The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In expanding today what we have been discussing in the previous lectures I should like to take up the astronomical aspect of the Easter Festival; and in order to do this it will be necessary to touch upon some of the facts referring to the so-called secret of the Moon.

During all epochs in which people knew of the Mystery wisdom, the secret of the Moon was a familiar concept and was invariably associated with the being of man, in so far as the latter is related to the whole cosmos. We must keep clearly in mind that in his entirety man is related to the whole cosmos, just as he is connected with the Earth as regards his physical body. Now, it is a concomitant of the materialistic age that of the vast cosmos, which expresses its spirituality in the form of the fixed star constellations and the movements of the planets, nothing has remained in human consciousness but the outer appearance of the stars and the computation of their movements (if they are planets) and so forth.

The manner in which astronomy is studied today is the same as it would be if one studied the relative measurements and the outer conditions of movement in the human organism, remaining unaware that a psycho-spiritual element pervades the physical organism and comes to expression in these measurements and conditions of movement.

In the human being a unified psycho-spiritual element manifests itself, held together by the ego. But spiritual observation discloses that the cosmic organism expresses itself, not in a unified psycho-spiritual entity, but in a multiplicity, an immeasurable, limitless multitude of spiritual beings that reveal themselves through the forms of the fixed star constellations, through the movements of the planets, through the light raying forth from the stars, and so on.

Inner man is related to this spiritual multiplicity in the stars as is physical man to Earth substances that can serve as nourishment. And man's closest connection with the universe has to do with what we can call the secret of the Moon.

External observation of the Moon shows it to be in a state of metamorphosis as seen from the Earth. We see the full luminous face, we see it half-illuminated, then one-quarter—and there is also that stage in which it entirely withdraws from outer view, called the stage of new Moon. And then we have again the return to full Moon.

All this is nowadays explained as though the Moon were merely some kind of a body moving about in cosmic space, illuminated by the Sun from different directions and hence presenting various aspects. But that does not exhaust what the Moon means to the Earth, and especially to Earth men. In the case of the Moon in particular we must understand that if we look out at something as readily perceptible in its physical surfaces as, say, the full Moon—that is, something that presents a physical aspect—this aspect embodies something totally different from what is inherent in a new Moon. True, the new Moon cannot achieve direct physical expression on account of correlated cosmic conditions; but we must not conclude that because it does not express itself as a physical phenomenon, it has no effect. When our knowledge of the firmament tells us that it is new Moon, this means that the Moon is present in an invisible but all the more spiritual way than when appearing as full Moon in physical light. So the Moon is present—now wholly physical, now wholly spiritual, and we have the rhythmic alternation of its physical and spiritual expression.

And now, in order to understand the crux of the matter, we must recall a fact with which you are familiar from my Occult Science, an Outline, namely, that at one time the Moon was within the Earth: it was part of the Earth body. It passed out of the Earth and became a satellite, as the term goes. In other words, it split off from the Earth and now circles it. When it was one with the Earth its influences upon human beings were exerted from the Earth.

Naturally, in the time when man existed and developed upon an Earth that still contained the Moon, he was a very different being. When this Moon withdrew, the Earth became poorer by exactly what the Moon represented; and henceforth the lower

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

part of man was formed and held fast by the other forces—no longer by the Earth-and-Moon forces, but by the former only. On the other hand, the influences that emanated from within the Earth at the time it still contained the Moon now act upon man from without, from the Moon.

We can put it this way: formerly the Moon forces came in contact first with the lower limbs—the feet and legs—and then streamed upward from below; but since the Moon withdrew from the Earth they act in the opposite direction, from the head downward. But this implies that the task of these forces has become a very different one, and the nature of this task comes into evidence in the experiences man has when he descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly life. When he has completed the period between death and a new birth and has absolved all the requirements of soul and spirit demanded during that period, he prepares to descend to Earth, to unite with the bodily-physical principle transmitted to him by his father and mother. But before it is possible for his ego and astral body to unite with the physical body he must provide himself with an etheric body, which he attracts from the surrounding cosmos.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

This process has radically changed since the Moon withdrew from the Earth. Before that time man needed forces, when approaching the Earth again, that would enable him to shape the all-pervading ether into the form of an etheric body around his ego and astral body. These forces he drew, as he approached the Earth, from the Moon which was then within it. He still does; but the point is that since the splitting off of the Moon they come to him from outside the Earth. This means that immediately before entering the Earth life he must appeal to the power of the Moon forces—that is, to something cosmic—if he would build his etheric body.

This etheric body must be formed in such a way that it has, as it were, an outer side and an inner side. Let us think of it quite graphically, formed with an outer side and an inner side. When the outer side is being formed the forces of light are needed, for, like other things of substance, the etheric body is fashioned principally out of the flooding light of the cosmos. But sunlight cannot be employed for this purpose: it does not provide the forces that would enable man to build his etheric body. This calls for sunlight that is reflected by the Moon and thereby radically altered; and all the light coming to us from the Moon—in fact, all the light shining from the Moon into the cosmos—contains the forces that enable man to form the outer side of his etheric body when he descends to Earth.

And on the other hand, the forces man needs to form the inner side of his etheric body are the spiritual emanations of the new Moon; so that his ability to form the outer and the inner side is related to this rhythm of the outer light and dark of the Moon.

But all this that the Moon forces achieve for man, as it were, goes back to the fact that the Moon is truly not the mere physical body about which modern science tells us fairy tales, but a body wholly permeated by spirituality, comprising a multiplicity of spiritual beings. I have repeatedly explained that when the Moon withdrew from the Earth, it was not merely physical matter that streamed out into cosmic space: those ancient beings, man's primordial teachers, who lived on the Earth not in physical bodies but in a spiritual form, these passed with the Moon out into the universe and there founded a sort of Moon colony. We have therefore to distinguish between the physico-etheric and the psycho-spiritual constituents of the Moon, remembering that again the latter is not a unity but a multiplicity.

Now, the entire life of this spirituality in the Moon depends upon the manner in which those beings observe cosmic conditions from their point of view, from the point of view of the Moon. Figuratively expressed: the spiritual beings of the Moon direct their gaze primarily to what is of greatest importance for them, to the planets of our orbit; and upon the inferences of these observations depends all that takes place on the Moon, as well as all that contributes to providing man in the right way with the forces needed for forming his etheric body.

Certain of the Mysteries knew this. It was ancient Mystery knowledge in some of the sanctuaries that the constellations and the movements in the planetary system were observed from the Moon, and the actions of the Moon beings determined accordingly. This was expressed by relating, in human consciousness, the Moon with the forces of other planets, the Moon being the point from which are determined those cosmic contexts that are linked with the forming of the human etheric body. This is reflected in the names of the days of the week:

Thus we see how everything pertaining to the point of view of the Moon was brought into relation with all that tended to quicken man's awareness of the planets in connection with reckoning time. And the burden of the admonition given in the old Mysteries was something as follows: Remember, oh man, that before descending to Earth you needed forces engendered in the Moon by the act of the Moon-beings in observing the other planets. For the configuration of your etheric body, when you descended to earthly life, you are indebted to the Moon's share in what is expressed by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and so forth.

So on the one hand we have the rhythmical passage of the Moon through light and darkness in its course around the Earth, and on the other we find the whole sequence of the planets inscribed in human consciousness. The Mysteries even added the following: Due to the ability of the Moon-beings to behold Mars, the capacity for speech is organized into man's etheric body, and through their observation of Mercury, the capacity for movement is concentrated there.

If we wish to employ these secrets of the Moon as a medium of expression, this can be done in an entirely different form: speech becomes eurythmy. It comes about as follows: if we study the secrets of speech by finding out what the Moon-beings observed when questioning Mars, and then discover what changes these observations undergo when the Moon-beings turn to Mercury, then speech becomes eurythmy. In other words, if we transform the Moon-beings' Mars experiences into their Mercury experiences, the human capacity for speech becomes the capacity for eurythmy. That expresses the matter cosmically.

The current engendering in man the capacity for wisdom derives from the Moon-beings' experiences with Jupiter; what streams through the soul as love and beauty, from Venus; and that which permeates the etheric body with inner soul warmth is gained from the experience acquired by the Moon-beings' observation of Saturn.

There remains that which must be kept away—pushed back, as it were—to prevent its interfering with the formation of the etheric body immediately before the descent to Earth: that which comes from the Sun. From the Sun—or from the observation of the Sun—derive the forces from which man must be protected if he is to become complete in himself through the integration of the etheric body—that is, through protective forces.

It can be said that in this way we learn what occurs on the Moon, and at the same time we learn how the human etheric body is formed and constituted when man descends from the pre-earthly to the earthly existence. Those are the facts connected with the secret of the Moon. Nowadays we can recount such matters, but in certain of the older Mysteries they were not merely narrated but actually experienced. What I shall now write on the blackboard was not only known; it was an inner experience.

By means of initiation into the Mysteries, of which I spoke yesterday, it was possible to get beyond looking outward and listening outward with eyes and ears in the physical vicinity of the Earth. It was possible to become free of the physical body, to keep aloof from it, and to live only in the etheric body; and then the initiate lived with all that has been described. He did not live with the speech formed in the larynx, but with the speech resounding in Mars as cosmic language. He moved in conformity with the way in which Mercury guided the movements in the cosmos: not merely with feet and legs did he move, but in accord with the manner in which Mercury directs the movements of the human being. Nor did he possess that wisdom so laboriously acquired during childhood and early youth—really an unwisdom in the materialistic age—but he lived actually in the wisdom of Jupiter, because he could unite with the Moon-beings who observed Jupiter.

This sort of initiation really meant that the mystic was wholly in the light shining from the Moon. He had left the Earth, no longer a creature of flesh and blood, and lived in moonlight modified by forces from the other planets. During these periods of spiritual observation he simply became a light-being of the Moon—not in a symbolical sense or in any way to be thought of as abstract, but rather, as a man might today go to Basel and back, fully conscious of a reality, knowing he had experienced something real. The mystic was equally conscious of reality when he was led through the initiation ritual to the Moon-beings.

The initiate knew that for the time being he had taken leave of his physical body, that his soul and spirit had passed into the light-sphere of the Moon, and that he had borne a light-body; and because he had been united with the Moon-beings he had looked out into planetary space, truly able to behold what could be revealed in this vast realm.

And what was that? Well, among other things, he observed principally that from the Sun there emanated the forces of beings that must not be allowed to intervene in the building of the human etheric body. The Sun appeared as something that tended to dissolve, destroy the etheric body; hence he knew that forces to be received by the Sun-beings must not proceed from his etheric body, but from his higher principles, from his ego and astral body. Only upon these must the Sun forces be allowed to act. So he knew that for the forming of his etheric body he must not look to the Sun but to the planets, and that he must turn to the Sun for his astral body and especially for his ego and its whole inner strength. The second point, then, that became manifest through this recurring initiation into the secret of the Moon was this, that in what pertained to his etheric body man belonged to the planets; but for the strengthening of his astral body and most of all his ego he must look to the Sun.

This initiation was really of such a nature as to make the mystic one with the moonlight; but it was by means of his own moonlight existence that he looked into the Sun.

And now he reflected as follows: the Sun sends its light to the Moon because this must not be imparted to man directly. The result is moonlight in conjunction with the planetary forces, and out of this the etheric body is formed.—That was the secret known to him who was initiated in this way. He also knew to what extent he bore within him the power of the spiritual Sun: he had seen it, become conscious of it; and this was the stage of initiation at which the initiate became a Christ bearer—that is, a Sun-being bearer, not a Sun-being recipient. Just as the Moon itself, when at full, is a sunlight bearer, so man became a Christ bearer, a christophoros. This initiation leading to the stage of christophoros was thus an absolutely real experience.

Now imagine this actual experience through which the mystic sped away from the Earth, as it were, and ascended as an initiated Earth-man to the light-being; and imagine this inner, human Easter experience of former times transformed into a cosmic festival. In later ages men no longer knew that such things could happen; that man is really able to withdraw from Earth conditions, unite with those of the Moon, and from the Moon behold the Sun. But the memory of it was to be preserved, and this we have in the Easter Festival.

The ability to experience all this did not pass over into the later consciousness that was becoming materialistic; instead it turned into an abstract conception. Men no longer looked inward and said, I can unite with the moonlight. They looked at the Moon, the full Moon, and said, It is not a question of my aspiring upward: it is the Earth that strives to ascend. And when is this effort at its height? When spring begins, when there burst forth from the surface of the Earth all the forces that had lain dormant in seeds and plants under the ground. On the Earth they become plants, but they go further: they stream out into cosmic space.

The old Mysteries employed this image: man can most easily attain to the Moon-Sun initiation and become a christophoros in the season when the inner Earth forces, by means of the stems and leaves of plants, carry out of the ground what then streams forth from the Earth into the cosmos; for then he floats, as it were, on the forces that in spring ray out from the Earth and up to the Moon. But it must be the light of the full Moon.

All this, then, became a memory, but it also became abstract ... It must be the light of the full Moon. ... Subconsciously, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could be a human experience, people imagined that something or other—not man himself—streamed toward the full Moon, the first one after the beginning of spring. And what can this full Moon do now? It beholds the Sun; that is, the first day dedicated to the Sun: the first succeeding Sunday. Just as once a christophoros, from the viewpoint of the Moon, beheld the Sun-being, so now the Moon beholds the Sun—that is, its symbolization in Sunday.

We have the beginning of spring, March 21st, and the forces of the Earth are burgeoning forth into the universe. We must await the proper observer, the full Moon.

March 21st—full Moon—Sunday.

What does the Moon observe? The Sun; and the following Sunday is fixed as Easter Sunday. This is an abstract way of determining the date, surviving from a very real Mystery event that in former times frequently occurred for many men.

That is actually what our present spring Easter Festival has come to be. It represents a Mystery act that has often been performed in spring; but it is not the one I described day before yesterday. The latter led man to a comprehension of the death event. I explained that the idea of resurrection, clarified by something like the Adonis celebration in the fall, really led men to the experience of death, to the spiritual resurrection after about three days; and this process of resurrection really belongs in the autumn, for the reasons I gave.

The process I described today is a different one, performed in other Mysteries for certain initiations—those of the Sun and Moon; and this process confronted the neophyte with life's beginning. So you see, we can look back at a period in which certain Mysteries saw the descent of man from the pre-earthly to the earthly life, while others dwelt on the ascent in the spirit. But in later epochs, when the living substance of man's relation to the cosmic spirit could no longer be discerned, men went so far as simply to combine the autumn Mystery of the ascent with the spring Mystery of the descent into one festival.

Thus the confusion manifesting itself in the course of human evolution is evidence of the gradual effect of materialism: not only has the latter engendered false beliefs, but it has completely confused men's minds concerning an issue that at one period of human events existed, I might say, in a sacred order that caused mankind at the approach of autumn to celebrate a cosmic festival. But this in turn pointed to a Mystery act that evoked the thought: Nature falls into barrenness, it wilts and dies away, and this is like the physical dying of man; but while in Nature only the perishable is seen to be active, there lives in man the eternal, which must now be observed spiritually, disregarding the course of Nature, as the element of resurrection in the spiritual world after death. The spring Mysteries made it clear that Nature is conquered by the spirit, that, in turn, the spirit acts out of the cosmos, and that matter germinates and sprouts from the ground because it is driven by the spirit.

But this was intended to remind men—not of their passing into the spirit through death, but of their origin in the spirit, their descent from the spiritual world. Precisely where Nature begins to ascend, man was to remember his descent into the physical; and where Nature disintegrates, man was to contemplate his ascent, his spiritual resurrection. There is no doubt that such an understanding of man's relation to the cosmos intensified his soul life enormously.

But this varied according to the locality. In olden times some were definitely inclined to be autumn peoples and others rather spring peoples. Among the former were to be found the Adonis Mysteries; among the latter, other Mysteries concerned with what I have set forth today. And only those seekers after wisdom of whom it is correctly reported that, like Pythagoras, they moved about from place to place, from one Mystery to another, only those enjoyed the fullness of human experience. They would pass from a sanctuary where they could participate in the autumn secret, which is really the Sun secret, to one where the spring secret was revealed, the Moon secret. For this reason it was reported again and again of the consummate old initiates that they traveled from one sanctuary to another. It can truly be said of these that they had a certain inner experience of the year and its festivals. An old initiate of that sort could say to himself, I come to a place where the Adonis Festivals are celebrated, and I can witness the cosmic autumn and the rays of the spiritual Sun at the beginning of winter's night; I wander to another, where the Mysteries of spring are observed, and I can behold the secret of the Moon.—Thus he acquired an inner knowledge of all that relates to the whole meaning of the year.

You see, our Easter Festival has really had something saddled on it that is not right. It should really be a spring commemoration of burial; and this commemoration of burial in the spring should at the same time be an incentive to work, such as the more primitive man needed during the summer time: that is what such burial festivals were in their appeal to the human spirit. Easter was a festival of admonition regarding the work of summer, just as the autumn festival of the resurrection of the spiritual world was a festival celebrated in the season when the labor was completed. But it was of the utmost importance for man's soul and spirit that, when his work was finished, he should become aware of and inwardly experience the eternal in himself by contemplating the resurrection in the spiritual world, the days that follow upon death.

In passing, then, from Earth secrets to cosmic secrets, from Earth wisdom to cosmic wisdom, we can come to know what I should like to call the inner structure of the order of the year, as indicated by the festivals. But much of what had been hidden in them has disappeared.

Today I wanted to present this subject to you by considering the conditions of the firmament itself. Tomorrow I shall endeavor, as far as time permits, to penetrate still deeper into it in the light of certain Mystery sanctuaries.

Continuing our subject of the last two lectures, I shall now indicate the astronomical aspect of the Easter Festival. To this end it will be first be necessary to touch upon some of the facts relating to the so-called secret of the Moon.

In all ages, wherever there was knowledge of the Mystery Wisdom, men spoke of the secret of the Moon which was connected with the being of man, inasmuch as man himself, in his full nature, is connected with the whole Cosmos, just as he is connected, with respect to his physical body, with the Earth. Now with the epoch of materialism it has come about that of these far spaces of the Cosmos whose spiritual life is expressed in the forms of the constellations and in the movements of the wandering stars, nothing at all has remained in human consciousness save the external appearance of the stars, the calculation of their movements if they are planets, and so forth.

To study these things in the way of modern astronomy is just as though one were to consider the outer measurements and proportions and conditions of movement of the human body in complete unconsciousness of the fact that a soul-and-spirit permeates this physical body. It is just as though one were to forget that in the proportions and movements of this body a soul-and-spirit comes to expression.

Now in the human being a single soul-and-spirit gathered together in an Ego makes its appearance. But in the organism of the universe, spiritually seen and considered, it is not a single soul-and-spirit that comes to expression, but a multiplicity. It is an immeasurable, infinite multiplicity of spiritual beings who express themselves in the forms of the constellations, in the movements of the planets, in the radiating light of the stars, and so forth.

All the multitude of spiritual beings who live in the stars are connected with the human being's inner life, just as the substances of the Earth environment available for human nourishment are connected with the physical man on Earth. And the first and nearest relationship of man to the great universe has to do with what we may call the secret of the Moon.

Outwardly regarded, the Moon appears from the earthly aspect in constant metamorphosis. At the present moment we see the full disc of the Moon shining brightly. Then we see it differently and have to assume that it is partially illumined, half illumined, quarter illumined, and so on. Moreover there is that appearance of the Moon when it withdraws entirely from our external vision, the time we call the New Moon, and at length we have again the return to the Full Moon.

Nowadays all this is explained as though the Moon were some material body moving out there in cosmic space, illumined in various directions by the Sun and thus showing itself to our vision in varying shapes and forms. But this by no means exhausts what the Moon is for the Earth and notably for humanity on Earth. For the Moon especially we must clearly understand the following.—When we look at something that represents itself to us so evidently in physical surfaces as the Full Moon, showing us a physical aspect, we see something altogether different in its appearance from what it is when it reveals itself as the New Moon. The New Moon, through all the cosmic relationships in which it stands, cannot reveal itself directly. We must now, however, imagine that in its influence the Moon is absent when it does not reveal itself as an outward phenomenon. At the times when through the whole world-relationships we become conscious of the appearance of the New Moon—at these times the Moon is present invisibly and for this very reason is present in a more spiritual way than when it appears to us in the physical light as the Full Moon. Thus the Moon is present, now in a fully physical way and now again in a fully spiritual way. We have indeed the perpetual rhythmic alternation between the physical manifestation and the spiritual manifestation of the Moon.

To understand what this really means we must look back to the event which is described, for instance, in my book, Occult Science. The Moon was once within the Earth; it belonged to the Earth body. It went forth from the Earth body and became a satellite as we say, or accompanying planet of the Earth. It split off from the Earth and circles around the Earth.

Now in the time when it was united with the Earth it influenced the human being from the Earth. Man was of course a very different being when he stood and evolved on an Earth which still had the Moon within its body. The Earth was impoverished by all that the Moon contains when the Moon went forth from it; and now from beneath, man is shaped and held fast by other forces, namely, by the Earth forces alone, no longer by the Earth-and-Moon forces together. On the other hand that which worked upon him from the Earth, from within outward when the Moon was still within the Earth, now works upon him from without inward, namely from the Moon.

Thus we may say: The Moon forces once rayed through the human being, impinging first upon his limbs, upon his feet and legs and then streaming through him from below upwards. But since the Moon has left the Earth, the Moon forces work on him inversely, from the head downwards. And as a result the Moon forces now have a quite different task for man than they had before. How does this manifest itself? It manifests itself as follows. When man descends from the pre-earthly into this earthly life he undergoes certain definite experiences. He has passed through the time between death and a new birth. He has absolved, so far as his soul-and-spirit is concerned, all that must be absolved between death and a new birth, and now he prepares to descend to Earth to unite with the physical bodily nature that is given to him by the father and the mother. Yet before he can find the possibility for his Ego and astral body to unite with the physical, he must first clothe himself in an etheric body which he draws into him from the surrounding Cosmos.

It is this process which has changed fundamentally since the time when the Moon left the Earth. Before the departure of the Moon, when man had absolved the life between death and a new birth and was approaching the Earth once more, he needed certain forces with which to attract and incorporate in the form of an etheric body around the Ego and astral body, the ether which is scattered through the whole universe. These forces which he received as he approached this earthly life, he received from the Moon which was then within the Earth. Since the Moon left the Earth man has received the forces which he needs to build his etheric body from outside the Earth, namely from the Moon which is now split off. Thus immediately before his entry into the earthly life man must have recourse to what lies inherent in the Moon forces, that is to say, to a cosmic principle, in order to build his etheric body.

Now this etheric body must be built in such a way that it has, so to speak, an outer and an inner aspect. When man forms the outer aspect of this etheric body he needs the forces of the light, for along with other substances the etheric body is created above all out of the flowing light of the Cosmos. But Sunlight is useless for this purpose; Sunlight can provide no forces enabling the human body to form his etheric body. For this, the light shining from the Sun to the Moon and raying back again from the Moon is needed. And by this process of reflection the Sunlight is essentially transformed. In effect, all the light that rays forth from the Moon into the Cosmos contains the force whereby man as he descends is enabled to form the outer aspect of his etheric body. On the other hand all that rays forth spiritually from the Moon when it is a New Moon, all this rays out into the Cosmos the forces which man needs to form the inner aspect of his etheric body. This rhythm, therefore, of the external shining of the Moon and of its darkening enables man to form the outer and the inner side of his etheric body.

Now what the Moon forces thus do for man essentially depends upon the fact that the Moon is not the mere physical body of which modern science tells its tales, but is permeated everywhere by spirituality. The Moon itself in fact contains a multitude of spiritual beings.

I have often explained how these things are. The Moon once separated from the Earth. But it was not only physical matter that went forth into cosmic space. There were also those Beings who lived in ancient time upon the Earth, not in a physical body but in a spiritual form, the Beings who were the primeval Teachers of mankind. These too journeyed forth with the Moon into the Cosmos and there founded a kind of lunar colony. Thus we must distinguish in the Moon the physical and etheric from the soul-and-spirit, only that the soul-and-spirit is not a unity but a multiplicity of Beings.

Now all the spiritual life in the Moon depends upon the way in which the Beings who inhabit it look out into the universe around. If I may express myself pictorially I would say: the spiritual Beings of the Moon turn their gaze to begin with on what for them is most important, namely, upon the wandering stars that belong to our planetary system. And all that happens on the Moon—including all that happens in order that man may properly receive the forces he needs to build up his etheric body—all this depends on the results of observation arrived at by the Beings in the Moon who, living as it were within the Moon, look out and observe around them the stars of our planetary system, Mercury, Sun, and so forth.

Knowledge of this was contained in certain ancient Mysteries. They knew that constellations, relationships and movements of the planetary system belonging to our Earth were observed from the Moon and that the deeds of the Moon Beings were determined accordingly. They not only knew, but they expressed the fact; for they brought these Moon forces into the consciousness of mankind in relation to the forces of the other planets, taking the Moon, as it were, as the point whence the cosmic relationships connected with the forming of the human etheric body are determined. They did so in the days of the week: Moon—Monday. The Moon in its observation has to do with Mars—Mars day—Tuesday; with Mercury—Mercury day, Mercredi, Wednesday; with Jupiter—Jupiter is the Germanic Thor or Donar—Thursday. Then again with Venus, the Germanic Freya—Friday; and with Saturn Saturday, and at length with the Sun itself. The Sun cannot influence the forming of the etheric body with its own forces directly, but in the reflection from the Moon it plays its part—Sunday.

Thus the facts related to the standpoint of the Moon were taken as the starting-point in bringing home the planetary system to the consciousness of man in the division of time. It was as though they meant to say in the ancient Mysteries: “Oh Man, remember that before you came down to the Earth you had need of the forces which are fashioned on the Moon when the Moon Beings look out upon the other Beings of the Planetary system. You owe to what the Moon receives from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday . . . the peculiar configuration which your etheric body can assume when descending into this earthly life.”

Thus we have on the one hand the rhythmic course of the Moon around our Earth through light and darkness, and on the other hand we have recorded in the consciousness of man the whole succession of the planets. And the Mysteries also proclaimed the knowledge that through the fact of the Moon Beings turning their gaze to Mars man receives the faculty of speech incorporated into his etheric body. Through the fact that the Moon Beings can turn their gaze to Mercury, man can receive the faculty of movement concentrated into his etheric body.

To speak for a moment in terms of these Moon secrets, we may express in quite a different form how Eurythmy arises out of speech. We may say, Eurythmy is born from speech, when having discovered the mysteries of speech by letting the Moon Beings tell us the observations that they make when they gaze on Mars, we hear from them how these observations change when they now turn their gaze to Mercury. That is to say, when we transform the Mars experiences of the Moon Beings into their Mercury experiences we receive from the faculty of spoken sound in man the faculty of Eurythmy. This is the cosmic aspect of it.

Then we come to that which permeates the human being with the faculty of wisdom. This we receive through the experiences of the Moon Beings with Jupiter. And that which flows through the human being by way of love and beauty in his soul, this we receive through the experiences of the Moon Beings with Venus. And what they experience by observing Saturn instils into the etheric body the inner warmth of soul which man requires. And at length we come to something that must be warded off as it were, which must be held aloof lest it should disturb and mar the forming of the etheric body. It is that which proceeds directly from the Sun before man's descent to Earth. Thus from the Sun—or the beholding of the Sun—proceed the forces from which the human being must be protected so that he may become a human being self-contained through the incorporation of the etheric body.

Thus we learn to recognise what happens on the Moon and by this we also learn to recognise how the human etheric body is formed when man descends from the pre-earthly into this earthly life. These are the things that relate to the secret of the Moon.

Such things as these can be told today; but in certain ancient Mysteries they were not merely told, they were consciously experienced. Men did not merely know these things; they inwardly discovered them.

 Monday Tuesday: Speech Wednesday: Movement Thursday: Wisdom Friday: Love, Beauty Saturday: Inner warmth of soul Sunday: Protecting forces (reflected from the Moon) 

By Initiation into the Mysteries of which I told you yesterday, man could get beyond the mere looking outward through the eyes or listening outward through the ears, to see and hear the physical earthly environment. He could free himself from his physical body and live in his etheric body. He could hold himself apart from the physical body and live in the etheric body only. And when he thus lived in the etheric body he lived with all the things of which I have just spoken, he lived not with the speech that is formed through the physical larynx but with the speech that resounds in Mars as cosmic speech. He moved in the way that Mercury guides the movements in the Cosmos; he moved not with the physical feet and legs but in the sense in which Mercury guides the movements of the human being. Nor did he have the wisdom that is acquired with such pains in childhood and adolescence, a wisdom which in this materialistic age is, to speak truly, an unwisdom. He lived directly within the wisdom of Jupiter; he lived in the wisdom of Jupiter because he could unite with the Moon Beings who observed Jupiter. When he was initiated in this way man was altogether within the Moon-radiating light. He had left the Earth. He was not a being of flesh and blood on Earth, he had gone away from the Earth and lived as a being in the Moon light. But this Moon light was configurated, differentiated, modified by what lived in the other planets of our planetary system.

At the time of spiritual observations in such Mysteries man did indeed become a light being of the Moon. I do not mean it in a symbolic sense or conceived abstractly, but just as the ordinary man of today, if he has gone to Basle and come back again, is conscious of the reality of it, he knows he has experienced something quite real—so was man conscious of a reality when through the Initiation rite he had paid his visit to the Moon Beings. He knew that he had taken leave of his physical body for a while. With his soul and spirit he had gone out into the light-radiating spheres of the Moon Beings, clothed in a light body, and through his unison with the Moon Beings he had looked out into the far planetary spaces, he had really been able to observe all that could be revealed to him in the far spaces of the planetary system.

And what did he see? This in the main—all the other things he observed too, but this he observed above all—he saw that from the Sun there come the forces of Beings who may have nothing to do with the form of the etheric body of man. He looked up to the Sun as to something that had a dissolving, destructive effect for the etheric body. By this experience he knew that the forces which were received by the Sun Beings must take their start not from the etheric body but from the higher members of man's nature, from the Ego and the astral body. The Sun forces must be allowed to work only upon these higher members. Thus he knew that for the human etheric body he cannot turn to the Sun, for the etheric body he must turn to the planets.

It is for the astral body and especially for the human Ego that he will turn to the Sun. He knew that for the full inner force of the Ego, of the “I am”, he must go to the Sun. This was the second great experience in the Initiation that took its start from the Moon Mystery. This was the second thing. Man learned that for the etheric body he belongs to the planetary system, whereas for the inner force and permeation of his Ego above all and of his astral body, he must look up to the Sun. Such indeed was this initiation. Man himself became one with the Moonlight. But through the Moonlight life of his own being he gazed into the Sun. And now he said to himself: The Sun sends its light to the Moon because he may not give it to man directly. Thence we have the Moonlight in unison with the planetary forces and from these we build up our etheric body.

This secret was known to him who was thus initiated. And so he knew to what extent he bore within him the force of the spiritual Sun, for he had seen it in his vision. He had gained a consciousness of how he bore the spiritual forces of the Sun within him, and this in effect was the degree of Initiation whereby man became a Christ-Bearer, that is to say, a bearer of the Sun Being, not a receiver of the Sun Being, but a bearer of the Sun Being. Just as the Moon itself when it is Full Moon is a bearer of Sunlight, so man became a bearer of the Christ, a Christophoros.

This initiation whereby a man became Christophoros was an absolutely real experience.

And now imagine this real experience whereby man sped away from the Earth and rose to the Light-Being as earthly man upon the way of Initiation—imagine this inner human Easter experience of former times transformed into a cosmic Festival. In later times men no longer knew that such a thing could happen. They no longer knew that man can really go forth from the earthly realm, unite himself with the Moon nature and from the Moon behold the Sun. But a certain remembrance of it had been preserved. This remembrance in effect was preserved in the Easter Festival.

For the real way in which man can experience these things was not transmitted to the later, increasingly materialistic consciousness. In abstract idea however it was transmitted. Man no longer looked into himself and said: “I can unite myself with the Moonlight”, but he looked up to the Moon, to the Full Moon. Gazing upward to the Full Moon he said, not “I myself can evolve up yonder”, but “The Earth strives yonder”. When does it do so most of all? It is when the Springtime begins, when the forces that were hitherto with the seeds, with the plants within the Earth, stream forth from the surface of the Earth. On Earth they become plants, but they go further. They stream outward into the far spaces of the Cosmos.

In the ancient Mysteries they used this image: When the forces of the Earth bear outward through stem and leaf of plant that which is raying forth from the Earth into the Cosmos, then man can most easily attain the Moon-Sun Initiation and become Christophoros. For then, as it were, he can float upward to the Moon—borne upward by the forces that in Springtime ray forth from Earth to Moon. Only he must enter into the Full Moonlight.

All this afterwards became a remembrance but it grew abstract—“he must enter into the Full Moonlight”. Subconsciously therefore, no longer with the clear knowledge that this could become a human experience, it was conceived that something or other, not man himself, goes out towards the Full Moon, the first Full Moon after the beginning of Springtime. And what can this Full Moon of Springtime do? It looks out towards the Sun, that is to say it looks towards the first Sun-consecrated day, towards the first Sunday that follows after it. As in former times the Christophoros from his Moon standpoint looked out and gazed upon the Being of the Sun, so now the Moon looks to the Sun, that is to say, to its symbolisation in the Sunday.

Thus we have first the beginning of Spring, the 21^st of March. The forces of the Earth are sprouting forth into the universe.

But we must await the coming of the right observer, namely, the Full Moon.

21^st March—Full Moon—Sun day.

And what does the Full Moon observe? He observes the Sun. We await the first Sun-day after the Full Moon and that is Easter Sunday. Thus all that is left of a real process of the Mysteries which many human beings often underwent in ancient Mysteries—all that has remained is an abstract fixation of time.

And so it is indeed with this Easter Festival. Our present spiritual Festival of Easter represents an event in the Mysteries which was indeed everywhere enacted in the Springtime. But this is a different Mystery from the one I described the day before yesterday. The event in the Mysteries which I described the day before yesterday led the human being to understand the fact of death. I told you of how the idea of resurrection was brought home to man by such festivals as the Adonis Festival in Autumn time. It really led the human being into the experience of death and into the resurrection in the Spirit after about three days. This event of resurrection truly belongs to the Autumn time for the reasons which I explained in that lecture.

The process which I have described today is a different one. It was celebrated or enacted in other Mysteries for certain Initiations, namely for the Sun and Moon Initiation. And this later process confronted the human being with the beginning of his life.

Thus we look back to ancient times when the descent of man from pre-earthly life into this earthly life was recognised in certain Mysteries, while the ascent, the resurrection in the Spirit, was recognised in other Mysteries, namely in the Autumn Mysteries.

In later days man was no longer able to penetrate the living reality of this his relationship to the Spiritual in the Cosmos. And at length things went so far that the Autumn Mysteries of resurrection were simply superimposed on the Springtime Mystery of the descent. The confusion that thus arose in the course of human evolution shows how deeply materialism worked in the course of time. For it not only created false opinions but brought mankind into real confusion with regard to those things which, if I may put it so, were once in sacred, holy order in the course of human earthly life. Once upon a time there was a sacred order in these things. As Autumn came near, mankind celebrated a Cosmic Festival, a Festival which pointed to a real process of the Mysteries. Nature, they said, is fading and dying away, Nature is laid waste. It is like the gradual death of man as to his physical life. But whereas when we look at Nature we see only the transitory at work in her, in men there lives the Eternal which we must now behold apart from what takes place in outer Nature, for we must behold it in the spirit as that which is resurrected after death in the spiritual world.

And through the Mysteries of springtime it was made clear to man that Nature herself is overcome by the Spiritual; the spiritual works in again from the Cosmos, the Physical springs and sprouts forth from the Earth, because it is impelled by the Spiritual. This however was to lead man to remember, not how they passed through death into the Spiritual, but how they have come hither and descended out of the Spiritual. Just when Nature is springing and ascending, man was to remember his descent into the Physical; and again when Nature is declining man was to remember his ascent, his resurrection in the Spiritual. And indeed it infinitely deepened the life of the soul thus to experience how man is related to the Cosmos.

