The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The great transformation that I have characterized here from a variety of angles and that has taken place in the spiritual development of humanity over the course of the last centuries, not only has the intellectual, the theoretical character of knowledge changed, but what has changed also has an influence on the whole human soul life, and thus on the whole human life in general. In order to understand this, one can imagine the following. Of course, what is shown in individual symptoms, which emerge more or less clearly when one wants to understand the actual foundations of life, must be shown in characteristic forms of expression of life.

We have often referred to what were places of knowledge in ancient times of human development. They were the mystery centres. These mystery sites were, to a large extent, shrouded in human veneration. When speaking of mysteries and mystery beings, it was said that through what was practiced in the mysteries, something most important for humanity on earth was present. Everything meaningful in human life was thought to radiate from the mysteries. It was said, in a sense, that If there were no mysteries among people, people on earth would not be able to be what the gods wanted them to be!

So people looked at the mysteries with a feeling of the highest reverence and the most intimate respect, and at the same time they looked at them with a feeling of gratitude, knowing that they gave them what makes it possible to be on earth what the gods want to make of people. One need only compare this with the way in which people look at educational institutions today, and one will find nowhere that tremendous warm devotion. In many cases, one even finds a feeling that, once one has necessarily settled for what comes from the educational institutions, one is glad to be free of them. But in any case, even if one does not look at this extreme, one still knows that one does not actually get from the educational institutions what seems necessary to one inwardly as a human being for one's actual humanity, what makes one a human being. No matter how much theoretical reverence one may have for what is gained in chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical schools, one will not have the feeling: You are aware of your humanity because there are chemical laboratories, biological institutes, legal educational institutions, and even philosophical seminars.

You cannot say that – even if these educational institutions are perhaps shrouded in a certain theoretical atmosphere – all the warm feelings of reverence of people in the widest sense gravitate towards these educational institutions.

In any case, it will not be all that often that a student, for example, who is preparing a paper for a university seminar and who then, in this way, gives of himself intellectually, feels that he is doing so imbued with his whole elementary humanity as a mystery schoolboy once felt when he had passed one of the stages of practice.

But on the other hand, man needs something that brings him into contact with something worthy of worship here on earth, from which he feels the divine emanating. But if we compare this nuance, which I would call more cultural-historical, with what actually underlies it, let us go back, say, to the times when, in the Near East, two or three millennia before the Mystery of Golgotha, mystery-like educational institutions existed: In these mystery-like educational institutions, the natural science of the time was studied, if one can call it that. They studied the starry sky, the nature of the stars, the movements of the stars, the appearance of the stars at certain times, and so on. Today one imagines that this study of the starry sky in those days may have been somewhat fantastic. It was not. It was done with at least the same, if not much greater, methodical care as mineralogy, geology or biology are done today.

But what did they say to each other when they studied the nature of the starry sky? They said to each other: If you know the nature of the starry sky, then you know something about the nature and destiny of man on earth. The study of the starry sky culminated in the fact that knowledge about the fate of man and entire peoples on earth could be gained from the constellations of the stars.

One did not look up at the starry sky with a merely theoretical intention, but rather one said to oneself: If you know the relationship of Saturn to the sun or the relationship of Saturn to a sign of the zodiac at the moment when a man is bidden or where he accomplishes an important deed in life, then you know how the heavens have placed man on earth, you know to what extent man is a creature, a son of the heavens. You study what you study about heaven in order to understand what guides you in your life on earth. Everything that was acquired as knowledge about the nature of heaven was aimed at man. All knowledge was actually permeated by something thoroughly human. And whatever man did on earth, he felt it in connection with what he could study in the heavens. We can take an example from, say, a human artistic activity. When people in ancient times took up poetry or music, they drew on the inspiration that came to them from the heavens.

I have mentioned it often: Homer does not say, to use a poetic phrase “Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of the Peleid Achilles,” but because he was aware that he was not speaking something that came to him from human arbitrariness, but he speaks something that the heavens whisper to him. And anyone who was in any way musically active on earth reproduced through the sound of earthly instruments what he believed he had heard in the spaces of heaven in the music of the spheres. Man felt quite distinctly in the way he was active on earth, in the way he cooperated with other people on earth, in the way he founded communities on earth, that he experienced the impulses of will that radiated from the vastness of the universe down to earth and which he explored according to his knowledge of the starry sky, that he acted as a human being here on earth according to these intentions of heaven.

One would like to say: everything that was science, art and religion in those ancient times flowed into human weaving and working. For religion, science and art were indeed a unity, a unity that ultimately radiated into man, so that man might feel himself on earth as the being the gods wanted him to be.

This mood lasted as long as man had a spiritual insight into the heavens, as long as he allowed a spiritual to be conveyed to him in the being, in the course of the stars and in the appearance of the stars, which, so to speak, flowed through the knowledge of the stars to him on earth so that he could realize it on earth.

Today, astrology is a word that does not have a good ring to it. However, if we imagine it in the old sense, it takes on a better sound. Man looked up at the stars, and from the stars the Logos revealed itself to him, which in turn worked through his thoughts, through his imagination, through his language here on earth. Man himself, when he set his speech organs in motion, practiced that which, in the formation of sounds, made the secrets of the heavens resound here on earth again. The Logos, which is the reason that prevails in the human race, appeared as the efflux of the starry world. Astrology: what happened here on earth appeared as an image of the archetype, which one experienced through astrology.

If we look at our insights today, we see how these insights are gained through sensory observation of the earthly. Even when studying astronomy today – I have already discussed this yesterday – it is only the reflection of earthly knowledge up into the heavens. Today's human being acquires sensory knowledge. He does indeed stand in the world differently than he used to. I have characterized this different standing in these lectures here recently. I said: Today's intellectual man, with his abstract concepts, but also with what his freedom is, which is only possible with the development of abstract-intellectual concepts that do not force man, that also give him moral imperatives that arise from his individuality, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, as I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom, only comes into the evolution of mankind at the time when that consciousness, which originated in astrology and presented man as a being executing the intentions of the gods on earth, had ceased to exist. This human being, with his intellect and his sense of freedom, is a creature cut off from the heavens. He has truly become the earth's hermit and acquires his knowledge here on earth. And the way in which he acquires his knowledge also explains the interest with which he clings to these insights.

In ancient times, it would have been inconceivable to see a duality between religion and scientific knowledge. When scientific knowledge was acquired, it was such that it gave one an immediate religious feeling, that it showed one the way to the gods, that one could not help but be a religious person in the right sense if one had acquired knowledge.

Today one can acquire the whole wide range of popular knowledge: one does not become a religious person from it. I would like to know who becomes a religious person today by becoming a botanist, a zoologist, a chemist! If he wants to become a religious person, he seeks the religious in addition to knowledge. Therefore, we seek places of worship in addition to knowledge, and are often even convinced that knowledge leads us away from religious paths, that we must seek other paths that in turn lead us to the religious. And yet, here too, we have repeatedly had to emphasize the importance of newer insights. We had to point out that these newer insights are absolutely necessary for modern man and for the further development of humanity. But when man today places himself in the world with his intellectualism, with his sense of freedom, he is already developing here on earth that which the older man, who, if I may express it in this way, had a sense of heaven , only developed after death.

When we describe the moments after death for today's man, we describe how the person in the picture looks back at first on his life by separating his etheric body from himself. We then describe how he reviews his life in a subsequent period. For older times, life after death had to be described in such a way that people were told: That which you can only attain here through a higher revelation, an intellectualistic view of the world, will appear to you after death. That which you are to achieve here on earth can only exist as an ideal; you will be a free human being after death. — That is what they told older people. The true human being comes when one has passed from this physical world into the spiritual world. That is what they said in ancient times. But what people experienced only after death in ancient times, looking back on earthly life, intellectualism and a sense of freedom, for which all earthly life was preparation, has already been introduced into the life between birth and death by the modern human being. Here on earth, he becomes an intellectual being, here on earth he becomes a being with a sense of freedom.

But for this, he must acquire something on earth in sensory knowledge and in the combination of his sensory knowledge that is initially far removed from his interests. No matter how long we explore through the telescope that which we today explore of the starry worlds: humanly we do not feel inwardly warmed and inwardly enlightened by it. Expeditions are being organized by astronomers and naturalists to prove Einstein's ideas. But no one expects the observations that are being made to be as close to directly elementary human nature as one would have expected from the astronomers of the ancient Babylonian or Assyrian cultures. The modern insights give us a tremendous difference: the lack of interest in values. It may be extremely interesting when this or that biological discovery is made today, but one does not say: By making this or that biological discovery, man comes closer to the divine-spiritual being that he carries in his soul. It is to this divine spiritual being, which he bears within his soul, that man wants to come closer through a separate religious interest.

Nevertheless, today we do not have the right concept of the way in which an older humanity has come to knowledge, even in later times. One need only think of the momentous experience of fate when a man like Archimedes, while bathing, discovered the Archimedean principle and exclaimed, “I have found it!” Just such a single insight was something that one felt as if one had looked through a window into the secrets of the universe.

This warm-heartedness towards knowledge was certainly not present when the X-rays were discovered, for example. One could say that today's relationship to what knowledge provides is more that of gaping open one's mouth than of inward soul rejoicing. That makes a human difference! And this human difference must be borne in mind for the development of humanity.

Something very remarkable emerges from all this. For centuries now, modern people have been experiencing in their lives what they used to have only after death: intellectual comprehension of the world and the consciousness of freedom. But they have not even really noticed it. That is the remarkable thing, that modern humanity has not even really noticed something that it has received from heaven into earthly life. The emotional world has not grasped it at all, the elemental in the human world. One would almost say that it has a bitter aftertaste for humanity. Humanity does not look at the pure thought the way I have tried to look at it in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, where one would rather sing hymns to it than dissect it. And the consciousness of freedom has led people to all sorts of tumultuous things, but not to the realization that something has descended from heaven to earth. Not even the fundamental power of modern human development has been felt purely humanly. Where does that come from?

If you answer this question, then you also answer one of the most important questions of human existence in general. In ancient times, man acquired his knowledge by looking up at the sky, seeking the Logos there, that which the gods spoke to man through the starry sky and the nature of the stars. All that man did here on earth was illuminated by the content of the Logos, and this content was in turn fetched from the stars. Human life would have been meaningless if it could not be given a purpose through knowledge of the stars.

Now, in a very similar sense, everything we acquire internally as knowledge is actually nothing. We acquire it by allowing ourselves to be constrained to botany, zoology, biology, physiology, etc., and at most we allow ourselves to be moved by ambition, by an insight into the necessity of being able to eke out our lives on earth, to all of this. Again, this is a radical statement, but in a sense it borders on reality. For those who attach great ideals to things today, there is still a certain illusionary element through which they reinterpret the matter into an ideal. At least, people who could associate a meaning with the word: I pray a chemical formula. Yes, one must indeed express an important cultural-historical fact, even if it is negative, in such a form!

It takes a Novalis, with his deep and at the same time youthfully enthusiastic knowledge, to feel something like: I pray in the dissolution of a differential equation. Our ordinary mathematicians do not feel very prayerful when they reveal the secret of a differential equation. That which is self-evident, that with knowledge the whole person is engaged at the same time, the whole person feels their indebtedness to the divine, this self-evident fact is not at all self-evident to today's humanity. It is much more natural for those who are rising to the highest achievements of knowledge to be glad when they have the exams behind them so that they do not have to go through these things again. The joy of going through the stages of the mysteries: you don't notice much of that in modern people who go through the exams. At least it is extremely rare for someone today to speak with the full ancient mystery seriousness of that intimate divine deed that this or that professor has done by giving him a dissertation topic and putting him in the position to now pass through the waters of holiness while working on this dissertation topic! But this would be the normal, the obvious!

If you just think about it, you have to say: Yes, down there is the earth with its many things (see drawing page 70, white and green). These many things have been seen by the old cognizers. But they only believed they had grasped them in the right sense by looking up at the stars and bringing down the rays from the stars, which illuminated everything for them in the right way (red).

These ancient cognizers sought the reflection of the starry world in earthly life (lower red), otherwise all that I have indicated below would have seemed worthless to them. Today we pay no attention to what is above, but study what is below. We study it in countless details. When we have surrendered to some kind of knowledge oriented here or there, we have many details in our heads. But the evaluation of these details becomes somewhat indifferent to life, and with it also a certain lack of interest in the high, elementary human. Especially in the actual spiritual realm, this becomes conspicuously apparent.

Vöscher, the Swabian, has already ridiculed how indifferent to a universal human consciousness that becomes, which is to be overcome today, if one wants to struggle up to knowledge, by saying that one of the most “significant” treatises on the subject of modern literary history would be one on the connection between the chilblains of Frau Christiane von Goethe and the symbolic-allegorical figures in the second part of Faust! Why could a dissertation not be written about this connection, as is done about many other things? The methodology that is applied, the human interest that is involved, is, after all, no different in quality from when someone writes a treatise – and this does happen – about the thought lines in Homer's poetry! Yes, we really do acquire knowledge about what people only considered worthy of knowledge after they were able to illuminate it from the knowledge of heaven.

We do not have the knowledge of heaven. We do not look at the copper by looking up at Venus, we do not look at the lead by looking up at Saturn, we do not look at the primeval man by looking up at the constellation of Aquarius, and we do not look at that which passes over into certain inner impulses of human nature in the animal nature of the lion by looking up at the constellation of Leo, and the like. We bring down from the heavens nothing that can explain the earthly to us, but we turn our gaze to the wide-ranging, scattered details of the earth alone.

We need something that brings us valences into the individual, that leads us to see again what someone saw when he saw some earthly object illuminated from the heavens. We have knowledge of many things, but we need a unified knowledge that can radiate into all the individual fields of knowledge and give the individual fields of knowledge value. That is what anthroposophy wants to be.

Just as people once looked to the heavens in astrology to explain the earth, anthroposophy wants to see in people what they have to say about themselves, so that from there everything we about minerals, animals, plants, about man, about everything that can be known in addition to what is scattered, will be illuminated by anthroposophy.

And just as man once looked up at the heavens to understand his life on earth , so the intellectually liberated human being must learn to know himself, so that he can look beyond the moment of death, when he steps out into a spiritual world, and where the gods will look down on what he brings them, what radiates from him. For he should already have become human on earth, whereas before he only became human after death.

How he has become human will be shown through the power he has gained from pure human consciousness. And this pure human consciousness is to be given to him through that which radiates from anthroposophy to everything else, which man on earth can know, but also what man on earth can accomplish.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” thus in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. Man has brought down the Logos from the revelation of the gods in the heavens.

But the Word was made flesh, and not only dwelt among us, but continues to dwell among us. The Logos has become flesh. What was once sought in the heavens must now be sought in man. For the Logos was once rightly sought in the Father-God; in our time the Logos must be sought in the Son-God.

But man finds this Son-God in his elementary meaning when he makes Paul's word true: “Not I, but Christ in me,” when he comes to know himself. All anthroposophy aims to delve deep into the human being. When ancient times delved deep into the human being, what did they find? At the bottom of human nature, the luciferic powers. If modern man delves deep enough into himself, he will find the Christ. This is the other side of the turnaround from older to newer times. With intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom having descended from heaven to earth, and with the Christ having united with humanity on earth, man finds the Christ in the depths of his own being, if he descends deep enough; while older people have found the Luciferian spirituality precisely by going deep enough.

This was also the message that an older student body in the mysteries was to understand particularly clearly: delve down into the human being as it is on earth, and at the bottom of your own soul you will ultimately find that which you must recoil from in terror: the powers of Lucifer. Therefore, look up at the moment of death; only when you have passed through the gate of death do you become a true human being. There you will be saved from what you find at the bottom of your soul here on earth: the luciferic powers.

That was the experience of death in the ancient mysteries. That was why they had to look to the realization, to the depiction of the moment of death in the mysteries, these ancient mystery students.

The modern human being should take on that which has become his: intellectualism and the consciousness of freedom. If he accepts them worthily, so that he permeates all other earthly knowledge and all other deeds with what wells up out of pure human consciousness, as anthroposophy wills, then he finds the Christ-powers at the bottom of his soul. Then he says to himself: Once I looked up at the constellation of the stars to fathom human destiny on earth; now I look at the human being and thereby learn to recognize how this human being, having already on earth become imbued with the humanity of the Christ-substance , shines out to the universe, and how it shines up to the heavens as the star of humanity after passing through the portal of death.

This is spiritual humanistics, which can take the place of the old astrology. This is what instructs people to look in the same way at what the human being can also reveal in himself as Sophia - Anthroposophia - as the stars once revealed themselves as Logia. But this is also the consciousness with which one must imbue oneself. And there one then learns the world significance of the human being. From there one learns to recognize that world significance of the human being that first allows us to study the physical body, which then allows us to study the formative forces or etheric body. But I will mention just one example: If you study the human physical body in the right way, by looking at it from the point of view of anthroposophy, you learn how the human physical body can follow its own forces. When it follows its own forces, it is constantly striving to become ill. Yes, what exists down there in the human being as the physical body is actually in a constant effort to become ill. And if we look up from the physical body to the etheric body, we have in the etheric body the totality of those forces of the human being that are constantly in the effort to restore the sick person to health. The pendulum swing between the physical body and the etheric body is aimed at constantly maintaining the center between the pathological and the therapeutic. The etheric body is the cosmic therapist, and the physical body is the cosmic pathogen.

And we could speak just as well for other areas of human knowledge. And in speaking thus, we say to ourselves: When we are confronted with an illness, what must we do? We must somehow, through certain healing constellations, call upon the etheric body to heal. Ultimately, all medicine does this: somehow call upon the etheric body of the person to heal, because it is the healer. If we approach the ether body in the right way in a person who can be made healthy, if we seek what can come to him from the ether body in terms of healing powers according to his general human destiny, then we are on the way to healing him.

But I will talk about that tomorrow. I will speak about this latter chapter, which has been discussed in connection with today's discussion, tomorrow.

At the times when the great festivals of the year approach our souls, it is good ever and again to bring before our inner eye, out of spiritual cosmic connections, the meaning of the festival year. And I should like to do this by setting before you how, under the influence of spiritual insights and over long ages, the festival year has gradually evolved out of the whole constitution of the Earth. If we look at the Earth and its events from such an aspect, we must only make clear that we cannot conceive the Earth as a mere conglomeration of minerals and rocks, as is done by modern mineralogy and geology, but we must rather regard it as a living, ensouled organism, which brings forth the plants, the animals and the physical being of man out of its own inner forces. Then what I shall now set forth will be in agreement.

You know that the Earth, with all the beings belonging to it—consider only the plant covering of the Earth—completely changes its aspect in the course of the year, changes everything with which it looks out into cosmic space as with its physiognomy, so to speak. After a year the Earth has always arrived again at about the same point, as to its appearance, at which it stood a year before. You need only to think how almost everything related to weather conditions, to the budding of plants, to the appearance of animal creatures—how with regard to all this the Earth has arrived again in this March, 1923, at about the same point of development at which it stood in March of the year 1922.

Today we intend to consider this cycle of the Earth as a kind of mighty breathing which the Earth carries out in relation to the surrounding cosmos. We can consider still other processes which take place on the Earth and around it as breathing processes of a sort. We can even speak of a daily breathing of the Earth. But today we want to place before our inner eye the yearly cycle, in the large, as a mighty breathing process of the Earth, in which of course it is not air that is breathed in and out, but rather those forces which are at work for example in vegetation, those forces which push the plants out of the Earth in spring, and which withdraw again into the Earth in fall, letting the green plants fade and finally paralyzing plant growth.

To repeat, it is not a breathing of air of which we speak, but the in-and-out-breathing of forces, of which we can get a partial idea if we notice the plant-growth during the course of the year. We intend today to bring this annual breathing process of the Earth before our souls.

Let us first look at the Earth at the time of the winter solstice, in the last third of December, according to our present reckoning. At this time we may compare the Earth's breathing with the lung-breathing of a man when he has inhaled a breath of air and is working on it in himself, that is, when he is holding his breath within him. In the same way, the Earth has within it those forces which I spoke of as being inhaled and exhaled. At the end of December it is holding these forces. And what is happening then with the Earth I can sketch for you schematically in the following way:

Let us think of this (red) as representing the Earth. We can of course only consider one part of the Earth in connection with this breathing. We shall consider that part in which we ourselves dwell; the conditions are of course reversed on the opposite side of the Earth. We must picture (vorstellen) the breathing of the Earth in such a way that in one region there is out-breathing, and in the opposite region in-breathing; but this we need not consider today.

Let us picture in our minds the season of December. Let us imagine what I am drawing here in yellow to be the held breath in our region. At the end of December the Earth has fully in-breathed and is holding in herself the forces of which I just spoke. She has entirely sucked in her soul element, for the forces of which I have spoken are the soul element of the Earth. She has drawn it completely in, just as a man who has inhaled holds the air entirely in himself.

This is the time at which with good reason the birth of Jesus has been set, because Jesus is thus born out of an Earth force which contains the entire soul element of the Earth within it. At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the initiates who were still worthy of the ancient initiation connected a deep meaning with the view which placed the birth of Jesus just at this point of the earthly in-breathing and holding of the breath.

These initiates said something like the following: “In the ancient days, when our places of initiation stood within the Chaldean and Egyptian cultures, when a wish arose to know what that Being who represents the lofty Sun-Being had to say to earthly humanity, an idea of his message was formed, not by looking at the sunlight directly in all its spirituality, but rather by observing the way in which the sunlight was rayed back from the Moon.” And when the gaze was turned toward the Moon, they saw—with the help of clairvoyant vision—along with the flooding moonlight the manifestation of the Spirit of the Universe. And the meaning of this manifestation was realized in a more external way when they regarded the constellation of the Moon in relation to the planets and fixed stars.

In this way the position of the stars, especially in relation to the down-streaming moonlight, was observed during the night hours in the Chaldean, and still more in the Egyptian mysteries. Just as a man now reads the meaning of letters on a sheet of paper, in those times meaning was read in the relation of Aries, or of Taurus, of Venus, or of the Sun itself, to the streaming moonlight. From the way in which the constellations and the stars stood in relation to one another, especially from the way they were oriented with the moonlight, there was read what the heavens had to say to the Earth. All this was put into words. And according to the meaning of what was thus put into words, the ancient initiates sought what that Being Who was later called the Christ had to say to earthly man. They sought to interpret what was conveyed by the stars in their relation to the Moon and apply it to the earthly life.

But now as the Mystery of Golgotha drew near, the whole nature of the Mysteries passed through what I might call a great soul-spiritual metamorphosis. Then the oldest of the initiates said to their pupils: “A time is at hand when the stellar constellations must no longer be related to the flooding moonlight. The universe will speak differently to earthly man in the future. The light of the Sun must be observed directly. The spiritual gaze of the knower must be turned away from the revelations of the Moon and toward the revelations of the Sun.”

The teachings given in the Mysteries made a profound impression upon those men who at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha still ranked as initiates of the old order. And it was from this point of view that these initiates formed their judgment of the Mystery of Golgotha. But at the same time they said, “Some Earth event must enter in, which can bring about this transition from a lunar to a solar orientation.”—It was in this way that the cosmic significance of the birth of Jesus dawned on them.

They saw the birth of Jesus as something which gave the impulse out of the very Earth itself, no longer to regard the Moon as the regent, so to speak, of celestial phenomena, but rather the Sun itself.—“The event that brings this about,” so they said to themselves, “must be of an extraordinary kind.” And the nature of this extraordinary event yielded its secret to them through the following: They began to understand the inner meaning of the Earth occurrence that took place in the last third of December, the occurrence which we now call Christmas. They said to themselves: “Everything must now be related to the Sun.”—But the Sun can exert its power on the Earth only when the Earth has exhaled its forces. At Christmas time it has breathed them in; its breath is being held. If Jesus is born at this time, He is born at a time when the Earth is in a certain way not speaking with the heavens, a time when the Earth with its being has entirely withdrawn into itself. Jesus is born, then, at a time when the Earth is rolling along through cosmic space quite alone, when it is not sending out its breath to be welled and woven through by the force of the Sun, by the light of the Sun. At this time the Earth has not offered its soul-being to the cosmos; it has withdrawn its soul being into itself, has sucked it in. Jesus is born on the Earth at a time when the Earth is alone with itself, is isolated as it were from the cosmos.

Try to feel for yourselves the cosmic perceiving-feeling (Empfinden) which lies at the basis of such a way of calculating!

Now let us follow the Earth further in its yearly course. Let us follow it up to the time in which we are just now, about the time of the spring equinox, the end of March. Then we shall have to picture the situation in this way:

The Earth (red) has just breathed out; the soul is still half within the Earth, but the Earth has breathed it out; the streaming soul-forces are pouring out into the cosmos. Whereas since December, the force of the Christ Impulse has been intimately bound up with the Earth, with the soul-element of the Earth, we find that now this Christ Impulse, together with the outward-streaming soul element, is beginning to radiate around the Earth (arrows). This which here as Christ-permeated Earth-soul is flowing out into spiritual cosmic space, must be met now by the force of the sunlight itself. And the mental picture arises: While in December the Christ withdrew the Earth-soul element into the interior of the Earth, in order to be insulated from cosmic influences, now with the out-breathing of the Earth, He begins to let His forces breathe out, to extend them to receive the forces of the Sun (das Sonnenhafte) which radiate toward Him. And our schematic drawing will be correct if we represent the Sun force (yellow) as uniting with the Christ force radiating from the Earth. The Christ begins to work together with the Sun forces at Easter time; hence Easter falls at the time of the out-breathing of the Earth. But what happens then must not be related to the light flowing back from the Moon; it must be related to the Sun.

This is the origin of fixing the time of Easter as the first Sunday after the full moon following the spring equinox. And anyone who is sensitive to such things would have to say to himself with regard to the Easter time: “If I have united myself with the Christ force, my soul also streams out into cosmic spaces along with the out-breathing force of the Earth-soul, and receives the Sun force, which the Christ now brings to human souls from the Earth, whereas before the Mystery of Golgotha He brought it to them from the cosmos.”

But here something else enters in. When festivals were established in those times in which whatever was important on Earth was referred to the flooding moonlight, it was done purely in accordance with what could be observed in space: how the Moon stood in relation to the stars. The intent of the Logos, which had been written into space by Him, was thus deciphered in order to determine the festivals. But if you consider the fixing of the Easter festival as we have it now, you will see that it has been established according to space only up to a certain point, that point at which we speak of the full moon after the beginning of spring. Thus far everything is spatial, but we depart from space when we refer to the Sunday after the spring full moon. This Sunday is determined, not spatially, but according to how it stands in the cycle of the year, how it stands in the cycle of the weekdays, where following Saturday come Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and again Saturday, always in periodical succession. We step out of space here, when we cross over from the spatial setting of the Moon constellation to the purely temporal course in the yearly cycle of Sundays.

Thus it was possible still in the old mysteries to perceive in feeling that the fixing of the festivals had formerly been related to cosmic space but that with the Mystery of Golgotha there was a progression out of cosmic space into time, which itself was no longer related to cosmic space. What related to the spirit was as it were torn away from the purely spatial. This was a powerful “jolt” of mankind toward the spirit.

If we carry further our view of the Earth's breathing process during the course of the year, we find the Earth in yet a third condition in June. At this place which we are observing, the Earth has completely exhaled. The entire soul-element of the Earth has been poured forth into cosmic space; it is yielded up to cosmic space and is saturating itself with the forces of the Sun and the stars. The Christ, Who is joined with this soul-element of the Earth, now unites His force also with the forces of the stars and the Sun, surging there in the Earth-soul that is given over to the cosmic All. It is St. John's Day—Mid-summer. The Earth has fully out-breathed. In her outer physiognomy, with which she looks out into the universe, she reveals not her own inherent force, as she did at the time of the winter solstice; instead, the Earth reveals on her surface the reflected forces of the stars, of the Sun, of all that is in the cosmos outside her.

The old initiates, particularly those in the northern regions of Europe, felt most livingly the inner meaning and spirit of this time that is our June. At this time they felt their own souls, along with the Earth soul, given over to the cosmic expanses. They felt themselves to be living, not within the earthly realm, but rather in the cosmic distances. Indeed they said the following to themselves: “We live with our soul in the cosmic expanses. We live with the Sun, we live with the stars. And when we direct our gaze back upon the Earth, which has filled herself with springing and sprouting plants, which has brought forth animals of all kinds, then we see in the springing and sprouting plants, in the gleaming, unfolding colors of the flowers; we see in the insects flitting and creeping hither and yon, in the birds with their multicolored feathers traversing the air; we see gleam back from the Earth as though mirrored, what we take up into our souls just when we abandon the Earth and unite ourselves with the out-flowing breath of the Earth in order to live with the cosmos rather than with the Earth. What appears in world space springing and sprouting from the Earth in thousandfold colors—this is of the same nature. Only it is a reflection, a raying-back force, whereas we bear in our human souls the original force itself.”

This was the feeling of those men who were inspired out of the Mystery places, those men who especially understood the festival of the summer solstice; and so we see the St. John's festival placed at the time of the Earth's great out-breathing into the cosmos.

If we follow this breathing-process still further we come finally to the stage that makes its entry at the end of September. The out-breathed forces begin their return movement; the Earth begins once more to inhale. The soul of the Earth which was poured out into the cosmos now draws back into the interior of the Earth again. Human souls perceive this in-breathing of the Earth-soul element, either in their subconscious or in their clairvoyant impressions, as processes of their own souls. Those men who were inspired by initiation knowledge of these things could say to themselves at the end of September: “What the cosmos has given us and what has united itself with our soul force through the Christ Impulse—this we now allow to flow back into the earthly realm, into that earthly sphere which throughout the summer has served only as a reflection, as a kind of mirror in relation to the extraterrestrial cosmos.”

