The Rudolf Steiner Archive

An Introduction by Hella Wiesberger Concerning Rudolf Steiner's Place in the History of the Occult Movement

Rudolf Steiner has become the pioneering leader in the field of esotericism, in which man should be given freedom through him.¹

As the first modern scientist of the supersensible, Rudolf Steiner was completely on his own. He only ever taught what he could give and take responsibility for from personal experience. Far ahead of his time, he recognized that the turn of the 19th to the 20th century would usher in not just a new century, but a completely new era in which humanity would be confronted with social upheavals of unimaginable proportions. With the ever-increasing individual consciousness, a tremendous struggle for freedom would begin; great technical and economic progress will be achieved through the increasingly life-dominant agnostic-pragmatic way of thinking of the mechanical-materialistic sciences, but at the same time the last remnants of the ancient knowledge of the connection with the world of the creative-spiritual as the true origin and goal of all existence will be lost. The inevitable consequence of this must be worldwide spiritual desolation and a feeling of meaninglessness in life.

From this insight, Rudolf Steiner gained the conviction that this historical process, necessary for the sake of general progress, can only be met by one thing: by a new world and life view rooted in modern individual consciousness, but oriented towards the Creative-Spiritual. And so, from his personal experiential knowledge of the supersensible world and life purpose, he developed the modern spiritual science of “Anthroposophy” and lived and taught in accordance with the spirit of the new age, according to the principle: freedom through the modern spirit of science, also in the field of the supersensible, of esotericism.

With this basic intention, he also brought about a turning point in the history of the occult movement. For the wisdom of the occult movement came from other sources of consciousness. It went back to the so-called original wisdom that had been revealed to mankind in the days of the primeval world and had enabled it to gain a very extensive mastery of the material forces of existence. As long as man still acted without personal responsibility in full agreement with the intentions of the spiritual worlds, this wisdom formed a common fund of knowledge. But when, in the course of the development of personality, egotism made its appearance and the natural connection with the supersensible worlds gradually disappeared, the supersensible knowledge conferring power had to be protected against misuse. It was withdrawn into the mysteries. But from there it continued to influence public cultural life well into the early days of the Christian era. It was only when, through Christianity and the rise of intellectualism, progressive cultural awareness became increasingly focused on the knowledge of material laws of the world that the old mysteries gradually lost their dominant position and were finally eradicated as public institutions. Since then, the old mystery wisdom could only be cultivated in secret, small circles. There it was strictly guarded until in the 19th century the signs of the times demanded that a spiritual counterpole be created to counter the exclusively materialistic-agnostic cultural thinking.

This task had raised a question that had become a serious problem for the occult movement of the 19th century. It was the question of whether the wisdom should continue to be kept secret under these circumstances, or whether it would not be more correct to popularize it. This question touched so deeply on the lifeblood of the working method practiced so far - since one was obliged from time immemorial to pass on the higher truths only to those who were prepared to receive them, in order to protect them from abuse - that one could not immediately decide to popularize it. They tried a compromise solution, first of all to test, so to speak, how public awareness would react to the knowledge of the existence of spiritual worlds and beings. This is how the manifestations of the spiritualist mediumistic movement of the forties to the seventies of the 19th century came about. The result was, however, different than expected, but the dam of strict secrecy had been breached and so it became inevitable to at least popularize the basic truths. This happened through the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by the Russian Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the American Henry Steel Olcott.

Although these two attempts had led to sensational movements, in the deeper sense they had to be considered a failure, mainly because the culturally dominant scientific thinking rejected the mediumistic path as unscientific. This was justified to the extent that the mediumistic path not only meant a return to earlier levels of consciousness, but also an impairment of the free right of self-determination. On the other hand, mediumship was the only method for supersensible research that had existed until then.²

While the occult movement was still facing this dilemma at the end of the 19th century, Rudolf Steiner had already solved the problem on his own spiritual path. Not through the traditional teachings preserved in the secret societies, but through his own experiences since childhood, he was quite naturally connected to the supersensible and, as a result of his scientific education, also mastered the mechanical-materialistic way of thinking of the sciences, he had gained the decisive insight that supersensible knowledge and beings can only be beneficially combined with modern cultural consciousness if the method can guarantee the same certainty and independence as is the case in modern natural science.

On the basis of this realization, he made it his first task to develop a method for supersensible research that was based entirely on scientific principles. Through a process of strict self-education, he transformed his thinking from a sensual to a supersensible level, and in so doing, he attained the necessary certainty of knowledge about the spiritual realm. At the same time, he discovered freedom as a real experience and as the basis of morality. Thus, for him, thinking free of sensuality became the starting point for a scientifically clear connection to the supersensible world and to a science of freedom as the basis of an “ethical individualism”.

The consistently further developed experience of the nature of the I led in turn to the realization of the macrocosmic representative of the I, the spirit of Christ, whose nature reveals itself in true freedom and love. Thus Rudolf Steiner had also paved the way for a contemporary understanding of the two greatest Christian ideals, freedom and love, as they are later repeatedly expounded by him as the basic impulses of the central event of human development, the mystery of Golgotha and the deepest task of humanity connected with it: to shape the earth into a cosmos of freedom and love (Düsseldorf, April 18, 1909).

The later statement that the ethical individualism of the “Philosophy of Freedom” is already built upon the Christ impulse, even if this is not directly expressed there (Dornach, May 24, 1920), as well as the other statement that there is no other way at present to “impart original wisdom of initiation directly than by keeping fellowship with the Christ” (Stuttgart, March 7, 1920).

On the basis of this community with the “emancipation of the higher consciousness of humanity from the fetters of all authority” achieved through thinking free of the senses, ³ Rudolf Steiner had created the conditions for a healthy liberation of esotericism from the era of its ties to particular circles. Whereas in the past it was only possible to penetrate to the world of spiritual realities with a subdued consciousness under the guidance of a spiritual leader whose authority had to be unconditionally recognized, today, through Rudolf Steiner's pioneering work, every serious seeker, in a clear consciousness and in free self-responsibility, can do so.

The only requirement for this, which everyone has to set for themselves, is spiritual activity. This is essential not only for individual but also for general progress, to such an extent that civilization must perish if each individual is not willing to give civilization a new impetus through the new spiritual knowledge. This was already stated by Rudolf Steiner more than six decades ago (Dornach, July 2, 1920).

It is precisely this aspect of activating the will of the individual with regard to social co-responsibility that fundamentally distinguishes anthroposophically oriented spiritual science from the ancient wisdom preserved in the occult movement. For no new fundamental social impulses can come from the ideas of the occult movement, which arose from the revelations of an epoch of humanity that was still rooted in group consciousness. On the other hand, social thinking cannot be developed without knowledge gained through initiation. For this social necessity, anthroposophy sees itself as an instrument of new revelations of the spirit that take personality consciousness into account. To make these new revelations, which have begun especially since the end of the Kali Yuga in 1899, understandable to humanity and to open up anew through them the meaning of the greatest human event, the mystery of Golgotha, has become a cultural-historical task that Rudolf Steiner took on and about which he once said: “Anyone who does not understand anthroposophy in this sense does not understand it at all.” (Dornach, December 20, 1918). That is why, at the time when he began to present his social insights, he appealed to the ability to distinguish within his own ranks by pointing out:

“Where, then, can one find a truly modern and effective way of addressing the burning issues of the present day that is in touch with reality? You will not be able to find these things in the rituals and precepts of one or other masonic or confessional community. One would like to see discernment taking place!” (Dornach, December 15, 1918).

In this same connection, he also asserted that the spiritual movement he represented had never been dependent on any other and that he was therefore under no obligation to anyone to keep silent about something he himself felt should be said in the present time.

“There is no commandment of silence for one who is not indebted to anyone for his spiritual knowledge.” This alone is enough to distinguish this movement from all others. Anyone who claims that the teachings of anthroposophical spiritual science are proclaimed differently from the sense in which the word “theosophy” , that I stand up for it purely personally, may not know the circumstances for my sake and often not have been there, but look at it from the outside, but he proclaims untruth, out of malevolence or not out of malevolence. But anyone who has been here often and says something different, for example, asserts some kind of past or a connection between this spiritual movement and another, when he knows the conditions here, is lying. That is what it is about. Either he will tell an untruth out of ignorance of the circumstances, or he will lie when he knows the circumstances. All opposition to this movement is to be understood in this way.

Therefore, I must emphasize again and again: I have only to withhold that which I know cannot yet be communicated to present humanity because of its immaturity. But I have nothing to withhold for any reason because a vow or the like would have been made to someone. Nothing has ever been taken into this movement that came from another side. This movement was never spiritually dependent on any other; the connections were only external.

On the basis of this statement, the question arises as to why Rudolf Steiner then joined other movements at all, if he felt obliged to reject both the old practice of secrecy and the old method of research?

This contradiction can only be resolved if the two main laws of esoteric life are taken into account, which Rudolf Steiner always tried to follow as far as possible. These are the two commandments of absolute truthfulness and the maintenance of continuity. Rudolf Steiner repeatedly presented these two laws to his esoteric students.⁴ He himself followed the commandment of unconditional truthfulness by teaching only what he had recognized as true through his own research, and the commandment of continuity by not simply replacing something incomplete with something completely new and more perfect, but by building on what already existed and seeking to transform it into something more perfect. For him, this meant bringing to life the most profound Christian idea, that of resurrection, in the realm of the imagination. If we experience the living continuation of the present in this way and thereby fulfill the words of Christ, not only to bind the bodies with the blood, but to the souls with the spirit, then this can become a path to the knowledge of the mystery of Golgotha (Berlin, April 24, 1917).

According to Rudolf Steiner, much would be gained if those who lived later were to orient themselves in this way towards the deceased, in order to consciously maintain continuity in development. When he wrote about Goethe, he himself had completely disregarded his own opinion and tried only to express the thoughts that could come from Goethe; he had written an epistemology of Goethe's, not his worldview. Just as he had delved into the world of Goethe's thoughts, so had he also delved into those of Nietzsche and Haeckel, since one can only arrive at real insight if one does not want to represent one's own point of view absolutely, but rather delves into foreign currents of thought. And only after he had endeavored for two decades to work from such insight, to acquire, so to speak, the right to influence the living, he advocated the public dissemination of spiritual science. For now no one could rightly claim that “this occultist speaks of the spiritual world because he does not know the philosophical and scientific achievements of the time.” ⁵

This path of Rudolf Steiner's, which is so unusual for ordinary thinking and feeling, could not be understood at all by opponents, and only with difficulty by friends of his spiritual-scientific worldview. Aware of this difficulty, he repeatedly endeavored from time to time to make it clear, at least to his anthroposophical friends, that the spiritual current he represented was never dependent on any other and that certain connections had only been superficial. He admitted that the distinction was complicated by historical events. But even if, from an external point of view, it might have been wiser to found the Anthroposophical Society without any relationship to other societies, the relationships were nevertheless justified by fate (Dornach, December 15, 1918).

This remark makes it clear that the connection with other societies at that time was founded on the tension between the polarities of freedom and love in their form of truthfulness and continuity as applied to esoteric life. The striving for truth and knowledge requires freedom, but at the same time what is recognized as true should connect fraternally with what already exists in the world. It is obvious that even Rudolf Steiner's strong power was not always able to balance the pole of a free, truthful life of knowledge with the pole of continuity as brotherhood. This was objectively impossible because the world is involved at the pole of continuity and this was respected by him to an extent far beyond the norm, based on his ideals of freedom and love. However, he was unable to cultivate brotherhood at the expense of truthfulness. When this became a problem in the Theosophical Society, it led to a split.

Only by ignoring Rudolf Steiner's subtle behavior towards the two poles of esoteric life can misunderstandings and misjudgments regarding his spiritual independence arise. But beyond all such passing judgments, the historical significance of his cultural achievement will be more and more confirmed, which lies precisely in having created a science for the study of supersensible realities, through which freedom also became possible in the field of esotericism.

It could be objected here that Rudolf Steiner also practised secrecy with his Esoteric School. This objection would not be justified, however, because for Rudolf Steiner, even in the Esoteric School, it was never a matter of secrecy in the usual sense. He was always concerned only with maintaining a genuine scientific spirit, which in public education quite naturally requires that serious knowledge can only be imparted in stages. For example, higher geometry cannot be presented to anyone if they do not know the basics. While this is clear with regard to geometry, there is a widespread belief in relation to supersensible knowledge that one can understand and judge everything in this field without any prerequisites.

Rudolf Steiner's teaching activity was structured solely in terms of this factually determined, gradual teaching, from public teaching with no prerequisites at all to teaching with prerequisites. All levels of teaching had their common root in what he described as his “inaugural act” before the public beginning of his work for a science of the supersensible:

"I will build on the strength that enables me to bring spiritual students onto the path of development. That alone must be the significance of my inauguration act.⁶

The Esoteric School served this purpose in a special way, because here the students were taught according to their individual predispositions and needs. But when the Esoteric School was re-established as the “Free University for Spiritual Science” in 1924, the esoteric teaching was also structured in a strictly methodical and generally valid way. However, this could only be done for the first class. The failure of his physical strength in the fall of 1924 made it impossible for Rudolf Steiner to complete his last great work.

• 1. Marie Steiner, Foreword to Rudolf Steiner “The Stages of Higher Knowledge”, GA 12.
• 2. Described in detail in 'The Occult Movement in the 19th Century and its Relationship to World Culture', CW 254. Cf. also 'Spiritual Soul Teaching and World View', CW 52.
• 3. Letter to Rosa Mayreder dated December 14, 1893, in “Letters I”, Dornach 1953 (GA 39).
• 4. As related by a member of the esoteric working groups, Adolf Arenson, in a letter dated December 24, 1926, to Albert Steffen.
• 5. See the autobiographical sketch from 1907 in “Briefwechsel und Dokumente 1901–1925”, GA 262; also the lecture Zurich, December 3, 1916.
• 6. Letter of August 16, 1902, to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, then representative of the German Theosophists (in “Briefe II”, so far only in the 1953 Dornach edition).

Dr. Steiner: Today, I would first like to hear the wishes and reports from the members of the faculty. In the first part of this meeting, I want to know if the faculty has any wishes or questions we should discuss without the extended faculty, that is, without the younger teachers who will come later.

I would first like to know how the instruction in the ninth grade is going, and I would like to hear the experiences of the teachers working with that class.

A teacher: In the eighth and ninth grade German class, we are reading Herman Grimm.

Dr. Steiner: Have you had an opportunity to bring other things into the lectures by Grimm? How far have you come in history? What did you do with his first lecture where he speaks about Rome in the second part of his characterization of the last centuries?

A teacher: The children did not know that history.

Dr. Steiner: It is important that you cover the history of the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, at least in the ninth grade. Perhaps you could do it that way. It is missing in the ninth grade. In teaching about these centuries, the goal would be that the students understand the present, don’t you agree? They are now fifteen years old. You could go through those themes as Herman Grimm presents them in each chapter and take the nineteenth century as a confluence of the histories of various peoples. Use the themes of the last four centuries as leitmotifs. Actually, it would be important to do that in both classes, only you should do it in different ways. In eighth grade, more narratively and in ninth grade, go more into the major ideas of the last centuries.

You need to work toward being able to present the major ideas to the children. There is a great deal of material in those lectures you can expand upon by bringing in literature from everywhere.

(Speaking to another teacher) You teach mathematics. Have you gone through geometrical drawing with the children?

I have been so occupied with other things, but do you find it necessary to bring so much reasoned and theoretical material into physics? Doesn’t so much purely conceptual material slow things down?

A teacher: I want to present only what is absolutely necessary.

Dr. Steiner: How many of the experiments have the students mastered? In electricity, it is, of course, necessary to present the observations very rationally with little theoretical speculation. That is something that probably does not stick with them too well. From a purely didactic perspective, it should not stick well. I think in this case we should have the ideal of developing the necessary concepts out of the experiment and drawing on the blackboard as little as possible. We should develop the whole thing out of the experiment. You can also try your Socratic method. When you develop something theoretically, the Socratic method is not of much help, since how can the children know anything? You can hardly ask them questions. Since you can do experiments, I would certainly take advantage of those opportunities. You can save a great deal of time. If you go through electricity in that way, you will complete it. The children will learn a great deal more than if you just explain the concept of voltage. Didactically, that would be unwise. You will then need to do two weeks of geometrical drawing, but only two weeks.

A teacher: In the foreign language class, we read the Forum scene from Julius Caesar.

Dr. Steiner: Could you also do that in writing as a kind of essay? You need to do something like that, also. In German, too, so that they have a picture, one that they can really articulate.

(Speaking to the German teacher) You don’t have any themes? It would not hurt if you repeated the material in your lecture, using your own words.

A report is given about French.

Dr. Steiner: In any event, we can do what we projected for the ninth grade.

The German teacher: I now need to do Jean Paul.

Dr. Steiner: I did not mean you should do everything one after the other. It is now mid-November, and we need to do some history. Actually, the four centuries in their context. You really need until mid-January in both classes. For all the other classes, the curriculum is fixed.

A teacher: Will this curriculum then become standard in the future?

Dr. Steiner: For now, we need to know what we need to do this year.

A teacher: Should we teach literary history in foreign languages?

Dr. Steiner: With those children you do not need to do anything more than to say something about Shakespeare in passing, for instance. Or things you can take care of in that way.

The methods the public schools use for Latin and Greek are horrible and utterly decadent. We need to bring our children along so far that they find a connection. When we have sufficiently developed our methods, we need to bring our children just as far. But our methods will not present things in the same way. I think that when we resolve this problem, you will no longer have discipline problems, and then you can achieve that. The real problem is that your children are out of control every five minutes.

The Austrian college preparatory high schools were exemplary. When you think of Leo Thun and 1854, their curriculum was the very best imaginable; Gautsch ruined it. They did history well. In Weimar, I found a different understanding of world history, namely, from the creation of the world until the Hohenzollern, only fifteen pages, and three volumes about the history of the Hohenzollern.

We also have the independent religious instruction for this class. How are things there?

A teacher: We have nine grades in three groups.

Dr. Steiner: Why have the classes become so enormous? If the distribution is reasonable, then large classes will not hurt. But in your case, the children are really sitting on top of one another. Mr. U.’s class is too large. We need to divide it. Seventy-three children! They don’t fit into the available seats, and then they push one another out. Terrible! Today, the worst students were absent. It is absolutely clear that we need to divide this class, and I think we should do it. Particularly in these cases where the instruction really depends upon having contact with the individuals—you must be able to ask one or another question as often as possible—surely we can arrange for two periods and divide the class between them. This is, at best, a question of space and is something we must solve, as otherwise we will fail in that area of instruction. Who could also give that class?

A teacher: I would be happy to do it.

Dr. Steiner: It needs to be someone who was not previously in religion. You may have been out for a number of years, but it still forms your thoughts. We have no one on the faculty. Of course, this is a difficult problem to solve, but we will have to get over this hurdle. The teacher must bring warmth into the instruction, warmth. I would, for example, propose A., but I do not know if he can acquire the necessary pedagogical perspective. How about trying A., since in the present crisis, who else could we propose from the anthroposophical movement? There is no one.

We’re stuck. I know of no one else. We cannot hang this around the necks of the teachers. The ninth grade is so small you can easily make contact with the individual students.

(To a teacher) It seems to me that you need a helper in your class, Miss H. Perhaps Miss S. could help you. We need to speak about that. You need someone especially when the children need to work. The class is too large for teaching in chorus. It has peripheral areas, and you cannot reach out into the farthest realms. I would prefer having two classes, but Miss S. can work in your class and help you when the children are busy, for instance, in drawing or painting. The class is falling apart. Individual children are not active enough during class. They just sit around. I also wondered if you could give a period and then stay in the class while Miss S. gives the next period. That would take care of the discipline problem. We could think about how to do it. In principle, a class could have one hundred and fifty students, but we will not have such large rooms. You have fifty students in your class, but it is too large.

A teacher: I would like to ask if I should stay with the C-major scale and emphasize the absolute tone in tone eurythmy. I was wondering if it was incorrect to present tone eurythmy as relative.

Dr. Steiner: You can do that.

A eurythmy teacher: I always assumed the absolute tone.

Dr. Steiner: You can teach the eurythmy movements by remaining with the absolute, but you don’t need to do that pedantically. What are the children doing with you in shop class?

A shop teacher: We have continued last year’s projects.

Dr. Steiner: How is the discipline in handwork this year? Last year, the last period was handwork and the discipline was quite good. Do you have much to do? I am asking because I think we should have discussed it in the foundation course last year. Is it possible to meet every other week about that subject, that is, apart from the school as such? Can you formulate some questions that will lead to a positive result? It would be good if we remained in contact about such things, if you developed some questions where you have doubts, and I could suggest some themes we could discuss when I am here. I hope in the future I will have some time to devote myself entirely to the Waldorf School. You need to think about some questions where you are having problems and send them to me so that I can answer them when I return.

A comment is made concerning painting.

Dr. Steiner: (To a class teacher) You have presented it?

A teacher: You saw some attempts today.

Dr. Steiner: As such, they were quite good, but you will need to work less from the conventional and develop writing more out of drawing and painting. That must be your goal. Guidelines are available for the first grade, but you must slowly develop them further so that color is more developed.

A teacher: At present, I can’t find a way. I am groping in the dark.

Dr. Steiner: Some of the children have done very good things, but it must come more out of the color. T.F. has some talent.

A teacher: I have found that the children have difficulty with forms using watercolor.

Dr. Steiner: You should not emphasize chalk too much. Unfortunately, we are not so far along yet, but it is quite important that we delineate. First, we will have an ordered curriculum in the lower classes. Of course, the others will do nearly the same thing, but we need to take the children’s age into account. The main thing now is that we awaken an inner feeling for color in the children, an experience of the world of colors, so that the children receive a feeling for the life in the world of colors through experiencing fairy tales.

A teacher: We need to give the children forms, particular motifs.

Dr. Steiner: The children will get forms if you allow their fantasy to be active. You need to allow the forms to grow out of color. You can speak with the children in the language of colors. Think about how exciting it is when to work with the children so that they understand something like: Here is a coy violet with a brash red right next to it. The whole thing sits upon a humble blue.

You need to do it concretely, so that the colors do something. That forms the soul. What we can imagine in the colors can occur in a hundred different ways. You need to get the children to live in the colors by saying things like, “When the red peeks through the blue.” Allow the children to really do that. I would try to bring a great deal of life into it. You must try to bring them out of their lethargy. Bring some fire into it. Nowadays, it is generally necessary to develop this feeling for colors. It is not as corrupted as music, but it will favorably affect their feeling for music.

A teacher: Would you be in favor of practicing drawing as well as painting?

Dr. Steiner: Not mechanical drawing. They should do that only when the object is geometrical understanding. In any event, it is important to work out of the polarity of light and dark. In that regard, the ninth grade has not shown itself to be particularly lively, and you need to help them.

A teacher: Could the eighth and ninth grades have painting lessons?

Dr. Steiner: That would have to occur in the periods we already have. We should do more artistic work, that is quite evident. That is also why it was important to me that Miss Hauck come into the handwork class and that handwork be taught artistically. Mostly the handwork is boring, and I would like to see it done really artistically. In handwork, you can use a ruler, but it is inappropriate with paper. We could form a bridge between shop and handwork. There are a number of things that can be painted. There are also things the children could paint by themselves at home. If the children would make things for their dolls, there is much we could develop. We could develop a sense of style and color. If we could overcome the naturalism in making dolls, we could make something lively, laughing dolls, ones that are artistic. That would be very beneficial.

Just as you can get children accustomed to writing in different ways, I do not know why you cannot teach children how to make a poster and how a poster can be beautiful, and how they can recognize the beauty of a beautiful poster. They should also recognize an ugly poster. But people look at such things without becoming angry. We must develop taste. We should develop a feeling for style. Concerning the feeling for style, the instruction, even in the most artistic schools, is terrible.

We had the most disgusting examples here a short time ago. You all know the drawings in Towards Social Renewal. They were changed to make them more current. What did the artist do? He created the motif so that the left side repeated on the right. He made a Gothic window out of it. Such things occur.

We could achieve something beautiful in the tenth or eleventh grade. One of our industrialists wants a logo for his baby food. That is something that should be created from within. There are inner needs. Today, people know only about art objects, but that is how it should be if it is to imitate something. In Basel, there is an art teacher who says he does not understand why, if I paint an eye here, I cannot paint the other one there. There is something to be said for that as long as you do not go along with the thing itself. What I mean is an inner ability to experience, that is what I mean by a feeling for style. People need to experience a triangle or a rectangle and not simply imitate. Today, people make dolls by simply imitating and not experiencing them from within. You need to be able to experience within yourself how a doll laughs or cries, and that all needs to be done properly, including the clothing. The girls could make a doll and the boys, a jester. We must take the capacity for inner experience into account in painting with colors.

A teacher: Could we use that also with tones?

Dr. Steiner: I think they can also be experienced inwardly. A music teacher: Should we express that to the children through words? The melody or the individual tones?

Dr. Steiner: That results from the theme alone, or the melody. If you treat tones that way, then something artistic results. I think that is what Goethe meant about how he learned to play the piano.

A teacher asks if the children should make eurythmy shoes.

Dr. Steiner: The children would become weak and ill from that. I think that would lead to problems. But, on the other hand, is there so much to making eurythmy shoes?

A teacher: Now, many children make them for the others.

Dr. Steiner: How long does a child need to make a pair of eurythmy shoes? I think that among the members there are many, that is, among the women, there are many who could make at least a dozen such shoes in a day, or at least nine or ten.

A teacher: There is a student in the fifth grade who does not want to do eurythmy. He has no interest for art, only for physics and electricity.

Dr. Steiner: Just as there are unmusical people, there can also be uneurythmic people. I would not excuse him from class. That should happen only when there is a partial idiocy present.

Comment about student S.

Dr. Steiner: The one who crept out from under the seats?

You need to always think, for example, I will make the drawing in a corner, I will make it large or small. You should make him develop some inner activity. You should not allow him simply to sneak away; he needs to be inwardly active. It is better if the boy has to do something that he first needs to decide to do. You can achieve the most with that boy by giving him some attention and being friendly. He can also be well behaved. I have found it curious. I have only seen when he is punished. What he did, I never saw.

Wherever we, as human beings, have striven for knowledge, whether as mystics or realists or in any way at all, the acquisition of self-knowledge has been demanded of us. As has been repeatedly emphasized on other occasions, however, this knowledge of the human soul is by no means as easy to achieve as many people believe—anthroposophists sometimes among them. The anthroposophist should be constantly aware of the hindrances he will encounter in his efforts. The acquisition of self-knowledge is absolutely essential, however, if we are to reach a worthy goal in world existence and if our actions are to be worthy of us as members of humanity.

