The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Yesterday we looked at the way in which a person functions in his various limbs – physical body, etheric body, astral body and I-bearer – by taking into account what is actually going on in these limbs from the human soul. You have seen that we had to attach particular importance, on the one hand, to the consideration of sensory perception and how the human being, according to his or her ego, lives in this sensory perception. On the other hand, remembering has led us more into the inner being of the human being itself. Here we have something that must be carefully considered, and I must ask you today to follow me into what may be difficult-to-grasp areas, because only through such an understanding is a serious comprehension of what is actually connected with the nature of the human being possible. Let us once again bring to mind some of what was said yesterday.

For ordinary consciousness, the I lives in sensory perception. As far as our sense perceptions reach, so far reaches this ordinary I-consciousness. I do not say the I, I say the I-consciousness. And we tie in with what we experience as I and sense perception, our imaginative experiences. With these imaginative experiences we live in our astral body.

Let us visualize the situation again schematically. We have sensory perception in the realm of I-consciousness, so we have activated our I in this sensory perception, and then, so to speak, extended this activity through our astral body and are experiencing the perceptions there. We have then seen that through the activity of our etheric body, memories arise. And in the physical body — as I said yesterday — all images are formed. Now we are trying to bring something to consciousness that can already be brought to consciousness through subtle introspection. If you, so to speak, cast your spiritual gaze over the field of sensory perception and become imbued with how the sense of self unfolds within it, then you will say to yourself: for sensory perception we are stimulated from the outside. So, if I want to draw a schematic representation of the human being's relationship to his or her sensory perceptions, I actually have to draw it in such a way that I say: if there is an outside world, then the sensory perceptions are stimulated by the outside world (see drawing, blue), but within these sensory perceptions, which are stimulated, the I lives (orange). So it is quite clear that we should not actually say: Our I is, insofar as we become aware of it, within us — but rather: we experience it from the outside in. Just as we experience sensory experiences from the outside in, we experience our I from the outside in. So it is actually an illusion to speak of our I being within us. We breathe in, so to speak, the I with our sense perceptions, if we think of the grasping of sense perceptions as a finer breathing. So that we have to say to ourselves: This I, which actually lives in the external world and fills us through the sense perceptions, then continues to fill us by attaching to the sense perceptions (orange), penetrating to the astral body, the perceptions (yellow).

So you see: if you want to imagine this relationship of the I to what is usually called a human being and what you think of as being limited within the skin, then you actually have to imagine – if I first draw the eye as a representative of sensory perception here – that the I is not inside, but that the I lives here outside and penetrates inwards through the senses. We usually succumb to the illusion that our ego lies within what we call our physical organism. But the ego is actually situated in relation to this physical organism in the outer world and, as it were, extends its tentacles into our inner being, first in our imagination, after the astral body, or up to the astral body.

Let us now take a closer look at the world of memories. Memories are propelled upwards from what we call our inner being. As they are propelled upwards, they initially represent an activity in the etheric body, and this in turn stimulates perceptions in the astral body; but these now come in reverse (see diagram on page 135, arrows). But ultimately they must come from what are the images in the physical body.

Now you can see that, starting from the physical body, the arousal flows to the etheric body, which underlies the memory, and because the I is in it, the I is also here. So I have to draw the thing in such a way that I not only think schematically of the ego here on the outside, but that the ego is also in the physical body (reddish) and stimulates the memories (green) from the physical body, which then become perceptions (yellow).

So you see, I cannot actually get by with the scheme I have drawn. I would have to draw differently. I would have to say: I, astral body, etheric body, physical body. But if I consider the memory, then I would have to put that which is up there as I, also into the physical body. At the same time it is separate from itself, and on the other hand it also fills the physical body. You see, through the careful knowledge of what is going on in a person, it is possible to get an idea of the integration of this ego, how it is on the one hand in the outside world, and on the other hand inside.

And now consider the following process. Imagine you meet a person on the street, and there you have the sensory perception of the person. Your I is there, but at the same time, memory arises from within: you recognize the person. The memory comes from within, and the sensory perceptions come from without. They interlock. This phenomenon of interlocking was already known to the old instinctively trained spiritual researchers. We are bringing it out of the sum of facts again. What I am now bringing to you from the sum of facts was known to the old spiritual researchers, and they were accustomed to drawing such things in pictures. They depicted what I have just told you, the existence of the ego, the coming together here with what comes from outside, as the snake that bites its own tail. The way in which man is related to the outer world was thus depicted as the snake that bites its own tail. When one has before him older pictures that have emerged from instinctive visions, one can often see how deep insights are hidden in such visions. Abstractions come and interpret all kinds of things. In this way, something terribly ingenious sometimes comes about; it is just of no value if it is symbolized and interpreted out of it, because one cannot grasp the facts with the intellect after all, but can only really find what is present if one again penetrates to the sources themselves.

But let us also visualize what is actually present in a different way. Let us think about this human ego as it is in sensory perception and in the imagination that follows from it. It is the case that we really live in an illusion, which has come about in the following way. Imagine that you have a mirror and you see yourself in it. Now, hypothetically, let us assume that you have never had any opportunity to gain any knowledge other than the knowledge that you have always seen yourself in the mirror. This would have led you to confuse yourself with your mirror image. The mirror image goes back and forth. Now, let us say you do not feel yourself within your skin, but you see the mirror image moving back and forth, and so you think: That is me — and you keep saying: That is me. — You are actually looking at your mirror image, but you mistake it for yourself. That is what a person actually does. In fact, the ego is like a stream that carries the sensory stimulus to the body. The body reflects it back, first of all that in which the actual self is seated. The self is here, but it is also in the outer world. It is even in the physical body, but it is reflected back to you. The human being does not perceive his real self, but the reflection. He does perceive the reflection, in that he has the sense perception. These are mirror images.

I have explained this in more detail in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'. The images are also mirror images, they are the reflection of experiences in the external world. The ego actually lives in the external world and experiences itself in consciousness, in that what it, as the unconscious ego, stimulates in the body is reflected back to it. That is if we consider the sensory perceptions and the images.

The situation is different, however, when memory comes into play. There we really are here below in the images that have come about, with our ego within them. There, indeed, an unconscious is at work to a high degree. Just consider how difficult it is for you to bring up memories, how little you can do with your full mental consciousness. There is an unconscious at work. There is indeed — and you can feel this — a reality at work. There it is different. You no longer confuse what you see with your ego, because you feel yourself in this activity. But it also remains very dark; the ego, as I have often mentioned, remains in an inner activity like a dream or even like something asleep, because the will is at work in it. And in remembering, it is essentially the will that is at work. A will that is strangely vacillating and changing is at work within. And if we want to use an image, we can say: let us imagine that we are looking spiritually with our ego. When we have this perception and imagination, we look in this way. When we form memories and everything that belongs to them, we turn around spiritually, so to speak. Indeed, when we move from sensory perception to memory, this concept of turning around spiritually is an important concept: spiritual turning around. Because if you imagine such a spiritual turning around, you get an inner concept of mobility.

They can no longer be stored so easily next to each other: I, astral body, etheric body and physical body. This is convenient when you are presenting anthroposophy to groups of anthroposophists who want to get quite calm, gentle presentations that can be easily absorbed while sitting on armchairs. But that is not how it is in reality. In reality, when we approach the human being by wanting to grasp the soul life, we have to envisage a continuous turning and turning around of the whole inner human being, that is, the true human being. The I is like that, and in being like that, it shines through the sense perceptions; in being like that (turned around), it shines up from the physical body. The concepts must be made mobile.

This is something that shows us how we must proceed to achieve flexible, inwardly living concepts if we want to grasp the human being. Just think about what our ordinary mental life is like! You only have to think of a very small part of everyday mental life to see this person in the outer world, that person in the outer world. That is all sense world. It penetrates in as a world of ideas. In the process, all kinds of memories arise. And you can only imagine that, while there are sense perceptions, you are, as it were, looking at one side of the soul and, as the memories arise, you are looking from the other side. But since this is constantly happening in a confused manner, you must constantly think of the soul as being in an inward whirling motion.

And that is also what is to be thought of as an image: the soul in inward whirling motion. That is also what presents itself to the gaze. That is why I have indicated in my books and also repeatedly emphasized: anyone who wants to make drawings that adequately represent what is actually present as the higher aspects of human nature is in the same case as a painter who wants to paint lightning. Just as lightning cannot be painted in reality, so the higher structure cannot be painted either. Even the etheric body cannot be painted in reality. You can make a diagram of it, but you cannot paint it in reality, because there is actually no such thing as a state of rest.

Memory and impressions of the external world meet, as I said. We are dealing here with something that should be grasped very precisely. If you look at the human physical body as such, then the I is in it for the purpose of remembering. But the I is also in the external world. So the I is actually in everything that underlies sensory perception. But it is also in the physical body of man. If you go through all kinds of philosophies of modern times - and these modern times have been going on for a long time - you will hear a lot about subjective and objective. You can also do that if you stop at the stage of imagining, because you can indeed distinguish between what lives in you and what lives outside of you. But if you delve deeper into the matter, these terms lose their meaning. For what is it that makes what lives behind the sense perceptions and from which the ego brings in the sense perceptions, what is it that makes it objective? It is objective precisely through the same thing that makes the physical body objective here. There is no difference between subjective and objective. The ego lives in the external world just as it lives in its own physical body. That is where the difference between subjective and objective ceases to exist.

This difference between subjective and objective only arises when we are up here in the realm of imagination. And why does it arise here? Not for the reason usually imagined either, but here it arises because we are only dealing with images. Up here we only experience images. But images are not real in themselves. We feel this by experiencing images. We therefore speak of the images as something subjective, and of the processes on which the images are based as something objective. But we cannot do that with the impressions of the outside world, because the processes in which the ego lives are of course objective here, as are the processes through which the ego works by releasing the memory images into the physical body. That is all objective, and if you like, all subjective. Here subjective and objective become completely mixed up and intertwined and can no longer be distinguished. And that is the important thing, because it is this concept of subjective and objective that occupies people and is juggled with in much philosophy.

But now, however, there is something deeper underlying it all. Man lives first of all in his everyday experiences. There he brings it to such a soul life, as is well known everywhere. But behind all this, of course, lives a completely different world. I have described in “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science in Outline”, how this world can be penetrated. But what spiritual research penetrates is, of course, a reality for every human being. It is always there, whether one knows it or not. So when one speaks of reality, one must take this into account. If one now develops those insights that arise in imagination, inspiration and intuition, then one arrives at what is present in every human being, what every human being carries around with them continually. When one ascends, as I have described, to imagination, one initially has a different soul world than the one that exists in everyday life. Through imagination, one receives images instead of the usual abstract ideas – that is why the term imagination, imaginative presentation, has been chosen – images that are clearly recognized as images. One is absolutely clear that one is dealing with images. That is the difference between what is really presented to the spiritual researcher and what lives in dreams or hallucinations: those who live in dreams or hallucinations consider their images to be reality. The spiritual researcher never does that. Only those who want to write foolish refutations talk about the fact that what is presented to the spiritual researcher could also be a hallucination or a dream. The spiritual researcher never confuses what is presented to him in pictures with reality. He is also clearly aware from the nature of these images that they are not invented images, not images conjured up by the imagination, but that they are images that point to spiritual reality.

First of all, he never confuses his images with realities, but he is clear about the fact that these images point to spiritual realities. There are many things that can lead a person to become fully aware of this pictorial quality on the one hand and the way these images point to a spiritual world on the other. If you are a fully conscious person, you are clearly aware that you link and separate your own ideas. You just have to reflect on something like this carefully. Just imagine how different your inner life would be if you could not arbitrarily combine the ideas you have, but rather if these ideas were forced together: you would be like an automaton. This inner ability to combine and separate ideas does, however, in a sense cease when one enters the imaginative world. And one must know that it stops, because through that one gets a clear consciousness of the fact that freedom, as man values it, can actually only be experienced and acquired in this physical world between birth and death. Then one also gets a clear feeling that we do not descend unnecessarily from spiritual worlds into this physical world. If we only lived in the spiritual worlds, which are otherwise accessible to us between death and a new birth, we would never be able to gain our freedom there. We gain this freedom within the physical world. Only people who do not care about freedom, who hate or undervalue this world, which man lives through between birth and death.

We particularly appreciate this freedom when we develop it as a force, let us say as a memory, namely after death. Only by feeling our way back into earthly life do we partake of freedom between death and a new birth. We must remain connected to earthly life in order to partake of freedom between death and a new birth. This can be felt by the spiritual researcher when he immerses himself in the imaginative world. If he did not stand firmly on the ground within physical reality before immersing himself in the imaginative world, he would not enter the spiritual world in a healthy state. That is why it is emphasized again and again: One must have prepared oneself well in the physical world if one wants to penetrate into the spiritual world. One must really have achieved everything that can be achieved in the physical world, namely, not to be at the mercy of one's instincts, which means bondage; not to be at the mercy of any automatic rules of habit, to which man so willingly submits. Man must really have come to the consciousness of his freedom before he can enter the spiritual world. Man should already have brought to life within himself the ideas that I have developed in my Philosophy of Freedom if he really wants to achieve his ascent into the spiritual world. This has also been emphasized in How to Know Higher Worlds.

Since we are talking about the imagination of pictures here, it must be understood that these are something thoroughly subjective. I would like to say that the degree of subjective experience is even stronger in the imaginative life than in the ordinary everyday life of the soul. The soul life is richer in the imaginations, but it is an experience of images. One knows that behind this pictorial experience is the true reality; but first one has the pictorial experience.

But there is something living in the images that does not allow them to appear so free to us. We cannot connect and disconnect in the same way, nor would we be able to penetrate to a reality if we could connect and disconnect these images of imaginative knowledge in the same way that we can connect and disconnect what we experience as ordinary ideas. We experience ordinary ideas in this way: here is an idea, here is the second, here is the third idea. We experience these, we form connections. We have the idea “rose”, we have the idea “beautiful”, the idea “I like it”. I form the connection: I like the beautiful rose. —- What I form here as a connection is definitely an inner activity; it depends on me, in that I am free. In this way, one is not free in the imaginative world. When you have images from the imaginative world, it is not the case that you now feel an inner activity through which you connect and separate these images. Just think, that cannot be the case, because although you feel free in the physical world, you can connect and separate, but you still separate and connect in the physical world in the way that the external physical-sensory world demands. So you have a regulative for connecting and disconnecting. You must also have such a regulative in the imaginative world. You just must not take what the physical world has dictated to you and put it into this imaginative world. That is what those Nebulists do, those fantasists or perhaps even people who are imaginative in the best sense of the word. They take some means of the sensuous-physical world and combine and separate them according to some judgment of taste. This may be very beautiful, but it cannot happen in the case of imaginative knowledge. There must be something there that gives rise in such a way to linking one element to another, to creating connections.

If you now take this idea, you will see: you arrive at something that lives in the imaginative world, that works in the imaginative world in the same way that our own mind otherwise works, in that it connects and separates the ideas of the ordinary world. There you come out into the objective. You come behind the worlds that are given as sensory perceptions; but you come into something that connects and separates.

What is it then? I would like to say that it is experienced in such a way that the imaginations begin to unfold their own life. I may use a comparison here: if you look at a human embryo at a very early stage, it has a highly developed head, with only the beginnings of the other organs attached to it; but these then take shape. In the same way, what lives in the imaginative world grows inwardly. One cannot place images there in an arbitrary way. It arises of its own accord. So there is something living within it that arises of its own accord. And this is gradually recognized as the world we call the world of the third hierarchy: Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai.

It is a thoroughly real process of human experience, in which one lives. I have now described it to you as a process of knowledge. But it is not a mere process of knowledge, because what is effective there is that which lives in the I and the astral body.

Now consider: we are children, we grow up. First, up to the age of seven, we receive the world of imitation within us, then the world that we accept on authority up to the age of fourteen or fifteen, and so on. If we observe life, we will find how much – not all, of course – of what we absorb in this way, through the sensations of the senses being brought to us and our processing of the sensations and perceptions, is later reflected in our face. Compare the dull face of someone who could not take in anything, who could not process anything from sensory perceptions in the life of ideas, with the speaking face, the speaking physiognomy of someone who, as a child, was introduced to the sensory world and to its processing in the imagination in the right way. This is something that lives in us from the soul-spiritual. We are shaped there. It is, I would say, the most subtle thing that works in us, and which only extends its forces into the whole physical life of the human being in a very subtle way.

Those who are able to observe people can still see from their gait at a later age whether they had a happy childhood or a childhood such as is sometimes the case among today's teaching staff. This is not an unreality that works from the I and the astral body into the whole human being. The spiritual researcher looks only into what actually lives in the I and astral body, and he discovers it through his imaginative world. There he discovers the world of angels, archangels, archai. But this is inherent in what develops in the human being as the spiritual-soul develops him, develops him in such a way that his development is initially an individual one. We can observe it in the way I have just explained. But this development also belongs to a group of people, to a nation. We distinguish between what grows within a person in so far as he belongs to a group of people, a nation, and in turn we distinguish between a modern person and an ancient Greek. In short, we distinguish the individual development of the human being, depending on the hierarchy of the angels; the development within the various ethnic groups, brought about by the hierarchy of the archangels; and we distinguish the human beings in different epochs, brought about by the hierarchy of the archai.

What is being discovered through spiritual science are realities that are effective in the spirits of the times, effective in the spirits of nations, and effective in those spirits that carry the life of the individual from consciousness into constitutional and organic life. We do not create our own physiognomy, just as the watchmaker makes a watch, by the fact that we may have been educated to joyful contemplation in our youth and have acquired a friendly physiognomy; something must help there. The nature of the hierarchy of the angels also plays a role. And we certainly do not put ourselves in the place of a people and imagine the various national physiognomies, just as the watchmaker makes the watch.

You see, we come across realities that are only shown in knowledge, but which are effective within the human being. We have, so to speak, the human being from one side, to speak with the old clairvoyants: from the side of the snake's head. Let us now approach the matter from the other side. We can approach that other side, the snake's tail, by turning to the world of memories that emerge from below, from where the human being also recognizes this world, where subjective and objective lose their meaning.

Yes, what emerges as the power of memory is grasped by the ego, but it emerges from the very subterranean depths of the human being. We know, or at least we can know, how intimately connected we are with our human nature when we unfold this power of remembrance. This points us even more to such depths, which we do not reach in ordinary life with our mental experience. This points us precisely to something that we are, but that is also how the outer nature is. There is something in us that is exactly the same as the outer nature. We do not have the same intimate connection with it as we do with the world, which we understand in terms of the hierarchy of the angels, archangels, and archai. Something is at work here that is not at all close to our present consciousness. I would like to say that there is only a thin veil between our present consciousness and the angels, archangels, and archai. But we enter a world that is deeply hidden from ordinary consciousness when we descend into that inner being of man from which only the power of memory shines forth, which we can still, I would like to say, just intercept. But what we intercept there is connected with contents that lie beyond ordinary consciousness.

But just as we can reach the world that I just characterized and from which we are separated in our imaginations as if by a thin membrane, we can now also, by progressing in spiritual science, recognize the world to which we are pointed on the other side: the side we reach when we turn around or turn to the other side of the snake. But we only reach this world when we rise to the third stage of spiritual knowledge, to intuition. And there we reach those beings that are referred to in my books as seraphim, cherubim, thrones. The world of cherubim, seraphim, thrones is just as much behind what shines up in our memory as activity in our life, as it is behind the sense perceptions and representations of the world of the angeloi, archangeloi, archai.

We will speak about these connections between the human world, which lives among our memories, and these hierarchies and what stands in between, Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai, tomorrow.

In these lectures, some of the occult signs and symbols will be discussed in such a way that the meaning and significance of such symbols and signs will be revealed not only to the mind but also to the senses and the soul.

You all know that in occultism, in Theosophy, the most diverse symbols and signs are used, and you also know that sometimes a great deal of ingenuity and speculation is applied to interpreting such signs and symbols. These lectures will now show us that much of this acumen and speculation is misplaced, and that speculation and acumen are not at all the abilities by which one can come close to the real meaning of occult signs and symbols. For the occultist, signs and symbols are by no means limited to what is listed as such in the usual manuals and writings. Rather, we find occult signs and symbols most frequently where we might least expect them: In myths and tales rooted in the people, deep occult truths are hidden. The mistake usually made in the interpretation of such myths and legends is simply that too much ingenuity, too much speculation is applied; one might almost say that too much is sought in a rational, too much reason is sought in a deep sense. Of course, a series of four lectures cannot exhaust this subject, but only treat it aphoristically. Nevertheless, what we discuss should be presented in such a way that we can form a conception of the relationship between the occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds, namely, what is called the astral world and the devachanic or spiritual world.

You know that even in ordinary language, when we want to imply something higher, we often use certain figurative similes. For example, if we want to use an image for knowledge or for insight, we say “light” or also “light of knowledge”. Behind these simple expressions of our language there is sometimes something extraordinarily profound. Those who use such expressions are often not even aware of the origin and therefore often have no idea how, for example, the image of light relates to knowledge or insight. They take it as a figure of speech, just as poets use figures of speech today. We would be quite wrong if we thought of occultism only in terms of such a figurative meaning. Things are much, much deeper. What in modern language is called symbolic, what is called pictorial, and what is also called an allegory, is as a rule misleading. It is easy to think that a sign has been arbitrarily chosen for something. In occultism, no sign is ever chosen arbitrarily. When a sign is used in occultism for a thing, there is always a deeper connection.

However, we will not be able to truly understand this connection between occult signs and symbols and the higher worlds if we do not delve a little into how man, from the point of view of occultism, relates to his environment. When occultism, or that elementary part of occultism that is proclaimed today as Theosophy, will one day fulfill its mission in the world in a deeper sense - with that only a beginning has been made - when it will one day come to the various branches of our life and culture are permeated by the truths and impulses of occultism, then the whole emotional and intuitive life of man, his whole relationship to the world around him, will change fundamentally. If we want to describe how today's human being relates to the environment, we have to say: for a number of centuries, the human being has increasingly developed a relationship to the environment that is very abstract, very intellectual, very materialistic. A person walking through the fields today, whether in spring, summer or fall, usually sees what meets the eye, what the senses can perceive, what the mind can combine from the sensory perceptions. If a person is aesthetically inclined and has a poetic sensibility, they imbue their perceptions with feelings and emotions, feeling sadness and pain at one natural phenomenon and elation, joy, and delight at another.

But even where, in the case of modern man, dry, sober sensual perception gives way to poetic and artistic feeling, it is actually only a beginning of what must be given through occultism, not to reason, not to the mind, not to the heads, but to the souls and the hearts. Only then will Theosophy become a significant factor in life, when it gives us not just a mental summary of all kinds of events in the physical, astral and devachanic planes, but when it becomes so ingrained in our souls that our souls feel, sense and learn differently. We must realize that through Theosophy and Occultism there will really come to pass more and more what we emphasized in our lecture yesterday: Humanity will learn to see in what is expressed in the outer world, as it presents itself to the senses, the physiognomy, the gestures, the facial expressions, through which what is soulful and spiritual is revealed behind things. We will learn to see an expression of the spiritual and soul-life in what is going on outside in the surrounding world, in the movements of the stars, just as we see an expression of something soul-like in the hand movements or in the gaze of a person. And so we will learn, for example, to see in the brightening air an external manifestation of internal processes of spiritual beings that truly permeate the air, the water and the earth.

Let us try to imagine how nature appears around us when we elevate ourselves to a concept of the soul and spirit that lives around us. Once we have opened ourselves up to this, we have to ask ourselves: What about the souls of the creatures living around us on the physical plane, the souls of animals, plants and minerals? What is in these three kingdoms of nature, besides what is physically presented to our senses? If we consider the animal kingdom, it differs quite substantially from the human being in spiritual and mental terms. What we have in the individual human being, enclosed within the boundaries of his skin, we do not have in the same way in the individual animal. The individual animal can rather be compared to an individual limb of a human being. We can compare all formally identical animals, so for that matter all lions, all tigers, all pikes, all flies and so on, everything in the animal kingdom that has the same form, with a limb of the human being, for example with the fingers of the hand. If we take the ten fingers of the human being, we will not be tempted to ascribe a soul to each of the ten fingers that would be endowed with ego. We know that all ten fingers belong to a single human being. We ascribe the I-soul to the individual human being. Just as we ascribe the I-soul to a single human being, we ascribe an I-soul to an entire species of animal; whether you call it the same group or species soul is not important. What is important is that we think of things as flowing into each other, fluctuating. Thus, in the case of a group of animals of the same form, we must assume that the same thing underlies them as underlies the individual human being: the I-soul. However, we must not look for this soul of the animal groups where we look for the I-soul of the human being. The place where this I-soul of the human being is between birth and death is the physical plane. This is not to say that this I-soul, by its nature and essence, belongs only to the physical plane, but the human I-soul lives on the physical plane. This is not the case with the group I-ness of animals. For these group Iches of animals, to which the individual animals belong that are of the same nature, it does not depend on the place where the individual animals are; whether a lion is in Africa or here in a menagerie, it makes no difference. The individual animals all belong to the same group I, and the group I is on the astral plane. So if we want to find the ego of a group of similarly shaped animals, we have to go clairvoyantly to the astral plane; and on the astral plane, the group ego of the animals in question is as complete a personality as a human being is on the physical plane. If a man puts out his ten fingers, and you put up a wall here, and the man puts his ten fingers through the ten holes in the wall, then someone standing outside the wall sees only the ten fingers; if he wants to find the ego behind the ten fingers, he must go behind the wall. So you must imagine that we have to see the individual lion as part of the group ego of all lions. If you go to the astral plane, you will find there a lion-genus individuality or personality of all lions, just as you find the individuality for the ten fingers of the human being behind the wall. The same applies to the other similarly formed animal species. And when you “walk” on the astral plane, you will find the astral plane populated by these animal group-I's, which you will encounter there just as you would encounter individual people here on the physical plane. The only difference is that these group-I's reach out for the separate animal individuals on the physical plane, just as you reach through the wall for the individual ten fingers.

But there is an enormous difference between the nature, the inner character of the group-I of the animals and that which is the character of the individual human being. This difference will seem very paradoxical to you, but it exists. There is a peculiar fact here: if you compare the intelligence and wisdom of the animal group-I on the astral plane with the intelligence and wisdom of humans here on the physical plane, you will find that the animal group-I are much cleverer. Everything they have to do is done with the greatest matter-of-factness. In the course of evolution, the human being must first bring his I to that wisdom which the animal group-Iche already have on the astral plane. These animal group-Iche lack one thing, however, which the human being here on the physical plane has to develop throughout the entire evolution on earth. This specific element is not to be found at all in the animal group-Iche. This is the element of love, everything that is love - from the simplest form of blood love between blood relatives to the highest ideal love of a universal brotherhood of man. This element is being developed by humanity within the evolution of the earth. The animal group-egos also have feelings, perceptions and volitional impulses. The mission of the human being here on earth is to develop love; this is lacking in the animals. The basic element of the group ego of animals is wisdom, just as the basic element of the human ego is love.

If we now want to find out how we ourselves are to perceive the revelations of these animal group-Iche within the surrounding nature, we only have to remember that everything around us here are revelations of spiritual events and spiritual beings. Those who are not endowed with clairvoyant abilities cannot, of course, take those “walks” on the astral plane whereby they encounter the population of animal group-Iche there as they encounter physical human Iche here on the earth. But even those who are not clairvoyant can perceive the effects, the deeds of what the group-Iche do here on the physical plane. He can observe how every year, when autumn approaches, the birds fly in the direction from northeast to southwest to the warmer regions, and how they fly back in very specific paths when summer approaches. If you compare the individual paths according to their height and direction for the individual bird species, you begin to suspect that there is wisdom, deep wisdom in all of this. Who is in charge of all this? The animal group egos are in charge. Everything that the various animal species accomplish here on our planet is an effect, an action of the animal group egos. And if you follow these actions of the animal group egos, you will find that, essentially, these animal group egos span the circumference of the earth, that they unfold as forces around the circumference of the earth. The earth is circled by forces of the most manifold kind, by forces that go around the earth in the most manifold convolutions, in straight and crooked and snake-like lines. Man can see these forces here only in their effects, in their revelations. When he grasps these revelations, he can divine what, with clairvoyant ability, leads him to the group Iches of the animals. Thus we can learn to empathize with the wisdom that takes place in our animal kingdom. What the genera and species do reveals something of the deeds of the animal group-I.

The situation is different for the plant world. For the plant world, too, the occult observer sees a series of I's, but there are far fewer I's for the plant world than for the animal world; they are more limited in number. Again, whole groups of plants belong to a common I, and these lie, when we visit them, in an even higher world. While the animal group I's are on the astral plane and live out their lives in the astral that flows around and envelops our Earth, the plant group I's are to be found in the lower regions of the Devachan plane, in what we are accustomed to calling in Theosophy the Rupa parts of the Devachan plane. There they live as closed personalities; just as people do here, the group-I-ities of plants walk there. Along with other beings that do not have a physical body at all, the plant-I-ities are there and form the population on the lower devachan plan.

How does a person find their way into the perception of these plant group-I-ities? The perception itself is ultimately tied to the development of clairvoyant abilities. But this development leads from lower levels upwards, ever higher and higher. What one must first develop in order to ascend to these abilities is feeling and sensation for the matter. Real, true clairvoyant abilities are always based first on the development of feelings and sensations, but not on trivial, egoistic feelings, no, on deeper and more devoted feelings. This is something completely different.

When you look at a plant, you must first of all focus your attention on the fact that the plant develops its roots into the soil, that it pushes its stem upwards, unfolds its leaves upwards, gradually transforming them into sepals and a corolla, in which the fruit then forms. It is important to realize that we cannot compare the plant to the human being in this way. We must not compare the human being to the plant in such a way that we compare the head of the human being to the corolla of the plant and his feet to the root. That is completely wrong. In occult schools, it has always been pointed out and said: You must compare the plant and the human being. But you have to compare them in such a way that you compare the head of man with the root of the plant. Just as the plant turns its root towards the center of the earth, so man turns his head into the universe; and just as the plant chaste turns its blossom and its fruit organs towards the sun, man shamefully turns his fruit organs straight down, where the plant turns its root. That is why occultism says: Man is the upturned plant. The plant appears like a human being standing on its head; the animal stands in between.