But a mirror has the property of not permitting anything that is in front of it to pass through it. Because the Earth is a mirror of the cosmos in the summer, it is also opaque in its inner nature, impermeable by cosmic influences and therefore, during the summer time, impermeable by the Christ Impulse. (See drawing). At this time the Christ Impulse has to live in the exhaled breath. The Ahrimanic forces, however, establish themselves firmly in this Earth which has become impervious to the Christ Impulse. And when the human being returns once more with the forces which he has taken up into his own soul through the Earth's out-breathing—including the forces of the Christ—he plunges into an Earth which has been ahrimanized.

However, it is so, that in the present cycle of Earth evolution—since the last third of the nineteenth century—from spiritual heights there comes to the aid of the descending human soul the force of Michael, who, while the Earth's breath is flowing back into the Earth itself, contends with the Dragon, Ahriman.

This was already foreseen prophetically by those in the ancient Mysteries who understood the course of the year spiritually. They knew that for their time the Mystery had not yet approached which would reveal Michael coming to the help of descending human souls. But they knew that when the souls should have been reborn again and again, this Michael force would enter, would come to the aid of earthly human souls. This was the meaning they saw in the cycle of the year.

Hence it is out of ancient wisdom that you will find written in the calendar on September 29, a few days after the fall equinox—Michael's Day, Michaelmas. And Michaelmas is for simple country people an exceedingly important time. But because of its position in the cycle of the year, Michaelmas is an important time also for those who want to grasp the whole significance of our present earth epoch. If we want to take our place in the present time with the right consciousness, we need to understand that in the last third of the nineteenth century the Michael force took up the struggle with the Dragon, with the Ahrimanic powers, in just the way necessitated by our time. And we must insert ourselves into this intention of earthly and human evolution by taking part in the right way with our own consciousness in this cosmic-spiritual battle.¹

We may say that up until now Michaelmas has been a festival for peasants—you know the sense in which I use the word—a festival for simple folk. But once the significance of the yearly breathing process that takes place between the Earth and the cosmos is recognized, Michaelmas will be more and more called upon to form a very real supplement to Easter. For mankind, who will understand earthly life again also in a spiritual sense, will eventually have to think in this way.

While the summer out-breathing occurred, the Earth was ahrimanized. Woe if Jesus had been born into this ahrimanized Earth! Before the cycle is completed again and December approaches, which brings about the birth of the Christ Impulse in the ensouled Earth, the Earth must be purified by spiritual forces, from the Dragon, from the Ahrimanic forces. And the purifying force of Michael, which subdues the evil Ahrimanic forces, must unite itself, from September into December, with the in-flowing earth breath, so that the Christmas festival may approach in the right way, and the birth of the Christ Impulse take place in the right way, so that it will then mature up until the beginning of the out-breathing at Easter time.

We can therefore say: “At Christmas time the Earth has drawn its soul-element into itself, the Earth has taken its soul-being into itself in the great yearly respiration. In this Earth-soul element which has been drawn into the Earth, the Christ Impulse is born in the inwardness of the Earth. Toward spring it flows out into the cosmos with the out-breathing of the Earth. It views the star world and enters into reciprocal action with it, but in such a way that its relation to the stars is no longer spatial, but temporal, so that the temporal is withdrawn from the spatial.”

Easter is on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. Within the full out-going breath man rises up with his soul-being into the cosmic world, permeates and saturates himself with the quality of the stars, takes in the breath of the cosmos with his earthly breath, thus permeating himself with the Easter spirit, and by St. John's Day he is most strongly imbued with that with which he began to permeate himself at Easter. He must then return to the Earth, with the Earth soul and his own soul-being, but he depends upon Michael's standing by him, so that he may penetrate the earthly world in the right way after the Ahrimanic element has been overcome through the Michael forces.

And ever more and more, with the strength of the indrawn breath, does the soul-element of the Earth retire into the Earth itself, up to Christmas time. And today we celebrate Christmas time in the right way if we say to ourselves: “Michael has purified the Earth, so that the birth of the Christ Impulse can occur at Christmas time in the right way.”

Then the out-flowing into the cosmos begins again. In this outflowing Christ takes Michael with Him, in order that Michael may again gather to him out of the cosmos those forces which he has used up in his struggle with the earthly Ahrimanic forces. At Easter time Michael begins again to immerse himself in the cosmic world, and is most strongly interwoven with the cosmos at St. John's time.

And a man in the present who comprehends in the right sense what unites him as man with the earthly, says to himself: “The age is beginning for us in which we see the Christ Impulse aright when we know that it is accompanied by the force of Michael in the course of the year; when we see the Christ flowing down into the earthly and rising up into the cosmos, accompanied by Michael, who at one time is contending within the earthly, at another gathering strength for the fight in the cosmic spaces.” (See lemniscate)

In the Easter thought we have an image of utmost grandeur which has been implanted into earth existence in order to bring enlightenment; namely, the image of Christ arising out of the grave in victory over Death. We can grasp this Easter thought in the right way in our time only if we understand that we must add to it today the Being of Michael, at the right hand of Christ Jesus. For while the force of the Earth's breath is becoming woven through with the force of Christ during the breathing process of the Earth in the course of the year's cycle, Michael accompanies Christ.

If we as Earth men would understand how to make the Christ thought alive in ourselves at each of the four great festivals of the year, including Easter, as indeed we must do, we need to be able to place this thought in the right way and in full consciousness into the present time. The hope that was focused on the coming of the Michael force in the service of the Christ force animated those who understand the Christ Impulse in the right way up to our time.

The obligation arises for us, especially in the modern age, to permeate ourselves with the Christ Impulse in the sense of the Michael thought. We do this in the right way when we know how to link the Resurrection thought with the active Michael thought which has been implanted into human evolution, in the way I have often explained.

• 1. This is the first occasion on which Rudolf Steiner spoke in a broader sense of the importance of celebrating Michaelmas today. His first allusion to the subject at all had been in a brief reference three months earlier. (The Spiritual Communion of Mankind, December 24, 1922)

[ 1 ] The decision to give public expression to the esoteric from my own inner experience impelled me to write for the Magazine for August 28, 1899, on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's birth, an article on Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, under the title Goethes Geheime Offenbarung.¹ This article was, of course, only slightly esoteric. But I could not expect more of my public than I there gave. In my own mind the content of the fairy-tale lived as something wholly esoteric, and it was out of an esoteric mood that the article was written.

[ 2 ] Since the 'eighties I had been occupied with imaginations which were associated in my thought with this fairy-tale. I saw set forth in the fairy-tale Goethe's way from the observation of external nature into the interior of the human mind as he placed this before himself, not in concepts, but in pictures of the spirit. Concepts seemed to Goethe far too poor, too dead, to be capable of representing the living and working forces of the mind.

[ 3 ] Now in Schiller's letters concerning education in aesthetics, Goethe saw an endeavour to grasp this living and working by means of concepts. Schiller sought to show how the life of man is under subjection to natural necessity by reason of his corporeal aspect and to mental necessity through his reason. And he thought the soul must establish an inner equilibrium between the two. Then in this equilibrium man lives in freedom a life really worthy of humanity.

This is clever, but for the real life of the soul it is far too simple. The soul causes its forces, which are rooted in the depths, to shine into consciousness, but to disappear again in the very act of shining forth after they have influenced other forces just as fleeting. These are occurrences which even in arising also pass away; but abstract concepts can be linked only to that which continues for a longer or shorter time.

[ 4 ] All this Goethe knew through experience; he placed his picture-knowledge in a fairy-tale over against Schiller's conceptual knowledge.

[ 5 ] In experiencing this creation of Goethe's, one had entered the outer court of the esoteric.

[ 6] This was the time when I was invited by Count and Countess Brockdorff to deliver a lecture at one of their weekly gatherings. At these meetings there came together seekers from all sorts of circles. The lectures there delivered had to do with all aspects of life and knowledge. I knew nothing of all this until I was invited to deliver a lecture; nor did I know the Brockdorffs, but heard of them then for the first time. The theme proposed was an article about Nietzsche. This lecture I gave. Then I observed that among the hearers there were persons with a great interest in the spiritual world. Therefore, when I was invited to give a second lecture, I proposed the subject “Goethe's Secret Revelation,” and in this lecture I became entirely esoteric in relation to the fairy-tale. It was an important experience for me to be able to speak in words coined from the world of spirit after having been forced by circumstances throughout my Berlin period up to that time only to let the spiritual shine through my presentation.

[ 7 ] The Brockdorffs were leaders of a branch of the Theosophical Society founded by Blavatsky. What I had said in connection with Goethe's fairy-tale led to my being invited by the Brockdorffs to deliver lectures regularly before those members of the Theosophical Society who were associated with them. I explained, however, that I could speak only about that which I vitally experienced within me as spiritual knowledge.

[ 8 ] In truth, I could speak of nothing else. For very little of the literature issued by the Theosophical Society was known to me. I had known theosophists while living in Vienna, and I later became acquainted with others. These acquaintance ships led me to write in the Magazine the adverse review dealing with the theosophists in connection with the appearance of a publication of Franz Hartmann. What I knew otherwise of the literature was for the most part entirely uncongenial to me in method and approach; I could not by any possibility have linked my discussions with this literature.

[ 9 ] So I then gave the lectures in which I established a connection with the mysticism of the Middle Ages. By means of the ideas of the mystics from Master Eckhard to Jakob Böhme, I found expression for the spiritual conceptions which in reality I had determined beforehand to set forth. I published the series of lectures in the book Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens.²

[ 10 ] At these lectures there appeared one day in the audience Marie von Sievers, who was chosen by destiny at that time to take into strong hands the German section of the Theosophical Society, founded soon after the beginning of my lecturing. Within this section I was then able to develop my anthroposophic activity before a constantly increasing audience.

[ 11 ] No one was left in uncertainty of the fact that I would bring forward in the Theosophical Society only the results of my own research through perception. For I stated this on all appropriate occasions. When, in the presence of Annie Besant, the German section of the Theosophical Society was founded in Berlin and I was chosen its General Secretary, I had to leave the foundation sessions because I had to give before a non-theosophical audience one of the lectures in which I dealt with the spiritual evolution of humanity, and to the title of which I expressly united the phrase “Eine Anthroposophie.”³ Annie Besant also knew that I was then giving out in lectures under this title what I had to say about the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] When I went to London to attend a theosophical congress, one of the leading personalities said to me that true theosophy was to be found in my book Mysticism ..., I had reason to be satisfied. For I had given only the results of my spiritual vision, and this was accepted in the Theosophical Society.

There was now no longer any reason why I should not bring forward this spiritual knowledge in my own way before the theosophical public, which was at first the only audience that entered without restriction into a knowledge of the spirit. I subscribed to no sectarian dogmatics; I remained a man who uttered what he believed he was able to utter entirely according to what he himself experienced in the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] Prior to the founding of the section belongs a series of lectures – which I gave before Die Kommenden, entitled Von Buddha zu Christus.⁴ In these discussions I sought to show what a mighty stride the mystery of Golgotha signifies in comparison with the Buddha event, and how the evolution of humanity, as it strives toward the Christ event, approaches its culmination. [ 14 ] In this circle I spoke also of the nature of the mysteries.

[ 15 ] All this was accepted by my hearers. It was not felt to be contradictory to lectures which I had given earlier. Only after the section was founded – and I then appeared to be stamped as a “theosophist” – did any objection arise. It was really not the thing itself; it was the name and the association with the Society that no one wished to have.

[ 16 ] On the other hand, my non-theosophical hearers would have been inclined to permit themselves merely to be “stimulated” by my discussions, to accept these only in a “literary” way. What lay upon my heart was to introduce into life the impulse from the spiritual world; for this there was no understanding. This understanding, however, I could gradually find among men interested theosophically.

[ 17 ] Before the Brockdorff circle, where I had spoken on Nietzsche and the on Goethe's secret revelation, I gave at this time a lecture on Goethe's Faust, from an esoteric point of view.⁵

[ 18 ] The lectures on mysticism led to an invitation during the winter from the same theosophical circle to speak there again on this subject. I then gave the series of lectures which I later collected into the volume Christianity as Mystical Fact.

[ 19 ] From the very beginning I have let it be known that the choice of the expression “as Mystical Fact” is important. For I did not wish to set forth merely the mystical bearing of Christianity. My object was to set forth the evolution from the ancient mysteries to the mystery of Golgotha in such a way that in this evolution there should be seen to be active, not merely earthly historic forces, but spiritual supramundane influences. And I wished to show that in the ancient mysteries cult-pictures were given of cosmic events, which were then fulfilled in the mystery of Golgotha as facts transferred from the cosmos to the earth of the historic plane.

[ 20 ] This was by no means taught in the Theosophical Society. In this view I was in direct opposition to the theosophical dogmatics of the time, before I was invited to work in the Theosophical Society. For this invitation followed immediately after the cycle of lectures on Christ here described.

[ 21 ] Between the two cycles of lectures that I gave before the Theosophical Society, Marie von Sievers was in Italy, at Bologna, working on behalf of the Theosophical Society in the branch established there.

[ 22 ] Thus the thing evolved up to the time of my first attendance at a theosophical congress, in London, in the year 1902. At this congress, in which Marie von Sievers also took part, it was already a foregone conclusion that a German section of the Society would be founded with myself – shortly before invited to become a member – as the general secretary.

[ 23 ] The visit to London was of great interest to me. I there became acquainted with important leaders of the Theosophical Society. I had the privilege of staying at the home of Mr. Bertram Keightley, one of these leaders. We became great friends. I became acquainted with Mr. Mead, the very diligent secretary of the Theosophical Movement. The most interesting conversations imaginable took place at the home of Mr. Keightley in regard to the forms of spiritual knowledge alive within the Theosophical Society.

[ 24 ] Especially intimate were these conversations with Bertram Keightley himself. H. P. Blavatsky seemed to live again in these conversations. Her whole personality, with its wealth of spiritual content, was described with the utmost vividness before me and Marie von Sievers by my dear host, who had been so long associated with her.

[ 25 ] I became slightly acquainted with Annie Besant and also Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism. Mr. Leadbeater I did not meet, but only heard him speak from the platform. He made no special impression on me.

[ 26 ] All that was interesting in what I heard stirred me deeply, but it had no influence upon the content of my own views.

[ 27 ] The intervals left over between sessions of the congress I sought to employ in hurried visits to the natural-scientific and artistic collections of London. I dare say that many an idea concerning the evolution of nature and of man came to me from the natural-scientific and the historical collections.

[ 28 ] Thus I went through an event very important for me in this visit to London. I went away with the most manifold impressions, which stirred my mind profoundly.

[ 29 ] In the first number of the Magazine for 1899 there appears an article by me entitled Neujahrsbetractung eines Ketzers.⁶ The meaning there is a scepticism, not in reference to religious knowledge, but in reference to the orientation of culture which the time had taken on.

[ 30 ] Men were standing before the portals of a new century. The closing century had brought forth great attainments in the realm of external life and knowledge.

[ 31 ] In reference to this the thought forced itself upon me: “In spite of all this and many other attainments – for example, in the sphere of art – no one with any depth of vision can rejoice greatly over the cultural content of the time. Our highest spiritual needs strive for something which the time affords only in meagre measure.” And reflecting upon the emptiness of contemporary culture, I glanced back to the time of scholasticism in which, at least in concepts, men's minds lived with the spirit. “One need not be surprised if, in the presence of such phenomena, men with deeper intellectual needs find the proud structure of thought of the scholastics more satisfying than the ideal content of our own time. Otto Willmann has written a noteworthy book, his Geschichte des Idealismus⁷ in which he appears as the eulogist of the world-conception of past centuries. It must be admitted that the human mind craves those proud comprehensive illuminations through thought which human knowledge experienced in the philosophical systems of the scholastics ... Discouragement is a characteristic of the intellectual life at the turn of the century. It disturbs our joy in the attainments of the youngest of the ages now past.”

[ 32 ] And in contrast to those persons who insisted that it was just “true knowledge” itself which showed the impossibility of a philosophy comprising under a single conception the totality of existence, I had to say: “If matters were as they appear to the persons who give currency to such voices, then it would suffice one to measure, weigh, and compare things and phenomena and investigate them by means of the available apparatus, but never would the question be raised as to the higher meaning of things and phenomena.”

[ 33 ] This is the temper of my mind which must furnish an explanation of those facts that brought about my anthroposophic activity within the Theosophical Society. When I had entered into the culture of the time in order to find a spiritual background for the editing of the Magazine, I felt after this a great need to recover my mind in such reading as Willmann's History of Idealism. Even though there was an abyss between my perception of spirit and the form of Willmann's ideas, yet I felt that these ideas were near to the spirit.

[ 34 ] At the end of September 1900, I was able to leave the Magazine in other hands.

[ 35 ] The facts narrated above show that the purpose of imparting the content of the spiritual world had become a necessity growing out of my temper of mind before I gave up the Magazine; that it has no connection with the impossibility of continuing further with the Magazine.

[ 36 ] As into the very element suited to my mind, I entered upon an activity having its impulse in spiritual knowledge.

[ 37 ] But I still have to-day the feeling that, even apart from the hindrance here described, my endeavour to lead through natural-scientific knowledge to the world of spirit would have succeeded in finding an outlet. I look back upon what I expressed from 1897 to 1900 as upon something which at one time or another had to be uttered in opposition to the way of thinking of the time; and on the other hand I look back upon this as upon something in which I passed through my most intense spiritual test. I learned fundamentally to know where lay the forces of the time striving away from the spirit, disintegrating and destructive of culture. And from this knowledge came a great access of the force that I later needed in order to work outward from the spirit.

[ 38 ] It was still before the time of my activity within the Theosophical Society, and before I ceased to edit the Magazine, that I composed my two-volume book Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century, which from the second edition on was extended to include a survey of the evolution of world-conceptions from the Greek period to the nineteenth century, and then appeared under the title Rätsel der Philosophie.⁸

[ 39 ] The external occasion for the production of this book is to be considered wholly secondary. It grew out of the fact that Cronbach, the publisher of the Magazine, planned a collection of writings which were to deal with the various realms of knowledge and life in their evolution during the nineteenth century. He wished to include in this collection an exposition of the conceptions of the world and of life, and this he entrusted to me.

[ 40 ] I had for a long time held all the substance of this book in my mind. My consideration of the world-conceptions had a personal point of departure in that of Goethe. The opposition which I had to set up between Goethe's way of thinking and that of Kant, the new philosophical beginning at the turning-point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – all this was to me the beginning of an epoch in the evolution of world-conceptions. The brilliant books of Richard Wahle, which show the dissolution of all endeavour after a world-conception at the end of the nineteenth century, closed this epoch. Thus the attempt of the nineteenth century after a world-conception rounded itself into a whole which was vitally alive in my view, and I gladly seized the opportunity to set this forth.

[ 41] When I look back to this book the course of my life seems to me symptomatically expressed in it. I did not concern myself, as many suppose, with anticipating contradictions. If this were the case, I should gladly admit it. Only it was not the reality in my spiritual course. I concerned myself in anticipation to find new spheres for what was alive in my mind. And an especially stimulating discovery in the spiritual sphere occurred soon after the composition of the Conceptions of the World and of Life.

[ 42 ] Besides, I never by any means penetrated into the spiritual sphere in a mystical, emotional way, but desired always to go by way of crystal-clear concepts. Experiencing of concepts, of ideas, led me out of the ideal into the spiritual-real.

[ 43 ] The real evolution of the organic from primeval times to the present stood out before my imagination for the first time after the composition of Conceptions of the World and of Life.

[ 44 ] During the writing of this book I had before my eyes only the natural-scientific view which had been derived from the Darwinian mode of thought. But this I considered only as a succession of sensible facts present in nature. Within this succession of facts there were active for me spiritual impulses, as these hovered before Goethe in his idea of metamorphosis.

[ 45 ] Thus the natural-scientific evolutionary succession, as represented by Haeckel, never constituted for me something wherein mechanical or merely organic laws controlled, but as something wherein the spirit led the living being from the simple through the complex up to man. I saw in Darwinism a mode of thinking which is on the way to that of Goethe, but which remains behind this.

[ 46 ] All this was still thought by me in ideal content ; only later did I work through to imaginative perception. This perception first brought me the knowledge that in reality quite other beings than the most simple organisms were present in primeval times. That man as a spiritual being is older than all other living beings, and that in order to assume his present physical form he had to cease to be a member of a world-being which comprised him and the other organisms. These latter are rejected elements in human evolution; not something out of which man has come, but something which he has left behind, from which he severed himself, in order to take on his physical form as the image of one that was spiritual. Man is a microcosmic being who bore within him all the rest of the terrestrial world and who has become a microcosm by separating from all the rest – this for me was a knowledge to which I first attained in the earliest years of the new century.

[ 47 ] And so this knowledge could not be in any way an active impulse in Conceptions of the World and of Life. Indeed, I so conceived the second volume of this book that a point of departure for a deepening knowledge of the world mystery might be found in a spiritualized form of Darwinism and Haeckelism viewed in the light of Goethe's world-conception.

[ 48 ] When I prepared later the second edition of the book, there was already present in my mind a knowledge of the true evolution. All through I held fast to the point of view I had assumed in the first edition as being that which is derived from thinking without spiritual perception, yet I found it necessary to make slight changes in the form of expression. These were necessary, first because the book by undertaking a general survey of the totality of philosophy had become an entirely different composition, and secondly because this second edition appeared after my discussions of the true evolution were already before the world.

[ 49 ] In all this the form taken by my Riddles of Philosophy had not only a subjective justification, as the point of view firmly held from the time of a certain phase in my mental evolution, but also a justification entirely objective. This consists in the fact that a thought, when spiritually experienced as thought, can conceive the evolution of living beings only as this is set forth in my book; and that the further step must be made by means of spiritual perception.

[ 50 ] Thus my book represents quite objectively the pre-anthroposophic point of view into which one must submerge oneself, and which one must experience in this submersion, in order to rise to the higher point of view. This point of view, as a stage in the way of knowledge, meets those learners who seek the spiritual world, not in a mystical blurred form, but in a form intellectually clear. In setting forth that which results from this point of view there is also present something which the learner uses as a preliminary stage leading to the higher.

[ 51 ] Then for the first time I saw in Haeckel the person who placed himself courageously at the thinker's point of view in natural science, while all other researchers excluded thought and admitted only the results of sense-observation. The fact that Haeckel placed value upon creative thought in laying the foundation for reality drew me again and again to him. And so I dedicated my book to him, in spite of the fact that its content – even in that form – was not conceived in his sense. But Haeckel was not in the least a philosophical nature. His relation to philosophy was wholly that of a layman. For this very reason I considered the attack of the philosophers that was just then raging around Haeckel as quite undeserved. In opposition to them, I dedicated my book to Haeckel, as I had already written in opposition to them my essay Haeckel und seine Gegner.⁹ Haeckel, in all simplicity as regards philosophy, had employed thought as the means for setting forth biological reality; a philosophical attack was directed against him which rested upon an intellectual sphere quite foreign to him. I believe he never knew what the philosophers wished from him. This was my impression from a conversation I had with him in Leipzig after the appearance of his Riddle of the Universe, on the occasion of a presentation of Borngräber's play Giordano Bruno. He then said: “People say I deny the spirit. I wish they could see how materials shape themselves through their forces; then they would perceive ‘spirit’ in everything that happens in a retort. Everywhere there is spirit.” Haeckel, in fact, knew nothing whatever of the real Spirit. The very forces of nature were for him the “spirit,” and he could rest content with this.

[ 52 ] One must not critically attack such blindness to the spirit with philosophically dead concepts, but must see how far the age is removed from the experience of the spirit, and must seek, on the foundation which the age affords – the natural biological explanation – to strike the spiritual sparks.

[ 53 ] Such was then my opinion. On that basis I wrote my Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century.

• 1. Goethe's Secret Revelation.
• 2. Mysticism at the Beginning of the Modern Spiritual Life.
• 3. “An anthroposophy.”
• 4. From Buddha to Christ.
• 5. This was the lecture which was later published, together with my discussions of Goethe's fairy-tale, by the Philosophische-Anthroposophische Verlag.
• 6. New Year Reflections of a Sceptic.
• 7. History of Idealism.
• 8. Riddles of Philosophy.
• 9. Haeckel and His Opponents.

It has been several decades since a certain scientific method of comparing different religions was developed. Those who devote themselves to this comparison are struck by how much agreement, even similarity, there is between the different religions. The most diverse evidence is cited to show that a certain core of belief underlies them all, from the Indian to the Germanic, the Near Eastern to the Greek, and that it can even be found in the uncivilized peoples of Africa and North America. The childlike predispositions of the various peoples have worked in the same way and have wanted to give enlightenment about the soul, the world, and God in the same way; for everywhere man is subject to the same powerlessness in the face of impending fate. The so-called Enlightenment assumes that people have attributed divine beings and forces to natural phenomena; it starts from the point of view that all religious beliefs are childish fantasies and that, finally, nations have now entered the age of reason, when people finally know how to understand these things.

But a thorough investigation teaches us otherwise. By comparing the Indian and Germanic intellectual spheres, we realize that before a thorough research, that doctrine of fantasy figures does not hold up. The deeper one penetrates, the more that hypothesis of enlightenment collapses, and two things prove that it is nothing: Firstly, we discover a deep meaning in the childlike ideas of recognized wild peoples. The more impartially we look at them, the deeper such folk religions appear to us; images and animals are the content of ideas that have an infinitely deep meaning.

Secondly, the people do not create poetry in the way that the gentlemen at the green table of scholarship imagine it. The people do not personify natural phenomena. Thus, the saga of Indra, which tells of how he set out with seven priestly sages to reclaim a number of cows that had escaped him to culture, was interpreted as if the god Indra personified the dawn and the seven cows personified darkness. Likewise, Buddha was seen as the sun god and it was said that his life was a personification of the sun – in short, the people personify natural phenomena.

Such a poetic folk poetry does not exist. Only those who are strangers to the people can arrive at such a view. Those who penetrate deeper will become more and more familiar with what spiritual research teaches in the Secret Doctrine.

The childlike religious ideas proceed from pure higher spiritual ideas and from the fact that a common, similar view underlies the various myths. This teaching is called the secret teaching of humanity. It has always been supported by the great spiritual leaders of humanity. Religions come not from the poetic folk poetry, but from the great initiates.

The original wisdom is the same, only it is structured according to the abilities and talents of the different peoples; thus we find a different form for the Greek peninsula, another for American, Indian, Germanic peoples. The different images are adapted to the different ways of life and talents of the individuals.

The profound spiritual basis reveals to us that a secret primordial revelation underlies all these religions. To many, this truth seems incredible, but only because of unfamiliarity with the facts, which appear to be imperfect because the great leaders can only give them such an expression as will be understood.

The very general secret doctrine of the fundamental primal generation is interesting in the history of the development of nations.

Although it is a sin against the holy spirit of modern monism to regard man as a two-part entity, and one risks being called a dualist, despite the unified origin , which of course underlies what we call “human”, the two-part nature of his being can be justifiably demonstrated, just as the existence of water can be demonstrated from hydrogen and oxygen. The two substances are present in it despite the unity of the whole. In the same way, it can be shown that the higher and lower selves of the human being have a common source. How a person's nature expresses itself, how he lives, strives and works, is revealed in a duality, just as water is revealed in the duality of hydrogen and oxygen. We therefore distinguish:

Firstly, the lower nature, which is more physical, more of the lower nature of matter.

Secondly, the higher nature, which is more spiritual, more of the higher nature of the spirit.

Development consists in ennobling the lower nature. No one has presented this better than Schiller in his “Aesthetic Letters,” where he says: Man is subject to the necessities of nature on the one hand, he is their slave as long as he clings to them, but he is also a slave to ironclad necessity of reason. Only he awakens to freedom who ennobles the lower nature through the higher nature. It is not the man who denies his lower nature who stands high, but he who ennobles it so that he can abandon himself to it.

The Secret Doctrine teaches that man overcomes his sensual nature through the spiritual and transforms his being in such a way that he receives a new impression of spirituality. The mystics often say: Man is a small world, and what surrounds him is the great world. He contains in miniature everything that the great world has around him. Schiller writes to Goethe in the first letter:

They take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, they seek the explanation for the individual. Goethe wanted man to be recognized as a microcosm in relation to the macrocosm, the great world. Paracelsus expressed it in the beautiful image: When we observe the individual phenomena of nature outside, they appear like letters, man as the word composed of them. Everything that is scattered outside in the great is in the small man.

In the sense of the secret teaching, the struggle that is fought within man and finally receives his purification is an image of the great struggle in nature outside. Just as in man the lower nature of the physical-visible is opposed to the spiritual nature of the invisible, so the Secret Doctrine opposes the nature of the visible universe - stones, plants, animals - as the second, the forces of nature, which are hidden in the individual things.

The divine part of man also corresponds to a divine part here. The Secret Doctrine also distinguishes here between the visible and the invisible, the physical and the spiritual. The man before you seems to be what is outwardly expressed in his plastic form, but through deeper causes, in the outburst of his passions, the forces of his lower nature are revealed. Likewise, nature, like man in his body, finds physical expression in physical forms, in which forces are hidden just as they are in the lower nature of man. The lightning flashes in the cloud. The Secret Doctrine not only shows this comparison as fundamental, but also that the divine entities in nature are related to what rules and lives in man as his spirit. The same thing that ennobles the lower nature of man has overcome the lower nature in nature. Minerals, plants and animals are the plastic expression of the nature of God in descending order, while the invisible spirits in nature signify, for the Secret Doctrine, the ascent into the higher nature. They are more advanced entities than man. Animals, plants and minerals are further advanced on the descending path.

A picture of this development is given by coal. It is stone, a mineral. Millions of years ago it was part of living beings, plants. Great forests have perished and become these stone masses. What was once a living being has become a fossil. This is admitted by science.

In the sea basin, limestone formations are piled up in many different ways, created by animals that secreted lime shells. Here we find vast masses of limestone, prepared by living things. The dead is nothing other than a product of life.

The question arises: how does the living emerge from the dead?

In truth, not only does the living emerge from the dead, but all that is dead emerges from the living. Even rock crystal is a differentiation from the primal living.

