The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] At the end of the New Testament stands a reAmarkable document, the Apocalypse, the Secret Revelation of St. John. We have only to read the opening words to feel the deep mystic character of this book. “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants how the necessary things are shortly going to happen; and this is sent in signs by the angel of God unto his servant John.” What is here revealed is “sent in signs”. Therefore we must not take the literal meaning of the words as they stand, but seek for a deeper meaning of which the words are only signs. But there are other things also which point to a hidden meaning. St. John addresses himself to seven churches in Asia. Not actual, material churches can be meant: the number seven is the sacred number, clearly chosen on account of its Symbolic meaning. The actual number of Asiatic churches was different. And the manner in which St. John arrived at the revelation also points to something mysterious. “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet, saying, ‘What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches.'” Thus, we have to do with a revelation received by St. John in the spirit. And it is the revelation of Jesus Christ. Wrapped in a hidden meaning, there appears what Christ Jesus manifested to the world. Therefore we must look for this hidden meaning in the teachings of Christ. This revelation bears the same relation to ordinary Christianity as the revelation of the Mysteries bore to popular religion in pre-Christian times. On this account the attempt to treat the Apocalypse as a Mystery appears to be justified.

[ 2 ] The Apocalypse is addressed to seven churches. To see the reason for this, we have only to single out one of the seven messages sent. In the first of these it is said: “Unto the angel of the church of Ephesus write; these things saith he that holdeth the seven stars in his right hand, who walketh in the midst of the seven golden candlesticks; I know thy works, and thy labor, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil: and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars: and hast borne, and hast patience, and for m) name’s sake hast labored, and hast not fainted. Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy highest love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the best works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitanes, which I also hate. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.” This is the message addressed to the angel of the first community. The angel, who represents the spirit of this community, has entered upon the path pointed out by Christianity. He is able to distinguish between the false adherents of Christianity and the true. He wishes to be Christian and has founded his work on the name of Christ. But it is required of him that he should not bar his own way to the highest love through any errors. He is shown the possibility of taking a wrong course through such errors. Through Christ Jesus the way for attaining to the Divine has been pointed out. Perseverance is needed for advancing further in the spirit in which the first impulse was given. It is also possible to believe too soon that one has grasped the right spirit. This happens when the disciple lets himself be led a short way by Christ and then leaves His leadership and gives way to false ideas about it. The disciple thereby falls back again into the lower self. He strays from the highest love. The knowledge attached to the senses and intellect may be raised into a higher sphere, becoming wisdom by being spiritualized and made divine. If it does not reach this height it remains in the realm of the perishable. Christ Jesus has pointed the path to the Eternal, and knowledge must with unwearied perseverance follow the path that leads to its becoming divine. Lovingly must it trace out the methods which transmute it into wisdom. The Nicolaitanes were a sect who took Christianity too lightly. They saw one thing only, that Christ is the divine Word, the eternal wisdom born in man. Therefore they concluded that human wisdom was the Divine Word, and that it was enough to pursue human knowledge in order to realize the Divine in the world. But the meaning of Christian wisdom cannot be construed thus. The knowledge which in the first instance is human wisdom is as perishable as anything else, unless it is first transmuted into divine wisdom: Thou art not thus, says the spirit to the angel of Ephesus; thou hast not relied merely upon human wisdom. Thou hast patiently trodden the Christian path. But thou must not think that the very highest love is not needed to attain to the goal. A love is necessary which far surpasses all love for other things. Only such can be the highest love. The path to the divine is an endless one, and it must be understood that when the first step has been gained it can only be the preparation for ascending higher and higher. Such is the first of these messages, as they are to be interpreted. The meaning of the others may be found in a similar way.

[ 3 ] St. John turned and 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 the paps with a golden girdle. His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire.” We are told (I, 20) that “the seven candlesticks are the seven churches.” This means that the candlesticks are seven different ways of attaining to the Divine. They are all more or less imperfect. And the Son of Man “had in his right hand seven stars” (I, 16). “The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches” (I, 20). The guiding spirits, or daimons (cf. p- 71), of the wisdom of the Mysteries have here become the guiding angels of the churches. The churches are represented as bodies for spiritual beings; and the angels are the souls of those bodies, just as human souls are the guiding powers of human bodies. The churches are the imperfect ways to the Divine, and the souls of the churches were to become guides along those paths. For this purpose they must themselves have for their leader the being who has in his right hand seven stars. “And out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword: and his countenance was as the sun shineth in his strength.” This sword is also found in the Mysteries. The candidate for initiation was terrified by a sword (cf. p. 17). This indicates the situation of one who wishes to know the Divine by experience, so that the face of wisdom may shine upon him like the sun. St. John also goes through this experience. It is to be a test of his strength (cf. p. 17). “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying unto me, Fear not” (I 17) . The candidate for initiation must pass through the experiences which otherwise man only undergoes in death. His guide must lead him beyond the region in which birth and death have any meaning. The initiate enters upon a new life. “And I was dead; and, behold: I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death.”

Thus prepared, St. John is led on to learn the secrets of existence. “After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter.” The messages to the seven spirits of the churches make known to St. John what is to take place in the physical world in order to prepare the way for Christianity. What he now sees “in the Spirit” takes him to the spiritual fountain-head of things, hidden behind physical evolution, but to be realized as a subsequent spiritualized age by means of physical evolution. The initiate experiences now in the spirit what is to happen in the future. “And immediately I was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” In this way is described the source of the world of sense in the pictures in which it appears to the seer. “And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold” (IV. 4). Beings far advanced on the path of wisdom thus surround the fountainhead of existence in order to gaze on its infinite Beingness and bear testimony to it. “And in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind. And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And the four beasts had each of them six wings; and they were full of eyes round about and within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.” It is not difficult to see that the four beasts represent the supersensible life underlying physical forms of life. Afterwards, when the trumpets sound, they lift up their voices, that is, when the life expressed in sense-forms has been transmuted into spiritual life.

[ 4 ] In the right hand of him who sits on the throne is the book in which the path to the highest wisdom is traced out (V, 1). There is only one worthy to open the book. “Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book and to loose the seven seals thereof.” The book has seven seals—human wisdom is sevenfold; and the fact that human wisdom is represented as being sevenfold is again associated with the sacred character of the number seven.¹ The mystic wisdom of Philo designates as seals the eternal cosmic thoughts that come to expression in things. Human wisdom seeks those creative thoughts; but only in the book scaled with them is Divine Truth to be found. First the fundamental thoughts of creation must be unveiled, the seals opened: before that which is in the book can be revealed. Jesus, the Lion, has power to open the seals. He has given a direction to the great creative thoughts which, through them, leads to wisdom. The Lamb that was slain and has bought its divinity with its blood, Jesus, who received the Christ into Himself, and who thus passed through the Life-Death Mystery in the supreme sense, opens the book (V, 9, 10). And as each seal is opened (VI), the four beasts declare what they know.

At the opening of the first seal, St. John sees a white horse on which sits a rider with a bow.² The first universal power, an embodiment of creative thought, becomes visible. It is directed into the right course by the new rider, Christianity. Strife is allayed by the new faith. At the opening of the second seal a red horse appears, ridden by one who takes Peace, the second universal power, away from the earth, so that humanity may not, through sloth, neglect to cultivate divine things. The opening of the third seal shows the universal power of Justice, guided by Christianity. The fourth discloses the power of Religion which, through Christianity, has received new authority.

The meaning of the four beasts thus becomes plain. They are the four chief universal powers, to which Christianity gives a new direction: War (the lion); Peaceful Work (the bull); Justice (the being with the human face); and Religious Ardor (the eagle). The Meaning of the third being becomes clear when it is said at the opening of the third seal: “A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny,” and that the rider holds “a pair of balances”. And at the opening of the fourth seal a rider becomes visible whose name “was Death, and Hell followed with him”. This rider is Religious Justice (VI, 6, 8). [ 5 ] When the fifth seal is opened there appear the souls of those who have already acted in the spirit of Christianity. Creative thought itself, embodied in Christianity, shows itself here; but by this Christianity is meant at first only the first Christian community which was transitory like other forms of creation. The sixth seal is opened (VI); it is made evident that the spiritual world of Christianity is an eternal world. The people at large appear permeated by that spiritual world out of which Christianity itself proceeded. What it has itself created becomes sanctified. “And I heard the number of them which were sealed: and there were sealed an hundred and forty and four thousand of all the tribes of the children of Israel” (VIL, 4) . They are those who prepared for the Eternal before the coming of Christianity, and who were transformed by the Christ-Impulse.

The opening of the seventh seal follows. It becomes evident what true Christianity is to mean to the world. The seven angels, “which stood before God,” appear (VILI, 2). Again these angels are spirits from the ancient Mysteries transferred to Christianity. They are the spirits who lead to the vision of God in a truly Christian way. Therefore what occurs next is a leading to God: it is an initiation bestowed upon St. John. The proclamations of the angels are accompanied by the signs necessary during initiations. “The first angel sounded and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.” And similar things take place when the other angels sound their trumpets.

At this point we sec that this was not merely an initiation in the old sense, but that a new one was taking the place of the old. Christianity was not to be confined, like the ancient Mysteries, to a few elect ones. It was to belong to the whole of humanity. It was to be a religion of the people; the truth was to be given to everyone who “has ears to hear”. The old initiates were singled out from a great number; the trumpets of Christianity sound for every one who is willing to hear them. It is for him to approach. This is the reason why the terrors accompanying this initiation of humanity appear enormously intensified. What is to become of the earth and its inhabitants in a far distant future is revealed to St. John at his initiation. Underlying this is the thought that initiates are able to foresee in higher worlds what is realized in the lower world only in the future. The seven messages represent the meaning of Christianity to the present age, the seven seals represent what is being prepared through Christianity for future accomplishment. The future is veiled and sealed to the uninitiated; it is unsealed in initiation. When the earthly period is over, during which the seven messages hold good, a more spiritual time will begin. Then life will no longer be as it appears in physical forms, but even outwardly it will be a copy of its supersensible forms. These are represented by the four animals and the other seal-pictures. In a still more distant future appears that form of the earth which the initiate experiences through the trumpets.

Thus the initiate learns prophetically what is to happen. And the Christian initiate learns how the Christ-Impulse intervenes and works on in earthly evolution. After it has been shown how everything perishes that clings too closely to the transitory to attain to true Christianity, there appears the mighty angel who has open in his hand a little book which he gives to St. John. “And he said unto me, Take it and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey” (X, 9) . St. John was not only to read the little book, he was to absorb it and let its contents permeate him. What avails any knowledge unless man is vitally imbued with it? Wisdom has to become life, man must not merely recognize the Divine but must himself unite with it. Such wisdom as is written in the book no doubt causes pain to the perishable part of man: “it shall make thy belly bitter;” but so much the more does it make happy the eternal part: “but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.”

Only by such an initiation can Christianity become actual on the earth. It kills everything pertaining to the lower nature. “And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.” By this is meant the followers of Christ who are ill-treated by the temporal powers. But what is ill-treated is only the mortal part of human nature which they will then have conquered by their true being. Thereby their fate is an imitation of the model destiny of Christ Jesus. “Spiritual Sodom and Egypt” is the symbol of a life which cleaves to the outer and is not changed by the Christ-Impulse. Christ is everywhere crucified in the lower nature. Where the lower nature conquers, all remains dead. The dead bodies of men lie about in the public places of cities. Those who overcome the lower nature and awaken the crucified Christ hear the trumpet of the seventh angel: “The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (XI, 15). “And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament” (XI, 19).

In the vision of these events the initiate sees renewed the old struggle between the lower and the higher natures. For everything the former neophyte had to go through must be repeated in one who follows the Christian path. Just as Osiris was threatened by the evil Typhon, so now “the great dragon, that old serpent” (XII, 9) must be overcome. Woman, the human soul, gives birth to lower knowledge, which is an adverse power if it is not raised to wisdom. Man must pass through that lower knowledge. In the Apocalypse it appears as the “old serpent”. From the remotest times the serpent had been the symbol of knowledge in all mystic wisdom. Man may be led astray by this serpent—knowledge—if he does not bring to life in himself the Son of God, who crushes the serpent’s head. “And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him” (XII, 9). These words disclose the purpose of Christianity: a new kind of initiation. What had been attained in the Mysteries was to be attained in a new form. For in them, too, the serpent had to be overcome, but this was no longer to take place in the old way. The one primary Mystery, the Christian Mystery, was to replace the many Mysteries of antiquity. Jesus, in whom the Logos had been made flesh, was to become the initiator of the whole of humanity, and humanity was to be His own community of initiates.

What was to take place was not a segregation of the elect but a linking together of all. As each grows up to it so does he become an initiate. The good tidings are announced to all, and he who has an ear to hear hastens to learn the secrets. The voice of the heart is to decide in each individual case. Not this person or that is to be introduced into the Mystery temples, but the word is to be spoken to all; and to one it will then appeal more strongly than to another. It will be left to the daimon, the angel within each human breast, to decide how far the initiation can go. The whole world is a Mystery-temple. Not only is salvation to come to those who see the wonderful rites in the temples devoted to initiation which give them a guarantee of eternal life, but “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Even if at first they grope in the dark, the light may nevertheless come to them later. Nothing is to be withheld from anyone; the way is to be open to all.

The latter part of the Apocalypse describes clearly the dangers threatening Christianity through antiChristian powers, and the final triumph of Christianity. All other gods are merged into the one Christian Divinity: “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof” (XXI, 23). The secret of the Revelation of St. John is that the Mysteries are no longer to be kept under lock and key. “And he saith unto me, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand.”

The author of the Apocalypse has set forth what he believes to be the relation of his church to the churches of antiquity. His purpose was to express in a spiritual Mystery what he thought about the Mysteries themselves. He wrote his Mystery on the Isle of Patmos, and he is said to have received the “revelation” in a grotto. These details indicate that the revelation was of a Mystery character.

Christianity, then, grew out of the Mysteries. Its wisdom is born as a Mystery in the Apocalypse, but a Mystery that aims to transcend the limits of the old Mystery world. The individual Mystery was to become the universal Mystery.

It may appear to be a contradiction to say that the secrets of the Mysteries were revealed through Christianity, and that nevertheless a Christian Mystery is to be seen again in the spiritual visions of the writer of the Apocalypse. The contradiction disappears directly when we reflect that the secrets of the ancient Mysteries were revealed by the events in Palestine. Through these there became manifest what had previously been veiled in the Mysteries. There is now a new secret, namely, that which has been infused into the evolution of the world through the appearance of the Christ. The initiate of ancient times, when in the spiritual world, saw how evolution points to the as yet hidden Christ. The Christian initiate experiences the concealed effects of the manifested Christ.

• 1. An explanation of the meaning of the number seven may be obtained in my book, Occult Science, an Outline.
• 2. The meanings of the Apocalyptic signs can only be given very briefly here. Of course, all these things might be much more thoroughly explained, but the scope of this book does not allow this.

[ 1 ] At the end of the New Testament stands a remarkable document, the Apocalypse, the secret revelation of Saint John. We need only read the opening words to feel the esoteric character of this book. “The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God granted him, to show to his servants how the necessary events will shortly run their course; this is sent in signs by the angel of God to his servant John.”⁶⁸ What is revealed here is “sent in signs.” Therefore we must not take the literal sense of the words as they stand, but seek for a deeper sense, of which the words are only signs. But there are also many other things which point to such a “secret meaning.” John addresses himself to seven communities in Asia. This cannot mean actual, material communities. For the number seven is the sacred symbolic number which must be chosen because of its symbolic meaning. The actual number of the Asiatic communities would have been different. And its esoteric character is further indicated by the manner in which John arrived at the revelation: “I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a voice like a trumpet, saying; What you see, write in a book and send it to the seven communities.” Therefore we are dealing with a revelation received by John in the Spirit. And it is the revelation of Jesus Christ. What became revealed to the world through Christ Jesus appears in an esoteric form. Such an esoteric sense therefore must be sought in the teaching of Christ. This revelation bears the same relationship to ordinary Christianity as the revelation of the Mysteries in pre Christian times bore to the folk religion. Hence the attempt to treat this Apocalypse as a Mystery appears justified.

[ 2 ] The Apocalypse is addressed to seven communities. What does this mean? We need only single out one of the messages to perceive the sense. In the first of these is said: “Write to the angel of the community of Ephesus: The words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lights. I know your deeds and what you have suffered and also your patient endurance, and that you will not support those who are evil, and that you have called to account those who call themselves apostles, and are not, and that you have recognized them as false. And you are enduring patiently and building up your work upon my name, and you have not grown weary of it. But I demand from you that you should attain to your highest love. Realize then from what you have fallen, change your thinking and accomplish the highest deeds. If you do not, I will come and move your light from its place, unless you change your thinking. But this you have, that you despise the deeds of the Nicolaitians, which I also despise. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the communities: To him who is victorious I will give food of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.” (Rev. 2:1–7)—This is the message addressed to the angel of the first community. The angel, who represents the spirit of his community, has entered upon the path marked out by Christianity. He is able to distinguish between the false adherents of Christianity and the true. He wishes to be Christian, and has founded his work on the name of Christ. But it is required of him that he should not bar his own way to the highest love by errors of any kind. He is shown the possibility of taking a wrong course through such errors. Through Christ Jesus the path toward attainment of the divine has been marked out. Patient endurance is needed for further advancement in the sense of the first impulse. It is possible to believe too soon that one has grasped the right sense. This happens if someone allows himself to be led part of the way by Christ and then, after all, leaves this leadership by surrendering himself to false ideas about it. Thereby he relapses into his lower self. He has left the “first love.” The knowledge arising out of material perception may be raised into a higher sphere, becoming wisdom by being spiritualized and made divine. If it does not reach this height, it remains among transitory things. Christ Jesus has pointed out the path to the Eternal. With unwearied, patient endurance knowledge must follow the path leading to its apotheosis. Lovingly it must follow the steps which transform it into wisdom. The Nicolaitians were a sect who took Christianity too lightly. They saw but one thing: Christ is the divine Word, the eternal wisdom which will be born in man. Therefore they concluded that human wisdom is the divine Word. Hence it follows that one need only pursue human knowledge in order to realize the divine in the world. But the meaning of Christian wisdom cannot be construed thus. The knowledge which begins as human wisdom is as transitory as anything else unless it is changed into divine wisdom. You are not thus, says the “Spirit” to the angel of Ephesus; you have not relied merely upon human wisdom. You have trodden the Christian path with patient endurance. But you must not believe that the very highest love is not needed to attain this goal. For this a love is necessary which far surpasses all love for other things. Only this is the “highest love.” The path to the divine is an infinite one, and it must be understood that when the first stage has been reached it can be only the preparation for ascending to ever higher stages. In this way, through the first of the messages is shown how they should be interpreted. The sense of the others can be found in a similar manner.

[ 3 ] John turned and saw “seven golden lights,” and “in the midst of the lights the image of the Son of Man, clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his loins; his head and his hair were gleaming white like wool or snow, and his eyes were sparkling in the fire.” We are told (Rev.1:20) that “the seven lights are the seven communities.” This means that the lights are seven different ways of attaining to the divine. All of them are more or less imperfect. And the Son of Man “had seven stars in his right hand” (verse 16). “The seven stars are the angels of the seven communities” (verse 20). Here the “guiding spirits” (daemons) of the wisdom of the Mysteries have become the guiding angels of the “communities.” These communities are represented as bodies for spiritual beings. And the angels are the souls of these “bodies,” just as human souls are the guiding powers of human bodies. The communities are the paths to the divine in the imperfect, and the souls of the communities should become guides along these paths. For this purpose they themselves must grow in such a way that their leader is the being who has the “seven stars” in his right hand. “And out of his mouth issued a two-edged sharp sword, and his countenance in its glory was like the shining sun.” In the Mysteries this sword is also found. The neophyte was terrified by a “drawn sword.” This indicates the situation of one wishing to know the divine by experience, so that the “countenance” of wisdom may “shine upon him with a glory like the sun.” Through this experience John also goes. It is to be a test of his strength. “And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead; and he laid his right hand upon me and said: Do not be terrified” (verse 17). The neophyte must go through experiences which otherwise come to man only when he goes through death. His guide must lead him beyond the region where birth and death have meaning. The initiate enters upon a new life, “and I was dead, and behold, I became alive throughout the cycles of life; and I have the keys of Death and the Realm of the Dead.”—Thus prepared, John is lead onward in order to learn the secrets of existence. “After this I looked, and behold, the door to heaven was opened, and the first voice which became audible sounded to me like a trumpet, and said Come up hither, and I will show you what will happen after this.” The messages of the seven spirits of the communities announce to John what is to occur in the material, physical world in order to prepare the way for Christianity; what he now sees “in the Spirit” leads him to the spiritual, primal source of things, hidden behind physical evolution, but which will be realized in a spiritualized age in the near future by means of physical evolution. The initiate experiences now in the Spirit what is to happen in the future. “And immediately I was withdrawn into the realm of Spirit. And I beheld a throne in heaven, and one seated on the throne. And he who sat there appeared like the jasper and carnelian stone; and a rainbow surrounded the throne that looked like an emerald.” In this way the primal source of the material world is described in the pictures in which it clothes itself for the seer. “And in the sphere around the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated upon the twenty-four thrones were twenty-four elders, clothed in white flowing garments, and with golden crowns upon their heads.” (chapter 4, verses 1, 2)—Beings far advanced upon the path of wisdom thus surround the primal source of existence, to gaze on its infinite essence and to bear testimony to it. “And in the midst of the throne, and around the throne, were four living creatures, full of eyes in front and behind. And the first living creature was like a lion, and the second like a bull, the third looked like a human being, and the fourth was like a flying eagle. And each of the four living creatures had six wings, full of eyes all round and within, and day and night they never cease to proclaim: Holy, holy, holy, the God, the Almighty, who was, and is, and is to be.” It is not difficult to perceive that the four beasts represent the supersensible life underlying the forms of life presented by the material world. Afterward, when the trumpets sound, they raise their voices, that is, when the life expressed in material forms has been transmuted into spiritual life.

