The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Numerous facts combined to show us that the N philosophical wisdom of the Greeks rested on the same mental basis as mystic knowledge. We understand the great philosophers only when we approach them with feelings gained through study of the Mysteries. With what veneration does Plato speak of the “secret doctrines” in the Phaedo! “And it almost seems,” he says, “as though those who have appointed the initiations for us are not such bad people after all, and that for a long time they have been enjoining upon us that anyone who reaches Hades without being initiated and sanctified falls into the mire; but that he who is purified and consecrated when he arrives dwells with the gods. For those who have to do with consecrations say that there are many thyrsus-bearers,¹ but few really inspired. These latter are, in my opinion, none other than those who have devoted themselves in the right way to wisdom. I myself have not missed the opportunity of becoming one of these, as far as I was able, and have striven after it in every way.”

It is only a man who is placing his own search for wisdom entirely at the disposal of the condition of soul created by initiation who could thus speak of the Mysteries. And there is no doubt that a flood of light is shed on the words of the great Greek philosophers when we illuminate them from the Mysteries.

[ 2 ] The relation of Heraclitus of Ephesus (535-475 B.C.) to the Mysteries is plainly given us in a saying about him, to the effect that his thoughts “were an impassable road”, and that anyone entering upon them without ‘ being initiated found only “dimness and darkness”; but that, on the other hand, they were “brighter than the sun” for anyone introduced to them by an initiate. And when it is said of his book that he deposited it in the temple of Artemis, this simply means that initiates alone could understand him.² Heraclitus was called “The Obscure”, because it was only through the Mysteries that light could be thrown on his views.

[ 3 ] Heraclitus comes before us as a man who took life with the greatest seriousness. Even his features show us, if we can recall them, that he bore within himself intimate knowledge which he knew words could only suggest, not express. Out of this background arose his celebrated utterance, “All things are in flux,” which Plutarch explains thus: “We do not dip twice into the same wave, nor can we twice come in contact with the same mortal existence. For through abruptness and speed it disperses and brings together, not in succession but simultaneously.”

A man with such views has penetrated the nature of transitory things, for he has felt impelled to characterize the essence of transitoriness itself in the clearest terms. Such a description as this could not be given unless the transitory were being measured by the Eternal; and in particular, it could not be extended to man without an insight into his inner nature. Heraclitus has extended his characterization to man: “Life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and age are the same; this in changing is that, and that again this” In this sentence there is expressed full knowledge of the illusory nature of the lower personality. He says still more forcibly: “Life and death are found in our living even as in our dying.” What does this mean but that only a point of view based on the transitory can value life more than death? Dying is to pass, in order to make way for new life, but the Eternal lives in the new life, as in the old. The same Eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When we grasp this Eternal we look upon life and death with the same feeling. Life has a special value only when we have not been able to awaken the Eternal within us. The saying, “All things are in flux,” might be repeated a thousand times, but unless said in the mood of this feeling, it is empty sound. The knowledge of eternal growth is valueless if it does not detach us from temporal growth. It is the turning away from that love of life which impels toward the transitory that Heraclitus indicates in his utterance: “How can we say of our daily life, ‘We are;’ when from the standpoint of the eternal we know that ‘We are and are not’?”³ “Hades and Dionysos are one and the same,” says one of the Fragments. Dionysos, the god of joy in life, of germination and growth, to whom the Dionysiac festivals are dedicated is, for Heraclitus, the same as Hades, the god of destruction and annihilation. Only one who sees death in life and life in death, and in both the Eternal, high above life and death, can view the merits and demerits of existence in the right light. Then even imperfections become justified, for in them, too, lives the Eternal. What they are from the standpoint of the limited lower life they are only in appearance: “The gratification of men’s wishes is not necessarily a happiness for them. Illness makes health sweet and good, hunger makes food appreciated, and toil, rest” “The sea’s water is the purest and impurest, drinkable and wholesome for fishes, it is undrinkable and injurious to human beings.” Heraclitus is not primarily drawing attention to the transitoriness of earthly things, but to the splendor and majesty of the Eternal.

Heraclitus speaks vehemently against Homer and Hesiod, and the learned men of his day. He wished to show up their way of thinking which clings to the transitory. He did not desire gods endowed with qualities taken from a perishable world, and he could not regard as supreme that science which investigates the laws of growth and decay of things. For him, the Eternal speaks out of the perishable, and for this Eternal he has a profound symbol. “The harmony of the world returns upon itself, like that of the lyre and the bow.” What depths are hidden in this image! By the pressing asunder of forces and by the harmonizing of these divergent forces, unity is attained. One tone conflicts with another, but together they produce harmony. If we apply this to the spiritual world we have the thought of Heraclitus: “Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the death of mortals, dying the life of the immortals.”

[ 4 ] It is man’s original guilt to cling with his cognition to the transitory. Thereby he turns away from the Eternal, and life becomes a danger for him. What happens to him comes to him through life, but its events lose their sting if he ceases to set unconditioned value on life. In that case his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he were able to return from the so-called seriousness of life to his childhood. The adult takes many things seriously with which a child merely plays, but one who really knows becomes like a child. “Serious” values lose their value when looked at from the standpoint of eternity. Life then seems like play. On this account does Heraclitus say: “Eternity is a child at play, it is the reign of a child.” Where does the original guilt lie? In taking with the utmost seri- ousness what ought not to be so taken. God has poured himself into the world of objects. If we take these objects and leave God unheeded, we take them in earnest as “the tombs of God”. We should play with them like a child, but at the same time should earn- estly strive to call forth from them the Divine that sleeps spellbound within them.

[ 5 ] Beholding of the Eternal acts like a consuming fire on ordinary speculation about the nature of things. The spirit dissolves thoughts which come through the senses; it fuses them; it is a consuming fire. This is the higher meaning of the Heraclitean thought, that fire is the primary element of all things. This thought is certainly to be taken at first as an ordinary physical explanation of the phenomena of the universe. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not think of him in the same way as Philo, living in the early days of Christianity, thought of the laws of the Bible. “There are people,” he says, “who take the written laws merely as symbols of spiritual doctrines, who diligently search for the latter, but despise the laws them- selves. I can only reprove such, for they should pay heed to both, to an understanding of the hidden meaning and to the observation of the obvious one.” If the question is discussed whether Heraclitus meant by “fire” physical fire, or whether fire for him was only a symbol of Eternal Spirit which dissolves and rebuilds all things, then a wrong construction has been put upon his thought. He meant both and neither of these things; for spirit was also alive for him in ordinary fire, and the force that is physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in the human soul, which melts in its crucible mere sense-knowledge and engenders out of this the perception of the Eternal.

[ 6 ] It is very easy to misunderstand Heraclitus. He makes strife the father of things, but only of “things”, not of the Eternal. If there were no contrasts in the world, no conflicting interests, the world of becoming, of transitory things, would not exist. But what is revealed in this antagonism, what is poured out into it, is not strife but harmony. Just because there is strife in all things, the spirit of the wise should pass over them like a breath of fire, and change them into harmony.

From this point there shines forth one of the great thoughts of Heraclitean wisdom. What is man as a personal being? From the point of view just stated Heraclitus is able to answer. Man is composed of the conflicting elements into which Divinity has poured itself. In this state he finds himself, and beyond this becomes aware of the spirit within him, the spirit which is rooted in the Eternal. But the spirit is born for man himself out of the conflict of elements, and it is the spirit also which has to calm them. In man, nature surpasses her creative limits. It is indeed the same universal force that created antagonism and the mixture of elements which afterwards by its wisdom is to do away with the conflict. Here we arrive at the eternal dualism which lives in man, the perpetual contrast between the temporal and the Eternal. Through the Eternal he has become something quite definite, and out of this he is to create something higher. He is both dependent and independent. He can participate in the Eternal Spirit whom he beholds only in the measure of the compound of elements which that Eternal Spirit has effected within him. And it is just on this account that he is called upon to fashion the Eternal out of the temporal. The spirit works within him, but works in a special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of the human soul that a temporal thing should be able to act like an eternal one, should work and increase in power like an eternal thing. This is why the soul is at once like a god and a worm. Man, owing to this, stands midway between God and the animal. The productive and active force within him is his daimonic element—that within him which reaches beyond himself.

“Man’s daimon is his destiny.” Thus strikingly does Heraclitus make reference to this fact.⁴ He extends man’s vital essence far beyond the personal. The personality is the vehicle of the daimon, which is not confined within the limits of the personality, and for which the birth and death of the personality are of no importance. What is the relation of the daimonic element to the personality which comes and goes? The personality is only a form for the manifestation of the daimon.

One who has arrived at this wisdom looks beyond himself, backward and forward. The experience of the daimonic in himself proves to him his own immortality. And he can no longer ascribe to his daimon the sole function of occupying his personality, for the latter can be only one of the forms in which the daimon manifests itself. The daimon cannot be shut up within one personality; he has power to animate many. He is able to transform himself from one personality into another. The great idea of reincarnation springs as something obvious from the Heraclitean premises, and not only the idea, but the experience of the fact. The idea only paves the way for the experience. One who becomes conscious of the daimonic element within himself does not find it innocent and in its first stage: it has qualities. Whence do they come? Why have I certain propensities? Because other personalities have already worked upon my daimon. And what becomes of the work which I accomplish in the daimon if I am not to assume that its task ends with my personality? I am working for a future personality. Between me and the spirit of the universe, something interposes that reaches beyond me, but is not yet the same as Divinity. This something is my daimon. As my today is only the product of yesterday and my tomorrow will be the product of today, so my life is the result of a former and will be the foundation of a future one. Just as earthly man looks back to numerous yesterdays and forward to many tomorrows, so does the soul of the sage look upon many lives in his past and many in the future. The thoughts and aptitudes I acquired yesterday I use today. Is it not the same with life? Do not people enter upon the horizon of existence with the most diverse capacities? Whence this difference? Does it proceed from nothingness?

Our natural sciences take much credit to themselves for having banished miracle from our views of organic life. David Friedrich Strauss, in his Old and New Faith,⁵ considers it a great achievement of our day that we no longer think that a perfect organic being is a miracle issuing from nothing. We comprehend perfection when we are able to explain it as a development from imperfection. The structure of an ape is no longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors to have been primitive fishes that have been gradually transformed. Let us at least accept as reasonable in the domain of spirit what seems to us to be right in the domain of nature! Is the perfect spirit to have the same antecedents as the imperfect one? Does a Goethe have the same antecedents as any Hottentot? The antecedents of an ape are as unlike those of a fish as are the antecedents of Goethe's spirit unlike those of a savage. The spiritual ancestry of Goethe’s spirit is a different one from that of the savage. The spirit has evolved as has the body. The spirit in Goethe has more progenitors than the one in a savage. Let us take the doctrine of reincarnation in this sense and we shall no longer find it unscientific. We shall be able to explain in the right way what we find in our soul, and we shall not take what we find as if it were created by a miracle. If I can write, it is owing to the fact that I learned to write. No one who has a pen in his hand for the first time can sit down and write offhand. But one who has come into the world with the stamp of genius, must he owe it to a miracle? No, even the stamp of genius must be acquired. It must have been learned. And when it appears in a person we call it spirit. This spirit too must have gone to school; its capacities in a later life were acquired in a former one.

[ 7 ] In this form, and this form only, did the thought of Eternity live in the mind of Heraclitus and other Greek sages. There was no question with them of a continuance of the immediate personality after death. Compare some verses of Empedocles (490-430 B.C.). He says of those who accept the facts of existence as miracles:

[ 8 ] Foolish and ignorant they, for they do not reach far with their thinking,
Who suppose that what has never been can really come into being,
Or that beings there be that die away and vanish completely;
It is ne’er possible for being to begin from what is non-being,
Quite impossible also that being can fade into nothing; For wherever a being is driven, there will it remain in being.
Never will those believe, who have in these things been instructed,
That the spirits of men live only while what is called life here endures,
That only so long do they live, receiving their joys and their sorrows,
But that ere they were born they were nothing, and after they die they are naught.

[ 9 ] The Greek sage never even asked whether there was an eternal element in man, but only inquired of what this element consisted and how man can nourish and cherish it in himself. For from the outset it was clear to him that man is an intermediate creation between the earthly and the Divine. There was no thought of a Divine being outside and beyond the world. The Divine lives in man but lives in him only in a human way. It is the force urging man to make himself ever more and more divine, Only one who thinks thus can say with Empedocles:

[ 10 ] When leaving thy body behind thee thou soarest up into the ether,
Then thou becomest a god, immortal, beyond the power of death.

[ 11 ] What may be done for a human life from this point of view? It may be introduced into the magic circle of the Eternal; for in man there must be forces which the merely natural life does not develop, and the life might pass away fruitless if the forces remained idle. To release them, thereby to make man like the Divine, this was the task of the Mysteries. And this was also the mission the Greek sages set themselves. In this way we can understand Plato’s utterance that “he who passes unsanctified and uninitiated into the nether-world will lie in a slough, but that he who arrives there after initiation and purification will dwell with the gods.” We have to do here with a conception of immortality the significance of which lies bound up within the universe. Everything man undertakes in order to awaken the Eternal within him he does in order to raise the value of the world’s existence. His enlightenment does not make him an idle spectator of the universe, imagining things that would be there whether he existed or not. The power of his insight is a higher one, a creative force of nature. What flashes up within him spiritually is something divine which was previously under a spell, and which, failing the knowledge he has gained, would have to lie fallow, awaiting some other exorcist. Thus the human personality does not live in and for itself but for the world. Life expands far beyond individual existence when looked at in this way. From within such a point of view we can understand utterances like that of Pindar, giving a glimpse of the Eternal: “Happy is he who has seen the Mysteries and then descends under the hollow earth. He knows the end of life, and he knows the beginning promised by Zeus.”

[ 12 ] We understand the proud features and solitary nature of sages such as Heraclitus, They were able to say proudly of themselves that much had been revealed to them, for ‘they did not attribute their knowledge to their transitory personality, but to the eternal daimon within them, Their pride had as a necessary adjunct the stamp of humility and modesty, expressed in the words, “All knowledge of perishable things is in perpetual flux like the things themselves.” Heraclitus calls the eternal universe a game: he could also call it the most serious of realities. But the word “serious” has lost its force through being applied to earthly experiences, On the other hand, the game of the Eternal leaves man that sureness in life of which he is robbed by such seriousness as derives from the transitory.

[ 13 ] A different conception of the universe from that of Heraclitus grew up, on the basis of the Mysteries, in the community founded by Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C. in Southern Italy. The Pythagoreans saw the basis of things in the numbers and geometrical figures into whose laws they made research by means of mathematics. Aristotle says of them: “They first developed mathematics; then, completely absorbed in it, they considered the roots of mathematics to be the roots of all things. Now as numbers are naturally the first thing in mathematics and they thought they saw many resemblances in numbers to things and to development,—more in numbers than in fire, earth, and water,—in this way one quality of numbers came to mean for them justice, another, the soul and spirit, another, time, and so on with all the rest. Moreover, they found in numbers the qualities and relations of harmony; and thus everything else, in accordance with its whole nature, seemed to be an image of numbers, and number seemed to be the first thing in nature.”

[ 14 ] The mathematical and scientific study of natural phenomena must always lead to a certain Pythagorean habit of thought. When a string of a certain length is struck, a particular tone is produced. If the string is shortened in certain numeric proportions, other tones will be produced. The pitch of the tones can be expressed in figures. Physics also expresses color relations in figures. When two bodies combine into one substance, it always happens that a certain definite quantity of the one body, expressible in numbers, combines with a certain definite quantity of the other. The Pythagoreans’ sense of observation was directed to such arrangements of measures and numbers in nature. Geometrical figures also play a similar role in nature. Astronomy, for instance, is mathematics applied to the heavenly bodies. One fact became important to the thought life of the Pythagoreans: that man, quite independently and purely through his mental activity, discovers the laws of numbers and figures; and yet, that when he looks around in nature, he finds that things obey the same laws he has ascertained for himself in his own mind. Man forms the idea of an ellipse, and ascertains the laws of ellipses. And the heavenly bodies move according to the laws which he has established, (It is not, of course, a question here of the astronomical views of the Pythagoreans. What may be said about these may equally be said of Copernican views in the connection now being dealt with.) Hence it follows as a direct consequence that the achievements of the human soul are not an activity apart from the rest of the world, but that in those achievements the cosmic laws are expressed. The Pythagoreans said: “The senses show man physical phenomena, but they do not show the harmonious order regulating these phenomena.” The human spirit must first find that harmonious order within itself if this spirit wishes to behold it in the outer world. The deeper meaning of the world, that which holds sway within it as ap eternal, law-obeying necessity, this makes its appearance in the human soul and becomes a present reality there. The meaning of the universe is revealed in the soul. This meaning is not to be found in what we see, hear, and touch, but in what the soul brings to light from its own unseen depths. The eternal laws are thus hidden in the depths of the soul. If we descend there, we shall find the Eternal. God, the eternal harmony of the world, is in the human soul. The soul element is not limited to the bodily substance enclosed within the skin, for what is born in the soul is nothing less than the laws by which worlds revolve in celestial space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality only serves as the organ through which the order of pervading cosmic space may express itself. There is something in the spirit of Pythagoras in what one of the Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, said: It is said that human nature is something small and limited, and that God is infinite. But who dares to say that the infinity of the Godhead is limited by the boundary of the flesh, as though by a vessel? For not even during our lifetime is the spiritual nature confined within the boundaries of the flesh. The mass of the body, it is true, is limited by neighbouring parts, but the soul reaches out freely into the whole of creation by the movements of thought.”

The soul is not the personality, the soul belongs to infinity. From such a point of view the Pythagoreans must have considered that only “fools” could imagine the soul force to be exhausted with the personality.

For them, too, as for Heraclitus, the essential point was the awakening of the Eternal in the personal. Enlightened knowledge for them meant intercourse with the Eternal. The more man brought the eternal element within him into existence, the greater must he necessarily seem to the Pythagoreans. Life in their community consisted in holding intercourse with the Eternal. The object of Pythagorean education was to lead the members of the community to that intercourse. Education was therefore a philosophical initiation, and the Pythagoreans might well say that by their manner of life they were aiming at the same goal as that of the Mystery cults.

