The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Since I plan to describe the problem of human death and the soul's immortality in relation to the Christ and Christianity's development, it will be necessary today for me to throw light once again from a different viewpoint on some of the topics I have already presented here.

When we look at the two conditions of waking and sleeping that alternate in daily human life, we find that during sleep, in regard to ordinary consciousness, man's sense perception is suspended and that what he experiences in his soul life as thinking, feeling and willing is also extinguished. Everything that we as human beings sum up as our “self” when we are awake is actually extinguished.

All that is here extinguished will now be rekindled bit by bit through imagination, inspiration and intuition. Meditation must first deal with ordinary thinking in order to produce imaginative thinking. I have described how thoughts are employed so that through meditating imaginative perception is attained. Particularly concerning the problem of death, it is necessary to clarify still further what is experienced on the path of initiation knowledge, for only then does it become clear what kind of a relationship man acquires in regard to his physical body and his soul-spiritual being when death occurs.

When thinking is used in meditation in the manner I have described it, the first experience of a person is that he actually cannot think for a while as he feels himself with his whole soul to be outside the physical organization. To a degree, thinking is, as it were, for a short time forgotten. It takes a certain amount of courage, inner energy, and also a certain presence of mind to experience this moment with full awareness. But then, as he awakens to renewed awareness, he notices that he experiences a much stronger activity of thought in his soul than he has had earlier. Thinking begins again.

Man progresses in the following way. To start he has his ordinary consciousness—I emphasize that ordinary consciousness is retained during genuine imagination—, then he must find his way into the other form of consciousness, and back again. While the ordinary, earthly view of things is naturally preserved as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned, in this other state of mind that man can enter he loses the capacity, so to speak, to produce thoughts. A stronger activity of thought sets in, however, as meditation is continued, a more pronounced, inner thought experience is acquired. In ordinary consciousness the thoughts that are experienced have to do mostly with the outer sense world and memories. Also, there are dim thoughts that arise out of any number of emotional experiences. Now, in this higher state of consciousness, man possesses a thinking with which he can call up into awareness in active thoughts the course of his own life from birth to the present moment in the manner I have described. This, however, has to do with a deeper layer of the course of man's life. I have already mentioned that they are not the memories a person also has in ordinary consciousness, these are on a deeper level. Man actually sees into an etheric process that builds up, saturates and penetrates, indeed, has always penetrated the physical organization. Everything that has occurred since birth in the physical body as growth was produced in it—how the separate organs were plastically formed, how our capacities of thinking, feeling and willing were drawn out of the depths of the bodily organization, everything connected with organic life that is otherwise hidden from consciousness—all of this shoots up in the form of active, inwardly experienced, substantial thoughts. In a certain sense man passes from ordinary thinking across an abyss to a thinking that experiences its own etheric body.

In developing imaginative thinking in this way, strict attention must be paid to what escapes you during the moments when you are within this imaginative thinking. The first thing you actually lose are your memories. You have the memories in ordinary consciousness, but alongside this ordinary consciousness, the other imaginative consciousness develops. In it, no memories exist. I ask you to clarify this to yourselves through the following explanation. When you recall anything as in all experiences of ordinary consciousness, you actually live in the present. You perceive what confronts you at the present moment and you think thoughts about it, and if you remember something of the past you nevertheless have before you in your mind a picture in the present moment that merely points to the past. Hence, ordinary consciousness experiences the present. Imaginative consciousness experiences its own life's course in such a way that the individual stages are surveyed all at once as if the things existing in time were spread out in space. Just as you experience one thing alongside another simultaneously in sense perception, so you now experience your own past on earth, all at once. Time becomes like space. The events you have lived through in your thirtieth, eighteenth, tenth, seventh or fifth year stand before the soul side by side.

In this way the experiences of imaginative consciousness differ from those of ordinary consciousness. Ordinary consciousness lives in the present, for the past it only has its memories. Imaginative consciousness experiences different times but in such a way that these time periods appear simultaneously before the soul. I said that recollections, the memory thoughts, slip away first. This is really the case. In imaginative consciousness man does not possess a memory or recollections, faculties that in his ordinary consciousness are a great help to him in life. It goes without saying that the capacity of memory in his normal human nature remains as it was because the ordinary human being remains unchanged alongside the new faculty. But man cannot remember his newly acquired imaginative experience of the ordinary course of his life. Let us assume that at a given moment a person experiences his life's course in imaginative consciousness. If in three days he wants to relive it again, he will not be able to recall what he has experienced today. He must repeat the same efforts that led him to experience the course of his life. Again, he must do the exercises that lead to this experience. Just as a real, physical object cannot actually be present in your memory—you have to walk over again to where it is located—so what you now experience, namely your etheric body, cannot simply be called up by memory for it is a living reality. It has to be summoned anew again and again.

This is something that disappoints many people who do such soul exercises. They set about doing them and achieve and see something. They assume that they can retain this view, that they can call it up again any time in memory. They are unable to do this and are disillusioned. The efforts have to be renewed each time in order to produce the experiences inwardly again. Let me give an example. Assume that a person gives a lecture, basing his talk on the new science of meditation. He lectures in such a way that he has not turned everything into abstract ideas but rather speaks out of living perception. He therefore cannot prepare himself by memorizing what he has in mind. Matters pertaining to the physical world can be memorized but not those relating to imaginative consciousness, for they always have to be produced anew. A person can indeed prepare himself, but this preparation is a kind of exercise. It is like acquiring a skill through practice. Earnest, constant meditation and practice help you to bring forth what you want from the supersensible world. But it must be produced in the present moment, it must arise instantly, if it is to come out of the spiritual world in truly alive form. It then contains the immediate echo of the spiritual in its formulation, its expression. Forgive me if I mention something personal here. I have perhaps spoken already thirty or forty times about one subject. It makes it no easier for me to speak on it for the thirtieth time. It is just as hard as it was the first time, for it is always the same process again. As a basis for producing such material a person needs composure and quiet so that the subject can arise out of a calm soul. Perhaps it is unnecessary, but to make myself clear I might add that in this regard an audience that expects a person to lecture on some aspect of the spiritual world is often really cruel to him—naturally the present audience is always excepted. It may be acceptable in a professorial lecture but not in a spiritual one that any number of persons come up prior to a lecture and ask all kinds of questions without considering at all that in the next moment facts from the spiritual world are to be brought forth.

In this way I have sought to describe to you the subjective experience of one who has imaginative consciousness. Because a person knows within his own mind how this active, living thinking comes to the surface, which now has as its content his own life's course, he also understands the nature of ordinary thinking. From the vantage point of imaginative consciousness he can now look back on ordinary thinking and arrive at the realization that in itself it has no reality at all. Actually, everyone lives in imagination. He does so unconsciously, carrying this substantial thinking within himself. But because he has not strengthened his soul forces sufficiently, his soul is too weak to lift into consciousness what is within him. When he wants to think, therefore, he always takes hold of his physical body. That becomes for him the basis of ordinary consciousness. But what actually happens there?

Because this inner activity—which even in ordinary consciousness is unconscious imagination—turns to the physical organism, it slips right into it. This unconscious imagination of which man knows nothing, which remains unconscious until it lights up in imaginative knowledge as active thinking, slips in ordinary consciousness into the physical organism and makes use of it. Then, as imaginative consciousness, which does not know what it is since it remains unconscious, it is reflected in the form of inner mirror-reflections. These, then, are the ordinary thoughts. They have as little reality as mirrored reflections have in relation to the objects standing before a mirror. Something is reflected back to us from our physical body, and these are the thoughts that arise in ordinary consciousness, merely mirror images. He who experiences these thoughts, therefore, experiences nothing substantial. There is no strength, no life in these thoughts of ordinary consciousness. At the moment, however, when active thinking sets in through imagination there is substance in thinking. In every imaginative thought there is substance and energy. You know that with this imaginative thinking you live within a force like the one that brought you from the state of childhood to that of a grown human being.

When a person works his way through to imaginative thinking, he actually passes to begin with from ordinary, physical reality to etheric reality. But in doing so he now receives the first insight into the physical body. He sees it as a reflecting apparatus that throws the thoughts back to the human being. Along with this, man begins to approach the problem of death, for it is not until his physical body becomes for him an external object that he can consider the problem of death. If man actually still exists as a being after death, he is quite certainly not present in his physical body. If, therefore, he wants to solve the problem of death while he is alive, he must have his physical body outside himself and view it as objectively as is the case, relatively speaking, when the body is beside or outside the human entity in death.

This characterizes the first step toward solving the problem of death. In the second part of today's lecture we shall discuss what else is required.

On the basis of a perception such as I have described to you, man is really in a position to judge how the soul-spiritual in the human being relates to the corporeal-physical. Not until he can objectively survey the physical organization, the etheric body and the soul-spiritual by means of the imaginative as well as the subsequent methods of super-sensible cognition, can he perceive how the two parts conduct themselves in the various stages of life. It is therefore of immense importance to bear in mind that in the super-sensible perception of which I am speaking here man retains the ordinary consciousness he possesses in everyday, waking life alongside all the other perceptual experiences. Already in imaginative consciousness, when he confronts something of his past life—for instance, the manner in which certain traits appeared in connection with the processes of growth when he was still a child of nine or ten, how moral tendencies, etc., arose—he perceives all this because he has before him the unity of the physical and soul nature at age nine or ten. He observes what took place then in the organism. But at the same time, he must retain his everyday consciousness. This means that he must now have this view of the ninth or tenth year of his life which reveals something that otherwise remains entirely unconscious; on the other hand, at his own discretion, he must be able to bring to mind instantaneously the memories that he has in ordinary consciousness, which carry him back in the normal way to his ninth or tenth year. Man must always be able to compare the one with the other, the higher with the ordinary consciousness. In the same way that he usually passes from one thought to another he must pass back and forth between an experience in imaginative consciousness and one in ordinary consciousness.

This characteristic of the higher consciousness referred to here is especially important. Those people who judge anthroposophical research only from the outside frequently believe that what appears as imagination can be dismissed like the hallucinations of some visionary. But you must become aware of the radical distinction that exists between true imagination and a vision. A vision certainly conveys a pictorial content also, but man is completely bound up in his vision. While the vision goes on, his consciousness has transformed itself into it and he cannot go back and forth at will from the vision to his ordinary consciousness. In contrast, a person who experiences imaginative consciousness has not transformed his ordinary consciousness into a vision, he has enriched it with imagination. He has added what he already possesses in ordinary consciousness to what he has attained in imagination. A person with imaginative consciousness therefore firmly rejects the common visionary experience, but he can also discern the visionary's predicament in life. For, whoever has achieved the heights of perception indicated here can observe in detail how a soul is inwardly active, in what way it employs the physical organism so that the body can reflect the thoughts back to it.

The person experiencing imagination and inspiration is familiar with the soul's relationship to the physical body in normal consciousness. He therefore can also form a judgement about a visionary. In the case of a visionary the soul has not become free of the body. The person who possesses imaginative consciousness knows what it means for the soul to be free of the physical body, for he has actually lifted the soul out of the body and has driven it into activity. When he observes a visionary, however, he sees that such a person's soul is submerged more within the physical body than is the case when it perceives the outer world with ordinary consciousness.

This is the difference between a person who has imaginative consciousness and the visionary. The visionary immerses himself more deeply into his body's functions than one does in ordinary life, while in imagination man actually emerges out of the physical organization. But at the same time, the ordinary soul content in the physical organism is consciously retained. If the vital significance of this difference is not recognized, if imagination is not kept under rigorous control by ordinary thinking which is retained side by side with imagination, the latter will always be confused with visionary activity that has no accompanying control, for there a man simply descends further into his physical body, and what appears to him as his vision is perhaps only a passing indisposition of his liver or stomach which was already present in ordinary life, but into which he has now submerged himself.

On the other hand, the imaginations of a person with imaginative consciousness have nothing to do with his bodily organs. He consciously looks into a part of his soul of which he was previously unaware. Imaginative consciousness therefore does not lead away from ordinary consciousness to something visionary, as some people believe. Rather, the schooling, the exercises for cultivating imaginative consciousness are a precise antidote for all uncontrollable, visionary elements. You do not develop in the direction of visions but in the opposite direction. The goal is to become free of the physical organization, and, in addition, to be able to utilize the soul in imagination, to start with the etheric organism, in order to arrive at a substantial, real thinking. In ordinary life, the physical body represents substantiality and what you possess in addition to it are mirror images in thinking that have no substance, no real, inner activity. It is precisely the contrast between the supersensible insights referred to here, and the visionary life, that makes it abundantly clear what is meant here by imagination, inspiration, and intuition in the higher consciousness.

Again, you see how you can gradually learn to comprehend the relationship of the soul-spiritual to the physical bodily nature by means of such perception. You realize that visionary activity can arise when someone's soul descends more deeply into the physical body during earthly life. But you can also understand what it implies to be outside your physical body, and what the soul experience is like at a time when you are outside your body. By means of this psychic-spiritual experience outside the body you sense and experience in advance how you must live when you no longer have a physical body. This means that the problem of death is solved within physical earth existence, for you must be able to live in a condition in which you will find yourself one day when you no longer possess your physical body. I ask you to understand that it is my aim to show how the problem of death can be approached and characterized with the greatest discernment, for this problem is nowadays dealt with so often in an amateurish fashion. But I want to make it clear that, above all in anthroposophical research, all the circumspection in thinking that could be demanded is indeed used to consider this problem. For this reason, I have not hesitated to formulate today's lecture in a more exact way so as to have a good basis for comprehending the problem of death. More concerning this will follow in the third part of today's considerations.

If we acquire a view of man's soul-spiritual constitution on the one side and his physical-bodily organization on the other then when we rise to imaginative, inspirational perception, and so on, we can survey the relationship that exists between the two—as I said earlier—in any given situation of man's life. Several days ago, I described how, in descending from the soul-spiritual world, man works on the creation of his own physical organization, how it then falls away from him and how he finds it again in another way through conception and birth. I described furthermore how the problem of birth appears when it is viewed from the standpoint of pre-earthly existence. Now, let us look more into earthly existence, as it is placed between the events of birth and death, for if we want to arrive gradually at an understanding of death, we must be able to link death to birth or conception by means of earthly life.

Particularly, when we observe the way the soul-spiritual in pre-earthly existence relates to what a man bears as physical body in earthly life, we can arrive at the realization that one part of the soul-spiritual—a part that man also possesses in pre-earthly existence—is completely transformed due to conception and birth. While it is still present in pre-earthly life, it now actually disappears; it is the part out of which thinking has developed. It is there in pre-earthly life but disappears as a soul-spiritual element the moment man arrives on the earth. Traces of it remain in the infant, but gradually this part of soul-spiritual life disappears entirely. What has happened to it?

The part that here disappears has been transformed into the life and form of the human head organization. Now understand this correctly: It is entirely wrong to believe that the whole soul-spiritual configuration of man exists as such in pre-earthly life and then, on earth, it receives a kind of house by means of the body into which it enters and lives. It is quite wrong to think in this way about that part of the soul I now referred to above. That part fades and disappears; it is transformed into a really physical material thing, namely our head organization. The life and form of our head organization is a physical metamorphosis of a soul-spiritual element of our pre-earthly existence. Look at your head organization. I do not mean now merely the head that falls off when one is beheaded, but the head with its whole inner content, with all the nerves running into it, and the blood circulation insofar as it is cerebral blood circulation. All this is a result of the transformation of a part of man's pre-earthly sojourn. This part of pre-earthly soul life disappears into the head organization. As a result of the fact that our head organization represents a real metamorphosis of what we possess in our pre-earthly life, and because we behold in the human head a true physical replica of our pre-earthly existence, this head is a real mirror for reflecting thoughts. This has come about because the head has formed and enlivened itself as a physical organism out of the experienced thoughts of the pre-earthly life. This way it is a mirror for the thoughts we form by means of all the sense perceptions.

By contrast—I might say, on the other side of the soul's life—another part of the soul emerges that passes in man through conception and birth and does not transform itself into the physical corporeality but comes only into loose contact with man's metabolic and limb systems. It is that part of the soul life that is ordinarily experienced in its reflections, as will. Compare the will with the conceptual life, with thinking. As human beings we are always fully conscious in the life of thoughts when we are awake. Indeed, “awake” actually means “living in thoughts.” It is not so with the will. Take the simplest act of will, the raising of an arm or hand. How much of this are you fully conscious of? In waking consciousness, you first have the idea: I will raise my hand.—Then something happens that runs its course in the depths of your bodily organization. You may experience all kinds of undefined feelings, shreds of emotions and the like, but what you next experience clearly and in full wakefulness is the result: The arm is raised—you can see it. Ordinary consciousness is as unaware of what takes place in the depths of the organism in the actual sphere of the will between the resolve to do something and the accomplished action as it remains unconscious of events during sleep. We are awake in our thought life; in our actual life of will we sleep even when we are awake.

This partial life of sleep that becomes evident in our will is therefore a sleep that also permeates our waking condition. We are always asleep in one part of our soul even when we are awake, namely, in that part where the will is rooted. Now this is the part of the soul that is not transformed into the physical organization at the time it undergoes human conception and birth. One part of the soul reappears in the physical world after birth as man's head organization. The metabolic- and limb-system, on the other hand, is not a direct replica of that other part of the soul; it is born out of the physical world. The will-segment of the soul has linked itself with it in a loose way; for this reason, the metabolic-and limb-system does not mirror what the soul experiences. This is why man is asleep in his will and also in relation to his metabolic- and limb-system even when he is awake. When this part of the soul is observed by supersensible perception in its relationship to the physical organization, it bears a strong similarity to the relationship of the ego and astral body, the whole soul, to the entire physical organization during sleep. Indeed, man is a much more complicated being than is usually believed. There are certain descriptions of the supersensible which simply state: When a person is awake, his soul-spiritual nature is within his physical-etheric organization, when he sleeps it is outside. But the matter is not as simple as this; at most, one can speak in this way of the head organization, but not of the rest of man's corporeality. For in regard to this remaining organization, a part of the soul sleeps even when the human being is awake.

This part of the soul's life that is asleep and arises from the dark depths of man's organization only in certain mental images is brought into view the moment a person attains to intuition, for, as I have shown, intuition is a result of will exercises. In that way man learns to see into what is otherwise always concealed in waking life; he learns to look into the mysteries of the human will. The human will is a mystery even for waking life; it is revealed partly by inspiration, but only intuition finally unveils it. Paradoxical as it may sound, once man has succeeded in perceiving the true nature of his own will he also has insight into the divine spiritual world. In the head organization the spiritual world is contained only in physical metamorphosis, not much of the spiritual world as such can be discovered there. The human head is actually the least spiritual part of man. But the remaining physical organization contains the unchanged soul life the way it was when man dwelt in pre-earthly life without physical and etheric bodies. In this soul life that lives concealed in the will, man is wholly spirit even between birth and death. Through intuition one can now discern the nature of this spirit.

The spirit that is unveiled to intuition as the element that underlies the will appears to this perception as the reservoir for everything a person has undergone during earth life in the form of intellectual activities of the mind and soul-initiatives, as moral inclinations and impulses in the soul. As I have already indicated from another standpoint, this is revealed as the younger part of the soul, the part that remains in an embryonic state in our present earth life and is at the beginning of its development. If we look at this part of the soul, we behold something in man's inner being that heads toward death in order to be actually born only at death, just as the soul in pre-earthly existence approaches earth life in order to be born into it through conception and birth. Beneath our will lives the soul embryo which reveals its embryonic life when intuitive perception beholds its true nature. We can tell by its nature how it is born to a new spiritual life at death, just as we can tell by the appearance of the human soul in pre-earthly life that it enters earthly existence through birth.

In order to gain insight into physical existence, it is therefore our concern to become acquainted—to begin with in supersensible existence—with the soul being that underlies the will. I shall conclude these observations in the last, the fourth part, and they will lead us tomorrow to a summation of the problem of death in relation with the questions concerning the Christ.

Through higher perception man gains a view of the evolution of his eternal being through pre-earthly existence, earth life and the life after death. Now, however, to unprejudiced observation a mighty riddle arises. It arises when we see how ego consciousness is acquired. From yesterday's lecture you may have surmised that ego consciousness is dependent upon the physical organization, for it originates only at that point in the course of human earth development when man in ordinary consciousness can utilize nothing else besides his physical organism. Particularly here, imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge make it abundantly clear that we as human beings attain our ego consciousness initially in the physical world between birth and death and that the attainment of this ego consciousness is linked to the use of the physical body. The body, however, is taken from us at death.

To a higher perception such as I described again today, the eternal nature of the soul life that was experienced by earth humanity prior to the development of ego consciousness can only appear as a soul life that passes from pre-earthly through earthly to post-earthly existence—in other words, through repeated earth lives. Concerning what man acquires as ego consciousness, however, we can say with absolute certainty: You attained it through the use of your physical body; indeed, only in the course of humanity's evolution—at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha entered human evolution—did you learn to make use of your physical body in such a way that ego consciousness lit up within you.

It is therefore equally certain that inasmuch as we gain ego consciousness by means of the physical body we must fear that we shall lose it at death. This is one of the problems of death. Even if the eternal part of our being in thought, feeling and will has revealed itself to us and we behold it in its metamorphosis as the element appearing only as a mirror image in thinking—actually it is the vanished soul life that has been transformed into the head organization—even if we see in the will the shadow of what leads an embryonic soul life in the rest of the physical organization and will only come to birth at death, even if we are able to look clearly into the soul life in this regard, we are still bound to become fearful. Indeed, we do not become afraid because of an insignificant emotional attitude, but because of our insight when we face the question: What do we manage to retain of the physical organism beyond death, for the physical body decays after death? If we have gained our ego consciousness by means of the body, then the scientifically justified fear arises: How do we carry our ego consciousness through death?

Only the Mystery of Golgotha can answer this question. Man could never carry his ego consciousness beyond death unless this ego consciousness, having developed in the physical body, unites with the Christ Who holds and supports it when it would otherwise melt away from the human soul along with the physical body. Ego consciousness has been attained by means of the physical body. In death, along with the physical body, it would leave the soul, if it were not bound up with the Christ Being in the sense of Paul's words, “Not I but the Christ in me,”—for the Christ takes our ego and carries it through death.

In the following lecture I will describe in detail how this takes place and I will show how the Christ is that Being Who makes it possible for us to preserve our ego consciousness and carry it through the portal of death.

Only anthroposophical research as meant here reveals the whole significance that the Christ event has for human life. After all, the significance of such insight already begins in the case of ordinary philosophy! Ordinary philosophy is only awakened to an inner life and gains a perception concerning itself when it can be nourished by imaginative knowledge. Think of what I said at the beginning of my lecture. When we advance through meditation to imaginative perception we cross over an abyss, as it were. Our thinking ceases, a state of non-thinking exists between ordinary thinking and the active, life-filled thinking of imagination. Several philosophers have experienced this non-thinking—for instance, Augustine and Descartes—but they were unable to interpret it correctly. They spoke of the doubt that arises at the start of philosophical thinking. This doubt that Augustine and Descartes spoke about is only the reflection, brought into ordinary consciousness, of this condition of non-thinking that man finds himself in between ordinary thinking and imaginative thinking. Since neither Augustine nor Descartes had submerged their souls into this actual non-thinking, they did not come to the true experience, only the reflection, of what a person experiences when his thinking, particularly the thoughts of memory, ceases between ordinary and imaginative thinking. The doubt of Augustine and Descartes is only the reflected image in ordinary consciousness of this experience that does not appear until the transition into imaginative consciousness. Thus, when we observe it in the light of imaginative philosophy, we can correctly interpret what appears vaguely in the mere philosophy of ideas.

Likewise, we have seen how a person confronts the course of his life as a unity and how, to a perception that enables him to be consciously alive in his ether body, events that run their course in time are seen to stand side by side. Through this insight, events that ordinarily occur one after the other are seen side by side like you normally see the objects in space. Bergson, for example, felt this when he formulated his idea of “duration.” This idea of duration plays a prominent role in his philosophy, but because of the manner in which he conceived it, it is only an inkling of the truth. The truth is the imaginative view of time as simultaneity. Bergson only arrived at the abstract feeling that if he entered more deeply into the matter, he could now, in the present, reach beyond this world and experience duration as such. But since Bergson would not approach a form of anthroposophical perception, he again arrived only at a reflected image of what a person experiences with imaginative perception in regard to time as simultaneity. He called this elusive element, experienced as a reflected image, duration, durée. It plays a prominent role in Bergson's philosophy.

Regardless of which aspect of philosophy you focus upon, it becomes evident that philosophy will only attain substance and life when this substance is grasped in the way it was done today. I have already indicated that cosmology and religious knowledge also gain substance in this way, and I will elaborate on the matter further in regard to the questions about the Christ in the next few days. I will show that for man today all higher perception leads basically to an appeal by his own being to the Mystery of Golgotha. And when man's will aspires to reach the Mystery of Golgotha and, once again, the Christ Being enters man's consciousness in His complete, supersensible reality, then modern supersensible perception will lead by means of a spiritual philosophy and cosmology to a firm foundation not only of supersensible life in general but of a spiritual Christianity.

The ordinary earthly soul life runs its course in the inwardly experienced manifestations of thinking, feeling and will. In reality, as we have seen in the previous lectures, the reason for this is that when we wake up an etheric and astral organism as well as an ego being are contained in man's physical organization. In a certain respect, man's astral organization and ego being are outside his physical body during sleep, or, more accurately, outside the head organization of the physical body. When man is awake in earthly life, however, the etheric and astral organisms and the ego being are completely united with the physical organism. They are active in the physical corporeality. During sleep, the soul's own system of forces is not strong enough to become conscious of what it experiences in the astral and ego organisms. On the other hand, in the waking condition only that enters clearly into ordinary consciousness which the physical body reflects as thoughts from the activity of the etheric and astral organism and the ego being.

If, in his waking state, man were fully capable of experiencing the activity of his own entire soul being, he would experience first of all the course of his own life, namely, what underlies the memories as the reality of the course of life. He would be equally aware of the cosmic experience in the higher worlds that we have learned about and which, during sleep, remains unperceived and beyond consciousness. For if man were fully capable of using his astral body, there would descend into his waking consciousness what he experiences each night as a replica of the planetary movements. He would feel how the after-images of these planetary movements stream through his breathing and circulatory system. As paradoxical as it sounds to ordinary consciousness, he could say: Through my veins streams the power of the Sun, intensified by the force of Mars, permeated by the substantial force of Jupiter, etc. Man would be able to say that he was feeling an after-effect in his own being of the planetary movements. And if he could experience his complete ego being during waking consciousness, he would also feel how the spiritual essence of the fixed stars in the sky permeates his own self.