Let us ask ourselves why must self-knowledge be so difficult for us. Man is truly a complicated being, and if we speak of his inner life, his life of soul, we should not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We should rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate always more deeply into this wonderful structure, this organization of the divine-spiritual powers of the world, which can appear as man.

Before we investigate the nature of this self-knowledge, two aspects of the life of the human soul may present themselves to us. Just as the magnet has north and south poles, just as light and darkness are present in the world as the principle poles of the light, so there are two poles in man's life of soul. Both these poles can appear when we observe a person placed in two contrasting situations in life. Suppose we are watching someone standing on the street who is entirely lost in the contemplation of some strikingly beautiful and impressive natural phenomenon. We see how still he is standing, moving neither hand nor foot, never turning his eyes away from the spectacle presented to him, and we are aware that he is engaged in making an inner picture of what he sees. We say that he is absorbed in contemplation of what surrounds him. That is one situation; here is another. A man is walking along the street and feels that someone has insulted him, injured him. Without much thinking, he is roused to anger and gives vent to it by striking the person who insulted him. We are there witnessing a manifestation of forces springing from anger, a manifestation of impulses of will, and we can easily imagine that if the action had been preceded by thought no blow need have been struck. We have now pictured two extremely different deeds. In the one there is only the forming of a mental picture, a process from which all conscious will is absent; in the other there is no thought, no forming of a mental picture, and immediate expression is given to an impulse of will. These two things present us with the two extreme poles of the human soul. One pole is surrender to contemplation, to forming mental pictures, to thought, in which the will has no part; the second pole is the impelling force of will without thought. We have arrived at these facts simply by exoteric observation of outer life.

We can go into these things more deeply, and we come then into those spheres in which we can find our bearings only by summoning the findings of esoteric research to our aid. Here another polarity confronts us—that of sleeping and waking. We know the esoteric significance of the relationship between sleeping and waking. From the elementary concepts of anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I—are organically and actively interwoven but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed while the astral body and I are poured out into the whole great world bordering directly on our physical existence. We could also approach these facts from a different point of view. We might ask what there is to be said about contemplation of the world, forming mental pictures, thinking, and the will and its impulses during waking life on the one hand and during sleep on the other.

You see that if one penetrates more deeply into this question it becomes evident that in his present physical existence man is, in a certain sense, essentially always asleep. He sleeps differently during the night, however, from the way he sleeps during the day. You can be convinced of this in a purely outer way, because you know that one can wake in the esoteric sense during the day, that is to say, one can become clairvoyant and see into the spiritual world. The ordinary physical body is asleep to this observation, and one can rightly say that it is an awakening when man learns to use his spiritual senses. In the night, of course, we are asleep in the normal way. One can therefore say that ordinary sleep is sleep in relation to the outer physical world; daytime consciousness at the present time is sleep in relation to the spiritual world.

These facts can be considered in yet another light. On deeper scrutiny one realizes that in the ordinary waking condition of physical life, man has, as a rule, little power or control over his will. The will quite detaches itself from daily life. Observe attentively what we call the human will, and you will see how little man has in his control during daily life regarding the will impulse. Only consider how little of all you do from morning to evening is really the outcome of your own thinking and forming of mental pictures, of your personal, individual decisions. When someone knocks at the door and you say “Come in!” that cannot be called a true decision of your own thinking and willing. If you are hungry and seat yourself for a meal, that cannot be called a decision made by the will, because it is occasioned by your condition, by the needs of your organism. Try to picture your daily life, and you will see how little the will is directly influenced from the human center. Why is this the case? Esoteric teachings show us that regarding his will man actually sleeps by day; that is, he does not really live within his will impulses at all. We can evolve better and better concepts and mental pictures, or we can become more highly moral, more refined individuals, but we can do nothing regarding the will. If we cultivate better thoughts we can work indirectly upon the will, but we can do nothing directly to the will that concerns life. This is because in our daily life our will is influenced only in an indirect way, namely, through sleep. When you are asleep you do not think; you do not form mental pictures. The will, however, awakes, permeates our organism from outside, and invigorates it. We feel strengthened in the morning because what has penetrated into our organism is of the nature of will. That we do not perceive this activity of the will, that we know nothing about it, becomes comprehensible if we consider that all conceptual activity sleeps when we sleep. To begin with, therefore, we will offer this suggestion for further contemplation, further meditation. You will see that the more progress you make in self-knowledge, the more you will find confirmation of the truth of the words that man sleeps in his will when he is awake and sleeps in his conceptual life when he is asleep. The life of will sleeps by day; the life of thought sleeps by night.

If man is unaware that the will does not sleep during the night, this is because he only understands how to be awake in his life of thought. The will does not sleep during the night, but it works then in a fiery element, works upon his body in order to restore what has been used up by day.

There are thus two poles in human beings, the life of observation and forming mental pictures and the impulses of will, and the human being is related in entirely opposite ways to these two poles. These are only the two poles, however. The whole life of soul lies in various nuances between these two poles, and we shall come nearer to understanding this soul life by bringing the microcosmic life of soul into relation to what we know as the higher worlds.

From what has been said we have seen that the life of forming mental pictures is one of the poles of one's soul life. This life of forming mental pictures is something that seems unreal to externally, materialistically minded people. We often hear the thought expressed, “Oh, mental pictures and thoughts are only mental pictures and thoughts!” This is intended to imply that if one takes a piece of bread or meat into one's hands, this is a reality, but a thought is only a thought. By this is meant that one cannot eat a thought, and thus a thought is not real but “only” a thought. But why? Basically, because what man calls his thoughts are related to what thoughts really are as a shadow-image of an object is to the thing itself. The shadow-image of a flower points you to the flower itself, to the reality. So it is with thoughts. Human thinking is the shadow-image of mental pictures and beings belonging to a higher world, the world called the astral plane. You represent thinking rightly to yourself when you picture the human head thus (this is not absolutely correct but simply sketched schematically). In this head are thoughts, which I shall represent with these dashes. These thoughts that are in the head, however, must be pictured as living beings on the astral plane. Beings of the most varied kinds are at work there in the form of teeming mental pictures and deeds that cast their shadow-images into human beings, and these processes are reflected in the human head as thinking. Continuous streams move from your head into the astral plane, and these are the shadows that establish the life of thought within your head.

As well as what we can call the life of thought, there is yet another life within the human soul. In ordinary life one distinguishes (this is not entirely correct, but I say it so that one can receive a concept from ordinary life) between a life of thought and a life of feeling. Feelings fall into two categories: those of pleasure and sympathy and those of displeasure and antipathy. The former are aroused by good, benevolent deeds; antipathy is aroused by evil, malevolent deeds. Here there is something more than and different from the mere forming of mental pictures. We form mental pictures of things regardless of any other factor. Our soul, however, experiences sympathy or antipathy only regarding what is beautiful and good or what is ugly and evil. Just as everything that takes place in the human being as thoughts points to the astral plane, so everything connected with sympathy or antipathy points to the realm we call Lower Devachan. Just as I could draw lines earlier between mental pictures and the astral world, so now in relation to feeling I can point upward to Devachan or the heavenly world. Processes in the heavenly world, or Devachan, are projected, mainly into our breast, as feelings of sympathy or antipathy for what is beautiful or ugly, for what is good or evil. In what we can call our experience of the moral-aesthetic world, we bear within our souls shades of the heavenly world or Lower Devachan.

There is still a third province in the life of the human soul that we must strictly distinguish from the mere preference for good deeds. There is a difference between standing by and taking pleasure in witnessing some kindly deed and setting the will in action and actually performing some such deed oneself. I will call pleasure in good and beautiful deeds or displeasure in evil and ugly deeds the aesthetic element, as opposed to the moral element that impels a person to do good. The moral element is at a higher level than the purely aesthetic; mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or evil. In so far as our soul feels constrained to give expression to moral impulses, these impulses are the shadow-images of Higher Devachan, of the higher heavenly world.

We can easily picture these three separate stages of activity of the human soul—the purely intellectual (thoughts, mental pictures, observation), the aesthetic (pleasure or displeasure), and the moral (revealed in impulses to do good or evil deeds)—as microcosmic images within human experience of the three realms which, in the macrocosm, the great world, lie one above the other. The astral world is shadowed in the world of thought, the intellectual world; the Devachanic world is shadowed in the aesthetic sphere of pleasure and displeasure; and the Higher Devachanic world is shadowed as morality.

If we connect this with what was said previously concerning the two poles of the human soul, we must experience the pole of intellect as that which dominates the waking life, the life in which man is intellectually awake. During the day man is awake regarding his intellect; during sleep he is awake regarding his will. Because at night he is asleep regarding his intellect, he becomes unconscious of what he is undertaking with his will. What we call moral principles and impulses are working indirectly into the will. In fact, man needs the life of sleep in order that the moral impulses he absorbs through the life of thought can come into effective activity. In his ordinary life today, man is capable of accomplishing what is right only on the plane of intellect; he is less able to accomplish anything on the moral plane, for there he is dependent upon help coming from the macrocosm.

What is already within us can bring about the further development of intellectuality, but the gods must come to our aid if we are to acquire greater moral strength. We sink into sleep in order that we may plunge into the divine will where the intellect does not intervene and where divine forces transform into the power of will the moral principles we receive, where they instill into our will what we could otherwise receive only into our thoughts.

Between these two poles, that of the will that wakes by night and that of the intellect that is awake by day, lies the sphere of aesthetic appreciation that is continuously present in man. During the day man is not fully awake; only the most prosaic, pedantic individuals are always fully awake in waking life. Human beings basically must actually dream by day, they must always be able to dream a little when awake; they must be able to give themselves up to art, poetry, or some other activity that is not concerned wholly with crass reality. Those who can give themselves up in this way form a bond that can enliven and invigorate the whole of existence. To give oneself up to such thoughts is to a certain extent like a dream penetrating into waking life. You know well that dreams enter into the life of sleep; these are real dreams, dreams that permeate the other consciousness in sleep. This is also something that human beings need by day if they do not wish to lead an arid, empty, unhealthy waking life. Dreams come during sleep at night in any case, and no proof of this is required. Midway between the two poles of night dreaming and day dreaming lies the condition that can live in fantasy.

So here again there is a threefold life of soul. The intellectual element in which we are really awake brings us shadow-images of the astral plane when by day we give ourselves up to a thought, wherein originate the most fruitful ideas for daily life and great inventions. Then during sleep, when we dream, these dreams play into our life of sleep, and images from Lower Devachan are shadowed into us. When we work during sleep, impressing morality into our will—we cannot perceive this directly, but certainly we can perceive its effects—when we are able to imbue our thinking during the night with the influence of divine-spiritual powers, then the impulses we perceive are shadowings from Higher Devachan, the higher heavenly world. These are the moral impulses and feelings that live within us and lead us to say that human life fundamentally is justified only when we place our thoughts at the service of the good and the beautiful, when we allow the very heart's blood of divine-spiritual life to stream through our intellectual activities, permeating them with moral impulses.

What we present here as the life of the human soul, first from outer, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character, is revealed by deeper esoteric research. The processes that have been described in their more outer aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the clairvoyant eye, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart toward the head. If we wish to sketch this schematically, we must draw the region of the heart here and show the continuous streamings from there to the brain, flowing in the head around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland.

These rays of light stream from the heart to the head and flow around the pineal gland. These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is continually dissolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance that streams upward toward the head and flows glimmeringly around the pineal gland. This process, the etherization of the blood, can be shown in the human being throughout his waking life. It is different now, however, in the sleeping human being. When a human being sleeps, the occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart.

These streams, however, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ greatly from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to esoteric observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their best not to let this happen!

Moral qualities are revealed distinctly in the particular coloring of the streams that flow into human beings during sleep; in a person of lower moral principles the streams are quite different from what is observable in a person of higher principles. Endeavors to disguise one's nature by day are useless. In the face of the higher cosmic powers, no disguise is possible. In the case of a man who has only a slight inclination toward moral principles the rays streaming into him are a brownish red in color—various shades tending toward brownish red. In a man of high moral ideals the rays are lilac-violet. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, a kind of struggle takes place in the region of the pineal gland between what streams down from above and what streams upward from below. When a man is awake, the intellectual element streams upward from below in the form of currents of light, and what is of moral-aesthetic nature streams downward from above. At the moment of waking or of going to sleep, these two currents meet, and in the man of low morality a violent struggle between the two streams takes place in the region of the pineal gland. In the man of high morality and an outstreaming intellectuality, a peaceful expansion of glimmering light appears in the region of the pineal gland. This gland is almost surrounded by a small sea of light in the moment between waking and sleeping. Moral nobility is revealed when a calm glow surrounds the pineal gland at these moments. In this way a man's moral character is reflected in him, and this calm glow of light often extends as far as the region of the heart. Two streams can therefore be perceived in man—one from the macrocosm, the other from the microcosm.

To estimate the full significance of how these two streams meet in man, we must first consider what was said previously in a more external way about the life of the soul and how this life reveals the threefold polarity of the intellectual, the aesthetic, and the moral elements that stream downward from above, from the brain toward the heart; we must also grasp the full significance of what was said about turning our attention to the corresponding phenomenon in the macrocosm. This corresponding phenomenon can be described today as the result of the most scrupulously careful esoteric research of recent years, undertaken by individuals among the genuine Rosicrucians. (see Note 7) These investigations have shown that something corresponding to what has been described in connection with the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm. You will understand this more fully as time goes on.

Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, so a similar process takes place in the macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our eyes to the Mystery of Golgotha, to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ. This blood must not be regarded simply as chemical substance, but by reason of all that has been described as the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, it must be recognized as something altogether unique. When it flowed from His wounds and into the earth, a substance was imparted to our earth which, in uniting with it, constituted an event of the greatest possible significance for all future ages of the earth, and it could take place only once. What happened with this blood in the ages that followed? Nothing different from what otherwise takes place in the heart of man. In the course of earthly evolution, this blood passed through a process of “etherization.” Just as our blood streams upward from the heart as ether, so, since the Mystery of Golgotha, the etherized blood of Christ Jesus has lived in the ether of the earth. The etheric body of the earth is permeated by what the blood that flowed on Golgotha became. This is important. If what has thus come to pass through Christ Jesus had not taken place, man's condition on the earth could only have been as previously described. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, however, there has existed the continuous possibility for the activity of the etheric blood of Christ to flow together with the streamings from below upward, from heart to head.

Because the etherized blood of Jesus of Nazareth is present in the etheric body of the earth, it accompanies the etherized human blood streaming upward from the heart to the brain, so that not only do these streams that I described earlier meet in man, but the human bloodstream unites with the bloodstream of Christ Jesus. A union of these two streams can come about, however, only if man is able to unfold true understanding of what is contained in the Christ impulse. Otherwise, there can be no union; the two streams then mutually repel each other, thrust each other away. In every age of earthly evolution, we must acquire understanding in the form suitable for that epoch. At the time when Christ Jesus lived on earth, preceding events could be rightly understood by those who came to His forerunner, John, and were baptised by him according to the rite described in the Gospels. They experienced baptism in order that their sin, that is to say, the karma of their previous lives, karma, that had come to an end, might be changed, and in order that they might realize that the most powerful impulse in earthly evolution was about to descend into a physical body. The evolution of humanity progresses, however, and in our present age it is important that man should learn to understand that the knowledge contained in spiritual science must be received and gradually be able so to fire the streams flowing from heart to brain that anthroposophy can be understood. If this comes to pass, individuals will be able to comprehend the event that has its beginning in the twentieth century: the appearance of the etheric Christ in contradistinction to the physical Christ of Palestine.

We have now reached the moment in time when the etheric Christ enters into the life of the earth and will become visible, at first to a small number of people, through a natural clairvoyance. Then in the course of the next 3,000 years, He will become visible to greater and greater numbers of people. This will inevitably come to pass; it is an event of nature. That it will come to pass is as true as were the achievements of electricity in the nineteenth century. A certain number of individuals will see the etheric Christ and will themselves experience the event that took place at Damascus. This will depend, however, upon such human beings learning to observe the moment when Christ draws near to them. In only a few decades from now it will happen, particularly to those who are young in years—already preparation is being made for this—that some person here or there has certain experiences. If only he has truly sharpened his vision through engaging himself with anthroposophy, he may become aware that suddenly someone has come near to help him, to make him alert to this or that. The truth is that Christ has come to him, although he believes that what he sees is a physical man. He will come to realize, however, that this is a super-sensible being, because it immediately vanishes. Many a human being will have this experience when sitting silently in his room, heavy-hearted and oppressed, not knowing which way to turn. The door will open, and the etheric Christ will appear and speak words of consolation to him. The Christ will become a living comforter to men. However strange it may as yet seem, it is true nevertheless that many a time when people, even in considerable numbers, are sitting together not knowing what to do and waiting, they will see the etheric Christ. He Himself will be there, will confer with them, will cast His word into such gatherings. We are now approaching these times, and the positive, constructive element now described will take hold of the evolution of humanity.

No word shall be said here against the great advances made by culture in our day; these achievements are essential for the welfare and the freedom of human beings. Whatever can be gained in the way of outer progress, however, in mastering the forces of nature, is something small and insignificant compared with the blessing bestowed upon the person who experiences the awakening in his soul through Christ, Who will now take hold of human culture and its concerns. What thereby awakens in human beings will be unifying, positive forces. Christ brings constructive forces into human civilization.

If we were to look into early post-Atlantean times, we would find that human beings built their dwelling places by methods quite different from those used today. In those days they made use of all kinds of growing things. Even when building palaces, they summoned nature to their aid by having plants and branches of trees interlace with one another, and so on. Today, human beings must build with broken fragments. We make all culture of the outer world with the products of fragmentation. In the course of the coming years you will understand even better how much in our culture is the product of destruction.

Light is destroying itself within our post-Atlantean earthly processes. Until the time of Atlantis the earthly process was a progressive process, but since then it has been a process of decay. What is light? Light decays, and the decaying light is electricity. What we know as electricity is light that is destroying itself within matter. The chemical force that undergoes a transformation within earthly evolution is magnetism. Yet a third force will become active, and if electricity seems to work wonders today, this third force will affect civilization in a still more miraculous way. The more of this force we employ, the faster the earth will tend to become a corpse and its spiritual part prepare for the Jupiter embodiment. Forces have to be applied to destroy the earth in order that man can become free of the earth and that the earth's body can fall away. As long as the earth was involved in a progressive process, this was not done, since only the decaying earth can use the great achievements of electricity. Strange as this sounds, it must gradually become known. We must understand the process of evolution to evaluate our culture in the right way. We shall learn thereby that it is necessary for the earth to be destroyed; otherwise, the spirit will not become free. We shall also learn to value what is positive, namely, the penetration of spiritual forces into our existence on earth.

We thus realize what a tremendous advance was signified by the fact that Christ necessarily lived for three years on the earth in a specially prepared human body in order that He might be visible to physical eyes. Through what came to pass during those three years, human beings have become ripe to behold the Christ Who will move among them in an etheric body, Who will enter into earthly life as truly and effectively as did the physical Christ in Palestine. If human beings observe such happenings with undimmed senses they will know that there is an etheric body that will move about within the physical world, but they will know that this is the only etheric body able to work in the physical world as a human physical body works. It will differ from a physical body in this respect only, that it can be in two, three, even in a hundred, a thousand places at the same time. This is possible only for an etheric, not for a physical form. What will be accomplished in humanity through this further advance is that the two poles I have mentioned, the intellectual and the moral, will more and more become one; they will merge into unity. This will come about because in the course of the next millennia human beings will learn increasingly to observe the etheric Christ in the world; more and more they will be permeated in waking life, too, by the direct working of the good from the spiritual world. Whereas now the will sleeps by day, and man is only able to influence it indirectly through thought, in the course of the next millennia, through what from our time onward is working in us under the aegis of Christ, it will come about that the deeds of human beings in waking condition, too, can be directly productive of good.

The dream of Socrates, that virtue be able to be taught, will come true; more and more it will be possible on earth not only for our intellect to be stimulated and energized by this teaching but, through this teaching, for moral impulses to be spread abroad. Schopenhauer said, “To preach morality is easy; to establish it is most difficult.” Why is this? Because no morality has yet been spread by preaching. It is quite possible to recognize moral principles and yet not abide by them. For most people the Pauline saying holds good, that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. This will change, through the moral fire streaming from the figure of Christ. Through this, the need for moral impulses on earth will be increasingly clear to man. Man will transform the earth in so far as he feels with ever-increasing strength that morality is an essential part of the earth. In the future, to be immoral will be possible only for people who receive immoral help, who are goaded in this direction, who are possessed by evil demons, by Ahrimanic, Asuric powers, and who strive for this possession.

This is the future condition of the earth: there will be a sufficient number of people who increasingly teach morality and at the same time offer a moral foundation, but there will also be those who by their own free decision surrender themselves to the evil powers and thus enable an excess of evil to be pitted against a good humanity. Nobody will be forced to do this; it will lie in the free will of each individual.

Then will come the time when the earth passes into conditions which, as in so much else, are only described in the great definitions of Oriental occultism, Oriental mysticism. The moral atmosphere will by then have gathered considerable strength. For many thousands of years Oriental mysticism has spoken of this moment in time, and since the coming of Gautama Buddha it has spoken especially strongly about that future condition when the earth will be bathed in a “moral-ether-atmosphere.” Ever since the time of the ancient Rishis it was the great hope of Oriental mysticism that this moral impulse would come to the earth from Vishva-Karman or, as Zarathustra proclaimed, from Ahura Mazdao. Oriental mysticism thus foresaw that this moral impulse, this moral atmosphere, would come to the earth from the being we call the Christ. It was upon Him, upon Christ, that the hopes of Oriental mysticism were set.

Oriental mystics were able to picture the consequences of that event but not the actual form it would take. They could picture that within a period of 5,000 years after the great Buddha achieved Enlightenment, pure Akashic forms, bathed in fire, lit by the sun, would appear in the wake of one Who could not be recognized through Oriental mysticism. A wonderful picture in very truth: that something would come to make it possible for the Sons of Fire and of Light to move about the moral atmosphere of the earth, not in physically embodied form but as pure Akashic forms within the earth's moral atmosphere. Five thousand years after Gautama Buddha's Enlightenment, so it was said, the teacher will also be there to make known to human beings what these wonderful forms are, these pure forms of Fire and Light. This teacher—the Maitreya Buddha—will appear 3,000 years after our time and will be able to teach people about the Christ impulse.

Oriental mysticism thus unites with the Christian knowledge of the West to form a beautiful unity. It will also be disclosed that he who will appear 3,000 years after our time as the Maitreya Buddha will have incarnated again and again on the earth as a Bodhisattva, as the successor of Gautama Buddha. One of his incarnations was that of Jeshu ben Pandira, who lived a hundred years before the beginning of our era. The being who incarnated in Jeshu ben Pandira is the same one who will one day become the Maitreya Buddha and who from century to century returns ever and again in a body of flesh, not yet as Buddha himself but as Bodhisattva. Even in our age there proceeds from him who later will be the Maitreya Buddha the most significant teachings concerning the Christ being and the Sons of Fire—the Agnishvattas—of Indian mysticism.

Those things by which man can recognize the being who is to become the Maitreya Buddha are common to all genuine Eastern mysticism and to Christian wisdom. The Maitreya Buddha who, in contrast to the Sons of Fire, will appear in a physical body as Bodhisattva, can be recognized by the fact that at first in his youth his development gives no intimation of the nature of the individuality within him. Only those possessed of understanding will recognize the presence of a Bodhisattva in such a human being, manifesting between the ages of thirty and thirty-three and not before. Something akin to an exchange of personality then takes place. The Maitreya Buddha will reveal his identity to humanity in the thirty-third year of his life. As Christ Jesus began his lifework in His thirtieth year, so do the Bodhisattvas, who will continue to proclaim the Christ impulses, reveal themselves in the thirty-third year of their lives. The Maitreya Buddha himself, as transformed Bodhisattva, speaking in powerful words of which no adequate idea can be given at the present time, will proclaim the great secrets of existence. He will speak in a language that must first be created, because no human being today could find the words with which the Maitreya Buddha will address humanity. The reason human beings cannot yet be addressed in this way is that the physical instrument for this form of speech does not yet exist. The teaching of the Enlightened One will not stream into human beings as teachings only but will pour moral impulses into their souls. Such words cannot yet be uttered by a physical larynx; in our time they can be present only in the spiritual worlds.

Anthroposophy is the preparation for everything that will come in the future. Those who take the process of man’s evolution seriously resolve not to allow the soul's development to come to a standstill but to ensure that its development will eventually enable the spiritual part of the earth to become free, leaving the grosser part to fall away like a corpse—for human beings could frustrate the whole process. Those who desire evolution to succeed must acquire understanding of the spiritual life through what we today call anthroposophy. The cultivation of anthroposophy thus becomes a duty; knowledge becomes something that we actually experience, something toward which we have responsibility. When we are inwardly aware of this responsibility and have this resolve, when we experience the mysteries of the world so as to arouse in us the wish to become anthroposophists, then our experience is right. Anthroposophy must not, however, be something that merely satisfies our curiosity; it must rather be something without which we cannot live. Only when this is the case do we experience in the right sense; only then do we live as living building stones in that great construction that must be carried out in human souls and that can embrace all humanity.

Anthroposophy is thus a revelation of true world phenomena that will confront people of the future and will confront our own souls, whether still in a physical body or in the life between death and a new birth. The coming upheaval will concern us regardless of whether we are still living in the physical body or whether we have laid it aside. People must acquire understanding of the earth in the physical body if it is to take effect between death and a new birth. To those who acquire some understanding of Christ now in the physical body, it will make no difference, when the moment comes to behold Christ, whether or not they have already passed through the portal of death. But if those who now reject understanding of the Christ have already passed through the portal of death when this moment arrives, they must wait until their next incarnation, because such understanding cannot be acquired between death and a new birth. Once the foundation has been acquired, however, it endures, and then Christ becomes visible also during the period between death and the new birth. Anthroposophy is thus not only something we learn for our physical life but also has value when we have laid aside the physical body at death.

This is what I wished to impart to you today as an understanding of humanity and a handle in answering many questions. Self-knowledge is difficult because man is such a complex being. The reason for this complexity is that he is connected with all the higher worlds and beings. We have within us shadow-images of the great world, and all the members of our constitution—the physical, etheric, and astral bodies and the I—are worlds for divine beings. Our physical, etheric, and astral bodies and I form one world; the other is the higher world, the world of heaven. For the divine-spiritual beings, the higher worlds are the bodily members in high, divine-spiritual worlds.