[ 4 ] In the right hand of him who sits on the throne is the scroll in which the path to the highest wisdom is marked out (chapter 5, verse 1). Only one is worthy to open the scroll. “Behold the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.” The scroll has seven seals.^c9 The wisdom of man is sevenfold. That it is designated as being sevenfold is again connected with the sacred character of the number seven. The mystical wisdom of Plato designates as seals the eternal cosmic thoughts which come to expression in things.⁶⁹ Human wisdom seeks for these creative thoughts. But only the scroll which is sealed with them, contains the divine truth. The fundamental thoughts of creation must first be unveiled, the seals must be opened, before what is in the scroll can be revealed. Jesus, the Lion, has power to open the seals. He has given a direction to the great creative thoughts which, through them, leads to wisdom. The Lamb who was strangled and sacrificed his blood for God; Jesus, who bore Christ in himself and who thus, in the highest sense, passed through the Mystery of life and death, opens the scroll (chapter 5, verses 9–10). And as each seal is opened (chapter 6) the four living creatures declare what they know. At the opening of the first seal a white horse upon which sits a rider with a bow^c10, appears to John. The first cosmic power, an embodiment of creative thought, becomes visible. It is directed into the right course by the new rider, Christianity. Strife is quieted by the new faith. At the opening of the second seal a red horse appears, on which again there is a rider. He takes peace, the second cosmic power, from the earth so that through sloth humanity may not neglect to cultivate the divine. The opening of the third seal reveals the cosmic power of justice, guided by Christianity; the fourth brings the power of religion, which has received new dignity through Christianity. The meaning of the four living creatures thus becomes clear. They are the four chief cosmic powers which are to receive new leadership through Christianity, War: the lion; Peaceful Work: the bull; Justice: the being with the human face; and Religious Enthusiasm: the eagle. The meaning of the third being becomes clear when it is said at the opening of the third seal: “A quart of wheat for a shilling, and three quarts of barley for a shilling,” and that the rider holds a balance. At the opening of the fourth seal a rider becomes visible whose name was “Death, and Hell followed him.” Religious justice is the rider (chapter 6, verses 6 and 7).

[ 5 ] And when the fifth seal is opened there appear the souls of those who have already acted in the spirit of Christianity. Creative thought itself, embodied in Christianity, is manifested here. But by this Christianity is at first meant only the first community of Christians, which is transitory like other forms of creation. The sixth seal is opened (chapter 7), it is evident that the spiritual world of Christianity is an eternal world. The people seem to be permeated by that spiritual world out of which Christianity itself proceeded. What it has itself created becomes sanctified. “And I heard the number of the sealed: a hundred and forty-four thousand who were sealed of all the tribes of the children of Israel” (chapter 7, verse 4). They are those who prepared for the eternal before Christianity existed, and who were transformed by the Christ impulse. The opening of the seventh seal follows. What true Christianity should mean for the world becomes evident. The seven angels who “stand before God” (chapter 8, verse 2) appear. Again these angels are spirits from the ancient Mystery-conceptions transferred to Christianity. They are the spirits who lead to the vision of God in a truly Christian way. Therefore what is next accomplished is a leading to God; it is an “initiation” which is bestowed upon John. The announcements of the angels are accompanied by the signs necessary at initiations. “The first angel sounded and hail came out of fire mingled with blood, and it fell on the earth. And a third of the earth was burnt up, also a third of the trees was burnt up, and all the green grass was burnt up.” And similar things happen at the announcements of the other angels when they sound their trumpets. At this point we see we are not dealing with an initiation in the old sense but with a new one which should take the place of the old. Christianity should not be confined, like the ancient Mysteries, to a few elect. It should belong to the whole of humanity. It should be a religion of the people; the truth should be given to each one who “has ears to hear.” The ancient mystics were singled out from a great number; the trumpets of Christianity sound for every one who is willing to hear them. Whether or not he draws near, depends upon himself. This is why the terrors accompanying this initiation of humanity are so enormously enhanced. What is to become of the earth and its inhabitants in a distant future is revealed to John at his initiation. Underlying this is the thought that initiates are able to foresee in the higher worlds what is realized only in the future for the lower world. The seven messages represent the meaning of Christianity for the present age; the seven seals represent what is now being prepared for the future through Christianity. The future is veiled, sealed to the uninitiated; in initiation it is unsealed. When the earthly period is over, during which the seven messages hold good, a more spiritual time will begin. Then life will no longer flow on as it appears in physical shapes, but even outwardly it will be a copy of its supersensible forms. These latter are represented by the four animals and the other images contained in the seals. In a yet more distant future appears that form of the earth which the initiate experiences through the trumpets. Thus the initiate prophetically experiences what is to happen. And one who is initiated in the Christian sense experiences how the Christ impulse penetrates and continues to work in earthly life. And after it has been shown how everything that clings too closely to the transitory to attain true Christianity has met with death, there appears the mighty angel with a little scroll open in his hand, and which he gives to John (chapter 10, verse 9): “And he said to me Take it, and eat: it will be bitter to your stomach but sweet in your mouth like honey.” John was not only to read the little scroll; he was to absorb it, letting its contents permeate him. What avails any cognition unless man is vitally and thoroughly permeated by it? Wisdom should become life; man should not merely perceive the divine, but become divine himself. Such wisdom as is written in the scroll no doubt causes pain to the transitory nature: “it will be bitter to your stomach;” but so much the more does it make the eternal part happy: “but it will be sweet in your mouth like honey.”—Only through such an initiation can Christianity become actual on the earth. It kills everything belonging to the lower nature. “And their dead bodies will lie in the square of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also their Christ was crucified.” This refers to the believers in Christ. They will be mistreated by the powers of the transitory world. But it is only the transitory members of human nature that will be ill treated, which the true essence will then have conquered. Thereby their destiny is a copy of the exemplary fate of Christ Jesus. “Spiritually Sodom and Egypt” is the symbol of a life which clings to the external and does not change itself through the Christ impulse. Christ is everywhere crucified in the lower nature. Where this lower nature conquers, everything remains dead. Human corpses cover the squares of the cities. Those who overcome the lower nature and bring about an awakening of the crucified Christ, hear the trumpet of the seventh angel: “The kingdoms of the world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ; and he shall reign from cosmic age to cosmic age” (chapter 11, verse 15). “And the temple of God in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant was seen within his temple” (verse 9). In the conception of these events the initiate sees the old struggle between the lower and higher nature renewed. For everything the neophyte formerly had to go through must be repeated in the one who follows the Christian path. As once Osiris was threatened by the evil Typhon, so now the “great Dragon, the old Serpent” (chapter 12, verse 9) must be overcome. The woman, the human soul, gives birth to lower knowledge, which is an adverse power if it does not raise itself to wisdom. Man must pass through that lower knowledge. Here in the Apocalypse it appears as the “old Serpent.” In all mystical wisdom from the remotest times the serpent has been the symbol of cognition. Man may be led astray by this serpent, by cognition, if he does not bring to life in him the Son of God who crushes the serpents head. “And the great Dragon was thrown out, that old Serpent, whose name is Devil, and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world: he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him” (chapter 12, verse 9). In these words one can read what Christianity would be. A new method of initiation. In a new form was to be attained what had been attained in the Mysteries. In them also the serpent had to be overcome. But this was no longer to take place in the same way. The one, the archetypal Mystery, the Christian Mystery, was to replace the many Mysteries of antiquity. Jesus, in whom the Logos became flesh, was to become the Initiator of the whole of humanity. And this humanity was to become his own community of mystics. Not a separation of the elect but a linking together of all is to occur. Each is to be able to become a mystic according to his maturity. The message sounds forth to all; he who has an ear, hastens to learn the secrets. The voice of the heart is to decide in each individual case. This or that person is not to be introduced individually into the Mystery temples, but the word is to be spoken to all; then some will be able to hear it more clearly than others. It will be left to the daemon, the angel within each human breast, to decide how far he can be initiated. The whole world is a Mystery temple. Blessing is not only to come to those who see the wonderful processes in the special temples for initiation, processes which give them a guarantee of the eternal, but “Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believe.” Even if at first they grope in the dark, nevertheless the light may come to them later. Nothing is to be withheld from anyone; the way is to be open to all. The latter part of the Apocalypse describes graphically the dangers threatening Christianity through Antichristian powers, and how the Christian powers must be victorious nevertheless. All other gods are united in the One Christian Divinity: “And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it: for the revelation of God lights it, and its light is the Lamb” (chapter 21, verse 23). The mystery of the “Revelation of Saint John” is that the Mysteries shall no longer be kept hidden. “And he said to me: Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the Godhead is near.”—The author of the Apocalypse has set forth what he believes to be the relationship of his church to the churches of antiquity. He wished to express what he thought about the Mysteries in the form of a spiritual Mystery. He wrote his Mystery on the island of Patmos. He is said to have received the “Revelation” in a grotto. These details indicate that the revelation was of the character of a Mystery. Thus Christianity emerged from the Mysteries. In the Apocalypse its wisdom is itself born as a Mystery, but as a Mystery which transcends the frame of the old Mystery world. The unique Mystery is to become the universal Mystery. It may appear contradictory to say that the secrets of the Mysteries became revealed through Christianity, and that nevertheless a Christian Mystery is to be seen again in the experience of the spiritual visions of the writer of the Apocalypse. The contradiction disappears at once when we reflect that the secrets of the ancient Mysteries were revealed through the events in Palestine. Through these events was laid bare what previously had been veiled in the Mysteries. A new Mystery has been introduced into the evolution of the world through the appearance of the Christ. The initiate of ancient times experienced, in the spiritual world, how evolution points the way to the as yet “hidden Christ;” the Christian initiate experiences the hidden effects of the “revealed Christ.”

• 68. Whenever Steiner quoted Martin Luther's translation of the Bible, the corresponding Authorized (King James) Version is given in this book. However, particularly in his quotations from the Apocalypse, Steiner's text sometimes coincides with neither the Greek original nor the Luther Version. In the first instance the present text as rendered in this book was translated directly from Steiner's German, and in the second, the Revised Standard Version proved to be nearer the German.
• c9. Regarding the significance of the number seven, enlightenment may be gained from my bookGeheimwissenschaft,Leipzig 1910. [26th edition, Stuttgart 1955.]
• 69. Philo, De specialibus legibus, The Special Laws, I, 47.
• c10. The meanings of the apocolyptic symbols can be only very briefly indicated here. Of course one could enter much more deeply into all these things. However, this does not lie within the scope of this book.

It has frequently been emphasized that man's greatest riddle is himself. Both natural and spiritual science ultimately try to solve this riddle—the former by understanding the natural laws that govern our outer being, the latter by seeking the essence and purpose inherent in our existence. Now as correct as it may be that man's greatest riddle is himself, it must also be emphasized that each individual human being is a riddle, often even to himself. Every one of us experiences this in encounters with other people.

Today we shall be dealing not with general riddles, but rather with those posed to us by every human being in every encounter, and these are just as important. For how endlessly varied people are! We need only consider temperament, the subject of today's lecture, in order to realize that there are as many riddles as there are people. Even within the basic types known as the temperaments, such variety exists among people that the very mystery of existence seems to express itself within these types. Temperament, that fundamental coloring of the human personality, plays a role in all manifestations of individuality that are of concern to practical life. We sense something of this basic mood whenever we encounter another human being. Thus we can only hope that spiritual science will tell us what we need to know about the temperaments.

Our first impression of the temperaments is that they are external, for although they can be said to flow from within, they manifest themselves in everything we can observe from without. However, this does not mean that the human riddle can be solved by means of natural science and observation. Only when we hear what spiritual science has to say can we come closer to understanding these peculiar colorations of the human personality.

Spiritual science tells us first of all that the human being is part of a line of heredity. He displays the characteristics he has inherited from father, mother, grandparents, and so on. These characteristics he then passes on to his progeny. The human being thus possesses certain traits by virtue of being part of a succession of generations.

However, this inheritance gives us only one side of his nature. Joined to that is the individuality he brings with him out of the spiritual world. This he adds to what his father and mother, his ancestors, are able to give him. Something that proceeds from life to life, from existence to existence, connects itself with the generational stream. Certain characteristics we can attribute to heredity; on the other hand, as a person develops from childhood on, we can see unfolding out of the center of his being something that must be the fruit of preceding lives, something he could never have inherited from his ancestors. We come to know the law of reincarnation, of the succession of earthly lives and this is but a special case of an all-encompassing cosmic law.

An illustration will make this seem less paradoxical. Consider a lifeless mineral, say, a rock crystal. Should the crystal be destroyed, it leaves nothing of its form that could be passed on to other crystals.¹ A new crystal receives nothing of the old one's particular form. When we move on to the world of plants, we notice that a plant cannot develop according to the same laws as does the crystal. It can only originate from another, earlier plant. Form is here preserved and passed on.

Moving on to the animal kingdom, we find an evolution of the species taking place. We begin to appreciate why the nineteenth century held the discovery of evolution to be its greatest achievement. In animals, not only does one being proceed from another, but each young animal during the embryo phase recapitulates the earlier phases of its species' evolutionary development. The species itself undergoes an enhancement.

In human beings not only does the species evolve, but so does the individual. What a human being acquires in a lifetime through education and experience is preserved, just as surely as are the evolutionary achievements of an animal's ancestral line. It will someday be commonplace to trace a person's inner core to a previous existence. The human being will come to be known as the product of an earlier life. The views that stand in the way of this doctrine will be overcome, just as was the scholarly opinion of an earlier century, which held that living organisms could arise from nonliving substances. As recently as three hundred years ago, scholars believed that animals could evolve from river mud, that is, from nonliving matter. Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist, was the first to assert that living things could develop only from other living things.² For this he was attacked and came close to suffering the fate of Giordano Bruno.³ Today, burning people at the stake is no longer fashionable. When someone attempts to teach a new truth, for example, that psycho-spiritual entities must be traced back to earlier psycho-spiritual entities, he won't exactly be burned at the stake, but he will be dismissed as a fool. But the time will come when the real foolishness will be to believe that the human being lives only once, that there is no enduring entity that unites itself with a person's inherited traits.

Now the important question arises: How can something originating in a completely different world, that must seek a father and a mother, unite itself with physical corporeality? How can it clothe itself in the bodily features that link human beings to a hereditary chain? How does the spiritual-psychic stream, of which man forms a part through reincarnation, unite itself with the physical stream of heredity? The answer is that a synthesis must be achieved. When the two streams combine, each imparts something of its own quality to the other. In much the same way that blue and yellow combine to give green, the two streams in the human being combine to yield what is commonly known as temperament. Our inner self and our inherited traits both appear in it. Temperament stands between the things that connect a human being to an ancestral line, and those the human being brings with him out of earlier incarnations. Temperament strikes a balance between the eternal and the ephemeral. And it does so in such a way that the essential members of the human being, which we have come to know in other contexts, enter into a very specific relationship with one another.

Human beings as we know them in this life are beings of four members. The first, the physical body, they have in common with the mineral world. The first super-sensible member, the etheric body, is integrated into the physical and separates from it only at death. There follows as third member the astral body, the bearer of instincts, drives, passions, desires, and of the ever-changing content of sensation and thought. Our highest member, which places us above all other earthly beings, is the bearer of the human ego, which endows us in such a curious and yet undeniable fashion with the power of self-awareness. These four members we have come to know as the essential constituents of a human being.

The way the four members combine is determined by the flowing together of the two streams upon a person's entry into the physical world. In every case, one of the four members achieves predominance over the others, and gives them its own peculiar stamp. Where the bearer of the ego predominates, a choleric temperament results. Where the astral body predominates, we find a sanguine temperament. Where the etheric or life-body predominates, we speak of a phlegmatic temperament. And where the physical body predominates, we have to deal with a melancholic temperament. The specific way in which the eternal and the ephemeral combine determines what relationship the four members will enter into with one another.

The way the four members find their expression in the physical body has also frequently been mentioned. The ego expresses itself in the circulation of the blood. For this reason, in the choleric the predominant system is that of the blood. The astral body expresses itself physically in the nervous system; thus in the sanguine, the nervous system holds sway. The etheric body expresses itself in the glandular system; hence the phlegmatic is dominated physically by his glands. The physical body as such expresses itself only in itself; thus the outwardly most important feature in the melancholic is his physical body. This can be observed in all phenomena connected with these temperaments.

In the choleric, the ego and the blood system predominate. The choleric thus comes across as someone who must always have his way. His aggressiveness, everything connected with his forcefulness of will, derives from his blood circulation.

In the nervous system and astral body, sensations and feelings constantly fluctuate. Any harmony or order results solely from the restraining influence of the ego. People who do not exercise that influence appear to have no control over their thoughts and sensations. They are totally absorbed by the sensations, pictures, and ideas that ebb and flow within them. Something like this occurs whenever the astral body predominates, as, for example, in the sanguine. Sanguines surrender themselves in a certain sense to the constant and varied flow of images, sensations, and ideas since in them the astral body and nervous system predominate.

The nervous system's activity is restrained only by the circulation of the blood. That this is so becomes clear when we consider what happens when a person lacks blood or is anaemic, in other words, when the blood's restraining influence is absent. Mental images fluctuate wildly, often leading to illusions and hallucinations.

A touch of this is present in sanguines. Sanguines are incapable of lingering over an impression. They cannot fix their attention on a particular image nor sustain their interest in an impression. Instead, they rush from experience to experience, from percept to percept. This is especially noticeable in sanguine children, where it can be a source of concern. The sanguine child's interest is easily kindled, a picture will easily impress, but the impression quickly vanishes.

We proceed now to the phlegmatic temperament. We observed that this temperament develops when the etheric or life-body, as we call it, which regulates growth and metabolism, is predominant. The result is a sense of inner well-being. The more a human being lives in his etheric body, the more is he preoccupied with his internal processes. He lets external events run their course while his attention is directed inward.

In the melancholic we have seen that the physical body, the coarsest member of the human organization, becomes master over the others. As a result, the melancholic feels he is not master over his body, that he cannot bend it to his will. His physical body, which is intended to be an instrument of the higher members, is itself in control, and frustrates the others. This the melancholic experiences as pain, as a feeling of despondency. Pain continually wells up within him. This is because his physical body resists his etheric body's inner sense of well-being, his astral body's liveliness, and his ego's purposeful striving.

The varying combinations of the four members also manifest themselves quite clearly in external appearance. People in whom the ego predominates seek to triumph over all obstacles, to make their presence known. Accordingly their ego stunts the growth of the other members; it withholds from the astral and etheric bodies their due portion. This reveals itself outwardly in a very clear fashion. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, that famous German choleric, was recognizable as such purely externally.⁴ His build revealed clearly that the lower essential members had been held back in their growth. Napoleon, another classic example of the choleric, was so short because his ego had held the other members back.⁵ Of course, one cannot generalize that all cholerics are short and all sanguines tall. It is a question of proportion. What matters is the relation of size to overall form.

In the sanguine the nervous system and astral body predominate. The astral body's inner liveliness animates the other members, and makes the external form as mobile as possible. Whereas the choleric has sharply chiseled facial features, the sanguine's are mobile, expressive, changeable. We see the astral body's inner liveliness manifested in every outer detail, for example, in a slender form, a delicate bone structure, or lean muscles. The same thing can be observed in details of behavior. Even a non-clairvoyant can tell from behind whether someone is a choleric or a sanguine; one does not need to be a spiritual scientist for that. If you observe the gait of a choleric, you will notice that he plants each foot so solidly that he would seem to want to bore down into the ground. By contrast, the sanguine has a light, springy step. Even subtler external traits can be found. The inwardness of the ego, the choleric's self-contained inwardness, express themselves in eyes that are dark and smoldering. The sanguine, whose ego has not taken such deep root, who is filled with the liveliness of his astral body, tends by contrast to have blue eyes. Many more such distinctive traits of these temperaments could be cited.

The phlegmatic temperament manifests itself in a static, indifferent physiognomy, as well as in plumpness, for fat is due largely to the activity of the etheric body. In all this the phlegmatic's inner sense of comfort is expressed. His gait is loose-jointed and shambling, and his manner timid. He seems somehow to be not entirely in touch with his surroundings.

The melancholic is distinguished by a hanging head, as if he lacked the strength necessary to straighten his neck. His eyes are dull, not shining like the choleric's; his gait is firm, but in a leaden rather than a resolute sort of way.

Thus you see how significantly spiritual science can contribute to the solution of this riddle. Only when one seeks to encompass reality in its entirety, which includes the spiritual, can knowledge bear practical fruit. Accordingly, only spiritual science can give us knowledge that will benefit the individual and all mankind. In education, very close attention must be paid to the individual temperaments, for it is especially important to be able to guide and direct them as they develop in the child. But the temperaments are also important to our efforts to improve ourselves later in life. We do well to attend to what expresses itself through them if we wish to further our personal development.

The four fundamental types I have outlined here for you naturally never manifest themselves in such pure form. Every human being has one basic temperament, with varying degrees of the other three mixed in. Napoleon, for example, although a choleric, had much of the phlegmatic in him. To truly master life, it is important that we open our souls to what manifests itself as typical. When we consider that the temperaments, each of which represents a mild imbalance, can degenerate into unhealthy extremes, we realize just how important this is.

