The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It will be our task to-day to describe to a certain extent the human being during his sojourn in Devachan between death and new birth. In this connection we must first of all form an idea of that which man gains through the fact that during his passage through the spiritual world he is, to begin with, active for his own sake. We can picture this more easily if we bear in mind the relationship of two things: of that which we experience, and of that which our experience becomes during the time between birth and death.

Consider, for instance, everything which you experience when you learn to write. You would find it difficult, to remember all the things which you had to take in at that time in order to learn the or writing. Think of all admonishments of your teacher. Perhaps even of his anger! All this passed through your soul, and what has remained? The capacity to write. Everything else has become blurred and the art of writing has remained.

This is the course of things in life generally—not only during the life between birth and death, but in the whole life of the universe, both in the physical and in the super-sensible world.

It is possible to form a conception of how the things explained above are active in the super-sensible world. Let us, for example, take Mozart. When he was quite a young boy he heard a long piece of music at St. peters in Rome; according to an old tradition it was not allowed to write down this music, but Mozart wrote it down afterwards, from memory. What memories you must have had! And he could do this as a young boy! How do materialists explained this? They would protest energetically if they were asked to believe that an ox grows out of a piece of earth, that in animals such as the ox arises in a way which does not correspond to Nature. They say: Miracles do not exist ... and they are perfectly right in this. But in the face of spiritual things they become tremendously superstitious and believed in miracles at which point materialists simply accept back such as the one just now described from Mozart's life, and without further ado they place it to the account of heredity. Yet at Mozart's case, an explanation not arising out of a spiritual science describes just as great a miracle as that of an ox growing out of a piece of earth. For it is possible for a human being gradually to acquire an excellent memory if he turns his spirit again and again towards the same object. Memory develops in exactly the same way in which something perfect develops out of something imperfect, and it would be a miracle if Mozart's memory had grown out of nothing!

The answer of spiritual science to such a problem is that even in such a case upgrade developed gradually and naturally. If a materialists seeks an explanation for it, he cannot extricate himself otherwise that by admitting that he must either believe in miracles or that capacity is which does manifest themselves prove that they already existed in a former life and that they followed an entirely natural course of development.

Reincarnation is consequently the logical deduction of such a train of thought. And those who explain, through a materialistic way of looking at things, that such a perfect memory as that of the young boy Mozart can arise out of nothing, should follow their belief to a logical conclusion and admit, for instance, that frogs develop without further ado from mud—A fact which was accepted by a natural scientists before the time of Francesco Redi. Consequently, those who wish to be logical in spiritual science state: Even as an oak-tree grows out of the acorn and develops gradually, so our soul-capacities develop little by little, and when a human being enters life with capacities so highly developed as those of Mozart, this undeniably proves that the human being gained these capacities during former lives on earth. This gives us a clue to the comprehension of man's destiny in the spiritual world.

The essential point is therefore that the experiences of one life transform themselves into capacities for the succeeding life. All the dispositions of character which we bring with us in this life are the fruit of experiences gained during earlier lives on earth. For this reason it is necessary to study man's passage through Devachan in order to understand fully how the experiences of one life become capacities in the next life.

When we pass through our life on earth, we daily experience many things, and all these experiences appear in the panorama-picture already described to you, which rises up before the soul's eye immediately after death. But the capacities which we have gained through all these experiences remain as an essence, and we take along with us into the spiritual world this essence,which endures for all times to come.

When the human being enters Devachan, he perceives the regions described to you yesterday; the continental region, consisting of the archetypes of all earthly forms; the oceanic region, consisting of everything which is life; the air-region, consisting of everything pertaining to the soul, pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, etc. In the continental region the human being first perceives the archetype of his own physical body, and in the air-region he of course perceives, to begin with, also that which took place within his own soul during his past life on earth in the form of joy, suffering, pleasure, pain and passions. In other words, he once more perceives all the experiences of his past life, but in an entirely different way than during his passage through the Kamaloka period, which I have already described to you. In Kamaloka he lived through them once more in order to lose the habit of being dependent on them. In the watery region of Devachan man experiences all the peculiarities of his bodily life, and in the air-region of the celestial world he passes through all his psychic experiences.

It is important and of great interest to realise that everything which we have experienced in the course of one life—our feelings concerning the world, pleasure, pain, etc.—that in the spiritual world all this surrounds us as an external world. We need not feel sad that there our sufferings lie spread out before us. This is not sad at all, for there, all our sufferings exist in the same way in which storms exist in the physical world and in the spiritual world all our joyful experiences appear to us like wonderful cloud-phenomena. In Devachan our own inner experiences do not exist within us, as here on earth, but they live in our environment in an external form, in the same way in which a picture of Nature lies spread out before us. Our inner experiences live round about us, as if they were images, sounds or atmospheric phenomena; they have become objectified, as heavenly forms.

I have told you that it is not sad if our sufferings come raying towards us; just as little sad as lightning or thunder in physical life. Those who perceive these connections know what they owe to their sufferings in particular. Just those who have passed through pain and suffering will always say that they gratefully accept joy and pleasure, but that they would never wish to do without suffering and pain. We owe all Our wisdom to our suffering and pain during past lives on earth. A man whose physiognomy bears upon it the mark of wisdom in this life, owes this to the fact that in former lives he experienced the world's connection as suffering.

I have already explained to you that everything which we have experienced during our earthly-life lies spread out before us in pictures, etc, , when we enter Devachan. What does this signify? It will be easier to understand this if we realise what influence the environment exercises upon us. You all know Goethe's words: “The eye has been formed through the light and for the light.” What does this mean? The eye must exist in order to perceive the light. If we did not possess our eyesight the world would be dark and gloomy. But what is the origin of the human eye? It has been formed by the light itself, and similarly the eye would degenerate if there were no light. It has, for instance, been possible to observe this fact directly, in the case of animals who immigrated into the caves of Kentucky.

Light is the origin of the power of sight. Once upon a time man was not endowed with sight, because he still lived under quite different conditions; in earlier times of the earth's development the sun was not visible to an external sensory eye. Let us remember in this connection what the legends relate in regard to “Niflheim”.

The:more man lived exposed to the sun, the further the eye developed by the light of the sun. All the other sense organs developed in the same way: sound formed the ear, heat the sense of heat. We would have no sense of touch if there were no hard objects. The external world moulds and forms our body.

This is most important in practical life; in fact, theosophy is always meant to be applied to practical life. It is also most important in education, for only an educator who can look deeply into man's nature educate in the right way.

The physical body develops until the child changes its teeth, the etheric body develops up to the 14th/15th year, and the astral body up to the 21st year. We must know all this if education is to be approached practically and not fantastically. Since the disposition of the physical body is what we must bear in mind up to the seventh year, physical impressions, that is to say, everything which the child perceives through his sense organs, must be considered deeply and thoroughly. Sins of omission in education in connection with the form and disposition of the physical organs in the child's body, are a loss for the whole of life.

An insight into this last sentence gives medicine in particular many guiding lines for a right treatment of illnesses, among others, for instance, rickets, How is it that rickets arise just in this period of life? Just because; the child is moulding its body, and that is why these symptoms manifest themselves in the form (deformed bones, bad teeth, wrong form of the skull, etc.) But for this very reason the child is still able, until dentition, to correct the wrong forms and lead them back to a normal condition. We can see that even the most crooked legs grow straight again if the child receives the right treatment, and that perfectly sound second teeth can develop even if the milk-teeth were quite defective, whereas crooked legs which were not healed up to the seventh year remain crooked for the whole of life.

Up to the seventh year the brain is also engaged in the work of moulding its plastic forms, and the fine developments and forms of the brain's shape which could not be moulded up to that time are lost forever. Since the physical brain is the instrument through which the spirit manifests itself, it is of tremendous importance that this instrument should be moulded as finely as possible, that is to say, that it should be prepared during, the first seven years of life. For even the greatest individuality can do nothing with a defective brain, just as the greatest pianist cannot play well on a piano which is out of tune. Spiritual science, can give most important guidance to pedagogy, as well as to medicine, particularly in regard to the development of the brain.

In modern medicine one comes across a complete misunderstanding of facts particularly in this field. Rickets manifest themselves in a deformation of the bones, but very frequently they also appear in the shape of a defective glandular system and diseased mucous membranes; that is to say, children affected with rickets frequently have symptoms of swollen glands, adenoid growths, etc. A third pathological symptom in such children is that at school they frequently remain behind spiritually and that they become apathetic, indeed even slightly idiotic. In reality this is based on the defective development of the physical brain, particularly of its so-called corticose substance, which must above all be developed in its finest structure during these years. And in the same way the other symptoms are based on defective development.

Through the modern natural-scientific training and attitude, modern medicine is in such cases more than inclined to follow the example of modern natural science, namely to look upon the external symptoms as cause and effect, linking them up together like pearls on a chain and completely ignoring the deeper spiritual causes. What is the result? The facts are: rickety bones, adenoid growths, diminished attention and comprehension on the child's part. The conclusion to which modern doctors arrive is: Children with adenoid growths become mentally defective Owing to those growths; consequently it is necessary to remove them. The growths are consequently removed by operation. If this conclusion were right, every child who underwent such a treatment would respond to it by the disappearance of the impediments in the brain. But what is observed after such a treatment in the great majority of cases? The operation results in a sham success of brief duration, for the growths appear again after a very short time. But if the illness is to be attacked at its root—and this is quite possible, only now this would lead us too far away from our subject—the deformed bones, the swollen mucous membranes and glands disappear, as well as the impediments in the working of the brain.

After this digression, let us new return to our subject. The external world thus calls into being and moulds the right physical forms. Up to the seventh year, the child is in reality nothing but sense-organ. Everything which it takes in with its senses is elaborated ; above all, what it sees and hears in its immediate environment. Until dentition, the child is therefore an imitative being, and,this goes as far as its physical organisation. This is quite natural. Through its sense-organs, the child takes in its whole environment. And it is always practicing how to use it to limbs. It watches how its father or mother, etc. do this or that thing, and it simply imitates them. This goes as far as the movements of hands and legs. If the father or the mother are, for instance, fidgety people, then the child will also become fidgety in countless cases; if the mother is calm, then the child will of course, also become calm. We must try to produce the right counter-condition by placing the child in a right environment.

It is absolutely necessary to stimulate the child's fantasy, besides giving it sensory impressions, if it is to receive the influences needed for the development of the physical brain. It is consequently necessary to give a small child toys which are as simple as possible. A natural child will again and again turned to the “old doll”, made of a rag, no matter how beautiful the “new doll” which it receives. Only the spoiled children of our age are brought up on “beautiful”dolls. What is the reason for this? The child must exert its fantasy in order to transform the red-doll in its fancy into something resembling human shape, and this is a sound activity for the brain. Even as the arm grow stronger through gymnastic exercises, so the brain develops through this exercise.

Also the colours in, the child's surroundings are important. They exercise quite a different influence upon a small child than upon an adult. Many people think that green has a calming effect upon children. But this is quite wrong. A fidgety child should be surrounded with red and a calm child with green or blue-green. The effect of red upon the child is as follows: If you look upon a bright red and then turn your gaze away quickly to a piece of white paper you will see its complementary colour, which is green. ... By this I mean to, illustrate the tendency which the eye has to produce the opposite colour. The child also attempts to do this; inwardly he seeks to unfold the activity which calls forth the counter-colour. This is an example showing how the environment can influence a child.

In a similar way the child is influenced by everything which surrounds it, in addition to many, many things which I shall explain later, in another connection. All this contributes to a very great extent to the development of the child's physical body, from its birth to dentition; to the development of the etheric body, from the seventh to the fourteenth year; or to the development of the astral body, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, etc. Indeed, during the whole life the surrounding world exercises its influence upon the human being. The proverb, “Tell me with whom you go, and I will tell you who you are”, is based on this insight, for “with whom you go” means “what takes place in my environment”. This environment therefore has a strong influence upon us. This applies particularly to the time when the astral body develops, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, and it is an almost daily experience that a young person can easily be astrally corrupted by his environment during these years.

It is exactly the same in Devachan, as here in physical life. Even as here on earth the human being is constantly exposed to the influences of the atmosphere, so he is also exposed to them in Devachan—and there the atmosphere consists of all psychic life, our own and that of our fellow men. All this soul life continually influences the, human being, and gifts and talents develop through the fact that they attract the psychically kindred astral forces from the environment, allowing them to exercise their influence. Mozart was born with such a great musical memory because in a former life he had gathered experiences having this goal in view, and then allowed these experiences to exercise their influence for a long time, during his life in Devachan. Through our environment in Devachan we pass through an enhanced development of our innermost being—indirectly, through all our experiences during our preceding life on earth.

All our capacities are therefore the fruit of former lives, and in Devachan they have been further developed. This is the bliss-giving feeling in Devachan. In Devachan we hatch out what we are able to do in our present life, And in accordance with this is the feeling which we have during the whole intermediary time of our Devachan existence: This feeling, connected with everything productive, is bliss.

Here on earth we often feel pain, but in Devachan even pain is bliss, for there we realise, that we acquire wisdom through pain. Even a materialistic scientist has discovered this fact his book “Mimic of Thought” he writes: “Every wise countenance reveals the expression of crystallised suffering”. From the pains of his preceding life the human being in fact produces through his experiences in Devachan talents and wisdom for his next life on Earth. And the feeling of producing this is one of untold bliss.

You may see a pale reflection of this here on earth in a hatching hen. If you transfer this to the spiritual plane and enhance it immensely you obtain the feeling of incessant infinite bliss between the time of Kamaloka and a new birth,—for then the human being works out all his dispositions and capacities for the next life. Everything there becomes a source of blissful life.

We have therefore seen that one source of bliss in Devachan is all the ties formed here on earth are formed once more in Devachan, indeed we experience the spiritual part of those relationships in an immensely enhanced form. The other source of bliss is the productive, creative activity for our next life, as described above.

If the spiritual investigator now turns his gaze upon this activity of man in Devachan he perceives that this productive work has a meaning not only for the individual human being and for his future organisation, but that the human being must contribute and cooperate in a significant way in the progress of the whole evolution of the earth. It is an error to think that in Devachan we are only concerned with our own affairs. How must we work, as blissful spirits in the realm of spirits?

The activity of the dead is a cooperation in the development of our earth . . . We might easily ask: Why are we always born again, after having passed through the experiences of one earthly life? Is not reincarnation useless?

But this is not the case. It is never useless for a man to be born again. The single lives on earth are so far apart , that we always learn something new and pass through new experiences. Centuries elapse between two incarnations, and when we return, the earth has completely changed. Let us suppose that we lived on earth in the second century after Christ. What aspect did the earth present at that time? Even the descriptions of this region, of the Elbe and the Weser etc. of a much later period would be quite different from present descriptions, for here, in Nassau-Hessen, there were still virgin forests.

When the human being is born again, he experiences something quite different from his former life. During our various lives on earth we participate in the development of the earth itself, through the very fact that we incarnate again and again. In addition there is the change brought about by every civilisation. Think of what a Roman boy was able to do! Of the great difference in the education of a boy of the present time! As we have seen, all these experiences are immensely important. It therefore has a deep significance that the human being must always come back again.

Let us now ask: Who changes the face of the earth? The dead themselves, who live in the spirit-realm, do this, through the power which they there acquire, enabling them to work upon this transformation of the earth. Even as human beings are here active externally upon the earth, so the dead are active upon the spiritual prototype of the physical earth. It is they who send their forces into this physical earth, cooperating in its transformation. Of course, there are leaders in this work and higher beings who take over the guidance. In this spiritual realm—which is in our very midst—the dead work upon the transformation of the countenance of the earth.

Why am I in this very place to-day? Why have I been born here? Because I myself have, so to speak, prepared my bed in the very place where I was born. The forces which have a transforming influence both upon the oceans and, upon the surface of the earth, are the forces of our dead. We know that the Atlantic Ocean of to-day was once upon a time a wide expanse of land; this transformation too has been brought about by our dead, and these forces are quite natural and in no way miraculous.

An insight into such things proves with absolute logic the importance and necessity of this work in the spirit realm. If we only know how to interpret the phenomena in the right way, we may even describe this work. Here on earth we breathe the air; we could not live without air. It is similar with the dead, except that there the light plays the same part which the air plays here on earth. The initiate perceives the dead in the midst of light, which is spread out everywhere. A clairvoyant seer, for instance, sees the plants surrounded by the spirits of the dead and these spirits of the dead make the plant grow through the light and change the plant. In the spiritual world we shall all soar above the earth and work upon the plants.

If we thus contemplate the world in connection with the spiritual beings, it becomes larger and more significant to us.

In conclusion, let me mention a few things which can help us to understand certain fine details in our civilisation.

At times, the seer finds that his own observations are confirmed by phenomena in the history of ancient peoples, which before were enigmas to him. It is, for instance, a well known fact that at first primitive nations possess a kind of clairvoyance enabling them to see things of which we have no idea. These primitive races often saw in the shadow, for example, something which is connected with the soul. The clairvoyant now returns to this through his own observations. For if you look in to the shadow which you yourself throw, you first learn to perceive your own spiritual emanations. If we retain the physical light, we perceive the spiritual in the shadow-space. This knowledge has been preserved in occult science, and many who had no inkling of this truth have used it, for example, Chamisso in his “Peter Schlemihl”. This is a man who lost his shadow and is very unhappy over this. But it is a spiritual fact that the soul is visible in the shadow, and the man without a shadow is therefore a man without a soul.

There are hundreds of examples of this kind. We really learn to know the world fully if we learn to know its spiritual foundations. Spiritual science therefore is not for brooding people, but for those who wish to be active in practical life. We do not wish to withdraw from the visible world, but rather to understand it better.

The higher facts are related to the visible world as magnetism is related to iron. We learn to know iron fully if we also learn to know magnetism. A few examples will show us that especially that which we learn to know in the spiritual world bears fruit in practical life.

My dear friends,

You will perhaps have noticed that in our considerations here, we are striving for a certain particular goal. We are trying to place together a series of phenomena taken from the realm of heat in such a manner that the real nature of warmth may be obvious to us from these phenomena. We have become acquainted in a general way with certain relations that meet us from within the realm of heat, and we have in particular observed the relation of this realm of the expansionability of bodies. We have followed this with an attempt to picture to ourselves mentally the nature of form in solid bodies, fluids and gaseous bodies. I have also spoken of the relation of heat to the changes produced in bodies in going from the solid to the fluid and from the fluid to the gaseous or vaporous condition. Now I wish to bring before you certain relations which come up when we have to do with gases or vapors. We already know that these are so connected with heat that by means of this we bring about the gaseous condition, and again, by appropriate change of temperature that we can obtain a liquid from a gas. Now you know that when we have a solid body, we cannot by any means interpenetrate this solid with another. The observation of such simple elementary relations is of enormous importance if we really wish to force our way through to the nature of heat. The experiment I will carry out here will show that water vapor produced here in this vessel passes through into this second vessel. And now having filled the second vessel with water vapor, we will produce in the first vessel another vapor whose formation you can follow by reason of the fact that it is colored. (The experiment was carried out.) You see that in spite of our having filled the vessel with water vapor, the other vapor goes into the space filled with the water vapor. That is, a gas does not prevent another gas from penetrating the space it occupies. We may make this clear to ourselves by saying that gaseous or vaporous bodies may to a certain extent interpenetrate each other.

I will now show you another phenomenon which will illustrate one more relation of heat to certain facts. We have here in the left hand tube, air which is in equilibrium with the outer air with which we are always surrounded. I must remind you that this outer air surrounding us is always under a certain pressure, the usual atmospheric pressure, and it exerts this pressure on us. Thus, we can say that air inside the left hand tube is under the same pressure as the outer air itself, which fact is shown by the similar level of mercury in the right and left hand tubes. You can see that on both right and left hand sides the mercury column is at the same height, and that since here on the right the tube is open to the atmosphere the air in the closed tube is at atmospheric pressure. We will now alter the conditions by bringing pressure on the air in the left hand tube, (\(2\) × \(p\)). By doing this we have added to the usual atmospheric pressure, the pressure due to the higher mercury column. That is, we have simply added the weight of the mercury from here to here. (Fig. 1b from \(a\) to \(b\)). By thus increasing the pressure exerted on this air by the pressure corresponding to the weight of the mercury column, the volume of the air in the left hand tube is, as you can see, made smaller. We can therefore say when we increase the pressure on the gas its volume decreases. We must extend this and consider it a general phenomenon that the space occupied by a gas and the pressure exerted on it have an inverse ratio to each other. The greater the pressure the smaller the volume, and the greater the volume the smaller must be the pressure acting on the gas. We can express this in the form of an equation where the volume \(V_1\) divided by the volume \(V_2\) equals the pressure \(P_2\) divided by the pressure \(P_1\).