If we follow the line of descent downwards from animals to fish, we finally find cartilaginous fish that have not yet developed any bones. In the same way, the physical human being has ancestors that had cartilage instead of bone, who are not yet at the stage where the petrification process has begun. Just as human bone turns to stone, so granite masses have also emerged from what was originally soft living matter.

Where does everything come from? From an original living organization, and this from original spirituality. — We find the overcoming of the lower by the higher everywhere, even outside. The lower has detached itself by the higher detaching itself.

But then there must be a great unity: as between the spiritual and the physical in man, so also a great unity between the great spirituality and the lower nature outside.

This unity is expressed by the various creeds. Just as it is clear that those who have today thrown off the lower nature were once struggling and striving beings, so the initiates are simply more advanced than their brothers; they have overcome the struggle and therefore know more.

At the bottom of all creeds we find the premise of the struggle of the higher nature against the lower and the conviction that there are initiates who are the leaders of humanity. — How has the Secret Doctrine been expressed among the Germanic peoples? There too we find the interpretation that the people have been poetizing, symbolizing the forces of nature.

We find a basis for the theosophical world view in a work by Ludwig Laistner: “Riddles of the Sphinx” on myth research. As is so often the case, the theosophist can learn the most from the non-theosophist, so we may start from his basic principles here. Let us start from a simple folk tale, the legend of the Midday Woman. She lives in the most diverse areas and has the following content: If you go to the field early in the morning to work and fail to go home at the appropriate hour, during the lunch break between twelve and one o'clock, the midday woman appears and asks him questions that are difficult to answer, about weaving, flax cultivation and the like, related to his work. During the whole of the lunch hour, questions are asked of him, all of which he must answer. If he misses even one, she comes with the sickle and cuts his throat. In some areas, it is said that you can get rid of her by reciting the Lord's Prayer, but it is not that simple, it has to be recited backwards, not from the beginning, but from the end. There is another spinning room saying related to this legend: “You ask like the midday woman.” Laistner interprets it as follows: This legend has its origin in the state that is brought about in a person when he stays outside in the field and falls asleep. Then the environment has such an effect that the dream always takes on this form in a similar way. Laistner traces all these legends back to the riddle of the Sphinx. It is the same torment of questioning that is found in this. In between lies a whole world of myths and legends. It has nothing to do with folk poetry, but can be explained by what the dream does to the sleeper. The dream is the main symbol. You catch a frog in your dream, wake up and find the corner of the bedspread in your hand. Legends and myths simply have their origin in the dream fantasy. From there, Laistner would have had only one step to the theosophical view, according to which there is not only the ordinary everyday state of consciousness, but another state of consciousness that, like the dream images, gives the outer things a different meaning: the tip of the bedspread is transformed into the image of a frog. The dream, a means of occult development, gives symbols of a higher spiritual world. Then, in contrast to this ordinary dream state, a higher state of consciousness arises in which the human being becomes aware of sensory perceptions. What shines into the dawning consciousness from the higher state of consciousness is the dream. This state is also present in a dull form in mediums in a trance: daytime consciousness is extinguished and a dusky consciousness has set in.

Everything in the world has developed, including man's consciousness today. Just as his organs have changed, so has he changed in terms of consciousness. He used to have no daytime consciousness, but a dim clairvoyant consciousness. Just as the body has organs whose significance fades, so the state that the person who misses the lunch break falls into is an echo of the old clairvoyant consciousness. It works in such a way that the untrained person sees everything the wrong way round; things appear as if in a mirror image. So, for example, you have to read 365 563. In this higher spiritual world, the astral world, man sees his desire. Everything in this plan attacks him in a retrograde direction, in the opposite order. The people therefore say quite correctly: If you want to escape the midday woman, you have to say the Lord's Prayer backwards, namely do something that does not correspond to the laws of this world.

These legends and myths deal with a different state of consciousness. It is only in this light that they can be explained to our medieval ancestors. Our ancestors had a clairvoyant consciousness, and the legends are echoes of it. This is the secret of the Germanic myths in particular. If you look behind the scenes of nature, you will see how the myths are expressed.

The dragon fight of the Siegfried saga is nothing other than the fight of higher wisdom against lower wisdom. The ancient Germans were a nation of warriors, their god was a warrior god, and their fight was a fight against dragons.

The astral picture, perceived clairvoyantly, can also be found in the Baldur saga: the primal struggle of the older brothers, the gods, against the lower ones, which has its echo in the forces of nature. The people see this and express it clairvoyantly as the real overcoming of Baldur by the blind Hödur.

It is said that Baldur represents the sun god, who was overcome by the winter god. But the saga means the struggle between beings of light and beings of darkness. The old Teuton remembers the primeval times, when he saw the darkness illuminated by spiritual light, when he saw the darkness illuminated by astral light - Hödur means astral blindness. — The clairvoyant consciousness has experienced the saga of Baldur. The Secret Doctrine, which tells us that there were initiates, also presents Wotan as an initiate. He was not a divine being, but a man who had raised himself up. The story that he hung on the gallows for nine days, wriggled through gorges and crevices like a snake to Gunnlöd, in order to receive the drink of initiation from the Valkyrie's cup, is consistent with the ancient cross initiation, with Egyptian mysticism. For three days and nights, Wotan is with Gunnlöd as a snake, which refers to the initiates. The higher soul, through which the ascent to higher levels is accomplished, is designated by the feminine.

The saga of Siegfried is also a picture of initiation. Siegfried acquires invulnerability, that is, he becomes insensitive to physical impressions, and thus becomes a companion of the Valkyrie. The initiates become invisible through the magic hood, that is, invisible as initiates, otherwise they remain visible (physically).

What then is initiation? Every nation has developed its secret teaching in a way that corresponds to its customs and traditions. The Germans were warriors, and a hero was called one who had fallen on the battlefield; he began the journey to Valhalla. The Valkyrie met him, that is, his own higher soul meets him when he passes through the gates of death.

“He who does not die before dying, when he dies, perishes.” That is, he who does not learn about that world beforehand, dies with death. Initiation is the forefeeling of what awaits the soul when it passes through the gates of death. The blessed warrior is united with the Valkyrie when he enters Valhalla: Siegfried with Brünhild. The leaders of the people clothed the initiation in this form. Even in this part of the saga, the Secret Doctrine finds expression in language that the people can understand.

The divine world, which has suppressed its nature, we find again in the giants.

The Secret Doctrine also tells how the migration of the peoples took place. Between Europe and America lay the Atlantic continent. Even the “Kosmos,” a magazine that swims in the Haeckelian direction, presents this as a hypothesis in the tenth issue. It only recognizes the existence of plants and animals, but that does not prevent the presence of humans, because science always lags behind.

From then on, people turned eastwards. Those who moved as far as Central and Eastern Asia form the basis of ancient Indian Asia, those who remained behind form the basis of the Celts and Germans. The Celts have progressed furthest in the transformation from the old dull clairvoyant consciousness to the present sensual consciousness. The Germans remained with the astral consciousness of the Atlanteans long after the Asians had developed to the day consciousness.

In the epoch before the Vedas, the teaching arose that was based more on ordinary day-consciousness. But man can never lose the connection with the spiritual, and so the longing arose there to find the way to the old clairvoyance by artificial means. That artificial clairvoyance arose there, which the wise strove for through inner development - yoga. Thus in India we have artificial clairvoyance with complete consciousness during the day, while among the Teutons the old consciousness of clairvoyance is still preserved. Among the Teutons, myths and legends form a dim expression of the secret doctrine as compared with that obtained by the initiates of modern times through artificial clairvoyance. For the people who no longer have clairvoyance, the divine worlds must be depicted. That is where the idol images come from, artificially prepared replicas by man. Among the ancient Germans, the old myths still lived in the people, in the old, retained symbolism, while in ancient India, the secret doctrine is artificially expressed by those who aspire to it. What we obtain from India is therefore more of an intellectual form, but the same secret doctrine that is expressed much more directly in the old Germanic myths.

The idols of the Indians and the theosophical doctrine: The renewal of the more theosophical doctrine of artificial clairvoyance in India goes completely parallel with what still lives in the old legends in Germania. Therefore, we do not need any Indian terminology in Europe, we only need to understand and revive what is original in Europe. We can get to the bottom of a great European secret doctrine and will get there.

The course of the secret teaching is determined by something else. The course of the future is prophetically expressed in the old Germanic secret teaching. The reference to Christianity is expressed in a powerful way. The research into legends, which is connected with the secret teaching, finds a coherent truth in the legend and in Christianity. Krimhild betrays her husband by attaching the cross. What does this deep trait indicate? It indicates the prophetic reference to the cross of Christ. Siegfried, the initiate, is invulnerable all over his body; only one spot is not invulnerable for the great initiate, the spot where Christ bears the cross. With the spread of Christianity, this spot has also become invulnerable.

In India we have a secret teaching that expresses itself rationally and symbolically, in Europe the old Germanic myth remained in the astral expression until Jesus Christ. Through Christianity, the myth has been replaced.

The task of Theosophy is to work in the sense of this spiritual development of humanity, to establish the deep connection between the ancient Germans and modern times. We cannot simply propagate the culture of the Orient; we must take into account the Germanic and Christian original culture. We must not seek the basis of the secret doctrine in Sanskrit dogmas, but we must seek the core of truth in those forms of religion that are appropriate to the European folk substance, seek what exists as an emanation of the secret doctrine in the Germanic world of legends.

That was the artist's intention when he gave a new culture by transforming the Germanic saga, that was Richard Wagner's intention when he reworked the old German sagas.

Theosophy also seeks the traces of the ancient secret teachings that live at the heart of the Germanic saga. Those who follow these traces will gradually find their way into Theosophy. However, we must not think in the same way as those who have “come so gloriously far”. For every nation has done its part in its own way. And in this sense, we in the Brotherhood must place unity and the harmony of the basic teaching above the differences in our views and presentations. If we seek the truth in every opinion and place brotherly love above the selfishness of our opinions, then we are acting in the true sense of the theosophical view of life.

Report in the “Münchner Neueste Nachrichten”, April 1906

Theosophical lectures. The theosophical speaker Dr. Rudolf Steiner gave two well-received lectures in the Prinzensaal of Café Luitpold on “Germanic and Indian Secret Doctrine” and on “Inner Development”. In the first lecture, the speaker tried to argue that the origin of legends and myths cannot be traced back to the personification of natural phenomena by the poetic fantasy of the people, as Ludwig Laistner had already suggested in “Riddle of the Sphinx” another explanation for the origin of certain myths, but that the strangely profound meaning of myths and legends point to regarding them as the symbolic expression of primal truths, which are intuitively recognized by primitive peoples themselves in images and symbols, and are also presented by the great teachers of humanity, who are initiated into the “primal secret teachings,” in images adapted to the understanding and character of the peoples of Asia, America, Africa and Europe. Thus, for example, we find the struggle of the higher nature with the lower, the spiritual battle of development, the primal fight, which takes place in the macrocosm as well as in the microcosm, and which the gods, that is, the beings who were the first to fight for spiritual development, fought in primeval times, is illustrated in the myths of the fight of the gods and heroes with the dragon. In the cycle of Teutonic myths we also find the fight against the dragon and the fight against the giants, the powers of the lower nature. For the warlike Germanic peoples, who regarded bravery as the highest virtue, the doctrine of the higher and lower self also found expression in the fact that the warrior who fell on the battlefield, elevated by his heroic death, moves up to Valhalla to meet his own higher soul, the Valkyrie, who comes to meet him. The speaker then expressed the view that the Theosophical Society in Europe had the primary task of working for an understanding of the great truths and beauties of the Germanic world of legends, as well as for a deeper understanding of the symbols of Christianity, since the forms of the Orient cannot be transferred to Europe without further ado. It must shine into the depths of the beautiful and true of the Germanic world of legends, which the great master Wagner artistically resurrected, and utilize it for her spiritualized conception of the world and life, as well as the primal truth of the Christianity brought to the Germanic world, which was destined to replace the old myths.

Tomorrow I shall begin my discussion of the problems related to the connection of the spiritual scientific impulses with various unclarified tasks of the present time, and the influence that spiritual science must exert on individual, especially scientific, problems. Then I should like to refer to what I may call, in the sense of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural epoch, the karma of human vocation.

Today I shall take as my point of departure something that seemingly has little to do with that theme, but it will afford an opportunity to connect various related matters. I shall endeavor to point out the element in Goethe's life that characterizes him especially as a personality of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, and much to which I have recently referred will, of course, be echoed in my remarks. I should like to bring before your souls the very facts pertaining to this personality that will enable anyone to distinguish important phenomena of the advancing post-Atlantean cultural epoch. In relation to the spiritual interests of humanity, the life and personality of Goethe are comprehensive and decisive to an extent that can hardly be ascribed to any other individual. Still, it may also be said that, in spite of much that has occurred, his life and personality have had the least possible effect on our lives. This, however, must be attributed to the very nature of our modern culture. It may be asked how it can possibly be said that the life of Goethe has remained without effect. Are not his works known? Has not an edition of his works, consisting of hundreds of volumes, been published recently? Did not his published letters number six or seven thousand by the turn of the century, and today number almost ten thousand? Is there not a wealth of literature concerning Goethe, one might almost say in every civilized language? Do not his works continue to be produced on stage? Is not his major work, Faust, brought again and again before the minds of men?

Now, I have often referred recently to the strange error of an illustrious contemporary scholar, which is really far more symptomatic of the character of our time than one might assume. A dominant scientist, this scholar speaks of the significance of the scientific world conception in such a way that he presents it as being the most brilliant, not only of our age, but of all ages in human history. He concludes that although it is hard to prove that we live in the best of all worlds, it is certain to the scientist, at least, that today we humans live in the best of all epochs, and we might exclaim in the words of Goethe:

‘Tis delightful to transport
Oneself into the spirit of the past,
To see in times before us how a wise man thought,
And what a glorious height we have achieved at last.’¹

This noted scientist² is gravely in error; he presents this as his own innermost sentiment and believes that he is thereby associating himself with Goethe, who is renowned for his knowledge of the world and of man. But he is really associating himself with Wagner, whom Goethe sets up as a foil to the Faust figure. Yet such a blunder contains at least a good bit of the honesty of our age because this person speaks more genuinely than the numerous people who, in quoting Goethe, have Faust on their tongues, but really have an undisguised Wagner attitude of mind. As a basis for subsequent reflections, let us, then, bring up before our mind's eye the life of Goethe as a spiritual phenomenon.

If we wish to study human life in connection with the important question of destiny, if we study the questions of karma, we should remember that Goethe was born in a city and under conditions clearly of much meaning for his life. The family of Goethe's father had come to Frankfurt in the seventeenth century, whereas his mother's family, the Textors, was old, established, and highly respected, so much so that from it the mayors of Frankfurt were chosen. This fact alone signifies the respect enjoyed by the family at that time. Goethe's father was a man with an extraordinarily strong sense of duty, but for a man of his time, he also possessed a broad range of interests. He had traveled in Italy and representations of important Roman creations, about which he liked to talk, hung on all the walls of his Patrician Frankfurt home. What was dominant in the French culture of his time completely permeated the life of Frankfurt and most intimately influenced Goethe's home. The important world events were part of the life in his home, and his father took a deep interest in them. Goethe's mother, moreover, was a woman of the most spontaneous human sentiment, sharing directly in everything that connects human nature with the legendary, the fabulous, everything that lifts man aloft above the commonplace as if on the wings of poetic fantasy.

In Goethe's boyhood days it was much more possible to grow up unconfused by those disturbing influences that affect children today because they are dragged into school at a relatively early age. This did not happen to young Goethe; he developed extraordinarily freely in his parents' home under the austere but never harsh influence of his father and his poetically endowed mother. In later years he could recall with inner happiness these years of his boyhood and childhood that led to a ripe humanness. Many things that we read today in Goethe's story of his life, Poetry and Truth, though decked out in a somewhat pedantic humor, have more meaning than may be supposed. In telling how he practiced the piano,³ there is a profoundly human significance; the fingers of his hands, as if playing mythological roles, become soul-endowed, independent figures. They become Thumbling, Pointerling—I say this without sentimentality—and acquire certain mystical relations to the tones. This indicates how Goethe was to be guided into life as a complete human being. Not only a piece of this man, the head, should be guided, as so often happens, one-sidedly into life to be followed by the support of the rest of the body, developed through all sorts of athletics and sports; but, on the contrary, the body permeated by spirit to its very fingertips should be related with the outer world.

We must take into account from the very first the marked individuality of the innate endowments and nature of Goethe. From his earliest youth, everything pointed to a definite orientation of his life. As he grows in childhood, he is just as strongly inclined to follow with complete absorption the charming and stirring fairy tales and other narratives of his mother, thus even as a boy bringing his fantasy into living activity, as he is also inclined to escape from her and especially from his austere father. Slipping away into the narrow alleys, he would observe all sorts of things and also become entangled in varied situations through which he experienced in vital sentiments and emotions much that is stored up in human karma. His stern father guides the boy in a certain matter-of-fact way to what people in those days thought could provide support and direction in life. The father is a jurist who has grown up among, and is permeated with, Roman points of view; the son's soul, too, absorbs these views. In this process, however, through viewing the works and treasures of Roman art that represented what is essentially Roman, there was kindled in the boyish soul a certain aspiration for what had been created in the culture of Rome.

Everything tended to situate Goethe in a quite definite way within the life of his time. In this way, he became, between the third and fourth centuries of the fifth post-Atlantean period, a personality bearing within him all the impulses of that period. Early on, he becomes a self-sustained personality, living out of his own nature, free of everything that binds a man in a fixed, pedantic way to those certain forms of one or another group of social ties. He learns to know social relationships in such a way that they affect him, but he is not united with them. He always keeps a certain isolated pedestal upon which he stands and from which he can establish connections with everything. From the very beginning, however, unlike so many others, he does not excessively identify himself with anything or with the environing circumstances. To be sure, all this results from a peculiarly favorable karma in which, when considered objectively, we shall find a solution for profound questions and problems regarding karma in general.

After Goethe had been introduced by his father to the field of jurisprudence, he was sent to the University of Leipzig, which he entered in 1765 at a relatively early age. We must not forget that when he joined this university life he was not tormented and exhausted by those strenuous exercises that must be suffered for an even longer period of time by young people in our day who are trying to pass the battery of final examinations at the conclusion of high school, the Abitur. After having passed their examinations, these young people are anxious to wipe the most recent learning experiences from their minds and enter a university in order to enjoy life. No, young Goethe had not entered the University of Leipzig simply to idle away his time but, nevertheless, he was not above skipping lectures and using the time saved for something else, as was done by many students. However, as he enlisted in the lofty and famous scientific life of the university, he came into circles that had never failed to awaken a longing in him whenever he had heard about them. Indeed, he knew above all that the famous Gottsched⁴ worked at the university, Gottsched whose head held all the learning of the time and who expressed it in writing and orally to those associated with the contemporary culture of Leipzig. To be sure, Lessing's⁵ great impulse was still to be felt in Leipzig, but it was natural for Goethe to think that the lofty Gottsched would introduce him to the entire scope of contemporary wisdom, enabling him to study conjointly jurisprudence and philosophy and whatever else a man of the world might derive from theology and learning regarding supernatural things.

Goethe, however, who possessed without doubt a certain sense for aesthetics, was slightly disillusioned when he first called on Gottsched. He appeared at Gottsched's door. I do not know whether or not the servant sensed something of Goethe's nature, but he admitted him directly into the presence of Gottsched without taking the time to announce him in the proper manner. So Goethe came upon the great man without his wig, standing there quite baldheaded. To a learned man in the year 1765 this was something quite dreadful. Goethe, who was sensitive to such things, had to witness how Gottsched seized his wig with a graceful turn and jammed it on his head, and how with his other hand he slapped his servant on the face. Goethe's enthusiasm was a little chilled. But he was still more chilled by the fact that Gottsched's entire demeanor corresponded little with that for which he longed.

Nor did Gellert's⁶ moralistic lectures speak to him of the comprehensive intellectual horizons he desired. Therefore, he soon turned his attention more to the medical and scientific lectures, which were in a way continued in the home of Professor Ludwig, where he took his lunch and where much of a similar nature was discussed. It cannot really be said that Goethe “studied thoroughly jurisprudence, medicine, philosophy and, unfortunately, also theology”⁷ in Leipzig, but he got a view of them and, most important, it was in Leipzig that he absorbed many a scientific concept of his time. After having busied himself with the sciences, having experienced various aspects of life, and having been involved in various affairs, he then became so ill that he stood face to face with death. Such things must be taken fully into account by one who considers the human being in a spiritual scientific way. We must realize how much passed through his soul as he actually faced death because of extremely severe and recurring hemorrhaging. He was weakened, had to return home, and could not resume his university studies for some time.

When Goethe did continue his studies in Strassburg, he joined the circle of an important personality who became of exceptional significance to him. In order to judge with what feelings he met this personality, we must recall that, when he returned to Frankfurt under the influence of those inner experiences through which he had passed in Leipzig when he was face to face with death, he had already begun to enter more deeply, through association with various persons, into a mystical experience and a mystical conception of the world. He had immersed himself in mystic, occult writings and sought in a youthful way to elaborate a systematic world conception that took its point of departure in mystical—one might say, mystic-cabalistic—points of view. Even then he endeavored to learn “what secret force/ dwells in the world and rules its course”⁸ and to open himself to the influence of “every working force and seed.”⁹ He was unwilling merely “to trade in words,” as he had seen this done in Leipzig.

Then he came to Strassburg where he could again attend lectures on science, and this is what he did at first. Jurisprudence, which was so dear to his father but less so to him, would be taken care of somehow, no doubt, but his most urgent impulse was to investigate how various laws of nature conform to one another. As he was once ascending a flight of stairs, he met a personality who immediately made a tremendous impression on him, not only through his external appearance, but also through an inner light that radiated through a highly intelligent countenance. Externally, a man approached him who had, indeed, somewhat the appearance of a priest, but who wore his long overcoat in such a curious way that the train was stuffed into his hind pockets. The man who made such a grand impression on¹⁰

Goethe now entered vitally into all that then stirred tempestuously in Herder, and that was indeed a good deal. One might say that Herder bore within him an entirely new world conception. Basically, what had never before been undertaken, Herder bore it brilliantly within himself; that is, the endeavor to trace the phenomena of the world from the simplest entity, the simplest lifeless thing, through the plant world to the animal kingdom, on to man, to history, and even to the divine governance of the world in history. At that time, Herder's mind already harbored a vast, comprehensive view of the world, and he spoke with enthusiasm about his new ideas; but he also on occasion spoke with indignation against all pedantic, traditional ideas. Many of these conversations with Herder animated Goethe. That everything in the world is in process of evolution and that a spiritual plan of the universe sustains all evolution was a connection Herder perceived as no one ever had before. But this was still growing in him, and he had not yet expressed it on paper. Goethe received it in this state of being born and shared in Herder's aspiration, contemplation, and struggle. We may say that Herder wished to trace the evolution of the world from a grain of dust through all the kingdoms of nature up to God. He then did this in a splendid comprehensive fashion, as far as was necessary at that time, in his incomparable work, Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History. Here we can really see that Herder's mind grasped everything that was then known of the facts of nature and of the human realm, but all this knowledge was condensed into a world conception permeated with spirit.

Beside this, Goethe received through Herder an idea of Spinoza's contribution to the evolution of a new concept of the world, and this worked on him. The leaning that Goethe showed throughout his life toward Spinoza¹¹ was planted in him at that time in Strassburg by Herder.¹²

Herder was an enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare,¹³ which was something unheard of at that time. Just think how this peculiar polarity of souls must have worked between Herder and Goethe when Goethe, yearning to perceive these things that contemporary culture could not give him, found in Herder a revolutionary spirit of the first rank storming the culture of his day. Up to that time Goethe had learned to revere that art of form that is found in Corneille and Racine,¹⁴ and had taken all this in as one takes in things that are said to be the most important in the world. But he had absorbed all this with a certain inner indignation. When Herder introduced him to Shakespeare, it worked on his mind like a breath of fresh air. Here was a poet free from everything formal—who created characters directly from human individualities; who possessed nothing of all the unity of time, place, and action that Goethe had learned to value so highly, but who presented human beings in his plays. We may say that a revolutionary cultural mood came to life in Goethe, now baptized in the name of Shakespeare, which we may express thus: I want to comprehend what constitutes the human being himself, not how he is put into the interrelationships of the world by formal rules and laws, or by the network of unities of situation, time, place, and action.

In this regard, he was able to become acquainted with men then in Strassburg who sought to look into the deeper and more intimate aspects of the life of the soul. One of them was the remarkable Jung-Stilling,¹⁵ for example, who was studying the occult aspects of the life of the soul and knew how to describe them thoroughly. His life history, his description of what he calls the “gray man” who rules in the subterranean sphere of the earth, belongs among the finest descriptions of occult relationships. It may be said that Goethe was introduced by Herder to all that belongs to the life of nature and history, the aesthetic in life, and by Jung-Stilling to the occult aspects of human life, with which he had already familiarized himself in Frankfurt through an exhaustive study of Swedenborg.¹⁶

Such ideas fermented in Goethe's mind in connection with what had been passed on to him as the laws of nature while he was attending lectures on the sciences in Strassburg. Then he began to see the great problems and questions of human life. He looked deeply into what can be cognized and what can be willed by man, and into the relation between human nature and universal nature. Earlier in Frankfurt he had become acquainted with the work of Paracelsus¹⁷ in connection with all this. And thus, a profound longing to perceive “every working force and seed” took a hold of him, especially in Strassburg along with all that he otherwise experienced there.

It must not be imagined that, in Strassburg, Goethe simply trifled away his time during his frequent visits to the pastor's home in Sesenheim,¹⁸ although I certainly do not want to deprecate the importance of these visits. He was always capable of uniting life in the depths of man's will and cognition with life in association with the immediately human and ordinary, and with every human destiny.

After he had defended his dissertation, he became a sort of Doctor of Jurisprudence—Licentiate¹⁹ and Doctor of Jurisprudence. He thereby satisfied his father and could return home. The practice of law began, but there was a notable disharmony in the soul of this man who had to study legal documents at the Supreme Court in Wetzlar that were often literally hundreds of years old. There “law and rights like an endless illness” dragged along their weary way. Even in later times much of this sort of thing could still be experienced elsewhere. In a place where I grew up—permit me to interject this—I was able to experience the following. In the 1870s when I was a boy, we once heard that a man was to be imprisoned—in the seventies! He was a much respected man who had a rather large business for such a place. He was imprisoned for a year and a half, I think, because in 1848 he had thrown stones at an inn during the revolution! The lawsuit had actually continued from 1848 when, as a young boy, this person had thrown stones at an inn, until his present age. In 1873 he was imprisoned for a year and a half. It was, perhaps, not so bad then as when Goethe studied the documents at the Supreme Court, but it was still bad enough.

Goethe's work gave his father immense pleasure, and he shared with counsel and help the problems Goethe had to solve with the dusty documents. This is not to say, however, that Goethe was lacking in skill as a lawyer. That was by no means the case. He made his contribution as an attorney and his work at that time belies the recurring belief that a great spirit, living in the world of ideals, must be deficient in practical life. He was not at all lacking as an attorney. When lawyers these days point to their busy schedules and call attention to the fact that they have no time to read Goethe's works, one should point out to them that Goethe was unquestionably just as good a lawyer as they. That can be documented, as can many things related to his work. But in addition to being just as practical as only a practical man can be, Goethe at this time also carried within him the idea for his book, Götz von Berlichingen.²⁰ Indeed, he bore within him the idea for his Faust, too, which had already emerged in Frankfurt from his scientific studies and later from his acquaintance with Herder and Jung-Stilling.

Götz von Berlichingen—Gottfried von Berlichingen—evidences at once, as Goethe forms it into a work of art, what his own nature really was. Goethe's way of being introduces a new element into the intellectual activity of humanity. As artist or poet, he cannot be compared with Dante, Homer, or Shakespeare. He stands in a different relationship to poetic creation, and this is bound up, in turn, with the way his mode of being relates to the age in which he lives. This age, as it was expressed in his immediate, and also in his more comprehensive, environment, did not permit such a spirit as his to blend wholly with the period. The life of the state that we today take for granted did not exist around him. After all, he lived in a region where certain territories had, to a high degree, taken on individual forms. How this came about is not important, but he did not live in a large state. No great all-encompassing conformity spread over the area where he lived and grew up. The life about him was not narrowly organized and thus he could experience it everywhere in its individual manifestations and simultaneously expose himself to its universal meaning. And this is what distinguishes Goethe from other poets.

One day a book came into his hands that is, indeed, badly written but that interested him immensely. It was Autobiography of the Iron-handed Gottfried of Berlichingen, which dealt with that strange individual who participated in so many events of the sixteenth century, but whose part in them was of such a peculiar nature. When we read this autobiography, we see how, under the Emperor Maximilian and Charles the Fifth, he came into contact with every possible kind of person and took part in every possible kind of quarrel and battle during the first half of the century.

His activities, however, always come about in such a way that he takes part in one event, is wholly involved in it and expresses himself completely therein. Then he becomes involved in another event in an entirely different role; he is drawn into that, fights for the most varied issues, and is later captured. After he has bound himself by an oath not to take any further part in quarrels and is thereby left at peace in his castle in middle South Germany, he becomes involved in the peasant uprising. All this, however, occurs in such a way that we see he is never forced by the events; but what holds these disparate episodes together is really his personality, the character of Gottfried himself. When one reads the autobiography of this man, I will not say that the events in which he is involved bore one to death, but we are not really interested in his quarrels and battles. Yet, in spite of all the boredom of the single events, we are always interested in his personality, so strong in character and so rich in content.

