The Rudolf Steiner Archive

To-day I should like to speak about a very important myth, also Greek, one which, like all myths, can be interpreted at many different levels. We will endeavour to uncover its real kernel. But before going on I should like to preface what I have to say by a few more theoretic observations.

In the last number of Lucifer-Gnosis¹ I stressed that the last three culture-periods of Atlantis saw the beginning of a particular influence on the human race which still endures even to-day. It has to do with the fact that men then became mature enough to work in what we call our intellect. Before that time man was more a being of memory. Up to the fourth Atlantean culture-period man's memory was especially developed. The faculty of intellectual combination, the calculating faculty, in short, all that makes up our present-day culture, began in the fifth Atlantean period with the Ur-Semites. And it was this that made the Ur-Semites capable of originating the whole of the fifth, the Aryan, root-race. The Aryan root-race had as its primary task the development of the intelligence which is active on the physical plane. When such a new phase of human evolution occurs, it becomes possible for new Beings, Beings who up to that time had led hidden lives, to gain an influence on evolution. And in fact, since the fifth culture-epoch of Atlantis, a particular host of Beings have participated in human evolution, the activity of whom had not hitherto been noticeable. You must think of these Beings as very highly evolved, far more highly evolved than man at the stage he then was. But in a certain way they had lagged in their development behind the Beings who in the middle of the Lemurian time had intervened in the affairs of the human race. It was a fresh setback which took place at that time. The Beings of whom I am now speaking belonged in their whole nature to what we call the Moon evolution. They went through their development on the Old Moon, but they were not so far advanced as the Beings who were able to intervene in the middle of the Lemurian time. They had remained behind the normal development on the Moon. They had advanced to the point of recognising that the faculties which man had now attained were analogous to their own, to the point of recognising that they could obtain control over those human faculties. Up to this time men had not been Beings of intelligence, now they acquired the intellect. And these new Beings made use of this human intellect for their own further development. Thus it came about that a phase of human evolution now set in which we call the phase of cold, objective science. Prior to this time there was no such thing, and one day there will again be no such thing. All wisdom hitherto attained in human evolution has been fundamentally associated with love. Cold, calculating science is under the influence of these backward Beings. Thus the influence of these Beings, who are still active, will come to an end only when our whole intellectual activity, everything which we are capable of knowing, is again permeated with love. When intelligence and love are once more united in the higher wisdom, the influence of those Beings, who are not visible on the physical plane, will disappear. To make clear their influence, in the first place to the pupils of the Mysteries, and then to mankind, was the task of the Greek Mysteries

About the eighth century B.C., a very important epoch sets in as regards these Beings. If you think of the culture-epochs of our fifth root-race—of the ancient Veda culture, then of the ancient Persian culture, of the Chaldean-Egyptian culture, if you think even of the time of the Druid culture, you will find that an objective, dispassionate science of knowledge did not exist. It first emerged at the dawn of the fourth culture-epoch, which one can place in about the eighth century B.C. With it there dawned an objective knowledge, completely detached from all the rest of the contents of the human mind. A Chaldean priest who cultivated astronomy still sought to fathom the purposes of the rulership of the world; and this can also be said of the Egyptian and Druid priests; they sought to acquire insight into the purposes of the world-ruler. A purely intellectual knowledge first dawned in Greece. This intellectual knowledge had been prepared step by step, and emerged, bound up with the rest of human activity, under the influence of the Beings I have mentioned; it was fully released in the fourth culture-epoch of the fifth root-race. Those who were initiated in the Mysteries of that time, confronted by the external wisdom, looked upon the ancient wisdom, which had formerly been at the disposal of mankind, as something lost, something which men must seek to regain.

Now there was a particular way of describing the point of time in which this dispassionate, dry wisdom separated itself from the all-embracing primeval wisdom. In the eighth century B.C., the passage of the sun through the sign of the Ram, which then took place, was experienced as the repetition of an earlier passage through the same sign thousands of years previously. It is well known that the sun moves forward through the whole of the zodiac, through the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, through Cancer, the Lion, the Virgin and so on, so that it has already passed through the Ram many times. The last time it had passed through the Ram, man was in possession of a knowledge united with love, and thereby of the primeval wisdom. This primeval wisdom had now been lost, and had given place to a culture of external wisdom. The priests of the Greek. Mysteries expressed this whole process in its occult significance through the profound symbol of the Argonaut saga, in which the ram is the symbol of the union of love and knowledge.

Let us first call to mind the whole of the myth. We are told that Phrixos and Helle had to suffer many things at the hand of their bad stepmother. Therefore their dead mother appeared to Phrixos and advised him to run away and to take his sister with him. She gave him a large ram with a golden fleece, upon the back of which they were to cross the sea. Helle fell off and was drowned in the Hellespont, but Phrixos reached Colchis with the ram. There he is said to have sacrificed it and to have given its fleece to King Petus, who hung it on an oak in front of a cavern. Later, the Greek hero Jason, together with the most important of the Greek initiates of the time, Orpheus, Theseus, Hercules and others, set to work to recover the fleece from the alien people of Colchis. Through winning the hand of the king's youngest daughter, Medea, he was enabled to bring it back to Greece. First he had to overcome two fire-breathing bulls. Then he had to sow a dragon's teeth. From the dragon's teeth grew armed men, who began to fight. With Medea's help he was able to bring this conflict to a successful conclusion. It was she too who enabled him to capture the fleece and to set out, together with it and her, on the homeward journey to Greece. In order to deceive her father Medea had taken her brother with her, had slain him and had thrown his dismembered body into the sea. While the lamenting father was collecting his son's limbs she was able to continue her flight with Jason into Greece.

In the eighth and ninth centuries B.C., the pupils of the Greek Mysteries were taught the occult meaning of this saga. They were taught that the Beings who made use of the dry, dispassionate human intelligence had now attained a special importance. The longing awoke in them for the ancient culture which had obtained when the sun had passed through the sign of the Ram on the occasion before the last. That the twins Phrixos and Helle were carried by the ram to Colchis means simply that an earlier race—the Persian-Iranian, with its twofold nature (it stood under the sign of the gods Ormuzd and Ahriman)—had regained the union of knowledge and love. This race had borne the fleece to hidden realms. Still earlier, in Atlantis, this fleece, this wisdom, had been the common possession of human culture; then it had been carried into distant Mystery-schools. It had to be brought back again. Thus the Argonaut saga is an expression of the founding of the Greek Mystery-schools.

Thus we are told that a primeval wisdom existed among the people of Atlantis. It was then the common possession of humanity. It had been lost and was now only to be found in the caves and crypts of the pupils of the Mysteries. But the Greeks established the Mysteries anew; by bringing the primeval wisdom back again to Greece, Theseus, Orpheus, Hercules and others became the founders of this Greek Mystery-wisdom.

A dispassionate, cold intelligence, which is objective, is introduced by Thales, Anaximenes, Socrates and other philosophers. The Mystery-wisdom is united with love. It is a wisdom which cannot be attained without purification of the passions, the forces of Kama.² The other kind of knowledge can be obtained without purification of Kama.

Thus the very important Argonaut saga puts before us the transition from the third to the fourth culture-epoch of our present root-race. Human culture, which formerly was one stream, now separates into two—into mystery-wisdom and external knowledge. The one stream was hidden—it was the recovery of the golden fleece but it was nevertheless effective. It had an influence on Greek art and culture. Only on external knowledge was it henceforth to have no influence. This is the saga of the voyage of the Argonauts.

The Odyssey too is concerned with the transition from one race to another. The Odyssey has been given the most varied explanations To-day I only want to indicate the bare framework of the saga. In my book Christianity as Mystical Fact I tried to make use of its second stage of interpretation; to-day we will look at the third.

Odysseus, who took part in the siege of Troy, by his cunning and his cleverness, helped the Greeks to conquer Troy. He made lone voyages, voyages in which he went astray—voyages on the water, be it noted. He came to the land of the Cyclops and overcame their one-eyed leader; then he went further, to Circe, who, we are told, turned his companions into swine. Then he descended into the underworld, and made the acquaintance of the dead heroes of Troy. Then he came under the influence of the sirens, who lead men astray by their magic songs. We are further told that most of his companions succumbed to the temptation, but that Odysseus caused himself to be bound to his ship, and thus saved himself; we are told how he then came to a place between Scylla and Charybdis where his ships were in danger of being wrecked. To save himself he had to pass through a whirlpool. Then he comes to the island of Calypso, sojourns there seven years and is enabled to leave by the intervention of Zeus, who orders Calypso to let him go, and at last he reaches his home country.

He is led by the goddess Pallas Athene into his house and to his wife, who has had to withstand many dangers because of the suitors who beset her. So she unravels by night the weaving she accomplishes by day, because she has promised her hand to one of her suitors when the work is finished.

Now let us go through this outline of the Odyssey as it is known to us from Greek occult wisdom. The schools of initiation, in which was actually enacted what I have just recounted, led the pupils on to the astral and the mental planes³ in such a way as to enable them to survey a stretch of human evolution, to survey the period from the middle of Lemuria to the time when in Greece, in the school of initiation which had been founded by Jason together with Orpheus, Theseus, Hercules and others, man was again able to find the primeval wisdom. Thus the pupil was led on to the astral and the mental planes and was shown the events which humanity had to pass through between the middle of Lemuria and the point of time when the Trojan war took place. The Argonaut saga is a picture of the primeval wisdom. It shows us that it existed at that time side by side with external knowledge.

What was it that was shown to the pupils of the Mysteries in the Odyssey? Odysseus himself is its expression. Let us turn back for a moment to the middle of the Lemurian time. Man was then in a state of transition from the hermaphroditic to the condition of sexuality, in a state of transition from the condition of being able to see without an external physical sense-organ to that of seeing with the physical eye. Up to the middle of Lemuria every man had one eye, which was then replaced by two external physical eyes. It was into this phase of evolution that the pupil of the early Greek Mysteries was transplanted. He had to experience the transition from the first half of Lemuria into the second half of Lemuria, into the time after the middle of Lemuria up to the emergence of the second eye. The Cyclopes were the men of the early Lemurian time. Odysseus came to know these men upon the astral plane. After this time, human astral bodies were plunged into matter which was becoming denser, more solid. We then come—so were the initiates instructed—to the first periods of Atlantis. The Atlantean acquires more and more the capacity to make use of the forces of life, to apply these forces for his own ends. They were fully developed astral forces which the Atlantean possessed, and it was only on the astral plane that a Greek could be transported into them. This was the time, so often spoken of in occult writings, when the Atlantean races lapsed into the wildest arts of black magic. This epoch was brought before the pupils of the Greek Mysteries in these shifting scenes. This was the age when. human passions became so distorted under the influence of the forces of black magic that their astral bodies resembled those of the lowest animals. This was the picture which the Turanians presented when they lapsed into these wild magic arts. The astral body was so changed under the influence of these black arts that it could only be expressed symbolically as the changing of the comrades of Odysseus into swine. This was the moment of human evolution which the Greek initiates of that time experienced. Then Odysseus descended into the underworld. In the world of Greek mythology this always signified an initiation. Whenever it is said of a hero that he descended into the underworld, the narrator wants to express the fact that the hero concerned has been initiated, made acquainted with things that lie beyond death. Odysseus was an initiate and the Odyssey itself is the description of his initiation.

Now we go on to a point when, after the Atlantean flood, men became acquainted with the first operations of those Beings of whom I have spoken, acquainted with the effects of external culture, science and art, with forces which influenced intellectual life after the flood. The first periods of purely external physical culture were brought before the initiates as the temptations of purely worldly arts, worldly culture. These are the siren songs of the young fifth root-race. It was of these siren songs of the young fifth root-race that so much is said in occult writings. For on the one hand we have the great wisdom teaching of Manu⁴ who, in the sub-race which was the originator of the fifth root-race, draws men's attention to the fact that their intellect has to lift itself up to the divine. This found its expression in the Vedas, and in what the Persian Zarathustra left to his co-religionists. But then we have the pure culture of the intelligence, which diverts men from what was developing in them under the influence of Manu. In all occult writings you find described the events which then took place. Manu chose a small band and went with them into the Desert of Gobi or Sebamo. There it was only a handful that remained true to him, whilst the others were unfaithful and dispersed in all directions. This important event was shown to the candidates for initiation—that is to say, they were shown how the Manu had chosen some of the Ur-Semites, but that of those chosen only a small number followed him, whereas the others ran into destruction through following the siren-song of external culture.

Then a still more important moment of human evolution was represented by the passage between Scylla and Charybdis. What is it which now really begins in mankind? The essential Kama—Manas culture now first begins. It had gradually been prepared up to this point; it is only now that it really begins. Our fifth root-race possesses preeminently this Kama-Manas culture. Kama is in the astral, and even to-day is still active in the astral body. But Manas is what is active in the physical brain. The man of the fifth root-race thinks with the physical brain. It is only in a future phase of evolution that Kama, the astral body, will be so advanced that it will be able to think. To-day Manas has taken hold of the physical brain. We have to pass between the hindrances on either side—Scylla-Manas and Charybdis-Kama. The passage of Odysseus is a picture of this. There is on the one hand the astral whirlpool of the instincts, appetites and passions into which man can fall; on the other hand there is the physical intellect chained to the rock. The rock occurs also in the Prometheus saga, where we meet the rock again. The human intellect is exposed to all the dangers of the physical, of the rock. Man sails between the physical intelligence and the whirlpool of the astral life. If he has accomplished that successfully, if he has recognized the dangers of the passage, and has nevertheless kept his footing, then he comes to Calypso, to the hidden wisdom. Then he can take a look into the future of humanity, then he can undergo the testing time, which lasts seven years. That is why Odysseus remains with the nymph Calypso seven years. Every man who seeks initiation goes through a seven-year testing period, and this is represented by the sojourn with Calypso. Only then can he reach the point to which the soul aspires. Read Homer's Odyssey! He means that man is in search of his own soul. He who really wishes to understand the Odyssey cannot accept the view of a modern investigator who asserts that Polyphemus and the Cyclopes only mean that Etna had erupted and that the scene of the conflagration seemed to Odysseus like the eye of a giant.

At last Odysseus returns home as a beggar, without any external property. This means that the man who had recognized the unimportance of the external world and of worldly goods, seeks his soul's home not in Maya, but behind Maya, thus in a mystical sense he returns home as a beggar. That he is truly wise is shown by his being led into his house by Pallas Athene. In all esotericism the soul is represented as feminine, it is always the feminine nature that is chosen as the symbol for the striving of the individual soul. Goethe calls it the ‘Eternal Feminine’. In Medea in the Argonaut saga, in Penelope, we have to understand the real soul, to which Odysseus seeks the way again. The Virgin Mary too, in the Christian religion, is the striving human soul, only there the significance is infinitely deeper. Strictly speaking, Penelope is the human soul in the fifth root-race. The fifth root-race has to cultivate human intelligence. Human intelligence is utterly unfruitful when it is only turned upon itself. When it has something that one can call a content, then the intelligence can be applied to it. Intelligence is a network which is spun around things we have from some other place. When external experience teaches you something, you can weave around it with your intelligence. When the higher occult wisdom teaches you something, you can also weave around it. Men say that occult wisdom contradicts reason. Nothing contradicts reason! When something new dawns on their horizon men have always said that it is contrary to reason. But the intellect is only there for purposes of combining. Out of itself it can win nothing. This barrenness of the intellect, which is nevertheless the real soul of the fifth root-race, is expressed in the perpetual weaving and unraveling of Penelope's cloth. Odysseus is led by wisdom. The initiate must find the way to the soul of the fifth root-race, but he will only unite himself with this soul in the right way if he is guided by Pallas Athene. Pallas Athene too is a feminine deity, another soul-force, wisdom, the real guide. But man has to reach intelligence through many by-paths, in so far as they are paths of development—for there were many by-paths in the Lemurian epoch. And in this journey Pallas Athene must be his guide. This was brought before the pupils of the Mysteries in Greece and this is what Homer wanted to express in his profound saga.

What is described in the Odyssey is initiation as it was carried out in Greece at that time—an initiation which was a repetition on the astral and mental planes of experiences from Lemurian times right down to the time of the Mysteries themselves. Odysseus is the clever man, the cunning man, and Troy was overthrown through his ability. The clever, intellectual man is the man of the fifth root-race. But to be able to find his way rightly in the fifth root-race, he must again on his devious path seek his home country, his Penelope. The man who is merely cunning and clever would never find the right way. He must first come out of himself, broaden his view, by looking back on the long journey of the human race. Odysseus is the representative of the cunning Kama-Manas man, who has to wander through many byways, in order to be led back again to the soul of the fifth root-race.

• 1. The article here mentioned, which first appeared in the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis was later published and forms chapter 1 of Atlantis and Lemuria.
• 2. Forces of Kama. The forces of the astral body.
• 3. Astral plane and Mental plane. These are the “soul-world” and “spirit-land” in Rudolf Steiner's Theosophy.
• 4. Manu. Described in An Outline of Occult Science as “the Christ-initiate” or “the leader of the Christ-oracle”.

Dearly beloved! Ours is a time of doubt and mystery that are given to humanity. And one can say that it is good for anyone who, in their innermost being, can honestly and with strength say to themselves in the face of present-day events: Yes, for me this time is a time of doubt, of mystery and of questions that need to be answered. — For if he could not say this to himself and yet looked with an alert soul at the events of the time, there would actually only be the other pole for him: despair at the continuation of human civilization in the West. And if our time holds hidden doubts, questions and riddles that need to be resolved, then we need the strength of those people who can find their way in the present chaos of civilization and who can bring forth from the flood of questions and riddles that which can lead to a new progress, to a building up of our Western civilization. Everything that is undertaken from this Goetheanum wants to contribute to the forces that time needs so that the doubts and riddles can be resolved in human souls.

In such a time of questions and riddles, the necessity will also arise for much of the content of ancient tradition to appear in a new light. Now shines up to us — as it were, like an ancient sacred legacy of Greek culture — the oft-repeated Apollonian saying: Know thyself! And much of Western civilization since ancient Greek times has been influenced by this saying. But it seems to me that even such a seemingly rock-solid magic word in the development of mankind can only survive today, in our times of great transformation, if it undergoes a kind of transformation itself, absorbing the forces of our time. And so it seems to me that the ancient oracle of Delphi must now sound to people as follows: Know thyself, and become a free being! — We must be able to see world events, insofar as they relate to human beings, swinging back and forth between the two poles of self-knowledge and true human freedom.

Why did Greek wisdom write the significant words on the temple at Delphi: “Know Thyself”? To this Greek wisdom there shone forth, from ancient times, historically undefinable in its origins, an ancient, sacred wisdom and science. The origins of this science go back into the darkness of prehistoric times. In Egypt, people still had direct access to this ancient wisdom. In Greece, people only had a feeling for it, albeit one steeped in noble Greek humanity, and they felt that this wisdom had come to people from the world, from the world itself, which was full of wisdom. Within the world of wisdom, man had felt like a more or less instinctive, more or less unconscious link in the whole of the world. Then, in the Greek feeling, the sense of the independence of the human soul dawned. In addition to the old world knowledge, the self-knowledge of man should be striven for. The ancient wisdom was based on the motto: Know the world and, in the world, know man! This motto of ancient wisdom shone forth in Greek civilization. But the urge to strive for this knowledge of the world with man in it, to strive for independent human self-knowledge, now asserted itself. To the: Know the world! was added: Know thyself. The Greek stood as it were on the shore of the past, absorbing the full content of the past treasures of wisdom. We – and I believe that any impartial person can feel this – stand on a different shore. We stand on the shore of an indeterminate future, but a future that humanity must create in a spiritual sense. And we feel that we need a new motto to help us reflect with all our human strength on what can work from within us into the indefinite future as a creative force. On the shore of the past, the Greeks established the motto: Know Thyself! — On the shore of an indefinite future, we must establish the motto: Become a free being! This building and everything that is done in it is intended to speak about that which lies in the oscillation between the two poles of human contemporary tasks. The short series of presentations of knowledge and art that are to take place in the next few days also intend to speak about this. We stand at the starting point of the great scientific mystery. Humanity has not yet experienced the full courage within itself to face this great, mighty scientific riddle. Natural science has achieved great and mighty things. It has adopted a way of looking at things through which one of the events that our souls see in the chain of causes and effects is necessarily followed by the other. And it is natural science's most natural endeavor to include the human being in this chain of natural necessity. The great ideal of natural science is to study natural phenomena with this law of causation, to perceive them — in accordance with their essence — according to this law of causation, and thus also to understand from man what is to be understood from him according to this law of causation. One does not yet fully understand with living feeling what this striving, this ideal, actually means for human life.

If we completely absorb ourselves in what we, through correct knowledge of nature, take in as the world necessity, then we ourselves, with our consciousness, stand in this world necessity, then we must say to ourselves: everything that is experienced in ourselves is only one link in the chain of necessities. But when we have acquired such an awareness through a proper immersion in the scientific view of life, then our innermost being revolts against this feeling, then an experience that shines through our soul speaks against this feeling, then we say to ourselves: as a human being I am free and I must grasp my freedom, with my knowledge I must penetrate just as much into the fabric of natural phenomena as into the life of my freedom.

If we take up this inner riddle of freedom in the full sense of the word, then we come to say to ourselves: The significant knowledge, the development of which has been going on for the last three to four hundred years and which has so significantly illuminated nature, needs to be extended in order to also illuminate the experience of human freedom. For those would always appear justified who, out of the scientific consciousness of the present, have said and continue to say: We can only comprehend nature; we cannot help but stop short of comprehending human freedom. We must repeat the old Kantian saying: To make room for faith, we must destroy knowledge. Yes, as long as we are immersed in mere knowledge of nature, this saying is true. But then comes the rebellion of human consciousness. And it is precisely in the proper appreciation of the greatest scientific achievements of modern times that the urge must arise to know, to recognize the experience of human freedom. And this knowledge must at the same time be an experience. For, starting from it, we must carry the strength that we gain from it out into social life, which today presents us with no fewer riddles and questions than the life of knowledge and belief. Just as the riddles and questions of knowledge and faith are lived out in the lonely room in inner struggles of the soul, so the other riddles and questions, the social ones, work tumultuously through the world because they are not worked on by human forces that, out of a clear consciousness of freedom, out of a consciousness of freedom experienced in knowledge, know how to work against what surrounds us today as social chaos.

Only those who penetrate the riddle of freedom with living knowledge are capable of bringing the power of harmonious human coexistence into social life. Because in recent centuries we have lost this power precisely by penetrating into the depths of external events, we now live in social chaos. Light will only dawn in this chaos when we step into it with the inner strength that comes from knowing how to see through the riddle of freedom. Just as the ancient Greek once stood questioning before all that an ancient wisdom handed down to him, standing questioning before: Know the world! — and passed over to the: Know thyself! —then we must stand questioning today before the saying: Man, become a free being!

Between these two poles of human activity, between the pole where the Greek sage threw into the multitude of thinkers and unbiased minds the word: Know thyself! - and the other pole, which expresses itself in the words: Man, become a free being! - lies, at bottom, an episode of human development.

It is tangible how an episode of human development lies between these two poles. Take the most modern of people, from whom this School of Spiritual Science borrows its name, Goethe. He found himself in the then already dawning and pressing modern life, sensing it in a time when most still lived fully in the traditions of the old. How did it affect Goethe's soul on the one hand in terms of true knowledge, and on the other hand in terms of true art, and in art in his case also in terms of religious deepening, of religious inwardness? All these impulses surged through his soul – which at that time were actually noticed only by him, at most by some of his friends, but which have since emerged into general human life – all these impulses tend towards the social life grasped in freedom. And when he felt strongly enough what lived in him like the dawn of a new era, he turned his back on the Nordic world and went to the south to sense from what remained of ancient Greek culture what the deepest essence of that Greek culture was. This modern man, Goethe, had wanted to build the wide-spanned bridge in his own soul across the episode between the future tasks of modern humanity and the comprehensive résumé of the past, as it was drawn in Greek culture.

And does not that which Goethe so vividly portrayed in his own personality live today in every human being who wants to strive upwards to that sphere where the great questions of the world can come to meet him in their true forms? Do not those who devote themselves to our education still draw from Greek culture that which should give this education its formal foundation? Is not the heart and mind of those who are educated in our grammar schools still imbued with Greek? We must feel this episode as Goethe felt it, first tragically and then redemptively for humanity. But then we shall also understand how we must turn to the other pole, the pole of human self-knowledge, in a new way, how we must approach it in the moment of world-historical development when the word resounds from our deepest innermost being: Man, become a free being! — also the: Know thyself! — differently than the Greek approached it.