All this is suppressed during ordinary waking consciousness. Man experiences nothing in waking consciousness of the ether body's activity, which, after all, comprises the actual foundation that underlies the course of his life. He knows nothing of the impulses that come from the movements of the planets and live as stimuli in his breathing, and pulse through his blood circulation. Nothing comes to experience in ordinary waking consciousness of the many activities of the astral organization. He also experiences nothing of what is expressed in the constellations of the fixed stars and is reproduced in the eternal core of his ego being, and which, if he could experience it, would lead him to say, “I am permeated by God.” This too does not come into awareness in ordinary consciousness because the activities that are carried out in the everyday condition of wakefulness by the etheric and astral bodies and the ego relate to the physical organization in the same manner in which man clothes himself with it anew each morning. Although unaware of them, he actively permeates his physical organism with the forces that he has gathered during sleep out of the starry world and has acquired from the planetary movements. Because man actively penetrates his physical body, because his three soul elements—etheric and astral organizations and the ego being—affect the physical organism with their activity from the moment of waking up until the moment of falling asleep, the bodily organization is worked upon in a specific way. For the purely physical activity which then arises in the body itself causes and enables the whole soul life to express itself in concepts, in thoughts that are reflected images thrown by the physical body back into the soul.

Man has no awareness of the vitality that courses through him, he is not conscious of the planetary movements and the world of the fixed stars, because all the activity of his inner being is reflected during waking life onto the physical body. Through its senses, the physical body carries the effects of the outer world into the physical inner being; the phenomena of light stream in through the eyes and through the ear, the world of sounds; the realities of heat and cold enter through the sense of warmth. By means of the activity put forth by the soul all this is reflected as thoughts in the physical organism, and the soul experiences these reflected thoughts in its clear, ordinary consciousness.

These are the facts surrounding the soul's experience in ordinary wakefulness, and this poses the question to us: What does the soul actually do to the physical organism so that thoughts appear as reflections?—But first, let us keep firmly in mind that the physical organism really prevents the soul from having a consciousness of the cosmic facts, which actually reverberate and produce after-effects in it. We shall next occupy ourselves with the details of how the waking consciousness unfolds.

Let us examine to begin with what it is that this triad—the etheric and astral bodies and the ego being—produces as it works in the physical head organization of man. It turns out that the activity that is exercised on the human head organization by this triad has a degenerative effect. If the human etheric body alone were to penetrate the physical organization, a continuous revitalizing activity would be present in the physical head system. In a manner of speaking, the head's activities would be completely filled with life. But in that case no physical consciousness would arise. Physical consciousness only arises because the astral organism intervenes in the head organization. This astral organism is adapted and attuned to man's pre-earthly life, something that we have already become familiar with. The astral organism must consider it its task, if I may put it like this, not to work upon this densely material, physical corporeality but to fill with its own astral activity the body's cosmic spirit form as it did in pre-earthly existence. This astral organism of man is, after all, an after-image of what the soul brought forth out of the secrets of the planetary movements and the constellations of the fixed stars in order to form what I have called earlier the cosmic germ of the physical organization. The activity of the astral organism is therefore not directed to the earthly metamorphosis of the physical body, but toward the cosmic spirit-metamorphosis of the physical organism. This means that while the astral organism is active in the physical organism, it continually wants to spiritualize the physical insofar as the brain or head organization is concerned. Indeed, our astral organism works constantly to transform our head organization into something spiritual. An actual, outwardly visible transformation is not achieved, only the tendency toward transformation is always there.

This tendency, then, is present continually. Degenerative forces are constantly added by the head organization of the astral body to the regenerative forces of the human head organization that would otherwise produce fresh, sparkling, but unconscious life in the human head. To the extent that it is head organization, these degenerative forces try to destroy the physical organism, making it feasible for a spirit organization to shine forth from it, for that is what the astral organism is accustomed to from pre-earthly life. The physical head configuration, however, offers resistance, it cannot be broken down. This resistance is expressed in the fact that each time sleep must intervene at the moment when the physical configuration of the head would otherwise disintegrate due to the astral body's activity. Then, in sleep, the forces of the etheric body alone are active once again in the head.

The alternating states of waking and sleeping may also be characterized by saying that during the waking state the astral forces continually expose the human head organization to death. The instant their destructive activity is on the verge of changing from a latent to an active state, if I may put it that way, sleep intervenes. The imaginative consciousness of modern initiation knowledge can observe these facts in the appearance of man's etheric body during the periods of waking and sleeping.

In regard to the head organization, the etheric body, which permeates the physical body as spiritual activity, becomes increasingly undifferentiated during the waking hours. In a man who is awake you find an etheric organism that is markedly differentiated inwardly and possesses complicated forms in those parts of the physical body where the lungs, the liver, the stomach, and limbs are located. The etheric organism has an abundance of shapes in these areas during waking hours. By contrast, the longer wakefulness lasts, the more undifferentiated the ether body in the head organization becomes. Finally, it turns into something comparable to a uniform cloud in the head, for the characteristic regenerative forces that are otherwise present in this etheric organism lose their impact as the degenerative forces of the astral organism in the waking state exercise their deadening effect upon the head system.

It is quite different during the state of sleep. You see with imaginative consciousness how this element of differentiation, of manifoldness of the etheric organism penetrates the etheric head system. In sleep, the head's etheric organization acquires the same kind of forms as possessed by the rest of the etheric organism during the waking state. In sleep, the life forces, the formative forces of the etheric body wake up in the head. Then, the head becomes an unconscious but most alive organization.

So you can see that in earth existence, due to waking consciousness, man bears potential death continually in his head organization. The tendency to die is present in the head all the time. The astral organism wants to transform the head system continually into spirit. It wants to make the head into an organ of planetary motion, into an image of the starry constellations. The astral organization is an ever-present destroyer of the physical head configuration.

If present-day science knew about these facts, it would find it utterly impossible to succumb to materialism. For what is it that those people say who want to interpret the whole human organization in a materialistic way? They say that the organic processes of life take place in the head just as they do in the liver or in the stomach, only in the brain they are expressed as thoughts, as soul activity. Compared to the facts, however, this is sheer nonsense. We do not think and experience the soul in ordinary consciousness due to constructive life processes that go on in the head, but because our nervous system is continually on the verge of being destroyed as a result of the presence of death in us. To be awake in the life of soul in ordinary consciousness signifies that organic processes are not developed but rather made to die down. They must first die down within themselves and make room for the soul, if they are to unfold in ordinary consciousness. If this were correctly understood, people would have to say that quite certainly soul life cannot originate from organic processes, because these processes have to come first to the point of dying down. They must first withdraw from the head organization if the soul is to be active there.

These are the true facts in regard to the way man's soul and his physical body function together. This also shows how, through being born, man at once bears within his head system the predisposition for death. Through supersensible knowledge we learn to understand that death has the tendency to occur continually in us and is constantly kept in check only by sleep. The once-in-a-lifetime event of dying, death in the physical sense, is indeed only a summing up, a more pronounced process in comparison to the continuous, if I may say so, atomistically minute death processes that take place all the time in waking consciousness. As long as we possess a physical organism, it defends itself against the destruction wrought by the astral organism. This is how matters stand with the head organization.

Man's astral organization, however, does not merely have this effect in waking life, only a part of it does. Another part finds its way into earthly life more in the form in which it is active in pre-earthly existence. This part of man's astral body is not active in the head organization but in everything that constitutes the rhythmic system, that is to say, those organs of the physical body in which breathing, blood circulation and the other rhythmic processes take place. Although this part of the astral body, to which I refer now, lives in man's rhythmic system, it does not unite itself as closely with the rhythmic system as does the other part that is active in the head. That part takes hold of the head organization so strongly that it continually makes it incline toward death by breaking it up, whereas the part of the astral body that enters the human rhythmic system permeates this organization. It lives in the breathing and in the blood circulation, but because it does not take hold of this organization in such an intense manner, it leaves it in some respects undisturbed. It does not lay hold of this system for the purpose of destroying it. But for this reason, no thought life comes into being through this union of the astral organization of man and the rhythmic system. The expressions of the soul life are reflected in the physical head organism which has the constant tendency to die. This produces fully conscious thinking. On the other hand, what is continually taking place in the streaming together of the astral and the rhythmic organizations is not reflected in the same manner as in the life of thoughts so that a clear consciousness could result. It is expressed in the more vague form of soul life: man's emotional life, his feelings. Emotions arise, because, in waking life, the astral organism pulses through the breathing and blood circulation but does not destroy these processes and does not immerse itself so deeply into them. Instead, through its interplay with the rhythmic system, man's life of feeling is roused.

While an element of what the human being has experienced in his pre-earthly, cosmic sojourn lives in the rhythmic-organic system, it does not reach clear consciousness. This has a quite definite consequence. Through this interplay between the astral and the physical-rhythmic organisms which I have described, something continually takes place below in the unconscious that enters ordinary daytime consciousness only as a weak reflection. Let us study this in detail. Say that a person carries out his activities, his deeds in physical life. These actions of his do not express themselves in him as do mere natural phenomena. Out of a certain impulse that arises from his subconscious, he feels impelled to judge whether these activities are moral or immoral, valuable or worthless, wise or unwise. Moral evaluation, moral judgement joins in with the otherwise amoral, not anti-moral life of thinking.

Now, what is it that flashes up from the depth of soul experience and tells us: This action is good, that one is bad, this deed is wise, that one is foolish? It is a soul activity which has remained as it was in pre-earthly existence, which penetrates man's rhythmic organism of breathing and blood circulation but cannot fully stream up into the life of thoughts. It only colors it. This way, we also have reflections of this inner experience in our conscious life of thoughts, which are valuable for the activities we carry on in the physical world. We do not bear within us only what we express in our actions as the conscious judgement of thinking. No, in the rhythmic system of man there lives and pulses an astral-spiritual element that is similar in form to what it was already in pre-earthly life and which—distinctly for itself but indistinctly for ordinary consciousness—says Yes or No to his actions. Here, within us, lives a judge who judges the worthiness of our soul, and this soul-judge is as real as is our soul that lives as thinking-soul within our head organization.

In ancient times of humanity's evolution, those who wanted to attain higher perception in the old manner sought, therefore, to bring the rhythmic system into consciousness, the breathing and also the blood circulation. Now observe what resulted from their efforts to use an older method of entering into the spiritual world, a method no longer to be employed today. It turned out that those people were able to discern their own human value from what the cosmos inscribed into their breathing, considering it good or bad, wise or foolish. In the old Indian Yogi, judgement as to what was morally natural and naturally moral in him was carried up into the brain by the breath from the rhythmic system. During his Yoga perception, he made his brain into a breathing organ for a while and experienced what the cosmos said about his activity.

This judgement by the cosmos concerning our deeds is very real in the astral human organization. When man's physical body is laid aside at death, the obstacle is removed which prevents what lives in man's breathing and blood circulation from entering his consciousness. The physical organism is like a non-transparent cover for what takes place in the astral organism in the way that I have just described. Therefore, the astral experiences that live in the breathing and blood circulation between birth and death continue to live on in man's being beyond death. We shall comprehend how this works when, directly after the translation of this part, I shall describe what the human soul undergoes when it actually passes through the portal of death.

When, at death, man's physical organism falls away from the human entity and disintegrates, man remains at the outset in the etheric and astral organisms and his ego being. Inasmuch as the physical organism is no longer an obstacle to the soul's unfolding into the cosmic element and ceases to hold the soul back in its own sphere, the possibility of cosmic consciousness arises at once for the human soul. The human soul is now clothed in the etheric organism that is no longer bound to a physical body. While this etheric organism represents the course of man's life on the one hand, it is at the same time the vehicle for the continuous in-streaming of cosmic forces of life. As the soul gradually passes through death along with the ether body, it experiences the cosmic world-ether in the etheric organism. The activities that take place in this world-ether now stream into the etheric organism, for only the physical body had prevented this earlier. Now this obstacle is gone. In its inner activities, the etheric organism is not as separated from the outer cosmic events and realities as is the physical organism. The occurrences outside in the cosmic world-ether stream actively into man's etheric organism, and what occurs in the human etheric organism pulsates out into the world-ether. After death, man not only lives directly in his own etheric organism, but, inasmuch as he has liberated it from the physical organization he finds his way into the cosmic-etheric element, which continually streams in and out of him.

Since the human soul is a unity, however, man's astral and ego being are drawn along into the cosmic-etheric realm. Increasingly, cosmic-etheric awareness lights up in the human soul as its own inner being. But in comparison to this great, mighty cosmic consciousness, man's own ether body represents only a very small etheric element; and the cosmic ether actually lives within this minute etheric element. For this reason, man's own etheric experiences, which were held together again and again by his physical organization, no longer have any significance in the great cosmic ocean of ether with its cosmic consciousness. This, however, means nothing less than the fact that man's etheric organism dissolves quite soon after death. Then, along with the cosmic consciousness that he has attained, man retains his astral organization and his ego being.

In this astral organism, however, the after-effects are contained of what it experienced on earth while within the physical body. I have characterized how a part of the astral organism retains its cosmic nature, as it were, since it is only loosely connected with the breathing and circulatory rhythms. Now that the physical organs of breathing and circulation are cast off, man's inner nature, which developed along with the physical processes of breathing and circulation during earthly life, lives on with its content of moral qualities and evaluation. Permeated by cosmic consciousness, this lives on and is experienced after death. The element that found its reflection during earth life in physical breathing and the blood circulation comes to expression in a cosmic rhythm after death. A rhythm is present again, but it is one in which man feels that the moral quality-valuation holds sway which he brought along from earthly life. He experiences his astral content as moral qualities; how they came to be good or bad, wise or foolish during life on earth. This is a kind of inner pulse beat.

The cosmic process that is not yet permeated by the moral element but represents a purely cosmic element streams continually into this inner pulse-beat from outside. It represents an amoral, not an anti-moral process that is reflected on earth in the processes of nature. We do not distinguish between “good” or “bad” in nature, everything proceeds according to neutral natural laws. All that goes on in nature is a reflection of a cosmic process, and that cosmic process pulses rhythmically into the after-effect of the rhythmic-moral valuation. After death, man thus experiences himself as existing in a cosmic rhythm, he inhales the cosmos in its moral innocence and exhales into the cosmos the moral judgements he has accumulated. A cosmic rhythm has taken the place of the physical rhythm, and the human soul experiences in this cosmic rhythm how a moral element arises in the cosmos—which is designed to reflect itself amorally in outer nature—an element which, because of human experiences on earth, is carried out through the gate of death into this cosmos. The moral evaluations of its deeds that the human soul bears through the portal of death into the cosmos is incorporated into the cosmic amorality. The moral results of man's life that have been carried through death are now imbedded into the depths of the cosmos. By means of his consciousness that is no longer impeded by anything, man becomes a witness of how a moral element develops for a future world in the depths of the amoral cosmos. Our world is morally neutral inasmuch as nature is a reflection of the cosmos. A future world will arise out of ours whose nature in its reflection (of the cosmos) will not be morally neutral; instead, everything moral will be natural and everything natural will be moral. The seed for this is carried by man into the cosmos through his moral deeds. During this experience, the human soul consciously faces the great question: As my existence continues, do the moral qualities that I have acquired make me worthy to take part in the future cosmos that no longer will have a merely neutral image in nature but a moral one?

This experience of the soul after death in the cosmic rhythm, described above as sensations and feelings—we can use these terms even though they do not quite represent the supersensible experience—is proof of the impact of morality upon the physical world. This lends a nuance of its own to the soul's experiences for a certain length of time following death. I once described these experiences, which are now pictured from another side, in my book, Theosophy, and there I called them the “soul world.”

But if, after death, man had to remain only within these experiences, he could not reach the point where he could properly prepare the spiritual archetype of his future physical organism that I have described earlier, and which he must bear within him in a new earth life. It could not be developed in a proper, healthy way out of a soul life filled with moral imperfections from the preceding earth life. Consequently, at a certain point after death, the soul must enter a world where it lives only in the purified cosmos, where the experiences of the cosmic rhythm that I have describe abate. This is because all moral valuation of the soul's activities affects this cosmic rhythm, and this would only produce a decadent spiritual archetype for the future physical organism. A healthy physical body can only be created when the soul is allowed to enter a world where it is no longer influenced by the after-effects of the earthly soul experiences of its past incarnation, where, instead, the nonhuman spiritual impulses of the cosmos are active, as I have pictured it. These experiences that have to be undergone by the human soul in the purified cosmos of the spirit were also characterized by me in my book, Theosophy, from another side than is done here. There I have called them “spirit land.” Man has to enter this spirit land of the soul, for it is only then that he will be able to collaborate in the universal, all-embracing creation of the spiritual organism that in future time metamorphoses into the physical organism. Man must be relieved for a while of the imperfections stemming from an earlier life, otherwise he would have to reincarnate in a misshapen physical organism in his next earth-life.

We thus arrive through inner perception at a description of what man experiences by means of his soul forces in the spiritual cosmos after death. Along with his astral body, he naturally also carries into the cosmic spirit world what lives in his ego being. This ego being, however, must be worked on in still another way. That can be the subject of tomorrow's lecture. Today, I will have to describe in the last portion of my lecture how the form assumed by man after death relates to Christian evolution and the Mystery of Golgotha.

You will understand that a true cosmology can only come into being when we include in it what inspiration can know concerning the incorporation of such a moral, cosmic germ, as I have described. Any cosmology would remain incomplete if it did not know that the present cosmos, which finds a neutral, amoral reflection in physical nature, will through the lives of men become a cosmos one day in which the natural is at the same time moral, and the moral is natural. For this reason, a true cosmology can only arise when ordinary knowledge is enriched by inspiration, just as a true philosophy can only receive a living content when it includes the results of imagination, as I brought out yesterday. Such a cosmology, however, also requires Christianity.

In the age that preceded the Mystery of Golgotha there were initiates who employed methods other than those that must be used in initiation of the present day. Those ancient initiates, who lived prior to this Mystery of Golgotha and who knew what happens in the spiritual worlds that man en counters after death, were already able to say to their followers: “After death, you enter a soul world in which you have to experience the consequences of your moral qualities and qualities similar to them. But you cannot enter the spirit land with the same soul forces that unfolded in the soul world, for even if you were to enter there the after-effect, present in your consciousness, of the moral evaluation present in the astral organism would dull and extinguish your ego consciousness, the consciousness of your self that you would otherwise attain in spirit land after death.”

As I said, ego consciousness has developed here in the physical world on the basis of the physical organism. But precisely for the cultivation of man's spirit germ, an ego consciousness had to be present for the sojourn in spirit land even in ancient times of human evolution.

“Man cannot possess this ego consciousness by means of his own forces,” said the old initiates to those of their followers who wanted to listen. “He can only have it, if, at a certain moment after he has passed through the soul world, the lofty Spiritual Being, Whose physical reflection is the physical sun, comes and stands beside him, and leads him from the soul world into the spirit land, being his Guide from then on. As man here in the physical world experiences his best physical forces under the influence of the physical sun,” thus spoke the initiates of old, “so he must be taken by the hand, pictorially speaking, when he passes out of the soul world into spirit land in order to receive his best forces from the impulses of that Sun Being, whose physical reflection here is the physical sun. “ In this way, the ancient initiates presented the spiritual Sun Being as the lofty Companion of the human soul through spirit land.

The initiates, who lived at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and three to four centuries later, said to those who wished to be their followers and wanted to hear what they said: Because of the direction taken by the physical development of man's organization, the inner human being, after his passage through the soul world, is so obsessed by what he has perceived of the moral consequences that if he were to remain dependent upon his own powers, his consciousness would darken there and he would not be able to receive the influence of that Sun Being. For this reason, the Sun Being Itself descended to earth, assumed a human nature in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, and accomplished the deed of the Mystery of Golgotha.

If man, in addition to what he can attain here on earth by means of his sense perception and the development of his ego consciousness, can also become aware of the Christ Being in his feelings, if he acquires an insight into the Mystery of Golgotha in his feelings—which are tied to the astral body—then, the after-effect of the relationship between earth events and Christ and the Mystery of Golgotha also exercises its effect upon the astral being of man which lives on after death in the manner that I have described. By means of this after-effect, man's consciousness, which would otherwise remain cloudy and dark, is given strength when he passes from the soul world into spirit land after death. It is made capable of perception in the spiritual world, which in turn enables the soul to prepare the spiritual archetype of the next physical organization between death and a new birth.

Therefore, the initiates, who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, or lived a few centuries afterwards, said to their followers: Although man has developed in such a way that he does not carry the forces through death that can lead him from the soul world into the spirit land, Christ did descend to the earth and accomplished the Deed of Golgotha. Through the effects of this Deed of Golgotha on the human soul, the forces of the soul can be strengthened in such a manner that after death, in the transition from the soul world into the spirit land, man has such rich experiences in the cosmic world that out of its impulses he is able to cooperate in working out the physical organism for his next earthly life. Through the Deed of Christ, the human soul is purified during the transition from the soul world into the spirit land. Thus spoke the initiated contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, as had the initiates of antiquity: Through the guidance of the sublime Sun Being, the human soul is purified during its transition from the soul world into the spirit land.

From this you see that what has to be summed up as the mystery of death is connected with the Christian evolution of earthly humanity. After the fourth century, however, as I have set forth already, the initiation knowledge that could have spoken to men who wished to become its followers in the way mentioned above faded away. Now, however, the time has come when a new initiation science is once again able to reveal the connection between men and Christ Jesus. This new initiation science must again say: Whosoever accepts the secret of the Mystery of Golgotha into his life of feelings during earthly life thereby so strengthens and invigorates his inner soul being in the transition from the soul world to the spirit land that it can become strong enough to avoid forming the kind of physical organization it would form if there were no such impulse from a renewed Christianity. For, without this impulse, physical organizations would inevitably arise in future earth evolution that would be pathological. Through a renewed Christianity, we can unite ourselves with the impulse that makes possible physical organizations that will be healthy and vigorous throughout the rest of earth existence.

Thus, there is a profound connection between man's development after death and the Christ Being. In a true cosmology, Christ stands as a World Power, a Cosmic Force. His Power can be perceived in man's transition after death from the soul world to spirit land.

In the next lecture we will consider how the element that lives in the human soul and is expressed in impulses of the will in ordinary consciousness passes through death. We shall see how between death and rebirth it can become the germinal basis for certain forces that will only come to expression in the next life, and how man's destiny—formerly called karma—continues from one earth life to another. Tomorrow's lecture will add a contemplation of the sphere of the human will to today's considerations of the spheres of human thinking and feeling. That will once again show how the significant relationship between man and the Christ Being, the Mystery of Golgotha and the whole of Christian evolution, must be developed in regard to the human will. Today we have placed Christ into cosmological evolution, into true cosmological insight; it will be our task in tomorrow's lecture to place Christ into a renewed Christian perception of religion.

The human soul's experiences in ordinary consciousness during its existence on earth come to expression in thinking, feeling and willing. Their actual background, however, must be sought in what I have described here as man's astral organism and ego being. I have shown how the part of the soul that does the thinking relates in a specific way to the head organization; how the part of the soul that produces the feelings has a somewhat different connection to the rhythmic system, to the breathing, the circulation and other rhythmic processes. In a much looser way, the will nature of the soul is connected with the physical and etheric organisms.

When we examine how the nature of the thinking-soul is connected with the head system, we find that it is devoted entirely to it, it is transformed, as it were, into the head organization. The head organization forms a physical and etheric replica of the part of the soul involved in thinking: therefore, when man really thinks in waking everyday life, he cannot actually observe the process of thinking in himself but must seek it in its replica in the physical and etheric processes of the brain and the rest of the nervous system. This is why the anatomy and physiology of the brain are the real domain for the physical part of a science of the soul, because the replicas of what goes on in thinking can really be observed in the structure of the brain, and thereby also in its processes.

The part of the soul expressed in feeling is not devoted in the same way to the physical and etheric organisms, neither has it become a part of them. We can say of it that at times it is devoted entirely to the breathing and the blood circulation, streaming into them so that it becomes as if invisible to imaginative and inspired vision; we focus on it and see that it slips into the breathing and circulatory processes. At times, the feeling-soul tears itself away from these processes, it becomes independent and exhibits within itself a formative activity of its own. Thus, the feeling-soul slips, so to speak, into the circulatory system and then withdraws, slips in again, and so on.

The part of the soul that is the basis for the human will behaves quite differently. It is neither devoted continually to the physical and etheric organisms, nor does it become involved in an alternation of permeating the two organisms and withdrawing from them; rather, by its own powers, it holds itself aloof from the physical and etheric parts of man's organism. It has an independent existence of its own by means of its own capacities. By virtue of these forces, it actually remains within the soul and spirit realm, and would stay there if nothing else intervened. We can therefore say that in this willing-soul, the soul's nature always remains soul-spiritual, even during life on earth. When, through intuition, you receive insight into the actual reality that exists behind the willing-soul, you are able to study the lasting soul-spiritual being of man in this will element. There is, nevertheless, a kind of surrendering of the willing-soul to the physical organism, an out-pouring into it, but it is neither continuous as is the case with the thinking-soul, nor is it a rhythmical alternation as with the feeling-soul. Instead, it is like this: When, for example, our thinking-soul takes hold of a thought by means of the head organization, which, because of its content, is in itself an impulse for willing something, then, the process that takes place in mere contemplation does not occur. Only the head organization is involved when a person ponders the affairs of the world without arriving at an act of the will. Through the thinking activity, the head organization is worn down, or is at least brought toward a tendency to a breakdown, to dissolution and death, as I described yesterday. But if we formulate the thought, “I will this or that,” then the activity that belongs to the thinking-soul spreads out from the head organization into the metabolic and limb organism. When a man has a thought that represents an intention of the will, intuition perceives how an astral activity pulses into some part of the metabolic or even the limb system. Then, through such a thought that arouses the will, a degenerative process takes place not only in the head system but also the metabolic organs and the limbs. Destructive processes arise through such thoughts. These destructive processes in turn cause the willing-soul that underlies the human will as reality to pour into the metabolic or limb system and to restore a balance by rebuilding what has been worn down by the thought.

If I want to illustrate this clearly, this is what happens: I have the thought: I will lift my arm. This thought then shoots out of the head organization into the arm, there it induces a degenerative process of destruction. It can be called a form of combustion. Something in the configuration of my arm is destroyed. The part of the astral organism that corresponds to the willing-soul follows in the wake of the degenerative process, enters the arm and repairs the damage. The lifting of my arm takes place during this regeneration,—what was burned up is restored and the actual act of the will occurs during this restoration.

Now the true ego being is contained in that part of the astral organism that underlies the soul's will impulses; so, whenever the will is stirred into action, the ego is aroused. When we observe how man unfolds his will, we gain insight into how the human astral organism and the ego being stream into the physical and etheric bodies in response to a certain stimulus. This also happens when an expression of the will occurs that does not require that I set my limbs in motion, but that is perhaps a supplementary impulse or maybe a fairly vivid wish. There, something similar also takes place, only much more inward parts of the human organism are permeated by the actual will nature of the soul.

