Transformations”, Hekate; of Triptolem's initiation by Demeter as a priest in Eleusis; of Triptolem's daring journey into Pluto's realm to free Persephones; and of the emergence of a “new Dionysos”, who arises from Zeus' fire and the light of Demeter through the sacrifice of Triptolem. The congress organizers attempted to present the drama, which was inspired by Schuré, to the visitors in German. This was made possible by the dedicated work of a number of our members and by the beautiful, loving support of Bernhard Stavenhagen, who created a wonderful musical accompaniment to the Schuré drama. Stavenhagen preceded each of the four acts with a musical introduction that atmospherically prepared the audience for the dramatic action. With true congeniality, this important composer has immersed himself in the basic motifs of the mystery and rendered them musically. This musical performance was received with great enthusiasm by the participants of the congress. The willingness of the members of the German Section to work on this performance can be gauged from the fact that all the roles were played by members. Miss Fräulein v. Sivers played Demeter, Miss Sprengel played Persephone, Miss Garmatter played Eros, Mrs. v. Vacano played Hekate, Mr. Stahl played Pluto; we were delighted to have the collaboration of our member, the excellent actor Mr. Jürgas, who created an impressive figure in the role of Triptolemus; Baroness v. Gumppenberg, Dr. Peipers as Zeus, and Miss Wollisch as Dionysus. These are only the main roles; the choruses that are part of the plot were also composed of members. Special recognition must be given to our esteemed member, Mr. Linde, who took on the laborious task of creating the decorations.

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

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

The evening was again devoted to purely artistic performances. The Sonata in G minor by L. van Beethoven was performed by Chr. Döbereiner (cello) and Elfriede Schunk (piano). Afterwards, Gertrud Garmatter's excellent vocal performance could be heard again (two songs: “Weylas Gesang” by Hugo Wolf and “Frühlingslaube” by Franz Schubert). This was followed by solos for viola da gamba with piano, firstly “Adagio” by Handel and secondly “Aria con variazione” composed by A. Kühnel in 1695. Both pieces were performed by Chr. Döbereiner (viola da gamba) and Miss Elfriede Schunk (piano). A brilliant performance on the piano by the Italian member Mr. Kirby concluded the evening.

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

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

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

Dr. Rudolf Steiner was authorized at his request, and indeed unanimously and out of the enthusiasm of the audience, to express the thanks of the congress to Monsieur Edouard Schure, the poet of the “Drama of Eleusis” and Bernhard Stavenhagen, the composer of the musical part.

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

The exhibition of a series of artworks and reproductions of such artworks that have a special connection to theosophical thought took place in the adjoining room. Here one could see: etchings by Hans Volkert; reproductions of two pictures by Moreau; reproductions of two pictures by Hermann Schmiechen; a statuette “The Master” by [Heyman]; a picture “Out of Deep Distress” by Stockmeyer; reproductions of various pictures by Watts; three reproductions of works by Lionardo; pictures by Kalckreuth the Elder, by Sophie Stinde (landscapes); by Haß (After the Storm, Fairy Tale. The King's Daughter, The Storm Cloud, Five Fir Tree Studies); a reproduction by the painter Knopf.

The next Federation Congress will take place in Budapest in 1909, two years hence, at the kind invitation of our Hungarian members.

The following events also took place after the congress: a public lecture by Mrs. Besant in Munich on “exertion and destiny” on 27 May; two public lectures by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in Munich on “Bible and Wisdom” on 23 and 24 May; and a “Course in Theosophy” based on the Rosicrucian method by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, which began on Wednesday, May 22 and included 14 lectures (lasting until June 8).

Photographs of the seals and pillars described above were provided by our member Mr. Kuhn, and will soon be available from Miss Marie von Sivers (Berlin W, Motzstraße 17).

It should be noted here that the first two yearbooks of the Federation (containing the communications, lectures and papers of the Amsterdam and London congresses) have been published. Those of the third (Paris) and fourth (Munich) congresses will follow shortly. The content of the books will be discussed in detail in the next issue of this journal; however, the importance of the books for every theosophist should be pointed out here, and their purchase is strongly recommended.

A group photograph of the Munich conference participants in the festival hall has been obtained by our member Otto Rietmann and can be obtained from Mr. Otto Rietmann (photographer in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Rorschacherstraße).

I have tried to reconcile the theosophical view of rounds and races, as stated in the “Ancient Wisdom”, with the Bible, and have suggested that the Genesis, the presentation of the Mosaic creation document, is to be taken in a truly literal sense, and that one then fully obtains the theosophical view. It should be noted that the true, great religious documents receive their original and real meaning through Theosophy.

To give an idea of what the Mosaic creation document means, I would like to repeat again: we have to distinguish seven rounds and in each round seven races. In the first round we have the archetypes of the mineral kingdom, in the second round the archetypes of the plant kingdom, in the third round the archetypes of the animal kingdom, in the fourth round the archetypes of man. When our present fourth round is over, the archetypes of man will have been formed. We have not even reached the archetypes yet. When our round is over, we will have expressed the human archetypes. The mineral kingdom will have already reached its completion in the round. It will dissolve again, regress. In the next round, the fifth, the plant kingdom will find its completion, in the sixth the animal kingdom, and in the seventh round the human kingdom.

In the seventh round, humanity will be the complete image of the deity in earthly development. What the deity was at the beginning, humanity will be at the end of the seventh round. The deity will have completed its task and will then rest. Nirvana will have been achieved. It will be able to hand over its task to the Masters and to the Master Lodges, to the Brotherhoods, which will then have developed into the complete image. This is described to us in the Biblical record.

The seven days of Creation signify in the esoteric sense seven rounds, so that the first chapter is to be understood in the following way.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: Then God divided the light from the darkness and called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. [Genesis 1:1-5]

I ask you to visualize exactly what I have described as the first round was. It was initially a reddish, brightly glowing sphere that then went through various stages of development to become a violet sphere, then disappeared into the pralaya, only to emerge again as a red sphere. The first day is thus complete. During this round, the archetypes of the mineral kingdom were formed.

Now the second round begins.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” Before the mineral kingdom came into being, there could be no firmament. The waters represent spiritual substances. These did not separate from each other until the archetypes of the mineral kingdom had been formed, so that chunks now appeared in them. Then God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. God called them heaven and earth. Only the mineral kingdom was pushed into the earthly, the other was still heavenly.

And God said: Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into separate places, so that the dry land may be seen. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of the waters he called the Sea. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, and herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit whose seed is in itself, and upon the earth:” And it was so. The earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth. And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven, to give light on the earth: and they did so. And God saw the light, that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Here it is emphasized that the completion of the mineral kingdom comes on the fourth day. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. That is yet to come. Now the mineral kingdom will reach its completion. In the fifth round, the plant kingdom will reach its completion. This is expressed by saying: the plant idea will reach its completion. Everything that is now connected with the peculiar life that is in the mineral kingdom will be fully expressed in the fifth round. In the fifth round the mineral kingdom will gradually dissolve, and man will have a completely different relationship to the environment. The plant idea will have been realized. The relationship to the mineral kingdom will no longer be there, so that instead of being surrounded by a world of minerals, in the fifth round we will be surrounded by a world of plants. Everything that man leaves behind today will then be a plant product. There will be no more minerals; then human beings will live in the plant nature as they now live in the mineral nature. Man will be master over the plant kingdom; he will have dominion over the plant kingdom. This is how Genesis expresses it:

And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in all directions under the open heavens.” So God created the great whales and every living creature that moves with which the water swarms, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the water in the seas, and the birds shall multiply on the earth. And there was evening, and there was morning – the fifth day.

In the sixth round, we are dealing with the complete dissolution of the plant kingdom. A high, living animal thought has been realized, so that a difference between living and non-living will no longer exist. One will only live among the living. There will be no element at all as a medium; there will only be animal-like living entities. In the sixth round, everything related to sexual reproduction has long since disappeared; in the sixth round, we are only dealing with living things. Reincarnation ceases in the middle of the fifth round.

And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let us make man in our image, in the image of ourselves; let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the cattle, and all the earth and all the creatures that creep on the earth.” So God created man in his image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. God said: See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. These shall be for food for you and for all the beasts of the earth, for all the birds of the air and for all the creatures that move along the ground; I have given you every green plant for food. And it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. [Genesis 1:24-31]

Everything culminated in animal existence. After the fourth round, the mineral; after the fifth round, the plant; after the sixth round, the animal. In the seventh round, everything had passed into the human. God created man as man and woman, no longer bisexual, but unisexual, and so God rested on the seventh day.

That is the story of the seven rounds. The first three days are over, the fourth day is the present round, and the last three are yet to come. The second chapter presents the story of the fourth round as such. Specifically, the fourth round shows how heaven and earth came into being, that they were created by God, who made heaven and earth and so on. Man was not yet there when the plant was made.

Then came the description of the fourth round. We had the red ball first, which then turns orange, yellow, and turns into a fog. Now the fog turns into the physical. God breathed a living soul into man after he had made him out of the clod of earth - the first two races. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, and put the man he had made there. This is the man who is still asexual. We are still very much in the first two races.

Previously, the plant and animal kingdoms were not so strictly separated. Man had a continuation that merged into the plant world. Then the plant world separated and then the animal kingdom. Even during our fourth round, there was a time - at the very beginning, when the first animals had split off - when humans were still connected to the center of the earth, similar to certain aquatic plants that hang from a long stem. Originally, men were plants, in the days when they had not yet descended into animality. They were still more plant-men, men who had not yet set the plant kingdom free from themselves.

Such a man was called Adam Kadmon. The man who still contains the plant and animal kingdoms within himself, and only later expels them, is Adam Kadmon. Then, in a new verse, on the one hand we have the Tree of Life and on the other hand an increase of consciousness, the Tree of Knowledge.

The Lord God formed man - Adam - out of dust from the earth and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils. So man was a living soul.

And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it was divided into four heads. [...] And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may eat from every tree of the garden; but you shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.” [Genesis 2:7-17]

Verse 16: Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Now the incarnation begins. The incarnation begins at the moment when Kama-Manas enters. That was in the middle of the third race, and it ends in the middle of the fourth race of the fifth round. Then the text also describes the individual races. But it describes the fourth race in particular.

Among the original Turanians, a kind of betrayal of the deeper secrets occurred. The priests allowed themselves to teach people what were priestly secrets. The soul of man is expressed as the feminine. The incarnated will is the masculine. The soul, the feminine. The initiated priests have now united with the human soul and handed over the secrets to it. This was in the fourth race of the Atlanteans. This betrayal is described in the sixth chapter of Genesis.

But when men began to multiply, the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which were fair [Genesis 6:1-2]...

... for they are flesh. Now God decides on the downfall, the flood, the downfall of Atlantis. That Noah took a pair of each animal into the ark is based on a real event. It shows how theosophy is becoming infinitely relevant to our culture. Not so long ago, Darwinism and the history of creation were still at a different point of view than they are today. In recent years, science has undergone important transformations. It was thought that animals develop through the struggle for existence and through selection; the imperfect perish, the perfect remain. Naturalists are already talking about the powerlessness of the struggle for existence. De Vries, the Dutch naturalist, has shown that the so-called mutation plays the greatest role in the descent of living beings. It has been found that living beings, when placed in different living conditions, quickly develop into completely different forms. You have to put them in completely different living conditions, that is the only real method of producing new species. It is mutation that causes new breeds to emerge. This does not happen gradually, but in leaps. The tomato, for example, emerged rapidly from a plant that did not have the red fruit. It originated in one place and then spread throughout the earth. All other forms of reproduction and development are secondary to mutation.

Now, science wonders: how could mutation once play such a major role? The Atlanteans knew the secrets of the germination power of seeds well enough to accumulate it, even to use it as a driving force. But they also understood how to cross the seeds of animals and bring forth new forms. What lives on Earth now has come about through conscious methods of crossbreeding, through actual cultivation, so that humans have actually created the animal species. From the few animal species, the Atlanteans created the entire living animal world. It is rooted in human nature that he who possesses greatness is inclined to abuse it.

A few specimens were selected from the animals and taken to the Gobi Desert - an ark. The rest perished. This is the basis of the story of the flood. The aberration of the Atlanteans, the segregation of the animals that arose from the mistakes of the Atlanteans, and the rescue of the same with the pure priests in the Gobi Desert. We must now ask: Who bred the races? Theosophy answers: the Atlanteans. But time is also pressing. The wheat, for example, came directly from a world body, from Venus. So we have to make a connection here between science and theosophy. [...]

After man had enjoyed knowledge, he had to die, he could no longer live, he could not at the same time also enjoy the side of life.

In our time, Theosophy seeks to be a spiritual movement that will deepen our entire spiritual life and steer man away from the sensual and back to the supersensible. It does not bring humanity something absolutely new – no, it stands on the ground of earlier times. It is based on what previous generations have worked for us. But even what earlier generations did and knew was not something new; these were also conceptions of the general and great fundamental truths. Each generation and each time expresses what it can understand of it in its own way, adapting to the spirit and circumstances of the time. Theosophy in our time means the realization of the basic truths in the form in which they are useful for our time.

Now let us think back to a culture like that of 600 to 700 years ago. At that time there were not a lot of channels through which anyone who wished could gather knowledge, as is now the case in schools, libraries and so on. We have now undergone the development for this in the last century. The sciences have spread, one always wants to know more and more and to express everything in scientific forms and terms, because man dresses his thoughts in forms to which he is accustomed. Now the time has come when everyone wants to know, learn and read for themselves, and they can also find the way to do so.

In ancient times there were also a few preachers of wisdom and a great multitude who believed them at their command. (The speaker means that the large circle of people who know a little and who currently exist could not be found at that time, besides the individuals who knew more, whose number is not large even now, any more than it was in the Middle Ages.) Those who knew more of the great truths of life, of this great wisdom, which in its present form we call 'Theosophy', were called initiates or adepts, because they had a great and certain experience behind them. And those who have this experience behind them do not speak of these things as if they were speaking of another world, but as if they were constantly living in this world. And that is the case, because this world has become their own. There are always other worlds around us, spiritual worlds, other beings are always at work around us, and they relate to the sensual and physical life of a person in the same way that the colorful splendor of the world of light relates to a blind person. What the initiate has gone through can be compared to the experience of a blind person who has been born blind, has undergone an operation and been given the ability to see the light.

The Rosicrucian method of initiation presents the experiences that a person undergoes when the world of the spirit opens up to him.

As for the Rosicrucians themselves (the speaker does not say it in so many words, but implies that this is the name of an order or association of initiates who practice the same wisdom teachings as those found in Theosophy) - this name has been much discredited by people who knew very little about it and not much more than a few external forms. What one can find here and there in old writings about the Rosicrucians was not calculated to command respect from the outside world. But all this was very natural, because what was really Rosicrucian was actually kept secret until the end of the nineteenth century, because it was only in this century that it was destined to benefit humanity in general. It is only the present-day theosophical movement that is destined to absorb and disseminate the wisdom of the Rosicrucians.

Now (said the speaker) we are not dealing with the history of the Rosicrucians, but with living Rosicrucianism. The system we are talking about was only founded in the fourteenth century, arising from various spiritual seeds.

Rosicrucianism should not be confused with Theosophy in general: it is only one method. But when it comes to linking Theosophy to modern science, the Rosicrucian method is probably the most suitable.

