The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In this lecture, Rudolf Steiner indicates the magnitude of the questions at stake and suggests that a mechanisation of the spirit, vegetation of the soul, and animalisation of the body will take place unless humanity is able to find a new relationship to the spirit. It is lecture 13 of 14 from the lecture series: Reorganization of the Social Organism.

Every individual has the feeling that part of his being is super-sensible, whatever function it has within his soul. And anthroposophical spiritual science—the name applying to what I have been presenting for many years—has something it wants to say about this feeling becoming an inner scientific certainty in the consciousness of present-day mankind. However, there are still all manner of prejudices against the anthroposophical approach to knowledge of man's super-sensible being and to knowledge of the super-sensible world altogether. But anthroposophy cannot speak about the super-sensible being of man in the kind of way people would still like to hear it spoken of in many circles today. For we should imagine, in fact, we should be certain that speaking about it in that way would not satisfy people's present-day aspirations for knowledge, which are none the less intense although they may still be unconscious. Nowadays when people pass judgment on one or another aspect of anthroposophy you constantly hear the remark that anthroposophy is difficult to understand. They say that anthroposophy obtains its knowledge from regions one does not need to go to in order to reach the super-sensible. They emphasise the difference between anthroposophy's search for knowledge and ‘simple faith’ based on the creed and the Bible, and they keep on stressing that anyone who has found the inner strength of this ‘simple faith’ does not need anthroposophical spiritual science.

If anthroposophy were to speak along the lines that people nowadays call ‘simple faith,’ it would certainly consider it was failing to do justice to the deepest aspirations of the times. It would have to admit, in that case, that although it was presenting a point of view still popular with many people who find it less difficult to understand than anthroposophy, this point of view is nevertheless no longer appropriate for the real soul needs of present-day mankind. I wanted this to be said because it is just from this direction that objections are continually being raised against the views which arise from a valid consideration of man's present-day needs, views which are held by the kind of spiritual science that will be spoken of here. This kind of spiritual science is convinced that certain inter-relationships exist about which many people nowadays have the most detrimental illusions. Today, however, we are living in an age that has a long way to go before confusion and chaos are over. We are entering a difficult period of human evolution. Anyone able to look more deeply into the evolution of mankind and seeing the amount of elemental unrest felt today throughout the whole of the civilised world, of which everything of the nature of inner tensions is only the ripples on the surface, knows that this has a mysterious connection with that obstinate attitude of ‘simple faith’ that wants to rely solely on the creed and the Bible. The parts of man's being that are attracted by this so-called ‘faith’ shut him off from those very forces that could bring order into chaos and confusion at the present stage of human evolution. If those people who speak in the way I have indicated would now deepen their knowledge somewhat, they would have to see all that is bringing mankind into such terrible conflict and chaos. Then they would have to admit that they now lack certain forces that they failed to develop because of their determination not to go beyond their so-called ‘simple faith,’ which they and others find so convenient. They would also have to admit that there is an inner relationship between the unrest of today and this harping on ‘simple faith.’ A causal connection there certainly is, today's elemental restlessness being the result of this obdurate harping.

I am not speaking out of subjective feelings but out of the very kind of knowledge I would like to tell you more about today, namely an inner scientific perception. It is this that has moved anthroposophy to bring knowledge of the super-sensible down from spirit heights. Insofar as the so-called believers in a simple faith point to the super-sensible, their knowledge has also come to them from spirit heights. But they have no wish at all to ascend to these heights.

This had to be said first of all, because today, in particular, what I will have to say concerning the super-sensible being of man will need to be brought into connection with a number of those spiritual scientific facts that people on the one hand find really incomprehensible—though if they were to go into them more thoroughly they would find they absolutely accorded with common sense; and that people on the other hand consider unnecessary, because they do not find they accord with the ‘simple faith’ they think they ought to advocate. I attempted the day before yesterday to characterise the paths by which the kind of spiritual science we mean attains to knowledge. On that occasion I began by saying that on the whole men of present times have very little desire to know about what is taking place unconsciously in the depths of their being. On the one hand people think the body is something external to themselves, and that they can gain knowledge of it either by observing it with sense perception or by considering it according to the outlook laid down by natural science. On the other hand they think that their thinking, sense perception, feeling and willing comprise the whole of their inner being. However, the path of knowledge I indicated the day before yesterday shows that the life of the external body, on the one hand, and the soul experiences of thinking, feeling and willing we have in ordinary consciousness, on the other, do not comprise the whole of man's being. The essential point is that man as spiritual investigator does not stop at the level of ordinary consciousness but takes the development of his soul into his own hands, as it were. In the realm of thought, in particular, he raises thinking consciously onto a higher level than in ordinary life, and in the other direction makes his will nature consciously into an object of self-education. Thus the development of soul forces beyond the level of ordinary life is the only thing that can lead in an anthroposophical sense to knowledge of the super-sensible world.

Now what is this development of thinking? It consists of making human thinking or human visualising stronger than it is in ordinary life, and doing so in a completely systematic way based on the experiences of man's inner soul nature. In ordinary life our thinking or visualising is merely a spectator. And man is conscious of the fact that he actually thinks best in ordinary life when he allows his experiences of life or of external nature to work on him in such a way that he forms his mental pictures as a passive spectator. With the methods described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you can bring activity into the world of thought. You will bring such activity into the world of thought that you will be conscious that you are not passive whilst you think, but are as active as you are when you use your limbs, even though this is an inner activity. Will must be brought into thinking, the kind of will, however, that does not make the thinking arbitrary, but adapts it to the phenomena of the world. So it is a particularly good preparation for the spiritual investigator if he precedes his spiritual scientific endeavours with a thoroughly disciplined study in the natural scientific method, thus training himself not to think arbitrarily but according to the phenomena of nature itself. But he also has to free himself from this mere looking at nature. His newly acquired capacity of systematic thinking and of observing natural phenomena must now be developed as a thought activity independent of physical phenomena. A spiritual scientific training of thinking is an activating of thinking. This is a fact that many people still disbelieve today—we are only at the beginning of spiritual scientific knowledge—namely the fact that man's thinking and whole activity of mental picturing really takes on quite a different character than it has in everyday life.

If we think back to the dreamlike mental images of early childhood and compare these with the clear thinking of adulthood, we find that man's inner life of soul has undergone a change. A similar change takes place in anyone who develops his thinking in the way we have described and progresses from ordinary thinking to active thinking. He feels as though he has awakened from the normal condition of existence, and, provided we do not use the word in a dubious mystical sense, we can certainly say that this activated thinking ‘awakens’ man.

By learning to use this active thinking man acquires an entirely new way of ‘seeing’ things, a new way of seeing the qualities of the human body, to begin with. Active thinking ascends to the kind of seeing in which the human body appears in quite a new way. Above all, a tremendous difference is to be seen between the form of man's head organisation and the organisation that comes to expression in man's mobile limbs and everything that is connected with these. By means of the kind of seeing that active thinking opens up we come to realise that the human head is of an entirely different character, even in its bodily nature, from the rest of the body, particularly the limb organisation. Inner perception shows us how thinking, especially this activated thinking, is related to the whole nature of the human head. We learn to know in a new way what the human body really is. For as our soul development progresses by means of this active thinking there enters consciously into this active thinking the kind of life experience that is not solely of the type that enters ordinary thinking or visualising.

Life experiences that enter ordinary thinking or visualising have a certain peculiarity. We experience the world within this ordinary visualising. We experience it through our sense perceptions and the thoughts that come to meet them. But we keep a bit of this experience back for ourselves, too. We would not have our whole human nature within ourselves if each external impression did not leave behind it the possibility of our remembering it. It is just this memory that keeps our whole human personality intact, and we only have to think of the devastation wrought in the human personality by any kind of loss of memory to realise what the power of memory means for the cohesion of the human personality in ordinary life. But the force that enables us to keep memories alive, those memories acquired by opening ourselves to the outer world and forming mental images of it via our sense perception, this force remains unconscious. This is something that man carries out unconsciously. But when it comes to the experiences of active, super-sensible thinking, it is different. It would be quite impossible to bring what is acquired in a really super-sensible way, through active thinking, into any sort of connection with the human personality if we were dependent on the activity that works unconsciously within us. Something we have to learn about the acquisition of super-sensible knowledge is that we are not taking something unconsciously into the body by means of which we can later on awake a memory, on the contrary the imprinting of something in the physical body, the taking in of it, that normally takes place as an unconscious activity and works on as memory, has to be carried out consciously by the spiritual investigator. The higher, super-sensible experience gained by activated thinking would never come in place of an absolutely dreamy experience if we could not acquire the capacity to introduce this super-sensible experience to the body consciously.

We can only introduce it, however, to the head organisation. But then this head organisation teaches us something that eludes ordinary science, but which sheds great light on the mystery of man's being. We discover that when we make a conscious imprint of what we experience in active thinking we are constantly bringing about a process in the human head that is not an intensification of life but a breaking down of life, a partial dying. This is a significant and moving experience acquired through spiritual science: In order to remember super-sensible knowledge, we have to imprint it into our head organisation, and it is immediately evident that this imprinting does not bring about an enlivening process but a process of partial dying, a breaking down of the head organisation's life processes. This teaches us how the bodily head organisation actually functions in man. We discover something that is normally not known because it remains unconscious, namely that our whole thinking activity or mental imagery is not something that comes from forces of life, as materialists believe, but something that comes from the damping down of the life of the head. It arises because whilst our soul is active our head is constantly in a state of partial dying. We also discover a fact that strikes a man of today as being absurd: if the thinking activity of the head were to spread into the rest of man's body, he would immediately die.

Thus spiritual science teaches us that the death-bringing principle is constantly at work in part of man's bodily nature. We learn that because our head is organised that way, death is at work in us throughout our life. You see, this approach, that people in many circles today imagine has nothing useful to offer, leads to the kind of conceptions that completely contradict the usual views. We find that this imprinting that I have just described as a conscious process which must be carried out by active thinking, cannot actually directly imprint into man's physical organisation the super-sensible world where the experiences have been undergone. We find out the real fact that eludes external sense observation. We discover that incorporated into the ordinary life of the senses is what I took the liberty, in my books on spiritual science, to call the etheric body or body of formative forces. We discover a delicate body of light between the activity of active thinking and man's physical body, particularly in the head organisation. This finer body is the formative force—a thing that modern natural science makes fun of—underlying the physical body, and it is discovered in this way by super-sensible sight, which at this stage we can call an Imagination. We discover a higher, super-sensible member of man's being. At this point we experience an extraordinarily shattering phenomenon. When we imprint our super-sensible experiences into our etheric body and on into our physical body, we feel as though we were no longer master of our ego. We thought our ego filled our soul being through and through, but now it feels as though it were being sucked into the body.

The way to overcome this phenomenon is to have other soul exercises going parallel with the activating of thinking. These outer exercises are to do with disciplining the will. Although I characterised them the day before yesterday, I want to refer to them again briefly. I described how man changes from one week to the next, from one hour to the next, from one year to the next. We know we are becoming a different person. Our experiences are not the kind of thing we have, but the kind of thing that is perpetually making us into a different person. But nowadays an unconscious activity is also at work here. Present-day man gives himself up to external experiences. If he goes so far as to observe his inner being to any extent, he may notice that on the whole he is becoming a different person from week to week, year to year, and decade to decade; that his soul constitution is changing. But he does not take this development of his soul constitution in hand. This, however, the spiritual investigator has to do. He has to work on himself in such a way that his own will controls the progress he makes from one year to the next and from one decade to the next, and this also has to be systematic. He has to practise self-discipline and self-education systematically and fully consciously, not merely arbitrarily or according to the pattern of ordinary more or less unconscious existence. He has to bring under the control of his own will what otherwise takes place in us involuntarily.

This calls forth another experience of a kind that is very far removed from present-day consciousness; we realise that we have to put aside a scientific prejudice that prevails nowadays in a particular realm of science and has taken general hold of people's minds. This scientific view—which I want to mention because it could be the very thing that might make my present argument intelligible—is that man has two kinds of nerves: the so-called sensory nerves and the motor nerves. The sensory nerves run from our sense organs (so people believe) or from the surface of the skin to the nerve centre and convey perceptions in the same way as telegraph wires. The so-called motor nerves, the will nerves, go out from the nerve centre. A kind of demonic being is imagined as residing in the central nervous system, although of course present-day science will not admit this, and he is supposed to change what comes in through the telegraph wire nerves from the senses to the telegraph exchange into will through the motor nerves, the will nerves. People have thought out such beautiful theories that are really extremely clever, especially those derived from the terrible illness tabes, to explain this theory of the two kinds of nerves. Nevertheless this theory is nothing else than the result of a lack of knowledge of super-sensible man. It would lead too far for me to go into it now—although tabes proves it if we observe it correctly—but there is no difference between the sensory and the motor nerves. The same as with the so-called sensory nerves, the function of which is to convey external perceptions, the only function of the so-called motor nerves is to convey internal perceptions when we walk or move our arms. The motor nerves are sensory nerves too, only their function is to perceive our movements.

The reason why people believe the motor nerves to be the bearer of the will is only because they have no idea what is the real bearer of the will. We only discover what this is when we really practise the kind of self-discipline of the will I was speaking about: become actively engaged in self-education and become at the same time independent of what the body does with us, so to speak. Then we discover that it is not the motor nerves that create will, for they only perceive its movements, but that it is created by a third member of man's being, a super-sensible member that we could actually call the soul. I have called it the astral body in my books, though people do not like the term yet. Again it is by means of direct vision, acquired through this self-disciplining of the will, that we get to know this super-sensible member of man's being; and we discover that it is this ‘soul body,’ if I may call it that, that is the soul and spirit entity underlying all the bodily movements arising out of will. Nerves are there only to convey the perception of movement. If we take this disciplining of the will to further stages, however, we must then ascend from the level of imaginative knowledge, to which I have just referred, to those of Inspiration and Intuition, as I call them in the book just mentioned. We then discover this soul body to be a higher member of man's being than the etheric body or body of formative forces. We find, however, that we cannot experience this soul body in ourselves but only when we are outwardly active and when we become conscious of our will impulses.

When we have reached the point where we discover this actual soul body in ourselves, this second super-sensible part of man's being, the will, grows stronger and stronger, and we recognise it as our sentient body, as the force that works into our limbs and sets our body in motion, as an organisation totally different from our head organisation. In contrast to this head organisation, which I characterised as being constantly in the state of partial dying, we discover that this organisation is constantly in the process of spiritual birth, in which life is increasing and developing all the time. Thus through the head organisation on the one hand, we experience a perpetual dying, and in the will organisation, the second super-sensible member of man's being, we experience a perpetual continuation of the birth process. Out of this continuation of the birth process, out of this increase of life which has to come out of our whole being, there then rays back to us the true, super-sensible nature of our ego, and enters into what we have imprinted into our body. Our ego arises again and again out of the grave of our partially dying head. This perpetual interplay of dying and being born is what we experience within ourselves when we develop our soul life in this way. So we discover that birth and death take place not only at the beginning and end of our lives but that dying and becoming are the expression of forces working in our organisation throughout our lives.

Only when we have thus encountered man's super-sensible forces through Intuition and Inspiration are we in a position to recognise the evolutionary path of mankind; for in developing this kind of vision, the forces we acquire from our head organisation and the organisation of the rest of our body combine to illuminate for us the inner forces at work in the historical development of mankind. How does historical development appear, as a rule, to the ordinary consciousness of present times? If we ignore what men believed in early stages of human evolution out of a primitive conception of mankind and which is now considered childish, namely that there is spirit working in history; if we ignore this, we can say that people nowadays regard history, or rather the evolution of mankind, as a collection of facts gleaned from documents, archives and tradition which, at the most, they link together with the intellect. Not until we perceive the super-sensible being of man, as I have just described it, does the ability to see the progression of higher super-sensible beings through the course of history associate itself with the historical facts which even a spiritual investigator has to take from external history. He gets to know human evolution from the inside, whereas it is usually only looked at from the outside.

So as not just to talk round the subject in the abstract, I will speak of one fact in particular, to show you the evolution of human history from the point of view of symptoms. As man's outlook is restricted solely to the material world, what is presented as history today is just an external picture, and is largely a fable convenue. Anyone who is able to look with inner vision at the connecting link between the facts, discovers that the first thing he sees on looking backwards into our historical evolution is, strange to say, a nodal point in the evolution of modern humanity around the middle of the fifteenth century. We see in a number of spheres something like a forward leap taking place in human development. We know of course that leaps like this take place in nature, too. If we look at the evolving plant, and see first the green leaves developing, then the calyx, and then the transformation into petals, we see a leap from the green leaf to the coloured petal, even though there is a steady development. There is a similar leap in the evolution of humanity in the middle of the fifteenth century, only it passes unnoticed when historical facts are looked at solely from the outside. Something then begins to make itself felt in human evolution that lifts men's souls onto quite a different level of development from the one preceding it. Earlier epochs of human evolution, it is true, also attained considerable heights from time to time, but human souls were quite differently constituted before and after the middle of the fifteenth century. Looking at history from the inside, the middle of the fifteenth century was the end of an epoch of human evolution that actually began in the eighth century B.C., roughly with the founding of the Roman Empire.

Anyone observing history from a spiritual scientific point of view sees a continuous line of development running through the centuries from 800 B.C. until the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. And anyone looking from inside at the Greek or the Roman era will find what is said here thoroughly substantiated. The kind of soul constitution that was developing in man during that epoch was of a kind that nurtured feeling (Gemüt) and intelligence. The surprising thing is that when observing history from the inside, we find that prior to the eighth century B.C. the power of feeling and intelligence was not yet actively at work in the human soul. In those days man was still to a great extent united with nature; he did not step back and reflect on the things he had seen, for his life of feeling was still a part of nature. Not until the eighth century did he free himself from nature and develop forces of intelligence and feeling independently within himself. By and large the whole of historical development from the eighth century B.C. to the fourteenth century A.D. is a gradual unfolding of those particular forces of soul in mankind that produce a flowering of the qualities of feeling and intelligence from out of man's inner being.

This development of the forces of feeling and intelligence, however, still had an instinctive quality about it during this epoch, intelligence and feeling still working in an instinctive way. In the middle of the fifteenth century, however, these forces previously working instinctively in the intelligence and feeling took on a fully conscious quality. Men felt more strongly isolated from outer nature than they had felt before, because in order to think about things consciously and experience their instinctive feelings of sympathy and antipathy consciously, they had to draw back from external nature, so to speak. Everything became conscious. Therefore we can say, from a spiritual scientific point of view, that whilst in earlier epochs the instinctive life of thought and feeling was being developed, from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards what we can call the consciousness soul has been developing, and this stage of development is something that will continue for a very long period of human evolution. Relatively speaking, we human beings are still at the beginning of this evolution of the consciousness soul, which is already responsible for the great progress made in natural scientific thinking. However great Plato and Aristotle were, they did not possess natural scientific thinking, which requires the kind of withdrawal of man's inner being from nature that did not take place until the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution. Thus our development of natural science is part and parcel of one epoch of human evolution. Lessing described this very beautifully, whichever way you interpret his words, by saying that the whole of human evolution is “a kind of Education of Mankind.” Since the middle of the fifteenth century the education of mankind consists of the education of the consciousness soul, and this it is that has actually brought with it the natural scientific outlook. Looked at from inside this is a section of human evolution.

We only understand fully what belongs to the era from the eighth century B.C. till the middle of the fifteenth century A.D. when we look at it from the inside, from the point of view of man's soul development. For the founding of Christianity falls in the first third of this era, and the spiritual scientist sees this as the greatest event that has ever occurred in earthly evolution. With his ability to look down the centuries from inside at man's soul development, the spiritual scientist recognises better than anyone else that in the first third of the epoch I described as the era of the evolution of intelligence and feeling, something was still present that had existed in the highest degree in the days of early humanity, namely something that made man feel a part of the natural world around him; but in those times this feeling arose out of the subconscious depths of the soul. Then there broke upon human evolution the Event of Golgotha, the nature of which can never be understood if people try to understand it merely out of a material conglomeration of historical facts. There broke in upon human evolution a fructification of man's evolution, in that a super-sensible element united with this evolution from out of cosmic heights, preparing the way for man's being to become conscious and inwardly strong to an ever greater and greater degree.

Initially the Event of Golgotha, the Incarnation of Christ as Man, met with a way of thinking and feeling that was still of an instinctive nature. It took the next two-thirds of this epoch for these forces emanating from the Event of Golgotha to flow into man's more or less unconscious instinctive forces of intelligence and feeling. Then from the middle of the fifteenth century onwards came the conscious soul evolution of man and, with it, the epoch of natural science, when men turned their attention to external processes of natural phenomena. The beginning of this epoch was the time in which the earlier connection with the spirit, with the super-sensible element in the world, tended to withdraw in favour of conscious existence. This spiritual element, which in earlier times man perceived as though by instinct in the very phenomena of the world, now sprang to life in his inner being by virtue of the fact that the Being of Christ had united Himself with human evolution. But this new life within man came at the point in his evolution when, as I said, man was becoming increasingly conscious and therefore increasingly external. Thus it happened that just at the beginning of the age of the consciousness soul, the age of the conscious development of intelligence and feeling, although the Christ Impulse was at work in human souls, men's consciousness was of a kind that made them lose sight of their spiritual and super-sensible being. Therefore it also happened that people had less and less understanding for the Event that had united itself with human evolution in a super-sensible way—the Event of Golgotha. In the nineteenth century there was a climax in this respect. Now the point had been reached when the Event of Golgotha was divested of its super-sensible character even in the eyes of most of the faithful. Even for these the Event of Golgotha was, in the nineteenth century, relegated to the world of external facts, so to speak. Jesus the Christ Bearer became the ‘simple man of Nazareth,’ a person no greater than a somewhat more highly developed human being. And this happened solely because, while they were developing the consciousness soul, men also lost the understanding for the super-sensible element in history. The conception of Jesus as the simple man of Nazareth brought materialism into Christianity. And nowadays there is not only a materialistic science, there is also a widespread materialistic faith.

Now, however, we have come to the time—in this epoch of human evolution that began in the middle of the fifteenth century—when we face the necessity of ascending once more to the spirit. And the path I described to you today and the day before yesterday is the path that coming humanity will have to tread to ascend to the spirit again and to find its way once more to super-sensible knowledge and to the super-sensible phenomena lying behind the sense world and behind external historical facts. It is this which will also lead it to the super-sensible nature of the Event of Golgotha. Then this unique Event will appear as the kind of turning point in the whole evolution of mankind that everybody can understand and accept. With the coming of this new super-sensible knowledge the Event of Golgotha will be divested of all its sectarianism, and, rising above separate denominations, even above the religious differences existing in different parts of the world, an understanding of it will become the general possession of mankind. Then the Mystery of Golgotha will be seen to be the most important super-sensible fact of all human evolution. The narrow view of Christ that prevents people from seeing the true mystery—and which still inhibits a number of denominations, because materialism has even found its way into faith—this narrow point of view will be superseded; people will find a new understanding of this Impulse, which is the greatest and most powerful Impulse in the whole of mankind's evolution.

This should show you that spiritual science does not deprive people of what they believe to be the results of ‘simple faith.’ On the contrary, spiritual science reaches up to the highest level of knowledge in order to show mankind the greatest Event of human evolution. This is something modern man longs for if he is honest enough with himself and admits that he is more and more disenchanted with ‘simple faith.’ It had to be stated here as belonging to spiritual science. And as we are in the age of consciousness, in which mankind is dividing and becoming disharmonious to an ever greater degree—because the individual is thrown back on his own personality and his personal loneliness—it is essential to point to what men, the whole world over, need to re-unite them once again.

What is needed today is a new understanding of the central Event of human evolution. Spiritual science does not take anything away from man. On the contrary it gives him just what his present-day consciousness needs. And if people, out of their healthy human understanding, want to complain of the views and teachings of anthroposophical spiritual science, we shall have to tell them that their thinking is not healthy enough and that they must throw off the illusions with which the purely external, material theories of natural science have befogged them; they should think about their own thinking, and then they will make a remarkable discovery about the particular nature of man's present-day life of soul. They will hear what natural science tells them from reliable, strictly methodical sources about the evolution of the physical body. But, when their minds are healthy, they will not be able to agree that there is no more to life as they know it than natural science tells them. They will find that when they listen to spiritual science in a really healthy way, and draw comparisons with life, the contradictions arising out of the illusions produced by materialism are enough to make them ill, and that they will only rediscover life if they refer, with the help of spiritual science, to the super-sensible nature of man and the super-sensible world in which the evolution of man and mankind are embedded.

