The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A few months ago, the British Colonial Secretary remarked that the world's centre of gravity has shifted from the Baltic and Atlantic to the Pacific. His observation is certainly indicative of the transformation now taking place in the social structure of the whole world. Only now, in fact, is the world gradually beginning, in circumstances that have arisen in the course of centuries and have changed so significantly as a result of the cruellest of wars, to realize the consequences of something that has long been brewing—the fact that not only economic and social relationships, but the whole of human relationships throughout the world are tending to transform themselves into a totality, a single entity.

If this is true, however, then the change in external economic organization (directly determined by the conversion of world trade into a world economy from the last third of the nineteenth century onwards) must also be followed by a profound spiritual transformation throughout the world, of which perhaps only the beginnings can be discerned today.

Yet we must also remember that, however social structures may change throughout the world, there live within them human beings who must reach an understanding as men if they wish to establish a relationship with one another. Understanding between men, however, involves trust. And trust involves a kind of insight into the souls of others. In Western civilization to date it has only been possible, generally speaking, to extend our horizons slightly, to include the Continent of Europe and its immediate colonial dependencies. A world-wide view has yet to be found.

Starting from one or two features of the historical background, which yet are directly reflected in man's life today, I shall try this evening to indicate what is actually happening in this direction. To do so, I shall first have to say something about understanding and attempts at understanding within Western civilization itself.

If you listen to the way educated Englishmen speak about Europe, about Central Europe and in particular about Germany, which has set the tone in certain respects for so long in Central Europe, what they say—and write in their books—is usually something like this: With us, everything rests on a democratic basis. The individual very largely determines what happens in spiritual and also in economic life. The greater part of public affairs is left to individual initiative. But when we look across at Central Europe—I do not want to claim that what they say is absolutely correct, only to illustrate what is in fact a widely-held view—a certain autocracy becomes apparent, a system of administration by officials—very capable, of course—who determine, from the centre of national life, the nature of individual human relationships. There is—or was before the war, at least—always this pointed reference to a centralized and more or less autocratic system. If we were then to look further East, we should have to say, following the same line of thought: further East, we find not just autocracy, but a kind of patriarchal autocracy. This is pervaded, not only by the ordinances of administrators, but also by a religious impulse: men therefore feel that what they do on earth is actually ordained by spiritual, extra-terrestrial powers and entities, the impulses from which are absorbed into their feelings.

Behind this English attitude there certainly lies something of great importance, which affects all the social structures of the present day. We can say: the further West we go, the more man with his whole thinking and feeling is bound up in the affairs he has to manage. This comes out most clearly when we look at economic affairs. In the West, what a man wishes to accomplish in economic life he accomplishes by attention to practical detail. He has an immediate personal relationship with the externals of life. In Central Europe, as the psychologically perceptive observer cannot help noticing, things are rather different. There is a tendency towards what the Englishman, from his standpoint, calls “academic administration by the state:” a tendency for certain ideas to prevail which are regarded as correct. These are expected to shape laws and inform administrative principles, and are set forth from the beginning in an administrative, a political system. The individual who comes to the affairs of actual life, even economic affairs, may look to economic practice first of all; but he is always looking over his shoulder at something of a juridical-political character that belongs to one of these systems. And he regards his personal activities as a part of such a system. The Englishman has no inclination to think up a system of this kind; his eye is only on the concrete details of life, not on the overall system that imposes itself upon them.

At this point, our attention is drawn to a historical phenomenon that has become particularly important in very recent times. For millions upon millions of people, the name of Karl Marx is of extraordinary significance. The rigidly dogmatic and formula-ridden Marxism that occupied the souls of many millions of men like a kind of religion, fifty years or so ago, has been modified in many ways. Yet for the broad masses of the European proletariat, the name Marx still denotes a prophet of social reorganization. On this occasion, I am not concerned to demonstrate the errors of Marxism. I only want to point to a certain aspect of Marx as a historical phenomenon.

Marx was educated in Central Europe, in Germany, where he absorbed a disposition towards the kind of systematization of ideas that I have just been describing. Then, however, he went to the West, to France and in particular to England, in order to study concrete details of the social and economic development of recent times. What he studied were concrete details—for that is all that exists in the British working-class. What he constructed from them is a system of social organization such as only a Central European temperament can create. And this system took root, not primarily in the West, but in Central Europe. And we may say: the concrete details that Marx observed in the West he shaped into a grand systematic edifice of ideas, which his disciples have made increasingly dogmatic and increasingly theoretical. It came to be regarded as the ideal organization of human society as a whole from the economic standpoint. And when its exponents had the opportunity of realizing it in Eastern Europe, it became, in a sense, the ideal economic and political organization—though in fact it has not been realized to any great extent, and even this little is gradually leading to absurdity. The essential point, however, is that we can see quite clearly, just with a phenomenon like this, how fundamentally the mode of thought even in Central Europe differs from that in Western Europe. From this, however, we must suppose that the variations throughout the world are very much greater still, and that only an impartial attitude, quite free of preconceptions, is capable of gaining a conspectus of these variations.

What strikes us as diversity within the small sphere of Western civilization must be seen today against a world background. This is because our present-day structures, including the social ones, are affected by world conditions as these have developed historically in East and West, just as they are affected by philosophical impulses, in the way I have described here in the last few days. A similar approach will be in place when we attempt to depict present-day social structures.

In so many of these, a great deal survives in a disguised form, so that its origin is only dimly visible. What originated long ago in the East exists side by side with what is specifically Central European and with what is just beginning to appear in the West as a quite new configuration. This is true of the social structures as it was of the philosophical situation throughout the world.

When we look across at the East—which, at some time in the future. Western structures will have to be extended to include—we can see in the modes of thought and social attitudes of people today definite survivals of ancient institutions and ancient impulses from which these arose. Decadent as it has become in the East, everything that can still be observed today points back to times when the Orient was ruled by a variety of priest-theocracies. In a way possible and appropriate to the culture of the time, their leaders embodied in the social structures things that they felt they had to ascertain from the spiritual worlds by means of the old instinctive spiritual vision, as I have described in the last few days. On the basis of historical documents, people today describe the priestly hierarchies as ruling by teaching the populace that all natural phenomena were inhabited by divine and spiritual entities, and that by certain magical operations one could gain the favour of these gods, or their love. This is true of a later epoch of the Oriental priest-theocracies, but it is precisely a later epoch, when the original qualities of the Orient were already in decline.

It is true that, in ancient Oriental civilization, certain select individuals sought a kind of connection with the spiritual world which was based on things that have no charms at all for us today. It was based on certain quite material activities of the human body: potions that were brewed and substances that were eaten. They regarded as a secret the fact that, by the consumption of these potions and substances, man's normal sensory activity is suspended, and he is taken back to times when there was as yet no sense of purely external natural law and when spiritual life, too, was not yet so abstract as it later became—times when the moral and spiritual element was still united with the physical and natural. These priest-scholars sought to return to primeval ages in the development of the earth itself by associating their metabolism with certain material essences of the outside world.

What they were actually asserting we again become capable of understanding when, by the quite different modern path into super-sensible worlds, we come to know what I expounded in my fifth lecture: that through spiritual insight into his own nature man experiences within himself a kind of world-memory. He thus goes back, in his spiritual vision of course, to times when for men natural laws were not as they are today—expressing themselves more or less by chance—and spiritual laws were not so abstract as they are today. In consequence, spiritual vision arrives, not at the purely mechanistic Kant-Laplace nebula, but at an origin of the earth that is to be interpreted physically and spiritually. As I have demonstrated in the last few days, the world-memory men gain in this way is achieved entirely without manipulating the physical, in a spiritual way by spiritual exercises. This was not so in those early Oriental times, when men established contact with the spiritual world through stimulating their unconscious instincts by associating their metabolism with essences of one type or another. They knew what each plant in nature could develop from their instinctive life by a kind of dream-like spiritualization; they knew that, if this or that plant was eaten, the effect upon their organism was such that they could transport themselves to a particular area of spiritual activity. This was in fact the way in which the high priests of the Oriental theocracies, who also had complete power over social and political structures, originally established contact with the spiritual world. They believed they had thereby obtained impulses that proved to be the actual guiding impulses for social life.

We may say: The subsequent belief, or rather superstition, that to this or that natural object this or that “spirit” was linked, is already a product of cultural decadence. The original implication was that, if we allow these natural objects to affect us in a certain way, we shall be led to a particular kind of spiritual being, from whom we can receive various impulses, including social ones. Oracles, star-gazing, everything astrological was basically a product of the decline of these older views, towards which, however, objective science today is already being led, if dimly as yet. Objective science has given up seeing crude polytheism deep down in all primitive peoples, and can now perceive a monotheism of primitive man. In the same way, it will arrive at the outlook that has been evolved by consideration of the historical background and by spiritual investigations such as I have described.

On the one hand, therefore, there existed a complete awareness of how impulses from extra-terrestrial nature, from spiritual entities, manifest themselves in human nature itself—these impulses had, after all, been obtained by stimulating the instincts, by a spiritualization of the instincts. Yet at the same time people could not help attaching some importance to what displayed itself in these instincts, which they ascribed to the particular quality of the blood, let us say in a family with a particular constitution. In the manifestations of this instinctive life also, they detected social impulses sent into the world from extra-terrestrial spheres. When decadence later set in, it was natural, for the men who were striving for power, to take over, quite arbitrarily, the general view that looked to this manifestation of the instinctive life, which they sought in blood and in what could be discovered through its spiritualization. In this way, however, something unspiritual and (based on blood) something patriarchal entered Eastern life as a whole. We can only discuss this patriarchal element, of course, by referring to what is known; but its point of departure lies in the relations that the old priest-rulers of the Orient sought with the spiritual world. For this reason, all the social configurations of the Orient are steeped in this religious element, this awareness that divine and spiritual powers must prevail in everything on earth, and that ultimately no man should give orders unless he has first allowed the power of the divine word to flow into the spirit, the soul that is to give them. Impulses initially felt as religious, as impulses of grace from extra-terrestrial powers, thus assumed for social life the character of commandments. Even when, in certain Eastern civilizations, we appear to be confronted with laws in the later sense of the word, we soon find, when we analyse the spirit of legislation such as that of Hammurabi, for example, that it is based on impulses of the commandment type, which derive from what was regarded as the commerce of the elect with the spiritual world.

In an increasingly attenuated form, this has survived in all the social configurations that rest on ecclesiastical and religious foundations. And however much these things are disguised in social structures today, we can see, even in those left-wing associations that rest on a religious basis, that the ancient Oriental impulses I have described still operate in an attenuated form. There is much in present-day social structures that we cannot understand at all if we are not in a position to ask: In what sense do human souls cling to such structures? They cling to them because, in these souls' subconscious depths, there still remain legacies of the religious inclinations of the Orient. This is true even where the religious views themselves have taken on quite different forms, forms that have detached themselves from economic life, as is the case with the religions of the West. That the effect of Oriental religions is felt even in detailed features of economic life could be observed in Eastern Europe right down to the Great War.

To understand social configurations, we must discuss the spiritual impulses that inform them. For the description often given these days of social structures really only relates to their external appearance, as can be shown quite clearly by an example such as the following.

Today, it is clear, we can only look with horror at the social organization that is trying to establish itself in Eastern Europe. Yet in considering what is going on there today, we cannot help remembering what happened some eight hundred years ago, in China. Here, quite suddenly, men sought and very largely realized a political system that aimed at ordering all the affairs of man, even those of an economic nature, in every detail on behalf of the state. At this period in China, there were government authorities that fixed prices from week to week, authorities that laid down how the land was to be cultivated here, there and everywhere, authorities that provided country people with the seed for the year. At this period in China, an attempt was made to impose a high rate of tax on people who were particularly rich, so that gradually their fortunes passed to the general public. Remembering all this, we may say: the social configuration sought in Europe in our time by certain circles was largely realized eight hundred years ago, over a period of three decades, until the Socialist government concerned was overthrown and its supporters expelled from China. For thirty years, a system persisted whose features, if we described them without mentioning China, might very well be taken to refer to present-day Russia.

We can point to such things if our aim is to direct attention to the surface features of social structures. For here we can see that Socialism, as it is popularly understood, need not be solely a product of our own time, but could arise eight hundred years ago there in the Far East on quite different cultural foundations.

Yet if we look at the spirit of these two social structures, we observe a significant difference. In the Chinese Socialism there clearly survive features of the theocracy that had always ruled over China, and does so still; in modern Russian Socialism there is embodied an abstract thinking, culled from natural science, which has nothing whatever to do with man's consciousness of a connection with spiritual worlds. Things that appear the same in their outward form are not the same when we consider them spiritually.

Looking at human history from this standpoint, we shall find that the particular form of the theocratic state—or rather, theocratic social structures—lasted for a definite period. When the Asiatic theocracies were at their zenith, the tribes in Western and Central Europe were still in an entirely uncivilized state. In moving over to Europe, what was theocratic in form has gradually assumed a quite special shape.

If we are sufficiently unprejudiced, we can discover a transitional form in the Platonic Utopian state. There is certainly something here faintly reminiscent, I would say, of the Oriental priestly hierarchies. For this reason, no doubt, Plato wished to choose as leaders of his state those who had become—in the Greek sense, it is true—wise men, philosophers. Within Greek civilization, in fact, the philosopher took the place of the Oriental priest. Yet Plato's Utopia derives, after all, from the social outlook of his own time, in the sense that it reproduces what was currently felt about society; and in it we can recognize a form into which Oriental society had already developed. No longer was a relationship of man to super-sensible powers sought. The religious feelings appropriate to this relationship were more or less taken over from the Ancient East; what the Greeks themselves evolved, however, was something that had played no particular part in early Oriental society, and ultimately plays no particular part even in the social structures we meet in the Old Testament. What was now elaborated independently was the relationship of man to man.

We encounter this relationship in its purest form when we look into the life of the soul in Greece. Here, man still felt a certain intimate association between the spiritual and the physical in his make-up. In conscious inner life, there was for the Greek as yet no separation of body and spirit, such as there is for us. We look within and apprehend the mind in a very diluted form, metaphorically speaking; so that, comprehending it by ordinary consciousness, we can have no conception how it activates the vigorous body or is influenced by it. For the Greeks it was different. And that is why Goethe longed to achieve their outlook in his own experience. The Greeks had no such concept of body and spirit as we have. For them, spiritual and physical were one. Not until Aristotle, a late Greek, does the distinction begin to creep in. Although Plato's views are often presented abstractly, the spirit in which he spoke is one that saw the body everywhere permeated by soul, even in its organic functions, and felt the soul to be so powerful that it could everywhere extend its antennae towards the physical organs. The attitude to the soul is more physical, to the body more spiritual. Such a view is linked at the same time, however, to a particular feeling that grows up between men. And from this view has arisen what is characteristic of the civilization of Central Europe.

If we look with a sensitive eye at the felt relationship between man and man among the Ancient Greeks, and recognize how it has evolved from man's old relationship to the divine, we can say: what was previously an attitude permeated by religion has transformed itself into the legal attitude, the political attitude. Out of this, out of a combination of the nature of Greek and Roman, there then arose something that could maintain itself in social configurations. The priest gradually becomes merely the successor of the Oriental national leaders, for, although he may have kept himself in the background, the priest in the Orient was always the real spiritual leader, even with Darius and Xerxes. There comes to the fore a mode of thinking that cultivates ideas based on the relationship between man and man. And this goes so far that even religious life is swallowed up by this legal current, as I would call it. A juridical element enters man's world-picture, and even the cosmology of the time; and this element then remains almost throughout the Middle Ages and can be detected when we study the political views of, say, Augustine or Aquinas. Religious impulses themselves, while remaining what they are, take on legal forms.

This entry of legal forms into man's religious, cosmological views is eloquently documented in the wonderful picture of the Last Judgment that faces us as we enter the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It is at its most monumental here in this picture in which Christ appears as judge over all the world. His status as judge magnificently symbolizes the transition from a purely religious and devotional element to that conception which permeates religious feeling with a legal element—one that is carried over into the theory of man's world government and guidance.

This legal element informs all the social structures of the Middle Ages and much that persists in those of today. When we remove the disguise, we observe the presence of this legal element, and see how it has transmitted to us religious impulses from ancient times. And in modern political systems, right down to their terminology and the workings of their laws, where these go back to the Middle Ages, we perceive how, in the middle period of human experience and in the civilization between East and West, this legal and logical element has made its appearance.

We may say: what was Oriental and theosophical changes into something legal and logical; the sophia of the Orient becomes the logos of the Occident; and from the logos there develops in turn the juridical structure, which then proceeds to reproduce itself.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the legal element also determined social configurations. You need only study the economic ordinances of the period: everywhere you will find that social structures are shaped by something which is permeated by ancient Oriental religiosity and is juridical.

Nowadays, we observe the religious element still active in the less formal human groupings or in those that arise from religious denominations, whereas in the major social structures that are the nations we observe the operation of legal thinking. We notice, however, that with the transition from medieval to modern history the religious element allows itself to be pushed more and more into the background, whilst the legal one becomes increasingly predominant.

At this stage, the legal element invades economic configurations. What I am now describing can be traced in all its detail in the history of Roman Law. We can see how concepts of property, customs of ownership, and everything economic in fact, has been decisively determined by a social mould of this nature.

Yet in the course of human development an independent economic element does assert itself increasingly in the West, the nearer we come to modern times. We can say: in earlier periods, economic activity is completely cradled in religious and legal forms. It is in the West that the economic element first emancipates itself in human thinking.

You need only examine the economic element as it presented itself to the Phoenicians, and compare it with the economic systems of modern times (though admittedly these are only at an early stage in their development). You will realize the difference: Phoenician economic life is the product of the impulses I have described; Western economic systems have gradually emancipated themselves from them.

Religion and law are thus joined by a third current which, at any rate at first, tends to endow economic conditions with a social configuration of their own. This trend derives from the West, which in turn has adopted, to a greater or a lesser extent, something of what originated in the East and in the region between. We can see, for example, how, in American civilization especially, economic conditions, unaffected by other cultural currents, evolve along their own lines, until trusts and syndicates emerge. We can see, too, how Western man is inclined to attempt to separate economic from religious life, though he is less successful in separating it from what he later absorbed from juridical thinking and feeling. Even so, we are clearly aware how economic configurations, in their social aspect, are gradually struggling free of the intellectual straightjacket that was imposed on them while they were still under the sway of the legal element. Increasingly, we find economic life pure and simple attaining its emancipation. There can then evolve categories that derive from economic life itself.

At this point, however, we become aware of something that must establish relationships between men and between peoples, yet also lead to conflicts between peoples, and indeed conflicts within nations. We perceive that, in the ancient Orient, the religious element included the legal and economic ones; that the legal element subsequently became more or less distinct, but still contains the economic one, whilst the religious element has become more independent; and that now, in the West, an independent economic life is seeking to develop. Perceiving this, we must also consider how the various cultural patterns of humanity stand in relation to these currents.

And here we may conclude that the theocratic and patriarchal element, with its roots in the East, can really only produce something consonant with an agrarian system, with a social organization based principally on the cultivation of land, on an arable economy. We thus observe a certain correlation between agrarian life and the theocratic element. Moreover, this has its effect on all the social structures of more modern times. In admitting that the theocratic element continues to inform social structures right down to our own times, we must also realize that, because other branches of human activity have come to the fore, they have come into conflict with it, to the extent that in agrarianism, in accordance with the nature of human agriculture, the theocratic element seeks to maintain its position. The correlation exists. A split occurs in it, however, when human activities of another kind seek to assert themselves.

Here we may point to something that can be regarded as a barometer for this aspect of world history. I recommend you some time to study the Austrian parliamentary proceedings of, say, the seventies of the last century. You can observe, sitting in this parliament, men who believe that the old order, with its roots in theocracy and jurisprudence, is intimately associated with agriculture. They are faintly aware of something that later became a great flood, the influx of Western produce—including it is true country produce—deriving from a mode of thought and a social order built on a quite different branch of the economy—on industrialism. Although this is only faintly audible in the various parliamentary speeches, yet we can perceive precisely here, where so much has come together and may be studied, something that illuminates world-wide perspectives.

To what is here developing in the West, the theocratic mode of thought is less applicable than it is to any other branch of the economy. What is developing is industrialism. Naturally, land cultivation is not included in it. But land cultivation itself is then caught up by social configurations that are distinctly reminiscent of the tutelage of industrial thinking.

Yet industrial thinking today, however much it has developed its technical structures, has still not assumed the social structures appropriate to it. On the one hand, we can see the correlation between the theocratic mode of thought, with its patriarchal essence, and the agrarian system. We can see, for example, that in Germany, right down to the present day, it has been impossible for agrarian thinking and industrial thinking to come to terms properly, for reasons I have indicated. We can see this correlation, therefore; but on the other hand we can also see how everything appertaining to commerce is, in the last analysis, correlated with politics and the law.

That is why, in the ancient Orient, commerce is a kind of appendage to the patriarchal administration of human affairs. And in the form that is socially significant for us today, commerce really develops alongside the legal element. For what is required between man and man in trade is something that develops particularly in the juridical sphere. In so far as it did develop in the Orient, the way was prepared by certain commandments, transposed into legal terms but definitely regarded as divine. Commerce, however, has achieved its social organization only within the political and legal current in human development. We can say, therefore, that it is the commercial aspect of economic life that has proved to be particularly suited to political systems based on law and legal thinking.

At the same time, it is true that—because in the whole man everything must be connected with everything else—the political and legal element has also linked up with the industrial sector of economic life. As we go further and further West, therefore, we find that, although men evolve their personal relationship to anything chiefly from industry and the things associated with it, yet they also take over features of commerce. For with social structures as they are today, any undertaking is viewed, in point of fact, in the light of its commercial function in the social order. The industrialist himself sees his own undertaking within a commercial framework, so that in this way too the second current, the legal one, maintains its influence on the economic life of the West.

In other present-day social structures, we can see even more clearly how this politico-legal element continues to exert an influence below the surface among the broad masses of the people. As concomitants of modern technical life, all kinds of social structures have emerged. We need only recall the trade unions. We correctly perceive the nature of these only when we realize that economic conditions have created them. Nevertheless, those who see these things in a vital manner know that, even if the unions emerge from economic conditions—associations of metalworkers, printing trades unions and so on—the way men behave within them, the way they vote, the way they look at things and discuss them, is the parliamentary, political and legal one, the administrative way. It is something that derives from the second current I have described. The ideas appropriate to the third current are still in their infancy, and it still has to take its social patterns from what is old.

At the present time, therefore, we can see three principal types of social configuration existing side by side, widely differentiated of course in one direction and another. They co-exist in such a way that, we may say, history is deployed in space. And in adapting ourselves to any individual social configuration—an economic association, a political association or a religious community—we do in fact, since each of them is in contact with the others, enter a community where elements that have arisen successively in history now co-exist. They have now become shuffled together in space, and call for our understanding today, for this is the time when mankind must regain, at a higher level, the nai'vet^ from which creativity originally sprang.

It was once proper that primitive economic and political life should be poured into the theocratic mould. At a later period, a duality developed, taking over from earlier times the religious element, and evolving the political and legal element, incorporating economic life. So, today, economic life cries out for independent organization, for vital human ideas that can operate once more in a formative manner, as the vital impulses! of the legal forms of Greece and Rome, and the Orient's religious impulses, once operated. Since these three currents in human development are now mutually diverging, however, we must be able to consider them independently. We must look at the spiritual side of social structures, initially the only effective one; must look at their legal side, which became the dominant one in the Middle Ages; and must look at their economic side, for which a spiritual aspect must also be sought.

This has been put forward simply as a reflection on the antecedents of present-day social structures. It is intended to indicate that, in order to understand these structures, we must enter with real understanding upon the contemplation of those world-wide perspectives to which I drew attention at the beginning of this lecture. To do so, however, we shall have need of vital thought. That this vital thought is needed can be seen on the one hand from the sociological tone of my observations here; but it also emerges from direct contemplation of contemporary life. Everywhere, people are longing to begin to permeate economic life with the vital thought-impulses appropriate to it.

In this respect, of course, educated men of the West are of peculiar interest. In an extraordinarily significant treatise written in England in the very year before the fearful event of the Great War, a notable Englishman pointed out how fundamentally the English way of thinking differs from the German one—in the sense that I indicated at the beginning of my observations today. But he points out something else too: what strikes him is that, within the German-speaking population of Central Europe, there has always existed thought. And he observes that thought is the element in the human soul that in the most intimate way points continually to the great enigmas. Through civilizations that cultivate thought, as the German does, we are confronted again and again with the deepest riddles of man and the cosmos, even if—and here comes the tail-piece characteristic of this man of Western Europe—even if, he says, we perceive the futility of supposing their solution.

Well, it was proper to speak of the “vanity” of a solution when one could only point to the thought that emerged by abstraction from the body of law and logic; for, although as thought it may rise to supreme heights, this still remains a kind of dead thought. Anyone, however, who becomes aware that in our time the souls of men can provide a birth-place for vital thought, will speak, not perhaps of a final solution, but of a path that can lead to our being able to solve, at least for that particular period, the social problems that face us at any time.

For it is probably true that, once thinking about social structures has appeared in human evolution, we cannot speak of being able to solve the social problem all at once, but must rather say that among the evolutionary impulses that must survive into the future are included reflections about social organization. We can say, therefore: It is true that we shall not be able to speak of solutions, but of a vital human thinking that in a conscious way will first perceive the goals and in a conscious way will then move towards the solution of the social riddles of existence.

This lecture is something like a continuation of that which I held about the origin of the human being. We come today back to times which are in the distant past, and we get to concepts which are very far to the present materialistic thinking. Hence, allow me that I tie on a few introductory words about the relation of my topic to the contemporary ideas.

It has absolutely to be clear to everybody who has penetrated and understood the scientific knowledge of the present that today the theosophical ideas about the origin of the earth can be taken as something very speculative, maybe even very fantastic. However, do not believe if one goes deeper into the matters that then a real contradiction appears between the scientific and the theosophical ideas. We have to get absolutely clear about the fact that the naturalist is only able to verify and to explain what takes place in the external sensory world and is to be grasped with the scientific reason. I am of the opinion completely that about such difficult questions, as this is one, also from the theosophical point of view only somebody should speak who is also familiar with the whole scientific education of our time, so that he has an idea of it, how much he violates the generally accepted ideas. However, I would like to put an example of mutual understanding on the top of my lecture for those who oppose these advanced views from the materialistic point of view.

It was at the end of the sixties, when for the last time an even if pessimistic; nevertheless, decidedly idealistic philosophy appeared which made a deeper impression on a bigger public. It was Eduard von Hartmann's (1842–1906) Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869). I only want to say what has resulted historically. Hartmann bore down on the ideological ideas which originated from Darwinism. When one noticed which great impression the Philosophy of the Unconscious caused, many opposing writings appeared. Among these one appeared anonymously with the title The Unconscious from the Standpoint of Physiology and the Theory of Evolution (1872). The most significant philosophers said that it was the best writing against Eduard von Hartmann and his philosophy. The writing was sensational. The naturalists realised that it was written by a naturalist and that Eduard von Hartmann was disproved thoroughly. The second edition of the same anonymous writing appeared soon afterwards, however, with the name of the author, namely with the name of Eduard von Hartmann! It was an ingenious mystification! Indeed, I am not a Hartmannian or follower of the Philosophy of the Unconscious, but this philosophy stands higher and contains more than one can otherwise bring forward from the pessimistic side. Hartmann showed that one only needs to scale down his point of view to understand the matters in question still much deeper than the opponents. Thus spiritual science or theosophy may also express itself in such a way like those who believe to be the best naturalists. I have said this to show that one may also disprove theosophy in similar way. However, theosophy may give this rebuttal better than any other.

We have to take into consideration that we deal with very difficult chapters and that it is exceptionally laborious to penetrate into these regions. However, it is even more difficult to find the appropriate means of expression within our language only shaped for the external sensuous world. One has to use everything possible to dress the fine, subtle concepts and the views which are taken from purely spiritual worlds into clear language. Nevertheless, I attempt to pictorially and clearly express what is familiar to me as experience in these higher fields. You find the relevant periods of the big world evolution also shown in the theosophical literature. But you find them shown more schematically than I will do it today. I do not make any objection to this schematic description which may also be useful and gives clear concepts of this evolution to the reason. One can learn this from the theosophical manuals. However, I would like to describe it somewhat clearer.

We have seen the human being facing us as another being in very distant times taking on the physical dress only bit by bit not having his origin from the physical but from the psychic. We have seen the psychic leading the way of the physical, the psychic developing the forces in itself by which it can gradually clothe itself in this physical dress. All that has been shown. At the same time, we have drawn our attention to the fact that we can trace back the human being, as well as he faces us today, only through a certain number of periods.

We are within the fifth age of our physical earth development. Another age preceded it that took place on a continent which forms the bottom of the Atlantic today. And another age preceded this Atlantean age called the Lemurian age. At that time, in the middle of the Lemurian age, we find that, actually, that connects with the human being, as well as he had developed till then which we call our immortal spirit. This higher element, this higher nature of the human being which outlasts any physical corporeality and any psychic development in other words the eternal in the human being this has established itself in those days. If we want to express ourselves figuratively, we may call it a spiritual spark in the human nature, so that the human being faces us till then as the connection of soul and body. Up to the middle of the Lemurian age, our ancestors were bodily-psychic beings.

If we want to conceive a clear idea how these human ancestors were in some way, actually, we have to remember that the spirit is inseparably connected with any really higher thinking. Without spirit the human being could not count, without spirit he could not speak, without spirit no higher spiritual activity, never mind still higher activities would be possible. So that we deal with a human being till then who waited to become mind-endowed who did not yet have the immortal part who had, however, a soul-life that was completely different from ours. Our soul-life is infiltrated with spirit. If we want to call the human being who was not yet mind-endowed a human being and we want to do this for the sake of the shortness of time , we must say that his soul-life was vague that it was a more dreamy, pictorial soul-life. One can understand the soul-life of the human being at that time only if one traces it back one period more. In the time of which I have spoken now the human being is able to receive external body impressions, to perceive the surroundings. This perception developed only slowly and gradually.

If we trace back the Lemurians still farther, we find that the human ancestors have sensation already, indeed, that the external objects make impressions on them but that they could not connect ideas with these external percepts. If you imagine a soul-life like that of the dream, then you have something similar. However, it is not completely the same. For the pictorial ideas which surged up and down in the soul at that time were much clearer, much more original and more elementary, much more saturated than the confused dream pictures of the present-day average person are. Above all, these pictures in the human soul were dependent in certain way on that which took place around the human being. At that time, the human being was not yet able to associate a colour with an external object, he could not yet see the things coloured. He could not see that an object is green or red; the colour idea did not yet combine with the object. Nevertheless, colours still surged in the human soul. These colours had some resemblance to that which the clairvoyant knows if he develops certain capacities in himself. The clairvoyant sees not only the external physical, but also the feelings and instincts in the form of an aura. The physical human being is only one part of the human being. The physical human being is embedded like in a cloud in which all sorts of formations surge up and down. Only someone can see them who has the gift of clairvoyance in our theosophical sense not in the sense of spiritism. I pass some remarks about the acquisition of such capacities next time when I speak about the great initiates of the world. Any real initiation can be connected only with the gift of clairvoyance. The capacities of the great initiates originated from the gift of clairvoyance.