• 1. Thyrsus, a staff entwined with ivy and surmounted by a pine-cone, or by a bunch of vine or ivy leaves, with grapes or berries. It is an attribute of Dionysos, or the Satyrs.
• 2. Edmund Pfleiderer has already collected the historical evidence for the relation of Heraclitus to the Mysteries. Cf. his book: Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee, Berlin, 1866.
• 3. Cf. Fragments of Heraclitus, No. 81.
• 4. Daimon is used here in the Greek sense. Today we would say “spirit”.
• 5. David Friedrich Strauss, Alter und Neuer Glaube.

[ 1 ] Numerous facts lead us to perceive that the philosophical wisdom of the Greeks stems from the same basic conviction as does mystical cognition. We can understand the great philosophers only when we approach them with the feelings gained from observation of the Mysteries. How reverently Plato speaks of the “secret teachings” in the Phaedo: “And it appears that those men who established the Mysteries were not unenlightened, but in reality had a hidden meaning when they said long ago that whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods. For as they say in the Mysteries, ‘the thyrsus-bearers are many, but the mystics few;’ and these mystics are, I believe, those who have been true philosophers. And I in my life have, so far as I could, left nothing undone, and have striven in every way to make myself one of them.”¹⁰—Initiation can be discussed in this way only by someone who has placed his own striving for wisdom entirely at the service of the conviction engendered by initiation. And there is no doubt that a bright light is cast upon the words of the great Greek philosophers when they are illuminated by the Mysteries.

[ 2 ] A saying which has been handed down about Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475 B.C.) gives a clear indication of his relationship to the essence of the Mysteries, saying that his thoughts are “a path which is difficult to travel,” that anyone who approaches them uninitiated will find only “obscurity and darkness,” but that on the other hand they are “brighter than sunlight” for the person who is introduced to them by a mystic.¹¹ When it is said of his book that he placed the latter in the temple of Artemis,¹² this means that he could be understood only by initiates. (Historical evidence of Heraclitus' relationship to the Mysteries has already been contributed by Edmund Pfleiderer. See his book, Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der Mysterienidee, Berlin 1886.) Heraclitus was called “The Obscure” because only the light of the Mysteries provided the key to his conceptions.

[ 3 ] Heraclitus strikes us as a personality with the most serious attitude toward life. If we know how to conjure up his appearance, we see in his physiognomy that he bore within him the most intimate experiences of cognition which he knew could only be indicated, not expressed, by words. From the soil of such a conviction sprang his famous saying, “Everything is in a state of flux,” which Plutarch interprets in the following words: “It is impossible to step twice in the same river nor is it possible to lay hold twice of any mortal substance in a permanent state, by the suddenness and swiftness of the change in it there comes dispersion and at another time, a gathering together; or rather, not at another time nor later, but at the same instant it both settles into its place and forsakes its place; it is coming and going.”¹³ The man who thinks in this way has seen through the nature of transitory things. He has felt urged to characterize in the sharpest words the essence of transitoriness. Such a characterization cannot be made unless the transitory is measured against the eternal. In particular this characterization cannot be extended to man unless his innermost being has been penetrated. Heraclitus does extend this characterization to man: “Living and dead are the same and so are waking and sleeping, youth and age. For the one in changing becomes the other, and the other, changing, again becomes the one.”¹⁴ Full cognition of the illusory character of the lower personality is expressed in this sentence. He speaks of this even more forcibly: “There is life and death in our life, just as in our death.” What does this mean except that life can be valued more highly than death only when seen from the point of view of the transitory. Death is decay to make room for new life, but the eternal lives in the new life as in the old. The same eternal appears in transitory life as in death. When man has grasped this eternal he looks upon death with the same feelings as he looks upon life. Only if he is unable to awaken this eternal within himself does life have a special value for him. The sentence, “Everything is in a state of flux” may be trotted out a thousand times, but if it is not spoken with a feeling for this content it is void of meaning. Cognition of eternal creation is valueless if it does not cancel out our dependence upon earthly creation. Heraclitus means to repudiate the lust for life which presses after transitory things with the saying, “How shall we say of our daily life: ‘we are,’ when we know that from the standpoint of the eternal: ‘we are and we are not.’” (Heraclitus, Fragment No. 81)¹⁵ “But Hades is the same as Dionysus,” states another of the Fragments of Heraclitus.¹⁶ Dionysus, the god of lust for life, of germination and growth, to whom the Dionysian festivals were dedicated, is for Heraclitus the same as Hades, the god of annihilation and destruction. Only one who sees life within death and death within life, and in both the eternal which is infinitely above life and death, his gaze alone can behold in the right light the disadvantages and advantages of existence. Then the disadvantages find their justification, for the eternal lives in them also. What they appear to be from the standpoint of the limited lower life is only illusory: “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing. It is disease that makes health a pleasant thing; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; and toil, rest.” “Sea water is the most pure and the most polluted; for fishes it is drinkable and salutary, but for men it is undrinkable and deleterious.”¹⁷ Heraclitus intends primarily to point out not the transitory quality of earthly things, but the splendor and majesty of the eternal. Heraclitus spoke vigorously against Homer, Hesiod and the scholars of his day. He wished to point out the manner of their thought which clings only to the transitory. He did not want the gods furnished with attributes taken from the transitory world. And he could not respect as the highest a science which investigated the laws of the growth and decay of things. For him the eternal speaks through the transitory. He has a deeply significant symbol for this eternal: “The harmony of the world is of opposite tensions, as is that of the lyre or bow.”¹⁸ How much is contained in this pictured Unity is attained by the striving of forces in opposite directions and the harmonization of these diverging forces. One tone contradicts another, yet together they achieve harmony. If we apply this to the spiritual world we have the thought of Heraclitus: “Immortals take on mortality, mortals immortality; death is the eternal life of mortals, earthly life the death of immortals.”¹⁹

[ 4 ] To cling to the transitory with his cognition is the original fault of man. Thereby he turns away from the eternal. Through this, life becomes a danger to him. What happens to him comes to pass through life. But it loses its sting when he no longer values life as absolute. Then his innocence is restored to him. It is as though he could return from the so-called seriousness of life to childhood. How much that is play to the child is taken in all seriousness by the adult! The one who knows, however, becomes like a child. “Serious” values lose their worth when seen from the standpoint of the eternal. Life then appears as a game. Therefore Heraclitus says, “Eternity is a child at play; it is the dominion of a child.”²⁰ Where does the original fault lie? It consists in taking with the utmost seriousness those things to which this seriousness should not be attached. God has descended into the world of things. Whoever receives these things without God receives them seriously as the “Tombs of God.” He should play with them like a child and employ his seriousness to draw out of them the God who sleeps spellbound within.

[ 5 ] Burning, yes, scorching is the effect which contemplation of the eternal has upon ordinary assumptions about things. The spirit dissolves the thoughts of sensuality; it melts them. It is a consuming fire. This is the higher sense of the thought of Heraclitus, that fire is the archetypal substance of all things. Certainly this thought is to be taken first in the sense of an ordinary physical exploration of the phenomena of the world. But no one understands Heraclitus who does not think about him in the way that Philo, who lived at the time of the birth of Christianity, thought about the laws of the Bible. He says, “There are people who take written laws only as pictures of spiritual teaching. They search out the latter with great care and despise the former. I can only censure such people for they should take care of both: the cognition of the esoteric sense and the observation of the exoteric.”²¹—We pervert the thoughts of Heraclitus if we argue whether by his concept of fire he meant physical fire, or whether for him fire was only a symbol of the eternal spirit which dissolves and reforms material things. He meant both and neither, because for him the spirit also lived in ordinary fire. The force physically active in fire lives on a higher plane in the human soul, melting sense-bound cognition in its furnace and allowing contemplation of the eternal to emerge from it.

[ 6 ] Heraclitus in particular may easily be misunderstood. He allows strife to be the father of things,²² but to him it is the father only of “things,” not of the eternal. If there were no polarities in the world, if the most manifold conflicting interests did not exist, the world of growth would not exist, nor would the world of decay. What reveals itself, however, in this, what is diffused in it, is not strife; it is harmony. Just because strife is in all things, the spirit of the sage is to move over all things like fire, transforming them into harmony. This point throws light on one of the great thoughts of Heraclitean wisdom. What is the personal essence of man? The above passage contains the answer of Heraclitus. Man is a mixture of conflicting elements, into which God is descended. This is the condition in which he finds himself. Further, he becomes aware of the spirit within him, the spirit which is rooted in the eternal. This spirit, however, is born for him personally out of the conflict of the elements. This spirit should also pacify the elements. In man, nature creates beyond herself. It is the same unique force which has begotten the conflict, the mixture, which, filled with wisdom, is to remove this conflict again. There we have the eternal duality which lives in man, the eternal contradiction in him between temporal and eternal. Through the eternal he has become something quite definite, and out of this he should create something higher. He is both dependent and independent. He can participate in the eternal spirit which he beholds only to the extent of the mixture the eternal spirit has produced in him. Just because of this he is called upon to form the eternal out of the temporal. The spirit works in him. But it works in him in a special way. It works out of the temporal. It is the peculiarity of the human soul that something temporal works like something eternal, that it leavens and strengthens like an eternal quality. This makes the human soul similar to a god and a worm at the same time. Because of this man stands midway between God and animal. This leavening and strengthening force in him is his daemonic element. This is what strives beyond him from within. Heraclitus points to this in a striking way: “Man's daemon is his destiny.”²³ (Daemon is meant here in the Greek sense. In the modern sense we would say spirit.) Thus for Heraclitus what lives in man extends itself far beyond the personal. This personal element is the bearer of a daemonic element. This element is not confined to one personality and the death and birth of the personality have no significance for it. What connection has this daemonic element with what in the form of personality comes into existence and decays? The personal element is only a form of appearance for the daemonic. The bearer of such cognition looks forward and backward beyond himself. That he experiences the daemonic element in himself is to him evidence of his own immortality. Now he may no longer ascribe to this daemonic element the single task of filling out his personality. For the personality can be only one form of appearance of the daemonic element. The daemon cannot confine itself within one personality. It has the force to animate many personalities. It can go from personality to personality. This premise of Heraclitus gives rise as a matter of course to the great thought of reincarnation. Not, however, to the thought alone, but to the experience of reincarnation. The thought is only the preparation for the experience. Whoever becomes aware of the daemonic element within himself does not discover it to be an innocent primary element. He finds that it has characteristics. How has it come by these? Why have I tendencies? Because other personalities have already worked upon my daemon. And what will become of the effect which I produce on the daemon, if I may not assume that its task is exhausted in my personality? I prepare for a later personality. Something which is not the same as a divinity, something which reaches beyond me, introduces itself between me and the cosmic unity. My daemon introduces itself. As my today is but the result of yesterday, and my tomorrow will only be the result of my today, so my life is the continuation of another, and will be the basis for another. As physical man looks backward on numerous yesterdays and forward to numerous tomorrows, so the soul of the sage beholds numerous lives in the past and numerous lives in the future. What I acquired yesterday in the way of thoughts and accomplishments, I use today. Is it not so with life? Do not men set foot upon the horizon of existence with the most varied faculties? Whence comes this variety? Does it come out of nothingness?—Our natural science congratulates itself on banishing the miracle from our conceptions of organic life. David Friedrich Strauss (see Alter und Neuer Glaube, Old and New Faith) considers it a great achievement of modern times that we no longer think of a perfect organic creature being miraculously created out of nothingness. We grasp perfection when we are able to explain it as an evolution out of imperfection. The structure of the ape is no longer a miracle if we may assume, as ancestors of the ape, primitive fish which have gradually transformed themselves. Let us agree to accept for the spirit what seems to us right with regard to nature. Is the perfected spirit to have the same origin as the imperfected spirit? Is Goethe to have the same disposition as any Hottentot? The spirit of Goethe cannot have the same spiritual predispositions as an aborigine, any more than a fish has the same predisposition as an ape. The spiritual ancestry of Goethe's spirit is different from that of the aborigine. The spirit has grown like the body. The spirit in Goethe has more predecessors than that in the aborigine. Let us take the teaching of reincarnation in this sense. Then we shall no longer find it “unscientific.” On the contrary, what is found in the soul will then be explained in the right way. What is given will not be accepted as a miracle. That I can write is the result of the fact that I have learned to do so. One who has never held a pen in his hand cannot sit down and write. But someone or other is supposed to have a “spark of genius” in some purely miraculous way. No, this “spark of genius” must also be acquired; it must be learned. If it makes its appearance in a personality, we call it a spiritual element. But first this spiritual element also had to learn; in an earlier life it has acquired for itself the “ability” it has in a later one.

[ 7 ] In this way and no other did Heraclitus and the Greek sages conceive the thought of eternity. For them there was no question of the continuance of the actual personality. Let us refer to a saying of Empedocles (490–430 B.C.). Of those who regard something as a miracle, he says:

[ 8 ] “Fools! for they have no far-reaching thoughts—²⁴
Who deem that what before was not comes into being,
Or that aught can perish and be utterly destroyed.
For it cannot be that aught can arise from what in no way is,
And it is impossible and unheard of that what is should perish;
For it will always be, wherever one may keep putting it.
A man wise in such matters would never surmise in his heart
That as long as mortals live what they call their life,
So long they are, and suffer good and ill;
While before they were formed and after they have been dissolved
They are just nothing at all. ”

[ 9 ] The Greek sage did not raise the question whether there is an eternal element in man; he only asked of what does this eternal consist and how can man cherish and care for it within himself. For it was clear to him from the beginning that man lives as a creature midway between the earthly and the divine. There was no question of the divine existing outside and beyond earthly things. The divine lives in man; it lives there, but in a human way. It is the force which urges man to make himself ever more and more divine. Only a person who thinks in this way can say with Empedocles,

[ 10 ] “When, released from the body, you ascend to the free ether,
You will become an immortal god, escaping death.”²⁵

[ 11 ] What can happen to a human life from such a point of view? It can be initiated into the ordered cycle of the eternal. Forces must be present in it which are not brought into development by a purely natural life. And this life could pass by unused if these forces remained lying fallow. It was the task of the Mysteries to open them up, thereby likening the human to the divine. And the Greek sages also set themselves this task. Thus we understand Plato's words: “Whoever goes uninitiated and unsanctified to the other world will lie in the mire, but he who arrives there initiated and purified will dwell with the gods.”²⁶ Here we are dealing with an idea of immortality, the significance of which is determined within the whole cosmos. Everything man undertakes in order to awaken the eternal within himself he does in order to heighten the existence-value of the cosmos. As a cognizant being one is not an idle observer of the whole cosmos when he pictures to himself what would equally well be there without him. His power of cognition is a higher natural creative force. What lights up in him spiritually is a divinity which was spellbound before, and which without his cognition would have to lie fallow and wait for another deliverer. Therefore the human personality does not live within itself and for itself; it lives for the cosmos. Life extends far beyond individual existence when it is regarded in this way. Within the framework of such a conception we can understand sentences such as the following by Pindar, which gives us a glimpse of the eternal: “Happy is he who has seen those Mysteries ere he passes beneath the earth. He knows the truth about life's ending, and he knows that its first seeds were of God's giving.”²⁷

[ 12 ] The proud physiognomy and solitary manner of sages like Heraclitus are understandable. They could say proudly of themselves that much was revealed to them, for they did not ascribe their knowledge to their transitory personality at all, but to the eternal daemon within them. Their pride was of necessity stamped with the attributes of humility and modesty, which are expressed in the words: All knowledge of transitory things is in eternal flux like these transitory things themselves. Heraclitus calls the eternal cosmos a game; he could also call it the most profoundly serious thing. But the word serious has become worn out through being applied to earthly experiences. The game of the eternal grants man a security in life of which he is deprived by the seriousness arising out of the transitory.

[ 13 ] Another form of world-conception, different from that of Heraclitus, grew from the same foundation in the essence of the Mysteries, within a community founded by Pythagoras in lower Italy in the sixth century before Christ. The Pythagoreans saw the foundation of things in numbers and figures, whose laws they investigated mathematically. Aristotle says of them, “They were the first to advance the study of mathematics, and having been brought up in it they thought its principles were the principles of all things. Since of these principles numbers are by nature the first, and in numbers they seemed to see many resemblances to the things that exist and come into being—more than in fire and earth and water, such and such a modification of numbers being justice, another being soul and reason, another being opportunity—and similarly almost all other things being numerically expressible; since, again, they saw that the attributes and ratios of numerical scales were expressible in numbers; since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be modeled after numbers, and numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the demands of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.”²⁸

[ 14 ] The mathematical-scientific observation of natural phenomena must always lead to a kind of Pythagorean conception. If a string of definite length is struck, a certain tone is sent forth. If the string is shortened in definite numerical relationships, other tones come into being. The pitch of these tones can be expressed by numerical relationships. In physics color relationships also are expressed by numbers. When two bodies combine to form one substance this always occurs in such a way that of one substance one quite definite mass, expressible by number, combines with an appropriate one of the other substance. The Pythagoreans directed their observation upon such arrangements of measure and number in nature. Geometric figures also play a similar part in nature. For instance, astronomy is mathematics applied to the heavenly bodies. The point which became important to the thinking life of the Pythagoreans is the fact that man discovers the laws of numbers and figures entirely by himself, through his spiritual activity alone, and that when he looks out into nature the objects follow these laws he has established for himself in his soul. Man formulates for himself the concept of the ellipse; he establishes the laws of the ellipse. And the heavenly bodies move according to the laws he has established. (Of course we are not concerned here with the astronomical conceptions of the Pythagoreans. What could be said of them also applies to the Copernican conceptions in the connection under consideration here.) From this it follows immediately that the functions of the human soul are not a force apart from the rest of the cosmos, but that these functions are the expression of a law-abiding pattern which is interwoven with the cosmos. The Pythagorean said to himself: The senses show material phenomena to man. But they do not show the harmonious patterns which the objects obey. Rather, the spirit of man must first find these harmonious patterns within himself if he wishes to behold them outside in the cosmos. The deeper sense of the cosmos, that which reigns in it as eternal law-abiding necessity, becomes apparent as a present reality in the human soul. In the soul the meaning of the cosmos dawns. This meaning does not lie in what is seen, heard and touched, but in what the soul brings forth from its deep recesses into the light of day. The eternal pattern therefore lies hidden in the depths of the soul. Let us descend into the soul, and we shall find the eternal. God, the eternal cosmic harmony, is within the human soul. The soul is not confined to the physical body enclosed by man's skin. For in the soul are born the patterns according to which the worlds circle in space. The soul is not in the personality. The personality merely provides the organ through which what is interwoven with the cosmos can be expressed. Something of the spirit of Pythagoras is contained in the saying of the Church Father, Gregory of Nyssa: “It is said that human nature by itself is something small and limited, but the Godhead is infinite, and how has the infinite been embraced by something so tiny? And who says that the infinity of the Godhead was enclosed within the bounds of the flesh as in a vessel? For not even in our life is man's spiritual nature enclosed within the bounds of the flesh; on the contrary the physical body is limited by neighboring parts, but the soul expands freely over the whole of creation by means of the activity of thought.”²⁹ The soul is not the personality. The soul belongs to eternity. Taking this point of view, the Pythagorean also had to admit that only “fools” could suppose the qualities of the soul to be exhausted with the personality. For them also it depended upon the awakening of the eternal within the personal. To them cognition was communion with the eternal. The more a man brought this eternal into existence within himself the higher they valued him. The life of their community consisted in fostering this communion with the eternal. In order to lead the members of the community to such communion, the Pythagorean education was established. This education, therefore, was a philosophical initiation. And the Pythagoreans could very well say that by their mode of life they strove toward the same goal as the Mystery cults.