And how is this method presented? In seven degrees (stages) man is led to the knowledge of spiritual truths.

These seven degrees are:

1. Degree: study
2. Degree: imaginative knowledge
3. Degree: knowledge through the occult scriptures
4. Degree: (what is called) the search for the philosopher's stone
5. degree: the study of the correspondence between man and the great world outside (microcosm and macrocosm),
6. degree: merging into the macrocosm,
7. degree: that which follows from the preceding degrees: beatitude.

Let us take a closer look at these different degrees:

First degree, “Study”: This is the acquisition of elementary knowledge of the higher worlds; for, above all, one needs some elementary knowledge before one can actually feel at home in it. But the higher worlds can only be known through an opening of the soul: Then man becomes a seer, in a certain sense already an initiate. Now, not every person can find the way out of themselves – at least not easily – but every person who is an explorer, gifted with common sense, can find their way through study, which would not have been so easy to find on their own. This is a kind of guidance, like using a map to find your way around an unfamiliar area. In this way, many have found what they previously searched for in vain: a coherent body of knowledge that never fails to provide a logical answer.

Here in the physical world, things correct people when they make a mistake: we would find our way here even without a map, even if it were less convenient. In any case, we would clearly see where we could not go and where there would be serious obstacles. This is not the case in the higher worlds: there you have to find your own guidance.

Once a person has absorbed the basic features of higher knowledge, they can be guided to the second degree of “maginative knowledge”. This is the knowledge that behind everything we perceive lies the truth of things, and that the (sensually) perceived things are only parables for the real spiritual (things).

Everything that is understood in science is in itself only a concept of the mind, it only exists in an idea. The task of the Rosicrucian is to recognize things not only in the idea, in the concept, but in the image.

We will give an example in the form of a dialogue, as it might have been held by a Rosicrucian teacher to his disciple:

The teacher: “Observe how the plant grows out of the ground, as an example of its own development, [observe] how it becomes: stem, blossom, fruit. And then understand that all these environmental conditions were necessary for the plant to develop in this way: air, light, earth and all the substances in it.

And now turn your gaze to the human being: a being formed differently. Flesh has come in place of plant substance, and instead of chlorophyll, the red blood flows through this being.

Sensually, the plant also has a consciousness, roughly that of a human being during sleep. The human being has a consciousness that is elevated to great heights. But this consciousness he has had to purchase at the price of being permeated by desires, instincts and passions. That which the plant contains and which grows into a fruit is pure; but on the other hand, consciousness is narrow and limited. And now grasp the pure plant on the one hand, and man on the other, with his higher development, permeated by the stream of passions."

The Rosicrucian (continued the speaker) must come to feel that it is the stream of passions that transforms the plant substance into muscle tissue, the green plant sap, the chlorophyll, into the red blood.

And then it was said: As a human being, you must rise to a higher ideal. Development does not end with this state. If it is to continue, then the human being and his consciousness must take on other forms, become a higher consciousness. He then returns to the chaste, pure plant substance at a higher level. Then the blood without passions has become like the plant sap again. Just as the plant produces fruit without desires, so the human being will then have become a being again whose organs produce without desires.

This ideal is called the ideal of the “Holy Grail”, the image of the cup in which the blood from the wounds of Christ was caught. As soon as the red blood has become chaste and pure like chlorophyll, it will be the blood of the pure human being.

There is a folk legend that tells how the bees came to suck honey from the wounds of Christ on the cross, just as they do from flowers. This image gives us an idea of what is meant. Everything that prevents man from rising above the plant must be killed. To represent this ideal, a symbol was chosen: the black cross with red roses around it. – The symbol of the spiritual ideal.

And it was of this spiritual ideal that an initiated man, a poet, spoke when he said: He who does not have this remains an ever-gloomy guest on our dark earth. (Goethe - see the same quotation in the lecture in Amsterdam.) It is clear that this is something quite different from intellectual knowledge. When we try to look at the whole world through this image, it makes a different, warmer impression on us than intellectual knowledge. It leaves us cold.

When we then face the world with such images, we feel what is happening in the world. Who can look at the black cross surrounded by red roses without shuddering with inner experience and feeling a flood of feelings within themselves? Feelings are creative forces. Because of them, new thoughts are born, a new world opens up for the person, as for the blind man who has been operated on and now sees the light. A new world opens up for the initiate through imaginative knowledge. These are things that are just as exact as the laws of nature.

Third degree: The appropriation of occult writings. In them, one not only gets to know the laws of nature, but also how to penetrate them with the will. An example of this: two experiences of the soul that are well known to us are shame and fear. If a person wants to hide something, then it is called shame, and the person blushes. If a person sees danger and fears being overwhelmed by it, then he feels fear. And then the person pales. These are two examples of how the inner state of mind results in a change in the physical, outer state. A world view is currently coming to us from America that seeks to explain everything the other way around, namely from material things. According to this, for example, a person does not cry because he is sad, but he is sad because he cries, because the eyes and lacrimal glands are under such material influences that tears are produced. This is: completely reversing the truth.

One can see that spiritual knowledge wants to say: everything that happens in the world is a consequence of the spiritual, which is the principle of this world; and man must experience for himself what happens outside in the great world, namely, by learning to understand how the spiritual is expressed in physical forms. You do not get to know the world by describing things and deducing the laws from them (abstracting), but by experiencing them inwardly.

(What followed here about the heart and its symbolic meaning was not sufficiently explained by the speaker to be more clearly reproduced.

Fourth degree: “The search for the Philosopher's Stone. Which involves no sorcery or deception, but something very natural. A writer who, incidentally, knew little or nothing about the secrets of the Rosicrucians, said something right about this point: the Philosopher's Stone is in the hand of every man - but he does not know it.

The significance of the breathing process is this: in the blood, oxygen combines with carbon to form carbonic acid, which the human being then exhales again. The plant inhales this carbonic acid through a process that is also a kind of breathing, even if we call it by a different name (assimilation process). The plant separates the carbon from the carbonic acid and returns the oxygen to man through evaporation. Without the plant world, human life on earth would be physically impossible, at least in the form in which we know it today. But then man must also realize that he is not an independent being; the plant belongs to him, just as his own limbs belong to him. That man could exist alone is an illusion.

And now we must consider that this material process is just as much based on a spiritual process as the feeling of shame is based on the blush of shame, and so on. This process is only an outward sign of an underlying spiritual process. We must understand that there is a real connection between humans and plants, and that changes in one must take place in the other as well, so that there must be a rhythmic connection between human breathing and that of the plant. There is actually a breathing rhythm in nature – but one cannot discuss this in public – which establishes a conscious contact between humans and plants.

But of this it can be said: When man consciously learns to direct the breathing process towards a goal, then he learns with his consciousness to carry out the process that the plant performs: the direct building of forms from carbon.

This is a completely true fact, even if it may sound strange: Man can learn to transform the carbon within himself, the transformation of matter.

The conquest of consciously transforming carbon into living substance is called the “philosopher's stone”. This is the path of the Rosicrucian: to use and master this greatest of all minerals. We now also understand what the man meant who said that we have all held the “philosopher's stone” in our hands without knowing it.

Now, in conclusion, we must again realize that the breathing process is based on and preceded by a spiritual process; that the transformation of carbon is a symbol of the transformation of man's inner being by ascending into the spiritual world; and also that what will be material in the future must first be spiritual.

Fifth degree: “The correspondence between man and the universe, between microcosm and macrocosm. This is based on the fact that everything that exists in the great world is also present in man as essence; and therefore man can find in himself everything that exists in the great world.

We owe our eye to the sun – its light. The eye is the creation of sunlight. And so the human being in his or her entire being is a creation of the universe. Just as we have to learn how to use our eye to see sunlight, we have to learn how to use our inner organs to receive spiritual light. Man must learn to recognize the relationship of external things to the spiritual world - the relationship of the microcosm to the macrocosm. And then he feels how roots expand out of him into the whole great world. Then he must come to forget his inner self completely: to forget the eye for the sake of the sun. Then it is as if the inner being of man has expanded into a whole universe.

Man learns to no longer say “I” in reference to himself, but in reference to the universe. This is the feeling through which man is absorbed in the macrocosm [- sixth degree].

The ideal of this knowledge is that everything eventually ends in a feeling that encompasses the world. And we cannot grasp this all at once, not with phrases like: Man must become selfless, but only along the long and arduous path of the Rose Cross initiation. To possess this feeling and thus understand the world, that is the initiation of the Rose Cross.

Everything that current science says can be understood in this light, but we do not stop at this science; we learn to understand the world and divinity [- seventh degree]. These are the preparatory teachings of Rosicrucianism.

We see that the teachings and methods of Rosicrucianism are based on the teachings of Theosophy, namely that there is a spark of God in man and that the goal is not to gather wisdom about God, but to learn to feel the pulse of the universe within oneself. Then man has become free. The knowledge that man can do this gives us a powerful impulse to act.

This concept is beautifully expressed by a man who knew (Goethe), in these words: “Man frees himself from the force that binds all beings by overcoming himself.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! First of all, allow me to express my heartfelt thanks to the Federation for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science for giving me the opportunity to speak about the relationship between certain scientific peculiarities of the present day and anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. Furthermore, I must ask you today to bear in mind that there is a certain difficulty in such a first, orienting lecture. This is because, of course, much of what needs to be said about a comprehensive topic can only be hinted at and therefore, necessarily, only suggestions can be made that will require further elaboration later on and that, by their very nature, must leave out some of the questions that inevitably arise.

But there are also certain difficulties in a factual sense with today's topic. The first is that in the broadest circles today, especially when the topic is discussed – the relationship between science and anthroposophy in any respect – a widespread prejudice immediately arises, namely that the anthroposophy meant here wants to take up an opposing position to science – to the kind of science that has developed in the course of human history in recent centuries, and which reached its zenith in the last third of the 19th century, at least in terms of its way of thinking and methodology. But it is not the case that there is such an oppositional position, because this anthroposophy, as I mean it here, is precisely concerned with bringing to bear the best fundamental principles of the scientific will of modern times. And it endeavors to further develop precisely that human outlook and scientific human attitude that is needed in order to truly validate the recognition of conventional science.

And in this further development, one finds that precisely from the secure foundations of the scientific way of thinking, if these are only correctly understood and pursued not only in their logical but also in their living consequences, then the path is also found to those supersensible regions of world existence with which the human being must feel connected precisely in their eternal foundations. In a certain respect, simply by continuing the fundamental principles of science, the path to the supersensible realms through anthroposophy is to be found.

Of course, when I speak to you about the relationship between anthroposophy and science, I will speak in such a way that you will not deviate from what you are accustomed to recognize as scientific conscientiousness and thinking. But I will not have to speak about individual fields, but rather, to a certain extent, about the entire structure of the scientific edifice of the present day. And since I have to assume that among you, dear fellow students, there are members of the most diverse fields of science, I will naturally not be able to do justice to the individual needs, and some things will have to be said in a way that is not meant to be abstract, but which is looking in an abstract way, so that perhaps the individual will have to draw the consequences from what I have to say for the individual fields. Agnosticism is a word that is not often used today, but it denotes something that is indeed related to the foundations of our scientific way of thinking. This agnosticism was established, I would say, as a justifiable scientific way of thinking, or perhaps better said, a philosophical way of thinking, by personalities such as Herbert Spencer. It was he who preferred to use this term, and if we want to find a definition of agnosticism, we will have to look for it in his work. But as a basis, as a fundamental note of scientific thought, agnosticism exists in the broadest fields of knowledge in the present day. If we are to say in the most abstract terms what is meant by agnosticism, we could say something like the following: we recognize the scientific methods that have emerged as certain in recent centuries, we use them to pursue appropriate science, as we must pursue it today in certain fields - through observation, through experiment, and through the process of thinking about both experiment and observation.

By pursuing science in this way – and I am well aware that this is absolutely justified for certain fields today – one comes to say to oneself: Of course, with this science one achieves a great deal in terms of knowledge of the laws that underlie the world. And then efforts are made to extend these laws, which have been assimilated, to man himself, in order to gain that which everyone who has healthy thinking within him ultimately wants to gain through knowledge: an insight into man's place in the universe, into man's destiny in the universe.

When one pursues science in this way, one comes, in the course of science itself, to say: Yes, these laws can be found, but these laws actually only refer to the sum of external phenomena as they are given to the senses or, if they are not given to the senses, as they can be inferred on the basis of the material that results from sensory observation. But what is discovered in this way about nature and man can never extend to those regions that are regarded in older forms of human knowledge as the supersensible foundation of the world, with which the deepest nature of man, his eternal nature, if it may be called that, must still have a certain connection.

Thus, it is precisely through the scientific approach that one comes to an acknowledgment of the scientifically unknowable - one comes to certain limits of scientific research. At most, one comes to say to oneself: the human soul, the inner spiritual being of man, must be connected with something that cannot be attained by this science alone. What is connected with it in this way cannot be investigated scientifically; it belongs to the realm of the unknowable. Here we are not faced with Gnosticism, but with an agnosticism, and in this respect contemporary spiritual life, precisely because of its scientific nature, has placed itself in a certain opposition to what still existed at the time when Gnosticism was the attitude of knowledge and was called Gnosis.

Now, what is advocated here as Anthroposophy is not, as some believe, a revival of the old Gnosticism, which cannot be resurrected. That was born out of the thinking of its time, out of the whole science of its time, so to speak. Today we are in an age in which, if we want to found a science on supersensible foundations, we have to take into account what has been brought forth in human development through the work of such minds as Copernicus, Galileo and many others whom I will not name now. And in saying this, one implicitly declares that it is impossible to take the standpoint of Gnosticism, which of course had nothing of modern science. But it may be pointed out that this Gnostic point of view was in a certain respect the opposite of what is often regarded today as the basic note of science. This Gnostic point of view was that it is very well possible for man to penetrate to the supersensible regions and to find there that which, though not religion, can be the basis of knowledge for religious life as well, if he turns to his inner powers of knowledge not applied in ordinary life.

Now, we will most easily come to an understanding of what I actually have to say today in this introductory lecture if I first remind you of something well known that can point to the transformation that the human cognitive process has undergone in the course of human development.

You all know, of course, what a transformation philosophy has undergone in terms of external scientific life. It encompasses – even in this day and age – the full range of scientific knowledge. As a human activity, philosophy was simply something that, as the name itself suggests, has a certain right to exist. Philosophy was something that did not merely flow from the human intellect, from observation and experiment, although philosophy also extended to the results that intellect, observation and even primitive experiment could arrive at. Philosophy was really that which emerged from the whole human being to a much greater extent than our present-day science, and again in a justified way. Philosophy emerged from a certain relationship of the human being's mind and feelings to the world, and in the age that also gave the name to philosophy, there was no doubt that the human being can also arrive at a certain objectivity in knowledge when he seeks his knowledge not only through experiment, observation and intellect, but when he applies other forces - forces that can be expressed with the same word that we use to describe the “loving” of something - when he therefore makes use of these forces.

And philosophy in the age of the Greeks also included everything that we today summarize in the knowledge of nature. Over the course of the centuries, philosophical endeavor has developed into what we know today as knowledge of nature. In recent times, however, this knowledge of nature has undergone an enormous transformation – a transformation that has made it the basis for practical life in the field of technology to the extent that we experience it in our lives today. If we take an unprejudiced survey of the scientific life of the present day, we cannot but say that what science has done especially well in recent times is to provide a basis for practical life in the field of technology. Our natural science has finally become what corresponds to a word of Kant - I quote Kant when he has said something that I can acknowledge, although I admit that I am an opponent of Kant in many fields. Kant said that there is only as much real science in science as there is mathematics in it. In scientific practice, especially in natural scientific practice, this has been more and more recognized.