Let us look around us, especially at those who have immersed themselves with all their soul in the modern scientific world view, who have become so great on its soil. We see how man, in observation as well as in experiment, through which so many puzzles have been solved for modern man, immerses himself in material existence. And we should listen more attentively than we are accustomed to to such a saying as was uttered by a Du Bois-Reymond, for example, out of this modern consciousness: where matter haunts, human knowledge can do nothing! — Modern knowledge has become accustomed to penetrating material existence. It has achieved great things in this field. Everywhere it follows how the material world is structured in material phenomena. But in order to decipher the fabric of material phenomena, it must presuppose that which it can never penetrate if it remains on its own ground: the world of matter itself.

It is a long story of what has taken place between the pursuit of human knowledge and the mystery of matter. What has taken place in the theoretical field is of little interest to us at this moment. But attention must be drawn to what has remained as a residue in the human mind, in all human life. No matter how much one believed that one was walking on mere paths of knowledge when dealing with material phenomena, no matter how much one established, by presupposing matter as such, a basis of feeling in the depths of the soul that permeates all human life. And we have such a basis of feeling. We can see it in the best of our contemporaries. They struggle with the material riddle; they wrestle with this material riddle. And a good number of them could not help but rise above this struggle and admit that the human riddle cannot be found, cannot be solved in this way, not even in a relative sense. And yet this solution is necessary for the security of the human soul. One would now like to get to the true essence of man “in the inner being of man”, but one has become accustomed to thinking and feeling one's mind on the outside world, “which cannot be seen through”, on the “conditions of material existence”. What one has become accustomed to doing there renounces seeing through. And if one turns this mind, which renounces seeing through, inwards, then one becomes a mystic in the modern bad sense.

Unfortunately, all too few people realize today that the best ones, who turn away from our knowledge of nature and come to a striving for knowledge of the human interior, have acquired their habits of thinking and feeling by observing “which is inscrutable”, and now they carry into the human interior what they have acquired as habits of thinking and feeling by observing the outside world. But when we turn our gaze, which we have first trained on dark and gloomy “matter”, inwards, it becomes nebulous mysticism, and nebulous mysticism bars the door to the knowledge of ourselves!

This is what everything that is done within this School of Spiritual Science seeks to emphasize. We must avoid the path of nebulous mysticism, as well as the path that leads only to outer scientific necessity and thus to the destruction of the knowledge of freedom. We can avoid these paths only if we seek real spiritual science, not that spiritual science which dare not stop short before the human soul, and which then, having stopped, continues the path by casting mystical fog into this human soul. This spiritual science, as it is meant here, must not do this! With the training that has been gained in bright, clear, light-filled knowledge of external facts, it must be possible to shine a light into the human interior, free of mysticism but in a spiritual scientific way. The: Know Thyself! must not be grasped in a mystical, dark way of life, but in a bright, clear clarity. Then will be united that which springs from man's inner knowledge, from the fulfillment of the word: Know Thyself! — and that which springs from his behavior of recognizing himself in relation to outer nature, under the watchwords: Man, become a free being!

These two words of truth may be seen as two pillars that stand ideally in the spirit when one enters this building: the pillar of truthful, light-filled human self-knowledge and the pillar of human freedom. The first is suited to remind people of that which can provide them with security and support, artistic activity and religious satisfaction. The second is suited to equip them with the strength to contribute to the pressing social issues of the present and the near future. From all that is aimed at here in the fertilization of the individual specialized sciences, as should become particularly apparent in the next few days, the world-historical moment should be grasped, as well as it can be grasped in all modesty, which places us on the shore of an indeterminate future, just as the Greek was placed on the shore of a fulfilled, overwhelming past.

But to do this, we must come to feel the light-filled grasp of the human interior in the knowledge itself, that we no longer merely drag the knowledge from external observation and external experiment, but that we freely raise it and, by permeating it with the inner being of the human being, we place ourselves with this knowledge in the life of freedom, in which mere scientific observation can never place us. From a scientific point of view it is honest to deny freedom, but it is human to protest against this denial and to see in this protest the starting point of a free spiritual science born out of the human soul and its organs.

This spiritual science, because it penetrates not into the dead but into the living, need not be feared as having a deadening effect on art, as does the dead science of the intellect. It will be able to fertilize art with what it draws from the spirit. This knowledge itself will be able to have an artistic effect on the outside, because it descends into human depths in clarity full of light. It will lead from true knowledge to the worship of that which can reveal itself in the human interior. And such knowledge, which only retains the form of mysticism but strives for the light, will at the same time lead human knowledge to religious

worship of the Highest, which lives and moves through the world. New artistic powers and new religious depths will be able to arise out of such knowledge, which grasps the inner being of man. And the life into which such knowledge may enter will be a life in freedom. It will first of all assure man of the consciousness of freedom. Man will no longer need to lose himself in the outer necessities of nature, as he does when he is merely aware of nature scientifically, because this is only a matter of necessity and not of freedom.

And the artist will become free from the mere model in the imitation of external nature, which he can never achieve anyway. From spiritual heights he will draw what he wants to impress on matter. A weak beginning of such a drawing of forms that reveal themselves to the free spirit, that are not linked to imitation in the model, should be what speaks from the forms and the artistic and the other artistic aspects of this structure.

And religious experience should be free from everything that is merely traditional, which approaches the human being as an external, unfree thing: freely grasping what reveals itself as the divine within the human being himself, freely connecting within with that power which, according to its true nature, only truly wants to connect with this human inner being in freedom: the power of Christ.

Knowledge in the most diverse fields – in the outer natural world, in the inner life of man, and in the all-embracing unity of both – that is the new striving for the fulfillment of the word: “Know thyself!” – a threefold step towards freedom: freedom in the inner experience of the most human, freedom in creative work, including artistic work, and freedom in religious experience. That is the other.

The cross-fertilization of the individual sciences and human endeavors, and of all of social life, is intended to lead to this, and will be discussed here over the next few days. It will be shown that not only can certain propositions be derived from the individual sciences, as a modern philosophy that is dying to death would have it, and then pieced together into an abstract world-view, but that a world-view can be gained through spiritual observation that embraces all sense impressions, and that this general world-view, grasped in the light of spirit, can shine into the individual specialized sciences.

It has also been demanded that the world view should draw nourishment from the individual sciences and their results. The time has come when the results of a spiritually experienced world view radiate into the individual sciences. However little the world may realize it today, what happens here in this place should never come from a different tone than the one that is itself impulsed on the one hand by the true: know yourself! - on the other hand from the: man, become a free being! — But this does not only call out to us from the lonely contemplation of science within the human being. This calls out to us in all of our catastrophic time today. And if we summarize what lies deepest in the riddles and questions of the times, that is what I have tried to suggest today.

We may speak in this way to the age about what is given to us by the signs of the times and by the sentient human being who stands within that time. These older people have experienced what it means to live in a catastrophic time. They feel how the ideals of their youth have been lost. They feel how they have poured out into a civilizational chaos what they believed in their youth they were contributing to modern Western civilization. To them, who have experienced such things, we may speak as we have today. For such a word must find the side in the life of the human soul that says: We must still use the rest of our lives to point out to humanity something stronger than what we have done.

And such words may also be spoken to young people. For they still see with full strength what is collapsing, what is living in catastrophe. They can feel, with their full human strength and enthusiasm, that something new and powerful must happen. And the right old person of today will seek out the word that can ignite in youth, so that other times see the souls that look out into the world from the eyes of today's youth, as the souls that look out into the world through today's old eyes must see.

And so one can speak to people of any age. One can speak to those who are called the “old houses” of all kinds in a certain language, and one can speak to young fellow students. Because one can speak not only out of the tasks of the times, but out of the greatest tasks of the human being itself. And we live in a time when the greatest questions of human life have become tasks for our time. We live in a time when we can look into the deepest interior of human beings. And we will see the call to action written there, to act in a direction that we will also find indicated when we look at the outer signs of the time with their clear language.

What lies in this twofold direction of view, I would like to speak about in the next few days. I would like the spoken word to find attention. Because in today's world, to understand the human being means to sense and feel an important thing in human life itself. Only he can rightly and justly place himself in the human activity of our time who is able to say: the signs of the time contain the challenge to look into the depths of the human soul with insight and spiritual recognition. And what the human being can fathom in his or her inner life today is at the same time what the clearly speaking signs of the time challenge us to recognize, feel, will and accomplish.

Rudolf Steiner's opening speech was followed by a lecture by Albert Steffen on “The Becoming of the Work of Art”.

Then Marie Steiner spoke the words of Hilarius, which Rudolf Steiner had already transformed for the opening ceremony of the First School of Spiritual Science: “The Guardian of the Threshold”:

In the name of that spirit which
Announces itself to the souls in our striving,
I appear at this moment
Before people who from now on want to hear
The word that sounds earnestly to the souls here.
Not earlier times could those powers,
that guide the aims of our earthly becoming,
could not reveal themselves in a fully conscious way.
For just as in the child's body,
the powers that are destined to be the vehicles of knowledge
must first gradually mature and grow stronger,
so humanity in its earthly course also had to unfold as a whole.
At first the soul impulses lived in dullness,
which were later to prove worthy of
seeing spiritual light from high worlds.
But when men were wise leaders
In the beginning of the earth, souls devoted to the spirit
Were chosen by higher powers of existence.
They used to send, in the places of knowledge,
The powers of the spirit, the rays of knowledge
Into souls that were only dimly aware
Of their ability to penetrate each other through their vision.
It was only later that spiritual researchers
were able to recruit students from the ranks of humanity
who, through the trials of life, had shown strength of will
proved themselves mature, in the brightness of consciousness,
striving towards spiritual knowledge.
And when the first disciples of the leaders
were later able to cultivate the noble good with dignity,
the unconscious leadership disappeared,
so that free souls were allowed to strive knowingly.
And free souls then chose people
Who were allowed to follow them in the care
Of the treasure of the spirit; and so it went on
From one generation to the next.
All seats of knowledge so far,
Which in truth are, have just arisen
from the highest, which stands in the spiritual spheres.
In earnest seeking we strive here
for the true spiritual human heritage.
We will never speak of knowledge
that does not bear the spirit's own seal,
but only of the light from the spiritual worlds,
which, by beholding, can be opened up to people
Who, aspiring, want to entrust themselves to it
To fathom the depths of their soul.
To strive worthily towards this light
The seriousness of the turn of time
And its need shows us; the signs are truly
Full of meaning, which in the plan of the world
Now clearly reveal spiritual eyes.

Dear friends,

If we are going to consider the mutual concerns of priest and physician, we should look first at certain phenomena in human life that easily slide over into the pathological field. These phenomena require a physician's understanding, since they reach into profound depths, even into the esoteric realm of religious life. We have to realize that all branches of human knowledge must be liberated from a certain coarse attitude that has come into them in this materialistic epoch. We need only recall how certain phenomena that had been grouped together for some time under the heading “genius and insanity” have recently been given a crass interpretation by Lombroso¹ and his school and also by others. I am not pointing to the research itself—that has its uses—but rather to their way of looking at things, to what they brought out as “criminal anthropology,” from studying the skulls of criminals. The opinions they voiced were not only coarse but extraordinarily commonplace. Obviously the philistines all got together and decided what the normal type of human being is. And it was as near as could possibly be to a philistine! And whatever deviated from this type was pathological, genius on one side, insanity on the other; each in its own way was pathological. Since it is quite obvious to anyone with insight that every pathological characteristic also expresses itself bodily, it is also obvious that symptoms can be found in bodily characteristics pointing in one or the other direction. It is a matter of regarding the symptoms in the proper way. Even an earlobe can under certain conditions clearly reveal some psychological peculiarity, because such psychological peculiarities are connected with the karma that works over from earlier incarnations.

The forces that build the physical organism in the first seven years of human life are the same forces by which we think later. So it is important to consider certain phenomena, not in the customary manner but in a really appropriate way. We will not be regarding them as pathological (although they will lead us into aspects of pathology) but rather will be using them to obtain a view of human life itself.

Let us for a moment review the picture of a human being that Anthroposophy gives us. The human being stands before us in a physical body, which has a long evolution behind it, three preparatory stages before it became an earthly body—as is described in my book An Outline of Esoteric Science.² This earthly body needs to be understood much more than it is by today's anatomy and physiology. For the human physical body as it is today is a true image of the etheric body, which is in its third stage of development, and of the astral body, which is in its second stage, and even to a certain degree of the ego organization that humans first received on earth, which therefore is in its first stage of development. All of this is stamped like the stamp of a seal upon the physical body—which makes the physical body extraordinarily complicated. Only its purely mineral and physical nature can be understood with the methods of knowledge that are brought to it today. What the etheric body impresses upon it is not to be reached at all by those methods. It has to be observed with the eye of a sculptor so that one obtains pictorial images of cosmic forces, images that can then be recognized again in the form of the entire human being and in the forms of the single organs.

The physical human being is also an image of the breathing and blood circulation. But the entire dynamic activity that works and weaves through the blood circulation and breathing system can only be understood if one thinks of it in musical forms. For instance, there is a musical character to the formative forces that were poured into the skeletal system and then became active in a finer capacity in the breathing and circulation. We can perceive in eurythmy how the octave goes out from the shoulder blade and proceeds along the bones of the arm. This bone formation of the arm cannot be understood from a mechanical view of dynamics, but only from musical insight. We find the interval of the prime extending from the shoulder blade to the bone of the upper arm, the humerus, the interval of the second in the humerus, the third from the elbow to the wrist. We find two bones there because there are two thirds in music, a larger and a smaller. And so on. In short, if we want to find the impression of the astral body upon the physical body, upon the breathing and blood circulation, we are obliged to bring a musical understanding to it.

Still more difficult to understand is the ego organization. For this one needs to grasp the meaning of the first verse of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word.” “The Word” is meant there to be understood in a concrete sense, not abstractly, as commentators of the Gospels usually present it. If this is applied concretely to the real human being, it provides an explanation of how the ego organization penetrates the human physical body. You can see that we ought to add much more to our studies if they are to lead to a true understanding of the human being. However, I am convinced that a tremendous amount of material could be eliminated not only from medical courses but from theological courses too. If one would only assemble the really essential material, the number of years medical students, for instance, must spend in their course would not be lengthened but shortened. Naturally it is thought in materialistic fashion today that if there's something new to be included, you must tack another half-year onto the course!

Out of the knowledge that Anthroposophy gives us, we can say that the human being stands before us in physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego organization. In waking life these four members of the human organization are in close connection. In sleep the physical body and etheric body are together on one side, and the ego organization and astral body on the other side. With knowledge of this fact we are then able to say that the greatest variety of irregularities can appear in the connection of ego organization and astral body with etheric body and physical body. For instance, we can have: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego organization. (Plate I, 1) Then, in the waking state, the so-called normal relation prevails among these four members of the human organization.

But it can also happen that the physical body and etheric body are in some kind of normal connection and that the astral body sits within them comparatively normally, but that the ego organization is somehow not properly sitting within the astral body. (Plate I, 2) Then we have an irregularity that in the first place confronts us in the waking condition. Such people are unable to come with their ego organization properly into their astral body; therefore their feeling life is very much disturbed. They can even form quite lively thoughts. For thoughts depend, in the main, upon a normal connection of the astral body with the other bodies. But whether the sense impressions will be grasped appropriately by the thoughts depends upon whether the ego organization is united with the other parts in a normal fashion. If not, the sense impressions become dim. And in the same measure that the sense impressions fade, the thoughts become livelier. Sense impressions can appear almost ghostly, not clear as we normally have them. The soul-life of such people is flowing away; their sense impressions have something misty about them, they seem to be continually vanishing. At the same time their thoughts have a lively quality and tend to become more intense, more colored, almost as if they were sense impressions themselves.

When such people sleep, their ego organization is not properly within the astral body, so that now they have extraordinarily strong experiences, in fine detail, of the external world around them. They have experiences, with their ego and astral body both outside their physical and etheric bodies, of that part of the world in which they live—for instance, the finer details of the plants or an orchard around their house. Not what they see during the day, but the delicate flavor of the apples, and so forth. That is really what they experience. And in addition, pale thoughts that are after-effects in the astral body from their waking life.

You see, it is difficult if you have such a person before you. And you may encounter such people in all variations in the most manifold circumstances of life. You may meet them in your vocation as physician or as priest—or the whole congregation may encounter them. You can find them in endless variety, for instance, in a town. Today the physician who finds such a person in an early stage of life makes the diagnosis: psychopathological impairment. To modern physicians that person is a psychopathological impairment case who is at the borderline between health and illness; whose nervous system, for instance, can be considered to be on a pathological level. Priests, if they are well-schooled (let us say a Benedictine or Jesuit or Barnabite or the like; ordinary parish priests are sometimes not so well-schooled), will know from their esoteric background that the things such a person tells them can, if properly interpreted, give genuine revelations from the spiritual world, just as one can have from a really insane person. But the insane person is not able to interpret them; only someone who comprehends the whole situation can do so. Thus you can encounter such a person if you are a physician, and we will see how to regard this person medically from an anthroposophical point of view. Thus you can also encounter such a person if you are a priest—and even the entire congregation can have such an encounter.

But now perhaps the person develops further; then something quite special appears. The physical and etheric bodies still have their normal connection. But now there begins to be a stronger pull of the ego organization, drawing the astral body to itself, so that the ego organization and astral body are now more closely bound together. And neither of them enters properly into the physical and etheric bodies. (Plate I, 3) Then the following can take place: the person becomes unable to control the physical and etheric bodies properly from the astral body and ego. The person is unable to push the astral body and ego organization properly into the external senses, and therefore, every now and then, becomes “senseless.” Sense impressions in general fade away and the person falls into a kind of dizzy dream state. But then in the most varied way moral impulses can appear with special strength. The person can be confused and also extremely argumentative if the rest of the organism is as just described.

Now physicians find in such a case that physical and biochemical changes have taken place in the sense organs and the nerve substance. They will find, although they may take slight notice of them, great abnormalities in the ductless glands and their hormone secretion, in the adrenal glands, and the glands that are hidden in the neck as small glands within the thyroid gland. In such a case there are changes particularly in the pituitary gland and the pineal gland. These are more generally recognized than are the changes in the nervous system and in the general area of the senses.

And now the priest comes in contact with such a person. The person confesses to experiencing an especially strong feeling of sin, stronger than people normally have. The priest can learn very much from such individuals, and Catholic priests do. They learn what an extreme consciousness of sin can be like, something that is so weakly developed in most human beings. Also in such a person the love of one's neighbor can become tremendously intense, so much so that the person can get into great trouble because of it, which will then be confessed to the priest.

The situation can develop still further. The physical body can remain comparatively isolated because the etheric body—from time to time or even permanently—does not entirely penetrate it, so that now the astral and etheric bodies and the ego organization are closely united with one another and the physical organism is separate from them. (Plate II) To use the current materialistic terms (which we are going to outgrow as the present course of study progresses), such people are in most cases said to be severely mentally retarded individuals. They are unable from their soul-spiritual individuality to control their physical limbs in any direction, not even in the direction of their own will. Such people pull their physical organism along, as it were, after themselves. A person who is in this condition in early childhood, from birth, is also diagnosed as mentally retarded. In the present stage of earth evolution, when all three members—ego organization, astral organization, and etheric body—are separated from the physical, and the lone physical body is dragged along after them, the person cannot perceive, cannot be active, cannot be illumined by the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body. So experiences are dim and the person goes about in a physical body as if it were anesthetized. This is extreme mental retardation, and one has to think how at this stage one can bring the other bodies down into the physical organism. Here it can be a matter of educational measures, but also to a great extent of external therapeutic measures.

But now the priest can be quite amazed at what such a person will confess. Priests may consider themselves very clever, but even thoroughly educated priests—there really are such men in Catholicism; one must not underestimate it—they pay attention if a so-called sick person comes to them and says, “The things you pronounce from the pulpit aren't worth much. They don't add up to anything, they don't reach up to the dwelling place of God, they don't have any worth except external worth. One must really rest in God with one's whole being.” That's the kind of thing such people say. In every other area of their life they behave in such a way that one must consider them to be extremely retarded, but in conversation with their priest they come out with such speeches. They claim to know inner religious life more intimately than someone who speaks of it professionally; they feel contempt for the professional. They call their experience “rest in God.” And you can see that the priest must find ways and means to relate to what such a person—one can say patient, or one can use other terms—to what such a human being is experiencing within.

One has to have a sensitive understanding for the fact that pathological conditions can be found in all spheres of life, for the fact that some people may be quite unable at the present time to find their way in the physical-sense world, quite unable to be the sort of human being that external life now requires all of us to be. We are all necessarily to a certain degree philistines as regards external life. But such people as I am describing are not in condition to travel along our philistine paths; they have to travel other ways. Priests must be able to feel what they can give such a person, how to connect what they can give out of themselves with what that other human being is experiencing. Very often such a person is simply called “one of the queer ones.” This demands an understanding of the subtle transition from illness to spirituality.

Our study can go further. Think what happens when a person goes through this entire sequence in the course of life. At some period the person is in a condition (Plate I, 2) where only the ego organization has loosened itself from the other members of the organism. In a later period the person advances to a condition where neither ego nor astral enter the physical or etheric bodies. Still later, (Plate I, 3) the person enters a condition where the physical body separates from the other bodies. (Plate II) The person only goes through this sequence if the first condition, perhaps in childhood, which is still normal, already shows a tendency to lose the balance of the four members of the organism. If the physician comes upon such a person destined to go through all these four stages—the first very slightly abnormal, the others as I have pictured them—the physician will find there is tremendous instability and something must be done about it. Usually nothing can be done. Sometimes the physician prescribes intensive treatment; it accomplishes nothing. Perhaps later the physician is again in contact with this person and finds that the first unstable condition has advanced to the next, as I described it with the sense impressions becoming vague and the thoughts highly colored. Eventually the physician finds the excessively strong consciousness of sin; naturally a physician does not want to take any notice of that, for now the symptoms are beginning to play over into the soul realm. Usually it is at this time that the person finally gets in touch with a priest, particularly when the fourth stage becomes apparent.

Individuals who go through these stages—it is connected with their karma, their repeated earth lives—have purely out of their deep intuition developed a wonderful terminology for all this. Especially if they have gone through the stages in sequence, with the first stage almost normal, they are able to speak in a wonderful way about what they experience. They say, for instance, when they are still quite young, if the labile condition starts between seventeen and nineteen years: human beings must know themselves. And they demand complete knowledge of themselves. Now with their ego organization separated, they come of their own initiative to an active meditative life. Very often they call this “active prayer,” “active meditation,” and they are grateful when some well-schooled priest gives them instruction about prayer. Then they are entirely absorbed in prayer, and they are experiencing in it what they now begin to describe by a wonderful terminology. They look back at their first stage and call what they perceive “the first dwelling place of God,” because their ego has not entirely penetrated the other members of their organism, so to a certain extent they are seeing themselves from within, not merely from without. This perception from within increases; it becomes, as it were, a larger space: “the first dwelling place of God.”

What next appears, what I have described from another point of view, is richer; it is more inwardly detailed. They see much more from within: “the second dwelling place of God.” When the third stage is reached, the inner vision is extraordinarily beautiful, and such a person says, “I see the third dwelling place of God; it is tremendously magnificent, with spiritual beings moving within it.” This is inner vision, a powerful, glorious vision of a world woven by spirit: “the third dwelling place of God,” or “the House of God.” There are variations in the words used. When they reach the fourth stage, they no longer want advice about active meditation, for usually they have reached the view that everything will be given them through grace and they must wait. They talk about passive prayer, passive meditation, that they must not pray out of their own initiative, for it will come to them if God wants to give it to them. Here the priest must have a fine instinct for recognizing when this stage passes over into the next. For now these people speak of “rest-prayer,” during which they do nothing at all; they let God hold sway in them. That is how they experience “the fourth dwelling place of God.”

Sometimes from the descriptions they give at this stage, from what—if we speak medically—such “patients” say, priests can really learn a tremendous amount of esoteric theology. If they are good interpreters, the theological detail becomes clear to them—if they listen very carefully to what such “patients” tell them, to what they know. Much of what is taught in theology, particularly Catholic pastoral theology, is founded on what various enlightened, trained confessors have heard from certain penitents who have undergone this sequence of development.

At this point ordinary conceptions of health and illness cease to have any meaning. If such a man is hidden away in an office, or if such a woman becomes an housewife who must spend her days in the kitchen or something similar in bourgeois everyday life, these people become really insane, and behave outwardly in such a way that they can only be regarded as insane. If a priest notices at the right moment how things are developing and arranges for them to live in appropriate surroundings, they can develop the four stages in proper order. Through such patients, the enlightened confessor is able to look into the spiritual world in a modern way but similarly to the Greek priests, who learned about the spiritual world from the Pythians, who imparted all kinds of revelations concerning the spiritual world through earthly smoke and vapor.³ What sense would there be today in writing a thesis on the pathological aspect of the Greek Pythians? It could certainly be done and it would even be correct, but it would have no meaning in a higher sense. For as a matter of fact, very much of what flowed in a magnificent way from Greek theology into the entire cultural life of Greece originated in the revelations of the Pythians. As a rule, the Pythians were individuals who had come either to this third stage or even to the fourth stage.