Yet, without the temperaments the world would be an exceedingly dull place, not only ethically, but also in a higher sense. The temperaments alone make all multiplicity, beauty, and fullness of life possible. Thus in education it would be senseless to want to homogenize or eliminate them, but an effort should be made to direct each into the proper track, for in every temperament there lie two dangers of aberration, one great, one small. One danger for the young choleric is that he will never learn to control his temper as he develops into maturity. That is the small danger. The greater is that he will become foolishly single-minded. For the sanguine the lesser danger is flightiness; the greater is mania, induced by a constant stream of sensations. The small danger for the phlegmatic is apathy; the greater is stupidity, dullness. For the melancholic, insensitivity to anything other than his own personal pain is the small danger; the greater is insanity.

In light of all this it is clear that to guide and direct the temperaments is one of life's significant tasks. If this task is to be properly carried out, however, one basic principle must be observed, which is always to reckon with what is given, and not with what is not there. For example, if a child has a sanguine temperament, he will not be helped if his elders try to flog interest into him. His temperament simply will not allow it. Instead of asking what the child lacks, in order that we might beat it into him, we must focus on what he has, and base ourselves on that. And as a rule, there is one thing we can always stimulate the sanguine child's interest in. However flighty the child might be, we can always stimulate his interest in a particular personality. If we ourselves are that personality, or if we bring the child together with someone who is, the child cannot but develop an interest. Only through the medium of love for a personality can the interest of the sanguine child be awakened. More than children of any other temperament, the sanguine needs someone to admire. Admiration is here a kind of magic word, and we must do everything we can to awaken it.

We must reckon with what we have. We should see to it that the sanguine child is exposed to a variety of things in which he has shown a deeper interest. These things should be allowed to speak to him, to have an effect upon him. They should then be withdrawn, so that the child's interest in them will intensify; then they may be restored. In other words, we must fashion the sanguine's environment so that it is in keeping with his temperament.

The choleric child is also susceptible of being led in a special way. The key to his education is respect and esteem for a natural authority. Instead of winning affection by means of personal qualities, as one does with the sanguine child, one should see to it that the child's belief in his teacher's ability remains unshaken. The teacher must demonstrate an understanding of what goes on around the child. Any showing of incompetence should be avoided. The child must persist in the belief that his teacher is competent, or all authority will be lost. The magic potion for the choleric child is respect and esteem for a person's worth, just as for the sanguine child it was love for a personality. Outwardly, the choleric child must be confronted with challenging situations. He must encounter resistance and difficulty, lest his life become too easy.

The melancholic child is not easy to lead. With him, however, a different magic formula may be applied. For the sanguine child this formula was love for a personality; for the choleric, it was respect and esteem for a teacher's worth. By contrast, the important thing for the melancholic is for his teachers to be people who have in a certain sense been tried by life, who act and speak on the basis of past trials. The child must feel that the teacher has known real pain. Let your treatment of all of life's little details be an occasion for the child to appreciate what you have suffered. Sympathy with the fates of those around him furthers the melancholic's development. Here too one must reckon with what the child has. The melancholic has a capacity for suffering, for discomfort, which is firmly rooted in his being; it cannot be disciplined out of him. However, it can be redirected. We should expose the child to legitimate external pain and suffering, so that he learns there are things other than himself that can engage his capacity for experiencing pain. This is the essential thing. We should not try to divert or amuse the melancholic, for to do so only intensifies his despondency and inner suffering; instead, he must be made to see that objective occasions for suffering exist in life. Although we mustn't carry it too far, redirecting the child's suffering to outside objects is what is called for.

The phlegmatic child should not be allowed to grow up alone. Although naturally all children should have play-mates, for phlegmatics it is especially important that they have them. Their playmates should have the most varied interests. Phlegmatic children learn by sharing in the interests, the more numerous the better, of others. Their playmates' enthusiasms will overcome their native indifference towards the world. Whereas the important thing for the melancholic is to experience another person's fate, for the phlegmatic child it is to experience the whole range of his playmates' interests. The phlegmatic is not moved by things as such, but an interest arises when he sees things reflected in others, and these interests are then reflected in the soul of the phlegmatic child. We should bring into the phlegmatic's environment objects and events toward which “phlegm” is an appropriate reaction. Impassivity must be directed toward the right objects, objects toward which one may be phlegmatic.

From the examples of these pedagogical principles, we see how spiritual science can address practical problems. These principles can also be applied to oneself, for purposes of self-improvement. For example, a sanguine gains little by reproaching himself for his temperament. Our minds are in such questions frequently an obstacle. When pitted directly against stronger forces such as the temperaments, they can accomplish little. Indirectly, however, they can accomplish much. The sanguine, for example, can take his sanguinity into account, abandoning self-exhortation as fruitless. The important thing is to display sanguinity under the right circumstances. Experiences suited to his short attention span can be brought about through thoughtful planning. Using thought in this way, even on the smallest scale, will produce the requisite effect.

Persons of a choleric temperament should purposely put themselves in situations where rage is of no use, but rather only makes them look ridiculous. Melancholics should not close their eyes to life's pain, but rather seek it out; through compassion they redirect their suffering outward toward appropriate objects and events. If we are phlegmatics, having no particular interests, then we should occupy ourselves as much as possible with uninteresting things, surround ourselves with numerous sources of tedium, so that we become thoroughly bored. We will then be thoroughly cured of our “phlegm;” we will have gotten it out of our system. Thus does one reckon with what one has, and not with what one does not have.

By filling ourselves with practical wisdom such as this, we learn to solve that basic riddle of life, the other person. It is solved not by postulating abstract ideas and concepts, but by means of pictures. Instead of arbitrarily theorizing, we should seek an immediate understanding of every individual human being. We can do this, however, only by knowing what lies in the depths of the soul. Slowly and gradually, spiritual science illuminates our minds, making us receptive not only to the big picture, but also to subtle details. Spiritual science makes it possible that when two souls meet and one demands love, the other offers it. If something else is demanded, that other thing is given. Through such true, living wisdom do we create the basis for society. This is what we mean when we say we must solve a riddle every moment.

Anthroposophy acts not by means of sermons, exhortations, or catechisms, but by creating a social groundwork, upon which human beings can come to know each other. Spiritual science is the ground of life, and love is the blossom and fruit of a life enhanced by it. Thus spiritual science may claim to lay the foundation for humankind's most beautiful goal—a true, genuine love for man.

• 1. Translator's note: The reader may conclude from this remark—for it was, after all, a remark, not a published claim—that Steiner was ignorant of the concept of seed crystals. However, a likelier explanation is that Steiner, whose audience was very likely not a scientifically knowledgeable one, was simply indulging in a bit of rhetorical hyperbole. He doubtless knew that a seed crystal will hasten the crystallization process in a saturated salt solution, but this fact is not really relevant to his point, which comes out only gradually in this paragraph. His point is not that a newly-forming crystal cannot receive some contribution from a previously existing one, only that it need not; this is in contrast to living things, which require a progenitor.
• 2. Francesco Redi, 1626-1697. Refuted spontaneous generation of living beings out of mud.
• 3. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600. Italian philosopher, Dominican monk, burned at the stake as heretic. Taught that the world is infinite in space and time and filled with innumerable suns.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814. German Idealist philosopher.
• 5. Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821. French ruler and emperor 1804-1814 and 1815.

Iron, Sodium, Carbon, Chlorine

(Dr. Steiner asks if anybody has a question.)

Questioner: I believe that we are expecting Dr. Steiner to make some further remarks about the stars.

DR. STEINER: Well, I will just try to connect my remarks with what I said last time and then build further on it. I will go over it again very briefly. We heard that everything which takes place with regularity in the universe, for instance, day and night, the course of the sun or the sequence of the seasons, is all connected with what is necessary in human life. The regular intake of food is necessary within the rhythm of sleeping and waking; the regular rhythm of breathing, circulation of the blood, and so on, is necessary. When we consider all this, we see that it is connected with what can be calculated through Astronomy. On the other hand, all that which happens less regularly—which certainly can be calculated but still happens less regularly, for example, comets and meteors—all these phenomena are connected with what is free will in man, with what gives rise to free will in man.

First and foremost we must turn our attention to a substance which is particularly important, which is abundant on the earth and indeed in the universe, and is present in the meteors which fall on the earth. This substance is iron. Iron exists in such abundance on the earth that the whole of our modern culture and civilisation may be said to be based on it. Just think of all the purposes for which iron is used! It is only quite recently that people have begun to manufacture all sorts of things from substances other than iron. During the last two centuries all the great advances, as well as our social conditions, have been due to iron. We must assume that iron is everywhere present in the universe because when anything falls to the earth from the heavens, it is found to be of iron.

Now let us consider the iron in our own bodies. It is very remarkable that at the beginning of his earthly life the human being drinks a substance which contains practically no iron—namely, milk. The mother's milk contains hardly any iron. So we can say: it is only in the course of his life that man begins to take in iron with his food. What does this mean!

Think of a baby: it kicks a lot and certainly dreams; but it has neither independent thought nor any free will in the real sense. In the measure that it attains freedom of will, its instincts call for iron. Iron is really necessary for free will. And if you come across a man who is hoarse or has a very weak voice and you want to know what is really the cause of it, you must above all find out if he is getting enough iron, for a man who gets too little iron shows this in the lack of will as expressed in speech. When you come across a man who can literally bellow when he is talking, you need not worry whether he is getting enough iron. But in the case of a man who can hardly make himself heard, you are perfectly right to consider how far iron is lacking. Man's need of iron for his free will is shown outwardly. We can therefore easily understand that the iron which is everywhere present in the universe and in the earth is connected with man's free will.

Now everything that happens influences everything else and we must be clear that iron alone does not form us or the universe—otherwise we should be iron men ... which would certainly make for strength, but if we were iron men we could not do many other things. So we must look for something which can form compounds with iron.

I told you recently that soda is especially important for everything in us that has to do with thinking. For soda is sodium carbonate and sodium carbonate has a stimulating effect upon the head. Everything that is connected with our thinking, with our head, with our inner light, has to do with soda. You will remember that I recently explained this.

In order that a substance like soda may be present in us, we must take in the oxygen contained in the air. This we do in breathing, for the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen—of many other things too but they play a less important part. We take in the oxygen with our breathing. What about the carbon? We form carbon in ourselves out of the food we take. Carbonic acid is formed and we then get carbonate of soda. Soda is very important for our heads. We have sodium carbonate—soda—within us, and it is all the time passing into our heads. In propagation, too, it has its part to play as I once told you. So you see soda is of great importance to us.

And now I will tell you something else. I spoke to you once—it was some time ago—about colours. The chief colours are to be seen in the rainbow: violet, blue, green, yellow, then orange and then red, in order. These are the colours of the rainbow. Nature creates these colours in the rainbow, but man can also create them by admitting just a tiny shaft of light through the window of a dark room. (Sketch.) Here is a window, here a small hole where the shaft of light enters. Here you place a glass prism so that the light passes through it and in this way you can get the colours as in the rainbow. You can then project them on a wall.

Now this succession of colours, this spectrum which appears here in the prism, as in the rainbow, has this peculiarity: it is only properly shown when one uses a glass prism, or sunlight. When one uses other bodies, one does not get this sequence of colours but only single colours. For example, under certain circumstances it can be dark everywhere, except for a fine yellow line in the middle. How is this? If you put sodium into a flame and let it burn in the flame, then you get this yellow line, not the red line, but the yellow. Thus when you take a flame, let the light pass through a small hole and take a prism, you do not get a spectrum of the sun, but a yellow line. When you take a tiny bit of sodium and bring it into this large space (sketch) you get the fine yellow line. There need not be much sodium—everywhere there are these fine yellow lines—even the very tiniest amounts of sodium give these yellow lines. ... Sodium is widely, very widely spread in the universe. If you ask yourselves, why is sodium so widespread, then you must answer: in order that this sodium carbonate, this soda, can come into existence. It is spread everywhere in order that human heads can exist. Iron is everywhere present in the universe in order that we can have free will. Sodium is everywhere in order that we can have heads. Were sodium not present in the universe, it would be quite impossible for us to have heads.

Now what must be present in order that we, as human beings, can have heads? There must be carbonic acid, that is to say, carbon and oxygen; and there must be sodium. Sodium, as I have told you, is present everywhere in the universe. Carbon we have in ourselves. It is all the time being created in us from our food; only it is transformed because we do not want to be dead carbon men, but living men, who destroy substance and then re-create it. And especially we create carbon. Thus we have the carbon ourselves, we take the oxygen from the air and the sodium from the universe. These must be present, in order that we may have heads.

You see now that in this way, if these things were present which I have described, we could have heads and we could have our free will. But how would this free will help us as earth-men if we had not arms and legs so that we could use it? We must also be able to nourish ourselves. In order that we can be built up from the materials of the earth, we must be able to take in food. This depends on the fact that we have in our lower organs something similar to what we have in our breathing. We breathe in oxygen; we breathe out carbonic acid gas. If we did not breathe out this carbonic acid, then the plants would not have carbon, for it is taken from the carbonic acid of men and animals. Thus plants are formed by what is breathed out by men and animals. Moreover, the oxygen takes our carbon away—it combines with our carbon. But first we must produce the carbon, we must first have it. To this end we must take food. Oxygen is frightfully greedy for carbon. If we did not give up our carbon to the oxygen, we should at once get fits of suffocation when the carbon cannot get out—that is to say, when the carbonic acid cannot get out. We should suffocate at once. Oxygen is really greedy. Our stomach must also take in food. Just as the oxygen takes up carbon and carbonic acid is formed, so must our stomach greedily take in carbon. Our stomach literally craves for food.

Now we might imagine that if oxygen were in our stomach, it could get out through the mouth and nose. The oxygen is there inside: it absorbs the carbon. There must thus be something in the stomach which also serves the process of the taking of nourishment. And so there is: a substance very like oxygen is in the stomach and is continuously being secreted, namely, chlorine.

I have told you already that soda is used for bleaching and especially for washing. But chlorine is also used for bleaching, is in fact, contained in washing blue. It also is a material which has light in itself, which carries light. Chlorine is very similar to oxygen.

In the breathing organs it is the oxygen of the air which continuously extracts the carbon from our bodies. In the stomach there is chlorine which, because it is greedy, frightfully greedy, similarly attracts to itself all hydrogen. And together with the hydrogen it forms hydrochloric acid.

This hydrochloric acid flows about in our stomach and it is greedy for food. When we take food into our mouths it must first be dissolved by the acid in the saliva—ptyalin. This ptyalin is similar to hydrochloric acid. Then, when the food gets to the stomach, there is pepsin, which is somewhat similar to hydrochloric acid. But pepsin is hydrochloric acid which is alive. It absorbs food greedily. If a man has too little hydrochloric acid he has a bitter taste in his mouth. Why? Because hydrochloric acid takes up all foodstuffs greedily and dispatches them to all parts of the body. So when the hydrochloric acid does not work properly, the food which a man has eaten remains in the stomach. Then he has a bitter taste in the mouth when it comes up as gas, and a coated tongue. Some hydrochloric acid must always be active inside us, especially if we are to build up our limbs.

And so we can say: Iron would not really help us unless we could use it in the operations of free will. We must build up our limbs. In order to do this, chlorine and hydrogen must combine to form hydrochloric acid. We must have this in us.

Now consider: Apart from all else, you have everywhere in your bodies hydrochloric acid, and carbon, and much else. You must look at man like this. If this is a man (sketch), there is hydrochloric acid everywhere. This must take up tiny particles of iron from the blood. Then a man can develop a free and powerful will. So much depends upon how a man combines the iron in himself with what comes from the hydrochloric acid, from the chlorine. This process must always take place in the right way. Now it can happen that young girls at puberty have to expend so much energy that they have not enough left to combine the hydrochloric acid with the iron. Then, on the one hand, there is iron which makes them heavy and cannot combine with what comes from the chlorine because there is not enough energy to make this possible. It is useless simply to give iron to such a girl; for very likely she has enough iron already. She has anaemia, which young girls get, not because they have too little iron, but because the iron cannot combine with the chlorine. So you see this power to combine the iron with the chlorine must be developed in us.

Now think of iron and then look out into the cosmos. Iron is connected with Mars. Mars is really the creator of iron in our planetary system. Man is related to Mars and the forces of Mars in many ways. I have already spoken about these things and shall do so again. Iron is connected with Mars. When we ask: What is it that has a great influence on a man when he does not properly produce his hydrochloric acid, when his stomach does not function properly, we find that it is Mercury, the planet Mercury, which is connected with chlorine. So that in the case of a young girl who is anaemic, we can say: the Mercury forces (which should work on the stomach and its appendages) and the Mars forces are not working well together. Mars creates in us those forces which make it possible for us to have iron. Mars must be there in order that we may have the power to use iron. And iron must be there in order that we may have the power to exercise free will. Mars gives us the power of the iron; meteors, since they are all the time giving up iron to the air, supply the substance of iron. Mars is that body in the cosmos which enables us to use in the proper way that iron which the meteors and comets bring to us in an irregular manner. It is actually the force of Mars together with that of the comets and meteors which enables us to speak. ... People just take human speech casually, and see nothing special in it. They do not really think, indeed they cannot really think, because they turn their attention to something which is not reality. Quite trivial matters are evidence of this. Just recently we have had a fire alarm test here. Naturally in such tests everything is done as it would be in the case of an actual fire. The Catholic Sunday paper announced that there had been a real fire here which was soon extinguished. You see, people are willing to think about something that didn't happen but not about something that did! That is just what is peculiar to-day: people think about all kinds of things that have never happened and have no inclination to think about what did. But a man who is always thinking about things which haven't happened loses all sense of reality. And that is so general nowadays. It is crippled thinking ... after all, when people continuously lie what is it but crippled thinking!

Thus free will in man is produced by the Mars force and comet force. This, however, must work properly with the Mercury force within him. It is Mercury which causes in our stomach the right hydrochloric acid combination. Just as we make use of soda in our heads, so in our stomachs we use what comes from hydrochloric acid. Soda gives light to the head, and also to the embryo which is, for the most part, head. When the human being reaches puberty, the hydrochloric acid is taken over by those parts which are connected with the stomach. And if the hydrochloric acid combines with the soda which is everywhere present, we get ordinary salt. In our heads we need soda, with which we also bleach. In our stomachs we need ordinary salt. This is not only taken in with the food but is always being created, so that down there in the body too there may be light. For both soda and salt are carriers of light, are transparent to it.

Now it is not without purpose that we add salt to our food. We salt our food in order to adjust ourselves properly to nature because we always secrete rather too little of our own salt. Thus the Mars force and the Mercury force must work together properly; if this happens, the iron that is necessary in our limbs will be at the disposal of our will, and we shall be able to use them with healthy, free will.

You can see in the case of an anaemic girl, for example, that what comes from the stomach and depends on hydrochloric acid does not properly combine with the iron. Now we must investigate, and perhaps it will be found that the fault lies with iron—perhaps there is too little iron (which may well be the case in anaemia); or perhaps there is too little chlorine (which may also be the case). Then we must try to remedy this. But the trouble in most cases is that the two do not combine: Mars and Mercury in the human being do not combine. That is usually the cause of anaemia.

In modern medicine people always want to find a single cause of disease ... but diseases may look identical outwardly and inwardly be quite different! If a girl has anaemia we must not only ask: has she too little iron? too little chlorine? ... but we must also ask: or do they not combine properly? If the girl has too little iron, we must see to it that she is given iron in the appropriate form. Well and good, but that is not so easy as it seems. For if, as usually happens, iron is introduced into the stomach, the chlorine must have the inclination to combine with this iron, otherwise the iron is left in the stomach, passes away through the bowels and does not get into the organism. Thus a way must first be found of bringing the Mercury force, the chlorine force, into the human being. And so it is of great importance not simply to give the iron as iron, but to introduce the iron into the stomach in such a form that it may somehow be taken up by the chlorine. But for that purpose a special medicine must be prepared, for example from spinach. Spinach contains iron. One can also make a medicine from other things, for example from aniseed and so on; but especially from spinach—not as ordinary spinach though it may also help if eaten just as it is. ... A medicine must be prepared from the iron in spinach, for it is then in a form in which it can be properly taken up by the blood. So, in a case where one finds that there is too little iron, one must try in this way to introduce more. But the disease may also be due to the fact that there is too little fat in the stomach to create hydrochloric acid. A certain scientist has discovered that in anaemia too little chlorine is created and so the disease has also been given the name of Chlorosis. But the real connection is not understood. One must not just try to introduce hydrochloric acid into the stomach for perhaps there is already enough of this, especially if it is brought in from outside. But what is important is that the chlorine should be produced in the stomach itself, that the stomach should have the capacity to produce chlorine. Man needs his own chlorine, not that which is introduced from outside. And for this it is necessary to introduce into the stomach something prepared in a special way from copper. This will make the stomach more capable of creating chlorine. ... So you see, things must be looked at from all sides. Usually in anaemia it is not the iron which is lacking, or the chlorine, but the trouble is due to the fact that the two cannot combine. Mars and Mercury in man cannot come together.

In the cosmos, between Mercury and Mars, stands the Sun (diagram). Just as Mars is connected with iron, so is Mercury connected with quicksilver or with copper. If when there is a lack of chlorine one needs the Mars forces, and when there is a lack of copper the Mercury forces, so when the two cannot come together one needs to strengthen the working of the Sun forces which lie between them. For it is the Sun force in man which brings chlorine and iron together. And this Sun force can be stimulated by giving gold in tiny quantities. When one tries to cure with gold—naturally in specially prepared forms because otherwise it lies in the stomach and is not absorbed—one can bring Mars and Mercury together again.