Today we do natural science while being aware that we connect what we explore in space and time through observation and experiment with what mathematics reveals to us through pure inner vision. And it is precisely because of this that we feel scientifically certain that we are able to interweave something that is so very much human inner knowledge, human inner experience, as is mathematical, with what observation and experiment give us. By encompassing that which comes to us from outside through the mathematical certainty given to us in pure inner experience, we feel that we are connected to this outside in the process of knowledge in a way that is enough for us to experience scientific certainty. And so we have come more and more to see the exactness of the scientific in precisely the scientific prerequisites, to mathematically justify what we do in scientific work.

Why do we do this? My dear fellow students, why we do it is actually already contained in what I have just said. It lies in the fact that, by doing mathematics, we are merely active within our own mental experience, that we remain entirely within ourselves. I believe that those who have devoted themselves specifically to mathematical studies will agree with me when I say: in terms of inner experience, the mathematical, the process of mathematization, is something that, for those who do it out of inner ability and I would say, can do it out of inner enthusiasm, can give much more satisfaction than any other kind of knowledge of the external world, simply because, step by step, one is directly connected with the scientific result. And when you are then able to connect what is coming from outside with what you know in its entirety, whose entire structure you have created yourself, then you feel something in what is scientifically derived from the interweaving of external data and mathematical work that can be seen as based on a secure foundation. Therefore, because our science allows us to connect the external with an inner experience through mathematics, we recognize this as scientific in the Kantian sense, insofar as mathematics is in it.

Now, however, this simultaneously opens the way for a very specific conception of the scientific world view, and this conception of the scientific world view is precisely what anthroposophical research pursues in its consequences. For what does it actually mean that we have come to such a view of our scientific knowledge? It means that we want to develop our thinking inwardly and, by developing it inwardly, arrive at a certainty and then use it to follow external phenomena, to follow external facts in a lawful way. This principle is now applied to anthroposophy in the appropriate way, in that it is applied to what I would call pure phenomenalism in relation to certain areas of external natural science, in relation to mechanics, physics, chemistry, in relation to everything that does not immediately reach up to life. In the most extreme sense, we hold fast to this phenomenalism for the domains that lie above the inanimate. But we shall see in what way it must be supplemented there by something essentially different.

By visualizing the mathematical relationship to the external world, one gradually comes to realize that in inorganic sciences, thinking can only have a serving character at first, that nowhere are we entitled to bring anything of our own thoughts into the world if we want to have pure science. But this leads to what is called phenomenalism, and which, though it may be criticized in many details, has, in its purest form, been followed by Goethe.

What is this phenomenalism? It consists in regarding phenomena purely, whether through observation or through experiment, just as they present themselves to the senses, and in using thinking only to see the phenomena in a certain context, to line up the phenomena so that the phenomena explain themselves. But in so doing, everything is initially excluded from pure natural science that regards hypotheses not merely as auxiliary constructions, but as if they could provide something about reality. If one stops at pure phenomenalism, then one is indeed justified in assuming an atomistic structure from observation and experiment – be it in the material world or in the world of forces – but this tendency towards an atomistic structure can only be accepted to the extent that one can pursue it phenomenologically, that one can describe it on the basis of phenomena.

The scientific world view that constructs an atomism that postulates something actual behind the phenomena that can be perceived with the senses, but that cannot fall into the world of phenomena itself, sins against this principle.

But anthroposophy draws the final conclusion, to which everything in modern natural science actually tends. Even in this modern natural science, we have recently come to a high degree of development of this phenomenalism, which is still little admitted in theory but is applied in practice, by simply not concerning ourselves with the hypothetical atomic worlds and the like and remaining within the phenomena. But if we stop at the phenomena, we arrive at a very definite conclusion. We arrive at the conclusion that we really come to agnosticism. If we merely string together phenomena by thinking, if we bring order into phenomena, we never come to man himself through this ordering, through this tracing of laws. And that is the peculiar thing, that we must simply admit to ourselves: If you draw the final, fully justified conclusion of modern science, if you go as far as pure phenomenalism, if you put unjustified hypotheses of thought behind the veil of the sensory world, you cannot help but arrive at agnosticism. But this agnosticism is something quite different for knowledge than what humanity has actually hoped for and sought through knowledge within its course of development, within its history.

I do not wish to lead you into remote supersensible regions, although I will also hint at this, but I would like to point out something that should show how knowledge has nevertheless been understood as something quite different, for example in ancient times, from what knowledge can become today if we conscientiously build on our scientific foundations. And here I may again point to that Greek period in which all the sciences were still united within philosophy. I may point out that each of us has the deepest reverence for Greek art, to take just one example, for example for what lives in Greek tragedy.

Now, with regard to Greek tragedy, the catharsis that occurs in it has been spoken of as the most important component of it - the crisis, the decisive element that lives in tragedy. And an important question, which at the same time is a question that can lead us deep into the essence of the process of knowledge, arises when we tie in with what the Greek experienced in tragedy. If we define catharsis in such abstract terms, then it is said, following Aristotle, that tragedy should evoke fear and compassion in the spectator, so that the human soul, by evoking such or similar passions in it, is cleansed of this kind of passion. Now, however, it can be seen – I can only mention this here, the evidence for it can certainly also be found through ordinary science – from everything that is present in Greek tragedy, that thinking about this catharsis, about this artistic crisis, was very closely connected in the Greek mind, for example, with medical thinking.

What was present in the human soul through the effect of tragedy was thought of only as a healing process for something pathological in man, which was elevated into the scenic. From this artistic point of view, one can see how the Greeks understood therapy, the healing process. He understood it to mean that he assumed that something pathological was forming in the diseased organism. What is forming there - I must, of course, speak in very abstract terms in an introductory lecture - the organism takes up its fight against that. The human organism overcomes the disease within itself by overcoming the disease process through excretion. This is how one thought in the field of pathological therapy. Exactly the same, only raised to a higher level, was the thinking in relation to the artistic process. It was simply thought that what tragedy does is a kind of healing process for the soul. Just as the remnants of a cold come out of the organism, so the soul, through the contemplation of tragedy, should develop fear and compassion, then take up the fight against these products of elimination and experience the healing process in their suppression.

However, one can only understand the fundamentals of this way of thinking if one knows that even in Greek culture – in this Greek culture, which was healthy in some respects – there was the view that if a person merely abandons himself to his nature with regard to his psychological development, it will always lead to a kind of illness, and that the spiritual life in man must be a continuous process of recovery. Anyone who is more familiar with Greek culture in this respect will not hesitate for a moment to admit that the Greeks conceived of their highest spiritual life in such a way that they said to themselves: This is a remedy against the constant tendency of the soul to wither away; it is a way of counteracting death. For the Greeks, the spiritual life was a revival of the soul in the direction of its essence. The Greeks did not see only abstract knowledge in their science; they saw in their science something that stimulated a healing process in them. And that was also the special way of thinking, with a somewhat different coloring, in those world views that are based more on Judaism, where there is talk of the Fall of Man, of original sin. The Greeks also had this view - only in a different way - that it is necessary for the human soul to devote itself to an ongoing process of healing in life. Within this Greek spiritual life, it was generally the case that man did not juxtapose the activities to which he devoted himself and the ways of thinking that he held. They were rather combined in him, and so, for example, the art of healing was just an art to him - only an art that remained within nature. And the Greeks, who were eminently artistic people, did not regard art as something that could be profaned or dragged down into a lower realm when compared to that which is a healing process for the human being.

And so we see how, in those older times, knowledge was not actually separated from all of human nature, how it encompassed all human activity. Just as philosophy encompasses knowledge of nature and everything that should now arise from science, by developing it further and further, it also encompasses the artistic life. And finally, religious life was seen as the comprehensive, great process of recovery of humanity, so that, in understanding knowledge in the old way, we must actually say: there knowledge is understood as something that comes from the whole human being. Thought was already there, but humanity could not stop at this phase of the development of knowledge. What was necessarily connected with this phase of the development of knowledge? This can be seen quite clearly if one, equipped with today's scientific spirit, delves a little into some work, let us say in the 13th or 14th century, that was considered scientific in the natural sciences, for example. If you want to understand such a work, you not only have to familiarize yourself with the terminology, but you also have to immerse yourself in the whole spirit.

I do not hesitate to say that if you are steeped in today's scientific spirit and have not first done intimate, honest historical studies, you will inevitably misunderstand a scientific work from a period such as the 13th and 14th centuries AD, for the simple reason that even in those days – and the further back we go in human development, the more this is the case – man not only brought mathematics into the external world, but also a whole wealth of inner experiences in which he believed just as we believe in our mathematics. Thus we address nature quite differently today when we chemists speak of sulfur, phosphorus or salt than when people of that time spoke of sulfur or salt. If we apply today's concepts, we do not in the least touch the meaning that was then in a book, even one meant to be scientific, because at that time more and something other than the mathematical or the similar to mathematics was carried into the results of observation of the external world. Man brought a whole wealth of inner experience – qualitatively and not merely quantitatively – into the outside world.

And just as we express a scientific result with a mathematical formula, just as we seemingly connect subject with object, so in those days subject was connected with object even more, but the subject was filled with a wealth that we no longer have any idea of today and that we dare not allow ourselves to carry back into nature in the same way. Man at that time saw much in the external world that he himself put into it, just as we today put mathematics into nature. He did not think about nature in the same way as we do today, but he projected a great deal into it. In doing so, however, he also projected the moral into nature. Man projected the moral into nature in such a way that in four millennia the moral laws arose in the same way as the laws of nature arose in his knowledge. Man, who projected into nature what in ancient times was thought of as salt, sulphur, phosphorus, etc., was also allowed to project into nature what he experienced as moral impulses, because inwardly he was not doing anything different.

Now, however, we have rightly separated from such a view of the external world, through which we carry all that has been suggested into it. We only carry the mathematical into the external world, and our science therefore becomes a very good basis for technical practice. But by only bringing the mathematical into the external world, we no longer have the right to transfer the moral into objectivity through our science. And we must of necessity – precisely when we are very scientific in the sense that has emerged in recent centuries – fall prey to a moral agnosticism, because we have no other choice than to see only the subjective in moral principles, to see something that we cannot claim comes from nature in the same objective way as the course of a natural process itself.

And so we are obliged to ask ourselves: How do we found moral science and with it the basis of all spiritual science, including all social science? How do we found moral science in an age in which we must justifiably recognize phenomenalism for external nature? That was the big question for me at the time I wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom.” I stood on the ground - completely on the ground! on the ground of modern natural science, yes, on the ground of a phenomenalism regarding what can be fathomed by the process of knowledge from the external world of the senses. But then, if one follows the consequences with all honesty to the end, one must say: If morality is to be justified objectively, then another knowledge must be able to stand alongside this knowledge, which leads to phenomenalism and thus to agnosticism - a knowledge that does not thinking to devise hypothetical worlds behind the phenomena of the senses, but a knowledge must be established that can grasp the spiritual directly in intuition, after it - except for the mathematical - is no longer carried out into the world in the old way. It is precisely agnosticism that, on the one hand, compels us to fully recognize it in its own field, but at the same time also compels us to rouse our minds to activity in order to grasp a spiritual world from which we can, in the first instance, if we do not want to remain merely in the subjective, find moral principles through objective spiritual observation.

My Philosophy of Freedom has been called, with some justification, ethical individualism, but that only captures one side of it. We must, of course, arrive at ethical individualism because what is now seen as a moral principle must be seen by each individual in freedom. But just as in the inner, active process of the mind, mathematics is worked out in pure knowledge and yet proves to be well-founded within objectivity, so too can that which is the content of moral impulses be grasped in pure spiritual insight - not merely in faith, but in pure spiritual insight. And that is why one is compelled, as I was in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” to say: Moral science must be based on moral intuition. And I said at the time that we can only arrive at a real moral view in the modern style if we realize that Just as we extract individual natural phenomena from the whole of nature, we must extract the moral principles, which are only intuitively grasped spiritually but nevertheless objectively grasped quite independently of us, from a contemplated spiritual world, from a supersensible spiritual world.

I spoke first of moral intuition. This brings the process of knowledge into a certain line. Through the process of knowledge — especially if it is to remain genuinely scientific — the soul is driven to muster its innermost powers and to push this mustering so far that the intuition of a spiritual world really becomes possible. Now the question arises: Is only that which can be grasped as moral impulses to be seen in the spiritual world, or is perhaps that which leads us to our moral intuitions merely one area among many? The answer to this, however, arises when one grasps what has been experienced inwardly in the soul as moral intuitions and then continues this in an appropriate way.

Exactly the same thing that the soul experiences when it rises to the purely spiritual grasp of the moral – it has only become necessary in modern times through natural science – exactly the same thing that is lived through there can now also be lived through for further areas. Thus it may be said that anyone who has once practiced self-observation of this inner experience that leads to moral intuition can indeed develop this inner experience more and more. And the exercises presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” serve to develop this inner experience. And these exercises then lead to the fact that one does not stop at thinking and forming hypotheses with it, but that one regards this thinking in its liveliness and develops it further - to what I will now explain in the second part of my lecture and what can be called an exact looking at the supersensible world. What is meant is not the lost mystical vision of earlier times, but an exact vision of the supersensible world, in accordance with science, which can be called exact clairvoyance. And in this way we gradually arrive at those forms of knowledge which I characterized only recently here in a public lecture: imagination, inspiration and the higher intuition — forms of knowledge that illuminate the inner human being.

If we now ask ourselves how we can still have an objectively based moral science and thus also a social science, precisely when we are firmly grounded in natural science, then in these introductory words I wanted to show you first of all how, by honestly place oneself on the ground of today's science, but still wants to turn to life - to life as it simply must be for the person who is to achieve an inner wholeness - how one is thereby rubbed into spiritual research. This now differs from ordinary research in that ordinary research simply makes use of those soul powers that are already there, in order then to spread over the wide field of observation and experiment. In contrast to this, anthroposophical research first turns to the human being so that he may develop higher soul forces, which, when they are precisely developed, lead to a higher vision, which in the supersensible provides the complement to what we find in the sensual through our exact scientific methods.

How this exact higher vision is developed, how one can now penetrate from the sensual into the supersensible outside the moral realm, that will be the subject of my discussions after the break.

Short break

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! The first step in attaining supersensible knowledge is achieved through what we may call meditation, combined with a certain concentration of our thinking. In my last public lecture here in Leipzig, I described the essential point of this from one perspective. Today I would like to characterize it from a different perspective, one that also leads us to a scientific understanding of the world. The essence of this meditation, combined with concentration of thought, consists precisely in the fact that the human being does not remain, for example, with that inner handling of thinking that has been formed once through inheritance, through ordinary education and so on, but that at a certain point in his mature life he regards this thinking, which he has acquired, only as a starting point for further inner development.

