The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dr. Steiner: Today I want you to summarize all your experiences of the last ten days and then we will discuss what is necessary.

Stockmeyer (the school administrator) reports: We began instruction on September 16, and Mr. Molt gave a short speech to the students. We had to somewhat change the class schedule we had discussed because the Lutheran and Catholic religion teachers were not available at the times we had set. We also had to combine some classes. In addition, we needed to include a short recess of five minutes in the period from 8-10 a.m.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, we can do that, but what happens during that period must remain the free decision of the teacher.

A teacher: During the language classes in the upper grades, it became apparent that some children had absolutely no knowledge of foreign languages. For that reason, at least for now, we must give three hours of English and three hours of French instead of the 1½ hours of each that we had planned. We also had to create a beginners’ class as well as one for more advanced students.

Dr. Steiner: What are you teaching in the eighth grade?

A teacher: The computation of interest. I plan to go on to the computation of discounts and exchanges.

Dr. Steiner: The two seventh- and eighth-grade teachers must remain in constant contact so that when one teacher leaves the class, he brings things to a kind of conclusion. When he returns, he then leads the class through a repetition. In the past few days, have you been able to determine how much the students already know?

A teacher: I was able to make an approximation.

Dr. Steiner: With your small class that certainly would have been possible, but hardly for the other teachers. Certainly, we can try to make it possible for you to change classes an average of once a week, but we must be careful that the exchange takes place only when you finish a topic.

A teacher: The seventh grade knows very little history.

Dr. Steiner: You will probably need to begin something like history from the very beginning in each class, since none of the students will have a proper knowledge of history. The children have probably learned what is common knowledge, but, as I have mentioned in the past, it is unlikely that any of them have a genuine understanding of history. Therefore, you must begin from the beginning in each class.

A teacher: Many parents have been unable to decide whether they should send their children to the independent religious instruction or the Lutheran or Catholic. Many of them wrote both in the questionnaire, since they want their children confirmed for family reasons.

Dr. Steiner: Here we must be firm. It’s either the one or the other. We will need to speak about this question more at a later time. A teacher: An economic question has arisen: Should those students who are paying tuition also purchase their own books? The factory takes care of all of these things for its children, but it could happen that children sit next to one another and one has a book he or she must return and the other a book he or she can keep. This would emphasize class differences.

Dr. Steiner: Clearly we can’t do things in that way, that some children buy their books and then keep them. The only thing we can do is raise the tuition by the amount of the cost of books and supplies, but, in general, we should keep things as they are with the other children. Therefore, all children should return their books.

A teacher: Should we extend that to such things as notebooks? That is common practice here in Stuttgart. Also, how should we handle the question of atlases and compasses?

Dr. Steiner: Of course, the best thing would be to purchase a supply of notebooks and such for each class. The children would then need to go to the teacher when they fill one notebook in order to obtain a new one. We could thus keep track of the fact that one child uses more notebooks than others. We should therefore see that there is a supply of notebooks and that the teacher gives them to the children as needed.

For compasses and other such items, problems arise if we simply allow the children to decide what to buy. Those children with more money will, of course, buy better things, and that is a real calamity. It might be a good idea if all such tools, including things for handwork, belong to the school and the children only use them.

As for atlases, I would suggest the following. We should start a fund for such things and handle the atlases used during the year in much the same way as the other supplies. However, each child should receive an atlas upon graduation. It would certainly be very nice if the children received something at graduation. Perhaps we could even do these things as awards for good work. A larger more beautiful book for those who have done well, something smaller for those who have done less, and for those who were lazy, perhaps only a map. That is certainly something we could do; however, we shouldn’t let it get out of hand.

A teacher: How should we handle the question of books for religious instruction? Until now, instructional materials were provided, but according to the new Constitution, that will probably no longer be so. We thought the children would purchase those books themselves and would pay the ministers directly for their teaching.

Dr. Steiner: I have nothing against doing it that way. However, I think that we should investigate how other schools are handling that, so that everything can move smoothly, at least this year. In the future, we must find our own way of working, but at least for this year, we should do it like the other schools. We need to act in accordance with the public schools. If they do not require the purchase of religion books and separate payment for instruction, we must wait until they do. It would certainly be helpful if we could say we are doing what the public schools are doing.

A teacher: Should we use the secondary schools as our model? Dr. Steiner: No, we should pay more attention to the elementary schools.

A teacher: Nothing is settled there yet.

Dr. Steiner: True. However, I would do what is common in the elementary schools, since the socialist government will not change much at first, but will just leave everything the way it has been. The government will make laws, but allow everything to stay the same.

A teacher: It seems advisable to keep track of what we teach in each class. But, of course, we should not do it the normal way. We should make the entries so that each teacher can orient him- or herself with the work of the other teachers.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, but if we do that in an orderly manner, we will need time, and that will leave time for the children to simply play around. When you are with the children as a teacher, you should not be doing anything else. What I mean is that you are not really in the classroom if you are doing something not directly connected with the children. When you enter the classroom, you should be with the children until you leave, and you should not give the children any opportunity to chatter or misbehave by not being present, for instance, by making entries in a record book or such things.

It would be much better to take care of these things among ourselves. Of course, I am assuming that the class teachers do not get into arguments about that, but respect one another and discuss the subject. If a teacher works with one class, then that teacher will also discuss matters with the others who teach that class. Each teacher will make his or her entries outside of the instructional period. Nothing, absolutely nothing that does not directly interact with the children can occur during class time.

A teacher: Perhaps we could do that during the recesses. Dr. Steiner: Why do we actually need to enter things? First, we must enter them, then someone else must read them. That is time lost for interacting with the students.

A teacher: Shouldn’t we also record when a student is absent?

Dr. Steiner: No, that is actually something we also do not need.

A teacher: If a child is absent for a longer time, we will have to inquire as to what the problem is.

Dr. Steiner: In the context of our not very large classes, we can do that orally with the children. We can ask who is absent and simply take note of it in our journals. That is something that we can do. We will enter that into the children’s reports, namely, how many times a child was absent, but we certainly do not need a class journal for that.

A teacher: I had to stop the children from climbing the chestnut trees, but we want to have as few rules as possible.

Dr. Steiner: Well, we certainly need to be clear that we do not have a bunch of angels at this school, but that should not stop us from pursuing our ideas and ideals. Such things should not lead us to think that we cannot reach what we have set as our goals. We must always be clear that we are pursuing the intentions set forth in the seminar. Of course, how much we cannot achieve is another question that we must particularly address from time to time. Today, we have only just begun, and all we can do is take note of how strongly social climbing has broken out.

However, there is something else that I would ask you to be aware of. That is, that we, as the faculty—what others do with the children is a separate thing—do not attempt to bring out into the public things that really concern only our school. I have been back only a few hours, and I have heard so much gossip about who got a slap and so forth. All of that gossip is going beyond all bounds, and I really found it very disturbing. We do not really need to concern ourselves when things seep out the cracks. We certainly have thick enough skins for that. But on the other hand, we clearly do not need to help it along. We should be quiet about how we handle things in the school, that is, we should maintain a kind of school confidentiality. We should not speak to people outside the school, except for the parents who come to us with questions, and in that case, only about their children, so that gossip has no opportunity to arise. There are people who like to talk about such things because of their own desire for sensationalism. However, it poisons our entire undertaking for things to become mere gossip. This is something that is particularly true here in Stuttgart since there is so much gossip within anthroposophical circles. That gossip causes great harm, and I encounter it in the most disgusting forms. Those of us on the faculty should in no way support it.

A teacher: In some cases, we may need to put less capable children back a grade. Or should we recommend tutoring for these children? Dr. Steiner: Putting children back a grade is difficult in the lower grades. However, it is easier in the upper grades. If it is at all possible, we should not put children back at all in the first two grades.

Specific cases are discussed.

Dr. Steiner: We should actually never recommend tutoring. We can recommend tutoring only when the parents approach us when they have heard of bad results. As teachers, we will not offer tutoring. That is something we do not do. It would be better to place a child in a lower grade.

Dr. Steiner: You should place these children at the front of the class, close to the teacher, without concern for their temperaments, so that the teacher can keep an eye on them. You can keep disruptive children under control only if you put them in a corner, or right up at the front, or way in the back of the class, so that they have few neighboring children, that is, no one in front or behind them.

A teacher: Sometimes children do not see well. I know of some children who are falling behind only because they are farsighted and no one has taken that into account.

Dr. Steiner: An attentive teacher will observe organic problems in children such as short-sightedness or deafness. It is difficult to have a medical examination for everything. Such examinations should occur only when the teachers recommend them.

When conventional school physicians perform the examinations, we easily come into problems of understanding. For now we want to avoid the visits of a school physician, since Dr. Noll is not presently here. It would be different if he were. Physicians unknown to the school would only cause us difficulties. The physician should, of course, act as an advisor to the teacher, and the teacher should be able to turn to the physician with trust when he or she notices something with the children.

With children who have learning difficulties, it often happens that suddenly something changes in them, and they show quite sudden improvement. I will visit the school tomorrow morning and will look at some of the children then, particularly those who are having difficulty.

A teacher: My fifth-grade class is very large, and the children are quite different from one another. It is very difficult to teach them all together and particularly difficult to keep them quiet.

Dr. Steiner: With a class as large as that, you must gradually attempt to treat the class as a choir and not allow anyone to be unoccupied. Thus, try to teach the class as a whole. That is why we did that whole long thing with the temperaments.

That children are more or less gifted often results from purely physical differences. Children often express only what they have within themselves, and it would be unjust not to allow the children who are at the proper age for that class (ten to eleven years old) to come along. There will always be some who are weak in one subject or another. That problem often stops suddenly. Children drag such problems along through childhood until a certain grade, and when the light goes on, they suddenly shed the problem. For that reason, we cannot simply leave children behind. We must certainly overcome particularly the difficulties with gifted and slow children.

Of course, if we become convinced that they have not achieved the goal of the previous grade, we must put them back. However, I certainly want you to take note that we should not treat such children as slow learners. If you have children who did not really achieve the goals set for the previous grade, then you need to put them back. However, you must do that very soon.

You can never see from one subject whether the child has reached the teaching goals or not. You may never judge the children according to one subject alone. Putting children back a grade must occur within the first quarter of the school year. The teachers must, of course, have seen the students’ earlier school reports. However, I would ask you to recognize that we may not return to the common teaching schedule simply in order to judge a student more quickly. We should always complete a block, even though it may take somewhat longer, before a judgment is possible.

In deciding to put a child back, we should always examine each individual case carefully. We dare not do something rash. We should certainly not do anything of that nature unthinkingly, but only after a thorough examination and, then, do only what we can justify.

Concerning the question of putting back a child who did not accomplish the goals of the previous school, I should also add that you should, of course, speak with the parents. The parents need to be in agreement. Naturally, you may not tell the parents that their child is stupid. You will need to be able to show them that their child did not achieve what he or she needed at the previous school, in spite of what the school report says. You must be able to prove that. You must show that it was a defect of the previous school, and not of the child.

A teacher: Can we also put children ahead a class? In the seventh grade I have two children who apparently would fit well in the eighth grade.

Dr. Steiner: I would look at their report cards. If you think it is responsible to do so, you can certainly do it. I have nothing against putting children ahead a grade. That can even have a positive effect upon the class into which the children come.

A teacher: That would certainly not be desirable in the seventh grade. Now we can educate them for two years, but if we put them ahead a grade, for only one.

Dr. Steiner: Just because we put the children ahead does not mean that we cannot educate them for two years. We will simply not graduate them, but instead keep them here and allow them to do the eighth grade again. When children reach the age of graduation in the seventh grade, the parents simply take them away. However, the education here is not as pedantic, so each year there is a considerable difference. Next year, we will have just as many bright children as this year, so it would actually be quite good if we were to have children who are in the last grade now, in next year’s last grade, also.

It is certainly clear that this first year will be difficult, especially for the faculty. That certainly weighs upon my soul. Everything depends upon the faculty. Whether we can realize our ideals depends upon you. It is really important that we learn.

A teacher: In the sixth grade I have a very untalented child. He does not disturb my teaching, and I have even seen that his presence in the class is advantageous for the other children. I would like to try to keep the him in the class.

Dr. Steiner: If the child does not disturb the others, and if you believe you can achieve something with him, then I certainly think you should keep him in your class. There is always a disturbance when we move children around, so it is better to keep them where they are. We can even make use of certain differences, as we discussed in detail.

A teacher: In the eighth grade, I have a boy who is melancholic and somewhat behind. I would like to put him in the seventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: You need to do that by working with the child so that he wants to be put back. You should speak with him so that you direct his will in that direction and he asks for it himself. Don’t simply put him back abruptly.

A teacher: There are large differences in the children in seventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: In the seventh and eighth grades, it will be very good if you can keep the children from losing their feeling for authority. That is what they need most. You can best achieve that by going into things with the children very cautiously, but under no circumstances giving in. Thus, you should not appear pedantic to the children, you should not appear as one who presents your own pet ideas. You must appear to give in to the children, but in reality don’t do that under any circumstance. The way you treat the children is particularly important in the seventh and eighth grades. You may never give in for even one minute, for the children can then go out and laugh at you. The children should, in a sense, be jealous (if I may use that expression, but I don’t mean that in the normal sense of jealousy), so that they defend their teacher and are happy they have that teacher. You can cultivate that even in the rowdiest children. You can slowly develop the children’s desire to defend their teacher simply because he or she is their teacher.

A teacher: Is it correct that we should refrain from presenting the written language in the foreign language classes, even when the children can already write, so that they first become accustomed to the pronunciation?

Dr. Steiner: In foreign languages, you should certainly put off writing as long as possible. That is quite important.

A teacher: We have only just begun and the children are already losing their desire for spoken exercises. Can we enliven our teaching through stories in the mother tongue [German]?

Dr. Steiner: That would certainly be good. However, if you need to use something from the mother tongue, then you certainly need to try to connect it to something in the foreign language, to bring the foreign language into it in some way. You can create material for teaching when you do something like that. That would be the proper thing to do. You could also bring short poems or songs in the foreign language, and little stories. In the language classes we need to pay less attention to the grades as such, but rather group the children more according to their ability.

A teacher: I think that an hour and a half of music and an hour and a half of eurythmy per week is too little.

Dr. Steiner: That is really a question of available space. Later, we will be able to do what is needed.

A teacher: The children in my sixth-grade class need to sing more, but I cannot sing with them because I am so unmusical. Could I select some of the more musical children to sing a song?

Dr. Steiner: That’s just what we should do. You can do that most easily if you give the children something they can handle independently. You certainly do not need to be very musical in order to allow children to sing. The children could learn the songs during singing class and then practice them by singing at the beginning or end of the period.

A teacher: I let the children sing, but they are quite awkward. I would like to gather the more musically gifted children into a special singing class where they can do more difficult things.

Dr. Steiner: It would certainly not violate the Constitution if we eventually formed choirs out of the four upper classes and the four lower classes, perhaps as Sunday choirs. Through something like that, we can bring the children together more than through other things. However, we should not promote any false ambitions. We want to keep that out of our teaching. Ambition may be connected only with the subject, not with the person. Taking the four upper classes together and the four lower classes would be good because the children’s voices are somewhat different. Otherwise, this is not a question of the classes themselves. When you teach them, you must treat them as one class. In teaching music, we must also strictly adhere to what we already know about the periods of life. We must strictly take into consideration the inner structure of the period that begins about age nine, and the one that begins at about age twelve. However, for the choirs we could eventually use for Sunday services, we can certainly combine the four younger classes and the four older classes.

A teacher: We have seen that eurythmy is moving forward only very slowly.

Dr. Steiner: At first, you should strongly connect everything with music. You should take care to develop the very first exercises out of music. Of course, you should not neglect the other part, either, particularly in the higher grades.

We now need to speak a little bit about the independent religious instruction. You need to tell the children that if they want the independent religious instruction, they must choose it. Thus, the independent religious instruction will simply be a third class alongside the other two. In any case, we may not have any unclear mixing of things. Those who are to have the independent religious instruction can certainly be put together according to grades, for instance, the lower four and the upper four grades. Any one of us could give that instruction. How many children want that instruction?

A teacher: Up to now, there are sixty, fifty-six of whom are children of anthroposophists. The numbers will certainly change since many people wanted to have both.

Dr. Steiner: We will not mix things together. We are not advocating that instruction, but only attempting to meet the desires. My advice would be for the child to take instruction in the family religion. We can leave those children who are not taking any religious instruction alone, but we can certainly inquire as to why they should not have any. We should attempt to determine that in each case. In doing so, we may be able to bring one or another to take instruction in the family religion or possibly to come to the anthroposophic instruction. We should certainly do something there, since we do not want to just allow children to grow up without any religious instruction at all.

A teacher: Should the class teacher give the independent religious instruction?

Dr. Steiner: Certainly, one of us can take it over, but it does not need to be the children’s own class teacher. We would not want someone unknown to us to do it. We should remain within the circle of our faculty.

With sixty children altogether, we would have approximately thirty children in each group if we take the four upper and four lower classes together. I will give you a lesson plan later. We need to do this instruction very carefully.

In the younger group, we must omit everything related to reincarnation and karma. We can deal with that only in the second group, but there we must address it. From ten years of age on, we should go through those things. It is particularly important in this instruction that we pay attention to the student’s own activity from the very beginning. We should not just speak of reincarnation and karma theoretically, but practically.

As the children approach age seven, they undergo a kind of retrospection of all the events that took place before their birth. They often tell of the most curious things, things that are quite pictorial, about that earlier state. For example, and this is something that is not unusual but rather is typical, the children come and say, “I came into the world through a funnel that expanded.” They describe how they came into the world. You can allow them to describe these things as you work with them and take care of them so that they can bring them into consciousness. That is very good, but we must avoid convincing the children of things. We need to bring out only what they say themselves, and we should do that. That is part of the instruction.

In the sense of yesterday’s public lecture, we can also enliven this instruction. It would certainly be very beautiful if we did not turn this into a school for a particular viewpoint, if we took the pure understanding of the human being as a basis and through it, enlivened our pedagogy at every moment. My essay that will appear in the next “Waldorf News” goes just in that direction. It is called “The Pedagogical Basis of the Waldorf School.” What I have written is, in general, a summary for the public of everything we learned in the seminar. I ask that you consider it an ideal.

For each group, an hour and a half of religious instruction per week, that is, two three-quarter hour classes, is sufficient. It would be particularly nice if we could do that on Sundays, but it is hardly possible. We could also make the children familiar with the weekly verses in this instruction.

A teacher: Aren’t they too difficult?

Dr. Steiner: We must never see anything as too difficult for children. Their importance lies not in understanding the thoughts, but in how the thoughts follow one another. I would certainly like to know what could be more difficult for children than the Lord’s Prayer. People only think it is easier than the verses in the Calendar of the Soul. Then there’s the Apostles’ Creed! The reason people are so against the Apostles’ Creed is only because no one really understands it, otherwise they would not oppose it. It contains only things that are obvious, but human beings are not so far developed before age twenty-seven that they can understand it, and afterward, they no longer learn anything from life. The discussions about the creed are childish. It contains nothing that people could not decide for themselves. You can take up the weekly verses with the children before class.

A teacher: Wouldn’t it be good if we had the children do a morning prayer?

Dr. Steiner: That is something we could do. I have already looked into it, and will have something to say about it tomorrow. We also need to speak about a prayer. I ask only one thing of you. You see, in such things everything depends upon the external appearances. Never call a verse a prayer, call it an opening verse before school. Avoid allowing anyone to hear you, as a faculty member, using the word “prayer.” In doing that, you will have overcome a good part of the prejudice that this is an anthroposophical thing. Most of our sins we bring about through words. People do not stop using words that damage us. You would not believe everything I had to endure to stop people from calling Towards Social Renewal, a pamphlet. It absolutely is a book, it only looks like a pamphlet. It is a book! I simply can’t get people to say, “the book.” They say, “the pamphlet,” and that has a certain meaning. The word is not unnecessary. Those are the things that are really important. Anthroposophists are, however, precisely the people who least allow themselves to be contained. You simply can’t get through to them. Other people simply believe in authority. That is what I meant when I said that the anthroposophists are obstinate, and you can’t get through to them, even when it is justified!

A teacher: My fifth-grade class is noisy and uncontrolled, particularly during the foreign language period. They think French sentences are jokes.

Dr. Steiner: The proper thing to do would be to look at the joke and learn from it. You should always take jokes into account, but with humor. However, the children must behave. They must be quiet at your command. You must be able to get them quiet with a look. You must seek to maintain contact from the beginning to the end of the period. Even though it is tiring, you must maintain the contact between the teacher and the student under all circumstances. We gain nothing through external discipline. All you can do is accept the problem and then work from that.

Your greatest difficulty is your thin voice. You need to train your voice a little and learn to speak in a lower tone and not squeal and shriek. It would be a shame if you were not to train your voice so that some bass also came into it. You need some deeper tones.

A teacher: Who should teach Latin?

Dr. Steiner: That is a question for the faculty. For the time, I would suggest that Pastor Geyer and Dr. Stein teach Latin. It is too much for one person.

A teacher: How should we begin history?

Dr. Steiner: In almost every class, you will need to begin history from the beginning. You should limit yourself to teaching only what is necessary. If, for example, in the eighth grade, you find it necessary to begin from the very beginning, then attempt to create a picture of the entire human development with only a few, short examples. In the eighth grade, you would need to go through the entire history of the world as we understand it.

That is also true for physics. In natural history, it is very much easier to allow the children to use what they have already learned and enliven it. This is one of those subjects affected by the deficiencies we discussed. These subjects are introduced after the age of twelve when the capacity for judgment begins. In the subjects just described, we can use much of what the children have learned, even if it is a nuisance.

A teacher: In Greek history, we could emphasize cultural history and the sagas and leave out the political portion, for instance, the Persian Wars.

Dr. Steiner: You can handle the Persian Wars by including them within the cultural history. In general, you can handle wars as a part of cultural history for the older periods, though they have become steadily more unpleasant. You can consider the Persian Wars a symptom of cultural history.

A teacher: What occurred nationally is less important?

Dr. Steiner: No, for example, the way money arose.

A teacher: Can we study the Constitution briefly?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, but you will need to explain the spirit of the Lycurgian Constitution, for example, and also the difference between the Athenians and the Spartans.

A teacher: Standard textbooks present Roman constitutionalism.

Dr. Steiner: Textbooks treat that in detail, but often incorrectly. The Romans did not have a constitution, but they knew not only the Twelve Laws by heart, but also a large number of books of law. The children will get an incorrect picture if you do not describe the Romans as a people of law who were aware of themselves as such. That is something textbooks present in a boring way, but we must awaken in the children the picture that in Rome all Romans were experts in law and could count the laws on their fingers. The Twelve Laws were taught at that time like multiplication is now.

A teacher: We would like to meet every week to discuss pedagogical questions so that what each of us achieves, the others can take advantage of.

Dr. Steiner: That would be very good and is something that I would joyfully greet, only you need to hold your meeting in a republican form.

A teacher: How far may we go with disciplining the children?

Dr. Steiner: That is something that is, of course, very individual. It would certainly be best if you had little need to discipline the children. You can avoid discipline. Under certain circumstances it may be necessary to spank a child, but you can certainly attempt to achieve the ideal of avoiding that. You should have the perspective that as the teacher, you are in control, not the child. In spite of that, I have to admit that there are rowdies, but also that punishment will not improve misbehavior. That will become better only when you slowly create a different tone in the classroom. The children who misbehave will slowly change if the tone in the classroom is good. In any event, you should try not to go too far with punishment.

A teacher: To alleviate the lack of educational material, would it be possible to form an organization and ask the anthroposophists to provide us with books and so forth that they have? We really should have everything available on the subject of anthroposophy.

Dr. Steiner: We are planning to do something in that direction by organizing the teachers who are members of the Society. We are planning to take everything available in anthroposophy and make it in some way available for public education and for education in general. Perhaps it would be possible to connect with the organization of teachers already within the Anthroposophical Society.

A teacher: We also need a living understanding about the various areas of economics. I thought that perhaps within the Waldorf School, we could lay a foundation for a future economic science.

Dr. Steiner: In that case, we would need to determine who would oversee the different areas. There are people who have a sense for such things and who are also really practical experts. That is, we would need to find people who do not simply lecture about it, but who are really practical and have a sense for what we want to do. Such people must exist, and they must bring the individual branches of social science together. I think we could achieve a great deal in that direction if we undertook it properly. However, you have a great deal to do during this first year, and you cannot spread yourselves too thin. That is something you will have to allow others to take care of, and we must create an organization for that. It must exclude all fanaticism and monkeying around and must be down to Earth. We need people who live in the practicalities of life.

A teacher: Mr. van Leer has already written that he is ready to undertake this.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, he could certainly help. A plan could be worked out about how to do this in general. People such as Mr. van Leer and Mr. Molt and also others who live in the practicalities of economic life know how to focus on such questions and how to work with them. The faculty would perhaps not be able to achieve as much as when we turn directly to experts. This is something that might be possible in connection with the efforts of the cultural committee. Yes, we should certainly discuss all of this.

A teacher: In geology class, how can we create a connection between geology and the Akasha Chronicle?

Dr. Steiner: Well, it would be good to teach the children about the formation of the geological strata by first giving them an understanding of how the Alps arose. You could then begin with the Alps and extend your instruction to the entire complex—the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Altai Mountains, and so forth—all of which are a wave. You should make the entirety of the wave clear to the children. Then there is another wave that goes from North to South America. Thus you would have one wave to the Altai Mountains, to the Asian mountains running from west to east and another in the western part of the Americas going from North to South America, that is, another wave from north to south. That second wave is perpendicular to the first.

We can begin with these elements and then add the vegetation and animals to them. We would then study only the western part of Europe and the American East Coast, the flora and fauna, and the strata there. From that we can go on to develop an idea about the connections between the eastern part of America and the western part of Europe, and that the basin of the Atlantic Ocean and the west coast of Europe are simply sunken land. From there, we can attempt to show the children in a natural way how that land rhythmically moves up and down, that is, we can begin with the idea of a rhythm. We can show that the British Isles have risen and sunk four times and thus follow the path of geology back to the concept of ancient Atlantis.

We can then continue by trying to have the children imagine how different it was when the one was below and the other above. We can begin with the idea that the British Isles rose and sank four times. That is something that is simple to determine from the geological strata. Thus, we attempt to connect all of these things, but we should not be afraid to speak about the Atlantean land with the children. We should not skip that. We can also connect all this to history. The only thing is, you will need to disavow normal geology since the Atlantean catastrophe occurred in the seventh or eighth millennium.

The Ice Age is the Atlantean catastrophe. The Early, Middle and Late Ice Ages are nothing more than what occurred in Europe while Atlantis sank. That all occurred at the same time, that is, in the seventh or eighth millennium.

A teacher: I found some articles about geology in Pierer’s Encyclopedia. We would like to know which articles are actually from you.

Dr. Steiner: I wrote these articles, but in putting together the encyclopedia there were actually two editors. It is possible that something else was stuck in, so I cannot guarantee anything specifically. The articles about basalt, alluvium, geological formations, and the Ice Age are all from me. I did not write the article about Darwinism, nor the one about alchemy. I only wrote about geology and mineralogy and that only to a particular letter. The entries up to and including ‘G’ are from me, but beginning with ‘H,’ I no longer had the time.

A teacher: It is difficult to find the connections before the Ice Age. How are we to bring what conventional science says into alignment with what spiritual science says?

Dr. Steiner: You can find points of connection in the cycles. In the Quaternary Period you will find the first and second mammals, and you simply need to add to that what is valid concerning human beings. You can certainly bring that into alignment. You can create a parallel between the Quaternary Period and Atlantis, and easily bring the Tertiary Period into parallel, but not pedantically, with what I have described as the Lemurian Period. That is how you can bring in the Tertiary Period. There, you have the older amphibians and reptiles. The human being was at that time only jelly-like in external form. Humans had an amphibian-like form.

A teacher: But there are still the fire breathers.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, those beasts, they did breathe fire, the Archaeopteryx, for example.