Man is so complex because he is truly a mirror-image of the spiritual world. Realization of this should make him conscious of his intrinsic worth. From this knowledge, however, that although we are pictures of the spiritual world we nevertheless fall far short of what we ought to be—from this knowledge we also acquire, in addition to consciousness of our worth as human beings, the right attitude of modesty and humility toward the macrocosm and its gods.

Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions at the End of the Lecture

Question: How are the words used by St. Paul, “to speak in tongues” (I Cor. 12:10), to be understood?

Answer: In exceptional human beings it can happen that not only is there present the phenomenon of speaking in the waking state but something otherwise present only in sleep-consciousness flows into this speaking. This is the phenomenon about which St. Paul spoke. Goethe spoke about it in the same sense; he has written two most interesting treatises about this phenomenon.

Question: How will one understand Christ's words of consolation?

Answer: Human beings will feel these words of consolation as though they arise in their own hearts. They can also be received through physical hearing.

Question: What is the relationship of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances that can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the harmony of the spheres. In the union of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a shadowing of two tones of the harmony of the spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a shadowing from the world of the harmony of the spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are really an expression of the numerical ratios of the harmony of the spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able actually to bring material substance into etheric dilution and to perceive the atomic numbers as the inner formative principle, one would hear the harmony of the spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan, and the Higher Devachan. If one thrusts the body down lower even than the physical world, one comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Ahriman and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. If one drives chemical action down beneath the physical plane, into the evil Devachanic world, magnetism arises. If one thrusts light down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world-electricity arises. If what lives in the harmony of the spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force, which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer, is generated. One can only hope that when this force comes—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—one can only hope that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humanity, human beings will no longer have anything immoral left in them.

Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality, too, must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point. Warmth can extend itself in the three dimensions of space. In light we must speak of a fourth dimension; it can extend itself in a fourfold way; it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Question: What happens to the earth's corpse?

Answer: As the residue of the ancient Moon evolution we have our present moon that circles the earth. Similarly, there will be a residue of the earth that will circle Jupiter. Then these residues will gradually dissolve into the universal ether. On Venus there will no longer be any residue. Venus will manifest, to begin with, as pure warmth, then it will become light, and then it will pass over into the spiritual world. The residue left behind by the earth will be like a corpse. This is a path along which man must not accompany the earth, however, because he would thereby be exposed to dreadful torments. There are, however, many beings who will accompany this corpse, since they themselves will by that means develop to a higher stage.

 Reflected as sub-physical world: Astral World ............. the province of Lucifer Lower Devachan ........... the province of Ahriman Higher Devachan .......... the province of the Asuras 

RUDOLF STEINER: It is most important that, along with all our other work, we should cultivate clear articulation. This has a kind of influence, a certain effect. I have here some sentences that I formulated for another occasion; they have no especially profound meaning, but are constructed so that the speech organs are activated in every kind of movement, organically. I would like you to pass these sentences around and repeat them in turn without embarrassment so that by constant practice they may make our speech organs flexible; we can have these organs do gymnastics, so to speak. Mrs. Steiner will say the sentences first as it should be done artistically, and I will ask each one of you to repeat them after her. These sentences are not composed according to sense and meaning, but in order to “do gymnastics” with the speech organs.¹

Dart may these boats through darkening gloaming
Name neat Norman on nimble moody mules

The N is constantly repeated, but in different combinations of letters, and so the speech organ can do the right gymnastic exercises. At one point two Ns come together; you must stop longer over the first N in “on nimble.”

Rattle me more and more rattles now rightly

In this way you can activate the speech organs with the right gymnastics.

I would recommend that you take particular care to find your way into the very forms of the sounds and the forms of the syllables; see that you really grow into these forms, so that you consciously speak each sound, that you lift each sound into consciousness. It is a common weakness in speech that people just glide over the sounds, whereas speech is there to be understood. It would even be better to first bring an element of caricature into your speech by emphasizing syllables that should not be emphasized at all. Actors, for example, practice saying friendly instead of friendly! You must pronounce each letter consciously. It would even be good for you to do something like Demosthenes did, though perhaps not regularly. You know that, when he could not make any progress with his speaking, he put pebbles on his tongue and through practice strengthened his voice to the degree that it could be heard over a rushing river; this he did to acquire a delivery that the Athenians could hear.

I will now ask Miss B. to introduce the question of temperaments. Since the individual child must be our primary consideration in teaching, it is proper that we study the basis of the temperaments with the maximum care. Naturally when we have a class it is not possible to treat each child individually. But you can give much individual treatment by having on one side, let’s say, the phlegmatics and melancholics, and the sanguine and choleric children on the other side; you can have them take part in a lively interchange, turning now to the group of one temperament, and then calling on another group for answers, saying this to one group and that to another. In this way individualization happens on its own in the class.

A comprehensive picture was presented of the temperaments and their treatment.

RUDOLF STEINER: You have given a good account of what was spoken of in our conversations together on this subject. But you may be going too far when you assert, with regard to the melancholic temperament, that it has a decided inclination toward piety. There is only one little word lacking: “often.” It is also just possible that the melancholic disposition in children is rooted in pronounced egoism, and in no way has a religious tendency. With adults you can leave out the little word “often,” but in young children the melancholic element often masks a pronounced egoism. Melancholic children are often dependent on atmospheric conditions; the weather often effects the melancholic temperament. The sanguine children are also dependent on atmospheric conditions, but more in their moods, in the soul, whereas the melancholic children are affected more unconsciously by the weather in the physical body.

If I were to go into this question in detail from the standpoint of spiritual science, I would have to show you how the childish temperament is actually connected with karma, how in the child’s temperament something really appears that could be described as the consequence of experiences in previous lives on Earth. Let’s take the concrete example of a man who is obliged in one life to be very interested in himself. He is lonely and is thus forced to be interested in himself. Because he is frequently absorbed in himself, the force of circumstances causes him to be inclined to unite his soul very closely with the structure of his physical body, and in the next incarnation he brings with him a bodily nature keenly alive to the conditions of the outer world. He becomes a sanguine individual. Thus, it can happen that when someone has been compelled to live alone in one incarnation, which would have retarded the person’s progress, this is adjusted in the next life through becoming a sanguine, with the ability to notice everything in the surroundings. We must not view karma from a moral but from a causal perspective. When a child is properly educated, it may be of great benefit to the child’s life to be a sanguine, capable of observing the outer world. Temperament is connected, to a remarkable degree, with the whole life and soul of a person’s previous incarnation.

Dr. Steiner was asked to explain the changes of temperaments that can occur during life, from youth to maturity.

RUDOLF STEINER: If you remember a course of lectures that I once gave in Cassel about the Gospel of St. John, you will recall the remarks I made concerning the relationship of a child to his or her parents.² It was stated there that the father-principle works very strongly in the physical body and the I, and that the mother-principle predominates in the etheric and astral bodies. Goethe divined this truth when he wrote the beautiful words:

From my father I have my stature [connected with the physical body] and the serious conduct of life [connected with the I], from my dear mother my happy nature [connected with the etheric body] and joy in creative fantasy [connected with the astral body].

There is extraordinary wisdom in these words. What lives in the human being is mixed and mingled in a remarkable way. Humankind is an extremely complicated being. A definite relationship exists in human beings between the I and the physical body, and again a relationship between the etheric body and the astral body. Thus, the predominance of one can pass over into the predominance of another during the course of life. For example, in the melancholic temperament the predominance of the I passes into the predominance of the physical body, and in a choleric person it even cuts across inheritance and passes from the mother element to the father element, because the preponderance of the astral passes over into a preponderance of the I.

In the melancholic temperament the I predominates in the child, the physical body in the adult. In the sanguine temperament the etheric body predominates in the child and the astral body in the adult. In the phlegmatic temperament the physical body predominates in the child and the etheric body in the adult. In the choleric temperament the astral body predominates in the child, the I in the adult. But you can only arrive at a true view of such things when you strictly remember that you cannot arrange them in a tabulated form, and the higher you come into spiritual regions, the less this will be possible.

The observation was expressed that a similar change can be found in the sequence of names of the characters in The Guardian of the Threshold and The Souls’ Awakening.³

RUDOLF STEINER: There is a change there that is definitely in accordance with the facts; these Mystery Plays must be taken theoretically as little as possible. I cannot say anything if the question is put theoretically, because I have always had these characters before me just as they are, purely objectively. They have all been taken from real life. Recently, on another occasion, I said here that Felix Balde⁴ was a real person living in Trumau, and the old shoemaker who had known the archetype of Felix is called Scharinger, from Münchendorf. Felix still lives in the tradition of the village there. In the same way all these characters whom you find in my Mystery Plays are actual individual personalities.

Question: In speaking of a folk temperament can you also speak of someone as belonging to the temperament of one’s nation? And a further question: Is the folk temperament expressed in the language?

RUDOLF STEINER: What you said first is right, but your second suggestion is not quite correct. It is possible to speak of a folk temperament in a real sense. Nations really have their own temperaments, but the individual can very well rise above the national temperament; one is not necessarily predisposed to it. You must be careful not to identify the individuality of the particular person with the temperament of his whole nation. For example, it would be wrong to identify the individual Russian of today with the temperament of the Russian nation. The latter would be melancholic while the individual Russian of today is inclined to be sanguine.

The quality of the national temperament is expressed in the various languages, so one could certainly say that the language of one nation is like this, and the language of another nation is like that. It is true to say that the English language is thoroughly phlegmatic and Greek exceptionally sanguine. Such things can be said as indications of real facts. The German language, being two-sided in nature, has very strongly melancholic and also very strongly sanguine characteristics. You can see this when the German language appears in its original form, particularly in the language of philosophy. Let me remind you of the wonderful quality of Fichte’s philosophical language or of some passages in Hegel’s Aesthetics, where you find the fundamental character of German language expressed with unusual clarity. The Italian folk-spirit has a special relationship to air, the French a special connection with fluids, the English and American, especially the English, with the solid earth, the American even with the sub-earthly—that is, with earth magnetism and earth electricity. Then we have the Russian who is connected with the light—that is, with earth’s light that rays back from plants. The German folk-spirit is connected with warmth, and you see at once that this has a double character—inner and outer, warmth of the blood and warmth of the atmosphere. Here again you find a polaric character even in the distribution of these elementary conditions. You see this polarity at once—this cleavage in the German nature, which can be found there in everything.

Question: Should the children know anything about this classification according to temperament?

RUDOLF STEINER: This is something that must be kept from the children. Much depends on whether the teacher has the right and tactful feeling about what should be kept hidden. The purpose of all these things we have spoken of here is to give the teacher authority. The teacher who doesn’t use discretion in what to say cannot be successful.

Students should not be seated according to their attainments, and you will find it advantageous to refuse requests from children to sit together.

Question: Is there a connection between the temperaments and the choice of foreign languages for the different temperaments of the children?

RUDOLF STEINER: Theoretically that would be correct, but it would not be advisable to consider it given current conditions. It will never be possible to be guided only by what is right according to the child’s disposition; we have to remember also that children must make their way in the world, and we have to give them what they need to do that. If in the near future, for example, it appeared as if a great many German children had no aptitude for learning English, it would not be good to give in to this weakness. Just those who show a weakness of this kind may be the first to need to know English.

There was a discussion on the task given the previous day: to consider the case of a whole class that, incited by one child, was guilty of very bad behavior; for example, they had been spitting on the ceiling. Some views were expressed on this matter.

RUDOLF STEINER interjected various remarks: It is a very practical method to wait for something like this to wear out, so that the children stop doing it on their own. You should always be able to distinguish whether something is done out of malice or high spirits.

One thing I would like to say: Even the best teacher will have naughtiness in the class, but if a whole class takes part it is usually the teacher’s fault. If it isn’t the teacher’s fault, you will always find that a group of children are on the teacher’s side and will be a support. Only when the teacher has failed will the whole class take part in insubordination.

If there has been any damage, then of course it is proper that it should be corrected, and the children themselves must do this—not by paying for it, but with their own hands. You could use a Sunday, or even two or three Sundays to repair any damage. And remember, humor is also a good method of reducing things to an absurdity, especially minor faults.

I gave you this problem to think on to help you see how to tackle something that occurs when one child incites the others. To demonstrate where the crux of the matter lies, I will tell you a story of something that actually occurred. In a class where things of this kind often happened, and where the teachers could not cope with them, one of the boys between ten and twelve years old went up to the front during the interval between two lessons and said, “Ladies and gentlemen! Aren’t you ashamed of always doing things like this, you good-fornothings? Just remember, you would all remain completely stupid if the teachers didn’t teach you anything.” This had the most wonderful effect.

We can learn something from this episode: When a large proportion of the class does something like this because of the instigation of one or more of the children, it may very well happen that, also through the influence of a few, order may be restored. If a few children have been instigators there will be others, two or three perhaps, who express disapproval. There are almost always leaders among the children, so the teacher should pick out two or three considered suitable and arrange a conversation with them. The teacher would have to make it clear that behavior of this kind makes teaching impossible, and that they should recognize this and make their influence felt in the class. These children will then have just as much influence as the instigators, and they can make things clear to their classmates. In any situation like this you must consider how the children affect one another.

The most important thing here is that you should evoke feelings that will lead them away from naughtiness. A harsh punishment on the part of the teacher would only cause fear and so on. It would never inspire the children to do better. The teacher must remain as calm as possible and adopt an objective attitude. That does not mean lessening the teacher’s own authority. The teacher could certainly be the one to say, “Without your teachers you would learn nothing and remain stupid.” But the teacher should allow the correction be carried out by the other children, leaving it to them to make their schoolmates feel ashamed.

We thus appeal to feelings rather than to judgment. But when the whole class is repeatedly against the teacher, then the fault must be looked for in the teacher. Most naughtiness arises because the children are bored and lack a relationship with their teacher.

When a fault is not too serious it can certainly be very good for the teacher to do just what the pupils are doing—to say, for example, when the pupils are grumbling, “Well I can certainly grumble too!” In this way the matter is treated homeopathically, as it were. Homeopathic treatment is excellent for moral education. It’s also a good way to divert the children’s attention to something else (although I would never appeal to their ambition). In general, however, we seldom have to complain of such misdemeanors. Whenever you allow mischievousness of this kind to be corrected by other children in the class, you work on the feelings to reestablish weakened authority. When another pupil stresses that gratitude must be felt toward the teacher, then the respect for authority will be restored again. It is important to choose the right children; you must know your class and pick those suited to the task.

If I taught a class I could venture to do this. I would try to find the ringleader, whom I would compel to denounce, as much as possible, such conduct, to say as many bad things about it as possible, and I would ignore the fact that it was this student who had done it. I would then bring the matter quickly to a close so that a sense of uncertainty would be left in the minds of the children, and you will come to see that much can be gained from this element of uncertainty. And to make one of the rascals involved describe the incident correctly and objectively will not in any way lead to hypocrisy. I would consider any actual punishment superfluous, even harmful. The essential thing is to arouse a feeling for the objective damage that has been caused and the necessity of correcting it. If teaching time has been lost in dealing with this matter, then it must be made good after school hours, not as a punishment but simply to make up the time lost.

I will now present a problem of a more psychological nature: if you have some rather unhealthy “goody-goodies” in the class—children who try to curry favor in various ways, who have a habit of continually coming to the teacher about this, that, and the other, how would you treat them? Of course you can treat the matter extremely simply. You could say: I am simply not going to bother with them. But then this peculiarity will be turned into other channels: these “good” children will gradually become a harmful element in the class.

• 1. Elsewhere, Steiner stated: “In giving artistic shape and form to speech, healthy cooperation and harmonization of body, soul, and spirit manifests. The body shows whether it can incorporate the spirit correctly; the soul reveals whether the spirit truly lives in it; and the spirit is vividly present, working directly into the physical.” Creative Speech, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1978, p. 33. The original German speech exercises may be found in the appendix.
• 2. The Gospel of St. John: And Its Relation to the Other Gospels, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1982.
• 3. See Rudolf Steiner, The Four Mystery Plays: The Portal of Initiation, The Soul’s Probation, The Guardian of the Threshold, and The Souls’ Awakening, trans. Adam Bittleston, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1983. The four plays will be published individually; see The Souls’ Awakening: Soul and Spiritual Events in Dramatic Scenes, trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 (the other plays will follow).
• 4. Felix Balde is a character in the Mystery Plays.

Today we will go over to some of those eurythmic exercises more related to the activity proceeding from the soul. Before we begin, however, it will be necessary to take note that it is usually assumed when a person produces an expression of will or when he arrives at a judgment, that these expressions are connected with the human nervous system alone. This, however, is not at all the case; one must make it clear to oneself that the judgments which the human being passes, for example, are bound up with his entire constitution; that man pronounces a judgment out of the totality of his being. Thus when one makes the eurythmic movement corresponding to a judgment, here again, the whole human being is influenced in a certain manner; it is not only the head which will be subject to the influences of what arises through judging eurythmically. Mrs. Baumann will show us the movement which corresponds to confirmation, and then the one corresponding to negation. Naturally it should be carried out several times without interruption when used as therapeutic exercise. Now this confirmation and negation is precisely that which can be called a judgment; when one confirms or negates something one has to do with the nature of judgment in its essence. When you give such a confirmation or negation, the movement works, when it is repeated frequently, by way of a detour through the etheric body very strongly on the respiratory system. One can by this means counter a tendency to shortness of breath. You can for example repeat the confirmation ten times consecutively, then the negation, and follow this up with confirmation, negation, confirmation, negation—both ten times consecutively. Whatsoever illness this shortness of breath may be the symptom of, by this means one will be able to counteract it in such a way that the entire constitution is affected as the whole matter occurs by way of a detour through the etheric body. You must only keep in sight what is being done here. One could interpret what Mrs. Baumann has done touching upon what is essential in it as follows: what she projects thereby into the world is a thought that has become fleeting, a thought which has gained wings and gone over into movement. When a judgment is fixed eurythmically—as a confirmation or negation—then it is a thought which rides on the movement. And because the thought rides on the movement one projects in fact on the one hand, a part of this being outwards; on the other hand, because the thought rides on the movement one takes a part more thoroughly into oneself than otherwise. That is to say, one makes a movement through which one becomes more awake than one otherwise is. Such movements are actually movements that awaken. However, because one does not wake up with the ego at the same time in the same manner, the activity of the ego is in a certain way dampened. This dampening of the ego is not absolute, however, but in relation to the organism. In fighting shortness of breath by means of this detour through the etheric body this constitutes what would be the first symptom reached and what is introduced into the whole human constitution by means of the byway through the etheric body.

Now a disposition of the will:¹ sympathy and antipathy. Now imagine you make this movement repeatedly, one after another: sympathy, antipathy, sympathy, antipathy, or only one of these two. When one does this, in a certain sense one is setting out something which one carries within oneself; naturally this can only be confirmed through observation. It is a sort of falling asleep. The other movement (confirmation and negation; the ed.) must be carried out quickly, and this must be carried out slowly. It is indeed a movement which brings forth the imagination of sleep in the observer; imaginatively one falls asleep in a way with such a movement—not in reality, however, at least that shouldn't happen. But because one in reality doesn't go to sleep while making this movement, the “I” is more strongly active in relation to the body than it usually is. And by means of such a movement the circulation and the digestion as a whole are stimulated. The entire digestion is really stimulated in such a manner that through such a movement the tendency to belch, for example, can be counteracted.

Now we want to express that which one could call the feeling of love towards something (Mrs. Baumann). Take a good look at this, the feeling of love for something. Imagine it carried out ten times consecutively and accompanied by a powerful E between each of the movements. Thus, Love-E, Love-E, and so on, one after another. You accompany the movements which you have learned as expressing feeling in eurythmy—it could be another feeling as well—with the movement for E. Here we have a strong influence which proceeds from the human etheric to act on the astral nature and which has the effect of warming the circulation. It is something which really works on the circulatory system in a beneficial manner. One cannot say that it accelerates or retards the circulation; it affects it in a beneficially warming manner.

We also have something which could be called a wish: Hope. (Miss Wolfram) Look at this and picture to yourself that one carries out this movement for the wish repeatedly—always returning to the position of balance, then carrying out the movement for the wish again—and always alternating it with the movement for U. This means that the astral will act very strongly upon the etheric and it can be said that a beneficial warming effect on the breathing system will result. Naturally one must take into consideration that all these things of which we have spoken today occur by way of the etheric body and can, therefore, never show what effect they have on the following day. Some effects may appear after two to three days and are then, however, all the more certain.

Now imagine that we make a bending and stretching movement with the legs and at the same time a definite B-movement (Mrs. Baumann). That which I have just shown you simultaneous with a decided B movement, now rest, B while bending, ten times consecutively. That is something which people who very frequently have migraine or other headaches should do. The time for them to do it, however, is not when they have the headache, but rather when they do not.

A particularly effective movement is the following: bend and stretch the torso forwards and backwards accompanying this movement simultaneously with the movement for R. (Miss Wolfram) Bend forwards, bend backwards with the R; that consecutively and often. That affects the whole rhythmic system, the rhythm of breathing and of circulation, positively. When there are irregularities present there, this will work extraordinarily well under all conditions.

Now I will ask you to take a look at another most effective movement which consists in shaking the head to the right and left with the movement for M. The head should not be turned, in so far as possible, but only bent to the right and left, and that with the M-movement. That is something which when practised has a very strong quieting effect on all possible irregularities in the lower body, again by way of the etheric body. Irregularities in the lower system which express themselves through pains can be mitigated thereby. One must combat tendencies to such pains when the pains are not present. That is the crux of the matter. While the pains are present it cannot very well be carried out. The important thing is to carry it out so long as the pains are not present.

Please take note of the following: strike the knee with the foot, stemming the movement of the foot against the knee; picture this accompanied by an E movement with the arms. It is a very beautiful movement. It can and should be carried out as an exercise with children in school, as when it is done frequently it wages war against the most varied aspects of clumsiness. The children will at least he well cured of their clumsiness when they practise just this exercise. And when the children come and say that their shoulders hurt so and everything possible hurts, then you should reply: that is exactly what I wanted; you will be especially glad about it once it's better again! Every pain that is brought about in this manner combats clumsiness. Thus in respect to this one can deal quite energetically with the children.

Now we will take a look at another variety (of movement). Imagine every sort of E movement which can be carried out with the arms now projected onto the floor. This movement comes into existence when this line crosses the other at an angle. Now let us imagine it in this way: Mrs. Baumann places herself here, Miss Wolfram there. Now walk and accompany the whole thing with an E movement with the arms. Run so that you pass by one another, but pay attention that you don't run into each other. So you make an E on the floor and an E with the arms and you pay attention at the same time that you don't collide. It is this taking notice of the other person, this exerting of one's concentration on him combined with the E-gesture which works together with the movement here. This exercise can only be carried out with two people. It is—when carried out by two people—essentially what one would call a strengthening of the heart, all that which is connected with the phenomena which one generally terms the strengthening of the heart.

Question: Could one have this exercise carried out by one sick and one healthy person?

One can readily do that, but one would perhaps have to have the healthy person omit the E-movement with the arms. This movement is especially intended for the clinical situation where one will, of course, have two people in need of a strengthening of the heart; it really is better if one has two such people.

Now let us imagine the movement so: one of the ladies stands here, the other here, behind one another. When you arrive here, then Miss Wolfram carries out the path which you have begun, but in such a manner that she is always facing forwards. Then as the movement carries on, you take this part of the path and you the other. You initiate the continuation of your own movement in the other person and accompany it with the O position of the arms. Now one must see that the people who do this begin at a certain tempo; to begin with it must be slower, then become ever faster and faster. This rapid tempo should then ebb out into a slower one. That is then a movement which serves to strengthen the diaphragm significantly and thereby the whole breathing system. Here again, when one leaves out the O movement with the arms one can have a healthy person participate, but it is of course best to employ two people who are in need of healing.

Now I will ask you, Mrs. Baumann, to demonstrate the H movement for us once again. And now I will ask you to make this movement in such a way that you hold the arms still and imitate the movement with the shoulders alone as well as possible. In this case, however, one must accustom oneself to doing this movement with the shoulders and making an A with the arms at the same time, an A of any sort with the arms. That should be repeated frequently. You see, that is what could be designated as: “laughing eurythmically”. That is how one laughs eurythmically. And when one laughs thus eurythmically that which one has in the curative effect of laughing itself is really very greatly heightened. The curative effect of laughing is well known. But when one practises laughing eurythmically, this curative effect is proportionately greater. You could do it otherwise as well, however.

Miss Wolfram, please make an A movement of some sort. And now try to make the same movement I spoke of before, the shoulder movement of the H, but do it quite slowly as if you wished to do it thoughtfully. Thus into the A movement of the arms one makes the shoulder movement of the 11. One could designate that as follows: the whole organism is brought into accord with the feeling of veneration. It encompasses all that which the feeling of veneration actually effects in the organism. The effect on the human organism of the feeling of veneration, when it is habitual, is to make the organism as such actually more durable, more sturdy. It becomes capable of greater resistance. People who really have the capacity for veneration inherent in them become more capable of resistance within their organism. That is why everything which brings children to veneration, to the gift or capacity for reverence makes children more resistant. And one can come to the assistance of this capacity for resistance through this last eurythmic exercise.

One must keep in mind that what we have demonstrated today as decision, expression of will, hope, love, what we have shown in respect to certain organic pains, what we have demonstrated as a means of combating clumsiness and so on, all these things are related to man in such a way that the human being is gripped through them in the innermost part of his organic being and by way of a detour through the etheric body actually derives the possibility of making this etheric body into a workable instrument. The etheric body is a part of man which becomes stiff in most of those people who sit out their lives, spend their lives without interest for their surroundings. And it is not good when the human etheric body becomes stiff; nor for the organic functions is it good. When one has the exercises which we have described today carried out by children in moderation and by the appropriate patients very energetically (one can see by the indications given which patients have need of them), the etheric body will become supple and inwardly flexible. And by means of them one will do the children as well as the adults a good service.

These movements are indeed such that one can give them priority over the usual gymnastic movements; the usual gymnastic movements are taken in reality from the physiology, from the physis of the body alone and they tear the physical body continually out of the etheric body. Thus, the physical body then makes its own movements which do not pull the movements of the etheric body in the appropriate manner after them. For this reason the usual, merely physiologic, gymnastics is basically a school for materialism, since by means of it materialistic thought is transformed into feeling. Eurythmy makes man capable of recognising himself within increasingly and of gaining control over himself inwardly. Therefore such exercises have a pedagogic-didactic value as well as therapeutic and hygienic value. The attempt should be made to have these exercises—those described today, I mean—carried out by adults as well in moderation and to develop them in such a way that they could be carried out by the sick in a clinical situation.

