The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Some poetry will be recited now and a corresponding mood in profound sense can only be created because the largest part of the friends present here have lately been deeply concerned with material concerning the spiritual world in relation to the entire historical development of humankind. What will be presented here in this lecture will bring to our awareness how spiritual science or Theosophy is not only something merely announced to the world through the Theosophical Society but that Theosophy as a teaching is based on the greater occult truth and wisdom which has already flowed through ancient times through the best minds searching for the Higher Worlds. We can find personalities in olden and recent times who can in actual fact show that in their imagination, ideas, feelings and experience, in their life mood they were totally permeated with a world view we could call theosophical and from which they worked, and that their entire life's activity unfolded in harmony with this. One such extraordinary personality lived in Novalis during the last three decades of the eighteenth century.

Not even reaching thirty years of age was Novalis, and we hope that through the lecture of his “Hymns to the Night” an awareness will be able to develop, which speaks out of these Hymns—so complete, as it was only possible in the last three decades of the eighteenth century—in an all encompassing manner, the precise knowledge of these spiritual scientific truths.

Out of a highly respected aristocratic family, Friedrich von Hardenberg, called Novalis, was born on 2 May 1772. Whoever has the opportunity to visit Weimar must not hesitate to view the impressive Novalis bust. It belongs to the classic records of Weimar, and clearly expresses how closely the spiritual high culture was connected to this time, the end of the eighteenth century. Whoever views this extraordinary bust will, if he or she has any sensitivity for it, get the impression that, one could say, out of this sphere of humble humanity the physiognomy of his soul expresses that he was totally established in the occult, in the spiritual worlds. To add to this, Novalis is one of those personalities who is a living proof of the possibility to connect this spirituality, this self-elevation in the highest sense of human beings reaching the spiritual worlds, to connect this to a solid practical `standing on the ground' physical reality. Basically Novalis never entered an angry conflict with the still conservative traditions in which his family circle lived, but we can take into consideration, that this family always had an open receptivity for everything noble and good, also when coming into contact with unknown people.

When we study Novalis' biography—it is in itself a work of art—and we allow it to work on us, his father is shown as having a practical, applied nature. Novalis was actually in his civil life educated for a totally practical career, for which knowledge of law and mathematics was necessary. He became a mountain engineer. Here is not the place to explore how he actually became a delight in this career for those whom he worked. It is also not the moment now to show how the mathematical-materialistic sciences, which lay at the foundation of this career, not only in full theory and practice came to be controlled by him completely, but that he was a diligent mathematician. What is most important is that Novalis as a spiritual being allowed mathematics to penetrate into his inner development.

When mathematics showed him how it is suitable for the elevation of pure sense-free thought, then we have where relevant, to refer to a classic example as here with Novalis, where outer observation doesn't have a say. For him life in the mathematical imagination became a great poem which filled him with delights, allowing his soul to experience an elevation when he dived into numbers and sizes. For him mathematics became the expression of divine creation, divine thought as it flashes through space in powerful directions and in measures of power and crystallize out there. Mathematics became for his mindset the warmest way to the spiritual life, while for many people, who only know mathematics from outside, it remains cold. It is so much more meaningful that we meet this spirituality in Novalis in a gentleness and refinement, as we would not meet in one or other of the most important intellects.

Novalis was a contemporary of Goethe. One should not place the kind of spirituality within Novalis, on the same level as what Goethe had. Goethe came to it through a regulated, out of a Higher World directed course towards an initiation, up to a particular stage. Novalis, by contrast, lived a life which one can best describe by saying: This young man, who left the physical plane at the age of twenty nine and who gave the German intellectuals more than a hundred thousand others could give, he lived a life which was actually a memory of a previous one. Through a quite specific event the spiritual experiences of earlier incarnations appeared, presented themselves to his soul and flowed in gentle, rhythmically woven poems from his soul.

Thus we can see that Novalis understood how the human being's soul can be lifted up into a higher world. For Novalis it gave the possibility to see that waking everyday awareness is only a fragment in a current human life, and how the soul who in the evening leaves the daily awareness and sinks into unconsciousness, in actual fact sinks into the spiritual world. He was able to experience deeply and to know, that in these spiritual worlds which are entered by the soul at night, lived a higher spiritual reality, that the day with all its impressions, even the impression of sun and light, only formed a fragment of the entire spiritual worlds. The stars, surreptitiously sending away the light of day during the night, appeared to him only in a weak glow, while in him spiritual truths rose up in his consciousness, which for the clairvoyant appears illuminated in a dazzling bright astral light when during the night he shifts himself spiritually into this state. During the night the actual spiritual worlds appeared to Novalis and thus the night from this perspective became valuable.

What enabled his memories of an earlier incarnation to appear? How did it happen that the experiences of the occult world, which we can reveal today in occult knowledge, rose so uniquely in him? His life unloosened him from the soul in whose knowledge slumbered earlier incarnations. One must take the result, which these spiritual experiences lifted out of this soul, back into the light of a spiritual observation, if one wants to understand it. Only childlike folly could place these experiences on the same footing as Goethe's meeting and Friederikes zu Sesenheim. This would be a coarsely unrefined comparison.

During his stay in Grüningen he became acquainted with a thirteen year old girl. Soul secrets played here which one could never, without abandoning the gentleness of a soul, call this a love relationship. Basically there was in Sophie von Kühn—that was her name—something like the lives of various beings. She became ill and soon died. The moment her spirit loosened from Sophie von Kühn, it wrestled with Novalis' inner life, awakening inner spiritual abilities.

Perhaps you could, when you allow yourself to admit it, obviously see the inability of a way of thought bound by outer experience coming to the fore here in what we must experience in judging these relationships, which can only be understood if we want to understand it in its spirituality, in our present materialistic time. People say science must be based on documentation; it must absolutely lead from everything concrete on the physical plane. Such natural scientists, who surely present a distorted side, the farcical side of natural science, have allowed us to experience what they believe in, that by presenting documents, Novalis basically had fallen prey to an illusion. The poetry is nice—they say—but show us the documents, let us look at who Herr von Rockenthien was where Sophie von Kühn lived. Look at—so the “Novalis adherents” said—various letters Sophie von Kühn wrote to Novalis. Sopie von Kühn made not only in every line but nearly in every word, a writing or spelling error! - concluding Novalis had fallen victim to a big deception.

In Jena, where she spent the last years, she also encountered Goethe—and made a deep impression on Goethe! Whoever can't comprehend that these unique words of Goethe are more valuable than documents which can be dug up—because all documents can lie—whoever wants to come with proof to show something, will not consider producing counter evidence, it will not help him, despite all his science.

What was the result for Novalis? Sophie von Kühn passed away and Novalis lived within a mood of: “I will emulate her in death” (Ich sterbe ihr nach!). Nevermore was he separated from her soul. Pouring out of the deceased soul of Sophie von Kühn came a force which he had in his own soul experienced as a mediator in the night, and within him rose enormous experiences which he depicted in his poetry.

Once again another feminine individual crossed his path: Julie von Charpentier. To him however, she was only the earthly symbol of Sophie von Kühn's deceased soul. Dissolved out of his soul were the elements of wisdom which he poured into the “Hymns to the Night”, through this first soul bond.

(Marie von Sivers (Marie Steiner) read the first two Hymns at this point.)

So far does this poem transport us into the worlds in which Novalis lived as a spirit, when he experienced from within the everlasting elements of wisdom.

You might often have heard that such reaching into the higher worlds is linked to a penetration of other secrets of existence. Out of this, a backward glance into the prehistoric times is necessary, where that, which now lives in the world, only existed as a sprig in the Divine and had not yet come down into an earthly form. When the soul of the natural kingdoms still existed in pure spirit, only perceptible in the astral world, all this contributed to the impressive images unfolding to Novalis the seer, when he glanced back. He saw the time when the souls of plants, animals and people were still companions of divine beings, when an interruption in awareness had not yet happened as it did later to human beings in the exchange between night and day—while nothing was influenced by any interruption, as is expressed in the words: birth and death. Everything living flowed in the spiritual-soul where there was no sense of death in this prehistoric past.

Then the thought of death struck into the life of these gods and divine earthly beings, and down into the earthly world the spirits moved. The godly beings were concealed in earthly bodies, the godly beings were enchanted into the mineral, plant and animal realms. Those who were able to return to the spiritual worlds found the gods within all phenomena, they recognised the earlier gods as linked to the human beings before an earthly existence began. They learnt what the life of a soul was, learnt to recognise that the day with its impressions creates a weaker fragment out of the great world of the beings whose existence was endurance, eternity. They learnt to become disenchanted by the world of nature.

This happened to Novalis' soul when he united his eternity to Sophie's soul by emulating her in death. In this emulation his spirit flourished. He experienced “die to live” and in him rose what he called his “magical idealism”.

(Now followed the recitation of the fourth hymn, from part 20, and the start of Hymn 5.)

In this way Novalis could glance back to a time in which gods moved among men, when everything took place spiritually because spirits and souls had not yet descended into earthly bodies. He perceived a point of transition: how death hit the world and how the human beings during this time placed death as their earthly shadowing and how he tried to brighten it up through fantasy and art. But death remained a riddle.

Then something of universal significance happened. Novalis could perceive the universal meaning of what had happened at that time on earth. Souls from the kingdoms of nature descended to the earth. Forgotten were the memories of their spiritual original existence, yet a unique spiritual Being remained in this universal womb of creation from which everything descended. One Being provisionally held back; it had held itself above and only provisionally sent its gift of grace downward, and then, when human beings needed it the most, it also descend into the earthly sphere. It remained in the spiritual spheres above the being of the spiritual light, this Being was hidden behind the physical sun. It held itself in heavenly spheres and descended when human beings needed to once again be able to rise up to spiritual worlds. It descended with the Mystery of Golgotha when Christ appeared in a physical body.

Humanity understands Christ in His universal unfolding when the life of Jesus of Nazareth is followed back to His spiritual origins, to the unsolvable riddle of death. The Greek spirit of death appears as a pondering muse, as an enigma which cannot be solved. Even the Greeks sensed that the riddle which is hidden in the youth's soul, found its solution with the Event of Golgotha, that here victory overcomes death and as a result a new impulse is given to humanity.

This Novalis could see and as a result there appeared to him, from the mystery of faith and the mystery wisdom, the Star which the old Magi had followed. As a result he understood the actual essence of what the Christ death implied. In the night of the soul the riddle of death revealed itself to him, the riddle of the Christ. This was it, which this extraordinary individual wanted to learn—through the memory of earlier lives—what the Christ, what the event of Golgotha signified for the world.

Hymns to the Night
I

Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light—with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? The giant-world of the unresting constellations inhales it as the innermost soul of life, and floats dancing in its blue flood—the sparkling, ever-tranquil stone, the thoughtful, imbibing plant, and the wild, burning multiform beast inhales it—but more than all, the lordly stranger with the sense-filled eyes, the swaying walk, and the sweetly closed, melodious lips. Like a king over earthly nature, it rouses every force to countless transformations, binds and unbinds innumerable alliances, hangs its heavenly form around every earthly substance.—Its presence alone reveals the marvelous splendor of the kingdoms of the world.

Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world—sunk in a deep grave—waste and lonely is its place. In the chords of the bosom blows a deep sadness. I am ready to sink away in drops of dew, and mingle with the ashes.—The distances of memory, the wishes of youth, the dreams of childhood, the brief joys and vain hopes of a whole long life, arise in gray garments, like an evening vapor after the sunset. In other regions the light has pitched its joyous tents. What if it should never return to its children, who wait for it with the faith of innocence?

What springs up all at once so sweetly boding in my heart, and stills the soft air of sadness? Dost thou also take a pleasure in us, dark Night? What holdest thou under thy mantle, that with hidden power affects my soul? Precious balm drips from thy hand out of its bundle of poppies. Thou upliftest the heavy-laden wings of the soul. Darkly and inexpressibly are we moved—joy-startled, I see a grave face that, tender and worshipful, inclines toward me, and, amid manifold entangled locks, reveals the youthful loveliness of the Mother. How poor and childish a thing seems to me now the Light—how joyous and welcome the departure of the day—because the Night turns away from thee thy servants, you now strew in the gulfs of space those flashing globes, to proclaim thy omnipotence—thy return—in seasons of thy absence. More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts—needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul—that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. Glory to the queen of the world, to the great prophet of the holier worlds, to the guardian of blissful love—she sends thee to me—thou tenderly beloved—the gracious sun of the Night,—now am I awake—for now am I thine and mine—thou hast made me know the Night—made of me a man—consume with spirit-fire my body, that I, turned to finer air, may mingle more closely with thee, and then our bridal night endure forever.

II

Must the morning always return? Will the despotism of the earthly never cease? Unholy activity consumes the angel-visit of the Night. Will the time never come when Love's hidden sacrifice shall burn eternally? To the Light a season was set; but everlasting and boundless is the dominion of the Night.—Endless is the duration of sleep. Holy Sleep—gladden not too seldom in this earthly day-labor, the devoted servant of the Night. Fools alone mistake thee, knowing nought of sleep but the shadow which, in the twilight of the real Night, thou pitifully castest over us. They feel thee not in the golden flood of the grapes—in the magic oil of the almond tree—and the brown juice of the poppy. They know not that it is thou who hauntest the bosom of the tender maiden, and makest a heaven of her lap—never suspect it is thou, opening the doors to Heaven, that steppest to meet them out of ancient stories, bearing the key to the dwellings of the blessed, silent messenger of secrets infinite.

III

Once when I was shedding bitter tears, when, dissolved in pain, my hope was melting away, and I stood alone by the barren mound which in its narrow dark bosom hid the vanished form of my life—lonely as never yet was lonely man, driven by anxiety unspeakable—powerless, and no longer anything but a conscious misery.—As there I looked about me for help, unable to go on or to turn back, and clung to the fleeting, extinguished life with an endless longing:—then, out of the blue distances—from the hills of my ancient bliss, came a shiver of twilight—and at once snapt the bond of birth—the chains of the Light. Away fled the glory of the world, and with it my mourning—the sadness flowed together into a new, unfathomable world—Thou, Night-inspiration, heavenly Slumber, didst come upon me—the region gently upheaved itself; over it hovered my unbound, newborn spirit. The mound became a cloud of dust—and through the cloud I saw the glorified face of my beloved. In her eyes eternity reposed—I laid hold of her hands, and the tears became a sparkling bond that could not be broken. Into the distance swept by, like a tempest, thousands of years. On her neck I welcomed the new life with ecstatic tears. It was the first, the only dream—and just since then I have held fast an eternal, unchangeable faith in the heaven of the Night, and its Light, the Beloved.

IV

Now I know when will come the last morning—when the Light no more scares away Night and Love—when sleep shall be without waking, and but one continuous dream. I feel in me a celestial exhaustion. Long and weariful was my pilgrimage to the holy grave, and crushing was the cross. The crystal wave, which, imperceptible to the ordinary sense, springs in the dark bosom of the mound against whose foot breaks the flood of the world, he who has tasted it, he who has stood on the mountain frontier of the world, and looked across into the new land, into the abode of the Night—truly he turns not again into the tumult of the world, into the land where dwells the Light in ceaseless unrest.

On those heights he builds for himself tabernacles—tabernacles of peace, there longs and loves and gazes across, until the welcomest of all hours draws him down into the waters of the spring—afloat above remains what is earthly, and is swept back in storms, but what became holy by the touch of love, runs free through hidden ways to the region beyond, where, like fragrances, it mingles with love asleep.

Still wakest thou, cheerful Light, that weary man to his labor—and into me pourest joyous life—but thou wilest me not away from Memory's moss-grown monument. Gladly will I stir busy hands, everywhere behold where thou hast need of me—praise the lustre of thy splendor—pursue unwearied the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft—gladly contemplate the clever pace of thy mighty, luminous clock—explore the balance of the forces and the laws of the wondrous play of countless worlds and their seasons. But true to the Night remains my secret heart, and to creative Love, her daughter. Canst thou show me a heart eternally true? has thy sun friendly eyes that know me? do thy stars lay hold of my longing hand? and return me the tender pressure and the caressing word? was it thou did adorn them with colors and a flickering outline—or was it she who gave to thy jewels a higher, a dearer weight? What delight, what pleasure offers thy life, to outweigh the transports of Death? Wears not everything that inspires us the color of the Night? She sustains thee mother-like, and to her thou owest all thy glory. Thou wouldst vanish into thyself—in boundless space thou wouldst dissolve, if she did not hold thee fast, if she swaddled thee not, so that thou grewest warm, and flaming, begot the universe. Truly I was, before thou wast—the mother sent me with my brothers and sisters to inhabit thy world, to hallow it with love that it might be an ever-present memorial—to plant it with flowers unfading. As yet they have not ripened, these thoughts divine—as yet is there small trace of our coming revelation—One day thy clock will point to the end of time, and then thou shalt be as one of us, and shalt, full of ardent longing, be extinguished and die. I feel in me the close of thy activity—heavenly freedom, and blessed return. With wild pangs I recognize thy distance from our home, thy resistance against the ancient, glorious heaven. Thy rage and thy raving are in vain. Unscorchable stands the cross—victory-banner of our breed.

Over I journey
And for each pain
A pleasant sting only
Shall one day remain.
Yet in a few moments
Then free am I,
And intoxicated
In Love's lap lie.
Life everlasting
Lifts, wave-like, at me,
I gaze from its summit
Down after thee.
Your lustre must vanish
Yon mound underneath—
A shadow will bring thee
Thy cooling wreath.
Oh draw at my heart, love,
Draw till I'm gone,
That, fallen asleep, I
Still may love on.
I feel the flow of
Death's youth-giving flood
To balsam and ether
Transform my blood—
I live all the daytime
In faith and in might
And in holy fire
I die every night.

V

In ancient times, over the widespread families of men an iron Fate ruled with dumb force. A gloomy oppression swathed their heavy souls—the earth was boundless—the abode of the gods and their home. From eternal ages stood its mysterious structure. Beyond the red hills of the morning, in the sacred bosom of the sea, dwelt the sun, the all-enkindling, living Light. An aged giant upbore the blissful world. Fast beneath mountains lay the first-born sons of mother Earth. Helpless in their destroying fury against the new, glorious race of gods, and their kindred, glad-hearted men. The ocean's dark green abyss was the lap of a goddess. In crystal grottos revelled a luxuriant folk. Rivers, trees, flowers, and beasts had human wits. Sweeter tasted the wine—poured out by Youth-abundance—a god in the grape-clusters—a loving, motherly goddess upgrew in the full golden sheaves—love's sacred inebriation was a sweet worship of the fairest of the god-ladies—Life rustled through the centuries like one spring-time, an ever-variegated festival of heaven-children and earth-dwellers. All races childlike adored the ethereal, thousand-fold flame as the one sublimest thing in the world. There was but one notion, a horrible dream-shape—

That fearsome to the merry tables strode,
A wrapt the spirit there in wild fright.
The gods themselves no counsel knew nor showed
To fill the anxious hearts with comfort light.
Mysterious was the monster's pathless road,
Whose rage no prayer nor tribute could requite;
'Twas Death who broke the banquet up with fears,
With anguish, dire pain, and bitter tears.

Eternally from all things here disparted
That sway the heart with pleasure's joyous flow,
Divided from the loved ones who've departed,
Tossed by longing vain, unceasing woe—
In a dull dream to struggle, faint and thwarted,
Seemed all was granted to the dead below.
Broke lay the merry wave of human bliss
On Death's inevitable, rocky cliff.

With daring spirit and a passion deep,
Did man ameliorate the horrid blight,
A gentle youth puts out his torch, to sleep—
The end, just like a harp's sigh, comes light.
Cool shadow-floods o'er melting memory creep,
So sang the song, into its sorry need.
Still undeciphered lay the endless Night—
The solemn symbol of a far-off might.

The old world began to decline. The pleasure-garden of the young race withered away—up into more open, desolate regions, forsaking his childhood, struggled the growing man. The gods vanished with their retinue—Nature stood alone and lifeless. Dry Number and rigid Measure bound it with iron chains. Into dust and air the priceless blossoms of life fell away in words obscure. Gone was wonder-working Faith, and its all-transforming, all-uniting angel-comrade, the Imagination. A cold north wind blew unkindly over the rigid plain, and the rigid wonderland first froze, then evaporated into ether. The far depths of heaven filled with glowing worlds. Into the deeper sanctuary, into the more exalted region of feeling, the soul of the world retired with all its earthly powers, there to rule until the dawn should break of universal Glory. No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence—they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations—into it the gods went back—and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. Among the people who too early were become of all the most scornful and insolently estranged from the blessed innocence of youth, appeared the New World with a face never seen before—in the poverty of a poetic shelter—a son of the first virgin and mother—the eternal fruit of mysterious embrace. The foreboding, rich-blossoming wisdom of the East at once recognized the beginning of the new age—A star showed the way to the humble cradle of the king. In the name of the distant future, they did him homage with lustre and fragrance, the highest wonders of Nature. In solitude the heavenly heart unfolded to a flower-chalice of almighty love—upturned toward the supreme face of the father, and resting on the bliss-foreboding bosom of the sweetly solemn mother. With deifying fervor the prophetic eye of the blooming child beheld the years to come, foresaw, untroubled over the earthly lot of his own days, the beloved offspring of his divine stem. Ere long the most childlike souls, by true love marvellously possessed, gathered about him. Like flowers sprang up a strange new life in his presence. Words inexhaustible and the most joyful tidings fell like sparks of a divine spirit from his friendly lips. From a far shore, born under the clear sky of Hellas, came a singer to Palestine, and gave up his whole heart to the wonder-child:

The youth thou art who ages long hast stood
Upon our graves, so deeply lost in thought;
A sign of comfort in the dusky gloom
For high humanity, a joyful start.
What dropped us all into abyssmal woe,
Pulls us forward with sweet yearning now.
In everlasting life death found its goal,
For thou art Death who at last makes us whole.

Filled with joy, the singer went on to Hindustan—his heart intoxicated with the sweetest love; and poured it out in fiery songs under the balmy sky, so that a thousand hearts bowed to him, and the good news sprang up with a thousand branches. Soon after the singer's departure, his precious life was made a sacrifice for the deep fall of man—He died in his youth, torn away from his beloved world, from his weeping mother, and his trembling friends. His lovely mouth emptied the dark cup of unspeakable woes—in ghastly fear the birth of the new world drew near. Hard he wrestled with the terrors of old Death—Heavy lay the weight of the old world upon him. Yet once more he looked fondly at his mother—then came the releasing hand of eternal love, and he fell asleep. Only a few days hung a deep veil over the roaring sea, over the quaking land—countless tears wept his loved ones—the mystery was unsealed—heavenly spirits heaved the ancient stone from the gloomy grave. Angels sat by the Sleeper—delicately shaped from his dreams—awoken in new Godlike glory; he clomb the limits of the new-born world—buried with his own hand the old corpse in the abandoned hollow, and with a hand almighty laid upon it a stone which no power shall ever again upheave.

Yet weep thy loved ones tears of joy, tears of feeling and endless thanksgiving over your grave—joyously startled, they see thee rise again, and themselves with thee—behold thee weep with sweet fervor on the blessed bosom of thy mother, solemnly walking with thy friends, uttering words plucked as from the Tree of Life; see thee hasten, full of longing, into thy father's arms, bearing with thee youthful humanity, and the inexhaustible cup of the golden future. Soon the mother hastened after thee—in heavenly triumph—she was the first with thee in the new home. Since then, long ages have flowed past, and in ever-increasing splendor have stirred your new creation—and thousands have, away from pangs and tortures, followed thee, filled with faith and longing and fidelity—walking about with thee and the heavenly virgin in the kingdom of love, serving in the temple of heavenly Death, and forever thine.

Uplifted is the stone—
And all mankind is risen—
We all remain thine own.
And vanished is our prison.
All troubles flee away
Thy golden bowl before,
For Earth and Life give way
At the last and final supper.

To the marriage Death doth call—
The virgins standeth back—
The lamps burn lustrous all—
Of oil there is no lack—
If the distance would only fill
With the sound of you walking alone
And that the stars would call
Us all with human tongues and tone.

Unto thee, O Mary
A thousand hearts aspire.
In this life of shadows
Thee only they desire.
In thee they hope for delivery
With visionary expectation—
If only thou, O holy being
Could clasp them to thy breast.

With bitter torment burning,
So many who are consumed
At last from this world turning
To thee have looked and fled,
Helpful thou hast appeared
To so many in pain.
Now to them we come,
To never go out again.

At no grave can weep
Any who love and pray.
The gift of Love they keep,
From none can it be taken away.
To soothe and quiet his longing,
Night comes and inspires—
Heaven's children round him thronging
Watch and guard his heart.

Have courage, for life is striding
To endless life along;
Stretched by inner fire,
Our sense becomes transfigured.
One day the stars above
Shall flow in golden wine,
We will enjoy it all,
And as stars we will shine.

The love is given freely,
And Separation is no more.
The whole life heaves and surges
Like a sea without a shore.
Just one night of bliss—
One everlasting poem—
And the sun we all share
Is the face of God.

6
Longing for Death

Into the bosom of the earth,
Out of the Light's dominion,
Death's pains are but a bursting forth,
Sign of glad departure.
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float.

Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.
We are heated by the day too bright,
And withered up with care.
We're weary of a life abroad,
And we now want our Father's home.

What in this world should we all
Do with love and with faith?
That which is old is set aside,
And the new may perish also.
Alone he stands and sore downcast
Who loves with pious warmth the Past.

The Past where the light of the senses
In lofty flames did rise;
Where the Father's face and hand
All men did recognize;
And, with high sense, in simplicity
Many still fit the original pattern.

The Past wherein, still rich in bloom,
Man's strain did burgeon glorious,
And children, for the world to come,
Sought pain and death victorious,
And, through both life and pleasure spake,
Yet many a heart for love did break.

The Past, where to the flow of youth
God still showed himself,
And truly to an early death
Did commit his sweet life.
Fear and torture patiently he bore
So that he would be loved forever.

With anxious yearning now we see
That Past in darkness drenched,
With this world's water never we
Shall find our hot thirst quenched.
To our old home we have to go
That blessed time again to know.

What yet doth hinder our return
To loved ones long reposed?
Their grave limits our lives.
We are all sad and afraid.
We can search for nothing more—
The heart is full, the world is void.

Infinite and mysterious,
Thrills through us a sweet trembling—
As if from far there echoed thus
A sigh, our grief resembling.
Our loved ones yearn as well as we,
And sent to us this longing breeze.

Down to the sweet bride, and away
To the beloved Jesus.
Have courage, evening shades grow gray
To those who love and grieve.
A dream will dash our chains apart,
And lay us in the Father's lap.

Malsch, April 6, 1909

Today we are gathered for the dedication ceremony of our anthroposophical branch in Maisch. Although this “Section” of our Society has been fully at work for a while, we are able only today to officially celebrate its opening.

Many of our anthroposophical friends have come to this celebration from the most diverse regions to which our anthroposophical endeavors have spread. By coming here, they have demonstrated that they wish to unite their anthroposophical feelings and thoughts with those of serious and hardworking people in this group. One might say this group of people in Maisch has been thrown into these remote mountains, but surrounded by all the beautiful, great, and noble forces of nature, they will successfully unfold anthroposophical life. Those of you who were able to look around in the vicinity of this hospitable house in Malsch will have noticed that much has been done for its external appearance, as if the people responsible wished to say externally that the spiritual life by which all of us are inspired shall find special expression in this beautiful spot.

Let us look back at the modest beginnings of our anthroposophical life at the founding of our German Section, into which the Section in Malsch is now being incorporated. At that time we began with but a small group of people of spiritual scientific enthusiasts. Then, as we look at events such as this one today and observe the large number of souls who unite with us in spiritual scientific feelings and sentiments, we can be satisfied with the last few years of our endeavors.

The Stockmeyer family has spared no efforts to help with the unfolding of spiritual life on this beautiful piece of land although the spirits of nature have clearly aided their efforts. Also, this family must find great satisfaction in seeing how many genuine and true friends have hurried to this hospitable place, and I am sure all anthroposophical friends may be justly called genuine and true friends. This is so because anthroposophy must above all be truth in our hearts, and truth is sincerity. Anthroposophy, therefore, must be sincere; and anthroposophical friendship is expressed by your participation in such a dedication festival. Everything must be imbued with sincerity because honesty in friendship unites us with those who have worked so industriously so that here, too, there would arise a working sphere of anthroposophic activity. The hearts of those who have come here will be filled with gratitude for the efforts of the Stockmeyer family, who can be assured of our truly sincere anthroposophical appreciation.

On the other hand, the very success of such a dedication festival with so many souls present shows that Spiritual Science in our time is a powerful magnet for human striving, and on this occasion it may also be fitting to say that we can certainly look beyond the rooms that, surrounded by the spirits of beautiful nature, enclose us today and look at the rest of the world. It is possible to say that life and the endeavors of Spiritual Science today appear as phenomena whose existence results from an inner necessity. Really, it is as if many a page in the book about the life of old cultures, which sustained European and Western humanity for millennia and gave security and strength for life to it, were now beginning to wither and appear cold and lifeless to human hearts. That is why we see today a longing for spiritual scientific truths in so many areas of life. I, for one, having been permitted to speak to you here, sense something like a future force at work because of what has been taking place around me in the last few days.

We are here surrounded by green trees, the budding life of nature, and also by the magnificent sunlight that shines on us benevolently at this dedication since it animates everything and is imbued with spirit. This, then, is a perfect place to relate to you the words of our great harbingers of the new wisdom, the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings.

A few days have passed since I was permitted to speak in the same spirit in a lecture cycle in Rome, and this event symbolized to me what a magnet spiritual striving is. I was to speak to those who harbor a spiritual scientific longing in their hearts, but their longing is still fairly undefined at times. Yet the place where I was to speak looked differently, and it was on ground that actually had been entered only by cardinals in pursuit of spiritual endeavors or by others who work out of the convictions of the most positive and orthodox Catholicism. And so the air of the rooms where normally nothing but the official message from the orthodox center of Rome was proclaimed resounded with the free pronouncements of the spiritual scientific world view.

This shows us that although the free contemporary spirits of these Northern lands feel more attracted to anthroposophy, they can nevertheless look with a certain satisfaction to the souls who long to escape from an old, iron-clad orthodox tradition. It is certainly a good indication of the spirit of the times that it was possible to speak as freely and frankly about anthroposophic truths on territory heretofore reserved for cardinals, and as freely as this would be possible in the North. For what has been said before holds true everywhere: anthroposophy is sincerity; and where souls are in need of it and a call is issued, anthroposophy will follow it. But at no time will anthroposophy deviate in the least from the overall precepts that inspire its pronouncements, just because the consideration for the territory on which these pronouncements are made may make this expedient.