These things varied according to the different regions of the Earth. In ancient times there were indeed some peoples who were more Autumn peoples, and others who were more Springtime peoples. Within the Autumn peoples there were the Mysteries of Adonis, while in the Springtime peoples there were other Mysteries related to what I have described today. And only those seekers after knowledge of whom it is truly related how they journeyed from place to place, from one Mystery to another, like Pythagoras, only they underwent the real totality of human experience. From a place of the Mysteries where they could behold the Autumn secret which is the real secret of the Sun, they wandered to another place where they could behold the Springtime secret, that is the secret of the Moon. Hence of the greatest Initiates of ancient times it is again and again related how they wandered from one place to another of the Mysteries. And we may truly say that those old Initiates in a certain sense experienced the year in their inner life, the year with its sacred Festivities. An old Initiate might say: “When I come to such and such a place where Adonis Festivals are celebrated, I behold the cosmic Autumn, the shining of the spiritual Sun in the beginning of the night of Winter.” And as he came to another place where the Springtime Mysteries were celebrated, he would say: “Now I shall witness the secret of the Moon.” Thus in his inner life he learned to know that which determines the whole meaning of the year.

So you see our Easter Festival has in fact been burdened with things with which it ought not properly to have been burdened. It ought really to be a Festival of the “laying in the grave”, and as was the case in such festivals in relation to the spiritual part of man, so this Springtime Festival of the laying in the grave should at the same time be a Festival to stir man to work, a Festival such as a man of more strong and pristine impulses needs for the Summer season. The Easter Festival was indeed a Festival to summon man to work during the Summer. And the Autumn Resurrection Festival was for the spiritual world a Festival celebrated in the time when man departed from his work once more. But as he departed from his work he was to experience in his inmost being that which is most important for his soul and spirit. He was to become conscious of his eternal being as he gazed upon the resurrection in the spiritual world three days after death.

Passing thus from earthly secrets to cosmic secrets, from earthly knowledge to cosmic knowledge, we may indeed recognise what I may call the inner structure in the order of our festivals throughout the year. But there are still many secrets that were hidden in these Mysteries which have disappeared.

Tomorrow, as far as possible, I shall try to deepen these things still further, referring more nearly to certain places of the Mysteries. Thus I shall try to deepen what I explained to you today in our study of the relationships in the Heavens.

If we really grasp Spiritual Science, it gives us strength and confidence in life. How can we introduce it into our life so that it may help us to advance? Many people think that when they acquire knowledge in this sphere and accumulate spiritual truths it is not a help but a hindrance in a sound human life. Why, they ask, do we need all this knowledge of the spirit, why should we have to learn so much about the development of the earth and of a whole planetary system? Why do we need this at all? We are true theosophists, they say, when we strive to find the higher self within us and are enabled thereby to advance as human beings. There are others whose minds are more theoretical and who enjoy hearing of the different members of man's being, of the development of mankind through the different epochs of culture, and of the regular, numerical periods. They wish to learn of all these things as quickly as possible, noting down the most important truths in a few words and circulating them in a catechetical form. But we must affirm that neither of these notions correspond in any way to what Spiritual Science can mean to us, and does mean to those who have adopted the right attitude to life through It.

It is true that we must begin by learning that man consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and an Ego. But it is a mistake to think that by enumerating them we know something of man's being for when we do this we merely schematise. We really know something about man only when this knowledge is applied to life. But this is impossible unless we realise that the essential thing is not only to know the names of these four members, but how they are connected within the human being. When we look upon a human being, it is essential to know how his etheric body is connected with his physical body, whether the etheric and astral body tend towards each other and seek a close connection, or whether they are loosely connected. A closer observation shows that the relationship between these members of the human being changes in the course of mankind's development on earth. In the past, this relationship was different and, in the future, it will be different from what it is to-day.

If we study the ancient Egyptian in the first thousand years of Egyptian culture, thus looking upon ourselves in past incarnations, we shall find in him a human being whose physical, etheric and astral bodies were loosely knit together. But when we consider a human being of the present time, we find instead a more intimate and a closer connection between his different members. And in future, this connection will become closer and closer. This explains why we have to pass through the different epochs of culture. When we say that man reincarnates so and so many times, we may also ask: Why does he reincarnate?—Because the connection between his enveloping members always changes, so that the human being whom we meet in the external world during the different epochs, also changes. When we were Chaldeans, we had a quite different bodily constitution from that of to-day, and in the future, we shall again be differently constituted. Because of these differences our experiences as human beings are different.

It is now essential to develop the right kind of thoughts regarding the true relation of man's inner nucleus passing from incarnation to incarnation, with its enveloping sheaths—the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body. In reality, ordinary science does not know anything about the deeper laws ruling from one incarnation to another. It deals only with what is external. It ignores even the deeper significance of the laws ruling the external sheath. We may convince ourselves of this by considering some of the connections accepted by ordinary science or rejected by it.

It is very interesting to note that for a long time science was inclined to ascribe free will to man. Yet I have pointed out to you that in many respects modern science denies the existence of free will. It refers us to external scientific research which tells us to observe the external course of life. For example, statistics can establish how many suicides occur in a particular place. A certain regularity may be ascertained in regard to these suicides. Statistics show that this occurs at certain regular intervals. A certain number of people is simply condemned to commit suicide. How is it possible then to speak of free will?—One might go still further by drawing attention to the technique of insurance calculations which formulate and reckon out how many of a certain number of people will still be alive after thirty years. This is expressed arithmetically. Death and birth are thus imprisoned within external laws of Nature. Ordinary science admits this. It will, however, be forced to admit very different things also, for it is already evident that certain facts are coming to the fore which will compel people to think in a spiritual-scientific way. Generally speaking, science is not readily inclined to accept new ideas. In this direction it follows a very strange habit. One can hear people declaiming that in the Middle Ages there were men who opposed Kepler's discoveries. The greatest efforts were needed before his teachings could assert themselves against the dark minds of his age. The very people who more than others now draw attention to this fact, are those who adopt the same attitude, not only towards Spiritual Science, but also towards scientific facts which force us in the present time to seek spiritual laws.

A physician in Berlin, for example, ascertained certain numerical connections which appear in the course of human life. This doctor, Fliess [Wilhelm Fließ (1858-1928)] by name, began to register the connections between births and deaths by following them up in different families. For example, a female member of a certain family died on a certain day. Her first grandchild was born 1428 days before her death, the second grandchild 1428 days after her death, so that in this case the grandmother's death lies symmetrically before and after the birth of a grandchild. In the space of 7 times 1428 days after her death, a great-grandchild was born. By following up this case, we come to definite numerical connections, which finally determine in a very wonderful way the relationship between cases of death and birth. Fliess ascertained this in many instances. But apparently modern science does not wish to recognise it, because it goes too much against its own direction.

Even improvements in health-conditions are based on numerical connections. When we compare the number of deaths through tuberculosis during a certain epoch, with the number of deaths of the preceding decades, we again find that this is regulated by certain numbers. Doctors say that by hygienic measures they have been able to diminish the cases of death through tuberculosis. But Fliess proved that this decrease can be reckoned out on the basis of arithmetical connections. This is most inconvenient to modern science, but in the end it will be forced to admit the existence of objective arithmetical laws. It will return to the sentence of Pythagoras: "Number is something which rules everything that weaves and lives". With our soul we calculate, but the higher Spirits made these calculations long ago and set into the course of life something that is in keeping with numbers. The Pythagorean saying, "In calling the world into being, God is a mathematician" seems to come into play. On the other hand, if this is so it would strengthen the attitude of ordinary science which denies that man's inner being has any share in the destiny of his life. For if birth and death are connected in such a way that the distance between them is equal to 7 times 1428 days, it is possible to calculate when we have to die and in that case our inner being really appears to be imprisoned within violent external conditions.

Apparently, we must renounce speaking of special laws which rule our inner being. External reasons may however be adduced which tell us that this isn't quite right after all. According to calculations, a certain number of suicides may indeed take place at a definite place, but is it possible to determine arithmetically what person will commit suicide? According to the theory of probability it is possible to calculate the probable duration of human life. But I do not think that anyone will admit that he will have to die on the day fixed by arithmetical calculation. These laws based on mathematical formulae are of no consequence to man's inner being.

But how do matters stand when Fliess proves that 1428 days lie between a case of death and two births? Does this prove anything in regard to the inner laws of our Ego? For it is impossible to recognise right away the connection between the inner nucleus of our being and the external course of life. How can we explain this with the fact that we follow Karma, that we must follow our inner Ego? This is not easy to grasp.

Let me explain this by an analogy—it is quite possible that two events, two strains, two facts connected with each other should follow completely different courses. Consider this: when you travel from Baste to Zurich you go by train. You consult the time-table to find out when your train leaves. You become, as it were, intimately connected with the figures. Your thoughts, your objectives and so on are dependent on them. (There are, of course, many other figures in the time-table). But is it not the case that alongside this sequence of facts there is another (sequence of facts) that has to do with the development of your soul: that you want to progress or "catch the train?" When you consult the time-table it tells you nothing about yourself—whether you are good or bad, wise or foolish and is of no importance for the soul's being. Similarly, the figures that result from the calculations of Fliess are of no importance for the Karma of our life. We catch a certain train in life, entering a definite stream controlled by laws which are connected with our inner being only through things that we ourselves bring about. We decide which train to catch. In the same way we have to decide, through the inner laws of our Karma, to enter a certain stream of life which is then determined by arithmetical laws.

I speak of these things because those who seek the spirit should more and more acquire a feeling that life is complicated; it is something that cannot be encompassed by slack, easy thoughts. Those who think that it is an easy matter to grasp the whole of life, and that a few sentences taken from Spiritual Science suffice for this, are very much mistaken. We must be willing to penetrate more and more into these connections. We should acquire a feeling which shows us that the thoughts that lie at the foundation of the world's structure, are also valid for the human being. If no connection whatever existed between external laws and human Karma, our whole life would fall asunder.

Two facts can prove this. In Spiritual Science we endeavour to make the best possible comparisons. In a certain way the numbers in the timetable are connected with practical life. Even though it does not concern the time-table whether or not you travel to Zurich, even though you do not see any connecting link with your journey, the time-table is nevertheless connected with human conditions. For men have compiled it in such a way as to correspond, not too awkwardly, to the conditions of life. It is adapted to human conditions of life in general. Something similar is the case with human Karma and the stream of life which it controls. The Beings of the Higher Hierarchies fixed the "time-table" in accordance with numerical conditions, which are then discovered in the regular numbers of statistics. Outwardly, these correspond to human conditions in general. When we reincarnate, we may have an easy or a difficult life. Not in every family do we come across the law according to which a grandchild is always born 1428 days before or after its grandmother's death. But when we consider that 1428 is divisible by 28, that it is equal to 51 times 28, then it is easier to understand this numerical connection. These calculations will not always give the number 1428, but as a rule we find a multiple of 28 between the death and the birth of any member of a family. The multiples may be 30, 17, 26 times 28, and so forth, but they will contain the number 28: this is included regularly.

In accordance with the time-table we have the possibility to catch different trains, and according to our Karma we may arrange life in an easy or a difficult way. I mention this to indicate how complicated these conditions really are.

I also wish to point out that a moral conclusion may be drawn from all these truths. This constitutes the immensely important element given by Spiritual Science. We may say: I live in this world and I find in it numerical connections which show me how external life is regulated. It required long periods of human cultural development before this was discovered. But how much do we really know of these regular laws? Here we must admit that we know very little indeed. Slowly and gradually we discovered something of this divine wisdom. But just as we discover the most beautiful and important facets of wisdom, the wisdom admonishes us to be humble; it shows us how little our thoughts are able to encompass life.

This will stimulate us to continue striving for the Light. This moral feeling, this reverence which we have for the wisdom contained in the universe, is what we may acquire, so that we become better human beings. We acquire this feeling towards wisdom, it takes hold of us, when we recognise how near it was to us during our life between death and a new birth. When we have to come down to a new earthly existence, we choose the train by which we travel, so that we may fulfil our Karma. It is then that we choose our family-ties. If someone were to ask us now which family would be the best for our present incarnation, we would have no idea. If we had to depend only on our own forces, we could not make the right choice.

Before our incarnation we are far wiser than afterwards for at that time we make the right choice. The feeling that now we are not cleverer than before we were born, cannot fill us with pride in regard to our own achievements. For during our existence between death and birth we were filled with other forces besides those we have the moment we step into physical existence.

When we enter physical life, the substances of the earth's realms pervade us and exist within our body. On laying aside the physical body when passing through the portal of death, the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies receive us and we share their substance during our existence between death and a new birth, even as here we share the physical substances of the earth. These physical substances assert themselves—for example, iron streams through our blood in accordance with external laws—and similarly the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies assert themselves between death and a new birth by working within us, and it is their wisdom which pushes us towards the right stream of life. The Beings of the Higher Hierarchies are filled with the wisdom which we need, even as we are filled with physical substance. Humility is therefore a justified feeling, it is the moral consequence of the knowledge that during our physical life we have absorbed only a very small portion of the mighty wisdom of those Spiritual Beings.

Between death and a new birth, we are embedded in the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. If we do not submit to them, this would be the same as trying to live on earth without taking in certain physical substances, such as hydrogen, oxygen, and so forth. It would be absurd to live without complete submission to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Those who bear in mind the fact that between death and birth we must completely surrender to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies will ask themselves: What is the best preparation for that existence? And they will give themselves the following answer: The best preparation is to unfold, already during the present earthly life between birth and death, a feeling of devotion for the divine-spiritual world. If we are pervaded by the right feelings, the truths which we receive will change into feelings of devoted surrender. Humility and reverence for the spiritual world will then live in all our feelings.

If we begin to think and live in this way, we shall also discover the true balance in the environing world, for thoughts of this kind regulate and harmonize all our other feelings.

Many mistakes of the external world are brought into the spiritual-scientific movement; they are mistakes which do not come from Spiritual Science, but which are brought into it from outside. For example, a person may be diligent and active in the outside world, but his activity might be characterized by saying that he is ambitious and does too much; he ruins his forces and does not notice that he should observe certain limits in his work. When such a person enters Theosophy, he will come across quite different ideas from those which he had in the external world. But he also brings into Theosophy his own characteristic qualities. He may, for example, hear that a certain amount of study is needed for the soul's progress. He begins to study,—yet he should learn to notice how much he can really do in accordance with the forces allotted to him by his Karma; he should not pursue theosophical studies which surpass his strength. Also, if for example, he becomes a vegetarian he must ask himself whether it agrees with him or not. Otherwise he will ruin himself.

The disciple of Spiritual Science must maintain the right balance. He must know if he can really follow the strictest obligations. A calm and humble observation of his Karma, of his own capacities and forces, may be acquired by accepting in the right way what Spiritual Science can give us. Those who have advanced furthest in occultism, faithfully observe the rule of maintaining the right balance. Some people try to force matters, when external circumstances obstruct a real training; they strive with all their might towards the aim which they have in view, work spiritually like slaves to obtain an immediate answer to the problems which rise up. But those who have really progressed, never do this. First of all, the existence of a definite problem should be clearly envisaged, and then the disciple of Spiritual Science should ask himself: Are you at this moment capable of obtaining a full answer? Wait (he should say to himself) until the Beings of the spiritual world send 3ou this answer. A true disciple of the spirit if he has to strain and push at the outset will give up for the time being. He knows that he must wait, and he can wait because he is filled with the knowledge of the eternity of life and that Karma, which he never forgets, gives each man his due. Then comes a certain moment in which he obtains a strange inner hint ... it is then that the Powers of the spiritual world may give him an answer. Perhaps after many years, even after many incarnations. But it is characteristic of a right attitude to be able to wait, to practise patience, to unfold soul-harmony.

Those who allow themselves to be influenced in the right way by the teachings of Spiritual Science will learn to master their feelings and sensations, so that they are always able to maintain a harmonious balance. If we adopt this attitude, our Ego sends forces into the astral body, so that the astral body absorbs the truths which come from the spiritual world, in the same way in which a sponge absorbs the water into which it is dipped. Spiritual knowledge gradually passes over into the astral body, and the astral body is pervaded by it.

We live in an age in which it is necessary, and in which it will be more and more necessary, to pervade the astral body with spiritual wisdom. The times change more and more, and they change also in regard to the crossing of the threshold of death. In future epochs, when man again returns to the earth, his astral body if not imbued with spiritual knowledge will not find its way about the spiritual world and will be filled with darkness. But if it is filled with the truths which we now absorb, it will become a source of light and it will shed this light on its environment, thus perceiving the wisdom which we take in here on earth, in the light of the spiritual world.

If we now ask ourselves why this future light of the spiritual world does not yet exist, we may say: It has not yet come, because in the past a primordial wisdom existed which could be impressed on man without any effort on his part. It existed as an inheritance which man had received from the old Moon. With this inheritance he could penetrate into the spiritual world. This lasted until the Christian era, when man could no longer obtain spiritual wisdom in an immediate way. In the present time he must first fill his soul with spiritual-scientific truths, which will constitute the power enabling him to enter the spiritual world, guided by the light in his soul. Human conditions change from epoch to epoch.

Every form of occultism knows that a wisdom exists which came from the old Moon and was still active, in its last traces, during the 15th and 10th century A.D. When the human being entered the spiritual world, he could see the light, which shone without any effort on his part. But in the present time, the whole wisdom of the past, which existed as an old inheritance, may unite with the human soul, but the soul no longer shines when we cross the threshold of death. Only the wisdom which we take in through Christ, by saying, "Not I, but Christ in me", will become a shining light, when in future we cross the threshold of death. We therefore take in the Christianized Spiritual Science in order that our astral body may become a source of light and that we may lift it out, when we cross the threshold of death.

When we take in this Christianized Spiritual Science and fill our astral body with it, it does not remain mere wisdom, for it permeates our feelings. We then learn to know the life-conditions of the past planetary stages of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and finally of the earth.

If you penetrate livingly into the descriptions in my Occult Science, you will be able to feel that the description of Saturn has an entirely different note from that of other planetary conditions. In the description of Saturn, you will be able to feel that conditions there are described with a certain harshness. Your soul will feel it. And this is essential. The Sun-existence will be experienced as if it contained a blossoming, growing life, and in the description of the Moon you will feel a dark, melancholic note in the conceptions pertaining to it. A sensitive person will even be able to taste it, he will feel its flavour on his tongue.

Fools may object that there are discrepancies in the descriptions and that a uniform style was not maintained. But we should realise that these differences are essential, and why. We should know why a melody of three definite notes must re-echo in the words of these descriptions, and when we know this, we are able to transform this knowledge into feelings which we send out into the world. These feelings undergo a change. The wisdom absorbed by the astral body changes into a freely willed surrender to the conditions of the world, and this takes hold of our etheric body. If we are wise, we shall prepare the path for this. The forces which enable us to descend into our subsequent incarnations form the etheric body and pervade it. If during our earthly life we have filled our etheric body with genuinely devout feelings and it then dissolves in the universal All when we die, we hand over to the universe an etheric body filled with devoutness, an etheric body which may be of benefit to the whole world. If on the other hand we have not been devout, but materialistic, the etheric body which we lay aside after death will have a destructive and explosive effect when it dissolves in the universal ether. In the same measure in which we gain wisdom, we help not only ourselves, but indirectly the world also, by acquiring better forces. And in the same measure in which we unfold devout feelings, we help the world in a direct way, for devoutness is imparted to the whole world.

Spiritual Science is not only able to bestow wisdom and unfold devout feelings, but it also gives us confidence and makes us aware of the body's vital forces. The conscious connection with the spiritual world in itself gives us these vital forces.

Fichte was aware of this connection of forces. He, too, had this confidence in life, so that when speaking of man's being he was able to say: Because I know of my connection with the eternal and that my innermost being is rooted in the eternal, I have such confidence in life that I am able to say: I look up to you, ye rocks and mountains; fall down upon me, crush my physical body; clouds, cover up everything that constitutes my being; thunder, split up everything which pertains to me; I shall nevertheless defy your might! Life-confidence streams out of the consciousness that we are rooted in the spirit's eternal essence. Can a man thus rooted in the spirit's eternal essence ever grow weak? It is Spiritual Science which gives him his strength, constantly pouring into him something of this strength.

What happens with this life-confidence? Wisdom gives the astral body the power enabling us to overcome more and more the obstructing forces and gives the etheric body its right structure. But the force which streams into our body through the knowledge of our connection with the eternal, is confidence in life, which penetrates into the very forces of our physical body. Maya, illusion and deception withdraw from us, if we are equipped with these forces. It is an illusion to say that our physical body decays into dust when we die. No! The structure of our physical body, the way in which we formed it, is not an indifferent matter. If this confidence in all that is eternal lives in the physical body, we give back to the earth this confidence in life which we gained for ourselves. We strengthen the earth-planet with the forces acquired during our life. Through our physical body we give the world confidence in life. The decadent part of our physical body is only a Maya. When we trace the physical body beyond death, we see that the amount of confidence in life which we acquired during our earthly existence streams into the earth.

We thus strengthen our astral body, our etheric body and our physical body by wisdom, devoutness and in life-confidence, the best forces which we were able to develop as human beings for the whole evolution of the earth. In this way we work upon the planet earth and we acquire a feeling which shows us that man does not lead an isolated existence in the world, but that the forces which he unfolds within himself are of value to the whole world. Every speck of dust bears within it the laws of the universe; similarly every human being builds up or destroys the world by what he does or leaves undone. We may give something to the progressive process of the world, or deprive it of something, and we may crumble away from it by ignoring it, by failing to acquire confidence in life. These sins of omission contribute to the decay of our planet, whereas the wisdom, the devoutness and confidence in life which we acquired, help to build it up. We may thus gradually obtain an idea of the feelings which Spiritual Science can give us, when it takes hold of the whole human being.

PREFATORY NOTE

The following pages, entitled “Philosophy and Anthroposophy,” mainly reproduce a lecture which I gave in Stuttgart in 1908.

Under Anthroposophy I denote a scientific investigation of the spiritual world which, while cognizant of the limitations of mere physical science and ordinary mysticism, and before attempting to penetrate into the spiritual world, first develops in the soul faculties not yet evident in ordinary consciousness and science. The development of these faculties renders this advance possible.

A spiritual science of this nature is usually held by accepted philosophy to be an amateurish procedure. In a short description of the evolution of philosophy I attempt to show that this reproach is entirely unjustified. The reproach is only made because contemporary philosophy, having itself erred into false tracks, fails to perceive that the nature of its own origin demands the pursuance of the path which eventually leads to Anthroposophy.

—Rudolf Steiner

PHILOSOPHY AND ANTHROPOSOPHY

The human soul, under normal conditions of life and development, is liable to encounter two obstacles which must be overcome if the soul would avoid being swept like a rudderless ship on the waves of life. A drifting of this nature produces, in time and by degrees, an inner insecurity eventually culminating in some form of distress, or it may rob a man of the power of rightly disposing himself in the order of the world according to the true laws governing life, thus causing him to disturb and not promote this order.

Knowledge in respect of the human self—that is, self-knowledge—is one of the means of ensuring inner security and our true alignment in the order of life's development. The impulse to self-knowledge is found in every soul; it may be more or less unconscious, but it is always present. It may vent itself in quite indefinite feelings which, welling up from the depths of the soul, create an impression of dissatisfaction with life. Such feelings are often wrongly explained, and their alleviation sought in the outer circumstances of life. Though we are often unconscious of its nature, fear of these feelings obsesses us. If we could overcome this anxiety we should realize that no external measures, but only a thorough knowledge of the human being, can prove helpful. But this thorough knowledge requires that we should really feel the resistance of the two obstacles which human knowledge is liable to encounter when it would enter more deeply into the knowledge of the human being. They consist of two illusions, towering as two cliffs, between which we cannot advance in our pursuit of knowledge until we have experienced their true nature.

These two obstacles are: Natural Science and Mysticism. Both these forms of knowledge appear in a natural way upon the path of human life. But they must be inwardly experienced if they are to prove helpful. Whether or not we can acquire a knowledge of humanity depends upon our developing the strength to reach, indeed, both obstacles, but not to remain stationary before them. When confronted by them, we must still retain sufficient detachment to be able to say to ourselves: neither method can lead our soul whither we would go. But this insight can only result from a true inner experience of their cognitive value. We must not shrink from really experiencing their nature; in order to realize thereby that we endow them with their true value by first advancing beyond them. We must seek access to both methods of knowledge; once we have found them, the way of escape from them becomes apparent. The belief that true reality is grasped by Natural Science is revealed, to an unprejudiced insight, to be an illusion. A normal feeling of our own human reality produces quite a definite experience. The latter is intensified the more we tend to apply Natural Science to the comprehension of our own human self. Man as a natural product consists of a sum of natural operations. It may become an ideal of knowledge to comprehend man in the light of the operative forces observed in the realm of Nature. With genuine Natural Science this ideal is justifiable. It may also be admitted that an incalculably distant future will reveal the method of development according to natural law of the miraculous human organization. Efforts in this direction must be accepted as the rightful ideal of Natural Science. Yet it is essential that we should, in the face of this rightful ideal, press forward to an insight promoted by a sound feeling of reality. We must inwardly experience how the results offered us by Natural Science become increasingly foreign to all our inner experience of reality. The more perfect the results, the more foreign are they felt to be to our inner life, with its thirst for knowledge. True to its ideal, Natural Science is bound to offer us material substances; yet, if inwardly unbiased, we cannot avoid finally encountering the difficulty experienced by Du Bois-Reymond, when he asserted, in his famous lecture on the “Boundaries of Natural Science,” that human knowledge would never grapple with the phenomenon haunting space in the guise of matter. To devote all suitable faculties to the pursuit of Natural Science is a sound experience, but we should at the same time feel that the distance between ourselves and reality is not thereby lessened, but increased. The results of Natural Science should give us occasion to make this experience. We must observe that they do not result from comprehension or feeling, and we shall reach the point of admitting that we do not, in truth, devote ourselves to Natural Science in order to draw nearer to reality; we believe this to be the case in our conscious self, but the unconscious origin of our efforts must have an altogether different significance—a significance for human life, into which we must inquire. Knowledge of true reality does not coincide with knowledge of Nature. This insight can prove a turning point in the life of our soul. The knowledge is brought home to us through inner experience that we were bound to follow the course of Natural Science, but that we were disappointed in the expectations raised by our diligent pursuit. This recognition is the final result of genuine experience and insight into the natural processes. We then abandon the belief that Natural Science, however perfect its future development, can supply us with the knowledge of the human being. Not to have reached this standpoint and still to cherish the hope that ideal natural scientific knowledge can enlighten us concerning our own being, is a sign that we have not sufficiently advanced in the experiences that are possible within the scope of Natural Science itself.

This is the first obstacle against which we strike in our effort to attain knowledge of the human being. Many a thinker has felt the thrust on this side, and has faced about towards Mysticism and mystical immersion in the inner self. A certain progress can also be made in this direction, in the belief that actual reality, or something in the nature of unity with the primordial fount of all Being, can be inwardly experienced. If, however, we press on far enough to destroy the force of illusion, we become aware that however deep the immersion in the inner self, this experience leaves us helpless in the face of reality. With however powerful a grip we may be induced to feel that we have seized primal being, this inner experience finally proves to be some effect of an unknown being; we remain incapable of laying hold on true reality and retaining it. The mystic pursuing this path discovers that he has inwardly abandoned the true reality which he seeks and cannot draw near it again.

The natural scientist reaches an outer world which illudes his inner life. The mystic, while seeking to grasp an outer world reaches an inner life which sinks into the void.

Our experiences, on the one hand with Natural Science and on the other with Mysticism, proved to be no fulfillment of our efforts to find reality, but merely the starting-point of our path, for we are shown the chasm that yawns between material occurrence and the inner life of the soul; we are led to see this chasm and to gain the insight that, in respect of true and genuine knowledge, neither Natural Science nor mere Mysticism is capable of bridging it. The perception of this chasm leads us to seek an insight into reality by filling the gap with cognitional experiences which are not yet forthcoming in ordinary consciousness, but must be developed. With true experience of Natural Science and Mysticism, we must admit that another form of knowledge must be sought in addition to these—a knowledge that brings the material outer world nearer to our inner life, and at the same time immerses our inner life more deeply into the real world than this can be the case with Mysticism.

A cognitional method of this nature can be called anthroposophical, and the knowledge of reality thereby attained, Anthroposophy; for at the outset, true and genuine Man (anthropos) is held to be concealed behind the “man” revealed by Natural Science and the inner life of everyday consciousness. This true and genuine Man makes his presence felt in dim feelings, in the more unconscious life of the soul. Anthroposophical research raises him into consciousness. Anthroposophy does not lead away from reality to an unreal imaginary world; it embodies the search for a cognitional method in response to which the real world will reveal itself. With due experience of Natural Science and the Mysticism confined to ordinary consciousness, Anthroposophy presses forward to the perception that a new consciousness must be developed, issuing from ordinary consciousness as, for instance, waking from the dull dream consciousness. Thus the cognitional process becomes for Anthroposophy a real inner occurrence extending beyond ordinary consciousness, whereas Natural Science is nothing but logical judgment and inference within the confines of ordinary consciousness, on the basis of outwardly given material reality, and Mysticism only a deepened inner life which, however, remains within the pale of ordinary consciousness.

In calling attention, at the present day, to the fact that an inwardly real cognitional process and an anthroposophical knowledge exist, habits of thought are encountered whose origin is due, on the one hand, to Natural Science with its wonderful achievements and great expansion, and to certain mystical prejudices on the other. Thus Anthroposophy is repudiated upon the one side for supposedly not doing justice to Natural Science, while upon the other it appears superfluous to the mystically inclined, who believe they can themselves take their stand upon true reality. Others, who aim at keeping “genuine” knowledge free from everything that extends beyond ordinary consciousness, hold that Anthroposophy disowns the true scientific character which philosophy, for instance, and its knowledge of the world should retain, and therefore lapses into dilettantism.

The following exposition will prove how little this reproach of dilettantism (especially at the hands of philosophy) is justified. A short sketch of its development will show how often philosophy has estranged itself from true reality, through not perceiving the very two cognitional obstacles alluded to above, and how an unconscious impulse is at the root of all philosophical effort to steer between these obstacles and strive for Anthroposophy. (I have dealt at greater length with this tendency of all philosophy towards Anthroposophy in my book Die Rätsel der Philosophie.

Philosophy is generally regarded by those concerned therewith as something absolute, and not as something which was bound to come into existence, under particular conditions, in the course of the development of mankind, and be subject to transformation. Many an erroneous view of its true nature is current. It is however precisely when dealing with philosophy that we are in a position to name the period when it originated (and must have originated) in the course of human development—not merely through inner experience, but also on the basis of external historical documents. Most exponents of the history of philosophy, especially of the older school, have estimated this period fairly correctly. In all such presentations we find that a beginning is made with Thales, and the course of philosophy traced from him onwards in continuity down to our times. Some modern writers on the history of philosophy, aiming at unusual comprehensiveness and perspicacity, have placed the beginning of philosophy in still earlier times, drawing upon the various teachings of ancient wisdom. This, however, is only due to a particular form of dilettantism wholly ignorant of the fact that all the teachings of Indian, Egyptian, and Chaldean wisdom were entirely different, both in respect of method and origin, from purely philosophical thought with its leaning towards the speculative. The latter developed in the world of Greece, and there the first thinker to be considered in this sense is, in fact, Thales.

We need not describe at length the characteristics of the various Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales; we need not dwell on Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Anaximenes, or yet on Socrates and Plato. We may begin at once with that personality who appears as the very first philosopher in the narrowest sense, the philosopher par excellence—Aristotle. All other philosophies were in reality but abstractions inspired by the wisdom of the Mysteries; in the case of Thales and Heraclitus, for instance, this could easily be shown.¹

Neither Plato nor Pythagoras is a philosopher in the real sense of the word, seership being the source from which both of them draw. The chief interest in a characterization of philosophy as such does not centre round the fact that someone or other expresses himself in ideas, but round the question where the sources from which he draws are to be found. Pythagoras drew from the wisdom of the Mysteries, which he translated into concepts and ideas. He was a seer, only he expressed his experiences as seer in philosophic form; and the same was the case with Plato.

But the essential characteristic of the philosopher, manifested for the first time in Aristotle, is the fact that he necessarily rejects all other sources (or has no access to them), and works exclusively with the technique of ideas. And since this may be said for the first time of Aristotle, it is not without good historical reason that it should be precisely this philosopher who founded logic and the science, of thought. All other efforts in this direction had been of a precursory nature only. The way and the manner in which concepts and judgments are formed and conclusions drawn this entire range of mental activity was discovered by Aristotle as a kind of natural history of subjective thought, and everything we meet within him is closely connected with this inauguration of the technique of thought. As we shall revert to certain points in connection with Aristotle which are of fundamental importance for all later aspects of the subject, this short historical indication will suffice to characterize in a few words the point from which we depart. Aristotle remains the representative philosopher for later times also. His achievements were not only embodied in the post-Aristotelian period of antiquity, up to the founding of Christianity, but he was regarded most especially in the first Christian period and onward into the Middle Ages as that philosopher in whom direction was to be sought in all efforts to formulate a conception of the universe. By this we do not mean that men had Aristotle's philosophy before them as a system, as a collection of dogmas—especially in the Middle Ages, when the original texts were not obtainable; but thinkers had become familiar with the process of applying the technique of pure thought and thereby ascending step by step to knowledge, up to the point where thought encompasses the fundamental problems of life. Aristotle became to an increasing extent the Master of Logic. The medieval thinkers would say to themselves: whatever be the source of the knowledge of positive facts, be it due to man's investigation of the outer world by means of his senses, or be it due to revelation by means of divine Grace, as through Christ Jesus, these things have simply to be accepted, on the one hand as the deposition of the senses, and on the other as revelation. But if any matter, however given, is to be substantiated by a purely conceptual process, this must be done with that technique of thinking which Aristotle discovered. And, in fact, the inauguration of the technique of thinking was achieved by Aristotle in so signal a fashion that Kant was but right in declaring that, since Aristotle, logic had not advanced by so much as a single sentence.² Indeed, this statement is in all essentials true of the present day; the fundamental teachings embodying a logical system of thought will be found today almost unaltered, if compared with what Aristotle set down. The additions made today are due to a somewhat mistaken attitude, prevalent even in philosophical circles, towards the conception of logic.

Now it was not merely the study, of Aristotle, but above all the assimilation of his technique of thinking, that became the standard of the central period of the Middle Ages, or the early Scholastic period, when Scholasticism was at its prime—a period which came to a close with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. When mention is made of this early Scholasticism, it should be clearly understood that no philosophical judgment is possible at the present time in this connection, unless we are unhampered by all authority and dogmatic belief. It is indeed almost more difficult nowadays to speak of these things purely objectively, than disparagingly; for if we speak of Scholasticism with disparagement, we run no risk of being charged with heresy by the so-called freethinkers; but if we speak purely objectively, it is highly probable we shall be misunderstood, because a positive and most intolerant ecclesiastical movement of the present day often bases—its appeal upon totally misunderstood Thomism. There is no question of discussing here what is accepted by orthodox Catholic philosophy; neither should we be intimidated by the possible reproach of being concerned with what is professed and determined in dogmatic quarters. Let us rather be undisturbed by what may be asserted on the right and on the left, and simply seek to characterize what Scholasticism in its prime felt of science, the technique of thinking and supernatural revelation. Early Scholasticism does not bear the character attributed to it in a ready-made modern definition. Far from being dualistic in nature, as many imagine, it is pure Monism. It sees the world's primal source as an undoubted unity; only the Scholastic has a particular feeling with regard to the perception of this primal being. He says: there exists a certain fund of supersensible truth, a store of wisdom which was revealed to mankind; human thought with all its technique falls short of penetrating, of itself, into those regions which embody the content of the highest revealed wisdom. The early Scholastic appealed to a certain fund of wisdom which transcends the technique of thinking; that is, it is only in so far attainable as thought is capable of elucidating the wisdom which has been revealed. This portion of the Wisdom must be accepted by the thinkers as revelation, and the technique of thinking merely applied for its elucidation. What man can evolve from his inner self has its being only in certain subordinate regions of reality, and here the Scholastic applies active thought for the personal investigation of man. He presses forward up to a certain boundary where revealed wisdom meets him. Thus the content of personal research and revelation becomes united in an objective, unified, and monistic conception of the universe. That a kind of dualism, owing to human limitations, is associated with the matter is only of secondary importance; this is a dualism in cognition and not a dualism in the world whole.

The Scholastic, therefore, pronounces the technique of thinking to be suitable for the rational elaboration of the material gathered by empirical science in sense-observation; further, it may press forward a stage, even up to spiritual truth. Here the Scholastic, in all humility, presents a portion of wisdom as Revelation, which he cannot himself discover, but which he is called upon to accept.

Now this special technique of thinking, as applied by the Scholastics, sprang entirely from the soil of Aristotelian logic. There was, in fact, a twofold necessity for the early Scholastics (whose period drew to its close in the thirteenth century) to concern themselves with Aristotle. The first necessity was provided by historical evolution. Aristotelianism had become a permanency. The second arose from the fact that, as time went on, an enemy to Christianity sprang up in another quarter.