A question has been put to me which could perhaps lead to something—and some other questions as well. Here is the question: “The Chinese cannot pronounce the letter R, they substitute L for it. Strawberries thus becomes stlawbellies, for example. Does that have to do with their race?”

It has to do with the organisation of the organism insofar as that is racially determined, of course. Through the particular gift of one part of mankind for one sound or another one can see what tendencies are inherent in certain people by virtue of their race. I brought such things to discussion just a few hours ago.

Other questions have been put about exercises which could be used in relation to conditions of indolence, insufficient reaction, lethargy and so on; conditions which frequently have to do with an insufficient thyroid activity. And here it has been brought to our attention that Fliess, in his well-known book about the course of life, has placed this complex of symptoms in the intermediate sexual category. How could a contemporary author not do so? Everything about which he knows very little he chalks up to the intennediate sexual category, or some other way. He puts the left-handed, for example, in the same category. I want to emphasize, expressly, however, that I have never recommended a eurythmic exercise with a special right-left emphasis to anyone.

(Attention was drawn to the exercises which one should begin either to the right or to the left: iambus, trochee.)

That is not in order to particularly accentuate an emphasis on the right or left, but rather in order to call forth the feeling of the iambus or trochee within the forward motion. That is thoroughly justified. The fact is that it has less to do with the long-short than it has to do with the particular movement. It is quite correct; it has to do with the fact that what lives in the breathing system is reversed when it is transferred into the system of movement. The upper man and the lower man are the reverse of one another. Thus every imaginable iambus in the breathing system, brought forth in speech, must of necessity become a trochee in the movement of legs and vice versa. Eurythmy in its entirety is based on this principle. You may test the whole of eurythmy in respect to it: eurythmy does not follow the principle of similarity in its execution, but the movement which is in keeping with the polar image. It is all entirely in accord with the image formed as the other polarity. This idea must be maintained throughout. But I have never recommended to anyone that he do something especially right or left; that should be left completely to the feeling. The question of whether a thing should be done with the right hand or the left hand should be determined only by those matters which would otherwise come into consideration. I do not want people to have the impression that I would have suggested an emphasis on the right in particular eurythmic exercises to any more left-sided person whosoever. That is not the case.

In addition I would like to emphasize the following. It is the case that when one has to do with insufficient reaction or with lethargy this more general indication will fall into some category which I have already given; lethargy is a general expression and can be relegated to something or other about which I have spoken. The appropriate movements should then be carried out.

On the whole one should see that with an exercise such as I have just given in connection with judgment and expression of will²—that the appearance of indolence, of lethargy and so on can be combatted very especially by that which I have given for the expression of will. And if one should notice that this is not particularly effective, one can alternate that exercise with the exercise that I have given for judgment, but in such a way that one attempts to discover—as it is here a question of trial—whether it is more effective when one varies the expression of will and the expression of judgment in a ratio of three to two or of two to three—one shorter, the other longer. And since these things work by way of a detour through the etheric body, one will find that one will first have to begin and carry on with these exercises for two to three days and according to the circumstances—when one sees that they are not having the proper effect—make a change on the third day. But in general one can say that the one exercise so well as the other will have an awakening effect on man in both directions. The will exercise and the judgment exercise are thus the ones that come into particular consideration.

In order that there be no misunderstanding, I emphasize that of course the opinion must not arise that these exercises would have a very significant effect after being carried out for two or three days. That would be an error. In order to produce an effect, these exercises should be carried out for at least seven weeks. Thus one can maintain—without necessarily being mystically inclined—that the space of time necessary for the beneficial effects just described to show themselves would be about seven weeks.

That is what I wanted to tell you today concerning these matters. I would like to request that the corresponding session tomorrow follow the other directly, after a short pause. Tomorrow will be the last eurythmy session then, as it will be necessary to have two purely medical sessions one after the other on Monday.

• 1. Willenszustinnung
• 2. Willensäusserung

Dear friends,

Yesterday we examined the human constitution as far as it can be seen in human beings themselves or in connection with their immediate environment. Now we must go out beyond humanity. For everywhere humanity stands in some relation to the forces in the universe, and one can only understand these various relations if one explores the immense diversity of the universe itself.

Just think, dear friends, how manifold the forces in the universe are! Look at a growing plant, for instance. Follow the growth of its stem upward from the earth's surface, and the growth of its root downward. Right there are two opposite tendencies within the plant: a striving upward and a striving downward. And if today we were far enough along in scientific research—so often used for less important matters—to use it for such a thing as the growth of a stem upward and the growth of a root downward, we would find the connections in the universe that would then finally explain the totality: humanity and the world, microcosm and macrocosm. For we would find that everything connected with the stem's upward growth has some relation to the unfolding of the sun's forces in the course of the day, in the course of the year, even beyond the year. And we would find that everything connected with the root's downward growth has some relation to the moon's forces and the moon's changes. If therefore we look at a plant properly, we already come to see through its form a relation between sun and moon. We have, so to speak, to extract the simple image of a plant from the whole universe, from all the forces in the universe.

Someone who is really observant will never see the root other than striving downward into the earth and at the same time rounding itself. The root rounding itself into the earth—that is the picture of the root that one must have, the rounding form pushing into the ground. (Plate V, left) We must see the stem differently as it unfolds in an upward direction. Someone who combines sensitivity with observation will have the definite feeling that the stem strives to stream out as a line. The root wants to unfold in a rounding, circular direction; the stem wants to unfold in a linear direction. That is the archetypal form of the plant. And in the linear striving upward we must see the presence of sun forces on the earth. In the root's striving toward roundness we must see the presence of moon forces on the earth.

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Now let us look further. We think of the sun as being at a great height and of the plant as streaming to reach it. But the plant does more than just reach upward; it reaches out in width, it creates peripheries. And we find within its upward striving that something else is active, at first just at its top in the blossoms we find the forces of Venus working with the sun forces. Then as blossoms unfold below, as leaves come, moving inward from the periphery, we find the forces of Mercury working. On the one hand if we want to understand the structure of the plant as it pushes toward the Sun, we must see that the sun forces are helped by the forces of Venus and Mercury.

On the other hand we must realize that these forces alone would not be able to form the plant. With them alone, the plant-being would in a certain sense only attain a compact, solid form. For it to unfold as one sees it, for instance, in the most extreme example in a tree, there are forces working everywhere counter to the Venus and Mercury forces: namely, the forces of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Thus in addition to the basic polarity of sun activity and moon activity, there is also the activity of all the other planets in the universe. (Plate V, left)

In the plant you have the entire planetary system in front of you. It is right there on the earth. And perhaps it is not so ridiculous that a scholar—a half or three-quarters scholar as Paracelsus¹¹ was—made such a statement as this: “When you eat a plant you're eating the entire planetary system. For all those forces are contained in it.” Paracelsus said it like this: With the plant you eat the whole heaven.” The world is indeed formed in such manifold variety that one does have in one's immediate environment the forces of the entire macrocosm—in growth, in structure, in the disposition of all living things.

Now let us get back to the human being. We showed yesterday that one can go from the area of lung breathing to a higher area where there is a finer inhalation. And we discovered that this finer inhalation carries karmic streams in from the past. We can go still further. If we have working into the human being what I would like for the moment to call a refined breath stream, (Plate V, right) we can say the following: If one would unfold only what lies in the astral body and ego, one would never reach the sun, with the human constitution as it is at the present time. When one is in the ego and astral body during sleep, one does not reach the sun sphere. There is only darkness. If one were to live in the astral body and ego without any connection to the etheric and physical bodies, one would not come to the sun. How, then, does this happen?

Let us consider first what the situation is when the astral body and ego approach the etheric body. In clairvoyance one can bring this condition about fairly easily, by strengthening thinking—strengthening it by very thorough, energetic meditation. Then it is easy to come to this condition; it is the beginning of initiation. One slips down into the etheric body but is not yet able to take hold of the physical body; one remains in the etheric body. In this condition it is possible to think very, very well. One sees nothing, hears nothing, but one can think very well. Thinking is not in the least extinguished, but seeing, hearing, and the other sense activities are suppressed. At first, thinking remains the same, except that one can think more than previously. One can think such thoughts as we are expressing here, for instance thoughts about the macrocosm. Thinking becomes wider. One knows clearly: “now I am in the etheric world.” Thus when one is in the etheric body, one is truly in the world ether. One has the clear experience of this: “I am in the spiritual world out of which the sense world comes.” But one is not able to differentiate between spiritual world and sense world, one is beyond a differentiated sense world. The sun no longer shines, the stars no longer shine, there is no moonlight. There is no longer a clear distinction between the kingdoms of nature on the earth. A person only has that faculty when down in the physical body in normal life or in a higher stage of initiation. But in exchange for the blurring of the contours of the sense world, there is a general spirituality, the weaving life of the spirit.

If one goes further, if one takes conscious hold of the physical body and begins to live in the organs, the perceptions that had become dim or had vanished begin to emerge again (with the exception of earthly forms) as spirit entities. Where earlier in ordinary consciousness one had seen the sun and then it had become dark, foggy, but had still been within the general weaving spirituality, now there appear beings of the second hierarchy. Now one can differentiate in the spiritual world. Moon and stars appear again, but in their spiritual aspect: they are now spiritual colonies—they can be called that, or something similar. Now one understands how in ordinary everyday consciousness humankind sees the sun, for instance, in its physical form, and the same with other things, but when someone has entered consciously into a physical body, and has actually taken hold of it in its spiritual dimension, the sun is seen as a spiritual being, and the same with the whole world. Now we know that with each sun ray shining down upon us during the day, spirit is also entering us. Through every sense experience spirit is entering us. We have therefore to regard the higher, finer breathing as a breathing that is continuously impregnated by spirit. And we perceive that the sun is living in every sense perception that streams into us. It is indeed the spirit of the sun, or the spirits of the sun. The sun is present in every sense perception. In our finer breathing the sun force, the sun life is streaming straight into us.

So you see the relation humanity has to the sun. When a ray of light streams into your eye, the sun spirit is streaming in with that ray of light. The spirit of the sun is the substance of the finer breathing. With our sense perceptions we breathe in the manifold ingredients of the spiritual sun. You have there an important view of the human being from one direction. As one unfolds in an etheric body, (Plate V, yellow) one develops in the etheric body thinking—the thoughts of the universe. These thoughts of the universe in which one finds oneself when living consciously in an etheric body are at first devoid of warmth or cold, devoid of tone. They are a kind of vague feeling in which one's feeling of self merges with one's feeling of the macrocosm. But if now one takes hold of the physical body, one enters into the spirit of the sense perceptions. And the thoughts are infused from various sides: through the eyes, the sun essence—thought—that is breathed in is infused with color; through the ear, thought is tinted with tone; through the organ of warmth, thought is tinted with warmth or cold. There you have the cosmic relation of thought to sense perception. Thought must be understood as preceding the sense experience; then the sense experience comes through infusion, tinted by the sun.

Humankind simply does not realize that the sun-being streams into us with every sense perception. And on the path of the sun, past karma streams in too. It is by no means a childish image to think of the sun as a receptacle of past karma. If we understand the human head properly, we must say the spiritual sun rays stream in invisibly and are transformed as they stream in into something physical, which then appears as merely a physical attribute in the world of color, tone, warmth. And at the same time, on the path of these sun rays that slip in through the senses into the nerves, karma enters into us. That is one side of the human being.

Now let us look at the other side. Karma goes out at that place in the organism where the lymph is, the place where everything is alive and active that has not yet been drawn into the blood. There we find outgoing karma. What are the paths of outgoing karma? To know that, we must acquaint ourselves through spiritual science with the moon forces.

And now if we gradually come from the etheric world to which we have become accustomed and take hold of the physical body in its periphery, the area of the senses, then all the life streaming in from the sun and bringing our past karma with it appears to be bringing reproach, and to be doing much to disturb us. But far more important than the disturbing elements in our karma is this knowledge, this insight that we can attain. It is by virtue of our past that we have become what we now are. The life of our inner being is enriched by the perception of the sun entering on the paths of the senses and nerves. If we can separate ourselves from our karma and concentrate on the instreaming forces of the spiritual sun, we will experience an infinite happiness as we receive them. We will wish that the sun element were in us perpetually; we cannot help longing for it. The sun element enters into us lovingly if we wish it; it is what we know in physical life in a weaker form as our active human love. This is the interplay of sun activity with the human inner world, the loving penetration of the sun into humans and into everything that wants to sprout and grow and thrive in humans. The living sun rays enter lovingly. Here love is not merely a soul-spiritual force: it is the force that calls everything physical to germinate and sprout and grow, everything that can be beneficial to humans in every way when they value it. This is the force of which a human being is aware through direct outer vision.

Now if one takes hold of the physical body in the other direction, in the direction of the forces that develop the lymph and prepare it for entering into the blood, one becomes aware of the activity of the moon. This is of quite a different character. On the one hand we can say the spiritual sun is active in the way we have indicated; on the other hand the moon is active. When we work to grasp the process of the lymph-blood formation inwardly, we find we are entering into the activity of the moon. And we have the constant feeling that the moon wants to take something away from us, to lift something out of us. With the sun we had the feeling that it wants continually to give us something. With the moon we have the feeling that it wants continually to take something out of us. And if we are not alert while we are observing the moon's activity, when we have consciously taken hold of the physical body and are engrossed in the lymph-blood formation, if we are not absolutely alert and in complete control of our vision, suddenly the continuity is broken and standing there before us is a spiritual being similar to ourselves but distorted, almost a caricature of ourselves, a being we have brought to birth. We would miss this emanation if we were not alert. But it does not seem particularly strange to us as it separates from us and confronts us. It is hardly more than an enhanced view of ourselves in a mirror. When we look at ourselves in an ordinary mirror, that is the physical world. When we see ourselves reflected in the etheric world by the moon forces, that is a higher kind of mirroring.

Let us review the whole process. There is nothing particularly amazing about it. But it shows us that we are indeed connected with the universe. That the moon is continually separating forces from us, which then it makes independent, forces that were living in us and that then go out into the spiritual world, streaming out into the macrocosm, constantly carrying images out of us into the macrocosm. But now think how it could be if such an image, which the moon forces are continually producing in humanity and which then they want to take out of us to carry into the distances of the world, if such an image were held back in the human body and kept there. And not merely an image, an abstraction, but a form permeated by forces.

How could such a form be retained in the human being? We have the moon forces continually striving to pull and draw the human image out. How could this form be held back? It can remain in humans if the sun forces are brought in deeply enough from another side. Then the form remains in the human being; then an embryonic life begins. Fructification consists of nothing else than that the sun forces are drawn down to where the moon forces are active in the lymph. Thereby the image that would otherwise go out takes hold of physical matter in the human body. What otherwise is a mere image now takes on physical form. For this to happen, sun forces combine with moon forces in the lymph system of the human organism. (Plate V)

Let us look at the other side. We can also investigate the moon forces higher up: then we find that the opposite happens. Then the human being is not formed again in the human body, but the sun macrocosm is given form in the human. Now we have a different view of the macrocosm. When the embryo is formed, a physical world arises within the human being that must come out. When on the other hand the moon forces activate their desire nature—they want to capture and draw down the sun forces—then the spirit in the universe comes into being within the human. The spirit of the universe is engendered, a spiritual embryo. Then the possibility is given for forming what must come in from the spiritual world, what has been in the spiritual world up to the time of a new earth-life and now comes in as spirit embryo. Then, the union of the two takes place in the human being.

If we explore these things, we come to see that they are completely interwoven. Then we have the true explanation of the human being's relation to the universe.

Now help comes from every direction. The sun activity that is uniting here with the moon activity has the help of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. What, then, are the tasks of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn? Recall, dear friends, what I said yesterday. When the sun forces are going in, first they must stop for the light; second, they must stop for the macrocosmic chemism; third, they must stop for the life. The Saturn forces bring about the stop for the light, the Jupiter forces in their wisdom bring about the stop for the world chemism, the Mars forces the stop for the life. There you have in detail the drawing-in of the sun forces modified by the forces of the so-called outer planets.

From the opposite direction you have the moon forces modified. When they work alone in their full strength, they bring about the formation of the embryo, that is, the physical formation. When they are less strong, they do not enter into physical matter but stay in the direction of the spirit, combining with the Venus forces of soul love. They can be still weaker—when they unite with what comes from the other side, the forces of Mercury, the divine messenger, who in ordinary everyday earth-life leads the lower forces up to the higher.

Look at the two diagrams, right and left. (Plate V) If we look out at the plant world spread as it is around us, we find the sun, moon, and stars everywhere. If we look within the human being, the sun, moon, and stars are there too, in exact correspondence. When something within is not in order, there is some trouble in the inner collaboration of sun, moon, and stars. If we as therapists want to restore it to order again, we must search in outer nature for a corresponding Saturn activity, for instance, that will work therapeutically on an unhealthy moon activity—and so forth. It is all out there. You see people will begin to have confidence in medicine again when they see that in the inner constitution the human being comprises the whole world. This is the knowledge we would like to bring to medicine again, knowledge it once had. The world will only have its trust in medicine restored when these things are once again understood.

But now let us look at the other side. Look first at the moon activity in human beings. See how it is striving continually to draw the human element out, to carry it into the universe. Let the picture stand before us—the human being striving to get out, wanting to be carried into the universe. This must not be presented to humanity as an abstraction, this shattering secret, but in picture form—the moon working continually to lift human beings out of themselves, to show them their relation to the macrocosm. The human being comes into earth-life as an embryo within another human being. But when this moon activity is enhanced by Venus and Mercury activity, then the human being is born not physically, but spiritually. If we add to the physical birth what we can invoke of Mercury and Venus activity, we bring about a spiritual birth. The human being is then born spiritually, outside, in the universe. We baptize the human being.

The working of the physical sun is always present in human beings. We can add to that perception a consciousness that the spiritual sun also is active in us, that on the paths of the physical-etheric sunlight, the light rays, chemical rays and life rays, the spirit is also pouring in. Spirit enters humans by way of the same paths that the physical-etheric sun activity enters: through the senses. In the same way that human beings perceive in everyday physical life the physical-etheric activity of the sun, we enable them to perceive the soul-spiritual activity of the sun. We give them communion.

Going out from the communion, we find on the one hand what is related to the help the sun is given: the darkening that relates to the light, the constant nearness of death to life. We go to the outer planets that are connected with the sun, and we add to the communion at the proper moment the anointing.

Or we go into human beings, and before they have any thought of the macrocosm, we hold them fast in their inner life, wanting not merely to give them their place as human beings in the macrocosm, but wanting to plant the macrocosm in them—in picture form, so that it becomes a seed developing in them. We give them confirmation.

If individuals receiving the sacraments live in them with full consciousness, they will be continually healed by them—healed of the universal illness to which they succumb, or are in constant danger of succumbing in statu nascendi simply by reason of their having incarnated in the physical material world. This is the priest's task.

It can also happen that an individual is by nature continually in statu nascendi of wanting to be free in the spiritual world, wanting to get out of the physical world, yet is obliged to remain in it during earth-life. And this causes in the organism not a state of unspirituality but a state of superspirituality, that is, illness. Medical measures must be prescribed, the opposite pole to the sacraments, when illness appears. This is the physician's task.

Thus we see on the one side the spiritual healing of the priest, and on the other side the priestly attitude of the physician, the physical healer. If we recognize how their tasks can be coordinated, we have grasped the significant connection between pastoral work and medical work. Then pastoral medicine is not just a theory, but embraces the working together of human beings.

• 11. Paracelsus (1493–1541). Swiss physician and alchemist.

We have seen that we approach certain riddles of the universe I and of mankind when we begin to observe man himself, seeing in his two-fold form something of the solution of the world-riddle. In meditating over all these things one can gain great help by thinking more deeply of the formula: The world as totality is a riddle, and man himself, again as totality, is its solution. We must not expect, however, to solve the world-riddle in a moment; human life itself in its completeness, what we experience between birth and death and again between death and a new birth—that is actually the solution of the world-riddle. So this is a very serviceable formula: The world is a riddle and Man is its solution.

We have seen that when we regard man's external physical form, we can distinguish in it the head-part and the remaining part. We can consider the head-part in its spherical form as an image of the whole cosmos, not only as a comparison but as an actuality. We can truly say that the whole starry heaven is at work to bring about the form, the shaping, the inner forces of the human head. Of course, it is also true—speaking lightly—that everyone has his own head. Man certainly has that. For as you know, the configuration of the starry heaven always differs, according to the special spot on earth and the special time at which one observes the stars. So that by taking the starry heavens, not in general, but in their configuration at the place and at the time in which the person is born, this must result in each person's having his special head according to the position of the stars in the heavens. Let us keep in mind that it is not the star-heaven in general that builds up our head, but its special configuration. And from the various studies we have pursued we can realize that a considerable part of man's task between death and rebirth consists in his becoming familiar with the mysteries, the spiritual secrets of the stars. One can even say in a certain sense, that the head is not merely given us quite passively but that we make it ourselves. Between death and a new birth we come to know all the laws that prevail in wide cosmic spaces. In fact, when we think of it spiritually, the wide universe is our home between death and a new birth. And just as here on the earth we learn to know the laws by which houses and other things are constructed, so in the time between death and rebirth we become familiar with the laws of the cosmos. And we ourselves take part in working in the cosmos. And from the cosmos, together with the purely spiritual beings who dwell there, we work chiefly upon the head. So that when the human head appears here in the physical world, it is only apparently determined by mere heredity from one's ancestors. I have said repeatedly that everyone acknowledges that the magnetic needle does not turn by itself to the North and the other pole to the South, but that cosmic forces are at work, namely, that the earth is working there. In the case of the magnet, people own that the universe plays a part, it is only when one comes to the origin of a living being that they are not yet willing to see that the whole universe participates in it. In the case of man, it is with the formation of his head that the whole universe is concerned. The head has not merely come about through heredity, from father, mother, grandparents, etc. but forces from the whole universe are at work within it. It is principally from man's limbs and members that the configuration of cosmic forces acts upon what is in his head. On the other hand, we actually receive the rest of our organism, in so far as it is physical, through a kind of hereditary transmission from the generations of ancestors.

Modern natural science, my dear friends, is moreover very close to the discovery of this from its own standpoint. In fact the natural science of today only struggles against those parts of the truth that are suggestive of Spiritual Science. Natural science is very near at many points to a meeting with spiritual science. I said in other lectures and have indicated the same thing here, that natural science is very near to a discovery of something that has met with opposition even in spiritual science. People who read my Theosophy often find themselves repelled by the chapter where I speak of the human aura and how man's forces of soul and spirit are expressed for clairvoyance in a colour aura that sparkles round him. Now Professor Moritz Benedict, whom I have often mentioned in other connections, has recently made experiments in Vienna with persons who have a gift for using the divining-rod. Professor Benedict did not make clairvoyant experiments; as he is very unwilling to acknowledge clairvoyance, but he made experiments in a dark chamber with those gifted for using the divining-rod, which has played such a great role in this war. You probably know that it has played a very special role in this war. Since water was needed for the soldiers, persons able to use the divining-rod were posted to various army-groups in order to discover springs of water for the men. This went on very largely in the southern areas of the fighting. Driven by necessity, of course, one had to do such things. Now in the camera obscura and with the method of natural science Professor Benedict has examined people who can find water or metals under the earth by means of the divining-rod. In the case of a woman who was quite small, he discovered that she showed under treatment in the camera obscura, an immense aura, so that she looked like a giant. He could even describe the right side as bluish, the left side as yellowish-red. This can all be read today as scientific findings, since Professor Benedict has published the whole matter in his book on the divining-rod. What has been observed by Professor Benedict through these methods is the aura, as I have mentioned on earlier occasions. It is not the aura of which we speak; we mean much more spiritual elements in man than this lowest, almost physical aura which Professor Benedict is able to find by natural means in the camera obscura. Still there is a connection. Precisely that part of my book Theosophy which has met with the most opposition and abuse, has thus shown its point of contact with ordinary science. Things will move quickly, and it will be the same with regard to what I have just touched upon. At no distant time, and purely from researches of natural science it will be possible to establish that what a man bears within him as inherited from ancestors is not the form of the head nor its inner forces, and that the head in fact is produced by forces of the cosmos. We should never be nationalistic, my dear friends, if we were to follow our head alone. The head is not in the least adapted to be nationalistic, for it is derived from the heavens, and the heavens are not nationalistic. All the dividing of men into groups that finds a place in our thoughts does not come from the head; it comes from that element through which we are connected with the hereditary stream of humanity. This of course plays into the head when man is living here between birth and death, for the rest of the organism continuously exchanges its nerve-forces and blood-forces with the head.

When we speak of heredity, however, and that the part of man which excludes the head received its forces from ancestors, we must only refer to the physical, for as regards the spiritual part of the remaining organism, it is another matter. And therefore it is very important for us now to consider a fact which can only be brought to light through spiritual science. Thus natural science will discover, as it has discovered the aura, the fact that the head is only influenced through heredity by being added to the rest of the organism. That man is only related to his ancestors in respect of the rest of the organism—this will be discovered even by natural science. But we touch upon another field which natural science cannot of course enter forthwith. Inasmuch as we are born we bear in our head the forces of the universe; they shape our head. A little, to be sure, can be outwardly substantiated. One who observes children in their development will perhaps know that in the very early days it can often be asked—whom does the child really resemble? And the likeness often only comes out strongly in later childhood—some at least of you will have already noticed that. It rests on the fact that the head is mainly neutral as regards earthly conditions; the rest of the organism must first affect the head (it can do so of course even in the embryonic stage) and then the features and so on can show a likeness to the ancestors. If one has a feeling for such things, one can see for oneself externally the truth that lies in this domain.

But the matter goes deeper. Between the spiritual universe—for the universe is filled with spirit and spirit-beings—and the earth on which we dwell there is an intermediary which is never at rest. A fine substance, which cannot be produced in the chemical laboratory since it does not belong to the chemical elements, streams in continuously on to the earth out of the wide universe. If one wants to draw it schematically, one can say: if the earth is here in universal space (see diagram), from all sides universal matter continuously streams in upon the earth, a fine universal substance (arrows inwards), and this fine substance penetrates a little below the earth's surface. So that this continually takes place—substances from the whole of cosmic space sink down towards the earth. It is not physical substance, not a chemical element, but actually spiritual, auric substance that sinks down below the surface of the earth. When we come down to earth from the spiritual world, to find a place in a human body, we use the forces that lie in this substance.