But we can think of a personality in a later epoch who went through these stages under the wise direction of her confessors, so that she could devote herself undisturbed to her inner visions. Something very wonderful developed for her, which indeed also remained to a certain degree pathological. Her life was not just a concern of the physician or of the priest but a concern of the entire Church. The Church pronounced her a saint after her death. This was St. Teresa.⁴ This was approximately her path.

You see, one must examine such things as this if one wants to discover what will give medicine and theology a real insight into human nature. One must be prepared to go far beyond the usual category of ideas, for they lose their value. Otherwise one can no longer differentiate between a saint and a fool, between a madman and a genius, and can no longer distinguish any of the others except a normal dyed-in-the-wool average citizen.

This is a view of the human being that must first be met with understanding; then it can really lead to fundamental esoteric knowledge. But it can also be tremendously enlightening in regard to psychological abnormalities as well as to physical abnormalities and physical illnesses. Certain conditions are necessary for these stages to appear. There has to be a certain consistency of the person's ego so that it does not completely penetrate the organism. Also there must be a certain consistency of the astral body: if it is not fine, as it was in St. Teresa, if it is coarse, the result will be different. With St. Teresa, because of the delicacy of her ego organization and astral body, certain physical organs in the lower body had been formed with the same fragile quality.

But it can happen that the ego organization and astral body are quite coarse and yet they have the same characteristic as above. Such an individual can be comparatively normal and show only the physical correlation: then it is only a physical illness. One could say, on the one hand there can be a St. Teresa constitution with its visions and poetic beauty, and on the other hand its physical counterimage in diseased abdominal organs, which in the course of this second person's life is not reflected in the ego and astral organization.

All these things must be spoken about and examined. For those who hold responsibility as physicians or priests are confronted by these things, and they must be equal to the challenge. Theological activity only begins to be effective if theologians are prepared to cope with such phenomena. And physicians only begin to be healers if they also are prepared to deal with such symptoms.

• 1 . Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), Italian anthropologist. Wrote Genius and Insanity (1864) and The Criminal: Anthropological, Medical and Legal Aspects (1876).
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1985).
• 3 . Pythians: priestesses of Apollo who delivered the oracles at Delphi.
• 4 . Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Carmelite nun. Reformed the Carmelite Order in association with John of the Cross. Canonized by the Catholic Church.

It is my task to say a few words about the difference in the way of thinking and mental imaging in our fifth post-Atlantic period compared to the fourth post-Atlantic period. In particular, I would like to indicate today the elements of thinking and feeling in relation from which much has changed from one period, from one cycle to the other. And I would like to indicate in particular the extent to which certain types of mental images and feelings have, as it were, descended into a deeper sphere, in order to then indicate what is particularly necessary in the fifth post-Atlantic period, in which we ourselves are, so that humanity can once again undertake an ascent.

For a long time, I have attempted to research how this matter can be most vividly presented, and today, based on this research, I would like to try to illustrate it. For this reason, I would like to begin by telling you something, let us say, in a kind of novelistic form, which has come together for me from certain things.

I would like to tell you about a family that lived not so long ago that was closely related to another family. And because all kinds of events that occurred to one family were extremely interesting and significant to a member of the other family, this member of the other family tried to get to the bottom of the reasons for these events. I will start from the fact that in this first-named family there was a young girl—as I said, the matter belongs to the past to some extent—who had not yet reached her twenties. The father of this girl was a warrior, and the time we are now looking at in particular was before a major war that the father of this girl had to take part in. But the girl was engaged, so to speak, to another warrior who also had to go to war, and she was extremely fond of him, so that she was deeply, deeply unhappy about him having to go to war. And since she thought that her father was partly to blame for the outbreak of the war, she also harbored a kind of resentment against him, without her father noticing at first. And the more the time approached, the more this young girl's ideas and feelings became confused. She could not bear the thought of losing her beloved. And because these feelings were so deep within her, her image of her own father became completely distorted. The resentment within her grew more and more. The war came. But what had taken hold in the young girl's soul grew almost to the point of mental confusion, to the kind of mental confusion that doctors in our time regard as a kind of mental illness. And so this young girl had all kinds of mental experiences, especially when the war broke out, but they were already on the verge of mental illness: visions and all sorts of similar things. In particular, she had a strong vision that her lover would fall in the war, and that everything she could have achieved in the world with her lover would be lost with his death, and that she would actually become a victim of the war with all that lay in her intentions. The mental illness worsened more and more. The doctors decided that it would be best to move her to a rural area far away, where she was well supervised and where she also had a beneficial effect on some of the people around her, as can happen with such patients. However, there was never any hope that the full abnormality of the mental illness would not reappear if she were removed from the circumstances and placed in different ones. And so she lived there for years.

The war was long over, and other fatal circumstances had occurred in the family, which I will not characterize in detail, all sorts of fatal circumstances, including the fact that after quite a number of years, the brother of this girl also suffered from mental illness. The strange thing was that the brother, who had transformed the girl's mental illness into masculinity, was now, after all sorts of other decisions that had been made, brought by a reasonable person to the very place where the girl was. And lo and behold, the quite remarkable fact emerged that the brother, despite also being considered mentally ill, had a favorable effect on the girl, and that they recognized each other in their loneliness, in which they had met among the other people, and through the whole environment, despite not having seen each other for many years, and recovered together. So that the girl could return home and establish a kind of asylum in her homeland that was designed in such a way that especially those who were as ill as they both were could be healed in a reasonable way, through knowledge of the causes, in a spiritual way. The asylum she founded had a deeply religious character.

Now, I said, this family, to which these events belonged, was closely related to another family. A member of that other family was very interested in all these strange events and said: This must be investigated, what a curious case actually exists. The events that I am now describing had happened just a few years ago. So he turned to a man with a background in medicine and science, a doctor whom he knew and who called himself a psychopathologist because he specialized in psychopathology. Let's call this doctor, this psychopathologist, Lövius, Professor Dr. Lövius. He first told the doctor what he knew, namely about the two children, about how the girl's illness had come about through resentment towards her father; how he had been able to observe her, what he had seen of the matter. Professor Dr. Lövius listened very carefully, made an extraordinarily serious face, thought deeply and said: “There must be a hereditary predisposition to a high degree. Hereditary burden, that is quite unquestionable, we have to do it with a hereditary burden. There we must look exactly in the family records, we must explore every single one!

And lo and behold, all sorts of things were found in the family records. As luck would have it, it turned out that the characteristics and qualities of the ancestors could be researched far back, to the grandfather, great-grandfather and even to the great-great-grandfather. Professor Dr. Lövius studied this case for a long time, and more and more people found it confirmed that they were dealing with an extraordinary case of hereditary strain, as it was called, not with a typical case of hereditary strain, with an exceptional case. Professor Dr. Lövius, who had already examined the psychopathy of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Viktor Scheffel, Hebbel and others, found this teaching case extremely interesting and compiled all the data from which this teaching case could be explained.

Let us try to follow this schematically. So, first of all, we are dealing with the daughter of that warrior and her brother, whose situation we know about – we begin these with these two individuals. If we go further, we come to the father. The father was the first to be targeted by Professor Dr. Lövius, who found that he had something extraordinarily violent in his character and was an ambitious man, albeit also a man with a lot of initiative. He had qualities that were found in his brother in a very peculiar way, as qualities that had been converted into strength – in such a case, one has to examine the entire family relationships. But the father of the two siblings was an extremely ambitious man who was extraordinarily full of initiative.

Such excess of ambition, drive, and a certain resistance to the world, of course, must be traced further back in the line of inheritance. So they went up to the father's father first. So we come to the father's father, who in turn had a brother. It turned out to be extremely interesting that the brothers had certain similarities and also differences through two generations. There was the father of the father, that is, the grandfather of our young girl, who – while the father was just an overly ambitious and energetic man – was already a kind of ruffian. In the father, the trait had weakened. But the brother was an amiable man who, through his kindness, actually degenerated into the pathological, into the abnormal. Abnormal – that is the similarity – they both were in the generation before last, but one degenerated into a ruffian and the other into kindness. And then Professor Dr. Lövius came to the conclusion that this ruffian, who was the grandfather of our young girl, was always out to sow discord and mischief in his brother's family. And this ruffian really managed to corrupt his brother's sons completely, as stated by Professor Dr. Lövius – we are now with the grandfather. He made one of them a gambler and corrupted the other in some other way. In short, he thoroughly corrupted his nephews. This much could be gleaned from the family records: all sorts of evil things had happened. It was not possible to get to the bottom of the matter. But this much was clear: ultimately, one man had behaved so badly towards his brother, the other man, that the whole family, all the sons, had degenerated, with only one remaining who decided to avenge his father on his brother. But by doing so, he only brought more disaster into the families through these acts of revenge, namely into the family of our girl's father. All kinds of unpleasantness ensued.

And now Professor Dr. Lövius said to himself: You have to go further up the line of descent. For this young girl had shown very strange visions at the beginning of her madness. She dreamt constantly of very distant regions, where she had not been during her girlhood, but which corresponded strangely with a certain locality. From a family diary, Dr. Lövius found out that in these visions something was alive from the area where the great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had once been. “Oh,” the professor said to himself, ”this is a particularly interesting case study: heredity appears in the visions; the great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather were somewhere other than in the area where their descendants last lived! And what earlier generations had experienced was inherited in such a way that the great-granddaughter or great-great-granddaughter had visions of it in madness! - Of course, this was something extraordinarily interesting for the professor. So he came to the conclusion that the grandfather had a father again, who, as I said, according to an old family diary, had emigrated from a completely different, foreign region, where the culture was very different. I will not mention any localities because it is so unpleasant now: the nations are so opposed to each other, and if you mention localities now, it will immediately evoke feelings. So great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather came from a foreign region. Now, from this diary it turned out that this great-grandfather was also a strange person. He had done all sorts of crazy things in this remote area, and was also a ruffian who occasionally became violently insane. Since he had done all sorts of things in his rages, he could not remain in the area, he had to emigrate and wandered to the area where the descendants were. But in the area where the descendants were, he immediately caused trouble again, even though he later became a very respected man. In the area where the descendants were, he caused trouble by simply killing the father in a duel because he was in love with a woman and her father did not want to permit the marriage. That's how he got the daughter. The matter was, as they say, covered up, and he was able to become a respected man.

Now, thanks to the family diary, Professor Dr. Lövius was able to trace his family back to his great-great-grandfather. And this great-great-grandfather was a particularly remarkable person. He lived in a very exotic place and was someone who had acquired a kind of deeper insight into the secrets of history. He was a very spiritual person. But, said Professor Dr. Lövius, someone who exaggerates spirituality as much as this great-great-grandfather did, there is already something wrong with him upstairs. And when he looked further into the family records, he found that this great-great-grandfather, despite being thoroughly versed in spiritual matters, had retained certain human qualities. Above all, he could not stand all the other people who had not come to spiritual knowledge in his way, but in some official way. They were a thorn in his side. And to do some kind of mischief to them was something he found almost like a spiritual delicacy. What I am going to tell you now is an event that took place in the 1760s. But things repeat themselves: Eduard von Hartmann did something similar with the philistine people of the 19th century, which I have often told about. This great-great-grandfather of mine once published something like a writing – but he did not put his name to it, but had it appear anonymously – in which he very thoroughly refuted everything that was his own teaching. He presented everything as confused and stupid and foolish, and always in such a way that the others could really delight in it, because he always cited their reasons, what they might have said: these were delicacies for the others; he had played a great trick on them.

Then Professor Dr. Lövius said to himself: Now, there you see it all! Even as far back as the times of the great-great-grandfather, one can see in the line of inheritance what has now manifested itself in such a terrible way in the descendants. Even the good side of the great-great-grandfather, his spiritual gift, showed itself again in the great-great-granddaughter, who founded a kind of spiritual asylum. As you can see, all good and bad qualities are hereditary burdens in this teaching case to the highest degree! So this story was of extraordinary interest to Professor Dr. Lövius. It was a matter of course that he had set out to write a thick book about this typical teaching case and he once explained it to a colleague. And you see, on this occasion, someone was listening who didn't want to, but couldn't help it, he listened. One who not only had knowledge of human nature, but also knowledge of the world in the sense of the development of humanity, listened and had all sorts of thoughts while Professor Dr. Lövius was telling his case. I will present these thoughts to you in a version – the version is not very important – and I will always refer to this family tree, to the family tree of the teaching case of Professor Dr. Lövius.

Thus the following thoughts came to people: Once upon a time, in the course of human evolution, there was a respectable family. That the fate of the founder of this family, Tantalus, was atoned in Tartarus, is well known in the widest circles. He was initiated into the secrets of the gods. The Greeks express this by saying that a person who is privy to the secrets of the gods can even take part in the meals of the gods. But he had something that he felt was like a thorn in his side, or one could also say, like a delicacy, to deceive the gods, the officially recognized gods. And so he offered them – as you all know – as a delicacy for the gods, his own son, whom he had cut into pieces. And the gods, who with all their omniscience made a mistake, ate of it and also drank of the blood. For this, Tantalus was thrown into Tartarus, and he had to endure the Tantalus torments, of which the Greek myths tell. Through a series of crimes that took place from link to link, the revenge of the gods was now inherited by the last descendants. First, Pelops, the son of Tantalus, was expelled from heaven, into which the gods had taken him. He wandered across Asia Minor to Greece, and won Hippodamia by defeating her father to make her his wife.

The listener was not aware of the fact that the professor Dr. Lövius had a duel with the father and thereby acquired the wife. As his luck proved, he had not yet been deprived of the grace of heaven. But soon he made himself so unworthy of her favor through various actions that the gods blessing left his house. From his marriage with Hippodamia sprang the two sons Atreus and Thyestes, who fled to Argos with the guilt of murder stained on their souls, where they inherited the throne of this kingdom from their cousin Eurysthes. There the pair of brothers committed new atrocities, so that the royal palace of Mycenae was the scene of a blood feud that destroyed the individual members of the two families from child to child. The worst crime was the so-called ‘Thyestes’ meal. Atreus, who learned that his wife had been seduced into infidelity by Thyestes, invited the latter and his two sons to a banquet. The guilty man accepted the invitation and came to the meal.

This reminded this judge of character very much of the quarrel between the grandfather and his brother, who had seduced his sons and got them into all sorts of trouble, causing the sons to perish, as it was written in the family records.

But this horrible thing happened: Atreus presented his brother with his secretly-slaughtered pair of sons. He drank of the blood. — This is actually also “inherited guilt”: the old Tantalus had already done this to the gods, now his grandson is doing it! — This was an atrocity that made Apollo turn his sun-horse away in horror as he looked down on Mycenae. Their avenger was a son of Thyestes, named Aegisthus, who was born later. Aegisthus, informed of the terrible incident, first killed his uncle Atreus and then also waylaid his children.

Atreus had two sons by his wife Aerope, Agamemnon and Menelaus, who were called the Atrides or Atreus Sons. Aegisthus, the last son of Thyestes, hatched treacherous plans of revenge against them. But he could not emerge from hiding until the two related brothers had undertaken the great military expedition to Troy. After their departure, he knew how to beguile the passionate queen. Clytemnestra had borne her husband three daughters and a son – the daughter of most interest to us is called Iphigenia – and the son Orestes. Iphigenia, the eldest daughter, was offered as a sacrifice on the altar of Artemis, or Diana, for this goddess had conceived a fierce resentment against the departing Greeks and had to be reconciled by the daughter. The mother hated her husband and went along with the whispered thoughts of murder. Now we know that Iphigenia was taken to Tauris and came to in the enclosure of a temple. We know that she was transported to a rural area, to an environment where she was harmless, a fate similar to that of our great-great-great-granddaughter. I need not recount the further events in the house. But now the myth reports the following: After Orestes had found his sister Iphigenia in Tauris and she had cured him of his madness, he brought her back to Greece. Then it is further related that Iphigenia, after she had returned to Greece, built a kind of oracle, a place of sacrifice for the Taurian Diana, which translated into Greek would be roughly the same as if someone were to build an asylum for the sick according to such spiritual scientific principles as I have mentioned.

What I wanted to say is this: the same process is conceivable in ancient Greece and in more recent times. It takes place depending on the times. For you can see that the process from the 19th and 18th centuries, which I have just related, could have taken place exactly as I have related it. No one will be able to doubt the slightest detail. Likewise, no one will be able to doubt the whole story that I have developed. But there is a certain difference: namely, how one feels about this case, how one thinks about it.

We have seen how Professor Lövius stated in the 19th and 20th centuries: “Hereditary burden! A textbook case!” The Greek said to himself: “When something like this happens, it expresses the deeper forces at work in the history of humanity,” and he created a myth about it. Professor Dr. Lövius did not exist in ancient Greece, but a poet did who, in a deeper sense, understood these one, two, three, four, five generations (see drawing) and wrote a poem about them in such a way that poets have continued to write about them ever since, right up to Goethe's magnificent “Iphigenia”. And yet the difference is not that great. For just think, today you only need to pick up a psychology or psychiatry book by one of the many natural scientists that deals with the study of the soul and mental faculties, and you will find everywhere that it says the following: the healthy person as such is extremely difficult to study in terms of his or her mental characteristics. But at the bedside of the sick and in the clinic and through the dissection of the mentally ill, one also learns a great deal about the normal workings of the healthy soul, and an enormous amount is inferred from the sick soul about the healthy one. I need only recall that, for example, the speech center, the place where speech is concentrated, was thought to be recognized by examining it in a sick person who suffers from a lack of speech ability. So they said to themselves: it is precisely by what is out of order that we can learn what prevails in the healthy.

Now, if we think of this not in the 19th century, but in the language of the Greeks, it would sound like this: If we want to know what forces prevail in the course of human development, we must not go to those people and study them who, in their mental life and all that they are, show only what is so-called healthy, but we must go to all kinds of people who, compared to the normal, have abnormal characteristics. And so, these Greek poets, who were still in some respects Greek sages because they combined wisdom and beauty, tried to understand what happened to the Greeks. And so it came about that these Greek poets portrayed the fate of Greek civilization in these abnormal generations.

But the Greeks were different in some ways. The big difference between the way Professor Dr. Lövius speaks and the way the Greek speaks is that the Greek knows something about the secrets of the human soul. There is a great difference between what is evoked in the soul by the story of the extraordinary myth of the Atrides, Iphigenia, Tantalus and Pelops, and all the ideas that are attached to our soul when we hear the bespectacled Professor Dr. Lövius say, “All hereditary burden!” For “hereditary burden” is what the textbook case fulfills in its full form according to modern science, according to the knowledge of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In this we have the opposite of a person who is still completely within Greek thinking. Imagine the Greek who also wanted to describe how Iphigenia, after she had lived through what the Greek expressed in the events at Aulis, would then have been transported to a foreign land, to Tauris, where she would have experienced the reunion with Orestes and so on, and imagine how all this was taken up again in Goethe's Iphigenia! Imagine the single moment when King Thoas of Tauris stands before Iphigenia, in Goethe's dictum, when he woos Iphigenia and she feels obliged to utter the words: “Listen! I am of the house of Tantalus!” — “You speak a great word calmly.”

All Greekness is revived in what the Greeks or the resurrected Greek says in such a case of the soul life of the Greeks: “I am of the family of Tantalus.” And then it seems as if, after this has been said, Professor Dr. Lövius chuckles in through the window: “He he he! Hereditary burden!” — There you have the whole difference between what the fourth post-Atlantic period offered and what the fifth, our post-Atlantic period offers. Because in fact the two things can be compared. I have not exaggerated in the slightest sense, but have described this quite objectively. The two things may be compared with each other, and that is because the place of the creation of Greek myth, the place of what was meant by Greek myth, has now been taken by the doctrine of hereditary burden, even in poetry. For ultimately, one need only compare Sophocles or Aeschylus with Ibsen to see exactly the same contrast in poetry, except that in Greek times, scholarship and poetry were not so divorced from one another. You only need to read what I have said about the mysteries and the origin of art and religion from the mysteries to understand that there was no Greek Professor Dr. Lövius alongside the Greek Ibsen: they would have been one and the same. But they would have been the ones who composed the whole myth, that which the myth contained as truth. For what health was, what the art of healing was, what the art of Mercury with the Mercury staff was, in ancient Greece this was also presented in the form of stories, just like this story of Tantalus' lineage and Iphigenia. In those days it was not usual to speak in abstract terms; one spoke in images. And through images one presented the truth. And that which filled the life of the Greek soul, that which organized this Greek soul quite inwardly, that bears relation to what is accepted today as the truth, for the original character of truth, such as: “Listen! I am of the house of Tantalus!” to: “He he he! Hereditary burden”.

That, my dear friends, is what one must write into one's soul about something that has descended from ancient Greece to the present day. It can give us guidance about what needs to be developed in order to ascend again. That would take us too far today. I will present the continuation of these reflections tomorrow for those who still want to hear it.

All of our medieval stories—Parsifal, the Round Table, Hartmann von Aue—reveal mystical truths in esoteric form, even though they are usually only understood in their outward aspect. Where do we search for their origin? We must look to a time before the spread of Christianity. Into Christianity was blended what had lived in Ireland, Scotland ... [Gap in the notes.] We are led to a particular centre whence this spiritual life was disseminated. The spiritual life [of Europe] emanated from a mother lodge in Scandinavia, ‘Drottes’ Lodge. Druids = Oak. For this reason the Germanic peoples were said to receive their instructions beneath oak trees.

‘Drottes’, or Druids, were ancient Germanic initiates. They still existed in England till Elizabethan times. All that we read in the Edda or can find in the ancient German sagas refers back to the temples of the ‘Drottes’ or Druids. The author of these tales was always an initiate. The sagas not only have a symbolical or allegorical meaning, but something else as well.

Example: We know the saga of Baldur. We know that he is the hope of the gods, that he is killed by the god Loki with a branch of mistletoe. The God of Light is killed. This whole story has a deep mystery content which all who underwent initiation not only had to learn, but had to experience.

The Mysteries. Initiation: the first deed was called the search for the body of Baldur. It was supposed that Baldur was always alive. The search consisted of a complete enlightenment about the nature of man. For Baldur was the human being who has gone astray. Once upon a time the human being was not as he is today, he was undifferentiated, not bowed down by passionate experiences, but composed of finer ephemeral substance. Baldur, the radiant human being. When truly understood, all things which appear to us in the form of symbols must be understood in a higher sense. This human being who has not descended into what today we call matter, is Baldur. He lives in each one of us. The Druid priest had to search for the higher self within him. He had to become clear about where this differentiation took place, between the higher and the lower ... [Gap]

The secret of all initiation is to give birth to the higher human being within oneself. What the priest accomplishes more quickly, the rest of mankind must undergo in long stages of development. To become leaders of the rest of mankind, the Druids had to receive this initiation.

Man who had descended deeper now had to overcome matter and regain his former higher level. This birth of the higher human being takes place in all the Mysteries in a similar sort of way. The man who had become submerged in matter had to be reawakened. One had to make a series of experiences—real experiences—which were unlike any sense experiences one can have on the physical plane.

The stages. The first step was that one was led before the ‘Throne of Necessity’. One stood in front of the abyss: really experienced through one's own body what lived in the lower kingdoms of nature. Man is both mineral and plant, but the man of today is unable to experience what is undergone by the elementary substances and yet the enduring, the constraining things in the world are due to the fact that we are also mineral and plant in our nature.

The next step led the human being to all that lived in the animal kingdom. Everything which existed in the form of passions and desires was beheld in swirling and interweaving movement- All this had to be observed by the candidate for initiation so that his eyes would be opened to what lay behind the veil of the senses. Man is not aware that what swirls around in astral space is hidden behind the physical sheath. The veil of maya is really a sheath which must be penetrated by him who is to be initiated—the sheaths drop away, the human being sees clearly. That is a very special moment: the priest becomes aware that the sheaths had dammed back the impulses which would have been frightful if they had been let loose.

The third step led to a vision of the elemental nature forces. That is a step which man finds difficult to comprehend without previous preparation. That powerful occult forces are residing in these nature forces and through them express elemental passions, is something which makes man aware that there are powers quite outside the scope of anything he can experience as his own suffering.