Wherever anthroposophical truth is proclaimed and where the spiritual element that pulsates through us is cultivated, there our message must be delivered in the light of sincerity, even when it is still surrounded by the thoughts of those who hate anthroposophy. However, in the midst of those who hate anthroposophy there are souls who, more or less consciously, long for the light of anthroposophy. And especially a strong contrast such as the one I have experienced during the past fourteen days can show us what a strong magnet anthroposophical life is.

The observation of our immediate present teaches us that this anthroposophical force is now strong enough to justify our joyful and satisfying hope that the small seedling planted today will in the future grow into a mighty tree. As theosophists, we are today in the same position humanity was in during the ancient Atlantean time. And just as life has become different since that time, so it will change again in the future, up to a time following a catastrophe. The wide perspective will now be made to appear before our souls.

Let us call to memory a similar movement in the last third of the Atlantean epoch that started small just like ours. The Atlantean soul life, which in many ways was still clairvoyant, had reached a high point during that time, but it did not yet have the consciousness of self, the strong feeling of the “I.” Instead, Atlanteans had a certain ability of clairvoyance and also certain magical powers, and this enabled them to look into the spiritual world. Those who had progressed to be leaders of this civilization were the ones best able to gaze into the spiritual world in the old ways and to bring forth the most knowledge from the astral realms. This clairvoyance disappeared little by little; in fact, mankind had to lose it completely in order to conquer for itself the consciousness of self in the physical world. But it is certain that clairvoyant knowledge in the last third of the Atlantean era had reached a special climax.

You will remember the technological achievement of the Atlanteans. They flew over the earth in small space vehicles—close to the earth because the atmosphere was saturated with thick fog formations. They propelled their small vehicles through this sea of air and water with energy derived from sprouting plants. The leading creators of this technology can be compared to today's industrial wizards who construct ingenious machines from lifeless forces. And those Atlanteans who could relate the most from the spiritual world can be compared to today's leading scholars and natural scientists.

However, within this Atlantean humanity a segment of people began to evolve who had only minor clairvoyant faculties, but possessed the ability to regard the external world with affection. The first rudimentary beginnings of arithmetic and counting could be observed in these people, but their participation in the great advances of the Atlantean industry—the construction of ever mightier vehicles for this sea of water and air—was very limited. And thus a small, insignificant group of people had developed in this last third of the Atlantean period who, in a certain sense, were despised for their comparative lack of clairvoyant power and their inability to participate in this great industry. However, this group of people prepared the way for seeing and knowing that is prevalent today, the way of seeing and knowing of which the external world today is so proud since it developed it in such a one-sided way.

Those leaders of the Atlantean civilization who had mastered everything that could be known from the vantage point of the Atlantean consciousness, including technology, conceived of a technical idea toward the end of the Atlantean era that has become fully productive in modern times. We can compare it to another measure of progress in our time that will carry over into the next catastrophe. During their golden age, the Atlanteans had vehicles that moved through air that was heavily mixed with water. Later, however, when their culture was already in a state of decline, it also became necessary to navigate the water, and this led the last cultural races of the Atlantean era first to embracing and then to realizing the idea of navigation and the conquest of the seas. This momentous idea in the Atlantean era not only of traversing the air but also of navigating the ocean water was quite a sensational idea that was put into reality by the last Atlantean races. After long experiments to navigate the waters, success came during the time when Atlantean culture was already in its decline.

Those responsible for this tremendous progress were not the ones who could be recruited for the task of transmitting the legacy of the actual spiritual life from the Atlantean era to our time. Rather, this task was reserved for the plain and simple people because they had been the first ones to be endowed with the ability to relate to the physical world. They were the ones whose clairvoyant faculties, though deteriorated the most among the several groups of people, were still adequate for those who were messengers from the spiritual world. These people, despised by the great scholars and inventors, were gathered by an eminent initiate whom we call The Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. This small group was comprised of people who had least preserved their technical abilities and who were disdained by the leaders and by the great scholars and inventors. Yet it was precisely they whom the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle led from the West to the East, through Europe and into Asia. And it is also this small group of people that made the foundation of the post-Atlantean cultures possible.

The best of what was subsequently developed by the various cultures, the mighty tree of post-Atlantean knowledge and wisdom, emanated from the descendants of the despised simple people from the Atlantean era. Above all, something else emanated from the midst of the descendants of this group of modest people. Let us place the external events side by side with the internal events of our evolution. Let us look at the great sensation of the Atlantean era when the secondary racial group, whose descendants were the Phoenicians, invented navigation. What was accomplished by this invention?

We need only to remember the great events from the beginning of modern times, such as the great voyages of discovery by Columbus and other seafarers, which would have been impossible without navigation and the invention of ships, and we shall see how this sensational invention led to the gradual conquest of the physical plane on earth. PostAtlantean peoples were confined to a small radius of activities, but through the invention of ships the circle defining the earth became rounded out so that we now have a completed configuration of the physical plane. And thus, the sensational invention of the Atlantean world reaches into our time and promotes further progress on the physical plane.

However, the greatest conquest in the Atlantean era emanated from the descendants of that group of plain people gathered around the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle. And when those descendants, through their own development, had prepared the Indian, Persian, Egyptian, GraecoLatin, and our cultures, the earth became capable of yielding the material into which the Christ could be born. Therefore, the greatest spiritual event and deed of the post-Atlantean era had its beginning in the people who belonged to the most despised human beings in the eyes of the leaders of the Atlantean civilization, and this event gave rise to the immense spiritual progress that supports and maintains all spiritual life in our time—weaves through it and makes it productive.

The events in Atlantis are paralleled by those of our time. Seeing that the germinal beginnings of man's ability to do arithmetic and to count were present in Atlantis, we can recognize how these capabilities are today furthered in a marvelous conquest of the physical plane and how they brought about all kinds of technical progress. We also see how the great inventors and discoverers today have reached the culmination, in a sense, in applying those forces that first began to germinate with the small group of despised people in the Atlantean time. And what was then clairvoyant knowledge is today knowledge of nature and of the physical world. There is also a similarity between the spiritual leaders of the Atlantean civilization and today's natural scientists and scholars. On the other hand, a class of plain people exists everywhere—irrespective of positions its members might hold in the world, whose hearts are filled with the mighty magnet that attracts us to spiritual life, just as people in Atlantis were attracted to a life in which the external faculties for the physical plane could be developed.

Despite these similarities, there is also a certain difference between the modern and the ancient situation. In the old days referred to, the last remnants of clairvoyance were still present in people so that they were able to behold the Great Initiate. In a certain way, things today are more difficult for human beings when a call from the spiritual world issues to an equally small group of people, something we designate as the call of the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings. But since people today are placed on the physical plane, these Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings are at first unknown to this small nucleus of human beings that has crystallized itself out of the mass of people. As we can deduce from the facts of the present time, this small group feels in its hearts that there is such a thing as a new spiritual message that is meant to have an effect on the future just as the message in former ages has had an effect on the present. These human beings who today come from all walks of life and whom we can find everywhere are the true theosophists because they carry in their hearts a longing for a spiritual life that is meant to lay the foundation for future cultures. The true theosophists in our time are emerging—just as we now encounter a sensational discovery similar to the one in the Atlantean era.

In ancient times water was conquered through the highest technological progress; the same is true today in the case of air. This conquest will, of course, extend into a later epoch. But just as ships in our times have brought about mastery of the physical plane only, so the air ship that will lead human beings into the atmosphere and beyond will empower the pilots to find only matter—material things. Granted, new realms of the physical plane will be conquered, and this will be beneficial for the external world. However, the inner spiritual life is borne in the hearts of those who feel spiritually fulfilled by the promise of being able in the future to look into the spiritual world while being conscious of self.

Look into life and you will find out there our leaders of civilization, the pillars of external culture, active as inventors and discoverers, as scholars and natural scientists. They look with scorn and contempt on a small group such as the one assembled here today that constitutes itself as a new bearer of culture and that unites its members with others in spiritual scientific associations. The events of the ancient Atlantean era repeat themselves.

However, when the spiritual life touches your hearts with such force that you can compare yourselves with dignity to those who were gathered around the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle, then you will be the bearers of spiritual life in later ages. In addition to offering humanity the external, material, and corporeal realities, such a life would also make possible a renewed immersion in the spiritual world. Although the Great Initiate gathered human beings around Himself in ancient times, today the Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings fulfill a similar function and issue their call to you. If you feel your mission from a sense of history, then your hearts will become strong enough to withstand all the ridicule and disdain that the so-called pillars of civilization heap on Spiritual Science from the outside. And if you understand your mission in this spirit, then your thoughts will be strong and any doubt that may reverberate into your souls from the outside will be unable to shake you in your conviction. Your thoughts will be spiritually refined by the very force that can issue from such a knowledge of our mission. Even if we have to review thousands of years and establish far-reaching ideals, it is worth the effort because where such ideals are established, life is transmuted, and where they are absent, life is dead. Ideals transform themselves into the force of a moment even if they have been taken from vast periods of time and may seem to make the person subscribing to them appear somewhat petty and despondent. You will be strong for the most insignificant task if you are capable of extracting your ideal from the loftiest heights. This will make you stand fast when those who govern the world with their erudition talk with disdain and contempt about the little spiritual scientific associations where those people sit who “do not want to go along with contemporary culture.” Oh yes, they do want to go along, and they also know to appreciate the accomplishments of the external, physical world, but they also know that just as a body cannot be without a soul, no external culture can exist without spiritual life.

Just as the despised human beings characterized above gathered around the Great Initiate and after generations made the existence of Christ on earth possible, so the anthroposophical movement must facilitate a comprehensive understanding of Christ. Christ descended to earth in the fourth major era, and those who wish to understand Him completely will be able to do so from the anthroposophical vantage point.

Why do people who have heretofore been nourished by the positive, orthodox religions, come to Spiritual Science as if responding to an undefined longing in their consciousness? Why do they listen to the anthroposphical message when before they listened only to the Vatican? Why? Is it still permissible today to say anthroposophy exists only for those who regard the greatest spiritual fact of our age—the Christ Impulse—with indifference? What do the people coming to us need from us? They want us to tell them who Christ was and what He accomplished! They are coming to us because those who consider themselves to be the privileged bearers of the Christ-name today cannot tell them who Christ was, whereas anthroposophy can. Today's cultural leaders use the denial of Christ to oppose the external tradition emanating from various religions, but they cannot effectively challenge the moribund positive religious movements. Those who do not know what the Great Christ is, those who deny His spirituality will be no match even for the old religious movements. But only the spiritual movements that place themselves in the midst of those who claim an exclusive right to the Christ-name, the movements who know how to express the true essence of the Christ even to those who wish to hear the opposite, only those spiritual movements will attract human beings to their cause who carry the future in their hearts. The ancient religious trends will prove to be stronger than all religious nihilism.

We do not conceive of anthroposophical life in a petty, dogmatic sense, nor do we want to comprehend it with the help of individual tenets or maxims, but rather by recognizing and understanding the mission and the task of our time. We want to embrace anthroposophical life in such a way that the true spirit of our time speaks to us and that the most significant event of our post-Atlantean era can be expressed through the words of anthroposophy. If these words are not just recited but rather put into practice as an expression of the spirit of our time, they will become a dynamic force of life in our souls, and this will make people understand what anthroposophical life is.

When we truly feel this, we will increasingly grow stronger, and the newly gained strength will help us to embrace our ideal firmly. Then we will know how this ideal can be justified, regardless of whether this happens in an environment where an old culture yearns for a new content, or in this environment here, where nature and the magnificent, spirit-endowed sunrays glittering around us encircle what the daily efforts of anthroposophy achieve. We will again learn to recognize the spirit within these sunrays and know that when the sun has set, the spirit indwelling in it will look into our hearts. We will also learn what it means to behold the sun and its spirit at midnight, and in understanding what this spirit is, we will see how it has descended and how it is now united with the highest impulses of our age. It is necessary that humanity understand the Christ-Impulse and that we can say who the Christ was. Such an understanding is now only in the beginning stages, but in direct proportion to its increasing spiritual insights, mankind will gradually understand how the Christ-Impulse has penetrated this worldly edifice.

To feel this way at the dedication of a branch of our movement is especially appropriate when, as is the case here, the members were united in wanting to express a heartfelt desire and name this branch after Francis of Assisi, whose life is enveloped by a deep spiritual mystery.

When Christ descended to the earth, He enveloped Himself with the threefold physical, etheric, and astral bodies of Jesus of Nazareth and lived three years in this sheath as Christ, the Sun-Spirit. With the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, Christ descended to the earth; but aside from what is known to all of you, something else special happened by virtue of the fact that Christ indwelled the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, particularly the astral and etheric bodies. After Christ cast off the bodies of Jesus of Nazareth, they were still present as spiritual substance in the spiritual world, but multiplied in a great many copies. They did not perish in the world ether or in the astral world, but continued to live as identical images. Just as the seed of a plant, once buried in the ground, reappears in many copies according to the mystery of number, so the copies of Jesus of Nazareth's etheric and astral bodies were present in the spiritual world. And for what purpose were they present, considering the large framework of spiritual economy? They were there to be preserved and to serve the overall progress of the human race.

One of the first individuals to benefit from the blessed fact of these countless copies of Jesus's etheric body being present in the spiritual world was St. Augustine. When he again descended to earth after an earlier incarnation, not just any etheric body was woven into his own, but rather the copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth. Augustine had his own astral body and ego, but his etheric body was interwoven with the image of the etheric body of Jesus. He had to work through the culture of his ego and astral body, but when he had made his way to the etheric body, he realized the great truths that we find in his mystical writings.

Many other human beings from the sixth to the ninth centuries had a copy of the etheric body of Jesus woven into their own etheric bodies. Many of these individuals conceived the Christian images that later were to be glorified in the arts in the form of the Madonna or the Christ on the cross. They were the creators of religious images who experienced in themselves what the people living at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha had experienced.

In the period spanning the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries the time had come when a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth was woven into the astral bodies of certain reincarnated souls. From the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries many human beings, for example Francis of Assisi and Elisabeth of Thüringen, had the imprint of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into them while their own astral bodies—the source of their knowledge—were formed during reincarnation. This enabled these individuals to proclaim the great truths of Christianity in the form of judgments, logical constructs, and scientific wisdom. But, in addition, they were also able to experience the feeling of carrying the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth within themselves.

Your eyes will be opened if you allow yourselves to experience vicariously all the humility, the devotion, and the Christian love that was part of Francis of Assisi. You will then know how to look at him as a person prone to make mistakes—because he possessed his own ego—and as a great individual because he carried a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth within his own astral body. All the humble feelings, the profound mysticism, and the spiritual soul life of Francis of Assisi become comprehensible if we know this one secret of his life.

Having such knowledge, we can see with our inner eye that the future of this new branch augurs well as it climbs upward under the guiding light of this great individual, for those who, like Francis of Assisi, received the grace and the calling to guide Christian humanity in the West will at all times let their spiritual light radiate into the areas of spiritual activity. And especially if this Francis of Assisi Section works in a genuinely spiritual sense, the unison of thoughts and feelings of this branch will be the reflection of the harmonizing light of Francis of Assisi, which he received as a gift of grace, as we mentioned before, by an infusion of his own astral body with a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Something of this light will radiate into this very branch.

In letting such perspectives roll by our inner eye, we who are assembled today in this modest branch for the purpose of dedicating the new branch will leave the proper feelings behind us when we depart. Let us look up to the light of Francis of Assisi; let us take along with us what can be ignited in us in this moment, and let us remember this branch in the future. In doing so, our feelings and thoughts will hover invisibly over this Francis of Assisi Branch, so that the impulses struggling upward from below may prove to be worthy of the light that shines into our souls from the outside. In such a moment we become conscious of the fact that we are here to work for the true and real measures of progress in our post-Atlantean era. Surely, when the founders of this branch felt the need to name it after Francis of Assisi, their souls must have sensed something of the great progress.

What was the most decisive turning point of our entire evolution? It was the time when the Christ descended to earth. Let us look back six hundred years from that event and then compare the earth to what it was six hundred years after Christ, a period spanning some twelve hundred years. First, let us look at Buddha, who lived six hundred years before Christ. In him we see an individuality of such greatness that words of admiration should be superfluous. Specifically, let us look at the moment where he is led out into life, but not into the life he wanted to live. Consider how he first meets a helpless child and how from this experience he forms the perception that there is suffering in the journey that human beings begin with their birth. And upon seeing a sick person, he says to himself, “Not only is there suffering in this world, but human beings on this plane are also subjected to illness.” He sees an old person who no longer is able to move his limbs and says to himself, “Aging involves suffering.” And when he sees a corpse, the sight of it conjures up in him the perception that death is suffering. Another perception is that to be separated from a loved one creates suffering, as is the case when one is united with someone whom one doesn't love. Finally, not to obtain what one desires is suffering too.

This, then, is the teaching that spread as the teaching of Buddha, some six hundred years before Christ. Let us fix in our minds the moment where Buddha steps out into the world, sees a corpse, and stands face to face with death. It was six hundred years after the event of Golgotha when for the first time one particular image came into being: the image of the cross with the corpse of the Savior hanging on it. Thousands of people were there to look at it. Now when Buddha looked at a corpse, it was to him a personification of all suffering on earth. The believers of the Christian community six hundred years after Christ would look at the corpse and see it as the victory of all spiritual life over death, the claim to bliss. And here we see how a faithful community looked at a dead body six hundred years before Christ, and then six hundred years after the event of Golgotha.

What can the Christ-Event tell us about the other pronouncements of suffering? Is birth suffering, as Buddha expressed it? Looking at Christ on the cross, the part of humanity that really understands Him will say, “Through birth we step into this existence—an existence that was found worthy of harboring the Christ. We are born into a life in which we can unite with Christ.” Likewise, sickness is not suffering if one understands Christ. People will have to learn to understand through the Christ-Impulse what, from a spiritual point of view, creates health. Illnesses will be healed in a spiritual way through the innermost, Christianized life. By dying to the outer world, we become assured that the treasure acquired in connection with the Christ-Impulse is carried into every other life. Through Christ's victory, death appears to us as a bridge that leads to the spiritual world, and we learn to understand the meaning of death for this spiritual world through this Christ-Impulse.

Also, it is no longer possible to say that the separation from the object of one's love creates suffering because the power of Christ will unite us, as one soul to another, with everything we want to love. Moreoever, the power of Christ will tie those together who love each other. The suffering that could arise through the separation of those loving each other is overcome through Christ.

Let us learn to love all people, lest our interpretation of the world be that to be united with what one does not love means suffering. Rather, let us learn to love every creature in its own right, and when our spiritual wells start to flow, our desires will be purified in such a way that we can partake in everything our souls are destined to receive, once the hurdles of the physical world are eliminated. And those spiritual fountainheads can begin to flow through the Christ- Impulse. People who will be content to obtain through the Christ-Spirit what they want will have their desires purified.

The new spiritual life has placed itself next to the old spiritual life through the Christ-Impulse. That is how deep progress in spiritual life ran before and after the Christ-Impulse had surfaced. This is keenly felt by someone who turns to one of the most ardent and joyful admirers and messengers of the Christ-Impulse—Francis of Assisi; his name, therefore, may well be bestowed on an association in which spiritual life is to be cultivated. May this name be a good augury, and may the work in this branch proceed in the true spirit of our time, properly understood, because this is necessary for the programs we have envisioned in our souls.

Let us consecrate this branch of our movement in the spirit expressed by the preceding words and by calling down the benediction we used yesterday when we broke ground for the outer temple. Let us conjure up the same spirit one more time so that it may hold sway and weave in this Francis of Assisi Branch.

May the feelings of those who have come to this dedication ceremony unite with this spirit and also unite in a brotherly way with those who are at work here in serious, anthroposophical endeavors so that spiritual life may germinate in the midst of the trees, forests, and sprouting plants of this sunny piece of nature. It matters little whether the bright sunrays outside indicate what is beautiful or magnificent in nature, whether snow be piled up outside, or whether a thick cloud cover be out there to obscure the external, physical sunlight. In times when nature renews itself or when she wears her somber garb, may the spirit of a higher life always imbue those who will be engaged in spiritual activities, and let us now conjure up this spirit to aid all the human beings in this branch.

With this, let us dedicate, from the bottom of our hearts, the Francis of Assisi Branch and hope that it will continue its work in the spirit in which it began—through the spiritual force of the Masters of Truth and of the Harmony of Feelings that streams into every branch. May it also continue its work through the good spirit with which it has endowed itself by naming itself after the splendid bearer of Christ.

May this branch continue as it began. Good spirits will guide its course as it becomes one of the centers where the kind of life is cultivated of which our time is clearly in need and where the seeds for the requirements of a far-distant future are sown. Let us hope the people who will soon have to work in solitude here emerge strengthened from today's festivities, where so many sincere friends united their feelings with them! Then the spiritual life cultivated in this place will flow back to all people involved and coalesce with the great harmony of anthroposophical life. Thoughts that originate in this place will encounter our thoughts, just as our thoughts will flow here from distant places. This harmony is something like an external garment of spirituality, and spirituality must pass through human evolution like a spiritual breath of air if beneficial forces are to reign over humanity.

May this branch be dedicated in the fullest sense of the word; may it become a field of activity into which we can always place our hopes with the same love and inner satisfaction as is the case in today's dedication ceremony.

If we would speak of initiation and its significance for human life and evolution, we must try to probe into the essential nature of all this with the concepts and modes of thought that are indispensable to any true description of super-sensible worlds. It is comprehensible that at every stage of its development the human soul should experience the deepest longing to discover the nature of the worlds more or less justifiably described as eternal. Surely it is also comprehensible that, at first, human souls should try to probe into higher worlds without much preparation and with the ordinary ideas and concepts of the life of the senses. I expressly say that this is comprehensible, and this may, to a certain extent, apply where the longing after eternity is satisfied by one or other of the religious faiths. But when it is a question of gaining a deeper insight into the course of all spiritual things, particularly into the course of all life of the soul in the real anthroposophical sense, we must gradually accustom ourselves to the necessity of submitting our ideas, concepts and modes of thought to a certain change before we are able to form correct ideas of the higher, super-sensible worlds. Because this is particularly necessary for an actual description of the Christ event, as we shall see in the next lectures, I may perhaps be allowed to say a few words today about the transformation and re-molding of man's conceptual life that is necessary if he would arrive at ideas about the super-sensible worlds.

For this, we must become familiar with the idea that everything is different in the super-sensible world from what it is in the world of the senses because an exact repetition of any world existence is nowhere to be found in the universe. If everything is different, why should it be assumed that human conceptions and representations hold good in the higher worlds as they do in the life of the senses? They certainly do not. Anyone really pursuing the practical path into the worlds opened to him by initiation, anyone having actual experience of super-sensible life, well knows that not only must he transform many things in himself—I might equally say, leave them behind with the Guardian of the Threshold—but he must also lay aside many of his habits, representations and concepts before he can enter the higher worlds.

We will proceed first of all from certain ideas to which we must all undoubtedly be subject in physical life. Here two concepts, or systems of concepts, have a decisive effect. In our life of the senses they stand side by side; they run parallel. The one consists of all the ideas we form about the natural world, about the forces and laws of nature. Side by side with all these ideas of ours, there exists in ordinary sensory life what we call the moral world order, the sum of our moral conceptions, thoughts and ideas. If a man takes accurate stock of himself, he must soon come to the conclusion that in the life of the senses these two systems of concepts natural order and moral world order—must be kept distinct. If we are describing a plant, we analyse it according to natural forces and natural laws. Let us suppose it is a poisonous plant. We do not confuse our description with the issue of whether or not it is morally responsible for being poisonous. We maintain that it is part of sound thinking in the life of the senses, when describing the world of nature, to rid ourselves of what we call moral concepts and ideas. We know that we must do the same, too, when we want to gain a clear and objective idea of the animal world. We feel, for instance, that it would be senseless to hold a lion responsible for its cruelty in the same way as we should a man. But if many modern naturalists are finding something like moral conceptions in the animal kingdom, I might say more as a matter of preference than from any real necessity, to a certain extent this may be justified. At the same time, we can at most speak of an echo, of a suggestion, of moral concepts in what animals do and in what happens in the animal kingdom. A simple development of the interpretation of nature requires that we should free ourselves from moral concepts so long as these interpretations are confined to the world of the senses. Then, however, as unprejudiced and thoughtful observation of oneself must affirm, the moral world order enters with authority into our life, making unconditional and absolute demands. We know it is his moral ideas that decide the world of a man, and indeed not only his worth in human social life. It also makes one able to say that even a man who is not moral, if he be granted grace at some special moment to reflect quietly about himself, will determine his own value as a human being according to the moral ideas that light up in his consciousness. It must repeatedly be emphasised that these two systems of concepts must be kept properly distinct.

All this becomes quite different the moment the higher, super-sensible worlds are entered, and one gains the power of perceiving, observing, experiencing and living outside the physical body. When such observation is really attained, it takes place at first in the etheric body of which I spoke yesterday. Then, later, the world, or rather a second super-sensible world, is observed with the astral body. The further we rise into higher worlds, the more do the concepts and ideas that we have worked upon and acquired in the ordinary physical world lose their significance. They must be transformed if we are rightly to describe and understand what comes to meet us in the super-sensible worlds. In the ordinary world of sense existence, we have only one thing to remind us of a fundamental fact familiar to every clairvoyant, and that is when we speak in symbols and metaphors so that our words re-echo what in actual reality is only experienced in higher worlds. When the expression is used that greed or jealousy or hate “burns,” there is something in such an expression that belongs to the many wonderful mysteries of the creative activity of speech, where there shines down into primitive, elementary human consciousness what, in its reality, is only present in the higher worlds. Everyone knows that when he speaks of a “burning hate” he does not mean a burning like the burning of a fire in the external world. He knows that he is speaking figuratively, but that it would avail him nothing to try to explain the objects and processes of nature by calling moral ideas to his aid. In speaking, however, of processes in the higher worlds, it is not in the same metaphorical, figurative sense that we use such expressions. I may perhaps remind you that in my mystery play, The Guardian of the Threshold, certain processes of the soul, feelings and desires, are twice spoken of as “burning” in the higher world. This expression is not to be taken as a metaphor; it stands for something quite real and actual, a spiritual reality. Lucifer, for instance, would never say that something burned him in the same sense as a man in the physical world would speak of hate burning him. Lucifer would say it in a real and literal sense. For what in super-sensible worlds might be compared to the natural order, to the natural processes of the sense world, is far more intimately connected with what may be called the moral world within the super-sensible world, than is the case with these two ideas in the world of the senses.

We can gain some idea of all this at once if we turn to man's etheric body. When speaking of the physical body, we can talk of raising a hand to perform a moral action. We can see the hand with our physical eyes and, to explain its functions, we can investigate it through knowledge belonging to the material world. This description of the hand in physical existence is not essentially different whether we have to do with a hand performing a moral or an immoral action. So far as we can give a description of the hand in physical life at all, we have no business to mix with the question of how the hand is formed and all that we bring to its explanation, the other question of whether it is the habit of performing moral actions or not.

The matter is different where a man's etheric body is concerned. Suppose that to clairvoyant vision a man's etheric body, or some particular part of it, appears incompletely developed. On enquiring into the true cause of such being the case with some particular organ, we find that the reason for the imperfect development lies in a moral fault, in some moral deficiency in the man. Thus, man's moral qualities are actually expressed to some extent in his etheric body. They are still more distinctly and more intensively expressed in his astral body. While, therefore, in the case of a man, we should be doing him a great injustice by assuming that some physical deformity were the expression of something in his moral nature, in what concerns the moral world it is certainly true that if we think of the expressions natural order, natural processes and moral causes as merging into one another in the higher worlds, moral qualities are actual natural causes and are there expressed in forms and processes. To avoid any misunderstanding, I should like expressly to state that the perfect or imperfect development of man's higher organism—his etheric and astral bodies, his higher bodies if we may so call them—need have nothing to do with the perfect or imperfect development of his physical body. A man may even have some physical organ crippled from birth, while the corresponding etheric organ may not only show a perfectly normal development but, in certain circumstances, a more perfect development more complete in itself, when the corresponding physical organ is thus crippled or deformed. The idea, therefore, that moral qualities are faithfully expressed in the form of the body cannot be applied to physical existence, but it is nevertheless absolutely true of the part of man that belongs to super-sensible worlds.

Thus we see that the natural order and the moral order, which apparently run side by side in the ordinary life of the senses, are interwoven in the super-sensible worlds, and in speaking of some part of the etheric body, we can well say that such and such a form is due to hate. Hate shows itself in this member of the etheric body in quite a different way from how love is expressed. We may speak thus where the super-sensible worlds are concerned, but it would have no meaning were we confined to a description of nature in the world of the senses. This necessity to change our concepts when the higher worlds are in question is a particularly distinctive feature as regards what, in ordinary sensory life are reckoned as cravings or desires. We may ask how cravings, desires and emotions appear to us in the life of the senses. They appear in such a way that we seem to see them arise from the very recesses of man's soul being. If we see any particular craving aroused in a man, we are then able to recognise something of his inner condition and how it causes this craving to arise. We can see that it is above all the inner nature of the soul that determines the character of the man's desires. We know quite well, for instance, that a piece of veal will call up quite different cravings in two different men. It does not depend on the veal, but on all that a physical man has in his soul. A Raphael Madonna may leave one man completely cold, while another may experience a whole world of feeling. We may thus say that man's world of desire is kindled within his inmost nature.

All this is changed when we enter the super-sensible world. It is foolish to say that one cannot speak of desires and so forth in super-sensible worlds. They do actually exist, and they are determined in the great majority of cases by external things—by what a being sees and perceives. Hence, a clairvoyant in these worlds cannot get such a near view of the inner conditions of the being he meets when wanting to discover his desires and cravings, but he has to observe the super-sensible surroundings of the being in question. When, therefore, in the super-sensible world, he perceives a being having desires, longings, emotions, he does not look at the being himself, as we should do in the physical world, but he looks at the surroundings. He looks to see what other beings are present in the neighbourhood. He will always find that the nature of the being's desires and emotions vary according to the kind of beings who surround him because there, desires and emotions can always be explained by external things.

A case in point may make all this clearer for you. Suppose a man enters the super-sensible worlds either through the first stages of initiation or by passing through the gate of death. A clairvoyant then observes him in the super-sensible worlds. Let us assume that the man had taken some imperfection belonging to his character with him out of physical existence—some kind of incapacity, a moral imperfection, perhaps some crime committed in the physical world that stays with him in the super-sensible worlds as a torturing memory. To make a search for this, it is not so much a question of the clairvoyant looking into the inner soul of the man, as it is of observing his surroundings. Why should this be? It is because this content of soul, this quality of soul that the man carries over with him as an imperfection or moral flaw performs something real, something actual. It guides the man and brings him to a particular place in the super-sensible world, to the very place where there is some being who possesses in perfection what is imperfect in the man who is newly arrived. Thus, this moral flaw, this consciousness of a faculty lacking, has an actual effect. It guides a man along a certain path and confronts him with a being possessing in perfection the very quality lacking in himself, and he is condemned to continual contemplation of this being.