From which it follows:

This expresses a relatively general law (we have to say relative and will see why later.) This may be stated as follows: volume and pressure of gases are so related that the volume-pressure product is a constant at constant temperature. As we have said, such phenomena as these must be placed side by side if we are to approach the nature of heat. And now, since our considerations are to be thought of as a basis for pedagogy we must consider the matter from two aspects. On the one hand, we must build up a knowledge of the method of thinking of modern physics and on the other, we must become acquainted with what must happen if we are to throw aside certain obstacles that modern physics places in the path to a real understanding of the nature of heat.

Please picture vividly to ourselves that when we consider the nature of heat we are necessarily dealing at the same time with volume increases, that is with changes in space and with alterations of pressure. In other words, mechanical facts meet us in our consideration of heat. I have to speak repeatedly in detail of these things although it is not customary to do this. Space changes, pressure changes. Mechanical facts meet us.

Now for physics, these facts that meet us when we consider heat are purely and simply mechanical facts. These mechanical occurrences are, as it were, the milieu in which heat is observed. The being of heat is left, so to speak, in the realm of the unknown and attention is focused on the mechanical phenomena which play themselves out under its influence. Since the perception of heat is alleged to be purely a subjective thing, the expansion of mercury, say, accompanying change of heat condition and of sensation of heat, is considered as something belonging in the realm of the mechanical. The dependence of gas pressure, for instance, on the temperature, which we will consider further, is thought of as essentially mechanical and the being of heat is left out of consideration. We saw yesterday that there is a good reason for this. For we saw that when we attempt to calculate heat, difficulties arise in the usual calculations and that we cannot, for example, handle the third power of the temperature in the same way as the third power of an ordinary quantity in space. And since modern physics has not appreciated the importance of the higher powers of the temperature, it has simply stricken them out of the expansion formulae I mentioned to you in former lectures.

Now you need only consider the following. You need consider only that in the sphere of outer nature heat always appears in external mechanical phenomena, primarily in space phenomena. Space phenomena are there to begin with and in them the heat appears. This it is, my dear friends, that constrains us to think of heat as we do of lines in space and that leads us to proceed from the first power of extension in space to the second power of the extension.

When we observe the first power of the extension, the line, and we wish to go over to the second power, we have to go out of the line. That is, we must add a second dimension to the first. The standard of measurement of the second power has to be thought of as entirely different from that of the first power. We have to proceed in an entirely similar fashion when we consider a temperature condition. The first power is, so to speak, present in the expansion. Change of temperature and expansion are so related that they may be expressed by rectilinear coordination (Fig. 2). I am obliged, when I wish to make the graph representing change in expansion with change in temperature, to add the axis of abscissae to the axis of ordinates. But this makes it necessary to consider what is appearing as temperature not as a first power but as a second power, and the second power as a third. When we deal with the third power of the temperature, we can no longer stay in our ordinary space. A simple consideration, dealing it is true with rather subtle distinctions, will show you that in dealing with the heat manifesting itself as the third power, we cannot limit ourselves to the three directions of space. It will show you how, the moment we deal with the third power, we are obliged, so far as heat effects are concerned, to go out of space.

In order to explain the phenomena, modern physics sets itself the problem of doing so and remaining within the three dimensional space.

You see, here we have an important point where physical science has to cross a kind of Rubicon to a higher view of the world. And one is obliged to emphasize the fact that since so little attempt is made to attain clarity at this point, a corresponding lack enters into the comprehensive world view.

Imagine to yourselves that physicists would so present these matters to their students as to show that one must leave ordinary space in which mechanical phenomena play when heat phenomena are to be observed. In such a case, these teachers of physics would call forth in their students, who are intelligent people since they find themselves able to study the subject, the idea that a person cannot really know it without leaving the three dimensional space. Then it would be much easier to place a higher world-view before people. For people in general, even if they were not students of physics, would say, “We cannot form a judgment on the matter, but those who have studied know that the human being must rise through the physics of space to other relations than the purely spatial relations.” Therefore so much depends on our getting into this science such ideas as those put forth in our considerations here. Then what is investigated would have an effect on a spiritually founded world view among people in general quite different from what it has now. The physicist announces that he explains all phenomena by means of purely mechanical facts. This causes people to say, “Well, there are only mechanical facts in space. Life must be a mechanical thing, soul phenomena must be mechanical and spiritual things must be mechanical.” “Exact sciences” will not admit the possibility of a spiritual foundation for the world. And “exact science” works as an especially powerful authority because they are not familiar with it. What people know, they pass their own judgment on and do not permit it to exercise such an authority. What they do not know they accept on authority. If more were done to popularize the so-called “rigidly exact science,” the authority of some of those who sit entrenched in possession of this exact science would practically disappear.

During the course of the 19th century there was added to the facts that we have already observed, another one of which I have spoken briefly. This is that mechanical phenomena not only appear in connection with the phenomena of heat, but that heat can be transformed into mechanical phenomena. This process you see in the ordinary steam locomotive where heat is applied and forward motion results. Also mechanical processes, friction and the like, can be transformed back again into heat since the mechanical processes, as it is said, bring about the appearance of heat. Thus mechanical processes and heat processes may be mutually transformed into each other.

We will sketch the matter today in a preliminary fashion and go into the details pertaining to this realm in subsequent lectures.

Further, it has been found that not only heat but electrical and chemical processes may be changed into mechanical processes And from this has been developed what has been called during the 19th century the “mechanical theory of heat.”

This mechanical theory of heat has as its principal postulate that heat and mechanical effects are mutually convertible one into the other. Now suppose we consider this idea somewhat closely. I am unable to avoid for you the consideration of these elementary things of the realm of physics. If we pass by the elementary things in our basic consideration, we will have to give up attaining any clarity in this realm of heat. We must therefore ask the questions: what does it really mean then when I say: Heat as it is applied in the steam engine shows itself as motion, as mechanical work? What does it mean when I draw from this idea: through heat, mechanical work is produced in the external world? Let us distinguish clearly between what we can establish as fact and the ideas which we add to these facts. We can establish the fact that a process subsequently is revealed as mechanical work, or shows itself as a mechanical process. Then the conclusion is drawn that the heat process, the heat as such, has been changed into a mechanical thing, into work.

Well now, my dear friends, if I come into this room and find the temperature such that I am comfortable, I may think to myself, perhaps unconsciously without saying it in words: In this room it is comfortable. I sit down at the desk and write something. Then following the same course of reasoning as has given rise to the mechanical theory of heat, I would say: I came into the room, the heat condition worked on me and what I wrote down is a consequence of this heat condition. Speaking in a certain sense I might say that if I had found the place cold like a cellar, I would have hurried out and would not have done this work of writing. If now I add to the above the conclusion that the heat conducted to me has been changed into the work I did, then obviously something has been left out of my thinking. I have left out all that which can only take place through myself. If I am to comprehend the whole reality I must insert into my judgment of it this which I have left out. The question now arises: When the corresponding conclusion is drawn in the realm of heat, by assuming that the motion of the locomotive is simply the transformed heat from the boiler, have I not fallen into the error noted above? That is, have I not committed the same fallacy as when I speak of a transformation of heat into an effect which can only take place because I myself am part of the picture? It may appear to be trivial to direct attention to such a thing as this, but it is just these trivialities that have been completely forgotten in the entire mechanical theory of heat. What is more, enormously important things depend on this. Two things are bound together here. First, when we pass over from the mechanical realm into the realm where heat is active we really have to leave three dimensional space, and then we have to consider that when external nature is observed, we simply do not have that which is interpolated in the case, where heat is changed over into my writing. When heat is changed into my writing, I can note from observation of my external bodily nature that something has been interpolated in the process. Suppose however, that I simply consider the fact that I must leave three dimensional space in order to relate the transformation of heat into mechanical effects. Then I can say, perhaps the most important factor involved in this change plays its part outside of three dimensional space. In the example that concerned myself which I gave you, the manner in which I entered into the process took place outside of three dimensions. And when I speak of simple transformation of heat into work I am guilty of the same superficiality as when I consider transformation of heat into a piece of written work and leave myself out.

This, however, leads to a very weighty consequence. For it requires me to consider in external nature even lifeless inorganic nature, a being not manifested in three dimensional space. This being, as it were, rules behind the three dimensions. Now this is very fundamental in relation to our studies of heat itself.

Since we have outlined the fundamentals of our conception of the realm of heat, we may look back again on something we have already indicated, namely on man's own relation to heat. We may compare the perception of heat to perception in other realms. I have already called attention to the fact that, for instance, when we perceive light, we note this perception of light to be bound up with a special organ. This organ is simply inserted into our body and we cannot, therefore, speak of being related to color and light with our whole organism, but our relation to it concerns a part of us only. Likewise with acoustical or sound phenomena, we are related to them with a portion of our organism, namely the organ of hearing. To the being of heat we are related through our entire organism. This fact, however, conditions our relation to the being of heat. We are related to it with our entire organism. And when we look more closely, when we try, as it were, to express these facts in terms of human consciousness, we are obliged to say, “We are really ourselves this heat being. In so far as we are men moving around in space, we are ourselves this heat being.” Imagine the temperature were to be raised a couple of hundred degrees; at that moment we could no longer be identical with it, and the same thing applies if you imagine it lowered several hundred degrees. Thus the heat condition belongs to that in which we continually live, but do not take up into our consciousness. We experience it as independent beings, but we do not experience it consciously. Only when some variation from the normal condition occurs, does it take conscious form.

Now with this fact a more inclusive one may be connected. It is this. You may say to yourselves when you contact a warm object and perceive the heat condition by means of your organism, that you can do it with the tip of your tongue, with the tip of your finger, you can do it with other parts of your organism: with the lobes of your ears, let us say. In fact, you can perceive the heat condition with your entire organism. But there is something else you can perceive with your entire organism. You can perceive anything exerting pressure. And here again, you are not limited strictly as you are in the case of the eye and color perception to a certain member of your entire organism. If would be very convenient if our heads, at least, were an exception to this rule of pressure perception; we would not then be made so uncomfortable from a rap on the head.

We can say there is an inner kinship between the nature of our relationship to the outer world perceived as heat and perceived as pressure. We have today spoken of pressure volume relations. We come back now to our own organism and find an inner kinship between our relation to heat and to pressure. Such a fact must be considered as a groundwork for what will follow.

But there is something else that must be taken into account as a preliminary to further observations. You know that in the most popular text books of physiology, a good deal of emphasis is laid on the fact that we have certain organs within our bodies by means of which we perceive the usual sense qualities. We have the eye for color, the ear for sound, the organ of taste for certain chemical processes, etc. We have spread over our entire organism, as it were, the undifferentiated heat organ, and the undifferentiated pressure organ.

Now, usually, attention is drawn to the fact that there are certain other things of which we are aware but for which we have no organs. Magnetism and electricity are known to us only through their effects and stand, as it were, outside of us, not immediately perceived. It is said sometimes that if we imagine our eyes were electrically sensitive instead of light sensitive, then when we turned them towards a telegraph wire we would perceive the streaming electricity in it. Electricity would be known not merely by its effects, but like light and color, would be immediately perceived. We cannot do this. We must therefore say: electricity is an example of something for whose immediate perception we have no organ. There are aspects of nature, thus, for which we have organs and aspects of nature for which we do not have organs. So it is said.

The question is whether perhaps a more unbiased observer would not come to a different conclusion from those whose view is expressed above. You all know, my dear friends, that what we call our ordinary passive concepts through which we apprehend the world, are closely bound up with the impressions received through the eye, the ear and somewhat less so with taste and smell impressions. If you will simply consider language, you may draw from it the summation of your conceptual life, and you will become aware that the words themselves used to represent our ideas are residues of our sense impressions. Even when we speak the very abstract word Sein (being), the derivation is from Ich habe gesehen, (I have seen.) What I have seen I can speak of as possessing “being.” In “being” there is included “what has been seen.” Now without becoming completely materialistic (and we will see later why it is not necessary to become so), it may be said that our conceptual world is really a kind of residue of seeing and hearing and to a lesser extent of smelling and tasting. (Those last two enter less into our higher sense impressions.) Through the intimate connection between our consciousness and our sense impressions, this consciousness is enabled to take up the passive concept world.

But within the soul nature, from another side, comes the will, and you remember how I have often told you in these anthroposophical lectures that man is really asleep so far as his will is concerned. He is, properly considered, awake only in the passive conceptual realm. What you will, you apprehend, only through these ideas or concepts. You have the idea. I will raise this glass. Now, in so far as your mental act contains ideas, it is a residue of sense impressions. You place before yourself in thought something which belongs entirely in the realm of the seen, and when you think of it, you have an image of something seen. Such an immediately derived image you cannot create from a will process proper, from what happens when you stretch out your arm and actually grasp the glass with your hand and raise it. That act is entirely outside of your consciousness. You are not aware of what happens between your consciousness and the delicate processes in your arm. Our unconsciousness of it is as complete as our unconsciousness between falling asleep and waking up. But something really is there and takes place, and can its existence be denied simply because it does not enter our consciousness? Those processes must be intimately bound up with us as human beings, because after all, it is we who raise the glass. Thus we are led in considering our human nature from that which is immediately alive in consciousness to will processes taking place, as it were, outside of consciousness. (Fig. 3) Imagine to yourselves that everything above this line is in the realm of consciousness. What is underneath is in the realm of will and is outside of consciousness. Starting from this point we proceed to the outer phenomena of nature and find our eye intimately connected with color phenomena, something which we can consciously apprehend; we find our ear intimately connected with sound, as something we can consciously apprehend. Tasting and smelling are, however, apprehended in a more dreamlike way. We have here something which is in the realm of consciousness and yet is intimately bound up with the outer world.

If now, we go to magnetic and electrical phenomena, the entity which is active in these is withdrawn from us in contrast with those phenomena of nature which have immediate connection with us through certain organs. This entity escapes us. Therefore, say the physicists and physiologists: we have no organ for it; it is cut off from us. It lies outside us. (Fig. 3 above) We have realms that we approach when we draw near the outer world—the realms of light and heat. How do electrical phenomena escape us? We can trace no connection between them and any of our organs. Within us we have the results of our working over of light and sound phenomena as residues in the form of ideas. When, however, we plunge down (Fig. 3 below), our own being disappears from us into will.

I will now tell you something a bit paradoxical, but think it over until tomorrow. Imagine we were not living men, but living rainbows, and that our consciousness dwelt in the green portion of the spectrum. On the one side we would trail off into unconsciousness in the yellow and red and this would escape us inwardly like our will. If we were rainbows, we would not perceive green, because that we are in our beings, we do not perceive immediately; we live it. We would touch the border of the real inner when we tried, as it were, to pass from the green to the yellow. We would say: I, as a rainbow, approach my red portion, but cannot take it up as a real inner experience; I approach my blue-violet, but it escapes me. If we were thinking rainbows, we would thus live in the green and have on the one side a blue-violet pole and on the other side a yellow-red pole. Similarly, we now as men are placed with our consciousness between what escapes us as external natural phenomena in the form of electricity and as inner phenomena in the form of will.

It can be seen from what has been said about evolution and involution that it is possible to ask with every phenomenon: What has evolved? [What is in involution?]

Looking at the physical Earth we will find different states of aggregation—solid, fluid, gaseous and ether-like. Physical substances are only perceptible to human [senses] from the outside; they also have an inner aspect, and this is in involution. The outer one, which is evolved, is perceptible to the senses.

Taking fire, air and water, we can say that they are representative of the three levels of which we have spoken:

fire - level of existence air - level of life water - level of conscious awareness.

The way we put it is to say that water is in some way related to conscious awareness, since for the physical human being the astral is the principle in which he becomes aware of himself in sentience.

When we go to the Earth, we have reached the level of existence; when he [the human being] becomes earthly, he gains self-awareness. These four states of aggregation thus represent four states in the human being: existence, life, conscious awareness and then again existence.

Let us go back to the state in which the human being was the way which has been described so often: like jellyfish or gel, not yet having reached the stage then of using air as such in himself. He was a water human being. It is evident that the organ used to take in air would have served no purpose then. It did not [exist], in fact and [hence also] not the creatures of the air, the birds. We were in the process of preparing for the lung human being and the creatures which arose in consequence.

The human being was preparing to take in air, which could only be done by ... him preparing an outer form for himself in which the formless principle concerned would be able to live. The lung is nothing but the evolution of the principle which is in involution in the air. The lung is thus the evolution of life [air].

Let us remember: The human being evolved from a lungless animal to one with lungs, he created form for himself, and life was able to enter into the form. The concomitant was the bird world. The gel-like human being grew solid, taking chaotic matter, dust-like at the time, into himself, and parallel to this assimilation of matter went that of air. Two things happened: assimilation of earthly dust and absorption of the principle of life with the air. He became living from within, in the soul.

We must also note the following. The bird world is something which remains as an eternal symbol of the living human soul. Hence the phoenix forever rising from the ashes in renewal and perishing in the flames.

A process such as the creation of a form through a principle must be seen as something typical.

Earlier, the air as such was the outer vestment of the life principle contained in it, and now the lung [which] is the outer vestment for the life principle contained in the human being.

The relationship between macrocosmic life and air is like the relationship between microcosmic human life and lung.

Once again the Bible can be taken literally: putting together earth dust and the living human being.

If we consider the whole of evolution, every mineral state of life is preceded by three earlier states, and there are three to follow. Let us ask ourselves, what is the relationship between these seven states? In the middle one we have a particular relationship between existence, life and conscious awareness. It is more or less in balance. If we think of them being evenly distributed, we get the middle planet, balance:

existence of body \(a\), life or soul \(b\), spirit or conscious mind \(c\). The planet is in its middle state:

Other relationships are possible (\(=\) equal, \(>\) predominant):

No others are possible.

When existence is grossly preponderant over the other states, so that life and conscious awareness are seed-like, we have the arupa state. If we let life be such that it contains existence, we have form, rupa. If conscious awareness preponderates ... [gap], we have the astral. When they are equal [we have] the physical.

In the arupa state we have existence in evolution, life and conscious awareness in involution. Rupa state: existence and life evolved, conscious awareness in involution. Astral state: all three evolved, but existence and life greater than conscious awareness. In the physical, approximate equality of proportions.

We have now tried to approach these things from different points of view, keeping our concepts fluid as we attach them to these things.

An important occult maxim is to see any form of understanding merely as a vestment for the essential nature. This must live in us. We must all the time make garments and vestments of the nature of the thing in us, but be aware that the nature of the thing is not in those vestments and garments. The moment we have found a form that expresses the inner nature of the thing we have made the esoteric exoteric. The esoteric can thus never be told in any but an exoteric form.

Create forms of understanding all the time, but also always overcome the forms of understanding you have created for yourself. First it is you, secondly are the forms of understanding you have created, thirdly it is you again, having made those forms your own and overcome them. This means that you are existence first, then life in the forms you have created, and thirdly conscious awareness in the life forms which you have assimilated. Or: you are you and need to evolve in your forms, so that you may then let the evolved forms go through involution in you.

Human understanding is thus also existence, life and conscious awareness.

It is impossible to see the all and everything of a truth in a dogma or teaching; the dogma is only the second element. We need to overcome it; then we have seen the truth of things for ourselves. Hence the important maxim:

Human beings have to be dogmatic in order to perceive the truth, but they must never consider the dogma to be the truth. And this gives us the life of someone seeking the truth; he can recast the dogma in the fire of concept.

Occultists therefore work with dogma in the freest possible way.