A teacher: You mean that animals whose bones we see today in museums still breathed fire?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, all of the dinosaurs belong to the end of the Tertiary Period. Those found in the Jura are actually their descendants. What I am referring to are the dinosaurs from the beginning of the Tertiary Period. The Jurassic formations are later, and everything is all mixed together. We should treat nothing pedantically. The Secondary Period lies before the Tertiary and the Jurassic belongs there as does the Archaeopteryx. However, that would actually be the Secondary Period. We may not pedantically connect one with the other.

[Remarks by the German editor: In the previous paragraphs, there appear to be stenographic errors. The text is in itself contradictory, and it is not consistent with the articles mentioned and the table in Pierer’s Encyclopedia nor with Dr. Steiner’s remarks made in the following faculty meeting (Sept. 26, 1919). The error appears explainable by the fact that Dr. Steiner referred to a table that the stenographer did not have. Therefore, the editor suggests the following changes in the text. The changes are underlined:

You can find points of connection in the cycles. In the Tertiary Period you will find the first and second mammals, and you simply need to add to that what is valid concerning human beings. You can certainly bring that into alignment. You can create a parallel between the Tertiary Period and Atlantis, and easily bring the Secondary Period into parallel, but not pedantically, with what I have described as the Lemurian Period. That is how you can bring in the Secondary Period. There, you have the older amphibians and reptiles. The human being was at that time only jelly-like in external form. Humans had an amphibian-like form.

Yes, all of the dinosaurs belong to the end of the Secondary Period. Those found in the Jura are actually their descendants. What I am referring to are the dinosaurs from the beginning of the Secondary Period. The Jurassic formations are later, and everything is all mixed together. We should treat nothing pedantically. The Secondary Period lies before the Tertiary and the Jurassic belongs there as does the Archaeopteryx. However, that would be actually the Secondary Period. We may not pedantically connect one with the other.]

A teacher: How do we take into account what we have learned about what occurred within the Earth? We can find almost nothing about that in conventional science.

Dr. Steiner: Conventional geology really concerns only the uppermost strata. Those strata that go to the center of the Earth have nothing to do with geology.

A teacher: Can we teach the children about those strata? We certainly need to mention the uppermost strata.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, focus upon those strata. You can do that with a chart of the strata, but certainly never without the children knowing something about the types of rocks. The children need to know about what kinds of rocks there are. In explaining that, you should begin from above and then go deeper, because then you can more easily explain what breaks through.

A teacher: I am having trouble with the law of conservation of energy in thermodynamics.

Dr. Steiner: Why are you having difficulties? You must endeavor to gradually bring these things into what Goethe called “archetypal phenomena.” That is, to treat them only as phenomena. You can certainly not treat the law of conservation of energy as was done previously: It is only a hypothesis, not a law. And there is another thing. You can teach about the spectrum. That is a phenomenon. But people treat the law of conservation of energy as a philosophical law. We should treat the mechanical equivalent of heat in a different way. It is a phenomenon. Now, why shouldn’t we remain strictly within phenomenology? Today, people create such laws about things that are actually phenomena. It is simply nonsense that people call something like the law of gravity, a law. Such things are phenomena, not laws. You will find that you can keep such so-called laws entirely out of physics by transforming them into phenomena and grouping them as primary and secondary phenomena. If you described the so-called laws of Atwood’s gravitational machine when you teach about gravity, they are actually phenomena and not laws.

A teacher: Then we would have to approach the subject without basing it upon the law of gravity. For example, we could begin from the constant of acceleration and then develop the law of gravity, but treat it as a fact, not a law.

Dr. Steiner: Simply draw it since you have no gravitational machine. In the first second, it drops so much, in the second, so much, in the third, and so on. From that you will find a numerical series and out of that you can develop what people call a law, but is actually only a phenomenon.

A teacher: Then we shouldn’t speak about gravity at all?

Dr. Steiner: It would be wonderful if you could stop speaking about gravity. You can certainly achieve speaking of it only as a phenomenon. The best would be if you considered gravity only as a word.

A teacher: Is that true also for electrical forces?

Dr. Steiner: Today, you can certainly speak about electricity without speaking about forces. You can remain strictly within the realm of phenomena. You can come as far as the theory of ions and electrons without speaking of anything other than phenomena. Pedagogically, that would be very important to do.

A teacher: It is very difficult to get along without forces when we discuss the systems of measurement, the CGS system (centimeter, gram, second), which we have to teach in the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: What does that have to do with forces? If you compute the exchange of one for the other, you can do it.

A teacher: Then, perhaps, we would have to replace the word “force” with something else.

Dr. Steiner: As soon as it is clear to the students that force is nothing more than the product of mass and acceleration, that is, when they understand that it is not a metaphysical concept, and that we should always treat it phenomenologically, then you can speak of forces.

A teacher: Would you say something more about the planetary movements? You have often mentioned it, but we don’t really have a clear understanding about the true movement of the planets and the Sun.

Dr. Steiner: In reality, it is like this [Dr. Steiner demonstrates with a drawing]. Now you simply need to imagine how that continues in a helix. Everything else is only apparent movement. The helical line continues into cosmic space. Therefore, it is not that the planets move around the Sun, but that these three, Mercury, Venus, and the Earth, follow the Sun, and these three, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, precede it. Thus, when the Earth is here and this is the Sun, the Earth follows along. But we look at the Sun from here, and so it appears as though the Earth goes around it, whereas it is actually only following. The Earth follows the Sun. The incline is the same as what we normally call the angle of declination. If you take the angle you obtain when you measure the ecliptic angle, then you will see that. So it is not a spiral, but a helix. It does not exist in a plane, but in space.

A teacher: How does the axis of the Earth relate to this movement?

Dr. Steiner: If the Earth were here, the axis of the Earth would be a tangent. The angle is 23.5×. The angle that encloses the helix is the same as when you take the North Pole and make this lemniscate as the path of a star near the North Pole. That is something I had to assume, since you apparently obtain a lemniscate if you extend this line. It is actually not present because the North Pole remains fixed, that is the celestial North Pole.

A teacher: Wasn’t there a special configuration in 1413?

Dr. Steiner: I already mentioned that today. Namely, if you begin about seven thousand years before 1413, you will see that the angle of the Earth’s axis has shrunk, that is, it is the smallest angle. It then becomes larger, then again smaller. In this way, a lemniscate is formed, and thus the angle of the Earth was null for a time. That was the Atlantean catastrophe. At that time, there were no differences in the length of the day relative to the time of year.

A teacher: Why should the celestial pole, which is in reality nothing other than the point toward which the Earth’s axis is directed, remain constant? It should certainly change over the course of years.

Dr. Steiner: That happens because the movement of the Earth’s axis describes a cone, a double cone whose movement is continuously balanced by the movement of the Earth’s axis. If you always had the axis of the Earth parallel to you, then the celestial pole would describe a lemniscate, but it remains stationary. That is because the movement of the Earth’s axis in a double cone is balanced by the movement of the celestial pole in a lemniscate. Thus, it is balanced.

A teacher: I had changed my perspective to the one you described regarding the movement of the Earth’s axis. I said to myself, The point in the heavens that remains fixed must seem to move over the course of the centuries. It would be, I thought, a movement like a lemniscate, and, therefore, not simply a circle in the heavens during a Platonic year.

Dr. Steiner: It is modified because this line, the axis of the helix, is not really a straight line, but a curve. It only approximates a straight line. In reality, a circle is also described here. We are concerned with a helix that is connected with a circle.

A teacher: How is it possible to relate all this to the Galilean principle of relativity? That is, to the fact that we cannot determine any movement in space absolutely.

Dr. Steiner: What does that mean?

A teacher: That means that we cannot speak of any absolute movement in space. We cannot say that one body remains still in space, but instead must say that it moves. It is all only relative, so we can only know that one body changes its relationship to another.

Dr. Steiner: Actually, that is true only so long as we do not extend our observations into what occurs within the respective body. It’s true, isn’t it, that when you have two people moving relative to one another, and you observe things spatially from a perspective outside of the people (it is unimportant what occurs in an absolute sense), you will have only the relationships of the movement.

A teacher: It is certainly curious in connection with light that at the speed of light you cannot determine your movement relative to the source of light.

Dr. Steiner: One of Lorentz’s experiments. Read about it; what Lorentz concludes is interesting, but theoretical. You do not have to accept that there are only relative differences. You can use absolute mechanics. Probably you did not take all of those compulsive ideas into account. The difference is simply nothing else than what occurs if you take a tube with very thin and elastic walls. If you had fluid within it at the top and the bottom and also in between, then there would exist between these two fluids the same relationship that Lorentz derives for light. You need to have those compulsive interpretations if you want to accept these things.

You certainly know the prime example: You are moving in a train faster than the speed of sound and shoot a cannon as the train moves. You hear the shot once in Freiburg, twice in Karlsruhe, and three times in Frankfurt. If you then move faster than the speed of sound, you would first hear the three shots in Frankfurt, then afterward, the two in Karlsruhe, then after that, one shot in Freiburg. You can speculate about such things, but they have no reality because you cannot move faster than the speed of sound.

A teacher: Could we demonstrate what you said about astronomy through the spiral movements of plants? Is there some means of proving that through plants?

Dr. Steiner: What means would you need? Plants themselves are that means. You need only connect the pistil to the movements of the Moon and the stigma to those of the Sun. As soon as you relate the pistil to the Moon’s movements and the stigma to those of the Sun, you will get the rest. You will find in the spiral movements of the plant an imitation of the relative relationship between the movements of the Sun and the movements of the Moon. You can then continue. It is complicated and you will need to construct it. At first, the pistil appears not to move. It moves inwardly in the spiral. You must turn these around, since that is relative. The pistil belongs to the line of the stem, and the stigma to the spiral movement. However, because it is so difficult to describe further, I think it is something you could not use in school. This is a question of further development of understanding.

A teacher: Can we derive the spiral movements of the Sun and the Earth from astronomically known facts?

Dr. Steiner: Why not? Just as you can teach people today about the Copernican theory. The whole thing is based upon the joke made concerning the three Copernican laws, when they teach only the first two and leave out the third. If you bring into consideration the third, then you will come to what I have spoken of, namely, that you will have a simple spiral around the Sun. Copernicus did that. You need only look at his third law. You need only take his book, De Revolutionibus Corporum Coelestium (On the orbits of heavenly bodies) and actually look at the three laws instead of only the first two. People take only the first two, but they do not coincide with the movements we actually see. Then people add to it Bessel’s so-called corrective functions. People don’t see the stars as Copernicus described them. You need to turn the telescope, but people turn it according to Bessel’s functions. If you exclude those functions, you will get what is right.

Today, you can’t do that, though, because you would be called crazy. It is really child’s play to learn it and to call what is taught today nonsense. You need only to throw out Bessel’s functions and take Copernicus’s third law into account.

A teacher: Couldn’t that be published?

Dr. Steiner: Johannes Schlaf began that by taking a point on Jupiter that did not coincide with the course of the Copernican system. People attacked him and said he was crazy.

There is nothing anyone can do against such brute force. If we can achieve the goals of the Cultural Commission, then we will have some free room. Things are worse than people think when a professor in Tübingen can make “true character” out of “commodity character.” The public simply refuses to recognize that our entire school system is corrupt. That recognition is something that must become common, that we must do away with our universities and the higher schools must go. We now must replace them with something very different. That is a real foundation.

It is impossible to do anything with those people. I spoke in Dresden at the college. I also spoke at the Dresden Schopenhauer Society. Afterward, the professors there just talked nonsense. They could not understand one single idea. One stood up and said that he had to state what the differences were between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and anthroposophy. I said I found that unnecessary. Anthroposophy has the same relationship to philosophy as the crown of a tree to its roots, and the difference between the root and the crown of a tree is obvious. Someone can come along and say he finds it necessary to state that there is a difference between the root and the crown, and I have nothing to say other than that. These people can’t keep any thoughts straight. Modern philosophy is all nonsense. In much of what it brings, there is some truth, but there is so much nonsense connected with it that, in the end, only nonsense results. You know of Richert’s “Theory of Value,” don’t you? The small amount that exists as the good core of philosophy at a university, you can find discussed in my book Riddles of Philosophy.

The thing with the “true character” reminds me of something else. I have found people in the Society who don’t know what a union is. As I have often said, such things occur. If we can work objectively in the Cultural Commission, then we could replace all of these terrible goings on with reason, and everything would be better. Then we could also teach astronomy reasonably. But now we are unable to do anything against that brute force. In the Cultural Commission, we can do what should have been done from the beginning, namely, undertake the cultural program and work toward bringing the whole school system under control. We created the Waldorf School as an example, but it can do nothing to counteract brute force. The Cultural Commission would have the task of reforming the entire system of education. If we only had ten million marks, we could extend the Waldorf School. That these ten million marks are missing is only a “small hindrance.”

It is very important to me that you do not allow the children’s behavior and such to upset you. You should not imagine that you will have angels in the school. You will be unable to do many things because you lack the school supplies you need. In spite of that, we want to strictly adhere to what we have set out to do and not allow ourselves to be deterred from doing it as well as possible in order to achieve our goals.

It is, therefore, very important that in practice you separate what is possible to do under the current circumstances from what will give you the strength to prevail. We must hold to our belief that we can achieve our ideals. You can do it, only it will not be immediately visible.

Yesterday I tried to characterize the nature of the moment in human evolution at which we find ourselves. I tried to show you how, in the course of human evolution, humanity has now arrived at a point where it is absolutely dependent on what we call the science of initiation. This means that it is necessary, firstly, for the branches of knowledge of human cultural life to be permeated by this science of initiation, but secondly also for social thinking and social feeling to be permeated by those feelings and perceptions that result for the human soul from consciousness: there is a spiritual revelation, a supersensible revelation – one need only turn to it.

One can be convinced that many people come and say: Yes, but history has been conscientiously studied, and what is supposed to result from spiritual science about the character of the present period, and how it has developed from the preceding ones, is not spoken of in history.

Yes, it does not speak of it because, uninfluenced by real spiritual knowledge, it does not ask about its real impulses and forces. In order to know what speaks through history, one must first understand how to ask history in the right way.

Now, the three successive post-Atlantean periods, the primeval Indian, the primeval Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, are such that, in the sense sense, humanity has become younger and younger, that is to say, in the second period it did not remain capable of development into those years in which it was still capable of development in the first period, and so on. In the Graeco-Latin period, that is to say, in the period that began in the 8th century BC and ended in the 15th century, it was the case that human beings remained capable of development until the beginning of their thirties. When this period closed in the 15th century, human beings were clearly capable of development until well beyond the twenty-eighth year. Today, as we have emphasized, the ability to develop only extends to the twenty-seventh year and will descend more and more.

Now, simply due to their physical and bodily constitution, human beings can only come into contact with the spiritual world from their thirties onwards. Do not misunderstand me! Of course, if he turns to spiritual science, he can come into contact with the spiritual world earlier, even today; but if man, through his own development, which is bound to the physical body, is to receive spiritual forces from the universe, this can only happen if he remains capable of development well into his thirties. He does not. Therefore, from our point of view, there can be no question of human development progressing by natural means. It can only progress if humanity is fertilized by the science of initiation.

Now, as I have already indicated in one of the previous lectures, there are initiates in areas of Western civilization, especially in Anglo-American areas. But the peculiar thing about these initiates is that, from their point of view, they only intend to promote as a science of initiation that which British-American world domination can gradually bring about on earth. However strange it may sound, it is so. And it may be said that every single assertion that comes from this side bears a stamp that the knowledgeable person can recognize as being true. Above all, the various ways in which the science of initiation is handled in Western countries point to all these things.

You have seen that, within certain limits, certain truths of initiation are not withheld here. And if you look through what has been presented to you over the years, you will find in it, if you really follow things unsleeping, a whole series of important initiatory truths that are suitable for bringing not just a part of humanity, but all of humanity across the earth, beyond the current crisis and towards a real further development. But you will always find people, especially among Western initiates, who disapprove of and condemn the fact that so much of what has been communicated here is being made public today. This is due to a distorted conception of the science of initiation. In order to make you understand this distorted conception, I must first say the following.

The science of initiation always addresses the individual human being. Even if it speaks to a group of people, it is in reality addressing the individual human being. One cannot present the true science of initiation in the way it used to be presented to people in the past. The Catholic Church, for example, transplanted this kind of thing into the present day, and not only the Catholic Church, but certain political parties also still use the same method today. The way they worked was to use, if I may put it this way, the mass psyche, to appeal to what is instilled in a community of people in a certain, I would say hypnotic, way. You know that, as a rule, if you only use the appropriate means, you can teach a crowd things more easily than you can teach each individual to whom you wanted to speak. There is some truth to such mass hypnosis.

These methods, which are quite effective, cannot be used by a true wisdom of initiation. It must speak as though addressing each individual person and appeal to the powers of persuasion of each individual person. The way of speaking which the science of initiation, which today stands at the height of human development, must make use of, has not yet existed. Therefore, the way in which, for example, I speak here and in my books is still an abomination to some people today, because the way of speaking strictly adheres to the rule of appealing only to the power of persuasion of the individual individuality.

This also gives us an important social principle, which I have already mentioned in another context in recent days and which you will find systematically and in principle implemented in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. If you only want to appeal to the individual with ethical, moral impulses, then you cannot want to organize from general abstractions, then you cannot group people together like herd animals in order to give them some kind of common directive, but then one can only appeal to the individual and then wait for the right thing to happen in the whole, because each individual, in his standing in the whole, wants the right thing.

The social morality of the future cannot be based on any other principle than this principle of general human behavior. When I published my “Philosophy of Freedom”, for example, a review appeared in the “Athenaeum” in which it was said that such a view leads to a theoretical anarchism. But it only leads to anarchism if we do not succeed in making people into real people, that is, if people absolutely want to be subhuman, if they absolutely want to be kept together under such aspects as the members of a group of animals are kept together. Lions are held together as lions by their very shape, hyenas too, dogs too; but the development of humanity is such that in the future groups of people should not be organized either by blood ties or by ideological ties like flocks of sheep, but that what arises from the interaction of people should actually happen out of the power of individualities.

A few days ago I used a comparison here that may sound a little grotesque, but which I believe can shed light on the whole matter. I do not know whether there are not also people who would find it particularly liberating if they saw inscriptions everywhere: Decree of such and such an authority: The one who walks in this direction must give way to the other who walks in the other direction. Even in populous cities, people generally still get along with each other on the street, they pass each other; out of their reason, out of what they have as an impulse within them, they do not constantly push each other away. Humanity is moving towards this ideal. That it does not recognize this is its misfortune. It is important to have the directives of one's actions within oneself, even in important matters, so that the other can rely on them, without a common law that trains them to behave in such a way that the other can exist alongside them.

This work towards individuality is what is connected with the most important impulses of human development. Human individuality can never be brought to bear on something like this if it can only be conveyed through the current knowledge of nature or the current social science or the current social motives. Man only comes to such an individuality as I have just spoken of when a mass of thoughts is awakened in him that comes from the science of initiation. Only through his relation to the supersensible is man imbued with such thoughts as will make him a free individuality, but which can also function in the social order with the greatest possible freedom. Everything depends on humanity opening its heart and mind to what comes from the science of initiation.

Great trust must become the most important social motive of the future. People must be able to rely on each other. Otherwise things will not move forward. What I have told you now seems obvious to anyone who is serious about the whole of humanity, if they are sufficiently initiated into supersensible things, to the extent that they must say: either this happens or humanity goes into the abyss. There is no third way.

You can say that you cannot imagine that a social order is based on general trust. To that one can only answer: Fine, if you cannot imagine it, then you just have to imagine: Humanity must go into the swamp. – These things are serious, and they must be taken seriously as such.

To a certain degree of abstraction, the initiates of Western countries also know this. But they say the following: We have the science of initiation to a certain degree, we could publish it. They would, however, only publish a science of initiation that leads to the goals I have indicated; we are also now moving in an area that is just as applicable to the true science of initiation as it is to the one-sided one. The initiates of Western countries can therefore say: We have the science of initiation; we can publish it, but the fact is that it is only addressed to the individual. Now the great fear begins for these people, the terrible fear. They say, 'Yes, if we only speak to individuals in the future, then we will unleash a fight of everyone against everyone, because then people are not organized, then we rely on general trust, then people will enter into the fight of everyone against everyone. This fear stands before people. Therefore, they want to keep the most important truths of initiation, I would say, in the darkroom and let humanity walk towards the future in an apparent light, but asleep.

These things are indeed very topical, since the mid-19th century, when the peak of materialism in modern civilization was reached and since then people have had to ask themselves: How far do we go with the science of initiation? — They have not dared to communicate a real science of initiation to humanity beyond certain smaller circles until now.

Now, a certain education that humanity has undergone must not be allowed to break down, but it is already breaking down today thanks to a completely misguided theology. You can follow this education if you do not study that fable convenue which is usually called “history”, but if you study real history. Today, people do not really know how what is designated by certain words has changed over time. People talk about Catholicism, about emperorship, about aristocracy, about bourgeoisie, and believe that if they find the same words in the fourteenth century, they mean approximately the same thing, perhaps only a little nuance is different. As long as we do not realize that what Catholicism, emperorship, bourgeoisie and aristocracy meant in the 14th century has nothing at all in common with what we mean by these words today, we do not understand history. We must be quite clear about how the state of mind of human beings has really changed a great deal over the course of a few centuries.

What was it, then, that, until the 15th century, and in its after-effects even further, was the basis of what worked from general human education into the consciousness of the souls of the civilized world? All this was based on the fact that, during these centuries, human beings were able to assimilate supersensuous knowledge into their imaginative life, not in the way it is to be assimilated now through spiritual science, but in the way they were able to assimilate it at that time, according to their still atavistic states of consciousness. A fundamental fact filled human souls. It was the fundamental fact that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. In the way people thought at that time, they knew that the Christ-Being had descended from supermundane heights, had been embodied in the man Jesus of Nazareth, and that something had happened in the Mystery of Golgotha that could not have happened according to ordinary laws discoverable by the knowledge of nature. The concepts and ideas that people had of the Mystery of Golgotha had such ideas and such conceptions that went beyond the earthly sphere.

Such conceptions create very different thought forms than the ideas that the average person has today. The thoughts that people have today do not extend into the supersensible life at all. Thoughts that people formed with such a connection to the mystery of Golgotha, as I have just characterized it, were suitable for evoking thought forms that had a reality in the supersensible. Therefore, one can also characterize the present moment in time by saying that humanity has gradually lost the ability to form such thought forms that have a meaning in the supersensible. Thus, one cannot create social orders on Earth that will advance it. Therefore, everything that has been introduced into humanity in the way of social ideas since about the sixteenth century bears the character that can be described as follows: We encounter social institutions according to the thought forms that are the thought forms of modern times. All such social institutions are destined to break down. They have no inner power of further development. That is even the secret of the newer development. No matter how willingly people may create social institutions on the basis of the external world-building that has taken place since the 16th century, all these social institutions carry the seed of death within them as they arise, because they are not connected to thought-forms that have a reality in the supersensible. As long as there are no people in the present who understand this, there is no point in talking about social progress at all. It is not a matter of deriving social ideas in an abstract way, perhaps out of some spiritual web of thought. That is not important at all. In my “Key Points of the Social Question”, for example, there is no long chapter about spiritual science from which social laws are then deduced, but reality itself draws attention to what has to happen. What matters is not that one deduces the social life from some spiritual web or other, but that one is oneself imbued with such thoughts, which are rooted in the supersensible. For it is this state of being imbued that makes it possible for everything one thinks to have a reality in the supersensible.

It is a paradox, but the following is quite true: Imagine a person, I will say a “statesman” - a word that is currently said in quotation marks - who says all sorts of clever things, that is, things that people today call clever, but has never established a connection with the supersensible world. What he says, if realized in reality, would bear the germ of death. Another speaks. If one does not know that he is engaged in spiritual science, one does not even need to notice it from his speech; he just talks about things in a slightly different way. From what he says about social issues, for example, one does not even need to notice that he is engaged in spiritual science, but the fact that he is engaged in spiritual science gives his ideas the real impulse.

So the point is that today it is not enough to have an abstract logic, but that one must speak reality. Because today we are already at a stage in the development of humanity that, let's say, a journalist can write the most beautiful things that people admire because they say: Yes, when I read this, it is pure spiritual science! That is not the point! Today it is no longer about the wording, but about the basis of the soul, from which something like this comes. It is about what the human being carries within himself as substance!

If I am to draw a comparison from a completely different field, then let it be the one I have often used before: there are poets today who write poetry with extraordinary ease, who make beautiful verses that one can admire. Nevertheless, the same also applies: today, ninety-nine percent of poetry is overdone. But there are others whose verses are like a stammer; but these verses, which sound like a stammer, can come from a genuine human, that is, spiritual, source, while those that one admires because the languages are so simple that any fool can create something admirable out of language can be worthless sound.

Today it is absolutely necessary to go beyond the mere wording to the motive, that is, not to remain in the abstract, not to read according to the wording, but to place oneself in full life and judge the phenomena from the standpoint of life. And so it is a matter of spiritual science, as it is meant here, above all, having to have a fertilizing effect on the various branches of life, otherwise what must happen will not happen.

When two people talk to each other, they communicate through language. But in relatively recent times, language was quite different from what it is today. Today, when we communicate through language, we actually become more or less a slave to language. In the past, people learned a great deal through the genius of language, and they did not actually think very much themselves; they let language do the thinking for them. This only worked until the period I described to you yesterday. Today, people only get ahead if they can emancipate themselves from language with their thinking and feeling. Language today runs, as it were, like a mechanism in which we stand, and instead of us, Ahriman actually lives more and more in the development of language. Ahriman actually speaks today when people speak. And little by little people have to get used to understanding each other from something quite different than from the mere wording of languages. One must go much deeper into life in order to understand another person today than in the age when the wings of language still contained what people had exchanged with each other. Today this is no longer contained in the wings of language. Today one can basically be a person completely empty of real knowledge. But the fact that language – every civilized language today – has gradually developed sentence forms, sentences, and even entire theories that already lie in the language, you just need to change what is in the language a little, then you have something seemingly created by itself, in reality you have basically just mixed up a little what was already there.

It would be very easy today, as grotesque as it may sound to you, to do the following experiment. Take the pronouncements of good bourgeois professors, philosophy professors, natural science professors and the like, who are only slightly inclined towards materialism, towards one side or the other, take what these people have said over the past few decades, in the second half of the 19th century, and with a little rethinking, the following can be easily achieved. Take, I mean, any concoction of a fairly brave philosopher, a brave dozen philosophers from the second half of the 19th century, who has expressed himself on this or that social thing, you can now take away certain adjectives and replace them with others that are in another sentence. You can turn things around a bit – and out of it comes the life philosophy of Mr. Trotsky! In order to be a Trotskyist with a Weltanschauung today, one does not need to be able to think for oneself at all, but only to let language think within oneself in the way I have just described. But because language has emancipated itself from them in a certain way, it is not people who are at work here, but Ahrimanic powers in human culture.

What I have told you now can be experienced. One only has to have the inner soul eyes open to such things. For those who work not with words but with thoughts, language today is a truly dreadful instrument. It is indeed not easy for those who work with thoughts to write today. Because if you want to write a sentence, it will not do so because so and so many people have written similar sentences. The sentence always wants to form itself out of the collective psyche, but you must first become its enemy in order to truly shape what is in your soul into a sentence. Anyone who works for the public today and cannot feel this hostility of language always runs the risk of abandoning themselves to the thinking of language and devising beautiful programs out of language.

The necessity of enforcing one's thoughts must begin today with the struggle against language. Nothing is more dangerous than for a person to allow themselves to be carried by language, in the sense of: This is how you express it, that is how you express it. — Because by having a stereotyped way of expressing things, by being able to say: you can only say it that way – you actually go with the usual flow of speech and do not work from the original thought.