If you have acquired the possibility in this way of seeing historical life supersensibly, the present world epoch, or epoch of human evolution, will appear before you—it is not the right occasion today to include a description of the whole of earthly evolution; you can read that up in my Occult Science and you will be far enough advanced to aspire to the kind of perception Lessing spoke of in his Education of the Human Race, which he had attained out of his much admired healthy human understanding within the German spiritual stream of development. Then you will be capable of perceiving that in the course of spiritual evolution human life runs its course in repeated earth lives. For the whole span of man's life consists of an altenation between the kind of lives he spends in a physical body and another form of existence between death and a new birth, spent in the super-sensible worlds which are connected with our world through the spirit that is also at work in historical evolution. We discover then, as Lessing also did, that in coming back for repeated lives on earth, man himself carries evolution forward from one epoch to the next. This knowledge of repeated earth lives cannot become a theory in the accepted sense, for when you are capable of penetrating into the spirit of human evolution in the way I have described, you can find this knowledge for yourself, but you have then acquired it as a fact of man's higher super-sensible nature.

A new perception of spiritual life, a perception which will help us find the spirit again in our materialistic world, is about to enter present civilisation. The materialistic outlook prevailing today is largely responsible for estranging man's inner life from a real perception of the spirit, and depriving him of the courage to plunge into this spiritual perception, making him believe that the only way to the spirit is the way of ‘simple creed’ based on a literal acceptance of the Bible. This ‘simple creed’ and the materialism of our time are closely related, for before such a thing as materialism existed, there was not this perpetual harping on a simple creed. After all, at the time when Christianity arose, the teachings about Christ Jesus came out of highly developed spiritual vision, though of course it was atavistic. This old spiritual vision cannot be the way of modern man. Modern man must work for spiritual vision in the way I have tried to describe. If you become aware of what is living deep down in people's souls nowadays and colouring their whole outlook, although they are not fully conscious of it—this mood that unconsciously flashes into consciousness, sometimes in a pathological way, so that people feel it as inner unrest, as a psychopathic tendency, even though they cannot explain it—this mood is the striving for a new spirituality. I certainly do not wish to be so immodest as to suggest or maintain that the spiritual science or anthroposophy I give lectures on is the only thing that has to happen on the path to the spirit. What I have given here is just a humble attempt. And anyone who makes a humble attempt like this, yet is aware that it comes out of the deepest longings of the present time, is also aware that there will be more and more people coming along and attempting to tread the paths to spiritual vision and to proclaim the possibility of ascending to life on a super-sensible level.

But you can see too, that when I lecture on anthroposophy I cannot spare anybody's feelings, at the first encounter, that these things are rather difficult to understand. You will also see that what leads to these spiritual worlds is neither a damping down of clear thinking nor a damping down of the will that works in practical life, but is an intensification of both thought and will. Many people of the present day cannot muster sufficient inner courage for this as yet. So they look at anthroposophy and say: They mean well, these people, but with their anthroposophy they tell us all kinds of things about mankind's evolution, even about cosmic facts of a spiritual nature. Looking at anthroposophy from a safe distance, people like this call it ‘crazy stuff’, etc., terms used here recently in Stuttgart, to apply to the world of physical facts. Yet, ladies and gentlemen, people will never get beyond a nonsensical, merely hazy presentiment of the spiritual world if clear, mathematical thinking and a light-irradiated, self-disciplined will are not applied to bring down real facts from the super-sensible world to replace mere phrases. Modern man needs these facts.

I have spoken to you about what mankind is longing for. And it was this very longing that caused such a caricature of super-sensible striving to arise in the nineteenth century. People only know how to strive in a materialistic way. But alongside this materialistic striving they acquired a yearning for the spirit. So they investigated the spirit on the pattern of their research in the material world and carried out a caricature of spiritual research, namely spiritualism, which is nothing else but a material search for something that can never be matter, namely spirit. What comes out in a pathological way in spiritualism as a caricature of spiritual striving, is the same thing that is being sought for by anthroposophical spiritual science, but in the latter case it is healthy and is based on a further development in clear consciousness of forces already inherent in man.

Anthroposophical spiritual science therefore appears, in the best sense of the word, as an attempt (we mean this modestly) to bring perceptions of the spiritual world, super-sensible man and his evolution into the age of great and outstanding perceptions of an external, scientific nature. Not until these scientific perceptions have been supplemented by the perceptions of spiritual vision will modern man understand his being in the way he longs to. Therefore spiritual science as we pursue it must shake off all the reproaches it encounters, even those from well-meaning people.

To conclude I should like to draw your attention to the fact that even the kind of people who have no intention of rejecting spiritual science are offended when we speak to large audiences about ‘spiritual secrets’, as they call them, instead of keeping these in intimate sectarian circles. Oh, they know very well that it is a sacred duty of the times to stand up and speak to large audiences. Therefore I must not pay attention to the kind of reproach that was made recently:—That it is just not done to speak about cosmic things to a large city audience, like Dr. Steiner does. What is needed is a master of the art of divine gesture who can inexorably drive everyone from his presence who does not know when to be silent. What we need is an approach that can distinguish in more than mere words between what is profane and what is holy.—In answer to this reproach we have to say that we have also entered the age of democracy in the spiritual sphere, and that it is a sin against mankind to wish to distinguish between what is profane and what is holy. Anyone whose destiny allows him to penetrate into the spiritual worlds has the obligation to speak as widely as possible to people's healthy human understanding, so that this healthy human understanding can find the way to the spiritual worlds again.

Although this is an absolutely general task of the times—an obligation to the whole of mankind—we have a special obligation to the middle European region in which we live. If anyone has been deeply interested for decades, as I have, in the beginning made in German spiritual life in the direction of a new spiritual perception by Lessing (who I have mentioned today), Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the German philosophers, then he knows—through the interest he takes in this spiritual life, if he does so in such a way that he makes those forces his own which motivated Goethe, Schiller and the rest—that this spiritual life leads straight into what I have been speaking about today and the day before yesterday. In order to overcome the terrible materialistic development of recent times, we in middle Europe can begin by bringing to mind again that which had its beginnings in the Great Age of Germany. Then what is called anthroposophical spiritual science will follow on naturally. That is why, just at this time when the German spirit is so little appreciated anywhere, we chose to call the building conceived as a High School for Spiritual Science the ‘Goetheanum.’ ‘Goetheanum’ as a sign that from the spiritual point of view, the Goetheanistic German spirit has the courage to face the world.

I know, too, that we are not sinning against Goethe if, in order to link on to something historical, we use the term Goetheanism for the new way of thought and vision we have spoken of today and the day before yesterday. However much is taken away from us in external ways, and however much power the world has today to make things as difficult as possible for us in external matters, it can never take away from us our connection with the best of German qualities, if we ourselves intend having this connection. If we have this intention, however, then even in these dark and sad times we shall not lose hope—the hope of a re-awakening, in a new form, of the spiritual life of mankind, that we are perhaps destined to have just in this time of greatest need.

If we continue with the kind of thing the materialistic age has brought into human evolution in recent times, we shall get further and further removed from the spirit and more and more attached to matter. But if we turn our minds to our super-sensible nature and develop this in ourselves, we shall add the results of spirit vision to the dazzling achievements of the materialistic natural scientific outlook. This spirit vision will then be like the soul of the world conception of outer nature. These two ways are open to human evolution today: either to keep to a perception of the material world and drag mankind further into chaos and distress, or to give birth to our higher inner being from out of our super-sensible nature and the super-sensible world. One of these directions, the materialistic way, can already be seen in the ripples it sends to the surface.

With its external logic of the intellect and its inability to find its way to the inner logic of facts, external science actually sees things very inexactly. I will give you one example of what I mean: There is a philosophical view prevalent at the present time that is a genuine product of materialistic thought. It was advocated by Avenarius and Mach, and it is to the effect that man's field of experience is limited to what he takes in through ordinary sense perception and ordinary consciousness. These two particular men expressed the materialistic outlook by means of some very clever philosophy, and if we inquire into what they expressed with such dedication we shall acquire great respect for their intellectual achievements. If we remain within the ordinary outlook, we shall accept philosophers like Avenarius and Mach as individual philosophical phenomena. But if we go beyond the ordinary outlook, and recognise the inner impulses behind world conceptions such as these, our eyes will be opened, and we shall see the mysterious way these world conceptions work in life. We shall then hit upon the remarkable connection existing between these world conceptions and the decline that threatens European civilisation today, and comes from the East, from Russia, from bolshevism. We shall realise that the practice of bolshevism is the end result of world conceptions like these. This is further confirmed by the fact that the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach is the state philosophy of bolshevism. This connection is known today only to those who penetrate into the spirit of things and who can rise above the noise of party opinion. Party opinion rides roughshod over everything that has to be said right now for the salvation of mankind. This kind of factual logic I have shown you is more important for the man of today than all the logic of sophistry, which would certainly never lead over from Avenarius and Mach to bolshevism. But the facts do. If you want to understand the origins of the things happening today to destroy civilisation within the civilised world, look at the philosophies of the past few decades, the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and you will find further confirmation of the fact that two ways are open to us today: One way continues with the materialistic approach, despite the fact that its logic is as subtle as that of Avenarius and Mach; and the other, that has been characterised here, wants to participate in the spirit. If we carry on in the first direction, the effect on European spiritual life will be that man's spirit will become mechanised, man's soul vegetative and man's body animalised. This is the fate that actually threatens us today. If men become addicted to this western mechanisation of the spirit, this state of being will combine with eastern animalisation, which means that social demands will be on a level of animal instinct and blind impulse. Western mechanisation and eastern animalisation are connected one with another. In between these is the vegetative or drowsy nature of soul that does not want to be woken up by a treading of the path to the spirit. This is the one perspective. Mankind will have to choose between becoming mechanised in spirit, vegetative in soul and animalised in body or going the other way. Hardship and distress will no doubt eventually drive us into going the other way. And although it will be the other people who have the power, they will not be able to bar us from going this other way, the way leading to the spirit. We shall have to want to go this way. We shall have to want to keep our spirit free, even if our bodies are in bondage. Out of the feelings and experience which can come to us out of a consciousness of super-sensible man and the super-sensible world, we shall have to resolve to have inner self-reliance. Then the others will not be able to harm us. And I should like to describe in the following words what might then come about after all:

In the course of the nineteenth century we middle Europeans were foolish enough to copy the western nations, even though there were no grounds for this in western civilisation. Through hardship and distress, through the very power these have over us, we shall perhaps find the way to stop imitating all that we were foolish enough to imitate when we chose them for a model.

Now, when they want to use their power to give us the lead in the mechanisation of the spirit, may we find the strength, in this old middle Europe of ours that has such a great heritage, to tread the path to the spirit from out of ourselves. We shall then avoid the materialistic mechanisation of the spirit and attain the freedom I attempted to characterise as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my Philosophy of Freedom. The liberated spirit will bring us to a real vision of the spiritual world. The spirit will also help us find the way to the equality of man. For human equality can never exist in the external economic order only. As soon as man understands the super-sensible nature of his own ensouled spirit being, however, he will be able to find the law that makes him an equal among equals. He will also deepen science; for with spiritual vision, as I have indicated here today, medicine, law, and the art of education will find their real source. Science will then lead neither to the mechanisation of the spirit as it has hitherto, nor to the inequality of man, for complete freedom of the spirit will come to man when the spirit seeks it on spirit paths; human equality will come to human souls when the spirit seeks it on paths of the soul; and finally, when the human being who knows himself to be a super-sensible spirit being approaches another person lovingly, then—because human beings will be associating with one another as conscious spirit beings in a loving way—in addition to having a liberated spirit and a soul that is equal with its neighbours, man will have, both in his human nature and in social life, a true, spiritualised, ensouled, thoroughly human brotherliness!

Dear attendees! Thoughts and spiritual struggles, which relatively recently were the concern of a few people who set themselves apart through their special education, must necessarily become a general concern for the whole of humanity today. I took the liberty of speaking here the day before yesterday about such a general matter, which used to be more or less a matter for the thoughts of a few individuals, about the process of developing a relationship with the peculiarities of the individual peoples living across the earth. Today I would like to speak of another such matter; I would like to speak of what is to become, under the influence of our humanity that necessarily strives for the new, what can be called history, the development history of humanity in the broadest sense of the word.

When, quite recently, the question of how we should actually relate to human history was still more or less a matter for scholars, the excellent art writer, art thinker and art observer Herman Grimm, whom I have often mentioned in these lectures, made a statement that is extremely significant in a certain respect for the evaluation of our current historical view. Herman Grimm says that, in wanting to characterize what is often regarded as history today, namely as history, humanity feels today that it is carrying far too much ballast with it.

Even though we must certainly admire what has been revealed to us in the last few decades through all kinds of excavations and discoveries of external documents of humanity, we must still say that the accumulated material, the material accumulated in notes in history, today lacks the great points of view in the historical view of humanity. And it is these great aspects alone that can give history a value for life. For when has history had any value for human beings? It only has value for us if what can be thought in it, what can be observed in it in terms of the destinies and achievements of past human beings, can yield a result for our own soul, something that warms our own hearts, so that from this warmed heart forces can develop that are suitable for placing us in the right position in life. In this respect, we must say that we are carrying a ballast in our current historical consideration and that the great perspectives that we need today in relation to the most pressing needs of contemporary humanity are missing.

Not as if historical consideration of earlier times did not have such great perspectives in its own way. Not that we cannot appreciate what it meant for young men and women to become acquainted with the great historical figures of antiquity and to emulate them, to fulfill the saying used by the poet: “Each must choose his hero, whom he works his way up to Olympus after.” But the way in which such individual figures are chosen as role models, and the things that have been tried and tested by them are incorporated into one's own will, depends on living in a time in which living admiration could flourish for personalities and for legal or state or ecclesiastical formations that flourished in those times from which we are now gone. To put it somewhat radically, one could say: How can young people today warm to Alexander the Great in the same way as in the past, since they have become more or less indifferent to something that Alexander the Great himself regarded as his ideal? In earlier times, a large mass of humanity had to look to individuals who took care of the affairs of this humanity within extensive empires, which they founded by conquering, so that history in the old form with its broad perspectives could have an effect on this humanity, namely on the will of people.

That is indeed the most significant fact of modern history: that the members of the broad masses of humanity must participate in all public life, that everything that bears the human face wants to come and regard the affairs of humanity as its own affairs. That is what is ultimately flooding our present as a justified democratic spirit. People are taking part in the great public affairs of life, which have become more or less indifferent to what inspired the members of earlier ages. Above all, because the spiritual interests of humanity have spread democratically across all people, the necessity arises to come to a new way of looking at history. And for those who really let the events of the present have an effect on them, especially for those who can truly feel the hardship of the present time, among the many other ideological or ideal questions, among the great spiritual questions of the present, there is the question: How can we, already in the child and then in the young person, bring the contemplation of our ancestors to such an effect, to such an experience, that the will can be steeled, that the orientation in life can be clarified precisely through the influence of a historical contemplation? In this way, what interests us as human beings in the first place – the spirit in the developmental history of our own earthly race – is interwoven with the big questions of education, pedagogy, didactics, and so basically everything is interwoven with the big social question of the present. And the point is that, as was said the day before yesterday and in last week's lectures, we live in the age of intellectualism, the age in which reason plays a major role in the ordering of human affairs. This human intellect, in its soberness and dryness, has not been suitable for writing history in such a way that it can truly become what it must become in the sense of what has just been said, if it is to retain the right value for humanity. It is precisely here that spiritual science believes it can do its part, including in the reformation of historical perspective.

Spiritual science assumes that insights can be gained by intensifying the inner life of the human being. What our knowledge and our other human abilities are in ordinary life, these are to be developed through spiritual science into a higher vision and an elevated soul life stimulated by this vision. These abilities are to be developed in the same way that the abilities of a child develop from a lower level to the abilities of an adult human being; the abilities dormant within the human being are to spring up from within. A strengthened thinking, a will that has been subjected to strict self-discipline, should bring forth, from the depths of the human being, powers of knowledge and insight that can look into those spiritual depths of the world and of human existence, of which they [without these abilities] can at most have an inkling.

That is the peculiar thing about this spiritual knowledge, as it is meant here, that it takes hold of the whole human being. If we can say that, with its striving for clarity, intellectual knowledge, which has become so great in the last three to four centuries, not only dominates our cognitive life but also our practical life, if we can say that it is primarily something that claims the human head, the purely intellectual realm of man, we must say that spiritual science strives no less for full clarity, for inner logic, for concepts full of light, but that these concepts, because they arise from previously practiced thinking and previously practiced will of the human being, draw on the forces of the whole human being. It would be a great mistake to believe that spiritual science, as it is meant here, wants to draw from dark feelings, that this spiritual science wants to have anything in common with all the nebulous, mystical currents with which it is so easily confused. No, its path should be such that it gains clear ideas and insights about the spiritual that are of the kind that are only ever clearly and precisely striven for in natural science. But these ideas should arise out of such a development of the life of the human soul that, in spite of their clarity and exactness, they fill the whole human being with their power and take hold of the whole human being. While we are not usually involved with our feelings when we recognize the laws of the world as formulated by modern science, and while these scientific laws give rise to little impulse for the will, it can be said that that what is recognized in the field of spiritual science about the world's interconnections really does course through the human being's soul and transforms him, that it pours into the will so that the person can orient himself and integrate himself into the practice of life, so that he can do the individual thing in accordance with the great mission of the human being on earth.

If one understands correctly what is at stake here – I have often characterized the details of how man arrives at such knowledge, especially here in these lectures – then one will easily be able to see the following.

When we first consider the individual human body, we actually do so only by observing the present. If we observe the human limbs, in an amateurish or scientific way, as the human body presents itself, we actually consider it as something that is present, even if this human body carries within itself the traces of its own past. We pay little attention to what this body retains from the past, no matter how scientifically we look at a human body. When we move on to the ordinary life of the soul, things are different. We do not just look at what is present in the person, but as human beings we look into our own past, almost to the point of birth. There we summarize everything we have experienced in our memory, which is the main thing. We must know that we would be mentally ill if we could not properly expand our memory of our experiences. We extend our interest from the present moment to our immediate past. Indeed, we extend it in another way by wanting to gain from this past the impulses and the strength of the past for our work in the future. We connect the past and the future with the present. Thus, a certain ascent in our approach can already be seen in ordinary life, when we ascend from the contemplation of the bodily to the experiences of the soul.

If we now progress within this soul and develop in such a way that we master thinking, come from thinking to beholding, from will to inner spiritual experience, then something completely different emerges. If we survey, as it were, our own few decades that we have to cover here as an earthly human being, by looking at our individual earthly development from childhood to adulthood – surveying our existence in our ordinary soul life – a new element of our whole being enters our inner being, our own past enters our memory. If we extend our concept of the human being through spiritual knowledge, if we develop beyond ordinary earthly knowledge to the point where we can see spiritually, then the context of the developmental history of the whole of humanity enters our view. However paradoxical

However paradoxical this may appear to many people today, it must be said: much will depend on our ability to see through how the human being - by simply inwardly taking hold of his entire humanity, his strength and his power of knowledge - becomes one with all humanity. In this way, what we can research through external documents about history is supplemented by what we can recognize inwardly through our knowledge thus acquired: our connection with all humanity, as a member of which we then feel truly included.

And here lies the path, which I can only sketch out today: to ascend spiritually to a comprehensive historical point of view, which can then lead us like a red thread through the developmental history of humanity. In the natural sciences, which in recent times, and with a certain justification, also include the physical body of man, we speak of the so-called biogenetic law. It has become famous in connection with the study of descent in modern times. I need only characterize it here in a few words. It states that, while developing as an embryo in the mother's womb before birth, man repeatedly goes through all the stages of development that can be observed in the individual animal forms. Development begins with man being similar to lower animals, in that he has the form of a fish. He then develops through higher animal forms until he gradually takes on the human form that sees the light of day. It is said that: The development of man is a repetition of the physical forms similar to animals that man has gone through before he has taken on his present human form. The development that a person undergoes from conception to birth is a brief repetition of what the human being has undergone in the course of, as they say, millions of years of development. An attempt has now been made to tie in with this scientific result, which I do not want to discuss here, by means of an external intellectual consideration, for that is what it is. Attempts have also been made to consider the spiritual and soul life, the history of the human being, in a similar way. The aim is to consider that which develops as culture in the present, that which characterizes the human being of the present as a civilized human being, as a human being with a certain education, in connection with the past, just as one considers embryonic development in connection with the past. And it has even come about that people want to investigate how the original cultures, so to speak, in the childhood of man, gain their special repetitive expression, how then, when man grows up, he repeats later cultures and so on, until he - after repeating the earlier epochs from birth through childhood - develops into what he actually is now as a person living in this time.

Spiritual science enables a certain self-knowledge of the human being precisely by the fact that one gains a more intimate knowledge of the human being through his spiritual exercises, through the strengthening of the soul forces, because in this way one can look more closely at the human course of life, as it presents itself to us or to others, than is possible with today's superficiality or than one tries to do in today's spiritual science or the like. And then it turns out that when a person advances to the possibility of true self-knowledge through spiritual science, they actually gain something different through this self-knowledge than is usually assumed today. This self-knowledge through spiritual science actually provides a lot of astonishing information about childhood; even if not exactly [with the methods of natural science], but from this spiritual science there is a lot of extraordinarily important information to be said about the periods of childhood. But this is precisely what is needed to renew pedagogy: a precise and honest application of ordinary human abilities. If we follow spiritual scientific principles here, we will be able to understand the developing child and become a proper teacher and educator of this child, even if we have not acquired direct insight ourselves. One can be a capable teacher in the sense of spiritual science, if one only has the honest will to respond intimately to the development of the human in the child, even without being able to see.

But with regard to the older stages of individual human life, it is not so. What is essential here is only really realized when one strengthens one's cognitive abilities as can be done within spiritual science. Then one notices that from about the 30th year of human life onwards, inner abilities are already present in a person, but hardly hinted at; one notices that they emerge intimately into the soul life from unknown depths , but that they initially express themselves so weakly in ordinary life that one cannot properly handle them - they are so weak that they are drowned out by what is rushing in through the external affairs of the world. One must observe quite intimately in order to see what continually seeks to emerge in the soul-life of man in advanced years and appears not like its original form, but as if it were the echo of something quite different from what it is now. And if you watch more closely, you will discover something quite remarkable through spiritual observation: if you want to look at the natural foundations of the human being in their connection with the prehistoric forms that the human being has gone through, then you have to look at the embryonic development, at the developmental epoch of the human being that precedes childhood; you have to go to the beginning of life. But if one wants to observe the historical development of humanity, then one must look at the final years of individual human development. Then we must look at the intimate abilities that now flit through the soul as if they cannot properly come out. They are just as much rudiments, intimations of something that has gone before and is historically past, as the hinting forms of embryonic development in the womb today are of what has gone before in developmental history. To understand the natural development of the human being, one must go to the beginning of life; for historical development, one must acquire the ability to see the end of human life by sharpening one's powers of perception through spiritual science.

If one seeks to penetrate what, I would like to say, appears like a faint afterglow in today's humanity, when one has passed the thirties, then one learns to recognize in these shadows, which flit across the soul life, what makes one understand the other, which resonates from times long past in the development of humanity. One then looks at what is called prehistoric cultures, yes, one even sharpens one's view for the prehistoric, which has only recorded its last echo in the historical; one lets one's gaze wander back from the Vedanta philosophy of the Indians, from the Vedas, to that from which they have descended, must have descended, for they do not show themselves as original products, but as final results, and one learns to recognize the basis of that remarkable element of power that has permeated ancient Indian culture, this first dawn of an earth culture. One finds a relationship between what lives shadowy in human age and what lived in humanity in youthful freshness at that time and cared for the culture of primeval times. We gradually learn to recognize the spiritual reversal of the basic biogenetic law in nature. We learn to recognize how, in those ancient times, to which one must go back if one wants to understand the developmental history of humanity, the human being retained the physical ability to develop into old age, with which a spiritual-soul ability to develop was connected. Today, we take an important leap in our childhood, also for our soul life, around the seventh year, when the teeth change; an important developmental period of a child's life is completed. The body undergoes a metamorphosis, and the soul and spiritual development accompanies this metamorphosis. And again, when sexual maturity occurs, the body undergoes a metamorphosis, but the soul and spiritual development of the person also accompanies this physical metamorphosis. What the person develops spiritually and soulfully in these stages of life is simply because the body also undergoes this development. Then, for us human beings, the possibility of perceiving such transformations soon disappears, and of even admitting such transformations. Although it is very clear that we are still undergoing a transformation at the beginning of our twenties, it is already more intimate, but still clearly present. But the transformation that occurs at the end of our twenties, and even more so those that occur later, are actually only present in shadowy form. And only the person whose view is sharpened through spiritual science notices how these shadows of transformation arise, those transformations that were, however, present in full clarity in earlier stages of human development. Just as today only children experience the transition through the change of teeth and through sexual maturity both physically and spiritually, and as we, being natural human beings, undergo a spiritual-mental development at the same time and feel united as a whole human being, in our development – while later our soul-spiritual separates and goes its own way – man in earlier developmental epochs of the earth has clearly undergone spiritual-soul metamorphoses that went hand in hand with the physical.