This insight, this stroke in the world of concept and then again counter stroke, is called ‘dialectics’, whilst holding fast to concepts is called ‘logic’. Dialectics is therefore the life of logic, and someone who understands the spirit of dialectics will transform dead, rigid concepts into living ones when he comes to the higher regions of perceptive insight, that is, he will assign them to particular persons. He will transform logic into dialogue. Thus Plato made logic into dialectics, transforming it into dialogue.

Goethe's green serpent⁹³

God - wisdom
Light - form in which wisdom comes into its own

What is more glorious than light? Dialogue!

Conclusion of Rudolf Steiner’s Eleven European Mystics, Angelus Silesius:⁹⁴

My friend, it is good so. In case you want to read more Go and be yourself the script, yourself the essence.

• 93. Refers to Goethe’s Tale of the Green Snake and the Fair Lily. See Rudolf Steiner’s Goethe’s Standard of the Soul GA 22, tr. D. S. Osmond, London: Anthr. Publ. Co. 1925.
• 94. Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modem Age GA 7, tr. K. E. Zimmer, Blauvelt: Steinerbooks 1980.

Dear children, dear teachers, and dear parents who are here today! Each year when Easter comes, it is a very special festival for the school, a special festival for children to experience and a special festival for all of human existence. This festival is anticipated in the beautiful language that nature now begins to speak to us.

Of course nature is always beautiful, and anyone who is sensitive to it can find beauty in it even in winter, when the snow makes its way up the mountains and covers the ground and the trees in a way that is almost sad. It is beautiful then, too, but it is cold outside, and that makes our souls cold and reminds us of how often life chills our hearts and souls.

But then in spring, as Easter approaches, the seeds sprout and the flowers spring up out of the ground. The March violets are a greeting from the sunlight and the world-spirit itself. And the green reminds us of our hopes in life, of what we wish to have from life. The color of hope, of wishing, and of joy in life is there in the green.

Turning from nature to our school of life, because we must say that a school of life is what the Waldorf School intends to be—and now I am speaking to you, dear children—the fact that life is now beginning to unfold outside makes Easter a festival that has a great effect on the school, on the children and on the teachers and on the parents, who are the most important thing standing behind the school’s children and faculty. At Easter-time, the new children enter our school.

This is when the teachers see the life task they face in educating these new children. This is when a wonderful soul-relationship has to come about between the teachers and the parents who are entrusting their children to them. At Easter-time, for a number of children and teachers, something begins that will continue for years as these teachers grow close to these children whom they love so dearly.

But at the same time, there is something different associated with Easter. It is also the time for graduation from school, as is now the case with us for many of the eighth graders and all of the twelfth graders. This is the time when their teachers are heavy-hearted, because they have grown close to these children in soul and in spirit. It is also the time when we can see the heavy hearts of the children who must now leave this school, which was a preparatory school for life, a school where everything possible was meant to be done to show the hopeful side of life. They must now leave this bright, beautiful summertime of their lives and go out into an existence that is often raw and hard, where there is so much pain and so many joys to experience. Life has a lot to give us—joy and sadness and problems—and we must cope with it. And when the festival of Easter is approaching, as it is now, when we turn our gaze to the coming of Easter, we are reminded of how this festival is a very incisive one in the hearts and minds of students and teachers.

In welcoming their new students, teachers look toward everything that is to come. They feel their tasks as teachers especially strongly now, as they turn to the parents of these children and realize that these men and women are showing their confidence in them by bringing them their nearest and dearest. This is something meaningful that should enter the teachers’ hearts and be very deeply felt. The children come in, joyfully looking forward to what they will be graced with through their teachers love and through everything that human beings have brought forth.

Then we must also be aware of the departures, for one or the other student will have to leave this school. That is when we get the other feeling, a feeling of mixed wistfulness and sorrow in many respects. Especially for teachers, this engenders a very wistful sorrow in their hearts and minds, because they must now send the children they have grown to love out into life. These children must now seek for themselves what they and their teachers had sought together in school. But to this is added the satisfaction of being able to say as a teacher, “If you have succeeded, then they will take with them the strengths that you wanted to give them.” This thought is what makes graduation beautiful for the teachers and makes their Easter a happy one.

It is one of the nicest things about being a teacher to hear from the children when they have been out there in life for a while, sometimes years later, and to find out what has become of them—how they have found their place in life, what good fortune they have experienced, how they learned to bear sorrow. When these messages from the students make their way back into the school when the students are practically grown up, perhaps, and are firmly rooted in life, these are experiences that really give the teachers strength and reanimate them, even if they have been teaching for a long time.

If we make ourselves aware of everything that is working into the school at Easter-time, we get a feeling—and this is a feeling that you too should get, dear boys and girls—for what this time in school signifies in a whole human life between birth and death. It is a real summertime, life’s sun time, and Easter in particular, as it is now starting to happen in nature, reminds us of it.

Then the teachers realize how happy they are to have the confidence of people like the parents who entrust their children to them. Because of all the effort they have made, the teachers are then really able to experience this: For years and years the parents have entrusted what is dearest to them to us in full confidence, and the school is fortunate in having been able to not only uphold this confidence but also to justify it, so that the parents can see their children leaving school, full of hope on entering life, with the same satisfaction that they had in trustingly sending them off to school for the first time.

All this is present in our hearts and souls at this time of year. I merely wanted to say a few words to impress it on the hearts and souls of the students and teachers.

All this will come about if something that must be present becomes a general practice among the students, namely love and devotion toward the faculty and devotion toward what you are learning through this school. If the right love prevails in the Waldorf School among parents, teachers, and students, then in what love can do when people are to be led through life by all that is beautiful and grand, this life will be able to prevail and to give people the forces they need.

This is why I have always asked you if you have succeeded in learning to really love your teachers. If you can learn to love them even more, it will be possible for everything to well up out of this love as if from a spring of fresh water. Then you will learn everything, and the Easter season will give you all it can. I would like to ask you, “Do you love your teachers?” [They all shout, “Yes!”] That is nice of you. Now, in this love that has developed between you, look at the ones who are now leaving school and resolve to follow them through life with your loving glances, and a wonderful relationship of love and friendship will be able to develop. And then the Waldorf School will be like a sun, able to ray out beautifully into life.

The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Evolution. The Cosmic View of the Organs and their Coarsening in Modern Times.

At various points in this cycle of lectures we have tried to present the facts of post-Atlantean evolution, and we have indicated that in our time there is a kind of repetition or resurrection of the experiences that mankind went through during the Egypto-Chaldean culture. It has been stated that the Indian period will repeat itself in the seventh period, the Persian in the sixth, the Egyptian in our time, and that the fourth, the Greco-Latin, stands by itself, so to say. Now, connecting the Egyptian time and our own, we shall try to indicate how a certain recrudescence of outer and inner experiences is to be seen when we bring our time into connection with the Egyptian.

We have seen that in the spiritual worlds there exist mysterious forces, to which there correspond certain other forces in the physical world which effectuate the appearance of these repetitions. Thus do these resurrections of outer and inner experiences originate. In the middle between these stands the Greco-Latin period, during which the Christ appeared upon the earth and the Mystery of Golgotha took place. It was also pointed out that not only the external evolutionary relationships on the physical plane had changed, but that also the relationships in the spiritual world had become different. I have described how the soul was in the Egyptian time, when it looked upon the gigantic pyramids, how different it was when it reincarnated in the Greco-Latin period, and how different it is in our time. We have seen that not only does this occur, but that also for the period between death and a new birth, in kamaloka and Devachan, there takes place a sort of progress or transformation, so that the soul does not experience the same thing when it enters into kamaloka or Devachan from an Egyptian, a Greek, or a modern body. Externally the world of the physical plane alters, but progress also occurs in the spiritual world so that the soul always experiences something different there.

It is primarily from the standpoint of this “beyond” that today we shall consider the mighty event of the Christ's appearance on our earth. We shall approach in a much deeper way the question, What significance has the advent of the Christ on our earth? What significance has the Christ's appearance for the dead souls, for the life on the other side, the spiritual side, of existence? For this purpose we must explore many different things that affected souls in the Egyptian period both within and beyond the physical plane.

From our studies of the earlier great epochs of earth evolution we can derive that the Egypto-Chaldean period furnishes a mirroring in knowledge and experience of what happened in the Lemurian time, of what happened on the earth during and after the departure of the moon. What men experienced then, they experienced again as a memory in what the Egyptian initiates gave them. The Egyptian initiate himself experienced during his initiation events that man otherwise experiences only when he passes through the portal of death. To be sure, the Egyptian initiate experienced this in a different way than does the ordinary person who dies. He experienced it differently and in a much fuller way. It will be well for us now, as a basis for these considerations, to describe the essence of Egyptian initiation in a few words. This initiation is essentially different from that of the time after Christ, for through his advent initiation was fundamentally altered.

We have seen that men had to descend further and further into the material world, gaining increasing interest in the physical world. In the same proportion, however, the experience in the spiritual world between death and a new birth became more pale and shadowy. The livelier man's consciousness became in the physical world, the more he enjoyed being there, the, more he discovered the laws of the physical plane, the dimmer his consciousness in the spiritual world became. The consciousness in the spiritual world reached its low point in the Greco-Latin time. But even before man had fully descended into these depths of matter, it had become impossible for him, within the physical body, to experience completely what one must experience if, during the period between birth and death, one seeks to gain insight into the spiritual world.

The initiation event may be briefly described, and it is the same for initiations before and after Christ, although the conclusion is different. Initiation is nothing other than man's gaining the capacity of developing organs of vision in his higher bodies. Today man sees darkness when it is night; he is in the dark. This is because man has no organs of perception in his astral body. As the eyes and ears have formed themselves into physical organs of perception, so super-sensible organs must be developed out of the higher members and assimilated into them. This occurs through certain exercises of concentration and meditation being given to the pupil. These exercises are performed after the pupil has first surveyed the knowledge of the spiritual worlds that can be given by the initiates. It has always been the case that the pupils had to learn what we today would call elementary theosophy. Much more strongly than today it was required that the pupils become acquainted with the truth in a regular progression. When there was enough theoretical preparation, and when the pupils were sufficiently mature, the exercises were given to them. These exercises have a definite purpose.

When in his daily life man lets the impressions of the senses work upon him, these impressions bring certain fruits for the ordinary life on the physical plane. These impressions pass over into the astral body, which in turn transmits them to the ego. But these impressions are such that man cannot hold them fast when, with his astral body and ego, he slips out of his physical and etheric bodies during the night. What man receives in this way from the physical plane does not penetrate into him so strongly that he can retain it as a permanent impression. But when a person performs the exercises of meditation and concentration, these are so adjusted, in accordance with thousands of years of experience, that the astral body no longer loses the impressions, but retains them when it slips out of the physical body in the night. Through the exercises the astral body receives plastic impressions, which shape and member it as the physical organs have been membered. Thus the astral body is worked on for certain periods through these exercises. Thereby the super-sensible organs of vision are imprinted on the astral body. It would be a long time, however, before man could use his organs of vision if they were imprinted only into his astral body. Something further must take place so that the astral body, when it returns into the etheric body, may stamp upon that body, like the impression of a seal, what has taken shape within itself. Only when what has taken shape in the astral body imprints itself upon the etheric body, only then does the illumination take place that makes it possible for the person to see the spiritual world as he sees the physical world today.

Here we can begin to grasp what kind of an impulse we have received through the appearance of Christ on earth. In the old initiations the astral body had the strength to work upon the etheric body only when the etheric body had been lifted out of the physical body. This was because at that time the etheric body, had it remained connected with the physical body, would have exerted so much resistance that it could not have received the imprint of what the astral body had formed within itself. In the ancient initiations, therefore, for a period of three and a half days, the candidate was put into a deathlike condition in which the physical body was deserted by the etheric body while this latter, freed from the physical, united itself with the astral body. The astral then stamped into the etheric all that had been built into the astral through the exercises. When the Hierophant again awakened the candidate, the latter was illuminated. He knew what took place in the spiritual world, for he had made a remarkable journey during the three and a half days. He had been led through the fields of the spiritual world. He had seen what went on there, and he knew from direct experience what another person could learn only through revelation. A person thus initiated could, out of his own experiences, give knowledge of the beings who were in the spiritual world, beyond the physical plane.

When man had not yet descended so far into the physical plane, he could learn what was experienced in the spiritual world. There the candidate became acquainted with the true form of Osiris, Isis, and Horus. The initiate saw the contents of the myths during this journey into the spiritual world. He could then transmit this to other persons when he had dressed it as myth or saga. He saw all this; he saw in what a special way the Osiris influences had shaped themselves when the moon had withdrawn from the earth; he saw how Horus issued from Isis and Osiris; he saw the four human types, the bull, the lion, the eagle, and the true man. He also saw what happened to man between death and a new birth. The Sphinx appeared to him as a real form; he experienced it. He could say, “Oh, I have seen the Sphinx, man as he was when he still had an animal-like form, and his etheric body—similar to the human—only projected out of this animal-like form!” The Sphinx was a real experience for the initiate. He even heard the question of the Sphinx with its enigmatic content. He saw how the human body prepared itself out of the animality, at a time when the head was only an etheric form, the ether-head of the Sphinx. This was truth for the initiate, as were also the older forms of the gods, who had, so to speak, taken a different course of evolution.

It has recently been said that certain beings pursued a different path in evolution. The individuality of Wotan, for example, takes such a different course. Up to a certain stage it travels together with man, but then it does not descend so deeply. Man descends further into matter and only later will he again join these beings, who are completing their evolution in the earth-time. We have seen that a time came when Wotan no longer walked on our earth. Such beings, however, were not like Osiris and Isis. These latter were beings who had branched off still earlier, who completed their evolution on a higher level in full invisibility. These forms went through their special experiences.

Let us look back into the Lemurian period. At that time the etheric was not yet manlike in its form. In his etheric body man was still similar to the animals, and the gods who descended then had to accommodate themselves to the same animal forms in which man lived on the earth. If a being wishes to enter into a certain plane, it must fulfill the conditions of that plane. This is also the case here. The divine beings who were connected with the earth during the departure of the sun and moon, who were on the earth, had to take on a form that was possible at that time, an animal-like form. And since the Egyptian religious views present in a certain way a recapitulation of the Lemurian time, the Egyptian initiate looked upon the gods, Osiris and Isis for example, as having animal-like forms. He still saw the higher gods with animal heads. Therefore from an occult view it was quite correct when such forms were represented with the head of a hawk or a ram in accordance with what the initiates knew. The gods were portrayed in the forms they had when they walked the earth. The outer images could only resemble what the initiate saw, but they were faithfully reproduced. The various divine beings changed a good deal. The forms in Lemuria were different from those in Atlantis. In those times beings went through much more rapid changes than they do now. In addition, these forms were still filled with spirit. When one looks back on them one sees them in their three bodies, but illuminated and rayed through by the astral and etheric light. This was accurately portrayed in the pictures. Modern men may laugh over the forms that were represented, but they do not know how realistic they were.¹

There was one being who performed special services in that period of human evolution when, through the cosmic-tellurian powers, the combining intellect was being organized in man. At that time the physical brain was prepared in such a way that man was able to develop intelligence later. This capacity was implanted in man and reckoned as one of the deeds of the god Manu. What was worked into man as intelligence was connected with this. If today we examine a person in whom a well-formed ability for judging and combining is present, if we examine him clairvoyantly, we find a strong expression and reflection of this fact in a green glittering and shining of the astral body, of the astral aura. The capacity for combining shows itself in green colors in the aura, especially in those who have keen mathematical understanding. The ancient Egyptian initiates saw the god who implanted the faculty of intelligence in men, and in portraying him they painted him green² because they saw the green shimmering of his luminous astral and etheric form. Today this is still the color that glitters in the aura when the person's intelligence is stirred. Much time could be devoted to these connections if people really wanted to study this wonderful realism of the forms of the Egyptian gods. These representations of the divine forms, through the fact that they were so realistic and not at all arbitrary, had magical power; and one who could see more deeply would perceive that many mysteries were present in the coloring of these ancient forms. Here one can, see deep into the workings of human evolution.

We have seen how what the initiates saw was retained in the Sphinx. Of course, this was not retained in a photographic way, yet it was realistic. But the forms were always changing. The form of the Sphinx gives an image of how man once looked. His present form has been shaped by man himself. We know that through evolution on the earth various animal forms have been split off. What is an animal form? It is a form that has remained static, while man proceeded further in evolution. In these forms we see arrested stages of evolution, to the extent that these forms have become physical. In the spiritual something else has taken place. What man is spiritually has nothing to do with his physical forebears. Only the physical is connected with that. Man does not descend from the animals; the animal forms have remained unchanged. In man, however, the shape has been transformed to a certain level. The animals are previous physical human forms fallen into decadence. The situation is different in another realm of evolution. Not only have the physical forms of the animals remained unchanged, but also the rudiments of the etheric and astral forms as well. Just as the lion, at the time when it split off, looked quite different than now, so certain soul-spiritual forms degenerate in the course of time when they remain at a particular stage. It is a law of the spiritual world that anything that stands still on the same level of spirit or soul becomes more and more decadent.

If, for example, the Sphinx stands still, it degenerates and receives a form that is like a caricature of what it originally was. The Sphinx has been preserved in this way on the astral plane up to our own time. To those who, as initiates or in some other lawful manner, penetrate into the higher worlds, these decadent forms have little interest, being only decayed vagabonds in the spiritual world. But when, in exceptional cases, persons equipped with inferior clairvoyant gifts are led into the astral world, such decadent forms approach them. The true Sphinx approached Oedipus, but it has not died even yet. Up to today it has not died; it only approaches man in another form. When persons who have remained standing at a certain stage of evolution, among the peasants perhaps, rest in the fields at midday in the hot glow of the summer sun, and fall asleep, they may have what could be called a latent sun-stroke. Through such an impact on the physical body, the astral and etheric are loosened from a part of the physical. Then such persons are translated to the astral plane and they see this last decadent offspring of the Sphinx. This apparition is called by different names. In certain regions it is called the midday woman. Many people in the country will recount that they have met the midday woman. She appears in many regions under many different names. She is a descendent of the ancient Sphinx, and as the ancient Sphinx put questions to the men who experienced her, so this midday woman also asks questions. You may hear it told how the midday woman asks endless questions of the men whom she meets. This torment by questions is a relic of the old Sphinx. The midday woman has grown out of the ancient Sphinx. This indicates how evolution proceeds beyond the physical world, how whole tribes of spiritual beings decline until at last they are mere shadows of what they were originally. Here we see another characteristic of the way in which things are connected in evolution. We have mentioned this so it may be seen how manifold evolution is.

Now, to understand everything correctly, we must give some thought to the fact that in the course of time man has organized the fourth member, the ego, into what he brought with him at the beginning of earth evolution as his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. I have shown how this ego permeates the astral body, claims it for itself so that it dominates it as higher spiritual beings formerly dominated it. It is a deed of the higher beings that this ego was implanted in the astral body. If evolution had proceeded further in accordance with the views of certain higher beings, it would have been a different evolution from what has actually taken place. However, certain beings remained unchanged. They had not become capable of collaborating in implanting the ego in the astral body.

When man appeared on the earth he consisted of the physical, etheric, and astral bodies, all of which he shaped further. Now he was endowed with egohood by certain sublime beings who had their dwellings mainly on the sun and moon. These beings collaborated, so to speak, on the ego. But there were certain other beings who, during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions, had not raised themselves so far that they could take part in this organizing of the ego. They could do only what they had learned on the moon. They had to limit themselves to working on the astral body, hence there was implanted in man's astral body something that did not belong to his noblest qualities, did not come from the higher sublime beings but from the retarded intruders who had remained behind. Had these beings done this on the moon, it would have been something lofty. But through the fact that they did this on earth as stragglers, they worked into the astral body something that placed it lower than it would have been otherwise. It became endowed with instincts and passions, and with egoism. We must heed this fact that man was influenced from two sides, that he received impacts in his astral body through which the latter became debased.