So you see, in illnesses of this character three kinds of medicine come into consideration. One cannot cure the disease merely from its name, but one must give a preparation of copper or of iron taken from a plant, from spinach for example. Or gold—in the appropriate form—may be necessary to bring them together. It amounts to this—when one only knows what happens here on the earth, one can know nothing essential about man ... and things that outwardly appear to be identical are called by identical names. But that is just as if we wanted to use a razor for cutting meat, simply because it is a knife. ... Anaemia's are not always the same. One form is due to poverty of iron, another to poverty of chlorine; and a third form is due to the fact that they do not harmonize properly ... there are different kinds of anaemia, just as there are different kinds of knives—razors, table-knives, pen-knives. But people always tend to mix everything up. A man may say of the condiments on the table that they are all additions to food, and so he salts his coffee, since salt is a condiment and so is sugar! This is on a par with the people who proclaim to the world: anaemia is anaemia. It is just as nonsensical as saying: condiment is condiment. For when one tries to cure an anaemia that is due to disharmony by means of iron, one does the same as when one salts coffee.

You see, it is a matter of looking for something which is not just at the end of one's nose. It can be said with truth that our science has progressed a nose's length, for when one looks in a microscope, one always knocks one's nose! In life it is not so simple. It is said of a man who does not see something that he sees no farther than his nose. (Those people to-day who are always looking through microscopes, they also see no farther than their noses). ... But one must look up to Mars if one wants to see what is important in ordinary iron. Why? The connections can only be discovered by looking out into the cosmos. It is not poetical fiction to say that Mars has this or that power. It is not that one develops a sort of dim, vague clairvoyance which looks up to Mars, but one must get to know many things: one must learn to understand the Mars force in man and then one can really speak of Mars; otherwise not. And so it is with the other planets. We can for example say: it will always be found that when something is inwardly lacking in a human being—as in the case of anaemia when the iron cannot be assimilated—this is connected with an irregular working of Mercury in the organism. If something is outwardly lacking, this is connected with an irregular working of Mars.

There are, for example, girls who suffer from anaemia at puberty—this means that something is inwardly not as it should be. The Mercury force is too weak and we must strengthen it by means of the gold forces.

There are also boys—you know, with boys at puberty something happens outwardly, namely the change of voice; sometimes a hoarseness appears; while with girls something happens inwardly—the periods commence. This hoarseness corresponds to the anaemia of girls—boys of course may suffer from it too and in that case there is also something wrong inwardly. But when the change in the voice does not take place properly and a certain hoarseness appears, as is often the case, then the real culprit is not the Mercury force, but the Mars force. Although iron comes not only from Mars but from the meteors, one must in any case strengthen the Mars forces—and this may be possible with gold. You see, the onset of puberty expresses itself in quite different ways: with girls, in that they come more under the Mercury forces; with boys, in that they come more under the Mars forces and are inclined to get hoarse; or if they are not always hoarse they become so every winter.

These things must be investigated by Spiritual Science to-day. The other sciences have no idea at all of these things. When anaemia is caused by a poverty of iron, for example, it is a matter of introducing into the stomach in the appropriate way that which, in the plant, brings about the right divisibility of iron. We only really get to know the nature of man when we relate it to the whole of the cosmos. This is infinite, but we must realise that all the stars of heaven have their particular influence on man. This is of the utmost importance.

We will deal with other matters next time. Perhaps something will occur to you in connection with these things. You might also ask yourselves: How is the people's food related to their health? Something may have occurred to you in connection with prevalent epidemics, and so forth. We might speak about this. Think it over and perhaps by next time you will have found something you would like to hear about in connection with nutrition.

With the remark that the present, in particular the German philosophy and its epistemology makes it difficult to its supporters to find access to the theosophical world view I have started these talks before eight days, and I added that I try to outline this theory of knowledge, this present philosophical world view and to show how somebody with an absolutely serious conscience in this direction finds it hard to be a theosophist.

On the whole, the theories of knowledge which developed from Kantianism are excellent and absolutely correct. However, one cannot understand from their point of view how the human being can find out anything about beings, generally about real beings which are different from him. The consideration of Kantianism has shown us that this view comes to the result in the end that everything that we have round ourselves is appearance, is only our mental picture. What we have round ourselves is no reality, but it is controlled by the laws which we ourselves prescribe to our surroundings. I said: as we must see with coloured glasses the whole world in this colour nuance, in the same way the human being must see the world—after Kant’s view—coloured as he sees them according to his organisation no matter how it may be in the external reality. That is why we are not allowed to speak of a “thing-in-itself,” but only of the quite subjective world of appearance. If this is the case, everything that surrounds me—the table, the chairs et cetera, is an image of my mind; because they all are there for me only, in so far as I perceive them, in so far as I give form to these perceptions according to the law of my own mind, prescribe the laws to them.

I cannot state whether still anything exists except for my perception of the table and the chairs. This is basically the result of Kant’s philosophy in the end. This is not compatible, of course, with the fact that we can penetrate into the true nature of the things. Theosophy is inseparable from the view that we can penetrate not only into the physical existence of the things, but also into the spiritual of the things; that we have knowledge not only of that which surrounds us physically, but that we can also have experiences of that which is purely spiritual.

I want to show you how a vigorous book of the world view which is called “theosophy” today represents that which became Kantianism later. I read up a passage of the book that was written a short time before Kantianism was founded. It appeared in 1766. It is a book which—we can say it absolutely that way—could be written by a theosophist. The view is represented in it that the human being has not only a relationship to the physical world surrounding him, but that it would be proved scientifically one day that the human being belongs also to a spiritual world, and that also the way of being together with it could be scientifically proved. Something is well demonstrated that one could assume that it is proved more or less or that it is proved in future: “I do not know where or when that the human soul is in relation to others that they have effect on each other and receive impressions from each other. The human being is not aware of that, however, as long as everything is good.” Then another passage: “Indeed, it does not matter whichever ideas of the other world we have, and, hence, any thinking about spirit does not penetrate to a state of spirit at all ...” and so on.

The human being with his average mental capacity cannot realise the spirit; but it is said that one can assume such a common life with a spiritual world. With such a view Kant’s epistemology is not compatible. He who wrote the foundation of this view is Immanuel Kant himself. That means that we have to register a reversal in Kant himself. Because he writes this in 1766, and fourteen years later he founds that theory of knowledge which makes it impossible to find the way to theosophy. Our modern philosophy is based on Kantianism. It has taken on different forms, those from Herbart and Schopenhauer to Otto Liebmann and Johannes Volkelt and Friedrich Albert Lange. We find more or less Kantian coloured epistemology everywhere according to which we deal only with phenomena, with our subjective world of perception, so that we cannot penetrate to the being, to the root of the “thing-in-itself.”

At first I would like to bring forward to you everything that developed in the course of the 19th century, and what we can call the modified epistemology of Kant. I would like to demonstrate how the current epistemology developed which looks with a certain arrogance at somebody who believes that one can know something. I want to show how somebody forms a basic epistemological view whose kind of view is based on Kant. Everything that science has brought seems to verify the Kantian epistemology. It seems to be so firm that one cannot escape from it. Today we want to roll up it and next time we want to see how one can find the way with it.

First of all physics seems to teach us everywhere that that is no reality the naive human being believes that it is reality. Let us take the tone. You know that the oscillation of the air is there outside our organ, outside our ear which hears the tone. What takes place outside us is an oscillation of the air particles. Only because this oscillation comes to our ear and sets the eardrum swinging the movement continues to the brain. There we perceive what we call tone and sound. The whole world would be silent and toneless; only because the external movement of our ear is taken up by the ear, and that which is only an oscillation is transformed; we experience what we feel as a sound world. Thus the epistemologist can easily say: tone is only what exists in you, and if you imagine it without this, nothing but moved air is there.

The same applies to the colours and the light of the external world. The physicist has the view that colour is an oscillation of the ether which fulfils the whole universe. Just as the air is set swinging by the sound and nothing else than the movement of the air exists if we hear a sound, light is only an oscillatory movement of the ether. The ether oscillations are a little bit different from those of the air. The ether oscillates vertically to the direction of the propagation of the waves. This is made clear by experimenting physics. If we have the colour sensation “red,” we have to do it with a sensation. Then we must ask ourselves: what is there if no feeling eye exists?—It should be nothing else of the colours in space than oscillatory ether. The colour quality is removed from the world if the feeling eye is removed from the world.

What you see as red is 392 to 454 trillions oscillations, with violet 751 to 757 trillions oscillations. This is inconceivably fast. Physics of the 19th century transformed any light sensation and colour sensation into oscillations of the ether. If no eye were there, the whole colour world would not exist. Everything would be pitch-dark. One could not talk about colour quality in the outer space. This goes so far that Helmholtz said: we have the sensations of colour and light, of sound and tone in ourselves. This is not even like that which takes place without us. We are even not allowed to use an image of that which takes place without us.—What we know as a colour quality of red is not similar to about 420 trillions oscillations per second. Therefore, Helmholtz means: what really exists in our consciousness is not an image but a mere sign.

Physics has maintained that space and time exist as I perceive them. The physicist imagines that a movement in space takes place if I have a colour sensation. It is the same with the time image if I have the sensation red and the sensation violet. Both are subjective processes in me. They follow each other in time. The oscillations follow each other outside. Physics does not go so far as Kant. Whether the “things-in-themselves” are space-filled whether they are in space or follow each other in time, we cannot know—in terms of Kant; but we know only: we are organised this and that way, and, therefore, something—may it be spatial or not—has to take on spatial form. We spread out this form over that. For physics the oscillatory movement has to take place in space, it has to take a certain time ... The ether oscillates, we say, 480 trillions times per second. This includes the images of space and time already. The physicist assumes space and time being without us. However, the rest is only a mental picture, is subjective. You can read in physical works that for somebody who has realised what happens in the outside world nothing exists than oscillatory air, than oscillatory ether. Physics seems to have contributed that everything that we have exists only within our consciousness and except this nothing exists.

The second that the science of the 19th century can present to us is the reasons which physiology delivers. The great physiologist Johannes Müller found the law of the specific nerve energy. According to this law any organ reacts with a particular sensation. If you push the eye, you can perceive a gleam of light; if electricity penetrates it, also. The eye answers to any influence from without in such a way as it just corresponds to it. It has the strength from within to answer with light and colour. If light and ether penetrate, the eye answers with light and colour sensations.

Physiology still delivers additional building stones to prove what the subjective view has put up. Imagine that we have a sensation of touch. The naive human being imagines that he perceives the object. But what does he perceive really? The epistemologist asks. What is before me is nothing else than a combination of the smallest particles, of molecules. They are in movement. Every particle is in such movement which cannot be perceived by the senses because the oscillations are too small. Basically it is nothing else than the movement only which I can perceive, because the particle is not able to creep into me. What is it if you put the hand on the body? The hand carries out a movement. This continues down to the nerve and the nerve transforms it into a sensation: in heat and cold, in softy and hard. Also in the outside world movements are included, and if my sense of touch is concerned, the organ transforms it into heat or cold, into softness or hardness.

We cannot even perceive what happens between the body and us, because the outer skin layer is insensible. If the epidermis is without a nerve, it can never feel anything. The epidermis is always between the thing and the body. The stimulus has an effect from a relatively far distance through the epidermis. Only what is excited in your nerve can be perceived. The outer body remains completely without the movement process. You are separated from the thing, and what you really feel is produced within the epidermis. Everything that can really penetrate into your consciousness happens in the area of the body, so that it is still separated from the epidermis. We would have to say after this physiological consideration that we get in nothing of that which takes place in the outside world, but that it is merely processes within our nerves which continue in the brain which excite us by quite unknown external processes. We can never reach beyond our epidermis. You are in your skin and perceive nothing else than what happens within it.

Let us go over to another sense, to the eye, from the physical to the physiological. You see that the oscillations propagate; they have to penetrate our body first. The eye consists of a skin, the cornea, first of all. Behind this is the lens and behind the lens the vitreous body. There the light has to go through. Then it arrives at the rear of the eye which is lined with the retina. If you removed the retina, the eye would never transform anything into light. If you see forms of objects, the rays have to penetrate into your eye first, and within the eye a small retina picture is outlined. This is the last that the sensation can cause. What is before the retina is insensible; we have no real perception of it. We can only perceive the picture on the retina. One imagines that there chemical changes of the visual purple take place. The effect of the outer object has to pass the lens and the vitreous body, then it causes a chemical change in the retina, and this becomes a sensation. Then the eye puts the picture again outwardly, surrounds itself with the stimuli which it has received, and puts them again around in the world without us. What takes place in our eye is not that which forms the stimulus, but a chemical process. The physiologists always deliver new reasons for the epistemologists. Apparently we have to agree with Schopenhauer completely if he says: the starry heaven is created by us. It is a reinterpretation of the stimuli. We can know nothing about the “thing-in-itself.”

You see that this epistemology limits the human being merely to the things, we say to the mental pictures which his consciousness creates. He is enclosed in his consciousness. He can suppose—if he wants—that anything exists in the world which makes impression on him. In any case nothing can penetrate into him. Everything that he feels is made by him. We cannot even know from anything that takes place in the periphery. Take the stimulus in the visual purple. It has to be directed to the nerve, and this has to be transformed anyhow into the real sensation, so that the whole world which surrounds us would be nothing else than what we would have created from our inside.

These are the physiological proofs which induce us to say that this is that way. However, there are also people who ask now why we can assume other human beings besides us whom we, nevertheless, recognise only from the impressions which we receive from them. If a human being stands before me, I have only oscillations as stimuli and then an image of my own consciousness. It is only a presupposition that except for the consciousness picture something similar to the human being exists. Thus the modern epistemology supports its view that the outer content of experience is merely of subjective nature. It says: what is perceived is exclusively the content of the own consciousness, is a change of this content of consciousness. Whether there are things-in-themselves, is beyond our experience. The world is a subjective appearance to me which is built up from my sensations consciously or unconsciously. Whether there are also other worlds, is beyond the field of my experience.

When I said: it is beyond the field of experience whether there is another world, it also beyond the field of experience whether there are still other human beings with other consciousnesses, because nothing of a consciousness of the other human beings can get into the human being. Nothing of the world of images of another human being and nothing of the consciousness of another human being can come into my consciousness. Those who have joined Kant’s epistemology have this view.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte also joined this view in his youth. He thought Kant’s theory thoroughly. There may be no nicer description of that than those which Fichte gave in his writing On the Determination of the Human Being (1800). He says in it: “nowhere anything permanent exists, not without me not within me, but there is only a continuous transformation. I nowhere know any being, and also not my own. There is no being.—I myself do not know at all, and I am not. Images are there: they are the only things that exist, and they know about themselves in the way of images—images which pass without anything existing that they pass; which are connected with images to images. Images which do not contain anything, without any significance and purpose. I myself am one of these images; yes, I myself am not this, but only a confused image of the images.”
Indeed—if you stick to the view that you deal in your subjective opinion only with the things of your own consciousness, then you must get inevitably to the view that you do not know more about yourselves than about the outside world. If you go over to the image of the own ego, then you do not have more of it than of the outside world. Keep this thought in mind in its full significance, then it becomes clear to you that the outside world dissolves in a sum of hallucinations, and that also the inside world is nothing else than a creation of subjective dreams fitted together. You can imagine already from the outside, I would like to say, from the corporeality that also you yourselves like the outside world are nothing else than dream images or illusions if you interpret the view correctly.

Look at your hand which transforms your movements to sensations of touch. This hand is nothing else than a creation of my subjective consciousness, and my whole body and what is in me is also a creation of my subjective consciousness. Or I take my brain: if I could investigate under the microscope how the sensation came into being in the brain, I would have nothing before myself than an object which I have to transform again to an image in my consciousness.

The idea of the ego is also an image; it is generated like any other. Dreams pass me, illusions pass me—this is the world view of illusionism which appears inevitably as the last consequence of Kantianism. Kant wanted to overcome the old dogmatic philosophy; he wanted to overcome what has been brought forward by Wolff and his school. He considered this as a sum of figments.

These were the proofs of freedom, of the will, of the immortality of the soul and of God’s existence which Kant exposed concerning their probative value as figments. What does he give as proofs? He proved that we can know nothing about a “thing-in-itself” that that which we have is only contents of consciousness that, however, God must be “something-in-itself.” Thus we cannot necessarily prove the existence of God according to Kant. Our reason, our mind is only applicable to that which is given in the perception. They are only there to prescribe laws of perception and, hence, the matters: God—soul—will—are completely outside our rational knowledge. Reason has a limit, and it is not able to overcome it.

In the preface of the second edition of Critique of Pure Reason he says at a passage: “I had to cancel knowledge to make room for faith.” He wanted this basically. He wanted to limit knowledge to sense-perception, and he wanted to achieve everything that goes beyond reason in other way. He wanted to achieve it on the way of moral faith. Hence, he said: in no way science can arrive at the objective existence of the things one day. But we find one thing in ourselves: the categorical imperative which appears with an unconditional obligation in us.—Kant calls it a divine voice. It is beyond the things, it is accompanied by unconditional moral necessity. From here Kant ascends to regain that for faith which he annihilates for knowledge. Because the categorical imperative deals with nothing that is caused by any sensory effect, but appears in us, something must exist that causes the senses as well as the categorical imperative, and appears if all duties of the categorical imperative are fulfilled. This would be blessedness. But no one can find the bridge between both. Because he cannot find it, a divine being has to build it. In doing so, we come to a concept of God which we can never find with the senses.

A harmony between the sensory world and the world of moral reason must be produced. Even if one did enough in a life as it were, nevertheless, we must not believe that the earthly life generally suffices. The human life goes beyond the earthly life because the categorical imperative demands it. That is why we have to assume a divine world order. How could the human being follow a divine world order, the categorical imperative, if he did not have freedom?—Kant annihilated knowledge that way to get to the higher things of the spirit by means of faith. We must believe! He tries to bring in on the way of the practical reason again what he has thrown out of the theoretical reason.

Those views which have no connection apparently to Kant’s philosophy are also completely based on this philosophy. Also a philosopher who had great influence—also in pedagogy: Herbart. He had developed an own view from Kant’s critique of reason: if we look at the world, we find contradictions there. Let us have a look at the own ego. Today it has these mental pictures, yesterday it had others, tomorrow it will have others again. What is this ego? It meets us and is fulfilled with a particular image world. At another moment it meets us with another image world. We have there a development, many qualities, and, nevertheless, it should be a thing. It is one and many. Any thing is a contradiction. Herbart says that only contradictions exist everywhere in the world. Above all we must reproach ourselves with the sentence that the contradiction cannot be the true being. Now from it Herbart deduces the task of his philosophy. He says: we have to remove the contradictions; we have to construct a world without contradiction to us. The world of experiences is an unreal one, a contradictory one. He sees the true sense, the true being in transforming the contradictory world to a world without contradictions. Herbart says: we find the way to the “thing-in-itself,” while we see the contradictions, and if we get them out of us, we penetrate to the true being, to true reality.—However, he also has this in common with Kant that that which surrounds us in the outside world is mere illusion. Also he tried in other way to support what should be valuable for the human being.

We come now, so to speak, to the heart of the matter. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that any moral action makes only sense if there is reality in the world. What is any moral action if we live in a world of appearance? You can never be convinced that that which you do constitutes something real. Then any striving for morality and all your goals are floating in the air. There Fichte was admirably consistent. Later he changed his view and got to pure theosophy. With perception we can never know about the world—he says—anything else than dreams of these dreams. But something drives us to want the good. This lets us look into this big world of dreams like in a flash. He sees the realisation of the moral law in the world of dreams. The demands of the moral law should justify what reason cannot teach.—And Herbart says: because any perception is full of contradictions, we can never come to norms of our moral actions. Hence, there must be norms of our moral actions which are relieved of any judgment by mind and reason. Moral perfection, goodwill, inner freedom, they are independent of the activity of reason. Because everything is appearance in our world, we must have something in which we are relieved of reflection.

This is the first phase of the development of the 19th century: the transformation of truth to a world of dreams. The idealism of dreams was the only possible result of thinking about being and wanted to make the foundation of a moral world view independent of all knowledge and cognition. It wanted to limit knowledge to get room for faith. Therefore, the German philosophy has broken with the ancient traditions of those world views which we call theosophy. Anybody who calls himself theosophist could have never accepted this dualism, this separation of moral and the world of dreams. It was for him always a unity, from the lowest quantum of energy up to the highest spiritual reality. Because as well as that which the animal accomplishes in desire and listlessness is only relatively different from that which arises from the highest point of the cultural life out of the purest motives, that is only relatively different everywhere which happens below from that which happens on top. Kant left this uniform way to complete knowledge and world view while he split the world in a recognisable but apparent world and in a second world which has a quite different origin, in the world of morality. In doing so, he clouded the look of many people. Anybody who cannot find access to theosophy suffers from the aftermath of Kant’s philosophy.

In the end, you will see how theosophy emerges from a true theory of knowledge; however, it was necessary before that I have demonstrated the apparently firm construction of science. Science seems to have proved irrefutably that there are only the oscillations of the ether if we feel green or blue that we sense tone by the aerial oscillations. The contents of the next lecture will show how it is in reality.

My dear Friends,

I will begin by placing before you what we may call the “Ur-phenomenon”—primary phenomenon—of the Theory of Colour. By and by, you will find it confirmed and reinforced in the phenomena you can observe through the whole range of so-called optics or Theory of Colour. Of course the phenomena get complicated; the simple Ur-phenomenon is not always easy to recognize at once. But if you take the trouble you will find it everywhere. The simple phenomenon—expressed in Goethe's way, to begin with—is as follows: When I look through darkness at something lighter, the light object will appear modified by the darkness in the direction of the light colours, i.e. in the direction of the red and yellowish tones. If for example I look at anything luminous and, as we should call it, white—at any whitish-shining light through a thick enough plate which is in some way dim or cloudy, then what would seem to me more or less white if I were looking at directly, will appear yellowish or yellow-red (Figure IVa).

This is the one pole. Conversely, if you have here a simple black surface and look at it directly, you will see it black, but if you interpose a trough of water through which you send a stream of light so that the liquid is illumined, you will be looking at the dark through something light. Blue or violet (bluish-red) tones of colour will appear (Figure IVb). The other pole is thus revealed. This therefore is the Ur-phenomenon: Light through dark—yellow; dark through light—blue.