Our schools are terrible in this respect. The schoolmasters, who actually correct every seemingly clumsy but at least original thought in terms of convention, commit great crimes in school. One should search for every awkward but substantially individual sentence that any boy or girl writes at school. One should use it to start discussions at school and not use the cursed red ink to replace what comes out of youthful individuality with convention. For today it is most important to look at what comes out of youthful individualities. Perhaps it will reveal itself in a way that we do not always find comfortable, that we easily see as flawed. If one wanted to correct Goethe's youthful letters with the eye of a high school teacher, then many things would have to be corrected! The Austrian poet Robert Hamerling received the worst grade in the “German essay” in his teaching examination! And there is still some truth to what Hebbel wrote in his diary, as I have often mentioned: he wanted to write a drama with the motif that a high school teacher of the higher grades in particular has a student who is the reincarnation of Plato, with whom he reads Plato in class; then the teacher finds that this “reincarnation of Plato” does not understand the slightest thing about Plato! The poet Friedrich Hebbel noted down this motif for a drama that was then not carried out. But there is some truth to it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that at all times, seduced by the remaining Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, people have resisted the normal progress of humanity. Today we are faced with the necessity of having to seek something completely new from spiritual life in order to save humanity. It is no wonder that people are violently opposed to all kinds of logical absurdities and immorality. And so, for a long time now, I have always had to talk about my own situation as a kind of prologue to our reflections.

About a week ago I told you about the defamatory and mean way in which a large number of German newspapers are currently reporting things that are known to be their source, but which could turn against everything that comes from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the related social issues. It is a very direct example, I might say, of what is happening “at the house” itself, how strongly the opposing forces are stirring. But there is a certain reason why I would like to characterize this matter for you in somewhat more detail today. To this end, I would like to draw attention once more to what has happened. It has come about that a defamatory report suddenly appeared in a number of German newspapers, which can be summarized in the following sentences. I have already read these sentences. However, we should bear them in mind once more, for they are actually worthy of being remembered as a characteristic example of certain cultural phenomena of the present day:

"Rudolf Steiner as political informer. The well-known Theosophical charlatan Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences millions of men and women, founded a league for the threefold social organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a very strange and repulsive political agitation. We learn the following about this from Dresden: “It is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – please note this sentence, “it is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – “that the League for Threefold Order is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the accuracy of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proved by the passage of a letter which says: “Accusations of theft are to be avoided because it is easier to prove that they are untrue. Similarly, one should not make incredible accusations such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, of course, this most slanderous and most mendacious story, sentence by sentence, is going through a series of German newspapers! One can be amazed at the most diverse things in it, but let us single out one fact. There is talk of letters that are said to have been written and that are referred to as authentic documents. In the issue of “Dreigliederung” that has not yet appeared, I expressly pointed out that I am well aware of the dubious sources from which such things originate. Now, however, I will read you a charming document from which you will see what the authentic foundations are for those people who spread such things into the world.

After this flood of meanness had subsided, and after I had received confirmation from various other sides of what I had known anyway about the murky sources, I received the following letter from a friend. This letter only reached me now, but it was written – I ask you to bear this in mind – before these newspaper articles appeared. So what this letter contains has been established before the newspaper articles appeared. I ask you to bear this fact in mind. This letter states:

So you see, there are factories for forging letters! These letters really do circulate. It continues:

"The second letter makes the following suggestion: Since there are still many officers in the army who are monarchists, it would be absolutely necessary to neutralize them by the following shameless means. The members of the troop to which the officer in question belonged during the campaign should be searched for people who, under oath, are to testify to as many of the person's crimes as possible. It is also stated in more detail that these would only have to be credible offenses, not rape, infanticide, and similar things. This record of sins should then be transmitted by a Mr. Grelling” - that is the only name mentioned in the letter - ‘to the Entente, and they would then demand the immediate extradition of the persons concerned.’

Both letters were read by the person concerned with his own eyes.

So this is the letter referred to in the newspaper article, the letter that is probably circulating in countless copies and that is addressed to this and that office in Berlin! So first the letters are forged, fabricated, then the newspaper articles are made up. This is the method of fighting!

I would like to know if other things are needed to make it clear that it is necessary to wake up today! — From what has happened in recent years, a moral ground for humanity has emerged, which was rooted in the impossibilities that had already preceded it, and which is producing such flowers.

It is no longer acceptable to continue sleeping when we know the depths of the swamp we are in. It could easily be, if these things were not talked about openly, that there would still be people in our ranks who would say, for example: Shouldn't we rather write to all the fine gentlemen who forge letters and then use the forged letters to fabricate newspaper articles in order to change their minds? Today it is really a matter of opening our eyes and seeing what kind of people are walking around among us, people whom we would soil ourselves if we got seriously involved with them. These things must not be overlooked; this must be said again and again. The connections must be pointed out. Do you think that it can be with impunity that, for example, in those Jesuit publications, in which the false statements that I have already mentioned to you are printed, the story has been circulated for years that I am a runaway priest, and then simply to take back such a thing with the words: This is something that one heard, “but which could not be substantiated”? Do you think that one has the right to say to such a Jesuit priest: You have taken back what you spread? No, one has to say to him: You have violated your duty in the most irresponsible way by spreading a thing unchecked, and your retraction means nothing at all. Today, morality must be taken seriously by those people who still understand something about morality. During the past five years, we have heard almost nothing but lies from all over the civilized world, and we are still living under the effects of the lie. It is necessary to face these things seriously.

Here you can clearly see an example of how things are. When things are not brought home to us through karma, so that the individual is at the same time completely decisive for the general, then there will always be people who want to vote for compromises, who, for example, treat a Ferriere still as a human being, with whom one engages on equal terms, while he belongs to the scum of the human race, by writing something unscrupulously, which he accepts without verification. These things are no longer acceptable today for a person who wants to stand on sound ground.

If I did not have this example of the origin of a matter at hand, it would not be so easy to believe me that there are now factories for forging letters, on the basis of which “they” then treat people in public as they did in this newspaper article.

But that happens today over and over again, and a large part of what you read consists of nothing other than the blossoms of this moral swamp. Today it is simply part of a healthy, serious and honest world view to know these things and to treat them accordingly. Today people are not allowed to make compromises with people who work with defamation in this way. For it cannot be justified by saying: One must be benevolent towards all people — love towards all people! — Love towards such people means extreme unkindness towards those who are slandered, who are distorted. It is a matter of knowing where to direct one's love. For loving the crime can never lead to the recovery of humanity. That such things would come could be foreseen. But it could be foreseen not only from the way certain quarters have been working. You only have to open the Jesuit literature that has been unleashed since the Church's condemnation of the anthroposophical writings in July 1919. You only have to look at the people who write and examine their approach to the truth, and you will naturally see everything that ultimately leads into such swamps. I do not want to talk today about the very murky sources, which I know very well and through whose acquaintance I also know how all these things are connected and how they are just the beginning.

I only wish that as few people as possible would be naive enough to believe that refutations could achieve anything. For these people, it is not about asserting this or that, but only about asserting something juicy, whereby they disparage others. These people could not care less about what they assert.

But not only that we have to take into account the fact that today we have numerous such people among us who work in this way, but also that we have to take into account the fact that for decades now, due to drowsiness, we have had a broad tolerance among the general public for this kind of thing, a reluctance to look at how public opinion is actually made today. But that is the most important part of what can lead to improvement. As long as people of the caliber of the Jesuit Zimmermann or the university professor Dessoir are not treated in the appropriate way, there can be no recovery. The people who stand opposite them and do not give them the right treatment are even more guilty than these individuals. For these individuals conduct their business in these matters, albeit in such a dirty way as Professor Dessoir. I characterized this to you some time ago. But it is a matter of finally waking up. Because a Dessoir book or a Zimmermann critique leads straight to these swamps, which I was able to characterize for you. I had to mention this not only with the intention of showing the symptoms of the forces that are effective in our time to suppress every legitimate spiritual aspiration, And so I would also like to mention the fact that I was recently given an article here that was supposedly intended for the Brockhaus Conversations Encyclopedia, for which the infamous Dessoir — infamous only with us! — was supposed to write articles about anthroposophy; at the same time that he had these articles of mine written by an intermediary, he was writing his book, this disgrace. But now consider the case that this article would lie here in our local archives! It would later be found there as an article that is said to come from me. So someone might say: Yes, Steiner copied the article in the archives from Dessoir's article in the encyclopedia and claimed it for himself! - Such blossoms can be driven when one is not awake! First one's things can be stolen by literary thieves, and then they can appear in such a way somewhere that not the one who made them but the one who stole them is considered the author and the one who is the author is considered the thief!

The moral question must be approached today from many sides; but it will not be approached profitably by anyone who does not stand on the ground of a sound spiritual science. That is what I wanted to share with you in the appendix to today's lecture, based on contemporary history.

DR STEINER:

My dear friends!

Today our agenda begins by giving us the pleasure of the lecture by Herr Werbeck.

Louis Werbeck gives his lecture on ‘The Opposition to Anthroposophy’.

DR STEINER: Dear friends, let us have a fifteen-minute break before continuing with yesterday's meeting of members.

DR STEINER: My dear friends! Let us hear again today the words which are to resound in our soul both here and later, when we depart and carry out with us what is intended here:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own
I Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway
In depths of worlds begetting being.
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones!
Let there ring out from the heights
What in the depths is echoed
Speaking:
Ex Deo nascimur.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

For the Christ-Will in the encircling round holds sway
In the rhythms of the worlds, bestowing grace on the soul.
Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai !
Let there be fired from the East
What through the West is formed
Speaking:
In Christo morimur.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

For the world-thoughts of the Spirit hold sway
In the being of worlds, craving for light,
Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi !
Let there be prayed from the depths
What in the heights will be granted
Speaking:
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.

Let us once again take hold of these words in meaningful sections. Here we have:

[Rudolf Steiner writes on the blackboard as he speaks. See Facsimile 4, Page XV bottom.]

Practise spirit-recalling

What takes place in the soul of man is related to all being in the cosmos of spirit, soul and body. Thus this ‘Practise spirit-recalling’ especially points to what is heard in the call to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones when the manner in which they work in the universe is characterized:

Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones!
Let there ring out from the heights
What in the depths is echoed.

We have the right cosmic concept when we picture in our soul how the voices of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones resound in the universal word and are heard because they find an echo in the depths of the grounds of world existence, and how what is inspired from above and what resounds from below, the universal word, emanates from Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

In the second verse we have:

Practise spirit-awareness

This is related to the second hierarchy: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai. To characterize them we imagine their voices in the universal word working as expressed in the words:

Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai!
Let there be fired from, the East
What through the West is formed.

The third member of man's existence is:

Practise spirit-beholding

To this we add the indication of how the third hierarchy enters with its work into the universal word:

Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi!
Let there be prayed from the depths
What in the heights will be granted.

[As shown on the blackboard]

Practise spirit-recalling
S. Ch. T.

Let there ring out from the heights
What in the depths is echoed.

Practise spirit-awareness

K. D. Ex.

Let there be fired from the East
What through the West is formed.

Practise spirit-beholding

A. AA. Ang.

Let there be prayed from the depths
What in the heights will be granted.

Here we have the opposite of the first hierarchy in whose case the voices resound downwards while their echo comes up from below. And we have here the voices heard coming from beings who pray for something from below and whose prayer is answered from the heights downwards into the depths. From above downwards: from the heights towards the depths; from the encircling round: East and West; from below upwards: from the depths into the heights.

My dear friends! Something left over from earlier is a letter to the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach from the Polish Anthroposophical Society which has not been represented here: ‘The working groups in Poland—Cracow, Lemberg, Warsaw—have resolved to found the Polish Anthroposophical Society. The Society shall serve the ideas of Anthroposophy by revealing the treasures of its spiritual teachings to the widest circles and by working among the Polish people in a time of destiny, helping them to recognize their mission. For the celebration of the laying of the Foundation Stone, the newly-founded Anthroposophical Society in Poland sends to the leader and founder of the international Anthroposophical Movement, Dr Steiner, this expression of their highest respect. The Polish Anthroposophical Society urgently requests that he may concern himself with it and not deny it his protection and guidance. For its part, it commits itself ... (the final words were obscured by noise).

For the Warsaw circle:
For the Lemberg circle:
For the remaining circles:
Luna Drechsler as their representative.’

Furthermore from Cologne on the Rhine: ‘For the celebration of the laying of the Foundation Stone in 1923 I wish you and ... (unclear) that the significance of this laying of the Foundation Stone may be revealed to all the world. With cordial greetings, Gottfried Husemann.’

My dear friends, I now consider that for the moment the Vorstand has put before you the main concerns that had to be brought to you. In the next few days there will still be the matter of a draft of some By-Laws or rules of practice to be attached to the Statutes. But now our main concern, before any other discussions, is that our dear friends should have a chance to express what they wanted to say. Here is a list of those who wish to speak or report, and I think it would be best, in order to save time, not to proceed along given lines—for if you do this you waste time—but to bring to completion what our respected, dear friends have to say. So I would like to ask whether you agree that those friends who have already asked to speak should now have their say.

They are Herr Leinhas, Dr Kolisko, Dr Stein, Dr Palmer, Herr Werbeck, Dr Lehrs, Miss Cross, Mademoiselle Rihouët, Mr Collison, Frau Hart-Nibbrig, Herr de Haan, Herr Stibbe, Herr Zagzwijn, Frau Ljungquist.

Dr Wachsmuth points out that these requests to speak were made at the beginning and referred to general matters, not specific themes.

DR STEINER: Then let me ask for the names of those friends who now wish to say something. It is naturally necessary, for the further progress of the meeting, that those friends or delegates who are concerned about something should express this. So now in a comprehensive, general discussion let me ask all those who wish to do so to speak about what concerns them with regard to the Anthroposophical Society which has been founded here.

MR COLLISON: Later on could we please speak about education.

DR STEINER: Would anyone like to speak about something entirely general? If this is not the case, dear friends, then let us proceed to the discussion of more specific aspects. According to the programme we have a discussion on the affairs of the Society and on educational questions. Perhaps someone first has something to say with reference to Herr Werbeck's lecture and so on?

Herr Hohlenberg wishes to speak.

DR STEINER: Herr Hohlenberg will speak on the subject of the antagonism we face.

Herr Hohlenberg does this.

DR STEINER: The best thing will be if I leave what I have to say on this subject till the conclusion of the discussion. A good deal will still be brought forward over the next few days.

The next person who wishes to speak about the affairs of the Society, and also the Youth Movement, is Dr Lehrs. May I invite Dr Lehrs to speak.

Dr Lehrs speaks about the Free Anthroposophical Society.

DR STEINER: My dear friends! I do not want a misunderstanding to arise in respect of what I said here a few days ago. Dr Lehrs has understood me entirely correctly, and any other interpretation would not be correct. I did not mean that what was suggested then no longer applies today. I said that I had naturally felt it to be tragic that I had to make the suggestion of creating a division between the Anthroposophical Society in Germany and the Free Anthroposophical Society. But this suggestion was necessary; it was the consequence of the situation as it was then. And now it is equally necessary that this Free Anthroposophical Society should continue to exist and work in the manner described by our young friend from various angles. So please consider Dr Lehrs' interpretation of what I said a few days ago to be entirely correct.

I assume that Herr Hans Ludwig Pusch wishes to speak to what Dr Lehrs has said, so may I ask Herr Hans Ludwig Pusch to speak now.

Herr Hans Ludwig Pusch speaks about the aims and endeavours of German young people in Hamburg.

DR STEINER: Could I ask you to continue with your report at this point tomorrow. We have to keep to the times on the programme.

We shall continue this meeting tomorrow after Dr Schubert's lecture on ‘Anthroposophy, a Leader towards Christ’. May I now ask those friends who wish to speak, or who feel they must speak for definite reasons, to let me know this evening after the lecture so that I can gain an impression of the number of speakers and make room in the agenda. Please bear in mind that we must make the most fruitful use of the days at our disposal. Apart from what has already been announced in connection with my three last lectures, it will also be necessary to have some smaller, specialist meetings with the doctors present here. Other smaller meetings will also have to be planned.

Now let me announce the next part of the agenda: This afternoon at 4.30 the Nativity Play; in the evening at 8.30 my lecture. Tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock the lecture by Dr Schubert on ‘Anthroposophy, a Leader to Christ’. This will be followed by the continuation of today's meeting which we have had to interrupt in the middle of a speech. Unfortunately we shall probably have to do this again to enable us to carry out the proceedings in a rational manner. The meeting is now adjourned till tomorrow.

I still have a few announcements to make and would ask you to remain in your seats. First of all, please do all you can to avoid crowding at the entrance. I have been told that older people who are more frail than the young have been put in danger, so please avoid this and give consideration to others.

Secondly, Dr Im Obersteg, Centralbahn Platz 9, Basel, who has frequently arranged rail and sea travel for us, has offered to make the necessary arrangements for those who need them for their return journey. In our experience Dr Im Obersteg's service is exceptionally reliable. Chiefly it will be a matter of taking over ship and rail tickets for the western countries such as Norway, Sweden, England, Holland, France, Spain, Italy and so on. You can either go direct or arrange it through us. Will those who have wishes in this respect please approach Dr Wachsmuth.

Translated by Steiner Online Library

My dear Theosophical friends! The Theosophical movement does not want to create a sect, it does not want to be a sectarian movement, it does not want to found any new religious system, nor does it want to oblige anyone to follow certain dogmas or doctrines, nor does it even want to cause anyone to believe in such doctrines. All the teachings that we spread and represent are only a means to deepen life itself.

Many misconceptions about the theosophical movement have been spread. It is believed that Theosophy is a doctrine, a system of dogmas, a philosophy, a religion, and on the basis of such views, some believe that they will be alienated from their worldview if they devote themselves to Theosophy. This is not the case, and it is not in the plan of those who brought the theosophical movement into being. On the contrary, the theosophical movement is supposed to be one that makes it possible to fully understand what in life is called science or religion, depending on the circumstances into which one is born and which one recognizes as one's own. Just as we survey the phenomena of nature and learn to understand them only by delving more deeply into them, so we also learn about the phenomena of human life only by delving more deeply into them. The various religious systems, the various scientific systems and also the various philosophical worldviews are phenomena of human spiritual life. They show man their exterior. The theosophical movement wants to lead people deeper into the essence of the actual spiritual phenomena. Therefore, no one should believe that they will be estranged from their religious beliefs or scientific convictions if they become Theosophists. Our Theosophical Society is also active in India, and the Indian Brahmins have found that the old depth of their own ancient wisdom has been restored to them through the theosophical movement. At the Congress of Religions in Chicago, the Indian Brahmin Chakravarti emphasized that his people, like other peoples, had fallen into materialism, had strayed from the high spiritual world view that came from the ancient rishis, and that the theosophical movement, by delving into this ancient wisdom, has taught the Indian people again the infinite depth that is revealed when the Hindu or Buddhist religious system is understood in its true essence and not merely on the surface.

Likewise, we can penetrate deeper and deeper into that mighty world view system that we know as the ancient Hebrew system, as that of the ancient Jews. I would like to say that this wisdom is written down in the Old Testament only in broken rays. But the Old Testament nevertheless reveals itself to those who delve into it with a theosophical understanding as a wisdom of extraordinary depth.

Above all, I would like to emphasize that Christianity, the Christian worldview itself, can be fully understood and explored through the theosophical method, through the theosophical life. This Christianity, which for centuries has been the one that has shown countless people the way to their highest goal, this Christianity, which today is still for countless people what they seek in life, what comforts them in death, we certainly understand this Christianity too, when we get to know it as it is presented to us through the various means of the different churches. But, my dear Theosophical friends, Christianity is something that one can delve into and delve into more and more, and each degree of delving always brings us teachings of infinite depth from within Christianity itself. There is no degree of delving that does not bring us ever new things from the depths from which the greatest Christian wisdom springs.

Above all, no one needs to become estranged from his Christianity by becoming a theosophist. Today, for those who might be led astray from Christianity by modern science – by the scientific endeavors of the present and also by the criticism that theological science itself has practiced on this Christianity – today the way to understand Christian truths again is solely and exclusively the theosophical one.

If we look back to the Middle Ages – no one can conjure up the Middle Ages again – but if we look at it psychologically, but not externally like today's psychology, then we will see what passed through the souls of people back then, then we understand what kind of spirituality passed through the souls of people back then, then we understand we realize that they did not have Christian dogmas, but that they more or less sensed what had been expressed by the Christian mystics – they sensed something of the glimmering of the Christ-being, as expressed in the saying of Angelus Silesius: “And if Christ were born a thousand times in Bethlehem and not in you, you would be lost forever.” — It is the same with Meister Eckhart when he demands that man should have experienced the nature of Christ within himself, because only then can he understand what the event in Palestine really means.

For centuries, people have had their emotional and spiritual guidance for experiencing the Christian essence in the Gospel of John, in the Gospel that we call the fourth, in the Gospel that which adheres – seemingly rigidly from today's point of view – to the fundamental Christian truth that the great teacher who once walked in Palestine – Christ Jesus – was the true God-man, that in him the divine principle of our universe became flesh. Today, the saying at the beginning of the Gospel of John is criticized above all from the point of view of so-called man. The enlightened person can hardly connect any meaning with the opening words of the Gospel of John. He does not know what it is supposed to mean: the word - the word that is God at the same time.

Go where the leaders of humanity were, and you will find that the pinnacle of effectiveness was spent understanding, grasping what it means: the Christ has come into the world. That was the yearning of the researchers, to understand what lies in these words. Then, in the times when it was taken for granted that a Christ had lived, that a Christ had been working through the centuries, medieval theology also believed in it, and the theologians did not even remotely think of doubting the true nature of the real Jesus. They all endeavored to build extensive scientific systems that contained the revealed truths, which were simply accepted as they were and as they were prescribed by the church; they were content with interpreting them.

We have the so-called period of scholasticism and, in a slightly different form, mysticism. We have the time when it was established that a Christian can only be a Christian by feeling connected, feeling a living connection with Christ Jesus. Those who sought to reach the summit of the spirit strove to awaken the Christ within themselves, the life and the essence. They lived the profound saying of Goethe, understood in that time:

If the eye were not sunlike,
The sun could never behold it.
If the God-owning power did not lie in us,
How could we delight in the divine?

The spiritual eye must first be made capable of finding God in the outer world. At that time no one would have felt entitled to make statements about the historical Christ Jesus without first having understood the nature of the Christ, without having studied Christology. Just as today no one feels called upon to judge about lightning and thunder without having studied physics, so at that time no one felt called upon to judge about Christology without having studied it.

Something else came up that ties in with the name of the Rosicrucians. This movement is similar to Theosophy. It strove to understand the various religions, but especially Christianity, in their depths. These Rosicrucians differ from us in that we appear openly before the people and communicate to them what we have learned ourselves, while the Rosicrucians worked in secret. But what they wanted to achieve was to make people understand what Christology is. They were inwardly convinced and knew that one can comprehend the phenomena only when one has experienced within oneself the nature of Christ Jesus.

I would like to emphasize one fact of the Rosicrucian movement. Every Rosicrucian had those who wished to become disciples practise one thing above all others. He demanded of the external disciple, who had yet to enter the sanctuary and who only wanted to approach the teachings within the Rosicrucian sanctuary, that he inwardly absorb the Gospel of John, chapter 13. This was the basic principle of this occult training. And anyone who had emerged from the Rosicrucian movement and tried to grasp everything that was there would experience something that not everyone can experience when they delve into the Gospel of John in the sense of what we call “meditation”. They experience a multitude of occult powers, so that the one who places himself under the influence of these sentences undergoes a metamorphosis. He experiences within himself a repetition of the mystery that Jesus exemplified for us. You can relive the life of Jesus point by point, from the washing of the feet to the crucifixion and resurrection, on the basis of the Gospel of John - not through the concepts that are there, but through the occult forces hidden in the concepts.

Just as something cannot be made clear by mere theory, so the Rosicrucians could not merely expound it to anyone. They allowed their disciples to experience it. And there were not a few such disciples in the nineteenth century who experienced real wounds on themselves.

Then there came a time when they knew that these things were more than abstract symbols, that they were to be taken literally. Before one has realized this, one does not know what this gospel is about, one does not know what is hidden in it. So those who wanted to lead their students to Christianity through the occult tried to do so through the Gospel of John. But at the same time they were convinced that the one who is gifted – that is, the one who has developed the corresponding power – is able to release forces in his community when he speaks, even if the community is unaware of it. Public preaching was based on this. In the churches of the Middle Ages, there was still some understanding of this occult side. But even in more recent times, there was still a magical, occult power in the Gospel of John. It was not for nothing that Luther made the Gospel of John his favorite gospel. He knew what it meant, even if he and his friends were not all occultists. But every person experienced a purification that led him to an understanding when he lived with a chapter, so that he sought to live through sentence after sentence, that he did not dwell on a verse for days but for weeks and months, began to love it, began to live with it, so that it filled his whole being without him having to neglect the duties of his outer life.

In the course of modern development, this has changed. Without saying anything against the modern heads of the church, it must be emphasized that the relationship of the religious person to the religious leader has become essentially different in modern times. Look at the figures [of religious leaders] in the Middle Ages up to our century: they were filled with true faith and with sacred secrets and views; they taught through inner experiences. The people who listened to them knew that someone was speaking who spoke from deep knowledge. They were not people who believed in authority. They sensed that something was alive within the religious leader, which flowed through his words, but which cannot be expressed in an abstract and intellectual way. It was more in the words of community life.

This changed in more recent times. The whole way of looking at the world became different. People no longer understood anything like what I said about the Gospel of John today; they no longer knew that there were hidden sides to the gospel. More and more, the Gospels were taken as a scientific object, as a pure object of methodical, historical research. And so, over time, we see a theology emerging that offers a truly tragic history with its research into the Gospels.

Now let me give a brief overview of what today's theology knows about the value and truth of the Gospels. What is taught at the university today wants to be a science like any other. It is no longer the case, as it was even a hundred years ago, when a Schleiermacher still spoke to the educated with the full power of the orator. Today, the word of the gospel is often used for money, but the actual leaders have subjected the gospel to a theology, to a science, which has become tragically peculiar to the gospel.

The first thing to be dropped is precisely this Gospel of John. You all know that a Christian learns about the founder of his religion, about the one from whom the teaching originated, about the Christ himself, through the Gospels. A Christian lets the Gospels work on him. In the Gospels, he is told about the teachings of Christ Jesus, about the teachings and deeds. Through the centuries, what has been told has been accepted because one was convinced of the actual fact that Jesus lived. No value was placed on whether or not they [the Gospels] contradict each other in detail; one sought to deepen one through the other. Whatever they may have done in different ways, the focus was still on the only figure of this God-man. And the Gospels were suitable for leading to this. The wording of the Gospels was not important. It was only in the nineteenth century that the Gospel was examined under the microscope, as is the case with every other work of man. The first question the learned theologians asked themselves was: To what extent can the Gospels be records of the Jesus who lived in Palestine? Are they records that prove the accuracy of the teachings? The objective reality of Jesus of Nazareth was the basis for the research of the nineteenth century. Now the question arose: Can the Gospels be historical records like other historical records? More and more it has been shown that the Gospels were written when Christianity had already begun. No scholar today would take the position that they were written in the first century of our era. It has been found that they were written only later.

The question that interests us most is this: if you compare the gospels and see that the individual evangelists directly contradict each other in their statements, how can we understand these statements as a record of Jesus? What can we do with it when Mark speaks differently than John and Matthew, differently than Mark and Luke? As it became more and more apparent that the gospels contradict each other, it became important to examine whether other testimonies, testimonies and reports from historians, could be found. The result was – as is well known – that no such documents exist. Neither the information Josephus gives us nor that which Tacitus gives us confirms anything about a Jesus of Nazareth.

Protestant theology places little value on Christian tradition. But it is there. And Irenaeus emphasizes that he had known apostles who had known the Lord. But these are traditions that cannot be considered historical. In short, all we have to shape a biography of Jesus are the Gospels. So one had to ask oneself: “What do the Gospels testify to?” Because everything else was found to be worthless.

The next realization was that the Gospel of John reports something quite different in many ways than the other three Gospels. They know that they are called “after” Matthew, “after” Mark, “after” Luke and “after” John. Above all, more and more emphasis was placed on the fact that the image of Jesus of Nazareth, as it emerges from the Gospel of John, is different from that of the other evangelists. Here are some basic features: the Jesus of John's Gospel is understood as God made man. He is the one who does things that can only flow from divine power itself. These are miracles of omnipotence. This gives a different picture than the other evangelists. It gives the picture that he portrayed Jesus as the one who feels within himself that he is God, that he is the God who came into the world to hold people fast to this belief in God.