Such a thing does not influence the astral body alone. Man is so constituted that the astral body transmits such an influence to the etheric body, and this again to the physical body. The astral body is active in all parts, hence these spirits work on the etheric and physical through the astral body. Had these spiritual beings not been able to exercise such an influence, something would not have appeared in man at that time. This is an enhanced selfhood in man, an increased ego-feeling. What this caused in the etheric body was all that appeared as darkening of judgment, as the possibility of error. All that the astral body accomplished in the physical body is the basis of what appeared as illness. That is the spiritual cause of illnesses in man; among animals, becoming ill is something different. We see how illness has been transplanted into man; illness is connected with the causes we have indicated here. And since the physical and etheric bodies are connected with the facts of heredity, so the principle of illness proceeds through the hereditary line. Let us again emphasize, however, that we must distinguish between inner illnesses and external injuries. If a man is run over, that is something entirely different. Also, certain internal illnesses can be connected with external causes; for example, if one eats something that upsets the stomach, that is something external.

Before the above-mentioned beings gained influence over man in the course of evolution, he was so organized that he reacted far more powerfully than today toward evil pressing upon him from without. But in proportion to the influence that they gained over him, he lost the instincts he had possessed for what was not right. Formerly, man's whole organization was such that he had fine instincts as to what was not right for him. Substances that are taken into the stomach today and there cause illness were then rejected simply through instinct. Gazing backward in time we come to periods when man stood in a delicate relationship to the forces of his environment, reacting sensitively to the forces in his surroundings. In this respect man grew ever less sure, less capable of rejecting what was not serviceable to him.

This is connected with something else. As man grew more inward, something occurred in the world outside; what we know as the three other kingdoms of nature arose. The three kingdoms around us arose gradually. At first, only man was present. Then the animal kingdom was added; then the plant kingdom, and finally the mineral kingdom. If we were to look back on the primeval earth when the sun was still united with it, we would find a human being in and out of whom all the substances of the physical world moved. Man still lived in the womb of the gods: everything still agreed with him, so to say. Then he had to leave behind what was precipitated as the animal kingdom. Had he carried this with him, he would not have been able to develop further. He had to expel the animal kingdom, and later the plant kingdom. What exists outside in the animals and plants is nothing other than temperaments, passions, certain traits of men that they had to expel. And when man formed his bones he expelled the mineral world. After a certain length of time, man could look upon his environment and say, “Formerly I could endure you; formerly you went in and out of me as air now does. When I still lived in the water-earth I could endure you; I digested you. Now you are outside, and I can no longer endure you, no longer digest you.” As man became enclosed in his skin, as he became a self-contained separate being, he saw, in the same proportion, these kingdoms around him.

If these beings had not worked on man, something else would not have happened. As long as man is healthy, he will stand in a normal relationship to the outer world. When he has disturbed forces within him, these must be driven back by the powers that man has. If his powers are too weak for this, if he cannot provide the normal resistance, then something must be infused into him from outside. Something must be implanted into him to furnish the resistance that he still had at the time the forces from outside breathed in and out of him. It may be necessary, when a person is ill, that the forces of a metal, for example, should be injected into him. It is because man was in connection with metals earlier, in connection with plant juices and similar things, that we are justified in applying them as medicaments.

When the Egyptian initiates could look back over the whole course of world evolution, they knew precisely how the individual organs of the human body corresponded with the substances of the external world. They knew which plants and which metals had to be administered to the patient. A great treasure of occult wisdom in the domain of medicine will be raised to light one day, wisdom that mankind formerly possessed. Not only are many things bungled in medicine today, but often special healing powers are ascribed to this or that in a one-sided way. The true occultist will never be one-sided. How often must we reject efforts that would make a compromise with the science of the spirit! The latter cannot support a one-sided method: on the contrary, it seeks to establish diversified research. It is one-sided to say, “Away with all poisons!” People who say this do not know the true healing forces. Naturally many stupid things are done today, for the professionals in most cases cannot grasp all the relationships, and a certain tyranny in medical science excludes what can proceed from occultism. If there were no campaigns against the oldest methods of medicine, against the injection of metals, there could be a reform. With modern experimentation nothing is discovered that can hold its own against the traditional remedies, which only a lay ignorance can oppose as strongly as is often done. The ancient Egyptian initiates excelled in these secrets. They had an insight into the real relationships of evolution, and if today certain physicians speak in a condescending way of Egyptian medicine, you can soon tell from their tone that they know nothing about it. Here we touch upon something in the Egyptian initiation that should be known.

It was such things as these that went over into the folk-consciousness. Now we must reflect that the same souls that are in our bodies today were also incarnated in that ancient time. Let us remember that these souls saw all the images that the initiates made of what they knew through vision in the spiritual world. We know that what a soul takes into itself from incarnation to incarnation, ever and again bears fruits in one or another way. Even though man cannot remember it, it is still true that what lives in the soul today lives in it because it was deposited there earlier. The soul is formed both within and beyond the physical life. When it was between birth and death, when it was between death and a new birth, Egyptian ideas were influential and modern ideas have proceeded from these. Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man's forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world. He remembers that it was said to him, “Our ancestors were animal forms.” But he does not remember that these forms were gods. This is the psychological basis for the emergence of Darwinism. The figures of the gods appear in materialistic form. Thus there is an intimate spiritual connection between the old and the new, between the third and the fifth cultural periods.

Now it is not the whole destiny of our time that man should see in material form what previously he saw in the spiritual. That would have been our fate had not the Christ-impulse entered into human evolution in the meantime. This was not significant only for life on the physical plane. Today we shall see what significance the events of Palestine had for the other side of life, where the souls of the Egyptians sojourned after death. Here on the physical plane occurred the things we have already discussed. But the three years of Christ's activity, like the event of Golgotha and the baptism in Jordan, were of significance equally to the souls incarnated on earth and to those who were in the condition between death and a new birth.

Let us recall the fact that the external physical expression for the ego is the blood. What works physically in the forces of the blood is the physical expression of the ego. In the course of evolution too strong a measure of egoism made its appearance, which means that the egohood impressed the blood too powerfully. This “surplus” of egoism had to be expelled again if spirituality was to be restored to mankind. On Golgotha the impulse was given for this expulsion of egoism. In the same moment when the Redeemer's blood flowed on Golgotha, still other events were taking place in the spiritual world. The Redeemer's blood flowed out in the material world, while the superfluity of egoism passed over into the spiritual world. The superfluous egoism had to vanish from the world, and the impulse for this was given on Golgotha. In place of egoism, universal human love entered into mankind.

But what was this event of Golgotha? What was this event of a three-and-a-half-day death on the physical plane? It was the enactment on the physical plane of what also had been experienced in spiritual development by one who was initiated. He was dead for three and a half days. One who had gone through this symbolical death could say to mankind, “There is a conquering of death. There is something eternal in the world.” Death was conquered by the initiates, and they felt themselves to be victors over death. The event of Golgotha signifies that what had often taken place in the mysteries of ancient times became, for once, an historical event: the conquering of death through the spirit. This was taken out into the world on the physical plane. If we let this work upon our souls, we sense what happened with the Mystery of Golgotha as something new, but also as an image of the ancient initiation. We feel this unique event entering into the world historically.

What was the consequence of this? What could the initiate do? Out of his own experiences he could say to his fellow men, “I know there is a spiritual world, that man can live in the spiritual world. I have lived in it for three and a half days and bring you tidings thence. I bring you the gifts of the spiritual world.” These gifts were useful and healing to mankind.

On the other hand, one who had lived as an initiate in the physical world could bring nothing similar to the dead. To the dead he could only say, “All that happens on the physical plane is so ordered that man ought to be redeemed.” Thus it was when, in the spiritual world, the ancient initiates held converse with the dead, to whom they could give only the teaching that “Life is suffering; only redemption will bring healing.” Thus did Buddha still teach. Thus did the initiate teach both the living and the dead. But through the event of Golgotha death was conquered in the physical world, and this signified something for those who had died and were in the spiritual world. Those who take up Christ in their innermost parts illuminate again their shadowy life in Devachan. The more man experiences here of the Christ, the brighter it becomes over there in the spiritual world. After the blood had flowed from the wounds of the Redeemer—this is something that belongs to the mysteries of Christianity—the Christ-spirit descended to the dead. This is one of the deepest mysteries of mankind. Christ descended to the dead and said to them, “Over there something has happened, of which it cannot be said that what happens there is not so important as what happens here. What man brings with him into the spiritual realm as a consequence of this event is a gift that can be brought out of the physical world into the spiritual world.” These are the tidings that Christ brought to the dead in the three and a half days. He descended to the dead in order to redeem them.

In the ancient initiation one could say that the fruits of the spiritual were reaped in the physical. Now an event occurred in the physical world that produced its fruits and did its work in the spiritual world. One can say that it was not in vain that man completed his descent to the physical plane. He completed it so that here in the physical world fruits could be produced for the spiritual world.

That these fruits could be produced came to pass through Christ, who was present among the living and among the dead, who gave an impulse so intense and so powerful that it shook the whole world.

• 1. Fantastic speculation on the reason why the Egyptians worshipped animal-headed gods began in classical times. See Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, Sec. 72.
• 2. For pictures of the Green Osiris, see the frontispieces in both volumes of Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, and in Volumes II, X, and XII of Maspero and Rappaport, History of Egypt (London, Grolier, 1901). See also text in Budge, Vol. II, p.355.

Dear children!¹ Last time I was able to be here, I told you how glad I am when our dear friend Herr Molt comes to pick me up in Dornach, where the school for big people, for grown-ups, is being built.² Then I can be with you again for a little while and see what you are doing.

And why am I so glad when Herr Molt comes to bring me here? Because it makes me think, “Now I am going to the school that was founded for our dear children”—that is, for you who are here because you long to become capable people who are ready for life.

Because I have only been here for a short time, I have not been able to see much yet—just the tiny little folks in the first grade, and the eighth grade—but what I did see gave me great pleasure. I saw how patiently and lovingly the first grade teacher had helped the children make some progress, and I was privileged to spend a very nice lesson with the eighth grade students. They were hearing about what human history tells us of how human beings on earth are involved in an evolution, an ongoing progress, that is driven by the spirit: Something that lives in human history gives us the desire to work on into the future. The spirit in which this was being conveyed to the souls of our dear young friends in the eighth grade was very beautiful. I am looking forward to seeing all the other classes, too. I am always pleased when I see how what our friend Herr Molt planted here is beginning to develop.

You entered this school when the fall was approaching. At that time we tried to think about what we would experience here and what we wanted to foster—love for each other, love for our teachers, love for God, who speaks to us from everything. And now, while you have been enjoying what your teachers presented to you each morning, you have also been experiencing what comes up out of the earth, what the spring draws out of it. You have seen the trees growing green. And now we remember what we hear when we go out into the woods. We hear the songbirds, and we are glad.

But today we have also heard something else, something for which I am especially thankful. We have heard you, under the direction of your teachers, express something that comes from inside of you. We can hear the birds singing out in the woods, and we can also hear what you have expressed to us, but there is a difference between them.

We are glad when we hear the little birds singing. But we know that something else is present when we hear what you perform for us. This is something that we call the human soul. It is your human souls that speak to us and sing to us. This is what human beings make out of what speaks to them out there in nature. In the woods, we hear the birds, but when you sing many other things that are heard come toward us out from the human soul.

But there are also other things out there in nature. You see how the plants grow and the trees turn green. All of this is called forth by the light. Light floods the entire universe. Light and warmth are what call everything up out of the earth, all those things that delight your eyes and hearts. What sounds in your ears, brought to you through the patience and persistence of your teachers, what travels through the world as light and then enters your eyes—we hear all of this resounding from you, not only when you sing and dance, but also when you tell what you have learned to calculate and what you have learned about everything that is human. In your souls, this turns to light. And just think what the plants would be without the sun. They would not be able to come out of the ground. They would always remain roots that would not be able to develop flowers, and it would be dark. This is what it would be like for you if you went through the world without ever finding a school where you could learn something. You would be like a plant that never finds the sun. The soul finds its sun in people from whom it can learn something.

This is why we are so glad that a school like this has been founded as a result of Herr Molt’s insight, and why you are so glad to be able to be in a school that you love. Seek the light of the soul, just as the plants seek the light and warmth of the sun!

I do not want to always say the same things to you, because I also do not want to always hear the same things when I come, but there is one thing that I want to hear from you again and again. You must answer me; this is what I am most curious about. And so I ask you, children, do you still love your teachers? [“Yes!” shout the children.] That is what I want to hear from the majority of you. That is what you are meant to take up into your souls. Love for your teachers will support you as you go out into life. Again and again, each time I come here, I would like to experience that you have made progress in learning, but I would also like you to show me that you have continued to love your teachers. You can be sure that in the great building that is being built for grown-ups in Dornach, where big people are meant to learn something, we all think about the Waldorf School here, and we think of it with love and joy. There are a lot of people who are thinking of the Waldorf School with love today, and they are thinking, “How good and capable these people will grow up to be, since as children they were filled with love for their teachers.”

Oh, there is something I must tell you—Frau Steiner sends her greetings, since she cannot be here today.

There is a spirit that is always meant to prevail here, a spirit that your teachers bring to this place. From the spirit of the cosmos, they learn to bring this spirit here to you; they take in what St. Paul said with all of their souls. The spirit of Christ prevails throughout our school; whether we are doing arithmetic, reading, writing, or whatever we do, we do it with the attitude that the Christ awakened in us:

“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”³

This is the spirit that is meant to prevail here, and it will do so through what your teachers bring to you with love, patience and endurance. May it also prevail through what lives in your souls!

Be with this spirit when you are in your class, and think of it when you leave. Be glad in your souls that you are coming back to the Waldorf School where the sun is lit for you, the sun that people need for life.

If there is someone among you who does not pay attention, there should be one of you who can go to that person and lovingly say, “Hey, hard work and paying attention get us up the mountain of life. Upward, friend! You should always be going up the mountain of life.”⁴ This is how each of you should help the friend who falters a little—all of you for each one, all for one, one for all, lovingly. Love needs to be present among you, for each other and for your teachers. This is something we want to cultivate as part of the good spirit of the Waldorf School.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner had suggested that the students gather at the school for a brief celebration instead of the monthly day off from school that was the custom in Baden-Württemberg. The mood of the course of the year was to form the background for this event and the classes were to show each other what they had been working on in recitation, drama, music, and eurythmy, or in foreign languages, gymnastics, and so on. Rudolf Steiner also gave a talk at these assemblies whenever he could be in Stuttgart.
• 2. The wooden building of the Goetheanum, the Free School of Spiritual Science, was under construction from 1913-1921.
• 3. Matthew 28:20.
• 4. In the original German, this is a reference to a song sung by the students at the beginning of the assembly.

Dear children!

Last time I was able to be here, I told you how gladI am when our dear friend Herr Molt comes to pick me up in Dornach, where the school for big people, for grown-ups, is being built.¹ Then I can be with you again for a little while and see what you are doing.

And why am I so glad when Herr Molt comes to bring me here? Because it makes me think, “Now I am going to the school that was founded for our dear children”—that is, for you who are here because you long to become capable people who are ready for life.

Because I have only been here for a short time, I have not been able to see much yet—just the tiny little folks in the first grade, and the eighth grade—but what I did see gave me great pleasure. I saw how patiently and lovingly the first grade teacher had helped the children make some progress, and I was privileged to spend a very nice lesson with the eighth grade students. They were hearing about what human history tells us of how human beings on earth are involved in an evolution, an ongoing progress, that is driven by the spirit: Something that lives in human history gives us the desire to work on into the future, the spirit in which this was being conveyed to the souls of our dear young friends in the eighth grade was very beautiful. I am looking forward to seeing all the other classes, too. I am always pleased when I see how what our friend Herr Molt planted here is beginning to develop.

You entered this school when the fall was approaching. At that time we tried to think about what we would experience here and what we wanted to foster—love for each other, love for our teachers, love for God, who speaks to us from everything. And now, while you have been enjoying what your teachers presented to you each morning, you have also been experiencing what comes up out of the earth, what the spring draws out of it. You have seen the trees growing green. And now we remember what we hear when we go out into the woods. We hear the songbirds, and we are glad.

But today we have also heard something else, something for which I am especially thankful. We have heard you, under the direction of your teachers, express something that comes from inside of you. We can hear the birds singing out in the woods, and we can also hear what you have expressed to us, but there is a difference between them.

We are glad when we hear the little birds singing. But we know that something else is present when we hear what you perform for us. This is something that we call the human soul. It is your human souls that speak to us and sing to us. This is what human beings make out of what speaks to them out there in nature. In the woods, we hear the birds, but when you sing many other things that are heard come toward us out from the human soul.

But there are also other things out there in nature. You see how the plants grow and the trees turn green. All of this is called forth by the light. Light floods the entire universe. Light and warmth are what call everything up out of the earth, all those things that delight your eyes and hearts. What sounds in your ears, brought to you through the patience and persistence of your teachers, what travels through the world as light and then enters your eyes—we hear all of this resounding from you, not only when you sing and dance, but also when you tell what you have learned to calculate and what you have learned about everything that is human. In your souls, this turns to light. And just think what the plants would be without the sun. They would not be able to come out of the ground. They would always remain roots that would not be able to develop flowers, and it would be dark. This is what it would be like for you if you went through the world without ever finding a school where you could learn something. You would be like a plant that never finds the sun. The soul finds its sun in people from whom it can learn something.

This is why we are so glad that a school like this has been founded as a result of Herr Molt's insight, and why you are so glad to be able to be in a school that you love. Seek the light of the soul, just as the plants seek the light and warmth of the sun!

I do not want to always say the same things to you, because I also do not want to always hear the same things when I come, but there is one thing that I want to hear from you again and again. You must answer me; this is what I am most curious about. And so I ask you, children, do you still love your teachers? [“Yes!” shout the children.] That is what I want to hear from the majority of you. This is what you are meant to take up into your souls. Love for your teachers will support you as you go out into life. Again and again, each time I come here, I would like to experience that you have made progress in learning, but I would also like you to show me that you have continued to love your teachers. You can be sure that in the great building that is being built for grown-ups in Dornach, where big people are meant to learn something, we all think about the Waldorf School here, and we think of it with love and joy. There are a lot of people who are thinking of the Waldorf School with love today, and they are thinking, “How good and capable these people will grow up to be, since as children they were filled with love for their teachers.”

Oh, there is something I must tell you—Frau Steiner sends her greetings, since she cannot be here today.

There is a spirit that is always meant to prevail here, a spirit that your teachers bring to this place. From the spirit of the cosmos, they learn to bring this spirit here to you; they take in what St. Paul said with all of their souls. The spirit of Christ prevails throughout our school; whether we are doing arithmetic, reading, writing, or whatever we do, we do it with the attitude that the Christ awakened in us:

“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Matthew 28:20.

This is the spirit that is meant to prevail here, and it will do so through what your teachers bring to you with love, patience and endurance. May it prevail through what lives in your souls!

Be with this spirit when you are in your class, and think of it when you leave. Be glad in your souls that you are coming back to the Waldorf School where the sun is lit for you, the sun that people need for life.

If there is someone among you who does not pay attention, there should be one of you who can go to that person and lovingly say, “Hey, hard work and paying attention get us up the mountain of life. Upward, friend! You should always be going up the mountain of life.”² This is how each of you should help the friend who falters a little—all of you for each one, all for one, one for all, lovingly. Love needs to be present among you, for each other and for your teachers. This is something we want to cultivate as part of the good spirit of the Waldorf School.

• 1. The wooden building of the Goetheanum, the Free School of Spiritual Science, was under construction from 1913–1921.
• 2. In the original German, this is a reference to a song sung by the students at the beginning of the assembly.

We have been occupied in showing how those spiritual forces that we call the luciferic and ahrimanic powers play their part in the historical growth of mankind. We have seen how what is to be carried over from one age into another in the course of world evolution is carried over through such powers, and we have been at pains to show how in the desires, instincts and strivings for knowledge, in the impulses, too, of man's social life, something is present that can only be grasped concretely when one recognizes those super-sensible forces that underlie world historical evolution. We have seen how what must come to expression in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch has been in preparation since the fifteenth century. We have seen what new faculties of mankind have evolved in the whole European cultural life since that time.