This simple phenomenon can be seen on every hand if we once accustom ourselves to think more realistically and not so abstractly as in modern science. Please now recall from this point of view the experiment which we have done. We sent a cylinder of light through a prism and so obtained a real scale of colours, from violet to red; we caught it on a screen. I made a drawing of the phenomenon (see Figure IIc and Figure IVc). You will remember; if this is the prism and this the cylinder of light, the light in some way goes through the prism and is diverted upward. Moreover, as we said before, it is not only diverted. It would be simply diverted if a transparent body with parallel faces were interposed. But we are putting a prism into the path of the light—that is, a body with convergent faces. In passing through the prism, the light gets darkened. The moment we send the light through the prism we therefore have to do with two things: first the simple light as it streams on, and then the dimness interposed in the path of the light. Moreover this dimness, as we said, puts itself into the path of the light in such a way that while the light is mainly diverted upward, the dimming that arises, raying upward as it does, shines also in the same direction into which the light itself is diverted. That is to say, darkness rays into the diverted light. Darkness is living, as it were, in the diverted light, and by this means the bluish and violet shades are here produced. But the darkness rays downward too, so, while the cylinder of light is diverted upward, the darkness here rays downward and works contrary to the diverted light but is no match for it. Here therefore we may say: the original bright light, diverted as it is, overwhelms and outdoes the darkness. We get the yellowish or yellow-red colours.

If we now take a sufficiently thin cylinder of light, we can also look in the direction of it through the prism. Instead of looking from outside on to a screen and seeing the picture projected there, we put our eye in the place of this picture, and, looking through the prism, we then see the aperture, through which the cylinder of light is produced, displaced (Figure IVc). Once again therefore adhering strictly to the facts, we have the following phenomenon: Looking along here, I see what would be coming directly towards me if the prism were not there, displaced in a downward direction by the prism. At the same time I see it coloured.

What then do you see in this case? Watch what you see, state it simply and then connect it with the fundamental fact we have just now been ascertaining. Then, what you actually see will emerge in all detail. Only you must hold to what is really seen. For if you are looking thus into the bright cylinder of light—which, once again, is coming now towards you—you see something light, namely the cylinder of light itself, but you are seeing it through dark. (That there is something darkened here, is clearly proved by the fact that blue arises in this region). Through something darkened—through the blue colour, in effect—you look at something light, namely at the cylinder-of-light coming towards you. Through what is dark you look at what is light; here therefore you should be seeing yellow or yellowish-red—in a word, yellow and red,—as in fact you do. Likewise the red colour below is proof that here is a region irradiated with light. For as I said just now, the light here over-whelms the dark. Thus as you look in this direction, however bright the cylinder of light itself may be, you still see it through an irradiation of light, in relation to which it is dark. Below, therefore, you are looking at dark through light and you will see blue or bluish-red. You need but express the primal phenomenon,—it tells you what you actually see. Your eye is here encountered by what you would be seeing in the other instance. Here for example is the blue and you are looking through it; therefore the light appears reddish. At the bottom edge you have a region that is lighted up. However light the cylinder of light may be, you see it through a space that is lit up. Thus you are seeing something darker through an illumined space and so you see it blue. It is the polarity that matters.

For the phenomenon we studied first—that on the screen—you may use the name “objective” colours if you wish to speak in learned terms. This other one—the one you see in looking through the prism—will then be called the “subjective” spectrum. The “subjective” spectrum appears as an inversion of the “objective”.

Concerning all these phenomena there has been much intellectual speculation, my dear Friends, in modern time. The phenomena have not merely been observed and stated purely as phenomena, as we have been endeavouring to do. There has been ever so much speculation about them; indeed, beginning with the famous Newton, Science has gone to the utter-most extremes in speculation. Newton, having first seen and been impressed by this colour-spectrum, began to speculate as to the nature of light. Here is the prism, said Newton; we let the white light in. The colours are already there in the white light; the prism conjures them forth and now they line up in formation. I have then dismembered the white light into its constituents. Newton now imagined that to every colour corresponds a kind of substance, so that seven colours altogether are contained as specific substances in the light. Passing the light through the prism is to Newton like a kind of chemical analysis, whereby the light is separated into seven distinct substances. He even tried to imagine which of the substances emit relatively larger corpuscles—tiny spheres or pellets—and which smaller. According to this conception the Sun sends us its light, we let it into the room through a circular opening and it goes through in a cylinder of light. This light however consists of ever so many corpuscles—tiny little bodies. Striking the surface of the prism they are diverted from their original course. Eventually they bombard the screen. There then these tiny cannon-balls impinge. The smaller ones fly farther up, the larger ones remain farther down. The smallest are the violet, the largest are the red. So then the large are separated from the small.

This idea that there is a substance or that there are a number of substances flying through space was seriously shaken before long by other physicists—Huyghens, Young and others,—until at last the physicists said to themselves: The theory of little corpuscular cannon-balls starting from somewhere, projected through a refracting medium or not as the case may be, arriving at the screen and there producing a picture, or again finding their way into the eye and giving rise in us to the phenomenon of red, etc.,—this will not do after all. They were eventually driven to this conclusion by an experiment of Fresnel's, towards which some preliminary work had however been done before, by the Jesuit Grimaldi among others.

Fresnel's experiment shook the corpuscular theory very considerably. His experiments are indeed most interesting, and we must try to get a clear idea of what is really happening when experiments are set up in the way he did. I beg you now, pay very careful attention to the pure facts; we want to study such a phenomenon quite exactly. Suppose I have two mirrors and a source of light—a flame for instance, shedding its light from here (Figure IVd). If I then put up a screen—say, here—I shall get pictures by means of the one mirror and also pictures by means of the other mirror. Such is the distribution you are to assume; I draw it in cross-section. Here are two looking-glasses—plane mirrors, set at a very small angle to one another,—here is a source of light, I will call it L, and here a screen. The light is reflected and falls on to the screen; so then I can illumine the screen with the reflected light. For if I let the light strike here, with the help of this mirror I can illumine this part of the screen, making it lighter here than in the surrounding region. Now I have here a second mirror, by which the light is reflected a little differently. Part of the cone of light, as reflected from here below (from the second mirror) on to the screen, still falls into the upper part. The inclination of the two mirrors is such that the screen is lighted up both by reflection from the upper mirror and by reflection from the lower. It will then be as though the screen were being illumined from two different places. Now suppose a physicist, witnessing this experiment, were thinking in Newton's way. He would argue: There is the source of light. It bombards the first mirror, hurling its little cannon-balls in this direction. After recoiling from the mirror they reach the screen and light it up. Meanwhile, the others are recoiling from the lower mirror, for many of them go in that direction also. It will be very much lighter on the screen when there are two mirrors than when there is only one. Therefore if I remove the second mirror the screen will surely be less illumined by reflected light than when the two mirrors are there. So would our physicist argue, although admittedly one rather devastating thought might occur to him, for surely while these little bodies are going on their way after reflection, the others are on their downward journey (see the figure). Why then the latter should not hit the former and drive them from their course, is difficult to see. Nay, altogether, in the textbooks you will find the prettiest accounts of what is happening according to the wave-theory, but while these things are calculated very neatly, one cannot but reflect that no one ever figures out, when one wave rushes criss-cross through the other, how can this simply pass unnoticed?

Now let us try to grasp what happens in reality in this experiment. Suppose that this is the one stream of light. It is thrown by reflection across here, but now the other stream of light arrives here and encounters it,—the phenomenon is undeniable. The two disturb each other. The one wants to rush on; the other gets in the way and, in consequence, extinguishes the light coming from the other side. In rushing through it extinguishes the light. Here therefore on the screen we do not get a lighting-up but in reality darkness is reflected across here. So we here get an element of darkness (Figure IVe). But now all this is not at rest,—it is in constant movement. What has here been disturbed, goes on. Here, so to speak, a hole has arisen in the light. The light rushed through; a hole was made, appearing dark. And as an outcome of this “hole”, the next body-of-light will go through all the more easily and alongside the darkness you will have a patch of light so much the lighter. The next thing to happen, one step further on, is that once more a little cylinder of light from above impinges on a light place, again extinguishes the latter, and so evokes another element of darkness. And as the darkness in its turn has thus moved on another step, here once again the light is able to get through more easily. We get the pattern of a lattice, moving on from step to step. Turn by turn, the light from above can get through and extinguishes the other, producing darkness, once again, and this moves on from step to step. Here then we must obtain an alternation of light and dark, because the upper light goes through the lower and in so doing makes a lattice work.

This is what I was asking you most thoroughly to think of; you should be able to follow in your thought, how such a lattice arises. You will have alternating patches of light and dark, inasmuch as light here rushes into light. When one light rushes into another the light is cancelled—turned to darkness. The fact that such a lattice arises is to be explained by the particular arrangement we have made with these two mirrors. The velocity of light—nay, altogether what arises here by way of differences in velocity of light,—is not of great significance. What I am trying to make clear is what here arises within the light itself by means of this apparatus, so that a lattice-work is reflected—light, dark, light, dark, and so on.

Now yonder physicist—Fresnel himself, in fact—argued as follows: If light is a streaming of tiny corpuscular bodies, it goes without saying that the more bodies are being hurled in a particular direction, the lighter it must grow there,—or else one would have to assume that the one corpuscle eats up the other! The simple theory of corpuscular emanation will not explain this phenomenon of alternating light and dark. We have just seen how it is really to be explained. But it did not occur to the physicists to take the pure phenomenon as such, which is what one should do. Instead, and by analogy with certain other phenomena, they set to work to explain it in a materialistic way. Bombarding little balls of matter would no longer do. Therefore they said: Let us assume, not that the light is in itself a stream of fine substances, but that it is a movement in a very fine substantial medium—the “ether”. It is a movement in the ether. And, to begin with, they imagined that light is propagated through the ether in the same way as sound is through air (Euler for instance thought of it thus). If I call forth a sound, the sound is propagated through the air in such a way that if this is the place where the sound is evoked, the air in the immediate neighbourhood is, to begin with, compressed. Compressed air arises here. Now the compressed air presses in its turn on the adjoining air. It expands, momentarily producing in this neighbourhood a layer of attenuated air. Through these successions of compression and expansion, known as waves, we imagine sound to spread. To begin with, they assumed that waves of this kind are also kindled in the ether. However, there were phenomena at variance with this idea; so then they said to themselves: Light is indeed an undulatory movement, but the waves are of a different kind from those of sound. In sound there is compression here, then comes attenuation, and all this moves on. Such waves are “longitudinal”. For light, this notion will not do. In light, the particles of ether must be moving at right angles to the direction in which the light is being propagated. When, therefore, what we call a “ray of light” is rushing through the air—with a velocity, you will recall, of 300,000 kilometres a second—the tiny particles will always be vibrating at right angles to the direction in which the light is rushing. When this vibration gets into our eye, we perceive it.

Apply this to Fresnel's experiment: we get the following idea. The movement of the light is, once again, a vibration at right angles to the direction in which the light is propagated. This ray, going towards the lower one of the two mirrors, is vibrating, say, in this way and impinges here. As I said before, the fact that wave-movements in many directions will be going criss-cross through each other, is disregarded. According to the physicists who think along these lines, they will in no way disturb each other. Here however, at the screen in this experiment, they do; or again, they reinforce each other. In effect, what will happen here? When the train of waves arrives here, it may well be that the one infinitesimal particle with its perpendicular vibrations happens to be vibrating downward at the very moment when the other is vibrating upward. Then they will cancel each other out and darkness will arise at this place. Or if the two are vibrating upward at the same moment, light will arise. Thus they explain, by the vibrations of infinitesimal particles, what we were explaining just now by the light itself. I was saying that we here get alternations of light patches and dark. The so-called wave-theory of light explains them on the assumption that light is a wave-movement in the other [ether?]. If the infinitesimal particles are vibrating so as to reinforce each other, a lighter patch will arise; if contrary to one another, we get a darker patch.

You must realize what a great difference there is between taking the phenomena purely as they are—setting them forth, following them with our understanding, remaining amid the phenomena themselves—and on the other hand adding to them our own inventions. This movement of the ether is after all a pure invention. Having once invented such a notion we can of course make calculations about it, but that affords no proof that it is really there. All that is purely kinematical or phoronomical in these conceptions are merely thought by us, and so is all the arithmetic. You see from this example: our fundamental way of thought requires us so to explain the phenomena that they themselves be the eventual explanation; they must contain their own explanation. Please set great store by this. Mere spun-out theories and theorizings are to be rejected. You can explain what you like by adding things out of the blue, of which man has no knowledge. Of course the waves might conceivably be there, and it might be that the one swings upward when the other downward so that they cancel each other out. But they have all been invented! What is there however without question is this lattice,—this we see fully reflected. It is to the light itself that we must look, if we desire a genuine and not a spurious, explanation.

Now I was saying just now: when the one light goes through the other, or enters into any kind of relation to it, it may well have a dimming or even extinguishing effect upon the other, just as the effect of the prism is to dim the light. This is again brought out in the following experiment, which we shall actually be doing, I will now make a drawing of it. We may have what I shewed you yesterday—a spectrum extending from violet to red—engendered directly by the Sun. But we can also generate the spectrum in another way. Instead of letting the Sun shine through an opening in the wall, we make a solid body glow with heat,—incandescent (Figure IVf). When we have by and by got it white-hot, it will also give us such a spectrum. It does not matter if we get the spectrum from the Sun or from an incandescent body.

Now we can also generate a spectrum in a somewhat different way (Figure IVg). Suppose this is a prism and this a sodium flame—a flame in which the metal sodium is volatilizing. The sodium is turned to gas; it burns and volatilizes. We make a spectrum of the sodium as it volatilizes. Then a peculiar thing happens. Making a spectrum, not from the Sun or from a glowing solid body but from a glowing gas, we find one place in the spectrum strongly developed. For sodium light it is in the yellow. Here will be red, orange, yellow, you will remember. It is the yellow that is most strongly developed in the spectrum of sodium. The rest of the spectrum is stunted—hardly there at all. All this—from violet to yellow and then again from yellow to red—is stunted. We seem to get a very narrow bright yellow strip, or as is generally said, a yellow line. Mark well, the yellow line also arises inasmuch as it is part of an entire spectrum, only the rest of the spectrum in this case is stunted, atrophied as it were.

From diverse bodies we can make spectra of this kind appearing not as a proper spectrum but in the form of bright, luminous lines. From this you see that vice-versa, if we do not know what is in a flame and we make a spectrum of it, we can conclude, if we get this yellow spectrum for example, that there is sodium in the flame. So we can recognize which of the metals is there.

But the remarkable thing comes about when we combine the two experiments. We generate this cylinder of light and the spectrum of it, while at the same time we interpose the sodium flame, so that the glowing sodium somehow unites with the cylinder of light (Figure IVh). What happens then is very like what I was shewing you in Fresnel's experiment. In the resulting spectrum you might expect the yellow to appear extra strong, since it is there to begin with and now the yellow of the sodium flame is added to it. But this is not what happens. On the contrary, the yellow of the sodium flame extinguishes the other

yellow and you get a dark place here. Precisely where you would expect a lighter part you get a darker. Why is it so? It simply depends on the intensity of force that is brought to bear. If the sodium light arising here were selfless enough to let the kindred yellow light arising here it would have to extinguish itself in so doing. This it does not do; it puts itself in the way at the very place where the yellow should be coming through. It is simply there, and though it is yellow itself, the effect of it is not to intensify but to extinguish. As a real active force, it puts itself in the way, even as an indifferent obstacle might do; it gets in the way. This yellow part of the spectrum is extinguished and a black strip is brought about instead. From this again you see, we need only bear in mind what is actually there. The flowing light itself gives us the explanation.

These are the things which I would have you note. A physicist explaining things in Newton's way would naturally argue: If I here have a piece of white—say, a luminous strip—and I look at it through the prism, it appears to me in such a way that I get a spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, dark blue, violet (Figure IVi). Goethe said: Well, at a pinch, that might do. If Nature really is like that—if she has made the light composite—we might well assume that with the help of the prism this light gets analyzed into its several parts. Good and well; but now the very same people who say the light consists of these seven colours—so that the seven colours are parts or constituents of the light—these same people allege that darkness is just nothing,—is the mere absence of light. Yet if I leave a strip black in the midst of white—if I have simple white paper with a black strip in the middle and look at this through a prism,—then too I find I get a rainbow, only the colours are now in a different order (Figure IVk),—mauve in the middle, and on the one side merging into greenish-blue. I get a band of colours in a different order. On the analysis-theory I ought now to say: then the black too is analyzable and I should thus be admitting that darkness is more than the mere absence of light. The darkness too would have to be analyzable and would consist of seven colours. This, that he saw the black band too in seven colours, only in a different order,—this was what put Goethe off. And this again shews us how needful it is simply to take the phenomena as we find them.

Also known as: The Secret of the Grail in the Works of Richard Wagner, Parsifal, Arthur Lecture 27 of 37 from the lecture series: Christian Mystery.

I want to speak to you today about the truths of occultism and of theosophy, relating what I have to say with Richard Wagner's Parsifal. For there is a deep connection between the artistic work of Wagner and the spiritual movement of the present day that is known as Theosophy. That there is in Wagner and in his works a very large measure of occult power, is something that mankind is gradually learning to realize. And in the future something further will also become clear to us; namely, that there lived in Wagner a great deal more than he himself could have knowledge of. This is, in truth, the secret of many a work of art, that a force and a power live in it of which its creator knows nothing.

When this has come home to us; namely, that more—much more—was living in Wagner than he himself was conscious of, we must at the same time not forget that Wagner was never able to reach the last stages of wisdom. On this account the art of Richard Wagner has for the occultist quite a unique character; for while he knows that something more, something of deep mystery, is hidden behind it, he knows on the other hand that one can be in danger of looking in Wagner for something that is not there. The fact that a great deal more is to be found in Wagner than is generally perceived was well expressed by Richard Strauss, who said somewhat as follows:

When I hear people perpetually declaring that we ought not to add anything from our own thought to what Wagner has created, it seems to me we might just as well say we should refrain from adding anything from our own thought when we contemplate a flower! We would certainly never discover the secret of the flower that way; and it will surely be the same with those who are unwilling to allow themselves to add anything from their own thought to the works of a great artist.”

Richard Wagner concerned himself with themes of sublime significance. Always in his works you will find names that are connected with ancient, holy traditions. What he achieved in “Parsifal” is intimately connected with the spiritual power that has been active in such a striking manner in and since the last third of the Nineteenth Century.

In order to understand the figures and motifs that we meet with in Wagner, we need to probe into deep mysteries of the evolution of mankind. Wagner made an intensive study of man and his place in the great world, and of the mystery of the human soul. As a young man he tried research into the mysteries of reincarnation. We have evidence of this in his draft for a drama called “Die Sieger” (“The Victorious,” or, “The Conquerors.”) He abandoned the attempt, because the music for the drama proved to be an insoluble problem. As drama alone he could have succeeded with it. The story is as follows. A youth in the Far East, in India, Ananda by name, belonging to the Brahman caste, is beloved by a Chandala maiden of the very lowest caste, who is called Prakriti. Ananda is a pupil of Buddha. He does not respond to Prakriti's love. She is accordingly thrown into the utmost distress and sorrow. Ananda withdraws from the world and devotes himself to the religious life. An explanation of her destiny is then given to the Chandala maiden by another Brahman. She had, he told her, in an earlier life been a Brahman and had rejected the love of this very youth who was at that time in the Chandala caste. Deeply impressed with the teaching conveyed in this explanation, the girl then attaches herself also to the Buddha, and the two become followers together of the same teacher.

This theme was sketched out by Wagner in 1855, with the intention of elaborating it. He did not succeed, but a year later the same impulse presented itself to him in a new way. In 1857 the great ideal contained in Parsifal suddenly entered into Wagner's soul. It happened on Good Friday, 1857, in Villa Wesendonk on the shores of the Lake of Zurich. Wagner was gazing out upon the world of nature, with all its fresh young life in the full beauty of springtime. And in that moment he saw with perfect clarity the connection between the upspringing of all the budding new life of nature and the death of Christ on the Cross. This connection is the secret of the Holy Grail. And from that moment onward Richard Wagner knew in his soul that he must send forth into the world this secret of the Holy Grail, he must send it out into the world of music.

If we would really understand this remarkable and unique experience that Richard Wagner underwent, we shall have to go back a few thousand years in the evolution of Europe. (His own noble and exalted thoughts on the evolution of man Wagner has put forward in his work entitled Heathendom and Christianity). What was the nature of the teaching that was given long ago in the so-called Mystery Fellowships or Mystery Brotherhoods? Let us consider for a little this teaching as it was to be met with in Europe right up to the Sixteenth or Seventeenth Centuries; let us see what form it took in these times.

Mysteries have existed in all ages. In the mysteries, man received a knowledge that was at the same time religion, and he received a religion that was at the same time wisdom.

It is impossible to have a correct conception of a mystery if one has no conception of a spiritual world. We are surrounded here by the various kingdoms of nature; minerals, plants, animals and human beings. We regard the human kingdom as the highest of the four. But now just as man has thus around him kingdoms that are lower than himself, so has he above him higher beings in many stages. The beings that stand at different stages higher than man have from time immemorial been designated as “Gods.” The kind of wisdom imparted to man in the mysteries enabled him to hold conscious intercourse with the Gods. He was then called an initiate. Such an initiate possessed no mere wisdom of words; he had, in the mysteries, experienced facts. Even still today there are mysteries, although they are of another kind than those of olden or medieval times.