Thus, in the super-sensible worlds we come into the presence of beings who possess all that we ourselves do not possess, and they show us what we lack. We are not drawn to them by what in physical life are called desires, but by means of a real process. If the clairvoyant sees what kinds of beings surround a man there, he can, by objective observation tell what the man lacks and what are his failings. The being into whose presence the man comes, at whom he is condemned to go on gazing, stands there as a continual reproach, one might say. This reproach, standing outside him, has the effect of rousing within him what in super-sensible worlds might be called a craving, a desire, to become different. It arouses in him the activity and strength to work his own transformation, so that he may rid himself of his fault, of his imperfection. You need not exclaim that the super-sensible worlds must, therefore, always be able to show forth beings having in perfection all that we lack! The super-sensible worlds are indeed rich enough to be able to confront us with beings perfect in everything where we are in fault. They are far richer than we in physical life can imagine. Yes, indeed, the super-sensible world is always able to confront man with a being having in perfection everything in which he himself is imperfect!

This gives some idea of how desires and cravings are real forces, determining our path in the super-sensible world. It is not as though our desires represented something objective in which we could remain stationary. But according to what we are, we are led on our way and placed where all that we lack appears before us as something real, or as an effective reproach. It might easily be said that if this is so man would be completely without freedom in super-sensible worlds because he would be confronted with an external world that would determine how he was to work upon himself. On further observation, however, in super-sensible worlds it turns out that while one being may feel the reproach and begin to work toward perfection, another may resist and fight against imitating what is thus placed as a reproach before him. But this resistance works quite differently in the super-sensible worlds from how it does in the world of the senses. When a being refuses thus to work on himself, he is driven back into other worlds that are strange to him, where he does not know the way, and where the necessary conditions of life are lacking. In other words, this being condemns himself to a kind of inward process of destruction. One may always either choose the fruitful, helpful process shown to one and behave oneself accordingly, or inoculate oneself with destructive forces by resisting it. One has this amount of freedom. But reciprocal action definitely takes place between what is moral and all that is going on in super-sensible space.

A further example of this is that our conceptions of beauty and ugliness, quite in place in the world of the senses, can really no longer be applied when we ascend into super-sensible worlds. Indeed, there are manifold reasons why these conceptions can no longer be used there in the way in which they are used in the world of the senses. When we perceive in super-sensible worlds, we see above all a significant difference in the various beings that meet us. By virtue of the intuitive knowledge that will then be ours, we will be able to say that the being we are looking at is able, and has the will, actually to reveal in his external appearance all that is within him.

Let us assume that such a being has an etheric light-body, that it is one of the beings who do not incarnate into the world of the senses but who only in higher worlds take on a light-body or something of that nature. This light-body may be the expression of what such a being is within. It is not like a man in the sense world who confronts us in a definite form and yet may be hiding within him the most manifold feelings and sentiments, so that he is able to say, “My feelings are for myself alone. What is seen of me externally is my natural form, and I am well able to conceal what appears in my soul.” That is not the case with certain beings in the super-sensible worlds; their external form is the most direct expression of what they bear within them. In their component parts, what they are lies fully open to view. But there are other beings unable directly to express, to manifest, their real nature in their external super-sensible appearance. Confronted by beings of this kind, clairvoyant consciousness has the feeling of something repellent, something from which it wants to get away, something oppressive that may even be offensive.

Thus, we can distinguish two kinds of beings, those who are perfectly willing to expose their inner nature, to reveal what is within them, and beings who give one the feeling that what they expose is definitely distorted and what is within them is concealed and does not issue forth. In man's life of the senses, one cannot say to the same extent, when one person is capable of being secretive and another is perfectly frank, that the difference lies in their natures. Their features may be different, but they belong to the same world as far as their natures are concerned. In the super-sensible worlds, however, those who reveal all that they have within them, and those who do not, are two radically different kinds of beings. If we would use the words beautiful and ugly with approximately the meaning we have in the world of the senses, we must apply them to these two kinds of beings. In the super-sensible world we only come to the point by calling the beings who reveal everything, beautiful, for in front of them we feel just as we do before a beautiful picture. But the beings who do not reveal their natures in their external form are felt to be ugly. Thus, if we can put it so, beauty or ugliness depends upon the fundamental natures of the beings.

What is the consequence of this? When clairvoyant consciousness enters a world where it must have these feelings about beauty and ugliness, much in its whole mode of feeling must undergo a change. It is quite natural for the clairvoyant to say that a being revealing all that he has within him is beautiful, and the other idea immediately arises that to be beautiful is to be upright and honest. A being is beautiful because he hides nothing, because he bears in his very countenance what is within him. True and beautiful are one and the same when we enter the super-sensible world. A being who does not reveal what is within him is ugly. That is immediately felt by clairvoyant consciousness. But there is the further feeling that he lies and does not show what he ought. What is ugly is at the same time untruthful! What is true, upright and honest is at the same time beautiful; what is ugly is untruthful. In the super-sensible worlds a point is reached when a separation between the concepts beautiful and true, in the one case, and between ugly and untrue in the other, loses all meaning. So the expression beautiful must be used of a being who is felt to be honest and upright, while the opposite feeling must be called ugly.

We see here how moral and aesthetic concepts merge when the higher worlds are reached. It is a peculiar feature of this ascent into super-sensible worlds that concepts do thus merge into one another, that things to which we refer separately in the world of the physical senses become linked and fused together. Hence, other modes of feeling must be acquired if expressions of the sense world are to be used of super-sensible beings. One is almost always obliged to represent these things more simply, and still more in accordance with physical consciousness than really coincides with a strictly correct representation because they become so complicated.

To my explanation of how the concepts true, upright and beautiful, in the one case, and ugly and untruthful in the other, become linked together, I must add something further. On making one's way into super-sensible worlds one may meet a being who, according to all ideas acquired in the life of the senses, must be called beautiful, perhaps even exquisite—beautiful, radiant and exquisite. There is the picture! But simply because this being appears in such a form, is no proof that it is also a good being; it may even be quite an evil being and yet stand before one in this sublime, angelic form. According to the idea of beauty that we have in the sense world, we should call such a being beautiful in its super-sensible appearance. How could we help it? Seeing it thus in the world of the senses we should be quite right in calling it beautiful. It may really be the ugliest being in existence, and yet, if one uses the expressions of the sense world, the word beautiful must be used. It may be an utterly evil being, containing hidden wickedness and untruthfulness, a very devil in the form of an angel; this is quite possible in super-sensible worlds. Still, in diverse ways of which we still have to speak, one may gradually get to the truth of the matter by approaching it in clairvoyant consciousness. One is confronted by this angelic form and if, during super-sensible vision, one has become capable of coherent thought, it is possible for one to say, “I must not let myself be deceived by the fact that I am looking at something angelic or a wonderful form of some kind; anything is possible; it may be an angel but also it could be a devil.” One may now begin with what must so often be undertaken on entering higher worlds, that is, a good examination of oneself.

We may seek counsel with ourselves to find out how many bad points such as selfishness or egoism we possess. Then our soul becomes permeated with bitterness and remorse. But this bitterness, this pain, may be the very thing to lead us to purify and cleanse ourselves from our selfishness and egoism. When, through this, one comes to see how little one is free from self, and how necessary it is to struggle to be free, then the whole process in the soul lights up. Now, if we have got so far as not to lose our vision while taking stock of ourselves as usually happens at first, the angel in certain cases may be revealed as no angel at all, but may assume an ugly form. Then one can gradually reach the point of saying to oneself, “I myself gave this wicked being the power to express its wickedness by masquerading before me in a quite different form, but, by permeating myself with purer feelings, I have forced it to show me its true form.”

Consequently, a process of the soul has a compelling force in the super-sensible world. We ourselves either make it possible for these beings to lie to us, or we compel them to show themselves in their true form. The appearance of the super-sensible world to us depends on how and with what qualities we enter it. What is called the source of illusion must be dealt with in quite a different way from what is customary.

Someone may enter the super-sensible world and describe all sorts of glorious things. If you told him he had been deceived he would not believe it, for did he not see it all? But he did not see what he would have seen had he done what I have just described. Had he acted in this way he would at once have seen the truth: It is beautiful when a devil shows himself as a devil but it is ugly for him to appear in the form of an angel.

When we enter the super-sensible world, we must above all rid ourselves of the habit of speaking of things according to the ideas we gained of them in the world of the senses. If we keep to these ideas we shall first say to the form appearing to us that it is a beautiful angel and afterwards that it is a hideous devil. But clairvoyant consciousness, if it is to give a correct description, cannot express it thus. On the contrary, it must say of the ugly devil that it is a beautiful devil, even though, according to material conceptions, it is quite hideous. We do not arrive at this point simply by turning upside down all the ideas gained from the life of the senses. That would certainly be an easy way. Anyone could then describe the devachanic plane, for instance, by putting beautiful for all that was ugly in the sense world, ugly for beautiful, red for green, white for black, and so forth. But that cannot be done; the concepts of the super-sensible worlds must be acquired by experience. We must acquire them gradually, as a growing child acquires sense conceptions, not by theory but by experience. When we become conscious that we are speaking in the language of the super-sensible world, it will no longer seem natural to call a devil ugly if he appears as a devil. Feelings of this kind must be acquired if we are to find our bearings in the super-sensible world and to know our way about there. From this it will be easy to form some idea of what is meant when, for the sake of simplicity, we say, “On the one side stands the world of the senses, on the other, the super-sensible worlds”. Super-sensible existence is entered by crossing the boundary of sensory life, but if it be entered with all that is gained from this life, if the conceptions and ideas acquired in the sense world are applied there, they are of no use and the wrong construction is put upon things. One must learn to transform one's knowledge at the boundary, not just theoretically but in a living way. Ideas acquired in the life of the senses cannot be used at all on crossing over; they must be left behind. So you see how at the boundary much must be left behind of all that is so intimately woven into us in the world of sense existence.

I should like now to describe the matter not theoretically but from the point of view of concrete perception. Let us suppose that someone, having acquired the capacity for crossing the boundary of which we have been speaking, enters the super-sensible world from the world of the senses. At the boundary he asks himself, “What must I leave behind now, so as to feel at home in the super-sensible world?” After due reflection he will say, “I must really leave behind everything I have experienced, learned or acquired in my various earthly incarnations from primeval times up to the present. I must lay everything aside here because I am entering a world in which all that can be learned during incarnation has no further meaning.” It is quite easy to say such a thing, easy to hear and easy to grasp it in the abstraction of a concept. But it is an entirely new inner world really to experience such a thing, to feel it livingly, to lay aside like a garment all that one has appropriated during incarnations in sensory existence in order to enter a world where it no longer has any meaning. If this becomes a living feeling, then one has a living experience that really has nothing to do with theory. It is a living experience such as we have in the world of reality when we actually meet a man and make his acquaintance, and when he speaks and behaves in a certain manner toward us, so that we learn to know him in a way we should were we living with him, not just by making concepts about him.

Here we stand at the boundary between the life of the senses and spiritual life, confronted not by a system of concepts but by a reality that only works super-sensibly, and as concretely and livingly as a human being. This is the Guardian of the Threshold. He is there as a concrete and real being. When we learn to know him, we know he belongs to those beings who, to a certain extent, have taken part in life since primeval times on earth, but who have not gone through what one experiences as a being of soul. This is the being who, in the mystery play, The Guardian of the Threshold, is meant to be expressed dramatically in the words:

Thou knowest well, who has been guardian
Of this realm's threshold since the world began,
What beings need to cross the threshold o'er
Who to thy time and to thy kind belong ...

This “to thy time and to thy kind” is something that proceeds indeed, from the very essence of the matter. Of other times and other kinds are the men, the beings, who since primeval times have in a certain sense separated themselves from the path of humanity on earth, and in each of these we meet a being of whom we may say, “I have a being before me who experiences and lives through a great deal in the world, but he does not concern himself with all the love and grief and pain that can be experienced on earth, nor yet with the failings and immorality there. He neither knows nor wishes to know anything of what has taken place up to now in the depths of man's nature.” Christian tradition expresses this in the words: “When confronted by the mystery of man's becoming, such beings veiled their faces.” A whole world is expressed in this contrast between such beings and human beings.

Now a feeling arises as immediately as does the feeling we have on meeting a fair-haired man, that “he has fair hair.” There comes this feeling: In passing through various earthly cultures. I have naturally acquired faults, but I must get back again to my original state; I must retrace my steps on earth, and this being can show me the way just because he does not possess my faults. One has before one a being who stands there majestically as an actual reproach, but at the same time spurring one on toward all that one is not. The being shows one this most vividly, and one can feel one's own being completely filled with the knowledge of what he is and what he is not. There one stands before this living reproach. This being belongs to the rank of archangels. The meeting actually takes place, and has the effect of suddenly revealing to us what we have become as earthly man in sensory existence. This is direct self-knowledge in the truest and broadest sense. You see yourself as you are; you also see yourself as you ought to become!

But it is not always fit for man to see himself thus. Today I have only spoken of the world of concept and idea that has to be discarded. But much else must be laid aside. When we reach the Guardian of the Threshold, we must really lay aside all that we know of ourselves, but we must still retain something to carry on with us. That is the chief thing. This knowledge that we have to leave everything behind at the threshold is an inner experience in itself to which one must have attained, and the preparation for this stage of clairvoyance must consist in schooling ourselves to bear what would otherwise be full of terror and fear. With proper schooling we need not speak of danger because such a schooling does away with danger. Powers of endurance must be attained through due preparation; they are the fundamental force necessary for all further experience. In ordinary life man is not capable of enduring all that he must endure when standing before the Guardian of the Threshold.

The Guardian of the Threshold is there for a strange purpose. If it is not to be misunderstood, it has to be judged from the standpoint of the super-sensible world. In man, the activities of the super-sensible world are always at work, though he knows nothing of this. Whenever we think and feel and will, it always necessitates a certain activity of the, astral body and connection with the astral world. But man knows nothing of this; if he knew what his bodies really were he would not be able to bear it and would be stunned by it. So that when man meets this being without sufficient preparation, everything must be veiled from him, including the being. The being must draw a veil over the super-sensible world. He must do this for the protection of man who, while within the world of the senses, could not endure the sight. In this we really see a concept that, in the world of the senses, can only be judged morally, as the most direct ordering of nature. The protection of man from sight of the super-sensible world is the function of the Guardian of the Threshold. He must hold man back until he has completed the necessary preparation.

We have here tried to gather up a few ideas that may help us to form a concept of the Guardian of the Threshold. I have tried to collect ideas, concepts and experiences of this kind in a little book, A Road to Self Knowledge, that will be in your hands in the course of the next few days. It may be helpful to you in conjunction with these lectures. The book will consist of a series of eight meditations, and is so conceived that should the reader carry them out, he will gain something definite for his life of soul. Today I have tried to deal with a few of the ideas that can lead us to the Guardian of the Threshold. Starting from this point we shall pass beyond the Guardian of the Threshold, and try to gain some degree of insight and perspective from which we can reach a yet deeper understanding of the Christ Being and of the Christ Initiation.

It may well be regarded as a curious symptom of the times that on the occasion of the jubilee of that body of the German Reich which was supposed to be the most learned, a theologian was at the center of the celebration. It will be said that Professor Adolf Harnack was a liberal theologian. But one thing remains true: theology can only be free-minded to the extent that it is permitted by certain basic views, without the recognition of which it would cancel itself out. Indeed, it can only be scientific to the extent that its essential dogmatic ideas allow it to be. The question: "Is theology science in the modern sense?" can only be answered with a clear "no". Science, if it is to be worthy of the name, must come to a world view independently, from human reason. Today we hear this emphasized again and again in all variations. But when a scientific body of the first rank celebrates a great feast, it does not choose a man of science, but a theologian as the main speaker and actor of its history. Theological views played such an important role at this festival that the most ultramontane press organs speak of it with particular pleasure.

For many of our contemporaries, it took the shrill discord of the lex Heinze debates to make them realize how powerfully the most reactionary attitudes intervene in our lives. Even the writers of articles in "free-minded" journals are blind to more subtle signs, such as those that emerged at the Akademiefest.

However, the reasons for the reactionary course of the present lie deep. They are to be found in the fact that the official philosophers of the present are absolutely powerless, even helpless, in the face of the onslaught of unscientific contemporary currents. In order to explain these reasons, we shall have to look at the elements which have brought about the present existence of cathederal philosophy. My view is that this philosophy is indeed unsuited to fight the battle against outmoded ideas alongside liberal natural science. In proving this assertion, I will start from the man who exerts the most profound influence on contemporary philosophical thought, Kant, and I will try to show that this influence is a pernicious one.

I

Kant's acquaintance with Hume's view shook the conviction he had held in earlier years. He soon no longer doubted that all our knowledge is really gained with the help of experience. But certain scientific theorems seemed to him to have such a character of necessity that he did not want to believe in a merely habitual adherence to them. Kant could neither decide to go along with Hume's radicalism nor was he able to remain with the advocates of Leibniz-Wolff's science. The latter seemed to him to destroy all knowledge, in the latter he found no real content. Viewed correctly, Kantian criticism turned out to be a compromise between Leibniz-Wolff on the one hand and Hume on the other. And with this in mind, Kant's fundamental question is: How can we arrive at judgments that are necessarily valid in the sense of Leibniz and Wolff if we admit at the same time that we can only arrive at a real content of our knowledge through experience? The shape of Kant's philosophy can be understood from the tendency inherent in this question. Once Kant had admitted that we gain our knowledge from experience, he had to give the latter such a form that it did not exclude the possibility of generally and necessarily valid judgments. He achieved this by elevating our perceptual and intellectual organism to a power that co-creates experience. On this premise he was able to say: Whatever we receive from experience must conform to the laws according to which our sensuality and our intellect alone can comprehend. Whatever does not conform to these laws can never become an object of perception for us. What appears to us therefore depends on things outside us; how the latter appear to us is determined by the nature of our organism. The laws under which it can imagine something are therefore the most general laws of nature. In these also lies the necessary and universal nature of the course of the world. We see that, in Kant's sense, objects are not arranged spatially because spatiality is a property that belongs to them, but because space is a form under which our sense is able to perceive things; we do not connect two events according to the concept of causality because this has a reason in their essence, but because our understanding is organized in such a way that it must connect two processes perceived in successive moments of time according to this concept. Thus our sensuality and our intellect prescribe the laws of the world of experience. And of these laws, which we ourselves place in the phenomena, we can of course also form necessarily valid concepts.

But it is also clear that these concepts can only receive content from the outside, from experience. In themselves they are empty and meaningless. We do know through them how an object must appear to us if it is given to us at all. But that it is given to us, that it enters our field of vision, depends on experience. How things are in themselves, apart from our experience, we can therefore make nothing out through our concepts.

In this way, Kant has saved an area in which there are concepts of necessary validity, but at the same time he has cut off the possibility of using these concepts to make something out about the actual, absolute essence of things. In order to save the necessity of our concepts, Kant sacrificed their absolute applicability. For the sake of the latter, however, the former was valued in pre-Kantian philosophy. Kant's predecessors wanted to expose a central core from the totality of our knowledge, which by its nature is applicable to everything, including the absolute essences of things, the "interior of nature". The result of Kant's philosophy, however, is that this inner being, this "in itself of objects", can never enter the realm of our cognition, can never become an object of our knowledge. We must content ourselves with the subjective world of appearances that arises within us when the external world acts upon us. Kant thus sets insurmountable limits to our cognitive faculty. We cannot know anything about the "in itself of things". An official contemporary philosopher has given this view the following precise expression: "As long as the feat of looking around the corner, that is, of imagining without imagination, has not been invented, Kant's proud self-modesty will have its end, that of the existing thing its that, but never its what is recognizable." In other words, we know that something is there that causes the subjective appearance of the thing in us, but what is actually behind the latter remains hidden from us.

We have seen that Kant adopted this view in order to save as much as possible of each of the two opposing philosophical doctrines from which he started. This tendency gave rise to a contrived view of our cognition, which we need only compare with what direct and unbiased observation reveals in order to see the entire untenability of Kant's thought structure. Kant imagines our knowledge of experience to have arisen from two factors: from the impressions that things outside us make on our sensibility, and from the forms in which our sensibility and our understanding arrange these impressions. The former are subjective, for I do not perceive the thing, but only the way in which my sensuality is affected by it. My organism undergoes a change when something acts from the outside. This change, i.e. a state of my self, my sensation, is what is given to me. In the act of grasping, our sensuality organizes these sensations spatially and temporally, the mind again organizes the spatial and temporal according to concepts. This organization of sensations, the second factor of our cognition, is thus also entirely subjective. This theory is nothing more than an arbitrary construction of thought that cannot stand up to observation. Let us first ask ourselves the question: Does a single sensation occur anywhere for us, separately and apart from other elements of experience? Let us look at the content of the world given to us. It is a continuous whole. If we direct our attention to any point in our field of experience, we find that there is something else all around. There is nowhere here that exists in isolation. One sensation is connected to another. We can only artificially single it out from our experience; in truth it is connected with the whole of the reality given to us. This is where Kant made a mistake. He had a completely wrong idea of the nature of our experience. The latter does not, as he believed, consist of an infinite number of mosaic pieces from which we make a whole through purely subjective processes, but is given to us as a unity: one perception merges into the other without a definite boundary.

II The reasons for the reaction within modern science

A worldview strives to comprehend the totality of the phenomena given to us. However, we can only ever make details of reality the object of our experiential knowledge. If we want to look at a detail in isolation, we must first artificially lift it out of the context in which it is found. Nowhere, for example, is the individual sensation of red given to us as such; it is surrounded on all sides by other qualities to which it belongs and without which it could not exist. We must disregard everything else and focus our attention on the one perception if we want to consider it in its isolation. This lifting of a thing out of its context is a necessity for us if we want to look at the world at all. We are organized in such a way that we cannot perceive the world as a whole, as a single perception. The right and left, the above and below, the red next to the green in my field of vision are in reality in uninterrupted connection and mutual togetherness. However, we can only look in one direction and only perceive what is connected in nature separately. Our eye can only ever perceive individual colors from a multi-membered color whole, our mind individual conceptual elements from a coherent system of ideas. The separation of an individual sensation from the world context is therefore a mental act, caused by the peculiar arrangement of our mind. We must dissolve the unified world into individual perceptions if we want to observe it.

But we must be clear about the fact that this infinite multiplicity and isolation does not really exist, that it is without any objective meaning for reality itself. We create an image of it that initially deviates from reality because we lack the organs to grasp it in its very own form in one act. But separating is only one part of our cognitive process. We are constantly busy incorporating every individual perception that comes to us into an overall conception that we form of the world.

The question that necessarily follows here is this: According to what laws do we combine what we have first separated? The separation is a consequence of our organization, it has nothing to do with the thing itself. Therefore, the content of an individual perception cannot be changed by the fact that it initially appears to us to be torn from the context in which it belongs. But since this content is conditioned by the context, it initially appears quite incomprehensible in its separation. The fact that the perception of red occurs at a certain point in space is caused by the most varied circumstances. If I now perceive the red without at the same time directing my attention to these circumstances, it remains incomprehensible to me where the red comes from. Only when I draw on other perceptions, namely those things and processes to which the perception of the red is connected, do I understand the matter. Every perception points me beyond itself because it cannot be explained by itself. I therefore combine the details separated by my organization from the whole of the world according to their own nature into a whole. In this second act, what was destroyed in the first is thus restored: the unity of the real regains its rightful place in relation to the multiplicity initially absorbed by my spirit.

The reason why we can only take possession of the objective form of the world in the detour described above lies in the dual nature of man. As a rational being, he is very well able to imagine the cosmos as a unity in which each individual appears as a member of the whole. As a sensory being, however, he is bound to place and time, he can only perceive individual members of the infinite number of members of the cosmos. Experience can therefore only provide a form of reality conditioned by the limitations of our individuality, from which reason must first extract that which gives the individual things and processes within reality their lawful connection. Sensory perception thus distances us from reality; rational contemplation leads us back to it. A being whose sensuality could view the world in one act would not need reason. A single perception would provide it with what we can only achieve with our mental organization by combining an infinite number of individual acts of experience.

The above examination of our cognitive faculty leads us to the view that reason provides us with the actual form of reality when it processes the individual acts of experience in the appropriate way. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the fact that reason appears to lie entirely within ourselves. We have seen that in truth its activity is destined precisely to abolish the unreal character which our experience receives through sensory perception. Through this activity, the contents of perception themselves re-establish in our minds the objective context from which our senses have torn them.

We are now at the point where we can see through the fallacy of Kant's view. What is a consequence of our organization: the appearance of reality as an infinite number of separate particulars, Kant conceives as an objective fact; and the connection that is re-established, because it corresponds to objective truth, is for him a consequence of our subjective organization. Precisely the reverse of what Kant asserted is true. Cause and effect, for example, are a coherent whole. I perceive them separately and connect them in the way they themselves strive towards each other. Kant allowed himself to be driven into error by Hume. The latter says: If we perceive two events over and over again in such a way that one follows the other, we become accustomed to this togetherness, expect it in future cases as well, and designate one as the cause and the other as the effect. - This contradicts the facts. We only bring two events into a causal connection if such a connection follows from their content. This connection is no less given than the content of the events themselves.

From this point of view, the most mundane as well as the highest scientific thought finds its explanation. If we could encompass the whole world at a glance, this work would not be necessary. To explain a thing, to make it comprehensible, means nothing other than to put it back into the context from which our organization has torn it. There is no such thing as a thing that is separated from the world as a whole. All separation has merely a subjective validity for us. For us, the world as a whole is divided into above and below, before and after, cause and effect, object and idea, substance and force, object and subject and so on. However, all these opposites are only possible if the whole in which they occur confronts us as reality. Where this is not the case, we cannot speak of opposites. An impossible opposition is that which Kant calls "appearance" and "thing-in-itself". This latter term is completely meaningless. We have not the slightest reason to form it. It would only be justified for a consciousness that knows a second world in addition to the one that is given to us, and which can observe how this world affects our organism and results in what Kant calls an appearance. Such a consciousness could then say: the world of human beings is only a subjective appearance of that second world known to me. But people themselves can only recognize opposites within the world given to them. Bringing the sum of everything given into opposition to something else is pointless. The Kantian "thing in itself" does not follow from the character of the world given to us. It is invented.

As long as we do not break with such arbitrary assumptions as the "thing in itself", we can never arrive at a satisfactory world view. Something is only inexplicable to us as long as we do not know what is necessarily connected to it. But we have to look for this within our world, not outside it.

The mysteriousness of a thing only exists as long as we consider it in its particularity. However, this is created by us and can also be removed by us. A science that understands the nature of the human cognitive process can only proceed in such a way that it seeks everything it needs to explain a phenomenon within the world given to us. Such a science can be described as monism or a unified view of nature. It is opposed by dualism or the two-world theory, which assumes two absolutely different worlds and believes that the explanatory principles for one are contained in the other.

This latter doctrine is based on a false interpretation of the facts of our cognitive process. The Dualist separates the sum of all being into two areas, each of which has its own laws and which are externally opposed to each other. He forgets that every separation, every segregation of the individual realms of being has only subjective validity. What is a consequence of his organization, he considers to be an objective natural fact that lies outside him.

Such a dualism is also Kantianism. For in this worldview, appearance and the "in itself of things" are not opposites within the given world, but one side, the "in itself", lies outside the given. As long as we separate the latter into parts, however small they may be in relation to the universe, we are simply following a law of our personality; but if we regard everything given, all phenomena, as one part and then oppose it with a second, then we are philosophizing into the blue. We are then merely playing with concepts. We construct a contrast, but cannot gain any content for the second element, because such a content can only be drawn from the given. Any kind of being that is assumed to exist outside the latter is to be relegated to the realm of unjustified hypotheses. Kant's "thing-in-itself" belongs in this category, as does the idea that a large proportion of modern physicists have of matter and its atomistic composition. If I am given any sensory perception, for example the perception of color or heat, then I can make qualitative and quantitative distinctions within this perception; I can encompass the spatial structure and the temporal progression that I perceive with mathematical formulas, I can regard the phenomena according to their nature as cause and effect, and so on: but with this process of thinking I must remain within what is given to me. If we practise a careful self-criticism of ourselves, we also find that all our abstract views and concepts are only one-sided images of the given reality and only have sense and meaning as such. We can imagine a space closed on all sides, in which a number of elastic spheres move in all directions, bumping into each other, bouncing against and off the walls; but we must be clear that this is a one-sided image that only gains meaning when we think of the purely mathematical image as being filled with a sensibly real content. But if we believe that we can explain a perceived content causally through an imperceptible process of being which corresponds to the mathematical structure described and which takes place outside our given world, then we lack all self-criticism. Modern mechanical heat theory makes the mistake described above. If we say that the "red" is only a subjective sensation, as modern physiology does, and that a mechanical process, a movement, is to be assumed as the cause of this "red" outside in space, then we are committing an inconsistency. If the "red" were only subjective, then all mechanical processes connected with the "red" would also only be subjective. As soon as we take something from the interrelated world of perception into the mind, we must take everything into it, including the atoms and their movements. We would have to deny the entire external world.

The same can be said of the modern theory of color. It too places something that is only a one-sided image of the sense world behind it as its cause. The whole wave theory of light is only a mathematical picture which represents the spatio-temporal relations of this particular field of appearance in a one-sided way. The undulation theory turns this image into a real reality that can no longer be perceived, but rather is supposed to be the cause of what we perceive.

III The reasons for the reaction within science

It is not at all surprising that the dualistic thinker does not succeed in making the connection between the two worlds he assumes - the subjective one within us and the objective one outside us - comprehensible. The one is given to him experientially, the other is added by him. Consequently, he can only gain everything contained in the one through experience, and everything contained in the other only through thinking. But since all experiential content is only an effect of the added true being, the cause itself can never be found in the world accessible to our observation. Nor is the reverse possible: to deduce the experientially given reality from the imagined cause. This latter is not possible because, according to our previous arguments, all such imagined causes are only one-sided images of the full reality. When we survey such a picture, we can never find in it, by means of a mere thought process, what is connected with it only in the observed reality. For these reasons, he who assumes two worlds that are separated by themselves will never be able to arrive at a satisfactory explanation of their interrelation.

Whoever allows the actual real entities to exist outside the world of experience sets limits to our knowledge. For if his presupposition is correct, we would only perceive the effect that the real beings exert on us. These, as the causes, are a land entirely unknown to us. And here we have arrived at the gate where modern science can let in all the old religious ideas. So far and no further, says this science. Why shouldn't the pastor now start with his faith where Du Bois-Reymond stops with his scientific knowledge?