If we wish to find a spirit who has brought to expression in the most concentrated and clearest manner what the impulses of our time ought to be, then we can look to Goethe. We have already observed that equally in his conception of nature and in his imaginative world, Goethe has expressed something that can form the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I must remind you today how I have often pointed out that Goethe has expressed in intimate fashion in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily what he regarded as the right impulses of culture, knowledge, feeling and will; that is, what he was obliged to look upon as necessary for the activity of man in the future. He has concealed in his fairy tale what he knew of the spiritually hidden active forces at work in mankind since the fifteenth century, and that will be at work for about two thousand years more. You know, too, how in our Mystery Dramas we have sought to bring to life in all possible detail what Goethe saw when he composed this Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The intention was to bring to expression, in the way in which it can again be brought to expression today, a hundred years later, what inspired Goethe and is to inspire the entire fifth post-Atlantean culture as the highest spiritual treasure. Such depths of soul underlying so great and powerful a work as the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in spite of its being symbolic, and such great impulses underlying Goethe's Faust as a poem of mankind, point again and again to forces lying deep below the surface of consciousness. All this worked in such a soul out of the depths of old cultural impulses. Today I should like to speak a little about such cultural impulses in connection with yesterday's lecture, and of how they went through a kind of spiritualizing process in Goethe.

We must go back to that age in which the impulses for the fifth post-Atlantean epoch were first laid down in germ, back before the fifteenth century because things that are to develop spiritually must be prepared long beforehand. One can only recognize how in the European life of soul, as well as in the European social life, in the striving toward the True, the Beautiful and the Good, the normally progressive divine-spiritual forces intermingle in our age with luciferic-ahrimanic powers when one goes back into the time when the earliest impulses were given. We learned about these first impulses of earlier ages yesterday. Today, we will learn about a similar impetus from the middle of medieval times, and come to know how certain spiritual tendencies were born out of human evolution. In doing so, we will no more than indicate the historical background since nowadays one can read about it in any encyclopedia.

In order to describe the configuration of the cultural impulses that underwent a certain spiritualization in Goethe, I must refer to the age in which the impulse of the Crusades arose out of the European will: in fact, out of the Christian impulses of the European will. At the time when the will to visit the Holy Places originated in the civilized inhabitants of Europe there were bitter conflicts in the life there between what are called the luciferic and ahrimanic powers. That is to say, into the progressive, good, truly Christian impulses those other powers worked in, as it were, from the direction that was described yesterday. They worked in the way in which they are permitted by the wise guidance of the world. Thus, what happens in the wise guidance of the world may be duly influenced by other impulses working from the past and interpenetrating the impulses of the present in the way we have described.

When we consider it, among much that brings rejoicing to the soul, among much that originated soon after the Crusaders won their first successes, we see the founding of the Order of the Knights Templar in the year 1119 A.D. Five French knights united under the leadership of Hugo de Payens and, at the holy place where the Mystery of Golgotha occurred, they founded an order dedicated entirely to the Mystery of Golgotha. Its first important home was close to the place where Solomon's Temple once stood, so that the holy wisdom from most ancient times and the wisdom of Solomon could work together for Christianity in this spot with all the feelings and sentiments that have arisen from entire and holy devotion toward the Mystery of Golgotha and its Bearer. In addition to the religious vows of duty to their spiritual superiors usual at that time, the first Knights Templar pledged themselves to work together in the most intensive manner to bring under European control the place where the events of the Mystery of Golgotha had occurred.

The Written and unwritten rules of the Order were such that the Knights were to think of nothing except how they could completely fill themselves in heart and soul with the sacred Mystery of Golgotha, and how with every drop of their blood they could help bring the holy places within the sphere of influence of European authority. In each moment of their lives they were to think and feel dedicated with all their strength to this task alone, shunning nothing in order to realize it. Their blood was no longer to be their own but was to be devoted solely to the task we have indicated. Were they to meet a power three times as great as themselves, it was commanded that they were not to flee but were to stand firm. In each moment of their lives they were to think that the blood coursing in their veins did not belong to them but to their great spiritual mission. Whatever wealth they might acquire belonged to no one individual but to the Order alone. Should a member of the Order be killed, no booty should be available to the enemy except the hempen cord girding his loins. This cord was the sign of their work, which was freely undertaken for what was then regarded as the healing of the European spirit. A great and mighty task was set, less to thought than to deep feeling, which aimed at strengthening the soul life as individual and personal with the intention that it might be entirely absorbed in the progressive stream of Christian evolution.

This was the star, as it were, that was to shine before the Knights Templar in all that they thought, felt and understood. With this an impulse was given, which in its broader activity—on the wider extension of the Templar Order from Jerusalem over the countries of Europe—should have led to a certain penetration of European life by a Christian spirit. With respect to the immeasurable zeal that existed in the souls of these Knights, the powers who have to hold evolution back, leading the souls to become estranged from the earth and to led away from it to a special planet, leaving the earth uninhabited, those powers who desired this, set to work quite especially on souls who felt and thought as did the Knights Templar. They desired to devote themselves entirely to the spirit and could easily be attacked by those forces that wished to carry away the spiritual from the earth. These forces do not want the spiritual to be spread over the earth to permeate earth existence. Indeed, the danger is always at hand that souls may become estranged from the earth, become earth weary, and that earthly humanity may become mechanized.

There we have a powerfully aspiring spiritual life that we can assume will easily be approached by the luciferic temptation; a foothold is here given it. Then we also have, however, at the same time as the spread of the Templar Order over the various countries of Europe, the possibility of a sharp intrusion of ahrimanic powers in Western Europe. At the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century, when the Templar Order—not the individual Knights but the Order—had attained great prestige and wealth through its activity and had spread over Western Europe, we have a human personality ruling the West who can actually be said to have experienced in his soul a kind of inspiration through the moral, or the immoral, power of gold. He was a man who could definitely use for his inspiration the wisdom materialized from gold. Recollect the Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily in which the Golden King became the representative of wisdom. Since spiritual forces also exist in the various substances, which are always only maya with spiritual forces standing behind that [which] the materialist cannot perceive, it is absolutely possible for gold to become an inspirer.

A highly gifted personality, Philip the Fair, who was equipped with and extraordinary degree of cunning and the most evil ahrimanic wisdom, had access to this inspiration through gold. Philip IV, who reigned in France from 1285 to 1314, can really be said to have had a genius for avarice. He felt the instinctive urge to recognize nothing else in the world but what can be paid for with gold, and he was willing to concede power over gold to none but himself. He wished to bring forcibly under his control all the power that can be exercised through gold. This grew in him to be the immense passion that has become famous in history. When Pope Boniface forbade the French clergy to pay taxes to the State, this fact, in itself not very important, led Philip to make a law forbidding anyone to take gold and silver out of France. All of it was to remain there, such was his will, and only he was to have control of it. One might say that this was his idiosyncrasy. He sought to keep gold and silver for himself and gave a debased currency to his subjects and others. Uproar and resentment among the people could not prevent him from carrying out this policy, so that, when he made a last attempt to mix as little gold and silver as possible in the coinage, he had to flee, on the occasion of a popular riot, to the Temple of the Knights Templar. Driven to do so by his own severe regulations, he had had his treasures deposited for safety with them. He was astounded to see how quickly the Knights calmed the popular uprising. At the same time, he was filled with fear because he had seen how great was the moral power of the knights over the people, and how little he, who was only inspired by gold, availed against them. The Knights, too, had by this time acquired rich treasure and were immensely wealthy, but according to their rules, they were obliged to place all the riches of the Order in the service of spiritual activity and creative work.

When a passion is so strong as avarice was in Philip the Fair, it presses out strong forces from the soul that have a great influence on the unfolding of the will toward other men. To the nation, Philip counted for little, but he meant much to those who were his vassals, and these constituted a great host. He also understood how to use his power. As Pope Boniface had once opposed his will to make the clergy in France pay as much as possible, Philip hatched a plot against him. Boniface was freed by his followers but he died of grief soon after. This was at the time when Philip undertook to bring the entire Church completely under his control, thereby making Church officials mere bondsmen of the kingly power in which gold ruled. He thereupon caused the removal of the Pope to Avignon, which marked the beginning of what is often known in history as the “Babylonian Captivity” of the papacy. This lasted from the year 1309 to 1377.

Pope Clement V, former Bishop of Bordeaux, resided in Avignon and was a tool completely in the hands of Philip. Gradually, under the working of Philip's powerful will, he had reached the point of having no longer a will of his own, but used his ecclesiastical power only to serve Philip, carrying out all he desired. Philip was filled with a passionate desire to make himself master of all the then available wealth. After he had seen what a different significance gold could have in other hands, it was no wonder that he wished above all things to exterminate those other hands, the Knights Templar, so that he might confiscate their gold and posses their treasure himself. Now, I said that such a passion, aroused in such a materialistic way and working so intensely, creates powerful forces in the soul. At the same time, it creates knowledge, although of an ahrimanic order. So it was possible for a certain second-hand sort of knowledge to arise in the soul of Philip, of those methods that we have seen flame up in the harshest, most horrible way in the Mexican mysteries. The knowledge arose in Philip of what can be brought about by taking life in the correct way, although in a different, more indirect way from that of the Mexican initiates. As if out of deep subconscious impulses, he found the means of incorporating such impulses into humanity's evolution by putting men to death. For this, he needed victims. In a quite remarkable way this devilish instinct of Philip's harmonized with what developed of necessity in the bosom of the Knights, resulting from the dedication of their lives to the things I have indicated.

Naturally, where something great and noble arises, as it did among the Knights Templar, much that does not belong—perhaps even immorality—becomes attached to that greatness and nobleness. There were, of course, Knights who could be reproached for all sorts of things; that shall not be denied. But there was nothing of this kind in the spirit of the foundation of the Order, for what the knights had accomplished for Jerusalem stood first, and then what could be accomplished for the Christianizing of the whole of European culture. Gradually the Knights spread out in highly influential societies over England, France, Spain, part of Italy and Central Europe. They spread everywhere. In each single Knight was developed to the highest degree this complete penetration of the soul with the feeling and experience of the Mystery of Golgotha and of all that is connected with the Christian impulse. The force of this union with the Christ was strong and intensive. He was a true Knight Templar who no longer knew anything of himself, but when he felt, he let the Christ feel in him; when he thought, he let the Christ think in him; when he was filled with enthusiasm, he let the Christ in him be enthusiastic. They were perhaps few in whom this ideal had worked a complete transformation, a metamorphosis of the soul life, and who had really often brought the soul out of the body and enabled it to live in the spiritual world, but in respect of the entire Order they were, for all that, a considerable number. Something quite remarkable and powerful had thus entered into the circle of the Templar Order without their having known the rules of the Christian initiation other than through sacrificial service. At first in the Crusades, then in the spiritual work in Europe, their souls were so inspired by intense devotion to the Christian impulse and the Mystery of Golgotha that consequently many Knights experienced a Christian initiation. We have before us the following world historical event: on the world historical basis of the experience of a number of men, the Christian initiation, which is to say the perception of those spiritual worlds that are accessible to men through Christian initiation, arises from the fundamental depths of human development.

Such events always call forth opposing forces, which, indeed, in those times were abundantly at hand. What thus enters the world is not only loved; it is also excessively hated. In Philip, however, there was less hatred than the desire to rid the world of such a Society and to filch from it the treasure that had flowed abundantly to it and that was used only in the service of the spirit.

Now in such an initiation as was experienced by a number of the Knights, there is always the possibility of perceiving not only the beneficent, the divine, but also the luciferic and ahrimanic forces. All that draws men down into the ahrimanic world and up into the luciferic, appears, to him who goes through such an initiation, side by side with the insight into the normal worlds. The one thus initiated is confronted with all the sufferings, temptations and trials that come upon man through the powers hostile to good. He has moments in which the good spiritual world disappears before his spiritual gaze, the gaze of his soul, and he sees himself as though imprisoned by what tries to gain power over him. He sees himself in the hands of the ahrimanic-luciferic forces that wish to seize him to gain control of his willing, feeling, thinking and sense perception. These, indeed, are spiritual trials that are well-known from the descriptions of those who have seen into the spiritual world.

There were many in the circle of the Knights Templar who could gain a deep insight into the Mystery of Golgotha and its meaning and into Christian symbolism as it had taken shape through the development of the Last Supper. They beheld as well the deep background of this symbolism. Many a one who in consequence of his Christian initiation could look into the Christian impulses passing through the historical evolution of the European peoples, also saw something else; he experienced it in his own soul, as it were, since it always again came over him as a temptation. Recognizing the unconscious capabilities of the human soul, he repeatedly overcame the temptation that showed itself to him. The initiate thus became conscious of it and sought to overcome what otherwise remained in the subconscious. Many Knights learned to know the devilish urge that takes possession of the will and feeling to debase the Mystery of Golgotha. In the dream pictures by which many such initiates were haunted, appeared in vision the reverse, as it were, of the veneration of the symbol of the crucifix. This was possible owing to the way in which the initiation had come about, and particularly because the luciferic forces had stood close by with their temptation. He saw in vision how the human soul could become capable of dishonoring the symbol of the Cross and the holy ritual of the Consecration of the Host. He saw those human forces that urge men to return to ancient paganism, to worship what the pagans worshipped and to scorn the advance to Christianity. These men knew how the human soul could succumb to such temptation since they had to overcome it consciously.

You are looking here into a life of soul of which outer history relates but little. Philip the Fair, through his ahrimanic gold initiation, had also a correct knowledge of these facts of soul life, even if only instinctively. He knew enough of it, however, to be able to communicate it to his vassals. Now, after a cruel judicial process had been contrived involving all manner of investigation, a course of action, decided upon beforehand, was begun. Plots were made, instigated by Philip together with his vassals who had been summoned to make investigations against the Knights. Although they were innocent, they were accused of every imaginable vice. One day in France they were suddenly attacked and thrown into prison. During their confinement their treasures were seized.

Trials were now arranged in which, entirely under the influence of Philip, torture was extensively employed. Every Knight to be found was subjected to the severest torture. Here, therefore, torture was also used to take life, the significance of which you have already learned to know. The intention of Philip was to put to the rack as many persons as possible, and the torture was applied in the most cruel way so that many of the harassed Knights lost consciousness. Philip knew that the pictures of the temptations emerged when, in terrible agony on the rack, their consciousness became clouded. He knew: the images of temptation come out! Under his instigation a catechism of leading questions was so arranged that the answers were always suggested in the way the questions were put. The Knights' answers were, of course, given out of a consciousness dulled by the torture. They were asked, “Have you denied the Host and refrained from speaking the words of Consecration?” In their clouded consciousness the Knights acknowledged these things. The powers opposing the good spoke out of their vision and, whereas in their conscious life they brought the deepest reverence to the symbol of the Cross and the Crucifix, they now accused themselves of spitting upon it; they accused themselves of the most dreadful crimes, which normally lived in their subconscious as temptations. So from the admissions made by the tortured Knights, the story was fabricated that they had worshipped an idol instead of Christ, an idol of a human head with luminous eyes; that on their admittance to the Order they were subjected to repulsive sexual procedures of the vilest nature; that they did not conduct the Transubstantiation in the right way; that they committed the worst sexual offences; that even on their admittance to the Order they forswore the Mystery of Golgotha. The catechizing had been so well organized that even the Grand Master of the order had been tortured into making these subconscious avowals.

It is one of the saddest chapters of human history, but one that can only be understood if one sees clearly that behind the veil of what is related by history stand active forces, and that human life is truly a battlefield. Because of lack of time, I will omit all that might be said further on this subject, but it would be easy to show how there is every ostensible reason for condemning the Knights Templar. Many stood by their avowals, many fled; the majority were condemned and, as stated, even the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was forced under torture to speak in the way described. Thus it came about that Philip the Fair, Philip IV of France was able to succeed in convincing his vassal, Pope Clement V—it was not difficult—that the Knights had committed the most shameful crimes, that they were the most unchristian heretics. All this the Pope sanctioned with his benediction, and the Order of the Templar was dissolved. Fifty-four Knights, including Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Shortly afterward in other European countries—in England, Spain, then right into Central Europe and Italy—action was also taken against them.

Thus we see how the interpretation of the Mystery of Golgotha and its influence penetrated into the midst of European evolution through the Order of the Templar. In a deeper sense, however, these things must be looked upon as determined by a certain necessity. Humanity was not yet ripe to receive the impulse of wisdom, beauty and strength in the way the Knights desired. Besides, it was determined on grounds we have yet to learn, grounds that lie in the whole spiritual development of Europe, that the spiritual world was not to be attained in the way in which the Templars entered it. It would have been gained too quickly, which is the luciferic way. We actually behold here a most important twofold attack of the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman: Lucifer urging the Knights on, driving them into their misfortune, and Ahriman working actively through the inspiration of Philip the Fair. We see here a significant twofold attack effected in world history.

But what lived and worked in the Knights Templar could not be eradicated. Spiritual life cannot be rooted out; it lives and works on further. With the Knights, notably with the fifty-four who had been burned at the stake through the agency of Philip, many a soul was certainly drawn up into the spiritual world who would still have done much work on the earth in the spirit of the Templar Order, and who would also have attracted pupils to work in the same spirit. But it had to turn out differently. In the spiritual world these souls lived through those experiences they had undergone in the most terrible agonies that were brought about under the influence of the visionary avowals extorted through torture. Their impulses, which now, between their death and their next birth, go out to souls who have since descended, and also to souls who are still above awaiting incarnation, must be metamorphosed from the character of the activity of the physical earthly world into spiritual activity. What now came from the souls of the Knights, who had been murdered in this pitiful way and who before their death by burning had to undergo the most frightful experience a man can suffer, was to become for many others a principle of inspiration. Powerful impulses were to flow down into humanity. We can prove this in the case of many human souls.

Today, however, we will keep more to the sphere of knowledge and intellect as we have done also in the other examples given in recent days. Inspiration from the cosmic knowledge of the Knights Templar—this was always given. The fact that ultimately people came to look on the Templars as heretics after they had been burned to death is not to be wondered at; nor is it to be wondered at that people also believed they had committed all sorts of infamous crimes. Had someone been pleased to condemn as specially heretical the Devil's act, which has just been presented here,¹ in which Mephistopheles, the Lemures and the thick and thin Devils appear, perhaps—I do not know—countless persons in the nation would also look on that as something heretical. The methods of Philip the Fair are, however, no longer employed in the present rather more lamentable times. The cosmic wisdom that these Knights possessed has entered many souls. One could cite many examples of how the inspiration of the Knights Templar had been drawn into souls. I will read you a passage from the poem “Ahasver” by Julius Mosen, which appeared in 1838. As you can read in the lecture cycles, I have often referred to Julius Mosen, the author of the profound poem “Ritter Wahn” (Knight Chimera). In the very first canto of the third section of “Ahasver”, Mosen leads his hero to those parts of the earth where, in Ceylon and the neighboring islands, the region is to be sought that we describe in the cosmology of our spiritual science as the approximate locale of Lemurian evolution. This region of the earth is distinguished in a special way. You know that the magnetic north pole is located at a different point from that of the geographic north pole. Magnetic needles everywhere point toward the magnetic north pole and one can draw magnetic meridians that meet at this point. Up in North America where the magnetic north pole lies, these magnetic meridians go round the earth in straight lines. Remarkably, however, in the Lemurian region the magnetic meridians become sinuous serpentine lines. The magnetic forces are twisted into a serpentine form in this region. People notice these things far too little today. One who sees the living earth, however, knows that magnetism is like a force vivifying the earth;

in the north it goes straight, and in the region of old Lemuria it goes in a tortuous winding line. Just think how profoundly Julius Mosen speaks as he sends his Ahasver toward this region in the first canto of the third epoch—it is divided in epochs—of the poem:

In line direct and straight from Southern Pole
Takes the Magnetic Line its chosen course,
When suddenly it twines in serpent-curve

There before India and its neighbor isles
Before the dungeon where in deepest woe
Sits the Eternal Mother ever bound.

In circle form the Line drew back its length,
And twining swift and secret on itself
With a single plunge in swirling vortex fell.

There the Great Spirit in a first embrace
Held the poor spouse, and from their ardent fire
Sprang the Earth-demons instantly to life.

When thus the first creation came to naught,
The Great, the Nameless Spirit in his wrath
Stamped down the bridal couch beneath the sea.