Now you know that there are mystical natures in the present day who speak somewhat contemptuously of thinking and who resort to all kinds of other powers of cognition that are more tinged with the subconscious in order to gain a kind of view of the world that is supposed to encompass what ordinary thinking cannot grasp. This dream-like, fantastic immersion in an inner soul life, which crosses over into the pathological realm, has nothing to do with what is meant by anthroposophy. It moves in precisely the opposite direction: every single step that is taken to further develop thinking, to reeducate it to a higher ability, can be pursued with such an inner free and deliberate vividness that can otherwise only be applied to the inner experiences of the soul, which we develop through such a deliberate cognitive activity as that practiced by mathematicians.

Thus one can say: precisely that for which modern man has been educated through his scientific education – mathematical thinking – is taken as a model, not only for seeking out some external connections, but for developing a higher thinking process itself. What mathematics undertakes in the horizontal plane, if I may express myself figuratively, is undertaken in the vertical plane, I would say, by carrying out an inner soul activity, a soul exercise itself, in such a way that you give an account of yourself inwardly with every single step, just as you give an account of yourself with mathematical steps, by placing a certain content of ideas at the center of your consciousness when you control your thoughts, which should simply be a content of thoughts. It does not depend on the content; it depends on what you do with it. You should not suggest something to yourself in any way. Of all these more unconscious soul activities, anthroposophical practice is the opposite.

But if you further develop what you have already acquired as a certain form of thinking by resting with all your soul activity on a manageable content, and if you this resting on a certain soul activity, this attentiveness to this soul activity with the exclusion of everything else that can otherwise penetrate into the soul, is undertaken again and again, the thinking process becomes stronger. And only then do you notice what was, so to speak, the good side of materialism, of the materialistic world view. Because you now realize that all the thinking that you do in ordinary life, especially the thinking that continues in memory, leads us to the fact that what we have experienced in thought can later be brought up again through memory. One notices that all this can only be accomplished by man between birth and death by using his body as a basis - I do not want to say as an instrument, but as a basis. And it is precisely by developing thinking through inner development that we realize that ordinary thinking is entirely bound to the human body and its organs, and that the process of memory in particular cannot be explained without recourse to a more subtle physiology. Only now do we realize that thinking is freeing itself from the body, becoming ever freer and freer from the body.

Only now do we ascend from thinking that takes place with the help of the body to thinking that takes place in the inner processes of the soul; only now do we notice that we are gradually moving into such inner experience, which does not occur, but - I would like to say - is preparing itself. When we pass from the waking state of ordinary consciousness into the state of sleep, our organism simply becomes such that it no longer performs those functions that live out in imagining and in the perceiving associated with imagining.

But because in our ordinary life we are only able to think with the help of our body, thinking ceases the moment it can no longer be done with the help of the body – that is when we fall asleep. The last remnants remain in the pictorial thinking of dreaming, but if one again and again and again pushes thinking further and further through an inner, an exact inner exercise - that is why I speak of exact clairvoyance in contrast to dark, mystical clairvoyance -, through an exact exercise, one learns to recognize the possibility of thinking that is independent of the body. It is precisely because of this that the anthroposophical researcher can point to his developed thinking with such inner certainty, because he knows - better even than the materialist - the dependence of ordinary thinking on the bodily organization, and because he experiences how, in meditation, in practice, the actual soul is lifted out of its bondage to the body. One learns to think free of the body, one learns to step out of the body with one's I-being, one gets to know the body as an object, whereas before it was thoroughly connected with the subjectivity.

This is precisely what is difficult for contemporary education to recognize, because on the one hand, through anthroposophical knowledge, the bondage of the imagination to bodily functions has been understood in modern science, and this is actually becoming more and more apparent through anthroposophical knowledge. But we must be clear about the fact that, despite this insight, we cannot stop at this thinking, but that this thinking can be detached from the body by strengthening it inwardly through meditation. But then this thinking is transformed.

At first, when this body-free thinking flashes, when the experience flashes: you are now in a soul activity that you carry out as if you had simply withdrawn from your body - when this inner experience flashes, then the thinking becomes inwardly more intense. It acquires the same inner satiety that one otherwise has only when perceiving a sensual object. Thinking acquires pictorial quality. Thinking remains in the sphere of composure, just like any other thinking that is bound to the body, but in the body-free state it now acquires pictorial quality. One thinks in images. And this thinking in images was also present in its beginning in what Goethe had developed in his morphology. That is why he claims that he can see his ideas with his eyes. Of course, he did not mean the physical eyes, but what arose in him, so to speak, from an elementary natural process, but which can also be developed through meditation. By this he meant that he saw with the “spiritual” eye what was just as pictorial as otherwise only the physical perceptions, but which was thoroughly mental in its inner quality. I say “thought-like,” not thought, because it is a thought that has been further developed, a metamorphosed thought - it is thought-like.

In this way, however, one rises to the realization of what one is as a human being in one's life on earth - at least initially to the moment in which one is currently living. In ordinary consciousness, we have before us the present moment with all the experiences that are in the environment. Even in ordinary science, we have before us what comes as a supplement to this - there are the thoughts that arise in our minds, which we connect with the experiences of the present moment. This body-free, pictorial thinking, to which we rise and of which I have just spoken and which I call imaginative thinking - not because it is an imagination, but because it proceeds in images and not in abstractions - this thinking encompasses our past life on earth as a unity, as in a single tableau that stands before us. And we now recognize that in us, alongside the spatial organism, there lives a temporal organism - an organism in which the before and after stand in just as organic a connection as the side by side in the outer, physical spatial organism that we carry on us. This organism is recognized as a supersensible organism - in my books I have called it the “etheric body”; one can also call it the life body.

What it comprises is not at all identical with the unwarranted assumption of a “vital force” by an earlier science, which arrived at this vital force only by hypothetical means, whereas this life body comes to the developed imaginative thinking as a real intuition. In this way, one arrives at the fact that what is past for ordinary consciousness in the inner being of man - as something that I experienced ten years ago, for example, and that now emerges in my memory - that this does not now appear as something past, but one experiences it as something directly present, one looks at it with the intensity with which one looks at something present. But as a result, what would otherwise have been lost in the passage of time is suddenly revealed to you in its entirety; your whole life is a single image, one whose individual parts belong together. And one realizes that in reality the past is a present thing, that it only appears as past because we, with our knowledge attuned to present observation, have it only as a memory at this moment. But in objectivity it is an immediate present, a reality.

Thus one comes to the recognition of what is the first supersensible in man. But it also leads to the recognition of something that is present in the entire living world, which inorganic science cannot provide up to the level of chemistry: we come to the insight that is the further development of Goethean morphology; we come to the insight that the individual plant form is only a particular manifestation of that form, which also exists in other plants; we come to what Goethe calls the primordial plant, which is not a cell, but a concretely formed, supersensible form that can be grasped only by imaginative cognition, but which can live in every single plant form — can live in a changed, metamorphosed way. We come to an appreciation of what we find in the vegetable world when we want to understand it fully. And we must realize that if we do not develop this imaginative knowledge, which shows a supersensible, dynamic element in everything vegetable, we learn to recognize only the mechanical, physical, chemical processes that take place in the plant form.

It is to the credit of modern natural science, insofar as it is botany, that it has carefully studied what takes place in the plant form, or rather, in the part of space enclosed by the plant form, what takes place in the mechanical, physical, and chemical processes. These processes are no different from those that are also out there, but they are grasped by something that cannot be grasped by the same methods as the physical and chemical ones. They are grasped by that which lives as a real supersensible and can only be recognized in imagination – in that imagination in which we also find ourselves at the same time as human totality in our experience since birth as if standing before us in a single moment.

We learn, on the one hand, to recognize why we, especially when we apply the modern, exact scientific methods as they have developed, must come to a certain agnosticism with regard to the understanding of the vegetable. And so we can see why there must be a certain field of agnosticism; and so we can also see how anthroposophy adds precisely that which must remain unknown to this agnosticism. We see how anthroposophy leads beyond agnosticism while allowing it full validity in its own realm. That, ladies and gentlemen, is one thing.

The other thing, however, is that at this stage we are acquiring a more detailed understanding of the interaction between the human being and the external world. Physics, mechanics, chemistry are rightly being developed in the present day in such a way that we carry as little of the human as possible into this external world, in that we say: only that has objectivity in which we contain all subjectivity. - Certainly, anthroposophy will not fight the justification of this method in a certain field, but will recognize it. But when we use what we also recognize in the imagination to grasp and behold what lives in the vegetable kingdom, we attain on the one hand an intimate knowledge of our own supersensible being — at least as it is between birth and death — but we also thereby gain a vision of the fluctuating, metamorphosing processes in the world of living forms. In this way we connect ourselves as human beings with the outer world, initially at a first level, in imagination. We incorporate the human element into our world view.

The next level of supersensible knowledge is inspiration. It is attained by developing more and more, I would say, the opposite pole of meditation and concentration. Anyone who has acquired a certain practice in meditation and concentration knows that when you energize thinking, you also get the inner inclination to dwell on what arises as a part of the soul as energized thinking. One must exert oneself more when leaving these energized imaginative thoughts than when leaving any other thought. But if one can now really throw these energized thoughts out of consciousness again - this whole imaginative world that one has first appropriated -, if one can empty consciousness, not cannot be emptied from the ordinary point of view, but can be emptied after one has first inwardly strengthened it, then this emptiness of consciousness becomes something quite different from what the emptiness of consciousness is in ordinary life. There the emptiness of consciousness is sleeping.

The emptiness of consciousness, however, which occurs after one has first strengthened this consciousness, is very soon filled by the phenomena of an environment that is now completely different from all that one has previously known. Now one gets to know a world to which our ordinary ideas of space and time can no longer be applied. Now we get to know a world that is a real external world of soul and spirit. It is just as concrete as our real world of the senses. But it can only flow into us if we have emptied our consciousness at a higher level. After one has first come to imagination, by concentrating on a spiritual content and now being able to perceive outside one's body because one has activity within oneself - not the passivity that is present in ordinary consciousness - and by having gone through the appropriate preparations, the spiritual outer world now penetrates through the developed activity of the freed consciousness, just as the appearances of the world of colors or the world of sounds otherwise penetrate through the senses.

On the one hand, through this spiritual outer world, we arrive at an understanding of what we were as human beings before we descended from a spiritual and soul world into the physical world, before we united with what had been prepared in the mother's womb through conception as the physical human germ. One gains an insight into what first lived in a spiritual-soul world and then united with the physical human being. So one gets to know that which, between birth and death, is basically quite ineffective, which is, so to speak, excluded from our sensory perception, but which was effective in us and which worked in its purity before we descended into a physical body. That is one thing: we gain a deeper knowledge of human nature by ascending to this second stage of supersensible vision, which is developed just as precisely as the other, the imaginative stage. And this knowledge, through which a spiritual world flows into us, just as pure air flows from outside into our lungs and is then further processed, this knowledge, which we process in the subconscious for ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious for the developed consciousness, fully consciously, I have allowed myself to call this influx “inspirative knowledge”.

This is the second step. Through it, we first come to recognize our eternal as pre-existing. But with this we also have the possibility to penetrate into what now not only lives in the external world, but what lives and feels, what thus lives out in the living formation of the inner life in such a way that this inner life becomes present to itself in feeling. Only through this do we learn to recognize what lives around us as animalistic. We supplement our knowledge with what we can never attain through an ordinary view, as we have developed it in physics and chemistry. We come to look at what lives in the sentient being as a higher, supersensible reality. We now learn through observation, not through philosophical hypotheses in the modern sense, to actually follow a new, higher world: the world of the spiritual and soul in the sentient physical. But in doing so, we move a step further away from agnosticism. This must exist if we only follow the chemical processes in the sentient living. We must follow these, and it is the great merit of modern natural science that these can be followed, but with that, this natural science must become agnostic. This must find its completion in the fact that precisely now, in free spirituality, one experiences through inspiration that which must be added in order to arrive at the full reality of sentient life. But in this way one achieves something else, of which I would like to give you an example. In this way one comes to recognize that the process that takes place in the human being, for example - it is similar for the animal - that this process is not only an ascending one, but at the same time also a descending one. Only now are we really learning to look at ourselves properly from within; we learn, by ascending to this inspired realization, to know more precisely what is actually going on in our ordinary consciousness. Above all, one learns to recognize that it is not a process of building up, but of breaking down, that our nervous life is essentially a life of breakdown. If our nerves could not be broken down - and of course rebuilt from time to time - we could not develop ordinary thinking. Vital life, when it appears in abundance, is basically a numbing of thought, as it occurs in every sleep. The kind of life that is interspersed with feeling and thinking must, at the same time, carry within it a process of decomposition, I would say a differential dying process.

This process of disintegration is first encountered in healthy life, that is, in the life in which it occurs in order for human thinking in the ordinary sense of the word to come about at all. Once one has acquired an understanding of the nature of these processes, one also becomes familiar with the abnormal occurrence of these processes. There are simply certain organs or organ systems in the human organism in which parallel processes to ordinary thinking occur. But if the catabolic processes, which are otherwise the physical basis of thinking, extend to organs to which they are not otherwise assigned, so to speak, through an internal infection – the word is not quite used in the actual sense – then disease states arise in these organs.

It is absolutely necessary that we develop pathology in such a way that we can also find the processes that we recognize in physiology in pathology. However, this is only possible if we can see the essence of these processes in our human organization; it is similar in the animal organization, but still somewhat different - I say this again so that I am not misunderstood. By observing the processes in our human organism in such a way that we recognize one polarity as an organization that is designed for breakdown and the other polarity as one that cannot be affected by this breakdown in a healthy state, we learn to see through these two aspects in inspired knowledge.

If we learn to see through this and can we then connect this seeing through of our own organism with an inspired recognition of the outer world, of the processes in the plant kingdom, if we learn to see through this mineral kingdom and also the animal kingdom through inspired knowledge, then we learn to recognize a relationship between human inner processes and the outer world that is even more intimate than that which already existed at the earlier stage of human history. I have shown how, at this earlier stage, man felt related to external nature by seeing in all that appears in the most diverse metamorphoses in the vegetable world something that he found in the soul, in his own life between birth and death.

But if, through inspired knowledge, he now learns to see that which he was in his pre-existent life, then at the same time he sees through that in the outer realm which not only lives in feeling, but which has a certain relation, a certain connection, to that which lives in the human organization, which is oriented towards feeling, towards thinking. And one learns to recognize the connections between the processes outside and the processes inside, and also the connections with the life of feeling. One learns to recognize what is brought forth in man when the organs are seized by the breakdown, which actually should not be seized by it, because the breakdown in this sense must only be the basis for the thinking and feeling process. When, as it were, the organic activity for thinking and feeling seizes members of the human organism that should not be seized, then what we have to grasp in pathology arises. But when we grasp the outer world with the same kind of knowledge, then we find what must be grasped by therapy. Then we find the corresponding process of polar counteraction, which - I would express it this way - normal internal breakdown. In short, through an inner vision we find the connection between pathology and therapy, between the disease process and the remedy. In this way we go beyond medical agnosticism – not by denying present-day medicine but by recognizing what it can be – and at the same time we find the way to add to it what it cannot find by itself.

If anyone now believes that anthroposophy wants to develop some kind of dilettantism in the most diverse fields of science, then I have to say: that is not the case! It consciously wants to be the continuation of what it fully recognizes as the result of today's science, but it wants to supplement it with higher methods of knowledge. She wants to go beyond the deficiencies of mere trial and error therapy, which basically everyone who is also active in practice has already sensed, to a therapy gained from observation that has an inner, organic connection with pathology, which is, so to speak, only the other side of pathology. If one succeeds in finding pathology simply as a continuation of physiology in the way described, then one also succeeds – by getting to know the relationship between man and his natural environment – in extending pathology into therapy in a completely rational way, so that in the future these two need not stand side by side as they do today in a more agnostic science.