These traits, however, are just what attracted Goethe to Gottfried of Berlichingen. Thus, he could see the substance, the life, and the struggle of the sixteenth century concentrated in one personality as he could never otherwise have seen it. This was what he needed. To him, this meant taking up history and becoming acquainted with it. The way in which one or another historian, after having searched through attics and wastebaskets, telescopes together in a few “pragmatic maxims”²¹ individual historical periods would certainly not have suited Goethe. But to see a man standing alive in the midst of it, to see reflected in a human soul what is otherwise not of special interest, this had some meaning for him. He took this tedious, badly written autobiography of Gottfried of Berlichingen, read it, and really changed its content remarkably little. For this reason, he called the first version of this drama, if we choose so to designate it, The History of Gottfried of Berlichingen with the Iron Hand, Dramatized. He did not use the term drama, but dramatized. He had really only dramatized the history of Gottfried of Berlichingen, but in such a way that the whole period became alive through this man. Bear in mind, it was the sixteenth century, the time of the dawn of the post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe perceived this time through the character of Gottfried of Berlichingen, the man who grew up in middle South Germany.

At that time a fragment of life had already passed through Goethe's mind that is historical but seen really within actual life, not in what is “historic.” It would not have been possible for him then, with all those problems of humanity in his mind to which I have alluded, to take just any individual and dramatize his life according to history. However, to dramatize the stammering autobiography of a being who worked upon him with complete humanness in such a way that it would reflect the dramatic art as revealed to him through the reading of Shakespeare, that was something he could do. So he became known in certain circles that were interested in this sort of thing since he had lifted a fragment of the past, which was a book sealed with seven seals, into his own present world. Of course, just as little was then known about what Goethe disclosed by means of the badly written history of Gottfried of the Sixteenth Century as is known today by many a pastor about the super-sensible life.

Goethe had taken hold of human life. He had to, since his life style was one that made him blend with life as it revealed itself directly to him. To be sure, he continued to stand on an isolated pedestal, but as life touched him, he became one with it.

Goethe was to be brought into union with life in still another way. There is little conception today of something that constituted a profound trait of the soul life in the so-called cultured world surrounding Goethe. People had become bound, as it were, to what had come about since the sixteenth century. In public life, the laws and statutes had been handed down like an inherited disease,²² but the souls of men were, nevertheless, touched in a certain way by what we recognize as the impulse of souls of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The result was that, for the most deeply endowed natures, a profound disharmony ensued between what they sensed within the soul and what took place in the external world. This, to be sure, led to a marked sentimentality in experience.

To sense as strongly as possible how wide the gulf was between the actual world and what a true and warm human soul could feel, to express this contrast with all possible emphasis, was felt by many to be a profound necessity. The eye was directed toward the life of the world in which various ranks of society and the people with their various interests lived. But they often had little soul contact with each other in this public life. Yet, when these human beings were alone, they sought for a special life of the soul existing apart from external life, and for them to be able to say to themselves that this external life was wholly unlike all that the soul would strive after and hope for was felt to be a great relief. To get into such a sentimental mood was a characteristic of the age. Life, as it was publicly manifest, was felt to be bad and defective. People strove to search for life where it had not been besmirched by indifferent public existence, and where they could really enter in a vital way into the silent working and weaving of the world of nature, the peaceful life of animals and plants.

From this a mood gradually arose that affected many cultured spirits. To be able to weep over the disharmonies of the world afforded a tremendous satisfaction. Those writers were especially honored whose works tended to induce a flood of tears to fall upon the pages that were being read. To be unhappy constituted for many the very happiness for which they longed. Someone takes a walk in the forest; he then returns and, sitting quite still in his room, reflects: “How many, many little flowers and tiny worms that I did not notice and trod under foot have sacrificed their lives to this walk of mine!” Then he weeps hot tears into his handkerchief over the discord between nature and human life. Letters written to beloved friends who were as sentimental as the writer begin with such expressions as “Dearly beloved Friend,” and this, too, is moistened by a tear that falls on the paper and hastens away with the letter as a precious testimony to the friend.

This life still permeated a large part of the cultured world in the second half of the eighteenth century. It also surrounded Goethe, and he had much understanding of it, for there was much truth in this feeling of the disharmony between the frequently unconscious or vague feelings of the soul and what was afforded by the outer world, and Goethe could feel the truth in it. In those days, the silent plan of life between souls was not at all similar to what took place in the world as a whole. He had to go through this because he could be, and needed to be, touched by everything. But, in his contact with these things, he had to draw health-giving forces from his inner self repeatedly.

And thus in his youthful novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, he wrote himself free of this whole temper of the age, which we call Siegwart,²³ or Werther, fever, and which had taken possession of a large part of educated society. In the figure of Werther he concealed to such a degree as to come near to suicide what he had shared of this sentimental mood and the disharmonies of the world. It is for this reason that he has Werther end his life through suicide. It is well to consider that, on the one hand, it was possible for Goethe to be bound up with everything in the souls of those about him, even though he was so firmly rooted in his own individuality. On the other hand, what he was writing about cleansed his soul and at the same time became a work of art. After he had finished Werther, he was completely cured of him, whereas in many cases other persons were only then possessed because through the influence of the Werther, Werther fever raged in the most widespread circles. Goethe, however, was cured.

In estimating such things, we must not overlook the fact that Goethe possessed a broad inner horizon so that he could, in a sense, live within himself in polaric contrasts. He went through the Werther sickness and wrote himself free of it through The Sorrows of Young Werther. Yet, there is truth in what he wrote to a friend at that time. He sketched a picture of his loftily sentimental mood, but also said there was a Goethe other than the suicidal Goethe who harbored thoughts of hanging himself and who entertained thoughts for which he ought to be hanged. There was also a carnival Goethe,²⁴ who could put on all sorts of masks and disguises, and this Goethe also really lived artistically. We need only allow the more or less fragmentary dramatic creations of that time, Satyros and Pater Brey, to work upon us, and we shall be able to sense the scope of his inner life: on the one hand, the sentimentality of Werther, on the other, the humor of the Satyros and Pater Brey.

Satyros, the deified forest devil who develops a veritable pantheism and does not enjoy the fruits of culture, wants to return to nature in genuine Rousseau fashion. Raw chestnuts—what a royal repast! Such is the ideal of Satyros. But he is really a philosopher of nature who is quite familiar with its secrets, and—if you will excuse me—he wins his followers especially among women, is deified, but finally behaves quite badly. Here all false yearning after authoritarian belief is ridiculed with immense humor. Then in Pater Brey we see the cult of false prophets play a part and, under the mask of holiness, do all kinds of things. This, indeed, is not ridiculed but objectively presented with much humor. Here Goethe is a humorist in the most vital sense—a blunt humorist, expressing it all from the same constitution of soul that created Werther. He was able to do this not because he was superficial but because he was profound enough to grasp the polarities of human life.

Especially the Werther book gained Goethe a far-reaching reputation. It became well-known rather early,²⁵ and it was really this work that led the Archduke of Weimar to take an interest in him. The Gottfried of Berlichingen made a decided impression, but not among those who then considered themselves capable of understanding culture, art, and poetry. “An abominable imitation of bad English works; a disgusting platitude,” said an eminent man of the time about this book.²⁶

It was in 1775 that Goethe was able to transfer his activities to a different field of operation, to Weimar. The Duke of Weimar²⁷ became acquainted with Goethe and called him there, where he became the minister of state.

Nowadays, after the event, people have the feeling that Goethe had already written the Gottfried of Berlichingen, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and even carried with him to Weimar a large part of his Faust; they see in all this his most important accomplishment. He himself did not consider them to be of first importance at that time, but they were only the scrapings of his life. The Duke, likewise, did not appoint him court poet, but minister of state, which caused the pedants in Weimar to be beside themselves with anger. The Duke had to address a sort of epistolary decree to his people in which he justified himself by saying that Goethe was in his eyes simply a greater man than the pedants. The fact that he was made minister of state without having been previously—what shall I say?—under-councillor and upper-councillor, required at least some justification from the Duke, and that is what he produced.

Goethe was by no means a bad statesman and performed his ministerial duties not as part time work, but as matters of first importance. He was a far better statesman than many a minister who was not a Goethe in our sense. Anyone who personally convinces himself—as I may say with all modesty that I have done—of the way in which he performed his ministerial obligations will know that he was an excellent minister for the Duchy of Sachsen-Weimar and was completely devoted to his duties. Being a minister was his chief occupation, and he achieved a good deal during his ten years in this capacity.

He had brought with him a part of his Faust, which is listed in the collected works under the delectable title, The Primordial Faust (Ur-Faust). All that we might call the upward vision of Faust was already alive in this version. How directly had Faust been taken from the life that touches every human soul!

In Weimar it was evident again that Goethe could not be completely captured by his environment. We often become acquainted with persons who are, in greater or lesser degree, merely the exponents of their files. Goethe, however, was not merely the exponent of the numerous documents he drew up as a Weimar functionary. In addition, he acclimated himself to the conditions in Weimar and, even though he remained on his isolated pedestal, he was nevertheless touched by everything human. The immediately human took form with him as art. Thus we see how the character of a woman, Frau von Stein,²⁸ with whom he formed a friendship, became a life problem for him. It was fundamentally his immediate view of her character that was the cause of his dramatizing the figure of Iphigenia. He wished to put into artistic form what worked on him in the character of Frau von Stein, and the legend of Iphigenia was only the means for solving this life problem. The relationships at the Weimar court, his life with Duke Karl August, whose character was so strangely endowed, his view of the fate of the Duchess, and other connected circumstances, all became problems to him. Life became a question. He again needed a subject in order to master these relationships in an artistic way, and to do so he took that of Tasso. It was, however, really the Weimar situation that he artistically mastered.

It is, of course, impossible to enter here into the many details of Goethe's mental life, yet I wish to place these facts before you in order that we may form a spiritual scientific contact with them as examples. Even in the most early period of his stay in Weimar, through the various circumstances into which he was brought, the possibility arose of deepening his studies in natural science by independent work. He continued his plant studies and began anatomical studies at the University of Jena. He endeavored in everything to confirm in detail the ideas of the universal interrelationships he had received from Herder. He wished to study the connections within the plant kingdom and what was spiritually alive in plants. He wished to hold the kinship among the animals before his mind and to find the path upward from them to man. He wished to study the idea of evolution in direct connection with actual natural objects. You see, Goethe had taken up Herder's great idea to study the evolutionary phrases of all entities, a unitary spiritual process of becoming. In this thought he and Herder then stood practically alone because those who dominated the intellectual life of the time thought quite otherwise; everything was pigeonholed.

All intellectual activity can be found to work in two polaric directions: toward separation and toward union. It was important for Goethe and Herder to bring unity into diversity and multiplicity; others were simply content with neat classifications and clever division. For these people, the problem was to show, for example, how man is distinguished from the animal. Man, it was said, has no intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw in which the incisors are rooted, but only a unitary jawbone; only the animals have an intermaxillary bone. Goethe was certainly not materialistically inclined, and he had no desire to establish materialism. The thought, however, that the inner harmony of nature could not be confirmed because of such a detail offended his intelligence. He therefore undertook to prove, in opposition to all scientific authorities, that man also has an intermaxillary bone, and he succeeded. He thus arrived at his first important scientific treatise entitled, An Intermaxillary Bone Is to Be Ascribed to Man as Well as to the Animal.²⁹ He had thereby introduced a single detail into the evolution of thought with which he opposed the entire scientific world, and which is now an obvious, undisputed truth.

Goethe appears, not as the poet of Werther, of Gottfried, and of Faust, or as the poet in whose head Iphigenia and Tasso came into being, but as one possessing a profound insight into the interrelationships of nature, so that he now studies and labors as a genuine research scientist. We have here, not a one-sided scientist, poet, or minister; he is a complete human being aspiring in all directions.

Goethe lived in Weimar for about ten years and then could no longer suppress his yearning to go to Italy. So in the late eighties he undertook a journey to Italy as if it were an escape. We must not forget that he then, for the first time, entered into situations that he had longed for and cherished from his earliest youth. This was his first introduction to the world at large; you must remember that he had never before seen any other large city except Frankfurt. We must also not forget that Rome was the first city through which he viewed the theater of world history. This must be included in his life and also that he felt the whole stream of life pulsating in Rome as it had risen in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Goethe united what then worked upon him as world history with the comprehensive world conception germinating in his mind. He traced the idea throughout the multiplicity of forms of plants, stones, and animals he had compared, and now followed them over the Apennine peninsula. He endeavored to confirm the idea of the "archetypal plant" over the broadest area and was able to do so. Every stone and plant interested him. How the multifold comes into form as the unit, this he allowed to work upon him.

Goethe also exposed himself to the influence of the great works of art, which revealed to him ancient Hellenism in its last feeble outgrowth. As he directed his objective glance over the multiplicity of nature, so also could he feel in the depths of his soul all the intimacies of the great art of the Renaissance. One need only read the words he spoke upon viewing Raphael's Saint Cecilia in Bologna, how, as he looked at it, he experienced in a wonderfully profound and intense manner all those feelings that lead man out of the sensory world into the super-sensible. One need only read in his Journey to Italy how, as he gradually deepened his ideas of nature, he sensed in the presence of works of art that man really creates such works only when art works creatively from the depths of life. Greek art, he said, now became clear to him: “I have an intimation that they proceed according to the same laws by which nature proceeds and which I am tracing,”³⁰ and “These lofty works of art, being also the highest works of nature, have been created by man according to true and natural laws. Everything arbitrary, all mere fancy, falls away; there³¹ So he wrote to his Weimar friends.

Goethe took into himself something stupendous, and what he had previously felt and surmised now took form. Scenes of great importance in his Faust were composed at this time in Rome. Iphigenia and Tasso had already been sketched and partly completed in Weimar. Now he rewrote them in verse. As he exposed himself constantly to classic works of art, he was now able to find the classic style that he wished to pour into these works. This was a regeneration, an actual rebirth of the soul, that he experienced in Italy. Thus, something peculiar now took form in his soul. He sensed a profound contrast between the aspirations of his age in what he had observed in his environment and what he had learned to feel as the loftiest expression of the purely human.

Goethe returned to Weimar to the world where works had been produced that entranced everybody. Schiller's The Robbers,³² Heinse's Ardinghello, and other such literary reproductions seemed to him barbaric stuff; they contradicted everything that was now rooted and living in his soul. He felt within like an utterly lonely person and had, indeed, been almost completely forgotten when a path was opened for the friendship with Schiller.³³ The approach was difficult because nothing was more repugnant to him when he first returned than Schiller's youthful works. But the two men discovered one another, and in such a way as to establish a bond of friendship almost without counterpart in history. They stimulated one another, and Hermann Grimm rightly remarks that in their relationship we have, not only Goethe plus Schiller, but Schiller plus Goethe as well.³⁴ Each became something different through the other; each enriched the other.

Profound, all-embracing human problems arose in the soul of Goethe and Schiller. What had to be resolved by the world in a political way—the vast problem of human freedom—was present before their minds as a spiritually human problem. Others gave much thought to the question of how an external institution that would guarantee man freedom in his life could be established in the world, but to Schiller the problem was: how does man find freedom within his own soul? He devoted himself to this problem in developing his unique work, Letters Regarding the Aesthetic Education of Humanity. For Schiller the question was how man guides his soul above himself, from the ordinary status of life to a higher status. Man stands, on the one hand, within sensory nature, said Schiller; on the other, he stands face to face with the realm of logic. In neither is he free. He becomes free when he enjoys and creates aesthetically, when his thoughts develop in such a way that they are under compulsion, not of logic, but of taste and inclination, and at the same time, free of the sensible. Schiller demanded a middle position.

These Letters Regarding the Aesthetic Education of Humanity of Schiller belong among mankind's most cultivated writings. But it was a question, a human riddle, that he and Goethe had faced in thought. Goethe could not penetrate this problem philosophically in abstract thoughts as Schiller had done. He had to attack it in a living way, and he resolved it comprehensively in his own way in the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. When Schiller undertook to show philosophically how man ascends from ordinary life to a higher life, Goethe undertook to show in his fairy tale, through the interplay of spiritual forces in the human soul, how man evolves spiritually from an everyday soul life to a higher one. What Schiller brought to light in a philosophic, abstract way, Goethe presented it in a magnificent visible form in this fairy tale. This he attached to a description of external life in his novel-like piece Conversations of German Emigrants. There really came to life in the inspired friendship between Goethe and Schiller all that man proposes to himself in riddling questions about life, and that is related to Faust's explanation of why he turned to a magic interpretation of the world:

[That I might]
Her vital powers, her embryo seeds, survey,
And fling the trade in empty words away.³⁵

Whoever penetrates the intellectual exchanges between Goethe and Schiller and sees what at that time came to life in the spirit of these two men receives through it as yet unrecognized and unrealized spiritual treasure—a treasure which manifests the aspirations of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch in an extraordinary manner. The innermost concern of the two was manifested through the way in which Schiller undertook to solve the riddle of man philosophically in his Aesthetic Letters, the way Goethe addressed himself to the realm of color in order to oppose Newton, and the ways he depicts the evolution of the human soul in the fairy tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. All this comprises comprehensive questions that were destined, it would seem, to be of vital concern to but a few people.

Even though we have wished thus far to touch only upon such facts as bear upon the life of Goethe, it must also be remarked that, although many people nowadays believe they are capable of speaking about him, for many this Goethe period belongs to the past and is a book sealed with seven seals. In a certain sense, we may really feel pleased when someone is quite honest about this. It was, of course, narrow-minded of the famous scientist Dubois-Reymond³⁶ to deliver his discourse Goethe and No End. The same man, a rector of a university, who had previously described the limitations of a knowledge of nature and had made so many remarkable physiological discoveries, delivered his discourse on Goethe and No End! His remarks were narrow-minded because they arose from the opinion: “Yes, so many people talk about one who, after all, was only a dilettante; Goethe, the universal dilettante, is forever the subject of discussion. But how much have we since acquired about which he was, of course, totally ignorant—the cell theory, for example, the theory of electricity and advances in physiology!” All that was present in Dubois-Reymond's mind. “What was Goethe in comparison? People talk about his Faust as if he had given us an ideal of humanity.”

Dubois-Reymond cannot see that Goethe really did set before us an ideal for humanity. He asks: “Would it not have been better to make Faust greater than Goethe made him and more useful for humanity? Goethe places before us a wretched fellow”—Dubois-Reymond did not use this expression but what he says is approximately the same—“a wretched fellow who cannot even master his own inner problems. Then, if Faust had been a virtuous fellow, he would have married Gretchen instead of seducing her; he would have invented the electric generator and the air pump and have become a famous professor.” He says quite literally that if Faust had been a decent man, he would have married Gretchen and not seduced her. He would have invented the generator and air pump and would have performed other services for humanity and not have become such a debauched genius who got involved in all sorts of spiritistic nonsense.

Such a rectoral address, heard at the close of the nineteenth century, was certainly narrow-minded. Yet at least it is honest. We could wish that such honesty might appear more often; it is delightful because it corresponds with the truth. Thrice mendacious, however, is much of the laudation for Goethe and Faust that is brought forth by people who are happy “only when they find earthworms.” The quotations from Goethe that we often hear are really only spiritual earthworms even though they are Goethe's own words.

Precisely through the relationship of our time with such a spirit as Goethe's is it possible to study the deep untruth of the present age. Many people do nothing more than “trade in words,”³⁷ even trade in the very words of Goethe, whereas his world conception contains an element of everything that leads to and must come to birth in the future evolution of mankind. As we have already suggested, this element not only unites with spiritual science, but is by its very nature already tied to spiritual science.

• 1. These words are spoken by Faust's student Wagner in Faust, Part I, lines 570–573. The German text reads as follows:
  
  Verzeiht: Es ist ein gross Ergotzen
  Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen
  zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,
  und wie wir's dann so herrlich weit gebracht.
  
  
  The German word "Ergötzen" connotes a passive and fleeting delight and is a contrast to the activating joy (“Erquickung“) Faust experienced in line 568. Wagner's conclusion in line 573 symbolizes the shallow optimism of the materialistic Enlightenment. Wagner himself is incapable of true spiritual perception.
  
  Except when noted otherwise, quotations of Goethe's works are from translations by Ann Swanwick.
• 2. Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), Swedish physicist, chemist, and astronomer, was the author of Die Vorstellungen vom Weltgebdude im Wandel der Zeiten [Conceptions of the Structure of the World in the Changing Course of the Ages] (Leipzig, 1908). The foreword of this book contains the quote from Faust.
• 3. See Goethe's Poetry and Truth, IV.
• 4. Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–1766) was a writer and a Professor of Literature in Leipzig. He is best known for his efforts to reform the German theater and for having established rules for drama that conformed to French models.
• 5. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) was the foremost poet and critic of the German Enlightenment.
• 6. Christian Fiirchtegott Gellert (1715–1769) was a Prussian poet of the German Enlightenment.
• 7. Faust, Part I, lines 1-3. Faust reviews his past education and questions his knowledge.
• 8. The translation is from Walter Kaufmann, Goethe's Faust (Anchor Books: 1963), p. 95. This pronouncement in the third scene of Part I, lines 382–383, reveals Faust's search for a cohesive spiritual force that holds the universe together. Later in the poem he admits that he has been seeking this knowledge through alchemy.
• 9. Lines 384–385 in Faust, Part I; cf. footnotes 8 and 35. The German word “Samen“ [seed] refers to a term used in alchemy, but it is not certain that the word “Wirkungskraft“ [working force] does. Some scholars think Goethe invented the word.
• 10. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a famous German theologian and cultural philosopher.
• 11. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77) was a Dutch philosopher, a rationalist, and a monist. His Ethics, published posthumously in 1677, exerted a profound influence on Goethe.
• 12. In the introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings I (1883), pp. LV-LVIII, Rudolf Steiner depicts Goethe's relationship to Spinoza. Fritz Jacobi helped to deepen Goethe's knowledge of Spinoza's philosophy in the summer of 1774. After Goethe and Herder had renewed their friendship in Weimar, the two men and Frau von Stein studied Spinoza together. Goethe the Scientist (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1950).
• 13. William Shakespeare (1564–1616).
• 14. Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) established a theory of French tragedy. Jean Baptiste Racine (1639–1699) was a famous writer of French classical tragedy.
• 15. Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817) was a German physician and writer.
• 16. Emanuel von Swedenborg (1688–1772) was a Swedish natural scientist and theosopher.
• 17. Paracelsus, Theophrastus von Hohenheim (1493–1541) was a Swiss physician, natural scientist and alchemist.
• 18. The reference is to Goethe's relationship with the pastor's daughter, Friederike Brion (1752–1813).
• 19. Goethe received the degree of “Licentiate of Law,“ a title which in Germany was regarded as being equal to the doctorate. From then on, Goethe used the title, “Doctor juris.“
• 20. Götz von Berlichingen (1480–1562) came from an old Swabian family. He became the leader of the peasant uprising in 1525, fought against the Turks in 1542, and against France in 1544. His autobiography was published in 1731.
• 21. The reference is to Faust, Part I, line 584: “mit trefflichen Maximen.“ Faust, in lines 575–585, replies to Wagner's remarks (cf. footnote 1):
  
  My friend, the times that antecede
  Our own are books safely protected
  by seven seals. What spirit of the time you call
  Is but the scholar's spirit, after all,
  In which times past are now reflected.
  In truth, it is often pathetic,
  And when one sees it, one would run away:
  A garbage pail, perhaps a storage attic
  At best a pompous moralistic play
  With wonderfully edifying quips,
  Most suitable to come from puppets' lips.
  
  
  The translation of these lines is by Walter Kaufman (cf. footnote 8); he renders “pragmatic maxims“ with “edifying quips.“
• 22. Faust, Part I, lines 1972–1975, trans. by Walter Kaufmann. Mephisto says to the freshman student:
  
  The laws and statutes of a nation
  Are an inherited disease,
  From generation unto generation
  And place to place they drag on by degrees.
• 23. Siegwart, a sentimental novel by Johann Martin Miller, was published 1776, two years after Goethe's Werther, and immediately became a best seller.
• 24. The reference is to Goethe's letter from Frankfurt to Countess Auguste von Stollberg-Stollberg, dated February 13, 1775.
• 25. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther was published in 1774. One year later, Goethe received Duke Kark August's invitation to Weimar and arrived there on November 7, 1775.
• 26. Frederick the Great in De la litterature alemande (1780).
• 27. Karl August, Duke of Weimar (1757–1828), son of Duchess Anna Amalia.
• 28. Charlotte Freifrau von Stein (1742–1827).
• 29. This treatise was written in 1784 and was published in Jena in 1786.
• 30. Goethe's letter from Rome, dated January 28, 1787.
• 31. Goethe's letter from Rome, dated September 6, 1787.
• 32. The Robbers had been published in 1781. In his Glückliches Ereignis [Happy Event] (1817), Goethe writes: “After my return from Italy, where I had endeavored to educate myself to a more definite and pure understanding of all branches of the arts and where I did not care what in those days was going on in Germany, I discovered that some recent, as well as some older, poetic works were in high repute and had widespread appeal. Unfortunately, they included some works that I found extremely disgusting such as Heinse's Ardinghello and Schiller's The Robbers.“
• 33. Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) was a dramatist, poet and historian and is regarded as one of the greatest German literary figures.
• 34. Hermann Grimm in the 21st “Goethe“ lecture: “When two superbly gifted men combine in common endeavors, their strength is not doubled but multiplied fourfold. Each one has the other invisibly next to himself. The formula would not read G + S, but (G + S) + (S + G). The strength of one accrues to the strength of the other.“
• 35 Faust, Part I, lines 384–385. The German text reads as follows:
  
  
  Schau alle Wirkungskraft und Samen
  Und to nicht mehr in Worten kramen.
  
  
  The Kaufman translation (cf. footnote 9) of this passage, although preferable as a whole, leaves “Wirkungskraft und Samen“ [vital power and embryo seed] untranslated and renders the two lines as follows:
  
  
  Envisage the creative blazes
  Instead of rummaging in phrases.
  
  
  To do justice to Steiner's remarks, I have here used Ann Swanwick's translation of these two lines. (P.M.)
• 36. Emil Du Bois-Reymond (1818–96) was a physiologist in Berlin.
• 37. Cf. footnote 35.

When, after repeated requests, I decided to speak about some aspects of most recent history leading up to the present, I expressly stated that my concern was the understanding of the facts and that there was no question of entering into politics or anything to do with politics. I frequently repeated this statement. Despite this, it seems to me that a definite carelessness—not to use a stronger word—is gaining ground amongst us in this respect. People do not consider that when someone is speaking the truth with the intensity that has been the case, he has a right to claim that attention is also paid to the manner of its expression. It appears that here and there people have been speaking about these lectures as if they were political lectures. Lack of consideration has for a long time been the order of the day among some of our members—only a few, of course; I refer only to those who are meant. Everything I have said and repeated over and over again out of anxiety for our concerns has fallen on deaf ears in some quarters. It is perfectly apparent that again and again the matters we speak about here are reported to outsiders in the strangest manner.

As such, I have nothing against reports if they remain within the obvious bounds. But it is clear from various recent publications—among them a most scandalous compilation from the Vollrath camp—that matters are not reported in a manner befitting the way they are discussed here, but in a manner—perhaps from want of a better understanding—that enables the most horrible distortions to be fabricated. I know very well that the source of this is to be found in our midst, and if again and again I hold my peace and refrain from taking steps against those so-called members who behave in this way, it is out of love for our whole Movement and our whole Society. It is surely not possible to hold a constant succession of hearings. It would, however, be possible for members who understand what is going on, to approach in a suitable manner those of whom it is known that their attitude to the spiritual content given here is not what it ought to be. I do not even want to maintain—though sometimes it is indeed the case—that there is a direct lack of morality in people's behaviour, but there is certainly a lack of insight into the way one might behave. If someone wants to speak about what he has heard, it is incumbent upon him to ask himself with honest—let me say—self-knowledge, whether he has really understood it in a way which enables him to pass it on.

It is necessary, unfortunately, to draw attention to this from time to time. I assure you that I am not doing so without good reason. If things go on as they are, it will become necessary to remain silent about certain matters, and it is easy to see what would then become of our Movement. And a share in bringing this about would lie with those members who again and again fail to prevent themselves from using the most awful expressions which can then lead to frightful distortions. Surely it is not necessary to speak about these things in places where they can be overheard by people who do not belong amongst us, and to use expressions which might come easily to the tongue, but which in no way correspond to the whole purpose on which these lectures are founded!

I must admit that having decided after repeated requests to give these lectures, I can only view as entirely personal attacks the instances in which they have been described as ‘political lectures’.

Now that we have discussed the many considerations contained in the lectures of the past few weeks, it will today be possible to draw some of them together in order to throw light on aspects which can help us to understand what is happening today. I shall first endeavour to recount quite baldly, in the most external fashion, the historical sequence of events as they occurred, and then, on the basis of the insights gained over the past weeks, I will point out some of the deeper-lying causes. I want to state expressly that, particularly today, I shall attempt to weigh carefully every single expression so that each one provides an exact delineation within which the view it expresses can come to light. Let me start, then, by describing quite externally and briefly certain events, viewpoints and impulses.

As you of course all know, the present painful events have come about in connection with the murder in June 1914 of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne. This assassination was followed in the whole of Europe by a newspaper campaign which showed, in what might be called surging waves, the degree to which passions had been aroused in every quarter. All this led to the well-known ultimatum from the monarchy of Austria-Hungary to Serbia which, in the main, was rejected by Serbia; then on to the Austro-Serbian conflict which was intended by the leading Austrian statesmen to consist of a military entry into Serbia, without any annexation of Serbian territory, for the purpose of exerting military pressure in order to force an acceptance of the ultimatum. The purpose of the ultimatum was to prevent Serbia from inciting unrest against the stability of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy via Austria's southern Slav population.

As you know, Austria comprises quite a number of nations—there are thirteen recognized languages and many more than thirteen distinct peoples. In the southern region the population is Slav; more to the West are the Slovenian Slavs; to the East, adjacent to them, the Dalmatian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Serbo-Croat population; then also the various groups who live in the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina which were annexed by Austria in 1908, though occupied by her long before that. Serbia borders on the territories populated by these southern Slavs. Austria believed it could be proved—and evidence of this proof can be found all over the place by anyone who cares to seek it—that Serbia was inciting unrest with the aim of founding a Southern Slav kingdom under the sovereignty of Serbia and entailing the detachment of the southern Slav population of Austria.