The next trial is called the ‘Handing over of the Serpent’ by the hierophant. One can only explain it by means of the effects which it brings about. It is elucidated in the Tantalus saga. The privilege of being allowed to sit in the Council of the Gods can be abused. It signifies a reality which certainly raises man above himself, but dangers accompany it which are not exaggerated in the story of the Tantalus curse. As a rule man says he is powerless in face of the laws of nature. These are thoughts. With that kind of thinking, which is only a shadowy brain-thinking, nothing can be achieved. In creative thinking, which builds and constructs things of the world, which is productive and fruitful, the passive kind of thinking is replaced by a thinking permeated by spiritual force. The blown skin of a caterpillar is the empty sheath of the caterpillar; when filled with [productive] thinking it is the living caterpillar. Into the sheath-thoughts, living active power is poured so that the priest is enabled, not only to see the world in vision, but to work in it through magic. The danger is that this power can be abused. He can ... [Gap]

At this stage the occultist acquires a certain power, whereby he is enabled to deceive even the higher beings. He must not only repeat truths but experience them and decide whether a thing is true or false. That is what is called ‘The Handing over of the Serpent by the Hierophant’. [it denotes the same thing on a spiritual level that the rudimentary stages in the formation of the spinal cord signify on the physical level. In the animal kingdom we pass through the fishes, amphibians and so on till we reach the brain of the vertebrates and man. See notes.] We have a spiritual backbone, too, which determines whether we are to develop a spiritual brain. Man goes through this process at this stage of his development. He is lifted out of Kama (feelings, passions, desires) and endowed with a spiritual backbone so that he can be raised up into the spiraling of the spiritual brain. On a spiritual level, the windings of the labyrinth are the same as the convolutions of the brain on the physical level. Man gains access to the labyrinth, to the windings within the spiritual realm.

Then he had to take the oath of silence. A naked sword was presented to him and he was obliged to swear the most binding oath. This was that he would henceforth keep silence about his experiences where it concerned people who had not been initiated as he had. It is quite impossible to reveal the true content of these secrets without preparation. He, [the initiate] however, could create these sagas so that they became the expression of the eternal. One who could give utterance to things in this way of course had great power over his fellow men. The creator of a saga of this kind imprinted something into the human spirit. What is thus spoken is then forgotten and only the merest vestige of it survives death. Eternal truths remain longest after death. Of less elevated scientific thought hardly anything remains. The eternal does so and appears again in a new incarnation.

The Druid priest spoke out of the higher plane. His words, though simple, being the expression of higher truths, sank into the souls of his hearers. He spoke to simple folk but the truth sank into their souls and something was incorporated into them which would be reborn in a new incarnation. At that time men experienced the truth through fairy stories; thus today our spirit bodies have been prepared and if we are able to grasp higher truths today it is because we have been prepared.

Thus this time, which came to an end in 60 A.D., had prepared the spiritual life of Europe, had provided the soil on which Christianity could build. These teachings have been preserved and whoever searches will be able to find access to what was taught in these Lodges.

After he [the Druid] had given his oath on the sword he had to drink a certain draught—and this he did from a human skull. The meaning of this was that he had transcended what was human. That was the feeling which the Druid priest had to develop concerning his lower bodily nature. He had to look upon all that lived within his body with the same objective, cool attitude as he felt towards a containing vessel. Then he was initiated into the higher secrets and shown the path to higher worlds. Baldur ... [Gap] He was led into an immense palace which was roofed by flashing shields. He encountered a man who cast forth seven flowers. Cosmic Space, Cherubim, Demi-urge [Maker of the World]. Thus he became truly a Priest of the Sun.

Many people read the Edda and are unaware that it is an account of what really took place in the ancient ‘Drottes’ mysteries. An immense power lay at the disposal of the ancient ‘Drottes’ priests, a power over life and death. It is true that everything becomes corrupt in time. It was once the highest, the holiest of things. At the time when Christianity was spreading, much had degenerated and there were many black magicians, so that Christianity came as a redemption.

The study of these old truths alone is able to give an almost complete survey of the whole of occultism.

Unlike our present practice, not one stone was laid upon another in the building of a Druid temple without the use of exact astronomical measurement. Doorways were built according to astronomical measurement. The Druid priests were the builders of humanity. A faint reflection of this is preserved today in the views which the Freemasons hold.

Learning to penetrate astral substance, viewing the sun at midnight: First initiation.

Handing over of the Serpent by the Hierophant: Second Initiation.

The journey into the Labyrinth: Third Initiation.

Note on Lecture III

The only source for this lecture was the short notes of Marie Steiner von Sivers. Sentences enclosed in square brackets are the amendments of the editor, where the text seemed insufficiently clear.

Further source material has been appended below, gleaned from the writings of Charles William Heckethorn on the subject of the Druids and the Scandinavian Mysteries. A copy of Heckethorn's book in German translation was in Rudolf Steiner's private library, and from marginal notes in Rudolf Steiner's handwriting it appears to have been used by him in connection with this lecture and other lectures included in this volume. (Charles William Heckethorn Geheime Gesellschaften, Geheimbünde und Geheimlehren, Leipzig, 1900. Original English edition: The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries, London,1875.)

From Charles William Heckethorn
The Secret Societies of all Ages and Countries
Chapter VIII. The Druids.

The Druids, the Magi of the West.
The secret doctrines of the Druids were much the same as those of the Gymnosophists and Brahmins of India, the Magi of Persia, the priests of Egypt, and of all other priests of antiquity. Like them they had two sets of religious doctrines, exoteric and esoteric. Their rites were practised in Britain and Gaul, though they were brought to a much greater perfection in the former country, where the Isle of Anglesey was considered their chief seat. The word Druid is generally supposed to be derived from “an oak,” which tree was particularly sacred among them, though its etymology may also be found in the Gaelic word Druidh, “a wise man” or “magician.”

Temples.
Their temples, wherein the sacred fire was preserved, were generally situate on eminences and in dense groves of oaks, and assumed various forms—circular, because a circle was an emblem of the universe; oval, in allusion to the mundane egg, from which, according to the traditions of many nations, the universe, or according to others, our first parents, issued; serpentine, because a serpent was the symbol of Hu, the Druidic Osiris; cruciform, because a cross is an emblem of regeneration; or winged, to represent the motion of the divine spirit. Their only canopy was the sky, and they were constructed of unhewn stones, their numbers having reference to astronomical calculations. In the centre was placed a stone of larger dimensions than the others, and worshipped as the representative of the Deity. The three principal temples of this description in Britain were undoubtedly those of Stonehenge and Avebury in the south, and that of Shap in Cumbria. Where stone was scarce, rude banks of earth were substituted, and the temple was formed of a high vallum and ditch. The most Herculean labours were performed in their construction; Stukeley says that it would cost, at the present time, £20,000 to throw up such a mound as Silbury Hill.

Places of Initiation.
The adytum or ark of the mysteries was called a cromlech, and was used as the sacred pastos, or place of regeneration. It consisted of three upright stones, as supporters of a broad, flat stone laid across them on the top, so as to form a small cell. Kit Cotey's House, in Kent, was such a pastos. Considerable space, however, was necessary for the machinery of initiation in its largest and most comprehensive scale. Therefore, the Coer Sidi, where the mysteries of Druidism were performed, consisted of a range of buildings, adjoining the temple, containing apartments of all sizes, cells, vaults, baths, and long and artfully contrived passages, with all the apparatus of terror used on these occasions. Most frequently these places were subterranean; and many of the caverns in this country were the scenes of Druidical initiation. The stupendous grotto at Castleton, in Derbyshire [Peak Cavern], called by Stukeley the Stygian Cave, as well as the “Giants Caves” between Luckington and Badminton [in Wilts.], certainly were used for this purpose.

Rites.
The system of Druidism embraced every religious and philosophical pursuit then known in these islands. The rites bore an undoubted reference to astronomical facts. Their chief deities are reducible to two,—a male and a female, the great father and mother, Hu and Ceridwen, distinguished by the same characteristics as belonged to Osiris and Isis, Bacchus and Ceres, or any other supreme god and goddess representing the two principles of all being. The grand periods of initiation were quarterly, and determined by the course of the sun, and his arrival at the equinoctial and solstitial points. But the time of annual celebration was May-eve, when fires were kindled on all the cairns and cromlechs throughout the island, which burned all night to introduce the sports of May-day, whence all the national sports formerly or still practised date their origin. Round these fires choral dances were performed in honour of the sun, who, at this season was figuratively said to rise from his tomb. The festival was licentious, and continued till the luminary had attained his meridian height, when priests and attendants retired to the woods, where the most disgraceful orgies were perpetrated. But the solemn initiations were performed at midnight, and contained three degrees, the first or lowest being the Eubates, the second the Bards, and the third the Druids. The candidate was first placed in the pastos bed, or coffin, where his symbolical death represented the death of Hu, or the sun; and his restoration in the third degree symbolized the resurrection of the sun. He had to undergo trials and tests of courage similar to those practised in the mysteries of other countries, and which therefore need not be detailed here.

The festival of the 25th of December was celebrated with great fires lighted on the tops of the hills, to announce the birth-day of the god Sol. This was the moment when, after the supposed winter solstice, he began to increase, and gradually to ascend. This festival indeed was kept not by the Druids only, but throughout the ancient world, from India to Ultima Thule. The fires, of course, were typical of the power and ardour of the sun, whilst the evergreens used on the occasion foreshadowed the results of the sun's renewed action on vegetation. The festival of the summer solstice was kept on the 24th of June. Both days are still kept as festivals in the Christian church, the former as Christmas, the latter as St. John's Day; because the early Christians judiciously adopted not only the festival days of the pagans, but also, so far as this could be done with propriety, their mode of keeping them; substituting, however, a theological meaning for astronomical allusions. The use of evergreens in churches at Christmas time is the Christian perpetuation of an ancient Druidic custom.

Doctrines.
The Druids taught the doctrine of one supreme being, a future state of rewards and punishments, the immortality of the soul and a metempsychosis. It was a maxim with them that water was the first principle of all things, and existed before the creation in unsullied purity, which seems a contradiction to their other doctrine that day was the offspring of night, because night or chaos was in existence before day was created. They taught that time was only an intercepted fragment of eternity, and that there was an endless succession of worlds. In fact, their doctrines were chiefly those of Pythagoras. They entertained great veneration for the numbers three, seven, nineteen (the Metonic cycle), and one hundred and forty-seven, produced by multiplying the square of seven by three. They also practised vaticination [prophecy], pretending to predict future events from the flights of birds, human sacrifices, by white horses, the agitation of water, and lots. They seem, however, to have possessed considerable scientific knowledge.

Political and Judicial Power.
Their authority in many cases exceeded that of the monarch. They were, of course, the sole interpreters of religion, and consequently superintended all sacrifices; for no private person was allowed to offer a sacrifice without their sanction. They possessed the power of excommunication, which was the most horrible punishment that could be inflicted next to that of death, and from the effects of which the highest magistrate was not exempt. The great council of the realm was not competent to declare war or conclude peace without their concurrence. They determined all disputes by a final and unalterable decision, and had the power of inflicting the punishment of death. And, indeed, their altars streamed with the blood of human victims. Holocausts of men, women, and children, inclosed in large towers of wicker-work, were sometimes sacrificed as a burnt offering to their superstitions, which were, at the same time, intended to enhance the consideration of the priests, who were an ambitious race delighting in blood. The Druids, it is said, preferred such as had been guilty of theft, robbery, or other crimes, as most acceptable to their gods; but when there was a scarcity of criminals, they made no scruple to supply their place with innocent persons. These dreadful sacrifices were offered by the Druids, for the public, on the eve of a dangerous war, or in the time of any national calamity; and also for particular persons of high rank, when they were afflicted with any dangerous disease.

Priestesses.
The priestesses, clothed in white, and wearing a metal girdle, foretold the future from the observation of natural phenomena, but more especially from human sacrifices. For them was reserved the frightful task of putting to death the prisoners taken in war, and individuals condemned by the Druids; and their auguries were drawn from the manner in which the blood issued from the many wounds inflicted, and also from the smoking entrails. Many of these priestesses maintained a perpetual virginity, others gave themselves up to the most luxurious excesses. They dwelt on lonely rocks, beaten by the waves of the ocean which the mariners looked upon as temples surrounded with unspeakable prodigies. Thus the island of Sena or Liambis, The Saints, near Ushant, was the residence of certain of these priestesses, who delivered oracles to sailors; and there was no power that was not attributed to them. Others, living near the mouth of the Loire, once a year destroyed their temple, scattered its materials, and, having collected others, built a new one—of course a symbolical ceremony; and if one of the priestesses dropped any of the sacred materials, the others fell upon her with fierce yells, tore her to pieces, and scattered her bleeding limbs.

Abolition.
As the Romans gained ground in these islands the power of the Druids gradually declined; and the were finally assailed by Suetonius Paulinus, governor of Britain under Nero, A.D. 61, in their stronghold, the Isle of Anglesey, and entirely defeated, the conqueror consuming many of them in the fires which they had kindled for burning the Roman prisoners they had expected to make—a very just retaliation upon these sanguinary priests. But though their dominion was thus destroyed, many of their religious practices continued much longer; and so late as the eleventh century, in the reign of Canute, it was necessary to forbid the people to worship the sun, moon, fires, etc. Certainly many of the practices of the Druids are still adhered to in Freemasonry; and some writers on this Order endeavour to show that it was established soon after the edict of Canute, and that as thereby the Druidical worship was prohibited in toto, the strongest oaths were required to bind the initiated to secrecy.

Chapter IX. Scandinavian Mysteries

Drottes.
The priests of Scandinavia were named Drottes, and instituted by Sigge, a Scythian prince, who is said afterwards to have assumed the name of Odin. Their number was twelve, who were alike priests and judges; and from this order proceeded the establishment of British juries. Their power was extended to its utmost limits, by being allowed a discretionary privilege of determining on the choice of human victims for sacrifice, from which even the monarch was not exempt—hence arose the necessity of cultivating the goodwill of these sovereign pontiffs; and as this order, like the Israelitish priesthood, was restricted to one family, they became possessed of unbounded wealth, and at last became so tyrannical as to be objects of terror to the whole community. Christianity, promising to relieve it from this yoke, was hailed with enthusiasm; and the inhabitants of Scandinavia, inspired with a thirst for vengeance on account of accumulated and long-continued suffering, retaliated with dreadful severity on their persecutors, overthrowing the palaces and temples, the statues of their gods, and all the paraphernalia of Gothic superstition. Of this nothing remains but a few cromlechs; some stupendous monuments of rough stone, which human fury could not destroy; certain ranges of caverns hewn out of the solid rock; and some natural grottos used for the purpose of initiation.

Rituals.
The whole ritual had an astronomical bearing. The places of initiation, as in other mysteries, were in caverns, natural or artificial, and the candidate had to undergo trials as frightful as the priests could render them. But instead of having to pass through seven caves or passages, as in the Mithraic and other mysteries, he descended through nine—the square of the mystic number three—subterranean passages, and he was instructed to search for the body of Baldur, the Scandinavian Osiris, slain by Loki, the principle of darkness, and to use his utmost endeavours to raise him to life. To enter into particulars of the process of initiation would involve the repetition of what has been said before; it may therefore suffice to observe that the candidate on arriving at the sacellum had a solemn oath administered to him on a naked sword, and ratified it by drinking mead out of a human skull. The sacred sign of the cross was impressed upon him, and a ring of magic virtues, the gift of Baldur the Good, delivered to him.

Astronomical Meaning Demonstrated.
The first canto of the Edda, which apparently contains a description of the ceremonies performed on the initiation of an aspirant, says that he seeks to know the sciences possessed by the Aesas or gods. He discovers a palace, whose roof of boundless dimensions is covered with golden shields. He encounters a man engaged in launching upwards seven flowers. Here we easily discover the astronomical meaning: the palace is the world, the roof the sky; the golden shields are the stars, the seven flowers the seven planets. The candidate is asked what is his name, and replies Gangler, that is, the wanderer, he that performs a revolution, distributing necessaries to mankind; for the candidate personates the sun. The palace is that of the king, the epithet the ancient Mystagogues gave to the head of the planetary system. Then he discovers three seats; on the lowest is the king called Har, sublime; on the central one, Jafuhar, the equal of the sublime; on the highest Tredie, the number three. These personages are those the neophyte beheld in the Eleusinian initiation, the hierophant, the daduchus or torchbearer, and the epibomite or attendant on the altar; those he sees in Freemasonry, the master, and the senior and junior wardens, symbolical personifications of the sun, moon, and Demiurgus, or grand architect of the universe. But the Scandinavian triad is usually represented by Odin, the chief deity; Thor, his first-born, the reputed mediator between god and man, possessing unlimited power over the universe, wherefore his head was surrounded by a circle of twelve stars; and Freya, a hermaphrodite, adorned with a variety of symbols significant of dominion over love and marriage. In the instructions given to the neophyte, he is told that the greatest and most ancient of gods is called Alfader (the father of all), and has twelve epithets, which recall the twelve attributes of the sun, the twelve constellations, the twelve superior gods of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Among the gods of the Scandinavian theogony there is Baldur the Good, whose story, as already hinted above, formed the object of the initiatory ceremonies. Baldur is Mithras, the sun's love. He foresees the danger that threatens him; he dreams of it at night. The other gods of Valhalla, the Scandinavian Olympus, to whom he reveals his sad fore-bodings, reassure him, and to guard against any harm befalling him, exact an oath from every thing in nature on his behalf, except from the mistletoe, which was omitted on account of its apparently inoffensive qualities. For an experiment, and in sport, the gods cast at Baldur all kinds of missiles, without wounding him. Hoder the blind [that is, Fate], takes no part in the diversion; but Loki [the principle of evil, darkness, the season of winter] places a sprig in the hands of Hoder, and persuades him to cast it at the devoted victim, who falls pierced with mortal wounds. For this reason it was that this plant was gathered at the winter solstice by the Druids of Scandinavia, Gaul, and Britain, with a curved knife, whose form symbolised the segment of the zodiacal circle during which the murder of Baldur took place. In the Edda of Snorro we have another legend of Odin and Freya, the Scandinavian Isis or Venus, giving an account of the wanderings of the latter in search of the former, which, of course, have the same astronomical meaning as the search of Isis for Osiris, of Ceres for Proserpine, etc. One of the chief festivals in the year, as with the Druids, was the winter solstice; and this being the longest night in the year, the Scandinavians assigned to it the formation of the world from primeval darkness, and called it “Mother Night.” This festival was denominated “Yule,” and was a season of universal festivity.

Once again, I would like to sum up some of what has been presented here recently. We spoke about the external sense world in its relation to the inner world of the human being and I pointed out two things in particular. I stressed that the external sense world certainly must be understood as a world of phenomena and that it is a sign of the prejudices of our age not to interpret correctly this view of the world of phenomena. Certainly, here and there, a certain perception surfaces concerning the fact that the outer sense world is a world of phenomena, of appearances, not one even of merely material realities. Then, however, behind this world of external phenomena, one seeks for material realities, for example, for atoms and molecules, and the like. This search for atoms and molecules, in short, for any world of physical reality standing behind the world of phenomena, is just as if one were to seek for some kind of molecular materiality behind the rainbow that is obviously only an appearance, a phenomenon. This search for material reality in regard to the external world is something quite unfounded, as spiritual science points out from the most diverse directions. We have to understand clearly that surrounding us in what we perceive as the sense world is a world of phenomena, and we may not interpret the sense of touch differently from the other senses in regard to the sense world. Just as we see the rainbow with our eyes without searching for a material reality behind it, accepting it as appearance, so we must accept the entire external world as it is, namely, in the sense I depicted it decades ago in my introduction to the volume an color theory⁴² in Goethe's natural scientific writings. The question then is posed to us: What is it that really stands behind this world of phenomena? The material atoms are not behind it; there are spiritual beings behind it—there is spirituality. This recognition signifies a lot, for it means that we admit that we do not live in a material world but in one of spiritual realities.

When we as human beings turn to the external world this drawing representing, as it were, the boundary of our body—we have here the sense world and behind it the world of spiritual realities, spiritual beings (right side).

Now, when we turn to the human interior, when we move from our senses inward, we have first of all the content of our world of conceptions, our soul world. If we call the sense world the world of sense phenomena, of sensory appearances, we have the world of spiritual phenomena when we turn from our senses inward (left). Naturally, in the manner in which they are present within us, our thoughts, our conceptions, are not realities, they are spiritual phenomena. Now, if we descend from this soul world still deeper into our inner being, it is all-important for us not to believe that we thereby arrive at a special, higher world, something that mystic dreamers presuppose. There, we actually come into the world of our organism, the world of material realities.

This is why it is important not to assume that by inward brooding one could discover something spiritual; there, we should seek for the constitution of the material human organism. One should not seek for all manner of mystical realities within oneself, as I have pointed out from a number of viewpoints. Instead, behind what pushes up into the soul and thus turns into a spiritual phenomenon, especially when one penetrates more and more deeply into oneself, we should seek the interaction of liver, heart, lungs, and other organs that mystics in particular do not like to hear mentioned. There we become acquainted with the essentially material element of our earthly existence. As I have often emphasized, many a person who believes he has encountered mystical realities by descending deeply into his inner being only finds what is given off by his liver, gall bladder and other related organs. Just as tallow turns into flame, so everything that liver, lungs, heart and stomach give off turns into mystical phenomena when it lights up into consciousness.

The important point is that true spiritual science guides the human being beyond any sort of illusion. Materialists cling to the illusion that they can find physical, material realities, not spiritual realities, behind the sense world. It is the illusion of mystics that when they descend into their own being, they can find, not the world of the material organization, but different kinds of special divine sparks, and such like.

In genuine spiritual science, it is important that we do not search for material substance in the outer world and do not seek the Spirit in the inner world, which initially appears as such through inward brooding.

What I have now said is of significant consequence for our entire world view. Bear in mind that from the time man falls asleep until he wakes up he is outside his physical and etheric bodies with his astral body and I. Where is he then? This is the question we must ask ourselves. If we assume that out there is the world described by the physicists, it makes no sense whatever to speak about an existence of the astral body or the ego outside the physical body. If we know, however, that beyond the sense world lies the world of spiritual realities, out of which the sense world blossoms forth, then we are able to imagine that the astral body and ego move into the spiritual world which lies behind the sense world. Indeed, astral body and ego find themselves in that part of the spiritual world that underlies the sense world. Thus, we can say that in sleep man penetrates into the spiritual world which is the basis of the physical world. Of course, upon awakening, his ego and astral body first penetrate his etheric being and then what constitutes the realm of the material organization.

Clear concepts of an anthroposophical world-view can only be attained if one is able to form intelligible ideas concerning such matters. For, above all, one will not succumb to the illusion of seeking the divine, or the spiritual underlying our human condition, behind the sensory surroundings. There, only that spiritual element is found which, out of itself, brings forth the sense world. As human beings we have our roots in the spiritual world, but in which spiritual world? We have our roots in the very spiritual world that we leave when incarnating into our physical body. We come from the spiritual world that we live in between death and a new birth; through birth or conception we enter this physical existence. The world we inhabit between death and a new birth, which we then leave, is a different spiritual world than this one [behind the sense world], although, because it is a spiritual world, it is related to the latter from which springs forth our sense world. We will not grasp the spiritual world of which we are speaking—I have described it in the lecture cycle, Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Birth,⁴³ namely, the spiritual world we experience between death and rebirth which creates and brings us forth—if we seek it behind the sense world. We will not take hold of it if we seek it within ourselves. There, we only discover the material element of our own organization. We can only grasp it when we leave space altogether. This spiritual world is not within space. As I have often emphasized, we can only speak about it when we base it solely on time, thinking of it as a world of time. Consequently, it goes without saying that all the descriptions we have about this world between death and rebirth can only be images, merely pictures. We must not confuse these pictures, in which we must of necessity express ourselves, with the realities in which we dwell between death and a new birth. It is vital that on the basis of the anthroposophical world-view we do not merely talk about all manner of fantastic things, depicting them in the ancient terminology which actually does not designate anything new. What matters is that we enrich our world of concepts and ideas when we try to send our thoughts into the world in which we live between death and rebirth. Thus we can acquire a most important concept that can also give rise to profound, albeit uncomfortable, reflection. It is this: When we have absolved the life between death and birth, we incarnate here in space. We penetrate into space out of a condition that is not spatial. Space has significance only for our experiences between birth and death. Again, it is important to know that when we pass through the portal of death, not only do we leave the body with our soul, we also leave space behind.