And once we have grasped this, once we have grasped how the human being of the first historical period that we can follow lived entirely in his body on earth, how he experienced what was in his body into the highest age, then we understand that such a completely different language is spoken in the oldest documents that speak of the historical development of humanity. Then we also understand the freshness with which wisdom comes to us in these old documents. Then we understand how something poetic was poured out at that time over that which we today produce only in abstract philosophy; then we understand how a Confucius produces the highest sayings of wisdom when we know that what we only experience in childhood was also experienced in those ages when the hair was already beginning to turn grey. Even then, man still experienced his physical self. He did not just speak from a more abstract soul and spirit, he spoke from the heart about the most abstract matters of humanity. That is what flows towards us not only from the scriptures, but also from what has been handed down and overheard from the public affairs of this primeval humanity.

And when we look back, we feel that we are a link in this whole human development, this development of humanity. We feel what it must have meant that in those times, although man grew old, he remained a child and experienced everything as a child, which today is experienced soberly, in a mature way. One understands how the whole inner life of the soul had a different coloring in those days; one understands that the way people lived together was such that the childlike, the youthful human being looked up to the old human being differently than we can today. For the young person could say to themselves: When I myself grow old, something will well up from within me that one can only experience when one grows old; one can look forward to growing old, because this growing old gives one a joy that one must grow old to experience. And one could also look up to old age in a different way, as if one believed that old age only makes the sober abstract exterior - as one usually thinks about old age today. The whole position of the human being in the world becomes different as a result. And we understand the whole character of ancient times inwardly, not just outwardly dryly, when we empathize with the first times of human development. We then learn to understand how there was an initial period of human development in which man lived in his body in such a way that he felt his physical development period at the same time as a spiritual-soul fact, just as we today only feel when we experience the spiritual-soul as such. But man then also felt himself to be in complete harmony with nature. Man in those ancient times was not yet placed in a position to despise, undervalue or overestimate anything material, because for him everything spiritual was still revealed in the material. He ate and drank, but in what he took in as food and drink, spiritual things were revealed to him. He knew not only the material. He could, by taking the fruit from the tree, in the enjoyment of the fruit, say to himself: Through the blossom, in the whole growth, in the power of the tree, the Godhead is at work; it gives me the fruit; the Godhead is directly related to me in that I enter into a spiritual-bodily relationship with the world.

Thus did the human being of the first epoch on earth feel connected to nature, to other people, and to the spiritual, economically, legally, and spiritually. He felt God to be present on earth, he felt God in everything that revealed itself to him physically – for he did not yet know a spiritual experience separate from materiality. Everything that presented itself to him in an earthly, sensual way, he also experienced spiritually; he based his institutions on what revealed itself to him as divine. The institutions, if one could study them today with an external historical perspective — one can only do so with spiritual science — the institutions that people encountered at that time, one can only describe them as theophanies. They can only be described by saying that through everything that man experienced inwardly, he and his environment were spiritual, and what happened in economic life was only a reflection of the spiritual, like a shadow image of the spiritual. It is quite wrong for this spiritual-scientific consideration to look at a primeval humanity that would have lived on the earth somewhat like animals and would have lived out of animal instincts, like better apes. Spiritual science makes it clear that man did indeed start from the most material experience, but that he felt this most material experience as spiritual-divine, that he also set up everything economic on earth as a mirror image, as a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In the course of his development on earth, man started out from spiritual experience, albeit with matter. He only progressed to something else when he ceased to perceive the inner soul-spiritual metamorphoses in harmony with the aging body at an advanced age, in his forties, even in his early fifties. The human being was limited to completing his sense of unity for the spiritual and soul and the physical at a younger age. In the previous cultural age, the human being still felt the harmony of the physical with the spiritual and soul until well into his thirties, but no longer higher. In the middle of life, the human being still felt what it meant to enter one's thirties in a bodily and spiritual sense. Then it ceased, just as the ordinary experience ceases for us even earlier, as we grow old earlier, without really experiencing growing old inwardly with the body.

The second period of human development - it begins around the 8th century BC - still includes that wonderful folklore that has gained such a great, such a huge influence on the whole civilizing life of modern times; the development of Greek folklore falls within it. Those who today cannot feel how fundamentally different this Greek culture is from our own do not properly feel the history of the development of humanity.

Oh, this Greek culture! One truly enriches one's human life when one can put oneself in the way the Greeks felt. They no longer remained young like primeval man into old age, but they felt like a unified human being until the middle of life, and they still felt a spiritual connection with the physical in their thirties, as we experience it until the time of sexual maturity. What lived and breathed as a unity in Greek nature formed the basis for the harmonious art and intellectual creativity of Greek culture. Experiencing this as a unity, as an inner harmony, even in middle age, in the middle of existence, made it possible for what we know as Greek culture to develop out of the old forms of artistic creation, of drama and of musical feeling. We only get to know this Greek culture in a truly human way if we are able to direct our gaze to the individual Greek. Oh, this Greek, he is to be our representative of this second epoch in the developmental history of humanity. He also saw the nature around him differently than we do. Because the growth forces of his soul-spiritual were still in use into his thirties, these growth forces flowed into his sensory perception. And anyone who can feel what it means for physical forces to work in the human being in such a way that they express themselves spiritually and soulfully well into the thirties will have to say to themselves: Another force is pushing into the senses themselves, and this results in a different perception of sensory reality. In this way, one learns to empathize with the entire development of humanity, to feel one's way into the individual human being of the past. One learns to feel how he looked at his surroundings in such a way that nature, with all its blossoms, with all its other expressions, yes, with stars, sun and moon, with clouds and so on, in all the nuances of impressions, had a different effect on him than it has on us. If we follow with feeling what was different in the Greek, we can say to ourselves in recognition: The Greek vividly felt precisely the light in its natural environment, everything that stood out, that shone and glistened, while he had little sense for what did not shine and glisten. Anyone who believes that the Greeks saw their surroundings in the same way that we see them has no sense of the developmental history of humanity. They are looking at it much like a forty-year-old would, who believes that a child sees the world around them in the same way that he or she does. But the Greeks, who lived in the second epoch of human development, saw the nature around them in great vividness. He saw what shone and glistened, what spoke directly to the human being; he also saw in other people that which is more active from person to person, that which is more luminous from person to person. The Greek saw his fellow human being differently from us, right down to the other person's complexion. This must be said by spiritual science out of its cognitive compassion for the developmental history of humanity.

This is not refuted by external observation, but fully confirmed, however one may dispute about these things. Anyone who looks at Greek literature with an open mind must notice that the Greeks do not actually have a real word to express blue. They have a word, yAauxög (glaukos), which they use to describe the dark hair and also the dark-colored eyebrows of certain people, and they also use the same word to describe the blue stone lapis lazuli. With the same word they designate everything blue and everything black or dark in general. And it is also quite interesting that the Greeks have a word for green, xAwoög (chloros), but with these words they simultaneously designate the yellow resin, the honey and the hair – just as blue-blind people of the present do not distinguish between green and yellow, so that we can say: External history also confirms that the ancient Greeks saw the light colors as the ones that mattered to them; and that they had no strong sense of blue, of dark colors, at all, that they expressed this sense particularly. Here we must look to a quite different bodily and mental constitution of the Greek. And this is given to us by a consideration of history, which inwardly reveals the course of progress over the earth. This leads us into the inner life of man.

And if we continue along this path and have followed such points of view, then we shall also look at other matters in the same way. Then one will understand why the Roman writers tell us that the Greek painters only painted with four colors, black, white, red, and yellow, and say nothing about their also painting in blue. Perhaps they also had what we see as blue and covered the surface with it, but they did not call it that. They only felt everything insofar as it was bright and shining and luminous. That is, they lived with the forces of nature and did not yet know the reflective element. For one learns to recognize that this reflective element in the developmental history of mankind can only arise when the effects of the thirties on man, in the sense that he still perceives the spiritual and soul in harmony with the physical body, when, so to speak, this sense of unity, where one as a human being feels the metamorphoses of the physical body and the spiritual soul at the same time, already ceases in the twenties. That which the body is primarily organized for develops in the old age body, and that which was present in full clarity in earlier ages only scurries up in traces, in shadows. If one follows these things impartially, then one comes to say that in the present age, this dependence of the spiritual-soul on the physical-corporeal normally ceases for the normal human being around the 26th or 27th year human being, if he does not do something about it by taking his inner development into his own hands, and that then only that which is laid in the human inner being through education during childhood comes to the fore. Something most significant occurs when we consider the developmental history of humanity in this way. We look back to earlier times in human development. We can understand that people were more satisfied with an education in which a person grew up with their environment through the natural process of imitation. We see the full, profound human importance of education and teaching only emerge in this third, “reflective” epoch. We learn to recognize our place as human beings in the developmental history of all humanity; we no longer feel our relationship to all humanity as abstract. We feel our mission in this particular age; by belonging to it, we know that, for example, educational tasks in particular are approaching the present age of humanity – the educational tasks of which the social question is one of the most important.

In the first epoch of humanity and in the aftermath of the second epoch, man in his youth could say to himself – he could learn this from the moods and messages of the ancients: as you grow up and grow older, you will experience this and that, which you will simply experience through your physical transformation in old age. In our time, the way in which a person fills their old age must be germinally assessed in their youth through education and teaching. And more and more, the time is approaching – it is already here to a great extent – when we must feel a strong obligation to educate young people in such a way that throughout their later old age, people can remember what they learned during their years of education. Because life no longer gives us the same things in elementary events that it gave to people in earlier epochs of humanity, what is experienced during the years of education must, I would say, be able to have an elastic effect over time, so that it can permeate and illuminate the whole of life

until we turn gray. In this way, history can gain insights, and in this way, history can give us knowledge that also strengthens the will and provides orientation in life.

This is what spiritual science must repeatedly draw attention to, that by trying to penetrate more deeply into life and existence to the point where this life and existence reveal themselves as spiritual, it can also directly serve practical life.

History that merely adheres to the external will not be able to give man such expanses [in the contemplation] of historical development that simultaneously become life forces in him. Nor does it give him ideas that can enlighten him about what has happened in human development.

It is remarkable to hear, for example, that one of the greatest historians of the recent epoch, Ranke, was always in doubt as to how he should place the figure of Christ Jesus in human history. He was convinced that the figure of Christ Jesus could actually only be considered from a religious point of view, that is, it had to be considered on a different level than is usual in the study of history. He was not able to place the life of Christ among the forces that construct history. Herman Grimm attempted to correct this deficiency in some of his allusions, but he did not succeed because in the present-day conditions of the age, one can only succeed by adopting the spiritual-scientific approach.

What has man basically become by becoming a “reflective” human being, by developing since the middle of the 15th century into the reflective, intellectualistic period? What has he become as a result of developing into everything that comes out of intellectualism in the field of technology, in the field of external life and external knowledge, albeit as something great?

In the first epoch, and to a large extent in the second, of which the Greek can be said to be a representative, man felt himself to be a member of the whole world simply because his body is a member of the whole world. He saw lightning; he had an instinctive realization that the power in lightning is akin to the power that lives in his own feeling. He felt part of the whole existence of the world. He was rich in his inner life because, at bottom, he felt himself to be a part of the whole world, because what lived and breathed in him as a human being was the same as what lived and breathed in the whole world. He saw his own destiny in the course of the stars. He could trace not only what was in him by natural law to the farthest heights of heaven, but also what was in him morally, he could trace it to cosmic widths.

We today have different experiences. Since the dawn of modern intellectual life in the third developmental epoch of humanity, in which we have become contemplative people, we have experienced that we can well calculate, with Galilean grandeur, with Bruno-like insight, looking up into the starry worlds. But we carry nothing down from them but mathematical-mechanistic formulas about planets and the course of the sun, and today at most what spectral analysis tells us about them. And here on this earth we have become lonely. We know we are standing on this earth, but we feel nothing more of a kinship with the starry expanse. We can no longer feel that we are a living link in the world if we live honestly within the modern mechanistic world view. We stand alone with our earth in space; and we only calculate about that which is not our earth. Can we, if we are honest, still develop the biblical belief that the Christ descended from the heights of heaven into the world that we have so rationalized, in order to accomplish the most important event, the meaning of all earthly development, in the body of Jesus of Nazareth?

What humanity has acquired through calculation and mechanistic knowledge is what has led it away from the spiritual understanding of the developmental history of humanity itself. Only spiritual science will be able to reconnect meaning to the fact that what lived in Jesus descended from spiritual heights, that the great marriage of the spiritual world with earthly humanity has been concluded for the benefit of human further development. That the Mystery of Golgotha is a spiritual one, that is the truth that can only be presented to the soul in full clarity through spiritual science.

And then, when one experiences the Mystery of Golgotha from a spiritually renewed perspective, one would like to say that spiritual science also brings to light a further, seemingly only incidental fact of human developmental history, but one that has a deeply moving effect on those who can perceive it in all its depth. By applying this reverse biogenetic law, we discover the fact that what human beings experience today in the age epoch of their individual development is a shadowy hint of what was clearly experienced by our human ancestors in body and soul and is today experienced only in the outer human metamorphoses of earlier developmental epochs. Just as the physical nature of the human being at the embryonic stage naturally repeats itself in the intimations of what was experienced by our ancestors over millions of years, so too what occurs in the human being in the adult stage is a shadowy repetition of what was clearly and distinctly present inwardly in prehumanity. We thus connect our present life with the past.

And if you follow these facts with spiritual scientific methods, which have often been characterized here and which you can read about in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science”, “The Riddle of Man”, “The Riddle of Souls”, you will be able to say to yourself that it is quite possible through inner vision to understand how, in pre-Christian times, people remained capable of development in this way, that is, they experienced inwardly, including spiritually and soulfully, the bodily-physical up to and including the thirties, up to the last thirties. Then it went down and down until our time, the third epoch in the developmental history of humanity, where the human being experiences the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily together only until the twenties. In between lies something that is an important transition in human life.

By shaping himself in terms of developmental history across the earth, the human being has, so to speak, descended from the youthful-childlike experience of aging into those times when he experiences only his unified human being into his thirties. Then the figure emerged from the depths of the world, who lived out before him, into his thirties, that which he is to live out, so that he can absorb the forces in his youth to carry into old age what he absorbs in his youth. In the time after the Mystery of Golgotha, man can no longer carry the forces he needs in old age into old age through natural development. Therefore, the life of Christ Jesus, which only extended to the middle of earthly life, was presented to him on earth, and which gave man a divine-human example until the age of 33. If he seizes the strong forces of this model so that he can grasp within: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” we organize all education and teaching in such a way that it is permeated by the Christ, that we allow the child in the youth to take up the forces that can then, as I have indicated, stretch like a rubber band into old age. We thus Christianize the whole person - then we work on the progress of humanity in this area, based on the knowledge of human developmental history.

And just as I was able to show in individual areas that the truly inwardly living understanding of human developmental history, in turn, provides insights from spiritual science that show us what we have to do in our present age, we can also show it in certain other areas. We can point out how man, through his physical development, was so constituted that he recognized the divine in material things. What we have received as the inheritance of man's relationship to the divine continues to work in us; we only have to cultivate it independently, for today it wants to be independent. It wants to be cultivated as an independent element of our social life.

In the second epoch of human development, where the human being finds harmony only between the physical and the soul-spiritual until about the thirties, which lie in the middle of the earthly life, in this second epoch, the instinctive forces of the human soul life, in particular, come fully to life, those instinctive forces of the human soul life that find expression, for example, in the right-shaping and state-shaping factors of public life. Thus, in the second epoch of human development, we see the germinal seeds of what we can well think of as right, but not reflectively, but instinctively. That is why there is always something controversial in all legal concepts, because they were still instinctively created in the second epoch.

The third epoch, which began in the middle of the 15th century - this can be clearly traced historically - this third epoch, in which we are still living, is primarily a reflective one. Man withdraws from the cosmos. Man withdraws from what he thought of as being organically connected with the human being of the first epoch. Man becomes lonely on earth, and this loneliness of spirit on earth reverses everything. In the first human epoch, it was felt that the spiritual-soul permeated the world as a matter of course, and that the economic was only a reflection of the spiritual-soul. In our epoch, where the human being stands with the spiritual-soul separate from the external in the later developmental epochs of individual life, where he only feels in tune with physical development as a whole human being until his twenties, it is economic life that becomes decisive. Economic life extends into the configuration of the state; the economic sphere becomes state economy, becomes empire. What we now see emerging, what then becomes a one-sided method in Marxism, what becomes theory and appears as if economic life were everything and the spiritual life, which once was everything, were only a reflection of economic life, thus the spiritual life were only ideology. Because we have separated ourselves from the external, bodily realm through our natural development, through the developmental history of humanity, because that is the normal development of human nature, man must now seek harmony through his culture, through his civilization, between what has become separated: the spiritual , which he must cultivate in its independence because it no longer shows itself connected with the material, and the economic, which he must cultivate so that he can fight with it in the right way, so that he can bring the spirit into it again, which used to be taken for granted. And in the middle he must cultivate the state-legal as an independent link.

A correct understanding of history, when viewed from within, also gives us a true social insight into the present. It lives in what we want to put into the social organism today. People have gone through [through these epochs] by developing the three limbs of the social organism more or less one-sidedly. Now the time has come when we must develop these three limbs independently, out of human consciousness, so that we become strong, these three limbs, an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or state life, an independent economic life, through our inner humanity.

The ancient Greeks, who in the Middle Ages still had harmony between the spiritual and soul and the physical, these ancient Greeks were still condemned to split people into classes, into teaching, military and nutritional classes. We are striving for a social structure in which people are not divided into such groups, but where life is structured in threefoldness and each individual person lives in each of these threefold aspects, with the three aspects working together in each individual person.

But, my esteemed audience, what really gives cause to consider the trinity in the strongest sense is the historical consideration of humanity, which allows new perspectives to be gained. I would like to say that in the intellectual circles of scholars, Herman Grimm has found that the facts of history, which are so numerous today, are carried along like a ballast, and that the great perspectives are missing. Yes, as the history of recent years teaches, we need such broad perspectives, but what has emerged [so far] from human thinking and feeling could only be experienced by individuals. The numerous people who come from the great masses to participate in public affairs will not be edified by this kind of history, as Herman Grimm presents it.

If we establish a human history from a spiritual scientific point of view, through which one sees how man has felt through the millennia, going once like this, once like that, if one learns in historical development from what every human being experiences in himself, must experience in himself, in order to feel the same as all other human beings, then we will have a history that our age needs, as the coming age will need: a historical perspective that is not merely absorbed in the intellect, a historical perspective that draws on clear and objective concepts, but one that penetrates into human life, so that the insights warm the mind and the mind, warmed by the insights, is will-forming. And when one feels that, after all, everything that is necessary for further social development does not depend on institutions - for these themselves depend on people - but must depend on people, then one longs for the strong will in people to become the disposition for strong action, so that the recognized and necessary institutions can also be taken. But the man we need, the creative, the insightful, the man who orients himself correctly in the public world, will only be the man who can make his will, his deeds glow and shine – not with dead, not with intellectualistic, but with living, spirit-filled knowledge. But this will come to him when he can recognize himself, feeling, as a link in the whole developmental history of humanity, when he can point to the past of humanity and from this a light will arise for him, which will shine for him to work by, to act, to have an effect on the future.

There are several reasons why it would seem a somewhat risky enterprise to speak about fairy tales in the light of spiritual science.

First of all, the subject is indeed difficult, for the source of what one can call the true fairy tale mood lies deep down within the human soul. The methods of spiritual science that I have often described must take their way along extremely convoluted and lengthy paths in order to find this source. We little suspect how deeply hidden lie the springs that have given rise through centuries of human history to all the enchantment of genuine fairy tale poetry.

In the second place, it is just this poetic enchantment that causes one to feel strongly about fairy tales; studying them or trying to explain them with one's own ideas must surely destroy their fresh spontaneity, yes, even the whole effect of the tales. We often hear it said quite rightly that explanations and commentaries of poetry spoil the immediate, lively, artistic impression that a poem should give us; we want it to affect us simply on its own. All the more should this apply to the infinitely subtle and bewitching quality of the poetic tales arising from the deep, almost bottomless springs of the folk soul or from single human hearts. They flow out in such an original way that intruding our own strong judgment would seem like tearing a flower to pieces.

Nevertheless, spiritual research does find it possible to throw some light into those regions of soul that give rise to the poetic mood of the fairy tale. In doing this, the second doubt will be allayed. Simply by searching out the sources and wellsprings from which fairy tales flow, deep down in human soul nature, we can be completely sure that the explanations of spiritual science will touch those depths so gently that they are not harmed. Just the opposite: the wonder of everything lying down there in the human soul is so new, so original, so individual that one has oneself to resort to a kind of fairy tale in speaking about it all; nothing else will do to describe these hidden springs.

Goethe, for one, moving beyond his work as an artist in order to plunge fully into the wellsprings and sources of life, would not take to theoretical discussion nor destroy the fairy tale's living water with his scrutiny when he wanted to reveal one of the most profound insights into the human soul. No, as soon as he had won these insights, it seemed natural to use the fairy tale itself to describe what lives and comes to expression in the soul at its deepest level. In his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, Goethe tried to express in his own way the extraordinary soul experiences that Schiller brought forward in a more abstract, philosophical style in the Aesthetic Education of Man.

The very nature of fairy tale enchantment leads us to believe that explaining and trying to understand it will probably never destroy the creative mood; to dig down into those wellsprings with the resources of spiritual research is to discover something quite remarkable. If I were to talk about fairy tales as much as I'd like to do, I would have to give many lectures. Today it will be possible to bring only a few hints regarding the results of research.

A person who attempts the spiritual exploration of the fairy tale sources will find that they lie in far more profound depths of the soul than those from which other works of art emerge, even for instance, the most awe-inspiring tragic drama. In a tragedy, the poet shows us how the human soul experiences the gigantic powers of fate that exalt as well as crush their victim. Fate is the cause of the ordeals and shocks of tragedy. We find that the tangled threads woven together and then unraveled in tragic drama belong more or less to what an individual has to suffer from the outside world. However difficult this may be to discern, requiring as it does our finding the way into the uniqueness of a human soul, it is nevertheless quite possible for anyone sensitive to the impact of life itself upon the soul. A tragedy, we feel, shows us how an individual is entangled in this or that fateful life-situation.

However, the source of fairy tale mood and fairy tale poetry lies still deeper than the complexities of tragedy. For one thing, we can feel that tragedy concerns itself—as do other artistic creations—with an individual who in a certain period of life, at a certain age, is exposed to some kind of misfortune. We take it for granted that when tragic drama affects us, it is because a human being is brought through his own unique experiences to what is happening; we realize that it is one single person with his own special destiny that we must come to understand. Here, as in other works of art, we meet a particular, circumscribed sphere of life.

It is altogether different, we feel, when we come knowingly to fairy tale poetry and its mood. The effect of a fairy tale on our soul is spontaneous, elementary, and therefore remains unconscious. When we try to get a feeling for it, however, we can find that what a fairy tale expresses is not about one person in a particular situation in life, is not a limited portion of life, but rather something so integrated in human experience that it has to do with the comprehensive truth of all mankind. It is not about some special individual who finds himself at a certain time of life in a singular dilemma; what the fairy tale describes lies so completely in everyone's soul nature that it represents actual experience to children in their early years to persons of middle age and even to old men and women.

Throughout our whole lifetime the fairy tale happenings picture our most profound experiences of soul, even though the style is light, playful and picturesque. The artistic enjoyment of a fairy tale, in its correspondence to inner soul experiences, can be compared—a rather bold comparison—to the relationship of an enjoyable taste on the tongue to the hidden, complex proceedings in the rest of the body, where the food takes up its task of nourishing the organism. What lies in that further process, after our pleasure in its taste, is not at all evident to our observation or understanding. Both things seem at first to have little to do with each other; no one is able to say, from savoring a food, what its particular use will be in the life processes of the body. And so it is with our joy in the art of the fairy tale. It is far, far removed from what is happening at the same time, all unconsciously, deep in the soul. There the essence of the fairy tale is pouring forth, satisfying the soul's persistent hunger for it. Just as our body has to have nutritive substances circulating through the organism, the soul needs fairy tale substance flowing through its spiritual veins.

Using the methods of research described in my books as a way to approach the higher worlds, you will discover, at a certain level of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual processes working unconsciously in the depths of the soul. In our ordinary life we are aware of these spirit impulses within our soul only when they surface as gentle dreams, caught at rare times by our waking consciousness. Now and then we may have such a special waking up that we realize: You are emerging out of a spiritual world where there is thinking and where there are intentions, and where something was happening down in the unapproachable grounds of your existence that was somehow akin to daily happenings; this something seems an intimate part of your own being but is completely hidden from your waking, everyday life.

It is often the same story with the spiritual researcher, even when he has progressed as far as experiencing a world of spiritual beings and spiritual deeds. However much further he then advances, he nonetheless reaches again and again the same edge of a world out of whose deep unconsciousness there come towards him spiritual impulses, impulses connected with himself. They appear to his spiritual gaze like a Fata Morgana but they do not yield themselves up to him completely.