So it goes on. We see inspiration emerge with wonderfully intuitive knowledge. The wisdom lives on that could only enter the world amid sufferings, tortures, persecutions and the most frightful offences. Nevertheless, it lives on in spiritualized form.

When we seek the most beautiful spiritualizations of this wisdom that has entered the development of Europe, as we have described, then we find one precisely in all that would work and live in the powerful imaginations of Goethe. Goethe knew the secret of the Templars. Not without purpose has he used gold as he has done in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, in which he made the snake consume the gold and then sacrifice itself. By this deed the gold is wrested from the powers with which Goethe truly knew it must not be allowed to remain. Gold—naturally everything is also meant here of which gold is a real symbol. Read once more Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily and try to feel how Goethe knew the secret of gold, how, through the way in which he lets gold flow through the fairy tale, he is looking back into earlier times. May I perhaps add here the personal confession that when for the first time in the eighties of the last century, I faced the question of the gold in Goethe's fairy tale, the meaning of the story emerged for me through the development of the gold in it.

Through the way in which Goethe lets gold flow through this fairy tale, he shows how he looks back into the time in which wisdom—for which gold also stands, hence, “The Golden King of Wisdom”—was exposed to such persecutions as those described. Now, he sought to show past, present and future. Goethe saw instinctively into the future of eastern European civilization. He could see how unjustifiable is the way in which the problem of sin and death worked there. If we wished to designate, not quite inappropriately perhaps, the nationality of the man who is then led to the Temple and the Beautiful Lily, who appears at first as without vigor as if crippled, then, from what we have had to say recently about the culture of the East and of Russia, you will not consider it unreasonable to deem this man to be a Russian. In so doing, you will almost certainly follow the line of Goethe's instinct. The secret of European evolution in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies concealed within this fairy tale, just as truly as Goethe was able to conceal it in his Faust, especially in the second part, as we know from his own statement. It is clearly to be seen in Goethe—we have already shown it in various respects; later it can be shown in others—that he begins to regard the world and to feel himself in it, in accord with the fundamental demand of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch.

In Goethe we have a true continuation of the life of the Knights Templar but, as I have said, in a spiritualized way. This Goetheanism, however, will only be able to enter slowly and gradually into human understanding. I have already shown in certain respects how the impulse for everything of a spiritually scientific nature lies in Goetheanism. All of spiritual science can be developed from Goethe. I have shown in a public lecture (Berlin, April 15, 1916) that I gave a short time ago how the first elementary scientific foundation for the doctrine of reincarnation, of repeated earth lives, lies in Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis. He begins the teaching of metamorphosis by showing how the leaf changes into the blossom, how an organ appears in different forms. When one follows this through with penetration, there lies implicit in it what I have often explained here; that is, the head of man is the transformed body, and the rest of the body is a human head still to be transformed. Here is metamorphosis in the ultimate degree, which for science will develop into a direct knowledge of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives. But Goethe is still but little understood; he must first become familiar in the cultural life of humanity. Not only centuries but millenniums will be needed in order to unravel what lies in Goethe. As a matter of fact, even today there is not a foundation for a study of Goethe such as a monograph or biography could provide that would be produced really in his very style.

Let us see what has been done in particular instances in modern culture toward the understanding of Goethe's personality. We can, of course, only cite single examples. Herman Grimm has, however, rightly said, “A certain Mr. Lewes has written a book, which was for some time the most famous book on Goethe; one can even say the best. It is a book treating of a personality who was supposed to have been born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749, and to have had a Frankfurt councilor for a father. He then developed and grew up in such a way that Goethe's youth was ascribed to him, along with all sorts of other things taken from Goethe. Goethe's works were attributed to him; he also traveled to Italy in the same year as Goethe, and died the same year Goethe died. This person, however, is not Goethe but a fantasy of Mr. Lewes's”.

Then we also have a relatively good book in which Goethe's life and creative work is described with immense industry and better than many other works on Goethe. It is filled, however, from the first to the last page with hatred and aversion. This book is by the Jesuit, Baumgartner. It is an excellent but, in fact, a Jesuitical, book; but antagonistic to Goethe. At least, it is better written than the countless others on Goethe that have appeared throughout the nineteenth century and now on into the twentieth. A great number of these works are unpalatable. One continually sneezes because the dust of the library and professor gets into one's nose. They have been written by pedants who call it Goethe. Often they have been written with pedantic pride, but they are also fusty with library dust or the air one must breathe when one guesses how often the man who is writing about Faust, for example, has opened Grimm's or some other glossary in order to decipher a word or passage—and so on. One could say: Oh horrible, most horrible, what has been written in this field!

One book, however, stands out in a quite unusual way. These are Herman Grimm's lectures on Goethe given in the seventies at Berlin University. Grimm was, as we can see, a spirit who had the best will and the most wonderful traditions to aid him in familiarizing himself with Goethe. His book is an intelligent and excellent one that has developed right out of the Goethean atmosphere. Grimm grew up in the age when there were still Goethean traditions, but this book shows something quite remarkable. In fact, in a certain respect it is not at all a book that has developed from Goethean traditions; it is both Goethean and un-Goethean. For Herman Grimm does not write in a Goethean style but, strangely enough, in a style that leads one to say that the book was written by an American, a German American! One can call Grimm's lectures a book written by an American but in German. In style it is American—a style in which Grimm has educated himself. As one of the most enthusiastic followers of Emerson, he has studied him, read, digested, translated him, has quite familiarized himself with him. Now, Grimm finds his way into this American-Emerson style so that he is complete master of it; at the same time he grows enthusiastic about it. One can see at once on reading his novel, Invincible Powers, how he is able to let everything American live on in him. Enthusiasm for what is American and at the same time a wonderful feeling of internationalism is poured out in Herman Grimm's Goethe lectures.

In spite of all this, much, very much in the spiritual life of man must come about before Goethe and similar spirits will be understood! If sometimes they are rightly understood, it must be in quite another way from that of Herman Grimm. Once, in a conversation with him, I wished to make just a few references to the path by which one could gradually enter the spiritual world. The movement of his right arm will always remain unforgettable—a gesture of warding off; he wanted to push that aside. He created a Goethe who is simply delightful to see from outside, but one does not see into his heart. This Goethe of Grimm's, as he makes his way through historical development, as he stands there, as he moves about and comes into relation with people, as human relations flow into his works, as the contemporary world conception flows into his works—this Goethe goes past our mind's eye as a ghost who flits through the world unseen by the living. Goethe will only be understood when one has deepened Goetheanism to become spiritual science. Then, much will emerge from Goethe that he could not express himself. Goethe, truly understood, leads, in fact, to spiritual science, which is really developed Goetheanism.

From the beginning Goethe also understood that Christianity is a living thing. How he longed for a possible expression for the Christianizing of the modern world conception. It did not lie in his time to find it, but in the new age spiritual science is already working to attain it. Let us take his poem, “The Mysteries” (Die Geheimnisse), in which Brother Mark is guided to the Temple where the Rose Cross is on the door, and let us look at the whole picture. We shall see that the Christian mood is in this fragment, “The Mysteries,” the mood born of the feeling that the symbol of the Cross becomes a picture of life through the living roses entwining it! Then, too Goethe lets his Faust end with a Christian conception; he spoke of it to Eckermann in his old age. A time will come when in a much more active, intense sense, one will connect with Christianity the thoughts that ring through the conclusion of Faust, although Goethe, who was inwardly modest in such things, was far from doing so himself. He was, in reality, on the way that he made his Brother Mark take—to the Cross encircled with roses. In this lies ultimately all that is to flow from such wisdom as was striven for by the Knights Templar. (Their striving was too rapid and unsuitable to physical evolution.)

A longing for the full Christianizing of the treasures of wisdom concerning the cosmos and earthly evolution gradually broke through—a longing for the full Christianizing of earthly life so that suffering, pain and grief appear as the earth's Cross, which then finds its comfort, its elevation, its salvation in the Rose symbol of the Crucifix. Repeatedly in men thus inspired, in whom lived on what was thought to have been destroyed with the burning of the Templars—in these inspired men lived ever again the ideal that in the place of what brings strife and quarrels something must appear that can bring good to earth, and this good may be pictured in the symbol of the Cross in conjunction with the roses.

The book, Ruins (Shutt), by Anastasius Grün has been given to me today by one of our members. I have here again the same verses that I read to you some time ago to confirm the fact that this mystery, which this poem also expresses, is not merely something put forward by us, but that it comes to life again and again. Anastasius Grün, the Austrian poet, composed these poems; the eighth edition appeared in 1847. In his own manner he wrote of the progress of mankind, and I will read again today the passage I read years ago as proof of the role played by the image of the Rose Cross in evolving humanity; that is, among those who are incarnated in the new age. Anastasius Grün turns his gaze toward Palestine and other regions after having described how much confused fighting and quarreling has been spread over the earth. After he has seen and described much that causes fighting and strife he, who is a great seer in a certain way, turns to a region of the earth that he describes thus. I cannot read all of it as it would take too long, but one's eye is first turned to a part of the earth where the ploughshare is used.

As children once were digging in a meadow
They brought a shapeless thing of iron to light,
It seemed too straight, too heavy for a sickle,
For plough it was too slender and too slight.

With toil they dragged it home as new found treasure;
The elders see it, yet they know it not;
They call the neighbors round within the circle,
The neighbors see it, yet they know it not.

There is an ancient greybeard, wan and sallow,
Whose lifetime lingers on like tale forgot
Into the present world of busy dealing,
They show it to him, but he knows is not.

Well for them all, that they have never known it,
Else must they weep, and still must be deplored
The folly of their fathers, long since buried,
For what was known by no one was a sword!

Henceforth it shall but cleave the earth as ploughshare;
Shall point the seed-corn's path into the ground,
The sword's new hero-deeds are peaned
When sun-filled airs with song of lark resound.

Once more it came to pass, that in his ploughing
The farmer struck what seemed a piece of stone.
And as his spade unloosed the earthy covers,
A structure of a wondrous shape was shown.

He calls the neighbors round within the circle;
They look at it but still they know it not.
Thou wise and aged one, thou'lt surely tell us?
The greybeard looks at it, yet knows it not.

Thus, in ploughing, something was dug up and even the aged man does not recognize it.

Though known to none, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around in every roadway;
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight!

They saw the fight not, and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not, and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross will always be known, even in a region where it was already buried and drawn out of the earth as a cross of stone, where civilization has so withdrawn that an un-Christian culture has developed. There, Anastasius Grün wishes to say, a cross is found and men know it in their inmost breasts, even though the oldest among them fails to recognize it through tradition.

Though known to one, yet with its ancient blessing
Eternal in their breast it stands upright,
Scatters its seed around on every roadway,
A Cross it was, this stranger to their sight.

They saw the fight not and its bloodstained symbol,
They see alone the victory and the crown,
They saw the storm not and the lashing tempest
They only see the rainbow's glistening shine.

The Cross of stone they set up in the garden;
A venerable relic strange and old,
Flowers of all species lift their growth above it,
While roses climbing high the Cross enfold.

So stands the Cross weighty with solemn meaning
On Golgotha, amidst resplendent sheen;
Long since 'tis hidden by its wealth of roses;
No more, for roses, can the Cross be seen.

But it is there! There is the Cross! There are the roses! One only learns the meaning of history when one turns one's gaze to what lives in the spiritual and pervades human evolution, when, too, one will turn one's attention to what shows us under what auspices, under what insignia things enter world history. I think that one can feel the deeper connection between what we have characterized for later times and what has been characterized in the ideal of the Knights Templar and their fate in the world at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

• 1. A presentation of Faust had presumably just taken place.

As we have gathered here⁵² on the eve of our annual general meeting, and look forward to a stimulating time, it may seem appropriate to open the sequence of meetings with a lecture for visitors from outside Berlin and as well as for our Berlin members. A lecture like this,⁵³ not part of the programme but offered as a free gift, may thus be on a subject that would fit in less well with the normal run of theosophical lectures—something for advanced theosophists and at the same time also for people who are at the very beginning. The latter will however need to find their way into things first. They will need to pay serious and careful attention if they are to be able to follow completely. On the other hand we also offer something for those who want to hear something about the parts of the higher worlds that are accessible to us.

Our theme will be the relationship of the human senses to the outside world, to the physical and the non-physical world around us.⁵⁴ We shall touch on a subject to which we are not yet paying sufficient attention among ourselves—the question as to how we should really see the relationship between the four bodies that make up essential human nature.

One of the first things people learn in the science of the spirit is that the human being consists of a physical body, an ether body, an astral body and a body which we have always been calling the I-body in our discussions. The I-body holds the seeds for our higher development. All this is given in elementary books on theosophy and in the things theosophists gradually come to hear in their first lectures. But people often say that the I-body is the highest of the four bodies, the astral body is less high, the ether body even less high, and the physical body the lowest of them all.

atman
buddhi
manas

kama manas
astral body
ether body
physical body

Anyone can read up about this in my Theosophy. We are interested in the four lower bodies also known as the Pythagorean quadrangle. The one called the ‘I’ or ‘kama manas’ is widely considered to be the highest, followed by the astral body, the ether body and the physical body as lower bodies. That is a fairly biased view, however, and I have often said that it is not correct. In its own way the physical body is the most perfect and also the oldest part of the human being. Consider this physical body in all its parts, study it, using the means given in modern science! You only have to give it some real thought and you’ll have to say to yourself: ‘This physical body is most marvellously constructed in all its parts, filled with the greatest wisdom the world has ever known.’ Nothing in this world—in so far as we are able to investigate it by physical means—is more perfect than the human physical body. You may look at a whole cosmos of stars, or study the most artful mechanism human beings can devise, and you’ll not find anything more perfect than the physical body. If you study the human heart and the functions it has to perform, looking at it as a purely physical apparatus, or just consider a piece of bone with all the marvellous struts inside, you’ll find this to be true. Just take a bit of the thigh bone. It has struts that run like this (Fig. 2):

The cleverest engineer would be unable to produce a structure as perfect as this, a system created by the cosmos to support the upper part of the human body. And it is the same with the human brain and all the organs that are part of the human physical body. You may study the whole of nature—there is nothing to equal this physical body in perfection.

Why is this physical body so perfect? Human beings have not always been the way they are today. They have gone through a long process of development. The human beings you see before you today, consisting of these four elements, have more than just long evolution on this physical planet earth behind them. Another planet, the predecessor of our earth, went before. That was the ancient Moon. This was preceded by the ancient Sun, and the Sun by ancient Saturn. Think of it in terms of a human being going through incarnations. The earth, too, has gone through similar states. We are able to trace four of them. In doing so, we are looking back on immeasurably long periods of time, stretches of time beyond the comprehension of an earthly human being. But something of this human physical body was present even then.

The first beginnings of the physical body existed on ancient Saturn. Nothing was there as yet of our present-time ether body, nor anything of the astral body, let alone the human I. We can see from this that the physical body has gone through four stages. On the ancient Saturn planet it emerged as a simple physical body, a kind of basic supportive structure. It then went through a transformation and entered into a twilight state, a pralaya. The physical body later emerged again on the ancient Sun—which was something very different from today’s sun—but now at a higher level. There the ether body joined it. The ether body is thus very much younger than the physical body. The young ether body developed under the influence of the physical body that already existed, now at its second level of perfection. During that time on the ancient Sun, when the physical and the ether bodies both existed, nothing existed as yet of the astral body. This only joined them during the third earth incarnation, on the ancient Moon. There the human physical body went through its third level of perfection, and the ether body through its second stage. On the Moon, the physical body may have been said to be in class 3, the ether body in class 2, and the astral body in class 1. The I only joined them on earth and had not yet been through anything until then. When the physical body appeared on earth, this was its fourth appearance. The human I-body will have reached the stage at which the physical body is today only after another three planetary stages, the astral body after another two planetary' stages. And the ether body will have reached the level of perfection of today’s physical body when one more planetary stage has been gone through.

Some quite commonplace reflections can convince us that the astral body is much less perfect than the physical body. The physical body in its wisdom would never fall into the kind of crude error the astral body does. Just think of the appetites created by the drives, desires and passions that live in the astral body. The heart has to stay fit for decades in spite of appetites in the astral body that are harmful to it. That is the case, for instance, if we drink coffee or tea, and so on. The heart does not want such stimulants, but the astral body does. The astral body does something that goes against the grain for the physical body at its present level of development. On the planet we call Venus, the astral body will have reached a level where it will be as wise in its behaviour as the physical body is now, unless it is disturbed.

We thus have to see the physical body as the most carefully developed and most perfectly made part of essential human nature. It has learned something every time it has completed another planetary stage, and has become increasingly more perfect. Looking at the physical human body you see that it consists of a number of organs. People do not give much thought to the way these organs have come into existence. In anatomy, in science, the human being is said to consist of such and such organs, having a liver, a heart, a nose for smelling, ears for hearing, eyes for seeing. And these organs are described in detail in modern science. But when people do this they are doing something that can only be compared with the following.

Imagine one were to put an old table and a new table side by side and describe them in a very basic way. One table has four feet, a top, it has such and such a colour, and the other table also has four feet, a top, such and such a colour, and so on. Those descriptions may be perfectly accurate and yet they do not really tell us what matters in this case—that one table is old and the other new. You can describe the eyes and ears in the same way. You can tell people what they look like today. You can describe the auricle, the auditory canal and everything, the acoustic nerves, and so on. You can describe the human eye in the same way. Both descriptions will look good, and it might appear that they are equal in value. But in the highest occult sense they are not. The two are not equal in value because these two organs—eyes and ears—have evolved at very different times.

If you were to go back to ancient Saturn and examine the first beginnings of the human physical body, when there was no question as yet of an ether body, astral body and I, if you were to examine the peculiar physical body that existed in those very early times, you would look in vain for even the first beginnings of eyes. But you would not be able to find them, for even the potential for eyes would not yet exist. You would find the potential for the human ear. This, then, is the age difference, and you can understand it if you realize that the physical body has gone through as many stages of evolution as our planet. At the first stage it went so far as to develop the full potential for the ears. These were already preformed when the human being came to Saturn from other, very different worlds. Human beings already had the potential for hearing when they entered into this particular chain of evolution.

They added the potential for a sense of temperature on that first planet, a feeling for warmth. This is generally called a skin sense. But careful distinction has to be made between two things. In the first place it is the sense of touch, perceiving hard and soft; then it is also the sense of temperature, perceiving hot and cold. This is the sense of temperature we are speaking of. So you have a sequence. First we have hearing and then the feeling, the sense of temperature. This sense of temperature evolved on the earth's planetary incarnation which we call Saturn. Such a sense does of course go through transformations at different stages of evolution. When it first appeared it was very different from the way it will be in its later form.

The ancient sense of hearing which human beings brought with them into planetary evolution was a quite peculiar sense of hearing. The best way of characterizing it is perhaps to say: ‘Basically that the human physical body was just one big ear.’ The human being was all ear at the time of entering into this planetary evolution. As a physical body the human being hardly differed at all from the environment. Man sounded, and everything else sounded as well. In the whole of their bodies, human beings perceived what lived out there as the sounds of the world. Just as a string vibrates when another is plucked or struck, so there was a vibration in the human physical body for every sound that arose in the world. Everything resounded.

The further development of the senses was a matter of specialization. Human beings had been all ear to begin with, and then the sense of temperature arose. Something that had been one before became differentiated into two structures. This also became apparent at the physical level. Organs appeared that would mediate only hearing, others that would mediate only temperature perceptions. The whole human being thus changed each time the physical body reappeared. The senses became specialized, and a simple form gradually grew highly complex.

Human beings thus entered into Saturn evolution with the potential for hearing. On Saturn they acquired a sense of temperature. During the Sun evolution that followed they gained the sense of sight. The potential for a sense of sight which developed during Sun evolution was thus the third stage, with the other senses becoming transformed so that on the Sun the human being was able to hear, feel and, in a way, to see.