At all costs the assassination of Franz Ferdinand had to be linked with these things, for the following reason: From 1867 onwards, the monarchy of Austria-Hungary was a dual state comprising, in accordance with a not very concise description ‘the kingdoms and lands represented in the Reichsrat’, and secondly ‘the lands of the Holy Crown of St Stephen’. Among the lands represented in the Reichsrat were Upper and Lower Austria, Salzburg, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and Istria, Dalmatia, Moravia, Bohemia and Silesia, Galicia, Lodomeria and Bukovina. To the lands of the Holy Crown of St Stephen belong first and foremost the Magyar regions to which was annexed what had formerly been Transylvania, which is inhabited by a number of peoples; further, Croatia and Slavonia, the latter enjoying a kind of limited self-government within the Hungarian state. A dual monarchy, in other words.

Now it was known that Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, wanted to overcome the drawbacks of the dualism of Austria-Hungary and replace this dualism with a ‘triadic’ reorganization. This triadic structure was to come about by making the southern Slav territories belonging to Austria self-governing, in the way the lands and kingdoms represented in the Reichsrat and also the lands of the Holy Crown of St Stephen were self-governing. This would have put a triadic structure in place of the existing dualism. You can see how, had it been realized, this would have led to an individualization of the separate southern Slav peoples within a kind of southern Slav community in the Austro-Slav regions. It would have meant a step closer to the aim of assimilating the western Slavs with western culture, thus working against what I have called Russianism in these lectures. This could quite well have worked out, for the structure of the Austrian state is entirely federalistic, not centralistic, and before the war it tended anyway increasingly to grant federal status to the different peoples. From 1867 to 1879 centralism was the aim; from 1879 onwards the efforts to centralize had to be seen as a failure, and from then on federalism was the aim.

In opposition to this were the efforts on the part of Serbia to found a confederation of southern Slavs under the hegemony of Serbia. This did not arise from within the Serbian people, but I have described to you how peoples are, in a way, led simply by means of suggestion. For this to happen, the southern Slav territories would, of course, have to be wrested from Austria-Hungary.

This concludes my brief summary of what lies behind the Austro-Serbian conflict. What I have just been telling you is all to do with the Austro-Serbian conflict. It is thinkable that this conflict could have been ‘localized’—I have used this expression once before. Had this come about—I am speaking hypothetically—the European world war would have been avoided. What would have happened if the strictly circumscribed intentions of the Austrian statesmen had been realized? Part of the Austro-Hungarian army would have marched into Serbia and stayed there until Serbia agreed to accept the ultimatum which would have quashed the possibility of a southern Slav conferation under Serbian hegemony, and, of course, Russian supremacy. If no other European power had interfered in this matter, if they had all done nothing more than stand to attention, as it were, then nothing would have taken place except the acceptance of this ultimatum. For Austria had guaranteed that she had no intention of annexing any parts of Serbian territory in any way. As a result, such assassinations as took place many times—that of Franz Ferdinand was only the last in a whole sequence incited by Serbian agitators—such assassinations would not have taken place, and without such agitation the establishment of a southern Slav confederation under the supremacy of Russia is, or rather would, of course, have been impossible. If events had taken this course—I speak hypothetically again—this war need never have broken out.

So what is the connection between this Austro-Serbian conflict and the World War? To comprehend this connection it is necessary to pass beyond an understanding of the external situation and, if I may say so, enter the deeper secrets of European politics. It is not politics we want to enter; we want to understand in our soul what it was that lived in these politics. I want to answer the question: How did a European conflict arise out of the Austro-Serbian conflict? What is the link between the Austro-Serbian question and the European question?

We must turn our attention to what I have just said about the southern Slav confederation. It was the British Empire, the more it took on a conscious form, that was interested in a southern Slav confederation, independent of Austria, but under the supremacy of Russia. In the societies I have mentioned it was the establishment of what was termed the Danube confederation—by which was meant this southern Slav confederation, which was to comprise the southern Slav peoples together with Romania and include the southern Slavs of Austria—that was expressly discussed. In the nineties of the nineteenth century we find everywhere in the occult schools of the West, under the direct influence of British occultists, indications that such a Danube confederation would have to come into being. Attempts were also made to manipulate the whole of European politics towards the creation of this Danube confederation, which would entail the relinquishing of the Austro-Slav territories.

Why was the British Empire interested in this Danube confederation, a project which was anti-Austrian and pro-Russian? The powers which have been in opposition to one another most strongly in recent times as a consequence of the imperialism which has broken out across the world, those powers which actually coexist with the greatest hostility, are the British Empire and the Russian Empire. Such hidden hostilities can indeed manifest outwardly as friendships and alliances. When there is such bitter hostility between countries outwardly coexisting peacefully, a certain consequence results from the fact that our earth has a specific characteristic: namely, that it is spherical in shape. If our earth were a flat plain stretching in all directions, such conflicts could not come about. But since our earth is round, not only do we eventually arrive back at our starting point if we walk long enough in a straight line, but something else also happens: Expanding empires come up against each other at a certain point, and when they collide they have to follow through with their opposing interests. This occurred between the British and the Russian Empires. Among many other situations, it became most obviously apparent when they collided with great force in Persia. The question was: Should Russia succeed in moving down against India and there gradually hem in the British Empire, or would the British Empire erect defences?

When your aim is to gain sovereignty, you can pursue it by means of war, or by other means, depending on which seems the most favourable. For the British Empire it seemed for the moment—in the case of states, only limited periods of time are reckoned with—more favourable to prevent Russia from proceeding against India by providing a different channel, by diverting her attention in another direction in which she could achieve the satisfaction of her natural ambition. Empires are always ambitious. This was to be brought about by conceding to Russia the sovereignty over the so-called Danube confederation. Thus the British Empire was indirectly interested in making the Danube confederation as extensive as possible, for the Slavs in the South wanted to belong together, and this feeling of belonging was stirred up in the way I have described to you. Thus the confederation of southern Slavs was to be played into Russia's hand so that she might withdraw her attention from other directions. This was why the confederation of southern Slavs, to be set up under Russian sovereignty, was in the British interest. It was a long story, prepared well beforehand.

Here we see one of the threads linking the Austro-Serbian question to the question of sovereignty on a world scale. This is how the whole relationship between the British and the Russian Empires was drawn into the matter. It was not a matter of Austria and Serbia, for the whole Austro-Serbian question necessarily became the question: Should Austria take the step towards a triadic structure, thus diverting the confederation of southern Slavs from its path, or should steps be taken towards a Russian-dominated southern Slav confederation? In this way the Austro-Serbian question became coupled with the European question.

When such situations exist—for what I have just described lived in human beings as absolutely real impulses—it is like an electric charge which will at some point have to be discharged. This, then, was one of the threads.

It is still, however, highly questionable whether the Austro-Serbian conflict would have led to the World War, if there had not been further aspects in addition to those we have just discussed. Indeed, it is highly unlikely that it would have done, if there had been no other causes. But there were plenty of other impulses, all of which reinforced the situation. First and foremost among these was the Franco-Russian alliance within the general European situation. This Franco-Russian alliance had existed since the nineties of the nineteenth century and, looking at the situation objectively, it could not have been more unnatural. No one will doubt that France had entered into this alliance with a view to winning back Alsace-Lorraine, for there is no other imaginable reason for this alliance. All other reasons would only have spoken against such an alliance. In the end, though, those other reasons carry little weight in comparison with the driving forces, for the fact is that an alliance such as this exists; through its very existence it represents a real force. It is there. Much more important than the actual aim of this alliance is the fact that here are a western and an eastern state who in combination constitute a monstrous military power. And between them lies Germany who could not but feel permanently threatened militarily by the scale of this combined French and Russian military might. It was this encirclement of Germany to West and East by the Franco-Russian alliance which became one of the driving forces in European affairs.

To discover further influences which played a part we must look at the following: In recent decades, imperialism has led to a general desire for expansion. You need only look, for instance, at the monstrous growth of the British Empire. Or think of France, whose territorial expansion over the last few decades has been incomparably greater than at any earlier time, when France, as she herself said, marched at the head of European civilization.

The events of recent decades have been like a chain reaction: In every case what came next could not have taken place without what had gone before. The most recent point of departure—of course we could go back further—lies in the British Empire's seizure of sovereignty over Egypt. For today's way of thinking it is perfectly reasonable to justify such an action by claiming the necessity of rounding off and securing one's assets. The expansion of British sovereignty over Egypt was justified by saying that a bridge to India was needed. The hope was that Arabia could be gained too, thus creating a direct link with India.

The expansion of the British Empire to include Egypt provided, to some extent, a protective barrier against any awkward expansion of the Russian Empire westwards; any such expansion westwards need not have harmed the British Empire to any great extent if Egypt had been able to provide the necessary link with India.

Now since the earth is spherical, there is insufficient territory for unlimited expansion outwards by empires because eventually they will clash. In consequence the expansion of one empire generates in the other an equal lust for expansion. Thus the expansion by France to include Morocco, in two stages in 1905 and 1911, was nothing other than a consequence of the expansion of the British Empire to include Egypt. The mutual recognition of these expansions—France's recognition of British dominion over Egypt and British recognition of France's dominion over Morocco—provided the threads with which an Entente Cordiale between the French and the British Empires could be spun. But because Germany was in the middle, efforts were made, as you know, to establish the Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria, Italy.

However, the distribution of Morocco and Egypt, and what followed this, meant that, at the Algeciras Conference, and particularly with the help of an elderly Italian politician who was well versed in these things, Italy was even then successfully drawn into the sphere of influence of the western entente between France and England. After the Algeciras Conference sensible people in Central Europe no longer believed that Italy would be able to remain faithful to the Triple Alliance. Because of the way she had behaved there had to be consequences for her, resulting from the seizure of Morocco by France. And the consequence was that Italy was permitted to establish herself in Tripoli. In effect this meant that Italy had been given permission by the West to wage war on Turkey. So Egypt led to Morocco, and Morocco to Tripoli. Then, because Tripoli meant a new weakening of the Turkish position, Tripoli led to the Balkan War. These events took place like a chain reaction, Egypt-Morocco-Tripoli-Balkan War; each is unthinkable without its predecessor.

Turkey having been weakened by the Italo-Turkish, or Tripoli War, the southern Slav peoples, with the others in their wake, and also the Greek peoples, believed themselves strong enough to win the Balkan peninsula for themselves. As a result of this, the trend towards a southern Slav confederation became linked with the national aspirations of the Balkan countries. The linking of these two chains gave the Balkan War an outcome in which Serbia was the strongest winner. Serbia has grown very powerful, incomparably more so than she was before. In consequence there came a revival of the ideal of founding the southern Slav confederation under the hegemony of Serbia and the overall sovereignty of Russia. This led to the agitations which culminated in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, which in turn led to the Austro-Serbian War. Now we have brought the two links together: The Austro-Serbian question was linked with the European question as a consequence of the whole historical process.

Those who followed these events with understanding were able to see under these circumstances many years ahead to the coming war, hanging like a sword of Damocles over European culture and civilization. Wherever these things were discussed you could hear how people realized that Russia's pretensions would lead to a conflict between Central and Eastern Europe. This conflict was inevitable. No one who studies the realities of history will say that this conflict between Central and Eastern Europe was not based on what may be called a spiritual necessity. Just as in ancient times conflict arose between the Roman and the Germanic peoples, so in modern times there had to be conflict between Central and Eastern Europe. There were manifold forms it could have taken, but conflict there had to be. Everything else, in so far as it had to do with the East, was included in this conflict.

It was the pretensions of Russianism that led to the expectation that somewhere or other these pretensions would lead to an attempt by Russia to impose sovereignty on the Balkan league. This was expected. The geographical situation made it inevitable that there would be a clash between Russia and Austria. And when this clash occurred—so said all those who had been contemplating these things over the years—everything else would automatically follow.

How, it was asked, would the situation be shaped by the existing structure of alliances at the moment of Russia's attack on Austria? Obviously no one expected Austria to attack Russia of her own accord. This was unthinkable; Austria could not possibly find herself in a position to launch an attack on Russia. It had to be supposed, therefore, that matters would arrange themselves in a way that would enable Russia to attack Austria. Well and good! Because of the alliance between Austria and Germany, Germany could be expected to stand by Austria and attack Russia in her turn. And as a result of Germany's attack on Russia—I am telling you what was presumed—the Franco-Russian alliance would come into action. France would be obliged to take Russia's side and attack Germany. And because of the relationship between France and England—whether laid down in a treaty or not—England would have to join in the attack on the side of Russia and France. These things were foreseen. The structure of treaties and alliances would automatically lead to a sequence of events.

In the end, the sequence was not quite what had been expected by those who concerned themselves day in, day out, with the future of Europe. What form did it take? Let us see. I have already described to you the history of the ultimatum, the rejection of the ultimatum, the resulting insistence by Austria on acceptance of the ultimatum. But the European powers did not remain indifferent to all this, for Russia immediately made ready to enter the fray as Serbia's protector. This made the localization of the Austro-Serbian question unthinkable. From the British quarter came all sorts of meaningless suggestions of the kind made by those who either want to take a hand in affairs without thinking things through properly, or who want to build up for themselves from the start a world-wide reputation of having endeavoured to settle the matter by peaceful means. This is not actually the aim, but it has to be possible later on to say that it was.

So the meaningless suggestion was made to call a conference made up, of all things, of England, Germany, France and Italy, to decide about the questions pending. Just imagine what would have been the outcome of such a conference! A majority verdict would have been required on whether Austria's demands to Serbia were justified or not. On the basis of the real situation, imagine, please, how the voting would have gone! Italy had inwardly deserted the Triple Alliance, France was on Russia's side, Russia was obviously only satisfied if Austria was refused the right to insist on acceptance of the ultimatum, England was in favour of the Danube confederation. Leaving aside Austria, the majority would have gone to Italy, France and England. Germany would obviously have been out-voted at all costs. This conference could not possibly have led to anything other than a refusal for what Austria, from her position, was compelled to demand. That means that if this conference had been held it would have been nothing but a farce, for Austria would either have been forced to give up her pretensions, or, regardless of the outcome of the conference, she would have continued to demand acceptance of the ultimatum. In other words, the conference would have been nothing but a bluff, as they say. A thorough study of the documentation reveals, however, that from the start Russia's pretension was to interfere in the Serbo-Austrian question. So it is really irrelevant whether the World War came about as the result of an automatic sequence of events or of deliberate scene-setting leading inevitably to the War.

It was the scene-setting that took place for, in addition to the various impulses, you must also take into account a quite particular mood. Maybe no other world event, no other historical event but this, has ever been quite so dependent on a certain mood. The mood of soul of those participating in the outbreak of the War at the end of July 1914 was certainly one of the most important causes. Of course there were also agitations at the outbreak of earlier wars, but they did not sweep in with such stormy, such hurricane force, as did the events between 24 July and 1 August 1914. Within a few days a monstrous agitation had gathered over the participants, an agitation in which was concentrated all the accumulated anxiety of the many years during which this coming event had been foreseen. This mood must definitely be taken into account. Those who do not do so can only speak in empty phrases.

All kinds of points could be brought in to characterize this mood, but I shall draw your attention to only one. An event had taken place which was indirectly, though in fact very strongly, connected with the outbreak of the War. If it is to be evaluated properly it will, and must, be seen in its proper place amongst the other events in Europe. This was the German defence bill, laid before Parliament after the Balkan War, which budgeted for an enlargement of the German army by means of a single large defence payment. This enlargement of the German army, which, by the way, was not anywhere near completion by the time the War broke out, can be studied by anyone in connection with the results of the Balkan War. These results showed that for an uncertain time in the future the clash between Russia and Austria was being manipulated. It was only because of certain situations, which I do not want to go into here, that Russia was prevented as early as 1913 from attacking Austria in order to gain sovereignty and dominion over the Balkan confederation. The enlargement of the German army was undertaken for no other reason—as I said, I am choosing my expressions very precisely today—than the threatened dispute with the East. Yet the French reaction followed promptly: If Germany is enlarging her army, then we must do something about strengthening ours. What this means is that the destiny, the inevitable necessity for Central Europe to take precautions with regard to the East, always produced reinforcements in the West, which naturally produced further reactions in their turn.

In this way matters progressed. In particular, everything connected with the defence bill after the Balkan War generated terrible anxiety in Central Europe because the whole of the European periphery was seen to have turned against Central Europe. Opinions differed only in the matter of Italy: Some still thought she would somehow throw in her lot with Central Europe, while others no longer held this to be possible.

Let us still assume—hypothetically—that the World War did not break out. There was only one precondition that could have prevented it. Russia would have had to refrain from immediate war threats—in other words mobilization, which under the prevailing circumstances could only be regarded as a war threat. Central Europe could not for one moment have thought that France would not go along with Russia, so an assault on two fronts had to be reckoned with. The only course of action open to those in positions of responsibility was to paralyse this assault in some way. No one in a responsible position could have thought: Let us spend the next fortnight at a conference! Not only could this conference have led absolutely nowhere, as I said, but it would have meant certain defeat. But no one can be expected to accept certain defeat from the outset. So the only possibility was to match the monstrous military superiority of West and East by means of speed.

For this the only possible course of action, as I showed earlier, was to violate international law and march through Belgium. Any other solution could only have led to the involvement of most of the German army in a long war of defence in the West while leaving the way open to invasion from the East. This was one of those historical moments at which—whether you can express it aptly or not—a state is forced to enter into a breach of the law in self-preservation. There is no other course of action open to those responsible for that state. In Central Europe it was—and I am choosing my words very carefully today in order to make my meaning quite clear—for some of those in responsible positions utterly monstrous to attempt war on two fronts at once.

So the attempt was made to restrict the matter to a single front. Careful, carefully intentioned, attempts were made to keep France neutral, and it was believed that France could be induced to remain neutral. No one in Central Europe had any intention of harming France. With a feeling of total responsibility it is possible to say that absolutely no one in Central Europe, no one in Germany, had any intention of harming France. What was done was done only with a view to tying matters up as quickly as possible in the West in order to prevent the threatened invasion from the East. It therefore never ceases to be astonishing that so much talk persists in the world about all the atrocities Germany has committed towards the West. None of the atrocities would have occurred if only France had declared her neutrality.

France was perfectly capable of protecting herself and Belgium against any attack. That France was forced to keep her agreement with Russia is her own affair and should not be trotted out in the same breath as the atrocities committed by Germany, for the allegiance of one state to another is no business of her enemies.

Since it proved impossible to keep France neutral by direct means, the attempt was then made via England—here, too, without success. I have touched a number of times on how England could have saved Belgium and, equally well, France. These things must be viewed absolutely objectively. Please accept as totally objective the statement that, once the war between Austria and Serbia could no longer be localized because Russia would not allow this, every effort was made at least to prevent it from spreading to the West. Truly, no one in Central Europe was seized with the madness of wanting to make war on two fronts, let alone subsequently on three.

That all the other universal untruths followed on from this is really not surprising now, when every day astonishes us with new lies, spoken, written and printed. Before coming here today I found someone had put on my desk a pamphlet by one of the participants engaged in the neutrality debate with Georg Brandes. Here, on the English side, you have William Archer, in whose pamphlet you find juxtaposed the black infamy of Germany and the pure innocence of the allies. Ten points illustrate the black infamy, and the angelic, utter innocence of the allies; we need consider only one of these, the second. The second point states that in Germany there exists a notable faction which is openly agitating for further territorial expansion, either in or outside Europe. In contrast it is said of the allies—in English, mark you: The allies have no desire for any territorial expansion, least of all at Germany's expense; even France's feelings for Alsace-Lorraine are exclusively peaceful.

My dear friends, much can be both printed and spoken these days! The other nine points are in similar vein. Just think of the expansion undertaken by England and France over recent decades; and then read that these countries have no desire for territorial expansion. It is quite possible nowadays to say and print the exact opposite of the truth, just as it is possible for countless people to believe it. People do indeed believe these things.

Here, then, you have the historical view of these events. Now we must link this external historical process with what we can discover through our knowledge of the impulses from the West which have been at work for a long time. Not all the impulses that make use to a greater or lesser degree of occult forces—such as we have discussed—are included in what might be called the outer ramifications: namely, Freemasonry, though as we have seen, a great deal is indeed brought about by western Freemasonry. Many strings are pulled by those involved there. And as I said, account is taken of long stretches of time.

Now add to the points I have been making the fact that modern Freemasonry undergoes a process of consolidation in England at the beginning of the eighteenth century, on foundations, of course, which are older. Within Britain, not the Empire, but the United Kingdom, Freemasonry remains—let me use the correct expression—essentially respectable in the interests it pursues. But everywere else, outside Britain, chiefly—or indeed exclusively—political interests are pursued by Freemasonry.

Such political interests, to the most marked degree, are pursued for instance by the French Grand Orient, and also by other Grand Lodges. You could ask: What business is it of the English if political trends in other countries are pursued by certain orders of Freemasonry which possess an occult background? In reply you might remind yourself that the first Grand Lodge in Paris was founded under the jurisdiction of England, not France! Englishmen, not Frenchmen, founded it; and then they let the French in. Then also remind yourself that after the founding of this Grand Lodge in Paris in 1725, this Grand Orient in turn sanctioned the founding of a lodge under its own jurisdiction in Paris in 1729. There were, under the jurisdiction of England, foundations in Gibraltar in 1729, Madrid in 1728, Lisbon in 1736, Florence in 1735, Moscow in 1731, Stockholm in 1726, Geneva in 1735, Lausanne in 1739 and Hamburg in 1737. I could carry on for a long time with this list. I could show you how a network was founded of these lodges, which were to act as the external tools for certain occult, political impulses. They differed in character from those in the United Kingdom itself. In addition to the breathtaking sequence of changes as we see them in history, such as the Jacobins and the furore they created, the Carbonari and their political activities, the Cortes in Spain and others, they also have a strong influence on the culture of their time and send out shoots which even show in the works of the greatest spirits of their time. We need only think of Rousseau's natural philosophy, or the critical philosophy of Voltaire, which became ever more cynical though its aim was to enlighten, or the efforts of the Illuminati, who wanted to overcome the prevailing cynicism, and similar circles. These progressive circles were crushed by reactionary streams, but continued to work in manifold ways underground.

So here you have the source of much that I have been describing. And you must attach a degree of importance to the following: The English Freemasons can maintain today that their lodges are entirely respectable and that any others are none of their business; yet if you look beyond the historical connections and the interplay of opposing currents, you are sure to find high-level British politics hiding in the background.

To understand the deeper meaning of these politics it is necessary to draw a little on recent history. Preparations having been under way from the sixteenth century onwards, there has been a tendency ever since the seventeenth century towards the democratization of society—in some countries more quickly, in others more slowly—by taking power away from the few and giving it to the broad masses. I am not here involved in politics and I shall not therefore express myself in favour of either democracy or anything else. I simply wish to state facts. The impulse towards democracy is having its effect in modern times at varying speeds, and so different streams are coming into being. It is a mistake, where several streams are apparent, to follow the course of only one. The way streams flow in the world is such that one always forms a complement to the others. Let us say a green and a red stream are flowing along side by side. Nothing occult is meant by these colours—it is simply to illustrate that there are two streams flowing side by side. Usually people are, let me say, hypnotized into looking at only one of the streams, while they fail to see the other flowing beside it during the same period in history. As you know, if you push a hen's beak into the ground and then draw a line leading away, the hen will always walk along this line. In the same way people today, especially university historians, see only the one side, and can therefore never really understand the historical process.

Parallel with the democratic stream there came into being the use of occult motives in the various secret societies—in isolated cases, also Masonic orders. In their purposes and aims these are not, of course, spiritual, but there developed, let us call it, a spiritual aristocracy parallel to that democratic stream which was at work in the French Revolution; the aristocracy of the lodges developed. To see clearly as a human being today, to be open to the world and to understand the world, it is necessary not to be dazzled by democratic logic—which has a place only in its own sphere—by empty phrases about democratic progress and so on; it is necessary also to point to that other stream which asserted itself with the intent of gaining power for the few by means that lie hidden within the womb of the lodge—the ritual and its suggestive influence. It is necessary to point to this also.

This has been forgotten during the age of materialism, but before the fifties of the last century people did point these things out. Study the philosophical historians prior to 1850 and you will see that they pointed to the connection between the lodges and the French Revolution with all that followed it. During the period that can be seen as preparatory for today, western historical development, the western world, never emancipated itself from the lodges. The influence of the lodges was always strongly at work. The lodges knew how to find channels through which to impress certain directions on people's thoughts. Once a web like this has been spun—of which I have shown you merely a few strands—the button need only be pressed for things to be set in motion.

Emancipation from all these situations, and the impartial embracing of humanity as such, only really came about under the influence of such great spirituality as developed in German philosophy beginning with Lessing, and developing through Herder and Goethe. Here you have a spiritual stream which took account of all that lives in the lodges, but in such a way that the mystery was brought out of the obscurity of the lodges and transformed into a purely human matter. You need only glance at Goethe's fairy tale The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, at Wilhelm Meister and other of Goethe's writings. This was material with which the step to emancipation could be taken and which still today makes emancipation possible. So you may view that whole part of German cultural history portrayed in my book Vom Menschenrätsel as a forgotten reverberation which is entirely independent of all the intrigues of the lodges.

In western culture over the last few centuries preceding our own day you will easily find many ways of demonstrating how the character of ideas in the exoteric world stemmed from the esoteric thinking of the lodges. Obviously this does not apply to the time before Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare but it is certainly true of what came later. But the spiritual culture linked with Lessing, Herder and Goethe has no such connections. You might ask: What about German Freemasonry—in Austria it is proscribed, so there is none there—or Magyar Freemasonry? Well, the others did not allow them to join in. They are quite an innocuous crowd. Though they might appear as thick as thieves with regard to their secrets, this is nothing but show.

The real, mighty impulses emanating from the quarters I have described to you are truly not found in German Freemasonry, which I have no wish to offend. So you can easily understand how it was possible for some rather strange occurrences to take place. Suppose, for instance, someone were to make known in Germany the things I have told you about societies, their secret connections and their external branches—the lodges of Freemasonry. It could be rather useful to make these things known there, but what would be the consequence? Experts would be asked to corroborate these things, and in this case the experts are the Freemasons themselves. But it would never occur to any Freemason in Germany to say anything other than that the English lodges do not concern themselves with politics, that they are concerned only with entirely respectable matters. This is all he knows, for he is ignorant of anything else. You can even be told—and this has actually happened—if you ask about specific names, that they are not on the list of members. They have the list but are unaware that perhaps the most important of all are not included in the list. In short, German Freemasonry is a quite innocuous society.

This does not alter the fact, though—and this may truly be said without any kind of arrogance or nationalistic affectation—that the spiritual life cultivated by certain western secret brotherhoods actually stems from Central Europe. Look at this historically. Robert Fludd: pupil of Paracelsus; Saint-Martin in France: pupil of Jakob Böhme. The origin of the movement itself is to be found in Central Europe. From the West comes the organization, the establishment in degrees—some western lodges have ninety-two degrees; just imagine how elevated you can become if you rise to the ninety-second degree—the use of knowledge for political aims, and the introduction of certain external elements.

We have just had an example which is quite typical, one to which I drew your attention. I am only describing these things in order to make you aware of their objective nature, just as the facts of natural history can be described; not from any nationalistic affectation. I drew your attention to the recent appearance of a book by Sir Oliver Lodge, in which he reports on communications he has received through various mediums from his son who was killed in action. A book like this, written by such a distinguished scientist, is sure to cause quite a sensation. Now that I have read the book there is no need for me to retract anything I said to you a little while ago. I said at the time that I would return to this subject. The strongest proof offered by Sir Oliver Lodge is the following: Seances with various mediums result in the manifestation of the soul of Raymond Lodge, who died in action. These seances tell us nothing people do not know already and would be unlikely to make any strong impression on anyone. But one thing did make a strong impression on the eminent scientist Sir Oliver Lodge and his whole family, who up to that point had been very sceptical about such things. At one of the seances a group photograph was mentioned, showing Oliver Lodge's son together with other people. This photograph, one of several, was described as showing the same people at the same place, but in varying arrangements; the same people are seen, but with differing gestures. Raymond Lodge described this photograph through the medium at that seance in England. But Sir Oliver Lodge and his family knew nothing about this picture, for it had been taken at the Franco-Belgian front at the end of Raymond Lodge's life and sent by him to his family, though it had not yet arrived. So this medium described a group photograph which existed but was unknown to the family: the participants in the seance. They only saw it after it had been described by the medium.

For those who dabble in the occult, this is naturally tremendously convincing. What should you make of the fact that a group photograph is described at a seance, the participants of which know nothing about it? The family, the participants in the seance, know nothing of it and nor do the mediums, because it has not yet arrived in England. It is still on the way. It only arrived later. Yet an exact description is given of where Raymond Lodge is sitting in relation to the others and even of the way he has laid his hand on a friend's shoulder. What could be more convincing than this?

However, Sir Oliver Lodge's interpretation can only have been reached by someone who merely dabbles in the occult. If he had known nothing much but had investigated the literature—for instance Schubert or similar people who still wrote about such things in Germany around the first half of the nineteenth century—he would have found countless examples of something that every genuine occultist knows: When consciousness is damped down even slightly, future events can be seen. The most simple case of seeing a future event is when someone experiencing a moment of lowered consciousness sees a funeral procession which will not take place for several days. A person has not even died, yet someone sees his funeral. Something in the future is seen. This is quite normal when consciousness is lowered. So this is what took place: A photograph has been taken in Flanders and is on its way to England. The time will come when the family will focus their eyes and their understanding on it, when they will bear it in their thoughts. The medium foresees it as an image of the future. Whether you foresee a funeral procession, or whether you foresee how a family receives such and such a photograph of their son in a few days' time—it is the same phenomenon: that of seeing a future event in advance. This is just a phenomenon.