You can see that the unfolding of the will can be studied in all its details, but in order to do so you require a knowledge of man's actual soul and spirit being. Without this insight, you cannot study the willing-soul, nor arrive at the ego being, for the latter expresses itself only in a weak replica in thinking, it appears on as an impulse in feeling, and has its true reality in earthly life only in the will. Aside from this unfolding of the will that follows a certain inducement, an element that corresponds to the human will as a reality is the continuous desire in the whole human organization for the physical body. Subconsciously, in the will nature of the soul, man longs, as it were, to be enclothed in the metabolic and limb systems of his body. If we go further into this part of the human soul, we see through this will nature into depths, into substrata of the human soul life, into processes of the soul that are completely hidden from ordinary consciousness.

I have already shown that ordinary consciousness remains completely unaware of the processes of degeneration and regeneration which take place in the human body. But aside from these activities that the human soul unfolds and that come into consideration in regard to the ordinary impulses of the will, there exist other processes, subconscious processes in man's being which are very real, but do not project their effects up into ordinary consciousness at all during earthly life. They are described below.

We saw yesterday how a continuous evaluation of the moral and moral-spiritual nature of man takes place in the feeling-soul. The process that only lights up as a weak reflection in consciousness as stirrings of conscience, as evaluations of one's own actions, is a very significant, incisive activity in the subconscious sphere. Everything that a person does, he also evaluates in his subconscious soul organization; on this level, it only comes to an assessment. But something additional and quite different occurs in the part of the soul that corresponds to the will. In the course of earthly life, we see how the astral body and ego, which are linked to this will nature, actually build up an inner entity of man—it is only dully alive—by means of the astral and ego forces in the cosmos. Indeed, it is like this: By inwardly evaluating our own capabilities, we bring to birth an astral being that exists within us and grows increasingly larger. This being contains these evaluations as facts, whereas the feeling-soul only causes the evaluations to arise, as it were, like a thought process, or—after it has happened—like a subconscious memory-thought. After the deed has been done, something additional arises in the willing-soul. The judgement, “I have perpetrated an evil deed,” turns into a being in us. With this being, we possess something within us that is the actualized evaluation of man's deeds.

Now, as you have just seen from this description, something lasting is contained in this will nature of the soul, something that was also present before man descended from the soul-spiritual world into a physical-etheric organism. In this spirit-part of the soul, this willing-soul, the after-effect of the soul-spiritual existence is at work to build up a human organism once again, for that was its activity in pre-earthly life. It is hindered now only by the presence of the physical organism; its activity cannot unfold since it bumps against all the protrusions and walls, so to speak, of the physical organization, but the tendency remains. Now, the reality that I have just described, the being that represents the actualized evaluation of the moral and moral-spiritual nature of man, unites with this tendency. Thus, we bear within us an entity in which flow together the impulses to form a new organism and the realized moral evaluation. We bear this being through the portal of death when our earthly life has come to an end.

From my descriptions you have seen that regenerative and degenerative forces are constantly present in the human organism, forces that cause dying and revitalizing, forces that dampen and arouse life. We find benumbing forces in the thinking-soul, revitalizing ones in the willing-soul. This battle between death and life accompanies us throughout our sojourn on earth. When we bring it to a close we carry the unconsciously developed result of our moral qualities into the spiritual world.

You have seen from the descriptions that I gave in the past few days that in the moment when man passes through the gate of death his consciousness, until now only an earthly one, expands into a cosmic consciousness. Just as man becomes accustomed on earth to live in a physical organization and feels himself enclosed within the skin of his body, he finds his way after death into the expanses of the cosmos. His former surroundings now become his inner content. His consciousness becomes a cosmic consciousness. The question then arises: What happens to the evaluation of the moral qualities of man, when, having passed through the portal of death, the human being receives this cosmic consciousness and has the desire to form a new physical and etheric organism? The answer to this will be given in the second part of today's considerations.

Before I can answer the question that I have just posed, I have to characterize several points concerning the course of man's earthly life in the light of the above described conditions. You have seen that continuous degeneration and regeneration go on in the human organism. This destruction and revitalization take place throughout life between birth and death. Inasmuch as we are thinking soul beings we must deteriorate, as beings of will we must restore what has been worn down. As feeling beings, we bring about an interplay between degeneration and regeneration. Therefore, the soul elements represented inwardly as thinking, feeling and willing are expressed as processes of destruction, recreation and an interplay between the two. These processes in the human organization, which are extremely complicated, are different for each period of life. They come to expression in a child in one way, in another way in an adult. It is especially important for anyone who raises and teaches children to see by means of a spiritual knowledge of man into this continuous interplay of degenerative and regenerative processes of man. It is important to be aware of this in-streaming of constructive processes into the destructive ones, of destructive ones into the constructive ones; to see how they constantly intermingle in certain parts of the human organization and to discern their effects on it. For you can only educate and teach correctly when you can discern how these forces work in a child and what effect can be brought to bear on them through upbringing and education.

I shall cite just one example of this. There is a big difference between making a child memorize only so much as is good for it, or making it memorize too much so that its memory is over-burdened. Because of the opinion prevailing today concerning the interplay of constructive and destructive processes, one could easily believe that they exert an influence only on the soul organism of the young person. That is not the case. When we make a child memorize too much, it forms thoughts that pertain to memory in an irregular fashion. They find their way into the head system. There, they cause irregularities by continuing on into thoughts of the will, even reaching into the metabolic and limb organism. We can discover that if we have raised and educated a child wrongly in regard to its memory, this error manifests itself, perhaps as late as the age of thirty, forty, or forty-five, in poor digestion and metabolic disturbances.

I only mention this as an example that is close at hand. These matters are most complicated. It is a fact that out of a spiritual insight into man a true teacher can estimate and survey the extent of what he undertakes with a child in respect to both body and soul. Genuine, true pedagogy can therefore only be established on the basis of a knowledge of man that views the physical corporeality and the soul and spirit, and also comprehends the interplay between these three members of man's total being. Such a pedagogy has been created within our anthroposophical movement. It becomes a reality in the Waldorf School, also in certain attempts at continuing education here at Dornach. But it must be stated once and for all that the mere sense-derived science that is generally accepted today can never establish a true pedagogy. This becomes possible only through an anthroposophical deepening of scientific life. Some of the details of what has now been touched upon will be further elaborated upon in the lectures tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.¹

Furthermore, clairvoyant sight beholds a certain interplay of destructive and constructive activities, an intermingling in one way or another of the two in the whole human body and in the individual organs depending on the state of a man's health. We can only learn to understand illnesses and their various symptoms by tracing the manner in which degenerative processes gain the upper hand over the whole organism, over one organ or a group of organs, causing the organism to become unyielding and hard; or how regenerative processes gain control, leading to unrestrained life and growth. We also learn to recognize how the destructive processes penetrate the constructive ones in erratic ways and permeate them with undigested products of the metabolism. In short, just as it is important for the teacher to be able to judge the normal course of these processes in a child, so it is important for one dealing with the sick to have insight into the abnormal processes of degeneration and regeneration.

Now, if we gain insight into the various kingdoms of nature around us in the physical world—the mineral, plant, and in part the animal kingdom—we find everything permeated by hidden soul-spiritual elements. In a particular kind of plant, for example, we find regenerative forces, which, when prepared in a certain way and introduced into the human organism, are effective against such destructive, pathologically abnormal processes. In short, we find medications for the abnormal processes in outer nature. The connection between medicines and an illness can only be perceived by looking into man's organism in the way just characterized. In everything that can be undertaken in some way for an ailing organism—be it the application of external medications, or that the ailing organism is treated in a manner one does not treat the healthy organism, or that supplements are found for what the body itself cannot do—whether it is such correctly employed measures or what I have put forward as Curative Eurythmy, one always seeks by such means to bring into balance again in the organism the rampant processes of regeneration or the destructive processes that exceed the norm.

You see that medicine that is based merely on a sense-oriented science must be supplemented and expanded by what can result from spiritual insight, from a knowledge of the total human being. Since, in physiology and anatomy, physical science is able to judge only the outer aspects of man's organization, it is able to find the relationship of a medication to an illness only through external experimentation. Inspiration, imagination and intuition make it possible to view simultaneously the inner connection of a medication or a healing process with the nature of the sickness. In place of a merely experimental, empirical therapy, it is possible to attain to a rational therapy that has insight into the human being and the healing processes. I can only refer to this in passing today, but from this you can see that a starting point for an extension of pathology as well as therapy along the lines described above is contained in what is being established as anthroposophical knowledge. These matters have already assumed practical form within our movement. We do not practice in a spirit of medical dilettantism in our therapeutic institutes in Stuttgart and here in Arlesheim. Present-day medicine is fully acknowledged and applied, but our methods of treatment are permeated by what spiritual perception and a spiritual point of view can add to them.

Critics who rely merely on physical science today still claim that what this spiritual science, working out of anthroposophy, has to say about illness and processes of healing is childish. This is quite understandable, coming from people who choose to base their ideas and their work on physical science alone. But I must say that when such people call our methods “childish,” they have no idea of the true facts. Indeed, what physical science produces as anatomy, pathology and therapy is only a substructure for what results for medicine from spiritual observation. I would like to say—not in a derogatory sense, only in reference to certain critics—that if anything is childlike in some respects it is medicine that tries to rely only on physical phenomena. I do not deride what is childlike with this remark, I only want to point out how it is supplemented by what arises out of a spiritual perception regarding man's total being. If you consider all this, you will realize how one must go into details if insight is to be attained into the activities of man's etheric, astral and ego organisms during physical life.

Now, at death, man lays aside his physical organism; it is lost to him. A condition then commences in which man is no longer clothed in a physical body, but in which his ego being and astral organism are still ensheathed in the etheric organism. I have already outlined that what constitutes man's etheric organism is not strictly separated by clear-cut boundaries from the general organization of the etheric cosmos. Streams from this etheric cosmos flow continually in and out of the human etheric organism. This is why, in the moment when man passes through the gate of death, but still carries his etheric organism within him, his consciousness expands into the etheric expanses yet he still feels that the etheric body which has just been drawn out of the physical corporeality is his own. During this state, man is wholly devoted to the etheric experiences of the cosmos, which, for his consciousness, contract now and then into the mere etheric experience of his own organism. After having passed through death, man is, as it were, overpowered by what this cosmic consciousness represents for him. As yet, there arises no conscious contemplation for what I have described as an entity which develops in us and represents the actualized valuations of man's moral qualities. This moral-spiritual being, which has incorporated itself in the astral body, is carried by us through death, but we do not perceive much of it in the very first period after death. Instead, passing in and out of the cosmic element, we are absorbed in beholding the course of our life just completed on earth, for that is the content of the etheric body. For a while, we look back on this earthly life that we have just completed. The course of our life appears directly after death in its inner nature in the same way that it represents itself to imaginative consciousness, as I described it already during the past several days. This condition, however, lasts only a few days, about as long as a person's daytime experiences stimulate the shaping of dreams, which is something that varies with each individual.

As to the form that dreams take, they always correspond directly to the experiences of the day before or the second or third one before that. Just as we dream about something from the day just past, which is linked, however, in an association of thoughts with other, earlier experiences of ours, in the same manner these other experiences also arise in a dream. We dream, for example, about having spoken to someone yesterday about one thing or another; this experience of the past day still enters directly into the life of dreams. We perhaps talked to him in an animated way about someone we met maybe ten years ago and have not seen since. Because this experience has woven itself into the conversation, we dream up all kinds of things about that person. Dreams are not studied correctly. If they were one would recognize these experiences of dream-life for what they are. Now dreaming does vary with different people. One person dreams only about what happened yesterday, another dreams about what he experienced the day before, still another dreams about what happened three or four days earlier. Insofar as this possibility exists for each individual person, this determines the length of the condition after death that a man still remains in the etheric body. I could also characterize it differently and say: The length of this time coincides with the length of time that a man does not require sleep, the time lasting through as many days and nights as he can remain awake without falling asleep. One person falls asleep when he goes only one night without sleeping. Another can stand to be awake for two, three or four nights. Just as long does the experience last during which the human being still remains in his ether body after death.

Then, however, it comes about that we are increasingly caught up by our consciousness which has lived its way into the cosmic-etheric world. Since our etheric organism is now not strictly separated from the cosmic-etheric world, it flows out into it, so to speak. We feel ourselves to be in this cosmic-etheric world, and when we look back upon our etheric body, it already appears larger to us. This continues until at last we no longer possess the etheric body. Then, clad in our astral organism, we find our way into the cosmos and into our new consciousness. It is then that there emerges in man what I have characterized as a being which represents the actualized valuation of man's moral-spiritual qualities. Man feels himself burdened with this being. His nature is then composed of what flows out of him into the cosmos, and the being to which he must return again and again in his experiences after death, namely the being that actually represents the sum total of his moral qualities.

Now, because, in a manner of speaking, the compensatory forces work continually out of the cosmic consciousness in a very real way, an extraordinarily strong tendency arises to say: You must now confront the wrong, foolish things you have done with the right action! Therefore, in the further course of the life that I have characterized yesterday as the soul world, man finds his way into the rhythm that alternates between his moral-spiritual qualities and the cosmic qualities. In this rhythm, a sum of tendencies develops in him to experience again the possibility of creating compensations for what he finds to be morally inferior, and so on. If, for instance, he has done something that affected another person in one way or another, the tendency develops to make amends for it in an action in the next earth life. In short, the seed of destiny which passes through repeated earth lives is created in this manner. But at the same time, the purely cosmic consciousness grows quite dark and dim because we carry this element within us. During the whole passage through the soul world, the human soul must remain in a dull—at least a duller—state of consciousness, until it becomes necessary for it to enter spirit land and to cast off the being that I have described. Then we can live for a while in the amoral cosmos into which we cannot bring what we have experienced in the soul world as the sum total of our moral or immoral spirit being.

If I wish to describe this transition from the soul experience to the spiritual experience after death, I can present it from the standpoint of human earth life in this way by saying: As long as man passes through the soul world, where he experiences a cosmic rhythm and the moral-spiritual being contained within him from the past earthly life, namely the interacting pulse beat of these two manifest realities, so long does he remain in a kind of affinity, as if spellbound to his last earth life. The being that he has brought with him, which represents his moral-spiritual qualities, has, after all, flowed out of his last earth life. He clings to it with all the inclinations of his soul. He can pass on into the pure experience of the cosmos only after he has freed himself inwardly from these inclinations. Spiritual beings can live together there with the human being in such a way that he gains for himself from their powers the forces that can develop the universal cosmic-spiritual part of a physical human organism for his future incarnation.

This is spoken from the standpoint of human earth experience. But the same relationship can be characterized from the standpoint of the cosmic consciousness and experience. Then one must say: After man has laid aside his etheric body, and while the inclination toward earth life continues to live on in his ego being and astral organism as I have described it, he is inwardly penetrated by the spiritual moon forces that pervade the cosmos. I already had to mention the moon forces when I characterized the condition of sleep.

Now they confront us again in man's existence after death. These moon forces are the element that brings or wishes to bring man into a certain connection with earth existence. Here, after death, they express themselves by trying to prevent man from leaving earth existence. He has laid aside his physical body, but he is anxious to return again to earth. This happens because the moon forces of the cosmos permeate him. Ordinary earthly thinking has ceased after death, for it is bound to the head organism of the physical body. Pre-earthly man flowed into this head system. Upon laying aside the physical body, everything that was brought about merely in a material way ceases to function. Man is therefore no longer an earth-bound being in a direct sense, though he is indirectly because the moon forces continue to affect him. For a long while after death, they still produce, as it were, a tendency in him to turn back to earth because it was there that he prepared the being now enclosed within him.

After death, however, it is necessary for man to struggle free of the moon forces and to reach beyond them, to become free inwardly from their influences that flow into him and affect him. They always preserve in him a kind of cosmic memory of the rhythmic forces, that is, in inspirations and imaginations they continually confront him with what is happening in the movements of the planets and their relationships to the fixed stars. But they hold man back from experiencing those spiritual beings who have their physical replica in the constellations of the fixed stars. Yet, he now faces the necessity of entering the pure, spiritual world. As long as the moon forces influence him, they prevent him from entering. He is, however, not supposed to view the cosmos he experiences merely from the side turned to him in physical existence; it is his task to view it from the other side. Man actually arrives at this condition if he develops a purely spiritual cosmic consciousness. Then, he reaches a position where he is, so to speak, at the periphery of the cosmos. Just as we stand here at the center and look out everywhere into the cosmos, so, in this spiritual perception, we look from the periphery inward into the cosmos. But now we do not see the physical replicas of the spiritual beings in question, we behold the beings themselves. We do not look into the cosmos from the periphery in a spatial manner. Just as we look out into the cosmos from the focal point of our two eyes here on earth, there, we look in from a spherical surface. Yet, it is in a way after all a spatial experience. We behold it qualitatively. We look out into the realm of the fixed stars and observe this universe from the outside.

Between death and a new birth, we must become independent of the physical world where we spent our earthly existence. In the period of humanity's development prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, man entered the spirit world in a manner that was quite different from that of the time that followed this event. During the course of human evolution on earth, a tremendous metamorphosis has taken place in man's inner life. The Christ event represents a turning point in the development of earthly humanity. Therefore, in the fourth part of my considerations and as a culmination of this evening, I would still like to describe how this entrance of man's soul-spiritual being into spirit land appears since the beginning of Christian evolution.

Before man enters the actual spiritual world where he engages in a life in common with other human souls who are not incarnated and are in a condition similar to his own—as it happens, he lives together with these souls even earlier—that is to say, before he can enter into a common life with those spiritual beings of the highest rank, whose physical replica is expressed in the starry constellations, he must leave behind in the moon sphere the being that constitutes his moral evaluation. Without it, he must enter the region of the stars where the moon forces no longer prevail. There, through the companionship with spiritual beings of the highest kind, the forces are born in his soul that enable him now really to prepare and work at the spirit germ of the future human physical organization.

Prior to the Mystery of Golgotha, when the old initiates wished to characterize the manner in which this transition into spirit land took place for the humanity of that time, they had to say to those who were willing to listen: “When, after death, you are to pass out of the soul world into the spirit land, you must leave behind you in the moon sphere the destiny-forming part of your good and bad deeds. But the forces of your own human organization are not enough to give you the power to bring about the transition from the moon sphere to that of the stars. Therefore, the Sun Being intercedes for you; He, Whose physical reflection is the physical sun. Just as your outer life proceeds under the influence of the physical sun's light and warmth, so, after death, the lofty Sun Being claims you, sets you free from your burden of destiny and bears you into the sphere of the stars. There, with the help of your Sun Guide, you can work out the spirit germ of your future physical organization. Then, after having worked sufficiently under the guidance of your Sun Leader on the formation of your physical organism in the spiritual realm, you can return again to life on earth. On this return to earth, you are again received by the moon sphere. In it you find the destiny being which you carried out of your earlier life on earth through the gate of death. You unite with it again and now, after having prepared the spirit germ of your future physical organism together with the great Sun Being, you can control it quite differently. You can unite this destiny being with the forces in you that are drawn toward your physical organism. You stride again through the moon sphere. “ Then follows the entrance into earth life as I have described it already earlier.

The initiates who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha, or who lived in the following centuries up until the third and fourth century, could say to their followers: The form which the human physical organism assumes in earth life increasingly shapes and develops the ego. But man loses the power to enter that region where the high Sun Being could be his guide above in the spiritual realms of the stars. Therefore, the Christ descended to earth and accomplished the Mystery of Golgotha. The power that the human soul gains by having in its feelings a bond with the Mystery of Golgotha works on after death. It tears the soul free of the germinal being of destiny and the moon sphere. Under the after-effect of the earthly Christ Event, the soul shapes its future physical organism with the other beings of the starry worlds and finds in turn the seed of its destiny, into which is placed the tendency for the destiny that will develop in the earth lives to come. The force that the human soul has received from the Christ Impulse enables it to pass through the spiritual realm in the right way and to take up the seed of destiny correctly.

A person who speaks out of initiation science today must add the following to this: “Indeed, it is the Christ Impulse Whose effects continue on beyond death. Under Its influence man wrenches himself away from the moon sphere and penetrates into the sphere of stars and the sun. There, out of the impulses given to man by the beings of the stars, he is able to work at molding the physical organism for his next earth life. But he frees himself from the moon sphere by means of the forces that he has accumulated in his ego by having turned on earth to the Christ Being and the Mystery of Golgotha. He struggles free of the moon sphere in such a way that he can in turn work in the starry sphere in a specific manner so that, when he returns again to the moon sphere and the core of his destiny confronts him, he can incorporate into himself as a free spiritual deed this seed of destiny. For he must tell himself: World evolution can only proceed in the right way if I incorporate into myself the seed of my own destiny and adjust what I have thus prepared as my destiny as compensation in future earth lives.”

This is the main element of the new experience in the life after death in the moon sphere. There comes a moment in cosmic existence when man in a self-reliant manner brings his destiny, his karma, into relation with his own advancing being. In the following earth life, the earthly reflection of this deed, which is accomplished in the supersensible realm, is human freedom, the feeling of freedom during earthly life. A true understanding of the idea of destiny, which traces this idea right into the spiritual worlds, does not establish a philosophy of determination but an actual philosophy of freedom, as I set forth in the nineties of the last century in my book, The Philosophy of Freedom.

Thus, when man finds his way into the spiritual regions after death in the right way, he brings back with him to earth—incorporated into his organism and linked with his universal destiny—the after-effects of having been permeated with the spiritual worlds, something he has experienced in the spirit land. Inasmuch as he experiences the Christ within him, modern man can experience freedom; and in connection with freedom he can also have the feeling of being pervaded by God, the permeation with the divine on earth which can be a recollection of what he has undergone in passing through the world of the stars to the moon sphere, and through the moon sphere itself.

Spiritual science strives towards a knowledge of all these relationships, inasmuch as intuition is brought about through soul exercises of the will. In ancient times, this intuition was produced according to instructions by those who were then initiates. These instructions directed man to mortify his outer physical organism through asceticism. By mortifying and subduing his physical body, man's independent will, which otherwise only expresses a craving for the physical organism, emerged with all the more intensity. Through asceticism, the physical organism becomes so mortified that it is difficult for the will to enter into the body and there to express itself. The will is driven back, as it were. The more difficult it becomes for the will to submerge and live in the physical organism, the more it finds its way into the spiritual world and develops intuitions. This is what was brought about by asceticism. It is wrong, however, to continue with this old asceticism in modern times. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, the human physical body has assumed a form that is no longer able to tolerate a successful practice of asceticism. By means of such asceticism, modern man would at the same time deaden his physical organism to the point where the ego consciousness that must develop could not properly do so. Man would then never attain a consciousness of freedom. He would also be unable to unite himself in a proper, free manner with the Christ Impulse.

Therefore, the will exercises must be undertaken in such a way that the physical body is not subdued as was the case in ancient times; instead, by means of these exercises, man's pure soul-spiritual capacities are strengthened so much that the body does not withdraw from the soul, but the soul can find its way into and live in the spiritual worlds. Not only has what the old initiates told their followers about experiences between death and rebirth changed, but also what has to be said about the exercises that men have to take up in order to acquire knowledge leading into the higher worlds. These exercises also have changed in accordance with humanity's progressive development. The ascetic of ancient times could not attain the royal consciousness of freedom which modern man must reach through his present organization. Nor could the old ascetic between death and rebirth encounter the Sun Being, Who at that time had to accomplish for him after death what now, ever since the Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, the human being can find within himself the strength to accomplish.

With the entrance of Christianity into human evolution, religious consciousness has therefore changed, for this consciousness is the earthly after-image of what man must experience as permeation with God in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In all respects we are led by modern initiation science to a deeper comprehension of Christology. Therefore, we can speak of a renewal of religious consciousness by means of anthroposophic insight, just as we have spoken in the past few days of a renewal of philosophy, which turns into a living philosophical science; likewise, we spoke of a deepening of cosmology through the inclusion of the insight into the higher worlds that can only be attained by means of intuition and inspiration. Through enhancement by anthroposophy, a renewal of religious consciousness, which only then will become a fully conscious Christian awareness, can be attained for the whole of mankind. Anthroposophy would like to contribute to the further rightful development of Christianity; this is meant in the sense that it does not want to become a new religion but wants to help in the development of the Christian religion that came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. This Christian religion has in itself the power to develop further, and anthroposophy wishes to understand this in the right way and be a true aid in this further development.

So, in these lectures I have sought to describe for you how philosophy, cosmology and religious knowledge are to be fructified by anthroposophy. Naturally, knowledge of religion is not religion. Religion can also be experienced if you devote yourself with your heart (Gemüt) in an open-minded way to what intuitive knowledge communicates, for the heart (Gemüt) can understand it. Therefore, the renewal of religious knowledge can bring about a new deepening of religious life.

I could describe all this only in a sketchy way during these days. Naturally, these matters can only be penetrated completely if one becomes acquainted with the details. Then, much that had to remain sketchy here could appear in its full coloring and with all the possible nuances. That alone would present a complete picture.

Most esteemed ladies and gentlemen! In concluding these lectures, I am deeply gratified when I think of the fact that you actually came from a foreign country to attend these lectures. This feeling leads me to express my heartiest thanks for your attention. I would like to express heartfelt thanks especially to Dr. Sauerwein for the trouble he took to present a faithful translation, and to ask him to fulfill one more wish of mine, namely to translate my thanks to him also, just as he translated everything else. I would be especially happy if you took home with you the feeling that the time spent here was not a waste of time for you.

• 1. Steiner gave eight lectures on the 16th and 17th of September 1922. They are currently unavailable in English, see table at the end of this lecture.

The lecture cycle now being published in its entirety for the first time in English has always been known as the “French Course” for an interesting reason—although it is directed to anthroposophists everywhere as much as any other of Rudolf Steiner's major cycles. The course was given in September, 1922 exclusively to members of the Society, and it was held in the old Goetheanum. French members were specially invited, and a considerable number of them were present. A French translation was provided by Jules Sauerwein, a distinguished bilingual French member, editor of Le Matin, the leading Parisian newspaper of the time, whose sister Alice was to become in the following year the first General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in France. Determined to spare no effort to make the cycle, difficult and detailed though it was, comprehensible to the French members present, Rudolf Steiner every night prepared an outline of what he was to say, and gave it to Jules Sauerwein the following morning, so that he could study it and decide how best he could translate it into French. During the lectures Steiner paused three or four times to allow him to translate the gist of what he had said, a procedure he followed also with George Adams Kauffman during these years when the audience was composed of English-speaking members.