This very peculiar experience is what awaits one on looking into the unfathomable spiritual relationships belonging to the human soul. It is fairly easy to follow attentively and understand certain intimate soul happenings, for example, the emotional conflicts that also lie there within the soul and that are revealed in art, in tragic drama. But far more difficult are the quite common human conflicts, which in our daily life we simply cannot imagine are there, and yet every one of us undergoes them at every period of our life.

One such soul conflict discovered by spiritual research takes place without the ordinary consciousness being aware of it: our waking up every day, when the soul leaves the world it has been in during sleep and slips down into the physical body. As I said, we have normally not the slightest knowledge of this, yet every morning our soul is engaged in a battle that the spiritual researcher can catch only to a slight degree: it is the battle of the single, lonely human soul meeting the gigantic powers of nature. Thunder and lightning and everything else in the elements that we have to confront out in the world unload their great strengths on us as we stand there more or less helplessly. All that tremendous power, however, even when we meet it head on, is a small thing compared to the unconscious battle at the moment of waking up, when our soul—alive only to itself up to then—has to unite with the pressures and substances of a purely physical body. The soul needs this organism in order to use the bodily senses that are governed by the laws of nature and to use also the bodily limbs in which the powers of nature prevail. There is something like a yearning in the soul to dip down into this sheer natural state, a yearning satisfied each time by waking up, and yet at this very moment there is a shrinking back, a feeling of utter helplessness in the face of the eternal opposition existing between the soul and the nature-related physical body, into which one awakens. It may sound strange that this daily battle takes place in the depths of our soul—but then it takes place in complete unconsciousness. The soul knows nothing of what it has to undergo every single morning, but nevertheless it is burdened by the conflict, which affects its very nature and its individual character.

There is something else happening in these depths, which can be caught on the wing by spiritual research; it occurs at the moment of falling asleep. The human soul withdraws from the sense world and from the bodily limbs and has more or less left behind the physical body in the physical-sense world. Then there comes to the soul what one may describe as an awareness of its inwardness. At that moment it begins to experience unconsciously the inner battles caused by its constraint in a physical body in the waking state, where it has to act in consequence of its entanglement in matter. It is aware of its bent toward the burdensome sense-world, which, however, represses its morality. In falling asleep and during sleep, the soul is alone with itself and pervaded unconsciously by so moral an atmosphere that it can hardly be compared to the morality we know in ordinary life. Besides other impressions, it is this that the soul experiences when it is outside the physical body and living a purely spiritual existence between falling asleep and waking up.

We should not imagine that all these occurrences in our soul are simply absent when we are awake. Spiritual research can show one very interesting effect as an example: we do not dream only when we believe we are dreaming but we actually dream the whole day long. In truth, our soul is full of dreams all the time, even though we don't notice it, for our waking consciousness is more forceful than the dream consciousness. As a somewhat weak light is extinguished altogether in the presence of a stronger one, our day-consciousness extinguishes what is continually running parallel to it, the dream experience in the depths of our soul. We dream all the time, but we are seldom conscious of it. Out of those abundant and unconscious dream experiences—an infinitely greater number than our waking perceptions—a few rise up like single drops of water shaken out of an immense lake; these are the dreams we become conscious of. But the dreaming that stays unconscious is perceived by the soul spiritually. In its depths many things are being experienced. Just as chemical processes that we are unaware of take place in the body, there are spiritual experiences taking place within us in unconscious regions of the soul.

We can throw more light into these hidden depths of soul life by adding something else to the facts we have mentioned. It has often been emphasized, and especially so in my last lecture, [Raphaels Mission im Lichte der Wissenschaft vom Geiste (January 30, 1913); The Mission of Raphael (unpublished MS).] that in the course of evolution on earth, human soul life has undergone a complete change. When we look far, far back into the past of humankind, we find the soul of ancient man having totally different experiences from those today. In earlier lectures we spoke about early mankind's primitive clairvoyance; we will speak further about it in the future. We look out at the world today in the wide-awake condition of soul that is normal, taking in sense impressions from outer stimuli, working on them with our intelligence, reason, emotions, and will forces—but this form of consciousness is merely the one that holds good for the present day. This modern consciousness has developed out of the earlier forms in ancient days that we can call—in the best sense of the word—clairvoyant; people were able in certain intermediate conditions between waking and sleeping quite normally to experience something of the spiritual worlds. At that time a person, even though he could not become really conscious of himself, would not find the experiences we have been describing as taking place in the depths of the soul at all unfamiliar or strange.

In ancient times the human being could more fully perceive his union with the spiritual world outside himself. He saw how everything going on in his soul, the happenings deep in his soul, were related to certain spiritual realities alive in the universe. He saw these realities moving through his soul, felt closely related to the spirit-soul beings and realities of the universe. This was a characteristic of mankind's primeval clairvoyance. In ancient times, not only artists but quite primitive people frequently had a feeling that I am going to describe, which today we arrive at only in quite special moods.

It can really happen that, living gently in the depths of the soul, as gently as anything can be, there is an experience of the spiritual realities mentioned above, one that does not come to consciousness. Nothing of it is perceived in the wide-awake life of the day. But something is there in the soul, just as hunger often is there in the physical organism, and just as we have a need for something to satisfy our hunger, we have also a need for something to satisfy this delicate need in our soul.

It is at this moment that one feels urged either to come to a fairy tale or a legend that one knows, or else, perhaps, if one has an artistic nature, to create something of the kind oneself, even though one senses that all the words one could theoretically use would only reach a kind of stammering about such experiences. This is how the fairy tale images arise. The nourishment that satisfies the hunger we spoke of is just this conscious filling of the soul with fairy tale pictures. In the earlier times of mankind's evolution, the human soul was closer to a clairvoyant perception of its inner spiritual experiences; often, therefore, the simple country folk felt this hunger more distinctly than we do today, and this led them to search for nourishing pictures arising out of their creative soul life; we find these today in the fairy tales coming down to us as folk traditions in various parts of the world. In those earlier times the human soul felt its connection to spiritual existence and felt more or less consciously the inner battles it had to undergo, even without understanding them. The soul formed these into pictures and images which had only a distant resemblance to what was happening in its depths. But still one can feel that there is a connection between the happenings of a fairy tale and the unfathomable, profound experiences of the soul.

It is evident—many can confirm this—that the heart of a child often succeeds in creating for itself a comrade or “friend” who is present only for that child and who stays at its side through all its coming and going. Probably everyone knows children with such invisible spirit-friends. These unseen playmates you have to imagine as being with the child wherever he is, sharing all his joys and sorrows. And then you see someone coming along, a so-called “intelligent” person, who hears about this invisible playmate and tries to talk the child out of it, even believes it's a healthy thing he's doing—but it has a bad effect on the child's feeling-life. A child will grieve for his soul-comrade and if he is susceptible to spiritual-soul moods, the grief will be weighty and can develop into a pining away or sickliness. This is actual experience, related to deep, inward happenings of the human soul.

We can take to heart, without dispelling the fragrance of such a tale, the Grimms' story of the child and the paddock (a small frog). A little girl lets the paddock eat with her out of her bowl of bread and milk; the paddock only drinks the milk. The child talks to the little creature as to another human being, saying one day, “Eat the bread crumbs as well, little thing.” The mother hears this, comes out to the yard, and kills the paddock. And now the child loses her rosy cheeks, wastes away and dies.

In this tale we can feel an echo of certain moods that really and truly are present in the depths of our soul. They are there not only at certain periods of our life, but whether we are children or adults, we recognize such moods because we are human beings.

Every one of us can feel reverberating in us how this something we experience but don't understand, something we don't even bring to consciousness, is connected with the effect of the fairy tale on our soul like the taste of food on our tongue. And then the fairy tale becomes for the soul very much like nutritious food when it is put to use by the whole organism. It is tempting to search in these deep-lying soul experiences for what reverberates in each different tale. Of course it would be a tremendous task over a long time, given the great collections of fairy tales from everywhere in the world, to probe into them just for this. However, what can be looked at in a few tales can be used in a general way for all of them, if the few are genuine fairy tales.

Take one of the stories that the brothers Grimm collected, “Rumpelstiltskin”. When a miller claims that his daughter can spin straw into gold, the king has him bring her to the castle in order to test her art. She comes to the king, is locked in a room with a bundle of straw and “there sat the poor miller's daughter and for the life of her could not tell what to do”. As she begins to weep, there appears a little man who says, “What will you give me if I spin the straw into gold for you?” The girl gives him her necklace and the little man spins the straw into gold. The king next morning is astonished and delighted but wants more; she should spin straw into gold again. She is locked in another room with even more straw, and when the little man appears again and asks, “What will you give me if I spin the straw into gold for you?” she gives him her ring. By morning all the straw is spun into glittering gold. But the king is still not satisfied. The manikin comes again, but now the girl has nothing more to give him. “Then promise me, if you should become queen, to give me your first child,” says the little man, and so she promises. And when, after a year, the child is there and the manikin comes and reminds the queen of her promise, she begs him to wait. “I will give you three days' time,” he replies. “If you know my name by that time, you shall keep your child.” The miller's daughter sends messengers far and wide. She must find every name and also the particular name of the little man. Finally, after several wrong guesses, she succeeds in naming the little man by his right name: Rumpelstiltskin.

No other work of art gives us the feeling of utmost inner joy as the fairy tale with its unsophisticated pictures, yet we can also know the deep soul experience from which such a tale arises. It is a prosaic but accurate comparison to say, we can know a great deal about the chemistry of our food and still take pleasure in something delicious we're eating. And so we can know and understand something about these deep inner soul experiences in us that are felt but not “known”—and that emerge as the pictures of fairy tales.

Indeed our solitary soul, this miller's daughter, is a lonely thing, both in sleep and in waking life, even though she is harbored in our body. The soul feels (but unconsciously) the great antithesis she has to live in; she experiences (but does not understand) her unending task, her own anchorage in divine worlds.

The soul will always be aware of other insignificant abilities in comparison to those of outside nature. Nature is the mighty enchantress, who can transform one thing into another in a trice—something the soul would like to be and do.

In everyday consciousness, one can submit with a good grace to this disparity between the human being and the omnipotent wisdom of the spirit of nature. In the depths of the soul, however, things are not so simple. The soul would certainly come to grief if she did not surmise that within her own conscious being a still deeper being is present, something she can trust, something she might be able to describe like this:

You, Soul, are still at such an imperfect stage—but there is something in you, another entity, who is far more clever than you, who can help you to accomplish the most difficult tasks and give you wings to rise up and look over wide perspectives into an infinite future. Someday you will be able to do what is still impossible, for there is something within you that is far, far greater than the part of you now that “knows”; it will be a loyal helper if you can enter into an alliance with it. But you must truly be able to form a concept of this creature who lives within you and is so much wiser, cleverer, more skilful than you are yourself.

When you try to imagine this conversation of the soul with itself, an unconscious conversation with the more capable part of the soul, you can then try to catch this nuance in the Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale: what the miller's daughter had to experience in not being able to spin straw into gold and then finding a loyal helper in the little manikin. It is impossible to blow away the fragrance of those pictures, even when we know their origin, deep down in our soul life. Let us take another tale. Please forgive me if it is connected with things that seem to have a personal coloring; it is not meant to be personal. It makes it somewhat easier to explain if I add this small personal note.

In my book Occult Science [ An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1972.] you will find a description of the evolution of the world. I don't intend to speak about it now—possibly on another occasion. During this evolution of the world our earth has passed through certain stages as a planet in the universe, and these stages can be compared to the stages of life in the individual human being. Just as individuals go through one life after another, the earth itself has had various planetary stages or embodiments. In spiritual science, for certain reasons, we speak about the earth—before its “earth” stage began—as having a “moon” stage and before that, a “sun” stage. There was a sun evolutionary period as a planetary pre-stage of our earth in the primordial past; an ancient sun was still united with the earth, from which—at a later stage—it split away. The moon also split away from what originally was the sun. Our sun today is not the original one but only a piece of it; we can speak of an ancient sun-stage of the earth and also of our present sun. Spiritual research can look back to the time in earth evolution when the second sun, our present one, developed as an independent body in the universe. In searching for the existence at that time of beings actually perceptible to the senses, it finds only the lower species up to the level of the fishes.

You can read all this in more detail in Occult Science, and there you will be able to understand it. The actual details, however, can be found only through the scientific methods of spiritual research. At the time they were discovered and I wrote them down (more precisely, they were not discovered just when I wrote them down but they were, one can say, discovered for me and I wrote them down in Occult Science) the following fairy tale was quite unknown to me—and this is the personal note I wanted to add. I can verify the fact that it was unknown then, for I found it much later in Wundt's Elements of Folk Psychology and traced it then back to its source.

Before I give you a short summary of the fairy tale, let me say this: Everything the spiritual researcher finds in the spiritual world—and what was just described had to be found in the spiritual world, for otherwise it would no longer exist—everything in that world is very much connected with the human soul. In the very deepest roots of our soul we are united with that world. It is always at hand; we enter it unconsciously as soon as we fall asleep in a normal way. In our union with that world, our soul holds within itself not only its sleep experiences but also all those experiences related to world evolution as we have described them. It is a paradox but one can say that the soul knows unconsciously that it experienced the stream of evolution from the original sun to its daughter, the sun we see shining in the sky, and to the moon that is also a child of the original sun. Moreover, the soul can recognize that it was living through a soul-spiritual existence at that time, for it was not yet united with earthly substance. It could look down then on earthly happenings, for example, when the highest animal organisms were the fish-prototypes, at the time when the present sun and moon developed by separating from the earth. In the unconscious, the soul is connected with these happenings.

Now look at this short folk tale that can be found among several primitive peoples: There was once a man who was made of resin. He worked only at night. If he had worked in the daytime, the sun would have melted him. One day, however, he did go outside, for he wanted to catch some fish. And lo! the man made of resin melted away. His sons made up their minds to take revenge. They shot off their arrows. They shot so well that the arrows formed figures, towering one above the other. They became a ladder, reaching right up into the sky. The two sons climbed up the ladder, one by day, the other by night. And one son became the sun, the other son became the moon.

It is not my custom to explain such tales with abstract, intellectual ideas. Everyone can realize, however, through spiritual research how the human soul is deeply connected with everything happening in the world, how the soul can be understood only through spiritual means, and how it hungers to enjoy the picture-images of its unconscious experiences—this is truly different. If you feel this, you will also feel, vibrating like an echo of this folk tale, just what human souls experienced at the time of the primordial sun and then at the origin of the sun and moon during the time of fish-development in earth evolution. It was for me a most important event—and this is the personal note—to discover, long after these things were described in Occult Science, this particular tale. Even though I would never wish to explain it in an abstract way, a certain feeling comes over me when I look at the evolution of the world, a feeling that is twin-brother to the one I get from immersing myself in the wonderful picture-images of the folk tale.

We can look at another story, this one from the Melanesian Islands. Before we hear it, let us recall that according to spiritual research the human soul is closely connected to the present-day happenings and facts of the universe. It may be too picturesque, but nevertheless quite correct from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, to describe the life of the soul when it leaves the body in sleep as completely related to and united with the whole universe. One possibility of remembering or understanding this relationship of our ego, for example, to the cosmos, at least to something significant in the cosmos is to look at the plants. They can grow only when they have the light and warmth of the sun. They are rooted in the earth and consist, as spiritual science tells us, of a physical body interwoven by an etheric body. This is not enough, however, to cause the plants to unfold and blossom; they must also have the forces of the sun shining down on them.

Looking at the human body during sleep, we see to some degree its equivalence to a plant. Our sleeping body is like a plant, in that it has the same power to grow. But the human being has freed himself from the cosmic order in which the plant is caught. A plant has to wait for sunlight to come to it, the rising and setting of the sun. It is dependent, as we humans are not, on the external cosmic order. Why are we not? Because of a fact that spiritual research has discovered, that the human ego, which in sleep is outside the plant-like body, unfolds for the body what the sun unfolds for the plant. The sun pours its light over the plant; the human ego shines too, resting spiritually over the sleeping body. And the human ego is related to the life of the sun; it is itself a kind of sun for the plant-like human body, engendering its growth during sleep, repairing its various forces that have been used up during the daytime. In perceiving this, we realize how much like the sun our ego is. As the sun moves across the sky—of course I am speaking of its apparent movement—the effect of the sun's rays changes according to the constellations of the zodiac from which they come to earth. In the same way, spiritual science shows us ever more clearly that the human ego passes through the various phases of its experience; the physical body is influenced according to each aspect. We perceive the sun's effect on earth, with the help of spiritual science, according to whether it is passing through Aries, or Taurus, or any other constellation. Rather than refer to the sun in general terms, it is preferable to describe the effect of the sun from one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. As we consider the sun's passage through the constellations, we become aware of its relationship to the ever-changing ego.

All this is described much more fully in Occult Science; it can be acquired as spirit-soul knowledge. We can perceive it as something that takes place unconsciously in the depths of the soul and yet takes place as an inward involvement with the spiritual powers of the cosmos alive in the planets and constellations.

Let us compare these secrets of the universe, disclosed by spiritual science, with the following Melanesian tale, which I will sketch very briefly.

In the road is a stone. The stone is the mother of Quatl, and Quatl has eleven brothers. After Quatl and his brothers were created, Quatl began to create the world. But in this world that Quatl created, there was no change of night and day. Quatl heard about an island where there was a difference between the day and the night. He traveled to that island and brought a host of beings back to his own land. And through the power of these beings, those in Quatl's land came into the alternation of sleeping and waking. Sunrise and sunset occurred for them as soul happenings.

It is amazing what vibrates as echo from this story. If you read the whole thing, you will find that every sentence vibrates with the tones of world secrets, just as our soul vibrates in its depths when it hears how spiritual science describes those secrets. It is true: the source of fairy tale mood and fairy tale poetry lies in the depths of the human soul! The tales are simply pictures using external happenings to help characterize the soul experiences we have described; the pictures are nourishment for the hunger arising from these experiences. This must also be true: we are quite distant from the experience but nevertheless we can feel them echoing in the fairy tale picture-images.

When all this has been said, we should not be surprised to find that the most beautiful and characteristic fairy tales have come to us from those very early times when human beings had a certain clairvoyant consciousness. Because of this, they were able to come close to the wellsprings of fairy tale mood and poetry; it is not at all strange that from those parts of the earth where souls are closer to spiritual sources than in the western world, for example in India or the Orient, fairy tales can have an especially distinctive character.

Furthermore, in German we find Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Children's and Household Tales, which they collected by listening to their relatives or other more or less simple, unsophisticated people telling stories that remind us of the ancient European sagas; even the fairy tales contain elements of the great stories of heroes and gods. We should not be surprised to hear that the most significant fairy tales have now been proven older than the sagas. The hero stories, after all, describe someone at a certain time of life in a particular difficulty, while the fairy tales show us what is relevant to every single person at every period of life from his first breath to his last. Then we understand how a fairy tale can press into itself the deep-seated soul experience on awakening from sleep, of feeling completely inadequate in the face of the powers of nature; how, too, one feels equal to it only with the consoling knowledge that something greater than oneself is present in the soul that may even allow one to triumph over the forces of nature.

When you have a feeling like this, you will understand why there are so many giants that have to be dealt with in the tales. Indeed, they make their appearance without fail as an image out of the soul's mood on waking up—of its wanting to enter the body and seeing the “gigantic” forces of nature alive there. The battle the soul has to undergo is exactly what corresponds—though this cannot be understood perhaps with the intellect—to the various descriptions of people having to fight giants. The soul realizes when confronted by battles with giants that it has only one advantage—and that is its cleverness. This is the soul's perception: You can slip into your body but what can you do about those tremendous forces of the universe? Why, there's one thing the giants don't have that you do have ... cleverness! reason! Unconsciously this lives in the soul even when it realizes the small strength it has; we find that the soul, put into this position, can express itself in the following pictures:

A man was going along the road. He came to an inn, went in, and asked for a bowl of milk soup. Flies by the dozen were buzzing around; some fell into the soup, the others he swatted. When he counted a hundred dead flies on the table, he boasted, “A hundred with one blow!” The innkeeper hung a medallion around his neck that said: He killed a hundred with one blow.

The man went further and came to a castle where the king was looking out of his window. When he caught sight of the wayfarer and his medallion, the king thought to himself, “This is a fellow I can make use of!” The king hurried out and took the man into his service to do a certain task. “There is a pack of bears coming ever and again into my kingdom. Look! if you've killed a hundred with one blow, you can put an end to those bears.” The man said, “I'll do it!” But first he demanded his wages and plenty of food before the bears should arrive, for he thought he might as well enjoy his life for a while, in case it should be cut short. Now came the time when the bears were expected; he collected together all the sweet things bears like to eat, and laid them ready.

The bears came, ate up everything they found and were so well stuffed that they had to lie down to sleep off their greed. And now as they lay helpless, the man came and finished them off. When the King arrived, the man told him, “I simply chopped off their heads while they jumped over my stick!” The King was delighted with this brave fellow and gave him a still harder task. “Look! The giants will soon be coming back into my kingdom. You must help me with them.” The man promised and when the time came, he collected a great amount of good things to eat, which he took along with him, besides a young lark and a piece of cheese. Sure enough, he met the giants and began to boast about how strong he was. One of them said, “We'll show you how much stronger we are!” Taking up a stone, he squeezed it into a powder. “Do that likewise, little man, if you're as strong as we are.” The other giant aimed an arrow up into the sky, shot it off, and only after a very long time, it dropped down again. “Do that likewise, little man, if you're as strong as we are.” At that, the man who had killed a hundred with one blow told them, “I can do better than that.” He took up a stone, stuck his piece of cheese on it and said, “Watch me press water out of the stone!” Sure enough, when he squeezed, water squirted out of the cheese. The giants were astonished. Then the man took the lark and let it fly upwards, saying, “Your arrow came back, but mine will go up so high that it never comes back!” Sure enough, the lark did not return. The giants were so astonished that they decided that they would have to overcome him with cunning, for it seemed that they couldn't manage it with strength. However, they failed to get the better of the man with cunning, for he got the better of them. They lay down together to sleep and in the dark the man put over his head a pig's bladder that was blown up and filled with blood. The giants told one another, “We can't overcome him when he's awake, so we'll have to wait until he sleeps.” As soon as he was asleep, they attacked him with great blows on the head and broke the pig's bladder. The blood gushed out; the giants were sure they had finished him off. Therefore they laid themselves to rest and slept so peacefully that it was easy for the man to put an end to them.

Just as it is in dreams, this fairy tale peters out in a somewhat vague, unsatisfactory way; nevertheless we do find in it the conflict of the human soul with the forces of nature, first with the “Bears” and then with the “Giants.” But something more is in the fairy tale. The man who “killed a hundred with one blow” stands out so clearly that we feel something vibrating in the unconscious depths of our soul to the utter trust he had in his cleverness, even in the face of those powerful forces he found so “gigantic.” It is wrong to try to explain in abstract detail the picture-images created with such artistry, and this is not the intention here. Nothing actually can disturb the character of a fairy tale if you feel how it echoes our inward soul processes. And these inner processes—however much one knows about them, however much as spiritual science itself can know about them—you do become ever and again entangled in them; then, experiencing them in a fairy tale, you see them in their most elemental, primary form. Knowledge of these soul-happenings, when it is present, does not destroy the ability to transform them into fairy tale magic.

It is certainly stimulating for the spiritual researcher to discover in fairy tales just what the human soul has need of when confronting its innermost experiences. The fairy tale mood can never be disturbed, for research that is able to arrive at the wellsprings of the tales in subconscious life will find there something that becomes poorer for the ordinary consciousness when it is described abstractly. The fairy tale itself is the most perfect description of these deepest of soul experiences. Now one can understand why Goethe put into the manifold eloquent picture-images of his Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily the rich experiences of life that Schiller expressed in abstract philosophical terms. It was pictures that Goethe wanted to use—even though he was otherwise very much given to thought—in order to express his most profound perception of the subconscious roots of human soul life.

Because fairy tales belong to our innermost feeling and emotional life and to everything connected with it, they are of all forms of literature the most appropriate for children's hearts and minds. It is evident that they are able to combine the richest spiritual wisdom with the simplest manner of expression. One has the feeling that in the magnificent world of art there is no greater art than this one, which traces the path from the unknown, unknowable depths of the soul to the charming and often playful fairy tale pictures.

When what is most difficult to understand is able to be put in the most clearly perceptible form, the result will be great art, intrinsic art, art that belongs at a fundamental level to the human being. Human nature in the child is linked to the life of the whole world in such a primary way that children must have fairy tales as soul-nourishment. The expression of spiritual force can move much more freely when it comes towards a child. It should not be entangled in abstract, theoretical ideas if the child's soul is not to become dry and disturbed, instead of remaining linked to the deep roots of human life.