The gospel of John also differs from the other gospels in its external appearance. We are never told that the mother of Jesus and the disciples were standing at the cross. There are many other points in which it radically differs from the others. That is why it was decided to exclude the gospel of John when it came to the biography of Jesus. The gospel of John is considered to be a confessional writing that cannot claim to be anything other than a hymn-like song. For modern theology, the gospel of John is not considered a historical document. Matthew, Mark and Luke show more agreement among themselves than these three gospels show with the gospel of John. These three gospels are called the synoptic gospels and their authors the synoptics. What is in Mark is to a high degree in all three synoptic gospels. Matthew is therefore the one that could be deleted, and you would find everything in Mark and Luke again. There is nothing in Mark that is not also in Matthew and Luke. Therefore, the gospel of Mark is considered the original. It is also written in very old Greek. Therefore, the researchers pointed out that the Gospel of Mark should be regarded as the first. So the Gospel of Mark was accepted as the first, and the others accordingly took from what Mark said. In Matthew and Luke, there are elements that are not in Mark, so-called “words of the Lord, core sayings, because they come from Christ Jesus. They agree in Matthew and Luke. Since they agree, one can only assume that they come from the same source. These words of the Lord are said to be based on a Greek source, a collection of wisdom proverbs from which they were inserted into what they copied from Mark. The agreement between Matthew and Luke is great, but the layout is quite different. So they could not have copied from each other, but they could have had a common collection of sayings as a basis.

So what do we have? First, the Gospel of Mark, which mainly tells of the deeds of Jesus, starting with the baptism. Second, the Gospel of Matthew and third, the Gospel of Luke. The corresponding words of the Lord were always added to the deeds. But then there is something special about each of the two, Matthew and Luke, that is not found in any of the others. Matthew has insertions that have a distinctly Jewish character. It is this that Matthew has for himself, so that it is to be regarded as a gospel that was intended for the Jewish community. Luke wrote more for others, namely for the poor and the oppressed. Therefore, the entire Gospel of Luke, as far as the words of the Lord and the material of Mark are not considered, gives the impression that it was written for the poor and from a heart full of mercy.

Theology has therefore created strange images. First, that the Gospel of John is out of the question altogether; then, that Matthew and Luke each have something special, and that each can be decisive to a certain extent for the true facts of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. But where do the words of the Lord come from? There must have been a Greek collection of sayings that were added to the Gospels. Historical research cannot determine the question of where they come from. It is impossible for it to say where this collection of sayings comes from. So we are led back to Mark again. So you have the Gospel of Mark and then the collection of sayings. As for what Matthew and Luke have to say, it could be said that it goes back to Jesus and is a retelling of his deeds, but we cannot prove it. It may be based on true facts, but that is not necessarily the case. Similarly, what is referred to as the words of the Lord may go back to Jesus, but we do not know. And so we are led back to the Gospel of Mark. It recounts deeds, but they are of a peculiar kind. What does modern theology say about this? It says: Let us examine the facts. We find that Mark narrates in a way that someone would have narrated if they had heard it themselves or been an eyewitness. Mark speaks of a work. But then he strings the things together in such a way that this stringing together of the individual facts is an artistic composition. That he has strung the facts together in the way he could best put them together, much like a poet puts the details together to form a whole work. The story itself is the composition of Mark – the facts could be tradition. But they are told in such a way that they have a very general character. – Mark is telling facts that have a general character. We see, then, that the composition is the work of Mark. But the facts are such that he says, for example, “Christ did this or that,” but in such a way that only three or four disciples see it and are not allowed to share it. It is difficult to get the Jews to believe in Jesus. Therefore, Mark seeks to frame the work in such a way that it became understandable to Christians why the Jews found it so difficult to believe in Jesus.

We find two things – so the modern theologian says: firstly, that Jesus is not understood. And this is explained by the fact that Mark makes it difficult for the Jews to understand Jesus. When Jesus performs miracles, he forbids those who have seen it to tell it. The modern theologian is baffled by this. The modern theologian only admits: There must have been some secret tradition here, but it only existed between Jesus and his chosen ones. The modern theologian cannot do anything with this.

We have a tradition that Mark the Evangelist was a disciple of Peter, who recorded what Peter said. There is no doubt that Peter did not write, but that he generally taught Jesus' doctrine and particularly emphasized soaring above earthly facts, so that the copyists were unable to describe anything local. This leads us to a later time when the gospel of Mark was written. A long span of time separates us from the oldest gospel, from the real Jesus. We do not know what we can deduce from the original gospel about the Jesus of Nazareth. We cannot construct a biography of Jesus' life from it.

The only thing that theology believes is to gain a clue to an oldest piece of the Gospel of Mark. This is a passage contained in the 13th chapter:

But when they lead you and deliver you up, do not worry about what you are to say, or how you are to defend yourselves. But whatever is given you at the time, that speak. For it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit.

And brother shall deliver up brother to death, and the father child; and children shall rise up against parents, and cause them to be put to death.

And ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake: but he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.

But when you see the abomination of desolation, spoken of through Daniel the prophet, standing where it should not (let the reader understand), then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains. And let him that is in the house not come down into the street, neither enter into his house, to take any thing out of his house. And let him that is in the field not turn back again for to take up his garment. [Mk 13,11-16]

From this point, modern theology believes that it could have been written immediately under the impression of the impending destruction of Jerusalem. There must be something here that is old, so old that we could place it in the time before the destruction of Jerusalem. It is said to have been a pamphlet, a flyer, to warn people and tell them how to behave when this event occurred. Mark may have used this flyer and incorporated it into his gospel.

Yet another passage is of particular importance to the modern theologian. This is a passage in Luke, chapter 11, verse 48:

Thus ye bear witness and consent to the deeds of your fathers: for they killed them, and ye build their tombs.

If you read this passage in Matthew, chapter 10, verse 15, the comparison is very interesting:

Truly I say to you, it will be more bearable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that city.

In Matthew it is a saying of Jesus, in Luke it is a quotation. Therefore, the wisdom of God is speaking. The latter must therefore come from a source that is called the “wisdom of God.” Theology assumes that it was a collection of sayings, a collection of wisdom proverbs from which the theologian quoted and taught by saying, “Thus speaks the wisdom of God.” Matthew does things differently. The so-called words of the Lord are traced back to the collection of sayings by modern theologians.

Take a rough overview of the sketchiness that is necessary and compare it with what remains of scholarly gospel research. – Nothing remains. The Gospel of John is eliminated, Matthew and Luke are traced back to the collection of sayings. The collection of sayings can be traced back to Greek sources and cannot be followed further; we lose the thread. Mark can only have been written long after Jesus. Therefore, the modern theologian says: We cannot gain anything from the gospel. We cannot gain a biography of Jesus, we cannot gain what Jesus taught, we cannot gain what he taught about the intermediate court and the kingdom of God. Modern people say that the gospels tell us nothing about any of this. And what they tell us cannot be decisive in the sense of materialistic science.

I call this research into the Gospels a tragic story. You see, you have measured the Gospel by the standards of external science, and now the whole truth - as a result of research - is not there.

This indicates a very different point of view today between the believer and the theologian than was previously the case. In the past, the believer looked up to the theologian, who only proclaimed the truth of the Gospels. He was the authority. Even Harnack's book, which caused such a stir, is based on this modern theology. Today, believers face the theologian who does not know what is in the words of the Gospels, but can only say: I am unable to say scientifically what the founder of Christianity taught, whether he lived at all, and so on. - Science has produced a completely negative result in this direction. From this you can see that it is quite difficult for those who rely on Christianity [of the theologians] to build on it. If you believe the theologians whose science says that, you may begin to waver.

So it must be considered a new source of wisdom, hypothetically, when the theosophical movement now again delves into the Gospel of John and tries to bring the Gospel of John back to true understanding. The theosophical movement does not depend on riding Buddhist dogmas forever. They are only means, dogma is only a means. Today a movement is being born out of the bosom of the Theosophical Society that will bring a true understanding of Christianity, of the gospel hidden in the gospels, which is not understood in the ordinary sense.

Those who have experience may speak about it. I myself can hint at it with a few words, by saying that I have titled my new book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”. I have not written this book from historical sources, I have deliberately written it without any historical source. I have left the historical sources alone and relied only on the occult sources. This book is written from the Akasha Chronicle, one might say. If you look at things from the point of view that Annie Besant has adopted in the book 'Esoteric Christianity' and that I have adopted in the book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact', then things take on a completely different effect. Next time I will show you what a completely different picture we get. This science will lead us from a different point of view to the greatest possible depth, to the revival of Christian truth. A parallel current is striving for this revival, and it is first of all the revival of the Gospel of John that is at stake. These great words, with which I would like to conclude today – in a translation that is reasonably accurate – will be understood again next time, when I will start from them again.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God.

All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.

In this was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shone in the darkness, but the darkness did not comprehend it.

There came a man sent from God, whose name was John.

He came for a witness, to bear witness about

the Light, that through him all might believe.

He was not the Light, but a witness of the Light.

The true Light that gives light to every man was coming into the world.

It was in the world, and the world was made through it, yet the world did not recognize it.

It came to the individual people [up to the I-people], but the individual people [I-people] did not accept it. But those who accepted him [it] could reveal themselves as children of God through him.

Those who trusted in his name were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of human will, but of God.

And we have heard his teaching; the teaching of the only son of the Father, full of devotion and truth.

Those who understand these words correctly will see that research can only find the right word from this understanding. One should not find fault with the word. And we want to understand this word again, the greatest word:

And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.

If you think back to the entrance of the Blessed Boys in the final scene of Goethe's Faust, you will recall the verse:

Boys, brought forth in midnights haunted,
Half-unsealed the sense and brain,
For the parents lost when granted,
For the angels sweetest gain!

I've already called your attention to many a profundity in this final scene of Faust, but it contains a great deal more than I was able to point out on that occasion, more indeed than could possibly be brought to light in a limited period of time.

The four lines just quoted are equally fitted to be the leitmotif of the deeper spiritual-scientific expositions with which we will be concerning ourselves today, tomorrow, and next Monday.

I want to point out today by way of introduction that it is possible to delve more deeply, in a truly spiritual-scientific approach, into the statement made here recently when I characterized sleeping and waking and related matters. I spoke of how the whole nature of spiritual science was such as to require finding the correct approach to the facts we encounter in the world. And I showed that this approach is to be found only when we seek it as was done in our study of the alternating states of sleeping and waking. We tried to understand how differently consciousness functions in the waking and the sleeping states. But much else can be learned here by studying the way consciousness works according to whether it is that of human beings or of other beings. The four lines quoted from Faust refer to a human state of consciousness, possessed by the souls of the “boys brought forth in midnights” and “for the parents lost when granted,” in other words, by souls claimed by death immediately after birth. But the verse states expressly that these souls are “for the angels sweetest gain.”

We'll see that the saying that souls of this kind are “gain for the angels” is comprehensible only if we look into the state of consciousness of beings belonging to the hierarchy of angels. But let us first acquire some preliminary concepts of these matters and so prepare ourselves for the deeper understanding of the spiritual world into which they are to lead us.

I'll start from the fact, familiar to us from various spiritual-scientific studies, of how remote from reality the learning, the truth, and our concepts of things in ordinary life all are. People are even glad not to have these add anything to reality as they see it, for in their view the reliability of knowledge and “the unvarnished truth” depend on the fact that our cognitive processes and our soul experiences add nothing to things. Just consider what a point science makes of restricting itself to merely reflecting what goes on in the world and not allowing the soul the least influence on its pronunciamentos. Let us recall what trouble is taken by those who dream up a world view on the basis of all sorts of illusions to show that their fabrications are dictated by some reality or other outside themselves rather than originate within them. This is true all the way up to what is claimed to be valuable “occult knowledge” such as we hear some people touting. Those who desire to have occult insight here on the physical plane are basically concerned with not adding anything to the conceptions they develop. How proud people of this type are when they can report that such and such beings appeared to them, this or that was “dictated” to them, or something else was mysteriously communicated to their spiritual ears! This satisfies them, for then they can have the feeling that the conceptions they have created are reflections of reality, not something they produced. We might say that in their concern for attaining the reliable knowledge they are seeking, they actually make a fifth wheel on the wagon out of it. Knowledge should not add anything to what already exists, for only then do they regard it as something particularly reliable, particularly right.

We can arrive at a true and reliable concept of the relationship of knowledge to reality only if we gradually ascend from ordinary knowledge about physical matters to higher types of insight. We are familiar with the fact that the next level of knowledge is that called imagination. But if imagination is to have any relationship to reality it cannot be attained by living in the physical body; we must make ourselves capable of overcoming all dependence on the physical body to attain genuine imaginative knowledge. We must have progressed beyond using the physical body as our instrument. But we do still use the etheric body when we seek imaginations; we have to make use of our etheric bodies to obtain really objective imaginative experience, exactly as we make use of our physical bodies for perceiving objects in the physical realm.

Now we find that when a person on the path of clairvoyant knowledge has progressed to the point where he has loosened his soul from his physical body and is using his etheric body as his cognitive tool, what is called knowledge in the physical world, the kind of knowledge sought without a wish to add anything to the findings, remains behind on the physical plane. For example, everything that a modern scientist is interested in finding out is left behind on the physical plane by those who leave it to ascend into the imaginative world. Nothing remains of what scientists and natural philosophers think of as a world of whirling atoms, a world, as I have often explained, that is dreamed up and totally lacking in reality; nothing remains but pictures of this world. In other words, on leaving the physical plane we become aware that the conceptions of a world of whirling atoms left behind there were just dreamed up. In the imaginative world into which we have ascended no direct use can be made of any knowledge acquired on the physical plane. Please note the word direct here. We will see the subtleties of what is involved as we progress.

Now in earlier lectures I've already shown that the spiritual energy underlying thinking changes when a clairvoyant seeker frees himself from the instrumentality of his physical body. I've said that it is as though all our thinking comes alive. Instead of living in the passive world of thinking experienced on the physical plane, it is as though all our thinking comes alive and starts to tingle as we enter the imaginative world. Once, in Munich, I used a drastic comparison. I said that upon entering that world the thoughts we were previously accustomed to sending hither and thither and otherwise dispatching them as perfectly passive entities become transformed as though we had stuck our heads into a wasps' nest and our thoughts swirled and whirled about, every thought possessing a life of its own. We have to endure it in the sense that we don't feel unfree as a result of being wrested, as it were, out of ourselves by this independent life of our thoughts.

We gradually make the discovery that the insights, the conceptions we obtain on the physical plane as mere images of external reality fall away from us like a rain that rains back down upon the physical world and doesn't enter the imaginative world; they fall away and stay behind in the physical realm. All that is left of them is a memory. So we can look back on everything we have attained by exerting thinking, but that is now left behind on the physical plane as something we have finished with and no longer have any influence on.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

This is a diagram of how it actually is. This would represent the physical body out of which the individual ascends. Then he immediately perceives his knowledge about physical facts falling like raindrops into the physical world. Knowledge of physical things is then outside him.

This is an extremely interesting and extraordinary process. As we ascend into the first spiritual world, the imaginative world, we see our thoughts dropping away from us. And then we see that these thought-forms become beings, and they make a strange impression on us if we really see them. We have the impression as we look at them that they are something wrested from us, something with significance for the physical world only.

Now it is extraordinarily difficult to get a more exact conception of what is dropping away from us there. It is scarcely possible, on ascending into higher worlds, to acquire correct insights by any other means than the most painstaking comparisons. First of all, it is necessary to discover what these thoughts of the physical plane, which have dropped away, can be compared to. These thoughts become very lively indeed. And the curious thing is that these thoughts we see back there on the physical plane are engaging in all sorts of dances similar to eurythmy. It is almost impossible to find these thoughts keeping really still.

I spoke of their dancing resembling eurythmy—not the eurythmy that is being nurtured here, but regular movements of a sort. These thoughts have an extremely peculiar aspect: they are inwardly alive when they have left us. And this fact makes them valuable in this first stage of true clairvoyance.

When a person says something colossally stupid here in physical existence, he certainly doesn't hold on to it for very long, once he has realized the situation. Most people like to skip lightly over their stupidities, once they've recognized them. A really stupid thought laughs when it gets out! It laughs in proportion to its stupidity. And other thoughts can be seen behaving in a similar manner. They manifest an inner life, these thoughts, a very lively play of expression. They convince us that no stupidity we perpetrate escapes being eternalized.

The only way we can get at the facts about these strange thought-forms which put in such a lively appearance is through a comparison. We will find one only if we are in a position to see our thoughts in the way just described. Then we are also in a position to experience what I am going to describe. We need for purposes of comparison the whole wide world of gnomes, the fairy folk that rules all of external earthly nature. These gnomes, who belong to the external inorganic realm in the way other elemental beings belong to plants, water, air, and fire, and so on, this whole world of gnomes has the same character, the same inner nature as the thought-forms described. I could also say that gnomes belong to the same class as our thought- forms, referring however to those thought-forms based on mental images derived from the physical plane alone.

Now as you see, we have a comparison. And that is why there is an inner relationship of sorts between the gnome world and our thoughts about things on the physical plane. As I've mentioned, people make an effort to be faithful to the facts in their knowledge and perceptions, making these into a fifth wheel on the wagon.

The gnomes have a similar relationship to their realm. Speaking euphemistically of course, but in a way corresponding to the facts, when a person talks with a gnome, he finds the gnome regarding the world to which he belongs with tremendous wistfulness, because he is so extremely uninvolved with it. He has as little influence over it as human beings have over the physical world around them with their knowledge. It is a matter of considerable indifference to the physical world surrounding us how we think about it with thoughts derived from the physical plane. A tree grows neither more nor less slowly because of thoughts derived from the physical plane that we may have about it, or because we go past it without giving it any thought at all. As I mentioned recently, we are the only ones to gain by this; our thoughts about the tree have not the least effect upon it.

The gnomes too have a similar external relationship to the world to which they belong externally. I might say that their world belongs to what we call the terrestrial world, the solid element. But we can just as easily disregard the world of the gnomes when we study the solid element as we can disregard watchmakers in a study of the laws involved in watch-making.

It is extremely important to develop a right understanding of a comparison of this kind, one that I have often resorted to, the comparison of the structure of the universe with the mechanism of a watch. If you want to understand a watch, you must study the laws governing its mechanism, and it would be ridiculous to say, Ah ha! The hands of a watch keep moving; there must be tiny demons pushing them. No such demons are involved. But if someone who understands watches as a result of studying them were to say that a watch has nothing to do with the watchmaker who put it together, he would also be talking nonsense. The fact that the world can be understood from its own make-up and that it is possible for scientists to discover natural laws can just as little be taken as proof of the nonexistence of a spiritual basis for the universe. The laws that govern the functioning of a watch are equally discoverable in the watch itself. So when it is stated that the laws that govern nature are to be found within the natural world and it is therefore unnecessary to look for anything divine in the universe, this reflects the same lack of thought as saying of watches that no watchmaker is needed because they are explainable on the basis of their own construction.

In the world surrounding us that is so entirely explainable on the basis of the laws that govern it, gnomes have a function. They too are somewhat comparable to the fifth wheel on a wagon: they accompany the world to which they belong, but without having any effect upon it. I ask you to consider the inner relationship of the world of gnomes to our physical thought world, for then you will realize that we have to make a start at understanding such a thing as the gnome world by taking a state of consciousness into consideration. Then we will ask ourselves how it is that we come to know about the physical world. We do so by forming the reflections I've been discussing. Just as reflections have no real connection with what they reflect, physical knowledge has nothing to do with what it knows about; it doesn't make anything happen in the physical realm. If we come to see physical knowledge as a matter of a state of consciousness and sense in full awareness how unessential, how superfluous, mirrors are to the objects mirrored, we will understand the soul-mood that envelops the world of gnomes. That is their soul-mood. Gnomes are therefore unable to grasp how there can be anything but an ineffectual relationship with this world.

If a clairvoyant person were to feel pain and sorrow, as they can indeed be felt on many occasions in human life, and were then to perceive gnomes, as clairvoyants do, he would find that they cannot comprehend his pain. They are aware that people can feel a general sadness and depression, but they cannot understand how anyone can be attached to physical existence; they laugh at such feelings. Indeed, we might say that our sense of the value of things on the physical plane is lost in encounters with the world of gnomes, because they heap such ridicule upon us for the value we attach to much that exists on the physical plane.

We understand the mental state of gnomes, then, if we become cognizant of the state of consciousness involved in the relationship of physical knowledge to the world reflected in it.

The beings to whom the name undines has been given and who are inwardly related not to the earthly but to the watery element and to everything liquidly rippling and flowing must be pictured somewhat differently. We cannot form a proper concept of plants just by looking at them and making a one-time image of them analogous to a papier-mâché reproduction. To be aware of nothing more than such a one-time impression is to lack any true conception of a plant, and the same holds true in the case of undines. We picture a plant rightly only if we know it in its various states: first in its root development, then growing a stem, then putting forth leaves, then blossoming, the blossoms wilting, fruits appearing, and so on. Goethe tells us in his beautiful Metamorphosis of Plants that we must study a plant's growth process.¹ And there live in the plant, in addition to what it is in and of itself, mobile elemental beings inwardly related to the shaping, rippling, mobile element of water.

And now we have to realize that the imaginative world into whose life we make our way on evolving beyond the physical plane is an inwardly mobile realm resembling the cloud-world in its metamorphoses, resembling the rippling, flowing element. The imaginative world is itself in flowing motion. And just as we encounter the realm of our own physical thoughts when we first enter the spiritual world, under favorable conditions encountering the elemental world of the gnomes, so do we live in the realm of higher elemental beings as waves live in water; we belong to and are part of its encompassing whole; we live in it.

It is of course difficult to give an impression of such matters, but here too we must picture the state of consciousness involved. It helps us to understand to say that all our thinking begins to come alive, that we are swept up by thoughts that become alive as though the thoughts we produce, thoughts endowed with imagination, were to take on a life of their own. Purely physical thoughts such as we had before are left behind, an abandoned realm. Then we can say that the gnomes live in the world we have abandoned. But now we are living in the realm of the undines, and both for them and for us it is a world of movement.

Let us picture this very exactly. We separate from our physical bodies and become strangers to them. We begin to carry on a life of inner mobility, of continuously changing, rippling motion. Everything takes on inner life as we experience ourselves in our etheric bodies. This is the experience we have also immediately upon dying, except that the tempo is slower.

This experiencing of the imaginative world is what we experienced on the moon, except that it is at a higher level now; there, it was a dream-world of imagination, a realm of pictures. On Jupiter we will experience it in full consciousness. We lift ourselves into it upon leaving our physical bodies behind as described. Try to picture it really vividly. The world of the senses is obliterated; what we saw with our eyes and heard with our ears is no longer perceptible. We cease to feel as well. Thoughts related to the outer world are laid aside in a way that could be described as follows: O gnomes, we give you our physical thoughts to keep you company; occupy yourselves with them for awhile.

Now an inner living and weaving sets in, a sharing in everything on earth that is inwardly alive and streams and ripples in the way the earth's fluid element carries on its rhythmic life. It is a sharing with the earth reminiscent too of the ancient moon period. A strange process starts: In addition to being aware of living in a realm of elemental beings belonging to the plant kingdom and to flowing liquids, we realize something else of a very special nature, something quite strange, namely, that we are becoming part of a rhythm that is involved both in the inner rhythm of the earth and in our breathing rhythm. We acquire the idea that the rhythm of our breathing is inwardly related to the rhythm of the earth. In short, we begin to be aware that we are part of the whole earth-organism. We really begin to sense our belonging to it. The earth-organism claims us.

This can be compared to what Goethe described to Eckermann on April 11, 1827, when he said, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.”² We feel ourselves involved in this. We share in this unique way in the life of the earth.

I'd like to point out something here that demonstrates again how fruitfully spiritual science illuminates the findings of natural science made by some characteristic scientific figures, and how well they go together. So I remind you of the famous exclamation of the Greek philosopher Archimedes, who as he sat in his bath shouted, “Eureka! I've found it!”³ And what had he found out? He lifted his feet out of the bath water and then put them back in again, finding that they were lighter in the water than outside it. So he discovered the important principle that any body suspended in water loses as much weight as the water it displaces weighs. Balloons rise according to the same principle, losing as much weight as the air they displace. In the case of water, a heavy object lying on the bottom does not lose weight, but it does so when it is suspended in the water. This principle obtains throughout nature, and it is an important one, for it is related to something of the greatest importance in human beings.

You will have heard that the human brain weighs on the average 1350 grams. It is therefore quite heavy, almost 1 1/2 kilos. Very fragile organs occupy the space beneath it, organs that would be crushed by laying anything weighing a single kilo on top of them. Yet it is a fact that we all have a brain heavy enough to crush the organs that lie at its base. But the pressure exerted on them actually amounts at most to 20 grams, rather than to a kilo. How is this accounted for? It is due to the fact that the brain is suspended in a fluid; it loses all but 20 grams of its weight because it is floating in the brain fluid. We are speaking here not of what it actually weighs, but of its 20-gram pressure on the organs at its base. We picture it correctly when we conceive the brain floating in the brain fluid and this fluid extending downward into the spinal column.

Now picture this brain fluid rhythmically rising and falling. This fluid with the brain floating in it is involved in rhythmical movement as the diaphragm contracts and expands with the in- and out-movement of the breath, and it is thus involved in the breathing process. Insofar as the brain is its instrument, the whole thought process thus is connected with the breathing process. The brain is thus an extraordinarily sensitive sense organ for the forces continually playing in the earthly realm. Goethe, in his deep insight into matters of this kind, refused, for example, to accept what the crude meteorological science of his time had to say about the rise and fall of barometric pressure being due to atmospheric lightness or heaviness. He spent an endless amount of time registering barometric readings in various localities. And he tried to determine how regular this rise and fall was over the earth as a whole and showed how it could be compared to an inner terrestrial force, an in- and out-breathing on the part of the earth, which is of course closely related to meteorological regularity and irregularity. We need not be surprised at the barometer's changeableness despite the regularity of the earth's in- and out-breathing; human beings too are prone, despite the regularity of their breathing, to contract colds and other conditions that act like barometers showing that something is amiss.

We perceive this wonderful lawfulness in the earth's gravity, this inner life of the terrestrial, even though we are not conscious of it in physical life. We perceive the mysterious inner processes of the “earth-creature” taking place in the continuous rising and falling of the brain fluid in exactly the same way we gaze out into the world and listen to it. Goethe said of it, “I picture the earth with its vapor mantle as a huge living organism involved in an unceasing in- and out-breathing.” We feel that we share in it, though on an unconscious level. But the moment we use our etheric bodies as perceptive organs we begin to perceive it consciously and to participate in it; we become part of this huge earth-creature.

Our age is really the first to confront such matters entirely without understanding. Kepler, whom even those currently eager to wipe out all spiritual insight regard as a great mind, still spoke of our earth as having a periodic respiratory process which he likened to that of whales, a going-to-sleep and reawakening, dependent upon the sun-rhythm and accompanied by a fulling and ebbing of the ocean.⁴ We have an experience of these processes on an unconscious level, and it finds expression in a physical process of which we are not consciously aware.

It will not surprise you, then, that clairvoyant perception reports that what has now withdrawn into the inner organism, the strange relationship between the external atmosphere and our thought process through the blood and the rising and falling of the brain fluid was once an external element on the ancient moon, where dreamlike clairvoyance prevailed. The circulating air was outside. The human being himself was as yet only a vortex in the moon substance, for there was as yet no earthly matter; the moon was still in a fluid state or, at its most material, a thickened fluid. And in this whirling and perceiving the whirling lived moon human beings, floating as condensations in the fluid element.

What we were as moon humanity remains within us. And if we study the brain in the brain fluid and study the nature of the various functions related to the breathing process, we see that it is indeed true that we have inherited the legacy of the ancient moon, but now withdrawn into our interior make-up. We are still there, as brains floating in fluid, in rhythmically alternating motion.