Today you have to be an absolutely reasonable person, before you become a clairvoyant. You must be able to think logically and clearly. Somebody who would attain the gift of clairvoyance without having developed the gift of the reasonable, clear thinking would receive a bad gift. He would be led to a world of fancies rather than to a higher spiritual world. There he would miss any control and would face it like the chaotic dream world. Not before you get into the habit of logical, clear, reasonable thinking, so that you walk through the spiritual things as the reasonable human being walks through tables and chairs, so that it is no longer anything special, you can understand that the gift of clairvoyance guides one into the riddle of the world. All occult schools have as a precondition that the human being is a quite reasonable, maybe a somewhat sober human being, so that he is the opposite of a daydreamer. Hence, we say that clairvoyance, the cognition of the astral auric world, is connected with the development of our spiritual abilities.

The view of the human being, as I have described it, was similar in the pre-Lemurian time. But it was not pervaded with consciousness. Only a dim consciousness existed in the human being. Indeed, at that time on this level he already felt what was hot and cold; he had a sense of touch and could perceive certain differences of density. He also had the gift of hearing. The sense of hearing is one of the oldest senses which humanity developed. But he did not yet have the sense of seeing. This still was, so to speak, an internal one. The colours lived as pictures in the human soul. If he came, for example, to a region which was colder than that he came from then in his soul a colour picture of darker colour shadings appeared. If he made it reversely, if he came from a colder air layer to a warmer one, then there was a yellowish or a yellowish-reddish colour picture. Thus those human beings had colour pictures which did not combine, however, with the surface of the bodies, but lived as uncertain colour pictures in the soul. This combined then with the surroundings of the human being.

But at that time the human being had something else. He had a fine sensitivity for that what took place emotionally in his surroundings. If we are here in a room, you do not sit there only as physical bodies, but also as souls. In each of you feelings and sensations live. These are also something real like the physical body is something real. What today the human soul has as sentient ability can no longer penetrate these forces of the feelings and sensation because just due to the further development of humankind the human being became clearer in his consciousness because he has developed his reason, his everyday view. But he has temporarily lost what existed in his soul. He will regain this ability maintaining his present reasonability and his clear waking consciousness. Once the whole humankind attains a state which today only the practical mystic, the clairvoyant has. In order to attain this state the human being had to go through a merely physical view, through a merely bodily percipience. In one respect humankind gets to a higher level, and in another respect it descends to a lower level in certain way.

At that time, the human being came from a vague, dim percipience. But this was at the same time mental-clairvoyant percipience. If now in the nearness of the human being any likeable feeling, anything emotional lived which you allow the expression emitted sympathy, then the human being received those bright colour pictures in himself. Bad feelings let arise darker colour pictures tending to blue, brownish, reddish colours. This was the interrelation of the inner soul-life with the external mental reality at that time. But at that time this external mental reality could just be perceived.

Only bit by bit the senses developed as they are today. With it the reason, the object consciousness came into being. The original gift of clairvoyance withdrew. At the same time, we come to a time where another development goes hand in hand with this development, the development of the so-called uni-sexuality. The human being was not always in such a condition as he is today concerning his reproduction. The bigger force which the soul had over the physical caused that the human being could produce a being of the same kind without resorting to another physical human being because he combined both sexes in himself. Hence, the transition was at the same time that of the mutual perception and that from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. At that time, the human brain was not yet developed in the same way as it is today. The human being was not yet such a cerebral being as he is today; at that time he also did not have such a perception as he has today. This is the time of which we have already spoken which is simultaneously the time of the creation of the human brain.

I have indicated last time that we do not sign Darwinism completely. We sign it in this respect that it shows the relationship of the physical human being with all other physical living beings on earth. But I have also indicated that we do not regard the imperfect animal living beings as ancestors of the present human beings, not even of the psycho-physical human beings. We have to regard these animal beings rather as branches of a common ancestor which resemble neither the modern human being nor the imperfect living beings, the animals of today.

In the time of which I have spoken, the higher mammals did not yet exist. The higher mammals have, just as the human being, only more imperfectly, a brain and a perception similar to the human one. Beings which have developed such a perception did not yet exist in this time. There were on the earth only beings with pictorial ideas, with a pictorial kind of soul formation, and basically everything was united in one single being, like in a common nodal point, that is today the human being and the higher animal realm. The human being was, in so far as it is a psycho-physical being, in a certain respect on the level of animality. But no present animal and also not the present human being resembles the human being of that time. However, the human being has developed so far that a part, a branch of the previous type has further-developed up to the present-day human beings. Other members of the beings of that time remained behind because of certain circumstances which I will especially show another time. They went back in their development, became decadent. These decadent beings are the higher animals.

I want to make this point clear to you and use the following for it: you know that there are regions in which Catholicism has degenerated to a kind of fetish service where it appears like adoring lifeless objects or pictures of saints. Nobody is able to state that this point of view, in proportion to the more perfect to which humankind has developed, is the same one. This fetish Christianity is a decayed Christianity. Thus it is also from the theosophical point of view considering different “savage” tribes. The materialistic history of civilisation regards them as ancestors of the civilised people. We regard them as decayed, decadent descendants of once advanced peoples. The same applies to the higher animals if we go back in time even farther. Once they were more perfect, they decayed. We come to a formation of the human realm which is different which shows the human being still undifferentiated from the other higher animal species, indeed, at a time which lies millions of years behind us.

How has it come to pass that the human being stopped in those days on the course of his development? Concerning his soul development the human being is completely the result of that which takes place round him. Simply imagine the room in which we are with a temperature higher than hundred degrees, and imagine also everything changing there! If you expand this thought to all the other natural conditions, it shows you that the human being is in truth completely dependent on the constellation and configuration of the forces within which he lives. He becomes another being if he is in another interrelation.

One made scientific attempts recently: one made butterflies hatch at temperatures at which they do not live, otherwise. One found that they change their colours and colour shadings. At higher temperatures even bigger changes are to be observed. Today the natural sciences are already a kind of elementary theosophy. Concerning theosophy there is no contradiction between the natural sciences and theosophy!

Thus the developmental levels of humankind also depended on the quite different developmental levels on our earth. Already the physicist says to you namely as a hypothesis that the farther we go back in the earth development, we come to higher and higher temperatures. The theosophist or the practical mystic sees really back to these primeval times, and he sees these conditions in the Akasha Chronicle as truth, like the average person sees table and chairs as truth before him. We come to a condition in which all substances on our earth are in quite different relations to each other than today.

You know that the substances if they are warmed up change their state. Solid substances become liquid, liquid ones become vaporous et etcetera Now we come back to much higher temperatures than we know on earth today. There the whole material world of our earth was different. Only someone who is set on the materialistic view and on the immediate view of our earth can get to the view that this is impossible. Who emancipates himself from our reality today also realises that life was possible in these higher temperatures of the earth .The human being really lived in these higher temperatures, indeed, in another way. He lived in the state of the “fire mist.” The bodies were a vaporous, soft mass which cannot really be compared with anything we know today. Thus we come back to quite different circumstances. One can still follow up this if one wants to get to know the origin of the earth. This origin is intimately connected with the whole development of the human being. If we go back, we find the human being in company of much lower animals which belong to the lower classes of our present-day animal realm which had, however, other figures in those days, were different from their present-day descendants. Because the earth became more solid and denser, they took on other shapes and characteristics. We have, if we observe what takes place in us with the bare rational eye, no idea how it looked at that time. An animal world, nevertheless, lived round the human being. As the human being takes up food from the physical world today, he also took up it in those days in similar way.

We have now to realise that what I tell now is something quite fantastic and strange for those who are not used to such ideas. The time has come to pronounce it once again. We stand on the point of evolution where again an idealistic world view will replace the purely materialistic one. Going back to these times, the whole materiality of our earth becomes different. At that time, the mass of the earth I ask you to not be too much astonished about what I say was still in connection with other heavenly bodies than it is the case today. Already somebody who thinks the present physical ideas without clairvoyance to an end understands that what I say is not completely inconsistent.

You need only to go back according to the Kant-Laplace theory to the time when the single planets do not yet circle the sun, have not yet developed from the primal nebula, and then you have a valiant, but correct hypothesis. We can also come back from the standpoint of the physicist to a time when the earthly materiality still was in contact with the materiality of the whole solar system. At that time, the human being was much more related with everything than he is today. In the Akasha Chronicle we find in this time that the earth was in a material connection of much more intimate kind with another heavenly body which circles the earth today, with the moon. It was a certain material interrelation between earth and moon.

If I may express myself roughly: what we have today as earth mass formed only because the crude materiality that we have in the moon was extruded as it were. Both bodies have differentiated from each other. You can imagine which immense shocks must have occurred there in the whole materiality! This cosmic shock is the counter pole, the correlative of what I have told, the correlative of the big living being with whose separation and change is connected that the human being went over from hermaphroditism to uni-sexuality. The whole separation did not take place in one go. Unfortunately, the reading of the theosophical literature offers so much opportunity to assume as if a heavenly body hurries out of the other. However, it is not a violent development. Slowly and gradually everything took place, in millions and millions of years. However, it is difficult to speak about figures because one must get to know the methods which the secret doctrine applies.

If we go back even farther, we find another interrelation that is harder to imagine and more intimate than that interrelation which today exists between sun and earth. But it existed in an older time. We want to take an idea in hand which makes it somewhat easier to us to illustrate this interrelation a little figuratively. If you see the sun and then imagine the sun limited within space is it really limited that way? Already a quite usual reflection can teach us that a real demarcation of the sun is basically not possible.

Does the sun really stop being where one sees its border? It does not stop there, its effect spreads through the whole planetary system. On our earth the sun has an effect. Does not belong that to the sun body what the sun makes on our earth, do not the etheric forces belong to it which spread on the earth and make life possible? Are these etheric forces not only the continuation of the etheric forces of the sun? Or their force of attraction? Does it not belong to the sun? There we see that if we understand the existence in an unrestricted way, we can realise that such an arbitrary limitation does not take place if we speak of a heavenly body like the sun. The effects which come from the sun were in the former times still quite different on the earth than they were later, and than they are today. They were in such a way that, if anybody could sit down on a chair and could have looked at the whole world edifice basically the physicist imagines this in such a way if he illustrates it to the children , he would not have perceived the sun and the earth as separate bodies, but he would have over-viewed the whole filled with perceptible contents; he would have seen that the earth is crystallised from the whole sun ball in later times.

If we go back to the times of the most distant earth past, we come to a point where that what has deposited in the lunar matter today was still connected with the earthly matter where the forces, which are pulled out today, were still efficient on the matter. These had effects on our physical bodies. They formed it in such a way that it reacted in quite different way to the forces and that in quite different way the effects on the bodily expressed themselves. In even earlier times the solar effect on the earth was there in an even more different way than today, also concerning growth. When the lunar body and the earth body were still united, we have all earth beings in a state which we only find with the animals which have the temperature of their surroundings approximately. The warm blood starts to develop to the same extent as the lunar matter withdraws from the earth.

If we go back farther to the times in which the solar body was still connected with the earth, we find within the human ancestors the effects which are preserved today in quite decadent forms of the lowest animals. The human being reproduced in those days by a kind of separation process. The human being existed in delicate matter, even more delicate than the fire mist. At that time, the reproduction happened as a kind of detachment. The daughter being had the same size as the mother being. The solar forces were in those days vital forces. They overpowered the material. They imprinted forms to the material. Thus we look, if we go back to the origin of our earth, at a time in which the human being was surrounded by subtler and subtler material states.

In the end, we get to a state which only the clairvoyant can envision where the most delicate etheric corporeality merges into astral being; as a pure soul-being the human being was placed in the earthly scene. The human beings who were formed like the physical aura were placed into the earthly scene. In the soul forces worked that imprinted forms into the matter soaking up the matter into themselves and forming it so that they became external seal impressions, a kind of shades of that what the souls were in the pure soul land. Now we have come back to the stage of our earth where the human being did not yet have the physical materiality where the human being only came in as an astral being into this physical world which was in those days of extremely delicate nature. Now we could go back to still much older states in which the human being did not yet have this astral existence. We could go back to purely spiritual states. Now, however, this should not interest us; for we do not want to pursue the human being, but the origin of the earth.

A few words more about the course backward. We meet the human being there, so to speak, still without material earth. He is not yet embodied in physical corporeality. There we would have to go back long periods if we wanted to find the human being at the former developmental stadia. The human being who was placed as a soul-being on the earth has the ability to draw the substance to himself in a particular way. If one were able to investigate the etheric man, one would perceive that his soul was already organised. It could already create forms. It had to develop for that for long times.

It had already gone through long developmental states. These have been completed on other heavenly bodies, of course. How have we to imagine such a development on other heavenly bodies? All the abilities which the soul had acquired were in such a way that they could work in the physical. It was led from former developmental states. The soul had to have already gone through physical states several times, because only within the physical world certain abilities can be developed. The human being could not speak and think today unless he had got into contact with the physical nature. What we work today becomes our ability later. I have often pointed to the child that learns to write and read. When the child has grown up, it can write and read. What was labour, what was intercourse with the outside world before has disappeared, but the fruit, the result has remained. This is the ability of writing and reading. What we have in the soul has originated from the intercourse with the outside world.

The theosophical world view calls it involution. If the human being again works out from within what he has acquired, we call it evolution. Between involution and evolution all life takes place. What the soul has done in the evolution is based on the fact that the abilities have emerged from the soul. These abilities were acquired once by involution. This involution took place again in another physical body. We have there an important moment that has happened on our earth; this is the moment when the human being was able to become a warm-blooded being from a cold-blooded one, because the lunar matter had emerged. This is the important point of the earth development. In all mystic schools this is emphasised. The human being takes the heat into him and reworks it inside. The myth which always shows the great truths figuratively preserved this in the Prometheus legend. Prometheus got down the fire from the heaven. This is the warmth of the human being that he got down there, not the external heat. Thus the human being had to get down all remaining abilities from the heaven, too.

I would like to lead you still to a point that is also very important for the earth development. This is the moment when the human being takes up in him what we have once got to know as the inside of the soul. We have seen that pictures have risen up in the human being which he associated with the objects. The human being possessed this ability to develop light in him in the first time. He acquired that sooner as well as he acquired the ability later to develop warmth. The human being developed the ability to sense light around him or still more properly speaking to sense the objects around him in the light. This took place on a planet which the theosophical world view calls “Moon.” However, this was not our physical moon. When the soul had acquired the ability of the inner light, the connection was there, and who knows the circumstances of the past, knows that it evoked the soul ability of seeing colours, the inner luminescence. We have to realise once how this abilities are connected. The development of warmth is connected with all life on our earth, with the present kind of reproduction, with the way the human being can bring something into real existence. Everything else is combining; only the reproduction is a real creating, and this is connected with warmth. We have a similar level of development when the inner luminescence appeared. The human being developed the luminescence on a previous planet. This was a luminescence from within like it is warmth from within today. It was luminescence. With it we have come to the most excellent characteristic of the human being in his pre-physical state on another heavenly body. Everything that went out from the human being was luminous as his aura shines today. The human being was a luminous being, and the perception of the human being was the perception of his luminescence. At that time, luminescence developed down to the physical. It was a physical luminescence of the human being.

How do we get our most significant ideas of the environment? Just by means of the visual percepts. You would nearly lose nine tenths of that what you know if you cancel the visual percepts. Because we have visual ideas today, wisdom can pour somewhat in us. With our lunar ancestors this was different. From them the light was emitted. The same was emitted from them that pours in us as light effects today. One calls our earth the universe of love in the mystic mythology because it is connected with forces of love. The universe of wisdom on which the light played the same role as today the warmth preceded this universe of love. The earth followed as a universe of love the universe of wisdom. The inner light is connected with the human will. The human being, who has certain desires, passions, sensations, and emotions, provides his aura, his astral body with particular colour shapes. These are subjected to the will in a broader sense. In those days, in the lunar period, the whole human being was an expression of will. The will flowed outwardly and came to the fore as that which shines.

Hence, our ancestors are the sons of will if we call these human beings of the universe of wisdom human beings. The children of love descended from the sons of will. The light played a similar role in those days as today the heat on the earth. One calls these luminous human beings within the luminous environment also the sons of the twilight. It was an especially luminous human being within the surrounding luminosity, an exchange of light took place as we have an exchange of warmth today. As we have a feeling of cold if it is cold one approximately had a feeling if it was darker all around than in the own inside. The will was the basis of that because the will basically found its expression in the whole surroundings. As today the human being is creative by love, he was creative in those days using his will. His will had an immediate influence on all surroundings. As powerless the creating human being is before the physical things of the outside world today because he has got to clearness in his consciousness and thereby the other soul forces have become more imperfect , as powerful the will was in those days. The human will had influence on the whole physical surroundings. Because it strives and is the upward trend in the development, this will strove for the higher. Thus that was caused, immediately from the living nature, what separated the centre of the heavenly body in two, so that at that time already a kind of invagination took place. One centre became two centres in a more mental way. We see this separation of the centres achieved in the later development in the separation of the earth and the moon.

These are sketchy indications I could give you. However, you will see that the matters coincide. Who tries to think consistently and strictly can admit this from the start. I myself might give a rebuttal as I have indicated it in the outset concerning Eduard von Hartmann. Habitual ways of thinking are something temporary. Who studies history of the Middle Ages, for example, not only the external one, because it is a wrong picture which is given to us, finds my explanations verified.

Goethe also says that it is basically only the historians' own spirit, in which the times are reflected. It is the task of theosophy to show the development in the past to receive an idea of the great human future. I have quoted Goethe, because he deeply looked into these mystic, mysterious connections of the world development. He used a strange figure, the “old man with the lamp” in his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. The lamp can only shine where another light shines. I have shown that as the incarnation of ancient wisdom. Now we come to an even more profound significance. It becomes clear to us what Goethe means with the light which spreads its light only where light is. Where the gift of clairvoyance is developed again, the lamp develops its whole magic force. There we get to that time when the human being becomes the flame to look back to this epoch in which he was a luminous being when the ability developed to bring light into existence. Goethe knew that this internal light was there once in the human being and that the present-day seeing of light is a later developmental state.

Before the human being could see the sun, he had to become an internally luminous being first; he had to develop light in himself to show light to the light. Goethe was a mystic; one does not know it only. At the head of his preface to the theory of colours he pronounces it using the words of an old mystic:

Unless the eye were like the sun,
How could we see the light?
Unless God's own force lived in us,
How could delight us the divine?

During the second half of last year, it became my duty to carry on some occult research into life between death and a new birth. We have, it is true, already described what has to be considered there, but a complete knowledge of this part of human life, a real penetration therein, is only possible if one carries on research into it from the most diverse points of view. Though everything found in the writings and cycles about this theme is correct, still to all this may be added that which must be said tonight and perhaps also the day after tomorrow about the subject.

When the human being has stepped through the portals of death—that is, when he has laid aside his physical and his ether body—the soul during the first interval of time is particularly taken up with memories of the span of life it spent on earth. We know, of course, that the soul requires a certain amount of time to free itself from all that connects it with the last earthly life. Now, let us present this process of growing out of the preceding life on earth as it relates to the whole of the universe, to the world.

When the human being leaves his physical body and his ether body, and thus lives only in his astral body, which we may also call the soul body, a complete spatial expansion takes place, one might say: a dilatation of his being into the far reaches of space; this takes place not merely after death, but also in sleep. Every night we really expand over the stellar spaces. After death, we expand slowly and gradually in such a way that we must seek the substance of our soul—for we cannot now say: the substance of our body—in the circumference of the earth, at first far beyond the atmosphere. Farther and farther it expands, until we (though it may sound paradoxical, it comes to that) have expanded the life of our soul over the whole expanse of the sphere which in the end corresponds to the moon's orbit around the earth. We grow so large that the boundary of our being is the orbit of the moon. As long as we thus grow larger, that which we may call the Kamaloka-time prevails. That is the time of inner connection with the preceding life on earth.

Then, however, the expansion goes on. The human being expands in fact out into the world of the stars, and then the time begins when he expands so far that the outer boundary of his being; may be designated as the orbit which, in astronomical terms, is described by Venus, in occult terms by Mercury. Now, the condition of life for man, after he has left the sphere of the moon, depends on the kind of life he led here between birth and death. When he carries his life into the universe to the sphere of Mercury, then he may live there in Such a way that he can easily find contact with people with whom he lived on earth, with whom his soul was united on earth; or, on the other hand, it may be man's fate to have difficulties in finding such contacts—that is to: say, to be condemned to loneliness in expanding his life thus into the sphere of Mercury. And it depends on the way in which he has led his life on earth whether he feels that he is destined to loneliness, or, if one may use the term, to sociability. A person who in life has not cared to awaken in his soul moral feelings a moral way of thinking, a moral mood, benevolence, sympathy—a person who has developed this only to a small extent—feels doomed to loneliness after death when he expands to the sphere of Mercury. And it is difficult for him to find other souls with whom he is united. A person who has developed much sympathy, a moral way of thinking, will live companionably with other souls as he expands to the sphere of Mercury. Thus it is given into our hands to arrange our life between death and a new birth. The sphere of Mercury—in occult terms—is therefore the sphere in which our moral qualities are expressed. It also is the sphere in which what we have developed in the way of moral qualities becomes effective in still another manner.

Another aspect to be considered is the fact that precisely during this passage through the sphere of Mercury (in occult parlance) we have the after-effect of having been in the life between birth and death a conscientious human being, or one lacking conscientiousness. You see, everything that happens in the world here in physical life receives its direction or its causation from the spiritual world. We have several times considered the natural death from old age, which has to occur for man because it is what really must happen to him in order that life may take its right course from incarnation to incarnation. But as we know, there is not merely this death from old age, well founded in evolution; there is also a death which befalls the human being in the flower of youth, even in childhood. There are in the world manifold illnesses, epidemics, and so forth playing a part in human life. And they are not merely the effect of physical causes, but they are ordained, directed from the spiritual world. And this actually comes from the region of Venus, that belt around the earth which, however, in occult parlance we call the sphere of Mercury. That is, if we take the radius from earth to Venus and draw a circle—quite without considering astronomical relations—that, then, is the sphere of Mercury (we mean a circle, not around the sun, but, around the earth); and in this belt, in the space occupied by this plane, there lie the forces by which illnesses and death are directed on earth: death in so far as it does not occur as natural death from old age, but in an irregular manner. Certain spiritual beings are operative there, those beings whom occultism designates as the spirits of illness and death. An individual who (in occult parlance) enters the realm of Mercury after having spent his life on earth as a person without a conscience, condemns himself to become a servant of these—as we may well call them—evil spirits of illness and death, while he is going through this realm. Indeed, we do not have a conception, an impression, of what is meant by a “lack of conscience” until we know this fact. Lack of conscience sentences a human being to bear the yoke of these evil spirits in the realm of Mercury for a time between death and a new birth. And when those forces are developed which are sent from the surrounding realm to the earth so that epidemics, illnesses, take place, so that death at the wrong time takes place, then these souls “without conscience” must cooperate as servants of the spirits of illness and death who send these forces into our physical world.

Something else happens when a trait which is very widespread on earth has its after-effect all the way up to this sphere: laziness. Our life is really conditioned by laziness. Innumerable things would be done differently by men if they were not lazy. Also by laziness, the human being sentences himself to become for a time in the sphere which has just been discussed the servant of those powers which are subordinate to Ahriman, and which we may designate as the powers of hindrance—that is to say, of those spirits who hinder work on earth. Servants of the spirits of hindrance we become for a definite period of time, more or less prolonged, through everything we have poured into our soul by laziness. In this way, we get a conception as to how those forces which we have developed in our soul during our physical life have their effect in that life between death and a new birth.

The next sphere to which the soul expands is designated in occultism as the sphere of Venus. [astronomically: sphere of Mercury.] We prepare ourselves for it by religious qualities, a religious attitude. A human being who has developed in the time between birth and death an attitude which causes his soul to look toward the spiritual primordial powers and primordial forces of the world—such a person is able to be a social being in the sphere of Venus, so that he lives together with other human beings with whom his soul has established relationship on earth. But also other spirits of the Higher Hierarchies enter from then on into the human sphere, and man lives there with spirits of the Higher Hierarchies if he has developed a religious attitude, religious sentiments, religious feelings. On the other hand, if here on earth he has not brought his soul into contact with religious impulses, he sentences himself to loneliness, to seclusion, to tormenting loneliness. If he has been an atheist here on earth, then he will be a completely isolated individual after reaching the sphere with which we are concerned here. And it must be said that those people who today foster an irreligious attitude condemn themselves to complete loneliness. Those, for instance, who unite in the Monist Society, inhibit their inner freedom of movement, and because they have found themselves united here under that “flag,” they sentence themselves to sit each in his own cage, each separate from the other.

The next sphere into which we enter is the sphere of the Sun. Again circumstances are different from those known to physical astronomy. We obtain this sphere if we draw a line between the earth and the sun—that is, if we use this line as the radius and draw a circle around the earth. In the spiritual world, conditions do differ from those in the physical world. We expand to the extent of this sphere after having gone through the sphere of Venus. For this sphere, the preparation valid for the sphere of Venus no longer holds good. For the Venus sphere, we may be prepared in such a way that we find contact with all those souls with whom we have established religious fellowship in the life between birth and death. In the sphere of Venus, human beings are so to speak confined in regions like the regions in which on earth peoples, races, live together. Thus there are in the Venus-sphere regions in which those persons find each other who are related through their religious feelings. This is not sufficient for the sphere of the Sun. In the sphere of the Sun the feeling of loneliness prevails if the human being was prepared on earth only for a certain kind of religious feeling in his soul. In the sphere of the Sun, a person is a social being only when he has developed, in the best sense of the word, an understanding of every religious feeling; when, so to speak, he has developed a deeper tolerance for all religious Systems on earth. Up to our time, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the exoteric Christian faith has been more or less sufficient, for this Christian faith contains in a certain way, though in quite a different way, an understanding of other systems of religion which far transcends that involved in a limited religious system. We can easily convince ourselves of this. Many other religious systems are still confined to certain regions of the earth, and if we wish to see, we can very easily note how the adherent of Hinduism, of Buddhism; and of other faiths; will indeed speak of the equal validity of all religions and of a wisdom common to all religions ... but if we consider more deeply what he means, we find that he means his own religion exclusively. In the last analysis, he demands of other people that they should acknowledge his own religion. That is what he then calls the equal validity of all religions. Read theosophical periodicals originating in India. There, the East Indian religion is considered the one religion, valid for the world, and those who do not accept this are said not to be honest theosophists. Primitive Christianity from the beginning has not been attuned to this idea, especially where it has become occidental religion. If things were in the Occident as, they are in India, we would have today a religion of Wotan; that would be then, what Hinduism is for the orient. The Occident, however, has not taken up the religion, which has evolved from it, but from the beginning the religion of a founder who has lived outside of the Occident, of the Christ Jesus. Unegotistically, the Occident has received a religion into its very being. That is a difference in principle, and in the very essence of Christianity there lies a true tolerance for every religious system, even though this essence may have been little understood by occidental Christians.

In fact, for the Christian, everyone is a Christian, no matter what he may call himself. And it is nothing but narrow-mindedness, if one wants to spread Christian dogma everywhere. Broad-mindedness is something quite different. If one considers the Hindu, the Chinese, the Buddhist, if one enters into the deeper elements of their being, one will find everywhere the beginnings of Christianity and will stress in everything they themselves think the beginnings of Christianity, without having to mention the name of the Christ. But this more narrow Christianity, as it is given today to man between birth and death, is only one preparation for the sphere of the Sun: another thing is necessary—that which we designate in the right, the true sense, as Theosophy. [Rudolf Steiner was talking to members of the Theosophical Society.—Ed.] It gives us an inner comprehension of all religious systems on earth, of their very essence. If we acquire this understanding here on earth, then we prepare ourselves in the right way for the sphere of the Sun. This understanding of the different religions and of the Mystery of Golgotha, of the Christ impulse, is necessary for us if we are not to become hermits in relation to other human souls and in relation to the spirits of the Higher Hierarchies in the sphere of the Sun, between death and a new birth.

When we come into the sphere of the Sun between death and a new birth, we find there two things. The first thing we find is something we can express only in an image: we find an empty throne, an empty World-Throne. And that which we may seek on this empty World Throne we can find only in the pictures of the Akashic Record. On this throne, which we find empty during the time we pass between death and a new birth, the Christ once sat within the Sun sphere. He expanded into the earth sphere through the Mystery of Golgotha, and since that time the inhabitants of the earth must gain here on earth an understanding of the Christ impulse, and must keep this impulse in their memory. Then they will be able to recognize the image which appears in the Akashic Record while gaining a living experience of the Sun sphere. He who has not attained this understanding here on earth will not recognize who at one time was sitting on the throne, and what is preserved as an image only. And he cannot find his way within the Sun-sphere between death and a new birth. There we see why it is the mission of the souls of men on earth to seek here for themselves the connection with the Mystery of Golgotha as we seek it in our spiritual movement. Through this, we keep between death and a new birth the memory of the Christ Impulse, and do not become hermits in the sphere of the Sun, but social beings, by reason of the forces which we have taken with us; so that in a way, by our own strength which we brought with us, we bring to life the image—which is now merely an image in the Sun-sphere—of the Christ. And we must take so much strength with us from the time on earth that this strength remains with us also for the subsequent time, and cannot be lost.

We find a second thing in this sphere of the Sun, a second throne: and it is now occupied by a real being, by Lucifer. And so, between death and a new birth, when we have reached the sphere of the Sun as it has been described, we feel ourselves on the one hand in the presence of Christ, on the other in the presence of Lucifer. If we had not received the Christ impulse, Lucifer alone would have to become our leader. But if we have received the Christ impulse, then we are, on the far voyage through the universe, under the leadership on the one hand of the Christ impulse, on the other of Lucifer; for we also need him for the ensuing times. We also need Lucifer, for he leads us in the right way through the lower spheres of the universe, at first as far as the Mars-sphere.