Therefore there is nothing of greater blessing for a child than to nourish it with everything that brings the roots of human life together with those of cosmic life. A child is still having to work creatively, forming itself, bringing about the growth of its body, unfolding its inner tendencies; it needs the wonderful soul-nourishment it finds in fairy tale pictures, for in them the child's roots are united with the life of the world. Even we adults, given to reason and intelligence, can never be torn away from these roots of existence; we are most connected with them just when we have to be fully involved with the life of the time. Therefore at various parts of our life, if we have a healthy, open-hearted mind, we will happily turn back to fairy tales. Certainly there is not a single age or stage of human life that can take us away from what flows out of a fairy tale, for otherwise we would be giving up the deepest and most important part of our nature; we would be giving up what is incomprehensible for the intellect: a sensing within ourselves, a sense for what is pictured in a simple fairy tale and in the simple, artless, primordial fairy tale mood.

The brothers Grimm, and other collectors like them, devoted long years to bringing the world the somewhat civilized fairy tales they had gathered out of the folk tradition. Although they had no help from spiritual science, they lived wholeheartedly with these tales, convinced that they were giving human beings what belonged intrinsically to human nature itself. When you know this, you will understand that although the age of reason did its best for a hundred years or so to alienate everyone, even children, away from fairy tales, now things are changing. Fairy tale collections like the Grimms' have found their way to every person who is alive to such things; they have become the property and treasure of every child's heart, yes, property of all our hearts. This will grow even stronger when spiritual science is no longer considered just a theory but becomes a mood of soul, one that will lead the soul perceptively towards its spiritual roots. Then spiritual science, moving and spreading outwards, will be able to confirm everything that the genuine fairy tale collectors, fairy tale lovers, fairy tale tellers wanted to do.

To sum up what spiritual science would like to say today in describing the fairy tale, we can take the poetic and charming tribute that a devoted friend of the tales [Ludwig Laistner (1848 – 1896)] liked to use in his lectures, some of which I was able to hear. He was a man who understood how to collect the tales and how to value them.

“The fairy tale is like a good angel, given us at birth to go with us from our home to our earthly path through life, to be our trusted comrade throughout the journey and to give us angelic companionship, so that our life itself can become a truly heart- and soul-enlivened fairy tale!”

Much that I should like to say regarding the spiritual world has to be hinted at pictorially, or rather half pictorially for the pictures must be taken in a real and active sense.

It is necessary to indicate pictorially such things as I desire to bring before your souls today for further meditation, because if one were not to speak symbolically but in ideas, one would have to speak at very great length. Each one of you can himself reach the depths of that of which I shall speak today, if he holds and ponders over it to a certain extent within his soul.

Every year at this season we pass from one division of time to another. This may at first appear simply a matter of convenience; but it is not so. The men who had to separate time into seasons followed by profound instinct certain great laws regulating the course of time. The festival of the passing of one year into another takes place with us in the depths of winter (naturally, I speak of our part of the world) at the time when all plants have suspended their growth, their blossoming and fruit-bearing. Only certain forest trees remain what is called evergreen through winter. The power of the Sim is then at its lowest.

We know that in all events and occurrences that take place before our senses, spiritual events are interwoven. We know that when we walk through the forest, we have not only the trees about us with their green foliage, but that in the background of existence spiritual and psychic beings are everywhere active. We are already familiar with this thought, which the clever people of our time regard as a childish superstition; we realise it as a true and actual fact.

It is absolutely clear to us that behind all the things of sense, whether they be solid or whether they be happenings which our senses perceive—are spiritual activities, and spiritual life.

Now let us, to begin with, consider what people call our lifeless inorganic Earth, the mineral kingdom of our Earth. This which is apparently lifeless substance, the mineral which to the materialist is merely lifeless, is to us not only endowed with life, but with soul and spirit, so that we speak also of a soul-and-spirit part of our so-called lifeless inorganic, purely mineral Earth. True, when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we do not in the first place see in the geological-mineral substance that which may be compared to a man’s muscles and blood, but we see only what may be compared to his bony system, namely, the solid earth; so that when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we have to think of it as connected with the whole Earth, not only with its bony system, but with water, air, ether, etc., corresponding to the muscles, blood, and so on.

The whole Earth has consciousness, a consciousness belonging to the mineral kingdom. We shall not occupy ourselves with the differences in this consciousness of the Earth in special regions during the course of the year, but we shall endeavour to evoke in our souls the conception that the whole Earth has consciousness. Let us now turn from the mineral Earth, and direct our attention to all that springs forth and sprouts on Earth, to the plant world.

Looked at in accordance with Spiritual Science, we must regard the plant world, in the first place, as an independent entity in reference to the Earth. That the whole plant world is an independent entity as regards the Earth only comes clearly before us when we consider the consciousness of these two entities or beings. We can speak of a consciousness of the whole mineral Earth, but we can equally speak of a consciousness of the whole plant world which evolves on the Earth. The laws of this consciousness are certainly entirely different from the laws of human consciousness. In speaking of plant consciousness, we must always speak of it as regards certain districts only, because it changes with different regions of the Earth.

As men we are not aware that there really is a certain parallel between our consciousness and the consciousness of the whole plant world, for we are apt to look on our waking consciousness as our complete consciousness, without taking our sleeping consciousness into consideration. To simplify our subject, we say: In the daytime when awake, our ego and astral body are within our physical body. I have, however, often remarked that this in fact refers to our blood and nervous system only, not to the remaining parts of our system. When the ego and astral body withdraw from our head, for instance, they are so much the stronger within other parts of us.

A parallel thing happens on the Earth, when on one part of it there is summer and on the other winter; this also is merely a change of consciousness. The case is the same with ourselves. We are not aware of this, however, because in man the two kinds of consciousness are not of equal clearness; they are of different strength. Night consciousness is beclouded consciousness, for us practically no consciousness at all; while day consciousness is full consciousness of our other side. In the night our lower nature wakes, while with our higher nature we sleep, and it is exactly the same with the Earth, when on the one hemisphere there is winter, on the other there is summer. On one side the consciousness is awake, on the other side it sleeps and vice versa. As I have just said, and as I have often explained, this only holds good in respect to the plant world. We know that the plant world sleeps in the height of summer when there is growth on every side; while it is outwardly unfolding its physical nature—it is asleep. But it wakes to full consciousness during the time when physically, externally, it is going through no development; then the plant world is awake. Thus we speak of all plant life on Earth as a whole; and this plant life, as a whole, has a consciousness.

When speaking of this consciousness which as a second consciousness intermingles with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, we can really say that during the height of summer in our part of the Earth the plant consciousness is asleep, and in depth of winter it is awake. At this season, however, during the time at which we now are, something further takes place.

Now I beg you to note that these two states of consciousness, that is, the general consciousness belonging to the mineral earth, and the general plant consciousness—are always distinct. They are throughout the whole year two separate beings. But these are not only two distinct Beings, for at one season they unite, so that at the present time of year, the one interpenetrates the other. At the time when one year is passing over into the other, the mineral things and events of the Earth and the whole plant world have but one consciousness, which means that these two consciousnesses interpenetrate each other.

What is the nature of the mineral consciousness of the Earth, the varieties of which (as I have said) we shall not study today as we shall those of the plant consciousness, which we realise wakes during winter time and sleeps in summer? What is the peculiar nature of this mineral consciousness, this consciousness of the great Earth-Being?

The man who is limited in his physical senses, and limited to the understanding that he considers appertains to these physical senses, can at first know nothing of this great Earth-consciousness. Spiritual Science, however, can instruct as to what this Earth-consciousness really thinks—thinks as we think of plants, animals, air, rivers, mountains, etc. Just as with our ordinary waking consciousness, we think of the things round about us, so, in like manner does the Earth think. Let us inquire today: of what does the Earth consciously think?

The Earth thinks with its consciousness the whole firmament of heaven nearest to the Earth. As we look with our eyes on trees and stones, so does the Earth consciously look into space and contemplate all that takes place in the stars. The Earth is a being that meditates on the occurrences of the stars.

Thus fundamentally the mineral consciousness contains the secret of the whole Cosmos. While we men move about on the Earth in a superficial way, thinking merely of the stones against which we knock, or of the many things which our senses reveal to us, the Earth thinks with its consciousness—through which we are passing as we move through space—of the whole Cosmos. She has indeed greater, more all-embracing thoughts than we have. In truth, it is an extraordinarily exalting thought, when we realise: ‘I am not simply passing through the air; I am moving through the thoughts of the Earth.’

Now let us again consider the other consciousness, that of the plants. These are not able to think so much as the Earth can. The thinking consciousness of the plants—not of individual plants, but of the whole united plant-world—is a much more restricted consciousness, it embraces a smaller circle of the Earth throughout the year; but this is not the case at the present season. Plant consciousness is now one with the whole consciousness of the Earth, and because the plant consciousness interpenetrates the earth-consciousness, the plant-world at New Year time, knows the secrets of the stars and applies them. Plants are thus able to unfold again in spring in accordance with the secrets of the cosmos, and can bring forth their blossoms and fruit. In this unfoldment the whole mystery of the cosmos is contained, in the way plants bring forth their leaves, blossoms and fruit.

But during the time the plants are producing their leaves, flowers and fruit, they are not able to meditate upon it. It is only at this present season they can think—now—when the plant consciousness is united with the consciousness of the whole mineral world. This is why it is said in Spiritual Science: About the season of the New Year, two cycles interpenetrate each other.

This is the main secret of all existence—that two cycles penetrate each other; then parting, continue separately their further development; again intermingle, and so on. Only think how marvellous this secret of existence is! Plant-consciousness and mineral-consciousness, two streams of evolution—progress apart through the whole year, then at the time when one year passes over into another, they unite. Again they pass through the year apart, uniting once more at the festival of the New Year. The cyclic advance of history is similar to this.

We turn from this mystic event, through which we are now passing, and which fills us with a deep feeling of holy awe in respect of the passing of one year into the other—we turn to a still deeper mystery.

We know that we are now living in that cycle in which the consciousness-soul is unfolding, that this was preceded by that of the unfolding of the rational or intellectual-soul, which was again preceded by the cycle in which the sentient soul was developed, before which again we go back to the time of development of the sentient body. This takes us back 6000 years before our Christian era, to a time when all human thought was evolved within the cycle of the sentient body—of the so-called astral body.

We have now to advance through the cycle of the spiritual or consciousness-soul, and through that of the Spirit-Self, and further still man has to develop.

The consciousness-soul (since 1923 translated by Dr. Steiner as the spiritual-soul) is principally developed at the present time because man chiefly makes use of his physical body alone as an instrument. On this account—as you know already from many lectures—this present age is the high tide of materialism. A time will come, however, when man will not only make use of his physical body, but will again learn to use his etheric body, as in earlier times he used his astral body, in the cycle of evolution when that body was the main element of consciousness.

We can therefore say: Our condition at one time on Earth was such, that our soul experienced a contact of its consciousness with the consciousness of our astral body. Just as at New Year, plant-consciousness penetrates mineral consciousness, so, thousands of years ago, did our soul intermingle with our astral body. At that time our soul was one, in its consciousness, with the astral body. The time of that type of consciousness was six thousand years before our era. When that consciousness came about man celebrated a New Year on Earth; a mighty New Year!

Just as we regard the New Year as the mingling of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, so we must realise that 6,000 years before our era a great, a mighty cosmic New Year of our Earth took place. Our Soul-consciousness then united with—passed through—the astral consciousness of our body.

What was it that then took place?

At that time when our inner soul-consciousness passed through (or intermingled with) the astral consciousness of our body—then our limited human consciousness, the consciousness which we have today, had progressed as far as the present plant-consciousness at New Year. Just as plants gaze abroad into the heavens because their consciousness has been united to the mineral consciousness of theEarth, so did man then see and perceive a wide field of wisdom six thousand years before our era, when his soul was united with his astral body at the time of the cosmic New Year.

From this time originated the knowledge which we have now lost, since the wisdom of the Gnostics has perished. The source of this knowledge must be sought in the earthly and cosmic New Year about 6,000 B.c. This was the knowledge from which Zarathustra gave forth his teaching; the knowledge, whose last great rays still illuminated the Gnostics, but of which only a few fragments remain. It is the winter of the Earth, but the Earth’s New Year to which we here look back.

If we now add four thousand years more to the years we have passed through since the founding of Christianity, we again come to a similar intermingling as that I have just indicated; to the mingling of our soul-consciousness with our astral consciousness, but at a higher stage. Man will once more experience a universal stellar consciousness. For this we endeavour to prepare ourselves through our Spiritual Science, so that there may be men ready to receive it.

We will seek to prepare for this cosmic New Year. IE we prepare for it through the keeping of the Christmas Festival, as I indicated in a recent lecture, we are preparing ourselves in the right way. If the birth of spiritual knowledge within us leads to that frame of mind which is in accord with the ‘Christmas Initiation,’ we are preparing ourselves for that new cosmic New Year on which we shall enter twelve thousand years after the previous cosmic New Year.

Twelve months pass by between one union of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, and another. Twelve thousand years pass between one cosmic New Year and another: between one intermingling of the human soul with the Astral World-Soul, and another.

So at this sacred season, we turn from the little New Year to the great cosmic New Year, from the New Year’s Eve of our year, to that for which we are preparing ourselves, by endeavouring—now in this winter tune—to behold the light, which in a normal elemental way flows into man as inhabitant of the Earth, only at the cosmic New Year.

We really only see the world in the true light, when we grasp what is around us, not only as it is presented to our senses,—as materialists do—but when we accept all that is about us in the outer world as a symbol of the great secrets of the universe.

Then when New Year draws near, it seems as if a message from spiritual worlds approaches, and unveils for us the mysteries connected with the birth of the New Year; and declares, ‘Behold, now in the depths of the dark cold winter, the consciousness of the plant world unites with the mineral consciousness of the earth. Let this be to you a sign that the Earth too has its year—the great cosmic year, of which Zarathustra spoke long ago, explaining how the world passed on from one great New Year’s Eve to another; this must be understood by those who really seek to comprehend the course of human evolution.’

Zarathustra spoke of epochs of twelve thousand years. He meant the great cosmic years of which I have spoken to you today. He represented the course of human evolution as being divided into four divisions within the Earth year. This fact is deeply rooted in spiritual mysteries.

So, from a deeper understanding of our Spiritual Science, let us accept a true Christmas attitude of reverence. Let us develop within our hearts that inner warmth which comes, when in the frosty night of winter we receive the first intimation of the dawning of the Sun-Spirit on the Earth, and with it the mystery of the revolving year. The thirteen days are the days in which the plant-consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness. If a man is but able to place himself within the plant consciousness, he can dream of—can gain a conception of—the many mysteries which then crowd into his heart, such as did in the dream of Olaf Oesteson,¹ the description and explanation of which entered into and stirred our souls here, this time last year. When we feel such a mood of initiation, we evoke the proper feelings and the perceptions for the aims and objects of our spiritual knowledge and with such warmth of heart we shall make preparations for the new cosmic New Year. Through it we can worthily expect that day which is to usher in a New Year for the world, Thus; when in succeeding incarnations our souls experience the cosmic New Year under quite new conditions on Earth, we shall be able to pass through it as those can for whom the small New Year’s Eve (which recurs every twelve months instead of every twelve thousand years) becomes a symbol of the great New Year’s Eve of the world.

This is the secret of our existence. Everything is in great as in small, and in small as in great. The small, the yearly cycle, can only be understood aright when it becomes for us a symbol of the mighty events of the cosmos—of the vast cycle of thousands of years. The year is an image of the aeons, and the aeons are the realities of those images which we encounter in the course of a year. When we understand this yearly course aright we are filled, in this important night in which a New Year begins, with thoughts of the great cosmic mysteries. Let our endeavour be, so to attune our souls, that they may look forward to the New Year with this conscious thought: ‘I will accept the year as a symbol of the great cosmic year which contains all mysteries, through which pass and repass the Divine Beings who accompany our souls from aeon to aeon, as the lesser Gods follow the secret development of plant and mineral existence throughout the course of an Earth year.

• 1. Editorial Note: The dream of Olaf Oesteson referred to above, appears in the linotyped course of lectures entitled The Forming of Destiny and Life after Death (Lecture 6.)

We saw yesterday that the Gospel of John contains something that can only be experienced on higher levels of consciousness. Before such experiences are possible, the human being must first develop higher.

The human being is a developing creature. We can observe this from subordinate to ever higher states. This is already shown by the difference between a savage and a civilized European, or between an ordinary person and a genius like Schiller, Goethe or Francis of Assisi. An unlimited potential for development is open to every human being. To understand this, let us take up yesterday's lecture and use a diagram to clarify the theosophical basic teachings on the development of the human being:

During the following explanations, the diagram below will be drawn on the “board, starting from the bottom left.

We have thus seen that man has his physical body in common with all inanimate beings, the etheric body with all plants in our physical world, and the astral body with all animal creatures in his environment. We then saw that man, in terms of his development, differs from all other beings in that he can say “I” to himself.

The “I” is by no means a simple entity. On closer inspection, it is also something that is structured. The animal feels, has desire and passion, the plant does not; the animal because it already possesses an astral body. In this, the I develops in man. But this I has been at work long before man became clearly aware of it. A look at the development of humanity teaches us more about this.

The earth has not always been as it is today. Its face has repeatedly changed; the present continents have not always been there. During the penultimate earth period, a continent called Atlantis was located where the Atlantic Ocean now rages. Traces of it and the story of its downfall have been preserved in ancient legends. In the Bible, the Flood is meant by this. The ancient fathers of a different nature, whose descendants we are, experienced this. In this old Atlantis, the air and water conditions were quite different from what they are now. The whole thing was shrouded in a dense fog. In the words Nebelheim, Niflheim, we still have a hint of this. There was no rain and no sunshine; instead of rain, only fog currents; instead of sun, only diffuse illumination. Only after long periods did the fog condense as water. The sun only penetrated a little, like a faint premonition, through the constant fog. In such an environment, people also lived a completely different mental and spiritual life than today. It was only towards the end of the Atlantic period, roughly in the area of present-day Ireland, that people began to show self-awareness for the first time, and to think clearly and logically. In the mists there was no possibility of distinguishing objects as we do today. Man only develops a consciousness like ours in relation to his surroundings. As the objects emerged from the mists, so did the physical eye; and in the same measure the consciousness soul developed, and within it the self-aware ego. Even then, man could speak.

If we go back even further to the earliest times of Atlantis, we find that man looked significantly different. He had no external vision at that time, but a different way of perceiving, in images. To understand this state of consciousness, imagine a very vivid dream that reflects something of your surroundings. The following “dream” may serve as an example. A student dreams that he is standing at the door of the lecture hall, and another student deliberately brushes against him, which is a serious offense that can only be atoned for by a duel. He challenges him, they drive into the forest, the duel begins, the first shot rings out. Then our student wakes up – he has pushed over the chair next to his bed. Had he been awake, he would have noticed that a chair had fallen over. But because his consciousness soul had descended into sleep, he perceived with a deeper, less developed soul power. The dramatic action of the dream is a pictorial transformation of an external process.

The processes of consciousness in the ancient Atlanteans were similar. Although the images were more regulated and ordered, they did not have a clear perception of their surroundings. The life of feeling expressed itself quite characteristically in fine perceptions of touch and color. If the early Atlantean perceived a warm mist that symbolized itself to him in red, he knew that something pleasant was approaching him. Or if he encountered another person who was unpleasant to him, this was also indicated to him by a very specific sensation that became an image, an ugly color tone. But warmth, for example, was symbolized to him in a beautiful red cloud. This happened in many degrees and variations. The early Atlanteans thus had visual perceptions. We only have such perceptions in the case of pain, which is obviously only within us, however much it is caused by the outside world and can become loud. Our pain is also experienced inwardly, spiritually, and is thus truer than the external facts.

The Atlanteans, however, already developed ordered ideas. Not so the Lemurians. The Atlantean period was preceded by the Lemurian period. Man was not yet able to express language. He was merely able to internalize what the animal also feels. Thus, what we call the sentient soul developed in him. The continent of Lemuria, which was destroyed by the forces of fire, we have to imagine between Africa, Australia and Asia.

But now back to our scheme: IIIa sentient soul, IIIb intellectual soul, IIIc consciousness soul are all three transformations, ennobled transformations from the astral body. It is only towards the end of the Atlantean period that man becomes capable of consciously working on himself. What does he do now?

Up to now, cosmic forces have lifted man up in his development. Now man begins to consciously take his development into his own hands, to work on himself, to educate himself. On which body does he now begin his work? It is important to pay strict attention to the sequence here. First, man was and is able to work on and in his astral body. And on this level of ability, the human being of the present day is still standing today. In general, we can say of today's human being: He uses his experiences and experiences to transform his astral body. Later we will see that a higher level of development consists of working into the lower bodies. Let us first stay with the first: with the ability to transform the astral body.

To do this, let us compare the civilized man with the savage. The savage first follows his instincts, desires and passions, every craving, without restraint. But then he can begin to work on his self. To certain instincts he says: remain; to others: leave. Thus, for example, the man-eater ceases his habit of eating his own kind; in so doing, he leaves a certain stage of civilization and becomes another. Or he learns to act logically, learns, for example, to plow. Thus his astral body becomes more and more structured. Formerly external powers determined man, now he does it himself. The astral body of a Hottentot circles in wild dark red vortices, in a person like Schiller in bright green and yellow, in Franz of Assisi in wonderful blue. This is how the astral body is worked on. That which is consciously worked into the astral body from the I is called the spirit self or manas. With the conscious working in of the I, something very special begins. Before that, however, before one comes to the formation of this manas, that part which the animal also has remains completely unchanged in the astral body. Despite the growth of intellect, the astral body can remain essentially unchanged, full of animal desires. But there are influences that do transform the sentient body: conscious religiosity and art. From these we draw strength to overcome and ennoble ourselves, which is a much stronger power than mere morality. Man has as much of the spirit or Manas as he has worked into his astral body. This is not something external, it is a transformation product of what used to be the sentient soul.

As long as I am merely working on my sentient body, I use my achievements to transform this my astral body. All the morality in the world cannot achieve more, nor can all intellectuality. But if true religiousness is at work in me, this stronger power expresses itself through the astral body and works its way into the next lower one, the etheric body. This is naturally a much greater achievement than when the ego merely works with the astral, because the raw material of the etheric body is much coarser and more resistant than the finer astral body. We call the result of this transformation the spirit of life or Budhi. The spirit of life is thus the spiritualized life body. In the Orient, someone who had brought it to the highest level was called a Buddha. This tremendous moral power proceeds from consciousness when the three souls are governed by a strong ego. These are preparatory steps for humanity in general. Only the chela works consciously in his etheric body. The chela aims to spiritualize everything, even into his etheric body. The chelaship is concluded when he has allowed Budhi to stream completely into his life body, so that the life body, which he ennobles from the I, has become a life spirit.

In the third stage, man reaches the highest principle that is currently accessible to us. He is able to work down to his physical body. In doing so, he rises above the level of the chela and becomes a “master”. When, on the second step, Budhi glows through his etheric body, the human being gains control not only of moral principles but also of his character. He can change his temperament, his memory, and his habits. Today's human being has only a very imperfect command of all these. To understand the task of the chela, compare yourself as you are now with yourself when you were ten years old. How much knowledge have you gained since then, and how little your character has changed! The content of the soul has changed quite radically, but the habits and inclinations only very slightly. Those who were hot-tempered, forgetful, envious, inattentive as a child are often still so as adults. How much our ideas and thoughts have changed, how little our habits! This gives you a clue to estimate how much tougher, firmer, more difficult to shape the etheric body is compared to the astral body. Conversely, how much more fruitful and consequential an improvement achieved in the etheric body!

The following sentence can be used as an example of the different speeds at which transformation is possible: What you have learned and experienced has changed like the minute hand of the clock, your habits like the hour hand. Learning is easy, unlearning is difficult. You can still recognize yourself from the writing of yesteryear, because that is also a habit. It is easy to change views and insights, but difficult to change habits. Changing this tenacious thing, habit, little by little, is the task of the chela. This means becoming a different person by creating a different etheric body, thus transforming the life body into the life spirit. This puts the forces of growth in your hands. Habits are among the manifest growth forces. If I destroy them, the vis vitalis, the power of growth, is released and placed at my disposal, to direct my consciousness. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Christ is the personification of the power that changes the life body.

Now to the third stage. There is something that is even more difficult to bring under the control of free will than our habits and emotional stirrings: the physical body in its animal and vegetative, mechanical or reflexive dependency. There is a stage of human development in which no nerve is activated, no blood corpuscle rolls without the human being's conscious will. This self-transformation reaches into conditions and states that were fixed long, long before Atlantis and Lemuria, and are therefore the hardest to reverse: into cosmic primeval states. In this work, man develops Atman, the spiritual man. The potential for this is present in every human being today. This whole cycle depends on the attainment of fully clear self-awareness.

The most powerful and potent laws are those of the breathing process. The entire spiritual being depends on lung breathing, because it is the outer expression of the gradual drawing in of the I. In ancient Atlantis, this potential emerged through the saying of the I. In Lemuria, man did not breathe through lungs, but through gill-like organs. Nor did he walk as we do today, but floated or swam in a more fluid element, where water and air were not yet separated. To maintain his balance, he had an organ analogous to the swim bladder of a fish. As the air gradually separated, the swim bladder was transformed into our present lungs. The development of the sense of self runs parallel to the development of the lungs. This is still expressed in the words: “And God breathed into the man his breath of life, and he became a living soul.” Atman means nothing other than “breath”. The regulation of the breath is therefore one of the most powerful tools in the work of yoga, which teaches the control of all bodily functions. Here we look into a future in which human beings will have transformed themselves from within.