In what is usually called a plant, only the physical body and the etheric body of the plant are present. But the plant also has its astral body and its I. But where is the astral body, and where is the I of the plant? We can ask about this place, because it is only a general definition of the matter when one says that the group I of plants is on the lower Devachan plan. We can indicate quite precisely where the astral body of the plants and where the ego of the plants is. The astral body of the plants, and indeed the astral body of all plants that exist on our globe, is the same as the astral body of the earth itself, so that the plant is immersed in the astral body of the earth. In terms of location, the plant-I am in the center of the earth. From the occult point of view, we can understand the earth as a great organism, as a living being that has its astral body; and the individual plants that are on our earth are the limbs. Individually, separately, they only have the physical body and the etheric body. In the individual plant, the individual lily, the individual tulip and so on, there is no consciousness; the earth has its consciousness, its astral body and its I. But there are not only plant 'I's; there are also other spiritual entities. We must not ask whether there is room for all of them. They are interwoven, and they can get along very well there. So when you look at the individual plant, you can only ascribe to it the properties of a physical body and a life body, but not consciousness as an individual being. But plants do have a consciousness, and it is connected with the consciousness of the Earth, it is part of the consciousness of the Earth. Just as we human beings have a consciousness that encompasses joy and sadness, and these interpenetrate each other, so the individual astral bodies of plants permeate the astral body of the Earth, and the plant 'I's permeate the center of the Earth. The living plant occupies the same position in the organism of our earth as milk in the animal organism. Similar astral forces underlie the process by which the plant sprouts from the earth, greens and flowers, and by which the cow gives milk. When you pick a plant with its flower, it does not feel unpleasant for the earth. The earth has its astral body and has feelings there, and when you pick a plant, it feels the same as when a calf sucksleaks, it feels a kind of sense of well-being. When you remove what has grown out of the ground, the earth does not have the individual plant - a sense of well-being. If, on the other hand, you tear out the plant by the roots, it is for the earth as if you were tearing flesh from an animal; it has a kind of feeling of pain.

If we delve into this, not just in the abstract terms of group-I-ness, but in such a way that we transform the empty abstract concepts into feelings and sensations, then we learn to live with the processes of nature; our observation of nature becomes a living sensation. When we walk through the fields in autumn and see the man with the scythe mowing the grain, we get an inkling that, to the same extent as the scythe passes through the stalks and cuts them off, something like spiritual winds is breathing feelings of well-being over the field. And so it is. What the clairvoyant sees in the astral body of the earth is the spiritual source of what has just been described. For the one who sees into these things, the mowing of the grain is not an indifferent process. Just as one can feel and see in a person, through one experience or another, that astral forms of a very specific kind arise, so one can see these astral expressions of the earth's sense of well-being sweeping across the fields in autumn. It is different when the plow cuts furrows through the earth and reworks the roots of the plants. The plowing through with the plow causes pain to the earth; we see feelings of pain emerging. In response to what has just been said, one could easily object that it would be better under certain circumstances to remove plants from the earth by their roots and replant them than to walk across a meadow and tear up all kinds of flowers out of idleness. Such an objection may well be correct from a moral point of view, but here we have a completely different point of view. It could, of course, be better for a person who is just beginning to go gray to pluck out the first gray hairs if he finds this right for aesthetic reasons, but it still hurts him. It is a completely different point of view when we say: plucking the flowers does the earth good, and when we dig up the plant by the roots, it hurts the earth. Life enters the world through pain. The child that is born causes pain to the mother who gives birth to it. This is an example of how we must learn not only to recognize but also to empathize with nature in our environment.

This extends to the mineral kingdom. Minerals also have their I, only the I of minerals lies even higher; it lies in the upper parts of the Devachan plan, which theosophical literature is accustomed to call the Aupa-Devachan. These group 'I's of the minerals are also partially self-contained entities, just as the human 'I's are on the physical plane, as the group 'I's of the plants are on the lower devachan plane, and as the group 'I's of the animals are on the astral plane. On the physical plane, you have only a physical body of minerals, but the minerals also have an astral body and an etheric body. The seer sees the living connections; he knows that when he goes out to a quarry and sees the workers cutting stones there, something is felt there just as when you cut into the flesh of an organism. And while the workers are at work, astral currents flow through the stone realm. What belongs to the mineral as an astral body can be found in the lower parts of the Devachan plan, and the I of the minerals is to be found in the upper parts of the Devachan plan. The group I of the stones feels pain and pleasure. When you break stones, the mineral group I feels pleasure, pleasure. This may seem paradoxical at first, but it is true nonetheless. If you only think in analogies, you might believe that when you smash a stone, it hurts the stone just as much as if you were to wound a living being. But the more you smash the stone, the more pleasure the mineral ego feels. Now you may ask: When does the mineral ego feel pain? You can perceive pain for the mineral ego in the following example. Take a glass of water in which table salt has been dissolved. Now cool the water in the glass until the salt separates out as solid crystals, thereby re-solidifying the mineral substance. Pain arises in this separation of the solid. Similarly, pain would arise if you were to reassemble all the individual pieces into which you had broken a stone. In the group ego of the minerals, pleasure arises whenever the mineral dissolves, and pain arises whenever it solidifies. A feeling of well-being arises when you dissolve salt in heated water, and a feeling of pain arises when the cooling of the water causes the salt to crystallize.

If we imagine this in a larger, cosmic context, we can see how the formation of our earth and our minerals is connected to such a process. If we trace the formation of our Earth far back in time, we come to ever higher temperatures, to ever greater warmth of our Earth; and we encounter a state of our Earth in the Lemurian period when the individual stones had dissolved, when even the minerals that have now crystallized into solid form ran out, as iron runs out today in ironworks when it is liquefied. All our minerals have undergone a process similar to the one you are experiencing on a small scale when the dissolved salt is deposited in a glass when the water cools down. In this way, everything has solidified and contracted on earth. This solidification has taken place in such a way that solid crystals have gradually been embedded in the liquid earth through contraction. Only through this solidification could the earth become the dwelling place for today's physical humanity.

However, this solidification is to be understood in such a way that it reached a peak in a certain period of time. This peak has now been passed in a certain way, and today we can already see a process of dissolution to a greater or lesser extent. When the Earth has reached its goal, when people have purified and spiritualized themselves to the extent that they can no longer draw anything out of the Earth, then the Earth itself will also be spiritualized again. Then all its mineral inclusions will have become fine and ethereal, so that the Earth can pass into an astral state, which it also had before it became physical. The physical process of dissolution is a transitional state to this.

When we look at the earth at the time when it was preparing to become the solid place, the solid ground on which we walk at our present stage of development, we see an ongoing process of suffering for the earth. As it becomes more and more solid, it suffers and “groans in pain”. Our existence has been achieved through its pain. And we find an increase of this pain in the early part of the so-called Atlantean period. From the time when man gradually brought about his own purification, the earth also attained liberation from pain and suffering. This process is not yet far advanced. The greater part of the solid ground that lies under our feet still suffers today, and when we turn our clairvoyant gaze to it, the solid ground is a revelation of the sighs of the earth's being. Whoever studies these facts from the occult and then rediscovers them in the great religious scriptures, will realize from what depth of the spiritual world these scriptures are written. We develop more and more a feeling of reverence for these religious documents. Through our experience, we can thus empirically recognize, by looking at the facts of the outer world, what real foundations underlie St. Paul's saying: “All nature groans in pain, awaiting adoption as a child.” Translate this saying of St. Paul's for yourself: All becoming earth is a becoming under pain, a drawing together into the firm under pain, so that afterwards for their beings the “adoption as children,” the spiritualization, can take place.

In what is really called the Secret School we must begin with such images from our environment, which, when they are looked at, awaken feelings in us. One begins by imparting to the pupil who wishes to undergo a training such images and concepts that enable him to see what is happening in nature not only as an external process, but to feel it as an inner experience with his whole soul, to feel how the becoming of our earth, its solidification, is like pain. This image of pain represents a real spiritual fact. In true occultism, images are not something invented, but are derived from real spiritual facts. No philosophy, no speculation, not the greatest acumen can unravel such an image; only the knowledge of the facts of the higher worlds leads to understanding. In occultism, all images are expressions of spiritual facts.

I just wanted to give you a hint today of how what we acquire in elementary theosophy as ideas, concepts and notions gradually leads to experiences; and every image in occultism is taken only from experiences. If you take, for example, the well-known image of the swastika, you can find the most astute interpretations for this image in the various scriptures. How did it originally come into occultism? This image is nothing other than the reflection of what we call the astral sense organs. Through a certain approach, through training, the human being can develop astral sense organs. These two lines (it is being drawn) are actually movements in the astral body, which are seen by the clairvoyant as fiery wheels or flowers. They are called lotuses.

For these wheels or lotus flowers – of which, for example, the two-petalled one is located in the area of the eyes and the sixteen-petalled one in the area of the larynx – for these astral sense organs, which appear as a luminous phenomenon in the astral world, is the sign, the image, the swastika. Or let us take another symbol, the so-called pentagram. You cannot find the original meaning of the pentagram by speculation or philosophy. The pentagram is a reality; it is a picture of the working of currents, of force currents that are found in the etheric body of the human being. There is a certain flow of forces in a person from the left foot up to a certain point on the head, from there to the right foot, from there to the left hand, from there through the body, through the heart to the right hand, and from there back to the left foot, so that you can draw into the person – into his head, arms, hands, legs, feet – the pentagram.

You have to imagine it as a force effect, not just as a geometric figure. In the etheric body of the human being you have the pentagram. The force effects follow exactly these lines of the pentagram. The lines can take the most varied contortions, but they always remain drawn as a pentagram on the human body. The pentagram is an etheric reality, not a symbol, but a fact.

Thus every symbol in occultism is an image of a fact in the spiritual world. One recognizes its significance only when one can point to the world in which this fact is rooted. Therefore, even the greatest acumen cannot lead to the interpretation of occult signs. The meaning of occult signs and symbols can only be found through experience [of spiritual worlds], and only with the realization of their meaning can man do something with them. It is therefore by no means useless for man to be told and told something that was first found through clairvoyant ability. And from the fact that has been researched, man can in turn be led back to the causes of that fact itself.

The same applies to signs and symbols as to ancient legends and myths. It is a theory based on erudition that legends and myths were invented by folk poetry. The people do not make up stories. All legends and myths are remnants of a time when man was still clairvoyant to a certain extent. What we are told in European legends and myths are records of facts that people saw in the past. Everything in these legends, fairy tales and myths was originally seen clairvoyantly and is the retelling of original clairvoyant experiences. That is what mythology is all about: the retelling of clairvoyant experiences.

Even today we can follow all the events related in mythology on the astral plane. The deeds of Wotan or Odin are real happenings. We must seek realities behind the occult signs, symbols and seals. And the less one allows oneself to be tempted to undertake an interpretation of these signs out of speculation, the better it is.

This lecture series is intended to guide us into the factual sense of occultism. No sign is invented or conceived; it is a picture or reproduction of a real process in the spiritual world. And all the stories we encounter in mythologies are renditions of what people saw when a large proportion of people still had clairvoyant powers.

If we want to understand the human being in his relationship to the world, we must always bear in mind that the whole reality of the human being contains, on the one hand, everything that, as it were, shines forth from prenatal life, that is, the life that the human being has led between the last death and this birth in the supersensible worlds. This life is naturally of a completely different nature than the life that is led here through the senses and through that will that is bound to the physical organs of man. But this prenatal life does play a part in our earthly life. Regarding this prenatal life, one must ask oneself the question: to what extent does it play a part in this earthly life? One must think of some kind of conclusion to this prenatal life. We must think of some kind of conclusion to this prenatal life. Perhaps we can gain a picture of it through some kind of comparison with earthly life, a picture that arises from spiritual contemplation of this prenatal life. This picture can perhaps best be gained by first thinking of the end of physical life on earth.

What I am about to say now, I say only to give you a picture, because the actual facts on which this picture is based come from spiritual research, from spiritual insight as such. When a person passes through physical death, when his higher organization withdraws from the lower organization, then the corpse remains behind and this corpse is then surrounded by the ordinary earthly laws, while he, let us say, lives on within the whole earthly organization.

What the human being goes through when he enters the sensual life from the supersensible life is to be imagined similarly. From the moment of conception or birth, the supersensible life stands behind the sensual life. This supersensible life is not at first such that man can develop a full consciousness in it. It is filled with the state of consciousness that is a dull, dark one, which man here on earth only goes through between falling asleep and waking up. It can be said that the supersensible nature of man always returns to the region in which man is between death and a new birth when falling asleep. But it is always dull when man remains in this time between falling asleep and waking up. In a sense, he does not live fully consciously in this state. But it is precisely this state of not fully conscious life in his self, into this state man has come by descending into a physical organism. And this dulling of consciousness, this inner darkening of consciousness, that corresponds to the approach to death in the physical life for the time between death and a new birth. Man, as it were, dies for the supersensible life when he moves towards birth, and he then also hands over to human life a kind of corpse. Just as the physical man, when he dies, hands over to earth a kind of corpse, so the man also hands over a kind of corpse to this human life here on earth when he is born. And this creature that we then carry within us, which is, as it were, dead to the supermundane life, is actually our ordinary thinking life, the thinking life that does not allow itself to be fertilized by the supersensible world, by imagination, by inspiration, by intuition.

Thus we can say: In our thinking we actually carry around with us the corpse that we took with us from the supersensible world. That is why this thinking is so very poorly suited to grasp the dead world, because it is actually the corpse of our supersensible being. We must realize that in our thinking we have the only conscious remnant of the supersensible world, but that it is a dead creature, just as it lives in us as thinking. We do indeed carry the dead supersensible world around with us in our thinking.

Now, in every physical human life here on earth, this dead thinking would not only lead to physical death, but also to the death of the soul, if this dead creature were not revived during life. Yes, it is revived! And it is revived by the fact that in our soul life, alongside thinking, the will is activated, as it were in opposition to thinking. The will is that which emerges from our entire organization, from our earthly organization, in order to enliven our dead thinking. And our earthly life is basically the lasting connection between dead thinking and the will that is reborn in us during each earthly life through our life's journey. This will is always being reborn. It then leaves its remnants behind when we pass through the gate of death. And when it is exhausted in the supersensible world, then thinking becomes dead again, and then it must go down again into the physical-sensual world. You see how we human beings are indeed a twofold creature in this respect, how we carry within us the remains of prenatal life and how, due to our organization, we have the young life of will, which must connect with the aged life of thinking, and which we then carry through the gate of death.

The physical expression of the human organization is entirely appropriate to this psychological structure of the human world. On the one hand, the head organization clearly shows anyone who wants to study it impartially that it is a kind of end organization, the most perfect product of the evolution of humanity, but also one that is coming to an end. In the head organization we have the human organization that is constantly wrestling with death, which is completely adapted to dead thinking. In contrast, in the organization of the rest of our human organism, we have that which is adapted to the organization of the will that is always born young. Therefore, everything that is connected with our head organization points us back to the past; everything that is connected with the rest of our organization points us to the future, points us to the future in a physical sense, and also points us to the future in a physical-spiritual sense. Our head is the metamorphosis of the rest of our organism from the previous incarnation, naturally in terms of forces, not physical substances. And the rest of our organism is transformed into the metamorphosis of the head for the next incarnation. This is something we have already explained here several times.

As a result, we as human beings are always confronted on the one hand with that which is more imbued with the life of ideas and which is more organized towards death. From this arises everything that urges us to develop insights. The more perfect a person becomes in their development on earth, the more dead their thinking becomes, so to speak, the more dead their head organization becomes. He will look more and more with this organization at the world that spreads around him, will try to understand this world, but he will also, if he does not want to lose the consciousness of his human dignity, have to look within, at what arises as newly born will and what holds up the moral ideals to him, what holds up the ideals of his actions, of his deeds, to him. But because man is split in two in the way I have indicated, the conflict arises between the world of natural necessity, which he tries to grasp intellectually, and the world of morality, which then elevates itself to the religious and which finds no points of reference to unite with the world, with the world picture that comes from knowledge of nature. This discord has been carried to the highest degree in our age. Just think how, after their knowledge of nature, people today reflect on how the earth was formed out of the primeval nebula, purely through natural causality, and how man also came into being in the course of this earth's development, and how this will then take millions of years. Man is enmeshed in this natural causality according to his physical organization. His moral ideals arise from it. He would like to found a world on the basis of these moral ideals. But what can he think about this moral world when he has to look at the end of the development of the earth, which will fall back into the sun like a cinder, with all that is on it? He must ask himself: What then is the actual state of all that is set up as moral ideals when this moral world has no basis in natural necessity, when it is, so to speak, only the smoke that rises from the processes that result from natural necessity?

This conflict weighs very heavily today on those people who have unbiased and internalized ideas about the world. Only a certain levity of life allows people to look past this conflict in life. But there is no way of overcoming this conflict in life other than genuine spiritual science. Natural science, to which people today particularly surrender as an authority when it comes to knowledge, shows that what is the beginning and end of the earth can be calculated: a formless cosmic fog is the beginning, the end of the earth is bleak, and an episode in between is people living in moral, ethical, and moral illusions. But that must be so during our incarnation on earth. The moral laws, as we experience them in our earthly humanity, are not the same as the laws of nature. If they were such laws, we would not be able to organize freedom within us. If freedom were driven like any natural process, you would not be able to develop freedom within you. It is precisely the fact that the organization of the earth is called upon to integrate freedom into the human being that makes it necessary for man, through his own inner being, must look up to the world of natural necessity that surrounds him, and can only absorb into himself the moral ideals, which are not laws such that nature would also carry them out. What we have in our world view of nature does not guarantee that what we want to establish as humanity and world in our moral ideals will be carried out.

But as things stand now, they will not always stand. They will not always stand in such a way that the world of moral ideals and the world of natural necessity stand in stark opposition to each other. After all, the earth is coming to an end, and from the spiritual-scientific point of view, as I have often explained here, this end looks different from the end that the knowledge of nature calculates. This end of the earth will come about when the periods of time have played themselves out that we can imagine correctly by looking, for example, at the period of time that preceded our period of time, which began around 747 BC and ended around 1413 AD. So now we are living in the year 1920. A period of time will occur that will again last as long as this period; that is ours. Then two more will follow, and if we survey these periods spiritually until the next end of our cultural periods and then imagine that something is added that is connected to even larger periods of the length of the Atlantic period, we certainly arrive at an end of the earth that is small compared to the millions or even billions of years that are calculated by correct but unrealistic calculations of natural science.

But when the Earth draws to its close, the relationship between the world of moral ideals and the world that enters into today's human perception will be different. The moral laws and the physical laws will move closer together. Now we live in an age where the two are separate. The spiritual researcher can already perceive how they are drawing together, how, for example, what is experienced in spiritual worlds is already having effects that last just as long as the effects of nature do. A uniting of the spiritual laws of morality and the physical laws of natural phenomena is perceived by the spiritual researcher, and he can see how, at the end of the earth, the whole development of that which goes through this end of the earth and goes to a next planetary embodiment will experience a union between the world of moral ideals and the world of natural laws. The moral ideals will become as the laws of nature are today, and the laws of nature will become as — by drawing near, the two — as the moral laws are today. The world of morality and natural law will not be a duality at the end of the world, but we are going through a period in which the one will be a unity. In this unity, many things will be bound and many things will be loosed that today are thought to be unbindable or unloosable.

The spiritual researcher is confronted with very special things, and I do not want to shrink back from developing such things in more detail, especially at this point, even if it means greater opposition from the outside world, which understands and wants nothing of what is being done here. But it is of no use to become callous to what is to be cultivated on anthroposophical soil. We must fight through what is formed by the fact that so much in the present world fights against a genuine striving for truth. From the point of view of this question, the spiritual researcher is also opposed to all the terrible things that have happened in the last five to six years, for example. We have really experienced things that have never been experienced before in the whole of human evolution, especially not experienced in such a way that knowledge of nature was used to destroy so much. Of course, much has been destroyed in the past; but that was all a trifle, because knowledge of nature was not there to cause such destruction. Just think how enormous areas of the earth have been simply shaved away for long, long times by covering the earth in concrete or the like. Just consider what human 'art' has been able to do in these five to six years to destroy what nature has created into the insubstantial. One need only strike this note and one points to something tremendous, but it also confronts the spiritual researcher in a significant way, in a tragically significant way. What actually goes on in the mind of today's materialist when he looks at these things? He sees the end of the earth when entropy is fulfilled, when everything is transformed by the heat death on earth, when the earth is close to its physical end. Then other people will have lived long ago who in turn dreamt of other moral ideals. But what has been concreted in for the destruction of nature, for the destruction of human creativity and so on, is insubstantial.

The spiritual researcher cannot go along with this realization of the materialist, because something else presents itself to him. He visualizes the moment of the end of the earth, when natural laws and moral laws form a unity, when that which man has morally accomplished, or, let us say in this case better, has immoralized will continue to have its effect as natural law, so that at the end of the earth there will come a point in time when the end of the earth is there, when the earth passes through other stages of formation, but when natural laws and moral laws are one. And then it passes over to the next planetary embodiment, which I have called the Jupiter embodiment in my “Occult Science in Outline”.

There will again be periods of development; but there will no longer be the mineral kingdom, there will be something else in the place of the mineral kingdom. We human beings will not carry within us the inclusions of the mineral kingdom, but at the bottom the inclusions of the plant kingdom, and what has happened in the way of morality or immorality, what has been taken up from the working of nature, will work its way over. And just as in our fifth earthly period, in the fifth earthly period, what we have seen as horrors wafting over the earth have happened, so, after these horrors, that is, the impulses for them, will be taken up by that process, which will be on Jupiter, a natural-moral process, a moral-natural process, so that what has developed in this fifth period of time will recur in the third period of time on Jupiter at a different level.

What will confront humanity in this future from the natural configuration of the next, the Jupiter period of the earth, will be what will then be natural processes. But they will be natural processes. They will be countered by the plant kingdom, which will then be the lowest, by what we can call poisonous plants of a vegetable nature. This has been sown through these last five to six years, which is a poisonous swamp material that will rise, that will grow into the period of Jupiter that will arise from this earthly existence. It is not that the moral or the immoral will pass away; a unity of effect is forming between the moral and the natural law, and that which has worked in terms of moral or immoral impulses in the whole of humanity will be carried over. I would like to say that humanity now has the choice of remaining thoughtless about the great interrelationships in which it is actually involved as humanity, living in the earthly human existence like a stupid animal and thinking: There are the laws of nature, according to which we calculate that a Kant-Laplacean world view corresponds to the beginning of the earth and a heat-death-like state caused by entropy corresponds to the end of the earth, that basically we can do whatever we like, yes, that we can murder millions: when heat-death has occurred, then they have simply been murdered along with us, and the impulses that led to their murder have no significance beyond this heat-death. Man must believe such things because of present-day materialism; but then he lives like a stupid animal. He lives so that he gives no thought to his connection with the whole of cosmic existence. That is the danger today, that man is losing the ability to think about his connection with the cosmic existence. Then insane ideas arise, such as the Kant-Laplacean theory or that of the heat death of the Earth; whereas in fact the Earth is an organization that had its beginning in an age when the moral and the natural law were one, an organization that will find its end in a period when, again, the moral and the natural law will be one. If one does not broaden one's view beyond the immediate present to that which only spiritual science can teach, then one lives just like a stupid animal. Only by allowing one's view to be sharpened to the point where spirit becomes matter and matter becomes spirit, so that they form a unity, only by this means does one come to an awareness of human dignity, that is, to the consciousness of the connection between man and all cosmic forces, which are neither one-sided morality nor one-sided natural law, but are such that morality itself forms a natural order, and the natural order itself permeates morality.

These are also the moral reasons why it is necessary for man in the present time to broaden the horizon of his knowledge. If he does not broaden it, he narrows himself down to an understanding of the world that can only be exhausted in that which cannot go beyond the dualism between the moral conception of the world and the conception of the world in terms of natural law. But in so doing, man narrows his view of the world to such an extent that it is impossible for him to truly understand himself in his entire being.

From this you can see that it is not really a matter of curiosity for knowledge that should be satisfied by what is done in spiritual science, but that there is a moral necessity for the spread of spiritual science. For what has guided people up to their present state has precisely produced the fact that today man cannot grasp how the moral world order and the physical world order are interrelated; they cannot penetrate each other today because man is to become a free being. But man must look at the nodal points of the world in such a way that in them the natural order and the moral order are one. It is basically a terrible thing when today, of all times, it is calculated how our earth would have begun from purely physical conditions, and how it would end up in purely physical conditions again. One should not believe that the traditional creeds, in the form they are, save man from this decline, as it is indicated in the words I have used today. It is these traditional creeds that have made the spiritual more and more abstract and have given rise to dualism, which has brought it to the point that man hardly feels the need to seek the bond between the natural order and the moral order. If he seeks it today, if he seeks it with all his heart, then he can only find it in spiritual science, which points him to the end and the beginning of the earth as the nodes of world evolution where the moral becomes natural and the natural becomes moral.

But then, in fact, all that surrounds us and into which we are integrated is interspersed with moral responsibility for us. We human beings, after all, to a certain extent, live through the image of the whole organization of the earth by having successive embodiments of life in our earthly existence. We live successive earthly lives in that we always seek to balance between birth and death that in which we lapse into one-sidedness between birth and death, seeking balance between death and a new birth. We oscillate back and forth between the life of the senses and the supersensible, seeking balance, and at the end of our earthly existence we will pass through a world that is very similar to the supersensible world, but where everything supersensible will take on the supersensible form that we have developed into at that time.

In the scheme of the world, our thinking is older than our present-day sensory perception. This does not contradict the fact that our sense organs were laid down in the first earth embodiment that we can trace. But this sensory perception, as we have it now, has only developed during the time on earth, while thinking, which is very much pushed back in our organization, was already present during the old moon time, even if in images. The sensory-physical organization has only come into existence during our existence on earth, up to the organs that perceive the sensory, namely how our senses, as they are developed today, perceive it. And what we perceive with our senses today, is that as fleeting as it seems? Yes, you see, man thinks. He looks at the green plant today, he looks at the red rose today. He thinks what is happening between his sense organs and the outer world as a passing thought. It is not a passing thought! It leaves an effect on the whole human organization. It does matter what you have focused your senses on. It is all contained in your human organization, and the entire scope of your sensory perception is seen in the impressions of the etheric body when it passes through the death of the earth and is taken over into the supersensible world in the astral impression. And that which is thus carried by us through death here on earth accumulates and we then carry it further over through this state of the end of the earth. Certainly, we carry nothing of our flesh over into the Jupiter period; but we carry over very much of what the effects of these perceptions are. This is already being prepared in the colorful images we have between death and a new birth, but it will undergo a significant intensification when we live through the state between the earth and Jupiter, which will be a moral-physical and a physical-moral state; through this we will be able to carry that which will become organized in us by our perceiving with our higher senses. That which is being organized within us is capable of passing through a world that is moral-physical and physical-moral, where natural laws are ideal laws and ideal laws are natural laws.

When we look at a rainbow today – and I know that I am speaking only comparatively and that any seemingly trained physicist can correct the way I use it, but that is not the point here – when we look at a rainbow today, spreading a large spectrum before us, the color floating in space appears before us separately. Something similar also forms when we do not see a rainbow, but when we just look at something that evokes the sensation of color in us; but something similar to what objectively forms out there when the rainbow appears to us , something similar happens in us with our etheric body and prepares for that body, which is now colored but then condensed, the transition between the earth and Jupiter. You see, at this point in spiritual science, man today can attain an inner consciousness of the unity of the moral and physical worlds, whereas otherwise the moral and physical worlds fall apart for today's materialistic consciousness. It is morally imperative that spiritual science be spread. For what human morality is evaporates and virtually vanishes if the physical world view alone were to prevail. Once one sees this, it is indeed bitterly disappointing, but the cause of this must be fought with all severity when one sees how people who claim to want to cultivate the spiritual life of humanity are fighting against this necessary, morally necessary cultivation of spiritual life.

There are always new examples of this “clean” fight. A particularly cute one has recently emerged. It ties in with – I don't know which side the things are always being talked about – it ties in with what Dr. Boos had said here about collecting trust notes. It is not for me to talk about this matter; but a supposedly good Christian paper in the local area finds it necessary to emphasize that this whole story is in turn a terrible danger for Swiss national identity. I would like to know whether the person who believes that Swiss national identity is particularly strong really believes that it will be shaken if anthroposophy is practiced? But you see, Swiss national identity is said to be in danger, and it is written about in such beautiful words: “As one can see, the anthroposophical cause stands on shaky ground. A secret circular, the mask of which we have torn off, is supposed to pave the way for Dr. Steiner's work, to make the authorities of the whole of Switzerland favorable to it, yes, to ensure that the immigration of foreign elements is not prevented. What does society care about our terrible housing shortage, what about the disastrous influence of this foreign race on our noble Swissness. They are turning to the Swiss people for help in destroying Swissness."

Now, it is pointed out that it is bad that non-Swiss impulses should play a role here. But now follows a sentence that neatly adds to the whole thing, which raises the question: where does the right come from to make this accusation of supposedly foreign impulses? It says: “For us Catholics, the position is clear. We have received word from Rome that no Catholic, directly or indirectly, may assist this new sect. We therefore consider it our sacred duty to alert wide circles to the new peasant catchers.”

These people, who want to save the Swiss people from foreign influences, get their influences, to which they point with their whole clenched fist, not from Bern or from Zurich from the Swiss people, but from Rome! Strange logic? You see, that is the logic of today. That is how people think - but without realizing it. And they don't realize it because our education, which comes from our educational institutions, allows such thinking. Those people who write this know what they want with it and that is why they can write such stuff. But numerous other sleeping souls, they first have to be made aware with harsh words that such follies are simply accepted today as logic and they are not recognized as follies. They are the hallmarks of the drowsiness of souls today. That is why it is so necessary to keep pointing out in no uncertain terms that souls should wake up, that they should look at what lives in our mired thinking, what things one is allowed to say today without the drowsy souls realizing that it is also a common nonsense in terms of logic.

This also shows us from another side the moral necessity that should spur us on to be a real support for spiritual science, not to continue sleeping, but to wake up and be a real support for spiritual science. You will find the logic that people here are counting on not to notice practiced everywhere in scientific books today. Go through the hypotheses, go through all the stuff that today forms the Kant-Laplace delusion for the faithful followers, then you will find in all of this the reason why people are still allowed to fool humanity with such things today. Look for it in the supposedly exact scientific hypotheses and theories that have been characterized here in recent days. Look for it in them. They force people to send young people to these universities where they are taught experimental knowledge, but their thinking, their whole soul life is thoroughly “de-logicalized”. And people do not want to look at the necessity that spiritual life must indeed stand on its own in the threefold social organism. People do not want to look at the evidence that can be seen everywhere. It must be said: It will not take long, because the powers that be, who use all means to count on people's illogicality, have good ground today. And if those who understand a little of what needs to be done continue to sleep, then it will come to pass that, for the time being, at least, the grave will be dug for European culture, and then a deliverance must come from quite different quarters.

I have often spoken here of the responsibility that exists for the various parts of European humanity. One should become aware of this responsibility. This responsibility is a great one. And it is not enough to think up all kinds of little remedies and believe that you can make your way with them. Today, we must recognize that our entire spiritual life is in need of renewal and that precisely this spiritual life cannot continue as it has developed into our times.