The follower of the monistic world view knows that the causes of the effects given to him must lie in the realm of his world. No matter how far removed the former may be from the latter in space or time, they must be found in the realm of experience. The fact that of two things which explain each other, only one is given to him at the moment, appears to him only as a consequence of his individuality, not as something founded in the object itself. The adherent of a dualistic view believes that he must assume the explanation of a known thing in an arbitrarily added unknown thing. Since he unjustifiably endows the latter with such properties that it cannot be found in our entire world, he sets a limit to cognition here. Our arguments have provided the proof that all things which our cognitive faculty supposedly cannot reach must first be artificially added to reality. We only fail to recognize that which we have first made unrecognizable. Kant commands our cognition to stop at a creature of his imagination, at the "thing-in-itself", and Du Bois-Reymond states that the imperceptible atoms of matter produce sensation and feeling through their position and movement, only to conclude that we can never arrive at a satisfactory explanation of how matter and movement produce sensation and feeling, for "it is quite and forever incomprehensible that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. atoms should not be indifferent to each other. -atoms should not be indifferent to how they lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and move. It is in no way comprehensible how consciousness could arise from their interaction". This whole conclusion collapses into nothing if one considers that the atoms moving and lying in a certain way are a creature of the abstracting mind, to which an absolute existence separate from perceptible events cannot be ascribed.

A scientific dissection of our cognitive activity leads, as we have seen, to the conviction that the questions we have to ask of nature are a consequence of the peculiar relationship in which we stand to the world. We are limited individualities and can therefore only perceive the world piecemeal. Each piece considered in and of itself is a puzzle or, in other words, a question for our cognition. However, the more details we get to know, the clearer the world becomes to us. One perception explains another. There are no questions that the world poses to us that cannot be answered with the means it offers us. For monism, therefore, there are no fundamental limits to knowledge. This or that can be unresolved at any given time because we were not yet in a position in terms of time or space to find the things that are involved. But what has not yet been found today may be found tomorrow. The limits caused by this are only accidental ones that disappear with the progress of experience and thought. In such cases, the formation of hypotheses comes into its own. Hypotheses may not be formed about something that is supposed to be inaccessible to our knowledge in principle. The atomistic hypothesis is a completely unfounded one if it is to be conceived not merely as an aid to the abstracting intellect, but as a statement about real beings lying outside the qualities of sensation. A hypothesis can only be an assumption about a fact that is not accessible to us for accidental reasons, but which by its nature belongs to the world given to us. For example, a hypothesis about a certain state of our earth in a long-gone period is justified. Admittedly, this state can never become an object of experience because completely different conditions have arisen in the meantime. However, if a perceiving individual had been there at the assumed time, then he would have perceived the state. In contrast, the hypothesis that all sensory qualities owe their origin only to quantitative processes is unjustified, because qualityless processes cannot be perceived.

Monism or the unified explanation of nature emerges from a critical self-examination of man. This view leads us to reject all explanatory causes outside the world. However, we can also extend this view to man's practical relationship to the world. Human action is, after all, only a special case of general world events. Its explanatory principles can therefore likewise only be sought within the world given to us. Dualism, which seeks the basic forces of the reality available to us in a realm inaccessible to us, also places the commandments and norms of our actions there. Kant is also caught up in this error. He regards the moral law as a commandment imposed on man by a world that is alien to us, as a categorical imperative that he must obey, even when his own nature develops inclinations that oppose such a voice sounding from the hereafter into our here and now. One need only recall Kant's well-known apostrophe to duty to find this reinforced: "Duty! thou great and sublime name, who dost not hold in thyself anything that is pleasing and ingratiating, but dost demand submission", who dost "establish a law... before which all inclinations fall silent, even if they secretly work against it." Monism opposes such an imperative imposed on human nature from the outside with the moral motives born of the human soul itself. It is a delusion to believe that man can act according to other than self-made imperatives. The respective inclinations and cultural needs generate certain maxims that we call our moral principles. Since certain ages or peoples have similar inclinations and aspirations, the people who belong to them will also establish similar principles to satisfy them. In any case, however, such principles, which then act as ethical motives, are by no means implanted from outside, but are born out of needs, i.e. generated within the reality in which we live. The moral code of an age or people is simply the expression of how adaptation and heredity work within the ethical nature of man. Just as the effects of nature arise from causes that lie within the given nature, so our moral actions are the results of motives that lie within our cultural process. Monism thus seeks the reason for our actions within nature in the strictest sense of the word. However, it also makes man his own legislator. Man has no other norm than the necessities arising from the laws of nature. He continues the effects of nature in the area of moral action.

Dualism demands submission to moral commandments taken from somewhere; monism points man to himself and to nature, i.e. to his autonomous being. It makes him the master of himself. Only from the standpoint of monism can we understand man as a truly free being in the ethical sense. Duties are not imposed on him by another being, but his actions are simply guided by the principles that everyone finds lead him to the goals he considers worth striving for. A moral view based on monism is the enemy of all blind faith in authority. The autonomous person does not follow a guideline that he should merely believe will lead him to his goal, but he must realize that it will lead him there, and the goal itself must appear to him individually as a desirable one.

The autonomous human being wants to be governed according to laws that he has given himself. He has only one role model - nature. He continues where the organic nature below him has stopped. Our ethical principles are pre-formed at a more primitive level in the instincts of animals. No categorical imperative is anything other than a developed instinct.

IV

The assumption of the limits of human cognition brought about by the "regression to Kant" has had a truly paralyzing effect on the development of an all-embracing way of thinking. An unprejudiced worldview can only thrive if thinking has the courage to penetrate into the last nooks and crannies of being, to the heights of entities. Reactionary worldviews will always find their reckoning when thinking clips its own wings. A theory of knowledge that speaks of an unknowable "thing in itself" can be the best ally of the most regressive theology. It would be interesting to pursue the psychological problem of the unconscious, secret longing of the theorists of the limits of knowledge to leave a loophole open for theology. Nothing is more characteristic of human nature than what can otherwise be noted as a great joy by excellent thinkers. It comes over them when they seem to succeed in proving that there is something where no knowledge can penetrate - where therefore a good faith may set in. With true delight one hears meritorious researchers say: see, no experience, no reason can get there; one may follow the pastor there.

Try to imagine where we would be today if we had not had the doctrine of all possible limits to knowledge in our higher educational institutions in recent decades, but rather the Goethean spirit of research, to penetrate as far as experience allows at every moment with our thinking, and not to present everything else as a problem as unknowable, but to leave it calmly to the future. With such a maxim, philosophy could have brought the dispute against theological belief, which began somewhat clumsily but not incorrectly in the 1950s, to a good conclusion today. Perhaps we would be ready today to regard the theological faculties with a smile as living anachronisms. Theologizing philosophers, such as Lotze, have caused unheard-of misfortune. The clumsiness of Carl Vogt, who was on the right track, made the game easy for them. Oh, that Vogt! If only he had chosen a better comparison instead of the unfortunate one: thoughts relate to the brain like urine to the kidneys. It could easily be argued that the kidneys secrete matter; can thought be compared to matter? And if so, must not what is secreted already be present in a certain form before it is secreted? No, Vogt the Fat should have said, thoughts relate to brain processes like the heat developed during a friction process relates to this friction process. They are a function of the brain, not a substance separated from it. Lotze, the bland philosophical Struwwelpeter, could not have objected to this. For such a comparison stands up to all the facts that can be established about the connection between the brain and thinking according to scientific method. The materialists of the 1950s waged a clumsy outpost battle. Then came the "regressives to Kant" with their limits of knowledge and stabbed the scientific progressives in the back.

The reaction in all areas of life is spreading again today. And knowledge, which can be the only real fighter against it, has tied its own hands. What use is it for the natural scientist to open the eyes of his students to the laws of nature in his laboratory and at his teaching pulpit if his colleague, the philosopher, says: everything you hear from the natural scientist is only external work, is appearance, our knowledge cannot penetrate beyond a certain limit. I must confess that under such circumstances it is no wonder to me that the most blind charcoal-burner's faith boldly raises its head next to the most advanced science. Because science is discouraged, life is reactionary. You should be fighters, you philosophers, you should advance further and further into the unlimited. But you should not be watchdogs, so that the modern worldview does not overstep the boundaries beyond which outdated theology goes at every moment. It is truly strange that pastors are allowed every day to reveal the secrets of that world about which the unprejudiced thinker should impose careful silence. The more cowardly philosophy is, the bolder theology is. And even the views that prevail about the nature of our schools. They may try to keep everything out of the classroom that natural science links to its established facts as a consequence of worldview, because unproven hypotheses - as they say - do not belong in school, only absolutely certain facts. But in religious education! Yes, Bauer, that's different. There, the "unproven" articles of faith can continue to be cultivated. The religion teacher who knows what the geologist "can't know anything about". The reasons lie deep. Just imagine that modern natural science had confirmed everything that the Bible taught; imagine that Darwin, instead of his evil theory of man's descent from the animals, had delivered a confirmation of the faith in revelation based on natural science: Oh, then we would hear the good Darwin's fame proclaimed from all pulpits today, then the religion teachers would be allowed to talk about it. Children would probably be taught that the seven books of Moses are fully justified by an English naturalist. But perhaps we would then have no theories about the limits of knowledge. It would probably be permissible to transgress the boundaries that lead to theology. However, it is a different matter if this crossing of boundaries leads to purely natural causes of world phenomena.

Address by Rudolf Steiner on the eve of the first Anthroposophical College Course at the Goetheanum.

My dear friends!

With the start of the School of Spiritual Science here in Dornach tomorrow, we are undoubtedly standing at a very important stage in our movement in anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. And even if it is only very briefly, I would like to be allowed to say a few words today about the development of this spiritual science, after I already did so to a certain extent here some time ago, a few months ago, due to [opposing] attacks. Nevertheless, today I would like to draw your attention to a few things in this regard.

We will open this course for spiritual scientific knowledge in the Goetheanum itself, in the construction of the Goetheanum, in a building that is still unfinished but has progressed so far that work will be able to begin in it in the next few weeks. And when I now consider the name 'Goetheanum', which was given to this building in the way you know, I cannot help thinking of one of the starting points of this movement. As I have often indicated, and also printed in a few sentences in the introduction to my book Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life, our movement originates from the lectures I gave in Berlin at the beginning of the century to a small circle. This inner circle in Berlin consisted partly of people who at that time called themselves Theosophists; but it also included such personalities who were quite distant from what the others called Theosophy. This circle met once a week in the house of Countess Brockdorff in Berlin, and there lectures were given from the most diverse areas of intellectual and public life; some artistic activities were also cultivated. Once I was invited to give a lecture in this circle. And I accepted, although I had never been in this circle before and did not know whether I had met one or other of the personalities in this circle; in any case, I did not know the lady of the house or the master of the house. But there are moments in life when one is polite. So after I had agreed through an intermediary to give the requested lecture on Nietzsche - it was, after all, quite some time after the writing of my essay “Nietzsche, a Fighter Against His Time” - it occurred to me: You have to be polite, you are now going to the housewife and the head of the household. So I first wrote a letter to Countess Brockdorff, asking her for permission to pay a courtesy call before giving the lecture at the house. Countess Brockdorff wrote back to me that it was not necessary, I should just come to the lecture – I no longer remember on which day it was, just the next lecture [evening]. And so I came into this circle and gave a lecture on Nietzsche. At the end of this lecture, I was invited to give another lecture during the winter season. And I immediately said: Yes, I would give a lecture on the same topic that I had written about in the “Magazin für Literatur”, which I was editing at the time, for Goethe's hundred and fiftieth birthday.

I had written on the occasion of Goethe's hundred and fifth birthday: “Goethe's Secret Revelation”. I said that I wanted to speak about this topic, “Goethe's Secret Revelation”, at the lecture evening to which I had been invited. The lecture took place. And I tried to present everything that can be connected to Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” in this lecture at the time.

That was actually, I would say, the original cell of this movement, my dear friends. The original cell was that lecture on Goethe's secret revelation. I have to mention this when we begin an important stage in our movement here at the Goetheanum tomorrow. Actually, it is very nice that this movement is returning to its beginning – at least for me and what I have to do in the movement.

It began with Goethe, and tomorrow we begin something extraordinarily important in the building that was given its name by Goethe. So you see, there is something of consistency and continuity in the whole course of our movement.

The lecture I gave [at that time] on Goethe's secret revelation then led to me having to present the essentials of what is now contained in my essay 'Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life' in connection with modern natural science in that circle during the following winter. Thus, having arisen from Goethe, it was then continued in that writing. I then presented to a wider circle what is contained in my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact”.

What is contained in my book “Mysticism” has already led to a large part of this “mysticism” being translated into English. And that led to me being invited to give lectures on what, in its various forms, was the “Theosophical Society”.

Now I will never allow anyone to take away the right to give lectures, to give what I have to advocate in order to advocate it, where I am invited to do so. Therefore, I also gave lectures for those who called themselves Theosophists, among other lectures, but which, as I told everyone from the outset who wanted to or should hear it, did not contain anything that had not arisen from my own research.

I then took part in various Theosophical congresses. In the meantime, this movement, which had come into being in this way, had gained members within Central Europe, members who stuck together mainly because of the world view that I had already advocated at the time. When I gave the lecture on Goethe's Secret Revelation, it didn't mean much that what was advocated there was advocated at the invitation of the Theosophical Society.

At one of the congresses in London, I also saw Olcott, the president of the Theosophical Society. He said to me at the time, “Yes, with this German Section, it's an awkward business.” I said: Why? – Yes, the membership lists are so difficult for us. – I said: I am not interested in the membership lists, I am more interested in the members; and if the members are there, I don't really care if they are on the list. – Well, similar comments were made more often.

After going through various stages [a congress was held in Munich – it was 1907 –] with the other Theosophists. And at that time, people were very surprised that this movement had sprung up so quickly within Central Europe, as it was put. For there was a dictum that had been passed from one to the other among members of the Theosophical Society, especially in the circles of those who were “advanced” - that's what they called those who directed something here or there; and this dictum, which was constantly being uttered among these people, was: Germany is not ripe for this.

Now, this dictum was somewhat suppressed in Munich at the time. But actually, this dictum did not seem entirely unjustified to me; because we were not ripe for what the Theosophical [Society] held in its bosom, nor are we today, and I don't think we care about it at all.

What this “immaturity” led to was that we did not mature to recognize this Hindu boy, Alcyone – or something like that was his name – who had been chosen to carry the soul of Christ Jesus, when others who had been chosen as suitable candidates for the incarnation of the soul of Christ Jesus had proved unsuitable. We proved ourselves to be completely immature. And so we were thrown out.

And so, more and more developed outwards into the clarity that is the Anthroposophical Movement. But it simply developed outwards only what was originally, very originally there.

You see, I had just been invited to lecture at the Theosophical Society, and I had just founded a German Section in Berlin in 1902; but during the founding, founding negotiations, founding meeting, I had to leave because I had to give a lecture in another venue that was part of a cycle called “Anthroposophical Reflections on World History”. And so you see that while the Theosophical Society was founding its German Section, I was speaking about anthroposophy.

Today there is nothing else there but what actually arose from this original cell, 'Goethe's Secret Revelation'. And the Anthroposophical Society is just that, even in its external name, which was always intended by me.

In 1909 there was a Theosophical Congress in Budapest. At that time all kinds of curious things were already simmering in the center of the Theosophical Society, the Adyar Center. I believe that a part of the more reasonable people at the time had split off from the Theosophical Society, and this part needed a name. They turned to me. I did not think the time had come then to come out openly under the real flag of the Anthroposophical Movement. And so I said at the time: I already know a name that should be given when this movement takes on a reasonable form; but I need it later, I don't want it misused yet. So I said in 1909. I had in mind the name “Anthroposophical Society”.

And then in 1913 the Anthroposophical Society was founded. Those who were then there as members, insofar as they were still members of the Theosophical Society, were thrown out of the latter, lock, stock and barrel.

These things must be faced if we want to see the whole continuity of what is before us today, my dear friends; for here beginning and end are truly connected. And in the course of development, too, you will basically not perceive any breaks if you do not artificially construct them.

Then came the time that had often been pointed out in our anthroposophical lectures, the time when the decline of modern civilization became most evident: the terrible years since 1914 came, and with them the collapse of Central Europe, which in reality is a collapse of modern civilization as a whole. And it was necessary to include this in the current of our anthroposophical movement, which now, I would say, is moving as a social wing within this movement.

Anyone who follows the movement internally can see how the threefold social order movement has grown out of this anthroposophical movement in a completely organic way.

The threefolding movement brought all sorts of new elements into the anthroposophical movement. However, the personalities who were the bearers of these elements were already there at the same time; admittedly, others were added, but as I said, the personalities who were the bearers of these elements were there at the same time. But for a number of personalities, the idea of threefolding had the effect of awakening a new impetus, a new impulse in them. It is not clear to me how this impetus could have arisen from within the Theosophical Society. Because, you see, when I consider these real, actual moments of the genesis of the anthroposophical movement, I always think of such things, as I have mentioned before.

I was once at a Theosophical event in Paris. There, for the most part, the people who were “advanced” spoke. And afterwards, people would express their judgments about what had been said. I can't say they talked about what had been said, but the advanced ones, especially the ladies, moved around partly nimbly, partly a little drowsily, and declared everywhere: There were such wonderful vibrations in this room while so-and-so was speaking! And everywhere you heard praise for these very brilliant “vibrations”.

And from everything that had been said behind the various lectures, I could only imagine that one actually did not use one's ears as a mediator for what was going on in the hall, but it seemed to me that one's nose was used. Because the way people talked afterwards was actually as if they had smelled these “vibrations”. So that one actually had to smell theosophy.

But I have to say: I don't think that much of a social nature could have been sensed from these reports, from these speeches! For there was nothing in all of this that was native to it, nothing of an impact that would have gone so far as to directly grasp the living existence, the full humanity.

The need to grasp this full humanity, however, came to the fore with great force in the second decade of the twentieth century. And if the anthroposophical movement had not sensed that it had to absorb social elements within itself, or rather, had to allow them to emerge from itself, then it would have proved to be just any old sect standing in the corner, but not as that which it was meant to be from the very beginning: the renewal of spiritual life from the original spiritual source for the developmental needs of modern humanity.

This should be fully understood within our movement. And above all, it should be understood that if anthroposophy is to fulfill its task, then it must actually pour its currents into all the individual branches of modern knowledge, it must take hold of all science.

In this respect, nothing was similar in all that had been achieved on anthroposophical ground to what had been achieved on the ground of the Theosophical Society. Because, you see, there they had also made all kinds of compromises with science, but they were compromises. If, on the other hand, you could impress people in Italy or England or elsewhere with a professorial conquest that you had made in this or that, of course, brilliant name, then you were happy: Professor so and so became a member of the Theosophical Society – a brilliant achievement! That's how you drew the line to the sciences.

But the anthroposophical movement should not draw its lines in this way. Of course, one could have some success by bowing and scraping to ordinary science, but we did not do that. So I made myself unpopular, at least in that respect. I could give many examples, but I will give only one.

There was a man [...] within the Theosophical Society who was actually quite charming. He once came to a place where we had an anthroposophical branch. He was a botanist. I was always interested in those things that I thought might incidentally interest him. And so I spoke to the professor of botany, and I talked about some details of botanical science. He was not at all interested, not in the least. He was even a little annoyed, because he was fond of “theosophy” and he assumed that it would not interfere with his botany. He thought to himself: “A botanist – that's someone in the style of modern scientific development. It's a matter of course that everything is in order there. And then, if you have any needs on the side, you also take up theosophy. But there you have two neatly separate drawers: here botany, here theosophy. And there the one does not interfere with the other. Therefore, it became extremely uncomfortable for him to hear about botany from an anthroposophical point of view. One example among many.

But we could not refrain from pouring into everything that comes from the sources of anthroposophical research, into the specific activity of life, into everything that belongs to the world. This became unpleasant for many people, quite unpleasant. Because, right, you could be a good botanist in the sense of the demands of the time, because you had graduated from high school, then did your specialized studies, wrote your dissertation, then became a private lecturer, wrote your book, became a professor – well, you also had your botanical collection – it was all in order; you had that behind you. Why interfere in any way? But because it was unsatisfactory, something was needed for the other needs of the human being. So one took up Theosophy. It was easy to grasp in relation to the many books one had studied before finally becoming a university professor. So one bought a few more, that is, Theosophical books. Now one also had something for the other. The circles should not be disturbed.

But we couldn't do it that way. I, in particular, could not become that well-behaved, my dear friends. And so I was obliged to speak out against this from an anthroposophical basis, to tell people: No, this is not right; we do not need to approach things with a hide; instead, each of the other subjects needs to be properly cleaned up; everything has become dead and must come to life again.

The whole matter is connected with our social demands. For if we had not this ghastly specialization in individual sciences alien to life, if we did not have this lack of understanding of life through these separate individual sciences, then we would not have been driven into the misfortune of recent years. And we must get out of it by starting at the right end and properly penetrating into the pigeonholes. So that the spirit, which alone can carry the development of humanity, is also present in all the individual activities of the life of knowledge. And everything that was to emerge from this life of knowledge was in our anthroposophical movement. And when the new elements came, who felt inspired by the idea of threefolding and by many other things that have been going on in the anthroposophical movement in recent years, the impetus also came to take the path that now leads to what is to begin tomorrow as our anthroposophical college course here.

Above all, it was Dr. Boos, the founder and leader of the Swiss Threefolding Union, who had the inner strength that led to what we will begin tomorrow.

In a certain way, one had to be completely immersed in the realization of the necessity to fertilize all scientific, all artistic, all social life from anthroposophy. You had to be equipped with the inner audacity to really combine absolutely clear, sharply defined thinking with the necessary intuition that sees that what flows through the currents of anthroposophy can really deliver what needs to be delivered to the sciences. Then you have to have that sacred fire that is dedicated to such work. This has been done in a way for which we cannot thank our friend Dr. Roman Boos enough, and it is actually thanks to him that we have his work in front of us, this anthroposophical university course that is to begin tomorrow.

Of course, we must not forget all those who have worked and contributed in abundance; but a driving force must be behind all of this. And this driving force must, I would say, be a social impetus. That was necessary above all. We have had that in relation to these enterprises, and I would just like to wish that we still had many more ventures with Dr. Boos; then we will certainly make progress.

And so we can follow the growth of what I took the liberty of presenting to you today in the original cell, how it branched out into the life of the individual sciences, how it summoned all the friends whom we cannot greet warmly enough and who will now devote themselves as lecturers to the development of anthroposophy in the individual sciences and branches of life. If we can show the world how Anthroposophy is working in the individual branches of science, we will also gain the necessary momentum for the social work of Anthroposophy.

And that, my dear friends, is what should inspire us as we experience this course of the anthroposophical higher education system. We hope that many new seeds will arise from everything that is done, spoken and shown here.

[The following remarks are not directly related to the history of the society from 1902 to 1913:]

"According to the program, we will begin tomorrow with this anthroposophical college course. The first event tomorrow will be what is intended to be the starting point, so to speak. We will begin tomorrow at five o'clock with a musical prelude by our friend Stuten. Then there will be a series of addresses, which I am supposed to open with one about science, art and religion, but which will hopefully lead to a whole series of addresses that briefly point out the significance of the moment, which is so embedded in the present that from here, from this Goetheanum, we are really trying to lead that impulse into the world, which, above all, aims at a renewal of scientific life.

Then there will be a rehearsal of the musical settings of our friend Schuurman, namely his setting of a poetic insertion in the “Chymischen Hochzeit des Christian Rosenkreutz”. Then there will be a break. After a break, declamations and other musical performances will follow. Then this morning celebration will close with a eurythmic performance. So we will first point out the different lines of activity that are to be cultivated here at this Goetheanum.

Today, my dear friends, it would probably be our task first of all to think about how to accomplish the work that falls to us, since we have to ensure that the entire three-week event runs in a dignified but also practical manner. To do this, the gentlemen from our Swiss threefold social order, the gentlemen from the Goetheanum, from the Association of Goetheanism and so on, the ladies and gentlemen, need to be supported by a number of other personalities who - please don't be offended by me, I don't always mean it to sound so bad - order, right, because if they have already been standing outside the entrance before, it is really not necessary to spend another hour until everyone is sitting in their seats, but to make sure that everyone finds their seat as quickly as possible, that what is done is that which leads to sitting still and listening as soon as possible. I have to say that I am actually sorry that I have to speak tomorrow: I would much rather be a steward, because you can develop such wonderful talents when you are a steward. Firstly, a steward, if he is really agile, if he is not clumsy, when he gets a ticket in his hand – excuse me, I don't mean any harm – first looks at it from all sides, just like a clumsy clumsy postal clerk at the counter with the letter, so that you get desperate until you get your ticket for a registered letter, but with a quick movement you immediately know: there is the place - so that the person in question can walk and immediately get to his seat. So direct them quickly, but calmly, and be charming at the same time, not rough, so that the person who is directed to the seat is very happy; so that no one can think: You're being snarled at. So I think this is a good opportunity to develop your best talents; it's actually extremely desirable. And so I ask the gentlemen in particular to be charming. I think it will be especially nice in this case if the gentlemen are officially charming, so to speak; the ladies without office are charming in between. I ask the gentlemen to strive for two things: to get the blue ribbon here, which is to distinguish the folder, into the buttonhole. I think that it will really be a worthwhile goal, especially for those who come from monarchical states, where nothing else is available now in the buttonhole, will be a contemporary ideal. So we will adorn all those who endeavor to view the tickets so quickly, to show them to their seats and to be charming, with a blue ribbon - not a red one, for example, so that the Swiss don't think we're socialists or something like that; right, you can get into all sorts of trouble with the minister Kully if you give people red ribbons; so you will get blue ribbons and all of you will be charming and nimble ushers. I ask you to consider this from these two points of view. The one point of view is that if you know you are one of those who can be nimble and charming, then don't refrain from helping to maintain order. And if you should know that you may have absorbed too much militarism in the course of the last few years, so that you cannot develop such qualities - but this is only said in parenthesis and really not meant badly - so if someone in the course of the last few years has absorbed too strong military tendencies , which are then not suitable for being charming and the like, so if you have got into the habit of commanding too much, then you may practice anthroposophical self-restraint and refrain from participating in the ordering. But as I said, I am only saying this as one would say in the old science: “for the sake of wilderness.” I will present alternatives in a moment. One must be complete in science. We have a scientific course now. Right? There's no need to be as radical as the one person from the neighborhood who, when she came up here for the first time, didn't want to miss the opportunity to reprimand us right away because we — who wanted to be an “innovator” wanted to be – now, wherever you look, we have “old hat, as the Berliners say, about doctor titles and so on; if you are going to start renewing, the personality said, then you should leave out such titles.

Well, that's not true, you can have different opinions about whether you want to do this or that, whether you should dress in a new style; but we don't want to see our ideals in outward appearances, and that's why I mentioned the second point for the sake of completeness, and I sincerely hope that it was not necessary for me to mention it.

Now, that would be part of what we have to complete today, if the personalities concerned, who, as stewards, now feel particularly called upon to do so after what has been said, let us know that they want to get this blue ribbon in their buttonhole for the next few days, and especially for tomorrow. Perhaps it could be the case that Dr. Boos himself or someone he appoints will take the names of those who feel called to such a high office at the end, after all the others have been addressed. That will be one thing.

The other thing would be for me to ask those of the honored gentlemen who are presenting and are already here today to perhaps contact me at the end of this evening, because there is still a lot to be discussed.

That is what I have to say for the time being. And now, since I have only been here since today and have not been able to participate in the rather extensive preparations that were necessary to launch this course, I will ask Dr. Boos to take over the management of this evening and to suggest to us what else needs to be done in this direction.

But then, when we have completed the things to be discussed for tomorrow and the following “days”, we will have to discuss some other things for this evening that relate to some other events. But first we want to discuss the agenda for the course.

Dr. Boos introduces the necessary measures and arrangements for discussion.

At the end, Dr. Steiner takes the floor again:

"I would just like to mention for those friends from out of town who have come as members of the Anthroposophical Society that, as before, anthroposophical lectures will take place on Saturday and Sunday when I am present in Dornach, and I also believe there will be eurythmy performances on Saturday and Sunday. The lectures will take place after the eurythmy at eight o'clock or, if there are no performances on Saturday and Sunday, at half past seven, and if we can accommodate everyone, here in the carpentry workshop, otherwise over in the building. The eurythmy performances will also be here in the carpentry workshop.” Dr. Boos reports on various activities that are intended to incite and slander, and calls for a statement to be made regarding a proposal that has been made to him to send something to the press from the meeting, which is now already in session.

Dr. Schmiedel says that the number of guests should be indicated.

Dr. Boos says that he had also considered drafting a resolution through a mass meeting here, in which those not yet present here could also be included according to the mood; one does not need to come up with numbers; a resolution would be extremely effective in a concise, short form. Adoption of the resolution is proposed. Since no amendments have been proposed, he will ask again. There is unanimity. This matter is thus also brought to a conclusion with regard to this resolution.

Rudolf Steiner: “I do not think it is necessary to say much about the meeting that apparently took place here in Dornach and was evidently convened by the machinations of Pastor Kully and Pastor Arnet, I think it is not necessary to say much about this meeting after the press report.

Certain things have been reported that might perhaps lead one to notice this or that. For example, it is a remarkable fact that these gentlemen, who now, out of absolute untruthfulness and dishonesty, collect all kinds of things that are not true, that these gentlemen are, or at least are supposed to be, able to have accurate reports, for example, of the celebration of our laying of the foundation stone and the like. All the signs are that our people, our members, are basically willing to give the two gentlemen, who are the soul of the counter-action and the emerging movement, just about anything the gentlemen want.

My dear friends, it will soon be nonsense to hold closed meetings when everything from our circle is carried to Father Kully and similar people. It has to be said, because things express themselves. The assembly itself is no concern of ours; what people want to decide among themselves, they may decide among themselves, they may be as indecent as they like; they were indecent enough, as we already know. The thing that the resolution we have just been proposed by Dr. Boos is directed against is precisely what they have excreted as garbage, and what has even been spread by a Swiss newspaper. Of course we have to take a stand against that. Let them decide among themselves what they decide among themselves. Unless we hear that it is happening through spiritual-scientific communications from our members, about things that should be kept within our circles. It is said, for example, that the gentleman who is reported to have spoken in original Swiss German, that he is said to have spoken such filth that people are now said to have felt compelled to simply leave out the dirty bits. But as I said, people can discuss whatever they like among themselves, that's none of our business for the time being. I notice that they should really settle it among themselves. Because those who did not belong and are said to have gone to that meeting were shown in a very indecent manner that they had no business talking, and they were thrown out in an indecent manner. So that in the end, or at least during part of the meeting, some people who did not belong to the group do not appear to have been present at all. There may have been only a few there.

On the other hand, I would like to warn against being too lulled and again giving in to the sleep that has often been characterized here. This sleep in the face of the dangers that come to us from that side is the very worst thing that could actually happen in our ranks. And there is a lot of sleep in this direction.