Conscious work in the etheric body is therefore a mastery.

Conscious work in the physical body: mastery.

The human being perceives the growth into these two stages as an opening up of new worlds, new environments, comparable only to the feelings of the child when it emerges from the dark, warm womb into the cold, light world at birth. The moment of generating Budhi is called second birth, rebirth, awakening in all mysteries. As man formerly left an inner world, of which only echoes remain in dreams, so he enters a new world as one awakened to the same world on a higher level. In those ancient times, man perceived the world with the help of his own inner images. On the future level of higher clairvoyance, man steps out of himself and sees behind the essence of things; he sees their souls. It is a kind of clairvoyance that is directed outwards and highlights the 'inherent essence' of things. The seer penetrates, for example, below the surface of the plant or stone. This outward-directed clairvoyance, with full mental alertness, not only illuminates the very basis of his own soul, but also that of the beings and things outside of himself. This is how development takes place.

Modern man lives in the manasical state, that is, he is able to change something in his astral body, but not yet in his etheric body, and least of all in his physical body. Therefore, man takes in from another only as much as corresponds to his stage of development. “You are like the spirit you understand, not like me!” This saying also applies here.

According to Christian terminology, the designations correspond:

Why is Budhi called the “Word”? This brings us to the edge of one of the great mysteries, and we will see the great significance of the term “Word”.

We have seen that man spiritualizes his life body through the Budhi. What does the life body do in man? Growth and reproduction, everything that distinguishes the living being from the mineral. What is the highest expression of the life body? Reproduction, growth beyond itself. What becomes of this last expression of the life body when man consciously covers the path back to spiritualization? How is this reproductive power transformed, what becomes of it when it is purified, spiritualized? — In the human larynx you have the purification, the transformation of the reproductive power, and in the articulated vowel sound, in the human word, you have the transformed reproductive capacity. Analogous to the law “All is below as above”, we find the corresponding process in the physical: the breaking of the voice, the mutation at the time of sexual maturity. All that becomes spirit emanates from the word or the content of the word. This is the very first glimpse of Budhi, when the first articulated sound emerges from the human soul. A mantram has such a significant effect because it is a spiritually articulated word. A mantram is therefore the means for the chela to work down into the depths of his soul.

Thus, in the physical, we have the power of reproduction, through which life is generated and passed on beyond the physical body, becoming something permanent. And just as the physical generative organs transmit bodily life, so the organs of speech — tongue, larynx and breath — transmit spiritual life like an ignition device. In the physiological, the close connection between voice and procreation is obvious. We encounter it in the song of the nightingale, in courtship display, voice change, vocal magic, in singing, cooing, crowing, roaring. We can truly call the larynx the higher sexual organ. The word is the power of procreation for new human spirits; in the word, man achieves a spiritualized creative power. Today, man rules the air with the word, by shaping it rhythmically and organically, by stirring it and enlivening it. On a higher level, he is able to do this in the liquid and finally in the solid element. Then you have transformed the word into the creator's word, for man will achieve this in his development because it was originally so. The life body, emanated from the word of the primal spirit, - this is to be taken literally. That is why Budhi is called the “word”, which means nothing other than: I am.

Thus we see with geometrical clarity the words of the miracle in St. John's Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.” The astral body, which is radiant as the stars, becomes the Word-light; the Primordial God, the Life and the Light, these are the three fundamental concepts of the Gospel of John. John had to develop to the point of Budhi in order to grasp what was revealed in Christ Jesus. The other three Evangelists were not so highly developed. John gives the highest, he was an awakened one. John is the name given to all who are awakened. This is a generic name, and the resurrection of Lazarus in the Gospel of John is nothing more than a description of this awakening. The writer of the Gospel of John, whose name we will hear later, never calls himself by any other name than “the disciple whom the Lord loves”. This is the term for the most intimate disciples, for those in whom the teacher and master has succeeded in awakening the disciple. The description of such an awakening is given by the author of the Gospel of John in the resurrection of Lazarus: “the Lord loved him,” he could awaken him.

Only if we approach such religious documents as the Gospel of John with the deepest humility can we hope to arrive at a literal understanding and to grasp at least a small part of its sacred content.

We will now consider the series of incarnations passed through by our planet, and realise that these were embodiments, that is to say, conditions of our Earth when it was once Saturn, Sun, Moon. We must be fully aware that these incarnations were necessary for the development of every living thing, especially of man, and that man's own evolution is intimately connected with the Earth.

We shall, however, only understand in the right way what took place then, if we realise how the man of today—we ourselves—has changed in respect of certain characteristics in the course of evolution. And first we will consider the changes which have come about in man's conditions of consciousness. Everything in the world has evolved, even our consciousness. The consciousness that a man has today he has not always possessed, it has only gradually become what it is now.

We call our present consciousness the objective consciousness or the waking day-consciousness. You all know it as that which you have from morning when you awake, to evening when you fall asleep. Let us be clear as to its nature. It consists in man's turning his senses towards the outer world and perceiving objects-and hence we call it objective consciousness.

Man looks into the surroundings and sees with his eyes certain objects in space which are bounded by colours. He listens with the ear and perceives that there are objects in space which produce a tone, which resound. With his sense of touch he feels objects, finds them warm and cold, he Smells, tastes objects. What he thus perceives with his senses he reflects upon; he employs his reason to understand these different objects, and it is from these facts of sense perception and their comprehension in the mind that the present waking day consciousness has arisen. Man has not always had this consciousness, it had first to develop, and he will not always have it as it is, but will ascend to higher stages. Now with the means supplied by occult science we can survey seven states of consciousness of which our present consciousness is the middle one: we can survey three preceding ones and three following after.

Many will wonder why we are just standing so nicely in the centre. This comes from the fact that other stages, preceding the first, are beyond our sight, others follow the seventh which are again beyond our sight. We see just far behind us as we do in front; if we took one step back, we should see one more behind us and one fewer before us-just as when you go into the fields you can see as far to the left as to the right.

These seven states of consciousness are the following: At first a very dull deep condition of consciousness which humanity hardly knows today. Only persons with a special mediumistic tendency can still have this consciousness today which once upon Saturn was possessed by all men. Mediumistic persons can come into such a consciousness, which is known to the modern psychologist. All the other states of consciousness have been deadened in them and they appear practically lifeless. But then, if from memory or even in this condition they sketch or describe what they have experienced, they bring to light quite extraordinary experiences, which do not take place around us. They make all sorts of drawings which, although they are grotesque and distorted, yet agree with what we call in theosophy cosmic conditions. They are often entirely incorrect, but nevertheless they have something by which we can recognise that such people during this lowered condition have a dull but a universal consciousness; they see cosmic bodies and therefore their sketches are of that nature.

A consciousness that is dull like this but in compensation represents a universal knowledge in our cosmos, was once possessed by man on the first incarnation of our Earth, and is called “deep trance consciousness.” There are beings in our surroundings who still have such a consciousness—the minerals. If you could talk with them, they would tell you what goes on in Saturn—but this consciousness is entirely dull and insensible.

The second condition of consciousness which we know, or much rather, do not know, since we are then asleep, is that of ordinary sleep. This condition is not so comprehensive, but in spite of its still being very dull, it is clear in comparison with the first. This “sleep-consciousness” was once the permanent state of all human beings when the Earth was “Sun”; at that time the human ancestor was in a continuous sleep.

Even today this state of consciousness still exists; the plants have it, they are beings who uninterruptedly sleep, and if they could speak they could tell us how things are on the Sun, for they have Sun-consciousness.

The third condition, which is still dim and dull in relation to our day-consciousness, is that of “picture-consciousness”, and of this we have a clear idea since we experience an echo of it in our dream-filled sleep, though it is but a reminiscence of what on the Moon was the consciousness of all human beings. It will be well to start from the dream in order to get a picture of the Moon-consciousness.

In the dream-life we find indeed something confusing, chaotic, but on closer observation this confusion nevertheless displays an inner law. The dream is a remarkable symbolist. In my lectures I have often brought forward the following examples, which are all taken from life. You dream that you are running after a tree-frog to catch it, you feel the soft, smooth body; you wake up and have the corner of the sheet in your hand. Had you used your waking consciousness you would have seen how your hand was holding the bed-cover. The dream-consciousness gives you a symbol of the external act, it forms a symbol out of what our day-consciousness sees as a fact.

Another example: a student dreams that he is standing at the door in the lecture hall. There he is roughly jostled, and from this ensues a challenge. He now experiences every detail, until, accompanied by his second and a doctor, he goes to the duel, and the first shot is fired. At this moment he wakes up, and sees that he has overturned the chair at his bedside. In waking consciousness he would simply have heard the fall; the dream symbolises this prosaic event through the drama of the duel. And you see too, that the conditions of time are quite changed, for the whole drama flashed through his mind in the single instant in which the chair fell. The entire preparation took place in one moment, the dream has reversed time, it does not conform to the circumstances of the ordinary world, it is a creator in time.

Not only can external events be symbolised in this way, but also inner processes of the body. A man dreams he is in an air hole of a cellar, obnoxious spiders creep about him; he wakes up and feels a headache; the skull has taken on the symbol of the cellar hole, the pain, that of the hideous spiders!

The dream of the present-day man symbolises events which are both external and within. But it was not so when this third state of consciousness was that of the Moon humanity. At that time man lived entirely in such pictures as he has in the modern dream, but they expressed realities. They signified precisely such a reality as today the blue colour signifies a reality, only at that time colour hovered freely in space, it was not resting upon the objects. In that former consciousness man could not have set out on the street, as today, have seen a man in the distance, looked at him, approached him; for forms of beings with a coloured surface could not have been perceived at that time by man, quite apart from the fact that he could not then walk as he does today. But let us suppose that one man on the Moon had met another, then a freely hovering picture of form and colour would have risen up before him. Let us say, an ugly one, then the man would have turned aside in order not to meet it; or a beautiful one, then he would have drawn near it. The ugly colour-picture would have shown him that the other had an unsympathetic feeling towards him, the beautiful, that the other liked him.

Let us suppose there had been salt on the Moon; when salt stands on the table today, you see it as it is in space, as object, granular, with definite colouring. At that time it would not have been so. On the Moon you would not have been able to see the salt. But from the place where the salt would be, a picture of colour and form would have proceeded, floating free; and this picture would have shown you that the salt was something useful. Thus the whole consciousness was filled with pictures, with floating colours and forms. In an ocean of such form and colour pictures the human being lived; but the pictures of colour and form denoted what was going on around him, above all, things of a soul character and those which affected the soul nature—what was advantageous to it or harmful. In this way the human being orientated himself rightly with regard to the things around him. When the Moon passed over into the Earth incarnation this consciousness changed into our day-consciousness, and only a relic of it has remained in the dream as one has it now—a rudiment, as there are rudiments of other things. You know, for instance, that there are certain muscles near the ear which nowadays seem purposeless. Earlier they had their significance; they served to move the ears at will; there are very few persons who can do this today.

So conditions are to be found in man which have remained as a last relic of a former significance. Although these pictures no longer have a meaning, at that time they signified the outer world. Even today you still have this consciousness among all those animals—note this carefully—which cannot utter sounds from their inner being. There is in fact a far truer division of animals in occultism than in external Nature Science, namely in to those which can utter sounds from within and those which are dumb. It is true that you can find among certain lower creatures the power of producing sounds, but then this happens in a mechanical way, through friction, etc., not from their inner being. Even the frogs do not create sounds so. Only the higher animals, which arose at the time when the human being could express his suffering and joy in tones, only these, together with man, have gained the power of bringing to expression their pain and pleasure through sounds and cries. All animals which do not utter sounds from within still have such a picture-consciousness. It is not a fact that lower animals see the pictures in such outlines as we do. If some lower animal, the crab, for example, perceives a picture that makes a distinctly unpleasant impression, it gets out of the way, it does not see the objects, but sees the harmfulness in a repelling picture.

The fourth state of consciousness is that which all men now have. The pictures which man formerly perceived as colour pictures floating freely in space, wrap themselves, so to speak, round the objects. One might say they are laid over them, they form the surface and seem to be upon the objects, whereas formerly they seemed to float in freedom. In consequence, they have become the expression of the form; what man earlier had within himself has come out and fastened itself on the objects and through this he has come to his present waking day-consciousness.

We will now consider something else. We have already said that man's physical body was prepared on Saturn; on the Sun was added the Etheric or Life-body, which interpenetrated and worked on it. It took what the physical body had already become by itself, and worked on it further. On the Moon was added the Astral-body; this still further altered the form of the body. On Saturn the physical body was very simple, on the Sun it was much more complicated, for then the etheric body worked on it and made it more perfect. On the Moon the Astral body was added, and on the Earth the Ego, which brought it to a still greater completion. At the time when the physical body existed on Saturn, when as yet no etheric body had interpenetrated it, all the organs it contains today were not yet within, for it lacked blood and nerves, nor had it as yet any glands. The human being at that time had merely the organs-and these only in their rudiments-which today are the most perfect, and which have had time to arrive at their present perfection, namely, the marvelously constructed sense organs.

The wonderful construction of the human eye, the wonderful apparatus of the human ear, all this has only attained its perfection today because it was formed out of the general substance of Saturn, and the etheric body, astral body and ego have worked on it. So too the larynx; it was already laid down on Saturn, but man could not as yet speak. On the Moon he began to send out inarticulate tones and cries, but only through the continuous activity described, the larynx became the perfected apparatus it is on the Earth today. On the Sun, where the etheric body was inserted, the sense organs were further elaborated and all those organs were added which are primarily organs of secretion and life, which discharge functions of nutrition and growth. They were first laid down during the Sun stage of existence. Then the astral body worked further during the Moon existence, the Ego during the Earth existence and thus the glands, the organs of growth and so on have matured to their present perfection. Then on the Moon the nervous system originated through the incorporation of the astral body. The principle, however, which enabled the human being to evolve an objective consciousness and at the same time gave him the power to sound forth his pleasure and pain from within—the ego—this formed in man his blood.

Thus the whole universe is the builder of the sense organs. Thus have all the glands, organs of reproduction and nutrition been formed by the life-body; thus the astral body is the builder of the nervous system and the ego the incorporator of the blood. There is a phenomenon described as “chlorosis”—anæmia or green-sickness. There the blood comes into a state where it cannot sustain the waking consciousness; such persons often lapse into a dim consciousness like that on the Moon.

Now let us consider the three states of consciousness which are still to come. One can ask how it is possible to know something about them already. It can be done through Initiation. The initiate can have these states of consciousness even today in anticipation. The next known to the initiate is the so-called psychic, *[Later called by Dr. Steiner Imagination.] a consciousness in which one has both together, the picture-consciousness and the waking day-consciousness. With this psychic consciousness you see a man in outline and forms as in day-waking consciousness. But you see at the same time what lives in his soul, streaming out as coloured clouds and pictures into what we call the “Aura.” Nor do you go about the world in a dreamy state like the Moon-human being, but in complete self-control, as modern man of the waking consciousness. On the planet that replaces our Earth the whole of humanity will have this psychic or soul-consciousness, the Jupiter consciousness.

Then there is still a sixth state of consciousness which man will also one day possess. This will unite the present day-consciousness, the psychic consciousness only known to the initiate and in addition all that man sleeps away today. Man will look deep, deep into the nature of beings when he lives in this consciousness, the consciousness of Inspiration. He will not only perceive in pictures and forms of colour, he will hear the being of the other give forth sounds and tones. Each human individuality will have a certain note and the whole will sound together in a symphony. This will be the consciousness of man when our planet will have passed into the Venus condition. There he will experience the sphere-harmony which Goethe describes in his Prologue to Faust:

The Sun-orb sings, in emulation
Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round;
His path predestined through Creation
He ends with step of thunder-sound.

(Bayard Taylor's translation)

When the Earth was Sun the human being was aware in a dim way of this ringing and resounding, and on Venus he will again hear it ringing and resounding “auf alter Weise” (as of old). To this very phrase Goethe has retained the picture.

The seventh state of consciousness is the Spiritual consciousness,* [Since called Intuition] the very highest, when man has a universal consciousness, when he will see not only what proceeds on his own planet, but in the whole cosmos around him. It is the consciousness that the human being had on Saturn, a kind of universal consciousness, although then quite dim and dull. This he will have in addition to all the other states of consciousness when he will have reached Vulcan.

These are the seven states of human consciousness which man must go through in his journey through the cosmos. And each incarnation of the Earth produces the conditions through which such states of consciousness are possible. Only because the system of nerves was laid down on the Moon, and further developed to the present brain, has the modern waking day-consciousness been possible. Organs must be created by which the higher states of consciousness may also have a physical basis of experience, as the initiate already experiences these states spiritually.

That the human being can pass through seven such planetary conditions is the meaning of evolution. Each planetary stage is bound up with the development of one of the seven states of human consciousness, and through what takes place on each planet the physical organs for such a state of consciousness are perfected. You will have a more highly developed organ, a psychic organ, on Jupiter; on Venus there will be an organ through which man will be able to develop physically the consciousness possessed by the initiate today on the Devachanic plane. And on Vulcan the Spiritual consciousness will prevail, which the initiate possesses today when he is in Higher Devachan, the World of Reason.

To-morrow we will examine these planets separately, for, just as our Earth earlier, in the Atlantean and Lemurian Ages, for instance, had a different appearance from that of today, and as later it will again look different, so too have Moon, Sun and Saturn passed through various conditions, and so will Jupiter and Venus pass through still others.

We have learnt today the broad, comprehensive cycle of the planets, tomorrow we will occupy ourselves with the changes under one by these planets while they were the theatre of human evolution.

A lecture delivered in Dornach, on December 31st, 1915. Lecture 17 of 19 from the lecture series: The Festivals of the Seasons (1928), and lecture 6 of 13 from the lecture series: The Spiritual Union of Humanity through the Christ Impulse. Published in German as: Die Geistige Vereinigung der Menschheit Durch Den Christus-Impuls.

Much that I should like to say regarding the spiritual world has to be hinted at pictorially, or rather half pictorially for the pictures must be taken in a real and active sense.

It is necessary to indicate pictorially such things as I desire to bring before your souls to-day for further meditation, because if one were not to speak symbolically but in ideas, one would have to speak at very great length. Each one of you can himself reach the depths of that of which I shall speak to-day, if he holds and ponders over it to a certain extent within his soul.

Every year at this season we pass from one division of time to another. This may at first appear simply a matter of convenience; but it is not so. The men who had to separate time into seasons followed by profound instinct certain great laws regulating the course of time. The festival of the passing of one year into another takes place with us in the depths of winter (naturally, I speak of our part of the world) at the time when all plants have suspended their growth, their blossoming and fruit-bearing. Only certain forest trees remain what is called evergreen through winter. The power of the Sun is then at its lowest.

We know that in all events and occurrences that take place before our senses, spiritual events are interwoven. We know that when we walk through the forest, we have not only the trees about us with their green foliage, but that in the background of existence spiritual and psychic beings are everywhere active. We are already familiar with this thought, which the clever people of our time regard as a childish superstition; we realise it as a true and actual fact.

It is absolutely clear to us that behind all the things of sense, whether they be solid or whether they be happenings which our senses perceive—are spiritual activities, and spiritual life.

Now let us, to begin with, consider what people call our lifeless inorganic Earth, the mineral kingdom of our Earth. This which is apparently lifeless substance, the mineral which to the materialist is merely lifeless, is to us not only endowed with life, but with soul and spirit, so that we speak also of a soul-and-spirit part of our so-called lifeless inorganic, purely mineral Earth. True, when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we do not in the first place see in the geological-mineral substance that which may be compared to a man's muscles and blood, but we see only what may be compared to his bony system, namely, the solid earth ; so that when we speak of the consciousness of the Earth, we have to think of it as connected with the whole Earth, not only with its bony system, but with water, air, ether, etc., corresponding to the muscles, blood, and so on.

The whole Earth has consciousness, a consciousness belonging to the mineral kingdom. We shall not occupy ourselves with the differences in this consciousness of the Earth in special regions during the course of the year, but we shall endeavour to evoke in our souls the conception that the whole Earth has consciousness. Let us now turn from the mineral Earth, and direct our attention to all that springs forth and sprouts on Earth, to the plant world.

Looked at in accordance with Spiritual Science, we must regard the plant world, in the first place, as an independent entity in reference to the Earth. That the whole plant world is an independent entity as regards the Earth only comes clearly before us when we consider the consciousness of these two entities or beings. We can speak of a consciousness of the whole mineral Earth, but we can equally speak of a consciousness of the whole plant world which evolves on the Earth. The laws of this consciousness are certainly entirely different from the laws of human consciousness. In speaking of plant consciousness, we must always speak of it as regards certain districts only, because it changes with different regions of the Earth.

As men we are not aware that there really is a certain parallel between our consciousness and the consciousness of the whole plant world, for we are apt to look on our waking consciousness as our complete consciousness, without taking our sleeping consciousness into consideration. To simplify our subject, we say: In the daytime when awake, our ego and astral body are within our physical body. I have, however, often remarked that this in fact refers to our blood and nervous system only, not to the remaining parts of our system. When the ego and astral body withdraw from our head, for instance, they are so much the stronger within other parts of us.

A parallel thing happens on the Earth, when on one part of it there is summer and on the other winter; this also is merely a change of consciousness. The case is the same with ourselves. We are not aware of this, however, because in man the two kinds of consciousness are not of equal clearness; they are of different strength. Night consciousness is beclouded consciousness, for us practically no consciousness at all; while day consciousness is full consciousness of our other side. In the night our lower nature wakes, while with our higher nature we sleep, and it is exactly the same with the Earth, when on the one hemisphere there is winter, on the other there is summer. On one side the consciousness is awake, on the other side it sleeps and vice versa. As I have just said, and as I have often explained, this only holds good in respect to the plant world. We know that the plant world sleeps in the height of summer when there is growth on every side; while it is outwardly unfolding its physical nature—it is asleep. But it wakes to full consciousness during the time when physically, externally, it is going through no development; then the plant world is awake. Thus we speak of all plant life on Earth as a whole; and this plant life, as a whole, has a consciousness.

When speaking of this consciousness which as a second consciousness intermingles with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, we can really say that during the height of summer in our part of the Earth the plant consciousness is asleep, and in depth of winter it is awake. At this season, however, during the time at which we now are, something further takes place.

Now I beg you to note that these two states of consciousness, that is, the general consciousness belonging to the mineral earth, and the general plant consciousness—are always distinct. They are throughout the whole year two separate beings. But these are not only two distinct Beings, for at one season they unite, so that at the present time of year, the one interpenetrates the other. At the time when one year is passing over into the other, the mineral things and events of the Earth and the whole plant world have but one consciousness, which means that these two consciousnesses interpenetrate each other.

What is the nature of the mineral consciousness of the Earth, the varieties of which (as I have said) we shall not study to-day as we shall those of the plant consciousness, which we realise wakes during winter time and sleeps in summer? What is the peculiar nature of this mineral consciousness, this consciousness of the great Earth-Being?

The man who is limited in his physical senses, and limited to the understanding that he considers appertains to these physical senses, can at first know nothing of this great Earth-consciousness. Spiritual Science, however, can instruct as to what this Earth-consciousness really thinks—thinks as we think of plants, animals, air, rivers, mountains, etc. Just as with our ordinary waking consciousness, we think of the things round about us, so, in like manner does the Earth think. Let us inquire to-day: of what does the Earth consciously think?

The Earth thinks with its consciousness the whole firmament of heaven nearest to the Earth. As we look with our eyes on trees and stones, so does the Earth consciously look into space and contemplate all that takes place in the stars. The Earth is a being that meditates on the occurrences of the stars.

Thus fundamentally the mineral consciousness contains the secret of the whole Cosmos. While we men move about on the Earth in a superficial way, thinking merely of the stones against which we knock, or of the many things which our senses reveal to us, the Earth thinks with its consciousness—through which we are passing as we move through space—of the whole Cosmos. She has indeed greater, more all-embracing thoughts than we have. In truth, it is an extraordinarily exalting thought, when we realise: ‘I am not simply passing through the air; I am moving through the thoughts of the Earth.’

Now let us again consider the other consciousness, that of the plants. These are not able to think so much as the Earth can. The thinking consciousness of the plants—not of individual plants, but of the whole united plant-world—is a much more restricted consciousness, it embraces a smaller circle of the Earth throughout the year; but this is not the case at the present season. Plant consciousness is now one with the whole consciousness of the Earth, and because the plant consciousness interpenetrates the earth-consciousness, the plant-world at New Year time, knows the secrets of the stars and applies them. Plants are thus able to unfold again in spring in accordance with the secrets of the cosmos, and can bring forth their blossoms and fruit. In this unfoldment the whole mystery of the cosmos is contained, in the way plants bring forth their leaves, blossoms and fruit.