This concept was quite familiar to people until the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries A.D. Even a person like Scotus Erigena,⁴⁴ who lived in the ninth century, was fully conversant with it. Yet the modern age has completely lost the concept of the spirituality underlying human existence, within which the human being lives after death—as was thought then, only after death; today we must say: between death and rebirth we are outside space. The modern age is proud and arrogant regarding its thinking, yet it can actually think only of what is spatial, holding any and every thought in a spatial context. In order to conceive of spiritual matters, on the one hand, we must make the effort to overcome space within our thinking. Otherwise we will never reach the truly spiritual; above all, we will never attain to an even approximately correct natural science, much less a spiritual science. Particularly in our time it is infinitely important to become acquainted with these finer distinctions of spiritual-scientific knowledge. For, what we acquire through such concepts is not just any kind of world concept, any sort of thought content. The acquisition of a thought content is, after all, the very least we can achieve through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For it is one and the same whether someone believes the world consists of molecules and atoms, or if he believes man consists of a physical body, a somewhat less dense etheric body, then something more nebulous and tenuous, the astral body, followed by whatever is next, say, a still finer mental body, or something even more and more rarefied; for one doesn't come anywhere near the etheric body by just thinking of something more rarefied. It is really the same thing whether one is a materialist picturing the world as atoms, or whether one harbors this coarsely materialistic conception that is the common factor of the so-called theosophical society teachings, or whatever they are called now. Something quite different is what really matters, namely, that we become capable of changing our entire soul constitution. We have to make every effort to think about the spiritual in a manner different from the one in which we are accustomed to think about the external sense world. We do not comprehend spiritual science if we conceive of something other than the sense world as being spiritual; we enter into spiritual science if we think about the spiritual in a different way than we think about the sense realm. We think of the latter in terms of space. We can think about the spiritual world in terms of time within certain limits, because we have to think of ourselves within this spiritual world. And we are in a certain sense spiritually conditioned by time, in that at a certain moment in time we are transposed from the life between death and rebirth into the life between birth and death.

As I have often indicated, it is this transformation of the state of mind that is so absolutely essential for mankind of today. For how did we become caught up in the calamities of the present? It is because, along with so-called modern progress, humanity has altogether forgotten to admit the spiritual into its conceptions. The theosophical teachings of the so-called Theosophical Society are actually the attempt to characterize spiritual facts in materialistic forms of thought, hence, to drive materialism all the way into the spirit. We do not attain to a spiritual concept merely by calling something spiritual, only by transforming our thinking to what is suited to the sensory realm.

Human beings do not live with each other only in purely spatial relationships that can be constructed by means of what has become the general thinking of natural science. We can no longer develop social concepts based on the present-day world view. The kind of thinking that humanity has become accustomed to owing to natural science cannot lead to a characterization of social life. In this way arise the aberrations we experience today as a variety of social ideologies that only come about because it is impossible to think realistically about the social problems based on the conceptions from which we proceed to regard something as right or wrong. Not until people are willing to penetrate spiritual science will it become possible again to think of the social life in the manner it has to be conceived if further decline is to be halted and, instead, progress is to ensue. The discipline brought about in us by spiritual science is more important than its content. Otherwise we shall finally reach the stage of demanding that spiritual matters be popularized, that is to say, that they be presented in coarsely sensory, realistic terms. Things that must be expressed in a certain manner if one doesn't want to fantasize but to speak of realities, as I have done in our anthroposophical presentations as well as in my book, Towards Social Renewal,⁴⁵ are found to be not graphic enough. Well, “graphic” is a word that has a peculiar connotation for people today. There are people today who have much to say about this longing of mankind to have everything presented in a crudely senseperceptible manner. This is true all over the world, not just in certain countries.

I found an interesting passage, for example, in a recently published book, Les forces morales aux Etats-Unis,⁴⁶ written by a French lady. It has the following subdivisions: l'eglise, l'ecole, la femme. The book contains an interesting little episode which demonstrates how, in certain quarters, one triel “graphically” to describe matters pertaining to man's relationship with the spiritual world. The author relates:

One evening a friend and I strolled down Broadway. I came to a church. A quick glance showed us the place was filled with men only. Offended by seeing this, we avoided moving further inside. A priest clad in a soutane saw us, approached and invited us to come in. Since we hesitated, he asked about our confession. “We are not Catholics,” I said. He urged us to enter the church and, index finger pointing upward, he said with conviction “Come here and listen to me. If, for instance, you wish to travel to Chicago, how would you go about it? You might go on foot, take a car, a boat, or travel by train. It stands to reason that you would choose the fastest and most comfortable means. In this case that's the train. Obviously, if you wish to get to the Garden of God you will choose the religion that will get you there in the fastest and safest way. That's the Catholic religion, which is the express train to Paradise.”

The Lady telling the story only concluded that she was so perplexed she did not think of telling him that he had forgotten the airplane in his graphic comparison, which he could have mentioned as a still quicker means of getting to Paradise.

You see, here was someone eager to counter people's prejudices, and he chose graphic conceptions. The description of the Catholic Church as the “express train to heaven” is a graphic image. It is indeed the tendency of our time to search for graphic images, meaning concepts that do not make any demands on people's thinking. It is precisely here that we must already discern the gravity of modern life which demands that we do away with such graphicness which turns into banality and triviality, thus pulling man down into materialism in regard to those matters that must be comprehended spiritually. Even in symptoms such as these we have to search for what is needed most in our age. It must be said again and again: Such symptoms cannot be ignored; we cannot afford to go blindfolded through the world, which is an organism asking to be understood by means of its symptoms. For these symptoms contain what we must comprehend if we wish to arrive at an ascent again from our general decline.

At this point, however, it is necessary to see a number of things in the right light. What has actually been produced from spiritual-scientific foundations in Towards Social Renewal truly has not been created out of some theory but out of the whole breadth of life, with the difference that this life is viewed spiritually. Mankind today cannot progress if people do not adjust to such a view of life.

I would like to put in here two points taken from life that once again showed me recently how necessary it is to lead humanity today to a life-filled comprehension of reality, but at the same time a spiritual comprehension of reality. Yesterday I read an article by a journalist whose name, so I am told, is Rene Marchand,⁴⁷ who, for a long time, was a correspondent for Figaro, Petit Parisien, and so on. He participated in the war on the Russian front, being a radical opponent of the Bolsheviks. He then had dealings with the general of the counter-revolution, becoming a follower of it. Overnight, he became converted to the idea of workers' councils, to Bolshevism. From an opponent of Bolshevism, so it says here, he turned into a protagonist, an unreserved supporter of the leadership and the ideology of workers' councils. Here is a man who belongs to the intellectual class, for he is a journalist, who, after all, lives with a deeper understanding of life, a deeper sensitivity for life, who dwells in the old traditions as do most of today's sleeping souls. It is interesting how such a person suddenly realizes: All this will assuredly lead to destruction!—and now the only goal worth aiming at for him appears to be Bolshevism! In other words, the man now perceives that everything that is not Bolshevism leads to ruin. I explained to you how Spengler described this.⁴⁸ Marchand sees only Bolshevism; initially, he believes that Bolshevism is merely a Russian affair. Then he discovers something quite different. He feels that Bolshevism is an international matter that must spread over the whole world. He says:

It now became clear to me that peace can only be restored when the people in all the countries freely take their destiny into their own hands. The principles, hitherto proclaimed by the bourgeois governments merely to deceive the masses, can only become reality when this new imperialism (that of the Entente powers) has in turn broken down.

He then relates how he has now arrived at the conviction that justice, unity, peace, and law will only rule when the world has become bolshevistic through and through; not till then will reconstruction be possible. This man now sees that all else leads to destruction. And basically he is quite correct in pointing out: If anything outside Bolshevism is to be cultivated further, it must turn into the dictatorship of the old capitalism, the Bourgeoisie and its trappings. It must become the dictatorship of people like Lloyd George,⁴⁹ Clemenceau,⁵⁰ Scheidemann,⁵¹ and so on. If one does not wish for this, if one does not want ruin, there is no other choice but the dictatorship of Bolshevism. He sees the only salvation in the letter.

In a certain sense this man is honest, more honest than all the others who see the approach of Bolshevism and believe they can oppose it with the old regime. At least Marchand sees that all the old ideas are ready to perish. A question arises, however, especially if one stands on spiritual scientific ground and experiences this; for a man like Rene Marchand is an exception. The question forces itself upon one's mind: Where has the man gained knowledge of all this? He has acquired such knowledge where most of our contemporaries have gathered it, namely, from newspapers and books. He does not know life. To a large extent, people living today know -life only from newspapers and books. Particularly the people in leading circles know life just from newspapers. Think of all that we have experienced in this regard through newspapers, by means of books! We have witnessed that a few decades ago people still formed their world conceptions by reading French comedies, that they knew the events occurring in a comedy better than what takes place in life. They ignored the realities of life and informed themselves by what they had seen on the stage. Later, we saw that people formed their view of life based on Ibsen, Dostoevsky, or Tolstoy. They did not know life; neither could they judge the books on the basis of life. Actually, people only assimilated the secondhand life printed on paper. From that they developed their slogans, founded societies for all manner of reforms without any real knowledge of life. It was a life which they knew only from Ibsen or Dostoevsky, or a life they knew in a manner that frequently could not help becoming quite obnoxious to a person when, in all the big cities of Europe, Hauptmann's “Weber” (weavers),⁵² for example, was being performed. The lifestyle of weavers appeared on stage. People with no idea of what transpires in life, having seen only its caricature on the stage, observing the misery of weavers on stage, and because it was a time of social involvement—began talking about all sorts of social questions, having become acquainted with these matters only in this way. Basically, they are all people who do not know life except vicariously from newspapers or books such as exist today. I have nothing against the books; one must be familiar with them, but one must read them in such a manner that through them one is able to perceive life. The problem is that we live in an age of abstraction today, abstract demands by political parties, societies, and so on.

This is why it is interesting for me to encounter, on one side, such a realistic man like Rene Marchand who, being a journalist, is simultaneously an oracle for many people. It does not even occur to him to ask if this Bolshevism really leads to a viable life style. For he really does not know life; he only exchanges what he has become acquainted with and finds headed for destruction, with a new abstract formula, with new theories. On the other side, I must now compare a letter I received this morning with these utterances of an intellectual. Somebody who is fully grounded in life, who has experienced precisely what can be experienced today in order to form an opinion of the social condition, wrote to me. He wrote that my book, Towards Social Renewal, had become a sort of salvation for him. This man, who has worked in a weaving mill, was thoroughly familiar with the practical aspects. One will only grasp what is meant with the book, Towards Social Renewal, when one judges it from the standpoint of practical life. It is a book depicting reality, but derived completely from the spiritual world, as must be the case with anything that is to serve life today. One will only know what is meant if one understands that every line, every word of this book is in no way theoretical, but taken straight from practical life; when one realizes that it is a book for those who wish to intervene actively in life, not for those who want to engage in socialistic chatter and babble about life.

It is this that causes one such pain, namely, that a book steeped in reality is called utopian by those who have no idea of reality. Those who have no inkling of the reality of life, being themselves addicted to literature, view even such a book that is truly taken from life as a piece of literature. Today, the “how” matters more than the “what.” Everything depends an our acquiring thought forms that are suitable tools for the comprehension of the spiritual life, for in reality spiritual life is everywhere. We have spiritual realities here in our surroundings as well as from beyond the sense world. It is out of these spiritual realities that social reconstruction must come about, not out of the empty talk appearing in Leninism and Trotskyism, which is nothing but the squeezed-out lemon of old commonplace Western views that have no power to produce any viable kind of social idea. One may well ask: Where are the human beings today who are prepared to comprehend life with the necessary intensity? We will never penetrate life if we are unwilling to view it from the spiritual standpoint. The life between birth and death will not be understood as long as one is not willing to comprehend the life between death and rebirth. If people are unwilling to resort to the spiritual life, they will either become complete materialists or intellectuals living in theories that only enable them to comprehend life after having had it dramatically presented by an Ibsen, a Dostoevsky, or another writer. What matters is that we interpret library presentations as a kind of window through which we look out upon life. This will be possible for us only if we perceive the spiritual world, the world of spiritual entities, behind the sense world; if we finally dismiss all the fantasies concerning atoms and molecules from which present-day physics wishes to construct a world for us. It would follow from these fantasies that the whole present world in fact really consists basically only of atoms and molecules, effectively eliminating all spiritual, and with it, moral and religious ideas. I will say more about this tomorrow.

• 42. See Note #4
• 43. Rudolf Steiner: Inner Nature of Man and the Life Between Death and a New Birth, GA 153 (London, Anthroposophical Publishing Co., 1959).
• 44. Scotus Erigena: 810–877 A.D. Translator of the writings by Dionysius Areopagita; author of “De divina praedestinatione,” “ De divisione naturae.” In 1225, the Vatican ordered all his writings burned.
• 45. See Note #13
• 46. Sophie Cheftele, “Les forces morales aux Etats-Unis (l'eglise, l'ecole, la femme),” Paris, 1920.
• 47. The source of this quote could not be found.
• 48. Rudolf Steiner: Oswald Spengler, Prophet of World Chaos, in GA 198 (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1949).
• 49. David Lloyd George: 1863–1945, British statesman, prime minister from 1916 until 1922.
• 50. Eugene Clemenceau: 1841–1929, French statesman.
• 51. Philipp Scheidemann: 1865–1939, German secretary of state, later minister president.
• 52. Gerhart Hauptmann: 1862–1946, playwright; “Die Weber,” Berlin, 1892.

Everything that enters into our work eventually crystallizes around the one point: to find union with the spiritual powers that advance humanity. From this point of view, the importance of the Christ-Being in the world has been spoken of here again and again. Today I would like to speak to you a few words that are intended to shape our ideas about this Christ-Impulse and its relationship to us humans ever more important. If we want to grasp the truth of this Christ impulse, we must be willing to reflect on many things. Nowadays, one hears the idea expressed here and there that everything schoolmasterly, pedantic, and didactic should be suppressed and that one should grasp the living life in art and world view. So many minds of the present express their fatigue towards everything didactic. It is only strange that as soon as matters of world-view are brought up, one always falls back into a longing for the didactic.

We have had to hear how Christ is spoken of as a world teacher; I once used the expression: “superhuman world schoolmaster”. Many feel comfortable when they can think that someone who had taught something had come into the world with Christ. In contrast to this, we have repeatedly emphasized the life character, the power character of the Christ impulse. Through what happened at the baptism in the Jordan, an entity found its way into earthly life by sharing the destiny of humanity for three years. Then it poured out into the earth aura and has been working there ever since.

When we look at this Christ event, we have to say that the event of Golgotha is a unique experience in the evolution of the earth. This has taken place once in relation to the evolution of the earth, but the Christ event was prepared in the spiritual world.

Although it is thoroughly wrong to think of the Christ-being as present in another body, one must nevertheless point to a preparatory event in the development of the world, namely to three preparatory events, preliminary stages of the event of Golgotha. They took place in supermundane, purely spiritual worlds.

I spoke of the two Jesus Children, the Solomon and the Nathan Jesus Child. The former bore within him the ego of Zarathustra. It passed over into the other Child and lived there from the twelfth to the thirtieth year. Then the shell was filled by the Christ-being. This Nathanic Jesus, he too is, this must be expressly mentioned, as he was born at the beginning of our era, in a human body for the first time properly embodied in the world. For the preliminary stages of his existence he lived in spiritual worlds. He was never properly embodied in a human body before. The relationship with Krishna was not a true embodiment, but a representative embodiment. When we visualize the being of this later Nathanian Jesus, we must look up to the angelic beings and can say: Before the Christ appeared on earth, he was not embodied, but three times present in the spiritual world, but in each of these three stages of existence, something similar to the event of Golgotha occurred again and again. We must therefore seek the preannouncement stages of Golgotha in the spiritual worlds. Each of these events has a deep significance for the whole life of people on earth. What we experience there is influenced not only by what happens within the physical earth, but also from the spiritual worlds. What was effected by the three preliminary stages was effected from the outside.

When humanity lived in the Lemurian epoch, the luciferic influence had already descended upon it. It sent its rays of power into human nature, as it were. The effect was inherent in this. Man had to develop differently then than if no luciferic influence had come. Man was, so to speak, infected with the luciferic impulse. We can say, on the basis of spiritual science, what this Luciferic influence has brought about. If it had remained as strong as in Lemuria, something would have happened to our human nature that would have placed it in great danger. What might be characterized as follows would have happened: the twelve sensory powers of the human being (for there are twelve) would have developed in such a way that the human being would have become supersensitive. While we now look at the red of the rose in such a way that it has an objective effect on us when we look at it, the red would then penetrate our eyes as if with pricks, and blue would suck at our vision. We would be supersensitive. It would be the same with hearing and all sensory perceptions of a human being. We would not be able to perceive anything without feeling pain or lust. Humanity was heading towards this through Lucifer. The beings of the higher hierarchies saw this. The Nathanic Jesus, as he later lived, was present in the spiritual world in the Lemurian period in an angelic being, and it was set before him to permeate himself with the Christ-being. While the sheaths were later permeated with the Christ-being, at that time the soul element of this angelic being was spiritualized by the Christ impulse. At that time the Christ Impulse already descended into the soul of the later Nathanian Jesus. This happened in the spiritual world, but the rays that proceeded from it spread over the earth and calmed the overly sensitive human senses, so that the danger was removed that people could only have beheld the sensual under pain and degrading lust. Thus we look at the first harbinger of the event of Golgotha and say to ourselves: We have become so with regard to our twelve senses because the Christ descended into the soul of the later Nathanic Jesus and appeased the human being of sense.

Then in Atlantean times, a danger came into human life again through the Ahrimanic influence gradually combining with the Luciferic influence. While in Lemuria the senses were in danger, now in the early days of Atlantia it was the vital organs and the etheric body of man that were in danger. These organs of an etheric body permeated by the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman would have developed in such a way that man would have taken on a form unworthy of a human being. Everything would have had to be done in such a way that man would have greedily pursued what was useful to him and could only have looked at what was not beneficial to him with disgust. Human life would have been a constant battle between greed and disgust. All the organs would have been so formed that man would have pounced in a degrading manner, like a wild animal, on what he had to absorb, and would have felt deeply degraded by disgust at what was not beneficial to him. That this did not happen is due to the second preliminary stage of the event of Golgotha. The danger was such that even in breathing, man would have drawn in the air with greed and would have expressed every flash of something unsuitable for him in a terrible way, with terrible outbursts of disgust. So it was the second time that this angelic being was imbued with the Christ impulse and thereby rays of strength entered the earth aura and calmed man's life.

Towards the end of the Atlantean period, the third preliminary stage developed. Once again, humanity was facing a great danger. Now, thinking, feeling and willing were to be brought into conflict with each other. The soul's expressions were to be made disharmonious, so that man could not have developed thinking, feeling and willing in an orderly way, but rather that these would have been in conflict with each other as if in madness. This was averted by the third preliminary stage. Once again the entity that later became Jesus of Nazareth imbued itself with the Christ impulse, and order and harmony were brought into the harmony of thinking, feeling and willing. This was still felt long after the Atlantean period. In the times that preceded our development of thought, the harbingers of an image that extends into our time but is not yet properly understood began to take shape. At the end of the Atlantean era, this soul, which later became Jesus of Nazareth, came into existence. This soul brought about an entity that always became master of the wildly storming affects, and triumphed over thinking, feeling and willing, which became a dense entity. Mankind pictured this in the image of St. George or St. Michael, the slayer of the dragon. This is the direct imaginative expression of the third forerunner of the event of Golgotha.

The Greeks, who in their imaginations brought to life what shone through from the mysteries of Atlantis, created an image of the being that was active in Atlantis. They worshipped in Apollo the spirit of which they imagined: this is He who is imbued with the spirit of the sun. They did not call it Christ, but the name is not important. In their sun worship they revered the third preliminary stage of the event of Golgotha and expressed this outwardly by seeking advice from the priests of Apollo in the most important matters. They knew, these Greeks, that what weaves in the earth aura is also woven into the secrets of existence, and how it has brought order to thinking, feeling and willing. They felt so connected to the earth that they said: What would have brought disorder to thinking and feeling and willing, if it had not been defeated by Apollo, rose up out of the earth in dense form. But Apollo brings order into it, so that instead of disharmony and madness in thinking, feeling and willing, wisdom emerges from the earth aura.

They looked towards the area where steam was rising from the earth, which they captured and stored in their sanctuary, and placed the priestess of Apollo over the opening through which he himself spoke in such a way that his wisdom was transformed into oracles, into advice for the concerns of those seeking this wisdom. Just as George and Michael appear in the picture, so Apollo appears in his sanctuary, pouring the prophecies of those who speak through him into the soul.

Oh, Christianity is ancient! It is not the name of Christ that matters. The service of Apollo honored Christ, the spirit of the sun, so that in this worship lies the consciousness of the third preliminary stage of the event of Golgotha. Then the time came when humanity faced a fourth great danger. In Lemuria, the physical body was in danger, then in Atlantia the etheric and astral organs. Now it was the I that was to come into disorder. This is preparing itself in such a way that at the time when the I was to take hold of man in Greek thought, it shows itself in a very peculiar phenomenon, that all conditions are present to bring disorder into the I. Only gradually will one understand how that which was to bring forth this I develops in Greek philosophy and so on. I have already tried to show how the I awakens. It can be seen from the study of philosophy, which culminates in the thought of Plato and Aristotle, how the I gradually comes into being. When Thales, Pherekydes of Syros, Anaxagoras first brought great thoughts into being, there was a parallel phenomenon that spread from Greece throughout the Greek world: there was the coming of the Sibyls parallel to the coming of the I. The Sibyls asserted themselves everywhere. Sometimes they spoke great wisdom for the future, but sometimes also madness. Everything that can throw the I into confusion, as the I must be thrown into confusion without the Christ Impulse, found expression in their prophecies. Two things were in preparation: Prophets, forerunners of the Christ Impulse, who, in the purity of their soul-searching, seek to absorb the young power of the Christ, and who, in their ordered life of thought, pass through what is weaving itself through the evolution of mankind. On the other hand, there are the Sibyls, who are at the mercy of the outer influences of the earth aura. In Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel in Rome, we are confronted with this contrast between sibyls and prophets. Michelangelo shows how the wind and other things work with the Sibyls, which are fundamentally connected with the earth, and shows that there was danger for the ego to become disordered with the Sibyls, and how the prophets work to calm this ego. Studying the prophets next to the sibyls in Michelangelo's paintings can lead us deep into many secrets. The forces that were at work through the Sibyls show how the human ego is inclined to fall into disorder on a fourth level. The order that the teaching of the prophets announces was established through the Mystery of Golgotha, the order of the ego forces in such a way that the human being's ego learned to feel more and more deeply: Not I, but the Christ in me. What would have contributed to the disorder of the ego in the Sibyls comes to the fore in an orderly way through the Christ impulse. Because the human ego must develop on earth, the event of Golgotha had to take place on earth; Christ had to permeate the body of Jesus, the real physical body, whereas in the preliminary stages an angel was inspired.

Thus Golgotha drew nearer to the evolution on earth. What Augustine says is deeply true: Christianity has always existed, only that now it is called Christianity. — In the time of Augustine there was a feeling that Apollo's servants were Christians, even if not in name. It was a veneration of the third, purely spiritual event. Thus Christ gradually approached the earth. In the devachan world was the first and second preliminary stage, in the astral world the third, and in the physical world the event of Golgotha.

But not as a teacher, but through his power did Christ penetrate into the earth aura. This must be emphasized again and again. If Christ had wanted to work only through what people could have understood of him, he would have been able to work little.

He entered evolution as a living entity. Human understanding must struggle to reach Him. In this way we see how the dogmatic disputes take place. Human judgment is still far from penetrating the Christ Impulse. The Christ Impulse works in the depths through the souls as a living power. We can trace this power. Let us look at an event that took place on October 28, 312. At that time, Constantine delivered a battle to Maxentius near Rome. Maxentius' army was four times as strong as Constantine's. Constantine won. Anyone who looks at history correctly says: The life of all of Europe would have been different if Constantine had not won. — It was a strange battle. It was not external strength that won, nor judgment. The battle was not fought with the help of the power of judgment. It was fought by each side according to subconscious impulses, into which the Christ impulse played. Maxentius consulted the Sibylline books. They told him: If you do not remain where you are, if you leave Rome, you will subjugate the great enemy of Rome. A dream also told him to leave Rome and fight outside the gates. He was securely entrenched in Rome. Human judgment did not decide what took place in this battle. The subconscious worked in the souls of Maxentius and Constantine. A dream revealed to Constantine that he should carry the symbol of Christianity before the army. Dreams decided the outcome of this battle, which decided the fate of Europe. Human judgment was not suited to bring about what was to be brought about, but the Christ impulse worked and confronted the four times weaker army of Constantine outside Rome with Maxentius. Through that which human beings cannot judge, the guidance of human affairs happened. This is significant for the whole guidance of human history.