That is the next sphere to which we expand between death and new birth. In order that Lucifer may lead us in such a way as is fitting for us men, we must have the Christ impulse as a counterbalance; then the Lucifer impulse is salutory for us; otherwise it is evil for us. Another thing has become necessary: in the sphere of Mars, we must have the possibility of taking into account, with our whole being, certain changes which have occurred on Mars in the course of recent centuries. These changes may be described in about the following way. Every heavenly body is related to every other heavenly body through the agency of certain forces; all heavenly bodies stand in a certain relation to the earth. From them the forces radiate. In fact, from Mars and its sphere not only does the light effect radiate, which comes to the earth, but from it also spiritual forces radiate. If we go back to earlier centuries, we find that the forces radiated from Mars which inspired men to that which human beings needed in earlier times: physical forces, to further the evolution of mankind. It is not merely a myth but an occult truth that what has developed as warlike force and warlike complication in the world, what has made man energetic, courageous through centuries and millennia, stems from an influx of the forces of Mars. But such is the life of a planet that its forces go through an ascending and a descending development. And Mars has changed in a certain way its mission during the last centuries. The warlike forces that are developed now are the ebbing warlike life of the previous centuries; new life from inciting forces of Mars does not flow in any longer. For at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Mars had reached a decisive point, a point which, in the life of Mars, may only be compared to the time when the earth had come to a decisive point, the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is a fact of immense importance upon which we touch here. Mars went through a decisive period. That fact was known within the earth-mysteries, in which the decision is made for the great spiritual concerns of earth-existence. That is to say, since the twelfth century, the decisive preparations have been made within the mystery development of the earth in order to take into account the change in the Mars-sphere. The forces which Mars was to send out to bring courage and energy to earth, were past for Mars: they were no longer destined to penetrate to the earth. But by the fact that Mars has gone through such a crisis, there came a change for the souls who live between death and a new birth, in the experiences they would have to go through in the Mars-sphere after death. That is to say: When man goes beyond the sphere of the Sun, forces radiate into the essence of his soul, forces which already have a significance for the next incarnation. The soul who passed through the sphere of Mars in the early times, before the seventeenth century, came into contact with those forces which permeated it with courage and energy. Lucifer was the leader to the sources of courage and energy. But the souls who came in later times could no longer find the characteristic forces: Mars was then going through its crisis. Where, within the Mysteries, the great spiritual decisions are made, there one does not take into consideration merely human life between birth and death, but also its salvation or perdition between death and a new birth; that is, in the Mysteries one sees to it that those things are infused into the spiritual culture of mankind which cause the souls after death to go through the different spheres in the right way.

If we wish to comprehend the meaning of the happenings in the Mars-sphere, we must consider the following. A great decisive matter confronts the Rosicrucian Mysteries because one had to consider that for the development of the earth, very special times were ahead: the times of external material culture, of external material triumphs. We cannot oppose these: though they bring nothing spiritual, we must of necessity experience this time of machines, airplanes, and other inventions. But these times bring a kind of death of the soul. We cannot oppose them, we must gain a living experience of them.—The materialistic era had to come, but it always was the endeavour of higher spiritual beings to create a counter-balance against this materialistic era. When we consider all that has come to light in the development of the earth as a counter-balance against materialism, we have as the last and most significant phenomenon Francis of Assisi; that Francis of Assisi who, in his entity as Francis of Assisi, turned away from all external life, who led in Assisi that life which is known to you and which has been painted so wonderfully by Giotto on the walls of the church of Assisi ... so that even today when these pictures have been painted over so often, life yet radiates movingly from the walls. And even though that place also has gone through a development tending toward materialism, we will have to say: the region around the town of Assisi still is pervaded by the spiritual atmosphere of Francis, that atmosphere which has assimilated the elements of a life alien to the world, but on intimate terms with the soul, not merely with the human soul, but with the soul of Nature. In the cycle Man in the Light of Occultism, Theosophy and Philosophy you may read that wonderful poem into which Francis of Assisi poured what he felt toward the soul of Nature and of Nature's beings. One may say that no poet has found more beautiful accents, and perhaps only Goethe has found again accents as beautiful about the life of Nature. What is the cause of all this? The cause of all this is the fact that Francis of Assisi in his previous incarnation, in the seventh, eighth century, in a Mystery School near the Black Sea, was the pupil of an individuality who was no longer incarnated in a physical body.

This is a noteworthy matter. Francis of Assisi, in his immediately preceding incarnation, had lived in this School of Mysteries, and with other disciples he was a disciple of a being who then worked only in the spiritual body among the pupils including Francis of Assisi. And this was none other than the Buddha, who we know was incarnated for the last time as Gautama Buddha. Nevertheless, he continued to be active in the spiritual body. We know that as a spiritual being he was present at the birth of the child Jesus of St. Luke's Gospel. He has continued to be active in the School in which Francis of Assisi lived in his previous incarnation. There the latter assimilated the impulses of his life so intimately associated with the soul, of that life which was to lead men away from everything that was to spread out on earth, which was to lead away from the purely materialistic life. And all this remained in Francis of Assisi. We see the after-effects of this in the Francis of Assisi incarnation. But it could not come about that on earth, in the era which had the materialistic mission, many souls should join a Francis of Assisi community. Those could not do this who had to progress with the time. So, in a way, a conflict was created. It could not come about that on one side there was only exterior, material culture, on the other disciples of Francis of Assisi. Although Francis of Assisi is great and powerful, on the one side, yet on the other the rules he gave could not be of use for ensuing times. How only could it come about? What had to happen on earth?

This has been established in significant perspectives in the Rosicrucian Mysteries since the twelfth century. There it was said; The human being will have to work with the earthly body, will have to gain a living experience in an external way of the material existence between birth and death, and he will have to go along with the triumphs of this material existence. But for every soul who becomes inured, intimate with material existence, a possibility must be created to have, with part of its nature, an understanding for the inner experience of that which lies in the teachings of Francis of Assisi. It is precisely this which constitutes the essence of progress of souls on earth: that these souls must increasingly develop so to speak two natures, the farther they go into the future; that we with the organs of our soul shall be able to take hold of the impulses of existence on earth, so that we may become familiar with them; but that we should be able to develop within ourselves moments and hours in which we can be given over in solitude to the life of the soul itself. While we become more open to the world and more familiar with it, we must at the same time have hours when we can become familiar with our soul. While on the one hand we follow Edison, we must be able to become quietly, in our hearts, disciples of Francis of Assisi or of his great teacher, the Buddha. Thus every human being must be able to feel even if he is being pushed into material life. And for this development the preparation had to be given in the Rosicrucian Mysteries. Christian Rosenkreuz had the mission to care for it.

How can all this be brought about? Only through the fact that a certain period of the life between death and a new birth may be used for the soul in a very definite way. They said to themselves in the Rosicrucian Mysteries: Mars, so to speak, loses his old task; let us give him a new one.—With the beginning of the seventeenth century, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Buddha who had apart from this completed his last incarnation on earth, was sent to Mars, to the sphere of Mars, and one may say, speaking quite correctly: At that precise time the Buddha accomplished for Mars something similar to what the Christ accomplished on earth—only in a larger measure—in the Mystery of Golgotha. That which had always emanated from Mars, and was part of its essence, that very thing the Buddha transformed by his sacrifice. He transformed the whole nature and essence of Mars. For Mars, the Buddha has become the great Redeemer. It was a sacrifice for him. You only have to remember how the Buddha arose to the point of expounding the doctrine of giving the message of universal peace, of harmonious existence. He was then transferred into that planetary sphere from which the force of aggressiveness originated. He, the Prince of Peace, crucified himself, so to speak, though not through the Mystery of Golgotha. In this way, something else is brought into the Mars-sphere: Mars is permeated by the essence of the Buddha. As on earth the substance of the Christ has flowed out from the Mystery of Golgotha, so the peace substance of the Buddha flows into the Mars-sphere, and since then is in the Mars-sphere.

It was thus that they spoke within the Rosicrucian Mystery. In consequence of the sending of the Buddha, human souls could live for some time between death and a new birth in the sphere of Mars, after they had found themselves in the Sun-sphere and had borne the Christ Impulse up to that sphere. After the soul has entered there through the right permeation with the Christ Impulse, and through the guidance of Lucifer, the soul comes out farther into the sphere of Mars; and precisely in our time, an event occurs in the Mars-sphere, which previously could not take place: the souls are permeated by that which no longer can occur on earth,—they are permeated by the Buddha—Francis of Assisi—element. Between death and a new birth each soul—if it is prepared in the right way—can go through that which has become living experience on earth, as in a last blossoming, in the soul-life of Francis of Assisi, but which since that time cannot have a proper home on earth. The human soul by experiencing the sphere of Buddha in the life between death and a new birth can acquire there the strength that will enable it to do what has just been said: it may enter by a new birth into a purely material existence, may be thrown into a terrestrial existence which will be more and more materialistic, and yet will be able to develop forces in another part of the entity of the soul so that it may be given up to the world of the spirit and of the soul. This is the truth about the secrets which are hidden between death and a new birth.

Then, we expand farther and farther into the reaches of the stars, to Jupiter, Saturn, and farther. What has been described now, occurs only, in fact, with the most advanced souls. Those souls which have not fulfilled the conditions and will not fulfil them until later—such souls, in the life between death and a new birth, come into contact only with the spheres nearest the earth. They also go through the other spheres, but in a certain unconscious state akin to sleep. In the outer spheres, in the spheres beyond the sun, the forces are gathered which man must acquire in order to be able to work, to collaborate, in building up a new body as he approaches a new birth. What man consists of has not merely been acquired on earth. It is the greatest short-sightedness of materialists to believe now that man is a creature of the earth. If man builds himself up in this way with the forces which are given to him, if he builds himself up in the most comprehensive meaning of the word, these constructive forces are cosmic forces which man first had to acquire for himself. While expanding, between death and a new birth, to the Sun-sphere, he still has contact with the forces which are after-effects from his previous life. The forces he needs in order to work into the sphere of the earth whatever can construct his physical body out of the surrounding spheres, those forces he must extract from the forces which meet him outside of the Sun-sphere. The human being really must expand into the cosmos between death and a new birth; he then must live with the cosmos, for on earth alone the forces are lacking which really can bring forth the human being. No new human being ever could result from the human germ which originates from the combination of the two sexes, if the following were not to take place.

There is in existence this small human germ. With this human germ unites something immeasurably great and significant, something which had first expanded in a mysterious way into infinite reaches of the world, and then contracted again. After man expands to the spheres of the stars, he begins to contract again. He goes through the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, and Moon, becoming ever smaller and smaller. And as he grows smaller, he takes into himself the spiritual forces of the cosmos. And he grows ever smaller and smaller. And that which is finally compressed, compacted into a small spiritual globe, that has been actually condensed from an immense dilution. And this now unites with the physical globe which is the germ cell, and fertilizes it by forces from the spiritual realms. Thus we see how man enters existence by birth.

After having gone through his previous death, he expanded into the distant spaces of the universe, became so to speak a giant globe. In spirit, he was together with spiritual beings and facts; then he compresses himself again, becomes ever smaller and smaller, until the time has come when, by the forces inherent in him, lie unites with physical matter. That which forms, together with the human germ cell, the human body, has been brought in from the cosmos. From this human germ cell, even if it were fertilized, nothing could result that might live on earth, if the compressed spirit-globe could not unite with it; this can be ascertained by occult investigation. And what only could result from this human germ-cell? From it only the foundation for the senses and the nervous system could result, but nothing that is capable of living, such as the body of man which must build itself up around the senses and the nervous system; the former does not originate with father and mother. Earth can give the forces for the senses, the nervous system. What grows organically around them, must be brought in from the cosmos. And when finally the time comes when a new science will grasp the processes in the human germ-cell according to the application of occult knowledge, then human beings who think clearly will be able to understand what they now cannot grasp in any scientific presentation. Whether you read Haeckel's sparkling discussions of this matter, or others, you will find everywhere that things are not understandable by themselves. What one does not know is the fact that a third force unites with that which comes from father and mother. The third force comes in from the cosmos. Only one certain group of people know—or today we may say, knew—of this secret, but this state of affairs is coming to an end now. Children and their nurses and educators mention it—or, at least it was mentioned, when they related that the stork or some other sort of being brings in an element by which human beings can enter the world. That is only a metaphoric expression for a spiritual occurrence, but it is more intelligent than what intelligent people maintain today. For our time, however, it is regarded as enlightened to explain human conditions in a materialistic way. This metaphoric presentation really still should have an effect on the children's souls, on their imagination! People do say: The children no longer believe in the stork—because those who tell this fairy-tale no longer believe it themselves. But those who today become anthroposophists believe in the stork, and they will soon find that in this metaphoric presentation a good interpretation is given of spiritual happenings.

Thus we have contemplated the cosmic aspect of life between death and a new birth; the day after tomorrow we will more particularly touch upon the human aspect of practical life.

But now we will consider one more thing. Kant once, following truly, one might say, an inspiration, made this significant statement:

“Two things have made a great impression on me: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.”

This statement may seem significant to the occultist. For what is the strange relation that exists between the starry sky and that which is best in the life of our soul? Both are one and the same. We expand between death and a new birth as far as the starry sky, and we bring its forces into life and feel them as the most significant forces of our soul. No wonder! We are, indeed, the external images of the heavens. We look up to the starry sky where we were between death and a new birth, and we see that which we have taken into ourselves. No wonder that we feel at one with that which lives in us as guidance for the life of our soul and that which radiates into us from the starry sky, and which we feel effective in us when we appeal to the deepest life of our soul. The starry sky is one and the same with us, and we with it, when we contemplate our existence as a whole.

Thus we must tell ourselves that such an anthroposophical contemplation does not merely give us that which we may call understanding, knowledge, in the usual every-day meaning. It really gives us moral strength and support in the feeling that the whole universe lives in us. And gradually we see ourselves permeated by the universe when we go through life between death and a new birth. Truly, it is hidden to the external eye, this life between death and a new birth; but that also is hidden which in the depth of our soul's existence drives us, impels us. And yet it is in us, it is effective in us and gives us our strength, this our best being. We carry the heavens within us because we experience them before we enter into our physical existence. We then feel the obligation to make ourselves worthy of these heavens which have done so much for us that we owe to them our entire inner being.

More of this the day after tomorrow, when we shall contemplate life more under the aspect of man, and from a point of view which affects rather the practical activity of life.

At the time when materialism—mainly theoretical materialism—was in its prime, in the middle and still to some extent during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when the writings of Buchner and Vogt (‘bulky Vogt’ as he used to be called) had made a deep impression upon people who considered themselves enlightened, one could often hear a way of speaking that is occasionally also heard today, because stragglers from that epoch of theoretical materialism are still to be found in certain circles. When people do not flatly deny the possibility of a life after death, or even here and there admit it, they are wont to say: Well, there may be a life after death but why should we trouble about it during life on Earth? When death has taken place we shall discover whether there is indeed a future life, and meanwhile if here on Earth we concern ourselves only with the affairs of earthly existence and take no account of what is alleged to come afterwards, we cannot miss anything of importance. For if the life after death has anything to offer we shall then discover what it is!

As I said, this way of speaking could be heard time and time again and this is still the case in wide circles today; in the way the subject is expressed it may often, in a certain respect, almost seem acceptable. And yet it is utterly at variance with what is disclosed to spiritual investigation when the facts connected with the life between death and rebirth are considered in their spiritual aspect. When a man has passed through the gate of death he comes into contact with many and infinitely varied forces and beings. He does not only find himself living amid a multitude of super-sensible facts but he comes into contact with definite forces and Beings—namely, the Beings of the several higher Hierarchies. Let us ask ourselves what this contact signifies for one who is passing through the period of existence between death and the new birth.

We know that when an individual has spent this period of life in the super-sensible world and passes into physical existence again through birth, he becomes in a certain way the moulder of his own bodily constitution, indeed of his whole destiny in the life on Earth. Within certain limits the human being builds and fashions his body, even the very convolutions of his brain, by means of the forces brought with him from the spiritual worlds when he enters again into physical existence through birth. Our whole earthly existence depends upon our physical body possessing organs which enable us to come in touch with the outer physical world, to act and moreover to think in that world.

If, here in the physical world, we do not possess the appropriately formed brain which, on passing through birth we formed for ourselves out of the forces of the super-sensible world, we remain unable to cope with life in this physical world. In the real sense we are fitted for life in the physical world only when we bring with us from the spiritual world forces by means of which we have been able to build a body able to cope with this world and all its demands. The super-sensible forces which man needs in order to fashion his body and also his destiny are received by him from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies with whom he has made contact between death and the new birth. What we need for the shaping of our life must be acquired during the time that has preceded our birth since the last death. Between death and the next birth we must approach, stage by stage, the Beings who can endow us with the forces we need for our physical existence.

In the life between death and rebirth we can pass before the Beings of the higher Hierarchies in two ways. We may recognise them, understand their nature and essential characteristics, be able to receive what they can give us and what we shall need in the following life. We must be able to understand or at least to perceive what is being offered us and what we shall subsequently need. But we might also pass before these Beings in such a way that, figuratively speaking, their hands are offering gifts which we do not receive because it is dark in the higher world in which we then live. Thus we may pass through that world with understanding, with awareness of what these Beings are offering us, or we may pass through it without understanding, unaware of what they wish to bestow. Now the way in which we pass through this spiritual world, which of the two ways we necessarily choose in our life between death and the new birth, is predetermined by the after-effects of the previous life and of earlier lives on Earth. A person whose attitude in his last life on Earth was unresponsive and antagonistic to all thoughts and ideas that may enlighten him about the super-sensible world—such a person passes through the life between death and rebirth as if through a world of darkness. For the light, the spiritual light we need in order to realise how these different Beings approach us and what gifts we may receive from them for our next life on Earth—the light of understanding for what is here coming to pass cannot be acquired in the super-sensible world itself; it must be acquired here, during physical incarnation on Earth. If, at death, we bear with us into the spiritual life no relevant ideas and concepts, we shall pass unknowingly through our super-sensible existence until the next birth, receiving none of the forces needed for the next life. From this we realise how impossible it is to say that we can wait until death itself occurs because we shall then discover what the facts are—whether indeed we shall encounter any reality at all after death. Our relationship to that reality depends upon whether in earthly life we have been receptive or antagonistic in our souls to concepts or ideas of the super-sensible world that have been accessible to us and will be the light through which we must ourselves illumine the path between death and rebirth.

Something further can be gathered from what has been said. The belief that we have, so to say, only to die in order to receive everything that the super-sensible world can give us, even if we have made no preparation for it—this belief is utterly false. Every world has its own special mission. And what a man can acquire during an incarnation on Earth he can acquire in no single one of the other worlds. Between death and the new birth he is able, in all circumstances, to enter into communion with the Beings of the higher Hierarchies. But in order to receive their gifts, to avoid having to grope in darkness through life there or in fearful loneliness, in order to establish contact with those Beings and receive their forces, the ideas and concepts which are the light enabling the higher Hierarchies to be visible to the soul must be acquired in earthly life. And so an individual who in earthly life during the present cycle of time has rejected all spiritual ideas, passes through the life between death and rebirth in fearful loneliness, groping in darkness. In the next incarnation he will fail to bring with him the forces wherewith to build his body efficiently and mould his organs; he can fashion them in an imperfect form only and consequently he will be an inadequate human being in his next life.

We realise from this how Karma works over from one life to the next. In one life a man deliberately scorns to develop in his soul any relationship with the spiritual worlds; in the next life he has no forces wherewith to create even the organs enabling him to think, feel or will the truths of spiritual life. He remains dull and indifferent to spiritual things and spiritual life passes him by as though in dream—as is so frequently the case today. On the Earth such an individual can take no interest in spiritual worlds; and his soul, after passing through the gate of death, is an easy prey for the Luciferic powers. Lucifer makes straight for such souls. Here we have the strange situation that in the next life in the spiritual world, the life that follows the dull, unreceptive one, the deeds and the Beings of the higher Hierarchies are indeed illumined for such an individual but in this case not as a result of what he acquired in earthly life but by the light which Lucifer sends into his soul. It is Lucifer who illumines the higher worlds for him when he passes into the life between death and rebirth. Now, he can, it is true, perceive the higher Hierarchies, recognise when they are offering their gifts to him. But the fact that Lucifer has tainted the light means that all the gifts have a particular colouring and character. The forces of the higher Hierarchies are then not exactly as the human being could otherwise have received them. Their nature then is such that when the human being passes into his next life on Earth he can certainly form and mould his body, but he moulds it then in such a way that although he becomes an individual who is, admittedly, able to cope with the outer world and its demands, in a certain respect he is inwardly inadequate, because his soul is tinged with Lucifer's gifts or at least by gifts that have a Luciferic trend.

When we come across individuals who have worked on their bodies in such a way that they are able to make effective use of their intellect and acquire certain skills which will help them to raise their status in the world, although to their own advantage only, snatching at what is in their own interest, dryly calculating what is beneficial to themselves without any consideration for others—and there are many such people nowadays—in these cases the seer will very often find that their previous history was what has been described. Before they began to display their dry, intellectual, sharp-witted character in life, they had been led through their existence between death and rebirth by Luciferic beings who were able to approach them because in the preceding incarnation they had lived an apathetic, dreamy existence. But these traits themselves had been acquired because such individuals had passed through an earlier existence between death and rebirth groping in darkness. The Spirits of the higher Hierarchies would have bestowed upon them the forces needed for fashioning a new life, but they were unable to receive these forces; and that in turn was because they had deliberately refused to concern themselves with ideas and concepts relating to a spiritual world. That is the karmic connection. Such examples do certainly occur; they appear before the eyes of spirit only too frequently when with the help of powers of spiritual investigation and knowing the conditions of human life, we penetrate into higher worlds.

It is therefore wrong to say that here on Earth we need concern ourselves only with what is around us in earthly existence because what comes later will be revealed in all good time. But the form in which it will be revealed depends entirely upon how we have prepared ourselves for it here.

Another possibility may occur. I am saying these things in order that by understanding the life between death and rebirth, life between birth and death may become more and more intelligible.

When we study life on Earth with discernment, we see many human beings—and in our time they are very numerous—who can, as it were, only ‘half think’, whose logic invariably breaks down when faced with reality. Here is an example: A certain free-thinking cleric, an honourable man in all his endeavours, wrote in the first Freethinkers' Calendar as follows: Children ought not to be taught any ideas about religion for that would be against nature. If children are allowed to grow up without having any ideas about religion pumped into them, we find that they do not of themselves arrive at ideas of God, immortality, and so forth. The inference to be drawn from this is that such ideas are unnatural to the human being and should not be drummed into him; he should work only with what can be drawn from his own soul. As in many other cases, there are thousands and thousands of people nowadays to whom an utterance such as this seems very clever, very subtle. But if only genuine logic were applied the following would be obvious: If we were to take a human being before he has learnt to speak, put him on a lonely island and take care that he can hear no single word of speech, he would never learn to speak. And so anyone who argues against children being taught any ideas about religion would logically have to say that human beings should not have to learn to speak, for speech does not come of itself. So our free-thinking cleric cannot propagate his ideas by means of his logic, for both he and his logic come to a halt when confronted by the facts. His logic can be applied to a small area only, and he does not notice that his idea, assuming one can get hold of it, cancels itself out.

Anyone who is alert to his surroundings will find that this inadequate, pseudo-thinking is very widespread. If with the help of super-sensible research we trace the path of such an individual backwards and come to the regions through which his soul passed between the last death and the last birth, when this illogical mentality was caused, the seer often finds that this type of human being, in his last life between death and rebirth, passed through the spiritual world in such a way that he encountered the spiritual Beings and forces while under the guidance of Ahriman; and that although those Beings would have bestowed upon him what he needed in life, they could not make it possible for him to develop the capacity for sound thinking. Ahriman was his leader and it was Ahriman who contrived that the gifts of the Beings of the higher Hierarchies could only be received by him in a form that would finally result in his thinking coming to a halt when confronting actual facts, and in his inability to make his thinking exhaustive and valid. A large proportion of those human beings—and their number is legion—who are incapable of genuine thinking today owe this to the fact that in their last life between death and rebirth they were obliged to submit to Ahriman's guidance; they had somehow prepared themselves for this in their last earthly life—that is to say, in the incarnation preceding the present one.

And what was the course of that preceding life as viewed by a seer? It is found that these were morose, hypochondriacal individuals, who shied away from facts and people in the world and always found it difficult to establish any relation with their environment. Very often they were intolerable hypochondriacs in their previous life; on medical examination they would have been found to be suffering from the type of illness occurring very frequently in hypochondriacs. And if we were to go still further back, to the life between death and rebirth that preceded the hypochondriacal incarnation, we should find that during that period such human beings were obliged again to forego the right guidance and could not become truly aware of what the gifts of the higher Hierarchies would have been. And how had they prepared themselves for this fate in the life preceding the last two incarnations? We should find that they had developed what it is certainly true to call a religious, pious attitude of soul but an attitude based on sheer egoism. They were people with a pious, even mystical nature emanating from egoism. After all, mysticism very often has its origin in egoism. An individual of this type might say: I seek within myself in order that there I may recognise God. But what he is seeking there is only his own self made into God! In the case of many pious souls it becomes evident that they are pious only in order that after death one or another of their spiritual inclinations may bear fruit. All that they have acquired is an egotistic attitude of soul.

When in the course of spiritual research we trace the sequence of three such earthly lives, we find that in the first, the basic attitude of the soul was that of egotistic mysticism, egotistic religiosity. And when today we observe human beings with this attitude to life, we shall be able, by means of spiritual investigation to trace them back to times when souls without number developed a religious frame of mind out of sheer egoism. They then passed through an existence between death and rebirth without being able to receive from the spiritual Beings the gifts which would have enabled them to shape their next life rightly. In that life they became morose and hypochondriacal, finding everything distasteful. This life again prepared them for the ensuing one when, having passed through the gate of death, Ahriman and his hosts became their leaders and the forces with which they were imbued manifested in the following earthly life as defective logic, as an obtuse, undiscerning kind of thinking.

Here, then, we have another example of three successive incarnations. And we realise again and again what nonsense it is to believe that we can wait until death to establish connection with the super-sensible world. For how this connection is established after death depends upon the inner tendencies of soul acquired here on Earth towards the super-sensible world. Not only are the successive earthly lives connected as causes and effects, but the lives between death and the new birth are also connected in a certain way as causes and effects. This can be seen from the following.

When the seer directs his gaze into the super-sensible world where souls are sojourning after death, he will find among them those who during part of this life between death and rebirth are servants of those Powers whom we may call the Lords of all healthy, budding and burgeoning life on the Earth. (In the very lengthy period between death and rebirth, innumerable experiences are undergone and in accounts of the present kind, parts only can be described.) Among the dead we find souls who for a certain length of time in the super-sensible world co-operate in the wonderful task—for wonderful it is—of pouring, infusing into the physical world everything that can further the health of beings on the Earth, can help them to thrive and blossom. Just as in certain circumstances we can become servants of the evil spirits of illness and misfortune, so too we can become the servants of those spiritual beings who promote health and growth, who send down from the spiritual world into our physical world forces that help life to flourish. It is nothing but a materialistic superstition to believe that physical hygiene and external regulations are the sole means of promoting health. Everything that happens in physical life is directed by the beings and powers of higher worlds who are all the time pouring into the physical world forces which in a certain way work freely, upon human or other beings, either promoting or harming health and growth. Certain specific spiritual powers and beings are responsible for these processes in health and illness. In the life between death and rebirth man co-operates with these powers; and if we have prepared ourselves in the right way we can experience the bliss of co-operating in the task of sending the forces which promote health and growth, from the higher worlds into this physical world. And when the seer enquires into why such souls have deserved this destiny, he becomes aware that in physical life on Earth there are two ways in which human beings can execute and think about what they want to achieve.

Let us take a general look at life. We see numbers of human beings who carry out the work prescribed for them by their profession or office. Even if there is no radical case of any one of these people regarding their work as if they were animals being led to the slaughterhouse, it is at least true to say that they work because they are obliged to. Of course they would never neglect their duty—although of course anything may happen! In a certain sense it cannot be otherwise in the present phase of man's evolution; the only urge such people feel towards their work is that of duty. This does not by any means suggest that such work should be criticised root and branch. It should not be understood in this sense. Earth-evolution is such that this aspect of life will become more and more widespread; nor will things improve in the future. The tasks that men will have to carry out will become increasingly complicated in so far as they are connected with outer life and men will be condemned more and more to think and do only that to which duty drives them. Already there are hosts of human beings who do their work only because duty forces them to it, but on the other hand there will be people who look for a Society such as ours in which they can also achieve something, not simply from a sense of duty as in everyday life but for which they feel enthusiasm and devotion. Thus there are two aspects of a man's work: has it been thought out or done as an outer achievement merely from a sense of duty, or has it been done with enthusiasm and inner devotion, solely out of an inner urge of his own soul? This attitude—to think and act not merely out of a sense of duty, but out of love, inclination and devotion—this prepared the soul to become a server of the beneficent Powers of health and salutary forces sent down from the super-sensible world into our physical world, to become a servant of everything that brings health and to experience the bliss that can accompany these circumstances.

To know this is extremely important for the general well-being of man, for only by acquiring during life the forces that will enable him to co-operate with the Powers in question will he be able to work spiritually for an ever intensifying process of healing and betterment of conditions on the Earth.

We will now consider still another case, of one who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment and its demands. This by no means applies to everybody. There are some people who take no trouble to adjust themselves to the world and are never at home with the conditions either of spiritual or outer physical life. For example, there are individuals who notice an announcement that here or there an anthroposophical lecture will be given; they go to the place but almost as soon as they get seated, they are already asleep! In such cases the soul cannot adapt itself to the environment is not attuned to it. I have known men who cannot even sew on a button to replace one that has been torn off; that again means that they cannot adapt themselves to physical conditions. Countless cases could be quoted of people who cannot or will not adapt themselves to life. These symptoms are very significant, as I have said. At the moment, however, we will think only of the effects upon the life between death and rebirth.

Everything becomes cause and everything produces effects. A man who makes efforts to adapt himself to his environment, someone, that is to say, who can actually sew on a button or can listen to something with which he is unfamiliar without immediately falling asleep, is preparing himself to become, after death, a helper of those Spirits who further the progress of humanity and send down to the Earth the spiritual forces which promote life as it advances from epoch to epoch. After death we can experience the bliss of looking down upon earthly life and co-operating with the forces that are perpetually being sent to the Earth to further its progress, but this is possible only if we endeavour to adapt ourselves to our environment and its conditions. To be rightly and thoroughly understood Karma must be studied in details, in details which reveal the manifold ways in which causes and effects are connected here in the physical world, in the spiritual world and in existence as a whole.

Here again light is thrown upon the fact that our life in the spiritual worlds depends upon the mode of our life in the physical body. Each world has its own specific mission; no two worlds have an identical mission. The characteristic phenomena and experiences in one world are not the same in another. And if, for example, a being is meant to assimilate certain things on Earth, it is on Earth that he must do so; if he misses this opportunity he cannot acquire them in some other world. This is particularly the case in a matter which we have already considered but of which it will be well to be thoroughly aware. The matter in question concerns the acceptance of certain concepts and ideas needed by man for his life as a whole. Let us take an example that is near at hand. Anthroposophy is a timely and active force in our epoch. People approach and accept Anthroposophy during their life on Earth in the way known to you, but again the belief might arise that it is not necessary to cultivate Anthroposophy on Earth, for one will be in a position after death to know how things are in the spiritual worlds; that moreover the higher Hierarchies will also be there and able to impart to the soul what is necessary.