But during the time the plants are producing their leaves, flowers and fruit, they are not able to meditate upon it. It is only at this present season they can think—now—when the plant consciousness is united with the consciousness of the whole mineral world. This is why it is said in Spiritual Science: About the season of the New Year, two cycles interpenetrate each other.

This is the main secret of all existence—that two cycles penetrate each other; then parting, continue separately their further development; again intermingle, and so on. Only think how marvelous this secret of existence is! Plant-consciousness and mineral-consciousness, two streams of evolution—progress apart through the whole year, then at the time when one year passes over into another, they unite. Again they pass through the year apart, uniting once more at the festival of the New Year. The cyclic advance of history is similar to this.

We turn from this mystic event, through which we are now passing, and which fills us with a deep feeling of holy awe in respect of the passing of one year into the other—we turn to a still deeper mystery.

We know that we are now living in that cycle in which the consciousness-soul is unfolding, that this was preceded by that of the unfolding of the rational or intellectual-soul, which was again preceded by the cycle in which the sentient soul was developed, before which again we go back to the time of development of the sentient body. This takes us back 6,000 years before our Christian era, to a time when all human thought was evolved within the cycle of the sentient body—of the so-called astral body.

We have now to advance through the cycle of the spiritual or consciousness-soul, and through that of the Spirit-Self, and further still man has to develop.

The consciousness-soul (since 1923 translated by Dr. Steiner as the spiritual-soul) is principally developed at the present time because man chiefly makes use of his physical body alone as an instrument. On this account—as you know already from many lectures—this present age is the high tide of materialism. A time will come, however, when man will not only make use of his physical body, but will again learn to use his etheric body, as in earlier times he used his astral body, in the cycle of evolution when that body was the main element of consciousness.

We can therefore say: Our condition at one time on Earth was such, that our soul experienced a contact of its consciousness with the consciousness of our astral body. Just as at New Year, plant-consciousness penetrates mineral consciousness, so, thousands of years ago, did our soul intermingle with our astral body. At that time our soul was one, in its consciousness, with the astral body. The time of that type of consciousness was six thousand years before our era. When that consciousness came about man celebrated a New Year on Earth; a mighty New Year!

Just as we regard the New Year as the mingling of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, so we must realise that 6,000 years before our era a great, a mighty cosmic New Year of our Earth took place. Our Soul-consciousness then united with—passed through—the astral consciousness of our body.

What was it that then took place?

At that time when our inner soul-consciousness passed through (or intermingled with) the astral consciousness of our body—then our limited human consciousness, the consciousness which we have to-day, had progressed as far as the present plant-consciousness at New Year. Just as plants gaze abroad into the heavens because their consciousness has been united to the mineral consciousness of the Earth, so did man then see and perceive a wide field of wisdom six thousand years before our era, when his soul was united with his astral body at the time of the cosmic New Year.

From this time originated the knowledge which we have now lost, since the wisdom of the Gnostics has perished. The source of this knowledge must be sought in the earthly and cosmic New Year about 6,000 B.C. This was the knowledge from which Zarathustra gave forth his teaching; the knowledge, whose last great rays still illuminated the Gnostics, but of which only a few fragments remain. It is the winter of the Earth, but the Earth's New Year to which we here look back.

If we now add four thousand years more to the years we have passed through since the founding of Christianity, we again come to a similar intermingling as that I have just indicated; to the mingling of our soul-consciousness with our astral consciousness, but at a higher stage. Man will once more experience a universal stellar consciousness. For this we endeavour to prepare ourselves through our Spiritual Science, so that there may be men ready to receive it.

We will seek to prepare for this cosmic New Year. If we prepare for it through the keeping of the Christmas Festival, as I indicated in a recent lecture, we are preparing ourselves in the right way. If the birth of spiritual knowledge within us leads to that frame of mind which is in accord with the ‘Christmas Initiation,’ we are preparing ourselves for that new cosmic New Year on which we shall enter twelve thousand years after the previous cosmic New Year.

Twelve months pass by between one union of the plant-consciousness with the mineral consciousness of the Earth, and another. Twelve thousand years pass between one cosmic New Year and another: between one intermingling of the human soul with the Astral World-Soul, and another.

So at this sacred season, we turn from the little New Year to the great cosmic New Year, from the New Year's Eve of our year, to that for which we are preparing ourselves, by endeavouring—now in this winter time—to behold the light, which in a normal elemental way flows into man as inhabitant of the Earth, only at the cosmic New Year.

We really only see the world in the true light, when we grasp what is around us, not only as it is presented to our senses,—as materialists do—but when we accept all that is about us in the outer world as a symbol of the great secrets of the universe.

Then when New Year draws near, it seems as if a message from spiritual worlds approaches, and unveils for us the mysteries connected with the birth of the New Year; and declares, ‘Behold, now in the depths of the dark cold winter, the consciousness of the plant world unites with the mineral consciousness of the earth. Let this be to you a sign that the Earth too has its year—the great cosmic year, of which Zarathustra spoke long ago, explaining how the world passed on from one great New Year's Eve to another; this must be understood by those who really seek to comprehend the course of human evolution.’

Zarathustra spoke of epochs of twelve thousand years. He meant the great cosmic years of which I have spoken to you to-day. He represented the course of human evolution as being divided into four divisions within the Earth year. This fact is deeply rooted in spiritual mysteries.

So, from a deeper understanding of our Spiritual Science, let us accept a true Christmas attitude of reverence. Let us develop within our hearts that inner warmth which comes, when in the frosty night of winter we receive the first intimation of the dawning of the Sun-Spirit on the Earth, and with it the mystery of the revolving year. The thirteen days are the days in which the plant-consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness. If a man is but able to place himself within the plant consciousness, he can dream of—can gain a conception of—the many mysteries which then crowd into his heart, such as did in the dream of Olaf Oesteson, the description and explanation of which entered into and stirred our souls here, this time last year. When we feel such a mood of initiation, we evoke the proper feelings and the perceptions for the aims and objects of our spiritual knowledge and with such warmth of heart we shall make preparations for the new cosmic New Year. Through it we can worthily expect that day which is to usher in a New Year for the world. Thus: when in succeeding incarnations our souls experience the cosmic New Year under quite new conditions on Earth, we shall be able to pass through it as those can for whom the small New Year's Eve (which recurs every twelve months instead of every twelve thousand years) becomes a symbol of the great New Year's Eve of the world.

This is the secret of our existence. Everything is in great as in small, and in small as in great. The small, the yearly cycle, can only be understood aright when it becomes for us a symbol of the mighty events of the cosmos—of the vast cycle of thousands of years. The year is an image of the aeons, and the aeons are the realities of those images which we encounter in the course of a year. When we understand this yearly course aright we are filled, in this important night in which a New Year begins, with thoughts of the great cosmic mysteries. Let our endeavour be, so to attune our souls, that they may look forward to the New Year with this conscious thought: I will accept the year as a symbol of the great cosmic year which contains all mysteries, through which pass and re-pass the Divine Beings who accompany our souls from aeon to aeon, as the lesser Gods follow the secret development of plant and mineral existence throughout the course of an Earth year.

My dear friends, many secrets of the spiritual world must first be explained symbolically or half symbolically, although the images are real and should be taken as realities. It is necessary to use an imaginative language, as I mean to do to-day, it is necessary to speak in the form of images which you can meditate in your soul, because long explanations would be needed if one were to speak: in the form of concepts and not symbolically. But those who bear in mind the things which I shall explain to you to day and who meditate upon them, will not fail to discover the deeper essence which they contain.

About this time of year we always pass over from one period into another. To be sure, this may at first appear to us a mere subdivision of time, but this is not the case. For a deeper instinct led the people, who had to fix the seasons of the year, to follow certain great laws governing the course of time. The festival which marks the transition from an old year to a new one is celebrated in our part of the world in the midst of winter, when the plants cease to grow, blossom and bear fruit. Only certain forest trees keep their so-called evergreen foliage throughout the winter. The sun unfolds its weakest power.

We know that spiritual processes are interwoven with all the processes which we perceive through our senses. We know that when we go through the woods we are not only surrounded by the trees with their green needles or leaves, but that a soul-spiritual essence weaves and works in the mysterious depths of life. We have already seen that things which in the eyes of our “clever” modern people appear as childish superstition, can be experienced as something which points to the real essence of the world.

We are therefore convinced that spiritual forces and influences lie at the foundation of everything physical, of the solid substances or of the physical phenomena which we can perceive through our senses. Let us now look upon the so-called lifeless an-organic earth, upon everything which constitutes the earth's mineral kingdom; let us look upon everything which is not endowed with life. To the materialist these lifeless substances appear devoid of life. But in every lifeless object we can see a soul-element, a spiritual element, so that we can also speak of a soul and spirit pertaining to our so-called lifeless, an-organic, purely mineral earth. When we speak of the consciousness of the earth, we cannot perceive in its geological-mineralogical substance even the trace of anything that can be compared with man's muscles and the blood; we can only see the earth's skeleton, or the earth's solid substance, so that when we speak of the earth's consciousness, we must think of it as being contained in the whole earth, which does not only consist of a skeleton, or of solid parts, but also of water, air, etc., which correspond to the muscles, the blood, etc. of man. The whole earth is endowed with consciousness, with a consciousness which forms part of the mineral kingdom. We shall not speak of the change in the earth's consciousness during the course of the year in a definite region, but shall instead enter more deeply into the idea that the whole earth is endowed with consciousness. Let us now turn away our gaze from the whole mineral earth and observe the plants which sprout and blossom out of the earth.

If we study the vegetable kingdom from the standpoint of spiritual science we must first look upon it as an independent being in respect to the earth. The fact that the vegetable kingdom as a whole is an independent being in respect to the earth, becomes clearly evident if we study the consciousness of these two beings. We can speak of a consciousness pertaining to the whole mineral earth, but we can also speak of a consciousness pertaining to the whole vegetable kingdom which develops upon the earth. The laws which govern this consciousness of course differ from the laws which govern human consciousness. When we speak of the consciousness of plants, we can only bear in mind a definite region of the earth, because the consciousness changes according to the various regions of the earth.

As human beings we do not notice that there is a certain parallelism between our consciousness and, for instance, the consciousness of the vegetable kingdom of the whole earth, because our daytime consciousness, not our night-consciousness, is a fully conscious state. In order to simplify matters, let us say that during our waning daytime consciousness our Ego and our astral body are within our physical body. I have already explained to you that in reality this only applies to our blood and nerve system, but not to the other systems. For when the Ego and the astral body are, as it were, outside the head, they permeate all the more the remaining parts of our organism.

Parallel to this we have the fact that when, for instance, there is winter on one side of the earth, there is summer on the other side. This too is only a transformation of consciousness. It is the same with us human beings. But we do not notice it, because these two states of consciousness are not equally clear. They have different degrees of strength. The night-consciousness is a dulled state of consciousness, practically no consciousness at all, and the daytime consciousness is a full state of consciousness pertaining to the other side of our being. Our lower nature is awake during the night, when our higher nature is asleep, and this is also the case with the earth, for when it is winter on one side, it is summer on the other side. When there is a waiting state of consciousness in one part of our being, there is a sleeping state in the other and vice-versa.

As explained just now (this has frequently been dealt with in other lectures) this only applies to the vegetable kingdom. In the height of summer the vegetable kingdom sleeps, because it sprouts and grows; it sleeps, while it unfolds its physical part to the utmost. And it is fully awake at that time of the year when it does not pass through any external physical development. The vegetable kingdom is then awake. We therefore speak of all the plants upon the earth as a whole; and this whole is endowed with consciousness.

When we speak of this consciousness, which therefore constitutes a second state of consciousness permeating the earth's mineral consciousness, when we speak of this plant-consciousness; we can really say that in our part of the world this plant-consciousness is asleep during the summer and awake during the dark winter season.

But at this time of the year something else takes place. You see, these two states of consciousness, viz. the whole earth-consciousness pertaining to the mineral kingdom and the whole plant-consciousness are distinct and separate: throughout the year they are two separate beings. Yet they are not ONLY two beings, for they permeate each other, so that one is filled by the other during that time of the year in which we are now living. When the old year passes over into the new year, the mineral objects and processes of the earth and the whole vegetable kingdom have ONE consciousness; that is to say, the two states of consciousness interpenetrate.

Of what kind is the MINERAL consciousness of the earth? To-day, however, we shall not consider its different stages in the same way in which we shall consider the consciousness of the plants, which is awake in the winter and asleep in the summer. What is the characteristic of the mineral consciousness, of the consciousness pertaining to the great being of the earth? Those who only rely upon their physical senses and upon the intellect which they think forms part of the physical senses, cannot know anything of this great consciousness of the earth. But spiritual science teaches us to observe the thoughts of the earth-consciousness, for the earth has thoughts, even as we have thoughts of minerals, plants and animals, of the air, the rivers and mountains. The earth has thoughts, in the same way in which we have thoughts concerning our environment, when we live in our ordinary daytime consciousness. What does the earth think? What thoughts live in its consciousness?

In the consciousness of the earth there are to begin with, thoughts connected with the whole heavenly space pertaining to the earth. Even as our eyes look upon the trees and stones, so the consciousness of the earth looks out into the heavenly spaces and harbours thoughts of all that goes on in the stars. The earth is a being that thinks about the stars and the events connected with them.

The mineral consciousness thus contains the secrets of the whole cosmos in the form of thought. Whereas we human beings walk over the surface of the earth and only think of the stones on our path or of many other things in our surroundings which we perceive through our senses, the earth thinks of the cosmos outside; these are the things which live in the consciousness of the earth, and as we walk through space we pass through the consciousness of the earth. The earth has a far wider consciousness and far greater thoughts than we. And it is really an uplifting thought to know: “As you walk along over the surface of the earth, you do not only pass through its atmosphere, but you pass through the thoughts of the earth.”

Let us now envisage something else—let us consider the consciousness of the plants. You see, plants cannot have great thoughts like those of the earth, for their consciousness, the thinking consciousness of the vegetable world (of the WHOLE vegetable kingdom, not of single plants) is far more limited; throughout the year it embraces a far smaller sphere pertaining to the earth—EXCEPT IN THESE DAYS, for at this time of the year (end of December/early January) the consciousness of the plants permeates the consciousness of the earth. The vegetable kingdom becomes aware of the secrets of the stars, it comprehends the mysteries of the stairs and uses them, so that in the springtime the plants may unfold again and bear blossoms and fruits in accordance with the mysteries of the cosmos. For the whole mystery of the cosmos is contained in the way in which the plants bear leaves, blossoms and fruits.

But while the plants develop their leaves, flowers and fruits they cannot develop thoughts about these processes. They can think of these processes only at this time of the year, when the consciousness of the vegetable world unites with the consciousness of the mineral world.

In spiritual science we therefore say; Two cycles interpenetrate at this time of the year, approximately around New Year's Eve.

The secret of existence consists in the fact that cycles INTERPENETRATE, continue their development separately and again interpenetrate. How wonderful is this secret of life! Two streams of development—the vegetable consciousness and the mineral consciousness, which take their course separately throughout the year, unite when one year passes over into the next. Then they develop separately until the end of the year when they unite once more. This constitutes the cyclic course of history.

Let us now pass over from this mystery, which can fill us with a deep, sacred feeling of reverence for the secret of the transition of one annual cycle into the next, let us now pass over to a still greater mystery. You know that we are living in the cycle which is connected with the development of the Consciousness-soul, which was preceded by the cycle connected with the development of the Understanding or Intellectual soul and by the cycle connected with the Sentient soul? If we go back still further, we come to the development of the Sentient Body. This leads us to the year 5000 B.C., when all human thinking developed under the influence of the sentient body, the so-called astral body.

In the course of human evolution we shall have to pass through the consciousness soul, the Spirit-Self, and still higher stages of development.

At the present time the consciousness-soul develops chiefly through the fact that the human being only uses his physical body as an instrument of perception. This brought us to the present; climax of materialism (we dealt with this in other lectures), for we use above all our physical body. But a time will come when we shall not only use the physical body, but also the etheric body, even as we once used our astral body, during the epoch of human development when the astral body supplied the chief foundation of consciousness.

We may therefore say: Once upon a time we lived upon the earth in such a way that our soul passed through a phase in which its consciousness contacted with the consciousness of our astral body. Even as at the end of the year the plants' consciousness passes through the. mineral consciousness, so thousands of years ago our soul passed through our astral body, through the consciousness pertaining to our astral body. At that time, the consciousness of our soul and the consciousness of our astral body were one. This leads us back thousands of years, to the year 6000 B.C. When this state of consciousness began, humanity on earth celebrated a new year, a great cosmic new year. Even as the new year now brings with it a union of the consciousness of the plants with the consciousness of the minerals, so 6000 years before our Christian ere marked the beginning of a new cosmic year upon the earth. It was a great cosmic new year! Our soul's consciousness then passed Through the astral consciousness. of our body.

What took place at that time? At that time, 6000 years B.C., when our inner soul-consciousness passed through the astral consciousness of our body, our limited human consciousness, such as we have it now, extended as far as the consciousness of the plants at New Year. Even as the plant looks out into the heavenly spaces, through the fact that its consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness, so 6000 years B.C. the human being saw and perceived an extensive field of wisdom, during that ancient cosmic NEW YEAR, when his soul united with the astral body.

From that time comes the lost wisdom (we spoke of this a few. days ago), the gnostic wisdom which disappeared. We must look for the origin of this wisdom in the cosmic New Year about 6000 years before our era. This, is the source from which Zarathustra drew his knowledge; it is the wisdom that illumined the Gnostics with its last rays, but as already explained, only a few traces of this gnostic wisdom have remained to us. It is the winter of the earth, but at the same time a cosmic new year of the earth, to which we go back.

Now add about 4000 years to the time which has passed since the founding of Christianity; this will bring us to a time when we shall again pass through our astral consciousness, but upon a higher stage. Our soul will again pass through our astral consciousness, through a cosmic star-consciousness. Let us prepare ourselves for this event, so that it may not find us unprepared.

Let us prepare ourselves for this Cosmic New Year! By preparing ourselves for the Christmas Festival, as explained during one of my last lectures, we prepare ourselves in the right way for the Cosmic New Year. If the birth of spiritual knowledge lives within us as a sacred Christmas feeling, we prepare ourselves in the right way for the new Cosmic New Year, which begins 12,000 years after the old cosmic year.

Twelve months of the year pass by from the union of the earth's vegetable consciousness with the mineral consciousness, to another union. Twelve thousands of years pass by from one Cosmic New Year to the other Cosmic New Year of the earth, from one passage of the human soul through the astral world to a new passage of the human soul through the astral world.

In this solemn hour, we thus look from the new year upon a small scale to the New Year upon a great cosmic scale, from the ordinary New Year's Eve to the cosmic New Year's Eve, for which we prepare ourselves if we try to perceive in the very midst of winter the light which only streams towards us, as inhabitants of the earth, during a cosmic New Year. Then it comes to us in a natural, elemental way.

We really see the world in its true light if we perceive the surrounding world not only in the way in which it appears to our senses, not only in accordance with a materialistic mentality, but if we look upon the external physical world as a symbol for the great mysteries of the cosmos.

The approach of New Year's Eve may therefore appear to us like the approach of a messenger from the spiritual world, revealing to us the mysteries connected with the end of the year and bringing us the following message:

“Behold, in the midst of the dark cold winter season the vegetable consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness of the earth. Let this be a sign to you that the earth too has its own cycle, namely the great cosmic year mentioned by Zarathustra, which goes from one Cosmic New Year's Eve to the other, and which we must understand if we wish to grasp the course of human development.”

Zarathustra speaks of twelve thousands of years, the twelve thousand years mentioned just now. He described the course of one Earthly Year, and divided it into four seasons representing the course of human evolution upon the earth. This is deeply rooted in the spiritual mysteries.

Let us fill our hearts and souls with a festive, earnest feeling, born out of a deeper comprehension of our spiritual science. Let us unfold within our heart that inner warmth which can be felt when in the midst of the cold winter night we hear the message of the Sun-Spirit's descent to the earth and then learn to know the mystery of the year's course.

The thirteen days from the 24th of December to the 6th of January are the days in which the plants' consciousness unites with the mineral consciousness. If the human being can transfer himself into the consciousness of the plants, he can see and dream of many mysteries which pass through his heart in many forms—he can have dreams such as that of Olaf Åsteson.

If we develop such feelings and moods, we obtain the right attitude towards the aims of our spiritual knowledge; these warm feelings which stream through our heart are a preparation for the New Cosmic Year, and they enable us to await it worthily, to look forward to that cosmic New Year's Eve which brings a new cosmic year. In future incarnations, when our souls will pass through the great Cosmic New Year, we shall experience it in the right way if the end of the year which closes the small cycle of twelve months becomes a symbol for the great end of the year which closes a cycle of twelve thousand years.

This is the secret of our existence. The things which take place upon a small scale always correspond to the things which take place upon a large scale, and upon a large scale the things are the same as upon a small scale. The small scale, the course of one year, can only be grasped if it becomes a symbol for the great cosmic course, for the cycle which encompasses thousands of years.

The year is an image for the Aeons. And Aeons are the reality of symbols which we encounter in the course of one year. If we really understand the year's course, our hearts will be deeply moved toy the mysteries of the cosmos, at this time of the year which marks the beginning of a new year. Let us try to attune our soul so that it can look into the new year conscious of the fact that it can bear within it the year's course as a symbol for the great COSMIC course, which encompasses all the mysteries pursued, by spiritual Beings who surge and weave through the universe from aeon to aeon, in the same way in which the Lesser Gods pursue the mysteries connected with the development of the vegetable and mineral Kingdoms during the course of one year.

We shall best understand how karma is anchored in the individual and in the evolution of humanity, and how the single facts of karma lend themselves to description, if we begin by considering how human consciousness has evolved since the time when, even in his ordinary life, man had a direct, elementary perception of his karma. To-day it is a fact that in his waking consciousness man knows nothing of his karma. The world in which he lives from awaking to falling asleep prevents him from having any direct knowledge of his karma. But humanity has not always lived in the state of consciousness that is considered normal to-day. In olden times, moreover during the earlier Post-Atlantean periods of evolution, quite different states of consciousness prevailed, even in the everyday life of man. There are three states or conditions of normal consciousness to-day—I have often described them to you. Firstly, there is waking consciousness; secondly, dream-consciousness into which scattered reminiscences of the day's experiences make their way but mingled, too, with influences from the spiritual world; and lastly, sleep-consciousness proper, in which dimness and darkness surround the human soul and consciousness sinks away, so to speak, into unconsciousness.

1. Waking consciousness.
2. Dream consciousness.
3. Sleep consciousness.

It was not always thus. There was a time in man's evolution when the experiences of his everyday consciousness took quite different forms. Let us look back some eight or ten thousand years to the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe whereby many widespread forms of civilisation and culture were wiped out of existence.

It was an epoch when land began to arise where formerly there had been sea, and sea to cover tracts that had once been land, a time moreover when the earth was destined to pass through a period of intense cold. We discover there a humanity which had survived the Atlantean catastrophe and was also endowed with three distinct kinds of consciousness but of an essentially different character from those of to-day. The prosaic, everyday consciousness of modern man in his waking hours, by which he sees other human beings and the creatures and happenings of nature in sharp outlines—this the men of those ancient times did not possess. They saw the human being without sharp contours, extending in all directions into the Spiritual, spreading out into the aura; and in this aura they saw his soul. Animals too were seen in great and mighty auras; in their case it was the inner processes—digestion, breathing and so forth—that became visible in the aura. Plants reached up with their blossoms into a sort of cloud which permanently surrounded the Earth. Everything was bathed in a dying astral light. The day-consciousness of men who lived directly after the Atlantean Flood was a gradually fading astral vision of the physical world. I say “fading,” for in its power of giving light it was gradually waning away; before the Atlantean catastrophe this power of vision in astral light had been much stronger and more intense.

The awakening to this condition of consciousness—for the entering into it may be compared to an awakening—was very different from the awakening of normal man to-day, where the soul is confronted with chaotic dreams before passing into the waking consciousness of day. When these people of antiquity awakened it was no mere world of dreams that invaded their consciousness; they were within a world of reality of which they knew also that therein they had been among spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies and elementary spirit-beings. “Waking up” was for them as it might be with a man of to-day who leaves a place in which he has had many experiences and goes somewhere else where in a sphere of new experiences he remembers the others. When in those ancient times a man entered waking life, he had the new experiences of day; but the remembrances remained with him of how he had been in another world, with other beings, not with the physical human beings who together with the plants and animals are generally around him, but with disembodied human souls living between death and a new birth, and with other beings, too, who never incarnate on the earth.