Now it is significant that this substance which streams into the earth and again streams out, is made use of by man when he

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dies. He finds in the out-streaming substance, forces which take him into the spiritual world. This substance, which I have shown coming inwards towards the earth, enters the surface to a certain depth and then streams away again (arrows pointing outwards). So that one can continually perceive a sort of inbreathing of ether or auric substance into the earth, and again an out-breathing.

This is an observation which is not so very easy to make. But if it has once been made, if one has once realized that the earth actually inhales and exhales spiritual substance continuously, then one knows how to apply it to all circumstances and, above all, to human life in the way I have just described. Thus we come into our bodily nature with what I have indicated as inwardly directed arrows, and with those pointing outwards, we pass out again in death.

In this case I will relate how I came upon this fact years ago. The forces that play here, the in-streaming and out-streaming forces, are not solely concerned with human life, but with every possible kind of earthly condition. Now a special problem for me was how matters stood with the cockchafers—yes, cockchafers. Cockchafers are in fact extraordinarily interesting because, as you probably know, when there are a great many cockchafers in a year then in three to five years there are very many grubs—(their larvae). These grubs affect the potato crop very seriously, one gets very bad crops if there are many grubs. And a man who has anything to do with potato culture knows that there will be a bad crop three to five years after a year in which there are great numbers of cockchafers. Now I had looked on that as an interesting fact, and then I discovered that the life of the cockchafer is connected with the in-streaming substance and the life of the grubs with the out-streaming substance. I will only stress this as a matter by which you can see how one comes upon such things from quite a different side. One comes to such things with the most certainty when one does not observe them on the direct object but on a relatively indifferent object, to which one can most easily maintain a neutral attitude. You see, however, from this that the substances of which I have spoken, penetrate under the earth and remain there for a time. The substance that in a certain year streams in, only streams out again after several years. This is also connected with the fact that the out-streaming substance is on the whole heavier than the instreaming substance. This latter is more active, streams in quicker, the out-streaming substance is heavier and streams out more slowly.

When one makes intensive observation of human life one can see how man makes use of the forces in the instreaming substance when he comes out of the universe to birth. Then in later years he loses connection with them. You will realize from what has been said that it is the head which is chiefly concerned with this instreaming substance. But the human head is a hard globe. It is indeed a hard globe, and among all the organs it is the most ossified. And thus, relatively early—not in childhood, but relatively early—it loses connection with the instreaming forces. Hence its formation and development are finished early. Man continues in his childhood his union with these instreaming forces and then they cease to influence him, at least this is so in our time-cycle. It was not always so on earth—I will speak of this presently—but it is so in our time. Now while man lives here on earth, the rest of his organism, apart from the head, takes possession of the out-streaming substances and their forces. This remaining organism imbues itself with them, and it is these forces which can rejuvenate the organism from without, as I indicated yesterday. They are the rejuvenating forces which act upon the etheric body, and which, while we are growing old physically, make it more and more chubby-faced. Thus the human being, as etheric man becomes chubby. In this process undergone by the etheric body that is connected with the remaining organism there work the forces streaming out of the earth. And it is these too which we use when we go through the portal of death to return to the cosmos, to the spiritual world.

The earth, as you see, has a share in our life, is inwardly interested in it. And something is connected with what I have now said that can very easily be brought into a formula, into an essentially important formula. For a long time we live as souls between death and rebirth before we enter physical life through birth, and again we live as souls when we have passed through the gate of death, even up to our next incarnation. The dead live a spiritual life, and this life is connected with the stars as here on earth we are connected with physical matter. Since our head has been formed and shaped by the forces which we have lived through between death and a new birth, since we build up our head, as it were, out of cosmic forces, our own real being of soul and spirit fairly early finds its spiritual grave in our head. We possess the head-forces that we have here on earth because our head is actually the grave of our soul-life as we led it before birth, or before conception. Our head is the grave of our spiritual existence. But inasmuch as we have come down to the earth, the rest of our organism is adapted to make us resurrect, for it takes up the forces which stream from the earth into universal space, in order to form its spiritual element. And whilst our physical organism falls away from us, our spiritual part with our forces that stream out from the earth passes through cosmic space into spirit existence.

This is the wonderful polarity that prevails in the universe in regard to man. We become physical out of the spirit, burying our spirit nature in the head, in the head is the end of our spiritual existence before birth. Here upon earth it is reversed. We leave the physical behind; the physical goes to pieces gradually during our life and the spiritual arises. We can say therefore: Birth denotes the resurrection of the physical, the spiritual being changed into the physical; death denotes the birth of the spiritual, the physical being given over to the earth, just as the spiritual is given over to the universe through our birth. We give our spiritual element to the universe by reason of our being born, and by reason of our dying we give over to the universe our physical element. By giving our spiritual part to the universe through our birth, we are physical human beings. By giving our physical part to the earth through death we are spiritual human beings in the period between death and a new birth. That is the polarity.¹ And our life here consists in developing our spirit organism. But we can only develop it in the right way for our present earthly cycle when what I said yesterday is taken into consideration. That is to say, when one reaches the point where both members of human nature enter into a real correspondence, when head-life and heart-life enter into correspondence with one another, and the shorter head-life really lives itself into the whole man. Thus the whole man can then be rejuvenated during the lifetime to be lived through, when in fact the head has long since lost its mobility, its power of inner development.

It will be the special task of a future educational science to make anthroposophical spiritual science so fruitful that the human being comes to feel how he is built up out of the cosmos, how he actually ‘shells himself’ from the cosmos and how he gives back to the cosmos what he has won for himself upon earth. This education must be given through all sorts of narratives, all sorts of things which are adapted moreover to youth—but so adapted that one can keep one's interest in them through every age of life. I only beg of you, my dear friends—I will not say to think-through something, for that is not of much use—to feel-through, thoroughly to feel-through something. Here too, you see, is a point where modern natural science is already concerning itself with what can be investigated through spiritual science. I have mentioned how intelligent geologists have expressed their view that the earth is already in a dying-out condition. The earth has overstepped the point where as earth-being she was actually in the middle of her life. In the excellent book by Eduard Suess, The Countenance of the Earth, you can read how the purely materialistic geologist Suess states that when one walks over fields today and looks at the clods of earth, one has to do with something dying out that once was different. It is dying out. The earth is dying. We know this from Spiritual-Science, since we know that the Earth will be transformed into another planetary existence which we call the Jupiter existence. Thus the earth as such is dying away. But man, that is the human-race as sum of spiritual beings, does not die with the earth; humanity lives beyond the earth, as it lived before the earth was Earth, in the way I have described in my Occult Science. And so one can permeate oneself—not in thought as I said, but in feeling and experience—with the conception: ‘I stand here on this earthly soil, but this ground on which I stand, in which I shall find my grave, has but a transitory appearance in the cosmos.’ How then does a next earth, a new planet, arise out of this earth, on which the humanity of the future can dwell? Through what does it arise? It arises through the fact that we ourselves carry piece by piece what is to form this new planetary existence. We human beings—the animal kingdom is also to some extent involved—inasmuch as we always carry within us something belonging to the next life, are already here during our physical life preparing the next planet that will follow the earth's existence. In the forces that go back again lies what is to be the future of the earth. We do not live merely in the present, we live in the future of the earth, but we have to keep returning into incarnation since we have many things still to fulfil on earth as long as earth exists. But we are involved in the future life of the earth. We have said that the earth breathes spirit-substance in and out. In the in-breathed substance we carry the past and the laws of the past, the forces of the past. In what is breathed out, given back again by the earth we bear in us what belongs to the future. In the human race itself rests the future of the earth's existence.

Think of all this made really fruitful with feeling and warmth, instead of all the stupid things that are imparted to the young nowadays: think of this made alive in hundreds and hundreds of vivid narrations and parables and brought to youth! Then think what a feeling towards the universe would be aroused—what there is to do! What there is to be done if our civilization is to go forwards—what there is to do concretely! This is very important to consider. And it can be considered all the more since it is connected with what I have called the rejuvenation of man. That present-day humanity has come to such calamities is connected with the fact that it has lost the secret of changing head-life into heart-life. We have hardly any real heart-life. What people generally speak of is the life of instincts and desires, merely that, not the spiritual element of which we have spoken. Today men let what streams out into the universe just peacefully stream out, and they do not bother themselves about it. They pay no attention to it.

Some individuals instinctively take it into account. I have recently given an example of how individuals take it into account, in which case however they differ very much from others. I have related the difference between Zeller and Michelet, the two Berlin Professors. I have said that I spoke with Eduard von Hartmann about the two men, just when Zeller had obtained his pension, since at seventy-two he no longer felt able to hold his lectures at the University. But Michelet was ninety-three years old. And Hartmann related how Michelet had just been there and had said to him ‘I don't understand Zeller, who is only seventy-two years old saying he cannot go on lecturing. I am ready to lecture for another ten years!’ And with that he skipped about the room and rejoiced over what he would lecture upon next year and could not imagine how that lad Zeller, the seventy-two-year-old Zeller, put in a claim to be pensioned off—no more to address the students!

This keeping young is connected with a proper mutual action taking place between head and heart. This can of course happen in the case of single individuals, but on the whole it can only occur rightly even in single individuals, when it passes over into our civilization, when our whole cultural life becomes imbued with the principle that it should not have mere head-life but heart-life as well. But you see, to acquire heart-life needs more patience. In spite of the fact that it is more fruitful, more youth-giving to life, yet for heart-life more patience is required than for head-life. Head-life ... well, you see, one sits down and crams. When we are young we prefer to stick to our cramming in spite of all the talk of the pedagogues. For, my dear friends, certain customs have remained from earlier times, when things were still known atavistically, but people no longer attach a right meaning to such customs. I will remind you of one.

Everything that has been preserved from relatively not very early times, before materialism had become general, has a deeper meaning. In recent decades the habit has already been lost, but when I was young—it is some time since—there was an arrangement in the Grammar School—in the Lower School in the second Class—to have Ancient History, and then in the fifth Class one had Ancient History again. Those who planned such regulations at that time no longer knew why it was so, and the teachers who dealt with these matters did not act as if they were aware of the reason. For anyone who had been aware of it, would have said to himself. ‘When I give history to a boy in the second Class, he crams it, but what he takes in needs a few years for it to become at home in his organism. Therefore it is a good thing to give the same again in the fifth Class, for only then does the knowledge that entered this poor head three or four years ago, bear its good fruits.’ The whole structure of the old grammar school was really built up on these things. The monastic schools of the Middle Ages had still many traditions derived from ancient wisdom, a wisdom that is not ours, but one that—preserved atavistically from olden times—arranged such things logically.

In fact it needs the principle of patience if life of the head is to pass over into life of the heart. For the head-life quickly unites with us, the heart-life goes more slowly, it is less active—so that we must wait. And today people want to understand everything all at once. Just imagine if a modern man had the idea of learning something and then had to wait a few years in order fully to understand it. Such a principle is scarcely to be associated with the frame of mind of modern men. The feelings of modern men lie along very different lines.

One can find examples of this and it is well to point them out. Two plays have lately been produced in Zurich by people connected with The Anthroposophical Society, in fact it has been widely pointed out that the two people are connected with the building in Dornach, with Spiritual Science and so on. In this case, to be quite just, it must be owned that these two Zurich performances by Pulver and Reinhart have really been very well received in Switzerland. But one can find remarkable things in the correspondence that has gone out from Switzerland. The foreign correspondents have shown themselves, well, less interested, shall we say, than in this case the Swiss audience themselves. Thus I have had a newspaper given me in which these two Swiss first performances by Pulver and Reinhart were discussed, where the correspondent cannot forego pointing out that the two authors are connected with our Movement and have drawn a good deal from it. Today people are not only afraid of the wrong teaching of the Gnosis, as I related yesterday, but they are afraid of anything concerning the life of spirit. If something about world-conception creeps into anything—Oh, that is dreadful! And this actually rests on the fact that there is no feeling for this relation of head-life and heart-life. All life to be found in mankind today outside the head is purely life of instinct and desire; it is not spiritual. And so the life of instinct and desire is irritated with the mere head-life. Head-life is very spiritual, very intellectual today, but more and more will it become—can one say—‘un-purified’ by the instinct and desire life. Hence thoughts come forth in a very curious way. And this correspondent of whom I speak—you can perhaps best judge of the confusion of his head through his instincts if I read you a characteristic sentence showing his fear that questions concerning world-conception play into these plays of the two authors. Just think, the man goes as far as writing the following:

‘But Pulver's belief in Christ ought to grow out of depths of sorrow and doubt if from the stage he wished to win disciples. The star flower plucked by Reinhart's seeker after Paradise at his studio window in the very first scene ought to bloom only at the end and from a bleeding heart.’

And now comes the sentence which I mean:

‘Both poets had their world conception already complete in their head as they began to write; it would have been better for the dramas if they had had to wrestle for their religion as they wrote.’

Now just think of that: nowadays one manages to make it a serious fault for anyone with a world conception to write! One is supposed to sit down as a perfect fool in face of the world to scribble away, and then in the scribbling, at the end, a world-conception is supposed to spring forth. Then the thing is produced at the theatre, and this is supposed to please the audience! Just imagine such stupid nonsense being actually spread abroad in the world today; and many people do not notice that such rubbish is being circulated.

Such things simply depend on the fact that the life of the head is not worked on by the whole man. For of course the journalist who wrote that was a very ‘clever man’. That should not be disputed.

He is very clever. But it is of no possible use to be clever, if the cleverness is mere head-life. That is the important thing to keep in mind; that is extraordinarily important.

Here we touch upon something fundamental, very necessary to our present civilization. One can make such observations in fact at every turn. Logical slips are not made today because people have no logic, but because it is not enough to have logic. One can be wonderfully logical, pass examinations splendidly, be a brilliant University Professor of National Economy, or any other subject, and in spite of being so clever and having any amount of logic in one's head, one can nevertheless go off the rails again and again. One can accomplish nothing connected with real life, if one has not the patience to lead over into the whole man what is grasped by the head, when one has not patience to call on the rejuvenating forces in human nature. That is the point in question. Anyone having to do with true science, such as spiritual science, knows that he would be ashamed to give a lecture tomorrow on what he had found out or learnt today—because he knows that that would be absolutely valueless. It would only have value years afterwards. The conscientious spiritual investigator cannot lecture by giving out what he has only recently learnt; but he must keep the things continually present in his soul so that they may ripen. If he brings forward what he has only just acquired he must at least make special reference to the fact, so that his audience may make note of it. One will only be really able to see what the present time needs if one bears in mind these demands on human nature. For what is necessary for the present age does not lie where today it is mostly sought; it lies in finer structures that nevertheless are everywhere spread abroad. One really need not touch on politics in calling attention to the following:

There are numbers of people today—more than is good for the world at any rate—who are of opinion that this war must continue as long as possible so that, from it, general peace may arise. If one ends it too quickly, one does peace no service. In the last few days—in what I say now I am passing no judgment on the value or lack of value of the so-called peace negotiations between the Central Powers and Russia, but it has been interesting all the same in the last few days to see what a curious sort of logic it is possible to work out. I have been given an article that is really extraordinarily interesting in this sense. The gentleman in question (his name is of no consequence here) argues against a so-called separate peace because he considers that through it universal peace would not be furthered. A direct way of thinking—but one perhaps that has gone a little deeper—might rather say to itself ‘Well, we may make a certain amount of progress if at least in one spot on earth we leave off mowing each other down’. That would perhaps be a straightforward, direct mode of thinking. But a thinking that is not so direct might be thus expressed: ‘No, one really dare not leave off in one place, for in that way “universal peace” would not be promoted.’ And now the gentleman in question gives interesting explanations—that is, explanations interesting to himself—as to how people quarrel over words. It is his opinion that those people who say ‘One must be enthusiastic about any peace, even if it is only a separate peace’, are only hypnotized by words. But one must not be dependent on words; one must go to the core of the matter, and the matter is just this—that a separate peace is harmful to the general peace of the world. Among the various arguments that the gentleman adduces is one of the following sentence, an interesting sentence, a most characteristic one for the present day—where is one to begin, not to reduce matters too much to the personal?—Well—‘Whoever is honest must admit that this is the motive of many’ (not all!) ‘among us who so delight in a “separate peace” and in Lenin and Trotsky’, (he means that enthusiasm for the word ‘peace’ is the motive) ‘while at the same time they shout tirelessly against anti-militarists and show little appreciation for our Lenins and Trotskys’. (He is speaking of Switzerland.)

‘We, however, who are not dupes of any word, but want to get at the matter itself, we do not want simply German peace, but peace, we want general peace. For us the word “separate” is a contradiction to the word “peace”.’

(If one goes into it seriously, one must carefully distinguish between peace and peace! Moreover the article is headed ‘Peace and Peace’.)

... ‘We too who do not want German peace, but peace, we want general peace. For us the word “separate” stands in contradiction to the word “peace”.’

Thus the gentleman who inveighs throughout the whole article against the worship of a word, then writes the following:

‘... For us the word “separate” stands in contradiction to the word “peace”. Separation is the principle of strife, not the principle of peace. After this World-War we need a World-Peace in which all nations come at the same time to a great mutual agreement. What we see in Brest-Litowsk, this game of a select circle of diplomats, imbued with all the subtleties of diplomacy, with the naiveté, the idealism, (also the dogmatism) of the representatives of a new order, is a spectacle that can please no one who wishes the ideal to remain pure. It is to be feared that we may get a Devil's peace, which will only produce more frightful war, instead of God's peace which finally leads to an end to all war.’

Well, my dear friends, this is certainly logic, for the article is written with ingenuity; it is brilliantly ingenious. This article ‘Peace and Peace’ is even boldly and courageously written in face of the prejudice of countless people, but its logic is devoid of any connection with reality. For the connection with reality is only found through that of which we have spoken, through the maturing of knowledge; what the head can experience must be reflected upon in the rest of man and this must mature. It may be said that what the very clever men of today lack most of all is this becoming ripe. It is something that is connected with the deepest needs and deepest impulses of the present. You see, the present day has no inclination at all to go in for the study of these things. Naturally I do not mean that every single person can go in for such study, but men whose métier is study, ought to occupy themselves with such things, and then that would pass over into the common consciousness of mankind. For do we not find that journalists—with all respect be it spoken—write what they find accepted as general opinion.

If instead of Wilsonianism or some such thing, Mohammedanism were to be represented as the accepted common opinion, European journalists would write away about something Mohammedan. And if spiritual science had already grown into a habit in human souls, then the same journalists who today grumble at Spiritual Science would, of course, write very finely in the sense of Spiritual Science. But nowadays there is a disinclination to go into such things among the very people whose task it should be.

You see, as man stands here on the earth, he is really connected with the whole cosmos. And I have said before that what holds good today on earth has naturally not always held good. That we may be informed at least about the most important things, we shall speak now principally of the period of time since the great Atlantean deluge, the Flood. Geology calls it the Ice Age. We know that changes took place in mankind at that time, but there was a humanity upon earth even before this, although in a different form. (You can read in Occult Science how mankind lived then.) The Atlantean evolution preceded the present evolution. In that part of the earth, for instance, where the Atlantic Ocean is today—as we have often said—there was land. A great part of present-day Europe was then under the sea—conditions on earth were quite different during the age of this Atlantean humanity. The ancient Atlantean civilization went down. The Post-Atlantean has taken its place. But the Atlantean followed the so-called Lemurian civilization, which again had several epochs. Thus we can say that we are in the post-Atlantean civilization in the fifth epoch, following the first, second, third and fourth epochs. Before this was the Atlantean civilization with its seven epochs (see diagram), before this again was the Lemurian civilization with its seven epochs. Let us turn our attention to the seventh epoch of the Lemurian civilization. It lies approximately 25,900 years before our epoch. It was about 25,000-26,000 years ago that this seventh epoch of the Lemurian age came to an end on earth. However remarkable it may sound, there is a certain resemblance between this seventh Lemurian epoch and our own epoch. Similarities are as we know always to be found between successive periods, similarities of the most diverse kinds. We have found a close similarity between our age and the Egypto-Chaldean. We will now speak of one which is more distant; there is also externally, cosmically, a resemblance. You know that our epoch which begins in about the 15th century of the Christian era is connected with the cosmos through the fact that since that time the sun has its Vernal Point in Pisces, in the constellation of Pisces, the Fishes. The sun had previously been for 2,160 years in the constellation of Aries, the Ram, at the Vernal Equinox. Here in this seventh Lemurian epoch (left) there were similar conditions. Twelve epochs ago the sun was in the same position. So that towards the end of the Lemurian age there were conditions similar to ours.

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This similarity contains, however, an important difference. You see, what we acquire today of inner force of spirit and head-experience, as we have described it in these studies, was also experienced by the Lemurian human being of that time, though in a different manner. The Lemurian man was constituted in quite a different way from the man of today, as you may read in my Occult Science. What could enter into him out of the universe, really entered right in. So that the Lemurian man received practically the same wisdom as the man of today gains I through his head, but it streamed into him out of the universe, I and only in this sense was it different. His head was still open, his head was still susceptible to the conditions of the cosmos. Hence powers of clairvoyance existed in ancient times. Man did not explain things to himself logically, he did not learn them, but he beheld them, since they entered his head out of the cosmos, whereas today they can do so no longer. For what comes in ceases in relatively early youth. As I have said, the head no longer stands in such intimate relation to the cosmos. That is so in the present epoch, at that time it was not so; at that time the head of man still stood in much more inward relation to the universe; at that time the human being still received world-wisdom. This did not lack that logic which is nevertheless lacking in what man gains for himself today. That original wisdom was an actually inspired wisdom, one that came to man from without, arising from divine worlds. Present-day man is unwilling to consider this; for modern man believes (forgive me if again I express myself somewhat drastically) that ever since he has been on earth he has had a skull as hard as it is today. This, however, is not true. The human head has only closed in relatively recent times. In ancient times it was responsive to cosmic in-streamings. Only an atavistic remainder is still there. Everyone knows that when he observes a child's head (a really young child's head) there is still one place that is soft. This is the last relic of that openness to the cosmos, where in ancient times cosmic forces worked in a certain way into the head and gave man cosmic wisdom. Man at that time still had no need of that correspondence with the heart, for he had a small heart in the head that has become shriveled and rudimentary today. Thus does the human being change. But conditions alter over the earth and man must grasp this and change too—adapt himself to other conditions. We should have been perpetually tied to the apron-strings of the cosmos, if our head had not ossified. We are shut off in this way from the cosmos and can develop an independent ego within us. It is important that we bear this in mind. We can develop an independent ego by reason of having acquired physically this hard skull. And we may ask when mankind actually lost the last remnant of the memories, the living memories of the ancient archetypal wisdom? This remnant really only faded away in the epoch that preceded ours, the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, during the Greco-Roman civilization. Human beings had then, of course, long since possessed closed skulls, but in the Mysteries there still existed original wisdom preserved from quite ancient times, from the epoch that preceded the Lemurian Pisces-age, from the Lemurian Aries-age.

As much as man could have of his ego in the Lemurian times was also revealed to him from the cosmos; his inmost soul-force was manifested to him from the cosmos. This came to an end in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Greco-Latin time. The heavens closed their last door to man. But instead they sent down their greatest Messenger precisely at that time, so that man can find on earth what he formerly received from heaven—the CHRIST. The Mystery of Golgotha is indeed a cosmic fact, inasmuch as there would have ceased for man what had been revealed to him from the heavens, cosmically revealed, from Lemurian times. Then there appears the Impulse which can reveal it to him from the earth. Only man must gradually develop what has been revealed to him from the earth in the Christ Impulse, and develop it, precisely by that process of rejuvenation of which we have been speaking.

Now, it is a result of this human development that we bear something within us today that is—so to speak—quite wonderful. I have already mentioned in yesterday's lecture that the knowledge of our time is the most spiritual it is possible to have; man however does not remark it because he does not let it mature. What can be known today about nature is far more spiritual than what was formerly known. What man formerly knew brought down certain realities out of the cosmos. In the stars, as I mentioned yesterday, the Scholastics of the Middle Ages still saw angelic Intelligences. Modern Astronomy does not of course see any angelic Intelligences, but something that one can calculate by mathematics or mechanics. But what was formerly seen has been thoroughly passed through a sieve; it is there, but sifted to the last vestige of spirituality. It belonged to the quite lovable genius of Novalis to see rightly in this point. In the Aphorisms of Novalis you find the beautiful expression—I have often quoted it—‘Mathematics is in truth a great poem’. But in order to see how mathematics, by which one also calculates the worlds of the stars and their courses, is a great poem, one must be oneself a poet, not as the modern natural scientists are perhaps, but such a poet as Novalis. Then one stands in wonder before the poetry of mathematics. For mathematics is phantasy. Mathematics is nothing observed through the senses, it is phantasy. It is, however, the final product of phantasy that has still a connection with the immediate external reality. Mathematics in fact is Maya thoroughly passed through a sieve. And if one learns to know it, not merely in the schoolmaster sense that prevails in the world today, but learns to know mathematics in its substance, learns to know it in what it can reveal, then one learns indeed to know something in it that has as much reality as an image that we see of ourselves in a mirror, but which nevertheless tells us something, in certain circumstances tells us a good deal. But to be sure, if one considers the mirror image as a final reality, one is a fool. And if one even begins to want to hold conversation with the reflection because one confuses it with reality, one is not really looking for reality at the right spot. Just as little can reality be found in the mathematical calculations in Astronomy. But the reality is certainly there. As a mirror reflection is not there without the reality, so the whole spiritual existence, that is calculated purely mathematically, is there; it is only passed completely through a sieve, and must force its way back to reality.

Precisely because our age has become so abstract, has been formed so purely by the head, it has such an immense spiritual content. And there is actually nothing that is so purely spiritual as our present science; it is only that men do not know nor value this. At any rate it is almost ridiculous to be materialistic with modern science! For it is a funny way of going through life if one takes modern science materialistically, and yet almost all learned men do take it thus. If one asserts, with the ideas that modern science can develop, that there is only a material existence, it is actually comic; for if there were only a material existence, one could never assert that there was a material existence. Merely by making the statement ‘there is a material existence’—this action of the soul is in fact the finest spiritual element possible, it is a proof in itself that there is not solely a material existence. For no person could assert that there was a material existence if there were only a material existence. One can assert all sorts of other things, but one can never assert that there is a material existence, if one only accepts a material existence. By asserting that there is only a material existence one actually proves that one is talking nonsense. For if it were true what one asserts, if there were only a material existence, nothing could ever arise from this material existence which became somewhere or other in a person the asserting—which is a purely spiritual process—‘There is a material existence’.