Now it is a fact that having passed through the phase of development leading to the present cycle of evolution, the human being, with his whole soul, has been prepared to contact on Earth the kind of anthroposophical life that is possible only while he is incarnated in a physical body. Men are predestined for this and if they fail they will be unable to establish relationship with any of the spiritual Beings who might have been their teachers. One cannot simply die and then, after death, find a teacher who might take the place of what here, during physical life on Earth, can come to souls in the form of Anthroposophy. We need not, however, be dejected by the fact that many individuals reject Anthroposophy and it is therefore to be assumed that they will not be able to acquire it between death and the new birth. We need not despair about them for they will be born in a new earthly life and by that time there will be a strong enough stimulus towards Anthroposophy and enough Anthroposophy on the Earth for them to acquire it. In the present age despondency is still out of place, but that should not lead anyone to say: I can acquire Anthroposophy in my next life and so can do without it now. No, what has been neglected here cannot be retrieved later on.

When our German Theosophical Movement was still very young I was once giving a lecture about Nietzsche, during which I said certain things about the spiritual worlds. At that time it was customary to have discussions and on this occasion someone got up and said that such matters must always be put to the test of Kant's philosophy, from which it would be evident that we can have no knowledge of these things here on Earth and can begin to know them only after death. That, quite literally, was what the man said. As I have repeatedly emphasised, it is not the case that one has only to die in order to acquire certain knowledge. When we pass through the gate of death we do not experience anything for which we have not prepared ourselves. Life between death and rebirth is throughout a continuation of the life here, as the examples already given have shown. Therefore as individuals we can acquire from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies only that for which we have prepared ourselves on Earth—perhaps by having become anthroposophists. Our connection with the Earth and our passage through the life on Earth have a significance which nothing else can replace.

A certain form of mediation is, however, possible in this connection and I have already spoken of it. A person may die and during his lifetime have had no knowledge at all of Spiritual Science; but his brother or his wife or a close friend were anthroposophists. The man who has died may have refused to have anything to do with Anthroposophy during his life; perhaps he consistently abused it. Now he has passed through the gate of death and Anthroposophy can be conveyed to him in some way by other personalities on Earth. But there must be someone on Earth who passes on the knowledge to him out of love. Connection with the Earth must be maintained. This is the basis of what I have called ‘reading to the dead’. We can render them great benefit even if previously they would listen to nothing about the spiritual world. We can help them either by putting what we have to say into the form of thoughts, conveying knowledge in this way, or we may take an anthroposophical book, visualise the personality concerned, and read to him from it; then he will learn. We have had a number of striking and beautiful examples in our Movement of how it has been possible in this way to benefit the dead. Many of our friends read to those who have died. I recently had an experience that others too may have had. Someone asked me about a friend who had died very recently and it seemed that he was trying to make himself noticed by means of all kinds of signs, especially at night, creating disturbance in the room, rapping and so on. Such happenings are often indications that the dead person wants something; and in this case it was quite evident. In his lifetime the man had been very erudite but had always rejected any knowledge of the spiritual world that might come his way. It became obvious that he would greatly benefit if a particular Lecture Course containing the subject-matter for which he was craving, were read to him. In this way very effective help can be given beyond death for something left undone on Earth.

The fact that can convince us of the great and significant mission of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy can bridge the gulf between the living and the dead, that when human beings die they have not really gone away from us but we remain connected with them and can be active on their behalf. If it is asked whether one can always know whether the dead soul also hears us, it must be said that those who do what has been described with genuine devotion will eventually become aware from the way in which the thoughts which they are sending to the dead live in their own souls that the dead person is hovering around them. But this is an experience, a feeling, of which sensitive souls alone are capable. The most distressing aspect is when something that might be a great service of love is not heeded; in that case it has been done unnecessarily for the person concerned, but it may still have some effect in the general pattern of worlds. In any case one should not grieve excessively about such lack of success. After all, it happens even here that something is read to people who do not listen!

These things may well give a true conception of the seriousness and worth of Anthroposophy. But it must constantly be emphasised that the conditions of our life in the spiritual world after death will depend entirely upon the manner of our life here on Earth. Even our community with others in the spiritual world depends upon the nature of the relationship we sought to establish with them here. If there has been no relationship with a human being here on Earth it cannot be taken for granted that any connection can be established in the other world between death and rebirth. The possibility of being led to him in the spiritual world is as a rule dependent upon the contact established here on Earth—not necessarily in the last incarnation only but in earlier lives as well.

In short, both objective and personal relationships established here on Earth are the decisive factor for the life between death and the new birth. Exceptions do occur but must be recognised as such. What I said here at Christmastime (in Lecture Five) about the Buddha and his present mission on Mars is one such exception. There are numbers of human souls on the Earth who were able to contact the Buddha—even in his previous existence as Bodhisattva—as a result of inspirations received from the Mysteries. But because the Buddha was incarnated for the last time as the son of Suddodana, then worked in his etheric body as I have described¹ and has now transferred his sphere of activity to Mars, at the present time the possibility exists that even if we never previously came in contact with the Buddha, we can establish a relationship with him in the life between death and rebirth; and we can then bring the results of that contact with us into the next incarnation on Earth. But that remains an exceptional case. The general rule is that after death we find those individuals with whom we had actual contacts here on Earth and continue these relationships in that other state of existence.

What has now been said is closely related to the information given during this Winter about the life between death and the new birth, and the aim has been to show that if Anthroposophy remains simply a matter of theory and external science, it is only half of what it ought to be; it fulfils its true function only when it streams through souls as a veritable elixir of life and enables these souls to experience in depth the feelings that arise in a human being when he acquires some knowledge of the higher worlds. Death then ceases to appear as a destroyer of human and personal relationships. The gulf between life here on Earth and the life after death is bridged and many activities carried out with this in mind will develop. The dead will send their influences into life, the living their influences into the realm of the dead.

My wish is that your souls will feel more deeply that life is enriched, becomes fuller and more spiritual when everything is influenced by Anthroposophy. Only those who feel this have the right attitude to Anthroposophy. What is of prime importance is not the knowledge that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego, that he passes through many incarnations, that the Earth too has passed through the several incarnations of Old Saturn, Old Sun and Old Moon, and so forth. The most important and essential need is to allow Anthroposophy to transform our lives in a way commensurate with the Earth's future. This feeling can never be experienced too deeply, nor can we bestir ourselves too often in this connection. The feelings we bear with us from these meetings and then move through life under the stimulus of the knowledge of the super-sensible worlds acquired here—these feelings are the really important element in anthroposophical life. Merely to have knowledge of Anthroposophy is not enough; knowledge and feeling must be combined. We must realise, however, how false it is to believe that without any understanding of the world we can do it justice. Leonardo da Vinci's saying is true: “Great love is the daughter of great understanding.” He who is not prepared to understand will not learn how to love.

It is in this sense that Anthroposophy should find entry into our souls, in order that from this influence which proceeds from our own being a stream of spirituality may find its way into Earth-evolution, creating harmony between spirit and matter. Life on the Earth will, it is true, continue to be materialistic—indeed outer life will become increasingly so—but as man moves over the Earth he will bear within his soul the realisation of his connection with the higher worlds. Outwardly, earthly life will become more and more materialistic—that is the Earth's karma—but in the same measure, if Earth-evolution is to reach its goal, souls must become inwardly more and more spiritual. My purpose today was to make a small contribution towards understanding this task.

• 1. See Lectures Three, Five and Six of the course, The Gospel of St. Luke

We have seen that necessity must be thought of in connection with the past, that the world contains as much necessity as it does past. For, as we tried to recognize, the past is reflected in the present. And there was another element involved: we hope to be so strengthened by our striving for clarity about just such concepts as we have been considering that we will be fit to take up the study of the truths of spiritual science. It is disastrous in many respects to have a great longing for what we might term deep spiritual-scientific truths if we shy away from strengthening our minds and thinking by taking in and thoroughly mastering concepts of a demanding nature. They are what disciplines our souls and spirits. And if we take pains to remain inwardly true in the process, no danger can ever threaten us from genuine spiritual-scientific concepts.

I have already mentioned, however, how often many people's longing for spiritual-scientific truths is found to outweigh their longing to work their way through to substantial concepts. Right at the beginning of our efforts in spiritual science there were some individuals who declared that they could not attend my lectures because they sank into a kind of sleep-state as a result of the concepts being discussed. A few especially mediumistic natures even carried things to the point of having to leave the lecture hall in Berlin. And one woman was actually found collapsed in sleep outside the hall, so powerful had been the lulling effect of the search for clear concepts!

The reproach was once made to Goethe that he created “pallid concepts” with his ideas about the metamorphosis of plants and animals and the primal phenomena of color. In his “Prophecies of Bakis,” which I have already had occasion to discuss, he inserted a passage referring to this avoidance of what people were calling “pallid concepts.”¹ As a matter of fact, this quatrain was also greatly misunderstood by those who tried to interpret these “Prophecies of Bakis.” Goethe said, “Pallid dost thou appear to me”—the concept, the idea—“and to the eye dead. How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe expressed with such accuracy the way people react who don't like to listen to clearly defined concepts, and therefore fall asleep, and who are always wanting to hear grand-sounding words about mysterious matters of the kind that give them something to dream about but never challenge them to think. They say, “Pallid dost thus appear to me, and to the eye dead”; they say it to those who want to speak occasionally on more sharply defined concepts. And they ask them, “How is it that you call forth holy life from founts of inner strength?” Goethe answers them, Passive would be your enjoyment if I could show you perfection.

Only the lack of it lifts you to levels beyond your own self.

In other words, the absence of those perfections that delight the eye or the senses in general proves elevating. Deadness overtakes those who do not attempt to take in and energetically work through what people often refer to as “pallid concepts.” It is therefore necessary, if we are to banish all traces of Baroque mysticism from the spiritual science we are pursuing, to devote ourselves occasionally to a concern with concepts of the utmost precision.

Thus far I have been talking about necessity. The question is now whether all the concepts that we tend, in ordinary life, to lump together with the concept of necessity really all deserve to be so linked. People say that what is necessary happens. But is this actually always the case? I would like to answer with a comparison that will clarify the matter. Let us suppose that we have a river with a gradually rising mountain chain beyond it, and we notice a stream or brook starting to run down from the heights. Let's imagine that something prevents our seeing beyond this point. We study the course of the stream or brook as it conforms to the contours of the mountain range and can state that according to what we are able to see from our vantage point it is a matter of necessity that this brook flows into this river. The mountain's formation conditions this, so that our sentence, “This brook flows into this river,” would unquestionably state a necessary fact. But now let us imagine that somebody decided to regulate the course of this brook, diverting it so that it flows in another direction. That person would have obviated the necessity, which would then not have developed. My comparison is crude, but it is a fact in life and in evolution that necessities don't always have to happen. We have to keep happenings and necessities apart. Two different concepts are involved here.

Now let us return to several previous concerns. First, let us review the insight we arrived at yesterday: that the past affects the present, appearing in reflection in it. But let us recall still another occasion on which mention of mirror images was also in order. We have often made a point of describing what takes place in human perception during ordinary waking consciousness. Human beings are really always outside their bodies and their bodily functions with that part of them that is engaged in the cognitive process; they live inside the things under study, as I've often said. And the fact that a person comes to know something is due to the reflection in his body of this experience he has inside things. So we can say that we are outside our bodies with one part of our perception, and our experience within things is reflected in our bodies.

If we now imagine ourselves looking at the color blue, we experience the blue of a flower, of chicory for example, but we do so unconsciously except for the fact of its reflection in our eyes. Our eyes are a part of our reflecting apparatus. We see the experience that we have in the chicory by allowing it to be reflected in our eyes. And we experience tone similarly. The life we live in tone is experienced unconsciously, and only becomes conscious through being reflected by our hearing organism. Our entire perceptive organism is a reflecting apparatus.

This is what I tried to establish as philosophical fact at the last Congress of Philosophers at Bologna.²

Cognition is thus engendered by reflection from our organism, by a reflecting of what we experience. And as you mull over this concept of reflection, both the reflecting of the past in the present and the reflecting of our present experience through our perceptive organism, you will have to admit that what is thus added to a thing or to an event in the form of reflections is a matter of total indifference to them, something that in neither case has anything directly to do with them. As you observe a mirror image you can quite well imagine that everything in it is as it is whether or not it is under observation. Reflections are therefore elements added to what is reproduced in them. That is especially the case with cognition; whether we develop this or that particular insight is not of the least consequence to the mirror image.

Now imagine yourselves walking through a landscape. Do you believe that the landscape would be any the less beautiful or in any way less whatever it is if you were not passing through it and experiencing it as a series of reflections engendered by your organism? No, those are elements added to the landscape and matters of total indifference to it. But is it a matter of indifference to you? No, it is not. For by walking today through a landscape that is reflected in your inner being and experiencing what is thus reflected, you will have become to some extent a different person in your soul tomorrow. What you experienced—a matter of total indifference to the landscape—signifies for you the beginning of an inner richness that can keep on growing there.

But what does all this really mean? It means, with reference again to the landscape metaphor, that we can say, “This situation was thus and such up to this point.” The fact that you walked through the landscape is a further addition to it. The landscape is reflected in you, becoming a further experience in your soul. Now how did what is continuing to grow there come into being? It did so as the result of something quite new being added to what had previously occurred. Something was really engendered in your soul out of nothingness, for contrasted with what had previously occurred, the reflection is of course a nothingness, a real, absolute nothingness. In other words, you relate to something to which there was no necessity to relate. You are an addition to it. You are added to a necessary happening as a living element that relates to it in a way not conditioned by previous events, since you could have stayed away. In that case, all that you gained from the reflection would not have become a part of the situation.

As you ponder examples of this kind, you become acquainted with the concept of chance; the real concept of it is to be found there. And you also gather from such examples that beings, things endowed with being, have to come up against each other, really to collide, for chance to occur. But we see from this that such a thing as chance can occur in the universe. If that were impossible, the enrichment of soul described above could not take place.

In this sense chance is a thoroughly legitimate concept. It is a real occurrence in cosmic events, and it shows us that new aspects of relationship can be garnered in cosmic evolution as products of reflection. If it were impossible for one participant to be linked with others without bringing about reflection in the cosmic process, then the occurrence of everything comprised in the term chance would be wholly out of the question. If the meadow through which you pass were to act as the agent of your passage, pulling you there with strings, and no reflection were to come about in you as described because of the meadow's total indifference, but the meadow were instead actively to imprint its impression on you, then the outcome could be called law-abiding necessity. But though it is hard to imagine it, there could then be no such thing as a present! There would be no present! And what would come of that? Why, beings who have no desire for such a linking up cannot progress any further if they follow such a course. They have to go back again. That is indeed the law governing devils and ghosts; they have to go out again by the door through which they entered. Goethe's Faust depicts this; they can't introduce any new evolutionary waves, and must return to the place they came from. And it is due to the possibility that new evolutionary waves can be set in motion in the developmental process of the cosmos that freedom exists.

In all our cognitive experiences, except for a certain category of them, no pure reflection takes place; the reflection is imperfect insofar as all kinds of impulses are combined with it. Concepts formed on the basis of past cognitive experience are imperfect. Once we have arrived at a pure concept, we no longer need merely to recall it; we can always create it anew. Though it becomes habitual, it is a habit that has finished with the past, and new reflections are constantly being summoned up with it. The concepts we form are pure reflections, which come to us from the beyond as additions to the things perceived. Therefore, when we form an impulse into concepts, it can be an impulse to freedom. That is what I attempted to develop at greater length in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.³ That is exactly the thought developed there.

But the concept of chance necessarily includes the concept of freedom. We must accustom ourselves to entertaining sharply defined concepts, for these are of immense significance for life. I want to cite an instance that has often been discussed here, but it is especially illuminating in the present context. Let us assume that we are studying illness. We must invariably look at illness from the standpoint of the present, never from the standpoint of the past, i.e., of necessity. This means enlivening the standpoint of the present by giving help to the full extent possible. Only if the illness terminates in death may we bring in the concept of necessity, realizing that necessity was involved. Anything other than this is the living present. We must be rigorous in adopting the standpoint that necessity inheres in the past; life rules the present. This example shows us that if we try to illumine concepts with the help of more fruitful viewpoints, we will acquire a certain knack for dealing with them.

A good deal could certainly be said on the subject of chance, and that will be done as time goes on. But for now I wanted to define the concept of chance and to clarify the extent to which it is valid. The easiest way to regard events after learning a little bit about karma is to say that everything is caused by karmic necessity. If someone has an incarnation at this point in time, then his life after death, and then his next incarnation, he calls something experienced in this second incarnation the consequence of the former life. But it is not absolutely necessary to look at things from the standpoint of the present; the consequence could be looked for further on, in the third incarnation. Something can occur then that we might be expecting to happen in the karma of the present incarnation. But an occurrence in the present incarnation may well be just the start of a karmic sequence, a reality generated by something presently living as a result of the reflection process. And the essential point here is that something is turned into a reality by a living element as a result of a reflection that is itself unreal. That is the way chance develops into necessity; when chance becomes a thing of the past, it is transformed into necessity.

On an occasion of great suffering, Goethe made a most beautiful statement, called by him “the word of a wise man.” He was speaking about the growth process of humanity, and said, “The rational world is to be looked upon as a single immortal individual engaged in a continuous bringing forth of what is necessary.” That is, bringing forth something, and when it has been brought forth, it is interwoven into the past and becomes necessity, “thus making itself the master of the element of chance.” A glorious saying to meditate upon! We can learn something from it too: Goethe wrote this sentence while experiencing great suffering, suffering that focused his entire feeling, his whole soul life, on the growth process of the human race, and caused him to ask what the actual course of this growth was. And there was wrung from his soul the realization that the rational world, the human race, brings forth what is necessary, and thus makes itself master over chance, in other words, incorporates chance forever into necessity.

I want to digress here for a moment. An insight such as I have just cited makes valuable material for meditation; it contains so much that flows into us as we meditate upon it. We shouldn't rest content with a mere abstract grasping of such a sentence, which emerged from Goethe's soul in his extreme old age, in 1828, when he was in the throes of great suffering. A great deal of life is packed into such a saying. And the digression I would like to make is this: our insights are always to be looked upon as grace bestowed upon us. And it is just those individuals who garner knowledge from the spiritual world who are aware what a matter of grace such knowledge is when they have prepared themselves to receive it, when their being reaches out to receive what flows to them from the spiritual world. One can experience over and over again how suitably prepared one must be for the reception of spiritual knowledge, how one must be able to wait for it, for one is not at just any and every moment in a condition to receive a particular insight from the spiritual world.

This fact must be stated in just such situations as ours, for it is only too easy for misconception to be piled upon misconception concerning the conditions under which supersensible insights flourish and can be fruitfully disseminated. Numbers of individuals come to me asking questions out of the blue about this or that, and often requesting information about matters that, at the time of questioning, are remote from my concern. They demand that I give them the most exact information. People are commonly convinced that a person who speaks out of a connection with the spiritual world knows about everything it contains and is always in a position to give out any information desired. And if he can't answer a question immediately, the comment is often made that the questioner is probably not supposed to be given the information, or something of the sort.

What we are dealing with here is too crude a conception of the relationship that exists between the spiritual world and the human soul. We should realize that “readiness for truth” is especially required for a direct reception of truths from the spiritual world. Misconceptions about these things must gradually be eliminated. Of course, people at some remove from the realm of truth in the life of the spirit feel a need to ask all sorts of questions, and answers can be given them from the investigator's store of memory, based on past research. But uninvestigated truths should not be requested out of the blue from spiritual researchers. Instead, it should be realized that the investigator feels requests for information about still unresearched matters to be like knife- cuts in his body, to use a physical analogy.

Definite laws govern everything that can lift human beings into the spiritual world. We need to familiarize ourselves with these laws to lessen misunderstandings about the flowing of spiritual truths into the physical world. Only by freeing ourselves from every trace of egoism—and this includes the desire for information on just any subject—will we create healthy conditions for the sort of movement this should and must be. Certain spiritual truths simply must be incorporated into the world today. But they should not encounter the kind of aspirations brought in from the world we formerly lived in or be pursued according to our erstwhile habits. The spiritual movement should not be undermined by them. In most cases, spiritual movements have been undermined by people's failure to adapt their habitual ways to spiritual truths, instead of bringing their accustomed habits to the reception of those truths. And so it could come about that a society was founded in the eighteenth century based upon what Jacob Boehme introduced into the spiritual life of Europe.⁴ It is now correctly reported that this society had a number of members, but only one—the founder of the society—survived. I certainly hope that more than one will do so in our case! But that was what happened in one attempt to establish a society. It is said, too, that a tremendous number of those who became members turned later on into really peculiar human beings. I don't want to go into all the further details reported about the adherents of that eighteenth century society at this point.

When we familiarize ourselves with the spiritual world, as we do in the process of absorbing spiritual science, we develop an ever growing sense of what it is to participate in it. And we prepare ourselves to make the right kind of understanding ascent into higher worlds by taking in, in the form of sharply defined concepts, the world we live in. Those who are unwilling to think as penetratingly about chance and necessity as we have been attempting to do here will not find it easy to rise to a conception of providence. For you see, we can learn a great deal from the spiritual beings who surround us.

The mental niveau of our time is that of mindlessness. I've tried to give you an idea of it by citing some of Fritz Mauthner's comments. I want to add one of the most curious remarks he has made so that you will see what an honest man is capable of, a man who not only says of the prevailing science of the day that it is the only science in existence and that we have overcome the ignorance of our stupid ancestors, but who honestly accepts the prevailing outlook and then goes on to draw some remarkable conclusions about a certain matter.

I once described Mauthner as “out-Kanting Kant.” He did not just write a Critique of Pure Reason, but a Critique of Language. He really got going on words. He invented a definition for the way a word moves from one category to another. I am deliberately citing an incorrect example from his Dictionary of Philosophy, but it is one that he himself held to be correct. The earlier periods of Latin civilization had a word for truth: veritas. Now Mauthner says that the word veritas was introduced into more recent German use, was simply taken over, to become the German word Wahrheit. He terms words in this category “borrowings” (literally “loan translations”). And he traces words thus borrowed through civilization after civilization with tremendous acuity and conscientiousness, tracking down their wanderings and transformations. He does an incredible amount of rummaging around in words. Nowhere does he share Faust's longing to behold “germs and productive powers”; he simply rummages around in words with utmost zeal.

He made attempts like the following: Let us imagine some people or other with its characteristic views. Mauthner cares only about the words derived from these views, for, to him, thinking consists of words. Now, he says, there are the words, but they can be traced back to another people. The second group, where we now come upon the words, borrowed them from the first group and transformed them. And he actually perpetrates the following: (I must cite the example, as it is really too nice for words to show you the way adherents of the present outlook must think to be faithful to it. It is vitally important not to pass lightly over things of this sort.) Mauthner traces various borrowings, looking for the various transformations that have come about in words. Among them the following:

Kaffee (“coffee”), borrowed from another language and still a foreign word in the sense that in German at least the way it is written and spoken is not homogeneous. “Potato” is an English loan from some Red Indian language; in the German Kartoffel there is either a borrowing or a bastardization based upon a shift in meaning; whereas in Erd-apfel (“earth-apple”) and Grum- or Bodebirn (“ground-pear”) we are dealing with cases of transliteration or of description.

The Romans adopted the Greek custom of crowning victors of a race, or on the occasion of a feast, with a wreath, and wreaths of flowers were also used elsewhere for these purposes. But it was only at the time of the Renaissance that the term “crown” was re-introduced in noun and verb form; there were poets' crowns and crowned poets, with the word “crown” signifying “wreath” as in Latin. The plant species used was native to Greece, and was imported, in historical times at least, both as a plant and as a word. The German Lorbeer (“laurel”) (the shrub, not the berry; “baccalaureus” became in turn the symbol of an academic title, the baccalauriat; in French, bachelier; its meaning twisted again to become the English “bachelor”) became the “vegetable of fame” of Speidel's jesting. And crowned poets from Petrarch to Tennyson were called “poets laureate.” The cheap laurel needed no replacement. The myrtle-wreath, which, as a result of faulty observation, or of a still more mistaken popular etymology, was regarded somewhere in the Orient as the symbol of sexual life and later became a chastity symbol, was more easily acquired in Germany as a weed than as a blossom; German brides therefore wear wreaths or crowns of the genuine leaves and false blossoms. Palms are replaced at Easter by pussy-willows as the only seasonal green plant available. And because palms, which in the Orient are the obvious plants for decorative purposes, have lent their name as a prefix to such terms as Palm Sunday and Palm Week in characterizations of the festival season, the green willow branches substituted for them have been designated “palm branches” and “palm catkins.”

As you see, Mauthner traces borrowed terms and words like these in their transmutations from one national region to another. And then he adds, “In the case of verbs too there is no end to the carry-over from Christianity to western peoples of such actual borrowings. The migration of the real facts of the Christian ritual and of Christian thinking may be studied in this book (cf. the article on Christianity).”

If we open the book to that article we come upon a remarkable sentence; “I want to state and demonstrate one thing only in regard to the development of Christianity as the creation of the Germanic and Germanic-Roman peoples, and to the way it still dominates western civilization, for the time being, in western usage, vocabulary and concerns. That is, that Christianity as a whole represents the most prodigious borrowing, or chain of borrowings, that it is possible to find in a scrutiny of history.”

What, then, is Christianity, according to Mauthner? A collection of borrowings! There were words at the time Christianity began. And if we want to find Christianity in Europe today, we'll have to make a search for borrowed words! What Mauthner is claiming is that Christianity is nothing but a collection of such borrowings. The whole civilization of Europe would have to have developed quite differently if certain words had just not happened to get borrowed! But the important thing to note here is that this finding is the logical consequence of current scientific assumptions. It is a consequence logically and honestly reached, and those who fail to draw it are simply less honest than Mauthner. Those who have adopted today's scientific outlook can only agree that all of Christianity means nothing more to them than a collection of borrowed words.

Somebody might object that Mauthner is only pointing out the fact that “coffee” entered our language as a borrowed word, but not how coffee itself was introduced into Europe. It is true that Mauthner didn't indicate that Christianity had to be introduced into Europe because it was a collection of borrowings. He made no assertion whatever on this score. This objection cannot be made without further ado; instead we have to say that those who think in the style of modern science are simply incapable of judging the matter. They are excluding themselves from any discussion of the issue; that is the point.

Small wonder, then, that a man who, in addition to all that I've had to say about him, is also really quite a clever fellow, says,

I don't go as far as James does (Psychology, p. 297) when he holds it impossible to improve memory.⁵ It would not be impossible to render the organs that serve memory capable of greater achievement by exercising them, as has been shown to be possible in the case of the muscles. It is certainly true that educational psychology, which believes that it can strengthen memory in the young by senseless exercises, is based upon the old associative psychology, which sees in memory the mental picture of a force, just as it does in the case of imagining other such mental pictures which this force learns to play with. If memory is nothing more than activity in the same sense that the soul is nothing more than its experiences, then nothing remains to be strengthened. Iron will that does not permit itself to forget useful knowledge and exerts itself to remember when remembering is required is a facet of character, and an individual's memory is in this sense unalterable, as character is. But quite aside from all such considerations, the pointless drilling that goes on in schools is every bit as senseless as the training of the wrong muscles for some special use of the limbs would be. A person who has learned nothing in his younger years except to walk on his hands can make no use of this capability later unless he intends to become a circus performer.

In Mauthner's opinion, schoolchildren receive training that teaches them a wrong use of their brains, analogous to a person's learning only to walk on his hands, an equally useless ability. But although this is clear to Mauthner, he has absolutely no suggestions as to what should take the place of this schooling. (I have explained to you how, in this respect too, furthering what we are developing in eurythmy is important).

Walking on their hands, with their heads down, is the chief training being given our young people. Bible verses (in the elementary grades), memorizing all the tributaries of some foreign river (in the middle school), tables and professional data presented in reference books (at the university level) form the memory training defended on the basis of an assumed strengthening of memory! On the occasion of my state examinations in the history of jurisprudence, I was required to list the 13 prerogatives of a cardinal in their God-ordained order, not forgetting the prerogative of a pallium woven by a particular group of nuns in a particular convent.

Schools should limit themselves to training character, to training it for the function of finding the easiest and best means of access to useful concepts of the real world.

By now we might expect this gentleman to be suggesting what the substitute for the above should be. People of any intelligence can only agree that the way mental training has been carried on ought not to continue, so they expect to hear what he suggests instead. But the article ends right there! There is nothing more! He has been chasing his pigtail in vain, to use yesterday's metaphor. Almost every article in his dictionary creates the impression that he is unsuccessfully chasing the pigtail hanging down behind him.

If we work our way through the concepts necessity and chance and learn to recognize that the human world is to be regarded as an “immortal individual” continuously bringing necessity about and thus establishing dominion over chance, and then add to this the concept that must be acquired if we are to understand how the spiritual world streams into the human soul, we gradually work our way through to a concept of something elevated above necessity and chance, and that is providence. It is a concept attained by a gradual working up to it.

I have often called your attention to the fact that merely looking at the world conveys nothing as to the effect of activities going on in it. It would be good to cultivate the right feeling for what I've just been saying by concerning ourselves in depth with the genius of language that lives behind words, instead of doing as Mauthner does in his concern with speech. Mauthner's data could even assist such an effort on occasion, for the tremendous zeal with which he has ferreted things out can sometimes bring a person contemplating the activity of the genius of language to significant insights that he might not otherwise become aware of. The genius of language does indeed guide us to a plane elevated above necessity and chance. A great deal we participate in goes on around us as we are speaking, without our having a true knowledge of it because we are incapable of lifting it fully into our consciousness. This is the spiritual world, holding sway around us. And to take just a random example, when we speak, these spiritual worlds speak too. We should make the attempt to be aware of this.

Let us try to make a small beginning with it. We have associated necessity with the past and chance with the immediate present. For if everything were necessity, it would also be of the past, and nothing new could ever come into being. That would mean that there could be no life. So if we involve ourselves and our own lives in the world's evolution, we would be confronted by necessity or the reflected past, and in our current life by what is called chance. These two interact. We have two streams: our present life, which we think of as simply chance, and the reflected past or necessity flowing along underneath it. What is considered real from the ordinary physical standpoint can only be related to the past, to necessity, if reality is taken to mean conformity with what already exists. The real has to belong to the past, to the necessary, while what is in the living process of coming into being always has to be freshly produced. Our life is lived in this, and we have to develop living concepts that flow out of necessity to deal with that life. Here, we cannot be onlookers at something corresponding to the concept; we can only live in it. When our own lives confront the stream of evolution, we can therefore preserve the past in the developing stream of life by now transforming the reflected picture into a present element. And we can make it into an ongoing present.