• 10. Plato, Phaedo, 69 C.
• 11. The anonymous epigram reads: “Do not be in too great a hurry to get to the end of Heraclitus the Ephesian's book: the path is hard to travel. Obscurity is there, and darkness devoid of light. But if an initiate be your guide, the path shines brighter than sunlight.” Anth. Pal. Book IX, 540 (Cf. also Diogenes Laertius IX, 16).
• 12. “Heraclitus lays down his book ceremonially in the temple of Artemis. So some people say, he has purposely written it obscurely, so that only the able would approach it.” (Cf. Kranz: Vorsokratische Denker, p. 84.)
• 13. Heraclitus, Fragments 40, 41. Cf. Note 5
• 14. Heraclitus, Fragment 78.
• 15. Heraclitus, Fragment 81.
• 16. Heraclitus, Fragment 127.
• 17. Heraclitus, Fragment 104, 52.
• 18. Heraclitus, Fragment 56 (Cf. 45).
• 19. Heraclitus, Fragment 67.
• 20. Heraclitus, Fragment 79.
• 21. Philo of Alexandria, De Migratione Abrahami, The Migration of Abraham, 89. (see Note 46 below)
• 22. Heraclitus, Fragment 44.
• 23. Heraclitus, Fragment 137.
• 24. Empedocles, Fragments 11, 12, 15, translated by John Burnet in his Early Greek Philosophy, Adam & Charles Black, London, 1952.
• 25. Empedocles, Fragment 112
• 26. Plato, Phaedo, 69 C.
• 27. Pindar, Fragment 137
• 28. Aristotle, Metaphysica A, Book I, Chapter 5.
• 29. Gregory of Nyssa (c 331–c 396), One of the four great Fathers of the Eastern Church, in Oratio catechetica magna, Chapter 10, modern edition edited by Krabinger, Munich, 1838.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

You know, perhaps, that in my Threefold Commonwealth I endeavoured to express in a formula how we may arrive at a conception of “true price” (as we will call it to begin with) in the whole economic process. Needless to say—to begin with, such a formula is only an abstraction. And it is the object of these lectures (which, I believe, in spite of the shortness of the time, will really form a whole)—it is our very object in these lectures to work the whole science of Economics, at any rate in outline, into this abstraction.

The formula which I gave in my Threefold Commonwealth was as follows: “A ‘true price’ is forthcoming when a man receives, as counter-value for the product he has made, sufficient to enable him to satisfy the whole of his needs, including of course the needs of his dependants, until he will again have completed a like product.” Abstract as it is, this formula is none the less exhaustive. In setting up a formula it is always necessary that it should contain all the concrete details. I do believe, for the domain of economics, this formula is no less exhaustive than, say, the Theorem of Pythagoras is for all right-angled triangles. But the point is—just as we have to introduce into the Theorem of Pythagoras the varying proportions of the sides, so shall we have to introduce many, very many more variables into this formula. Economic Science is precisely an understanding of how the whole economic process can be included in this formula.

Today I intend to start from one essential feature of the formula. It is this. The formula does not point to what is past but to what is going to happen in the future, for I say in it, of set purpose, “the counter-value must satisfy the man's needs in the future—namely, until he will have made a like product again.” This is an absolutely essential feature of the formula. If we were to demand a counter-value, literally, for the product which the man has already finished—if we expected this to be true to the real economic facts—it might well happen that he would receive a value which would only satisfy his needs, say, for five-sixths of the time which he will take in finishing the new product. For the economic facts alter from the past into the future. He who imagines that he can draw up any kind of table from the past, will invariably go wrong in economics. Economic or business life essentially consists in setting future processes in motion with the help of what went before. But where past processes are thus used to set future ones in motion, it inevitably happens in some cases that the values are considerably shifted. Indeed they are constantly shifting. Hence in this formula it is essential to say: “If someone makes a pair of boots, the time he took to make them is not the determining factor in the economic sense. The determining factor is the time he will take to make the next pair of boots.” That is the point, and we must now try to understand its fuller implications within the whole economic process.

Yesterday we brought before our minds this cycle (see Diagram 3): Nature, Labour, Capital—that is, Capital endued with value by the Spirit. At this point I might just as well write (instead of “Capital”) “Spirit.” To begin with we followed out the economic process in this direction, counter-clockwise, and we found that at this point congestion must not be allowed to occur. On the contrary only so much must be allowed to go through as will act as a kind of seed to carry on the process. A state of economic congestion must not be allowed to arise through a fixation of Capital in ground rents. Now, as I said, fundamentally speaking, the return for land when it is sold—i.e., when land is given a value in the economic process—works in direct opposition to the interests of a person engaged in the manufacture of valuable goods. For if a man wishes to manufacture valuable goods with the help of Capital, it is to his interest that the rate of interest should be low. Having less interest to pay, he will be less hampered in his use of the Capital he has borrowed. The landowner, on the other hand (I may go fully into these things, as they are of economic significance), the landowner, or anyone who has an interest in the land becoming dearer, will be able to make it dearer simply by a reduction in the rate of interest. If he has a low rate of interest to pay, the value of his land will grow, it will become dearer and dearer. Whereas a man engaged in the manufacture of valuable commodities will be able to make them cheaper because of a low rate of interest. Commodities, therefore, which depend mainly on manufacture, become cheaper when the rate of interest is low. Land, on the other hand, which gives a yield without first having to be manufactured, becomes dearer when the rate of interest is low. You can easily work it out. It is an economic fact.

It would appear then to be necessary to arrange for two different rates of interest: We ought to have a rate of interest as low as possible for the installation of works for the production of valuable commodities; and a rate of interest as high as possible for everything that falls under the heading of “land.” This follows directly from what we said before. We want a rate of interest as high as possible for all that comes under the heading of “land.” But that is a thing which cannot easily be carried out in practice. A slightly higher rate of interest for Capital advanced on land might be practicable, but this would be of little help. A considerably higher rate of interest—say, for instance, the rate of interest which would keep the land at an ever constant value, namely, 100%—would be extremely difficult to realise in practice without taking additional steps. 100% interest for money borrowed on land would mend matters at once, but it cannot be carried out in practice. In all such cases, the first point is to see with full clarity into the economic process. When we do so, we soon realise that the life of Associations is the only thing that can make it healthy. Rightly to see the economic process will lead to our being able rightly to direct it.

In the economic process we must speak, as I indicated yesterday, of Production and Consumption. We must observe the producing and the consuming process. This contrast has played a great part recently in various much-canvassed economic theories which in due course have been used for purposes of agitation. There has especially been much dispute upon the question, whether spiritual or intellectual work, as such, is in any way value-creating in the economic sphere.

The spiritual worker is certainly a consumer. Whether he is also a producer in the economic sense is a question which has been much discussed. The extreme Marxists, for example, have again and again cited that luckless fellow, the Indian book-keeper, who has to keep the accounts for his village community. He does not till the fields or do any other productive work; he merely registers the productive work done by others. The Marxists deny him the faculty of producing anything. They declare that he is simply and solely maintained out of the surplus value which the productive workers create. This worthy book-keeper is worked as hard in Economics as Caius is in the formal Logic which we did at college. Caius's job is proving the mortality of man. You remember: “All men are mortal, Caius is a man, therefore Caius is mortal.” His everlasting function of proving the mortality of man has made him immortal in the world of Logic. The same thing has happened in Marxian literature to the Indian bookkeeper who is maintained simply by the surplus value of the productive workers. He has become a classic.

This question is, if I may say so, extraordinarily full of “snags,” in which we very easily get caught when we try to work it out economically. I mean the question: How far (if at all) spiritual work is economically productive? Now here it is especially important to distinguish between the past and the future. For if you consider, if you reflect statistically on, the past only, with respect to the past and to all that is only the unbroken continuation of the past, you will be able to prove that spiritual work is unproductive. From the past into the future within the material sphere, only purely material work and its effects can be held to be productive in the economic process. It is quite a different matter when you turn your eye to the future. And, as we said, to be engaged in economics is to be working from the past into the future.

You need only think of this simple instance. Assume that in some village a craftsman, who manufactures this or that, falls ill. Under certain given circumstances—let us say, if he falls into the hands of an unskilful doctor—he will have to lie in bed for three weeks, during which time he will be able to do nothing. He will disturb the economic process to no small extent. If he is a cobbler, for three weeks long the boots and shoes will not be brought to market—taking the word “market” in the widest sense. But now suppose he gets a very skilful doctor who makes him well in a week. He can go back to work again in a week. In all seriousness you can now decide the question: Who made the boots for the remaining 14 days, the cobbler or the doctor? In reality it was the doctor. And now the thing is altogether clear. As soon as you take into account the future from any given moment onward—towards the future—you can no longer call the Spiritual unproductive. In relation to the past, the Spiritual—or rather, those human beings who work in the spiritual sphere—are consumers only. In relation to the future they are decidedly productive, indeed they are the producers, for they transform the whole process of production and make it pronouncedly different for the economic life. You can see this from the example of the tunnel. What happens when tunnels are built nowadays? They could

not be built unless the differential calculus had been discovered. To this day, therefore, Leibnitz is helping to build all tunnels. The way prices work out in this case has really been determined by that exertion of his spiritual forces. You can never answer these questions in Economics if you consider the past in the same way as the future. But, ladies and gentlemen, life does not move towards the past, nor does it even prolong the past; it goes on into the future.

Hence no economic thought is real which does not reckon with what is done by spiritual work, if we may call it so, that is to say, fundamentally by thinking. But spiritual work is not an easy thing to grasp. It has its own peculiar properties which are not at all easy to grasp in economic terms. Spiritual work begins the moment work itself—that is to say, Labour—is organised. The organising work of thinking begins the very moment Labour itself is organised and divided. Thenceforward, it grows more and more independent. Consider the spiritual work of one who directs some undertaking within the material sphere. You will see that he applies an immense amount of spiritual work. Nevertheless he is still working with the resources with which the economic process provides him as from the past. But even on quite practical grounds you cannot get around the fact that the sphere of spiritual activity (if I may now call it “activity” instead of work or labour) also includes the entirely free kind of activity. When a man invents the differential calculus, and even more so when he paints a picture, there we have a case of entirely free spiritual activity. At any rate, relatively speaking, we can call it free. For whatever materials are derived from the past—the paints and the like—they no longer have the same significance in relation to the eventual products as do the raw products, for example, purchased for material manufacture.

Passing into this region, therefore (see Diagram 4), we come into the sphere of the completely free spiritual life. In this sphere we find, above all things, teaching and education. Those who have to teach and educate stand undoubtedly within the sphere of the completely free spiritual life. For the purely material economic process, it is especially the free spiritual workers who are, in relation to the past, absolutely and exclusively consumers. Of course, you may say, they produce something, and, if they are painters, for example, they are even paid something for what they have produced. In appearance, therefore, the economic process is the same as when I manufacture a table and sell it. And yet the process is essentially different as soon as we cease to consider the buying and selling of the individual and turn our attention to the economic organism as a whole—and this is what we must do in the present advanced stage of division of Labour.

Now there are also pure consumers of another kind within a social organism, namely, the young and the very old. Up to a certain age, the young are pure consumers; and those who have been pensioned off are again pure consumers. A very little reflection will suffice to convince you that if there were no pure consumers in the economic process—mere consumers who are not producers at all—the thing could not go forward at all. For if everyone were producing, all that is produced could not be consumed if the economic process were to go forward at all. It is so at any rate as human life is, and human life is not purely economics; it must be taken as a whole. The real advancement of the economic process is only possible if it includes pure consumers.

But I must now illumine from a different angle this fact: that we have pure consumers within the economic process.

You see, this circle (in the diagram) can be made very instructive. We can endow it with all manner of properties, and the question will always be, how to bring the several economic processes and facts into this circle, which represents for us the cycle of the economic process. Something very important happens when, in buying and selling in the market, I pay on the spot for what I get. The point is not that I pay for it with money; I might equally well barter it for a corresponding commodity which the other person was willing to accept. The point is that I pay at once. Indeed it is this that constitutes “paying” in the proper sense of the word. Now here once more we must pass from the ordinary, everyday conception to the true economic conception. For in the economic life the several concepts constantly play into one another. The total phenomenon, the total fact, results from the interplay of the most diverse factors. You may say: “It is conceivable that some regulation should be made, so that no one need ever pay cash down; then there would be no such thing as ‘paying at once’; one would only pay after a month or after some other interval of time.” But the point is this: We are forming our concepts altogether wrongly when we say: “Some-one hands me a suit of clothes and I pay for it after a month.” The fact is that after a month I no longer pay for this suit of clothes alone. In that moment I am paying for something quite different. I am paying for something which circumstances, by raising or lowering prices, may have made quite different. I am paying for an ideal element in addition. In fact, we cannot do without the concept of “immediate payment.” This is the concept which holds good in cases of simple purchase. Nay more, a thing becomes a commodity on the market through the very fact that it is paid for at once. This is generally the case with those commodities which are “Nature transformed by Labour.” For such commodities I pay. Here payment plays the essential part. There must be such payment. I pay at the very moment when I open my purse and give away my money; and the value is determined in the very moment at which I give away the money, or exchange my commodity for another. That is payment. That is one thing there must be in the economic process.

The second thing, which plays a similar part to payment, is the thing to which I drew attention yesterday. It is Lending. This, as I said, does not interfere with the concept of payment as such. Lending, once more, is an altogether different fact, a fact which simply exists. If I have money lent me, I can apply my Spirit to this loaned Capital. I become a debtor; but I also become a producer. In this way, lending plays a real economic part. If I have intellectual or spiritual capacities in some direction, it must be possible for me to obtain loaned Capital. No matter where I get it from, I must have it. Thus in addition to payment there must be loan (see >Diagram 4). Here then we have two very important factors in the economic process: Payment and Loan.

And now by a simple deduction—we must verify it here (see diagram)—by a very simple deduction you can find the third. You will not doubt for a moment what the third thing is. We have had Payment and Loan. The third thing is Gift. Payment, Loan and Gift—this is a real trinity of concepts, essential to a healthy economy. There is a prevailing disinclination to include “free gift ” in the economic process as such, but, ladies and gentlemen, if there is not a giving somewhere, the economic process cannot go on at all. Imagine for a moment what we should make of our children if we gave them nothing. We are constantly making free gifts to the children. If we consider the economic process as a whole—as a process that goes on and on continuously—Gift is part of it. There is no escaping the fact. It is wrong to regard the transfer of values from hand to hand, representing a process of free gift, as something inadmissible in the economic process as such. Precisely this one of the three is found—with horror by some people—worked out in my book, The Threefold Commonwealth, where it is shown how values are to be transferred, how means of production, for instance, are to be transferred, by a process really identical with giving, to one who has the faculties necessary for managing them further. Provision must, of course, be made that the giving is not done in a haphazard way. But in the economic sense they are none the less free gifts, and such gifts are absolutely necessary.

You will find it more and more to be an economic necessity. The trinity of payment, loan and gift is there in the economic process. Consider the matter thoroughly and you will say: In every economic process this must be contained. Otherwise it would be no economic process; it would lead to absurdities at every point.

People may rebel against these things for a time; but we must remember that economic wisdom is today not very great. Those especially who want to teach it should be under no illusions on this point. Modern economic knowledge is by no means great. People are little inclined to go into the real economic relationships. This is an obvious fact, so obvious that if you look in today's Basler Nachrichten you will find curiously enough a reflection on this very fact. Neither Governments nor private people nowadays, it says, are inclined to evolve real economic thinking. I think we may take it that anything expounded in the Basler Nachrichten is likely to be obvious. It is indeed a palpable fact and it is interesting to find it discussed in this way. The article is interesting, inasmuch as it endeavours to set in a glaring light the absolute impotence which prevails in the economic sphere; interesting, too, because it says that these things must be changed—it is time Governments and individuals began to think differently. But there the matter ends. How they are to think differently—on this you will, of course, find nothing in the Basler Nachrichten—which is also interesting!

Now it is possible to interfere in the economic process in a disturbing way, if one does not rightly relate the one thing with the other in this trinity. Many people today are enthusiastically demanding the taxation of legacies (which, of course, are also gifts), Such proposals have no deep economic significance. For we do not lessen the value of the inheritance if, say, it has a value V and we divide the value V into two parts, V₁ and V₂ giving V₂ to some other party and leaving the legatee with V₁ alone. All it means is that the two together will now do business with the original value V, and the question will be whether he who receives V₂ will husband it as advantageously for the economic life as would the original legatee who would otherwise have received V₁ and V₂ together. Everyone of course may settle this question for himself according to his taste, whether a single clever man, receiving the whole legacy, will husband it better, or whether it will be better for one to receive only part while the State receives the other part, so that the individual is obliged to do business in conjunction with the State.