Today, too, after I barely returned, I heard again that news is spreading in a certain comfort that the Catholics' behavior in such a disgraceful way, as it has happened, has brought us good friends everywhere among the non-Catholics. So for a large number of our members it is not a matter of facing the facts, but of finding another excuse for themselves to lie comfortably on their backs, on the other side, when one ear what is negotiated in the Dornacher “Ochsen” - in that meeting, of which it is said - I don't know if it is true, I emphasize this expressly - of which it is said: Such a great “Ochsen” event has never taken place in Dornach before. - But that was only because the meeting was in the “Ochsen”.

But to those who would like to go back to their cozy comfort zone, I would like to recommend paying attention to a certain statement in the report that has been written about this meeting, a statement that is already intended to be understood and that could show how significant the attacks actually are. It is said there – I don't have it verbatim right now, but it is in one of the reports – that the way Pastor Kully spoke at that Catholic gathering was quite remarkable. The person reporting this was apparently strangely touched, struck by Pastor Kully's particular turn of phrase. He says: “A unified thought did not go further through the speech; the speech did not make much sense either; but it was made up of nothing but individual images, which were presented to the people in a certain way, and which were only summarized by everything that hatred could do to present these images and these imaginations to the people, held together by the element of hatred. Anyone who is aware of the nature of the methods and polemics on certain sides also knows that such a message means an extraordinary amount, and that these things are effective.

It is necessary, or at least would be necessary, that finally, after decades of practicing anthroposophy, it could be known on our side that such things cannot be ignored, and that one cannot calm oneself by saying: Now they are being stirred up on that side, and stirred up in a very shameless way... This only wins us special friends on the other side. The point is to try to look things squarely in the eye; because the people - I have said this before - the people who are fighting on that side, they know very well what they want, they know very well how they should work, and how they should escalate things, and how they should then finally reach their goal through this clever escalation and sentiment.

So it would be better to try to face the matter squarely and realize that the situation is indeed a very dire one for us, here where we have just put what should be most sacred to us. And it would be necessary to consider that we should wake up, and to consider that it is always possible that things that should remain among us are immediately also carried to Father Arnet. Or is it not very strange, for example, when there is a message here: Pastor Arnet has spoken of how many people have been seriously affected in their health by the effects of my exercises; if he wanted to talk further about what is being reported to him, he would have to violate the seal of confession.

So, it would be a good idea to keep an eye on what is coming to the surface again and again as a result of such things, even within our ranks.

Furthermore, I consider it unworthy of us to concern ourselves with the assembly; because, right, certain things simply cannot be negotiated about anymore. When they begin to consider a certain level below decency as their own, you can no longer negotiate, you can no longer talk about the matter seriously at all. But that should not encourage anyone not to be vigilant about what comes from there.

I don't think we have anything else to discuss today. I would therefore ask those honored friends who wish to acquire the blue ribbon in their buttonhole to report to Dr. Boos.

And in a few minutes I will be back here and ask those friends who will be speaking in the next few days and are here today to come together for a very short meeting to discuss a few points on which we need to agree. So I will be back here in a few minutes.

You will have seen from several earlier contemplations, that I do not like the phrase: “We live in a time of transition”, because every age is a time of transition—a transition from the earlier time to the later one. It is only a question of in how far a time is the time of transition—and just what is changing?

For the person who can see into the spiritual world, ours is indeed the time of an important transition.The wisdom of oldest time has always pointed to this important transition. During the epochs in which a spiritual world was still spoken of truthfully—if only out of dreamlike knowing—it was always said: after a certain time had passed, the so-called Dark Age will come to an end and a light-filled age would begin. If one now examines the words of the old wise men and takes them seriously, one indeed comes to realize that they meant that the transition from the Dark to the Light Age would occur around the turn of the 19th and 20th century—the time in which we now live. But we do not have to go through Anthroposophy to a renewal of the old dreamlike wisdom. I often have said that this is not the case, that with Anthroposophy it is the question of what one can acquire as knowledge in our time through spiritual research. Anthroposophy shall therefore not be the renewal of any kind of old wisdom, but a present-day mode of cognition. But as regards the transition from the Dark Age into the Light Age, present cognition has to completely concur with the old wisdom.

Although one can hardly say that we as mankind, especially as civilized European mankind, enter from worse conditions into better ones, what the old wisdom had in mind regarding the passing over into the light age, and what we also must think today, is nevertheless true. Only we must understand matters in the right way. I would like to make clear, with the help of an example, what the difference is between a Light Age—meant in this way—and a Dark Age.

Those people who once—in about the 5th pre-Christian millennium—spoke about such Dark and Light Ages, looked at this dark age as at the continuation of an earlier Light Age, and they expressed the opinion that, after the Dark Age had lasted for some time, a Light Age would come again. It would be instructive to look back and see how—mainly in human affairs—the Light Age, which once existed (approximately in the 7th or 8th millennium) was different from the later Dark Age, out of which we as mankind shall now emerge.

I would like to make that clear by an example—as I said—through the example of healing. The example of healing is very suitable in this respect, because one can see much by it. Namely, during that Light, or illuminated age, we did not look to the physical human body. One did not think of that at all. Altogether, one did not speak during that old Light Age of illness in the manner that one still speaks today of illness, but will speak no longer in the future. Of course one had in those olden times also the phenomenon that a person experienced the decay of his organs in this or that direction, that he simple was not healthy. However, one did not speak of illness, but said right out: Death exists and He takes hold of man. One saw something like a struggle between life and death in the situation where we would say today: this person is ill. So in those olden times one did not speak of illness and health when a person had become ill in the sense we understand, but one spoke about it in this way: in him death is fighting. And making well one regarded as combating, as driving out death in this way. Illness was only a special case of death, one might say, "a little dying", and health was life.

Why did one speak that way? One spoke that way because healing was then done entirely from the etheric body of man. One did not pay attention to the physical body; instead one was healing altogether in relation to the etheric body.

How was this done? Let us assume now, that a human being had become ill of something we would call pneumonia today. The form of illness in case of pneumonia was of a somewhat different type at that time, but one can nevertheless speak of this type of illness. One then said to oneself: this person has become too dependent on the region of the earth where he lives. This took place in times when migrations of people, when the moving away from places, was more unusual than today. People—at least the majority of people--mostly spent all their life at the same place. Nevertheless in such a case one said: this person has become too dependent upon the earthly spot where he was born. In those olden times one knew very specifically: man has already had a pre-earthly existence; through the survey, so to speak,through his destiny, he had decided about the place on earth himself. Therefore one said to oneself if a person has been taken ill before his 40th year or earlier by pneumonia, then he simply has not chosen his place on earth in quite the right way. He does not quite fit on this place on earth. In short, one derived the illness from the relation his human organization had to the spot on earth on which he was.

If I would sketch this, it would be this way: (diagram 1). If one imagined the earth this way, one said to oneself: if the person lives there, then he is too strongly dependent upon this particular spot on earth. One has to heal him by freeing him inwardly from the outer dependence on this earthly spot. One can do this by bringing him into connection with the surrounding cosmos to the outer heavenly cosmos. Heaven is that which had been man's home before he came down to earth. He does not quite fit into the earthly surroundings. One has to heal him in bringing him into the right relationship to the cosmos. One did this in such a way that one said: since this person has too many effects of the earth in himself—because there is too much gravity, and what is connected with gravity, in him, one has to give him relief—one has to bring super-earthly forces into him. One said to oneself: In these or other plant-blossoms, super-earthly forces are working. Therefore one prepared these or other plants by extracting their juice. One said to oneself: this plant is blossoming at a certain season, it is blossoming at this season through the influence of the cosmos. One investigated now, how far this person is influenced by this season in particular. In olden times the dependence of a person upon the cosmic forces was investigated through a kind of horoscope. One gave then as medication something that brought his ether-body into a general vibration. One expressed it to oneself in the following way: If this is a man (diagram 2, red), then this will be his ether body. He became ill of pneumonia because his ether body in the region of the lung is too much inclined towards the earth (blue) and because the forces of the earth have too great an influence on him. Mow one simply imparts to him juices from plant blossoms, which will work in him and help him to overcome these forces (Yellow). In this way one imparted forces to him which brought him into connection with the cosmos. One was striving through this treatment to place the whole ether body into the right vibration to balance the different single incorrect vibrations. So one always was asking: what does one have to do regarding the ether body?

Altogether, how could one proceed in such a way? One could do that, because one had a distinct picture of the human ether body. One did not only see the physical human body in those old times, but one saw the physical human body luminous, one saw the ether body. Man was a being of light, and as one judges today by a person's complexion, e.g., if someone is pale, that he is ill—in the same way one formed an opinion about his state of health by his ether body, by the color, if it became red, or blue or green. On what did one base one's knowledge of the human being in those times? On the light, on that which was Light in man. One has to take it quite literally: it was the Light Age, it was the age in which one really saw what was living in man as Light.

If you look at man from today's point of view in regard to health and illness, you will find that today, also, it must be said: light has a tremendous strong influence on human health. People have to take care that they receive the right quantity of light into their organism. We know that children who at a delicate age suffer from lack of light, will contract rickets or other illnesses ,which are throughout related to a lack of light. Of course these are related to other factors, too—an illness can never be derived from only one cause—but such cases as rickets, can connected throughout with lack of light. One can relate with certainty how frequently rickets occurs among children who live in city apartments, where little light enters, and how little children are inclined to rickets—approximately, of course—who can be exposed to light in the proper way. So we can rightly say today as well that the human being takes light into himself.

But the light that man receives today is—if I may express myself that way—mineral light. Man takes up that light which is radiated onto the earth, onto the minerals, and is radiated back to him, or else the light which he receives directly from the sun. It is mineral light. The light that falls on the meadows and on the trees is also conveyed to us in a mineral way. It is dead light that we absorb through our skin, throughout our whole human being. During that old light-filled age, which preceded our dark age, men were conscious that this dead light was of no meaning to them.

The research historian of today, as well as the cultural historian know absolutely nothing about such things. The light that we appreciate so much today was not considered worthy of appreciation by men of olden times. They differentiated between the light they appreciated and the light that is so much esteemed today. For example—we sit down at the table and have plates and forks and knives, and on the plate some kind of cake or something else that is edible. We then eat the cake; naturally, we also appreciate knives and forks, but we don't eat them, they are just there. What we value as light stood in relation to what the ancients valued as light much as the utensils stand in relation to the cake. But what they regarded as light comes from the plant kingdom. This we do not take up at all any more, as it was taken up in the old light ages. We enjoy ourselves today when we can walk in the sun. The man of old enjoyed himself when he walked over a meadow, or through the woods, because he absorbed into himself—through his skin—the light that the woods had first absorbed, which had been enlivened in the woods, enlivened on the meadow. The other, the dead light—that was an addition, “trimmings,” as it were. For us, the trimmings have become the main thing. The man of old lived in the light, which the flowers, the trees of the woods gave to him. For him that was a source of being quickened inwardly with light, with inner living light and not with dead light. With our abstract joy of the woods, with our abstract joy about flowers, with all that, we have, basically, what I might call philistinism, in the cosmic sense. It may still be very beautiful, but it is philistine in contrast to what was existing in the old people as inner jubilation of the soul in face of the wood, of the meadow, in face of all that was living outside. The man of old felt himself related with his trees, with all that was for him precisely the suitable plant. He felt sympathy and antipathy in the most animated way with this or that plant. We, for example, walk across such meadows as those around the Goetheanum in autumn. We judge in a philistine way: the meadow saffron, the colchium autumnale might perhaps be beautiful. The man of old passed by these plants and became sad, so that even his skin seemed to become somewhat dry. He even sensed something like his hair becoming limp. While, when he passed—let us say, by red blooming plants, they might be such plants as the poppy is today, his hair became downy, soft. Thus he experienced the light of the plants in an absolute way. It was the light-filled age, and his whole cultural life was directed accordingly. Accordingly it was also directed that he could heal—that is, could combat death—through observation and treatment of the ether body.

This remained effective for a long time and we still see, when we go back to the older Greek medicine, to Hippocrates, how one spoke then of the “humors” of man, of a black or light bile, of blood and of phlegm. This was really thought about as remembrances of the old light age. Phlegm was essentially taken to mean the ether body and blood, those vibrations which the astral body effects in the ether body, and so on, So these after-effects were still there, and basically only at the time of Galen did one start to rely on the mere physical world, including the remaining human cultural life. The conception of man, in as far as it should be the foundation for processes of healing, received a physical character. One looked at the physical body.

But it was in fact only at the great turn in the first half of the 15th century that one did not know anything at all any more of the human ether body, not even how it expresses itself in the temperaments; that one began to look more and more only at the physical body of man. The older physical medicine was still something else than it was to become later, mainly in the 18 and 19th centuries. The old physical medicine always had traditions, at least, of the earlier healing through the ether body. One really has the impression that in this older European medicine, one had retained old principles and had only carried them over into the physical. In a certain way the physical human organism still continued to be seen as under the influence of the etheric organism. Only in more recent times—in the time of Copernicus and Galileo—did one begin to observe more and more merely the physical human body and cease to know something the earlier times had known in an exact way. Today one thinks: if man eats this or that substance, which one finds out there in nature, it will stay basically the same inside the human organism. But that is not true. Only the salts remain approximately the same. But all that is there in the animal and plant kingdom becomes something entirely different in the human organism. The human organism changes it completely. One knew that the human physical organism “is not from this world” in its inner consistency and one knew fundamentally that becoming ill is nothing else than a continuation of what happens through eating. In fact there was a time, especially among the Arabian physicians, when one regarded every digestion as a partial process of illness, where one looked at digestion in a way that.was not really wrong; when man has eaten, he has brought something foreign into himself and that he really is “sick”. He must first, through his inner organism, through inner organic functions, overcome the illness. So that one continuously lives in a state of being “a little bit sick,” and “a little bit overcoming the illness.” One eats oneself sick and one digests oneself well again. This was in fact for some time, especially among Arabian physicians, a point of view which is altogether—if I may express myself that way—something quite healthy, because there exists no real borderline between what one calls today “eating oneself well” and “eating oneself ill.” Just think how easy it is to get one's stomach in disorder, something that—as one says—could normally still be overcome, quickly goes over into something one cannot overcome any more. Then one is simply sick. But the borderline is really not to be drawn at all.

It is just as difficult to draw a borderline regarding confusions between something that still can be evened out in a completely natural way and something where one has to come and give help through a process of healing. So once one correctly saw illness as a continuation of eating—eating that was not done correctly. One studied the daily process of digestion, that is: digesting oneself into health; this one studied.

In this respect it is quite a good practice if one person or another who cannot tolerate this or that food unsalted, adds more salt for himself. Somebody else even has to add pepper, others add paprika—isn't that so? Because he cannot digest the things just as they are, he adjusts them to his needs. There again is no borderline, if somebody needs pepper or paprika as a healing factor; there again is no borderline, if one gives more pepper or paprika, so one can digest oneself well, or if, when things get worse, one takes something out of the mineral kingdom. It does not matter if one then gives that as addition to the food, or as medicine. There again things flow into each other, there is again no borderline.

What was therefore known in a precise way was that if man takes something completely from the outer world, this will injure his inner organism and he must by all means overcome it. If finally I push a rusty nail into myself and my organism has to fester it out, or if I bring something into my stomach, which must not be allowed to stay that way, and my organism has to go through all these processes so it can assimilate this—these are only gradations of difference. But the knowledge that the human organism is not of this earth, and that it can sustain itself on this earth only if it is continuously stimulated to overcome the forces of this earth—this knowledge did exist. Namely, we do not eat to get this or that food into oneself, but we eat so that we can develop the forces inwardly which can overcome this food. We eat to bring forth resistance to this earth, and we live on this earth in order to bring forth resistance.

But this was gradually forgotten. One just took the whole matter in a materialistic way and finally one only still tried to see if this or that substance in these or other plants might give help. Yes, you see that is what was once meant, and what we again must have in mind regarding the dark age. Everything has simply become dark. In earlier times one looked at the light ether-body, and regarded this as man. Now one does not see anything of this light any more. One perceives only where there is matter, and one holds on to the dead light. But this dead light gives man only abstract conceptions, it has brought forth only intellectualism. But today we stand in a transition to the necessity to recognize the light again in a new way. Before, man knew within himself: he had this light ether body. Now we must increasingly develop such knowledge, and recognize the etheric in the outer world, especially in the plant kingdom.

Goethe made a beginning with this in his theory of metamorphosis, although he still put the whole into abstract conceptions. This must develop more and more into Imaginations. And we must be clear that we simply must reach the point of perceiving the being of the plant in luminous pictures. While man himself was luminous in the earlier light age, in the future nature around us, as far as it is plant-world, has to become aglow in the most manifold Imaginations of plant forms. And just with the help of these plant forms, luminously shining forth, will we be able to find new remedies in the plants. This necessity confronts us. While man in the earlier light age saw an inner light, people of the present age have the obligation of “seeing” in the outer world, to behold again a light, this light in the outer world.

This light can be kindled, if one deepens more and more the study of spiritual science. You may say: spiritual science, Anthroposophy—there also I read only concepts, and finally, if I read Occult Science, I also find only concepts there; that does not give me an occasion to really “perceive.” Yet, my dear friends, this Occult Science does have a twofold goal. The first is that one learns to know what is related there; but that is not the whole. If you have read my Occult Science like another book, then you will know only the match. But if you want to have fire, you must not say: this match is no fire! It is nonsense to say, if he gives me a match, that he gives me fire, it does not look like fire! Occult Science does not look like clairvoyance; that is like saying the match does not look like fire. Yet it will look like fire if you will but strike the match. And if it does not work the first time, you will strike another time, and so on. That is how it is with Occult Science. If you have read it like another book, then it is simply only “the match,” but if you have rubbed it in the right way in your whole human being, then you will see, it kindles! It has kindled only a little! But it does kindle, my dear friends. And the person who says: this remains far away from what one is striving for, namely clairvoyance, he will only look at the match and not strike it. But the fact is, one must first know the match, otherwise one will give oneself up to the illusion that one could kindle it with a pin. Of course, you cannot kindle it with a pin—that is, with modern science—you can do it only with a real match.

The human race is confronted precisely by this necessity and it may be especially shown in something such as medical knowledge and medical ability. If one will find the transition from a mere looking at the darkness in substances—in the way that one somehow looks at a plant blossom, as it is done today—to an imaginative way of looking, by “striking the match”—then one acquires the knowledge of how this or the other substance will affect the human being. And if one now thinks over the matter a little, one has to say to oneself: today's mankind is confronted with that: out of the darkness it should enter again into the light, it should learn to judge in a light-filled way.

I want to make this clear once more by an example. Let us assume that a physician of today is making a diagnosis of, let us say, an enlargement of the heart. He does it the way it is done today. One cannot do much with such a diagnosis. Perhaps one has tried if this or that can help here. But the fact is that one does not have any comprehensive connections. One does not have anything comprehensive because one does not look through the whole matter. A real penetration of the whole would result in the following: Assume once that the human being, as I have, presented him quite often, renews his organism after seven years. But I also mentioned last time how this renewal comes about. There are always unfinished substances in a way sent upwards or also forwards or downwards by the kidneys' system. From the head the rounding off is done (diagram 3) so that continuously such waves (blue) are coming from the head-system, which give form, and that through the kidney-system such effects take place—four times faster—which are broken off and formed by the waves (red) as I described.

Take an organ such as the heart (orange). There too such an exchange takes place in every human after 7 or 8 years. The heart is being renewed. It is made anew. What you see at the fingernails, that they grow outwards and always grow again after one cuts them off, that is also the case with the whole human being: he renews the material substance from the center. Now assume once that the rhythmic man might not be in order, that it might be so for his organization, that the rays from the kidney system burst forth much too rapidly, so that the right relation of 4 to 2 is not there. That varies for the individual—every person is an individuality in this respect—but it is the case in regard to his whole construction as a human being. Assume then, that this is not in order, that the radiation from the kidney-system is pushing too fast. What will happen thereby?

The following can happen. The process of renewal is indeed happening continuously; let us then imagine that the new heart moved in (red) before the old heart is completely ejected (diagram 4, light). Then it goes too fast. If the renewal goes on too fast, such phenomena as an enlargement of the heart occurs. First and foremost you can detect in the beginning of an enlargement of the heart that something is not in order in the activity of the kidney. Just where you take this matter of a renewal of the human being in 7-8 years seriously you will see: if that which will come as renewed substance is already there after 6 years, that which is there as the old heart has not yet been removed sufficiently and the organ expands, or tries at least to expand itself. That is how one must learn to look at things; one must learn to see things in living movement. That is what confronts us. One must see most of all what one always has seen in fixed limits. How does the physician today make a diagnosis?

The physician of today comes to a diagnosis in such a way that he likes best to trace down the contours of the heart to what it is as a finished organ. It is not so much the question of looking at what the finished organ is, since it simply is an organ that is always floating away and getting pushed back again. In this going away and pushing back there is something inwardly mobile. If I lay hold of it, it is essentially as if I were to lay hold of lightning—it is constantly in movement, Therefore if I want to comprehend man, I have to grasp him in his liveliness. This liveliness I understand and find today only if I understand the whole world, and man out of the world and cosmos. This is what we are confronted with: every thing has to pass over into knowledge that is flexible. It is something dreadful if we keep the children in school immobile. For example, it is always quite grievous for me to see the children use any kind of finished triangle, with which they make all sorts of things. This fixed object is really nothing. One should really have a kind in which the triangle can be shifted. This is the point: that the children get the conception in the right way that everything should be grasped in movement. (diagram 5).

It is, of course, dreadfully difficult to get an understanding in regard to these things with such people who want their peace and quiet, who are already angry, when children are making a row—and now the tools for instruction are making a row! It is, of course, something dreadful: but it is so, we have to change over to liveliness. All this taken together results in the challenge to move upward into the light, luminous
age. Out of the dark age we must enter into the light luminous age.

And because people can not do it—that is, they imagine that they cannot do it—because people do not want it, because people cling to the old, and don't want to step into the new, and because the old does not fit any more—it is because of this that we experience the terrible catastrophes in our present time. And we will experience them still more if people don't want to take the trouble to enter into the new.

What occurs as catastrophe is the reaction of the dark age, which does not belong in our time. But it is, of course, terribly difficult to come to an understanding. At best something like an inkling appears in the contrasting attitude between the old people and youth today, like an inkling of the new light: filled age. Young people say as a rule: oh, the old people are philistines. This also has its forerunners. The great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had something of an inkling beforehand of this in making the classical declaration, that one really should kill all people at the age of thirty because man is only a decent human being up to his 30th year. This is a famous sentence of Fichte and since Goethe at the time that Fichte made this sentence was already considerably older, he was terribly annoyed and has ridiculed this whole theory in the second part of his Faust. It was really provoking for Goethe, of course! So one finds that youth agrees that the old people are philistines, but up to now no serious results have come about in this matter, because young people declare this up to a certain age and then become even greater philistines than the old ones have been. Even this side must be looked upon from an inner vantage point.

What I mean is the question that we already know: either Spenglerism—that is, the decline of the West—or taking the trouble to adjust ourselves to the new appearance of the light age in contrast to darkness, during which men were “earthworms” in regard to the cosmos. It cannot be different. But for a while in the course of history man had to he an earthworm because otherwise he would have been taken up completely by the light. He could strive to gain his freedom only during the dark age, and most of all during the termination of the dark age, in the more recent times. He could acquire his freedom only because the light left him unmolested so that he could lead an earthworm existence.

But now I tell you: men of the light ages preferred to receive the light of the plant world. The plants were, so to speak, drinking the cosmos light and man in turn drank the light out of the cup the plants presented to him.

Today we have only the dead light. But on the rays of the dead light Christ has come and has achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. That is the great cosmic Mystery of the newer time. Though we have the dead light—the dead light that cannot make us blessed—yet on this dead light's rays has Christ entered the earth and achieved the Mystery of Golgotha. And though outwardly we have around us the dead light we can bring the Christ in us to life. And with Christ in us in the right way we will enliven all of the light on earth around us—we will carry life into the dead light, we ourselves will have a reviving effect on the light. This means we must enter the new age with the right Christ impulse. The denial of the Christ-impulse is the basis of all that keeps men away from seeing rightfully how a dark age transits into the light age.

It is really so. Where the plant grows out of the earth (diagram 6) it develops the seed bud—as I have shown you already—still through the forces of the previous year; only the petals grow out of this year's light. What pulls the plant out of the earth really comes from the previous year. So it was actually conserved light which the plants once gave to man during the old light age. We have to find the possibility to comprehend the dead light with the mind and heart that is engendered in us if we receive the strength of Christ in the living perception of the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we will revive the light as I have indicated. But we can do that only if we learn to try to look at all things in the way I have tried to describe to you in these lectures.

My dear friends! First, we will speak the verse that comes to us as an adjuration out of the world-all itself, summoning us to self-awareness.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

It is most certainly insight into oneself, my dear brothers and sisters, that can lead us in a spiritual sense to insight into the world. And it has often been said, how appreciation must be there for the streaming forth of a true spiritual knowledge out of the spiritual world itself, how a person must have an appreciation of this, that of those who can impart such knowledge of the spiritual world, that they will certainly have approached the Threshold, at the Threshold where the Guardian of the Threshold stands, the Guardian that there protects a person in ordinary consciousness from entering the spiritual world unprepared.

But as soon as one gets to know this Guardian, initially through a healthy human mental appreciation, and later by really getting to know, after one’s healthy human mental appreciation leads the way to an appreciation of the true constitution, the reality in being of the Guardian, then this Guardian places there what we confront as an admonition, when we first seek to enter the spiritual world in the proper manner, and then in the proper manner when we seek to remain within the experience of the spiritual world.

Now as it has also often been said, remaining in the spiritual world for the most part proceeds improperly, due to one’s wanting something else to take place instead of the reality of being in the spiritual world. Such a person wants it to be similar to the sensory world. But this is not being in the spiritual world. It is suddenly supersensory, and it cannot simply lead to the sort of gazing about that is like gazing about with the senses. This sort of imagination of supersensory gazing is only a picture. It must lead to real experiencing of the spiritual world. And quite a few of you have this experience of the spiritual world, my dear brothers and sisters, many more than you might think. They just don’t quite notice it, they pay it no attention, how it actually maintains dominion within their soul experiencing. It actually rules, and part of its action there is to bring into intimate presence of mind the true realization of this ruling actuality.

Toward this end knowledge should flow ever and again, immediately out of the spiritual world into these Class lessons knowledge should be flowing to you, my brothers and sisters, and it should become ever more and more your actual point of departure in making tangible your human soul in the spiritual world. And the following can be such a declamation of wisdom.

Take any one of the mantras, or any other meditative verse, and recite all that lies within such a mantra. It certainly does not come down to which one it is, but rather to one specific mantra, one specific mantra, however, that is quite well known by you. For your meditation take the mantra and say it to yourself in the most beautiful manner in which you can say it, bringing it forth for yourself, into your presence. Make it, say it to yourself, not right away in a loud tone, but rather in a soft peaceful tone, and so bring forth the specific mantra.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

And then, when you yourself have brought forth such a mantra, try to sense how it works in you, how it is. In this manner try to reach it, so that you sense the speech, you sense what sort of difference there is in your body between the condition of your being at peace, and the condition of your speaking. And so try to sense the speech in your organs, in its coursing. You ought to feel it in its forceful coursing and reverberating entrainment even in the organ of speech.

And when you have caught the aroma of its sense and feeling, then each of you must ask the following of yourself. “If I am thinking about something so as to bring my attention to bear on it, perhaps something someone said to me and I am thinking about, an otherwise external experience that has made an impression on me, in order to make it clear, when I think about something in this way, as it were, can I also sense its aroma, its feeling?

Well, when you have learned to sense speech, then it will be easy for you in addition to become able to sense thinking, made immediate when presented in this way. So in this way you can also sense thinking. It is lighter and quieter in sensing than is speech, but it may be sensed. By sensing speech, you can learn to sense the aroma of thinking, to perceive thinking.

It is good to undertake such an exercise, for such an exercise generally eases the way to intimate self-observation.

And then you proceed, my dear brothers and sisters, so that you now make a thought active in yourself, a memory-thought, perhaps something that you thought about a few days ago, or weeks, or months, some thought, however, that you can make really active within yourself. Then try to sense this memory-thought, try to perceive it, and you will have the feeling that in perceiving it you localize it underneath speech, you perceive it therefore below, below the localization of speech [yellow]. And you will say to yourself something like, “When I speak, I experience it in the region of my organ of speech, when I think, I experience it over this in my head, but when I remember, I experience it underneath the thinking.”

For this to be intimate experiential knowledge for you, if you really feel it to be so, then you will have already engaged in the spirit to some extent, which can generally be the beginning of a further progressive spiritual engagement. A great disconnectedness from the other experiences of the day is necessary, however, in order to sense it inwardly in this way. And it is not good to say to yourself, “Well of course, to attain such disconnectedness, I must take a couple of weeks off sometime to go where there are no other people, where nothing will disturb me, where I will have absolute peace and quiet, away all by myself, possibly to a cottage on Mont Blanc, in order to bring it about.” It is not good to think like this, for what is best is rather to remain in the middle of all the strife of life, to be exposed to all that life brings from morning until evening, and through all this, through one’s own power of soul, to find a certain time, be it ever so brief, to be totally outside the strife of the world, remaining within yet totally outside, purely through the power of one’s inner nature totally outside. That is best. In the solitude of going away by oneself, in order to find peace and quiet, that is certainly not the thing that is most effective, but rather through one’s own power to engender the solitude, that is the very thing that absolutely and certainly can lead to the goal. And in this manner a good foundation will be established, concerning specifically the ability to practice meditating, which most certainly is needed.

You have become acquainted with mantras, my dear brothers and sisters, to be effectively spoken out of stillness of soul. The first mantras in the Class lessons have certainly been of this sort. But we have forged ahead by means of such mantras, which in part ring forth from the soul, and which also in part must be envisioned as intonations coming to us from the breadth of the world, so that in meditating we not only speak them inwardly, but also in meditating we hear them inwardly, so that we shift our position in thinking, and so hear them coming to us, being spoken to us, out of the depths of space, out of spirit-being. And directly out of this reorientation of ourselves into other entities speaking to us, directly out of this reorientation of ourselves in such a way, we may become able to really consummate this soul-reorientation inwardly, thereby feeling ourselves within the spiritual world.

Please note that today’s mantra ought to be given over to this goal. The human soul must now imagine itself to be entirely silent, utterly silent. But it should imagine that it is already on the other side of the Threshold, already in the spiritual world before which the Guardian stands, and there the soul hears three different intonations. While it remains entirely silent itself, it hears three different intonations. The first intonation resounds out of the breadth of the world-all. The second comes from the Guardian. And the third comes from the various beings that become identified by the mantra. So should it be thought, that which comes forth to your souls today as the mantra. So, out of the breadth of the world sounding forth and arriving from all sides,

Examine¹ the field of thinking.

Just so we take up, we focus our attention on becoming clear about the true nature of thinking by means of a spiritual, soulful experience of the world.