We can make a human virtue of transforming into ongoing life the past that has become rigid necessity, carrying reflections further, keeping them alive and evolving in ourselves. And what name do we give the virtue that carries the past into further life stages? Loyalty! Loyalty is the virtue related to the past, just as love is the virtue related to the present, to immediate living.

But speaking of these matters brings us to what I want to say about the genius of language that we need to become aware of. Wahrheit, the German word for truth, has no connection whatsoever with the Latin veritas; it suggests the past and necessity and ordinary truth, for it is related to the German bewahren (“to preserve”), to bewähren (“to hold good”), to währen, (“to last”), with all that is carried over into the present from the past. And there is a still stronger suggestion of the same meaning in the English language, which translates both the German wahr (“true”) and the German treu (“loyal”) as “true.” And if we want to describe someone telling the truth and being believed, the old German saying auf Treu und Glauben (“on trust,” “in good faith”) is still in use, with treu rather than wahr. Here we see the genius of language at work, and its work is wiser than what human beings do.

And when we ascend from the concept of loyalty to that of love, and then to what I have described in the past as grace, a state of being we have to wait for, we come to the concept of providence; we enter the world where providence holds sway.

If Fritz Mauthner were to concern himself with providence, he would of course search out the source from which it is borrowed and trace the connection of the German Vorsehung (“providence”) to sehen (“to see”) and vorhersehen (“to foresee”), and so on. But a person concerned with reality searches for the world indicated when the union of chance and necessity plays the dominant role rather than either one alone. And the world referred to is that in which there is no such thing as the past in our sense.

I have often told you that when we look into the spiritual world and see the past, it is as though the past had remained standing; it is still there. Time becomes space. The past ceases to be simply the past. Then the concept of necessity also ceases to have any meaning. There is no longer a past, a present, and a future, but rather a state of duration. Lucifer remained behind during the moon evolution in exactly the same way that someone on a walk with another person may stay behind, either out of laziness or because his feet are sore, while his companion keeps on walking. Lucifer has as little directly to do with our earth existence as a person who stays behind has to do with places eventually reached by his companion. He stayed behind during the moon evolution, and there he still remains. In the spiritual world we cannot speak of past things, but only of a state of duration. Lucifer has remained as he was on the moon. All our concepts of necessity and chance change when we look into the spiritual world; providence holds sway there.

I wanted at least to particularize the realms in which what we call necessity, chance and providence are to be sought. This has been a beginning only, and we will return to these matters after spending some time on others. For we must devote ourselves occasionally to studies of a kind that more “mystically” oriented natures may consider unnecessary in a movement like ours. I must regard them as very necessary, however, because I believe that it is also essential for every genuine mystic to occupy himself with thinking.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, dramatist, and novelist. The quoted quatrain is from his poetry collection entitled The East-West Divan, published in 1819. The poems are influenced by ancient Persian and Arabian poetry.
• 2. Sixth International Congress for Philosophy, Bologna, 1911.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1986).
• 4. Jacob Boehme, 1575–1624, German pantheist mystic. He was a shoemaker by profession and the first philosopher to write in German rather than in Latin.
• 5. William James, 1842–1910, American psychologist and Pragmatist philosopher. Published Principles of Psychology in 1890

We will now continue our discussions by speaking of certain matters of method, and here I should like to say that in these few lectures our purpose cannot be to give detailed indications but only general principles. You can also study the Waldorf School Seminar Courses, and with the indications you have received here you will be able to understand them thoroughly. We must get a clear picture of the child between the change of teeth and puberty; we must know that in the years before the change of teeth the inherited characteristics are the determining factors, and that the child receives from his father and mother a “model” body which is completely thrown aside by the time he changes his teeth, for during the first seven-year period it is being replaced by a new body. The change of teeth, indeed, is only the external expression of this replacing of the old body by a new one, upon which the soul and spirit are now at work.

I have already told you that if the spirit-soul is strong, then during the school period from the change of teeth to puberty the child may go through great changes as regards the qualities he formerly possessed. If the individuality is weak, the result will be a body that very closely resembles the inherited characteristics, and with the children of school age we shall still have to take into account deeply-rooted resemblances to the parents or grandparents.

We must be clear in our minds that the independent activity of the etheric body of man only really begins at the change of teeth. The etheric body in the first seven years has to put forward all the independent activity of which it is capable in order to build up the second physical body. So that this etheric body is pre-eminently an inward artist in the child in the first seven years; it is a modeller, a sculptor. And this modelling force, which is applied to the physical body by the etheric body, becomes free, emancipates itself with the change of teeth at the seventh year. Then it can work as an activity of soul.

This is why the child has an impulse to model forms or to paint them. For the first seven years of life the etheric body has been carrying out modelling and painting within the physical body. Now that it has nothing further to do as regards the physical body, or at least not as much as before, it wants to carry its activity outside. If therefore you as teachers have a wide knowledge of the forms that occur in the human organism, and consequently know what kind of forms the child likes to mould out of plastic material or to paint in colour, then you will be able to give him the right guidance. But you yourselves must have a kind of artistic conception of the human organism. It is therefore of real importance for the teacher to try and do some modelling himself, for the teachers' training of today includes nothing of this sort. You will see that however much you have learnt about the lung or the liver, or let us say the complicated ramifications of the vascular system, you will not know as much as if you were to copy the whole thing in wax or plasticine. For then you suddenly begin to have quite a different kind of knowledge of the organs, of the lung for instance. For as you know you must form one half of the lung differently from the other half; the lung is not symmetrical. One half is clearly divided into two segments, the other into three. Before you learn this you are constantly forgetting which is left and which is right. But when you work out these curious asymmetrical forms in wax or plasticine, then you get the feeling that you could not change round left and right any more than you could put the heart on the right hand side of the body. You also get the feeling that the lung has its right place in the organism with its own particular form, and if you mould it rightly you will feel that it is inevitable for the human lung to come gradually into an upright position in standing and walking. If you model the lung forms of animals you will see or you will feel from the touch that the lung of an animal lies horizontally. And so it is with other organs.

You yourselves therefore should really try to learn anatomy by modelling the organs, so that you can then get the children to model or to paint something that is in no way an imitation of the human body but only expresses certain forms. For you will find that the child has an impulse to make forms that are related to the inner human organism. You may get some quite extraordinary experiences in this respect in the course of your lessons.

We have introduced lessons on simple Physiology in the school, and especially in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh classes, as this is obviously an integral part of the Waldorf School method. Our children paint from the very beginning, and from a certain age they also do carving. Now if you simply let the children work freely it is very interesting to see that when you have explained anything about the human being to them, the lung for instance, then out of themselves they begin to model such forms as the lung or something similar. It is really interesting to see how the child forms things out of his own being. That is why it is essential for you to take up this plastic method, and to find ways and means of making faithful reproductions of the forms of the human organs exactly in wax or plasticine—even, if you like, as our children often do, in mud, for if you have nothing else that is very good material to work with.

This is an inner urge, an inner longing of the etheric body, to be at work in modelling or painting. So you can very easily turn this impulse and longing to account by deriving the letters of the alphabet out of the forms which the child paints or models, for then you will be really moulding your teaching out of a knowledge of man. This is what must be done at this stage.

Now to proceed. Man consists not only of his physical body and etheric body, which latter is emancipated and free at the seventh year, but also of the astral body and ego. What happens to the astral body of the child between the seventh and fourteenth year? It does not really come to its full activity till puberty. Only then is it working completely within the human organism. But whilst the etheric body between birth and the change of teeth is in a certain sense being drawn out of the physical body and becoming independent, the astral body is gradually being drawn inwards between the seventh and fourteenth year, and when it has been drawn right in and is no longer merely loosely connected with the physical and etheric bodies but permeates them completely, then the human being has arrived at the moment of puberty, of sex maturity.

With the boy one can see by the change of voice that the astral body is now quite within the larynx, with the girl one can see by the development of other organs, breast organs and so on, that the astral body has now been completely drawn in. The astral body finds its way slowly into the human body from all sides.

The lines and directions it follows are the nerve fibres. The astral body comes in along the nerve fibres from without inwards. Here it begins to fill out the whole body from the outer environment, from the skin, and gradually draws itself together inside. Before this time it is a kind of loose cloud, in which the child lives. Then it draws itself together, lays firm

hold upon all the organs, and if we may put it somewhat crudely, it unites itself chemically with the organism, with all the tissues of the physical and etheric body.

But something very strange happens here. When the astral body presses inwards from the periphery of the body it makes its way along the nerves which then unite in the spine (see

drawing). Above is the head. It also forces its way slowly through the head nerves, crawls along the nerves towards the central organs, towards the spinal cord, bit by bit, into the head, gradually coming in and filling it all out.

What we must chiefly consider in this connection is how the breathing works in with the whole nervous system. Indeed this working together of the breathing with the whole nervous system is something very special in the human organism. As teacher and educator one should have the very finest feeling for it; only then will one be able to teach rightly. Here then the air enters the body, distributes itself, goes up through the spinal column (see drawing), spreads out in the brain, touches the nerve fibres everywhere, goes down again and pursues paths by which it can then be ejected as carbon dioxide. So we find the nervous system being constantly worked upon by the in-breathed air which distributes itself, goes up through the spinal column, spreads out again, becomes permeated with carbon, goes back again and is breathed out.

It is only in the course of the first school period, between the change of teeth and puberty, that the astral body carries this whole process of breathing, passing along the nerve fibres, right into the physical body. So that during this time when the astral body is gradually finding its way into the physical body with the help of the air breathed in, it is playing upon something that is stretched across like strings of an instrument in the centre of the body, that is, upon the spinal column. Our nerves are really a kind of lyre, a musical instrument, an inner musical instrument that resounds up into the head.

This process begins of course before the change of teeth, but at that time the astral body is only loosely connected with the physical body. It is between the change of teeth and puberty that the astral body really begins to play upon the single nerve fibres with the in-breathed air, like a violin bow on the strings.

You will be fostering all this if you give the child plenty of singing. You must have a feeling that the child is a musical instrument while he is singing, you must stand before your class to whom you are teaching singing or music with the clear feeling: every child is a musical instrument and inwardly feels a kind of well-being in the sound.

For you see, sound is brought about by the particular way the breath is circulated. That is inner music. To begin with, in the first seven years of life, the child learns everything by imitation, but now he should learn to sing out of the inward joy he experiences in building up melodies and rhythms. To show you the kind of inner picture you should have in your mind when you stand before your class in a Singing lesson, I should like to use a comparison which may seem a little crude, but which will make clear to you what I mean. I do not know how many of you, but I hope most, have at some time been able to watch a herd of cows who have fed and are now lying in the meadow digesting their food.

This digestive process of a herd of cows is indeed a marvellous thing. In the cow a kind of image of the whole world is present. The cow digests her food, the digested foodstuffs pass over into the blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, and during this whole process of digestion and nourishment the cow has a sensation of well-being which is at the same time knowledge. During the process of digestion every cow has a wonderful aura in which the whole world is mirrored. It is the most beautiful thing one can see, a herd of cows lying in the meadow digesting their food, and in this process of digestion comprehending the whole world. With us human beings all this has sunk into the subconscious, so that the head can reflect what the body works out and sees revealed as knowledge.

We are really in a bad way, we human beings, because the head does not allow us to experience the lovely things that the cows, for example, experience. We should know much more of the world if we could experience the digestive process, for instance. We should then of course have to experience it with the feeling of knowledge, not with the feeling that man has when he remains in the subconscious in his digestive process. This is simply to make clear what I want to say. I do not wish to imply that we now have to raise the process of digestion into consciousness in our teaching, but I want to show that there is something that should really be present in the child at a higher stage, this feeling of wellbeing at the inward flow of sound. Imagine what would happen if the violin could feel what is going on within it! We only listen to the violin, it is outside us, we are ignorant of the whole origin of the sound and only hear the outward sense picture of it. But if the violin could feel how each string vibrates with the next one it would have the most blissful experiences, provided of course that the music is good. So you must let the child have these little experiences of ecstasy, so that you really call forth a feeling for music in his whole organism, and you must yourself find joy in it.

Of course one must understand something of music. But an essential part of teaching is this artistic element of which I have just spoken.

On this account it is essential, for the inner processes of life between the change of teeth and puberty demand it, to give the children lessons in music right from the very beginning, and at first, as far as possible to accustom them to sing little songs quite empirically without any kind of theory: nothing more than simply singing little songs, but they must be well sung! Then you can use simpler songs from which the children can gradually learn what melody, rhythm and beat are, and so on; but first you must accustom the children to sing little songs as a whole, and to play a little too as far as that is possible. Unless there is clearly no bent at all in this direction every Waldorf child begins to learn some instrument on entering school; as I say, as far as circumstances allow, each child should learn to play an instrument. As early as possible the children should come to feel what it means for their own musical being to flow over into the objective instrument, for which purpose the piano, which should really only be a kind of memorising instrument, is of course the worst possible thing for the child. Another kind of instrument should be chosen, and if possible one that can be blown upon. Here one must of course have a great deal of artistic tact and, I was going to say, a great deal of authority too. If you can, you should choose a wind instrument, as the children will learn most from this and will thereby gradually come to understand music. Admittedly, it can be a hair-raising experience when the children begin to blow. But on the other hand it is a wonderful thing in the child's life when this whole configuration of the air, which otherwise he encloses and holds within him along the nerve-fibres, can now be extended and guided. The human being feels how his whole organism is being enlarged. Processes which are otherwise only within the organism are carried over into the outside world. A similar thing happens when the child learns the violin, when the actual processes, the music that is within him, is directly carried over and he feels how the music in him passes over into the strings through his bow.

But remember, you should begin giving these Music and Singing lessons as early as possible. For it is of very great importance that you not only make all your teaching artistic, but that you also begin teaching the more specifically artistic subjects, Painting, Modelling and Music, as soon as the child comes to school, and that you see to it that he really comes to possess all these things as an inward treasure.

The point of time in the life of the child which falls between the ninth and tenth year must be very specially borne in mind in the teaching of languages. I have characterised for you this turning point between the ninth and tenth year as the time when the child first learns to differentiate between himself and his environment. Up to this time they have been as one. I have already indicated the right method of teaching for the child entering school, but he ought not really to come to school before he begins to change his teeth; one might say that fundamentally any kind of school teaching before this time is wrong; if we are forced to it by law we must do it, but it is not the right thing from the point of view of artistic education. In a true art of education the child should not enter school until the change of teeth. Our first task, as I have shown you, is to begin with something artistic and work out the forms of the letters through art; you should begin with some independent form of art as I have explained to you, and treat everything that has to do with nature in the mood and fashion of fairy tales, legends and myths, in the way I have described. But for the teaching of languages it is specially important to consider this epoch between the ninth and tenth year.

Before this point of time is reached language teaching must under no circumstances be of an intellectual nature; that is to say it must not include any grammar or syntax. Up to the ninth or tenth year the child must learn to speak the foreign language just as he acquires any other habit; he must learn to speak as a matter of habit. It is only when he learns to differentiate himself from his environment that he may begin to examine what he himself is bringing forth in his speech. It is only now that one can begin to speak of noun, adjective, verb and so on, not before. Before this time the child should simply speak and be kept to this speaking.

We have a good opportunity for carrying this out in the Waldorf School, because as soon as the child comes to us at the beginning of his school life he learns two foreign languages besides his mother tongue.

The child comes to school and begins with Main Lessons in periods, as I have already described; he has the Main Lesson for the early part of the morning, and then directly after that the little ones have a lesson which for German children is either English or French. In these language lessons we try not to consider the relationship of one language to the other. Up till the point of time I have described to you between the ninth and tenth year, we disregard the fact that a table for instance is called “ Tisch” in German and “table” in English, that to eat is “ essen” in German and “eat” in English; we connect each language not with the words of another language, but directly with the objects. The child learns to call the ceiling, the lamp, the chair, by their names, whether it is in French or in English. Thus from the seventh to the ninth year we should not attach importance to translation, that is to say rendering a word in one language by a word in another, but the children simply learn to speak in the language, connecting their words with the external objects. So that the child does not need to know or rather does not need to think of the fact that when he says “table” in English it is called “ Tisch” in German, and so on; he does not concern himself with this at all. This does not occur to the children, for they have not been taught to compare the language in any way.

In this manner the child learns every language out of the element from which it stems, namely, the element of feeling. Now a language consists, of course, of sounds, and is either the expression of the soul from within, in which case there is a vowel, or else it is the expression of something external and then there is a consonant. But one must feel this first of all. You will not of course pass on to the children exactly what I am saying here, but in the course of your lesson the child should actually experience the vowel as something connected with feeling, and the consonant as a copy of something in the outside world. He will do this of himself because it lies in human nature, and we must not drive out this impulse but rather lead on from it.

For let us think, what is the vowel A [In these references to A and E the sounds of Ah and Eh should be considered, not the names of the letters.] (ah)? (This does not belong to the lesson, but is only something you ought to know!) What is A? When the sun rises I stand in admiration before it: Ah! A is always the expression of astonishment, wonder. Or again, a fly settles on my forehead; I say: E (Eh). That is the expression of warding off, doing away with: E. The English sounds are somewhat differently connected with our feelings, but in every language, English included, we find that the vowel A expresses astonishment and wonder.

Now let us take a characteristic word: roll—the rolling of a ball, for instance. Here you have the R. Who could help feeling that with the R and the L together, the ball rolls on (see drawing a.). R alone would be like this (see drawing b.):

R. L. goes on. L always implies a flowing on. Here you have an external process imitated in the consonant (see drawing c.).

So the whole language is built up in the vowels out of a feeling of inner astonishment, wonder, self-defence, self-assertion, etc., or out of a feeling of imitation in the case of the consonants. We must not drive these feelings out of the child. He should learn to develop the sound from the external objects and from the way in which his own feelings are related to them. Everything should be derived from the feeling for language. In the word “roll” the child should really fed: r, o, l, l. It is the same thing for every word.

This has been completely lost for modern civilised man. He thinks of the word simply as something written down or something abstract. Man can no longer really feel his way into language. Look how all primitive languages still have feeling within them; the most civilised languages make speech an abstract thing. Look at your own English language, how the second half of the word is simply cast aside, and one skips over the real feeling of the sounds. But the child must dwell in this feeling for language.

This must be cultivated by examining characteristic words in which such a feeling plays. Now in German we call what one has up here “Kopf.” In English it is called “head,” in Italian “testa.” With the abstract kind of relationship to language that people usually have today, what do they say about this? They say, in German the word is “Kopf,” in Italian “testa,” in English “head.” But all this is absolutely untrue. The whole thing is nonsense.

For let us think: “Kopf,” what is that? “Kopf” is what is formed, something that has a rounded form. Theform is expressed when you say “Kopf.” When you say “testa”—you have it in the word “testament” and “testify”—then you are expressing the fact that the head establishes or confirms something. Here you are expressing something quite different. You say of that organ that sits up there: that is the establisher, the testator— testa. Now in English one holds the opinion that the head is the most important part of man, (although you know of course that this opinion is not quite correct). So that in English you say “head,” that is, the most important thing, the goal of all things, the aim and meeting-place of all.

Thus different things are expressed in the different languages. If people wanted to designate the same thing, then the Englishman and the Italian too would say “Kopf.” But they do not designate the same thing. In the primeval human language the same thing was expressed everywhere, so that this primeval language was the same for all. Then people began to separate and to express things differently; that is how the different words came about. When you designate such different things as though they were the same you no longer feel what is contained in them, and it is very important not to drive out this feeling for language. It must be kept alive and for this reason you must not analyse language before the ninth or tenth year.

Only then can you pass on to what a noun, a verb or an adjective is and so on: this should not be done before the ninth or tenth year, otherwise you will be speaking of things which are connected with the child's own being, and this he cannot yet understand because he cannot yet distinguish himself from his environment. It is most important to bear in mind that we must not allow any Grammar or comparison of languages before the ninth or tenth year. Then what the child gets from speaking will be similar to what he gets in his singing.

I have tried to illustrate this inner joy in singing by picturing to you the inner feeling of pleasure that rises up out of the digestive organs of the cows in the meadow when they are digesting their food. There must be present an inner feeling of joy of this kind, or at least some feeling for the thing itself, so that the children feel what is really contained in a word, that they feel the inward “rolling.” Language must be inwardly experienced and not only thought out with the head. Today you mostly find that people only “think” language with their head. Therefore when they want to find the right word in translating from one language into another they take a dictionary. Here the words are so put together that you find “testa” or “Kopf” and people imagine that that is all the same. But it is not all the same. A different conception is expressed in each word, something that can only be expressed out of feeling. We must take this into account in language teaching. And another element comes in here, something which belongs to the spirit. When the human being dies, or before he comes down to earth, he has no possibility of understanding the so-called substantives, for example. Those whom we call the dead know nothing about substantives; they know nothing of the naming of objects, but they still have some knowledge of qualities, and it is therefore possible to communicate with the dead as regards qualities. But in the further course of the life after death that soon ceases also. What lasts longest is an understanding of verbs, words of action, active and passive expressions, and longest of all the expression of sensations: Oh! Ah! I (ee), E (eh); these interjectional expressions are preserved longest of all by the dead.

From this you can see how vital it is that if the human soul is not to become entirely un-spiritual it should have a living experience of interjections. All interjections are actually vowels. And the consonants, which as such are in any case very soon lost after death, and were not present before the descent to earth, are copies of the external world. This we should really experience in our feeling, be aware of it in the child, and see that we do not drive it out by giving lessons on nouns, adjectives and so on too early, but wait with these until the ninth or tenth year is reached.

From the first class of the Waldorf School upwards we have introduced Eurythmy, this visible speech in which, by carrying out certain movements either alone or in groups, man actually reveals himself just as he reveals himself through speech. Now if there is the right treatment in the language lessons, that is to say if the teacher does not ruin the child's feeling for language but rather cherishes it, then the child will feel the transition to Eurythmy to be a perfectly natural one, just as the very little child feels that learning to speak is also a perfectly natural process. You will not have the slightest difficulty in bringing Eurythmy to the children. If they are healthily developed children they will want it. You will always discover something that is pathologically wrong with children who do not wish to do Eurythmy. They want it as a matter of course, just as when they were quite little children they wanted to learn to speak, if all their organs were sound. That is because the child feels a very strong impulse to express his inward experiences as activities of will in his own body. This can be seen in the very early years when he begins to laugh and cry, and in the various ways in which feelings are expressed in the face.

It would have to be a very metaphorical way of speaking if you were to say that a dog or any other animal laughs. In any case it does not laugh in the same way as the human being does, neither does it cry in the same way. Indeed in the animal all gestures and movements which carry over inward experience into the element of will are quite different. There is a great difference between animal and man in this respect.

What is expressed in Eurythmy rests upon laws just as language does. Speaking is not an arbitrary thing. With a word like “water” for instance, you cannot put another vowel in place of the “a,” you cannot say “wuter,” or anything like that. Speech has laws, and so has Eurythmy. In the ordinary movements of the body man is in a sense free, although he also does many things out of a certain instinct. When he is cogitating about something, he puts his finger to his forehead; when he wants to show that something is not true, he shakes his head and his hand, extinguishing it, as it were. But Eurythmy leads inward and outward experiences over into ordered movements, just as speech leads an inward experience over into the sound: this is what Eurythmy is, and the child wants to learn it. For this reason the fact that Eurythmy is not yet taught in modern education proves that there is no thought of drawing forth the human faculties out of the very nature of man himself, for if you do that then you must come to Eurythmy in the natural course of things.

This will not mean any interference with Gymnastics, the teaching of physical exercises. This is something quite different, and the teacher and educator must recognise the difference. Gymnastics as taught today and all kinds of sport are something quite different from Eurythmy. You can quite well have both together. For the conception of space is very often considered in quite an abstract way, and people do not take into account that space is something concrete. For people have become so accustomed to think of the earth as round that when someone who lives in this part of the world makes a jump he says he jumps “up.” But when someone in the Antipodes, who has his legs down here and his head up there, jumps, he jumps “down”—or so we imagine. But this is not anything we can experience. I once read a book on Natural Philosophy where the author tried to ridicule the idea that the sky is above us by saying: Down there in the Antipodes the sky must be below! But the truth is far richer than that. We do not make judgments about the world and about space in such a way that we leave ourselves out of it altogether and simply consider space by itself as something abstract. There are certain philosophers who do this—Hume and Mill and Kant. But this is all untrue. It is really all nonsense. Space is something concrete of which man is sensible. He feels himself within space and he feels the necessity of finding his place in it; when he thus finds his way into the balance of space, into the different conditions of space, then Sport and Gymnastics arise. In these man is trying to find his own relationship to space.

If you do this gymnastic movement (arms outstretched), you have the feeling that you are bringing your two arms into a horizontal direction. If you jump you have the feeling that you are moving your body upwards by its own force. These are gymnastic exercises. But if you feel you are holding within you something which you are experiencing inwardly—the sound EE—and you reflect upon it, then you may make perhaps a similar movement, but in this case, the inner soul quality is expressed in the movement. Man reveals his inward self. That is what he does in Eurythmy, which is thus the revelation of the inner self. In Eurythmy there is expressed what man can experience in breathing and in the circulation of the blood, when they come into the realm of soul. In Gymnastics and in Sport man feels as though space were a framework filled with all sorts of lines and directions into which he springs and which he follows, and he makes his apparatus accordingly. He climbs a ladder or pulls himself up on a rope. Here man is acting in accordance with external space.

That is the difference between Gymnastics and Eurythmy. Eurythmy lets the soul life flow outwards and thereby becomes a real expression of the human being, like language; Eurythmy is visible speech.

By means of Gymnastics and Sport man fits himself into external space, adapts himself to the world, experiments to see whether he fits in with the world in this way or in that. That is not language, that is not a revelation of man, but rather a demand the world makes upon him that he should be fit for the world and be able to find his way into it. This difference must be noticed. It expresses itself in the fact that the Gymnastics teacher makes the children do movements whereby they may adapt themselves to the outside world. The Eurythmy teacher expresses what is in the inner being of man. We must feel this, we must be sensible of it. Then Eurythmy, Gymnastics, and Games too, if you like, will all take their right place in our teaching.

We will speak further of this tomorrow.

We have often studied the period of evolution following the Atlantean catastrophe and the epochs of post-Atlantean civilisation: the Old Indian, Old Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Roman, and now the fifth, in which we ourselves are living. There will be two more epochs, making seven in all, before there is another great catastrophe.

The accounts given have naturally been of different aspects of these culture-epochs, for an idea of the future can be formed only by knowing how we are related to each of them. I have often said that there is a correspondence between the individual human being as a ‘Microcosm’, a ‘little world’, and the ‘Macrocosm’, the ‘great world’. Man, the ‘little world’, is in every respect a replica, a copy, of the ‘great world’. This is literally true, but stated in this form it is a very abstract truth and does not lead us very far. It becomes significant only if we can go on and show in detail how the individual human being is to be conceived as a Microcosm compared with the Macrocosm.

The man of to-day belongs to all the seven post-Atlantean epochs for he has been, or will be, incarnated in each of them. In every incarnation we receive what that particular epoch can give us. Thus we bear within ourselves the fruits of past phases of evolution. Our intrinsic qualities and talents are those we have acquired during the several post-Atlantean epochs and they lie more or less within the range of human consciousness as it is to-day. On the other hand, during our Atlantean incarnations there were very different states of consciousness and what we then acquired has, generally speaking, been pressed down into the subconscious. It does not therefore reverberate within us as strongly as what was acquired in later incarnations during the post-Atlantean epoch. In the much earlier Atlantean epoch human consciousness was by no means as wideawake as it became later on and men were not then able to the same extent to injure their own development. Consequently the fruits of Atlantean evolution within us are more in harmony with the World-Order than has been the case since we have been able ourselves to create disorder in our own being. Ahrimanic and Luciferic influences were active during the Atlantean epoch too, but the effect of them upon man was altogether different. Nor was man then in a position to protect himself against them.

The ever-increasing development of human consciousness is the essential feature of post-Atlantean civilisation. The evolution of mankind in the period between the catastrophe which overwhelmed Atlantis and the one that will bring the post-Atlantean epoch to an end may be thought of as a macrocosmic process; humanity as a whole evolves as one great being through the seven post-Atlantean epochs. And the most important phases in the evolution of consciousness during these seven epochs resemble what the individual himself undergoes in the seven ‘ages’ or periods of his own life.

In my book Occult Science, and elsewhere, these different life-periods have often been described. The first period covers the seven years from birth to the change of teeth. During this period the physical body of the human being acquires its basic forms and with the coming of the second teeth these forms are to all intents and purposes established. Naturally, the child continues to grow; but speaking generally, the lines of the bodily structures have already been established. What is accomplished in the first seven years is the construction of the bodily form. We must be prepared to find these rhythms manifesting in us in a wide variety of ways. For instance, there is a difference between the first teeth, which appear during the earliest years of life and then fall out, to be replaced by the second teeth. The two sets of teeth are the result of essentially different conditions. The first teeth are the inherited product of the organisms of the child's forefathers. The second teeth are the product of the child's own physical constitution. This must be kept firmly in mind. Only by being attentive to such details can the distinction be fully understood. Our first teeth, together with our whole organism, are passed on to us by our forefathers; our second teeth are the product of our own physical organism. In the first case the teeth are a direct inheritance: in the second it is the physical organism that is inherited and this in its turn produces the second teeth.

The second life-period is from the time of the change of teeth to puberty, at about the fourteenth or fifteenth year. The important process now is the development of the etheric body. The third period, to about the twenty-first year, covers the development of the astral body. Then follows the development of the Ego, with the progressive development of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual or Mind-Soul and the Spiritual Soul (Consciousness-Soul).

These are the different periods in man's life: but as you certainly know, the first period of seven years alone follows a completely regular pattern, and this is as it should be for man of the present age. The regularity apparent in the first three life-periods is not found in the later ones, nor can their length be defined with exactitude. If we ask why this is so, the answer is that in world-evolution which proceeds in rhythms of seven periods, the fourth plays a middle part. Thus in the post-Atlantean era we already have within us the fruits of the first four epochs; we are now living in the fifth and moving towards the sixth.

There is undoubtedly a certain correspondence between the evolution of the post-Atlantean epochs and that of the individual human being. Here again there is evidence of correspondence between the macrocosmic and the microcosmic.