The teachings of Aristotle did not expand to Western countries only, but also to the East; and everything that had been brought by the Arabs into Europe by way of Spain was, in respect of thought technique, saturated with Aristotelianism. It was a certain form of philosophy, in particular of Natural Science, extending into Medicine, which had been brought over, and which was eminently saturated with Aristotelian technique of thinking. Now the belief had grown in that quarter that nothing but a kind of Pantheism could be the consistent outcome of Aristotelianism—a Pantheism which, particularly in philosophy, had evolved from a very vague Mysticism.

There was, therefore, in addition to the fact that Aristotle's influence was still paramount in the technique of thinking, yet another reason for men to concern themselves with his teachings, for in the interpretation placed upon him by the Arabs, Aristotle is made to appear as the opponent and foe of Christianity.

It had to be admitted that if the Arabian interpretation of Aristotelianism were true, the latter could provide a scientific basis adapted for the refutation of Christianity. Now let us imagine what the Scholastics felt in this extremity. Upon the one side they adhered firmly to the truth of Christianity, yet upon the other they were bound by all their traditions to acknowledge that the logic and the thought technique of Aristotle were alone right and true. Placed in this dilemma, the Scholastics were faced by the task of proving that Aristotle's logic could be applied and his philosophy professed, and that it was exactly he, Aristotle, who provided the very instrument by means of which Christianity would be really conceived and understood. It was a task imposed by the trend of historical development.

Aristotelianism had to be handled in such a way as to make it evident that the teaching brought by the Arabs was not Aristotle's, but only a mistaken conception thereof; that, in short, one had but to interpret Aristotle correctly in order to find in his teaching a basis for the conception of Christianity. This was the task Scholasticism set itself, to the achievement of which the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas were largely devoted.

Now, however, something else happened. When the day of Scholasticism had drawn to its close, there occurred in course of time a complete rupture along the whole line of logical and philosophical thought-evolution. No criticism is here intended of this fact; we do not wish even to suggest that it could have happened otherwise; the actual course taken was necessarily such as it was, and we merely put the case hypothetically when we say that the most natural thing would have been to have increasingly expanded the technique of thinking, so that ever higher and higher portions of the supersensible world should have been grasped by thought. But the next development was not of this nature. The fundamental conceptions, which, with St. Thomas Aquinas for instance, were applicable to the highest regions, and which could have received such development that the boundaries restricting human research would have receded ever farther and upwards into the supersensible regions—this body of thought was robbed of its power and possibility, and survived only in the conviction that the highest spiritual truths transcend altogether the activity of human thought and are beyond elaboration by concepts which man can evolve from himself. By such means a break in man's spiritual life occurred. Supersensible knowledge was pronounced to be entirely beyond the compass of human thought and to be unattainable by subjective cognitional nets; it must have its roots in faith. There had always been a tendency in this direction, but it ran to extremes towards the close of the Middle Ages.

Pains were taken to accentuate the breach between faith on the one hand, which must be attained by objective conviction, and, on the other hand, whatever logical activity can elaborate as the basis of a sound judgment.

Once this chasm was opened, it was only natural that knowledge and faith should be increasingly thrust asunder and that Aristotle and his technique of thinking should also become the victims of this breach occasioned by historical development. This was more especially the case at the beginning of the modern era. It was maintained on the scientific side (and we may consider many of the statements as well founded) that no progress could be made in the search for empirical truth by merely spinning out what Aristotle had placed on record. Furthermore, the trend of historical events was such that it became inadvisable to make common cause with the Aristotelians; and as the era of Kepler and Galileo drew near, mistaken Aristotelianism had become the very bane of knowledge.

It repeatedly happens that the adherents and followers of some particular philosophy of the universe corrupt an uncommon amount of the teaching which the founders themselves presented in the right way. Instead of looking to Nature herself, instead of exercising the faculty of observation, it was found easier at the end of the Middle Ages to have recourse to the old books of Aristotle and base all academic dissertations on his written word. It was characteristic of the epoch that when an orthodox Aristotelian was invited to convince himself by inspecting a dead body, that the nerves do not proceed from the heart, as he had mistakenly gathered from Aristotle, but that the nervous system has its centre in the brain the Aristotelian replied: “Observation certainly shows me that this is actually the case, but Aristotle states the reverse, and I have greater faith in him.” The followers of Aristotle had, in fact, become a grievance; empirical science was bound to make a clearance of this false Aristotelianism, basing its authority on pure experience, and we find a particularly strong impulse in the direction given by the great Galileo.

On the other side we see an entirely different development. An aversion to the technique of thinking was felt by those who, so to speak, sought to save their faith from this invasion of independent thought. They were of the opinion that this technique of thinking was powerless when faced by the fund of wisdom acquired through revelation. When the worldly empirics invoked the book of Aristotle, their opponents confronted them with arguments gathered from a different but equally misunderstood book—namely, the Bible. This was more particularly the case at the beginning of the modern era, as we may gather from Luther's hard words; “Reason is deaf and purblind fool” that should have naught to do with spiritual truths, adding further that pure faith by conviction can never be kindled by reason in a thought founded upon Aristotle, whom he calls “hypocrite, sycophant, and stinking goat.” These are, indeed, hard words; but when considered from the standpoint of the new era, they may be better understood. A deep chasm had opened between reason and its technique of thinking on the one hand, and supersensible truth on the other. A final expression of this break is found in a philosopher through whose influence the nineteenth century has become entangled in a web from which it can only with difficulty extricate itself. This philosopher is Kant. He is, virtually, the last representative thinker whose methods can be traced to that division which occurred in the Middle Ages. He differentiates sharply between faith and that knowledge which man may claim to attain. Externally the Critique of Pure Reason is associated with the Critique of Practical Reason, and Practical Reason seeks to handle the problem of Knowledge from the standpoint of rational faith. On the other hand Kant asserts most emphatically of Theoretical Reason that it is incapable of comprehending the Actual, the “thing-in-itself.” Man receives impressions from the thing-in-itself, but he is circumscribed by his own ideas and conceptions. We could not describe Kant's fundamental error without going deeply into the nature of his philosophy and its history; but this would lead too far from the present subject, moreover the reader will find the question adequately treated in my Truth and Science.

What is of far greater interest to us at the present moment is this web in the meshes of which the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century has become entangled. Let us examine how this came about. Kant was especially alive to the necessity of demonstrating to what extent something absolute was given us in thought, something in which there could be no uncertainty, as against the uncertainty, according to him, of everything which proceeds from experience. Our judgment can only derive certainty from the fact that a portion of knowledge does not originate with external things, but with ourselves. In the Kantian sense, we see external things as through a coloured glass; we receive them into ourselves, grouping them according to lawful connections which we ourselves evolve. Our cognition has certain forms—the forms of space, time, the categories of cause and effect, and so on. These are immaterial for the thing-in-itself, at least we cannot know whether the thing-in-itself has any existence in space, time, or causality. The latter are forms created by the subjective mind of man and imposed upon the thing-in-itself the moment of its appearing; the thing-in-itself remains unknown. Thus when man finds the thing-in-itself before him, he endows it with the forms of space and time, and finds an apparent association of cause and effect, thus enveloping the thing-in-itself with a self-made network of concepts and forms. For this reason man may claim a certain security of knowledge, since, as long as he is as he is, time, space, and causality possess actual significance for him. And whatever man thrusts into the things he must also extract from them. Of the thing-in-itself, however, he can have no knowledge, for he remains ever a captive of the forms of his own mind. This view was finally expressed by Schopenhauer in his classical formula; “The world is my conception.”

Now this entire process of reasoning has been transmitted to almost the entire thought of the nineteenth century; not only to the theory of knowledge, but also, for instance, to the theoretical principles of Physiology. Here philosophical speculation was amplified by certain experiences. If we consider the doctrine of the specific energies of the senses, there would seem to be a corroboration of the Kantian theory. At all events that is how the matter was recorded during the nineteenth century. “The eye perceives the light”; yet, if the eye be affected by some other means, say by pressure or by electric current, a perception of light is also recorded. Hence it was said: the perception of the light is generated by the specific energy of the eye and transferred to the thing-in-itself. It was Helmholtz in particular who laid this down in the crudest manner as a physiological-philosophical axiom, declaring that not even a pictorial resemblance can be claimed between our perceptions and the objects exterior to ourselves. A picture resembles its prototype, but in so called sense-perception the resemblance to the original cannot be so close as even in a picture. The only designation, therefore, we can find for the experience within ourselves is “symbol” of the thing-in-itself, for a symbol need have no resemblance to the thing it expresses.

Thus the philosophical thought of the nineteenth century, until the present day, became thoroughly impregnated with elements which had long been in preparation, so that the relation of human cognition to reality could not be conceived except in the sense of the ideas given above. I often recall a conversation I had the privilege of having years ago with a highly esteemed philosophical thinker of the nineteenth century, with whose views, however, on the theory of knowledge I could by no means agree. To qualify human conceived thought as purely subjective was, I urged, a cognitional assertion which should not be assumed a priori. He replied that one need only bear in mind the definition of the word “conception,” which pronounces the latter to exist only in the soul; but since reality is only given us by means of conceptions, it follows that we have no reality in the act of cognition, but only a conception thereof. This truly ingenious thinker had allowed a preconceived opinion to condense to a definition (which, for him, was indisputable), to the effect that conceptual thought reaches only as far as the boundary of the thing-in-itself, and is, therefore, subjective. This habit of thought has become so predominant in the course of time that all writers on the theory of cognition who pride themselves on understanding Kant, consider every man a dullard who will not agree with their definition of conceptual thought and the subjective nature of apprehension. All this has resulted from the split which I have described as occurring in the spiritual development of mankind.

Now a real understanding of Aristotle enables us to find that an entirely different principle and theory of cognition might have resulted from a direct, that is, from an undistorted, development of his teaching. In the matter of the theory of knowledge, Aristotle already admitted ideas to which man today can but slowly and gradually ascend through the intellectualistic undergrowth which is the outcome of Kant's influence. We must, above all things, realize that Aristotle, by means of his technique of thinking, was able to elaborate true concepts capable of transcending those limits which were imposed upon knowledge in the way described above.

We need only concern ourselves with a few of Aristotle's fundamental conceptions in order to recognize this. It is entirely in conformity with him to say: Our initial knowledge of the things which we apprehend around us is provided by our sense-perception. Sense presents to us the individual thing. When we, however, begin to think, the things group themselves; we gather diverse things into a unit of thought. Here Aristotle finds the right connection between this unity of thought and an objective reality (which, leads to the thing-in-itself), in showing that if we think consistently we must conceive the world of experience around us as composed of “matter” and what he terms “form”—two concepts which he genuinely differentiates in the only true and possible sense. It would entail a lengthy exposition to treat exhaustively of these concepts and all they involve; some elementary notions, however, in this connection will help us to understand Aristotle's teaching of “matter” and “form” as differentiated by him. He clearly realizes that, in respect of our cognition, it is essential that we should grasp the “form” of all things which constitute our world of experience, since it is the form which is the vital principle of things, and not matter.

There are even in our day personalities endowed with a true comprehension of Aristotle. Vincent Knauer, who in the 'eighties was lecturer at the University of Vienna, was in the habit of explaining to his hearers the difference between form and matter by means of an illustration which may, perhaps, appear grotesque, but is none the less pertinent. “Think,” he said, “how a wolf, after eating nothing but lambs for a part of his life, consists, strictly speaking, of nothing but lamb—and yet this wolf never becomes a lamb!” This argument, if only rightly followed up, gives the difference between matter and form. Is the wolf a wolf by reason of matter? No! His being is given him by his form, and we find this “wolf-form” not only in this particular wolf, but in all wolves. Thus we find form by means of a concept expressing a universal, in contradistinction to the thing grasped by the senses, which is always particular and single. Our thought moves altogether along Aristotelian lines, if we, like the Scholastics, exert ourselves to conceive the nature of form by dividing the universal into three kinds. The universal, as essence of the form, is conceived by the Scholastics, firstly as pre-existent to all operation and life of the form in the single thing; secondly as permeating the single thing with life and activity; thirdly, they found that the human soul, by observing the things inwardly, endows the universal form with life in a manner consistent with its (the soul's) nature. The philosophers, accordingly, differentiated the universal that lives in the thing and comes to expression in human cognition, in the following way:

1. Universalia ante rem: the essence of the form before its incorporation in the single thing.

2. Universalia in re: the essential forms existent in the things.

3. Universalia post rem: these essential forms abstracted from the things and appearing in cognition as an inner experience of the soul, through the reciprocal relation of the soul to the things.

Until we approach this threefold difference, no genuine insight is possible, in this connection, into what is here of importance. For only consider for a moment what is involved. The insight is involved that man, in so far as he remains within the universalia post rem, is confined to a subjective element. Further (and this is especially important), that the concept in the soul is a “representation” of universally existent real forms (Entelechies). The latter (universalia in re) have incorporated themselves in the things, thanks to their having previously existed as universalia ante rem.

A purely spiritual form of existence must be attributed to the universal essences before their incorporation in the single things. The conception of such essential universalia ante rem will naturally appear as a fanciful abstraction in the eyes of those for whom only the world of sensible objects is real. But it is of essential importance that an inner experience should induce us to accept this conception. That experience is meant, thanks to which the general concept “wolf” is not merely regarded as a condensation, effected by the intellect, of all the various single wolves, but is perceived as a spiritual reality extending beyond the single thing. This spiritual reality enables us to recognize difference between animal and man in a genuinely spiritual sense. What is inherent in the species “wolf” does not find its realization in the single wolf, but in the totality of these single wolves. In man, an entity of soul and spirit is immediately revealed in the individual, whereas, in animals, only through the species, in the totality of the individuals. Or, in Aristotelian terminology with individual man the “form” finds its immediate expression in the physical human being; in the animal world the “form,” as such, remains in a supersensible region and extends itself along the line of development comprising all the individuals of the same “form.” It is permissible, in the sense of Aristotelianism, to speak of “group-souls” (the souls of kind or species) in the case of animals, and of individual souls in the case of man. If we succeed in acquiring an inner experience in the light of which the above distinction becomes equivalent to a perceived reality, we have advanced one step farther on the path of knowledge, along which Aristotelianism and Scholasticism had only progressed as far as the technique of concepts and ideas. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science seeks to prove that the above experience can be acquired. The “forms” are then not merely the outcome of conceptual differentiation, but the object of supersensible vision. The group-souls of the animals and the individual souls of men are perceived as beings of similar kind. This entire process is perceived as physical reality is perceived by the senses. The method by which Anthroposophical Spiritual Science seeks to acquire this experience will be indicated in the course of this treatise. At this point the writer's intention was to show how ideas within the range of Aristotelian doctrine can be found to corroborate Anthroposophy. There is, however, in addition to all that we have met with in Aristotle, something which finds less and less favour in modern times. We are required to exert ourselves to think in concise, finely chiseled concepts, in concepts which we have first carefully prepared. It is necessary that we should have the patience to advance from concept to concept, and above all things cultivate clarity and keenness of thought; that we should be aware of what we are speaking when we frame a conception. If, for instance, we speak, in the Scholastic sense, of the relation of a concept to that which it represents, we are required in the first place to work our way through lengthy definitions in the Scholastic writings. We must understand what is meant when we find it stated that the concept is grounded “formally” in the subject and “fundamentally” in the object; the particular form of the concept is derived from the subject and its content from the object. That is but a small, quite a small, example. The study of Scholastic works involves labouring through massive volumes of definitions most unpleasant task for the scientist of today; for this reason he looks upon the Scholastics as learned pedants and condemns them downright. He is totally unaware that true Scholasticism is naught but the detailed elaboration of the art of thinking, in order that thought may provide a foundation for the genuine comprehension of reality.

It is of course far easier to bring a few ready-made conceptions to bear upon everything that confronts us in the nature of higher reality—far easier than to construct a firm foundation in the sphere of thought. But what are the consequent results? Philosophic books of the present day leave one with a dubious impression: men no longer understand each other on higher questions; they are not clear in their own minds as to the nature and scope of their conceptions. This could not have happened in the days of the Scholastics, for thinkers of that period were necessarily acquainted with the aspect of every concept they used. A way of penetrating to the depths of a genuine thought-method was clearly in existence, and, had this path been duly pursued, no entanglement in the web of Kant's “thing-in-itself,” and the (supposedly subjective) conception thereof, would have been possible. On the contrary, two results would have been attained. In the first place, man would have achieved an inwardly sound theory of knowledge; secondly (and this is of great importance), the great philosophers who lived and worked after Kant would not have been so completely misunderstood in accepted philosophical circles. Kant was succeeded by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel; what are they to the man of today? They are held to be philosophers who sought to fashion a world from purely abstract concepts. This was never their intention.³

But Kant's principles of thought were the dominating influence and prevented the greatest philosopher in the world being understood. People will only by degrees ripen an understanding of all that Hegel has given to the world; only when they have east off this hampering web of theories and cognitional phantoms. Yet this would be so simple! No more is necessary than the effort to think naturally and without constraint, rejecting the set habits of thought which have developed under the questionable influence of the Kantian school. The question must clearly be settled whether man (as proceeding from the subject) encompasses the object with a conception which he himself constructs within that subject. But does it necessarily follow that man is unable to penetrate into the “thing-in-itself?” Let me give a simple example. Imagine, for instance, that you have a seal bearing the name of Miller. Now press the seal on some sealing-wax and again remove it. There can be no doubt, I take it, that the seal being, let us say, of brass, no property of the brass will pass over into the wax. Were the sealing-wax to exercise the function of cognition in the Kantian sense, it would say: “I am entirely wax; no brass passes over into me, there is therefore no connection whereby I may learn the nature of that which has approached me.” And yet the point in question has in this case been entirely neglected—namely, the fact that the name “Miller” remains objectively imprinted upon the sealing-wax, without any portion of the brass having adhered to it. So long as people cling to the materialistic principle of thought that no connection is possible unless matter passes over from one to the other, they will in theory maintain: “I am sealing-wax and the other is brass-in-itself, and since none of the brass-in-itself can enter me, therefore the name of Miller can be no more than a sign. But the thing-in-itself which was in the seal and which has impressed itself upon me so that I can read it, this thing-in-itself remains forever unknown to me.” With this final formula the argument is clenched. Continuing the illustration, we might say: “Man is all wax (conception). The thing-in-itself is all seal (that which is exterior to the conception). Now since I, being wax (the subject conceiving), can but attain to the outer surface of the seal (the thing-in-itself), I remain within myself and nothing passes into me from the thing-in-itself.” So long as Materialism is allowed to encroach upon the theory of knowledge, no understanding is possible of what is here of importance.⁴

It is true that we are limited by our own conception, but the element that reaches us from outer reality is of purely spiritual nature, and is not dependent upon the transmission of material atoms. What passes over into the subject is not of material but of spiritual nature, as truly as the name Miller passes into the wax. This must be the starting-point of a sound theory and investigation of knowledge, and it will soon become apparent to what extent Materialism has gained a footing even in philosophical thought. An unbiased review of the state of affairs leaves us no alternative but to conclude that Kant could only conceive the “thing-in-itself” as matter, however grotesque this may seem at first sight. For the sake of a complete survey of the subject we must new touch upon another point. We have explained how Aristotle distinguished between “form” and “matter” in all things within our range of experience. Now if the process of cognition allows us to approach the “form” in the manner indicated above, the question arises to what extent is a similar approach possible in the direction of “matter.” It must be noted that, for Aristotle, matter was not synonymous with material substance, but comprised the spiritual element underlying the world, of physical reality. It is therefore possible not only to comprehend the spiritual element that reaches us from external things,* but also to seek immediate access to the things and identify ourselves with matter. This question is also of importance for the theory of knowledge, and can be answered only by one who has gone deeply into the nature of thought, that is, of pure thought. The concept of “pure thought” is one which we must be at pains to acquire. Following Aristotle, we may look upon pure thought as an actual process. It is pure form and, in its initial mode of existence, void of content as far as the single, individual things of the external physical world are concerned. Why? Let us make it clear how pure conception comes into being in contradistinction to perception through the senses. Let us imagine we wish to form the conception of a circle. We can, for this purpose, put out to sea until we see nothing but water around: this perception can provide the conception of a circle. There is another way, however, of arriving at the conception of a circle without appealing to the senses. I can construct, in thought, the sum of all places which are equidistant from one particular spot. No appeal to the senses is necessary for this exclusively internal thought-process; it is unquestionably pure thought in the Aristotelian sense; pure actuality.

And now a further significant fact presents itself. Pure thought thus conceived harmonizes with experience; it is indispensable for the comprehension of experience. Imagine Kepler evolving, by means of pure constructive thought, a system in which the elliptical courses of the planets are shown, with the sun in the focus, and then observation, by means of the telescope, subsequently confirming an effort of pure thought conceived in advance of experience. Pure thought is thus shown to possess significance for reality—for it harmonizes therewith. Kepler's method affords a practical illustration of the theories which Aristotelianism founded upon the science of knowledge. The universalia post rem are grasped, and, upon nearer approach, it is found that they became united with the things in a previous form, as universalia ante rem. Now if these universals are not perverted in the sense of a false theory of knowledge, if they are not made to appear as subjective notions, but are found to exist objectively in the things, it follows that they must first have become united with that “form” conceived by Aristotle as the underlying foundation of the world.

Thus the discovery is made that the apparently most subjective activity (when something is determined independently of all experience) provides the very means for attaining reality in the most objective manner possible.

Now what is the reason why human thought, in so far as it is subjective, cannot at first find free access to the world? The reason is that it finds its way obstructed by the “thing-in-itself.” When we construct a circle we live in the process itself, if only formally to begin with. Now the next question is: To what extent can subjective thought lead to the attainment of any permanent reality? As we have pointed out, subjective thought is, in the first place, expressly constructed by ourselves; it is of merely formal nature and, as far as the objective world is concerned, has the appearance of an extraneous addition. We are indeed justified in claiming that it is a matter of complete indifference to any existing circle or sphere whether our thought concerns itself therewith or not. My thought is brought externally to bear upon reality, and is of no concern to the world of experience around me. The latter exists in its own accord irrespective of my thought. It can therefore follow that our thought may possess objectivity for ourselves, yet be of no moment for the things. What is the solution of this apparent contradiction? Where is the other pole to which we must now have recourse? Can a way be found, within pure thought to create not only form, but together with form its material reality? As soon as the possibility is given of a simultaneous creation of form and matter a point of security is reached upon which the theory of knowledge may build.

When we, for instance, construct the circle, we may claim that whatever we assert concerning this circle is objectively true; but the question whether our assertions are applicable to the things will depend upon the things themselves eventually showing us to what extent they are subject to the laws which we construct and apply to them. When the totality of forms resolves itself in pure thought, some residue (Aristotle's “matter”) must remain, where it is not possible by the process of pure thought to reach reality.

Fichte may at this point supplement Aristotle. A formula along Aristotelian lines may be reached to the effect that everything about us, including all things belonging to the invisible worlds, necessarily call for a material reality to correspond with form-reality. To Aristotle the idea of God is a pure actuality, a pure act, that is, an act in which actuality (the formative element) possesses the power to produce its own reality; it does not stand apart from matter, but by reason of its own activity fully and immediately coincides with reality.

The image of this pure actuality is found in man himself, when by the process of pure thought he attains to the idea of the “I.” Upon this level (in the “I”) he is within the sphere of what Fichte calls “deed-act.” He has inwardly arrived at something which not only lives in actuality, but together with this actuality produces its own “matter.” When we grasp the “I” in pure thought we are in a centre where pure thought produces its own essential “matter.” When we apprehend the “I” in thought, a threefold “I” is at hand; a pure “I” belonging to the universalia ante rem; an “I” wherein we ourselves are, belonging to the universalia in re; and an “I” which we comprehend and which belongs to the universalia post rem. But here we must especially note that, in this case, when we rise to a true apprehension of the “I,” the threefold “I” becomes merged into one. The “I” lives within itself; it produces its own concept and lives therein as a reality. The activity of pure thought is not immaterial to the “I,” for pure thought is the creator of the “I.” Here the “creative” and the “material” coincide, and we must but acknowledge that, whereas in other processes of cognition we strike against a boundary, this is not the case with the “I” which we embrace in its inmost being when we enfold it in pure thought.

The following fundamental axiom may therefore be formulated in the sense of the theory of cognition: “In pure thought a particular point is attainable wherein the complete convergence of the 'real' and the 'subjective' is achieved, and man experiences reality.” If we now set to work at this point, if we cultivate our thought so that it shall bear fruit and issue from itself—we then grasp the things of the world from within. In the “I,” therefore, grasped in pure thought and thereby also created, something is given whereby we may break down the barrier which, in the case of all other things, must be placed between “form” and “matter.”

A well-founded and thoroughgoing theory of cognition may thus advance to the point of indicating a way into reality by means of pure thought. If this path be pursued, it will be found that it must eventually lead to Anthroposophy. Very few philosophers, however, have any understanding of this path. They are mostly entangled in their self-made web of notions; arid since they cannot but regard the concept as something merely abstract, they are incapable of grasping the one and only point where it is a creative archetype, and equally incapable of finding a bond of union with the “thing-in-itself.”

For a knowledge of the “I” as an instrument whereby the human soul's immersion in the fullest reality may be clearly perceived, we are required to distinguish most carefully between the real “I” and the “I” of ordinary consciousness. A confusion of these might lead us to assert, with the philosopher Descartes: “I think, therefore I am”; in this case, however, reality would refute us during every sleep, when we “are” though we do not “think.” Thought does not vouch for the reality of the “I.” On the other hand, it is equally true that an experience of the true “I” is not possible except by means of pure thought. As far as ordinary human consciousness is concerned, the true “I” extends into pure thought, and into pure thought alone. Mere thinking only leads us to a thought (conception) of the “I”; experience of all that may be experienced within pure thought provides our consciousness with a content of reality in which “form” and “matter” coincide. Apart from this “I,” ordinary consciousness can know of nothing which carries both “'form” and “matter” into thought. All other thoughts do not image full reality. Yet by acquiring experience of the true “I” in pure thought we become acquainted with full reality; moreover, we may advance from this experience to other regions of true reality.

Anthroposophy attempts this advance. It does not remain stationary on the level of the experiences of ordinary consciousness, but strives to achieve an investigation of reality through the agency of a transformed consciousness. With the exception of the “I” experienced in pure thought, ordinary consciousness is excluded for the purpose of this investigation.

A new consciousness takes its place, whose activity in its widest range is commensurate with the activity of ordinary consciousness at such moments when the latter can rise to the experience of the “I” in pure thought. To achieve this purpose, our soul most acquire the strength to withdraw from the apprehension of all external things and from all conceptions with which we are inwardly so familiar that we can recall them in our memory. Most seekers after the knowledge of reality deny the possibility of the above; they deny it without trial. Indeed, the only method of trial is the accomplishment of those inner processes which lead to the above-mentioned transformation of consciousness. (A detailed description of these processes will be found in my book, among others, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.) An attitude of denial in this matter effectively hinders the attainment of true reality. Only the main points in connection with these processes can here be given; the subject is treated in detail in the author's above-mentioned and other books. The soul forces which in ordinary life and science are devoted to the perception of things and to the activity of such thought as can be recalled in memory—these forces can be applied to the perception and experience of a supersensible world. Our initial experience in this way is the perception of our supersensible being. The reason why we cannot attain this supersensible being if we remain within the limits of ordinary consciousness becomes conspicuous to us. (Though we attain it at that one point of the true “I,” as explained above, we are unable immediately to recognize it in its state of isolation.) Ordinary consciousness is produced when man's physical, bodily nature, as it were, engulfs his spiritual being and acts in its place. In the ordinary apprehension of the physical world we have an activity of the human organism which is maintained by the transformation of man's supersensible being into a sensible (physical) being. The activity of ordinary thought originates in the same way, with the difference that apprehension is ensured by the reciprocal relation of the human organism to the outer world, whereas thought evolves within the organism itself.

An insight into these facts is conditional to all true knowledge of reality. The seeker after knowledge must make the attainment of this insight the object of inner, spiritual exertion. The habits of thought prevalent in our day tend to a confusion of this spiritual exercise with all manner of nebulous, mystical amateurishness. Nothing can be more irrelevant. The effort is entirely in the direction of the fullest clarity of soul. Strictly logical thought is both the point of departure and the standard of exercise, to the exclusion of all experiences deficient in such inner clarity. But this purely logical thought is related to the inner exercise in question, as a shadow to the object which casts it. The exercise of the inner faculties strengthens the soul to such an extent that the struggle towards knowledge becomes fraught with more than the experience of mere abstract thought; the experience of spiritual realities is achieved. Knowledge is kindled in the soul, of which a non-transformed consciousness can have no conception. This development of consciousness has nothing to do with any form of visionary or other diseased condition of soul. These are inseparable from a debasement of the soul below the sphere in which clear, logical thought is active; anthroposophical research, however, transcends this sphere and leads into the spiritual. In the above-mentioned conditions of soul the physical body is always implicated; anthroposophical research strengthens the soul to such an extent that activity in the spiritual sphere is possible independently of the physical body. The attainment of this strengthened condition of soul requires, to begin with, exercise in “pictorial thought.” Consciousness is made to centre upon such clear and pregnant conceptions as are otherwise only formed under the influence of external apprehension. An inner activity is thus experienced of such intensity as only external tone or colour or another sense-perception can otherwise evoke. In this case, however, the activity is purely the result of strong inner effort. It is of the nature of thought; not such thought as accompanies sense-perception with abstract concepts, but thought which becomes intensified to the point of (inner) visibility such as ordinarily is only evident in the imagery of sense-perception. The importance does not lie in “what” we think but in the consciousness of an activity not undertaken in ordinary consciousness. We thus learn to experience ourselves in the supersensible being of our “I” which, in ordinary life, is concealed by the manifestations of the physical, bodily organization. A consciousness thus transformed becomes the instrument for the perception of supersensible reality. For this purpose, however, further exercise in respect of feeling and willing is necessary, in addition to the above-mentioned exercise, which is only concerned with the transformed faculties of perceiving and conceiving.

In ordinary life, feeling and willing are associated with beings or processes external to the soul. To bring supersensible reality within the range of cognition, the soul must give vent to the same activity which, in the case of feeling and willing, is outwardly directed; this activity, however, must now apprehend the inner life itself. For the purpose of and during supersensible investigation, feeling and will must be entirely diverted from the outer world; they must solely grasp what the transformed faculties of perceiving and conceiving create within the soul. We “feel,” and we permeate with “will” solely what we inwardly experience as consciousness transformed through thought intensified to the point of inner visibility. (A more detailed account of this transformation of feeling and willing will be found in the books mentioned above.) The life of the soul thus becomes completely transformed. It becomes the life of a spiritual being (our own) experienced in a real supersensible, spiritual world—as man, within ordinary consciousness, experiences his “self” in a sensible, physical world through his senses and the faculty of conceptual thought connected therewith. The knowledge of true reality is the goal of human effort, and the first step towards its realization consists of the insight that neither Natural Science nor ordinary mystical experience can provide this knowledge; for between them there yawns an abyss (as was shown at the outset) which must be bridged. This is effected through the transformation of consciousness as outlined in these pages. The knowledge of true reality can never be attained unless we first realize that the usual instruments of knowledge are inadequate for this purpose, and that the requisite instrument must first be developed. Man feels that something more is slumbering within him than his own consciousness can encompass in ordinary life and with ordinary science. He instinctively yearns for a knowledge which is unattainable for this consciousness. For the purpose of attaining this knowledge he must not shrink from transforming the faculties which in ordinary consciousness are directed towards the physical world, so that they shall apprehend a supersensible world. Before true reality can be apprehended, a condition of soul appropriate for the spiritual world must first be established! The range of ordinary consciousness is dependent upon the human organization, which is dissolved by death. Hence it is conceivable that the knowledge resulting from this consciousness falls short of being knowledge of the spiritual and eternal in man. Only the transformation of this consciousness ensures a perception of that world in which man lives as a supersensible being, that is, as a being which remains unaffected by the dissolution of the physical organism.

The acceptance of this transmutability of consciousness and, hence, of a possible investigation of reality, is alien to the habits of thought of the present day. More so, perhaps, than the physical system of Copernicus to the men of his time. But as this system, in spite of all obstacles, found its way to the human soul—so, too, anthroposophical Spiritual Science will find its way. An understanding of anthroposophy is also difficult for contemporary philosophy, for the latter derives its origin from a mode of thought which failed to fructify the germs of an unprejudiced technique of thought which were implanted in Aristotelianism. This shortcoming, as was shown above, was followed by the seclusion of thought and investigation, through an artificial web of concepts, from true reality, which became a “thing-in-itself.” Owing to this fundamental tendency, contemporary philosophy cannot but refuse to accept anthroposophy. In the light of the philosophical conception of scientific method, anthroposophy cannot but appear as dilettantism, and this reproach is easily conceivable if the essentials of the question are kept in view. The origin of this reproach has here been explained.

These pages will possibly have made clear what must necessarily occur before the philosophers can undertake to agree that anthroposophy is no dilettantism. It is necessary that philosophy, with its conceptual system, should work its way to an unprejudiced recognition of its own fundamental basis. It is not the case that anthroposophy is at variance with sound philosophy, but that a modern theory of knowledge, accepted by science, is itself at variance with the deeper foundation of true philosophy.

This theory of knowledge is wandering in false tracks and must relinquish these if it would develop an understanding of anthroposophical world-comprehension.

• 1. Under “Wisdom of the Mysteries” a wisdom is meant which flourished in ancient times, and differed essentially from later methods of knowledge. Its origin as an inner experience of the soul whereby the secrets of the Cosmos were revealed. During the sixth century B.C., this method of knowledge was succeeded by another which, rejecting the inner experience of the soul, sought to gain an understanding of the world by the rational observation of the physical and spiritual phenomena. The inner vision of the more ancient method was sustained by an instinctive logic. In the following period logical thought became to an increasing extent a conscious faculty. Intuitive vision disappeared and the wisdom of the Mysteries was succeeded by philosophical speculation. The philosophers of the earliest period, however, were acquainted with the wisdom of the Mysteries, either through inner vision (if they still retained this faculty) or through tradition, and applied to it the newly evolving faculty of rational thought. The reader will find a description of this historical transition in the author's Die Rätsel der Philosophie
• 2. Little or no weight can be laid on the objections raised against this statement of Kant in certain quarters.
• 3. The author is well acquainted with certain modern philosophic works in which reference is made to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel with a view to obtaining direction from the utterances of these thinkers. But he finds such treatises deficient in a point of vital importance for the philosophers in question, namely as regards their attitude towards a spiritual reality which must be experienced in the soul. A mere reference to the abstract logical element in their philosophy falls short of attaining the vital principle therein.
• 4. It clearly follows that the term “Materialism” must be used far more comprehensively than is usually the case. A man is a “materialist” when his method of thought constrains him to believe that the real thing-in-itself remains external to his soul, because no portion of its “matter” is transmitted. He is a materialist even though he deem himself an idealist for admitting the soul, as such. And it is to a masked materialism that Kant's doctrine can be traced. Viewed in this light, the modern claim that “Science has superseded nineteenth-century materialism” appears in all its hollowness. On the contrary, Science, failing to recognize materialistic thought as such, has plunged still deeper into Materialism.

It is of great importance to Spiritual Science to follow the gradual development of man’s spirit, from epoch to epoch, as it slowly evolves, and pressing ever upward, emerges from the dark shadows of the past. Hence it is that the study of ancient Egyptian culture and spiritual life is of especial moment. This is found to be particularly the case when we endeavour to picture and live in the atmosphere and conditions associated with the latter.

The echoes which reach us from the dim grey vistas of by-gone times seem as full of mystery as is the countenance of the Sphinx itself, which stands so grimly forth as a monument to ancient Egyptian civilization. This mystery becomes intensified as modern external scientific research finds that it is constrained to delve ever deeper and deeper into the remote past, in order to throw light upon later Egyptian culture; regarding which most important documents are extant. Such investigations have found traces of certain things, clearly related to the active cultural life of Egypt, which date back to a period at least 7,000 years before the beginning of the Christian era. Here, then, is one reason why this particular civilization is of such paramount interest, but there is another, namely, present-day man, although living in times of broader and more general enlightenment has nevertheless a feeling, whether acceptable or not, that this ancient culture is in some singular and mysterious manner, connected with his very aims and ideals.