This sort of thing definitely leads us away from pure economic thinking. It is a thinking based on resentment, on feeling. People envy the rich heir. There may be reason for it, but we cannot look at it only from this point of view if we claim to be thinking in an economic sense. The point is, how must the thing be conceived in the economic sense, for whatever else has to be done must take its start from this. You can, of course, conceive a social organism becoming diseased through the fact that payment is not working together in an organic way with loan and gift, since one or the other is being obstructed and one or the other fostered. But they will still go on working together in some way. If you abolish giving on one side, you merely effect a redistribution, and the question to be decided is not whether this ought to be done, but whether it is necessarily advantageous. Whether the individual heir alone should receive the inheritance, or whether he must share it with the State, is a question which must first be settled on economic grounds. Which is more advantageous? That is the point.

The important thing is this: Free spiritual life arises almost of necessity out of the entry of the Spirit into the economic life. As a result of this free spiritual life, as I said just now, there will be pure consumers so far as the past is concerned. But what of the free spiritual life in relation to the future? Here it is productive—indirectly it is true—but none the less extraordinarily productive. Imagine the free spiritual life in the social organism really freed, so that the individual faculties were always able to evolve to the full. Then the free spiritual life will be able to exert an extremely fertilising influence on the half-free spiritual life—i.e., on that spiritual life which enters into the processes of material production. Considered in this light, the thing takes on a decidedly economic complexion.

Anyone who can observe life with an unbiased mind will say to himself that it is by no means a matter of indifference whether in a given region all who are active in the free spiritual life are exterminated (for instance, if they got nothing to consume, the right to live being admitted only for those who work directly into the material process) or whether really free spirits are allowed to exist within the social organism. For the free spirits have the peculiar property of loosening and liberating the spirituality, the “gumption” of the others. They make their thinking more mobile, and these others are thus able to work into the material process more effectively. But it is important to remember that the free spirits are living men. You must not try to refute me by pointing to Italy and saying: There is a great deal of free spiritual life there, yet the economic processes which proceed from spirit have not been stimulated to any unusual degree. Granted, it is a free spiritual life. But it is a free spiritual life handed down from the past. There are statues, museums and the like; but they do not have this effect. Only what is living is effectual—that is to say, what proceeds from the free spirit and passes on to other spiritual producers. This is what works as a productive factor into the future, even in the economic sense. It is certainly possible to exert a healing influence on the economic process by giving a free field of action to free spiritual workers.

Suppose now that we have a healthy Associative life in a community. The task of the Associations will be to arrange production in such a way that when too many people are working in any sphere they can be transferred to some other work. It is this vital dealing with men, this allowing the whole social order to originate from the insight of the Associations that matters. And when one day the Associations begin to understand something of the influence of free spiritual life on the economic process, we can give them a very good means of regulating the economic circuit. I mentioned this in my Threefold Commonwealth. The Associations will find that when free spiritual life declines, too little is being given freely; they will grasp the connection. They will see the connection between too little giving and too little free spiritual work. When there is not enough free spiritual work, they will realise that too little is being given. When too little is being given, they will notice a decline in free spiritual work.

There is then a very definite possibility of driving the rate of interest on Nature-property right up to 100% by transmitting as much Nature-property as possible in the shape of free gifts to those who are spiritually productive. In this way you can bring the Land question into direct connection with what works particularly into the future. In other words, the Capital which presses to be invested, the Capital which tends to march into mortgages and stay there, must be given an outlet into free spiritual institutions. That is the practical aspect. Let the Associations see to it that the money which tends to get tied up in mortgages finds its way into free spiritual institutions. There you have the connection of the Associative life with the general social life. Only when you try to penetrate the realities of economic life does it begin to dawn on you what must be done in the one case or in the other. I do not by any means wish to agitate that this or that must be done. I only wish to point out what is. And this is undoubtedly true: What we can never attain by legislative measures—namely, to keep the excess Capital away from Nature—we can attain by the life and system of Associations, diverting the Capital into free spiritual institutions. I only say: If the one thing happens, the other will happen too. Science, after all, has only to indicate the conditions under which things are connected.

On the eve of the day we call White Lotus Day let us remember the great individual to whom we are indebted for giving the impulse for the theosophical movement Fifteen years ago on the 8th of May, Mrs Blavatsky¹⁸ left the physical plane. We speak of the anniversary not of her death but of a second, different birthday when we remember the day when this individual, who did great things for humanity when in her physical body, was called to other spheres from where to continue her work. This day should arouse feelings and inner responses in us through which we get a sense of the way of working which human beings are called on to follow when they are no longer on the physical plane. This work may be all the more significant if they find suitable instruments for it on the physical plane. The members of the theosophical movement are meant to be such instruments. They are able to be such through the truths gained in the science of the spirit which you take into your hearts and minds all the year round.

The individual who was so incomparably selfless and the first to give the great messages that are taken up in the theosophical movement, may be brought a bit closer to us on this anniversary. Not many of us have an idea what Helena Petrovna Blavatsky truly was and will continue to be for the world. What does it matter? In the first century after Christ, Tacitus, a historian of incomparable significance, lived in Rome.¹⁹ A century after the spiritual movement on which the whole of our western culture has been based had arisen he had no more to say about it than that far away, on the edge of the Roman empire, an insignificant sect was reported to have been founded by a certain Jesus, a Nazarene.

Is it surprising, then, if academics, professors and many educated people know nothing of Mrs Blavatsky's mission, or at least have only wrong and confused ideas and prejudices? There are laws according to which a great person appearing in this world must arouse contradiction, prejudice and misunderstanding. It will happen again and again that something minor and insignificant is only slowly and gradually overcome by something great that holds certainty for the future. The event which has come into the world through Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is one that cannot be measured in a short time span. It was an event in the face of which our words today have grown too shadowy. If the potential that lay in Mrs Blavatsky's mission comes to realization, a new stage will be reached not only in the way humanity understands the world and sees things, but also in the way human beings feel and inwardly respond. Let us consider the tremendous change that will come today for some and for many more in the future.

So that we may understand one another, let me paint a picture for you. Let us go far back to ancient Greek times. The magnificent sculptures, poetic works and scholarship that have come down to us from that time, the divine poetry of Homer, the penetrating thoughts of Plato, the teaching of Pythagoras—all this comes together for us if we cast an eye on what we may call the Greek mysteries. Such a mystery centre would be both school and temple. It was not open to those who were not yet able and worthy to take in those truths, but only to those who had prepared themselves to face truth with hallowed feelings. When they were admitted to the centre from which all the art, poetry and scholarship came, onlookers who were not yet initiated into clairvoyant power were able to see in an image—those in whom the dormant powers of mind and spirit had already been awoken would see the reality of it—how the god descended into matter, embodying himself there, and now rests in the realms of nature to await his resurrection. The mystery pupil would see that all realms of nature, the mineral, plant and animals worlds, have the sleeping god at their foundation, and that man is called to experience the resurrection of this god in himself, knowing his soul to be part of the godhead. Everywhere out there the human being can perceive something from which he is meant to arouse the slumbering godhead. In his own soul, however, he feels the divine spark itself, feels himself to be the god and gains certain knowledge of his immortality, of being at work and alive in the infinite universe. Nothing compares with the sublime feeling the mystery pupils would experience in such centres. Everything was to be found there—religion, art, knowledge. His religious feelings were aroused by the objects of veneration, holy feelings of wonder and awe would be kindled by works of art, and the riddles of the world were revealed to him in beautiful images that inspired devotion. Some of the greatest people who knew this were to say: It is only through initiation that a human being rises above the transitory and earthly to reach the eternal. Perhaps the most beautiful word we can use to speak of a scholarship and art that is deeply immersed in the sacred flame of religious feeling is ‘enthusiasm’, which means ‘to be in god’.

Having contemplated this picture and now letting our thoughts move to the present time we see not only that it has all become separated for us—beauty, wisdom and religious devotion—but that our civilization has grown so abstract and rational that the living fire of those times has been lost and grown shadowy by nature.

Some of the outstanding representatives of cultural life in our present age who felt they were not understood and thus isolated, therefore looked back to those great periods in the infinitely distant past when human beings still had communion with the spirits and the gods. They knew this, and in the stillness of the night would often long to be back in the past, at the Eleusinian Mysteries. Those were the last, wonderful times of the ancient Greek mysteries. A profound German thinker, one of those who had contemplated the riddles of existence, reflects for us the mood that would come on him when his thoughts went back to the ancient centres of Greek wisdom—the mood of one who went far away in the spirit. It was Hegel, that great master of thought, who sought to encompass the images once seen by the pupils in the mysteries.²⁰ He wrote:

Eleusis
To Hölderlin²¹

Around me, in me, calm is reigning.
The ever-active cares of busy people sleep.
They give me freedom and a breathing space.
Thank you. O night.
That frees me—White mists are drawn
Over the distant hills to veil them By the moon.
The bright ribbon of the lake Reflects a gentle light.
Memory puts far away the endless noise of day,
As if many years had passed since.

Those are the words of the reflective thinker as he looks deeply into the riddles of the world, being able to encompass all that lived in his own heart in his thoughts only. Looking back now to the Mysteries of Eleusis he continued:

Your image, beloved, comes before me,
And the joy of days now gone. But it soon yields
To sweeter prospects of seeing you again.
Now the longed-for ardent embrace becomes a picture
That I see before me; then the scene where questions come,
And more secretly, looking to see
What may have changed in my friend's
Demeanour, mien, way of thinking
Since we last met; delight in being sure
Of finding the old trust again, grown firmer, riper,
A union that no oath did ever seal—
To live for free and open discourse,
And never, never make a pact with statutes
That regulate opinion and the way we feel.
Now the great wish that took me to you
So easily over mountains and across rivers
Is negotiating with inert reality
But soon a sigh marks division between them
And with it, the dream sweet fantasy created soon is gone.

My eye is raised to the eternal vault of heaven,
To you, O brilliant star of night!
And from your eternal space there flows
Forgetfulness of all my wishes, all my hopes.
My mind is lost as I thus gaze,
All that I called my own has vanished.
I give myself to the immeasurable.
I am in it, am all, and am but it
Thought when it returns to me feels alien,
It fears the infinite and in a maze
It fathoms not the depths that are beheld.
Fantasy brings the eternal close to the mind,
Marrying it with form and figure. Welcome,
Sublime spirits, lofty shades
Whose brows do radiate perfection!
Be not afraid, I feel it is my heartland, too,
The glory and solemnity that shines around you.

So we have a thinker calling up the spirits who in truth did appear to the pupils at Eleusis. Then he calls up the goddess Ceres who was at the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries. For Ceres is not only the goddess of earth's fruitfulness but also the one who fructifies cultural life.

Ha! If the gates to your sanctuary were to open now,
O Ceres, once enthroned in Eleusis!
Overcome with enthusiasm I'd now feel
The shivers of your nearness,
Understand your revelations,
I'd tell the images' sublime meaning, hear
The hymning at the meal the gods would take.
The sublime words of their counsel.

Yet silence now reigns in your halls, O goddess!
The gods have gone away to Olympus,
Away from desecrated altars;
Gone away from the tomb of humanity profaned
Is the genius of innocence whose magic once brought them here.
The wisdom of your priests is silent.
Nothing from the blessed sacraments
Has survived for us, and in vain does now
The curiosity of scholars look for more than love
Of wisdom. The seekers own it now, and despise you.
To master it, they delve for words
That would express your sublime reality.
In vain! It is but dust and ashes they discover,
In which your life will not return in all eternity.
Yet those eternally dead, content in moderation
Also liked to delve in decay, with soul all gone. In vain.
No sign remained of your fastness, no trace of any image.
To the son of sacred faith, sublime things taught,
Unspoken depth of feeling, were much too sacred
To let dry signs and symbols take their place.
Thought cannot encompass the soul,
For outside time and space, immersed in its sense
Of vast infinity, it forgets itself and once again awakens
To full awareness. Wanting to speak of this to others,
E'en in angels’ tongues, you'd know the poverty of words.
He shudders, having thought so small the sacred,
Made it so small that words seem sinful now;
Trembling he keeps silent.
Thus the initiate imposed on himself a silence that a wise
Law bid lesser spirits never to proclaim
What they did see, hear, feel in the holiness of night,
Lest the clamour of their nonsense disturb the better man
In his devotions; the hollow sound of words
Make him wax angry at the sacred thing itself, that it
Should not be trodden in the mire, entrusted
Even to memory, that it should never be
The toy and merchandise of sophists,
Selling for a pittance,
Nor a mantle for wordy pretenders, nor a rod
Upon the back of cheerful lads, and be so empty
In the end, that its life roots would lie
But in the echoes of alien tongues.
Avariciously, goddess, your sons did not
Take your honour into alleyway and market, keeping it
Within the sanctum in their breast.
You therefore did not live upon their lips.
Their life did honour you. You live on in their deeds.
During this night, too, I did hear you, sacred goddess.
Often the life of your children also reveals you to me.
I often sense you to be the soul of their doings!
You are sublimity of mind, steadfast faith
Unshaken in a divine spirit, though all else may perish.

In recent times need arose to bring the power of thought to expression in an ideal way on the one hand and a more materialistic way on the other. Hegel, too, was no longer understood, being altogether one of the lost spirits of humanity. In the second half of the 19th century the spirit of materialism entered into everything, and it now prevails almost everywhere. If it were to keep the upper hand, materialism would cause human culture to turn to stone in every way.

A strange attitude came to the fore in the second half of the 19th century. In the 18th century, Lessing was still saying that a faith need not be meaningless just because it arose in the pure, innocent childhood of humanity.²² Materialists will, however, say that this faith, which is the basis of culture for all peoples, represents childish fantasies, and that only the thoughts created by means of scientific thinking reflect a mind that is both male and mature. Everyday life has become a hustle and bustle for material goods to satisfy purely physical needs, and much worse things will arise from this in future. Scientists who pride themselves on their achievements consider themselves far above anything humanity has achieved in the past to gain a relationship to the world—the priestly wisdom of ancient Chaldaea and Babylon, the teaching of Pythagoras and others. It is said of Plato, that great mind, that one cannot make head or tail of the confused ideas he has bequeathed to us. His Timaeus is said to be incomprehensible, but people do not ask for the reason why it cannot be understood.²³ Here we may think of Lichtenberg's words that when a head collides with a book and there is a hollow sound this may not be due to the book. In practice, materialism has also given rise to hypocrisy; above all people are not prepared to admit that life is governed entirely by materialistic aims. There has hardly ever been so much talk of ideals and such lack of understanding as in our time.

The mission of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky came at this time. Perhaps it may be permitted to state, without saying anything against her as a person, that her soul was given a task that was really too much for it. To solve the riddle as to why it was this woman in particular who was called upon to give to the world the message of theosophy, we find that she was the only possible means the spirits could find to make themselves understood by Western peoples. People in official positions had not the least conception of the spiritual realities humanity needed. The very idea of the spirit had been lost, and when anyone would speak of the spirit those were but empty words. This strange woman, who even as a young person had unusual psychic and spiritual gifts, was called upon to give the world a message which no academic person could give. From her earliest days her view of the world differed to some degree from that presented at schools and universities in the 19th century. She was able to perceive spiritual entities in everything around us, and they were as real to her as tangible objects are. From her young days, she felt great veneration for a sublime spirit. No human soul will even gain higher insight without such veneration. You may have a brilliant mind or a clear, rational mind, you may even have developed dim powers of clairvoyance, but you will not progress to genuine, true insight without the feeling we call ‘great veneration’. True insight can only be given to us by spirits who are well ahead of humanity in their evolution. Everyone will admit that people differ in their levels of development. Maybe people don't like to admit it so much in this day and age, but it cannot be denied that there are differences. Most people will, however, believe that the level of insight they have gained is indeed the highest, and they will not easily admit that there are more highly developed minds, greater than Goethe and Francis of Assisi. This, however, is the basic condition if true insight is to be gained. No one can gain it unless they have this great veneration, something that has been completely lost in our levelling age.

An important fact relates to this great veneration. We all come from worlds of spirit, from an original life in the spirit. The part of our soul that is divine comes from a divine source and origin. There was a time for each of us when the ability to look out from the soul world into the world perceived through the senses first awoke in us. In very early times, human beings had dim but clairvoyant perception. Images would arise from the soul that pointed to a real world around them. Conscious awareness in the senses, as we know it today, only came later. There was a particular moment in the development of each of us—shown symbolically for Eve in the paradise story²⁵—when the serpent of knowledge came to us, in an incarnation that happened a long, long time ago, and said the words: ‘Your eyes will be opened, you will know good and evil in the visible world around you.’ The serpent has always been the symbol of the great spiritual teachers. Every human being had such an advanced teacher and on one occasion was with one of them when he spoke the words: ‘One day you will know the world around you as it is perceived through the senses.’

A human being who has developed great veneration will meet such a teacher once more in life, when the senses for the spirit are opened up for him. In occult terms this is known as ‘finding the guru again’, the great teacher. Each must seek his guru and will only be able to find him if he is capable of great veneration and also knows that there is something that goes beyond run-of-the-mill humanity.

This great veneration and knowledge of the existence of the great teachers lived in Mrs Blavatsky, and it was because of this that she was called to make something about these great teachers known to humanity. The guru works in hidden ways and can only be recognized by someone who has found his way to him of his own accord. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky thus had the right inner feeling that enabled her to give present-day humanity something that is quite new.

Anyone who has had some insight into the places where the truth is represented also realizes that taking hold of something new like this does have its problems. The time then comes for someone who knows something about the search for the truth when he loses his critical approach to the great human spirits. He will no longer consider superficial things about them. People who have no idea of the position which such great people hold in the world will cling to such superficial aspects. Someone able to grasp the situation will be grateful for the gifts those great spirits have given. This is indeed the only possible attitude to a person such as Mrs Blavatsky. ‘Much admired and blamed as much’,²⁶ this woman called Helena came among the people. It would seem that hardly anyone else has had so much nonsense and silly things said and written about them as Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, except, of course, for others of the same stature. Some academics have made the strange statement that she had written a great work, her Secret Doctrine,²⁷ which contains the Dzyan verses, which are said to be a very ancient tradition. Others who were opposing them said, however, that Mrs Blavatsky had invented the verses, pretending that they were ancient tradition. Only academics can take foolishness to such a level. Let us assume, just for the moment, that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had really invented the verses and let us consider them in more detail. If we study them for a while, two or three years maybe, we find that all our scholarship and all discoveries, all the achievements of modern science, may still be of interest but pale into insignificance compared with the great revelations made in these verses. Don't you think that this would make us venerate Helena Petrovna Blavatsky even more? Now of course someone who uses just the short span of two or three years to enter into the profound meaning of these verses will not care if they were written thousands of years ago or by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the last third of the 19th century. On reflection one even has to say to oneself that in the latter case the miracle would be even greater. It then seems all the more foolish for critics to raise objections which merely show that they have not understood a single word of it all. So there you see some of the great obstacles that rose in the path of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. People who talk of her having had some fault or other clearly have no idea of her true importance.