Continuing along the line of evolution we come to the Moon. The Sun had first gone into pralaya again. It then rose again as Moon. On the Moon, the sense of taste developed in addition to the other senses. Four of our present-day senses had thus evolved. The others again specialized, distributing themselves among individual organs. You can literally follow the way this physical body opened up to be an organ for the outside world. The sympathetic nervous system had already evolved on the Sun. During life on the ancient Moon, the other organs also evolved in stages, but we’ll just consider the senses here. On the Moon, then, the sense of taste was added and on earth the youngest of the senses, the sense of smell. If you study the senses today, you can tell yourself that the sense of smell is the youngest, having developed last in the human being. The sense of taste was already there during Moon evolution and has been refashioned once. Every refashioning makes the senses more perfect. The sense of smell is the least perfect. The sense of taste has corrected its errors once, the sense of sight twice, the sense of temperature three times. Our sense of hearing is the most perfect, however, for it had already gone through four transformations and is going through the fifth on earth.

You thus have to see the human body as a highly complex entity and realize that much had to happen so that the physical body was gradually able to develop. One has to know their relative ages if one is to form an opinion about different parts of this body. So the senses again have different relationships to other spirits, also as regards their level of perfection. A sense organ which is more perfect, having gone through quite a number of transformations, relates to completely different worlds from those to which a sense organ relates that has only gone through a few transformations.

Let us stay with the sense of hearing for now. It has gone through a whole sequence of stages, for potentially it existed already when the human being entered into this evolution. So what happened? Physical Saturn evolution took the sense of hearing a stage further, and then added the first beginnings of a sense of temperature. Then, during Sun evolution, the ether body was added to the physical body. From Moon onwards the astral body played a role, and from earth evolution onwards the I-body. But this whole scheme of things also meant something else. The I does not yet have an influence on the sense of smell because the sense of smell only joined the other senses on earth and is still wholly caught up in physical evolution. The human ether body has an influence on the sense of taste, the astral body on the sense of sight, and the I-body on the sense of temperature, of warmth, of feeling.

The first beginnings of manas developing in the human being, as the potential for a higher spiritual self, have an influence on the sense of hearing. This principle, which belongs to man’s higher nature, thus only has an influence on the sense of hearing today. None of the things the four lower senses make their own becomes part of our eternal soul. Only the things that can be expressed in words, things we are able to put into words—a word only has to be thought and it will be heard inwardly—are part of the eternal, immortal part of the human being. All thoughts that can be put in words, feelings that are so clear in our minds that we can put them in words, all the impulses to which human beings can put a name and which do not live in them as dim drives but are so clear that they can be put into words—all this belongs to the eternal part of the human being. The word is therefore something that is part of the eternal basis of the human being. And if we start to speak of things eternal at all, we must quite literally speak of the word. At the time when the earth entered into its evolution, when earth evolution began on Saturn, this first potential for the word was there. Now, on earth, this potential has evolved. The statement: ‘In the beginning was the word’⁵⁵ must be taken quite literally. Those gospel words should not be taken as symbolic, but their meaning has to be developed until they can be understood in their literal sense. The word is also the beginning of the eternal part of the human being. Because of this, the word, the audible word, is the first part of the human being that proves useful for developing the future world. Everything the other senses produce is of no use at all for the evolution which the earth must still go through.

Legends and myths often contain profound truths, or do you think legend does not know that anything produced by the sense of smell is of no immediate use in earth evolution? That further planetar evolutions have to be gone through before the principle that lies in the sense of smell will be of use? The father of all obstacles thus is one who leaves a horrible stench behind—the devil is recognized after he’s gone because of the stench he leaves behind. The world of legend holds the deepest truths; one only has to know how to take them literally in the highest sense.

Our study of the senses and the way they relate to the world can take us yet further. Let us take one of the senses, say the sense of sight. It is the middle one of the senses. I’d now like you to follow me into something rather subtle. You know that the astral body, in which man’s inner drives, appetites and passions live, shows itself to the clairvoyant as a light body. In this light body you see all kinds of configurations and colours. Every passion, every drive has a specific colour. All this, and even a person’s basic mood, comes to expression in this light body. Looking at the light body of someone who is rather nervous, you see it pregnant with glittering dots that flash and shine out. It all shines out and vanishes again in a rich play of colour.

If there is a terrible affect, you see rays like this:

Someone with hidden resentment shows figures like snakes:

This is difficult to draw, because it is in constant motion, rather like lightning. The person is feeling anger or resentment or anxiety when the soul is twitching like this inside. That is where a human being inwardly experiences his state of soul. Outwardly this state of soul shows itself in light phenomena to the clairvoyant.

The physical eye sees lights and colours around it. Just as a clairvoyant sees red, blue, yellow and green in the astral body, so does the physical eye see red, blue, yellow and green around it. In both cases the cause is exactly the same. Just as an appetite lives behind the red in the astral body, so there is an appetite behind the red of a flower as the ‘thing in itself’. What the sense of sight does when it goes beyond this point is no different from turning a coat inside out. Whilst man's astral nature comes to expression in his aura, external astral nature lives behind the whole world of colours and light, the world that exists for the sense of sight. There would be never be any colours in the world if all things were not completely imbued with astral spirits. The colours that show themselves in the world come from the astral spirits that show themselves in colours. In turning inside out, the spirit moves from the higher to the lower plane.

You can achieve the following by means of meditation. If you have a green area before you, perhaps the leaf of a plant, and now go outside yourself to look at the matter from the other side, you would see the astral spirit that is behind the green colour and shows itself to be present by means of the colour green.

So you have to see it like this. Looking out in the world and seeing it decked out in colours, you can assume that astral spirits are behind those colours. Just as you let the colours of your aura become apparent to the clairvoyant, so does the tapestry of colour in the world reflect the cosmic aura. All colour in this world is aura turned inside out. If you were able to turn your aura the way you do a coat, the other side your aura would also become physically visible to you. This applies to the sense of sight, and you can see from this that the sense of sight is closely bound up with the astral world.

Taking the sense of feeling, the sense of temperature, this in turn has a universal relationship to the lower parts of the astral world. While the sense of sight relates more to the upper parts of the astral world, the sense of feeling or temperature has the same kind of relationship to the lower parts of the astral world, more to the region where the astral world begins its transition to the ether world. The sense of hearing is directly related to the physical world, and the things you perceive as sense of hearing are oscillations in the physical air.

This is something I would ask you to consider in a most subtle way, in the right way. If you want to see something, an astral spirit must be behind the colour you see. There must also be an astral spirit behind the heat or cold you feel. If you want to hear something, you have fully arrived in the physical world, since the sense of hearing is the most perfect of the senses and you can hear a physical entity. It is thus only in the word that the world of the spirit has rightly descended as far as the physical world.

Starting from the top therefore [on the board], we are able to say that the phenomena of the sense of heating are entirely on the physical plane, those of heat are already somewhat higher up, those of the sense of sight are on the astral plane, and the phenomena we perceive through the least perfect of the senses belong to the higher parts of the spiritual world. Whatever extends down into the physical world is simply the least perfect. Anything the sense of smell is able to perceive, anything it brings down into the physical world, is most incomplete. Where this goes its own way, it separates out from the great scheme of things, from evolution. The phenomena revealed in the sense of smell should only arise in intimate connection with the most sublime worlds today.

Let us then take the spirits which at one time, just when the sense of smell had started to evolve on earth, separated out from evolution and became independent. These are spirits that make themselves known mainly through the sense of smell. And so it is rather nice that legend speaks of fallen angels making themselves known in a most unpleasant way through the sense of smell. Having left the stream of evolution, they have become perceptible to the sense of smell.

If we therefore ask ourselves what really lies outside the skin which encloses the human sense organs, we have to say to ourselves that there we do indeed have the different higher planes and their spirits.

Research at the physical level is in most beautiful agreement here. Just think of how an eye develops. Initially it starts from the outside. A small depression develops in the skin of the creature developing an eye. This gradually deepens,

and after a time it looks like this. This then fills up with a kind of fluid and finally closes up.

And so the eye is indeed pushing in from the outside. The human organs do not develop from the inside but push in from the outside. It is the same for all human and animal organs. The technical term for it is ‘invagination’ or ‘inversion’. In vertebrate animals, a channel first developed, and the spinal marrow integrated itself into this from the outside. That is also how the senses integrate themselves from the outside.

What makes the eye push in like that? This is the work of the spirits that are active in the light. It is the spirits active in the ray of light which create the eye from the organism, spirits that are behind the outer appearance of things, astrally, of which we have said that we would be able to see them if we could turn our conscious mind inside out. They have pushed the eye into the physical organism. The eye is thus created by spirits of light. The other organs are created in the same way by other spirits from the different worlds. When you feel yourself to be inside your skin, you can feel yourself to be in the condition where spirits have worked on your body from different sides. When man arrived on Saturn in his very first evolution, only the most sublime spirits were able to work on his organ of hearing. He was taught to hear by higher and then also by lower spirits until on earth, too, the spirits embodied in the outside air began to share in the work on his organ of hearing. Man hears air in motion with his organ of hearing; that is where sound lies.

If we really take this into our hearts and minds, we shall begin to understand in a very deep sense why air played such a special role in the Genesis story, why it had to be breathed into man, so that it might play this role also with regard to his organ of hearing. ‘The creator breathed the living breath in man, and he became a living soul.’⁵⁶ Man himself is at his highest level created by the word, by sound. This also shows the relationship human beings have to their whole environment through the senses.

Looking at the sense of sight you can say that the spirits which live on the astral plane have worked on the sense of sight. They live in the ray of light. The ray of light has a physical and an astral part. Now imagine it falling on something. It contains the external physical light and also the astral spirits which live in the ray of light. Now make yourself stand in such a way that you stop the ray of light, letting the sun shine on your back. You will stop the physical light but not the astral spirits. An astral spirit will then be in front of you, in your shadow. An astral spirit lives in he shadow which you cast before you. This astral spirit living in your shadow is no more and no less than an image. An image of what? Of the body. And what lives in it takes its form from the soul. This is one of the methods by which one can gradually see one’s own soul. Primitive peoples were not entirely wrong when they said that the soul lived in a person’s shadow. You will find this in countless legends—the soul goes with the shadow. The soul first shows itself to astral vision in the shadow, in its form.

You’ll now also understand the deep significance of Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, the man who lost his shadow.⁵⁷ Read Chamisso’s short story with this thought about the shadow in mind and you will realize that much, much deeper meanings lie behind many such stories.⁵⁸

You will in fact realize more and more that someone who does not know of these things is going about more or less like a blind Person. Someone who knows nothing of the worlds of spirit does not have the slightest notion of what he is taking along with him in his shadow. All the subtle things that surround us will be opened up again to people through the science of the spirit. The world is very puzzling for someone who wants to respond to it inwardly. When people become aware of the riddles that face them, they will no longer consider the spiritual scientific view to be something superfluous, something dreamt up by people with vivid imaginations, but realize that the reality which exists all around us only opens up for us through the science of the spirit. We should never tire of studying everything around us. Many spirits have had a hand in the complex structure we call the human being. This is also why the structure has so many different levels of perfection. The physical ear only gained the right to hear at the physical level once it had gone through many stages. A chela⁵⁹ who under the guidance of his master goes early to the Venus stage, will also be able to perceive other people on the physical plane in light activity; for then light activity will also extend down to the physical plane.

The process of evolution is quite regular. Just as the sense of hearing has descended to the physical plane, so will the sense of sight descend to the physical plane permitting genuine clairvoyance. The logic of this is quite apparent. Someone who is prepared to think can already see the sense of it, and no one can refute it by mere thinking. That is how it is with all things in the science of the spirit. Only people who do not want to think will fight the science of the spirit, or people wanting to apply their thinking activity only to the things they are used to thinking. Of course someone may come and say: I don’t want to go on a train, but this does not mean we can deny the existence of the railways. So there may also be people who say: There’s nothing in this business of higher worlds. But that does not mean we can deny the existence of the higher worlds. They do exist.

We have spoken of the human sense organs and tried to throw some light on the surrounding world. We have found that the sense organs exist only because other spirits create them. In the same way we could have spoken of the inner spirit that bases itself on the surrounding world. It is not possible to understand these things with a science of the physical world. There it may well be possible to show the structural differences between eye and ear, but not the difference in age between eye and ear. This needs occult science, where it is possible to see behind the surface. We could also have shown that the liver is much younger than the spleen. In that case we would have found that the spleen existed when the ether body joined forces with the physical body, whilst the liver only came with the astral body, with human passions. This is most beautifully shown in the story of Prometheus. The eagle that pecked at the liver of Prometheus who had been chained to a mountain peak is deeply significant.

You might thus consider the great truths to be found in legends in a new way. Ancient legends and myths hold profound wisdom. The myths did not arise from the poetic fantasy of the people, that is an academic superstition. Academics are the most superstitious people in the world. People who believe in ghosts are not as superstitious as are our academics. It is superstition to say that there is a popular fantasy that creates blindly. In reality the great myths come from initiates who knew the things which are now being made accessible again to humanity in the great theosophical truths.

In earlier times, societies where theosophy was taught existed in the part of the world where we are now. Some would go out and tell the things they had heard in their circles to the people, presenting them in myths. Myths thus hold spiritual truths, and anyone who tries can discover these again in the myths. Only lesser myths do not go back to the great initiates. Genuine myths come from them, they are their creation. If you remember this, you’ll see that the myths of different peoples are miraculous writing. Learn to read the myths and look deeply into the souls of peoples that have gone before, peoples that created from inside, as it were. Turn the myths inside out, as we turned the astral plane inside out earlier, and you have modern science, in concept.

In modern science you find the same truths, the evolutional truths to be found in the myths. Hence the strange agreement between the idea of evolution, understood at a deeper level, and the very earliest teaching given to humanity. The elements of mythology are seen from inside, modern science sees them from the outside; but they are the same elements. This brings to mind the remarkable fact that truths found in the earliest religious beliefs come up again in scientific facts that are rightly understood. It need not surprise us to hear that modern science is mythology transformed. It therefore has to be the same in structure as something that existed before.

We have been considering the way the senses relate to the world around us.

Tomorrow at 2 p.m. we'll talk about theosophical matters that do not come from so far away but nevertheless play a role in everyday life.

• 52. The Architektenhaus in Berlin had lecture rooms which could be rented. Rudolf Steiner lectured there from 1903 to 1918, giving a comprehensive introduction to anthroposophy in his longest continuous series of lectures.
• 53. A further set of notes became available for this lecture (19 Oct. 1906). Changes in the text compared to the 1st German edition of 1974 are due to this.
• 54. On this subject, see Steiner R. Theosophy of the Rosicrucian (GA 99), lectures of 1 & 2 June 1907. Tr. M. Cotterell, D. Osmond. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1981. Welt, Erde and Mensch (GA 105), lecture of 3 August 1908 (in German). It seems significant that Rudolf Steiner was considering the subject as preparations were in progress for the Annual General Meeting of the Theosophical Society's German Section. For the same occasion in 1909 he developed a theory of the senses based on the science of the spirit in the lectures he gave on 23-25 Oct. that year, publ. in The Wisdom of Man, the Soul and the Spirit (GA 115). In his own words, this gave the European spiritual scientific movement he was leading a firmer foundation. He intended to publish this theory of the senses in book form, but the work remained fragmentary. Published posthumously as Anthroposophy (A Fragment) (GA 45).
• 55. John 1: 1
• 56. Genesis 2
• 57. Chamisso, Adalbert von (1781–1831). German poet, writer and biologist. Peter Schlemihl published in 1813.
• 58. Changes in the German text compared to the 1974 edition are the result of making comparison with another set of notes.
• 59. Chela (Sanskrit), adept or disciple in the spirit.

In these first lectures, we shall bring together, from the field of knowledge of conditions which go to promote a healthy Agriculture, those which are necessary in order to enable us to reach certain practical conclusions which are to be realised in immediate application and which can only have significance when being so applied. To do so we have to enquire at the very outset how the products of Agriculture come into being and what is their connection with the Universe as a whole. Now a farm or agricultural estate comes to full expression as a ‘farm’ in the best sense of the word if it can be regarded as being a kind of separate individuality, a self-contained individuality. This is the condition to which every agricultural estate or farm should approach as near as possible, although it cannot be completely attained. In other words, everything that is needed to bring forth agricultural products should be supplied by the farm itself, which includes, of course, the necessary cattle and live-stock.

Anything brought in from outside, such as manure and the like, ought under ideal conditions of Agriculture, to be regarded rather as medicine for use in the case of sickness. A sound farm should be able to bring forth from itself everything that it needs. We shall see later why this is quite the natural thing. As long as we neglect the inner nature and essence of things and regard them only from their outer material aspect, so long will it be legitimate to ask: Does it really matter whether cow-manure is taken from the neighbouring farm or from one's own steading? Although it may be impossible to carry it out strictly it is important to hold before one the ideal of a self-contained farm. You will find some justification for this statement if you consider first the earth from which our farm arises and secondly the factors which work in upon the earth from the Universe. It is usual to speak of these factors in very abstract terms. People are aware, it is true, that the light and warmth of the sun, and all the meteorological phenomena connected with these, have a particular bearing upon the type of vegetation produced in a given area. But modern views can give no further details, nor throw any further light on the matter because they do not penetrate into the underlying facts. Let us therefore start from the standpoint which embraces the fact that the basis of all Agriculture is the soil of the earth.

This soil—I will indicate it schematically by this straight line (see Drawing No. 2) is generally looked upon as being something purely mineral into which at the best organic substance has entered either because humus has been formed or manure has been introduced. The idea that the soil not only contains added organic substance but also has itself a plant—like nature—and even contains an astral activity: such an idea has never been considered, still less conceded. And if we go a step further and consider how this inner life of the soil in the delicate balancing of its distribution is quite different in Summer from what it is in Winter, we come to subjects which are of enormous importance in practical life but to which no attention is paid to-day. If you start by considering the soil, then you must bear in mind the fact that it is a kind of organ within that organism which manifests itself wherever the growth of Nature appears. The earth surface is really an organ, an organ which, if you care to. you may compare with the human diaphragm. “We may put the matter broadly in this way (it is not quite exact but will give the right idea): Above the diaphragm there are in man certain organs, the head in particular, and the processes of breathing and circulation which work up into the head. Under the diaphragm are other organs. Now if we compare the earth surface with the human diaphragm we must say: The individuality represented by our farm, having the earth surface for its diaphragm has its head under the earth, while we and all the animals live in its belly. Above the surface of the earth, is really what may be regarded as the bowels of what I will now call the “agricultural-individuality.” On a farm, we are walking about inside the belly of the farm, and the plants grow upwards within this belly. Thus, we are dealing with an individuality which is standing on its head, and which is only rightly looked at if so understood, especially as regards its relation to Man. In relation to animals, the situation, as we shall see later on, is slightly different.

Now why do I say that the “agricultural-individuality” stands on its head?

I do so because the air, vapours and warmth, which are in the immediate neighbourhood of the soil and from which both man and the plants derive air, moisture and warmth—all this corresponds to the abdominal organs in the human body. On the other hand, everything that takes place within the earth, under the soil, affects the general growth of plants in the same way as our head affects our organism—especially in childhood, but also throughout the whole of our life. Thus, there is a constant and very living interplay of supra-terrestrial and sub-terrestrial activities.—The forces at work above the earth are immediately dependent upon what we will regard for the time being as localised on the planets. Moon, Mercury and Venus. These planets in strengthening and modifying the effects of the Sun exercise their influence on all that is above the earth surface, while the more distant planets lying outside the earth's path round the Sun strengthen and modify the effects of the solar influences which penetrate upwards through the earth. Thus, the growth of plants is affected by the distant heavens in so far as it takes place underground, and by the nearer heavens in so far as it takes place above ground; and the influences upon vegetable growth coming from the expanses of the Cosmos do not shine directly down upon the earth, but are first absorbed by the earth which then causes them to radiate upwards. What come from beneath as good or bad vegetable growth are really the cosmic influences which are reflected from below; whereas in the air and water above the earth the Cosmos exercises its power directly. The direct cosmic in-streaming is stored up beneath the earth's surface, and from there it works back. The inherent qualities of the soil affecting the growth of plants are dependent upon these stored up influences. (Later we shall consider the case of the animals). The soil still retains in it the effects of influences dependent upon the most remote parts of the Cosmos, which need to be considered in connection with the Earth. These effects are found in what we know generally as sand and rock; the substances which do not absorb water, which are ordinarily supposed to contain no nutritive elements whatsoever and which nevertheless play a very important part in the promotion of growth. These minerals are entirely dependent upon the activities of forces coming from the remotest parts of the Cosmos, and, improbable as it may appear, it is primarily through the medium of siliceous sand that it comes about that soil contains and radiates upwards what may be called its elements of life-ether and chemical activity (chemical ether). The inner life of the soil and the formation of its particular chemical properties depend entirely upon the constitution of its sandy parts, and what the plant roots experience within the soil is determined by the amount of Cosmic life and Cosmic Chemistry which the Earth has absorbed through the mediation of its stony substance (which of course, may lie at some depth below the earth surface). Anyone, therefore, who has to concern himself with the growth of plants should be quite clear as to the geological structure of the ground from which the plants are to grow, and further should bear in mind in all cases that those plants whose roots are for us of primary importance cannot do without silicon in the soil, even though thi3 may lie well below. We should be thankful that silicon makes up 47% to 48% of the Earth, either in the form of silicon (silicic acid) or in other' compounds. Such supplies as we need are therefore always present.