If he had known something about real occult facts, he would not have interpreted the event as he did. Such an interpretation arises because occult values, occult laws, are seen from a materialistic standpoint. It comes about because people avoid undertaking that form of development which would enable them to comprehend the spiritual world in an inward process. Instead they want to see the spiritual realm by laboratory means, purely materialistically. The spirit is made materialistic, whether by Sir Oliver Lodge or anybody else. But this is only one example of what happens to everything that is spiritual. These things can be observed, just as you can observe the progression from Paracelsus to Fludd, from Jakob Böhme to Saint-Martin; everywhere the spirit is made more materialistic.

As the Anthroposophical Society we only succeeded in saving ourselves from becoming materialistic by emancipating ourselves from the Theosophical Society. For impulses emanating from the kind of society I have described penetrate deeply into the social fabric. Naturally, here again I must beg you not to misunderstand me. I am not saying that this is a natural characteristic of the western nations. But it exists and has succeeded in influencing the course of history and is not even without influence on the untruthfulness which is now playing such a devastating part.

It is particularly to this untruthfulness that I am obliged to draw you attention, for this untruthfulness always takes the form of accusation, of blaming others. That dismal New Year's Eve note is really nothing but an accusation based on a distortion of the facts, just as is the article by Mr Archer which I read to you here. But you see such things are beginning to be believed, they are beginning to play their role. In a few weeks' time people will have long forgotten that an opportunity to achieve peace was present in a form that could not be overlooked by the world, and that this opportunity was thwarted by the powers of the periphery. People in Europe will once again begin to believe that the offer of peace was refused by the powers of the Entente on purely humanitarian grounds, on the basis of the extraordinary reasoning that if one wants peace one must prevent it from coming about. Even such grotesque untruths as this are believed nowadays. That they can be believed at all derives from preparations made by the kind of occultism I have been describing to you. It is indeed a sign of an arrant corruption of the soul when it becomes possible to write down side by side the two sentences I mentioned about the black and the white raven. And this corruption of the soul comes about as a consequence of an atmosphere tampered with by organizations such as I have described.

In this connection, too—I can say this quite objectively—there has been a tendency for Central Europe to emancipate itself. In all the Central European spiritual life thrown open by Lessing, Herder, Goethe, such as we have spoken about during the course of our anthroposophical life, you have seen clearly enough how the direction was towards a gradual evolution into the spiritual world. What it is not inclined to do, is enter into any kind of permanent compromise with what lives in the western streams such as those I have described to you. This is impossible. That is why things appear in a different way.

Let us look back for a moment to Fichte, so disparaged in the West today; let us turn to his Reden an die deutsche Nation. What is Fichte aiming at? That the German nation should educate itself! What he says in Reden an die deutsche Nation is not aimed at other nations; he is endeavouring to inspire Germans to improve themselves. But others seem to have what we might call a real ‘genius’ for misunderstanding whatever comes into being in Germany. That harmless national anthem Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, which, if you take the trouble to read the next few lines, speaks of nothing more than loving one's fatherland above all others—for only the different parts of the fatherland are named—is made into something utterly grotesque. In the same way, if one wants to, one can misunderstand Fichte, since he begins Reden an die deutsche Nation with the words ‘I speak for Germans as such, and about Germans as such’. Why does he say this? Because Germany is divided into a whole number of small individual states, and he does not want to address the Prussians, or the Swabians or the Saxons, or the people of Oldenburg, Mecklenburg or Austria and so on, but Germans as such. He wanted to unite all the individuals. So he is talking to Germans and only to Germans. I do not want to praise the Germans, but such things may justifiably be included in a description of them.

I have brought up this matter today because there is definitely a tendency to sound a note in the centre, a note differing from that of the periphery. And if our anthroposophical work can contribute to this other note, there is no reason why we should not say so amongst ourselves. Just today I received a pamphlet by our friend Ludwig von Polzer, who as you know worked here: Thoughts during Wartime. Whether you agree in detail with what he says or not, it is interesting to note that he is not particularly concerned with attacking and insulting others but rather with reading the riot act to his Austrian compatriots. It is to them he speaks. Obviously he has come to be an Austrian as a result of his karma, but he nevertheless reads the riot act to his Austrian compatriots. He does not say: We are blameless, we never did this or that, we are pure white angels and all the others are black devils. No, he says:

‘Why does mankind hate itself and tear itself to pieces? Are external political differences of opinion really the cause of so much suffering? Every party to the fray claims to know what it is about, but in reality none of them know.
A declining, decadent culture is fighting its deathly struggle. The Central Powers, who are fighting for the first germination of a new culture, have not recognized it as yet; they fight for something they do not know, for something unknown to them; and they are themselves still filled with the convictions against which their own soldiers are bleeding in battle.
The old degenerate ways must be, as it were, vomited forth and that is why in their final fling they are running so wild.
Do we not come up against it amongst ourselves wherever we turn, this attitude of the Entente which bears the old, decadent culture? Has it not infected us as well? We see it on the streets in the latest fashions, it is embodied in modern architecture, it grins down at us from the hoardings, in commerce it runs to orgies, it inflates itself in bureaucratic madness, in its self-important untruthful humanism it lies to itself, our press seeks to outbid its colleagues of the Entente in devotion to the truth, and so on.
The Entente is here among us, fuming and raging, claiming to work for our honest soldiers and compatriots, almost all of whom have meanwhile died a sacrificial death.
All these things running so horrifyingly wild in our own country—let it be hoped for the last time before the end—are not deutsch.’

So all those things worthy of censure in his own country he calls ‘not deutsch’. His main aim is to appeal to the conscience of his own compatriots. There are further, similar passages in this booklet. It is good that such a thing is said for once in connection with our own endeavours. There is no need for us to be in total harmony with every sentence that is written amongst us. The most wonderful achievement will be to work on all these things independently, preserving our individuality and taking nothing as dogma or as the word of a higher authority. Those things which are meant to come to the fore are quite able to do so without the help of any authority. But to give our Society meaning we need to stand together in unanimity. In part this means, of course, that we should be alert to what goes on amongst us and should recognize those who work alongside us and who endeavour to place before the world what goes on within our Anthroposophical Society in such a way that it really reflects the intentions of our Society. The main thing we can do to help our age is to work with understanding through the impulses of this age from our viewpoint. We need not lose heart, for however unfavourable conditions become in time, we may recall Lessing's words: Is not the whole of eternity mine? This is a thought that concerns every single human being.

We should be particularly careful to develop good practices with regard to the proper evaluation and estimation of all that comes to the fore amongst ourselves. In this connection I hope you will not mind my mentioning something, without wishing to say anything unpleasant to anyone. The periodical Das Reich, produced by Alexander von Bernus, makes every endeavour to move within our stream. So what does it matter if we agree or disagree with one or another of the articles it publishes? It is quite possible to disagree with a good deal. But many mistakes have been made on the part of our members with regard to this periodical. Seeing how it has been berated from all sides, I have to say that it is really not right to throw obstacles in the path of efforts which genuinely endeavour to work in harmony with our Movement. Of course everybody is entitled to his own opinion about the verses which Alexander von Bernus composed in connection with certain historical occult teachings which may be found amongst us. But I do consider things have been taken too far when floods of blatently rude letters start to arrive from our members. Where will it lead if we ill-treat those who are on our side while taking very little notice of those who insult us, just letting them go on doing so?

I wanted to bring up the matter of this periodical Das Reich, which strives to promote our endeavours, because I want to reply to the question that could be asked: What can we do? The very reason why these lectures have been given is to find a reply to this question: What can we do? What we can do is maintain an understanding attitude, in accordance with our anthroposophical spiritual science, towards everything going on at present! For what would be the significance of this spiritual science for us if we could really not transcend the attitude prevalent all over Europe today of people who speak of national aspirations and the like, and shape events in accordance with these national aspirations. Within the Society which serves anthroposophical spiritual science no one need become a faithless son of his nation, or deny anything he ought not to deny because he is firmly united with a particular nation as a result of his karma. But no one can be a true anthroposophist if he turns a blind eye towards the enormity of what is going on just now and allows himself to be deafened by all those means which some of those in power use today to stun us in order to avoid having to state what they are really playing at. So let me point out those things that are easily believed when they come towards us in a sentimental form, whereas what has always been hidden by the screens behind which occult events take place still has to remain hidden away behind these screens.

It must become clear to us that a time could come again—I am choosing my words very warily today, so I say could come again—in which the battle grows extremely terrible because peace is definitely not wanted. It could grow even more terrible than it has hitherto been if something is not introduced from one side or the other which can prevent this terror. Then there will once again be an opportunity to speak about the atrocities of Central Europe; then under the rubble and ashes will be buried the fact that these atrocities could have been prevented if people had not roared like a bull against moves towards peace. It was within the power of countries of the periphery to bring about peace. Yet the time will come—it is by no means unlikely that the time will come—when it will be said once again: The Germans are doing this or that and flouting every international law.

Indeed, my dear friends, it is once again fashionable for the encircling powers, having failed to bring about what could have held such actions in check, to accuse those who are encircled of protecting themselves on all sides. We must come to see this clearly in all its enormity. Beside all that may very well have happened, for instance in Belgium, must be placed the fact that the British Empire could have prevented all that has happened in Belgium.

Harsh though it might sound, it has to be said that it is untruthful to speak about the atrocities in Belgium without taking into account how easily they could have been prevented by the English. And it goes without saying that we feel the tragic destiny of France. Yet France was truly in a position which could have enabled her not to participate in the war.

The Central Powers were not in a position to avoid waging a defensive war once it became obvious that France would take part in any case. It is all very well to say the two could have faced each other, frontier to frontier. This is the very thing that was not possible, because Franco-Russian militarism so greatly outweighs what is called Prussian militarism.

However strongly we feel we belong to one group or another, we can surely resolve to look at these things squarely—I say ‘can’, not ‘must’. Then, when we work through this and make it a part of our lives, each in his own way will be able to do whatever he wants to do, in answer to the question: What can the individual do? Unless ever more and more people come to nurture the idea of making a united European stand against the belligerence of powers now at work invisibly, the collapse of European culture will indeed be inevitable. Even now a belligerent wave from the East is threatening to engulf us—from Japan, where a form of imperialism is in preparation which might turn out to be far mightier than any imperialism the world has so far known. The will to conquer is expressed in the cry of the new national anthem which, reminiscent of the English hymn, ‘Rule Britannia’, now resounds in ‘Rule Nippon’. To show you that the powers of Europe would have good reason not to mock the word ‘peace’, not to mock the content of the peace idea, let me read to you this hymn, now quoted in Japanese newspapers:

When Nippon, at the Lord's command,
Rose from the sea at dawn,
There sounded throughout all the world
A call from heaven's blue dome:
Born, Japan, are you to rule.
Rise proudly with the morning sun:
You I choose to rule the world.
Torn by hate and blinding rage
Europe drowns in her own blood,
But you, devoid of blame or fault,
Shall be the guardian of the earth.
Born, Japan, are you to rule.
Rise proudly with the morning sun:
You I choose to rule my world.

This is what is now booming across the world from the East. This is the Orient's answer to Europe, bathed in blood. Yet despite this, there are people in Europe who want to scorn the call for peace! This is a fact to which we cannot give too much thought.

Recently, Ludwig Jacobowski ¹ with his “Loki” a narrative poem that depicts in symbolic acts the heavy, hot struggles that take place at the bottom of every human soul that does not merge into the hustle and bustle of everyday life, but leads a deeper life. Those who immerse themselves in this “novel of a god” will be captivated by the poet's deep insight into the workings of the soul and his powerful sense of everything that shakes, elevates and plunges the human heart into abysses.

Now Jacobowski has followed up this creation with his “New Poems”*. Through them we can look into the depths of his own soul, into the experiences of his inner life, into everything that has lifted him up to the high vantage point from which he surveys the world and its mysteries in “Loki”. The great, free worldview that we encounter in the novel is deeply rooted in the poet's nature. Two character traits are inherent in this nature, which, in their harmonious interaction, always determine the significant personality: a fine, receptive sense for all the individual things that confront us in life, and a mind that grasps the great connections between the details in their true significance. We owe the fresh, rich colors that shine out at us from Jacobowski's poems to his receptive senses; and it is through his mind that the poet always points out to us what “holds the world together at its core”. In the “Shining Days” we never miss the great view of the essence of the world that lies behind the eternal flow of appearances. Rather, these poems constantly direct our feelings and our imagination towards this essence. One always has the feeling that this poet draws from the eternal source from which the best content of life flows to us.

For those whose spirit is directed in such a way, life is not easy. For every step means a test for them. The world has many secrets to reveal to them. But nature does not give anything away voluntarily. It wrings everything from us in a hard struggle. It paves the way to every goal with suffering and deprivation. But the essence to which it ultimately always leads us is that which satisfies the heart and mind. The mists of existence dissolve; and the sun of life smiles upon us. The true artist shows us this sun. Because it is the sun that, as a spiritual bond, causes the connection of things. All genuine art is therefore “cheerful”. And a sunny cheerfulness, a cheerfulness born out of the difficult struggle of life: these are the things that flow from Jacobowski's poems to us.

Oh, our shining days
Shine like eternal stars.
As a consolation for future lamentation
They glow from a golden distance.

Don't cry because they're gone!
Smile because they have been!
And even if the days are gloomy,
our stars will redeem them!

Jacobowski introduces the collection with this poem, as if with an artistic gospel, and he ends it with the confession:

Sinking arms,
folded hands,
Around me the warm,
land illuminated;
Eyelashes closed
In the flattering light,
flowing around
The brown face.

Stand in the sun
that I fade away...
Wistfulness becomes bliss,
And bliss becomes woe!
If only I had grace
And kindness and pleasure,
To bathe in the glow
The darkest breast! ...

Shining days,
Now you sink slowly!
Alas, without complaint
I look after you.
Secret glow,
That so surrounds me,
Shines forever
The blooming world!

The liberating keynote that resounds throughout the book is expressed in these verses. However powerful the individual experiences may be that inspire the poet, his mind always pushes him towards the heights of existence, towards those bright regions for which the transience of everyday life is only a metaphor. Just as every individual experience becomes a symbol of the eternal ideas of world events for the philosopher, so for the true lyricist every individual feeling, every particular mood becomes a symbol of the entire fate of the soul. And Jacobowski is a true lyricist in this highest sense. See how in the following verses ($. 56) a single feeling comes to life in a universal one.

Brown twigs protrude from a white vase
And drag heavily on the densely filled lilac.
Bright green leaves push through
through the brown branches. The wind gently brushes the blossoms,
A scent runs up and down in shivers.
The whole room drinks itself full of lilac,
And even the soul feels the blossoms softly.

Once I was so happy in my heart
suck sweets from lilac stems. —
Oh, I do it again and make children's eyes
And feel the youth in the sap of the blossom!

This diversion of the individual experience into the general is a fundamental trait of Jacobowski's personality. It works in him like a natural process of life in the human organism. He does not seek depth anywhere, he does not strive beyond the individual. This lives in his soul in an immediate way, as the individual plant appears before us as a representative of its entire species. One need only compare his poetry with that of Richard Dehmel to grasp the immediacy of his universal feelings. In Dehmel's work, the path from the individual experience to the great world connections always leads through the idea, through abstraction. In Jacobowski's work, this is not necessary. For he feels universally. He does not need the world of imagination to rise to the primal facts of the soul; every experience of the soul has for him the character of the eternally significant.

This trait in Jacobowski is inextricably linked to another, without which greatness in the human soul is not possible. This is the feeling for the great, simple lines in the world. Everything great in the world is simple; and if someone does not feel the simple greatness of the simple, but seeks the significant in the strange, in the so-called secrets of existence, this only proves that he has lost the sense of the great that meets us at every moment of life. The sins of some modern poets, who seek salvation in random, remote moods because they lack a sense of the simple, the “simple-minded”, are far removed from Jacobowski. Just as in a folk song, an everyday event can trigger a gigantic strength of feeling, so in Jacobowski's work a simple event becomes great because he transports it into the sphere of his mind. It is the simplest thing in the world; and at the same time it is one of the deepest experiences that can happen to a person, as is shown in the poem “The Old Woman” (p. 207):

The old woman

I

I have an old woman,
She lives right next to heaven,
For it is exactly ninety steps,
And children on it, a real muddle.

In her little room, clean and bright
The loud echo of the streets resounds. And slowly night falls in
Darkening on the masses of houses.

The full moon climbs over the roof,
the stars shine in a circle,
The wall clock ticks only slowly...
We sit there motionless and silent.

II

What do I have in common with the old woman?
I don't know exactly.
It can't be her coffee,
she puts too much milk in it,
I only love her baked apples,
She cooks them for me in the oven."
What do I have in common with the old woman?
That makes a narrow grave far away. There she laid her hopes,
A slim, blonde maiden. She went through life quietly,
And thought of one and that was me. And no one else realized
That she was the sweetness of my life. When I feel life is confused and rough,
Then I climb up to the old woman.
For her modest little chamber
Holds my soul's blossom within.
And when I come to her, I feel pain. And only when I leave her!

The following lines will describe the outstanding place that Jacobowski occupies among contemporary poets and present the character of his lyrical creations in detail.

II

Looking back on the “Shining Days” as a whole, after enjoying the individual poems, a unified, self-contained work of art stands before the soul. All the lyrical creations form a stylish harmony. The circle of human soul life passes before us. The feelings that are aroused in us by the sublimity and perfection of the whole world, the relationship of the soul to the world, human nature in various forms, the joys and sorrows of love, the pain and happiness of knowledge, the social conditions and their repercussions on the human mind, the mysterious paths of fate: all these elements of the life organism find expression. Nothing is alien to the personality that lives itself out in this book; it is at home on the heights and in the depths of existence. And one has the feeling that in this personality every feeling is given the right measure, the right degree. None pushes itself forward at the expense of the others. A harmonious universality, radiating from the central interests of life, is Jacobowski's essence. And his feelings are driven by these interests in life with a warmth and strength that have a personal and immediate effect in the most beautiful sense of the word. What moves all of humanity becomes, in a truly lyrical way, a matter of its own for this poet. We do not need to put ourselves in the place of a single individual in order to understand his creations; he guides us to our own inner selves. He expresses in his own way what moves us all. He has the magic wand to strike poetic sparks from life everywhere, and therefore does not need to look for peculiarities. Sentimentalism is as foreign to him as delicate sensitivity is his own; he is not a dreamer, but a powerful grabber. A rare confidence in his spiritual direction, a sure, firm feeling of the fruitfulness of his striving speaks from his poems. There is something pithy and delicate at the same time in his nature; he is like a tree that is exposed to strong storms, but is firmly rooted in the ground. He knows that he can abandon himself to life, to the everyday, because he finds treasures everywhere, even on the most trodden paths.

Compare Jacobowski with contemporary poets of note. How many believe that they will only find what is valuable if they search for the shells and extract rare, precious pearls from them. Jacobowski is not looking for shiny pearls; the seed that he reaches for, the common flower at the edge of the meadow, is enough for him. If one wants to name contemporary poets who, after having delighted us with his “Shining Days”, now stand with him in the front row, then only two names will come to mind: Detlev von Liliencron and Otto Erich Hartleben. The differences between the three poets are, however, great. And it is difficult for us to assess them when they are still in the prime of their lives, still stirring up new feelings in us every day. We can only give a provisional and very subjective judgment. Otto Erich Hartleben, the lyricist, seems to me like Goethe's description of the artist in “Winckelmann”. With his admirable taste and his cult of beauty, he communicates something to us that flows over us like ancient art. In this respect, he stands so much alone that we would rather isolate him than compare him. Detlev von Liliencron is the lyrical master of detail. His eye sees every thing in the light of the eternal. But his mind knows nothing of this eternity; that is why he tells us nothing about it. With Liliencron, it is as if we had to hear a second voice if we are to understand the coherence of his images. We must have a kind of second sight with this poet: then we will see what he gives us in the light of the eternally meaningful. Jacobowski has this second sight himself. And with it he achieves something that only poets achieve who create from a worldview, and what I must regard as the hallmark of the true poet: that the philosopher must call him a “brother poet” and at the same time that the simplest mind finds itself in him. The simplest nature and the highest spirit that can be drawn from this nature are one and the same.

Jacobowski's poetry will pass the highest test there is for a poet: to be equally appealing to the man who goes to work in the morning and can only use the festive moments on Sundays to let the serene realm of art work its magic on him, and to the true philosopher who is on familiar terms with the eternal riddles of existence. Like the philosopher, Jacobowski is a world thinker. See how he translates the great idea of Indian wisdom, that everything in the world is only an illusion and therefore need not touch us, into a very individual feeling:

“It's nothing! Just walk past the world!”

This strange word does not set my heart free.
How gladly would I pass by the world,
But, alas, the world does not pass me by!

For even if I stand in hiding like children,
fearfully turned away from the dance of the days, —
They drag me out of the corner by force,
And each one presses pain into my hand.

In a poem like this, the highest wisdom seems like the most charming naivety; the three most monumental forms of the soul reveal their innermost relationship: the childlike, the artistic and the philosophical.

Because Jacobowski unites these three forms in the most original way, I believe that as a poet he surpasses his contemporary Dehmel. He is a complete poet; Dehmel is half poet and half thinker. And two such halves make as little of a whole as a half lens and a half bean. In Dehmel's work, you will look in vain for a poem as simple as the following, which could almost serve as a motto for many of the greatest philosophical creations:

Soul, tell me, what are you struggling for?
“I am of the earth, but I long to be of heaven!"
Soul, you only achieve night and death?
“A morning red glows over nights!"

In a beautiful psychological study in “Pan” (1898, 3rd [issue, 4th year]), the brilliant Lou Andreas-Salome hit the nail on the head when she said: “In our time, many, and not the worst, turn away from the whole outer life and even despise it as a mere occasion for personal activity and self-realization, because they feel themselves hemmed in and robbed of their individual existence by the entire cultural conditions in which we live. [...] There is a search and longing for solitude in the most advanced people, in all those who carry something within themselves that cannot be born on the market, in all those who carry hope and future within themselves and secretly fear that these could be desecrated. They know full well that the great works that stride across the earth with brazen steps of victory and ringing music, century after century, arise from full contact with the full breadth and depth of real life, but until then – they also know this – many other, quieter works must precede them in white robes, with shy buds in their hair, and testify that there are human souls that are festively dressed and willing and ready for a new beauty in their lives.” On the other hand, it is safe to say that in the future, people with white robes and shy buds in their hair will be interesting symptoms of the end of the nineteenth century, people who will be studied for their peculiarity, but that the real signature of this period will be the spirits with healthy senses, with developed blossoms in their hair, who love fresh colors and not the pale, sickly white. We count Jacobowski among them.

Our healthy thinking has given rise to Darwinism and all its consequences in the second half of the century; on the paths along which this healthy thinking and healthy feeling walks, we also meet poets like Jacobowski. Alienated from the world, lost in aesthetic and philosophic-mystical quirks, we encounter poets with white robes and shy buds in their hair. Artificial poetic forms are of little value, as are bizarre, ingenious ideas. Both, however, always arise in times of powerful spiritual struggle. However, they never appear in the case of strong, original, independent minds, but rather in the case of weak, dependent minds that cannot produce original content from their souls, that have to extract everything from themselves with pliers and pumps, but that would still like to participate. Such minds are not equal to the demands and tasks of the time. They do not know any simple, straightforward answers to the questions that are buzzing around us. That is why they seek the abstruse, the sophisticated. The profound connoisseur of the workings of nature, Galileo, spoke the wise words that the true is not hard and difficult, but simple and easy, and that in all its works nature uses the closest, simplest and easiest means. Only the mind that knows how to use the simplest and easiest means, just like nature, truly lives in harmony with nature. Jacobowski appears as such a mind among the host of contemporary poets. Dehmels' artificial forms and artificial feelings seem like a departure from natural simplicity.

III

What a mistake it is for individual contemporaries to seek the salvation of poetry in formlessness and to believe that the “old” forms have been used up is best shown by contrasting the creations of these enthusiasts of formlessness with poems such as those of Jacobowski. The philosopher Simmel has written an interesting essay about a follower of formlessness, Paul Ernst. According to Simmel, this formlessness represents progress in that the artist no longer seeks the higher, the divine in art through artificialization, through the manipulation of immediate natural phenomena, but rather sees a divine significance in every experience that takes place before our senses, a significance that deserves to be captured in this immediacy. On the basis of such views, poetry that is nothing more than prose divided into verses is considered “modern” today. Those who hold such views live in the mistaken belief that the “old” forms are something that the artist arbitrarily adds to the phenomena of nature from his subjective essence. He does not realize what Goethe repeatedly explained in the most illuminating way, that the external course of events is only one side of natural existence, the surface, and that for those who look deeper, higher laws of form are expressed in nature itself, which they recreate in their artistic forms. There is a “higher nature” in nature. What Goethe has the Lord say to the angels in “Faust”: “But you, the true sons of the gods, rejoice in the living, rich beauty! That which is becoming, which eternally works and lives, embrace with the love of gentle boundaries, and what floats in a wavering appearance, fasten with lasting thoughts,” expresses the artist's mission. Only the “shaky appearance” presents itself in formlessness; the eternal becoming is full of form; it is inwardly, through its essence, bound to form. The rejection of form is nothing more than an expression of the inability to see the “higher nature” in nature, to find the subjective, stylish expression for its innermost harmony. In the face of all such aberrations of the time, Jacobowski, out of an inner necessity of his artistic sensibility, takes the safe path of the artist. One can see what he achieves with the proven “old” forms in a poem like “The Four Robbers”, which forms the conclusion of “Shining Days”. In this legend, simple simplicity is combined with symbolic allusions to the deep connections of world events and with a noble, closed form. What I said at the beginning of this essay about Jacobowski's poetry, that this poet draws from the eternal source from which the best content of life comes, is the reason why he stands out as such a pleasing, refreshing poet from other fellow poets. These others, however, only know derived sources. They are driven by a purpose in life that is unable to fulfill them. At best, they see branches and shoots, but they are unable to penetrate to the fertile, constructive elements of the life organism. Only those who direct their gaze to these fertile beings will find life's higher justification. When it is so often said that spiritual greatness leads to loneliness, one must reply that the proud, necessary loneliness that arises from the feeling of the eternal in the world has nothing to do with the accidental loneliness that arises from someone withdrawing into some isolated corner of existence. If he sees nothing in this corner but “what lives in a fluctuating appearance”, then his report cannot captivate us, even though he speaks of things that are hidden from the everyday eye. The cultural content of the world is not enriched by adding isolated phenomena to the old stock, but by leading the eternal becoming to a new stage of development. The way in which an artist who is capable of such things relates to life phenomena that appear new and “modern” in his time is evident in the part of “Leuchtende Tage” entitled “Großstadt” (Big City). Here, a spirit speaks of the social life of our day that does not see it in the perspective of the moment, but rather in the perspective that arises from the contemplation of the great laws of the world. The singers of social passions and conflicts often see only a few steps ahead. The light that falls on contemporary phenomena when they are placed in the context of a world view is what gives our feelings about these phenomena the right nuance. Modern big-city life, for example, is given such a nuance in Jacobowski's poem “Summer Evening”:

Summer evening. —
The air is soft and warm;
a distant scent from a garden,
The wide expanses of the sky are still pale,
here and there pale traces of stars;
On the street, the crack of whips and noise,
boys who are infatuated with young girls;
Children play with hoops in front of the doors,
coachmen knock their pipes;
knights on steeds, who are thinking of love,
honestly endeavor to win the favor of the ladies on bicycles, ...
And all the soft, warm air,
And from gardens a stray scent.

The poet experiences a “modern” situation; he portrays it in the context of the whole world. We do not see the city scene in isolation, but in such a way that the rest of the world plays into it. In this sense, “The Soldier, Scenes from the Big City” is a truly modern creation, in which the fate of a person transplanted from the countryside to the big city is described. Moving images pass before our soul, and from them we see the suffering of a man who is caught in the snares of eternal, gigantic fate, with the part of unreason that is in the world, and crushed. A poem like this teaches us how much a person's attitude, such as Jacobowski's, can deepen their feelings about modern life:

The mother once carried vegetables,
And when the cherry harvest came,
Then dear Liese stole for me,
as much as her little apron could hold.
How we feasted in the fields and meadows!

Mother sits in front of her baskets;
Now she is old, but happy in her mind,
So she boasts to her neighbor:
“My girl can't go wrong,
For she knows how to earn
And still puts something aside for later!"

I gave her a present yesterday
And recognized her face at once.
I stood in silence in the crowd,
until her Rembrandt feathers faded
In the street bustle slowly faded.

I couldn't move from the spot,
Her gaze burned into me.

IV

Jacobowski's ability to see the deeper connections of existence in the individual experience makes it possible for him to also poetically shape what reveals itself to us in life as chance, as blind necessity. In such poetic creation, the senseless approximation then appears as the expression of a meaningful guidance in world events. The kind of poetry that arises from such a view is usually called symbolist. A versatile nature like Jacobowski's will always push towards the symbolic representation of certain experiences. The serious play of the imagination will seek eternal laws even where they do not impose themselves in reality. But it is precisely this universality that prevents symbolism from being exaggerated in a one-sided way. For the harmonious personality always feels more or less what Goethe felt when he saw the Greek works of art in Italy: that the true artist proceeds according to the same laws as nature itself when creating its creatures. When the imagination of such a poet works symbolically, it does not do so in the obtrusive way in which many contemporary symbolists would like to force their subjective and arbitrary ideas on us as revelations, but with that spiritual chastity that allows nature itself to speak in the symbol, without distorting or contorting the inner truth of its expressions. In this beautiful sense, Jacobowski's “Frau Sorge” is a symbolizing poem:

A couple walks through the evening light,
he is a blacksmith's apprentice, she is a seamstress.

"Rosel, when we both pull a cart,
It's twice the joy and half the effort!"

And she leans wearily against her beloved;
A tear now and then runs down her cheek.

"Rosel, stop crying for your daily bread;
If it was enough for one, it's enough for two!"