These are only suggestions that I would like to make in the sense that they could show a little – I know how incomplete one has to be in such an orienting lecture – how far it is from anthroposophy to ant opposition to recognized science, but rather that it is precisely important for it to draw the final consequence from the agnostic form of science and thereby arrive at the view of what must be added to this science. This is already being sensed, and basically there are many, especially members of the younger generation, who are learning to feel that science as it exists now is not enough, who feel: we need something else, because it is not enough for us. Precisely when we are otherwise honest about it, then we have to come to something else through it. And it is precisely for those who get to know science not just as an answer but, in a higher sense, as a question that anthroposophy wants to be there — not to drive them into dilettantism, but to progress in exactly the right, exact way from science to what science itself demands if it is pursued consistently.

But then there is a third higher stage of knowledge. This is attained when we extend the exercises to include exercises of the will. Through the will, we initially accomplish mainly what a person can do in the external world. But when we apply the same energy of the will to our own inner processes, then a third stage of supersensible knowledge arises on the basis of imagination and inspiration. If we are completely honest with ourselves, we will have to admit at every moment of our lives: We are something completely different today than we were ten or twenty years ago. The content of our soul has changed, but in changing it, we were actually quite passively surrendered to the outside world. It is precisely in relation to our inner transformation that a certain passivity reigns in us.

But if we take this transformation into our own hands, if we bring ourselves to radically change what is habitual in us, for example, in a certain relationship - where a change seems possible - if we behave inwardly towards ourselves in such a way that we make ourselves into a different person in a certain direction through our own will, then we have to actively intensify our inner experience over years, often decades, because such exercises of will take time. You make up your mind: you will develop a certain quality or the form of a quality in yourself. After months you notice how little you succeed in doing this, in this way, what otherwise the body makes out of you. But if you make more and more effort, then you not only see your inner, supersensible human being, but you also manage to make this inner human being, so to speak, completely transparent. A sense organ such as our eye would not be able to serve us as a visual organ if it did not selflessly - if I may use the term - withdraw its own substantiality. As a result, it is transparent, physically transparent. Thus, through exercises of will, we become, so to speak, inwardly transparent to the soul.

I have only hinted at a few things here. You will find a very detailed account in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” We really do enter a state in which we see the world without ourselves being an obstacle to fully penetrating into the supersensible. For, in fact, we are the obstacle to entering fully into the supersensible world because, in our ordinary consciousness, we always live in our body. The body only imparts to us what is earthly, not what is soul-spiritual. We now look, by being able to disregard our body, into a stage of the spiritual world through which that appears to us before the spiritual gaze, which becomes of our soul, when it has once passed through the gate of death. Just as we get to know our pre-existent life through the other way I described earlier, so now we get to know our life in the state after death. Once we have learned to see the organism no longer, we now learn, as it figuratively presents itself to us, the process by which we find ourselves when we discard this physical organism altogether and enter the spiritual-soul world with our spiritual-soul organism. The demise of our physical existence, the awakening of a spiritual-soul existence: this is what we experience in the third stage of supersensible knowledge, in the stage that I have called higher intuitive knowledge.

By having this experience, by being able to place ourselves in a spiritual world without being biased by our subjectivity, we are able to recognize this spiritual world in its full inwardness. In inspiration, it is still as it flows into us; but now, in higher intuition, we get to know it in its full inwardness. And now let us look back at what first presented itself to us as a necessity: moral intuition. This moral intuition is the only one for ordinary consciousness that arises out of the spiritual world during proper self-contemplation of pure thinking - I have presented this in my “Philosophy of Freedom”. But if we now go through imagination and inspiration, we do exercises that teach us to completely detach ourselves from ourselves, to develop the highest activity of the spiritual and soul, and yet not to be subjective, but to be objective, by living in objectivity itself. Only when we have achieved this standing in objectivity is it possible to do spiritual science.

Only then is it possible to see what is already living as spiritual in the physical world; only then does one gain a real understanding of history. History as a series of external facts is only the preparation. What lives as spiritual driving forces and driving entities in the historical can only be seen through intuitive knowledge. And it is only at this level of intuitive knowledge that we truly see what our own ego is. At first, our own ego appears to us as something we cannot see through. Just as a dark space within a brightness appears to us in such a way that we see the brightness from the darkness with our eyes, so we look back at our soul, see its thoughts, feel further inner processes, live in our will impulses. But the actual I-being is, so to speak, like a dark space within it. This is now being illuminated. We are getting to know our eternal being. But with that, we are only getting to know the human being in such a way that we can also fully understand him as a social being. Now we are at the point where the complement to social agnosticism occurs.

This is where things start to get really serious. What is social agnosticism? It arises from the fact that we apply the observation that we have learned to apply correctly to external, natural phenomena, and that we now also want to apply this trained observation to social phenomena. This is where the various compromise theories in social science and sociology come from – in fact, all the theories about the conception of social life that we have seen arise. This is where the approach to the conception of social life that starts from the natural sciences comes from, but which must therefore disregard everything cognizable, everything that is alienated from thought and only present in the life of instincts. The extreme case of this occurred in Marxism, which regards everything that is spiritual as an ideology and only wants to see the impulses of social life realized if these impulses develop out of the instinctive, which belongs to agnosticism. Class consciousness is actually nothing more than the sum of all that is not rooted in a knowledge of man, but that comes from the instincts - only it must be recognized by those who develop such instincts in certain life circumstances.

If you look at our social life with an unbiased eye, you will find that we have come to agnosticism precisely in the social sphere. However grotesque and paradoxical it may still appear to modern man, in this field of spiritual science we can only go beyond this kind of knowledge, insofar as it is agnostic, if we rise to truly intuitive knowledge and thus to the experience of the human being. We humans today actually pass each other by. We judge each other in the most superficial way. Social demands arise as we develop precisely the old social instincts most strongly. But an inner, social soul mood will only come about if the intuitions from a spiritual world permeate us with life. In the age of agnosticism, we have necessarily come to see everything spiritual more or less only in ideas. However, ideas, insofar as they are in ordinary consciousness, are not alive. Today's philosophers speak to us of logical ideas, of aesthetic ideas, of ethical ideas. We can observe them all, we can experience them all inwardly and theoretically, but they have no impulsive power for life. The ideas only become a reality of life when they are wrung out in intuitive experience of the spiritual. We cannot achieve social redemption and liberation, nor can we imbue our lives with a religiosity that is appropriate for us, if we do not come to an intuitive, vitalized grasp of the spiritual.

This life-filled comprehension of the spiritual will differ significantly from what we call spiritual life today. Today, we actually call the ideational life spiritual life; in other words, life in abstract ideas that are not impulses. But what intuition provides us with will give us as humanity a living spirit that lives with us. We have only thoughts, and because they are only thoughts, we have lost the spirit altogether. We have thoughts as abstractions. We must regain the life of thoughts. But the life of thought is the spirit that lives among us - and not the spirit that we merely know. We will only develop a social life if, in turn, spirit lives in us, if we do not try to shape society out of the spiritless - out of what lives in social agnosticism - but if we shape it out of that attitude that understands through intuition to achieve the living spirit.

We may look back today on earlier ages - certainly, we have overcome them, and especially those of us who stand on anthroposophical ground are least likely to wish them back in their old form. But what these earlier ages had, despite all the mistakes we can easily criticize today, is that in certain epochs they brought the living spirit - not just the spirit of thought - among people. This allowed the existing basis of knowledge to expand to include artistic perception of the world, religious penetration of the innermost self, and social organization of the world. We will only achieve a new social organization of the world, a new religious life, and new artistic works on the basis of knowledge, on which they have always fundamentally stood, when we in turn gain a living knowledge, so that not only the thoughts of the spirit, but the spirit itself lives in humanity. It is this living spirit that Anthroposophy seeks. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory or a theoretical world view; Anthroposophy wants to be that which can stir the spirit in its liveliness in the life of the human being, that which can permeate the human being not only with knowledge of the spirit, but with the spirit itself.

In this way we shall go beyond the age that has brought phenomenalism to its highest flowering. Of course, one can only wish that it will continue to flourish in this way, one can only wish that the scientific way of thinking will continue to flourish in the conscientiousness in which it has become established. But the life of the spirit must not be allowed to exist merely by continuing to live in the old traditions. Fundamentally, all spiritual experiences are built on traditions, on what earlier humanity has achieved in the way of spirit.

In principle, our art today is also built on traditions, on the basis of what an earlier humanity has achieved. Today, we cannot arrive at new architectural styles unless we reshape consciousness itself, because otherwise we will continue to build in Renaissance, Gothic, and antique styles. We will not arrive at creative production. We will arrive at creative production when we first inwardly vitalize knowledge itself, so that we do not merely shape concepts but inner life, which fills us and can form the bridge between what we grasp in thought and what we must create in full life.

This, dear attendees, dear fellow students, is what anthroposophy seeks to achieve. It seeks to bring life into the human soul, into the human spirit, not by opposing what it recognizes as fully justified in the modern scientific spirit, as it is often said to do. It seeks to carry this spirit of science further, so that it can penetrate from the external, material and naturalistic into the spiritual and soul realms. And anyone who can see through people's needs in this way today is convinced that in many people today there is already an inner, unconscious urge for such a continuation of the spirit of science in the present day. Anthroposophy seeks only to consciously shape what lives in many as a dark urge. And only those who get to know it in its true light, not in the distortions that are sometimes created of it today, will see it in its true light and in its relationship to science.

Pronunciation

Walter Birkigt, Chairman: I would like to thank Dr. Steiner for the lecture he has given here, and I would now like to point out that the discussion is about to begin. Please submit requests and questions in writing.

Dr. Dobrina: Dear attendees! After such a powerful picture of the present and past intellectual history of humanity has been presented, it is not easy to give a sharp summary in a few words. But I think that before proceeding to a critique, one must first appreciate the depth of the whole presentation. One must appreciate and admit that a synthesis is sought between natural science with its exact trains of thought and spiritual science with its partly antiquated forms.

In the last few centuries, natural science has indeed managed to rise to the throne and even to push philosophy down from the throne as antiquated. Now, however, those who cannot be satisfied with the philosophy that has been overthrown and deified are again looking for an impetus to bring philosophy back to the old podium on which it stood in Greece. And I believe that anthroposophy, as developed for us by Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is an attempt to shape the synthesis in such a way that, although it only recognizes natural science in the preliminary stages and makes every effort not to object to its exactness, it then goes beyond it to penetrate into the supersensible realm. However, the step into the supersensible world seems to me to be based on very weak foundations, especially since Dr. Rudolf Steiner works with concepts such as preexistence. Those who have more time could ask more pointed questions about what he means by this preexistence or what he has to say about the “post-mortem” life, about life after death.

Applause.

In any case, I believe that from this point of view we can and must immediately enter into a sharp discussion with him, and it will probably show that basically the whole conceptualization of Dr. Rudolf Steiner breaks down into two quite separate areas. On the one hand, he makes an effort to plunge into therapy and to consider Greek thinking from the point of view of therapeutic analysis, while on the other hand he works with concepts that come from the old tools of theosophy and are very reminiscent of antiquated forms of spiritual life.

Applause

For this reason, I would like to say very briefly that the whole picture that Dr. Rudolf Steiner has developed here, as well as in the previous public lecture, seems to me to be quite inadequate and that on this basis one can in fact arrive at no criticism of modern life, nor of modern economic struggles, nor of the position that is taken today against the spiritual powers that have fallen into decline.

Applause.

Perhaps Dr. Rudolf Steiner would be kind enough to

respond to this shortly.

Walter Birkigt: Does the assembly understand the statement as a question, that Dr. Steiner should respond immediately? I would therefore ask Dr. Steiner to respond.

Applause.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, dear attendees, I said in my lecture that it should be an orienting one. And I said that an orienting lecture faces the difficulty of being able to only hint at certain things that would require further elaboration, so that a whole flood of unsatisfactory things naturally arise in the soul of the listener, which of course cannot be cleared away in the first lecture either. The point of the comments – I cannot say objections – made by the esteemed previous speaker is that he found that I had used words that he considers old terms.

Now, my dear audience, we can put all our words – even the most ordinary ones – into this category. We must, after all, use words when we want to express ourselves. If you were to try to see what is already available today in contemporary literature, which often seems outrageous to me – I mean outrageous in terms of its abundance – if you were to read everything that I myself have written, for example, ...

Heiterkeit

... when faced with this abundance, it is quite natural that in a first, introductory lecture, only some aspects can be touched upon. So let us take a closer look at what the esteemed previous speaker has just said. He said that pre-existence reminds him of old concepts. But now, he is only reminded of old terms because I have used words that were there before. Of course, when I say that by elevating imaginative knowledge, which I have characterized, to inspired knowledge, which I have also characterized, I arrive at the concept of preexistence. If I merely describe how one comes to the vision of the pre-existent life, then it does not depend on the term “preexistence,” but only on the fact that I describe how a precise practice takes place to arrive at an insight into what was there in the human being before this human being — if I may put it this way — united with a physical body, with what was being prepared in the mother's body through the conception. So, I only used the word pre-existence to point to something that can only be seen when supersensible knowledge has been attained in the way I have described. In Gnosticism one finds a certain attitude towards knowledge. As such, Gnosticism has nothing to do with the aims of modern anthroposophy, but this attitude towards knowledge, as it was present in ancient Gnosticism and which aims at recognizing the supersensible, is reviving in our age - in the post-Galilean, post-Copernican age - but in a different form.

And now I will describe to you in more detail what should follow – I will describe it in a few sentences. You see, if we look from a knowledge that is sought on the basis of the methods I have spoken of, if we look from this kind of knowledge to an older one that is very different from it, we come to an oriental form of knowledge that could in fact be called “theosophical”. Only after this had developed in older times could a philosophy arise out of a theosophy, and only then could anthroposophy arise out of a philosophy. Of course, if you take the concepts in such a way that you only hold them in their abstractness, not in what matters, then you will mix everything up, and the new will only appear to you as a rehash of the old. This theosophy was achieved by completely different methods of knowledge than those I have described.

What were the essentials of this method of knowledge? I do not mean everything, but just a certain phase of it. For example, the ancient Indian yoga process, which should truly not be experienced as a warm-up in anthroposophy. We can see this from the fact that what I am describing initially seems very similar to this yoga process, doesn't it? But if you don't put it there yourself, you won't find that what I am describing is similar to the yoga process. This consisted in the fact that at a stage of human development in which the whole human life was less differentiated than it is today, it was felt that the rhythmic breathing process was connected with the thinking process. Today we look at the matter physiologically. Today we know: When we breathe, when we inhale, we simultaneously press the respiratory force through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breathing process continues in a metamorphosed way, so that, physiologically speaking, we have a synthesis of the breathing process and the thinking process.