It is indeed significant that a man of such outstanding intellect as Kepler, should, at the very dawn of modern scientific development, have been moved to express the feelings which came over him, while engaged in astronomical research, in words somewhat as follows:—‘During my attempt to discover the manner of the passing of the planets around the sun, I have sought to peer into the deep secrets of the cosmos; the while it has oft-times seemed as if my fancy had led me into the mysterious sanctuaries of the old Egyptians—to touch their most holy vessels, and draw them forth that I might bestow them upon a new world. At such moments the thought has come to me, that only in the future will the true purport and intent of my message be disclosed.’

Here we find one of the greatest scientists of modern times overcome by a sense of such close relation to the ancient Egyptian culture, that he could find no better way of expressing the fundamental concepts underlying his work, than by representing them as a regeneration, naturally differing as to word and form, of the occult doctrines taught to the disciples and followers in the by-gone Egyptian Sanctuaries. It is therefore a matter of the greatest interest to us that we should realize the actual sentiments of these olden Egyptian peoples, in regard to the whole meaning and nature of their civilization.

There is an ancient legend that has been handed down through Greek tradition which is most suggestive, not only of what the Egyptians themselves felt regarding their culture, but also the way in which their civilization was looked upon by the ancients as a whole. We are told that an Egyptian sage once said to Solon:—‘You Greeks are still children, you have never grown up, and all your knowledge has been acquired through your own human observation and senses; you have neither traditions nor doctrines grey with age.’ We first learn what is implied by the expression, ‘doctrines grey with age‘, when the methods of Spiritual Science are employed in an endeavour to throw light upon the nature and significance of Egyptian thought and feeling. But, as has been before stated, when we approach this matter we must bear in mind that during successive periods of man’s development he gradually acquired different forms of consciousness, and that that order of conscious apprehension which is ours to-day, with its scientific method of thought, and through which we realize the outer world in virtue of our senses working in conjunction with reason and intellect, did not always exist. Deep down, underlying all human cognition, there is what we term ‘Evolution’, and evolution affects not only the outer world of form, but also the disposition of man’s soul. It follows, that we can only really understand the events which took place at the ancient centres of culture, when we accept that knowledge which Spiritual Science can alone obtain, from the sources of information at its disposal. We thus learn that in olden times instead of our present intellectual consciousness, there existed a clairvoyant state that differed from our customary normal conscious condition, of which we are cognizant from the moment we awake until we again fall asleep. On the other hand, the ancient clairvoyant state cannot be likened to the insensibility produced by slumber. Hence, the primeval consciousness of prehistoric man should be regarded as an intermediate condition now only faintly apparent, and retained, as one might say, atavistically in the form of an attenuated heritage in the picture world of our dreams.

Now, dreams are for the most part chaotic in character, and therefore meaningless in their relation to ordinary life. But the old clairvoyant consciousness, which also found expression in imagery although often of a somewhat subdued and visionary nature, was nevertheless a truly clairvoyant gift, and its symbolical manifestations had reference, not to our physical world, but to that realm which lies beyond all material things, in other words—the world of spirit. We can say that in reality all clairvoyant consciousness, including the dream-state of primitive man, as well as that acquired to-day through those methods to which we have previously referred, finds expression pictorially and not in concepts and ideas, as is the case with externalized physical consciousness. It is for the possessor of such faculty to interpret the symbols presented in terms of those spiritual realities, which underlie all physical perceptual phenomena.

We have reached a point where we can look back on the evolution of the ancient races, and of a surety say:—Those wondrous visions of by-gone times of which tradition tells us, were not born of childish fantasy and false conception of the works of Nature (this, as I have pointed out, is the wide-spread opinion in the materialistic circles of to-day), but were in truth veritable pictures of the Spirit-World, flashed before the souls of men in that now long distant past.

He who seriously studies the old mythologies and legends, not from the point of view of modern materialistic thought, but with an understanding of the creation and spiritual activities of mankind, will find in these strange stories a certain coherence which harmonizes wonderfully with those cosmic principles that dominate all physical, chemical and biological laws; while there rings throughout the ancient mythological and religious systems a tone of spiritual reality, from which they acquire a true significance.

We must clearly realize that the peoples of the various nations, each according to disposition, temperament and racial or folk-character, formed different conceptions of that vision world in which they conceived higher powers to be actively operating behind the accustomed forces of Nature. Further, that during the gradual course of evolution, mankind passed through many transitionary stages between that of the consciousness of the ancients, and our present-day objective conscious state. As time went on, the power necessary to the old clairvoyance dimmed and the visions faded; one might say—the doors leading to the higher realms were slowly closed, so that the pictures manifested to those whose souls could still peer into the Spirit-World, held ever less and less of spiritual force, until towards the end, only the lowest stages of supersensible activity could be apprehended. Finally, this primeval clairvoyant power died out, in so far as humanity in general was concerned, and man’s vision became limited to that which is of the material world, and to the apprehension of physical concepts and things; from that time on, the study of the interrelation of these factors led, step by step, to the birth of modern science. Thus it came about, that when the old clairvoyant state was past, our present intellectual consciousness gradually developed in diverse ways among the different nations.

The mission of the Egyptian peoples was of a very special nature. All that we know regarding ancient times, even that knowledge attained through modern Egyptian research, if rightly understood, tends but to verify the statements of Spiritual Science regarding the allotted task and true purpose of the Egyptian race. It was ordained that these olden peoples should still be imbued with a sufficiency of that primal power which would enable them to look back into the misty past; when their leaders in virtue of outstanding individualities and highly developed clairvoyant faculties, could gaze far into the mysteries of the Spirit-World. [Spiritual Science asserts that it was in accordance with ‘The Great Eternal Plan‘ that the Egyptians should gain wisdom and understanding from this source, to be a guide and a benefit in the development of mankind.] And we have learnt that it was to this end that this great nation was still permitted to retain a certain measure of that fast-fading clairvoyant power so closely associated with a specific disposition of soul. Although these qualities were, at that time, weak and ever waning in intensity, nevertheless they continued active until a comparatively late period in Egyptian history.

We can therefore make this statement:—The Egyptians, down to less than 1000 years before the Christian era, had actual experience of a mode of vision differing from that with which we are familiar in every-day life, when we merely open our eyes and make use of our intellect; and they knew that through this gift man was enabled to behold the spiritual realms. The later Egyptians, however, were unable to penetrate beyond the nethermost regions as portrayed in their pictorial visions, but they had power to recall those by-gone times in the Golden Age of Egyptian culture, when their priesthood could gaze both far and deeply into the world of spirit.

All knowledge obtained through visions was most carefully guarded and secretly preserved for thousands of years with the greatest piety, thankfulness and religious feeling, especially by the older Egyptians. At a later period, those among the people who still retained somewhat of clairvoyant power, expressed themselves after this fashion:—‘We can yet discern a lower spiritual realm—we know therefore that it is possible for mankind to look upon a Spirit-World; to question this truth would be as sensible as to doubt that we can really see external objects with our eyes.’ Although these later Egyptians were only able to apprehend weak echoes, as it were, of the inferior spiritual levels, nevertheless they felt and divined that in olden times man could indeed penetrate far into the mystic depths of that realm which lies beyond all physical sense perceptions. There is a doctrine grey with age, still preserved in wonderful inscriptions in Temples and upon columns. (It was this doctrine to which the sage referred when he spoke to Solon.) These inscriptions tell us of the broad deep penetration of clairvoyant power in the remote past.

That being to whom the Egyptians attributed all the profundity of their primordial clairvoyant enlightenment they called THE GREAT WISE ONE—THE OLD HERMES. When, at a later period, some other outstanding leader came to revive the ancient wisdom, he also called himself Hermes, according to an old custom prevalent among exalted Egyptian sages, and because his followers believed that in him the primeval wisdom of the old Hermes lived once again. They named the first Hermes,—‘Hermes Trismegistos‘—the Thrice-Great Hermes; but as a matter of fact it was only the Greeks who used the name of Hermes, for among the Egyptians he was known as ‘Thoth‘. In order to understand this being, it is necessary to realize what the Egyptians, under the influence of traditions concerning Thoth, regarded as true and characteristic cosmic mystics.

Such Egyptian beliefs as have come to us, one might say from outside sources, seem very strange indeed. Various Gods, of whom the most important are Osiris and Isis, are represented as not wholly human; oft-times having a human body and an animal head, or again formed of the most varied combinations of manlike and animal shapes. Remarkable religious legends have come down to us regarding this world of the Gods.

Again, the veneration and worship of cats and other animals by this ancient race was most singular, and went to such lengths that certain animals were considered as holy, and held in the greatest reverence, and in them the Egyptians saw something akin to higher beings. It has been said that this veneration for animals was such that when a cat, for instance, which had lived for a long time in one house, died, there was much weeping and lamentation. If an Egyptian observed a dead animal lying by the wayside, he did not dare to go near it, for fear that someone might accuse him of having slain it, in which case he would be liable to severe punishment. Even during the time that Egypt was actually under Roman rule, so it has been said, any Roman who killed a cat went in danger of his life, because such an act produced an uproar among the Egyptians. This veneration of animals appears to us as a most enigmatic part of Egyptian thought and feeling. Again, how extraordinary do the Pyramids, with their quadrilateral bases and triangular sides, seem to modern man; and how mysterious are the sphinxes and all that modern research drags forth from the depths of this ancient civilization and brings to the surface, to add to our knowledge an ever-increasing clarity. The question now arises:—What place did all these strange ideas occupy in the image world of the souls of those olden peoples? What had they to say regarding those things which the Thrice-Great Hermes had taught them, and how did they come by these curious concepts?

We must henceforth accustom ourselves to seek in all legends a deeper meaning, especially in those which are the more important. It is to be assumed that the purpose of some of these legends, is to convey to us in picture form, information regarding certain laws which govern spiritual life, and are set above external laws. As an example we have the fable of the god and goddess, Osiris and Isis. It was Hermes himself who called the Egyptian legends ‘The Wise Counsellors of Osiris‘. In all these fables, Osiris is a being who in the grey dawn of primeval times lived in the region where man now dwells. In the legend Osiris, who is represented as a benefactor of humanity, and under whose wise influence Hermes, or Thoth, gave to the Egyptians their ancient culture, even to the conduct of material life, was said to have an enemy whom the Greeks called Typhon. This enemy, Typhon, waylaid Osiris and slew him, then cut up his body, hid it in a coffin, and threw it into the sea. The goddess Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, sought long her husband who had been thus torn from her by Typhon, or Seth, and when she had at last found him, she gathered together the pieces into which he had been divided, and buried them here and there in various parts of the land, and in these places temples were erected. Later, Isis gave birth to Horos. Now, Horos was also a higher being, and his birth was brought about through spirit influence which descended upon Isis from Osiris, who had meanwhile passed into another world. The mission of Horos was to vanquish Typhon, and in a certain sense re-establish control of the life-current emanating from Osiris, which would continue to flow and influence mankind.

A legend such as this must not be regarded simply as an allegory, nor as a mere symbolism; in order to understand it rightly, we must enter into the whole world of Egyptian feeling and perception. It is far more important to do this than to form abstract concepts and ideas; for by thus opening the mind, we can alone give life to the sentiments and thoughts associated with the ideal forms of Osiris and Isis. Further, it is useless to attempt to explain these two outstanding figures by saying that Osiris represents the Sun, and Isis the Moon, and so forth—thus giving them an astronomical interpretation, as is the custom of the sciences of to-day outside of Spiritual Science—for such a theory leads to the belief that a legend of this nature is a mere symbolical portrayal of certain events connected with the heavens, and this is not true. We must go far back to the primeval feelings of the Egyptians, and from these as a starting-point try to realize the whole peculiar nature of their uplifted vision of the supersensible, and conception of those invisible forces beyond man’s apprehension which underlie the perceptual world. It is the spiritual interrelation of these factors that finds expression in the ideal forms of Osiris and Isis.

The old Egyptians associated these two figures with ideas similar to the following: There is a latent higher spiritual essence in all mankind which did not emanate from that material environment in which it now functions; at the beginning of earth-life it entered into physical bodily existence in condensed form, there slowly to unfold and grow throughout the ages. Man’s human state was preceded by another and more spiritual condition, and it is from this primordial condition from which the human being gradually developed. The Egyptian said:—‘When I look into my soul, I realize that there is within me a longing for spiritual things; a longing for that true spirituality from which I have descended, and I know that certain of the supersensible forces which operate in the region from which I come still live within me, and that the best of these are intimately related to the ultimate source of all superperceptual activity. Thus do I feel within me an Osiris power, which placed me here—a spirit embodied in external human form. In times past, before I came to this state, I lived wholly in a spiritual realm, where my life was confused, dim and instinctive in character. It was ordained that I be clothed with a material body, so that I should experience and behold a physical world, in order that I might develop therein. I know of a verity that in the beginning I have lived a life which compared to this physical perceptual existence, was indeed of the spirit.’

According to ancient Egyptian concepts the primordial forces underlying human evolution were regarded as dual, the one element being termed Osiris, while the other was known as Isis; hence we have an Osiris-Isis duality. When we give ourselves over to inner contemplation and are moved by the feelings and perceptions of the old Egyptians concerning this dualism, we at once find that we are involved in a process of active and suggestive thought, leading to certain conclusions. In order to follow this mental process we have only to consider the manner in which the mind operates when we think of some object, such for instance as a triangle. In this case, active thought must precede the actual conception of the figure. After the soul has been thus engaged in primary contemplation, we then turn our minds passively to the result of our thought concepts, and finally see the fruit of our mental activity pictured in the soul. The act of thinking has the same relation to final thought, as the act of conceiving to the final concept, or activity to the result of activity or its ultimate product. If we contemplate our mental process when we picture the Egyptian past, and are mindful of the mood of these ancient peoples, we realize that they looked upon the relation between Osiris and Isis in a somewhat similar manner to our conception of the order and outcome of thought activity. For instance, we might consider that activity should be regarded as a Male, or Father-Principle, and that therefore the Osiris-Principle must be looked upon as an active Male-Principle, a combative principle, which imbues the soul with thoughts and feelings of potency and vigour.

[We can form an idea of the old Egyptian concept concerning Osiris and Isis from the following considerations]:—In the physical body of man are certain components such as those that are active in the blood and those which are the basis of bone formation. The whole human system owes its being to the interaction of forces and matter, which combine to create and to enter the material form; these elements can be physically recognized, they were, however, at one time dispersed, and spread throughout the universe. A similar idea prevailed among the ancient Egyptians concerning their conception of Osiris-Force, which was conceived as actively pervading the entire cosmos, as Osiris. Even as the elements which form the physical body enter into it, there to combine and become operative, so did those olden peoples picture the Osiris-Force, as descending upon man to flow into his being and inspire within him the power of constructive thought and cognition—the veritable Osiris-Force. On the other hand, the expression Isis-Force was applied to that universal living cosmic influence which flows directly into the thoughts, concepts and ideas of mankind—it was this influence that was termed the Isis-Force. It is in the above manner that we must picture the uplifted vision in the souls of the old Egyptians, and it was thus that they regarded Osiris and Isis.

In that creation which surrounds us during our material existence, the ancient consciousness could find no words wherewith to express concepts such as these; for everything which is about us appeals alone to the senses, and has only meaning and value in a perceptual world, proffering no outer sign suggestive of a superphysical region. In order, therefore, to obtain something in the nature of a written language, which could express all such thoughts as moved the soul strongly, as for instance, when man exclaimed:—‘The Osiris-Isis-Force works within me,’ the ancients reached out to that script which is written in the firmament by the heavenly bodies, and said:—That supersensible power which man feels as Osiris, can be apprehended and expressed in perceptual terms if regarded as that active force emanating from the sun and spread abroad in the great cosmos. The Isis-Force may be pictured as the sun’s rays reflected from the moon which waits upon the sun, so that she may pass on the power of his radiance in the form of Isis-Influence. But until she receives his light the moon is dark—dark as a soul untouched by active uplifting thought. When the old Egyptian said:—‘The sun and the moon that are without reveal to me how I can best express, figuratively, my ideas concerning all that I feel within my soul,’ he knew that there was some hidden bond, in no way fortuitous, between these two heavenly bodies which appear so full of mystery in the vast universe—the light-giving sun and the dark moon every ready to reflect his splendour. And he realized that the light dispersed in space, and that reflected, must bear some unknown but definite relation to those supersensible powers of which he was conscious.

When we look at a clock we cannot see what it is that moves the hands so mysteriously, apparently with the aid of little demons, for all that can be seen is a piece of mechanism; but we know that underlying the whole mechanical structure, is the thought of the original designer, which thought had its origin in the soul of a man; so that in reality the mechanism owes its construction to something spiritual. Now, just as the movements of the hands of a clock are mutually related, and fundamentally dependent upon certain mechanical laws which exist in the universe, and finally upon those that are operative in the soul of a man (as when he speaks of experiencing the influence of the Osiris-Isis-Force), so are the movements of the Sun and Moon interrelated, and these bodies appear to us as indicators on the face of a mighty cosmic clock. The Egyptian did not merely say:—‘The Sun and Moon are to me a perceptual symbol of the relation between Osiris and Isis,’ but he felt and expressed himself thus:—‘That force which gives me life and is within, underlies the mysterious bond existing between the Sun and Moon, and it likewise endowed them with power to send forth light.’

In the same way as Osiris and Isis were regarded with reference to the Sun and Moon, so were other heavenly bodies looked upon as related to different gods. The ancient Egyptians considered that the positions of the various orbs in space were not merely symbolical of their own supersensible experiences, but likewise of those which tradition told them had been the experiences of seers belonging to the remote past. Further, they saw in the cosmic clock an expression of the activity of those forces, the workings of which they felt in the ultimate depths of the human soul. Thus it came about that this mighty clock, this grand creation of moving orbs, so wondrously interrelated with others that are fixed, was to the Egyptians a revelation of those mysterious spiritual powers which bring about the ever-changing positions of the heavenly bodies, and thus create an universal script, which man must learn to know and to recognize as a means whereby superperceptual power is given perceptual expression.

Such were the feelings and perceptions which had been handed down to the old Egyptians from their ancient seers, regarding a higher spiritual world of the existence of which they were wholly convinced, for they still retained a last remnant of primeval clairvoyant power. These olden peoples said:—‘We human beings had our true origin in an exalted spiritual realm, but we are now descended into a perceptual world, in which manifest material things and physical happenings, nevertheless, we are indeed come from the world of Osiris and of Isis. All that is best and which strives within us, and is fitted to attain to yet higher states of perfection, has of a verity flowed in upon us from Osiris and from Isis, and lives unseen within as active force. Physical man was born of those conditions which are of the external perceptual world, and his material form is but as a garment clothing the Osiris-Isis spirit within.’

Predominant in the souls of the old Egyptians was a profound sentiment concerning primeval wisdom, which filled their whole soul-life. The soul may indeed incline towards abstract notions, particularly the mathematical concepts of natural science, without in any way touching the moral and ethical factors of its life, nor affecting its fate or state of bliss. For instance, there may be discussion and debate relative to electrical and other forces, without the soul being moved to enter upon grave questions concerning man’s ultimate destiny.

On the other hand, we cannot ponder upon feelings and sentiments such as we have described regarding the Spirit-World and the inner relation of the soul’s character to Osiris and Isis, without arousing thoughts involving man’s happiness, his future, and his moral impulses. When the mind is thus occupied, man’s meditations are prone to take this form:—‘There dwells in me a better self, but because of what I am within my physical body, this “better self” is repressed and draws back, it is therefore not at first apparent. An Osiris and an Isis nature are fundamental to me; these, however, belong to a primordial world—to a by-gone golden age—to the holy past; now they are overcome by those forces that have fashioned the human form. But the Osiris-Isis power has entered and persists within that mortal covering which is ever subject to destruction through the external forces of Nature.’

The ‘Legend of Osiris and Isis‘ may be expressed in terms of feeling and sentiment in the following manner:—Osiris, the higher power in man, which is spread throughout cosmic space, is overcome by those forces which bring about utter degeneration in all human nature. Typhon confined the Osiris-Force within the body, as in a coffin formed to receive man’s spiritual counterpart; there the Osiris-Element lies concealed—invisible and unheeded by the outer world. (The name Typhon has linguistic connection with the words—‘Auflösen‘, to dissolve; and ‘Verwesen‘, to decompose.) The Isis-Nature, hidden within the confines of the soul, was always mysterious to the Egyptians. They considered that at some future period its influence would bring mankind back to that state which he enjoyed in the beginning; and that this return would ultimately be brought about through the penetrative force of intellectual power; for they fully recognized that in humanity there is a latent disposition which ever strives to re-endow Osiris with life.

The Isis-Force lies deep within the soul, and its profound purpose is to lead mankind, step by step, away from his present material state, and bring him back once more to Osiris.

It is this Isis-Force which—so long as man does not cling to his physical quality—makes it possible for him (even though he remain outwardly a physical man in a material world) to detach himself from his perceptual nature, and henceforth and for ever more to look upward from within his being to that more exalted Ego, which in the opinion of the most advanced thinkers, lies so mysteriously veiled at the very root of man’s powers of thought and action. This being, not the outer physical one, but the true inner man who has ever the stimulus to strive towards higher spiritual enlightenment, is as it were, the earth-born son of that Osiris who did not go forth into the material world, but remained as if concealed in the realms of the spirit. In their souls, the Egyptians regarded this invisible personality that struggles toward the attainment of a higher self, as Horos—the posthumous son of Osiris. It was thus that these old Egyptians visualized, with a certain feeling of sadness, the Osiris-origin of man; but at the same time they looked inward and said:—‘The soul has still retained something of the Isis-Force which gave birth to Horos, the possessor of that never-ceasing impulse to strive upward towards spiritual heights, and it is there, in that sublimity, that man shall once again find Osiris.’

It is possible for present-day humanity to bring about this mystic meeting in two ways. The Egyptian said:—‘I have come from Osiris, and to Osiris I shall return, and because of my spiritual origin, Horos lies deep within my being and Horos leads me on, back to Osiris—to his Father—who may alone be found in the world of spirit; for he can in no way enter into man’s physical nature; there he is overcome by the powers of Typhon, those external forces which underlie all destruction and decay.’

There are but two paths by which Osiris may be attained, the one is by way of the Portal of Death; the other passes not through the Gateway of Physical Dissolution, for Osiris may be reached through Initiation and the consecration of life to Sacred Service.

Under the title of Christianity as a Mystical Fact, I have gone more fully into this belief. The Egyptian conception was as follows:—When man has passed through the Portal of Death, and after certain necessary preparatory stages have been completed, he comes to Osiris, and being freed from his earthly envelope, there awakes in him a consciousness of actual relationship with that supreme deity; and he realizes that henceforth he will be greeted as Osiris, for this form of salutation is always bestowed upon those who have experienced death and entered into the World of Spirit.

The other pathway which likewise leads back to Osiris, that is to say, into the Spiritual Realms is, as we have already stated, by way of Initiation and Holy Devotion. Such was regarded by the Egyptians as a method through which knowledge might be gained of all that is supersensible and lies concealed in man’s nature, in other words of Isis, or the Isis-Power. We cannot penetrate into the depths of the soul, and thus reach the Isis-Force within, in virtue of mere earthly wisdom born of the experiences of daily life, but nevertheless, we have a means at hand whereby we may break through to this inner power and descend to the true Ego; there to find that this same Ego is ever enshrouded by all that is material in man’s physical disposition. If, indeed, we can but pierce this dark veil, then do we find ourselves at last in the Ego’s veritable spiritual home.

Hence it was that the old Egyptians said:—‘Thou shalt descend into thine own inner being—but first cometh thy physical quality, with all that it may express of that self that is thine, and through this human disposition must thou force a way. When thou regardest the stones, and the justness of their fashion—when thou considerest the plants, the inner life thereof and wonder of their form and when thou lookest upon the animals about thee—there of a verity, in these three Kingdoms of Nature, beholdest thou the outer world as begotten of spiritual and supersensible powers. But when thou standest before man, look not alone upon the outer form, but seek that which is within, where abideth the soul’s strength—even as the Isis-Forces.’ Therefore, in connection with the rites of initiation, there was included certain instruction as to what things should be observed during such time as the soul might remain incarnated.

The experiences of all who have in truth descended into their innermost being, have been fundamentally the same as those which come about at the time of passing, differing only in the manner of their occurrence. [One might say that if this method of approaching the spirit realms be followed, then]—Man must pass through the Portal of Death while he yet lives. He must learn to know that change from the physical to the superphysical outlook, from the material to the spiritual world—in other words, he must acquire knowledge of that metamorphosis which takes place at the time of actual death. And in order that he may obtain such enlightenment, he that would become initiated must take that way which leads him into the very depths of his being, for thus alone may true understanding and experience be attained. When this method is employed, the first real inner experience is connected with the blood, as formed by Nature, and the blood is the physical agent of the Ego, just as the nervous system forms the material medium in connection with [the three ultimate modes of consciousness], Feeling, Willing and Thinking. We have already referred to this matter in a previous lecture.

According to the ancient Egyptians, he who desires to descend into his being in order to realize profound association with the primary material media, must first pass down into his physical-etheric sheath and enter the etheric confines of his soul; he must learn to become independent of that force in his blood upon which he normally relies; he can then give himself up to the workings and the wonder of the blood’s action.

It is essential that man must first thoroughly understand his higher nature in regard to its physical aspect. To do this he must learn to view his material being as a detached and wholly separate object. Now, man can only recognize and be fully conscious of an object, as a specific thing, when external to it; hence he must learn to bring about this relation in respect to himself, if he would indeed comprehend the actuality of his being. It was for this reason that Initiation was directed towards the development of such powers as enabled the Soul-Forces to undergo certain experiences independently of the physical media, or agents. So that finally the aspirant could look down upon such media objectively, in the same way as man’s spiritual element looks down upon the material body after death.

The primary duty of one who would know the Isis-Mysteries was to acquire knowledge concerning his own blood; after which he underwent an experience that can be best described as—‘Drawing nigh unto the Threshold of Death.’ This was the first step in the Isis-Initiation; and he who would take it must have power to regard his blood and his being externally, and pass into that sheath which is the medium of the Isis-Nature. Further, the neophyte was led before two doors—within some Holy Sanctuary—the one was closed, the other open; and as he stood in that place there came before him visions depicting the most intimate experiences of his very life, and he heard a voice saying:—‘It is thus that thou art, so dost thou appear when thou beholdest thy true self pictured in the soul.’ How remarkable are these teachings the echoes of which are still heard after thousands of years have passed, and how wonderfully they harmonize with man’s present-day beliefs, even though they have since received materialistic interpretation.

According to the ancient Egyptian seer—when man takes the initial step and comes upon the world of his inner form he is there confronted by two doors—‘Through two doors shalt thou enter thy blood and thy innermost being.’ The anatomist would say:—‘Through two inlets situated in the valves on either side of the heart.’ [There are two pairs of valves in the heart, one pair on one side and one on the other; in each case when one of these valves is open, in order to let the blood-stream flow into a part of the system, that which is adjacent is closed (Ed.)]. Hence, he who desires to penetrate beneath his outer form must pass through the open door; for the gateway which is closed merely confines the blood to its proper course. We thus find that the results of anatomical investigation are certainly analogous to those born of clairvoyant vision in olden times; and although not so clear and accurate as are the conclusions of the modern anatomist, nevertheless they portray what the clairvoyant consciousness actually apprehended, when it regarded man’s inner form from an external stand-point.

The next step in the Isis-Initiation was what one might term the proving or profound study of Fire, Air and Water. During this period the Initiate gained complete knowledge of the Sheath-Quality of his Isis-Being, of the properties of Fire and how, in a certain form, it flows in the blood, using it as medium, and becomes fluid. He further received instruction concerning the manner in which Oxygen is infiltrated into the system from the air. All this wisdom descended upon him—the understanding of Fire, Air, Water, the warmth of his breath, and the true nature of the fluidity of his blood.

Thus it came about that the aspirant, in virtue of the knowledge he acquired of his Sheath-Quality through his newly-born comprehension of the elements of Fire, Air and Water, became so purified that when his vision at last penetrated beneath the enfolding envelope, he entered into his veritable Isis-Nature. We might say that at this point, the Initiate felt for the first time that he was in contact with his actual being, and that he was able to realize that he was indeed a spiritual entity, no longer limited by his external relation to humanity, and that he truly beheld the wonder of the spiritual realms.

It is a definite law that we can only look upon the sun in the daytime, for at night it lies concealed by matter; but the powers in the spiritual world are never thus veiled to those who have acquired the true gift of sight, for they are best discerned when the physical eyes are closed to all material things. Symbolically, in the sense of the Isis-Initiation, we would say:—‘He who is purified and initiated into the Isis-Mysteries, may discern that spiritual life and power to which the sun owes its origin, even though there be darkness as at midnight, for, metaphorically speaking, he may at all times behold the great orb of day and come face to face with the spirit beings of the superperceptual world.’

Such was the description of the method, or as one might say, the path leading to the Isis-Forces within, and we are told that it could be traversed by all who, during earthly life, would but earnestly seek the deepest forces of the soul. There were, however, yet higher mysteries, The Mysteries of Osiris, in which it was made clear that through the medium of the Isis-Forces, and in virtue of those supersensible primordial spiritual powers to which man owes his origin, he could exalt himself and thus attain to Osiris. In other words, he was initiated into those methods by which the human soul might be so uplifted, that it could at last enter upon the presence of that supreme deity.

When the Egyptians wished to portray the nature and character of the relation between Isis and Osiris, they had recourse to that special script which is written in the firmament by the passage of the Sun and Moon; while in the case of other spiritual powers, reference was made to the movements and interrelations existing between the various stars. Most prominent among the astronomical groups in such portrayals was the Zodiac, with its condition of comparative immobility, and the planets which move across its constellations. It was in the revelations of the Heavens, as manifested in spiritual symbols, that the old Egyptian found the true method of expressing those deep feelings which touched his soul. He knew that no earthly means were competent to indicate clearly the vital purpose of that urgent call to seek the Isis-Forces, that mankind might, through their aid, draw nearer to Osiris. He felt that in order to describe this purpose fittingly, he must reach out and make use of those bright groups of stars that ever shine in the firmament.

Hence we must regard Hermes, The Great Wise One, who according to Egyptian tradition, lived upon the Earth in the dawn of antiquity—and was endowed with the most profound clairvoyant insight concerning man’s relation to the Universe—as having possessed in high degree the power of apprehending and explaining the true nature of the connection between the constellations and the forces of the Spirit-World; and of interpreting the signs portraying events and happenings, as expressed in the language of the stars, in terms of their mysterious interrelations. Now, if in those olden days it was desired to enlighten the people with regard to the nature of the bond existing between Osiris and Isis, this matter was put forward in the form of an exoteric legend; but in the case of the Initiates the subject was treated more explicitly by means of symbolical reference to the light which emanates from the Sun and is reflected by the Moon, and the remarkable conditions governing its changes during the varying phases of the latter. In these phenomena the Egyptians found a practical and genuine analogy, expressive of the sacred link between the Isis-Force within the human soul and that supreme spiritual figure—Osiris.

From the movements of the heavenly bodies and the nature of their interrelations, there originated what we must regard as the very earliest form of written characters. Little as this fact is as yet recognized, we would nevertheless draw attention to the following statement:—If we consider the consonants of the alphabet, we note that they imitate the signs of the Zodiac, in their comparative repose; while the vowels and consonants are connected in a way which may be likened to that relation which the planets and the forces which move them bear to the constellations of the Zodiac as a whole. Hence it would appear that in the beginning, written characters were brought down to earth from the vault of heaven.

The sentiments which moved the ancient Egyptians when their thoughts turned to Hermes were such as we have described, and they realized that his great illumination came from those spiritual powers which called to him out of the heavens, prompting him with counsel concerning that activity which persisted in the souls of mankind. Ay! and more than that—he was instructed even in the deeds of everyday life, and in those directions in which such sciences were needed as Geometry and Surveying, both of which Pythagoras target=_blank>Pythagoras learnt from the Egyptians, who ascribed all this knowledge to the primordial wisdom of Hermes. One might say that ‘The Old Wise One’ saw in the interrelation of all things spread abroad upon the earth a counterpart of that which exists in the firmament, and finds expression in the mystic writings of the stars. It was Hermes—’The Thrice-Blessed‘—who first gave this Stellar Script to the world, and through its aid, and in the dawn of Egyptian life, he instilled into the minds of the people the elements of the science of mathematics, while he adjured them to look up to the heavens, there to seek guidance even regarding mundane matters.

The very life of the Egyptian nation in that olden time was dependent upon the overflowing of the Nile, and the deposits which it swept down from the mountainous country to the South. We can therefore readily understand how absolutely essential it was that there should be a certain pre-knowledge of the date of the coming of flood periods, so that they might anticipate the accompanying changes in natural conditions thus brought about in the course of any particular year. In those early days the Egyptians still reckoned time according to that Stellar Script which was written in the canopy of heaven. When Sirius, the Dog Star, was visible in the Sign of Cancer, they knew that the Sun would shortly enter that part of the Zodiac from whence its rays would shine down upon the earth and conjure forth, as if by magic, that life brought thereto by the deposits of the overflowing Nile. Hence, they looked upon Sirius as ‘The Watcher‘, who gave them warning of what they might expect; and the movements of Sirius formed part of their celestial clock. They gazed upward with thankful hearts, for the timely warnings of their ‘Watcher‘ enabled them to cultivate and to tend their land in such manner that it might best bring forth all things necessary to external life.

When questions of import arose such as the above, these old Egyptian peoples sought enlightenment and guidance from those writings which they saw spread across the firmament; the while they looked back into that dim grey past, when first they learnt that the passage of the stars was in truth an expression as of movements among the parts of some mighty cosmic clock. In Thoth, or Hermes, they recognized that Great Spirit who, according to their ancient traditions, set down the very earliest chronicles concerning cosmic wisdom. From that inspiration which came to him through the wondrous Stellar Script, Hermes conceived the forms underlying the physical alphabet, and through their aid taught mankind the principles of Agriculture, Geometry and Surveying; indeed, he instructed them in all things needful for the conduct of physical life. Now, physical life is nought but the embodiment of that spiritual life so deeply interwoven throughout the cosmos—and it was from the cosmos that the spirit of wisdom descended upon Hermes. It was evident to the Egyptians of that period to which we refer, that the influence of The Great Wise One was still active throughout their civilization, and they felt that this mystic bond was both profound and intimate in character.

The method adopted by the old Egyptians for the purpose of time calculations, and which continued in use for many centuries, was most convenient in operation and lent itself readily to all simple computations of this nature. They regarded the year as made up of exactly 365 days, which they divided into 12 months each of 30 days, thus leaving 5 days over, which were separately included. But modern Astronomy tells us that if this method be employed, then one quarter day every year is not taken into account [the actual difference is 6 hours, 9 min., 9 sec.]. Therefore, the Egyptian year came to an end one quarter day too soon. This difference gradually spread backward through the months until a coincidence was reached at the beginning of a certain year; and such coincidence took place every four times 365 years. Hence, after the lapse of each 1,460 years, the terrestrial time estimate would be for a moment in agreement with astronomical conditions, because at that particular moment the sum of the annual differences would be equivalent to one whole year.

Let us now suppose that at a certain time in 1322 B.C. an Egyptian looked up into the heavens, there, at that moment any visible constellation would occupy a definite position in the firmament [which position could be used as a basis of computation]. If we calculate backwards over a period of three times 1,460 years from 1322 B.C., we come to the year 5702 B.C., and it was some time prior to this date to which the Egyptians ascribed the dawn of that primordial Holy Wisdom which came to them in the beginning. They said:—‘In bygone times man’s power of clairvoyance was truly at its highest, but with the passing of each great Sun-Period‘ [of 1,46o years, which brought about the balance of terrestrial reckoning] ‘the divine gift of “clear seeing” gradually faded, until in this fourth stage in which we now live it is weak and ever-failing. Our civilization reaches far into the remoteness of antiquity, where the voice of tradition is all but stilled. In thought we hark back beyond three long Cosmic Periods, to that glorious and distant past when our greatest teacher, his disciples, and his successors, imparted to us the elements of the ancient wisdom which now finds expression—albeit in strangely altered form—in the character of our script, our Mathematics, Geometry, Surveying, our general conduct of life, and also in our study of the heavens. We regard the cosmic adjustment of our human computation, with its convenient factors of twelve times 30 days with five supplementary thereto, as a sign that we are ever subject to correction by the divine powers of the Spirit-World, because through error of thought and reason we have turned away from Osiris and from Isis. We cannot with exactitude measure the year’s length, but when our eyes are raised on high we can gaze into that hidden world from whence those spirit powers that ever guide the courses of the stars, remedy our faults and bring harmony where man has failed to find the truth.’