You see from this that nowhere has such a logical proof been put forward that the world is of the spirit, as by the science of our time which does not believe in it—that is to say, does not believe in itself—and by our whole age, which does not believe in itself. Only because mankind has spiritualized itself increasingly from epoch to epoch and has arrived at having such sharply refined concepts as we have today, only because of this has mankind reached the point of now seeing solely the quite ‘sieved’ concepts and can of its own volition connect them with the heart forces. This is shown very plainly now in external life, it is shown too in the great catastrophic events.

For, my dear friends, if one really studies history, there is a great difference between what is now called the present world-war—which is really no war at all, but something else—and earlier wars. People today are not yet attentive to these things, but in all that is going on this distinction is shown. One could refer to many proofs of the fact that this is shown. But you see, there are many men who speak from the standpoint of a quite particular ingeniousness in such an unclear way as the man from whose article I read you a sentence. For this modern acuteness gets to the point of again and again defending the peculiar sentence ‘One must prolong this war as long as possible so that the best possible peace may be established’. No one would have spoken like that about earlier wars. In many other respects too they would not have spoken as is spoken today. People do not yet notice that, as I said, but nevertheless it is so. If you take all earlier wars you will always find that fundamentally in some way or other men could say why they were waging war. (I will bring forward two things to illustrate this, though hundreds might be brought forward.) They wanted something definite, clearly to be outlined, to be described. Can the men of today do this? Above all, do they do it? A great part of those who are heavily involved in the war, do not do it. No one knows what really lies behind things. And if someone says that he wants this or that, it is generally so formulated that the other has no real idea of what he wants.

That was certainly not the case in earlier wars. One can go through the whole of world history and not find it. You can take such grievous events in earlier times as, for instance, the invasions into Europe of the Tartars, the Mongols, and you will always find that they were quite definite things, that could be sharply defined, that could be understood, and from which one could understand what actually happened. Where is there today a really clear definition of what is actually going on, a really clear description?

That is one thing. But now, my dear friends, let me say something else—what was generally the actual result of wars in earlier times? Look wherever you will and you will find that it was certain territorial changes, which people then accepted. How do people face these things today? They all explain that there must be no territorial changes. Then one asks oneself again ‘What is the whole thing for?’ Compared with former things this is really how the matter lies: people cannot in any case fight for what they always fought before, because that simply cannot be done. The moment that is somehow supposed to happen there is an instant declaration ‘That simply cannot be done’. Thus according to the impulses that prevail there can really never be a peace; for if one were to leave everything as it was before, there was no need to begin. But since one has begun and nevertheless wants to leave everything as it was before, one can naturally not leave off, for otherwise there would have been no need to begin!

These things are abstract, paradoxical, but they correspond to profound realities; they really correspond to conditions that ought to be kept in mind at the present time. One must in fact say that what is discussed here as the lack of correspondence between head-man and heart-man is today world-historical fact. And, on the other hand, one can say: men stand today in a quite particular period of development; they cannot control their thoughts in a human way. That is the most significant characteristic of our time; men cannot humanly control their thoughts. All has become different, and people are not yet willing to notice that all has become different.

Thus, one is not merely concerned with something that has a significance in questions concerning world-conceptions, but with something that very deeply affects the most wide-spread event of our time, the most crushing event for humanity. Men no longer find from out their soul the connection with their own thoughts. And this can show us how not only the individual but humanity too in a certain way has forgotten how to call upon the rejuvenating forces. Humanity will not easily be able to extricate itself from this condition. It can only do so when there is a belief in the rejuvenating forces, when we get rid of much of what cannot be rejuvenated. Whether we look at individual persons or consider what is going on around us, we find the same thing everywhere. We find a sifted and sieved head-wisdom, head-experience, without the will to let things ripen through the heart-experience. This is, however, so deeply linked with the needs of the common evolution of mankind, that man should turn his closest attention to it for the present and the immediate future. We have indeed often spoken of it before from the most varied aspects. It is precisely this state of things that shows how necessary it is for spiritual science to enter the world today—even, one might say, as something abstract. But it is fruitful, it can remould the world because above all it can send its impulse into actual, concrete conditions of life. Man would face sad times if he should continue no longer to have faith in the becoming older, if he wanted to stop short at what the short-lived head can experience. For I have said already that the utmost extreme of what the short-lived head can acquire is abstract Socialism, which does not proceed from concrete conditions. Yet this is really solely and alone what people believe in. The philosopher constantly asserts today that there is only matter—on account of his refined spirituality. But he ought to give up this judgment at once, for it is nonsense. But the mainspring of the present so-called war is to be found in the general world-condition from which there is no way out—just as there is no way out from the sentence ‘There is only matter’. For the present time is in fact spiritual! And this that is spiritual needs condensing, needs strengthening, so that it may grasp reality; otherwise it remains mere mirror-image. In the way humanity works today it is as if one did not wish to work in a workshop with actual men, but as if one thought one could work in a workshop with mirror-pictures.

And so it is in the most extreme form of head-concept-socialism, which on this account is so plausible for great masses since it is logical head-experience, purely logical head-experience. But when this logical head-experience cannot meet the spirit element of the other man, with what then can it meet? That is what we have often spoken of, in fact, even today. It then unites with blind desires and instincts. Then there results an impure mixture between the head-experience, which is really quite spiritual, and the blindest instincts and desires. That is what they are now trying to join together in the East, in a world historical way! A socialistic theory, pure head-experience, has nothing whatever to do with the actual concrete conditions of the East;

what is devised by men like Lenin and Trotsky has nothing to do with what is developing as concrete necessities in the East. For if Lenin and Trotsky, through some peculiar chain of circumstance, had landed up in Australia instead of Russia, they would have thought they could introduce the same conditions that they wished to introduce into Russia. They fit Australia, South America, just as much, or just as little, as Russia; they would fit just as well on the Moon, since they fit no real concrete conditions at all. And why? Because they come from the head, and the head is not of the earth. Perhaps they would really fit better on the Moon, since they are purely from the head. The head is not of the earth. That they are intelligible, comes from the fact that they are closely related to the head. But here on earth such things must be established as are related to the earth; a spirituality must also be found which is connected with the earth's future, in the way we described yesterday.

That leads into quite deep and significant things. And when one considers them, one will see how little inclined the man of today really is, to go into these things. And they are as necessary as our daily bread. For otherwise, if the path to rejuvenation is not found, the evolution of mankind will either get into a pit or a blind alley.

• 1. See: ‘Prayers for mothers and children’—and ‘Earthly Death & Cosmic Life’.

Rudolf Steiner: I think this should be a kind of discussion hour again, and I think you will have a lot on your minds. Please feel free to express yourselves in all directions!

Emil Bock: The question of worship is close to our hearts because we cannot create the new form of worship on our own.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, it will of course be necessary to develop some symbolism in this direction, that is to say that in the cultus we have spoken of, we develop individual examples of cultic forms, so to speak. The shaping of the cultus is actually such that one comes to it when one has the prerequisites for it. Of course, it is definitely a matter of becoming accustomed to the pictorial shaping of what one is so accustomed to today, to look at it intellectually. And Mr. Uehli, I believe, said something today, didn't he, about something cult-like, as it is practiced in the Waldorf School. That it is difficult to shape the cultic aspect may be clear to you from the fact that for a long time all cults have been limited to adopting the traditional. All the cultic forms that exist today are actually very old, only somewhat transformed in one way or another. And in the time when humanity lost the ability to create pictorially, in that time, cult was also fought against in a sense. Perhaps it can help you to understand cult if we add a few words to what we said this morning about a very different form of cult.

You know that wherever real community is sought, inner community, that cultus plays a certain role. I only remind you that when the somewhat questionable Salvation Army movement spread, even this Salvation Army movement sought a certain cultus; and it is also known that even the temperance movement has very few cultic surrogates. Wherever the aim is to achieve a true community movement, there the striving for some form of cult is everywhere.

Now, as you know, the Freemasonry movement in modern times is a very extensive community. Isn't it true that this freemasonry movement also seeks to achieve the cultivation of community through cult, and one can say that the freemasonry movement shows how cult must become when it turns into a purely materialistic movement. For actually the freemasonry movement is the materialistic form of a spiritual movement.

You see, the secret of the human essence is essentially part of the rituals and symbols of the Masonic movement. If you want to look at the human being and study the actual essence of the human being in its connection with the world, then today the materialistically minded researcher will tell you: the human being actually only has the same muscle forms, the same bone forms as the higher animals, even the same number of these organic forms – he is a higher developed animal, a transformed animal. That is, after all, what more or less clearly expressed underlies our current knowledge. This realization is immediately dispelled when one considers how humans integrate into the cosmos quite differently [than animals]. The essence of the animal – if one disregards the individual forms of deviation, which are everywhere, after all – the essence of the animal is that its backbone is built on the horizontal. Please do not misunderstand what I mean by this. Of course, an animal can sit up like a kangaroo, and that can seemingly make its spinal column form an angle with the horizontal. But that is not actually required by the organic constitution. Similarly, certain birds, parrots, can have a more or less upright posture; but the animal's plastic structure is not designed to lift the spinal column out of the horizontal. In contrast to this, the essential thing about man is the formation of his spinal column in a vertical direction. Man has thus formed the spinal column in a vertical direction. This gives one of the essential characteristics for distinguishing man from the animal world. You just have to bear in mind that you cannot consider a being in the world in isolation.

You see, when someone looks at a compass needle, it does not occur to him to say that the compass needle takes on a certain direction through that which is only in it, but he says quite naturally that the earth has a magnetic north and south pole, and the compass needle is directed by the whole earth. Only when it comes to the organic does man prefer to explain everything that is in the organism only from the organism itself, and not to relate the human being at all to the whole universe. But the person who sees through things also relates the organism to the whole universe. The fact of the matter is that systems of forces run through the whole universe; some circle the earth horizontally, while others act in such a way that these horizontal forces are interspersed with forces that run in a radial direction, so that the human being aligns his spine with the radial forces. In this way he is integrated into the universe quite differently from the animal, which has its backbone, the most important bodily line, integrated horizontally, that is, parallel to the earth's surface. Now, many other things depend on this.

You see, the human brain, which weighs 1300 to 1400 grams, would, if it were to exert its full weight, immediately crush all the blood vessels underneath the brain. The brain is quite capable of crushing the blood vessels with its weight. Why doesn't the brain crush them? Because the brain is embedded in the cerebral fluid. The cerebral fluid oscillates through the arachnoid space, which is formed by the spinal column on the inside; the cerebral fluid flows up and down under the influence of breathing. The entire brain floats in cerebral fluid. From physics, you may know that a body loses as much weight as the displaced fluid volume weighs, so that instead of weighing 1300 to 1400 grams, the brain exerts a maximum of 20 grams of pressure on the blood vessels. So you see, the human brain is designed not to insist on its heaviness, but to have an uplift, to escape heaviness. This is only possible if the human spine is vertical. In animals, the whole heaviness of the brain presses, and that is because the arachnoid space goes horizontally into the brain. The circulation that is caused takes place in a completely different way.

One must not only look at the structure of the human being, but also at the position in the universe. So that one can say: If one considers the outstanding position of man in the universe, several important lines arise above all. (It is drawn on the board).

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Firstly, the line parallel to the earth's surface, the horizontal. Secondly, the thing that distinguishes humans from animals: the fact that the backbone is vertical to the horizontal. You have drawn two shapes with this: firstly, the horizontal, and secondly, the right angle. If you are aware of the significance of the horizontal line, which basically creates animality, and the significance of the right angle for the placement of man in the universe, then you associate certain ideas with the horizontal line and with the right angle, which can thus become symbols.

Freemasonry, which seeks to characterize the essence of man, has the spirit level and the right angle among its symbols. The other symbols are also modeled on the forces of the universe. How they are modeled on the forces of the universe will become clear from the following consideration.

If we imagine the earth here; man moves on the earth, let us say so, so I will draw it radially, then it is the case that man here has his direction in the vertical and that the way he connects to the center of the earth is a triangle. You have the triangle again as a symbol in the Freemasons' cult. Everything in this Freemasonry is — in the first degree — taken from the configuration of the human being. There you see the formation of symbolism. Symbolism is there where it occurs in its reality, not arbitrarily invented. You only come to the symbolism when you study it in reality. Symbolism is grounded in the universe, it is there somewhere. It is the same with the cult.

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You see, in his temporal life between birth and death, man is constituted in such a way that he has within him the forces that continually kill him. These are the forces that solidify him, that are effective in the formation of the bone system, and that, in their morbid development, can lead to sclerosis, gout, diabetes, and so on. I would say that these forces are found in every human being, as forces of solidification. That is one system of forces. The other system of forces that a person has within them is what continually rejuvenates them. This system of forces is particularly evident when one falls prey to pleurisy, feverish illnesses, in fact, anything that burns a person internally. In the anthroposophical world view, I have called the solidifying forces Ahrimanic forces, and the forces that lead to fever, which are therefore warming forces, I have called Luciferic forces. Both forces must be kept in perpetual equilibrium in the human being. If they are not kept in balance, they will lead the human being to some pernicious extreme, physically, mentally or spiritually. If the feverish and solidifying forces, the salt-forming forces, were not kept in constant physiological balance, then man would necessarily end up either in a state of sclerosis or in a feverish state. If man develops only the powers of understanding, if he is inclined only towards intellectualism, he falls prey to the Ahrimanic; if he develops only the fiery elements, passion, the emotional, then he falls prey to the Luciferic. And so man is always caught between two polarities and must maintain his balance. But think how difficult it is to maintain balance. The pendulum that should be in balance always tends towards a deflection. These three tendencies: the tendency towards balance, the tendency towards warmth and the tendency towards solidification are in man. He must maintain himself upright, so that man can be seen symbolically as a being who continually seeks to maintain himself upright against the forces that continually endanger his life.

This is represented by the third degree of Freemasonry. The Mason who is initiated into the third degree is symbolically shown how man is threatened by three unruly powers that approach him and endanger his life. This is done in different ways. The simplest form is this: a man is presented in a coffin and three assassins creep up who want to kill him. In the contemplation of this threefold danger in which man is immersed, he is taught an awareness that he is in danger of death at every moment and must rise up.

Thus, in this symbolic clothing, man experiences a kind of real cultic action; he experiences something really important in a ceremonial way that is connected with life. And so it is indeed that one must try to get to know life, because then the symbols arise out of life. The dark side of Freemasonry is that although these symbols are used, although rituals are performed – in the first three degrees of Blue Masonry, in high-grade Freemasonry there are many other things – and that this ceremonial is drawn from ancient traditions, but that they are no longer understood. There is no longer any connection with the origins, which I wanted to present to you in a brief sketch. People only look at the ceremony and - and this is the dangerous thing - they get stuck on the ceremony; they are not introduced to the ceremony in such a way as to gain access to the spiritual through the ceremony.

You see, another way in which, relatively late, even as late as the 18th century, one still had a very vivid sense of the pictorial visualization of the secrets of the world, is for example this: If you open some books with pictures that were still in circulation in the 18th century – they were in circulation to make people aware of things that cannot be grasped by the intellect – you will see a picture that keeps recurring: a man with a bull's head and a woman with a lion's head. The man with the bull's head and the woman with the lion's head stand side by side. At first glance, the image is shocking for anyone who does not look at it more closely. But it is indeed the case that we human beings are actually constituted in such a way that we are most perfectly shaped in our physical body. That is where we are actually human. The physical body, as you will find described in my 'Occult Science', is the one that goes back to the oldest foundations; it is the most perfect. The human ether body is shaped like the physical body. If the physical body could be removed from the ether body, it would only adapt to the astral body, then this ether body would probably take on an animal form to the annoyance of many people, because then it becomes the expression of the emotional, the passionate. It is shaped in different ways in different people.

If we regard the male head, the etheric head, as an expression of what lives in the emotional nature, then, taken as a type, as an average, there is something bull-like in the male head. In the female head, as soon as one looks at the ether head, there is something lion-like. These are average forms. One can also feel this morally if one opens oneself to what the nature of woman encompasses, how she is the type of the lion-like. One can feel the bull in the man and feel the lion in the woman.

These are things that seem to be merely figuratively spoken, but they are taken from the supersensible nature [of man]. When the astral body [is considered] taken out of the physical body, it takes on complicated plant forms, and the human ego is a purely mineral, crystal-like being, it is completely geometrically shaped. So that one can say: In form, man is human in the physical body, in the etheric body he is actually animal-like, in the astral he is plant-like and in the I he is mineral-like. When one knows all these things, then one comes to realize how, in an earlier clairvoyant state, people really knew about higher worlds and formed these images from these higher worlds.

Now, this is just to indicate how symbols came into being and how they then traditionally propagated themselves. In our time, it is only possible to arrive at symbols if one delves lovingly into the secrets of the world; and only out of anthroposophy can a cult or a symbolism actually arise today.

You see, it is necessary to start from the elements. The first thing is that one grows into the genius of the language itself. Our language, especially where civilization is at its highest, has taken on a terribly external, abstract form. We speak today without feeling in our speech. You see, our way of speaking today is actually something terribly inhuman, because we no longer live in our language. Take the German word “Kopf”. When we feel it, we also feel how it is completely connected with the round form, with the rounded. On the other hand, the Romance word 'testa' is related to the idea of making a will, bearing witness, establishing something. It comes from a completely different background. And if you feel what is in the two words, you also feel the difference between the Romance and the Germanic element. The Germanic element forms the word from the plastic, the Romance, the Latin element forms it from the soul's manifestations. Take the word 'foot', which is related to 'furrow'; 'pied' is related to 'to set up'. This can be seen throughout the language, and you can feel it everywhere, how the special world feeling actually comes to light in the genius of the language. Consider how strongly the pictorial quality of language was still felt in the time when Goethe was writing. Do you remember the scene where the poodle appears on the stage, following Faust and Wagner, and where Wagner talks about the poodle and says, “he doubts” — by that he means that he moves his tail; with the word “doubt” he expresses the movement of the tail. If you look at what is still alive in the picture and compare it with our abstractions today, you can really feel your way into the pictorial way in which the genius of language has worked, by observing how the word “doubt” contains this wagging, this to and fro.

This is the first element of the pictorial soul life when one lives into the pictorial language. It is really the case that one grows into the pictorial language if one only wants to; and that is already a good education of the soul, to grow into the pictorial language. Today we speak in abstracto, the words no longer mean anything to us. You see, in my homeland a certain kind of lightning that you see in a special way is called “Himmlatzer”. I would like to know how one should not feel the image of lightning in “Himmlatzer”, the word paints it. And so it is also quite possible, if you go more into the dialect-like, into the dialects, to grow even more into the pictorial. One should educate oneself to have the pictorial in language. Today it is sometimes almost impossible to express something that one has because the pictorial quality of language has been lost. Of course, one must disregard all artificially induced things. Anyone who is in any way eccentric will experience what happened to the Falb. He was walking with a friend and speaking animatedly – and stepped into a pool, and thought – pool? — temple! — Of course, one must not be eccentric by seeking external similarities. One must delve inwardly into the imagery of language. Then one will really understand the word “two.” Originally, the “two” was not thought of in terms of adding one and one, but rather the “two” was thought of in terms of dividing one in two. The older way of forming numbers is based on analysis, not synthesis. You can still see this if you take, for example, Arabic arithmetic in the 12th century AD.

An interesting booklet has now been published by our friend Ernst Müller about Abraham Ibn Ezra – I will give you the exact title tomorrow – which deals with numbers and is extremely interesting for understanding the earlier way of forming numbers. If you follow this, you will find, without making any crazy claims, the similarity of the word “two” with the word “doubt”; you will also be led to the suffix “el”. In this way you can find your way into the imagery of language. This is the alphabet of pictorial imagination.

Furthermore, it is about finding your way into the whole complicated way in which, for example, a human being is constructed. I have given some examples today. As I said, if you arrive at real knowledge in this way, the images first arise for the symbolism, and then you come to really understand historical life. Then you also come to be able to imagine cultic acts.

Take the following example. You see, the Greeks did not yet have the possibility of having the concepts completely separate from the things. Just as we perceive colors, the Greeks perceived the concepts in the things; for them, they were perceptions. If we start from this, we really come to understand how humanity has changed since the time of the Greeks. If, for example, one wanted to depict a type of altar that would be more suitable for the Greeks, one would depict it in bright colors. If one wanted to depict an altar that would be suitable for a person who lives more in the modern world, who is not attuned to bright colors (the Greeks did not perceive colors in the way we do), one would have to build it in a more blue color today.

If you want to approach a community with a cult today, you would have to make it extraordinarily simple. A complicated cult would not satisfy people today, so you have to make it extraordinarily simple. Above all, we need an expression of the inner transformation of the human being in the cult everywhere. This inner transformation of the human being, which one could call the pervasion of the human being with Christ, for man is actually not born at all in a state in which he is already permeated with Christ from the outset, as a result of heredity; he must find Christ within himself. This could now be expressed symbolically in the most diverse ways through simple but effective cultic acts.

Let me give you an example: if someone were to formulate a saying, it would consist of seven lines. In the first three lines one would express essentially how the human being still stands under the influence of the conditions of heredity, how he is born out of the father principle of the world. The fourth line, the middle one, would then show how these principles of heredity are overcome by the principles of the soul. And the last three lines would show how, through this, the human being becomes a seer of the spiritual. Now, one could read such seven lines to a community in such a way that one presents the first three lines with a somewhat more abstract, rougher language, then in the middle, the fourth, one transitions to a somewhat warmer language, and the last three lines are presented in elevated language, with a raised tone. And one would have in it a simple cultic act that would represent the becoming-Christed and becoming-spiritualized of the human being.

It is not important that something like this is explained afterwards – that is precisely what should not be done – but it should be made tangible. The image should be felt, and one should act accordingly. So you see how it is possible, after all, to ascend to the cultural. Then one must get a feeling for how everything that relates to the thinking is similar to light, and how everything that relates to love is similar to warmth. Now think what a means of expression you have in language when you can, wherever you wish to express something tending towards the thinking, associate it with light. When you say, “Let wisdom illuminate the human being,” you have said something real. You will feel how the thinking is actually the captured light that becomes a thought. Likewise, when speaking of love, we everywhere use images taken from warmth relationships. If one says, “A common idea spreads warmly over a community of people,” then you have the image of warmth in it, but you have spoken in real terms. Thus, when you feel the inner wisdom of language, you enter into the pictorial realm.

This is one such path, and I will give you very detailed examples later when we meet again. One can even develop modern culture on the basis of these things. Today I just wanted to hint to you at the practical way in which one is actually led. But it is always about our — forgive the harsh expression — emaciated souls. We are not human at all, we have become so dead through materialistic education. Today man feels everything separately. He does not feel at all that his nerves are the receptacle of light, that his nerves are glowing with light. He believes that vibrations are at work. But it is from light that the thought is formed. It is not just an image, but reality, when it is said: “Man is permeated by thoughts”.

This is far too little known, which is why it is not possible to visualize it. But I believe that if you read my book “Die Geheimwissenschaft” (The Secret Science), for example, and immerse yourself in how I present the three metamorphoses of Moon, Sun and Saturn, in order to visualize how it all unfolds in pictures, then you will be able to visualize it all by yourself. If you do not stop at the abstraction or even believe that I have constructed or invented something, but if you feel the necessity that it must be presented in this way, then you already have a school for pictorial imagination. And there is every reason to move on to cultic actions. From what I have presented, one must also acquire a feeling for the inner numerical structure of the universe.

Today, of course, people often laugh when you talk about the number seven or the number three. But these numbers can easily be empirically derived from the universe. I would like to know how anyone can avoid thinking of the number three when they think of a human being. Man is, after all, a threefold being, and if you think about it properly, you come across the number three everywhere. If, for example, you are speaking to a group of children, or to older children, “May the light of your thinking shine through you,” you have not finished speaking until you also say, “May the life of your feeling stir you,” or “permeate you”; and “May the fire of your will empower you.” The elements combine of their own accord, and this then flows over into the form of the ritual. You have to get a feeling for the fact that something is incomplete if you just say, “May the light, your thinking, illuminate you.” It is just like putting up a human head alone. That cannot be, I cannot imagine that someone just puts up the human head, it cannot be like that, something else is needed. So I must also have the feeling when I say: “The light, your thinking, illuminates you,” that is not complete, I must also say: “The life, your feeling, permeates you” and “The fire, your will, empowers you.” If I take only one, I have just as much as if I only have the human head. So you come to think of the other. Then one enters into the self-creative aspect of the world's numerical organization, and so the cultic form arises out of the thing itself:

May the light of your thinking permeate you. May the life of your feeling imbue you. May the fire of your will empower you.

This is, after all, the basis of what Mr. Uehli will have told you today [about the Sunday lesson in the Waldorf school]. It is all there in the formula; it is formed in this way everywhere. It is so difficult to understand when it occurs in life.

You see, if you were to take a piece out of my Philosophy of Freedom, a chapter, it would be almost like cutting off a limb of the human being. It is only intended to be read as a whole, because it is a special form of thinking. It is not a combination of individual parts, it has been allowed to grow. And that can be further developed.

Paul Baumann: Doctor, could you tell us something about the musical element in the cult?