The reason for this special invitation to the French lies far back in anthroposophical history. Eduard Schuré, the Alsatian author of The Great Initiates, a book greatly admired by Steiner, was twenty years older than Steiner and by 1900 had won a considerable reputation in Europe, becoming at the same time interested in Theosophy. It was in 1900 that he became acquainted with Marie von Sievers, who was in Paris studying to become an actress. Knowing of her interest in spiritual matters he suggested that she might look into Theosophy, but in fact she did not do so until she paid a visit to Berlin later in the same year. There she heard of some lectures being given in the Theosophical Library by a certain Rudolf Steiner, and later wrote a glowing letter to Schuré about him. Meanwhile she herself translated two esoteric dramas by Schuré, though of course she continued working from 1902 onward with Steiner, eventually in 1914 becoming his wife.

Thus, Schuré already had begun to play an important part in Steiner's life before he met him personally when he came to Paris in 1906 to give some lectures at a Theosophical Congress. On that occasion he was tremendously impressed by the man he was willing to admit was the first modern initiate he had known, and he wrote an enthusiastic introduction to Steiner's work Christianity as Mystical Fact which appeared at this time in a French translation. Meanwhile Marie von Sievers translated Schure's esoteric dramas, the first of which, The Mysteries of Eleusis, was presented by the German Theosophists at their Congress in Munich in 1907. Immediately after the Congress Steiner and Marie von Sievers were guests of Schuré at his property in Barr, in Alsace, and Schuré persuaded him to write an autobiographical sketch of his life and spiritual development, which is the oldest such document known (printed, together with Schure's introduction in the Golden Blade of 1966).

Thus, the two men were friends and collaborators of long standing by the time of the outbreak of World War I. But unhappily Schuré, like so many Alsatians who had bitterly resented the German annexation of their province in 1871, was a strong French patriot, and it seemed to him that Steiner was too pro-German in the early years of the war. So the two men became estranged, and the estrangement continued for some years after the war, and it was even thought by many Frenchmen that Steiner had been an unofficial adviser of General von Moltke at the beginning of the war. Jules Sauerwein helped to clear up this misunderstanding by publishing an interview with Steiner in his paper, and gradually it became clear to Schuré that he must make an effort to meet Steiner again and become reconciled to him, while Steiner, for his part, had never harbored anything but friendship for Schuré. The reconciliation was consummated at the Goetheanum in 1922 at the time of the French course; and it marked at the same time the reconciliation with the French people, so many of whom had shared Schure's extreme patriotism and wanted as little as possible to do with the Germans. The meeting of the 81 year old Schuré with the 61 year old Steiner was the warmest possible, and the entire course, in which the French had been given such marked consideration, was suffused with the glow of the reconciliation.

The outline prepared by Rudolf Steiner for Jules Sauerwein has survived, and it is extremely interesting to compare it with the course. Steiner explained on several occasions that when he lectured he spoke always directly out of his supersensible perception of the spiritual worlds and could never speak out of what he remembered or had given previously. It will be evident that he did not deviate from his rule even when he had given his translator an outline of what the night before he had decided he would say. Especially the last highly esoteric lectures of the course when he speaks of the influence of the Christ in earth evolution go so much farther than the outline that Sauerwein must have felt he had been given little enough to help him through his exceptionally difficult task.

Even so, the outline is in itself a most remarkable work, and it is not surprising that Harry Collison published two editions of it (1930 and 1943) in English translation, and that Marie Steiner's German edition was published long before the full course. The Anthroposophie Press is planning to publish both the outline and the course, as either may be studied with profit separately, and both are most suitable for group study, though requiring somewhat different responses from the students. The very bareness of the outline demands extremely careful attention to each sentence and each concept, whereas the course does not invariably supply all the knowledge to fill in the outline. What it does is to provide an enormous amount of detailed information, some of it hard to come by elsewhere, on how to attain higher development and the kind of exercises that are needed, following this with a dense and packed account of the period between death and rebirth, and especially the role of the Christ after death, as revealed to imagination, inspiration and intuition. This material differs significantly from that given in most of the better-known cycles devoted to this subject. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Steiner, faced with a highly educated French audience in the Goetheanum in which he had already given so many difficult scientific lectures, took special pains to direct everything he said to their thinking and understanding—even taking the trouble to provide an outline in advance for his translator. The result is a course that is in many respects unique in all his work, and it is very good that at long last it should be made available to English-speaking readers.

Colmar, Alsace, France Stewart C. Easton

In recent lectures I have been trying to describe in some detail the connection of man as a being of body and soul with the spiritual Powers of the universe. I should like now to enlarge the picture by describing, in a similar way, certain historical happenings and their connections with spiritual worlds. In our materialistic age, study of the history of the human race is limited to its external aspect; attempts are made to depict what comes to pass in the physical world of sense, but no consideration is given to how the spiritual world plays into the activities and doings of men. In our epoch, human actions in the on-flowing course of history are never studied from the point of view of their connection with the Beings and Powers behind human existence.

Let us think of very ancient times in the evolution of mankind—to begin with, of those epochs described in my Outline Of Occult Science as the Old Indian and Old Persian periods of culture. Naturally, many things that were done by men in those times go to form the content of history. But it must be realised that happenings which then constituted external history were by no means the outcome of fully conscious deliberation on the part of men, for human consciousness was pervaded by a kind of dreamlike clairvoyance. Pictures arose in men's consciousness—pictures interwoven with the activities of Spiritual Beings who then spurred men on to deeds of one kind or another.

In the epoch of which I am speaking now, the process of inbreathing was extremely important. The fact that through the exercises of Yoga, breathing became a conscious process, a process of perception, indicates the significance of the part played by breathing in those ancient times. But the process of inbreathing was more important then than that of out-breathing.

We do not realise today that besides, shall I say, the coarse inhaled with the air, all kinds of substances are present, but in a state of exceedingly delicate, fine distribution. Those substances, too, which in present earth-existence are in the solid, mineral condition, are contained in the air in fine, delicate distribution, and the human being breathes them in. Now the peculiarity of these substances in their state of fine distribution through the air, is that they have the tendency to assume forms and shapes. Earthly substances too, of course, assume the forms we know as the mineral crystals. I am not here referring to the crystals but to substances finely distributed in the air, or one might also say, in the air-ether, inasmuch as this plays through the air. These substances, too, build forms—forms that do not resemble those of the minerals but of the organs in man. This is a peculiarity of the ether, which pervades the air. When we can observe this ether with Imaginative Knowledge, we see within it floating forms, delicate ether-forms with the shape of lung, or liver, or stomach—at any rate, shapes of the inner organs of man. With trained etheric sight all these forms can be observed in the cosmic ether. In comparison with our physical organs, however, these cosmic forms are usually of gigantic dimensions. We see gigantic ether-forms, with the shapes of liver, lung, and so on, interpenetrating the cosmic space around us. These forms, floating as it were in space, are breathed in by man—and it is good that this happens. For as man inbreathes these forms which enter into him with the air, they work beneficially and with healing effect upon his organs. Organs, after all, deteriorate as life progresses and, to speak colloquially, they are patched up again by what is inbreathed in this way. We well know how difficult it is for therapy to restore the physical organs, but this other kind of therapy works effectively and continuously upon the human being.

In those very early epochs of history it was possible for men, without special training and merely through their dreamlike clairvoyance, to see these ether-forms and, above all, to realise what it means when, together with the finely dissolved, pepsin-like substances in the ether, the form of the stomach, let us say, is breathed in and received by the corresponding organ in the human body. In olden times a very great deal was known about this connection with the delicate organisation of the surrounding world, and the further back we go in time, the greater was the knowledge.

This process of breathing in the ether-form was not as if air were automatically pumped into a space emptied of air. Think of an ether-form that passed into the human being through his inbreathing. Spiritual Beings were active as the cosmic forms sank into him. In recent lectures, some public and some given here, we have heard about certain Spiritual Beings and of their significance for man. I refer to those Spiritual Beings who have their physical reflection in the Moon and its light: the spiritual Moon-Beings. It was these Moon-Beings who, in the times of which I am now speaking, were able by way of these cosmic forms to pass from the cosmos into the human being. So that in those ancient epochs of historical evolution on the earth, men drew the spiritual Moon-Cosmos into themselves in the process of inbreathing, stimulating the spiritual Moon-Beings to activity within them.

What I am now telling you was the content of a science and was a body of wisdom to which much study was devoted in the most ancient Mysteries. For the Initiates of these Mysteries knew that human beings drew the spiritual Moon-Cosmos into themselves in this way. The Initiates knew, too, that this took place chiefly during the night, during sleep. But because in those olden days men were endowed with dreamlike clairvoyance, living in a state of consciousness midway between waking and sleeping, it was possible to reckon with the fact that these spiritual Moon-Beings entered into human beings during certain periods of the day-consciousness. And the leadership given to mankind by the Initiates of the ancient Mysteries aimed at gaining control of what passed into the human being in this way through the inbreathing, so that men might be able to utilise the forces of these Moon-Beings in their own deeds.

You must realise that in those ancient times there was no such thing as intellectual instruction of the kind that is current today. Nevertheless the Initiates of the Mysteries had much more potent ways and means of guiding and leading the peoples than was the case later on—and, above all, than is the case today. In the earliest period of human evolution the Initiates had developed the art of conversing with the Moon-Beings breathed in by man during the night and during the clairvoyant periods of his waking consciousness, and of causing these Moon-Beings to inculcate something very definite into humanity. Inasmuch as the Moon-Beings, via the inbreathing, became their helpers, the Initiates of the ancient Mysteries were able, in this way, to give wonderful leadership to mankind.

Only the most inadequate conceptions exist today of these deeply mysterious processes which had their outward image in all manner of ceremonial rites—processes which were used in olden times in order, from the centres of the Mysteries, to lead and guide humanity.

As evolution proceeded, a different age came to birth. Darkness gathered over the old clairvoyance, with the result that the special processes, which the Initiates had been able to make elective in the days of ancient India and ancient Persia, presented greater and greater difficulties. Up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, of course, and for a few centuries afterwards, remnants of the old clairvoyance persisted, particularly in certain regions. But it was already dim and by the second or third century B.C. the procedure of which I have spoken could no longer be as effective as it had been in the earliest times of human evolution after the Atlantean epoch. The Initiates of the Mysteries were more and more at a loss when they desired to make use of the power of the Moon-Beings in the guidance of mankind. If I am to describe what then took place between the Initiates and the Moon-Beings, I will say the following: When an Initiate of the Egypto-Chaldean epoch approached one of these Moon-Beings with the object of charging this Being, when he had entered into a man via the inbreathing, to instill this or that into the soul, the Moon-Being would often reply to the Initiate: During the hours of day-consciousness we no longer have any dwelling-place on the earth; we find a dwelling-place only during the hours of night.

But the Initiates would have regarded it as unlawful thus to influence men on earth during the hours of night-consciousness by way of the Moon-Beings, for this would have meant handling them like automatons. Such procedure would have given rise to what is described in certain terminology as an art of black magic, and with this the good Initiates would, naturally, have nothing whatever to do. So it was deeply significant for them when the Moon-Beings who were to be their helpers in the guidance of humanity, made answer: During the hours of the day-consciousness we have no dwelling-place on the earth. The Initiates of these Mysteries were thus faced with the danger of being without helpers in the methods they had used for leading mankind. On the other hand, what came into the world with the Christ Mystery was not yet in existence. There was an intermediate period between that of the ancient clairvoyance, when the procedures I have described were possible, and the epoch that changed the whole character of the workings of the Spiritual on the earth—the epoch inaugurated by the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Egypto-Chaldean epoch, following that of ancient Persia, provides the best illustration for study of this intermediate period. The Initiates among the Chaldean peoples hardly knew at all how to tackle the dilemma of which I am now speaking. In a certain respect they were extraordinarily helpless and they sought what they needed for the guidance of men through somewhat external means, namely, through their star-lore, their art of astrology. For what the Chaldean Initiates learnt through their astrology could be experienced in quite a different way through the Moon-Beings who passed into the bodies of men via the inbreathing. Now, however, the Moon-Beings were saying: There is no dwelling-place for us on the earth. And so the Chaldean Initiates substituted a power of external observation for the inner power, which in former days had been imparted by these Beings.

The Initiates of Egypt set to work quite differently. They sought for ways and means whereby dwelling places might be provided on earth for the Moon-Beings. For Beings, therefore, who according to the eternal laws of world-evolution no longer had their appointed dwelling places on the earth—for these Beings the Initiates of the Egyptian Mysteries sought to provide shelter. And the priests of the Egyptian Mysteries, the Egyptian Initiates, did indeed succeed in providing dwelling places on the earth for the Luciferic Moon-Beings. By peopling the burial places with mummies, the Egyptian priests found the solution to the secret of enticing the Moon-Spirits to come down to the earth, although according to the laws of world evolution this was no longer their allotted role. Mummified human beings, mummified corpses, became dwelling places for the Luciferic Moon-Beings. In earlier lectures I have spoken from a different point of view of what the mummified corpse signified, and I refer to it now from the aspect of cosmological history. Surrounded by their rows of mummies, the Egyptian Initiates were able to make observations that were no longer possible in a natural way. In earlier times it was merely a matter of being together with men and clairvoyantly observing their breathing. In substitution for this a method was found for bringing about what had once happened in the natural process of inbreathing. Places were established to which these Spirits could descend—the Spirits who now had no dwelling-place within humanity during the hours of day and would otherwise have been obliged to wander homeless about the earth. Under such conditions they could have played no part in the affairs of the earth, and places were therefore established where they could, as it were, be given shelter. These places were the mummies, the mummified corpses of men. The mummies became the dwelling places of the Moon-Beings. Standing with full understanding before the mummies, the Egyptian Initiate studied what the Initiates of earlier times had studied from life in its fresh and natural state. The Egyptian Initiate observed the activities of the Moon-Beings in the dwelling places that had thus been provided for them, and by this means he became aware of what these Moon-Beings were able to inculcate, in manifold ways, into the historical development of humanity.

Paradoxical as it will appear to the materialistic intellect of today, it is nevertheless true that if we wish to understand historical development during the Egyptian epoch of culture, we must study not merely the external monuments but that eternal Chronicle of worlds which can be read with the vision of Imagination and Inspiration, and in which are recorded the deeds of those spiritual Moon-Beings to whom no outer monuments were erected and who left no written scripts. But the achievements of the men to whom the monuments were erected—these achievements were inspired through the work of the Initiates with the Moon-Beings in the mummies, inspired by the spiritual Moon-Beings for whom, during the hours of day-consciousness, dwelling places on earth had been provided in the mummies. We can, in truth, only understand the origin of what is recorded in the ancient scripts when we are able to check out, in the life of the cosmos, those Beings who tell us: “During the third, second and first millennia before Christ we could come down to the earth only because the Priest-Initiates of Egypt provided dwelling places for us in the mummies.” From these Moon-Beings we can learn the intentions behind deeds that go to form the history of that epoch.

To understand man in his true being, we must turn to the stars and to the Hierarchies, as I said in the last two lectures given here. But to understand the historical development of humanity we must be able to study, as well, the Spiritual Powers that play into this development. We must study the meaning of a phenomenon as striking as that of the mummification of the human corpse in ancient Egypt. The inner purpose of things often regarded by modern materialism merely as curious customs can be understood when we are able to investigate them by means of spiritual science.

Once upon a time the mummies were the homes of Gods, dwelling places of Moon-Beings who were now Luciferic Beings. In the Greco-Roman epoch, the fourth Post-Atlantean epoch, conditions were somewhat different. The process of inbreathing now ceased to play the predominating part. In-breathing retained its significance, certainly, but it was no longer as important as it had once been. Inbreathing and out-breathing were now of equal significance for the human being. The Greek Initiates were well aware of this fact and the wonderful balance between inbreathing and out-breathing, which was characteristic of the Greeks, enabled their art to become the model to which history always points. It would not have been in keeping with the nature of the Greeks to receive the Moon Beings specifically by way of the inbreathing. Through the work of their Initiates, the Greek people were able to make effective those Beings who hovered—half flying, half floating in the air, and who liked best to be cradled in the condition of balance between inbreathing and out-breathing. Looking back to those ancient times of Greek development when the real inspiration was given for what manifested, later on, in a more external form—looking back to the times when forms of primitive grandeur were the source and wellspring of plastic art, of the Greek art of tragedy and of philosophy, we find that the Priest-Initiates of the Mysteries in their guidance of humanity, were able to make use primarily of those Beings who cradled themselves in the condition of balance between man's inbreathing and out-breathing. We can have no real knowledge of the Apollonian art, or of Orphic wisdom, unless we realise that their inspiration came from dæmonic Beings moving within this condition of balance between inbreathing and out-breathing. The strings of Apollo's lyre were tuned in accordance with what could be observed of those Beings who lived between the moon-sphere and the earth-sphere, who liked best to hover, to dance, as it were, on the strings of the cosmos which had been woven into the balance between inbreathing and out-breathing. The dance of the daemons of the air—this was mirrored in the tuning of the strings of Apollo's lyre.

Thus we must look into the spiritual world if we would gain knowledge of what has come to pass in external history. Think of what I said some time ago, namely, that scansion, the development of the art of ancient recitative, of the hexameter, is based on the relation between the rhythms of breathing and blood-circulation in man. Remind yourselves of what I once said in a series of lectures about the development of the hexameter. The study that led to the creation of the hexameter was, for the Greek Initiates, full of concrete realities. As we breathe in, we receive the moving waves of cosmic life into ourselves, and adjust them to our inner being. As we breathe out we impart to the rhythm of the breath something of the vibration of the pulse in the circulating blood. Thus we can say: The external world pulsates into our inbreathing. In our out-breathing our own blood pulsates. And so a Greek Initiate who was schooled in these things was able to observe how in and around the human being, in his ether-body and astral body, cosmic rhythm and the rhythm of the blood were meeting and intermingling and how denizens of the air were moving and dancing in these rhythms.

Such was the study to which Homer applied himself when he was developing the hexameter, in particular, to its highest perfection of form—for the hexameter is born from the connection between the human being and the world.

Many things become clear for the first time when we study history with the eye of knowledge permeated by art, and with the eye of art permeated by knowledge. I have no desire to speak about the materialistic mentality of today, which instead of pondering deeply about the origin of, let us say, the “Songs of Homer” finds a way out by saying that Homer never existed. That is the simplest way out of the difficulty, from the standpoint of modern materialism. It is not possible for materialistic science to understand Homer, and according to a mentality that has become so vain and self-glorious in our times, anything that is incomprehensible cannot possibly exist. Things that cannot be explained by the academic mind do not exist! Homer is incomprehensible—therefore he never existed. He cannot be explained, so he doesn't exist ... but after all, surely there is it more sensible explanation than this!

In museums everywhere you will find sculptured heads of Homer. I am not saying that the likeness is particularly good, but when we look at this blind Homer, whose eyes, in spite of blindness, have such a mysterious expression and whose head has a striking pose, the portrayal is good enough to make us feel perhaps he blinded himself voluntarily—I am, of course, speaking metaphorically—perhaps he deliberately made himself blind in order that sight should not disturb a certain kind of listening; for Homer listens. Without the distraction of sight, he experiences the interplay between the pulsation of the cosmos and the pulsing of human blood, the pulsing of the human ether body, where the Beings of the air carry out their dance of harmony and melody. In a kind of whirring ... as when one listens to the whirring of a swarm of flies ... Homer heard the hexameter and, undisturbed by sight or the ordinary clear light of day, it is as if his ears were touching at the same time as hearing.

Look at the heads of Homer from this point of view. The form of marble or plaster gives the impression of hearing that is also touching, touching that is also hearing; life of a very special kind is present here. The head-nature seems to flash from within through the blinded eyes. There is something that seems not only to hear, but actually to touch the sounds, to detain them, in order to lead over into scansion by the human voice what was drawn in from the cosmos. So it was, in days when the predominating factor was not the inbreathing or the out-breathing, but the interplay between them. Contemplation of the head of Homer should give rise to the eager question: How did he breathe? This head is undisturbed by external light, is wholly given up to the mysteries of the breathing. To have this feeling about the sculptured heads that can be seen in many places would be more intelligent than to argue away the existence of Homer. The reasons produced by scholars when they argued away the existence of Homer were so subtle and deceptive that even Goethe was a little disturbed. The German philologist Wolf was the first to argue away the existence of Homer and even Goethe could not entirely put aside his subtle, plausible contentions. And although Goethe always had a feeling of horror at the thought that Homer had been demolished by Wolf, he was nevertheless a little shaken by the extremely astute arguments put forward. Modern cleverness is capable of anything! On this subject I have always said: Modern men are clever, extraordinarily clever and astute; but cleverness does not necessarily mean that they really know the world.

Hermann Grimm set to work ... not to bring Homer to life again, for he had not really been demolished by Wolf—all that had been demolished was a picture that had grown up in the course of time ... Hermann Grimm set to work as follows. He said: We will not, to begin with, concern ourselves with Homer, nor with Wolf who is supposed to have demolished him, but we will turn to the Iliad itself. Let us read this epic of Homer, not as a philologist reads it but as a human being reads it. Let us take the first Book, the first Song, and try to discover by what kind of art the introduction, the continuation and the further development were created. Then pass to the second Song; again we find a remarkable unity in the composition and realise with what a wonderful feeling for art each Song is built on the preceding one. Hermann Grimm pursued this method of study through the whole of the Iliad and it did not fail. Then he said: It would indeed be strange if Homer had never existed, if one man had written a portion of the Iliad, a second man another portion, a third man another, and so on, and then such fragments had merely been put together—as people will probably one day say of Faust, because contradictions have been found in it. It would indeed be strange if a work like the Iliad with its unbroken uniformity of composition had been compiled from all kinds of fragments discovered here or there.

Truly, it is necessary in studying history to picture the weaving and working of Spiritual Beings in the happenings and proceedings of history. Anthroposophical spiritual science must also have this aim, and I have tried today to pursue it in respect of very early periods and up to the time of Greek culture. In the lecture tomorrow we shall see how in the present age, since the Mystery of Golgotha, Spiritual Beings have been manifestly working in human deeds which have become increasingly free and we shall learn what we ourselves have to do in order to find help as did the Egyptian Initiates when they provided shelter for certain Moon-Beings. Something not altogether dissimilar may have to be brought about, but out of a true understanding of the Spirit.

I spoke yesterday of certain happenings in history which lead over our study of the life and being of man to the spiritual worlds and I referred to two early epochs of history (the Egypto-Chaldean and the Greek) in this connection. I told you how the ancient Initiates sought to give guidance to men not only in matters of religion but in other domains too, including that of social life, by calling to their aid Spiritual Beings who are connected with the inbreathing. And we heard that these Beings in turn are connected in the cosmos with what is manifest, externally, in the Moon and its light. Certain Moon-Beings, in times when such intervention had become necessary, namely in the Egyptian epoch, were used by the Initiates in order to give direction to the religious and the social life in ancient Egypt and to other spheres too, of ancient historical development. We also heard of the importance assumed in Greek culture by Luciferic Beings, elementary Beings who were used by the Greek Initiates, for example by the Initiates of the Orphic Mysteries, as their helpers in the inauguration of Greek art.

I indicated that even today, to those whose perceptive faculty is deeper and more inward than is normally the case, the traditional heads of Homer in sculpture give the impression of a kind of listening, of hearing that is also touching, of touching that is also hearing. Homer listens to those Spiritual Beings of the air who use the state of equilibrium between the inbreathing and the out-breathing of man to create a rhythm between the breathing and the circulating blood. The Greek hexameter is based upon the wonderful ratio of number existing between the rhythm of the breathing and the pulse in the human being, as indeed are all the measures of Greek verse which, for this reason, as well as being creations of man have also been created by the mysterious rhythm which surges and shimmers through the cosmos. I said that when the Greeks speak of the lyre of Apollo, we can picture its strings being according to the impressions which came to men from this composite rhythm.

Since those days humanity has entered upon a quite different phase of evolution, the characteristics of which I have described from many points of view. Since the fifteenth century, mankind has been laid hold of by the intellectualism which now has sovereign sway in all human culture and civilisation, and arose because an older form of speech—the Latin language in its original form, which was still connected with that hearing of rhythm in the Graeco-Roman epoch of which I have spoken—continued far on into the Middle Ages and became entirely intellectual. In many respects the Latin language was responsible for educating man to modern intellectualism. This modern intellectualism, based as it is upon thoughts that are dependent entirely upon the development of the physical body, exposes the whole of mankind to the danger of falling away from the spiritual world. And it can be said with truth that as earlier creeds speak of a Fall into Sin, meaning a Fall more in the moral sense, so, now, we must speak of the danger to which modern humanity is exposed, the danger of a Fall into Intellectualism.

The kind of thoughts that are universal today, the so-called astute thoughts of modern science to which such great authority is attached—these thoughts are altogether intellectualistic, having their foundation in the human physical body. When the modern man is thinking, he has only the physical body to help him. In earlier periods of earth-existence, thoughts were entirely different in character for they were accompanied by spiritual visions. Spiritual visions were either revealed by the cosmos to man or they welled up from within him. On the waves of these spiritual visions, thoughts were imparted to men from out of the spiritual world. The thoughts revealed themselves to men and such “revealed” thoughts are not accessible to intellectualism. A man who builds up his own thoughts merely according to the logic for which modern humanity strives—such a man's consciousness is bound to the physical body. Not that the thoughts themselves arise out of his physical body—that, of course, is not the case. But modern man is not conscious of the forces that are working in these thoughts. He does not know what these thoughts are, in their real nature; he is entirely ignorant of the real substance of the thoughts that are instilled into him, even in his school days, by popularised forms of science and literature. He knows them only in the form of mirrored pictures. The physical body acts as the mirror and the human being does not know what is really living in his thoughts; he only knows what the physical body mirrors back to him of these thoughts. If he were really to live within these thoughts, he would be able to perceive pre-earthly existence, and this he cannot do. He is unable to perceive pre-earthly existence because he lives only in mirrored images of thoughts, not in their real substance. The thoughts of modern man are not realities.

The element of danger for modern evolution lies in the fact that whereas, in truth, the spiritual, the pre-earthly life, is contained in the substance of the thoughts, the human being knows nothing of this; he knows the mirrored pictures. And, as a result, something that is really attuned to the spiritual world falls away. These thoughts are attuned to and have their roots in the spiritual world and are mirrored by the physical body; what they mirror is merely the external world of the senses. In respect of the modern age, therefore, we may speak of a Fall into sin in the realm of intellectualism. The great task of our age is to bring spirituality, the reality of the Spirit, once again into the world of thought and to make man conscious of this. If he wants to live fully in the modern world, a man cannot altogether rid himself of intellectualism, but he must spiritualise his thinking, he must bring spiritual substance into his thoughts.