The Christ Impulse worked in the subconscious of souls as a spiritual impulse. It worked in the same way later, when the map of Europe was once again given a completely different form. If at the decisive moment the Maid of Orleans had not stepped forward to the side of her king, the destiny of all Europe would have been changed. Again it was not the power of judgment, but the Christ impulse, which availed itself of a human instrument. It does not depend on our judgment whether one finds this good or bad.

I can show by another example how the Christ impulse works below the threshold of consciousness. It makes use of strange forms of revelation, strange to the materialist. When modern spiritual life approached, there was something in its development that would have caused materialism to stretch its arms much further over European life. If certain events had not occurred, it would have been possible that even in those souls that still felt spiritually, purely material conceptions would have arisen. The understanding for the Christ Impulse would have sunk so low in the preceding centuries that one would have doubted one's physical existence. Then it would have been much easier for Arthur Drews and others. It spread to the most distant regions of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, when there was a danger that people would no longer have any connection with the Christ Impulse. The mood was: Why should one believe that Christ lived? And so the same thing happened simultaneously in the most diverse places. In almost all parts of Europe, everywhere it was seen that through the most diverse human places, through villages and towns, not always the same, but always a different physical, human personality walked. The opinion spread that this human personality, which appeared in a particularly strange guise, was Ahasver, the eternal Jew, who had wandered the world since he rejected Christ. The rumor spread that there lived a man who could say from his own experience: I have seen Christ, he really lived. - In the most diverse places, this personality went through the villages, attended church services in a terrible state of mind, in very outdated clothing, and recounted the event of which he could bear witness. Bishops and abbots invited such personalities to banquets and organized festivities. These personalities always told them: We can strengthen your awareness that Christ walked the earth, because he passed me by, and because of how I treated him, I must now go through the world like this.

From what we learn in history, we have no idea how deeply what Ahasver told affected human minds a few centuries ago. There were always other personalities, but they saw, as in a retrospective of Ahasver, Christ passing by, so that they were believed. From them came the realization: Yes! He has lived, for he can

can tell about him. — Superficial people today may say: Should that have had such a great influence that it averted the danger that Christ would have been completely forgotten as an historical Christ? They do not know that such events went through the world that history has not recorded. That we are not completely mired in materialism today is a consequence of what emanated from these personalities. Today, “it could not happen.” In some places, Ahasver had thick calluses, peculiar clothing, long hair, yellowed skin, was tall and gaunt; in other places he was small, had a hump, but was always imbued with the consciousness of what the soul believed it had experienced at the moment when Christ passed before it.

This consciousness, this ability to look back into the Akashic Records and to identify with them to such an extent that they truly believed it, was instilled in numerous personalities. Today, all these Ahasueruses would end up in an asylum; at that time, they were instruments for strengthening spiritual life. Bishops and abbots were strengthened by them in the power of the Christian faith. The seed was sown in psychically inclined natures from spiritual worlds, to be able to look back to the event of Golgotha. The narrators then saw themselves in the picture through the peculiarity of their consciousness. That was a true, living contemplation of the event at Golgotha. Much more than in the human being's conscious mind, in which the power of judgment asserts itself, took place in the subconscious regions of the soul, which emanated from the Christ impulse. Today's materialistic man can easily scoff at such things. He will consider it a psychic epidemic and say: What can one give that comes from diseased souls? One would like to ask these materialists what they would say if someone became so mentally ill that psychiatrists locked him up in an asylum, but there, out of his enlightenment, he began to devise the air engine that people really have in mind as an idea? They would accept it from such a soul and not ask whether it comes from a diseased soul. Whether a soul is diseased is not a criterion, not an objection. The point is to examine the content of what comes from the soul. The worst thing about our material mind is that one appeals to secondary considerations, not to the power of truth.

If we survey the development of humanity, it will become clear to us that we have to understand the Christ impulse as a living force that works much more in the depths of the soul and makes use of physical means, more than what people understand. If it had remained limited to this, its influence would not have come far. But in our time, things are beginning to change, to the point that, little by little, what was the thought for the Greeks, with which at the same time the consciousness of the human ego was actually born, must have an effect in us. How does this thought assert itself today? One does not need to prove this with spiritual science, but with philosophy. In the centuries before the establishment of Christianity, beginning with Pherekydes and ending with Aristotle, thought begins to play a role in the evolution of the world. Thinking in images only begins in Greek life. This prepares the way for the actual consciousness of self. Then comes the Christ impulse. It works together with what has emerged as ego power. In our time, we see it in Hegelianism, which is indeed little noticed, but is a significant phenomenon of humanity, as Fege struggles with the thought that wants to grasp the whole world. Man develops in the world; he crowns development by filling the world with thought. He recognizes his environment through this. But thought can do two things: it can develop properly, which can be compared to the development of the germ into a flower, or the germ can be used for human food. Then it is torn out of its continuous flow. If it remains in its continuous flow, a new plant develops, and it is likely to give rise to life in the future. It is the same with human thought. It is said that we use it to create images of our environment. But to use it for such knowledge is as if we used germs for food. We drive the thought away from its current. But if it persists in its current, we do not use it for food, so to speak, then we let it live its own germ life, let it arise in meditation and inspiration, let it develop into a new, fruitful existence. That is the straight current for the thought. In the future, people will recognize that what has been regarded as knowledge of the world behaves like grain that does not develop into new grain but is driven out into a completely different current; but what we learn to know through knowledge of the higher world is thought that is philosophically grasped in freedom, that leads directly into spiritual life through meditation and concentration.

We have reached the point where it will be recognized that ordinary knowledge relates to supersensible knowledge in the same way that a grain of wheat used for food relates to a grain of wheat that is transformed into new grain. Inner knowledge of thoughts is what the future must bring. Philosophy in its old form has been overcome, has played out its role. It will be recognized that such knowledge must always be there, but must lead to a by-product of development. It will be recognized that the living thought, which is transformed into meditation and concentration, leads to spiritual knowledge of human nature and to knowledge of the spiritual world.

When we consider various phenomena in our spiritual life, many things may be noticed. Here we may say and discuss what would be misunderstood in the outside world. A man is regarded today as a great philosophical spirit who, in essence, limits his wisdom to repeatedly saying: Man must not stop at external knowledge, he must grasp the spirit. One could say that he repeatedly says, in different versions: Man cannot stop at mere external knowledge, he must grasp the spiritual within himself, must experience it within himself, it must not be grasped merely in concepts, it must become alive. He does not say what the spirit is, nothing is recognized. This is the hallmark of Eucken's philosophy. It does not lead to real spiritual knowledge. When thinking forms itself out of itself, it does not become an indeterminate spiritual experience, but it is rounded off in itself, and what we have come to know as the etheric body resonates with thinking. When thinking transforms itself into meditation, this thought will form and out of the human etheric body there is - the spiritual human being. Humanity is on the way out of philosophy and into a living spiritual knowledge.

We are on the right path. Those who understand this recognize their time, but real insight into these things cannot be gained without developing a holy awe of the knowledge that holds one back from applying the power of judgment one has everywhere. One must always want to prepare oneself for new knowledge, because the way the soul is, it is only good for a side current of knowledge. Only when it develops itself higher is it good for really entering the spiritual world. Only then do we understand our task within our community correctly when we feel, with all humility, how we are called to know something of this great re-evaluation of all concepts of knowledge that want to lead into the spiritual life. We want to remain very modest, but we can call some of those who are considered great minds today shallow talkers, because that is not derogatory criticism. What we need to do is to combine clear, strong and forceful judgment of what we are striving for with humility; to recognize that, in the grand scheme of things, we are only at the beginning, but our hearts can swell, our hearts can glow with joy at the thought of what we want to achieve, to which we want to devote our most intimate soul powers. I would like to appeal not only to your imagination, but also to the deepest powers of your heart, to that in your soul where your deepest feeling for the pulse of the times can be found. Then you will understand what is meant by the fact that such a speech is only intended to hint at what the leading powers of our time, the spiritual individuals, of whom we know that they are going through our time, are saying to us. We do not advance only by acquiring more and more concepts about what the spiritual world is. We must acquire them. But we only really advance by connecting something with each new idea that comes from the deepest part of our soul, so that this ever-increasing understanding can be proven to the leading powers of the time. We can feel them speaking to us from the most intimate depths of our souls. Long before we perceive this speaking as a warning, we can feel how our movement is supported by these spiritual guiding powers, of which we are the true heralds within our movement. This awareness should pour out like a true spiritual current over what we do.

Yesterday we spoke of how preparation was made for that which had to come about for the evolution of humanity through the Mystery of Golgotha. We spoke of the three permeations of a Being of the higher Hierarchies by the Christ, and in the wonderful emergence of the Greek Apollo we found an echo of what had taken place at the end of the Atlantean time, as a far distant prefiguring of the Mystery of Golgotha. Now we have to inquire how the effects of this are manifest in the evolution of mankind. It will first be necessary to say something about the basic characteristics of the world pictures which appeared in post-Atlantean times as the echoes, or after effects, of the threefold Christ-event, for this, as we have seen, reached a certain conclusion at the end of the Atlantean Age.

Let us try to look more deeply into the fundamental characteristics of these world pictures. They arose as after effects in human souls of all that I described yesterday. These post-Atlantean world-pictures are indeed the reflections of the threefold Christ-event in the souls of post-Atlantean mankind. From this point of view we need say only a few words about the first post-Atlantean epoch. We know that in terms of spirituality it was the highest post-Atlantean epoch up to now, but that what the souls of the holy Rishis and their disciples received from it was less penetrated by the Mysteries of which I spoke yesterday.

The first post-Atlantean world-picture to show a direct effect of the threefold Christ-event was that which arose from the Zarathustrian impulse. Now I must here remark in parenthesis that I shall have to introduce words which—because of the way they are used today—have a dry, abstract, even pedantic sound; but, search as one may through the language; there are no other words available. And so I shall want to appeal to your souls to understand by these words something far more spiritual than anything they can signify for the and scholarship of the present time.

From the point of view relevant here I should like to associate the Zarathustrian world-picture with “Chronology”. It looks beyond the two Beings, Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman, to the workings of Time—Zervan Akarana. Not, however, the abstract Time we think of today, but Time viewed as a living, super-personal Being. From this Being proceed the rulers of Time; first of all the Amshaspands, the spiritual Beings who are symbolised in cosmic space by the signs of the Zodiac. Through the number six—or twelve if we reckon in their antipodes—they rule over the Izeds, who rank below them and are 28–31 in number. The Izeds are spirits of a lower kind, servants of the high Time Beings; they regulate the days of the month.

The Zarathustrian consciousness looked at the wonderful harmony which works through forces and is symbolised numerically by all the relations and combinations which result from the interweaving of 28 to 31 with 12. It looked into all that streams into the world and resounds through it, because in the great world-orchestra the instruments sound harmoniously together in these numerical relationships. For the Zarathustrian world-picture this appears as the ordering and harmonising principle in the cosmic order. I want to give only a hint of these relationships. And because in that which creates, and nourishes itself in creating, in that which takes the world-pictures into itself, absorbing them spiritually and carrying them over to higher stages—because the Zarathustrian outlook sees in “Time” something living and super-personal—so, while spiritualising the term, we may call this world-picture “Chronology”, whereby we are led to think at once of the god Kronos, the Regent of Time.

Then we come to the third post-Atlantean epoch. Yesterday I described it as the epoch in which knowledge was kindled in human souls by the forces which shone out from the stars; when the secrets of the world were no longer discerned only through the relations between the Rulers of Time in the super-sensible, for these were becoming manifest in the realm of sense existence. In the courses of the stars, in the signature of their movements in cosmic space, men could now perceive how harmony and melody in cosmic happenings are brought about. This picture of the world I would like to call Astrology. So Chronology is followed by Astrology. And everything that was disclosed by the true, authentic Chronology of Zarathustrianism, and by the true, authentic Astrology of the Egyptian and Chaldean Mysteries—all this was activated by the secret influence which had come into the world though the threefold Christ-event before the Atlantean catastrophe.

And what followed in Greece or in the Graeco-Latin epoch? What I am now going to say applies not only to the Greek and Roman cultures, but also to all the other regions of Europe. Yesterday I tried to illustrate it through a single example, but it holds good, one might say, for all the West. Let us recall how the Greeks reverenced Apollo, the reflection of the Nathan Jesus-child as he had been at the end of the Atlantean time. It was out of the Hyperborean land, from the North, that Apollo came to the Oracle at Delphi. Through the Pythia, in summer, he spoke the most important things that the Greeks wished to hear. In the autumn he returned to his Hyperborean land. We connected this journey of Apollo with the journeys of the sun; but it is the spiritual sun that speaks through Apollo, and the spiritual sun goes away to the north, while the physical sun goes to the south. The myths are seen to be endlessly full of wisdom if they are considered in the light of true occultism. But in revering Apollo the Greeks did not look on the sun as his visible sign in the heavens; Apollo was not a sun god in this sense. For a god symbolised by the external sun the Greeks had Helios; it was he who regulated the course of the sun in the sky. Even if we take only the physical sun into account, we find that its influence on earth-life is not confined to the direct effects of its rays. The sun works in the first place through air and water and water-vapour, and so through the vapours which (as we have seen) rise from the site of the Castalian spring and coil round the neighbouring hillsides like a dragon—the dragon killed by the Greek St. George. The sun works in all the elements, and after it has worked into them, inoculated them, its activity plays out from them on to human beings, through the servants whom we call elemental spirits. In the elements the Sun-Spirit is actively alive, and this is the activity the Greeks saw in their Apollo.

Thus for the Greeks Apollo was a sun god, but not the Helios who drove the chariot of the sun across the heavens and to some extent regulated the times of the day. In Apollo the Greeks saw the sun's activity in the atmosphere, and this activity they addressed as Apollo when they addressed it spiritually. And so it was with many gods and spiritual beings whom we find in the West. I could mention many, but we need point only to Wotan with his wild host, rushing through the storm. What form then did the world-picture—still echoing the threefold Christ-event—take in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch? Again I must make use of a pedantic, dried out word. Astrology was followed by Meteorology. Chronology, Astrology, Meteorology! We have only to bring the “logy” into relation with the Logos.

But while all this was breaking in over the Western world, something else streamed into the whole post-Atlantean civilisation. This too was an after-echo of the threefold Christ-event, but it came from quite another side. And this fourth element, running as though parallel to the Meteorology of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, is something I must again designate with a dry, pedantic word: Geology—but I beg you once more to relate the “logy” to the Logos. Geology, then—where do we encounter it?

The development of the ancient Hebrew civilisation will never reveal its particular secrets unless it is studied as Geology, in our sense of the term. How do we first come upon the ranks of the Elohim, or upon the Jahve-god?¹ We meet him first when he wishes to form into man something taken from the Earth itself. He wishes to clothe with a new covering, an Earth-vesture, the part of man that has come down from earlier times, from Saturn, Sun, Moon. Jahve is precisely the god who forms man out of the Earth—that is, out of the forces and elements of the Earth. Therefore the ancient Hebrew wisdom, since it professed the Jahve-god, had to become Geology. And this teaching about man, that he is formed out of the forces of the Earth, is Geology. Is not the geological character of the ancient Hebrew teaching shown to us at once in the name of the first man, Adam—he who was formed out of earth! That is the significant point that we must keep before us: among other peoples—the peoples with a meteorological world-picture, let us say—the creation of man is spoken of quite differently, with the emphasis on his soul. In the Greek tradition, for example, we see Prometheus engaged in the forming of man. Athene lends her aid and causes a spark from spiritual heights to be united with man. Prometheus forms the soul in the symbolic likeness of a butterfly. The Jahve-god forms man out of earth; and he, the Jahve-god, having become in the course of his evolution the Ruler of Earth, breathes out of his own substance a living soul into man. So Jahve unites himself through his breath with what he has formed out of earth. And he wishes to dwell in his offspring, in his living breath, in Adam and his descendants; those beings whom Jahve considered it his task to clothe in earth. And now to carry this further, let us try to call up before our souls everything we find handed down by the Bible from Hebrew antiquity itself.

We know, and have emphasised, that the Earth develops certain forces. Goethe and Giordano Bruno, among others, compare these forces to those of in-breathing and out-breathing in human beings. The Earth does have forces of in-breathing and out-breathing which bring about ebb and flow, the swelling and sinking of the waters; they are inner Earth-forces, but the same as those which guide the Moon round the Earth. In water-effects we encounter a manifestation of these Earth-forces. In this realm the Bible shows us the Deluge as another important event after the creation of Adam, the ‘man of earth’. And now let us pass on to the time of Moses!

If we look at the doings of Moses in the right light, we find them constantly related to activities of the Earth. Moses goes to the rocks with his rod and makes water gush out. Moses goes up the mountain. Above and below, the mountain is connected with Earth activity. For we must think of this mountain as a volcano, or at least as volcanic. It is not the Sinai generally imagined; the Earth is active in it. The column of fire in which Moses stands is akin to what happens when we bum a piece of paper in the sulphur hills of Italy and smoke comes out. So does fiery smoke, telluric activity, come out of the mountain. And in telluric activity the Jews always saw symbols. In front of them went the pillar of cloud or of fire—telluric activity! We could go deeply into details and everywhere we should find that the spirit of Earth prevails in all that Moses gives out as a revelation of the Jahve-god. What Moses proclaims is Geology!

The profound difference between the Greek and the Hebrew conceptions of the world will never be understood unless it is recognised that the Greek conception belongs to Meteorology, and the Hebrew conception to Geology. The Greeks felt that they were living in the midst of forces pouring in on the Earth from the surrounding Cosmos; pouring into the air and pervading the atmosphere. The Hebrews felt themselves in close relationship to forces rising from the Earth below and bound up with the Earth. Yes, even the sufferings of the Hebrew people come from the desert, where the Earth-forces prevail. Geology dominates the destiny of the Hebrews. Geology, expressed now in the fruitfulness of the Earth, is what draws them, through the reports of their spies, to the Promised Land.²

Paul knew well that this consciousness of a connection with the Earth-spirit is a result of the pre-earthly Christ-event, for he indicates that it was the Christ who led the Jews through the desert and caused water to flow from the rock. And if we were to go on from the Bible to some of the significant Hebrew legends, we should find them permeated with Geology, in the sense meant here. Thus we are told how Jahve, when he was forming man out of earth, sent forth an angel to gather earths of different colours from all parts of the Earth, so that everything belonging to the Earth should be mingled in Adam's bodily vesture. Today we should say that Jahve took great care to place man on the Earth so that in his true being he would be the highest flower, the crown, of earthly creation.

For the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Zoroastrians, the Greeks, the Romans and the European peoples of central and northern Europe, the most important part of man was the part that came from the spiritual world. For the Jews, the most important element in man was connected with the Earth and its forces. Jahve felt himself as the god whose spiritual rulership prevailed throughout the Earth.

Thus we can regard as the most important event in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch the emergence of Geology side by side with Meteorology. And a wonderful spiritual reflection of this comes to expression in ancient Hebrew prophecy.

What were these prophets really striving for? Let us try to look into the prophetic souls of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hezekiah, Daniel, Joel, Jonah and Zechariah. If we do this quite impartially, without any preconceptions, we find that they were endeavouring, fundamentally, to bring a particular soul-force into the forefront of the soul and to drive another soul-force down, as it were, into the depths. I have already asked you to notice how, in the paintings by Michelangelo which I described, the prophets are always depicted sitting there as if wrapped in deep thought, inwardly at rest, so that one sees how in the devotion of their souls they are connected through sub-earthly depths with the Eternal. In contrast with them Michelangelo places the Sibyls, who are open to the elemental powers of the Earth. Thus the hair of one Sibyl is blown about by the wind; even her blue mantle billows in the wind, and under the influence of the wind she utters her prophecies. We see another Sibyl seized by inner fire; in the typically assertive gesture of her hand we see the fire, the earthly element. We could look again at these Sibyls one by one and we should find that they live in the midst of the forces which play into their souls from the elemental surroundings of the Earth. These Sibylline forces, which so to speak draw into their souls the spirit of the elements and bring it to expression—these are the forces that the old Jewish Prophets wanted to repress. If you read impartially the whole history of the Jewish Prophets, you will find that the prophet sets himself—and that is the aim of his training—to suppress in himself the Sibylline urge and to prevent it from ever breaking out.

Apollo changed the Sibylline impulse of the Pythia by sinking himself into it and speaking through her. The Prophets wanted to suppress everything Pythian in their souls and to cultivate solely that which works in the clear force of the Ego; the Ego which is bound up with the Earth and belongs to it; the Ego which is the spiritual counterpart of the geological element. How the Eternal reveals itself in the Ego through calm repose, when the Sibylline elements are silent, when all inner turmoil ceases, when only calm prevails and gazes into the grounds of the Eternal—that is what the Jewish Prophets wished to manifest, so that their proclamations could spring from a temper of soul which corresponds in the highest degree with Geology.

Thus the stirring message that sounds forth to us from the Prophets is like an out flowing of the geological element, and even when things turn out quite differently from what has been prophesied, this very fact shows us how closely bound are the Prophets to the element of Geology. A future kingdom which will redeem the existing kingdom while remaining in all appearance an earthly kingdom, a heaven on Earth—that is first of all what the Prophets announce, so closely are they united with Geology.

This geological element in the Prophets flowed on even into the early days of Christianity, since people expected not only the return of the Messiah, but that he would come down from the clouds and found his kingdom on Earth. The distinctive inner character of Jewish culture will be understood only if it is taken in this sense as Geology. This was what the Prophets longed for and inculcated in their pupils—to suppress the Sibylline element, together with everything that leads the soul into unconscious depths, and to make manifest that which lives in the Ego.

The relations of all other peoples to their gods were different from those of the Jews to their Jahve. The other relations were predetermined: they reflected the outcome of the relations of men to the spirits of the higher Hierarchies during the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods. The Jewish people had the task of developing a relationship which belonged specially to the Earth period. But when the Ego wishes to establish a relationship with its god, how does this find expression? Not as inspiration, so that morality springs from the operation of divine forces within the soul, but as commandment. The form of commandment found in the Decalogue is encountered first among the Jews—whatever nonsense learned men may talk about earlier commandments, Hammurabi, and so forth. I cannot go now into the follies of modern scholarship. The commandments that arise when the Ego stands directly over against God and receives from God the rule, the precept, that the Ego must follow out of its own inner will—this kind of commandment is met with first among the Jewish people. And it is here, too, that we first find God entering into a covenant with his people.

The other gods worked with forces which are always connected with subconscious realms of the soul. Let us recall how Apollo worked through the Pythia, and how a person on his way to the Pythia had to prepare himself, so that the god might be able to speak to him. Apollo spoke through the unconscious soul-life of the Pythia. In contrast with this we have the Jahve-god uttering his commandments, making a covenant with his people, speaking directly to the Ego in the soul. And the Prophets immediately wax wrath if something happens which did often happen to the Jewish people—if the influence of heathen peoples gains sway over the Jews. No subconscious forces were to be allowed to influence the Jews; everything had to rest on the alliance with God and the principle of the Law. That was the especial concern of the Prophets. And now let us look back a little, with the aid of occult knowledge, over what we have already tried to illustrate.

Yesterday we came to know about the threefold Christ-event which took place in Lemurian and Atlantean times. We saw how on three occasions the Being who appeared later as the Nathan Jesus-child was permeated by the Christ, but in such a way that he did not incarnate on Earth but remained in spiritual worlds. And when we look back over what happened then, we must say that what was accomplished in Atlantean times flowed over into the East.

For example, Elijah was one of the Prophets—but in what sense is he a Prophet?³ He is a servant of the God Jahve, but in his soul an echo of the threefold Christ-event lives on. In his soul is the knowledge: “As a prophet of Jahve I must above all things proclaim that in Jahve there lives the Christ who will later on fulfil the Mystery of Golgotha; the Christ who poured His enduring influence into the cosmos through His third experience at the end of the Atlantean time.” Elijah proclaimed the Christ-filled Jahve. For the Christ was indeed living in Jahve, the Jahve-god, but as a reflection of Himself. As the moon reflects the sunlight, so did Jahve reflect the Being who then lived as Christ. Christ caused his Being to be reflected from Jahve or the Jahve-god. But a messenger such as Elijah worked in the after-effects of the threefold Christ-event; we might say that Elijah went ahead of the Nathan Jesus-being, who was passing spiritually from West to East in order to find his way into the course of civilisation and then to be born as one of the Jesus-children.

The overflow, as it were, of Meteorology, especially when this came into touch with Geology, was felt by all peoples as a heralding of things to come. And we meet with the remarkable fact that in the region which afterwards became so important for Christianity one of these prefiguring signs occurred. We see how in the most varied places of Asia Minor, and also in Europe, festivals were held which were like foreshadowings of the Mystery of Golgotha. The cults of Attis and Adonis have been correctly noted as having this character. But if we look at these festivals in their true light, we see that the event they prefigure is on the meteorological level. The god who was slain as Adonis, and who rose again, was not thought of as embodied in the flesh. What his worshippers had for a god was primarily an image, a picture; and in fact it was a picture of the angelic Being who in spiritual heights was permeated by the Christ at the close of the Atlantean time and was later born as the Nathan Jesus-child. It was the destiny of the Nathan Jesus-child that was celebrated in the worship of Adonis and Attis.