Today I would like to continue our examination of the things we began eight days ago. Not long ago, one of our Theosophical friends showed me a letter written in response to an invitation from a southern German pastor to the Theosophical friend. Our friend thought it might be a good idea to invite the gentleman in question to the lecture on the wisdom teachings of Christianity because he believed that the gentleman was actually preaching Theosophy and that a connection could be made between Theosophy and the pastor's understanding of Christianity. The answer given by the person concerned was interesting. He refused to come that evening. He was prevented by external circumstances. But he said that he had studied Theosophy and had also tried to read some issues of “Lucifer - Gnosis” and that he could see from them that the purpose of Theosophy is to renew certain old Gnostic ideas. He could not really see anything special in all these efforts, because he preferred to gain a direct relationship with his God and not to be satisfied with a relationship with divinity that was mediated by many intermediate beings. This is a very characteristic answer, which I mention because it is given by so many people today. A great many people say this, and I say this not as a criticism of our contemporaries, but simply as an observation, for the phenomenon is as justified as can be. It arises entirely from our sense of the times. I say that this answer is given frequently today. People think that one is actually doing something that does not quite correspond to today's consciousness and feelings if one assumes, in addition to the sensual world in which we live and the divinity that permeates the world, a whole series of intermediate beings, let us say gods or spiritual entities. For four centuries, humanity has been educated in this view. It is therefore not surprising that such a feeling has become general today, and that people believe that Theosophy has a little too much to do with all the different spirits and spiritual entities, with a whole hierarchy of spiritual entities between people, and of which one can have no consciousness, but only an inkling.

The doctrine of such a large number of spiritual beings is not new, but as old as humanity itself. The time in which one believes one can ignore this feeling of the spiritual is actually short in relation to the great time of development. Where there was an awareness of the real significance and depth of the spiritual world, there was never the widespread opinion that one can disregard spiritual beings and their knowledge. I have often mentioned here that Theosophy as such is nothing particularly new, that it only represents the popularization, the generally understandable proclamation of teachings, which have always been cultivated in the so-called brotherhoods. Only the way in which people came by these teachings was different in the past centuries than it is today. Fifty years ago, one could not have spoken of all the things we are talking about today. At that time, anyone who wanted to know something like that was definitely required to seek admission to a so-called occult school, and no one was introduced to such significant and far-reaching ideas as can be found today in every little manual of Theosophy. You had to acquire the ability to become acquainted with such things slowly and gradually, you had to complete and study degree after degree. Each new degree one acquired first entitled one to take in certain higher views. And the education within such a degree consisted in one getting the feeling that what one received in the ascending development of mankind from the teachers of occult schools was the true, correct and essential. This was not because it was forbidden - no criticism of the occult teacher - but because one gradually became convinced that it would be nonsense to criticize the occult teachers, just as it would be absurd for a child to criticize the multiplication table before he could do so, or for a student of geometry if he was not yet ready to understand it. In the same way, in the past one would never say, “I don't like that, it doesn't suit me,” and so on. One took it for granted because one was prepared for it.

Today we are obliged to introduce a further circle without such preparation and to speak of the elementary teachings of occultism. I have often explained the reasons why spiritual teaching is proclaimed before all people. Do not think that what we are allowed to proclaim of these occult teachings is the whole teaching of occultism. It is the very first. And the times will not come for a long time yet when the deeper teachings can be communicated. But these too will come, when it will also be possible to open up higher spiritual worlds. Today it is only necessary to proclaim and introduce people to as much as the course of time requires of us. Those who are sitting here have, for the most part, been here often, and for this reason assertions and communications can be made here all the time, which appear grotesque and paradoxical to those on the outside, to those who come to a public lecture, fantastic, if not crazy. But the deeper truths, especially those that constitute the very nerve of life, the deepest laws of world knowledge, these teachings appear at first to those who are only captivated by external sensuality and to what is otherwise said to them about the spiritual world as illusory, as paradoxical. For those who penetrate deeper and deeper into today's world, it is precisely what our senses teach us in our ordinary lives and what our minds can convey to us that appears as an illusion. Now, for centuries, humanity has lost the power to truly distinguish between spiritual things, and that, my esteemed audience, is something you consider to be essential in the introduction to today's lecture, that humanity's powers of discernment have somewhat diminished over the last four centuries.

This is why objections can be made as in the letter mentioned. Imagine what such an objection means. It is exactly the same as if you wanted to make someone a suggestion that they should come to a lecture on botany and they wrote back: I have read a little about botany, read that it distinguishes between different plants - orchids, oaks, palms and so on - but it does not interest me further. I don't want to distinguish between individual plants, I want to be content with a general, direct feeling of plant life as such. I know that the world has plants: oaks, lilies, tulips, poplars - these are plants; but it is an exaggerated gnosis for me to first have to distinguish between lilies, firs, tulips, poplars. I am content with the fact that in general there is something spiritual, something divine that permeates the world. What are people talking about with such entities? Such a person is in the same situation as the one who objects to the distinction in botany. Humanity has lost some of this discernment over the centuries. But this discernment must be awakened again today. That is precisely the purpose of the theosophical worldview. For one who knows the spiritual connections, it is really not an easy decision to go before the world and speak of the great connections between the great spiritual beings, because he knows how hard it is to achieve understanding in this time and how man can be misled by such discussions about the spiritual beings. But at the same time, one must look into the course of the spiritual world.

It is little known that the phenomena of the world occur in so-called cycles. Today, in materialistic times, the regular, rhythmic course of even fatal phenomena in the world is overlooked. But he who looks into the hustle and bustle of the great human spiritual life sees something approaching, something that is revealing itself more and more to humanity. What I am about to say is also paradoxical, but it will only be recognized all too clearly in some time, perhaps in the not too distant future. What is in store for humanity, must be in store simply because of the materialism that has been preparing itself for four centuries, that is a certain loss of spiritual life, a confusion in spiritual life, which would most certainly develop into a kind of spiritual disease, into a kind of epidemic, if the teachers of spiritual life did not work to counteract this spiritual epidemic through their teachings. We would be facing that today. It is slowly preparing itself. Those who do not have eyes do not see, and those who do not have ears do not hear, even if they are in psychiatry. But those who can observe spiritually know the danger that man is in. This danger need not come, but it would come if the human spirit is not strengthened again through life, that is, if it does not receive a true center. The purpose of Theosophy is to produce firm, strong character in the depths of the soul, and not to allow any spiritually vacillating nature to arise. He who scurries about with his knowledge, flitting like a will-o'-the-wisp through the outer material phenomena of existence, today inclined to this person and tomorrow to that, is exposed to the great danger of losing his spiritual center. And it does not help if we imbue this scurrying with general ideas of divinity and spirituality. Just as the only ruler and safe in the plant kingdom is he who has learned botany, so only he can be sure of the spiritual beings — which are there after all — who has knowledge of the spiritual world.

In the past, no one ever said anything about higher spiritual entities. Those who were mature enough sought and found it. They came to people who could initiate them by no mere coincidence. It was the great spiritual human magnetism that necessarily draws the student to the teacher. They may seemingly encounter an innocent person, in the waiting room or on the train, where they may have to sit for hours. Then you will enter into conversation with such a person. It seems to be by chance, but in reality it is a necessity for you. You may find in such a person the one who has the most significant influence on you, who may be your occult teacher. So it has come about that this inner psychic magnetism has diminished to such an extent that this power no longer plays. You no longer find it so easy to connect with the actual spiritual teachers.

Therefore, it has become necessary to develop the occult teachings in an elementary way through the spoken word to the larger masses of our contemporaries, so that everyone can say to themselves, there and there is a center; if I want, I can join. Actually, no one should be asked to join any secret science current. How far the individual goes must be his absolutely free decision. One should never act under the sign of occultism, as is the view today. Such agitation brings about what should not be in this field. Those who join without actually being seekers say, “I like this and I don't like that – and this is not the right thing.” Actually, the principle of social union is not the right one, as in Buddhism. It is only a surrogate today because people join together socially for everything. What is right in occultism is the grouping.

Nor is there any sense in joining a society for the purpose of occultism, just as there is no sense in joining in relation to geometry. You can learn geometry from someone who knows geometry, but you cannot discern the truth of geometry in a society. The occult is a small circle within our society. The Theosophical Society is an administrative matter. But the occult life cannot be cultivated in any other way than the one I have tried to explain. Those who have settled into the occult life know that the great security of the inner soul character can only be achieved if one has the power of discernment within the spiritual world.

I had to presuppose this because, with teachings such as we will now develop, we will encounter the same contradictions over and over again.

Now I would like to expand on what we discussed last time. I have already indicated that there are four levels of knowledge. These four steps have always been cultivated wherever there have been occultists. Not arbitrarily, my esteemed audience, through deliberation, through reasoning, through speculation, has humanity gained knowledge of the higher spiritual worlds and their beings, but by forming the spiritual organs through which one can gain experience in these higher worlds.

Now let us briefly bring these stages of higher life before our soul. The ordinary knowledge that is peculiar to all people in the world is called material knowledge. This material knowledge is almost the only thing that people today know. Almost no other form of knowledge is known today than this material knowledge. You seek it in everyday life, whether you are dancing, cooking or doing something else, and you recognize in this way. But even in the anatomical dissecting room, in the laboratory and in all of science, there is nothing but material knowledge. It is the first step of knowledge. It is not the case that the occultist wants to criticize material knowledge. Material knowledge has its full justification in life. It must be said, however, that there are higher levels of knowledge. You have to be aware of this material knowledge in its individual parts.

There are four elements involved in material cognition. Now, please follow me closely. What belongs to ordinary material cognition? Imagine that you are to look at this flower from the point of view of material cognition. Four things are necessary for this material cognition to come about. First, the flower, which is the object. Secondly, the image of the object. If you want to appreciate something like this at all, you have to engage in such subtle things. Thirdly, the concept. This is something different from the image. The concept is attained through inner spiritual work. The image remains as an impression of the object on your soul. But the concept is something else. I will make it even clearer.

Imagine: many people have looked at the starry sky. They either had the image without the concept or the concept and also the image. The astronomer has a concept of the starry sky and the image; the farmer has an image of it, but no concept. You can see here that the concept and the image are different. Let's take the concept of a circle. The circle is a line that extends equally from the center.

The fourth is the I, yourself. If you consider these four things, you have the components of ordinary material knowledge. That by which the image comes about in material cognition is called sensation.

The second level of knowledge, which also exists, differs from the first in that the external object is absent, and with it the sensation. That which gives you the stimulus for the image is gone. All that you recognize in this way, that an object has an effect on you, is precisely not the second level of knowledge. You have to imagine that the whole world is gone. Now, the materialistic person says that there is nothing left at all. But that is what matters, that you still have something. Indeed, the one who does not undergo development has nothing left when he closes his eyes. He has the empty, dark space around him. The second stage of realization is developed through so-called meditation. The external object has gone. What is still present is the image, the concept and the I. These three are still there. The fact that there is no external object, only the image, tempts many to say: this is fantasy.

It can be, and it will always be fantastic if it is not systematically developed. To regard it as fantastic just because one has only an image would be foolishness. If someone could invent the dirigible balloon in a dream and then realize it, it does not matter whether he made the discovery while dreaming or while awake. If you can become convinced that what appears to you in dreams is true, then it is right – and that is what it is about. The object that otherwise causes sensation must be replaced. What occurs is what in occultism is called illumination. And this whole cognition, which again has four parts – namely image, concept, I and illumination – is now called imaginative cognition. This imaginative cognition is trained through meditation. I have often described how this is done. One cannot meditate without the guidance of someone who has experience in this field. Meditation proceeds in such a way that the meditator really loses sight of the objects around him, that he makes himself blind and deaf and then also loses his memory, so that the soul is completely empty of external objects. You have to be able to fire a cannon without paying attention, then you have achieved the stillness of the soul.

Then, through practice, illumination must be stimulated. You can recognize that you have achieved something by noticing that your dreams no longer have a chaotic character. You have to pay attention to the fact that the dream world is calm and steady. In the case of ordinary people, their dream world is usually one in which they have reminiscences or in which they experience the moods of their external lives in their dreams. So when he meditates, the dream world begins to take on a regular character. He then gets to know things he does not know. Dreams speak in symbols first. This must be felt. But that is where people usually go too far. They try to interpret these dream images. But they should not be interpreted intellectually. The legend of digging for treasure also refers to this fact. It says that when you dig a treasure, you must not speak, otherwise it cannot come out. Even if you say something inwardly, that is, quibble, that is already a danger. You can only speak to someone who has precise experience of this matter. But if you quibble, then the intellect begins to act like a scorching, burning fire on the fine spiritual life.

One should experience dreams very intimately, treat them like very delicate things to which one surrenders with intuition, and not interpret things in sharp, rough lines of the mind. One must do this for the reason that the dream images, when they occur with a reality value, then have such a rich and comprehensive reality value that the ordinary powers of the mind are not sufficient to grasp them. They destroy their inner life when they approach the cobweb-like inner structures with the outer mind. This is how this wonderful life begins, how the inner illuminations begin, and soon you become aware that a new world is opening up in them. Through them you get to know something that is quite different from this ordinary, material world around you.

I would like to understand how it is structured in terms of a way of perceiving within the illumination. Take this flower, for example. It is yellow and has green leaves. Let's look at the colors first. These colors are spread over the surface of the object, so to speak. Think about the fact that you usually perceive color as appearing spread over the surface of the body. Try to consider how seldom it happens that you see colors separate from objects. At most, you have this with a rainbow. You can roughly imagine this when you see a sunbeam entering a dusty room. You have a rough sense of a color. Now imagine that the yellow is not attached to the object, but is free like flakes of color floating through space. Now imagine a room like this, filled in all directions with these color flakes and color formations, and you will have something approximating what you will see when you visualize the world of illumination in terms of colors.

Occult students with a softer nature than Westerners do very special exercises. Westerners are much too compact for that. But because of their soft nature, the Orientals have the opportunity to do these exercises. The Oriental yogi sits down and looks at the color of such a flower, turns all his attention to that color, lives in that color so that he is able to withdraw his attention completely from the object and fix it only on the color, then he acquires the ability to hold the color even when the object is gone. Then it becomes possible for him to gradually bring this floating world of color into consciousness.

The same can be said for the world of sound and for other forms of the world. You see: Man conquers a whole new field of perception. This world and these color flakes are always and everywhere there. These color flakes are not irregular, they are not just clouds flying around, but just as objects on the physical earth plane are not just blocks, but also entities, so too do entities reveal themselves in this flaky world of colors. They have no bones and no flesh, they are incarnated in the substance that I have just described.

So these are the bodies of certain entities. The forms of the entities that you can get to know, once you have generated the illumination so that you can perceive them in this space, are mostly the bodies of the spirits of the twilight. So you can perceive them as the outstanding spirits of this sphere: the spirits of the twilight, the lunar or moon Pitris. Such beings people themselves once were on the planet preceding our Earth. They have only attained their present form through their condensation. Those beings who have not attained human condensation, who have remained at that level, stand today in that world as Lunar Pitris, as spirits of the twilight.

Just as one has to become familiar with each realm in turn, ascending from the mineral realm to the plant realm to the animal realm, and one must not lump all three realms together, so too can we now ascend further to the realm of the lunar Pitris, who can manifest themselves in this so-called elemental realm. This is the first elemental realm - actually the third.

We have not been talking in vague terms, but have indicated a path that leads to the perception of a type of being that you will get to know in planetary development. These twilight spirits play a very special role in this. These are the beings that are closest to man in the spiritual world. Next time I will share something about the relationship between man and these spiritual beings. These entities are present around you and influence you continuously.

At the next level of realization, the image also disappears. So only the concept and the ego remain. This state is achieved through concentration. This consists of the person associating certain parts with certain parts of the organism. That which prevents him from blindly fantasizing, from inventing concepts, is something similar to the illumination of the previous level and the sensation of the level before that. So we have sensation, illumination and now, at the third stage, inspiration. Here, the object and the image are absent, and the concept acquires content through the inspiration that occurs. So here you are dealing with the I, the concept and inspiration.

Illumination has something light-like about it, which is why it is also called illumination. Inspiration is completely free of all these pictorial representations. Here the human being floats in the purely spiritual world. That is why it is also said that his ideas take on a content without the need for them to be images first. It is the word 'imageless' that can be used to compare it to. That is why it is also said that at this stage, a person receives the inner word, that is, he is able to find truths through inspiration, in that the spiritual world works into his understanding in such a way that it is not the image that affects him, but that the spirit speaks directly to him. The language of the spiritual world itself flows into his concepts. That is inspiration. It is the conversation with the beings of a spiritual world. The person is quietly closed in on himself, rejects everything visionary, everything pictorial, keeps quiet and still, and the spirits tell him the truth. That is the level of inspiration, the inner word. This level of inspiration makes it possible for a person to not only see objects wherever he goes, but for them to tell him something everywhere, so that he can hear everywhere what is buzzing around in a new space. This level of knowledge is what Goethe means when he speaks the words at the beginning of the prologue in heaven: “The sun resounds in the old way in the brother spheres of value singing.” This is not a phrase, it is reality. He speaks of the spiritual sun that resounds. The whole world becomes a resounding world that teaches us significantly about the inner core of our being. In this world, we then make acquaintance with a higher group of spiritual beings, which we call the sun spirits or also the fire spirits. Just as we got to know the spirits of twilight there, we get to know the spirits of fire here.

So we have: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, spirits of twilight, spirits of fire. The realization at this level is a volitional realization, because the power that one must particularly develop is the will. A special training of the will through concentration, through inner willpower and will education. One then makes the acquaintance of the beings that are growth-producing power, power of reproduction and so on. We get to know this in this way. That which exists everywhere of these fire spirits lives in all growing entities. The one who rises to an inspired realization is one who 'hears the grass growing'. The proverbs are often tremendous words of wisdom. At this level, all growth is heard. That which makes the beings grow is the power that lives in the fire beings.

Finally, there is still the [fourth] stage. The concept is still missing. Then there is only the I. There is no more recognition in the concept, there is a recognition without concept, a pure life in the spiritual. You creep into the beings you want to recognize. The coarsest form of recognition is in the material. Think how little you are able to penetrate a flower. You have to stay outside. In imaginative cognition, you have the images around you. In inspired cognition, the sounds from the outside world come to you. But now you enter into the beings. You are every being you recognize. Space and time cease to exist. You are where you recognize the corresponding being. You are no longer different from that being. Your ego has submerged in that being. And that is the realization through intuition – intuitive realization.

These are the four stages of realization. Through this intuitive realization, you get to know not only the outer appearance of the beings, but the beings in their inner being. The I expands to include the whole environment. The person who has attained this higher realization is called the “swan”. Lohengrin is led from a spiritual world into the physical world by a swan. Through this gift, one attains a knowledge that is only accessible to those who have the gift of transformation into these beings. If you want to rise to the level at which intuitive recognition stands, you must present yourself in such a way that intuitive recognition can transform into you. That is why Zeus had to transform himself into a swan so that he could be grasped. The legends all have a great relationship to this world existence.

Through this intuitive knowledge, you rise to the level of entities called the spirits of personality or the spirits of selfishness. Everything that lives in us as a principle, as an essence of selfishness, comes from this spiritual realm, the realm of the spirits of selfishness or personality. The spirits of selfishness have always been at work. First, the physical body is worked on by the spirits of selfishness, then the etheric body, and then the astral body. Therefore, as a kama-manasic being, man is an egoist. What he thinks is what is independent and also what is selfish. What these beings are can only be recognized when one stands at the stage that one can crawl into the being, into the ego of the beings. There you get to know the spirits of the personality.

So you see that it is not just talk when you find something like this in my 'Lucifer' or in Mrs. Besant's books, even if perhaps not under the same names. The spirits are not invented, but gained through the stages of knowledge. Therefore, we distinguish: mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, human, lunar Pitris or spirits of twilight, fire spirits or solar Pitris, spirits of egoism or spirits of personality - Suras and Asuras. Then the higher realms: spirits of form, spirits of movement and spirits of wisdom. We will talk about these four spiritual levels next time.

But you can already apply what I have said today in practice, namely that if you know something about this nature, even if you do not yet rise to the level of direct experience in this way, you will gain inner strength if you know even just a little. Man would completely lose his center in the coming decades if the knowledge of these things did not come. These entities do not exist in cloud-cuckoo-land, but surround us continually. The person standing in front of me is not just a human being, but interrelated with him is the Lunar-Pitri, the Solar-Pitri, the spirits of selfishness and so on. And they are constantly active in this person. I recognize something incompletely when I only have the outer person in front of me. Just imagine how insecure you would become if you were to go blind. Orientation in the new world is only made possible by new senses. In the same way, knowledge in the world is only made possible by knowing what is there. It makes us feel secure to know that such things exist, that such things are there. It is therefore necessary for humanity to know such things. In the fourth century, higher spiritual beings still led man, unconsciously. That is the higher development. The meaning of the materialistic time is that the spirits have fled to reappear in his consciousness. Man has descended into darkness to consciously ascend to the light again. That would be the greatest harm if man remained down here in darkness and did not find his way back to the light. The theosophical doctrine has not been brought out of mere caprice, but because it is a necessity for humanity. There have always been individuals in secret societies who had the realization. But it must become much more general. That is why the popular way in which these teachings are spread in theosophy.

Today I will have to say a few things about more recent historical developments from the point of view of the spiritual science which we are considering in these lectures. It will be necessary to take as read some of the things I said in the earlier lectures. Essentially this will be the only precondition. Something else which I will not be able to repeat, time being limited, in so far as it applies today is that along the lines I tried to give in the first lecture, this science of the spirit can confirm that human beings, striving with their powers of soul, must come to recognize a supersensible world, and that a specific training of these powers of soul—I have characterized this at least in principle—will enable human beings to gain insight into the facts pertaining to this supersensible world.

It is now a matter of applying these fundamental truths of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science to one of the most significant fields in human life, the field of history. I will, of course, have to limit myself to what is of most immediate concern to us, the historical evolution of humanity in more recent times. People who do not look far into the development of human civilization take history to be a very old field of study. The truth is, however, that history really only came to life just before the second half of the 18th century, arising from beginnings that could not yet be called history. And in the sense in which we are accustomed to think of history, having learned this at school, namely that history serves to study the laws that govern the evolution of the human race in the course of time—in this sense history is really only a child of the 19th century.

The study of history arose from the interest that people have always shown in other people and their destinies, in so far as those other people and their destinies had a connection with one’s own life, being on the periphery of one’s personal life experience. We might say it is a straight line from the family records that people use to inform themselves on their own nation and native land, and ultimately the efforts made to gain insight into the laws that govern the evolution of humanity as a whole. It is significant that the study of history, which before was always within the above-mentioned narrow confines, thus came to be extended to the whole of humanity. It has only been in the recent times which we intend to consider here that a wholly general, human interest in the evolution of humanity as a whole arose from the more or less narrowly defined interest shown by people.

This alone will show anyone who is prepared to see that human beings showing pure interest in other human beings as such is essentially of recent origin. Now the situation is such that exactly because history arises from people’s interest in people, an obstacle arises when history is supposed to rise to a higher level where insight is gained into the laws that govern human evolution. For here history is very easily taken into an abyss that at some time or other has threatened every kind of scientific study. The natural-scientific approach has almost completely overcome this in more recent times, but it will often and quite unconsciously influence the way people look at history. We may call it the anthropomorphic view. It arises because something found in the human being himself is taken out into the world and the phenomena which present themselves in the world. The most obvious, happily overcome in natural science, is that a person finds that when he achieves something he has been following a purpose, an aim. People are therefore inclined to look at anything that happens in the natural world, and also at historical developments, by looking for purposive actions in the same sense as one finds them in the inner human being, that is, in oneself.

Natural science has grown great in the more recent sense exactly because efforts are made not to take an anthropomorphic view, though this is in many respects unconscious. Goethe was justified in saying that people do not know how anthropomorphic they are.¹¹¹ In the case of history, however, there is the special temptation to see the things which we find in ourselves also in historical developments outside, for we are trying to consider something that is human. We overcome the obstacle—which existed to a greater or lesser degree for the most hardworking thinkers of recent times when they wanted to establish a kind of philosophy of history—basically only by going beyond the narrow limits set to human nature even as we consider the human being himself. Those limits are set because human beings act according to something that is immediately subjective, according to such aims as are possible in their inner life between birth and death.

If you overcome an inner nature that relies on the senses, with the life of the soul bound to it between birth and death, by rising higher and going beyond the senses, you can take the discoveries made in supersensible study of the human being out into historical evolution. For human beings go beyond themselves when they rise to their supersensible nature, and they can then no longer be anthropomorphic in the study of history, for they are no longer so in the way they look at their own essential nature. By just making efforts to overcome a particular obstacle to seeing the world clearly, we are thus taken beyond ourselves into the supersensible sphere.

If we are thus equipped to approach historical evolution with the powers that take us into the supersensible world, the facts of historical life appear in a completely new light, purely because one sees them in the light of the supersensible sphere. In this new light you ask yourself: What is the real situation? Have certain facts that have been recorded so that we find them in our usual history books truly had such a close connection with the human being as they are often said to have, with the view expressed that the human being, as he stands before us, is a product of historical development, a product of the past? However, if we ask these questions only in the light of supersensible insight, we soon discover, on turning our attention to historical events, how little people are able to say with the impulses of the lives in which they find themselves at the present time, for example: This or that is connected with this or that historical event in the past. Just as natural science, if pursued consistently, takes us beyond itself, so does the study of history take us to the point where we have to say: In a sense, the historical events are falling apart. We cannot just speak of cause and effect in the usual sense, considering the present as though it were due to the influence of the past, certainly where this contains whatever may be found in the world perceptible through the senses. We can only see history truly if we connect the human being with the supersensible and do not look in historical facts for anything they appear to be on the surface but for something that initially is only given as revelation—a supersensible process in world events, with human beings involved in it.

Then history becomes something other than a study of consecutive events. It becomes a symptomatology, as I’d like to call it. We then consider individual events not just the way they present in the life perceived through the senses but as symptoms that allow us to penetrate into a supersensible process behind them that goes beyond history itself. It will then also no longer be possible to seek absolute completeness in the usual way—anyone who has been working with historical material in some area or other will know that such completeness can never be achieved. Instead you will try to take the facts that can be discovered, regarding them as symptoms, and penetrate into the great spiritual scheme of things that lies behind them.

Taking this road you will soon find yourself compelled to abandon the old distinctions we know from our schooldays, where the study of recent history begins with all kinds of reflections on the journeys of discovery and the importance of discovering America, or on inventions and the like. Instead you feel compelled to say: Where can a point be found—if we start from the present time and go back in historical evolution—where a major change came in the course of human evolution, with new ways of life and new conditions for life?

People who like to take the easy way in looking at the world often tend to say that one thing simply arises from another that went before, and that there are no significant changes or turning points. They will even quote the soothing words: Nature does not take leaps.¹¹² But just look at the natural world and the leaps that are made! A plant will first develop green leaves and later transform them into petals of different colours—a leap. And such leaps exist everywhere in the natural world, refuting common prejudice that people find comfortable.

Even a superficial look will in fact show that in the European world, the 15th century brought a major change in all ways of life. A change came in the characteristic state of soul humanity had had until then, and in the way humanity made this inner state of soul into external historical actions. With regard to symptomatology, we can point to something of a landmark at an earlier time, an important turning point in the historical life of more recent humanity. This was when the French forced the Pope to move his residence from Rome to Avignon in 1303.¹¹³ Almost at the same time the order of the Templars, a very special community that had a strange relationship to the Church, was destroyed by the French government, its properties being confiscated.¹¹⁴

Those events were turning points in more recent historical evolution because they showed that people were going against something that for centuries had been characteristic of the whole civilized world. This characteristic was reflected in the strange hostilities between central European imperialism and the Popes, as well as the mutually supportive alliances that resulted from them. All those hostilities were in the light of a quite specific fact. The peoples throughout the civilized world of that time were not divided into groups such as national and other groups the way they came to be in later times, for beyond any such division reigned something that people had in common; we can only say that a universal idea reigned in the human race, influencing people’s actions, and on the one side this came from the Roman papacy, which felt itself to be something that brought people together. Medieval imperialism was equally universal, except that it was often fighting that universal community.

The element that came with the turning point of which I spoke goes against this way of holding people together. The kind of cohesion which existed through the Middle Ages, with people feeling themselves to be part of a great whole, was for centuries based on certain unconscious impulses that dwelt in human beings. The leaders knew them and used them in bringing people together. They addressed a particular sum total of unconscious powers of soul in bringing people together from the above-mentioned points of view in the civilized world of that time. The event at Avignon created breaches, perceptible breaches in that cohesion. We can sense that a new element thus had to come into the constitution, into the state of soul, of occidental humanity.

We also see that the forces at work in the European West had for a long time been affected by an event that had come from the East like a force of nature. I only need to mention everything that started with the Mongolian hordes, and the migrations from East to West, from Asia to Europe, that followed. Both were turning points, and at the dawn of the 15th century they gave Europe and its people the structure of community life. Despite all attempts to preserve the past, this structure was different from the earlier one, when it depended on unconscious impulses. Humanity found it increasingly necessary to be consciously aware also in areas where they were previously given cohesion on the basis of unconscious impulses.

Something highly significant happened with these changes in the West of Europe, especially in areas where people had until then be used, more or less so but significantly, to find cohesion through that universal idea, universal impulse, which I have been characterizing. We see something completely new arise in those areas. The national element came to take over from the old, more spiritual element of the Catholic Church in providing cohesion. We see England and France become a new kind of nation-states, setting a pattern, as it were.

Let us try and consider the way in which the new element was taken particularly into those areas of Western Europe. Initially the two countries were united until the movement arose in the 15th century which we may also call a turning point, in 1428, when in a certain direction a dividing wall came between England and France. This came to expression in the events that happened around Joan of Arc.¹¹⁵ The seed was then sown for the mutual independence of France and England; before that there had been a degree of connection between them. This is a tremendously significant phenomenon. For we shall see many things grow from this differentiation, which only came at that time, in the 15th century, things that will again prove symptomatic in the further evolution of history.

Another change came when a kind of national feeling, at the time preparing the way for an independent feeling of being Italian, developed in Italy from the very element which had led to the papacy being so powerful in that country, overshadowing all such national and similar groupings. Letting the eye roam across Europe we also see ourselves—I can only refer to these things briefly here—coming closer to the time when a major struggle arose between central and more or less eastern parts of Europe, the Germanic and Slavonic cultures. We see how the power of the Hapsburgs arose from the struggles in those regions, with the Slavs attacking, and Slav and Germanic cultures mingling. We also see highly individual structures, which before that had not emerged in such a way from the universal impulses, now with individual views and individual purpose. From the 13th to the 15th centuries, city states flourished throughout the occidental civilization of that time.