Because this is our task, our position is the reverse of that of the Initiates of ancient Egypt. The Initiates over in Asia, before the Egyptian epoch, were able, because men were endowed with the old clairvoyance, to utilise the intermediate state of consciousness between sleeping and waking to have as their helpers the Moon-Spirits who lived in the inbreathing. But during the Egyptian period men gradually lost this old clairvoyance and the Initiates were forced to provide for their helpers dwelling places on the earth, because these Moon-Spirits had, as I said yesterday, become homeless. I told you that the dwelling places provided by the Egyptian Initiates for these Moon-Spirits were the mummified bodies of men, the mummies. The mummies played a part of the greatest imaginable importance during the Third Post-Atlantean period of evolution, for in the mummies there dwelt those elementary Spirits without whose help the Initiates on earth could do very little to influence the social life of men. In more ancient times still, it had been possible to enlist the help of the Moon-Spirits living in the inbreathing of men for the spiritual guidance of earth-evolution; and when this was no longer possible a substitute was created in ancient Egypt by making use of the Spirits who had a dwelling-place in the mummies.

Today we are in the opposite position. The Initiates of Egypt looked back to what had been possible in a past age and were obliged to create a substitute. We, in our day, have to look towards the future, to that future when once again there will be men who live in communion with the spiritual world, who will bear the impulses of their morality in their own individuality, who live in the external world as I have described in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by saying that moral impulses must be born in the individual and from the individual work out into the world. This is possible only when the out-breathing of men is such that the air exhaled by an individual who has within him quickened moral impulses, impresses the images of this morality into the external life of the cosmos. Just as with the inbreathing, as I described yesterday, the cosmic ether-forms enter into man and work for the preservation of his organs, so what develops within the individual himself must enter as an impulse into the out-breathing and pass, together with the out-breathed air, into the external cosmos. And when in a distant future, the physical substance of the earth disperses into cosmic space—as it will do—there must exist a life that has taken shape in the cosmic ether out of these images of moral Intuitions that have passed into the ether with the out-breathed air. As I have described in Occult Science, when the physical substance of the earth is dispersed in the universe, a new earth, a “Jupiter” planet will arise from the densified forms out-breathed by individuals in times to come. Thus we must look towards a future when the out-breathing will play a role of predominating importance, when the human being will impart to his out-breathing those impulses whereby he is to build a future.

New light can here be shed upon words from the Gospel: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My words will not pass away.” I have often indicated the meaning of this passage, namely, that what surrounds us physically, including the world of stars, will one day no longer exist; its place will be taken by what flows, spiritually, out of the souls of men to build the future embodiment of the earth, the Jupiter embodiment. The words: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My words will not pass away”, may be supplemented by saying: Men must be so permeated with Christ that they are able to impart to the out-breathed air the moral impulses quickened within the soul by Christ's words—impulses which will build the new world out of the forms proceeding from the human being himself.

Since about the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, elementary Spiritual Beings from other worlds have entered into the sphere of the earth—Beings who were not previously there. We may call them Earth-Spirits, in contrast to the Moon-Beings who in the epochs of ancient India and ancient Persia fulfilled an important function and who then, having become homeless on the earth, took up their abode in the mummies; in contrast also to the daemons of the air who played an important role in ancient Greece and to whom Homer “listened”. We can speak of elementary Earth-Spirits in contrast both to the Moon-Beings who lived in the inbreathed air and to the Air-Beings who moved, in their cosmic dance, in the state of balance between inbreathing and out-breathing, and were mirrored in Greek art. These Earth-Spirits will one day be the greatest helpers of the individual human being with his own moral impulses—they will help him to build a new earth planet out of his moral impulses. We can call these helpers “Earth-Spirits”, elementary Earth-Spirits, for they are intimately connected with earthly life. They expect to receive from earthly life a stimulus that will enable them to undo their activity in the future incarnation of the earth. As already said, these Beings have come into the sphere of earth-evolution since the fourth and fifth centuries of our era. In public lectures, as well as elsewhere, I have emphasised that remnants of the old clairvoyance persisted for some time after the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place. In those days there were still external institutions, ceremonial cults and the like, by means of which these Beings who had come into the sphere of earth-evolution maintained their footing—if I may use a trivial expression. The particular tendency of these Beings is to help man to become very individual, so to shape the whole organism of a man who has within him some strong moral idea that this moral idea can become part of his very temperament, character and blood, that the moral ideas and individual moral quality can be derived from the blood itself. These elementary Earth-Beings can render significant help to men who are acquiring individual freedom in ever-greater measure. But a great and powerful obstacle confronts these Beings.

If, instead of speaking from theories—theories are never to be taken quite seriously—we speak about the spiritual world from actual experience, we can hardly refer to these Spiritual Beings in any other way than that in which we refer to men, for they are present on the earth just as men are present there. Thus we can say: These Beings feel especially deflected from their aim by the factor of human heredity. When the superstition of heredity is very potent, this runs counter to all the inner inclinations and propensities of these elementary Beings who are by nature turbulent and passionate. When Ibsen brought out a work like his Ghosts, which helped to make heredity a fixed superstition, these Beings were roused to fury. (As I said, you must get accustomed to hearing them spoken of as if they were men). Let me express it pictorially. Ibsen's disheveled head, his tangled beard, the strangely wild look in his eyes, his distorted mouth—all this comes from the havoc wrought by these Beings because they could not endure Ibsen, because in this respect he was one of those typical moderns who persist in upholding the superstition of heredity. Those who fall victim to this “ghost” believe that a man inherits from his parents, grandparents and so on, propensities in his blood of which he cannot get rid, that his particular constitution is due entirely to inherited qualities. And what in Ibsen came to the fore only in a grotesque, poetic form and also with a certain grandeur—this tendency pervades the whole of modern science. Modern science does indeed suffer from the superstition of heredity. But the aim that ought really to be pursued by modern man is to free himself from inherited qualities and abandon the superstition that everything comes from the blood flowing down from his ancestors. Modern man must learn to function as an individual in the true sense, so that his moral impulses are bound up with his individuality in this earthly life, and he can be creative through his own, individual moral impulses. The Earth-Beings serve this aim and can become man's helpers in pursuit of it.

But in our modern world, circumstances for these Earth-Beings are not as they were for the Moon-Beings who, having become homeless, were obliged to find dwelling places in the mummies. These Earth-Beings to whom we must look as the hope of the future, are not homeless in humanity but they wander about like pilgrims gone astray, meeting everywhere with uncongenial conditions. They feel constantly repelled, most of all by the brains of academic scholars, which they try at all costs to avoid. They find disagreeable conditions everywhere, for belief in the omnipotence of matter is altogether abhorrent to them. Belief in the omnipotence of matter is, of course, connected with the “Fall” into intellectualism, with the fact that the human being holds fast to thoughts that are, fundamentally, of no significance because they are only mirror-images and he is quite unconscious of their real nature and content.

Just as the Egyptian Initiates were obliged to wrestle with the problem of how to bring down the Moon-Beings who had become homeless, so it is our task now to help these other Spirits to find the earth a fruitful, not an unfruitful field. The worst possible rebuff for these Beings is constituted by all the mechanical contrivances of modern life that form a kind of second earth, an earth devoid of Spirit. The Spiritual indwells the minerals, plants and animals, but in these modern mechanical contrivances there are only mirrored thoughts. This mechanized world is a source of perpetual pain to these Beings as they wander over the earth. Complete chaos prevails in the out-breathing of men during the hours of sleep at night. These Beings who should be able to find paths in the carbonised air out-breathed by men, feel isolated, cut off by what intellectualism creates in the world. And so, much as it goes against the grain, much as modern man struggles against it, there is only one thing to do, namely, to strive to spiritualise his actions in the external world. This will be difficult and he will have to be educated up to it. Modern man is extremely clever, but in the real sense he knows nothing, for intellect alone does not create knowledge. The modern intellectual, surrounded by his mechanical contrivances in which mirrored thoughts are embodied, is well on the way to losing his real self, to knowing nothing of what he really is. Inner reality, inner morality in his intellectual life—that is what modern man must acquire, I will tell you what I mean by this.

Human beings today are exceedingly clever but there is really not much substance in their cleverness. Every imaginable subject is talked about, and people pride themselves on their talk. Examples lie very close at hand. A curious one in European literature is a volume of correspondence, in Russian, between two men—Herschenson and Ivanow. The literary setting is that these two men live in the same room but they are both so clever that, when they are talking, their thoughts jostle to such an extent that neither of them listens to the other; they are both always talking at the same time. I can think of no other reason why they should write letters to each other, for there they are, in the same square room, one in one corner and the other in the corner opposite. They write letters to each other—very lengthy letters containing a vast number of words but no real substance whatever. One of them says: We have become much too clever. We have art, we have religion, we have science—we have become terribly clever ... The other man, reading these remarks, is merely astonished at the stupidity of the writer, although he is, admittedly, clever in the modern sense. But in his own view he has become so clever that he doesn't know where to begin with his cleverness and he longs to return to times when men had no ideas about religion, no science, no art, when life was entirely primitive. The second man cannot agree, but his opinion is that as this whole medley of culture develops it must abandon certain fundamental ideas if anything at all is to result from it. The two men are really talking about nothing, but they pour out floods of clever words. This is only one example and there are many such.

Intellectualism has reached such a pitch that this kind of discussion is possible. It is just as if a man is proposing to sow a field with oats ... it never occurs to people that it is up to them to sow seeds in culture and in civilisation—they merely criticize what has been and what ought not to have been and what, in their opinion, ought to be different ... Very well, then, a man is proposing to sow a field with oats and he discusses with someone else whether this would be a good thing to do. They begin to debate: Ought one to sow oats here? Once upon a time the field was sown with corn. Ought one to show oats in a field that was once sown with corn, or has the field been spoilt by having had corn on its soil? Were there not people living near the field who knew that the field contained corn? And is not the thought that one should now sow oats somewhat marred by the fact that certain people knew that corn had been sown in the field? These people may have been pleasant people. Should one not also take into account that the people who knew about the corn in the field were quite pleasant? ... and so on, and so on. This is more or less the kind of talk that goes on; because what nobody realises is that his task is to sow the oats! Whatever the value of our culture—whether one desires to return to the condition of Adam or that the world shall come to an end—a man who has something real to contribute to culture will not sit down and write letters to his neighbour in the style of the correspondence of which I have spoken. This sort of thing is one of the worst products of modern mentality; it is symptomatic of the deplorable state of modern cultural life.

These things must be faced fairly and squarely. People who hold a certain position in life are often capable of doing a great deal; but the important thing is that they should do what is right at each given opportunity. There are innumerable possibilities for action at this very minute—11:45 a.m., 23^rd September, 1922—but it is up to every individual to do what the particular situation demands of him. This principle must also operate in the life of thought. People must learn that certain thoughts are impermissible, and others permissible. Just as there are things that ought to be done and things that ought to be left undone, so people must learn to realise that by no means every thought is permissible. Such an attitude would bring about many changes in life. If it were universally cultivated, newspapers written in the modern style would be practically impossible, for those who discipline themselves at all would turn their back upon the thoughts voiced in such newspapers. Just as there must be morality in men's actions in the world of practical affairs, so, too, morality must pervade the life of thought. Today we hear from everyone's lips: This is my point of view, I think so-and-so ... Yes, but perhaps it is not at all necessary to think it, or to hold such a point of view! In their life of thought, however, people have not yet begun to adopt moral principles. They must learn to do so and then we shall not be treated to floods of pseudo-thoughts as in the correspondence I have mentioned ... All these things are connected with the fact that intellectualism has diverted men right away from the Spirit, from understanding of the truly spiritual. A good example of this is ready to hand, and I will give it to you, before speaking in the lecture tomorrow, about what must come to pass in order that intellectualism may be prevented from ousting men altogether from the world of realities.

A certain Benedictine monk, by the name of Mager, has written quite a good little book about man's behaviour in the sight of God. This little book only goes to show that the Benedictine Order was a magnificent institution in the period immediately after its foundation, for the influence of the rules of the Order of St. Benedict is still strong in the writing of this modern monk. One can really have a certain respect for this little book (it is not expensive as prices go nowadays, for it came out in a cheap edition) and, in comparison with much of the trash that is published today, it can be recommended as reading matter. It really is an example of the best writing emanating from those particular circles, although all such literature is, of course, antiquated, quite behind the times. And now this Benedictine monk has also felt inspired to speak about Anthroposophy. So do all kinds of people, and from every possible angle! They cannot be expected to abstain from this in their thoughts because they do not realise that they have no understanding whatever of Anthroposophy. It must be admitted, however, that what Mager writes about Anthroposophy is by no means in the worst category, and it is useful to consider his book because it is characteristic of the intellectualism prevailing in our time. Mager says: The anthroposophist tries to develop his faculties of knowledge so that he can actually behold the spiritual. Certainly, Anthroposophy aims at this and can, moreover, achieve it. Alois Mager admits that it would be an extremely good thing if men could really unfold perception of the spiritual world, but he maintains that they are incapable of this. He is even of the opinion that it is not, in principle, impossible, but that the general run of human beings cannot attain real vision of the spiritual world. He proves that he is not, fundamentally, opposed to this aim, because he says: Two men were actually able to develop their faculties of cognition to such an extent that they could gaze into the spiritual world: Buddha and Plotinus.

It is very remarkable that a Catholic monk should hold the view that the only two men really able to see into the spiritual world were Buddha and Plotinus—Plotinus who is naturally regarded by the Catholic Church as a visionary and a heretic, and Buddha, one of the three great figures whom, in the Middle Ages, the faithful were made to abjure. Nevertheless, Mager says of Buddha and Plotinus that their souls were capable of looking into the spiritual world. He uses a strange picture as a comparison, very reminiscent of modern trends of thought, especially of militaristic thought. He compares the spiritual world with a city, and those who desire to approach it he compares with soldiers who are storming this Divine City. He says it is as if an army had equipped itself to storm a city; but only two of the bravest soldiers succeed in scaling the battlements, and so the attack collapses. During the World War, how often did we not read, in the communiqués, of attacks collapsing ... and today a Benedictine monk speaks of knowers of the Spirit as soldiers who want to storm the city of the spiritual life, but the attack fails, with the exception of what the two valiant soldiers, Buddha and Plotinus, were able to achieve. Mager, you see, is simply not able to admit that man can approach the spiritual world; his intellectualism makes him incapable of it. One is surprised, however, at his refusal to admit that any Christian can draw near to God with real knowledge. Being quite sincere in this respect he would naturally be obliged to reject a book like my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for its aim is to show that the individual, out of himself, can give birth to moral impulses in the truest sense. Mager's view is that this can never be, for he maintains that when the human being is left entirely to his own resources, nothing spiritual can come out of him. Therefore he says that both private and public life will, as time goes on, be based wholly on the precepts of the Gospels. He means, in other words, that without understanding what the Gospels actually say, private and public life will be organised according to Gospel precepts—which are beyond the grasp of human powers of knowledge.

It is really not to be wondered at, when, with the intellectualism of today, Mager says: It is my innermost and well-founded conviction that Steiner's Anthroposophy can only be described as a clever systematising of hallucinations into a picture of the world, as a materialisation of the spiritual ... It is grotesque that this should come from a man who, in himself, is honest and sincere and is by no means among the most trivial thinkers of the present day. In order to do him justice I told you that quite recently he wrote a good little book. This critique of Anthroposophy is his latest production. Think once again of the sentence: It is my innermost and well-founded conviction that Steiner's Anthroposophy can only be described as a clever systematising of hallucinations into a picture of the world, as a materialisation of the spiritual ... My reply would be: “Very well, let us assume that you are in earnest about your conceptions of God and of the Spirit. You must place the spiritual somewhere when you aspire to reach it ... but you do not admit that man's powers of knowledge are capable of this. Why, then, are you a priest, desiring to dedicate your whole life to the service of the spiritual? You admit that the material proceeds from the spiritual. If, now, someone attains to a knowledge of the Spirit, what is the nature of such knowledge?” Those who adhere merely to knowledge of the material, well, they have the material before them and the spiritual amounts only to a number of thoughts. But a man who truly turns to the spiritual experiences its reality. Within the spiritual, the things that can be seen with physical eyes are present only as indication. Father Mager regards this as hallucination, so he says that Anthroposophy systematises hallucinations. His view is quite understandable, because in speaking of the spiritual we cannot speak as we do about a material table that the eyes can see and the hands can touch. A material object exists in the spiritual merely as indication, and so it seems to Mager to be hallucination.

And now let us go further, and say to him: “You, Father, are dedicating your life and service to the spiritual and you most certainly acknowledge that the creator of the material is the spiritual. What, then, is the world in your view—materialisation of the spiritual? Yes, but this is exactly what you censure in Anthroposophy! You speak of a picture of the world that is a materialisation of the spiritual, but you believe for a fact that this world has been created out of the Spirit, through materialisation. This is what Anthroposophy tries to fathom. Your strongest censure of Anthroposophy is that Anthroposophy takes in earnest something that you, yourself, ought to take in earnest, but are not willing to do so. That is why you censure Anthroposophy. According to your view, the God in whom you believe must surely once have taken a materialisation of the spiritual in earnest! Otherwise there would have been no Creation. Are you, therefore, taking your religion in earnest when you censure Anthroposophy for trying to grasp how the spiritual can gradually become the material?”

Into what an abyss we gaze when we see how a man like this approaches Anthroposophy! This man is really clever, moreover he is not like others who are all cleverness and nothing else; he knows a little and has also learnt how to think. But just realise what his judgement of Anthroposophy implies and you will understand what kind of fruit is produced by intellectualism, even when it is dedicated to the service of the Spirit today. You will realise, too, that this intellectualism must be superseded by methods differing from those adopted by the priests of Egypt to overcome the spiritual dilemma that had arisen in their epoch. Of the Powers to which intellectualism must turn we will speak in the lecture tomorrow.

A wise man of ancient Egypt once spoke to a wise man of Greece words to this effect: You Greeks are a people who live only in the present, without taking history into account. You speak of what is happening immediately around you and give no thought to how the present has been taking shape since primeval times.

What did the Egyptian sage mean by this? He wanted to convey that the thoughts of the Egyptians were concerned with great problems of the cosmos, with the evolution of the earth through different forms, and that the Greeks, at most, had only pictures of these things in myth and saga. But in reality the Egyptian sage wanted to indicate what had resulted from the use made of the mummified human being, as I have been trying to explain in the last two lectures. The Egyptians set out to bring into the rhythm of inbreathing, impulses derived from certain Spiritual Beings for whom dwelling places had been created in the mummies. Let us try to picture as clearly as possible the significance of the mummy in days when Egyptian Initiation-culture was at its prime.

The mummy was the human being after the spirit-and-soul had departed from his physical form. While a man is alive, the forces active in his etheric organism, his astral organism and Ego, work within this form. The form is irradiated and permeated by the human “tincture” proceeding from the blood and the rest of the organism. The mummy was bare form, a form that could exist on earth only because the human being exists on earth. The Egyptian Initiates used this form—in which the soul and the spirit were not actually present—in order to acquire a power which, without the cult of the mummy, they could not have possessed.

We must try to picture times when the life of soul was quite unlike that of today. Before the Egyptian epoch, all the ideas and thoughts of man, all the experiences of his inner life, were imparted to him directly from the spiritual world. Even when immersed in his thoughts, therefore, he was living in revelations of the spiritual world. In the days of the ancient Indian and ancient Persian civilisations, all the thoughts of man were revelations from the spiritual world. No thoughts were stimulated in him by the external world, by plants, animals or other human beings. His life of soul was replete with thoughts proceeding from the Spiritual and they shed abundant light upon the world. Man lived in communion with the plants and animals and he also gave them names. But these names, too, came to him as revelations from the Gods. When, in the epochs of ancient India and ancient Persia, man gave a name to a flower, it seemed to him that a divine voice said to him distinctly: This is the name by which the flower is to be known. When he gave a name to an animal, he was conscious of hearing inwardly: This is the name by which the animal is to be known. In the civilisations of ancient India and ancient Persia, all such names came to men via their inner life of soul.

In the civilisation of ancient Egypt it was different. Clairvoyant experiences were now fading more and more into twilight and man no longer had clear perception of what was being revealed to him from the spiritual world. As a result he felt it increasingly necessary to live in communion with external nature, with the kingdoms of the animals, the plants and the minerals. But this, too, was out of his reach, for the time was not yet ripe. It was to come in the real sense only after the Mystery of Golgotha. The development of the human being in ancient Egypt had not reached the point where he could have lived in direct communion with the external world. He was obliged, therefore, to mummify the human body. For out of what was present in the mummified form from which the soul and the spirit had departed, he could receive enlightenment about nature around him, about the plants, the animals, the minerals. The first facts of knowledge about these kingdoms of nature came to man from the Spirits who spoke to him from the dwelling places provided for them on earth in the mummies. In the days when the Gods ceased to speak to man from the super-sensible world, he had recourse to helpers who were now able to live on the earth because the human form was preserved by mummification.

But the matter was full of complication. True, it would have been possible for the Initiates to receive from the Moon-Beings indwelling the mummies, enlightenment upon what should be introduced into human life and directives for the guidance and education of men. But because the necessary faculties of soul were still undeveloped, it would not have been possible, even for the Initiates, to obtain, without further measures, enlightenment on nature, on the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals, from the Moon-Beings in the mummies. And yet in this very domain the Egyptians were great. With the help of the culture connected with the mummies, they founded, for example, a wonderful art of medicine.

Of course, when a “clever” man of today interprets these things, he says: By preserving the mummies, the Egyptians obtained knowledge of the various organs and founded a science of anatomy, not merely of medicine. This, however, is an illusory conception. The truth is that purely empirical research and logical deliberation would have been no use to the Egyptians for their intercourse with the external world was not of this character; it was much more delicate, much subtler. But something was achieved by this careful preservation of the mummified form, namely, that the souls of the Dead were fettered for a time to their mummies.

Herein lies the dubious character of Egyptian culture, a perpetual reminder that it was a culture in decline, in degeneration, and cannot be said to represent a golden age in human evolution. It was a culture that encroached upon the super-sensible destinies of men, for human souls after death were fettered, as it were, to the preserved, mummified form. And whereas through the Spiritual Beings indwelling the mummies, directives for human affairs could be received, it was not possible to obtain enlightenment about nature, about the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms directly, but only indirectly, in this sense, that the Moon-Beings were able to communicate secrets of nature to the human souls still fettered to the mummies. And so it was from the human souls lingering with their mummies that the Initiates of Egypt, in their turn, obtained enlightenment about the kingdoms of the plants, animals and minerals. A strange atmosphere pervaded Egyptian culture. The Initiates said to themselves: Before death our bodies are not suited to receive enlightenment about nature; a science of nature is beyond our reach; this can come only later, after the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place; our bodies now are unsuitable. Nevertheless we need enlightenment. As human bodies now are, men can acquire knowledge about nature only after their death. They live in the midst of nature here, but they cannot use the body in order to form concepts about nature. After death, however, such concepts can arise. Let us therefore detain the Dead for a period in order that they may give us enlightenment about nature.

Thus a dubious element was introduced into the historical development of humanity through Egyptian culture. Chaldean culture held aloof in this respect and was, so to speak, a culture of greater purity.

Now all these things—modern science, of course, will regard them as so much fantasy, but modern science holds the same opinion of a great deal that is true—all these things were known, particularly, to men of Hebrew antiquity. Hence the aversion to Egyptian culture indicated in the Old Testament although, through Moses, many elements of Egyptian culture found their way into the events there recorded. The Old Testament indicates the kind of attitude that prevailed in regard to all those things I have described as typifying Egyptian development. The attitude of the Initiates in ancient Egypt was this. They said: In order to acquire the powers that are essential for the direction and education of men, we must create external means since inner means are no longer available to us. But we must also anticipate something that will arise only in the future, namely, a science of nature. And there is no other way of achieving this than by letting the Dead, whom we fetter to their mummies, impart it to us. Time ran on and the Mystery of Golgotha took place. By the fourth or fifth century A.D., the old constitution of the soul, with its pictorial conception of the world, had completely passed away. Indications were already appearing of an epoch when men were to form their concepts of outer nature from outer nature herself and moreover when they would be capable of doing so. The whole organisation of man was inwardly transformed. He felt more and more that his soul remained empty when he waited for thoughts and ideas to be revealed to him directly out of the spiritual world. And so he turned to the observation of external phenomena; he formed his concepts and ideas from observations and, later on, from experiments. The process was exactly reversed.

And now, once again it was a matter of acquiring by other means something that was no longer within the reach of man's own powers. More and more since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., it has been borne in upon men that a future must come when, despite the gift of intellect and the capacity to form thoughts and ideas about external nature through the intellect, this intellect must be spiritualized, so that thoughts will once again lead directly to Divine-Spiritual reality and the power inherent in such thoughts pass into the out-breathing. But this power has not yet come into existence. For the time being we have recourse only to the intellect that is bound up with the physical body.

Certain traditional conceptions which today have almost entirely died out and of which history knows nothing, were alive all through the early Middle Ages, from the fourth and fifth to the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even later, although hidden in obscurity. Men now proceeded to make “mummies” of a certain kind, out of these conceptions—mummies that are analogous to those of Egypt although they take a different form and the analogy is not perceived. Modern humanity could have gained nothing by preserving the human form in the mummy, as was the custom in Egypt. What modern humanity preserved, was something different, namely ancient cults, mainly pre-Christian cults. And particularly since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the birth of a completely intellectualistic culture, ancient ceremonies and rites were preserved in all kinds of occult Orders. Wonderful cults of antiquity, occult rites and ceremonies have been continued in Orders and Lodges of different kinds. They are mummies, like the mummies of human beings in ancient Egypt, as long as they are not irradiated and quickened by the Mystery of Golgotha. There is a very great deal in these cults and ceremonies, but of the wisdom they contained in ancient times only dead elements have been preserved, just as the mummy preserved the dead form of man. And in many respects it is so to this very day. There are innumerable Orders where ceremonials and rituals of all kinds are enacted; but the life has gone out of them, they are mummified. Just as the Egyptian felt a kind of awe when he gazed at a mummy, so in modern man there is not exactly awe, but a feeling of uneasiness perhaps, when he comes across these mummified procedures in his civilisation. He feels them to be something mysterious, as the mummy was felt to be mysterious.

Now just as among the Initiates of Egypt there were some who acted unlawfully, who used the information conveyed to them by the Spirits indwelling the mummies to give false instruction and direction to humanity, so in the mummified ceremonies of many occult Orders an impetus is given to introduce a false twist here or there in the guidance of mankind. I told you that something made possible by mummification of the corpse, passed into the human being by way of the inbreathing. As I said yesterday, the Spiritual Beings needed by the Egyptians had no dwelling-place on earth. And this was provided by the mummies. Those Spiritual Beings and forces which by way of the out-breathing are to bear the inner configuration of man into the ether-world, find no paths in the everyday world, but they are able to move along paths created in these ceremonies—even though they are not understood and are mummified.