He took her in his arms, asked no more questions,
caressed her warm, glowing face...

Gradually the light faded and they walked far

A woman sat down in the same place,

Looked with a gray gaze, raised her withered hand,

Threatened with the crutch, murmured and vanished...

The couple strode into the city,
Mrs. Worry was already sitting in the middle of her little room.

Jacobowski's imagination has a similar symbolic effect on the phenomena of nature. This is also evident in his prose stories. It appears so enchanting in his “Loki”. The spiritual in him grows out of the natural, as it were; it reflects its soul-stirring power back onto nature and receives from it a firm basis in reality. In the “Shining Days”, this trait is particularly evident in the section “Sun”. I will quote the poem “Shining”:

Just now, when the sun is shining,
my darling is walking across the field;
A glow passes over the field,
Catches itself, as if it were meant for her,
shining in her blonde hair.

Just now, when my sweetheart is running
over the blooming field,
Where her laughter falls down,
the stalks glisten like dewdrops,
The flowers glisten in the grass.

Just now, when the golden trace
Brightly glows in my eyes,
I see only blessings, only love, only happiness,
I see only a single glow
over the blossoming world.

And the poem “Maienblüten” seems to me like a bond that nature and the soul form in the imagination – in the best sense of a symbolist inspiration of nature:

Bear it silently when from the branches,
From the overfilled branches,
flowers blow into the pious hair,
And gently bend over,
So in thirst, lean over,
lips to lips
. See, a sweet and wondrous tremor
runs through the rows of leaves,
All the blossoms that they scatter,
they scatter blessings on you and me.

If we let the various currents of modern poetry pass us by, we are sure to encounter many a magnificent blossom. But we see only too often that beauty in the individual must be paid for with one-sidedness. It is harmonious universality that makes Jacobowski significant. He knows no poetic dogma; he knows life, and his interests end where life ends.

• 1. Not«Leuchtende Tage». New poems (1896-1898) by Ludwig Jacobowski. J. C. C. Bruns Verlag, Minden in Westf.

The most important thing we must do here is to read the Apocalypse in the way it should be read today. Already for the reason that we must become fully conscious of what is guiding spiritual life today, since spiritual development is now taking place under the sign of the consciousness soul. Hence it will be a matter of orienting ourselves to what the Apocalypticer tells us and of absorbing it in a fully conscious way.

The communications of the Apocalypticer have meant nothing to ordinary priests so far, and at most they meant something to the highest initiates, although there have been ever fewer of them in recent times. Priests must now become aware of the real contents of the Apocalypse.

We pointed to the seven churches from a particular point of view, for the world is very complex and one can look at things from many different viewpoints; so that we can describe the community in Ephesus in the way that we did yesterday. We then find that the Christianity there developed out of certain heathen conditions.

However, we can also point out that much of the basic structure of the first post Atlantean epoch was contained in these impulses—in fact, to an even greater extent than it was contained in the later phases of Indian civilization. So that in a way one can look upon the Christianity which developed in Ephesus as a Christian continuation of the first world view and view of life after the Atlantean epoch, whereas the original Persian culture lived more in the second community—Smyrna—and passed over into Christianity.

Then again, Pergamos is described as a community which cultivated the third post Atlantean culture. If we let the message to Pergamos work upon us, we find a more or less clear reference to the words of Hermes, which lived in this cultural milieu.

Then in Thyatira we are referred to the fourth post Atlantean culture, in which the Mystery of Golgotha took place. If we let this important message work upon us, we are constantly reminded of the direct way in which the message of the Mystery of Golgotha worked.

And then comes the church in Sardis, which we discussed yesterday. I showed you that this church in Sardis was somewhat astrologically oriented, and that it was oriented towards astronomical work. Therewith this community bears a lot of the past in it—which of course every community does from a historical viewpoint. But precisely this community in Sardis also bears a lot of the future in it.

And now take what we're trying to bring into our spiritual view of the present. We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. If one looks at Sardis' past one sees that there was still something germinal there which hadn't been taken to completion at the time when John wrote the Apocalypse. The whole tone of this fifth epistle is different. It points to the future. The future to which he pointed at that time, which is as it were germinally contained in Sardis is our future; it is the time in which we're living.

So the development of the successive post Atlantean periods is hidden in the developing Christian churches, and the same thing is indicated from another side in the seven seals.

We have another indication, as it were, of what the secret of the seven churches is in the seven seals. We will describe the other meaning of the seven seals later, but when the fourth seal is opened, it corresponds to a secret of the fourth post Atlantean epoch, for a pale horse appears, and there is talk about the death which has come into the world. This touches upon one of the most important secrets of the Apocalypse—at least, it is very important for our time. In a way, death really entered into humanity during the fourth Post Atlantean epoch. You should make this clear to yourselves. One finds out what human nature is if one contemplates something like this; one can really get to know it quite well.

If we go back to the first, second and third post Atlantean epochs we find that the way man felt about himself, and his whole frame of mind was different in these early times than it became later. Man had a distinct inner feeling that he was growing into his earthly abode. Even though this consciousness had dimmed considerably by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, men had a distinct memory in their ordinary consciousness that they had lived up in the spiritual world before their life on earth. In the first, second and third post Atlantean epochs, everyone knew that they had been a spiritual being before they had become a child. One doesn't find this, in external documents very much, but the fact is that people, took the continuation of their stay upon earth backwards into the spiritual world for granted. Human beings only began to feel that their life on earth was closed off by the two portals of conception or birth and death in the fourth post Atlantean epoch, which coincided with the Mystery of Golgotha.

This consciousness or attitude of soul first arose in the fourth post Atlantean epoch, so that this consciousness of being strictly enclosed by the boundaries of earthly life developed from about the eighth century before Christ up to the 15th century after the Mystery of Golgotha. A new consciousness is being prepared in the present epoch, but we're only at the beginning of it. Only about five centuries have elapsed since then, and this corresponds to about the third pre-Christian century with respect to the preparation of the fourth post Atlantean consciousness. The consciousness which they had then was quite different from the one they had when the fourth post Atlantean consciousness was fully developed. Likewise, most men today are not wearing the clothes of the new consciousness yet, but they are still wearing the consciousness of the fourth post Atlantean epoch. Our whole civilization tends to create this situation.

Just think of how much has been carried over from the fourth post Atlantean epoch and of how much people are living in the fourth post Atlantean epoch in a matter of fact or coquettish way. The fourth post Atlantean epoch is still working on in our entire high school education. Scholars who use Latin are still back in the fourth post Atlantean epoch. People in public life still think in the way that they thought in the fourth post Atlantean epoch. We haven't arrived at full humanity with respect to the development of our consciousness soul, as it were, in the fifth post Atlantean epoch. And this is why men of the present still think that their earth life is closed off by the two portals of birth and death.

The consciousness soul is being developed, but this development only becomes evident in people who have a special talent for it. I have met quite a few talented people like this during my lifetime; but one usually doesn't notice them. There is an awareness that a man with this fifth post Atlantean consciousness doesn't completely fit into the period between birth and death, that death plays into earthly life, that one really dies a little bit every day, that we're dying continuously all the time and that death exists. Some people are very much afraid of death, because they feel that it is undermining their ability to be human on earth. On the other hand, I have also known people who loved death because it always accompanied them, and they were really longing for it.

This is something which will arise evermore during the fifth post Atlantean epoch, namely, people will see death walking alongside them. To put it even more concretely: men will perceive an intimate fire process in themselves which is connected with the development of the consciousness soul. They will experience this development of waking consciousness like a kind of fire process which consumes them, especially at the moments when they pass over from sleeping to waking consciousness. The consciousness soul is a very spiritual thing, and spiritual things always consume material ones. The consciousness soul consumes material and etheric things in human beings through a kind of intimate fire process or transformation process.

This is something which men will perceive more and more in the course of this fifth post Atlantean epoch. Except that you shouldn't think that it's like a burning candle flame; one shouldn't think of it in such a physical way. Rather he will incorporate this proximity of death into his moral soul.

The situation with most people today is as follows. If you see how the good resolves and firm intentions which they have disappear in the next moment, hour, day or month, then in accordance with the prevailing, materialistic world view, one considers this to be something which simply occurs. But one will gradually begin to feel differently about this. One will begin to feel that a good intention which one was too weak to carry out weakens one's life and reduces one's moral value, and one will see that one becomes morally lighter and less significant in the universe thereby.

People today generally feel that what is present here is a weakness in their soul, and not something which works on in the universe. But this will change. Likewise, there will be certain intellectual qualities which people will increasingly feel are weakening them, as if a fire in their soul were consuming them. These phenomena are already here, and some of them exist on a large scale. But they are not being felt in an honest way.

There is a way to find one's way into the spiritual world where one goes step by step and where one also takes what is given in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? and in other books into account; thereby one arrives at a harmony between spirit, soul and body. But through the way in which most people cultivate a spiritual life today without these exercises, namely, through the way in which people in various confessions pursue a religious life, the latter is active in them in such a manner that it reduces their moral value and makes them lighter.

These are things which people are becoming aware of more and more. People in this fifth post Atlantean epoch are changing a great deal. For it is a significant change if one feels that one's whole manhood is strengthened or weakened by what one is in one's soul. It's quite a change if one feels that destiny is not only a matter of circumstances which work upon one and which are present around one outside, but that it is something which makes one morally lighter or heavier. It's not as if one's physical body were protected against this, for one feels that one becomes lighter or heavier as a whole human being.

You see, this is the consciousness which is being prepared, and one can see externally and empirically that it is being prepared. The time is beginning today when the priesthood will have to think of these things, when the faithful are standing before them. For it's a question of dealing with what is rising in men's consciousness in such a way that a man is comforted and strengthened. These things are not fully conscious yet, and they are coming up together with all kinds of unrest, nervousness and disharmonious emotional contents.

You priests will find that it's becoming increasingly impossible to treat individual people in accordance with the general ideas which you have formed. Don't be offended by this, but in a certain sense clichés have been the decisive thing in the past and in many respects they still are today. If you ask what a priest did with someone who came to him with some kind of delusive ideas, one will hear that he tried to make him feel aware that he was a sinner, and that he did the same with a second case, and so on. Thus everything is pervaded by clichés.

I once went to three burials in one day, and I noticed that the same priest began each burial with the statement, “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so much higher are my thoughts than your thoughts.” Here we have another cliché, which was relatively justified in the fourth post Atlantean epoch. Like the other things that I mentioned, this has reached over into the fifth and it rules our thinking, whereas a finer observation shows that all things must be transformed in our cultural epoch. Priests must begin to be able to look into the hearts of other human beings again.

Very few people can do this today. Human beings know terribly little about other human beings today. For you see, if one reads the passage about the white raiment which people who have fulfilled the task of the fifth cultural epoch will have to wear, and if one does this with a certain reverence—because one can't really read the Apocalypse without reverence—one gets the impression that here it's a question of looking deeply into the special kind of consciousness which each human being has with the eye of a priest. It's a question of their becoming acquainted with the people who appear before them in the fifth post Atlantean age. We are being admonished to become acquainted with each human being in his soul garment, and not just in the clothes which he wears through what he is in the outer world. This admonishment of the Apocalypticer is addressed to our present time through this letter.

Today's priests must penetrate the souls of human beings as they momentarily disregard all the external things into which men are placed. Priests must really begin to look at human beings in the way I described, namely, in the way one must look at them if one wants to investigate their karma. The day before yesterday I said that if one wants to investigate someone's karma one has to immerse oneself in his soul and in the qualities which can come to expression in any profession and basically in any capacity, and one shouldn't look at people from the viewpoint of their vocation, social ties, and ability or non-ability. For one has to look at what a human being was in his past earth life. Now priests don't have to go quite that far, but they must begin to see through external things and to look at man's inner life and his purely human side, and at what gives each inner human being an individual constitution. It's really the case that if we read up to this Book of Revelation we feel that what is written in it is like a direct exhortation to present-day humanity. And if we read on we can get an even deeper impression.

Just consider the following. We're going through the fifth post Atlantean epoch; during this fifth post Atlantean age man is changing his consciousness in such a way that he sees through the work and activity of death itself. He will understand it. He will not learn to see through it in such a way that he knows how much longer he has to live; but he will see the working of death itself; he will have it as a constant companion. Of course he will have to have a soul content which will make this standing next to him of death seem natural, and this is something which will have to be created in the various spheres of life. If one's soul forces are constantly alert one will be able to have death next to one as a good friend and a constant companion.

You should realize that when you look out into your environment today, you are still seeing things like a man of the fourth post Atlantean epoch. You're basically looking at life which has death in it in every plant and rock, but you don't see the death, because you still don't see it in yourself. People will soon begin to see death all the time. This is what one will increasingly have to say to present-day men. People's whole perception will change as they see death more and more.

If one sees death one sees many things which are completely hidden in the phenomena. We see nature in a rather stable way today because we don't look into certain fine, intimate things in nature at all. We walk through the countryside, and we see signs which say that there is a lot of foot and mouth disease in this area. However, in reality something happened in the more intimate things above such a place—if one can see it—which can be compared with an ocean which is roiled by a storm or with a volcanic eruption. This is what will approach mankind in the sixth post Atlantean epoch.

Today people can observe the eruption of a Vesuvius or a great earthquake by means of a seismograph, but because they don't see death yet they don't see the tensions in the etheric which become manifest in all kinds of things, such as when a significant genius lives somewhere or is born there. People can see the tremendous working and weaving of the spirit behind the planets and stars and their configurations just as little; the latter are just an external manifestation of the former.

People will see all of this in a certain way during the sixth post Atlantean epoch. The sun and the stars and planets in their present form will have fallen down from the heavens. One will see the working and weaving of spirit where the materially abstract stars shine today. Thus the way that men see themselves will change a great deal in the course of the fifth post Atlantean age and the way they see the whole world around them will change greatly in the course of the sixth. For example, don't think that an initiate sees the world like a non-initiate does. Something similar applies to successive stages of consciousness. Human beings see the world differently in successive epochs.

The fact that we are living at a time when man and the way the world looks are being transformed is indicated in a number of ways but also by the fact that there is a relative uniformity in the description of the first four letters. The first letter is unsealed and a horse appears, a white horse. The second letter is unsealed and a red horse appears, but it's a horse. The third letter is unsealed and a black horse appears, but it's a horse. The fourth letter is unsealed and a pale horse appears, but again it is a horse.

The fifth letter is unsealed and no horse appears; there is no mention of horses anymore. The decisive thing here is indicated in an entirely different way. If we go on reading the letters, we find that a very important transformation which is occurring during our age is pointed to in this way.

We can only say that we must prepare ourselves to become the new, transformed community of Sardis. This new and transformed community in Sardis must realize that it's rather trivial to know plants, animals and rocks, for one only really knows these things if one finds the activities of the stars and planets in every stone and in every plant. The stars must fall down from heaven in a spiritual way. One can already begin to perceive this.

I would just like to give a particular example of this. People accept the outer forms of such things. One doesn't pay much attention to the way in which something like this is present in the whole spiritual evolution of mankind. Each person can only do something at the place where he stands. Before I went on my last trip to England, the following thing happened. You may know that when I'm here I give the people who are working on our building one or two hours a week during their working time, where I talk to them about scientific and spiritual things. I let the workers give me the themes, and they really like to do this. The workers like it if they can choose the themes. Now they wanted to know about things which are possible in present-day spiritual life. This is one of the things which priests should really understand.

When I walked into the classroom before I went on my trip to England, a worker had a prepared question: Why is it that only certain rocks and plants have an odor? Where does the fragrance of flowers come from? Now these workers were educated by the lectures which have been given for years to such an extent that they're not particularly interested in chemical explanations, where one tells them that one has this or that substance which is giving off this or that aroma, along the lines of explanations which tell one that destitution comes from poverty. The workers want real explanations.

Now you see, I had to tell them the following. I will briefly repeat what I explained to them for about an hour. Things which smell refer us to our sense organs; we perceive the aroma through our organ of smell. But let's ask ourselves whether we have developed our organ of smell to the point where we can compete with a police dog. You will have to admit that we can't. On the contrary, you will have to admit that man has a rather crude organ of smell and that one runs into more sensitive organs of smell if one goes down to certain lower forms in nature.

One can see this from the following. Take a dog, which has this sensitive organ of smell, so that it can become a police, dog. You will see that it has a receded forehead which follows the olfactory nerves that bear smells into its system. All of this is puffed up into a forehead in us; our intellectual apparatus and especially our ability to recognize things is a transformed organ of smell. This explains why we find more sensitive organs of perception when we descend to lower creatures.

Now spiritual science teaches us that the fragrant flowers of a large number of plants are really organs of smell; they're vegetable organs of smell which are extraordinarily sensitive. And what do they smell? They smell the omnipresent, world's aroma. The worldly smell which is emitted by Venus is different from the ones which are given off by Mars or Saturn. For instance, violet smells are the aromatic echo of the cosmic smell which violets perceive. Such pleasant smelling plants perceive the elements of the world's smell which come from Venus, Mercury and Mars. Stinky asafetida smells Saturn odors and reproduces them.

Here one has to explain to people how the stars fall down, because they want to know this; for the things of the world are basically nothing else than what they give out or radiate down. If one wants to talk about things in a realistic way, one has to say that the stars are really falling down already, because they are in the plants. Plants are aromatic and they are also olfactory organs. This morning I let the workers give me some more questions. One of the questions was: If what was said about smells is correct and plants are sensitive organs of smell, where do plant colors come from?

I had to explain that although plant aromas come from the planets, plant colors come from the power of the sun. I gave an example to make this seem plausible. However, one of the workers wasn't entirely satisfied with this answer, and he said: this doesn't explain why rocks have colors; I can understand why plants have colors, for if there's a plant growing in the cellar where there's no sunlight, it has a form which has an aroma, because the world's aroma passes through the walls of the cellar; but the sun doesn't shine through the walls and so plants remain pale or even white; but how do rocks become colored? Then I had explain[ed] that we have the course of the day, with a revolution with respect to the sun in hours, and we have the course of the year which brings about the seasons during which the sun goes up towards the zenith and back down again; but we also have something else. I had to explain the Platonic year, and I explained that although the sun is now in Pisces at the vernal equinox it was previously in Aries, Taurus and Gemini, and that it takes 25.920 years for it to go all the way around. So that the sun is connected with the course of a day, the course of a year and the course of a world year; and whereas plants get their colors from the sun in the course of a year, rocks get their colors in the course of a world year.

The power which the sun develops in its movement through a Platonic year lives in the colors of green emeralds, wine yellow topaz and red rubies. And so you see that if one begins to speak about the spiritual world people are no longer satisfied if one explains their questions about earthly things with the trivialities which come out of our laboratories and dissecting rooms. They want to know things, and they feel very satisfied if they know them in a Sardisian way or in a way where one brings in the stars and planets and their activities. After all, by placing Sardis into the present time, one is doing the same thing that the Apocalypse is doing.

You see, this is an example, but on the other hand, one has to begin to carry this sensing of the stars and their beings into the present People will have to begin to see that the Christ is a sun being again. But this is what they fight most of all. But if I tell you such things, namely, if I tell you that our modern, fifth post Atlantean epoch must be the resurrected Sardis, in the way that this is concisely and wonderfully described in the fifth community and in the fifth seal, when these things are unsealed, if I say this to you, you will feel that one of our tasks is to develop this particular understanding of the Apocalypse today, namely, to be able to understand the tasks which are demanding our heartfelt attention every day. It doesn't do any good to merely interpret the Apocalypse today. We must put the Apocalypse into practice in everything we do, otherwise we might just as well forget about it. A desire to interpret it in order to satisfy one's curiosity doesn't have much value.

Thus I have tried to show you the second thing which belongs to a reading of the Apocalypse. Yesterday I tried to indicate the formal aspect to you; today I tried to indicate that it takes will power to read it. But this is only natural. For apocalypses have always arisen through inspirations of the will, and here we touch upon a really apocalyptic point, because it is an apocalyptic point which is full of life.

We already have people today who are being trained in an apocalyptic way; but they are being apocalyptically trained so that they receive their training of the will in a way which is oriented specifically towards the Roman catholic church; these are the Jesuits. There is something very apocalyptic about the Jesuits' training and exercises. The Jesuits' exercises involve a training of the will, which always underlies the perception of apocalyptic things. Hence anyone who takes a real priesthood in the sense of a Christian renewal seriously today has to keep this training of the Jesuits in mind.

He must understand the Apocalypse so that he can find the right impulse for his will in it, whereas although the impulse for the will which was given by Ignatius of Loyola was wonderful, it was very one-sided, and it has become Ahrimanically hardened today. For Ignatius of Loyola is a good example of how wrongly we can look at the world if we don't gain knowledge of it in a spiritual scientific way.

People ascribe the present development of the Jesuits to Ignatius of Loyola. But it no longer has anything to do with him. Ignatius of Loyola reincarnated a long time ago, and of course he has separated himself from the movement completely, for he lived as Emanuel Swedenborg; and so the Jesuitic movement has become completely Ahrimanic since then. It is no longer connected with Ignatius and it is active in an Ahrimanic way. Here you have a kind of shadowy counter image of what you must train yourself to do, when you take apocalyptic things into your ego in the way I mentioned, so that your ego becomes' a sum of active forces which are also apocalyptic.

I propose to devote the time that remains at our disposal to the consideration of the rearing of live-stock and the cultivation of fruit and vegetables.

Naturally there will not be time to treat the subject at very great length, but in order to obtain a fruitful starting point, we must gain insight into all the factors which come into consideration. We shall do this to-day, and tomorrow we shall pass on to the more practical aspect of the subject.

I shall ask you to-day to join me in the consideration of rather more recondite matters, to follow me into what is nowadays an almost unknown territory, although the instinctive husbandry of the past was thoroughly conversant with it. The beings in Nature—minerals, plants, animals—we will disregard man for the moment—are often regarded as though, they existed in completely separate realms. It is the custom to-day to look at a plant as though it existed by and for itself, and similarly one species of plant is also regarded as being isolated from other plant species. So these things are neatly sorted and fitted into genera and species, as though they were being put into boxes. But things are not like this in Nature. In Nature—nay, in the world—being as a whole, all things are in mutual interaction. One thing is always being affected by another. In these materialistic days, only the more palpable effects of this interaction are noted, such as when one thing is eaten or digested by another, or when the dung of animals is used for the soil. In addition to these, however, finer interactions amongst more delicate forces and substances are continually taking place: through warmth, through the chemical-etheric element which is continually at work in the atmosphere, and through the life-ether. Unless we take account of these more delicate interactions, we shall make no progress, at any rate in certain departments of Agriculture. In particular we must look to those more intimate interactions which take place in Nature when we have to deal with the life together of plant and animal on the farm. We must look with understanding not only upon those animals which undoubtedly stand close to us, such as cattle, horses, sheep, etc., but also, for example, upon the manifold insect world, which during a certain period of the year hovers around the plants. Indeed, we must learn to look with understanding at bird-life too. Humanity to-day is very far from realising how much farming and forestry are affected by the expulsion from certain districts of certain kinds of birds as a result of modern conditions. Here again light can be thrown on the subject by conceptions given by Spiritual Science. Let us therefore extend some of these ideas which have been working upon us and come by their help to a yet wider vision.

A fruit tree—apple, pear or plum—is something completely different in kind from a herbaceous or cereal plant as any kind of tree outwardly is indeed. But, putting aside any preconceived notions, we must find out wherein the peculiarity of the tree lies. Otherwise we shall never understand the function fulfilled by fruits in the economy of Nature. I am speaking, of course, of the fruit that grows on trees. If we look at a tree with understanding we shall find that the only parts of it which can really be reckoned as plant are the tender twigs, the green leaves and their stalks, the blossoms, the fruits. These grow out of the tree just as herbaceous plants grow out of the soil, the tree being in fact “earth” in relation to the parts that grow out of it. It is as though the soil were heaped up—but a somewhat more quickened soil than the ordinary soil in which our herbaceous and cereal plants grow.

If, therefore, we want to understand the nature of a tree, we must observe that it consists of the thick trunk, to which are attached the branches and boughs. On this ground the specifically plant-like parts grow, viz. leaves and blossoms, which are as much rooted in the trunk and branches as cereal and herbaceous plants are rooted in the earth. The question therefore arises: is this plant this plant-like part—which may be regarded as more or less parasitical, really rooted in the tree?

We cannot discover an actual root on the trees. We conclude, therefore, that this plant, which develops its leaves and blossoms and twigs up aloft, must have lost its roots in growing on the tree. But no plant is complete without its root. It must have a root. Where, then, does the actual root of this plant reside?

Now, the root is only invisible for our limited outer vision. In this case one does not see it, but has to understand where it is. What do we mean by this? The following concrete comparison may help. Suppose I planted a large number of herbaceous plants so closely together that their roots were intertwined and grew into each other, forming a completely matted mass or pap of roots. You can well imagine that this pap does not remain chaotic, but that it organises itself into a unity so that the sap-bearing vessels unite with each other. In this organised root-pap, it would not be possible to distinguish where one root finished. and the other began, and a common root-organ would arise (See Diag. No. 12). A thing like that does not, of course, exist in the soil, but such a root-formation is actually present in the The plants that grow on the tree have lost their root, have become relatively separated from it and are only, as it were, etherically connected with it. What I have drawn hypothetic ally is really the layer of cambium (a layer of living cells lying between the last-formed wood and the outer bark) in the tree and we cannot regard the roots of these plants otherwise than as having been replaced by the cambium. From this tissue, which is always forming new cells, these plants unfold themselves just as from the root below an herbaceous plant unfolds above the soil. We can now begin to understand what the tree really is. The tree with its cambium—which is the only cell-producing layer in the tree, is actually heaped-up earth, which has grown upwards into the air element and therefore requires a more interiorised form of life than is present in the ordinary soil which contains the root. Thus, we must regard the tree as a very curious entity, whose function it is to separate the “plants” growing on it (twigs, blossoms, fruit; from their roots; an entity which places between them and their roots a distance which is bridged only by spirit—or more strictly by the Etheric. It is in this way we need to look, with a macro-cosmic understanding, into the facts of growth.

But the matter goes much farther. What results arise from the existence of a tree? That which is around the tree in the air and outer warmth is of a different plant-nature from that which grows up from the soil in the air and warmth and forms the herbaceous plant. It is a plant-world of a different order, possessing a far more intimate relation with the surrounding astral element. Lower down that element is eliminated from the air and warmth in order to make them mineral-like, so that they can be used by man and beast. [See Lecture II. They become “dead” air and warmth.]

It is true, as I have said, that the plant we see rowing upon the ground is surrounded, as with a cloud. v the astral element. But around the tree, the astral element is far denser. So much so, that we may say: Our trees are definitely collectors of astral substance.

Here one might say it is quite easy to reach a higher development and become “esoteric”—I do not mean clairvoyant but clair-sentient as to the sense of smell. One has only to acquire the capacity for distinguishing between the scent of plants growing in the ground, the peculiar smell of orchards, especially in the spring when they are in flower, and the aroma of forests. Then one is able to tell the difference between a plant atmosphere poor in astral elements, such as that of herbaceous plants growing in the soil and an atmosphere such as we sniff with such pleasure when the scent of trees is wafted in our direction. And if you train your sense of smell to distinguish between the scent of soil-grown (herbaceous) plants and the scent of trees, you will have developed “clear-smelling” for the thinner and for the denser forms of the astral element. The countryman, as you see, can very easily acquire this “clear-smelling” though this faculty, common in the old days of instinctive clairvoyance, has been much neglected in recent times.

If, now, we realise the consequences to which this may lead the question will arise: What is happening in that part of the tree which may be regarded as the opposite pole from the “parasitical” plants on the tree which collect this astral element. What is happening through the cambium?

Now. the tree makes the atmosphere far and wide around it richer in astral element. What happens while the “parasite” growth goes on above in the tree? The tree here has a certain inner vitality, a powerful etheric life in it. The cambium tones down this vitality, making it more mineral in nature. “While about the upper part of the tree an enrichment of the astral substance is going on, the cambium causes an impoverishment of the etheric life in the tree. The tree within is deprived of etheric life as compared with the herbaceous plant. In consequence, this produces a change in the root. The root of the tree becomes more mineral, far more mineral than the roots of the herbaceous plants. But by becoming more mineral, the tree-root withdraws some of the etheric life from the soil; it makes the soil around the tree slightly more dead than it would be around a herbaceous plant. This must be fully borne in mind, for these natural processes always have a great significance in the economy of Nature. We must therefore seek to understand the significance of the astral wealth in the atmosphere around the tree and of the etheric poverty in the region of the roots.

If we look around us, we can find the further connection. It is the fully developed insect which lives on and weaves in this enriched astral element which wafts through the trees; whereas the impoverished etheric element beneath, spreading in the soil and throughout the whole tree (for, as I pointed out yesterday in connection with human Karma, a spiritual element always works throughout the whole being) is that which harbours the' larvae or grubs. Thus, if there were no trees on the earth there would be no insects. The insects that flutter around the upper parts of the trees and through the forests depend for their life upon the presence of the trees; and exactly the same thing is true of the grubs.

Here we have yet another indication of the inner connection between all roots and animal life beneath the soil. This is especially evident in the case of the trees. But this same principle which is so striking in the case of the trees is present in a modified form throughout the whole of the vegetable world, for in every plant there lives something that tends to become a tree. In every plant the root and what is around it tends to throw off the etheric life whereas the upper growth strives to attract the astral element more closely to itself. For this reason, there arises in every plant that kinship with the insect world which I have specially characterised in the case of the tree.

This relation, however, to the insect world in fact extends so as to comprise the whole of the animal world. In former times insect grubs, which can only live upon the earth because of the presence of tree roots, transformed themselves into other kinds of animals, similar to larvae and remaining at the larva stage throughout their lives. These animals then emancipated themselves to a certain extent from the tree-root nature and adopted a life which extends also to the root region of herbaceous plants. And now we find the curious fact that certain of these sub-terrestrial animals, though far removed from being larvae, yet have the ability to regulate the amount of etheric life in the soil if this amount becomes excessive. When the soil becomes, as it were, too much alive and the sprouting etheric life too strong, these animals of the soil see to it that this excess is reduced. They are thus wonderful vents which regulate the vitality in the soil.