We see here a reflection of the old moon rhythm that constituted human physical nature on the moon. And our whole physical make-up, which we perceive with our nerves and external senses, has spread out over that nature as an outer covering. Hidden beneath it is what remains as a moon legacy.

There are always and everywhere these interrelationships, marvelously wrought. But we have no inner perception of them as long as our eyes and ears are directed only toward the external. The moment we surrender the use of our senses and leave our thoughts behind as described, however, we feel our unity with the life of the earth. And we know ourselves inwardly to be one with the earthly gravity of our etheric life, that life into which we enter upon leaving our physical bodies in the transformed condition known as death.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet and thinker. Published Metamorphosis of Plants in 1790; in this book he shows the leaf as the primeval organ of the plant out of which all other plant organs evolved.
• 2. Johannes Peter Eckermann, 1792–1854. Published Conversations with Goethe, 1823-1832 in 1836.
• 3. Archimedes, 285–212 B.C., Greek physicist and mathematician.
• 4. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630, German astronomer. Calculated orbits of the planets and discovered the laws of the movement of the planets.

Often I have indicated how spiritual science wants to position itself in the spiritual life of the present. I have also often spoken about what it can be for the human beings and what it can bring to them, and I will do this in detail in the last talk. I have also pointed in the course of these winter talks repeatedly to the fact that one can understand that on one side numerous human beings of the present, maybe more than they already know it, strive instinctively for this spiritual science out of the unconscious soul forces. On the other side, one can understand that from the general attitude of our time opposition arises against spiritual science. The spiritual researcher also understands the objections, although they are based on prejudice. However, the whole attitude of our civilisation to a possible spiritual science depends to no small measure on the fact that one does not want to realise how spiritual science can basically understand all other worldviews and can completely acknowledge the reasons which are brought forward by this or that side against it. I have drawn your attention to the fact that spiritual science wants to be the large circle which extends the human knowledge of all fields of life, and that all other worldviews are small circles within this large circle, which, of course believe to be right from their viewpoints. Spiritual science can mostly affirm the positive aspects of these worldviews. However, one cannot say this of the other worldviews that one asserts today, in the same sense. Since just on the following point of view one will not position oneself: this or that—may it be put forward for materialism, spiritualism or realism—is to be regarded as one-sided in a certain respect, and only by overcoming this one-sidedness one can attain knowledge satisfying the human being. In its fields, that worldview which must appear as one-sided is often fully entitled, so that it can produce truth at its place. Spiritual science cannot stop there recognising these truths as something all-embracing, but it has to go over to putting them at their right place. That is why we deal in particular in spiritual-scientific fields with the opposition of that worldview which believes to stand firmly on the ground of modern science, and which must—I say expressly “must” -- regard spiritual science from its point of view as fantasy and daydreaming.

I choose a form of worldview that believes to stand strictly on the firm ground of scientific methodology. I want to characterise this worldview somewhat radically. It says that one has to consider the physical, chemical and mineral forces and substances of the human being if one wants to understand the human being and gets clear about the fact that, as any other being is composed according to the principles of nature, also the human being, as the crown of creation, is composed.

This worldview thinks, if it has succeeded once in getting to know all natural principles and substances that work in the human nervous system up to the subtlest processes of the brain, then it recognises, as far as it is scientifically possible, how the human thinking, feeling, and willing arise from the physical laws. It is an entitled ideal of this worldview to understand the human being wholly scientifically.

I know that I must cause, indeed, contradiction from some researchers taking action a little more seriously who already say today that one has left that more materialistic worldview which believes there that the human being is understood completely if he is understood completely according to the outer physical processes. However, it does not depend on that that one admits there or there already that one has not understood the human being if one knows the wholly natural processes that go forward in his nervous system up to the brain. However, that is the point that in spite of this consciousness even in the scientific methods also of the philosophically thinking contemporaries nothing else exists than the view, which positions itself on these natural processes. Since most people who believe to be based on science reject a view as it is meant here as spiritual science.

The view of spiritual science has to admit on basis of its research results that with any thinking, with any research which can survey the processes of the sensory world and can pursue them up to the processes in the nervous system one can find nothing else than the wholly natural human being. However, this wholly natural human being is only the cover of that which we got to know as going over from one life on earth to another which experiences an existence in a purely spiritual world between death and new birth after every life on earth. I tried to show this in the last talk. Spiritual science must realise that this everlasting must remain concealed in the human nature to any philosophy that wants to turn only to the forces accessible to this view of nature. One can investigate this everlasting in the human nature only with forces that one attains with an inner development, as I have described it more exactly in my Occult Science. An Outline and in the bookHow Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. However, even the philosophers who stress the necessity of spiritual life, yes, even the philosopher who has become famous in such weird way, Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926, Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908) who speaks in his essayistic philosophy of the “spirit” repeatedly, restricts himself to this natural human being. He nowhere betrays that he has a sensation of the fact that spirit and spiritual world can be investigated only with the mental forces that certain spiritual-scientific methods bring out of the soul.

Spiritual science is not the adversary of such scientific views, also not of such philosophical worldviews, but it has to show their limits, has to show what they are capable of and what they can show. Concerning this standpoint of spiritual science to the other worldviews, I have also emphasised here repeatedly that it feels in harmony with those spirits of the human development who indeed did not yet have spiritual science. Nevertheless, because they had a thorough inkling of truth from their deepest feeling, they spoke in a clear, understandable way where they expressed this inkling.

This applies to two personalities of the nineteenth century, to Goethe and to the less known Robert Hamerling (1830-1889, Austrian poet)) about whom I would like to speak today. Both poets have dealt with a problem like from a deep spiritual-scientific feeling, but poetically, while I want to stress the spiritual-scientific colouring of this problem.

I would like to ask: could not the thought even arise in a head: what originates really if one invents the human being as a being in such a way that one does not count on the everlasting forces slumbering in the human soul? Which picture of the human being originates if one only uses the natural forces and substances and the physical principles?

The spiritual scientist can assess such a picture only from his point of view. If you develop the forces slumbering in your soul to spiritual beholding, you experience yourself in the soul so that you experience and recognise that these abilities are not bound to the senses and not to the forces of the brain. You experience this way that you are really with your soul beyond your senses, beyond the brain, beyond the body, yes, you face everything that is bound to the body as an outer object. Now you face what you consider, otherwise, as belonging to your ego, your body, as you face the table. You face your destiny too, as far as it takes place in the outer world. You have become a new human being to whom that what you were before has become objective and outside you.

If you consider the human being in such a way, you attain the possibility to assess how much is valid what one can think up as a picture of the human being with only natural substances, natural laws and abilities. One realises that this picture is something very real; but for the human being it is not real in the sensory world, but it is a part of the human being, it penetrates and invigorates the human being.

Those listeners who remember the ambitious attempt eight days ago have heard that the human soul, after it has gone through the purely spiritual life between death and a new birth, enters a new earth-life with forces developed in this life, that it is attracted by a parental couple and that it adapts itself to the inherited forces of father and mother. However, the spiritual researcher realises that the human soul descends to a new embodiment on earth, must wrap itself during the penetration into the physical embodiment in forces that are as it were an essence of the whole physical nature. Before the everlasting human being hurries to his embodiment, he has to attract as it were forces and substances from the spiritual substance by which he hardens the picture that he has developed purely spiritually like a prototype for the next embodiment and wants then to embody himself physically within the line of inheritance. We can say that with the human embodiment an intermediate link puts itself between the completely spiritual which prevails between death and a new birth, and that what stands then in the physical world as a human being before us. In this physical human, we just have what has come from father and mother, and that what comes from the former embodiments, the spiritual-mental. However, in between is, one would like to say, a purely etheric human being, a still spiritual human being that is invisible, supersensible, that contains, however, the forces in himself which are like an essence of the whole physical world process. It is strange: if the human being believes to be on the firm ground of natural sciences and develops a corresponding picture of the human being, he gets to a picture that is not real in this physical human being who contains the everlasting soul. It is a mere abstraction that works, however, in this physical human being, it is that in which the human being wraps himself up before he descends to the physical embodiment.

It is a real being what the human being snatches from the everlasting spiritual life and forces into the life between birth and death what prevails in us between birth and death, what is spiritual, but what lifts us from the physical and what hands over us to the spirit. However, it is not physically visible but to a higher beholding.

Hence, the strange fact emerges that those are not completely wrong who believe to think materialistically correctly, while they form a fantastic picture of the human being completely according to the principles of nature. This picture has meaning for the human being between birth and death, and causes during the life on earth that the soul forgets its spiritual life as it were. However, it does not exist as a thing of nature with mere physical substances and principles, but it penetrates the human nature only. This link between the outer and the everlasting human being walks through the physical world.

Goethe considered this thing as something “supersensible-sensory,” one would like to say, and he characterised it as Homunculus in the second part of his Faust. The materialistic worldview develops fantastically that what Goethe meant with his Homunculus as the picture of the human being. However, this picture of the human being does not exist in truth. It impregnates the human being; it divests him of his everlasting meaning between birth and death and works in the physical-sensory nature.

This latter is the third that comes to the other two. While the materialistic thinker believes to put the most real before us with his picture of the human being; he puts an abstraction, he puts something supersensible. This ideal of modern monism, this Homunculus, that what the modern monism would like to describe as a “human being,” Goethe used it in the second part of his Faust for a particular mission.—I can indicate these things only briefly not to drag the talk out too much.

Faust has experienced what is known from the first part of the drama under the guidance—or by the seduction—of Mephistopheles. He has gone through all phases and tortures of the desire of knowledge, has experienced serious human guilt, and now in the second part Goethe shows how Faust is snatched away from the usual imagination. Faust shall not get the possibility to penetrate farther into the world, so that he works up his way with the usual consciousness again from everything that his soul has experienced. A night is presented to us, it means, Faust's consciousness is removed at the beginning of the second part. From the spiritual worlds, forces are put in his sleeping consciousness in which he does not immediately become aware of that; however, they become effective, as Goethe suggests, in Faust's soul where the everlasting forces prevail, so that he can advance. Hence, spirits speak in his sleep, like Ariel, and others. Therefore, he feels “life's pulses beating with fresh vitality” (verse 4679); he is given back to life and can begin the struggle for existence anew.

I want to refrain from all other things and state only that one demands from him to conjure up the pictures of Paris and Helen. Faust himself gets the desire to behold Helen; and one understands it after Goethe's portrayal that he himself gets this desire.

What a figure is Mephistopheles? He places himself beside Faust as the spiritual being that wants to keep the human being in the outer-sensory world, in the natural existence. Mephistopheles is absolutely a spiritual being, but a being that denies the spiritual world towards the human being. Faust has to demand from Mephistopheles that he enables him to penetrate into those fields of existence where the everlasting-mental of Helen exists. Mephistopheles can give him only the key of this world; since it is the world of the mothers, the everlasting forces of spiritual existence. Now a conversation develops in the second part of Faust where the spiritual-scientific attitude of Faust and the refusal of this attitude by Mephistopheles face each other. Mephistopheles regards that world as nothing into which Faust wants to penetrate. However, Faust replies to him: “in your Nothingness I hope to find my All” (verse 6256). As to Mephistopheles the world into which Faust wants to penetrate, is nothing.—Faust meets the primal figure, the everlasting of Helen in the realm of the mothers. He brings up it. He is immature to face it. I do not want to mention everything that still happens, but only this one: Faust is not so purified as in such striving someone who wants to face the spiritual really has to purify the forces. He approaches Helen as if she is a sensory appearance and the result is that Helen paralyzes him. His consciousness is snatched away from him because of his violent passions. In paralysis, his dream emerges which leads him into the realm where Helen has lived.

Now the big question originated for Goethe: how can one continue the life of Faust poetically? Goethe was no symbolic poet; he was a realistic poet, even if spiritually more realistic. The question originated in him: Faust must be able to face Helen as a human being, as she lived as a human being. She has to descend to the realm of the human beings, she has to embody herself, and Faust must be able to face Helen as a human being: how can one do this in the spiritual-realistic sense?

When Goethe wrote this scene in the twenties of the nineteenth century, he remembered former studies. What he had studied in his youth as spiritual science, affected him more and more. Hence, the second part of this drama is riper all the more what caused, however, that some people regarded this second part as a miserable product of the old Goethe because they had no use for it. Goethe asked, how can I use my spiritual-scientific studies to bring Faust where one has to search the spiritual of Helen? There he remembered what he had read in the book De generatione rerum naturalium by Paracelsus (1493-1541), he remembered the “Homunculus.” Paracelsus declares in this book how a picture of a completely natural human being can be produced, so that one can see him really.—It would lead too far to go into that what Paracelsus shows, simply because his explanations are not at all satisfactory for us today. I want to go into the matter more in the style of modern spiritual science, and not into that what Paracelsus showed.

Paracelsus talks of the fact that one can mix different substances and treat them according to the methods of his time. If one goes into it how the human beings thought in this respect at his time, it mattered not so much how the substances were mixed how they decomposed and combined, but it mattered that the human being stood before the chemical processes and let them work on his soul. The effect of these processes caused a clairvoyance to be produced by other means today. Then one beheld that figure which Paracelsus describes which is really a paradigm of the human being, a little human being, but only radiant, without body, not embodied. These are the essentials in the sense of modern spiritual science that those processes produced that condition of consciousness while the Homunculus became visible.

So Goethe said to himself tying on Paracelsus: this Homunculus is a being which stands between the supersensible and the sensory, namely in such a way that it can bring the human beings down from the everlasting into the physical-sensory world which works in the human being as a force but is not embodied. Goethe moulded the Homunculus into a poetic figure. For he presents a spirit of such kind at first about which one can say in the sense of Faust, such spirits look greedily for treasures and are happy if they find earthworms. Goethe presents such a spirit in Wagner, a figure that is really an ideal of people with modern worldview who look for treasures and are happy if they find the laws of the earthworms.

  To two sides the picture of Wagner arose to Goethe. Since there is beside aFaust book also a Wagner book first; and then there a strange man lived at Goethe's time: His name was Johann Jacob Wagner (1775-1845, philosopher). This man stated that one gets a little human being really, if one mixes substances and so on in the retort according to certain methods. From these two Wagner figures, Goethe melted down a figure, the Wagner of the poem. Thus, the figure of that Wagner originated who stands before his retort and mixes substances and waits until the “well-behaved little human being,” the Homunculus, originates. He would not originate without further ado. Neither in the retort of Johann Jacob Wagner nor in that of the Goethean Wagner a human being would originate, or what some modern scientists imagine as the human being, unless Mephistopheles slipped in the processes, unless the spiritual power of Mephistopheles worked in the background. A purely spiritual being originates in Wagner's retort that way, it is radiant, it wishes, however, to be embodied and it does not lack mental faculties, but it lacks efficiency—a being that the materialistic worldview considers as the human being:

He's well supplied with mental faculties,

but sorely lacks substantial attribute.

So far he weighs no more than does his vial

but hopes that he may soon obtain a body. (Verses 8249-8-9-8252)

Homunculus wants to embody himself, but he is a being only living in the spiritual. Since those present a bad abstraction who search the “real.” However, Wagner can only believe that he has caused the super-creation in reality. He stands before the retort and believes:

It works! the moving mass grows clearer,

the super-creation (conviction) the more certain; (Verses 6855-6-5-6856)

This passage is so little understood in the Faust literature even today that people believe that it concerns a “conviction” (German: Überzeugung). However, Goethe means it in the sense of Nietzsche's “superman” (Über-mensch) as super-creation (Über-zeugung).

Homunculus turns out to be a being that belongs to the spiritual world. Since he attacks Faust immediately in a weird way. Faust lives in dreams of ancient Greece. Homunculus is clairvoyant; he beholds everything that Faust is dreaming. Why? Because Goethe imagines him in the spiritual world, not emerging from the physical world. The human being has it as forces in himself. There Homunculus loses his abstraction. One will even concede to the monists that this abstraction would be clairvoyant if they beheld it in the spiritual world where it is real. Since Homunculus, the human being, as Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899, philosopher) and others invented him exists as a spiritual being and is a clairvoyant being in the spiritual world. However, a person like Büchner would not suppose this. Hence, Homunculus can really become the leader in the regions where Helen shall reincarnate where she shall appear and face Faust. However, Homunculus must appropriate the forces for that only which are in the physical nature apart from everything else.

Homunculus as a clairvoyant being becomes the leader of Faust in the Classical Walpurgis night. There he gets advice from the ancient philosophers, from Thales and Anaxagoras, from Proteus also, how he could get to a natural existence. He who wants so much to be embodied, who “is well supplied with mental faculties,” but even more, “he sorely lacks substantial attribute.” Nevertheless, if once the materialists realise how that what we imagine fantastically could get to natural existence?! Proteus advises to develop through all realms of nature. Goethe's tip to that is great where it concerns the passage through the plant realm, Homunculus says there:

I like the way the air smells fresh and green!

(German: Es grunelt so, und mir behagt der Duft!) (Verse 8266)

The verb “gruneln” is derived from “becoming green” to show the effective fresh life of the plant realm. However, one thing is said to Homunculus: that he can get on this way only to the time when the human being comes into being. He is the mediator between the bodily and the everlasting. When it concerns the birth he must submerge head first into the natural forces, must be taken up in the merely cosmic elements. Hence, one says to Homunculus, experience all that, and that he has “lots of time before you must be human” (verse 8326). Then one tells him:

just don't aspire to the higher places,

for once you have become a human being

you've reached the end of everything. (Verses 8330-8332)

How wonderfully is that in harmony with the mission of Homunculus with the process of human incarnation; since if he has become a human being, he completely goes into the human nature. Hence, one says to him, stay here, do not aspire to higher places (German: Orten and notOrden = medals (or classes) as in most editions). - Here, one must say “places.” For the copyist made a mistake there. This part of theFaust exists only as a duplicate, and because Goethe spoke with Frankfurt accent, the writer understood Orden (“medals”) instead of Orten (“places”). The modern commentators have believed that already the old Proteus spoke of “medals,” one of the unhappiest ideas that slipped in the Faust literature.

Goethe portrays the merging of Homunculus into the elements splendidly where Helen should originate where she should face Faust, so that her everlasting unites with the forces that come from the elements, so that she can enter the earthly existence. The sirens say:

What miraculous fire transfigures our waves,

that break on each other and shatter and sparkle?

Lights wave and hover, the brightness comes nearer,

what moves in the darkness is pure incandescence,

and all is enveloped in eddies of fire.

Let Eros now rule, the creator of all! (Verses 8473-8479)

That is: if the human being enters the physical existence from the eternally spiritual by love, Eros, then one can clairvoyantly behold this merging in waves. “Waves” are meant spiritually. Hence, one says:

Hail to Ocean and the waves

now embraced by sacred fire!

Hail to Water! Hail to Fire!

Hail this strange and rare event!

Hail to Air and its soft breezes!

Hail to Earth's mysterious depths!

To you four, o Elements,

Here we offer solemn praise!(Verses 8480-8487)

That is: Homunculus is now taken up in the elements, and Helen appears in the third act. The reincarnated Helen appears who does not smash Faust.

Thus, Goethe knew how to use the figure of Homunculus poetically. Thus, Homunculus is also in Goethe's eyes that in the human being that leads a completely mechanical existence in which purely mechanical forces prevail. However, the human being is the highest member of creation because these forces dissolve when they enter into him. However, what the human being is not in reality he can be it in his imagination. Out of human freedom, he can get an idea of his ideal and that he can deny his everlasting spiritual which he does not want to take into consideration, and that he can imagine: I am only a being that consists of completely natural substances and forces. Then he can also live in a corresponding manner.

In a time which produces materialism in theory which thinks in theory in the described way, it is not harmless that it has something in its whole attitude that denies the everlasting spiritual and makes just that the natural human being what we have got to know as Homunculus. A certain desire must be there to develop the Homunculus forces particularly; then one has taste to a worldview that regards this Homunculus as the human being.

In the sixties of the nineteenth century, a weird catchword circulated in psychology. One has always believed of psychology that the human beings would not go so far into Homunculism in relation to the soul that they wanted to know nothing about the soul and accept the purely bodily only. However, there the catchword “psychology without soul” emerged (by Friedrich Albert Lange in hisHistory of Materialismup to Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920, psychologist). That is: one wants to study the mere phenomena of the soul life to the details. These are just “events,” one says; but one does not turn to the soul itself.-

Of course, it is in the nature of this Homunculism to deny the soul; since one must deny the soul if one considers Homunculus as the true human being, because Homunculism cannot be reconciled with the soul. A time in which the catchword “psychology without soul” could originate must show Homunculism as a hidden desire of human life. A time, which believes that the human being is only that what one can recognise with the usual forces engaged in the nervous system, shows homunculoid characteristics in the majority of its human beings.

There the thought may arise in a poet: how would it be if I hold up a mirror to the time and show: you imagine what would result from you if you believed to originate only from purely physical forces and principles. He is a poet who takes the catchword “psychology without soul” seriously and says to himself, the human beings have not only said this, but they also lived it. I want to put a human being who is invented exactly after the picture as they imagine him. They do not know only that he is in such a way as he works. However, I want to invent strictly what would originate from the picture of the modern materialist.

Such thoughts worked in Robert Hamerling (1830-1889, Austrian poet), and he carried out these thoughts on his sickbed and sent out the picture of theHomunculus in the world. One knows this poem little today, although 5,000 copies were sold during the first five months after its publication. However, this is also something that is in the sense of Homunculism, of our time.—Hamerling created his Homunculusas I try to show him in few words. I can show him in such a way. As I got around to regarding that as correct what I say about Goethe after a more than 30-years study, I can do it concerning Hamerling too. Since shortly after Homunculusby Hamerling had appeared, I wrote a treatise about it, and Hamerling still wrote to me that I had understood his idea completely.

Robert Hamerling had taken the idea to put once before the modern human being what is contained in the views if one imagines the human being consisting of wholly physical forces and substances according to natural laws only. Hence, he let the modern professor be serious to create a human being according to the physical forces and principles. Indeed, the scientist who believes to construct a worldview based on physical laws says that one is not yet able to create a human being that way today. However, the poet can say, let us assume that this time has already arrived that that could be performed what was theory once. Thus, we see the academic monist standing before the retort, we see him treating the substances accordingly—and the little human being, Homunculus, appearing:

“Bravo, little doctor!” he shouted

Still a second time, while he

Slipped shivering in a little jerkin,

Which was ready for him;

With gracious look he knocks

On the shoulder of the producer.

“So on the whole and from the pure

Chemical-physiological point of view

Considered, is that, my dear,

What you created, a respectable,

Praiseworthy piece of work.

In detail, one could say

Many a thing about it.”

Homunculus continued

And gave some learnt,

Estimable hints.

He spoke much about albumin,

About fibrin, about globulin, too,

Keratin, mucin, and other things,

And about their correct mixture,

And taught his creator

And producer thoroughly how he

Could have made it better.(Literal translation)

Thus he is there in reality—that is in the reality of the poet, as he is invented in the heads of many materialistically minded people. From this materialistic attitude that is given to the “well-behaved little human being” that originates also which this little human being shows as his first tendency. If one looks at the world for the tendencies of the “youngest” people, one already understands how Homunculus can come to such like that:

Gradually he started quibbling

And grumbling in the book,

Which he had in his hands,

The Homunculus. This was interesting

To the doctor, and he wrote

The remark in his notebook:

The first literary emotion

Of a little human being—Review

However, it will not go at all. Since Homunculus grows out of the thoughts of his creator, we say, of his super-creator, and brings many things with him that lived in his thoughts because of the whole condition of our time. He is nervous; he brings nervousness with him. Nevertheless, there his learnt producer cannot do anything with him. That is why he casts him back into the retort, makes him the human embryo again. Homunculus is correctly conceived and born now by a mother, so that we have a not entirely right Homunculus, but one who is only without a natural father.

Then he goes through his apprenticeship. He also becomes a poet, of course. He experiences what many poets experienced in our time: he looks for publishers. He develops a pleasant relation not only to his publisher, but also to his daughter who is promised to him, if his poems find the necessary distribution. Of course, one has “connections”in the era of Homunculism. One praises the book very much; how can Homunculus assume it different! But behold: when the year was over, the publisher had sold thirteen copies only. He takes away the daughter from him, and Homunculus must search his further journey through life.—He chooses all possible ways. He comes to a spa resort, and there he gets to know the customs and traditions of Homunculism, I would like to say, the customs and traditions of modern spa life. Then he grasped the plan to found a newspaper,News for Everything and for All People.

Councillors, councils of state and other councils or also the leaders of powerful, financially strong parties, the leaders of big bank companies and trading companies urge to it and write their editorials and reports.—I beg you to consider—because Homunculus was published in 1888—that with it no satire was intended about something that appeared much later.—However, Homunculus is not content with it; he still aims at something higher. He sells his newspaper to a corporation—this is no satire—and he devotes himself to his other enterprises. Then he becomes a millionaire and lives in a very strange way. I would like to stress that he settles very well in the time of Homunculism. What Non-Homunculism attains by lifeless forces if, for example, anything is supported by columns still belongs to the past times. The big tamed snakes in his garden pavilion hold its cupola. One had trained squirrels once and had imprisoned them in cages. Homunculus does not do this; he lets them work as machines. This is the right Homunculism. Such a thing would already come out if some thoughts existing already today were developed further.

However, even if he is a millionaire he does not arrive at a satisfying life. He did not know a “soul life” because he had no soul. Thus, his existence dissatisfies him extremely, and, therefore, he plunges into the Rhine River. There a being saves him that also has no soul, the mermaid Lurley. Now Homunculus and Lurley become a couple. Because all old worlds are not enough for them, they immigrateto a quite new region.—One would still have to describe the interesting Literary Walpurgis night that is celebrated at the wedding feast of this couple. Some things of it apply to our time, too.

One would have to carry back one's mind only to Hamerling's time, but one would also have to say the same here that it should be no satire of modern conditions:

The host of water poets was

Completely addicted

To harsh world-weariness,

To bitter weariness of life,

To dark melancholy,

And to Prometheic

Liverish pessimism.

The beer and wine poets

Felt much more comfortable in their skin.

To these the world was just

Right, and they suffered only

From one evil: hydrophobia.

The absinthe poets, in the end,

With the wine and beer poets

Shared hydrophobia,

And with the host of water poets

The vulture bite of the dark,

Melancholy-weary,

Liverish pessimism.

Therefore, they were twice miserable.

“Art and literature” are studied rather interesting.

They immigrate into a region not yet sicklied by the faith in the soul. The soulless man and the soulless mermaid emigrate into an Eldorado. This is an Eldorado of some party systems; and something that prevails in a party system today is portrayed brilliantly. I only want to suggest that Homunculus also does not manage here with the establishment of his model state, the Eldorado, even his Lurley is taken away from him by a party man who walks around with the slogan: “nobody shall outvote us!” However, Lurley says, he is a character, and Homunculus has to move on. Nevertheless, he is an inventive head and wants to think the things to their ultimate consequences. He says to himself, you can bring about nothing with the human beings if you want to put Homunculism into reality; nevertheless, they are not able to do this. However, why should I not take the ultimate consequences? Could I not develop the monkeys to human beings? Modern science already teaches that the human beings have developed from the monkeys. I gather the best of them and transform them into human beings rather fast.—He founds an enterprise in which he wants to transform the monkeys into human beings, a quite new realm. Now one tells us about the monkey school:

The teachers of the monkey school

Only complained about restlessness,

Since it was hard to tear

These noble offsprings

From certain habits

Of their race

From climbing up, for example,

Everywhere.

They forgot themselves now and again

So far, in long lessons

To delouse each other,

Attacked the teacher

In wild hordes to delouse his head.-

When the monkeys were now educated,

They competed the human beings

In any field. They were

Very competent at fine arts

Because of their innate imitation talent.

They were unequalled—of course—

As stage artists,

And undertook tours

With brilliant success.

Farce, comedy, operetta,

Parody—all that was their field.

If they made faces, these were:

Showpieces and masterpieces

Of drastic and finest comic,

As one had never seen before.

They had world-famous recitals -

Howling monkeys were the soloists,

Now and then they beat

Human choirs at prize singing.