Yoga is based on this process, transforming ordinary breathing into a differently regulated breathing. Through the modified breathing process – that is, through a more physical process – thinking was transformed. It was made into what a certain view in the old, instinctive sense yielded. Today, we live in a differentiated human organization; today we have to go straight to the thought process, but today we also arrive at something completely different as a result. So when you go into the specifics, you will be able to clearly define each individual phase of cognition as it has occurred in succession in human development. And then you will no longer think that what is now available in the form of anthroposophy, as a suitable way of acquiring higher knowledge in the present day, can somehow be lumped together with what was available in older times. Of course, we cannot discuss what I have not talked about at all on the basis of what I have told you in an introductory lecture. I would now, of course, have to continue with what pre-existent life is like. I could say nothing else in my introductory lecture except that the realization of pre-existent life is attained through the processes described, which are indeed different from anything that has ever emerged in history as inner development.

And now I would really like to ask what justification there is for criticism when I use the word pre-existence in the sense in which everyone can understand it. It means nothing other than what it says through the wording. If I understand existence as that which is experienced through the senses, and then speak of pre-existence, then it is simply existence in the spiritual and soul life before sensual existence. This does not point to some old theosophy, but a word is used that would have to be further explained if one goes beyond an orienting lecture. You will find that if you take what may be called Theosophy and what I have described in my book, which I have also entitled “Theosophy” - if you take that, then it leads back to its beginnings in ancient forms - just as our chemistry leads back to alchemy.

But what I have described today as a process of knowledge is not at all similar to any process of knowledge in ancient times. It is therefore quite impossible to make what will follow from my lecture today and what has not yet been said the subject of a discussion by saying: Yes, preexistence, that leads back to old tools. If you have followed it, it does not lead back to old tools, but it does continue certain attitudes of knowledge that were present at the time when the old tools were needed, and which today only exist in their remnants and project into our present as beliefs, whereas in the past they were reached in processes of knowledge. Now, through processes of knowledge that are organized in the same way as our scientific knowledge, we must again come to insights that can fill the whole human being, not just the intellectually oriented one.

Dear attendees, if you want to criticize something, you have to criticize what has been said directly, not what could not be discussed in the lecture and of which you then say that it is not justified or the like. How can something that is just a simple description not be justified? I have done nothing but describe, and that is precisely what I do in the introductory lectures. Only someone who knew what happens when one really does these things could say that something is not explained. If one really does these things, that is, if one no longer merely speaks about them from the outside, then one will see that they are much more deeply grounded than any mathematical science, for they go much more closely to the soul than mathematical processes do. And so such a criticism is an extraordinarily superficial one. And the fact that anthroposophy is always understood only in this external way makes its appearance so extraordinarily difficult. In no other science is one required to give everything when a lecture is given. Only in anthroposophy is one required to give everything in a lecture. I have said from the beginning that I cannot do that.

Applause

But it is not a matter of my describing what is available as old tools of the trade, for example how gnosis has come to such knowledge in inner soul processes or how, for example, the oriental yoga school comes to knowledge. If one knows these tools, if one does not just talk about them, ...

Applause

... then people will no longer claim that anthroposophy reminds them of the old days. This is only maintained as long as one allows reminiscences to come in the form of abstract concepts that arise only from the fact that they are not compared with the concrete, with the real. Of course, I could go on for a very long time, but this may suffice as an answer.

Lively applause

Mr. H. Schmidt: Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to criticize something, or rather put a question mark over it: Dr. Steiner said this evening that every scientific world view is dualistic in the sense that it must add to what is immediate and certain something uncertain. It is clear that in anthroposophy this other is the supersensible world. But the scientific value of a philosophy is shown to us in how far it succeeds in presenting the inner relationship between the supersensible and the sensible - I say “scientific” value on purpose, not cultural or psychological. Platonism, for example, which in this respect has not so often succeeded in constructing the relationship between idea and reality, had an enormous cultural significance.

Now, in anthroposophy, Dr. Steiner attempts to describe the relationship between the supersensible and the sensible, that is, he attempts to prove the necessary transition from the immediate sensory world to the supersensible world, or - seen subjectively - from empirical and rational knowledge, from scientific knowledge, to what I would call super-scientific knowledge. He used anthroposophy for this. I am only relying on Dr. Steiner's lecture, and more specifically on the first part – frankly, I didn't have enough strength for the second.

Applause

Anthroposophy is based on the analogy of mathematics. Dr. Steiner explained how we project mathematics into nature. This has already been established in Greek science, and in fact the ideal of mathematical science is at least to mathematize nature, as they said in ancient times. But in what sense can we even talk about this? That is precisely the problem.

Dr. Steiner explained with what affect, with what passion, with what sympathy the individual mathematician imposes his ideas of conceptual things in empirical reality. But what are the structures that the mathematician deals with? They are not his representations at all. The circle, for example, that a mathematician draws on the blackboard to demonstrate his geometric theorems is not his representation. He has nothing to do with the circle as a human being – rather, he has nothing to do with it as a mathematician, but he does have something to do with it as a human being, in that he uses his two eyes to perceive the circle. Restlessness

The concept of a circle, which the mathematician does deal with, cannot be represented in reality at all; it is never perceived by the senses. The concept of a circle is much more general.

Now anthroposophy needs something personally real that it wants to project into nature. The general, which I have in my mathematical head, so to speak, does not exist in reality. If the supersensible world is to be founded on the sensory world in such a way that conclusions can be drawn from the subject to the object, then this can never be done by projecting subjective ideas into nature in the manner of mathematics. In my opinion, the analogy of mathematics is not appropriate for this, because mathematics deals with conceptual things that never occur as such in reality. In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general. On the other hand, today's lecture emphasizes the reality of supersensible things.

So, what matters to me: I cannot see how mathematics is supposed to serve here to explain the bridge from the sensory to the supersensible. The main value of the lecture now obviously lay in the fact that personal experience, personal excitement, the totality of personal experience, is to be active in thinking. But that must immediately raise a concern for everyone. The personal, the individual, is precisely what is unnecessary. Yes, anyone can tell me: “That is your imagination, that is your idea, I have nothing to do with it.” In my opinion, this is an objection to anthroposophy in general.

Applause

Then, what Dr. Steiner was particularly concerned about, in the inner participation that his lecture had at this point and that was actually moving for the opponent: the starting point for higher knowledge for Dr. Steiner is moral intuition. Anthroposophy requires a supersensible to derive moral principles from it, and it gains this derivation by looking at the supersensible. To be honest, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. Let's assume that there is a supersensible faculty of knowledge, or rather, such faculties of knowledge that we ordinary mortals do not yet have, and that it would also be possible to actually see the supersensible with this higher faculty of knowledge - the supersensible as an existing thing: how can I see from that what I should do? We can never deduce what we should do from what is. We can never build a bridge from the sphere of being to the sphere of ought.

Walter Birkigt: Since there are no further requests for the floor for the time being, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner to respond. Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees, I would like to say the following first: The very nature of the remarks I made this evening prevented me from speaking of analogy where I spoke of mathematics, and I ask you to reflect carefully on the fact that I did not use the word analogy. This is no accident, but a thoroughly conscious decision. I could not use the word 'analogy' because there was no question of an analogy with mathematics, but mathematical thinking was used to arrive at a characteristic of the inner experience of certainty. And by trying to explain how one can arrive at an inner experience of certainty in mathematics, I wanted to show how one can acquire this same degree of certainty in a completely different field, where one tries to arrive at certainty in the same way. It is therefore not about an analogy with mathematics, but about citing two real experiences of the soul that are to be compared with each other in no other way than by pointing to the attainment of inner certainty. Dear attendees, what the previous speaker said is not a reference to my lecture, because then he could not have used the word analogy. I avoided it because it does not belong.

Furthermore, it was said that I spoke of the passion of the individual mathematician. I could not do that either, because I simply referred to the nature of mathematical experience as it is known to those who are initiated into and trained in mathematics. How anyone can even think of speaking of some kind of personal involvement in mathematics is beyond me. On the other hand, I would like to make the following comment: It sounds very nice to say that the inner concept of the circle has absolutely nothing to do with the circle that I draw on the blackboard. I am not going to claim that it has anything to do with it, because it would never occur to me to say that the inner concept of the circle is made of chalk. I don't think that's a very profound truth that is being expressed.

But when we pass from abstract thinking to thinking in terms of reality, we must say the following. Let us take something that we construct mathematically within ourselves, for example, the sentence: If we draw a diameter in a circle and from one end of the diameter a line to any point on the circumference and from this point a further line to the other end of the diameter, then this angle is always a right angle. I do not need to draw this on the board at all. What I recognize there, namely that in a circle every angle through the diameter with the vertex on the periphery is a right angle, that is a purely internal experience. I have no need to use the circle here on the board.

Interjection: That is not true! Only when you have also looked at it, can you construct it afterwards!

But there is no doubt that what I draw on the board is only an external aid.

For anyone who can think mathematically, it is out of the question that they cannot also construct such mathematical truths purely through inner experience, even if they are the most complicated mathematical truths. There is no question of that. Even if I had to draw them with chalk, that would still have no significance for the simple reason that what constitutes the substantial validity of the proposition is to be illustrated in the drawing, but does not have to be concluded in it. If I use the drawing on the board to visualize that the angle is a right angle, then this visualization does not establish anything specific for the inner validity of the sentence. And that is what ultimately matters. There can be absolutely no question of my first needing the drawing on the board. But even if I needed it, that would be completely irrelevant to what I have said about the nature of mathematization – not about solving individual problems, but about mathematization in general. What is important here lies in a completely different area than what has been mentioned here, because when we look at mathematization, we are simply led to say that we experience inner truths.

I did not say that we already experience realities in mathematics. Therefore, it is completely irrelevant to object that mathematics as such does not contain any reality. But in the formal it contains truths, and these can also be experienced. The way in which one comes to truth and knowledge is important, even if these do not initially have any reality within mathematics itself. But when this mathematical experience is transferred to a completely different area, namely to the area where the exactness of mathematics is applied to the real life of the soul, the character of exactness, which is initially experienced in the mathematical-formal, is carried into the real. And only through this am I entitled to carry over into reality what applies to mathematics as merely formal.

I have first shown how to arrive from within at truths which we — of course only in an external way — apparently transfer as unrealities to observation, to experiment, or with which experiment is interwoven. And then I also showed how this formal character is transformed into a real one. But then, what is apparently so plausible still does not apply: what is mathematical only lives in me; the concept only lives in me, it does not live outside in reality. What has been mathematically explored and mathematically worked out would have nothing to do with reality as such. Well, does the concept of a circle really only live in me?

Imagine – I don't draw a circle on the board, but I have my two fingers here. I hold a string with them and make the object move in a circular motion, so that this lead ball moves in a circle. The laws that I now recognize for the movement by mathematically recognizing them – do they have nothing to do with reality? I proceed continually in such a way that I determine behavior in the real precisely through mathematics. I proceed in such a way when I go from induction to deduction that I bring in what I have first determined by induction and then process it further with mathematics. If I introduce the end term of an empirical induction into a mathematical formula and then simply continue calculating, then I am counting on the fact that what I develop mathematically through deduction corresponds to reality. It is only through this that the mathematical is fruitful for reality, not through such philosophical arguments as have been presented.

Let us look at the fruitfulness of the mathematical for reality. One can see the fruitfulness simply when, for example, someone says: I see the irregularities that exist in relation to what has been calculated, and therefore I use other variables in the calculation. And so he initially comes to assume a reality by purely mathematical means; reality arises afterwards – it is there. Thus I have, by continuing my empirical path purely through mathematics, also shown the applicability of the inner experience to the outer world. At least I expect it. And if one could not expect that the real event, which one has followed in sensory-descriptive reality to a certain point, continues in the calculation, then what I just meant would not be possible at all: that one feels satisfied in mathematics. The point is to take the concepts seriously, as they have been dealt with.

Now to what I said about moral intuition. You may remember that I said in my lecture that the intuition that I established as the third stage of supersensible knowledge occurs last. But moral intuition also occurs for ordinary consciousness. It is the only one that initially arises for a consciousness that has advanced to our level from the supersensible world. Moral intuition is simply an intuition projected down from a higher level to our level of knowledge. I illustrated this clearly in the lecture. That is why I spoke of this moral intuition first, not afterwards. I have described it as the starting point. One learns to recognize it; and when one has grasped it correctly, then one has a certain subjective precondition for also understanding what comes afterwards. For in experiencing moral intuition, one experiences something that, when compared with what is otherwise real, has a different kind of reality, and that is the reality of ought. If you go into what I have said, then the difference between being and ought is explained simply by the fact that moral intuition projects into our ordinary sphere of consciousness, while the other intuition is not a projection, but must first be attained. It was not at all implied that moral intuition is only a special case for the process of knowledge of general intuition, but it is simply the first case where something occurs to us intuitively in our ordinary consciousness, in today's state of consciousness.

So, it is important to understand exactly the concepts that are developed here for anthroposophy. I wanted to give suggestions. I fully understand that objections are possible because, of course, one cannot explain everything in such detail, and so I assume that there are still many doubts and so on in the souls of those present. But imagine how long my lecture would have been if I had already dispelled in the lecture all the doubts that I am now trying to dispel in my answer. That is what one has to reckon with in a first exploratory lecture, not only in anthroposophy but in all fields. That is what it was about today. I did not want to give anything conclusive, and I must say that some people do not want to go into anthroposophy at all. But I have found that the best recognizers of what anthroposophy is were often not those who fell for it right from the start, but that the best workers in anthroposophy became those who had gone through bitter doubts.

Therefore, please do not take what I said with a certain sharpness in the reply as if it were meant with hatred. Rather, I am basically pleased about everything that is objected to, because it is only by overcoming these obstacles of objection that one actually enters into anthroposophy. And I have always had more satisfaction from those who have come to anthroposophy via the reefs of rejection and doubt than from those who have entered with full sails at the first attempt.

Lively applause.

Mr. Wilhelm: I do not wish to criticize, but only to ask a question to which I would find Dr. Steiner's answer very interesting. Dr. Steiner replied to the criticism of the first speaker, who compared Theosophy with Anthroposophy, by saying that the method of knowledge of Anthroposophy is quite different from that of Theosophy, especially the old one, and that in the whole history of Theosophy there is no trace, not a single reference, to the method of knowledge presented by Dr. Steiner this evening. I would just like to ask whether Dr. Steiner is familiar with the passages in 'The Green Face' – a book that has a very strong Theosophical slant and where this method of knowledge actually forms the basis of the whole work. I would be very interested to hear Dr. Steiner's position on this.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I would first like to point out that it would be possible, if there were indeed echoes in the “Green Face”, which appeared a few years ago, of what I have said this evening, to be fundamentally traced back to anthroposophy. Shout: Never!

I only said in general that it would not contradict itself, but since someone here shouted “Never!”, I completely agree with that, because I find nothing anthroposophical in “The Green Face”, but I find that what is said about anthroposophy in “The Green Face” is based on methods of knowledge that I would not want to have anything to do with. That is what I have to say about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• what changed in multiple way

• what he does not recognise again,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Steiner: I am sorry I could not come sooner, but it was not possible. We have a number of things to catch up on, and I am really very happy to be here today.

A member of the administrative committee: (After greeting Dr. Steiner) After we came back from the Christmas Conference in Dornach, we felt responsible for doing everything to make the Waldorf School an appropriate instrument for its new task. I have been asked to tell you that the members of the administrative committee now place their positions in your hands. Since it seems possible that the relationship of the school to the Anthroposophical Society may change, we would like you to redetermine from this new standpoint how the school should be run.