Again, once national aspirations had become differentiated and France and England were separate, we see long periods of civil war in England leading to the parliamentary system, as the world was to know it, being the goal of a social structure that arose from mutual understanding among individual people.

These, then, are not all, but some of the symptoms from more recent history. I merely have to add that as the groups formed from those impulses everywhere in Europe, there slowly arose in the East, still only in its early beginnings, from struggles that had to lead to its emergence, what later was to be the Russian structure. A strange structure. Seen from Europe it evolved in such a way that to our feeling it will always be a riddle. The most important impulses living within that structure were not really sentiently perceived but welded together, I would say, from something that had survived through all kinds of migrations—passing through Byzantium, arising from a certain metamorphosis of Roman Catholic life; something had come together that arose from what had sprouted forth as the blood of the Slavonic and Norman cultures. In ways that are familiar enough to you, it took in much of the Asiatic inner attitude of soul, a state of soul—I am now referring to the best parts of it—that through millennia had turned away from anything immediately coming through the senses and towards great mystic approaches, hoping to penetrate into a supersensible world with which the sensual life of human beings is connected.

If we take these and perhaps also many other symptoms of more recent historical development and truly consider them from the point of view of the issues considered earlier, a characteristic emerges clearly from these symptoms. We come to perceive it if we ask ourselves: How does the element that comes to expression in these symptoms inwardly differ from anything which in earlier centuries and millennia showed itself in a similar way in a historical evolution of humanity that was more at an unconscious level? We need to consider these things without any sympathy or antipathy, in a wholly objective way. It is only then that we will discover the characteristic element in the phenomena we are considering.

It is strange, when we ask ourselves: What do all these symptoms—for instance those I have given as examples today—have in common if we compare them with earlier impulses that came into historical evolution? I won’t speak of the fruitful way, for example, in which Christianity came into the world in a positive way, creating something new for the soul. I won’t speak of this, but only of the kind of impulses that were, for example, often given in ancient Greek life, when a new impulse would simply be given as though produced from inmost human nature. This would then come into its own in a completely new configuration of reality; or the way it was given, let us say, to Roman civilization in the days of Augustus. None of the impulses that come now are of that kind. The most evident impulse we see, for example, is the national one, based not on national cohesion—as one often sees it identified today and considered to be a state cohesion—but on the national element in so far as it bases on natural principles deep down in human nature. We see it as an impulse that people take up without having produced it inside. A person is French or English on account of his nature. And when in establishing the historical configuration he refers to his nationality he is not referring to something produced in his mind and spirit, but something he has simply accepted from outside.

If we compare the national principle as it has come up in history with those earlier impulses, we discover that all the impulses which we have seen coming to humanity in Greek and in Roman Latin times were infinitely much closer to the productive side in human nature. What came there was retained and preserved. When one takes up something new in more recent history, this is something one is not producing oneself, something which comes to the human being from outside.

Having attempted to gain our orientation more from the outer progress of more recent European history, we’ll now attempt to penetrate to the inner aspects. Within the soul’s inner state, we see a very similar onrush in the inner state of soul against the universal impulse that had counted on the unconscious, an impulse given through the ages. We see the onrush of Huss in the 15th century, Wiclif even before him, and then Luther and later Calvin. We see something human beings want to give, to put into history much more than anything that went before, when it was thought of in more universal ways; this is something individual, welling up from human nature itself. Strangely, however, we also see how in discussion, everything is always related to what went before. What is new is that the human being was referred to his own nature. Decide for yourself what the nature of the eucharist is. Decide for yourself on your attitude to your priest, do not let it be forced on you through a universal impulse coming from outside.

Yet when we consider the subject of the discussion, the dogma of the eucharist that had earlier been produced into humanity, had existed for centuries in history, or in human life altogether. Nothing new was being produced from the soul and given over to historical life, but the old was produced and preserved, everything that was there without human beings contributing anything. All that happened then was that the human being entered into a new relationship to it.

In following this inner process in European development we see infinitely much of the old torn apart, changed, metamorphosed in the onrush against the universal impulse that had reigned before. We can see it exactly from the way knighthood scattered and vanished. The whole of its inner state of soul—you only have to study the crusades—was connected with the universal impulse. Again we can refer to a turning point that will provide the orientation for everything else that happened. This was the battle of Murton in 1476, towards the end of the 15th century, fought against knighthood connected with the universal impulse. We may see it as representative of a struggle that happened in many places.¹¹⁶

We also find a change in the ecclesiastical authority in connection with all this. This ecclesiastical authority had assumed a strange form, and you can find this characterized in any work on history. During this time and because of the onrush, a need was felt for inner regeneration and improvement. The onrush against it really made the Church itself change many things internally. Yet we see everywhere how the element that had raised the Church up in the course of human evolution, having spread it in form of a universal impulse, was to be given a new relationship to each individual human being. We see this happening all over Europe. We see how the English Church made itself independent. We see how in central Europe growing independence joined forces with political powers. We see how everywhere the individual and personal rose against the universal, in other words how something that the human mind was to make its own raged against an earlier inner human nature that had been more unconscious or subconscious, and we see what followed from this in historical terms.

Counter forces did, of course, also arise, like the counter reformation against the reformation. But if we study the symptomatology, the struggles this caused immediately show something of the greatest importance with regard to more recent history. We see the Thirty Years’ War arise from everything that happened in connection with the symptoms I have characterized. Studying the Thirty Years’ War,¹¹⁷ we discover something strange. It arose from opposition arising among the confessions in Europe. It began with all the impulses connected with religious struggles, and it ended as a purely political phenomenon. It turned into something completely different as it progressed. If we now ask ourselves how its evolution looks to us with regard to the confessions which then existed in Europe, we find that in 1648 people were exactly where they had been in 1618. The whole 30 years really changed nothing of any significance as regards the relationship between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and so on. All this remained as before. However, in the course of that war quite different powers intervened, and this gave the European national structures a completely different configuration.

If you study the Thirty Years’ War in this way you will be truly convinced that we cannot see history as something that follows as an effect connected with what went before and call the latter the cause. Nothing that came from the Thirty Years’ War was genuinely connected as effect with anything we can call cause in the true sense. Studying the evolution we see how events happening on the outside can only be a symptom for something that happens deeper down. This is particularly evident in the case of the Thirty Years’ War. But what did happen? It was the western countries and above all France which advanced as a result of the events that came in the course of that war, and not its causes. The consequences of the Thirty Years’ War later led to the whole regal glory of France. We see how the royal power of France shone out over Europe in the time that followed.

Then again, something arose in the womb of what was evolving there, taking the old national impulse forward in a most eminent sense. This new element went far beyond anything merely national; it broke the national idea apart, as it were. Individual, personal nature arose, later to come into its own in the French Revolution. The human individual, standing by himself, wanted to emancipate from the compulsion of a community that had not arisen from some productive impulse but been taken up into the human state of soul from nature, from the world surrounding humanity. Again, in looking at the symptomatology, we see how Napoleon then arose, quite inorganically we might say, without any evident motivation. He was the executor, as it were, of the French Revolution’s will and testament. At the same time we also see a strange, a great and tremendous turning point arise. This significant turning point in more recent history came on 21 October 1805, when the battle of Trafalgar prevented Napoleon from extending his tentacles across to England. Something which earlier had only been potential, the separation between England and the Continent, was then made complete.

We can now let things that are generally known pass quickly before the inner eye. We find that parliamentary life going in the direction of liberalism evolved further in an independent England. We see a more tumultuous evolution in France during the 19th century. Then, however, we see emerge in a new form, symptomatic and shining out over what is really happening at the foundations of European history, how the European west and centre needed to come to grips in the 1850s with something that was like a dark riddle in the European east, with the Russian configuration that had arisen. This was like a question posed with regard to European development. We then see certain ideas gaining strength in the 19th century, other ideas going against them, and how ideas of the one kind or the other became impulses in historical development. We see how everything was building up in the 19th century towards the storm which then broke in 1848.¹¹⁸ And we see evolve from all this the social movement that was later to be so comprehensive and today has a profound influence on human evolution. We see how one especially noteworthy event came among everything that evolved in the 19th century, something the people of Europe were able to observe quite profoundly. Out of the glory that had arisen with France becoming a national state, a kind of demand or claim arose and continued to spread.

Let us not put values on things here. We do not follow them with sympathy or antipathy, but quite objectively. We see how out of the relationship between developments in west and east something arose that was considered an insoluble problem—insoluble for Europe at least for the time being—by people who had the necessary insight at the time, irrespective of the attitude they took to it, to whether it should happen or not. We can even completely leave aside the question as to whether Alsace was occupied by the French originally or later by the Germans, but the Alsatian question, as it is known today, evolved out of European life.

If you study history, and especially things said by people with insight at the time in question, you will know that even then they foresaw conflicts arising from this, conflicts that were really insoluble in either direction because they had to do with all the difficult questions concerning the European east. Those questions arose because the European west—the Crimean War¹¹⁹ was symptomatic of this—was forced to come to grips with the European east, which was behind all the phenomena like an enigma. We should really consider and feel it to be extraordinarily significant, especially in these days, that something which appears insoluble is given in the way in which central Europe must face up to western Europe because of a question which under specific historical conditions may be asked to be solved in one way or another, a question that has arisen from the national impulse emerging in France but cannot be solved in national terms.

I could give you many more symptoms apparent in recent history, but I only want to mention just one thing which enters deeply into the whole of human evolution in recent times. Although the connections cannot always be clearly seen, I want to refer to the emergence of the more recent scientific way of thinking. I have characterized its significance from other points of view in my earlier lectures here. The scientific way of thinking is evolving. What does it do? It makes the human being stand on his own. It is exactly this thinking which separates the individual out from the community. It is in many respects also the driving impulse in all the other things I have mentioned. This modern scientific way of thinking has something in it which strangely does betray the significance which it has in more recent history.

Two kinds of problems arise. Let me show you the one by referring to a fact. This is that in 1830 a friend found Goethe in a state of sheer excitement. Asked what was the matter, Goethe said: The news coming from France are overwhelming; the world is in flames; something new is beginning to emerge. Soret, the friend to whom Goethe said these words, did of course think he was speaking of the 1830 revolutions. ‘No,’ said Goethe, ‘I am not talking about that but about the revolution which is taking place between the two scientists Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire.’¹²⁰ Cuvier held the view that all life forms in the natural world exist side by side and each had to be taken on its own. Saint- Hilaire was looking for a common type in the organic forms, he set the whole of organic life in motion, so that one could only get an overview in this state of flux if one looked at nature itself in an immediately productive spirit, experiencing the spirit to be as much in flux as nature itself. Goethe sensed something in Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that ultimately, when taken from seed to fruit, will be the supersensible concepts of natural phenomena which I characterized here the day before yesterday.

Initially, however, the world was overshadowed by everything that came with the other way of looking at nature, where the human being is taken out of any living, immediate relationship to the phenomena of nature. This approach, which has not been taken hold of by the impulse of which Goethe spoke, gives insight into the part of nature that is nonliving, into the dying element, where nature dissolves, and this is connected with the element that is mortal in us, as I characterized it the day before yesterday.

The study of nature from which Goethe turned away is such that it can only work with the gradual process of decay in nature. Efforts are then made to rise to something that cannot be shown by these means but only by supersensible vision, and those are the symptoms of ascent, of growth, of being born and thriving. But, though this does again sound paradoxical, this approach to nature, which really focuses on whatever is dead within living nature, cast its deep shadows on the whole of modern social life. Essentially it created a new universal impulse for humanity in more recent times, but this is a universal impulse against which the human being himself as an individual must rebel all the time, for it takes him out of nature, so that he must look for the real whole over and over again. The knowledge gained puts him outside. He needs to look for the real whole again in something other than the area in which he seeks such knowledge. The result is dualism in the way the human being relates to his environment and hence also in life. This natural science flows into modern industrial life which supports the whole of modern civilization; its influence is highly significant.

With the impulses we considered earlier, for instance the national impulse, we saw that old tradition was preserved and no new productive element introduced into life. With the riddle of the European east we see how a nation remarkably stimulated to be productive in the spirit ties itself up so that it truly cannot be productive, although it has the potential to be highly productive, truly tying itself up in the most extreme bonds of the old Byzantine Church community. Old things are thus preserved. We see how with the views from natural science that are poured out over modern humanity something universal is created, something universal which also does not consider anything the human being produces out of himself, but exactly the knowledge that is gained in cutting things off from himself, knowledge concerning decay in natural phenomena. This can also only be brought into civilization in the sphere of industry, with the natural element killed off.

Initially by not being productive in the old sense, humanity has been gaining the full conscious awareness which began to develop in the 15th century. Earlier, they maintained their connection with nature and the world at a subconscious level rather than in full conscious awareness. In addition to preservation of old things we see a process of educating the human race in more recent times which is given out of something new but nevertheless is along the lines of the old. The principles developed for industry only seem to arise from productive ideas. For those productive ideas do not arise as independent green plants in the human soul—the supersensible, if it is to be sought, must arise as an independent plant in the human soul—but from calm contemplation of objective natural phenomena.

We see how an event that has had a significant influence on more recent developments is particularly connected with this modern industry, for it is now becoming apparent that modern industry develops progressively in our times and that colonization also gains significance; for colonial and colonizing life is closely bound up with the element that enters into industry through natural science.

Let us now take a general view of what all these symptoms are more or less telling us. We see that anything which has come up as something new since the 15th century has not come from productive human nature. Looking at these things we find it necessary to take a wider view of historical evolution and to acknowledge—supersensible insight makes us acknowledge this—that there is not only ascent in this human life, not only what in abstract terms is usually called progress, but that ascending, sprouting and shooting life goes hand in hand with a descending life. Life is bound up with a principle that is all the time leading to death.

When we consider an individual human life, birth, growth and development are presented separately from dying and decay. But it only seems like that. When we consider life in the outside world, developments that have come particularly in more recent history show that dying, descending and ascending development are immediately next to one another and influence one another. We see that descending evolution, which is the evolution that takes historical death into itself, had great significance actually for the beginning of this more recent period in history which began in the 15th century, doing so initially for several centuries and right into our own time. The life of decay, of death, has greater significance than ascending, sprouting and shooting life. We see how the mind of modern man as it evolves is connected with the element in him which is mortal, and how he is able to sense that the element which drives him towards death is also the element that helps him to advance in knowledge. Whilst sprouting, shooting life lulls him as if in dreams, we can see that the spiritual soul is evolving from the more unconscious state of soul which humanity developed from the 8th century BC until the 15th century AD, and that it has influenced the history of more recent times. We see that there is need, for a first education towards developing this spiritual soul, that symptoms of decay, of dying life take effect particularly also in human civilization. We cannot understand more recent historical life unless we are able to develop the thought—in spite of all admiration, in spit of all the good will and recognition that has to be given for the great, tremendous achievement of modern industry, of modern national impulses—that descending life moving towards the death of historical evolution must be present in it all, and that an ascending, sprouting and shooting life must be born into this descending life.

This has caused people of more recent times who have insight to develop something we might call a pessimistic view of civilization. Thus Schopenhauer¹²¹ looked at more recent historical developments. In spite of all the achievements they seemed rather trivial to him. The only thing Schopenhauer appreciated was anything that could be achieved in the minds of single individuals. Pessimists are themselves mere symptoms in recent historical development, but they have a feeling that the greatest and most significant element in that development which we are used to seeing as a characteristic of more recent historical evolution has been the death impulse entering into it.

What has been the consequence? Something we may call tragedy coming into the historical life of more recent times. Promotion of the impulses that we may consider to have been partly traditional and partly coming from natural scientific views is a matter of course. All this is such that we have to say to ourselves: We must encourage it, we must take it up, it is a necessity of our more recent history; human beings absolutely must make it part of developments in world history, but it must of necessity also lead to its own decline and death in everything that arises, that is achieved in this field. The tragedy is that something has to be encouraged and considered an achievement of which one knows that in creating it one is creating something that must at the same time also decay. We actually start the decay as we create it.

Anyone who thinks that the events arising in more recent historical development from the impulses I mentioned can stand on their own, is like someone who thinks a woman can give birth without conception, without the one principle being connected with the other. The element arising from those impulses presents as something one-sided that needs something to come from another side if it is to survive. Within itself there is only the power to die. Let us take everything that has come with modern industry and social relationships in more recent times, be they commercial or other kinds of connections. Let us take all this—on its own, seen in accord with its own impulse, it is infertile and always leads to its own death, I would say in rhythms. We have to realize that we need to look at it in such a way that we say: For the sake of something else, this dying element has to enter into our modern world as an achievement.

What is this something else? Well, we have seen that the strange thing I hinted at shows itself as we follow more recent history with its sequence of what we consider to be different symptoms. On the one hand we see the spiritual soul come into flower from the 15th century onwards, and this happens exactly because of the unproductive principle. On the other hand we have seen this spiritual soul grow great in that initially the stimulus for the productive element was withdrawn from its environs, so that it took its guidance from the principle that was all the time leading to a dying process in civilization. This has made the human being independent. The outside world does not stimulate something in us that has productive life but all the time something that bears the seed of the dying process in the insights gained. The human being grows up in his individual and conscious natural development in a way where the outside world does not raise him for life, nor to something that will take him higher, but is all the time preventing anything intended to take him higher. As a result, the human being stands by himself.

Looking at the situation purely in the light of supersensible insight, we see that this inner life of the human being, with the movement towards the spiritual soul from the 15th century onwards, also has something that corresponds to it on the outside. This could not emerge in the early centuries but shows itself immediately if without bias we consider the human heart and mind in the present time when it has once again gained an inclination towards a supersensible life. Many are, of course, still unconscious of this, but this inclination towards a supersensible life now exists for very many people. Someone working with the science of the spirit with an anthroposophical orientation knows that the principle of dying which developed in the outer material civilization of recent times was only of a passing nature and that we are at a great turning point in time which will bring a new revelation of the supersensible to human beings from outside, this time not through nature but stimulated in the way I have shown when I spoke on anthroposophically orientated spiritual science.

We see it approaching everywhere, this new revelation of the supersensible. It will now be gained in a different way from earlier times when human beings were connected with nature unconsciously, through their instincts, finding in nature itself the principles that also held true for the soul and which they could also introduce into social and historical life. A productive, supersensible life will develop that goes beyond anything which this study of nature and the old impulses in more recent historical developments are able to give. It will be revealed from the world of the spirit. And if we look particularly at the terrible catastrophe that has arisen in our time—what is it, seen in the genuine light of truth, but something in which elements that are dying crowd together?

Much will die within this catastrophic life. Anything that has the principle of dying within it in the way I have characterized will die more quickly. No reason for pessimism, even if there is reason for pain with all the things that can come to us from watching and being involved in this catastrophe. There is no reason to be pessimistic about civilization if we consider life in the light of anthroposophically orientated spiritual science. For it is apparent now in one point in recent historical evolution around the globe that the dying process which otherwise is distributed across material life comes powerfully together. This gives more recent events their tragic note. At the same time it shows us that everything that comes into the world in the way I have characterized earlier must be fruitless and needs to be made fruitful with what we receive out of the supersensible.

Anyone who considers the principle which makes the development of the spiritual soul complete and the new revelations from the supersensible with an open mind will raise his head, however much it may be bowed down in pain over the things that are happening now, and say to himself: It is the first flush of dawn for something that must come and will trigger the impulse in humanity to turn towards the supersensible. All the suffering and pain over the present collapse would be in vain, and so would be all the feelings, the justifiable pain felt by those who see this collapse, if these feelings could not take us forward to the realization that as with everything in nature that is destined to die, so with this dying, too, something new is arising. However, the new development will only be possible if humanity has the will to take up the principle that will make things fruitful, a principle revealed to us from the supersensible world.

The spiritual soul has evolved. Nature must now no longer give us unconsciously the things we introduce into the world of social and historical development. Humanity of our time must now also consciously receive, willingly receive, the new kind of supersensible revelation that comes to the spiritual soul if this spiritual soul wills it. It is exactly when we consider the tragedy of modern life without prejudice that the redeeming impulse reveals itself on the other side. It reveals itself in that we feel the need to acknowledge the revelation of a new supersensible element which now also has to be there for the spiritual soul.

We thus see through the symptoms and perceive what humanity is going to be and what is to be revealed to humanity out of the universe. In Graeco-Latin times, which began in the 8th century before the Christian era and came to an end in the 15th century, the inner life was still bound up with outward physical life. This led to the great achievements of Greek and Roman times that were passed on to the Middle Ages. In the 15th century evolution took a great leap as the powers of conscious awareness began to evolve what we may call the spiritual soul. We are now in this stage of evolution. We see that for a true science of history human beings must take up the principles that are revealed behind the symptoms. We must have the courage to admit, however, that death is all around us as much as life, and that death is necessary so that new life may come. It has also been necessary for death to be overwhelming for a time, so that human beings might all the more develop the powers of the spiritual soul. When no more is given to us from outside, we feel the need to look inside for the spirit, the supersensible principle.

Some may of course object and say: Well, where are those people, how many of them are there? Not many have developed their powers of soul so that they are able to point to the supersensible world. We certainly have to admit that there are only few of them today. Their numbers will grow apace; but it is not a matter of how many find their way to the supersensible sphere which is needed to make the sensual fruitful. What matters is that one does not have to take the road to supersensible insight oneself, for, quite apart from how and for what you estimate the individual who provides the fruits of the supersensible, once they have been uttered, once they have been cast into human culture, they can be understood with the understanding that is perfectly common in the age of the spiritual soul. People can largely understand everything brought to them from the sphere of the supersensible, unless they create obstacles for themselves with prejudices which they then find insurmountable.

There is, however, one thing which is needed. Just consider that with the view of history I have outlined one finds it necessary to admit to oneself, in insight, as it were, and in full awareness, that what has to be done—what is a necessity of the age and will be a necessity more and more—is at the same time something that is all the time also dying. It does take some courage to acknowledge that one has to be active so that that active principle may perish and be the soil for the Father principle of the spiritual, supersensible sphere. It does need such courage for all supersensible insight. Fear of supersensible insight prevents many people from entering into it. There is one field at least where in more recent times we face the immediate necessity to develop such courage if we want to be at all considered for human development. This is the field of history. Those who know something of supersensible insight always speak of crossing the threshold, and of a guardian of the threshold.¹²² They speak of crossing the threshold because one has to abandon many things that seemed to be absolutely solid ground before one crossed the threshold in finding one’s way into the supersensible world. Unconsciously people feel it is a relief not to have to cross the threshold. Yet something that had to be done at a particular time for historical development is becoming more and more of a necessity. And this is again part of the inner progress of historical development from the 15th century onwards. It is becoming more and more of a necessity to say to oneself: You are actively involved in the creation of processes of dying, processes of decay. You need to devote yourself to these processes of decay, and this will bring your inner power to life; it is exactly because of this that you will be able to come close to the supersensible. You must abandon what you used to consider a foundation in mind and spirit before, cross the threshold to the supersensible world, losing the ground under your feet, as it were. And in its place you must find within you the firm focal point where you can maintain yourself even in the face of what in sensual terms has no ground.

The human being needs to find a new focus for the whole of his inner life. Historical necessity will make us look for this focus more and more in future. The fact that we thus gain insight will not change things. We are, as it were, facing the process of dying—in the sense I mean here. The fact that we admit it is a dying process will not change it. But it is exactly by this that one must feel driven to try and fructify the living principle that is the counter force. For the situation is like this: Inscribed above the search for supersensible insights there has always been the great, tremendous demand: ‘Know yourself.’¹²³ And it is still the demand made on human beings who are seekers. Seeking to gain this insight today people can only do so by rising to worlds that can take them beyond finite existence. Above all, impelled by the necessities of human evolution, they will have to admit to themselves with regard to historical life in more recent times, that the spiritual soul is a goal that has been implanted with regard to more recent history, to know themselves more and more. In coming to know themselves, they are facing the necessity of going beyond themselves. In going beyond themselves, perceiving his supersensible nature within their sensual nature, they also come to the supersensible that is active in history, with external facts merely symbols for it. We will only have a history that is fruitful for life if we look for the supersensible behind the symptoms, just as we do behind the phenomena of nature.

The look we have taken at history has shown that more recent developments impose trials on human beings, the trial where they must consider descending as well as ascending life, involution as well as evolution. With supersensible insight into history people will find this gaining of insight to be a great trial for the soul for they must cross the threshold and find a new focus in the inner life of the soul, so that in having gone through the trial they will have the strength to go through the other trials that life will present more and more out of historical events as they move towards the future. We may say, however, that human beings only grow strong and robust and truly fit for life by going through trials. Fear of insight should not prevent people from entering into the trials. Instead, courage to gain insight should make them prepared to accept these trials. They will develop those trials on the road to insight into powers that will also guide them to be active human beings who are involved in evolution and fruitful in the course of history.

Questions and answers

Following the lecture given in Zurich on 17 October 1918

The suggestion has been made that 1 should briefly say something about one particular phenomenon in more recent history that is particularly relevant to human life, and that is the evolution of speech and language. This could, of course, be another whole lecture if I were to treat the subject exhaustively. I would, however, like to take up the suggestion, apart from anything else because I would indeed like to draw your attention to the fact that anthroposophically orientated spiritual science in the sense of which I have been speaking truly is such that it does not owe its existence to a sudden idea that came like a shot, nor is it made up of sudden flashes of insight. No, if you study the literature you’ll find that this anthroposophically orientated spiritual science gathers what it has to say from the whole breadth of observation, the whole range of phenomena in the world.

Of course, when one has to cover vast areas in an hour—and I am sorry that it always takes longer than this anyhow—the impression inevitably arises that one is moving in abstract regions; on the other hand the intention is not to convince anyone, but merely to encourage them to take this further, for then people will see that this science of the spirit is based on careful, conscientious and methodical investigation, serious research, more so than in any other kind of scientific endeavour.

It is interesting to consider the principles which I have been characterizing in general terms today in a single phenomenon such as the development of human speech and language. When we say anything today, we do not usually consider the fact that talking is actually at every moment forcing us to be inaccurate. Fritz Mauthner has written three volumes as well as a dictionary of philosophy to show that everything we produce in philosophy and science is based on language and that the language is imprecise. Because of this, he says, we can really never have a body of true knowledge.¹²⁴

Well, when it comes to the science of the spirit this is, of course, a foolish thing to say, even in three volumes. It is, however, significant to consider the partial phenomenon that lies behind this. Going back in the development of language we find—unlike the superficial anthropological linguistics where the means are inadequate—that the further back we go, human beings were progressively more closely connected with anything their speech expressed, inwardly so, and again instinctively and unconsciously. Human beings are gradually also separating from the things that lie in their own inherent nature, just as they are from the outside world of nature.

Thus they also cease to be so closely connected with their speech. Speech thus becomes something external. A marked dualism arises between the thoughts that live in us—and some do not even have them any more, because they remain in the sphere of language—and the words that are spoken. If we do not give ourselves to illusion at the point in human evolution where we are today, in the age of the spiritual soul, we need to take a real look at the way language has already separated from the human being. It is really only proper names relating to a single individual that are truly appropriate to that individual. As soon as we use general terms, be they adjectives, nouns, or whatever, they are imprecise about what they are meant to tell us. They are abstract, they are like generalities. We will only understand the relationship between language and human life rightly if we take it really as gesture; if we know: just as I point to something in a direct, living way when I point to it with my finger, so I also point in a kind of gesture at the entity to which the sounds of speech refer when I produce sounds, using my larynx. To take speech as gesture, this is what matters. In earlier times, people had a vague feeling, I would say it was instinctive and lay in the subconscious, as to how their inner life was connected with sound in a kind of gesture. They did not confuse their experiences in inner life with the things brought to expression in speech.

We ourselves have tried to develop endeavours in this direction in a field of spiritual science, using the element of gesture to make speech visible. This is in the art we call eurythmy. Efforts are made to get the whole human being moving, and express in gesture—in the movements of the limbs, movements of the human form in space, the movements in groups and relationships between individuals—what is otherwise expressed in gesture, though not perceived as gesture, through the human larynx and its neighbouring organs. We call this art of movement, something new which has to come to humanity, eurythmy. We had intended to follow this lecture here in Zurich with a eurythmy performance. This had to be put off for another time, for we were given permission to give these lectures, in what is now a difficult time,¹²⁵ but not to give a eurythmy performance. The intention was to show how the whole human being becomes a larynx, as it were. In becoming aware of what speech is, we come to something that is particularly important, fundamentally important, for life in the present and future.

Nothing happens more frequently in human life today but that someone makes a statement of some kind, as I am doing with regard to the science of the spirit, for instance, and then someone else will come along and say: ‘I have read this before,’ showing you something which at least in parts has exactly the same wording. I could give you striking examples of this, but will give just one which I found illustrated the situation perfectly.

One thing I truly endeavour to do is to apply all the things that demand consideration in spiritual science to life and thus enter into the true impulses in life. For a long time I have thus been reflecting on the whole way of thinking, the whole attitude of thought, shown by Woodrow Wilson.¹²⁶ I found it interesting to study especially his essays on historical method, the study of history and American historical life. He plays such a major role in present-day life that one has to get to know him—this is what someone would say who does not want to sleep through current events but observe them with his senses wide awake. I have come to admire the magnificent way, truly apt in an American way, in which Woodrow Wilson presents the evolution of the American nation, this advance from the American east to the American west, with American life emerging in a quite specific way, that came only once people had advanced from east to west. Woodrow Wilson characteristically speaks of everything that went before as mere appendage to European life. This uprooting and overcoming of nature, overcoming the native population of the American west, this specific way of making history, which shows some similarity to what has happened in human life generally yet also differs in quite specific ways—this is magnificently presented. It is therefore also interesting to see how Woodrow Wilson develops his method of history.

I looked at the descriptions he gave of his own method of history and found something quite peculiar. Sentences come from this man, who is wholly and entirely American, that seemed to me to almost word for word in agreement with sentences written by a completely different person, someone who truly arose from an entirely different approach to life and way of thinking. Statements Woodrow Wilson made in his essay on the methodology for history that bore such excellent fruit for him, could be transposed word for word into essays by Herman Grimm, who is entirely within the Goethean development of our time, and out of this development presents as a truly Central European mind. We might say that you need only take sentences from Herman Grimm’s essays and transpose them, or include sentences by Woodrow Wilson in Herman Grimm’s essays, and you would not see any great difference in the wording.