In the epoch of Egyptian civilisation, the Moon-Spirits found themselves homeless during the hours of the day. The Spirits who work in the out-breathing of man, these elementary Earth-Spirits who are to be the helpers of mankind today—they have no dwelling-place by night, but they slip down into these ceremonies and ritualistic enactments. There they find paths and are able to live. During the day it is still possible for these Beings to live as it were an honourable existence, for by day the human being thinks, and his intellectualistic thought-forms are passing outwards all the time with the breath as, driven through the cerebral fluid, through the spinal canal, it is then again exhaled. During the hours of night, however, when a man is not thinking, no thought-forms go forth from him; there are no little “ether-ships” upon which the Earth-Spirits can go forth into the world in order to impress man's form into the cosmos of ether. And so ways and directions for the Earth-daemons have been created through these mummified ceremonies. What is contained in all kinds of occult Orders, especially since the birth of modern intellectualism, has a basis similar to that of the cult of the mummy in Egypt, which so suddenly made its appearance. For the human being cannot have knowledge of outer nature without knowledge of himself and of his own form. When the Egyptians set out to acquire a knowledge of nature, they were able to have the mummified human form before them. When it behooved men of the modern age to find something that is not merely passive, ineffective thought elaborated by the intellect but that can really go forth into the world and produce an effect there, then they were obliged to surround themselves with symbolism, symbolism which points to what should really take shape within them in a spiritual sense.

These ceremonial forms and enactments in Lodges and Orders are devoid of soul—the soul has departed from them. As little as the soul of a man indwelt his mummy, as little does there inhere in these ceremonies the power of soul that once was present when they were conducted by the Initiates of olden time. Spiritual life pulsated through the ceremonies when they were being enacted among the ancient Initiates—a spiritual life flowed out from human beings into the ceremonies. In those days, man and the ceremony were one. Think, by way of comparison, of how externalised the ceremonies have become in Orders of the modern age!

The modern man cannot get beyond his intellect. I told you yesterday how even a Benedictine Father, whose vocation it is to be a servant of the Spirit, how even he cannot get away from intellectualism. Modern man cannot find his way out of intellectualism any more than the ancient Egyptian could find his way into it. The ancient Egyptians needed the souls of men already dead in order that a science of nature might be imparted to them. The man of modern times needs something that again imparts to him a spiritual science, a knowledge of the Spirit, because as yet he is unable to unfold this himself.

Now quite apart from the many occult Orders which have become pure mummies, have no deep background, and are carried on more out of a liking to dabble in mysteries, we find that as late as the first half of the nineteenth century there always existed, as well as these others, very earnest and sincere Orders, in which more was imparted than, for example, an average Freemason today receives from his Order. The Orders to which I am referring were able to impart more, because certain needs prevailed in the spiritual world among Beings belonging to the Hierarchy of the Angeloi who are of less interest to us on the earth but very important in our pre-earthly existence. Certain Beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, too, have needs of knowledge, and can only satisfy them by letting human beings reach over, probingly as it were, to these genuine occult Orders before they have come down from pre-earthly into earthly existence. It has actually happened that in connection with certain Lodges working with ancient ceremonial forms, men of vision have been able to assert: Here there is present the soul of a human being who will descend to the earth only in the future. Before the man is born, the soul may be present in such a Lodge and, through their feelings, men can acquire a great deal from this source. Just as the human soul hovered around the mummy, was still bound in a sense to the mummy, so in certain occult Lodges the spirits of human beings not yet born hover in a kind of anticipatory existence. What happens in a case like this does not stimulate intellectual thoughts, for modern men have these thoughts naturally and need no such stimulus. But when they are working in their occult Lodges with the right mood of soul, they can receive communications from human beings not yet born, who are still in their pre-earthly existence and who can be present as a result of the ceremonies. Such men feel the reality of the spiritual world and can, moreover, be inspired by the spiritual world.

There is something in the biography of Goethe which strikes anyone who has a feeling for such things as very significant, particularly when it is mentioned by people who, although they do not know the whole truth, none the less indicate it out of a kind of half-conscious knowledge. Karl Julius Schröer, of whom I have often told you, was quite remarkable in this respect when he was speaking of Goethe. Again and again when he was lecturing on the works and biography of Goethe, a striking phrase would fall from his lips. Schröer would say: “Goethe experienced that once again and the experience rejuvenated him.” Schröer spoke of Goethe as a personality who, say at the age of seven, had had a certain experience; then at the age of fourteen, perhaps, he experienced something different, but the second experience really brought him back a little nearer childhood. Goethe became younger, was rejuvenated. At the age, say, of twenty-one, he was again rejuvenated. Schröer depicted Goethe as if, from stage to stage, he was constantly being rejuvenated.

Study Goethe's biography with care and you will find clear indications of this. Even when he had become a corpulent official in Weimar with a double chin, even in the days when in his dealings with certain people he was a surly, morose old man—and there is much to suggest that in his intercourse with others he was anything but pleasant—even then, in advanced age, Goethe underwent a rejuvenation. It would have been impossible for him, at a great age, to write the second part of Faust if he had not been thus rejuvenated. For about the year 1816 or 1817, Goethe was not a personality from whom one could have expected anything like the second part of Faust, which was written from the year 1824 onwards. A rejuvenation had actually taken place. Moreover Goethe himself had an inkling of this, at any rate in his younger years, when he depicts Faust being given a draught of youth. It is really part of his own biography.

When we investigate what was responsible for this, we realise that it was Goethe's membership of a Lodge. Other venerable figures of Weimar, perhaps only with the exception of Wieland, Chancellor von Muller and one or two others, were ordinary members of the Lodge like many bona fide officials in Weimar. It was their habit to go to Church on Sundays and also be members of the Lodge—the contrast did not worry them! It was the custom in such circles. But it was different in Goethe's case, different too, in the cases of Chancellor von Muller, Wieland and one or two others. They actually experienced these rejuvenations because in their souls they had intercourse with men as yet unborn. Just as the priests of the temples in ancient Egypt had intercourse with the souls of men after their death, so persons such as I have named had intercourse with human beings still living in pre-earthly existence. And from this existence before birth, human beings can bring spirituality into the world of the present. They bring, not intellectualism, but spirituality, which a man then receives through his feelings and which can pervade his whole life.

Thus it may be said that the first elements of intellectual thinking unfolded by mankind in the course of evolution, were learnt by the Egyptians from the Dead, And the first elements of spiritual truths, which have been learnt again by men in the modern age, were acquired from unborn human beings by certain outstanding personalities out of the Initiation-teachings given in occult Orders. Study Goethe's works and again and again you will find flashes of spiritual wisdom which he is not able to express in the form of thoughts but which he clothes in pictures often reminiscent of symbols used in occult Orders. The pictures came to Goethe in the way described. And there are many other such cases.

Now these unborn human souls can give enlightenment only about spiritual truths which can be experienced in the non-earthly world—about the things of heaven and what lies out-side the actual arena of earth-evolution. But because the elementary Earth-Spirits find a foothold in the ceremonies, communications can be made by the Unborn to these Earth-Spirits. And if there is anyone present at the ceremonies with a gift for hearing from the Earth-Spirits what has been communicated to them by the Unborn, such men can, in their turn, give voice to what the Unborn say to the Earth-Spirits. Think of the wonderful understanding of nature possessed by Goethe and by other men in those days, for example, the Danish writer Steven, or men like Troxler, or Schubert who wrote so prolifically on the subject of dreams and whose best inspirations came from the Nature-Spirits. And there were many others—more numerous in the first half of the nineteenth century than later on—who are examples of what came to men by this means. Often, too, something else happened. Communications made in this way by the Unborn to the Nature-Spirits did not always result in the voicing of spiritual secrets of nature. In some human beings these communications became part of their very soul. The forces of the Nature-Spirits were received into their individual qualities of soul and this expressed itself in the style in which such men wrote. Anyone who has a feeling for such things today will realise that the very style of historians such as Ranke or Taine or a typically modern English historian, is intellectualistic. Ranke's style in itself is intellectualistic. The sentences are strung together in an intellectualistic way; the subject is cleverly placed, the predicate just where it should be, and so on. It is all so clever that even a schoolmaster could be satisfied with it, but compare this kind of style with that of Johannes Muller in his twenty-four volumes of world-history: that is a style ... well ... as though an angel were speaking. And in other domains too, in the eighteenth century, many things were written in a style which has no trace of this lack of individuality, this irritating objectivity, but on the contrary, has a quality which makes us feel that elementary forces of nature are streaming through the writer, so that his style seems to flow from the cosmos, from the universe. In such cases something resembling what went out from the mummies to the Initiates of ancient Egypt, comes to modern man. These are facts of great significance, taking place behind the veils of outer history, and they must be recognised by anyone who desires really to understand the evolution of humanity. And so, although these things have remained unrecognised for a time because nowadays there are no ears to hear them—we see how preparation was made for the spiritual power that must enter into and live within the intellect in future ages if humanity does not wish to take the path leading towards the decline of the West depicted by Spengler.

The ancient Egyptians mummified the human form. Since the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., humanity has mummified ancient cults, making it possible, in this way, for forces from beyond the earth to work in the ceremonial of these old cults. Human beings themselves contributed little to these cults; but superhuman beings often contributed a great deal. It is the same with cults of the Churches, and those who have vision of realities can often dispense with the person who stands in the flesh before the altar, because—apart altogether from the officiating priests—they are able to perceive the presence of these Spiritual Beings in the ceremonies.

When we think about these things, it will be clear to us that if we really desire to approach what is all around us spiritually, quite a different kind of language is necessary from that to which modern man is accustomed. Nor shall we be surprised at the appearance of a work like Fritz Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache, which sets out to prove that the ideas men have conceived of Spiritual Beings are words and nothing more. And if words are not to be believed, then, obviously, one cannot believe in Spiritual Beings. Such is the purport of Mauthner's Kritik der Sprache.

Yes, but as far as a large proportion of modern humanity is concerned, Mauthner is quite right. A large proportion of modern humanity has nothing but words with which to speak of the super-sensible. Here, unfortunately, the Kritik der Sprache is right. What is necessary is that real spiritual substance shall again be brought into words. And so it was also necessary in the course of historical evolution that during a period when men themselves were unable to lay hold of this spiritual substance, it should be continued and developed for them by superhuman Beings and by unborn human beings, just as intellectuality was prepared for the Egyptians by those who had already passed through death. The Egyptians received from the Dead the intellectuality in which we are now steeped. We, in the present age, have to learn or at least study by way of the now mummified cult, the spirituality we have not yet acquired—for cult has many things to tell us. Through this different kind of mummy we must supplement our intellectual knowledge with the spirituality of the future. Mummified enactments have taken the place of the mummified human being; mummified ceremonies have superseded the mummified human form.

In this way we must study what proceeds behind the veils of world-history; otherwise every account of the flow of history remains a jumble of external, seemingly fortuitous happenings. But they are not fortuitous when their background is known and understood; they become so only if men refuse to recognise their background. They throw up waves, as it were, of which man believes that each is separate and distinct from the other, whereas the truth is that they all surge upwards together from the depths of an ocean. In reality, processes in history are waves thrown up to the surface, into the sphere of man's life, from the depths of a spiritual sea of world-evolution. In each historical fact we should perceive one such wave, and abandon the belief that one wave arises fortuitously by the side of another. Each wave, that is to say, each historical fact, arises from spiritual depths of that historical evolution which flows onwards eternally, from age to age.

I have been speaking to you about the secrets connected with the mummy and with cult and rites, indicating how the mummy enshrined secrets of antiquity before the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas cult and ceremonial rites in their more modern forms enshrine secrets whose full significance will be revealed only in the future. Today and tomorrow I want to add something to what has already been said and to begin with I will give you a picture in the form of a kind of narrative.

If you had been able to participate in many a scene in the Mysteries during a certain epoch of Egyptian development, in times when the custom of the mummification of bodies was at its height, you would have experienced something like the following. The Priest-Instructor in the Mysteries would have tried, first, to explain to his pupils that in the human head all the mysteries of the world lie concealed, in a very special sense. He would have bidden them regard the earth, the dwelling-place of man, as a mirror, a reflection of the whole cosmos. In very truth, everything that exists in the cosmos is also to be found in the earth itself. Looking upwards to the world of stars, we see the moon as our nearest neighbour among the heavenly bodies. Think of the earth and the moon circling around the earth.¹ We can picture the course taken by the moon as it moves around the earth and all that lies between the earth and the orbit of the moon. Those who rightly understand how to interpret what they find when they dig down into the earth, will say: What is present in the environment is mirrored, and condensed, in an outermost layer of the earth itself.

And now take another planet, which together with the earth, circles round the Sun. We can picture this planet, Venus, and its path. This sphere is filled with delicate, aeriform, etheric substance. Again a lower layer in the earth must be pictured as a reflection of what is outside in the cosmos. Proceeding in this way we have the whole earth as a mirror image of the universe, remembering that what exists out yonder in a state of extremely delicate, ethereal volatility is condensed and still further condensed when it is found in the earth's strata. Thus at the centre of the earth, the outermost periphery of the universe would be condensed into a single point.

In the epoch to which I am now referring, the Initiate of Egypt spoke to his pupils of those things I have very briefly outlined. But the Initiate also said to his pupils: To understand the interaction between the cosmos and its mirror image, the earth, let us study the human head. The human head is formed in the mother's body through the combined working of the whole universe and the earth. But—so the Initiate would have said to his pupils—no observation of the human head can, in itself, enable us to understand its real nature, for the head in itself does not reveal its secrets. It contains innumerable secrets and mysteries but they remain concealed.

The human head is active from the earliest period of germination in the body of the mother until death but it does not contain within itself the effects of its own activity. The mystery of the human head is that it is infinitely active, but the effects of its activities are to be found in the other parts of the organism, not in the head itself.

An Egyptian Initiate would have spoken to his pupils just as I am speaking to you now, except that he would, of course, have used the forms of expression current in those days.

Diagrams were sketched on the blackboard, of circles one inside each other, the smallest indicating the earth in the centre and the larger circles the paths around the earth of the moon and other planets with their interpenetrating spheres

He would have made the following intelligible to his pupils. When the human eye looks at a colour, the perception of the colour gives rise to a change in the brain. What is thus produced in the human eye, with the resulting change in the brain is, in truth, a deed of the outer world. The processes that take place in the brain itself are deeds of the outer world. But the brain itself does something. When the brain receives a colour-impression from outside and a nerve-process arises inwardly as a result, the brain brings about something in the astral body and Ego. The actual effect of this, however, manifests in the other parts of the organism, not in the brain itself. Whereas the working of the external world results in a change in the brain, the brain, for its part, works, for example, upon the heart or upon some other organ of the human body. You can only perceive what the human head does when you know exactly what happens in the human physical body—so would the Initiate have spoken to his pupils.

The Egyptians had knowledge of these things, but because the possibilities that had existed in still earlier times were no longer at their disposal, the Initiates were obliged to adopt methods different from those used by the Initiates of ancient Persia or ancient India. The Initiates of ancient India let their pupils carry out exercises of Yoga, made them breathe in a particular way; and by transforming the breathing process into a sensory process the pupils acquired knowledge of the human physical body. And how did they acquire it?

We know that when man breathes in, the breath-impulse passes through the lungs into the whole of the body, through the spinal canal into the brain. In the brain, the breath-impulse combines with the other processes there, and then recoils. It was this recoil that the pupil of Yoga observed. The breath-impulse passes first into the lungs, through the spinal canal into the brain, and there expands; then it recoils and passes through the different organs, into the chest, and so on. Observing the recoil of the breath downwards into the organism, the pupil of Yoga was able to watch what the brain was doing in the chest, in the abdominal organs and so on. In the recoil through the spinal cord and the expansion through the whole body, the pupil of Yoga was able to observe what the head brings about in the organism. Such was the art connected with the breath, in times when the breathing process was made into a sensory process, when through observation of the breathing, a human being could answer for himself the question: How does my head work in my organism?

I told you in the last lecture that at a certain stage of the Egyptian epoch, this art had been lost and the Egyptian Initiates were obliged to resort to other means. The Initiates of Egypt led their pupils to the mummies, taught them to mummify the human organism, taught them, through observation of what was there presented to them, something that had once been learned by inner means, through contemplation of the breathing process. But I told you, too, that although the pupils of the Egyptian Initiates were no longer capable of following these spiritual processes, which are revealed as the deeds performed by the brain in the human organism—and that was the point of importance—nevertheless the Initiates were helped, as they spoke to their pupils, by the spiritual Moon-Beings. These spiritual Beings who would otherwise have wandered homeless about the earth, found dwelling places in the mummies. These were the Beings who could be observed, whose speech was still understood in that period of ancient Egyptian development and through whom the first science of nature was imparted. What the pupil of Yoga was able to perceive inwardly, through cultivation of the breathing process—these things were now taught somewhat in the following way. The Initiates would say to their pupils: The human head is involved in a constant process of dying. It is really dying all the time, and every night the organism must make efforts to counteract this dying process in the head. But what the head does during this dying process between birth and death results in the influx of new life into the other organs of the body, so that inasmuch as the forces of these other organs—not their substance, of course, but their forces—are sent on into the future, during the period between death and a new birth they become head, the head of the next earthly incarnation. But the Initiates impressed upon their pupils the necessity of understanding what is contained in the actual forms of the organs, and it was for this reason that such scrupulous care was given to the preservation of the mummies. By way of the forms in the mummy, the Moon-Spirits were able to reveal the secrets of the organs, their connection with the human head, and how they bear within them those forces of germination by means of which they become head in the next earthly life. Such was the teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt to their pupils, by means of the mummy.

At a certain period, then, it became necessary to teach in an external way what had once been inner teaching in the days when the Yoga philosophy and religion were at their prime. This, indeed, was the great transition that took place from the culture of ancient India and ancient Persia to that of Egypt: what had once been a teaching by inner means was now taught by external means.

The teaching given by the Initiates of Egypt was brought to a majestic climax when they said to their pupils: And now steep yourselves in the plastic quality of the forms lying before you in the mummy. Here you have very faint indications of that which during the life of man on earth is perpetually passing away, namely, the inner components of the human head. But you have before you in great clarity and precision the forms of the rest of the human organism. Contemplation of the mummy will not help you to study the life-processes, or the perceptive processes; but the plastic quality of the forms of the inner organs of the human body, the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, the stomach, and so forth—all this you can study from the mummy. Try to picture the following. During life, the breath is drawn back into the head and then streams out into the organism. In this breath there is a plastic force, which has the tendency to shape the breath into the form of a mummy. The breath, in its drive from the head towards the body, has the tendency towards mummy-formation. And it is only because the body works against this impulse and brings about out-breathing, that this “nascent” mummy is transformed back again. Thus what is seen streaming from the human head into the other part of the organism, taking shape there as the breath passes onwards, is a form like the mummy, a form that takes shape rapidly. In that the breath is breathed out, it dissolves again. All that remains of it is a form of appearance of the etheric body, which is almost always there, notably during waking life. Observation of the etheric body gives the feeling that from the head outwards the etheric body is trying all the time to form itself into a mummy and is in turn dissolved into a kind of resemblance with the human physical organisation. The inner, plastic force of the human etheric body tends to make it assume the form of a mummy, and then to dissolve this form again so that finally the etheric body resembles the physical organism. This was taught as an apotheosis of all the manifold teachings given by the Initiates of ancient Egypt to their pupils with the help of those super-sensible, elementary Beings whom we may call the Moon-Spirits.

The Egyptian Initiates directed the attention of their pupils especially to the past, to the inner experiences of human beings in very ancient times. This, in truth, was the essence of Egyptian culture, which for us today is so fraught with riddles. Sphinxes, pyramids, mummies—they are all enigmas. But these enigmas are unveiled to spiritual science when we know that the sphinxes represent forms that were actually visible to men in the time of Atlantis, and when we remember that the teachings concerning the mummy given by the Egyptian Initiates to their pupils were an echo of the Yoga teaching imparted, for example, by Initiates of ancient India to their pupils. It was not difficult for an Initiate of ancient India to give such teaching because in those remote times the slightest impetus would enable a man to perceive within a human physical organism this momentary birth of the ether-mummy and its retransformation.

It is deeply interesting to contemplate how these mysteries were unveiled in the Egyptian centres of instruction where such intimate connections were thus established with death. Through the methods adopted in Egypt, death preserved forms, which, during life, are hidden from observation but of which there must be knowledge if the being of man is to be truly understood.

The mummies were displayed before the eyes of the ancient Egyptians and I have told you that there is something analogous for human beings who have lived since the Mystery of Golgotha. For them, cults and rites in many forms have been preserved. I told you that at the time when men needed such forms, they began to “mummify” ancient cults and rites. In its first, faint beginnings, this custom arose in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., but it comes more and more to the fore with the passage of time. In occult and other Brotherhoods, rituals are studied and enacted, but there is never anything essentially new in them. Ancient forms, ancient rituals, are preserved. Indeed those whose task it is to preserve these rites and ceremonies, who have to lead them, lay great stress upon the fact that the ceremonies and customs date back to very ancient times, that they have been preserved from remote antiquity. But we never find that the ceremonies or the effects produced by the rituals are really understood.

To “understand” such rites and ceremonies—what does this really mean? What does it mean to understand the nature of acts performed in rites and ceremonies? To answer this question we must go back to the times, say, of ancient India and ancient Persia and try to discover how ceremonies and rites were understood then. A man today is aware of a difference when, let us say, he touches a rose made of papier-mâché and when he touches a real rose. He is also aware of the difference, through his sense of smell, when he is near a rose. He is aware of the difference and says that the papier-mâché rose is a dead object whereas the rose picked from the rosebush is alive. In very early times, dating back to four or five thousand years before Christ, a man with true perception of the world seeing someone working with a machine or tool, say for cutting wood, would have called this a “dead” process; for even with the eye of spirit he would have seen not the physical substance but a kind of dead, shadow-image. But in ritualistic and ceremonial enactments he saw Spiritual Beings from the surrounding elementary world approaching and pervading all the forms and actions of the rite. He beheld spiritual reality in these enactments.

If you were to ask people today whether they have ever seen Spiritual Beings weaving and streaming through rituals and ceremonies in Churches or Lodges, you would find that this is never the case. In these ritualistic enactments today there is no more spiritual life than there was life in the Egyptian mummy of the human being who had been mummified. But inasmuch as these rituals were preserved, as the form of the human body was preserved in the Egyptian mummy, inasmuch as human enactments and rites were preserved by tradition—“mummified”, as it were—something was preserved that can and will be wakened into life when men have discovered how to bring into all their deeds the power that streams from the Mystery of Golgotha.

Men today have very little understanding of how to draw into their actions the power of the Mystery of Golgotha. Through the centuries, however, there were always individuals here and there who had some conception—even if not so clearly as in earlier times—of how the spiritual impulse that can live in the human being may be guided into all his actions, and of how the human being himself can be an intermediary between the Spirit and what comes to pass through him in the outer world. The right impulse must, of course, be at work before this can happen. Think of a man like Paracelsus. He was one of those isolated individuals who had an inkling, at least, that the spiritual must so live among men that it streams out from them into their actions. There is a great difference between man's mode of life today and what Paracelsus, for example, desired. Today people make a sharp distinction between certain domains of their life. For instance, they practise medicine, but according to materialistic conceptions. A doctor today may, of course, also be a religious man or woman in the modern sense; but the two domains are separated. Medicine is practised on the basis of materialistic principles and people seek what their souls need in an entirely separate sphere of religion—into which, as a result, a highly egoistical element finds its way. People only turn to religion when they want to know what is to become of them after death or how what they do tallies with what a God would be able to make of their deeds. Paracelsus had a very different attitude. He wanted to be a man of piety and religion as a doctor. He wanted each medical, each therapeutic deed also to be a religious deed. He regarded what he did with a sick man as the union of an external, human deed with a religious act. To Paracelsus, healing was still a sacred enactment and it was his constant ideal to make it so. His contemporaries had little understanding of this and today there is even less. It makes one's heart ache to hear the tradition which still persists in Salzburg, that Paracelsus was a drunkard and that returning to his house late one night in a state of intoxication, he met his death by falling over a rock and breaking his skull. If the real truth were told, one would, of course, have to point to the work of his enemies. Paracelsus' drunkenness was less responsible for his broken skull than were people who then proceeded to spread the fairy-tale about his habits.

Customs today are less violent in such matters—less violent but not so very different. A time will come when a deeper conception of the cult and of all ceremonial enactments will take root in men. And then the true teachers will be able to reveal to their pupils something similar to what was revealed by the Initiates of Egypt with the help of the mummy. The Egyptian Initiate was able to make his pupils realise that they could behold in the mummy something, which in still earlier times, became actual experience through transformation of the breathing process into a sensory process. And so, when the cult can once again be truly understood, those who possess this understanding will be able to make clear to their pupils that enactments in sacred cults and rites have an immeasurably greater significance for the cosmos than deeds performed by men in the external world with mechanical tools or the like. Tools, as you know, also play a part in cult and ritual. When true ceremonial, true ritualistic enactments are again established in place of what is customary today, Initiates will be able to say to their pupils: An enactment in cult or rite is a call to the spiritual Powers of the universe who through the deeds of men should be able to unite themselves with the earth. Such an enactment, performed according to a true rite, is different from an act of a purely technical nature. An act that is purely technical or mechanical, however, does bring something about, for with machines many things can be made and used in life. Clothes, for instance, are made with a sewing machine. The clothes are worn and eventually wear out. This is what happens to the products of machines. But it is not so with sacred enactments. I told you in the last lecture that provided a man has the requisite faculty and the true conception of sacred enactments, he can come into contact with spiritual Beings who are as closely connected with the earth as the Spirits who spoke to the Egyptians out of the mummies were connected with the moon. Through machines, through external technical devices, man comes into contact with the physical nature-forces of the earth. Through the sacred enactments of cult and ritual he comes into contact with the elementary-spiritual Powers of the earth, with those Powers who point the way to the future.

And so in times to come an Initiate will be able to say to his pupils: When you participate truly in a sacred enactment of cult or ritual, you are engaged in something of which the materialist says that it has no reality, or, if he is a cynic, he will say that it is all child's play. Nevertheless the enactments of a true rite contain spiritual power. The elementary spiritual Beings, who are evoked when such a rite is enacted, have need of the rite because from it they draw nourishment and forces of growth.

A time will come when the earth will no longer exist. Everything that is around our physical senses, everything that is present in the kingdoms of minerals, plants, animals, in air and clouds, even the radiance of the stars ... all this will pass away and, as I have described in An Outline Of Occult Science, the earth will prepare to pass over to the Jupiter embodiment. This future Jupiter planet will be a subsequent incarnation of the earth just as our own future earthly life will be a reincarnation of our present existence, save that the periods of time involved are immeasurably longer. Of the substance present today in minerals, plants, animals, in wind and clouds, not a single particle will remain in that distant future. The processes set up by machines and technical devices will have performed their task—and they too will have become things of the past. But within what was once earth, within what was once external, technical civilisation, something different will have been prepared.