Mrs Blavatsky spoke of phenomena in the occult worlds. Anyone who knows the path she followed to reach those worlds will also know the dangers connected with this. If you consider how easily our passions are roused even in the world of the senses, and the deep abysses someone had to experience who had to look into the occult worlds in the way it had to be done in order to write a book like Secret Doctrine, will no longer consider the superficial things connected with this important person and those around her. She was strong, but the resistance the world offered almost broke even her. She met so much lack of understanding and false authority, and if we consider the receptiveness and sensitivity of her occult powers, we can understand why she was more or less a broken woman when she came to the end of her life. But the things she has given to the world shall live on in humanity and have a future.

The mood I wanted to recreate for you, using the words of one of the greatest men of our time, this mood of longing must spread more and more. The longing can be satisfied with the things Mrs Blavatsky was destined to give to the world, things that need to be developed more and more. We honour her most if we see her as someone who has given the impetus. She only sought to prevail as a faithful disciple of the great spiritual powers that stood behind her, and the only people to work in harmony with the theosophical stream are those who do so in accord with those spiritual powers. The life of the spirit, which has become shadowy, will come alive again if people come to understand more and more of the things Helena Petrovna Blavatsky wanted to bring into the world with such courage, such energy and boldness. And it is possible to gain deeper insight into the nature of such a Lotus Day if we ignore all historical gossip and make every effort to consider the things that are important.

We have the right understanding for the theosophical movement if we come to realize that the living spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky must continue to act through us for the salvation and progress of humanity. We'll then not merely say in an indolent, sentimental way that her immortal spirit is celebrating another birthday, but actively help it to live and work in the places where it should take effect. It surely was the only personal wish our founder had that the members of the theosophical movement would be a living means of giving expression to the spirit which she herself selflessly put wholly at the service of this spiritual movement. The more members understand this spirit of selflessness, and the more they understand that it behooves us to gain insight and understanding, the more will they do justice to the spirit of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. One always hears people say: ‘Love and compassion are the main thing.’ Of course they are, but it needs insight and understanding to make love and compassion bear fruit. It is not uncommon to be facile, even among those who believe themselves to seek the spirit. To say ‘love’ is something you learn in a second. To gain insight for the salvation and progress of humanity needs an eternity. The meaning the theosophical movement has for us must more and more be that insight is the foundation of all true spiritual activity. It is important, therefore, that we work without respite to follow in the footsteps of our founder—step by step, never giving in to the laziness of wanting to grasp it all in a day rather than learn it properly. We can study this very well in the writings and the work of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and all talk is in vain that is mere refusal to face up to things. What we must learn, continuing the work she herself started on the physical plane, is to seek to gain insight and knowledge in the science of the spirit.

• 18. Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, née Hahn (1831–91). Born in Yekaterinoslav in the Ukraine, went to the USA in 1873. In 1875 she founded the Theosophical Society with Henry Olcott. Later she continued her work in India.
• 19. Tacitus (c. AD 55–120). Annales XV, 44.
• 20. Hegel (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, German philosopher, 1770–1831)
• 21. Hegel sent the work Eleusis to his friend the poet Hölderlin in 1796.
• 22. Lessing. Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81), German writer. Erziehung des Menschengeschlechtes (education of the human race) p. 78 ff. Berlin 1844.
• 23. The dialogue in this book, written late in Plato's life, shows the connection between the world of space and the cosmic soul; this has also given rise to the laws that govern the movements of heavenly bodies. Summing up, Plato wrote: ‘It has been shown how this world evolved—evolved uniquely and on its own, perfect in its nature and phenomena, visible and encompassing the great fullness of all things visible, a living organism within which all other mortal and immortal organisms have their being, the sense-perceptible image of a god who can only be conceived in thought.’ Timaios 92 C.
• 25. Genesis 3:5
• 26. Faust 2, Before Menelaus' Palace.
• 27. Published in London, New York, Madras in 1893.

We have heard that the human soul was once endowed with a kind of primeval wisdom, that this wisdom gradually faded away and is now no longer accessible. Consequently in respect of their knowledge, men feel thrown back more and more upon what is presented to them by physical existence. By “knowledge” I do not only mean science in the accepted sense, but the knowledge that is consciously applied by the soul in the ordinary affairs of life.

The question will naturally arise: how did this ancient wisdom actually come into being? Here I must touch upon a new aspect of matters we have often considered from other angles.

Let us look back to the time when man began in the real sense to be a citizen of the earth, when as a being of soul-and-spirit he came down to the earth, surrounded himself with its forces and became an earthly being. If he had simply descended to the earth with the qualities inherent in his own nature, evolution would have taken quite a different course through the various epochs of culture. But having made the descent, man would have been obliged to establish relationship with the surrounding world, to acquire earthly knowledge—I will not say through clairvoyance in the proper sense—but through instincts imbued with a certain measure of clairvoyance. The acquisition of this earthly knowledge would have been a very slow and gradual process and for long ages men would have remained ineffectual, childish beings. By our own time they would, it is true, have succeeded in developing a constitution of soul and body compatible with manhood, but they would never have reached the spiritual heights they have actually attained. That they were able to achieve this evolution in a way other than by passing through all the stages of childhood, is due to the intervention in earthly evolution of the Luciferic beings. We know from recent lectures that the Lucifer-individuality himself incarnated in Asia in a certain epoch of pre-Christian times, and that the original Pagan wisdom to which many historical data bear witness, proceeded from this Being. But the Luciferic beings have from the very beginning been associated in some way with the evolution of humanity.

I beg you earnestly—although I know that such requests are of little avail—not to adopt a philistine attitude when mention is made of Luciferic beings. Even among anthroposophists there is still the tendency to say: “That is certainly Luciferic. At all costs let us avoid it, reject it!” But these things have to be considered in many different aspects and it must always be remembered that the whole of the old Pagan wisdom emanated from a Luciferic source. The subject is one that calls for deep and serious study.

The farther back we go in the evolution of humanity, the more do we find certain individuals who through the qualities attained in earlier incarnations were sufficiently mature to apprehend the treasures of wisdom possessed by the Luciferic beings Think, for example, of the seven Holy Rishis of ancient India.—When an Indian interpreted the wisdom of the Holy Rishis, he knew, if he had been initiated into these things, that the Teachers of the Rishis were Luciferic beings. For what the Luciferic beings brought with them into earth-evolution was, above all, the world of thought, of intellectualistic thought pervading culture, the world of reason in the highest sense of the word—the world of wisdom. And going back to the primeval origins of human existence, we find that the sources of Pagan wisdom always lie with Luciferic beings.

It may be asked: How is this possible? We must realise that man would have remained a child had he not received from the Mysteries the constant instruction that emanated from Luciferic beings. Those who possessed the knowledge and the inherited, primeval wisdom wherewith to foster the progress and education of mankind, were not—like a modern philistine—fearful of receiving this wisdom from Luciferic sources. They took upon themselves the obligation incumbent upon everyone to whom Luciferic beings impart knowledge from spiritual realms. The obligation—for so it may be called, although such words do not always convey the exact meaning—was to use this Luciferic, cosmic wisdom rightly, for the good of earth-evolution. The difference between the “good” wisdom and the purely Luciferic wisdom—which so far as content is concerned is exactly the same—is that the “good” wisdom is in hands other than those of the Luciferic beings. That is the essential point. It is not a question of there being one wisdom that can be neatly packed away in some chamber of the soul and make a man virtuous! The wisdom of worlds is uniform, the only difference being whether it is in the hands of wise men who use it for good, whether it is in the hands of the Angeloi or Archangeloi, or whether it is in the hands of Lucifer and his hosts. In olden times the wisdom needed for the progress of humanity could be obtained only from a Luciferic source; hence the Initiates were obliged to receive it from that source and at the same time to take upon themselves the obligation not to yield to the aspirations of the Luciferic beings.

Lucifer's intention was to convey the wisdom to men in such a way that it would induce them to abandon the path of earth-evolution and take a path leading to a super-earthly sphere, a sphere aloof from the earth. The Luciferic beings inculcated their wisdom into man but their desire was that it would make him turn away from the earth, without passing through earthly evolution. Lucifer wants to abandon the earth to its fate, to win mankind for a kingdom alien to the kingdom of Christ.

The wise men of olden time who received the primeval wisdom from the hands of Lucifer had, as I said, to pledge themselves not to yield to his wishes but to use the wisdom for the good of earth-evolution. And that, in essence, was what was accomplished through the pre-Christian Mysteries. If it be asked what it was that humanity received through these Mysteries, through the influence of the Luciferic beings who, in post-Atlantean times, still inspired certain personalities like the Rishis of India and sent their messengers to the earth—the answer is that man received the rudiments of what has developed in the course of evolution into the faculties of speech and of thinking. Speaking and thinking are, in their origins, Luciferic, but were drawn away from the grip of Lucifer by the wise men of old.—If you are really intent upon fleeing from Lucifer, then you must make up your minds to be dumb in the future, and not to think !

These things are part of the Initiation-science which must gradually come within the ken of humanity, although on account of the kind of education that has now been current for centuries in the civilised world, men shrink from such truths. The caricatured figure of Lucifer and Ahriman—the medieval devil—is constantly before their minds and they have been allowed to grow up in this philistine atmosphere for so long that even to-day they shudder at the thought of approaching treasures of wisdom that are intimately and deeply connected with evolution. It is much pleasanter to say: “If I protect myself from the devil, if I give myself to Christ with the simple-heartedness of a child, I shall be blessed, and my soul will find salvation.”—But in its deep foundations, human life is by no means such a simple matter. And it is essential for the future of human evolution that these things we are now discussing shall not be withheld from mankind. It must be known that the art of speaking and the art of thinking have become part of evolution only because they were received through the mediation of Lucifer. The Luciferic element can still be observed in thinking. Speech, which has for long ages been differentiated and adapted to earthly needs, has already been assailed by Ahriman. It is he who has brought about differentiation, who has degraded the one, cosmic speech into the different tongues on earth. Whereas the Luciferic tendency is always towards unification, the fundamental tendency of the Ahrimanic principle is differentiation.—What would thinking be if it were not Luciferic?

If thinking were not Luciferic, human beings on the earth would be like one whose thought was utterly non-Luciferic, namely Goethe. Goethe was one of those who, in a certain respect, deliberately set out to confront and defy the Luciferic powers. That, however, makes it essential to keep constant hold of the concrete, individual reality. The moment you generalise or unify—at that moment you are nearing Luciferic thinking. If you were to contemplate each human individual, each single plant, each single animal, each single stone in itself alone, having in mind the one, single object, not classifying into genera and species, not generalising in your thought—then you would be little prone to Luciferic thinking. But anyone who were to attempt such a thing, even as a child, would never get beyond the lowest class in any modern school.

The fact of the matter is that the universal thinking implicit in Pagan wisdom has gradually been exhausted. Man's constitution is such that this Luciferic principle of unification can no longer be of much real service to him on earth. This has been counteracted by the fact that the God-created nature of man has followed in the wake of earth-evolution, has become related to, allied with the earth. And because this is so, through his own inherent nature man is less allied with the Luciferic element which always tends to draw him away from the earth.

But woe betide if man were simply to draw away from the Luciferic element without putting something different in its place. That would bring nothing but evil. For then man would grow together with the earth, that is to say with the particular territory on earth where he is born; and his cultural life would become completely specialised, completely differentiated. We can already see this tendency developing. It has taken root most markedly since the beginning of the nineteenth century; but the tendency to split up into smaller and smaller groups has been all too apparent as a result of the catastrophic world war. Chauvinism is more and more gaining the upper hand until it will finally lead men to split up to such an extent that at last a group will embrace only one single human being! Things could come to the point where individual men would again split into right and left, and be at war within themselves; left would be at loggerheads with right. Such tendencies are even now evident in the evolution of mankind. To combat this, a counterweight must be created; and this counterweight can only be created if, like the old wisdom inherent in Paganism, a new wisdom, acquired by the free resolve and will of man, is infused into earthly culture. This new wisdom must again be an Initiation-wisdom.

And here we come to a chapter that must not be withheld from the knowledge of modern man. If, in the future, man were to do nothing himself towards acquiring a new wisdom, then, unconsciously to him, the whole of culture would become Ahrimanic, and it would be easy for the influences issuing from Ahriman's incarnation to permeate all civilisation on the earth. Precautions must therefore be taken in regard to the streams by which the Ahrimanic form of culture is furthered. What would be the result if men were to follow the strong inclination they have to-day to let things drift on as they are, without understanding and guiding into right channels those streams which lead to an Ahrimanic culture?—As soon as Ahriman incarnates at the destined time in the West, the whole of culture would be impregnated with his forces. What else would come in his train? Through certain stupendous arts he would bring to man all the clairvoyant knowledge which until then can be acquired only by dint of intense labour and effort. Men could live on as materialists, they could eat and drink—as much as may be left after the war!—and there would be no need, for any spiritual efforts. The Ahrimanic streams would continue their unimpeded course. When Ahriman incarnates in the West at the appointed time, he would establish a great occult school for the practice of magic arts of the greatest grandeur, and what otherwise can be acquired only by strenuous effort would be poured over mankind.

Let it never be imagined that Ahriman will appear as a kind of hoaxer, playing mischievous tricks on human beings. No, indeed ! Lovers of ease who refuse to have anything to do with spiritual science, would fall prey to his magic, for by means of these stupendous magic arts he would be able to make great numbers of human beings into seers—but in such a way that the clairvoyance of each individual would be strictly differentiated. What one person would see, a second and a third would not see. Confusion would prevail and in spite of being made receptive to clairvoyant wisdom, men would inevitably fall into strife on account of the sheer diversity of their visions. Ultimately, however, they would all be satisfied with their own particular vision, for each of them would be able to see into the spiritual world. In this way all culture on the earth would fall prey to Ahriman. Men would succumb to Ahriman simply through not having acquired by their own efforts what Ahriman is ready and able to give them. No more evil advice could be given than to say: “Stay just as you are! Ahriman will make all of you clairvoyant if you so desire. And you will desire it because Ahriman's power will be very great.”—But the result would be the establishment of Ahriman's kingdom on earth and the overthrow of everything achieved hitherto by human culture; all the disastrous tendencies unconsciously cherished by mankind to-day would take effect.

Our concern is that the wisdom of the future—a clairvoyant wisdom—shall be rescued from the clutches of Ahriman. Again let it be repeated that there is only one book of wisdom, not two kinds of wisdom. The issue is whether this wisdom is in the hands of Ahriman or of Christ. It cannot come into the hands of Christ unless men fight for it. And they can only fight for it by telling themselves that by their own efforts they must assimilate the content of spiritual science before the time of Ahriman's appearance on earth.

That, you see, is the cosmic task of spiritual science. It consists in preventing knowledge from becoming—or remaining—Ahrimanic. A good way of playing into Ahriman's hands is to exclude everything of the nature of knowledge from denominational religion and to insist that simple faith is enough. If a man clings to this simple faith, he condemns his soul to stagnation and then the wisdom that must be rescued from Ahriman cannot find entry. The point is not whether men do or do not simply receive the wisdom of the future but whether they work upon it; and those who do must take upon themselves the solemn duty of saving earthly culture for Christ, just as the ancient Rishis and Initiates pledged themselves not to yield to Lucifer's proviso that mankind be enticed away from the earth.

The root of the matter is that for the wisdom of the future too, a struggle is necessary, a struggle similar to that waged against Lucifer by the ancient Initiates through whose intermediary the faculties of speech and of thinking were transmitted to men. Just as it devolved upon the Initiates of the primeval wisdom to wrest from Lucifer that which has become human reason, human intellect, so the insight which is to develop in the future into the inner realities of things must be wrested from the Ahrimanic powers. Such are the issues—and these issues play strongly into life itself.

I recently read some notes written shortly before his death by one who was a friend of the Anthroposophical Movement. He had been wounded in the war and lay for a long time in hospital where, in the course of the operations performed on him, he had many a glimpse into the spiritual world. The last lines he wrote contain a remarkable passage, describing a vision which came to him not long before his death. In this last experience, the atmosphere around him became, as he expresses it, like dense granite, weighing upon his soul. Such an impression can be understood in the light of the knowledge that we have to battle for the wisdom of the future; for the Ahrimanic powers do not allow this wisdom to be wrested from them without a struggle. Let it not be thought that wisdom can be attained through blissful visions. Real wisdom has to be acquired “in travail and suffering”. What I have just told you about the dying man is a very good picture of such suffering, for in this struggle for the wisdom of the future, one of the most frequent experiences is that the world is pressing in upon us, as though the air had suddenly frozen into granite. It is possible to know why this is so. We have only to remember that it is the endeavour of the Ahrimanic powers to reduce the earth to a state of complete rigidification. Their victory would be won if they succeeded in bringing earth, water and air into this rigidified state. Were that to happen, the earth could not again acquire the Saturn-warmth from which it proceeded and which must be regained in the Vulcan epoch; and to prevent this is the aim of the Ahrimanic powers. A trend which has an important bearing on this is the lack of enthusiasm in human souls at the present time for the content of spiritual science. If this lack of enthusiasm were to persist, the first impulse towards the rigidification of the earth would emanate from the souls of men themselves, from their apathy, their indolence and love of ease. If you reflect that this rigidification is the aim of the Ahrimanic powers, you will not be surprised that compression, the feeling that life is becoming granite-like, is one of the experiences that must be undergone in the struggle for the wisdom of the future.