At the time when the Crusades were beginning, and even a little before, we find in a district in the North of Spain an important mystery. The mysteries that were still extant in that time have generally been known as the later Gothic Mysteries. Those who were initiated were called the Templars, or the Knights of the Holy Grail. Lohengrin was one of these. The Order of the Knights of the Grail had a different significance from another order or brotherhood which had its location in England and Wales; all the stories that are told of King Arthur and his Round Table relate to this other order of initiation.

In ages long ago, long before Christianity, a migration took place from West to East. Very long ago, there was land in the region of the Atlantic Ocean—the so-called land of Atlantis, where dwelt the Atlanteans, our ancient ancestors. All the people who lived later on in Europe and also in Asia as far East as India, were descendants of the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans lived under entirely different conditions from those that prevailed in later times. Life was hierarchically ordered. All control and rule was in the hands of the initiates.

In the North of what is today Russia a famous school of initiation existed in earlier times. The initiates of this school were known as “Trotten.” In the West of Europe were other initiation schools, and in them the Druids were the initiates. The whole social life of the people was still even then ordered and regulated by these initiates.

When we look back to these ancient schools of initiation, what sort of a teaching do we find there? What was the Mystery that was taught in them? It is after all only the forms of the teaching that change with the passage of time. Astonishing as it may seem, we actually find that in these very ancient schools of initiation the secret, the mystery that Parsifal discovered, is brought to its highest development—the secret; namely, of how the new budding life of nature in Springtime is connected with the Mystery of the Cross. We have to understand it in the following way.

The power of reproduction which we recognize in the animal and human kingdoms is also to be seen in the plant kingdom. In the springtime of the year the divine active power of creation shoots up out of Mother Earth. For we have to recognize that a deep connection exists between the power that manifests when the Earth clothes herself with her robe of green, and the divine creative power. The pupils in the initiation school were taught as follows: “All around you in nature you see the opening flower buds, and within them a power at work which is then later concentrated in the small grains of seed. Countless seeds will come forth from the flowers—seeds which, if laid into the earth, will be capable of bringing forth new plants. And now receive what I am about to say into your heart; take it deeply into your soul. The process that is taking place out there in nature is the very same as takes place in human beings and in the animal kingdom, only in nature it takes place without desire or passion. It goes forward in perfect purity and chastity. The boundless and chaste innocence that sleeps in the flower buds of the plants—this, it was felt, must enter right into the soul of the pupils.

And then they were told further: “It is the sun that opens the blossoms. The ray of the sun calls forth the power that rests in them. Two things meet—the opening flower and the ray from the sun. Between the plant kingdom and the divine kingdom stand the two other kingdoms—the animal kingdom and the human. These latter are really no more than a kind of pathway leading from the plant kingdom to the divine kingdom. In the divine kingdom we have again a kingdom of innocence and chastity, as in the plant kingdom. In the animal and human kingdom we have kingdoms of desire and passion.” But then it was told to the pupils that in the future “all passion and desire will at length disappear. The chalice will then open (even as the chalice of the flower opens)—will open from above downwards and look down to man. And as the ray from the sun goes right down into the plant, so will man's now purified power unite itself with this divine chalice. It can actually come about that the chalice of the blossom is spiritually reversed so that it inclines downwards from heaven, and the sun's ray, too, is reversed so that it lifts itself up from man to heaven.” And this reversed flower chalice which was told of in the mysteries as an actual fact was called the Holy Grail. The flower chalice of the plant that we have before us in material reality is the reversed Holy Grail. And the ray from the sun—all who have true occult knowledge learn to recognize it in the “magic wand.” For the magic wand is a symbol, in the language of superstition, for a spiritual reality. In the mysteries it was called the “bloody lance.” So here we have before us, on the one hand, the origin of the Grail and on the other hand the original “magic wand” of the genuine occultist.

I have given you here slight indications of profound truths, deeply significant truths that played a part in men's lives in the North and West of Europe.

Richard Wagner had a deep intuitive feeling for these truths, and so had his friend Graf Gobineau.

If one wanted to express what was behind the mysteries of which we have been speaking, one could say it was the knowledge of what flows in the veins of animal and man. True indeed are the words that are so often quoted from Goethe's “Faust”: “Blood is a very special fluid.” We shall come to perceive what blood really signifies when we learn to understand a great revolutionary change that took place once in the mysteries.

In the olden times of the European peoples it was known how much depends in human life on blood relationships. On this account the continuance of humanity was never left to chance. All such matters were in those times regulated out of an occult wisdom. It was known that when further evolution was restricted within small racial communities and no other blood was allowed to come in from outside these communities, then the human beings who were born within them would possess certain higher powers. In the mysteries it was understood what effect the mingling of different kinds of blood would have. The initiates had quite exact knowledge, also, of which family or clan would be rightly suited for a certain region of the earth. And they knew that where a union of common blood takes place, there certain powers are bestowed on the human being that is born.

When the ancient blood relationships began to be broken, a significant event took place in the mysteries. Something else was substituted in place of the parents having common blood in their veins.

In the high mysteries, blood relationship was replaced by the partaking of two spiritual “preparations.” In the lower mysteries outward symbols were used instead of these; and the outward symbols were Bread and Wine. In the two spiritual preparations was a substance that was like blood. They were substances that worked spiritually in a somewhat similar way to the way blood works physically in the veins. As the old clairvoyance gradually disappeared, men began instead to partake of these spiritual preparations. When they had learned all that is contained in the whole wisdom of theosophy, they received these symbols out of Ceridwen's Cup. That was the purified blood that could be given to man from the chalice that opened down to him from above. This Mystery in this true essence passed into the care of a very small community. In other parts of Europe the mysteries became decadent and were horribly profaned. For we find on every hand as the symbol of sacrifice a dish on which a bleeding head has to be laid. It was thought that something can be awakened in man by the spectacle of this bleeding head. What was at work there was nothing but black magic. It was the downright opposite of the Mysteries of the Holy Grail.

It was known in the Mysteries that what streams upwards in the Chalice of the Flower lives also in the blood of man. The blood needs, however, to be made clean and pure again, it must be as chaste as the sap that flows in the blossom. And in these Mysteries that had become depraved, this was brought to expression in a gross and materialistic manner. (In Northern Europe sublimated blood was used as a symbol, and in the Eleusinian mysteries were the wine of Dionysus and the blood of Demeter.) The Vessel of the Grail turned into an abomination by being made to hold within it the bleeding head—this we find again in the story of Herodias who uses for the head of John the Baptist, making mock in this way of the Mysteries. The essential secret of the high mysteries passed into the hands of Templars in Northern Spain, the Guardians of the Grail.

While the Knights of King Arthur concerned themselves rather with the events and affairs of this world, The Templars were able to be prepared to receive a still more sublime Mystery—even to understand the Great Mystery of Golgotha, which is the secret of the history of the world.

Christianity had its beginning among the people of Galilee—a mixture of strikingly different races, thus a people who stand entirely outside all blood relationship. The Saviour is One who does not base His kingdom in the very least on blood relationships; He founds a kingdom that is quite remote from any such bond. The blood that has been sublimated, the blood that has been purified, gushes forth from the sacrificial death—for that is the cleansing process. The blood that gives rise to sensual desires has to be shed, has to be sacrificed, has to flow right away.

The Holy Vessel with the purified blood was brought to Europe to the Templars on Monsalvatsch. The venerable patriarch Titurel received the Grail; he had been chosen for this beforehand. The victory had now been won. The spiritual in the blood had overcome that which was merely physical.

As long as we regard blood merely as a substance that is built up of various chemical component parts, we cannot understand what took place on Golgotha. How was it that Wagner was able to find the right mood for his Parsifal? It is most important for us to recognize that Wagner was able to do this because he knew that what happened on Golgotha had especially to do with the blood, he knew that we had to see there not only the death of the Saviour but we had to see what took place there with the blood, how the blood was purified on Golgotha and became something quite different from ordinary blood. Wagner has spoken of the connection of the Saviour's blood with the whole of mankind. In his book “Paganism and Christianity” we read these words: “Having found that the capacity for conscious suffering is a capacity peculiar to the blood of the so-called white race, we must now go on to recognize in the blood of the Saviour the very epitome, as it were, of voluntary conscious suffering that pours itself out as divine compassion for the whole human race.”

And in another place Wagner says: “Because His will to save was so tremendously strong, the blood in the wine of the Saviour was able to be poured out for the redemption of all mankind when even the noblest races among men were falling into decay—poured out for their salvation, as divine sublimation, the blood that is associated with family or species.” The Saviour having come from a mingling of many different peoples, His blood was the symbol of compassion and blood in purified form.

Hardly has anyone even come so near to this mystery as Wagner did. It is indeed the power with which he approaches this mystery that constitutes his greatness as an artist. We must not think of him merely as a musician, but as one who possesses deep knowledge and understanding and whose desire it is to resuscitate for the people of modern times the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Before Wagner wrote his Parsifal little was known in Germany of the mysteries and of the characters of whom he tells.

When men were brought into the mysteries, there were three distinct stages through which they had to pass:

The first was stupidity, simple-mindedness.

The second was doubt.

The third was blessedness.

The first was the stage when man was led right away from every prejudice that prevails in the world, and was made to depend upon the power he had in his own soul, made to depend upon his own power of love, so that he might be able to behold the inner light, to see it light up within him.

The second stage was that of doubt. This doubt comes to all when they are at the second stage of initiation, and is then resolved and raised up to a higher stage, even to the inner brightness and splendor known as “Saelde” or blessedness. That was the third stage where man was brought—consciously—together with the Gods.

Parsifal (“through the vale”) was the name given in medieval times to all such candidates for initiation, and “Parsifal” had to undergo these three stages in inner experience. With the insight of a genius, Wagner saw on that Good Friday, 1857, the guiding thread that must run through the whole development of Parsifal.

The Templars were those who stood for true Christianity as distinguished from Church Christianity. In the Middle Ages remnants were still left of the old degenerate mysteries. All that belongs to those is grouped together under the name of Klingsor. He is the black magician in contrast to the white magic of the Holy Grail. Wagner places him in opposition to the Templars.

Kundry is the modern version of Herodias, the symbol of the force of reproduction in nature, the force that can be chaste or unchaste, but is uncontrolled. Beneath chastity and unchastity lies a fundamental unity; everything depends on the way of approach. The force of reproduction that shows itself in the plants, within the chalice of the blossom, and right up through the other kingdoms of nature, is the same as in the Holy Grail. Only, it has to undergo purification in that noblest and purest form of Christianity which manifests in Parsifal.

Kundry has to remain a black enchantress until Parsifal releases and redeems her. In the polarity of Parsifal and Kundry we can sense the working of deepest wisdom. Wagner, more than anyone else, took care that men should be able to receive what he had to give without knowing that they were doing so. He was a missionary who had a most significant message to deliver—to deliver, however, in such a way that mankind was not aware of receiving it.

Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote an epic on “Parsifal.” It was inartistic, but it sufficed for his time; for there were in those days men who had a measure of clairvoyance and could accordingly understand Wolfram. In the Nineteenth Century it was not possible to make clear to man the deep meaning of that great process of initiation in a drama. There is, however, a medium through which man's understanding can be reached, even without words, without concepts or ideas. This medium is music. Wagner's music holds within it all the truths that are contained in the Parsifal story. His music is of such a unique character that those who listen to it receive in their ether body quite special vibrations. Therein lies the secret of Wagner's music. One does not need to understand it—not in the least! One receives in one's ether body the benign and healthful effect of the music. And man's ether body is intimately connected with all the movements and throbbings of the blood. Wagner understood the mystery of the purified blood. In his melodies are rhythms and vibrations that must needs beat in the ether body of man if he is to be cleansed and purified so as to be ready to receive the Mysteries of the Holy Grail.

We can only arrive at a full understanding of the quite individual way in which Wagner expresses himself in his writings when we look carefully into what lies behind it. Wagner was convinced that the human will receives a special illumination from the spirit. He said that the will is—to begin with—rude, clumsy, and instinctive; then it grows gradually more and more refined, the intellect begins to cast its light upon it, and man becomes conscious of suffering and through his becoming conscious of suffering, a purification is able to come about.

(Dr. Steiner here quotes a passage from Wagner where he is writing of his friend Gobineau, who held that this consciousness of suffering was the distinctive mark of the white race, and that man was able thereby to rise to clairvoyance and to a higher moral life.)

(Dr. Steiner continues:)

Wagner is here describing the process that consists in the reflection of the intellect upon the will, and of how man becomes thereby clairvoyant.

Wagner's creative work consists, in its essence, of a religious deepening of art; ultimately it is concerned with the deepening of man's understanding of Christianity. Wagner knew that Christianity can be shown forth to the world, best of all in music.

Through raising himself up to the contemplation of the inner mysteries of the world order, man can attain on the one hand knowledge and on the other hand also true piety. A path of development stands open for him, which will teach him to know the meaning of the fact of Christianity.

In continuation of yesterday's sketch on the planetary evolution, let us now add some further explanations. We have already explained that our earth once passed through a Saturn, a Sun and a Moon condition. Let me now describe to you these successive states of existence, as they are usually described in occultism. When speaking of the soul's development along the path of knowledge, we shall be able to understand many things which can now only be advanced hypothetically.

If we consider the Saturn state of existence, that condition of our earth lying millions and millions of years before the present time, we find that it presented an aspect greatly differing from the one which is taken for granted through our present physical conditions. Above all, we should bear in mind that man, the most perfect being we know, has passed through the longest course of development. You will therefore hear the description of a course of development which greatly deviates from the Haeckel-Darwin theory of evolution, but the advantages of this purely materialistic theory may be gathered from my book, “Haeckel, the Riddles of the World and Theosophy”.

The first thing to be grasped is that the most perfect beings are those who passed through the longest course of development, and the most perfect being of all is man, especially the physical body of man. All other beings in our environment have not attained to the perfection of man's physical body, which has taken longer than all others for its development. If we look back through spiritual vision, we therefore find that the first foundation of man's physical body was laid upon Saturn. The whole universe, with all the beings and objects which it contained, influenced the first state of the earth's existence. The present human beings on our planet still possess all the organs which were formed upon Saturn and they are the most perfect parts of man's physical body, namely, the sense-organs. These apparatuses can be grasped from a purely physical aspect and their first foundation was then laid. Of course, you must not think that the eye existed on Saturn in the same form in which it exists to-day. But the first foundation of the eye, the ear, of every sense-organ and of all the other purely physical apparatuses of the human being appeared upon Saturn. The only activities existing upon Saturn which may still be found to-day, are those which pertain to the mineral kingdom. (Crystallizations, etc.)

Upon Saturn, the human being existed in the form which was the first foundation of his physical body; everything, else, the blood, the tissues, etc. did not then exist. Physical apparatuses constituted the first basis of man's physical body. Even as the emerald, the mica, etc, arise through physical laws and develop in the form of cubes, hexaeders, etc, so at that time forms developed which resembled apparatuses and which existed upon Saturn in the same way in which crystals now exist upon the earth. The activity of Saturn's surface essentially consisted in a kind of reflection which went out into the universal space. The Beings in Saturn's environment who were scattered in the universal spaces sent down their influences. Something which we may call the “cosmic aroma” was also then strongly developed. Only a few phenomena of the present day may give you a feeling for what took place upon Saturn: for example, when you hear an echo in Nature, the sound of this echo can convey to you something which went streaming out of Saturn as the result of the impressions which it received. These conglomerations of forces resembling apparatuses which threw back pictures in the universal space, formed the first foundation of that which developed later on as the eye. In a similar way we might follow the development of everything else. What you now have within your body, was once upon Saturn a physical kingdom, which sent out into the world's spaces the reflection of the whole cosmos in a manifold manner.

Myths and legends preserved this knowledge far more clearly than one generally supposes. The Greek myth of Chronos and Rhea, proceeding from the Eleusinian Mysteries preserved, for example such a truth; it contains however, a great displacement of facts due to the way in which the Greeks viewed the great cosmic connections. This myth tells us that Chronos sent down his rays and that these rays then returned to him in many forms: this explains the picture of Chronos devouring his children.

Now you must not think that the Saturn mass was as firm and solid as the physical bodies of to-day; even water and air do not give you an idea of Saturn's fundamental substance. When speaking of bodies in occultism, we speak of solid, liquid and gaseous bodies. And if we speak of the elements in the old manner, they correspond to that which modern chemistry designates as the “aggregate conditions” of matter, for you must not think that the men of olden times, when speaking of the “elements” meant the same thing as we do. Then there is a higher “aggregate state”, designated in ancient occultism as “fire”; a better meaning is however conveyed by calling it “heat”. Even physics will be obliged to recognise that what is designated as heat, may be compared with a kind of fourth aggregate state, with another kind of substance differing from air and water. The Saturn mass was not even condensed to the state of air it consisted of purified heat, and its activity resembled that of the heat your blood, for it was connected with inner life-processes. The physical processes upon Saturn were real life-processes. Saturn consisted of heat-substance, of an immensely fine volume which may be designated as neutral, if compared with our present substances.

If we wish to study the Beings who inhabited Saturn, we must realise that the Beings whom we now see moving about upon the earth, then possessed only the first beginning of a physical body; they were embodied in heat-substance, and their activity consisted in a current of heat which moved about. These currents constituted the deeds of the Beings who filled Saturn with life. Even as to-day you are able to make a table, so these Saturn-beings did their work by producing currents of heat. Nothing else could be observed of these Beings. A greeting exchanged upon Saturn was as if two currents of heat moved to and fro, exchanging their forces.

The Beings who passed through the human stage upon Saturn did not possess a physical body as their lowest member, for they did not descend into matter so deeply as to require a physical body. Their lowest member was the Ego, even as to-day our lowest member is the physical body; then came their Sprit-Self or Manas, their Life-Spirit or Buddhi, then Spirit-Man or Atma. In addition they developed an eighth, ninth and tenth members, which must be included.

Theosophical literature calls these members which the human being has not yet developed, the “Three Logoi”; in Christianity they are called the Holy Spirit, the Son or the Word, and the Father. We may therefore say: Even as the human beings now consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man, so these Beings living upon Saturn, who in regard to their connection with the earth may be compared with the present human beings, consisted of Ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man; of the Holy Ghost, the Son or Word, and the Father. The theosophical terminology designates them as “asuras”. They are the Beings who from the very beginning implanted into the physical foundation of man's body the feeling of independence, of Ego-consciousness, and of Ego-feeling. You could not use your eye in the service of the Ego had your eye's foundation not been prepared at that time, so that now you are enabled to place your eye at the service of the Ego. These members were therefore prepared by the Spirits of the Ego, also
named the Spirits of Egoism. They gave us the wisest thing of all, when developed in the right way. But everything of the highest nature becomes perverted into its opposite if it is not developed in the right way, because then it exercises the most harmful and destructive influence. Man could never reach that high stage which we designate as human dignity, had not these Spirits of Egoism implanted in him the Ego-feeling. There have always been Beings who followed an evil Course, and consequently we must say: The Beings who implanted the Ego into man and who are now upon a stage of development greatly surpassing the human one, those Beings to whom we may look up as the highest of all, gave their Ego as an offering of self-renunciation and sacrifice; but the others followed the development of their Ego in a selfish manner.

In striving after freedom and human dignity we bear within us the influences of the Spirits of the Ego who followed the good path, and we bear within us the seed of evil, because the influence of the Beings who fell away continued to be active. This contrast has always been felt. Christianity itself makes a distinction between God the Father, whom it considers as the most highly developed Spirit of Saturn, and his opponent, the Spirit of all the evil Egos and of everything which is radically immoral, the Spirit who fell away upon the ancient Saturn. These are the two representatives of Saturn.

Even as after death we encounter other forms of existence, so a cosmic body, such as Saturn, passes through a kind of intermediate state, a kind of sleep-condition, before it enters into a new condition; it passes through a “pralaya” in contrast to a “manvantara”, so that we have a kind of resting, passive condition of the planet, between the Saturn and the Sun state of existence. The whole planet then emerges in a new form from its sleeping state, which is, however, a spiritual one.

Saturn thus emerged as the Sun, and a considerable transformation had taken place. Upon the Sun a great number of the germs which had already developed upon Saturn and which are still developing within us to-day, were permeated by an etheric body. During such a planetary transition something evolves which may be compared with the fruit of a plant which we lay in the earth; it decays, but it forms the foundation of a new plant Thus everything which developed upon Saturn arose again upon the Sun with a new foundation and it became permeated with an etheric body.

There were also other beings who had remained behind upon the mineral-physical stage, and they can be compared with the present mineral kingdom. The Sun absorbed them as a kind of subordinate kingdom of Nature, but at the same time another kingdom was raised to the stage of plant-man.

You obtain a right conception of the Sun-atmosphere if you imagine a thick, chemical gas, no longer representing a merely reflecting body, but one which absorbed everything which, came raying towards it, and after having transformed it, reverberated it in the same way in which plants now reverberate colours. The plant forms its green colour and other substances and returns them to the cosmic spaces. That which lived upon the ancient Sun cannot be compared with an echo, nor with a reflected image, as in the case of Saturn, in regard to the beings embodied upon the Sun, we come across a phenomena which can only be compared with a kind of Fata Morgana, with atmospheric phenomena resembling coloured pictures. Such phenomena which can only be perceived to-day in certain regions of our globe, can give you an idea of how these plant-bodies could be perceived. You must imagine that your bodies revealed certain Fata Morgana-like processes, through which your present bodies could pass as if through air. You were then as transparent as a Fata Morgana—but this phenomenon did not only consist of light, but also of tones and smells whirring through the gas- sphere of the Sun.

Whereas the beings living upon the Sun could shine like the fixed stars of to-day, the ancient Saturn kingdom of the beings who had remained behind, could be observed like a dark mass, like dark forms against the light, like obtuse. caverns in the body of the Sun, which disturbed its harmony. Particularly in regard to the “cosmic aroma” these retarded beings mixed into it sensations which provoked all kinds of evil smells. Myths have retained a recollection of this, for they relate that the Devil leaves behind an evil smell. As it progressed, the Sun really left behind a dark part, and the sun-spots which are visible now, are the remnants of the ancient Saturn kingdom which once existed upon the Sun. Hypothetically these spots should be explained exactly as we explain them now; for all these explanations are valid.