Man felt that he had departed from beings dwelling in the cosmos and was now placed into another world, into the world of physical experience between birth and death, Nevertheless he still preserved a memory of the spiritual world, the world through which human beings pass between death and a new birth. Vision of the spiritual world still streamed into his already fading astral vision. The condition of consciousness in which man to-day lives among purely physical beings did not then exist at all. In those times men had the following experience—it was not a dream but a picture that was graphic and real: when they passed into the day-consciousness and looked at trees, animals, mountains, rocks and clouds, they felt that this was the same world in which were living those spirit-beings and human souls who were not incarnate on the earth but living in the spiritual world that is man's habitation between death and a new birth. And then there came to these men a concretely real picture of how these beings pass into the trees and rocks while man is in his waking consciousness, how they disappear into the depths of the mountains or rise up to the heights of the clouds, steal away into all the created things of outer physical nature.

On going into a forest, a man would, for example, notice a tree and know that it was the hiding place of a being with whom he had been together in the night. Men then saw clearly, as an Initiate can still see to-day, how spirit-beings made their way into physical habitations as though into their homes. No wonder that all these things passed over into the myths and that men talked of tree-spirits, water-spirits, spirits of clouds and mountains, for they saw their companions of the night disappearing into the mountains, into the waves, into the clouds, into the plants and the trees.

Such was early dawn in the experience of the soul: men saw the spirit-world disappearing into the physical world of sense. They spoke reverently of the great and lofty Spirits as taking rest by day in these physical habitations; they spoke of the lesser, elementary beings who live among men and often among animals, as lurking in the things of nature. They expressed it even roguishly. But whether expressed in sublime and reverent language or in pleasantries, it was exactly what they felt about this condition of early dawn in the soul's experience.

Picture it to yourselves. A human being had been in a spiritual world during the last phase of his sleep; it was when he awoke, and only then, that he clearly remembered having been in this spiritual world. How was this? Why did he only see this spiritual, super-sensible world as he awoke, when the spirits were already disappearing? Why did he only then see this spiritual, super-sensible world in which he lived between death and birth? It was because in those days, when during the last phase of his sleep man was able to see the spirit-world, he experienced yet a third condition of consciousness which conjured up another, an entirely different world before his soul. For it was so that during the time he was “asleep” in his earthly existence and present with power of vision in the spiritual world, he looked back on the evolution of his own karma.

This third state of consciousness experienced by men during the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, consisted in a vision of karma. This vision of their own karma was an absolute reality to them.

1. Waking consciousness .... Fading astral vision.
2. Dream consciousness ..... Vision of the spiritual world.
3. Sleep consciousness ....... Vision of karma.

As the three states of consciousness alternate in the life of man to-day, so did ancient man experience successively the three conditions of a darkening astral vision, a vision of spiritual worlds and a vision of karma.

It is a fact that in olden times a vision of karma was a reality of consciousness for man; we can truly say that man once had a consciousness by means of which he beheld the reality of karma.

Evolution then took the following course. First of all this vision of karma ceased in the sleep that was of course no sleep as we understand it. The vision of karma began to grow dim. Of the facts of karma there only remained the knowledge possessed by the Initiates in the Mysteries. That which had once been vision and actual experience became a matter of learning and erudition. The ancient consciousness darkened and there only remained—so it was in the old Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian period—the power to look up into the spiritual world. Thus, in the centuries which preceded the Christian epoch, a vision of the super-sensible world still came about quite naturally, but the facts about karma were only taught, they were no longer seen. In the times immediately preceding the Christian era there was still an intense consciousness of the spiritual world, of the world in which man lives between death and a new birth, although the consciousness of karma had faded and was simply not there for humanity in general when the Christian era began. It is therefore understandable that special emphasis was laid upon man's connection with the spiritual world while he is in the disembodied state. Especially in the ancient Egyptian conception we can discern this intensely strong consciousness of the spiritual world, a purified, and clear-sighted consciousness of the world which man enters through the gate of death, when he becomes Osiris. But there is no consciousness any longer of repeated earthly lives.

Then came the gradual approach of the time which has now reached its apex and properly belongs to the humanity of our day. Astral vision has sunk into the prosaic, matter-of-fact consciousness we have in ordinary life between awaking and falling asleep, when we only perceive, for example, that insignificant part of man which is enclosed by his skin and consists in flesh and bones and different vessels; that is all we see in our day-consciousness. One can well understand that people want to array it in all kinds of so-called beautiful clothes in an attempt to give it some importance, since deep down in the sub-consciousness there is a feeling that in itself it is of no significance and belongs, rightly, in the radiant, glowing garment of the aura, of the astral and Ego nature. And when men became aware of the change from the vision that sees the human being in his aura to the vision that sees only the unimportant, bodily part of him, they endeavoured to imitate in the clothing what had once been seen as the aura; so that the fashions of old—if I may put it so—were in a certain sense copies of the aura. As for modern fashions, well, I can assure you they are no such thing!

The consciousness of the super-sensible world has taken on the form of chaotic dreaming. Man dreams it away! And in respect of the karma-consciousness, man is fast asleep. He would have the consciousness of karma if that part of his consciousness which is dreamless between falling asleep and awakening were suddenly to awake. Then he would have the consciousness of karma. Thus in the course of ten thousand years or thereabouts, the great change has taken place. Man “wakes” away—not only “sleeps” away—the spiritual reality in the physical world. He “wakes” away the Spiritual in nature, he “dreams” away the true spiritual world, he “sleeps” away his karma.

This development was necessary, as I have often told you, in order that the consciousness of freedom might arise. But humanity must now again emerge from its present condition of consciousness.

We have heard that what was a natural, albeit a dreamlike state of consciousness in olden times, namely knowledge of the super-sensible world and of karma, gradually grew dim and then became Mystery-teaching, while in the modern age of materialism it has been entirely lost. But in this age the possibility must again be found of building a bridge to consciousness both of the super-sensible world and of karma.

This means, in other words: When we picture to ourselves how in olden times at early dawn, the spirit-beings with whom man lived from falling asleep to awakening hid themselves in trees and clouds, in mountains and rocks, so that in the day man could say to himself when he saw a tree or a rock or a spring: “A spirit has been enchanted into it, a spirit with whom I was together during my sleep-consciousness”—so now, by accepting the new Initiation-Science, we must learn in our present day-consciousness to recognise the spirit and as we look at every rock or tree or cloud or star, or sun or moon, to recognise the spiritual beings in all their diversity.

We must set out on the path that leads to this. We must prepare for the time when it shall be even so. As truly as a man of olden time, on awakening, saw the spirit-beings with whom he had lived during the night steal into the trees and rocks, so truly for modern man shall the spirit-beings steal forth again from tree and rock and spring!

It can really happen, and in this way. A man can lay aside the standpoint of ordinary prejudice in which he has been living, into which even children in the kindergarten are led to-day; he can put aside the prejudices that make him imagine he cannot with healthy human understanding see into the spiritual world. And when the Initiate comes and tells of things of the spiritual world and of events that happen there, then, although he cannot yet himself see, nevertheless by making use of his unprejudiced human understanding, he can be enlightened by the communications that are given concerning the spiritual worlds. This is indeed, and under all circumstances, the right first step for each one to-day.

But difficulties are always cropping up ... Last year, after one of my lectures on how to attain knowledge of the spiritual worlds, a well-meaning paragraph appeared in a newspaper of some standing. We can really call it “well-meaning” and even “respectable” as compared with many vehement expressions of opposition to Anthroposophy to-day! In this lecture I had pointed out that there is no need to become clairvoyant in order to have knowledge of the spiritual world, but that when the seer imparts the knowledge it can be received and understood by the healthy human intellect. I had emphasised this very strongly. The man who wrote the paragraph said in all good faith: “Steiner wants to apply the healthy human intellect to knowledge of the super-sensible world. But so long as the human intellect remains healthy it can certainly know nothing of a super-sensible world; as soon as it does, it is no longer healthy.” I think I have never heard it put so honestly before! For it is after all what everyone is bound to say if he denies to the healthy human intellect a knowledge of the super-sensible world, and if he speaks in the usual way of the boundaries of knowledge. Either he must give up the present point of view, or he must agree with this assertion; no other way is really honest.

A modern Initiate can speak from clear and conscious knowledge of how from every star a spirit-being is released, of how other spirit-beings are released from plants. They come forward to meet us as soon as we pass beyond external sense-observation. Every time we go out into nature we may see all around where nature begins to be a little elemental, kobold-like elementary beings coming out of their stony shelters; if we become friendly with them, especially with the elementary beings of the mineral world, we can see behind them higher Beings who finally lead up to the First Hierarchy, to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

It is a fact that if the exercises given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are practised regularly with strong inner energy, selflessness and devotion, they will lead—provided we have the necessary courage—to a new power of perception. We become able to see, for instance, in certain strata of the mountains, whole worlds of elemental beings lying hidden in rock and stone. They come forth on every side, they steal out, they grow big—and we discover that they have only been as it were rolled up and packed tight into these fragments of the elementary world. Beings are present in the mineral kingdom of nature, especially where the earth begins to grow green, and feels so fresh that we can scent its aroma and the aroma of the plants that cover it. But when we enter this sphere of elemental beings, we find that they can indeed inspire us with fear. For the beings we thus encounter are incredibly clever. We must be humble enough to say to ourselves, when we see these little dwarf-like beings emerging from the objects of nature: “How stupid man is! and how clever is this elemental world!” And because many do not like to say this in earnest, do not like even to admit that judged by spiritual perception a little new-born child is much wiser than a learned scholar, therefore these elementary beings withdraw from man's vision. If however we can discern them, the horizon is widened and the foreground opened up to us by these clever, playful little sprites leads away into a background that reaches right up to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Thus by means of the exercises to which I referred, a man whose consciousness has been made clear and quick by the study of what humanity has learned through modern natural science, can enter this world of elemental beings, and thence a higher world. If by a loving surrender to nature we thus acquire a consciousness that is not “sicklied o'er” by the authority-ridden knowledge that holds the ground to-day, we may gradually rise through Initiation-knowledge to that knowledge which humanity has lost.

And he who eventually attains the faculty to see the tree-spirits come forth from the trees—the same that the ancients saw stealing away in the dawn, and darting out again in the evening twilight—he will also be able, as he approaches a human being, to see emerge from him the figures of his earlier lives together with the evolution of his karma. For this kind of vision leads on to a vision of karma.

In the mineral world, where at first we perceive the clever, mischievous little dwarfs, the vision leads us to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

In the plant world, the vision leads us to the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

In the animal world (when we see emerge from the animals their own spiritual beings) we are led to a vision of the Archai, Archangels and Angels.

And in the human kingdom the vision leads to karma.

Behind the manifestations of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, behind all the other Beings of the higher Hierarchies, behind all the elemental nature-spirits who startle us by their cleverness when they dart forth from the minerals, or who come to meet us with their gentle importunities from the plant world, behind all that comes from the animals—fierce, passionate and violent as that may be at times, and also icy cold—behind all that stands here so to speak as a foreground, we face the overwhelming, the sublime manifestations of karma. For behind all the mysteries of the world there lies, in truth, the great mystery of human karma.

Having thus prepared our hearts and minds in the right way, we shall pass on in the remaining lectures to speak of particular facts of karma.

We shall best understand how karma is anchored in the individual and in the evolution of humanity, and how the single facts of karma lend themselves to description, if we begin by considering how human consciousness has evolved since the time when, even in his ordinary life, man had a direct, elementary perception of his karma. To-day it is a fact that in his waking consciousness man knows nothing of his karma. The world in which he lives from awaking to falling asleep prevents him from having any direct knowledge of his karma. But humanity has not always lived in the state of consciousness that is considered normal to-day. In olden times, moreover during the earlier Post-Atlantean periods of evolution, quite different states of consciousness prevailed, even in the everyday life of man. There are three states or conditions of normal consciousness to-day—I have often described them to you. Firstly, there is waking consciousness; secondly, dream-consciousness into which scattered reminiscences of the day's experiences make their way but mingled, too, with influences from the spiritual world; and lastly, sleep-consciousness proper, in which dimness and darkness surround the human soul and consciousness sinks away, so to speak, into unconsciousness.

1. Waking consciousness.
2. Dream consciousness.
3. Sleep consciousness.

It was not always thus. There was a time in man's evolution when the experiences of his everyday consciousness took quite different forms. Let us look back some eight or ten thousand years to the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe whereby many widespread forms of civilisation and culture were wiped out of existence.

It was an epoch when land began to arise where formerly there had been sea, and sea to cover tracts that had once been land, a time moreover when the earth was destined to pass through a period of intense cold. We discover there a humanity which had survived the Atlantean catastrophe and was also endowed with three distinct kinds of consciousness but of an essentially different character from those of to-day. The prosaic, everyday consciousness of modern man in his waking hours, by which he sees other human beings and the creatures and happenings of nature in sharp outlines—this the men of those ancient times did not possess. They saw the human being without sharp contours, extending in all directions into the Spiritual, spreading out into the aura; and in this aura they saw his soul. Animals too were seen in great and mighty auras; in their case it was the inner processes—digestion, breathing and so forth—that became visible in the aura. Plants reached up with their blossoms into a sort of cloud which permanently surrounded the Earth. Everything was bathed in a dying astral light. The day-consciousness of men who lived directly after the Atlantean Flood was a gradually fading astral vision of the physical world. I say “fading,” for in its power of giving light it was gradually waning away; before the Atlantean catastrophe this power of vision in astral light had been much stronger and more intense.

The awakening to this condition of consciousness—for the entering into it may be compared to an awakening—was very different from the awakening of normal man to-day, where the soul is confronted with chaotic dreams before passing into the waking consciousness of day. When these people of antiquity awakened it was no mere world of dreams that invaded their consciousness; they were within a world of reality of which they knew also that therein they had been among spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies and elementary spirit-beings. “Waking up” was for them as it might be with a man of to-day who leaves a place in which he has had many experiences and goes somewhere else where in a sphere of new experiences he remembers the others. When in those ancient times a man entered waking life, he had the new experiences of day; but the remembrances remained with him of how he had been in another world, with other beings, not with the physical human beings who together with the plants and animals are generally around him, but with disembodied human souls living between death and a new birth, and with other beings, too, who never incarnate on the earth.

Man felt that he had departed from beings dwelling in the cosmos and was now placed into another world, into the world of physical experience between birth and death, Nevertheless he still preserved a memory of the spiritual world, the world through which human beings pass between death and a new birth. Vision of the spiritual world still streamed into his already fading astral vision. The condition of consciousness in which man to-day lives among purely physical beings did not then exist at all. In those times men had the following experience—it was not a dream but a picture that was graphic and real: when they passed into the day-consciousness and looked at trees, animals, mountains, rocks and clouds, they felt that this was the same world in which were living those spirit-beings and human souls who were not incarnate on the earth but living in the spiritual world that is man's habitation between death and a new birth. And then there came to these men a concretely real picture of how these beings pass into the trees and rocks while man is in his waking consciousness, how they disappear into the depths of the mountains or rise up to the heights of the clouds, steal away into all the created things of outer physical nature.

On going into a forest, a man would, for example, notice a tree and know that it was the hiding place of a being with whom he had been together in the night. Men then saw clearly, as an Initiate can still see to-day, how spirit-beings made their way into physical habitations as though into their homes. No wonder that all these things passed over into the myths and that men talked of tree-spirits, water-spirits, spirits of clouds and mountains, for they saw their companions of the night disappearing into the mountains, into the waves, into the clouds, into the plants and the trees.

Such was early dawn in the experience of the soul: men saw the spirit-world disappearing into the physical world of sense. They spoke reverently of the great and lofty Spirits as taking rest by day in these physical habitations; they spoke of the lesser, elementary beings who live among men and often among animals, as lurking in the things of nature. They expressed it even roguishly. But whether expressed in sublime and reverent language or in pleasantries, it was exactly what they felt about this condition of early dawn in the soul's experience.

Picture it to yourselves. A human being had been in a spiritual world during the last phase of his sleep; it was when he awoke, and only then, that he clearly remembered having been in this spiritual world. How was this? Why did he only see this spiritual, super-sensible world as he awoke, when the spirits were already disappearing? Why did he only then see this spiritual, super-sensible world in which he lived between death and birth? It was because in those days, when during the last phase of his sleep man was able to see the spirit-world, he experienced yet a third condition of consciousness which conjured up another, an entirely different world before his soul. For it was so that during the time he was “asleep” in his earthly existence and present with power of vision in the spiritual world, he looked back on the evolution of his own karma.

This third state of consciousness experienced by men during the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, consisted in a vision of karma. This vision of their own karma was an absolute reality to them.

1. Waking consciousness .... Fading astral vision.
2. Dream consciousness ..... Vision of the spiritual world.
3. Sleep consciousness ....... Vision of karma.

As the three states of consciousness alternate in the life of man to-day, so did ancient man experience successively the three conditions of a darkening astral vision, a vision of spiritual worlds and a vision of karma.

It is a fact that in olden times a vision of karma was a reality of consciousness for man; we can truly say that man once had a consciousness by means of which he beheld the reality of karma.

Evolution then took the following course. First of all this vision of karma ceased in the sleep that was of course no sleep as we understand it. The vision of karma began to grow dim. Of the facts of karma there only remained the knowledge possessed by the Initiates in the Mysteries. That which had once been vision and actual experience became a matter of learning and erudition. The ancient consciousness darkened and there only remained—so it was in the old Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian period—the power to look up into the spiritual world. Thus, in the centuries which preceded the Christian epoch, a vision of the super-sensible world still came about quite naturally, but the facts about karma were only taught, they were no longer seen. In the times immediately preceding the Christian era there was still an intense consciousness of the spiritual world, of the world in which man lives between death and a new birth, although the consciousness of karma had faded and was simply not there for humanity in general when the Christian era began. It is therefore understandable that special emphasis was laid upon man's connection with the spiritual world while he is in the disembodied state. Especially in the ancient Egyptian conception we can discern this intensely strong consciousness of the spiritual world, a purified, and clear-sighted consciousness of the world which man enters through the gate of death, when he becomes Osiris. But there is no consciousness any longer of repeated earthly lives.

Then came the gradual approach of the time which has now reached its apex and properly belongs to the humanity of our day. Astral vision has sunk into the prosaic, matter-of-fact consciousness we have in ordinary life between awaking and falling asleep, when we only perceive, for example, that insignificant part of man which is enclosed by his skin and consists in flesh and bones and different vessels; that is all we see in our day-consciousness. One can well understand that people want to array it in all kinds of so-called beautiful clothes in an attempt to give it some importance, since deep down in the sub-consciousness there is a feeling that in itself it is of no significance and belongs, rightly, in the radiant, glowing garment of the aura, of the astral and Ego nature. And when men became aware of the change from the vision that sees the human being in his aura to the vision that sees only the unimportant, bodily part of him, they endeavoured to imitate in the clothing what had once been seen as the aura; so that the fashions of old—if I may put it so—were in a certain sense copies of the aura. As for modern fashions, well, I can assure you they are no such thing!

The consciousness of the super-sensible world has taken on the form of chaotic dreaming. Man dreams it away! And in respect of the karma-consciousness, man is fast asleep. He would have the consciousness of karma if that part of his consciousness which is dreamless between falling asleep and awakening were suddenly to awake. Then he would have the consciousness of karma. Thus in the course of ten thousand years or thereabouts, the great change has taken place. Man “wakes” away—not only “sleeps” away—the spiritual reality in the physical world. He “wakes” away the Spiritual in nature, he “dreams” away the true spiritual world, he “sleeps” away his karma.

This development was necessary, as I have often told you, in order that the consciousness of freedom might arise. But humanity must now again emerge from its present condition of consciousness.

We have heard that what was a natural, albeit a dreamlike state of consciousness in olden times, namely knowledge of the super-sensible world and of karma, gradually grew dim and then became Mystery-teaching, while in the modern age of materialism it has been entirely lost. But in this age the possibility must again be found of building a bridge to consciousness both of the super-sensible world and of karma.

This means, in other words: When we picture to ourselves how in olden times at early dawn, the spirit-beings with whom man lived from falling asleep to awakening hid themselves in trees and clouds, in mountains and rocks, so that in the day man could say to himself when he saw a tree or a rock or a spring: “A spirit has been enchanted into it, a spirit with whom I was together during my sleep-consciousness”—so now, by accepting the new Initiation-Science, we must learn in our present day-consciousness to recognise the spirit and as we look at every rock or tree or cloud or star, or sun or moon, to recognise the spiritual beings in all their diversity.

We must set out on the path that leads to this. We must prepare for the time when it shall be even so. As truly as a man of olden time, on awakening, saw the spirit-beings with whom he had lived during the night steal into the trees and rocks, so truly for modern man shall the spirit-beings steal forth again from tree and rock and spring!

It can really happen, and in this way. A man can lay aside the standpoint of ordinary prejudice in which he has been living, into which even children in the kindergarten are led to-day; he can put aside the prejudices that make him imagine he cannot with healthy human understanding see into the spiritual world. And when the Initiate comes and tells of things of the spiritual world and of events that happen there, then, although he cannot yet himself see, nevertheless by making use of his unprejudiced human understanding, he can be enlightened by the communications that are given concerning the spiritual worlds. This is indeed, and under all circumstances, the right first step for each one to-day.

But difficulties are always cropping up ... Last year, after one of my lectures on how to attain knowledge of the spiritual worlds, a well-meaning paragraph appeared in a newspaper of some standing. We can really call it “well-meaning” and even “respectable” as compared with many vehement expressions of opposition to Anthroposophy to-day! In this lecture I had pointed out that there is no need to become clairvoyant in order to have knowledge of the spiritual world, but that when the seer imparts the knowledge it can be received and understood by the healthy human intellect. I had emphasised this very strongly. The man who wrote the paragraph said in all good faith: “Steiner wants to apply the healthy human intellect to knowledge of the super-sensible world. But so long as the human intellect remains healthy it can certainly know nothing of a super-sensible world; as soon as it does, it is no longer healthy.” I think I have never heard it put so honestly before! For it is after all what everyone is bound to say if he denies to the healthy human intellect a knowledge of the super-sensible world, and if he speaks in the usual way of the boundaries of knowledge. Either he must give up the present point of view, or he must agree with this assertion; no other way is really honest.

A modern Initiate can speak from clear and conscious knowledge of how from every star a spirit-being is released, of how other spirit-beings are released from plants. They come forward to meet us as soon as we pass beyond external sense-observation. Every time we go out into nature we may see all around where nature begins to be a little elemental, kobold-like elementary beings coming out of their stony shelters; if we become friendly with them, especially with the elementary beings of the mineral world, we can see behind them higher Beings who finally lead up to the First Hierarchy, to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

It is a fact that if the exercises given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are practised regularly with strong inner energy, selflessness and devotion, they will lead—provided we have the necessary courage—to a new power of perception. We become able to see, for instance, in certain strata of the mountains, whole worlds of elemental beings lying hidden in rock and stone. They come forth on every side, they steal out, they grow big—and we discover that they have only been as it were rolled up and packed tight into these fragments of the elementary world. Beings are present in the mineral kingdom of nature, especially where the earth begins to grow green, and feels so fresh that we can scent its aroma and the aroma of the plants that cover it. But when we enter this sphere of elemental beings, we find that they can indeed inspire us with fear. For the beings we thus encounter are incredibly clever. We must be humble enough to say to ourselves, when we see these little dwarf-like beings emerging from the objects of nature: “How stupid man is! and how clever is this elemental world!” And because many do not like to say this in earnest, do not like even to admit that judged by spiritual perception a little new-born child is much wiser than a learned scholar, therefore these elementary beings withdraw from man's vision. If however we can discern them, the horizon is widened and the foreground opened up to us by these clever, playful little sprites leads away into a background that reaches right up to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Thus by means of the exercises to which I referred, a man whose consciousness has been made clear and quick by the study of what humanity has learned through modern natural science, can enter this world of elemental beings, and thence a higher world. If by a loving surrender to nature we thus acquire a consciousness that is not “sicklied o'er” by the authority-ridden knowledge that holds the ground to-day, we may gradually rise through Initiation-knowledge to that knowledge which humanity has lost.

And he who eventually attains the faculty to see the tree-spirits come forth from the trees—the same that the ancients saw stealing away in the dawn, and darting out again in the evening twilight—he will also be able, as he approaches a human being, to see emerge from him the figures of his earlier lives together with the evolution of his karma. For this kind of vision leads on to a vision of karma.

In the mineral world, where at first we perceive the clever, mischievous little dwarfs, the vision leads us to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

In the plant world, the vision leads us to the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

In the animal world (when we see emerge from the animals their own spiritual beings) we are led to a vision of the Archai, Archangels and Angels.

And in the human kingdom the vision leads to karma.

Behind the manifestations of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, behind all the other Beings of the higher Hierarchies, behind all the elemental nature-spirits who startle us by their cleverness when they dart forth from the minerals, or who come to meet us with their gentle importunities from the plant world, behind all that comes from the animals—fierce, passionate and violent as that may be at times, and also icy cold—behind all that stands here so to speak as a foreground, we face the overwhelming, the sublime manifestations of karma. For behind all the mysteries of the world there lies, in truth, the great mystery of human karma.

Having thus prepared our hearts and minds in the right way, we shall pass on in the remaining lectures to speak of particular facts of karma.