What we learn from such things—to put it in ordinary words, though I want to say something highly significant in this way—is that when two people say the same thing, even using the same words, it is not the same. We have to learn from this that it is necessary to enter not only into the wording, which comes from speech, but the into whole person. This will reveal the specific differences between Herman Grimm and Woodrow Wilson. You will find that with Herman Grimm, every single sentence is worked out with the spiritual soul wholly present. The progression one finds in Herman Grimm’s spirited essay where he writes about historical method and the contemplation of history is truly such that one sees him progress from sentence to sentence through an inner struggle in his soul, so that nothing remains unconscious and everything is brought to conscious awareness. All the time one sees this inner progression in the soul.¹²⁷

Looking across at what we see in the case of Woodrow Wilson, we see how the statements arise from subconscious depths of the soul, as though out of the human being as such rather than inner activity. I don’t mean anything bad by this, but I would like to say, if I may be paradoxical about it, that with Herman Grimm I always feel that in the region of wholly conscious inner life, all the life of the soul proceeds as statement follows statement; with Woodrow Wilson I feel he is as if possessed by something that lies within himself and lets his own truths shine up in his own inner life. As I said, I do not mean anything sympathetic or antipathetic by this, merely something I want to characterize. It is given to him from the depths of his own soul. So we find, and it is truly evident, that even if the wording is the same, two people are saying the same thing yet it is not the same. We only discover what lies behind it if we learn to go not by the wording but by what arises from the whole way the person presents himself in life.

You see, modern humanity must learn to overcome the general habit of judging anything that is presented only on its content. We will have to learn that the content is not really what matters. When I speak about the science of the spirit, I do not focus on the way I formulate my sentences, on the content, but what matters is that something which has truly been projected from the supersensible world flows into what I say. Considering the How more important than the What, so that one can sense, or feel, that these things are said out of the supersensible world. This is what matters.

This is how we must altogether learn in a way in the present time in contrast to ordinary life. A paper, or a journal, may say the nicest things—people can say the most beautiful things today, for ‘beautiful ideas’ and ‘nice things’ are commonplace today—but it is not the words which matter but the inner attitude from which they arise, so that we look through the statements and the words to symptoms, to the human being. We need to penetrate language and wording as if they were a veil and thus come closer to the human being himself again. We are made aware of this in more recent developments in language, for here the human being’s inmost nature, his spiritual soul, has become separate from speech and language. Out of ourselves, therefore, the necessity arises to consider not just the words, but see through them to the human soul, doing so in every possible direction and way.

It will, however, be necessary to overcome something else if one wants to go on in this direction. People are still used to abstract notions today, to going by the immediate content in what I might call an uninspired, middle-class way. When someone speaks of an ideal, however beautifully formulated, we need to be aware that this is something that is a hundred a penny today, for the ideas have been given form. You can put all kinds of ideas to people and nations today, and they will be formed. It will depend on where they come from, where they truly arise in the inmost soul, in the soul region. Life will be tremendously enriched if we are in a position to see it like this.

Perhaps I may also be permitted to say something personal. You see I am often presented with people’s poetical productions. All kinds of people produce them nowadays. Among them are some that are perfect in form, beautifully expressing something or other, and others that seem awkwardly phrased, bumpy or indeed primitive, having problems with the language. Someone taking a point of view that is not yet modern will of course delight in the beauty of the language, especially if the forms are perfect. He will not—not yet today—feel that Emanuel Geibel¹²⁸ was right in saying that his verses would have a public for as long as there were young girls. They are beautiful, polished, and will have a public even among those who believe Wildenbnich¹²⁹ or similar people to be poets—and there are many of these as well.

Today, however, a different view is taken. This is also the case with other arts, but I am here talking about language. There are poets today whose verses make us stumble; you may have problems with the awkward words, but there is a new impulse in them. This is something we must feel! We must be able to see through the veil of the language and see the inner superficiality reflected in polished verse. For polished poems, beautiful poems, much more beautiful than Goethe’s poems, are a hundred a penny today; there it is the language itself which is producing the poetry. But a new inner life springing directly from the source of all life—this is something one must look for. It sometimes comes to expression exactly by having to battle with the language, so that we might say it has only got as far as being a stammer. Such ‘stammers’ may, however, be preferable for us to something that is perfect in itself but only reflects superficiality of soul. There was an occasion where I was given some verses. We needed verses, because we had to make a translation from another language. Very beautiful verses. I grew angry about them and wrote bad verse myself. I am aware that as poetry they are much poorer in quality. I knew, however, that in that case it was a necessity to express what needed to be expressed in a language that may perhaps seem rough and bumpy if one was drawing on the source spring of life that had to be sought in that case. I certainly do not overestimate what I undertook to do; but I also do not overestimate the polished verse I was given at the time.

The human being seeking through speech and language in the age of the spiritual soul—this is something which becomes life practice when we truly consider the life of language. Today I have therefore also tried to speak in a way where I did not deal with spiritual science in every sentence, always wanting to prove the supersensible, and instead tried to put this into the How of looking at history. And I think this is also the important thing, that one does not only call someone a true spiritual scientist whose every fifth word is ‘spirit’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual world’, believing in the suggestive effect of this, but someone who shows in the way he looks at the world, even in completely outer terms, by the way in which he presents things, that the inner guide, who takes us from thought to thought, from view to view, from impulse to impulse—that this guide is the spirit. If it is the spirit we need not keep on chirping the word all the time.

Here you can see how one can substantiate in speech and language something which I might also present in an extensive lecture.

• 111. Sprüche in Prosa. See note 10.
• 112. Nature non facit saltus. First in Fournier, Varietés historiques et litteraires, 1613, IX, 247, then in Leibniz, Nouveaux essais sur I’entendement humain, 1756, preface and IV ch. 16, and in Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica, 1751, No. 77.
• 113. At the request of Philipp IV, Pope Boniface VIII was taken prisoner at Anagni on 7 September 1303. He died soon after. The French pope Clement V did not go to Italy but resided in Avignon from 1309. The Papal Court had its seat there from 1309 until 1377.
• 114. The Order of the Templars, established in 1119 for the protection of the Sacred Tomb in Jerusalem and the pilgrims who visited it, was accused of heresy by French Kind Philip IV who wanted them suppressed and their property appropriated. The Papacy, then wholly under the French influence in Avignon, acceded to this. Following inquisition and torture, the Order was suppressed in 1312. The remaining Templars who had been arrested in 1307 were burned.
• 115. In the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, Orleans was under siege by the English in 1428. It was relieved in April 1429 by a small army led by Joan of Arc.
• 116. The attack by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was successfully beaten off by the Swiss at Grandson and Murten. Charles was killed in the decisive battle of Nancy in 1477.
• 117. 1618-1648, power struggle between kings of France and Habsburg rulers of Holy Roman Empire and Spain, with added overtones of conflict between Calvinism and post-Tridentine Catholicism. Other powers that became involved included German principalities, Sweden, Denmark and Transylvania. [Tr.]
• 118. Revolution broke out in many European countries in 1848—France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Germany and other areas. In England this was reflected in a final outburst of Chartist agitation [Tr.].
• 119. Britain and France fought Russia in 1854-6, originally because the Russians had successfully fought the Turks in the Black Sea region. European peace was under threat.
• 120. The talk between Goethe and Frédéric Jean Soret took place on 2 August 1830. Conflict between Etienne Geoffrey de Saint-Hilaire and Georges Cuvier had started in February that year at the Paris Academy. Goethe had above all studied Saint-Hilaire’s writings, publishing a review entitled ‘Principes de Philosophic zoologique’ in 1830/32. In Goethe’s scientific writings. See note 10.
• 121. See note 33.
• 122. See also Rudolf Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (GA 10); tr. G. Metaxa; Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press 1993; chapter on the guardian of the threshold.
• 123. Words of Solon or Chilon on the Apollo Temple at Delphi.
• 124. Mauthner, F. Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 Bde, Stuttgart 1901-1903. Wörterbuch der Philosophy, see note 27.
• 125. An influenza epidemic had led to a partial ban on gatherings.
• 126. See note 88.
• 127. It has not been possible to establish exactly which essay this was. See notes 44 and 46, however.
• 128. Geibel, Emanuel (1815–1884), German poet and dramatist.
• 129. Wildenbruch, Ernst von (1845–1909), German writer and dramatist, wrote patriotic poems during the Hohenzollem empire.

[ 1 ] Enlightenment is the result of very simple processes. Here, too, it is a matter of developing certain feelings and thoughts which are dormant within all men, but must be awakened. Only he who carries out these simple processes with complete patience, continuously and strenuously, can be led by them to the reception of inner illumination. The primary step is taken by observing different natural objects in a particular way; and these are as follows: a transparent stone of beautiful form (a crystal), a plant, and an animal. One should endeavour at first to direct one's whole attention to a comparison of the stone with the animal, in the following way: The thoughts which, accompanied by strong emotions, are thus induced, must pass through the soul, and no other emotions or thoughts must be mixed with them, or disturb the intense contemplation. One then says to oneself= “The stone has a form and the animal changes his. It is impulse (desire) which causes the animal to change its place, and it is these impulses which are served by the form of the animal. Its organs and instruments are the expression of these impulses. The form of the stone, on the contrary, is fashioned, not in accordance with impulses, but in accordance with an impulseless force.” [The fact here mentioned, in its bearing on the contemplation of crystals, is in many ways distorted by those who have only heard of it in an outward (exoteric) manner, and in this way such practices as crystal-gazing have their origin. Misrepresentations of such a kind are the outcome of misunderstanding. They have been described in many books, but they never form the subject of genuine (esoteric) teaching.]

If one sinks deeply into such thoughts, and while doing so observes the stone and the animal with fixed attention, then there arise in the soul two separate kinds of emotion. From the stone into the soul there flows one hind of emotion, and from the animal another. Probably in the beginning the experiment will not succeed, but little by little, with genuine and patient practice, these emotions become manifest. Again and again one should practise. At first the emotions only last as long as the contemplation. Later on, they work afterwards, and then they grow to some thing which remains alive in the soul. One then needs only to reflect, and both emotions invariably arise, apart from all contemplation of an external object.

Out of these, emotions, and the thoughts which are bound up with them, clairvoyant organs are formed. For should the plant be added to the contemplation, one will notice that the feeling out-flowing from it, both in its quality and in its degree, lies between that which emanates from the stone and that from the animal. The organs which are so formed are spiritual eyes. We learn by degrees and through their means to see both astral and mental colours. As long as one has only attained, the condition described as Probation, the spiritual world with its lines and figures remains dark, but through Enlightenment it will become clear. It must be noted here that the words “dark” and “light,” as well as the other common expressions, do but approximately describe what is really meant. But if ordinary language is not used, there is none possible and yet this language was only constructed to suit physical conditions.

Occult science describes what emanates from the stone and is seen by clairvoyant eyes, as “blue” or “bluish-red:” that which is observed as coming from the animal is described as “red” or “reddish-yellow.” In reality they are colours of a spiritual kind which are discerned. The colour proceeding from the plant is “green.” Plants are just those natural phenomena whose qualities in the higher worlds are similar to their qualities in the physical world. But it is not so with stones and animals. It must now be clearly understood that the above-mentioned colours do but suggest the prevailing shades of the stone, the plant, or the animal. In reality, all possible overtones exist. Every animal, every stone, every plant has its own peculiar shade of colour. In addition to these there are also the creatures of the higher worlds, who never incorporate themselves with their on colours, often marvellous, often horrible. In fact, the variety of colours in the higher worlds is immeasurably greater than in the physical world.

[ 2 ] If a man has once acquired the faculty of seeing with spiritual eyes, he then, sooner or later, meets with the beings here mentioned, some of them higher, some lower than man himself, beings who never entered into physical existence.

If he has come so far, the way to a great deal lies open before him; but it is inadvisable to proceed any further without an experienced guide. Indeed, for all that has been here described, such experienced guidance is desirable. For the rest, if anyone has the power and endurance to travel so far that he fulfils the elementary conditions of enlightenment here described, he will assuredly seek and discover his guide.

[ 3 ] But under all circumstances it is important to give one warning, and he who will not apply it had better leave untrodden all the steps of occult science. It is necessary that he who would become an occult student should lose none of his attributes as a good and noble man, and one susceptible to all physical truths. Indeed, throughout his apprenticeship he must continually increase his moral strength, his inner purity, and his powers of observation. let us give an example: During the preliminary practices of Enlightenment, the student must be careful to be always enlarging his sympathy with the animal and human worlds, and his sense of Nature's beauty. If he is not careful to do this, he persistently blunts that sense and that feeling by the use of these practices. The heart would grow cold and the senses become blunted, and that could only lead to perilous results.

[ 4 ] How enlightenment proceeds, if one rises, in the sense of the foregoing practices, from the stone, the plant, and the animal, up to man, and how, after enlightenment, under all circumstances, the gentle hand of the Pilot comes on a certain day, and leads to Initiation—of these things the next chapter will deal in so far as it can and may do so.

[ 5 ] In our time, the path to occult science is sought after by many. It is sought in various ways, and many dangerous and even objectionable practices are tried. Therefore it is that those who know something of the truth concerning these things have allowed part of the occult training to be communicated. Only so much is here imparted as this permission allows, and it is necessary that something of the truth should be known in order that it may counteract the great danger of these errors. If nothing be forced, there is no danger for him who follows the way already described; only one thing should be noted: nobody ought to spend more time or power upon such practices than what is at his disposal with due regard to his circumstances and his duties. No one, for the sake of the occult path, ought suddenly to change anything in the external conditions of his life. If one desires genuine results, one must have patience; one should be able to cease the practice after a few minutes, and then peacefully to continue one's daily work, and no thought of these practices ought to be mingled with the work of the day. He who has not learned to wait, in the best and highest sense of the word, is of no use as an occult student, nor will he ever attain results of much real value.

[ 6 ] He who is in search of the paths to occult knowledge, by the means which have been indicated in the foregoing pages, must fortify himself throughout the whole course of his efforts by a certain thought. He must ever bear in mind that after persevering for some time he may have made very real progress without becoming conscious of it in the precise way which he had expected. He who does not remember this is likely to lose heart, and in a little while to abandon his efforts altogether. The mental powers and faculties about to be developed are at first of the most subtle kind, and their nature differs entirely from the conceptions of them which are formed in the student's mind. He was accustomed to occupy himself with the physical world alone. The mental and astral worlds eluded his gaze, and baffled his conceptions. It is, therefore, not remarkable if, at first, he fails to realise the new forces, mental and astral, which are developing in his own being. This is why it is dangerous to enter the path leading to occult knowledge without experienced guidance. The teacher sees the progress made by the pupil, long before the latter becomes conscious of it himself. He sees the delicate organs of spiritual vision beginning to form themselves, before the pupil is aware of their existence, and a great part of the duties of the teacher consists in perpetual watchfulness, lest the disciple lose confidence, patience, and perseverance, before he becomes conscious of his own progress. The teacher, as we know, can confer upon the student no powers which are not already latent within him, and his sole function is to assist in the awakening of slumbering faculties. But he may be a pillar of strength to him who strives to penetrate through darkness into the light.

[ 7 ] There are many who leave the occult path soon after setting foot upon it, because they are not immediately conscious of their own progress. And even when higher experiences first begin to dawn upon the seeker, he is apt to regard them as illusions, because he had anticipated them quite differently. He loses courage, either because he regards these first experiences as of no value, or because they appear so insignificant that he has no hope of their leading to any appreciable results within a measurable time. Courage and self-confidence are the two lamps which must never be allowed to burn themselves out on the pathway to the occult. He who cannot patiently repeat an exercise which has failed for an apparently unlimited number of times, will never travel far.

[ 8 ] Long before any distinct perception of progress, comes an inarticulate mental impression that the right road has been found. This is a feeling to be welcomed, and to be encouraged, since it may develop into a trustworthy guide. Above all, it is imperative to extirpate the idea that any fantastic, mysterious practices are required for the attainment of higher experiences. It must be clearly realised that ordinary every-day human feelings and thoughts must form the basis from which the start is to be made, and that it is only needful to give these thoughts and feelings a new direction. Everyone must say to himself: “In my own sphere of thoughts and sensations lie enfolded the deepest mysteries, but hitherto, I have not been able to perceive them.” In the end it all resolves itself into the fact that man, ordinarily, carries body, soul, and spirit about with him, yet is conscious only of the body, not of the soul and spirit, and that the student attains to a similar consciousness of soul and spirit also.

[ 9 ] Hence it is highly important to give the proper direction to thoughts and feelings, in order that one may develop the perception of that which is invisible in ordinary life. One of the ways by which this development may be carried out will now be indicated. Again, like almost everything else we have explained so far, it is quite a simple matter. Yet the results are of the greatest consequence, if the experiment is carried out with perseverance, and in the right frame of mind.

[ 10 ] Place before you the small seed of a plant. It is then necessary, while contemplating this insignificant object, to create with intensity the right kind of thoughts, and through these thoughts to develop certain feelings. In the first place, let the student clearly grasp what is really presented to his vision. Let him describe to himself the shape, colour, and all other qualities of the grain of seed. Then let his mind dwell upon the following train of thought: “This grain of seed, if planted in the soil, Will grow into a plant of complex structure.” Let him clearly picture this plant to himself. Let him build it up in his imagination. And then let him reflect that the object now existing only in his imagination will presently be brought into actual physical existence by the forces of the earth and of light. If the thing contemplated by him were an artificially-made object, though such a close imitation of nature that no external difference could be detected by human eyesight, no forces inherent in the earth or light could avail to produce from it a plant. He who thoroughly grasps this thought and inwardly assimilates it will also be able to form the following idea with the right feeling. He will say to himself: “That which is ultimately to grow out of this seed is already as a force now secretly enfolded within it. The artificial duplicate of the seed contains no such force. And yet both appear to be alike to my eyes. The real seed, therefore, contains something invisible which is not present in the imitation.” It is this invisible something on which thought and feeling are now to be concentrated. [Anyone who might object that a microscopic examination would reveal the difference between the two would only show that he has failed to grasp the intention of the experiment. The intention is not to investigate the physical structure of the object, but to use it as a means for the development of psychic force.] Let the student fully realise that this invisible something will later on translate itself into a visible plant, perceptible by him in shape and colour. Let him dwell upon the thought: “The invisible will become visible. If I could not think, then I could not realise, already, that which will only become visible later on.”

[ 11 ] Particular stress must be laid on the importance of feeling with intensity that which one thinks. In calmness of mind a single thought must be vitally experienced within oneself to the exclusion of all disturbing influences. Sufficient time must be taken to allow the thought, and the state of feeling connected therewith, to become, as it were, imbedded in the soul. If that is accomplished in the right way—possibly not until after numerous attempts—an inward force will make itself felt. And this force will create new powers of perception. The grain of seed will appear as if enclosed in a small luminous cloud. The spiritualised vision of the student perceives it as a kind of flame. This flame is of a lilac colour in the centre, blue at the edges. Then appears that which one could not see before, and which was created by the power of thought and feeling brought into life within oneself. That which was physically invisible (the plant which will not become visible until later on) has there revealed itself to the spiritual eye.

[ 12 ] It is pardonable if, to many men, all this appears to be mere illusion. Many will say: “What is the value of such visions or such hallucinations?” And many will thus fall away, and no longer continue to tread the path. But this is precisely the important point—not to confuse, at this difficult stage of human evolution, spiritual reality with the mere creations of phantasy, and to have the courage to press manfully onward, instead of growing timorous and faint-hearted. On the other hand, however, it is necessary to insist on the necessity of maintaining unimpaired, and of perpetually cultivating, the healthy attitude of mind which is required for the distinguishing of truth from illusion. Never during all these exercises must the student surrender the fully conscious control of himself. He must continue to think as soundly and sanely in these conditions as he does with regard to the things and occurrences of ordinary life. It would be a bad thing if he lapsed into reveries. He must at every moment be clear-headed and sober-minded, and it would be the greatest mistake if the student, through such practices, lost his mental equilibrium, or if he were prevented from judging as sanely and clearly as before the matters of work-a-day life. The disciple should, therefore, examine himself again and again to find out whether he has remained unaltered in relation to the circumstances among which he lives, or whether perchance he has lost his mental balance. He must ever maintain a calm repose within his own individuality, and an open mind for everything, being careful at the same time not to drift into vague reveries or to experiment with all sorts of exercises.

The lines for development here indicated belong to those which have been followed, and whose efficacy has been demonstrated in the schools of occultism from the earliest ages, and none but such will here be given. Anyone attempting to employ methods of meditation devised by himself, or which he may have come across in the course of promiscuous reading, will inevitably be led astray, and will lose himself in a boundless morass of incoherent fantasies.

[ 13 ] A further exercise which may succeed the one described above, is the following: Let the disciple place himself in front of a plant which has attained the stage of full development. Now let his mind be absorbed by the reflection that a time is at hand when this plant will wither and die. “Nothing,” he should say to himself, “nothing of what I now see before me will endure. But this plant will have evolved seeds which in their turn will grow into new plants. I become again aware that in what I see something lies concealed which I cannot see. I will fill my mind wholly with the thought that this plant-form with its colours will cease to be. But the reflection that the plant has produced seeds teaches me that it will not disappear into nothing. That which will prevent this disappearance, I can at present no more see with my eyes than I could originally discern the plant in the grain of seed. The plant, therefore, contains something which my eyes are unable to see. If this thought fully lives in me, and combines with the corresponding state of feeling, then, in due time, there will again develop a force in my soul which will ripen into a new kind of perception.” Out of the plant there grows once more a flame-like appearance, which is, of course, correspondingly larger than that which was previously described. This flame is greenish at the centre, and is tinged: with yellow at the outer edge.

[ 15 ] He who has won this vision has gained greatly, inasmuch as he sees things not only in their present state of being, but also in their development and decay. He begins to see in all things the spirit, of which the bodily organs of sight have no perception. And he has thus taken the initial steps on that road, which will gradually enable him to solve, by direct vision, the secret of birth and death. To the outer senses, a being begins to exist at its birth, and ceases to exist at its death. This, however, only appears to be so, because these senses are unable to apprehend the concealed spirit. Birth and death are only for this spirit, transformations, just as the unfolding of the flower from the bud is a transformation enacted before our physical eyes. But if one desires to attain to direct perception of these facts, one must first awaken the spiritual vision by the means here indicated.

[ 16 ] In order to meet an objection which may be raised by certain people already possessed of some psychical experience, let it be at once admitted that there are shorter and simpler ways than this, and that there are persons who have direct perception of the actualities of birth and death, without having had to pass through all the stages of discipline here set forth. There are human beings endowed with high psychical faculties, to whom only a slight impulse is necessary for the developing of these powers. But they are exceptional, and the methods described above are safer, and are capable of general application. Similarly, it is possible to gain some knowledge of chemistry by special methods; but in order to make safer the science of chemistry, the recognised, reliable course must be followed.

[ 17 ] An error fraught with serious consequences would result from the assumption that the goal could be reached more simply by allowing the mind to dwell merely on an imaginary plant or a grain of seed. It may be possible by such means to evoke a force which would enable the soul to attain the inner vision. But this vision will be, in most cases, a mere figment of the imagination, for the main object is not to create arbitrarily a mental vision, but to allow the veritable nature of things to form an image within one's mind. The truth must well up from the depth of one's own soul, but the necromancer who shall call up the truth must not be one's ordinary self, but rather must the objects of one's perception themselves exercise their magical power, if one is to perceive their inner reality.

[ 18 ] After the disciple has evolved, by such means, the rudiments of spiritual vision, he may proceed to the contemplation of human nature itself. Simple appearances of ordinary life must be chosen first. But before making any attempts in this direction, it is imperative for the student to strive after an absolute sincerity of moral character. He must banish all thoughts of ever using the insight to be attained in these ways for his own personal benefit. He must be absolutely determined that under no circumstances will he avail himself, in an evil sense, of any power which he may gain over his fellow-creatures. This is the reason why everyone who desires to gain direct insight into the secrets of human nature must follow the golden rule of true Occultism. And the golden rule is this: For every one step that you take in the pursuit of the hidden knowledge, take three steps in the perfecting of your own character. He who obeys this rule can perform such exercises as that which is now explained.

[ 19 ] Begin by observing a person filled with a desire for some object. Direct your attention to this desire. It is best to choose a. time when this desire is at its height, and when it is not yet certain whether the object of the desire will be attained or not. Then surrender yourself entirely to the contemplation of that which you observe, but maintain the utmost inner tranquillity of soul. Make every endeavour to be deaf and blind to everything that may be going on around you at the same time, and bear in mind particularly that this contemplation is to evoke a state of feeling, in your soul. Allow this state of feeling to arise in your soul, like a cloud rising on an otherwise cloudless horizon. It is to be expected, of course, that your observation will be interrupted, because the person on whom it is directed will not remain in this particular state of mind for a sufficient length of time. Presumably you will fail in your experiment hundreds and hundreds of times. It is simply a question of not losing patience. After many attempts you will ultimately realise the state of feeling spoken of above as fast as the corresponding mental phenomena pass through the soul of the person under observation. After a time you will begin to notice that this feeling in your own soul is evoking the power of spiritual vision into the psychical condition of the other. A luminous image will appear in your field of vision. And this luminous image is the so-called astral manifestation evoked by the desire-state when under observation. Again we may describe this image as flame-like in appearance. It is yellowish red in the centre and reddish blue or lilac at the edges. Much depends upon treating such experiences of the inner vision with great delicacy. It will be best for you at first to talk of them to nobody except your teacher, if you have one. The attempt to describe such appearances in appropriate words usually only leads to gross self-deception. One employs ordinary terms not applicable to such purposes and therefore much too gross and clumsy. The consequence is that one's own attempt to clothe this vision in words unconsciously leads one to blend the actual experience with an alloy of imaginary details. It is, therefore, another important law for the occult inquirer that he should know how to observe silence concerning his inner visions. Observe silence even towards yourself. Do not endeavour to express in words that which you see, or to fathom it with reasoning faculties that are inadequate. Freely surrender yourself to these spiritual impressions without any mental reservations, and without disturbing them by thinking about them too much. For you must remember that your reasoning faculties were, at first, by no means equal to your faculties of observation. You have acquired these reasoning faculties through experiences hitherto confined exclusively to the world as apprehended by your physical senses, and the faculties you are now acquiring transcend these experiences. Do not, therefore, try to measure your new and higher perceptions by the old standard. Only he who has already gained some certainty in his observation of inner experiences ought to speak about them with the idea of thereby stimulating his fellow-beings.

[ 20 ] As a supplementary exercise the following may be set forth. Direct your observation in the same way upon a fellow-being to whom the fulfilment of some wish, the gratification of some desire has just been granted. If the same rules and precautions are adopted as in the previous instance, you will once more attain to spiritual perception. You will distinguish a flame-like appearance which is yellow in the centre and greenish at the edges.

[ 21 ] By such observations of one's fellow-creatures one may easily be led into a moral fault—one may become uncharitable. All conceivable means must be taken to fight against this tendency. Anyone exercising such powers of observation should have risen to the level, on which one is absolutely convinced that thoughts are actual things. He may then no longer allow himself to admit thoughts incompatible with the highest reverence for the dignity of human life and of human liberty. Not for one moment must he entertain the idea of regarding a human being as a mere object for observation. It must be the aim of self-education to see that the faculties for a psychic observation of human nature go hand in hand with a full recognition of the rights of each individual. That which dwells in each human being must be regarded as something holy, and to be held inviolate by us even in our thoughts and feelings. We must be possessed by a feeling of reverential awe for all that is human.

[ 22 ] For the present, only these two examples can be given as to the methods by which an insight into human nature may be achieved, but they will at least serve to point out the way which must be followed. He who has gained the inner tranquillity and repose which are indispensable for such observations, will already, by so doing, have undergone a great transformation. This will soon reach the point at which the increase of his spiritual worth will manifest itself in the confidence and composure of his outward demeanour. Again, this alteration in his demeanour will react favourably on his inner condition, and thus he will be able to help himself further along the road. He will find ways and means of penetrating more and more into the secrets of human nature, hidden from our external senses, and he will then also become ripe for a deeper insight into the mysterious correlations between the nature of man, and of all else that exists in the universe. By following this path, the disciple will approach closer and closer to the day on which he will be deemed worthy of taking the first steps of initiation; but before these can be taken one thing more is necessary. At first it may not be at all apparent to the student why it should be necessary, but he cannot fail to be convinced of it in the end.

[ 23 ] The quality which is indispensable to him who would be initiated is a certain measure of courage and fearlessness. He must absolutely go out of his way to find opportunities for developing these virtues. In the occult schools they are cultivated quite systematically; but life in this respect is itself an excellent school of occultism, nay, possibly the best. To face danger calmly, to try to overcome difficulties unswervingly, this is what the student must learn to do; for instance, in the presence of some peril, he must rise at once to the conception that fears are altogether useless, and ought not to be entertained for one moment, but that the mind ought simply to be concentrated on what is to be done. He must reach a point where it has become impossible for him ever again to feel afraid or to lose his courage. By self-discipline in this direction he will develop within himself quite distinct qualities which he needs if he is to be initiated into the higher mysteries. Just as man in his physical being requires nervous force in order to use his physical senses, so also, in his psychic nature, he requires the force which is only produced in the courageous and the fearless. For in penetrating to the higher mysteries he will see things which are concealed from ordinary humanity by the illusions of the senses. The latter, by hiding the higher verities from our gaze, are in reality our benefactors, since they prevent us from perceiving that which, if realised without due preparation, would throw us into unutterable consternation, things which we could not bear to behold. The disciple must be able to endure this sight. He loses certain supports in the outer world which were owing to the very illusions that encompassed him. It is truly and literally as if his attention were suddenly drawn to a certain danger by which for some time he had already been threatened unconsciously. He was not afraid hitherto, but now that he sees his peril, he is overcome by terror, although the danger has not been rendered any greater by his knowledge thereof.

[ 24 ] The forces at work in the world are both destructive and creative. The destiny of manifested beings is birth and death. The Initiate is to behold this march of destiny. The veil, which in the ordinary course of life clouds the spiritual eyes, is then to be uplifted. The man is himself, however, interwoven with these forces, with this destiny. His own nature contains destructive and creative powers. As undisguisedly as the other objects of his vision are revealed to the eye of the seer, his own soul is bared to his gaze. In the face of this self-knowledge, the disciple must not suffer himself to droop, and in this he will only succeed if he has brought with him an excess of the necessary strength. In order that this may be the case he must learn to maintain inner calm and confidence in the most difficult circumstances; he must nourish within himself a firm faith in the beneficent forces of existence. He must be prepared to find that many motives which have actuated him hitherto will actuate him no longer. He must needs perceive that he has hitherto often thought or acted in a certain manner, because he was still in the toils of ignorance. Reasons like those which influenced him before will now disappear. He has done many things out of personal vanity; he will now perceive how utterly futile all such vanity is in the eyes of the Initiate. He has done much from motives of avarice; he will now be aware of the destructive effect of all avariciousness. He will have to develop entirely new springs for his thought and action, and it is for this that courage and fearlessness are required.