Baboons, grinning like fauns,

Developed to fops,

To elegant strollers,

Were also at balls smart

Dancers, and the gallant style,

Which they showed perkily

With the women, was partly

Very much after the taste of the latter.

Concerning the monkey women,

They equalled the human women

And soon before also

In the skill of flirting.

Who would understand better

To dress up always fashionably

Than a monkey? They understood

To festoon themselves with jewellery

With tassels, ribbons, and bows...

And so on. Nevertheless, Hamerling thinks that one cannot transform an educated monkey to a human being. Indeed, the monkeys referred to many a “monkey ancestor,” but they only became similar to the humans with one “virtue,” that of conviction. They soon declared that it is actually inferior to be a human being; because these have not even become “monkeys.” This led to the fact that the elected monkey rector, the monkey “Doctor Krallfratz” replaced Homunculus. Thus, Doctor Krallfratz replaced him. Nevertheless, the monkeys had less luck with it. Indeed, the human beings did not cope with the monkeys that had become human beings; but in wild regions the human beings living still there in the primordial state coped with them, they simply killed the monkeys.

Now a chapter comes which one held against Hamerling very much.—Hamerling did not want to go among the anti-Semites; he strictly protested against it where he made Homunculus the leader of the Jews immigrating to Palestine in the eighth song. They do no longer stand it here under the today's conditions.

One should assume that this is something noticeable in a time that knows the attempts of Zionism. However, it is important what arises now for Homunculus from it, the Jews crucify him because they do not endure being together with him. When he is attached to the cross, only Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, visits him. He frees him from his bonds, and they both have to walk on together.

Indeed, Homunculus has thought up to the ultimate consequence what he believes to have gained from modern science. However—and this should appear with people who deal with ideological questions—he has not really dealt, actually, with science. He begins now to deal with scientific problems. Indeed, there he manages to win a big part of humanity for an idea which appeared first with the philosopher of the unconscious out of pessimism which is also a kind of Homunculism in certain sense: from Eduard von Hartmann's pessimistic philosophy. Not many people still know today what pessimism has to announce to the human beings: oh, the world is bad, as bad as possible, and it would be the best of all to escape this bad world. It is necessary that one realises that the world originated from the will, and if all human beings grasped the volition to finish their existence, world and life would be finished by the united volition of all. Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869) describes in detail that it were possible to eliminate humanity from the world by a common volition.

Homunculus founds a society not only of human beings but also of animals under this viewpoint. One holds congresses and speeches, and so on. In the end, a time is determined at which all human beings should decide simultaneously: now we want to exist no longer. Besides, even the earth should perish. All agree; the day, the hour approaches, but it stops the sun only. What had happened? Homunculus and Lurley had wished a child; however, they could not get it in Eldorado. Hence, they accepted two children of the prehistoric humans living there; they called them Eldo and Dora. However, both could not cope with Homunculism. When all human beings gather to carry out their decision, Eldo and Dora meet again after long separation, they fall in love, and therefore they come too late. They were absent when the whole humanity gathered at the agreed time, and all efforts were pointless. Homunculus himself has built up those who ruin his decision. Oh, Homunculism will create the “Eldo” and “Dora” in manifold way from itself who come too late if Homunculism wants to take the ultimate consequences. Then the sun of spiritual life, of spiritual science rises!

Nevertheless, in the end Homunculus must reach something from his science. He builds, after he has investigated all forces of nature, a huge telescope with which he can see into the most distant regions of the universe, all that is increased hugely with which the modern worldview has grown up. Except this huge telescope, he constructs a huge stethoscope and a gigantic smelling pipe; and, one can say, he still builds everything that one can obtain from the mechanical forces! From these mechanical forces in the most modern style, he builds a gigantic airship. I note once again: in 1887, Robert Hamerling in his Homunculus writes the history of the dirigible airship! With this dirigible airship, Homunculus leaves the earth sphere. He can race along with his airship faster than the light does. But he is not content with that what he is able to do: he can travel around with his airship in the cosmic space, can look out with his huge telescope into the world of the stars, he can listen to the earth with his huge stethoscope, and he speaks with a gigantic megaphone down to the human beings. There he comes into a thundercloud, lightning strikes his airship, it cannot destroy the rudder, the engine, but it destroys its controllability! Thus, Homunculus is handed over with his airship to the elementary forces. He can still take one thing along: when he approaches the earth once again, he discovers the corpse of Lurley and carries it with him on his dirigible gigantic airship.—Hamerling closes his epic with the words:

Whom the holy nature,

The mysterious mother,

Gave life by love,

Gave life in love.

She also refuses death to him,

The happiest death, above all, is

Dying down in love.

The vast universe has for him

No grave of blissful rest,

No place of everlasting peace.

Who can say where

And how long with Homunculus

And the mermaid that joins him

The ruling fate does chase

The charred gigantic airship

In the whirl of iron laws,

Of substances and forces

On roads without barriers?

Sometimes in starry nights

Sunday's children still see

That wreck as a dark planet

High above in immeasurable distance,

And shuddering they suspect

The fate of the forever restless.

Hamerling showed in his way that that what Homunculism invents cannot belong to the world in which the human soul lives but only to the completely mechanical forces. Mechanical forces of nature tear him away. Indeed, the poet could have this idea that the modern human being who develops his completely natural human ideal looks, actually, only at that in himself what is abstraction, what is something unreal and belongs to the completely natural elements. Hamerling means that what also Goethe said where his Homunculus disintegrates in the elements:

Hail to Air and its soft breezes!

Hail to Earth's mysterious depths!

To you four, o Elements,

Here we offer solemn praise!(Verses 8484-8487)

Whereas Goethe's Homunculus contributes his forces to the incarnation of Helen, the Homunculus of Hamerling as soulless being, as the representative of that human ideal that denies the soul has to be taken up in the elements of the universe.

One can say, Hamerling had the intention—I leave it to others to assess whether he was successful or not—to hold up a mirror to that modern attitude which wants to know nothing of the spirit and conjures up a human ideal divested of spirit before itself. It is another question whether the reflection is also recognised. However, it is something that is not real in the physical nature that rightly those can deny who just put up it. Strange disaster! Goethe solves the riddle somewhat. He reminds of the other word:

Simple folk never sense the devil's presence

not even when his hands are on their throats. (Verses 2181-2182)

Wagner who produces Homunculus in his retort also does not notice that the devil is that who produces him, actually. Since Mephistopheles brings in the spiritual forces. It is an inspiration of the “father of all obstacles” of that what is a product of modern science what materialism wants to put as the modern human being.

I read about Homunculus a third time. I say it somewhat bashfully; however, I do not want to shrink back from a remark that forced on me already once. I read a book of the learnt economist Werner Sombart (1863-1941) who describes the modern economic human being. Read the final chapter about the bourgeois; it is written very interesting; and at last, the modern economic human being appears whom the forces seize like with tentacles that prevail in the modern economic life and who is driven from enterprise to enterprise. As the last, he has also lost religion, Sombart says. “Religion has become business.” The modern human being is in Sombart's humanity. Someone who knows something of it has to say, does he not exist; do not the economists describe him?

It arises from everything that one has to overcome Homunculism by the living understanding of the spiritual life. As Homunculism cannot see many things, it also does not see to what its own forces lead him. The poets tried to show it, and spiritual science completely feels in harmony with such poets who felt out of their inkling what spiritual science has to found anew. What spiritual science can be as a treasure for life to the human being that it can grasp his soul that it is the only true overcomer of any Homunculism; I show this in the next talk. Today I just wanted to bring into view how spirits who looked with open eyes and sense recognised that what prevails in the conditions of the presence as Homunculism.

I believe that one understands Hamerling on the ground of spiritual science; one understands just the last words:

Who can say where

And how long with Homunculus

And the mermaid that joins him

The ruling fate does chase

The charred gigantic airship

In the whirl of iron laws,

Of substances and forces

On roads without barriers?

Sometimes in starry nights

Sunday's children still see

That wreck as a dark planet

High above in immeasurable distance,

And shuddering they suspect

The fate of the forever restless.

Nevertheless, you permit that I use a well-known and somewhat changed proverb compared with this quotation: why should we look with the eyes of the Sunday's child at the wreck in the vast universe? Homunculus is so close that even Sombart can describe him! Homunculus is very close to the modern human being, and one can only hope that many anticipating and sighted souls become Sunday's children in this respect by spiritual science that recognise the very close Homunculism, the wreck of a worldview. More and more of such Sunday's children will be there. And what also—let me use this expression—Homunculism is able to argue against spiritual science, spiritual science will give humanity what it cannot lack, what it craves for and what it must hope for: the soul, and with the soul the spiritual life. Hence, one has not to be worried about the future of spiritual science.

This will be the topic of the last of these winter talks.

What we have said so far about the Gospel of St. John has taken us deeply into the essence of Christianity, and has shown us what profound mystical power lies hidden within this Christian document. We have seen that it should not be read like a report of outer events, or an historical account, but a script engraved by life, so that every sentence re-lived, transforms something in us.

We have followed the seven stages of spiritual ascent in the life of St. John. Today we will add something which goes even deeper. A few examples will show that I have not forced an arbitrary meaning on the gospel, but that by means of occult teaching we are able to understand many things that otherwise would remain dark and unintelligible. First I will remind you of the seven stages of initiation which existed at the time of the birth of Christianity.

In the last lecture we came to know the Christian initiation, but it was not Christianity that first made initiation possible. At all times, ever since there were men as we know them on earth, it was possible to become an initiate—to ascend to higher stages of human existence. Through Christianity all these things became more inward. Since Christianity has provided us with such documents as the John Gospel—which only needs to be allowed to work and live in us—one can achieve much, and rise to spiritual heights. There were no such documents in pre-Christian times available. One had to be introduced into hidden mystery temples, or centres, and according to the various peoples, the lower stages of initiation differed. In the higher stages national peculiarities were of no account, and they were the same for all peoples even in much older times.

I would like to describe the seven stages of initiation as they were practised in the Persian Mithras cult. It was a form of initiation that was cultivated in the whole of Asia Minor, in Greece and Rome, and even as far as the Danube basin it was practised far into the Christian era. For a long time it was possible to go through these stages even in the hidden cultic centres and temples in Egypt which were often built into the solid rock. They were only accessible to those who came to know them as morally advanced pupils and initiates after strict tests. The first grade was the “Raven”. As a raven the neophyte carried the knowledge acquired in the outer sense world into spiritual life. The idea of the raven has lingered in myths and sagas. There are the Ravens of Wotan, the ravens of Elijah, and in the German Barbarossa saga ravens are the intermediaries between the emperor under a spell in the mountain and the outer world. In the Mithraic mysteries “Raven” signified a grade of initiation.

The second grade was that of the “Occult One”. This was the name for someone who had already received some important occult secrets.

The third grade was that of the “Fighter”. These were initiates who felt their higher self to the extent that they understood sayings such as one finds in the second part of “Light on the Path”.¹ Only an initiate of the third grade can understand such sayings. This does not mean that the ordinary person cannot reach a certain comprehension. Everyone has a higher self, and if one is able to abnegate one's lower self and make it a servant of the higher self then one can say in a certain sense: “Though thou fightest thou art not the fighter”. But it is not until one has reached a particular stage of initiation that one really knows what this sentence signifies. What one formerly considered as higher interests become mere subsidiary interests, mere servants of the fighter.

The fourth grade was achieved when complete inner harmony and calm, equilibrium and strength are gained. This grade was called that of the “Lion”. Such an initiate had so developed the occult life in himself that he could represent the occult not only with words but with deeds.

Meanwhile the consciousness of a person who has passed through these four stages of initiation extended further and further. He identified himself with ever larger groupings of people. All these names have a hidden meaning. For instance, the expression, “The Occult One”. What is a human being as we see him in front of us? He is what is in him. As a Raven an initiate of the first grade—he tries to overcome what is only in him. Then his interests become wider. What people around him are, what they feel and what they will, becomes his own feeling and his own will. The terms were coined in times when there were still communities which were kindred enlarged families. How did one regard such a family? One said they were members of a soul-family tracing right back to a common ancestral pair—members of a hidden ego.

An initiate of the second grade, an “Occult One”, had so ennobled his ego that it became the ego of his community; he made their interests his own. The occult entity of a human community was able to live in him. When the ego of such a human community became the ego of an individual initiate then this community became his dwelling place. The “Fighter” fought for the larger community. In ancient Palestine one designated as a “Lion”, he who had raised himself up to encompass the consciousness, the ego, of a whole tribe. The “lion” of the tribe of Judah is the term applied to someone who had reached such a stage of initiation that he bore within himself the ego of the whole tribe.

The initiate of the fifth grade had so overcome his personality that he could take up the folk-soul. The folk-spirit lived in him. In Persia such an initiate was called a “Persian”. In Greece one would have called him a “Grecian”, if it had been the custom. What does this grade signify? For him everything individual has vanished and his consciousness has become one with the whole. This constitutes a higher state of consciousness.

Today it is different. Because of the splitting up of all communal groups we meet with quite different stages of initiation. But at the time of the birth of Christianity it still had a meaning when one spoke of souls initiated to the fifth grade. You can verify this in the John Gospel. Take the first chapter, verse 45:

“Philip findeth Nathanael and saith unto him: We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the Prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth the son of Joseph. And Nathanael said unto him: Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him: Come and see. Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him and saith of him: Behold an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile!”

Nathanael is here acknowledged as an initiate of the fifth grade. This means that he had learned to know what for us men is the essence of life, the Tree of Life. Earlier in life one tastes of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One partakes of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge the moment one is able to say “I” to oneself. When the higher, the spiritual, in man awakens it can happen that God has to protect man. Jehovah was concerned lest man, after having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, should also eat of the Tree of Life before he was ready for it. The initiate of the fifth grade learns what relieves this concern and what raises one beyond all death and all that is transitory. This is the spiritual element.

How can the spiritual element become established in man? For someone who has penetrated more deeply into Theosophy it is something which flows through the whole world. For him whose vision is able to penetrate into higher worlds, all that is, to begin with, a stage of inner development even on higher planes, is expressed at first on the astral plane as a picture. When a person has reached the fifth grade of initiation he always sees a picture on the astral plane, which formerly he had not seen—the picture of a tree, a finely branched, white tree. This picture on the astral plane, which is to be taken as a symbol of the fifth grade of initiation, is called the Tree of Life. He who had reached this point is said to have sat under the Tree of Life. Thus Buddha sat under the Bodhi Tree and Nathanael under the Fig Tree. These are terms for the picture on the astral plane. What is seen are reflections of inner—even bodily inner things. The Bodhi Tree is but the astral mirror image of the human nervous system. He who through initiation is able to direct his gaze inward, sees his inner life, even his bodily inner life, projected, reflected into the outer astral world. So you see what is intended in this chapter of the John Gospel.

Nathanael is addressed as one who knows. It is implied: We understand each other. “Jesus said unto him, ‘Before that, Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.’” This means, we are brothers of the fifth grade of initiation. It is a recognition between initiates. “Nathanael answered and saith unto him, ‘Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel.’” You see the recognition is complete. Jesus answered him, and said that it will become apparent that he is more than an initiate of the fifth grade. He said, “Because I said unto thee I saw thee under the fig tree, thou believest; thou shalt see greater things than these.”

I would also like to draw your attention to the conversation with Nicodemus, which you will find in the third chapter. There we have the significant words, “Verily, verily I say unto thee, except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God.” What does it mean to be born anew and to see the Kingdom of God? It means to have awakened the higher self, to be born so that the eternal core of one's being is awakened. What does it mean to enter the kingdom of heaven? It means to see not only the reflection of Devachan here on earth as we see it through our physical eyes, but to see this realm directly itself. He alone can do this who has not only been born for this physical world, but is born a second time.

Take what I have used as a comparison, but one which is more than a comparison. Take it literally. To be born means to proceed from an embryo to a stage at which one perceives the outer world with the senses. If one does not pass through an embryonic stage one can never be ready to be born. Those who know this stage also know that ordinary life is an embryonic stage for the higher life. This leads us deep into the meaning of ordinary life. It could be quite easy for someone who directs his gaze towards the spiritual world to become convinced that there is such a world and that man is a citizen of it. He could then proceed to disregard the physical world and to believe that one cannot depart from it quickly enough, and that one should mortify the flesh, the sooner to reach the spiritual world. This shows ignorance. It is as senseless as if one would not allow the human embryo to mature but would bring it into the world at two months, and expect it to live there. Likewise for the higher world, one has to develop to become mature. Such is he who has developed his higher self. The physical world is the school. He who has developed his ego here is ready to enter the kingdom of heaven, which means to be born again. Man has to go through birth and death ever and again, until he has gained his full maturity in order to enter the spiritual world itself, so that he no longer needs physical organs. Thus we have to realise that everything we do by means of our eyes, ears and other senses is work done for the higher life.

Certainly, we have, frequently said that man must develop higher senses, that he must develop the chakrams or holy wheels, which enable him to enter the spiritual world and see it. But how does he come to obtain these holy wheels? Through his work on the physical plane. Here is the place of preparation. Our work here prepares the organs for a higher world. As the human being is prepared in the mother's body, so in the body of the great world mother—where we are while leading our physical life—is prepared what is necessary to make it possible for us to see and act in higher worlds. One is perfectly justified to speak of a higher world and to value it higher than our lower world, but we should only use these terms in a technical sense. All worlds are, basically, equally valid expressions of the highest principle, in different forms. We should not despise any world. In this way we learn to relate ourselves rightly towards both the lower and the higher worlds. This is the requirement for entering into the third chapter of the John Gospel.

It must be understood that Jesus speaks to Nicodemus of a genuine rebirth, and that, above all, he wishes to remind him that looked at in this way, the ordinary, everyday life must be reborn as a higher life and recognised as such. He who reads this chapter really carefully will see that this is what is meant.

Many circles lay it against Theosophy that it teaches reincarnation—the gradual maturing of humanity through rebirth and repeated earth lives. It is said that Christianity knows nothing of this teaching of reincarnation. But actually in the John Gospel there is a clear indication that when he spoke intimately with his disciples, Jesus taught reincarnation. For instance, one can only make sense of the ninth chapter (the healing on the Sabbath of the man born blind) if one bases it on the idea of reincarnation. One must remember that he spoke in the language current at that time. In Greece it was then usual to speak of the power that permeates man's innermost being and leads it forward. For the Greeks and all other peoples of that time, the power that made man into man and caused him to develop was God. An outer God, a God in the next world, was unknown in those days. Therefore one called what lived in man, the God in man. Thus if one spoke of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob, it was the higher self that was meant. One can only understand the Old Testament if one appreciates this conception of God. Jesus too speaks of the God living in man when talking intimately to his disciples: “His disciples asked him, saying, ‘Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither hath this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’”

These three sentences speak clearly enough. Neither had he sinned in his physical body, nor had his parents; therefore the Jewish law that God will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto so and so many generations does not hold good. But the works of God in man shall be made manifest, i.e. the self in man that passes through all his incarnations. These words which Jesus spoke to his disciples could not be clearer. You know the orthodox explanation. Think, if someone meant what is supposed to be said here: The glory of God should be made manifest in a blind person. This presumes that it was arranged that someone should be blind so that Jesus could heal him and the glory of God be made manifest. Can this be reconciled with true Christianity? No. Christianity would be morally degraded. Interpreted theosophically, this image carries a truly beautiful and noble meaning.

It was always so when Jesus spoke intimately with his disciples. That it was so, is especially revealed in the scene known as the transfiguration. It is, however, not in the John Gospel. We find it in the seventeenth chapter of St. Matthew and in the ninth chapter of St. Mark. In St. John it is not to be found. The only reference that could have any relation to it is the passage in the twelfth chapter, verse 28: “‘Father glorify thy name.’ Then came there a voice from heaven saying, ‘I have both glorified it and will glorify it again.’” And further in verse 31: “‘Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth will draw all men unto me.’ Thus he said, signifying what death he should die. The people answered him, ‘We have heard out of the law that Christ abideth for ever, and how sayest thou: the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?’ Then Jesus said unto them, ‘Yet a little while is the light with you. Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you for he that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth. While ye have light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.’”

We find the transfiguration scene in all the evangelists except St. John. This is significant. Let us clarify the meaning of this scene. What takes place? Jesus goes with three disciples Peter, James and John—up a mountain: this means into the inner sanctuary where one is initiated into higher worlds and where one also speaks in occult language. Then it is said: the master took his disciples up into a mountain—it means that he went to that place where he expounded the parable to them. The disciples were carried up into a higher state of consciousness. They saw then that which is not transitory but eternal. Moses and Elias appear and Jesus himself with them. What does this mean? In occult science the word Elias means the same as El—the goal, the way. Moses is the spiritual scientific word for truth. By the fact that Elias, Moses and Jesus appear you have the fundamental Christian truth: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. Jesus himself says—this is a fundamental Christian mystical truth—“I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” (John, ch. 14, v. 6)

The important thing is that here the eternal is shown as against the temporal, and the disciples see into a world which lies beyond this world. Afterwards they said to the master, “All this should only have come to pass once Elias has come again.” Thus they spoke to him as though reincarnation was taken as a matter of course, as also in many other passages in the gospels. John asked, “Art thou Elias come again?” Then answered the master, “Elias is indeed come again—John the Baptist is Elias. But the people did not recognise him. Say it unto no man until I come again.” Here we have the general, religious, profound truth of reincarnation uttered in the intimate conversation between the master and his disciples. At the same time it is set down as a testament: “Say it unto no man until I come again.” This coming again refers to a much later time, the time when all men will recognise Christ through their higher comprehension. When this comes about then will He reappear to them.

Thus time is being prepared through the theosophical world conception. Christ will reappear in the world. The doctrine of reincarnation and karma as a generally accepted idea was to be laid aside until this time. At that time people should know nothing of reincarnation and karma, so that they were obliged to take the life between birth and death as something of particular value and importance. Humanity had to pass through all stages of life experience. Up to the time of Christ, reincarnation was generally accepted. Life between birth and death was only a passing episode. But then man had to learn to take life on earth as something important. An extreme form of this teaching was the dogma of eternal punishment and eternal reward. This is an extreme form. What mattered was that each human individuality, each “God-man”, should pass through one incarnation in which he knew nothing of reincarnation and karma and in which he appreciated the vital importance of life between birth and death.

If you read theosophical books you will find that the time between the two incarnations is fifteen to eighteen hundred years. This is about the same length of time as between the birth of Christ, and the present day. Those living then, appear again today. Because of this they are able again to accept the new teaching. Therefore, the theosophical outlook was really prepared on Mount Tabor by Christ Jesus. If we look at world history in broad lines, we should not think that we are dealing either with truth or with error which we can censure. It is not a question of absolute truth or error, but of what is right for man at any given time. If I sat here with a group of boys no more than ten years old, and set about teaching them higher mathematics, I would be teaching them truth and yet it would be folly. I must give a person what he needs, at any given stage of his development. It is not right for us today to say in retrospect, that the Christian teaching contained errors. No. In order to master the physical plane, one had to take this one life seriously. Certainly, the priestly sages of Chaldea taught great spiritual truths. They brought down a vast knowledge of the spiritual world, but they used the most primitive tools, and did not know how to use the forces of nature in everyday life. The physical plane had first to be mastered. To do this, man's whole life of feeling must be directed towards it. Christianity had to prepare mankind to master the physical world. This was decreed, it is the testament from Mount Tabor. What lies behind this declaration is something wonderful.

If one penetrates deeper, one will find more and more. If we want to understand religious documents which came down to us from times which had true knowledge of spiritual life and not a materialistic way of thinking, we must realise that the mode of thought was so different, that if one spoke of man, one spoke in a completely different way.

Now I must tell you something which though easy to understand intellectually, is difficult for the man of today to grasp with his whole soul. The time when the gospels were written was the dawn of Christianity. One used names then in a way which I will now explain. One did not look to the outer physical man, but one saw something higher, the spiritual, shining through it. A name was not used as it is today, it had a significance. Suppose someone was called James (Jacobus). James really means water. Water is the spiritual scientific term for the soul element. If I call somebody James, I say that his soul shines through his body. With this, I signify that he belongs to the watery element. If I give the name James to an initiate, he is to me the symbol for water (Hebrew—Jam). James is nothing but the technical name for an initiate who especially governs the force of water in its occult sense.

Thus were the three disciples who were taken up to Mount Tabor called by their initiate names: James means water, Peter stands for earth, or rock (Hebrew—Jabascha), John signifies air (Ruach). Thus, John means he who has attained the higher self. This leads us deep into the secret doctrines. Transport yourself back into the time when man only possessed the lower principles—the third Root Race, the Lemurian epoch. Mankind did not then breath air, he breathed through gills. Lungs and breathing through lungs developed later. This process coincided with the impregnation by the higher self. Air is, according to the hermetic principle, the lower which represents the higher—the higher self. If I call somebody John (Johannes), then he is one who has awakened his higher self, who governs the occult forces of air. Jesus is the one who governs the occult forces of fire (Nur). Thus you have in these four names, the representatives of earth, water, air and fire. They are the names of the four who ascended Mount Tabor.

Think of these four together on the Mount of Transfiguration. There you have at the same time, the initiates who govern the four elements: fire, water, air and earth. What happened? It was made manifest spiritually that through the appearance of Jesus, the whole power of the elements was renewed in such a way that the life pulsing through the elements passed through a new, important phase of its development. This is the transfiguration seen occultly. If somebody goes through the transfiguration in this manner, if he has within himself the stages of water, earth and air, and even rises to the forces of fire, then he is a reawakened one, someone who has gone through the crucifixion. Thus, in the case of the other evangelists, this scene is but a preparation for the deeper initiation scene of the crucifixion itself. In the John Gospel, everything is already prepared. The preparatory scene does not appear, only the death on the Mount of Golgotha. Jam, Nur, Ruach, Jabascha—INRI—this is the meaning of the words on the cross.

One can go deeper and deeper into the religious texts and never finish learning. Sometimes when one hears an explanation like this it sounds forced. But every step that leads you deeper will furnish evidence that it is not forced. Superficial explanations seek to avoid the “depths” purposely. But there are depths in these writings. Those who know something can always say to themselves: probably there is much more in it, I have still much to learn. This is the attitude of reverence that we can bring to religious texts.

This reverence is of the utmost importance, for it will become strength in us drawn from the depths. There is one important sentence that I can only touch on. In chapter 19, verse 33,we find: “But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was dead already they brake not his legs ... ” and in verse 36, “For these things were done, that the scripture should be fulfilled, A bone of him shall not be broken.” You know that this reminds one of a passage in one of the books of Moses (Exodus 12:46). Rightly understood, it has a deep meaning. It is deeply symbolical, but I can only touch on it.

If you look around the world you will have to admit that man as he is now incarnated in the flesh has no power over life, nor over what stands, above life. He is only master of the lifeless inorganic forces. Man cannot oblige a plant to grow, or to grow faster. He would have to acquire occult power, to do so. Far less is he able to master what is higher than life forces. What he is able to control is the lifeless outer world. There, he exerts his mastery in everyday work over the materials with which nature provides him. He creates works of art, pictures of the Almighty, but he cannot breathe life into them. He can only copy life. He cannot awaken an intimation of life in the lifeless, even in the most sublime Christian works of art. This is so because man has enfolded his astral and etheric forces in the solid, dense physical body. Thus he came to have this relation to the outer world—to be master only of the lifeless. The higher forces which are not tied to the physical must be awakened, and then man will again be able to master life. As it is, he can only control physical forces, and not life itself.

This is connected with the fact that the human body which was once soft and pliable has now become more and more solid. If you go back in evolution you will see that man has changed very much. In Lemurian times he had no skeleton. This was formed later. The bones were the last things to appear in the human organism. He will have them until he has spiritualised himself again, until he has awakened again his inner forces and learned the lesson which he can only learn in this dense body with its hard skeleton. Christ Jesus is that spirit whose cosmic mission it was to be incarnated in just such a body in order to show man the way out of this world into a higher world. He is the leader and guide into the higher world. That which has to find its way into the higher world is symbolised by the solid human skeleton. As long as man had not reached the stage of having a hard skeleton, he did not need a Messiah. But for this present epoch he needs the Messiah, the Redeemer.