From the above it is clear that the old Egyptians realized the feebleness of man’s powers of intellect and understanding, so that, even in the case of their Chronology, they sought the aid of those higher spiritual forces and beings beyond the veil. Beings who correct, watch over, and protect mankind during the activities and experiences of earth life, bringing to bear upon these problems the mystic laws of the Great Cosmos. Hermes, or Thoth, was held in greatest veneration as One inspired by the ever vigilant heavenly powers, and in the souls of these ancient peoples this outstanding personality was looked upon, not merely as a great teacher, but as a being who was indeed exalted, and whom they regarded with the most profound feelings of reverence and thankfulness, so that they cried out:—‘All that I have cometh from Thee. Thou went on High in the dim grey dawn of antiquity and Thou hast sent down, by those who were the carriers of Thy traditions, all that flows throughout external civilization, and which is of greatest human service.’ Hence, with reference to the actual Creator of all supersensible forces, and those who watch over them, as well as Osiris and Hermes, or Thoth, the Egyptians felt in their souls not merely that they were imbued with knowledge begotten of wisdom, but they experienced a sentiment in deepest moral sense, of greatest veneration and gratitude.

The graphic descriptions of the past tell us that the wisdom of the ancient Egyptians was permeated throughout with a certain religious quality and mood, particularly noticeable in olden times, but by degrees these characteristics became less and less marked. In those days the people felt all knowledge to be closely associated with holiness, all wisdom with piety and all science with religion. As this attitude waned it gradually decreased in purity of form and expression. A similar change has taken place throughout the evolution of mankind among all those various civilizations whose mission has been to alter the trend of spiritual thought, and lead it in some wholly new direction. When each nation had reached the pinnacle of achievement, and its task was ended, there followed a period of decadence.

The greater part of our knowledge concerning ancient Egyptian culture is connected with an epoch of this nature, and the significance of all that lies beyond is merely a matter of conjecture and supposition. For instance, what is the true meaning of that extraordinary, and to us grotesque, worship of animals in that by-gone age, and of the curious feeling of awe we experience when our thoughts dwell upon the pyramids? The Egyptians themselves tell us that there was an era during which not only mankind, but also beings from the higher spiritual realms descended upon the earth. This was in the beginning before the knowledge and wisdom that was then vouchsafed had truly developed and become active.

If we would indeed know man’s innermost nature, we must not alone regard the outer form, but penetrate to the true self within. All external qualities with which we come in contact are but stages of manifestation which have remained ‘in situ‘, as one might say, and are seen as if representing in powerful, albeit diminutive imagery, ancient principles which are dominant in the three kingdoms of nature. Consider the world of minerals and of rocks—here we find those same relations of form which man has used in the architecture of the pyramids; while the inner forces of plant-life are expressed in the beauty of the Lotus-Flower; and lastly, distributed along that path which culminates in man himself, we find in the brute creation existences which have not attained to the higher level of humanity; they are, as it were, a crystallization of divine forces that have been embodied and scattered abroad in separate and distinct animal shapes.

We can well imagine that the feelings of the old Egyptians gave rise to thoughts of the above nature, when they recognized in animal life a manifestation of the unaltered primordial forces of the gods. For they looked back into the grey past when all earthly things were begotten of divine supersensible powers, and developed under their guidance. From this concept they conjectured that among the creations in Nature’s three kingdoms certain of these higher primal forces, which had lived on unchanged over a long period, had ultimately undergone some intimate modification which had raised them to that higher standard exhibited in the human form. When considering these ancient peoples we must ever have regard for their feelings, perceptions and the necessities of their life. It is from these factors that we can best realize how close was the moral bond between their wisdom and the soul, so that the latter might not swerve from the path of rectitude and morality.

The Egyptians believed, that because of the manner in which the Spirit-World was created and fashioned by the divine supersensible powers, there must be some definite moral relation which extends to the creatures of the animal kingdom. The grotesque and singular modes in which this concept ultimately found expression came about, only, after the final decline of the nation had commenced.

From the study of the later periods of Egyptian culture, it is clear that human frailty and imperfection were unknown in primordial times, for we learn from this source that in the early dawn of Egyptian life civilization was of a high standard, and it was then that man knew and experienced the most intimate divine spiritual revelations. We must not fall into that error, so common in our days, of assuming that all forms of human culture had their inception under the most simple and primitive conditions. In reality it was only after the impulse imparted by those first glorious blessings had waned, and a period of decline set in, that man’s life became crude and uncultured.

Hence, we should not look upon the barbaric tribes merely as peoples in whom intellection is expressed in its most elementary form, but, on the contrary, we must consider the aboriginal races as representative of civilizations which have fallen away from some exalted primordial state. This assertion is not at all to the liking of that branch of science which would have us believe that all culture had its inception under the most elementary conditions, such as those which are still found among the savages of our time. Nevertheless, Spiritual Science affirms, in virtue of knowledge obtained through the medium of its special methods, that the primitive states of mankind are in truth manifestations of long perished civilizations, and that all human life had its inception under cultural conditions directly inspired by divine beings—mentors from the Spirit-World—who descended upon the earth in the dim dawn of antiquity, and over whose deeds is cast a veil impenetrable to external history.

Man has long believed that if we trace life’s course backward through the ages we should in the end arrive at childish conditions, similar to those found among barbaric peoples. It was certainly not expected that in so doing we would find ourselves confronted with noble and exalted concepts and theories. Now, Spiritual Science definitely asserts that if we peer into the past, then, at the beginning of human life we shall not find rudimentary cultural states, but lofty and glorious civilizations, which at some later period fell away from their first high spiritual standard. At this point we might well ask:—‘Does this asservation, as advanced by Spiritual Science, bring it into conflict with the results of modern scientific research—the logical methods of which delve deeply and without prejudice, into all matters that come within the scope of its investigations?‘ Let us see how external science itself replies to this question.

With this object I will give a literal quotation from a recent work by Alfred Jeremias [Licentiate Doctor and Lecturer at the University of Leipzig], entitled The Old Testament in the Light of the Ancient East.¹ From the text we learn that external science while engaged in the gradual unfoldment of ancient history, has reached back into the remote past, and there found traces of a highly spiritual primeval civilization, whose culture was imbued with the most momentous and intellectual conceptions. It is further emphasized that those cultural states, which we are so accustomed to term barbaric, should in reality be regarded as typical of primordial civilizations that have fallen away from some higher level. The actual quotation to which I have referred is as follows:—²

‘The earliest records, as well as the whole ancient civilized life about the Euphrates valley, indicate the existence of a scientific and at the same time religious theoretical conception, which was not merely confined to the occult doctrines of the temple; but in accordance with its precepts, state organizations were regulated and conducted, justice declared and property administered and protected. The more ancient the period to which we can look back, the more absolute does the control exercised by this concept appear. It was only after the downfall of the primal Euphratean civilization that the influence of other powers began to make itself felt.’

From the above excerpt it is clear, that external science has truly made a beginning toward the opening up of new paths that tend to bring harmony and agreement into those matters [so often regarded as controversial] which it is the province of Spiritual Science to bring forward and impress upon our present civilization. In a previous lecture we have drawn attention to a similar progress in connection with the science of Geology. If in the future we continue to advance in like fashion, we shall gradually be compelled to recede ever further and further from that dull and lifeless conception which would have us regard all primordial civilization as primitive and childish in its nature. Then, indeed, shall we be led back to those great personalities of the remote past, who seem to us the more transcendent, because it was their divinely inspired mission to endow a yet clairvoyant people with those priceless blessings which are evident throughout all cultural activity in which we now play our part. Such noble spirits in human form as Zarathustra and Hermes at once claim and rivet our attention. They appear to us so exalted and so glorious, because it was THEY who in the dim dawn of human life gave to mankind those first most potent and uplifting impulses. The old Egyptian sage had this sublime concept in mind when he spoke to Solon concerning ‘doctrines grey with age‘. (Vide p. 86.)

Thus do we honour and revere Hermes, even as we venerate the great Zarathustra. To us he shines forth as one of those grand outstanding individualities—veritable leaders of mankind—the very thought of whom engenders a feeling of enhanced power within, and begets the indubitable conviction through which we know that the Spirit is not merely abroad in the world, but weaves beneath all earthly deeds, and is ever active throughout the evolution of humanity. Then are our lives strengthened, a fuller confidence is in our every action, hopes are assured and destiny stands out the more clearly before us. It is at such times that we exclaim:—‘Those yet to be born will of a surety lift up their hearts to the glorious spirit mentors who were in the beginning, and will seek the verity of their being in the gifts which are of the inner forces of the soul. They shall acknowledge and discern in the ever recurrent impulses which come as an upward urge to mankind the workings of a divine power, and the eternal manifestations of those Great Ones from the Spirit-World.’

ADDENDUM

The above lecture was delivered in Berlin on the 16th of February, 1911. In the interim, external science has probed further into the secrets of that highly advanced primal civilized life about the valley of the Euphrates, to which reference has been made on page 123. The following brief outline will indicate some of the results of Archæological research carried out in Mesopotamia at the site of the olden city known as ‘Ur of the Chaldees‘. At this place, most important discoveries have been made in connection with ancient Euphratean civilization, as the outcome of a Joint Expedition arranged by the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania in 1922, under the direction of C. Leonard Woolley, M.A., Litt. D. In a lecture given before ‘The Royal Society of Arts’ on the 8th of November, 1933, and which duly appeared in their Journal, Dr. Woolley said: ‘Certainly the discoveries that we made at Ur in the last ten years have tended to set scientists by the ears rather than satisfying them with the new information obtained ... few surprises in recent years have been so great as that occasioned by the excavation of the great cemetery lying beneath the ruins of Ur.’

In the tombs of Kings, in vaulted chambers of rubble masonry, dating as far back as 3500 B.C. were found treasures of gold, silver, mosaic, etc., wrought by the Sumerian workers and of a degree of technical excellence unsurpassed by the craftsmen of to-day. In one case, when referring to an especially fine specimen of polychrome art which had been discovered, and is now known as ‘The Ram Caught in a Thicket‘, Dr. Woolley drew attention to the fact, that this particular polychrome sculpture, while characteristic of the work of the ancients in 3400 B.. in the Near East, was actually suggestive of that of some rather late Italian Renaissance artist. As the investigations proceeded it became abundantly clear, that the ancient people who had so skilfully fashioned the strange and wonderful treasures brought to light, ‘were not tyros, they must have had behind them long traditions, long apprenticeship‘.

With the view of obtaining an insight into the history of this by-gone and highly developed civilization, excavations were commenced at a point which was actually the ground level of 3200 B.C., where through a depth of over sixty feet relics of the dim past were unearthed in clearly marked strata. Traces of eight superimposed cities were revealed, and deep down beneath the remains of an ancient pottery factory, so Dr. Woolley tells us, the excavators suddenly came upon a mass, eleven feet thick, of water-laid sand and clay, perfectly uniform and clean, which was undoubtedly the silt thrown up by “The Flood”.—‘We can,’ said Dr. Woolley, ‘actually connect it with the flood which we call Noah’s Flood‘. The verge of this deluge was found to be up ‘against the flank of the mound on which stood the earliest and most primitive city of Ur ‘. Below this deposit were ‘the remains of antediluvian houses ... the lowest human buildings rested upon black organic soil ... and that in turn went down below sea-level‘.

The excavations proved that the ancient Sumerian architects were familiar with concrete at the beginning of the fourth millennium B.C., and possibly earlier. They were acquainted with every basic form of modern architecture, and Dr. Woolley further states that there is no doubt that, ‘the arch, the vault, the apse, and the dome, used in Europe for the first time in the Roman period’, specimens of which were found among the ruins, ‘are a direct inheritance from the Sumerian peoples of the fourth millennium B.C. at least, and they may well go hack to a date still more remote’. (The italics are ours.) Further, it has been shown that continuity in Sumerian civilization undoubtedly extended from the fifth millennium B.C., up to the sixth century B.C. This fact has come to light as a result of discoveries made by digging beneath the foundations of the massive staged tower, known as the Ziggurat of Ur, the main religious building of the city; and by tracing the dates and character of cylinder seals of different periods, carried by these by-gone peoples for the purpose of signing written documents.

Toward the close of his most interesting lecture, Dr. Woolley stated that imports into Egypt before the First Dynasty, seemed to indicate that the Sumerians imparted to the then barbarous people of that country an impulse, which enabled them to develop their remarkable civilization. He further said: ‘Civilized as the Babylonians were, they made no new discoveries at all; they hardly advanced beyond what their predecessors had known and they preserved civilization rather than invented it. We know, too, that the Sumerians sent out the ancestors of the Hebrews with all the traditions of law, civilization, religion and art, which they had themselves enjoyed in their home country and which the Hebrews never entirely forgot, but by which they were profoundly influenced.’

Thus has this Joint Archæological Expedition, under the able leadership of Dr. Woolley, thrown the light of modern external science upon one of those glorious spiritual civilizations of the dim grey past, so often referred to by Rudolf Steiner, which endured just so long as its people opened their hearts to the guidance of the Spirit, but fell away and perished when they left the true path, and gave themselves up to material things. [Ed.]

Notes for this lecture:

1. Manual of Biblical Archaeology, 2 Vols. Translated from the second German Edition, by C. L. Beaumont. Edited by the Rev. Canon C. H. W. Johns, Litt.D. Published by Williams and Morgate, 1911.

2. Der Einfluss Babyloniens auf das Verständnis des Alten Testamentes, von Alfred Jeremias. ‘Die ältesten Urkunden sowie das gesamte euphratensische Kulturleben setzen eine wissenschaftliche und zugleich religiöse Theorie voraus, die nicht etwa nur in den Geheimlehren der Tempel ihr Dasein fristet, sondern nach der die staatlichen Organisationen geregelt sind, nach der Recht gesprochen, das Eigentum verwaltet und geschützt wird. Je höher das Altertum ist, in das wir blacken können, um so Ausschliesslicher herrscht die Theorie; erst mit dem Verfall der alten euphratensischen Kultur kommen andere Mächte zur Geltung.’

For many years now, I have been giving the lectures on spiritual science during the winter season from this very place. I have always tried to begin these lectures with a consideration of the connection between the particular view of the spiritual world that is represented within this spiritual science, as it is meant here, and the general spiritual life. And already last winter, I tried — which must be particularly obvious in our present fateful time — to turn my attention to the feelings that are currently living within the German people, to that time of German spiritual development in which, out of the very core of the German being, a connection, a living together with the spiritual world, was sought in a truly idealistic form. In our time, in which the German nation must defend itself against a world of enemies in its existence, in its hopes for existence, it must be particularly obvious to look to the time of which one of the most popular historians of the German nation says: it is the time in which the idealistic spirits of this German nation have shown that even in times of extreme distress, in times of extreme hostility, the German character is able to salvage that greatness which can be saved by cultivating the spiritual life, as it appears to be inherent in the very deepest characteristics of this nation. We need not fall into the error of our opponents, who today believe, in such a strange and peculiar way, that they must particularly characterize the importance of their own nation by belittling the nature of the opponents. We need not fall into the error, for example, of those of whom we now hear that the German Weltanschauung itself must have seduced them into leading the German people into the most savage warfare. We can, without making the mistake of belittling our opponents, turn our attention to what the German people believe, must believe, according to their very nature: that their world-historical task is rooted in the deepest inwardness of their nature. And there is no need, as so many of Germany's enemies do today, to form an opinion about the popular, be it one's own or that of another people, out of direct hatred and antipathy in the present.

And so let us take as our starting-point for today's consideration an idea which an outstanding mind, relatively calm, was able to form in a time long before our own fateful time. This idea was formed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller's great friend, who was able to delve so wonderfully into the essence of the development of humanity, who knew how to depict the needs of man within the development of world history in such a subtle way, In 1830, when Wilhelm von Humboldt looked back on what Schiller's friendship meant to him, but also on what Schiller's significance for the development of the German people was, on what Schiller's entire intellectual development was, he expressed himself in the following way about the German essence:

Thus someone who has devoted much thought to the feelings that go with knowing this points to what he had to believe lies in the task and the immediate destiny of the German people.

And when we look at what has shaped the German character from the spiritual side in the great age when German idealism raised Germanness to the stage of thought; and when we point to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century with all what had developed up to the immediate phase of development of our time, then we see something that cannot be grasped by the certainly significant but not very lofty concept, let us say, of the internationality of science and the like, which, insofar as it concerns science, is self-evident. But what emerged so powerfully in Germany's greatest periods in terms of intellectual development was that at that time, through those minds that felt so intimately connected to German nationality, such as Fichte, for example, the question of the whole significance of knowledge, of what man can achieve through the knowledge that he develops as science; the question of the relationship of this knowledge to the secret of the world, to the eternal-working, eternal-spiritual in the world itself. That knowledge has been called into question, that knowledge itself has become a mystery, and that it is precisely through this tendency towards the mysteriousness of knowledge that man has had to make the matter of this knowledge a personal and yet objective and factual human interest, that is the tremendously significant thing is how one can feel connected in every fiber of one's being to what man can achieve through an ideal in his striving, through the pursuit of knowledge; how one can strive for knowledge full of light and yet still raise the question: Can one go beyond this knowledge, or rather must one go beyond this knowledge if one wants to arrive at the deepest thing that connects man to the eternal sources of existence? And the reason why this riddle could present itself to the German soul in its best minds in a particularly intense way lies in the fact that during the period of German idealism, the striving asserted itself to have knowledge not only as something that something that teaches you about the world in terms of concepts, something you can stand coolly opposed to in your desire to dissect the phenomena of the world, but to have knowledge as something that lives in the whole soul and sustains the human being. It was precisely out of this yearning for the vitality of knowledge, out of this intimate feeling of connection with knowledge, that the great riddles of knowledge arose. It seems as if one only wants to have knowledge, only wants to cultivate a science, if this science can really live in such a way that one can also find the way to the sources of existence in the experiencing of knowledge.

It is appealing to see how German minds want to live in their knowledge, in their science, in a much higher sense than is usually meant when one speaks of the connection between life and science. Last winter, in a similar context, I tried to characterize Fichte's idiosyncrasy, this noble German spirit who, in one of the most difficult times in the development of the German people, placed his spiritual striving entirely at the service of his people, who, from the depth of his spirit, found the most wonderful words of power to inspire German enthusiasm. The way in which he felt connected with the pursuit of knowledge, and how he strove to rise to German idealism, is part of what Fichte was able to be to his people. A picture that has been preserved for us can illustrate this beautifully. Forberg, who heard Fichte speak when he tried to bring to life, from the depths of his striving for wisdom, what he saw as his connection with the weaving, ruling world spirit, said the following beautiful words about Fichte's way of speaking about spiritual matters:

And if one wants to characterize Fichte's German nature, one must point out how, by wanting to rule in the realm of concepts, he sought within this realm of concepts something that was more than what is often called concepts and ideas, something that was a revival of those forces of the human soul, which are one with the creative powers of all existence, those creative powers that live outside in nature, that have placed man himself in nature, that guide and direct historical life, that interweave and permeate all existence. But in order to gain such a view in full vitality, Fichte could not stop at the abstractness of the concepts, at concepts that are only views. For this he needed concepts that were directly experienced and imbued with soul by an element of activity that not only illuminates the human soul, but also strengthens it, so that this human soul, by first withdrawing from the external world, feels connected to the very innermost part of reality. And so Johann Gottlieb Fichte directed his contemplation to something living in the human soul, something that is being willed into existence. And what he sensed there, as flowing into his will, he experienced as if the divine spiritual forces that permeate and interweave the world were entering the soul, and the soul itself felt at rest within the divine experience. If one wishes to call this trait in Johann Gottlieb Fichte mystical, then one must remove from this expression everything that brings any kind of nebulousness into the world view; one must then bring this concept together with everything that is the highest energy of knowledge in Fichte's entire striving. Then German idealism appears as if compressed into a focal point, not only when Fichte talks about German nationality, but especially when he speaks of the highest matters to which his thinking and, one might say, his inner experience turns. In his attempt to visualize the ruling will in his own soul and to make it come alive before those to whom he speaks, he speaks about this will as if he were aware that the innermost essence of the whole world lives in this will. He speaks as if he himself felt the exalted will of the world pulsating in the human soul's own will, when this human soul, in its striving for knowledge, goes back to the innermost outflow and activity of the will itself. Fichte speaks wonderful words here:

Thus Fichte addresses what he senses as the will of the world by deepening his quest for knowledge, so that it may find what, in the innermost part of the soul, holds that soul together with the sources of existence; that from which the soul must create if it wants to feel that its creation in harmony with the historical and eternal powers that guide all existence itself. That science, through an idealistic consideration of life, must lead to such a grasp of human inwardness that in this inwardness, at the same time, the innermost of the world's existence in human striving is embraced, that is the basic feature of German idealism. And with this idealism, Fichte's philosophical comrades basically also face the great riddles of existence. |

From a certain point of view, I tried last winter to present this very arena of thought within German idealism and the world view of this German idealism. I undertook to show how Fichte tried to grasp the world through the experience of the innermost nature of the human will itself, by wanting to grasp the human soul where the will can delve into it. I wanted to show how Fichte, in his attempt to penetrate to the human ego in its essence, could not be satisfied with grasping this ego in being or in mere thinking, in the sense of Descartes with his “I think , therefore I am”, but how Fichte wanted to grasp the self, the innermost essence of the human soul, in such a way that there lies in it something that can never lose its existence because it can create this existence anew in every moment. Fichte wanted to show the living, ever creative will as the source of the human ego; not by a judgment of the kind: I think, that is something, therefore I am — not by that did Fichte want to find the essence of the ego, but by showing that even if this ego were not in any given moment, or if it could be said of it, on the basis of some evidence, that it were not, then this judgment would be invalid on the grounds that this ego is a creative one, because it can, in every moment, generate its existence anew out of the depths of this ego. In this perpetual re-creation, in this continuity of the creative, in this connection with the creative of the world, Fichte tried to recognize the essence of the ego in the will, to preserve it in the will, to shape the striving for knowledge in a living way.

And Schelling, Fichte's philosophical companion, who in many respects went so far beyond him, placed himself before nature in such a way that nature was not for him what it otherwise is in many respects for external science: a sum of phenomena that one dissects; rather, for Schelling, nature was to the human spirit in its nature, except that the human spirit stands in the present, experiences itself, but nature has lived through this spirit, so that it now rests enchanted in it, so that it hides behind its veil and reveals itself through its external appearances. Just as one regards a person in relation to his physiognomy, not only describing this physiognomy formally like a statue, but looking through the physiognomy to what is the living soul life, what looks through the physiognomic features, what spiritualizes and warms the outer form. Through the outer phenomena of nature, through the outer revelations as through the physiognomy of nature, Schelling wanted to go back to what is spiritual in nature, to unite the spirit in the soul with the spirit in nature. And from this arose in him that one-sided but bold way of striving for knowledge, which is expressed in Schelling's saying: “To comprehend nature is to create nature!” That in the human soul there could be something that only needs to be dragged into creative, living existence, and by so doing, not creating the outer phenomena of nature, but creating images that are the same as what lives behind nature, is expressed in the words: “To understand nature is to create nature!” Today, there is truly no need to take this philosophy of German idealism dogmatically; one need not be a follower of it, that is not the point. What is important is to get to know the power and inner soul from which such a direction of spiritual life arises. And so someone could be an opponent of the dogmas of German idealism in the fullest sense of the word, but find something resiliently alive, something that carries the future, in the way the human soul wanted to penetrate into the deepest secrets of existence back then.

And in this context, we may refer to Hegel, the third in this series, who was not afraid to ascend into the coldest realms of pure thought. For Hegel believed that when the soul withdraws from all the warmth of external observation, from all direct resting in natural existence, when it is all alone with the concepts that live in the soul in such a way that this soul is no longer present with its arbitrariness in the thinking of the concepts, but the soul abandons itself to the process of how one concept arises from the other, how concepts prevail within her, without her turning in any way to anything other than to these prevailing pure, crystal-clear and transparent concepts, which she lets prevail and weave within her as they themselves want, not as the soul wills, - then, Hegel believed, in this process, in this flowing of concepts, a union of the soul with the ruling world spirit itself, which lives out itself in concepts, which, through the millions of years, by sending its concepts commanding through infinity, allowed the outer world to emerge from the condensation of these concepts and then placed man into it so that man can awaken in his soul these concepts from which the world itself emerged. Is it really one-sided, the way Hegel delves into the world of existence by trying to penetrate to the sources of existence by squeezing out all other reality from the pure world of concepts? Is it one-sided in the sense that the World-Spirit, which flows and weaves through the world as if it were a mere logician, conjure up the world out of pure logic, this striving, which arises directly from the German essence and German nature, also shows how the German spirit, in its striving for knowledge, by its very nature seeks to connect with that which lives in the soul, that which can be directly beheld in the soul in its inwardness and which, by being thus beheld, simultaneously seizes the spirit flowing in the world. The fundamental principle of this striving is the seizing of the world-spirit by the spirit developed in the soul. And even if the right way of relating to world-life and its knowledge can only be solved by the human soul in a reasonably satisfactory way in the farthest, farthest future, the way in which it has been attempted within German idealism , this way of seeking the world spirit is so intimately connected with the German essence and at the same time it is the way in which, in our time, the eternal must be sought in the temporal human soul.

One can see how closely interwoven with German striving this kind of knowledge is when, at the dawn of the newer spiritual striving, one looks at how two phenomena confront each other at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century; that is, the time when those forces first emerged that gave the newer world view the impulses for European development. It is interesting to see how the German soul relates to this dawn of intellectual life, for example, by juxtaposing two images from the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Regardless of one's own opinion of this remarkable spirit, let us consider him only in the context of the development of modern spiritual striving, if one places Jakob Böhme and compares him with a contemporary striving spirit in Western Europe, with a spirit who is also characteristic of his people, as Jakob Böhme is characteristic of his people, with Montaigne.

Montaigne is also a great and important figure, expressing one of the elements that arise at the dawn of the modern intellectual life. He is the great doubter. He is the one who, from within French culture, receives the following impulse: Let us look at the world. It reveals its secrets to us through our senses. We will try to reveal these secrets through our thinking. But who can say, in any way, that the senses do not deceive; that what is revealed to the senses from the depths of the world can somehow have a connection, which can be visualized, with the sources of existence. And who can deny, this great doubter asks, that if one does not rely on the senses, but on judgment, on thinking, if one seeks evidence and each piece of evidence in turn demands evidence, and the new proof in turn demands another proof, that one can then proceed along the chain of proofs and must also proceed, because everything that one believes to have proven appears fleeting when one looks at it more closely. Neither thinking nor sensual observation can provide any certainty. Therefore, a wise man, according to Montaigne, is one who does not seek such certainty at all; who has an inner irony about the phenomena of the world and about the knowledge of the sources of existence; who knows that although one can reflect on and observe all things , but that one thereby acquires only a knowledge that one can just as well admit as reject, without having any hope of attaining anything else through spiritual striving than precisely such a thing to which one can only relate doubtfully and ironically.

At the same time, within the German being stands Jakob Böhme, who undertakes the journey into the depths of the human soul by means of mere inner development of soul powers, by mere immersion in what the soul can draw up from its depths. And in the fact that he finds these depths of the human soul in the way he believes he is able to find them, he was clear about it, he was convinced that by descending into the depths of the human soul, he at the same time hears the sources of all existence, natural and spiritual, of all comprehensive existence, flowing into these depths. For Jakob Böhme, descending into the depths of the soul also means reaching out into the divine spiritual life that governs the world. And so Jakob Böhme sought this path; that in this path there can be no question of doubt or of an ironic mood in the Montaignean sense, because Jakob Böhme in his way is clear about the fact that he lives in the spirit, because one cannot doubt that in which one lives, in which one co-creates by immersing oneself in it. And one would like to say: Only a revival of this endeavor of Jakob Böhme's in a higher form lies in what lives on the scene of German idealism through the spirits just mentioned. And these just mentioned spirits basically all turn their gaze to a personality who – however much this has been doubted from a narrow-minded point of view – in her entire being, in her entire nature, emerged from the deepest popular German culture, to Goethe. And Fichte, the philosopher who was only struggling for clarity, who was never satisfied if he could not express what he had to say in concepts with sharp outlines, Fichte, who could be considered a dry, sober man of knowledge — that was not his way, but that is what characterizes his striving characterizes – who could be thought of as far, far removed from Goethe in the nature of his being, – Fichte addressed beautiful words to Goethe in which he wanted to express how he tried to align himself with the highest that he strove to bring forth, with what Goethe was by nature. When Fichte had brought the first, most abstract, one might say coldest, most historical, form of his “Wissenschaftslehre” to print, he presented the book to Goethe and wrote to him:

“I regard you and have always regarded you as the representative (of the purest spirituality of feeling) at the present level of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is the same touchstone!”

Words that each of the others could have addressed to Goethe in the same way, and indeed each of them did address to Goethe in one way or another, as history shows.

And when Schiller, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, which, as I allowed myself to characterize here last winter, have been far too little appreciated, tried to answer the question from the depths of Kantian philosophy: How must the human soul strive in order to truly come to live together with the spirit of the world in freedom in the harmonious interaction of all its powers? And when Schiller turned his gaze to Goethe, he saw in him something like the German spirit in one of its centers, seeking to bring forth before the world, out of the deepest inwardness of his being, the highest that he had come to. Schiller admired the pure, free humanity of the ancient Greeks, that pure, free humanity that, on the one hand, is allowed to turn to external nature, but which does not allow this nature to have such an external hold on it as the more recent spiritual striving, in which man becomes unfree in his striving in the face of the coherence of nature. This Greek nature, which on the other hand became so aware of itself in the depths of its soul that it sensed itself as nature itself, also in its innermost being, this Greek element, which stood before Schiller's soul like a model of all human striving and living, Schiller saw it shine anew in Goethe's nature and life in the face of the newer spirit of the people. And Schiller characterized this at about the same time as Fichte wrote the words just quoted to Goethe, in a letter to Goethe with the following words:

"For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have been watching the course of your mind and have noted the path you have set out on with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary for nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory basis for the individual. Step by step, you ascend from the simple organization to the more complicated, in order to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By recreating him in nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its conceptions together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending – and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad, between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and if from your cradle you had been surrounded by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into the first view of things, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now that you have been born a German, now that your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the application of your powers of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak.” The creative force that arises from the deepest inwardness, that not only creates the present, but that even gives birth to the past anew out of its own essence: the Goethean spirit. In this letter, Schiller selflessly characterizes it wonderfully, in which he truly laid the foundation for the friendship between these two minds, Goethe and Schiller; Schiller wonderfully characterizes this inwardness of the creation of the Goethean spirit. And truly, Goethe appears in the image of German idealism with all his striving.

Therefore, out of the striving of Goethe's personality, a poetic figure could arise that – I do not believe that one has to be prejudiced to say this – is uniquely placed in world literature and in the whole of world creation, the figure of Faust. How does he stand there, this Faust? As the highest representative of human striving, but still – after all, he is a university professor at heart – as a representative of the striving for knowledge, for knowledge! And right at the beginning of Faust, what becomes a riddle, what becomes a big question? Knowledge itself, the striving for knowledge becomes a question! Two elements come to life in this Faustian legend. And one must point out this living out of the two elements if one wants to understand the basic character of Goethe's Faustian creation on the one hand and, on the other hand, its connection with the innermost nature of German spiritual striving.

Of course, the term magic and everything connected with it is not exactly popular today. But Goethe was compelled to place his Faust before magic, after knowledge and insight had become a question, a riddle, for Faust. And the fact that today we are able to separate everything that is conventionally associated with the concept of magic from a deeper spiritual striving will be my particular task tomorrow in the lecture where I want to speak about the eternal powers of the human soul. But the way in which Goethe has Faust turn to magic can perhaps be thought of as quite separate from all the wild superstition and nebulous striving associated with the word magic and with magical striving in general. One can overlook secondary matters and look at the main thing, namely, the fundamental human striving as expressed in Faust. Why must Faust, who has really been involved in all human sciences, wanted to gain clarity in all human sciences about that which underlies existence as a source, why must Faust turn to magic, to a completely different way of interacting with nature than is the case with the ordinary pursuit of knowledge? Why? Because Faust has experienced everything that can be experienced in the pursuit of knowledge; because he has experienced everything that can be felt by a person who has a yearning for the depths of the nature of the world; everything that can be felt by a person when he feels alive in himself, which external science can comprehend. This science visualizes the laws of nature in concepts, in ideas. But do I exist with these concepts, or do I only have something in these concepts that weaves itself as a ghost in my own soul and that perhaps, with regard to this image, is clearly, but not with regard to its life, directly connected to the sources of existence? What forces itself into the soul as a question of this kind can be felt in different ways. It can be felt weakly, but it can also be felt strongly, so that the enigma that lives itself into the soul through these feelings becomes like a nightmare from which this human soul wants to free itself. For the soul can say to itself: All this knowledge is only something that one forms on the basis of existence. All this knowledge is something that has been subtracted from existence. But I must still descend into existence with what I experience in myself.

What one might say Schelling believed in his presumptuousness, Faust cannot believe: that by living in concepts, one creates in nature. Rather, he wants to descend into nature. He wants to seek out nature where it lives in creation. He wants to unfold an activity that is such that the human soul accomplishes it, but which, in that this activity is within the soul, is both creating nature and creating soul at the same time. Because Faust cannot do this in any other way, he tries to do it by seeking to invigorate within himself the path that ancient magicians have tried. Faust tries to have something in his soul that does not merely depict nature in terms within him, but that appears to him in what lives and creates behind appearances. He seeks to bring the spiritual in the creative power of nature, which flows and weaves through the world, which surges up and down in the tides of life and the storm of action, not only into knowledge, but seeks to connect with it in a living way. He seeks the path to it in such a way that the spiritual creation of nature stands beside him, as the soul of a human being stands embodied here in physical existence, so that one experiences existence, not just knows about it.

And in this way Faust stands before nature in the same way as—one need only point to a spirit like Jakob Böhme, in his own way, one need only look at that which underlies German philosophical striving in the idealistic period—Faust, yearning , yearning for knowledge, expecting certain achievements, to which he wants to rise, so in the face of nature, so next to nature, as befits the innermost life and weaving of the German spirit: to create nature in the soul and to let it become living science, living knowledge. That is why Goethe has to bring his Faust together with magic.

There is something else that Goethe brings together with his Faust, something that perhaps even more than the magical element that confronts us in the first scenes and then continues in what I would call a directly dramatic way, while it loses itself as a magical element – which seems perhaps even more wonderful than this magical element for this Goethean Faustian poem, which is now also intimately interwoven with the spiritual striving of the German people.

Let us try – as I said, without pronouncing dogmatically or in any way on the value – to place ourselves in the position of Jakob Böhme; let us try to bring to life before our soul one of the aspects of Jakob Böhme's striving. A great question confronts Jakob Böhme with regard to the riddle of existence, the question that arises from the contemplation of the world when one says: The world is governed by the World Spirit in its goodness, in its wisdom. He who is able to immerse himself in the spirit of the world senses the surging of the world's wisdom, the surging of the world's benevolence. But evil intrudes, evil in the form of suffering, evil in the form of human deeds. If we do not look at the abstraction of the thought, but at a striving for knowledge that is based on feeling and emotion, a striving for knowledge that takes hold of the whole person, we stand in awe at the way in which Jakob Böhme raises the question of the origin of evil. He cannot avoid saying to himself: the spirit of the world, the divine spirit of the world, must be thought of as connected with the sources of life; but one does not find the origin of evil by immersing oneself in the spirit of the world. And yet evil is there. — With tremendous intensity, the question of the origin of evil arises in the quest for knowledge of Jakob Böhme. He seeks to answer it by asking about evil, as one might ask about the origin of the deeds of light. What Jakob Böhme has developed in depth can only be illustrated here through this comparison, for the sake of brevity. For, just as one can never derive from the light that which appears as the deeds of light, but always needs darkness for this; just as one can never derive darkness, with which light must appear together, from the light itself, but rather one must go to this source of light if one wants to examine the deeds of light in external nature, Jakob Böhme attempts to find the essence, not merely the principle, of evil, not in the Divine either, but in that which takes its place beside the Divine, like the shadow, like the darkness beside the light, which one does not seek in the light, but for which one does not need reasons in the same way as for the light itself. He seeks to find it by undertaking the previously characterized journey into the depths of the soul and at the same time trying to grasp the existence of the world at its sources in the soul. Thus he does not confront evil as something that can be recognized in a concept, but as something that he tries to grasp in its reality. In his attitude towards evil as something that cannot be grasped conceptually but only in reality, Schelling is followed in his very significant treatise “Philosophical Investigations Concerning the Essence of Human Freedom and the Related Objects”, 1809. Schelling consciously follows Jakob Böhme in his search for evil.