In a short sketch you thus have the earth's sun-existence painted, as it were, from its material aspect. Let us now see who were the Beings who attained the human stage upon the Sun. They would have to be described as follows: Their lowest body is the astral body, then comes the Ego, the Spirit-Self, the Life-Spirit, the Spirit-Man or Atma, then the Holy Ghost in the Christian meaning, and finally the Son or the Word. They did not have the Father, for this member was only developed during the Saturn era. These Saturn Spirits meanwhile rose to a still higher stage, and now they stand far above the human being.

The Leader of the Sun Spirits, in so far as He exercised the highest, influence upon the earth, the representative of the Spirits whose highest member was the Son or the Word, is the Christ, in the esoteric meaning of Christianity. He is the real regent of the earth, in so far as the earth is based upon the Sun state of existence. Upon the Sun, Christ would not yet have been called by that name. The old form of Christianity always taught this truth, and the difference between genuine Christianity and, the exoteric form of Christianity, which is in so many cases based upon misunderstandings, is that the older form of Christianity exerted all its thinking power and applied every conception in order to understand that high Being Who took on human shape in Jesus of Nazareth. The ancient form of Christianity wished to gain a conception of what lay at the foundation of this mystery, and no wisdom was too high for it, or too complicated: It explained the Being of Christ within Jesus of Nazareth in accordance with this truth. Many a passage in the Gospel of St. John can only be understood if you grasp it from this aspect. It suffices to draw attention to one point: If you take the words, “I am the Light of the World” literally, these imply that the Christ is the great Sun Hero, and that the Light which belongs to the Sun constitutes His being. We designate the whole hosts of Spirits whose Leader is the Christ as the “Fire Spirits” and we say: The Asuras or the Ego Spirits reached the human stage during the Saturn era. During the Sun existence the Fire Spirits or the Logoi, whose highest representative is named the Logos or the Word, reached this stage. For this very reason, Christ is named the “Word” that existed in “the beginning”, and the “beginning” designates in the Bible a definite point of departure in the cosmic evolution.

Again we have an intermediate condition, a kind of sleeping condition for the whole cosmic body, and then it begins to shine forth again as the ancient Moon.

You must imagine that in the beginning the present Earth and the present Moon formed one body with the Sun. Only when the Sun began to shine forth again, one part of the Beings separated from it with their own environment, so that two celestial bodies arose. One of these bodies, the Sun, begins to develop into a fixed star, and the body which separates from it begins to circle around it. The ancient Sun thus divided itself into two parts; the more highly developed substance remained behind upon the Sun, and the less perfect substance was eliminated. Consequently, that which once pursued the same course, because there was only one body, now followed two separate course: the Sun path and the Moon path. The Sun path was the one which developed upon the Sun-body, whereas the Moon developed its own world. You could reconstruct the ancient Moon by mixing together the present earth and the present Moon; this would enable you to form a conception of the way in which the ancient Moon was constituted. Both physically and spiritually the present Moon is far below the Earth in regard to its quality, and the Earth separated from the Moon just because it needed better conditions of life for Beings who lived upon it. The Earth developed beyond the stage it had reached during the Moon existence; but its best part remained behind upon the Sun.

What was the aspect of things upon the ancient Moon? The Beings who had passed through a preparatory stage upon Saturn by developing the physical foundation of the sense-organs, transformed these organs upon the Sun by permeating them with a etheric body; the sense organs thus became centralised, and the first basis of the organs of growth reaching as far as the glands could unfold upon the ancient Sun under the influence of the etheric body; this was a final product of the Sun existence.

Upon the Moon, the astral body was added in a similar manner. Everything astral first existed in the surroundings; the Fire Spirits had an astral body as their lowest member. The Beings upon the Sun resembled plants; for instance, they could not move from their fixed places. Although the whole body of the Sun was gaseous, you must imagine air-strata of greater density which were the bodies of these human plants. But now the astral body of man was added; this gave rise to the first foundation of a nervous system. The kingdom which had reached the plant stage of development upon the Sun, passed over to the animal stage, to a stage resembling that of animals. The physical ancestors of man upon the Moon thus possessed three bodies: the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body, yet they greatly surpassed the most highly developed apes of our planet; they were human animals which no biology can describe, an intermediate kingdom between man and animal. Our present vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms only developed later, but even as there were human animals; so we must admit the existence of an intermediate kingdom between plant and animal; plants with a kind of sentient capacity, plants which literally squeaked if one touched them. These plant-animals could never have grown upon a mineral soil, such as the present soil of the Earth; in fact, this mineral soil did not exist upon the Moon. Its mass did not consist of the present rocky substances, not even of loose soil. Comparatively speaking, the Moon's foundation consisted of a mass resembling a mash of cooked spinach or salad, and in it a kind of mineral plant, The whole foundation of the Moon was therefore of vegetable nature. A peat bed of to-day would resemble the kingdom which existed at that time as an intermediate kingdom between our plants and minerals. There were no rocks, and anyone walking over the ground would have walked over such a peaty ground or vegetable foundation, and analogously you may think of rocks in the form of woodened portions within this mass.

The plant-animals grew out of this whole foundation, and above them, in the Moon's environment which may be designated as “fire-air”, moved those beings who were man-animals. Imagine the whole atmosphere filled with saltpeter, carbon and sulphur gases; the Moon-men lived in this fiery air which you would thus obtain. Occultists always knew of the existence of this fire-air, and under older conditions of the Earth it was even possible to produce this fire-air artificially. This is only possible to-day in a very restricted circle, but this knowledge has been preserved in genuine alchemy. Consequently, if you read in Goethe's “Faust”, “Let me produce a little fire-air”, this touches the depths of occultism. Fire-air enwrapped; the Moon; this was its atmosphere.

We can understand this Moon-existence even better if we add another fact. Upon the Moon there was a kingdom of plant-minerals, of animal-plants growing out of this vegetable-mineral soil, and then there were the animal-men moving about upon it. But upon each stage there are beings who remain behind—you may, if you like, say that they did not “pass”. This is the case not only at school, but also in the great course of development, where a pupil may have to repeat a class. These beings who did not “pass”, appear in future stages of development in very peculiar conditions. Such stragglers of the plant-minerals who did not “pass” still exist in parasites, for instance in the mistle-toe. It cannot grow upon mineral soil, because it was accustomed to grow upon a vegetable-mineral soil. It proves a fact resembling that of a pupil who did not move on to a higher form; except that the case of the beings who remain behind in the cosmic development is far worse. Particularly in the North we come across a myth which describes this; you are all acquainted with the northern myth of Baldur and his death through Loki.

The Gods were frolicking about in the Aesir's home and in there games they hurled about all kinds of objects. Baldur had just before had dreams foreboding his early death, and the Gods were therefore afraid to lose him. The Mother of the Gods had taken an oath from all the living and inanimate beings and they all had all promised that they would never hurt Baldur, and so the Gods enjoyed the game of throwing all manner of weapons against Baldur. Loki, the opponent of the Gods, had discovered that one being, who was considered to be harmless, had not made any promise, and this was the mistle-toe, which lay in hiding somewhere in the distance. Loki obtained the mistle-toe, gave it to the blind god Hodur, who threw it at Baldur: the mistle-toe wounded Baldur, for it had not sworn the oath, and Baldur died.

This myth indicates that that which is invulnerable upon the Earth can only suffer harm through that which has remained behind from another existence as something evil. In the mistle-toe people saw something which had entered the present state of existence from an earlier one. All the beings now living upon the earth can only suffer harm through that which has remained behind from an earlier one. All the beings now living upon the Earth are connected with Baldur. But it was otherwise upon the Moon; consequently that being which had remained behind from the Moon was able to kill Baldur. All the various customs connected with the mistle-toe arise out of this foundation.

We should also consider the Moon existence from another aspect, from the Spiritual one. The Moon Beings who had reached the human stage must be described as beings whose lowest member was the etheric body, their second one the astral body, then the Ego, Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit, Spirit-Man or Atma, and then they also had the Holy Ghost. They no longer had the ninth member pertaining to the Fire Spirits upon the Sun. The highest of the Moon Spirits who had reached the human stage is called the “Holy Ghost” in Christian esotericism. In the early original form of Christianity, the threefold Godhead was therefore intimately connected with the evolution of the earth. The Holy Ghost is a Spirit who is above man and Who is able to inspire him in a direct way.

Thus you may see that the Moon Spirits now stand above the human being. They are also called “Lunar Pitris”, “Moon Fathers” and “Spirits of Twilight”. The whole host belonging to the Holy Ghost is called in Christian esotericism the Host of Angels. The Angels are the Spirits immediately above man, who passed through their human stage upon the ancient Moon.

The life of the animal-men and of the plant-animals upon the Moon, differed from that of the beings who developed out of them upon the Earth. The movement of the Moon, which had already severed itself from the Sun, was quite different from the movement of the present earth around the sun. The ancient Moon circled around the Sun in such a way that it always turned the same face towards it, even as the Moon to-day always shows the same side to the earth. The Moon thus turned only once around its own axis, while circling around the Sun. The Moon Beings were therefore dependent upon the Sun in quite a different way than is the case with the present earthly inhabitants. During the Moon's whole epoch of revolution around the Sun, it was always daytime on one of its sides, and a kind of night upon the other. The Moon Beings, who were already able to move about, wandered in a kind of circle around the Moon, so that they passed through one epoch in which they stood under the influence of the Moon. The time in which they stood under the Sun's influence was their time of procreation. For there was already a kind of procreation. The Moon-men could not as yet express joy and pleasure through sounds; their expressions had a more cosmic significance. The sun-epoch was the time of ardour and passion, and it was connected with a great screaming on the part of the Moon Beings, This exists to-day in the animal kingdom.

Many other things have remained from that time. You know how one tries to investigate the true reason for the birds migration, why they circle around the globe in a certain manner. Many things which are mysteriously concealed to-day, can be understood if the whole course of earthly evolution is borne in mind. There was a time when the lunar beings could only procreate when they wandered towards the Sun; this may be called their epoch of sexual life. General processes of lunar life expressed themselves in sounds at certain seasons of the and at other times, the beings upon the Moon were dumb.

We have thus learned to know time earth' s passage through the three preceding conditions of its existence: that of Saturn, of the Moon and of the Sun.

The Mystics and the Time of Copernicus. Involution, Evolution and Creation out of Nothingness. The Number Four, the Sign of Creation.

Today we shall first occupy ourselves with a consideration of what is called the symbolism of numbers. When speaking of occult signs and symbols, it is necessary to mention the symbols that are expressed in numbers, even if only briefly. You may recall my elucidations of the day before yesterday in which I spoke of the numerical proportions in the universe, of the speed with which the single planets move and of the harmony of the spheres that comes about through these different speeds. Even from this you can see that numbers and numerical proportions have a certain meaning for the cosmos and the world. It is in numbers, we might say, that the harmony that wells through space is expressed. Now we shall turn our attention to a more intimate numerical symbolism, the meaning of which we can only touch upon, however. Were we really to immerse ourselves in it, many other things would have to be considered. Anyway, you will receive at least an idea of what is meant when it is said of the old occult Pythagorean School that it stressed the necessity of immersing oneself in the nature of numbers in order to gain an insight into the world.

To think about numbers may appear dry and dreary to many. To those who are affected by the materialistic culture of our times it will appear as mere playfulness if it is believed that, through a consideration of numbers, it is possible to gain knowledge of the nature of things. There was, however, a deep reason for the great Pythagoras to tell his pupils that knowledge concerning the nature of numbers would lead to the essence of things. But do not think it sufficient to reflect on the numbers 1, 3, or 7. Real occult teaching knows nothing of witchcraft and magic, nor of a superstitious meaning of some number. Its knowledge rests on deeper things, and from the short sketch I will give you, you will see that numbers can give you a clue to what is called meditation if you have the key to plunge deeply enough.

The number one must be our starting point. Later, in considering the other numbers, it will become clearer how far the number one symbolizes what I shall say. In all occultism the One has always designated the indivisible unity of God in the universe. God is indicated by the number one. We should not believe, however, that anything is to be gained by becoming engrossed in nothing but this number. You will see later how this absorption should rightfully come about, and it will be far more fruitful if we first consider the other numbers.

Two is called the number of revelation in occultism. This means that whatever appears to us in the world, whatever reveals itself, whatever is not in any way concealed, stands as a duality. Thereby we acquire ground under our feet, whereas with the number one we are groping in the unfathomable. Everywhere in nature you find that nothing reveals itself without being related to the number two. Light alone cannot reveal itself. There must also be shadow or darkness—that is, a duality. There could never be a world filled with manifest light were there not corresponding shadow. Thus it is with all things. It would never be possible for good to manifest if it did not have evil as shadow-picture. The duality of good and evil is a necessity in the manifest world. There are infinitely many dualities. They fit all life, but we must look for them at the right spots.

There is one important duality in life about which men might well reflect. Yesterday, we considered various conditions that a man experienced before he became an inhabitant of our present earth. We saw that on Saturn and on Sun he had a certain immortality in that he directed his body from outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first becomes a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct his body from the outside, that he broke off pieces of this body and added new ones, so that he perceived nothing of fading and dying. Human consciousness at that time was not as it is today, but was dull. Men have wrestled through to a consciousness that is bound up with self-consciousness for the first time on our earth. It is here that a man first became a being who knew something of himself and could distinguish himself from objects. For this to occur, it was necessary not only that he direct himself from outside, but he also had to slip into this body, perceive himself therein, and say “I” to it. Only because a man finds himself completely in his body has he been able to achieve his full consciousness. Now, however, he also shares the destiny of his body. Earlier, when he still hovered over it, this was not the case. It was only when a man had achieved this degree of consciousness that he came into relation with death. At the moment when his body falls apart, he feels the suspension of his ego because he identifies himself with his body. Only gradually, through spiritual development, will he again achieve the old immortality. The body is here as the school through which to wrestle through to immortality with self-consciousness. Through death a man acquires immortality on a higher level. As long as he had not experienced death, so long was the world unrevealed to him because duality belongs to the revealed world—death and life.

Thus, we could point out dualities at every step in life. In physics you find positive and negative electricity, in magnetism, forces of attraction and repulsion. Everything appears in duality. Two, duality, is the number of appearance, of manifestation.

There is, however, no revelation save that the Divine holds sway behind the scenes. In this way, behind every duality a unity is hidden. Therefore, three is nothing but two and one, that is, the revelation and the existent divinity backing it.

Three is the number of the Divinity revealing itself. There is a statement in occultism that says that two can never be the number for the Divinity. One is a number for God, and also the three. The one who sees the world as a duality, sees it only in its revelation. Whoever claims that this duality is all is always in the wrong. Let us make this clear to ourselves with an example. Even in places where spiritual science is discussed, sinning often occurs against the statement of true occultism that two is the number of revelation but not the number of fullness or completeness. You will often hear it said in popular occultism by people who do not really know, that all development runs its course through involution and evolution, but we shall see the direction this really takes. First, however let's examine a plant, a fully developed plant with roots, leaves, stems, blossoms, fruit, etc. This is an evolution. But now observe the small seed from which the plant has arisen or can arise. In this tiny seed the entire plant is, in a sense, already contained. It is hidden within it, ensheathed, because the seed is taken from the whole plant, which has laid all its forces into the seed. Here we may therefore make a distinction between two processes—the one in which the seed's forces have unfurled themselves and unfolded into the plant, evolution, and the other in which the plant has folded itself up and, as it were, crept into the seed, involution.

The process that occurs when a being that has many organs so forms itself that nothing of these organs remains visible, so that they contract to a tiny part, is called an involution. The process of expansion and unfolding is an evolution. Everywhere in life this duality alternates but always only within the manifest. You can follow this up not only in the plant but also in higher realms of life. Let us trace in thought, for example, the development of European spiritual life from Augustine to Calvin, that is, roughly through the Middle Ages. You will find in Augustine a kind of mystical inwardness. No one can read the Confessions or his other writings without experiencing the deep inwardness of this man's feeling life. When we advance further, we come across wonderful characters such as Scotus Erigena, a monk from Scotland called the Scottish St. John, who later lived at the court of Charles the Bald. He did not get on well with the Church, and it is told that the brothers of his order tortured him to death with pins. Of course, this is not to be taken literally, but it is true that he was tortured to death. A splendid book was written by him, On the Divisions in Nature which reveals a great profundity of thought even though it is found wanting in many ways from the anthroposophical point of view.

Proceeding further, we find the German mystics in the region of the Rhine, through whom an inner warmth poured itself out over great numbers of people. Not only did the highest of the clergy experience it, but also those who worked on the land and in the smithies. They were all picked up by this current of the time. Further along the way we find Nicolaus Cusanus (1400–64), and so we can follow along in time until the end of the Middle Ages. Always we find that depth of feeling, that inwardness, that spreads itself over all strata of the population.

If we now compare this time with that following it, with the period that began in the sixteenth century and extends into our own, we notice a tremendous difference. At the outset, we find Copernicus who, through a comprehensive idea, effected a renewal of spiritual life, whose thought has become so incorporated into human thinking that whoever believes something else today is counted a fool. We see Galileo, who discovered the law of gravity by observing the swinging of a church lamp in Pisa. Step by step we follow the passage of time up to the present, and everywhere we find the opposite, the strict opposite, of the Middle Ages. Feeling steadily declines and inwardness disappears. The intellect comes steadily to the fore and men become more clever.

Spiritual science explains the difference between these two epochs and shows us that this change had to be. There is an occult statement that says that the period from Augustine to Calvin was one of mystical involution. What does this mean? From the time of Augustine to the sixteenth century there was an outward unfolding of mystical life; it was outside. But something else was also there—intellectual life hidden in germinal form. It was, as it were, like a sun buried in the spiritual earth that unfolded later after the sixteenth century. The intellect was involuted as the plant is in its seed. Nothing can come forth in the world that was not previously in such an involution. Since the sixteenth century, the intellect has been evolving, the mystical life withdrawing. Now the time has come when this mystical life must again appear, when through the Anthroposophical Movement it will be brought to unfolding, to evolution. In this way involution and evolution disclose themselves alternately everywhere in life.

Whoever stops here, however, is taking only the outer aspect into account. To reckon with the whole we must include a third aspect that stands behind these two. What is this third aspect? Imagine yourself facing a phenomenon in the outer world. You reflect over it. You are here, the outer world is there, and from within your thoughts arise. These thoughts were not there previously. When, for example, you form a thought about a rose, this thought first arises in the moment you make a connection with the rose. You were here, the rose there, and now the thought arises in you. When the image of the rose arises, something quite new has come about. This is also the case in other spheres of life. Imagine the artist, Michelangelo, arranging a group of models. Actually, he did this in the rarest of cases. Michelangelo is here, what he renders is there. Something new—the image—arises in his soul. This is a creation that has nothing to do with involution and evolution. It is something entirely new that arises from the intercourse between a being that can receive and a being that can give. Such new creations are always generated through intercourse of being with being, and such new creations are a beginning.

Recall what we considered yesterday, how thoughts are creative, how they can ennoble the soul, indeed, even work later on forming the body. Whatever a being once thinks, the thought creation, the concept creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation, works and actively carries on further. It is a new creation and at the same time a beginning because it gives rise to consequences. If you have good thoughts today, they are fruitful into the remote future because your soul goes its own way in the spiritual world. Your body returns to the elements and decays. Even if everything through which the thought arose disintegrates, the effects of the thought remain.

Let us return to the example of Michelangelo. His glorious paintings have affected millions of people. These paintings, however, will one day fall into dust and there will be future generations who will never see his creations. But what lived in Michelangelo's soul before his paintings took outer form, what at first existed as new creations in his soul, lives on, remains, and will appear in future stages of development and be given form. Do you know why clouds and stars appear to us today? Because there were beings in preceding eras who had thoughts of clouds and stars. Everything arises out of thought creations.

There you have the number three! In revelation things alternate between involution and evolution. Behind this is a deeply hidden creation, a new creation born out of thought. Everything has arisen out of thought, and the greatest things in the world have gone forth from the thoughts of the Godhead. From what, then, do things arise since ideas are new creations? They arise out of nothing! Three different things are here connected: Creation out of nothingness, which always occurs when you have an idea; the manifestation of this creation; the course of its development in time through the two forms, involution and evolution. This is what is meant when certain religious systems speak of the world created out of nothingness. If today people deride this, it is only because they do not understand what is to be found in these documents.

In the world of manifestation, to sum it up once more, everything alternates between involution and evolution. At the root of this is a hidden creation out of nothingness that unites itself with the two (involution and evolution) to form a triad. This is a union of the Divine with the revealed.

So you can see how we can reflect on the number three. We should not take off and spin pedantic thoughts about it, but we must look for the duality and triad that is to be met at every turn. Then we consider the numerical symbols in the right way, in the Pythagorean sense, and can draw conclusions leading from one to the other. We could also say that light and shadow appear in the manifest world, and behind these lies a third, hidden element.

We come now to the number four. Four is the sign of the cosmos or of creation. As far as we can determine with our present organs, the present planetary condition of the earth is its fourth embodiment. Everything that is manifest to us on an earth such as ours presupposes that this creation is the fourth stage. This is but a special case for all creations that appear thus. They all stand under the sign of the four.

The occultist says that men today stand in the mineral kingdom. What does this mean? Because a man understands only the mineral kingdom, he can only control this kingdom. Using minerals, he can build a house, a clock, and other things because they are subject to mineral laws. For various other activities he does not have this capacity. He cannot, for example, form a plant from out of his own thinking. To be able to do this he would himself have to exist in the plant kingdom. Some time in the future this will be the case. Today men are creators in the mineral realm. Three other kingdoms, the elementary kingdoms, have preceded this; the mineral kingdom is the fourth. All told there are seven.