Dr. Steiner: I certainly understand how this view could arise among you, since the intent of the Christmas Conference was to do something for anthroposophy based upon a complete reformation, a new foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. On the other hand, the Christmas Conference gave the Anthroposophical Society an explicitly esoteric character. That seems to contradict the public presentation, but through the various existing intentions, which will gradually be realized over the course of time, people will see that the actual leadership of the Anthroposophical Society, the present board of directors [Vorstand] in Dornach, will have a completely esoteric basis. That will also effect a complete renewal of the Anthroposophical Society.

Now, it is quite understandable that the various institutions connected with anthroposophy ask themselves how they should relate to what happened in Dornach. In my letter to members published in our newsletter, I said that the conference in Dornach will have a real purpose only if that purpose is not forgotten for all time. The conference will realize its complete content to the extent individual anthroposophical institutions slowly make the intent of the Dornach conference their own.

The Christmas Conference was the second part of a decision in principle. The first part was that if anthroposophists want it, the board of directors will do some things from Dornach, and that includes a continuous questioning of life within the Anthroposophical Society. In principle, there is a decision that—to the extent that this intention is realized, that we bring it into reality—the board of directors in Dornach is justified in taking over the responsibility for anthroposophy, not just for the Society. That is the esoteric purpose, but of course the esoteric impulses must come from various directions. I would like to ask the individual institutions to understand that whatever emanates from Dornach always has an esoteric background. It is, of course, just as understandable that the Waldorf School particularly, and its representatives, question its relationship to Dornach and to the Free School of Spiritual Science.

Perhaps, as you have considered the question in more detail, you already feel there are some significant difficulties, particularly concerning the final decision about the administrative committee. The situation is this: First, we must find the form through which the Waldorf School can make the connection to the School of Spiritual Science. Formally, the Waldorf School is not an anthroposophical institution; rather, it is an independent creation based upon the foundations of anthroposophical pedagogy. In the way it meets the public, as well as the way it meets legal institutions, it is not an anthroposophical institution, but a school based upon anthroposophical pedagogy. Suppose the Independent Waldorf School were now to become officially related to the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. Then the Waldorf School would immediately become an anthroposophical school in a formal, external sense. Of course, there are some things that would support making such a decision. On the other hand, though, we must consider whether the Waldorf School can fulfill its cultural tasks better as an independent school with an unhindered form than it can as a direct part of what emanates from Dornach. Everything that emanates from Dornach is also collected there. If the Independent Waldorf School entered a direct relationship to Dornach, all activities of the Waldorf School falling within the Pedagogical Section of the Anthroposophical Society would also be the responsibility of the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science and fall within their authority. In the future, Dornach will not be simply a decoration, as many anthroposophical institutions have been. Dornach will be a reality. Every institution belonging to Dornach will, in fact, must, recognize the authority of the leadership in Dornach. That will be necessary. At the same time, the leadership of the Waldorf School would then take on an esoteric character.

On the other hand, given the state of the world today, we could certainly weigh the question of whether the Waldorf School could best achieve its cultural goals that way. This is definitely not a question we can immediately brush aside. Weighed with nothing but the most serious feeling of responsibility, the question is extremely difficult since it could mean a radical change throughout the Independent Waldorf School.

Pedagogical life in the modern world may still be subject to the error, or better said the illusion, expressed through the various goals of all kinds of pedagogical organizations. However, everything in those pedagogical organizations is really nothing more than talk. In reality, pedagogy is increasingly falling prey to three factors of development, two of which are making giant steps today. Anthroposophy, the third factor, is very weak; it is only a shadow and is not seen by opponents as anything of any importance. Pedagogy is slowly being captured by the two main streams in the world, the Catholic and the Bolshevik, or socialist, streams. Anyone who wants to can easily see that all other tendencies are on a downward path in regard to success. That says nothing at all about the value of Catholicism or Bolshevism, only about their strength. Each has tremendous strength, and that strength increases every week. Now people are trying to bring all other cultural movements into those two, so it only makes sense to orient pedagogy with the third cultural stream, anthroposophy. That is the situation in the world.

It is really marvelous how little thought humanity gives to anything today, so that it allows the most important symptoms to go by without thinking. The fact that a centuries-old tradition has been broken in England by MacDonald’s system is something so radical, so important, that it was marvelous that the world did not even notice it. On the other hand, we from the anthroposophical side should take note of how external events clearly show that the age whose history can be written from the purely physical perspective has passed. We need to be clear that Ahrimanic forces are increasingly breaking in upon historical events. Two leading personalities, Wilson and Lenin, died from the same illness, both from paralysis, which means that both offered an opening for Ahrimanic forces. These things show that world history is no longer earthly history, and is becoming cosmic history. All such things are of great importance and play a role in our detailed questions.

If we now go on to the more concrete problem of the administrative committee putting their work back into my hands, you should not forget that the primary question was decided through the conference in Dornach. From 1912 until 1923, I lived within the Anthroposophical Society with no official position, without even being a member, something I clearly stated in 1912. I have actually belonged to the Anthroposophical Society only as an advisor, as a teacher, as the one who was to show the sources of spiritual science. Through the Christmas Conference, I became chairman of the Anthroposophical Society, and from then on my activities are those of the chairman of the Society. If I were to name the administrative committee now, that committee would be named by the chairman of the Anthroposophical Society. The highest body of the Independent Waldorf School would thus be designated by the chairman of the Anthroposophical Society. That is certainly something we could consider, but I want you to know that when we go on to discuss this whole problem. If the Waldorf School and Dornach had that relationship, then the Waldorf School would be something different from what it is now. Something new would be created, different from what was created at the founding of the Waldorf School. The Christmas Conference in Dornach was not just a ceremony like the majority of anthroposophical activities, even though they may not have a ceremonious character, particularly in Stuttgart. The Christmas Conference was completely serious, so anything resulting from it is also very serious.

The Independent Waldorf School can relate to Dornach in other ways. One of those would be not to place the school under Dornach, but instead to have the faculty, or those within the faculty who wish to do so, enter a relationship to Dornach, to the Goetheanum, to the School of Spiritual Science, not for themselves, but as teachers of the school. The Waldorf School, as such, would not take on that characteristic, but it would emphasize to the outer world that from now on the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum will provide the impulse for the Waldorf School pedagogy, just as anthroposophical pedagogy previously provided it. The difference would be that, whereas the relationship to anthroposophical pedagogy was more theoretical, in the future the relationship would be more alive. Then, the faculty as a whole or as individuals would conform to the impulses that would result when one, as a teacher at the Independent Waldorf School, is a member of the School of Spiritual Science. That relationship would make it impossible for the Goetheanum to name the administrative committee. The committee would, of course, need to remain as it is now because the thought behind it is that the committee was chosen, even elected, by the faculty. It may not even be possible from the perspective of the legal authorities here for the administrative committee to be named from Dornach. I do not believe the laws of Württemberg would allow the administrative committee of the Independent Waldorf School to be chosen from the Goetheanum, that is, from an institution existing outside Germany. The only other possibility would be for me to name the new administrative committee. However, that is unnecessary.

These are the things I wanted to present to you. You can see from them that you should consider the question in detail yourselves. Now I would like you to tell me your thoughts about the solution of the question. Whether you want to give me more or less control over the solution, whether you want me to decide how you should operate. You do not need to do this in any way other than to say what you have already discussed in the faculty, and what led you to say what you said at the outset.

A teacher: For us, the question was whether the Christmas Conference in Dornach changed the relationship of the Waldorf School to the Anthroposophical Society.

Dr. Steiner: The Waldorf School has had no relationship to the Anthroposophical Society. Because it was outside the Society, the Christmas Conference has no significance for the Waldorf School. That is the situation. It is different, though, for institutions that arose directly from the Anthroposophical Society. That is quite different. The Waldorf School was founded as an independent institution. The relationship that existed was unofficial and can continue with the new Society. The relationship was completely free, something that came into existence each day because the vast majority of the teachers here belonged to the Anthroposophical Society and because anthroposophical pedagogy was carried out in a free manner, since, as the representative of anthroposophical pedagogy, I also was chairman of the faculty. We need change none of that.

A teacher: How should we understand the Pedagogical Section?

Dr. Steiner: We can only slowly put into practice the intentions of the Christmas Conference, particularly those of the School of Spiritual Science. To an extent, that is because we do not have enough money right now to construct all the buildings that we will need for everything we want to do. What we need will gradually be created. For now, the various sections will be created to the extent possible with the people and resources available today. My thought was that the basis for creating the Independent University as an institution of the Anthroposophical Society would be the membership of the School of Spiritual Science. I have now seen that a large number of teachers of the Waldorf School have applied for membership; thus, they will also be members and from the very beginning become a means for spreading the pedagogy emanating from the Independent University. We will have to wait and see which other institutions join the Independent University.

Other institutions have often expressed a desire to form a relationship with Dornach. The situation is simple with those anthroposophical institutions that have either all the prejudices against them or none. For example, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute here in Stuttgart can join. Either it has been fought against from the very beginning as an anthroposophical institution, in which case no harm is done if it joins, or it has been recognized because people are forced to see that the healing methods used there are more effective than those found elsewhere, in which case it is obvious that it joins. That institution is not in the same situation in regard to the world as a school. The clinic can join without any further problems.

However, if a school suddenly became an anthroposophical school, that would upset both the official authorities and the public. There is even a strong possibility that the school officials would object. They actually have no right to do so, and it doesn’t make any sense to object to the pedagogical methods, which can certainly be those of anthroposophy. There is also no reason to object even if all the teachers personally became members of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. That is of no concern to the officials, and they can raise no objection to it. However, they would immediately object if an existing relationship between the Waldorf School and the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum required the Waldorf School to accept pedagogical decisions made there, so that, for example, those in Dornach controlled the curriculum here. That is certainly true for the first eight grades. If we had only the higher grades, from the ninth grade on, hardly any objections could be raised except for possibly not allowing the students to take their final examinations, but the officials would hardly do that. Nevertheless, they would not allow it for the elementary school grades.

The basic thought of the School of Spiritual Science is that it will direct its primary activity toward insight and life. Thus, we can say that every member has not only the right, but, in a certain sense, a moral obligation to align him- or herself with Dornach in regard to pedagogical questions. Certainly, there will be people at the School of Spiritual Science who want to learn par excellence. However, once having learned, they will remain members, just as someone who has earned a diploma from a French or Norwegian or Danish university remains a member of the university and has a continuing relationship with it. In France, you do not simply receive a piece of paper when you earn a degree, you become a lifelong member of the university and retain a scientific connection to it. That is something the old Society members who will be members of the school under the assumption that they already know a great deal of what will be presented there should consider from the very beginning. The school will, however, continually have scientific or artistic tasks to resolve in which all members of the school should participate. To that extent, the life of each individual member of the school will be enriched. In the near future, we will send the same requests to all members of the other sections that we have already sent to the members of the Medical Section, requesting that they turn toward Dornach in important matters. We will also send a monthly or bimonthly newsletter, which will contain answers to all the questions posed by the membership. However, you would not be a member of the section, but of the class. The sections are only for the leadership in Dornach. The board of directors works together with the sections, but the individual members belong to a class.

A teacher: Should we work toward making it possible for the Waldorf School to be under Dornach?

Dr. Steiner: As with everything that can really be done, the moment we wish to join the school with Dornach we are treading upon a path we once had to leave, had to abandon, because we were not up to the situation when we undertook it. That is the path of threefolding. If you imagine the Independent Waldorf School joined with the School of Spiritual Science, you must realize that could only occur under the auspices of what lies at the foundation of threefolding. We would be working toward a specific goal if all reasonable institutions worked toward threefolding. However, we have to allow the world to go its own way after it intentionally did not want to go the other one. We are working toward threefolding, but we have to remember that an institution like the Independent Waldorf School with its objectively anthroposophical character, has goals that, of course, coincide with anthroposophical desires. At the moment, though, if that connection were made official, people could break the Waldorf School’s neck. Therefore, the way things presently are, I would advise that we not choose a new administrative committee; rather, leave it as it is and decide things one way or another according to these two questions. First, is it sufficient that the teachers here at the school become individual members of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach? Or, second, do you want to be members through the faculty as a whole, so that you would have membership as teachers of the Independent Waldorf School? In the latter case, the Pedagogical Section in Dornach would have to concern itself with the Waldorf School, whereas it would otherwise be concerned only with general questions of pedagogy.

That is certainly a major difference. Our newsletter might then have statements such as, “It would be best to do such and such at the Independent Waldorf School.” In a certain sense, such statements would then be binding on the teachers at the Waldorf School, which would be connected with the School of Spiritual Science. There is no danger in joining all branches and groups with the Anthroposophical Society. Actually, they have to do that. All such groups of many individuals who fulfill the requirements, and such institutions as, for example, the biological institute, the research institute, and the clinic can join. You could have problems otherwise. The difficulties that would arise for the Waldorf School would not be of concern there. When the school was founded, we placed great value upon creating an institution independent of the Anthroposophical Society. Logically, that corresponds quite well with having the various religious communities and the Anthroposophical Society provide religious instruction, so that the Society provides religious instruction just as other religious groups do. The Anthroposophical Society gives instruction in religion and the services. That is something we can justifiably say whenever others claim that the Waldorf School is an anthroposophical school. Although anthroposophy believes it has the best pedagogy, the character of anthroposophy is not forced upon the school. That is a very clear situation. Had The Coming Day approached the Anthroposophical Society for exercises everyone who wanted to could do, then the remarks in the Newsletter would not have been necessary. We can clearly see the real formalities through such things.

A teacher: Hasn’t a change already occurred since you, the head of the Waldorf School, are now also the head of the Anthroposophical Society?

Dr. Steiner: That is not the case. The position I have taken changes nothing about my being head of the school. The conference was purely anthroposophical and the Waldorf School had no official connection with the Society. What might happen if, in the course of time, the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach takes over the guidance of the religious instruction, is a different question. Were that to occur, it would be a situation of organic growth.

A teacher: Is the position we took at the founding of the Waldorf School still valid today?

Dr. Steiner: When you present the question that way, the real question is whether it is even appropriate for the faculty to approach the question, or whether that is actually a question for the Waldorf School Association. You see, the outside world views the Waldorf School Association as the actual administration of the school. You know about the seven wise men who guide the school. This is a question we should consider in deciding whether the Waldorf School is to be joined with Dornach or not, that is, should the faculty of the Waldorf School decide whether to join as a whole or as individual teachers? Everything concerning pedagogy can be decided only in that way. Under certain circumstances, this is a professional question. The Waldorf School is as it is, outside of that. You need to look at things realistically. What would you do if you, here in the faculty, decided to connect the school with Dornach, and then the school association refused to pay your salaries because of that decision? That is something that is at least theoretically possible.

A teacher asks about the final examination.

Dr. Steiner: In connection with the question of the final examination, which is purely a question of compromise, what would change through the connection to the Society?

The teacher explains his question further.

Dr. Steiner: Well, the only other viewpoint would have to be that we absolutely refuse to take into account whether a student wishes to take the final examination or not, that we consider it a private decision of the student. Until now, no one has been thinking of that, and the question is whether we should consider that as a principle. Thus, all students’ parents would be confronted with the question, “Do I dare consider sending my child into life without having taken the final examination?” Of course, we can do that, but the question is really whether we should do that. All that is quite independent of the possibility that we may have no students at all or only those who cannot go anywhere else. It seems to me very problematic whether we can bring that question into the discussion of final examinations. I do not believe a connection with Dornach would change anything in that regard. In some ways, we would still have to make a compromise.