Then the Guardian speaks. And as the sounding forth unto us out of the breadth of the world fades away, the spirit of which we must dwell within, then the Guardian speaks.

He speaks, who you the ways
From earthly life to earthly life
Will show in spirit light:

That is the Guardian’s speech.

Then the Angelic being speaks, who accompanies us from earth-existence to earth-existence.

Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

That is also the being, that as an Angelic being, as an Angel, conducts us from incarnation to incarnation. So is this line spoken. We hear it living, inwardly in contemplation.

The Guardian speaks again.

He speaks, who on to souls
In realms of being material free,
Will carry you on wings of soul.

Then the next line sounds, spoken by a caring being watching over us from the hierarchy of the Archangels.

Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.²

That comes down from where the Archangels are.

First it was “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.” In reality, it really is this way, similar to the sun’s glowing in sensory life. In sensory life, our senses do not seem to glow, but in actuality, they also really glow. Nevertheless, even though our senses are actually glowing, we do not take note of it. So the being admonishes us, the being belonging to us from the ranks of the Angels, “Look to your senses’ radiant nature.”

As we go about thinking in customary awareness, we generally don’t really examine the thinking, we don’t really sense it as such. We don’t actually perceive it. The being that belongs to us from the realm of the Archangels admonishes, “Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.”

Now it progresses to where the Archai are. The Guardian admonishes in three lines, and we ought to hear this being’s admonition as coming from the ranks of the Archai. The next three lines are the lines of the Guardian.

He speaks, who among spirits
In creator fields far from earth
Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.³

I could also say “the throne of existence-awareness,” but “the grounds of existence-awareness” is better, for it will give you a sort of spiritual floor, much as here in the sensory world you have a physical floor.

After the Guardian of the Threshold has spoken this, then the being from the ranks of the Archai speaks.

Look to memory’s picture-forming.

That is the third. First, we are to look to the radiant nature of our senses, then to thinking’s forceful affect working in us, then to that which lies deep underneath, to what lies underneath speech, to what lies in the constituting of memory, “Look to memory’s picture-forming.”

And so we ourselves have managed in this disparate fashion to bring the three-part speech to our ears, first the speech from the cosmos in the very first line, “Examine the field of thinking,” then the Guardian’s respective three lines lying between directives from the cosmos and the specific hierarchies, and finally the lines of the being belonging to us out of the actual realms of the hierarchies, always speaking the specific paradigm-line, in certainty to the most profound part of our being. It is all brought together in the following manner, which I will then write down.

Examine the field of thinking:

He speaks, who you the ways

From earthly life to earthly life

Will show in spirit light:

Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

He speaks, who on to souls

In realms of being material free,

Will carry you on wings of soul:

Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.

He speaks, who among spirits

In creator fields far from earth

Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.

Look to memory’s picture-forming.

[The mantra was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “thinking was underlined, and in each case the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]

1. Examine the field of thinking

1. He speaks, who you the ways

   From earthly life to earthly life

   Will show in spirit light:

   Look to your senses’ radiant nature.

2. He speaks, who on to souls

   In realms of being material free,

   Will carry you on wings of soul:

   Look to your thinking’s forceful impact.

3. He speaks, who among spirits

   In creator fields far from earth

   Will give you the grounds of existence-awareness.

   Look to memory’s picture-forming.

With this we have it, which as an admonition for our self-awareness sounds forth out of the three lower hierarchies, experienced inwardly in soul: the first from the hierarchy of the angels, the second from the hierarchy of the archangels, the third from the hierarchy of the Archai. [“Angels” was written next to the first part, “Archangels” next to the second part, and “Archai” next to the third part.]

Before the exercise is utilized, soul-concentration can be engendered by means of a person’s bringing up before the soul a certain well-defined picture: picture an eye gazing overhead [an eye was drawn] beholding the sphere of the higher hierarchies [a curving arc] which the forces of the world allow to stream down upon the eye [upper rays], and that then beholds the sphere of the lower hierarchies [a wavy line] that intertwines itself with the higher hierarchies and sends the rays further on to human beings [lower rays].

This picture may be called up before the soul and held there in mind, the outward-looking eye, the two lines, one curved and one wavy, and the rays that come down. And you imagine yourself actually there while practicing the exercise, but without thinking further about the picture, so that while practicing the exercise, the picture remains before the soul, the picture of this outward-looking eye.

Then a person again takes up, attends to, hearkens to the sounding forth from all sides of the cosmos:

Examine the field of feeling.

Spoken then by the Guardian, the next three lines are:

He speaks, who as thought
Out of spirit sun-rays
Calls you to world existence-awareness:

It is already a higher speech, a speech that rings forth from higher hierarchies. Here [in the first mantra], we are always merely made to take note of what is already in us, whereas we are spoken to here in this mantra, by the Guardian, so that we are not merely called to observe our senses, our thinking, and our remembering, but rather so that we are called to taking note of how we ourselves are called out into the world, into world existence-awareness. That sounds forth from the hierarchy of the Exusiai.⁴

Spoken forth then by the being who belongs to us from the hierarchy of the Exusiai:

Feel in your breath life stirring.

Spoken again by the Guardian, the next three lines are:

He speaks, who world existence-awareness
Out of star-life-forces
Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Then the being speaks from the hierarchy of the Dynamis:⁵

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

Here we must think steadfastly on the interwoven fabric of the world, feeling it actually, within the vibrant activity of our blood.

And the Guardian speaks again, now admonishing us, that we should hearken unto what is spoken by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes:⁶

He speaks, who spirit-sense
In light-filled gods-high-realms
Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Then the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes speaks:

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

Only when a person feels this mighty counter striving of earth-forces can a person properly remain within the purely spiritual world.

So now experience this mantra sounding as a unity:

Examine the field of feeling:

He speaks, who as thought

Out of spirit sun-rays

Calls you to world existence-awareness.

Feel in your breath life stirring.

He speaks, who world existence-awareness

Out of star-life-forces

Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

He speaks, who spirit-sense

In light-filled gods-high-realms

Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

In ascending into the ranks of the second hierarchy, self-awareness will be quickened in us, as an entity belonging to us from the ranks of the Exusiai admonishes us. At first the Guardian will direct us, then such a being will speak to us.

Now, my dear brothers and sisters, we think in life on earth, but our thoughts are quite in vain. When, however, a being from the ranks of the Exusiai thinks, it thinks us as such. Our ego is being thought. And it is brought into being as the thought of a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. If on the earth we say “I” to ourselves, just what are we gazing upon? Yes, this ego, when we say “I” [it was drawn, a circle with the word “I” in gold], we look back on this ego [red arrows], in articulating the word “I”. But for a being from the ranks of the Exusiai [green line], for such a being this ego is a thought, but a thought with more reality, with more actuality. We exist in that we are thought by a being from the ranks of the Exusiai. And when we say “I” to ourselves, we are certainly stating in this way, that we have been thought into being by a heavenly being. And in this thought-becoming by a heavenly entity is contained our higher being.

Then, an entity from the ranks of the Dynamis admonishes us, that we are endowed by him with spirit-presence-in-being, which he abstracts out of life-forces from the stars and bestows on us.

And a being out of the ranks of the Kyriotetes admonishes us, that what lives in us specifically as will upon the earth, will be drawn out into the heights of heaven, and in the transmutation that takes place there, our will of earth again will be given to us, so that we can then utilize it in spirit-willing. Earth-willing is merely a transmutation of spirit-willing. Earth-willing of course will be trundled out down below and also above. On high it is heavenly-willing; below it is earth-willing. Of this we are admonished in closing, first by the Guardian, then by the being from the ranks of the Kyriotetes, who says, “Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.” [Mantra II was now written on the board and at the same time in the first line “feeling” and correspondingly the last lines of parts 1,2, and 3 were underlined.]

2. Examine the field of feeling

1. He speaks, who as thought

   Out of spirit sun-rays

   Calls you to world existence-awareness.

   Feel in your breath life stirring.

2. He speaks, who world existence-awareness

   Out of star-life-forces

   Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

   Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

3. He speaks, who spirit-sense

   In light-filled gods-high-realms

   Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

   Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

And so therefore the second mantra runs as follows:

Examine the field of feeling:

He speaks, who as thought

Out of spirit sun-rays

Calls you to world existence-awareness.

Feel in your breath life stirring.

He speaks, who world existence-awareness

Out of star-life-forces

Would bestow on you in spirit realms.

Feel in your blood’s welling-weaving.

He speaks, who spirit-sense

In light-filled gods-high-realms

Will fashion for you out of will of earth.

Feel earth’s mighty counter striving.

The first is intoned from the ranks of the Exusiai,
the second from the ranks of the Dynamis,
the third from the ranks of the Kyriotetes.

[Exusiai was written next to part 1, and correspondingly Dynamis and Kyriotetes next to parts 2 and 3.]

Once again in ending, so that we may remember what we have fashioned before ourselves as a picture, after all of it has run through us, so that we may have a clear experience of it all, let us place before ourselves once again the picture, which we were to have envisioned as ever standing before our souls during the entire exercise, let us pointedly place it once again before our souls. [This picture, already drawn on the board before the writing of the mantra “Examine the field of thinking”, was now again drawn on the board, the eye, the curving arc, the upper rays, the curvy line, and the lower rays.]

The further ascent into the ranks of the Seraphim, the Cherubim, and the Thrones will properly become appended to all this in the next Class lesson. However just now it may be possible to make somewhat more comprehensible and intelligible what the sense of the whole is.

My dear brothers and sisters, coming to us at the beginning of today’s Class lesson was the formulation, coming out of universal existence-awareness, coming forth out of the essential true nature of the world, admonishing us to self-awareness. Self-experience, it was alleged, leads to true knowledge of the world, although only if and when we can place the self in unity with the world.

But the self does not stand in fanciful relationship to any external entity or process of nature, but rather solely to what is in the spiritual world. That is where the beings of the hierarchies are. If we really wish to penetrate into our self, into the part of our being from which we can say “I”, then we must not coexist with external nature, but rather we must coexist with the beings of the hierarchies. For whatever emerges from external nature that can be spoken of as our inner nature, all that is certainly merely the empty external reflection of our true inner nature. What we truly refer to when we say “I” stands in the same realm within which also stand the higher hierarchies. As soon as a person enters into true self-awareness, he must enter into the ranks of the higher hierarchies. He must then take into account the language of the higher hierarchies.

So that one might do this with full force, not merely making it into a theory drained of blood, but rather doing it with full force, for this reason the admonitions of the Guardian of the Threshold are forever emplaced right there. So that the whole meditation approaches us with due greatness and majesty, for this reason placed there are the two powerful admonitions from the cosmos, “Examine the field of thinking,” and “Examine the field of feeling,” and subsequently the third, which we will hear next time.

If and only if we hold this three-part declamation within our hearts and minds full of life and force, if and when we experience ourselves in this mantric manner in the spiritual world, then we can really bring things forward. For only then have we grasped things in the appropriately correct spirited mood. We must seek this spirited mood in all things. For the actual inner sanctity which must be present, and meditation ought to be conducive, ought to lead to sanctity, this actual inner sanctity comes to one most certainly only through a spirited demeanor, through a specific spirited mood, one in which we are enraptured by the external world for a while, but one in which alone and solely within oneself the content and matter of the meditation is lived. When we entirely full of life attune our inner demeanor in this manner, then self-awareness is not just a sort of brooding within our inner nature, but it is rather a seed-awakening conversation with the world in the widest sense, with the Guardian, and with the Hierarchies. And then we find ourselves in the depths of true self-awareness.

This ought to be taken up by us quite broadly, so that we take it as a ground-rule, to avoid thinking on such things, unless at the same time we can bring this spirited mood to bear on it. And so we should henceforth only think about such things, such as were brought forward today, if and when we can really bring forth within the soul this demeanor, this fundamental accompaniment to our perception, as the majesty of world-wide cosmic distances presses in upon us with a universal thunderclap, as within this in a soft, admonishing voice is intoned all that comes from the Guardian of the Threshold, and as then in compelling fashion a certain being of the Hierarchies itself speaks to our souls.

And only then, when we keep this in memory, and when we bring up the feeling accompanying this memory, specifically only then should we think on this mantra, only then setting ourselves inwardly in relationship with this mantra, so that in this way we should not inwardly desecrate it, thereby desecrating its power, that we may well do by thinking about it with the type of customary, dry, philistine thinking with which we usually think, rather than placing ourselves first in the appropriate mood and demeanor of soul.

And in this regard, we should also make sure that we obtain this mood of soul in order to feel that human self-awareness is something special, serious, and holy, and that in fact, these things should only be spoken inwardly by the soul, silently then externally, so that they come into perception as serious, special, and sacred.

A great hindrance in progressing along an esoteric path is just this, that these things are spoken about so frequently in cliques, in which this serious, special, sacred, spirited nature is not developed at the same time, but rather, even in flights of fancy, these things are gossiped about. In doing this one forgets that in esoteric life all depends on the dominion of truth, proper full truth. Progress cannot be made in esoteric life by one who does not have this knowledge, that in esoteric life truth, full truth, must have dominion, that a person therefore cannot simply speak about the truth and then nevertheless approach such things merely in the way external profane things are approached, in the manner of making these things the subject matter of customary chitter-chatter.

And this, which happens so frequently, this customary chitter-chatter, this is what so very often places hindrances and constraints along the esoteric path. And so we must absolutely bring a serious, special, sacred, spirited tenor of soul along in focusing on all that belongs to self-awareness. Then we will also be able to allow the word to work on our soul in the proper manner, the word which in conclusion shall now be spoken again, just as it was spoken at the beginning of today’s Class lesson:

O Man, know yourself!

Yes indeed, that is a directive to self-awareness.

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.

You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?

Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

Fundamentally, it is a question. The answer is given in such as this. [The mantras on the board were indicated.]

• 1. Vernimm is the modified second person singular command form of nehmen, and means “to take up and use.” In English it is much the same as an instructor saying, “Let us take up and examine …” Perceive, which means to understand, is not quite the correct translation, but is close. Examine is also a good translation in that it has a syntactical prefix modifying the base word appropriately. The base word is Amen, a very ancient word in semitic languages as well as in Greek, Latin, and in English meaning take this in, have faith in it, for it is the truth. The prefix ex- modifies it with the understanding that it is external to us, and we must use our powers of thinking, of feeling, and of willing in order to take it into us, to partake of it.
• 2. Kräftewirken: Wirken is something that really works, that has a real effect, a real impact. Kräftewirken then is forceful impact.
• 3. Daseinsgrund: It is not just Sein, which is existence, but Dasein, an existence which is conscious of itself.
• 4. Exusiai means to enthuse a thought with reality, to be the author of something that comes into being, and so the very name should fill us with enthusiasm and these beings are called authors, or authorities in English.
• 5. Dynamis means dynamic magical power, so these beings are called powers.
• 6. Kyrie, Eleison: Repetitive chanting of supplications did not last in the Roman rite, but the response Domine, miserere nobis (Lord, have mercy) persisted. After becoming Pope in 590 AD Gregory the Great changed it to the Greek Kyrie, eleison. It means Lord (in his aspect from the ranks of the Kyriotetes), grace us (undeservedly) with your glory and presence, but have mercy, do it gently, withhold your full glory and presence, as it would destroy us.

My dear friends! We have been studying the position of the human being in relation to the Guardian of the Threshold, and have led the soul in progressive steps into an understanding of the relationship a person has with the Guardian of the Threshold along the path of knowledge. Today we will initially focus our attention on the situation before Guardian of the Threshold, bringing it once again fully alive before our souls, in order to progress a bit forward by means of this esoteric consideration.

A person must forsake, and here I repeat what is appropriate for today and has been covered in prior lessons, a person must forsake the physical world, in which his customary awareness is in force. He comes to know that the sensory-physical world can be grand and joyful, but also full of sorrow and pain, that it can in fact be majestic, and that he has every reason in the world to remain within it, in his awareness. But he also comes to know that he cannot ever get to know himself if he only directs his contemplative eye and sensitive soul out upon this physical world. And he must say to himself, that it is quite grand, arrayed color upon color and arranged form on form, but that just what he himself springs from and is patterned after cannot be found in the encircling wide reaches around.

Yet even at this moment there rings forth from all sides unto a person, as the most noteworthy challenge in one’s life, the word of self-awareness: O man, know yourself!

And in this way, a person will become clearly aware that in customary life he is certainly safeguarded from entering unprepared into what in certainty is the world of his own essential being. Moreover, the Guardian of the Threshold is the same high being who shelters a person as he enters the spiritual world every night in sleep, who shelters the person from consciously experiencing what in sleep is all around him, for otherwise he would be terribly upset in experiencing all this in sleep, if he experienced it unprepared, so much so that he would not be able to continue on in waking life as a human being with strength intact. But at the same time, the Guardian of the Threshold makes it clear to a person that he, the Guardian himself, is the only portal to true, to authentic knowledge.

At this point, a person notices that he comes to an abyss, before entering the realm of knowledge, an abyss displayed as a bottomless chasm. The supporting pillars, that one stands on in the physical world, are gone. One cannot simply march over it. One can only carry himself across when freed of the physical, expressed symbolically, when one “grows wings”, so that one journeys over the abyss as a being of spirit and soul.

But first the Guardian of the Threshold calls out for you to be mindful in regard to the abyss, particularly in regard to the beasts that emerge as spirit-formations from the abyss, for these beasts are the external reflections of impure willing, feeling, and thinking, and these beasts must first be overcome. And in vivid pictures displayed before one’s eyes, willing, feeling, and thinking are revealed in the three beasts, one shown as spectral, one ghoulish, and so forth.

Then the Guardian of the Threshold shows us in greater depth how, in and of themselves, thinking, feeling, and willing can be strengthened, according to whether one has resolved in full awareness to overcome the beasts. And then, before someone actually enters the spiritual world, it is necessary to engage in situational meditations in perceiving the spiritual world, within which to discover how the cosmos speaks to a person, how the hierarchies speak to him, how at first all the things are proclaimed that await him there in the spiritual world.

And we will become progressively more aware, through what is played out before our souls in the mantras, that a person must become something else, if he would stride over the abyss, if he would live within what is on the other side of the abyss. Ever more and more, we will become aware that here on the earth, we are in the company of the beings of the three realms of nature and in the company of people, but over there we are in the company of disembodied souls and in the company of the spirits of the higher hierarchies. A different sort of acquaintanceship is present there. Quite a different constitution of soul is required there for this quite different acquaintanceship.

Once again, it is the business of the Guardian of the Threshold there to forcefully advise a person about how to comport himself, specifically about how to comport himself when striding across the Threshold and actually confronting the things of the spiritual world in their reality, about how in arriving there he must come to possess a wholly different soul-constitution.

There, a person will be aware that within himself two conditions of soul can become a reality, the soul-condition of customary awareness on this side of the abyss, and the soul-condition outside of the physical and etheric bodies on the other side of the abyss, which is the soul-condition of the purely spiritual world.

There, where the difference in these soul-conditions appear, great dangers await a person, dangers however, that initially present themselves in such a way that we have to characterize them as minor departures from normal conditions of soul, but that remain always within the soul when we characterize them properly, for they involve an extreme sickly soul-deformation. It must of course always be said, that when one’s path in the higher worlds is undertaken in the way so painstakingly delineated in the book How to Know Higher Worlds, in many smaller published anthroposophical works, and in the second part of my Outline of Occult Science, then straying from a normal soul-constitution should not happen, at least not easily. A person passing over into the spiritual world through healthy human understanding should be as fully aware of knowledge, initially, as one is through initiation. But a person must know that he may emerge in two different ways from the daily condition of soul-life that he is immersed in, if he does not pay attention to the proper sign-posts along the spiritual world’s pathway.

Here on this side of the Threshold we stand upon the earth, upon the fixed elements of earth. The ground is under our feet. The ground supports us. The watery element is around us, that also takes part in the formation of our own body. This watery element cannot support us in normal life, but infuses throughout us, attaching itself to our blood. It is contained within our forces of growth, within our forces of nourishment. The air is what we breathe. The aeriform, the gaseous element is all around us. Warmth is also all around us, the warmth-ether, the fourth element.

They are disconnected from one another in normal life. Where there is solid earth, there is no water. Where there is water, there is no air. Where there is air, there is no water. Only the fiery warmth presses into and throughout it all, for it is the only one that begins to press itself into everything.

But the moment we take leave, even the first time, my dear friends, the moment we take leave of our physical body, these differentiations cease. The different elements cease to have individual borders. We ourselves enlarge, we extend ourselves out, and we are simultaneously in earth, water, fire, and air. We can no longer differentiate one from another. The attributes held individually by the four elements cease. The earth no longer supports us, for its fixed solidity ceases. Water no longer forms us, for its formative forces cease. In other words, when we plunge into water, it is not as in swimming, where we are separated from the water, but rather it is as if we dissolve into it, as ice dissolves into warm water, as if in becoming one with the water, then we no longer carry, when we pass over into the spiritual world, we no longer carry our blood as a separate element in our vascular circulation, but rather our blood becomes one with the ever-moving watery element of the universe. And just so, air ceases to be a formative breathing-force in us. And warmth ceases to engender our ego-force, ceases to inflame us in warmth to the feeling of individuality. It all ceases. This must be confronted, it must be confronted in the proper manner, this cessation of the differentiation of earth, water, air, and fire.

To do this we may engage, in thought, in having already flown over the abyss. We have arrived on the other side, my dear brothers and sisters. There the Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us, that we should turn, lift our gaze, and face him.

Now think, my dear brothers and sisters, have a lively imagination, imagine a person’s arrival there on the other side, where in certainty the knowledge of the spiritual world is revealed to him. He is there. The Guardian of the Threshold prompts him to look about, to take up the admonitions that he now needs, that in a certain fashion he has now become accustomed to, in the soul-condition that is present there, on the other side of the Threshold, within the spiritual world, there where he lives pressed into the four elements themselves, into earth, water, air, and fire.

Just there a great danger appears, and please forgive the seeming triviality of the expression, my dear brothers and sisters, but if the person has possibly fallen in love with the illusion of disconnectedness of the solid earth, from the formative forces of water, from the creative forces of air, from the ego-awakening forces of warmth, then he may feel delighted merely in spiritual bliss, in giving himself over to the wonder of the spirit, and so he might remain within this spirit-bliss.

A person may be overwhelmed, as the alluring power of Lucifer musters up against him. It depends on his karma, whether a person is more or less susceptible to the alluring power of Lucifer. If he is susceptible, so that he simply totally and completely falls in love with dissolving into earth, water, air, and fire, then the Luciferic attaches itself to him, and he will no longer be able to emerge from this demeanor of soul. He runs the risk, when he once again returns to daily life, of remaining within this soul-demeanor. And so the Guardian of the Threshold must and does call out to him, “You may not do it. You may not fall under the sway of Lucifer. In the dissolution in earth, water, fire, and air you may not simply feel the solitary wonder of bliss. You must take yourself firmly in hand, or else, when you again return to the physical world, as a person in the physical world, when you take up the soul-condition of customary awareness of the physical world, then from then on you will be a person quite confused.”

That is the Luciferic danger, that on the return from the spiritual world, from the other side of the Threshold, a person may be bewildered and no longer have his senses about him, but would be an enthusiastic dreamer, an enthusiastic adherent of idealism, disdainful of customary awareness. That one may not do. And the Guardian of the Threshold admonishes, insistently, that one should be resolutely determined to live in the way corresponding to whatever world one is in, be it earthly or transcendental.

But the Guardian of the Threshold sets down a second admonition. The second admonition is this, that one should take care, when one has arrived on the other side with his thinking, feeling, and willing split apart, one should take care of how much of his thinking, feeling, and willing at hand is still connected to the earthly, is still inclined to the earthly.

There a person can once again be predisposed to remain in what has given him the experiences on this side in the fixed support of earth, to hold on tightly and cross over to the other side of the Threshold with a materialistic soul-constitution, to cross over with the formative forces of water frozen, solidified. Then he can become afflicted with an overweening earthly pride, and can say to himself, “In life on earth I have breathed in, have drawn into myself the very breath, out of which in times past the Father-God has formed human souls, human lives, which I can do also, when freed from earthly life’s confines.”

But if a person carries over into the spiritual world what he perceives in his breath as the creative force of God, then he falls under the sway of the Ahrimanic alluring power. In this condition he cannot return, because before he would return, there in the spiritual world he is enfolded in powerlessness. He would be non-sentient, more or less. His awareness would be disabled, crippled. In this manner, his awareness having been stunted, he would more or less be a sort of tool or implement of the Ahrimanic powers there in the spiritual world.

It is certainly so today since the beginning of the age of Michael, that the spiritual life of human beings, which today is crass and crude, frozen in materialism, is for the most part carried over as such into the spiritual world. And what this means, what it entails, is that the Ahrimanic powers enfold the human being in their grasp whenever his awareness has been stunted into something other than the condition of full wakefulness, and yes, my friends, this has been in evidence everywhere energetically ever since the outbreak of the great World War.

As I have most certainly said many times since the outbreak of the World War, the history of this war cannot be written about from the physical plane’s standpoint alone. Documents by themselves do not reveal the truth, that of the thirty or forty people who were most certainly engaged in the production of the war, a great number at various times were in a state of clouded awareness, and were therefore implements of the Ahrimanic powers. In this way much of what transpired in the World War was a legacy of Ahrimanic powers. This World War can only be written about in an occult manner. Whatever one has seen after a fashion, in his wanderings on this side of the Threshold, of various leading personalities immediately before the outbreak of the World War, all that can be taken truly to be indicative of the habits of soul that are carried over to the other side of the Threshold, and over there then become stunted, become stunted in awareness, and become, therefore, a working force of the Ahrimanic powers.

A person must be clear and fully self-possessed about this, that he may not carry back to this side, the soul-constitution of the other side of the Threshold. He may not carry the soul-constitution of this side of the Threshold to the other side, but rather, for every domain, this side and the other side of the abyss, a strongly stark human inner awareness must be developed.

It arises in this manner for all four elements in the admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold. And again, we should delve into this admonition meditatively.

Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, imagine that you are standing there on the other side of the Threshold. The Guardian has beckoned. You look straight at him. First, he calls out to you, admonishing.

Where is earth’s firmness, that supported you?

One no longer has it. But your heart moves, deep within, and would give an answer. But the heart can be moved inwardly in a three-fold manner, an answer emerging by means of and from the cosmos. It can be moved, this heart, by Christ and his force. Then it answers:

I leave its solid ground,

meaning, the earth’s firmness,

as long¹ as the spirit carries me.

That is the right demeanor of soul. I relinquish the pillars of earth, as long as the spirit carries me within the spirit-domain, as long as I am outside of the body. But the heart can also be moved by Lucifer. Then it answers:

I feel delight, that I no longer need the support.

So speaks the person in his lofty pride, in his self-satisfaction, as if he also would not need the support, when he traverses back into the physical world. Or the heart can be moved by Ahriman. Then it answers:

I will hammer it still harder by the spirit’s might.

The support is referred to here, and carrying the hammered support out and over.

No one should shrink back in fear from meditative soul-consideration of all three answers again and again, in order in this way to be able to choose and align with the first answer in freedom. For one must feel the inherent inward vacillation, the alignment with Lucifer, then with Ahriman. One must place this in meditation firmly within one’s vision. The meditation in this manner must embody the earthen element. [The first part of the mantra was now written on the board.] First the Guardian speaks:

I) Guardian: Where is earth’s firmness, that supported you?

The human heart must give answer. When moved by Christ, it answers:

Christ: I leave its solid ground, as long as the spirit carries me.

If the soul has been moved by Lucifer, it answers in this way:

Lucifer: I feel delight, that I no longer need the support.

The phrase “as long as” [The words “as long as” were underlined.] emerges from the heart, draws the eternal into temporality, and so transforms the sentence. If the heart has been moved by Ahriman, it answers in this way:

Ahriman: I will hammer it still harder by the spirit’s might.

And then, progressing further, so that the soul can fully devote itself to what stands there before it, the second admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold appears, pointing to the formative force of water. This formative force of water is what builds the fixed organs in us, drawing them out of the fluid elements. All that we take in as nourishment must first become fluid, and then the organs are formed out of it. All of a person’s sharply contoured organs have been cast out of fluid elements. This formative force ceases as soon as a person enters the domain on the other side of the Threshold. The Guardian warns, that this is the case. He calls out to us, when we stand there on the other side of the Threshold, our gaze directed onto his stern face. [The second part of the mantra was now written on the board.]

II) Guardian: Where is water’s forming force, that permeated you?

The person answers, if he has been moved in his heart by Christ, “My life extinguishes it, quenches it, as long as the spirit forms me.” The spirit begins to work on you over there, half out of your body.

Christ: My life extinguishes it,

in the sense of quenching it, putting it out, and by “it” is meant the forming force,

as long as the spirit forms me.

Again appears “as long as”, again unobtrusively. [The words “as long as” were underlined.] If the soul has been moved by Lucifer, however, then the phrase “as long as” is left out, and the sentence emerges with haughty arrogance:

Lucifer: My life expunges it, in the sense of melting it away,

Well, what has been extinguished can be rekindled, but what has been melted away, expunged, remains expunged. “My life expunges it”

that I may be released from it.

If the soul has been moved by Ahriman, then it answers:

Ahriman: My life affixes it, in the sense of holding it fast, that I may carry it to spirit realms.

Please take note, my dear brothers and sisters, how everything in mantric verse is fashioned inwardly, meaningfully, and with confident certainty. Here [The first verse was indicated.] we see, “I leave”, “I feel”, “I will.” The ego speaks in the answer. In the second verse the ego speaks, but not so egocentrically, but rather says, “My life”, as in “My life extinguishes it”, “My life expunges it”, “My life affixes it.” Any entry into all reality is only spoken about properly, if it is spoken about accurately in every aspect. Lassitude in the formation of sentences, which is appropriate for people in the physical domain, may not be carried forward into the spirit-domain. In the spirit-domain speaking must be exact and accurate.

You should also most certainly keep in mind, my dear friends, that it all corresponds to a reality, that this esoteric school has not been constituted out of human intentions, but rather out of those of the spiritual world, as was said at the outset, that all that comes to the fore here in the esoteric school of the Goetheanum, even though it is said through my mouth, is nevertheless a dictum of the spiritual world. This must be so in every rightfully constituted esoteric school, certainly in the present and in times to come, just as it was in the ancient holy mysteries. And this esoteric school is the true Michael School, the institution of those high spiritual beings partaking immediately of the inspiration of the cosmic will of Michael.

Concerning the domain of air, the Guardian of the Threshold once again speaks in admonition,

Where is air’s stimulation,² that waked³ you?

waking you into existence. As Jehovah, by means of his infusion of the breath of life into humans, transformed simple living beings, by means of the stimulus inherent in his breath, into beings that can perceive, so a person, through sensing, through the stimulus that the external world brings to bear on the senses, becomes a being who perceives. But what exactly are the senses?