Goethe, from the depths of the German soul, sensed this riddle of evil in a completely different way. Just think what a challenge it was to create a work of poetry in the way that Goethe did in his Faust. On the one hand, Goethe had to present a purely inward striving, which, after all, could only be expressed, one might think, by depicting a person who presents himself to the world lyrically. Goethe seeks to bring it to dramatic life as Faust stands before the world. He does this, however, by allowing what lives in the soul to shine through in such a way that it is inwardly alive in the soul and becomes external. The dramatic not only places the human being in the world as he stands in it lyrically, but also as he stands in it actively. This enables Goethe, as a dramatist must, to lead man out of subjectivity, out of the mere inwardness of the being into the outer world. But one should try to imagine what a challenge lay in what can be characterized in the following way. Now Faust is to strive, as man does when he lets the riddles of existence take effect on him, to go forward in the world, to become a fighter in the world. And yet such struggles, which arise from the riddles of knowledge, are inner struggles. As a rule, man stands alone in this, and as a rule nothing dramatic is connected with it. Dramas proceed differently, in that one simply lets the interior of the human soul unroll. What enabled Goethe to transform what is basically only an internal matter of the human soul into a vivid dramatic image? Simply by the fact that, just as he brings the human soul out into nature through magic on the one hand, on the other hand he brings this human soul out into the big wide world by trying to show that when one seeks out seeks out evil and wants to experience it in its reality, one cannot understand it merely as an inner principle and seek an inner explanation for it, but one must step out into life as it confronts one full of life. Therefore, Goethe cannot direct his attention to evil in such a way that he finds something in him that is mere philosophy, but he must direct his attention to the essence, to one who fights Faust, to one who is the embodiment of evil, who is as alive as the principle of evil as man is alive here in his physical body. And he must be able to feel and show that the fight against evil is not just an abstract, inward struggle, but that it is a struggle that is waged hourly, momentarily, in which man lives. In everything he does, he essentially encounters evil. Thus this obstacle was overcome. What is otherwise an abstract philosophical principle was brought into direct existence, into essential existence. Walking, changing, acting, fighting were brought about, which one otherwise speaks about. For these reasons, on the one hand, the magical element had to be revived in Faust, in that Faust tries to penetrate the shell of nature. On the other hand, evil had to be contrasted with Faust as something essential, something that is much more than what is usually called an idea or a concept; something that is usually conceived as living only within the soul had to be embodied, placed out into the world. And so in poetry, too, there was a need to resort to that deepening of the conception of evil which we find as such a wonderful fundamental trait of the German spiritual striving, from Jakob Böhme up through all the deeper German spirits who cannot satisfy themselves by seeking evil only in philosophical concepts, but who want to go out into the world. And in going out into the world, they encounter evil just as one encounters another human being in the physical world. In order to spiritually unlock the inner world, the striving had to connect with such a view of evil. That is to say, just as nature is to be sensed through magic to its sources, so spiritual life is to be placed in the context of human life by showing evil itself as a spiritually active being. Thus, as a poet, Goethe elevates man to the realm of the ideal, but of the living ideal.

And he was faced with a dilemma in yet another way: he, the great artist, of whom Schiller said that he could give birth to a Greece out of his own inwardness. He was faced with a dilemma in yet another way, one that we may only gradually come to see in its full significance. In Faust, we see the striving human being. Many commentators on Faust have emphasized the fact that Goethe did a great deed in having Faust redeemed, in not allowing Faust to perish, as was the case in earlier representations of Faust, but in having him redeemed, because, in accordance with the newer world view, one must assume that within man lie the forces that can achieve victory over evil. Yes, what this actually means for the overall view of the Faust epic is something that is not usually considered. One says, offhand: Goethe's Faust could only become what it is if Goethe had the idea from the very beginning to take into account the innermost nature of man in such a way that Faust could be redeemed. One imagines a drama, one imagines a work of art that takes place in time and that is supposed to be great, in such a way that one knows from the beginning what must come out in the end. And that is what it should actually be. For man, as one so often says, must bring with him his convictions from the highest riddles of life. Actually, nothing more and nothing less is expressed by this than that “Faust” should, by its very nature, be the most boring piece of writing in the world. After all, every pedant today knows, or at least believes he knows, that if man strives correctly, he should ultimately be redeemed. And now one of the greatest poets is to present a grandiose world poem in order to show this self-evident truth through all possible forms! And yet, Goethe has succeeded in embodying the thought just expressed, not in some abstract way, but in presenting living life before us through a long, long series of images. Why? Simply because he has shown how that which, when inwardly conceived in abstract thoughts, would be a mere truism, a matter of course, is set forth in life in a completely different way; because he attempts to extend life, on the one hand, in the direction of the magical , on the other hand, towards the spiritual side; because the striving for nature is not a striving for knowledge but a magical one; because the striving for evil or the recognition of evil is not just a philosophical matter but a matter of life. How does something become a matter of life that is otherwise only the soul's inner, abstract striving? It becomes a matter of life when the human being, when he stands before nature in the same way that Faust stands before nature in the sense of his striving, wants to go beyond abstract knowledge. He wants to go beyond that which can only live in concepts, which spins itself out as ideas, as concepts. He wants to enter into the sphere of nature, where there is creative life, with which the soul's own creative life connects, in order to go beyond nature's creation through mere abstract conceptual life.

But when you take hold of the matter in full life, you enter into that in man from which man in turn emerges by being able to acquire consciousness in his concepts. One need only go back to what, for example, the Greek Stoics strove for in their earnest quest for knowledge. They wanted a wisdom that would smooth the world, that would survey the world, and that would have nothing to do with human passion. Man should become dispassionate, dispassionate, in order to feel his soul absorbed in the calm conceptual grasping of the wisdom that pervades the world. Why did the Stoics want this? Because they felt that one comes out of a certain intoxication of life, out of a half-unconscious immersion in life, by coming to dispassionate understanding. Stoicism consists precisely in the search for a life free of intoxication.

Now, in the course of human evolution, the personality that is to be represented in Faust stands before nature in such a way that knowledge becomes a question for it, the very thing by which man tries to save himself from the intoxication of life. He can enter into the intoxication of life by immersing himself with the creative powers of the soul, but he does not absorb the same powers with which he has just risen, but rather he submerges himself seeking to connect the foundations of the soul with the foundations of nature. But from this arises what is now the error of Faust in the first part of the story, the submerging into sensuality, into sensual life, even into the outer trivial life, which he must undergo in his own personality because he is to connect what lives in his own personality, what lives in the depths of his soul, with what lives in the depths of world existence. The task of the first part of Faust and also of a large part of the second part is to present in a lively way the error by which man can be tested in his soul.

To what extent man, by wanting to grasp the world personally, the world in its power through knowledge, exposes himself to the danger of being submerged in the personal and being drawn into the whirlpool of life, is depicted in “Faust”. And that does not depend on some abstract doctrine, but on the will, on the character of this Faust. It is only through this that the poem becomes a poem. And on the other hand, since the human being strives for a real knowledge of evil and is not satisfied with a principal, conceptual understanding of evil, he must break through the ordinary life of the soul; for there he finds only concepts, ideas and feelings. He must go through this soul life, he must go to the place where man, without seeing the essential reality through the senses, perceives an essential reality through the pure soul experiences, from the spirit. This becomes the task of the one who wants to recognize evil in its reality through direct experience. This becomes the task of Faust in relation to Mephistopheles. But man cannot approach evil at all as he is at first. It is virtually impossible to approach evil as man is at first; for one must know the world, and one can only know it by knowing it in the soul. One must form concepts. One must have in one's soul that which can be experienced in one's soul. After all, as newer philosophers have so rightly and so wrongly asserted, one cannot transcend one's consciousness. But if one remains in consciousness, evil remains only an abstract concept, does not appear in essence.

Faust is faced with a great, so to speak, impossible task. But great, as it says in “Faust” itself, is “he who desires the impossible”. Faust is faced with the virtually impossible task of going beyond that which is the sole source of his consciousness, of going out of consciousness. This will be his further path, the path out of the ordinary consciousness of the soul. Tomorrow we will speak about the path of knowledge out of the ordinary consciousness to those realms where the spirit is grasped directly as spirit. This stands before Faust as a task. He cannot find evil in its essential nature in the field to which consciousness is initially directed. Therefore, he must again, and now not in a general, trivial, abstract way, come to find the reconciliation of man with existence, but in the way that he is able to do so as an individual human being. It must be shown how he finds his way out of ordinary consciousness to an understanding of life that now comes from deeper forces of the soul.

Thus we see Faust going, I might say, everywhere touching and feeling the existence of the world, feeling it inwardly, to see where he can find the gate through which he can penetrate into the inner being. Thus we see how he soars so high that, having transformed the soul and transformed it more and more, he really descends in experience to those depths towards which Jacob Boehme strove and which are then hinted at to us in the second part of “Faust” that Faust finds something widest, greatest, highest and at the same time deepest, which he had already striven for in his walk to the Mothers, in that his senses fail him, in that he goes blind and in his inner being inner bright light comes to life. Out of the ordinary consciousness, to a different consciousness, to a consciousness that slumbers in the depths of the soul, as the depths of the sources of nature slumber under the shell of nature that one sees with the outer senses, to a deeper consciousness that always accompanies man between birth and death, but that is not present in the ordinary field of consciousness. Faust must be guided in two ways through the strengthening of the spiritual life to the gates that lead from the abstractness of the idea to the livingness of spiritual existence itself: As a magician, Faust knocks at the gate of existence, which leads from mere observation of nature to co-creation with nature; in his dealings, in the living, dramatic dealings with Mephistopheles and with all that is structured by them, Faust knocks at the other gate, at that other gate that leads from the ordinary consciousness of the soul to a superconscious, supersensible consciousness, which opens up a spiritual world, from which evil also really originates, behind the ordinary existence of the soul, just as external natural revelation is only the expression of that which lives and moves entirely in nature.

Through the connection with what, one can say, is peculiar to the German national spirit, Goethe created a piece of writing that could only become a piece of writing in the most difficult sense. For the most non-sensuous, the most distant from the senses, the purely inward, was to be shaped dramatically. But this inwardness can only become dramatic if it is expanded in two directions. And Goethe sensed the necessity of this expansion in two directions. In doing so, he created the possibility of placing this unique poetry, which in a sense no one else in another nation would have conceived in the same way, into the world evolution.

If one has these thoughts, one can perhaps still raise the question: Yes, but did Goethe not actually create a work of art that requires a great deal of preparation to understand? It almost seems that way. For the commentaries that scholars, both German and non-German, have written about Goethe's “Faust” fill several libraries, not just one. But if one were to believe that a great deal of preparation is needed to understand the Faust epic, then the thought must arise: what did Goethe actually make this Faust epic out of? Was it the result of a philosophical quest? Was it speculation about the magical foundations of nature? Or was it speculation about the sources and origins of evil? No, truly not! He saw the puppet show, a pure folk performance, the folk play of Faust, which was presented to the simplest minds. He transformed what lives and breathes in it according to his own mind. The Faust legend, therefore, presents us with a work of art and a work of the spirit in the best sense of the words. If we look only at the most general aspect of its origin, it shows how this summit of German intellectual life has its source in the most direct folklore, that is, in the most elementary of the folk spirit, and how German idealistic intellectual striving is connected with the essence of the German folk spirit. It can also be proved historically from the origin of the highest poetry of mankind from the simplest folk drama. This is a significant world-historical drama, that a spirit that can delve so deeply into the folklore in its inner work, like Goethe, is able to create something supreme out of the most primitive folklore, something supreme that, as we have been able to show, is also connected to the most significant philosophical pursuit, to the philosophical idealistic pursuit in Germany's great intellectual period. In Faust — as I said, these things must not be taken dogmatically — we see the striving Fichte. How? Fichte does not seek to grasp being and the ego by bringing thought to consciousness, as Descartes and Cartesius did. Instead, Fichte seeks to grasp being and the ego by connecting with the world-creating powers that play into the inner soul, so that the ego creates itself in every moment. We see this, only translated into the dramatic will, into the directly living, flashing up again in Faust. Faust is not satisfied with the self that human striving for knowledge was able to convey to him, but he wants to experience his own self directly in the spiritual world. The whole progress of the dramatic action in 'Faust' consists in the fact that the ego, in its dealings with the world, creates itself anew, always elevating itself. Fichte lives in Goethe's Faust; Schelling also lives in Goethe's Faust, in that Faust, on the one hand, seeks to unite the truth of magic with his soul, but also seeks true striving in the depths of the soul seeks the true striving in the depths of the soul; in that which cannot be found in the ordinary life of the soul, in thinking, feeling and willing, he seeks it in his dealings with the representative of evil, as a direct spirit. Faust truly seeks out nature where it lives in creation. Schelling had, I might say, presumptuously explained it when he said: To understand nature is to create nature! Fichte stands on healthier ground when he says: To understand nature is to live with one's own creation in the creation of nature. But one can see how the power for a deeper striving for knowledge, for the sources of existence, also lives in Fichte. Hegel strove for the sober thought, and one cannot be more sober than Hegel. The world spirit with which the soul in Hegelian philosophy seeks to unite itself becomes a mere logical spirit. To think of the divine spirit of the world as a logical soul that only builds the world logically! It must not be taken dogmatically, but it must be taken as an expression of the striving that remains mystical even in the most extreme logic, that seeks a union of the deepest part of the soul with the summit of the whole existence of the world itself in nature and history. Hegel must also be taken in this way, that one cannot find one's own self in what the senses provide us, but only in what the human soul can achieve within itself when it comes out of the sensual world. This is also what Hegel's philosophy strives for. And Faust, after his eyesight has gone, is illuminated by a brighter light within. What Hegel seeks on the right path, only to fail to perceive as the right goal, is what Faust seeks: to let one's own self merge with the world-self, to unite with it, and thus to experience the world-self in one's own self.

As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, can we not say that this German striving has not only tried in a beautiful way to establish harmony between philosophy – if one wants to call the pursuit of a worldview such – and poetry, and art in general, but that the German spirit has also brought this striving to external expression in a very unique way in Faust? Is not the very essence of Germanness characterized in this harmonious blending of the creations of the imagination with the quest of the sense of truth? Is it not otherwise in the world, where one finds that the imagination creates in freedom, but in unreality? The sense of truth creates according to the necessities of existence, but it does not come to a real life through this, only to an objectification, to a representation of experience. To bring fantasy out of its unreality and to animate that which it is able to create in such a way that the created lives together with the living spirit, so that harmony, harmonious harmony between poetry and philosophy can also exist in a work of art for once – that is what Goethe attempts, out of the whole originality and the truly not at all philosophical nature of his being. And when he has achieved this harmonizing of poetry and philosophy, of imagination and philosophy, by connecting with the most popular sources of the German spirit, then we may say: just as this Goethean work (we might also show it in other of his works, but it is most clearly and explicitly shown in his “Faust” — shows itself in connection with what the idealistic German world view has sought; there it is, as it now stands before us, seemingly the spiritual heritage of a few who prepare themselves especially for it. One can also see that, basically, supporters and opponents have tried to come to terms with the paths taken in the Goethe, Schiller, Schelling and Hegel era in the further course of German intellectual life up to our time. Infinite efforts have been made to understand the paths taken at that time along which one can find the sources of existence. But anyone who delves deeper into the ideas of those who lived in the arena of German idealism may come to the conclusion that what was developed there need not remain the property of only a few, of only a few individuals. Of course, if today we want to delve into the world view as presented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel themselves, if we get involved in their books, it is understandable that we will soon close the books again if we do not want to make a special study of them. For it is understandable to say: All this is quite incomprehensible. Nor is there any criticism to be made of those who claim that it is incomprehensible and indigestible. But there is a possibility, and this possibility is actually offered by human development, that what appears to be an indigestible good for a few can become quite popular, can really find its way into the whole spiritual cultural life of humanity. In order to grasp the cosmic striving of man in the way it was grasped in German idealism, it was necessary that some people should devote themselves entirely to the particular formulation of concepts and ideas, that they should attempt this in a solitude of spiritual life that stands alone as such.

But it does not have to stay that way. It is possible to popularize that which lives in Fichte's thoughts, which are so abstract, so abstruse, and, as many might say from their point of view, so convoluted – I know that for many people I am saying something paradoxical, but time will teach that it is correct – if you live into the spirit and the way of thinking, to present it in such a way that it can be directly conveyed to the boy or girl in earliest youth; that it can be understood in the way one understands something that lies completely in the nature of human life if one wants to grasp this human life. And so with all the other spiritual heroes! It can be done just as it can with the Grimm fairy tales. It takes no more spiritual activity of the soul to recognize, feel and sense Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the depths of their creations than it does to grasp a fairy tale in the right imaginative way, as it is in the Grimm fairy tales. But the path will first have to lead people to live with something that belongs to the highest that humanity has gone through in terms of knowledge and poetry. And that is the significance of this idealistic striving of the German spirit. If one can show how one can grasp the essence of the soul in a simple way by appealing to the creative powers that lie within everyone, if one can show how these powers can be accessed in the right way, then one can bring this to people in a simple, elementary and direct way, whereas Fichte, to find it for the first time, needed a particularly high level of intellect. The same applies to everything else. But is what I am saying really so incredible? I do not think that anyone who remembers how he learned to understand the Pythagorean theorem at school will find it so incredible. But that does not mean that he is inclined to consider himself a Pythagoras, although the spiritual level and power of Pythagoras was necessary to first discover the Pythagorean theorem. An intense stream of spiritual world experience will flow from what the best German minds have sought in lonely, abstruse thoughts within German idealism, down to the most ordinary aspirations and lives of human beings.

And there is much, infinitely much, in this ordinary striving of man, if he is able to relate to the ever-creative and to feel that the human ego is creatively creative in the infinite. It is only by merging with the creative forces of nature that the human soul will be able to experience and feel the great beauties of nature as it reveals itself. And in a similar way, this applies to the other elements of this German intellectual life.

One must feel this, then the right feeling comes over one for the connection of the German striving with the entire world striving. And to revive this feeling in our days, it seems certainly appropriate to our destiny-bearing time. And it already belongs to that in which the German soul finds its strength. In conclusion, an example of this.

Even before the unity of the German people, the new German state, came about out of the context of the world, out of history, an unknown spirit writes beautiful words in his contemplation of Goethe's “Faust”. It was in 1865. I only quote these words of an otherwise quite unknown interpreter of Faust because they express what countless others have felt in exactly the same way. Since the emergence of the elevation in German idealism, which we have spoken of again today, countless of the best German minds have felt the connection between the paths that the idea takes in idealism into the spirit of nature and into the deeper foundations of the soul-spiritual itself. They felt that there is a connection between what the German spirit at its height has created for thought, what it has given to humanity as the sum of thoughts and artistic creations, and a connection between all this and what can also live in the German deed, in what the German people have to do when they have to carry out their world struggles on a different stage than that of thought. The connection between German intellectual life and German action was most deeply felt by those who knew how to place German thought and German idealistic work highest in their way of thinking. And from the contemplation of the past of German idealism, with its ascent to the heights where thought introduces to the life of the spirit—from the contemplation of this sphere of German idealism, there has always emerged the most beautiful hope that the German people will find the impulse for action from the same source when they need it.

What could be shown by many can be exemplified by one – and deliberately by one who is little known, Kreyssig, an explainer of Faust. Kreyssig, in 1865, wrote a paper about Goethe's “Faust” in which he tried to clarify, in his own way, what Goethe actually wanted with his “Faust.” He concludes with the words:

“And so we would then also know the overall impression that the contemplation of this giant monument of our great educational epoch, which after all remained unfinished and fragmentary, leaves behind, here we cannot summarize it better than in the simple memory of a passage from the famous legacy of the then 75-year-old poet to the younger world, which was preparing to take on new paths.”

Kreyssig cites Goethe's own thoughts, where he envisages the way in which Goethe sought a path into the spiritual world into old age. Kreyssig states how the power that leads into this spiritual world seems to him to be connected with the power that German action is to create in distant, distant times, which Goethe, as an old man, could only guess at:

The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
The primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through books as readily as through rocks.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
Will never live in the learned hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken it,
It has taken the glass of the hothouse with it.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
a mild light will still pour forth,
from whose reflection of those stars
the late grandchildren will learn to see,
and in prophetically higher visions
to accomplish greater things for the world and humanity.

And the “Faust” interpreter adds - in 1865 -:

"Let us add the wish that the words of the master, who looks down on us with a mild light from better stars, may come true for his people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and struggle, but, God willing, with indestructible strength, and that “in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of 'Faust' expects from the coming centuries, German action too, no longer as a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!"

Thus thought a German personality in 1865 of the German idea in connection with the hoped-for German deed. How the disembodied souls of such personalities may look upon the field in which the German deed is called upon for its realization today!

But precisely in connection with the faith, love and hope of such personalities, and especially of those personalities who, either through creation or understanding, have stood within the world view of German idealism, it may be said: the German need not, if he wants to recognize the impulses that are to inspire him, disparage any opponent. He has only to reflect on what he must believe, according to the innermost part of his being, to be his world-task. He must therefore reflect that he looks up to the way in which it has been handed down by his fathers, his ancestors, to his time; how it has become a force for the present, and how from this force, which is before his eyes, which lives in his soul, from the present hope may spring into the future.

Indeed, in the context of the present with German idealism, one can say from the innermost feeling: By looking to the past of thought or to what he has striven for outside of thought, the German feels feel his world task; he may feel it in this fateful time, he may feel it out of his love for his past and out of his faith in the power of the present, which becomes his when he has the right love for what the past has brought him. And from this love and from this faith, from this dual relationship between past and present, will spring in the right way that which, transcending blood and pain, allows us to glimpse a blessed present: German hope for the future. Thus, by delving into the idealism of the German essence, we can create a triad of love for the German past, faith in the German present, and hope for the German future.

From Buddha to Christ

Budapest, May 31, 1909

I do not wish to offer you here an observation about the philosophy of religion or a treatise on literary history, nor do I wish to give you a scientific lecture about the subject matter. I simply want to tell you what Spiritual Science or occultism have to say about such great individualities as Buddha and Christ, more precisely what knowledge they can offer from the vantage point of Rosicrucian occultism.

In a lecture intended for more advanced theosophists, I presume you will permit me to speak more intimately of such truths. I shall present to you broad outlines, and I will incorporate certain details into them. Rosicrucian occultism presents one of the great principles of occult theosophical investigation from which spiritual life should flow into our hearts. Even though the goals and ideals of theosophy can also be found outside the Theosophical Society, there is nevertheless a difference in the means employed by anyone seriously trying to struggle for the attainment and right application of knowledge and truth, for occult investigation can and must flow directly into life.

Allow me to illustrate this point with a trivial example. The human soul is like a stove that does not need to be persuaded to heat a room because heating is its function. The stove does this on its own, provided we put wood into it and light it. It could be objected that the appearance of the wood does not suggest to us that it can generate heat, and yet it does precisely that. By putting some firewood, the appearance of which is so different from the stove, into it and lighting it, we bring warmth into our house. Similarly, by getting used to spiritual scientific concepts, we also become accustomed to our ability to make judgments and to orient ourselves freely in this world. It is not our task to preach ideals but rather to provide human souls with the fuel that can generate spiritual wisdom, genuine brotherliness, and true humanity. To realize this is our goal.

What we designate as the Rosicrucian stream arose in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the spiritual stream of Christianity was already obscured since it had taken on an external form. At a time when Christianity in the outer world increasingly was taking on an external form and when its true original meaning had faded, Rosicrucianism, received the task to cultivate ancient wisdom and to preserve the treasures of primordial wisdom. In the outside world, wherever people deemed only external forms and hardened dogmas to be important, they abjured and cursed anything that was venerated in the mysteries as the highest and holiest truths. One frequently heard the words: “I curse Skythianos; I curse Boddha; I curse Zarathas.” These are the three names that were venerated in greatest secrecy in the mysteries and in the Rosicrucian mystery schools as sacred names of the masters.

Zarathas is the same individual as Zarathustra—not the Zarathustra known to history, but the exalted individual who founded ancient Persian culture and who was the teacher in the occult schools of that time. Skythianos was a highly developed individual of ancient times. In one of his subsequent incarnations he led the occult schools of Central Asia, and later he also became the teacher of esoteric schools in Europe. Boddha and Buddha are one and the same person.

In order to understand what an initiate felt when he heard these three names and in order to gain some idea of what they could give him, we have to go back in human evolution and examine the character of Rosicrucian occultism more closely. Let us gain an understanding through listening and through looking back into the past. There have always been highly advanced personalities who stood out from the masses and to whom average people looked up in reverence as one would to high ideals. To look up to the individuals who had reached such a lofty stage of wisdom and intellectual power had the effect of animating the average person's moral sense and vital energies. Even today the forces of these lofty spirits flow into our finer bodies.

Let us look back into the past to all the spiritual individualities of whom I want to speak to you, all the way back to the ancient Indian culture. If we went further back in human evolution to the remote age of Atlantis and its end, this would lead us to the event that separates us from an even more ancient epoch of humanity where our souls led lives greatly different from the ones they lead in our present physical bodies. However, rather than dealing in detail with a description of life and culture in those ancient times, let us today be content to illuminate the answer to the question: How was humanity guided in ancient times, and where did the forces that influenced it come from?

When a seer whose spiritual eye is opened so that he knows how to read the fine script of the Akasha Chronicle looks back into the spiritual worlds, he discovers the sites from which the culture and all spiritual life of those times emanated. Our souls can discover the sites where the masters and their disciples assembled in the mystery schools of that time. There were many such Mystery Centers on the ancient Atlantean continent, and they differed from those of today and were given a different name. They were not just churches and not just schools, but rather a combination of both. Those who searched for truth could find both religion and wisdom in the mystery schools; here, religion and wisdom were one. Using a modern word, we can characterize the concept of those cultic centers, the mystery schools, by the term “Atlantean Oracles.” This is the name given to them by the European mystery schools, but originally they were called something entirely different.

In the Atlantean Oracles and their centers of wisdom, spiritual life was differentiated in the same way that external knowledge and the areas of trade and professions are subdivided in external life today. There were various branches of spiritual investigation and occult wisdom in ancient Atlantis, but everything in those times depended on different conditions. Wisdom varied from one oracle to another according to the capacities of the human beings and their external environment. A connection existed between certain human capacities and certain planets, that is, certain mystical occult capacities were connected with special planets. Therefore, on the Atlantean continent we should distinguish between oracles of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.

Our present capacities, too, developed out of the cosmos, as did our earth, and they are in each case tied to different planets and their influences. On Atlantis, people who were suited to develop this or that cognitive capacity were chosen from the population and assigned to one of the seven oracles. Of the seven oracles, which were named after the seven planets in ancient Atlantis, the Sun Oracle stood out from all the others, but next to it the Vulcan Oracle prepared itself in secrecy for its future task.

Each of these oracles had emanated from the cosmos according to its capacity, but there was one center in which the capacities of all seven oracles flowed together, and it was here that the wisdom of the seven oracles in Atlantis coalesced. The adepts of this center, of the Holy Sun Oracle, had been initiated into the mystery and service of what we today know as the Sun. We should not forget that the physical sun is only the external expression or physiognomy—the body and garment—of the spiritual life of the exalted Sun-Being.

All of you have heard of the time when the sun separated from the earth, and along with the physical sun those beings abandoned the earthly arena who had advanced through the human state and, therefore, could no longer use the earth for their development. After the moon too had left, the earth was able to realize its destination of becoming the abode of humanity. If the sun alone had influenced the earth, the latter would have gone through such a rapid development that human beings would have become old soon after birth. By contrast, if our earth had been only under the influence of the moon, human beings would have been stiffened and become mummies Development would have been too slow, and their bodies would have reached a state of rigidity and lignification. However, through a wise guiding force, sun and moon maintained a balance in the external influence they exert on the earth; and this enabled earth and human beings to develop at a speed suitable to them. The beings of Mars, Mercury, Venus, and so on, who did not need the forces that had left with the moon and earth for their development, departed with the sun to take up their own abode. Yet they continued to be connected with the earth and sent their beneficial forces down to it in the sunlight.

During the ancient Atlantean epoch, the adepts of the Sun Oracle had been initiated into the deeds of this lofty Sun-Being. The Great Initiate who was the leader of this highest oracle had been initiated in the most comprehensive ways into these mysteries. The entire ancient Atlantean and, as we shall see, also the post-Atlantean culture proceeded from him. The “Manu,” as this leader of the Sun Oracle was called—although the name doesn't really matter all that much—did not choose the main representatives of the post-Atlantean culture from among the so-called scholars and scientists, nor from the clairvoyants and Magi of that time. The people who were endowed with spiritual and psychic knowledge and who in those days were approximately comparable to the scientists and scholars of our time were not considered suitable by him; rather plain people who had begun gradually to lose the clairvoyant faculty were chosen. Our present state of consciousness began to develop only at the end of the Atlantean epoch. That was the time when the old clairvoyant consciousness was waning, gradually giving way to a full consciousness of self, to the ability to address the “I” in oneself. The great Manu gathered about him those who were able to function intellectually, not the clairvoyants and Magi but those who absorbed and developed the rudiments of arithmetic. They were the despised who knew nothing in the opinion of the leading people, and in this they were not unlike the theosophists today. Yet it was they with whom the great Manu journeyed to the sanctuary in Asia from which the postAtlantean culture was to emanate.

Disregarding America for this purpose, let us say that Europe, Asia, and Africa have all been populated by the descendants of the ancient Atlanteans who had moved to these continents under Manu's leadership. This initiate of the Sun Oracle now had to take care that the founding of this post-Atlantean culture and the evolution of its human beings would proceed under the proper influence. From the very beginning he had to take care that everything that was valuable for a future development should be carried forward. This preservation of values from the past is a law of occultism, of spiritual economy, but it is also a law that can only be known through spiritual wisdom.

Now the Great Initiate took something very valuable with him when he journeyed from ancient Atlantis to Europe. To accomplish this, he had—let me put it this way—traveled to and inspected the other oracles. You all know that in the case of ordinary people the etheric body separates from the astral body and the ego soon after death and gradually dissolves in the universal ether. The same happens with the astral body after a certain time, but this law is sometimes broken in the interest of spiritual economy. This is what happened in the case of the etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates who were the leaders of the ancient Atlantean oracles.

What does it mean when we say we work on ourselves? It means that we purify the etheric body and the astral body. Now, once purified, the spiritualized etheric and astral bodies do not dissolve after death but are preserved in accordance with the law of spiritual economy. In short, it was known in the mysteries how to preserve the valuable etheric and astral bodies developed by the great initiates, but it would lead me too far afield to speak about this in detail. Suffice it to say that these bodies were kept by the preservers of the mystery schools.

It is for this reason that the Great Initiate of the Sun Oracle journeyed to the other Atlantean oracles to collect and take with him the seven etheric bodies of the greatest Atlantean initiates. And then he attracted through his wisdom a number of human beings who were to become fit for their coming culture. He taught these humans who were gathered around him so that they became increasingly more capable and pure. What followed may be called an art. After some time had elapsed, it became possible to incorporate the seven more important etheric bodies of the seven greatest initiates of the ancient Atlantean oracles into seven human beings. In regard to their egos, their power of judgment, and so on, they were simple people whose existence had no significance from an external point of view. However, they carried within them the seven most highly developed etheric bodies of the seven most significant initiates. These etheric bodies had streamed into these people, thereby enabling them to exude the great, powerful visions and truths of evolution through inspiration from above. Thus, they were able to speak of all this exalted wisdom.

The Great Initiate sent these seven bearers of wisdom to India where people still had a sense and an understanding of the spiritual and of spiritual worlds. In India human beings still had the feeling and the consciousness of having at one time emanated from a primordial spiritual world and of having been born from the womb of the Godhead. Therefore, the whole physical world appeared to them as maya, as illusion, and they longed to return to this world of the gods, to those divine-spiritual beings with whom they had once lived. To such people the seven bearers of wisdom could speak. They were called the Holy Rishis, and it was they who inaugurated the dawn of our post-Atlantean culture. The people who had preserved for themselves the consciousness of and the longing for the spiritual world with its divine-spiritual beings were thus given the opportunity to learn more about this world and to find the way back to it.

Subsequent ages gave birth to not only peoples who were destined to look into the spiritual worlds, but also to those who wanted to contribute to the founding of a new culture. They were meant to become fond of the physical world and to see it not only as maya or illusion. Rather, they began to understand that this physical world is but the expression or physiognomy of the spiritual world that lies behind it. This was the second epoch, the ancient Persian or Zarathustran culture. Ordinary history records only a relatively late Zarathustra because historians are unaware that it was customary in ancient times for a successor to receive the name of a great leader from the past. I am here referring to the greatest of all Zarathustras, who was one of the most intimate disciples of the Initiate of the Sun Oracle. His task was to find the connection between the physical and the spiritual world. He had to teach his disciples that the physical sphere of the sun is the body of spiritual beings who have their abode on the sun and that this whole physical world should be viewed as the members and limbs of the physical body of divine-spiritual beings. Just as the sun is surrounded by a great aura, so the human being is surrounded by his or her own small aura, which is a microcosmic expression of the sun's great aura. The sun is the body of the Sun Spirit who revealed himself in the Sun Oracle of the ancient Atlantean epoch. Zarathustra beheld this spirit in clairvoyant vision. He also designated the aura of the sun as Sun Spirit, and this is the same being whom he also called Ahura Mazdao. Occultists of later ages called it Ormuzd.

Zarathustra taught his disciples to see Ahura Mazdao in the physical sun and not to be led astray by Ahriman. Ahriman has lived in the physical world since the last third of the Atlantean epoch and attacks the human soul through sense perception, that is to say from the outside. By contrast, Lucifer attacks the soul from within. Zarathustra had to kindle in the hearts of humans the love for the great Sun Spirit, and he did this in powerful words that cannot be adequately rendered in our modern languages. All the magnificent words that you find in the Vedas and Gathas, no matter how beautiful, are but a feeble superficial expression of the great and lofty words originally uttered by Zarathustra. In our language, they can be approximated by the following:

“I wish to speak, now hearken and listen to me, you from near and from afar, who are filled with longing for these words. I want to speak about that which is the highest truth to me in this world and what was revealed to me by the great and mighty Ahura Mazdao. Hearken and listen to me now and mark my words carefully: No longer shall the teacher of falsehoods, the evil one whose lips bore witness to an evil faith, lead you astray for He—the mighty Ahura Mazdao—has manifested himself! Those who do not want to listen to the words as I say them and to the meaning that I give to them will experience evil things when the course of time reaches its end.”

And at other times Zarathustra said this: “So great and mighty is He who revealed Himself to me in the sun that I surrender everything for him. I rejoice in sacrificing to Him the life of my body, the etheric existence of my senses, and the expression of my deeds”—the astral body. Such was the vow that Zarathustra made a long time ago.

Zarathustra had two disciples. To one of them he revealed through spiritual means everything that one can perceive with clairvoyant astral organs. This disciple was reincarnated under the name Hermes, the Egyptian Hermes. To the second disciple he imparted truths that one can know through the clairvoyant etheric body: the wisdom of the Akasha Chronicle. This second disciple was Moses, and you can find the wisdom imparted to him in the Book of Moses of the Old Testament.

When the first disciple was reincarnated as Hermes, he bore within him the astral body of Zarathustra, who had revealed to him not only his teachings, but also his own nature. Such a transfer is possible for what Hermes had received was nothing else but the astral body Zarathustra had sacrificed for him. Hence it was Zarathustra's wisdom that Hermes, the founder of the third post-Atlantean epoch, proclaimed.

The other disciple, to whom Zarathustra had given wisdom through the etheric body, was also born again. When he reincarnated, the etheric body that Zarathustra had sacrificed was woven into him. This disciple was Moses. You can find such facts recorded in religious documents, but in a veiled manner only. Read the story of the birth of Moses. What happened then? The child was placed into an ark of bulrushes which was then put into the water. What does that mean? It means that he was completely cut off from the world. His ego and astral body were not to become manifest until they were permeated by the principle of the etheric body. How can this take place? During the time when Moses lay isolated in the ark on the water, the etheric body that had been woven into him became illuminated. Only then could the astral body and the ego begin to work in him. Are not the powerful images of Genesis, which will occupy humanity for a long time to come, images taken from the Akasha Chronicle? These things cannot be understood without the aid of occultism.