Now the effects which have been brought about in the root through silicon must be borne upwards through the plant. It must stream upwards and there must be a constant interaction between the cosmic forces that have entered into the plant through silicon and those that are active above—forgive me—m the “belly” and that supply the “head” below with what it requires. True the “head” must be provided for out of the Cosmos, but this process must interact with that which takes place above ground in the “belly.” The forces coming in from the Cosmos and being caught up underground must be able to flow upwards again, and the substance which brings this about is clay. Clay is the mediator through which the cosmic activity in the soil is enabled to work from below upwards. In actual practice this will give us the key to the handling of both clay soil and sandy soil according to the particular which we may wish to cultivate. But we must first know what is actually happening. How clay is to be described and how treated in order to make it fertile are important but secondary considerations. The first and foremost thing to know about clay is that it promotes the cosmic upward flow.

However, this cosmic upward flow is not enough by itself. There must also be present the opposite, which I would call the earthly or terrestrial element streaming downwards. All that undergoes a kind of external digestion in the “belly” (the processes above the surface throughout Summer and Winter are indeed a kind of digestion in relation in the growth of plants I) has to be drawn down into the earth. All forces produced by the action of water and air above the Earth and also the substances in delicate homeopathic distribution called from there are drawn down into the earth by lime presented in it in greater or smaller proportions. The lime content of the soil and the distribution of lime in homeopathic dilution above the surface—these are the factors which have the task of leading the terrestrial (“belly” Ed.) forces down into the soil.

These things will take on a very different aspect in future when we shall have a real science concerning them, and not only the scientific guesswork of to-day: it will be possible then to give exact information. We shall then know that there is a great, an immense difference between the warmth that exists above the surface of the Earth and which stands within the sphere of the influence of the Sun, Venus. Mercury and Moon, and the. warmth which makes itself felt within the earth and which stands under the influence of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These two kinds of warmth which we may call the “blossom and leaf warmth” and the “root-warmth” respectively, are completely different from one another—so much so, indeed, that we can describe the warmth above the Earth as a “dead” warmth, the warmth below the Earth's surface a “living” warmth. The warmth below the surface, especially during Winter, contains an inner vital principle. If we human beings had to experience in ourselves this living warmth which works within the soil, we should all become immensely stupid, because in order that we may be intelligent beings, dead warmth has to be supplied to our bodies. But at the moment when the limestone and other substances enable warmth to be drawn into the soil and to change from outer into inner warmth, it passes over into a condition of gentle aliveness. It is recognised to-day that there is a difference between the air which is above the Earth and that which is below the surface, but the difference between warmth above the Earth and that below the surface has been overlooked. It is generally known that the air under the Earth contains more carbonic acid, while that above the Earth contains more oxygen; but the reason for this is not known. It is that the air, as it is drawn into the earth, is penetrated by a gentle aliveness. This is true both of warmth and of air. They both receive a tiny spark of life as they pass into the earth. It is different in the case of water and of the solid earth element itself. Both of these have less life inside the Earth than they have when above its surface. They become “more dead,” they lose something of their life they had outside. But it is precisely this circumstance which exposes them to the influences of the most distant cosmic forces. The mineral substances have to free themselves from the forces which are working immediately above the surface of the Earth if they wish to be accessible to these far away cosmic forces. In our epoch, this emancipation from the processes in the immediate neighbourhood takes place in the period of the time between the 15th January and 15th February, i.e. in Winter. The time will come when these indications will be acknowledged as exact data. It is at this period of the Winter that within the Earth the formative forces of crystallisation reach their full development in the mineral substances. In these days of mid-winter, it is a peculiar feature of the interior or the Earth that it becomes less dependent upon its mineral masses and falls under the influence of the crystallising forces of the cosmic expanses.

Now consider what happens. Towards the end of January, the mineral substances of the Earth have a greater “longing” than at any other time to reach crystal purity in the economy of Nature; and the deeper one goes, the greater one finds this “longing” to be. The plants, absorbed in their own life in the Earth, are less open at this time than at any other to the influence of the mineral substances. But for a time before and for a time after this period, (but especially before when the minerals are preparing to perfect their crystal shape and purity) they are of utmost importance to the growth of plants. It is then that they throw out forces which are of extreme importance to plant growth. Thus, some time in November and December there .is a point of time when the mineral forces at work under the Earth are particularly propitious to the growth of plants. The question therefore arises: How can this best be utilised for the growth of plants? Someday it will become evident that by utilising this knowledge we are able to guide the growth of plants. I will say this now: That m the case of a soil which does not of itself promote the required upward movement of forces which ought to work upwards in the Winter period, it is well to add clay in a proper proportion. (I shall indicate this proportion later on). In this way, we enable the soil to carry those forces, upwards to make it effective in the realm of plant growth above the Earth; before the forces of the minerals have reached their maximum effects for themselves, which will not be until January or February period. (These forces show themselves outwardly—for those who can read their story—in snow crystals.) It may be noted that the power of these forces becomes stronger and stronger the deeper we go into the interior of the Earth.

In this way, what seems to most people recondite can give us insight of the greatest positive value and practical help, where we should otherwise be working at random. Indeed, we must realise clearly that the cultivated ground together with what lies under the surface of the Earth forms an individuality living also within the element of time, (i.e. living through the four seasons,) and that the life of the Earth still is particularly strong during Winter, whereas in Summer it undergoes a kind of death.

Now with regard to the cultivation of the soil there is a point of great importance which must be thoroughly understood. It is a point I have often dealt with among Anthroposophists. It is that we know the conditions under which the forces of the cosmic spaces can work upon the earthly realm. Let us begin with seed formation. The seed which gives rise to the embryo of the plant is generally regarded as a molecular structure of exceptional complexity, and science lays great stress upon this interpretation. The molecules, it is said, have a certain structure, in simple molecules it is simple, in complicated molecules it becomes more and more complex, until we come to the extreme complexity of the albuminous or protein molecule. People stand in wonder and astonishment at the enormous complexity of the structure supposed to exist in the seed.

They do so because they reason as follows. The albumen (or protein) molecule, they say, must be of enormous complexity, for the organism in succeeding plants arises from it. This organism is enormously complex, and since its structure was determined by the embryonic conditions of the seed, the latter's microscopic or ultra-microscopic content must also have a structure of enormous complexity. Well, it is complex indeed in the beginning. As the earthly albumen is formed, its molecular structure is driven to the utmost complexity; but this alone would never give rise to a new organism. For the organism arising from the seed does not proceed by a mere continuation in the offspring of what was present in the parent plant or animal. What happens is that when the embryonic structure has reached its highest stage of complexity in the earth domain it falls to pieces and becomes a “little chaos,” it breaks up and dissolves, one might say, into “world-dust.” And when this little chaos of world-dust is there, the whole surrounding Cosmos begins to work upon it. to stamp it with its own image and to build up in it a structure conditioned by the forces of the Universe working in upon it from every side (see Drawing No. 3). Thus, the seed becomes an image of the Cosmos. Every time this happens, and seed formation is carried through to the point or chaos, the new organism is^: built up from the seed-chaos by the activity of the cosmos. The parent organism has only the tendency to bring the seed into such cosmic position that through its affinity with this cosmic position the cosmic forces will act in the proper directions so that, e.g., a dandelion will give rise to another dandelion and not a berberis.

But the new thing that is built up is always the image of some cosmic constellation. It is built up out of the cosmos. And if in the Earth we would make effective the forces of the cosmos, we must drive the earthly elements into the state of greatest possible chaos. This has to be the case whenever we want the cosmos to act upon our Earth. In the case of plant-growth this is in a certain sense provided for by Nature herself. But just because every new organism is built up by the Cosmos it is necessary that the cosmic principles must be allowed freedom to work in the organisms until the seed-formation is completed.

If, for example, we plant the seed of a given plant in the earth, the seed contains the impress of the whole Cosmos from a particular cosmic direction, which means that it came under the influence of a particular constellation and received its particular form. At the moment when the seed is placed in the soil it is strongly worked upon by the terrestrial (“belly” Ed.) forces, and it is filled with the longing to deny the cosmic forces, in order that it may spread and grow in all directions. For the forces above the surface of the Earth do not want the plant to retain this cosmic form. The seed had to be driven to the point of chaos; but now that the plant is sprouting it is necessary to oppose the terrestrial to the cosmic forces which live as the form of the plant inside the seed. For the cosmic forces must be opposed and balanced, as it were, by the terrestrial forces. We must help the plant to become more akin to the Earth in its growth. This can only be done by introducing into the plant some form of living earthly matter which has not yet reached the state of chaos and seed formation, life which has been held up in a plant before the seeds have been formed. For this purpose, a rich humus formation comes to man's assistance m those districts that are fortunate enough to possess it. Man can hardly find any artificial substitute for the fertility given to the soil by Nature through humus. What causes the formation of humus? It arises from the absorption of remnants of living plants into the whole process of Nature. These remnants have not yet reached the state of chaos, and respect the cosmic forces, as it were. If humus is used for the growth of plants the terrestrial forces are held fast within them. The cosmic forces then work only in the upward stream that terminates in seed-formation. While the terrestrial forces work in the development of flowers, leaf and so on, the cosmos only radiates its influence into all this.

Let us suppose that we have before us a plant growing up out of its own root. At the top end of the stem comes the grain of seed, while the leaves and blossoms spread out sideways. Now, in the leaf and the blossom the terrestrial element is working in giving shape and filling it with matter; the reason why a leaf grows or a grain swells, and takes up the substance inside it is to “be found in the terrestrial forces which we lead to the plant and which have not yet reached the point of chaos. The seed, however, whose forces work upwards through the stem—vertically—not rotating around it (as in the formation of leaves Ed.) radiates the cosmic forces into leaves and blossoms. One can actually see this. We have only to look at the green leaves of a plant. In their shape, in the substances filling them and in their green colour, the leaves bear the terrestrial element. But they would not be green if they had not within them the cosmic force of the Sun. And now look at the coloured blossoms. In these the cosmic force of the Sun is not working alone but is supported by the distant planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. If we regard the growth and development of plants from this point of view, we shall see the redness of the rose as the force of Mars, the yellow of the sunflower- (so-called only because of its shape) as the force of Jupiter. It should be called the Jupiter flower, for it is the force of Jupiter that reinforces the solar force and brings forth the white and yellow colours in the flowers. The blue of the chickweed or chicory flower is the effect of Saturn reinforcing the effect of the Sun. Thus, we can see Mars in the red-coloured flower. Jupiter in the yellow, Saturn in the blue, while in the green colour of the leaf we see the Sun itself. But the same powers which appear as colour in the flower are also at work especially strongly in the root. Here once more the forces living in the distant planets are active within the soil. If we pull a plant out of the ground we may see that in the roots there is cosmic force, in the blossom mostly the terrestrial element. and only in the finest shading by the colour the cosmic element can be seen. The terrestrial forces on the other hand if living actively in the root cause the root to push out into form. For the form of the plant is determined by factors arising in the realm of earth. It is the terrestrial forces that causes the form to spread. When the root develops and divides, it is due to the terrestrial forces working downwards just as the cosmic forces (in the case of the colour) work upwards. Single roots are therefore cosmic roots, whereas forked roots are due to the terrestrial forces working down into the soil, just as in colour the cosmic forces work upwards into the flowers. And the cosmic force of the Sun stands between the two. The Sun force works principally in the green leaves, in the interaction between blossom and root, and in all that is between the two. Thus, the Sun element really belongs to what we have called the diaphragm provided by the surface of the earth: whereas the cosmic element belongs to the interior of the earth and works its way up into the upper part of the plant. The terrestrial element above the earth works downwards and is drawn into the plant with the help of the limestone. Plants which draw down the terrestrial element into their roots through the lime are those whose roots divide in all directions such as all herbs used for fodder, (but not turnips) and such as the sainfoin. Thus, it should be possible, looking at the form of a plant and the colour of the flowers, to tell how much cosmic forces and how much terrestrial forces are at work in it. Now let us assume that we find some means of holding back the cosmic forces within the plant. These forces will then be prevented from manifesting it by pushing up into flowers but will live out their life in the region of the stem of the plant. Now wherein do these cosmic forces reside in the plant? They reside in the silicon. Take the Equisetum. It has this very property of attracting silicon and permeating itself with it. It is 90% silicon. Thus, in this plant the cosmic element is present to a tremendous extent. It does not manifest itself in flowers, but in the growth of the lower part of the plant.

Now, let us take the opposite case. Let us suppose that we want to hold back these forces which work upwards from the root through the stem into the leaves and store them up in the region of the root. This possibility is no longer fully open to. us in the present epoch of our earth, since the genera and species of plants have been so firmly established. Formerly, in ancient epochs when men could easily transform one plant into another, this possibility had to come greatly into consideration. Today we consider it only from the point of view of finding out the condition favourable to a given plant. How can we then set about preventing these forces from pushing upwards into blossom and fruit? How can we in addition hold back the development of stem and leaf within the formation of the root? We must place such a plant on sandy soil. For silicon or flint holds back the cosmic forces and even gathers them. Now the potato plant is one in which the growth of leaf and stem is held back. The potato is a root-stock. The forces that form leaf and stem are held fast in the potato itself. The potato is not a root but a stem which has been held back. Potatoes must therefore be planted on sandy soil; this is the only way of holding back the cosmic forces in them.

The A B C of everything concerning the growth of the plant consists, therefore, m knowing what in any particular plant is of cosmic origin, and what is due to terrestrial forces. How can we make a soil more inclined to condense, as it were, the cosmic forces to retain them in root and leaf? How can we thin them out so that they can be sucked upwards into the blossoms and colour them and even into the fruit, and permeate them with a delicate taste? For the delicate taste in an apricot or plum is, like the colour of a flower, both being due to the cosmic forces which have worked their way upward through the plant. In the apple, you are literally eating Jupiter, in the plum you are eating Saturn. If modern man were faced with the necessity of producing the innumerable species and varieties of fruit-bearing plants from the much smaller number of original plants existing in primordial times, he would not get very far. And we may be thankful that the great majority of our existing fruit trees were brought into existence when mankind still possessed an ancient instinctive wisdom of how to produce new varieties out of the primitive species which then existed. Nowadays these things are done “by trial and error. People do not enter into the process with knowledge. And yet a rational method is the fundamental condition for any possible advance in Agriculture. What our friend Stegemann said in this connection was particularly apposite. He drew attention to the fact that agricultural products are deteriorating in quality. Now you may or may not agree with what I am going to say, but this deterioration is, I claim, connected as is the transformation of the human soul, with the declining of the Cosmic Kali-Yuga during the last few decades and the decades that are to come. For we are also in the presence of a complete inner transformation of Nature. All that we have inherited and been handed down in the way of natural talents, inherited knowledge, nature and of traditional medical remedies is beginning to lose its significance. We shall have to acquire new knowledge if we want to penetrate the natural connection of these things. Humanity has no other alternative before it today than either to learn again about the whole web of natural and cosmic connections, or to let both Nature and humanity degenerate and die out. As in the past, it is imperative that our knowledge should penetrate into the actual structure of Nature.

For example, man knows more or less what happens to air inside the Earth_? but he hardly knows anything of what happens to light inside the Earth. He does not know that silicon, the cosmic mineral» takes up light into the Earth and there makes it active, whereas humus, the substance closely allied to terrestrial life does not take up light and make it active in the earth but produces a lightless activity there. But these are things which will have to become understood and known.

Now, to go further: In any given region of the Earth there is not only a particular vegetation but also certain animals live there. For reasons which will appear later on, we need not consider human beings for the moment. It is one peculiar fact, and I should be glad to see this put to experimental test as I am quite sure that such a test would confirm it. This fact is that the right quantity of cows, horses and other live-stock on a farm will supply just the necessary amount of manure for the farm to restore to it what has been discharged into “chaos.” Moreover, the right proportion of horses, cows and pigs will yield the right proportions in the mixture of manures. This is because the animals eat the right proportion of the plant substances yielded by the soil, and because in the course of their organic processes they produce as much manure as is needed to be given back to the soil. And. though it cannot be strictly carried out. I would say that manure of any kind introduced from outside can only be regarded as a curative substance for a farm that has become diseased. A farm is only healthy if it can supply itself from the manure yielded by its own animals. This of course entails the development of a real knowledge of how many animals of a given sort are necessary for a given farm. But this will be found out as soon as some knowledge returns to us of the inner forces in Nature. To what I said about the “belly” being above the Earth and the “head” being under the Earth, belongs an understanding of the animal organism. For the animal organism is connected with the whole economy of Nature. With respect to form and colour structure and consistency of its substance it is under the influence of the planets. Working backwards from the snout the influences are as follows. Saturn, Jupiter and Mars affect the region extending from the snout to the heart, the heart is worked upon by the Sun, while the region extending from behind the heart to the tail comes under the influences of Venus, Mercury and Moon. (See Drawing No. 5).

Those who are interested in these things should try to examine the forms of animals from this point of view. For a development of knowledge along these lines would be of enormous importance. Go to a museum, for example, and examine the skeleton of any mammal. In doing so, bear in mind the principle that the structure and build of the head is primarily the result of the direct radiation of the Sun streaming into the mouth. Then you will 3ee that the structure of the head and of the adjoining parts depends upon the way in which the animal exposes itself to the Sun. A lion exposes itself quite differently from a horse: the reason for these differences will be examined later on. Thus, the front part of an animal and the structure of its head are directly connected with the Sun's radiation. Now the light of the Sun also reaches the Earth indirectly, by being reflected from the Moon. This too has to be taken into account. The sunlight that is reflected from the Moon is quite ineffectual when it falls on the head of an animal. (These things apply especially to embryonic life). The light* reflected from the Moon produces its greatest effect when falling upon the hind parts of the animal. Look at the formation of the skeleton of an animal's hind parts and the peculiar polarity in which it stands to the formation of the head. You should develop a feeling for this contrast in form between the animal's hind quarters and its head, and especially for the insertion of the hind limbs and the rear and the intestinal tract. This contrast between the front and the hindmost parts of the animal is the contrast between Sun and Moon. If you go further you will find that the influence of. the Sun stops just short of the heart; that Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are acting in the formation of the blood and the head;' and that, from the heart backwards the activity of the Moon is reinforced by that of Mercury and Venus. Thus, if we imagine ourselves to have picked up the animal, turned it round and set it upside down with its head in the earth we shall have the position invisibly taken by the “Agricultural-individuality.” The consideration of this formation of the animal enables us to see a relation between the manure produced by the animal and the needs of the earth in which the plants grow which serve as food for the animal. For you will remember that the cosmic forces which act in a plant are guided upwards through it from inside the earth. If, therefore, a plant is particularly rich in these cosmic forces, and an animal eats it, then the manure which this animal excretes will be particularly well-suited to the soil on which the plant grows. Thus, if we learn to grasp the forms of things we shall see in what sense an agricultural unit, or farm, is a “self-contained individuality” (or as we have called it an “agricultural-individuality”) only we have to include within it the necessary live-stock.