[ 25 ] It is a matter especially of cultivating this courage and this fearlessness in the inmost depths of the mental life. The disciple must learn never to despair. He must always be equal to the thought: “I will forget that I have again failed in this matter. I will try once more, as though nothing at all had happened.” Thus he will fight his way on to the firm conviction that the universe contains inexhaustible fountains of strength from which he may drink. He must aspire again and again to the Divine which will uplift and support him, however feeble and impotent the mortal part of his being may prove. He must be capable of pressing on towards the future, undismayed by any experiences of the past. Every teacher of Occultism will carefully ascertain how far the disciple, aspiring to initiation into the higher mysteries, has advanced on the road of spiritual preparation. If he fulfils these conditions to a certain point, he is then worthy to hear uttered those Names of things which form the key that unlocks the higher knowledge. For Initiation consists in this very act of learning. to know the things of the universe by those Names which they bear in the spirit of their Divine Author. And the mystery of things lies in these Names. Therefore is it that the Initiate speaks another language than that of the uninitiated, for the former knows the Names by which things were called into existence.

My dear friends,

In the remainder of the time at our disposal, I wish to say something about farm animals, orchards and vegetable gardening. We have not much time left; but in these branches of farming, too, we can have no fruitful starting-point unless we first bring about an insight into the underlying facts and conditions. We shall do this to-day, and pass on tomorrow to the more practical hints and applications.

To-day I must ask you to follow me in matters which lie yet a little farther afield from present-day points of view. Time was, indeed, when they were thoroughly familiar to the more instinctive insight of the farmer; to-day they are to all intents and purposes terra incognita. The entities occurring in Nature (minerals, plants, animals—we will leave man out for the moment) are frequently studied as though they stood there all alone.

Nowadays, one generally considers a single plant by itself. Then, from the single plant, one proceeds to consider a plant-species by itself; and other plant-species beside it. So it is all prettily pigeonholed into species and genera, and all the rest that we are then supposed to know. Yet in Nature it is not so at all. In Nature—and, indeed, throughout the Universal being—all things are in mutual interaction; the one is always working on the other.

In our materialistic age, scientists only follow up the coarser effects of one upon the other—as for instance when one creature is eaten or digested by another, or when the dung of the animals comes on to the fields. Only these coarse interactions are traced. But in addition to these coarse interactions, finer ones, too, are constantly taking place—effects transmitted by finer forces and finer substances too—by warmth, by the chemical-ether principle that is for ever working in the atmosphere, and by the life-ether.

We must take these finer interactions into account. Otherwise we shall make no progress in certain domains of our farm-work. Notably we must observe these more intimate relationships of Nature when we are dealing with the life, together on the farm, of plant and animal. Here again, we must not only consider those animals which are undoubtedly very near to us—like cattle, horses, sheep and so on. We must also observe with intelligence, let us say, the many coloured world of insects, hovering around the plant-world during a certain reason of the year. Moreover, we must learn to look with understanding at the birds.

Modern humanity has no idea how greatly farming and forestry are affected by the, owing to the modern conditions of life, of certain kinds of birds from certain districts. Light must be thrown upon these things once more by that macrocosmic method which Spiritual Science is pursuing—for we may truly call it macrocosmic. Here we can apply some of the ideal we have already let work upon us; we shall thus gain further insight.

Look at a fruit-tree—a pear-tree, apple-tree or plum-tree. Outwardly Seen, to begin with, it is quite different from a herbaceous plant or cereal. Indeed, this would apply to any tree—it is quite different. But we must learn to perceive in what way the tree is different; otherwise we shall never understand the function of fruit in Nature's household (I am speaking now of such fruit as grows on trees).

Let us consider the tree. What is it in the household of Nature? If we look at it with understanding, we must include in the plant-nature of the tree any more than grows out of it in the thin stalks—in the green leaf-bearing stalks—and in the flowers and fruit. All this grows out of the tree, as the herbaceous plant grows out of the earth. The tree is really “earth” for that which grows upon its boughs and branches. It is the earth, grown up like a hillock; shaped—it is rate—in a rather more living way than the earth out of which our herbaceous plants and cereals spring forth.

To understand the free, we must say: There is the thick tree trunk (and in a sense the boughs and branches still belong to this). Out of all this the real plant grows forth. Leaves, flowers and fruit grow out of this; they are the real plant—rooted in the trunk and branches of the tree, as the herbaceous plants and cereals are rooted in the Earth.

Here the question will at once arise: Is this “plant” which grows on the tree—and which is therefore describable as a parasitic growth, more or less—is it actually rooted? An actual root is not to be found in the tree. To understand the matter rightly, we must say: This plant which grows on the tree—unfolding up there its flowers and leaves and Stems—has lost its roots. But a plant is not whole if it has no roots. It must have a root. Therefore we must ask ourselves: Where is the root of this plant?

The point is simply that the root is invisible to crude external observation. In this case we must not merely want to see a root we must understand what a root is. A true comparison will help us forward here. Suppose I were to plant in the soil a whole number of herbaceous plants, very near together, so that their roots intertwined, and merged with one another—the one root winding round the other, until it all become a regular mush of roots, merging one into another. As you can well imagine, such a complex of roots would not allow itself to remain a mere tangle; it would grow organised into a single entity. Down there in the soil the saps and fluids would flow into one another. There would be an organised root-complex—roots flowing into one another. We could not distinguish where the several roots began or ended. A common root-being would arise for these plants (Diagram 15).

So it would be. No such thing need exist in reality, but this illustration will enable us to understand. Here is the soil of the earth: here I insert all my plants. Down there, all the roots coalesce, until they form a regular surface—a continuous root-stratum. Once more, you would not know where the one root begins and the other ends.

Now the very thing I have here sketched as an hypothesis is actually present in the tree. The plant which grows on the free has lost its root. Relatively speaking, it is even separated from its root—only it is united with it, as it were, in a more ethereal way. What I have hypothetically sketched on the board is actually there in the tree, as the cambium layer—the cambium. That is how we must regard the roots of these plants that grow out of the tree: they are replaced by the cambium. Although the cambium does not look like roots, it is the living, growing layer, constantly forming new cells, so that the plant-life of the free grows out of it, just as the life of a herbaceous plant grows up above out of the root below.

Here, then, is the free with its cambium layer, the growing formative layer, which is able to create plant-cells. (The other layers in the free would not be able to create fresh cells). Now you can thoroughly see the point. In the tree with its cambium or formative layer, the earth-realm itself is actually bulged out; it has grown outward into the airy regions. And having thus grown outward into the air, it needs more inwardness, more intensity of life, than the earth otherwise has, i.e. than it has where the ordinary root is in it. Now we begin to understand the free. In the First place, we understand it as a strange entity whose function is to separate the plants that grow upon it—stem, blossom and fruit—from their roots, uniting them only through the Spirit, that is, through the ethereal. We must learn to look with macrocosmic intelligence into the mysteries of growth. But it goes still further. For I now beg you observe: What happens through the fact that a free comes into being? It is as follows:

That which encompasses the free has a different plant-nature in the air and outer warmth than that which grows in air and warmth immediately on the soil, unfolding the herbaceous plant that springs out of the earth directly (Diagram 16). Once more, it is a different plant-world. For it is far more intimately related to the surrounding astrality. Down here, the astrality in air and warmth is expelled, so that the air and warmth may become mineral for the Bake of man and animal. Look at a plant growing directly out of the soil. True, it is hovered-around, enshrouded in an astral cloud. Up there, however, round about the free, the astrality is far denser. Once more, it is far denser. Our trees are gatherings of astral substance; quite clearly, they are gatherers of astral substance.

In this realm it is easiest of all for one to attain to a certain higher development. If you make the necessary effort, you can easily become esoteric in these spheres. I do not say clairvoyant, but you can easily become clair-sentient with respect to the sense of smell, especially if you acquire a certain sensitiveness to the diverse aromas that proceed from plants growing on the soil, and on the other hand from fruit-tree plantations—even if only in the blossoming stage—and from the woods and forests! Then you will feel the difference between a plant-atmosphere poor in astrality, such as you can smell among the herbaceous plants growing on the earth, and a plant-world rich in astrality such as you have in your nostrils when you sniff what is so beautifully wafted from the treetops.

Accustom yourself to specialise your sense of smell—to distinguish, to differentiate, to individualise, as between the scent of earthly plants and the scent of trees. Then, in the former case you will become clair-sentient to a thinner astrality, and in the latter case to a denser astrality. You see, the farmer can easily become clair-sentient. Only in recent times he has male less use of this than in the time of the old clairvoyance. The countryman, as I said, can become clair-sentient with regard to the sense of smell.

Let us observe where this will lead us. We must now ask: What of the polar opposite, the counterpart of that richer astrality which the plant—parasitically growing on the tree—brings about in the neighbourhood of the tree? In other words, what happens by means of the cambium? What does the cambium itself do?

Far, far around, the free makes the spiritual atmosphere inherently richer in astrality. What happens, then, when the herbaceous life grows out of the free up yonder? The tree has a certain inner vitality or ethericity; it has a certain intensity of life. Now the cambium damps down this life a little more, so that it becomes slightly more mineral. While, up above, a rich astrality arises all around the tree, the cambium works in such a way that, there within, the ethericity is poorer.

Within the tree arises poverty of ether as compared to the plant. Once more, here within, it will be somewhat poorer in ether. And as, through the cambium, a relative poverty of ether is engendered in the tree, the root in its turn will be influenced. The roots of the tree become mineral—far more so than the roots of herbaceous plants. And the root, being more mineral, deprives the earthly soil—observe, we still remain within the realms of life—of some of its ethericity. This makes the earthly soil rather more dead in the environment of the free than it would be in the environment of a herbaceous plant.

All this you must clearly envisage. Now whatever arises in this way will always involve something of deep significance in the household of Nature as a whole. Let us then enquire: what is the inner significance, for Nature, of the astral richness in the tree's environment above, and the etheric poverty in the realm of the free-roots? We only need Look about us, and we can find how these things work themselves out in Nature's household. The fully developed insect, in effect, lives and moves by virtue of this rich astrality which is wafted through the tree-tops.

Take, on the other hand, what becomes poorer in ether, down below in the soil. (This poverty of ether extends, of course, throughout the tree, for the Spiritual always works through the whole, as I explained yesterday when speaking of human Karma). That which is poorer in ether, down below, works through the larvae. Thus, if the earth had no trees, there would be no insects on the earth. The trees make it possible for the insects to be. The insects fluttering around the parts of the tree which are above the earth—fluttering around the woods and forests as a whole—they have their very life through the existence of the woods. Their larvae, too, live by the very existence of the woods.

Here you have a further indication of the inner relationship between the root-nature and the sub-terrestrial animal world. From the tree we can best learn what I have now explained; here it becomes most evident. But the fast is: What becomes very evident in the tree is present in a more delicate way throughout the whole plant-world. In every plant there is a certain tendency to become tree-like. In every plant, the root with its environment strives to let go the ether; while that which grows upward tends to draw in the astral more densely. The free-becoming tendency is there is every plant.

Hence, too, in every plant the same relationship to the insect world emerges, which I described for the special case of the tree. But that is not all. This relation to the insect-world expands into a relation to the whole animal kingdom. Take, for example, the insect larvae: truly, they only live upon the earth by virtue of the tree-roots being there. However, in times gone by, such larvae have also evolved into other kinds of animals, similar to them, but undergoing the whole of their animal life in a more or less larval condition. These creatures then emancipate themselves, so to speak, from the tree-root-nature, and live more near to the rest of the root-world—that is, they become associated with the root-nature of herbaceous plants.

A wonderful fast emerges here: Certain of these sub-terrestrial creatures (which, it is true, are already somewhat removed from the larval nature) develop the faculty to regulate the ethereal vitality within the soil whenever it becomes too great. If the soil is tending to become too strongly living—if ever its livingness grows rampant—these subterranean animals see to it that the over-intense vitality is released. Thus they become wonderful regulators, safety-valves for the vitality inside the Earth. These golden creatures—for they are of the greatest value to the earth—are none other than the earth-worms.

Study the earth-worm—how it lives together with the soil. These worms are wonderful creatures: they leave to the earth precisely as much ethericity as it needs for plant-growth. There under the earth you have the earth-worms and similar creatures distantly reminiscent of the larva. Indeed, in certain soils—which you can easily tell—we ought to take special care to allow for the due breeding of earth-worms. We should soon see how beneficially such a control of the animal world beneath the earth would react on the vegetation, and thus in turn upon the animal world in general, of which we shall speak in a moment.

Now there is again a distant similarity between certain animals and the fully evolved, i.e. the winged, insect-world. These animals are the birds. In course of evolution a wonderful thing has taken place as between the insects and the birds. I will describe it in a picture. The insects said, one day: We do not feel quite strong enough to work the astrality which sparkles and Sprays around the trees. We therefore, for our part, will use the treeing tendency of other plants; there we will flutter about, and to you birds we will leave the astrality that surrounds the trees. So there came about a regular division of labour between the bird-world and the butterfly-world, and now the two together work most wonderfully.

These winged creatures, each and all, provide for a proper distribution of astrality, wherever it is needed on the surface of the Earth or in the air. Remove these winged creatures, and the astrality would fail of its true service; and you would soon detect it in a kind of stunting of the vegetation. For the two things belong together: the winged animals, and that which grows out of the Earth into the air. Fundamentally, the one is unthinkable without the other. Hence the farmer should also be careful to let the insects and birds flutter around in the right way. The farmer himself should have some understanding of the rare of birds and insects. For in great Nature—again and again I must say it—everything, everything is connected.

These things are most important for a true insight: therefore let us place them before our souls most clearly. Through the flying world of insects, we may say, the right astralisation is brought about in the air. Now this astralisation of the air is always in mutual relation to the woods or forests, which guide the astrality in the right way just as the blood in our body is guided by certain forces. What the wood does—not only for its immediate vicinity but far and away around it (for these things work over wide areas)—what the wood does in this direction has to be done by quite other things in unwooded districts. This we should learn to understand. The growth of the soil is subject to quite other laws in districts where forest, Field and meadow alternate, than in wide, unwooded stretches of country.

There are districts of the Earth where we can tell at a glance that they became rich in forests long before man did anything—for in certain matters Nature is wiser than man, even to this day. And we may well assume, if there is forest by Nature in a given district, it has its good use for the surrounding farmlands—for the herbaceous and graminaceous vegetation. We should have sufficient insight, on no account to exterminate the forest in such districts, but to preserve it well. Moreover, the Earth by and by changes, through manifold cosmic and climatic influences.

Therefore we should have the heart—when we see that the vegetation is becoming stunted, not merely to make experiments for the fields or on the fields alone, but to increase the wooded areas a little. Or if we notice that the plants are growing rampant and have not enough seeding-force, then we should set to work and make some clearings in the forest—take certain surfaces of wooded land away: In districts which are predestined to be wooded, the regulation of woods and forests is an essential part of agriculture, and should indeed be thought of from the spiritual side. It is of a far-reaching significance.

Moreover, we may say: the world of worms, and larvae too, is related to the limestone—that is, to the mineral nature of the earth; while the world of insects and birds—all that flutters and flies stands in relation to the astral. That which is there under the surface of the earth—the world of worms and larvae—is related to the mineral, especially the chalky, limestone nature, whereby the ethereal is duly conducted away, as I told you a few days ago from another standpoint. This is the task of the limestone—and it fulfils its task in mutual interaction with the larva- and insect-world.

Thus you will see, as we begin to specialise what I have given, ever new things will dawn on us—things which were undoubtedly recognised with true feeling in the old time of instinctive clairvoyance. (I should not trust myself to expound them with equal certainty.) The old instincts have been lost. Intellect has lost all the old instincts—nay, has exterminated them. That is the trouble with materialism—men have become so intellectual, so clever. When they were less intellectual, though they were not so clever, they were far wiser; out of their feeling they knew how to treat things, even as we must learn to do once more, for in a conscious way we must learn once more to approach the Wisdom that prevails in all things. We shall learn it by something which is not clever at all, namely, by Spiritual Science. Spiritual Science is not clever: it strives rather for Wisdom.

Nor can we rest content with the abstract repetition of words: “Man consists of physical body, etheric body,” etc., etc., which one can learn off by heart like any cookery-book. The point is for us to introduce the knowledge of these things in all domains—to see it inherent everywhere. Then we are presently guided to distinguish how things are in Nature, especially if we become clairvoyant in the way I explained. Then we discover that the bird world becomes harmful if it has not the “needle-wood” or coniferous forests beside it, to transform what it brings about into good use and benefit. Thereupon our vision is still further sharpened, and a fresh relationship emerges. When we have recognised this peculiar relation of the birds to the coniferous forests, then we perceive another kinship. It emerges clearly. To begin with, it is a fine and intimate kinship—fine as are those which I have mentioned now. But it can readily be changed into a stronger, more robust relationship.

I mean the inner kinship of the mammals to all that does not become tree and yet does not remain as a small plant—in other words, to the shrubs and bushes—the haze-lnut, for instance. To improve our stock of mammals in a farm or in a farming district, we shall often do well to plant in the landscape bushes or shrub-like growths. By their mere presence they have a beneficial effect. All things in Nature are in mutual interaction, once again. But we can go farther. The animals are not so foolish as men are; they very quickly “tumble to it” that there is this kinship. See how they love the shrubs and bushes. This love is absolutely inborn in them, and so they like to get at the shrubs to eat them. They soon begin to take what they need, which has a wonderfully regulating effect on their remaining fodder.

Moreover, when we trace these intimate relationships in Nature, we gain a new insight into the essence of what is harmful. For just as the coniferous forests are intimately related to the birds and the bushes to the mammals, so again all that is mushroom—or fungus-like—has an intimate relation to the lower animal world—to the bacteria and such-like creatures, and notably the harmful parasites. The harmful parasites go together with the mushroom or fungus-nature; indeed they develop wherever the fungus-nature appears scattered and dispersed.

Thus there arise the well-known plant-diseases and harmful growths on a coarser and larger scale. If now we have not only woods but meadows in the neighbourhood of the farm, these meadows will be very useful, inasmuch as they provide good soil for mushrooms and toadstools; and we should see to it that the soil of the meadow is well-planted with such growths. If there is near the farm a meadow rich in mushrooms—it need not even be very large—the mushrooms, being akin to the bacteria and other parasitic creatures, will keep them away from the rest. For the mushrooms and toadstools, more than the other plants, tend to hold together with these creatures. In addition to the methods I have indicated for the destruction of these pests, it is possible on a larger scale to keep the harmful microscopic creatures away from the farm by a proper distribution of meadows.

So we must look for a due distribution of wood and forest, orchard and shrubbery, and meadow-lands with their natural growth of mushrooms. This is the very essence of good farming, and we shall attain far more by such means, even if we reduce to some extent the surface available for tillage.

It is no true economy to exploit the surface of the earth to such an extent as to rid ourselves of all the things I have here mentioned in the hope of increasing our crops. Your large plantations will become worse in quality, and this will more than outweigh the extra amount you gain by increasing your tilled acreage at the cost of these other things. You cannot truly engage in a pursuit so intimately connected with Nature as farming is, unless you have insight into these mutual relationships of Nature's husbandry.

The time has come for us to bring home to ourselves those wider aspects which will reveal, quite generally speaking, the relation of plant to animal-nature, and vice versa, of animal to plant-nature. What is an animal? What is the world of plants? (for the world of plants we must speak rather of a totality—the plant-world as a whole.) Once more, what is an animal, and what is the world of plants? We must discover what the essential relation is; only so shall we understand how to feed our animals. We shall not feed them properly unless we see the true relationship of plant and animal. What are the animals? Well may you look at their outer forms! You can dissect them, if you will, till you get down to the skeleton, in the forms of which you may well take delight; you may even study them in the way I have described. Theo you may study the musculature, the nerves and so forth.

All this, however, will not lead you to perceive what the animals really are in the whole household of Nature. You will only perceive it if you observe what it is in the environment to which the animal is directly and intimately related. What the animal receives from its environment and assimilates directly in its nerves-and-senses system and in a portion of its breathing system, is in effect all that which passes first through air and warmth. Essentially, in its own proper being, the animal is a direct assimilator of air and warmth—through the nerves-and-senses system.

Diagrammatically, we can draw the animal in this way: In all that is there in its periphery, in its environment—in the nerves-and-senses system and in a portion of the breathing system—the animal is itself. In its own essence, it is a creature that lives directly in the air and warmth. It has an absolutely direct relation to the air and warmth (Diagram 17).

Notably out of the warmth its bony system is formed—where the Moon- and Sun-influences are especially transmitted through the warmth. Out of the air, its muscular system is formed. Here again, the forces of Sun and Moon are working through the air. But the animal cannot relate itself thus directly to the earthy and watery elements. It cannot assimilate water and earth thus directly. It must indeed receive the earth and water into its inward parts; it must therefore have the digestive tract, passing inward from outside. With all that it has become through the warmth and air, it then assimilates the water and the earth inside it—by means of its metabolic and a portion of its breathing system.The breathing system passes over into the metabolic system. With a portion of the breathing and a portion of the metabolic system, the animal assimilates “earth” and “water” In effect, before it can assimilate earth and water, the animal itself must be there by virtue of the air and warmth. That is how the animal lives in the domain of earth and water. (The assimilation-process is of course, as I have often indicated, an assimilation more of forces than of substances).

Now let us ask, in face of the above, what is a plant? The answer is: the plant has an immediate relation to earth and water, just as the animal has to air and warmth. The plant—also through a kind of breathing and through something remotely akin to the sense system—absorbs into itself directly all that is earth and water; just as the animal absorbs the air and warmth. The plant lives directly with the earth and water.

Now you may say: Having recognised that the plant lives directly with earth and water, just as the animal does with air and warmth, may we not also conclude that the plant assimilates the air and the warmth internally, even as the animal assimilates the earth and water? Ne, it is not so. To find the spiritual truths, we cannot merely conclude by analogy from what we know. The fact is this: Whereas the animal consumes the earthy and watery material and assimilates them internally, the plant does not consume but, on the contrary, secretes—gives off—the air and warmth, which it experiences in conjunction with the earthy soil. Air and warmth, therefore, do not go in—at least, they do not go in at all far. On the contrary they go out; instead of being consumed by the plant, they are given off, excreted, and this excretion-process is the important point.

Organically speaking, the plant is in all respects an inverse of the animal—a true inverse. The excretion of air and warmth has for the plant the same importance as the consumption of food for the animal. In the same sense in which the animal lives by absorption of food, the plant lives by excretion of air and warmth. This, I would say, is the virginal quality of the plant. By nature, it does not want to consume things greedily for itself, but, on the contrary, it gives away what the animal takes from the world, and lives thereby. Thus the plant gives, and lives by giving.

Observe this give and take, and you perceive once more what played so great a part in the old instinctive knowledge of these things. The saying I have here derived from anthroposophical study: “The plant in the household of Nature gives, and the animal takes,” was universal in an old instinctive and clairvoyant insight into Nature. In human beings who were sensitive to these things, some of this insight survived into later times.

In Goethe you will often find this saying: Everything in Nature lives by give and take. Look through Goethe's works and you will soon find it. He did not fully understand it any longer, but he revived it from old usage and tradition; he felt that this proverb describes something very true in Nature. Those who came after him no longer understood it. To this day they do not understand what Goethe meant when he spoke of “give and take.” Even in relation to the breathing process—its interplay with the metabolism—Goethe speaks of “give and take.” Clearly-unclearly, he uses this word.

Thus we have seen that forest and orchard, shrubbery and bush are in a certain way regulators to give the right form and development to the growth of plants over the earth's surface. Meanwhile beneath the earth the lower animals—larvae and worm-like creatures and the like, in their unison with limestone—act as a regulator likewise.

So must we regard the relation of tilled fields, orchards and cattle-breeding in our farming work. In the remaining hour that is still at our disposal, we shall indicate the practical applications, enough for the good Experimental Circle to work out and develop.

The Christmas festival which we are about to celebrate is given deep significance again and a new life in the spirit with the anthroposophical view of the world. Spiritually, the Christmas festival is a sun festival, and it is as a sun festival that we shall meet it today. To begin with, let us hear the most wonderful apostrophe⁸¹ addressed to the sun, words Goethe wrote for his Faust:

The throb of life returns, with pulses beating Soft to ethereal dawn. O steadfast earth,
True through the night, you waited for my greeting,
Breathing beneath my feet in glad new birth,
And, clothing me afresh in joy of living,
In high resolve that banishes misgiving,
You stir my soul to prove life’s utmost worth.—

In gold of dawn the quickened world lies gleaming,
The forest is alive with myriad voices,
Through dell and vale the misty shapes are teeming,
But nature’s deepest heart in light rejoices;
Now burgeon, freshly quivering, frond and bough,
Sprung from the fragrant depth where they lay dreaming;
On flower and blade hang trembling pearls, and now Each colour stands out clear, in glad device,
And all the region is my Paradise.

Look up on high!—The giant peaks that stand In joy of light above the mountain-brow,
Are heralds of the solemn hour at hand,
That brings the blessing down upon our land.
Already, down the soft eternal stair,
The shine has reached the lower Alpine sward,
Where clarity and brilliance are restored,
As downward, step by step, the light is poured—
The dazzling sun strides forth, and fills the air.
I turn, from greater power than eyes can bear.

And thus it is, when hope with earnest striving Has toiled in aims as high as man may dare,
Fulfilment’s open gates give promise fair,
But from those everlasting depths comes driving,
A fiery blast that takes us unaware:
We thought to light life’s torch, but now, depriving Our highest hope, a sea of fire surrounds us.
Such fire! Of love? Or the fierce glow of hate?
The blend of joy and sorrow that confounds us Sends us to earth: to veil our troubled state,
For benefice of Spring we supplicate.

And so I turn, the sun upon my shoulders,
To watch the waterfall, with heart elate,
The cataract pouring, crashing from the boulders,
Split and rejoined a thousand times in spate;
The thunderous water seethes in fleecy spume,
Lifted on high in many a flying plume,
Above the spray-drenched air. And then how splendid To see the rainbow rising from this rage,
Now clear, now dimmed, in cool sweet vapour blended.
So strive the figures on our mortal stage.
This ponder well, the mystery closer seeing;
In mirrored hues we have our life and being.⁸²

These are the tremendous words Goethe lets his representative of humanity utter as the sun rises in the morning. It is not this sun, however, awakening anew every morning, which we are considering in connection with the festival of which we want to speak today. We want to let the true nature of the sun influence us in a much deeper sense. And the reality of that sun shall be our lodestar today.

We shall now hear the words that reflect the most profound meaning of the Christmas mystery. These words sounded as the pupils listened in deep devotion in the mysteries of all ages, hearing them before they were permitted to enter into the mysteries themselves.

Behold the sun
At the midnight hour!
In the lifeless ground
Build thy rocky tower!

So, when in depths thou mourn,
Find thou in death’s dark night
Creation’s pulse new-born With living morning light.

The powers on high make known
The eternal word divine;
The deeps must guard their own—
Peace, in their sacred shrine.

In gloom thou livest—
Create anew a sun!
In matter weaves—
Know spirit-bliss begun!⁸³

The Christmas festival was known and celebrated in all the mysteries of earliest times everywhere. It is not a mere sun feast but one that takes humanity to true perception or at least an idea of the wellsprings of existence. It was celebrated annually by the highest initiates in the mysteries at the time when the sun sent the least energy to the earth, gave the least warmth. It was also celebrated by those who could not yet take part in the whole of it, but knew only an outer reflection of the most sublime mysteries, a reflection in the form of images. And these secrets from the mysteries have survived through the ages and assumed a different garb among different peoples, depending on their beliefs. Christmas is the name given to the solemn night, this holy night celebrated in the great mysteries. These were occasions when the initiator would let the higher human being be resurrected in those who had been adequately prepared, or, to put it in present-day terms, when the living Christ was born in the inner human being.

People who do not know that spiritual principles are at work as well as chemical and physical principles, and that like chemical and physical principles these have their particular seasons in the cosmos, people like this are the only ones able to believe that it does not matter when the higher self is awakened. The essence of the great mysteries was that human beings lived through an event in which they were allowed to see the creative powers in the glory of colour, in bright light; were permitted to see the world around them filled with spiritual qualities, with many spirits; were permitted to see the world of spirits around them, and had the greatest experience a human being can have. One day this moment will come for all and everyone. All will know it, though perhaps only after many incarnations—but the time will come for all and everyone when the Christ will rise within them and new seeing, new hearing will awaken in them.

Mystery pupils who were being prepared for the awakening would first be taught what this awakening meant in the great universe. After this the final acts would come to bring awakening, and these acts were performed at the time when the darkness was greatest, when the sun was at its lowest in the outside world—at Christmas, for those who knew the true facts in the spirit knew that powers moved through cosmic space at this time that were helpful for such an awakening. During the preparation the pupils would be told that those who truly wished to know must know not only what had been happening on this globe through millennia but must also learn to have an overview of the whole of human evolution. They also had to know that the great festivals had been made part of the year and its seasons by leading spirits and that they must devote themselves to looking up to the great eternal truths.

The eye was guided to roam over millions of years. Look to the time, the pupils would be told, when our earth was not yet the way it is now, when there was no sun as yet, no moon, but the two were still one with the earth; when the earth was still one body with the sun and the moon. Human beings were there at that time, but they did not yet have a body. They were spiritual entities, and no light of the sun fell on those human souls and spirits from outside. The light of the sun was in the earth itself. It was not like the sunlight of today, which falls on creatures and objects from the outside. It was a light that had power of spirit in it, and shone forth at the same time in the inner life of every human being. Then came the time when the sun moved away from the earth. It separated from the earth and its light then fell on the earth from outside. The sun had withdrawn from the earth. Darkness had come to the inner human being.

This was where the human race began to evolve towards the future point in time when they would find the inner light shining again within them. Humanity had to gain knowledge of the things of this earth, using the outer senses. Human evolution tended towards the time when the higher human being, the spirit human being, would once again be aglow and alight within. From the light through the darkness to the light—that is the course of human evolution.

When the pupils had been prepared they would be guided towards awakening at the moment in time when as a chosen group they were to have an inner experience of something which the rest of humanity is only to experience in the distant future. Then they would see the light of the spirit with eyes that had been opened in the spirit. This solemn moment was to come when outer light was weakest, on the day when the sun shone least in the outside world. Then, on that day, the pupils of the mysteries would be brought together, and the inner light would open up for them.

Others who were not yet able to take part in this celebration were to have at least an outer image that would tell them: ‘You, too, shall one day know this great moment. Today you see an image. Later you shall experience the event you now see in the image.’

Those were the lesser mysteries. They would show a reflection of what the initiate would experience at a later time. Today we’ll share in the experience of what happened in the lesser mysteries around the midnight hour. It was the same everywhere—in the Egyptian mysteries, the Eleusinian mysteries, the mysteries of Asia Minor, in the Babylonian and Chaldean mysteries and also in those of Persian Mithra worship and the Indian Brahma mysteries. Everywhere the pupils of those mystery centres would have the same experience around the midnight hour of that solemn night.