But remember that men to-day can prepare themselves to look into the spiritual world by apprehending with their healthy human reason what spiritual science has to offer. The effort applied in study that lets itself be guided by healthy human reason can be part of the struggle which leads eventually to vision of the spiritual world. Many tendencies will have to be overcome, but for men of to-day the fundamental difficulty is that when they want to understand spiritual science they have to battle against their own granite-like skulls. If the human skull were less hard, less granite-like, spiritual science would be far more widely accepted at the present time. Infinitely more effective than any philistine avoidance of the Ahrimanic powers would be to battle against Ahriman through sincere, genuine study of the content of spiritual science. For then man would gradually come to perceive spiritually the danger that must otherwise befall the earth physically, of being rigidified into granite-like density.

And so it must be emphasised that the wisdom of the future can be attained only through privations, travail and pain; it must be attained by enduring the attendant sufferings of body and soul for the sake of the salvation of human evolution. Therefore the unwavering principle should be, never to let oneself be deterred by suffering from the pursuit of this wisdom. So far as the external life of mankind is concerned, what is needed is that in the future the danger of the frozen rigidification—which, to begin with, would manifest in the moral sphere—shall be removed from the earth. But this can happen only if men envisage spiritually, feel inwardly and counter with their will, what would otherwise become physical reality.

At bottom, it is simply due to faint-heartedness that men to-day are unwilling to approach spiritual science. They are not conscious of this, but it is so, nevertheless; they are fearful of the difficulties that will have to be encountered on every hand. When people come to spiritual science they so often speak of the need for “upliftment”. By this they usually mean a sense of comfort and inner well-being. But that cannot be offered, for it would simply lull them into stupor and draw them away from the light they need. What is essential is that from now onwards, knowledge of the driving forces of evolution must not be withheld from mankind. It must be realised that in very truth the human being is balanced as it were between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic powers, and that the Christ has become a companion of men, leading them, first, away from the battle with Lucifer, and then into the battle with Ahriman.

The evolution of humanity must be understood in the light of these facts. One who presents secrets of cosmic existence in the way that must be done in spiritual science, is often laughed to scorn, for example about the use of the principle of the number seven—as you will find in my book Theosophy. But you will notice that people do not laugh when the rainbow is described as sevenfold, or the scale—tonic, second, third and so on, up to the octave which is a repetition of the tonic. In the physical world these things are accepted, but not when it comes to the spiritual. What must be regained here is something that was implicit in the old Pagan wisdom. A last glimmer of this Pagan wisdom in regard to a matter like the principle of the number seven, is to be found in the Pythagorean School—which was actually a Mystery-school. You can read about Pythagoras to-day in any text-book; but you will never find any understanding of the reason why he based the World-Order on number. The reason was because in the ancient wisdom everything was based on number. And a last glimmer of insight into the wisdom contained in numbers still survived when Pythagoras founded his School. Other branches of the ancient wisdom survived much longer, some indeed until the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. Up to that time many true things about the higher worlds are said in the sphere of what is called natural philosophy. And then, gradually, this primeval intelligence in mankind ran dry—if I may use this expression.

Let us picture some orthodox representative of modern learning sitting in a corner and saying: “What nonsense these anthroposophists talk! What do they mean by asserting that the primeval wisdom has run dry? Wonderful, epoch-making results have been achieved, above all during the last few centuries, and are still being achieved. There may have been a temporary halt in 1914, but at any rate up to then marvels were accomplished!”—But if you look candidly and without bias at what has been achieved most recently, you will arrive at the following conclusion.—Admittedly, masses of notes have been collected—masses of scientific and historical data. This kind of collecting has become the fashion. Countless experiments have been made and described. But now ask yourselves: Are there any fundamentally new ideas in all that this modern age has produced? New ideas, new conceptions were given by individual spirits like Goethe—but Goethe has not been understood. If you study recent findings of natural science or historical research, it will be clear to you that, in respect of ideas, there is nothing new. Certainly, Darwin made journeys, described many things he saw on these journeys and gathered it all into an idea. But if you grasp the idea of evolution in its details, as idea, you will find it in the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras. So too you will find the fundamental principles of modern natural science in Aristotle—that is to say in the pre-Christian era. These ideas are treasures of the primeval wisdom—springing from a Luciferic source. But the primeval wisdom has run dry, and something new in the form of insight into the spiritual world must be attained. A certain willingness on the part of man is necessary to undertake the labour entailed by really new ideas. And mankind to-day is sorely in need of new ideas, especially concerning the realm and the life of the soul. Fundamentally, all that science tells us in regard to the soul amounts to nothing more than a collection of words. What is taught in the lecture-halls about thinking, feeling and willing, is simply a matter of words thrown out spasmodically. It amounts to little more than the sounds of the words. There is hardly the beginning of an attempt to take seriously anything that is really new.

In this connection one may have curious experiences! Some time ago I was invited to speak to a “Schopenhauer Society” in Dresden. I thought to myself: Yes—a Schopenhauer Society—that must surely be something out of the ordinary! So I tried to show how the contrast between sleeping and waking, between waking up and going to sleep is to be understood in the psychological sense, how the soul is involved. I spoke of something I have recently mentioned to you, namely, that a zero-point is there at the moments of falling asleep and waking up, that sleep is not merely a cessation of the waking state, but bears the same relation to the waking state as debts bear to assets.

If you were to search through modern psychology you would not find the slightest trace of any attempt to get to the root of these far-reaching matters.—After the lecture, in a “discussion” as it was called, certain learned members of the audience got up to speak. One of these philosophers made a really splendid statement, to the following effect. He said: “What we have been hearing could not possibly be a concern of serious science. Serious science has other, very different matters with which to occupy itself. Man can know nothing of what has just been put before us so plausibly; none of it is a concern of human cognition. Moreover we have known it all for a long time.”—In other words, therefore: what we cannot know is something with which we have long been familiar!

Now contradictions do exist, but contradictions of this kind exist only in the heads of present-day scholars! If someone says that certain things cannot be known, that they are not objects of human cognition—well and good, that is his opinion. But if he says in the same breath that he has known all about them for a long time, then there is an obvious contradiction. Erudite scholars of to-day often have a habit of placing two diametrically opposite opinions side by side in this way.

This kind of thinking has a great deal to do with the present situation. An individual—thanks to the Divine Powers and also, be it remembered, to Lucifer and Ahriman—is often able to form a fairly sound judgment of these things; but when it comes to presenting them to the world—that is a different matter altogether. Many people are willing to embark upon the study of spiritual science provided they find a society of rather sectarian tendencies in which they can take refuge. But when they have to face the world and present something of which the world itself possesses evidence, everything is apt to go up in smoke and they become veritable philistines.—And then Ahriman's progress is greatly furthered.

We have heard that the human soul was once endowed with a kind of primeval wisdom, that this wisdom gradually faded away and is now no longer accessible. Consequently with respect to their knowledge, people feel thrown back more and more upon what is presented to them by physical existence. By “knowledge” I do not mean only science in the accepted sense, but the knowledge that is consciously applied by the soul in the ordinary affairs of life.

The question will naturally arise: how did this ancient wisdom actually come into being? Here I must touch upon a new aspect of matters we have often considered from other angles.

Let us look back to the time when human beings began in the real sense to be citizens of the earth, when as beings of soul and spirit they came down to the earth, surrounded themselves with its forces and became earthly beings. If human beings had simply descended to the earth with the qualities inherent in their own nature, evolution would have taken quite a different course through the various epochs of culture. But having made the descent, human beings would have been obliged to establish a relationship with the surrounding world, to acquire earthly knowledge—I will not say through clairvoyance in the proper sense—but through instincts imbued with a certain measure of clairvoyance. The acquisition of this earthly knowledge would have been a very slow and gradual process and for long ages people would have remained ineffectual, childish beings. By our own time they would, it is true, have succeeded in developing a constitution of soul and body compatible with humanness, but they would never have reached the spiritual heights they have actually attained. That they were able to achieve this evolution in a way other than by passing through all the stages of childhood is due to the intervention in earthly evolution of the luciferic beings. We know from recent lectures that the Lucifer individuality himself incarnated in Asia in a certain epoch of pre-Christian times, and that the original pagan wisdom to which many historical data bear witness proceeded from this being. But the luciferic beings have from the very beginning been associated in some way with the evolution of humanity.

I beg you earnestly—although I know that such requests are of little avail-not to adopt a philistine attitude when mention is made of luciferic beings. Even among anthroposophists there is still the tendency to say: “That is certainly luciferic. At all costs let us avoid it, reject it!” But these things have to be considered in many different aspects and it must always be remembered that the whole of the old pagan wisdom emanated from a luciferic source. The subject is one that calls for deep and serious study.

The farther back we go in the evolution of humanity, the more do we find certain individuals who through the qualities attained in earlier incarnations were sufficiently mature to apprehend the treasures of wisdom possessed by the luciferic beings. Think, for example, of the seven Holy Rishis of ancient India. When Indians interpreted the wisdom of the Holy Rishis, they knew, if they had been initiated into these things, that the teachers of the Rishis were luciferic beings. For what the luciferic beings brought with them into earth evolution was, above all, the world of thought, of intellectualistic thought pervading culture, the world of reason in the highest sense of the word—the world of wisdom. And going back to the primeval origins of human existence, we find that the sources of pagan wisdom always lie with luciferic beings.

It may be asked: How is this possible? We must realize that human beings would have remained children had they not received from the Mysteries the constant instruction that emanated from luciferic beings. Those who possessed the knowledge and the inherited, primeval wisdom wherewith to foster the progress and education of humankind were not—like a modern philistine—fearful of receiving this wisdom from luciferic sources. They took upon themselves the obligation incumbent upon everyone to whom luciferic beings impart knowledge from spiritual realms. The obligation—for so it may be called, although such words do not always convey the exact meaning—was to use this luciferic, cosmic wisdom rightly, for the good of earth evolution. The difference between the “good” wisdom and the purely luciferic wisdom—which so far as content is concerned is exactly the same—is that the “good” wisdom is in hands other than those of the luciferic beings. That is the essential point. It is not a question of there being one wisdom that can be neatly packed away in some chamber of the soul and make a person virtuous! The wisdom of worlds is uniform, the only difference being whether it is in the hands of wise people who use it for good, whether it is in the hands of the Angeloi or Archangeloi, or whether it is in the hands of Lucifer and his hosts. In olden times the wisdom needed for the progress of humanity could be obtained only from a luciferic source; hence the initiates were obliged to receive it from that source and at the same time to take upon themselves the obligation not to yield to the aspirations of the luciferic beings.

Lucifer's intention was to convey the wisdom to humanity in such a way that it would induce people to abandon the path of earth evolution and take a path leading to a super-earthly sphere, a sphere aloof from the earth. The luciferic beings inculcated their wisdom into human beings but their desire was that it would make them turn away from the earth, without passing through earthly evolution. Lucifer wants to abandon the earth to its fate, to win humankind for a kingdom alien to the kingdom of Christ.

The sages of olden time who received the primeval wisdom from the hands of Lucifer had, as I said, to pledge themselves not to yield to his wishes but to use the wisdom for the good of earth evolution. And that, in essence, was what was accomplished through the pre-Christian Mysteries. If it be asked what it was that humanity received through these Mysteries, through the influence of the luciferic beings who, in postAtlantean times, still inspired certain personalities like the Rishis of India and sent their messengers to the earth—the answer is that human beings received the rudiments of what has developed in the course of evolution into the faculties of speech and of thinking. Speaking and thinking are, in their origins, luciferic, but were drawn away from the grip of Lucifer by the sages of old. If you are really intent upon fleeing, from Lucifer, then you must make up your minds to be dumb in the future, and not to think!

These things are part of the initiation science which must gradually come within the ken of humanity, although on account of the kind of education that has now been current for centuries in the civilized world, people shrink from such truths. The caricatured figure of Lucifer and Ahriman—the medieval devil—is constantly before their minds and they have been allowed to grow up in this philistine atmosphere for so long that even today they shudder at the thought of approaching treasures of wisdom that are intimately and deeply connected with evolution. It is much pleasanter to say: “If I protect myself from the devil, if I give myself to Christ with the simple-heartedness of a child, I shall be blessed, and my soul will find salvation.” But in its deep foundations, human life is by no means such a simple matter. And it is essential for the future of human evolution that these things we are now discussing shall not be withheld. It must be known that the art of speaking and the art of thinking have become part of evolution only because they were received through the mediation of Lucifer. The luciferic element can still be observed in thinking. Speech, which has for long ages been differentiated and adapted to earthly needs, has already been assailed by Ahriman. It is he who has brought about different tongues on earth. Whereas the luciferic tendency is always toward unification, the fundamental tendency of the ahrimanic principle is differentiation. What would thinking be if it were not luciferic?

If thinking were not luciferic, human beings on the earth would be like one whose thought was utterly non-luciferic, namely Goethe. Goethe was one of those who, in a certain respect, deliberately set out to confront and defy the luciferic powers. That, however, makes it essential to keep constant hold of the concrete, individual reality. The moment you generalize or unify—at that moment you are nearing luciferic thinking. If you were to contemplate each human individual, each single plant, each single animal, each single stone in itself alone, having in mind the one, single object, not classifying into genera and species, not generalizing in your thought—then you would be little prone to luciferic thinking. But anyone who was to attempt such a thing, even as a child, would never get beyond the lowest class in any modern school.

The fact of the matter is that the universal thinking implicit in pagan wisdom has gradually been exhausted. The human constitution is such that this luciferic principle of unification can no longer be of much real service to people on earth. This has been counteracted by the fact that the God-created nature of the human being has followed in the wake of earth evolution, has become related to, allied with the earth. And because this is so, through their own inherent nature, people are less allied with the luciferic element which always tends to draw them away from the earth.

But woe betide if humanity were simply to draw away from the luciferic element without putting something different in its place. That would bring nothing but evil. For then human beings would grow together with the earth, that is to say with the particular territory on earth where they are born; and cultural life would become completely specialized, completely differentiated. We can already see this tendency developing. It has taken root most markedly since the beginning of the nineteenth century; but the tendency to split up into smaller groups has been all too apparent as a result of the catastrophic world war. Chauvinism is more and more gaining the upper hand until it will finally lead people to split up to such an extent that at last a group will embrace only one single human being! Things could come to the point where individual human beings would again split into right and left, and be at war within themselves; left would be at loggerheads with right. Such tendencies are even now evident in the evolution of humankind. To combat this, a counterweight must be created; and this counterweight can only be created if, like the old wisdom inherent in paganism, a new wisdom, acquired by the free resolve and will of human beings, is infused into earthly culture. This new wisdom must again be Initiation wisdom.

And here we come to a chapter that must not be withheld from modern knowledge If, in the future, people were to do nothing themselves toward acquiring a new wisdom, then, without their consciousness, the whole of culture would become ahrimanic, and it would be easy for the influences issuing from Ahriman's incarnation to permeate all civilization on the earth. Precautions must therefore be taken in regard to the streams by which the ahrimanic form of culture is furthered. What would be the result if people were to follow the strong inclination they have today to let things drift on as they are, without understanding and guiding into right channels those streams which lead to an ahrimanic culture? As soon as Ahriman incarnates at the destined time in the West, the whole of culture would be impregnated with his forces. What else would come in his train? Through certain stupendous acts he would bring to humanity all the clairvoyant knowledge which until then can be acquired only by dint of intense labor and effort. People could live on as materialists, they could eat and drink—as much as may be left after the war!—and there would be no need for any spiritual efforts. The ahrimanic streams would continue their unimpeded course. When Ahriman incarnates in the West at the appointed time, he would establish a great occult school for the practice of magic arts of the greatest grandeur, and what otherwise can be acquired only by strenuous effort would be poured over humankind.

Let it never be imagined that Ahriman will appear as a kind of hoaxer, playing mischievous tricks on human beings. No, indeed! Lovers of ease who refuse to have anything to do with spiritual science would fall prey to his magic, for by means of these stupendous magic arts he would be able to make great numbers of human beings into seers—but in such a way that the clairvoyance of each individual would be strictly differentiated. What one person would see, a second and a third would not see. Confusion would prevail and in spite of being made receptive to clairvoyant wisdom, people would inevitably fall into strife on account of the sheer diversity of their visions. Ultimately, however, they would all be satisfied with their own particular vision, for each of them would be able to see into the spiritual world. In this way all culture on the earth would fall prey to Ahriman. Human beings would succumb to Ahriman simply through not having acquired by their own efforts what Ahriman is ready and able to give them. No more evil advice could be given than to say: “Stay just as you are! Ahriman will make all of you clairvoyant if you so desire. And you will desire it because Ahriman's power will be very great.” But the result would be the establishment of Ahriman's kingdom on earth and the overthrow of everything achieved hitherto by human culture; all the disastrous tendencies unconsciously cherished by humankind today would take effect.

Our concern is that the wisdom of the future—a clairvoyant wisdom—shall be rescued from the clutches of Ahriman. Again let it be repeated that there is only one book of wisdom, not two kinds of wisdom. The issue is whether this wisdom is in the hands of Ahriman or of Christ. It cannot come into the hands of Christ unless people fight for it. And they can only fight for it by telling themselves that by their own efforts they must assimilate the content of spiritual science before the time of Ahriman s appearance on earth.

That, you see, is the cosmic task of spiritual science. It consists in preventing knowledge from becoming—or remaining ahrimanic. A good way of playing into Ahriman s hands is to exclude everything of the nature of knowledge from denominational religion and to insist that simple faith is enough. If people cling to this simple faith, they condemn their soul to stagnation and then the wisdom that must be rescued from Ahriman cannot find entry. The point is not whether people do or do not simply receive the wisdom of the future but whether they work upon it; and those who do must take upon themselves the solemn duty of saving earthly culture for Christ, just as the ancient Rishis and initiates pledged themselves not to yield to Lucifer's proviso that humankind be enticed away from the earth.

The root of the matter is that for the wisdom of the future too, a struggle is necessary, a struggle similar to that waged against Lucifer by the ancient initiates through whose intermediary the faculties of speech and of thinking were transmitted to humanity. Just as it devolved upon the initiates of the primeval wisdom to wrest from Lucifer that which has become human reason, human intellect, so the insight which is to develop in the future into the inner realities of things must be wrested from the ahrimanic powers. Such are the issues—and these issues play strongly into life itself.