My dear brothers and sisters, the senses are most certainly just refined organs of breathing. The breath broadens itself out into all the senses. As it lives in the lungs, so it lives in the eyes. Only that in the lungs it is bound up with carbon, but in the eyes with the more refined silica. In one’s organism carbonic acid is produced. [It was drawn in red and the word carbonic acid⁴ was written down.] In the senses silicic acid is produced in a much more refined state. [Drawn in yellow, silicic acid⁵ was written down.] A person lives in his lower pole where oxygen combines with carbonic acid, and in his upper pole, in the domain of his nerve-sense system, where oxygen combines with silicon, with silica, and forms refined silicic acid [green]. A human being lives in such a way, that when the breath forms up in the blood, he produces carbonic acid, and when the breath forms up in the senses, he produces silicic acid [yellow arrows], below and outwardly through the breath carbonic acid, in the senses and returning from the senses within the breathing-process silicic acid in a totally more refined dose.

The Guardian of the Threshold calls out to us concerning what is in the air:

Where is air’s stimulation, that waked you?

He who is moved by Christ in his heart answers:

My soul breathes heaven’s air,

no longer earth’s air, but heaven’s air,

as long as the spirit is about me.

The heart moved by Lucifer answers:

My soul cares not for it in spirit blissfulness.

The heart moved by Ahriman answers:

My soul absorbs it, that I may learn godlike to create.

As Jehovah once created with his breath, so those swayed by Ahriman absorb the air, in order to carry it along while crossing over into the spiritual world.

III) Guardian: Where is air’s stimulation, that waked you?

The heart moved by Christ speaks:

Christ: My soul breathes heaven’s air, as long as the spirit is about me

The heart moved by Lucifer speaks:

Lucifer: My soul cares not for it in spirit blissfulness.

The air’s power to stimulate is not noticed at all.

The heart moved by Ahriman speaks:

Ahriman: My soul absorbs it, that I may learn godlike to create.

Concerning the fiery or warmth elements, the Guardian now speaks his last elementary word, admonishing that a person should not lose himself in the element of warmth, but also not carry over into the spiritual world the warmth-element as it is in physical existence, as displayed on earth.

Just before I do this, however, my dear brothers and sisters, I would like to call your attention to this progression along the ascent:

“I” is spoken by the person first.
“My life” is spoken next by the person.
“My soul” is then spoken by the person.

Now the Guardian speaks in warning concerning the fiery elements: [The fourth part of the mantra was written on the board, and at the same time in the Christ-line “as long as” was underlined.]

IV) Guardian: Where is fire’s cleansing,

or cleansing catharsis

that inflamed in you the I?

Our ego lives in warmth, in what presses into and throughout us as warmth. I have often, my dear brothers and sisters, remarked on this in the esoteric school, that the fixed elements remain unconscious within, and also the fluid elements, even though in one’s feeling of satisfaction, one already feels the perfusion of the fluid elements. In satiety or in hunger one experiences the essential nature of the fluid element. The aeriform element is experienced soulfully. A person becomes breathless when not connecting properly with air, and fear comes with breathlessness. This already enters the realm of soul. Warmth is something in which one feels wholly at home. He participates in his condition of warmth or of cold with the whole of his ego. Fire inflames his ego.

The heart moved by Christ answers:

Christ: My “I” blazes in God-Fire, as long as the spirit kindles me.

A person does not need the material warmth of earth when the spirit supplies the spark and ignites his ego. For the ego blazes there not in earthly warmth, not in earthly fire, but within the fire of God.

But the heart moved by Lucifer answers:

Lucifer: My “I” has flaming power through spirit sun-craft.

The heart moved by Ahriman answers, as if the fire begun upon the earth is taken as his own and carried over into the spiritual world, to master the spiritual world with the ego-fire of the physical world.

Ahriman: My “I” has its own fire, that flames purely through self-unfolding.

The ego will not blaze up except by deploying its own fire.

Once again, the progression arising in the formulation first appears in the person speaking “I”.

I leave
I feel
I will

It then becomes more objective, in that the person addresses the things pertaining to himself as “Mine”.

My life extinguishes it
My life expunges it
My life affixes it

It then goes more inwardly, so inner nature becomes objective.

My soul breathes
My soul cares not
My soul absorbs

Now he climbs somewhat further into himself. And take note of the difference, my dear brothers and sisters. Early on is said merely “I”. Then “I” becomes objective, “my I”, as if it were another’s, as one would speak of another’s property. One is externalized even more, one is externalized out of the physical body, even to the extent initially of allowing one to speak fully egoistically of the ego, and one says:

My “I”

as if it were an object. That is the proper way to render it here.

One becomes acquainted with this rendering, my dear brothers and sisters, in all its depth and intensity, when one speaks with souls who have gone through the portal of death and have been in the spiritual world awhile. They do not say “I”, but rather they always say “my I”. I have not yet heard of one departed after death who has said “I”, except at most for a very brief time after death. So some time after death, the dead one says “my I”, because he gazes upon the ego with the eyes of the gods. It becomes objective for him, characteristically objective. Therefore, an account, from someone who has been dead for a somewhat longer time, cannot be accurate if the departed says “I”, if he does not say “my I”. So here in the fourth progressive section, before the Guardian of the Threshold, the soul says “my I”.

And that, my dear friends, is the wonderful spoken exchange at the Threshold, between the Guardian of the Threshold and the human personality, that actually takes place when one stands there before the Guardian of the Threshold, as illustrated here, which must be attended to, in order to catch the feeling in its essential actuality when deploying and immersing oneself in this dialogue properly in meditation. So you form the words up in meditation properly, my dear brothers and sisters, the mantric words coming to you here today, when in a certain sense you hear the words that you yourself are speaking, but only in the course of the Guardian having been heard to be speaking before us first in a manner of soul. Therefore this is how one meditates, as if hearing four times over the Guardian of the Threshold at the start of each section, concerning earth, water, air, and fire, and then allowing one’s own true soul to answer, but in such a manner that one immediately hears the first answer as if inwardly ensouled by Christ, the second answer in the voice of the tempter, and the third answer in the voice of the pompous materialistic Ahriman-Spirit, who approaches a person with the desire to carry over into the spirit the manner of being of the mineralized human.

Now, in closing today’s esoteric lesson, we will allow the characteristic way this is to be meditated to sound forth with firm effect.

Where is earth’s firmness, that supported you?
I leave its solid ground, as long as the spirit carries me.
I feel delight, that I no longer need the support.
I will hammer it still harder by the spirit’s might.

Where is water’s forming force, that permeated you?
My life extinguishes it, as long as the spirit forms me.
My life expunges it, that I may be released from it.
My life affixes it, that I may carry it to spirit realms.

Where is air’s stimulation, that waked you?
My soul breathes heaven’s air, as long as the spirit is about me.
My soul cares not for it in spirit blissfulness.
My soul absorbs it, that I may learn godlike to create.

Where is fire’s cleansing, that inflamed in you the I?
My “I” blazes in God-Fire, as long as the spirit kindles me.
My “I” has flaming power through spirit sun-craft.
My “I” has its own fire, that flames purely through self-unfolding.

• 1. so lang: Translating so lang as "so long as" carries a hint of inevitability that this condition is bound to end sooner or later, whereas translating it more correctly as "as long as" still has the same sense of contingency, but additionally carries the sense that in choosing this condition it can carry on forever.
• 2. Reizgewalt means alluring, stimulating power
• 3. erwechte: The verb in this line is not erwachte, which translates as the intransitive awakened, but rather the transitive erweckte, which translates as waked (inspired, excited, aroused).
• 4. Kohlensäure
• 5. Kieselsäure

[ 1 ] Max Dessoir's book Beyond the Soul (Vom Jenseits der Seele) contains a brief section in which the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science advocated by me is portrayed as scientifically invalid. Now it might seem to many that a discussion with people who take Dessoir's point of view about science must prove altogether unfruitful to anyone advocating spiritual-scientific anthroposophy. For, such an advocate asserts the existence of a purely spiritual region of experience that a Dessoir fundamentally rejects and consigns to the realm of fantasy. Discussion of the findings of spiritual-scientific knowledge, therefore, might only seem possible with someone who already has reason to believe that such a spiritual-scientific region exists.

This view would be correct if the advocate of anthroposophy presented nothing more than his own inner personal experiences and simply placed them beside the results of the science based on sensory observation and the scientific processing of such observations. Then one could say: the adherent of natural science refuses in fact to regard the experiences of the spiritual researcher as realities; the researcher in the spiritual realm can only make an impression with his findings on those who have already adopted his own point of view.

[ 2 ] This opinion, however, rests upon a misunderstanding of what I mean by anthroposophy. It is true that this anthroposophy is founded upon soul experiences that are attained independently of sense impressions and independently of scientific judgments based only upon sense impressions. Therefore the two kinds of experiences, sensory and extrasensory, seem at first to be separated by an unbridgeable chasm.

But this is not so. There is a common ground where both approaches must meet, and where discussion is possible. This common ground can be described in the following way.

[ 3 ] Out of experiences that are not just personal to him, the advocate of anthroposophy believes himself justified in stating that human activity in knowledge can be developed further from the point at which those researchers stop who want to base themselves only upon sensory observation and intellectual judgment of such observation.

To avoid continuous, long-winded paraphrases, I would like to use the word “anthropology” from now on to designate that approach in science which bases itself on sensory observation and the intellectual processing of such observation, asking the reader to permit me this uncommon usage. In what follows, "anthropology" means only what I have just described. In this sense, anthroposophy believes itself able to begin its research where anthropology leaves off.¹

[ 4 ] The advocate of anthropology limits himself to relating his intellectual concepts—experienced in the soul—to his sense perceptions. The advocate of anthroposophy observes that these concepts—apart from the fact that we relate them to sense impressions—are able in addition to unfold a life of their own within the soul. And that, by unfolding this life within the soul, these concepts effect a development of the soul itself. The advocate of anthroposophy sees how the soul, if it is sufficiently attentive to this development, discovers spiritual organs within its own being. (In using this expression "spiritual organs," I am adopting and extending the linguistic usage of Goethe when he speaks in his world view of “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears.”) ² Such spiritual organs, therefore, are for the soul what sense organs are for the body. These spiritual organs must of course be understood as being entirely of a soul nature. Any attempt to connect them with one or another bodily configuration must be strictly rejected by anthroposophy. Anthroposophy must not picture these spiritual organs as extending in any way beyond the soul realm or encroaching upon the structure of the body. It would regard any such encroachment as a pathological configuration, to be strictly excluded from its domain. The way anthroposophy portrays the development of our spiritual organs should be strong enough proof—to anyone who really informs himself about it—that the researcher in the real spiritual realm arrives at the same conclusions as anthropologists about abnormal soul experiences like illusions, visions, and hallucinations. ³ Any confusion of anthroposophical findings with abnormal, so-called soul experiences rests entirely upon misunderstanding or insufficient knowledge of what anthroposophy actually maintains. And anyone who studies and understands anthroposophy's description of the path to development of our spiritual organs will certainly not fall prey to the notion that this path could lead to pathological configurations or states. The insightful person, in fact, will recognize that every stage of soul experience that a human being passes through on the anthroposophical path to spiritual perception lies in a realm that is entirely of a soul nature; alongside this realm, our sensory experience and normal intellectual activity will continue, unaltered, as they were before this soul realm opened up for us. The great number of misunderstandings holding sway in precisely this area of anthroposophical knowledge stems from the fact that it is difficult for many to bring something of a purely soul nature into the sphere of their attention. The power to picture mentally ⁴ fails such people the moment this ability is not supported by the sight of something sense-perceptible. Their power to picture mentally is then dampened down, even below the level of dreams, into dreamless sleep, where it is no longer conscious. One could say that such people, in their consciousness, are filled with the aftereffects or the direct effects of sense impressions, and that, alongside this fullness, a sleep is occurring that blocks out what would be recognized as being of a soul nature if it could be grasped. One could even say that the essential nature of soul phenomena is subject to such profound misunderstanding by many people just because they cannot wake up to the soul element as they can to the sense-perceptible content of consciousness.

The fact that there are people in this situation whose degree of attention is only at the level produced by ordinary external life need not surprise anyone who can grasp the point, for example, of a reproach which Franz Brentano made to William James on this subject.

Brentano writes that one must “differentiate between our activity of perceiving and its object, i.e., between perceiving and what is perceived” (“and these two differ from each other as certainly as my present memory differs from the past event I am remembering; or, to make an even more drastic comparison: they differ as much as my hatred of an enemy differs from the object of this hatred”), and Brentano adds that one sees this error cropping up here and there. He continues:

William James, among others, embraced this error and went to some length to validate it at the International Congress on Psychology (Rome, 1905). Because, according to James, when I look out into a room, my vision appears along with the room; and, furthermore, because my mental images of sense-perceptible objects differ only in strength from the visual images directly stimulated by these objects; and, finally, because we call some objects beautiful, yet the difference between beautiful and ugly is connected to differences in emotions: therefore, soul and physical phenomena should no longer be regarded as two different classes of phenomena!

I find it hard to understand how the speaker himself could not feel the weakness of these arguments. To appear at the same time does not mean to appear as the same thing; just as existing at the same time does not mean existing as the same thing. Descartes could therefore recommend without self-contradiction that one deny—at least initially—the existence of the room I see, and regard as indubitable only the existence of my vision of the room. But if James' first argument is invalid, then obviously the second is also; for, what does it matter whether imagining differs from seeing only in degree of intensity, since, according to James, even if the degree of intensity were the same in both, the total congruency of imagining with seeing would still only represent congruency with a soul phenomenon? In his third argument, James speaks of beauty.... It is certainly a strange logic that could conclude—from the fact that pleasure in the beautiful is of a soul nature— that the object with whose appearance the pleasure is connected must also be of a soul nature. If that were so, then every dislike would be identical with what one dislikes, and one would have to be careful not to regret a past mistake, since, along with this remorse, the mistake, being identical with the remorse, would repeat itself.

With arguments like these, however, we need not fear that his authority—to which, among German psychologists, there is unfortunately added that of Mach—will cause many to fail to recognize the most obvious differences.⁵

Actually, this “failure to recognize the most obvious differences” is no rare occurrence. It is based on the fact that our power of mental picturing can unfold the necessary attentiveness only for sense impressions, whereas the actual soul activity that is also occurring is present to consciousness as little as what is experienced in a state of sleep. We are dealing here with two streams of experience; one of these is apprehended in a waking state; the other—the soul stream—is grasped simultaneously, but only with an attentiveness as weak as the mental perception we have in sleep, i.e., it is hardly grasped at all. We must by no means ignore the fact that during our ordinary waking state, the soul disposition of sleep does not simply cease, but continues to exist alongside our waking experience, and that the actual soul element enters the realm of perception only when the human being awakens not only to the sense world—as this occurs in ordinary consciousness—but awakens also to a soul existence, as is the case in seeing consciousness. It hardly matters now whether this soul element is denied—in a crudely materialistic sense—by the condition of sleep (to the soul element) that accompanies our waking state, or whether, because unseen, the soul element is confused with the physical, as in James' case; the results are nearly the same: both lead to fatal nearsightedness. But it is not surprising that the soul element so often remains unperceivable, if even a philosopher like William James is unable to differentiate it correctly from the physical.⁶

[ 5 ] With people as little able as William James to distinguish between the actual soul element and the content of what the soul experiences through the senses, it is difficult to discuss that region of our soul's being in which the development of spiritual organs is to be observed. For, this development occurs precisely where his attention is unable to direct itself. This development leads from an intellectual knowing to a knowing that sees.⁷

[ 6 ] But now, through the ability to perceive the actual soul element, we have as yet fulfilled only the very first precondition, which makes it possible to direct our spiritual gaze to where anthroposophy seeks the development of soul organs. For, what meets this gaze at first compares to anthroposophy's description of a soul-being equipped with spiritual organs the way an undifferentiated living cell compares to an organism endowed with sense organs. The soul becomes conscious of possessing the individual spiritual organs themselves, however, only to the extent that it is able to use these organs. For, these organs are not something at rest; they are in continuous movement. And when they are not in use, one also cannot be conscious of their presence. For them, therefore, perceiving and being used are synonymous. In my anthroposophical writings, I describe how the development—and along with it the perceptibility—of these organs comes to light. I will indicate here only a little of what can be said in this regard.

[ 7 ] Anyone who devotes himself to reflection on the experiences caused by sense-perceptible phenomena encounters questions everywhere that this reflection seems unable to answer at first. The pursuit of such reflections leads the adherents of anthropology to set certain limits to knowledge. One need only remember how Du Bois-Reymond, in his discourse on the limits of natural science, states that one cannot know the essential nature of matter or of the simplest phenomenon of consciousness. Now one can stop short at such points in one's reflections and surrender to the opinion: there human knowledge is in fact confronted by insurmountable barriers. And one can resign oneself to the fact that knowledge is attainable only on this side of the barrier, and that beyond this only inklings, feelings, hopes, and wishes are possible, with which “science” could have nothing to do.

Or else one can start at such points to form hypotheses about a region transcending the sense-perceptible world. In this case one employs the intellect, believing that it is justified in extending its judgments out over a region of which the senses perceive nothing. In such an undertaking, one runs the risk that nonbelievers will declare that the intellect has no right to judge a reality for which it lacks the foundations of sense perceptions. For only sense perceptions could provide a content for the intellect's judgment. Without such content, its concepts must remain empty.

[ 8 ] Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in either of these two ways. It does not form hypotheses about the supersensible world because it must agree with those who feel that any basis for reflection is lost if mental pictures are left in the same form as when taken from sense perceptions, and yet are to be applied in a realm transcending the sense world.

Anthroposophy does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in the first way either, because it realizes that in our encounter with these so-called limits of knowledge, something can be experienced by the soul that has nothing to do with the content of mental pictures gained from sense perception. If the soul focuses only upon this latter content, then, if its self-examination is honest, it must admit that this content can reveal nothing directly to our activity of knowing except a copy of what we experience through the senses. The situation changes if the soul goes further and asks itself: What can be experienced within the soul itself when it fills itself with those mental pictures to which it is led when confronted by our usual limits of knowledge? After sufficient self-examination, the soul can then say to itself: Through such mental pictures I cannot, in the ordinary sense of the word, know anything; but in the event that I really make this powerlessness of my knowing activity inwardly visible to myself, then I become aware how these mental pictures work within my own self. As ordinary cognitive pictures, these mental pictures remain mute; but the more their muteness communicates itself to our consciousness, the more these mental pictures take on an inner life of their own that unites with the life of the soul. And the soul then notices how, with this experience, it is in a situation comparable to that of a blind being who has also not experienced much development of its sense of touch. Such a being would at first keep bumping into things. It would feel the resistance of outer reality. And from this generalized sensation, it could develop an inner life for itself, filled with a primitive consciousness that no longer has merely the general sensation of bumping into things, but that differentiates this sensation and distinguishes between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness, etc.

[ 9 ] In the same way, the soul can hold and differentiate its experience of the mental pictures it forms in its encounter with the limits of knowledge. The soul learns to experience that these limits represent nothing more than what arises when the soul is touched by the spiritual world in a soul way. The dawning awareness of such limits becomes an experience for the soul that can be compared with the experience of touch in the sense world.⁸ What the soul formerly regarded as limits to knowledge it now sees as a soul-spiritual touching by a spiritual world. And out of the soul's attentiveness to its experiences with the various pictures it makes for itself at this borderland, the general sensing of a spiritual world differentiates for the soul into diverse perceptions of a spiritual world. In this way, the spiritual world's lowest form of perceptibility, so to speak, becomes an experience. This characterizes merely the very first opening of the soul to the spiritual world. But it also shows that the spiritual experiences striven for in what I mean by anthroposophy do not point in the direction of general, nebulous, emotional experiences that the soul has of itself, but rather in the direction of something that can be developed in a lawful way into a true inner experience. This is not the place to show how this first primitive spiritual perception can be intensified by further soul practices in such a way that one can speak of other, in a certain way, higher kinds of perception besides this soul-spiritual blind groping. For a description of such soul practices I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and essays. Here only the basic principle of spiritual perception was to be indicated of which anthroposophy speaks.

[ 10 ] I would like, through a comparison, to clarify still further how the whole attitude of soul in anthroposophical spiritual investigation differs from that of anthropology. Picture to yourself a number of wheat kernels. These can be used as food. But one can also plant them in the earth so that other wheat plants can grow from them. Likewise, one can hold mental pictures—gained through sense impressions—within one's consciousness in such a way as to experience them as copies of sense-perceptible reality. Or, one can experience these mental pictures in such a way as to let work in the soul the power these pictures exercise through what they are, irrespective of the fact that they reproduce sense perceptions. The first way that mental pictures were described as working in the soul can be compared with what becomes of wheat kernels when they are taken up as food by a living being; the second way, with the production of a new wheat plant from each kernel.

This comparison, to be sure, is only meant to focus on the fact that from the seed there arises a plant similar to its progenitors; and that from a mental picture working in the soul there arises within the soul a power that is effective in developing spiritual organs. And one must also consider the fact that our first awareness of such inner powers can only be kindled by mental pictures that work as forcefully as those mental pictures we described as occurring at the borderland of knowledge; once awakened, however, this awareness of such powers can find other mental pictures that can also be effective—to a lesser degree, it is true—in helping one progress upon this path.

[ 11 ] At the same time, this comparison points to a result of anthroposophical investigation into the essential nature of our life in mental pictures. Just as a seed, when it is processed into food, is lifted out of the course of development that lies within its own primal being and that leads to the formation of a new plant, so a mental picture too is diverted from its own essential course of development when it is used by the picturing soul to reproduce a sense perception. The development particular to a mental picture through its own essential nature is to work as a power in the development of the soul. Just as little as one discovers the plant's laws of development when one investigates the nutritive value of its seeds, can one discover the essential nature of mental pictures when one investigates the way mental picturing brings forth a cognitive reproduction of the sense-perceptible reality it communicates. This does not mean to say that such an investigation cannot be undertaken. This is just as possible as investigating the nutritive value of seeds. But just as a study of the nutritive value of seeds addresses something different than the developmental laws of plant growth, so an epistemology that investigates how the cognitive power of mental pictures reproduces reality informs us about something different than the essential nature of our life of mental picturing. Just as little as it lies prefigured in the essential nature of a seed to become food, does it lie in the essential nature of mental picturing to provide cognitive reproductions of reality. Yes, we can even say that it is as completely external to the seed's own nature to use it as food as it is to the actual nature of mental pictures to use them to reproduce reality in cognition. The truth is that in its mental pictures the soul grasps its own evolving being. And only through the soul's own activity does it occur that mental pictures become the mediators of any knowledge of reality.⁹

[ 12 ] Now, as to how mental pictures become mediators of such knowledge, anthroposophical observation, which employs spiritual organs, arrives at different conclusions than those epistemologists do who reject this observation. Anthroposophical observation reveals the following.

[ 13 ] Mental pictures, as they are in their own primal nature, do in fact form a part of the life of the soul; but they cannot become conscious in the soul as long as the soul does not consciously employ its spiritual organs. As long as these mental pictures are active in a way corresponding to their own essential nature, they remain unconscious in the soul. The soul lives by virtue of them, but can know nothing of them. These mental pictures must dampen down their own life in order to become conscious soul experiences for ordinary consciousness. This dampening down occurs with every sense perception. Thus, when the soul receives a sense impression, there occurs a laming of our life in mental pictures; and the soul experiences this lamed mental picturing consciously as the mediator of our knowledge of external reality.¹⁰ All mental pictures that the soul relates to an outer sense-perceptible reality are inner spiritual experiences whose life has been dampened down. Everything that one thinks regarding the outer sense world consists of deadened mental pictures. Now it is not as though the life of mental pictures were lost, however; it leads its existence, separated from the realm of consciousness, in the unconscious spheres of the soul. And there it is to be found again by our spiritual organs. Now, just as the deadened mental pictures can be related by the soul to the sense world, so the living mental pictures grasped by our spiritual organs can be related to the spiritual world.

The mental pictures described above as occurring to us at the borderland of knowledge are those that, by their very nature, do not let themselves be lamed; therefore, they resist any relation to sense-perceptible reality. Precisely through this fact, they become the points of departure for spiritual perception.

[ 14 ] In my anthroposophical books, I have called the mental pictures that are grasped as living ones by the soul “Imaginative mental pictures.” One misunderstands what is meant here by “Imaginative,” if one confuses it with the pictorial form of expression that must be used to point to such mental pictures in a suitable way. What is actually meant by "Imaginative" can be clarified in the following way. When someone has a sense perception, while the outer object is making an impression on him, the perception has a certain inner strength for him. When he turns away from the object, he can then only represent it to himself in an inner picture. But this mental picture has little inner strength. It is shadowy, so to speak, when compared with the mental picture that occurs while the outer object is present. If a person wants to enliven the mental pictures that are present in his soul in the shadowy form characteristic of ordinary consciousness, he saturates them with the aftereffects of sense perception. He makes the mental picture into an image he can observe [inwardly]. Such images are certainly nothing other than the results of interaction between mental picturing and sense perception. The “Imaginative” mental pictures of anthroposophy do not arise at all in this way. In order to bring them forth, the soul must know this inner process of uniting the life of mental pictures with sense impressions so exactly that it can prevent any sense impressions—or their aftereffects, as the case may be—from flowing into its life of mental picturing. One can achieve this exclusion of perception's aftereffects only if one has learned to know how mental picturing is gripped by these aftereffects. Only then is one in a position to unite the spiritual organs in a living way with the essential being of mental picturing and thereby receive impressions from spiritual reality. Through this, the life of mental pictures is permeated from an entirely different quarter than in sense perception. One's experiences are essentially different from those to be had from sense perceptions. And yet it is possible to describe these experiences. This can be done in the following way.

When the human being perceives the color yellow he does not merely have a visual experience in his soul; a nuance of feeling accompanies what the soul experiences. This feeling may vary in strength from person to person, but it will never be totally absent. In the beautiful chapter of his Color Theory on the sensory-ethical effects of colors, Goethe describes in a quite vivid manner the participation of our feeling in red, yellow, green, etc. Now when the soul perceives something in a particular region of the spirit, it can happen that this spiritual perception is accompanied in the soul by the same nuance of feeling as occurs in the sense perception of yellow. One knows then that one is having a particular spiritual experience. In this mental picture, of course, one does not confront what one confronts in a sense perception of a yellow color. Yet, as a nuance of feeling, one has the same inner experience as when the eye is confronted by a yellow color. One says then: I perceive the spiritual experience as “yellow.” In order to express oneself even more exactly, one could perhaps say: I perceive something that is like “yellow” for my soul. But this description is unnecessary for anyone who has learned from anthroposophical literature how the process leading to spiritual perception occurs. This literature points clearly enough to the fact that the reality accessible to spiritual perception does not confront the spiritual organs like a rarefied sense-perceptible object or process, or in such a way that it could be reproduced through mental pictures that are perceptible in the ordinary way.¹¹

[ 15 ] Just as the soul, through its spiritual organs, learns to know the spiritual world lying outside of the human being, so it also learns to know the spiritual being of man himself. Anthroposophy regards this spiritual being as a member of the spiritual world. Anthroposophy proceeds from observation of one part of the spiritual world to mental pictures about the human being of what reveals itself in the human body as a spiritual human being. Working from the opposite direction, anthropology also arrives at mental pictures about the human being. When anthroposophy develops the kinds of observations described in this essay, it arrives at views about the spiritual being of man that manifests in the sense world through its body. The flower of this manifestation is human consciousness, which allows sense impressions to live on in the form of mental pictures. By proceeding from experiences of the spiritual world outside man to man himself, anthroposophy ultimately finds the human being living in a sense-perceptible body and, in this body, elaborating his consciousness of sense-perceptible reality. The last thing anthroposophy, on its path, discovers about the human being is the soul's living activity in mental pictures, which anthroposophy is able to express in coherent imaginative pictures. Then, at the end of its path of spiritual investigation, so to speak, anthroposophy can employ its vision further and see how the real life of mental pictures is lamed by the perceiving senses. With the light it sheds from the spiritual quarter, anthroposophy shows this lamed life of mental pictures to be characteristic of man's life in the sense world, insofar as he forms mental pictures. In this way, as one of the last results of its investigations, anthroposophy arrives at a philosophy of the human being. What lies on its path down to this point is to be found purely in a spiritual realm. With the results of what it has found on its spiritual path, anthroposophy arrives at a characterization of the human being who lives in the sense world.

[ 16 ] Anthropology investigates the realms of the sense world. Proceeding on its way, it also arrives at the human being. He presents himself to anthropology as drawing together the facts of the sense world in his bodily organization in such a way that from this drawing together a consciousness arises through which outer reality is presented in mental pictures. The anthropologist sees mental pictures arising from the human organism. In observing this, he must come to a halt in a certain sense. With mere anthropology, he cannot apprehend the inner, lawful connectedness of mental pictures. Just as anthroposophy, at the end of its path through spiritual experiences, still looks at the spiritual being of man—insofar as this manifests through the perceptions of the senses—so anthropology, at the end of its path through the sense world, must look at the way the sense perceptible human being is active in mental picturing in its encounter with sense perceptions. And when it observes this, anthropology finds that this activity is not sustained by the organic laws of the body, but by the thought-laws of logic. But logic is not a region that can be entered in the same way as the other regions of anthropology. In thinking that is governed by logic, laws hold sway that can no longer be regarded as those of the bodily organization. As the human being works with these laws, the same logical activity reveals itself in him that anthroposophy encounters at the end of its path. It is just that the anthropologist sees this logical activity in the light shed from the sense-perceptible realm. He sees the lamed mental pictures and, by acknowledging the existence of logic, he also concedes that in these mental pictures laws are operative from a world that is indeed united with the sense world, but does not coincide with it. In man's life of mental pictures, which is carried by a logical activity, there manifests to the anthropologist the sense-perceptible human being who extends into the spiritual world. In this way, as the final results of its investigations, anthropology arrives at a philosophy about the human being. What lies on its path up to this point lies purely in the sense world.¹²

[ 17 ] If these two paths—the anthroposophical and the anthropological—are followed in the right way, they meet at the same point. Anthroposophy brings with it to this meeting a picture of the living spiritual human being and shows how he develops, in sense-perceptible existence, the consciousness that is present between birth and death while the life of supersensible consciousness is lamed. Anthropology, at this meeting point, shows a picture of the sense-perceptible human being who apprehends himself in consciousness, but who extends up into spiritual existence and lives in that essential beingness which reaches beyond birth and death. At this meeting point, a really fruitful understanding is possible between anthroposophy and anthropology. This understanding will occur if both progress to a philosophy of the human being. The philosophy of the human being that emerges from anthroposophy will in fact produce a picture of him painted in an entirely different medium than that provided by an anthropological philosophy of the human being; but those who look at both pictures will be able to find a harmony between their mental pictures similar to that between the negative of a photograph and the corresponding positive print.