These lovely creatures, for they are of the greatest value to the earth are no other than the common earthworms. One ought to study the life of earth-worms in relation to the soil, for these wonderful animals allow just that amount of etheric life to remain in the soil as is needed for the growth of plants. Thus, in the soil we have these creatures, earth-worms and their like, distantly resembling larvae. One ought in fact to see to it that certain soils which require it, are supplied with a healthful stock of worms. We should soon see how beneficent such a control over this animal-world in. the soil can be, not only for vegetation but also thereby for the rest of the animal kingdom, as we shall show later.

Now there are certain animals which bear a distant resemblance to the insect world, to that part of it which is fully developed and winged, I mean the birds. It is well known that in the course of the development of the earth something very wonderful took place between the birds and the insects. It is as though, to put it figuratively, the insects had one day said: “We do not feel strong enough to ‘work-up’ the astrality sparkling around the trees, we shall therefore use the ‘desire-to-be-a-tree’ of other plants. We shall flutter around these, and leave largely to you birds the astral life that surrounds the trees.” Thus, there arose in Nature a proper “division of labour” between the birds and the butterflies; and this co-operation in the winged world brought about in a wonderful manner the right distribution of astral life wherever it was required on the surface of the earth. If these winged creatures are removed, the astral life will fail to accomplish its proper function, and this will be noticeable in the stunted condition of the vegetation. The two things are connected; the world of winged animals and all that grows out of the soil into the air. The one is unthinkable without the other. In farming, therefore, we must see to it that birds and insects fly about as they were meant to do; and the farmer should know something about the breeding and rearing of birds and insects. For in Nature—I must repeat this again and again—everything, everything is connected.

These considerations are of the utmost importance for a right understanding of the questions before us and we must therefore hold them very clearly in our minds. The winged world of insects brings about the proper distribution of astrality in the air. The astrality in the air has a mutual relationship with the forest which directs it in the proper way, much as in the human body the blood is directed by certain forces. And this activity of the forest, which is effective over a very wide area, will have to be undertaken by something quite different in a district where there is no forest. Indeed, in districts where woods alternate with arable land and meadows that which grows in the soil comes under quite different laws from those which rule in completely unwooded districts.

There are certain parts of the earth which were obviously wooded areas long before man took a hand. In certain matters, Nature is cleverer than we are. and it may safely be assumed that if a forest grows naturally in a certain district it will have its uses for the neighbouring fields and for the herbaceous and cereal vegetation round about. In such districts one ought therefore to have the intelligence not to uproot the woods but to cultivate them. Ana as the earth is gradually changing through climatic and cosmic influences of all kinds, one should have the courage, when the vegetation becomes poor, not merely to indulge in all sorts of experiments in the fields and for the fields, but to increase the area of woods in the neighbourhood. And when plants run to leaf, lacking the power to produce seed, one should take bites out of the neighbouring woods. The regulation of woods in districts which Nature intended to De wooded is an integral part of agriculture, and must be examined with all its consequences from a spiritual point of view.

Again, the world of grubs and worms may be said to stand in a mutual relationship to the lime, i.e. to the mineral part of the earth; while the world of birds and insects, of all that flies and flutters about, has a similar relationship to the astral element. The relation between the worm and grub world and lime brings about the drawing off of the etheric element, as I explained a few days ago, from a different point of view. This is the function of lime, but it performs this function in cooperation with the world of worms and grubs.

If these ideas are carried out in more detail, they will lead to other things which—and that is why I have expounded them with such confidence—were applied, in the days of instinctive clairvoyance, in the right way. But this instinct has been lost, rooted out by the intelligence, as have been all such instincts. Materialism is to blame for men's having become so clever and intellectual. In the days when they were not intellectual, they were not so clever, but they were far wiser and learned through their feelings how to go about things; and we must learn to act with wisdom once again through Anthroposophy, but this time the wisdom will be conscious. For Anthroposophy is by no means something clever and intellectual—it strives for wisdom. And we must try to draw near to wisdom in all things and not be content merely to learn by rote an abstract jingle of words, such as “Man consists of a physical body, etc.” The main point is that we should introduce this knowledge into everything; then one finds the way to discriminate—especially if one really becomes clairvoyant in the sense that I have explained to you—and to see things in Nature as they really are. We shall discover, for example, that birds can become harmful if they are not in the neighbourhood of a wood of conifers which can turn what they do into something useful. Our vision is then further sharpened and we begin to discern the presence of yet another relationship. It is a very delicate relationship, similar to those I have been dealing with, but which can appear in a more tangible form. All growing things that are neither trees nor small plants, i.e. all shrubs such as the hazel bush have, an intimate relationship with mammals. If, therefore, we wish to improve the mammals on our farm, we shall do well to plant such bush-like growths. The mere presence of the bushes has a beneficent influence, for in Nature all things stand in constant reciprocal relationship.

But let us go a step further. Animals are not so foolish as human beings. They very soon notice the presence of this relationship. They find that they like these shrubs; this liking is inborn in them, and they enjoy eating them. They begin to eat what they need of the shrubs, and this has a wonderfully regulating effect upon the rest of their diet. But this insight into the intimate relations in Nature will also throw light upon the nature of harmful influences. Just as conifer woods stand in intimate relationship to birds and shrubs to mammals_? so do all kinds of fungi stand in a relation similarly intimate to the lower animals, to bacteria and the like, viz. to parasites. Harmful parasites are closely connected with fungi. They develop where fungus-life is dispersed. In this way, there arise plant diseases and other greater ills in plants. If, however, we can contrive to nave not only woods, but also well-watered meadows suitably situated in the neighbourhood of cultivated lands, these will be useful in forming a good breeding ground for fungi. One should see to it that the moist meadows are well-planted with such growths. We then make the following remarkable discovery, that if a meadow, not necessarily very large, but rich in fungi (e.g. mushrooms) is situated near cultivated land then the fungi, because of their kinship with bacteria and other parasites, will keep these creatures away from the farming-land. For mushrooms “hang together” with these little creatures more than do other plants. Thus, in addition to the other methods I have advocated for combating plant pests there is also the possibility of keeping these tiny creatures, these vermin away from cultivated land by converting land in its vicinity into meadows.

It is so important for success in agriculture that the right amount of acreage should be assigned respectively to woods, orchards, shrubberies and meadows with a natural growth of fungi, that one often gets better results-even if one reduces the extent of tilled land accordingly. Generally speaking, to cultivate the whole of the acreage at one's disposal, leaving no room for the other factors of which I have spoken, and to count in consequence upon larger crops is certainly no real economy. The extension of the tilled area is counterbalanced by a lowering in the quality of the produce because the increase in the cultivated area is made at the cost of the other factors. One cannot be engaged in a thing like farming where Nature is the “manager,” without realising the inter-connections and inter—actions which exist between all her processes.

Now let us look at something which will make clear to us the relation of plant to animal and, conversely, of animal to plant. What is an animal in reality, and what is the plant-world? (In the case of plants it is better to speak of the whole of the plant-world). We must look for the relationship between the two because only by this means can we come to understand the feeding of animals. For feeding is only properly done if it is done in accord with the true relationship between plant and animal. What are animals? We examine them, we even dissect them, study their muscles and nerves and admire the forms of their skeleton. But this does not tell us what an animal is in the whole economy of Nature. We shall only get at this if we grasp what it is with which the animal is most intimately connected in its environment.

Now with its system of nerves and senses and with part of its breathing system, the animal “works-up” all that which comes through the air and warmth. The animal does this to the extent that it is a separate being. (See Diag. No. 14). We may make a schematic drawing to indicate this. With regard to everything lying in its periphery, the animal lives with its nerves and sense system and part of its breathing system immediately in air and warmth. The animal has an immediate connection with air and warmth, its bony system being actually formed from the warmth which in particular mediates the influences of the sun and the moon. Its muscular system is formed from the air, which again works as a mediator of the forces of sun and moon. But as regards its relation to earth and water, the animal is not able directly to assimilate. It must first absorb them into its digestive tract and then work on them with what it has itself become through air and warmth; it works upon earth and water with its metabolic system and with a part of its breathing system, which passes over into the metabolic system. The animal must therefore have already come into existence by virtue of air and warmth if it is to be able to “work up” earth and water. This, therefore, is the animal's way of living in the sphere of earth and water. The process of transformation which I have described takes place, of course, by means of forces (dynamically) rather than by means of substances (materially).

Let us now try to answer the question: What is a plant?

The plant stands in an immediate relation to earth and water just as the animal does to air and warmth. The plant, therefore_? through a kind of breathing and through something very distantly resembling a sense system absorbs earth and water in the same direct manner as the animal absorbs air and warmth. Thus, the plant and earth and water live directly together. And now_? of course, you will say: If the plant lives in immediate contact with earth and water as the animal does with air and warmth, then no doubt the plant “works up” air and warmth inside itself just as the animal “works up” earth and water? But this is not the case. We cannot reach spiritual truths merely by analogy. The fact is that whereas the animal absorbs earth and water into itself, the plant actually gives off the air and warmth which it experiences dimly through its connection with the soil.

Thus, air and warmth do not go into the plant, or at any rate do not enter deeply into it; instead of being devoured by the plant, air and warmth are given off by it. And this process of elimination is the important thing. Organically the plant stands in inverse relation to the animal. That which in the animal is important as a process of nutrition becomes in the plant an elimination of air and warmth, and as in that sense we can say that the animal lives by absorbing food, in the same sense does the plant live by giving off air and warmth. And in virtue of that quality it may be said that the plant is virginal. Its character is not to absorb greedily but actually to give out that which the animal takes from the world in order to live. Thus, the plant lives by giving.

In this giving and taking, we can recognise something which played a very important part in the old instinctive knowledge of these matters. “In Nature's economy, the plant gives and the animal takes.” What is contained in this saying garnered from Anthroposophy was once common property in times of instinctive clairvoyance into Nature. Even m later days, much of this knowledge has remained among' those gifted with a peculiar sensitiveness in these matters, and in the works of Goethe you will sometimes come across the phrase: “In Nature everything lives through giving and taking.” Goethe did not fully understand the phrase, but he adopted it from ancient customs and traditions and he felt that it pointed to something in Nature which was true. Those who came after him understood nothing of this, and so did not understand what he meant when he spoke of taking and giving. Goethe also speaks of taking and giving in connection with breathing, in so far as breathing inter-acts with metabolism. He uses the words “taking and giving” in a fashion, semi-clear.

To sum up, I have shown you that in a certain sense the woods, orchards and shrubberies on the earth act as regulators in producing the right kind of plant-growth, and that under the soil grubs and other worm-like creatures act similarly in conjunction with lime. This is how we should envisage the relationship between the cultivation of fields, of fruit and of cattle, and then proceed to put our knowledge into practice. We shall endeavour to do this in the last hour that remains at our disposal, so that our Experimental Circle may work out these things more fully in the future.

Initiation makes it possible for a person to gain insight into higher worlds. It is a process of development in the inmost soul. Different people take different paths, but the truth is the same for all of them. Having reached the summit of a mountain you have an open view in all directions. But it would be quite nonsensical not to take the path to the top that is nearest to the point where we actually are. And it is the same with initiation. Once we have reached our goal and truly gained an open view, the insight gained will be the same for all.

It is not good, however, for someone to take a route other than the one that suits his nature. There should really be a separate path for every individual. All of them do, however, fall into one of three types—the yoga path, gnostic and Rosicrucian Christian initiation. One of these three different routes may be taken. They differ because there are three kinds of human beings. Only few Europeans can take the Oriental yoga route. It therefore is not right, as a rule, for a European to take that route. People live in an entirely different climate in the Orient, where the light of the sun is completely different. The anatomical differences between Orientals and Europeans are not easily demonstrable, but the difference in soul and spirit is profound, and this must be taken into account, for inner development intervenes deeply in the soul and spirit nature of a person. Anatomists cannot perceive the finer structure of the Hindu brain. But if you were to ask of a European the things that can be asked of an Indian, you would destroy him. An Indian may be asked to do certain things which serve no purpose at all for a European and may even be bad for him. Above all the yoga path makes one basic demand on pupils that has to be met if the path is to be taken at all. It demands the strict authority of a teacher, who is called a guru. To take that path one must accept the guru's directions in every detail of life. Quite apart from that, the Indian yoga route can hardly be taken unless one tears oneself away from the external conditions of life. It is necessary, you see, to make all kinds of external arrangements that will support the exercises one is given. If you experience things that make a deep impression on your feeling life, this will have a profound influence on you as you are going through occult inner development. The Oriental yoga pupil must therefore ask his guru about every detail of his life. To make any change whatsoever in his life, he must first ask the guru for direction. The yoga path therefore requires absolute subjection to a guru. You have to learn to see things through the guru's eyes, and to feel the way he does. It is impossible to follow this path unless there is profound trust, perfect love, combined with utter trust and an unconditional surrender that has precedence over everything else.

For the gnostic Christian path there is only one great teacher, the central guru. What is needed is belief in Christ Jesus himself not only his teachings. A gnostic Christian pupil must be able to believe that the one and only sublime divine individual spirit was incarnated in Christ Jesus, an individual spirit that cannot be compared with any other, not even the highest. All other individuals started at a lower level on earth and then ascended, examples being Buddha, Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras, and their spiritual stature is the result of many earlier incarnations. This is not the case with Christ Jesus. He cannot be compared with any other individual, with anything else on earth. It would be impossible to follow the gnostic Christian path unless one believes this.

A third path is the Rosicrucian Christian one. There the teacher is the counsellor who essentially limits his counsel to the actual measures taken for spiritual development. This spiritual development must be organized in such a way that it has a deep-reaching influence on the life of the individual. A teacher must always be present for initiation. There is no serious initiation without a teacher. Anyone who wants to say there is, would be saying something as silly as someone who thought it was possible for a child to be bom without the two sexes playing a role. Initiation is a spiritual fertilization process which would in fact be harmful if it were not brought about in such a dual relationship between teacher and pupil.

The Indian yoga path is in seven stages. The sequence is not always the same, however. Different stages may be combined, in a way. It is not necessary to go through stages 1 to 7 in that order. It may happen that one is asked to take something from somewhere in the sequence earlier on, and an exercise may be given that relates to another stage. It depends on the individual concerned. A pupil may do this in a few years, or even a few months. Asked how long initiation takes, Subba Row¹⁴⁸ said it may be 70 incarnations or 7, some need 7 years, others may need 7 months, or 7 days, or indeed 7 hours. It depends entirely on the spiritual maturity of the person. Spiritual maturity shows itself sooner in some and needs longer in others. This is a matter of karma. We may well ask why someone may not be outstanding in this respect though he may have reached a very high level of spirituality in an earlier existence. There may be obstacles in his physical or soul nature. The teacher's task is above all to remove such obstacles. The physiognomy of a person in ordinary life has nothing to do with it. An earlier incarnation may lie hidden deep down in the soul and be unable to emerge because of some kind of obstacle or other.

Yama is the first stage of Indian yoga training. It signifies ‘restraint’; or ‘forbearance’. To an Indian this means not to lie, not to kill, not to steal, no dissoluteness, no desires. To enter more deeply into what this means to an Indian, we must consider it in its whole context. Thus we may be vegetarians, but we still have not got out of the habit of killing things. Our life is in fact impossible without this. We actually kill as we breathe, for we exhale carbon dioxide. If the earth's green plant cover did not continually take up the carbon dioxide and give off oxygen, humans and animals would be unable to live. It is part of the yoga exercises to get out of the killing habit. Indians take this very seriously. Many of the connections we have in our life would also come under the heading of stealing for them. Each of us must accept money in some way. Many conditions are involved in our getting this money. When we buy a coat we have no way of knowing if human blood has not been shed for it. People do not give much thought to the fact that they are in a social context and partly responsible for what they do. If we take these things seriously, we must feel responsible for the things that happen because of us.

You help other people most by having few wants. Someone who reduces his wants helps others more than a philanthropist does. Thus if we do not write unnecessary letters this may save some people the effort of having to climb stairs. It is quite wrong to think that you help people by making more demands, thus providing more work. You do not in the least add to the things people need by making work for them. In Europe the situation is so complex nowadays that it is getting more and more difficult to meet the requirements of the Eastern yoga path. This can of course be followed in the proper, strict way in a country where there are no banks and where the cultural situation is clearly apparent.

The 2nd stage is niyana, observance of ritual. The Indian yoga way certainly demands ritual, so that the teachings may be linked with religious rites. It is strictly required that everyone taking the yoga way observes a ritual. Things should be enacted before their eyes. Just as in the case of art it matters that it comes to real expression in objects, so in the case of initiation it is important to have things presented in rituals.

The 3rd stage is asana, body positions assumed to be in accord with specific currents in the cosmos. When people still had a feeling for such things, they would always put the main altar at the eastern end of their religious buildings. Indians are so subtly organized that it matters in which direction they face. The current that goes from north to south is indeed different from the one that goes from east to west. Body positions are important for yoga initiation because the Oriental body is much softer, and taking a particular position leaves much more of an imprint. A European wanting to take the Oriental yoga way would have to do all these things as well.

The 4th is pranayama, bringing rhythm into the breathing process. We can best understand this if we consider that under present-day conditions, the human breath kills things. The teacher instructs the pupil to regulate his breathing according to certain rules he gives him, at least for a time. If we were to examine the breath we would find that the air exhaled by a yoga pupil has quite a different composition, quite a different carbon dioxide content, than the breath of ordinary people. It is therefore true that by regulating the breath the pupil influences the future evolution of the earth. Constant dropping wears the stone. You don't see results from one day to the next. But it all adds up and will have definite significance over long periods of time.

At a particular time, Rosicrucian teachers also get their pupils to bring rhythm into their breathing. What does the breathing process bring about? The physical human being cannot be thought of without the plants. We inhale oxygen which combines with carbon in the lung, and we exhale carbon dioxide. The plant does exactly the opposite. There is a continuous cycle between human beings on the one hand and plants on the other. In far distant times human beings will develop an organ of their own which will take care of the function plants perform today. They will be able to process the carbon dioxide in themselves. Human beings will have an organ able to separate the carbon from the oxygen and make it part of themselves. The principles we take in with our food today to build up our bodies will then be something we consciously do within ourselves. We'll thus change carbon dioxide into oxygen again. This process is indeed helped by making the breathing process rhythmical. This was taught extensively in 14th century Rosicrucian schools. Some of these secrets were betrayed, so that they appeared in the popular literature. In an 18th century work reference is made to the philosopher's stone.¹⁴⁹ The statement is literally true. The author himself probably did not know what this was really about. The whole human being must change if he is to achieve what the plant does for him now. His physical body will then be carbon, but not black coal, nor hard diamond, which after all is only a symbol for the philosopher's stone. The philosopher's stone is meant to be a body which is transparent, with the other organs integrated within it. It will consist of a mass of gel-like carbon, rather like the white of an egg. Man is following a course where he will one day develop into this marvellous glory. The rhythmic breathing which leads to this is called ‘alchemy’. The philosopher's stone is the lapis philosophorum. The man who wrote this did not actually know what it was he was writing.

The 5th stage on the yoga path is pratyahara. It consists in being able to suppress external sensory impressions. We have to know the things that are truly our soul world and leave aside everything that has come to us from outside. Most of the things people think have come to them from outside. When someone is able to give himself up consciously to his inner thoughts and make himself blind and deaf to the world around him, though he is inwardly awake; if he is able to have a thought without reflecting on external things, his sleep will be filled with dreams and he'll be practising pratyahara.

At the 6th stage one needs not only to blot out completely anything the eyes see and the ears hear but also suppress inner ideas rising from the soul itself. Having removed everything from the soul that has come to it from life, one then holds one idea, which the guru has given, in one's inner soul. These may be ideas like those given in the first four rules in Light on the Path. The best soul contents are those a special teacher is able to give us.

Such a soul content is allowed to act for some time before one lets go of it, without losing conscious awareness. One then has the function of the life in mind and spirit, without the thinking content. When this 7th stage has been reached the world of the spirit enters into us. This condition is called samadhi.

The path of Christian gnosis is also in seven stages. This method is designed for a somewhat less subtle body and above all for the world of sentience and feeling. The Christian teacher has to guide the pupil's world of sentience and feeling. The seven stages of Christian initiation are 1) the washing of the feet, 2) the scourging, 3) the crown of thorns, 4) the crucifixion, 5) the mystic death on the cross, 6) the entombment, 7) the ascension to heaven.

It is best to consider these 7 stages by describing the way the teacher works with the pupil. The teacher will say, for instance: ‘Look at the plant. It roots and grows in the world of minerals. Addressing itself to the mineral world it would have to say: “It is to you that I owe my existence, and I am only able to live because of you. Thank you!”’ In the same way the animal should say to the plant world: ‘I owe my existence to you and am only able to live thanks to you.’ Looking at the natural world around him and at the human beings who are at a lower level, a similar feeling should live in his soul. It is never possible to develop and reach a higher level unless there are also lower levels. Because of this, people who are socially at a higher level must also go down to those who are below them and give thanks to them. Christ Jesus suggested this when at the washing of the feet he bent down to his disciples and washed their feet. Someone who is at the first stage of Christian initiation must fill his heart and mind with such a feeling of gratitude to all that is below him. Two symptoms will indicate what he has achieved. He will have an astral vision where he sees himself in the washing of the feet situation. This happens to everyone who goes through this in the right way. Secondly he will have a feeling as if water were washing around his feet.

At the 2nd stage the pupil must learn to bear all the pain and suffering that life brings and which is always present all around him. He must stand up straight, even when he has to suffer the greatest pain. The symptoms will be an astral vision where he sees himself being scourged and he will feel something like needle pricks in different places on his body.

At the 3rd stage the pupil gains the ability to bear it when scorn and derision are poured on things that are most sacred to us. The teacher says to the pupil: ‘If you are able to bear mockery and derision of what is most sacred to you and stand up for it nevertheless, you will be able to wear the crown of thorns.’ The pupil will experience a particular kind of headache when he has reached this level.

At the 4th stage he must learn to consider the body as something wholly external to himself carrying it around the way we carry around an instrument, a hammer or some other tool. In some schools the pupils learn to speak of their body like this: ‘My body goes through the door’—and the like. In his astral vision the pupil then sees himself nailed to the cross. He has Christ's stigmata on his hands and feet and on the right side of the body. Red stigmata appear at the moment of meditation and concentration.

The 5th stage is the mystic death. Here the individual feels as if a veil was placed between him and the rest of the world, like a black curtain. He then comes to know inwardly all the badness there can be in the world. Descent into hell—that is the mystic death. A vision will then show the curtain being torn apart.

At the 6th stage one has a feeling as if everything else were one's own body. You are united with the earth. That is the entombment.

The 7th stage, resurrection, cannot be put into words. Someone who goes through those feelings in his soul gains insight into the world of the spirit.

The third kind of initiation is the Rosicrucian way. It has been known in Europe from the 14th century. It is above all concerned to strengthen and empower the inner will. Where the Oriental school puts the emphasis on thinking, and the Christian school on feeling, the Rosicrucian way aims to develop the will. The stages of this way are 1) study, 2) Imagination, 3) learning the occult script, 4) bringing rhythm into life, 5) coming to understand the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, 6) contemplation of or entering into the macrocosm, 7) godliness.

For study, the pupil must have the patience to gain certain ideas concerning the world. He must first of all accept the teaching he is given. Thus he must, for example, devotedly study the teachings of elementary theosophy. He must try and enter as deeply into these as he can. Patient acquisition of ideas is essential for anyone who wants to reach higher levels. This calls for a specific way of training one's thinking, getting used to living and being active in the pure thinking element. Books such as The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Truth and Knowledge¹⁵⁰ have been written for those who want to achieve Rosicrucian initiation and train their minds. It is a matter of overcoming the difficulties, which many find insurmountable, of following one's thoughts and perceiving how one thought of necessity arises from another. Oriental training required strict submission to the guru. For gnostic Christian training the pupil must put the Christ at the centre of all endeavour. In Rosicrucian Christian training the teacher is by his side, his friend and counsellor.

We are more apt to take a tumble when we come to the higher regions. It is therefore important to gain inner certainty. In everyday situations life itself puts us right. It will sometimes correct our errors in terrible ways. Such correction is not given when we ascend to the higher worlds. This is why in Oriental training one must see with one's guru's eyes and feel through him. The European teacher is a counsellor. One needs the guidance of another when ascending into the higher worlds. In the astral world, perceptions are entirely different from those we have in the physical world; and in the devachanic world, too, a new world of perceptions opens up for us. The three worlds differ completely in the impressions to be gained. But one thing is the same for all of them, and that is logical thinking. This can be a reliable guide on the astral and devachanic planes. When study has taught us to think logically, we can also manage on the astral and devachanic planes. The logic of the physical plan no longer applies on the buddhi plan, however.

The 2nd stage of Rosicrucian training is Imagination. European pupils should take their time over this, for it is easy to take a tumble. Man must learn to develop a moral relationship to things. All that is transient should be seen as a simile for something that is eternal. If we look at the natural world in this way, the autumn crocus, for instance, becomes the image for us of a solitary spirit seeking to rise upwards in a melancholy way. The violet will be a symbol of something that has its existence in undemanding, calm beauty. Every stone makes us think—it is a simile for something that lies behind it. Our world thus grows richer. Things tells us of their inmost nature. One flower will then be the tear through which the earth gives expression to its pain, another the expression of joy. Looking at a grain of rice, for example, we may observe a small flame arising from it. The small flame becomes an image of what will later be the haulm growing from the grain.

At the 3rd stage a whole world of the spirit arises from all that is. The spiritual reality, the spiritual content of all things floats above them. The whole astral world becomes visible. You then find yourself as if in the waves of the ocean, feeling as if you were floating in the sea. You see the colour of a tulip lifted out of it, as it were, and realize that this is the garment of a spiritual entity. At this third stage the pupil learns the occult script. We must learn this if we truly want to live in the astral world. Thus many things are based on a spiral in this world (Fig. 4).

We see such a spiral in the Orion nebula and in the configuration of life forms. Human and animal embryos are spiral in form at an early stage. One part is an image of the physical aspect, the other part, which winds into it, of the astral. The beginning of a new stage in human history is also symbolized by a double spiral. It is the sign of Cancer in the zodiac. When ancient Atlantis had perished and the post-Atlantean period began, with the ancient Indian race, the sun rose in the sign of Cancer at the beginning of spring. Learning the occult script we gain our orientation in the astral world.

The 4th stage consists in learning the rhythm of life. The pupil is instructed to regulate his breathing in a particular way. In nature, everything goes in rhythms. Every plant will rhythmically flower at the same time. Rhythm may also be seen in the animal world. Thus an animal is only fertile at certain times of the year. In man, however, rhythm becomes chaos. Man must create a new rhythm for his life. Many people only have rhythms that are imposed on them. Generally speaking, people do not have rhythms chosen of their own free will. The Rosicrucian must see to it that his life becomes rhythmical. Rhythm is given to the breathing process according to special instructions given by the teacher.

The 5th stage is getting to know the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. A bond exists between human beings and all things around them in this world. Ordinarily this only shows itself as love between the two sexes, the feeling that the one person finds in the other exactly what is familiar and related to him, what belongs to him. Many things are due to this mysterious relationship between world and man. An example is Paracelsus' discovery of the relationships that exist between certain plants and man. Having this ability he also came to know how other substances relate to man.¹⁵¹ He called someone suffering from cholera an Arsenicus, because arsenic will evoke exactly the symptoms in a healthy person which one also sees in a case of cholera.¹⁵² One can have a personal relationship, a loving relationship with all things, one that is wholly of the spirit. This must be practised. You achieve it by following specific directions. If you think of the point that lies between the eyebrows and above the root of the nose in relation to a particular word, insight into a quite specific process in the world will come to you after some time. Thinking of the inner eye you gain knowledge of the sun's nature, of the processes that occurred when sun and earth were still one heavenly body. Another exercise makes it possible to know the moon in its spiritual aspect, or the condition of the earth 18 million years ago.

You then enter deeply into the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm. Concentration on the point between the eyebrows and above the root of the nose you are able to penetrate into the time when the I entered into the human being. The human being then grows into the macrocosm in his conscious mind. He has to practise this for some time, growing into all things, be they far or near.

The 7th stage is that of godliness, when one grows beyond the limited bodily shell and is able to live with the macrocosm.

Pupils are instructed according to their occult status. When a pupil has gone through these stages as a real experience, he has reached the summit of insight into higher worlds.

• 148. Subba Row (Rao) (1856–1890), Indian scholar. Esoteric Writings, 2nd edition, Adyar 1931.
• 149. Karl Arnold Kortüm (1745–1828) published a treatise on the philosopher's stone in a paper called the Reichsanzeiger on 8 October 1976. Those able to read German may also see Kleeberg L. Wege und Worte 2. Aufl., Fussnote auf Seite 131. Stuttgart 1961.
• 150. Steiner R. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. A Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4). Tr. R. Stebbing. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1989. Steiner R. Truth and Knowledge (GA 3). Tr. R. Stebbing. West Nyack NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1963.
• 151. Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus (1493–1541), son of a Swiss physician. Studied alchemy and chemistry at Basel, the properties of metals and minerals in mines. Later town physician at Basel, moving to Salzburg in 1541. Revolutionized old medical methods, basing himself on empiricism.
• 152. ‘It arises from this that you shall not say “that is cholera”, “that is melancholia”, but “that is Arsenicus, that is Aluminosum”; and thus also "he is of Saturn, he is of Mars”, not “he is of melancholia, he is of cholera”. Then one part is of the heavens, one part of the earth, mingled together like fire and wood, so that each may lose its name; then they are two things in one.’ From Paragranum, collected medical works in German, edited by K. Sudhoff vol. 8 p. 74. Munich 1922–23.