We now come to the fourth epoch of the post-Atlantean culture, to the Graeco-Roman epoch. Up to this point, human beings were developed in such a way that they should learn to love the earth. Yet there were also those who had been the companions of the gods in the Atlantean age, and it is therefore justified to ask what had become of the egos of the great initiates of that time. Atlantean egos had dwelled in a softer and finer body, and for them existence on earth was such that individualities had to go through an incarnation only for the time necessary to maintain the connection between the world's primordial spiritual wisdom and humanity.

The great Buddha is one of the individualities who was actually able to imbue the oriental writings with that deep wisdom and spiritual force that we find in them now. As occultists, we are able to understand the communications relating to him, and we may even take them literally. For example, it is true when we read about him: “At his birth he shone like the bright light of the sun.” We can also take it literally when Buddha says: “I have entered my last incarnation and need not return to earth unless I do it on my own free will.” During the post-Atlantean epoch he also toiled to pass through stages of intellectual insights, and we can understand him when he says that the lines of incarnations and different stages of initiations through which he had passed flashed up before him:

Before me stood the splendor of the forms,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I saw the Spirits of Insight,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I saw the site of initiation,
But my intuition was not yet pure!

I was the companion among them:
Now my intuition was pure!

This is Buddha's illumination. He was one of those with whom we live in Rosicrucian theosophy.

We have already named three of the Masters: Zarathas, Skythianos, and Boddha or Buddha, and we can see how the lives of these leading personalities extend into our present time. An occultist can test these findings. In the realm of spiritual economy we not only find what these exalted men left behind; everything else that is of value to humanity is preserved. Take, for example, an individual such as Galileo, who in the sixteenth century achieved such significant results in physics. Galileo had an etheric body that was not allowed to die with him. Far away from the place where Galileo had worked, there lived a man in the middle of the eighteenth century who prepared himself for a great task after two decades of a devotional childhood. Deep in Russia, at the White Sea, lived a man in the plainest circumstances. His name was Michael Lomonosov. Unknown and without means, he hiked to Moscow and subsequently laid the foundations for Russian grammar. Lomonosov bore within him the etheric body of Galileo. And now it happened that a personality, who knew that the etheric body of Galileo had been preserved and who, in fact, had been present when this connection was being investigated occultly, knew nothing about Michael Lomonosov. This is no disgrace since on the physical plane one cannot know everything. But here we see that valuable elements are preserved and the past is connected with the future through the law of spiritual economy. In the Rosicrucian mysteries, too, we encounter the individuality who lived in the body of Buddha on the physical plane. During the Atlantean age, he had lived only as a bodhisattva, but later on he descended into the physical body of Buddha.

Let us now look at the times of Buddha and Zarathustra and observe what souls had to do in the ages between these two spiritual leaders. On the one hand, we have the teachings of Ahura Mazdao, on the other, that side of humanity that increasingly became fond of the earth. Let us envision once again the Indian, Persian, and Chaldean-AssyrianBabylonian times during which the soul gradually lost its connection with the spiritual world. Then, in ancient Greece the soul came to love the earth so deeply that the statement of a famous Greek, “Better to be a beggar in the upper world than a king in the world of shadows,” was accepted as truth. During this fourth post-Atlantean, the Graeco-Roman epoch, everything in the external world appeared to be beautiful and charming. The seer may, for example, observe the ruins of the Temple of Paestrum with his physical eye and revel admiringly in the beauty of the temple's form and in the intriguing charm of its lines. However, when he takes his eyes off the temple and looks for a similar substance in the spiritual world, he finds nothing. Everything seems to be blotted out. This is what these souls experienced between death and rebirth. They were isolated within the cold circumference of their individuality, cut off from all spiritual things and longing only for the physical world and all its beauty.

Ahura Mazdao himself, the Leader of the Sun, had to descend to earth to bring light into this icy separateness. He had to become a human being in the physical world in order to help both the living and the dead. He had to be a human among humans! The high and the magnificent that lives in the sun descended to earth and revealed itself in and to humanity. Previously, it had revealed itself in the elements, for example to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and in the lightning on Sinai. The Israelites were to make no graven image of their God. Why? Because no external name can be given to “Me,” the Divine Being; only an entirely different name can express the “I am the I am!” The only possibility of discovering the spirit of the sun's name is to seek it in the human being. That which lives as “I” in human beings is the Christ-Being.

The Jehova revelation precedes the Christ. That was at the time when the Christ-Being could gradually descend to the earth. What had Zarathustra once vowed to the high Sun-Being? What sacrifice did he want to make to him? His body, senses, life, and speech. Zarathustra was reincarnated as a contemporary of the great Buddha. He could then build up the etheric and astral bodies that he had sacrificed. He was reborn as Zarathas or Nazarathos, and he became the teacher of Pythagoras, who himself was reincarnated as one of the three Wise Men of the East and became one of the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth. Zarathustra, who had once sacrificed his etheric and astral bodies, was also able to give up his external sheath to Him whose coming he had once announced. As the Jesus of Nazareth of Western occultism, he could place his physical body at the disposal of the Sun Spirit and was then able to say, “I am the Light of the World!”

The Christ-Being was known in all the mysteries. In ancient India, at the time of the Seven Rishis, the being who represented Christ was called Vishva Karman. Zarathustra named him Ahura Mazdao, and in Egypt he was known as Osiris. The Jewish people called him Jahve or Jehova, and then in the fourth cultural epoch this very same being lived for three years on our physical earth. This is the being who will in the future reunite the sun with the earth. Mystically, the Christ united Himself with the earth when the blood streamed from His wounds at Golgotha. At that time He appears in the aura of the earth, and He has been in it ever since.

Who was the first man to see Christ in the aura of the earth? It was St. Paul, who did more than anyone else for the dissemination of Christianity. What caused Saul to become Paul? Neither the teachings nor the events that took place in Palestine, but the event at Damascus, which was of a super-sensible nature. Before that experience, Paul could not believe that the one who had died so disgracefully on the cross had been the Christ, but as an initiate of the cabala he knew that the Christ would be visible in the aura of the earth once He had appeared on earth. That was the experience of Paul, which transformed him from Saul to Paul. Paul said of himself that he was born prematurely, and the same is also said of the Buddha. This means that such an individuality does not descend too deeply into the physical realm. When Paul became clairvoyant before he came to Damascus, he saw and knew who Christ was.

The Christ was working in Buddha as a bodhisattva, and it was He who was now the planetary spirit of the earth since the event of Golgotha and who could since be found in the physical aura of the earth. Through the Christ-Principle a new light has been kindled in this world and beyond. The body of Jesus of Nazareth—the etheric and astral bodies and the ego of Jesus of Nazareth—exist in many copies in the spiritual world. Such a statement expresses something of great significance, and for a better understanding of it we can draw on nature for a number of enlightening examples. Just think of a grain seed that grows into a stalk and multiplies itself many times in the process. This apparently simple natural process is a parable of the events in the super-sensible world that are governed by certain laws. Many copies of the etheric and astral bodies and of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth exist in order to be incorporated in the preliminary bearers of the Christ-Principle. Everything connected with the Christ-Principle is so momentous that humanity can grasp it only little by little.

St. Augustine, for example, bore within him a copy of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth; and once you know that, you will be able to appreciate his life, his errors, and his accomplishments. His ego and his astral body were left to their own resources, and only in his etheric body did his great mystical gift come to life. St. Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas had copies of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their souls, and it is this fact that allowed them to be such dynamic teachers. They worked from a sphere in which Christ had once lived.

In some cases external events such as natural catastrophes or similar things enhance this weaving of spiritual bodies into the soul of the recipient. It is said of St. Thomas Aquinas that lightning struck and killed his little sister in the room where he happened to be standing, but spared him. He interpreted this lightning bolt next to him to the effect that elemental forces were necessary to help him take up the copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth. Elisabeth of Thüringen also had an imprint of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth in her soul.

Zarathustra, or Jesus of Nazareth, is one of the three Masters of the Rosicrucians. Many copies of his ego, that is of the ego in which the Christ Spirit Himself had dwelled, can be found in the spiritual world. The copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth are waiting for us in the spiritual world to be utilized for the future evolution of humankind. People who endeavor to strive upward to the heights of spiritual wisdom and love are candidates for these copies of the ego of Jesus of Nazareth. They become bearers of Christ, true Christophori. On this earth they shall be heralds of His Second Coming.

We derive strength for our future work from the knowledge of which individualities are behind the missions of important human beings. It is possible to test these facts. Not everyone is able to investigate what goes on behind the curtains of the physical world, but everyone can examine the results of such investigations by looking at the Holy Scriptures written before and after Christ. These facts can illuminate the way to understanding; and if they do, they change within us and become spiritual life blood.

My dear Friends,

If now we would proceed to consider man from the three points of view—the occult, the theosophical and the philosophical—it will be necessary to speak first of the occult point of view. And we shall do best if we start by giving a description of how in the history of the evolution of mankind one or another human being has succeeded in raising himself to occult vision of the world.

As we said in the introductory lecture, there have naturally never been more than a few who were found ripe to partake in all that went on in the Mysteries and places of occult teaching and education. It is therefore of the development of these few that we shall have to speak.

It will, however, also have been clear to you from many other lectures I have given that we stand now at a point in time when through the popularising of theosophical knowledge more and more people will have to take part in occult life, instead of the very few who have done so in the past. So that what we have to consider today concerns everyone who takes an interest in theosophy and realises that occult knowledge—the knowledge, that is, of the hidden aspects of existence—must no longer remain secret, but must spread farther and farther, in accordance with the demands of a continually developing humanity.

A man who set out to attain occult knowledge had in the first place to turn his gaze away from the external world and direct it upon the forces of his own soul. Since he had, however, at the same time to remain a man of action in the external world, his occult development was, so to say, his own affair, was a matter that concerned himself alone In the world he continued to be a man among men, with all the duties that life had brought to him. This fact found striking expression in the very first step he had to take for the development of his soul forces. For the first thing the pupil had to do may be described in the following words he had to reconcile himself to his karma in respect of all that concerned his will. Reconciliation with karma (or destiny)—that was the first thing demanded of a man who was undergoing occult development.

Please do not imagine that such a reconciliation with one's karma necessitates the forming of a comprehensive theory about karma what is meant is much more a particular kind of culture and education of the life of feeling. Think how it is with a man who is beginning on a path of occult development Before the moment of time when he makes this beginning, he has lived in the world as a man among men. He has acquired a certain standing in life, he has made himself master of certain thoughts which enable him to carry out satisfactorily the external actions that his calling demands. He has also come to recognise certain duties or obligations that custom and society have laid upon him. It can at the very outset be assumed that any man who has not responded to what the world demanded of him, any man, that is, who does not want loyally to fulfil his obligations to the world around, would never have the urge to undergo occult development In fact, as a general rule, those who could be called to occult development were men who showed great ability in the positions in which life had placed them and who were also desirous of being in every respect equal to the obligations laid upon them by custom and society. The capacities and faculties a man shows in his position in life, the round of duties also that he recognises as incumbent upon him,—these are the very things that constitute karma in the positive sense. Here a man's karma comes to expression. And the first demand made upon a man who was preparing to step outside the bounds of his position in life as such and enter upon an investigation of the spiritual world, was that he should not in any way deviate from the karma of his life, but maintain it untouched. This meant that he made a promise, to himself and to those who were assisting him to penetrate into the occult world, not to make use in his outer standing in life of whatever should be acquired in the field of occult research. His will and action had to be so directed that others who were observing him would not be aware of any marked difference in the whole behaviour of his life since he had begun to take steps on the path of occult research. The power given him in occult research must never be allowed to interfere in the external life of the physical plane. This is what is meant by “reconciliation with karma.” The pupil forgoes all advantages that might be gained by occult means for his position in life.

We shall find that a right and regular following of the path does, as a matter of fact, lead often to a certain improvement in the pupil's external standing in life. This, however, has nothing to do with the obligation that has to be deliberately undertaken by one who sets out on the occult path. “You shall not attempt to make any use of your occult development to acquire an advantage over those who stand with you in life, but you shall direct your life in accordance with the very same rules which you have followed hitherto.” Such was the injunction constantly laid upon those who underwent occult development It was the first renunciation they were called upon to make,—to forgo all application to an egoistic end of the means acquired in occult life. What has just been said is intended to be taken quite exactly and literally; please receive the words as they stand, neither more nor less. You will observe that they are concerned with what the pupil is in a position to do, or is under obligation to do, in the external world by reason of the karma that is laid upon him.

From the very outset the egoistic will of man is thus consciously and deliberately excluded from all occult striving. This factor alone brings about a change in the whole mood and character of the pupil. If you reflect for a moment, you will see that this must be so. Hitherto the round of duties that devolve on him in his external position in life have been the one and only world in which he lived and to which he devoted himself. Now he takes upon himself the obligation to continue to live in this world in accordance with the same rules as he has followed hitherto, and yet at the same time to have forces to spare for something else quite different. This means that a boundary is set up for him between two regions within both of which he is active. A world now opens before him to which he previously never gave a thought. That is a fact of extraordinary importance. For verily man begins a new chapter in his life, when fresh interests suddenly enter and assert themselves strongly and persistently.

This then was what happened at the very beginning of occult development; a man's whole feeling and interest were claimed for a new world, a world in which he had previously had neither part nor place. Strict watch had to be kept on the pupil, especially in the more ancient Mysteries and schools of occult development, lest he be brought into any disharmony with his circle of external interests. It was sternly required of him to fulfil his duty in the widest sense in respect of the demands made by his calling or by his connection with the State or other form of community. Those who made any show of not being willing to do this or of rebelling against the duties of external life were not admitted into places of occult instruction. I am here simply relating facts. Study the history of occult development, and you will find that those who in outer life showed themselves rebellious in one direction or another against the whole ordering of life within which they lived were not members of any Mystery school or place of occult instruction.

The second thing required of the pupil was far more difficult of attainment. Consider the case of a man who has given himself and his teachers the promise of which we have spoken. He has had to declare: “I will not suffer to enter into my will, as it makes itself felt on the physical plane, anything that has come to me as a result of occult research.” He takes with him into the realm of occult research the entire forces of his soul, with the exception of the will. The will is held back in accordance with his promise; but every other faculty that he has at his disposal on the physical plane—judgment, fancy and imagination, memory, emotions,—all these forces and faculties of the soul with which he was previously active on the physical plane, can still be actively applied on that plane.

Take the intellect or understanding,—that capacity of the soul which enables us to discriminate and to form judgments about the facts of life. We could not get on without it in ordinary life; we have to apply it at every turn. Now let us suppose we become a member of an occult society or school. We achieve certain results in occult research; we acquire, let us say, knowledge about what we do in our external standing in life. We are not allowed to apply this knowledge with our will. But to begin with, there is nothing to prevent us from calling in the help of all the higher means we have from occult research in order to make intelligent observation of the things and persons that we meet with on the physical plane. Thus, we may not allow the results of occult research to flow into our action or into the resolves of our will, but we may allow occult research to have its influence upon the way we form our thoughts and conclusions on the kingdoms of nature as well as on our fellowmen,—in effect, upon the whole way in which we stand in the ordinary world with our intellect.

You will observe that a rigid self-discipline will here be necessary. What is easier for a man who meets other men and has to take active part in their lives than to apply what he knows? Suppose, for example, he is able by the help of his intellect to perceive that he has to do with a morally inferior person, nothing is easier than that he should act accordingly. It would be the natural and obvious thing to do.

The occultist, however, may not take this line. By means of what occult research gives him he can, it is true, give wings to his understanding and have clearer insight than he could before into the character of a fellowman, can recognise perhaps that he is a morally inferior person; he can also regulate accordingly what he does to this person, for he has accepted no obligation in regard to his fellowman but only in regard to his own standing in life. He is under no necessity to refrain from applying his will in respect of what he does for the other person. What he does, however, on his own behalf,—for that he is under obligation to be reconciled with his karma and not to make use of the knowledge that accrues to him when he applies his intellect, reinforced with the means of occult research.

Let us suppose an actual case of a man who is at the stage of which we are speaking. Had he not become an occultist, he would perhaps have met the other person and not recognised him to be morally inferior,—with the result that he would have allowed himself to be taken in by him. Obviously such things can and do happen in the world, as you will all be ready to admit. One can be mistaken and take a man for better than he is, and then find oneself deceived.

The occultist has here an advantage He is able to recognise the moral inferiority of the person in question. But he has for the time being—please note the words—he has for the time being put himself under obligation not to apply this occult knowledge with his will, that is to say, not to apply it to his own standing in life. He has to know that the other is a morally inferior man and at the same time to conduct himself exactly as before; he has to put up with all the ways of the other just as though he had never acquired occult knowledge about him.

Here you have a striking illustration of the rigid self-denial a beginner in occultism has to practise. He must draw a sharp line of distinction between what he can know without occult research and what comes to him through occult research and might give him an unfair advantage in life. He who is so fortunate—being blessed either with natural talents or with particularly favourable conditions of life—as to recognise, without being an occultist, the moral inferiority of the other person, is inclined to consider the occultist a fool, because he waives any advantage that might accrue to himself from the knowledge. And this frequently happens. Other people through some good fortune or other are able to perceive what the occultist also perceives, only does not act upon, being under obligation to refrain from doing so. You will constantly find this happen,—as you will also find it happen that one or another who has made the promise fails to keep it. That is, however, his own affair! We may, if we will, consider the occultist a fool because he lets someone else get the advantage of him, but we must not let that lead us to conclude that he has no means for perceiving the character of men.

We have then this second stage: forgoing the use of the will for our own egoistic ends, we apply our understanding in the external physical world. The occult teachers of olden times allowed their pupils to remain rather long at this stage. For a considerable time the pupils had to go through the world learning to observe more deeply and with increasing penetration and insight not only their fellowmen but also the other kingdoms of nature, and yet all the time continuing to walk the path of ordinary life in exactly the same way as before. This meant they had to practise a very severe self-discipline, for they must learn never to place into the service of egoism the advantages their mind and spirit afforded them. Nor was this all; the whole experience brought them a step further in another direction as well.

When, after the intellect has spoken, the will comes behind and adds the action which is the natural sequence of what the intellect has said, then this intellect does not evolve nearly so much as when it is used by itself, completely isolated from the sphere of the will. If a man excludes himself as a being of will and egoism from a realm into which he enters by applying his intellect and understanding to the whole surrounding world, then he becomes increasingly able to detect fine differences. His understanding grows subtle and delicate. His faculty of judgment and discrimination grows steadily stronger.

The pupil has now absolved the second stage of occult development, the stage we may call the “cultivation of the will-emancipated understanding,” and is ready to go on to the next.

Having for a long time applied his understanding with all keenness and insight, the pupil must then begin to renounce even the use of this understanding. This step is a very difficult one. The pupil has to understand and judge as he did before he became an occultist. In respect of the objects of the external physical plane he must use only the power of understanding and judgment which he had previously. All that he has acquired on the occult path in the way of deeper understanding and that has brought him untold good and has meant a definite advance for his spirit,—all this he has now to shut out of his spiritual activity; he may only handle matters of quite ordinary knowledge. That which he has striven after so keenly and energetically for a long time, namely, the strengthening of his understanding, he must lay aside, he must absolutely root it out of his soul, in so far as conscious application of it is concerned, and say to himself: As I go about and fulfil my life on the physical plane, I must think and judge and discriminate as I did before my occult development, using only the degree of cleverness to which I had then attained. The pupil has, so to speak, to force himself to be again as stupid as he was before his understanding was sharpened.

What becomes of the understanding which he has now forgone? He must not now apply it. He has done so for a long time, but he may do so no more. What becomes in any case of the results of our power of judgment and understanding when we refrain from putting them to direct use? They pass over into memory. This is the next step. All the knowledge gained by the sharpening of the power of intellect has to become memory. The pupil must not advance any further in the cultivation of his intellect, he must also refrain from applying his strengthened intellect, must not desire to gain with his intellect any further knowledge about the connections of the world. That which he has already acquired by means of his strengthened understanding, he must look for in his memory; ever and again it must rise up in memory. He shall endeavour to bring it about that the knowledge he has gained becomes like the thoughts he had, say ten or twenty years ago,—thoughts he no longer thinks, but only remembers.

In occult schools such as the school of Pythagoras in olden time, and in many a Mystery school of Asia Minor, the selection of pupils was very strict. Only those were considered ripe who could be trusted to keep the vow not to let flow into their egoistic will the results of the cultivation of the intellect. They were then educated for a very long time in the cultivation of the intellect. In all possible ways they were shown first how to distinguish things and then how to combine and connect them again, and they developed a keener sense of discrimination than it is possible to attain in ordinary life. The greatest importance was attached in rightly conducted schools of ancient and medieval times to this cultivation through long periods of time of the power of judgment.

Then the pupil has to make this further, second renunciation. He has to vow to himself and to his teacher that he will cease to judge any more the things he sees on the physical plane, cease to employ in regard to them the power of judgment he has acquired with his understanding. Nor may he indulge in a critical attitude to the teachings imparted to him. All he may do is to compare what he receives from his teacher with what he has himself previously acquired through his own power of judgment. He must not make any criticism, he must be no more than a listener who compares what he now hears with what he has himself acquired with his sharpened intellect. Such is the requirement of the next stage of occult development, which may be called the “elimination of the sharpened power of the intellect and the restriction of the inner soul life to memory.” Fancy and imagination were still allowed play; these might reproduce the remembered ideas and opinions in symbols and in imaginative pictures.

Memory and fantasy—these two powers of the soul came as it were, into their own, and were able to manifest in their full effectiveness. For now they stood alone, forming as it were a pure distillate out of the rest of the soul life, instead of being perpetually influenced and counselled by the judgment of the intellect.

Therewith had the pupil taken a further step in occult development. The time he had to pass in this stage was generally spent in receiving communications, in the form of ideas, of the recognised truths of occultism in so far as these had already become a theosophy. The pupils stood there with such forces as they had already acquired by the exercise of their power of judgment, remembering what they had learned and at the same time opening themselves to the influence of what was imparted by their teachers.

It goes without saying that the length of time passed in this stage of development varied very much in the several Mystery schools, according as it was thought necessary for the general requirements of human evolution to impart more or less of occult secrets to those who were undergoing occult development in order to fit them to become leaders of mankind. For the most part, however, this stage of development took quite a considerable time.

The next task to which the occult pupil had to address himself was to summon up all his strength in an endeavour to extinguish and wipe out of consciousness even the memories and the symbolic paintings of the fancy, as well as also the ideas—be it noted!—he had acquired by his own efforts. This was in truth a task of quite peculiar difficulty, and it is, ordinarily speaking, impossible to conceive how a pupil could shoulder successfully such a task. You will be the better able to imagine that a pupil could master such a task—namely, to pour out complete forgetfulness over all that he had acquired by his own powers—when you take into consideration that such pupils had already learned to curb and restrain their wills, had already practised the severe self-discipline we have described. For when, instead of allowing the will free play, they were obliged to keep it under strict restraint, they acquired thereby great reserve forces in the will. It was literally so. For a man grows stronger and stronger in his soul, when he is in this way compelled to restrain his will outwardly and allow nothing whatever of the results of spiritual development to flow into it. It makes him so strong that he becomes at last able to take the great resolve to repress and obliterate from consciousness all that he has acquired in his occult training and has up to now been holding in remembrance. As one erases an idea that one cannot make use of in life, so has all this to be entirely erased. Such was the unconditional demand.

You are not to imagine that those who were occult pupils in this sense became blind followers of their teachers, receiving on authority all that was imparted to them. That was by no means the case. Easy believers in authority are generally also those who in a light kind of way apply at once their perfectly ordinary intelligence to pronounce judgment on what they hear. But those who have first sharpened their power of judgment and then, holding only in remembrance what they have acquired by it, have let occult instruction work upon them through the medium of memory and of fantasy, will most assuredly be no easy believers in authority, rather will they receive what occult instruction imparts in the same way as we receive what Nature tells us. Such will be the attitude of the occult pupil to the instruction that is now given to him, after he has passed through the previous stages.

The teachers themselves also took care that their words should work in the way that Nature works; there was accordingly no need to charge their pupils to have this or that opinion or thought. It was actually so that the pupils, after all they had undergone in the development of their powers of understanding and discrimination, met the words of their teachers as we meet, shall I say, a sunrise, or a wind-swept sea or some other natural phenomenon, which we observe with the desire to learn all we can about it,—not approaching it critically, for then we would never grow really acquainted with it. Those know least of all the inner power and might of a phenomenon in Nature who approach it with sympathy or antipathy. In the very same way in which one observes Nature herself did the occult pupil now observe what was given to him in occult instruction.

When the pupils have continued in this experience for a while, allowing only memory and fantasy to be active within them, applying their understanding to their external calling in life and to that alone, a time comes when they have to enter on a period of inner quiet and rest. They must forget their own powers and destroy their own attainments. For they can only attain complete inner rest of soul when even the memories and imaginations that they have acquired during their occult training are blotted out of consciousness.

The soul had to be made empty; and then, when it was empty, when the egoistic will and the egoistic understanding, and also the egoistic memory and the egoistic fancy were all driven out,—then an absolutely new world opened before the soul. There had first to be this emptying in order that the new world might be able to find entrance into the soul.

You must familiarise yourselves with the fact, that really and truly it was a new world that penetrated into the empty soul,—an altogether new world! You will, therefore, not be surprised if this world has strange qualities and characteristics. For what do we mean by strange? We call a thing strange when we find it contradicts our previous experience. Look around you in the world today and observe how often when some statement is made, people reject it right away. What reason do they give? They say: “That statement is contradictory.” What they mean is that according to the power of judgment they have so far been able to attain, they find the statement to be in contradiction to everything else they know; they then jump to the conclusion that they have scored a point over the man who has put forward the statement, just because they can point to a contradiction in it.

It is a fact that when one begins to speak quite openly of things, it always has the result that people point to contradictions and declare that what has been said must necessarily be false, because it contains a contradiction. We need to recognise that on this path we shall indeed meet with contradictions, for we are approaching something that cannot possibly have any similarity with the world that has been ours hitherto; we shall have to reconcile ourselves to complete and utter contradictions when this new world approaches us, for it can only be described in ideas which must needs appear to us as contradictory. It is inevitable that this should be so; the new world would not be a new world if it were in complete harmony with the old and never contradicted it in any way!

It should therefore not surprise us that when we come to describe the world man enters when he attains the peace of soul which follows the stage of forgetfulness, the first characteristic can only be given in words that, from the point of view of the world to which we are accustomed, are directly contradictory.

There are three things man finds when he has come to the stage we have described,—three things that can only be characterised by making use of expressions that are in themselves contradictory when regarded from the point of view of what man knows of the external world. These three things man learns to know when he really enters what we may call the super-sensible world.

The first is the unmanifest light. Look around you in the world! Can you not see light everywhere? It is of the very nature of light to reveal itself and be manifest. And yet the first thing man learns to know in the super-sensible world is the light that is unmanifest and unrevealed, the light that is dark and does not shine.

The second thing man learns to know in the super-sensible world is the unspoken word. In the ordinary world a word that is unexpressed is not a word. We have therefore again a complete contradiction in terms when we say that the second thing man learns to know in the super-sensible world is the unspoken word.

The third is the consciousness without any known object. Reflect how, when you develop a consciousness, when you know, you must have always an object of knowledge. But the consciousness we find as the third thing to be met with on entering the super-sensible world is a consciousness without object.

These then are the three things the pupil encounters when, having undergone the preparation we have described, he enters right into the realm of occultism. These are the first three actual occult things he learns to know:

The unmanifest light,
The unspoken word,
The consciousness without knowledge of an object.

It is a moment of the very greatest significance for the occult pupil when he can learn to unite a meaning with what appears to be in entire contradiction to all he has known hitherto. When he is able to unite something of his own inner experience with the three ideas of the “unmanifest light,” the “unspoken word” and the “consciousness without knowledge of an object,” then he has in that moment become an occultist; the pupil in occultism has really begun to tread the path of occult knowledge.

[Dearly beloved!]

It is not possible to determine exactly when the Book of the Dead was written. In any case, it is one of the most important documents, because it shows us that in such early times in Egypt a world view, a deepening, prevailed which aimed strictly at a unified world and which, on the other hand, already had the strange urge in itself to understand death as a symbol, to understand death in such a way that it does not appear as the terrible in itself, but that it appears as that which can be seen as a symbol, as a mere allegory, which still stands high above [life]. If death is to be overcome, it is certain that death can only be overcome spiritually. It essentially deals with the transition from physical life to life after death - and that means nothing other than life in general. We can describe even more precisely what is contained in the Book of the Dead. It contains chants, hymns to the sun god Ra, to Osiris, the son of the sun god, hymns which are preferably put into the mouths of the dead. These dead who have made their way to the afterlife, these dead are to experience something, they are to gain knowledge [of what they have seen and what they are aware of from those who are no longer bound to the body. That is the first part. The second part consists of the dead person being held up to account in a kind of judgment for the debts he has incurred. He is weighed, and depending on the findings, his value appears in the overall structure of the universe. Those who have reached a high level will not - as is often said - come to Osiris, but they will become "Osiris. It is curious that the book is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the [sun] god Ra, the second part deals with human destiny, the third part then shows the path to reach Osiris, the path that leads to deification. This book thus represents the path to life, the path from the individual life to the total life, which is achieved through the realization and deification of man.

The details of the Book of the Dead are important in the most diverse ways for the history of the development of world views. In the Book of the Dead, for example, we find the myth of Osiris' battle with Typhon, Osiris' enemy, hatred. Isis had to find Osiris again in the universe, and she then brings forth the younger Osiris, Horus, whom she describes as the deification of the universe. We find this in the Book of the Dead.

But then we also find the doctrine of the seven-part man in it. The Egyptians thought of man as being made up of the body, the spiritual body and the mummy.

So we have three stages:
[1.] Heart, sensation or mind,
[2-] Genius and creation,
[3-] the Holy Spirit and intelligence.

These are roughly the details of this Book of the Dead, which was in any case much better known in antiquity than in later times. In later times, the awareness of the teachings as they are expressed in the Book of the Dead has been lost. However, we often find the teachings of the Book of the Dead again in Greece, and the entire Greek spiritual life in the post-Pythagorean period can only be understood if one assumes that [its] views were the teachings of this Book of the Dead, the tripartite division of the human path of knowledge and the eventual merging into the Osiris nature. If one assumes that they were transplanted to Greece and that essentially the same views lived there. However, it must be noted that the Egyptians did not have an intermediate stage that played a greater role among the Greeks, namely the myth developed with [a certain sense of] beauty. The Greeks loved to embellish everything with beauty. We have therefore been compelled to regard the entire Greek religion, the entire Greek world view, which stands between Pythagoreanism and Platonism, as an aesthetic one. We can do this if we see it as born out of Greek myth, but in its spiritualized form.

We know the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, the myth of the Argonauts and so on. However, we can always assume - and we have to hold on to this - that the myth exists in a threefold meaning:

[1] The first meaning is that in its immediate form as the purely naturalistic conception,
2. then as a human, as a symbol and
3. thirdly as the divine.]

And the third, the divine, was the concept that was taught only to a select few, only to a few who had prepared themselves for it. We can already prove this historically. We are told of Samothrace, an island, that the deities there were nothing other than names for other deities. However, it is not to be believed that they were the same as the names of Greek or Egyptian deities. For outsiders, they had the same names. But for the insiders, they were deeper understandings of the entire myths and stories of the gods.

The best-known Greek myth is that of Demeter and her daughter Persephone and then the myth of Dionysus, which has already been mentioned several times. Demeter, one of the supreme female Greek deities, was first understood in a naturalistic sense. She had a daughter with Zeus, Persephone. She was stolen by Hades, the god of the underworld. Hades had asked to be allowed to take this daughter as his wife in the underworld. She was only to remain in the upper world temporarily. She was to remain two thirds in the upper world and one third in the underworld. This myth, which is alive everywhere in Greece in its naturalistic meaning, was also that which was to be found in certain mysteries, namely that on which the Eleusinian Mysteries were based. This myth also had a threefold meaning. The naturalistic meaning lies simply in the fact that one understands the actual as such, that one has a mythological history of the gods. The second conception would then be something that took place in [Greek] life, and that was the marriage of the Ionian spirit with the Doric.

The Greek people were divided into tribes. Among the most important were the Dorians and the Ionians. The myth of Demeter had originated among the Dorians, and the Ionians had adopted it and mixed it with the myth of Dionysus. We are interested in the Dionysus myth because it leads to an esoteric view. Dionysus is also a son of Zeus and Demeter. He was torn to pieces and only managed to save his heart. From this, Zeus had formed the younger Dionysus. But he could no longer take the limbs. It is therefore the case that the world represents the scattered limbs. This therefore represents the marriage of the Dorian Persephone with the Ionian Dionysus. The fusion of these two views has thus taken place in this myth.

But what remains to be noted is the third, the divine conception. We can only understand this historically if we stick to the sparse information we have. We are first referred to the temple in which the service of Demeter takes place. This Demeter service is a service in which we encounter the three deities mentioned. Demeter herself is one of the greatest deities of Greece, symbolically shaped, with the inscription: "I am the origin of the soul, I am the origin of the spirit." At her side, Persephone is presented to us with the inscription: "I am death and carry within me the secret of life." Her brother Dionysus is presented to us with an even stranger inscription: "I am death, I am life, I am rebirth and adorned with wings." - If we understand this, we come to the interpretation of one of the most important Greek myths. Demeter loses her daughter. She has to give her Persephone to Hades. She could return to her mother if she had not already partaken of the fruit of the pomegranate with Hades and was therefore unable to return completely. This Persephone is supposed to save her brother. Only this makes it possible - now in a deeper sense - for Persephone to return, for Dionysus to sacrifice himself. We have to look at these two in context again. We must recognize that sacrifice is what matters here. This is shown to us by the fact that Orpheus - who is originally credited with having communicated the deeper content of this to the Greek people - was also sacrificed, for he is also said to have been torn apart and to have lived on as a spirit by having flowed out into the world matter. The child of eternal life must be sacrificed to Hades, to Pluto. We can only understand this if we see the material world in Pluto. Thus, according to the esoteric view, we see in Demeter the universal spirituality, the primordial mother of intelligence, and in Hades the material world. In the whole Persephone myth we see the necessity of Persephone's falling away from her mother. The daughter must enter matter. She must partake of the pomegranate of the underworld. Now she can no longer save herself from matter and therefore a second sacrifice is necessary. Persephone's brother, Dionysus, must sacrifice himself again. He must allow his [own] spiritual nature to flow out into the gross nature, so that Persephone now enters into a spiritual marriage with her brother, but can flow back again to the original spirit of the primordial mother, Demeter. This mystery of the spirituality's necessary departure from itself, this immersion of the spirits in the material and this longing of the spirit to return to the spiritual is expressed in the Demeter myth.

This was the vivid experience that was to be taught to those who were introduced to the Eleusinian Mysteries. They were to be given the urge to find their way back from matter to the spiritual primordial mother. This is what lived in Greece in the spirit of a few chosen ones and what carried the whole world view between Pythagoras and Plato. What lived as the deeper spirit in these personalities from Empedocles through Anaxagoras to Socrates and Plato sometimes appears to be merely a logical chain of thought, as presented to us by the philosophers. But it is an exposition of Greek myth, an exposition that was cultivated wherever a deeper foundation was sought. This is what appears to them as a mere logical chain of thought.

I would like to point out another myth, which was cultivated even more frequently than the Demeter myth, which is perhaps easier to understand, and which was cultivated in order to gradually lead initiates into a deeper spiritual understanding of the world. I would like to refer to the myth of the Argonaut voyage. This shows in each of its individual sentences that it can only be understood as the symbolic clothing of a deeper wisdom. Phrixos and his sister Helle set off on the ram [...] to the barbarian king. On the way, Helle falls into the sea and Phrixos alone reaches the coast on the ram. When they reached the barbarian people, the ram was sacrificed to the king. But the ram's skin was hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and guarded by a great dragon. Jason, together with Orpheus, Heracles, Theseus, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, Peleus, Neleus, Admetus, Pirithoos and many others, undertakes to retrieve this ram's skin [- the golden fleece]. These are the great heroes of Greece. It is significant that Jason, with the representatives of the highest Greek spirituality, undertakes to retrieve the skin. He actually wins the skin and brings it back. The dragon guarding the skin is defeated by Jason. The dragon's teeth are then sown, and out of these grow fierce men who fight each other. Finally, in short, he gets the fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. On the way back, however, Medea decides to dismember [her] little brother Apsyrtos. The father Aietes collects the pieces and therefore does not reach the fugitives. The fleece is brought back to Greece.