They would gather in good time on the eve of the event. In quiet thought they had to gain insight into the significance of this, the most important event. They would sit in absolute silence, having gathered in the dark. When midnight approached they would have been sitting in the dark room for hours. Thoughts of eternity went through their inmost minds. Then, towards midnight, mysterious sounds would arise, flooding the room, growing louder and then softer again. Hearing these sounds the pupils would know it to be the music of the spheres. Profound, solemn devotion filled their hearts. Then a faint light would come from a dimly lit disk. Those who saw it would know that this disk represented the earth. The luminous disk would then grow darker and darker until finally it would be quite black. At the same time the room around them would grow progressively lighter. Those who saw it knew that the black disk was the earth. The sun, which otherwise shone through the earth had been obscured. The earth could no longer see the sun. Then halo upon halo would develop around the earth’s disk, in rainbow colours, going outwards. Those who saw this would know that it was the iris.⁸⁴ And around midnight, a luminous reddish violet halo would arise in place of the black earth disk; a word was written on this. The word would be a different one, depending on the nations whose members were allowed to experience the mystery. In our present-day language it would be Christos.⁸⁵ Those who saw it would know it to be the sun. It appeared to them in that midnight hour when the world all around was lying in profound darkness. The pupils would be told that they had now experienced something in images which in the mysteries was called ‘to see the sun around midnight’.

A true initiate truly learned to see the sun around the midnight hour, for the material principle in him had been extinguished. The sun of the spirit alone lived in him, its light shining out over all the darkness of matter.

This was the most blessed moment in human evolution when the human being found himself released from darkness and living in the light of eternity. It was shown as an image in the mysteries, year after year, around the midnight hour of that solemn night. The image showed that there is a sun of the spirit as well as the physical sun, and like the physical sun this must be born from deep darkness. To make it even clearer to them, the pupils were taken to a cave after their experience of the rising sun, the Christos. The cave appeared to contain nothing but rock—dead, lifeless matter. They would then see ears of corn arise from the stones, a sign of life, a symbolic picture of life arising from apparent death, life being born in dead mineral. They would then be told that just as the power of the sun will wax again from this day onward, the day when it appeared to have died, so new life was forever rising from life that was dying.

The same event is referred to in the words ‘He must wax but I must wane’ in the New Testament.⁸⁶ John, herald of the coming Christ, of the light of the spirit when it is at its greatest height in the course of the year at midsummer, this John must wane, and as he wanes the power of the light that is coming waxes, growing more and more powerful as John wanes. Thus the new, the coming life is preparing in the seed which must perish and die so that the new plant may arise.

The inner feeling pupils were meant to develop was that life lies dormant in death, that new, magnificent flowers and fruit arose from death and putrefaction, that the earth was filled with the power to give birth. They had to come to believe that something happens in the inner earth at this time—the overcoming of death through life. When they were shown the conquering light they were shown the life that was present in death. They experienced this inwardly, they lived through this when they saw light arise and shine out in the darkness. They now saw sprouting life in the rock cave, life arising in glorious abundance from something that was seemingly dead.

That is how the pupils were trained to develop this belief in life, and belief in what may be called the greatest human ideal was made to grow in their hearts and minds. They learned to look up to this, the greatest human ideal, to the time when earth will have completed its evolution, when light will be radiant in the whole of humanity. The earth itself will then fall to dust, but its spiritual essence will remain, with all the human beings who have grown inwardly luminous through the light of the spirit. And earth and humanity shall awaken to a higher form of existence, a new stage of existence.

When Christianity arose in the course of evolution, this was its ideal in the highest possible sense. It was inwardly felt that the Christos, being the immortal spirit of the earth, was to appear as the foundation not only of all material, sprouting life, but also of spiritual rebirth, the great ideal of all humanity; that he was born around Christmas time, the time of greatest darkness, as a sign that a higher human being can be born out of the darkness of matter in the human soul. Before people came to speak of a Christos, they would speak of a sun hero in the earlier mysteries; he was seen to be connected with the same ideal as the Christos of Christianity. The individual connected with the ideal was called the sun hero. Just as the sun completes its cycle in the course of the year, as its light increases and decreases, just as its heat seems to be withdrawn from the earth and then radiates again, just as its death holds life, letting it stream forth once again, so the sun hero has become lord over death and night and darkness because of the power of his life in the spirit.

Seven degrees of initiation were known in the Persian Mithras mysteries. The first was the ‘raven’, someone able only to go as far as the portal of the temple of initiation. The ravens became mediators between the material life of the outside world and the spiritual life of the inner world; no longer belonging to the material world they were not yet part of the spiritual world. We find these ravens come up again and again, always playing the same role as messengers going to and fro between the two worlds and conveying knowledge between them. We also have them in our Norse and German myths and legends—Odin’s ravens and the ravens flying around the Kyffhäuser mountain. The second degree, that of the ‘occult person’, took the disciple from the portal into the inner initiation temple. There he matured until he reached the third degree, the ‘protagonist’ who would go out and make known to the world the occult truths he had experienced in the temple. The fourth degree, that of the ‘lion’, was gained when his consciousness was no longer limited to the individual but to a whole tribe. Hence the Christ was known as the ‘lion of Judah’. Someone whose consciousness extended even further, embracing a whole nation, would have reached the fifth degree. He would no longer have a name of his own but would bear the name of the nation. Thus people spoke of a ‘Persian’, or an ‘Israelite’. We can see why Nathanael⁸⁷ was called a ‘true Israelite’; it was because he had reached the fifth degree of initiation. The sixth degree was the ‘sun hero’, and we need to understand what this means. We shall then come to see that pupils in the mysteries would feel a shudder of veneration if they knew something about a sun hero and were able to share in the festival to celebrate the birth of a sun hero at Christmas.

Everything in the cosmos takes its rhythmic course. All the stars follow a great rhythm, as does the sun. If the sun were to abandon this rhythm for even a movement, if it were to leave its orbit for just a moment, this would cause a revolution of unheard-of importance in the whole of the universe. Rhythm governs the whole of nature, from lifeless nature all the way to the human being. We see it in the plant world—a violet, a lily flowering at the same season. Animals are on heat at given times in the year. This changes only in humans. Rhythm, active in powers of growth, reproduction and so on all the way up to the animal world, comes to a halt in human beings.

Humanity is meant to be embedded in freedom, and the more civilized people are the more is this rhythm on the decrease. Just as the light vanishes at Christmas time, so has rhythm apparently completely disappeared from human lives, and chaos prevails. But human beings are meant to bring this rhythm to birth from within and do so on their own initiative. They are meant to shape their lives of their own free will so that they run within rhythmic boundaries. Life’s events are meant to follow one another as firmly and securely as the sun’s orbit. And just as it is unthinkable that the sun’s orbit should ever change, so it should be unthinkable that the rhythm of such a life could be broken.

The sun hero was the embodiment of such a life rhythm. With the strength of the higher human being who had been born in him he gained the strength to govern the rhythm of his own biography. This sun hero was also the Christ Jesus for the first two centuries, and this is why the celebration of his birth was moved to the time when the birthday feast of the sun hero had been celebrated from time immemorial. Hence also everything connected with the life story of Christ Jesus, hence also the midnight mass, celebrated in caves by the early Christians in memory of the sun festival. At this mass, a sea of light shone out in the darkness of midnight in memory of the spirit sun that rose in the mysteries. Hence the story goes that Jesus was born in a stable, in memory of the rock cave out of which life was born in those ears of com that were the symbol for life.

Just as life on earth was born out of dead rock, so was the highest—Christ Jesus—born out of the lowest. The legend of three priestly sages, the three kings from the east, was connected with his birth. They brought gold, the symbol of external power full of wisdom, myrrh, the symbol of life vanquishing death, and incense, symbol of the cosmic ether in which the spirit lives.

In the deeper meaning of the Christmas festival we can therefore sense echoes from man’s earliest times. And this has come down to us in the particular quality which Christianity has. Its symbols reflect the earliest symbols known to humanity. The tree with its candles is such a symbol. It is an image of the tree of paradise for us.⁸⁸ That tree represents the life-giving principle and the gaining of knowledge in paradise. Paradise itself is the whole, complete sphere of material nature. Spiritual nature is represented by the tree in the midst of it, the tree that encompasses knowledge and the tree of life. Knowledge can only be gained at the cost of life.

A story tells us the significance of the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. Seth stood before the gates of paradise and asked to come in. The cherub guarding the entrance let him enter. This is to indicate that Seth became an initiate. When Seth was in paradise he found that the tree of life and the tree of knowledge were firmly intertwined. The archangel Michael, he who stands before god, allowed him to take three seeds from the intertwined tree.

This tree prophesies the future of humanity. When the whole of humanity has gained insight and has been initiated, it will bear within it not only the tree of knowledge but also the other tree, that of life. Death will then be no more. For the time being, however, the initiate was only allowed to take three seeds, the three seeds that signify the higher principles of the human being.

When Adam died, Seth placed the three seeds in his mouth and a flaming tree grew on Adam’s grave. This had the property that new shoots and leaves would grow from any wood cut from it. In the bush’s circle of flame were written the words ehjeh asher ehjeh, meaning ‘I am the one who was, who is and who shall be’. This signifies the principle that goes through all incarnations, the power of man to renew himself, come into existence again and again, descending from the light into the darkness and ascending from the darkness into the light.

The rod Moses used to perform his miracles was cut from the wood of this bush. The gate of Solomon’s temple was made of it. Wood was taken from the bush and put into the pond at Bethesda and gave it the power of which the story tells. And the cross of Christ Jesus was made of this wood, the cross which shows life dying away, life perishing in death which nevertheless has the power in it to bring forth new life. Here we have before us the great symbol for the world—life that overcomes death. The wood of the cross had grown from the three seeds that came from paradise.

The same symbol—of the lower principle dying and the resurrection of the higher principle sprouting forth from it—is also shown in the Rose Cross, and the red roses. Goethe put it in these words:

For as long as you do not have
this word ‘die and become’,
you are but a troubled guest
in the darkness of this earth. ⁸⁹

This is a wonderful connection between the tree of paradise and the wood of the cross! The cross may be a symbol for Easter, but it also deepens the Christmas mood for us. We can feel the new life welling forth in the Christ idea as we contemplate it in the night when Christ Jesus was born. We see the idea reflected in the living roses decorating our tree here. They tell us that the tree of holy night has not yet become the wood of the cross but the power to be this wood is beginning to arise within it. The roses growing among the green are a symbol of the eternal conquering the temporal.

The square of Pythagoras (Fig. 12) is a symbol for the fourfold nature of man—physical body, ether body, astral body and I.

Above it is the tao (Fig. 16), the sign reminding us of the image our earliest ancestors had of God. Before Europe, Asia and Africa were cultivated land, those ancestors lived on Atlantis, which has gone down beneath the waves. Norse mythology still holds memories of Atlantis in the legends of Niflheim, home of mists. For Atlantis did not have clear air. Vast, mighty masses of mist rolled and boiled above the soil, similar to the experience we may have today walking in the clouds and mists at high altitudes. Sun and moon were not clearly visible in the sky. On Atlantis they appeared surrounded by rainbow haloes the sacred iris. People were then still much more able to understand the language of nature. The lapping waves, the sound of the wind in the trees, the whispering leaves, the rumble of thunder still speak to us today, but we no longer understand them. The ancient Atlanteans did. They felt that a divine element was speaking to them in all these things. In the midst of all those speaking clouds and water and leaves and winds a sound reached the ears of the Atlanteans: tao—it is I. The essence of the whole natural world lived in that sound. Atlantis heard it. The tao later became the letter T. The circle at the top is the sign for the all-encompassing nature of God the Father.<.p>

Finally the principle which is present in the whole of the universe and exists as the human being is shown in the symbol of the pentagram (Fig. 17) which we see at the top of the tree. It is not permissible to speak of the deepest sense of the pentagram here and now. It does show us the star of evolving humanity. It is the star, the symbol of the human being which is followed by all who have wisdom, as the priestly wise men did in the distant past. It is the meaning of the earth, the great sun hero who is born in holy night because the most sublime light shines out in the deepest darkness.

Humanity will live on into a future when the light will be born in them; when words pregnant with meaning will give way to others and it will no longer be said that the darkness cannot comprehend the light. Truth will sound out in cosmic space, and the darkness will comprehend the light that shines out for us in the star of humanity. Darkness shall yield and comprehend the light, that is, will be taken hold of by it. And this is meant to sound out for us from our inmost being in the Christmas festival. Only then will we be celebrating Christmas in the right way, for it will then tell us that one day the light of the spirit will shine out from the inmost human being into the whole world. And we’ll then be able to celebrate Christmas as the feast of the most sublime ideal for humanity. It will then have real meaning again, be alive again in our souls, and the Christmas tree, too, will once more have its true meaning as a symbol of the paradise tree, truer than the meanings it is given today, however thoughtful. In our hearts, celebration of holy night will lead to joyful hope and to understanding that yes, I too shall experience within me what we must call the birth of the higher human being; in me, too, the birth of the saviour, of the Christos, will come.

• 81. In rhetoric, a passage where the speaker specifically turns away from the main discourse and addresses a present or absent person or thing.
• 82. Goethe, J. W. Faust 2, Pleasing landscape. Faust speaking. Translated by Philip Wayne. London: Penguin Classics, Penguin Books Ltd 1959.
• 83. Version as found in a notebook entry Rudolf Steiner made in 1906. Different versions appeared in later years. English version given here taken from Steiner R. Verses and Meditations. Translated by F. Melland. London; Rudolf Steiner Press 1979.
• 84. In Greek mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods. In another set of notes it says: 'an image of St Iris'.
• 85. The Greek ὁ Χριστός means ‘the anointed’, corresponding to the Hebrew ‘the Messias’. The ‘χρηστος’, Chrestos, used by Gnostics and Manicheans means 'the good one'; according to Marcion (early Christian Gnostic, c. 100–165 AD), the most sublime good god as distinct from the demiurgos, the creator god who was merely just. 'Chrestos' was introduced in the 3rd edition of the special German booklet Zeichen und Symbole des Weihnachtsfestes, for Rudolf Steiner used it in the lecture he gave on 14 December 1905 (in GA 54; English in Christmas). The context was a different one, however, and a further review of the original records shows that 'Chrestos' does not appear in any of the sets of notes available to us (Literary Estate Administration in Dornach).
• 86. John 3: 30.
• 87. John 1:47.
• 88. See 'Der Baum des Lebens und der Erkenntnis des Guten und des Bosen. Die Geheimnisse der Kunst' in GA 162.
• 89. In ‘Selige Sehnsucht’, Westöstlicher Diwan.
• 90. Lully (or Lull), Raymond (c. 1232–1315). See Steiner R. World History in the Light of Anthroposophy (GA 233), lectured dated 5 January 1924. Tr. G. & M. Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.

Indeed, it is attractive to become engrossed in the past and to look around among the great spirits who preceded us. However, with the personality about which we want to speak today quite another matter than the charm of historical consideration comes into question as point of view. It rather matters with Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541, physician, occultist) that he can give the human beings very much still today. Just a movement of the spiritual investigation of matters as spiritual science is particularly suitable to unearth the treasure, the spirit of knowledge, the investigation, and enlightenment of nature, which is hidden with Paracelsus. Today, indeed, modern research turns more or less also to spirits like Jacob Boehme, Paracelsus, and others of the end of the Middle Ages. However, the approach of our present science is so different from the spirit, the point of view of a man like Paracelsus that it cannot do justice to him in the true sense of the word.

For Paracelsus has to be understood in another way than it normally happens if one becomes engrossed in a spirit of the past. One has to develop a living feeling of the object and the direction of thinking to which he dedicated himself. This is in certain respect such a deepening in the spiritual life, in particular in the spiritual forces and beings that form the basis of nature, and only the spiritual-scientific approach does this. Paracelsus already belongs to an interesting time. It was the time from 1493 to 1541 in which he lived that was either just over or was still right in the middle of the emergence of the bourgeoisie. This exerted a significant influence on the entire spiritual life.

Two classes only had the greatest say concerning the spiritual life before the emergence of the bourgeoisie: nobility and clergy. After bourgeoisie had emerged, the intellectual culture was based more on the single personality and its efficiency. Before, the blood relationship, the clanship had a say within the nobility in the worth and the social position of the human being, on the one side, and, on the other side, the whole power and intellectual culture of the church supported the priests. It stood as a whole behind the single personality. Only in the time of the bourgeoisie, the performance of the single was based on the personal efficiency. Hence, everything that meets us in this time of the ending Middle Ages, the emerging bourgeoisie, gets a personal character and the personality has to fight for himself much more. We could quote many of such personalities who had to use their very own forces at that time.

One of the strangest and most interesting personalities is just Paracelsus. Other things still came into consideration in his lifetime too. This has been just in the time when the scene of the peoples increased enormously when the big discoveries of distant countries were done, in the time when the just invented art of printing pointed the spiritual life to quite different directions and currents than it was once the case. All that delivers the basic tableau, so to speak, from which this personality of Theophrastus Paracelsus emerges. To all that is to be added that we are concerned with a seldom-prominent person, with a person of revolutionary character in the spiritual sense. He was a person who was aware of that which was performed once in the realms of the spiritual life and how much his own work contrasted with it.

In order to understand Paracelsus, one must look at the basic character of his work as a doctor and as a philosopher, and grasp him as a theosophist, as he combined these both soul characters with each other. This personality was uniform. With brilliant look, he tried to grasp the construction of the world edifice. His surprised sight looked up at the secrets of the starry heaven, became engrossed in the construction of the earth and in particular in the construction of the human being himself. This brilliant sight penetrated also into the secrets of the spiritual life. He was also a theosophist, while he tried to enclose the nature of the astronomical knowledge and at the same time the nature of anthropology, the doctrine of the human being in connection with the doctrine of all living beings. Nothing was mere theory in him, everything was immediate in such a way that it was bent on practise, that he wanted to use all that he knew for the welfare, the spiritual and physical health of the human being. This gives his work, his thinking, and investigations the big, immense unity. This makes him appear as sharply carved from one single piece of wood. Thus, he stands before us as an original, elementary personality.

There were two schools for him in the field with which he was mainly concerned, with the medical art. The one went back to the old Greek physician Hippocrates (~460-370 B.C.), the other to Galenus (129-200 or 216 A.D., physician, philosopher). The father of medicine, Hippocrates, stood before him like a big ideal. The modern scholar can cope neither with that which that Greek was, nor with that which Paracelsus saw in him. Indeed, it seems rather problematic today if we hear that this medicine differentiated four humours in the human being: black bile, white or yellow bile, blood and phlegm, which were said to have a certain relation to earth, water, air and fire. These should be components of the human nature. Of course, the modern naturalist regards as a childish point of view, which a detailed knowledge had to overcome in the course of time. He does not anticipate that it depends, nevertheless, still on anything else.

That is why the modern academic view understands Paracelsus so exceptionally. He did not at all understand these four members of the human nature as usual physical humours and. The naturalist of that old time regarded the substances with which the human body builds itself up from the physical, sense-perceptible substances, only as the external expression of something spiritual, of the real builder of this external body.

In spiritual-scientific talks, we have often spoken about this builder of the human body. We have spoken about the etheric body, a fine body, forming the basis of the physical body and all its manifold materials, substances and humours. This etheric body or life body contains the forces to build up the physical body. It is in such a way that this etheric body builds up any. Sensuous research does not suffice to study this etheric body; something else belongs to it, namely intuition, spiritual research. If one uses sensuous expressions of that which is considered for this spiritual research, like black, white, yellow, green et cetera, one only means metaphors of something that is behind. It is quite wrong if one identifies them with our material things.

The way in which the old doctors approached the ill human beings in the medical centres was another. It was the intuitive view, which they directed not to the physical, but to the finer, the ethereal underlying the physical. One started out from the idea: if anything is ill, it is less crucial, which external changes are discernible, but what has caused them. The disorder in the external physical body corresponds to the disorder in the etheric body. The old doctors recognised how the etheric body changes in the ill organism, and they were out to cure that force, which is behind the physical body as the sculptor. If I may express myself somewhat roughly, one can say, if anybody has fallen ill with the stomach, he suffers not from the stomach, but from the finer body the expression of which the illness only is.

Paracelsus had taken up the spirit of such an intuitive medicine in himself. However, the Roman doctor Galenus worked everywhere like an authority. Indeed, he bases his medicine on these old principles, and if one reads Galenus externally, one gets the idea: what does Paracelsus really intend fighting in such a way against Galenus and taking the older medicine under his wings? Is it not the same?—It could almost seem that way, however, it is not in such a way. For Galenus externalised medicine while he materialised the originally spiritual view. The pupils of Galenus already understood by that which was once meant intuitively, as something externally material. Instead of using the intuitive view, they researched only in the matter, speculated, invented theories. The moral view had got lost.

Paracelsus opposes this method, this loss of the intuitive view. He wanted to go back; he wanted to find the means to cure the human beings from the knowledge of the big nature. Therefore, all that was antipathetic to him, which prevailed in those days officially as medicine. He did not want to take as basis that which one can read in the books, but wanted to open the fundamental book, the big book of nature. Everything that had emerged gradually as medicine was spun out from a completely deduced speculation, from a research that knew nothing of the original spiritual view. There one could no longer see the connection between a medicament and an illness because one just did no longer behold what is behind the body because one looked only materially at everything. This caused that Paracelsus said, the light of nature should shine again.

It brought him into a sharp conflict with the medicine of his time. Such a great insight, as he had it, his reasonable nature that grasped the big connection with the universe gave him the intensive self-confidence, which has something lovely, in the way in which he behaved towards those who practised science in generally accepted way at that time. However, the pharmacology of that time bears big analogy to that of today, with the difference that our time has no Paracelsus in the medical field. However, confusion and insecurity were almost the same as they are today. This reminds very well of that old time of Paracelsus. If we pursue medicine today, we see how a remedy is invented and then is regarded and rejected as something noxious after five years, how so and so many people are examined, but the big view of the coherence of the human being with nature has completely got lost. That reminds rather well of the time of Paracelsus. It is true that most people do not anticipate that they are again embedded in such a time and that the belief in authority has such an immense power just in this field. One struggles against the belief in authority on one side, and one considers oneself superior campaigning against the old superstition that sends people to Lourdes.

One may be right with it, but one does not anticipate that only the form of superstition has changed and that superstition becomes hardly smaller if one sends anybody to Wiesbaden (spa town) and other places. One can see in it something similar as it existed with Paracelsus and his time when one was inclined to oppose the conventional. Paracelsus said, “As I take the four for me, so you have to take them also and to follow me and I have not to follow you, you have to follow me. Follow me, you Avicenna (~980-1037, Persian polymath), Galenus, Rasis (854-927, Persian polymath), Montagnana, Mesue (~777-857, Assyrian physician) and all those from Paris, from Cologne, from Vienna and from the regions of the Danube and Rhine rivers, from the islands, from Italy, from Dalmatia,Sarmatia, Athens, you Greeks, you Arabs, you Israelites, follow me, I do not follow you. I become the monarch and the empire will be mine, and I lead the empire and gird your loins.” That as a characteristic and expression of his personal strength. He believed to owe this strength to his original relationship with the secrets of nature. She expressed herself for Paracelsus in such a way that he saw not only what he saw with his eyes, but with his being, which combined with nature.

He undertook big journeys. He did not want to listen to anything scientific from the chairs, but from the dark intuitiveness of the simple people outdoors who had not yet cut the band of feeling with nature; he wanted to learn from them. I would like to bring his soul condition to your mind by a comparison. It is rather nice to see how the animals know instinctively for sure in the field what they have to graze and what they have to leave what serves them for their welfare and what would become detrimental to them. This is based on the relationship of the being with its environment. This relationship exists in the soul forces and is able to choose what is good and what is not good.

The being breaks free from nature by the intellect and speculation. It is no superstition, if one says that the simple human being who lives in the countryside has still something of the original forces, which lead the animal to its food instinctively, that this relationship still delivers something of the knowledge how the single herb, how the single stone works on the human being. This feeling is different from the usual knowledge, which, however, is no longer so important for him. Hence, one finds with a human being, who has not yet gone through education, an original certainty what is useful for him within nature. Paracelsus feels related to this original feeling for nature. He emphasises repeatedly that those people are not the right ones who wander the world in such a way that they travel around the world in carriages and apart from the immediate contact with the rural population. Paracelsus travelled differently. He listened to that which the simple man could say to him. The instinct of the simple man became to him the intuition of the ingenious human being. He did not cut the connection between nature and the original intuitive force in the human being. He expresses this in such a way: “By nature I am not spun subtly, it is also not the way of life in my country to acquire something with silk spinning. We are not bred with figs, nor with mead, nor with wheat bread, but with cheese, milk, and oat bread. That cannot make subtle fellows because one is dependent on that which one has got as adolescent. Such a human being is almost rude compared to the subtle men feeling superior, to superfine people, and to those who have grown up in soft clothes and in boudoirs, whereas we grow up in fir cones, therefore, we do not well understand each other.”

He knew that he always walked on his journeys through Poland, Hungary to Turkey in the sun, not only in the sun of the physical world, but also in the spiritual sun. What distinguishes Paracelsus is the uniform sight in the spiritual. Hence, the human being is to him not the human being in whom one slips in with the sensory examination, but he is connected with the whole nature. He says, look at the apple and then at the apple pip. You cannot understand how the pip grows if you do not look at the whole apple.

That is why one also does not understand the elementary human being if one does not recognise the earth with all its substances and forces, because it has all its strength from the earth. Then a force incorporates a finer materiality in this physical elementary human being. Paracelsus calls it the archaeus. From the elementary body, he distinguishes the finer body, which is the builder of the physical body and the builder of the earth. Thus, he looks from the externally sense-perceptible at the cause, from the body at the life body, from the externally physical at that which as a force forms the basis of it. This is the first member of the human being in the sense of Paracelsus.

He regards the second member as a pip in a certain different way. For this second member the apple is the whole world of stars. Just as the elementary body draws his forces and humours from the earth and from that which belongs to it, the second human being draws his forces from that which lives in the stars, from the principles of the stars. Just as the blood, the muscles, the bones, and food juices are composed and the food juices change, are transformed, and as these are dependent on the earthly, Paracelsus summarises the instincts, desires, and passions, the ideas, joy and sorrow, all that as the two basic forces of the human mental nature, sympathy and antipathy. They are expressions of the whole world of stars, as the pip is an expression of the whole apple. Therefore, he calls the second body the astral body or the body related to the world of stars.

What works outdoors as gravity or gravitation, as force of attraction and repulsion is in the human being like in an essence as desire and listlessness, as sympathy and antipathy, so that nothing of that which is in the human being as instincts and passions can be understood different from the astrological astronomy as Paracelsus calls it. This is a science about which our time knows precious little. Astronomy took another path. Paracelsus as a doctor wants to know nothing about it. He wants to know how the astral forces are connected in space with the astral body of the human being. He behaves compared to an astronomer like a priest to a requiem parson. A requiem parson is someone who reads the mess and is paid for it, whereas a right priest is someone who penetrates into the spirit. Paracelsus uses clear expressions what others often call rudeness. We have now understood the second part of human wisdom.

The third part is that which he calls spirit. This spirit relates to the spiritual world like the pip of the apple to the much bigger apple, like the divine spark in the human being to the whole sum of divine forces in the world. Thus, Paracelsus differentiates in the world: the divine-spiritual, the astrological-astronomical, and the elementary-earthly. The human being contains an essence of them: the human mind from the spiritual-divine, the astral body from the astrological-astronomical, and the physical body from the elementary-earthly.

Just as one has to study the material, the plants, and animals and so on if one wants to understand the body of the human being, the doctor has to study and understand what goes forward in the world of the stars if he wants to understand the human being. Because Paracelsus says to himself, one understands an illness only if one goes back to its origin, he looks for the reason of the illness in the desires and passions. He considers the illness as a result of mental fallacy and finally he leads it back to moral qualities even if he also does not lead back these qualities to the stars, because he knows very well that the effect does not happen so fast.

He sees an expression of the spiritual everywhere in the physical. That is why he says, someone who wants to investigate the reason of an illness has to study the reason of all the sympathies and antipathies of the soul, and he can study this only if he studies the stars of the human being. Thus, you imagine how he approaches an ill human being. With an intuitive view, this soul digresses from the externally ill limb to that which lives internally in the soul of the human being.

From there he goes to the astral influence of the stars and to the elementary influence of the earth. He has this in every single case before him. Just this is spiritual medicine. How he imagines this, and how he tries to make clear with his own picture, he expresses this nicely in this deciphering of the whole world: “This is something great you should consider. Nothing is in heaven and on earth that is not also in the human being, and God who is in heaven and on earth is also in the human being.”—I have often quoted another nice saying where he compares what he wanted to say here. He says, look out at nature. What is there? He sees a mineral, an animal, a plant, these are like single letters and the human being is the word that is composed of these single letters. If one wants to read the human being, one has to collect the single letters in the big book of nature.—This does not mean that Paracelsus picks up the things, but that he tries to get a synopsis of the things in nature. This has always enabled him to keep in sight the whole world with the single special case, which he has to cure as a doctor. Behind all that, the ingenious-moral strength works from which all that arises with him. At last, it is something like moral indignation that rebels in him against the way conventional at that time to cure and to find mixtures for all possible things. He says, I am not there to enrich the apothecaries; I am there to cure the human beings.

One has to realise that Paracelsus used words quite unlike in later time if one fairly wants to read his writings. If you read salt, mercury, and sulphur with Paracelsus, one has no right idea automatically, one thinks of what today the human being calls in such a way. Everything that one reads with Paracelsus seems then to be imperfect and childish. Who knows science today has a certain right to regard Paracelsus as childish, but one has to penetrate somewhat deeper. I want to give you an idea how you can get around to understanding what he means if he uses the terms salt, mercury, and sulphur. Paracelsus looks far back into the evolution of the earth, in the evolution of the beings, which live round him, and of the human being. If he looks back in such a way, a time faces him in which the human beings still had forms of existence very different from now.

Nobody gets as clear about what has become as Paracelsus. The earth was completely different millions of years ago. We have spoken of the transformation of the earth often enough. He looked back at a human figure that was still completely animal where the hands were still locomotive organs where the human being still lived in air and water. The earth, the surroundings were quite different. Even modern physics looks back at an age in which that which is solid today was still in a liquid state. Paracelsus, who started from the spiritual, saw a spiritual human being in connection with such an earth that still looked quite different from today. On an earth, which was so much warmer than today, the present human being could not live.