We can now say that it was part of the karma of world history—you will perhaps look for something more behind these words—that in the place where the Bible with a certain truth locates the birth of the Jesus-child—in Bethlehem—there was a centre of the Adonis cult. Bethlehem was one of the places where Adonis had been worshipped. The Adonis who died and rose, again was often celebrated there, and so was an aura prepared by the calling up of a memory: Once in the spiritual heights there was a Being who then belonged still to the Hierarchy of Angels and was later to come to Earth as the Nathan Jesus-child; a Being who at the end of the Atlantean time had been permeated by the Christ. What had formerly been done for the harmonising of thinking, feeling and willing—this was celebrated at the Adonis festivals. And in Bethlehem, where Adonis festivals had been held, we have also the birthplace of the Nathan Jesus-child. In conjunction, these words sound strange. But when we have sought out the threefold Christ-event, the super-earthly event which on three occasions preceded the Mystery of Golgotha, do we not see the Christ pass over from West to East, to the place where the Mystery of Golgotha was to be fulfilled? Do we not see how He had sent His messenger in Elijah, and do we not know how in his next incarnation the messenger reappeared as John the Baptist? And are we not expressly told of this in a wonderful harmony of words: “He sent his angel before him, to herald his coming?”⁴ That can be said as well of John as of Elijah. Or even better of Elijah, as will be understood by those who remember my saying that Elijah remained in spiritual heights and worked through a representative, so that he himself never went about on Earth. If you reflect on that, the expression, “He sent his angel before him”, is even more appropriate to Elijah than to John. Such messengers were always messengers of the Christ, who was passing from West to East.

And now the Geology of the Jews was to be permeated by the spiritual Being whom we have learnt to see as having a particular activity in relation to the Earth. Geology was to be Christened (durchchristet). The spirit of the Earth was to be experienced in a new way by men; they had to be enabled to free this spirit, in a certain sense, from the Earth. But this was possible only if there came a power which could free the spirit of the Earth from the forces of the Earth. This happened when the Earth's aura was permeated by the power of the Christ and in consequence a change came over the Earth itself. The Christ entered into the forces which the Jahve-god had released and gave them a different character.

From all this, if we look back over it, we can understand why the laurel became a visible symbol of Apollo. For those who bring something of Spiritual Science to the study of the plant kingdom, the laurel has a strong connection with meteorological conditions. It is shaped and built out of Meteorology. Another plant is much more closely bound up with the Earth; is so to speak an expression of Geology. If one really feels how the oil penetrates the olive tree, so that in one's own soul the elemental forces are stirred by the way in which the tree allows a new sprout to be grafted on to it and to flourish there—then one can feel how the olive tree is inwardly penetrated with the oil of Earth. One can feel the earthly element pulsing through the oil.

And now you will remember something I touched on in the second lecture—that Paul was called to build a bridge between Hebrew antiquity and Christianity, between Geology and Christology. As we said, Paul's activity extends through the realm of the olive tree. And if we understand Apollo in the vapours rising from the mountain chasms, and how through the vapours he inspires the Pythia and speaks oracular words concerning human fate, then we can also feel how the elemental forces stream from the olive tree into its environment, and these are forces familiar to the soul of Paul. We can feel it in his words. He immerses himself, as it were, in Geology in order to feel the elemental forces in the aura of the olive tree and to let its aura inspire him in that geographical realm where his work lay.

Nowadays people read these things far too abstractly. They imagine that things said by writers in the past were as abstract, as dependent only on the brain, as are the things often said by modern authors. People do not reflect how not only understanding and reason, but all the forces of the soul, can be connected in a primordial earthly sense with all that gives a certain region its particular stamp. It was the olive tree that gave its stamp to the Pauline region. And when Paul sought to raise the Jewish Geology up to himself, then it was that—inspired by the olive tree—he spoke the most important things concerning the relationship of the Christ-filled man to men who are far from Christ. Let us hear the strange words Paul uses when he wishes to bring the Gentile Christians into relation with the Jews. They are not to be taken abstractly, but as words that rise new-minted from the elemental depths of his soul: Romans XI. 13–24. (From the New English Bible):

“But I have something to say to you Gentiles. I am a missionary to the Gentiles, and as such I give all honour to that ministry when I try to stir emulation in the men of my own race, and so to save some of them. For if their rejection has meant the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean? Nothing less than life from the dead! If the first portion of dough is consecrated, so is the whole lump. If the root is consecrated, so are the branches. But if some of the branches have been lopped off, and you, a wild olive, have been grafted in among them, and have come to share the same root and sap as the olive, do not make yourself superior to the branches. If you do so, remember that it is not you who sustain the root: the root sustains you.

“You will say, ‘Branches were lopped off so that I might be grafted in.’ Very well: they were lopped off for lack of faith, and by faith you hold your place. Put away your pride, and be on your guard; for if God did not spare the native branches, no more will he spare you. Observe the kindness and the severity of God—severity to those who fell away, divine kindness to you, if only you remain within its scope; otherwise you too will be cut off, whereas they, if they do not continue faithless, will be grafted in; for it is in God's power to graft them in again. For if you were cut from your native wild olive and against all nature grafted into the cultivated olive, how much more readily will they, the natural olive-branches, be grafted into their native stock!”

Thus wrote he of whom tomorrow we will speak further, showing how he took what he had to say from Jewish Geology and drew a superb picture of the elemental forces which rise up from the Earth and reign in the olive tree.

• 1. On the subject of the creative work performed by Jahve together with the other six Elohim, see Genesis. Secrets of the Bible Story of Creation. Lecture-course given by Dr. Steiner in Munich, August, 1910.
• 2. See Numbers, XIII. 16.
• 3. On the subject of the Prophet Elijah, see the following lecture-courses by Dr. Steiner: The Gospel of St. Mark (lectures III and VI) and The Gospel of St. Luke (lecture VI).
• 4. “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me.” Malachi, III. 1. “For this is he of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.” Matthew, XI. 10.

I have spoken to you about the Sibyls, pointing out how they appear as shadows of the Greek philosophers in Ionia. Through centuries they conjured up from their chaotic soul-life a mixture of deep wisdom and sheer spiritual chaos, and they exerted much more influence on the spiritual life of Southern Europe and its neighbouring regions than external history is willing to recognise. I wanted to indicate that this peculiar outpouring from the souls of the Sibyls points to a certain power of the human soul which in ancient times, and even in the third post-Atlantean epoch, had some good significance. But as one culture-epoch succeeds another in the course of human history, changes occur. The forces which the Sibyls employed to produce, at times, sheer nonsense, were good, legitimate forces in the third post-Atlantean epoch, when Astrology was studied and the wisdom of the stars worked into the souls of men, harmonising the forces which later emerged chaotically as Sibyllism.

You can gather from this that forces which prevail anywhere in the world—including those which prevailed in the souls of the Sibyls—should never be called good or bad in themselves; it depends on when and where they appear. The forces that appeared in the souls of the Sibyls were good and legitimate, but they were not adapted to the fourth post-Atlantean epoch; for the forces that were then intended to prevail in human souls were not those that come from subconscious depths, but those that speak to the soul through the clarity of the Ego. Yesterday we heard how the Hebrew prophets strove to suppress the Sibylline forces and to bring out the forces that speak through the clarity of the Ego. This indeed was the essential characteristic of the old Hebrew school of prophecy—to press back the chaotic Sibylline forces and to bring out those which can speak through the Ego.

The fulfilment of this task given to the Hebrew prophets—we could call it a task of bringing the Sibylline forces into the right path of evolution—came about through the Christ Impulse. When the Christ Impulse entered into the evolution of humanity in the way known to us, one result was that the chaotic forces of the Sibyls were thrust back for a time, as when a stream disappears below ground and reappears later on. These forces were indeed to reappear in another form, a form purified by the Christ Impulse, after the Christ Impulse had entered into the aura of the earth. Just as in human life, after we have been using our soul-forces throughout the day, we have to let them sink into nightly unconsciousness, so that they may reawaken in the morning, so it was necessary that the Sibylline forces, legitimate as they had been during the third post-Atlantean epoch, should flow for a while below the surface, unnoticed, in order to reappear—slowly, as we shall hear.

The forces—legitimate human forces—which emerged so chaotically in the Sibyls were cleansed, so to speak, by the Christ Impulse, but then they sank below the surface of the soul. Human beings in their ordinary consciousness remained entirely unaware that the Christ continued to work on these forces; but so it was.

From the standpoint of Spiritual Science, it is a superb drama to watch this impact of the Christ Impulse; to see how, from the Council of Nicaea onwards, human beings in their normal consciousness quarrel ardently about dogmas, while what was most important for Christianity takes its course in the subconscious depths of the soul. The Christ Impulse does not work where there is strife, but below the surface, and human wisdom will have to uncover a great deal that we may think strange, if we look at it superficially. Much will have to be revealed as a symptom of the Christ Impulse working below the surface. Then we shall understand that essential developments in the historical configuration of Christianity in the West could not come about through the quarrels of Bishops, but sprang from decisions which were reached below the surface of the soul and rose into consciousness like dreams, so that men were aware only of these dreamlike apprehensions and could not discern what was going on in the depths. I will mention only one symptom of this. There are events that reflect, as though through dreams, the activity which the Christ was undertaking in the depths of the soul in order to bring human soul-forces into a right alignment with the course of Western history.

Many of you will perhaps guess something of what I mean if we observe that on October 28, 312, when Constantine the Great, the son of Constantine Chlorus, was making war against Maxentius on the outskirts of Rome, a decision was taken which proved to be of the highest importance for the configuration of Christianity throughout the West. This battle in front of Rome was not determined by military orders, or by the conscious acumen of the leaders, but by dreams and Sibylline omens! We are told—and this is the significant thing—that when Constantine was moving against the gates of Rome, Maxentius had a dream which said to him: “Do not remain in the place where you are now.” Under the influence of this dream, reinforced by an appeal to the Sibylline Books, Maxentius committed the greatest folly—looked at externally—that he could have committed. He left Rome and fought the battle—with an army four times the size of Constantine's—not within the protection of the walls of Rome, but outside them. For the message received from the Sibylline Books ran thus: “If you fight against Constantine outside the gates of Rome, you will destroy Rome's greatest enemy.” A truly oracular utterance! Maxentius obeyed it and with faith and courage went outside the gates. As on an earlier occasion another Sibylline oracle had guided Croesus, so was Maxentius guided by this one. He destroyed the enemy of Rome—himself.

Constantine had a different dream. It said to him: “Carry in front of your troops the monogram of Christ!” He did so and he won the battle. A decisive event for the configuration of Europe, brought about by dreams and Sibylline sayings! There we gain a glimpse of what was going on below the surface in the soul-life of Europe. Truly, like a stream which has disappeared into mountain cavities, so that it is no longer to be seen up above and one may form the strangest conjectures about it, so the Christ Impulse works on below the surface—works, at first, as occult, i.e. hidden, reality.

My dear friends, allow me at this point to confess to you that when in my occult researches I tried to follow this stream, I often lost trace of it; I had to search for places where it reappeared. I could suppose that the stream of the Christ Impulse had reappeared slowly, and that even today it has not fully reappeared but can only give evidence of itself. But where and how did it come to the surface? That is the question. Where did it lay hold of souls sufficiently to make an impression on their consciousness?

If you follow up the various expositions in my books and lecture-courses, and if you feel about it as I do, you will find, especially in the older ones, that what I have said in connection with the name of the Holy Grail is one of the least satisfying parts. That is how I feel and I hope that others have felt it too. It is not that I have said anything that could not be upheld, but simply that when I spoke of this, I felt unsatisfied. I had to give out what could be told with confidence, but often, when I tried to trace the further course of this stream—when I tried to unravel the further occult development of Christianity in the West—then before my soul rose the admonition: “You must first read the name of Parsifal in its right place.”

I had to experience the fact that occult researches are guided in a remarkable way. So that we may not be enticed into speculation, or into realms where we can very easily be borne away from occult truth on the wings of fantasy, we have to be guided slowly and by stages, if at last our research is to bring to light the truth which can of itself impart a kind of conviction of its rightness. So I often had to be content with waiting for an answer to the injunction: “Search out where the name of Parsifal stands!” I had quite understood something you all know from the Parsifal saga—after Parsifal returns, in a certain sense cured of his errors, and again finds the way to the Holy Grail, he is told that his name will appear shining upon the Holy Vessel. But where is the Holy Vessel—where is it to be found? That was the question.

In occult researches of this kind one is often held back, delayed, so that one may not do too much in a day or a year and be driven on to speculate about the truth. Landmarks appear. For me they appeared in the course of really a good many years, during which I sought an answer to the question—Where will you find the name of Parsifal written on the Holy Grail?

I knew that many meanings can be attached to the Holy Vessel in which the Host, the holy bread or wafer, is placed. And on the Holy Vessel itself “Parsifal” was to shine. I was aware also of the deep significance of a passage such as that in St. Mark's Gospel, Chapter 4, verses 11 and 12, 33 and 34, where we are told that the Lord often spoke in parables and only gradually clarified their meaning. In occult investigation, too, one is, led gradually, step by step, and very often only in connection with karmic guidance, and on encountering something that seems to have to do with a certain matter, one very often does not know what will be made of it in one's own soul under the influence of forces coming from the spiritual world. Often one does not know in the least whether something drawn from the depths of the occult world will have a bearing on some problem that one has been following up for years. Thus I did not know how to proceed when I once asked the Norwegian Folk Spirit, the Northern Folk Spirit, about Parsifal and he said: “Learn to understand the saying that through my powers there flowed into the northern Parsifal saga ‘Ganganda greida’”—“circulating cordial”, or something like that!¹ I had no idea what to make of this. It was the same when I was coming out of St. Peter's in Rome under the strong impression made on me by Michelangelo's work that you find on the right-hand side as you enter—the Mother with Jesus, the Mother who looks so young, with Jesus dead already on her knees. And under the after-effect of looking at this work of art (this was a leading of the kind I mean), there came to me, not as a vision but as a true Imagination from the spiritual world, a picture which is inscribed in the Akashic record, showing how Parsifal, after he has gone away for the first time from the Castle of the Grail, where he had failed to ask about the mysteries which prevail there, meets in the forest a young woman who is holding her bridegroom in her lap and weeping over him. But I knew that whether it is the mother or the bride whose bridegroom is dead (Christ is often called the Bridegroom), the picture had a meaning, and that the connection thus established—without my having done anything about it—had a meaning also.

I could tell you of many indications of this kind that came to me during my search for an answer to the question: Where can I find the name of Parsifal inscribed on the Holy Grail? For it had to be there, as the saga itself tells us; and now we need to recall the most important features of the saga.

We know that Parsifal's mother, Herzeleide, bore him in great suffering and with dream-like visions of a quite peculiar character; we know that she wished to shield him from knightly exercises and the code of knightly virtue; that she arranged for the management of her property and withdrew into solitude. She wanted to bring up her child so that he would remain a stranger to the impulses that were certainly present in him; for he was not to be exposed to the dangers that had surrounded his father. But we know also that from an early age the child began to notice everything glorious in Nature; from his mother's teaching he really learnt nothing except that there was a ruling God, and he conceived a wish to serve this God. But he knew nothing of what this God was, and when one day he met some knights he took them for God and knelt before them. When he confessed to his mother that he had seen the knights and wanted to be a knight himself, she put on him a fool's garments and sent him forth. He met with many adventures, and later on—people may call this sentimental but it is of the deepest significance—the mother died of a broken heart because of her son's disappearance: he had not turned back to give her any farewell greeting but had gone forth to experience knightly adventures.

We know that after many wanderings, during which he learnt much about knightly ways and knightly honour, and distinguished himself, he came to the Castle of the Grail. On other occasions I have mentioned that the best literary account of Parsifal's arrival at the Castle is to be found in Chrestien de Troyes. There we are shown how, after often mistaking the way, Parsifal comes to a lonely place and finds two men: one is steering a little boat and the other is fishing from it. They direct him to the Fisher-King, and presently he encounters the Fisher-King in the Grail Castle. The Fisher-King is old and feeble and has to rest on a couch.

While conversing with Parsifal, the Fisher-King hands him a sword, a gift from his niece. Then there appears first in the room a page carrying a spear; the spear is bleeding and the blood runs down over the page's hand; and then a maiden with the Holy Grail, which is a kind of dish. But such glory streams forth from it that all the lights in the hall are outshone by the light of the Holy Grail, just as the stars are overpowered by the light of sun and moon. And then we learn how in the Holy Grail there is something with which the Fisher-King's aged father is nourished in a separate room. He has no need of the sumptuously appointed meal of which the Fisher-King and Parsifal partake. These two nourish themselves with earthly food. But each time a new course—as we should say nowadays—is served, the Holy Grail withdraws into the room of the Fisher-King's aged father, whose only nourishment comes from that which is within the Holy Grail.

Parsifal, to whom it had been intimated on his way from Gurnemanz that he ought not to ask too many questions, does not inquire why the lance bleeds or what the vessel of the Grail signifies—naturally he did not know their names. He then goes to bed for the night, in the same room (according to Chrestien de Troyes) where all this has happened. He was intending to ask questions in the morning, but when morning came he found the whole Castle empty—nobody was there. He called out for someone—nobody was there. He got dressed, and downstairs he found his horse ready. He thought the whole company had ridden out to hunt and wanted to ride after them in order to ask about the miracle of the Grail. But when he was crossing the drawbridge it rose up so quickly that his horse had to make a leap in order not to be thrown into the Castle moat. And he found no trace of the company he had encountered in the Castle on the previous day.

Then Chrestien de Troyes tells us how Parsifal rides on and in a lonely part of the wood comes upon a woman with her husband on her knees, and weeping for him. It is she, according to Chrestien de Troyes, who first indicates to him how he should have asked questions, so as to experience the effect of his questions on the great Mysteries that had been shown to him. We then hear that he went on, often wandering from the right road, until exactly on a Good Friday he came to a hermit, named Trevericent. The hermit tells him how he is being cursed because he has wasted the opportunity of bringing about something like a redemption for the Fisher-King by asking questions about the miracles in the castle. And then he is given many and various teachings.

Now when I tried to accompany Parsifal to the hermit, a saying was disclosed to me—a saying which in the words I have to use for it, in accordance with spiritual-scientific investigation, is nowhere recorded—but I am able to give you the full truth of it. It was spoken—and it made a deep impression on me—by the old hermit to Parsifal, after he had made him acquainted, as far as he could, with the Mystery of Golgotha, of which Parsifal knew little, although he had arrived there on a Good Friday. The old hermit then uttered this saying (I shall use words that are current among us today and are perfectly faithful to the sense of the utterance): “Think of what happened on the occasion of the Mystery of Golgotha! Raise your eyes to the Christ hanging on the Cross, at the moment when He said, ‘From this hour on, there is your mother’; and John left her not. But you”—said the old hermit to Parsifal—“you have left your mother, Herzeleide. It was on your account that she passed from this world.”

The complete connection was not understood by Parsifal, but the words were spoken with the spiritual intention that they should work in his soul as a picture, so that from this picture of John, who did not forsake his mother, he might discern the karmic debt he had incurred by his having deserted his own mother. This was to produce an after—effect in his soul.

We hear then that Parsifal stayed a short while longer with the hermit and then set out again to find the Holy Grail. And it so happens that he finds the Grail shortly or directly before the death of the old Amfortas, the Fisher-King. Then it is that the Knights of the Holy Grail, the Knights of that holy Order, come to him with the words: “Thy name shines in the Grail! Thou art the future Ruler, the King of the Grail, for thy name shines out from the holy Vessel!”

Parsifal becomes the Grail King. And so the name, Parsifal, stands on the holy, gold-gleaming Vessel, in which is the Host. It stands there.

And now, as my concern was to find the Vessel, I was at first misled by a certain circumstance. In occult research—I say this in all humility, with no wish to make an arrogant claim—it has always seemed to me necessary, when a serious problem is involved, to take account not only of what is given directly from occult sources, but also of what external research has brought to light. And in following up a problem it seems to me specially good to make a really conscientious study of what external scholarship has to say, so that one keeps one's feet on the earth and does not get lost in cloud-cuckoo-land. But in the present instance it was exoteric scholarship (this was some time ago) that led me astray. For I gathered from it that when Wolfram von Eschenbach began to write his Parsifal poem, he had—according to his own statement—made use of Chrestien de Troyes and of a certain Kyot. External research has never been able to trace this Kyot and regards him as having been invented by Wolfram von Eschenbach, as though Wolfram von Eschenbach had wanted to attribute to a further source his own extensive additions to Chrestien de Troyes. Exoteric learning is prepared to admit, at most, that Kyot was a copyist of the works of Chrestien de Troyes, and that Wolfram von Eschenbach had put the whole thing together in a rather fanciful way.

So you see in what direction external research goes. It is bound to draw one away, more or less, from the path that leads to Kyot. At the same time, when I had been to a certain extent led astray by external research, something else was borne in upon me (this was another of the karmic readings). I have often spoken of it—in my book Occult Science and in lecture-courses—and should now like to put it as follows.

The first three post-Atlantean epochs, which occur before the Mystery of Golgotha, reappear in a certain sense after the fourth epoch, so that the third epoch reappears in our epoch, the fifth; the second epoch will recur in the sixth, and the first epoch, the epoch of the Holy Rishis, will recur in the seventh, as I have often described. It became clearer and clearer to me—as the outcome of many years of research—that in our epoch there is really something like a resurrection of the Astrology of the third epoch, but permeated now with the Christ Impulse. Today we must search among the stars in a way different from the old ways, but the stellar script must once more become something that speaks to us. And now observe—these thoughts about a revival of the stellar script linked themselves in a remarkable way to the secret of Parsifal, so that I could no longer avoid the belief that the two were connected with each other. And then a picture rose before my soul: a picture shown to me while I was trying to accompany Parsifal in the spirit on his way back to the Grail Castle after his meeting with the hermit Trevericent. This meeting with the hermit is recounted by Chrestien de Troyes in a particularly beautiful and touching way. I should like to read you a little of this, telling how Parsifal comes to the hermit:

Er gibt dem Ross den Lauf
Und seufst aus tiefstem Herzen auf.
Weil er vor Gott sich schuldig fühlt
Und Reue in der Brust ihm wühlt.
Mit Weinen kommt er durch den Wald,
Doch vor der Klause macht er halt,
Steigt ab von seinem Pferde,
Legt seine Wehr zur Erde—
Und fand in einem Kirchlein klein
Den frommen Mann. In seiner Pein
Er vor ihm auf die Knie sinkt,
Das Nass, das ihm vom Auge blinkt,
Rollt endlos nieder auf sein Kinn,
Als er in kindlich schlichtem Sinn
Die Hände vor ihm faltet.
“Der Ihr des Trostes waltet,
Mein reuiges Geständnis hört:
Fünf Jahre war ich wahnbetört,
Dass ohne Glauben ich gelebt
Und nach dem Bösen nur gestrebt.”
“Sag mir, warum du das getan
Und bitte Gott, dass er dich nah'n
Dereinst noch lässt der Sel'gen Schar.”
“Beim Fischerkönig einst ich war;
Ich sah den Speer, auf dessen Stahl
Es blutig tropft. Ich sah den Gral
Und unterliess die Frage.
Was dieses Blut besage,
Und was der Gral bedeute.
Seit diesem Tag bis heute
War ich in schwere Seelennot.
Weit besser ware mir der Tod!
Und da vergass ich unsern Herrn
Und blieb von seiner Gnade fern.”
“So sage mir, wie man dich nennt.”
“Als Perceval man mich erkennt.”
Da seufzt der Greis aus tiefster Brust,
Der Name ist ihm wohl bewusst.
Er spricht: “Dem Leid hat dich vermählt,
Was ohne Wissen du gefehlt.”

[Quoted from Eduard Wechssler's
Die Sage vom Heiligen Gral
(Halle, 1898).]