Rudolf Steiner: The situation is as follows: we human beings are placed in the world in such a way that — if I may use a pictorial image (diagram 2 is drawn on the board) — on the one hand we are organized in our heads. This organization of the head is essentially conditioned by the fact that the external world penetrates into it and is inhibited everywhere. Everything that penetrates from the world into the head is actually reflected in the head, and what we perceive outside is the reflection, that is, what we usually have inside in our waking consciousness. And if you take the human body, especially what is made of the eye, but also of the other sense organs, then you find that it all tends to be defined at the back; something is mirrored. On the other hand, the human being develops the bone system, the muscle system and so on. In the case of the head, we actually have the round, closed skull capsule. Then we have the tubular bones, the muscles and so on (see plate 2). The head is actually quite impenetrable for what affects it, just as the mirror is impenetrable for light; that is why it reflects. This is different in what is broadly termed the limb-metabolic-organism; here the world reaches into the tubular bones and muscles, so that one can say: In the head organization everything is repelled, but the limbs absorb, so that actually the processes of the limb-metabolic organism are brought about from outside through the way in which I am integrated into the world organism. Nothing is repelled; it is, as it were, organized through, it is taken in. And that then accumulates, especially in the lungs. The lungs are such an accumulation organ where the external world takes shape. And a second, already sieved accumulation is in the organ of hearing. The organ of hearing is actually a lung at a higher level. Anyone with an eye for it can see even in the structure of the outer ear how it is not formed like the eye. The eye is formed from the outside in. The ear is closed and encloses what is the actual sensory organ. So everything that is visible on the ear is formed in such a way that the human being is formed from two vortices. One of these is thrown back, reflected, and actually returns to itself; the other forms an organism, develops the form, and meets the first, and they then come together here (see plate 2), so that everything that comes from the outside inwards is reflected here and gives the ordinary memory, for example the memory for the images seen. On the other hand, that which builds up the human being is movement, it is movement throughout, it is forms of vibration that run within him. I have told you about the brain water, haven't I? Man is 92% water and only 8% solid; what is solid is only incorporated. The whole is all movement. What organizes the human being out of movement, that organizes him out of the word. Man is truly the Word made flesh in the most literal sense, and this Word made flesh comes together with that which is reflected in it, so that we can say: We are built first of all for the visual, but this is organized entirely for being reflected back; and then we are built for the auditory, for that which forms the human being, for sound formed into words, which then accumulates in listening, which becomes heard sound.

The human being becomes aware of the external world through the direct or the transformed visible. Through that which becomes sound in himself, which becomes musical, the human being is the being who rises from the sphere of the musical and is fertilized by the sphere of the optical, of the visible, so that the musical is indeed that which continues to work in us from the world. We are built through music; our body is an embodied music. This is the case in the fullest sense. And light plays a role here (see Chart 2) and is reflected. This also accounts for the great difference between ordinary memory, which we have in relation to the outside world, where we retain the visual, and musical memory. Musical memory is something quite different – it will also seem wonderful to you – musical memory arises in the opposite way, it arises from the accumulation of the sound that flows through; in this way, the human being throws back his own nature within himself. It is therefore that which works musically in the human being, his very innermost nature.

Now you may think that we place images in some way, whether we place them visibly before people in worship, or whether we evoke the images by speaking, and then we imbue these images with the musical, whether with instrumental music or song. It is nothing other than the fact that, fundamentally, the two main principles of the world are juxtaposed. What the human being is as a creature of light is brought into connection with what the human being is as a creature of sound. And through this, the cult [...] becomes a polarity. Admittedly, this is already the case with the word, and the older cults did not use abstract speech for this reason either, but rather the recitative, which already has something song-like about it. And this recitative, which played such an important role in the ancient sacrifice of the Mass because the Mass was sung, was intended to represent the interpenetration of the luminous with the tonal, so that in the cult the musical that which most essentially internalizes man, that which furthers the mystical element, while the rest furthers that which furthers the pantheistic, the outpouring of man to the universe.

We thus have the possibility, on the one hand, of driving man into expansion through everything luminous and conceptual, and on the other hand, of leading him into contraction, into the absorption of the supersensible through the musical. And while, for example, the non-musical, the luminous in cult is suited to teaching us a sense of the world, the musical is suited to deepening our sense of the I to the point of the divine. The ideal would be to take the luminous to a certain degree and then let it merge into the musical, letting it merge quite organically into the musical. In this way, one would actually have recreated the human being in his constitution through cult.

Gottfried Husemann asks whether the church music of the past, for example Bach, is still needed. Would the new cult not also need a new kind of music?

Rudolf Steiner: It is true that if one is obliged to do something quickly today, then one will revive these older musical things. But it is certainly the case that people can no longer develop an entirely inward relationship to these older forms, just as an adult cannot develop the same life forms as a child. It is absolutely necessary that musical forms be created out of today's feeling. Naturally, one must begin where one has the possibility to do so. You will have noticed that where we do eurythmy and work with music, our friends have already found quite good musical forms out of the musical feeling of today. This will be based on the fact that more and more people will relearn in the musical sphere, just as in the pictorial sphere. There are indeed tentative attempts, which need not be condemned, but one must know that they are just tentative attempts, and the same applies to the musical sphere, for example with Debussy, who lives in the individual note, who lives in the individual tone. But it must not become tone painting. It is the case that more and more will be experienced of what arises in the individual tone as a secret, and then one will seek to analyze the individual tone. Perhaps one will have to expand the scale, insert some tones, but mainly one will enrich by experiencing the character of the individual tone. And thereby special musical possibilities will arise. [To Mr. Baumann:] You also hope that one will then experience melodies in the individual tone? — It is actually the case that you can. There is then a training opportunity. There the anthroposophical musicians will have to meet the others halfway. I am absolutely convinced that anthroposophical musicians will still have a great deal to do, that anthroposophical musicians in particular will have a great mission. Before Wagner, old music was actually at an impasse. But Wagner did not really advance music. He broadened music by bringing a side-current into it. One can see this as great and ingenious, but it is still a side-current. One will have to take up the development of music before Wagner and find there precisely that which can give much to culture. Until then it will, of course, be very good to use older works. There are actually some truly wonderful things there, both in Protestant and Catholic church music. For the modern person, the relationship will no longer be a completely inward one; one will have to try to delve into the musical itself.

Emil Bock asks a question concerning the Quaker movement.

Rudolf Steiner: I have always had the feeling with the Quakers that this is actually a movement that comes specifically from the Anglo-American element. I have not been able to find any significant predispositions in Central Europe for the kind of community building that comes to light in Quakerism. I am not familiar with this endeavour from my own experience and therefore cannot know whether anything fruitful can come of it or not, but I doubt that something similar to Quakerism can arise out of the Central European spirit. You see, the Anglo-American element actually experiences religion in a completely different way than the Central European can experience it. The Central European experiences religion first and foremost in thinking. That is the archetypal phenomenon. It is a mysticism thoroughly illuminated by the intellectual light. This is everywhere, even where very radical religious forms and sectarian aspirations arise. In Central Europe you will find everywhere mysticism illuminated by the light of thinking, while the Anglo-Americans let the religious element be immersed in the instinctive part of man. Of course this appears in different ways, and it would be interesting to investigate somehow from which blood mixtures the Quakers recruit themselves. One must go to the instinctive, blood-related, and there one will find the subsoil. You will see that one will surely find something like an instinctive disposition there, but the Central European never founds anything community-building on instinctive dispositions.

This is really a clear difference between the West, the Center and the East. The West seeks the higher more or less in the subconscious, in the center one seeks it in consciousness, and in the East one seeks it in the superconscious, there one is always looking up. The American especially looks to the earth and expects everything from the earth, the Russian - even more the Asian - actually always looks up. The Central European looks straight ahead. It is already the case that we could end up on dangerous ground in the religious field in particular if we were to imitate the actually Western element. We must not do that in any field. It has caused us great damage in science and leads to rigidity in the religious field in particular. We have to work more with the soul than with the body.

Emil Bock: We have heard that there are already rituals that have been handed out on occasion: a baptismal ritual, a funeral ritual, and an adapted version of a mass. I would like to ask whether there is a possibility that we could get to know such pieces in order to live into them.

Rudolf Steiner: Certainly, these things would be considered as starting points. The funeral ritual came about because a member of our movement wanted such a funeral ritual. Of course, we had to tie in with the usual funeral rituals, but by translating the usual ritual, not lexicographically, of course, but correctly, something essentially different emerged. I would ask for these things back some time and would very much like to use them as a basis for our course consideration. I will simply ask our friend to transcribe them and then perhaps send them here; that is quite possible. In the case of the Mass offering, I initially only gave a translation of the [Catholic] Mass offering, but something new actually emerged. But I only got as far as the offertory with the translation, it is not finished yet. In the Old Catholic service, the Mass is read in the local language. Our friend went so far as to read the Mass in this translation up to the offertory in the Old Catholic service.

Things take time, and we have little time. But all of this can really be made available to you. Of course, it would be necessary to create a new baptismal ritual in particular, because the old baptismal ritual is not entirely suitable because it was always aimed at baptizing adults, and then it was transferred to the child. If you want to baptize children today, a [new] ritual must first be found. Elements for this already exist, which I can also make available to you. The baptismal rituals have grown out of baptisms for adults. When you baptize a child, you are speaking to an unconscious person, and it must be a corresponding action. The child knows nothing about it. We must not go so far as to rebel against infant baptism itself, but many things need to be renewed in the ritual. If you take the St. John's baptism, it is based on the fact that the person was submerged in the water, the adult was submerged. You know that a person can be brought to the point where his earthly life appears to him in a mere tableau. His life appears to him in a kind of tableau, and through this he experiences unconditionally that he belongs to a spiritual world. He has an experience of belonging to a spiritual world. This is actually also expressed in the baptismal ritual. We cannot do that with children. We need a ritual for children that expresses how the child is accepted into our community, and the communal religious supersensible substance that lives in the community must flow over to the child. We must express this in the baptismal rite, and it can indeed be done.

You see, there has been no reason in the anthroposophical movement to develop these things in a concrete way for the simple reason that we wanted to avoid them. There have been more than a few cases where people wanted to introduce such things. I always rejected it for the reason that, of course, it would have killed the anthroposophical movement stone dead from the start. We just had to stick with what was more or less allowed.

Twenty years ago it was more, today it is less the case that the Catholic Church regarded the ritual as its monopoly. We would have been killed on the spot, and so there was little reason to develop the ritual in that direction. The other thing, where the form of a ritual was developed, was interrupted by the war, where one could no longer continue; because as soon as these things would have been continued, one would have been treated as a secret society.

These are the reasons why the ritual side has not been developed within the anthroposophical movement. But it will be possible to develop it in your movement, because it can be regarded as something quite natural for ritual to be developed in a religious movement. Even though Protestantism has a certain horror of the cultic, I still believe that [the necessity of ritual] could be felt again.

A participant: To begin with, Catholics have more sacraments than Protestants. What is the basis for this and what is the actual significance of the ritual of Holy Communion?

Rudolf Steiner: What is contained in Catholic dogma goes back to certain forms of older knowledge. It is imagined that between birth and death, the human being passes through seven stages. First, birth itself, then what is called maturing, puberty, then what is called the realization of one's inner self around the age of 20, then the feeling of not corresponding to the world, not being fully human, that is the fourth. And then, isn't it, the gradual growth into the spiritual. These things have then become somewhat blurred, but one imagined the whole human life, including the social one, in seven stages, and one imagined that the human being grows out of the spirit between birth and death. The Catholic Church does not recognize pre-existence in more recent times. There is only one thought of God, and this growing out of the thought of God is presented in seven stages. These seven stages must be counteracted by other forces. Birth is an evolution, maturing is an evolution, and each form of evolution is counteracted by a form of involution: baptism for birth, confirmation for puberty. Every sacrament is the inverse of a natural stage in evolution. One can say that Catholic doctrine presents seven stages of evolution, to which it juxtaposes seven stages of involution, and these are the seven sacraments, four of which are earthly, namely baptism, confirmation, the sacrament of the altar, and penance. These four are as universal as the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and I. As you go higher, you come to the spirit self, the spirit of life and spiritual people. Just as the shining in from the spiritual world, the last three sacraments are those that go into the social: marriage, ordination and extreme unction. The penetration of the spiritual world is expressed in ordination. So these are the seven sacraments, of which the last are extreme unction, ordination and marriage. They are simply the sacraments of the inverse processes for the natural processes that take place for humans, and the corresponding cultic acts are also set up accordingly.

The concept of the seven sacraments is certainly not arbitrary. What is arbitrary is to limit these seven sacraments to two. This happened at a time when people no longer had a feeling for the inner numerical constitution of the world. It is these things, of course, that make truly serious Catholic priests, especially those in religious orders, such opponents of Protestantism. They all consider it to be a form of rationalism, something that knows nothing. There are genuine spiritualized natures among the clergy – the Jesuits, aren't they, they are prepared – I found one among the clergy of Monte Cassino, Father Storkeman, with whom I also spoke about Dionysius the Areopagite, who showed me the altar where he usually says mass. He spoke to me about his feelings at mass, and you could see that it had nothing to do with the usual confession of the Catholic Church.

And another time, in Venice, there was a patriarch who was a terrible fellow. Another, a younger cleric, preached, and I could see occultly that the one who had preached was truly spiritualized. The sermon was also really very fine. It is precisely through the ceremonial that individuals who stand out show themselves. I also saw one read the mass on the lower ground floor [of a church] in Naples, where I could really see the transubstantiation that underlies the Catholic transformation. It is actually the case that when transubstantiation is performed by a real priest, the host acquires an aura. Now, you may believe that or not, I can only relate it.

There is no need to hold back [saying this]: there is an inner reality to the cult, that is undoubtedly the case. You can see the damage in Catholicism when you see what it has been, and what was lost in the rationalist period. It makes no sense that [Protestantism] took two out of seven sacraments; there is no reason for that.

Emil Bock: May we also ask what the significance of laying on of hands was in the early days of Christianity?

Rudolf Steiner: You must be clear about the fact that humanity has undergone a development and that certain spiritual forces that were present in prehistory are increasingly receding as humanity becomes more intellectual and develops freedom. Certain powers in relation to natural life have definitely declined, and that is why we do not understand many things that are told in biblical history and that mean something quite different from what man associates with them today. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that in modern times, something like Socrates' relationship with his students is viewed in a mean and disgustingly mean way. People talk about a kind of homosexuality, whereas it points to a side of the powers of the soul where something was achieved not only through the word, but also through the presence of Socrates with his students. The human presence meant something to them. It is a disgusting slander of things when today the concepts of homosexuality are applied to these things in Greek culture. And so it is with the touch of the laying on of hands. The hand of a person essentially not only has a feeling meaning, but it also has an emanation, and in earlier times the emanation was stronger, it could have a healing effect. I have often expressed this in lectures in a certain formula: human life is a whole, and childhood belongs together with later life. No person attains the power to bless in later life who is not able to pray in childhood. Anyone who has never folded their hands in prayer as a youth can never hold their hands in blessing. The laying on of hands was simply an initiation process [.. gap in the postscript], what is involved there, is involved in the laying on of hands. That was something that was trained earlier, and the healing effect of laying on hands should definitely be considered. Isn't it true that today's people are no longer in the same situation, they are not encouraged to develop something like that in their youth. Such things were taught in the past, they were a reality once. But it is not out of the question that in a more spiritualized future these things will be taught again. Would you not consider that desirable? — The folding of the hands is a preparation for blessing. Likewise, for example, in older Catholicism it was taught that If you learn to kneel, you will learn to say the 'Dominus vobiscum' in the right way. Do you find that strange? You know how to say the 'Dominus vobiscum', don't you? You learn to say it by kneeling, otherwise it is not as powerful.

A participant: It has been said that the priests in ancient Egypt had an extraordinary position of leadership. We have heard that initiates have led humanity, that they have worked through real thoughts. The question is how this would have to be modified today by the new.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, it must become new in so far as we must no longer return to this strongly unconscious, atavistic element, but we must go through the much more conscious element, taking more account of the fact that every human being must develop into a personality. Even today in Catholicism, the personality of the priest is completely suppressed. When the stole is crossed, the priest is only a figurant of the church, he is no longer a human being. We must not cultivate this. In the Egyptian priesthood, in particular, much was based on the fact that, as long as the highest priest lived, the others were only allowed to be figurants. Only when he died could another enter. There was always only one. We must exclude all this today.

A participant: What about the priest's vestments?

Rudolf Steiner: The liturgical vestment came about in such a way that one imagined the coloration of a personal feeling in relation to the real, so, for example, one imagined the blessing priest. This naturally gives a very definite coloration of the astral body, and the liturgical vestment is formed accordingly. Isn't it so? When blessing, one's own personality is absorbed into the supersensible world and the blessing is allowed to flow over to the congregation; this gives a blue undergarment and a red outer garment. One simply models the astral body. The same is true for the other acts, for praying and so on. For example, they imagine that one has an outpouring of the spiritual. This can be followed quite precisely: the coloring of the astral body – the priestly robe. The liturgical robe is simply the coloring of the astral body. This could certainly be recreated, and the only question is to what extent humanity is ready to accept something like that again.

I had an excellent Protestant clergyman as a friend who had a great ideal, that is, he had many very beautiful ideals, but among others he had one, and that was the abolition of the Luther skirt. He wanted to go like an ordinary dandy. It embarrassed him that he could not go like a dandy when he was a pastor. Therefore, it was very painful for him not to be able to walk around in this modern, aesthetic man's garment, where one is clamped in two stovepipes. This monstrosity is, of course, regarded today as the only possible garment, and anything else that may arise is considered to be something foolish. The greatest folly is our man's suit. A human race that puts on a tailcoat and a top hat – it is obvious that such a human race cannot have any understanding for cultic vestments. This must be cultivated again in humanity. Perhaps when women can also take up this profession, when female preachers come along, there will be a way to arrive at cultic vestments sooner. Because women will have to do something to get to the pulpit. But today men want to do it like a Swiss speaker. He thought it was right, for example, not to give sermons, but to give speeches while walking back and forth on the lectern with a cigarette in his mouth. That's how he gave his lectures.

That's right. You know that cult robes were not limited to the church, because judges also had cult robes – and if you asked a judge today to put on the old cult robes, he would also remonstrate against it – yes, even the court ceremonial went hand in hand with a kind of cult robe. And finally, at the universities, you still have the rector's robes, which always pass from one rector to the next. In this respect, we just need to change our aesthetic ideas, and that's that.

Also known as: The Secret of the Grail in the Works of Richard Wagner, Parsifal, Arthur Lecture 27 of 37 from the lecture series: Christian Mystery.

I want to speak to you today about the truths of occultism and of theosophy, relating what I have to say with Richard Wagner's Parsifal. For there is a deep connection between the artistic work of Wagner and the spiritual movement of the present day that is known as Theosophy. That there is in Wagner and in his works a very large measure of occult power, is something that mankind is gradually learning to realize. And in the future something further will also become clear to us; namely, that there lived in Wagner a great deal more than he himself could have knowledge of. This is, in truth, the secret of many a work of art, that a force and a power live in it of which its creator knows nothing.

When this has come home to us; namely, that more—much more—was living in Wagner than he himself was conscious of, we must at the same time not forget that Wagner was never able to reach the last stages of wisdom. On this account the art of Richard Wagner has for the occultist quite a unique character; for while he knows that something more, something of deep mystery, is hidden behind it, he knows on the other hand that one can be in danger of looking in Wagner for something that is not there. The fact that a great deal more is to be found in Wagner than is generally perceived was well expressed by Richard Strauss, who said somewhat as follows:

When I hear people perpetually declaring that we ought not to add anything from our own thought to what Wagner has created, it seems to me we might just as well say we should refrain from adding anything from our own thought when we contemplate a flower! We would certainly never discover the secret of the flower that way; and it will surely be the same with those who are unwilling to allow themselves to add anything from their own thought to the works of a great artist.”

Richard Wagner concerned himself with themes of sublime significance. Always in his works you will find names that are connected with ancient, holy traditions. What he achieved in “Parsifal” is intimately connected with the spiritual power that has been active in such a striking manner in and since the last third of the Nineteenth Century.

In order to understand the figures and motifs that we meet with in Wagner, we need to probe into deep mysteries of the evolution of mankind. Wagner made an intensive study of man and his place in the great world, and of the mystery of the human soul. As a young man he tried research into the mysteries of reincarnation. We have evidence of this in his draft for a drama called “Die Sieger” (“The Victorious,” or, “The Conquerors.”) He abandoned the attempt, because the music for the drama proved to be an insoluble problem. As drama alone he could have succeeded with it. The story is as follows. A youth in the Far East, in India, Ananda by name, belonging to the Brahman caste, is beloved by a Chandala maiden of the very lowest caste, who is called Prakriti. Ananda is a pupil of Buddha. He does not respond to Prakriti's love. She is accordingly thrown into the utmost distress and sorrow. Ananda withdraws from the world and devotes himself to the religious life. An explanation of her destiny is then given to the Chandala maiden by another Brahman. She had, he told her, in an earlier life been a Brahman and had rejected the love of this very youth who was at that time in the Chandala caste. Deeply impressed with the teaching conveyed in this explanation, the girl then attaches herself also to the Buddha, and the two become followers together of the same teacher.

This theme was sketched out by Wagner in 1855, with the intention of elaborating it. He did not succeed, but a year later the same impulse presented itself to him in a new way. In 1857 the great ideal contained in Parsifal suddenly entered into Wagner's soul. It happened on Good Friday, 1857, in Villa Wesendonk on the shores of the Lake of Zurich. Wagner was gazing out upon the world of nature, with all its fresh young life in the full beauty of springtime. And in that moment he saw with perfect clarity the connection between the upspringing of all the budding new life of nature and the death of Christ on the Cross. This connection is the secret of the Holy Grail. And from that moment onward Richard Wagner knew in his soul that he must send forth into the world this secret of the Holy Grail, he must send it out into the world of music.

If we would really understand this remarkable and unique experience that Richard Wagner underwent, we shall have to go back a few thousand years in the evolution of Europe. (His own noble and exalted thoughts on the evolution of man Wagner has put forward in his work entitled Heathendom and Christianity). What was the nature of the teaching that was given long ago in the so-called Mystery Fellowships or Mystery Brotherhoods? Let us consider for a little this teaching as it was to be met with in Europe right up to the Sixteenth or Seventeenth Centuries; let us see what form it took in these times.

Mysteries have existed in all ages. In the mysteries, man received a knowledge that was at the same time religion, and he received a religion that was at the same time wisdom.

It is impossible to have a correct conception of a mystery if one has no conception of a spiritual world. We are surrounded here by the various kingdoms of nature; minerals, plants, animals and human beings. We regard the human kingdom as the highest of the four. But now just as man has thus around him kingdoms that are lower than himself, so has he above him higher beings in many stages. The beings that stand at different stages higher than man have from time immemorial been designated as “Gods.” The kind of wisdom imparted to man in the mysteries enabled him to hold conscious intercourse with the Gods. He was then called an initiate. Such an initiate possessed no mere wisdom of words; he had, in the mysteries, experienced facts. Even still today there are mysteries, although they are of another kind than those of olden or medieval times.

At the time when the Crusades were beginning, and even a little before, we find in a district in the North of Spain an important mystery. The mysteries that were still extant in that time have generally been known as the later Gothic Mysteries. Those who were initiated were called the Templars, or the Knights of the Holy Grail. Lohengrin was one of these. The Order of the Knights of the Grail had a different significance from another order or brotherhood which had its location in England and Wales; all the stories that are told of King Arthur and his Round Table relate to this other order of initiation.

In ages long ago, long before Christianity, a migration took place from West to East. Very long ago, there was land in the region of the Atlantic Ocean—the so-called land of Atlantis, where dwelt the Atlanteans, our ancient ancestors. All the people who lived later on in Europe and also in Asia as far East as India, were descendants of the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans lived under entirely different conditions from those that prevailed in later times. Life was hierarchically ordered. All control and rule was in the hands of the initiates.

In the North of what is today Russia a famous school of initiation existed in earlier times. The initiates of this school were known as “Trotten.” In the West of Europe were other initiation schools, and in them the Druids were the initiates. The whole social life of the people was still even then ordered and regulated by these initiates.

When we look back to these ancient schools of initiation, what sort of a teaching do we find there? What was the Mystery that was taught in them? It is after all only the forms of the teaching that change with the passage of time. Astonishing as it may seem, we actually find that in these very ancient schools of initiation the secret, the mystery that Parsifal discovered, is brought to its highest development—the secret; namely, of how the new budding life of nature in Springtime is connected with the Mystery of the Cross. We have to understand it in the following way.

The power of reproduction which we recognize in the animal and human kingdoms is also to be seen in the plant kingdom. In the springtime of the year the divine active power of creation shoots up out of Mother Earth. For we have to recognize that a deep connection exists between the power that manifests when the Earth clothes herself with her robe of green, and the divine creative power. The pupils in the initiation school were taught as follows: “All around you in nature you see the opening flower buds, and within them a power at work which is then later concentrated in the small grains of seed. Countless seeds will come forth from the flowers—seeds which, if laid into the earth, will be capable of bringing forth new plants. And now receive what I am about to say into your heart; take it deeply into your soul. The process that is taking place out there in nature is the very same as takes place in human beings and in the animal kingdom, only in nature it takes place without desire or passion. It goes forward in perfect purity and chastity. The boundless and chaste innocence that sleeps in the flower buds of the plants—this, it was felt, must enter right into the soul of the pupils.

And then they were told further: “It is the sun that opens the blossoms. The ray of the sun calls forth the power that rests in them. Two things meet—the opening flower and the ray from the sun. Between the plant kingdom and the divine kingdom stand the two other kingdoms—the animal kingdom and the human. These latter are really no more than a kind of pathway leading from the plant kingdom to the divine kingdom. In the divine kingdom we have again a kingdom of innocence and chastity, as in the plant kingdom. In the animal and human kingdom we have kingdoms of desire and passion.” But then it was told to the pupils that in the future “all passion and desire will at length disappear. The chalice will then open (even as the chalice of the flower opens)—will open from above downwards and look down to man. And as the ray from the sun goes right down into the plant, so will man's now purified power unite itself with this divine chalice. It can actually come about that the chalice of the blossom is spiritually reversed so that it inclines downwards from heaven, and the sun's ray, too, is reversed so that it lifts itself up from man to heaven.” And this reversed flower chalice which was told of in the mysteries as an actual fact was called the Holy Grail. The flower chalice of the plant that we have before us in material reality is the reversed Holy Grail. And the ray from the sun—all who have true occult knowledge learn to recognize it in the “magic wand.” For the magic wand is a symbol, in the language of superstition, for a spiritual reality. In the mysteries it was called the “bloody lance.” So here we have before us, on the one hand, the origin of the Grail and on the other hand the original “magic wand” of the genuine occultist.

I have given you here slight indications of profound truths, deeply significant truths that played a part in men's lives in the North and West of Europe.

Richard Wagner had a deep intuitive feeling for these truths, and so had his friend Graf Gobineau.

If one wanted to express what was behind the mysteries of which we have been speaking, one could say it was the knowledge of what flows in the veins of animal and man. True indeed are the words that are so often quoted from Goethe's “Faust”: “Blood is a very special fluid.” We shall come to perceive what blood really signifies when we learn to understand a great revolutionary change that took place once in the mysteries.

In the olden times of the European peoples it was known how much depends in human life on blood relationships. On this account the continuance of humanity was never left to chance. All such matters were in those times regulated out of an occult wisdom. It was known that when further evolution was restricted within small racial communities and no other blood was allowed to come in from outside these communities, then the human beings who were born within them would possess certain higher powers. In the mysteries it was understood what effect the mingling of different kinds of blood would have. The initiates had quite exact knowledge, also, of which family or clan would be rightly suited for a certain region of the earth. And they knew that where a union of common blood takes place, there certain powers are bestowed on the human being that is born.