[ 18 ] This essay, I hope, has shown how the question raised at the beginning—about the possibility of a fruitful discussion between anthropology and anthroposophy—can be answered in the affirmative, especially from the anthroposophical point of view.

• 1. Although the anthroposophy advocated by me stands on a completely different ground, with its results, than the presentations of Robert Zimmermann in his book Anthroposophy (1881), still I believe myself justified in using the concept by which he characterized the difference between anthroposophy and anthropology. As the content of his anthroposophy, however, Zimmermann only draws together into an abstract schema the concepts provided by anthropology. For him, the knowing vision that is the basis for what I mean by anthroposophy lies outside the domain of scientific procedure. His anthroposophy differs from anthropology only through the fact that the former first submits the concepts it receives from the latter to a process like that of Herbart's philosophy, before making these concepts into the content of its purely intellectual schema of ideas.
• 2. A more detailed presentation and justification of this notion of “spiritual organs” can be found in my book The Riddle of Man, Mercury Press, 1990, page 125ff. and in my books on Goethe's world view.
• 3. The inner experiences that the soul must undergo in gaining the use of its spiritual organs are described in a number of my books, but especially in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in the second part of Occult Science, an Outline.
• 4. Sich Vorstellen means to visualize, to picture to oneself mentally. The ability to “place something before oneself inwardly is a crucial factor in spiritual development and as such is referred to constantly in this essay. How do we hold something up before our inner eye? What is the attention we focus upon it? Who does this? What is the nature of mental pictures (Vorstellungen) themselves? Such questions are among the many painful riddles that ordinary consciousness cannot solve, and that bring us up against an invisible world. Translator.
• 5. See F. Brentano, Research into a Psychology of the Senses, Leipzig, 1907, p. 96f.
• 6. The awakening of those soul faculties which, in ordinary consciousness, are unawakened is described in more detail in my book The Riddle of Man, page 132ff.
• 7. For a more extensive validation of what is stated here, please see addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.
• 8. Limits to knowledge like those discussed above do not merely present themselves in the small number of which most people are aware; they occur in great number along the paths that intelligent reflection, according to its own inner nature, must take in order to gain a relation to true reality. Please see addendum 2: The Appearance of Limits to Knowledge.
• 9. A more detailed case is made for these views in the last chapter of my book The Riddles of Philosophy: “Sketch of a Perspective of an Anthroposophy.”
• 10. Please see addendum 3: The Abstractness of Our Concepts.
• 11. For further clarification of what has just been expressed, please see addendum 4: An Important Characteristic of Spiritual Perception.
• 12. Like the thoughts before footnote 7, what has been indicated here can be clarified further in a certain direction by addendum 1: The Philosophical Validation of Anthroposophy.

American readers have known the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in English for somewhat less than fifty years. The first translations of Nietzsche's works began appearing in this country shortly after the turn of the century. Since then, almost without interruption American publishers' lists have included collections of his writings, selections from his letters, extracts from his journals, commentaries on his works, and, above all, numerous descriptions of his tragic life story; and American interest in Nietzsche continues today.

In view of this it seems particularly fitting that the present book, with its profound insight into Nietzsche's creative activity, brilliant analysis of his character, and clear evaluation of his significance should be published for the first time in English translation as the second volume of the Centennial Edition of the Major Writings of Rudolf Steiner.

In Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom, Rudolf Steiner presents an unforgettable portrait of the man whose writings continue to exercise an important influence in shaping the world in which we live today, and which our children will inherit tomorrow.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the little village of Röcken near Leipzig on October 15, 1844. As he wrote later, “I was born on the battlefield of Lützen, and the first name I heard was that of Gustavus Adolphus.” The Protestant element was in his very blood, for Lutheran clergymen were among his forebearers on both his paternal and maternal sides, while his father was the pastor of Röcken. A tradition that his ancestors were Polish noblemen of the Niëzky family was recorded by Nietzsche himself, as was the statement that his grandmother belonged to the Goethe-Schiller circle of Weimar.

The parsonage life during Nietzsche's early childhood was typical of most of the country clergy-houses of the time. The atmosphere was that of “plain living and high thinking,” and the family combined honor and piety with a social life of happiness and cheer, in which a love of music, books and friendships played a role. When the boy was nearly five, in the summer of 1849, Pastor Nietzsche sustained a severe fall, in consequence of which he died. The widow took her children to Naumberg some months later, and they made their home with the paternal grandparents.

At first Friedrich was enrolled in the municipal school in Naumberg, but shortly afterward he was transferred to a private school in the same town. In October 1858, in response to the offer of a scholarship, the boy was enrolled in the Landes-Schule at Pforta. This famous institution had been founded as a Cistercian Abbey in the middle of the twelfth century; at the time of the Reformation it became a secular school. Klopstock, Fichte, Schlegel and Ranke are among the names of those who studied there. In the nineteenth century the Landes-Schule at Pforta was frequently referred to as “the German Eton” because of its excellence in classical studies and as a preparatory school.

Friedrich Nietzsche found a second home in the Landes-Schule; he thoroughly enjoyed his studies—languages, literature and history in particular. In the summer of 1860 he conceived the idea of organizing a literary-artistic club among the students, and this met with a ready response from his schoolmates. Soon the Germania Club, as it came to be called, was organized, and Nietzsche contributed a number of essays on literary and historical themes to the club paper. Many happy hours were spent with his friends at the Germania Club in active discussions about Greek and Latin classics, the works of current German and English authors, and similar subjects. Nietzsche's favorite writers at this time included Emerson, Shakespeare, Tacitus, Aristophanes, Plato and Aeschylus. About Tristram Shandy he wrote his sister Elizabeth, “I read it over and over again.”

While Friedrich Nietzsche was a student at the Landes-Schule, Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27, 1861 in the little town of Kraljevec on the frontier between Hungary and Croatia. His father was a station master in the service of the South Austrian Railway, and the boy's earliest recollections were connected with the activities of the railroad. From his second through his eighth year his impressions were those of the quiet country village of Pottsach, situated in a beautiful green valley at the foot of the magnificent Styrian Alps. The infrequent arrival and departure of the train, the daily activities of the village people, the services at the little church, the colorful peasants and foresters, the life at the local mill, and always and ever the mysterious wonder and beauty of the surrounding nature: all this was a part of the child's world. He attended school in the village for a time; afterward his father undertook to teach him the rudiments of elementary education.

But side by side with this world, the child knew another world, a spiritual world, which was just as real and tangible to him as were the forests, fields and mountains surrounding him. This spiritual world was filled with objects and beings, just as the world about him contained stones and plants and animals and people. Even before he was eight, the child could distinguish between these two worlds, and the one was as clear and immediate to him as the other.

Many children have experiences similar to this of Rudolf Steiner. However, generally speaking, with the passing of the years of childhood, these experiences also vanish little by little, until in the retrospect of later years they seem like “the gentle fabric of a dream.” But in the instance of Rudolf Steiner, the reality and immediacy of the spiritual world did not fade away; it broadened and deepened into a clear, conscious perception of beings and events of that world.

In the wondering eyes of this quiet boy there were many questions. He knew, however, that these were questions he could ask of no one around him. More than this, he could speak with no one about the “other” world which was as close and as real to him as were the houses and fields of Pottsach. So he remained silent, and the questions remained alive within him. And, although he shared the daily activities of the children around him, and entered fully into the life of his family, he was unhappy. More than this, he was lonely ...

In September 1864, Nietzsche left the Landes-Schule with excellent marks, particularly in languages and literature. He entered the University of Bonn a short time later, enrolled as a student of theology and philology. However, he had not been long in the university when his friendship with his professor of philology, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschel, caused him to drop his theological studies in favor of philology. This action caused great grief to his mother and the other members of his family, who had looked to him to continue the clerical tradition of his father.

A year after he had entered the University of Bonn, Nietzsche withdrew in order to accompany Ritschel, who had been transferred to the faculty of the University of Leipzig. Here he continued his philological studies, and here also two very important events of his life took place. He met Richard Wagner in the home of Professor Brockhaus at Leipzig for the first time; his other meeting happened in a somewhat unusual way.

One day while he was browsing in Rohm's second-hand bookstore in Leipzig, “as if by accident” Nietzsche picked up a copy of Schopenhauer's Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Idea. Without stopping to so much as open the book, he paid for it, and rushed to his lodgings. There he threw himself down on his bed and began to read avidly. As he relates in his journal, “I don't know what daemon told me to take the book home with me. ... From every line I read I heard a cry of renunciation, denial, resignation. In the book I saw a mirror of the world; life and my own soul were reflected with dreadful faithfulness. The dull, disinterested eye of art looked at me. I saw illness and healing, banishment and restoration, hell and heaven.”

Thus, at the age of twenty-one, his reading of Schopenhauer's book—the first part of which had been sold as waste paper shortly after publication because there was no sale for it—changed Nietzsche's outlook upon life. In Shopenhauer he felt he had found his teacher in the fullest, most ideal sense.

After a brief interval spent in military service, during which he sustained a serious chest injury as the result of a fall from a horse, Nietzsche returned to Leipzig to continue his studies in the autumn of 1868. Meanwhile, a series of articles he had contributed to the periodical, the Rheinisches Museum, had been read by the authorities of the University of Basel, where a position as professor of classical philology was vacant. A letter was addressed to Ritschel, asking details about Nietzsche, and indicating that the chair at the university might be offered to the young student. Ritschel's reply was unequivocal: “Nietzsche is a genius, and can do whatever he puts his mind to.”

This sweeping endorsement must have impressed the authorities at Basel, for they appointed Nietzsche to the post, despite the fact that he had not yet obtained his doctor's degree. One member of the board, however, was slightly dubious of the appointment, for he said, “If the candidate proposed is actually such a genius, perhaps we had better not appoint him, for he would be certain to remain only a short while at such a little university as ours!”

When word of the appointment reached Leipzig, the authorities of the university at once conferred a doctorate upon Nietzsche, without requiring him to undergo further examination. Accordingly, on May 28, 1869, Nietzsche delivered his Inaugural Address at the University of Basel on Homer and Classical Philology. He remained in the position for the next ten years, his final retirement being due solely to reasons of health. The foreboding of the official who felt he might “remain only a short while” proved to be ill-founded.

His residence at Basel gave Nietzsche opportunity to follow up his friendship with Richard and Cosima Wagner, and he was often a guest at their Triebschen estate on the Lake of Lucerne, under the shadow of Mount Pilatus. At the same time, he made friends with Jacob Burckhardt, “the hermit-like, secluded thinker,” as Nietzsche described him. Burckhardt had recently completed his well-known Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, History of the Renaissance in Italy, 1867, and was famous as the author of a series of critical historical writings on Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture. In addition he occupied the chair of professor of history at the University of Basel.

1869 was a year of importance in the life of Rudolf Steiner, now a boy of eight years. Surrounded by the beauties and wonders of nature, puzzling over the intricacies of such mechanical contrivances as the telegraph equipment in the railway station and the machinery in the local mill, the boy's questions moved to a still broader plane. How could he reconcile his direct experience of the spiritual world with the world of sense which surrounded him? Was there a connection between the two? How could one find a bridge between the experiences of the outer and the inner?

The answer came in a most unexpected way.

Among the books of his school teacher in the little Hungarian village of Neudörfl where he now lived with his family, the boy found a textbook on geometry. This volume opened a new world for Rudolf Steiner. In the study of geometry he found answers to his questions. Perhaps even more important, he says, “I learned to know happiness for the first time.” His satisfaction was complete, for he had discovered that “one can live within the mind in the shaping of forms perceived only within oneself.” He had found that an inner joy came to him as he learned through his study of geometry to “lay hold upon something in the spirit alone ... ”

In the vicinity of his home in Neudörfl was a monastery of the Order of the Most Holy Redeemer. As the boy often met the silent monks on his walks, they aroused solemn feelings in him and he very much wished that they would speak with him. But they never did.

In October 1870, Rudolf Steiner, now eleven, entered the Realschule at Wiener-Neustadt in Austria, traveling backward and forward daily from his home in Neudörfl, which was over the border in Hungary. Along with his intimate contacts with nature which were still an important part of his daily life, the boy now began to find interest in such scientific matters as space and time, attraction and repulsion, atoms and their relation to natural phenomena, and many other subjects. With intense interest his mind turned to science and mathematics, and his teachers in the Realschule were of great help to him in these studies.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870 found Nietzsche active as an ambulance attendant in the medical corps, because his health would not permit him to take part in more active combat. However, even these duties proved too much for his strength, and he contracted diphtheria as a result. He returned to his work at the University of Basel, and in 1872, when he was twenty-eight, Nietzsche published his first major work, the result of his friendship with Wagner and Burkhardt, and the feelings they had evoked in him. This was his Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. The aesthetic passages attracted musicians to the book, but Nietzsche's colleagues in the philological field greeted it with a bitter attack which was led by Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. The result was that despite efforts on the part of Ritschel and Burckhardt to defend him, Nietzsche had no pupils at all in his philology classes in the winter term of 1872–3.

The aftermath of the German victory in the War of 1870 was the eruption of a nationalistic spirit which had been gathering since the previous successes of 1864 and 1866. Nietzsche felt that this was the time to issue a fiery call to the intellectuals of Germany to abandon what he considered a highly dangerous and unworthy chauvinistic spirit, and to return to their work in the service of true German culture. Richard Wagner joined him in this effort to arouse the German youth to a recognition of the responsibilities their victorious destiny had placed upon them.

Nietzsche devoted parts of his lectures in the university to this subject, and finally, in 1873 he issued the first of a series of pamphlets under the general title, Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, Thoughts Out of Season, which he called David Strauss, dealing with the Philistinism of the period. The second, which was published in the following year, was Von Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben, The Use and Abuse of History in Life, a sharp attack on the exaggerations of the current “popular historians” of Germany. The third pamphlet was titled, Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Schopenhauer as Educator, and appeared in the same year as the second. The last in the series was Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and was published in 1876 when Nietzsche was thirty-two years of age.

Late in August, the first complete performance of Richard Wagner's opera cycle, Der Ring des Niebelungen took place in the newly constructed Bayreuth Festival Theatre under the direction of Hans Richter. People flocked to Bayreuth from many countries to attend this cultural event of the first magnitude. Among the spectators was Friedrich Nietzsche who, however, did not share the general enthusiasm for what he saw depicted on the stage.

The well-known French author and critic, Edouard Schuré was also present at the Bayreuth Festival and wrote an account of his meeting with Nietzsche, including a keen appraisal of the latter's character. Schuré's article appeared some years later in the Paris Revue des Deux Mondes (1895):

“I met Nietzsche in 1876 when the Ring of the Niebelungs had its premiere in Bayreuth. As I spoke with him I was impressed by the high caliber of his mind and by his strange countenance. His forehead was large, his short hair combed well back, and his prominent cheekbones were those of a Slav. His thick mustache and courageous bearing gave him the look of a cavalry officer, at first glance. However, this was tempered by a certain mixture of arrogance and nervousness difficult to describe.

“The music of his voice and the slowness of his speech expressed his artistic feelings. His circumspect, thoughtful bearing pointed to the philosopher in him. But nothing could have been more misleading than the seeming tranquility of his expression. The fixed gaze revealed the unhappy task of the thinker; his look combined sharp perception with fanaticism. This double quality made his eye appear uneasy, particularly since it always seemed to be fastened upon a single point. When he spoke for any period of time his face took on the appearance of poetic gentleness, but it was not long before it resumed its antagonistic character.

“When we left (the theatre) together, he spoke no word of censure or disapproval; his face expressed only the sorrowful resignation of a defeated man. ...”

The year ended badly for Nietzsche. As the months progressed, his health began to fail steadily, and toward the end of the year his symptoms of eye disease were augmented by those of a still graver sort. He withdrew from his university teaching, and was given sick leave.

He passed the winter in Sorrento in company with his friends, Baroness Meysenberg and Dr. Paul Rée, with whom he was to travel considerably in the next years. Despite his illness, he somehow found strength to begin another of his important writings, which would occupy him periodically over the next four years. This was his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Human, All Too Human.

The three years that followed were a time of increasing illness and loneliness. Finally, Nietzsche resigned his position at the University of Basel in 1879 and was given a retirement pension on which he lived for the rest of his life.

The physical and mental suffering he experienced in the year 1879 alone, is described by him: “I have had two hundred days of anguish in this year. ... My pulse is as slow as that of Napoleon I. ...”

The years between 1873 and 1879 were most important in the development of Rudolf Steiner. He then passed his twelfth through eighteenth years. As Nietzsche had discovered Schopenhauer's book in Leipzig, Steiner now saw Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Critique of Pure Reason, in a bookstore window, and eventually came into possession of the volume. From the eager study of this book, to which he devoted every spare moment he could find, often reading single pages “more than twenty times in succession,” he hoped to find that which would enable him to understand his own thinking. Yet what he read in Kant was sharply opposed to his own inner conclusion, which he was to describe with the words, “Thinking can be developed to a faculty which really grasps the objects and events of the world.”

In this period Steiner deepened his knowledge of mathematics and German literature, in addition to the prescribed courses of study in the Realschule. From his fifteenth year onward he spent considerable time tutoring other pupils, thus inaugurating an educational activity that was to accompany him through the coming years. He found that a knowledge of practical psychology was indispensable for this task, and from his experience as a tutor he learned many valuable things about the problems involved in the training of the human mind.

Early in the summer of 1879 Steiner completed his studies at the Realschule, and was entered as a student at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna for the term to begin in the fall. He spent the summer entirely in the study of philosophy, working his way with utmost care and diligence through the writings of Kant and the principal works of Fichte. He was enrolled for the study of mathematics, natural history, and chemistry.

The years from 1879 to 1889 are generally regarded as Nietzsche's time of mature productivity. When one takes into account the suffering he experienced, the restless traveling, his constant loneliness, one is astonished at the amount of creative work he was able to produce during this period. In Italy, the French Riviera, the Swiss Engadine, the urge to write drove him relentlessly.

In July 1881, his Morgenröte, Dawn, was published. Although it received a cold reception, it is of importance, for it marks a turning point in Nietzesche's creative development. His previous writings had been largely negative and critical in tone. This book marks the appearance of a positive, constructive tendency, which increased in the works which followed.

Although his letters and journals give the impression that the autumn of this year was one of the happiest times of his life, he described the winter as a time “of unbelievable suffering.”

The next summer while Nietzsche was at Tautenberg in Thuringia, Dr. Rée and Baroness Meysenberg introduced him to Miss Andreas Salomé. Out of this and subsequent meetings with Nietzsche, Miss Andreas Salomé later wrote what has been described as “the most unreliable book about Nietzsche which has ever appeared in print.”

In July the first performances of Richard Wagner's music drama, Parsifal, were given at Bayreuth under the composer's direction. Nietzsche chose this occasion to send Wagner a presentation copy of his Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Human, All Too Human. Curiously enough, at exactly the same time, Wagner sent Nietzsche an inscribed copy of his Parsifal. The two packages crossed in the mail. No word of acknowledgment from either recipient was ever forthcoming; the break between Nietzsche and Wagner was complete, although the public was not to become aware of it until six more years had passed. In the meanwhile, Wagner had died suddenly in Venice early in 1883.

The high point in Nietzsche's creative life came in May 1883 with the birth of his Also Sprach Zarathustra, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work which he and many others considered to be his masterpiece. The first part in twenty-three chapters took just ten days to write, as did each of the other parts with the exception of the fourth and last which was completed in 1885. In a letter he said of the writing of his Zarathustra, “All of it was conceived in the course of rapid walks ... absolute certainty, as though each sentence were shouted at one. While writing this book, the greatest physical elasticity and sense of power ...”

In addition to his studies at the Technische Hochschule, Rudolf Steiner attended lectures at the University of Vienna. He particularly appreciated the courses given by the celebrated Karl Julius Schröer on German literature, especially on Schiller and Goethe. As a result, Steiner read Goethe's Faust for the first time at the age of nineteen. Later, he enjoyed a personal friendship with Schröer, under whose guidance he came to a deep awareness of the importance of Goethe's contribution to natural science as well as to literature.

Out of his interest in philosophical studies, Steiner attended lectures by the philosophers Robert Zimmerman and Franz Brentano. He studied writings by Ernst Haeckel on morphology, and by Friedrich Theodor Vischer on aesthetics. The writings of Eduard von Hartmann, “the philosopher of the unconscious,” interested him deeply, and the day was to come when he would meet this man face to face in Berlin; eventually Steiner would dedicate his book, Wahrheit und Wissenschaft, Truth and Science, to him “in warm admiration.”

Among the lectures in his scientific courses, those of Edmund Reitlinger on the mechanical theory of heat and on the history of physics made a deep impression on Rudolf Steiner.

At this time Steiner was engaged as tutor in a family where there were four boys, the youngest of whom was a retarded child. The three older boys were no particular problem for him, and their studies went forward without difficulty under his direction. However, the retarded child was a great challenge. That Steiner met this challenge is clear from the fact that in two years the child was able to complete his work in the elementary school and enter the Gymnasium. Eventually he entered the School of Medicine and finally graduated as a physician. The experience with this child was reflected in methods for the treatment and care of retarded children which Rudolf Steiner gave some forty years later, thus laying the foundation for a system of Curative Education which is successfully practiced in both Europe and America today.

In 1884 Professor Schröer recommended Steiner to the position of editor and commentator on Goethe's natural scientific writings which the publisher, Joseph Kürschner, wished to include in his series of volumes on German literature. In recalling the nature of this task years later, Steiner wrote, “I saw in Goethe a personality who, because of the particular spiritual relation in which he placed man in regard to the world, could also fit the science of nature into the entire realm of human creative activity in the right manner ... To me, Goethe was the founder of a science of organics ... applicable to what is alive.”

From this time onward, Steiner was occupied with Goethe's investigations in such areas of natural science as metamorphosis, the archetypal plant, the world of animals and minerals, and so on. And out of this study in the light of Goethe's investigations and comments, Steiner came to recognize that if one wishes to understand Goethe as a natural scientist this can be done only on the basis of learning how one must perceive in order to enter into the phenomena of life.

Finally he realized that no theory of knowledge then extant explained Goethe's particular form of knowledge. Therefore, as a part of his preparatory work before setting about to edit and write commentry on Goethe's natural scientific writings for Kürschner, Steiner drafted a short study of Goethe's theory of knowledge. This was completed in 1886, when Steiner was twenty-five, and is clear proof of his comprehensive grasp of Goethe's way of thinking. The book is titled, >Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, Theory of Knowledge in Goethe's Conception of the World, and is one of the most basic of Rudolf Steiner's major writings.

In 1886 Nietzsche, now in his forty-second year, wrote his Jenseits van Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, a large part of which was composed during his residence in Italy. This was his first attempt to deal with the subject of the origin of morals. The reaction to the book was generally unfavorable, although Jacob Burckhardt in Basel and Hyppolyte Taine in Paris wrote appreciatively of it.

On July 8th Nietzsche wrote his sister, “My health is actually quite normal, but my soul is very sensitive and is filled with longing for good friends of my own kind. Get me a small circle of men who will listen to me and understand me, and I shall be cured. ...” No words could better express the poignancy of the pathetic struggle for health and the longing for human beings who “understand.”

In 1887 came his Zur Genealogie der Moral, The Genealogy of Morals, a further development of the subject which had occupied his mind for some time.

Finally, in 1888 came the publicizing of his break with Richard Wagner upon the appearance of Neitzsche's book, Der Fall Wagner, The Case of Wagner. The volume produced a sensation. It was the first of Nietzsche's works to be reviewed by the public press, and for the first time Nietzsche attracted widespread attention as an author.

Not long before this, Nietzsche had written, “I am the author of fifteen books, and never yet have I seen an honest German review of any of them.” Even though this may have been the case, nevertheless Nietzsche had had devoted and entirely capable readers during all his productive years. Among these were Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, and Hyppolite Taine, the French critic, as we have seen, and also August Strindberg, the Swedish dramatist, and Georg Brandes, the Danish literary historian. It was Brandes who wrote his famous essay about Nietzsche in 1888, thus making his name known in leading intellectual circles throughout Europe. Nietzsche's books began to sell widely. Fame had come at last. ...

But Nietzsche was fast wearing out; day by day he was fighting against fearful odds. In a pitiful letter to Brandes late in the year, he said, “I have resigned my professorship at the University; I am three parts blind. ...”

Somehow he managed to complete his Götzendämmerung, Twilight of Idols, before the year came to a close.

With the dawn of New Year's Day, 1889, the battle Nietzsche had waged so long was nearly over. For four days he struggled against the gathering shadows, but finally the light of his consciousness flickered out.

On the fourth of January Nietzsche wrote his last letter in pencil on a scrap of paper torn from a child's notebook. It was addressed to Georg Brandes from Turin: “To the friend Georg: When once you had discovered me, it was easy enough to find me; the difficulty now is to get rid of me.” The letter was signed, “The Crucified One.”

Nietzsche was forty-five years of age; the long night of spiritual darkness began. ...

While at work on Goethe's natural scientific writings, Steiner was active in the literary and artistic circles of Vienna in the last two years of the eighties. He had many friends among writers, poets, musicians, architects, journalists, scientists and the clergy. Before the Goethe Society of Vienna in 1888 he gave a lecture which reflected his keen interest in the question of artistic beauty. This lecture was subsequently published under the title, Goethe als Vater einer neuen Ästhetik, Goethe as Father of a New Aesthetics.

This year was marked by Steiner's first journey into Germany. This was in response to a letter from the administration of the Goethe-Schiller Archives at Weimar inviting him to act as a collaborator on the famous Weimar Edition of Goethe's works then in preparation under commission from the Archduchess Sophie of Saxony. Steiner was well received at Weimar, and from there went to Berlin where he made the acquaintance of Eduard von Hartmann, as we have already seen.

The reading of Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Beyond Good and Evil, in 1889 was Steiner's first acquaintance with Nietzsche's writings. He said, “I was fascinated ... yet repelled at the same time. I found it difficult to discover a right attitude toward Nietzsche. I loved his style, I loved his daring, but I did not love the way he spoke of most significant matters without entering into them in ... full consciousness. But then I saw that he said many things to which I was very closely related by my own spiritual experience. I felt myself near to his struggle. To me Nietzsche seemed to be one of the most tragic figures of the time.”

“I felt that Nietzsche photographed the world from the point to which a deeply significant personality was forced if he had to subsist on the spiritual substance of that time alone, that is, if the vision of the spiritual world did not penetrate into his consciousness ...

“This was the picture of Nietzsche that appeared in my thought. It revealed to me the personality who did not see the spirit, but in whom unconsciously the spirit fought against the unspiritual views of the age ...”

Steiner's move from Vienna to Weimar was the beginning of a new phase of his life. As a free collaborator in the Goethe-Schiller Archives he could observe events from the vantage point of one of the centers of the cultural life of his time. He came to know many of the leading personalities of the day. He had conversation with men like Hermann Grimm, the art historian and Goethe scholar, Ernst Haeckel, the scientist and German interpreter of Darwin, Ludwig Laistner, author and literary advisor to the internationally-known Cotta publishing firm, and many others. Laistner invited Steiner to edit editions of Schopenhauer and Jean Paul Richter, which were published by Cotta in their Library of World Literature. Steiner fulfilled this task, including writing introductions to the writings of both authors.

In 1891 Steiner received his Ph.D. at the University of Rostock. His thesis dealt with the scientific teaching of Fichte. In somewhat enlarged form this thesis appeared under the title, Wahrheit und Wissenchaft, Truth and Science, as the preface to Steiner's chief philosophical work, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, The Philosophy of Freedom, 1894.

And now events occurred which finally brought Rudolf Steiner into the company of those around Nietzsche, who was being cared for at the home of his mother in Naumberg.

In his autobiography Steiner describes a significant meeting: “One day Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, visited the Goethe-Schiller Archives. She was about to take the first step toward forming the Nietzsche Archives, and wanted to know how the Goethe-Schiller Archives were managed. A short time afterward the publisher of Nietzsche's works, Fritz Koegel, also appeared in Weimar, and I came to know him. ...

“I am thankful to Frau Foerster-Nietzsche that during the first of my many visits (to Nietzsche's home), she led me into the room of Friedrich Nietzsche. There on a couch he lay in spirit-night, with his marvelously beautiful brow, that of artist and thinker in one. It was early in the afternoon. Those eyes, which even in thir dimness gave the effect of soul penetration, still took in a picture of the surrounding, but this had no entrance into the soul. One stood there and Nietzsche was unaware of it. And yet one could have believed that this spiritually illuminated countenance expressed a soul which had formed thoughts within itself all morning, and now wished to rest for a while. A deep inner shudder which siezed my soul ... transformed itself into an understanding for the genius whose look was directed toward me, but which did not meet mine ...

“And before my soul stood the soul of Nietzsche, as if floating above his head, already boundless in its spirit light, freely surrendered to the spirit world, for which it had longed before this darkened condition, but did not find. ...

“Previously I had read the Nietzsche who had written; now I saw the Nietzsche who, from far distant spirit fields carried within his body ideas which still shimmered in beauty, despite the fact that on the way they had lost their original power of light. I saw a soul which had brought rich gold of enlightenment from earlier earth lives, but which it could not bring to full radiance in this life. I had admired what Nietzsche had written, but now behind my admiration I glimpsed a radiant picture.

“In my thoughts I could only stammer about what I had seen, and that stammering is the content of my book. ... It was the picture of Nietzsche which had inspired it.

“Frau Foerster-Nietzsche had asked that I arrange the Nietzsche library. Thus I was permitted to spend several weeks in the Nietzsche Archives in Naumberg. It was a beautiful task that brought before me books that Nietzsche had read. His spirit lived in the impressions these volumes made. ... A book by Emerson, covered with marginal notes, bore traces of the most devoted, intense study. ...

“My relationship with the Nietzsche Archives was a very stimulating episode in my life in Weimar. ...”

In 1897 Nietzsche's mother died, and his sister took him into her home, where he passed his last years. In this same year Rudolf Steiner wrote his Goethes Weltanschauung, Goethe's Conception of the World, a rich harvest from his work in Vienna and Weimar in close study of Goethe's contribution to the knowledge of man and nature. This book marked the end of Steiner's residence in Weimar, for he now moved to Berlin to assume the editorship of Das Magazin für Litteratur, a well-known literary periodical which had been founded by Joseph Lehmann in 1832.

On the twenty-fifth of August, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche died. He was buried in the graveyard at Röcken near the church where his father had preached, and the parsonage where he had been born fifty-six years before.

In Berlin, two weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche's death, Rudolf Steiner gave a Memorial Address in his honor, the text of which is included in the present volume.

In his Fors Clavigera, John Ruskin wrote, “Youth is properly a forming time—that in which a man makes himself, or is made, what he is to be. Then comes the time of labor, when, having become the best he can be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which, in happy lives, is very short; but always a time. The ceasing to breathe is only the end of death.”

For the Fighter for Freedom, the end of death had come at last.

PAUL MARSHALL ALLEN

Englewood, New Jersey
February, 1960