Let us consider what was particularly characteristic of the first post-Atlantean epoch. We call it the Old Indian epoch because the character of post-Atlantean evolution in general was especially marked in the people of India. In this epoch there existed a sublime, all-embracing wisdom, with wide ramifications. In principle, the teachings given by the seven holy Rishis were identical with what was actually seen in the spiritual world by natural clairvoyants and also by very many of the people of that time. This ancient knowledge was present in the Old Indian epoch as a heritage from still earlier times. In the Atlantean epoch it had been experienced clairvoyantly, but it had now become more of an inherited, primal wisdom, preserved and made known by those who, like the Rishis, had risen through Initiation to the spiritual worlds. Basically, all the wisdom that penetrated into human consciousness was inherited and therefore essentially different from our modern knowledge.

It would be quite wrong to attempt to express the sublime truths proclaimed by the holy Rishis in the first post-Atlantean epoch in terms such as those used in modern scholarship; moreover it would hardly be possible to do so, because the forms assumed by scholarship as it is to-day appeared only in the course of post-Atlantean culture. The knowledge possessed by the ancient Rishis was of a very different character. Anyone capable of proclaiming it felt it working and seething within him, rising up spontaneously. To understand what knowledge was in those days we must realise above all that it did not in any way rely upon memory. Please keep this very specially in mind. Memory is the most important factor when knowledge is being transmitted to-day. A professor or a public speaker must take care that he knows beforehand what he is going to say from the rostrum, and then draw it out of his memory. True, there are people who deny that they do any such thing, insisting that they simply follow their own genius. But they don't affect the argument. The communication of knowledge to-day depends almost entirely upon memory.

Things were very different in the Old Indian epoch. It would be true to say that knowledge arose at the actual moment of speaking. In those early times knowledge was not prepared beforehand as it so often is to-day. The ancient Rishi did not prepare what he had to say and then memorise it. The preparation he made was to induce in himself a mood of piety, of reverence. It was his mood and his feelings that he prepared, not the content of what he was about to communicate. And then, while it was being communicated it was as if he were reading from an invisible script. It would have been unthinkable in those days for listeners to take down in writing what was being said; anything recorded in this way would have been considered quite worthless. Value was attached only to what a man preserved in his soul and might later reproduce for others. It would have been regarded as desecration to write anything down. The view rightly held at that time was that what is transcribed is not, and cannot be, the same as the oral communication.

This way of thinking persisted for a very long time. Such matters are retained in the feelings much longer than in the intellect and when, in the Middle Ages, the art of printing was added to that of writing, it was at first regarded as black magic. Old feelings were still astir in men and they felt that what is meant to pass directly from soul to soul should not be preserved in the grotesque form of letters and words printed on sheets of white paper. People were convinced that this transformed the knowledge to be communicated into something lifeless which might, moreover, subsequently be revived with anything but beneficial results. The direct streaming of knowledge from soul to soul was characteristic of the times we are considering. It was a prominent feature in the cultural life of the first post-Atlantean epoch and must be recognised if we are to understand, for instance, how it came about that Greek and even old Germanic rhapsodists could go from place to place reciting their very lengthy poems. This would never have been possible if they had been obliged to rely upon memory. It was a power and a quality of soul much more alive than memory that lay behind their recitations. Nowadays if we are to recite a poem we must have learnt it beforehand; but what those men were reciting was an actual experience in them, a kind of new creation. Moreover a direct expression of the life of soul was then more clearly in evidence than it is now, when—with some justification in view of prevailing conditions—it is apt to be suppressed. What is considered of main importance nowadays in recitation is the actual meaning of the words. It was not so, even in the Middle Ages, when a minstrel was reciting the Niebelungenlied, for instance. He still had a feeling for the inner rhythm and would stamp his feet to mark the rise and fall of the verse as he strode forward and back. But this was only an aftermath of what had been customary in more ancient times. You would have an erroneous idea of the Rishis and their pupils if you were to think that they had not faithfully communicated the old Atlantean knowledge. Even if the pupils in our schools were to fill their exercise books from cover to cover, they would not have reproduced what had been said as faithfully as the Indian Rishis reproduced the ancient wisdom.

The characteristic feature of the epochs which followed was that the flow of Atlantean knowledge came to a standstill. Until the decline of the Old Indian culture-epoch, knowledge received by men in the form of an inheritance continually increased. In essentials, however, the increase ceased with the close of this epoch: thereafter, hardly anything new could be produced from existing knowledge. An increase of knowledge was therefore possible only in the first epoch; thereafter it ceased. In the Old Persian epoch, among men influenced by Zoroastrianism, something began in connection with knowledge of the external world which can be compared with the second period in human life and is, in fact, best understood through such a comparison. In a spiritual respect the Old Indian culture-epoch is comparable with the first period in human life, from birth to the seventh year. During this period the basic forms are developed; whatever comes later is merely expansion within these established forms. What followed in the Old Persian epoch can similarly be compared with a kind of school-learning, the kind of learning connected with the second life-period. Only we must be clear who were the pupils and who were the teachers. At this point there is something I want to interpolate.

You must have been struck by the difference between the figure of Zarathustra, the Leader of the second post-Atlantean epoch, and the Indian Rishis. Whereas the Rishis seem to be consecrated individuals stemming from a primordial past, to be vessels into whom old Atlantean wisdom has poured, Zarathustra appears as the first historical personality to be initiated into a genuinely post-Atlantean Mystery-knowledge, that is to say, knowledge presented in such a way that it could be understood only by the intelligence of post-Atlantean humanity. Something new has therefore made its appearance. True, during the early period it was preeminently supersensible knowledge that was acquired in the Zoroastrian schools. Nevertheless it was there that knowledge began for the first time to take the form of concepts. The ancient knowledge possessed by the Rishis cannot be reproduced in the forms of modern scholarship but to some extent this is possible with the Zoroastrian knowledge. This is knowledge of an altogether supersensible character and concerned entirely with the supersensible world but it is clothed in concepts comparable with those current during the post-Atlantean epoch in general. Among the followers of Zarathustra a systematic development of concepts took place. To sum up: The treasure-store of ancient wisdom which had evolved until the end of the Old Indian epoch and continued from generation to generation, was accepted. Nothing new was added but the old was elaborated. A comparison, for example, with the production nowadays of a book on occultism will help us to picture the task of the Mysteries of the second post-Atlantean epoch. The contents of any book resulting from genuine investigations into the higher worlds could of course be presented as an entirely logical exposition in the physical world. This might be done. But in that case my book Occult Science, for example, would have to consist of fifty volumes at least, each of them as bulky as the present one. There is, however, another way of doing things, namely to leave something to the reader, to induce the reader to think things out for himself. That is what must be attempted nowadays, for otherwise no progress in occultism could be made. To-day, in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, with the intellectual concepts developed by humanity, it is possible to approach and also to assimilate occult knowledge. But in Zarathustra's time the concepts in which to clothe occult facts had first to be discovered and gradually elaborated. There were then no branches of knowledge such as exist to-day. Something capable of being clothed in human concepts had survived from the time of the ancient Rishis, but the concepts as such had to be formulated before the supersensible facts could be clothed in them. It was then, for the first time, that man-made concepts were used to grasp supersensible realities. The Rishis had spoken in the only way in which, in their day, supersensible knowledge could be communicated. They poured their knowledge from soul to soul in an unceasing flow of pictures. They were unconcerned with cause and effect, with concepts and categories such as are familiar to us to-day. This was a much later development. In the field of supersensible knowledge a beginning was made in the second post-Atlantean epoch. It was then that man first became aware of the opposition offered by material existence and therewith the need to express supersensible facts in forms of thought employed on the physical plane. This was the basic task of the second post-Atlantean epoch.

By the third epoch, that of Egypto-Chaldean culture, concepts of supersensible realities were actually in existence. This again is difficult for the modern mind to grasp. There was no physical science but there were concepts of supersensible facts and happenings which had been acquired in a supersensible way, and these concepts could be expressed in forms of thought applicable to the physical plane. In the third post-Atlantean epoch men began to apply to the physical world itself what they had learnt from the supersensible world. This again can be compared with the third period in the life of a human being. In the second period he learns without proceeding to apply what he has learnt. In the third life-period most human beings have to apply their knowledge to the physical plane. The pupils of Zarathustra in the second culture-epoch were pupils of heavenly knowledge; now men began to apply to the physical plane what they had learnt. It may help us to picture this if we say that through their visions men learnt that the supersensible can be expressed by a triangle—a triangle taken as an image of the supersensible; that the supersensible nature of man, permeating the physical, can be conceived as threefold. Other concepts too were mastered, enabling physical things to be related to supersensible facts. Geometry, for instance, was first mastered in the form of symbolic concepts. In short, concepts were now available and were applied by the Egyptians to the art of land-surveying, also to agriculture, and by the Chaldeans in their study of the stars and in the founding of Astrology and Astronomy. What had previously been regarded as purely supersensible was now applied to things physically seen. In the third culture-epoch, then, men began for the first time to apply supersensible knowledge to the phenomena of the world of sense.

In the fourth epoch, the Graeco-Latin, it was especially important that men should come to see that what they were doing was to apply to the physical plane knowledge derived from supersensible sources. Hitherto they had acted without questioning whether this was actually the case. The ancient Rishis had no need for such questioning because the knowledge streamed into them directly from the spiritual world. In the epoch of Zarathustra men assimilated the supersensible knowledge and were fully aware how it originated. In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch men invested the concepts derived from the supersensible world with knowledge they had acquired in the physical world. And in the fourth epoch (the Graeco-Latin) they began to ask whether it is right to apply to the physical world what has come from the spiritual world. Is what has been spiritually acquired in fact applicable to physical things?—Men could not put this to themselves as a definite question until the fourth culture-epoch, after they had for some time been applying supersensible knowledge in all naivety to physical experiences and observations. Now they became conscientious in regard to their own doings and began to ask whether it is justifiable to apply supersensible concepts to physical facts.

Now when any epoch has an important task to perform, it always happens that some individual is particularly alive to its nature and responsible for fulfilling it. In this case, such an individual would have been struck by the thought as to whether one has the right to apply supersensible concepts to physical facts. Can anyone really predict how things will develop? It is obvious that Plato, for example, had a living connection with the ancient world and still applied concepts in their old form to the physical world. It was his pupil Aristotle who asked whether it is right to do this.—And so Aristotle became the founder of Logic.

People who reject Spiritual Science should just ask themselves why man had managed to get on without any system of Logic. Had they never before the fourth epoch felt any need for it?—To a clear-sighted view of evolution, important periods occur at definite points of time. One such period lies between Plato and Aristotle. Here we have before us a situation that is related in a certain way to the connection with the spiritual world existing in the Atlantean epoch. True, the living spiritual knowledge died out with the Old Indian culture-epoch, but something new had nevertheless been brought down to the physical plane. Now, in this later age, man had begun to develop a critical faculty, and to ask how ideas about supersensible reality may be applied to physical things. This is a sign that man only now became conscious that he himself achieves something when he is observing the external world, that he is actually bringing something down into the sense-world. This was a significant state of things.

We can still feel that concepts and ideas are in essence supersensible when we regard their very character as being a guarantee for the existence of the supersensible world. But only few feel this. What concepts and ideas contain is for most people extremely tenuous. And although there is something in them which can provide complete proof of man's immortality, it would be impossible to convince him, because compared with the solid, material reality for which he longs, concepts and ideas are as unsubstantial as a cobweb. They are, in fact, the last and slenderest thread spun by man out of the spiritual world since his descent into the physical world. And at the very time when he had left the spiritual world altogether and remained linked to it by this last, slender thread only—a thread in which he no longer had any faith—there came the mightiest incision from the supersensible world: the Christ Impulse. The greatest of all spiritual realities appeared in our post-Atlantean epoch at a time when man was least able to recognise the supersensible, because the only spiritual quality remaining to him was his feeling for concepts and ideas.

For anyone studying the evolution of humanity as a whole it would be interesting in a strictly scientific sense—apart from the tornado-like effect it may have on the soul—to set side by side the infinite spirituality of the Christ Being who entered into humanity and the fact that shortly before His coming man had been wondering how far the last thread of spirituality within him was connected with the supersensible world—in other words, to contrast the Christ Principle with Aristotelian Logic, that web of wholly abstract concepts and ideas. No greater disparity can be imagined than that between the spirituality which came down to the physical plane in the Being of Christ and the spirituality which man had preserved for himself. You will therefore understand that with the web of concepts available in Aristotelianism it was simply not possible in the first centuries of Christendom to comprehend the spiritual nature of Christ. And then, gradually, efforts were made to grasp the facts of world-history and the evolution of humanity in such a way that Aristotelian Logic could be applied. This was the task facing medieval philosophy.

It is significant that the fourth post-Atlantean epoch may be compared with the period of Ego-development in man's life. It was in this epoch that the ‘I’ of humanity itself streamed into evolution, at the time when man was further removed from the spiritual world than he had ever been and was therefore at first quite incapable of accepting Christ except through faith. Christianity was bound at first to be a matter of faith and is only now beginning, very gradually, to be a matter of knowledge. We have only just begun to bring the light of spiritual knowledge to bear upon the Gospels. For hundreds upon hundreds of years Christianity could only be a matter of faith, because man had reached the lowest point of his descent from the spiritual worlds.

This was the situation in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. But after the lowest point the re-ascent must begin. Although in a certain respect this epoch brought man to the lowest point of descent, it also gave him the strongest spiritual impulse upwards. Naturally, this was beyond his comprehension then and will be understood only in the epochs still to come. We can, however, recognise the task before us: it is to permeate our concepts and ideas with spirituality.

World-evolution is not a simple, straightforward process. When a ball begins to roll in a certain direction, inertia will keep it rolling unless its course is changed by some other impact. Similarly, pre-Christian culture tended to preserve and maintain the downward plunge into the physical world until our own time. The upward urge is only just beginning and periodically needs a new impetus.

The downward tendency is particularly evident in the way men think, even in a great deal of what is called Philosophy to-day. Aristotle still recognised that spiritual reality is within the grasp of human concepts. But a few centuries after him men were no longer able to understand how the activity of the human mind can make contact with reality. The most arid, most barren element in the development of the old mode of thinking is represented by Kantianism and everything related to it. For Kant's philosophy severs all connection between the concepts a man evolves, between ideas as inner experiences, and what concepts and ideas are in reality. Kantianism is in the process of withering away and has no living impulse to give to the future. It will now no longer surprise you that the conclusion of my lectures on Psychosophy had a theosophical background. I have made it clear that in all our activities, and especially in connection with knowledge of the soul, our task is to take the knowledge bestowed by the gods on men in earlier days and brought down as a stimulus to our thought, and offer it up again at the altars of the gods. But the ideas and concepts we make our own must have their origin in spirituality.

Psychology as a science must be cultivated in such a way that it can emerge from the decadence into which it has fallen. This is not said out of arrogance but because it is what the times demand. There have been and there still are many psychologists: but they all work with concepts totally devoid of spirituality. It is significant that in 1874 a man like Franz Brentano published only the first volume of his Psychology, which in spite of certain distortions, is generally sound. He had announced the second volume for publication in the same year; but he came to a standstill and could not finish it. He was able to give an outline of what the content was to have been but to get beyond that a spiritual impulse would have been needed.

Modern psychologies, for example those written by Wundt and Lipps, do not really deserve the name because they work only with ideas previously evolved and it was obvious from the outset that nothing would come of them. Brentano's Psychology might have led to something but he came to a standstill—which is the fate of all dying sciences. It will not happen so quickly in the case of the natural sciences, where cut-and-dried concepts can be applied because facts are being collected and may be allowed to speak for themselves. With Psychology—the science of the soul—this is much less practicable, for the whole foundation disappears if any attempt is made to work with the ordinary, rigid concepts. You don't immediately lose touch with a heart-muscle even if you analyse it as if it were a mineral product and have no knowledge of its real nature. But you cannot analyse the soul in the same way.

The sciences are as it were dying from above downwards. And it will gradually dawn on men that while they are certainly able to turn the laws of nature to account, this is something quite independent of science itself. To construct machines and instruments, telephones and the like, is a very different matter from a basic understanding of the sciences, let alone the ability to further their progress. A man may have no fundamental understanding of electricity and yet be able to construct electrical apparatus. Science in the real sense is, however, gradually declining and we have now reached a point where in its present form it must be given new life through spiritual science. In our fifth culture-epoch science is rolling downwards by its own momentum: when the ball can roll no further it will come to a standstill, as Brentano did. At this time, therefore, it is imperative that the ascent of humanity should be given a stronger and stronger stimulus. This will indeed take place, but only if efforts continue to be made to fertilise knowledge acquired from outside with what spiritual investigation has to offer.

As I have said before, a kind of repetition of the old Egypto-Chaldean epoch will become apparent during our own fifth epoch. This repetition is at present only just beginning. Indications of this might have become clear to you during this General Meeting. Think, for instance, of Herr Seiler's lecture on Astrology. You will have felt that as students of Spiritual Science you are able to apply to astrological concepts ideas which would be quite impossible for a conventional astronomer, who will inevitably treat anything connected with Astrology as nonsense. This has nothing to do with the intrinsic character of Astronomy. As a matter of fact, Astronomy is the science par excellence which lends itself readily to being led back again to spirituality; from what Astronomy has at present to offer it would be easy to pass to the basic truths of Astrology which is so often derided. What stands in the way is that the general attitude of mind is so far removed from any return to spirituality. It will take time to build the bridge between Astronomy and Astrology and meanwhile all sorts of theories will be devised in an attempt to give a purely materialistic explanation of the planetary movements, and so on. In the case of the chemical and biological sciences the bridge will be even more difficult to build.

The building of a bridge can be easiest of all in the domain of Psychology—the science of the soul. The first requisite will be to understand the conclusion of my lectures on ‘Psychosophy’ where I showed that the stream of soul-life flows not only from the past into the future but also from the future into the past. There are two streams of time: the etheric stream, flowing into the future, and the astral stream, moving from the future back into the past. It is unlikely that anyone in the world today will discover anything of this character without a spiritual impulse, but there can be no real grasp of the life of soul until we recognise that something is perpetually coming towards us from the future. This concept is essential. We shall have to rid ourselves of the mode of thought which looks only to the past when cause and effect are being considered. We shall have to learn to speak of the future as something real, something moving towards us, just as we trail the past behind us. It will be a long time before such concepts are accepted; but until they are there will be no real Psychology.

The nineteenth century produced a really bright idea: Psychology without Soul! People were very proud of it. Roughly, what it meant was that psychological study should be confined to the external manifestations of the human soul and should take no account of the soul itself from which they originated. A science of the soul without soul! As a method this might be possible; but the outcome, to use a rough analogy, is a meal without food. That is modern Psychology. People are anything but satisfied if you give them a meal with nothing on their plates, but nineteenth century science was wonderfully content with a Psychology without soul. Such a trend began at a comparatively early stage and spiritual life must flow as a strong impulse into this whole domain.

The old life has come to an end and a new life must begin. We must feel that there was given to us from the ancient Atlantean epoch a primeval wisdom which has gradually withered away and that in our present incarnation we are faced with the task of gathering a new wisdom for the men of a later time. To make this possible was the purpose of the Christ Impulse, and the activity and power of that Impulse will continually increase. It may be that the Christ Impulse will work most strongly when all tradition—in history too—has died away and men find their way to Christ Himself as the true reality.

You can see, then, that the course of post-Atlantean evolution and the life of an individual human being are comparable as Macrocosm with Microcosm. But the individual is in a strange situation. What is there left to him in the second part of his life but to absorb and assimilate what he acquired for himself in the first half? And when that is all used up, death follows. The spirit alone can be victorious over death and carry forward into a new incarnation what begins to decay after the half-way point of life has been passed. Development is on the ascent until the thirty-fifth year. After that there is decline. But it is precisely then that the spirit takes a hand. What it cannot incorporate into the bodily nature of man during the second half of life it brings to blossom in a later incarnation. As the body withers the spirit gradually comes to fruition.

The macrocosm of humanity as a whole reveals a similar picture. Until the fourth post-Atlantean epoch there is a youthful, thriving development of culture. From then onwards there is a decline—symptoms of death everywhere in the evolution of human consciousness, but at the same time the inflow of new spiritual life which will incarnate again as the spiritual life of humanity in the culture-epoch following our own. But man must work with full consciousness on what is subsequently to incarnate again. The rest will die away. We can look prophetically into the future and see the birth of many sciences seeming to benefit post-Atlantean civilisation although they belong to what is dying. But the life that is poured into humanity under the direct influence of the Christ Impulse will come to manifestation in the future just as the Atlantean knowledge came again to manifestation in the holy Rishis.

Ordinary science knows of the Copernican system only that part which is in process of dying. The part that will live on and bear fruit—and that is not the part that has been influential for four centuries—must now be mastered by men through their own efforts. Copernicanism as presented to-day is not strictly true. Spiritual investigation alone can reveal its real truth. The same holds good for Astronomy, and for everything else that is regarded as knowledge to-day. Science can of course be of practical use and as technology completely justified. But in so far as it pretends to contribute to human knowledge in its real form, it is a dead product. It is useful for the immediate handiwork of men and for that no spiritual content is necessary. But as far as it purports to have anything vital to say about the mysteries of the Universe it belongs to the culture that is dying. If knowledge of the mysteries of the Universe is to be enriched, the orthodox science of to-day must be imbued with life through the findings of Spiritual Science.

The foregoing lectures were intended as an introduction to the study of St. Mark's Gospel which we shall now begin. I had first to show how essential this greatest of all spiritual impulses was for human evolution just at the time when only the last, most tenuous threads of spirituality remained to mankind.

There are certain deeper questions of karmic connection concerning more especially our human influence upon karma, particularly upon that of other people, and concerning also the changing of the direction of karma, be it to a greater or less extent. Such questions as these one can neither answer nor even give an idea of how they ought to be answered, without touching, as we shall today, upon certain important secrets of our world existence. They may perhaps arise out of what has been said, if we follow up what has been broached and had light thrown upon it from one side or another.

We may ask what happens in a person's karma when by reason of his previous acts or experiences there has arisen a necessity for illness to compensate for these acts and experiences, and this person is really healed through human assistance by means of remedies or other intervention. What does this signify and in what way is such a fact related to a deeper conception of karmic law?

Now I will begin by saying that in order to throw any important light at all upon this question, things must be touched upon which are far removed from the science and the present thought of today and which may, so to say, only be spoken of amongst Anthroposophists who, having absorbed some of the truths relating to the deeper foundations of existence, have already prepared themselves for such things, and have acquired a perception of how things which today can only be indicated, may nevertheless be fully proved. I should like, however, to take this opportunity of asking one thing of you. I am today compelled to talk about the deeper foundations of the earth's existence which I shall endeavour to express as precisely as possible. But this would be wrong if it were used in another connection or spoken of without any connection at all, and would lead to one misunderstanding after another. I ask you for the present just to accept it only, and make no other use of it. I must also make a point, regarding these things, that they should not be handed on; that no one should consider them as a teaching which may in any way spread further; for only the connection justifies such a statement, and such a statement is justifiable only when it is backed by the consciousness that can coin suitable words to express thoughts of this kind.

We are now speaking, on the one hand, of the deeper nature of material existence, and on the other, of the nature of soul existence. We must today acquire a deeper comprehension of what pertains to the soul and to the material world. This is, indeed, necessary for a quite definite reason—for the reason given in the previous lectures when we said that the soul of man can penetrate more or less deeply into matter. We described yesterday the nature of the male by saying that in a man the soul penetrates deeper into matter, while in the female the soul holds back in a certain way and is more independent of matter. We saw that much of karmic experience depends upon how the penetration of the soul into matter takes place. We saw also how certain illnesses in one incarnation appear as the karmic consequences of errors made by the soul in former incarnations when it worked at its deeds, experiences and impulses. Then on the way between death and a new birth the soul acquired the tendency to transform into matter that which was formerly only a characteristic, a mere influence in the soul; so it now permeates the body. Because the human being is then permeated by a soul which has also absorbed either the luciferic or ahrimanic influence, the human substance will in consequence be damaged. Here is to be found the cause of illness, and we may therefore say: In a sick body there dwells a damaged soul which has come under a wrong influence—a luciferic or ahrimanic influence; and the moment we are able to remove these influences from the soul, the normal relationship of soul and the body should come about, and health should be re-established. What then is the relation between these two members of the earthly human existence of which we are now speaking, matter and soul? What are they in their deeper nature?

The man of the present day is generally of the opinion that the answer to the question, ‘Of what does matter consist? What is the soul?’—if it could be given at all—must prove to be the same all over the world. I do not think it would be easy for him to understand that for the beings who lived upon the old Moon, the answer to these questions must be quite different from those of beings who live upon the Earth. For existence is so much in the throes of evolution, that even the ideas may alter which a being may have about the deeper foundations of his own nature; so that the answer to this question, ‘What is matter, what is the soul?’ must also vary. It must at once be emphasised that the answers which will be given are only those which the earth-man can make, and are of significance only to the earth-man.

A person will at first judge ‘matter’ according to what confronts him in the external world in the shape of different beings and things, and everything which makes an impression upon him in any way. Then he discovers that there are different sorts of matter. But I need not go very far into that, for you may find in all the ordinary books those expositions which could be given here if we had time enough. These differences in matter present themselves to man when he sees the different metals, gold, copper, lead, and so on, or when he sees anything that does not belong to this category. You know, too, that chemistry traces these different materials back to certain fundamental substances of matter, called ‘elements.’ These elements, even in the nineteenth century, were still considered to be substances possessing certain properties which did not admit of being further divided. But in the case of a substance such as water, we are able to separate it into hydrogen and oxygen, yet in hydrogen and oxygen themselves we have substances which, according to the chemistry of the nineteenth century, were incapable of being further divided. One could distinguish about seventy such elements. You will doubtless also know that owing to phenomena which have been produced in connection with a few special elements—radium, for instance—and also owing to various phenomena produced in the study of electricity, the idea of the elements has been shaken in many ways. One has come to the conclusion that the seventy elements were only temporary limitations of matter, and that one could trace back the possibility of subdivision to a fundamental substance, which then through inner combinations, through the nature of its inner elementary being, manifests at one time as gold, at another time as potash, lime, and so on.

These scientific theories vary; and just as the scientific theories changed in ‘each fifty years’ of the nineteenth century, so it came about that certain physicists saw in matter certain entities which are charged with electricity; just as the ionic theory is now in fashion—for there are fashions in science—in the same way at no distant future other scientific methods will exist, and our idea of the constitution of matter will be quite different. These are facts. Scientific opinions are changeable, and must be changeable, for they depend altogether upon those facts which are of significance for one particular epoch. The teachings of Spiritual Science on the other hand continue through all ages—as long as there are civilisations on the earth—and will continue as long as these civilisations exist. It has always had the same comprehensive view regarding the nature of material existence and matter; and in order to lead you on to what Spiritual Science looks upon as the essential part of matter and of substance, I should like to say the following:

You all know that ice is a solid body—not through its own nature, but through external circumstances. It at once ceases to be a solid if we raise the temperature sufficiently; it then becomes a fluid substance. Therefore it does not depend upon what is in a substance itself as to what form it takes in the external world, but upon the entire conditions of the universe surrounding it. We can then further bring heat to this substance, and out of the water we can, after a certain point, produce steam. We have ice, water, steam, and through the raising of the temperature we have caused what we may describe as ‘the appearance of matter in manifold forms.’ Thus we have to distinguish in matter that the appearance it presents to us does not come out of an inner constitution, but that the manner in which it confronts us depends upon the general constitution of the universe, and that one must not isolate any part of the whole universe into individual substances. Now the methods of modern science cannot reach where Spiritual Science is able to reach. The science of today can never, by means of the methods at its disposal, bring the substance of ice—which, when the temperature is increased, is first made fluidic and then turned into steam—into the final condition attainable on earth, into which every substance can be transmuted. It is not possible today, by scientific means, to bring about conditions which show that ‘if you take gold and rarefy it as far as it can be rarefied upon the earth, you will bring it at last to a state which could equally be reached by silver or by copper.’ Spiritual Science can do this because it is based upon the methods of spiritual research; is thus able to observe how, in the spaces between substances, there is always a uniform substance everywhere which represents the extreme limit to which all matter is reducible. Spiritual research discovers a condition of dissolution in which all materials are reduced to a common basis, but what then appears there is no longer matter, but something which lies beyond all the specialised forms of matter around us. Every single substance, be it gold, silver, or any other substance, is there seen to be a condensation of this fundamental substance, which is really no longer matter. There is a fundamental essence of our material earth existence out of which all matter only comes into being by a condensing process, and to the question: What is this fundamental substance of our earth existence, Spiritual Science gives the answer: ‘Every substance upon the earth is condensed light.’ There is nothing in material existence in any form whatever which is anything but condensed light. Hence you see that to those who know the facts, there can be no necessity for such a theory as that of the ‘vibration hypothesis’ of the nineteenth century. Therein one sought to find light by methods which themselves are coarser than the light itself. Light cannot be traced back to anything else in our material existence. Wherever you reach out and touch a substance, there you have condensed, compressed light. All matter is, in its essence, light.

We have thus indicated one side of the question from the point of view of Spiritual Science. We have seen that light is the foundation of all material existence. If we look at the material human body, that also, inasmuch as it consists of matter, is nothing but a substance woven out of light. Inasmuch as man is a material being, he is composed of light.

Let us now consider the other question: ‘Of what does the soul consist?’ If we were to make research in the same way, by means of the methods of Spiritual Science, into the substance, into the really fundamental essence of the soul, then it would appear that just as all matter is compressed light, so all the different phenomena of the soul upon earth are modifications, are manifold transformations of that which must be called, if we truly realise the fundamental meaning of the word: love. Every stirring of the soul, wherever it appears, is in some way a modification of love, and if the inner and the outer are, as it were, intermingled, impressed into one another in man, we find also that his outer bodily part is woven out of light, and his inner soul is woven spiritually out of love. Love and light are, indeed, in some way interwoven in all the phenomena of our earth existence, and anyone who wishes to understand things as explained by Spiritual Science, will first of all ask: To what extent are love and light interwoven?

Love and light are the two elements, the two component parts of all earthly existence: love as the soul part, and light as the outer material part.

Now, however, another fact comes in. For both these elements, light and love, which would otherwise be side by side throughout the great course of the world existence, there must be found an intermediary, weaving the one element into the other—light into love. This must needs be a power which has no particular interest in love, which thus weaves light into the element of love—a power which is interested only in causing the light to be spread abroad to as great an extent as possible, and therefore causes light to stream into the element of love. Such a power cannot be terrestrial for the earth is the Cosmos of Love; and its mission is to weave love in everywhere. Anything, therefore, which is bound up with the earth existence can have no interest which is not to some degree influenced by love.