When the ancient blood relationships began to be broken, a significant event took place in the mysteries. Something else was substituted in place of the parents having common blood in their veins.

In the high mysteries, blood relationship was replaced by the partaking of two spiritual “preparations.” In the lower mysteries outward symbols were used instead of these; and the outward symbols were Bread and Wine. In the two spiritual preparations was a substance that was like blood. They were substances that worked spiritually in a somewhat similar way to the way blood works physically in the veins. As the old clairvoyance gradually disappeared, men began instead to partake of these spiritual preparations. When they had learned all that is contained in the whole wisdom of theosophy, they received these symbols out of Ceridwen's Cup. That was the purified blood that could be given to man from the chalice that opened down to him from above. This Mystery in this true essence passed into the care of a very small community. In other parts of Europe the mysteries became decadent and were horribly profaned. For we find on every hand as the symbol of sacrifice a dish on which a bleeding head has to be laid. It was thought that something can be awakened in man by the spectacle of this bleeding head. What was at work there was nothing but black magic. It was the downright opposite of the Mysteries of the Holy Grail.

It was known in the Mysteries that what streams upwards in the Chalice of the Flower lives also in the blood of man. The blood needs, however, to be made clean and pure again, it must be as chaste as the sap that flows in the blossom. And in these Mysteries that had become depraved, this was brought to expression in a gross and materialistic manner. (In Northern Europe sublimated blood was used as a symbol, and in the Eleusinian mysteries were the wine of Dionysus and the blood of Demeter.) The Vessel of the Grail turned into an abomination by being made to hold within it the bleeding head—this we find again in the story of Herodias who uses for the head of John the Baptist, making mock in this way of the Mysteries. The essential secret of the high mysteries passed into the hands of Templars in Northern Spain, the Guardians of the Grail.

While the Knights of King Arthur concerned themselves rather with the events and affairs of this world, The Templars were able to be prepared to receive a still more sublime Mystery—even to understand the Great Mystery of Golgotha, which is the secret of the history of the world.

Christianity had its beginning among the people of Galilee—a mixture of strikingly different races, thus a people who stand entirely outside all blood relationship. The Saviour is One who does not base His kingdom in the very least on blood relationships; He founds a kingdom that is quite remote from any such bond. The blood that has been sublimated, the blood that has been purified, gushes forth from the sacrificial death—for that is the cleansing process. The blood that gives rise to sensual desires has to be shed, has to be sacrificed, has to flow right away.

The Holy Vessel with the purified blood was brought to Europe to the Templars on Monsalvatsch. The venerable patriarch Titurel received the Grail; he had been chosen for this beforehand. The victory had now been won. The spiritual in the blood had overcome that which was merely physical.

As long as we regard blood merely as a substance that is built up of various chemical component parts, we cannot understand what took place on Golgotha. How was it that Wagner was able to find the right mood for his Parsifal? It is most important for us to recognize that Wagner was able to do this because he knew that what happened on Golgotha had especially to do with the blood, he knew that we had to see there not only the death of the Saviour but we had to see what took place there with the blood, how the blood was purified on Golgotha and became something quite different from ordinary blood. Wagner has spoken of the connection of the Saviour's blood with the whole of mankind. In his book “Paganism and Christianity” we read these words: “Having found that the capacity for conscious suffering is a capacity peculiar to the blood of the so-called white race, we must now go on to recognize in the blood of the Saviour the very epitome, as it were, of voluntary conscious suffering that pours itself out as divine compassion for the whole human race.”

And in another place Wagner says: “Because His will to save was so tremendously strong, the blood in the wine of the Saviour was able to be poured out for the redemption of all mankind when even the noblest races among men were falling into decay—poured out for their salvation, as divine sublimation, the blood that is associated with family or species.” The Saviour having come from a mingling of many different peoples, His blood was the symbol of compassion and blood in purified form.

Hardly has anyone even come so near to this mystery as Wagner did. It is indeed the power with which he approaches this mystery that constitutes his greatness as an artist. We must not think of him merely as a musician, but as one who possesses deep knowledge and understanding and whose desire it is to resuscitate for the people of modern times the mysteries of the Holy Grail. Before Wagner wrote his Parsifal little was known in Germany of the mysteries and of the characters of whom he tells.

When men were brought into the mysteries, there were three distinct stages through which they had to pass:

The first was stupidity, simple-mindedness.

The second was doubt.

The third was blessedness.

The first was the stage when man was led right away from every prejudice that prevails in the world, and was made to depend upon the power he had in his own soul, made to depend upon his own power of love, so that he might be able to behold the inner light, to see it light up within him.

The second stage was that of doubt. This doubt comes to all when they are at the second stage of initiation, and is then resolved and raised up to a higher stage, even to the inner brightness and splendor known as “Saelde” or blessedness. That was the third stage where man was brought—consciously—together with the Gods.

Parsifal (“through the vale”) was the name given in medieval times to all such candidates for initiation, and “Parsifal” had to undergo these three stages in inner experience. With the insight of a genius, Wagner saw on that Good Friday, 1857, the guiding thread that must run through the whole development of Parsifal.

The Templars were those who stood for true Christianity as distinguished from Church Christianity. In the Middle Ages remnants were still left of the old degenerate mysteries. All that belongs to those is grouped together under the name of Klingsor. He is the black magician in contrast to the white magic of the Holy Grail. Wagner places him in opposition to the Templars.

Kundry is the modern version of Herodias, the symbol of the force of reproduction in nature, the force that can be chaste or unchaste, but is uncontrolled. Beneath chastity and unchastity lies a fundamental unity; everything depends on the way of approach. The force of reproduction that shows itself in the plants, within the chalice of the blossom, and right up through the other kingdoms of nature, is the same as in the Holy Grail. Only, it has to undergo purification in that noblest and purest form of Christianity which manifests in Parsifal.

Kundry has to remain a black enchantress until Parsifal releases and redeems her. In the polarity of Parsifal and Kundry we can sense the working of deepest wisdom. Wagner, more than anyone else, took care that men should be able to receive what he had to give without knowing that they were doing so. He was a missionary who had a most significant message to deliver—to deliver, however, in such a way that mankind was not aware of receiving it.

Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote an epic on “Parsifal.” It was inartistic, but it sufficed for his time; for there were in those days men who had a measure of clairvoyance and could accordingly understand Wolfram. In the Nineteenth Century it was not possible to make clear to man the deep meaning of that great process of initiation in a drama. There is, however, a medium through which man's understanding can be reached, even without words, without concepts or ideas. This medium is music. Wagner's music holds within it all the truths that are contained in the Parsifal story. His music is of such a unique character that those who listen to it receive in their ether body quite special vibrations. Therein lies the secret of Wagner's music. One does not need to understand it—not in the least! One receives in one's ether body the benign and healthful effect of the music. And man's ether body is intimately connected with all the movements and throbbings of the blood. Wagner understood the mystery of the purified blood. In his melodies are rhythms and vibrations that must needs beat in the ether body of man if he is to be cleansed and purified so as to be ready to receive the Mysteries of the Holy Grail.

We can only arrive at a full understanding of the quite individual way in which Wagner expresses himself in his writings when we look carefully into what lies behind it. Wagner was convinced that the human will receives a special illumination from the spirit. He said that the will is—to begin with—rude, clumsy, and instinctive; then it grows gradually more and more refined, the intellect begins to cast its light upon it, and man becomes conscious of suffering and through his becoming conscious of suffering, a purification is able to come about.

(Dr. Steiner here quotes a passage from Wagner where he is writing of his friend Gobineau, who held that this consciousness of suffering was the distinctive mark of the white race, and that man was able thereby to rise to clairvoyance and to a higher moral life.)

(Dr. Steiner continues:)

Wagner is here describing the process that consists in the reflection of the intellect upon the will, and of how man becomes thereby clairvoyant.

Wagner's creative work consists, in its essence, of a religious deepening of art; ultimately it is concerned with the deepening of man's understanding of Christianity. Wagner knew that Christianity can be shown forth to the world, best of all in music.

Through raising himself up to the contemplation of the inner mysteries of the world order, man can attain on the one hand knowledge and on the other hand also true piety. A path of development stands open for him, which will teach him to know the meaning of the fact of Christianity.

A few more remarks may be added to what was said in yesterday's lecture. We have seen how necessary it is—in order to cross the threshold rightly and enter the spiritual world with clairvoyant consciousness—to leave behind us all the perceptions of the physical world as well as everything we ordinarily think, feel, and will in this world. We have to be prepared to confront beings and happenings whose characteristics bear no relation at all to what can be perceived in the sense world. First, we have to strengthen the soul and its faculties, and then these strengthened, fortified soul faculties must be carried upwards with us. When we cross the threshold into the spirit realm, we must take something with us. We have pointed out that everything the sense world can give us, as well as the ideas and feelings we acquire there, are all images of what is perceptible to the senses. Nothing we acquire in this way can be of use in the spiritual world.

On the other hand, whatever is not an image of the sense world and has no significance for it—although it can there be aroused, called forth and given shape in free, inner soul experience—must be carried up into super-sensible worlds. In the last lecture we suggested using certain images of triads in their numeric relationships, images of the harmonious working together of opposites (especially the luciferic and ahrimanic elements) and of the intermediate condition. Such ideas have no immediate significance for the physical world—one can get on quite well without them—but one must have formed them in the physical world in order to carry them into spiritual worlds. That is why we tried to show through the teachings of Benedictus how the luciferic, the ahrimanic and the middle condition work into the triad of thought, word and writing in the development of human culture.

In connection with this I would like to mention something that can be of greatest use in understanding the life of humanity when looked at in the right way; it is what people from now on must acquire if our civilization is ever to progress properly. People will eventually see that they can no longer make do with the ideas that easygoing human beings today like to form in order to understand the times and social conditions. In Europe there are folk groups that speak different languages and there are also those that differ in their script. The western Europeans write with what are called Roman letters, but others use an entirely different form of writing, which is known as Black Letter or Gothic; these exist side by side. This is a significant phenomenon for anyone wishing to form a judgment about European culture. Although such things seem unimportant, they are symptoms arising out of very deep foundations of existence. When folk groups use different forms of writing, they will come to a genuine, mutual understanding only by taking up spiritual initiatives and aims together. Nations writing a different script give the ahrimanic impulse special points of attack; it is not enough to look for mutual understanding merely based on the requirements of the physical plane. A spiritual element must be taken up by both peoples, and through this, harmony can be sought. For nations that write with Roman letters, it will be necessary—in order to understand one another—to carry the spiritual element so far that understanding takes place even in regard to facts on the physical plane. One who understands such things can recognize this in regard to the relationships in European national life. It is of deep significance that in Central Europe both kinds of writing, expressing the peculiar relationship of ahrimanic and luciferic elements, exist side by side. The reason for this is that here a middle condition cannot be reached without special difficulties: the Roman alphabet, exposed more to the ahrimanic element, must be brought into a certain opposition to the Gothic, which is more open to the luciferic element; it shows a certain trend that in their handwriting many people have to mix together both scripts. Such an intermingling of scripts is of immense importance, for it points to something lying deep in the substrata of the soul, i.e., that such people have to come to terms with both the luciferic and ahrimanic elements in a special way. Much will depend on their making a tremendous effort (if they are writing in German) not to fall into Gothic when they intend to write Roman and not to fall into Roman when they intend to write Gothic. It is becoming more and more necessary to observe life in such minute details and to look at the symptoms which bring to the surface what is happening in hidden depths. In this way we shall learn how to acquire in the physical sense world the concepts, ideas and feelings we can carry fruitfully across the threshold into the realm of the spirit.

We will certainly have to recognize what extraordinary talent—even genius—for superficiality there is in our modern culture in regard to anything expressing itself as spirituality. Somehow we will have to acquire in the physical world the concepts for what shines out of the spiritual world and sends its rays into the physical sense world. Let us therefore look at another sphere where the luciferic and ahrimanic elements play into the physical world; we will speak first of the realm of art. In this we still hold to what has already been said, that in all human artistic development the luciferic element plays a part, that the luciferic element is present to the greatest extent in the development of art. But something more must be added. There are, in general, five principal arts to be found in the physical world: the art of building or architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry. Other arts combine and mix together the elements of these five; the art of the dance, we could say, is a combination of several arts. When one rightly understands dance, one does so on the basis of fundamental preconditions in the other arts. Naturally these can be combined.

Of the five arts, architecture and sculpture are those most particularly open to the ahrimanic impulse. In these arts we are concerned with form. To accomplish anything in architecture and sculpture we must find our way into the form element, which is dominant on the physical plane, for here the Spirits of Form are the ruling forces. To get to know them, one must plunge into their spiritual element, as I said before, when speaking figuratively of putting one's head into an ant hill. A person who has anything to do with sculpture must plunge his head into the living element of the Spirits of Form. In the realm of the physical world these Spirits work cooperatively with the ahrimanic element.

It is important, we will see, especially in such cases, not simply to assert in a superficial way that we have to protect ourselves from the ahrimanic element. We should always realize that such beings as the luciferic and ahrimanic ones have their particular domains, where normally they live and work, and that bad effects come about only when they overstep their boundaries. The ahrimanic impulses have their absolutely legitimate domain in architecture and sculpture.

On the other hand, we find that music and poetry are two arts where luciferic impulses are at work. Just as thought takes place in the solitude of the soul and thereby separates it from the rest of the world, the experience of music and poetry, too, belongs to our inner nature where these arts directly meet the luciferic impulse. In architecture and building we have to consider folk differences, simply because wherever Ahriman is, Lucifer will play a part as well, but these arts are directed only to some extent by the character of a people; in general this element remains neutral. However, poetry is essentially bound to the luciferic element, which comes to expression in the differences of folk character. Although one notices this less in music, here too things lead to differentiation, much more than in architecture and sculpture.

In this we see again that in order to form concepts for the higher worlds we cannot get on in the comfortable way many people would like to do. It is absolutely correct to say that the ahrimanic element works in architecture and sculpture, the luciferic more in music and poetry, yet it must also be said: as soon as we have to do with concepts that are valid also in the higher worlds, it is not so easy to answer the question once and for all, “In sculpture is Ahriman more active, or is Lucifer?” It is certainly easy in the physical world to answer the question, “What color is common chicory?” with the statement, “It is blue.” People would like things to be as easy as that for the higher worlds, but it is wrong to suppose that one can obtain such quick answers. Still, although all this holds good, the following is true. In architecture it is generally the case that the ahrimanic impulse is the stronger, but in sculpture the luciferic influence opposing Ahriman can be so strong that in some sculptural works Lucifer is more dominant than Ahriman. Nevertheless, what we said before is correct, for in the spiritual world there is not only the faculty of metamorphosis but one can say, everything is everywhere. In truth, every spiritual element tries to permeate everything. There can be luciferic sculpture and though poetry is chiefly under the influence of Lucifer, the ahrimanic influence can work very strongly on music, so that we can find music with more of Ahriman than of Lucifer.

In the middle between what is generally ahrimanic in architecture and sculpture and what is luciferic in poetry and music lies painting. In a way it is a neutral region but not such that we can comfortably settle down and say to ourselves, “Now I'll go ahead with painting, for here neither Lucifer nor Ahriman can get at me.” Actually it is just here in the middle that we are exposed on both sides most strongly to their attacks; at every moment we must be on our guard. In the realm of painting we are in the highest degree vulnerable to one or the other influence. The middle line is always the place where we have to bring about, in the very strictest sense of the word, the harmonious balance of polarities by means of human will and human action.

Looking at the sphere of art as we have done—it could have been any other sphere—you see that we acquire certain concepts without which, of course, we can manage quite well on the physical plane. For it is obvious that when we are willing to remain shallow and superficial, we can get along easily enough on this plane even if we don't find music luciferic and architecture ahrimanic! But if we want to manage without such concepts, we will not be able to form on the physical plane any ideas, thoughts, or feelings that will strengthen our soul and enable it to cross the threshold successfully and rise into the realm of spirit; we will have to remain here below on the physical plane.

We must therefore acquire concepts, feelings and ideas for the realm of the spirit if we really wish to cross the threshold, and while these must indeed be invoked by the physical, they will nevertheless have to rise above the physical-sense realm. Then with strengthened soul we will cross the threshold and become familiar with this world already characterized as a place of living thought-beings, engaged in spiritual conversation. With our strengthened soul we will become familiar with a world of beings that consist of thought-substance; through this thought-substance they are more alive, more individual, more real than any human being on earth. These beings within their thought-substance are just as real as any man of flesh and blood on the physical plane. We can gradually find our way in this world where a thought-language passes between one being and another, and where our soul is forced to carry on thought-conversations with the thought-beings if we want to arrive at a relationship with them. I have intimated this in my book The Threshold of the Spiritual World; more details can now be added. Because of the great responsibility in writing all this, I have tried to avoid in the book a systematic description and instead have put in aphoristic form the things that can be useful even if you have already absorbed everything in earlier lecture cycles and books.

As living thought-beings, we have to adjust to the spiritual realm of which it can be said:

At this place words are deeds
and further deeds must follow them.¹⁴

A human being in the physical world carries out his actions through the movement of his hands; we have described how thoughts, living within the cosmic Word, are also direct actions. Whatever is spoken accomplishes a deed. That is what matters in the spiritual world. A being is active towards another being; a being is active in relation to the external spiritual world around it; both of these actions are contained in spirit conversations. The spoken word is action. Therefore we have to bring ourselves upward into spirit regions in order to find ourselves as living thought-beings among other living thought-beings. We must conduct ourselves as do the other thought-beings, that is, allow our own words to be actions, to put it simply.

What do we find in those spirit regions? No longer do we find for our own use what we find down in the physical or even in the elemental worlds. This self that we carry through the physical and elemental worlds is the sum total of our experiences, gathered together from the impressions of the physical world and from everything on the physical plan that thinking, feeling and willing developed in our soul. But neither the impressions nor the feeling, thinking, and willing as they meet us on the physical plane have any significance at all in the spiritual world. There, instead of the so-called human self of the physical and elemental worlds, we find something else; namely, the part of oneself that indeed is always present in the depths of soul even though the ordinary physical consciousness can not know it. Like another being we will find our other self; this second self we find in the spiritual world.

At the close of these lectures, as in the closing section of The Threshold of the Spiritual World, I shall indicate for anyone who wants to ferret out contradictions, how the terms employed here are related to the terminology I used in Theosophy and Occult Science. But here it can be said: a person lives in his physical body in the physical world around him. When he comes away from it and has experiences outside the physical body, he is having those experiences in his etheric body with the elemental world around him; and when he comes out of that world as well, he is experiencing the spiritual realm in his astral body. With this experience—feeling oneself in the astral body—there will be a meeting in the spiritual world, the meeting with the other self, the second self,¹⁵ of which Johannes Thomasius speaks at the end of The Guardian of the Threshold, and which stands throughout the whole action of The Souls' Awakening at the side of the first self of Johannes Thomasius, summoning forth his experiences. Let me describe the essence of this other self; it is what a person comes to recognize when he learns within his astral body to perceive and feel and observe in the spiritual world. It is what lives from one life on earth to another, from incarnation to incarnation. In moving from one life on earth to the next one, between death and a new birth, it weaves itself so mysteriously into our being that the physical consciousness usually cannot perceive this other self, for it is actually within the spiritual world even though bound up with our physical being.

How is this other self active? It has just been said that it belongs to the realm of the spirit as a living thought-being among other living thought-beings, whose words are deeds; they accomplish all they do through what we can call Inspiration. The second self acts inspiringly in man's nature. What does it inspire? Our karma, our destiny. Here we discover a mysterious process: whatever our experience, whether painful or joyous, whatever it is that happens in our life, it is inspired by our other self, working from the spiritual world into this one. If you are walking along the street and something happens to you that seems accidental, it is inspired by your other self from out of the spiritual world. So you see that something like Inspiration in the spiritual world reveals itself on the physical plane and brings about your destiny in large and small happenings. Your destiny is inspired by your other self, out of the realm of the spirit.

A clairvoyant soul entering this realm perceives in the spirit-conversation a revelation of what can be put into the phrase: words are deeds. However, everything that happens in the spiritual world stamps itself upon the physical World. Whether you see a stone, a plant, a cloud, or lightning—behind all these stand spiritual beings and spiritual processes. Furthermore, behind the physical events of your destiny stand spiritual beings and spiritual processes. What are they? Inspirations! They are brought about by a conversation in the spiritual world. The cosmic Word is active as the inspirer of human destiny! This is of great significance for your spiritual perception on meeting your other self. You no longer think then of your human personality within its ordinary limits alone, for you extend yourself—and this must include your other self—to cover your entire destiny. You are only then a truly whole human being when—in just the same way that you say, “This finger is part of myself and belongs on the physical plane to my ego”—you also say, “It is part of myself to bang my thumb or take a painful fall, for all these things are inspired by my other self.”

However, we must bear in mind just how we meet this other self on crossing the threshold into the realm of spirit. Again and again we must recollect and make clear to ourselves that in all we have learned, observed and experienced in the physical world and even in the elemental world, there is nothing in them similar to the characteristics of the spiritual world where thoughts are living beings. If we were to enter the spirit realm only with what we have discovered in the physical and elemental worlds, then we would be confronting nothingness. What indeed can we bring into this realm? Let us consider the question carefully. The soul must become accustomed not to perceive or think or feel or will in the spirit realm as it does in the physical or in the elemental worlds. All of that must be left behind. However, it must remember what it perceived, thought, felt, willed in the physical world. Just as we carry into later periods of life the memories of earlier times, so must we carry over into the spirit realm out of the physical plane everything that has been strengthened and invigorated in our soul. We must enter the spiritual world with a soul that recollects the physical world.

Then we have to endure a certain experience that can be described in the following way: Imagine a moment in your ordinary earth life when all your sense perception suddenly stops; when you can no longer see nor hear, no longer are able, to think or feel or desire anything new. Every kind of life activity stops. You would know only what you remember. In exactly this situation you find yourself, when you rise into the spiritual world with clairvoyant consciousness. There is nothing there at first that will provide new perceptions. Your understanding comes only through remembering; your existence depends on what has remained to you of your memories. Your soul is aware that it can say of itself, “You now are only what you once were; your existence consists of your past; present and future have no meaning for you; your being is made up of what you have been.” One could perhaps say all this easily enough—but to see oneself as nothing but memory, with no perception of the present moment, to speak of one's being as a mere ‘has been,’ is a remarkable experience.

When the clairvoyant soul has penetrated so far and endured this experience, then for the first time the human being will begin to have a true understanding for the being whose name has now been mentioned so often, for Lucifer. The human soul, in passing out into the spirit realm, realizes for a moment, “You are only a being of the past.” Lucifer is the one who has become in the cosmic order forevermore such a being of the past, a mere has-been, a remnant of earth epochs that have died away, of what cosmic epochs had brought to his soul. And Lucifer's life—because the other divine-spiritual beings of normal earth evolution have condemned him to the past—consists in fighting with the aid of his past to gain a present and future.

Thus Lucifer stands before the clairvoyant vision, preserving in his life and soul the divine spiritual glories of world creation, yet condemned to realize, “They were once yours.” And now this eternal struggle begins: fighting to add present and future to his past in the cosmic order. To perceive the macrocosmic resemblance of Lucifer to the microcosmic nature of the human soul as it crosses the threshold between the elemental and the spiritual worlds is to perceive the profound tragedy of this figure of Lucifer. And then we begin to divine something of the great cosmic secrets resting deep in the womb of existence, where not only one being struggles with another but even an epoch of time confronts another in battle, as they evolve into beings. A true picture of the world begins to take shape, pouring deep earnestness and dignity into the soul. Here we will sense something that can be called the breath of Eternal Necessities, such as those experienced in the World Midnight—where lightnings flash into existence, illumining even the figure of Lucifer, but they:

... die on recognition,
and dying shape themselves to scripts of fate
forever actively engraved in souls.¹⁶

The human soul itself, as it grows into life in the spiritual worlds, has a moment where it is a mere “has-been” and confronts nothingness; it is a single point in the universe, experiencing itself only as a point. But then this point becomes a spectator and begins to observe something else. Our human soul, become microscopic, has at first no content—just as a single dot has none, but now it finds itself belonging as a third entity to two others. The first to make its appearance is what lives in our memory. This is like an external world which we look back on, saying, “All that is my past.” At first, without really knowing it, we ourselves stand there next to this past existence that we have brought across the threshold into the spiritual world, providing it with a life as thought-being. If then we have a feeling of utter calmness in our soul, whatever we have brought there as our past begins a spirit conversation with the living thought-beings around it. We can observe—like an objective spectator, standing nearby, though at the same time a mere dot—the other two beginning their conversation. Whatever we have brought with us in the way of thought content unfolds a spirit conversation in cosmic language with a spiritual, living thought-being of that realm; there we listen to what our own past discusses with the living spiritual being. At first we are like nothing at all, but then, even as a nothing, we are born through listening to our own past converse with the spiritual beings of the spirit realm. Listening begins to fill us with new inward contents. We learn now to recognize ourselves when we are like a single point and feel ourselves as such, listening to the conversation of our own past with a living spiritual being. And the more we take in of this spirit conversation between our own past and the future, the more we actually become we ourselves become a spirit being.

In this process in the spiritual world we find ourselves within a triad. One member of the triad is our own past being, which we have carried up into the spiritual world; we have won it for ourselves in so far as it was able beforehand to reveal its spirituality in the sense world, and then across the threshold to perceive itself as our past life. The second member of the triad is the whole spiritual environment; the third member is our self. This is the threefoldness of the spiritual world: Within the triad, through the antithesis of past life and living spiritual being, the third, the middle part, the mere point-like part, develops itself and becomes—through listening to the spirit conversation of the other two—more and more filled out: a being that is developing itself within the spiritual world. In that world we thus “become” ourselves in clairvoyant consciousness.

This is what I wanted to convey to you—using words, of course, that are limited because they have to be borrowed from the language of the physical world. However, one has to try as well as possible with such words to characterize these sublime and profound relationships. For it is through these relationships alone that we can come to know our true being. And this, as I said, we receive in the spiritual world through listening to the two other thought-beings. It has been the task of this cycle of lectures to try to lead us toward understanding our true nature.

• 14. The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 3.
• 15. See The Guardian of the Threshold, Scene 10.
• 16. The Souls' Awakening, Scene 6.