We must also interpret this in a threefold sense. Firstly natural, secondly human and thirdly divine. [As a human event it is of no interest, but in its divine meaning this myth perhaps leads most deeply into the Greek intellectual world.] Phrixos is divine vision, that which points us to the abyss of divine being, to the premonition of an infinite depth. Nothing else is expressed in the personality of Phrixos. [Brightness is the personality, the representative of man before his fall into sin, for whom the struggle of the spirit with materiality has not yet existed] - the undivided humanity, which is connected with nothing other than the infinite vision of infinity. [Both set out on the path to the most sacred thing they have. And the representatives of the human soul first come to the sacred grove of the gods in order to sacrifice to it and to begin the path of life with this human soul]. We have only one other person in the Argonaut train. Phrixos begins his journey through life into the realm of the barbarians on the other side of the sea. This is to be understood as the realm of passions, the realm of sensuality. The human soul is to be sacrificed to the realm of materiality. It is to be sacrificed to the waves and bustle of the world. As a result, one thing is lost, the original innocence. It is initially submerged, lost. It is initially something that has flowed out into existence. [It is something that is initially completely lost, which is why it has sunk into the Hellespont. The soul is led into life, where we have nothing but a dark urge, where we must find our way back to the higher life]. But [the soul] must be redeemed anew, just as Persephone was redeemed by Dionysus. It must be redeemed. What had to be sacrificed to life must be redeemed. It must be redeemed here by Jason, the Greek hero. The ram is sacrificed to the gods. Only the ram's skin, that which surrounds the human soul as a shell, is first hung up in the sacred grove of the gods and carefully guarded by the dragon. This is initially nothing other than what is given in the Book of the Dead. [The ram's skin] is the representative of enlightenment, of knowledge. It must first be redeemed from the fury of the terrible powers that lurk before it. The king's son Jason must overcome these forces through knowledge in conjunction with spiritual and physical forces. He must lead this ram's skin back to Greece, supported by Medea, a female figure. I have already pointed out that the female figure signifies a state of consciousness in Greek. The soul must be redeemed with the help of Medea's magical power. From this immersion she can then be led back up to her deification, her divinization. That is the deeper meaning of the Argonaut saga.

The fact that the young son of Aietes, Medea's brother, has to be killed so that Medea's father cannot reach [the fleeing Jason] also has its significance. The one who has achieved this must leave behind many things that have been in his life. He has to leave some things behind, for the reason that [he cannot be caught up] on the path to deeper knowledge. This is how the saga of the Argonauts concludes. Basically, it is nothing more than a different version, more tailored to the individuality of man, of the myth that we also encounter in the Demeter myth.

This conception of the Greek myth then confronts us in a philosophically one-sided formation in a personality that represents a kind of fall from grace for the Greek world view: in Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. He first pointed out in an intellectual or rational way that sensual knowledge cannot satisfy man. He pointed out that man cannot get to the bottom of things and that the weighing up and weighing down of the world cannot be the truth, but that the truth must be something much deeper, that it can only be purely spiritual. He first put this into this form: true existence can only be achieved through pure thinking, through the deepest knowledge, while the senses only present us with a dream. - Parmenides thus divides the whole of existence into two parts, into sensual illusion on the one hand and intellectual, mental existence on the other. But there is still something that he could not find, and that is the ego. He could not find the figure of Dionysus in the figure of Persephone, in the urge to emerge from the sensual, the spirit. Parmenides did not take this [step]. He only saw that which is enchanted in the sensual world and on the other side Demeter [and Hades], the materiality. But he was unable to find the path that unites the two.

In a slightly different form, we encounter the same thing in Empedocles, who said that the primordial being had dissolved into a series of elements, into fire, water, earth and air. In these four elements he saw nothing other than individual eternal manifestations of the primordial being, the eternal world spirit. And in every single thing he saw certain mixtures of the four elements, even in man. The fact that the human being also consists of a mixture of the same elements as the world means that the human being can understand the world. The same can be recognized by the same. This is the same thing that Goethe says:

Were not the eye sun-like,
it could never behold the sun.
If God's own power were not in us,
how could the divine delight us?

This view was already held by Empedocles. He even had the view that the essence reigns in all being, [so that] he already [anticipated] the saying in Goethe's "Faust": "Exalted Spirit, you gave me, gave me everything ..." [anticipated]. Empedocles already recognized this totality of being. He believed that before it rises to the higher, it must pass through the lower stages. The spirit must pass through the stages of inorganic, elementary existence, the stages from plant to animal existence up to the form of man, and always follow them. This is why he sees love and hate as what brings the elements together. Empedocles thus describes life as a constant struggle between love and hate. In this way, the worldly sage also repeats the battle between [Osiris-Isis and Typhon] and the battle between Persephone and [Hades].

So we see in the Empedoclean doctrine nothing other than the elaboration of what [Empedocles] could get to know in the Greek mystery schools. We shall see that he does not consider anything incomprehensible that is described to the philosophers as incomprehensible.

We are told that human existence is not completed in the single individuality, but that this human existence was already there before it entered the individual personality, and that it will also be there again in other forms and shapes after it leaves this personality. In short, [Empedocles] stands on the standpoint of the transmigration of souls, of metempsychosis. He was initiated into the teachings of the Pythagoreans. The philosophers could not understand how Empedocles arrived at this doctrine if he assumed that the soul is a mere mixture of the four elements, but still ascribes to it a special existence in that it can take on different forms. We will understand that Empedocles sees in these four elements nothing other than the one eternal primordial being that has poured itself into existence, and that we therefore have to see in them only a special form of existence that flows back again to the primordial being. Thus in the spiritual conception of Empedocles we have something higher than the merely sensual. Empedoclean philosophy is nothing more than a philosophical dissection of the Argonaut legend, the legend of Demeter and Persephone and so on.

These teachings were then adopted by Socrates and Plato, and we are not to understand the historical Socrates in the figure of Socrates when we encounter him in the Platonic dialogues. Socrates appears to Plato as the master of the school, and he represents the school in his conversations. Socrates was regarded by Plato as such a leader. In the Platonic Discourses, it is not the historical Socrates who is the main subject, but the spiritual leader, the one who leads from the lowest levels of knowledge up to the highest. We cannot understand the meaning of the Platonic Conversations if we do not understand them as a mental image of mystical instruction, as instruction and guidance from the lowest to the highest levels of knowledge.

The other day I mentioned the talk about the immortality of the soul. This is usually understood as if immortality were to be proven by a logical thread. But it is not a question of proving the immortality of the soul, and what has been written about whether the proof has succeeded or failed. If it is said that the proof is no longer congenial to us today, then the person concerned only shows that he has not grasped the whole spirit of the "Phaidon". It is not a question of proving whether the soul is immortal, but of something quite different. We can assume that Plato also went through the schools of [the] Sophists. Protagoras was the founder of the "phrase: he is portrayed [in the Platonic dialog "Protagoras"] as someone who led knowledge astray. But we must not forget that Socrates was a profound [ironist]. We must not forget that the Greeks had their own conception of irony, that they understood it as something that was necessary for the illumination of the whole world view. Socrates fought the sophists with irony. What are the sophists? The sentences uttered by Protagoras characterize them:

["Man is the measure of all things, of those that are, that they are - of those that are not, that they are not." And:] We cannot prove anything rigorously. One thing can be said of every thing, but the opposite can also be said of every thing. This seemed to be the destruction of all knowledge. Even today it seems as if the sophists were playing a vain game with ideas, as if they wanted nothing more than to talk about every thing. Vanity was their purpose, as the measure of all things was only purpose. The Sophists by no means took this absurd and downright frivolous standpoint. The Sophists are, if I may say so, the personalities within Greek intellectual life who wanted to reduce to absurdity the knowledge that flows purely from the intellect, but who also put into practice in a different way the old Apollonian sentence: "Man is the measure of all things", which means nothing other than that man has to rise and seek within himself. - Do not recognize yourself with random intellectual knowledge, but immerse yourself in your true self. - They adjusted themselves to pure logic on a trial basis in order to lead them all the more surely into error. You can prove the one, and you can prove the other. But the sophists only wanted to show the worthlessness of logic. It is worthless to stop at what we encounter externally, at purely intellectual knowledge. Man would have to be just as unsatisfied in this knowledge as he would have to be unsatisfied within a purely mindless sensory life.

Plato had become acquainted with this sophism, and he apparently fought it, not because he regarded it as a worthless phenomenon, but as an irony. He took the standpoint of Protagoras, and Protagoras always falls short of Socrates, who does not want to grasp the world through reason, but through immediate life and through the mind. But this is not a different point of view from the one put forward by the Sophists. The sophists wanted to be opposed because they wanted to expose the absurdity of these propositions in order to show where each proposition leads. Thus Socrates, by leading beyond sophistry, led to deeper knowledge. He liberates his students from the belief in reason. This redemption is expressed to us in all those conversations [in which the sophists, Socrates' immediate predecessors, are combated]. The Discourses are written for the sole purpose of disabusing people of the belief in the provability of higher knowledge. That is the purpose of the Platonic Discourse. No one will believe that a flower can be proved. No one will seek proof that a flower exists. It is enough if we experience existence. You cannot prove a thing. You can prove the connection between things. You can prove that some fact must be there, from a context that you have already perceived. But you can never prove a thing that you have absolutely not perceived. So it is not a question of proving something logically, but of expanding the field of experience, of opening up the field of experience into a metaphysical realm. Something should be opened up that lies behind experience. [So it should not say: Here you have experience, and you should pay attention to something that lies behind it. It should not be deduced logically, but experienced spiritually. It should not be proven, but experienced.

This is also the case in the "Phaidon". You have to experience what Socrates means by "soul". He does not want to prove that the soul is immortal, but he wants to lead his students to experience the soul in the same way as the body. The "Phaidon" is about the discovery of the soul. It is about experiencing the soul. When his students have really experienced "soul, then [its] characteristics will soon become clear to them. If you want to be shown a flower, you show him the flower and don't let him prove it.

This is what is meant by the Socratic method. The Socratic method is usually understood in a much more trivial way. The Socratic method means nothing other than the opening of a completely new field of experience, the opening of new senses, the opening of a new field of experience, and the teaching of Socrates is such that every person can be led to such higher [cognitive] powers. And the leading to such powers in the Socratic method is the conversation.

We will find in the conversations the most profound method and the truest mysticism, and we will see the form in which [Greek] mysticism has expressed itself in the most profound and experiential way. I am convinced that Plato's teaching can only be understood superficially, that the doctrine of ideas can only be seen as an emptiness of ideas, if one does not draw this doctrine of ideas from the depths of Greek spiritual life, if one does not take into account the tragedy of life that the myth of Demeter expresses by showing that the dearest thing Demeter has must first fall away in order to then seek the way back again. And in the Argonaut legend, it is depicted that man must lose himself on the path of life in order to be able to redeem himself again with the help of his new powers. That saga thus expresses to us the deep tragedy that lies in the fact that [knowledge] must first be lost, sunk into the depths of materiality, and that it can only be found again by way of complete self-denial - and only by giving up many a love. And this expresses that this rediscovery of the highest knowledge is linked with the true redemption of this knowledge, with the finding of the infinite in the finite, with the overcoming of individuality, that therefore this knowledge can only be achieved through one of the most original forces that rule in man; and this again expresses itself meaningfully through the emergence of human vision, that which Phrixos has to sacrifice first, the vision which leads us into the indeterminate and into the deepest depths, which leads us to the point that we can never be satisfied and that we can only find ourselves on the perpetual path back to Demeter. This realization means the infinite path to rediscover lost knowledge. This is expressed in the distinction between the lower and higher consecrations.

When Schelling passed from his youth to a later age, he distinguished the teachings of his youth, which express the most spiritual and profound. He later expressed this philosophy of his youth as a lower consecration compared to his later one, because the height of that vision had dawned on him, in which he recognized that there are abyss-like depths that can never be reached [with the ordinary powers of thought]. The realization of certain spiritual powers to encompass this world is what he calls [higher] consecration. To lose this faith altogether in comparison to the lower consecration and to believe and experience the omnipotence of the infinite depth, which has been lost to us, is the infinite love into which the divine principle has flowed and can be found again through this infinite. This is what he calls the "higher consecration."

Answer to the question:

Question about the sacrifice of Abraham.

These teachings of the Old Testament are a distortion. Jewish secret teachings then emerge, in which these things are then pulled together again. It is the same as in the legends of Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus. In them the doctrine of man is carried out in a tangible way. The Abraham sacrifice would correspond to the second stage of the human stages, the necessity of sacrificing one's loved one. It is undoubtedly taken from religious systems in which this school of thought lives.

It must be assumed for a whole series of Christian myths that in the year 1 there was no awareness of the esoteric side at all. Paul was the founder of Christianity, which has lived in the church right up to our time.

If I interpret the "Sistine Madonna" esoterically and someone tells me that Raphael knew nothing about it, I say: Yes, it doesn't need to be. If that is attempted, I have to be pleased and regard it as a perfectly justifiable thing. I am always pleased when people try to show this. The philosophers in the pulpits don't get involved in esotericism. The most important is Kühnemann.

In Empedocles, there is something we cannot understand. We can only present [it] as something incomprehensible; all modern research deals only with the purely natural conception of the matter and finally only with the question of its origin, with the question: How could something like this have developed?

In the last lecture we tried to present a retrospect not only of the content of our studies during the past year, but also of the true meaning—the inner spirit of these studies. In doing so we showed that the spirit which fills our souls when considering the Christ-problem from all possible sides must permeate our whole movement, all our spiritual efforts. We realise that we have been able to grasp one subject from so many different aspects because, in striving after knowledge, we have ever cultivated true modesty with regard to this knowledge. We should like for a moment to speak somewhat more exactly about humility in respect of knowledge.

I have often said that we can only arrive at a true conception of any object when this is viewed from different aspects, that only when these different views are placed side by side is a true picture of the object obtained. Even in ordinary observation we must go all round an object in order to form a comprehensive conception of it. If anyone said that it was possible to grasp an object at a single glance, from one point of view in the spiritual world, he would be much mistaken. Many human errors spring from failing to recognise this. In the accounts given by us of the Event of Palestine great care has been taken that thoroughness in this respect should not be relaxed. We have four accounts of this event, the accounts of the four Evangelists. Those who do not know that in spiritual life an object, being, or event, must be observed from different sides (for people approach such things without much thought) see nothing more in this fact than the possibility of apparent contradictions between the Evangelists. We have repeatedly pointed out that the accounts of the four Evangelists have to be regarded as giving four different aspects of the one mighty Event of Christ, and that they must he compared one with another as we compare four pictures of the same object taken from different sides. If we proceed carefully in this way as we have already tried to do in respect of the Gospels of Matthew, of John, and Luke, and as we hope later to do in respect of the Gospel of Mark, it is seen that the four accounts of the event of Palestine agree in the most perfect way. Thus, in the very fact that there are four Gospels, a great lesson is given showing the necessity of a many sided view if the truth is to be reached.

I have often spoken of the possibility of there being different opinions held by different individuals concerning truth. You will recall how at our general meeting last year I supplemented what is generally called “Theosophy” by another view which I described as the “Anthroposophical view,” and explained how this was related to Theosophy. I showed that there is an ordinary science built on facts and the intelligent comprehensions of facts as revealed to the senses, this when it deals with mankind is called “Anthropology.” It contains everything that can be discovered and investigated by means of the senses. It therefore studies the human organisms as revealed by the instruments and methods of natural science. It studies, for instance, the relics of an earlier humanity, the utensils and instruments of civilisations that have remained hidden within the earth, and seeks from these to form some idea of how the human race has developed. It studies further those stages of development found in savage or uncivilised peoples; and from the conclusions arrived at traces the stages civilised peoples have passed through in former ages. In this way Anthropology forms its conceptions of what man has experienced up to the present stage of development. Much more could be said regarding the nature of Anthropology. I have compared it with a man who learns of a country by walking about on the level, observing the features of the land, its towns, forests, fields, etc., and describing these as seen from this stand-point.

Now mankind can be observed from a different standpoint—theosophical. All Theosophy begins by defining man, by speaking of his being or nature. If you study my “Outline of Occult Science” you will see that everything is summed up and reaches its climax in the description of the being of man himself. If Anthropology can be compared with a man who gathers facts and tries to understand them by walking about on the level, Theosophy can be compared with the observer who climbs a mountain in order to observe the surrounding country from its summit. Much that is spread out on the plain will then fade and only certain features remain. So it is with spiritual observation, with Theosophy. The point of view it takes regarding spiritual matters is a higher one. It follows that many things seen from this standpoint, and many of the ordinary human activities met with in daily life fade away, just as villages and towns vanish when seen from a mountain top.

What I have just said may perhaps not seem very obvious to a beginner in Theosophy. For what such a beginner first learns concerning the nature of man, concerning the different principles of his being, physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., he tries to understand and form a conception of, but at first he is far from the greater difficulties which face him when he advances further in the acquisition of Theosophical truths. The further one advances the more one realises how infinitely difficult it is to find a connection between what has been gained above, on the spiritual mountain top of Theosophy, and what emerges in daily life as characteristic human feelings, ideas, etc.

We might ask:—Why do Theosophical truths seem obvious and right to many in spite of their not being able to prove what is told them from the spiritual mountain tops, or by what they have themselves seen? This is because the human soul is really designed for truth, not for untruth; it is so organised that it feels it natural when anything true is said. There is a feeling for truth in man; and he should realise the infinite value of this feeling. This is especially the case in our day, for the very reason that the spiritual heights from which the necessary truth can alone be seen are so infinitely high. If people had first to climb these heights they would have to travel a long way in spiritual experience, and those unable to do so would know nothing of the value of these truths for human life. But every soul, are these truths are imparted, can realise them and make them its own.

What is the position of a soul that receives these truths compared with one able to discover them for itself? This can he shown by a quite trivial example, but however trivial it means more than at first appears. Everyone can pull on a boot, but not everyone can make a boot; for this a bootmaker is necessary. What a man receives through the boot does not depend on whether he can himself make it or not, but on whether he makes use of it in the right way. This can be compared exactly with the spiritual truths given to us by spiritual science. We are summoned to make use of them, even though we are not able to discover them for ourselves. And when through our own natural sense of truth we accept and make use of them, they serve us for the directing of our whole lives; through them we know that we are not confined to life between birth and death, that we bear within us a spiritual man, that we pass through repeated earthly lives, and so on. We can make use of these truths. They serve us. Just as a boot protects us from cold, so these truths shield us from spiritual cold, from spiritual poverty. For it is a fact that we are chilled and impoverished spiritually when we only think and feel those things that have reference to the external world of the senses. We must allow that the truths presented to us by those who can bring them down from a higher standpoint can be of service to all, though there may perhaps be only a few who can travel the spiritual path described in recent lectures.

Now every glance into the ordinary world around us—and which when it deals with man is also the concern of Anthropology—shows us how this world is itself the revealer of a world lying behind it, a world that can be seen from the spiritually higher standpoint of Theosophy. Thus even the world of the senses can reveal another world to us when we pass on to its interpretation, when we not only receive the facts it presents to us with our understanding, but begin to interpret these facts. If we cannot see as far over the fields of the sense world as Theosophy can, yet we can stand on the mountain side where the various objects are not absolutely indistinct and some prospect is possible. This standpoint in respect to spiritual things we have called Anthroposophy, and in doing so have shown that there are three ways of considering man—the anthropological, the anthroposophical, and the theosophical.

We hope this year, in connection with the General Assembly, to give lectures on “Psychosophy,” these are important in other ways from those given on “Anthroposophy”; I will then show how the human soul can interpret things for itself from its own impressions and experiences, and can participate in spiritual life in a similar way as in Anthroposophy. And in a future course of lectures on “Pnematosophy” I will bring these lectures to a conclusion so that those dealing with Anthroposophy and with Psychosophy will flow again into Theosophy. All this is for the purpose of evoking in you a sense of the manifold nature of truth. The experiences of one who seeks earnestly for truth is this:—The further he goes the humbler he becomes, and also the more cautious in translating the truths gained at a higher level into words suited to ordinary life. Although, as was stated in the last lecture, these truths are really only valuable when so translated, it must be realised that the task of recalling and translating what has been seen is one of the most difficult in the work of spiritual science. To make what is seen on spiritual heights so clear to the understanding, that sound logic and a healthy sense of truth can accept and understand them presents the very greatest difficulties.

I must lay stress again and again on the fact that in the activities of our group we are especially concerned with the creation of this feeling for, and understanding of, truth. We do not concern ourselves only with the comprehension of what is communicated to us from the spiritual world, it is far more important that we should experience it sympathetically through feeling, and by this means acquire those qualities that should he possessed by all who strive earnestly in the theosophical sense.

Looking at the world that surrounds us we acknowledge that on every side it presents to us the external expressions of an inner spiritual world. For us to-day this is a worn out saying. Just as the human countenance expresses what is passing in a man's soul, so the changing face of the external world can be likened to the play of expressions on the countenance of a living, spiritual world behind the sense world; and we first understand physical events aright when we see in them the expressions of a spiritual world. If a man has not yet been able to reach those heights whence spiritual vision is possible by following his own path of knowledge, he has at least the physical world before him, and can ask himself:—Is not confirmation given me through the evidences of my own senses of what is imparted to me as the result of spiritual vision?

This search for evidence is always possible, but it must be carried out not lightheartedly but with precision.—If you have followed different lectures given by me on spiritual science and have read my “Outline of Occult Science” you will realise that at one period of the earth's development the earth was united with the sun, that these formed one globe; the earth only separated from the sun later. If you remember all you have heard or read you must allow that the animal and plant forms found on the earth to-day are the further development of those that existed at the time when the earth and sun were one. But just as the animal forms of to-day are suited to the present conditions of the earth, so the animal forms of that far off time must have been suited to the planetary body which was then both sun and earth. It follows from this that the animal forms that have remained over from these times have not only remained over, but are the continuation of creatures that existed formerly. There are, for example, animals that still have no eyes, for eyes only have meaning when there is light, such light as streams to earth from the sun when it is outside. Thus among the various creatures of the animal kingdom we find those that have formed eyes after the sun separated from the earth, and also those that are relics of the time when the earth was still united with the sun—that is animals without eyes. Such animals would naturally belong to the lowest types, and so they do. We find it stated in popular books that the possession of eyes began at a certain stage of development. This bears out what spiritual science tells us.

We are able in this way to picture the world around us, in which we ourselves are placed, as the facial expression of the living, weaving life of the spirit. If we merely, considered the physical world, without it revealing to us how it points to a spiritual world, we would never feel the urge, the longing to develop towards that world. Some day a longing for what is spiritual will be aroused in us by the surrounding world itself, some day the spirit must stream down from the spiritual realms as though a door or window that has opened into our everyday world. When will this take place? When does spiritual illumination stream directly into us? It takes place—and you have heard this in many lectures from me and others—when we are in the position to experience our ego.

The moment we experience our ego, we experience something which is directly related to the spiritual world. But what we experience is at the same time in-finitely feeble; it is but a single point amid all the phenomena of nature, the single point which we express by the little word “I.” This word certainly describes something that was originally spiritual, but a spirituality that has dwindled to a single point. All the same what does this shrunken spiritual spark teach us? We cannot learn more of the spiritual world through the experience of our own ego than this ego-point contains, unless we progress to interpretation. But this point possesses what is still more important, namely, through it we are told how we are to know, when we seek to know the spiritual world.

What is the difference between the experiences of the ego and all other experiences? The difference is that we are ourselves within the ego-experiences. All other experiences approach us from outside; we are not ourselves within them. Someone might say here:—“But my thoughts, my will and desires, my preceptions, do these not live within me?” A man can convince himself, through very slight awareness of self, how little he is able to accomplish in respect of dwelling within his will. We imagine that the will can he recognised as that which urges us, as if we were not ourselves within it, but as if in our actions we were compelled by someone or something. This is the case also as regards our perceptions, and as regards the greater part of what people think in daily life. We are not really within these. How little we are within our thoughts in ordinary life is seen when we carefully investigate how much ordinary thought is dependent on education, and on what we have acquired at one time or another, and on surrounding conditions. This is why the ordinary content of human thinking; feeling and will varies so much in different nations and at different epochs. One thing only is the same.—One thing exists everywhere among men, and must be the same in every nation in all parts of the earth and in every human association—this is the experiencing of the single point, the ego.

We may now ask:—What does the experiencing of the ego-point mean? This is not such a simple matter as you might suppose. One might easily think, for example, that one experiences the ego itself. But this is not the case at all. Man does not really experience his ego. What then does he experience? He really experiences a concept of the ego, a percept of it. If the experiencing of the ego was clearly understood by us, it would present something that reached to infinity, that spread out on all sides. If the ego were unable to confront itself, to see itself as an image is seen in a mirror—though this image is only experienced for a moment—man could not experience his own ego, he could form no conception of it. This is man's first experience of the ego, it has to suffice him, for it is precisely this conception that differs from all other conceptions. It differs from them in this, that other conceptions resemble their original, they cannot differ from their original; but when the ego forms a conception of itself it is concerned with itself alone, and the conception is but what remains behind of the ego-experience. It is like a checking or blocking of it, as if we would check it in order to turn it back on itself, and in this checking the ego is confronted by the reflected image of itself which resembles the original. This is what occurs at the experiencing of the ego.

We can therefore say:—We recognise the ego in the conception of it (Ich-vorstellung). But this ego conception differs considerably from all other conceptions, from all other experiences. It differs from them profoundly. For all other conceptions and all other experiences we require something of the nature of an organ. This is clearly seen in respect of sense-perception. In order to have the conception colour we require eyes and so on; it is clear to anyone that in the ordinary perception of the senses an organ is necessary. You might think that no organ was required to perceive what is intimate to your own inner Being, but even in this you can convince yourselves by simple means that organs are necessary. This is dealt with more particularly in my book “Anthroposophy”; here opportunity is given to approach by theosophical methods what there is stated in a manner more suited to the generality. Let us suppose the following—at some period of your lives you grasp a thought or idea. You understand the idea that comes to you. By what means do you understand it? Only through other ideas that you have previously accepted. You realise this because you observe that one man comprehends a new idea that comes to him in one way, another in another way. This is because one man has within him a greater, another a smaller sum of ideas which he has assimilated. The material of old ideas is within us and confronts the new as the eye confronts the light. Out of our own old ideas a kind of “idea-organ” is constructed, and what we have not constructed of this in our present incarnation must be sought in some former one. There it was built up, and we are able to confront the new ideas that come to us with an “organ of ideas.” We require an organ for all the experiences that come to us from the outer world, especially if these are of a spiritual nature. We never stand spiritually naked as it were before what comes to us from the outer world; but are ever dependant on what we have become. Only in a single case do we confront the outer world directly, namely, when we attain ego perception (Ich-wahrnehmung). The ego is present, even when we sleep, but perception of it must always be aroused anew, it must be roused anew each morning when we wake. Even supposing We journeyed in the night to Mars, where our surroundings would be quite different from what they are on earth, yet ego-perception would remain the same! This latter under all conditions take place in the same way because no external organ is required for it—not even an “organ of ideas.” What confronts us here is a direct conception (Vorstellung) of the ego; a conception or perception (Wahrnehmung) certainly, but in its true form. Everything else comes before as a picture seen in a mirror, and is restricted by the form of the mirror. Ego-perceptions come before us absolutely in their true form.

Put in another way one might say:—When realising things with the ego, we are ourselves within them; they cannot possibly be outside of us. We now ask our-selves:—How do individual ego-conceptions or ego-perceptions differ from all other perceptions by the ego? They are distinguished by the direct impression they make on the ego, no other perceptions make this direct impression. But we receive pictures of all that surrounds us; and these in a certain sense can be compared with ego-perceptions. Everything is changed by the ego into an inner experience. The outer world must become our conception if it is to have any meaning or value for us. We form true pictures of the surrounding world, which then continue to live in the ego no matter through which of the sense-organs they have come to us. We smell a substance when we pass it by, and though we do not come in direct contact with it we bear an image of it within us. In the same way we bear within us the image of colours we have seen, and retain pictures of them. The ego preserves such experiences. But if we wish to describe the characteristic feature of these images we must say—it is that they come to us from outside. All the pictures we have been able to unite with our ego, so long as we are in the world of the senses, are the relics of impressions we have received by means of the senses.

One thing the sense-world cannot give us—Ego-perception! This arises in us spontaneously. Thus in ego-perception we have a picture that rises of itself, however closely it may be confined to one point.

Think now of other pictures being added to these, pictures that do not rise through stimulation of the senses, but that rise freely in the ego (as ego-conceptions do), and are therefore formed in the same manner as the ego-conception. These arise in what we call the “Astral world.” There are picture-concepts which arise in the ego without our having received any impression from the outer world.

How do these inner experiences differ from those other pictures we received from the sense-world? We receive pictures of the sense-world by having come in contact with that world; these then become inner impressions, but impressions which have been stimulated from outside.

What are those experiences of the ego which are not directly stimulated by the outer world? We have these in our feelings, our wishes, impulses, instincts and the like. These are not stimulated by the outer world. Even if we do not stand within our feelings, wishes and impulses etc., by means of the senses as already described, yet we must allow an element does enter into our inner feelings, impulses, and desires. In what way do these differ from the sense-pictures we bear within us as a result of what our senses have perceived? You can feel this difference. Pictures received through the senses quietly rest within us, and we try to retain faithful reproductions of them once we have realised our connection with the outer world. But our impulses, desires and instincts are active in us, they represent a force. Though the outer world has no part in the rise of astral pictures, yet the fact of their appearing denotes a certain force. For what is not set going (getrieben) is not there, it cannot arise.

In sense-pictures the “initial force” is the impression received from the outer world. In astral-pictures this force is what lies at the root of desires, impulses, feelings, etc. Only, in life as it is to-day, man is shielded from developing a force in his feelings and desires sufficiently strong to evoke pictures—pictures that would be experienced in the same way as those of the “I” itself.

The most marked feature of the human soul to-day is this powerlessness of its instincts and desires to attain to forming pictures of what the ego places before it. When the ego is confronted with the strong forces of the outer world it is moved to form pictures. When it lives within itself, it has, in the normal man, but one opportunity of perceiving an emerging picture; that is when this picture is the picture of the “I” itself.

Instincts and desires do not work with sufficient strength to form pictures similar to this single ego-experience. If they did they would have to acquire a quality which every external sense-perception has. This quality is of great moment. All sense-perceptions do not grant us the pleasure of doing as we wish. If, for instance, someone lives in a room where there is an unpleasant smell, he cannot dispel it through his impulses and desires. He cannot change the colour of a flower from yellow to red, because he prefers red, merely through his wish to do so. It is characteristic of the sense-world that it remains entirely independent of us. Our wishes and impulses affect it in no way. They are directed altogether to our personal life. What then must happen to them in order that they may he so greatly enhanced that we can experience through them a world of pictures (Bilddasein)? They must become like the external world, which in its construction and in the pictures it calls forth in us does not follow our wishes, but con-strains us to form pictures of the sense-world in accordance with the world around us. If the pictures a man receives of the astral world are to shape themselves aright, he must become as detached from himself, from his own personal sympathies and antipathies, as he is from the presentations of the outer world which come to him through his senses. What he wishes or does not wish must not carry weight with him in any way.

I mentioned in the last lectures that this demand can be formulated as follows—“One must not be egoistic.” This endeavour should not be undertaken lightly, for it is by no means easy to be unegoistic.

There is another fact I would like you to notice. The great difference between the interest we feel in what comes to us from outside compared with what meets us from within. The interest a man takes in his inner life is infinitely greater than in anything the outer world brings him. We certainly know that for many people the outer world when it has been changed into pictures does occasionally have an effect on our subjective feelings; we know people frequently “reckon something to be the blue of heaven,” that they are even not lying but believe what they say. Sympathy and antipathy always enter into such things, people deceive themselves as to what actually comes from outside, allowing it to be changed later into pictures. But these are exceptional cases; for little progress would be made if men allowed themselves to be deceived in daily life. Something in that case would be out of harmony with external life. This would not help them, truth has to be acknowledged as regards the external world; reality is the corrective. It is the same with ordinary sense impressions; external reality is here a good regulator. But when we begin to have inner experiences reality is apt to fail us. It is not then so easy to permit outer reality to make the necessary corrections, and we permit ourselves to he ruled by sympathy and antipathy.

The thing of greatest importance when we begin to approach the spiritual world is that we learn to regard ourselves absolutely with the same indifference with which we regard the outer world.

These truths were formulated in a very strict way in the ancient Pythagorean schools, as were also the truths regarding a most important part of man's knowledge, that concerning immortality. How few there are to-day who take any interest in the question of immortality! The ordinary things of life are what men long for in the life beyond birth and death. But this is a personal interest, a personal longing. The breaking of a tumbler is a matter of small interest to you, but if you had a personal interest in the continued existence of the tumbler, even though broken, the same interest as you have in the immortality of the human soul, you may be sure most people would believe also in the immortality of the tumbler.

Therefore in the schools of Pythagoras teaching concerning immortality was formulated as follows:—

“Only that man is ripe for understanding the truth concerning immortality, who could also endure it if the opposite were true; if he could bear that the question regarding immortality was answered with a ‘no.’ If a man is himself to bring down (selber ausmachen will) anything from the spiritual world regarding immortality," so said the Pythagoreans, "he must not long for immortality; for while there is longing, what he says regarding it is not objective. Opinions regarding the life beyond birth and death if they are to have any value can only come from those who could lie down peacefully in the grave even if there was no immortality.” This was taught in the olden times in the Pythagorean schools when the teacher wished to make his pupils realise how difficult it was to be sufficiently ripe to accept any truth. To be ripe enough to receive a truth and to state it from oneself requires a very special preparation, and must consist in the person being entirely without interest in the said truth. Now, it might well be said regarding immortality:—“It is quite impossible that there should be many people who are not interested in this, there cannot be many such.” People not interested in immortality are those who are told of it and of the eternal nature of human existence, and in spite of this remain uninterested. To accept and make use of the statement concerning reincarnation and human immortality so as to have something for life, can be done by anyone who also accepts the truth without any self-conviction. The fact that one is not sufficiently ripe to accept a truth is no reason for rejecting it. On the contrary, it is being ripe for what life requires of us, when we accept a truth and devote our life to its service. What is the necessary counterpart to the acceptance of truths? One may accept truths calmly even when one is not ripe. But the necessary counter-part to the acceptance of them is—that in the same measure as we long for truth that we may have peace, contentment, and security in life, in the same measure we make ourselves ripe for these truths, such truths as can only be perfected in the spiritual world. An important precept for spiritual life can be drawn from this—that we should accept everything, making what use we can of it in life, but should be as distrustful as possible regarding our presentments of truths, more especially of our own astral experience. This establishes the fact that we must specially guard against those astral experiences that come when we reach the point where we are bound to feel interest, namely, when our own life is under consideration.

Let us suppose that someone through his astral experiences has become ripe enough to carry out some-thing he destined to do next day, to experience next day. It is a personal experience. He guards himself from investigating the record of his personal life; for here he is bound to be interested. People might for instance ask lightly:—“Why does the clairvoyant not investigate the precise moment of his own death?” He does not do so because this can never be without interest to him, and he must hold himself aloof from anything connected with his own personality. Only what is in no way, connected with his own person may be investigated in the spiritual world. Nothing whatever of objective value is transmitted where the investigator is personally interested. He must be willing to confine himself to what is of objective value only, he must never speak of anything that concerns himself in his investigation, or in the impressions he receives from the higher world. When matters arise that concern himself he must be very certain that these are not introduced through his own interest in them. It is exceedingly difficult to investigate anything where the investigator's own interests are concerned.

Thus at the beginning of all endeavours to enter the spiritual world the following rule must be laid to heart:—Nothing that affects oneself must be sought for or considered valuable. The personality must be absolutely excluded. I may add that the “exclusion of everything personal” is exceedingly difficult, for frequently one thinks one has done so, yet is mistaken! For this reason most of the astral pictures seen by one or another are nothing more than a kind of reflection of their own wishes and desires. So long as we are strong enough in our spiritual self to say:—“You must distrust your own spiritual experiences,” these do little harm. But the moment the strength to do so fails and a man declares his experiences to be of value to his life he begins to be unbalanced. It is just as though a person wishing to enter a room finds no door and runs his head against the wall. So the investigator must keep ever before him the maxim:—Be very careful to test your own spiritual experiences. This carefulness consists in setting no more value on such experiences than on any piece of imparted knowledge or enlightenment. We must not apply such knowledge to our own personal life, but merely allow it to enlighten us. It is well if we feel in regard to such experiences:—“You are only being given enlightenment!” For in that case we are in a position as soon as some contradictory idea enters, to correct it.

What I have said to-day is but a part of the many things we shall be considering during the coming winter, and can serve as an introduction to lectures on the life of the human soul, entitled "Psychosophy," which are to follow at a later date.