Think of the earth and within it the different processes of nature and plant life. Machines are there, with all that they bring about on the earth; animals and the physical bodies of men move over the earth ... All this will pass away. But on this earth, in future time, sacred rites will be enacted out of a true understanding of the spiritual world. Through these rites and sacred enactments, elementary spiritual Beings are called down. As I have said, a time will come when the material substance in minerals, plants, animals, clouds, the forces working in wind and weather and also, of course, all the accoutrements used in rites and ceremonies, will pass away, will be dissipated in the universe. But the spiritual Beings who have been called down into the sphere of the rites and sacred enactments—these will remain when the earth approaches its end. They will remain, in a state of more perfect development, within the earth, just as in autumn the seed of next year's plant is concealed within the present plant; just as the dry, withered leaves fall away from the plant, so the substance in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms will disintegrate in the universe, but the perfected elementary Beings will be there, living on into the Jupiter existence as a seed of the future.

And so once again an Initiate will be able to bring the teaching given to his pupils to a grand climax. He will be able to say: “Just as the Initiate of Egypt, standing before the mummy, was able to explain to his pupils all the mysteries of the human head and therewith all the mysteries of the earth and the cosmos around the earth, I am able to explain to you how the earth will arise from its destruction—rise again through the spiritual Beings who develop onwards to the future in cults and rites enacted with true understanding.”

In the evolution of our epoch this conception has a glorious beginning. It can be pictured as follows. Human beings satisfied their hunger and thirst by what lay on the tables before them. But there came the Being Who dwelt in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, Who gathered His closest disciples around Him and said: “Here is bread, here is wine. Do not now look upon what your outer eyes see in bread and wine, upon what your tongue can taste and your physical body digest. All that is earthly bears within it the seeds of decay. But if you have within you the true impulse you can permeate earthly substance with the Spirit of the earth. For then it is no longer bread, nor is it wine, but something that can live in the inmost depths of man himself, something that lives and has its being in his body and that he can spiritualise and that will be carried over into the future when everything on the earth has passed away.” Christ entered into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and in his whole being, Jesus of Nazareth was spiritualised. He could point to bread and wine, saying: “This is not the true form of bread and wine. Their true form is what indwells the human being—this is My Body, this is My Blood.” And the words receive their full significance from those other words of Christ: “Heaven and earth will pass away but My Words will not pass away.”

I have said many times: The kingdom of plants, of animals, of minerals, all that lives in wind and storm, in clouds—even the radiance of the stars—will be dispersed and scattered; not one particle will remain. But what man prepares spiritually—this will remain.

In earlier times of the evolution of humanity it was known that words contain Spirit. The modern view is that when we speak, movement is brought into the air through the speech-organs and these movements then beat upon the drum of the ear [(Trommelfell, drum of the ear, so-called because the modern view is that the movements of the air, “drum” or beat upon the membrane.)], the nerves begin to move, and there the process ends. In earlier times it was known that words enshrine the movements of elementary Spirits, that forces in words spoken in sacred ritual, for example, stream into the external action and that the Spirit living in man unites with this external enactment. Thereby the elementary Spirits who are developing onwards to the future enter, in actual presence, into the sphere of the sacred rite. Men who understand these things can realise what the “word” signified in olden times. Today it means little more than “noise and smoke”, and Goethe was justified when he used the expression Schall und Rauch. But in days of yore the “word” signified the indwelling Spirit, not the abstract, conceptual properties, but the spiritual reality inherent in the word. In the word there is much that is spiritual. Christ indicates that the life with which man imbues the word is contained in what comes to pass in sacred enactments of rite and cult, namely, a process whereby elementary Spirits are borne on-wards to the fulfilment of their existence, and He said:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My Words will not pass away.”

And now think of the beginning of St. John's Gospel: “In the Beginning was the Logos, the Word ...” The Logos is the Christ. What, then, are the Bread and the Wine in the service of Holy Communion? The Bread and the Wine are the Body and Blood of the Logos. And as we have heard, the Logos relinquishes what is transient, seizes what is in the becoming, prepares what is to come.

Thus we can point to the Mystery of Golgotha as a glorious climax, just as teaching in days of old culminated in the revelation of the ether-body assuming the shape of a mummy and then immediately changing into a form resembling that of the human physical body. But I have emphasised over and over again that man will have to re-establish his connection with the spiritual world if the earth is to attain its goal. Just as the predecessors of the Egyptians, perceiving the breath and its expansion in the organism, inwardly experienced a nascent mummy-formation and its immediate re-transformation, so, in the future, men must perceive in the out-breathing process, in the passing of the out-breathed air into cosmic space, the communication to cosmic space of what takes shape within the human organism, the spiritualisation of the environment through the human being himself. The ancient Egyptians said: The mummy represents a form which the human being strives inwardly and spiritually to assume with every indrawn breath. Initiates of the future will say: Every out-breathing is a manifestation of man's striving to become a cosmos, a whole world. Contemplation of how the inbreathed air surges down from the head into the organism—this brings understanding of the human being. Contemplation of how the indrawn air is breathed out again by man into the world—this can bring understanding of the cosmos. Understanding of the cosmos will be born when Imaginative Knowledge is able to span the world; with Imaginative Knowledge we can also recognise what the human being himself sends forth into the external world with his out-breathing. It is what he is preparing for the future.

Thus what man does in the course of history and what comes to pass in the cosmos are interwoven, intermingled. Without realisation of this there can be no understanding of the world, for history must be studied in its cosmic aspect and historical happenings must reveal to us the workings of the cosmos.

We have been hearing in recent lectures how fundamental impulses in the development of history are expressed in such phenomena as the strange custom in Egyptian culture of mummifying the human body and in the modern age the preservation of ancient cults—which is also a kind of “mummification”, in this latter case of ceremonies and rites.

Thinking again of Egyptian culture as expressed outwardly in the phenomenon of mummification, we will combine the picture thus outlined with a theme of which I have spoken recently and have frequently expounded here, namely, the theme of ordinary human thinking, how this thought-activity is exercised by man, how he gradually unfolds the faculty of thinking during childhood, becomes to a certain degree accomplished in it during his youth and then puts it into operation until his death. This thinking, this intellectual activity, is a kind of inner corpse of the soul. Thinking, as exercised by the human being in earthly life, is viewed in the right light only when it is compared, as far as its relation to the true being of man is concerned, with the corpse left behind at death.

The principle, which makes man truly man, departs at death, and something remains over in the corpse, which can only have this particular form because a living human being has left it behind him. Nobody could be so foolish as to believe that the human corpse, with its characteristic form, could have been produced by any play of nature, by any combination of nature-forces. A corpse is quite obviously a remainder, a residue. Something must have preceded it, namely, the living human being. Outer nature has, it is true, the power to destroy the form of the human corpse but not the power to produce it. This human form is produced by the higher members of man's being—but they pass away at death.

Just as we realise that a corpse derives from a living human being, so the true conception of thinking, of human thought, is that it cannot, of itself, have become what it is in earthly life, but that it is a kind of corpse in the soul—the corpse of what it was before the human being came down from worlds of soul-and-spirit into physical existence on the earth. In pre-earthly existence the soul was alive in the truest sense, but something died at birth, and the corpse, which remains from this death in the life of soul, is our human thinking. Those who have known best what it means to live in the world of thought have, moreover, felt the deathlike character of abstract thinking. I need only remind you of the moving passage with which Nietzsche begins his description of philosophy in the era of Greek tragedy. He describes how Greek thought, as exemplified by pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides or Heraclitus, rises to abstract notions of being and becoming. Here, he says, one feels the onset of an icy coldness. And it is so indeed.

Think of men of the ancient East and how they tried to comprehend outer nature in living, inwardly mobile pictures, dreamlike though these pictures were. In comparison with this inwardly mobile, live thinking, which quickened the whole being of man and blossomed forth in the Vedanta philosophy, the abstract thinking of later times is veritably a corpse. Nietzsche was aware of this when he felt an urge to write about those pre-Socratic philosophers who, for the first time in the evolution of humanity, soared into the realm of abstract thoughts.

Study the sages of the East who preceded the Greek philosophers and you will find in them no trace of any doubt that the human being lived in worlds of soul-and-spirit before descending to the earth. It is simply not possible to experience thinking as a living reality and not believe in the pre-earthly existence of man. To experience living thinking is just like knowing a living human being on earth. Those who no longer experienced living thinking—and this applies to Greek philosophers even before the days of Socrates—such men may, like Aristotle, have doubts about the fact that the human being does not come into existence for the first time at birth. And so a distinction must be made between the once inwardly mobile and living thinking of the East wherewith it was known that man comes down from spiritual worlds into earth-existence, and the thinking that is a corpse, bringing knowledge only of what is accessible to man between birth and death.

Try to put yourselves in the position of an Egyptian sage, living, let us say, about 2000 B.C.. He would have said: Once upon a time, over in the East, men experienced living thinking. But the Egyptian sage was in a strange situation; his life of soul was not like ours today; experience of living thinking had faded away, was no longer within his grasp, and abstract thinking had not yet begun. A substitute was created by the embalming of mummies whereby, in the way I have described, a picture, a concept of the human form was made possible. Men trained themselves to unfold a picture of the dead human form in the mummy and began, for the first time, to develop abstract, dead thinking. It was from the human corpse that dead thinking first came into existence.

The counterpart of this in modern times is that in occult societies here and there, rituals, cults and ceremonial enactments once filled with living reality have been preserved as dead traditions. Think only of rituals that you may have read, perhaps those of the Freemasons. You will find that there are ceremonies of the First Degree, the Second Degree, the Third Degree, and so forth. All of them are learnt, written or enacted in an external way. Once upon a time, however, these cults were charged with life as real as the life-principle working in the plants. Today, the ceremonies and rites are dead forms. Even the Mystery of Golgotha was only able to evoke in certain priestly natures here and there, those inner, living experiences which sometimes arose in connection with rites of the Christian Churches after the time of Christ. But up to now mankind has not been able to infuse real life into ceremonies and rites—and indeed something else is necessary here.

All present-day thinking is directed essentially to the dead world. In our time there is simply no understanding of the nature of the living thinking which once existed. The intellectualistic thinking current since the middle of the fifteenth century of our era is, in very truth, a corpse and that is why it is applied only to what is dead in nature, to the mineral kingdom. People prefer to study plants, animals and even the human being, merely from the aspect of mineral, physical, chemical forces, because they only want to use this dead thinking, this corpse of thoughts indwelling the purely intellectualistic man.

In the present series of lectures I have mentioned the name of Goethe. Goethe was, as you know, a member of the community of Freemasons and was acquainted with its rites. But he experienced these rites in a way of which only he was capable. For him, real life flowed out of the rites which, for others, were merely forms preserved by tradition. He was able to make actual connection with that spiritual reality of being, which flowed in the way described from pre-earthly into earthly existence and which, as I said, always rejuvenated him. For Goethe underwent actual rejuvenation more than once in his life. It was from this that there came to him the idea of metamorphosis¹—one of the most significant thoughts in the whole of modern spiritual life and the importance of which is still not recognised.

What had Goethe actually achieved when he evolved the idea of metamorphosis? He had re-kindled an inwardly living thinking, which is capable of penetrating into the cosmos. Goethe rebelled against the botany of Linnaeus in which the plants are arranged in juxtaposition, each of them placed in a definite category and a system made out of it all. Goethe could not accept this; he did not want these dead concepts. He wanted a living kind of thinking, and he achieved it in the following way. First of all he looked at the plant itself and the thought came to him that down below the plant develops crude, unformed leaves, then, higher up, leaves which have more developed forms but are transformations, metamorphoses of those below; then come the flower-petals with their different colour, then the stamens and the pistil in the middle—all being transformations of the one fundamental form of the leaf itself. Goethe did not say: Here is a leaf of one plant and here a leaf of another, different plant.² He did not look at the plant in this way, but said: The fact that one leaf has a particular shape and another leaf a different shape, is a mere externality. Viewed inwardly, the matter is as follows. The leaf itself has an inner power of transformation, and it is just as possible for it to appear outwardly in one shape as in another. In reality there are not two leaves, but one leaf, in two different forms of manifestation. A plant has the green leaf below and the petal above. Intellectualistic pedants say: “The leaf and the petal are two quite different things.” Nothing could be more obvious, as far as the pedants are concerned, for the one form is red and the other green. Now if someone wears a green shirt and a red jacket—here there is a real difference. As regards clothing, at any rate in the modern age, philistinism prevails and is, moreover, in its right place. In that domain one cannot help being a philistine. But Goethe realised that the plant cannot be comprised within such theories. He said to himself: The red petal is the same, fundamentally, as the green leaf; they are not two separate and distinct phenomena. There is only one leaf, manifesting in different formations. The same force works, sometimes down below and sometimes higher up. Down below it works in such a way that the forces are, in the main, being drawn out of the earth. Here the plant is drawing forces from the earth, sucking them upwards, and the leaf, growing under the influence of the earth-forces, becomes green. The plant continues to grow; higher up the sun's rays are stronger than they are below, and the sun has the mastery. Thus the same impulse reaches into the sphere of the sunlight and produces the red petals.

Goethe might have spoken somewhat as follows. Suppose a man who has nothing to eat sees another who has quantities of food and gets envious, literally pale with envy. Another time someone gives him a blow and then he reddens. According to the principle that speaks of two distinct and different leaves, it might be argued: Here are two men—two, because one is pale and the other is red. Just as little as there are two men, one who is red on account of a blow and the other who is pale because of envy—as little are there two leaves. There is one leaf; at one place it has a particular form, at another place a different form. Goethe did not regard this as particularly wonderful for, after all, a man can run from one place to another and the men you will see in different places are certainly not two different persons. Briefly, Goethe realised that this observation of things in strict juxtaposition is not truth but illusion, that there is only one leaf—green at one place, red at another; and he applied to the different plants the same principle he applied to the several parts of the single plant. Think of the following. Suppose some plant lives in favourable conditions. Out of the seed it forms a root, a stem, leaves on the stem, then petals, stamens and pistil within the stamens. Goethe maintained that the stamens too are only different formations of the leaf. He might also have said: Intellectualists argue that, after all, the red petals are wide and the stamen as thin as a thread, except perhaps for the anther at the top. In spite of this, Goethe maintained that the wide flower petal and the slender stamen are only different formations of one and the same fundamental leaf. He might have asked: Have you not noticed some person who at one time in his life was as thin as a reed and afterwards became very stout? There were certainly not two different people. Petals and stamens are basically one, and the fact that they are situated at two different places on the plant is immaterial. No man can run swiftly enough to be in two places at once, although the story goes that a clever banker in Berlin when he was being pestered on all sides, once exclaimed: “Do you think I am a bird which can be in two places at once?” ... A human being cannot be in two places simultaneously. The point here is that Goethe was seeking everywhere for manifestations of the principle of metamorphosis, of the unity within multiplicity, of the unity within the manifold. And thereby he imbued the concept with life.

If you grasp what I have now said, my dear friends, you will grasp the idea of Spirit. I have said that the whole plant is really a leaf manifesting in different formations. This cannot be pictured in the physical sense; something must be grasped spiritually—something that transforms itself in every conceivable way. It is spirit that is living in the plant kingdom. Now we can go further. We can take a plant that is normal and healthy because its seed has been properly placed in the earth, it has absorbed the gentle sun of spring, then the full summer sun and has been able to develop its seeds under the weakening sun of autumn. But suppose a plant exists in such conditions of nature that it has no time to develop a root, an adequate stem, leaves or petals, but is obliged to unfold very rapidly—so rapidly indeed that everything about it lacks definition. Such a plant becomes a mushroom, a fungus.

There you have two extremes: a plant that has time to differentiate into all its detailed parts, to develop roots, stem, leaves, flowers, fruit; and a plant placed in such conditions of nature that it has no time to form a root, with the result that everything about it remains indication only; it cannot develop stem and leaves, and is obliged to unfold rapidly and without definition the principle underlying the formation of petals, fruit and seed. Such a plant only just manages to take its place in the earth and unfolds with amazing rapidity what other plants unfold slowly. Think, for example, of the corn poppy. After slowly putting out its green leaves it can proceed to unfold its petals, then the stamens, then the jaunty pistil in the centre. But a mushroom must do all this very rapidly; there is no time for differentiation, no time for exposure to the sun, which would bring the beautiful colours, because the sun is absent during its brief period of development. In the mushroom we have a flower without definition; development has taken place far too rapidly. Here, too, there is fundamental unity. Two quite different plants are basically the same.

But before all this can be really thought through, one must change a little, inwardly. An intellectualist—Goethe might have said, a “rigid philistine”—looks at a poppy with its sappy, red flower and well-developed pistil in the centre. What he really ought to do is at the same time to look at a mushroom and keep the concept he has formed of the poppy so mobile and flexible that he is able to see within the poppy itself, in tendency at least, some kind of mushroom or toadstool. But that, of course, is asking too much of a pedant. You will have to place before him the actual mushroom so that his intellect may drag itself away from the poppy without inner exertion, without being kindled to life—for all he need do is to incline his head very slightly. Then he will be able to visualize the one object beside the other separately, and all is well!

Such is the difference between dead thinking and the inwardly alert, live thinking unfolded by Goethe in connection with the principle of metamorphosis. He enriched the world of thought by a glorious discovery. For this reason, in the Introductions to Goethe's works on Natural Science which I wrote in the eighties of last century, you will find the sentence: Goethe is both the Galileo and the Copernicus of the science of organic nature, and what Galileo and Copernicus achieved in connection with dead, outer nature, namely, clarification of the concept of nature to enable it to embrace both the astronomical and the physical aspects, Goethe achieved for the science of organic nature with his living concept of metamorphosis. Such was his supreme discovery.

This concept of metamorphosis can, if desired, be applied to the whole of nature. When a picture of the plant-form came to Goethe out of this concept of metamorphosis, it immediately occurred to him that the principle must also be applicable to the animal. But this is a more difficult matter. Goethe was able to conceive of one leaf proceeding from another; but he found it much more difficult to picture the form of one of the spinal vertebrae, for instance, being metamorphosed, transformed, into a bone of the head—which would have meant the application of the principle of metamorphosis to the animal and also to the human being. Nevertheless Goethe was partially successful in this too, as I have often told you. In the year 1790, while he was walking through a graveyard in Venice, he was lucky enough to come across a sheep's skull, the bones of which had fallen apart in a way very favourable for observation. As he examined these animal bones the thought dawned upon him that they looked like spinal vertebrae, although greatly transformed. And then he conceived the idea that the bones, at least, can also be pictured as representing one, basic bone-creating impulse, which merely manifests in different forms.

With respect to the human being, however, Goethe did not get very far because he did not succeed in passing on from his idea of metamorphosis to real Imagination. When real Imagination advances to Inspiration and Intuition, the principle of uniformity is revealed still more strikingly. And I have already indicated how this uniformity is revealed in the being of man when the concept of metamorphosis is truly understood. When Goethe contemplated the dicotyledons and visualised the flowers of such plants in simpler and more and indefinite forms, he could finally see them as a mushroom or fungus. And from this same point of view, when we study the human head, we can conceive of it as a metamorphosis of the rest of the skeleton.

Try to look at one of the lower jaws in a human skeleton with the eye of an artist. You will hardly be able to do otherwise, than compare it with the bones of the arm and of the leg. Think of the leg bones and arm bones transformed and then, in the lower jaws, you have two “legs”, except that here they have stultified. The head is a lazybones that never walks, but is always sitting. The head “sits” there on its two stultified legs. Imagine a man in the uncomfortable position of sitting with his legs bound together by some kind of cord, and you have practically a replica of the formation of the jaws. Look at all this with the eye of an artist and you can easily imagine the legs becoming as immobile as the lower jawbones—and so on.

But the truth of the matter is realised for the first time when the human head is conceived as a transformation of the rest of the body. I have told you that the head of our present earth-life is the transformed body (the body apart from the head) of our previous earth-life. The head, or rather the forces of the head, as they then were, have passed away. In some cases indeed they actually pass away during life! The head—I am speaking, of course, of forces, not substances—the forces of the head are not preserved; the forces now embodied in your head were the forces which were embodied in the other parts of your body in your previous life. In that life, again, the forces of the head were those of the body of the preceding life; and the body that is now yours will be transformed, metamorphosed, into the head of the future earth-life. For this reason the head develops first. Think of the embryo in the body of the mother. The head develops first and the rest of the organism, being a new formation, affixes itself to the head. The head derives from the previous earth-life; it is the transformed body, a form that has been carried across the whole span of existence between death and a new birth; it then becomes the head-structure and attaches to itself the other members. Accepting the fact of repeated earthly lives, we can thus see the human being as a metamorphosis recently perfected. The idea of plant-metamorphosis discovered by Goethe at the beginning of the eighties of the eighteenth century leads on to the living concept of development through the whole animal kingdom up to the human being, and contemplation here leads on to the idea of repeated earthly lives.

Goethe's participation in the ceremonial enactments of the cult to which he belonged was responsible for this inner quickening in his life of thought. Although it was not fully clear to his consciousness, he nevertheless had an inkling of how the human being, still living entirely as a soul in pre-earthly life, carries over forces which have remained from the bodily structure of the previous earth-life and which, having entered into the present life, develop within the protective sheaths of the mother's body into the head structure.

Goethe did not know this consciously but he had an inkling of it and applied it, in the first place, to the simplest phenomena of plant life. Because the time was not ripe, he could not extend the principle to the point that is possible today, namely to the point where the metamorphosis of the human being from one earth-life over to the next can be understood. As a rule it is said, with a suggestion of compassion, that Goethe evolved this idea of metamorphosis because, owing to his artistic nature, something had gone wrong with him. Pedants and philistines speak like this out of compassion. But those who are neither pedants nor philistines will realise with joy that Goethe knew how to add the element of art to science and precisely because of this was able to make his concepts mobile. Pedants insist, however, that nature cannot be grasped by this kind of thinking; strictly logical concepts are necessary, they say, for the understanding of nature. Yes, but what if nature herself is an artist ... presuming this, the whole of natural science which excludes art and bases itself only upon the concepts of logical deduction might find itself in a position similar to one of which I once heard when I was talking to an artist in Munich. He had been a contemporary of Carriere, the well-known writer on Aesthetics. We began, by chance, to speak about Carriere and this man said: “Yes, when we were young, we artists used not to attend Carriere's lectures; if we did go once, we never went again; we called him ‘the aesthetic rapture-monger’.” Now just as it might be the fate of a writer on Aesthetics to be called a “rapture-monger” by artists, so, if nature herself were to speak about her secrets she might call the strictly logical investigator ... well, not a rapture-monger, but a misery-monger perhaps, for nature creates as an artist. One cannot order nature to let herself be comprehended according to the laws of strict logic. Nature must be comprehended as she actually is.

Such, then, is the course of historical evolution. Once upon a time, in the ancient East, concepts and thoughts were full of life. I have described how, to begin with, these living concepts became actual perception through a metamorphosis of the breathing process. But human beings were obliged to work their way through to dead, abstract concepts. The Egyptians could not reach this stage but forced themselves in the direction of dead concepts through contemplating the human being himself in the state of death, in the mummy. We, in our day, have to awaken concepts to new life. This cannot happen by the mere elaboration of ancient, occult traditions, but by growing into, and moreover elaborating, the living concept which Goethe was the first to evolve in the form of the idea of metamorphosis. Those who are masters of the living concept, in other words, those who are able to grasp the Spiritual in their life of soul—they are able, out of the Spirit, to bring a new and living impulse into the external actions of men. This will lead to something of which I have often spoken to Anthroposophists, namely, that men will no longer stand in the laboratory or at the operating table with the indifference begotten by materialism, but will feel the secrets revealed by nature to listening ears as deeds of the Spirit which pervades and is active in her. Then the laboratory table will become an altar. Forces leading to progress and ascent will not be able to work in the evolution of humanity until true reverence and piety enter into science, nor until religion ceases to be a mere bolster for human egoism and to be regarded as a realm entirely distinct from science. Science must learn, like the pupils of the ancient Mysteries, to have reverence for what is being investigated. I have spoken of this in the book Christianity as Mystical Fact. All research must be regarded as a form of intercourse with the spiritual world and then, by listening to nature we shall learn from her those secrets, which in very truth promote the further evolution of humanity. And then the process of mummification—which was once a necessary experience for man—will be reversed. The Egyptians embalmed the human corpse, with the result that even now we can witness the almost terrifying spectacle of whole series of mummies being brought by Europeans from Egypt and deposited in museums. Just as human thinking was once rigidified as the outcome of the custom of mummification, so it must now be awakened to life.

The ancient Egyptians took the corpses of men, embalmed them, conserved death. We, in our day, must feel that we have a veritable death of soul within us if our thoughts are purely abstract and intellectualistic. We must feel that these thoughts are the mummy of the soul, and learn to understand the truth glimpsed by Paracelsus when he took some substance from the human organism and called this the “mummy”. In the tiny material residue of the human being, he saw the mummy. Paracelsus did not need an embalmed corpse in order to see the mummy, for he regarded the mummy as the sum-total of those forces which could at every moment lead man to death if new life did not quicken him during the night.

Dead thinking holds sway within us; our thinking represents death of soul. In our thinking we bear the mummy of the soul which produces precisely those things that are most prized in modern civilisation. If we have a wider kind of perception, the kind of perception, for example, which enabled Goethe to see metamorphoses, we can go through rooms where mummies are exhibited in museums and then out into the streets and see the same thing there ... it is merely a question of the level from which we are looking, for in the modern age of intellectualism there is little difference—the fact that mummies do not walk as human beings walk in the streets, is only an externality. The mummies in the museums are mummies of bodies; the human beings who walk about the streets in this age of intellectualism are mummies of soul because they are filled with dead thoughts, with thoughts that are incapable of life. Primordial life was rigidified in the mummies of Egypt and this rigidified life of soul must be quickened again for the sake of the future of mankind. We must not continue to study anatomy and physiology in the way that has hitherto been customary. This was permissible among the ancient Egyptians when corpses of the physical human being lay before them. We must not further mummify the corpse of abstract soul-life we bear in our intellectualistic thinking. There is a real tendency today to embalm thinking so that it becomes pedantically logical, without a single spark of fiery life.

Photographs of mummies are as rigid and stiff as the mummy itself. A typical standard work today on some branch of modern knowledge is a photograph, an image of the mummified soul; in this case it is the soul that has been embalmed. And if doubt arises because as well as the intellect which is certainly mummified, human beings have other characteristics, all kinds of bodily and other urges, for instance, so that the picture of the mummy is not very clear ... nevertheless it is there, unmistakably, in standard text books. The embalming process in such writings is very perceptible. This embalming of thought must cease. Instead of the embalming process applied by the Egyptians to the mummies, we need something different, namely, an elixir of life—not as many people think of this today, as a means of perfecting the physical body, but in a form which makes the thoughts alive, which de-mummifies them. When we understand this we have a picture of a profoundly significant impulse in historical evolution. It is a picture of how spiritual culture was once rigidified in the embalming of mummies and of how an elixir of spirit and soul must be poured into all that has been mummified in modern man in the course of his education and development, so that culture may flow onwards to the future. There are two forces: one manifests in the Egyptian custom of embalming and the other in the process of “de-embalming” which modern man must learn to apply.