Thus it is evident that the forces in Jesus which are connected with the higher world do not concern present day humanity. We can express it by calling the skeleton the exterior; water, the etheric body; blood, the astral body; and then the spirit. *[First Epistle of John, ch. 5, v. 8, (literally) “And there are three that bear witness: the spirit and the water and the blood.”] Therefore blood and water can flow from the body of Christ. These are of no import for the present cycle of human development. On the other hand, that which supports the whole, which leads man upwards to the throne of the Eternal, what he needs in order to learn the lesson, that must be kept uninjured. This is the skeleton, the symbol for the lifeless in nature. Through this skeleton, Christ is connected with the present cycle of man's development. This is what must be kept intact until such time as man shall have reached higher stages. We can follow this back to the corresponding passages in the Books of Moses. But this can be done some other time.

Today I wanted to add something which will have shown you that the John Gospel is inexhaustible, and how full it is of strength and life. As we take it in and absorb it, it gives us strength and life. This is why this gospel is the leading scripture for those who wish to penetrate deeper and deeper into theosophical Christianity. If theosophy is to work for Christianity it is from this, above all, that it must start. But clearly, if I were to explain the John Gospel in its entirety to you, I should have to take the whole winter. I should have to take it sentence by sentence and then you would see how deep are the words ascribed to John, i.e. to him whose very name indicates that he is a herald of the higher self. He is the representative of air, and master of the higher forces, who, from the perception of the higher self, wrote his Gospel according to St. John.

It would be futile and in vain, to attempt to fathom, or criticise this gospel with the powers of the ordinary intellect. In our time the intellect has achieved great things, but the John Gospel is not written for the intellect. Only he who has overcome the intellect and is able to lead it to the heights of spirit power as John did, can understand his gospel. Theosophy would be quite wrong to undertake an intellectual critique of this John Gospel. Instead, it should immerse itself in it, in order to understand it. Then we should see that a new spirit of Christianity—not only the spirit of the past, but a future Christianity, can proceed from the John Gospel. We will become aware of the deep truth of one of the most beautiful and profound sayings of Christ. Out of his mouth we are told that Christianity is not something that has merely lived in the past, but that the same power still lives today. True it is what Christ said: I am with you always, even unto the end of time.

• 1. “Stand aside in the coming battle, and though thou fightest, be not thou the warrior.” Light on the Path, Mabel Collins, Theosophical University Press. Pasadena, California, 1971.

Today's talk is connected with the broader theme we have talked about here so often recently. As we have seen, we need to look at the activities, thinking, and beliefs of our times that resist and oppose spiritual science as we understand it. We believe this spiritual science must become a necessary part of human cultural development in the present and the near future. Thus, what I have presented here is connected to the outlook of spiritual science as well as to the whole impulse or force on which our movement is based. And in this context I want to add a few remarks today.

Again and again we have to caution people against letting certain ideas and concepts that are meaningful in our spiritual science become merely empty words. We have to warn particularly against approaching the ideas of spiritual science—in many respects a new acquisition of humanity—with old ways of thinking and old habits of soul. For instance, we must not approach such conceptions as “ahrimanic” and “luciferic” with all the usual feelings and ideas these words evoke. We need only picture how the name Lucifer in southern regions brings up the concept of demons prevailing there. However, when we arrive at the spiritual scientific view of Lucifer, we should not have the same negative ideas and feelings connected with the old idea of demons. Nor should the ideas that arose in human souls when the medieval views of the devil were alive be applied unhesitatingly to our concept of the ahrimanic.

We must be aware that the world as it presents itself to us is in a state of equilibrium or balance. The beam of a scale does not come to rest in a straight horizontal position just because it is a beam, but only because equal weights hang down from it on both sides and balance each other out. It is the same with everything in our world. The world exists neither because of a state of rest nor because of nothingness, but because of the balance created by the possibility of deviating radically from what is right and good either toward Lucifer or toward Ahriman.

Anyone who says that we simply have to guard against everything ahrimanic and luciferic is in the same position as people who say they want a scale, but don't want to put weights on either side. For instance, we know there would be no art if the luciferic element did not play a role in the world. On the other hand, we also know there would be no observation and understanding of nature if the ahrimanic element did not play a part, too. It is only a matter of establishing a balance in the human heart and soul. And that is why we can fall prey to the ahrimanic and luciferic elements just when we think we are rejecting everything ahrimanic and luciferic. We can sin against reality, but we cannot suppress it!

Thus, those who want to avoid everything ahrimanic will easily fall prey to the luciferic, and those who are trying to avoid the luciferic will be easy prey for Ahriman. The point is to find the balance, to fear neither the one nor the other, and to have enough courage to face both ahrimanic fear as well as luciferic hope or desire. But our culture does not like this; on the contrary, our contemporary culture, unknowingly and without wanting to, loves the ahrimanic and the luciferic. Believing it is avoiding them, it becomes all the more completely their prey.

Talking in general terms and abstractions usually leads absolutely nowhere. We can only get somewhere if we approach these important problems in life in a concrete way. That is why I chose so many specific examples that show how one can find a balance in life, the balance between rest and movement, between unity and diversity.

Now there are philosophers, or people dealing with world views, who say they are striving for unity. That sounds very fine but is purely luciferic. Others are striving for diversity and don't want to have anything to do with unity. Though this can be fruitful today, it is ahrimanic. Only those really strive for balance who seek unity in diversity and look for diversity in such a way that it reveals unity. It is simply a matter of finding a way to really do this. I can only mention a few sins against this balance.

In our times, one such sin is perpetrated primarily in the way people view history. How do they view history? They study how events follow each other and how they are connected in time through the law of cause and effect—at least that's what people think. What happens immediately after one event is taken as its consequence, and people try to explain the latter on the basis of what preceded it. However, as a rule people's memory these days is very short, as we can see from the fact that for nearly two years now people have been talking about historical events, the events leading to this terribly tragic war, as if the world had only begun in July of 1914! They forget so easily what happened before that. From our reading we know people have forgotten what happened prior to that date. But aside from that, when people look at history at all, they link events to the ones that preceded them, and those in turn they connect with other preceding events. Thus, the individual events are strung up like beads on a necklace, and the result is then called history.

This way we will never find the truth, at least not the kind of historical truth that will help us in life. Although events do indeed follow upon one another, one of them may be far more important than another. Sometimes a particular event taking place at a particular time may mean much more for the understanding of what follows than other events happening at the same time. The point is to find the right events, the right facts. I have often called this way of looking at history a symptomatic view of history, in contrast to the merely pragmatic view so popular nowadays. The symptomatic approach to history tries to understand our inner, spiritual evolution on the basis of symptoms, and it finds at certain times particular events that are of far greater significance than other, concurrent happenings.

This approach to history is basically a Goethean one. Goethe made it part of his whole outlook not to see events simply lined up side by side. Instead, he saw events as significant for the course of human history depending on whether the spiritual revealed itself in them to a greater or lesser extent. Someday people will write the history of the current tragic conflicts by describing certain specific events of recent decades, and from these they will understand why the current situation has come about. Today is not the time to explain these facts; they would only be misunderstood. But in the future historians will report events that people now ignore when they read about them. However, if I may say so, truth shines forth from these events.

Over the last few years I have told you about all kinds of facts with the intention to speak about the true spiritual course of events by means of them. Now, I have spoken more abstractly about the issue of history because if I had discussed certain facts in more detail—which would have clarified contemporary events—I would have had to talk about things that people don't want to hear about nowadays.

Those who do not look at history in this symptomatic way do not find the balance between the ahrimanic and the luciferic and fall prey to an ahrimanic view of history. The modern view of history is largely ahrimanic. Facts are not weighed properly. People believe they are evaluating facts and events but are not really doing it. Generally, they do not even know what the most important facts are because those are just the ones they consider the least important. But the opposite also happens, and we can talk about that in more detail. The opposite happens when people don't take facts into account at all, but develop general truths out of their hearts and souls; they carry these with them throughout life, trying to apply them everywhere. No matter how different the situations they may be in, they always try to apply the same tmth. That is really a kind of luciferic exaggeration, but it is what people prefer these days. They want to have a kind of essence of tmth that will never change and will carry them through each and every situation—that is what they would like. But that won't do at all. We have to find the balance.

Now I would like to explain what I mean. You see, people may go through the world, they may stand on a mountain and take in the wide expanses of nature. Well, they look at everything but don't connect it with the spiritual. Or people may go into homes where misery reigns; they look at everything, are touched by it, and feel sympathy. But what they think about the deepest mysteries of human existence is always the same; they carry the same thoughts into every situation. In the old folk wisdom, which is now on the decline, we can find a clear striving for balance in the soul. Thus it could happen that someone walked through a village at the time when there were still sundials—of course, nowadays sundials could not very easily be used for they cannot be set an hour back or ahead; that is impossible! But in the days when sundials were still of importance, someone might have passed through a village, seen a sundial, and found words written under it that were quite impressive. For example, people could find the following words under a sundial:

I am a shadow.
So too art thou!
I reckon with time;
And thou?

Just think, such profound words under a sundial, “I am a shadow. So too art thou!” A shadow cast by the sun. “I reckon with time. And thou?” Here, out of direct perception of a concrete reality, speaks the profound truth that human life is but a shadow of what works and weaves in the spiritual world. How vividly this comes to meet the weary wanderer, imprinting itself in his heart, when he steps before the sundial and sees the shadow! The sundial then points out to him: “A shadow so too art thou! I reckon with time. And thou?” Just imagine, these are profound and powerful questions for us, for our conscience: “Do you reckon with time? Are you finding your place in your time?” That is what I mean by saying balance must be sought.

It is important that people stop letting facts work side by side, each as important as the others and instead realize that there are important facts that can speak to us of great and eternal truths. Then what lives in the human soul and what is spread out in the universe can unite. We find ourselves truly united with the truth of the world only if we continuously come upon the truth in our interaction with the world, only if we don't insist on carrying a priori truths in us and don't walk by a sundial as we would by a plow or something like that. Instead, in looking at things, we must be instructed about the most noble and greatest striving that can light up in human souls.

This living together with outer reality, with all that is spread out throughout the universe, this feeling oneself at the right moment face to face with the eternal, is something quite different from learning out of books that this or that is an everlasting truth. No matter how often we abstractly impress upon ourselves that human life is a shadow of what happens to us in eternity, no matter how many beautiful ethical truths about the use of time we impress upon our memory, none of them will ever reach as deep as the finding of a right relationship between ourselves and outer reality. Then we will see a significance in the individual concrete fact, and only then will we find the balance in life we can never find by losing ourselves in the external world or by merely immersing ourselves deeply into our inner being. Mysticism is one-sided and luciferic; natural science is onesided and ahrimanic. But mysticism developed through observation of external nature or observation of nature deepened to mysticism, that is balance!

Let us take another example. Suppose someone were hiking one morning in a beautiful area in the Alps, noticing the song of the birds, the beauty of the woods, perhaps even the marvelous virginal purity of the water as it babbles its way downhill in brooks, and so on. Imagine the hiker wandered for an hour, maybe, or an hour and a half, and then came upon a simple wooden crucifix. The hiker may be inwardly glad, having all the forces of gladness in his soul shaken awake because he or she has seen beautiful, great, noble, and sublime views. But the hiker is also weary and approaches this place where a simple wooden crucifix stands in the midst of beautiful and wonderfully sublime nature. On the crucifix there are the following words:

Stay your steps, wanderer,
Look on my wounds.
Wounds abide,
Hours glide.
Take heed, and guard thy way,
Beware what on the judgment day
O'er thee as verdict I shall say.

The experience we can have on reading these words can be greater and can touch our hearts more profoundly than what we may experience on seeing the figure of Christ in Michelangelo's famous painting in the Sistine Chapel. The author of the words I have just spoken is unknown. Yet, all those who understand anything about poetry know that the person who wrote the words: “Wounds abide, hours glide,” is one of the greatest poets of all time. But first one has to have a feeling for this and know that true poetry is the poetry that pours out of the human soul in the right place. Not all words that rhyme, not all that passes for poetry is true poetry. But it is true poetry when out of Christianity's eternal truths there pours forth:

Stay your steps, wanderer,
Look on my wounds.
Wounds abide,
Hours glide.
Take heed, and guard thy way,
Beware what in the judgment day
O'er thee as verdict I shall say.

These are simple words, sublime words—grandest poetry! To be made aware of the greatest event in the evolution of the earth while surrounded by sublime nature and its graceful beauty means to experience with the soul the reality in the universe. This is only an example and a more profoundly touching one than the previous one of the sundial. The important thing is to develop in life so that when we meet with such things, we do not pass by reality but experience the human soul growing together with reality and maintain the balance even in our relation to what was not made by human beings, but was given by the eternal powers. We can perceive the spiritual world only when our striving is neither only one-sided mysticism, nor only one-sided observation of nature, but instead is directed toward the union of both.

I have to say this because it is part of what present-day humanity has the least real feeling for and what it can least experience. That is why spiritual science is so difficult for people to understand nowadays. What it offers is obliterated as much by a one-sided search for an all-purpose insight as by accepting the external world pretty much without seeking the symptomatic traits and the revelation of the spiritual in various events. That is what our contemporaries have the least understanding for. If they had it, there would be much less versifying and, if I may say so, much less defining. For definitions only lead people to overestimate words, and versifying leads them to misuse words. A poem such as the one under the simple crucifix—well, nobody knows who wrote it—surely originated in a time when a profound poetical sensibility lived in the hearts and souls of the people and true balance reigned in their souls.

Alas, people in our age have become inured to true poetry because there is much too much verse around, and poetry begets more poetry just as unhealthy living produces cancer. Encouraging everybody to write poems based on what already exists in poetry is the same on the cultural and spiritual level as stimulating the life process to produce cancerous growth. In this respect we have seen the most precious fruits of the art of versifying at the end of the nineteenth century. As you may know, one of the most biting critics in Berlin had to call himself Alfred Kerr, because his real name was Kempner, a name that could not be used at the end of the nineteenth century since it brought to mind Friederike Kempner.¹ Yes, she, too, was a poet. We need only remember one of her pretty poems—I won't recite many such verses, but just this one:

America, thou land of dreams,
Thou world of wonder, broad and long!
Thy trees of coconut how fair,
Thy busy solitude how strong!

This is a very striking example, but many contemporary poems, though less striking are just like this one, and many concepts formed are just like Friederike Kempner's “busy solitude.” For people nowadays often have no feeling for how strongly the adjective contradicts the noun when they speak or write. These things simply must be realized,- there is no other way. After all, quite a few people nowadays speak as though they did not take language to be just gesture, which is all words really are. I have pointed out to you how clumsy a theory like Fritz Mauthner's is.² He wants to reduce all philosophy and all world views to mere semantics and wrote three hefty volumes as well as a whole dictionary in two volumes, which lists alphabetically all philosophical terms but not a single philosophical concept.³ He completely disregards the fact that a word relates to its concept like a gesture. People always forget this in their world view. In everyday reality it cannot be forgotten; there we cannot easily confuse a table with the word “Table,” and we won't expect to learn about tables from the word “table.” But in philosophy and in matters of world view that is what happens all the time.

Well, Fritz Mauthner should just meet what we call in Austria a “Bohemian Privy Counselor” (“böhmischer Hofrat”). He would enter “Bohemian” in his dictionary and explain all sorts of things and then do the same with “Privy Counselor.” However, a “Bohemian Privy Counselor” is neither a Bohemian nor a Privy Counselor, in fact, he can be a Styrian office messenger. In Austria, we call all people “Bohemian Privy Counselor” who advance in their careers on shoes that make no more noise than slippers and who push aside their rivals without the latter noticing anything. In other words, they don't have to be Bohemians or Privy Counselors. Clearly, the meaning of this expression cannot be gotten from the words alone; they are merely a gesture.

That is what we have to realize: words are gestures. The larynx makes gestures, which become audible by means of the air, just as our hands or arms make gestures, which we cannot hear only because they are too slow. The larynx makes its gestures so quickly they become audible. The only difference lies in the quickness of the larynx. And just as it is wrong to describe somebody's gesture pointing to the table rather than describing the table, so it is wrong, in the cultural and spiritual realm, to use words to get to any truths about their concepts or the things they name.

Errors of this kind occur very frequently these days. People rely completely on words. When I was a young man—well, actually not yet a young man; I was only a boy and went to school in Wiener-Neustadt in lower Austria—I learned a little verse that has kept me from setting great store by definitions and explanations of words in general. This little verse was written on a building as the motto of the house, so to speak; it reads as follows:

I, Hans Carouser,
Prefer wine to water.
If I preferred water to wine,
Carouser would be no name of mine!

That is roughly what the modern definitions of words are often like. That is, one first makes up a definition and then formulates the explanation so that it fits, for if it didn't fit, then things would not be as they are. If you remember this little verse, you will be shielded from so much that emerges these days and is clearly visible in our so-called cultural life. Much, very much appears in our age. All these things are likely to divert our attention more and more from looking at the spiritual, from realizing that spirit reigns and weaves in what is real, in everything around us.

To an ever greater extent, we, and indeed the world, are losing all connection with the spiritual. For just talking about the spiritual does not bring it to us. A gesture pointing to a reality does not have the same meaning in regard to the reality concerned as the imitation of that gesture by another person in another room does. But what will become of our world if it loses all contact with the spiritual, if it casts off all that is spiritual? It is strange that people hardly seem to notice that they are losing the connection to the spiritual world. Humanity needs world views; people do not want to live without a world view. Yet, our modern time is largely without spirituality, without faith, or even an inclination to spirituality. However, not all those who are not inclined to spirituality can make do without a world view. And then strange justifications for a world view appear!

For example, in these last few weeks, I have been thinking about a man I spent much time with around the turn of the century, between 1898 and 1901 or so. Back then he was striving for a world view but unable to construct one. He was searching for it in Haeckelism, but apparently did not find that satisfactory. Then I completely lost touch with him. Now I see that this same man, thoroughly educated in the natural sciences, is indeed still striving for a world view, but he has the most peculiar ideas about the reasons why people arrive at world views. And incidentally, he also includes religion under the category “world view.” Someone who lives totally in the merely external, material understanding of facts, in the ahrimanic reality, cannot really feel justified integrating these facts into a world view. Now if he is nevertheless looking for a world view, how is he supposed to justify this search? We can see especially from this example how misguided people can be these days. Still, they are all honestly striving people.

Now this man I mentioned admits that on the basis of what the conventional sciences give us, on the basis of what is simply “the truth,” one cannot build a world view. How then do we arrive at a world view? We do not get it through our senses; our intellect, which is necessarily bound to the senses, also does not lead us to a world view—so what is left?

Well, this man hit upon the idea to look for the source of a world view in a place typical for our times, namely in psycho-sexuality! How do people build their world views? Through the fact that they are sexual beings! If we were not sexual beings, we would not integrate events and facts into a world view but would merely perceive them. I would like to read you a passage typical of this man's thinking:

If we follow Schopenhauer's thoughts to their logical conclusion, we can say that in psycho-sexuality there are supra-individual tendencies and strivings that ultimately have to be seen in connection with the metaphysical needs of human beings. These are expressed in the creation of religious feelings and ideas as well as in the formation and elaboration of integrated world views. At the same time, we find in psycho-sexuality an opposite pole, namely, a force that pulls human beings down into the depths of their darker side. Criminal instincts also spring from psycho-sexuality.

In other words, there are two poles in human nature, and both originate in psycho-sexuality. The one pole is religious feeling and thinking about a world view, the other, criminal instincts. Isn't it—I do not say sad, I say tragic—isn't it tragic to see where our time is heading?

These ideas are not to be taken lightly. Those who observe matters closely can see with what enormous speed these ideas are spreading. In my youth psychoanalysis, the Freudian theory, did not yet exist, and back then anyone who would have wanted to found it would have been considered a lunatic. Nowadays we have not only the Freudian theory, with its publications and with its representatives in all countries, but also psychoanalytical institutions all over the world where this psychoanalysis nonsense is practiced. These days, the most important and, as you have seen, even the most sacred experiences of the human soul are traced back to psycho-sexuality.

Humanity has indeed strayed very far from the paths it used to travel and to which spiritual science must lead it again. For what we are dealing with here cannot be refuted easily, because what is at stake when we speak about these things is the overall tendency of the soul, the whole form and understanding of the soul. When a pamphlet on psychosexuality appeared in our own Society—and a very superficially and badly written one at that—we had a big fight on our hands, which is not yet over. People could not understand why we thought such a booklet unsuitable. I told the author that the occultist is cautious in these matters because here only a very fine line, a thin spiderweb, so to speak, separates misunderstanding from the truth, and what is important is the whole attitude of the soul, and it is dangerous to speak of these things.

We will have to speak about these things for they are investigated by external science, where they will come to play a certain role. But first we must return to the direction the soul has to take so humanity can find its way to the spiritual.

In connection with the grotesque idea to look for the source of world views in psycho-sexuality, let me tell you about another fact, one sacred to all of us. I mean the fact that in the section on Paradise in the Bible, the Hebrew has been translated appropriately into our language, and we read: “And Adam knew his wife.” There you have knowledge, the concept of knowledge brought into connection with sexuality. But how? It is done exactly in the opposite way! This conceals a deep mystery. Only when people will come to things that are true on this opposite path, only then will light be shed upon these things. These truths must be looked at from the point of view of the spiritual if they are not to lead us astray. In the present age we must guard against the lack of respect for spiritual research, a lack that definitely exists. In the truest sense of the word, there is a general disrespect for the spiritual world. People believe that based on their experience of what is immediately in front of them, or on yesterday's experiences, they can intervene in the course of the world to reform and improve it.

A pathetic example of this has recently caught my attention. A man allowed himself to be so affected by the present tragic events of this terrible war that he concluded it would be a disaster if peace were ever to return to the world. He concluded that the war must continue because warfare is the natural condition of humanity. He wrote:

War is not leamt in a day. It is really fortunate that the threats of our enemies are speeding up the process of adaptation, above all this last threat of the complete destruction of our export trade. [You see, this must have been published very recently for it takes into account the Economic Conference in Paris.] Now nobody can evade the logical conclusion that peace would be a catastrophe, that war remains the only possibility. Up to now, war has been a reaction against provocation and a means to an end; from now on it will become an end in itself. From now on all those unredeemed German souls, and possibly even the most stalwart pacifists, will realize the error of their ways and see that their ideals are not relics but fossils. The whole nation as one man will demand eternal war ...

Educate people to hate, to revere hatred, to love hatred, to organize hatred! Away with immature timidity, away with a false sense of shame in the face of brutality and fanaticism! Even in terms of politics Marinelli's words hold good: “More slapping, less kissing.” We must not hesitate to announce blasphemously: “Ours are faith, hope, and hatred.” But hatred is the greatest of these.

Yes, my dear friends, such things exist. It can never be a matter of sticking one's head in the sand like an ostrich, but only of knowing where materialism leads, especially in its latest phase, when it is denied even by its adherents. In fact, things were better in the nineteenth century, in the days of Büchner, David Friedrich Strauss, and chubby Voit, the one who analyzed the metabolism, and all the others who at least declared themselves materialists.⁴ Nowadays materialism wears a hypocritical air, and people say it has long since been overcome. However, what they have put in its place, hypocritically denying it is materialism, is nothing else but materialism, an increasingly fierce materialism.

What we need, my dear friends, is Goetheanism; we need a world view that allows the soul to grow together with reality in its particular, characteristic phenomena. This Goetheanism is nothing else but the renewal of the true Christian life of feeling and experience.

Why do Orientals not understand the Mystery of Golgotha? They do not understand it because they cannot understand that one event is more significant than another. We understand the Mystery of Golgotha only when we know the difference between events, for only then can we realize that one event can give the earth its meaning. Only when we can see differences between events can we see one event as more important than another. In the Orient, we find at most a continual play of cycles, where everything is said to repeat itself. That the earth is based entirely on the fact that we have a time of preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha followed by the Mystery of Golgotha itself as the zenith of earth evolution, and then the living into it, this truth is what humanity will gradually have to understand, based on the symptomatic view of history, of course.

Everything spiritual science can give us will ultimately culminate in the Christian view of the world, which will prevail. As I have often said, spiritual science does not want to be a new kind of religion. Rather it wants to provide the tools for humanity, which would otherwise completely fall prey to materialism, to fully understand again the spiritual that is contained in Christianity. It is absolutely necessary to look with open eyes at our age, and that is much more important than any sentimental looking into it.

• 1. Alfred Kerr, real name Kempner, 1867–1948, German theater critic He was a relative of Friederike Kempner (1836–1904), a poet notorious for the unintended humor of her poems.
• 2. Fritz Mauthner, 1849–1923, German writer and theater critic. Exponent of philosophical Skepticism.
• 3. Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einei Kritik der Sprache (“Contributions to a Critique of Language”), 3 vols., 1901–2; Wörterbuch der Philosophie (“Dictionary of Philosophy”), 2 vols., 1910–11.
• 4. Friedrich Karl Christian Ludwig Buchner, 1824–1899, German physician and philosopher. Evolved philosophy of consistent, determinist materialism; roused controversy with view of mind and consciousness as epiphenoma of physical brain.
  
  David Friedrich Strauss, 1808–1874, German theologian and philosopher.
  
  Carl von Voit, 1831–1908, German physiologist. Conducted pioneering research on animal and human metabolism.

The Masters of Wisdom and of the Harmony of Sensations in Rudolf Steiner's Work

Hella Wiesberger

At the first general assembly of the German Section in October 1903, Rudolf Steiner outlined his future teaching program as “occult historical research”, part of which was the teaching of the great spiritual leaders of humanity. For, according to the aspects of the great trinity of body, soul and spirit, occult historical research will show how the physical existence of humanity is determined by the great cosmic forces of nature; what role the personal element plays in history; how the universal spirit of the universe intervenes in human destinies by pouring its life into the higher self of a great human leader and thereby communicating it to all humanity:

"For this is the way this higher life takes: it flows into the higher selves of the leading spirits, and they share it with their brothers. From embodiment to embodiment, people's higher selves develop and learn more and more to make their own selves missionaries of the divine plan of the world. Through occult historical research, one will recognize how a human leader develops to the point where he can take on a divine mission. One will realize how Buddha, Zarathustra, and Christ came to their missions.“ ¹

At the next General Assembly in October 1904, the topic was taken up again by the leaders of humanity, who repeatedly pointed out that in order to understand it, a distinction had to be made between masters of the past, the present and the future.

The masters of the past, the present and the future

After such references in the lectures of October 7 and 24, 1904, this fact was presented in detail on October 28, 1904, on the grounds that although it was already known to most people, it was necessary to keep repeating that

"In the course of our fifth root race, that is, in the time from the sinking of the Atlantean race until the next root race, a highly important step will be taken in the evolution of humanity, in that, namely, out of humanity itself, the leaders of humanity, the Manus, will arise.

All the great leaders, the Manus, who have helped humanity during the earlier root races and given it great impulses, have not completed their development purely on earth, but partly on other celestial bodies, and have thus already brought with them from other worlds what they had to give to humanity in the way of great impulses for this earth. The Manus of the Lemurian and Atlantean races, as well as the Stamm-Manu of our fifth root race, are superhuman individualities who have undergone their great schooling on other planets in order to become the leaders of humanity.

In contrast, during our fifth root race, highly developed individuals are emerging within our own humanity who, from the sixth root race onwards, will be able to become the leaders of humanity. In particular, the main leader of the sixth root race will be a human being like us, only one of the most advanced - indeed, the most advanced of all human beings. He will be an entity that began its development at the time when, in the middle of the Lemurian race, human incarnation began at all. This entity will have always been a human being among humans, only able to progress faster, and will have gone through all stages of human development. This will be the basic character of the Manu of the sixth root race. Such entities must pass through the most varied initiations, must have been initiated repeatedly.