Men stand in the fourth kingdom. Only here do they reach their actual consciousness oriented to the outer world. On the Moon they were still operating in the third elementary kingdom, on the Sun in the second, and on Saturn in the first. In the future on Jupiter, they will be able to create plants as today they are able to construct a clock. Everything visible in creation stands in the sign of the four. There are many planets that are not to be seen with physical eyes, such as those in the first, second, and third elementary kingdoms. Only when such a planet within creation enters the mineral kingdom can it be seen. Four is, therefore, the number of the cosmos or of creation. With the entrance into the fourth condition a being becomes fully visible to eyes that can see external things.

Five is the number of evil. This will become clear to us if we again consider human beings. In their development men have become fourfold beings and thereby beings of the created world. Here on earth, however, the fifth member of their being, the spirit self, will be added. Were they to remain fourfold beings, they would be constantly directed by the gods—toward the good, of course—but they would never develop their independence. They have become free through the gift of their germinal fifth member, but it is also from this that they have received the ability to do evil. No being can do evil who has not arrived at “fivefoldness.” Wherever we meet with evil, such that it can actually adversely affect our own being, there a fivefoldness is at play. This is the case everywhere, including the outside world, but people are unaware of it, and our present materialistic world view has no conception of the fact that the world can be considered in this way. Actually, there is justification for speaking of evil only where fivefoldness appears. When, one day, medicine will make use of this, it will be able to influence beneficially the course of illness. Part of the treatment would be to study the illness in its development on the first and fifth days after its onset, on the separate days at the fifth hour past midnight, and again during the fifth week. Thus it is always the number five that determines when the physician can best intervene. Before that there is not much else he can do than to let nature take its course, but then he can intervene, helping or harming, because what can justifiably be called good or evil then flows into the world of reality. It is possible in many areas to show that the number five has meaning for outer events.

A man's life consists of periods of seven years—from birth until the change of teeth; puberty; seven or eight years later; toward thirty, followed by the seven year periods throughout the rest of his life. When, one day, he will take these periods into account and consider what had best come toward or stand aloof from him, he will come to know much about preparing a good old age for himself. He can thus bring about good or evil for the remainder of his life. In the early periods of life a great deal can be done by observing certain laws of education. Then, however, there comes an important turning point. This also may become a regression if he is turned loose in life with complete confidence too early. The accepted principle of today that sends young people out into life early is harmful; the fifth period should be passed before this happens. Such ancient occult principles are of great importance. This is why, in the past, at the direction of those who knew something of these things, the years of the apprentice and journeyman had to be completed before one could be called a master.

Seven is the number of perfection. Observation of man himself will make this clear. Today he is under the influence of the number five insofar as he can be good or evil. As a creature of the universe he lives in the number four. When he will have developed all that he holds at present as germ within him, he will become a seven-membered being, perfect in its kind. The number seven rules in the world of colour, in the rainbow; in the world of tone it is found in the scale. Everywhere, in all realms of life, the number seven can be observed as a kind of number of perfection. There is no superstition or magic in this.

Now let us look back again to the number one. Because we have considered other numbers, what is now to be said about one will appear in the right light. The essence of the number one is its indivisibility. Of course, it can be subdivided, for example, 1/3, 2/3, etc. but this can only be accomplished in thinking. In the world, especially in the spiritual world, when you take the two-thirds away, the one-third still remains a part of it. In the same sense it can be said that when some part of God is separated from Him and becomes manifest, the remainder exists as something that still belongs to it. In the Pythagorean sense we can say, “Divide the unity, but never otherwise than to have in your underlying thoughts the remainder connected with what has been separated.”

Take a thin golden plate of glass and look through it. The world will appear yellow because that is the colour that will be reflected. But in white light other colours are also contained. What happens to them? They are absorbed by the object. Hence, a red object appears red because it reflects the red rays and absorbs the rest. It is not possible to separate red from white light without leaving the other colours behind. With this we touch the edge of a world secret. You look at things in a certain way. You see, for instance, a red cloth spread out on the table and visualize at the same time that green is hidden in it. In this way you have accomplished what in the Pythagorean sense is called “The division of the One so that the rest is preserved.” If you carry this out meditatively, if you again and again unite separated parts into a unity, you have brought about a meaningful development through which you can attain spiritual heights.

Mathematicians have an expression for this that holds good in all occult schools:

1 = ( 2 + x ) - ( 1 + x )

This is an occult formula that expresses how Oneness can be divided and the parts so arranged that the One results. It indicates that, as occultists, we should not think of Oneness simply as One, but as parts that we add together again.

So, in this lecture we have examined what is called number symbolism and learned that when we meditate on the world from the standpoint of numbers, we can penetrate deep world secrets.

To complete these remarks let it be said once more that in the fifth week, on the fifth day, or in the fifth hour we can find important things that can be missed or made good. In the seventh week, on the seventh day, or in the seventh hour (or in a definite relationship, say, 3 1/2 because seven is also in this number), something can happen through the thing itself. On the seventh day of an illness, for instance, a fever will take on a definite character; this might also occur on the fourteenth day. These things are always based on number relationships that point to the structure of the world.

Those who steep themselves in the right way in what, in the Pythagorean sense, we may call the “study of numbers,” will learn to understand life and the world in this number symbolism. Of this the lecture today was meant to give you roughly sketched thoughts.

First of all I want to say a few words of greeting to express the feelings which your gathering have aroused in me. Your speaker described in a pleasing way the impulses that have brought you together here. Much of what I shall have to say in the coming days will inevitably be a kind of interpretation of what is present within you, more or less strongly as inner experiences which you wish to be brought to clarity of soul. I say clarity of soul rather than merely of an intellectual nature.

You have been brought together by that which lives in the depths of your souls. These depths are taken hold of by forces which, in the specific way in which they are working at the present time, are of recent date. These forces—in the way they are working in you—are scarcely older than this century. They are forces which even today reveal themselves very clearly to him who can see them, but in the near future they will become ever more apparent. In the next few days we shall describe these forces in their most intimate nature, as well as the opposite tendencies which preceded and had become “out of date” by the last third of the nineteenth century. But today, I shall speak about these forces in their more external aspect.

I think, my dear friends, that you feel you can no longer find yourselves in accord with what an older generation has to say to the world today. You see, as early as the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century, people were stressing, both in art and in philosophy, the deep gulf between the older and younger generations. But all that was said then by poets and others about this gulf, this abyss, is pale in comparison with what has to be considered today. Today the younger and the older generation speak entirely different languages of the soul. This is so to a far greater extent than is realized. It attaches no blame to an older generation as regards the younger. To speak of blame would be to use a form of thought belonging to the older generation—one of their philistine forms of thought. We shall not speak of blame, neither shall we accuse. But we shall consider how fundamentally souls belonging to evolution in the West have changed since the last two to three decades. In our present time, many things clash.

A little while ago I gave a series of lectures in England, at Oxford. As a university town, Oxford occupies a unique position in the cultural life of the West. One feels that in Oxford—a town very closely connected with spiritual evolution in the West—a relic of the Middle Ages is surviving on into the present time. It is by no means an unpleasing relic, quite the contrary, and in many respects worthy of admiration. We were taken round by a friend who is a graduate of Oxford University, and it is the custom there, when in their capacity as graduates, always to wear cap and gown. After we had gone round with him, I met him again in the street. The next morning I could not help describing to the English audience the impression I had when this friend appeared in cap and gown. It seemed to me thoroughly symptomatic. This, together with other experiences, induced me to form a picture and to say why a new social structure, reaching to the depths of modern spiritual life, is necessary. When this friend met me in the street, I said to myself that if I had to write a letter now, under the immediate impression of this meeting, I should not know what date to put on the letter. I should have been tempted to date it about the twelfth or thirteenth century, in order to adhere to the style where such a thing was possible.

Something that is not of the present has been preserved there. We find nothing like it in Middle Europe. But what we find in Middle Europe, in influential centers of culture, is nevertheless an evolutionary product of what I have just described.

Here, in Middle Europe, the gown has practically been discarded, except on festive occasions, when Directors and other officials are expected to wear it, often to their great annoyance.

Our friend, who was also a barrister, said to me: “If I were taking you round the Law Courts in London, I should, as a barrister, have to put on a wig, not a cap.” There you see a survival of something that has become out of date, and yet was still alive in the last century. So there we have the Middle Ages in the present. In Middle Europe people have, after all, outgrown a custom which belonged to the former generation and had become old. First they discarded the costume; then, with a sudden jump, they adopted a kind of thinking, rather different in character, which headed straight into materialism. These contrasts between Western and Middle Europe are extraordinarily great. And now there is a very symptomatic phenomenon which I prefer to describe through facts rather than by abstract words.

In Middle Europe we have forgotten Goethe and accepted Darwin, although Goethe grasped at its roots the knowledge which Darwin only indicates superficially. Many similar things might be quoted. Perhaps you will say that Goethe has not been forgotten, for there exists a Goethe Society, for example. I don't believe you will say it, so I will not pursue it further. Goethe himself and what he brought to light—the Middle European spiritual impulse—were, in fact, forgotten in the second half of the nineteenth century. But these things are mere symptoms. The point is, that along the path taken by Middle Europe and its cultural life, the leading centers of culture emancipated themselves in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries from the spirit which still remained in the West. Since that time, Middle Europe lost the spiritual, lost the element that storms and pulsates through the soul, from consciousness. That is why it was possible, too, for Goethe to be forgotten.

In the West this element has been preserved in traditions and in external life. In Middle Europe, especially in the German-speaking regions, it has been pushed down, as it were, into the depths of the life of soul, and consciousness has not been filled with it. This was particularly marked in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Close historical study will reveal something strange in the last third of the nineteenth century. If we study the literature and the writings which were read by those who played a part in shaping the cultural life, we find during the last third of the nineteenth century, up to the middle of the eighties and nineties, in German-speaking districts, quite a different style in the journals and even in the newspapers from the style that is current today. Thoughts were finely chiseled and elaborated; importance was attached to sequence in the thoughts, and to beauty as well. In comparison with the style current in the last third of the nineteenth century, our modern style is raw and crude. We need only pick up writings—no matter what they may be—of men in the sixties and seventies, not deeply learned or scholarly but possessing an average degree of culture, and we shall find this great difference. The forms of the thoughts have changed. But what is raw and crude today has proceeded from what, even in scholarly literature during the last third of the nineteenth century, was finely chiseled and full of spirituality. But those who lived through it, who, without necessarily growing old, have reached more advanced years in the present-day world of thought—we notice what has insinuated itself in a dreadful way into every domain of thought and spiritual life: symbolically, I will call it the “empty phrase,” the “cliché.”

With the vogue of the “cliché” there began to develop lack of thought, lack of sound sentiments, lack of will, which are now on the upgrade. These characteristics were the immediate outcome of the “empty phrase,” the “cliché.” The outstanding development of the “empty phrase” took place in the last third of the nineteenth century. You can follow this externally, my dear friends. Things that crop up in a certain epoch need not necessarily appeal to you. And although in one form or another they may definitely not appeal, you can still study them from the point of view of their significance for the whole of mankind.

Think of the rich tones of inner beauty which are to be found in the German romantic poets in the first third of the nineteenth century. Think of the words of a man like Jacob Grimm when he touches on things spiritual, how these words seem to be full of the fresh, health-giving air of the woods, and you will say: “In those days the ‘cliché’ did not yet dominate Middle Europe.” It did not make its way into Middle Europe until the last third of the nineteenth century. Those who are sensitive to such matters are aware of the gradual entrance of what inevitably accompanies the “empty phrase.” When the empty phrase begins to dominate, truth, as experienced inwardly by the soul, dies away. And something else goes hand in hand with the empty phrase: in social life man cannot really find his fellow-men any longer.

My dear friends, when words sound forth without soul from the mouth—as they do in the empty phrase, the cliché—then we pass by other human beings and cannot understand them. This too reached its culmination in the last third of the nineteenth century, not in the soul's depths but in the field of consciousness. Men became more and more alienated from one another. The louder the call for social reforms, the more is it a symptom of the fact that men have become unsocial. Because they no longer have any feeling for what is truly social, they cry out for social reform. A hungry animal does not howl for food because it has food in its stomach, but because it has none. Similarly, the soul that cries out for social life, cries, not because it is permeated with social feeling, but because this feeling is lacking. And so man was gradually turned into a being whose nature is not understood today, and yet it is clear enough that everywhere in the relations between man and man no need is felt to grow near, in soul, to other human beings. Everyone passes the other by. The individual's greatest interest is only in himself.

What then has come into the twentieth century from the last third of the nineteenth as the customary social feeling between man and man? Nowadays you continually hear: “That is my standpoint.” This is how people talk: “That is my standpoint.” Everyone has a standpoint.—as if the standpoint matters! The standpoint in spiritual life is just as fleeting as it is in the physical. Yesterday I stood in Dornach, today I am standing here. These are two different standpoints in physical life. What matters is that a man should have a sound will and a sound heart so that he can look at the world from every standpoint. But people today do not want what they can glean from different standpoints; the egoistic assertion of their own particular standpoint is more important to them. But thus a man shuts himself off in the most rigorous way from his fellow-men. If somebody says something, the other person does not really enter into it, for he has his own standpoint. But people do not get any nearer to each other by such means. We can only come nearer to each other when we know how to place our different standpoints in a world that is common to us all. But this world is simply not there today. Only in the spirit is there a world that is common to all—and the spirit is lacking. That is the second point.

And the third is this. In the course of the nineteenth century the humanity of Middle Europe has really become very weak-willed—weak-willed in the sense that thought no longer unfolds the power to steel the will in such a way as to make man, who is a thought-being, capable of shaping the world out of his thoughts.

And now, my dear friends, when it is said that thoughts have become “pale” this must not be twisted into the assertion that no thoughts are needed in order to live as men. Thoughts, however, must not be so feeble that they stick up there in the head. They must be so strong that they stream down through the heart and through the whole being of man, right down to the feet. For really it is better if, besides red and white blood corpuscles, thoughts, too, pulse through our blood. It is a good thing, certainly, when a man has a heart too, and not merely thoughts. Best of all is for thoughts to have a heart. And that has been lost altogether. We cannot cast off the thoughts that have followed in the wake of the last four or five centuries. But these thoughts must get a heart as well!

And now I will tell you, from an external point of view, what is living in your souls. You have grown up and have come to know the older generation. This older generation expressed itself in words; you could only hear clichés. An unsocial element presented itself to you in this older generation. Men passed each other by. And in this older generation there also presented itself the impotence of thought to pulse through the will and the heart.

You see, people could live with the “cliché,” with antisocial conventionality, with mere routine instead of warm community of life, so long as the heritage from earlier generations was still there. But this heritage was exhausted by the close of the nineteenth century. And so what presented itself could not speak to your own souls. And now, precisely in Middle Europe, you felt that in the depths below there is something that stands in the direst need of rediscovering what once lived beyond the empty phrase, beyond convention, beyond routine. You wanted again to have a living experience of truth, a living experience of human community, of stout-heartedness in cultural life. Where is it then?—so asks a voice within you.

And often, at the dawn of the twentieth century—even if not clearly expressed, it could be seen—on the one side there were the young, and on the other, the old. The old man said: “That is my standpoint.” Ah! as the nineteenth century drew to its close, everyone began to have his own particular standpoint. One was a materialist, the second an idealist, the third a realist, the fourth a sensualist, and so on. They all had their standpoints. But gradually under the domination of empty phrase, convention, and routine, the standpoint had become a crust of ice. The spiritual Ice-Age had dawned. The ice-crust was thin, but as men's “standpoints” had lost the sense of their own weight, they did not break through it. Besides, being cold in heart they did not thaw the ice. The younger people stood side by side with the old, the young with their warm hearts not articulate yet, but warm. This warmth broke through the ice-crust. The younger man did not feel: “That is my standpoint,” but he felt: “I am losing the ground from under my feet. The warmth of my heart is breaking this ice that has congealed out of empty phrase, convention, and routine.” Although not clearly expressed—for today nothing is clearly expressed—this state of thing[s] had existed for a long time and still exists at the present day.

It is hardest of all for those who with a scholarly education try to fit in with the times. They are confronted by thoughts that are void of heart-quality and are quite consciously striven for just because of this. Now in speaking out of the spirit it is often necessary to shape words differently from what is customary when telling people something highly logical, philosophical or scientific. This approach is quite out of place in face of the spiritual, and altogether out of place in face of the spiritual is the following, which we will take as an example.

People say today: He is not a true scientist who does not interpret observation and experiment quite logically; who does not pass from thought to thought in strict conformity with the correct methods that have been evolved. If he does not do this he is no genuine thinker. But, my dear friends, what if reality happens to be an artist and scorns our elaborate dialectical and experimental methods? What if Nature herself works according to artistic impulses? If it were so, human science, according to Nature, would have to become an artist, for otherwise there would be no possibility of understanding Nature. That, however, is certainly not the standpoint of the modern scientist. His standpoint is: Nature may be an artist or a dreamer; it makes no difference to us, for we decree how we propose to cultivate science. What does it matter to us if Nature is an artist? It matters not at all, for that is not our standpoint

At the outset I can only describe a few impressions to illustrate what was working together in chaotic interplay with the approach of the twentieth century—the century that has placed you before such hard trials of the soul. We have had to face outer events, including the grim and terrible world-war; these are only the outward expression of what is reigning in the innermost soul of the modern civilized world. It is simply so, and we must be conscious of it. Primarily we have to seek for something which the deepest soul of Germany is yearning for—as your speaker truly said—but which precisely within Germany was denied by men's consciousness the nearer the modern age approached. We lost not only Goethe but also a great deal of what was there in the Middle Ages and out of which Goethe grew, and we must find it again. And if it is asked today quite from the external aspect: Why have you come here today?—I shall answer: In order to find this. For you are really seeking for something that is there. Goethe answered the question: Which secret is of the highest value?—The revealed secret. (From the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.) But it has to be revealed through eyes being opened to perceive it. What concerns you are mainly longings of the inner life—if you understand yourselves aright. Whether one has to become a teacher or adopt some other profession—that is not the point. Everything which those who want again to become whole men are seeking today shall be found out of the common center of true manhood. That is why we find ourselves together here.

After all, it is quite a different matter if in earlier centuries—to take a radical example—people burnt a Giordano Bruno. In those times this was the customary way of refuting truths. But now—to compare this with the following symptom drawn from the realm of science—when the Swabian doctor Julius Robert Maier was making a voyage round the world, the peculiar constitution of the blood in Southern Asia brought him to the conception of what is known as the heat equivalent, the conservation of energy. In 1844 he wrote a treatise on this subject which was rejected as amateurish and unsuitable by the most famous scientific periodical of the time, the Poggendorf Annals. Julius Robert Maier was so enthusiastic about his discovery that whenever anyone met him in the street he began at once to talk about it, until finally contemporary experts decided that as he was always talking about the same thing, he was suffering from fixed ideas. As you know, he was declared insane and put into an asylum. Today you can go to Heilbronn and see the Robert Maier Memorial. It is said that the law of the conservation of energy is the most important law of physics that has been discovered in the modern age. Well, of course, such things happen! Mankind may, naturally, lapse into error, but the point I want to make is that this can be judged out of mere phrases, mere convention, mere routine.

Think of the way such a terrible tragedy, such a terrible mockery, was described in the nineteenth century, and compare it with the account given today of the same case. What has actually happened cannot be undone by abstract writings. Anyone who has a heart within him and reads the descriptions that are given of such a case, feels as if robbed of all inner support and a terrible turmoil is set going in his soul. Human beings must again be capable of feeling, not weakly, but strongly: beautiful—ugly, good—evil, true—false. They must be capable of feeling things not weakly but strongly, so that they live in them with their whole being, that their very heart's blood flows into their words. Then the empty phrase will dissipate and they will feel not only themselves but other men within their own being; convention will dissipate, and the heart's blood will pulse through what they have in their heads; then sheer routine will dissipate and life will become human once again.

Young people in the twentieth century feel these things; they have been seeking but found only chaos. These things cannot be portrayed by writing up external history. At the end of the nineteenth century there was a crucial point in the inner development of mankind. Souls who were born shortly before or shortly after the turn of the century are of quite a different inner make-up from those who were born even during the last third of the nineteenth century. One can speak about this if, in spite of the years piling up, one has not allowed oneself to get old.

So we shall see tomorrow, my dear friends, how the new generation has not linked up with the old but is divided from it by an abyss. It is not a question of finding fault but only of trying to understand. I am not finding fault when I speak of the tragedy which befell Julius Robert Maier. The same kind of thing happened to many people. It is not a matter of finding fault, but of the need for understanding. For the most important thing is to understand what is experienced deeply and inwardly; an unclear seeking cannot be allowed to continue. A light must come that will flood this unclear seeking without making it dry or cold. We must find this light, while preserving the heart's blood.

I do not wish to impose upon you anything that savors of the mystical, but to point to the truth, the truth in the spirit. You know that among the many clichés which became current in the nineteenth century, it was said that the great pioneer of the nineteenth century closed his life by calling out to posterity: “More light!” As a matter of fact Goethe did not say “More light!” He lay on his couch breathing with difficulty and said: “Open the shutters!” That is the truth. The other is the cliché that has connected itself with it. The words Goethe really spoke are perhaps far more apt than the mere phrase “More light”. The state of things at the end of the nineteenth century does indeed arouse the feeling that our predecessors have closed the shutters. Then came the younger generation; they felt cramped; they felt that the shutters which the older generation had closed so tightly must be opened. Yes, my dear friends, I assure you that although I am old, I shall tell you more of how we can now attempt to open the shutters again.