He roused the steed to start
And sighed from out his deepest heart,
For guilt to God doth rack his breast,
Remorseful feelings give no rest.
With weeping comes he through the wood
Yet halts where hermitage has stood.
Makes ready to dismount,
Lays weapons on the ground—
And finds within a chapel cell
The pious man. ’Fore him he fell
Upon his knees in woeful plight,
The tear that blinked before his sight
Now rolls at last down to his chin
As he with simple childlike mien
Doth fold his hands together
That he may solace gather.
“Hear ye my sad confession:
Five years I bore delusion
While without faith my life I led
And only strove towards the bad.”
“Say me wherefore thou this hast done
And pray to God that He ere long
Will draw thee near the holy Bond.”
“I once by Fisher-King did stand.
I saw the spear upon whose steel
Hung drops of blood. I saw the Grail
Yet did forbear to put the word
What signified this blood,
This Grail, what signified—
’Twere better had I died!”
Until this day indeed
My soul's in direst need.
Our Lord I thought of never more
And from His Grace I stayed afar.”
“Now tell me what thy name may be.”
“As Parsifal men speak of me.”
Then sighs the aged man with groan,
The name to him is full well-known.
“What thou unwittingly hast left undone
Has brought this sorrow as thy doom.”

[Translation by M. Cotterell.]

Then come the conversations between Parsifal and the hermit of which I have spoken already. And when I sought to accompany Parsifal in spirit during his return to the Grail, it was often as though there shone forth in the soul how he traveled by day and by night, how he devoted himself to nature by day and to the stars by night, as if the stellar script had spoken to his unconscious self and as if this was a prophecy of that which the holy company of Knights who came from the Grail to meet him had said: “Thy name shines forth in radiance from the Grail.” But Parsifal, quite clearly, did not know what to make of the message of the stars, for it remained in his unconscious being, and therefore one cannot so very well interpret it, however much one may try to immerse oneself in it through spiritual research.

Then I tried once more to get back to Kyot, and behold—a particular thing said about him by Wolfram von Eschenbach made a deep impression on me and I felt I had to relate it to the ‘ganganda greida’. The connection seemed inevitable. I had to relate it also to the image of the woman holding her dead bridegroom on her lap. And then, when I was not in the least looking for it, I came upon a saying by Kyot: “er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral”—“he said, a thing was called the Grail.” Now exoteric research itself tells us how Kyot came to these words—“er jach, ez hiez ein dinc der gral.” He acquired a book by Flegetanis in Spain—an astrological book. No doubt about it, one may say: Kyot is the man who stimulated by Flegetanis—whom he calls Flegetanis and in whom lives a certain knowledge of the stellar script—Kyot is the man who, stimulated by this revived astrology, sees the thing called the Grail. Then I knew that Kyot is not to be given up; I knew that he discloses an important clue if one is searching in the sense of Spiritual Science: he at least has seen the Grail.

Where, then, is the Grail, which today must be found in such a way that the name of Parsifal stands upon it? Where can it be found? Now in the course of my researches it had been shown to me that the name—that is the first thing—must be sought for in the stellar script. And then, on a day which I must regard as specially significant for me, I was shown where the gold-gleaming vessel in its reality is to be found, so that through it—through its symbolical expression in the stellar script—we are led to the secret of the Grail. And then I saw in the stellar script something that anyone can see—only he will not immediately discern the secret. For one day, while I was following with inner sight the gold-gleaming sickle of the moon, as it appeared in the heavens, with the dark moon like a great disc dimly visible within it ... so that with physical sight one saw the gold-gleaming moon—ganganda greida, the journeying viaticum—and within it the large Host, the dark disc. This is not to be seen if one merely glances superficially at the moon, but it is evident if one looks closely—and there, in wonderful letters of the occult script, was the name Parsifal!

That, to begin with, was the stellar script. For in fact, if this reading of the stellar script is seen in the right light, it yields for our hearts and minds something—though perhaps not all—of the Parsifal secret, the secret of the Holy Grail. What I have still to say, briefly, on this subject I will give you tomorrow.

• 1. Another possible rendering is “journeying viaticum.” (See note at the end of the lectures.)

Today, I would like to precede the reflections of these three days with an introduction that will initially provide orientation from a certain point of view regarding the relationship between the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science movement and older spiritual research movements. You have noticed, and I have often mentioned and characterized, how it has become necessary due to the conditions of our time to treat the knowledge and cognition of supersensible things, which we speak of within our spiritual scientific movement, differently than the knowledge and cognition that was brought to people in the old mysteries. You are also aware that the comparison of this spiritual-scientific knowledge of the present with the initiatory knowledge of the ancient mysteries is justified, despite the differences between the two. It is true that the ancient mystery teaching imparted knowledge that was based on an atavistic, one might say half-dream-like state of consciousness of the person seeking knowledge. The modern spiritual knowledge we are speaking of here is such that everything in it, down to the smallest detail, must be attained with full consciousness, with a consciousness that is completely equal to the consciousness we have, for example, when we absorb and process geometrically or mathematically comprehensible truths. Thus, the fully awakened spiritual experience is attained through this modern spiritual movement in a soul life that must be completely illuminated with the same light that also illuminates our waking day life when we are truly awake. But this knowledge, like the instinctive, half-dreamlike knowledge of the ancient mysteries, is meant to lead to the higher supersensible forms of existence.

We have often spoken of the special character of this ancient mystery knowledge. We have pointed out that it goes back to an original knowledge, to an original wisdom of humanity. It is only obscured by the prejudices of the modern materialistic-Darwinian view that humanity did not start its development from animal-like conditions, but from conditions for which there is no analogue at all in the present-day physical world, but which so encompassed the life of the soul that knowledge of the spiritual was instinctively acquired and was present throughout the inhabited earth of that time. We must, however, bear in mind when considering this fact of supersensible original knowledge that in that primeval time mankind had a more naive, more elementary, one might say more innocent, view of life. In a sense, those impulses which the divine-spiritual beings themselves laid into the souls were in that primeval mankind. So that one can say: In the sphere which we might today call the moral, the beings of primitive times were simply the instruments for the deeds of the divine spiritual beings, so that one cannot speak of any personal responsibility of these human beings, of the possibility of personally sinning, for that time, nor of an actual straying from the will of that Divine-Spiritual from which, after all, the human soul-life has emerged. But this also includes the reason why it was possible in those older times to spread the means in humanity, to keep spread in humanity a knowledge of supersensible things. This knowledge, if it is true knowledge, even in its atavistic state of primeval times, is in reality connected with the control of certain forces of material existence. Today we are proud of the fact that we have formed our technology out of our few scientific ideas, that in this sense we control nature to a certain extent through our knowledge of nature. In a completely different way, however, prehistoric man was able to control the various natural forces of material existence by virtue of the knowledge that was his in his innocent state of mind. This state of mind prevented him from using the supersensible knowledge given to him by the gods to harm humanity.

From my descriptions you know that this early humanity was not as dense as the later humanity and that in some respects it was much less material. This also meant that the impulses of divine-spiritual existence could express themselves in a much more direct way than was later the case. What gradually occurred in the development of humanity is, of course, the connection of the spiritual-soul-like with the physical-material. In a sense, man descended deeper and deeper into matter. But with this descent into matter, there also arose what might be called the possibility of sinning, the possibility of deviating from the paths that came from the impulses of the divine-spiritual beings themselves, thus the possibility of doing evil, and therefore also the possibility of applying supersensible knowledge in an evil sense. This possibility only arose at a certain point in human evolution. At this point, however, something very special occurred. It was only then that the most important mystery being actually concentrated in the oracle sites, in the mysteries, in the true sense of the word. You know this from the description of the Atlantean world that I gave in my book “Occult Science”. There, so to speak, the knowledge of the supersensible worlds was withdrawn from the broad masses of humanity, and this knowledge became the property of those initiated into the mysteries. So that the development goes so that actually more and more the supersensible knowledge fades from the great mass of people and is preserved in its actual form in the mysteries. But these mysteries, as you know, still contained a great deal of ancient wisdom and preserved it until almost Christian times, some of them until much later. But various mysteries with the very deepest knowledge, such as one, or rather two, in the area of present-day France, were wiped out by the Romans in the century before the emergence of Christianity, as I recently hinted to you, wiped out root and branch, even in a terribly bloody way. And in these places, which must be pointed out, a wonderful, penetrating knowledge still flowed within Europe in the last pre-Christian centuries, which has since completely disappeared for Europe. This also happened in other places in Europe.

Then, only in very narrow circles could the wisdom of the ancient world be preserved. In these circles, where one very rarely found people who could penetrate into the supersensible worlds from their own experience, it was also the case that knowledge of the supersensible worlds was then applied in the worst , in the national-socialistic sense, which even today comes to light in the cases that I have been characterizing here for years, namely as the work of certain secret societies of the English-speaking population.

Now, there is a certain way in which those people who actually think entirely in the spirit of ancient times about the knowledge of supersensible worlds still present the reasons why the mystery knowledge was so carefully withheld from the masses by the bearers of the mysteries. The obedient representatives of secret societies, who preserve this knowledge with greater or lesser justification, in a better or also in a very questionable way, still speak today of the fact that a certain kind of knowledge, the highest kind of knowledge about the supersensible, cannot be delivered to the masses, because today the masses are absolutely not ripe for certain contents of this knowledge. These things are said, and the way it is substantiated from certain quarters is always significant. It is necessary that we talk about this a little today in the introduction, because I have all sorts of important things to talk to you about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. We have to do this because the principle is being followed from here, with regard to the dissemination of knowledge of the supersensible worlds, to put it bluntly, from the point of view of the democratic being.

You know that I have not held back, at least to a certain extent, even from the broadest public, certain supersensible insights. And insights of the kind that I present today in public lectures, although they are little understood, are considered by very worthy representatives of today's mystery teachings to be insights that should not be communicated to the public in this way. One cannot go as far as certain peaks of knowledge, but these insights must be presented to the public at a certain level, if only for the reason that, as I have often emphasized, they must be incorporated into the social impulses that are most urgently needed by present-day humanity and humanity in the near future. And so it has come about that I have continued with the communication of such insights, which, as I said, are unfortunately very little understood. The most important things, which are already being incorporated into public lectures and which one would often think have a deeply moving effect, are actually received in such a way that one can see that the souls that receive them are actually sleeping a very healthy sleep as these things resonate in their ears. But nevertheless, these things must be communicated to the public today, and in a certain form I have repeatedly tried to bring them forward to an even higher level within the Anthroposophical Society, although not the best experiences have been made in the process.

Everyone will see it as ridiculous to hand over higher geometry to someone who does not know elementary geometry. The comparison is misleading, like all comparisons, because what is given as a certain higher knowledge in the field of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not quite the same as elementary geometry, although it only appears to be so. The fact is this: if you do not know elementary geometry, you will reject higher geometry when it is presented to you because you are aware that you do not understand it. But if you present the higher knowledge of anthroposophy to someone who does not yet have the elementary knowledge of anthroposophy, they will accept it. He understands them just as little as the other person understands higher geometry, but since the insights have to be clothed in popular words that can be understood, he believes he understands them, scoffs at them or talks about them like Pastor Kully, and then we have the impossible situation of the higher insights being brought to humanity in a completely distorted form, in a dishonest form. But to bring true knowledge to people in a false form means to contribute to the destruction of humanity. Therefore, it would be necessary to assume an understanding of such things, to assume that this higher knowledge should be preserved from those who do not already have the lower knowledge. But for decades now, quite bad experiences have been made within the Anthroposophical Society, which could actually urge one to stop the whole proclamation of the supersensible world system, if, for example, one had the old ideas about secrecy regarding supersensible knowledge. For, what one does experience! The gossip, the inner and outer gossip, has indeed been no small thing over the decades; and even in recent times we have had to experience it, when we were obliged, to our great regret, to protect our writings from a possible false understanding of certain facts, that from a certain side a naive and foolish revolt has arisen. It is of no use to leave these things unspoken because there is no complete and thorough understanding of them, especially of their sacredness. If there were an awareness of the place of supersensible knowledge in the whole social life of man, it would never have been possible for those things which belong to the most sacred matters of humanity to have been carried out into the world in such a distorted, lying form, where they have been stripped bare in such a way. But despite all this, even if a large number of people treat what should be treated with the utmost seriousness as a light-hearted game, it is still necessary, urgently necessary, that these things be brought to humanity today. The duty towards the spiritual world, the duty towards the spiritual guiding powers of humanity, must be considered higher today than that which can be observed from the outside in the manner just described. The time has come when a certain sum of supersensible knowledge must be handed down to the world.

As a rule, supersensible knowledge remains harmless when it is expressed in abstract terms about spiritual things; but seriousness is immediately called for – if seriousness is called for at all – when it is a matter of supersensible knowledge of the older initiates. Such things are indeed completely comprehensible only to him who can now in turn find the wisdom of the old initiates through his own researches. The old initiate said: If one imparts occult truths only in groups of three, then as a rule one can indeed cause all kinds of social harm; one can stultify people, one can lull people to sleep, one can befuddle them, and so on; but when one imparts all sevenfold forms of the secrets of the supersensible worlds, then one imparts to people something that, if they are maliciously inclined, must lead to evil. The initiate says: To impart the supersensible knowledge in a threefold form may possibly only cause external social harm; to impart it in a sevenfold form means danger at the moment when people who are capable of evil in some direction approach these sacred secrets. What does that mean?

You see, there is a kind of harmless mysticism. Such harmless mysticism is practised when people sit together in small circles in a sectarian way and make all kinds of statements to a number, let us say seven, eight or a hundred people, about the etheric body, the astral body, about re-embodiment, about karma and so on, in short, when one speaks in abstract sentences about these things in much the same way as one speaks about the things of ordinary life, without being in a different state of mind than in ordinary life, at most in a mystical devotion of a nebulous kind and the like. Of course, what stands out as bad is that ultimately the people who sit down together in this way do, let's say, steal a little from the dear Lord, when it would be much wiser if they would sew or knit or cook or wash or do something similar in the same hour in which they make such mystical communications to others. In fact, such abstract dabbling in supersensory truths is basically no better than the other activities that are now being organized through numerous channels with so-called world views. But you know: we, on our anthroposophical ground, have never got involved with such abstract stuff where it was taken seriously. We have, of course, always emphasized that one must have certain substantial insights into the human being, into the nature of the universe, and so on, if one really wants to form ideas about the supersensible. The aim of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has always been to bring spiritual-scientific knowledge into real life, into medical life, into social life, into the life of scientific experiment and other areas where, above all, it is necessary to bring in supersensible knowledge before one can think of achieving a social recovery from our catastrophic conditions. But if, let us say, we apply supersensible knowledge to medicine, then we immediately enter the field of which the true initiates know that it can cause evil in the hands of evil people. For when we exert our soul powers, thinking, feeling, and willing, as we initially carry them in their abstractness in our soul, then these soul powers are very, very strong mere images, applied to ordinary consciousness mere images, very shadowed images. There is only a very low intensity of reality in it (triangle). What people can think is, I would say, an image of an image; what they can feel even more so; and they do not descend into their will at all, they only see it in images of external events that take place on the physical plane as a result of this will. Since what a person experiences is so little connected with reality, not much harm can be done. One does indeed enter into the realm of abstract concepts. One can speak very beautifully about Atma, Buddhi, Manas and so on, but one is actually speaking of abstract words, of words that are far removed from really drilling into reality.

With our instincts, that is, with all that underlies our being, we say our temperament, and with what else underlies our instinctive being, we are already more in reality. With what, for example, our hunger is, what becomes of our hunger as a result of our will instincts, we are very much in our reality; and if it were not for hunger and the will instincts connected with hunger, which are often perverted today, there would be no Russian Bolshevism and the like. Reality is more closely connected with this life (square), out of which thinking, feeling and willing (triangle) rises only like a shadow, with this life of our instincts, our drives, our temperaments. This reality is just as threefold as our soul life is threefold; this reality is also fourfold and has always been represented as such by the initiates. And if we look at the human being as a whole, we see a sevenfold being. But the lower members, those in which the human being repeats the animal in a certain way, are present with a much more intense reality than the shadowy, distilled abstraction of thinking, feeling and willing.

But now, when we grasp the supersensible worlds, if only in the abstract, our knowledge does reach into our instinctual life, into our temperament, into our life of drives, and with that it reaches into the world of real facts, into reality. One would like to say: If one draws this world of the soul, as it exists today in the human being, very thinly, one would like to draw the world of the instinctive, the impulsive, the temperamental, very thickly and realistically, and supersensible knowledge plays into this world (see drawing). But this world must only be ennobled, otherwise it becomes an evil world. Therefore supersensible knowledge can only have an ennobling effect on this world, so that at the moment when one approaches realities with supersensible knowledge, when one plunges into material things, it depends entirely on whether it is done in a pure, ethical, free spirit or whether it is done in an impure, immoral, unfree, that is, emotional, instinctive, animalistic spirit.

These things have been seen through by the keepers of the original human world wisdom, who have locked away the higher knowledge in the mysteries for those prepared for it. But this secrecy is not something that can be asserted today as an absolute necessity, and those people who today, for example, belong to secret societies and in the abstract sense want to assert the necessity of secrecy about the higher knowledge are completely wrong. They are wrong because such people do not understand the signs of the times at all. They preserve old traditions, they still say today what the great teachers of mystery wisdom said thousands of years ago. It is interesting, for example, that in the books of Aelena Petrovna Blavatsky, precisely where Blavatsky speaks most ingeniously about occult things, you will find attitudes towards the concealment of occult knowledge occult knowledge, opinions that are no longer valid today, which Blavatsky held because she had learned them from those who had no idea of the actual necessities of the present time. And so Blavatsky behaved like a personality who might just as well have lived thousands of years ago; she had no idea of the necessities of present-day life, talked about the necessary concealment of certain mystery truths, just as the mystery priests talked thousands of years ago. As a result, even if one does not want to, one becomes untruthful to one's fellow human beings in the present. And certain supersensible currents become untruthful to their fellow human beings in the present in the most eminent sense precisely from this point of view, because the times in which we live today speak a clear and distinct language, and this language proclaims an extraordinary aberration in the spiritual and soul realms among people.

Only recently I called your attention to a literary phenomenon of the most significant kind, namely, to the book The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler. I told you that this book has a profound influence on young people, especially on the student youth of Central Europe, and that when I recently had to speak to the students of the Stuttgart Technical University about the significance and nature of of spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical research, I went into this lecture with the impression that Spengler's ideas about the decline of the Occident make on today's youth, especially on academic youth. You will perhaps have noticed how justified it is to speak today of the profound impact of Spengler's ideas, because far beyond the borders of Central Europe, everywhere where literary phenomena are observed today, Spengler's book is taken into account. The Times has even repeatedly published detailed reviews of the book.

What is the strange theory that comes to light in this Spengler book? We find it set forth in a thick volume by a man who, as I have already mentioned, has a genius for mastering any of a dozen or fifteen sciences, and who presents his arguments in the manner in which arguments are presented in science today. The fact that Benedetto Croce, who has since attained great eminence, has said foolish things about this book, although he has otherwise said sensible things, need not mislead us. that it is shown how the whole of the Western world, with its American offspring, is growing old and becoming senile, how death at the beginning of the third millennium is imminent for Western culture, how barbarism must break in, how, roughly around the year 2200, what is now Western civilization must be replaced by barbarism. We find this, as I said, substantiated with all the tools of today's science, and we have to recognize that only spiritual scientific deepening can arise against such a terrible view, terrible above all because of the scientific tools with which it appears, that only spiritual scientific deepening is capable of showing the point where in the human soul itself arises that which must replace what is today Western civilization, and that only spiritual scientific deepening is capable of showing how this must happen, approximately around the year 2200. can only arise from spiritual-scientific deepening, and that only spiritual-scientific deepening is capable of showing the point where, in the human soul itself, that which the West in turn drives out of ruin wells up. If the Occident only retained what is now being taught at universities, grammar schools, secondary schools, and primary schools, and what is being taught through our newspaper literature and our popular scientific literature, Spengler's calculation that barbarism would sweep over this Occident in 2200 would be justified. Only an appeal to the will of the human soul, as can be made by spiritual science, because it ignites spiritual forces in this human soul, because it opposes the external forces that are everywhere pushing towards decline today with the force that man must oppose out of his will, only spiritual science has the right to rebel today against such scientific armament as presented by Oswald Spengler. Ordinary, profane refutations of Spengler's book are a mockery.

But what do we learn from Spengler's book in particular? From the way it is conceived as a whole, from the way the research is processed in it, we see that Spengler's thinking has emerged entirely from the thinking of the broad masses of today's educated humanity, only that Spengler is immensely more clever and ingenious than the average person today. Therefore, he says the opposite of what the average person of today says about many things, but what he says is only a straightforward continuation of what the average person of today thinks, what the average person of today considers to be right. But how does this book strike us, which makes a harrowing impression on thousands and thousands of souls today, when we look at it with the unbiased gaze that comes from the wisdom of initiation? It throws almost complete light on the innermost structure of the traditional world-view of today, on the current current thinking. The remarkable thing about Spengler's book is that one can be ingenious — Spengler is ingenious, extraordinarily ingenious — and yet say the greatest follies; for his book also contains the greatest follies, but follies that only an ingenious person can actually find today. Other people are not capable of finding such great follies as Spengler has found. Now imagine the confusion that a book must cause in the mind, where on every page one can admire both genius and folly at the same time!

Today, extremes collide in a way that one might not have dreamed of a hundred or a hundred and twenty years ago. And if today's philistines reproach me for calling someone both a genius and a fool, I have to say that I reserve the right to do so today. Perhaps I shall make the mistake of calling Oswald Spengler a genius and a fool at the same time, because he is both at once. But that is what one is when one outgrows the strange configuration of today's literature. One must be as clever as Spengler, as fundamentally clever, to think up such idiotic nonsense as Spengler has thought up. A person of little intelligence would not arrive at Spengler's fascinating and dazzling assertions, for example, that the right, the true socialism is Prussianism, and that Western civilization, which will decline and fall by the year 2200, has no other way out than to become completely Prussian, that is, completely socialist in Spengler's sense. And a brochure that is considered a supplement to the book “The Decline of the West,” “Prussianism and Socialism,” is full on every page of the most ingenious insights that can be gained into individual details of the intellectual and social essence of today. What Spengler says, for example, about Russianity sometimes reminds me – although I must always take into account everything I have just said about Oswald Spengler – of many things I myself said many years ago about Russianity, about the future of Russianity and about the nature of the Russian people. And since Spengler declares that he will expand on what he says about Russianness, especially in terms of its scientific justification, in his second volume of “The Decline of the West,” I have to say: I look forward to that “brilliant cabbage” that will be said about the future of Europe under the influence of the further development of Russianness in this second volume.

You see, today you have to be paradoxical if you want to describe truthfully what is actually around us, and you can't get by without describing in such a paradoxical way what is beneath us. A third thing that can also be found in Oswald Spengler: he describes pessimism all the way. For it is pessimistic to say that in the year 2200 all Western civilization will have been replaced by barbarism. And it is particularly pessimistic when you prove this with twelve to fifteen sciences as rigorously as Spengler does. But Spengler worships this pessimism in a certain way, with religious humility. He indulges in this pessimism, I might say he glorifies this pessimism, this socialism or this Prussianism, which will take hold of the whole world, because only through organization and saturation of society in the Prussian spirit can the necessary downfall be postponed until the year 2200. That is pessimism, isn't it? But the whole thing that Oswald Spengler has before him as this socially Prussianized world, this Western world that will still be alive until the year 2200 and then dying, is still glorified by him, so to speak. He describes it with inner fire, but it is not a lasting fire, it is a theatrical fire, if you watch closely.

I don't like to talk abstractly, I prefer to talk in facts. And if you were to ask why: why does a brilliant man, just because he has a keen eye for certain details of contemporary civilization, have to be so foolish at the same time? Why does such a fundamentally clever man have to claim such stupid things at the same time? Why must such a man, who paints pessimism, paint this pessimism with a theatrical fire that makes this pessimism, if one can forget that it leads to destruction, appear like a grandiose optimism, like an invitation to admire this catastrophic downfall? Why is that all?

I would like to answer with a very specific sentence: Oswald Spengler, while thinking entirely in terms of natural science, demands psychology for the 20th century, but he has not the slightest idea about the human soul. Why? Because the moment he utters the words “theosophy” or “occultism” – he seems to be unaware of anthroposophy – he turns red and becomes quite angry. This is why his brilliant approach can only be devoted to the shell, not to the inwardness through which the soul must be sought. Therefore, his fire cannot be that which arises from the elemental primal forces of man, but is basically only a theatrical fire. Oswald Spengler turns red when he mentions the words “theosophy” and “occultism,” and it seems that he can hardly find any other purpose for occultism and theosophy than to use them to foster Bolshevism and Spartacism into a kind of parlor socialism. This is again the grandiose stupidity of a man whose genius is born of the intellectual substance of the present. But at the same time it testifies that where there is no idea, but only a red head in the face of intellectual deepening, that is precisely where the most confusing cultural phenomena of the present must come to light, even if they appear in a genial way.

That is what I wanted to say today by way of an introduction to the important considerations that I will present to you tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.