I believe we first need to choose a form. Such things are not permanent; they can always be reconsidered. I think you should decide to become members of the School of Spiritual Science as individual teachers, but with the additional remark that you want to become a member as a teacher of the Independent Waldorf School. I think that will achieve everything you want, and nothing else is necessary for the time being. The difference is that if you join as an individual without being a member as a teacher, there would be no mention of the Waldorf School in our newsletter, and, therefore, questions specifically about the Waldorf School would not be handled by Dornach. Of course, if you add that you are joining as a teacher, that has no real meaning for you, but for the cultural task of the Waldorf School it does have some significance, because all other members of the School of Spiritual Science will receive news about what those in Dornach think about the Waldorf School. The Independent Waldorf School would then be part of anthroposophical pedagogical life, and interest would spread to a much greater extent. Everywhere members of the School of Spiritual Science come together, people would speak about the Waldorf School: “This or that is good,” and so forth. The Waldorf School would thereby become a topic of interest for the Society, whereas it is presently not an anthroposophical activity. For you, it is all the same. The questions that would be discussed in Dornach would of course be different from those that arise here. It could, however, be possible that we need to discuss the same questions here in our meetings. For the Society as a whole, however, it would not be all the same. It would be something major for anthroposophical pedagogy, and in doing that you would fulfill the mission of the Independent Waldorf School. Through such an action, you would accomplish something you actually want, namely, making the Independent Waldorf School part of the overall cultural mission of anthroposophy. It could, for example, happen that a question arises in the faculty meeting in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart that then becomes a concern of the School of Spiritual Science.

A teacher: That would mean the school would send reports about our work for publication in the newsletter.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to make reports about the pedagogical methods so long as they do not concern personnel questions, unless, of course, these had pedagogical significance.

The teachers ask Dr. Steiner how he envisions the Easter pedagogical conference and ask him to give a theme for the conference.

Dr. Steiner: The only thing I have to say is that the conference at Easter must take into account that there will also be a pedagogical course in Zurich beginning Easter Monday.

I would like to bring up another question, which relates to something we mentioned earlier. What we can do from the Waldorf School is the following, although I need to consider what I’m now going to mention in more detail. There is another way that could immediately bring you closer to achieving your intention of a complete connection with the anthroposophical movement. The proposal is that the Waldorf School declare itself prepared to host a conference that the Anthroposophical Society would present at Easter at the school. No one could complain about that. Certainly, the Independent Waldorf School could hold an anthroposophical conference on its own grounds. That is something we can do. I would like to think some more about whether this is the proper time. However, I do not think there will be any public objection, and the officials at the ministry will not even understand the difference. They will certainly not understand what it means. That would be a beginning. I will set up the program.

There is one other thing I would like to say. The Youth Conference of the Christian Community in Kassel was quite in character in terms of the desires you now bear in your hearts. What happened was that the Christian Community priests held small meetings from Wednesday until the end of the week with those who wished an introduction to what the Christian Community, as a religious group, has to say. The whole thing closed with a service for the participants of the conference. The last two or three days were available for open discussions, so that the people who attended had an opportunity to meet officially with the Christian Community and see that it is independent of the Anthroposophical Society.

I should mention that the participants consisted of young people under the age of twenty, and others who were thirty-six and older, so that the middle generation was missing, something characteristic of our time. They participated in a Mass, followed by open discussion that assumed the topic would cover what had been experienced. What actually happened, however, was that what had been experienced awakened a longing for something more, so that the anthroposophists present then spoke about anthroposophy. It could be seen that all of what had occurred had anthroposophy as its goal. That was a very characteristic conference because it shows that what is objectively desired is a connection with Anthroposophy. There will be something about the Kassel youth conference in the next newsletter.

A teacher discusses the question of the final examination and says that some students will be advised to not take it.

Dr. Steiner: The question is how we should give the students that advice. If you handle the question from the perspective you mentioned, the principles will not be readily apparent when you give that advice. I would like to know what you have to say about the principles.

A teacher: If students are to take the final examination at the end of the twelfth grade, we cannot achieve our true learning goals in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. Instead, we will have to work toward preparing the students to pass the examination. They should take both a thirteenth school year and the examination at another school.

Dr. Steiner: On the other hand, the whole question of final examinations arose from a different perspective, namely, that the students wanted to, or their guardians wanted them to, take the test. Has anything changed in that regard? The students, of course, are unhappy, but students in other schools are also unhappy that they need to learn things they don’t want to learn. I mean that our students are unhappy about the same things all other children with the same maturity at eighteen or nineteen years are unhappy about. The question of final examinations is purely a question of opportunity. It is a question of whether we dare tell those who come to us that we will not prepare them for the final examination at all, that it is a private decision of the student whether to take the final examination or not. That is the question. For the future, it would be possible to answer that question in principle, but I do not think it would be correct to decide it for this year at the present stage.

A teacher asks whether it would be better to have the students take a thirteenth school year at another school and take their examinations there. Should a note be sent to the parents with that suggestion?

Dr. Steiner: You can do all that, but our students cannot avoid having to take an entrance examination. The question is only whether they will fail the entrance examination or the final examination.

Most of the parents want their children to have an opportunity to attend a university, in spite of the fact they gave the students to us. Both parents and students want that. At the beginning, the children did not believe it would be a problem. Their concern was that they would be able to take the final examination. That is certainly a possibility, and they can try it, but we cannot solve the problem simply by sending the students to a thirteenth school year at another school. The question is only whether we can solve it in the way we already discussed but found very problematic and therefore rejected. If we are firm about completing the school, the question is whether we could consider the alternative of creating a preparatory session in addition to the school. We rejected that because we thought it very unpedagogical. The question is whether to create a preparatory group or ignore the curriculum. I think it would be best if we did not send the students to another school. They would then need to take an entrance examination. However, if we completed the curriculum through the twelfth grade, we could use a thirteenth year to prepare them for the final examination.

Let’s consider the question pedagogically. Suppose a child comes into the first grade at the age of six or seven and completes the twelfth grade at the age of eighteen or nineteen. At that time and not later, the child should actually begin the transition into the university. Adding another year then is just about as smart as what the state does when it believes there is more material to be learned and adds an additional year for medical education. Those are the sorts of things that can drive you up the wall. Those who do not want to attend the university will need to find their own way in life. They will be useful people in life without the final examination, since they will find what they need for life here. Those who are to go to the university can use an additional year to unlearn a little. I think we can certainly think of the thirteenth year as a year of boning up. Nevertheless, we will certainly need to be careful that they pass, since we cannot put the children in a different school. We will need to separate it in some way from the Waldorf School, and we could hire instructors. We would have to enlarge the faculty to include the thirteenth grade. If we hired such people and the faculty kept control of things, we could possibly do that. That is what I think.

A teacher asks about the students who are not yet ready for the examination.

Dr. Steiner: We could suggest that, in our judgment, they are not yet ready. At other schools, the question of taking the final examination is also handled by advising the relatives of such students in the last grade not to enroll them, but to wait a year. We could also give such advice, and tell the officials that we gave it. You have always said something that is true: we have had these students only from a particular grade. We could give the ministry a report stating that it was impossible for us to properly prepare the students for the final examination during the time they were with us. We believe they need to wait a year. You should try to advise them against it, but if they want to enroll for the examination, you should inform the officials in the way we discussed by saying we think the students need to stay in school one more year.

A teacher asks about counseling students for choosing a career.

Dr. Steiner: That can be done only in individual cases. It would hardly be possible to do it in principle. In most instances, the school has little influence upon their choice of career. Determining that is really not so simple. By the time a boy is eighteen or nineteen, he should have come to an opinion about which career he should work toward; then, based on that desire, you can counsel him. This is something that involves much responsibility.

A teacher asks about pedagogical activities relating to writing essays and giving lectures.

Dr. Steiner: That would be good in many instances, particularly for eurythmy students. I think that if you held to the kind of presentations I gave in Ilkley, it would be very useful.

I do not know what you should do to revise my lectures. It is not really possible to give a lecture and then tell someone how to revise it.

A teacher asks about reports on work at the school.

Dr. Steiner: Why shouldn’t we be able to report on our work? I think we should be able to send reports to the Goetheanum on things, like those, I believe it was Pastor Ruhtenberg, has done about German class. You could give the details and the general foundation of what you as a teacher think about the specific subject. For each subject you could do things like what Ruhtenberg did and also a more general presentation about the ideas and basis of the work done up to now.

It would probably be quite good if you did some of these things the way you previously did. Keep them short and not too extended, so that the Goetheanum could publish something more often, something concrete about how we do one thing or another. the Goetheanum now has a circulation of six thousand, so it would be very good for such reports to appear in it or in some other newspaper.

A shop teacher thinks it is too bad that painting instruction cannot be done as regularly and in the upper grades as often as in the lower grades. He also asks about painting techniques for the lower grades.

Dr. Steiner: It does no harm to interrupt the painting class for a few years and replace it with sculpting. The instruction in painting has a subconscious effect, and when the students return to the interrupted painting class, they do it in a more lively way and with greater skill. In all things that depend upon capability, it is always the case that if they are withheld, great progress is made soon afterward, particularly when they are interrupted.

I think painting instruction for the lower grades needs some improvement. Some of the teachers give too little effort toward technical proficiency. The students do not use the materials properly. Actually, you should not allow anyone to paint on pieces of paper that are always buckling. They should paint only on paper that is properly stretched. Also, they should go through the whole project from start to finish, so that one page is really completed. Most of the drawings are only a beginning.

Since you are a painter, what you want will probably depend upon your discussing technical questions and how to work with the materials with the other teachers. No other practical solution is possible.

In the two upper grades, you could have the talented students paint again. There is enough time, but you would have to begin again with simpler things. That could not cause too many problems if you did it properly. With younger children, painting is creating from the soul, but with older children, you have to begin from the perspective of painting. You need to show them what the effects of light are and how to paint that. Do all the painting from a practical standpoint. You should never have children older than ten paint objects because that can ruin a great deal. (Dr. Steiner begins to draw on the blackboard with colored chalk.) The older the children are, the more you need to work on perspective in painting. You need to make clear to them that here is the sun, that the sunlight falls upon a tree. So, you should not begin by drawing the tree, but with the light and shadowy areas, so that the tree is created out of the light and dark colors, but the color comes from the light. Don’t begin with abstractions such as, “The tree is green.” Don’t have them paint green leaves; they shouldn’t paint leaves at all, but instead areas of light. That is what you should do, and you can do it.

If I were required to begin with thirteen- or fourteen-year-olds, I would use Dürer’s Melancholia as an example of how wonderfully light and shadows can be used. I would have them color the light at the window and how it falls onto the polyhedron and the ball. Then, I would have them paint the light in the window of Hieronymus im Gehäus. And so forth. It is very fruitful to begin with Melancholia; you should have them translate the black and white into a colorful fantasy. We cannot expect all the teachers to be well-versed in painting. There may be some teachers who are not especially interested in painting because they cannot do it, but a teacher must be able to teach it without painting. We cannot expect to fully develop every child in every art and science.

A teacher: Someone proposed that the school sell the toys the shop class makes.

Dr. Steiner: I do not know how we can do that. Someone also wanted to sell such things in England, with the proceeds going to the Waldorf School, I believe. However, we cannot make a factory out of the school. We simply cannot do that; that would be pure nonsense. This idea makes sense only if someone proposes building a factory in which the things we make at school would be used as prototypes. If that is what they meant, it is no concern of ours. At most, we can give them the things for use as prototypes. However, I did not understand the proposal in that way, so it really doesn’t make much sense. In the other case, someone could make working models. If someone were to come with a proposal to create a factory, we could still think about whether we wanted to work that way.

A teacher requests a new curriculum for religion class in the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: We have laid out the religious instruction for eight grades in two groups, the first through fourth grades in the lower group, and the others in the upper. The religious instruction is already arranged in two stages. Do you mean that we now need a third?

A teacher asks whether the curriculum could be more specialized for the different grades, for instance, the fifth, eighth, and twelfth grades.

Dr. Steiner: You can show me tomorrow how far I went then.

A teacher asks about the material for religion class in the ninth grade.

Dr. Steiner: St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis.

A teacher asks if Dr. Steiner would add something more to the ritual services throughout the year, for example, colors or such things.

Dr. Steiner: The Youth Service for Easter is connected with the entire intention of youth services. I am not certain what you mean. Were you to do that, you would preoccupy the children with a suggested mood. That is not good while they are still in school.

Through that, you would make them less open. Certainly, children need to remain naïve until a certain age, to do things without being fully conscious of them. Therefore, we should not have a complete calendar of the year, as that would suggest certain moods. Children need to be somewhat naïve about such things, at least until a certain age. You certainly could not have a small child who has just learned to walk, walk according to a vowel or consonant mood. You can work only with the Gospel texts in the Mass. I think that in the Youth Services we can proceed more objectively. The Mass is also not given according to season; it does not adhere strictly to the calendar. What was done historically comes in question only for the reading. During the period from Christmas until Easter, there is an attempt to present the story of the birth and suffering, but later, we can only take the standpoint that the listeners should learn about the Gospels. I don’t think we can do this strictly according to the calendar.

A teacher asks about creating new classes at Easter.

Dr. Steiner: It is a question of space and even more so of teachers. The problem is that there are no more people within the Anthroposophical Society who could teach within the Waldorf School. We can find no more teachers, and male teachers are nowhere to be found within our movement.

A teacher asks what they can do about the poor enunciation of the children.

Dr. Steiner: You mean you are not doing the speech exercises we did during the seminar? You should have done them earlier, in the lower grades. I gave them for you to do. It is clear the children cannot speak properly. You should also do the exercises for the teachers, but you need to have a feeling for this improper speaking. We have often discussed the hygiene of proper speech. You should accustom the children to speaking clearly at a relatively early age. That has a number of consequences. There would be no opportunity for doing German exercises in Greek class, but it is quite possible during German class. You could do speech exercises of various sorts at nearly every age.

In Switzerland, actors have to do speech exercises because certain letters need to be pronounced quite differently if they are to be understood, g, for example. Every theater particularly studies pronouncing g. Concerning the course by Mrs. Steiner, you should never give up requesting it. At some time you will have to get it from her. If you request it often enough, it will happen.

Some teachers ask about the school garden and how it could be used for teaching botany.

Dr. Steiner: Cow manure. Horse manure is no good. You need to do that as well as we can afford to do. In the end, for a limited area, there can be no harmony without a particular number of cattle and a particular amount of plants for the soil. The cattle give the manure, and if there are more plants than manure, the situation is unhealthy.

You cannot use something like peat moss, that is not healthy. You can accomplish nothing with peat. What is important is how you use the plants. Plants that are there to be seen only are not particularly important. If you grow plants with peat, you have only an appearance, you do not actually increase their nutritional value. You should try to observe how the nutritional value is diminished when you grow seedlings in peat.

You need to add some humus to the soil to make it workable. It would be even better if you could use some of Alfred Maier’s manure and horn meal. That will make the soil somewhat softer. He uses ground horns. It is really a homeopathic fertilizer for a botanical garden, for rich soil. In the school garden, you could arrange the plants according to the way you want to go through them. Sometime I will be able to give you the twelve classes of plants.