Therefore, the fifth root race has always had initiated people since its inception, people who were initiated in that direction, so to speak, that they could go their own voluntary way. This was not the case during the entire Lemurian period and also during the entire Atlantean period. Those who helped humanity, who governed and directed it, who were statesmen and leaders of great religious communities, were under the influence of higher beings. During the Lemurian and Atlantean races, they were directly dependent on those higher beings who had undergone their development on other planets. It was only in the fifth root race that humanity was released. There we have initiates who, although they are connected with the higher entities, are not given such far-reaching advice that they are fully developed, but the initiates of the fifth root race are given more and more freedom in the details. In general, directives are given, not only to the initiates, but also to those who are inspired by them. They are given impulses, but in such a way that it is their own spirituality from which they have to carry out the things.” (Berlin, October 28, 1904)

A few months after this account, it is emphasized once again that in the fifth root race - the post-Atlantean period - the human leaders and masters are to emerge from the human race itself:

"Now, one who has passed through all phases of humanity more quickly becomes a master and rises to become a leader of humanity.” (Berlin, May 5, 1905)

Such people will then be the “true” masters of wisdom and of the harmony of feelings (Düsseldorf, March 7, 1907). The direction in which this development must be striven for can be seen from the following statement:

"Our task today is to grasp the occult in the Manas, in the purest element of thought. To grasp the spiritual in this finest distillate of the brain is the real mission of our time. To make this thought so powerful that it has something of occult power is the task set for us, in order to be able to fulfill our place in the future.” (Düsseldorf, March 7, 1907)

The same is expressed in the answer to the question once asked as to where the initiates of humanity actually are when a work like his is at stake:

“Now it is a matter of the higher truths being grasped by human thinking. If you were to meet these initiates today, you might not find in them what you are seeking. Their task lay more in earlier incarnations. Now human thinking must be spiritualized.”

²

From the twelve-, seven- and fourfold activity of the masters

Up until the separation of the first esoteric working group from the E.S.T. in 1907, Rudolf Steiner named four masters who are particularly associated with the Theosophical movement: the two masters of the East, Kuthumi and Morya, and the two masters of the West, Christian Rosenkreutz and Master Jesus. After the separation, he only spoke of the two masters of the West.

If we try to answer the question of why only four or two masters were named, while according to other statements there are twelve who form the great white lodge (Cologne, December 3, 1905), and it is also stated that there have never been more than seven initiates at the same time (Berlin, October 10, 1905), it becomes clear that that the numbers 12, 7, 4 are based on certain laws. First of all, there is a certain ratio of 12 to 7, which is found in notes from a private session with Marie von Sivers (Berlin, July 3, 1904) as follows:

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"If we imagine the evolution of a planetary system, we must consider the following. Evolution takes place in such a way that two always alternate for each being: evolution and involution. Now we must imagine the seven evolving and involutionizing each other.

On the next planet, each of the rulers has to go up one level. 8 is the evolved 7. As they develop further, they develop into the others. When they arrive at 7, they cannot go any further. If 7 became 8, the process would already have happened; it is nothing but a repetition of the first, 7 on a different level. As we move up, we see that the leaders themselves change. We get 12 regents and a 13th, superfluous one. This 13th brings the whole planet into a state as it was in the beginning, only into a higher one.

We have to conclude with 12. So that in each constitution of a planetary chain we have not seven but twelve exalted leading spirits. Of these, only the first has the eighth not in action, and so on. (Our concepts belong to the rupically mental world; these entities lie beyond our concepts, so that it is not a matter of a coming forth, but of relationships - timeless). ³

These beings have been recognized as the 12 regents in the symbols, for example of the zodiac, through which the sun passes. Corresponding to the stages of the macrocosm is also the increase in consciousness of microcosmic development. Thus the number 12 has always been decisive and there have been 12 leading spirits everywhere: 12 tribes of Israel, 12 apostles, 12 knights of the Grail.

Thus, both macrocosmically and microcosmically, 12 is the sacred number that underlies everything. 7 are in action, 5 have other tasks. For the physical planet, only 7 are considered, therefore only 7 of the 12 principles of man are taught.

⁴

This description, as well as the answer to the question of May 29, 1915 (p. 201), that of the twelve leading spirits, only seven are considered for the physical plan, explains why the Theosophical Society spoke of seven masters: the Masters Kuthumi, Morya, Jesus, Christian Rosenkreutz (also known as the Count of Saint-Germain after his incarnation in the 18th century), Hilarion, Serapis and the so-called Venetian Master. These seven were understood to be the seven emanations of the Logos, and each Master was ascribed a particular mode of working according to his ray. For example, it was said of Christian Rosenkreutz that he worked through ceremonial magic as a representative of the seventh ray. Rudolf Steiner apparently rejected this, because in the lecture Berlin, June 20, 1912, there is a remark that the individuality of Christian Rosenkreutz, whom “we recognize as the leader of the occult movement into the future,” is also much misunderstood by occultists and that he will certainly never develop his authority in the world through an “outer cultus.”

However, Rudolf Steiner also spoke of a sevenfold activity of the masters, as can be seen from the account given in Berlin, July 3, 1904, and the answer to a question given on May 29, 1915. When asked about this sevenfold structure from a different quarter, he is reported as having replied: “Two work in the east, two in the west, two in the center, but one goes through”.⁵ The expression “in the center” does not refer to Central Europe, but to the Mediterranean region as the center of the world; from a global perspective, Central Europe belongs to the western world, which is why Rudolf Steiner always spoke of the two masters of the West as the ones who are decisive for Central Europe.

If we now look at the various details about the incarnations of the masters, these could appear contradictory at first glance, when on the one hand it is said that they have already been taken from the world as highly developed individuals, and on the other hand there is talk of specific incarnations, of certain masters with a special mission, even to the extent that their physical body is preserved so that death does not occur at all (see page 205). This apparent contradiction, however, only points to the manifold and complicated way in which the masters work, as well as to the degrees of mastery, as they have often been presented, for example, by Rudolf Steiner at the Boddhisattva-Buddha levels.⁶ The following two statements, for example, point to the as-well-as in the question of incarnation or non-incarnation:

“As a rule, the masters are not exactly historical personalities; they sometimes incarnate in historical personalities when it is necessary; but it is a sacrifice to a certain extent. The degree of their consciousness is no longer compatible with working for themselves. And working for themselves is already maintaining the mere name.” (Berlin, December 23, 1904)

"When the present-day leaders of humanity go about in the world in their human guise, they are not recognized in the outer exoteric world. And if we speak of the Masters of the Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings on the basis of spiritual science, then people would often be amazed at the simple, unpretentious humanity with which these Masters of the Wisdom and of the Harmony of Feelings come to all countries. They are present on the physical plane. But they do not give the most important teachings on the physical plane, but... on the spiritual plane. And anyone who wants to hear them and receive teachings from them must not only have access to them as to their physical, carnal body, but as to their spiritual form.

The latter statement in particular also indicates that it is advisable to exercise caution when judging and thinking further about Rudolf Steiner's statements about the incarnations of the masters, especially when the information has been handed down only inadequately and not truly authentically. This is because the masters do not work only in physical incarnation, but also through incorporation, inspiration or even astral appearance. This is indicated by the note handed down from an esoteric lesson in which the way Master Kuthumi works was discussed and it was said “that this incarnation was not in a particular personality, but that his power was at work here and there.” (Berlin, December 13, 1905, p. 213). It is obvious that these are occult phenomena that are difficult or impossible for the ordinary conscious mind to grasp, which is why the different ways in which the Mahatmas appear in H.P. Blavatsky and others in the T.S. have led to great misunderstandings. However, Rudolf Steiner did not doubt the possibility of materialization either, because Friedrich Rittelmeyer related that Rudolf Steiner once spoke to him about it:

“I vividly remember a conversation after a Berlin branch evening. Dr. Steiner told of the previous incorporations of the masters. ‘Someone enters the room. They shake hands and talk to him, he leaves the room again, but you won't notice that he leaves the house’.”

Friedrich Rittelmeyer also reports, however, that however willingly Rudolf Steiner answered his questions, he gradually distracted him in two directions: on the one hand, to spiritualize thinking, which is the most important task today, and on the other hand, to the historical context.

The Seven Great Mysteries of Life and the Masters

If, in relation to the work of the Masters in humanity, we move from the question of the ratio of twelve to seven to the question of the ratio of seven to four, we encounter an even more complicated problem. To make it clear, we must start from the letter to Günther Wagner of December 24, 1903. This letter answers the request for a more detailed explanation of what had been hinted at at the first general assembly of the German section, which had taken place in October 1903 in Berlin, namely that each of the seven races had a secret to solve. The answer to Günther Wagner begins with a sentence from the “Secret Doctrine” by H.P. Blavatsky:

“Of the seven truths or revelations, only four have been handed down to us, since we are still in the fourth round.”

This sentence comes from Blavatsky's commentary on the ten stanzas from the so-called Book of Dzyan, which, as a theosophical cosmogenesis, form the core of the “Secret Doctrine”. The rest of the content is a single commentary on them. Although Rudolf Steiner was generally very critical of H.P. Blavatsky's commentaries, he always spoke with the greatest appreciation of the Dzyan verses themselves (e.g. in the lecture Düsseldorf, April 12, 1909). He once translated the first verse from English into German himself as follows.⁷

"The Eternal Mother, clothed in her eternally invisible robes, had once again slumbered for seven eternities.

There was no time, for she lay asleep in the boundless bosom of duration.

Universal thinking was not, for there was no Ah-hi to contain it.

The seven wise (ways) to bliss were not. The great causes of suffering were not, for there was nothing that could have become entangled in them.

Darkness alone filled the infinite universe, for Father (Law, Necessity), Mother (World Substance) and Son (Lawful World, Substance, Cosmos) were as one, and the Son had not yet awakened to a new cycle and pilgrimage.

The seven sublime entities and the seven truths had ceased to be, and the universe, the son of necessity, had plunged into Paranishpanna to be exhaled by that which is and is not. Nothing (overseen) was.

The causes of existence were extinguished; the visible that was and the invisible that is remained in eternal non-being - the One Being (overseen).

Only this One Form of existence (of being) stretched endlessly, without limit, without cause, in dream-like sleep; and life wove unconsciously (blissfully) in universal space, through and through that omnipresence, which is felt only by the opened eye of the Dangma.

But where was Dangma when the A-laya of the universe was in Paramartha and the great cycle was Anupadaka?

Ah-hi = soul of the Dhyan-Choans
Paranishpanna = perfection
Dangma = seer
A-laya = soul of the world
Paramartha = accomplishment (parama = above all, artha = grasp)
Anupadaka = parentless.

H.P. Blavatsky's commentary on the sixth sentence of the first Dzyan verse, to which Rudolf Steiner refers in his letter of December 24, 1903, to Günther Wagner, reads in full: ⁸

"The ‘seven exalted rulers’ are the seven creative spirits, the Dhyan-Choans, who correspond to the Hebrew Elohim. It is the same hierarchy of archangels to which St. Michael, St. Gabriel and others belong in the Christian theogony. Only, while St. Michael, for example, is only allowed to guard the promontories and gulfs in dogmatic Latin theology, in the esoteric system the Dhyanis in turn guard one of the rounds and the great root races of our planetary chain. It is further said that they send forth their Bodhisattvas, the human representatives of the Dhyani Buddhas during each round and race. Of the “seven truths” or revelations, or rather revealed secrets, only four have been handed down to us, because we are still in the fourth round and the world has had only four Buddhas so far. This is a very complicated question and will be dealt with in detail later.

In this respect, Hindus and Buddhists say: “There are only four truths and four Vedem.” For a similar reason, Irenaeus insisted on the necessity of four Gospels. But since every new root race must receive its revelation and its revealers at the beginning of a round, the next round will bring the fifth, the following the sixth, and so on.

Of the seven truths or revelations, only four have been given to the world so far, according to H.P. Blavatsky – confirmed by Rudolf Steiner's letter of December 24, 1903 to Günther Wagner. And because every revelation needs its revelator, the world has had only four Buddhas. Whether and in what way these four Buddhas are identical with the four masters of whom Rudolf Steiner spoke within the Esoteric School must remain an open question, although he once equated the two ranks of “master” and “Buddha” (Lugano, September 17, 1911).

This immediately raises the question of the relationship between the masters and the buddhas or bodhisattvas, for Rudolf Steiner speaks of both as the greatest spiritual teachers of humanity and of both as forming a twelve-fold unity whose task it is to regulate ongoing development and to teach the significance of the Christ impulse for human development. The prerequisite for a closer study of this question is certainly that the terms Master, Buddha, and Bodhisattva are not proper names, but ranks, or dignities in the hierarchy of adeptness, which can be achieved by a human individuality with appropriate development. In the lecture Berlin, October 1, 1905, the term Bodhisattva is defined as a person who has absorbed all earthly experiences so that he knows how to utilize every thing and can thus work creatively. The wise men of the earth are not yet Bodhisattvas, because there are still things in life that even the wise cannot yet find their way around in. After a long period of working as a teacher of humanity with the rank of a Bodhisattva, he ascends to the dignity of a Buddha; he no longer needs to incarnate, but works purely spiritually for further development.

Since Rudolf Steiner calls the same individualities, for example Zarathustra, sometimes a Bodhisattva, sometimes a Master, and sometimes equates the Mastership and Buddhahood (Lugano, September 17, 1911), it may well be assumed that the same ranks are meant by the great masters of wisdom and harmony of feelings, which in the Oriental tradition of wisdom are understood as the Bodhisattva and the Buddha. But the fact that an extraordinarily complicated structure arises from the interaction of beings from the higher hierarchies, which comes into play for the realization of the concrete interrelations, has been presented by Rudolf Steiner on various occasions.⁹

An understanding of the relationship of seven to four, which H.P. Blavatsky already described as very complicated, only opens up through Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of the so-called “seven great mysteries of life”. They are none other than the “seven truths or revelations, or rather revealed mysteries”, as they were described by H.P. Blavatsky. In his letter, Rudolf Steiner also calls them the seven “esoteric root truths”. In the notes from the lecture in Berlin on October 28, 1903, it says:

"We speak of seven great mysteries. There are seven great mysteries that reveal the seven great phases of life. They are called the ‘ineffable’.” (Berlin, October 28, 1903).

In the General Assembly that took place ten days before this lecture, Rudolf Steiner had already hinted at this “in the sense of a certain occult tradition” (letter of December 24, 1903). This tradition had already been expressed in writing by the English occultist C. G. Harrison. In the book “The Transcendental Universe”, London 1894,¹⁰ From the standpoint of traditional European-Christian occultism, he critically examines the theosophy of H.P. Blavatsky's Theosophy, but admits that its “Secret Doctrine” contains very valuable information about prehistoric civilizations and religions, alludes to certain secrets “whose existence itself was not suspected” and that some of them “have been tested and found correct by a process known to occultists.” (1st lecture). In the sixth lecture, Harrison then lists the “seven great mysteries.” It is said that they apply to all levels of consciousness and cannot be explained in words, but require the application of a symbolic system, the nature of which he is not at liberty to discuss. In a footnote they are listed as follows: “1. Abyss, 2. Number, 3. Elective Affinity, 4. Birth and Death, 5. Evil, 6. The Word, 7. Bliss”.

In the very fragmentary notes from the first years of Rudolf Steiner's spiritual scientific lecture work, these seven secrets are usually only partially mentioned and the name Harrison never appears. Even in later, even more concrete descriptions, they are only partially treated, so that it is not recognizable that it is a seven-part whole. ¹¹ Only once are all seven secrets found in the same terms as in Harrison's list. This is in the Paris lectures of May/June 1906. In the lecture of June 13, 1906, it says:

"There are seven secrets of life that have never been spoken of outside the occult brotherhoods until today. Only in the present era is it possible to speak of them exoterically. They are also called the seven “inexpressible” or “unspeakable” secrets.¹²

These are the secrets:

1. The secret of the abyss.
2. The secret of the number. (It can be studied in Pythagorean philosophy).
3. The secret of alchemy. (This can be understood through the works of Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme).
4. The mystery of birth and death.¹³
5. The mystery of evil, which deals with the Apocalypse.
6. The mystery of the Word, the Logos.
7. The mystery of bliss; it is the most profoundly hidden.

The fact that these seven great mysteries or esoteric root truths are not just principal concepts that “run like leitmotifs through the entire esoteric movement” (Paris, May 5, 1913), but that they point to high spiritual beings, is clear from notes that Marie von Sivers made during a private lesson (Berlin, July 2, 1904). According to this, the seven possible relationships that the Trinity of Father, Son and Spirit enters into are to be understood as entities, and the designations given for these seven possible relational entities correspond in turn to those for the seven secrets of life. In the first lecture cycle on spiritual cosmology (October 17 to November 10, 1904), there is a fundamental discussion of how all development is determined by the three principles of consciousness, life and form, and how each of these three principles has to pass through seven stages or phases. The stages or phases of life mentioned in it correspond in turn to the seven great mysteries of life. Their realization and the soul experiences associated with them constitute the two halves of the initiation and thus the content of anthroposophy as a modern science of initiation (Dornach, December 30, 1914).

While the seven stages of consciousness and form are repeatedly encountered as the seven principles of the structure of man and the world in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, this is not the case to the same extent with the seven phases of cosmic life. This is apparently due to the fact that the planetary spirit keeps its life of feeling to itself (Berlin, November 3, 1904). This is presumably why the seven secrets of life are also called the “unspeakable” ones, the description of which must be very difficult, as indicated, for example, in the lectures Munich, December 4, 1907, and Dornach, December 30, 1914.

The most decisive clue to the question of the ratio of seven to four, both in relation to the seven mysteries and to their revealers, the masters, is given in the notes from the lecture Berlin, November 1, 1904. According to these notes, the main characteristic of the seven mysteries of life is that they apply to all developmental cycles because they are always repeated “in every round and racial development, also in all other cyclic developments, including the human being. This reference makes it possible to understand why, according to the letter of December 24, 1903 to Günther Wagner, “the fourth of the... seven truths goes back to seven esoteric root truths and that of these partial truths (the fourth considered as a whole) one is delivered to each race, as a rule.”

From this, three things can be deduced:

1. The seven root truths or secrets apply primarily to the great developmental cycles of the planetary chain Saturn-Sun-Moon-Earth-Jupiter-Venus-Vulcan.

2. The fourth secret of birth and death applies to the entire development of the earth.

3. Since the seven mysteries are always repeated, they also apply to all sevenfold subdivisions of the overall development of the earth, but as partial truths of the overarching fourth mystery (see, for example, Dornach, November 3 and 4, 1917).

The question arises: how does Rudolf Steiner's work and activity relate to the seven great mysteries of life?

Rudolf Steiner's work and the fifth of the seven great mysteries of life

Since the seven great mysteries of life apply to all sevenfold developmental cycles, the fifth mystery, that of evil, must become decisive for our immediate present as the fifth post-Atlantic cultural epoch. Not as a whole, but as a partial truth anticipated, for the fourth mystery still applies as the overriding principle for the overall development of the earth. The fifth secret will reveal itself more strongly than it is doing today in the fifth cultural epoch and in its full power at the fifth stage of the earth's life, when the earth will have developed to the fifth planetary stage, the consciousness of Jupiter. (Munich, January 16, 1908).

If it is stated in the letter of December 24, 1903 to Günther Wagner that Theosophy, the partial Theosophy that lies, for example, in Blavatsky's “Secret Doctrine” and its “Esotericism” (the third volume of the “Secret Doctrine”), is a sum of partial truths of the fifth secret, this raises the serious question: What can evil have to do with Theosophy?

This question finds a certain answer in the spiritual-scientific view of good and evil. According to this, the recognition of good and evil in our cultural epoch is bound up with the recognition of the spiritual developmental impulses of the human being and the cosmos. (Dornach, September 28, 1918). Evil occurs when the individual or the community strays from harmony with the progressive impulses of the cosmos. There is no such thing as evil in itself. All evil is not absolutely real, but arises from the fact that something that is good in some way is used in the world in an inappropriate way. This turns a good into an evil. (Munich, August 25, 1913).

Another concept of evil was decisive for the previous cultural epoch, the Greco-Latin period, because it was the fourth epoch under the fourth secret, that of birth and death. This can be seen from the following modification of the seven stages of initiation. The Christian-Gnostic path of initiation, as it was decisive in the fourth epoch, had the seven stages: foot washing, flagellation, crowning with thorns, crucifixion, mystical death, entombment, ascension. The Christian-Rosicrucian path of initiation, which is decisive for the fifth cultural epoch, has the seven stages: Study for True Self-Knowledge, Imagination, Learning Occult Writing or Inspired Knowledge, Rhythmization of Life (Preparation of the Philosopher's Stone), the Correspondence between Microcosm and Macrocosm (Knowledge of the Connection between Man and the World), Dwelling or Immersing Oneself in the Macrocosm, and Divine Bliss. Now, in both paths of initiation, the experience of evil lies on the fifth step, but in the Christian-Gnostic path of the fourth epoch it was connected with the experience of the mystical death as the so-called “descent into hell”. In the path of initiation of our fifth epoch, on the other hand, one gets to know true good as the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm and evil as the respective deviation from this correspondence on the fifth initiation level. Since the path of initiation that is decisive for an epoch is always connected with the forces that are to be developed in the respective epoch in connection with the seven secrets of life, anthroposophy was bound to become the science of the correspondences or non-correspondences of microcosm and macrocosm. The question of good and evil must therefore be resolved today through the knowledge of the right correspondence.

Seen in this light, the statement in the letter of December 24, 1903, that Theosophy is a sum of partial truths of the fifth secret, can be explained to mean that only the double meaning of the fifth step of the modern path of initiation can be meant: the correspondences of microcosm and macrocosm on the one hand, evil as the aberrations of this on the other. Thus, in the spirit of the fifth epoch, knowledge of good and evil, which in the fourth epoch had a more fixed, more spatial character, takes on a more fluid character. It becomes more and more a question of recognizing the right impulses of time, or, to put it another way, the right impulses of cosmic-historical development. This developmental step from a more spatial to a more temporally shaped knowledge is based on a certain lawfulness, to which Rudolf Steiner once drew attention when he spoke about the relationship of the first four cultural epochs to the three that followed. He said:

“When a spatial relationship is to become temporal, it happens in such a way that it happens in the ratio of four to seven, that the tetrad expands into the heptad... The ratio of four to seven is based on a very specific law.” (Berlin, October 28, 1904)

The fact that a completely different position must be taken to the question of good and evil than had been correct for the preceding epochs, is also expressed in the following entry in a notebook: ¹⁴

"The masters are not a bulwark against evil, but guides to the absorption of evil. We should not exclude evil, but rather take it up and use it in the sphere of good. The lion's rage is evil only as long as it is used selfishly by the lion; if a ruler could appropriate the lion's rage and use it to create welfare institutions, it would be good. Therefore, evil is to be recognized as non-real. There is no evil. Evil is only a displaced good. Only with this realization is spiritual alchemy possible.

In connection with the seven great mysteries of life, it can be said in the sense of H.P. Blavatsky that “each new root race at the beginning of a round must receive its revelation and its revelators.” Rudolf Steiner in his work can only be understood as the first proclaimer of the fifth esoteric root truth, the fifth of the seven great mysteries of life, and in its double meaning: the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm on the one hand, and the aberrations from it as evil on the other.

In the written records from the early years of his spiritual scientific lectures, the proclamation of the mystery of evil appears only in hints, but already in its full and profound significance. For example, the report of Rudolf Steiner's remarks at the first general assembly of the German Section of the T.S. (Berlin, October 18, 1903) that among the many reasons that led to the founding of the Theosophical Society as an “occultly powerful necessity”, one of the most important is that each human race is given “a secret” and that we, as the fifth race, are at the fifth secret, which, however, cannot be pronounced today. The text continues:

"We are gradually living into it. What kind of secret it is, is already hinted at by Paul, who was an initiate. It will only be revealed in the course of the development of our race. A premature guessing of this secret through purely intellectual abilities would mean an indescribable danger for humanity. Since such a guess has almost been made twice already ¹⁵ and will happen again in the foreseeable future, the great teachers of humanity have brought about the theosophical movement. Humanity is to be prepared for the great truth. Theosophy is working towards a certain point in time. A core is to be formed that understands this truth when it emerges undisguised one day – a core that grasps it correctly and uses it not as a curse but as a blessing for humanity. The earlier races were formed from an already existing one, by selecting suitable individuals or families and continuing them through the Manu in suitable uninhabited landscapes. This procedure is no longer feasible with today's global transportation, but it is also no longer necessary. In its place, education is provided by the cosmopolitan International Theosophical Society, which is to form this core.” (Berlin, 18.10.1903).

If the fifth secret of life was characterized more generally at that time, it was later described in more concrete terms as the unlawful use of the sacred powers of transformation:

"It truly allows us to gain deep insights into the mystery of existence when we know the source of injustice, evil, crime and the misfortunes that befall the world. As a result, the best and most sacred forces that exist, namely the powers of transformation, are applied in the wrong way. There would be no evil in the world if it were not for the most sacred powers of transformation.

More and more urgently and in ever greater detail, Rudolf Steiner spoke of the reign of evil, especially of its reign in history as the aberrations from the progressive evolutionary current, particularly since the outbreak of the First World War. The great significance of the realization that evil is the fundamental mystery of our time also makes it possible to understand why the visible emblem of the Anthroposophical Movement, the Goetheanum, was associated with it. At the laying of the foundation stone (Dornach, September 20, 1913), the Fifth Gospel, the Gospel of Knowledge, was mentioned for the first time, in accordance with an “occult obligation”. The core of this gospel, the macrocosmic Lord's Prayer, reads:

Evil reigns
Witnesses of dissolving egoity
From other selfhood guilt incurred
Experience in daily bread
In which heaven's will does not prevail
Because man separated himself from your kingdom
And forgot your name
You fathers in the heavens.

And in the following ten years of intensive construction work, with the help of many volunteers, the central motif, the sculptural group “The Representative of Humanity between Lucifer and' Ahriman”, was created as an artistic expression of the dual nature of the fifth secret of life. The Representative of Humanity – Christ, as seen by Rudolf Steiner in his recognition as the Master of all Masters – represents the full correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm and overcomes the powers of aberration, of evil: Lucifer and Ahriman, through his radiance of love. When the building, almost completed, was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/23, the only thing that remained was this wooden sculpture – a legacy and a memorial from its creator for the realization of the deepest secret of life in our fifth period.

• 1. Autoreferat ‘Occult Historical Research in ’Lucifer-Gnosis,” GA 34.
• 2. Friedrich Rittelmeyer, “My life-encounter with Rudolf Steiner”.
• 3. Concerning space and time in connection with the numbers 7 and 12, see also the lecture in Munich on August 31, 1909.
• 4. Also in the writing “From the Akasha Chronicle”, GA 11, it is implied that there are actually twelve levels of consciousness, but only seven of them can be described. The eye of the seer can see five more, but a description of them is quite impossible.
• 5. As reported by Friedrich Rittelmeyer.
• 6. See, for example, Lecture Berlin, October 25, 1909 in “The Christ Impulse and the Development of I-Consciousness”, GA 116.
• 7. Notebook from 1903, archive number 427 and notepad 580/81.
• 8. Blavatsky, “Secret Doctrine”, I. Volume, German edition, Leipzig, no year, page 73. f
• 9. On the Bodhisattva-Buddha question, see ” The Bodhisattva-Buddha Question, CW 93a; Spiritual Hierarchies and their Reflection in the Physical World, CW 110; The Christ Impulse and the Evolution of I-Consciousness, CW 116; Esoteric Christianity and the Spiritual Guidance of Humanity, CW 130.
• 10. German translation 1897 by the Theosophist Carl Graf zu Leiningen-Billigheim, “Das transzendentale Weltall”. New edition Stuttgart 1990.
• 11. See “The Secrets of the Threshold”, GA 147; “Occult Reading and Occult Hearing”; GA 156; “Spiritual-Scientific Explanations of Goethe's Faust” (3.,4.Nov.1917)GA 273.
• 12. The paper by Schure was originally written in French. In the German translation in GA 94 “Kosmogonie” it says “namenlose” (nameless) instead of “unsagbaren” (innomable), which is a translation error.
• 13. This fourth mystery is only recorded in Schur's presentation as “The Mystery of Death,” which is likely to be a defect in the transcript.
• 14. 1906, archive number 105; cf. in the appendix to the section 'Individually Given Exercises', 5. 188.
• 15. More details are not known.