I recently read some notes written shortly before his death by one who was a friend of the anthroposophical movement. He had been wounded in the war and lay for a long time in hospital where, in the course of the operations performed on him, he had many a glimpse into the spiritual world. The last lines he wrote contain a remarkable passage, describing a vision which came to him not long before his death. In this last experience, the atmosphere around him became, as he expresses it, like dense granite, weighing upon his soul. Such an impression can be understood in the light of the knowledge that we have to battle for the wisdom of the future; for the ahrimanic powers do not allow this wisdom to be wrested from them without a struggle. Let it not be thought that wisdom can be attained through blissful visions. Real wisdom has to be acquired “in travail and suffering.” What I have just told you about the dying man is a very good picture of such suffering, for in this struggle for the wisdom of the future, one of the most frequent experiences is that the world is pressing in upon us, as though the air had suddenly frozen into granite. It is possible to know why this is so. We have only to remember that it is the endeavor of the ahrimanic powers to reduce the earth to a state of complete rigidification. Their victory would be won if they succeeded in bringing earth, water, and air into this rigidified state. Were that to happen, the earth could not again acquire the Saturn warmth from which it proceeded and which must be regained in the Vulcan epoch; and to prevent this is the aim of the ahrimanic powers. A trend which has an important bearing on this is the lack of enthusiasm in human souls at the present time for the content of spiritual science. If this lack of enthusiasm were to persist, the first impulse toward the rigidification of the earth would emanate from human souls themselves, from their apathy, their indolence and love of ease. If you reflect that this rigidification is the aim of the Ahrimanic powers, you will not be surprised that compression, the feeling that life is becoming granite-like, is one of the experiences that must be undergone in the struggle for the wisdom of the future.

But remember that people today can prepare themselves to look into the spiritual world by apprehending with their healthy human reason what spiritual science has to offer. The effort applied in study that lets itself be guided by healthy human reason can be part of the struggle which leads eventually to vision of the spiritual world. Many tendencies will have to be overcome, but for people of today the fundamental difficulty is that when they want to understand spiritual science they have to battle against their own granite-like skulls. If the human skull were less hard, less granite-like, spiritual science would be far more widely accepted at the present time. Infinitely more effective than any philistine avoidance of the ahrimanic powers would be to battle against Ahriman through sincere, genuine study of the content of spiritual science. For then human beings would gradually come to perceive spiritually the danger that must otherwise befall the earth physically, of being rigidified into granite-like density.

And so it must be emphasized that the wisdom of the future can be attained only through privations, travail, and pain; it must be attained by enduring the attendant sufferings of body and soul for the sake of the salvation of human evolution. Therefore the unwavering principle should be never to let oneself be deterred by suffering from the pursuit of this wisdom. So far as the external life of humankind is concerned, what is needed is that in the future the danger of the frozen rigidification—which, to begin with, would manifest in the moral sphere—shall be removed from the earth. But this can happen only if people envisage spiritually, feel inwardly and counter with their will, what would otherwise become physical reality.

At bottom, it is simply due to faint heartedness that people today are unwilling to approach spiritual science. They are not conscious of this, but it is so, nevertheless; they are fearful of the difficulties that will have to be encountered on every hand. When people come to spiritual science they so often speak of the need for “upliftment.” By this they usually mean a sense of comfort and inner well-being. But that cannot be offered, for it would simply lull them into stupor and draw them away from the light they need. What is essential is that from now onward, knowledge of the driving forces of evolution must not be withheld from humankind. It must be realized that in very truth the human being is balanced as it were between the luciferic and the ahrimanic powers, and that the Christ has become a companion of human beings, leading them, first away from the battle with Lucifer, and then into the battle with Ahriman.

The evolution of humanity must be understood in the light of these facts. One who presents secrets of cosmic existence in the way that must be done in spiritual science is often laughed to scorn, for example about the use of the principle of the number seven—as you will find in my book Theosophy. But you will notice that people do not laugh when the rainbow is described as sevenfold, or the scale—tonic, second, third, and so on, up to the octave which is a repetition of the tonic. In the physical world these things are accepted, but not when it comes to the spiritual. What must be regained here is something that was implicit in the old pagan wisdom. A last glimmer of this pagan wisdom in regard to a matter like the principle of the number seven is to be found in the Pythagorean school—which was actually a Mystery school. You can read about Pythagoras today in any text book; but you will never find any understanding of the reason why he based the world order on number. The reason was because in the ancient wisdom everything was based on number. And a last glimmer of insight into the wisdom contained in numbers still survived when Pythagoras founded his school. Other branches of the ancient wisdom survived much longer, some indeed until the sixth and seventh centuries of the Christian era. Up to that time many true things about the higher worlds are said in the sphere of what is called natural philosophy. And then, gradually, this primeval intelligence in humankind ran dry—if I may use this expression.

Let us picture some orthodox representative of modern learning sitting in a corner and saying: “What nonsense these anthroposophists talk! What do they mean by asserting that the primeval wisdom has run dry? Wonderful, epoch-making results have been achieved, above all during the last few centuries, and are still being achieved. There may have been a temporary halt in 1914, but at any rate up to then marvels were accomplished!” But if you look candidly and without bias at what has been achieved most recently, you will arrive at the following conclusion. Admittedly, masses of notes have been collected—masses of scientific and historical data. This kind of collecting has become the fashion. Countless experiments have been made and described. But now ask yourselves: Are there any fundamentally new ideas in all that this modern age has produced? New ideas, new conceptions were given by individual spirits like Goethe but Goethe has not been understood. If you study recent findings of natural science or historical research, it will be clear to you that, with respect to ideas, there is nothing new. Certainly, Darwin made journeys, described many things he saw on these journeys and gathered it all into an idea. But if you grasp the idea of evolution in its details, as idea, you will find it in the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras. So too you will find the fundamental principles of modern natural science in Aristotle-that is to say in the pre-Christian era. These ideas are treasures of the primeval wisdom—springing from a luciferic source. But the primeval wisdom has run dry, and something new in the form of insight into the spiritual world must be attained. A certain willingness on the part of humanity is necessary to undertake the labor entailed by really new ideas. And humankind today is sorely in need of new ideas, especially concerning the realm and the life of the soul. Fundamentally, all that science tells us in regard to the soul amounts to nothing more than a collection of words. What is taught in the lecture halls about thinking, feeling, and willing is simply a matter of words thrown out spasmodically. It amounts to little more than the sounds of the words. There is hardly the beginning of an attempt to take seriously anything that is really new.

In this connection one may have curious experiences! Some time ago I was invited to speak to a “Schopenhauer Society” in Dresden. I thought to myself: Yes—a Schopenhauer society—that must surely be something out of the ordinary! So I tried to show how the contrast between sleeping and waking, between waking up and going to sleep is to be understood in the psychological sense, how the soul is involved. I spoke of something I have recently mentioned to you, namely, that a zero-point is there at the moments of falling asleep and waking up, that sleep is not merely a cessation of the waking state, but bears the same relation to the waking state as debts bear to assets.

If you were to search through modern psychology you would not find the slightest trace of any attempt to get to the root of these far-reaching matters. After the lecture, in a “discussion” as it was called, certain learned members of the audience got up to speak. One of these philosophers made a really splendid statement, to the following effect. He said: “What we have been hearing could not possibly be a concern of serious science. Serious science has other, very different matters with which to occupy itself. We can know nothing of what has just been put before us so plausibly; none of it is a concern of human cognition. Moreover we have known it all for a long time.” In other words, therefore: what we cannot know is something with which we have long been familiar!

Now contradictions do exist, but contradictions of this kind exist only in the heads of present-day scholars! If someone says that certain things cannot be known, that they are not objects of human cognition—well and good, that is his opinion. But if he says in the same breath that he has known all about them for a long time, then there is an obvious contradiction. Erudite scholars of today often have a habit of placing two diametrically opposite opinions side by side in this way.

This kind of thinking has a great deal to do with the present situation. An individual—thanks to the Divine Powers and also, be it remembered, to Lucifer and Ahriman—is often able to form a fairly sound judgment of these things; but when it comes to presenting them to the world—that is a different matter altogether. Many people are willing to embark upon the study of spiritual science provided they find a society of rather sectarian tendencies in which they can take refuge. But when they have to face the world and present something of which the world itself possesses evidence, everything is apt to go up in smoke and they become veritable philistines. And then Ahriman's progress is greatly furthered.

The first thing to realise is that Yoga is not a sudden, convulsive event, but a process of gradual training, inner transformation. It does not consist, as is often supposed, in a series of external adjustments and ascetic practices. Everything must run its course in the depths of the soul.

It is often said that the first steps of Initiation are fraught with perils and grave dangers. There is a measure of truth in this. Initiation, or Yoga, is a coming-to-birth of the higher soul which lies latent in every human being. The astral body is faced with dangers analogous to those attending physical birth; there is travail before the divine soul comes forth from the desire-nature of man. The difference is that the birth of Spirit is a much longer process than that of physical birth.

Let us take another comparison. The higher soul is closely linked with the animal soul. By their fusion the passions are tempered, spiritualised and dominated according to the strength of man's intelligence and will. This fusion is of benefit to man but he pays for it by the loss of clairvoyance. Imagine to yourself a green liquid, produced by a combination of blue and yellow elements. If you succeed in separating them, the yellow will descend and the blue will rise to the surface. Something analogous happens when, through Yoga, the animal-soul is separated from the higher soul. The latter acquires clairvoyant vision; the former is left to its own devices if it has not been purified by the self and it is then given over to its passions and desires. This often happens in the case of mediums. The ‘Guardian of the Threshold’ protects man from this danger.

The first condition requisite for the Initiate is that his character shall be strong and that he shall be master of his passions. Yoga must be preceded by a rigorous discipline and the attainment of certain qualities, the first of which is inner calm. Ordinary ‘morality’ is not enough, for this relates merely to man's conduct in the outer world. Yoga is related to the inner man.

If it is said that compassion suffices, our answer will be: compassion is good and necessary but has nothing directly to do with occult training. Compassion without wisdom is weak and powerless.

The task of the occultist, of the true Initiate, is to change the direction of his life's current. The actions of man today are impelled and determined by his feelings—that is to say, by impulses from the outer world. Actions determined by space and time have no significance. Space and time must be transcended. How can we achieve this?

(1) Control of thought. We must be able to concentrate our thought upon a single object and hold it there.

(2) Control of actions. Our attitude to all actions, be they trivial or significant, must be to dominate, regulate and hold them under the control of the will. They must be the outcome of inner initiative.

(3) Equilibrium of soul. There must be moderation in sorrow and in joy. Goethe has said that the soul who loves is, till death, equally happy, equally sad. The occultist must bear the deepest joy and the deepest sorrow with the same equanimity of soul.

(4) Optimism—the attitude which looks for the good in everything. Even in crime and in seeming absurdity there is some element of good. A Persian legend says that Christ once passed by the corpse of a dog and that His disciples turned from it in disgust. But the Christ said: ‘Lo! the teeth are beautiful.’

(5) Confidence. The mind must be open to every new phenomenon. We must never allow our judgments to be determined by the past.

(6) Inner balance, which is the result of these preparatory measures. Man is then ripe for the inner training of the soul. He is ready to set his feet upon the path.

(7) Meditation. We must be able to make ourselves blind and deaf to the outer world and our memories of it, to the point where even the shot of a gun does not disturb. This is the prelude to meditation. When this inner void has been created, man is able to receive the prompting of his inner being. The soul must then be awakened in its very depths by certain ideas able to impel it towards its source.

In the book Light on the Path, there are four sentences which may be employed in meditation and inner concentration. They are very ancient and have been used for centuries by Initiates. Their meaning is profound and many-sided.

“Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears.”

“Before the ear can hear, it must have lost it's sensitiveness.”

“Before the voice can speak in the presence of the masters, it must have lost the power to wound.”

“Before the soul can stand in the presence of the masters, its feet must be washed in the blood of the heart.”

These four sentences have magical power. But we must bring them to life within us, we must love them as a mother loves her child.

This, the first stage of training, has power to develop the etheric body and particularly its upper part which corresponds to the head. Having trained the upper part of the etheric body, the disciple must begin to control the systems of breathing and blood, the lungs and the heart. In remote ages of earthly evolution, man lived in the waters and breathed through gills like fish. Sacred literature indicates the time when he began to breathe the airs of heaven. Genesis says “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”

The disciple must purify and bring about changes in his breathing system. All development proceeds from chaos to harmony, from lack of rhythm to rhythm (eurhythmy). Rhythm must be brought into the instincts.

In ancient times, the various degrees of Initiation were called by particular names:

First degree: The Raven (he who remains at the threshold). The raven appears in all mythologies. In the Edda, he whispers into the ear of Wotan what he sees afar off.

Second degree: the hidden Scholar, or the Occultist.

Third degree: the Warrior (struggle and strife).

Fourth degree: the Initiate bears the name of his people—he is a “Persian” or a “Greek” because his soul has grown to a point where it includes the soul of his people.

Sixth degree: the Initiate is a Sun-Hero, or Sun-Messenger, because his progress is as harmonious and, rhythmic as that of the Sun.

Seventh degree: the Initiate is a ‘Father,’ because he has power to make disciples of men and to be the protector of all; he is the Father of the new being, the ‘twice-born’ in the risen soul.

The Sun represents the vivifying movement and rhythm of the planetary system. The legend of Icarus is a legend of Initiation. Icarus has attempted to reach the Sun-sphere prematurely, without adequate preparation, and is cast down.

The new rhythm of breathing produces a change in the blood. Man is purified to the point of himself being able to generate blood without the aid of plant-nourishment. Prolonged meditation changes the nature of the blood. Man begins to exhale less carbon; he retains a certain amount and uses it for building up his body. The air he exhales is pure. He gradually becomes able to live on the forces contained in his own breath. He accomplishes an alchemical transmutation.

What are the higher stages of Yoga?

(1) The Initiate finds calm within his soul. Astral vision—where everything is a symbolic image of reality is acquired. This astral vision which arises during the sleeping state, is still incomplete.

(2) Dreams cease to be chaotic. Man understands the relation between dream-symbolism and reality; he gains control of the astral world. And then the inner astral light awakens in the soul who perceives other souls in their real being.

(3) Continuity of consciousness is set up between the waking state and the sleeping state. Astral life is reflected in dreams but in deep sleep, pure sounds arise. The soul experiences the inner words issuing from all beings as a mighty harmony. This harmony is a manifestation of reality; it was called by Plato and Pythagoras, the harmony of the spheres. This is not a poetic metaphor but a reality experienced by the soul as a vibration emanating from the soul of the world.

Goethe, who was initiated between the periods of his life at Leipzig and Strasburg, knew of the harmony of the spheres. He expressed it at the beginning of Faust in words spoken by the Archangel Raphael:

“The Sun makes music as of old
Amid the sister-spheres of heaven.
On its predestined circle rolls
With roar of thunder.”

In deep sleep, the Initiate hears these sounds as if they were the notes of trumpets and the rolling of thunder.

An initiate is one who is able to communicate from self to self with other individualities. The fourth step on the path of knowledge is initiation. One cannot speak about the nature of the initiate.

To understand Western spiritual culture, we need to note a few things. The starting point of our reflection today is the event that Tauler experienced in the Middle Ages. He preached passionately as a Christian. One day, a personality came to him who apparently wanted to listen to him. But he soon turned out to be greater than Tauler. He said that this sermon is only conceptual, it is only intellectual knowledge, a matter of memory. But through practice, Tauler soon brought him to the point where he preached differently, that he spoke through the Spirit. This layman walked with the Master Jesus of Nazareth.

Christianity originated from a circle that came from oriental sources. The Knights Templar had a home where Solomon's Temple used to stand. This is only an external accessory. One can distinguish between an exoteric side, an esoteric side and a secret doctrine. The aim of the Knights Templar was to give Christian life a completely new direction. The cults were hidden in a completely secret service. They differed significantly from what was then the Christian cult of the West. They were based on an oath that had been taken by a Christian patriarch. It was a current that can even be seen as anti-Christian. The worship of the divinity of Christ was to be done away with. It is an emphasis of the faith of the Knights Templar in John the Baptist. It was a revival of what had existed in Christianity within the Gnostic school.

In what way was the Templars a new influence in Christianity, a revival of the old teachings? Jesus accompanied the cultural development to the present day. - “I remain with you until the end of the world.”

One could learn as little about the true nature of Christianity through study as one can today. The most diverse studies on Christianity have been made. One is amazed at this. Just take Pfleiderer, for example. But this cannot give satisfaction to anyone who stands on the ground of Christianity. Historical facts cannot help us. It is about an eye-to-eye vision with Jesus, about an immediate vital influence. There must be a small circle that knows the truth not only through the knowledge of the letter, but through direct life. The Knights Templar said to themselves: We can only be initiated into the secrets by the chela who has been left to us.

No one can skip any of these stages. There are four stages. “I baptize you with water, but one is coming who will baptize with fire and the Holy Spirit.” The baptism with water is associated with the personality of John the Baptist.

A large part of Goethe's initiatory knowledge can be traced back to Rosicrucianism. Not only the outer part of it, but the stream of mystical facts has existed. With Swedenborg, there is a danger of being easily taken for a charlatan. But before he came to his mysticism, he was at the height of the science of his time. The Academy of Sciences collected the learned writings of Swedenborg. This current also had a great influence on Goethe. Swedenborg was influenced by a current of Atlantic culture. This influence can only be a very peculiar one, and one can see how difficult these mystical things are for those who try to understand them. The influence of this Atlantic school of thought can be as follows.

The Atlanteans inhabited a country that stretched between Africa, Europe and America. It perished many thousands of years before our era. Plato still speaks of a last remnant, of the island of Poseidonis, which is said to have perished about ten thousand years before our era. For the mystical researcher, the fact of the Atlanteans' existence is certain. This fourth race had particularly developed one spiritual power, which has taken a back seat in our society in favor of another power. Their memory was their main strength. It is less important for us to know what they looked like on the outside. Our fifth race has developed the intellect. The Atlanteans did not calculate and think like us. Our calculating and thinking is a product of the fifth human race. Another power of mind will replace the intellect in the future. The Atlanteans never formed the judgment 2 x 2 = 4. There was no such judgment at that time. Man remembered that 2 x 2 = 4 was taken earlier. He also knew general sentences, but he could not summarize certain types of animals. The general judgments were only formed in the fifth race.