To learn how to “de-embalm” the dead, rigid forces of the soul—this is a task of the greatest possible significance today. Failure to achieve it produces phenomena of which I gave one example here a short time ago. A man like Spengler realised that rigidified concepts and thoughts will not do, that they lead to the death of culture. In an article in Das Goetheanum I showed what really happened to Spengler. He realised that concepts were dead, but his own were not living! His fate was the same as that of the woman in the Old Testament who looked behind her. Spengler looked at all the dead, mummy-like thoughts of men and he himself became a pillar of salt. Like the woman in the Old Testament, Spengler became a pillar of salt, for his concepts have no more life in them than those of the others.

There is an ancient occult maxim that “wisdom lives in salt” ... but only when the salt is dissolved in human mercury and human phosphorus. Spengler's wisdom is wisdom that has rigidified in salt. But the mercury that brings the salt into movement, making it cosmic, universal—this is lacking; and phosphorus, too, is lacking in a still higher degree. For when one reads Spengler with feeling, above all with artistic feeling, it is impossible for his ideas to kindle inner enthusiasm, inner fire. They all remain salt-like and rigid and even produce a bitter taste. One has to be pervaded inwardly by the mercurial and phosphoric forces if it is a question of “digesting” this lump of salt that calls itself The Decline of the West. But it cannot really be digested ... I will not enlarge upon this particular theme because in polite society one does not mention what is done with indigestible matter! What we have to do is to get away from the salt, away from rigidity, and administer an elixir of life to the mummified soul, to our abstract, systematized concepts. That is the task before us.

• 1. See The Mystery of the Trinity lecture II, by Rudolf Steiner
• 2. Sketches of leaves of various shapes were made on the blackboard.

In the last few lectures we have been studying impulses of far-reaching influence in the historical evolution of humanity—great impulses which are like the tracks of stars across history, illuminating our understanding of particular events. Knowledge of an epoch in history can only be external and superficial if the underlying impulses are not perceived and understood. For these impulses are real powers; they work for the most part, and they work most powerfully, through the unconscious forces of the soul; what transpires outwardly and in full consciousness is only to be perceived in the right light when its origin can be traced back to them.

We will think of an event or, more precisely, a series of events well known to history and of profound significance in the whole life of the West during the Middle Ages—a series of events which, in the outer world, ended in a comparatively short time, after about a century or a century and a half, but the effects of which continued and (to those able to understand the deeper currents in the flow of world-history) have continued to this day. I refer to the Crusades which began in the eleventh century—1096 is the year usually assigned—and as a series of outer events continued until the year usually given as 1170. But we find that even external history mentions all kinds of enterprises and institutions that developed out of the Crusades.

We hear, for example, of the Templar Knights, who first assumed their real significance in outer life during the time of the Crusades. We hear, too, of Orders like that of the Knights of St. John, later the Knights of Malta, and others. Things that were inaugurated by these communities of secular and spiritual life, and thus sprang from the spirit pervading the Crusades, subsequently developed in such a way that, while their provenance in the Crusading spirit was less and less remarked, their effects and influences were clearly present in the life of the West.

Thinking, to begin with, of the external course of history, we know how the Crusades originated. Needs of the soul led adherents of Christianity in the West to believe that pilgrimages to Palestine would imbue their Christian impulses with fresh vigour; but they encountered obstacles, because Palestine and Jerusalem had fallen into the hands of a people of very alien character, namely, the Turks. The maltreatment inflicted by the Turks upon these pilgrims to Jerusalem had provoked an outcry all over Europe and from this was born the mood and spirit which gave rise to the Crusades—a mood which had been present for a long time, although in a different form. We see how men gave vent to this mood by demanding the liberation of the Holy Places of the West, the Holy Places of Christendom, from Turkish oppression.

We hear how Peter of Amiens, himself a victim of this oppression, traveled through Western Europe as a pilgrim and by his fervent preaching won over many hearts to the project of liberating Jerusalem from the Turks.

We know too that, to begin with, this led to no result. But soon a whole number of Knights in the West, gathering together under the leadership of Godfrey of Bouillon in the first real Crusade, succeeded in liberating Jerusalem, for a time at least, from the Turks.

The course of these events requires only brief mention, for the story is familiar enough in history. The really important thing is to study with insight and understanding what was working more or less unconsciously through human souls, in such a way that again and again, and for a long period of time, numbers of men, in most cases with extraordinary devotion and valour, set out upon these journeys to the East, these seven Crusades, under the leadership of the most distinguished princes of the West. The real question is this: Whence came that first fiery enthusiasm which swept across Europe, especially at the beginning of the Crusades? Once the ball had been set rolling—if I may so express it—interests of a different sort crept in, from the fourth Crusade onwards. There were European princes who went to the East with quite other motives, to enhance their power, their prestige and the like. Nevertheless the beginning of the Crusades is an historical event of prime importance. We cannot fail to be impressed by the spectacle of this mighty force prompting a large part of European humanity to an undertaking linked, as they felt, with the most sacred concerns of the heart. Men felt that these sacred concerns were vitally connected with the liberation of Jerusalem from the Turks, in order that Christians in Europe desirous of visiting the Grave of the Redeemer might find their ways cleared.

The dry, prosaic accounts of the historical facts to be read in books do not, as a rule, convey any real impression of the fire of enthusiasm that flamed up in Europe when that noble company of knights set out on the first Crusade, nor of the re-kindling of this enthusiasm by the ardour of men like Bernard of Clairvaux and others. There is an awe-inspiring grandeur about the birth of the Crusades, and we cannot help asking ourselves: What impulses were working in the hearts and souls of Europeans at that time—what were the impulses out of which sprang the spirit of the Crusades?

These impulses can only be rightly understood if we trace their development back through the centuries. A pivotal point in history and one which throws a flood of light upon subsequent happenings of incisive importance in Europe, is the reign of Pope Nicholas I, approximately in the middle of the ninth century, between the years 858 and 867. Before his inner eye, Nicholas I perceived three streams of spiritual life—three streams confronting him like great question marks (if I may use the term) of civilisation.

He saw the one stream moving as it were in spiritual heights, across from Asia into Europe. In this stream certain conceptions innate in oriental religion are making their way, in a much modified and changed form, across Southern Europe and Northern Africa, to Spain, France, the British Isles and especially to Ireland. In view of what will presently be said, I will call this the first stream. Springing from the Arabian regions of Asia, it flows across Greece and Italy but also across Africa into Spain and then upwards through the West. But its influence also rays out, in different forms, towards other parts of Europe.

Little is said of this stream in the tale told to us as history. We will speak today only of two characteristic features of this stream—which was immeasurably deep in content. One of these is what may be called the esoteric conception of the Mystery of Golgotha. I have often spoken to you of the conception of the Mystery of Golgotha held by those in whom vestiges of the ancient, pre-Christian Initiation-knowledge survived. There is an indication of this in the Bible itself—in the coming of the three Magi or Kings from the East. With their knowledge of the secrets of the stars they foresee the approaching Christ Event and set out in search of it. Pre-eminently, therefore, the three Magi are examples of men concerned less with the earthly personality of Jesus of Nazareth than with the all-important fact that a Spiritual Being had descended from worlds of spirit-and-soul, that Christ had come to dwell in the body of Jesus of Nazareth and would impart a mighty impulse to the further evolution of the earth. These men viewed the Event of Golgotha from a wholly super-sensible standpoint. Vision of the super-sensible truth was possible to men in whom the ancient principles of Initiation had been kept alive, for comprehension of this super-sensible Event, unintelligible in the natural and historical life of the earth, could be achieved with the help of this ancient Initiation-knowledge.

But it became more and more difficult to keep alive these ancient principles of Initiation and therefore more and more impossible to find appropriate language in which to convey how Christ had come down from super-sensible worlds, had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and how His Power continues to work through all the subsequent evolution of the earth. Men simply had no means of so shaping their concepts and ideas that they could find words to convey what had actually come to pass through Christ and through the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so in order to clothe this Mystery in words, men were forced more and more to pictorial forms of presentation. One such is the story of the Holy Grail, of the precious Cup, said, on the one hand, to be the Cup in which Christ Jesus had partaken of the Last Supper with His Apostles, and, on the other, the Cup in which the Roman soldier at the foot of the Cross caught the blood flowing from the Redeemer. This Cup was then carried by Angels ... and here is the touch of the super-sensible, tendered in faltering words, for what the old Initiates could have conveyed in clear concepts could now only be conveyed by pictures ... this Cup was carried by Angels to Mont Salvat in Spain and received there by the noble King Titurel; he built a Temple for the Chalice and there dwelt the Knights of the Holy Grail, keeping watch and ward over the treasure that shields the impulse flowing onwards from the Mystery of Golgotha.

And so we have there a deeply esoteric stream, passing over into a mystery. On the one side we perceive the influence of this deeply esoteric stream in the founding of academies in Asia, where men studied the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, endeavouring to understand the Event of Golgotha with the aid of Aristotelian concepts. Later on, in European civilisation, we see attempts made in such a poem as Parsifal to convey the living content of this esoteric stream in pictures. We see this same living content shimmering through the teachings that arose especially in the Schools of Ireland. We see too how the best elements of Arabian wisdom flowed into this stream but how, at the same time, Arabian thought introduced an alien element, coarsened and corrupted over in Asia by Turkish influence.

Of the character imparted to this first stream by the Arabian influence and by its advance from the East towards the West, we shall speak later, when the other streams have been considered. To indicate the fundamental character of this stream, one would be obliged to say: Those who were connected in any real way with this stream of spiritual life, held that the one and only way of salvation—and an echo of this is heard in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parsifal—lay in rising above the sensible and material into the super-sensible, in having at any rate some vision of the super-sensible worlds, in letting man share in the life of the super-sensible worlds, in bringing home to him that his soul belongs to a stream not immediately to be perceived by senses directed to terrestrial events.

The feeling characterizing this gaze upward into super-sensible, super-earthly regions was that, in order to be a full human being, man must belong to worlds transcending material existence, worlds whose happenings are hidden, as were the deeds of the Knights of the Grail, from the outward eye. The Mystery implicit in this stream was felt to be somehow imperceptible to the eyes of sense.

This, then, was the first stream, barely felt and yet looked at askance in Rome at the time of Pope Nicholas I in the ninth century. The whole tendency in Rome was to regard it as an inimical influence and one to which it would be unwholesome for Western humanity to yield. In the religious and intellectual life of Europe there must be nothing of the esoteric, nor anything even faintly deriving from the esoteric—such was the attitude.

This was the first and assuredly the most awe-inspiring question before Nicholas I, for he also discerned the grandeur of this stream of spiritual life. Although much dimmed since the third or fourth century (when a society had actually been founded in Italy for the extermination of all paths to spiritual knowledge) its radiance still shone, by way of many hidden embrasures, into the hearts of men, revealing itself now here, now there. What broke through in this way into the experience of men, often from mysterious strata underlying the progress of history, was denounced as heresy. The feeling also prevailed that the esotericism still faintly glimmering in this stream could no longer find its way into those concepts which, in the culture of Latin Rome, had departed more and more from the inwardness of Greek thought with its oriental colouring and had adopted the forms of Roman Rhetoric—in other words, had become formal and exoteric.

Yet on the other hand, among individuals and communities denounced as heretical sects, this stream flashed into life with tremendous power.

The second question of world-history before the soul of Nicholas I was this. All the knowledge gathered hitherto by the Catholic Church forced him to the conclusion that the Europeans of the West were incapable of bearing the great spiritual tension that is evoked in the souls of men if they are to scale the heights of spiritual, esoteric understanding.

A great uncertainty weighed upon the soul of Nicholas I. What will happen if too much of this esoteric-spiritual stream makes its way into the souls of the people of Europe?

In the East itself, greater and greater confusion had crept into what had once been the esoteric content of this stream. It was over in far-off Ireland that it maintained its purest form and for some time there were Schools in Ireland where the holy secrets were preserved in great purity.

But—so pondered Nicholas I—this is useless for the people of Europe. Nicholas I was, in reality, only repeating the view previously held by Boniface in a somewhat different form, namely that owing to their intrinsic character the people of Europe were not adapted for the inflow of spiritual life into their souls. And so the strange position arose that in the East the real, esoteric substance died away. Human beings living in the East and also in the East of Europe, in the regions of present-day Russia, could make no contact in their souls with this esoteric substance. But over in the East, purely in the form of feelings, and in so far as these feelings had not been utterly exterminated by the gradual advance of the Turanian peoples—the Turks—over in the East men had a dim feeling that the sublimely esoteric, which is not to be comprehended by the dawning intellect, flows in cult and ritual; but only when the cult has at the same time an actual centre in the outer world, a geographical centre.

And so in the East of Europe, while the esoteric, spiritual reality was forgotten, men turned to cult and ritual, clinging with greatest intensity of feeling to what they held to be the very heart and core of the cult: the Grave of the Redeemer.

Hard by the Grave of the Redeemer in Jerusalem was the place where He had celebrated the Last Supper with His Apostles, that Eucharistic meal that in metamorphosis became the Death on Golgotha, was consummated by this Death and then lived on—in the central rite, but also in the whole ritual—in the Mass.

In their estrangement, because they failed to reach an esoteric understanding of the spiritual reality, men gave their hearts to cult and ritual, and to that with which the cult was outwardly connected: the Grave of the Redeemer and the Holy Places in Jerusalem. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem came to be regarded as crowning all the solemn ceremonies, wherever they were celebrated. For the individual man, the ceremonies and ritual were to receive their crowning triumph when, having poured his very heart into what he had experienced in image in the ceremonies, he himself went forth on the pilgrimage to the Grave of the Redeemer.

Certain schools here and there in Asia were still able to grasp the concepts that, under tremendous stress, had been unfolded by the ancient Egyptians from contemplation of the mummy, of the mummified human corpse, but this knowledge had passed from the ken of the general population. Human understanding was incapable of grasping what is at once the Mystery of Man and of the Divine World.

And so in the days of Pope Nicholas I, the farther one looked to the East, the more clearly did one see this inward, heartfelt veneration of the cult; men clung passionately to the cult and to all the experiences evoked by the sacred acts, regarding as the crowning triumph of these experiences, indeed as the supreme act of worship, the pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre.

Looking over to the East from ninth-century Rome, in the days of Nicholas I, there arose the picture of the one influence—of which Nicholas I and his counselors said: This is not for the peoples of Europe, for the peoples of Middle and Western Europe—for they have too much of the intellect that is now storming into human evolution to be able to cling, with whatsoever fervour of the heart, to the mere contemplation of the ceremonial acts and to the actual pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre. In the people of Europe there is too much of the dawning intellect to enable them in this way to be fully Man. It was perceived that although this was possible in the East, it was not to be expected of the peoples of Middle Europe and the West.

Meanwhile the first great question still remained. Terrible danger seemed imminent if Europe were swept by the stream charged with such deep esotericism, with so much that can be fully grasped only by a spiritualised thinking.

Let me put it like this. Looking from the Rome of Pope Nicholas I towards the West, danger loomed. Looking towards the East, again danger. The stream outspread in the East and making its way far into Europe was seen, in reality, as a series of streams, as the stream of the esoteric cult in contrast to the other (Western) stream of esoteric life. Middle Europe must not, dare not be seized by either stream ... this, or something like it, was what was being said at the Papal Court of Nicholas I. What, then, must be done? The great treasure perceptible to those truly belonging to this first esoteric stream must be clothed in dogma. Words must be found, formulae coined and proclaimed; but the possibility of understanding through actual vision of what was thus proclaimed must be withheld from men.

The idea of Faith was born—the conception that without providing them with the means of vision, men must be given in the forms of abstract dogma, those things in which they can believe.

And so a third stream arose, taking hold of the religious and also the scientific life of Middle and Western Europe. The onset of the intellect was opposed by dogmas, dogmas that could not be described as vision restated in ideas, but such that the element of vision had departed from them; they were simply believed.

If that esoteric stream which penetrated to Ireland and died away in later times had been pursued in deed and truth, the souls of those belonging to it would inevitably have experienced union with the spiritual world. For the great question living in this esoteric stream was in reality this: How is the human being to find his orientation in the ether-world, in the etheric cosmos? The visions, which also included the conception of the Mystery of Golgotha as I described it just now, were connected with the etheric cosmos. Here, then, the great question was that concerning the nature of the etheric cosmos.

But in the middle stream which until far into the Middle Ages was clothed for the most part in Latinised forms of thought, the knowledge bearing upon the etheric cosmos became the content of dogma.

Just as in the West the question concerning the mystery of the etheric cosmos was an unconscious one, so in the East there had arisen the great, unconscious question as to the nature of the etheric organism, the etheric body of man.

Unconsciously astir in all those trends of feeling and knowledge in the East, which poured into cult, ceremony and ritual, was the question: How is man to adjust himself to the workings of his etheric body?—Just as in the South and West the question was: How is man to adjust himself to the etheric cosmos?

In earlier times the truth of the super-sensible world had been within man's reach as an outcome of his natural, dreamlike clairvoyance. It was not necessary for him to become conscious of the etheric in the cosmos and in his own being. A significant feature of the modern age was the great question which now arose concerning the nature and content of the etheric world—in the West, the question as to the etheric cosmos, in the East as to man's own etheric body.

The question concerning the etheric cosmos demands the exercise of supreme spiritual effort. A man must unfold thought to its highest potency if he is to penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos. In the lecture yesterday I told you that the way is opened up by study of Goethe's conception of plant-metamorphosis, but that this must pass on to the mighty metamorphosis that leads over from one earthly life to the next.

But in Rome, especially at the time of Pope Nicholas I, this was considered to be full of danger ... the living content of this stream must be stifled and concealed.

The Eastern stream too was involved in the struggle concerning the etheric world but particularly the etheric nature of man, the etheric body of man. With his physical body, man lives in contact with the outer world of nature, with the animals, plants and minerals, the machines and the like. But to live in and through the etheric body during his existence here on earth is only possible for man by the external means presented by ceremony and ritual, by participation in happenings and actions which are not, in the earthly and material sense, real. In the East, men longed to share in these acts in order that they might thereby experience the inner nature and working of their own etheric organism.

In the Rome of Pope Nicholas I, this too was considered unsuitable for Europe. It was decided to retain in the West only what the intellect had formulated into a body of dogmas—wherein super-sensible truths are matters of faith alone, no longer of actual vision. The dogmas were then promulgated over wider areas of the West and the esoteric stream was entirely obscured. The inner attraction to cult and ritual that had characterized Eastern Europe was also thought to be out of keeping with the nature of the peoples of Middle and Western Europe, and from this was born the modified form of the cult which now exists in the Roman Catholic Church.

If you compare the cult and ritual of the Eastern Church, the Orthodox Russian Church, with the form of cult practised in the Roman Catholic Church, you will perceive this difference: in the Roman Catholic Church it is more of the nature of a symbol for the eyes to contemplate; in the East it is something into which the soul penetrates with ardent devotion. In the West, men grew increasingly aware of the need to turn away from the cult—wedded as it now was to dogmatic interpretation—to the dogmas, and from the dogmas to explain the cult. In the East, cult and ritual worked as a power in themselves and what found its way over to the West was gradually confined within the externalised forms preserved in various occult communities. These communities exist to this very day and though emptied of all the esotericism of olden time, still play no insignificant apart in affairs.

How to inaugurate in Europe a form of cult which does not, as in the East, take hold of the etheric nature of the human being, and to establish a system of dogma which would make it unnecessary for men to direct their gaze to the spiritual world ... how to inaugurate a twofold stream of this character—such was the third great question confronting Nicholas I. And at this he laboured. The outcome of it all was the complete severance of the Eastern, Greek Church, from the Roman Catholic Church. Here, in what I have indicated, lie the inner reasons.

All that I have just been describing to you was still clearly perceptible in the middle of the ninth century, at the time of Pope Nicholas I. In the West, vestiges of esotericism still survived. In Spain particularly, but also in France and in Ireland, esoteric Schools existed. There were men who could still look into the spiritual worlds, whose understanding of Christianity derived from actual vision. Later on, nothing remained of this earlier power of vision, save a hint, save those mysterious, repeated glimpses of the Holy Grail or its secular reflection and counterpart, the Round Table of King Arthur. There men did feel the presence of something actually connected with vision of worlds beyond the earth, with living experience of these worlds.

Middle Europe, extending into those regions of the West where esotericism still survived, was the home of devout belief sustained by dogmas, combined with a world of ceremonies and rites not quite connected with the human etheric body. Of what was living in the East, I have already spoken. Any true portrayal of the life of soul as it was in Europe during the ninth century, would have to include description of these three different moods-of-soul in their many variations.

The account given by history is but a cursory, superficial expression of what was actually reigning in the depths. But as time went on, the esoteric stream was followed by a current, which in the forms of Arabian thought was becoming increasingly exoteric and formal. What men over in Asia had made of the Aristotelian teachings—that too flowed over in the wake of what had once been a very spiritual understanding, and under this influence the content of this esoteric stream became more and more materialistic. Already in the eleventh and twelfth centuries we see how esotericism begins to flicker out, to melt away as it were; this esoteric stream itself takes on a materialistic mode of thinking, that mode of thinking which in later metamorphosis becomes the materialism of natural science—which has its real origin in Arabian thought.

The middle stream—actually brought into being by Nicholas I but previously fostered by Boniface and supported by the Merovingians and Carolingians—although for long centuries bearing faint traces of the influence exercised by the Grail and other sacred lays in turning the eyes of soul to the super-sensible world, this middle stream tended more and more to introduce the element of materialism into cult and dogma. The older and purer conceptions of Transubstantiation, of the celebration of the Mass, for example, were followed by those crude, materialistic conceptions, which alone could have resulted in controversy over the Eucharist. When these quarrels arose they were proof of the fact that men no longer understood the Eucharist as originally conceived. Indeed it is a mystery that can be understood only in the light of spiritual knowledge.

And so materialism found its way into the stream that had flowed across to the West from the South and East; it found its way into the middle stream, and, fundamentally, also into the Eastern stream. The waves of materialism were surging on—and everywhere men strove to dam them back as best they could.

We pass now from the ninth century, from the days of Pope Nicholas I, to the eleventh century. We must picture the three great question marks standing like three terrible powers, soul-torturing powers, before a man like Pope Nicholas I. For he could not say—as in Congresses later on, when frontiers were drawn on maps according to opinions based upon external considerations—he could not say: I decree that there shall be a frontier here, and another frontier here ... for souls cannot be divided off in this way. What he could do was to indicate lines of direction and impart to the middle stream a certain strength, and herein his genius was particularly effective. Nevertheless the mood prevailing in the East spread far, far into the West. What mood? The mood in which the etheric organism of man is set aflame from within by the sacred acts of cult and ritual and in which, in a way more characteristic of Western Europe, these acts were now linked with their centre in Jerusalem.

With all the ardour for pilgrimage and the intense yearning towards the real centre in Jerusalem, Peter of Amiens, with less effect at the beginning, and then, later on, Bernard of Clairvaux with veritably blinding fervour, preached the Cross. With this mood of ardour in Europe there mingled the remains of the stream which had been kept alive in the West by the cult of the Grail, by the Arthurian cult—the remains of the esotericism which had here found its outlet ... and there arose the picture of Man in his physical form as a being to whom the earth is not really earth, but a particular place in the cosmos.

Some such conception was alive in the world of chivalry and knighthood or at least in that part of it that took shape in Western and Middle Europe and allied itself with the Crusading Spirit. And as a faint undertone only, but as the Crusades proceeded steadily increasing in strength, there mingled with this mood the temper of mind that had been engendered by Nicholas I as appropriate for European civilisation.

That is why there is something about the Crusades not fully to be explained by later circumstances. For the middle stream spreads out; beside it remains the stream belonging to the East of Europe, regarded in Europe itself as a backward tendency in religion; and the Western stream converts itself into branches of the occult, esoteric life, into all kinds of occult societies, Masonic Orders and the like. In the world of Scholasticism, the middle stream finally lays hold of science too, and then of the child of Scholasticism: natural science in its later form.

The spirit inspiring the Crusades cannot be understood by those who look only at what happened in later times; it can be understood only by those who perceive the effects of these impulses from the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and who grasp the full significance of the question with which Nicholas I, in the ninth century, was so profoundly concerned: How can happenings in the outer world in which the human being himself participates, pre-eminent among them being the sacred acts of the cult, how can these be brought into connection with the living flow of spiritual life, with the life of the Spiritual Beings? In the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the problem had already been set for the peoples of Europe. Just as on the one side they had lost the realities contained in cult and ritual, so too, on the other side, they had lost the realities yielded by spiritual vision. Just as in the East the realities of cult and ritual vanished into the mists of Asia and the conquests of the Turks sealed off the holy place around which the acts of the Christian cult must be centred, so, if I may speak in metaphor, did the esoteric secrets contained in the Western stream disappear into the Atlantic Ocean. And there arose as a reaction the mood, which asked: How are the sacred acts of the cult, with their centre in Jerusalem, to be infused with spiritual life?

Anyone who reads the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux can feel to this very day how on the one hand, fervent devotion to the cult, to the outer symbol in which the esoteric is contained, speaks from his lips, and how, on the other hand, his heart is fired through and through by all that was once astir in the esotericism of the West.

Resounding in the tone and tenor of the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux, not in what he actually says but in the artistic grandeur and majesty of his utterances, are those mysteries which the etheric cosmos would fain reveal to man and can no longer reveal, and on the other side all that strives, from out of the earth, to work in man's own etheric body. That is what drives men over to Asia, seeking for what they had lost in the West.

Esotericism, however, was really the driving force. By making a new link with the Grave of the Redeemer, men desired to glimpse again what the West had lost. The tragedy of the ensuing age was that this was not understood, that there were no ears ready to listen, let us say, to Rosicrucianism—I mean Rosicrucianism in its genuine form—which sought for Christ in heights of the Spirits, not at the physical grave.

Now, however, the time has come for mankind to realise that just as those who after the Redeemer's death came to the tomb, were told: He Whom ye seek is no longer here, seek Him elsewhere, so, too, it was said to the Crusaders: He Whom ye seek is no longer here, seek Him elsewhere.

The age is upon us when He Who is no longer here must be sought elsewhere, when He must be sought through a new revelation of the spiritual worlds. That is the task of those who are living at this present time and of that I wished to speak to you, in connection with our recent studies.