It is the luciferic beings which act here—for they remained behind upon the Moon upon the Cosmos of Wisdom. They are particularly interested in weaving light into love. The luciferic beings are everywhere at work when our inner part which is actually woven out of love comes into any sort of connection with light, in whatsoever form it may be found; and we are confronted with light in all material existence. Wheresoever we come into connection with light, the luciferic beings enter, and the luciferic influence becomes woven into love. In that way man first, in the course of his incarnations, entered the luciferic element. Lucifer has woven himself into the element of love; and all that is formed from love has the impress of Lucifer, which alone can bring us what causes love to be not merely a self-abandonment, but permeates it in its innermost being with wisdom. Otherwise, without this wisdom, love would be an impersonal force in man for which he could not be responsible. But in this way love becomes the essential force of the Ego where that luciferic element is woven, which otherwise is only to be found outside in matter. Thus it becomes possible for our inner being which, during earth existence, should receive the attribute of love in its fullness, to be permeated besides by everything that may be described as an activity of Lucifer, and from this side leads to a penetration of external matter; so that which is woven out of light is not interwoven with love alone, but with love that is permeated by Lucifer. When man takes up the luciferic—element, he interweaves into the material part of his own body a soul which is, it is true, woven out of love, but into which the luciferic element is interwoven. It is that love which is permeated with the luciferic element, which impregnates matter and is the cause of illness working out from within. In connection with what we have already mentioned as being a necessary consequence of an illness proceeding from a luciferic element, we may say that the ensuing pain, which we have seen is a consequence of the Luciferic element, shows us the effect of the working of the karmic law. So the consequences of an act or a temptation coming from Lucifer are experienced karmically and the pain itself indicates what should lead to the overcoming of the consequences in question.

Now ought we to help in such a case or not? Ought we in any way to cancel what has pressed in from the luciferic element with all its consequences working out in pain?

Remembering the answer to our question as to the nature of the soul, it follows of necessity that we have the right to do this only if we find the means, in the case of a man who has the luciferic element in him which caused his illness, to expel that luciferic element in the right way. What is the remedy which exerts a stronger action, so that the luciferic element is driven out. What is it which has been defiled by the luciferic element on our earth? It is love! Hence only by means of love can we give real help for karma to work out in the right way. Finally we must see in that element of love which has been psychically influenced by Lucifer resulting in illness, a force which must be affected by another force. We must pour in love. All those acts of healing dependent upon what we may call a ‘psychic healing process’ must have the characteristic that love is part of the process. In some form or other all psychic healing depends on a stream of love, which we pour into another person as a balsam. All that is done in this domain must finally be traced back to love; and this can be done. Even if we set simple psychic factors in action; if we assist another, perhaps, only to overcome depression, this can be traced back to love. All arises from the impulse of love, from simpler processes of healing, to that which is often, in amateur fashion called ‘magnetic healing.’ What does the healer communicate to the one to be healed? It is, to use an expression of physics, an ‘interchange of tensions.’ Certain processes in the etheric body of the healer create with the person to be healed a sort of polarity. Polarity arises just as it would arise in an abstract sense, when one kind of electricity, say positive, is produced and then the corresponding electricity—the negative—appears. Thus polarities are created, and this act must be conceived as emanating from sacrifice. One evokes in oneself a process which is not intended to be significant to oneself only, for then one would call forth one process only; in this case, however, the process is intended in addition to induce a polarity in another person, and this polarity, which naturally depends upon a contact between the healer and the person to be healed, is, in the fullest sense of the word, the sacrifice of a force which is no other than the transmuted action of love. That is what is really active in these psychic healings—a transmuted power of love. We must clearly understand that without this fundamental love-force the healing will not lead to the right goal. But these processes of love need not always run their course [so] that the person is fully aware of them with his ordinary day-consciousness; they run their course also in the region of the subconscious. In that which is considered as the technique of the healing process, even to the way in which the movements of the hands are made, and technically reduced to a system, we have the reflection of a sacrificial act. Therefore even where we do not see the direct connection in a process of healing, when we do not see what is being done, we have, nevertheless, before us an act of love, although the action may be completely transformed to a mere technique.

Since the soul consists fundamentally of love, we can assist with psychic factors. And these processes apparently lie very near the periphery of human nature, and by such factors of healing that which in its essence consists of love is enriched by what it requires in the way of love. Thus on the one side we see how we can help, so that, after being caught in the toils of Lucifer, the sufferer is able to free himself again. Because love is the fundamental essence of the soul, we may, indeed, influence the direction of karma.

On the other hand, we may ask, what has become of the substance woven from light in which the soul dwells?

Take the body—the outer man in his material part. If through a karmic process there had not been imprinted from out of the soul into matter a love substance such as is permeated by Lucifer or Ahriman; if a pure love substance only had poured in, it would not have been impurifying, or damaging to the substance woven out of light. If love alone were to flow into matter, it would then so flow into the human body that the latter could not be damaged. It is only because a love which has absorbed luciferic or ahrimanic forces can penetrate that the substance woven out of light becomes less perfect than it was originally intended to be. Therefore it is only through pouring into man of the luciferic or ahrimanic influences during his consecutive incarnations, that the human organisation is not what it might be. If it were as it ought to be, it would manifest healthy human substance; but because it has absorbed the activities of Lucifer and Ahriman, sickness and disease result.

How can we draw from outside those influences which have flowed in from an imperfect soul, that is, from a wrong love substance? What happens to the body by this influx of something which is faulty? According to Spiritual Science something happens which turns light in some way into its opposite. Light has its opposite in darkness or obscurity. Everything really presenting itself—strange as it may sound—as the defilement of that which is woven out of light, is a darkness woven out of a luciferic or ahrimanic influence. Thus we see darkness woven into the human substance. But this darkness was only thus interwoven because the human body has become the bearer of the Ego that lives on through the incarnations. This was formerly not there. Only a human body can be subject to this corruption, for such a corruption was formerly not contained in that which was woven out of light.

Man today draws the base of his material life out of what he has gradually rejected in the course of evolution—that is, the animal kingdom, the vegetable kingdom, and the mineral kingdom. These also contain the different substances woven out of light for earth existence. But in none of these substances are there any of the influences which, in the course of human karma have acted on the organism through the soul. In the three kingdoms around us, therefore, man cannot through his luciferic or ahrimanic influence, as emanating from his love forces, have a defiling effect. Nothing of him is here. And what in man has been defiled is spread around him in all its purity. Let us consider a mineral substance, a salt or any other substance which man has also within him, or might have within him. But in him it is interwoven with the love substance defiled by Lucifer or Ahriman. Outside, however, it is pure. Thus every substance outside is distinguished from that which man bears within him. Externally it is always different from what it is in man, because in him it is interwoven with the ahrimanic or luciferic influence. That is the reason why, for everything of external substance which can be more or less defiled by man, there must be something which can be found externally representing the same thing in its pure condition. That which exists in the world in its purity, is the external cure for the corresponding substance in its damaged state. If you apply this in the right way to the human being, you then have the specific for the corresponding injury.

Thus we find in quite an objective way, what may be applied to the human body as a remedy. Here is the injury characterised as a form of darkness—and that which is not yet dark as the outer woven pure light; and we see why we are able to remove the darkness to be found in man if we bring pure substance woven from light to bear upon him. Thus we have a specific remedy for the injury. Now attention has often been drawn to the fact that Anthroposophists in particular should not fall into the narrow-minded error of denying that in such cases there really is a specific remedy against this or that injury, or which beneficially affects this or the other organ. It has often been said that the organism has within it the forces with which to help itself. Even although the Vienna School of Nihilistic Therapeutics may be right in its assertion that by calling up the opposing forces we can bring about a cure, we may nevertheless help on the cure by specific remedies. Here we see a parallel which one may describe from Spiritual Science.

From what I have said about diphtheria, for instance, you may gather that the karmic causes have in this case particularly affected the astral body. Now closely related to the astral body is the animal kingdom You will always find in those forms of illness closer connected with the astral body, that medical science, unconsciously driven by a dim impulse, seeks for remedies from the animal kingdom. For such illnesses whose causes lie in the etheric body, science seeks for remedies out of the vegetable kingdom. An interesting lecture might be given about the relation of the purple foxglove to certain illnesses of the heart. These are things which, inasmuch as they are based on truth, are not right for five years only—as one doctor states—and then begin to be wrong—as in the case when only external symptoms are taken into consideration. But there is a certain treasure of remedies which can always in some way be traced back to some connection with Spiritual Science, which have been inherited without any knowledge whence they came. Just as today the astronomers do not know that the theory of Kant and Laplace came from the mystery schools of the Middle Ages, so people do not know whence came these real valuable remedies. Causes of illness, which are connected with the nature of the physical body, lead to the use of remedies from the mineral kingdom.

A simple consideration of these analogous views will provide a fingerpost for these matters. Through his connection with the surrounding world, man can be helped from two different sides: on the one hand bringing him transmuted love from the psychic method of healing and on the other hand by bringing him transmuted light in various ways by those processes which are connected with external methods of healing. Everything which can be done is brought about either by inner psychic means—by love—or by the external means of densified light. When one day science has advanced so far as to learn to believe in the super-sensible and in the saying: ‘Matter is a form of condensed light,’ then a spiritual light will be thrown by these words upon the systematic research on external remedies. Hence we see that what during long ages, from the mystery schools of old Egypt and old Greece, was gradually added to the treasure of healing is not mere nonsense, but that in all these things there is a sound kernel. Anthroposophy does not exist in order to attack a certain school of medicine, and to say, ‘There they give people poisons!’ The word poison today works as a suggestion, and people do not reflect how relative this word is. For what is ‘poison’? Every substance may be a poison. It is only a question of the methods of healing and of how much is taken at a time. Water is a strong poison, if one takes ten bucketfuls at one time. The results of this, considered chemically, are not very different from what they would be if one gave a person any other substance. It depends always upon the quantity, for all these ideas are relative.

From what we have gone into today, we can be glad that for every injury we can do to injure our body, there is to be found in surrounding nature, which now appears to us as the world, that which will make it whole again. It is also a beautiful relationship that we have for the external world, and we may rejoice not only because we see the beautiful flowers and the mountains glowing in the sunlight, but also because our surroundings are so intimately connected with what is in man himself, good or bad. We can rejoice in nature, not only for what appeals at first sight, but the deeper we go into what has condensed into external material existence, the more we shall find that this nature which causes us to rejoice has within it at the same time the mighty healer for all the damage man can cause himself. Somewhere in nature the remedy is concealed. It is a question, not only of understanding the language of the healer, but also of obeying it and really carrying it out. Today it is in most cases impossible for us to hear the voice of healing nature because our misunderstanding of light, and the darkness which has penetrated into knowledge has in many respects brought about conditions preventing us from hearing. Therefore we must clearly understand that where in one case no help can properly be given, where, on account of karmic connections, some suffering may not properly be lessened, this does not mean that it absolutely could not be done.

Here again we see a remarkable connection which allows us to perceive the whole great world, inclusive of mankind, as One Being. In the sayings: ‘Matter is woven light,’ and ‘the soul is in some way or other diluted love,’ are to be found the keys of innumerable secrets of earth existence. But these hold good only for the earth existence, and would not concern any other domain of the world existence. Thus we have shown nothing less than that we, if in any way we alter the direction of karma, unite ourselves in one or the other case with the elements composing our earth existence: on the one side with light which has become matter—and on the other side with love which has become soul. We either draw the remedies out of our surroundings, out of the condensed light, or out of our own soul by the healing loving act, the sacrificial act, and we then heal with the soul-forces obtained from love. We unite ourselves with what is most deeply justified upon the earth, when, on the one hand, we unite ourselves with light and on the other with love. All earth conditions are in some way conditions of balance between light and love and everything unhealthy is a disturbance of that balance. If the disturbance is in love, we can then help by unfolding the forces of love; and if the disturbance is in light, we can then help by somehow providing for ourselves, out of the universe, that light which is able to dissolve the darkness within us.

These are the fundamental ways of help, and we see again how everything depends upon the balance of opposites. Light and love are polar opposites and on their being interwoven depend ultimately all the psychic and material processes of our life. Therefore in all the spheres of human life, evolution continues from epoch to epoch with the balance inclining first to one side and then swinging back to the other, so that evolution resembles the surging of waves. This motion of an unstable equilibrium throws light even on the most complex processes of civilisation. Take a period when certain injuries entered into the evolution of mankind because man contemplated only [the] inner and neglected the outer, for example, in the Middle Ages. It was then that through the blossoming of the mystical side, the external remained unheeded and errors occurred not only in knowledge but in action. Then followed the age that was repelled by mysticism, and was attracted by the outer world so as to make the pendulum swing to the opposite side.

Here is the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times and many such disturbances of the balance, manifest in different ways.

In this connection I should like to note that just in such times as our own, a characteristic in many people is that they completely forget, and pay no attention to, that which one may call ‘the consciousness of a super-sensible world.’ They pay no attention whatever to the fact that there is a spiritual world, and they therefore turn away their thoughts from it. In such an age—or in all such ages—there is always in certain respects a counterpart to be found. I should like to show you this in a very simple manner.

When there are people upon the physical plane who are so absorbed in the physical that they completely forget the spiritual, then a contrary tendency appears among those souls who are living in the spiritual world between death and a new birth—a tendency which works over from the physical into the spiritual plane—impelling them to occupy themselves with the influences which act out of the spiritual world into the physical. It is this which brings about in the physical world the intervention by souls who are still in that state before birth. These souls work down into the physical world according to the means which offer and they are able to work indirectly through persons who are more sensitive to such influence from the spiritual world. In order to make this clearer, one must not accept everything that purports to be a revelation from a Spiritual world. We must distinguish the real characteristic cases in which the dead are anxious show in a palpable manner that there is indeed a spiritual world. Because there are so many people completely in the dark, who have woven so much darkness into themselves that they wish to know nothing about the spiritual world, there are, on the other hand, among the dead many who have the impulse to work into the physical world. Such things generally occur when nothing is done deliberately to bring them about on the physical plane and they occur without special preparation.

You will find much proof of these things collected in the book by our friend, Ludwig Deinhard, Das Mysterium des Menschen (The Mystery of Man). Here much has been collected and systematised which is just what one needs, and which in the scientific literature of to-day is so scattered that it is impossible for everyone to gather it together. Therefore it is a good thing to have in this book a collection of these spiritual facts, which, as you now see, are eminently characteristic of one aspect of our age. You will find very aptly described in this book the characteristic fact of an investigator, who by materialistic methods had in his earth life endeavoured to give every possible proof of the spiritual world—I mean the late Frederick Myers—and who after his death was strongly impelled to show to mankind by means of radiations from the spiritual world and by the help of the spiritual world, what he had endeavoured to do when here.

This is intended to illustrate how in the world and in world affairs we see continual disturbances of the balance, and then again the efforts for the restoring of the balance.

This continual disturbance and restoration of the balance between the two elements of light and love is fundamental for us; and in human karma, from incarnation to incarnation, both work to restore the disturbed condition. Karma, working its serpentine way through incarnations is just such a disturbed balance, until man, after all his incarnations, shall at last create the final balance which can be reached upon earth. Having fulfilled his mission on earth, he evolves then into a new planetary form.

I have endeavoured to set forth a few facts, without which a deeper establishment of karmic connections and laws would be impossible. I have not shrunk from touching to-day upon those mysteries for which our modern science will not for a long time be ripe: Matter is in reality woven light, and that which belongs to the soul is in some way or other refined love. These are ancient occult sayings, but they are sayings which will for all time remain true and will prove fruitful for human evolution, not only for knowledge, but also for human work and action.

Those of you who have been attending my lecture cycles or single lectures on spiritual-scientific subjects have had various phenomena of the higher worlds presented from many different aspects, and various beings as well have appeared to us from one realm or another and were shown in different lights. In order to anticipate any possible misconceptions that might arise I should like to point out today that when these beings and phenomena are illuminated, now from one angle, now from another, a superficial view might see contradictions. But if you look more closely you will see that these complicated facts of the spiritual world can be clarified only by throwing light on them from many sides. It is necessary to say this because certain facts with which most of you are already familiar from one aspect must in part be illuminated today from another, a new angle. We need only turn to that most profound document of the New Testament, familiar as the Gospel according to St. John, and read the pregnant words with which we brought yesterday's discussion to a close, in order to sense the literally endless enigmas of cosmic and human evolution hidden in the opening words of this Gospel. In the course of our observations the opportunity may present itself to show why the great narrators of spiritual events often expressed precisely the mighty, comprehensive truths in such a concise, paradigmatical form as we find in the opening verses of the John Gospel. Today we will return to certain well-known facts of spiritual science, treating them from an aspect differing from yesterday's, and see in what form we meet them again in the Gospel of St. John. Let us take our point of departure from the most elementary facts of spiritual science, comparatively speaking.

As we know, man in his ordinary state consists of four principles: physical body, etheric or life body, astral body, and ego, and we know that his daily life alternates in such a way that during his waking hours these four members of his being are organically interconnected and interpenetrative in him, whereas during sleep, while the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, the astral body and the ego bearer—we may call it simply the ego—are removed. Now, there is one point we must thoroughly understand today. In a man of our present stage of evolution we have before us this fourfold state as an inherent demand. As he lies in bed at night with only his physical and etheric bodies present he has, in a sense, the status of a plant; for the plant, as it appears in the outer world, consists only of physical body and etheric or life body; it bears no astral body or ego, and is thus differentiated from the animal and from man. The animal is the first in the scale to have an astral body, and man, an ego. Hence it can be said that during sleep, when his physical and etheric bodies alone remain in bed, man is in a sense a plantlike being. But again, he is not like a plant, and this must be rightly understood. In the present age a free and independent being having neither astral body nor ego, but consisting solely of etheric body and physical body, must have the appearance of a plant—must, in fact, be a plant. On the other hand man, as he lies asleep in bed, has grown beyond the status of a plant, because during the course of evolution he has added an astral body—vehicle of joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, impulses, desires, and passions—and also the vehicle of the ego. But the acquisition of a higher principle always involves a corresponding alteration in all that pertains to the lower principles. If an astral body were added to the plant we see today as a being of outer nature, if this astral body were not only to hover over the plant but to permeate it, then what we see penetrating the plant in its substance would have to become animal flesh. That is because upon entering, the astral body would transform the plant in such a way as to convert the substance into animal flesh. And the addition of an ego in the physical world would entail an analogous transformation.

We may therefore say that in a being like man, whose nature embraces not only a physical body but invisible, higher, super-sensible principles as well, the super-sensible members find expression in the lowest ones. Just as the inner qualities of your soul are superficially expressed in your features, in your physiognomy, so your physical body is an expression of the work performed by your astral body and ego; and the physical body does not represent merely itself: it stands as the physical expression of the human principles that are physically invisible. Thus the glandular system and all that pertains to it is an expression of the etheric body, everything connected with the nervous system is an expression of the astral body, and all that is comprised in the circulation is an expression of the ego bearer. So in the physical body itself we again have to take into account a fourfold organization; and only one who worships a crass materialistic world conception could classify the various substances in the human body as equivalent. The blood pulsating in our veins became the substance it is as a result of the fact that an ego dwells in us; the form and substance of the nervous system are due to the presence of an astral body; and the glandular system is the outcome of the etheric body.

If you will take all this into consideration you will readily see that between falling asleep at night and waking up in the morning the human being is really a contradiction in terms. One is inclined to call him a plant, yet he is not a plant because the physical substance of a plant lacks the expression of the astral body—the nervous system—as well as the expression of the ego—the circulatory system. A physical being such as man, equipped with a glandular, a nervous, and a circulatory system, can exist only by means of an etheric body, an astral body, and an ego; but in the night you forsake your physical and etheric bodies—that is, in as far as your astral body and ego constitute you a human being. You basely abandon them, as it were, making them into a self-contradictory being. Were nothing of a spiritual nature to intervene at this time, while you simply withdraw your astral body and ego from your physical and etheric bodies, you would find your nervous and circulatory systems destroyed when you woke up in the morning; for these cannot exist without your having an astral body and an ego within you. Therefore the following takes place, perceptible to clairvoyant consciousness:

In proportion to the withdrawal of the ego and astral body the clairvoyant sees a divine ego and a divine astral body enter into man. Actually there is during sleep, too, an astral body and an ego—or at least a substitute for these—in the physical and etheric bodies. When man's astral principle passes out, a higher one moves in—as does similarly a substitute for the ego. From this it is evident that within the realm of our lives, within their sphere, beings are at work that have no immediate expression in the physical world. What comes to expression in the physical world are minerals, plants, animals, and human beings. The last are for the moment the highest of the beings within our physical sphere, for they alone have physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. The fact that in sleep the astral body and ego withdraw from the physical and etheric bodies shows us that even today the former retain a certain independence; that they detach themselves, so to speak, and can live for a certain length of time every day thus sundered from the physical and etheric vehicles.
At night, then, we have the following condition: Just as the human physical body and the human etheric body are by day the bearers of the human ego and the human astral body—in other words, of the innermost principles—so by night they become the bearers, or the temple, of higher astral and ego beings. Now we look with different eyes at the sleeper, for the astral principle within him is a divine-spiritual principle, and there is also an ego, but a divine-spiritual ego. In a sense it can be said that while we are asleep in respect of our astral body and ego, we are watched over and the structure of our organization is maintained by these beings that thus become a part of our life, beings that enter our physical and etheric bodies when we ourselves abandon these. A great deal can be learned from a fact of this sort; and especially if taken in conjunction with certain clairvoyant observations it can elucidate much concerning the evolution of man. What we shall now do is to correlate this difference between waking and sleeping with the great spiritual facts of evolution.

The astral body and the ego appear, to be sure, as the highest and most intimate principles of man's nature, but by no means do they prove to be the most perfect. Even to superficial observation the physical body is more perfect than the astral body. Two years ago I pointed out here¹ that the more closely we examine man's physical body, the more admirable it appears in its entire structure. Not only does the marvel of the human heart or the human brain when examined anatomically satisfy the mind's acute, intellectual thirst for knowledge, but whoever approaches these with his soul feels an aesthetic and moral uplift when he realizes how sublime and wise are the provisions made in this physical body. The astral body is as yet less advanced. It is the bearer of joy and sorrow, of impulses, desires, indulgence, and so forth; and we must admit that in order to satisfy his desires man turns to all sorts of things hardly calculated to further the wise and ingenious workings of the heart or the brain. His craving for enjoyment leads him to seek satisfaction in things like coffee, that are poison for the heart, thereby proving the astral body's craving for pleasures that harm the wisely contrived human heart; yet for decades the heart withstands such poisons consumed by man as a result of his astral body's craving for enjoyment.

This proves that the physical body is more nearly perfect than the astral body. At some time in the future the astral body will be incomparably the more perfect of the two, but at present the development of the physical body is the most advanced. That is because it is actually the oldest principle of man's nature. The physical body itself furnishes the evidence that it was worked upon long before our earth came into being.

The modern doctrine of the origin of the world grew out of purely materialistic conceptions, and what it teaches is nothing but a materialistic fantasy; nor does it matter whether it is called the Kant-Laplace theory or, in the case of a later one, something else. For comprehending the outer structure of our world system these materialistic flights are undoubtedly useful, but they are of no avail in helping us understand anything higher than what the outer eye sees. Spiritual research shows that just as the human being passes from incarnation to incarnation, so a cosmic body like our earth has experienced other formations, other planetary conditions, in the remote past. Before our earth came into being it was in a different planetary state, the spiritual state science calls the “old Moon”.² This does not refer to our present moon but to an ancestor of our earth as a planetary being; and just as the human being has developed from an earlier form of embodiment into what he is today, so our earth has developed from old Moon to Earth: the old Moon is a sort of previous incarnation of the Earth. Going still farther back: a previous incorporation of the old Moon was the Sun—again not the present sun but an ancestor of our present earth; and finally, the precursor of this old Sun was the old Saturn. Those are the states our Earth passed through: a Saturn state, a Sun state, and a Moon state, and now it has reached its earth state.

The first germ of our physical body appeared on the old Saturn. In other words, while nothing of all that surrounds us today existed on that primeval cosmic body we designate the old Saturn (not the present planet)—nothing of our animal or plant life, or even of our mineral kingdom—yet there were the first rudiments of the present-day human physical body. This physical human body was constituted very differently from what it is today: it was present in its earliest germinal state, then developed during the Saturn evolution; and when the latter was completed the old Saturn passed through a sort of cosmic night in the same manner in which man passes through a devachan in order to reach his next incarnation. Then Saturn became the Sun; and as the plant arises out of the seed, so the human physical body reappeared on the old Sun. Gradually this physical body became permeated by an etheric or life body, so that on the old Sun the germinal physical body was joined by the etheric or life body. Man was then not a plant, but he had the status of a plant. He consisted of physical body and etheric body, and his consciousness resembled that of sleep, the consciousness of the carpet of plants that is spread out around us in the physical world today.

The Sun existence came to an end, and again there intervened a cosmic night, or world devachan, as we can call it. When the Sun had passed through this cosmic devachan it was transformed into the old Moon state. Again we find the human physical and etheric bodies that had entered on Saturn and the Sun respectively, but during the Moon evolution the astral body was added. Now the human being possessed a physical, an etheric, and an astral body. Thus you see that the physical body, having come into being on Saturn, was already passing through its third state on the Moon; and the etheric body that had been added on the Sun now rose to its second stage of perfection. The astral body, just engendered, was in its first stage in the Moon period.

Something now happened on the Moon that would not have been possible during the Saturn and Sun stages. While the latter had kept man a comparatively homogeneous being, the following event occurred when the old Moon was at a certain stage of development: The whole heavenly body split into two members, a sun and its satellite, the Moon; so that while in the case of Saturn and the Sun we have the evolution of a single planet, only the first part of the Lunar evolution can be thus characterized. That is because in the beginning everything that constitutes our present earth, sun, and moon was united in one primordial cosmic body in a single state, and then two bodies came into being. The sun that had its genesis at that time was not our sun, nor was it the old Sun, mentioned above: it was a special state that detached itself from the old Moon as a sun state; and along with it there came into being a planet, outside of the sun and circling it, which in turn we call the old Moon minus the sun; that is, the Moon.

Now, what is the significance of this division that took place in our earth's predecessor during the evolution of the old Moon? It lies in the fact that along with the sun the higher beings and the finer substances withdrew from the whole stellar mass as sun, while the coarser substances and the lower beings remained with the Moon. So during the evolution of the old Moon we have two heavenly bodies instead of one: a sun body, harboring the higher beings, and a Moon body, the dwelling place of the lower beings. Had the whole remained united, with no separation occurring, certain beings who developed on the sundered Moon could not have kept pace with the sun beings: they were not sufficiently mature, and therefore had to segregate, cast out, the coarser substances and build for themselves a sphere of action apart. Nor could the higher beings have remained united with these coarser substances, for it would have obstructed their more rapid progress. They, too, required a special field for their development, and that was the Sun.

Now let us turn to the beings dwelling on the old Sun and those on the old Moon, after the separation. We have learned that the potential human physical body had its inception during the Saturn state, that on the Sun the etheric body was added, and on the Moon, the astral body. Now, these human beings—or primeval men, if we may so call them—on the Moon had, in fact, remained with the Moon when it split off; and these were the ones who could not keep pace with the rapid development of the sun beings—those who had gone with the sun and now dwelt within the finer substances and matter on the sun. This also accounts for their becoming coarser during the Moon evolution. During this period, then, we have man in a state consisting of physical body, etheric body, and astral body; in other words, he had attained to the evolutionary stage of a present-day animal, for an animal has the physical, etheric, and astral bodies. But you must not imagine man on the old Moon as having been really an animal: his form was very different in appearance from anything in the present animal world, and it would strike you as utterly fantastic if I were to describe it.

Summing up, then: On the old Moon we find what may be called the ancestors of present-day man, equipped with physical, etheric, and astral bodies, in whom these principles tended to become rigid after the division—to become coarser than they would have become had they remained with the sun. But all that had split off with the sun had also passed through this threefold development, the Saturn, Sun, and Moon evolutions. This, however, proceeded in the direction taken by the sun, whereas the ancestors of men followed the Moon. These beings that went with the sun show a threefold organism closely paralleling that of man. On the sun, too, were beings who had acquired three principles, so to speak; but these had become finer instead of coarser after the separation. Think of the process as follows: After the split the human forebears became denser beings than they were before, they tended to solidify; while corresponding beings on the sun became more rarefied. Through having acquired an astral body during the Moon evolution, man in a sense descended to the level of an animal; but the beings that did not take part in this development—those that carried the finer substances with them to the sun—became finer.

So while man was hardening on the Moon, being of lofty spirituality arose on the sun. In spiritual science this spirituality is designated the counterpart of what evolved on the Moon. On the Moon men developed up to the rank of the animal, so to speak, although they were not animals. Now, in dealing with the animal kingdom people have always quite justifiably distinguished between different grades of animals, and the animal men on the Moon appeared in three grades differing essentially from one another. In spiritual science these are termed the grades of the “Bull”, the “Lion”, and the “Eagle”. Those are typical configurations, as it were, of the animal world. The old Moon was inhabited by the three groups: Bull men, Lion men, and Eagle men.—Although these connotations apply in no way to our present bulls, lions, and eagles, the deteriorated character of those primordial Moon men which we call Lion-men is nevertheless expressed, to a certain extent, in the feline species; in the character of the hoofed animals there comes to expression the degenerated nature of the so-called Bull men, and so forth.—That describes the densified nature of man after a three-stage development.

But on the sun dwelt the spiritual counterparts of these, also consisting of three groups. While the development of the astral principle on the Moon was shaping these three different animal men, the corresponding spiritual men arose on the sun as Angelical beings, spirit beings. These, too, are known as Lion, Eagle, and Bull, but as the spiritual counterparts of the others. So when you contemplate the sun you see spiritual beings whom you envision as the beautiful prototypes conceived in wisdom, while on the Moon you find something like hardened replicas of what dwells on the sun.

But something in the nature of a mystery underlies all this. These images down on the Moon are not without connection with their spiritual counterparts on the sun. On the Moon we have a group of primordial men, the Bull men, and on the sun a group of spirit beings connoted “Bull spirits”; and there is a spiritual connection between prototype and image. That is because the group soul is the prototype and acts as such upon the images. The forces proceed from the group soul and direct the image down below: the Lion spirit directs the beings who, as Lion men, are its image; the Eagle spirit guides the Eagle men, and so on. If these spirits up above had remained united with the Moon, bound to their replicas and inhabiting them, their activity would have been paralyzed; they could not have exercised the forces needed for the salvation and development of the images. They understood that they had to foster on a higher level what was destined to evolve on the Moon. The Bull spirit felt, I must care for the Bull men; but on the Moon I cannot find the conditions for my own progress, hence I must dwell on the sun and from there send down my forces to the Bull men.—And the same applies to the Lion spirit, and the Eagle spirit.

That is the way evolution proceeded. Certain beings needed a sphere of action above those that were their physical images, so to speak. The latter required a lower, lesser field. In order to function effectually the spiritual beings had to sunder the sun from the Moon and then send down their forces from without. Thus we see on the one hand a development downward, so to say, and on the other, an upward trend.