This shows how one faculty can be overshadowed by another. The strong sense of smell in certain animals is later overshadowed by the intellect of humans. This Atlantean culture has been preserved in today's spiritual development. Certain influences flow into our cultural life. Examples of this are Leadbeater and Swedenborg. However, this influence is always somewhat chaotic. Since the eighteenth century, there has been a very intense influence of this Atlantic Lodge within our Western development. Many are under this influence without knowing it. The influence goes to the subconscious. This can always be influenced by certain currents. This can be observed in somnambulists. Many people who advocate something today do not know that they are under this influence.

What did the Knights Templar bring to Western thought? They broke away from Christianity. Then astrology comes to them. Within the Knights Templar we have a complete system of astrology. They now turn their gaze up to the starry world, to the great connections of the universe, away from Jesus. Thomas Aquinas predicted Copernicus [in the thirteenth century], as did Cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus [in the fifteenth century].

Two things can be seen:
1. A great plan has been designed, under the influence of which we stand in the Theosophical Society.
2. Religions have a common core of truth.

This is expressed in the second program of the Theosophical Society. One also finds the teaching that the earth revolves around the sun in Cusanus and later in Copernicus. The last point has emerged in a long series of developments. Western culture had emerged from the same source from which Gnostic knowledge had originally emerged.

A comparison: I have a child to educate until adolescence. I don't want him to absorb knowledge too soon that makes the mind strong but does not sufficiently ennoble the heart. Certain truths are left untouched. When the heart has been purified and ennobled in the right way, then one approaches it with the truths of nature. It is the same in the greater world of nature. First comes the development of the emotional side and then that of the intellectual powers. The development of literature is subject to the same influences.

We have a mystical direction and a scientific direction. The first includes the well-known great mystics, the second the naturalists such as: Lamarck, Darwin, Copernicus and so on. These two currents still run side by side today. The union has not yet been found.

Reincarnation and karma are contained in the Bible as self-evident truths. The higher soul of man was the content of all wisdom religions. The mysteries had to cultivate this higher soul above all else. This higher soul should now recede, so that the lower soul can experience development. This too should receive a higher religious culture. This ennobling of the individual personality was achieved all the more surely the more one disregarded the development of the higher soul. It is necessary to give humanity a new impetus from this theosophical side.

The materialistic attitude has gained a great influence, and has also gained a deep influence on the moral life. This can be seen from statements such as the following: Hamlet's tragedy is nothing more than a product of the transformation of what Shakespeare ate. - In the long run, there is no morality in the materialistic view. Hence the necessity for the Theosophical movement. In the past, world views were still possible on a materialistic basis. Today, after the research of natural science, no longer.

As long as Christianity was only concerned with the sanctification of the personality, it was not necessary to consider the greater truths and the higher life of the soul. There is a great connection with what I have said about the mysteries. You will see on closer examination that Christianity wanted to make the mysteries popular. This is evident from many sayings: “Blessed are they that have believed without seeing,” “Blessed are they that have begged for the Spirit,” and so on. What was in the mysteries was to be handed down to humanity piece by piece.

The mystery process was carried out in different stages:

— The first stage was the purification of the personality, the purification of the astral body. Pythagoras also subjected his disciples to a preparatory and purification process.
— Then he taught them about the nature of the external world.
— Then he gave them the teaching about re-embodiment and karma, the law of the moral world order.

This process then also became external, historical; it became a mystical fact within the historical development itself:

— Up to the twelfth century, Christianity is the process of purification of the fifth race of mankind.
— Then comes the teaching about the nature of external nature. In the case of humanity, this takes centuries.
— Then comes the teaching about reincarnation and karma. The development of the individual is repeated in the development of humanity.

The repetition of the mystery process can be found in the theosophical current.

[ 1 ] Goethe spoke of art as a revelation of secret natural laws that would have to remain hidden forever without it. In this way he brings art close to knowledge. He makes it the interpreter of the secrets of the world. He has thus prophetically pointed to something that must be the ideal of those contemporary spirits who know how to interpret the signs of the times. The spirits envision an art that seeks to reconnect with the paths of the searching soul that lead to the sources of existence. They want to speak to the mind in need of beauty; but what they speak should at the same time be the expression of the highest truths and insights. Religion, mysticism, research and art should flow from a primal source. In this way, the human spirit today seeks to renew something that was present in the dawn of our cultures. The Egyptian pyramids and sphinxes are the great truths embodied in small stones, which the sages of the land of Nile had to proclaim. In the ancient poetry of the Indians we also have monumental documents of the wisdom of this people. And in the ancient Greek drama, the intuitive imagination senses a work of art that was also the expression of the religious truths of primeval times. The hero of this drama is God, who descends into matter, suffers and finds his redemption in the work of man. - If we look at the development of the world in this way, we can look back on a human culture in which religion, art and science still formed an undivided unity. The One Truth found its expression in forms that represented beauty, wisdom and religious exaltation at the same time. Only a later period found a special religious expression for the mind, an artistic one for the senses and a scientific one for reason. This is how it had to be, for only when man developed each of his faculties on separate paths to its highest flowering could perfection be achieved. For thousands of years, truth, beauty and divinity went their separate ways. The high works of art of the Greeks and of all subsequent ages were made possible by a striving for beauty that followed its own laws and gave only the imagination the role of master. The depths of the Christian religion stem from a deepening of the soul that eluded the forms of beautiful sensuality. And the achievements of our science have sprung from rational thought and strict experience, which granted no access to the imagination or the religious needs of the soul.

[ 2 ] What has sprung from one source strives today to reunite. What did Richard Wagner want other than a work of art that also elevates the soul to the sources of the divine? And what did Goethe really want when he sought to lead the hero to redemption in the regions of the highest truth in the second part of his “Faust”? He says himself (on January 29, 1827 to Eckermann): “But still, everything (in Faust) is sensual and, thought of in the theater, will fall well into everyone's eyes. And that is all I wanted. If it is only so that the crowd of spectators enjoys the appearance; the initiated will at the same time not miss the higher meaning.” And this “higher meaning” is none other than that of human existence in general. And it is shown by religion, art and wisdom.

[ 3 ] If art becomes aware of its connection with the truth, then it must draw its inspiration from the same source as religion and science.

[ 4 ] Such awareness permeates the personality whose creation is hereby presented to the German public. Edouard Schuré, the intellectual and profound French writer, should have a significant impact on our contemporaries. For it was given to him to be a herald of truth as an artist and a revealer of the mystical paths of the soul as a researcher. With an intuitive spirit, he immersed himself in the mysteries of the human spirit. His “Great Initiates” (Les Grands Initiés) lead to those heights of human development on which Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Pythagoras, Orpheus, Plato and Jesus walked. The ways in which these leaders showed their peoples and times the goal of humanity, which they drew from the source of their divine insight, are described in brilliant colors. In his books on “Musical Drama” and “Richard Wagner”, Schuré had already shown the goal of our time, which lies in the unification of the truth-seeking spirit, the religiously striving soul and the beauty-seeking senses. In the “Sanctuaries of the Orient” (Sanctuaires d'Orient), he recreated the sacred drama of Eleusis with a brilliant sense, that primal drama which was both a work of art and a religious cult act. The later Greek drama applied the art form, which had previously been the shaper of divine world action, to the sphere of human action and experience.

[ 5 ] This is how Edouard Schuré - to use Goethe's expression - moved from the search for truth to the artistic interpretation of truth. In the preface to his “Sanctuaries of the Orient” he said (1898) that he wanted to express “through the artistic word and in the translucent medium of poetry” what goes on in the deep shafts of the searching and striving human soul. He calls the “Children of Lucifer” and the associated drama “La Saur Gardienne” the “theater of the soul”.

[ 6 ] Schuré's entire oeuvre shows how deeply imbued he is with the need to reunite contemporary culture with the intimate mystical experience of the soul. For him, the dramatic action is a symbol of the deeper processes within the human being. What the eye sees is an image of what the soul experiences when the forces that connect it with the eternal are at work within it. One would like to write the words of Goethe's Chorus mysticus about the drama “Children of Lucifer”: “Everything transient is only a parable - the inadequate, here it becomes an event - the indescribable, here it is done.” For what is taking place here in the context of the fourth century, when Hellenism and Christianity fought the great battle, is a parable for two eternal forces in the struggling soul. Man strives eternally from the depths to the heights; and eternally he must expect redemption from the heights. Freedom and grace are the poles that strive towards each other, longing and will strive to complement each other, these “two souls” wrestle in the human breast. And all external processes are the images of the wrestling souls. Creating and receiving are embodied in a thousand forms. And what takes place between man and man is an interaction between creating and receiving, or - to use Goethe's words again - between taking and giving. And it is always through the “miracle of love” that balance is achieved. This “riddle of the world” cannot be grasped with the intellect, it must be experienced with the deepest forces of the soul. Whoever loves creatively, the living power flows towards him and unites with his life in a creative union. In the loving devotion of one's own, the seed is planted which inserts the human being into the eternal weaving of the world. Just as the blood flows through the body, so these secrets of humanity flow through Schuré's drama.

[ 7 ] The “Children of Lucifer” are “theater of the soul”, because behind the plot the eternal hieroglyphics of the struggling human spirit can be seen. They are inspired by what in mysticism is called the One Cause of humanity. Imagination and mystical sense have an equal share in this work of art. If the mystical sense does not lose itself in the darkness of feeling, but calls the clarity of seeing its own, and if the imagination does not abandon itself to the arbitrariness of subjective ideas, but follows the intuition of truth, then alone can such a work of art come into being.

[ 8 ] If we could see works of art of this kind in the theater, they would be temples of truth; and beauty would not be a servant of the religious sense, but its child. And from such a deepening of art it could be hoped that it would also have an effect on its sisters: religion and wisdom. Reason, imagination and religious edification could once again come into harmony with one another.

[ 9 ] In Schuré, this harmony lives as a goal. Because he is a mystic as an artist, and because he has the power to express mystical knowledge in the form of art, time should listen to him. In his work lives something of what the future must bring.

[ 10 ] The last centuries have reshaped our lives with reason and the senses; but the “life of the soul” will be brought by those who once again imprint the great intuitions of the true and the divine on external life. It is in this spirit that this drama is to be presented to the German readership.

At the beginning of the new volume (June 1905)

[ 11 ] The new volume of “Lucifer-Gnosis” begins with No. 25. Something new will be added to the previous content in that each issue will contain articles on the relationship of Theosophy, occultism, mysticism and so on to the great questions of life in the present. The next issue will contain, for example: “What is the significance of Theosophy in the life of contemporary man and the present?” Furthermore, in response to many requests, information will be provided on the theosophical movement, on occultist endeavors and everything that belongs to it in contemporary spiritual life. The next issues will appear in the next few days. And care will be taken to ensure more punctual publication in future. The publishing house M. Altmann in Leipzig will take over the commission publishing from No. 25 onwards.

It is only of recent times that the truths of occultism have been the subject of public lectures. Formerly, these truths were only revealed in secret societies, to those who had passed through certain degrees of initiation and had sworn to obey the laws of the Order through the whole of their life. Today, man is entering upon a very critical period. Occult truths are beginning to be disclosed to the public. In a matter of twenty years or so, a certain number of them will already be common knowledge. Why is this? The reason is that humanity is entering upon a new phase which it is the object of this lecture to explain.

In the Middle Ages, occult truths were known in the Rosicrucian Movement. But whenever they leaked out, they were either misunderstood or distorted. In the eighteenth century they entered upon a phase of much dilletantism and charlatanry and at the beginning of the nineteenth century they were put entirely in the background by the physical sciences. It is only in our day that they are beginning to re-emerge and in the coming centuries they will play an important part in the development of mankind. In order to understand this, we must glance at the centuries preceding the advent of Christianity and follow the progress that has been made.

It does not require any very profound knowledge to realise the difference between a man of pre-Christian times and a man of today. Although his scientific knowledge was far less, man of olden times had deeper feelings and intuitions. He lived more in the world beyond—which he also perceived—than in the world of sense. There were some who entered into direct and actual communication with the astral and spiritual world. In the Middle Ages, when earthly existence was by no means comfortable, man still lived with his head in the heavens. True, the mediaeval cities were somewhat primitive, but they were a far truer representation of man's inner world than the cities of today. Not only the cathedrals but the houses and porches with their symbols reminded men of their faith, their inner feelings, their aspirations, and the home of their soul. Today, we have knowledge of many, many things and the relations among human beings have multiplied ad infinitum. But we live in cities that are like deafening factories in awful Babels, with nothing to remind us of our inner world. Our communion with this inner world is not through contemplation but through books. We have passed from intuition into intellectualism.

To find the origin of the stream of intellectualism we must go back further than the Middle Ages. The epoch of the birth of human intellect, the period when this transformation took place, lies about a thousand years before the Christian era. It is the epoch of Thales, Pythagoras, Buddha. Then for the first time arose philosophy and science, that is to say truth presented to the reason in the form of logic. Before this age, truth presented itself in the form of religion, of revelation received by the teachers and accepted by the masses. In our times, truth passes into the individual intelligence and would fain be proved by argument, would like to have its own wings clipped.

What has happened in the inner nature of man to justify this transition of his consciousness from one plane to another, from the plane of intuition to that of logic? Here we touch upon one of the fundamental laws of history—a law no longer recognised by contemporary thought. It is this: Humanity evolves in a way which enables the different elements and principles of man's being to unfold and develop in successive stages. What are these principles?

To begin with, man has a physical body in common with the mineral kingdom. The whole mineral world is found again in the chemistry of the body. He has an etheric body, which is, properly speaking, the vital principle within him. He has this etheric body in common with the plants. This principle engenders the process of nutrition and the forces of growth and re-production. Man has also an astral body in which feelings and sentiments, the power of enjoyment and of suffering are enkindled. He has the astral body in common with the animals.

Finally, there is a principle in man which cannot be spoken of as a body. It is his innermost essence, distinguishing him from all other entities, mineral, plant and animal. It is the self, the soul, the divine spark. The Hindus spoke of it as Manas; The Rosicrucians as the ‘Inexpressible.’ A body, in effect, is only part and parcel of another body, but the self, the ‘I’ of man exists in and by itself alone—“I am I.” This principle is addressed by others as ‘thou,’ or ‘you;’ it cannot be confused with anything else in the universe. By virtue of this inexpressible, incommunicable self, man rises above all created things of the Earth, above the animals, indeed above all creation. And only through this principle can he commune with the Infinite Self, with God. That is why, at certain definite times, the officiating hierophant in the ancient Hebrew sanctuaries said to the High Priest: Shem-Ham-Phores, which means: What is his name (the name of God)? He-Vo-He, or—in one word—Jev or Joph, meaning God, Nature, Man; or again, the inexpressible ‘I’ of man which is both human and divine.

These principles of man's being were laid down in remote ages of his vast evolutionary cycle—but they only unfold slowly, one by one.

The special mission of the period which began about a thousand years before the Christian era has been to develop the human Ego in the intellectual sense. But above the intellectual plane there is the plane of Spirit. It is the world of Spirit to which man will attain in the centuries to come, and to which he will be wending his way from now onwards. The germs of this future development have been cast into the world by the Christ and by true Christianity.

Before speaking of this world of Spirit, we must understand one of the forces by means of which humanity en masse passed from the astral to the intellectual plane. It was by virtue of a new kind of marriage. In olden times, marriages were made in the bosom of the same tribe or of the same clan—which was only an extension of the family. Sometimes, indeed, brothers and sisters married. Later on, men sought their wives outside the clan, the tribe, the civic community. The beloved became the stranger, the unknown. Love—which in days of yore had been merely a natural and social function—became personal desire, and marriage a matter of free choice. This is indicated in certain Greek myths like that of the rape of Helen and again in the Scandinavian and Germanic myths of Sigurd and Gudrun. Love becomes an adventure, woman a conquest from afar.

This change from patriarchial marriage to free marriage corresponds to the new development of man's intellectual faculties, of the Ego. There is a temporary eclipse of the astral faculties of vision and the power of reading directly in the astral and spiritual world—faculties which are included in ordinary speech under the name of inspiration.

Let us now turn to Christianity. The brotherhood of man and the cult of the One God are certainly features of it but they only represent the external, social aspect, not the inner, spiritual reality. The new, mysterious and transcendental element in Christianity is that it creates divine Love, the power which transforms man from within, the leaven by which the whole world is raised. Christ came to say: ”If you leave not mother, wife and your own body, you cannot be my disciple”

That does not imply the cessation of natural links. Love extends beyond the bounds of family to all human beings and is changed into vivifying, creative, transmuting power.

This Love was the fundamental principle of Rosicrucian thought but it was never understood by the outer world. It is destined to change the very essence of all religion, of all cults, of all science.

The progress of humanity is from unconscious spirituality (pre-Christian), through intellectualism (the present age), to conscious spirituality, where the astral and intellectual faculties unite once more and become dynamic through the power of the Spirit of Love, divine and human. In this sense, Theology will tend to become Theosophy.

What, in effect, is Theology? A knowledge of God imposed from without under the form of dogma, as a kind of supernatural logic. And what is Theosophy? A knowledge of God which blossoms like a flower in the depths of the individual soul. God, having vanished from the world, is reborn in the depths of the human heart.

In the Rosicrucian sense, Christianity is at once the highest development of individual freedom and universal religion. There is a community of free souls. The tyranny of dogma is replaced by the radiance of divine Wisdom, embracing intelligence, love and action.

The science which arises from this cannot be measured by its power of abstract reasoning but by its power to bring souls to flower and fruition. That is the difference between ‘Logia’ and ‘Sophia,’ between science and divine Wisdom, between Theology and Theosophy.

In this sense, Christ is the centre of the esoteric evolution of the West. Certain modern Theologians—above all in Germany—have tried to represent Christ as a simple, naive human being. This is a terrible error. The most sublime consciousness, the most profound Wisdom live in Him, as well as the most divine Love. Without such consciousness, how could He be a supreme manifestation in the life of our whole planetary evolution? What gave Him this power to rise so high above His own time? Whence came transcendental qualities?