At that time, the human beings also lived under other conditions. At that time, the metals were still liquid, they could hardly be contained as steam in the air. At that time, the living beings could also not take shape; however, they have developed. Just as today the elementary human being is connected with the physical world as the pip with the apple, the primeval human being was differently connected with the primeval earth and with the entire surrounding astral world. Therefore, that which constitutes the present physical human being, his soul as the astral body and his mind as a divine human being had still to emerge. This was quite different from once. The human being was still closer to the divinity. The astral human being is born out of the astral world, and the physical human being is born out of the entire physical world. Paracelsus spoke in a much greater and nobler sense of the origin of the physical human being from the physical surroundings than our modern theory of evolution. Paracelsus understood this, and he emphasises it also repeatedly, but for him the human being is a confluence of all that which lives outdoors in nature. The human being has passions; he has them in himself, only in reduced form as the lion has them, for example, and as they exist in the environment. If the human being looks at the lion in the sense of Paracelsus, he sees the same force that lives today as his passion in him born out of the astral world.

In the lion, it is one-sided, with the human being it is mixed with other forces. The entire animal realm is to Paracelsus like a fanned-out humanity. He sees everything that is distributed in the forms of the animals in himself, invisible in his inner human being. That also applies in certain respect if the human being looks at the earth. The metals that have become physical today are born out from the same being from which the physical human being is born out. Please, understand me properly, because it is far from present ideas. Paracelsus sees back to the time when the physical human body had only built the heart. There are lower animals that have no hearts that still preserve the form that the human being had at that time. This was to Paracelsus the same time when from a much more general essence of the earth the gold also developed, so that a connection exists between the origin of the gold and the human heart. He also sees a connection between abnormalities like cholera and the arsenic. He says to himself, the possibility that cholera could originate depends on the fact that the arsenic is developed from the external world. He considers any single organ as belonging to the human unity and it is in such a way that it belongs to him like any animal, any plant, or any substance in the external world.

I would like to read out another remark that shows you how he expresses himself in particular. This is a remark that is got out of a number of remarks of Paracelsus, which one could multiply by thousand. He regards the single human being as specifically related to the physical world and the astral world concerning his single organs and the recognition of their illnesses. It is differentiated in the most certain way. One admires the general expressions of modern pantheism, of the modern view of nature, but this is the purest dilettantism if one does not know that the great Paracelsus cannot be pleased with an all-life, which enjoys life in the single human being. Paracelsus speaks of something concrete: “That is why you should not say, this is cholera, this is melancholia, but this is arsenicus, this is aluminosum; and also he is a Saturnian, that is a Martian, and not: this man suffers from melancholia, that man suffers from cholera. For one part is from heaven, one part is from earth, and they are intermingled like fire and wood, because everything loses its name; since these are two things in one.”

As he explains the connection of the heart with the gold, he also explains the connection of certain phenomena with Saturn and another with Mars and that, which is related to Mars. The peculiar mind of Paracelsus positions the human being that way in nature, in the world. Even if there is to correct anything with Paracelsus: it depends on the great, on the comprehensive that lives in this soul.

He attributes this to single certain types. Thus, everything that originates as a precipitation in the mineral is elementary to him. At the same time, it originated in the developmental time when the human-bodily formed and took on the figure on earth, which it has today. Hence, every deposit of the mineral, everything salty is connected with the human-bodily, with the animal-bodily. He calls everything Mercurial, changeable that remains liquid after a certain precipitation has taken place. Mercury is to him a typical example of it. Thus, we have a trend towards the solidification of the liquid metal. The soul is also born out of the same universal forces from which the Mercurial was born out. The deeper connection is in such a way that one cannot discuss it publicly at all.

Sulphur and the present form of mind have a parallel cause of origin. However, they are not connected allegorically. No—these three things outdoors in the world correspond exactly to the body, the soul, and the mind of the human being.

Sulphur is connected according to its nature with the mind, mercury with the soul, and salt with the body of the human being. What the human being takes up besides is related to these in a certain respect because they are born out of them. Therefore, such an example shows us that we have to go in deeper. It is not enough if we understand the expressions of Paracelsus only; we must approach the books of Paracelsus with a deepened preparation, and then we understand him. We have to realise that he always has the whole in mind. Therefore, he says to himself, if the human being has an illness, it is an interruption, a disturbance of a certain balance. He calls it magnetic balance and—as there is never one pole in the magnetic needle, but always north pole and south pole together—, any digestion in the human body belongs to a digestion outdoors in the world, which he searches then. In the etheric human being, he searches the cause of the individual, in the material; he searches the expression of the spirit. In this respect, he calls the material the mummy. One has only to understand this significant expression. It is a certain essence that forms the basis of the bodily; the mummy is different in the healthy and the sick person because the whole and the individual is changed. Therefore, one needs only to recognise the mummy, the changes in the etheric body to recognise what a person lacks.

Briefly, we see there into the depth of a spiritual life from which one can learn quite a lot. We have to realise that only a detailed spiritual research can understand again what is contained in Paracelsus. If one understands so detailed, he does no longer appear as a spirit whom one regards only as an interesting historical object, but as a spirit whom one has to consider from a higher point of view and from whom one can still learn quite a lot also in our time—at least from his method. One should position himself to Paracelsus in this way. Someone who does this finds in his lovely-rude manner a difference between the modern way of research and his way, a difference that he already made for his contemporaries. He distinguishes two reasons, the reason that looks into the whole realm of the spiritual life, and the reason that is only bent on the single one. He calls the one the first reason. He calls it in such a way because it leads to the concealed spirit of the things He calls the other reason a public folly compared with the concealed wisdom. He expresses himself even lovelier or more rudely saying, one has to distinguish a human-divine reason and a bestial reason.

He does not express himself in such a way that he speaks of the animal and spiritual nature of the human being, but of the bestial one. He considers the human being as a son of the animal genus. The animal is spread in single facets; the animal is summarised in the human being. He says once, the human being is the son of the remaining animal realm. However, if he wanted to be like the other animal beings, they would not understand this, they would look like at a wayward son and would be surprised about that which he has become.

Apart from that, you can also receive elementary instructions of certain theosophical basic concepts from Paracelsus. What Paracelsus argues about dream and sleep is in the most eminent sense what also spiritual science has to say about it, only he expresses it in his superb language. If the human being sleeps, the elementary body is in the space, and the astral human being is active. Then the astral human being can dialogue with the stars, so that he only needs to remember the dialogue with the stars to help, to cure the sick person. He is able to lead back all that to the prophets. He esteems them more than all the later ones. He calls Moses, Daniel, and Enoch not magicians, but he says, if one understands them properly, they are the precursors of this great astronomical-astrological medicine, which has worked for humanity.

Such a man was allowed to have a self-confidence in certain ways, and the strength of his work flows out from this self-confidence. However, he was clear in his mind also that what he had donated must live on and will live on with those who can recognise it. In spite of it all, a lot of gossip and historical gossip approached him. One examined his skull to slander him because this skull had a hole and one has to think much of such external things. One verified that he fell a victim to drunkenness and broke his skull. One wanted to judge his whole life this way. One can state the parable of Christ Jesus with the dead dog where Christ Jesus pointed to the nice teeth of the animal. The other things of such a personality do not concern us, besides that which we can learn from him, by which he has become a benefactor of humanity who overcame so much and by which he has become immortal.

Let me close with his own words that he throws in the teeth of his adversaries: “I want to elucidate and argue in such a way that until the last day of the world my writings must remain and will remain true, and yours are recognised as full of bile, poison, and brood of vipers and are hated by the people like toads. It is not my will that you should fall down or be knocked down a year hence, but you must show your shame after a long time and you certainly fall through the cracks, I shall judge you more after my death than before, and even if you eat my body, you have only eaten filth: the Theophrastus will struggle for the body with you.”

[Ladies and gentlemen present!

The last time I drew attention to the fact that I wanted to talk about Pythagorean teaching. Pythagoras had founded a school in Lower Italy. It was not so much a school, but rather a discipleship whose spiritual leader was Pythagoras. He formed a doctrine. We can no longer say how much of it belonged to Pythagoras and how much to his disciples.

The world view of the Pythagoreans emerges before us, and this shows itself to be one of the most profound world views we have. Since it is very important for us to really introduce the things we are dealing with, I would like to introduce a modern Pythagorean before I mention Pythagoras himself, a Pythagorean who lived in Germany himself and whose world view always seems to me like a forecourt to Pythagoras.

You can understand this world view much better if you are familiar with the works and views of Baron von Hardenberg - Novalis, a poet of a thoroughly mystical nature. No one who knows his writings will doubt this.

Take his "Apprentices at Sais". This is something that can only be understood in its esoteric meaning. But anyone who knows the personality of Novalis - he was born in 1772 and died in 1801, so he was 29 years old - will understand this. This Novalis seems to have remained the most innocent youth throughout his life. He seems to us more like the revelation of an unearthly individuality than an earthly personality. It is quite impossible to understand that this immersion, this contemplation, could have been acquired in his immense youth.

When we read his "Heinrich von Ofterdingen", we find that he drew from direct sources, from the sources of mysticism. He then incorporated these into his novel "Heinrich von Ofterdingen" and thus showed that he understood the mysticism of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. If we look at his basic ideas, we will find a certain similarity with other mystics.

He searched for the "Blue Flower. People have often mocked this "Blue Flower. We will understand each other better if we remember Goethe's "Prophecies of Bakis", where he speaks of the serpent's thread and the flower, where he says that man can walk the path that is long and narrow. When man then walks this path, he sees knots before him. He also sees the knot in which lives are tied together. Behind him, he trails a snake. The snake disappears and the knot transforms into a flower in front of him.

This image, which Goethe repeatedly refers to, is egoism, the approach to the highest spirituality or deepest knowledge. The symbol for this is the "blue flower. It is also a symbol of that which arises for man as an entanglement of life when he progresses along the path of knowledge. It is this "Blue Flower" that Novalis has in mind for his Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

We also find this flower in Master Klingsohr, who can prophesy. The future lies open before him. Goethe says: The future also lies open before him who really has a complete overview of the past. [...] - Master Klingsohr reveals the future to Heinrich von Ofterdingen. This satisfies him to such an extent that he is able to see the individualized Blue Flower in the daughter, as he has progressed so far that he can see the highest in the female being.

Matilda dies away from Henry of Ofterdingen. He decides to die after his beloved. For him, reality turns into a dream. What he was previously inclined to regard as a dream, the higher spiritual world, is now reality. He no longer finds this highest in the individual being, but he

finds it in other beings as well. He finds a second girl. It is the same for him. He finds Mathilde again in Cyane. She is like a new embodiment of him. He lives a life of the afterlife.

We find the idea of this in his "Apprentices of Sais". A beautiful fairy tale is woven into it about the boy Hyacinth, who loves the girl Rosenblüthe. Only the trees and birds of the forest know of this love. Then we find Hyacinth changed. He is overcome by a longing to seek something deeper. He leaves Rosenblüthe without sufficient reason. Then he comes to the evil old man, who plants in him the longing to seek the mother of all things, or the veiled maiden. He sets off on his journey to the temple of Isis, comes upon an image, and when he unveils it, he finds nothing but roses. [He finds the beloved as the solution to the riddle, as the veiled image of Sais.

This is reminiscent of the higher concept of "Know thyself", as he expressed it in an epigram. He stands before the veiled image at Sais. He lifts the veil and - wonder of wonders - he finds himself. A magical individualism consists in the fact that one can find the infinite in the finite, [that one can turn the spirit into immediate reality].

So in Novalis we undoubtedly find a mystical personality. So if we assume that in Novalis we are dealing with a deep-seated, mystical nature, and if we then get to know him, he does not appear to us as a mystic, as he has just been described, but as a resurgent old Pythagorean disciple.

When we let Novalis pass us by, when he seems more like a memory, and when we then see how this touch of the earthly, how this personality nevertheless stands firmly in life, has tendencies that we would least expect to find in such romantically inclined natures, then we are referred to the Pythagoreans as to fleeting ghosts.

We must by no means equate this view and philosophical contemplation, as we have it of Romanticism in him, with the view of the other Romantics, with contemporaries of his who lack any depth. Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel or Tieck, [E-T.A.] Hoffmann and so on must not be confused [with him]. But anyone who allows Novalis to have an effect on them will not be tempted to make such a confusion. What is astonishing about Novalis - despite his [poetic] nature - is that he is one of the most enthusiastic admirers of everything mathematical. He has a thoroughly educated, mathematical psyche, an immediate revelation of what he calls the magical in nature. In this he finds the law of the spirit. That which he who wishes to enter the higher regions would like to leave behind, we find in Novalis as the main thing, as that which led him to emphasize the magical in his [idealism]. In the concatenation of basic mathematical concepts he sees the most intriguing revelation of the mystery of the world. He sees free matter at the bottom of things. Mathematics is the foundation on which existence rests, it is therefore nothing other than the highest form, the purest form of spirituality.

If we find this as the basis of his view, then he appears to us as a representative of Pythagoreanism. We can understand Pythagoreanism much better if we imagine it like Novalis. The Pythagorean soul must be imagined in this way, then we arrive at where Novalis stands; [just as] Pythagoras was able to arrive at the view that the basic structure, the basic essence, the basic spirit of the universe is actually given in the connection between numerical quantities and spatial quantities in this harmony.

If we want to gain an insight into a Pythagorean soul from the first elementary beginnings, we must imagine it in the following way. The pupil was led up step by step to the knowledge to which he was to come. He was guided in a very careful way. The first was mathematical knowledge, the second astronomical. Astronomy was preferably mathematical. The regularity resulted from the numerical relationship in the universe. He was first introduced to these numerical relationships. Then he was gradually led on to the knowledge of man himself. The fulfillment of the desire "Know thyself" [came] last. First he was introduced to mathematics.

How can one imagine that man can actually come to the idea that mathematics is the spiritual foundation of the entire universe? How can this be imagined in the form of harmony, formed in space and time? If we immerse ourselves in those areas of space and time which outwardly already show a regular grouping, such as the movement of the celestial bodies, if we immerse ourselves in that, then we have basically given nothing other than an embodied mathematics, an embodied arithmetic, in this construction of the celestial vault that we perform in our minds.

No human being can actually find anything of a mathematical structure, of a spatial structure of geometric figures in the world and in reality, if he has not first formed these mathematical figures in his mind. If someone described a circle or an ellipse, we would not know what it is that he is describing as an object. We would be able to trace the line in the various places in space and connect these places. But we would not be able to connect a concept with the whole line that describes the object if we had not already formed the concept. We can draw a star and then think about what kind of line the star describes. But only then can we find the figure if we already have it in our minds. The same is also the case with other things, even if we take the numerical relationships. We will only recognize the objects outside in space in their certain mutual numerical relationships, in their numerical diversity, if we have formed these relationships in our minds. If we know that 2 x 2 = 4, then we can also recognize it outside in space. We would not be able to connect any concepts with reality, we would not be able to grasp them at all, they would pass us by like nothing, they would not be there for us at all, if we had not formed the images in a purely spiritual way in our psyche.

So it is that the Pythagoreans could say: That which I see outside must also be contained in a certain way in my mind. What emerges from the source point of my soul is the same as what I perceive outside as the primordial ground of the world itself. The Pythagoreans thought about this more deeply and said to themselves: "It is impossible that two things that are completely separate from each other, spirit outside and world inside, [merely] exist side by side [and do not agree]. The coincidence would only have meaning if what is in the spirit is exactly the same as what is outside in space. If the circle, the ellipse that I perceive within me, the numerical relationships, are the same as those outside, which I see in the outer world, then it makes no sense at all if [the Pythagorean] does not have something that he forms within himself. If he sees the spirit of things and has it within him, then it has only one meaning.

Therefore the Pythagorean did not initially think like the philosophers of the nineteenth century under the influence of Kant. He did not ask: How is it that my imagination inside me corresponds to the things outside? My experience is quite different. That is the unquestionable unity of what is outside and what is in my mind. This is how the Pythagorean thinks.

It makes no difference whether I take the ideas of the Pythagoreans' astronomy or apply the new ones. It doesn't matter at all. So when the Pythagorean sees the celestial body describing an orbit in the form of an ellipse, it is a direct experience for the Pythagorean that the ellipse that he perceives within himself and the ellipse that exists outside as the orbit of a star are not two ellipses, but only one. And that is experience.

Schelling also expressed this, and this makes the matter clear in the simplest way. He has taken up the "power of attraction that physicists have always [known]. They imagined that objects exert a force of attraction on each other. The earth attracts the moon, the sun attracts the earth. When the sun attracts the earth, it acts on the earth. It is difficult to attribute an effect to a body where it does not exist. But the fact is that when a body acts on the earth, it is on the earth. A body is where it acts. The boundary of light is not the boundary of the real sun. The sun is in the entire space where it exerts its gravitational pull. The space that the earth fills is also part of solar space.

Imagine this Schellingian idea as [already] underlying the Pythagorean doctrine. The human spirit fills the entire world space. It is not enclosed in a single organism. The spirit is where it perceives.

For the philosophers of the nineteenth century who followed Kant, the question is this: How is it that the mind perceives what is outside it? - The Pythagorean does not say this at all: How is it that the mind perceives that which is apart from it? The Pythagorean says: If the mind perceives an ellipse in the sky, then it is a fact that the mind is not enclosed in the organism, that it is not there where it perceives with the senses, but that it is there where it perceives [mentally]. The limit of the spirit is not the sense, but the spirit is where it perceives. - There is a separation between the numerical relationships in space and what exists in our head as numerical relationships, which does not exist for the Pythagoreans. The Pythagoreans do not recognize the idea that man is initially a sensual, finite being, enclosed with the psyche in a fabric that connects the senses with the outside world. This gives people today the impression that the mind is also enclosed in [a] housing.

When other philosophers take this for reality and ask: "How is it that we perceive external things?", the Pythagoreans take the opposite view. They do not ask: How is it that the mind is enclosed in such an organism? - It is perhaps better that I do not say "individual", but "individual being". This then leads to an understanding of a world view such as the Pythagorean one. It leads to an understanding that can only be grasped if one sees in the mathematical that which constitutes the basic structure in the universe, and which, if one thinks of the whole world as filled with spirit, constitutes the basic structure of the spirit itself.

So we actually have in the basis of the thing that can be perceived with the senses deep down, on a lower level, in the spatial-temporal of the universe, commonalities that can be expressed through spatial sizes and numerical ratios, that which appears to the spirit on a higher level. The spirit has a numerical, geometrical basis. The spirit has its origin where things are regular. The spirit grows out of the mathematically constructed world. Therefore [the Pythagorean] seeks the primordial grounds of existence in the mathematically constructed world.

I have pointed out that there is a difference between the Greek worldview, as represented by Heraclitus, and the Pythagorean one. At the time, I constructed my remarks in such a way that they came back to Goethe's basic view. I said then that Goethe says that the seed and the plant are one and the same being. The material seed contains everything that is still in it in complete concealment. It is the same as the fully developed plant. The plant is not in it, but it has the sense that in a spiritual way the plant is the same in every form as in another form, so that the plant with its foliage and petals, with its whole fruit and with all that is in it, is to be regarded as that which has become material, materially, which is in the seed in an ideal way. Goethe therefore says that the seed is the whole plant, except that the spirit is still concealed behind it. That which is ideal in the seed becomes material reality in the whole plant.

The same image can be applied to the whole world. One can understand the world by observing it in its highest state, by immersing oneself in its blossom and fruit, in the human soul, by studying the "Know thyself" and going to the human being. There, where the purely spiritual-soul then appears directly, i.e. in the deepening, in the direct immersion into the self, one can first look for a world view, a world view. But you can also examine a seed. You can find ways and means to examine the seed. One can assume that what lies in the seed is already indicated and that the world view that is gained from the human being is the highest. The Pythagoreans do not seek man where he is soul, nor where he appears as spirit, but where he is apparently not spirit at all, where he apparently is not at all. The Pythagorean seeks certain reality through indifferent numbers. And that is why he seeks the spirit where he already knows the spirit. That is why he also finds the primal source, the basic structure of existence, in mathematics.

I just wanted to say that this world view of the Pythagoreans can only be understood if one understands the immersion of Novalis, which must be understood mathematically - of Novalis, who was of a thoroughly poetic nature and as such was what literary history calls a "Romantic", yet was rooted in such laws that he could see strict mathematics as the primal source of existence. That is why the Pythagoreans, because their spirit was powerful enough, were able to find spirit in the relationships of numbers. They started from the lowest level of the spiritual. Just as the seed is not yet a plant, but can become a plant, so they ascended from the seemingly unspiritual to the spiritual.

This is what can make us understand the whole world view of the Pythagoreans. The Pythagorean worldview is usually presented as if it were the numerical aspect of the world that led the Pythagoreans to regard number as the origin of things. And one cannot quite imagine what they meant by that. I must confess that if we follow what is written in the textbooks and read that the Pythagoreans regarded number as the origin of all things, it would seem meaningless to me. Only if I imagine how it is in reality, if I assume that they grew up in a completely different theory of knowledge, can I understand what they meant. Their view is simply described by the word: the Pythagorean did not look for the spirit where it appears to be a sensual entity, but where he perceives it as something that fills the whole of space.

That is one side of the Pythagorean world view, that is the reason why they descended to numbers and geometric shapes. On the other hand, the reason is also because they found something in these numbers and geometric figures that they could address as spirit.

What do geometric or mathematical ratios mean? Anyone who can only imagine a circle or an ellipse when they are drawn on the blackboard cannot be said to have any idea of the real geometric or mathematical relationships. If he has to put five peas or beans on the table when he wants to imagine the number <>, we cannot say that he has an idea of the real numbers.

On the contrary, we are aware that what we call a circle, what we call an ellipse, can only be represented approximately in material reality. We know that the material circle we draw is only an approximation of what we can create in our minds. We also know that what the celestial bodies in outer space describe is only an approximation of a circle. However, it is the same law that governs the creation of the world as the law that governs us when we imagine a circle in our minds, when we no longer need to deduce the spiritual from the sensual. That is why mathematics would be the best thing to introduce us to the spiritual. This is also why the Pythagoreans placed the highest value on mathematics. So if you really want to recognize the spirit, you have to be able to disregard everything sensual. You must be able to realize that it is not what you draw on the blackboard with chalk that is a real circle, but what remains for the spirit without the chalk drawing on the blackboard. Using the salt cube, it was possible to show that the cube is something completely different from the [salt] cube. In this way, the pupils could be shown that the spiritual - also of other things - can only be understood if the sensual remains absent. This is easy to show with the salt cube. The spiritual content is not the same as the outer cube.

But if we understand this for the whole sum of world phenomena, if we understand that the spiritual can be detached from the material, then this leads us up to higher levels. Everyone admits that mathematics has nothing to do with the things of the world, but with the spiritual. But if this goes further up, people confuse the spirit with reality

A strange document on the confusion of the spirit with reality has just come out these days. A book has been published entitled "Kritik der Sprache" (Critique of Language) by Fritz Mauthner, which aims to show how all our knowledge floats in the air, how nothing is given to us but the sensory world, and if we disregard the sensory world, we have nothing more in our imaginary world than empty words.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is something that someone who is unable to detach the spirit of things at a higher level of reality, as he can do with mathematical entities, can very easily come to. He who has no intuition, who does not really have from the source point of his spirit what he has to hold up to things, who is sterile and barren, who cannot fill his soul with spiritual realities, believes that he has nothing more when he goes beyond [the sense world] than words. Instead of a "critique of knowledge, he writes a "critique of language.

The book comprises two volumes. It seems to me as if someone wanted to write a critique and had not mastered what he wanted to criticize. He confuses what the mind adds to the formations. What Mauthner gives would be - compared to what spiritual content can and should give - a critique of pencil drawing. It shows how much the pencil is capable of depicting circles. Thus sterile views cling to those who are unable to feel the true content. He does not know that the spirit gradually acquires the ability to ascend to the higher realms of existence and is aware of its difference from material things at every stage of spiritual life, just as the mathematician is able to detach the spiritual, the spiritual from things, i.e. to advance from what is not yet spirit to the immediate God in the world.

This was something that the Pythagoreans sought to achieve step by step by trying to lead the student from the lower to the higher. They were convinced that by ascending from the lower to the higher, man was not merely having an experience within himself, but was fulfilling a task in the universe itself. They were convinced that he was doing something in the world, they were so convinced that they only compared the ascent with the numerical relationships themselves. They said to themselves: The individual human being who perceives is apparently a duality. The perceiver and the perceived. These two great opposites stood for the Pythagoreans at the basic level of their table of knowledge.

But they said to themselves: All this is only apparent because man does not stand on the highest level of perfection, but on the lower levels. The perceiving and the perceived must be overcome if they are to become one. Thus the Pythagorean imagines that, just as now in human cognition, unity triumphs over duality, over what is separate in the world, the Pythagorean must imagine everything according to numerical relationships and specifically again in such a way that what is separately a duality presents itself to him as unity.

Now the Pythagorean is convinced that the whole multiplicity of the world, the fact that there are many things in the world, derives only from the fact that man first sees the appearance, not the thing, that he does not see things as they are, but that he sees them as they are not, because of the limitations of his own existence. He sees that this multiplicity, when he overcomes appearance, then presents itself in reality, in truth, as unity. What man ultimately achieves is the primordial unity, the primordial One of the world, and the Pythagorean also sees this as the foundation from which everything springs.

This is what makes it possible for man to perceive something in space. This is the general unity of the world, but man can only gradually ascend to it. What is revealed last is there first, and that is because it is a member of this multiplicity. After it has been placed in a corner for a while, it integrates itself into the world structure and becomes one with the world harmony. The numerical harmony, the geometric regularity of the world view embraces the human being. And so he finds it by integrating himself into the structure of numbers. Therefore, the Pythagorean can say that all good, all virtue consists in man overcoming appearances and finding numerical, geometric regularity, whereby he integrates himself into the great world existence.

Thus man appears to himself like a tone in harmony, and because he appears to himself like a tone in harmony, he has to give himself the right tone and the right proportion. He does not fulfill a task for himself, but fulfills a moral task. If he does not fulfill it, then he is not in the right numerical proportion. He has something to [contribute] not to himself, but to the whole structure of the world. Through every transgression, man brings upon himself an unlimited responsibility, and, recognizing this, he should strive more and more to attain the mood that he has to fulfill in the great music of the world.

So to the Pythagorean, what is spread outside in space and time appears as a moral task itself. For the Pythagoreans, the moral task is not to be understood as a mathematical one on a higher level. The mathematical task is that he discovers the world space, but in such a way that he is thereby integrated, that he is thereby integrated like a tone in the world music, like a number in the law of numbers. He then discovers that when he does something - because he is not just his own redeemer - it is not just important for himself, but something that concerns the whole universe. The spirit is not only in me, but also where it works. He then sees that the spirit not only has to work on its own moral perfection, but also on the harmonization of the whole universe. When the Pythagorean imagines the harmony of the universe in such a way that he thinks of the world as permeated by musical tones, by music of the spheres analogous to music itself, this happens because music is based on tonal relationships.

The Pythagorean translates this by saying: Just as the tonal relationships become perceptible to our senses as a harmony of tones, there is also a harmony of tones, a music of the spheres in the world, which acts like the numerical relationships in the world. But if it does not find the right numerical relationship, the right tonal relationship to the world within itself, then it disturbs the harmony of the world.

This is why the insights of the Pythagoreans had to lead to the strictest educational system. The Pythagorean is aware, when he teaches the individual this or that, that he is taking upon himself a responsibility, not only towards that person, but towards the whole universe.

Answer to the question:

Everyone's special disposition enables them to gain knowledge of the spirit. The Pythagoreans endeavored to create this possibility for everyone.

[Mathematical ideas are only easy to prove because they are simple, almost without content.

For those, however, who are not at all suited from the outset to immerse themselves in the content of the world, the best and safest school will be to go through mathematics. Plato therefore demanded a thorough knowledge of mathematics from his students. Otherwise it might not have worked for everyone. I would like to explain this to someone who has gone through the Pythagorean school: Let's imagine a person who can only feel. Such an organism would be able to perceive geometric shapes and also be able to conceive of numbers. In fact, blind and deaf people have been taught these relationships and turned into accomplished mathematicians. Such an organism can also arrive at music in a mathematical way. The numerical relationships only appear to him in a shadowy way. Now let us imagine that such a person suddenly hears. He will then perceive the same thing that he had previously understood. He now perceives it with his ears. It is the same with the blind. Through an explanation of the vibrations of the world, he can get an idea of the colors through the numerical relationships. The Pythagorean should now also bring the higher senses to rise. It is the same thing as when a mathematician comes to a musician who is constructing his work himself and calculates it for him. Then the musician can say: "Stay away from that. If you have the necessary receptivity, you can have perceptions even without mathematical representation.

I have contrasted two currents. One current within Hellenism, which starts from Heraclitus, and the other, which starts from Pythagoras. Heraclitus and Pythagoras stand before us as two who have the same object. Heraclitus, as it were, as the composer, Pythagoras as the one who mathematically calculates his subject. It is the same with us as with Pythagoreanism. You first have to teach the blind and the deaf and then you can lead them to higher levels.

Mathematical concepts devised by humans are often confirmed in the outside world. In the case of electricity, people calculate that this or that must be one way or the other. If you then carry it out in reality as an experiment, it must agree [with the calculation].

I would like to cite a famous conversation between Schiller and Goethe. Goethe and Schiller left a scientific lecture together and got into a conversation about what they had heard. In the course of the conversation, Goethe took a piece of paper and drew a symbolic plant, an ideal plant, saying: "This plant is actually in every plant. Every plant is actually an individual embodiment of this general plant. To which Schiller replied: Yes, but that's just an idea! To which Goethe replied: But then I see my ideas with my eyes.

[Or let's take a] triangle [it is presumably drawn]: The angles add up to 180 degrees. Because we have seen a triangle, we can form a quadrilateral by connecting the blue one with the green one. This can be extended in the mind. We can move from the triangle to the square. But we cannot go from one shade of color to another. We can only perceive sensually what belongs to the world of the senses. In mathematics, the spiritual is the easiest to grasp. The mathematical is the most spiritual.

You don't know how to perceive sounds from numerical relationships? Sounds are not perceived [with the ears], only thought. Composers who become deaf therefore only have a surrogate. It is the same as when we deduce one mathematical entity from another. It is not [sensory] perception, but a mental experience.

The sensual is transformed [into the spiritual], it is elevated.

Studying mathematics makes no difference, but recognizing the essence of mathematics does. The most superficial person just splashes and splashes around in the primordial being. Someone can also have studied mathematics. Goethe studied little mathematics. But no one understood the essence of mathematics more than he did. Goethe arrived at his magnificent world of metamorphoses precisely because he had such a great idea of the nature of mathematics, even though he was only able to arrive at the [gap in the transcript] theorem.

He who can make razors may not be able to shave, and he who can shave usually cannot make razors. Thus the mathematician who knows mathematics [only] in form need not know its meaning and its application to the primal being.