The evolution of the old Moon (as a cosmic period) proceeds. By acting upon their images from without, the spiritual beings spiritualize the Moon, with the result that the latter can in time reunite with the sun. The prototypes take their images back into themselves, absorb them, as it were. Another world devachan comes about, a cosmic night. (This is also known as a pralaya, whereas stages like Saturn, Sun, and Moon are called manvantaras.) Following this cosmic night there issues out of the obscurity of the cosmic womb our Earth stage, whose mission it is to advance man to the stage at which he can add the ego, or ego bearer, to his physical, etheric, and astral bodies. In the meantime, however, all previous evolution must be repeated; for whenever a higher stage is to be reached a cosmic law demands the repetition of all that had already taken place. The Earth had thus to pass once more through the old Saturn stage: again the first potential beginnings of the physical body evolved as out of the cosmic germ; and then followed a repetition of the Sun and Moon stages.

At this time sun, earth, and moon still formed a single body; but now a repetition of previous events takes place: the sun again splits off, and again those loftier beings that need this higher sphere for their development depart with the sun, carrying with them the finer substances they need for creating their cosmic sphere of action. Thus the sun left the Earth, which at that time still bore the moon within its body, and took with it those beings who were sufficiently advanced to find their further development on the sun. You will readily imagine that among these beings were to be found primarily those that had previously functioned as prototypes. All these beings, who during the old Moon period had attained to adequate maturity, progressed rapidly, with the result that they could no longer live in the denser substances and among the earth-plus-moon beings: they had to detach themselves and establish a new existence on the sun—our present sun.

Who were these beings? They were the descendants of those who, back in the old Moon state, had developed on the sun as the Bull, Lion, and Eagle spirits; and the loftiest of these, the most advanced, were those who had merged within themselves the natures of Eagle, Lion, and Bull in a harmonious unity. They are the beings that can be connoted human prototypes—spirit men in the true sense of the term. Keep in mind that among the spiritual beings, who during the old Moon period were to be found on the sun as Bull, Eagle, and Lion spirits, some had attained to a higher plane of development, and these are the Spirit Men proper whose dwelling place is now principally the sun. They are spiritual counterparts, so to speak, of what is in the process of evolution down below on the severed earth-plus-moon; but those that are developing down there are the descendants of the beings that had lived on the old Moon. Now, you can imagine that since a certain condensation, a solidification of these beings had already set in on the old Moon, a tendency to condense, to solidify, to dry out would be all the more pronounced in their descendants. Indeed, a sad and dreary period commenced for this sundered portion which then comprised earth-plusmoon. Above, on the sun, an ever fresher and livelier development, ever fuller life; below, on the Earth, misery and barrenness, steadily increasing rigidity.

Something now occurred without which evolution would have been brought to a standstill: the moon as we know it today separated from the earth-plus-moon body, and what remained is our present earth. In this way the coarsest substances withdrew before rendering the earth completely hard, and the latter was saved from total desolation.

To summarize all this: At the beginning of our Earth evolution the Earth formed one body with our present sun and moon. Had the Earth (earth plus moon) remained with the sun, man would never have been able to reach his present stage of development: he could not have kept pace with a development such as the beings on the sun needed. What developed up there was not man as he is on earth, but his spiritual prototype of which, as he appears in his physical body, he is really but an image. And on the other hand, had the moon remained within the earth, man would have gradually dried out and mummified, and have found no possibility of further development on Earth. The Earth would have become a barren, arid cosmic body; and in place of human bodies as we know them today, something like lifeless statutes would have developed, growing up out of the ground like desiccated men. This was prevented by the secession of the moon, which withdrew into cosmic space and took with it the coarsest substances. That made it possible for an ego to be added to the physical, etheric, and astral bodies already present in the descendants of the old Moon beings; and because the forces of sun and moon acted from without and there held each other in balance, man could experience fructification by the ego.

The earth was now the scene of further human evolution. All that had come over from the old Moon represented in a certain respect a devolution, a development into a lower stage; but now there appeared a new impetus, an impulse upward.—And in the meantime the progress of those corresponding spiritual beings who had remained with the sun steadily continued.

Let us suppose we have a block of hard iron before us and that our muscles are of average strength. We pound and hammer the iron, trying to beat it flat, but we cannot manage to give it any form until we have softened the substance by heat. Something of this sort happened to the earth after the densest substances had withdrawn with the moon. Now the earth beings could be formed, and now the sun beings again took a hand—those beings who as early as the old Moon state had intervened there from the sun as the group souls. Before the moon split off, substances were too dense; but now these beings asserted themselves as forces that gradually shaped and developed man to his present form.

Let us examine this more closely. Imagine you could have stood on this ancient heavenly body that consisted of earth-plus-moon. You would have beheld the sun out in space; and if you had been clairvoyant you would also have seen the spiritual beings described above. On the Earth you would have perceived a sort of solidification, of desolation, and it would have struck you that all about was nothing but aridity and death on the Earth; for the forces of the sun could gain no influence over all this that was on its way to becoming a great cosmic graveyard.—And then you would have seen the body of the moon detach itself from the Earth. You would have seen the substances of the earth becoming malleable and plastic, with the result that the forces descending from the sun were once more able to act. And you would have seen the Bull, Lion, and Eagle spirits regaining their influence over the human beings that were their images. You would have understood that the moon, isolated, had lost some of its harmful influence through its withdrawal, for thenceforth it could act only from a distance; and that in this way the earth was rendered capable of receiving what the spiritual beings had to give. Tomorrow we shall see what sort of a picture presents itself to the clairvoyant when he traces the more remote phases of evolution in the akashic record.

We know that during the old Saturn stage the first beginning of the human physical body was formed. What today we see as the physical human form first took shape on Saturn as though emerging from cosmic chaos. Then came the Sun stage during which the etheric body was added to the physical; and on the old Moon these were joined by the astral element in the case of those beings who continued their development on the sundered Moon, as well as of the spirits who had remained with the sun. On the sun dwelt the spiritual prototypes, on the Moon, their counterparts on the animal level; and finally, upon the Earth there had gradually evolved a condition under which man was once more able to receive into himself the astral element developed on the sun during the Moon evolution, an element that now acted in him as a force.

Let us now trace these four states. The exalted power which during the Saturn stage provided the spiritual germ of the physical human form is called by the author of the John Gospel the Logos. The element that was added on the Sun and merged with what had arisen on Saturn he designates Life, known to us accordingly as the etheric or life body. And what was subjoined on the Moon he terms the Light, for it is the spiritual light, the astral light. On the severed Moon this astral light effected a hardening, but on the sun itself, a spiritualization. What was thus engendered as spirit could and did continue to develop; and when the sun again split off, the principle that had evolved during the third stage shone into men, but man was as yet unable to see what thus shone in from the sun. It took part in the shaping of man, acted as a force; but man could not see it.

What we have in this way come to recognize as the essence of the Saturn evolution we can now express in the words of the Gospel of St. John:

In the beginning was the Logos.

Now we pass to the Sun. To denote what came into being on Saturn and was further developed on the Sun, we say, the etheric body was added:

And the Logos was Life.

On the Moon the astral element entered into both the physical and the spiritual aspects of men:

Within the animated Logos Light arose.

When the separation occurred the light developed in two directions: on the sun into a clairvoyant light, among men into darkness. For when man was to receive the light he, who was the darkness, comprehended it not.

So if we illuminate the John Gospel by means of the akashic record, what we read concerning cosmic evolution is a follows: In the beginning, during the Saturn evolution, everything had come into being out of the Logos; during the Sun evolution, Life was in the Logos; and out of this living Logos there arose Light during the Moon evolution. Finally, out of the living, light-filled Logos there appeared on the sun, during the Earth evolution, the Light in heightened luster—but men walked in darkness. And the beings who had become the advanced spirits of Bull, Lion, Eagle, and Man, shone down as light from the sun to the earth and into the forms of men that were taking shape. But these were the darkness, and they could not comprehend the light that shone down upon them.—Naturally we must not think of this as the physical light, but rather, as the Light that was the sum of the radiations from the spiritual beings, the spirits of Bull, Lion, Eagle, and Man, who constituted the continuation of the spiritual evolution of the Moon. It was the spiritual Light that streamed down. Men could not receive it, could not comprehend it. Their whole development was advanced by it, but without their consciousness taking part. The light shone in the darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

Thus paradigmatically does the writer of the John Gospel present these great verities; and those versed in such matters have ever been called the “servants or ministers of the Logos as it was from the beginning.” He who speaks thus was such a minister or servant of the Logos as it was from the beginning; and in the Luke Gospel we find what is basically the identical disposition. Just read understandingly what the writer of the Luke Gospel says: his purpose is to report events as they occurred from the beginning, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the Word.

And we believe that these documents were written by servants of the Word, or the Logos. We learn to believe this when by means of our own spiritual research we see what took place, when we see how our Earth evolution came about by way of Saturn, Sun, and Moon. And when we then find that we can rediscover, independent of all documents, what is presented in the comprehensive words of the John Gospel and in the words of the Luke Gospel, we learn anew to appreciate these documents and to find in them their own evidence that they were written by those who could read in the spiritual world. They provide a means of communication with men of remote times whom we can face, in a sense, and say, We recognize and know you—because what they knew we have found again in Spiritual Science.

• 1. Cf. Lectures delivered in Whilhelmshöhe near Kasel, June 16-19, 1907.
• 2. In his translation of Occult Science, an Outline, by Rudolf Steiner, Mr. Henry B. Monges provided an ingenious device for eliminating the confusion that arises so easily in connection with the study of planetary evolution. The following footnote, quoted from Occult Science, explains it.
  
  In order to make clear the difference between the designations for the Planetary Evolutions and our present planetary bodies, which bear the same names, the following device has been determined on: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan printed in italics with initial capitals designate the great cosmic planetary cycles of evolution. In the Sun evolution, after the separation of the main cosmic body into two parts, the designation is Sun and Saturn, spelt with capitals, but not with italics. In the Moon evolution, when a separation takes place, the remaining body is spelt Moon, with an initial capital, the separating planetary sun is spelt with small letters. In the Earth evolution, the separated planetary bodies are spelt as is customary: The planets Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury with initial capitals; sun, moon, earth with small letters.”
  
  The device is gratefully adopted in this translation

The lecture presented here was given in Dornach on April 2, 1920, and is the 4th of 17 lectures in the series entitled: Healing of the Social Organism. It appears in the original German in Heilfaktoren Fuer den Sozialen Organismus, Bibliographic Nr.198, Dornach 1961. It is also known as: Easter, Festival of Warning, or Event at Damascus, or New Knowledge of Spirit. The translators are Dorothy S. Osmond, Alan P. Shepherd, and Charles Davy. Edited by, and with additional commentary by Frank Thomas Smith.

Ever since the early days of Christianity it has been the custom to draw a distinction between the festivals of Christmas and of Easter in that the Christmas festival has been made immovable, having been fixed at a point of time a few days after the 21st of December, the winter solstice, whereas the day of the Easter festival is determined by a particular constellation of the stars, a constellation of the stars which unites earth and man with the worlds beyond the earth. To-morrow will be the first full moon of spring and upon this full moon will fall the rays of the springtime sun, for since the 21st of March the sun has been in the sign of spring. When, therefore, men on earth celebrate a Sunday—a day, that is, which should remind them of their connection with the sun-forces—when the Sunday comes that is the first after the full moon of spring, then is the time to keep the Easter festival. Easter is thus a movable festival. In order to determine the time of the Easter festival, note must be taken each year of the constellations in the heavens.

Principles such as these were laid down at a time when traditions of wisdom were still current among mankind, traditions that originated from ancient atavistic clairvoyant faculties and gave man a knowledge far surpassing the knowledge that present-day science can offer. And such traditions were a means for bringing to expression man's connection with the worlds beyond the earth. They always point to something of supreme importance for the evolution [of] mankind.

The rigid point of time fixed for the Christmas festival indicates how closely that festival is bound up with the earthly, for its purpose is to remind us of the birth of the man into whom the Christ Being afterwards entered. The Easter festival, on the other hand, is intended to remind us of an event whose significance lies, not merely within the course of earth-evolution, but within the whole world-order into which man has been placed. Therefore the time of the Easter festival must not be determined by ordinary earthly conditions; it is a time that can be ascertained only when man turns his thoughts to the worlds beyond the earth. And there is deeper meaning still in this plan of a movable time for the Easter festival. It indicates how through the Christ Impulse man is to be set free from the forces of earth-evolution pure and simple. For through knowledge of that which is beyond the earth, man is to become free of the evolution of the earth, and this truth is indicated in the manner of dating the Easter festival. It contains a call to man to lift himself up to the worlds beyond the earth; it contains a promise to man that in the course of world-history it shall be possible for him, through the working of the Christ Impulse, to become free of earthly conditions.

To understand all that is implied in this manner of dating the Easter festival, it will be helpful to turn our minds to early secrets of the beginnings of Christianity, to some of those early mysteries which during a certain period of earthly evolution have become more and more veiled and hidden from the materialistic view of the world which arose at the beginning of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch and must now be vanquished and superseded. In order to see the whole matter in a true light it will be necessary first of all to consider the part played by the figure of St. Paul in the evolution of the Christ Impulse within the whole history of mankind.

We should indeed remind ourselves again and again what a great event in the evolution of Christianity was the appearance of the figure of St. Paul Paul had had abundant opportunity to inform himself, by external observation, of the events in Palestine that were associated with the personality of Jesus. All that came to his notice in this way in the physical world left Paul unconvinced; when these events in Palestine had come to an end in the physical sense, Paul was still an antagonist of Christianity. He became the Apostle of the Christians only after the event at Damascus, after he had experienced the very Being of the Christ in an extra-earthly, super-sensible manner. Thus Paul was a man who could not be persuaded of the meaning of the Christ Impulse by evidence of the physical senses, but who could be convinced only by a super-sensible experience. And the super-sensible experience that came to him cut deeply into his life—so deeply indeed, that from that moment he became another man. Nay, more: he became an initiate.

Paul was well prepared for such an experience. He was thoroughly acquainted with the secrets of the religion of the Jews; he was familiar with their knowledge and their conception of the world. He was thus well equipped to judge of the nature of the event that befell him at Damascus and to have a right view and understanding of it. The writings of Paul, as we know them, convey only a weak reflection of all that he experienced inwardly. But even so, when he speaks of the event of Damascus we can discern that he speaks as one who through this event attained knowledge of cosmic happenings lying behind the veil of the world of sense. From the very manner in which he speaks it is plain that he is fully able to understand the difference between the super-sensible world and the world of sense.

When, even externally, we compare the life of Paul with the earthly experience of Christ Jesus, we discover a strange and astounding fact which becomes intelligible to us only when with the help of spiritual science. We are able to survey the whole evolution of mankind. I have often drawn attention to the great difference in the development of the human soul in the several epochs. I have shown you how man has changed in the course of evolution through the Indian, Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Greco-Latin epochs, on to our own time. When we look back into the ancient past we find that man remained capable of organic physical development until an advanced age. The parallelism between the development of the soul and the development of the body continued until an advanced age; it is a parallelism that we can recognise now only in the three stages marked by the change of teeth, puberty and the beginning of the twenties. As far as outward appearance goes, mankind has lost the experience of such transitions in later life. In very ancient Indian times, however, men experienced a parallelism between the development of soul and of body up to the fiftieth year of life, in Persian and Egyptian times up to the fortieth year, and in Greco-Latin times up to the thirty-fifth year. In ordinary consciousness, we experience a like parallelism only up to the twenty-seventh year and it is not easy to detect even for so long as that. Now the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of mankind at a time when men—especially those of the Greek and Latin races—experienced this parallelism as late as into the thirtieth year. And Christ Jesus lived His days of physical earthly life for just so long as the duration of the span of life which ran in a parallelism between the physical organisation and the organisation of soul and spirit. Then, in relation to earthly life, He passed through the gate of death.What this passage through the gate of death means can be understood only from the point of view of spiritual science; it can be understood only when we are able to look into super-sensible worlds. For the passage through the gate of death is not an event that can be grasped by any thinking concerned entirely with the world of sense.

As physical man, Paul was of about the same age as Christ Jesus Himself. The time that Christ Jesus spent in His work on earth, Paul spent as an anti-Christian. And the second half of his life was determined entirely by what came to him from super-sensible experiences. In this second half of his life he had super-sensible experience of what men at that time could no longer receive in the second half of life through sense-experience, because the parallelism between soul-and-spirit development and physical development was not experienced beyond the thirty-fifth year of life. And the Event of Golgotha came before Paul in such a way that he received, by direct illumination, the understanding once possessed by men in an atavistic way through primeval wisdom, and which they can now again acquire through spiritual science. This understanding came to Paul in order that he might be the one to arouse in men a realisation of what had happened for mankind through the working of the Christ Impulse.

For about the same length of time that Christ had walked the earth, did Paul continue to live upon earth—that is, until about his sixty-seventh or sixty-eighth year. This time was spent in carrying the teaching of Christianity into earth-evolution. The parallelism between the life of Christ Jesus and the life of Paul is a remarkable one. The life of Christ Jesus was completely filled with the presence and Being of the Christ. Paul had such a strong after-experience (acquired through Initiation) of this event, that he was able to be the one to bring to mankind true and fitting ideas about Christianity—and to do so for a period of time corresponding very nearly to that of the life of Christ Jesus on earth. There is a great deal to be learned from a study of the connection between the life lived by Christ Jesus for the sake of the earthly evolution of mankind, and the teaching given by Paul concerning the Christ Being. To see this connection aright would mean a very great deal for us; only it is necessary to realise that the connection is a direct result of the super-sensible experience undergone by Paul. [Rudolf Steiner here considers the "Christ Being" to be the spiritual being who entered the body of Jesus of Nazareth during the Baptism in the Jordan; and "Christ Jesus" to be Jesus of Nazareth plus the Christ Being. Ed.]

When modern theology goes so far as to explain the event at Damascus as a kind of illusion, as a kind of hallucination, then it is only a proof that in our day even theology has succumbed to materialism. Even theology has no longer any knowledge of the nature of the super-sensible world, and entirely fails to recognise man's need to understand the super-sensible world before he can have any true comprehension of Christianity.

It is good that we should confess today, in all sincerity, how difficult it is to find our way into the ideas presented in the Gospels and in the Epistles of Paul—ideas that are so totally different from those to which we are accustomed. For the most part we have ceased to concern ourselves at all with such ideas. But it is a fact that a person who is completely given up to the habits and ways of thought of the present day, is far from being able to form the right ideas when he reads the words of Paul. Many present-day theologians put a materialistic interpretation upon the event of Damascus, even trying to disprove and deny the actual Resurrection of Christ Jesus—while professing at the same time to be true Christians. Such persons themselves bear testimony that they have no intention of applying knowledge of the super-sensible to the essence of Christianity or to the event of the appearance of Christ Jesus in earthly evolution. The very fact that the figure of Paul stands at the summit of Christian tradition, the figure, that is, of one who acquired an understanding of Christianity through super-sensible experience, is like a challenge to man to possess himself of super-sensible knowledge. It is like a declaration that Christianity cannot possibly be comprehended without having recourse to knowledge that has its source in the super-sensible. It is essential that we should see in Paul a man who had been initiated into super-sensible, cosmic happenings; it is essential to see in this light what he laboured so hard to bring to mankind. Let us try in the language of the present day to place before our minds one of the things that seemed to Paul, as an initiate, to be of particular significance.

Paul regarded it of supreme importance to make clear to men how through the Christ Impulse an entirely new way of relating themselves to cosmic evolution had come to them. He felt it essential to declare: that that period of the evolution of the world which carried within it the experiences of the heathen of older times, had run its course; it was finished for man. New experiences were now here for the human soul; they needed only to be perceived.

When Paul spoke in this way, he was pointing to the mighty Event which made such a deep incision into the evolution of man on earth; and indeed if we would understand history as it truly is, we must come back again and again to this Event. If we look back into pre-Christian times, and especially into those times which possess to a striking degree the characteristic qualities of pre-Christian life, we can feel how different was the whole outlook of men in those days. Not that a complete change took place in a single moment; nevertheless the Event of Golgotha did bring about an absolute separation of one phase in the evolution of mankind from another. The Event of Golgotha came at the end of a period of evolution during which men beheld, together with the world of the senses, also the spiritual. Incredible as it may appear to modern man it is a fact that in pre-Christian times men saw, together with the sense-perceptible, a spiritual reality. They did not see merely trees, or merely plants, but together with the trees, and together with the plants they saw something spiritual. But as the time of the Event of Golgotha drew near, the civilisation that bore within it this power of vision was coming to an end. Something completely new was now to enter into the evolution of mankind. As long as man beholds the spiritual in the physical things all around him, he cannot have a consciousness which allows the impulse of freedom to quicken within it. The birth of the impulse of freedom is necessarily accompanied by a loss of this vision; man has to find himself deserted by the divine and spiritual when he looks out upon the external world. The impulse of freedom inevitably implies that, if man would again have vision of the spiritual, he must exert himself inwardly and draw it forth from the depths of his own soul.

This is what Paul wanted to reveal. He told how in ancient times, when men were only the race of Adam, they had no need to draw forth an active experience from the depths of their own being before they could behold the divine and spiritual. The divine and spiritual came to them in elemental form, with everything that lived in the air and on earth. But mankind had gradually to lose this living communion with the divine and spiritual in all the phenomena of the world of sense. A time had to come when man must perforce lift himself up to the divine and spiritual by an active strengthening of his own inner life. He had to learn to understand the words: “My kingdom is not of this world.” He was not to be allowed to go on receiving a divine and spiritual reality that came forth to meet him from all sense-phenomena He had to find the way to a divine and spiritual kingdom that could be reached only by inward struggle and inward development.

People interpret Paul today in such a trivial manner! Again and again they show an inclination to translate what he said into the language of this materialistic age. So trivial is their interpretation of him that one is liable to be dubbed fantastic when one puts forward such a view as the following concerning the content of his message. And yet it is absolutely true.

Paul saw what a great crisis it was for the world that the ancient vision, which was at one and the same time a sense-vision and a spiritual vision, was fading away and disappearing, and that another vision of the spiritual was now to dawn for man in a new kingdom of light, [Romans 13:12] a vision which he must acquire for himself by his own inner initiative, and which is not immediately present for him in the vision of the senses. Paul knew from his own super-sensible experience in initiation that ever since the Resurrection Christ Jesus has been united with earth-evolution. But he also knew that, although Christ Jesus is present, He can be found by man only through the awakening of an inner power of vision, not through any mere beholding with the senses. Should anyone think he can reach the Christ with the mere vision of the senses, Paul knew that he must be giving himself up to delusions, he must be mistaking some demon for the Christ.

This was what Paul was continually emphasising to those of his hearers who were able to understand it: that the old spiritual vision brings no approach to Christ, that with this old vision one can only mistake some elemental being for the Christ. Therefore Paul exerted all his power to bring men out of the habit of looking to the spirits of air and of earth. [Gal. 4:3,9] In earlier times men had been familiar with elemental spirits, and necessarily so, for in those times they still possessed atavistic faculties with which to behold them. But now these faculties could not rightly be possessed by man. On the other hand, Paul never wearied of exhorting people to develop within themselves a force whereby they might learn to understand what it was that had taken place, namely, an entirely new impulse, an entirely new Being had entered earth-evolution. “Christ will come again to you,” he said, “if you will only find the way out of your purely physical vision of the earth. Christ will come again to you, for He is here. Through the working of the Event of Golgotha, He is here. But you must find Him; He must come again for you.”

This is what Paul proclaimed, and in a language which at the time had quite another spiritual ring than has the mere echo left us in our translation. It sounded quite different then. Paul sought continually to awaken in man the conviction that if he would understand Christ, he must develop a new kind of vision; the vision that suffices for the world of sense is not enough. today, mankind has only come so far as to speak of the contrast between an external, sense-derived science, and faith. Modern theology is ready to admit of the former that it is complicated, that it is real and objective, that it requires to be learned; of faith it will allow no such thing. It is repeatedly emphasised that faith ought to make appeal to what is utterly childlike in man, to that in man which does not need to be learned.

Such is the attitude of mind which rejects the event of Damascus as unreal, preferring to regard it as a kind of hallucination that befell Paul. If, however, the event of Damascus was a mere hallucination—or I might just as well say, if the event of Damascus was what a great number of modern theologians would have it to be—then we ought also to have the courage to say: Away with Christianity! For Christianity has brought with it a belief that is absurd and senseless.

This would be the necessary outcome of the teaching of modern theology, if only people took it—first of all, seriously, and secondly, with courage. As a matter of fact they do neither. They shrink from having nothing but a merely external, sense-given science, and yet at the same time they deny the real, inner impulse of the event of Damascus, while still professing to hold fast to Christianity! It is precisely in such things that the soul-and-spirit sickness of our age comes to clearest expression; for a deep inner lack of truth is here laid bare. Truth would be obliged to confess: Either the event of Damascus was a reality, an event that can be placed in the realm of reality, then Christianity has meaning; or it was what it is asserted to be by modern theology, which wants always to associate itself with modern science; then Christianity has no meaning. It is important that people should face such conclusions, for there is no doubt we live in an age of severe testing. Through man's becoming inwardly untrue in regard to the very matters that are most sacred for him—for he ought no longer to call what he has, ‘Christianity’—through this, a tendency to untruth, often unconscious but no less destructive on that account, has taken hold of mankind. That is the real reason for the existence of this tendency. That is why this tendency to untruth is so closely interwoven with the events that will inevitably lead to decadence in the whole cultural life of Europe, unless people rethink these things in time and turn to spiritual knowledge.

And if we would turn to spiritual knowledge, it is emphatically not enough to rest content with looking at life in any superficial way; it is absolutely essential for us to take things in all their depth of meaning and to be ready to contemplate the necessity of mighty changes in our own time.

Again and again we must ask: What is a festival such as that of Easter for the greater part of mankind? It may be said of very many people that when they are in the circle of their friends who still want to gather together to keep the festival, all their thinking about Easter runs along the lines of old habits of thought; they use the old words, they go on uttering them more or less automatically, they make the same renunciation in the same formula to which they have long been accustomed. But have we any right today to utter this renunciation, when we can observe on every hand a distinct unwillingness to take part in the great change that is so necessary in our own time? Are we justified in using the words of Paul: “Not I, but Christ in me!” when we show so little inclination to examine into what it is that has brought such great unhappiness to mankind in the modern age? Should it not go together with the Easter festival that we set out to gain a clear idea of the destiny that has befallen mankind and of what it is that alone can lead us out of the catastrophe—namely, super-sensible knowledge? If the Easter festival, whose whole significance depends upon super-sensible knowledge—for knowledge of the senses can never explain the Resurrection of Christ Jesus—if this Easter festival is to be taken seriously, is it not essential that people should consider how a super-sensible character can be brought again into the human faculty of knowledge? Should not this be the thought that rises up in our minds today: All the lying and deception in modern culture is due to the fact that we ourselves are no longer in earnest about what we recognise as the sacred festivals of the year?

We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest—for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter—these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology—that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. In our own time a book entitled “The Essence of Christianity” has been written by an eminent theologian of Central Europe, and is accounted of outstanding importance. Yet throughout this work we find evidence of a desire not to take seriously the fact of the Resurrection of Christ Jesus. There you have a true symptom of the times!

People must learn to feel these things deeply in their hearts. We shall never find a way out of our present troubles unless we develop understanding of the enmity cherished by the modern materialistically minded man towards the truth, unless we learn to see through things like this, for they are of very great significance in life today.

During the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch a new tendency has been at work, a tendency towards a scientific knowledge that is adapted to the power of human reason and judgment; and now it is time that this should go further and develop into a knowledge of the super-sensible world. For the Event of Golgotha is an event that falls absolutely within the super-sensible world. And the event of Damascus, as Paul experienced it, is an event that can be understood only out of super-sensible ideas. On the understanding of this event depends whether one can in very truth feel something of the Christ Impulse, or whether one cannot. The man of the present day is faced with a severe test when he asks himself: In the time that has been christened ‘Easter,’ how do I stand to super-sensible knowledge? For Easter should remind him, by the very way its date is determined, to look up from the earthly to what is beyond the earth. The man of modern times has left himself no more insight into what is beyond the earth than at most that which is given him in mathematics and mechanics, and now in spectro-analysis. These sciences are the groundwork upon which he tries to build up his knowledge concerning all that is beyond the earth. He no longer feels that he is himself united with those worlds, and that the Christ descended thence when He entered into the personality of Jesus.

Let me beg you to give these thoughts, which are so pertinent to our present problems, your full and earnest attention. I have often pointed out what a fine spiritual nature such as Herman Grimm must needs think of the Kant-Laplace theory. It is true, the theory has undergone some modification in our day, nevertheless in all essentials it is still the prevailing theory of the universe. It is said that the solar system has come out of a primeval nebula, and in course of mighty changes undergone by the nebula and its densifications, plants, animals and also man have come into being. And carrying the theory further, a time will come when everything on the earth will have found its grave and when ideals and works of culture will no longer send their voice out into the universe, when the earth itself will fall like a bit of slag into the sun; and then, in a still later time, the sun will burn itself out and be scattered in the All, not merely burying, but annihilating everything that is now being made and done by man.

Such a view of the ordering of the world must inevitably arise in a time when man wants to grasp that which is beyond the earth with mathematical and mechanical knowledge alone. In a world in which he merely calculates or investigates qualities of the sun with the spectroscope—in such a world we shall never find the realm whence Christ came down to unite Himself with the life of the earth! There are people today who, because they cannot get clarity into their thoughts, prefer not to let themselves be troubled with thinking at all, and go on repeating the words they have learned from the Gospels and from the Epistles of St. Paul, simply repeating by rote what they have learned, never stopping to think whether it is compatible with the view of the evolution of the earth and man that they acquire elsewhere. But that is the deep inward untruth of our time: men slink away into some comfortable dark corner instead of bringing together in their thought the things that essentially belong together. They want to raise a mist before their eyes so that they may not need to ‘think together’ the things that belong together. They raise a mist before their eyes when they keep a festival like Easter and are at the same time very far indeed from forming any true idea of the Resurrection of which they speak; for a true idea of it can only be formed with spiritual and super-sensible knowledge.

The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this—that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.

The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need today to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based—all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are today living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place—until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.

This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds today. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival—that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.

How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave—we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” but to have the right to say: “Not I, but Christ in me.”

It is related of a learned English scientist [T.H. Huxley] that he said he would rather believe that he had by his own power worked his way up little by little from the ape stage to his present height as man, than that he had descended from a once ‘divine’ height, as his opponent, who could not give credence to the ideas of natural science, appeared to have done.

Such things only serve to show how urgent it is to find the way from the confession of faith: “Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,” to that other confession of faith: “Not I, but Christ in me.” We must strive to understand this words of Paul. Not until then will it be possible for the true Easter message to rise up from the depths of our hearts and souls and enter into our consciousness.